I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [58]
Given the cold shoulder by Massine and Lifar, in October 1933 Lincoln approached Balanchine, who was ripe for something new, even as big a change as leaving Europe. Despondent over the disbanding of his little start-up company, his loss of the Paris Opéra, and periodically ill from recurrent bouts of tuberculosis, Balanchine, at the urging of this giant, mad capitalist, agreed to journey to America. Always the pragmatist, he interrupted Lincoln’s avalanche of words: “But first a school.”
Lincoln, while recounting this history to me, his mouth full of hors d’oeuvres at our lunch, growled, “Lifar was getting the Paris Opera, and Massine just wanted to make money and buy his island in Italy. Only George saw the vision.”
Expanding his dream, Lincoln envisioned a conservatory to rival the Imperial School of St. Petersburg. He dreamed of hundreds of young male dancers with exquisite manners, learning the arts. Lincoln designed uniforms for them, badged with a lyre emblem. There were ballerinas in his vision, but they were vague shapes in the background.
When Lincoln got Balanchine, he got Balanchine’s enterprising manager, Vladimir Dimitriev, who negotiated the terms, details, and contracts. Balanchine felt deeply indebted to Dimitriev, and insisted that he come to New York as part of the new partnership.
DIMITRIEV
In 1923, barely two years after Balanchine graduated from the Ballet School in Petrograd,1 Vladimir Dimitriev (a singer of the Theater of Musical Drama and later of the Maryinsky Opera) helped Balanchine launch “Evenings of Young Ballet” with a company of some fifteen young dancers from the Maryinsky. An important alliance/ collaboration/partnership had been formed.
I remember Dimitriev at SAB in 1942. Even though he had been replaced as director of the school (first by Lincoln, then Eugenie Ouroussow), he occasionally came around because his wife, Kyra Blank, taught the beginner’s classes. I came out of her class once, and a greasy-looking man was talking to Miss Ouroussow. One of the mothers whispered to the Boss, “That’s Dimitriev, he’s Kyra Blank’s husband. He came from Russia, like they all did.”
Lenin died in 1924, and life in Russia plunged into deeper darkness as Stalin took charge. George Kennan, America’s ambassador to Russia, and a great diplomat and Russian scholar, told me, “Stalin had yellow eyes. He lived at night, and if at any moment he decided to call someone, they had better be available. All over the eleven time zones of the Soviet Union, Communist Party members, bureaucrats, sat at their desks, awaiting word from the Kremlin, ‘He’s gone to sleep.’ Then it would be safe to close down, collapse, maybe go home, before they would have to be back at their offices.”
Nearly everyone wanted desperately to get out of the country. Foreign visas were seemingly impossible to secure, especially for artists, but wily Dimitriev managed a miracle, manipulating the Soviet bureaucrats into providing passports and visas for a small group of artists, headed by himself and Balanchine. Calling themselves the Soviet State Dancers, the troupe included three singers, a conductor, and five dancers, among them Tamara Gevergeyeva, Balanchine’s first wife, later known in the U.S. as the actress Tamara Geva; Alexandra Danilova, who would become Balanchine’s second wife2 and, by the time she put away her toe shoes, a prima ballerina of international renown; Nicholas Efimov, who later became a premier danseur at the Paris Opéra; and Lydia Ivanova, who never made it.3
Setting out (supposedly) to propagandize the prowess of Soviet ballet in the West, late in 1924 they boarded a boat for Germany and embarked on a nail-biting, white-knuckled journey. As punishment for defection involved either imprisonment in a Siberian gulag or execution, they expected cannons to fire