Portraits and Observations (22 page)

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 Unfortunately, the old seats have been replaced by wooden ones, rather like those in a school auditorium, and their harsh, natural color makes too raw a contrast against the subtle grays and silvers of the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.” Miss Ryan said she was pleased to hear that, and remarked on the excellence of his English, which he explained by saying that he’d spent several of the war years in Washington as part of a Russian Purchasing Commission. “But can you really understand me? It’s been so long since I’ve had the opportunity of speaking—it makes my heart pound.” One sensed, in the admiring intensity of his attitude toward Miss Ryan, that the pounding of his heart was not altogether due to the English language. His smile slackened as a fluttering light signaled the end of intermission; and urgently, as though spurred by an impulse he couldn’t resist, he said, “Please let me see you again. I’d like to show you Leningrad.” The invitation was directed to Miss Ryan, but by polite necessity included Lyons and myself. Miss Ryan told him to call us at the Astoria, and he jotted our names on a program, then wrote out his own and handed it to Miss Ryan.

“Stefan Orlov,” Miss Ryan read, as we returned for the last act. “He’s quite sweet.”

“Yeah,” said Lyons. “But he won’t call. He’ll think it over and get cold feet.”

Arrangements had been made for the company to go backstage and meet the ballet artists. The final scene of
Corsair
is partly played on the deck of a ship hung with rope nets, and at the end of the performance, when the Americans came behind the curtain, there was such a congestion onstage that half the dancers had to stand on the ship’s deck or climb the rope nets to get a glimpse of the Western colleagues whose entrance they cheered and applauded a full four minutes before enough quiet could be summoned for Breen to make a speech, which began, “It is
we
who should applaud
you
. Your thrilling artistry has produced an evening none of us will ever forget, and we only hope on Monday evening we can a little repay you
for the pleasure you have given us.” While Breen finished his speech, and the director of the Mariinsky made another, the little ballerinas, sweat seeping through their make-up, crept close to the American performers, and their painted eyes rolled, their lips ohd-ahd as they gazed at the visitors’ shoes, shyly, then boldly, touched the dresses, rubbed bits of silk and taffeta between their fingers. One of them reached out and put her arm around a member of the company named Georgia Burke. “Why, precious-child,” said Miss Burke, a warm, happy-natured woman, “hug me all you like. It’s good to know somebody loves you.”

It was nearer one than midnight when the company started the bus ride back to the Astoria. The buses, rolling refrigerators, had the same seating plan as those that operate on Madison Avenue. I sat on the long back seat between Miss Ryan and the interpreter, Miss Lydia. Street lamps, yellowing the snows of empty streets, flashed at the windows like wintry fireflies, and Miss Ryan, looking out, said, “The palaces are so beautiful in the lamplight.”

“Yes,” said Miss Lydia, stifling a sleepy yawn, “the private homes are beautiful.” Then, as though suddenly awake, she added, “The
former
private homes.”

The next morning I went shopping on the Nevsky Prospekt with Lyons and Mrs. Gershwin. Leningrad’s principal street, the Nevsky is not a third the length of Fifth Avenue, but it is twice as wide; to get across its skidding aisles of traffic is a perilous chore and a rather pointless one, for the stores on either side of the street are all government-owned emporiums selling, in their different classifications, the same stock at the same prices. Bargain hunters, buyers on the lookout for “something a little different” would find shopping on the Nevsky a discouraging experience.

Lyons had set out with starry hopes of picking up “a nice piece
of Fabergé” to take home to his wife. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks sold to French and English collectors almost all the jeweled eggs and boxes that Fabergé had created for the royal amusement; the few known examples of his work left in Russia are on display in Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum and in the Armory at the Kremlin. Today, on the international market, the beginning price of a small Fabergé box is over two thousand dollars. None of this information impressed Lyons, who felt he was going to locate his Fabergé quickly and quite cheaply at a Commission Shop. Which was right thinking as far as it went, for if such an item existed, then a Commission Shop, a state-controlled pawn brokerage where a comrade can turn the last of his hidden heirlooms into spot cash, is probably the only place you would discover it. We visited several, drafty establishments with the going-gone sadness of auction halls.

In one, the largest, a glass cabinet ran the length of the room, and the spectacle its contents presented, the conglomeration of spookily diverse objects, seemed a dadaist experiment. Rows of secondhand shoes, so worn the spectral shape of the previous owner’s foot could be pathetically discerned, were neatly set forth under glass like treasures, which indeed they were at $50 to $175 a pair; a selection of headgear flanked the shoes, flapper cloches and velvet cartwheels; after the hats, the surrealistic variety and value of the cabinet’s contents spiraled: a shattered fan ($30), a soiled powder puff ($7), an amber comb with broken teeth ($45), tarnished mesh handbags ($100 and up), a silver umbrella handle ($340), an unexceptional ivory chess set with five pawns missing ($1,450), a celluloid elephant ($25), a pink plaster doll cracked and flaked as though it had been left in the rain ($25). All these articles, and yards more, were placed and numbered with a care that suggested an exhibition of mementos, the possessions of some dead beloved figure, and it was this, the reverence of the display, that made it poignant. Lyons
said, “Who do you s’pose
buys
this stuff?” But he had only to look around him to see that there were those who, in lieu of anything else, found the moth-nibbled fan and the silver umbrella handle still fetching, still desirable, quite worth their quoted costs. According to the Russian calendar, Christmas was two weeks off, but Russians prefer to give gifts at New Year’s and the Commission Shops, like all the stores along the Nevsky, were packed with spenders. Though Lyons failed to flush any Fabergé, one pawnbroker came up with a unique nineteenth-century snuffbox, an immense topaz, hollowed and split in half. But the price, $80,000, was more than the customer had in mind.