Let me first set down the man’s virtues. De Basil had great charm. By that I do not necessarily mean he was charming. His charm was something he could turn on at will, like a tap, usually when he was in a tight spot. More than once it helped him out of deep holes, and sticky ones. He had an inexhaustible fount of energy, could drive himself and others; never seemed to need sleep; and, aiming at a highly desired personal goal, had unending patience. With true oriental passivity, he could wait. He had undaunted courage; needless, reckless courage, in my opinion; a stupid courage compounded often out of equal parts of stubbornness and sheer bravado. He was a born organizer. He intuitively possessed a flair for the theatre: a flair without knowledge. He could be an excellent host; he was a cordon bleu cook. He was generous, he was simple in his tastes.
Yet, with all these virtues, de Basil was, at the same time, one of the most difficult human beings I have ever encountered in a lifetime of management. This tall, gaunt, cadaver of a man had a powerful physique, a dead-pan face, and a pair of cold, astigmatic eyes, before which rested thick-lensed spectacles. He had all the makings of a dictator. Like his countryman, Joseph Stalin, he was completely impossible as a collaborator. He was a born intriguer, and delighted in surrounding himself with scheming characters. During my career I have met scheming characters who, nevertheless, have had certain positive virtues: they succeeded in getting things done. De Basil’s scheming characters consisted of lawyers, hacks, amateur managers, brokers, without exception third-rate people who damaged and destroyed.
It would be an act of great injustice to call de Basil stupid. He was as shrewd an article as one could expect to meet amongst all the lads who have tried to sell the unwary stranger the Brooklyn Bridge, the Capitol at Washington, or the Houses of Parliament.
De Basil deliberately engaged this motley crew of hangers-on, since his Caucasian Machiavellism was such that he loved to pit them one against the other, to use them to build up an operetta atmosphere of cheap intrigue that I felt sure had not hitherto existed save in the Graustark type of fiction. De Basil used them to irritate and annoy. He would dispatch them abroad in his company simply to stir up trouble, to form cliques: for purposes of chantage; he would order them into whispered colloquies in corners, alternately wearing knowing looks and glum visages. De Basil and his entire entourage lived in a world of intrigue of their own deliberate making. His fussy, busy little cohorts cost him money he did not have, and raised such continuous hell that the wonder is the company held together as long as it did.
De Basil’s unholy joy would come from creating, through these henchmen, a nasty situation and then stepping in to pull a string here, jerk a cord there, he would save the situation, thus becoming the hero of the moment.
I shall have more to say on the subject of the “Colonel” before this tale is told.
Now, with the contracts signed for the first American visit, we were on our honeymoon. Meanwhile, however, the picture of what I had agreed to bring was changing. Leonide Massine, his stint at the Roxy Theatre in New York completed, had met a former Broadway manager, E. Ray Goetz. Together they had succeeded in raising some money and planned with it to buy the entire Diaghileff properties. With this stock in hand, Massine caught up with de Basil, who was barnstorming through the Low Countries with his company in trucks and buses; and the two of them pooled resources. Although Massine’s purchase plan did not go through entirely, because much of the Diaghileff material had disappeared through lawsuits and other claims, nevertheless Massine was able to deliver a sizable portion of it.
As the direct result of Massine’s appointment as artistic director, a number of things happened. First of all, Balanchine quit, and formed a short-lived company in France, Les Ballets 1933, the history of which is not germane to this story. Before he left, however, Balanchine had created three works for the de Basil-Blum Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo: La Concurrence, Le Cotillon, and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Massine, as his first task, staged Jeux d’Enfants and Les Plages; restaged three of his earlier works, The Three-Cornered Hat, Le Beau Danube and Scuola di Ballo; and the first of his epoch-making symphonic ballets, Les Présages, to Tchaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony. These were combined with a number of older works from the Diaghileff repertoire, including the three Fokine masterpieces: Les Sylphides, Prince Igor, and Petroushka.
Massine had strengthened the company. There were the former Diaghileff régisseur general, Serge Grigorieff, of long memory, as stage director; his wife, Lubov Tchernicheva, a leading Diaghileff figure, for dramatic roles; the last Diaghileff ballerina, Alexandra Danilova, to give stability to the three “baby ballerinas”: Baronova, Toumanova, and Tatiana Riabouchinska, the last from Kchessinska’s private studio, by way of Nikita Balieff’s Chauve Souris, where she had been dancing. There was the intriguing Nina Verchinina, a “different” type of dancer. There were talented lesser ladies: Eugenia Delarova, Lubov Rostova; a group of English girls masquerading under Russian names. Among the men, in addition to Massine, there were Leon Woizikovsky, David Lichine, Roman Jasinsky, Paul Petroff, Yurek Shabalevsky, and André Eglevsky.
A successful breaking-in season was given at the Alhambra Theatre, in London’s Leicester Square. While this was in progress, we set about at the most necessary and vastly important business of trying to build a public for ballet in America, for this is a ballet impresario’s first job. That original publicity campaign was, in its way, history-making. It took a considerable bit of organizing. No field was overlooked. In addition to spreading the gospel of ballet, there was a Sponsors’ Committee, headed by the Grand Duchess Marie and Otto H. Kahn. Prince Serge Obolensky was an ever-present source of help.