Having succeeded in this, de Basil emerged from his hiding place to hold me up once again by demanding money under duress. He had no money and had to have cash in advance before he would move the company to Mexico. Once there, he raised objections to the Baronova arrangements, did not want her to dance or as a member of the company; and there was a general air of sabotage, egged on, I have no doubt, by a domestic situation, wherein his wife wanted to dance leading roles.
Somehow we managed to get through the Mexico City engagement and to get them to Cuba. There matters came to a head with a vengeance. Because of de Basil’s inability to pay salaries, he started cutting salaries, with a strike that has become a part of ballet history ensuing.
Once more I dispatched my trusty right hand, Mae Frohman, to foreign parts to try to straighten matters out. There was nothing she could do. The mess was too involved, too complicated, and the only possible course was for me to drop the whole thing.
De Basil, looking for new worlds to conquer, started for South America. His adventures in the Southern Hemisphere have no important place in this book, since the company was not then under my management. They would, moreover, fill another book. The de Basil South American venture, however, enters this story chronologically at a later point. Let it be said that the “Colonel’s” adventures there were as fantastic as the man himself. They included, among many other things, defection after defection, sometimes necessitating a recruiting of dancers almost from the streets; the performances of ballets with girls who had never heard of the works, much less seen them, having to rehearse them sketchily while the curtain was waiting to rise; the coincidence of performance with the outbreak of a local revolution; flying his little company in shifts, since only one jalopy plane, in a dubious state of repair, was available. I shall not go into his fantastic financing, this being one of the few times when, as I suggested at the beginning of this book, the curtain might be lowered for a few discreet moments, in order to spare the feelings of others rather than my own.
In the quiet of the small hours of the morning, I would lie awake and compare the personalities of the two “organizers,” de Basil and Denham, reviewing their likenesses and their differences. As I dozed off, I came to the conclusion that most generalizations about personality are wrong. When you have spent hours, days, months, years in close association and have been bored and irritated by a flamboyant individual, you are apt to think that restraint and reticence are the only virtues. Until you meet a quiet fellow, who is quiet either because he has nothing to say or nothing to make a noise about, and then discover his stillness is merely a convenient mask for deceit.
Massine, unable to continue any longer with the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe management, severed his connection with the company he had made, in 1942. Save for a few undistinguished creations, de Basil was skating along as best he could on his Diaghileff heritage; classicism was being neglected in the frantic search for “novelties.” Both companies were making productions, not on any basis of policy, but simply for expediency and as cheaply as possible. Existing productions in both companies were increasingly slipshod. While it is true that a good ballet is a good ballet, it is something less than good when it receives niggardly treatment or when it is given one less iota than the strictest attention to detail.
That is exactly what happened when the companies split, and split again: the works suffered; this, together with the recurring internal crises, boded ill for the future of ballet. There was the ever-present need for money for new productions. Diaghileff had one Maecenas after another. By the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth century, a Maecenas was becoming a rare bird indeed. Today he is as dead as the proverbial Dodo.
I had certain definite convictions about ballet, I still have them. One of them is that the sound cornerstone of any ballet company must be formed of genuine classics. But these must never take the form of “modern” versions, nor additionally suffer from anything less than painstaking productions, top-drawer performances, and an infinite respect for the works themselves. Ballet may depart from the classical base as far as it wishes to experiment, but the base should always be kept in sight; and psychological excursions, explorations into the subconscious, should never be permitted to obscure the fact that the basic function of ballet is to entertain. By that I do not mean to suggest ballet should stand still, should chain itself to reaction and the conservatism of a dead past. It should look forward, move forward; but it must take its bearings from those virtues of a living past, which is its heritage: all of which can be summed up in one brief phrase—the classical tradition.
There are increasingly frequent attempts to create ballets crammed with symbols dealing with various aspects of sex, perversion, physical and psychological tensions. In one of the world’s great ballet centers there have been attempts to use ballet as a means to promulgate and propagandize political ideologies. I am glad to say the latter have been completely unsuccessful and they have returned to the classics.
I should be the last person to wish to limit the choreographer’s choice of subject material. That is ready to his hand and mind. The fact remains that, in my opinion, ballet cannot (and will not) be tied down to any one style, aesthetic, religion, ideology, or philosophy. Therefore, it seems to me, the function of the choreographer is to express balletic ideas, thought, and emotion in a way that first and foremost pleases him. But, at the same time, I should like to remind every choreographer of a distinguished authority, when he said, “Pleasure, and pleasure alone, is the purpose of art.” But pleasure differs in kind according to the way that individuals and groups of individuals differ in mental and emotional make-up. Thus ballet provides pleasure for the intellectual and the sensualist, the idealist and the realist, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Atheist. And it will remain the function of the choreographer to provide this infinite variety of pleasure until such time that all men think, feel, and act alike.