Every Comma Mattered: Sheila Benson’s Life & Times, by Chuck Wilson, friend & colleague

Former Los Angeles Times film critic Sheila Benson died February 23, 2022 of natural causes. She was 91. Admired by colleagues for the eloquence of her prose and by filmmakers and actors alike for her generosity of spirit, Sheila came to criticism quite naturally. Her parents were artists and writers. She herself studied ballet under the great Balanchine. Observing the world, onscreen and off, with an artist’s eye, was an intrinsic gift Sheila spent her life cultivating.

Sheila was born December 4, 1930 in New York City to museum curator-dioramist turned costume designer Dwight Franklin and novelist-screenwriter Mary C. McCall, Jr. During the Depression, the Franklin-McCall’s moved to Los Angeles. Sheila was four-years-old. Her parents found great success in Hollywood, with Dwight designing costumes for Cecil B. DeMille while Mary became the first woman to be voted president of the Writer’s Guild of America (twice).

Sheila attended Beverly Hills High School and studied theater arts at UCLA alongside classmates James Dean and Carol Burnett. Sheila would eventually become a writer like her mother, but in her heart of hearts, she was a dancer, and as a teenager, studied at the School of American Ballet under choreographer George Balanchine. A harsh taskmaster whom Sheila adored, the Russian master taught her a respect for rigor and detail that she would carry forth into her own work. For Sheila, every comma mattered. Intensely.

She would marry three times, first to photographer Charles W. Ashley, with whom she had two daughters, Ann and Eden. Later, she married developer Walter Benson, with whom she had her daughter, Caitlin. Some years later, in 1982, she married businessman Herman Hong, who would prove to be the great love of her life. This August would have been their 40^th wedding anniversary.

By the end of her second marriage, Sheila was living in Mill Valley, California, and writing film criticism for the Pacific Sun. Sheila’s reviews were immensely popular and caught the attention of Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin, who invited her to join the paper.

Soon, Sheila was back in the city of her upbringing, traveling to screenings at the movie studios at which her parents had once worked, often with their daughter at their side. Those years, along with her deep love of literature and art, infused every line of every review she wrote.

Sheila was the Chief Film Critic of the Los Angeles Times from 1981 to 1991 and Critic at Large from ’91 to ’92. She was invited to serve on the critic’s jury to many prestigious festivals, from her beloved Mill Valley Film Festival to Telluride, Toronto, Sundance, and Berlin. She often moderated onstage interviews with filmmakers and actors, including a grand one with Alfre Woodard as well as a nerve rattling but triumphant encounter with Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni.

In those years, Sheila won the adoration of L.A. Times readers, who were known to read her reviews aloud or cut them out and post them on the fridge. Her reviews turned many small, no-budget releases, such as Some Girls and One False Move, into local hits.

Carl Franklin and Jesse Beaton, the director and producer, respectively, of One False Move, credit Sheila’s early support with helping the film, now hailed as a masterpiece, gain a nationwide release. “She changed the course of both our lives,” Beaton said upon learning of Sheila’s passing.

As Hollywood turned to superheroes and L.A. traffic became a bit too awful to bear, Sheila stepped away from the Times and she and Herman moved to Seattle and a new life. There, they made many new friends, and as in Los Angeles and Mill Valley, the Benson-Hong house was always brimming with activity. Dinner, of course, was served after 9 p.m. when it could be savored and the day fully discussed and appreciated. If you called, and you were welcome to call late, Sheila might talk with you, but Herman would surely chime in, his commentary laced with laughter. There was much laughter in that house. Laughter and joy and enviably good food.

Sheila was with us for 91 years and each was full to bursting with life.

Sheila Benson is survived by her husband, Herman Hong, and daughters, Ann Brooke Ashley, Eden Ashley Umble, and Caitlin Benson Hartford, and sons-in-law Michael Umble and Tim Hartford. She doted on her four grandchildren, Chloe & Riley Umble, and Samantha & Michael Hartford. She is also survived by her sister, Mary David Sheiner, and niece, Laurel Phillips.

Plans for a Sheilabration (multi-city tour) will be announced later this year.

In lieu of flowers, her family invites you to consider a donation in her memory to support human rights (refugee aid for Ukraine), reproductive rights, literacy, or voters’ rights – all causes near and dear to her activist’s heart.

Remembering Balanchine

This George Platt Lynes study of George Balanchine with School of American Ballet students was on the cover of the School’s brochure scant years after I entered, and I’ve always loved it. (The boy is 10-year-old Edward Villella.)

Only in our dreams would Mr. B. feel the need to work with dancers at our level. This is what I remember from one time that he did.

In a slightly different form, it appeared in the Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1983, just after Balanchine’s death..

The last thing we expected George Balanchine to be was funny. Actually the last thing we expected him to be was visible. In 1945 as a student at the School of American Ballet, you could count on an occasional harrowing glimpse of Lincoln Kirstein in the elevator to class, well over 6’4” tall and austere, and that was bad enough.

Mr.B. was legendary but largely unseen. I was sure he’d look like one of those George Platt Lynes photographs in Dance Index, with his necktie thrown dramatically back over his coat. Classmates thought he’d look imperious, since half his photographs were taken with his head back like a greyhound. But although we felt his presence at the School we almost never saw him during those long afternoons while we spattered the wooden floorboards with drops of sweat and prayed that somehow, some way we would learn the combinations. Not only learn them but begin to dance them.

Occasionally, a girl from the most advanced class would to drop into C class to work on technique; dancing what we were only holding onto with our fingernails. The one we used to stare at most, covertly, trying not to show our fascination, seemed as close to perfection as we could imagine. She had extraordinarily long legs and arms and she tied her hair back neatly with the narrowest pink satin ribbon, the color which exactly matched the pink flush her cheeks took on as the class work grew progressively harder. It gave her the effect of a porcelain doll, a comparison we suspected she had already noticed, but there was nothing doll-like in the way she covered the diagonal distance of the practice room in three long, low leaps.

There was yet no New York City Ballet company to aspire to, although we had no way of knowing how close on the horizon it was to being born. It seemed as though nothing would change, that classes from these fierce Russian emigres, Anatole Ouboukhoff and Pierre Vladimiroff who gave their directions in French strained through Russian, or from Muriel Stuart who was English and kindly and had toured with Pavlova, would continue forever; that we would learn or not learn each succeeding level of difficulty in a sort of dream-like continuum.

But it all changed one November afternoon. A large group from class, as well as soloists taken from the professional class, were quietly notified: there was to be a school performance at Carnegie Hall with Leon Barzin and the National Symphony Orchestra. Mr. B. would choreograph a Mozart Symphonie Concertante, a Stravinsky Elegie for viola and Stravinsky’s Circus Polka.

And so we began to work with Balanchine. And with our pink-cheeked idol from professional class, Tanaquil LeClercq, who we found was only a year older than most of us, and not aloof but intent. She and another dancer the physical opposite of herself were to do a pas de deux. Most of the rest of us were involved in the Mozart Symphonia Concertante, forming a living background for the serious action, standing, kneeling, posing, changing arms, counting, changing arms again. All in an atmosphere of the greatest concentration. There were, you can be sure, no hysterical mothers, and no worries over costumes either. We were to wear our hideous blue regulation leotards and tie our hair back neatly. And that was that.

But we could watch. So we would line the floor, our backs against the cold mirrors, sit quietly and try not to be noticed while we watched them practice. Balanchine would get two or three dancers into a tangle, their hands linked in a long continuous movement until he ran out of human slack, and had to unknot them as you would unknot a snarled chain. And at these moments we discovered his oblique humor.

Tamara Toumanova had been through New York just then, with, among other things, a peculiar ballet done to the music of Chopin in which the pianist was on stage with her and she was his muse. A white, romantic ballet, it had been choreographed to feature one of her particular aptitudes, spectacular balance. At one moment of inspiration she balanced en pointe at his shoulder, balanced and balanced while the music filled and swelled and repeated and went back and over again until, finally, she had her fill of inspiration and got on with the rest of the dance.

And on this particular Saturday morning on Madison Avenue in this dingy, sacred school, Balanchine, working with three other dancers, had left a fourth girl on pointe as he wandered off a little to the side, head down, to figure out what in heaven’s name he was going to do next. Our eyes were riveted on her. She held her pointe, held it and held it. He had not told her to move. She began to sway. Our heads swayed slightly with her. Finally, noticing his entire room moving like palm trees in a wind, Balanchine looked up and saw her predicament.

“You can come down now, Toumanova.” The corner of his mouth twitched very slightly.

The night before the performance we lined up for one last costume check. Something distressed Mr. B. Scissors were brought. And he personally cut lower the decolletage of each dancer he felt needed it. Twelve year olds, I seem to remember, were not in that group, nor weed-like 14-year-olds either.

To tell the truth, I can’t remember much about that evening. What we had to do we did sturdily enough; it was cold but we barely felt it. A whole orchestra sounded rich to us after a rehearsal piano, and the night was over entirely too quickly. The School gave us each nosegay bouquets. Years later, after a dozen moves I finally lost mine. And cried.

But I remember vividly the morning I read that Balanchine had married Tanaquil. A classmate called me and her sigh was unenvious. “She married him for all of us,” she breathed. And so she had.

This piece came about through the generosity of Martin Bernheimer, the towering Los Angeles Times Music Critic and my next-office neighbor at the paper. When Balanchine died, Bernheimer remembered that I’d had something to do with ballet, or Balanchine or whatever in my past, and asked if I’d write something in the way of an appreciation.

Sometimes panic steadies you. It did me, that day, as I clung to the thought that personal wasn’t necessarily negative.  Besides, it was all I had to bring.  After it ran, panic came back when a warm note arrived. Toumanova had so enjoyed the piece, “Would you like to have tea one day, just me and Momma?”  I declined, polite but aghast.  All I could think was, Didn’t she realize that the joke, more or less, was on her? 

Perhaps. But it was Balanchine’s joke.