Word: jacked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Home was a rambling place in Bucks County, Pa., shared by three of Jack's children from earlier marriages and four grandchildren. Carloads of theater friends and Kirkland's fellow writers arrived regularly from New York for extended house parties. Amid all the drinking and countryside romping, Gelsey stood out as the poker-faced toddler. "Her seriousness was always a source of kidding," says Brother-in-Law Don Bevan. "But she would never encourage it. She would never give the adults satisfaction. You could never get her to sit on your lap and be cuddly...
When she was three, the Kirklands moved to an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. There, Jack decided that both girls should be prepared for a life in the theater. He took a special interest in Johnna, whose easygoing gregariousness matched his own. "I was my father's child," says Johnna, "and Gelsey was my mother's child." The younger daughter's obsessiveness taxed a mother's patience. First it was ice skating. Tummy sticking out and a frown on her large face, Gelsey learned to whirl around the Wollman rink in Central Park. "She had no fun doing...
...became totally absorbed in a craft as demanding and stubborn as she was. Regular schooling was a chore she impatiently endured; she eventually dropped out in the eleventh grade. At home, Jack's royalties were dwindling. Nancy took a job and found work for Gelsey as a child model. She detested it "because it was so upsetting to miss a class." A dance scholarship came to the rescue and put her in classes 12½ hours a week. Twice a day she and her classmate Meg Gordon donned rubber sweat pants and took turns stretching each other's legs, an ordeal...
Johnna was already there. Jack Kirkland's death two months after Gelsey's 16th birthday momentarily brought the sisters together but did not dampen a long-simmering rivalry between the two. Gelsey's determination to be a better dancer than anyone else definitely included Johnna. Soon the sisters did not speak. Balanchine apparently did not help matters. Johnna remembers him asking Gelsey, "Why can't you do an adagio like your sister? Go home with your sister and have her teach you how to do an adagio." Johnna was told to learn jumping from Gelsey. The result was predictable. Says...
...Jack Cobetto had trouble warming up in the first set of that match, as Walker smoked him, 6-1. The portly Eli nabbed the second set, 7-5, but a close encounter in the third set went to Walker, 7-5, for the victory...