I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [68]
Since 1952, Balanchine’s buddy Leon Leonidoff had arranged our European tours. For Italy, he had hired three Florentine stagehands to work as crew, and I ended up hanging around with them. Alfredo, dapper, always dressed in a suit jacket, struck me as a confidence man; tiny Osvaldo, charming, laughing, and active as a buzzing insect, always had something to say. Osvaldo was a kind of Sancho Panza to the hero of the trio, tall Gulio, who could have been lifted out of a Caravaggio painting. A beautiful hunk of Northern Italian male, Gulio’s classical profile, heroic Roman nose, and smooth, ivory skin graced a body on par with Michelangelo’s David. He had the entire company, male and female, undulating with desire. None of the trio was ever without a cigarette in his mouth.
When we had an engagement in a city, the company would book, in advance, a room in a hotel near the theater. If you didn’t like the hotel, you were responsible for paying the first night, and then could go find your own digs. We had no per diem, only our salaries. Mine was thirty-five dollars a week. Most dancers let the company book them for the first night, then wandered the streets to find a cheap pension for the rest of the stay. On the advice of my three Italian buddies, I developed a penny-pinching system that worked: don’t book a room in advance, follow Osvaldo’s lead.
“Not to worry, we no have a room, we find albergo when we get there,” Osvaldo assured me. Therefore, fresh off the bus or train, the four of us would lug our bags to the stage door of the opera house. Immediately, Osvaldo would burst into a torrent of Italian, to various members of the stage crew, seeking advice on a place to stay. We usually ended up in the homes of the theater’s cleaning women. These Italian families had so little—often, they gave me their children’s room and crowded their young ones onto mats on the floor of their bedroom. I paid the equivalent of one U.S. dollar a night—620 lire. The arrangement included a light supper, left on the kitchen table for my after-performance repast—usually several cheeses, bread, olives, and, occasionally, a tomato. A carafe of water as well, and, every once in a while, one of wine. Simple, delicious, heart-and-stomach warming.
This system worked—until Naples. Decades earlier, Mussolini had promised to make the Italian trains run on time, but since he had been hung off a balcony, the Italians (and their train system) reverted to a more lax sense of time. The bullet train the Italians were so proud of, the Rapido, ran four hours behind schedule, and we arrived in Naples at two o’clock in the morning. The whole company boarded the bus that had been patiently waiting, and drove off to the arranged hotel, leaving the four of us with our bags on the station platform. “Osvaldo,” I cried, “the Teatro San Carlo’s been closed for hours! How are we going to find a family to stay with?” He seemed a little embarrassed, but assured me, “Sì, sì … sì! No worry, no worry, Jacques! We find a bed.” “Dove? Osvaldo, where?” I bellowed. With a sheepish grin, he answered, “Oh, hee, hee, hee. Now we go out to find women of the street, and we pay to sleep in their beds.” With that, the three of them picked up their bags and scattered. I found a bench in the train station.
On the previous year’s tour, crossing borders from one country to another, I had discovered that at an Italian bank, you could take a U.S. dollar and say, “I want French francs,” and you’d get 350. Take a dollar’s worth of lire (620) and say, “I want to exchange these Italian lire for French francs,” and you’d get 380, thirty francs more! In the Italians’ eyes, their lire had greater value than the rest of the world acknowledged, especially the French. “Holy smokes, Jacques,” I thought. “Take your dollars, exchange them for lire, then buy French francs in Italy, and store those francs for the company’s next engagement in France. You’re going to make a profit!”
On my day off, I’d head for