Deborah Jowitt and Marcia Siegel

Marcia B. Siegel: Deborah, for those of you who don't know, is working on a biography of Jerome Robbins under rather extraordinary circumstances. Tell us how this came about for Deborah Jowitt: Well, I got a phone call from a close friend of Robbins who is also the partner of one of the literary executors of the estate saying, Do you have any idea how much Jerry liked your writing? And I said, No.... Although I did know that we got along fairly well. And he said, How would you like to write a biography of him, and we will give you complete access to all his private papers. We'll do everything we can to help you. They did also give that privilege, eventually, to another writer, which presents an interesting problem of two supposed rivals-cheek by jowl, often-writing. MBS: And researching. DJ: And researching. I think Amanda Vaill is probably writing a full-scale biography. I'm focusing on the work. And the whole business of thinking about what history is now is so important and controversial that if you think about it too much you can't even write it anymore. Marcia's working on a book on Twyla Tharp, and we share things. I think that in a sense what drew me to dance history in the beginning was a very old-fashioned sense of how wonderful it was to sleuth, to discover something, to try to really invade

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