Sol Hurok: America's dance impresario.

Impresario Sol Hurok, who arguably did more (under the ubiquitous marquee "S. Hurok Presents") to create an American audience for classical ballet than any other single figure in our history, loved to tell stories. His favorite was his own biography.

Since facts never constrained him, and since a dynamic rags-to-riches saga was also good for business, this master of self-aggrandizement provided the edifying story of his extravagant life with countless and increasingly colorful variations over the years. The tale grew taller and taller. A compulsive and shameless booster, he deftly navigated his self-portrait from the spoken word to countless newspaper accounts to two ghostwritten volumes and finally to the silver screen.

There, under his careful supervision as "technical advisor," Hurok's life story attained its glamorous and improbable apogee: the 1953 feature film Tonight We Sing. Besides colorful appearances by Isaac Stern (as composerviolinist Eugene Ysaye) and Ezio Pinza (as the implacable Russian opera star Fyodor Chaliapin), this lavishly apocryphal P.R. fantasy included a vivid performance of The Dying Swan by Hurok's long-time client Tamara Toumanova in the headlining role of Anna Pavlova--an earlier and even more celebrated Hurok artist.

In the early 1920s, barely fifteen years after sailing into New York Harbor as a penniless teenaged immigrant from the dusty Ukrainian town of Pogar, Hurok managed to outsmart his more established competitors. Drawing on his renowned powers of persuasion and communicating with her in their shared language of Russian (or, in his case, a close approximation thereof), he convinced Pavlova that he should present her.

Under his guidance, she made a number of grueling--and highly profitable--cross-country tours that introduced the exotic art of ballet to thousands of people previously unable to distinguish a toe shoe from a breadbox. During her last North Americn tour in the 1924-25 season, Pavlova and her company, often accompanied by the desperately star-struck Hurok (or Hurokchik, as she liked to call him) gave 238 performances in seventy-seven towns in twenty-six weeks.

"Often it meant that we had to get into an express after our performance," she told Dance Magazine in 1928, "snatch what rest we could despite the bumping and the noise, and arrive at our next destination only just in time to get changed, and appear on the stage again."

That Hurok did present Pavlova in the early 1920s is one of the established historical facts in a career that can at times seem more invented than real. That he and Pavlova had an affair, as he liked to imply in later years (after she was conveniently out of the way), seems to belong to the realm of legend, however. So do similar insinuations of romantic involvements with some of the other ballerinas he idolized and presented over the years, including (to name a few) Alexandra Danilova, Tamara Toumanova, Alicia Markova, Vera Zorina, Lucia Chase, Margot Fonteyn, Galina Ulanova, and Maya Plisetskaya.

Although she was eternally grateful to Hurok for making her a megastar, when he brought her to the United States as Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty with the Sadler's Wells Ballet (later the Royal Ballet) in 1949, an amused Fonteyn deflated any rumors of romance in her autobiography. There, she described Hurok unflatteringly as "egg-shaped and bald with a worldly look about him." His weird and heavily accented English only made his attempt to adopt the role of a dashing backstage suitor all the more comical. (As Hurok's longime client and friend Isaac Stern once observed so succinctly, "Hurok knows six languages--and all of them are Yiddish.")

Others who had occasion to deal with Hurok's incurable habit of embellishing the facts (or abandoning them altogether) took a less charitable view than Fonteyn. "I don't think he was capable of the truth," dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille told me not long before her death. "He could say the most incredible things about himself and other people," she fumed. De Mille, who knew Hurok for most of his professional life, also bitterly resented his strong preference for Russian dancers, choreographers, and ballets, believing that it prevented emerging homegrown American talent from developing more rapidly.

De Mille even questioned his powers of discrimination, proclaiming that "Sol Hurok was a peasant and a midget who would never give an opinion on anything until he had been told what to say."

And yet Hurok did have an almost infallible sense of who and what would "project" and sell to an audience. "He didn't have the musical understanding of a scholar or specialist," Russian pianist Alexander Slobodyanik, another Hurok discovery, told me. "But he had a sixth sense for the aura surrounding an artist, the aura of success or the ability to interest an audience. And after all, most people in a concert audience don't have any special education either. Like Hurok, they just have hearts."

Whatever his deficiencies as a reliable source of accurate information about himself and others, no one doubts that Hurok played a major role in introducing Americans of all social classes to serious dance, and particularly classical ballet. A passionate balletomane despite his lack of formal education or dance training, this rough-hewn, shrewd, and infinitely patient impresario made dance an established feature of the American cultural scene and helped shift the center of the dance world from Europe to the United States by the time of his death in 1974.

Among many other awards recognizing his prominence in the field, Hurok in 1958 received the prestigious Capezio Award (previously bestowed upon Lincoln Kirstein, Ted Shawn, and Danilova) for "contributing to public awareness of the progress of dance in the United States."

As de Mille pointed out, Hurok did strongly favor the Russian ballet tradition, which he worshiped as an ideal of beauty, perfection, and noble decorum. If it is true, as New Yorker critic Arlene Croce once pointed out, that "Americans who have a passing acquaintance with ballet think of it as Russian," then Hurok is the main reason why. In this sense, his legacy is still very alive and influential today.

That the Russian ballet tradition, that most aristocratic and elitist of art forms, should have been brought to American audiences by an uneducated and marginally literate Jewish immigrant who had never seen ballet until he arrived in America is surely one of the more peculiar ironies of our cultural history.

Even a partial list of Hurok's accomplishments makes evident the impressive scale of his influence. De Mille's complaints notwithstanding, the dancers he presented on tour all across the country spanned a surprisingly wide range of styles, from classical to modern and even avantgarde: Pavolva, Isadora Duncan (as well as her disciples the Isadorables), German expressionist Mary Wigman, Spanish dancer Vicente Escudero, Indian traditional dancer Uday Shankar, Trudi Schoop, Martha Graham and her company (although Hurok confided to his daughter Ruth that "all they do is run around in dirty feet"), and Katherine Dunham.

But even more important was Hurok's decision to bring the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe to the St. James Theatre in New York in 1933. This was "the first classically trained ballet to present a season here in a generation"--since the Diaghilev Ballets Russes tours organized by Otto Kahn in 1916 and 1917.

Anna Pavlova, a Hurok artist (1921-25), and Hurok perform variants of the

arabesque.

Unlike Diaghilev, however, Hurok made a long-term commitment to the presentation of classical ballet in the wilds of America. Despite small houses and large expenses, Hurok was convinced that if he kept on showing it to them, American audiences would eventually come to embrace this imported art form. Nor did he leave much to chance. A genius at planning and executing advertising and public relations campaigns, Hurok carefully prepared the way in each new city.

"He was tireless," English ballet critic Arnold Haskell, who toured with the company in 1934, remembered later. "Wherever we went newspapers were fed with material, clubs and organizations were given talks and lectures, and the way was prepared not only for that season but for the future."

On the strength of the popular response to the first twenty-week Ballet Russe American tour in 1933-34, Hurok booked the company for 172 performances over five months in ninety-two cities in 1934-35. The next two seasons were even bigger: six months in 112 cities in 1935-36, and eight months in 110 cities in 1936-37. The box-office gross (Hurok claimed) rose from $1 million in 1934-35 to $1.3 million in 1935-36 and $1.5 million in 1936-37. At a running cost of approximately $16,000 per week, this worked out to a healthy profit margin.

So popular did the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo become in the United States that even the august Metropolitan Opera cast aside its suspicions that dance was somehow suspect and frivolous. It also helped that the Met was on the brink of bankruptcy in the wake of the Great Depression, and desperately in need of rental income. On October 9, 1935, Hurok presented the Ballet Russe at the Met, inaugurating a long-term relationship with the theater and instantly making it the premiere venue for high-class ballet and dance attractions.

By 1940, when Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre) was founded, Hurok had become the unquestioned King of Ballet. Comfortably and advantageously positioned as an independent presenter operating within the security of NBC's National Broadcasting and Concert Bureau, Hurok loved to exercise his power by pitting his various rivals in the field against each other. It was, there-fore, inevitable that he would eventually become involved in the trials and tribulations of Ballet Theatre as well.

At first, Hurok's interest in presenting Ballet Theatre was regarded by those who had been running the company with something akin to horror. In 1939, American-born and Princeton-educated Richard Pleasant had taken over what was then called the Mordkin Ballet (after its creator, Russian dancer Mikhail Mordkin) from its first manager--the German emigre actor-turned-publisher Rudolf Orthwine. Pleasant then persuaded American dancer (and heiress) Lucia Chase to provide financial backing for a new company designed to showcase the work of various choreographers--including American ones. They called it Ballet Theatre.

Deeply committed to creating a company featuring American choreographers, music, and dancers, Pleasant found the prospect of entering into a relationship with Hurok profoundly distasteful. To collaborate with a domineering impresario whose preference for "Russian" ballet was all too well known seemed a complete betrayal of the new company's artistic ideals. Pleasant's anti-Hurok sentiments were shared by virtually all the members of Ballet Theatre's artistic staff.

Pleasant's unwillingness to work with Hurok was, in fact, one of the main reasons for his resignation as director and vice president of Ballet Theatre in March 1941. The company's board had come to believe that Hurok, with his vast experience of profitably presenting ballet in America, was the only one who could save the floundering enterprise, but Pleasant refused to go along. To Ballet Theatre's anxious directors, Hurok's unfortunate lack of interest in American dance and dancers was less important than his big mailing list and carefully nurtured clout with "cafe society." To them, his trademark name and proven ability to make money on ballet were just what the doctor ordered.

In mid-June, 1941, Hurok signed a contract with Ballet Theatre. For the next five, highly contentious years he presented the company, clashing regularly with Chase and others over repertoire, casting, and publicity.

What most infuriated the Ballet Theatre administration was Hurok's insistence on advertising the company as the "best in Russian ballet," minimizing the contribution of its numerous American and English choreographers and dancers. Nor did it please Chase and her allies that Hurok was simultaneously presenting other ballet companies (various incarnations of the Ballet Russe troupe) in New York, playing all ends against the middle.

Finally, in 1946, Hurok and Ballet Theatre parted ways, bitterly. In a vehement report, Chase and her partner, Oliver Smith, accused Hurok of "intimidation, smothering tactics, and sabotage"; of interfering with the choice of repertoire; of insisting that his own private clients (like Markova and Anton Dolin) perform, thereby blocking the careers of younger, lesser known dancers; and even of insisting that his own photograph appear first in the souvenir program book.

Ever the diplomat, however, Hurok rarely let his personal feelings interfere with business. ("Never criticize anybody; you may be managing them next year," he once sagely observed.) Some years later, he was able to overcome his rancor toward Chase and again present Ballet Theatre, although with less creative control than he possessed in the early 1940s.

Increasingly, Hurok began promoting and presenting non-American ballet companies, making each of their New York engagements into social and cultural happenings covered on front pages across the nation. His timing was impeccable; he knew just when an audience was ready for something, and how to prepare the way.

The first Sadler's Wells tour in 1949, which included a full-length performance of The Sleeping Beauty, inaugurated a new era in American dance. New York Times critic John Martin later called it "the greatest opening of the popular audience that the ballet had ever known in this country." The hundreds of thousands of Americans who thronged to see Sadler's Wells in 1949 and in subsequent years proved that "grand" ballet could be embraced in the United States.

If one of Hurok's most important and enduring achievements was introducing the American audience to ballet on a large scale, then the other was bringing Soviet Russian attractions to the United States after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Indeed, as an architect and practitioner of Soviet-American cultural exchange, Hurok was unequaled. In their choreographic, cultural, and political significance, his commercially successful presentations at the Met (and on tour) of the Moiseyev Folk Dance Ensemble in 1958, the Bolshoi Ballet in 1959, and the Kirov Ballet in 1961 still rank among the great entertainment coups of the century. They were defining events of the entire post-Stalinist cold war era.

Having worked toward these enormously complex tours since the 1920s, making endless trips to Moscow and weathering countless disappointments and expensive cancellations, Hurok--already past age seventy when they finally came to pass--rightly regarded them as the crowning accomplishment of his career.

Even now, as the vivid, longtime reality of the Soviet-American confrontation fades with each passing day, Hurok's contribution not only to dance but to better understanding between two systems capable of blowing each other to nuclear bits remains unassailable and remarkable. By bringing Soviet artists to the West and American artists to the USSR from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, Hurok added an important measure of continuity and humanity to the fragile superpower relationship. Even at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the moment at which the world came closest to nuclear war, the Bolshoi Ballet was dancing across the United States under the "S. Hurok Presents" banner.

To those opposed to rapprochement with Moscow, however, such as the militant Jewish Defense League, Hurok's presentation of Soviet performers in the United States was a moral outrage. Beginning with picket lines and stinkbombs, the JDL's anti-Hurok campaign climaxed in the terrorist bombing of his offices in early 1972. Hurok was hospitalized for smoke inhalation, and one of his secretaries was killed.

Those who knew Hurok well agree that the incident undermined his seemingly indestructible constitution. He died two years later of a massive heart attack on the way to a meeting with David Rockefeller. They were planning to discuss possible financing for a new attraction he was developing with Rudolf Nureyev--"Nureyev and Friends."

On Friday, March 9, 1974, three days after Hurok's death, more than 2,600 people nearly filled Carnegie Hall for his funeral, the last glamorous performance of the impresario's life. Limousines pulled up to the stage door, unloading opera stars, ballerinas, musicians, conductors, and stage and film personalities eager to pay tribute to the man who had launched and shaped many of their careers.

In the twenty years that have passed since Hurok's death, no one has come forward to replace him. He was "The Last Impresario," the last large-scale individual practitioner of risk capitalism in the arts. The work he did has been largely taken over by nonprofit organizations operating out of huge performing arts complexes. Unlike them, Hurok never had a board of directors. Only occasionally (mostly in the days of the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe) did he seek backers for specific attractions. In the end, he took the financial risk himself and made his own decisions about whom to present and how to promote them.

Hurok was not an aesthete in the class of Serge Diaghilev or George Balanchine. Alexandra Danilova, who knew both Balanchine and Hurok well, told me that "Hurok always thought about selling tickets. Balanchine never did; he thought only about art. They had as little in common as champagne Veuve Cliquot and Coca-Cola."

In the great American democratic tradition which he so adored and celebrated, Hurok was a populist in the arts. He loved his audience and loved giving them what they wanted. One of his most beloved maxims was, "If people don't want to come, nothing will stop them."

"Hurok's taste was sometimes very good and sometimes it was very bad," critic George Dorris wrote soon after the impresario's death, "but ultimately it was unreliable, a mixture of what he liked and what he thought would sell." One might add that Hurok's taste was basically quite conservative. As a manager and presenter, he was all-American in his daring and flair for publicity, but as a connoisseur, he was strictly Old World. With a few exceptions (Duncan, Wigman, Dunham), he had little use for contemporary music or dance, especially in his later years.

For all of that, Hurok made history as one of the most influential figures in the development of classical music and dance in the United States. A peculiarly and profoundly American character, Hurok infected his audiences with his own passion for the performing arts. His 1963 testimony to the congressional committee exploring the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts set forth his personal and professional credo, words that we would be well advised to heed in these days, when the future of the arts seems threatened from all sides.

"I am an American who was not born in this country but sought to be an American out of my love for this land and its great dream of freedom and democracy. I have dedicated my life to the belief that the arts are a major part of any life, and that to be without them is to starve, no matter what other wealth one may achieve."