“I loved dancing!”
“I’d never wanted to be anything but a dancer, really. Traveling, meeting wonderful people. It was a very, very exciting life.”
When I first met Carmen Gutierrez Martel out walking her chihuahua Poncho on Palos Verdes Drive, I had no idea that this petite, modest, and soft-spoken 93-year-old had once been a much sought-after dancer on Broadway. Only when she casually mentioned that she was going to the sixtieth reunion of the original cast of West Side Story did I discover the rich narrative of her life. She agreed to sit down with me on a sunny summer afternoon soon afterwards to tell me of her journey from Mexican schoolgirl to international performer of stage and screen. . .
If I had to summarize Carmen’s story in a word, I would choose “serendipity.” At nearly every turn, Carmen was given opportunities which most dancers, hoping to reach the lights of Broadway, could only dream of. From the beginning, it was as if Carmen was destined to dance professionally, even before she knew that such a life was possible. Practically every dance teacher and choreographer who met her recognized her potential and helped pave the way to her success.
Beginnings: Vaudeville, Bellas Artes, and the Sokolovas
Carmen Gutierrez was born in 1926 in Mexico City, the youngest of five children. Her father was from Spain, and her mother was born in Mexico. Carmen’s mother loved the arts, including dancing, so Carmen and her two sisters learned to dance at a very young age.
Carmen’s first public dancing performance was at a traveling vaudeville show. The performers invited the local children to put on a performance, dancing or singing, whatever they wanted. Carmen’s mother said to her, “Go up and dance and I’ll play the piano for you!” So Carmen did, and she won first prize! She returned to this competition every week for four weeks straight, and each time she won first prize. Carmen’s mother was so proud.
Carmen would never have performed without her mother’s encouragement since she was very shy. She was such a good dancer that the vaudeville performers asked if she could travel with them, but her mother said, “No! She’s so young, and she’s still in school.” Carmen’s mother wasn’t invested in her daughter’s success as a dancer; she just wanted her to overcome her shyness. So Carmen’s newfound ambition to become a professional dancer would have to wait.
Carmen’s first exposure to formal dance training came with the establishment of Escuela de Danza de National Bellas Artes (The National School of Dance) in Mexico City in 1933. Carlos Merida, director of the dance school, also collaborated with Diego Riviera on the murals for the Bolivar Amphitheater in Mexico City.
Carmen was about seven years old when Ippolito Sevin, a Russian dancer who taught at Bellas Artes, canvassed the local schools, inviting the most promising young dancers to enroll in Bellas Artes. Raquel, one of Carmen’s older sisters, was chosen first. Carmen came to Raquel’s rehearsals and learned the art of ballet by watching her sister and the other dancers perform. At the tender age of eight, Carmen was also chosen to attend the school. She loved taking ballet classes twice a week from Sevin; he was such a talented dancer and instructor.
Later, Anna Sokolow, the gifted American choreographer from Martha Graham’s Dance Company based in New York, came to Mexico City to teach modern dance. Carmen and Raquel both studied with her as well. Carmen recalls that Sokolow had a passionate temper: she would hit her students if they performed a step incorrectly. Despite her temper, Carmen loved studying dance under Sokolow. She became part of a group of dancers known as the Sokolovas because of their commitment to Sokolow and her style of dance. Carmen’s first professional role came when she danced in the movie La Corte de Faraon, choreographed by Sokolow, in 1944.
The First Tour: Carmen and Ballet Russe
After her role in this film, Carmen’s dancing career began to take flight, starting with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Ballet Russe was a well-known ballet company, based in New York, which arrived in Mexico City shortly after the production of La Corte de Faraon. Carmen joined this company under the direction of George Balanchine, a Russian-born choreographer now considered the father of American ballet.
This was the first time Carmen had danced with a professional troupe. She was now seventeen, and she was invited to go on tour with the ballet to cities in Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. Carmen said “Oh yes, I would love to go!”, despite her parents’ desire for her to stay at home. Raquel, her sister, was invited as well, but she decided not to leave the family in Mexico.
Carmen toured with Ballet Russe for over a year, including eight months in several major cities in the US. Carmen’s father was so upset at her departure that he did not write to her at all until she returned to New York at the end of the tour. At that point, her mother convinced him to write, and he sent her a letter expressing how much he missed her.
Carousel and Finian’s Rainbow: Carmen Falls in Love with Broadway
While she also missed her parents, Carmen was not ready to leave New York. She was invited to travel with Ballet Russe back to Europe, but Carmen had fallen in love with the theater scene on Broadway. The first show she went to see was Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Carousel. She thought the production was absolutely beautiful: she loved the singing and the dancing and the drama. Agnes de Mille was the choreographer, and Carousel was the first big hit on Broadway.
Carmen and some of her friends heard of auditions for dancers to tour with the musical. They decided to audition, and Carmen was one of those chosen. In fact, she became the first Mexican to dance in a Broadway musical! She toured with the cast from Carousel throughout the United States for a year before returning to New York.
Carousel was just the beginning of Carmen’s Broadway career: she performed in a series of shows on Broadway in the forties and fifties. Finian’s Rainbow, produced in 1947, was one of her favorites. In this show, she played the role of a mute girl, Susan Mahoney. She loved playing this role as she was still learning to speak English at the time, and taking this part allowed her to communicate the thoughts and feelings of her character wordlessly through dance.
Most of the cast of Finian’s Rainbow was African-American, and the musical itself was a satire on racism as well as a romance. Many of the dancers were members of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company: Katherine Dunham has frequently been referred to as the matriarch of African-American dance.
When the cast and crew of Finian’s Rainbow went on tour, the African-American dancers and singers were sometimes told that they couldn’t stay at the same hotel as the other cast members. Carmen recalls that one of the first times this happened, an older African-American singer was told that there weren’t any hotel rooms left. Carmen, naively believing that the hotel was actually full, offered to give up her room so that the older woman would have a place to stay.
Tamiment and Your Show of Shows: Carmen and TV’s Golden Age
After Finian’s Rainbow, Carmen went on to perform in many other Broadway shows, including The King and I with Yul Brenner, directed by Jerome Robbins; Shinbone Alley with Eartha Kitt; and Candide with Barbara Cook, with music by Leonard Bernstein and choreography by Carmen’s former dance instructor, Anna Sokolow.
Around the same time, she also performed “The Dance of the Seven Veils” in the opera Salome and appeared on several early TV shows including the Ed Sullivan Show, the Steve Allen and Perry Como shows, and Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, produced by Max Liebman.
Struck by her talent, Liebman invited Carmen to the Tamiment Playhouse in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania in 1948. Tamiment was known at the time as a training ground for theater, dance, film, and television stars; celebrities like Danny Kaye, Carol Burnett, Jerome Robbins, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon got their start at Tamiment.
Carmen loved everything about Tamiment: the talented people she worked with, the camaraderie among the writers and performers, and the chance to appear in weekly comedy shows and musical revues. Musical numbers and comedy sketches that were originally written and produced at Tamiment later made their appearances on Broadway and television including Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows.
Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner were both writers for Sid Caesar while Carmen was performing on the show. I was amazed to hear Carmen speak of her collaboration with these television luminaries: she was clearly fond of them and grateful to have performed for Sid Caesar, but entirely modest in her role as a solo dancer on one of the most celebrated shows of TV’s Golden Age.
West Side Story: The Height of Carmen’s Career
Her most famous role however, was performing in the original Broadway cast of West Side Story with dancers Chita Riviera and David Winters. The musical was directed by Jerome Robbins, and the music was written by Bernstein and Steven Sondheim. Carmen played the role of Teresita, a member of the Sharks gang; she also performed as the dancing double for Carol Lawrence, who starred as Maria.
Carmen remembers Jerome Robbins (or Jerry, as she calls him) as the most demanding director she worked for on Broadway. She still speaks ruefully of the long, excruciating rehearsals, including early morning dance classes, which went on and on for three months. She came home sore every night! “But, you know, it was worth it, really.” Carmen credits Robbins’s demanding directorial style with West Side Story’s great success. The musical ran for two years on Broadway, from 1957-59.
While performing in West Side Story, Carmen met Liz Taylor. No, not that Liz Taylor. The Liz Taylor who married Miles Davis. Yes, that Miles Davis. Liz changed her stage name to Frances to avoid being confused with the other Liz Taylor, but she remained Liz to those who knew her. Carmen and Liz soon became good friends, and Carmen often went to parties at the Davis’s apartment on 77th Street. At these parties, she met even more famous people: Lena Horne, her husband Lennie Hayton the composer, Carmen McRae the jazz singer, James Baldwin, and many others.
Carmen was equally awestruck by the celebrities she met and by Miles’s temper: “They were always taking him to jail because of drugs or a fight. I was a little afraid of him!” The parties were fabulous: inevitably, someone would start playing piano, people would sing and dance, and Liz would serve Southern comfort food, like ham hocks and beans, for everyone to enjoy. As Carmen relates, the dancers who came to the parties ate like locusts: they would consume everything on the table since they had no money and never ate well.
Remi and the Martel Dance Trio: Carmen’s European Romance
Carmen met her husband, Remi Martel, shortly after her return to New York from the tour of Carousel, while they were both dancing in Sleepy Hollow on Broadway. Remi was a native of Brussels, Belgium; his father, Paul-Jean Martel, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter. Shortly after meeting Carmen, Remi went on a dancing tour of European night clubs. He wrote to Carmen from Europe, asking her to join him in an original night club act with a mutual friend, Annie Dunbar.
Carmen agreed, and the Martel Dance Trio became quite successful. Carmen, Remi, and Annie toured Egypt and Europe from 1949-51, spending an entire year in Italy. Carmen loved living on the Continent, particularly the time she spent in Barcelona and Rome. In addition to their own dance numbers, the trio also performed in a traveling variety show with Italian comedian Ugo Tognazzi, who would later become internationally known for originating the role of gay cabaret owner Renato Baldi in La Cage aux Folles in 1978.
Remi and Carmen began dating while they were on tour. However, Remi remained in Europe after these two years abroad while Carmen returned to New York. After a long-distance relationship that lasted four years, Remi returned to New York, to Broadway, and to Carmen. The couple were married at City Hall in Manhattan in 1955. Their lives continued to revolve around dancing: after the ceremony, Remi performed that same evening in Oklahoma! and Carmen danced in that night’s performance of Sleepy Hollow.
Carmen’s Grand Exit: A Moment in Love and The Dance Jubilee
That same year, Carmen danced the solo for “The Dance of the Seven Veils” in the opera Salome and followed that performance by dancing on a live telecast of the opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. She continued to dance on The Steve Allen Show, The Perry Como Show, and on Broadway.
Carmen’s last appearance on the silver screen was starring in an independent dance film, written and directed by Shirley Clarke, head of The National Dance Association and a filmmaker of experimental short films. The 1956 film was titled A Moment in Love. Anna Sokolow recommended Carmen for the role of the female lover in this modern interpretation of a wordless yet beautiful love story expressed through dance.
In 1959, Carmen was contacted by dancer Rod Alexander, who asked if she wanted to join a company he was forming, Dance Jubilee. The dance company was sponsored by President Eisenhower’s Special Program for International Cultural Presentations and was scheduled to tour for nine months throughout Greece and parts of Asia, including India, Iran, Taiwan, Cambodia, and Thailand. Carmen agreed to join the company, and Remi came along as stage manager. Her dance partner, Lou Kristopher, said of Carmen’s dancing, “No one could take their eyes off her while she was dancing. In dance classes, she would always choose to dance in the back row, but during performances, choreographers would always place her in front. She was just that good.”
Along the way, the dance company met royalty and other dignitaries, including Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and the Shah of Iran. These extraordinary meetings were a welcome respite from the demands of the tour. As Wakefield Poole, another member of the dance company, recalled, the troupe
performed a two hour cavalcade of American dance. We started with an 1880s minstrel show—all of us playing banjos—and proceeded through the Cake Walk, castle walk, black bottom, the lindy, a hoedown, movie dances of the 1930s, an Agnes de Mille style western ballet, and finished with a Gershwin jazz finale, incorporating all forms of theater dance. It was a difficult show to dance, made even harder by quick costume changes (Dirty Poole 47).
In the summer heat, the whole troupe worked up a sweat during each performance, and their costumes were often wet with perspiration from the moment they put them on. Like her European tour with Remi, however, Carmen reveled in the opportunity to observe and participate in other cultures. She and Remi were only two of four members of the company who accepted the King of Cambodia’s invitation to watch an early morning performance of the Monkey Dance on the castle grounds, including an elderly dancer who had gone into retirement, but returned to dance for their pleasure.
From Dance to Design: The Advent of Carmen G.
When they returned to the United States, Carmen began to think about the future. She and Remi had bought a house on Long Island while maintaining their apartment in Manhattan and soon, they had their first child, a son named John Paul in honor of his artist grandfather. Life became hectic as they spent weekends on Long Island, then packed up baby and baby gear at the start of each week to return to the city. Carmen began to wonder how long she and Remi could keep up this active pace.
About this same time, Carmen had begun designing clothing for herself: beautiful, feminine yet comfortable dresses and blouses. Carmen made the acquaintance of the fashion designer Arthur Magee, and he suggested that she sell her dresses and blouses to boutique shops. She made six dresses for the chic boutique shop Tomas on Madison Avenue, and the shop sold out of them in one day! Next, Magee encouraged her to sell one of her dresses to B. Altman’s department store, and the same thing happened: they sold out within twenty-four hours!
Ater selling her clothes on consignment, Carmen and Remi decided to start their own dressmaking business, Carmen G. Soon, magazines like Seventeen, Mademoiselle, Sports Illustrated and Vogue published advertisements for Carmen’s designs: she even had full page ads in The New York Times! The buyers at Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue heard of the popularity of her clothing line and began ordering from Carmen as well. Miles Davis even bought a blouse for his wife Liz without realizing it was designed by Carmen!
Carmen and Remi’s Transcontinental Move to LA
The business continued to grow, and the couple opened factories and warehouses in New York and Los Angeles, selling to boutiques and department stores on both coasts. Carmen G began to compete in popularity with the likes of Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne. In addition to Bloomingdale’s, one of her biggest customers was Bullock’s department store in Los Angeles.
After her design business took off, Carmen retired from dancing. She and Remi had had their second child, a daughter named Maclovia, and they continued to ferry both children back and forth (literally) from their house in Long Island to their apartment in Manhattan every week. A friend suggested that they move to the West Coast, where the pace of life was slower than New York, and where Carmen could devote herself full-time to designing clothes and looking after the children.
Shortly afterwards, Remi went on a house hunting mission to Los Angeles; he fell in love with the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which reminded him of a seaside Italian village. He and Carmen moved their family to the peninsula, about fifteen miles south of LA, in early 1974. They ran their clothing business out of their home until both of their children had grown and moved out. in the late ‘90s, they sold Carmen G and made the transition to full-time retirement living in the natural beauty of Palos Verdes.
Looking Back on a Live Well Lived
Towards the end of our conversation, after Carmen has reminisced over the many serendipitous turns her career has taken, she sits back and smiles: “Yes, I have had a good life.” Although Remi has since passed away and Carmen has given up their gracious Palos Verdes home to move into an apartment nearby, she continues to surround herself with art and beauty. Her living room is filled with the paintings of John Paul Martel, Remi’s father, and her hallway and bedroom walls are covered by professional black and white photos of her sisters and parents, as well as stunning photographs of a young Carmen dancing, caught in mid-stride with a joyful expression on her face. In fact, it is not at all hard to recognize the joyful, vivacious dancer in the small but erect frame of her older self. The grace and beauty which have characterized Carmen all of her life remain in her smile, in her twinkling eyes, and in her gratitude for the life she has lived.
Photography by E. Geno Frazier, Langley Avenue; Background Research by Maclovia Martel, A Girl from Mexico