George Balanchine’s Don Quixote, as originally produced in 1965 by the New York City Ballet, saw the sixty-one-year-old choreographer in the title role, with the part of Dulcinea danced by a nineteen-year-old soloist named Suzanne Farrell, who at the time had only been two years with the company. The three-act ballet, complete with story-line and dance divertissements to a score by Nicolas Nabokov, was seen as quite a departure for the master of complex, plotless works to music by Stravinsky. It was generally speculated that the ballet was in itself a quixotic venture, a statement of the hopeless adoration the aging Balanchine felt for his young ballerina.

Farrell’s autobiography, Holding on to the Air, written with Toni Bentley (a dancer and the author of Winter Season, an account of life backstage at the New York City Ballet in 1980), is interesting primarily for what it has to say about Balanchine. After the premiere of Don Quixote, which Farrell says brought them together—“I have often thought that was the ballet’s real purpose”—the couple’s relationship began to attract public attention. It was generally assumed that Farrell would be the next in Balanchine’s long line of ballerina-wives and mistresses, including Tamara Geva, Alexandra Danilova, Vera Zorina, Maria Tallchief, and Tanaquil LeClerq. Instead, just over three years later at the beginning of 1969 (soon after Balanchine got his divorce from LeClerq), Farrell suddenly married Paul Mejia, a young dancer also in the New York City Ballet, and the