It was a chilly and fairly raw December morning in 1933 when I clambered aboard the cutter at the Battery, to go down the Bay to board the ship at Quarantine. It is a morning I shall not soon forget. I was in ballet up to my neck; and I loved it. There have been days and nights in the succeeding two decades when I have seriously played with the notion of what life might have been like if I had not gone aboard (and overboard) that December morning.
I took with me the traditional Russian welcome: a tray of bread, wrapped in a white linen serviette, a little bowl of salt, which I offered to de Basil. I was careful to see that the reporters and camera men were in place when I did it. De Basil’s poker-face actually smiled as I handed him the tray, uncovered the bread, poured the salt. But only for a moment. A Russian word in greeting, and then there was an immediate demand from him to see the theatre. We were on our way. Driving uptown to the St. James Theatre, the arguments commenced. There was the matter of the programme. There was the matter of the size of de Basil’s name; the question of the relative size of the artists’ names; the type-face; the order in which they should be listed; what was to become the everlasting arguments over repertoire and casting. But I was in it, now.
I believed in the “star” system—not because I believe the system to be a perfect one, by any means, but because the American public, which had been without any major ballet company for eight years, and which had had practically no ballet activity, had to be attracted and arrested by something more than an unknown and heretofore unheard-of company and the photograph of a not particularly photogenic ex-Cossack.
The pre-Christmas première at the St. James Theatre, on the night of 21st December, marked the beginning of a new epoch in ballet, and in my career. It was going to be a long pull, an uphill struggle. I knew that. The opening night audience was brilliant; the house was packed, enthusiastic. But the advance sale at the box-office was anything but encouraging. Diaghileff had failed in America. The losses of his two seasons, paid for by Otto H. Kahn, ran close to a half-million dollars. I was on my own. Since readers are as human as I am, perhaps they will forgive my pardonable pride, the pride I felt sixteen years later, on reading the historian George Amberg’s comment: “If it had not been for Mr. Hurok’s resourceful management and promotion, de Basil would certainly not have succeeded where Diaghileff failed.”
But I am anticipating. The opening programme consisted of La Concurrence, Les Présages, and Le Beau Danube. Toumanova in the first; Baronova and Lichine in the second; Massine, Danilova, and Riabouchinska in the third. It was a night. The next day’s press was excellent. It was John Martin, with what I felt was an anti-Diaghileff bias, who offered some reservations.
Following the opening performance, I gave the first of my many ballet suppers, this one at the Savoy-Plaza. It was very gala. The Sponsors’ Committee turned up en masse. White-gloved waiters served, among other things, super hot dogs, as a native gesture to the visitors from overseas. The “baby ballerinas” looked as if they should have been in bed. That is, two of them did. One of them was missing, and there was some concern as to what could have happened to Tamara Toumanova. However, there was no necessity for concern for Tamara, since she, with her sense of the theatre, the theatrical, and the main chance, made a late and quite theatrical entry, with Paul D. Cravath on one arm and Otto H. Kahn on the other. The new era in ballet was inaugurated by these two distinguished gentlemen and patrons of the arts sipping champagne from a ballet slipper especially made for the occasion by a leading Fifth Avenue bootmaker.
The opening a matter of history, the publicity department went into action at double the record-breaking pace at which they had been functioning for weeks. The resulting press coverage was overwhelming and national.
But, however gratifying all this may have been, I had my troubles, and they increased daily. The publicity simply could not please all the people all the time. I mean the ballet people, of course. There was always the eternally dissatisfied de Basil. In addition, there were three fathers, nineteen mothers, and one sister-in-law to be satisfied. Then there were daily casting problems. The publicity department was giving the press what it wanted: feature stories on ballet, on artists, on the daily life of the dancer. It was then de Basil determined that all publicity must be centered on his own august person. He had a point of view, I must admit. Dancers were here today, gone tomorrow. De Basil and his ballet remained. But no newspaper is interested in running repeated photographs of a dour, bespectacled male. They wanted “leg art.” When de Basil insisted that he be photographed, the camera men would “shoot” him with a filmless or plateless camera.
In addition to having to contend with what threatened to become a chronic and incurable case of Basildiaghileffitis, I was losing a potful of money. The St. James Theatre is no better than any other Broadway house as a home for ballet. The stage is far too small either to display the décor or to permit dancers to move freely. The auditorium, even if filled to capacity, cannot meet ballet expenses. We were not playing to anything like capacity. There was a tour booked; but, thanks to a “stop clause” in the theatre contract—a figure above which the attraction must continue at the theatre—we could not leave. We had made the “stop clause” too low. There was only one thing to do in order to protect the tour. I decided to divide the company into two companies.
Forced to fulfil two sets of obligations at the end of the first month at the St. James Theatre, I opened a tour in Reading, Pennsylvania, with Massine, Danilova, Toumanova, the larger part of the corps de ballet, Efrem Kurtz conducting the orchestra, and all of the ballets in the repertoire except three.