The Martin Duberman Reader (21 page)

Finally, on July 26, the long-awaited cable from Chick Austin arrived:
GO AHEAD IRONCLAD CONTRACT NECESSARY STARTING OCTOBER 15 SETTLE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN BRING PUBLICITY PHOTOGRAPHS MUSEUM IS WILLING CAN'T WAIT.
Lincoln was elated and immediately wired Balanchine in Paris. While in London, Lincoln received a further telegram from Chick announcing that he'd already raised $3,000 from some dozen people, with the architect Philip Johnson ($500), Jim Soby of MoMA ($500), and Eddie Warburg, scion of the wealthy Warburg clan ($1,000) giving the largest sums. The extraordinary Muriel Draper, already close to Lincoln, was also trying to raise money for the enterprise, though she confessed in a letter to him that she was having trouble envisioning the “poor Russians” in Hartford, “stopping for a Western at a lunch wagon.” Her letter upset Lincoln because he knew she was at least “half true” about the cultural disjunction between the cosmopolitan Russians and the conservative business elite of Hartford.

Balanchine notified Lincoln that his friend Vladimir Dmitriev would be a necessary addition to any plans. When Lincoln met Dmitriev, he was immediately impressed with the older man's solidity and shrewdness. Aged forty, and with considerable experience, Dmitriev could be a formidable ally—or antagonist—depending on whether he felt Balanchine's interests (and his own) were being sufficiently protected. Lincoln could tell, he wrote in his diary, “how afraid they are to be left high and dry.” The commercial failure in London of Les Ballets 1933, meant that Balanchine was feeling particularly tender at the moment. He insisted that he did want, above all, to come to the United States, but as everyone agreed, it would be “a big risk and . . . very difficult to actualize.” Besides, though he claimed a lack of interest in them, Balanchine had recently received several offers to stay in Europe, including an invitation to go to Copenhagen as
maître de ballet
, and to stage for the well-known and wealthy actress-mime Ida Rubinstein, an Igor Stravinsky-Andre Gide work for the Paris Opera.

Dimitriev, Lincoln wrote Chick, felt that the project fell into two distinct parts: a school to train dancers and a ballet company to perform; and at first “everything should be centered around the foundation of a school . . . nothing at all should be mentioned about a company or ballets.” Lincoln urged on Chick the formation of a private corporation, arguing that it, and not the Atheneum trustees, must hold “the whiphand.” He reiterated that “such a chance as now presents itself comes but once in a lifetime,” and lamented that it should be at a time of such general economic distress. “When I think,” he wrote Chick, “of the cash spent on the bushes and shrubbery of the Philadelphia Museum, of the people who collect stamps and matchboxes, I go mad. This will be no collection, but living art—and the chance for perfect creation. . . .”

Ready or not, the day of Balanchine's arrival was suddenly upon them. In the early evening of October 17, 1933, Lincoln, Chick, and Eddie Warburg gathered dockside to await Balanchine's and Dmitriev's debarkation from the
Olympic.
They went immediately to the duplex apartment he'd rented for them on the thirty-fourth floor of the Barbizon-Plaza at Fifty-Eighth and Sixth; Lincoln had decided to splurge on the steep twelve-dollars-a-night rental to help create a favorable first impression.

After dinner, Lincoln had the first of what would be many “heavy” talks with Dmitriev about plans for the school, Dmitriev telling him firmly that the importation of Pierre Vladimiroff, the prominent ballet teacher, was “a necessity.” Dmitriev also made clear that the European offers Balanchine had had “would have paid him a lot had he accepted them.” Lincoln boldly replied that he “knew Balanchine's services were not to be named in mere figures, but if it was money he wanted he wouldn't be here.” Then, it was off, by car, to Hartford. On the way they talked politics, with Balanchine and Dmitriev expressing their grave fear about “the coming of communism” to the United States, and how no Russian “has any civil rights anywhere.”

After seeing the museum's new theater, the Russians declared that it was “a big disappointment; there is no height; they couldn't
use any scenery in it . . . the floor is too hard for dancing, the whole thing too small,” that no more than twenty-four people at most could be put on that stage. Dmitriev said it might do well enough for rehearsals, “small ballets,” or school performances, but no more than that. Dmitriev came quickly to the point: Hartford was impossible. It was too far away from New York, the facilities were unsuitable, the cost of living too high, and Chick's dilettantism (he'd made the mistake of remarking at one point that he himself would paint whatever scenery was needed) boded ill for a serious venture.

Was Hartford really a needed preliminary? Why waste time in a provincial backwater, and allied with a dilettante like Chick? Perhaps they could open the school straight off in New York under the auspices of MoMA—especially since Eddie Warburg had just given the museum a $100,000 check. Dmitriev felt that “Chick was wholly unimportant,” and that they “never could work with him.” Lincoln expressed his feeling that they had to have some sort of a sponsor in order to convince the public that this was not just another dancing school. The more everyone talked, the more Hartford faded into the background.

As they passed through Harlem on their way back to New York, Balanchine asked him if he'd “ever screwed a negress.” No, Lincoln said, “but he'd always wanted to”—which would have come as surprising news to any number of Lincoln's closest friends. “
Alors
,” Balanchine responded, “we will go together.” Obviously Lincoln hadn't yet brought up the subject of his sexual preference, nor had Balanchine apparently surmised it for himself or heard about it from the many others who knew. Either that or Balanchine was playing cat and mouse. Dmitriev later confided to Lincoln that he “really didn't understand” Balanchine, that Balanchine “had no sentiment, liked casual fucking . . . no heart”; he was of “another generation.”

As for MoMA, the director Alfred Barr read the prospectus Lincoln drew up “with great sympathy,” and made several useful suggestions for improving it still further. But he told Lincoln frankly that he thought the whole idea was “utopian,” that “no Americans could submit to the necessary discipline” for creating an
American ballet; in addition, Barr emphasized his belief that “European sources” were responsible for all American art—that there was “no possibility of calling anything primarily American.”

Nonetheless, Lincoln notified Chick that the Russians had turned down Hartford as “unsuitable.” Chick, in turn, “exploded” with resentment, and Eddie Warburg felt that “a definitive meeting” with him, without the Russians present, was necessary. Lincoln agreed and the two headed up to Hartford. The meeting
was
definitive—but hardly pleasant. Chick had already decided to save face by telling the local press that the venture had unexpectedly turned commercial and that the Atheneum could not possibly lend its good name to that sort of enterprise. He intended to announce publicly that he was voiding the contract with Balanchine and Dmitriev, apparently not realizing (or caring) that the contract was already void since neither man had as yet signed it.

When face-to-face with Chick in Hartford, Lincoln could feel his “just resentment.” He told Chick how sorry he was that things had turned out the way they had, and made “several polite attempts to engage” him in conversation. They failed. Chick told him “bitterly” that he'd “hypnotized Eddie [Warburg] and betrayed him.” Within twenty minutes the meeting was over. Lincoln felt that Eddie himself lacked any profound interest in ballet and it was questionable how long he would stick. Then there were all those people, from Archie MacLeish to Alfred Barr, who believed the project was misguided from its inception. And perhaps worst of all, despite a printed notice soliciting applications, no students were banging down the doors seeking instruction. That is, with one exception. A “boy” named Erick Hawkins, whom Lincoln remembered seeing in Harvard Yard, came by to say he'd already studied with the modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg and now wished to learn ballet from Balanchine. This was the same Erick Hawkins, of course, who would subsequently shift his allegiance to Martha Graham, become her lover, and play an aggressive role in her company before going on to found his own.

Then, just as Lincoln's gloom began to thicken, he and Dmitriev
finally found “a dream place” for the school at 637 Madison Avenue, a space “better than anything [that] could be imagined.” That same day they signed the papers for incorporation that they'd long been working on, with parity for all four participants: Lincoln, Eddie, Balanchine, and Dmitriev.

But these encouraging developments were paralleled by a sudden, sharp decline in Balanchine's health. After viewing his X-rays, Eddie's physician, Dr. H. Rawle Geyelin, came over to the hotel and said, in front of Balanchine (who was now running a high fever), that they had shown “an active tuberculosis spot” and he would have to go to Presbyterian Hospital for at least two weeks. Then, out of Balanchine's hearing, he notified Lincoln and Dmitriev that there was “another darker spot on his lung which might be a really serious thing. If so, he would have to go away for six months perhaps.” In any case, “he could not live much longer than ten years, if that long.” In response to Lincoln's direct question, Geyelin advised them not to sign any lease for the school—which, of course, they'd already done.

Though the number of students did begin to climb, by the end of 1933 only some seventeen of them (by Lincoln's estimate) were paying fees, which in total were projected to bring in about $10,000 during 1934. In the sketchy budget the four partners had drawn up, expenses came to roughly $22,000, with rent ($94 a week) and salaries the major items; Pierre Vladimiroff topped the list at $150 a week, and Balanchine and Dmitriev each got $100. (All these figures, in today's terms, would be approximately nine times higher.) That left a considerable projected deficit, even without factoring in any of the much-desired and discussed plans for performance and expansion.

Eddie's pledge of $12,000 a year and Lincoln's of $8,000 did, theoretically, cover the deficit. But Eddie would one day declare himself “satisfied with the way everything was going,” and the next privately tell Lincoln that he was “consumed with apprehensiveness about the future finances of the ballet school,” that he was wary of committing himself to what seemed like a bottomless pit, and that
he doubted if Balanchine “understands American taste sufficiently to give them what they want.”

Lincoln constantly had to play nursemaid to Eddie, reassuring him about everything from the school to his hemorrhoids to the endless crises attendant on his endless psychoanalysis with the brilliant but unscrupulous Russian émigré Gregory Zilboorg (George Gershwin was another of his patients). Lincoln thought Eddie essentially “soulless” and without any real commitment to anything. But out of both self-interest and friendship (at his best Eddie could be a charming companion), Lincoln played out his role of concerned confidant—half the time wanting to strangle him. One night, when Eddie had a bad cold, Lincoln stayed overnight in order to administer steady doses of tea and lemon. On another, Eddie asked Lincoln to talk him to sleep, and as he did (so Lincoln recorded in his diary), Eddie “became amorous and over a long sleepy period gradually worked “himself down and me up”—but Lincoln, “moist,” stopped him. That seems to have been the only time Eddie attempted sexual contact, though Lincoln occasionally recorded other instances of Eddie's homosexual escapades.

Though his father Louis, a prominent partner in Filene's department store, was wealthy, Lincoln had no significant financial resources of his own, or none he could touch anyway, in order to meet his pledge to the school of eight thousand a year; in truth, as he wrote his father, “I have no idea how much money I own myself, that is, in my own name.” Louis had grown accustomed to paying his son's bills and providing him with a monthly allowance to cover incidental expenses, but he constantly hectored him about his financial irresponsibility—even though it was Louis who'd set up the framework that perpetuated it: he'd kept Lincoln in the dark about his own assets, even after he'd turned twenty-one, and then, from his own pocket, had indulged his son's constant overdrafts. As a result Lincoln had become incorrigibly inept at keeping reliable financial records and had long since learned, when pressed, to turn to his parents to bail him out. . . .

Lincoln had seen himself as something of a co-creator with
Balanchine, and for months he'd been dreaming up ideas for new ballets based on American themes—
Flying Cloud
(about the clipper ships),
Custer's Last Stand, Pocahontas
, and (one that did interest Balanchine) a ballet based on the Rover Boys books. Still, Lincoln fully understood Balanchine's “righteous fear of dilettantism” and had no doubts about who the chief creative force was. But Dmitriev and Balanchine's combined remarks, sometimes cruelly overstated, made him increasingly feel like some sort of incompetent office boy, someone incapable of carrying out even the minor tasks assigned him. It rendered Lincoln upset and resentful. He tried to harden himself against feeling bitter toward the Russians, though (as he put it in his diary) “their iron lack of emollient words” did nothing to help his hurt pride. Lincoln had a habit, when feeling emotionally wounded, of believing that his current mood would be permanent (“I will never meet Balanchine or Dmitriev on friendly terms again,” and so on), but he vowed to break the habit this time around, to work himself through his resentment. Yet the wound went deep, and he had trouble adjusting to what their harsh words had revealed about the diminished creative esteem in which they held him and the peripheral role they saw him playing in future plans.