8 Revolution and Counter-revolution: Leonide Massine and the New Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo
IN order that the reader may have a sense of continuity, I feel he should be supplied with a bit of the background and a brief fill-in on what had been happening meanwhile at Monte Carlo.
I have pointed out that de Basil’s preoccupation with London and America had soon left his collaborator, René Blum, without a ballet company with which to fulfil his contractual obligations to the Principality of Monaco. The break between the two came in 1936, when Blum formed a new company that he called simply Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.
Blum had the great wisdom and fine taste to engage Michel Fokine as choreographer. A company, substantial in size, had been engaged, the leading personnel numbering among its principals some fine dancers known to American audiences. Nana Gollner, the American ballerina, was one of the leading figures. Others included Vera Nemtchinova, Natalie Krassovska, Anatole Ouboukhoff, Anatole Vilzak, Jean Yasvinsky, André Eglevsky, and Michel Panaieff. A repertoire, sparked by Fokine creations, was in the making.
Back in America, the prime mover in the financial organization of the new Massine company was Sergei I. Denham. It is hardly necessary to add that Denham and de Basil had little in common or that they were, in fact, arch-enemies.
Denham had no more previous knowledge of or association with ballet than de Basil; actually much less. I have been unable to discover the real source of Denham’s interest in ballet. Born Sergei Ivanovich Dokouchaieff, in Russia, the son of a merchant, he had escaped the Revolution by way of China. His career in the United States, before ballet in the persons of Leonide Massine and Julius Fleischmann swam into his ken, had been of a mercantile nature, in one business venture or another, including a stint as an automobile salesman, and another as a sort of bank manager, none of them connected with the arts, but all of them bringing him into fringe relations with the substantially solvent.
No sooner did he find himself in the atmosphere of ballet than he, too, became infected with Diaghileffitis, a disease that, apparently, attacks them all, sooner or later.
It is one of the strange phenomena of ballet I have never been able to understand. Why is it, I ask myself, that a former merchant, an ex-policeman, or an heir to carpet factory fortunes, for some reason all gravitate to ballet, to create and perpetuate “hobby” businesses? I have not yet discovered the answer. As in the case of Denham, so with the others. Lacking knowledge or trained taste, people like these no sooner find themselves in ballet than down they come with the Diaghileffitis attack.
Russian intrigue quickened its tempo, increased its intensity. Denham, with the smooth, soft suavity of a born organizer, drove about the country in his battered little car, often accompanied by his niece, Tatiana Orlova, who was later to become the fourth Mrs. Massine, ostensibly to try to attract more backers, more money. More often than not, he followed the exact itinerary of the de Basil tour. Then he would insinuate himself back-stage, place a chair for himself in the wings during the performances of the de Basil company, and there negotiate with dancers in an effort to get them to leave de Basil and join the new company. At the same time, he would exhibit what can only be described as a deplorable rudeness to de Basil, whose company it was.
On the other hand, de Basil increased and intensified his machinations to try to induce me to again sign with him. Not only did he step up his own personal barrage, but the intrigues of his associates were deepened. These associates were now three in number. Russian intrigue was having an extended field day. On the one hand, there was Denham intriguing for all he was worth against de Basil. On the other, de Basil’s three henchmen were intriguing against Denham, against me, against each other, and, I suspect, against de Basil. It was a sorry spectacle.
It was the sort of thing you come upon in tales of Balkan intrigue. The cast of this one included a smooth and suave Russian ex-merchant, bland and crafty, easy of smile, oozing “culture,” with an attractive dancer-niece as part-time assistant, and a former Diaghileff corps de ballet dancer, a member of de Basil’s company, as his spy and henchwoman-at-large. Arrayed against this trio was the de Basil quartet: the “Colonel” himself, and his three henchmen. The first was Ignat Zon, a slightly obese organizer and theatre promoter from Moscow and Petrograd, who, after the Revolution, had turned up in Paris, where he allied himself with Prince Zeretelli, de Basil’s former Caucasian partner. Zon was not interested in ballet; he was a commission merchant, nothing more. The other two were a comic conspiratorial pair. One was a Bulgarian lawyer, who had lived for some time in Paris, Jacques Lidji, by name. The other was an undersized, tubby little hanger-on, Alexander Philipoff, a fantastic little man with no experience of theatre or ballet, who neither spoke nor understood a word of anything save Russian. Philipoff certainly was not more than five feet tall, chubby, tubby, rotund, with a beaming face and an eternally suspicious eye. The contrast between him and the tall, gaunt de Basil was ludicrous. Privately they were invariably referred to as Mutt and Jeff. Philipoff constantly sought for motives (bad) behind every word uttered, behind every facial expression, every gesture.
Both men were overbearing, and rather pathetic, at that. Neither of the pair could be called theatre people by any stretch of the imagination. Lidji, the lawyer, was quite as futile in his own way as Philipoff. As a pair of characters they might have been mildly amusing in The Spring Maid type of operetta. As collaborators on behalf of ballet, they were a trial and a bloody bore. Lidji, incidentally, was but one of de Basil’s lawyers; others came and went in swift procession. But Lidji lasted longer than some, and, for a time, acted as a sort of under-director, as did Philipoff. Since Lidji was not, at the time, an American citizen, he was unable to engage in the practice of law in the States. When he was not otherwise engaged in exercises of intrigue, Lidji would busy himself writing voluminous reports and setting down mountains of notes.
I am convinced that the reason de Basil had so many legal advisers was that he never paid them. Soon one or another would quit, and yet another would turn up. I have a theory that, no matter how poor one may be, one should always pay one’s doctor and one’s lawyer; each can help one out of trouble.
My personal problem was relatively simple. With the Massine group raiding de Basil’s company, which of the dancers would remain with the “Colonel”? This was problem number one. The other was, with de Basil dropping Massine, who was the creator and the creative force behind the de Basil company and who would, moreover, be likely to take a number of important artists from de Basil to his own company, what would de Basil have in the way of playable repertoire, artists, new creations?
To annoyance and aggravation, now were added perplexity, puzzlement.
It was at about this time, on one of my European visits, I had had extended discussions with René Blum regarding my bringing him and his new company to America. I had seen numerous performances given by his company during their London season, and I had been impressed by their quality.
During this period of puzzlement on my part, Sergei Denham came to me to try to interest me in the new Fleischmann venture. Denham assured me he had ample financial backing for the new company. My chief concern at this time was the question of the artistic direction of the new organization. I told Denham that if he would secure by contract the services of Leonide Massine in that capacity, I would be interested in taking over the management of the company, and signed a letter to that effect.
Subsequently, the late Halsey Malone, acting as counsel for Universal Art, the corporate title of the Fleischmann group, secured Massine’s signature and a detailed contract was drawn up.
As matters stood, I had one more season to go with my contractual arrangements with de Basil, and Massine had the better part of another season with the former’s company.
Massine’s contract with de Basil expired while the company was playing in San Francisco, and the two parted company, with Massine, Danilova, and others leaving for Monte Carlo.
That repertoire consisted of five Fokine-Diaghileff revivals: Carnaval, Le Spectre de la Rose, Les Sylphides, Prince Igor, and Schéhérazade.
There was a production of Delibes’s Coppélia, staged by Nicholas Zvereff; the Swan Lake second act; a version of The Nutcracker, by Boris Romanoff; and Aubade, to the music of Francis Poulenc, staged by George Balanchine.
Importantly, there were several new Fokine creations: L’Epreuve d’Amour, a charming “chinoiserie,” to the music of Mozart; Don Juan, a balletic retelling of the romantic tale to a discovered score by Gluck; Les Eléments, to the music of Bach; Jota Argonesa, a work first done by Fokine in Petrograd, in 1916; Igroushki, originally staged by Fokine for the Ziegfeld Roof in New York, in 1921; Les Elfes, the Mendelssohn work originally done in New York, in 1924. The two other Fokine works were yet another version of The Nutcracker, and de Falla’s Love, the Sorcerer, both of which were later re-done by Boris Romanoff.
Painters and designers included André Derain, Mariano Andreu, Nathalie Gontcharova, Dmitri Bouchene, Mstislav Doboujinsky, and Cassandre.
Massine’s preparations went ahead apace. In Boston there were intensive researches and concentrated work on the score for what was destined to be one of the most popular works in modern ballet, Gaîté Parisienne. In a large room in the Copley Plaza Hotel were assembled all the extant scores of Offenbach operettas, procured from the Boston Public Library and the Harvard Library. There were two pianists, Massine, Efrem Kurtz, the conductor, copyists. The basic musical material for the ballet was selected there, under Massine’s supervision. Later, in Paris, it was put together and re-orchestrated by Manuel Rosenthal.
The de Basil company finished its American season and sailed for Europe. Meanwhile the deal was consummated between Fleischmann, Massine, Denham and Blum, and Universal Art became the proprietor of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Before the deal was finally settled, however, Fokine had left Blum and had sold his services to de Basil, whose company was playing a European tour. Massine was the new artistic director of the new Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, while Fokine had switched to de Basil.
Massine was now busily engaged in building up the dancing personnel of his new organization. On the distaff side, he had Alexandra Danilova, Eugenia Delarova, Tamara Toumanova, Lubov Rostova, from the de Basil company. From the Blum company he took Natalie Krassovska, Jeanette Lauret, Milada Mladova, Mia Slavenska, Michel Panieff, Roland Guerard, Marc Platoff, Simon Semenoff, Jean Yasvinsky, George Zoritch, and Igor Youskevitch, as principals. Of the group, it is of interest to note that three—Mladova, Guerard, and Platoff—were American. In addition, Massine engaged the English ballerina, Alicia Markova, then quite unknown to American audiences, although a first lady of British Ballet; Nini Theilade of plastic grace; and the English Frederick Franklin, yet another Massine discovery. Serge Lifar, the last Diaghileff dancing discovery and the leading dancer and spirit of the ballet at the Paris Opera, was added.
The new company was potentially a strong one. I was pleased. But I was anything but pleased at the prospect of the two companies becoming engaged in what must be the inevitable: a cut-throat competition between them. The split, to be sure, had weakened the de Basil organization; the new Monte Carlo company had an infinitely better balance in personnel. In some respects, the Massine company was superior; but de Basil had a repertoire that required only careful rehearsing, correcting, and some refurbishing of settings and costumes. With Massine’s departure, David Lichine had stepped into the first dancer roles. Irina Baronova had elected to remain with de Basil, in direct competition with Toumanova; others choosing to remain with the old company included Riabouchinska, Grigorieva, Morosova, Verchinina, Tchernicheva, Osato, Shabalevsky, Petroff, Lazovsky, and Jasinsky.
I envisaged, for the good of ballet and its future, one big ballet company, embracing the talents and the repertoires of both. I genuinely feared the co-existence of the two companies, being certain that the United States and Canada were not yet ready to support two companies simultaneously. I pleaded with both to merge their interests, bury their differences. I devoted all my time and energy in a concentrated effort to bring about this desired end. The problems were complicated; but I was certain that if there was a genuine desire on both sides, and good will, a deal would be worked out. It blew hot. It blew cold. As time went on, with no tangible results visible, my hopes diminished. It was not only the financial arrangements between the two companies that presented grave obstacles; there were formidable personality differences. The negotiations continued and were long drawn-out. Then, one day, the clouds suddenly thinned and, to my complete surprise, we appeared to be making progress. Almost miraculously, so it seemed, the attorneys for Universal Art and de Basil sat down to draw up the preliminary papers for the agreement to agree to merge. Through all this trying period there was helpful assistance from Prince Serge Obolensky and Baron “Nikki” Guinsberg.
At last the day arrived when the agreement was ready for joint approval, clause by clause, by both parties to the merger, with myself holding a watching brief as the prospective manager of the eagerly awaited Big Ballet. This meeting went on for hours and hours. It opened in the offices of Washburn, Malone and Perkins, the Universal Art attorneys, in West Forty-fourth Street, early in the afternoon. By nine o’clock at night endless haggling, ravelled tempers, recurring deadlocks had, I thought reached their limit.
Food saved that situation. Prince Obolensky and my attorney, Elias Lieberman, fetched hamburgers. But, before they could be consumed, we were evicted from the offices of the attorneys by the last departing elevator man, who announced the building was being closed for the night, and the conference, hamburgers and all, was transferred to the St. Regis Hotel. At four o’clock the next morning, a verbal agreement was reached. The deed was done. I felt sure that now we had, with this combination of all the finest balletic forces extant in the Western World, the best as well as the biggest.
The “Colonel” departed for Berlin to join his company which was playing an engagement there. He was to have signed the agreement before sailing, but, procrastinator that he was, he slipped away without affixing his signature. Nor had he authorized his attorney to sign for him, and it took a flock of wireless messages and cables to extract from him the authority the attorney required. At last it came.
I had never been happier. Mrs. Hurok and I got ourselves aboard the Normandie for our annual summer solstice in Europe. On board we found the Julius Fleischmanns. At dinner the first night out, our joint toast was in thanks for the merger and to the Biggest and Best of all Ballets.
Although Fleischmann showed me one mildly disturbing wireless message, I had five days of peace. It was not destined to continue. When I stepped down from the boat train at London’s Waterloo Station, I was greeted by the news that the merger was off.
The “Colonel” had changed his mind. Massine also had become resentful at a division of authority. Confusion reigned. As an immediate result, almost overnight de Basil lost control and the authoritative voice in his own company. Altogether, it was a complicated business.
A new holding company, calling itself Educational Ballets, Ltd., headed by Baron “Freddy” d’Erlanger, banker and composer, whose bank had a large interest in the de Basil company, had taken over the operation of the company, and had placed a new pair of managing directors in charge: Victor Dandré, Anna Pavlova’s husband and manager, jointly with “Gerry” Sevastianov, the husband of Irina Baronova. The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, which was to have been the scene of the debut of the Big Merged Company, had been taken for the original organization.
It was all a bad dream, I felt. This impression was intensified a hundred fold when I sat in the High Court in London’s Temple Bar, as be-wigged counsel and robed judge performed an autopsy on my dream ballet. Here, with all the trappings of legality, but no genuine understanding, a little tragicomedy was being played out. Educational Ballets, Ltd., announced the performance of all the Massine ballets in the de Basil repertoire. This spurred Massine into immediate legal action.
Massine went into court, not for damages, not for money, but for a declaratory judgment to determine, once for all, his own rights in his own creations. The court’s decision, after days of forensic argument, conducted with that understatement and soft but biting insult that is the prerogative of British learned counsel, was a piece of legalistic hair-splitting. Under British law, unlike the American, choreographic rights are protected. Would that the choreographic artist had a like protection under our system! By virtue of having presented the works in public performance, the court decided that de Basil had the right to continue such presentation: any works Massine had created as an employee of de Basil, while receiving a salary from him, Massine could not reproduce for a period of five years. Only the three works he had originally created for Diaghileff: The Three-Cornered Hat, The Fantastic Toy-Shop, and Le Beau Danube, could be reproduced by him for himself or for any other company.
The court action was a fortnight’s news-making wonder in London. Ballet was not helped by it. Ballet belongs on the stage, not in the musty atmosphere of the court room. De Basil and his lawyers, Massine and his lawyers, Universal Art and their lawyers. It is a silly business. X brings an action against Y over an alleged breach of a theatrical employment contract. Let us assume that X represents the employer, Y the artist-employee. Let us assume further that X wins the action. Y must continue in the employment of X. What, I ask you, is less satisfactory than an artist who is compelled by a court judgment to fulfil a contract? In ballet, the only persons who benefit in ballet lawsuits are the learned counsel. Differences of opinion, personality clashes are not healed by legal action; they are accentuated. Legal actions of this sort are instituted usually in anger and bitterness. When the legal decision is made, the final settlement adjudicated, the bitterness remains.
The merger off, my contract with Universal Art came into force. I was committed to the management of a London season. Since the traditional home of ballet, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, had been preempted by the old company, I took Old Drury, the historic Drury Lane Theatre, whose history is as long, whose beauty is equally famous, whose seating capacity is enormous.
The two houses are two short blocks apart. The seasons were simultaneous. Both were remarkably successful; both companies played to packed houses nightly. Nightly I had my usual table at the Savoy Grill, that famed London rendezvous of theatrical, musical, balletic, and literary life. Nightly my table was crowded with the ebb and flow of departing and arriving guests. The London summer, despite my forebodings, was halcyon.
De Basil, at this period, was not a part of this cosmopolitanism and gaiety. Having been forced out of the control of his own company, at least for the moment, he became a recluse in a tiny house in Shepherd’s Market, typically biding his time in his true-to-form Caucasian manner, reflecting on his victory, although it had been more Pyrrhic than triumphant. We met for dinner in his band-box house, most of which time I devoted to a final effort to effect a merger of the two companies. It was a case of love’s labour lost, for the opposing groups were poles apart.
The summer wore on into the late English midsummer heat, when all London takes itself hence. The original company’s season at Covent Carden slowed down, came to a stop; and a fortnight later, we rang down our final curtain at Drury Lane.
Before leaving for Paris, en route home to New York, there was a bit of straightening out to be done in London. The merger having failed to jell, a bit of additional adjustment was necessary. In other words, because of the changed situation, my contract with Universal Art had to be renegotiated. As in all matters balletic, it would seem, numerous conferences were required; but the new contract was eventually negotiated agreeably.
Back in New York, the day of the new Monte Carlo Ballet Russe opening approached. There were the usual alarums and excursions, and others not so usual. Markova, of course, was English. Moreover, she danced the coveted role, the title part in Giselle. She had already made this part quite personally something of her own. Her success in the role during the Drury Lane season, where she had alternated the part with Tamara Toumanova, had been conspicuous. Although the role was shared between three ballerinas, Markova, Toumanova, and Slavenska, Massine and I agreed that, since the opening performance in New York was so important and because Markova was new to the country, it would provide her with a magnificent opportunity for a debut; she should dance Giselle that night.
Factionism was rampant. Pressures of almost every sort were put upon Massine to switch the opening night casting.
A threat of possible violence caused me to take the precaution to have detectives, disguised as stage-hands standing by; I eliminated the trap-door and understage elevator used in this production as Giselle’s grave, and gave instructions to have everything loose on the stage fastened down. So literally were these orders carried out that even the lilies Giselle has to pluck in the second act and toss to her Albrecht while dancing as a ghost, were securely nailed to the stage floor. This nearly caused a minor contretemps and what might have turned out to be a ludicrous situation, when Markova had to rip them up by main force before she could toss them to Serge Lifar, who was making his first New York appearance with the company as Albrecht.
Lifar’s brief association with the new Monte Carlo Ballet Russe was not a happy one for any of us, least of all for himself. He certainly did not behave well. In my earlier book, Impresario, I dwelt quite fully on certain aspects of his weird fantasies. There is no point in repeating them. Always excitable, here in New York at that time Lifar was unable to understand and realize he was not at the Paris Opera, where his every word is law.
Lifar’s fantastic behavior in New York before we shipped him back to Paris was but an example of his lack of tact and his overwhelming egoism. He proved to be a colossal headache; but I believe much of it was due to a streak of self-dramatization in his nature, and a positive delight he takes in being the central character, the focus of an “incident.”
Under the influence of a genuine creative urge, Massine’s directions of the new Monte Carlo Ballet Russe for two seasons richly fulfilled the promise it held at the company’s inception. The public grew larger each season. At the same time, slowly, but none the less surely, that public became, I believe, more understanding. The ballet public of America was cutting its eye-teeth.
It was during the early seasons that Massine added three more symphonic ballets to the repertoire, with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony; Rouge et Noir, to the brilliant First Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich; and Labyrinth, a surrealist treatment of the Seventh Symphony of Franz Schubert. Christian Bérard provided scenery and costumes for the first of them; Henri Matisse, for the second; Salvador Dali, for the last. The Shostakovich work was the most successful of the three. Regrettably, all these symphonic ballets are lost to present-day audiences.
The outstanding comedy success was Gaîté Parisienne, the Offenbach romp, originally started in Boston before the company as such existed. The most sensational work was Massine’s first surrealist ballet, Bacchanale, to the Venusberg music from Wagner’s Tannhauser. A quite fantastic spectacle, from every point of view, it was a Massine-Dali joke, one that was less successful when the same combination tried to repeat it in Labyrinth.
There were lesser Massine works, produced under frantic pressure; examples: Saratoga, an unhappy attempt to capture the American spirit of the up-state New York spa, to a commissioned score by Jaromir Weinberger; The New Yorker, which was certainly no American Gaîté Parisienne, being Massine’s attempt to try to bring to balletic life the characters, the atmosphere, and the perky humors of the popular weekly magazine, all to a pastiche of George Gershwin’s music. A third work was one of his last Monte Carlo Ballet Russe creations, Vienna—1814, an evocation of the spirit of the Congress of Vienna, to music by Carl Maria von Weber, orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett.
Bogatyri, a colorful Russian spectacle, designed as a sort of successor to Fokine’s Le Coq d’Or, had spectacular scenery and costumes by Nathalie Gontcharova, and was a long and detailed work utilising a movement of a Borodin string quartet and his Second Symphony. In cooperation with Argentinita, Massine staged a quite successful Spanish divertissement to Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Capriccio Espagnol, using for it the set and costumes Mariano Andreu had designed for Fokine’s Jota Argonesa.
In summing up Massine’s creations for the new company, I have left his most important contribution until the last. It was St. Francis, originally done in our first season at London’s Drury Lane, where it was known as Noblissima Visione. A collaboration between the composer, Paul Hindemith, and Massine, it may be called one of Massine’s greatest triumphs and one of his very finest works. The ballet, unfortunately, was not popular with mass audiences; but it was work of deep and moving beauty, with a ravishing musical score, magnificent scenery and costumes by Pavel Tchelitcheff, and two great performances by Massine himself in the title role, and Nini Theilade, as Poverty, the bride of St. Francis.
For the record, let me note the other works that made up the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo repertoire under my management: Massine’s productions of The Three-Cornered Hat, The Fantastic Toy Shop, and Le Beau Danube. George Balanchine staged a revival of Le Baiser de La Fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) and Jeu de Cartes (Card Game), both Stravinsky works he had done before, and all borrowed from the American Ballet. There was a new production of Delibes’s Coppélia, in a setting by Pierre Roy; and the Fokine-Blum works I have mentioned before.
I accepted as a new production a revival of Tchaikowsky’s The Nutcracker, staged by Alexandra Fedorova, and a re-working of parts of Tchaikowsky’s Swan Lake, also staged by Fedorova, under the title of The Magic Swan.
Three productions remain to be mentioned. One was Icare, staged only at the Metropolitan Opera House in the first season, a graphic and moving re-enactment of the Icarus legend, by Serge Lifar, to percussive rhythms only. The second was Richard Rodgers’s first and only exclusively ballet score, Ghost Town, a genre work dealing with the California Gold Rush. It was the first choreographic job of a talented young American character dancer, Marc Platoff, born Marcel Le Plat, in Seattle. Not a work out of the top drawer, it was nevertheless a good try for a young choreographer.
The third work in this group is one I felt should have been given a better chance. It was Devil’s Holiday, by Frederick Ashton, the leading choreographer of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, and his first all-balletic work to be seen on this side of the Atlantic. Done at the opening of our 1939-1940 season, at the Metropolitan Opera House, under the stress and strain of a hectic departure, and a hurried one, from Europe after the outbreak of the war, it suffered as a consequence. In settings and costumes by Eugene Berman, its score was a Tommasini arrangement of Paganini works. Ashton had been able only partially to rehearse the piece in Paris before the company made its getaway, eventually to reach New York on the day of the Metropolitan opening, after a difficult and circuitous crossing to avoid submarines. On arrival, a number of the company were taken off to Ellis Island until we could straighten out faulty visas and clarify papers. I am certain Devil’s Holiday was one of Ashton’s most interesting creations; it suffered because the creator was unable to complete it and, as a consequence, America was never able to see it as its creator intended, or at anything like its best.
With the 1940-1941 season, deterioration had set in at the vitals of the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe, Massine had exerted tremendous efforts. The company he had created was a splendid one. But, as both leading dancer and chief choreographer, he had no time to rest, no time to think. The same sloughing off that took place with the de Basil company was now becoming apparent in this one. There was a creaking in the vessel proper, an obvious straining at the seams. The non-Massine productions lacked freshness or any distinctive quality. There were defections among some of the best artists. Massine was coming up against a repetition of his de Basil association. Friction between Massine and Denham increased, as the latter became more difficult.
I could not be other than sad, for Massine had given of his best to create and maintain a fine organization. He had been a shining example to the others. The company had started on a high plane of accomplishment; but it was impossible for Massine to continue under the conditions that daily became less and less bearable. Heaven knows, the “Colonel” had been difficult. But he had an instinct for the theatre, a serious love for ballet, a broad experience, was a first-class organizer, and an untiring, never ceasing, dynamic worker.
Sergei Denham, by comparison, was a mere tyro at ballet direction, and an amateur at that. But, amateur or not, he was convinced he had inherited the talent, the knowledge, the taste of the late Serge Diaghileff.
I had not devoted twenty-eight years of hard, slogging work to the building of good ballet in America to allow it to deteriorate into a shambles because of the arbitrariness of another would-be Diaghileff.
It was time for a change.