Marthe Krueger: 
Dancing with Nature

The small town of Ridgefield in the 1940s was home to many writers, artists, actors, composers, and dancers  who found here not only fellowship, but the peace and beauty of the countryside. Concert dancer, choreographer and photographer Marthe Krueger of New York City felt that the “fluidity and lyrical qualities of dance” were close to many of the qualities found in nature. In 1942, to be closer to the natural world, she set up a home and studio in The Coach House on Branchville Road, a building that would later house another dancer, an actor and a world-class art collection.

Born in Mulhouse, Alsace-Lorraine, France, in 1910,  Krueger began ballet training at the age of eight  in Strasbourg,   and went on to study in Paris and London with several dance luminaries.

She appeared on stages  throughout Europe, and upon coming to America at the age of 23 in 1933, made her debut at New York City’s Town Hall.  During the Depression, Krueger not only performed, but taught at several of New York’s finest dance schools, where she became close friends with the legendary ballerina Muriel Stuart. 

She also began working with two notable composers. Classical composer Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) wrote “Suite for Marthe Krueger,” a work for two pianos, in 1940 while  Alex North (1910-1991), a rising young composer who would become one of Hollywood’s top creators of movie scores, wrote several dance pieces for her in 1941 and 1942, including “Prelude,” “Will-O’-Wisp,” and “Trineke.”  

She and North became such good friends that she invited him to teach at the school she had just established at her Ridgefield home. (A few years later, North bought himself a house in Ridgefield, using it as a weekend retreat for many years.) 

“Ridgefield was selected for the establishment of a school to perpetuate her art because Marthe Krueger feels that in the hills of Connecticut, spiritual as well as bodily strength  may be developed through the appreciation, practice and understanding of beauty of movement,” said The Ridgefield Press in reporting her arrival in 1942.

 

The year after she moved to town, Krueger staged Alex North’s new musical for children, “The Hither and Thither of Danny Dither.” On Aug. 28, 1942 North himself played the piano as the children of the new Marthe Krueger dance school performed the musical  in a PTA benefit at the East Ridge School auditorium — now the Ridgefield Playhouse. (North went on to compose the music for many of the 20th Century’s top movies, including “Death of A Salesman,”   “The Sound and the Fury,”  “Spartacus,”  “Cleopatra,” “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,  “2001: A Space Odyssey,”  “Dragonslayer,”  and “Good Morning, Vietnam.” He also wrote the pop hit, Unchained Melody, and was a mentor of the young and promising film composer, John Williams.)

During World War II, Krueger   toured with a U.S.O. unit, entertaining troops. She also worked as a professional photographer, opening her own studio in New York. Her photographic work ranged from artistic shots of dance productions to engagement announcement portraits for young ladies  — a number of them appeared in The New York Times in the 1940s.

Later she served as ballet mistress at the Silvermine Guild. She had been married in 1938 to importer Adolph Mayer, a widower twice her age, who died three years later.

In the late 1940s, she moved to Wilton where, in 1960, she opened the  Marthe Krueger School of Dance in a studio that was aimed at taking advantage of its natural setting. Former student Christine Leventhal said Krueger “surrounded her lovely glass-walled studio with the best of nature: a tree-encircled pond complete with swans Sigy and Odette (whose elegant necks and movement inspired those within); all sizes, colors and kinds of birds; mallards, wood ducks and geese; deer; muskrats; raccoons; and most thrilling of all — the great blue heron. Marthe loved her animals and birds. She was a gifted gardener as well, and bright swatches and drifts of color surrounded her property.”

“She was a pioneer of dance in Fairfield County,” Leventhal added, calling her “devoted to her students surely, but even more, devoted to the art of dance and a never-ending pursuit of excellence in her art.”

Marthe Krueger taught her last class on the day before she fell ill in 2002 and was sent to the hospital, where she died at the age of 92.  

 After Krueger left the Coach House around 1948, she leased the place to Paul Draper,  an international tap dancing star. Draper was accused of being a communist and was under attack by followers of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Disturbed at his treatment, he left the U.S. in 1951, moving to Switzerland, but eventually returned to teach and perform.

Chinese art collector Abel Bahr lived there from 1951 until his death in 1959; many works from his collection are now in major museums. A later occupant was Broadway actor and singer Don McKay, who was known for his parties featuring celebrities in the arts.

Paul Draper: 

Targeted Tap Dancer

Paul Draper was yet another target of McCarthy-era attacks who found a brief refuge in Ridgefield. An international dancing star who was called “the aristocrat of tap,” Draper danced on the major stages of Europe and the United States with top stars of the 1930s and 40s.

He wound up in exile in Europe but unlike his close friend, harmonica virtuoso and fellow Ridgefielder and McCarthy victim, Larry Adler,  Draper returned to the United States to teach, dance and choreograph new works. 

“Draper brought cool intellectualism and playful wit to the dance form,” said The New York Times. “He performed everything from jazz to the bossa nova to Brahms and Scarlatti, establishing a style very different from that of Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers.”

Paul Draper was born in 1909 in Florence, Italy, into an artistic, socially prominent New York City family. His mother Muriel Draper was a writer and lecturer whose later home in London hosted such guests as Pablo Picasso, Henry James and Arthur Rubinstein. Novelist Norman Douglas promised a young Paul a penny every time he was naughty.

From a young age he loved to dance and mostly self-taught himself tap — he reportedly took only six lessons in his life. 

After teaching briefly at an Arthur Murray studio in Manhattan as a teenager, Draper moved to London, hoping to find work in tap dancing. “He scraped together a living performing flashy routines in Europe and the United States, then enrolled in the School of American Ballet and realized the possibilities of combining tap and classical ballet,” said entertainment historian David Lobosco. Draper got into the school with the help of his mother’s friend, George Balanchine.

He made his solo debut in London in 1932, introducing his new “ballet-tap” technique.  His career blossomed in the 1930s as he performed in Europe and the U.S. with his combination of tap dancing and ballet. He headlined at famous night spots like the Rainbow Room and Plaza Hotel’s Persian Room, danced at Carnegie Hall, and appeared in the 1948 film “Time of Your Life.” His greatest fame was perhaps as part of a two-man act formed in 1940 with harmonica  virtuoso Larry Adler, who also lived in Ridgefield around the same time Draper did.

Draper began coming to Ridgefield in late 1940s. A note in the May 5, 1949, Press said, “Mr. and Mrs. Paul Draper and family of New York City have leased ‘The Coach House’ on Branchville Road for a year from Miss Marthe Krueger... Mr. Draper is a well-known dancer in New York. The family spent a summer here recently in the guest cottage at the former Paul Palmer estate on Wilton Road East.” (Marthe Krueger was an international concert dance star and choreographer who had a teaching studio on Branchville Road in the “Old Coach House” of the former Hawk estate.)

Draper’s career hit the same rocks that sank many artistic talents of the era: anti-communist blacklisting. Two other local notables of the day — a leftist presidential candidate and a right-wing newspaper columnist — were involved.

Draper’s leftist leanings were no secret, and he publicly supported the 1948 presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, a former vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wallace lived just across the line in South Salem and attended St. Stephen’s Church here.

Draper was active in liberal or progressive causes. He served as a spokesman for a committee of actors, producers and writers who opposed an inquiry by the House Committee on Un-American Activities into Communist infiltration of the film industry, The New York Times said. “Mr. Draper had performed in benefits to raise money for groups and causes labeled as subversive by the committee.” 

A Los Angeles Times report noted that “Mr. Draper said he was a supporter of several organizations which had been called subversive by the U.S. Attorney General’s office, but steadfastly denied any communist affiliations.”

Then there was the “Draper-McCullough case,” which drew national attention in the early 1950s. It was later described by The Press: “A woman in Greenwich [Mrs. John T. McCullough] called dancer Paul Draper a Communist and Mr. Draper, who lived in Ridgefield, sued the woman for libel and — in line with Connecticut’s attachment law of that day — attached the property of Mrs. McCullough. This latter move aroused the ire of the Right Wing to an almost eerie extent, those espousing Mrs. McCullough’s cause appearing not to be prepared to recognize what Mrs. McCullough’s charges had done to Mr. Draper’s career.” 

The power of the anti-communist blacklisting of the era was described in the L.A. Times obituary: “In 1950, Mr. Draper’s dance routine was snipped out of a CBS segment from Ed Sullivan’s  Toast of the Town’ because the network received protests. His bookings were also canceled on other TV programs and at several upscale hotels around the country.”

Among those brandishing Mrs. McCullough’s banner was nationally syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, who also lived in Ridgefield. The Press didn’t like Pegler and a 1950 editorial supporting Draper began: “We dislike mentioning the name of Westbrook Pegler in the Press because we have a certain pride in keeping our paper free of evil things. But now and then there is a tide which must be taken at the flood.”

The trial ended in a hung jury and, dejected, Draper left Ridgefield in 1951 to live in Switzerland. Soon after, his friend and frequent partner Larry Adler, also subjected to anti-communist attacks, moved from Ridgefield to England where he died in 2001. 

 Unlike Adler, however, Draper returned to the States and became a professor at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute in the 1970s. In the words of The New York Times, he “continued to be recognized as an important, if seldom seen, figure in concert dance.” His career never recovered from the blacklisting, though he did continue to occasionally perform. He also wrote the 1978 book, “On Tap Dancing.”

He died in 1996 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., at the age of 86.

Paul Draper never denied belonging to the leftist organizations that the right accused him of supporting. “I did do the things and belong to the organizations they said,” The New York Times quoted him as saying in 1980. “I was happy to and am still proud of it.”

But he always denied ever having been a communist.

Patricia Schuster, 

Dancer, Teacher, Founder

More than 5,000 children learned dance from Patricia Schuster, a professional ballet dancer who brought the art of fine dance to Ridgefield in 1965 and whose legacy is alive — and dancing — today.

Born in 1937, the Ohio native grew up in New York City, Schuster studied at the American Ballet Theater School and with teachers from the Royal Ballet and the Kirov Ballet. She danced professionally with the Brooklyn Opera Company, the Boris Goldovsky New England Opera Theater, and other companies. 

In 1964 she moved to Ridgefield and a year later opened the Patricia Schuster School of Dance in the Community Center. Later, she renamed the school the Ridgefield Studio of Classical Ballet. In 1978 she also founded the Ridgefield Civic Ballet, which staged many productions with local students and international stars. 

A number of her students have gone on to professional ballet, including James Fayette, who was a leading dancer with the New York City Ballet and is now a director, with his wife, of a school in Los Angeles. 

Many who did not become dancers also benefited from the experience. “My daughter took ballet lessons from Pat for years and the poise and self-confidence she gained was immeasurable,” said Nancy Pinkerton. “She later became Connecticut Junior Miss using ballet dancing as her talent. The scholarship money was a big aid in college expenses.” 

Schuster died in 1999 and in May 2000, it was revealed that she had bequeathed her Ridgefield Studio of Classical Ballet to the Friends of the Ridgefield Playhouse, the organization that was renovating the old high school auditorium into a performing arts center. In its early years the Ridgefield Playhouse provided a venue for both classes and performances, and still is a stage for performances under its new management, the Ridgefield Conservatory of Dance. 

“The Playhouse embraced the school as its dance school in residence and, recognizing that the school needed and deserved its own management structure, acted as a bridge to its new life as a non-profit with its own board and management,” said the Conservatory, which now has its school at 440 Main Street. Schuster’s bequest included funds to support the project.

“Miss Schuster never had any biological children of her own, but in reality, and far better, she actually had thousands of adoring ‘children,’ ” Susan Consentino, who’d studied under her for 17 years, said at her Schuster’s memorial service in 1999. “She helped shape and influence every one of us, and not just while we were her students. She gave each of us skills to carry with us in life that consciously or unconsciously are part of us to this day.”