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Index 323

S. HUROK PRESENTS

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 , 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 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.

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.

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 Dandr?, 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.

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.

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