[1] Eugene Loring, born as Le Roy Kerpestein, the son of a saloon-keeper, grew up on a small island in Wisconsin's Milwaukee River.
[citation needed] With savings from his job as a hardware-store manager, Loring went to New York City near the depth of the Great Depression in 1934, and was taken into George Balanchine's and Lincoln Kirstein's newly formed School of American Ballet.
[3] Within two years Loring choreographed and danced in Billy the Kid, which enjoys status as the first American ballet classic, with an unbroken history of production since.
Some of Loring's most notable films include: Silk Stockings, Funny Face (both in 1957), Ziegfeld Follies, The Toast of New Orleans, Deep in My Heart, Meet Me in Las Vegas.
However unlike de Mille's ballet, Billy the Kid offers a bleak vision of the frontier, with a protagonist more fittingly characterized, according to one recent critic, as a "murderous psychopath".