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$4.50
S. HUROK PRESENTS
A MEMOIR OF THE DANCE WORLD
BY =S. HUROK=
In these exciting memoirs, S. Hurok, Impresario Extraordinary, reveals
the incredible inside story of the glamorous and temperamental world of
the dance, a story only he is qualified to tell. From the golden times
of the immortal Anna Pavlova to the fabulous Sadler’s Wells Ballet,
Hurok has stood in the storm-center as brilliant companies and
extravagant personalities fought for the center of the stage.
Famous as “the man who brought ballet to America and America to the
ballet,” the Impresario writes with intimate knowledge of the dancers
who have enchanted millions and whose names have lighted up the marquees
of the world. Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Lydia Lopokova, Escudero, the
Fokines, Adolph Bolm, Argentinita, Massine, Alicia Markova, Anton Dolin,
Robert Helpmann, Shan-Kar, Martha Graham, Moira Shearer, Margot Fonteyn,
Ninette de Valois, and Frederick Ashton are only a few of the
celebrities
(_cont’d on back flap_)
(_cont’d from front flap_)
who shine and smoulder through these pages.
The fantastic financial and amorous intrigues that have split ballet
companies asunder come in for examination, as do the complicated
dealings of the strange “Col.” de Basil and his various Ballet Russe
enterprises; Lucia Chase and her Ballet Theatre; and the phenomenal
tours of the Sadler’s Wells companies.
Although the Impresario’s pen is sometimes cutting, it is also blessed
by an unfailing sense of humor and by his deep understanding that a
great artist seldom exists without a flamboyant temperament to match.
There are many beautiful illustrations--32 pages.
[Illustration: _Hermitage house inc._]
8 West 13 Street
New York, N. Y.
S. HUROK PRESENTS
S. HUROK
_Presents_
A MEMOIR OF THE DANCE WORLD
By S. Hurok
HERMITAGE HOUSE NEW YORK 1953
COPYRIGHT, 1953, BY S. HUROK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published simultaneously in Canada by Geo. J. McLeod, Toronto
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 53-11291
MANUFACTURED IN THE U.S.A.
AMERICAN BOOK-STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK
To
The United States of America:
Whose freedom I found as a youth;
Which I cherish;
And without which nothing that has
been accomplished in a lifetime
of endeavour could have come to pass
CONTENTS
1. Prelude: How It All Began 11
2. The Swan 17
3. Three Ladies: Not from the Maryinsky 28
4. Sextette 47
5. Three Ladies of the Maryinsky--and Others 66
6. Tristan and Isolde: Michel and Vera Fokine 92
7. Ballet Reborn in America: W. De Basil and his Ballets
Russes De Monte Carlo 105
8. Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Leonide Massine
and the New Ballet Russe De Monte Carlo 125
9. What Price Originality? The Original Ballet Russe 138
10. The Best of Plans ... Ballet Theatre 147
11. Indecisive Interlude: De Basil’s Farewell and a Pair of
Classical Britons 183
12. Ballet Climax--Sadler’s Wells and After ... 208
13. Epilogue: Unborn Tomorrow 310
Index 323
S. HUROK PRESENTS
1. Prelude: How It All Began
In the mid-forties, after the publication of my first book, a number of
people approached me with the idea of my doing another book dealing with
the dance and ballet organizations I had managed.
I did not feel the time was ripe for such a book. Moreover, had I
written it then, it would have been a different book, and would have
carried quite another burden. If it had been done at that time, it would
have been called _To Hell With Ballet!_
In the intervening period a good deal has happened in the world of
ballet. The pessimism that prompted the former title has given way on my
part to a more optimistic note. The reasons for this change of heart and
attitude will be apparent to the reader.
At any rate, this book had to be written. In the volume of memoirs that
appeared some seven years ago I made an unequivocal statement to that
effect, when I wrote: “There’s no doubt about it. Ballet is different.
Some day I am going to write a book about it.”
Here it is. It is a very personal account, dealing with dance and ballet
as I have seen it and known it. For thirty-four years I have not only
watched ballet, but have had a wide, first-hand experience of and
contact with most of the leading dance and ballet organizations of the
world. This book is written out of that experience.
Ballet on this continent has come a long way along the road since the
night I bowed silently over the expressive hand of Anna Pavlova as she
stood among the elephants in Charles B. Dillingham’s Hippodrome. I like
to think, with what I hope is a pardonable pride, that I have helped it
on its journey. It has given me greater pleasure than any of the
multifarious other activities of my managerial career. On that side of
the ledger lies the balance. It has also given me a generous share of
heartaches and headaches. But, if I had it all to do over again, there
is little I would have ordered otherwise.
Because of these things, I believe my point of view is wider than that
of the scholar, the critic, or the enthusiast. Ballet is glamourous. It
is technical and complex; an exacting science. It is also highly
emotional, on the stage, behind the scenes, and often away from the
theatre. Temperament is by no means confined to the dancing artists.
During the course of these close contacts with the dance, a mass of
material has accumulated; far too much for a single book. Therefore, I
am going to attempt to give a panorama of the high spots (and some of
the low spots, as well) of three-and-one-half decades of managing dance
attractions, together with impressions of those organizations and
personalities that have, individually and collectively, contributed to
make ballet what it is today.
With a book of this kind a good resolution is to set down nothing one
has not seen or heard for oneself. For the most part I shall try to
stick to that resolution. Whenever it becomes necessary to depart from
it, appropriate credit will be accorded. Without question there are
times when silence is the wiser part of narration, and undoubtedly there
will be times when, in these pages, silence may be regarded, I hope, as
an indication of wisdom. However, there are not likely to be many such
instances, since a devotion to candid avowal will compel the dropping of
the curtain for a few blank moments and raising it again at a more
satisfactory stage only to spare the feelings of others rather than
myself.
One of the questions I have asked myself is where and how did this
passionate interest in dance arise. I was, as almost every one knows,
born in Russia. Dance and music are a part of the Russian. Russia was
the home of a ballet that reached the highest perfection of its time: an
organization whose influence is felt wherever and whenever a ballet
slipper is donned. Yet, as a country lad, springing from an obscure
provincial town, brought up in my father’s village hardware business and
on his tobacco plantation, I am unable to boast of having been bowled
over, smitten, marked for life by being taken at a tender age to see
the Imperial Ballet. No such heaven-sent dispensation was mine. I was a
long-time American citizen before I saw ballet in Russia.
Nevertheless, I believe that the fact I was born in Russia not only
shaped my ends, but provided that divinity that changed a
common-or-garden-variety little boy into what I eventually became.
Consciously or unconsciously the Russian adores the artist, denies the
artist nothing. As a normal, healthy, small-town lad, in Pogar, deep in
the Ukraine, I sensed these things rather than understood them. For it
was in Pogar and Staradrube and Gomel, places of no importance, that I
not only came into contact with the Russian “adoration” of the artist;
but, something much more important, I drank in that love of music and
dance that has motivated the entire course of my life.
The Imperial Ballet was not a touring organization; and Pogar,
Staradrube and Gomel were far too unimportant and inconspicuous even to
be visited by vacationing stars on a holiday jaunt or barnstorming trip.
But the people of Pogar, Staradrube and Gomel sang and danced.
The people of Pogar (at most there might have been five thousand of
them) were a hard-working folk but they were a happy people, a
fun-loving people, when days work was done. Above all else they were a
hospitable people. Their chief source of livelihood was flax and
tobacco, a flourishing business in the surrounding countryside, which
served to provide the villagers with their means for life, since Pogar
was composed in the main of tradesmen and little supply houses which, in
turn, served the necessaries to the surrounding countryside.
Still fresh in my mind is the wonder of the changing seasons in Pogar,
always sharply contrasted, each with its joys, each having its tincture
of trouble. The joys remain, however; the troubles recede and vanish.
Winter and its long nights, with the long hauls through the snow to the
nearest railway station, forty frigid miles away: a two-day journey with
the sleighs; the bivouacked nights to rest the horses. I remember how
bitterly cold it was, as I lay in the sleigh or alternately sat beside
the driver, wrapped in heavy clothes and muffled to my eyes; how, in the
driving snow, horses and drivers would sometimes lose the road entirely,
and the time spent in retracing tracks until the posts and pine trees
marking what once had been the edges of the road were found. Then how,
with horses nearly exhausted and our spirits low, we would glimpse the
flickering of a light in the far distance, and, heading towards it,
would find a cluster of little peasant huts. Once arrived, we would
arouse these poor, simple people, sometimes from their beds, and would
be welcomed, not as strangers, but rather as old friends. I remember
how, in the dead of night, still full of sleep, they would prepare warm
food and hot tea; how they would insist on our taking their best and
warmest beds, those on the stove itself, while they would curl up in a
corner on the floor. Then, in the morning, after more hot tea and a
piping breakfast, horses fed and refreshed, they would send us on our
way with their blessing, stubbornly refusing to accept anything in the
way of payment for the night’s lodging.
This warm, human, generous hospitality of the Russian peasant has not
changed through devastation by war and pestilence. Neither Tsardom nor
Bolshevism could alter the basic humanity of the Russian people, who are
among the kindest and most hospitable on earth.
The winter nights in Pogar, when the snow ceased falling and the moon
shone on the tinselly scene, were filled with a magic and unforgettable
beauty. The Christmas feasting and festivities will remain with me
always. But the sharpest of all memories is the picture of the Easter
fun and frolic, preceded by the Carnival of Butter-Week. Spring had
come. It mattered little that Pogar’s unpaved roads were knee-deep in
mud; the sun was climbing to a greater warmth: that we knew. We knew the
days were drawing out. It was then that music and dance were greater,
keener pleasures than ever. Every one sang. All danced. Even the lame
and the halt tried to do a step or two.
We made the _Karavod_: dancing in a circle, singing the old,
time-honored songs. And there was an old resident, who lived along the
main roadway in a shabby little house set back from the lane itself, a
man who might have been any age at all--for he seemed ageless--who was a
_Skazatel_ of folk songs and stories. He narrated tales and sang stories
of the distant, remote past.
The village orchestra, come Easter time, tuned up out of doors. There
was always a violin and an accordion. That was basic; but if additional
musicians were free from their work, sometimes the orchestra was
augmented by a _balalaika_ or two, a guitar or a zither--a wonderful
combination--particularly when the contrabass player was at liberty.
They played, and we all sang, above all, we sang folk song after folk
song. Then we danced: polkas without end, and the _Crakoviak_; and the
hoppy, jumpy _Maiufess_, while the wonderful little band proceeded to
outdo itself with heartrending vibratos, tremulous tremolos, and
glissandos that rushed up and down all the octaves.
Spring merged into summer. The lilacs and the violets faded; but the
summer evenings were long and the change from day to night was slow and
imperceptible. It took the sun many hours to make up its mind to
disappear behind the horizon, and even then, after the edge of the
burning disk had been swallowed up by the edge of the Ukranian plain,
its scarlet, orange and pink memories still lingered fondly on the sky,
and on the surface of our little lake, as if it were reluctant to leave
our quiet land.
It was then the music rose again; the _balalaikas_ strummed, and I, as
poor a _balalaika_ player as ever there was, added tenuous chords to the
melodies. From the near distance came the sound of a boy singing to the
accompaniment of a wooden flute; and, as he momentarily ceased, from an
even greater distance came the thin wail of a shepherd’s pipe.
There was music at night, there was music in the morning. The people
sang and danced. The village lake, over which the setting sun loved to
linger, gave onto a little stream, hardly more than a brook. The tiny
brook sang on its journey, and the rivulets danced on to the Desna; from
there into the Sozh on its way to Gomel, down the Dnieper past the
ancient city of Kiev, en route to the Black Sea. And in all the towns
and villages it passed, I knew the people were singing and dancing.
This was something I sensed rather than knew. It was this background of
music and dance that was uppermost in my thoughts as I left Russia to
make my way, confused and uncertain as to ambition and direction.
Despite the impact of the sumptuousness of the bright new world that
greeted me on my arrival in America, I found a people who neither sang
nor danced. (I am not referring to the melodies of Tin-Pan Alley or the
turkey-trot.) I could not understand it. I was dismayed by it. I was
filled with a determination to help bring music and dance into their
lives; to make these things an important part of their very existence.
The story of the transition to America has been told. The transition was
motivated primarily by an overwhelming desire for freedom. In 1904 I
heard Maxim Gorky speak. Although it was six months later before I knew
who Maxim Gorky was, I have never forgotten what he said. Yet, moved as
I was by Gorky’s flaming utterance, it was Benjamin Franklin who became
my ideal.
It was some time during Russia’s fateful year of 1905 that, somehow, a
translation of _Poor Richard’s Almanack_ fell into my hands. Franklin’s
ideas of freedom to me symbolized America. There, I knew, was a freedom,
a liberty of spirit that could not be equalled.
Although I arrived at Castle Garden, New York, after a twenty-three day
voyage, in May, 1906, it was the fact that Philadelphia was the home of
Benjamin Franklin that drew me to that city to make it my first American
abiding place.
The evidence of these boyhood dreams of America has been proved by my
own experience.
My dream has become a reality.
2. The Swan
It was The Swan who determined my career in dance and ballet management.
Whatever my confused aspirations on arriving in America, the music and
dance I had imbibed at the folk fonts of Pogar remained with me.
I have told the story of the gradual clarification of those aspirations
in the tale of the march forward from Brooklyn’s Brownsville. The story
of Music for the Masses has become a part of the musical history of
America. I had two obsessions: music and dance. Music for the Masses had
become a reality. “The Hurok Audience,” as _The Morning Telegraph_
frequently called it, was the public to which, two decades later, _The
New York Times_ paid homage by asserting I had done more for music than
the phonograph.
Through the interesting and exciting days of presenting Chaliapine,
Schumann-Heink, Eugene Ysaye, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, Tetrazzini,
Tito Ruffo, the question of the dance, my other obsession, and how to do
for it what I had succeeded in doing for music, was always in my mind.
It was then I met The Swan.
Anna Pavlova is a symbol of ballet in America; nay, throughout the
world. I knew that here in America were a people who loved the dance, if
they could but know it. The only way for them to know it, I felt, was to
expose them to it in the finest form of theatre dance: the ballet.
The position that ballet holds today in the affections of the American
public is the result of that exposure, coupled with a strongly
increasing enthusiasm that not only holds its devotees, but brings to it
a constantly growing new audience. But it was not always thus. Prior to
the advent to these shores of Anna Pavlova there was no continuous
development. America, to be sure, had had theatrical dancing
sporadically since the repeal of the anti-theatre act in 1789. But all
of it, imported from Europe, for the most part, had been by fits and
starts. From the time of the famous Fanny Ellsler’s triumphs in _La
Tarantule_ and _La Cracovienne_, in 1840-1842, until the arrival of Anna
Pavlova, in 1910, there was a long balletic drought, relieved only by
occasional showers.
America was not reluctant in its balletic demonstrations in the Fanny
Ellsler period, when the opportunities for appreciation were provided.
The American tour of the passionately dramatic Fanny Ellsler was made in
a delirium of enthusiasm. She was the guest of President Van Buren at
the White House, and during her Washington engagement, Congress
suspended its sittings on the days she danced. She was pelted with
flowers, and red carpets were unrolled and spread for her feet to pass
over. Even the water in which she washed her hands was preserved in
bottles, so it is said, and venerated as a sacred relic. Her delirious
_Cachucha_ caused forthright Americans to perform the European
balletomaniac rite of toasting her health in champagne drunk from her
own ballet shoes.
It is necessary now and then, I feel, to mark a time and place for
purposes of guidance. Therefore, I believe that the first appearance of
Anna Pavlova at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on 28th
February, 1910 is a date to remember, since it may be said to mark the
beginning of the ballet era in our country.
That first visit was made possible by the generosity of a very great
American Maecenas, the late Otto H. Kahn, to whom the art world of
America owes an incalculable debt. The arrangement was for a season of
four weeks. Her success was instantaneous. Her like never had been seen.
The success was the more remarkable considering the circumstances of the
performance, facts not, perhaps, generally remembered. Giulio
Gatti-Cazzaza, the Italian director of the Metropolitan Opera House, was
not what might be called exactly sympathetic to Otto Kahn’s
determination to establish the Opera House on a better rounded scheme
than the then prevalent over-exploitation of Enrico Caruso. As an
Italian opera director, Gatti-Cazzaza was even less sympathetic to the
dance, and was, moreover, extremely dubious that Metropolitan audiences
would accept ballet, other than as an inconsequential _divertissement_
during the course of an opera. So opposed to dance was he, as a matter
of fact, that, although he eventually married Rosina Galli, the _prima
ballerina_ of the Metropolitan, he made her fight for ballet every inch
of the way and, on general operatic principle, opposed everything she
attempted to do for the dance.
Because of his “anti-dance” attitude, and in order to “play safe,” Gatti
ordained that Pavlova’s American debut be scheduled to follow a
performance of Massenet’s opera _Werther_. The Massenet opera being a
fairly long three-act work, its final curtain did not fall until past
eleven o’clock. By the time the stage was ready for the first American
appearance of Pavlova, it was close to eleven-thirty. The audience that
had remained largely out of curiosity rather than from any sense of
expectation left reluctantly at the end. The dancing they had seen was
like nothing ever shown before in the reasonably long history of the
Metropolitan. For her début Pavlova had chosen Delibes’ human-doll
ballet, _Coppélia_, giving her in the role of Swanilda a part in which
she excelled. The triumph was almost entirely Pavlova’s. The role of
Frantz allowed her partner, Mikhail Mordkin, little opportunity for
virtuoso display, the _corps de ballet_ seems to have been
undistinguished, and the Metropolitan conductor, Podesti, most certainly
was not a conductor for ballet, whatever else he might have been.
Altogether, in this first season, there were four performances of
_Coppélia_, and two of _Hungary_, a ballet composed by Alexandre
Glazounow. Additional works during a short tour that followed, and which
included Boston and Baltimore, were the Bacchanale from Glazounow’s _The
Seasons_, and _La Mort du Cygne_ (_The Dying Swan_), the miniature solo
ballet Michel Fokine had devised for her in 1905, which was to become
her symbol.
Such was the success, Pavlova returned for a full season in New York and
a subsequent tour the following autumn, bringing Mordkin’s adaptation of
_Giselle_, and another Mordkin work, _Azayae_.
It was six years later that The Swan floated into my life. In 1916,
Charles B. Dillingham, Broadway theatrical producer with a difference,
was the director of the Hippodrome, the unforgettable Sixth Avenue
institution. Dillingham was “different” for a number of reasons. He was
a theatre man of vision; the Hippodrome, with its fantastic and
colossal entertainments, if not his idea, was his triumph; he was
perhaps the only Broadway manager who had been offered the post of
business manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, an offer he refused,
but he did accept a commission to make a complete survey of the
Metropolitan’s business affairs.
For years I had stood in awe of him.
In 1916, Dillingham engaged Pavlova to appear at the Hippodrome, with
her partner, Alexandre Volinine. Neither the auspices, the billing, nor
the setting could, by any stretch of the imagination, be termed ideal.
Dillingham’s Hippodrome bore the subtitle “The National Amusement
Institution of America,” an appellation as grandiose as the building
itself. The evening’s entertainment (plus daily matinees), of which The
Swan’s appearance was a part, was billed as “The Big Show, the Mammoth
Minstrels, and the Ice Ballet, The Merry Doll.”
Every night I was there in my favorite place at the back of the house. I
soon learned the time schedule. I could manage to miss the skaters, the
jugglers, the “mammoth” minstrels, the acrobats, the jumbo elephants. I
would arrive a few minutes before Pavlova’s entrance. I watched and
worshipped from afar. I had never met her. “Who was I,” I asked myself,
“to meet a divinity?”
One night, as the falling curtain cut her off from my view, a hand fell
on my shoulder. It was Dillingham, for whom my admiration remained but
my awe of him had decreased, since, by this time, we were both managers.
He looked at me with a little smile and said, “Come along, Sol. I’m
going back to her dressing-room.”
The long hoped for but never really expected moment had come. Long had I
rehearsed the speech I should make when and if this moment ever arrived.
Now the time was here and I was dumb. I could only look.
The Swan extended her hand as Dillingham presented me. She smiled. I
bent low over the world’s most expressive hand. At her suggestion the
three of us went to supper in the Palisades Amusement Park outdoor
restaurant, overlooking the Hudson and upper Manhattan.
I shall have a few things to say about Pavlova, the artist, about
Pavlova, the _ballerina_. Perhaps even more important is Pavlova, the
woman, Pavlova, the human being. These qualities came tumbling forth at
our first meeting. The impression was ineradicable. As she ate a
prodigious steak, as she laughed and talked, here was a sure and
certain indication of her insatiable love of life and its good things.
One of her tragedies, as I happen to know, is that fullness of life and
love were denied her.
I already have described this night in detail. I mention it again
because it sets a time and place: the beginnings of the realization of
the other part of my dream. I was already happily embarked on my avowed
purpose of bringing music to the masses. Although I may not have
realized it, that night when we first dined and talked and laughed, when
we rode the roller-coaster, and together danced the fox-trot at the
Palisades Amusement Park, was the beginning of my career in the world of
the dance.
During Pavlova’s Hippodrome engagement I doubt I missed a performance. I
also saw a good deal of her off stage. A close friendship was formed and
grew. Many suppers together, with Volinine, her partner, and Ivan
Clustine, her ballet-master.
In the years that followed there developed a long and unforgettable
association. Her first tour under my management, and large parts of
others, we made together; and not, I may say, entirely for business
reasons. Thus did I learn to know the real Anna Pavlova.
For those of a generation who know Pavlova only as a legend, there is a
large library of books about her as artist and dancer. As for myself, I
can only echo the opinion of J. L. Vaudoyer, the eminent French critic,
when he said: “Pavlova means to the dance, what a Racine is to poetry; a
Poussin to painting; a Gluck to music.”
At the time of the Pavlova tours, the state of balletic appreciation in
America was certainly not very high. Pioneering in ballet was hard,
slogging work for all concerned, from every point of view. The endless
travel was not only boring but fatiguing. It took all our joint and
several wits to overcome the former, a strong constitution to endure the
latter. Traveling conditions then were infinitely more primitive than
now, making the strain of constant touring all the greater. The reason
that Pavlova willingly endured these grinding tours year after year was
because, in my belief, she simply could not live without working. These
tours were not predicated upon any necessity. Twenty-five years of her
life, at least one-half of it, she spent on trains and ships. Aside from
Ivy House, in London, to which she made brief visits, hotel rooms were
almost her only home. There was no financial necessity for this.
Then, in addition to all the vicissitudes of travel under such
conditions, there persisted another aspect: the aesthetic inertia of
the public at the whistle-stops demanded every ounce and every facet of
audience persuasion.
Among certain latter-day critics there exists a tendency not so much to
belittle as to try to underrate Pavlova, the dancer, Pavlova, the
artist; to negate her very great achievement Many of these denigrators
never saw her; still fewer knew her. Let me, for the benefit of the
doubters and those readers of another generation who are in the same
predicament, try to sum her up as she was, in terms of today.
There exists a legend principally dealing with a certain intangible
quality she is said to have possessed. This legend is not exaggerated.
In any assessment of Anna Pavlova, her company, her productions, I ask
the reader to bear in mind that for twelve years she was the only ballet
pioneer regularly touring the country. She was the first to bring ballet
to hundreds of American communities. I should be the first to admit that
her stage productions, taken by and large, were less effective than are
those of today; but I ask you, at the same time, to bear in mind the
development of, and changes that have taken place in, the provincial
theatre in its progress from the gas-light age, and to try to compare
producing conditions as they were then, with the splendid auditoriums
and the modern equipment to be found in many places today. Compare, if
you will, the Broadway theatre productions of today with those of
thirty-five years ago.
Anna Pavlova was a firm believer in the “star” system, firmly entrenched
as she was in the unassailable position of the _prima ballerina
assoluta_. Her companies were always adequate. They were completely and
perfectly disciplined. They were at all times reflections of her own
directing and organizing ability. Always there were supporting dancers
of more than competence. Her partners are names to be honored and
remembered in ballet: Adolph Bolm, with whom she made her first tour
away from Imperial Russia and its Ballet: Mikhail Mordkin, Laurent
Novikoff, Alexandre Volinine, and Pierre Vladimiroff; the latter three,
one in the American mid-west, one in Paris, and one in New York, still
founts of technical knowledge and tradition for aspiring dancers.
In its time and place her repertoire was large and varied. Pavlova was
acquainting a great country with an art hitherto unknown. She was
bringing ballet to the masses. If there was more convention than
experiment in her programmes, it must be remembered that there did not
exist an audience even for convention, much less one ready for
experimentation. An audience had to be created.
It should be noted that at this time there did not exist as well, so far
as this continent was concerned, as there did in Europe, any body of
informed critical opinion. The newspapers of the wide open spaces did
not have a single dance critic. In these places dance was left to music
and theatre reporters in the better instances; to sports writers on less
fortunate occasions.
Conditions were not notably better in New York. Richard Aldrich, then
the music critic of _The New York Times_, was completely anti-dance, and
used the word “sacrilege” in connection with Pavlova and her
performances. More sympathetic attitudes were recorded later by W. J.
Henderson of _The Sun_, and by Deems Taylor. About the only New York
metropolitan critic with any real understanding of and appreciation for
the dance was that informed champion of the arts, Carl Van Vechten.
I have mentioned Pavlova’s title as _prima ballerina assoluta_. She held
it indisputably. In the hierarchy of ballet it is a three-fold title,
signifying honor, dignity, and the establishment of its holder in the
highest rank. With Pavlova it was all these things. But it was something
more. Hers was a unique position. She was the possessor of an absolute
perfection, a perfection achieved in the most difficult of all
schools--the school of tradition of the classical ballet. She possessed,
as an artist, the accumulated wisdom of a unique aesthetic language.
This language she uttered with a beauty and conviction greater than that
of her contemporaries.
Unlike certain _ballerinas_ of today, and one in particular who would
like ballet-lovers to regard her as the protégé, disciple, and
reincarnation of Pavlova rolled into one, Pavlova never indulged in
exhibitions of technical feats of remarkable virtuosity for the mere
sake of eliciting gasps from an audience. Hers was an exhibition of the
traditional school at its best, a school famed for its soundness. Her
balance was something almost incredible; but never was it used for
circus effects. There was in everything she did an exquisite lyricism,
and an incomparable grace. And I come once again to that intangible
quality of hers. Diaghileff, with whom her independent, individualistic
spirit could remain only a brief time, called her “ ... the greatest
_ballerina_ in the world. Like a Taglioni, she doesn’t dance, but
floats; of her, also, one might say she could walk over a cornfield
without breaking a stalk.” The distinguished playwright, John Van
Druten, years later, used a similar simile, when he described Pavlova’s
dancing “as the wind passing like a shadow over a field of wheat.”
Does it matter that Pavlova did not leave behind any examples of great
choreographic art? Is it of any lasting importance that her repertoire
was not studded with experiments, but rather was composed of sound,
well-made pieces, chiefly by her ballet-master, Ivan Clustine? Hers was
a highly personal art. The purity and nobility of her style compensated
and more than compensated for any production shortcomings. The important
thing she left behind is an ineffable spirit that inhabits every
performance of classical ballet, every classroom where classical ballet
is taught. As a dancer, no one had had a greater flexibility in styles,
a finer dramatic ability, a deeper sense of character, a wider range of
facial expressions. Let us not forget her successful excursions into the
Oriental dance, the Hindu, the dances of Japan.
Above and beyond all this, I like to remember the great humanity and
simplicity of Pavlova, the woman. I have seen all sides of her
character. There are those who could testify to a very human side. A
friend of mine, on being taken back stage at the Manhattan Opera House
in New York to meet Pavlova for the first time, was greeted by a
fusillade of ballet slippers being hurled with unerring aim, not at him,
but at the departing back of her husband, Victor Dandré, all to the
accompaniment of pungent Russian imprecations. Under the strain of
constant performance and rehearsal, she was human enough to be ill
tempered. It was quite possible for her to be completely unreasonable.
On the other hand, there are innumerable instances of her
warmheartedness, her generosity, her tenderness. Passionately fond of
children, and denied any of her own, the tenderness and concern she
showed for all children was touching. This took on a very practical
expression in the home she established and maintained in a _hôtel privé_
in Paris for some thirty-odd refugee children. This she supported, not
only with money, but with a close personal supervision.
Worldly things, money, jewelry, meant little to her. She was a truly
simple person. Much of her most valuable jewelry was rarely, if ever,
worn. Most of it remained in a safe-deposit vault in a Broadway bank in
New York City, where it was found only after her death.
Money was anything but a motivating force in her life. I remember once
when she was playing an engagement in Chicago. For some reason business
was bad, very bad, as, on more than one occasion, it was. The public at
this time was firmly staying away from the theatre. I was in a depressed
mood, not only because expenses were high and receipts low, but because
of the effect that half-empty houses might have on Pavlova and her
spirits.
While I tried to put on a smiling front that night at supper after the
performance, Pavlova soon penetrated my poker-faced veneer. She leaned
across the table, took my hand.
“What’s wrong, Hurokchik?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I shrugged, with as much gallantry as I could muster.
She continued to regard me seriously for a moment. Then:
“Nonsense.” She repeated it with her usual finality of emphasis.
“Nonsense. I know what’s wrong. Business is bad, and I’m to blame for
it.... Look here ... I don’t want a penny, not a _kopeck_.... If you can
manage, pay the boys and girls; but as for me, nothing. Nothing, do you
understand? I don’t want it, and I shan’t take it.”
Pavlova’s human qualities were, perhaps, never more in evidence than at
those times when, between tours and new productions, she rested “at
home,” at lovely Ivy House, in that northern London suburb, Golder’s
Green, not far from where there now rests all that was mortal of her:
East Wall 3711.
Here in the rambling unpretentiousness of Ivy House, among her
treasures, surrounded by her pets, she was completely herself. Here such
parties as she gave took place. They were small parties, and the
“chosen” who were invited were old friends and colleagues. Although the
parties were small in size, the food was abundant and superlative. On
her American tours she had discovered that peculiarly American
institution, the cafeteria. After rehearsals, she would often pop into
one with the entire company. Eyes a-twinkle, she would wait until all
the company had chosen their various dishes, then select her own; after
depositing her heavily laden tray at her own table, she would pass among
the tables where the company was seated and sample something from every
dish. Pavlova adored good food. She saw to it that good food was served
at Ivy House and, for one so slight of figure, consumed it in amazing
abundance.
One of these Ivy House parties in particular I remember vividly, for her
old friend, Féodor Chaliapine, that stupendous figure of the world of
the theatre who had played such an important part in my own life and
career, was, on this occasion, the life of the party. He was in a
gargantuan mood. He had already dined before he arrived at Ivy House. I
could imagine the dinner he had put away, for often his table abounded
with such delicacies as a large salmon, often a side of lamb, suckling
pigs, and tureens of _schchee_ and _borscht_. But despite this, he did
ample justice to Pavlova’s buffet and bar. His jokes and stories were
told to a spellbound audience. These were the rare occasions on which I
have seen this great musician, with his sombre, rather monkish face,
really relax.
This night Pavlova was equally animated, and Chaliapine and she vied
with each other in story-telling. I studied them both as I watched them.
Pavlova had told me of her own origins and first beginnings; about her
father, her mother, her childhood poverty. Here she sat, sprung from
such a humble start, the world’s greatest dancer, the chatelaine of a
beautiful and simple home, the entire world at her feet.
Facing her was another achievement, the poor boy of Kazan, who, in his
early life, suffered the pangs of hunger and misery which are the common
experience of the Russian poor. He had told me how, as a lad of
seventeen in the town of Kazan without a kopeck in his pocket, day after
day, he would walk through the streets and hungrily gaze into the
windows of the bakers’ shops with hopeless longing. “Hurok,” he had
said, “hunger is the most debasing of all suffering; it makes a man like
a beast, it humiliates him.”
One of the few serious stories he told that evening was of the time when
he and my childhood idol, Maxim Gorky, were working on the boats on the
Volga and had to improvise trousers out of two pairs of old wheat-sacks
which they tied round their waists. Gorky and Chaliapine were both from
Kazan and of the same age. Tonight, as the party wore on, Chaliapine
sang folk songs, gay songs, sad songs, ribald songs. Loving fine
raiment, tonight he had worn a tall gray top hat. When he arrived and we
had greeted him in the hallway, I caught him watching his reflection in
the long mirror and getting great satisfaction out of it. Now, as he
sang, he became a Tsar, and it was difficult to imagine that he had
never been anything but a great Tsar all his life.
The party waxed even gayer, the hour grew late. We were all sitting on
the floor: Pavlova, Chaliapine, his wife Masha, and the other guests.
Chaliapine had been gazing at Pavlova for some time. Suddenly he turned
and fixed his eyes on his wife appraisingly.
“Masha, my dear,” he said, after a long moment, “you don’t object to my
having a child by Annushka?”
Masha smiled tolerantly and quickly replied:
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Chaliapine, with all the dignity and solemnity of a Boris Godunoff, put
the question to Pavlova. Pavlova’s eyes fixed themselves on his, with
equal gravity.
“My dear Fedya,” she said, quite solemnly, “such matters are not
discussed in public.”
She paused, then added mischievously:
“Let us make an appointment. I am leaving for Paris in a day or two....
Perhaps I shall take you along with me....”
* * * * *
In all the dance, Pavlova was my first love. It was from her I received
my strongest and most lasting impressions. She proved and realized my
dreams. To the Western World, and particularly to America, she brought a
new and stimulating form of art expression. She introduced standards, if
not ideas, that have had an almost revolutionary effect.
Anna Pavlova had everything, both as an artist and as a human being.
3. Three Ladies: Not From
the Maryinsky
A. _A NEGLECTED AMERICAN GENIUS--AND
HER “CHILDREN”_
Although my association with her was marked by a series of explosions
and an overall atmosphere of tragi-comedy, it is a source of pride to me
that I was able to number among my dance connections that neglected
American genius, Isadora Duncan.
It was Anna Pavlova who spurred my enthusiasm to bring Isadora to her
own country, in 1922, a fact accomplished only with considerable
difficulty, as those who have read my earlier volume of memoirs will
recollect.
Despite the fact they had little in common, Pavlova had a tremendous
respect for this tall American dancer, who abhorred ballet.
Genius is a dangerous word. Often it is bandied about carelessly and,
sometimes, indiscriminately. In the case of this long-limbed girl from
California it could not be applied more accurately or more precisely,
for she was a genius as a person as well as an artist. She brought to
Europe and to her own America, as well, a new aesthetic.
One of four children of a rebellious mother who divorced the father she
did not love, Isadora’s childhood was spent in a quasi-Bohemian
atmosphere in her native San Francisco, where her mother eked out a
dubious living by giving music lessons. Isadora was the youngest of the
four. Brother Augustin took to the theatre; Brother Raymond to long
hair, sandals, Greek robes, and asceticism; Sister Elizabeth eventually
took over Isadora’s Berlin School.
What started Isadora on the road of the dance may never be known;
although it is a well established fact that she danced as a child in San
Francisco, and early in her career traveled across the United States,
dancing her way, more or less, to New York. I am reasonably certain that
her dancing of that period bore little or no relation to that of her
later period. Her early works were, for the most part, innocuous little
pieces done to snippets of music by Romantic composers. Her triumphs
were in monumental works by Beethoven, Wagner, César Franck.
Her battle was for “freedom”: freedom in the dance; freedom in wearing
apparel; freedom for women; freedom for the body; freedom for the human
spirit. In the dance, ballet was to her a distortion of the human form.
Personally, I suspect the truth was that the strict discipline of ballet
was something to which Isadora could not submit. Inspiration was her
guiding force. She wore Greek draperies when she danced; her feet were
bare. Yet there are photographs of Isadora, taken in the later
’nineties, showing her wearing ballet slippers, and a costume in which
considerable lace is to be seen. It was Europe, I feel, that “freed” her
dance.
Isadora’s was a European triumph. In turn she conquered Germany,
Austria-Hungary, Russia, Greece. She was hailed and fêted. There was no
place in the American theatre for Isadora’s simplicity and utter
artlessness. It was in Budapest that the tide turned for her, thanks
particularly to an able manager, one Alexander Gross. While I never knew
Mr. Gross, I believe he fulfilled the true manager’s purpose and
function. Gross made an audience for a great artist, an audience where
one did not exist before, until, eventually, all Europe was her
audience.
I have said that inspiration was Isadora’s guide. She did, of course,
have theories of dance; but these theories were, for the most part,
expressed in vague and general, rather than in precise and particular,
terms. They can be summed up in a sentence. She believed that dance was
life: therefore, the expression of some inner impulse, or urge, or
inspiration. The source of this impulse she believed was centered in
the solar plexus. She also believed she was of tremendous importance.
Her own ideas of her own importance were, in my opinion, sometimes
inflated.
To her eternal credit it must be noted that she battled against sugary
music, against trivial themes, against artificiality of all sorts. When
her “inspiration” did not proceed directly from the solar plexus, she
found it in nature--in the waves of the sea and their rhythms, in the
simple process of the opening of a flower.
These frank and simple and desirable objectives, if they had been all,
would not have excited the tremendous opposition that was hers
throughout her lifetime. Nor did this opposition, I believe, spring
solely from her unconventional ideas on love and sex. Isadora insisted
on becoming a citizen of the world, a champion of the world’s less
fortunate, the underprivileged. In doing so she cleared the air of a lot
of nonsense and a lot of nineteenth century prudery which was by way of
being carried over into the twentieth.
In Europe, in each and every country she visited, she arrayed herself on
the side of the angels, i.e., the revolutionaries. The same is true in
her own country. She shocked her wealthy patrons with demonstrations of
her own particular brand of democracy.
There was an occasion, during one of her appearances at the Metropolitan
Opera House, when she walked with that especial Isadorian grace to the
footlights and gave the audience, with special reference to the
boxholders, the benefits of the following speech:
“Beethoven and Schubert,” she said, “were children of the people all
their lives. They were poor men and their great work was inspired by and
belongs to humanity. The people need great drama, music, dancing. We
went over to the East Side and gave a performance for nothing. What
happened? The people sat there transfixed, with tears rolling down their
cheeks. That is how they cared for it. Funds of life and poetry and art
are waiting to spring from the people of the East Side.... Build for
them a great amphitheatre, the only democratic form of theatre, where
everyone has an equal view, no boxes; no balconies.... Why don’t you
give art to the people who really need it? Great music should no longer
be kept for the delight of a handful of cultured people. It should be
given free to the masses. It is as necessary for them as air and bread.
Give it to them, for it is the spiritual wine of humanity.”
As for the ballet, she continued to have none of it. She once remarked:
“The old-fashioned waltz and mazurka are merely an expression of sickly
sentimentality and romance which our youth and our times have outgrown.
The minuet is but the expression of the unctuous servility of courtiers
at the time of Louis XIV and hooped skirts.”
Isadora’s European successes led to the establishment of schools of her
own, where her theories could be expounded and developed. The first of
these was in Berlin, and as her pupils, her “children,” developed, she
appeared with them. When she first went to Russia, the controversy she
stirred up has become a matter of ballet history; and it is a matter of
record that she influenced that father of the “romantic revolution” in
ballet, Michel Fokine.
Russia figured extensively in Isadora’s life, for she gave seasons
there, first in 1905, and again in 1907 and 1912. Then, revolutionary
that she was, she returned to the Soviet in 1921, established a school
there and, in 1922, married the “hooligan” poet, Sergei Essenin.
Throughout her life, Isadora had denounced marriage as an institution,
disavowed it, fought it, bore three children outside it, on the ground
that it existed only for the enslavement of woman.