Quechee
A Quechee resident who taught dance in the Upper Valley for three decades, Stein — Madame Stein, to her students — commanded attention in whatever she did, whether it was emceeing a concert in a glittering beaded gown, finishing her Ms. Senior Vermont routine with a cartwheel and a split, or simply strutting down the sidewalk dressed head to toe in furs, or maybe leopard print, posture impeccable, hair and makeup on point.
(Being en pointe, on the other hand, called for another outfit entirely.)
“She was a diva. That’s for sure,” chuckled Deb Cahill, a close friend and former student of Stein’s who was with her during the last few days before she died, on May 18, at 91. “She was really old-world fabulous. … But she’d say it fah-bulous,” Cahill added, drawing out the first syllable in homage to Stein’s lingering Hungarian accent. “Fah-bulous, darling.”
Stein didn’t mind commanding this attention; in fact, she herself once said that she “always had to shine.”
But for Madame Stein, whose great love was Russian ballet, “to shine” was not just about being admired. To shine was also to gift something to the world: The clean, disciplined lines of the body in a well-executed foutte, or the moment of controlled weightlessness at the peak of a grand jete, made life more beautiful.
“She believed everything should be beautiful,” said Cahill, who used to hang around following Stein’s 55-and-older ballet classes because she was drawn to the teacher’s florid, eccentric aura. “She believed that beauty should be everywhere. You should have seen her apartment.” It was filled with framed art and string lights and little lovely things, a vast collection of classic movies, mementos of her own life, the color gold.
“Some people are just born to be in the spotlight,” said the older of her two sons, Haddon Stein. Said her good friend, the White River Junction-based performer Gabriel Quirk, “she was born a star.” But officially, Madame Stein was born Erika Eleonora Riech, to a Jewish family in Budapest in 1926. She started taking ballet lessons as a young child, mentored by the Russian ballet “maestro” Semyon Troyanoff, who felt she had a certain spark.
But Budapest, at that time, was no place for a Jewish child. By the late 1930s, anti-Semitism in Hungary was running feverishly high. In 1938 — the same year Hungary aligned itself with Nazi Germany — Stein and her mother immigrated to New York City, on a visa procured by her grandfather.
The voyage was not without incident. It was a story her family and friends retold in interviews almost word for word, and which Stein would recount in her self-published autobiography: At a train station in Berlin, a German soldier confronted her and mother. “They wouldn’t let us get off the train,” she wrote. She would always remember what it felt like to look up and see that “the glass dome, the roof, was hung with gigantic swastikas from one end to the other.”
The soldier demanded to see their documents. “He yanked them out of her (mother’s) hands and threw them right back in her face,” Cahill remembers Stein telling her. “She was very frightened.”
The mother and daughter made it safely to New York. Stein’s father and brother were snuck in a year later.
“But other than that, and one set of cousins, she basically lost her entire family,” said Haddon Stein, a police sergeant in New Jersey. He doesn’t know whether this tragedy might have played into why, at 18, Stein became Catholic. But he doesn’t rule it out.
“On some psychological level, she might have felt like it provided some level of protection,” he said. But even her conversion she did her own way: She walked into a local church, found the holy water and baptized herself in it.
“So she was never an official Catholic. But she considered herself a Catholic,” he said.
He remembers her taking him and his brother Adrian to church when they were kids, but not to the one nearest their house — to the one in New Brunswick, “because she felt it was prettier, and had better acoustics for singing,” her son said. “She liked to blow people out of the water when she sang.”
A flair for putting on a show was in her blood. In Budapest, her mother had been a costume designer, and in New York found a job as seamstress for a prominent costume supplier. Her father was a toy-maker whose juggernaut was an angel Christmas tree topper, one that shared the spotlight with the likes of Cary Grant and Bing Crosby when it became a common movie prop in such classic films as The Bishop’s Wife and Holiday Inn.
It was around the time of her conversion, shortly after she graduated from what’s now the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, that she adopted the stage name Erika Bard (her mother’s maiden name was Bardos). Though a heart murmur prevented her from pursuing ballet professionally, she had plenty of other talents to fall back on, all of which she was more than willing to share with the world: She was a natural model, and could sing arias like a bird, albeit one with an unusually wide vocal range.
“She was the total package,” said her daughter-in-law, Joann Clarke-Stein, who is married to Adrian Stein and who said she and Stein shared a close relationship. “She was an amazing dancer, she had a beautiful voice, she could pull off acting. And just look at how amazingly gorgeous she was.”
And it’s true, based on her angelic-looking black-and-white headshots from the 1950s, that Stein was classically beautiful, a mixture of Grace Kelly and Eva Peron. But her biggest asset, even then, might have been her aura.
As an entertainer on a cruise ship, it was essentially her job — in the days when American women were not expected to have jobs — to travel the world in a slinky dress, crooning and shimmying and flirting with millionaires. And she did her job well, stealing hearts from New York Harbor to Montevideo Bay.
“She was propositioned by a number of wealthy men. She turned them all down,” Quirk said. She valued her independence too much to become somebody’s arm candy, and besides, she was having too much fun. When the cruise ship docked in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival, she wanted to drink and dance and party for days, and so that’s what she did.
“Then she got married and moved to New Jersey,” Quirk laughed.
But a domestic stereotype she was not. She had two boys — to her relief, she once told Haddon, because she “always wanted to be the queen bee” — and cooked traditional Hungarian meals, the obligatory chicken paprikash, the sausage dishes. Still, she continued to indulge her worldliness, and wildness, through her palate.
“We tried everything … a lot of weird stuff,” Haddon Stein said. Honey-covered bees, chocolate-covered ants, bear, boar, kangaroo, rattlesnake, whale. That last one tastes like roast beef, and came sliced in a can like tuna, he recalled. “It sounds really bad now. But she loved stuff like that. So we had no opportunity whatsoever to become picky eaters.”
Because show-biz was in her blood, and ballet in particular was in her bones, she opened a dance academy in New Jersey, then another, training hundreds of students and maintaining close ties with those in whom she saw a spark, like the spark her maestro saw in her. One such student, having moved to the Upper Valley after getting married, urged Madame Stein to bring her magic to rural Vermont, where there was a serious hunger for a serious dance school. In 1985 — Stein was divorced by now — she packed up her truck and headed north.
Almost immediately, she gained something of a cult following among her students.
“At one point, there were people who’d drive an hour, or more than an hour, to take classes where she was,” Clarke-Stein said. That’s because Madame let nothing slide. Once, while sitting in the waiting room of Quechee’s Eleonora Stein Academy, Clarke-Stein “could hear her talking to her students and correcting everything, right down to where their fingers were,” she said. Graceful fingers — and hands, and elbows, everything about the arms, really — were paramount to Madame Stein.
This emphasis on port de bras is a hallmark of Russian ballet, more so than in other styles, and so uncouth arms were one of Madame’s pet peeves, along with teachers who put students en pointe too early and caused injury, bad pop music, picky eaters, TV shows that weren’t Downton Abbey and anything crass. When she and Clarke-Stein would go to a show together and watch people dancing, Madame would grumble at times: “Such sloppy arms!”
But because of these high and rigid standards, nobody would teach you how to hold yourself better, said her former student, Sophie Peyton, who had that spark of talent and became Stein’s friend. That’s why, for so long, the teacher was in such high demand. Her “old-school” standards of excellence, passed down to her from own maestro, were part of what made her — and her students — shine.
“I learned how to carry myself a certain way from her. I think I learned a lot about confidence,” said Peyton, who danced with Stein from age 4 to 20. “I learned how to be myself from her.”
Though Madame taught with deep respect to the Russian masters, she continued to do things her own way. She devised a dance style she called “Balazaptics,” for example, which combined elements of ballet, jazz, tap and acrobatics. And Peyton recalled that at the end of her ballet classes with younger children, “she would have us gather round her chair and give us a little French lesson. … Then she would give us Little Debbie snacks from her drawer.”
She often improvised when she thought it would be to the benefit of her students: when Stein wanted to teach a class full of girl students to dance with a partner, she asked fathers and brothers to join the lessons — much to the delight of the audience who, seven months later, saw the performance.
Performance. That word was important to Stein. “You never wanted to make the mistake of calling it a recital,” recalled Quirk.
The difference might sound semantic to some, but to Stein, it was the difference between recognizing artistic merit and diminishing it.
“A recital signified some poorly choreographed, poorly rehearsed show with crappy overpriced costumes,” Haddon Stein said. Over the years, as parental and societal attitudes began to place less value on the art and historical significance and discipline of dance and more on whether their kids thought it was fun, her enrollment numbers staggered, then dropped.
But she remained as unwaveringly herself as ever. Even after she closed her school, several years ago, she continued to teach privately until the winter before she died. Even after she could no longer teach, she continued to dress to the nines. Peyton described a typical Madame Stein outfit as including heels, a mini-skirt and “definitely something tight-fitting,” she said.
“Wherever she went, she wanted people to know who she was when they saw her.”
And if you saw her, then you did.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at ejholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.