The ballet was at the Mariinsky theater, which has been renamed, though no one calls it that, the Kirov, after the old revolutionary and friend of Stalin’s whose assassination in 1934 is said to have initiated the first of the Moscow trials. Galina Ulanova, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina, made her debut in this theater, and the Leningrad Opera and Ballet Company, which is now installed there on a repertorial basis, is considered first-class by Soviet critics. Except for the Fenice in Venice, a theater it somewhat resembles in its eighteenth-century size and style and heating system, I think it the most beautiful theater I’ve seen. Unfortunately, the old seats have been replaced by wooden ones, rather like those in a school auditorium, and their harsh, natural color makes too raw a contrast against the subtle grays and silvers of the Mariinsky’s simplified rococo interior.
Despite the chilliness of the theater, all of us, ladies included, were required to leave our coats at the cloakroom; even Mrs. Gershwin was forced to part with her mink, for in Russia it is thought uncultured, nye kulturni at its extremest, to enter a theater, restaurant, museum, any such place, wearing a coat or wrap. At the moment, the principal sufferer from the ruling was Miss Ryan.
A tall, striking blonde, Miss Ryan was wearing a low strapless dress that hugged her curves cleverly; and as she swayed down the aisle, masculine eyes swerved in her direction like flowers turning toward the sun. For that matter, the entrance of the entire company was creating a mass stir in the crowded audience. People were standing up to get a better view of the Americans and their black ties, silks and sparkles. Much of the attention was centered on Earl Bruce Jackson and his fiancée, Helen Thigpen. They were sitting in the Royal Box, where a hammer-and-sickle blotted out the Imperial crest. Jackson, lolling his hand over the edge of the box so that his jewelry, a ring on every finger, could be seen to advantage, was slowly inclining his head right and left, like Queen Victoria.
“I’d be freezing, if I weren’t so embarrassed,” said Miss Ryan, as an usher seated her. “Just look, they think I’m indecent.” One couldn’t deny that there was a touch of criticism in the glances Miss Ryan’s bare shoulders were receiving from surrounding Russian women. Mrs. Gershwin, who was wearing a becoming green cocktail dress, said, “I told Wilva Breen we shouldn’t get all dressed up. I knew we’d look ridiculous. Well, darling, never again. But really, what should we wear?” she asked, looking about as if hunting fashion hints among the audience’s melancholy, shapeless attire. “I didn’t bring anything that wasn’t pretty.”
Sitting in the row ahead, there was one girl whose hair was neither plaited nor a sour bundle of string; she had an urchin-cut, which suited her curious, wild-faun face. She was wearing a black cardigan and a pearl necklace. I pointed her out to Miss Ryan.
“But I know her,” said Miss Ryan excitedly. “She’s from Long Island, we went to Radcliffe together! Priscilla Johnson,” she called, and the girl, squinting near-sighted eyes, turned around. “For God’s sake, Priscilla. What are you doing here?”
“Gosh. Gee whiz, Nancy,” said the girl, rubbing back her tomboy bangs. “What are you doing here?”
Miss Ryan told her, and the girl, who said that she too was staying at the Astoria, explained that she had been granted a lengthy visa to live in the Soviet Union and study Russian law, a subject that had interested her since Radcliffe, where she’d also learned the Russian language.
“But, darling,” said Mrs. Gershwin, “how can anyone study Russian law? When it changes so often?”
“Gosh. Ha ha,” said Miss Johnson. “Well, that’s not the only thing I’m doing. I’m making a kind of Kinsey report. It’s great fun, gosh.”
“I should think,” said Miss Ryan. “The research.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Miss Johnson assured her. “I just keep steering the conversation toward sex; and gee whiz, you’d be surprised what Russians think about it. Gosh, Nancy, the number of men who have mistresses! Or wished they did. I’m sending articles to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. I thought they might be interested.”
“Priscilla’s a sort of genius,” Miss Ryan whispered to me, as chandeliers dimmed and the orchestra conductor raised his baton.
The ballet, in three acts with two intermissions, was called Corsair. The average Soviet ballet is far less concerned with dancing than with stupendous production, and Corsair, though a minor work in their repertory, involves as much change of scenery as the extravagant vaudevilles at Radio City Music Hall or the Folies Bergère, two theaters where Corsair would feel quite at home, except that the choreography and its execution are not up to the standards of the former, and the latter would never tolerate a scene of dancing slave girls swathed to the neck. The theme of Corsair is very similar to The Fountains of Bahchisarai, a poem of Pushkin’s that the Bolshoi ballet has taken and swollen into one of its prize exhibits.
In Fountains, an aristocratic girl is kidnaped by a barbaric Tartar chieftain and hauled off to his harem, where, for three hours of playing time, many vile adventures befall her. In Corsair, this girl’s twin sister undergoes somewhat the same ordeal; here she is the victim of a shipwreck (brilliantly simulated onstage with thunder, lightning, torrents of water crashing against the stricken vessel) who is captured by pirates, after which, for three hours, ditto. Both these tales, and countless like them, reflect a tendency in the contemporary Soviet theater to rely on fantasy and legend; it would seem that the modern author who wishes to roam beyond the propagandist garden finds that the only safe path is the one that leads him into the forest of fairy stories.
But even fantasy needs realistic underpinning, reminders of the recognizable, the human; without them, the power of life is not there, nor is art, a dual absence that occurs too often in the Soviet theater, whose practitioners appear to believe that trick effects and technical wizardry can be made to supplant them. The Ministry of Culture frequently boasts that Russia is the sole country to have produced an art-culture en rapport with its population. The reaction of the audience to Corsair was nothing to disprove the claim; every set, every solo brought chandelier-shaking rounds of applause.
The Americans were enthusiastic too. “Magnificent, a dream,” Mrs. Breen told Mrs. Gershwin during an intermission spent in the Mariinsky’s café-salon. The opinion was seconded by her husband. Yet while praising the ballet, Breen, a dapper man whose facial expressions alternate between boyish beamings and Buster Keaton calm, had a troubled flickering in his eyes, as though perhaps he was comparing the physical elaborateness of Corsair with Porgy and Bess’s three simple changes of scenery; if lavish effects were the criterion, then Soviet audiences were certain to be disappointed with his production.
“Well, I don’t like it,” said Mrs. Gershwin rebelliously, as the Breens moved on to another group. “I can hardly keep awake. And I’m not going to say I like it if I don’t. They [the Breens] would put the words in your mouth if they could.” That, of course, was the difficulty of the Breens’ position. Like parents who have taken their children on a visit to the neighbors, they lived in dreadful anticipation of gaffes, of breakage and misconduct.
Refreshments were on sale in the Mariinsky’s café-salon: beer, liqueurs, raspberry soda, sandwiches, candy and ice cream. Earl Bruce Jackson said he was starving: “But, man, that ice cream costs a dollar a lick. And guess what they want for a little bitty piece of chocolate not big as your toe? Five-fifty.” Ice cream, advertised by the Soviets to be a delicacy of their own contriving, started to become a national passion in the U.S.S.R. in 1939, when American machinery was imported for its making. Most of the customers jammed into the salon stood spooning it out of paper cups while watching the Americans pose for photographs, informal ones, balancing beer bottles on their foreheads, demonstrating the shimmy, doing imitations of Louis Armstrong.
At the second interval I looked for Miss Ryan and found her backed into a corner, haughtily smoking a cigarette in a long holder and trying to pretend she was not the cynosure of puffy girls and leaden-faced women gathered to giggle and comment on her clinging gown and naked shoulders. Leonard Lyons, standing with her, said, “See, now you know how Marilyn Monroe feels. Would she be a wow here! She ought to get a visa. I’m going to tell her.”
“Ohhhh,” moaned Miss Ryan, “if only I could get my coat.”
A man in his late thirties, clean-shaven, dignified, an athletic figure with a scholar’s face, stepped up to Miss Ryan. “I should like to shake your hand,” he said respectfully. “I want you to know how much my friends and I are looking forward to Porgy and Bess. It will be a powerful event for us, I can assure you. Some of us have obtained tickets for the first night. I,” he said, smiling, “am among the fortunate.”
