I Envied the Girl in “A Very Young Dancer.” I Didn’t Know Her Whole Story.

Stephanie DePierro was seen as the perfect little girl ballerina with a charmed life. That public perception destroyed her.

When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with Jill Krementz’s book A Very Young Dancer. Krementz, back in the late seventies, wrote a series of photo-essay books about young working children who appeared to lead glamorous lives in show business. Stephanie DePierro, who was ten in 1979, was one of Krementz’s subjects. DePierro, as Margaret Wheeler Johnson later…