Cindy Bradley, who taught the class, told me, “I remember putting my hand on her foot, putting it into a tendu pointe, and she was definitely able to go into that position—she was able to go into all the positions that I put her into that day—but it wasn’t about that.” Bradley said she had a kind of vision, “right then, that first day, of this little girl becoming amazing.”

Copeland recalls her first class differently: “I was so embarrassed. I didn’t know anything that the other girls in the class knew; I thought I was doing everything wrong.”

But she kept attending the class. Copeland had an unusual body: her shoulders were sloped, her legs were long, her knees were hyperextended, and she was effortlessly flexible and strong even as she was very slight. She was in the habit of entertaining her siblings (and slightly weirding them out) by linking her hands together, putting them over her head behind her ears, and then getting her elbows to bend in the wrong direction. She also had a natural ability to quickly memorize and mimic any movement she saw. She began attending ballet classes five days a week, at Bradley’s studio in San Pedro. “One day, it just clicked,” Copeland told me. “I began to understand what it was.”

According to Copeland, the beginning of her ballet career overlapped with her family’s abrupt move out of her second stepfather’s spacious home and into a single room of the Sunset Inn, near a highway and liquor stores, in Gardena. The move left her with a long commute to school and then home from ballet practice. Her brother Douglas recalls them missing their bus one afternoon, and walking the thirteen miles home. Seeing an exhausted Copeland one evening, her mother, Sylvia DeLaCerna, told her that she had to give up ballet. Copeland didn’t protest; that wasn’t what she was like.

But the next evening DeLaCerna and Bradley spoke, and they decided that Misty would spend the weekdays at the Bradley home and weekends with her family. “I hadn’t been married that long,” Bradley explained, “and we had a two-year-old son, but I just walked into our home that night and called out to my husband, ‘I have Misty here with me, and she’s going to be staying with us.’ ”

Bradley waived Copeland’s ballet-school fees, and other community members contributed to the cost of her leotards and pointe shoes. “When I was dancing, I felt in control, and happy,” Copeland said. “I’m a Virgo, so I really like to be in control.” For most of the next three years, she lived with the Bradleys. Fairly predictable tensions arose between the two families. “I felt very loved and accepted by the Bradleys—I felt like a member of the family,” Copeland told me. “I’m not sure my attitude was so great when I would go home and complain about canned string beans, and say that I preferred shrimp scampi. My mom was working all day, and she had six children.” Copeland shared a room with the Bradleys’ young son, Wolf, attended synagogue with Bradley’s parents, and at the dinner table all attention was centered on her and her goals. Bradley’s husband, a modern-dance teacher, was Copeland’s pas-de-deux instructor and partner. “I loved the attention,” Copeland told me.

At fifteen, Copeland attended the San Francisco Ballet summer intensive program on a full scholarship; at the end of it she was invited to study with the school. (She turned the invitation down, planning to try out for her dream company, A.B.T.) Copeland believes, in retrospect, that her mother saw her summer success as evidence that she no longer needed the Bradleys—she could now move back in with her family and attend a ballet school nearby. At the time, however, both Copeland and the Bradleys felt that this would damage Copeland’s career. Everyone panicked. In her memoir, Copeland relates that the Bradleys introduced her to a lawyer, and she filed for emancipation. DeLaCerna filed restraining orders against the Bradleys, claiming that they had brainwashed her daughter. Copeland was too young, by a few weeks, to take action anyway. At one point, police officers picked Copeland up, so that she could be reunited with her mother, and for the next decade she saw little of the Bradleys.

“It was a nightmare,” Copeland told me. Her story was covered extensively in newspapers and on television. “I had no places left for privacy, where I could feel safe. Everyone had an opinion about what happened.” Eventually, all sides withdrew their claims. A while later, Copeland went with Elizabeth Cantine to try out for A.B.T.’s summer intensive session; she was accepted, and at the end of the program she was invited to join the studio company. Her mother expressed reservations, but ultimately said that the choice was Copeland’s. After spending another year at home, Copeland moved to New York.

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“None of this is a fairy tale,” Craig Salstein, an A.B.T. soloist who has danced with Copeland since her earliest days in the company, told me. He was talking about ballet in general, but it applies equally to Copeland’s career path. Only a few months after she became a member of A.B.T.’s corps de ballet, at the age of eighteen, she found out that she had a lower-vertebral fracture. She had to wear a brace twenty-three hours of the day, and for a year she was unable to dance at all. A doctor, learning that she had not yet menstruated, told her that this was likely contributing to weakness in her bones. He recommended that Copeland begin taking birth-control pills to induce puberty. Within ten days, she began menstruating, and in a short time her figure changed from ballet-tiny to Marilyn Monroe. Her body, which at the start of her career had been considered perfect for ballet—she was said to have the “Balanchine body”—was suddenly no longer the ideal. “I was scheduled to do Clara, in ‘The Nutcracker,’ before that injury,” Copeland said. More than a decade passed before she was offered the role again.

Copeland says that eating disorders are not as pervasive among ballerinas as people think. Nearly every woman has at times felt that the shape of her body has determined an overwhelming proportion of someone’s response to her; ballet dancers, so much more intimately aware of their bodies’ appearance and ability both, might—through professionalism, through necessity—have a healthier way of relating to their bodies than the rest of us. Then again, the stakes are higher. Copeland had never given much thought to her diet, but when it was suggested to her that she needed to “lengthen”—balletspeak for losing weight—she rebelled. This was pretty much the first time in her life that she had done so, and, in the way of a young person, she mostly damaged herself.

“I didn’t want to be seen ordering huge amounts of food, but the local Krispy Kreme would do deliveries if the order was large enough,” Copeland said. “After practice, I would order two dozen doughnuts and then, alone in my apartment, eat most of them.” She felt that her ballet career was getting away from her, that she was far from family, that she was alone. “I was barely over a hundred pounds, but I felt so fat, and even a stranger at a club, when I told him I was a ballerina, said, ‘No way,’ ” Copeland recalled. “It took me about five years to figure out how my body worked, and to understand how to make my muscles more lean.”