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.