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| The image is part of a personal memento the late Dany Bustros gave to me in 1995 |
This article was originally printed at the end of 1998 in Campus magazine:
It still strikes me that, after three years of its publication, people still remember the interview I did with Dany Bustros. Recently, an AUB student asked me if I ever saw her again, which was somehow peculiar because I had the intention of doing another interview with her.
I now have difficulty recalling the general looks of some of the most prominent figures I have interviewed but that I can still remember what Dany Bustros was wearing during the interview. Leopard printed tights and a black stretch body.
Boy George, famous cross dresser of the eighties and lead singer of pop band culture club, wrote: “Jimi Hendrix was more than a guitar solo, Ziggy was more than his stardust, Prince is more than a pair of Cuban heels. Boy George is more than his eyebrows”.
And Dany Boutsros was more than her dancing outfits.
Few people know that Bustros is a graduate of the fine arts academy in Lebanon, and that she was so good she was accepted directly as a second year student. When I asked her three years back about her painting career, she confessed that it had been a while since she did anything serious.
Bustros also took courses at the Actors’ studio, that’s where people like Robert de Niro graduated from. As a matter of fact, she was once called by Alain Delon’s agent and was offered a role in one of his movies. The movie never became a reality through. At the time when asked about why she used acting during her dance routines, through slight eye or mouth movements, Bustros said that “dance is expressive in itself, the hands, waist, eyes and mouth all merge to transmit it”.
Officially, her professional career began at the 1987 Jarash festival in front of fourteen thousand people. However, the first time she danced for money was when she was away on a trip and ended up broke so she danced at the club of the hotel she was staying at to finance the rest of her staying.
Bustros redefined oriental dancing and single handedly helped give a new identity to the women who practiced it by changing the title of her profession from vulgarly known “rakkassa” (common dancer) to “rakissa” (The dancer) and forging herself a graceful image in the sensual world of oriental dancing, also known as “belly dancing”. Very few dancers could perform the traditional Egyptian Saiidi dance dressed in a abaya from head to toe yet at the same time highlighting every inch of her svelte body.
Her charm appealed, not only to young men like myself who saw in her the mature and educated woman she was, but also to older people. The Monday that followed the interview, which took place over the weekend, my sixty year old teacher called upon me and said: “Ya walad, I heard you spent some quality time this weekend”. Then, showing him the authographed photograph she gave me, he repeated whet she had written: “To Tarek: All the best in God”. And then added, “A truly remarkable woman”.
It all seems too easy. But it wasn’t.
The Bustros family is one of the most aristocratic families of Beirut. It is one of the “seven families” who constituted the Beiruti high class, and who traditionally owned the keys to the doors of Beirut, when the wall around the city still stood. Bustros was given the classic education a girl of her background should have, an education that clearly set her apart from all other artists on the Lebanese scene. One of Bustros’s hobbies was to collect miniature liquor bottles.
But Bustros did not settle for this. She was inhabited by the rhythm, but it was a taboo to show it since oriental dancing was not to women of her standing. There are reports of suicide attempts as early as when she was sixteen. Poor little rich girl!
With her ever defiant attitude she married without the approval of her family to start a journey filled with highs and lows. Reportedly, and according to someone who chose anonymity, it was at this point that her relationship with the family took an irreconcilable differences turn. Bustros rarely talks of that marriage, especially that it was followed by a divorce, and briefly told me that her marriage was a “youth mistake as a result of defiance and recklessness”.
As a result of the marriage, Bustros had a son; George. Five years back, when she had a show at a summer resort in north Lebanon, George - then eleven years old - died as a result of underwater suffocation. Bustros was devastated. At the time of our interview, when I brought the subject of her son, it was a serene and pragmatic woman who answered that she knew why God had taken George, it was because he was suffering from living a dual life with his divorced parents and that he was torn between the love of both of them that ‘s why God chose to relief him. She also announced in a television show that she felt the spirit of her son next to her up until the fortieth day after his death when it left the to heaven.
Only a deep believer could come up with such a conclusion. Bustros, known to be a mystical person, was according to her “not only a deist, but a Christian”. God, still according to her, was a friend to whom she explains what she does. Bustros spent several extended stayings in convents and during one time wanted to be a nun. “I abide by the ten commandments” she told me.
But she confessed to me that once, and only once, she lost faith in the existence of God, it was the day after George’s death. Repeatedly, Bustros criticized Madonna’s (The western Madonna’s that is) attitude towards the church and the sexual gestures she performs over the cross and called upon her “to repent”.
Suicide, according to Christian beliefs, is considered a sin. Never the less, Bustros attempted suicide several times after the death of her son. A priest in the Greek Orthodox church, of which the Bustros family is part of, said that “up until recently, people who committed suicide were denied Christian burials and that the cross was forbidden to decorate their coffins. But a decision was taken, that minimal services should be given since it was up to God, not Humans, to judge”. Burial ceremonies took place on the 28th of December 1998 without the archbishop's attendance since the cause of death was suicide.
The cause of death was attributed to a financial jam Bustros was going through. Bustros was living off her “own earnings, not the De Bustros fortune” as she had explained to me. Recently, business was slow and Bustros made serious investments in her own piano bar “Le Dany”. Reportedly, what drove her over the edge was low reservations for her new year’s eve show she was supposed to throw with singer George Karam in the Al Sabil restaurant at the Regency Palace Hotel complex.
On the morning of Monday the 28 of December 1998, newspapers came out after two days of absence, one of them being Sunday and the other the Christmas holiday, bearing along with the news of the death of Bustros, an advertisement for the said new year show. Annahar newspaper featured the advertisement keeping the photograph of Bustros with Karam but deleting her name by an obvious printing utility cut. Other newspapers kept the advertisement as is.
Contact with the management of Al Sabil confirmed the forced change of program. Karam will still be singing but dancer Jihane Al Masri will replace Bustros.
The Show must go on. Without Bustros on board.