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.