Hans Christian Anderson, who wrote "The Little Mermaid" and "The Red Shoes," wanted to be an opera singer. At 14, he ran away from home and was taken in by a series of affluent older men.
He had an affair with a Danish ballet dancer, Harold Schaff. By the time of Anderson's death at 70 in 1875, he had achieved world fame for his many fairytales of wonderment and introspective woe.
Of his own sexuality, he wrote to Edwin Collin, Danish Royal Theater director's son,
"I languish for you as a pretty Calabrian wench. My sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a secret."
"The Red Shoes," now a cult film, was released in England in 1948. It was something of a flop, but in the United States it ran at New York's Bijou Theatre for two sell-out years. Quipped its co-producer Michael Powell, "attracting half the little would-be tutu girls in America."
The film, in digitally enhanced, supercharged radiant color, is being once more shown at New York's Film Foundation. It stars Sadler Wells Ballet prima ballerina Moira Shearer (her first film), actor Anton Walbrook, and Sadler dancers Robert Helpmann – now Sir Helpmann – and Leonide Massine.
Often ranked by critics as one of the best 100 films ever made, "The Red Shoes" is replete with gay associations. Walbrook's character – dance impresario Boris Lermontov – is based on Sergey Diaghilev, founder of the famed Ballet Russe, and autocratic lover of both Vaslav Nijinsky, and later Massine.
(Nijinsky, perhaps the greatest male ballet dancer of all time, shocked audiences at the opening night of his performance of "The Afternoon of a Faun," to the music of Claude Debussy, by dancing in tights without the non-bulge-displaying dance supporter. He was eventually coerced into a horrid marriage, disowned by Diaghilev and died insane. One fifth position too many!)
Anderson's tale, "The Red Shoes" is about a ballet dancer whose dance career takes off spectacularly when she is given a pair of demonic red ballet slippers. They cause her to dance, dance, dance, forsaking opportunities for love, happiness, a family life to cherish.
The red shoes are tenacious. She cannot remove them. Eventually she dances nonstop to her untimely death. (In the film version, Moira Shearer leaps in front of an oncoming train. What, if anything, this did to dash the hopes of kiddie ballet aspirants is not known.)
Currently there's a rumor in more art-sensitive sectors of the leather community – and, believe it or not, there are one or two such sectors (they're understandably kept hush-hush) – that an update of "The Red Shoes" is planned for summer release.
Working title, BTL is told – actually ordered to take note of – is, "The Polished Black Boots." It's the story of a lowly, shy, gym-reject, 25-year-old, Dun & Bradstreet accountant, Walter Tepidtoes, who's transformed into an icon of beyond-butch perfection by wearing a magic pair of highly polished black boots, inadvertently purchased at Cosco.
Walter takes on the moniker of The Stud-Dance Kid, and wins leather contest after contest. Any guy who by chance sees his reflection in Stud-Dance's boots – guys must of course first get close enough – is doomed to be a worshiping, adoring follower who must polish, polish, polish his own pair of black boots to perfection, non-stop.
The film ends – predictably, its TV financial backers admit – with the once-happy Walter Tepidtoes, now The Stud-Dance Kid, himself doomed to wander in hundreds of leather bar backrooms until – as the camera zooms in for his final close-up – he's frazzled, S.S. 62 eligible, and looks it. PG-13.
