According to Melanie Hamrick, the outwardly refined world of ballet is, in fact, a hotbed of drink, drugs, debauchery and eating disorders. When she’d repeat the colorful anecdotes of her 16 years as a member of the corps de ballet at New York’s American Ballet Theatre (ABT), “Mick would say, ‘Enough with telling these stories from the ballet — you’ve got to write them down.’ ” So she’d carry a notebook, jotting down all the juicy details, joking that one day she’d put it all in a book.
Now she has. First Position, the 36-year-old’s debut novel, is set in the world of ballet and, if not a literal bodice-ripper — “I wish I had done a scene where they ripped a bodice, but that’s just not authentically ballet, because you would be murdered if you ripped a costume” — then it’s a bona fide bonkbuster, published by Mills & Boon.
And the “Mick” who pushed her to put pen to paper is Sir Mick Jagger, the snake-hipped, 79-year-old Rolling Stone, Hamrick’s partner and father to their six-year-old son, Deveraux.
I first met Hamrick in October 2018 over tea in a genteel New York hotel, when “Dev” was 22 months old. So tense was Hamrick that, had I tapped her with my teaspoon, I’d not have been surprised to see her crumble to dust. She’d never really done an interview before.
“I was just very nervous,” she says today. “I thought, ‘I’m going to say the wrong thing. I’m going to do something wrong.’ I was like a robot.” She laughs, cranking her arms and adopting a monosyllabic tone: ” ‘He’s an amazing father.’ ” She shakes her arms free and laughs. “But I can’t say it enough: he is an amazing father.”
Today, we’re in another hotel, on the 46th floor of the Shangri-La the Shard, London’s highest hotel. It’s extremely luxurious and feels entirely appropriate, given how much of First Position’s action plays out in opulent hotel suites in global cities including Paris, Barcelona and Washington DC. Hamrick is sitting in a deep, egg-shaped swivel armchair, which she spins incessantly. Like many former athletes, she fidgets with unspent energy. Unlike the last time we met, though, she is quick to laugh and crackles with confidence. She left the ABT in 2019, “burned out” after three years trying to combine motherhood with performing, training and touring. “I feel good in my skin now and I didn’t feel good in my skin half the time I was at the ballet.”
But I don’t believe leaving ballet behind is the only reason for Hamrick’s increased confidence. Back in October 2018, she was still based in New York while Jagger was living in London. “Mick and I are fantastic co-parents and I don’t feel as though I’m the sole caregiver at all,” she insisted at the time. While she was pregnant, gossip had emerged linking Jagger to the Russian model Masha Rudenko. And a few months before we met for the first time, the film producer and socialite Noor Alfallah, then 22, posted a shot of herself cuddling up to Jagger on a sofa alongside Ronnie Wood and his wife, Sally. Alfallah and Jagger were rumored to have begun a fling a few months earlier in Paris, where the Rolling Stones were on tour, when Dev was nine months old. “I feel very secure in my relationship,” Hamrick said briskly at that first meeting. “There will always be rumors in the newspapers, but I know what Mick and I have so I don’t pay any attention.”
“I feel good in my skin now and I didn’t feel good in my skin half the time I was at the ballet.”
Today, while you couldn’t call it nuclear — Jagger’s famously blended family numbers eight children with five mothers, ranging in age from 52 to 6 — Hamrick, Jagger and their son are certainly a family unit. She tells me about the “magical” safari in Botswana and South Africa from which they’ve just returned — “Mick had been joking with me, ‘We’re going camping.’ I was like, ‘I don’t want to go camping. I’m not a camper.’ We got there and I was like, ‘This isn’t camping’ ” — and their current country-hopping lifestyle between various Jagger residences. “Just full nomad,” she says, beaming. “We want to travel as long as we can until school gets us.” Dev has a tutor who travels with them, is enrolled in a school in Los Angeles and “goes [to school] a little bit when we’re in France”, she says.
Her friends tell her that when Dev hits eight, he won’t want to miss out on birthday parties with friends and they will be forced to decide on a home base. “But I enjoy this schedule. I don’t want to be tied down. London’s my favorite city, so hopefully one day in the future we’ll end up based here, but until then I’m going to just keep going.”
They’ve been together for almost nine years, but neither she nor Jagger has ever publicly discussed the status of their relationship. Would she like to get married? She sighs. “I’m not bothered. I’m neither here nor there,” she claims. But should her legendary lover propose, she wouldn’t say no? “I wouldn’t say no.”
She stops spinning in her chair and thrusts her left hand towards me. “I know there have been lots of, ‘Are they engaged or aren’t they engaged?’ ” she says. “Yes, I have a commitment ring. This is my commitment ring and that’s about as much as I’ll say.”
And what a commitment ring it is, a whopper of a diamond set in a sea of slightly less whopping but still extremely impressive diamonds, with a sprinkling of sapphires for good measure. I know absolutely nothing about rings, but I am fairly sure this is a very fine example of one. If they are engaged, which they might well be, she’s not about to make that explicit today. And if not, that is a very nice non-engagement ring.
Hamrick was keen to set her own novel in the sphere in which she’d spent most of her life. And it reads as a fairly fabulous life — travelling, touring and knocking back champagne in high-end hotel bars.
“It’s a short career — most people retire by their mid-thirties — but it pays well,” she says. “That’s what’s fun about it. You’re like, ‘I’m 22, I’m travelling, I can have an apartment in New York. Wow.’ ” But, she adds, “You’re also so focused on doing what you love that you kind of miss out on all the cool fun things.”
Her two protagonists, frenemies Jocelyn and Sylvie, don’t seem to miss out on much, tempering all the focus and hard work with plenty of drink and drugs. There are threesomes and sex parties, S&M, oral sex in the theater stalls, illicit affairs with other dancers and directors, and vivid descriptions such as, “His dick was the kind of perfect that just looking at it made me go primal for him.” Hamrick claims these were not her own experiences at ABT (“I wish I’d had more of a wild time”), but, “I definitely was around people who dabbled in drugs,” she says. “And you have these 18-year-old dancers — they’re beautiful, they’re very aware of their bodies — so yes, there is a lot of sex at the ballet.”
There are threesomes and sex parties, S&M, oral sex in the theater stalls, illicit affairs with other dancers and directors, and vivid descriptions.
Hamrick was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, and raised in nearby Williamsburg. Her father was a civil engineer, her mother a healthcare worker. It was, she says, “a classic suburban American” childhood. “We had the station wagon; we even had the golden retriever.” The youngest of three children, she did everything her sister, Rachel, did — which was primarily dance. “In America, as in a lot of places, it’s a rite of passage. We did everything — swimming, gymnastics — but kept coming back to ballet. At seven I remember thinking, ‘I want to be a professional ballerina.’ ”
At 11, she followed Rachel to the Kirov Academy in Washington DC, a ballet boarding school that accepted just 12 students a year. Housed in a former monastery, the strict regime included a couple of hours of academic schooling each morning and afternoon and six hours-plus of ballet per day.
“If you didn’t have your room clean by a certain time, you lost privileges to go outside. You had to bow to your teachers when they walked by,” Hamrick recalls. She once broke her toe and couldn’t get her pointe shoe on; her ballet teacher called her “a stupid lazy idiot”. “And they weighed you all the time,” she says. What happened if you were deemed too heavy? ” ‘No food for you today.’ ”
It sounds, I say, brutal. “That was brutal,” she agrees. “I’m still friends with a lot of girls I went there with and I’m like, ‘How did we survive that?’ It’s survival of the fittest,” she says. “If you want to be a ballerina you have to make it work. So you suck it up.”
Melanie Hamrick once broke her toe and couldn’t get her pointe shoe on; her ballet teacher called her “a stupid lazy idiot.”
Little wonder that when she joined the American Ballet Theatre at 17, Hamrick was unfazed by what newbies are put through — including being given the last spot at the barre and being made to sit on the floor of the dressing room — all designed, says Hamrick, “to bring you down a notch. Because to get into the company you had to be the best at your school, so they have to bring you back down. You’re young and they’re mean.
“Since I left and with the #MeToo movement, ballet’s started to take a look at itself,” she says. But slowly. According to Hamrick, the ABT only established a human resources department 18 months ago.
She struggled with her company’s apparent lack of compassion. “ABT considers itself a family,” she says. But when her father was diagnosed with cancer, she was denied time off to spend with him. When he eventually died, in 2015, and she asked for seven days off, she was told, she says, ” ‘If you don’t think you can handle it, just don’t come back at all.’ Maybe with other people it’s different, but my experience is they weren’t supportive,” she says.
Hamrick initially tells me that she’s never suffered from an eating disorder. Later, she says that ballet skews one’s idea of what an eating disorder even looks like. “I didn’t think of it as an eating disorder, but it probably was, because I wasn’t eating,” she says. “I definitely had warped ways of eating. If I tried to live off that diet now, I’d pass out.
“I think there is that bordering on eating disorder culture of being thin enough to be teeny-tiny, fitting into a costume and light enough for a guy to lift and yet still having energy,” she says. “So to someone outside the ballet, when you look at a ballet dancer — yes, that’s an eating disorder.”
She first met Jagger in Tokyo in February 2014. The Rolling Stones were on tour in the city, as was ABT, and staff for the two touring groups had organized a ticket swap. The Stones concert was Hamrick’s first gig. Had Jagger also been to her show? No. “But he made up for it and came to lots of others,” she says. “He’s my number one fan.”
She had been engaged to the Cuban former dancer José Manuel Carreño, while Jagger was in a long-term relationship with the American fashion designer L’Wren Scott, whom he had been dating for 13 years. Less than a month later, Scott took her own life, her death believed to have resulted from the pressures of debts and business difficulties. In June of that year, Hamrick and Jagger were first pictured together, papped on the balcony of his penthouse at the five-star Dolder Grand hotel in Zurich. When, after less than two years of transatlantic dating, she discovered she was pregnant, it was, says Hamrick, “definitely surprising”.
“I didn’t think of it as an eating disorder, but it probably was because I wasn’t eating.”
She had few role models combining motherhood and ballet. Out of a company of about 40, she says, only one other dancer had had a baby. Hamrick kept her pregnancy a secret for as long as possible.
“I felt so close to being promoted from corps de ballet to soloist. I was dancing so many solo roles and my boss kept saying, ‘This is your year,’ ” she says. “I knew if I told them I was pregnant, I wouldn’t get the promotion.”
Her doctors had cleared her to keep dancing and, “I was taking care of myself, feeling invincible, but I pushed it too hard and I fell during a show and needed to evaluate.” At four months pregnant, she told the company she needed to step back; at five months, she informed them she was, in fact, pregnant.
After Dev’s arrival, she received just four weeks’ maternity pay from the ballet company. “And I even had to fight for those four weeks,” she says. The company cited injury and time she’d taken when her father died as having used up her allotted paid leave.
Two weeks after her caesarean section, she was back in the gym and ballet class. “I cried the whole time. It was horrible,” she admits of that first class. But, “I wanted to show them you can have a baby and you can be just as good. I was out to prove myself,” she says. “I look back and I shouldn’t have done it. I should have just chilled out.” Five months after giving birth, she was back on stage performing.
“I knew if I told them I was pregnant, I wouldn’t get the promotion.”
Given it was a touring company, travel was an integral part of the job. And, as Dev’s primary caregiver, this presented logistical problems for Hamrick. “If I could bring my child with me I would, but in some cities it wasn’t healthy to bring a baby. Downtown LA, where are you going to take a child?” She had a “wonderful” nanny and plenty of support. “But it’s not the same as taking care of your own child. You’re still a mum away from your baby. No matter who’s there, you’re not there.”
It was, ultimately, unsustainable. “I pushed too hard. I burned out,” she says. When Dev turned three in 2019, she resigned. “And I hate that, because I want there to be more mothers in ballet,” she says. But, she adds, “Being a mum, finding a life outside the ballet, having a partner outside the ballet, having a child and seeing the more well-rounded picture,” made her realize, “They don’t pay enough for me to be breaking my back like this… I still loved performing, but I love my son more.”
She lined up choreography work and founded her own company, Live Arts Global, which staged ballet shows around the US. But in early 2020, when Covid closed theaters and performance spaces for the foreseeable, she finally sat down instead to write.
“Even Mick was like, ‘I’m still surprised you wrote the book, because lots of people sit down and say, “I’m going to write a book,” but you actually finished it,’ ” she says. “That’s the ballet training. If I’m going to do it, I will do it, no matter how long it takes.” That is, she says, something she and Jagger connect on. “Yes, one of the biggest things we have in common is the discipline and dedication — his passion for his art and his craft and mine for mine.
“I pushed too hard. I burned out.”
“He works with movies as well [as music], and he was so supportive of me writing the book and changing career paths,” she says. “That really brings us together and he understands that I need to do this.”
I gush a bit about seeing the Stones last summer and Jagger’s extraordinary energy levels. I had seen Harry Styles — 50 years Jagger’s junior — play the weekend before, and Jagger’s performance was easily as dynamic. His training regime to prepare for the tours is, says Hamrick, “definitely like ballet. His trainer used to work at the Royal Ballet, and the woman who does the wardrobe for the Stones used to work there too. They’re very similar, the two worlds.”
I’m then waylaid by a diversion into Jagger’s stage wardrobe, a seemingly inexhaustible collection of sequined jackets that would make Elton John envious, which he would wear for one track and then blithely toss away. Hamrick understands my fixation. “Sometimes I walk into a room and Mick’s like, ‘Where did you get that jacket?’ I’m like, ‘From your closet.’ ” He tells me, ‘Stop nicking my jackets.’ ”
Even the extended Jagger clan — Mick’s seven other children, plus grandchildren and great-grandchildren — is, says Hamrick, “not that different to the ballet. You’re folded into this world, you adjust, you get used to it and it’s wonderful.”
Jagger famously loves to have his sprawling family on tour with him. Hamrick enjoys it too — up to a point. “I do like timeouts — partly for Dev, because it’s a lot, changing cities every three days, and because I know what it’s like to perform. We’re together, but you also need some you-time. You’re performing for 60,000 people. I wasn’t performing for that many people, but I liked my me-time when I was dancing,” she says. “I can say, ‘I feel like you need some you-time,’ or, ‘I feel like Dev and I need some me-time.’ It’s finding the balance. When it comes to performing, we really understand each other in that sense.”
It seems inevitable that Dev will inherit this performing gene. “He wants to be a football player, but he goes back and forth — he wants to be a performer too,” she says.
Hamrick has no plans to further swell the ranks of the Jagger brood. “One and done,” she says firmly. “Motherhood is so rewarding and wonderful, but it’s hard.” She’s already working on her second novel. Dev doesn’t yet understand that writing is her new career, she says, and that she needs to set aside time for it. But he was very curious about the book, she says with a laugh. “I said, ‘You cannot read that.’ He’s not at that level [of reading] yet, but also, he just cannot read that.”
Jane Mulkerrins is an associate editor at The Times Magazine