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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

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.

Hermitage house inc.
8 West 13 Street
New York, N. Y.



S. HUROK PRESENTS

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

CONTENTS

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.

There had been three Duncan seasons in America before I brought her, in 1922, for what proved to be her final visit to her native country. The earlier American series were in 1908, when she danced with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, at the Metropolitan Opera House, prior to a tour; in 1911, when she again danced with Damrosch; again in 1916, when she returned to California, early the next year, after a twenty-two years’ absence. She also visited New York, briefly, in 1915, impulsively renting a studio at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, with the idea of establishing a school. It was during this brief visit that she made history of a kind by suddenly improvising a dance to the French national anthem at the Metropolitan Opera House.

As I have pointed out, enlightened dance criticism, so far as the newspapers were concerned, in those days was almost non-existent. For those readers who might be interested, however, there are available, in the files of The New York Times, penetrating analyses of her performances by the discerning Carl Van Vechten.

The story of Isadora’s intervening years is marked by light and shadow. Hers was a life that could not long retain happiness within its grasp. Snatches of happiness were hers in her brief association with England’s greatly talented stage designer, that misunderstood genius of the theatre, Gordon Craig, the son of Ellen Terry, by whom Isadora had a child; and yet another child by the lover who was known only as Lohengrin.

Her passionate love of children was touching. Never was it better exemplified than by her several schools, her devotion to the girls and her concern for them. Most of all was it apparent in her selflessness in her attitude towards her own two children. It is not difficult to imagine the depth of the tragedy for her when a car in which they were riding on their way to Versailles toppled into the Seine, and the children were drowned. A third child, her dream of comfort and consolation, died at birth.

It was in an attempt to forget this last tragedy that she brought her school to New York. That same Otto Kahn, who had made Pavlova’s first visit to America possible, came to her rescue and footed the bills for a four weeks’ season at the old Century Theatre, which stood in lower Central Park West, where Brother Augustin held forth with Greek drama and biblical verse, and Isadora and the “children” danced. The public remained away. There was a press appeal for funds with which to liquidate a $12,000 indebtedness and to provide funds with which to get Isadora and the “children” to Italy. Another distinguished art patron, the late Frank Vanderlip, and others came to the rescue with cash and note endorsements. Thus, once again, Isadora put her native America behind her in disgust. Her parting shot at the country of her birth was a blast at Americans living and battening in luxury on their war profits while Europe bled.

Her 1916-1917 visit to her home shores was no more auspicious than the others. She danced, as I have said, at the Metropolitan Opera House. Lover Lohengrin gave her a magnificent party following the performance, a soirée that ended in an expensive and scandalous debácle. Isadora sold her jewels piece by piece, and succeeded in establishing her school at Long Beach. Quickly the money disappeared, and Gordon Selfridge, the London equivalent of Marshall Field, paid her passage to London. The “children,” now grown up into the “Isadorables,” remained behind to make themselves American careers.

It was after Isadora’s departure for London, in 1917, that I undertook to help the six “children” to attain their desires. They were a half-dozen of the loveliest children imaginable.

For their American debut as an independent group, we first engaged George Copeland, specialist in the works of contemporary French and Spanish composers, and an artist of the first rank, and later, Beryl Rubinstein, American composer and teacher, and until his recent death director of the Cleveland Institute, as accompanists.

Smart New York had adopted the “Isadorables.” The fashionable magazines had taken them up and had spread Dr. Arnold Genthe’s photographs of Anna, Lysel, Gretl, Thérése, Erica, and Irma over their pages. Frank Crowninshield championed them. During a hot June they sold out a half-dozen performances in Carnegie Hall, which takes some doing at any time of the year. Following a successful tour, I presented them at the Metropolitan Opera House, this time with an orchestra.

The girls, charming, delightful, fresh, were a direct product of Isadora, for which she used herself as model. Theirs was a reproduction of Isadora’s art. One of them functions actively today, Maria Thérésa, giving out a fine, strong, sturdy reflection of Isadora’s training and ideas. Basically, as an individualist, Isadora was a solo artist. She made no great effort to build up group dances into a series of linked dances that result in some form of dance drama. Such mass dances as she arranged were in imitation of the Greek chorus. Broken down into simple elements, they were nothing more than lines of girls, all of whom repeated the same simple movements. Her own creative gifts, which were magnificent, found their expression in her solo dances, and it is in this respect Maria Thérésa splendidly carries on.