Walter Foy Prude (1909 - 1988)
and
Agnes George de Mille (1905 - 1993)

Walter Foy Prude married Agnes de Mille. The excerpts reproduced below from her biography give a window into his life as well as hers.

Excerpts from No Intermissions, The Life of Agnes de Mille: Carol Easton, Little Brown and Company, Boston: 1996. This book is out of print as of June, 1999 but you may be able to find it in a library or used book store. The niece of Cecil B., Agnes de Mille made her name early in the dance world via classical ballet, and went on to transform musicals on Broadway and in Hollywood with Oklahoma! and Carousel. This comprehensive biography of one of America's most controversial choreographers provides a complete portrait of this giant on the nation's cultural scene.

Page 180:
"From the age of two, Walter was a motherless child - a status that made him a misfit from the start and that, if it did not shape his personality, certainly colored his sensibility. Agnes was also a misfit, but her family was an anchor, a bedrock of devotion and strength and pride. Walter's only emotional connection as a child appears to have been with his mother's [Note: Roma Foy, 1882-1912] youngest sister, who was only six years older than himself; he spent his summers with her family in a small West Texas town [Baird, Callahan County]. Annie Vee, [Note: Annie Virginia Foy 1903-1996] as she was called, remembered Walter as a sweet, stubborn, perfectionist child, decent and reserved - adjectives that would apply to him throughout his life. During the school year, he lived with his paternal grandmother, a righteous Fundamentalist, in Dallas. His father, a clothing salesman, eventually remarried, but there is no evidence of love between Walter and any of the Prudes."

"In his teens, he fell passionately in love with Brahms and became an accomplished, self-taught pianist. His other passion was tennis, at which he also excelled. Academically he was precocious, graduating from high school at fourteen. At Rice Institute, in Houston, he prepared for medical school; but in his fourth year as an undergraduate, he dropped out and followed a friend, Craig Barton, to New York, where his real education began."

""I want to really live," Walter wrote in his journal, "and I want to accomplish; but I have not the slightest notion of how to begin either." He polished his manners and refined his tastes. He read Proust, wrote romantic, Byronic poetry, and considered the piano "my real mistress." He diluted his accent until it almost disappeared, but he would always look like the star of a Western movie - over six feet tall, with a long-lanky body, fair hair and complexion, and deep-set gray eyes. Agnes thought him "a nice combination of Gary Cooper and George VI of England." Like Cole Porter, another small-town American boy, he transformed himself into a paradigm of sophistication, his wit as dry as his martinis. He seemed, people said, almost English. No one would ever have guessed Walter Prude to be the son of a Texas haberdasher."

"He scrutinized people, including himself, with a merciless eye and noted the details in his journals with excruciating self-consciousness. He was hired as secretary to the concert pianist Olga Samaroff, and entered the inner sanctum of the music world, where he felt very much at ease with he people he met. His artistic standards, already high, rose. In 1931 he met Paul Nordoff, a composer, who fell in love with him. He wrote lyrics to Nordoff's music, lived with him for a time, and traveled across Europe with him. Eventually, he left Nordoff and took a job with a Chicago-based concert agency. In 1941, Martha Graham was one of his clients."

"He had never heard of Agnes until Graham introduced them. At their first meeting, he was intrigued. She was enchanted. They met again the next day - and the next, and the next. They both loved language and good music; they played a game of listening to a string quartet and identifying the period and composer. They made each other laugh. "Our relationship ripened precipitously," Agnes said, "there was no time for finesse" - meaning that within three weeks of their meeting he was drafted and ordered in Biloxi, Mississippi."

"Agnes was "madly in love," but the war made everyone's future dubious. Walter kept his feelings guarded; like her father, he was "never wholly within reach." He told her he loved her and that he had never been in love before; but the closest he came to a commitment was to leave his poems with her, and his journal. She wrote to him, often and at length; paradoxically, the physical distance between them generated letters that brought them closer. Still, they scarcely knew each other. He had met her mother once (Anna was not impressed); they had slept together twice; he knew little and cared less about dancing, except Graham's. But their lives, although neither of them could have known it, were already inextricably linked."

Page 272:
"In the cutthroat world of concert management, Walter Prude was known for his taste, sensitivity, and integrity. His clients, including such luminaries as Isaac Stern, Marian Anderson, Roberta Peters, Jan Peerce and Andres Segovia, adored him…"

"…The care and feeding of delicate egos was part of Walter's job, but he had no intention of pampering anyone on his own time. At work he might go white with anger, but his control never faltered. At home, he showed his temper. He had moods. He was a hard-core pessimist and a hard-nosed perfectionist; coming from Walter, "not too bad" was high praise."

"Walter's intelligence, sophistication, and with would not have saved him from being obliterated by the power of Agnes personality. But he was also contrary, stubbornly independent, and in his understated way, as self-centered and strong-willed as his wife. Agnes wanted a man who would dominate her - an impossible task. Walter won that game because he refused to play it. His game was teasing, along the lines of "I only married you because I thought I'd be killed in the war.""

Page 306:
"…In his youth, he had wanted to be a writer - but although he had talent, he was as merciless a critic of his own work as of everyone else's …"

Page 418:
"Agnes urged Walter to pursue his own aspirations to write, even prodding him into analysis to overcome his resistance. But the talking cure was not for Walter, and he soon gave it up. "Walter didn't know how good he was," Harold Taylor believed. "He was in the middle of the major cultural movements of this century. He told great anecdotes. I said, "Why don't you write your memoirs of working with all this great talent? He said he didn't write well enough."

Page 419:
"Walter was a gentleman, but he was not a saint. Normally he measured every word … but his temper could be explosive …On the subject of infidelity, Isacc Stern said, 'All of us assumed that Walter had many dalliances, none of which were very deep. Because he wouldn't give of himself to that degree. If he didn't to Agnes or those closest to him, he certainly wouldn't to a casual encounter. With Agnes' schedule, Walter had a life apart from her that was completely free. And being as handsome and convivial as he was, he would take his comforts as they came along. They obviously weren't overly demanding of the other. I think they knew there was a limit, and beyond that it was dangerous territory.'"

In May, 1975 Agnes suffered a stroke which paralyzed the right side of her body. She was hospitalized for 3 ½ months and two operations were required to remove blood clots. Through determined effort she regained some of her gross motor movements.

Page 437:
"Always conscious of her appearance in public, Agnes now saw herself as a clumsy embarrassment to her elegant husband. Walter demurred; 'This has been the making of me, my dear,' he said. Strong and even devoted husbands have fled from a wife's chronic disability; that Walter did neither was a revelation to both him and his wife. Agnes, who had learned as a child that love was earned by accomplishments, discovered that Walter's l love was based on something deeper and more durable. To Ed Dietz he confided, 'I'm afraid I haven't been a very good husband, but all my life I've wondered what I would do without Agnes,' then put his arm on Dietz's shoulder and wept. 'I don't want to live if she is gone,' he told another friend. The stroke stripped away jealousies, power struggles, all the defensive weaponry and emotional fortifications with which he and Agnes had protected themselves. In that sense, the last years of their marriage would be the best."

After 1975 Walter began to develop "chronic cervical arthritis - literally, a pain in the neck …"

Page 452:
"Agnes and Walter maintained a scaled-down version of the lifestyle they had adopted in the forties - she with her Victorian manners and values, he with his ascots and tennis and cigarette holder and cocktails before dinner. Their dinner parties were still glittering occasions …Agnes recruited young dancers to assist the cook and to serve. Robert Whitehead said, 'It was like a salon …' Walter suffered from sinus problems (for which he took snuff) throughout his life (it invariably became acute sinusitis just in time for the annual Christmas Eve party), but his health had generally been good. By 1982, however, his cervical arthritis had worsened, despite traction and surgery, and he was in pain most of the time. He could no longer work or play tennis, or even raise his left arm. He spent his time reading mysteries, watching sports on television and chain-smoking unfiltered Chesterfields, even after doctors diagnosed emphysema. He friend Ed Dietz tried to persuade him to stop smoking. 'I lost' Dietz said, 'and he lost. He was as strong and as willful as Agnes, and he was on a course to self-destruct.'

Page 453:
"When they went to Merriewold, Walter insisted on driving their loaded-up station wagon, even though he wore an orthopedic collar that made it impossible to turn his head. Agnes and other passengers found the ride hair-raising, but she did not object. . . Walter preferred staying home and watching football … to the bother of going up to Merriewold … and Agnes would often stay in New York with him when she would rather have been in the country. On occasion Walter would go, groaning all the way. When he got there he would sit down on the lounge and stay there, half sitting, half lying, smoking. He and Agnes would argue about anything - his smoking, the news, the menu. He'd complain about the heat, his difficulty breathing, his cough, the pain. 'Oh mercy, mercy'-he must have said that a million times… at Merriewold I sat on the porch steps and heard them talking upstairs, in the bedroom. He was Prudie or Puddy, she was Punk or Punkin. They were in love… When Walter could no longer walk the three blocks to sit on a bench in Washington Square Park, he took the sun sitting on the brass water hydrant outside the front door of their apartment. Eventually, he hated to leave the apartment… Walter found the phone irritating so [Agnes] made restrictions about hours when people could call. She did her best to entertain him. She read poetry to him, which he had always enjoyed. She gave small dinner parties; he was still witty and debonair, the orthopedic collar notwithstanding. Then his shoulder would hunch as though in a spasm and when he saw that it was noticed, he would suddenly excuse himself and disappear into the bedroom. He had morbid depressions. 'Walter doesn't like me to leave the house,' Agnes told a friend. 'He doesn't like to have people in. He doesn't like me to see people. Well, it just won't do… But at Agnes eightieth birthday party, Walter stunned his wife and their guests by raising his glass and declaring, 'Amo Agnes, ergo sum.'"

Page 457:
" … [Agnes] spent much of her time propped up on her bed … her books and papers and telephone were close at hand and so, with increasing frequency, was Walter, propped up on the adjacent bed. Wearing his neck brace, pajama coat, gray flannel trousers, and slippers - and smoking, always smoking …'We just lie here all the time like tow old turtles,' said Agnes. 'We crawl toward each other like tow handicapped crabs, to kiss each other good night.' 'Walter was dying by inches on one side of the bed,' a friend said, 'while Agnes was living by inches on the other.' When visitors came for tea, neither of their hosts could lift the pot to pour. But they were still entertaining, interested, and interesting. 'Welcome to the golden years,' Walter would say, gasping for breath. When his pain was severe he became silent and turned up the volume on the television. At five o'clock Agnes would put aside whatever she was doing and hobble to the rocking chair at the foot of his bed for drinks and hors d'oeuvres, and they would watch the news together… In the summer of 1988 - Walter's seventy-ninth year - the eventuality that she refused to contemplate came to pass. On August 21, Walter was admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital, where, eight days later, he died. He was eulogized at a public memorial, at the 92nd Street YMHA auditorium, as an honorable man with extraordinary elegance, integrity, wit and dedication to quality… A private ceremony took place at Merriewold. On a rainy September afternoon … a box containing Walter's ashes was placed in the ground on which the five-year-old Agnes had danced, under the oak tree that shades the house… [Agnes] said, 'Walter darling, we've been married for forty-five years, and in all that time I was never bored.'"

Page 478:
"Agnes's struggles in this world were ended by another stroke, sometime during the night of October 6, 1993 … Death had come suddenly but apparently not before Agnes recognized it and made an abortive attempt to summon help …"

Page 480:
"Her ashes were interred beside Walter's at Merriwold, in the presence of family members- Jonathan and Rosemary, their sons and niece Judith Donelan …"
Additional information about Agnes de Mille:
Agnes de Mille Kennedy Center Honors
Agnes de Mille as the cowgirl in Rodeo
The Other was Agnes de Mille's final work for American Ballet Theatre.

Submitted by Nancy Foy Archer
June 1999

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