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Passport to Paris
PASSPORT TO PARIS
by
Vernon Duke
BOSTON Little, Brown and Company TORONTO
COPYRIGHT 1955, BY VERNON DUKE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK IN EXCESS OF FIVE
HUNDRED WORDS MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT
PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 54-83!!
FIRST EDITION
The quotations from the article "Gershwin, Schillinger, and Dukelsky: Some Remi
niscences" are reprinted by permission from The Musical Quarterly for January, 1947.
Copyright, 1947, by G. Schirmer, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada
by Little, Brown & Company (Canada) Limited
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To the memory of my mother
Contents
I I Emerge 3
II To Music 18
III Kiev Conservatory 33
IV Came the Revolution 42
V Odessa 58
VI Turkish Delight 67
VII The Bad Old Days 81
VIII Passport to Paris 106
IX Fame Did Not Delay 133
X Bright Young People 155
XI After the Ballet Is Over 180
XII Back to the New Country 219
XIII Settling Down 250
XIV The Good Years 281
XV In My Thirties in the Thirties 3 1 8
XVI The Fiery Forties Part One 368
XVII The Fiery Forties Part Two 395
XVIII Paris Interlude 430
XIX Californian Coda 458
Index 485
Illustrations
All illustrations will be found between pages 246 and 247.
Anna Alexeevna Dukelsky
Vladimir Alexandrovitch Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) in 1921,
1924 and 1928
Serge Prokofiev
Sergei Diaghilev
Paul Kochanski and Serge Prokofiev
George Gershwin
Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke
Vernon Duke and Admiral R. Waesche, USCG
George Balanchine, Vernon Duke and friend
Alexis, Mona and Natasha Dukelski
Serge and Natalya Koussevitzky
Jack Robbins, Ogden Nash, Vernon Duke and friends
Lehman Engel, Vernon Duke, Mimi Cabanne and prospective
backers
Vernon Duke in 1936 and 1945
Passport to Paris
CHAPTER I
I EMERGE
A CCORDING .to Who's Who, I have spent my "entire career"
jtV(come, come, I'm still spending it) writing two kinds of music:
the serious or unrewarding kind as Vladimir Dukelsky and the un-
serious but lucrative variety as Vernon Duke. Almost every inter
view I've ever had has brought forth some tired references to "the
Jekyll and Hyde of Music," "the Two-Headed Janus of Music," etc.
There have been quite a few cases of composers who successfully
managed to write in both the high- and low-brow genre, but I am
entirely unique in one respect. Gershwin always remained Gershwin
whether he wrote Porgy or "I Got Rhythm"; Weill was easily recog
nizable as Weill whether he tackled Mahagonny or One Touch of
Venus; and even Lennie Bernstein is his ingratiating self whether he
tears into Jeremiah or On the Town; but Dukelsky in no way resem
bles Duke.
There isn't a note of jazz in my serious music, and there are no
symphonic overtones to my musical-comedy output. I don't think
that's anything to be proud of, and as a matter of fact, the wide
gulf between the two styles has proven entirely too wide for most
people's comfort, particularly for critics and fellow composers. It has
often been said of George Gershwin that his Broadway enemies
thought he belonged in Carnegie Hall, and his high-brow detractors
kept repeating in print that he should never have left Broadway.
This same attempt at pigeonholing has been applied even more se
verely in my case.
My versatility, far from being a boon, has in reality been infuri
ating to most musical people. Just why that is I have no way of
knowing, but the critical boys seem to think there is something mon
strous and unnatural about a composer writing two different kinds
4 PASSPORT TO PARIS
of music under two different names. It annoys them not to be able
to say that I go slumming when writing jazz, and it annoys them still
more not to be able to classify me as an ambitious peasant, gazing at
the musical Olympus behind a Lindy's herring.
It is a matter of record that I have never been a critics' darling.
In 1927, the era of "bright young people" and Oxford bags (trou
sers, not frumpy women), I, the slave of fashion, was never without
a pair. Accordingly, when the late Serge Koussevitsky asked me to
play a short and not very good piece of mine with his orchestra in
Paris, I eagerly accepted, and crossed the Channel armed with the
orchestra parts and my prize pair of striped trousers neatly tucked
away in the week-end bag. The concert was to be on Saturday after
noon, and a morning jacket plus striped trousers were de rigueur.
Following two rehearsals came the concert. At the appointed time
I made my appearance, mincing to the piano in the center of the
stage as gracefully as I could. My entrance was greeted by an audi
ble gasp and some spotty applause; the French never really took to
Oxford bags and I presented a strange spectacle, clad as I was in a
tight-fitting morning coat (I was very slim in those days) terminating
in balloon-shaped trousers which, although cut by Anderson & Shep-
pard, would have been an excellent fit for the then-popular Fatty
Arbuckle.
The piano part of my piece (it was called, somewhat preten
tiously, a "sonata for piano and orchestra") was not spectacular and
was very easy to play, as I, no virtuoso, took good care not to over
burden myself with technical difficulties. We did finish together, Dr.
Koussevitsky, the orchestra, and I The applause was even spottier
than at my entrance, and a few days later (the French critics never
review anything the next day, bless 'em) the leading music critic
wrote: "Mr. Dukelsky's music was barely visible behind his sumptu
ous trousers."
In the same year Poulenc, Auric, Rieti, and myself played the
four pianos in the London premiere of Stravinsky's Les Noces by the
Diaghilev ballet at His Majesty's Theatre. Ernest Newman lost no
opportunity to tell his Sunday Times readers that; "There was a
quarter of a composer at each piano."
At about the same time I began to function as Vemon Duke (a
name invented by the late George Gershwin, whose* quarters I then
shared in London) and wrote my first musical comedy, for Daly's
/ EMERGE 5
Theatre; this opus was entitled Yvonne, and promptly retitled "Ivan
the Terrible" by Noel Coward.
In 1935 the above-cited Ernest Newman, on reviewing a ballet of
mine given by the de Basil Ballets Russes (it was called Jardin Public
and had a scenario by Andre Gide) confessed that my music irri
tated him so profoundly that he couldn't make himself look at the
stage because of the horrible sounds emanating from the pit. To this
day it isn't clear to me just where Mr. Newman was looking, but I
know darned well that he was listening and, after all, what more can
a composer ask?
I was often overly fond of stinging letters, ill-timed righteous ges
tures, and experienced an exaggerated delight at putting a man in
his place. These things do not make for popularity, and since quarrels
are everyday fare in musical and theatrical circles, I have had more
than my share of them. I never hesitated about speaking my mind
when it would have been far wiser to remain blandly noncommittal.
The not-so-green pastures of Broadway, 57th Street, and Hollywood
are peopled with professional villains of all hues who go about their
villainies with an air of such innocence that to remind them of their
true nature is a rude, and to them undeserved, shock. These iniqui
tous souls, instead of becoming penitent, denounce their victims as
trouble makers if they dare yell when kicked. It is a golden rule on
Broadway never to sue a producer and never to argue with a critic
I've done both.
Prior to embarking on this job, I read a great many autobiogra
phies, particularly those of my contemporaries. I have discovered
that autobiographies can roughly be divided into two groups, those
with emphasis on facts and those preoccupied with literary style. Sir
Osbert Sitwell is a good sample of the second type, and Tallulah
Bankhead and Agnes de Mille are typical of the first school. That
doesn't mean that the two women don't go in for much editorializing
and Marie Corellizing, although their lives seem hectic enough with
out such additional veneer. At least there is a minimum in their
books of the "rich, beautiful prose" which makes Sir Osbert's pretty
tough going.
As for me, I thought a great deal about a tongue-in-the-cheek ap
proach, the poker-face approach, the Dali or sensational-at-all-costs
approach, the Freud or turn-over-a-new-fig-leaf approach, and finally
6 PASSPORT TO PARIS
decided to stick to the facts and the hell with it. Just to record
the facts is quite a job without indulging in the luxury of stylistic
orgies.
I envy people pregnant with fruity memories of their childhood.
Tolstoi did a wonderful job on his early youth, and it would seem
that the older he got the further back he went and the more he re
membered. A Russian composer now in his eighties writes about his
childhood as if he were still in the first one. Facts, sights, smells fol
low one another in precise chronological order, whereas I have diffi
culty remembering what happened last year unless I go through files
and files of letters and income-tax returns. Fortunately the really im
portant incidents never desert my memory, and more fortunately
still, I have recently found a touching and artless biographical essay
written about my early years by my mother. This copybook, along
with her personal belongings, was forwarded to me from New York,
and for these recollections, as for everything she did for me, I must
bless her. I will try to reconstruct my early days with the help of
this little document written in July, 1930, in Arrochar, Staten Island.
There is something indicative of my subsequent dual role in music
in the very manner in which I was born. Four months before this
event took place, Mother went to see a famous St. Petersburg spe
cialist significantly named Professor Phenomenov. While crossing the
river Neva on a small Finnish ferryboat, she had a frightening ex
perience: she unwittingly sat down under the siren, which suddenly
sounded with such force that Mother instinctively seized her left ear
and twisted it. On recovering from the shock, her first thought was a
fleeting superstition that the left ear of her unborn child would be
marked. This fear was substantiated when, on examining me at my
first appearance, Mother perceived the irregularity of my left ear;
the lobe was cleft. Possibly my left ear has never heard what the
right ear heareth, and there you have the whole mystery of Duke
and Dukelsky in an earshell. The question is, which of the two ears
is attuned to jazz?
I emerged into being, irregular ears and all, on October 10, 1903,
in an obscure railroad station called Parafianovo, in the government
of Minsk. Mother gave birth to me in the railroad station because
she happened to be traveling by train and I imagine the station facili
ties were superior to those of a railway carriage. There is some con-
/ EMERGE 1
siderable irregularity, too, not only in the fact that I was born by
accident as it were, but also because my citizenship papers and my
passport would indicate that I was born in the historic town of
Pskoff. The reason for this discrepancy lies in the fact that an Eng
lish immigration officer back in 1925, on filling in the required
data concerning my birth and nationality, began writing out Parafi-
anovo and, not finding enough room in the allotted space, stopped at
"Paraf." This was subsequently interpreted by various officials as
Pskoff, and thereby that ancient city was elected as my birthplace.
Another factor that might have contributed to the warring influ
ences in my musical nature lies in my mongrel-like antecedents. Al
though I am technically speaking a native Russian, there is exactly
one quarter of Russian blood in my veins. That was supplied by my
mother's father, Alexis Kopylov, a self-made man of, I believe, peas
ant origin. He made his money in sugar, as he was general manager
for the famous Count Bobrinsky Refineries. Kopylov married a pretty
and rather social young girl who was half Viennese and half Spanish
and whose name was von Koestel. On my father's side I am half
Lithuanian and half Georgian (Caucasian); my grandfather, Vladi
mir Apollonovitch Dukelsky, was a highly placed official in Tiflis,
where he occupied the post of general administrator under the Grand
Duke Michael, the lord lieutenant of Caucasus. Grandfather married
the beauteous Georgian Princess Daria Toumanov, nicknamed Da-
riko and noted for her lavish parties, eccentricity of dress, and some
what Catherine-the-Great-like self-assertiveness. Both grandmothers
were extremely musical and played the piano quite well; the maternal
one, according to the family legend, was Anton Rubinstein's favorite
pupil and appeared in public playing her teacher's D-minor concerto
with a provincial orchestra. Princess Toumanov was an amateur of
conservative tendencies and I remember distinctly her taking me to a
symphony concert in Pavlovsk (just before the First World War) and
telling me to put my fingers in my ears while an "abomination by
that scoundrel Debussy" was being performed by the orchestra. The
conductor on that occasion was the very able Aslanov, who later set
tled in New York and made a reputation for himself as a vocal
teacher.
Both grandfathers were more or less unmusical and would have
probably been happier with Duke than with Dukelsky. Grandfather
8 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Kopylov, having settled in Kiev, became partial to Ukrainian folk
songs, but I suspect it was because of the strapping girls who inter
preted them rather than for the music.
Father and Mother were addicted to music in the customary man
ner of Russian dilettantes in comfortable circumstances. Father, a
handsome man of medium height, with brilliant black hair and a
resplendent mustache, was a civil engineer specializing in railroad
building and occasionally given to singing gypsy songs in a pleasant
baritone. Mother studied the piano diligently while an inmate of the
Institute for Maidens of Gentle Birth (the equivalent of an Ameri
can finishing school) in Kiev, and her two great passions, which I
never shared, were Beethoven and Wagner.
According to Mother's testimony, I was something of a sickeningly
romantic child. Not only was my head adorned with curling brown
locks, but my face perpetually wore a serious, not to say profound,
expression, and of usual childish pranks I would have nothing. I
cried only on the rarest occasions and then almost inaudibly, which
perturbed the whole household, brought up in the belief that healthy
children are also healthy vocalists. At the age of eleven months I ap
parently had quite a vocabulary of Russian and French and soon
got used to being exhibited to the politely enthusiastic friends of the
family. A few months later (Ah, here it comes now!) I developed a
habit of getting under Mother's feet when she played the fine Bech-
stein concert grand, which was a wedding gift my grandmother
brought from Vienna. I was even more fascinated by a huge Gramo
phone with an imposing metal horn which was made to play an
eclectic assortment of musical bits and pieces ranging from Italian
operas sung by Battistini, Anselmi, Caruso, and the Russian gallery
gods Sobinov and Smirnov (tenors both), to gypsy songs. A ritual
was established of lulling me to sleep each night with florid Italian
airs,
My brother Alexis was bora a year and a half after my advent,
and we soon moved to Nikolaiev in the government of Kherson,
where my father was engaged in laying out the Kherson-Nikolaiev
Railroad. We remained in this colorful southern town for nearly
three years. In Nikolaiev, I manifested considerable signs of preco-
ciousness. When taught the usual childish games by my parents, I
reneged on the rules and insisted on inventing my own. I detested
mechanical toys, anything machinelike in fact, but had a passion for
/ EMERGE 9
stuffed animals, especially dogs and elephants. This penchant grew
into a grandiose game (in which my brother shared enthusiastically)
of an imaginary dog kingdom where certain dogs were assigned the
roles of composers, novelists, and painters and sculptors. The crown
prince of this kingdom was, for no particular reason, a small tin frog
beloved by me because of its bright-green color. On learning to read
and write between the ages of two and three, I began to cover page
after page of fat copybooks with accounts of life in the dog kingdom
(the name I coined for the kingdom, Sobatchania, meaning Dog-
land, stuck with my family for many years), hieroglyphics signifi
cant only to myself, and eventually dots and dashes that I imagined
to be musical notes. All this was natural enough, but when I
switched to writing reams of completely meaningless poetry, which I
recited eloquently to the uncomprehending butler and cook, Mother
and Grandmother called a halt and, greatly alarmed, took me to the
local psychiatrist. On viewing some particularly fruity samples of my
handiwork, that worthy proceeded to ask me searching questions
which I answered not only satisfactorily, but so nonchalantly as to
disconcert the man. He let me off easy, but recommended some
more suitable sports and recreations (I was four at the time) rather
than the pedantic pursuits in which I took such unseasonable pleas
ure.
My brother, one of the quietest and gentlest of men, was an insuf
ferable brat in his early life. He didn't have much hair on his head
until he was about five, but he certainly could scream that head off
and did so with uncommon relish. None of my precocious nonsense
for him; physical exploits and bodily harm inflicted on whoever
came within his reach were his special delights. Of linguistic prowess
he showed but little, and to make matters worse he seemed to be
afflicted with various impediments of speech which I strongly sus
pected were imaginary- His attitude towards me was one of awe
mingled with contempt and acute and ever-present jealousy. Fully
realizing that I was a self-appointed genius, demanding and receiv
ing rapturous attention at all times, he never failed to kick or bite
me when least expected to do so. His jealousy, provoked by my cul
tural attainments, manifested itself in grudging but slavish imitation
of my creative activities; for instance, he was furious at the speed
with which I filled my diary with the daily trivia of our lives and in
sisted on being given a similar diary, although he could hardly write
10 PASSPORT TO PARIS
at all. He would then proceed to scribble at great speed and would
ask me every few minutes how many pages I had completed. On
hearing that I had completed my fourth, Alex would say that he had
just finished his fifth, and if I registered some skepticism, would re
ward me with an extra-vicious kick accompanied by copious tears of
rage.
Our collection of stuffed animals was soon augmented by the live
addition of a large, sad-looking poodle, Caro by name. This ordinar
ily gentle dog developed a dislike for the assorted citizens of Sobat-
chartia and took large chunks out of them when we were not pres
ent. By way of retaliation, I, abetted by my grudgingly admiring
brother, fed the poor dog all sorts of unsavory concoctions liberally
seasoned with pepper and mustard which I cooked up on a toy stove
given me by my grandmother. Caro would obediently swallow
the multicolored messes and then have fits of sneezing and cough
ing which ended in an unholy whine. This usually resulted in the
stove's being locked up for a day or two. In spite of these poisonous
experiments, Caro lived to be eighteen and died in Kiev at the
height of the Bolshevik revolution. Outside of the psychiatrist, Sobat-
chania, Caro's banquets, and the epic diaries, my only other recol
lection of Nikolaiev is an outing with Father to a country fair where
he regaled himself with pickled watermelon, which I insisted on tast
ing and found so vile that I maliciously passed a piece of it to my
brother, who swallowed it heroically, delighted at the thought of
sharing his elders' pleasures.
The next event recorded by Mother was our removal to the
small city of Kungur in the Ural Mountains. Father, who reveled in
this nomadic existence, was now heavily involved in the building
of the Perm-Catherineburg Railroad. I still remember the open
sleigh in which we traveled for eighty miles in the frosty Ural air
from Perm to Kungur. The magnificent Ural forests, the smells of
fresh snow and crisp apples and the tart flavor of the birch juice from
the young trees were a far cry from the semitropical, indolent at
mosphere of Nikolaiev, but we all thrived on the change. According
to Mother's notes, it was during the three years spent in Kungur that
she grew from a simple young matron to a poised hostess and an
avid student of letters and arts. She began entertaining her husband's
business associates and soon presided over a group interested in phi
losophy and two-piano playing. Mother was very fond of teaching her
/ EMERGE 11
sons a large repertoire of Russian nursery rhymes set to music, and
while I had the better ear, Alexis had the louder voice. However,
since his r's, Fs, and most sibilants were defective, he made a good
deal of noise but very little sense, which gave me another opportunity
to shine which I seldom failed to seize. Beginning with our sojourn
in the Ural Mountains, we were never without governesses of as
sorted nationalities; one of these was a gay Czech, another a dog-
faced German spinster, and a third, supposedly a Frenchwoman,
turned out to be Swiss-Italian. Soon Alexis and I learned to express
ourselves in a Franco-Russo-German patois with a generous admix
ture of the dog language understandable only to us children.
My first essay in composition somewhat resembled the meaning
less poems that so frightened the womenfolk in our family, in that
the notes looked like notes but were undecipherable to a musician.
This essay, which was prophetic in a sense, was a ballet in fourteen
acts, one page to each act, entitled Cassiopea.
Father, on completing his Ural job, was characteristically trans
ferred many miles away, to Crimea. This time we, accompanied by
the Czech governess, traveled by Volga steamboat all the way down
to Nijny-Novgorod and thence by Pullman to Sebastopol.
It was at the time of our removal to Crimea that I was first able to
see Mother as she really was, not as the legendary Good Fairy of
one's chaotic beginnings. Mother was something of a Russian version
of the Gibson Girl, although she was dark and Spanish-looking. She
had a splendid carriage, a small waist and the traditionally ample
hips of a good-looking female of the pre-War Number I vintage. In
reality, Mother was not beautiful, but rather uncommonly handsome,
as her features were irregular, her nose a bit too long, and her mouth
too full, but she had huge luminous brown eyes with the longest-
imaginable eyelashes and a truly Gibsonian head of hair. What
made her immediately attractive, and this attraction she retained
to the end, was the trusting, childlike appeal of her entire mien. She
had a touching curiosity about every human being she came in con
tact with, and an insatiable quest for friendship in which she was in
variably disappointed.
On arriving in Sebastopol, we boarded another steamer and
finally reached our destination, the small and none-too-fashionable
resort named Evpatoria. Apparently there was some miscalculation
on Mother's part, as here it was July and the season was to end
12 PASSPORT TO PARIS
August 15th. Russian vacationists were very strict about observing
seasonal deadlines, and we arrived in the middle of the general exo
dus. The female servant who went with the villa turned out to be a
chronic alcoholic and her drunken railleries alternated with the dis
mal howling of the numerous dogs abandoned by the departed va
cationists. A short winter interlude in Kiev followed, remarkable only
for my first taste of the theater; the first two spectacles I witnessed
were Maeterlinck's Blue Bird, and Massenet's Cinderella. At the
beginning of 1910, Father obtained the much-coveted job of con
struction engineer for the proposed south-shore Crimean Railroad.
This was a private enterprise undertaken by the multimillionaire T.
K. Ushkov, the brother of N. K. Koussevitsky, the second wife of the
conductor who played so significant a role in my musical develop
ment. Ushkov's country estate, Foros, was the most-photographed
showplace of Crimea.
That spring Mother and we two boys migrated to the Alexandrov-
Dollnik "Pensione" situated next door to the celebrated Vorontzov
Park in Alupka. Father lived in the mountains in a tent surrounded
by engineers and students and joined us on holidays only.
The Crimean peninsula was the Russian Riviera, actually much
smaller than its prototype, but considerably more lush as to its
flora and fauna. The Black Sea is bluer than the bluest Mediterra
nean; the fish more varied and far tastier; the flowers larger and
more fragrant; and above all, the fruit not to be compared with any
obtainable elsewhere. My most vivid recollection of Crimea is the
taste of the local grapes and the astonishing variety in their shape,
size and flavor. I particularly remember three: the huge yellow-
green Chaoosh, the subtly perfumed Isabella, and the common but
infinitely juicy Shashla. The everyday drink of all tourists and resi
dents of Crimea was a fresh grape juice squeezed before your eyes
from a pound of Shashla; this drink, amber-green in color, in no way
resembled commercial grape juice as we know it in the U.S.A.
Crimea was famous as a health resort for tuberculosis patients, and
fresh grape juice was their diet staple. Chekhov supposedly thrived
on it.
After a heavenly summer and autumn in Alupka, we were to
spend the nonexistent winter in Yalta. Mother rented a dilapidated
villa belonging to one Usatov, Chaliapin's first vocal teacher and an
obscure operatic composer. The little fat man, something of a "card"
/ EMERGE 13
by reputation, obligingly removed himself and his wife to a small an
nex nearby. They were a delightful couple. Usatov had given up a
promising career as an opera singer for his wife, a sudden TB vic
tim. They were both small, rotund and ever-smiling, just like the cele
brated Old World landowners in Gogol's tale. Outside of having
coached Chaliapin (who, in common with most overnight phenom
ena, proved forgetful of Usatov's valuable contribution to his suc
cess), the old man's new claims to fame, which I'm afraid never came
off, were a new Chaliapin called Matveiev and a five-act opera en
titled Love Is Closer Than the Mountains. I immediately told Usatov
that I went him one better by writing a fourteen-act ballet, which
announcement was greeted by thunderous laughter and a gift of a
dozen apples, Usatov's favorite food.
Shortly afterwards, Father was sent to Europe by Ushkov for four
months and Mother, with time on her hands, began giving me piano
lessons. I was no wunderkind, but on Father's return, I knew enough
to play easy piano duets with Mother or Frdulein.
My other two recollections of Crimea were the spectacularly hand
some Tartar provodniks (guides) whose thriving trade was to teach
well-heeled gentlewomen the art of horseback riding. Mother's sister-
in-law, Aunt Genia, and numerous other young divorcees donned
Godey-like riding habits with tall hats and starched jabots and disap
peared into the mountains accompanied by these Tartar Valentinos
with their girlishly narrow waistlines and flashing white teeth. The
other recollection was a charming young lady tutor Mother found
for me with whom I was secretly in love. My tender feelings for this
deserving young woman caused me to prepare my lessons with un
common zest, which was rewarded by the glowing accounts the
girl gave to Mother. Alexis, true to form, was proceeding at a
much slower pace, but he now grew into quite a sentimentalist;
Mother records an episode when Alex, on hearing the first pages
of Uncle Tom's Cabin, burst into tears and refused to hear more of
the book.
In the spring of 1911, my piano studies were resumed in earnest,
but Alexis now displayed a good deal of determination to have les
sons also in spite of Mother's great doubts as to his readiness. He
astonished us all, especially myself, with his ability and zeal and
pretty soon was making such progress as to put me to shame. His
formerly hairless dome was now resplendent with silken blond locks
14 PASSPORT TO PARIS
and he was definitely beginning to come into his own, to my con
sternation. While in Crimea we met the three sons of General Mdi-
vani good-looking lads owning a fleet of expensive toy battleships,
but no princely titles at that time.
In March of 1912, Father, whose excessive mountain-climbing
exploits began to take their toll, had a serious heart attack. He was
not quite thirty-nine. Mother, greatly alarmed, took us children back
to Kiev to the Kopylov town house, and on doctor's advice, started on
a journey abroad with Father. He was ordered to Bad Nauheim,
a German health resort, but apparently the doctor's diagnosis
was faulty and, following a short sojourn in Switzerland, my
parents returned to Kiev for further consultations with the family
physician.
On their return, we were taken for a short summer holiday to the
unusual beach resort of Mejigorye on the banks of the Dnieper. It
was unusual because it was run by the nuns of the Mejigorye Con
vent for married gentlewomen and their offspring. The husbands
were not allowed on the beach for the reason that all bathing was
done in the nude, but quite unorthodox leniency was exercised in
sofar as the children were concerned; they were allowed to swim in
the nude with their mothers regardless of their sex.
My only experience with sex up to then had been in my grand
mother's quarters on the family estate when I was about six years
old. Grandmother, a strict Catholic, allowed no men on the premises,
and consequently the young peasant wenches whom she employed
were somewhat starved for male company. One of them, a nineteen-
year-old Polish amazon named Marylia took a great fancy to me,
and I dimly recall certain liberties she took with me, to which I sub
mitted rather sheepishly and for which I was rewarded by succulent
sweets stolen from Grandmother's larder. This episode, redolent of
the writings of Restif de la Bretonne, left a mark on me, as I became
peculiarly addicted to Renoir-like women in later life.
I also recall that some years after this vaguely erotic interlude I
became fascinated with the Scriptures and was engulfed by a wave
of religiousness; on recapturing the odd sensations provoked by
Marylia, I was driven to utter despair and started thinking seri
ously of suicide. This was at about the same time that we went to
Mejigorye, and the spectacle of abundant feminine flesh on all sides
made me cringe with terror and remorse. Some of my companions
/ EMERGE 15
exhibited a premature interest in their surroundings, and I remember
a little pug-nosed boy called Petya being chased off the beach by an
enraged good sister completely naked except for a huge black um
brella with which she succeeded in getting the culprit off the sacred
territory.
There was a small island in the middle of the Dnieper which
was the favorite swimming haunt of men vacationers whose wives
were entitled to the privileges of the nuns' beach; these men spent
most of the day gazing rapturously at their friends' wives through
powerful binoculars, which pastime the nuns were unable to sup
press.
While luxuriating on the nuns' beach, I again demonstrated my
capacity for bluff by wading to a sand bank located in apparently
deep water and pretending to swim, inviting Mother and her friends
to admire my prowess.
This all too short vacation was brought to an abrupt end by a
series of family tragedies, beginning with the death of my maternal
grandmother on September 8th, in Kiev, where we were summoned
to her funeral.
With no chance to recover from her grief, Mother had further
cause for increasing worry about Father's condition. He now walked
with considerable difficulty, and in early December was ordered to
his bed, which he was not to leave again. The whole household was
busy preparing a true Russian Christmas, a ritual quite unlike that
in any other place, and we children were reveling in the protracted
bounties of the holiday, when on December 28th, Father had his
second heart attack, which proved fatal. Fraulein, Alexis, and my
self sneaked into the library next door to Father's bedroom and
heard with horror his gasps of agony. At one point, he cried out with
indescribable pathos: "I don't want to die!" and shortly afterwards
was no more.
We ran to Mother, begging her to tell us what was happening,
and Mother's strange look of spent resignation told us the truth.
We both burst into uncontrollable tears, whereas Mother remained
inexplicably silent. The next few days brought all the paraphernalia
of the Greek Orthodox conception of human frailty and untimely
demise: swarms of hastily arriving relatives and yellow-faced nuns
with ikonlike burning eyes, who mumbled inaudible but strangely
terrifying prayers, their monotonous chants at the bier, the singing of
16 PASSPORT TO PARIS
the large choir brought back speedily after performing a similar
chore for Grandmother, the frightening smell of incense mingled
with that of unnaturally beautiful flowers and the damp leather of the
servants' freshly varnished boots, the black crepe over the mirrors,
and the hordes of the usual curious onlookers all of these many
emblems of death contributing to an untimely awakening after the
innocuous dreams of our pastoral childhood. All at once, Sobatcha-
nia, bulging diaries, and piano duets became like so much gilt on
the gingerbread of our beginnings.
On July 16th of the following year, Mother's younger brother,
Uncle Vassily, a six-foot-three Guard's -officer in Her Majesty's cele
brated Uhlan Regiment, put a bullet through his head. He was
barely twenty-three at the time, but in true Russian fashion had led
a sumptuously wild existence. I recall vividly a breakfast at Grand
father's table, with Uncle Vassily, arriving after a sleepless
night spent in Kiev dives with gypsies of easy virtue, demanding
champagne in the midst of our oatmeal. Grandfather, a choleric
and uncompromising old man whose secretary Akivisson usually sat
at his left at table, thought nothing of upbraiding Vassily with
forceful invective; Grandmother had alone been able to remon
strate with Grandfather and stand up for her son, but now that she
was dead, Vassily had no supporters except us children, who loved
him for the sweets he brought us, but had no say in the matter.
These breakfast scenes usually ended in Vassily's demanding one
hundred rubles, which would start a violent row terminating in
Grandfather's abrupt exit. He was followed by Akivisson, shaking
his head ominously, and an enormous Saint Bernard named Satan,
whose affections were divided between Grandfather and Vassily, but
who knew in canny dog fashion where his next meal was coming
from. Uncle Vassily's pranks were of such a nature that he was about
to be demoted to the rank of sergeant. This dishonor, plus his un
requited love for a celebrated French operetta star and his chronic
debts, apparently precipitated his untimely end. A thing I recall with
some delight about Uncle Vassily was his insistence on dragging
poor Satan, carefully washed and beribboned, to his rendezvous
with the heartless Frenchwoman. Vassily apparently believed that no
female could resist the huge, perpetually drooling dog, but Alexis
and I had a sneaking suspicion that the Saint Bernard contributed
but little to Uncle Vassily's amatory chances; the dog was more adept
I EMERGE 17
at staging one-sided battles with Caro, who sometimes attached him
self to Satan's ear and was nonchalantly dragged the length of the
court.
Thus, with Vassily's suicide, our family was thrice visited by
death in the course of ten months. September came, and Mother,
in spite of Grandfather's entreaties, refused to remain in his house,
where so much grief had been endured by her. She was quite com
fortably off and set up housekeeping in an attractive flat at Bolshaya-
Podvalnaya Number 14, where we remained until .the time of our
exodus from Russia in the winter of 1919.
CHAPTER II
TO MUSIC
ONE OF the leading figures in Stepanov's popular novel Port
Arthur, published in Moscow in 1945, is my paternal uncle
George Dukelsky. On the first page of the novel he is described as :
"Lieutenant Dukelsky, Admiral Stark's flag officer, a tall, handsome
young man ..." He was later made aide-de-camp to Admiral
Makarov on board the battleship Petropavlovsk, the flagship of the
Russian Pacific Fleet. This ship, under fire from the entire Japanese
fleet, went out of Port Arthur to save sailors from the sinking Russian
destroyer Strashniy on April 13, 1904.
The Petropavlovsk struck a nest of Japanese mines in the Yellow
Sea, exploded and sank within one and a half minutes. Among the
men lost were two admirals, Makarov and Molas, the famous Russian
painter Vereschagin, twenty-seven officer^ and six hundred and fifty-
two sailors. Only seven officers and fifty-two sailors were saved
among them Grand Duke Cyril and Lieutenant Dukelsky, mortally
wounded, died the same day in Port Arthur Naval Hospital.
Uncle George, or Gigisha (his Caucasian nickname), was a great
ladies' man, and even the Soviet novelist, while not without prole
tarian indignation at the young officer's foppishness and aristocratic
pretensions, gives his charm and courage their just due. Gigisha mar
ried a lovely Nagasaki girl some few months before his tragic end
and the result of this temporary marriage was a handsome Russo-
Japanese boy who was later to send me postcards to New York ad
dressing me as the "flower of his soul." It was probably at the insti
gation of Uncle George that I was enrolled in the St. Petersburg
Naval Academy at birth, to the subsequent delight of Grandmother
Dariko who, enchanted with my early flair for languages, saw me as
a combination naval officer and diplomat.
TO MUSIC 19
Thus, shortly after our removal to the Bolshaya-Podvalnaya flat,
Mother received a letter from Dariko outlining her plans for me
and requesting that steps be taken to insure the proper sort of pre
paratory education, preferably in St, Petersburg.
So far, the only formal education I could boast of had been morn
ing sessions at a glorified kindergarten of progressive tendencies pre
sided over by a famous lady educator, Madame Jekulina; the Froebel
and Pestalozzi systems then fashionable in Russia were employed
in this institution, which was pleasantly co-educational and gave me
a first taste of feminine company my own age. Madame Jekulina's
school was paradise compared to what I feared might be in the offing
educationally speaking.
Although fascinated by the sea, particularly the Black Sea, I was
frightened by the harrowing tales of the midshipmen's rigorous
training, which included diving from the top of the mast into the
raging waves. I was too proud to admit my fear, but suddenly de
veloped a devouring passion for composing music, writing longer and
obscurer poems, and sketching whoever and whatever happened to
be around, such as Alex, Caro, and our ugly cook, Pauline. These
activities were indulged in to impress Mother with my artistry; I was
taking no chances and practiced all the arts at once. Of the three,
Mother preferred music, and after hearing a long "sonata" I had
completed, saw fit to wire Grandmother that I was a composer of
great promise and my naval career was not to be.
A long wrangle ensued, with the maternal relatives upholding
Mother, and Father's brother's sticking by Grandmother Dariko. I
kept my mouth diplomatically shut and opened it only to tell my
uncles and aunts that I didn't see in what way Beethoven's sonatas
were superior to mine. So astonishing a statement made it imperative
for Mother to take me to a composition teacher, Lubomirsky, and
seek his impartial verdict.
Lubomirsky was somewhat distressed on discovering that I did not
boast perfect pitch, in those days regarded as a "must" for future
composers. With my customary aplomb I told him that my pitch was
indeed perfect; but it proved to be a hit-and-miss, one of my ears
probably at variance with the other. Not giving Lubomirsky a chance
to recover from his disappointment, I plunged into my latest sonata,
which was so long and loud that the kind little fellow was taken
aback and had no other way out but to accept me as a pupil. His
20 PASSPORT TO PARIS
summing up was rather on the guarded side; what he actually said
was that he saw no reason why I should not become a composer, but
this was optimistically interpreted by Mother and myself as a bona
fide passport to greatness. Suitable telegrams were dispatched to all
the members of the family and the "jumping off the mast" terror
subsided somewhat.
The first intelligible piece of music I wrote was not the over-long
sonata, but a little waltz composed at age seven. Mother testifies
in her notes that I jumped out of bed in the morning and ran to
the piano, seized by the kind of inspiration people love to read about;
ah, those inspirations! Soon enough writing music becomes like sign
ing checks, just as methodical and just as disseminated. My studies
with Lubomirsky were to start in the autumn of 1914; that summer
Mother discarded her mourning and felt the need of a change of
scene to which she had become accustomed by her migrating hus
band and off we went to untrodden paths, this time to the so-called
Riga Strand, which consists of a cluster of small watering places on
the Baltic Sea. What a change from the warmer and darker waters
of Crimea. The swimming was actually better as there were none of
the rocks or pebbles characteristic of Crimean beaches; the sand was
fine and lemon-yellow, the water steel-blue, and the surrounding
smells were tarter and cleaner, but not as mellow as the subtropical
scents of the balmy Black Sea.
We soon found a small pink villa in Bilderlingshof and joined
the waxen-blond Latvians and Germans summering there. Alexis and
I were elected to an amateur fire brigade of Russo-German boys,
cannily managed by two German lads in their early teens. We were
given fancy uniforms and made to pay large dues to purchase an
almost full-scale fire engine, which the German boys craftily appro
priated at the end of the season. Alexis was a much better fireman
than I. We were both elected "spritzers," which gave us an op
portunity to squirt large quantities of salt water on giggling little
German girls in white dresses.
In the evenings, Mother played accompaniments for a young Pol
ish violinist called Michalski and I became enamored of Kreisler's
"Liebestraum" and "Liebesfreud."
One of Mother's closest friends, the stately Mrs. Dityatin, and her
three children occupied a little house in Bilderlingshof. The husband,
TO MUSIC 21
Vitaly Fedorovitch, a polished Anglophile type, was a friend of Georg
Schneevoigt, the Finnish-born conductor whose influence was then
great in the Scandinavian countries. Dityatin offered to show a
would-be orchestral piece of mine to the eminent Schneevoigt, then
vacationing in Marienhof a few miles away. Although I was im
mensely flattered, I somehow was smart enough to decline.
On June 16th, war with Germany was declared; our German fire
men suddenly disappeared, carrying off the splendid fibre engine, and
we Russians began a precipitate exodus to Riga. The hotels were
packed to the roof, the prices rose alarmingly, but we let Mother
worry about that and happily roamed the streets of the beautiful
medieval town. One afternoon I wandered into a sixteenth-century
square on the outskirts of Riga and heard a group of sad-looking
Latvian children led by a girl not more than fifteen in a monotonous
chant which, while it seemed to be a nursery rhyme, filled my heart
with extraordinary sadness. I believe that they sang in Latvian; the
odd music with incomprehensible words scared me off and I ran home
in inexplicable terror.
There was more violin music in Riga, and quantities of delicious
smoked fish (particularly one called seeg, the like of which I have
never tasted since), but such luxuries soon came to a premature end
as we finally booked train space home to Kiev.
Everybody was being mobilized all around us, but with Uncle
Vassily's suicide, we had no immediate relatives of conscription age.
Having graduated from Madame Jekulina's establishment with some
distinction, I was now to experience the thrill of becoming a full-
fledged gymnasiast, or high-school pupil. Russian high schools were
much stricter than their American counterparts. They were not co
educational, and the boys were made to wear uniforms at all times;
the government high-school students were decked out in black
with silver buttons and in caps with silver insignia. Alexis and I
were sent to a private high school run by a much-esteemed peda
gogue named Naumenko, and our specially designed uniforms were
of powder blue with golden buttons and cap insignia. This provoked
great hostility on the part of the "plain" or government boys, who
called us blue-breasted sissies, Mamma's boys, and offered to fight us
at the drop of a hat. In school I was good in history, literature, lan
guages, and geography, and rotten in all mathematical subjects. I
22 PASSPORT TO PARIS
was frail and reasonably aesthetic-looking, which went well with my
proclivities for writing poetry and music, drawing caricatures of my
classmates, and disdaining athletics.
By an uncanny coincidence, there was an attractive boy a year
older than myself whose name, exactly like mine, was Vladimir Du-
kelsky. To make things more complicated, he too wrote poetry, but,
unlike me, showed promise as a soccer player. One day we two got
mixed up by the athletics coach, and I was ordered on the field to join
the team. Not being able to run fast enough for a forward, I was
entrusted with the responsible position of goal keeper. The coach
didn't have much faith in me, but I somehow miraculously blocked
a few assaults during practice periods and was allowed to play on the
second squad in an interschool match. The score on this momentous
occasion was four to nothing in favor of the opposing team, all four
goals being scored due to my fatal fumbling; following the game I
was severely beaten by my classmates and spent the next three
days in bed.
While at Naumenko's I learned to play the domra, a round instru
ment of the mandolin family whose metallic strings are manipulated
by a plectrum but whose sound is more nasal and twangy than that of
a mandolin. The domras, of assorted sizes, were employed to take
the "melody lead" in the balalaika bands always popular in Russia.
Every school boasted one and so did Naumenko's. I was only a fair
performer on the primitive Russian lute, but I did make some efforts
at arranging, with indifferent results.
Meanwhile I was progressing satisfactorily with my piano lessons
under the guidance of one Josephine Leskevitch, a pupil of Dombrov-
sky, who was later to become my teacher at the Conservatory. Lubo
mirsky was now instructing me in elementary theory and first har
mony; he, too, was a minor case of musical schizophrenia, having
written a textbook on theory and a "Danse Orientate" in great favor
to this day with cooch dancers, oriental travelogues, and Caucasian
knife throwers. These were Lubomirsky's only known accomplish
ments, and I began seriously to question his adequacy as a teacher of
composition on so slender a record.
This was the era when the "Russian Decadence" school in poetry
and painting was becoming all the rage. The first futurists, like the
Burliuk brothers, Kruchenikh, Khlebnikov, and others of that ilk,
true to the teachings of Marinetti, the Italian founder of the school,
TO MUSIC 23
donned eccentric garb, wore carrots and radishes in their buttonholes,
painted their faces blue or green and created disturbances in theaters
and other gathering places, to attract publicity. The effete, coiffeurSke
ego-futurist Igor Severyanin made women swoon with his would-be
chic poems, in which he glorified imported motor cars, Paris dress
makers, pineapples filled with champagne, and other attributes of
High Life. Severyanin had his low-brow apostle in the person of
Alexander Vertinsky (at this writing still flourishing in Moscow),
who got himself up as Pierrot and mumbled Frenchified inanities to
strangely gypsylike tunes a weird but eminently successful combi
nation. Russian women were, and often still are, captivated by these
two home-grown catchpenny Baudelaires, and their influence was
enormous everywhere. Vertinsky was responsible for the cult of the
exotic-at-all-costs; one of his best-known songs was called "Purple
Negro," another, "Your Fingers Smell of Incense," and there were
tattooed sailors and super-virile cowboys galore in his chansons.
Poor Mother didn't escape this unhealthy fad; in common with
her women friends she began smoking out of long amber cigarette
holders, wore Mexican earrings, and studied the tango. This new
word meant not only the latest dance craze, but also was the tag of
flaming orange color. Alexis and I were badgered into learning the
steps of the Argentine pas de deux and in a week or so could put on
a fair exhibition, with Alexis the unwilling danseuse.
On reading Severyanin and Co. avidly, I perceived to my great
exhilaration that their poems made even less sense than my own
early ones. I began to consider myself a futurist, too, and even ap
peared in high school with a painted face on one occasion, to be
ordered out of class immediately. My Beethoven-like "sonatas" were
now discarded and gave way to more experimental essays which con
sternated Lubomirsky, who complained to Mother about my non
conformist tendencies,
I, at first a model student, was now beginning to sow my oats
in school contributed ego-futurist poems to the school magazine,
played my "revolutionary" piano pieces at children's parties, and found
less and less time to do my homework, particularly math and physics.
The math teacher was an old friend of Mother's and let me off easy
until he was shown a cruel caricature I had drawn of him; then he
cracked the whip and failed me. Mother was greatly alarmed by this
unpleasant change in my scholastic standing and began to cite Alex
24 PASSPORT TO PARIS
as an example of a not-too-imaginative but diligent student. This was
the last straw, and instead of reforming I was determined to get
out of the gymnasium, as I deemed it unworthy of my highly special
ized talents.
Mother had a box at the opera and we boys soon began to antici
pate every operatic outing. Although I loved opera, symphony con
certs fascinated me even more, especially when conducted by the
placid but thorough Reinhold Gliere, then just made director of the
newly created Kiev Conservatory. Gliere, born in Kiev, was of Bel
gian origin, which could not be guessed from his conventionally
Russian, Glazunov-like music. He was forty at the time, dressed well,
and quite captivated Mother, who began to nurture the ambition of
annexing him as a teacher for me. On one occasion, she took us to
hear his interminable Ilia Murometz Symphony, a favorite warhorse
of Stokowski's. Another time, we went to hear the piano concerto
of a young St. Petersburg Gold Medalist, Serge Prokofiev by name.
This last experience proved something of a turning point for me, but
not in the obvious sense.
After a conventional overture, and sympathetic applause, Glifere
bowed and shortly reappeared with a tall young man of extraordi
nary appearance. He had white-blond hair, a small head with a large
mouth and very thick lips (unlike the purple African of Vertinsky's
imagination Prokofiev was then nicknamed the "White Negro") and
very long, awkwardly dangling arms, terminating in a bruiser's pow
erful hands. Prokofiev wore dazzlingly elegant tails, a beautifully cut
waistcoat, and flashing black pumps. The strangely gauche manner
in which he traversed the stage was no indication of what was to
follow; after sitting down and adjusting the piano stool with an
abrupt jerk, Prokofiev let go with an unrelenting muscular exhibition
of a completely novel kind of piano playing. The prevailing fashion
in those days was the languorous hothouse manner of a Scriabin or
the shimmering post-Debussy impressionist tinklings of harp and
celesta. This young man's music and his performance of it reminded
me of the onrushing forwards in my one unfortunate soccer experi
ence; there was no sentiment, no sweetness there nothing but un
relenting energy and athletic joy of living. No wonder the first four
notes of the concerto, oft-repeated, were later nicknamed "po chere~
poo" ("hit on the head"), which was Prokofiev's exact intention. I
will not say that I was fascinated by the piece, Far from it,
TO MUSIC 25
Mother, Aunt Genia, Alexis and I were all horrified, all said that the
so-called concerto was a disgrace and that there wasn't a tune in it.
(How often was I to hear those words applied to me in my later
career.) To our consternation, there was frenetic applause and no less
than six flower horseshoes were handed to Prokofiev, who was now
greeted with astonished laughter. He bowed clumsily, dropping his
head almost to his knees and recovering with a yank.
"That's not music, Dima (my family nickname)/' said my mother
sternly. "Don't you start writing like that. Remember, my boy, mel
ody first and last."
I grunted my approval. Little did Mother know the warring in
fluences already rife in my breast.
My scholastic labors were interrupted by two bucolic episodes; the
first, a short sojourn in Grusskoye in the government of Kursk.
This was an estate belonging to one Kourdiumov, a rich epicurean
totally paralyzed by the gay sins of his Hussar youth. He was still
young, but had to wear yellow-black eyeglasses, which were supposed
to strengthen his unseeing eyes; his face retained traces of the good
looks typical of his regiment and had the faded color of a vellum
binding. His limp and useless body was propelled in a wheel chair
by an old servant with white side whiskers. Only his hands were
eloquent and his palate active; Kourdiumov lived for food and was
a true gourmet in the old Russian not the finer French tradition.
Every morning at breakfast, Kourdiumov summoned his chef and
his two apprentices and held a long conversation, often interspersed
with hectic arguments, on the subject of the day's menus. Varieties
of game supplied by full-time hunters employed by our host, baskets
of imported fruit, and cobweb-covered bottles from his vast cellars
were exhibited, compared and critically sampled before the day's gas
tronomic program was decided upon. Menus in French with the fam
ily crest were then hectographed and deposited in all the guest
rooms, including the children's.
Noontime marked the arrival of the hungry guests, consisting of
neighboring landowners, a few generals, retired and active, and a
horde of "Popes" as the members of the Greek Orthodox clergy were
familiarly called. These Falstaffian clerics sported luxuriant beards,
wore the somber black garments of their calling, and had a truly
Byzantine capacity for eating and drinking. Long before mealtime
they assembled in Kourdiumov's bedroom, where large carafes of
26 PASSPORT TO PARIS
herb-distilled vodka were consumed amid wall-shaking laughter and
distinctly pagan jollity.
Alexis and I, accompanied by the Lvov children, a brother and
sister of twelve and fourteen respectively, were ushered into the
enormous dining hall chaperoned by our two governesses. Mother
and Mrs. Lvov arrived in fresh mousseline dresses fragrant with
Coty's L'Origan, the perfume then in vogue. Both women were some
what apprehensive of extra poundage from the daily eating festivals,
but the food was so good that they soon joined the noisily masticating
throng.
The daily luncheon began with four tables of hors d'oeuvres
wheeled in by as many white-gloved footmen; the first table covered
with smoked and pickled fish of the rarest species, another with five
or six kinds of caviar of all hues, the third with meats and fowl in
aspic, and the fourth with hot sausages, veal patties, lobster and crab
concoctions, and other savory dishes. On certain days there was a fifth
table on which reposed two or three hundred heavenly pink-boiled
raki, or large fresh-water prawns cooked with dill. As a grand finale
to the entrances of these groaning boards, a perambulating bar of
rainbow-hued vodkas appeared, the vodkas varying from the fresh
green of the zubrovka to the clear pink of the Ryabinovka, distilled
from a berry not unlike the U.S. cranberry. The idea was to wash
down the hors d'oeuvres with these potent liquids, and there was quite
a trick to use the right vodka with the right appetizer, although after
a while it didn't particularly matter.
At table, the first course was usually the beloved blini, or light
fluffy pancakes, which were, as brother Alexis was fond of saying,
easy to eat. First the bllni were smeared with hot melted butter, then
with a thick layer of sour cream, and finally garnished with caviar,
although some connoisseurs disdained that delicacy in favor of lightly
smoked salmon couleur de popo d'enfant (color of a baby's behind).
The blini, of which we children ate approximately a dozen and the
grownups not less than three or four dozen, were washed down by
bouillon, and then the real meal started.
The first course was some magnificent fish, preferably out of sea
son, like cold sturgeon with sauce verte; then game traditionally
cooked in sour cream with cranberry sauce; then the main meat
course, either a boiled suckling pig accompanied by creamed horse
radish or a baby lamb served whole with kasha (buckwheat groats);
TO MUSIC 27
then a fancy salad with wonderful Russian mayonnaise, the secret of
which is irretrievably lost; then the pride of the chef a huge plom-
bieres, an elaborate ice-cream mold with glace fruits adorning it and
Kourdiumov's initials for decoration. For those who were still hungry,
a table decked with every imaginable cheese was trotted out, and
finally a vast assortment of liqueurs, the particular delight of the
clergy. Enormous vintage cigars and specially blended coffee termi
nated the feast.
The children and their governesses, as well as the ladies, were
now allowed to leave the table while the men remained to regale one
another with bawdy stories. Half an hour later, the assorted com
pany adjourned to their respective bedrooms for a lengthy two or
three hour siesta. An hour after waking, the vodkas reappeared, this
time in the drawing room, where one of the ladies was called upon
to tackle the piano, and then dinner was announced, always twice as
elaborate as the luncheon. It was Kourdiumov's custom to kiss all the
ladies, including young girls, the younger the better, after each meal,
a ritual not at all to their taste.
We children never slept in the afternoon, but were provided with
facilities of croquet, volleyball, and to my alarm horseback
riding. The ringleader of the sports was a tall and prematurely
worldly wise gymnasiast, Serge Golinevitch by name, who was to
graduate that year and was therefore much admired and envied by all
us small fry. The belle of the younger group, a dark-haired fourteen-
year-old named Nina, looked rather like Judy Garland at her debut.
This girl, although secretly adored by Alexis and myself, was an
nexed by the enterprising Serge, who impressed her with his big-town
airs and easy chatter. The three younger boys, her brother, Alexis,
and I, saw the young couple mount the fine Cossack horses provided
by Kourdiumov's grooms and disappear in a shower of golden dust
They were usually absent for not less than two hours, and there was
much leering and whispering on the part of my companions as to
the exact nature of these expeditions. I pretended to be above such
unworthy speculations, but was in reality horribly envious of the
suave city slicker.
I demanded from Mother that I be given riding lessons, to which
she reluctantly acceded; I never liked or understood horses, and
don't to this day, but was determined to make a nuisance of myself
and to become a master equestrian. It took me quite some time to
28 PASSPORT TO PARIS
learn to post for the trot, my behind was increasingly sore, but I
persevered. In a few days I bribed a groom with Mother's ruble and
suddenly appeared on a small brown horse, bent on accompanying
Serge and Nina on their outing. Nina, already a true representative of
her sex, was of course gratified by my zeal, guessing the great effort
it cost me, but Serge was not at all pleased and arrogantly galloped
off with Nina, leaving me behind.
On a certain Sunday, hordes of juvenile visitors made their ap
pearance, and each was provided with a nice tame horse; my favor
ite, Arabchik (Little Arab), was already engaged, and the only
horse left available was a black brute of a stallion named Barbarian.
This horse was reluctantly assigned to me, as I was determined to
join the merry cavalcade, especially since Nina's horse had just been
saddled. I gave Barbarian a dirty look and was hoisted into the saddle
by ominously scowling grooms. Somehow I managed to sit up
straight, and bestowed a triumphant smile on Nina, who smiled back
admiringly, when Barbarian emitted a bloodcurdling whinny and
lunged forward entirely on his own. In a furious gallop, my feet
deserting the stirrups, and my would-be aesthetic hands clutching
wildly at the brute's mane, we traveled at such a diabolical pace
that the entire cavalcade was soon left behind, and I began to scream
my heart out unheard by anyone. There was no hope except to hold
on to the black mane for dear life, but the beast had a horrible
habit of shaking his head, which made this safety device rather pre
carious. My terror increased when Barbarian swerved from the bridle
path and headed for the main house, a marble-columned eighteenth-
century edifice. Directly facing the porte-cochere was a formal gar
den, Kourdiumov's delight, planted with the rarest flowers, and this
was apparently Barbarian's destination. In a flash, I saw Mother at
an open window knitting, and Barbarian threw me at her feet in the
prize-tulip bed with a disgusted snort. I wasn't hurt, but with my
already pronounced flair for the theatrical, played dead. A whole
Greek chorus of terrified women, led by Mother, surrounded me,
suggesting fancy remedies for me and a bullet for Barbarian, pest
of all, Nina appeared, flatteringly solicitous, and temporarily deserting
the disgruntled Serge for me, the hero of the moment. Needless to say,
I played the scene to the hilt; yet my happiness was but short-lived.
One day, we children heard a violent harangue emanating from
Kourdiumov's bedroom, and a few minutes later the wily Serge
TO MUSIC 29
emerged white and trembling, refusing us any explanation. Stifled
cries in Nina's room in answer to her mother's shrill scolding were
equally incomprehensible and disturbing. Alexis did some snooping
around and came up with the astounding intelligence that Serge and
Nina had been discovered in a most compromising position in the
summerhouse by one of the governesses. Serge was sent home that
same evening and Nina was confined to her room and put on a
strict and no doubt antiaphrodisiac diet. I, of course, knew the exact
location of Nina's window and spent the next morning playing
detective under it. Nina, her splendid sunburned body meagerly hid
den by a white nightgown, finally appeared at the window, opened it
and stared unseeing ahead. I will never forget the girl's look of
adolescent despair mingled with wanton longing and helpless rage at
the absence of her lover; a large tear ran down her cheek and I
could no longer be silent.
"Nina," I gulped, "what is the matter? Is there anything I can do?"
The look she gave me was witheringly contemptuous. "You? Why,
you wouldn't know what to do, even if there was anything to be
done. You're nothing but a child!''
With these words she closed the window and disappeared. There
is nothing sadder than telling a boy just past ten that he is only a
child, except, on passing forty, to hear "old man" for the first time.
The second episode involved my only trip to Moscow.
Moscow, something of a Paris to Russians (while there was a
London-like austerity and aloofness about St. Petersburg), was the
goal of every provincial Russian. The sing-song of the native Musco
vite with his broad a's and o's was considered irresistible, although not
quite as comme il faut as the crisper, less emotional St. Petersburg
accent. Mother, still disconsolate over the loss of her husband, began
to seek solace in the Moscow Art Theatre season then holding forth
at the Solovtzov Theatre in Kiev; she much admired the versatile
Kusnetzov, who tackled Gogol's Revizor, Charley's Aunt and Hamlet
with equal ease. After the performance there were gay suppers with
the Moskvichi (Muscovites) at the Praha, the lights of which we
could see from our fifth-floor flat.
A gay Moscow couple, the Savostianovs, were ringleaders in these
nocturnal outings of Mother's, whereas Alex and I were told to
display our best table and play manners to the Savostianov children,
Nata and Youra. This new friendship resulted in the Savostianovs*
30 PASSPORT TO PARIS
invitation to spend the Christmas holidays at their country place near
Moscow, which Mother gratefully accepted.
The three things I recall best about Moscow are the broadbacked,
bearded and vociferous izvostchiks (coachmen); the heady smell
of the freshly baked Moscow kalatch, the tastiest bread known to
man; and the famous department store Muir and Merrilies, the
Scotch-owned Russian forerunner of the Macy's and Selfridge's of the
occidental world at least that's what the Russians are sure to claim,
if they haven't already done so.
The Savostianov datcha was typically suburban; of Kourdiumov's
feudal splendor there was none, but there were the simple country
pleasures of snow games and tobogganing with the Savostianov
children. The slim, Circassian-looking Nata got along famously
with Alex, and they, with Youra, would disappear after the tobog
ganing for some mysterious sessions in the bushes, where I strongly
suspect the three of them played an oriental version of the "doctor
game." I, with my pious reputation, was never asked to participate
and pretended no interest in their pastimes. One day I overheard a
shockingly colorful description of these goings-on and melodramati
cally declared that, being a true Christian, I would have to report
such sins to the two mothers. Nata, terrified, tried to buy me off with
an offer to join me in the bushes, but I indignantly declined and
burst into uncontrollable tears, which brought Mother and Mrs.
Savostianov running. The three culprits glared threateningly while I
was questioned as to the cause of my hysterics, but I am proud to say
that I refused to play the informer.
After the holidays, the two families went their separate ways to
Moscow, where Alex and I were fed pirojki, bought from Filippov,
the caterer, and allowed to roam about the Kremlin.
We listened to the melancholy and elephantine waltzes played by
a military band at the Moscow skating rink, where cocky gymnasiasts
showed off in daredevil fashion for the watching schoolgirls, blush
ing and giggling into their handmuffs, the sharp Russian frost biting
their little ears.
Mother took us back to uneventful Kiev to resume classes at
Naumenko's Gymnasium, to Scarlatti with Miss Leskevitch, and for
me to wrest from him the last of the now steadily dwindling stock
of Lubomirsky's musical surprises.
The great day came when Mother felt that I was ready to beard
TO MUSIC 31
Kiev's musical lion in his den; she put on her caracul manteau over
the orange "tango" dress with its matching fur border, and we headed
for the Conservatory's inner sanctum Gliere's cabinet de travail
In the izvostchik on the way to the Conservatory, Mother
sighed over my snowballing reputation as a Peck's Bad Boy at
Naumenko's, but I grandly reassured her that it was all part of a
"plan."
Gliere greeted us impeccably turned out, and after appraising
Mother's ensemble and taking a whiff of her violet corsage backed
up by the ever-present L'Origan, he bowed and kissed her hand with
obvious pleasure. After Mother's excited explanations, he sized up my
kneepants with some surprise.
"So young and already a composer," he observed sadly. "And
when you compose, young man, do you actually write it down?"
I whipped out the orange-colored (the tango influence) cover of
my "sonata" and asked Gliere if he would care to follow the music
while I played it. Thus cornered, Gliere had no choice he folded
his arms and prepared to listen. I'm afraid his response was more
or less the same as Lubomirsky's at my first audition. The longer I
played, the more startled Gliere became, until finally he asked me to
stop and told my mother that I was indeed peculiarly talented; he
suggested that I take some private lessons from him prior to entering
the Conservatory. Gliere considered my piano playing sufficiently ad
vanced for the class of Professor Marian Dombrovsky, who was Miss
Leskevitch's teacher. The interview was most satisfactory to Mother
and me and we left Gliere's office feeling that we had Euterpe by the
tail.
The next morning I entered the Naumenko temple of learning
in a particularly flip mood. When the geography teacher asked me to
point out the Carpathian mountains on the map, I deliberately lo
cated the Crimean range. My brazenness brought a gasp from my
classmates, but I topped this in the Russian literature class (my fa
vorite subject) which followed. A handsome young Ukrainian named
Galiun was the teacher and the idol of all the schoolgirls. Because
of my overly advanced ego-futurist experiments, I was no longer
allowed to write for the "serious" school publication Our Thoughts,
and had enterprisingly retaliated with my own satirical journal, The
Ventilator. No sooner had Galiun begun class than I circulated the
newest hectographed copies of my rag, which featured his likeness on
32 PASSPORT TO PARIS
page one in a rapt embrace with the schoolgirl popularly considered
his pet. There was ill-repressed mirth among the readers, and with a
mock bow, Galiun appropriated one of my gay little sheets. He red
dened up and stomped out of the schoolroom, Ventilator in hand,
shortly returning with the school principal; I was then called out of
class.
The next morning I was formally expelled from the gymnasium,
which was exactly the result I desired. Mother was perturbed of
course, but I set her right by claiming that my Pegasus was far more
likely to be Gliere than Naumenko, and that I would reach Olym
pus much faster in the Conservatory chariot.
CHAPTER HI
KIEV CONSERVATORY
I WOULD give anything to take a long look at Kiev as it is now,
thirty-four years after I left it, if I could avoid winding up in a
Soviet torture chamber. Whatever the modern improvements, I don't
believe it can be in any way more enticing than it was in the days of
my musical beginnings. True, the railroad station was a horribly
ugly edifice which was to be torn down and replaced, and surely has
been by now; once through its gates, Kiev was a world half-
occidental and half-medieval Russian. The modern and luxurious
thoroughfares of Kreschatik (Kiev's main street) and the exclusive
Lipki residential section, named for its abundant young linden trees,
seemed highly kinetic next to the peaceful golden domes of the city's
many sixteenth-century churches; of these the Lavra of Petchersk
was the Saint Mark's of Russian Christendom. The city's parks in
cluded the Gorka (Hill) of St. Vladimir, the splendid Czarski Sad
(Gardens), and the Merchant's Gardens, the home of the summer
symphony concerts. Our street, the Bolshaya-Podvalnaya, was well
paved, clean, and boasted a cinema where we saw the first super-
colossal movie epic, Cabiria; the hilarious comedies of Max Linder,
the monocled predecessor of Charlie Chaplin; the homemade sexy
melodramas that starred the Russian favorites Vera Kholodnaya and
Ivan Mozjoukin.
The Gromov sisters, two enchantresses in their early teens, lived
nearby, and it was strongly rumored that they smoked cigarettes,
drank their father's champagne, wore their mother's silk stockings,
and had week-end adventures with young cavalry officers. We
boys were no match for them, but we constantly spied on the
demure sirens as they trotted in and out of their house, schoolbooks
under arm.
34 PASSPORT TO PARIS
The rich and glamorous Mouraviov and Ilyashenko families lived
near us in expensive private houses and gave festive parties for
young people to which Alex and I were often invited. I recall that
some of the older boys, habitues there, urged us to visit a brothel to
which they were already resorting; this premature invitation filled me
with terror as it was commonly known that the Kiev venereologists
were getting richer by the year attending to their patients. The best-
known of these doctors, an ex-wrestler named Alphonse Schwartzer,
had his office near our house and I always quickened my steps on
passing his fearsome sign with its ominous 606-914 glaring at me.
With the advent of penicillin, Schwartzer switched to general prac
tice and became my physician in New York at the time of World
War II.
Two blocks away was a puny little two-story edifice with a large
sign in its window proclaiming its ownership by "A. Razilo-Olizar,
Free Artist, Vocal Lessons, Italian Method." I was entranced by so
unorthodox a monicker until it dawned on me that Olizar was
Razilo spelled backwards.
Between our house and the teeming Kreschatik was the pereulok
(mews) where the Conservatory was located; in the opposite direc
tion was grimy and unfashionable Lvovskaia Street. Off Lvovskaia
was another mews called Dionisovsky Pereulok, where Grandfather's
townhouse stood, the scene of the three family tragedies; next door to
him was a convent run by nuns in some way affiliated with those at
Mejigorye, the sanctified nudist beach.
Grandfather had combated his gloomy solitude by taking his
housekeeper for a mistress. Mother brought us to see him occasion
ally, but we didn't enjoy these trips very much; the food had deterio
rated, Grandfather was increasingly irascible, and poor Satan, the
Saint Bernard, was sinking into the hairless and toothless miseries of
age. However, Grandfather expected attention from Mother and
the other four offspring who would share in his estate. That is, except
ing Mother's brilliant brother Alexis, who was persona non grata
with Grandfather because of his involvement in a conspiracy during
the 1905 revolution. Grandfather's politics were of a markedly mon
archist variety; he and his friend Dobrynin were among the chief
stockholders in the Tory sheet Kievlyanin, and their feudal views
went Nicholas II one better. Paradoxically, Uncle Alexis married
Dobrynin's daughter Liza and settled down to teaching political econ-
KIEV CONSERVATORY 35
omy at Novotcherkask University, so Grandfather grudgingly received
but never forgave him.
Uncle Alexis had a genuine feeling for music, among his many
interests, and of all my maternal relatives did the most to encourage
me. His tastes in music were those of a serious dilettante, worshipful
of standard symphonic literature and fairly contemptuous of any
thing that smacked of the music hall.
Mother's Moscow friends tried to cheer her up by taking her to
operetta performances. She sometimes brought home sheet music
from such hits as The Chocolate Soldier, Sylvia, and The Merry
Widow for which I, the future Vernon Duke of Broadway, roundly
scolded her. On one occasion, an avant garde lounge lizard presented
Mother with some hot platters of American imported ragtime; the
raging two-steps had such detestable titles as "Automobile" and "Tr&s
Moutarde" (Very Mustard). Alexis and I watched aghast as the
daring young man demonstrated, with Mother as his startled partner,
the vigorous arm-pumping and jerky steps of these pre-Scott Fitz
gerald favorites. Mother tactfully eschewed an opportunity for terpsi-
chorean advancement and led our visitor into the familiar tango,
which I magnanimously played on the piano; I wasn't fond of dance
music or the pseudo-gypsy waitings of the early Russian crooners of
prerevolution days.
Our apartment boasted a small but diversified library, which
started 'me on the long and adventurous road I have traveled to
Bibliophilia. Memories of Sobatchania probably accounted for Alex's
and my love for the eight illustrated volumes of Braehm's Life of the
Animals. The rarer and more repulsive the animal described, the
better we liked him.
There were two books on the shelves forbidden to Alex and me:
ForeFs Sexual Question and a fat volume on atheism, Bezverye. In
the Russian language zver means animal and bez means without;
consequently Alex and I had deduced that this book wickedly
championed the destruction of animals, a plan abhorrent to us. The
title really should be translated Without Faith, since vera means faith
in Russian.
One night Mother went to the theater and Alex and I sneaked out
these two guilty volumes; I plunged into the mysteries of sex and
Alex probed the animal-less world. After some furious reading, we
looked at each other with puzzled disappointment. Alex had found
36 PASSPORT TO PARIS
no animals at all, only obscure pagan gods and obscurer Greek and
Roman philosophers, and I felt the sex act as scientifically explained
was unfeasible, the whole thing being preposterous. We replaced the
books sadly, unable to find answers to our surreptitiously acquired
questions.
The date had rolled around for my first lesson with Gli&re. I had
an idea that so esteemed a member of the artistic community would
occupy palatial quarters in the Lipki sector. Instead, Mother left me
at the door of a small house next to a disreputable market place in
Bessarabka. Gliere opened the door for me in furry slippers, his face
unshaven and Bohemian-looking, quite unlike his urbane polish on
the symphony platform.
We plunged immediately into first harmony. I was waiting for his
lead to describe my latest efforts at composition, but he hewed to the
pedagogic line. Finally, as he was dismissing me, I ventured the in
formation that I was starting my first symphony.
"A symphony?" queried Gliere with a supercilious smile. "My dear
boy, prove to me that you can write a thirty-two-bar prelude first
and then we'll try a small piano study before we progress to the
symphony."
He patted me on the back and turned me out into the cold air. On
the tram trip home I tried to fit the acclaim he received at the concerts
and the meager, shabby home he worked in together. I had thought
that composers and artists of all kinds moved in a teratogenic and
prodigal world, their most extravagant wishes the command of an
adoring public. Glifere was the lion of Kiev and he lived more
humbly than its lambs.
Although I always took my music seriously, even at that remote
period I had the unwise tendency to attempt media for which I had
no proper equipment. Unbeknown to Gli&re I had written a piece
purporting to be a string quartet, without the most rudimentary
notion of the technique or limitations of stringed instruments. I
brought my score to a sweet old drunk named Grigorovitch, who
taught calligraphy for a living and played string quartets for amuse
ment. At his request I copied the parts of my quartet, and to my
delight the kindly Grigorovitch volunteered to give it a reading. I'm
sure the opus must have been awful, but hearing four grownups
execute sounds arranged by me filled me with exaltation. Whenever
a particularly juicy chord made its appearance, I jumped for joy and
KIEV CONSERVATORY 37
asked the musicians to please play that bar again because "it sounded
so good." The four good-natured Ukrainians were gluttons for punish
ment; they complied by repeating the work throughout the evening
and Grigorovitch even offered to give it a semipublic hearing, from
which fate my prudent mother saved me.
At that same time I was practicing conscientiously for my piano
examination, which called for two taxing technical studies and in
which I intended to include my most radical sonata, an addition not
at all obligatory. I appeared before the assembled pedagogues, headed
by Gliere, who did not show me any favoritism and stopped me cold
on the third page of my sonata. However, my general musicianship
was pronounced excellent and my piano technique acceptable for
Dombrovsky's advanced piano class.
I then became a full-fledged Conservatory pupil and since that
institution ran gymnasium classes for its students, the matter of gen
eral education was not neglected either.
The students were mostly aspiring singers, pianists, and violinists;
composers were a distinct minority and loftily aloof from the lowly
interpreters. In later years I found that, ironically, it was the inter
preters who made a good living out of music, while the creator
often worried about his next meal. The sharpest of the students were
the young violinists, as high-strung as their fiddles, who raced after
the girls along the corridors, solfeggio-stuffed satchels in tow. The
girl singers were always prettier than the girl pianists, and from the
adolescent exchanges I overheard, the boys considered them far
more rewarding partners in the emotional dramas that teemed
among us.
I remember two of these inconstant nymphs of music, both ten
years older than myself, whom I admired through their surrounding
crowds of fiddlers; one was the Nordic Znamenska, who sang my
songs two years later at a Conservatory recital, the other a luscious
Scheherazade-like contralto with the odd name of Vera Character. Of
the male pupils I recall sad-eyed and long faced Vladimir Horowitz,
who studied then with Serge Tarnovsky and later with the celebrated
Felix Blumenfeld; his piano playing was already dazzling, but most
of us students championed Horowitz's friend and rival, Sasha Doubi-
ansky, who tragically committed suicide in his early twenties. Horo
witz specialized in Chopin and Liszt, whereas Doubiansky leaned
toward the moderns, particularly the charming Polish composer
38 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Szymanovski, who later became my friend. Another pianistic lumi
nary at the Conservatory was Harry Neuhaus, a cousin of Szymanov
ski; he was considerably older than the other two virtuosi. Neuhaus
was identified with all the latest musical fashions and was a close
friend of Pierre Souvtchinsky, the rich and influential publisher of the
Musical Contemporary, the most luxurious musical magazine ever
printed.
In Gliere's class were two young men in their twenties who were
regarded as master craftsmen by us beginners; they were Liatoshinsky,
now the leading composer of Ukraine, and Mischa Levin, presently
a successful background-music composer in Hollywood, under the
name of Michel Michelet. Liatoshinsky's music was a blend of the
seemingly incompatible styles of the two prevailing Messiahs of every
Russian conservatory, Scriabin and Glazunov. Levin was more of a
"modernist," in that he was not averse to French influences and was
rather cosmopolitan in his tastes, due to previous study with Max
Reger in Leipzig.
Tall, awkward Liatoshinsky was married to an excellent colora
tura, nee Tzarevitch, who affably sight-read the latest songs turned
out by the Gli&re pupils; once a week we met at Liatoshinsky's large
apartment and played and sang each other's music far into the night.
In the summer of 1915 Mother took us to Finland to visit my
paternal great uncle, Nikolai Apollonovitch Dukelsky, who had a
villa in Kuokkala, about forty miles north of St. Petersburg. We
swam in the cold waters at the gloomy and forbidding seacoast. A
Wuthering Heights brooding hovered over the place, and my cousin
Vera would have made a good Bronte heroine had I been a little
older.
We went to St. Petersburg, my only visit there and a pleasurable
one; I saw the celebrated Tzarskoe Sielo, the name of which sings
nostalgically to Russians who associate it with Pushkin's happiest
years.
Moscow's scent can be likened to that of overripe passion fruit;
St. Petersburg seemed to me redolent of lemon and verbena, emanat
ing from the River Neva, and there was an acidy, lemonish pallor to
the St. Petersburg faces.
It was here that I was awed by the phenomenon of the Nordic
white night, which I translated many years later musically in my
cantata The End oj St. Petersburg; after one performance this work
KIEV CONSERVATORY 39
disappeared into a musical limbo as inexplicable as the polar lights
which brought it into being.
Grandmother Dariko, the Princess Toumanov, received us in a
magnificent Patou summer frock whiter than the night of her city,
scrutinized us closely through her lorgnette, felt for my muscles and,
on finding them nonexistent, told Mother I was probably better off
as a composer than a naval officer after all. It would have given the
thwarted lady pleasure to see me commissioned a lieutenant in the
U.S. Coast Guard in 1944.
She ushered me to the piano and bade me display my latest musi
cal attempts; I complied with zest, but it was obvious that Grand
mother wasn't too smitten.
"You undoubtedly have talent," she conceded graciously, "but your
musical style is already polluted with that horrible futuristic hogwash;
all those Rebikovs, Scriabins, Debussys, and, God forbid, Schoenbergs.
Ugh!"
To show there were no hard feelings, she took Alex and me on a
round of the pastry shops. At the Confiserie Berrin we ate heavenly
apricot ice cream; we swallowed eclairs and petits fours at several
patisseries, and wound up in an arcade where pale, pretty St. Peters
burg girls in white uniforms dispensed the latest concoction, raspberry
ice drowned in seltzer, a Russian version of ice cream soda.
Father's younger brother, Colonel Ilya Dukelsky, lived in a luxu
rious flat in Basskov Pereulok, ostracized by the rest of the family
because he belonged to the despised Corps de Gendarmes; he cyni
cally asserted that he intended to indulge his expensive tastes, which
included gold-digging cocottes. Mother took us on two visits to Uncle
Ilya, who looked like a dissipated version of my late father, and
Alex and I played big-game hunters with the bear and tiger skins
stretched over the floor. I overheard Uncle Ilya's fascinating confes
sion that his chief occupation in the Gendarme Corps was spying on
Rasputin. Although the czar held the Siberian ex-monk in awe
and had succumbed to his hypnotic influence, my uncle kept close
tab on Rasputin's relationship with the czarina and her favorite lady
in waiting, Anna Vyrubova. At his death in Nice during the German
occupation, Uncle Ilya left a journal presumably full of the scandal
ous adventures of Rasputin in the hands of a friend who also died
without bringing the memoirs to the light of day.
On another occasion Mother took us for a visit with young Prince
40 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Irakly Toumanov and his pretty first wife, a Georgian, who lived
not far from Tzarskoe Sielo. Uncle Irakly, who was Father's cousin,
wore the beautiful uniform of a Czar's Strelok (the czar's crack rifle
corps). While the young princess and Mother drank tea from a giant
samovar, spiking it with quantities of choice cherry jam (an excellent
recipe, by the way), Uncle Irakly took several rifles off the wall and
proceeded to perform inspection of arms, to the terror of Alex and
myself. His house was full of champion pointers, hunters, and bea
gles, as hunting was Irakly's favorite recreation,
The year immediately preceding the revolution was unremarkable
musically speaking, as the World War made normal pursuits of
learning more and more difficult. Mother and most of her female
friends joined the Red Cross as volunteer nurses, and our apartment
became the meeting place of young officers fresh from the front, quite
a few of them wounded. Some of Gliere's older pupils were mobi
lized, but on the other hand, there was an influx of aspiring com
posers from St. Petersburg and Moscow. Food was still plentiful in
Kiev, and life was easy and carefree compared with the growing
feeling of insecurity and unrest, as well as various economic restric
tions, in the two Russian capitals.
Mother, who was a one-man woman if I ever saw one, dropped
the frivolous Muscovites one by one and divided her time between the
hospital and her new religion theosophy, in which she was
absorbed to the time of her death. Several St. Petersburg theosophists
of note appeared in our midst; among them was the spruce Colonel
Alexis Fedorovitch Lvov, grandson of the composer of the Russian
national anthem, "God Save the Czar," written in 1833. Lvov was
a vegetarian, spoke in a high-pitched and petulant voice, and in spite
of his aestheticism relished the company of pretty women. He di
rected Mother to the writings of Blavatsky, Besant and Krishnamurti,
whose ideas so entranced Mother that she spent several weeks in the
prophet's camp after we came to America. Lvov was attached to a
railroad battalion of the army, a connection which proved most use
ful to us a few years later. The colonel had just arrived from St
Petersburg, was devoted to the czarina, and had bitter misgivings
about the mysterious conspiracy surrounding the czar's entourage.
Mother was a mild liberal in her political views and talked lightly
about the desirability of a "change/' the corruption of the court, the
sufferings of an ill-equipped and ill-fed army, and the stifling St.
KIEV CONSERVATORY 41
Petersburg censorship, which made clear thinking and frank talk
an impossibility. It was a tradition in our household for Mother to
tuck us into bed and bless us Greek Orthodox fashion every night;
having performed this ritual lovingly, she would return to her guests
wounded officers and fanatical theosophists whose clamorous dis
cussions in the drawing room kept us awake many an hour.
My piano studies with Dombrovsky were not progressing too satis
factorily. The business of practicing five or six hours a day was
odious to me, and with my customary capacity for bluff, I tried a
system of doing no piano work for several days and then spending
all the day preceding the lesson practicing. The first few times I did
tolerably well, but the exacting Dombrovsky soon caught up with
my tricks.
"You don't want to be a pianist, you're a composer first and last,"
growled the big Pole. "I'm wasting your time, and you're wasting
mine. You're gifted and facile, but you won't work; I suggest that
you go to a teacher more interested in musical development than in
pianistic pyrotechnics."
He gave me a note to a fellow Pole, Boleslav Javorsky, who had
a reputation for eccentricity, radical tendencies, and fanatical disciples
who did everything but study the piano. Obviously a man after my
own heart.
CHAPTER IV
CAME THE REVOLUTION
TO THE non-Russian world all Russians are divided into two
classes: Russians proper, that is the present inhabitants of my
native country, and the White Russians, or emigres. The arbitrary
division of my former countrymen into resident procommunists and
nonresident anti-Reds is erroneous. There are probably as many sup
pressed "Whites" inside Russia as there are underground "Reds" out
side it. The term White Russian originated in the civil war following
the Revolution, and we and our friends were of the bourgeois class
from which this group was culled. To such people the great up
heaval that came about in February, 1917, was a gratifying fulfill
ment of a roseate dream without which no supposedly clear-thinking
bourgeois could call himself a member of the intelligentsia. Every
body was openly contemptuous and even patronizing about Nich
olas II because of his mildness, lack of will power, and because he
was dominated by unscrupulous and grafting cabinet members, who
stifled the Duma (Parliament) and allowed Rasputin to become
virtually a one-man Tammany Hall.
All that the February Revolution meant to the white-collar ideal
ists was the dethronement of the unpopular czar, the humiliation of
the still less popular czarina, and the vague beginnings of a mildly
socialistic paradise in which the fast-talking and histrionically capable
Alexander Kerensky played a self-appointed Archangel Gabriel with
sex appeal.
Russian women gave the puny Severyanins, the Vertinskys, and the
Sabinins the heave ho and became pioneer bobby soxers, with Ker
ensky as their political crooner. What he stood for, what he
preached, and what he did with the enormous power given him
seemed to be of no consequence. The whole country was in an un
seeing and unthinking ecstasy, and the crew-haircutted, khaki-
CAME THE REVOLUTION 43
clad Kerensky with his Napoleonic attitudes and rhetorical flights
kept it at its highest pitch.
The early days of revolution will always remain in my memory as
elaborate flower parades put on in every street to the deafening oom-
pahs of military bands; as throngs of wildly gesticulating women in
their still Gibson-girlish dresses now mingling with fat-cheeked
Ukrainian peasant girls; as occasional shootings and skirmishes with
the rapidly dwindling loyal monarchists; as a never-ending recess
from school, from the strict daily routine of a student, from obliga
tions of any kind. -
Spring was especially beautiful that year the cataclysmic
Russian spring with its islands of melting snow and tons of bluish-
green ice suddenly cracking under the onslaught of the March sun,
the streets inundated by rushing rivulets that were snow and ice only
the night before. The swiftness of this spring and the welcome
and clean-cut suddenness of the first Revolution seemed perfectly and
violently mated. The sternest admonitions didn't prevent Alexis and
myself from joining little groups of happily shouting collegians whose
chief fun was tearing the Imperial eagles from their caps and adorn
ing their sleeves with flaming-red bands.
Almost nightly there were symphonic concerts, everywhere hast
ily gotten up for some revolutionary-charity benefit and, at first, for
the War Loan and Liberty Loan drives. Best of all were the Mer
chants' Gardens Concerts, where on one occasion a full-sized sym
phony orchestra consisting entirely of enlisted personnel played
Tchaikovsky's Path&tique symphony, which inappropriate hymn to
death was greeted by tumultuous shouts and frenzied cheering. At
another concert a string intermezzo of mine, composed behind
Glare's back, was publicly performed by the Moscow conductor
Palitzin. This was a mournful little piece, inoffensive but pleasantly
mellifluous, and it got a respectable enough hand for me to come
forward and take my first bow before a paying audience. When the
assembled other boys' mammas saw me, a thirteen-year-old in knee-
pants, they cooed and twittered audibly: "Isn't he cute?" and, "Now
you can see why you should practice the piano, Junior!" I was not
concerned with my juvenile appeal, but only my (in my own eyes)
indubitable greatness and didn't neglect telephoning GUere the next
morning to tell him of my first triumph.
To achieve this "triumph," Mother secretly bribed a Conserva-
44 PASSPORT TO PARIS
tory graduate named Jasensky, a disgruntled musical pen pusher
who wrote small orchestral pieces with little music in them but
showily orchestrated; Jasensky was hired especially to clean up
some unwieldy writing in my string piece, and got paid extra (unoffi
cially) to palm off the music on Palitzin. Palitzin had no idea as to the
identity of the composer and was just as amazed as the audience at
my appearance.
Every concert given that spring mixed music with politics in that
intermissions were taken up by fiery speeches some by soldiers
"just back from the front" (never the politically suspect officers,
as they would have been roundly booed) , some by influential civil
ians hastily appointed to government posts, and quite a few by un
kempt and ferocious members of the dreaded Council (Soviet) of
Workers and Soldiers Deputies. The soldiers "back from the front"
were of the popular-hero variety, and their reassuring slogan was War
to the Victorious End; these "heroes," some of whom had never seen
battle, patterned themselves on Kerensky, copying his khaki trench-
coats and eaglelike attitudes. The "important" civilians were mostly
rich and polished members of the Constitutional-Democratic Party
(C.D., or Cadets as they were popularly called), landed gentry
most of them, titled as often as not and sporting golden pince-nez,
well-kept beards and bulky fur coats. These were the bourgeois in
tellectuals and would-be liberals so ruthlessly exterminated by the
Soviets in the ensuing years; at the time they were enthusiastically
received, as they spoke well if somewhat above their audience's
heads (which is always impressive to Russians). The third group,
the Soviet boys, were members of the extreme-left parties: the Bol
shevik division of the Socialist-Democrat Party (then still a small
minority) and even an anarchist or two. Their speeches consisted of
shrill and impassioned screaming, with much invective and fist-
shaking; "fraternize with the enemy and come home, soldiers" was
their appeal These violent rabble rousers meant no good, and every
time they appeared a strange chill and premonition of the horrors to
come seized their listeners,
Worse still, no concert was complete without a passport examina
tion, a "security measure" for which the Soldiers and Workers Coun
cil was largely responsible and which was more in the nature of a
raid on monarchists and other political undesirables. We children
got off easy, of course, but we saw fashionably dressed bourgeois of
CAME THE REVOLUTION 45
both sexes, their teeth chattering, their eyes glassy with fear, being
led away to pastures unknown by burly ex-soldiers with the dread red
armbands. Sometimes suspects attempted to flee and to our horror
distant shots would ring out, mingling with the thick harmonies of a
Glazunov symphony.
Some subtle changes were taking place at home. Our ugly cook,
Pauline, got herself a "returned hero" sweetheart who instructed her
in the joys of stealing. Each day some trinket of Mother's would dis
appear, and when questioned Pauline laughed disdainfully and threat
ened that this was only the beginning and Mother could fire her if
she didn't like it. It was impossible to get other servants as they were
always in the street celebrating, and poor Mother was so used to the
treacherous Pauline that she didn't have the heart to show her the
door. New money in large denominations appeared everywhere,
prices rose alarmingly, and food particularly country produce
became scarce. Some of our young officer friends, desperate and
disgusted, took off their uniforms, put on peasant garb, and went into
the country with their wives' jewels to get drunk with the festive
Ukrainians and to return with live chickens and geese, butter and
eggs and milk.
Shortly after the February upheaval, I was admitted into Gliere's
Conservatory composition class. Outside of Liatoshinsky and Levin,
there were several newcomers, mostly St. Petersburg and Moscow
refugees. The eldest was the bankerlike Shatunovski, fortyish and
dandified, his music so closely akin to that of Ravel that distinguish
ing between the two became an engrossing game for us students.
In true St. Petersburg fashion, Shatunovski held himself somewhat
aloof from us. Also from St. Petersburg was the now-prominent Soviet
musicologist Alswang, a typical conservatory bore given to long
speeches and enamored of technical terms.
Thanks to a blond Ukrainian named Nadenenko I discovered
Debussy's Pelllas, and after much poring over its ethereal pages, my
style switched from the recognized, respectable Gliere-Glazunov
manner (with a dash of Scriabin) to slavish imitations of Debussy
and Ravel. I wrote a suite for piano duet fancifully entitled "Ver-
lainiana," and shortly afterward the first act of an opera based on
Maeterlinck's Aladdine and Palomide in which I cribbed from Pel-
teas to my heart's content.
These pretentious works made quite a bit of noise among the stu-
46 PASSPORT TO PARIS
dents and were exhibited to Glire. The good Reinhold Moritzovitch
played them over searchingly and smiled at me benevolently through
his pince-nez: "What have you and Nadenenko done, applied for
French passports?" The class greeted this sally with students' in
evitably overgenerous laughter. "What are we beginners to do, Rein-
hold Moritzovitch?" I retorted. "You and Glazunov have said all
that could be said in Russian; we shall have to learn another lan
guage." Gliere grinned, patted me on the back, and told me to get to
work on a chamber piece for the student's concert which would
abide by the rules, and put aside the mists of Pelleas.
Scriabin, as I have inferred, was the reigning influence in the two
years preceding the 1917 revolution; he died in 1915 at the age of
forty-four. This feverishly emotional but most limited composer was
then the accepted model and the idol of Russian concert audiences.
He provided effective piano vehicles for the virtuosi (a splendid
pianist himself) and the ecstatic erotomania of his best inspirations
moved and exhilarated the listeners. Not to write la Scriabin was
the mark of provincialism; his imitators were legion in every Russian
city.
In our midst appeared a St. Petersburg pupil of Essipova, Markian
Frolov, whose music was almost undistinguishable from that of Scria
bin; it had the same agitated leaps, capricious rhythms, and erratic
but opulent harmonies. Frolov, whom we called starik (old man)
since he was nearly thirty, was a good pianist, and his rugged pipe-
and-tweeds exterior belied his Scriabin worship. Briefly I succumbed
to his tenets too, and produced some unconvincing Scriabinesque
essays, but the style was entirely foreign to me and the influence
proved inconsequential.
Revolution is always identified with youth, and the young for
the most part blissfully unconscious of the grave social changes and
the accompanying crises thrive on haphazard, come-what-may
restlessness and pleasant chaos. We saw old and respectable con
servatory professors inexplicably vanish, their places taken by ag
gressive young men in military-style 44 f ranches" (as American and
British officers' tunics were then called in Russia) and polished
cavalry-issue boots. They talked music, but instead of using words
like counterpoint, double fugue, recapitulation, main subject, etc,,
constantly referred to ideology, proletariat, class war, bourgeois- tend
encies and social significance. Their talk sounded strange to us,
CAME THE REVOLUTION 47
but these early "commissars" were there to enforce the New Order,
and we liked to consider ourselves "progressive" and to be part of it
The two capitals began sending us dozens of precocious music boys,
among them ten-year-old Julian Scriabin, the late composer's son.
His mother, Tatiana Fedorovna, was a tragically beautiful figure in
deep mourning, which she affected long after her husband's death of
blood poisoning. Julian had enormous deerlike eyes, and a rather
distant air. I was slightly resentful of his extreme youth, which dis
placed me as the official wunderkind of Gliere's class. One night at
Liatoshinsky's, Julian played some promising piano preludes for us;
his mother and two sisters were accompanied by a Puckish young man
of quick eye and ready tongue named Nicolas Skmimsky, who is now
an entertaining writer on music in America.
Apparently Scriabin pere, in common with most composers, had
little money to leave his wife and children, for Tatiana Fedorovna and
her son lived in genteel poverty. There was no electricity in the house
they occupied and poor Julian composed by candlelight. He was pecu
liarly choosy about various orchestral timbres: disliked strings but
adored the clarinet, which he called the aristocrat of instruments.
The first revolutionary summer, a lazy Ukrainian summer, started
the usual desertion from Kiev to the countryside; this was no longer
easy, as the trains were jammed with soldiers celebrating their re
turn from the front, revolutionary officials and their staffs transferring
from place to place, and with the ever-present Workers and Soldiers
Deputies always holding the priorities. Finally we managed to accept
the invitation of Mother's new friends, the Lipofka-Polovinetzes. The
son Stass played the violin and was one of Alex's buddies. His uncle,
a rich and cynical sybarite named Wulfert was a cousin of Tchai
kovsky's tragic friend Davidov. Wulfert owned the lovely eighteenth
century house where we vacationed, in the government of Poltava
not far from Mirgorod, immortalized by Gogol.
The house was on Gogol's beloved river Psiol, and when I first saw
it I had a strange feeling that I'd been there before and that I was
familiar with every corner of it. Wulfert had a superb Erard piano;
at dusk as I played it, the open windows of the drawing room wafted
in the rich scents of honeysuckle and roses from the garden out
lined in tall poplars, with the village church spire in the back
ground; I heard the peasant girls singing as they sauntered home
from their work in the fields.
48 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Even in that provincial hamlet there was a feeling of insecurity
and unrest and the peasants had begun to assert themselves bit by
bit. But food was still abundant, there were no ration cards, no people
lining up before understocked grocers' shops, none of the other dis
comforts we had known in Kiev.
We drank in that last summer in the Russian countryside avidly.
There were boating and swimming daily in the willow-sheltered wa
ters of the Psiol, and Mrs. Wulfert, an extraordinarily handsome rose-
skinned blonde, had a floating bathing barge built for herself and
could be observed every afternoon, completely naked, indolently
stretching herself in the sun. My recollections of church-sanctioned
nudism came back strongly, as the numerous peasant wenches em
ployed on the estate were also fond of swimming in the nude, sing
ing, giggling, and splashing about like clumsy white seals.
On our return to Kiev we found great changes. The "french-
coated" young men were on every street corner, gesturing and shout
ing threats and promises to hypnotized citizens. Large posters cov
ered with exclamation points and promising death to the bourgeois
and all enemies of the working class were now signed openly by the
central committee of the Workers and Soldiers Soviet and the Pre
sidium of the Socialist-Democrat Party (Bolsheviks).
The lines outside the food shops lengthened daily. All clothing
was severely rationed, shots rang out constantly, and the populace
was asked not to leave home after sundown on certain evenings be
cause of spreading disturbances. Alex and I were still handed our
daily lunches carefully wrapped by Mother and sent off to school,
Alex to Naumenko's and I to the Conservatory, Mother warning us
not to endanger ourselves in the crowded streets. Going to the opera
or to concerts was now a perilous adventure as all bourgeois children
and grownups were recognizable by their dress and manner and were
automatically asked for their identification papers and often held for
annoying and officious examinations,
The reports from St. Petersburg and Moscow were more and more
disturbing. In April the authorities had permitted a sealed train bear
ing Lenin and his cohorts across the Russo-German border; a few
weeks later these men were joined by Trotsky, who arrived from Can
ada, and their nefarious plotting began to be activated in Russia in
earnest. Although their first attempt in July to seize power with the
CAME THE REVOLUTION 49
help of mutinous sailors from the Kronstadt naval base proved abor
tive, their imprisonment was only temporary.
The country and the war effort undeniably were going to the dogs.
The officers who still paid furtive visits to our flat dressed as soldiers or
peasants unanimously denounced the vacillating Kerensky, who de
prived the popular General Kornilov of command while he was en
route to St. Petersburg to protect the provisional government until a
zemski sobor (people's voting assembly) could be held; this allowed
the Bolshevik leaders to seize power, the Red masterminds were re
leased from prison, Kerensky, for whom Lenin issued a warrant of ar
rest, fled the country disguised as a woman, and the Soviets moved
virtually unopposed into the custody of Russia.
Kiev, being a provincial town, did not receive the news of these
events until a few days later, but the repercussions were swift and ter
rifying.
One of the first men to be arrested, held for questioning, and finally
returned to his domicile with all of his money and securities confis
cated was Grandfather Kopylov. Mother's comfortable yearly income
vanished with the inflation that swept Ukraine, and she was unable
to sell her stocks and bonds. She began to dispose of her diamonds,
of which she fortunately had quite a few, and managed to carry
on for several years. The two leading newspapers, including of
course the reactionary Kievlyanin of which Grandfather was an im
portant stockholder, were abolished and replaced by Bolshevik sheets
which were carbon copies of the all-powerful Pravda and Izvestya.
The Red Terror carried off hundreds of victims to the Che-Ka cel
lars daily, and we couldn't sleep at night because of the racing mo
tors of the huge army trucks employed to drown out the screams of
the townspeople being shot or tortured by the Chekists.
Each apartment house had a "house committee," the head of
which was responsible to the Soviet government for his tenants; this
resulted in people spying on each other, making up stories about un
popular neighbors, and carrying on a private revolution in every
courtyard.
The new plutocrats were the food-shop owners, who took to sporting
furs and Paris dresses; enterprising youths pursued the lady shopkeep
ers, offering their manly charms in exchange for butter and milk.
The fact that clothes were rationed became meaningless, because
50 PASSPORT TO PARIS
even with a ration card clothes were unobtainable. Mother spent
most of her time cutting trousers and making outlandish coats out of
old skirts, bedroom-window curtains, and woolen rugs to clothe her
growing sons. I remember traipsing off to the Conservatory in a
golden-yellow coat of a most unorthodox cut, with green trousers made
galije (cavalry) fashion, the origin of which I suspected was Grand
father's billiard table.
The Bolsheviks, pie-eyed drunk with power, mobilized boys of six
teen and men over fifty to fight the volunteer patriotic troops assem
bling throughout Russia; it was a moot point with these unfortunates
as to which was worse to wear a Red star on one's cap or a Red
bullet in one's heart.
One afternoon, Gliere's counterpoint class was interrupted by the
unheralded arrival of the notorious Che-Ka executioner Pereverzev,
accompanied by two Red Army officers and two music commissars.
Pereverzev was a splendid Slavic specimen, tall and blond, wearing
an unfamiliar uniform with three or four guns jammed in his holster
belt; he shook hands patronizingly with Gliere and turned to speak
to the students, who were all frozen with fear.
"Composer Comrades, the hour has struck, now that the great
October Revolution has given humanity a new hope and pattern for
life; you musicians have the chance to combat the Soviet's dastardly
enemies the degenerate capitalists and czarist lackeys who con
spire to stab the Revolution in the back!" He went on like this, using
roughly the clich6s of today's Soviet newspapers, and wound up with:
"We ask you, therefore, on behalf of our beloved Soviet government
and our noble leader Comrade Trotsky, to do your bit to help the Uni
versal Military Training Program (Vsievobutch). To popularize this
more than timely measure, we of the Communist Party have decided
to present a full-length opera which you will write within two weeks."
This brought an involuntary gasp from the assembled students, and
a whispered conversation between Gliire and the intruders ensued,
Pereverzev resumed his talk to inform us that he was fully in accord
with Glare's plan to have the opera created "collectively" by the
best of Glare's composing talent. The libretto was the work of Lev
Nikulin, a mediocre poet turned Red, Liatoshinsky was to write the
overture and orchestrate the entire opera, Nadenenko and Frolov
were to supply the ballets and choral ensembles, and I, because of my
melodic gift, was entrusted with the job of writing three "revolution-
CAME THE REVOLUTION 51
ary" arias. In spite of his extreme youth, Julian Scriabin, the late com
poser's son, then only ten, was assigned the words of a "patriotic"
girls' chorus.
Pereverzev nodded approvingly as the truly communistic work
division took place, repeated a few more official platitudes, and with
an ecstatic "Death to the World's Bourgeoisie!" strode out of the
classroom, patting one of his guns, followed obsequiously by the offi
cers and commissars.
The silence that ensued was quite the gloomiest in my experience.
There was no arguing with the new masters, we all knew that; but what
if we shouldn't deliver "the goods" they wanted? It was not for us, the
earliest birds, nor for any Soviet composer since, to question the va
lidity or possible effectiveness of such an assignment. All we had to
do was to set Nikulin's servile verses and be damned quick about it.
The lesson over, we, the collective Soviet composers, were ordered
home to our frozen pianos.
Mother, on hearing of my strange assignment, became terribly per
turbed, but dejectedly realized there was no way out. "Don't make it
too good, Son," she said with an attempt at humor.
I went to work immediately and astonished Gliere two days later by
bringing in all three arias neatly written out. Little Julian was there,
too, as he was having considerable trouble with his girls' chorus, pro
fessing not to understand the words assigned to him. Gliere played
over my songs and apparently found them satisfactory, for he called
in one of the commissars and asked him to play over Comrade
Dukelsky's inspirations. The well-groomed young commissar, a
conservatory-trained pianist, played the arias through and said he
thought them "just right" and very stimulating indeed. I confess that
although I was not in tune politically with my new boss, I was quite
elated at his praise; I went home to tell Mother that my songs had been
accepted and would go into rehearsal the next day. Mother was hor
rified, as she had secretly hoped I would be found incompetent for
such an important task, and vowed that although I must help during
rehearsals, she would never allow me to attend any performances of the
devilish Soviet propaganda opera. "How can you prevent my attend
ing?" I queried incredulously. "If I don't show up they are sure to
throw me in the Che-Ka!" Mother shook her head determinedly. "You
will be very ill, Dima, and I will be forced to keep you in bed. Do you
understand?" This prospect was not to my liking, but Mother was ada-
52 PASSPORT TO PARIS
mant. The opera was completed on schedule; all its component parts
fitted like a jig-saw puzzle and were orchestrated by the harried Lia-
toshinsky, who gave up all hope of sleeping for several nights. After I
got through rehearsing a fat blond soprano in my revolutionary an
thems, Mother appeared at the Conservatory with our family doctor,
who felt my pulse, made a grave face, and speeded me home in an
izvostchik.
I was put to bed and given a peculiar-tasting drug which made me
very weak indeed; I suspect it was a potent sedative as I remember be
ing in bed for three days and floating in celestial dreams. On the fourth
day I was awakened by sounds uncomfortably familiar. I ran to the
window in my nightshirt and saw my fat blond soprano propped
against a truck-borne piano, her accompanist being one of my fellow
composers. She was singing one of my revolutionary hymns through a
large megaphone, and Nikulin's flashy words set off almost as flashily
by my music rang out abrasively in the morning air. Mother ran into
the room in the middle of the refrain and burst into bitter tears.
Back to bed I went. An hour or so later, there was a loud knock at
the door, of the kind universally feared in Russia. Mother went white
and crossed me hastily. "This is it, Dimotchka," she said, her eyes
misty with tears. "Have courage. If we die, we die together." She
walked to the door and opened it cautiously. Four Red Army soldiers
wearing huge squeaking boots entered carrying two big burlap bags.
"Does Comrade Dukelsky live here?" the tallest of the four asked.
"Yes, gentlemen," Mother said falteringly, "He is my son. He's sick
in bed. Is there anything I can do?"
The soldier grinned. "In bed, eh, the little Bourjooitchik? Very
well, here is his pay for contributing to our opera. Good day to you,
Comrade." With these words, the soldiers threw the bags on the floor
and walked out, their boots squeaking reassuringly.
Mother ran to the bags and, on feeling the burlap with her needle-
worn hands, exclaimed joyfully, "It's flour, flour!" She brought a
kitchen knife and, after making an insertion, ascertained to her even
greater delight that my pay consisted of precious white flour.
One afternoon in the spring of 1918, Julian Scriabin and his sisters
went swimming on the Dnieper. He hid himself in the rushes to un
dress; apparently had a sunstroke, fainted, fell into the swift river
and drowned instantly. His terrified sisters, unable to find him, ran
back to town and unburdened their grief to Nicolas Slonimsky, as
CAME THE REVOLUTION 53
their mother was away on pressing family business in Moscow. Slonim-
sky telephoned Levin and they instigated a search which lasted a week
before Julian's body was recovered. The two young musicians were
faced with the inhuman task of telling Madame Scriabin, on her re
turn, of her new loss.
Music became my only life, the one meager illusion of immortality
in a rapidly vanishing world. I came down, in swift succession, with
one disease after another, so that my health added to Mother's mount
ing tribulations; we were chronically undernourished and going into
the country in search of food was now punishable by death. There
was little desire for such expeditions anyhow as Kiev was surrounded
by bands of disorganized rebels, "Yellows" and "Greens," as they
called themselves; these were highway robbers who tried to white
wash their plundering and mayhem with the labels of various assumed
ideologies.
In Kiev, we drank tea distilled from carrots, coffee made from tree
bark and soup cooked with a stock of the bones of a raw herring used
again and again. The only bread available was made of stale, sickly
green peas and had a musty, forbidding odor rather like that of a rat-
trap. Horse meat was the standard luxury, but some of our acquaint
ances even essayed cat and dog ragouts, which we boys, with memo
ries of Sobatchania still fresh, refused to sample. Little wonder that
our gums bled regularly and that Alex and I began to lose our teeth.
From the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the time
of our flight in the winter of 1920, there were nineteen changes of
government in our city. Each one of these changes was accompa
nied by a bloody battle in the streets, including Bolshaya-Podvalnaya,
and by all-night bombardment and incessant machine-gun fire. Dur
ing these tense struggles, the house-committee leader ordered all ten
ants into the basement shelters, where we huddled together in fear and
hunger. During one bombing which occurred in the middle of the
day, I got acutely fed up with the whole thing the evil-smelling fel
low tenants, the prayer-mumbling old women, the ceaselessly whining
children, and, I'm ashamed to say, my own mother's exaggerated pre
occupation with my welfare. I ran out of the shelter and up five
flights to our apartment, where I stole to the piano. This sounds like an
affected theatrical tour de force, but I truly began composing, obliv
ious of the crashing bombs outside. As I was picking out a French
ified reverie, a bomb hit the top of our building and caved in the sev-
54 PASSPORT TO PARIS
enth floor, with the sixth floor above the only barrier between me and
certain death. A heavy chandelier plunged to the floor, missing my
head by inches, and I tore back to the shelter, panic-stricken. I en
tered to a concerted wail led by Mother; her relief was as great as my
delicious feeling of enveloping safety.
In the spring of 1918 I completed a four-movement string sextet,
and this Glazunov-like work, quite respectable as to technique and
musicianship, permitted Gliere to devote one half of a Conservatory
concert to my compositions; also programmed were some of my
rather flowery songs and a set of piano pieces. The soprano Znamenska
acquitted herself well in the songs, the sextet made a favorable im
pression, and by the time I appeared in one of Mother's better sartorial
creations, the audience gave me a warm reception. After the con
cert there were even some cheers, and pretty girls came back to the
artists' room to shake my hand, which quite turned my head.
Although Javorsky, my piano teacher, played the instrument beau
tifully, he was far less concerned with technical proficiency than
with the all-around conception and feel of a piece assigned to his stu
dent for preparation. Javorsky discarded all accepted academic
tools and created his own modal system, to which he devoted most of
his life. He lived with his favorite pupil, Serge Protopopov, a pudgy,
good-looking youth who usually wore an apron, as he did all the cook
ing in the Javorsky m6nage. There were some strange stories about
these two and Javorsky's morals in general, but I was too eager to ab
sorb Boleslav Leopoldovitch's revolutionary musical theories and his
new slant on piano playing to worry about the excessive kisses he
showered on the pupils after each lesson. Javorsky was a fascinating
talker and never lost an opportunity to kick whatever academic
backside happened to be close by. He was most unpopular with the
rest of the Conservatory personnel and his piano pupils never won
prizes, which was all right with me; Javorsky was far more interested
in what I wrote than in what I played.
Chronologically speaking, it is hard and unnecessary to list Kiev's
bloody government changes in the order of their appearance and dis
appearance. Regardless of one's political beliefs, it is only fair to say
that food, clothing, and other necessities returned briefly under the
German-appointed Hctman (leader), General Skoropadsky, and the
short-lived triumph of the Volunteer Army in 1919. Otherwise,
whether they temporarily seized power in street skirmishes or full-size
CAME THE REVOLUTION 55
bombings, these varied regimes brought nothing but misery and acute
distress to the Kiev people.
What Ukrainian patriots didn't bargain for was that with the advent
of the Hetman Kiev was virtually German-occupied, and the steel
helmets of Prussian and Bavarian Burschen bristled everywhere.
Shortly after the installation of the Hetman regime, the revolution in
Germany took place and the troops deserted Kiev, with Skoropadsky
escaping, Kerensky style. With him fled our hopes for order, as the
Ukrainian Nationalists took over briefly in bandit fashion, and in their
wake followed the notorious Ataman Petliura, whose troops indis
criminately slaughtered Bolsheviks and volunteers alike, not to men
tion a few Hetman supporters who couldn't get out in time. After four
teen days and nights of incessant bombing, during which we only
awakened when the shock of a ten-minute lull occurred, the Soviets
retook the city and the Red Terror again engulfed us. We had little
energy to keep track of the political turnover, being too preoccupied
with where the next meal was coming from.
Then on August 31, 1919, the Denikin Volunteer Army made a
magnificent entrance patterned on the seventeenth-century Boyards
processions. We had never seen so many imperial standards, golden
epaulets, glittering decorations, never heard so many prerevolutionary
songs and czarist army marches. This time the joyous schoolboys and
hysterical parents were out in full force, not to welcome a revolution
but what looked like a release from it; the same rose-tossing females
who had pelted Kerensky now favored the fat, red-jowled General
May-Maevsky. I remember standing on tiptoe behind two Madame
LaFarge-like, scrawny hags in the Place of St. Sophia to hear the gen
eral's speech of victory; his sonorous voice resembled an aged bull
dog's bark. No one understood what he said, but who cared? The white
officers were back and so were white bread, milk, butter, and plump
country chickens.
Our officer friends, the same ones who had crawled in and out of
the apartment disguised as workers or peasants, blossomed out in their
dress uniforms with Saint George crosses dangling triumphantly on
their chests. Colonel Lvov put aside theosophy and busied himself
with his railroad battalion. Miniature theaters mushroomed overnight.
Restaurants with renowned Muscovite names opened. Hordes of cur
rency speculators flourished. A renaissance of the good old ego- and
cubo-futurists took place: the Vertinsky imitators, decked out as
56 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Pierrots, the Acmeists, who were a Russian continuation of the Paris
Parnasse, and out-and-out poetical anarchists like Zdanevitch, who
cantered around a stage and made sounds like a horse as his contribu
tion to the arts. I wavered between continuing as a composer or re
turning to poetry; on one or two occasions, I painted my face subtly
and recited some of my poems at one of the dozens of the poets' cafes.
The intoxicated patrons rewarded my youthful aplomb with assur
ances that I was at least as good as Mayakovsky, which appraisal of
my gifts did not displease me. Mother was too busy selling her dia
monds and buying dubious bargains to criticize my exploits.
By the end of November it was clear that the Denikin cause was
rapidly disintegrating, there were reports of wholesale corruption, and
the newspapers reporting the progress of "our valiant army" were full
of blank spots, due to the increased censorship. The volunteer forces
not only had not reached Moscow, but were now retreating toward
Kiev at a vertiginous pace; in spite of censorship, battles and skir
mishes were reported at various points too close to Kiev for comfort.
One morning early in December we were awakened by heavy
cannon fire; Colonel Lvov, who was rooming with us, located it at fif
teen miles from Kiev. He dressed rapidly, dashed out of the apartment
scowling ominously, and returned for a family conference. Lvov's
folded arms and compressed lips promised trouble.
<C I have just returned from the railroad-battalion headquarters,
Anna Alexevna, and I have it on excellent authority that the Com
munists will be here in three or four days at the latest. You have been
kind enough to give me sanctuary and the least I can do is offer you
and the boys the limited facilities available for transportation to
Odessa. Since, however, space is most restricted, you will be forced
to leave all your belongings here and take nothing but the barest ne
cessities."
"Leave my husband's souvenirs, my mother's Bechstein and silver?
That's unthinkable!" Mother exclaimed.
^ Lvov shrugged wearily. "Then we must stay here and face the mu
sic; we may all be killed, but then again we may not. Who knows? As
a true theosophist "
This was my cue. "Theosophy be hanged!" said I. "We are all
doomed here. Every Soviet spy in the neighborhood saw you in your
splendid uniform; every errand boy knows that you are rooming with
us; our family has been identified with the White regime. Even if they
CAME THE REVOLUTION 57
don't kill us here, life anywhere else would be better. If we stay on,
Alex and I will lose all our teeth, Mother will sell her last diamonds,
and I won't have the strength to write my music and poetry. We must
go, please, please!"
The colonel tugged his mustache, shrugged again, and said that the
decision was up to Mother; that nothing so absurd as my artistic pur
suits should influence this momentous decision in the lives of four peo
ple. This made me boil with indignation and I began painting our im
pending doom under the Soviet onslaught so eloquently that Mother
arose somewhat theatrically, her mind made up.
"Lead on, Alexei Fedorovitch; your opinion as to my son's talents
is immaterial to me, although I regret that you are not sufficiently mu
sical to appreciate his promise as a composer. Since my husband's
death I live only for my boys; although my possessions are dear to me,
they are nothing weighed against my sons' future lives. I am grateful
for your offer and I accept it." A third shrug from the colonel and we
began to pack.
The next day, December 14th, the newspapers were reduced to
half a page, the rest all whitened out by the censors, the rout of the
volunteers obviously in full swing. Mother's decision to entrain to
Odessa was strengthened by the knowledge that my father's brother,
Colonel Ilya Dukelsky, the former shadow of Rasputin, was now in
charge of evacuation in the seaport; the train on which Lvov ar
ranged passage to Odessa for us was the last to leave Kiev, as it turned
out. Mother packed a few essentials under the eagle eye of the colo
nel while I made a tidy bundle of my music manuscripts, collected
poems, and a prized green toothbrush; when the colonel spied this he
sniggered disdainfully and said that at times like this, such superfluous
trivia should not consume space. A prolonged verbal battle ensued,
with Mother and Alex (never a Lvov fan) as my impassioned sec
onds. My precious bundle finally was passed by the colonel and we
closed up our home and stole out into the sickly, silent streets. After
dragging our belongings for several blocks we were hoisted into a
grimy truck, along with other would-be exiles, and driven to the de
serted and blacked-out Kiev railroad station. On Lvov's promised
train, our accommodation was a dirty red carriage with the legend
"40 men, 8 horses" on the door; we were grudgingly given cramped
space on its floor by the crowded occupants. Thank God, there were
no horses.
CHAPTER V
ODESSA
THE TRAIN to Odessa started forward with a weary whine
after three or four violent preliminary jerks, stealthily deserting
Kiev's icy, blacked-out station. Mother, Colonel Lvov, Alex and I
crouched together, surrounded by a suffocating mass of human bod
ies, whose combined warmth heightened the acrid smells reminis
cent of the boxcar's former horse-tenants. Male and female, old and
young, sturdy and disease-stricken, the fur-clad bodies crouched or
stretched out about us in a sleepy stupor, some of the faces wrapped
in bashlyks (hoodlike woolen scarves) vaguely familiar to us.
Mother tried to keep from crying for her abandoned home. Alex
and I had some pangs about never again seeing the citizens of Sob-
atchania, who were now locked up in the 1880 cupboard in the hall,
and we wondered what boys would be appropriating our animal books
in the musty little library; but when you're sixteen, you are blissfully
aware that your life is before you, and leaving the familiar for the un
known is a challenge to be relished.
The train was maddeningly slow, stopping not only at all stations,
but countless times between stations; something always seemed to be
going wrong there was much signaling and shouting which was
hard to make out through our one, high boxcar window. At stations,
the train groaned and squeaked to a stop and we opened the doors to
the frosty air, searched for the sign bearing the station's name, and
were sometimes rewarded by the sight of a stationmaster swinging a
welcoming lamp while a howling group of babas (peasant women),
coifed in their traditional kerchiefs (peculiarly known to American
women as "babushkas," which in Russian is grandmother) , and their
raggedy children engaged in lively trade with the hungry passengers.
Their wares were none too appetizing pickles, bublicks (bagels)
ODESSA 59
and sometimes hard-boiled eggs, at outrageous prices; the crafty
peasants contemptuously refused the "Kerenka" (Kerensky's rubles)
and the Denikin banknotes in high denominations and clamored for
articles of clothing or jewelry. As in Kiev, Alexis and I scouted for
boiling water, which cost more at each succeeding station.
In the bandit-infested areas the train was completely blacked-out;
Greens, Yellows and even Blacks (anarchists) prowled for rich
boorjoois to loot, killing Denikin officers and raping their women.
Our train was twice held up by those blood-curdling Eastern counter
parts of the James brothers, but our car miraculously escaped, leav
ing us in a bad fright, trying to curb some typically high-powered Rus
sian feminine hysterics. Cauchemar (nightmare) was one of my
mother's favorite words in normal circumstances (she had even ap
plied it to Pauline's cooking on occasion) , and now the poor woman
was quite beside herself with terror.
The trip became a cauchemar in earnest when an epidemic of
typhus broke out. The entire car was kept awake one night by the
cries and convulsions of a man lying next to me, who died in agony at
dawn. There were no provisions or time for burial; four of us heaved
him onto a snowbank when the train stopped between stations. The in
fection spread, and two former inhabitants of our apartment building
in Kiev had to be left at a country hospital; we shuddered at leaving
them without proper doctors or medicine, but it was their only hope.
Although we were suspicious of Alex's condition for a while, none of
our quartet caught the typhus.
The journey from Kiev to Odessa, which ordinarily took about
twenty hours, lasted for fifteen days. We arrived unspeakably dirty
and ridden with lice and other vermin and set out to find my paternal
Uncle Ilya to put ourselves under his powerful protection. Colonel
Ilya Vladimirovitch Dukelsky held the ominous title of Head of Evac
uation of the City of Odessa; obviously the persons whom he was to
evacuate were the Denikin Volunteers. These erstwhile "liberators"
were being pushed back into the Black Sea by the other self-styled
"liberators," the Bolsheviks; but my Uncle Ilya and his fellow White
officers, in that last overconfident month of 1919, seemed bent only
on evacuating boredom and pessimism.
We were shown to the portico of 8 Deribasovskaya Street, a splen
did private house commandeered by the Denikin headquarters for
Ilya's use, and were startled to hear the impassioned sounds of a gypsy
60 PASSPORT TO PARIS
chorus backed up by an apparently sizable balalaika orchestra,
ample proof that Uncle Ilya had transplanted his lavish St. Petersburg
bacchanalia to Odessa. Mother and Colonel Lvov exchanged out
raged glances before ringing the bell. The door was flung open by a
massive orderly, who examined our tattered quartet with surprised
distaste. Mother, in a proud if tremulous voice, delivered the informa
tion that we were his master's relatives, and after scratching his head,
the orderly went off to interrupt the festivities with the news of our ar
rival.
Ilya Vladimirovitch appeared, a little unsteady on his feet, his eyes
bloodshot, but elegantly uniformed and full of good perhaps a little
too good cheer. His dissipations had aged him terribly, his glossy
mustache had given way to unbecoming Edwardian side whiskers and
his hair was now shot with untidy gray. After kissing us with caution
and shaking hands ceremoniously with Lvov, he scowled, "Good
heavens, Niura!" (Mother's family nickname.) "You must be cov
ered with lice and bugs, you poor tilings! Come now, I'll order hot
baths for you all and find some clean clothing. I'll drop in later to be
sure you are comfortable."
"Aren't you going to talk to us for a moment, Ilya?" Mother ques
tioned indignantly. "We aren't untouchables, you know. You don't
know what we have gone through, escaping from our Kiev hell!"
Ilya stammered embarrassedly, "Yes, yes, of course. Only you see
a few friends dropped in for supper, so I'm afraid I must . . ."
Mother sighed, "Very wdl, Ilya, don't worry about us. Hot water,
soap, and a change of clothing will be heavenly. We'll talk when you
are free."
Ilya smiled, patted me on the head, and went back to the "few
friends," who were now dancing with the hard-working, hired gyp
sies. Upstairs, we four had luxurious baths with stinging-hot water,
pungent yellow soap, and outsized turkish towels; then we slipped into
clean robes and were served chicken bouillon, as well as precious
white bread and fresh butter. We said our prayers and happily flopped
into four separate beds without waiting for Uncle Ilya's promised
visit. He apologized the next morning for not breaking away, but we
learned that it had been a birthday celebration for his Siberian mis
tress and therefore a special occasion.
"Odessa Mama" as the popular ditty had it, was an enchanting
town. Far less Russian than Kiev or Moscow (the French, the Greeks
ODESSA 61
and the Italians played important roles in its history) , the place had an
almost Mediterranean indolence and subtropical languor.
Having soon discovered that Uncle Ilya's temporary palace was
no suitable place for us it was heavy with the colonel's amorous
intrigues and almost nightly "celebrations" Alex and I were sent
into the streets on insignificant but, to us, most attractive errands. My
passion for fldnerie (a sort of inspired strolling dear to the literary
Frenchman), already begun in Tzarskoe Sielo, St. Petersburg and
Moscow, was now being indulged hourly and, since my sturdy brother
was equally fond of walking, we soon explored the town very thor
oughly indeed.
In the realm of music instruction, Gliere was now replaced by
Vitold Malishevsky, a good-looking youngish Pole, then director of
the Odessa Conservatory. Like Gliere of foreign origin, Malishevsky
also like Gliere adhered strictly to the Belaiev group and wrote
(in Diaghilev's phrase) "samovar and red boots" music. This music
was no better and no worse than the productions of the Belaiev minor
gods. Malishevsky's fastidious taste, however, led him to tinker with a
little Debussy-and-water on the side. In appearance and manner he
somewhat resembled that great charmer Karol Szymanovski; they both
had (if you'll forgive the too-easy gag) that irresistibly Polish polish,
catlike suavity and softness of speech. They subsequently succeeded
one another as director of the Warsaw Conservatory in the days prior
to the Communist annexation of their country. To Malishevsky I
brought some highly spiced songs which he professed to like. One of
them (salvaged from Kiev and now adorning one of my walls) is per
haps the first really decent piece I wrote, and Malishevsky praised it
unreservedly; another ("Like the White Swans" was the title) in
trigued him chiefly because of its inhuman range. "Why do you insist
on making the poor soprano hit high C's all the time?" Malishevsky
asked me. My answer was typical of my early cockiness: "Because I
only want good singers to sing my music and bad singers can't hit a
C." Malishevsky burst out laughing and took me under his wing.
During the day, I studied the counterpoint problems set me by Ma
lishevsky, and at night the bizarre human patterns of my Uncle Ilya's
menage, which my mother considered distressingly unorthodox.
Ilya's two favorites of the moment were the Siberian beauty Olga
Stepanovna and an ample seductress named Claudia Mikhailovna,
who had a most melodious laugh, an irresistible habit of squinting sen-
62 PASSPORT TO PARIS
suously and a laudable capacity for taking on all comers. One of
these, the tiny but muscular dandyish Goulaiev, was the classical "life
of the party" Russian, and prided himself on outsinging, outdancing,
and outdrinking them all. After warbling "To the Darling Women," a
cavalier's serenade I always thought insufferable, he drank cham
pagne out of his chosen lady-of-the-evening's slipper, then led her to
one of the cozy Persian divans for more concentrated gallantries.
Olga and Claudia detested one another and, to make things worse,
Uncle Ilya was of extremely jealous nature and, with truly gendarme-
like persistence, spied on Olga, occasionally even stooping to ques
tioning us boys about her comings and goings. Alas, the Siberian siren
considered poor Ilya an "old man," while availing herself of his gener
osity, and to irk him further, embarked on an energetic flirtation with
a sixteen-year-old boy myself. This was both flattering and terrify
ing to me; I was clearly no match for the athletic and amoral bans
vivants of Ilya's entourage, so, to assert myself, I began showering the
lady with amorous sonnets. On receiving these tokens of my adora
tion, the heartless Olga would read them aloud to her circle, punc
tuating her delivery with mocking laughter. Some of my rhyming
proved surprisingly ingenious, which the younger men grudgingly ad
mitted, but Ilya was not at all amused and complained to Mother;
she, in turn, took my poetic offerings very seriously and even remon
strated with Olga, asking her to leave me alone.
In the evening, when the balalaika orchestra was unavailable, I
would be pressed into service, rattling off polkas, tangos, and the in
creasingly popular American two-steps. The nearer the Reds came
to Odessa, the more worried and despondent Ilya's group became,
and the nightly orgies grew more frantic and noisy in our false oasis of
pleasure.
An American enlisted man, Corporal Krouglov, who had been born
in Russia, was one of the lions at these soir&es dansantes* Krouglov
was a huge bear of a man whose hands, big as Smithfield hams, could
have crushed the puny poets who had long sung of "gentlemen cow
boys" and now found themselves uncomfortably deserted by the ladies
in favor of a living personification of their super-virile dream prince.
With his colorful, broad-brimmed hat, cavalry boots, and Sam Browne
belt, since discarded by the U.S. Army, his impressive position with
the American Red Cross, and his exaggerated nasal twang, "Big Jim"
Kroughlov succeeded in conquering all hearts in Ilya's harem.
ODESSA 63
Things soon assumed an unpleasantly familiar pattern. The News
From the Front section in the Odessa newspapers began to resemble a
chessboard with so many white quadrangles. Our "valiant allies,"
mostly in the shape of French sailors with their gay pompons, Sena-
galese infantry of the flashing white teeth and shining black faces,
phlegmatic Britishers, were still about, but we began to suspect that
they were there to protect their own interests rather than Denikin's.
Mother attempted to interrogate Uncle Ilya on this unhappy turn of
events, but, beyond references to "our brilliant leader, General Dem-
kin" and "our valiant allies" got nothing out of him. Poor Ilya was too
preoccupied with Olga's perfidies to bother about the political scene.
Mother's younger brother, Nicholas, a rising gynecologist, appeared
at 8 Deribasovskaya and declared that he was desperately in love
with one of his patients the young wife of a rich manufacturer
and "wouldn't budge." Plenty of budging was quietly going on all
around us, with journalists, doctors, businessmen and just plain spec
ulators offering large bribes to captains and first mates of various
commercial vessels stationed in Odessa port, for transportation for
themselves and their families to the Crimea, where the courageous
Baron Wrangel was still firmly entrenched, or far-off Constantinople,
at the other end of our own Black Sea.
Krouglov was now too busy at the American Red Cross head
quarters to bother further with Ilya's women. He needed a few English-
speaking lads to help him guard his organization's warehouses in the
port, and since I had a smattering of English and since among Krou-
glov's promises was space on a transport bound for Constantinople,
I eagerly volunteered. When Krouglov, with a skeptical glance at my
frail physique, asked whether I could handle a gun, I lied by replying
in the affirmative. I was given a rusty Enfield rifle, an American khaki
uniform, and a Red Cross armband. Every evening we young volun
teers (there were seven or eight) were picked up by a Red Cross
truck and taken to the port, there to stand watch, report possible dis
turbances and shoot at sight, if necessary. This last possibility was
purely academic in my case, as I didn't know how to hold the rifle
correctly, let alone fire it. However, what I missed in knowledge and
experience, I made up in bluff a formula I often relied upon with
satisfactory results, and Krouglov soon told Mother that I was a will
ing worker and a model sentry. Luckily, outside of a sailors' brawl or
two and some shots that occasionally rang out nearby but caused no
64 PASSPORT TO PARIS
damage, there was no trouble and I was never put to the test of using
my Enfield.
A few days later, the city of Odessa awoke to the sounds of heavy
bombing, and on rushing into the street, we beheld posters on which
were printed a prikaz (order) calling for a general and immediate
evacuation. The prikaz was signed by a general unknown to us, not by
poor Ilya, who either resigned or was relieved of his duties. The flight
to transports, barges, small passenger steamers and even private
yachts, now requisitioned by the Denikin command, was on in ear
nest. Krouglov summoned "his boys" and told us that we were to guard
the warehouses as usual that night and, in the early morning, round up
a half-dozen senior officers and escort them to the small Spanish
transport Navaho, a disreputable old tub already familiar to us. To my
dismay, I read the name of Uncle Ilya on the list handed us by
Krouglov. Did this mean that he was under some form of arrest? As
Krouglov later explained, the senior officers on the list were heavily
involved in anti-Bolshevik activities and ran the risk of being slaugh
tered by the Soviet underlings, even before the Red Army's entrance
into Odessa, expected momentarily. We teen-age boys were thus en
trusted with the task of protecting the lives of professional military
men, veterans of many battles. When I told my uncle, already irked
by my attentions to Olga, that we had orders to escort him and his fel
low officers on board the Navaho, he shrugged wearily without looking
at me. "It's a sad farce," he muttered. "It is also the end of everything
for us all; good thing that Niura has a few diamonds left." These were
the last three diamonds Mother still owned, and she was constantly
inventing new and unusual methods of hiding them should we have to
flee Russia.
That last long night on duty in the port was bitterly cold and there
was a thick layer of ice on the bay. The ceaseless bombing reached
closer and closer. Our sentry duty passed uneventfully, except for
handing a few prowling drunks over to the port police. At dawn we
were served steaming coffee in big mugs and coarse black-bread
sandwiches with country bacon; thus fortified, we were started off
with the detailed itinerary of our "round-up.*' We must have been a
strange sight seven or eight undersized boys, dressed in American
uniforms far too large for us, stepping along the deserted streets of the
besieged city brandishing useless rifles.
We learned at our first stop what an awkward errand we were dis-
ODESSA 65
charging; the first to be picked up was a middle-aged general, who
was dead drunk and furious when he learned our mission. He called us
every name in the unwritten military dictionary, but followed meekly
enough when threatened with arrest. Another man, a fat colonel,
had to be forcibly parted from the blowzy mistress who was in bed
with him. After a prolonged wrangle he dropped his demand that she
be allowed to accompany him, and invoking hell's fire on Lenin,
Trotsky, and the American Red Cross, walked out, ignoring the
piercing screams of the deserted girl. None of the officers relished
having to march, unshaven and unkempt, convoyed by scrawny
youths, especially Uncle Ilya, who smoked furiously, stalking disdain
fully ahead.
^ Krouglov had arranged that Mother, Alex, Colonel Lvov, and the
"Ilya regulars" were to be driven to the port; when my procession
reached there I was unable to search for them as we were under or
ders not to leave our officers until they were safely escorted on board
the Navaho.
The port presented a spectacle worthy of Hogarth or Dore at their
cruelest; literally thousands of frenzied citizens pushed and kicked
madly, all codes of decency abandoned, with men fighting women,
lost children howling in a maze of luggage, bundles, and even furni
ture, with no one to organize the unwieldy mob and hold it in check.
Two larger transports were loaded to the point of danger, and the rest
of the raging humanity apparently was to be squeezed into the rat-
eaten entrails of the decrepit Navaho. Krouglov appeared at last,
energetic and unruffled as ever, and ordered us boys with our charges
"to wait until everyone else gets aboard."
Suddenly furious shooting started nearby, and we learned that the
Soviet cavalry was entering the Port of Odessa. Ours would be the last
ship to leave, and the crowd knew that the ship was their only hope of
avoiding mass slaughter. The scene that ensued was unforgettable.
The danger-obsessed crowd crushed itself on board the creaking
ship, we boys followed and were ordered to remain on deck ready to
shoot if necessary. The captain ordered full speed ahead; the rusty en
gines gave one tortured screech and then stopped. The ice in the
bay had us marooned, and the Soviet cavalry was bearing down upon
us. Luckily, the ship next to us, the St. Andrew, an old Imperial Navy
ice-breaker, pushed ahead, cracking the ice, with the Navaho fol
lowing like a scared Eliza out of range of the Soviet's hounds.
66 PASSPORT TO PARIS
We had a hellish trip, as the Navaho was built to hold cargo, not a
crowd of human beings; without a proper balance in the hold, the
ship rolled from side to side with each wave, tossing us and our belong
ings about like oranges hi a sorter.
There was a blinding snowstorm (the first of its kind hi twenty-three
years) as we started across the Black Sea. The storm subsided, but an
impenetrable fog reared and the captain was unable to see the proper
course when we reached the Bosporus Straits. With the lives of all on
board ship in his hands, the captain made three stabs at finding the
opening, each time running into a blank wall of fog, the waves sky-
high, and the ship barely recovering with its dangerous list. After the
third failure, the man locked the door to his cabin and shot himself.
He was replaced by a young sailor, who gambled on finding the gate
as we were more likely to be bashed against the rocks if no positive
move was made quickly.
The sailor took the wheel, closed his eyes, and ordered, "Full speed
ahead!" Death never seemed closer to any of us. A slight lurch
the ship shuddered, and suddenly glided forward as smoothly as if it
were on the surface of a Swiss lake. "We made it, we made it!" went
up the cry, and most of us ran on deck to verify the miracle. We
stood in the clear January air screaming our lungs out with joy the
blue Bosporus, soothing and serene, just as advertised.
CHAPTER VI
TURKISH DELIGHT
ONSTANTINOPLE decorated both shores of the canal-like Bos-
porus in Turkish-delight technicolor. The Navaho stopped dead
in the middle of the anchored vessels proud British battleships, glis
tening luxury steamers, weather-beaten tankers none as unkempt as
our old tub.
"What now? Why are we stopping?" The exhausted passengers
stretched their necks inquisitively, like so many hungry turkeys. The
word went around that we were halted until the immigration and
health officials decided our fate. With the chronic inconsistence of the
human race, the horrors of the trip from Odessa were forgotten, and
the bourgeois dowagers, used to lording it over husbands, children
and servants, started bitching at their new status as unwanted refu
gees as if it were the worst blow of all. We "Red Cross Boys" re
turned our rifles to the genial Krouglov, got into a hot huddle and
began bitching, too. We demanded to know if his promises of sanctu
ary were to be broken, but Krouglov waved us away and went off to
his shipboard flame, a pale young baroness who looked like a poodle
in need of a haircut. She was munching dejectedly on oversalted
canned corned beef, washing it down with sickly condensed milk, the
two staples of the Navaho cuisine.
The only man on board who appeared unperturbed by our deten
tion was the musician Oscar von Riesemann (his book on Mussorgsky
is still widely read) ; I joined him to discover the source of his detach
ment from the all-Russian bedlam. A tall, Baltic baron in a lamb's-
wool papakha (Cossack cap), von Riesemann drawled pleasantly:
"I don't mind this a bit. The Bosporus is very decorative, and who
knows what the Turks or our so-called allies have in store for us?
Let's talk music."
68 PASSPORT TO PARIS
He told me about his old friend Rachmaninov; how he played the
whole series of Scriabin sonatas (ten of them) at a Moscow concert
and at the conclusion slumped wearily on the piano, oblivious of the
deafening applause; how young Prokofiev, in tails and monocle, had
then dashed onstage and slapped Rachmaninov on the back, exclaim
ing: "Well played, old man!"
Oscar chuckled as he recalled the scathing review critic Leonide
Sabaneiev published the morning after the announced premiere in
Moscow of the Scythian Suite by Prokofiev (Sabaneiev's bete
noire) . The Prokofiev performance had been canceled as the orchestra
parts failed to arrive in time.
Von Riesemann was extolling the composing talents of Issay
Dobrowen, a Moscow name unfamiliar to me, who has since acquired
a reputation as a conductor rather than as a composer. Meanwhile a
snappy black-and-gold tugboat, with the red-and-white Turkish flag
fluttering its star and crescent on the mast, secured itself alongside us,
and discharged the long-awaited and dreaded officials. Two were doc
tors in red-and-green uniforms, a third was the immigration officer,
and with them a bearded civilian who acted as interpreter.
The entire ship's company was ordered to line up for a medical ex
amination and a searching inquiry into each individual's political,
military, financial, and family status. This was old stuff to us, veterans
of nineteen Kiev regimes.
The inspection lasted several hours and uncovered two typhus vic
tims among the passengers. We were to be quarantined right in the
middle of the Bosporus for three days, and then dispersed to one of
the four islands in the straits known as the "Princes."
The three days went by swiftly enough. The American Red Cross
supplied more corned beef and canned milk, a few crafty merchants
from Constantinople sneaked on board and tempted us with gazos
(bottled lemonade), halvah, rahat-lokoum, and genuine berry-red
Turkish fezes with black tassles. The matrons went on with their
verbal hair-pulling, Krouglov paid court to Olga, Claudia, and the
baroness, Mother and Colonel Lvov talked theosophy, and Alex and
I speculated as to whether I had been justified in tearing the family
away from Kiev. There was wild talk that the Allies would ship all
refugees back to Odessa; that the valiant General Wrangel had be
gun a major counteroffensive and was headed straight for Moscow;
and that those of us who couldn't be accommodated on the Prince
TURKISH DELIGHT 69
islands would be sent to the dreaded Dogs' Island, to be eaten alive
by the thousands of wild dogs imprisoned there by Constantinople's
governor.
Of the Prince islands, Prinkipo was the largest and most luxurious,
Halki was the next best, and Proti the smallest, poorest and dirtiest.
With the customary Dukelsky luck we were assigned to Proti. Our
group, led by Krouglov, consisted of the four Dukelskys (including
Uncle Ilya), Colonel Lvov, the rival crooners Dolinsky and Nyegin
(Goulaiev's stage name), the rival courtesans Olga and Claudia, the
ex-General Pestrikov, our uncle's crony, who was darkly plotting a
diamond coup, the languid baroness with her fourteen-year-old, husky
son, and a sociable couple, the Berestnevs (who later settled in Bos
ton, Massachusetts).
A small American cutter transported us to the barren, torturously
hilly island of Proti. An old Greek monastery on the hilltop, con
verted to a military hospital, was to be our new quarters. The rooms
were all filled with officer patients, so we were stationed in a corridor,
men at one end and women at the other. We were supplied with cots,
linen and blankets, and individual clothes lockers. Men and women
were issued drab semimilitary olive-green uniforms, particularly
shocking on the formerly highly decorated general and Uncle Ilya.
The corridor of our "Krouglov crowd," as we were becoming known,
opened on a meager garden featuring olive trees which never ab
sorbed enough vitality from the poor soil to produce olives.
As soon as we were settled, the usual Russian intrigues and squab
bles began. Olga, Claudia, and the baroness gossiped behind each
other's backs about their sex adventures, until they nobly decided to
serve as hospital aides; Uncle Ilya and Pestrikov whispered about the
diamond market in dark corners and found a way of sneaking into
Constantinople daily; Dolinsky and Nyegin sighed over the loss of
their "public" and the good old days; and Alex and I spent most of
our time on Proti sick in bed, with Mother worrying over us.
Life on the wretched island was bleak enough, but viewed from a
hospital cot, it was so desolate that I was inspired to write long pes
simistic poems in the genre known to the French as larmoyant. One
of them started with the fatalistic line: "I want to die as simply as
possible," which was a poetic exaggeration as I had no intention of
dying but was merely sick of being sick.
Mother met the director of the Constantinople YMCA through
70 PASSPORT TO PARIS
some American theosophist friends and was asked to help out with
the Russian Lighthouse, a club for refugees organized by the YMCA
in Pera, the European quarter of Constantinople. I was finally cured
of my nth disease and given a lamer passer so that we might leave
humble Proti, unsung by any travelogue commentator for its barren
hills, stubborn donkeys, undernourished trees, and the largest bedbugs
known to man. We had learned there, though, that when an Oriental
shook his head he meant "yes," and when he nodded energetically,
often emphasizing the nod with a crisp "tsk," he was saying "no."
The white, villalike Lighthouse in Rue de Brousse became our
headquarters. The ground floor contained the offices of the American
director and lesser employees, along with a well-appointed gym. A
wide marble staircase led to the dining hall and library, with an ad
joining salon of considerable elegance. The salon boasted an excellent
Steinway as it was sometimes used as a chamber-concert hall, and this
became my personal haunt. The third floor was given over to a "pro
gressive" kindergarten, and as Mother was good with children and
they loved her, she was soon put in charge of the other nursery
teachers. Our sojourn at the Lighthouse brought much-needed com
fort and harmony into our lives and has left me with a high regard for
the YMCA's kindly policies.
I was not so much attracted by the universally known landmarks
of Constantinople the Aya Sophia, the Golden Horn, the intermin
able staircase which was used as a street to lead into the mercantile
Galata from our district of Pera; it was the mysterious zigzagging
sidestreets which intrigued me, peopled with masked matriarchs stol
idly sitting on the curbs, vendors hawking pungent foods and liquids
in fiercely polytonal counterpoint while whipping their donkeys
along, bearded philosophers in white-tiled caf6s tugging at their
waterpipes or sipping the vile duziko, the baby lambs being roasted
on a spit right in the street and being eaten without benefit of cut
lery, the terrifying fat whores in Galata, their faces immobile and
grotesquely painted, their bodies like gallons of inferior vanilla ice
cream, squatting in cages to be gaped at by pencil-slim American
sailors.
Along the Galata staircase you could buy Siberian furs, trained
fleas, pornographic postcards whose salesmen extolled their delights
with coloraturalike commercials, violins played cello fashion, bleating
clarinets and crazily cackling records of Turkish, Armenian and
TURKISH DEUGHT 71
Greek hits of the moment (the Greek ones always tangos, for no
conceivable reason), the heavy buttocks of black-silk-clad Armenian
belles and their heavy blacker-than-olive eyes overweight women
being a specialty of the Orient. These Levantine curios mingled hap
pily with Longines watches and Walk-over shoes, dazzling one from
behind their Pera vitrines the Longines and Walk-overs tokens of
their wearers' opulence and forever denied us insolvent refugees.
Mingling with the oriental boulevardiers were strutting, corseted
French officers, bemonocled and faultlessly tailored British officers,
hordes of overfed Greek and Armenian civilians everyone seem
ingly armed with a Longines watch and shod with a pair of freshly
shined Walk-over shoes and the universally despised and impecu
nious Russian refugees like me. I cringed when I saw former
heroes, proud earners of all four Saint George crosses, still bearing
the now-obsolete insignia of no-longer existing regiments, in their
faded and artlessly patched uniforms, ambling aimlessly and shame
facedly along; or worse, Russian women, many of them still pretty,
still hopeful, with the bold flag of Parisian lipstick on parched lips,
an overdose of mascara on their eyes, which had seen too much too
soon, their dresses out of fashion even in Turkey their shoes
pitifully disguised wrecks, who haunted the Grande Rue de Pera at
all hours, window-shopping masochistically. There were grim stories
of our women becoming desperate and essaying prostitution, clandes
tinely and otherwise; the worst one concerned the languid baroness,
Krouglov's erstwhile protegee. Her son, having passed the turbulent
stage of puberty, became urgently aware of his surging maleness,
and went out in the Pera of an evening, in search of feminine com
pany, his mother's five liras firmly in his pocket. After wandering
back and forth along the nocturnally bright Pera, he ventured hesi
tantly into a dimly lit arcade where assorted demoiselles de la nuit
plied their trade, armed with the universal trade-marks outsize all-
purpose handbags and beribboned umbrellas. He ducked several too-
vividly painted harridans and smiled shyly at a fairly ladylike speci
men, dressed in severest black, then approached the tart awkwardly
and opened his mouth to make the usual overtures, when the girl let
out a wild shriek and fled, sobbing it was the boy's mother, the
languid baroness. I quite realize that the anecdote sounds like poor
Maupassant; it is, nevertheless, authentic.
Mother, Alex, and I had moved to a small flat just off Rue de
72 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Brousse at No. 27 Rue Agha-Hamam. Uncle Ilya, up to his ears
in diamonds, including the smallest of Mother's three stones (our
entire fortune), shared a more opulent habitat with Pestrikov, and
Colonel Lvov was quartered at the Russky Mayak (lighthouse).
Mother spent most of the day in her kindergarten, Alex became a
platoon leader in the Russian Boy Scout organization, and I wangled
the job of music supervisor, concert manager and accompanist at the
Saturday concerts of the Mayak; for performing these duties I received
three meals a day and the use of the club facilities, but no money.
My rather flexible position left me with a lot of time on my hands,
and I used it for the purpose of doing nothing most agreeably, when
not composing or arranging the club's programs, hiring the artists
and rehearsing them. Of an evening, Mother and Alex would often
have a meal at home, happy in the family warmth that only new
poverty, intimately shared, gives people, and I occasionally joined
them, sensing my mother's troubled and infinitely loving glance
scanning my face at which I'm ashamed to say, irritation welled
within me. Mother knew I had plenty of free time to gad about,
and she disapproved of most of my new friends. She was right, as
mothers generally are, and I resented her Tightness in the equally
general fashion of recalcitrant sons.
Among my new friends was the son of the famed St. Petersburg
baritone Tartakov; he later became a gypsy singer and conjirencier
in London, and was a "good-time Charlie" from way back. He
struck up an acquaintance with the Sultan's chef and wangled an in
vitation to dinner at the chefs house in Beshiktash for four of us
Russians* The host, a storybook Turk, portly and cordial, greeted us
in a mixture of French and Russian. We sat down to a Babylonian
banquet, the main feature of which was a whole lamb stuffed with
turkey, the turkey with a chicken, the chicken with a quail All
manner of exotic side dishes and international wines and liquors ac
companied this gastronomic surprise package, and as toasts in Turk
ish, French and Russian succeeded each other, each more effusive
than the last, by the time coffee appeared we were all orgiastically
drunk. The host and Tartakov kissed and embraced tearfully and fol
lowed declarations of undying devotion with a peculiarly choreo
graphed and somewhat untidily executed dance, the rest of us con
tented with shouting and clapping our hands. The chief cook, who
did not cook the dinner, now grew positively reckless and summoned
TURKISH DELIGHT 73
his six wives from what I presume was an authentic old-fashioned
harem. The coy young women, unused to such outlandish goings-on,
duly appeared, clad in black and dark purple; at least two of them
were extremely pretty.
I remember dimly, in the mists of my first major alcoholic bout,
reciting one of my Russian poems to the youngest wife, who had the
largest eyes and longest eyelashes I've ever seen; although she didn't
understand a word I said, she nodded her approval. We were initiated
into smoking hashish, and after the six wives honored us with a
stately native dance, parted from our host, declaring our eternal
friendship. I also remember that I was violently sick on leaving the
cook's mansion and was supported by the three fellow gay blades,
who immediately became sick too, and were then supported by me in
turn, and that, finally, I was deposited at my doorstep at 7:30 A.M.
and fell into the anxious arms of Mother, who was getting Alex's
breakfast but had to set it aside to put me to bed.
There were other and similar diversions, but I took my musical
duties at the Mayak very seriously and executed them ably enough.
Constantinople was then rich in refugee talent concert artists, bal
let dancers and opera stars. I remember three of these whose names
all ended with "etz," including Nina Koshetz, a great dramatic singer,
Rachmaninov's proteg6e and later a success in the U.S.A., where she
now lives. These and lesser stars were more than available they
were anxious to appear at the Mayak, because it meant desirable
American contacts and a few Turkish liras.
My poetical pursuits were not abandoned either. Constantinople
was crawling with poets, young and old, and the Mayak was as suit
able a meeting place as any, although it was no Closerie des Lilas and
I was far too young to be a new Jean Moreas. What I lacked in
authority and renown, I made up in nerve, and soon persuaded the
Americans to subsidize a poetic almanac in Russian, with me as editor.
My new status made the poets unbend a little, and they began to
gather in the Mayak salon, armed with poems, some of which were
quite remarkable. Among the older poets was the Quasimodo-like
Valentin Goryansky, a bitterly brilliant satirist, and the enigmatic
Zavyalov, with the massive build of a professional athlete, a rich and
domineering Polish wife, and reams of the most savagely destructive
and violently defeatist poetry ever produced.
There was a significant aftermath to these poetic strivings. On sort-
74 PASSPORT TO PARIS
ing out the various contributions to our proposed almanac, I glimpsed
an unopened blue envelope, addressed to me and marked "Personal."
The arresting thing about the envelope was the startlingly recherche,
baroque calligraphy with which my name was written my name,
not an especially pretty one, literally sang out from the fine blue
paper on which it was so lovingly emblazoned. "A man of taste, ob
viously,** I murmured smugly and opened the letter with the utmost
care, so as not to cause damage to the handiwork of the artistic
sender. The envelope contained three or four poems in the same un
earthly handwriting, poems rather affected, although not uncharm-
ing, dealing mostly with angels and precious stones, and signed
Boris Kochno. I liked one of these verses, something about an emer
ald or sapphire which "sang, nay screamed at me" in the poet's
phrase, and decided to read them that evening to Goryansky, Zavya-
lov and company. My colleagues were more impressed with Mr.
Kochno's calligraphic prowess than his poetic ability, but we decided
to summon the man to one of our gatherings there was something
about that handwriting that made us all eager to see its owner.
The young man (he proved to be almost exactly my age) ap
peared at the appointed time and we had tea in the Mayak salon. I
beheld, for the first time in my life, a faithful replica of a youthful
man-of-fashion an incroyable; Kochno was of good height and
figure, wore a well-tailored sack suit with a great air, sported a
Doucet bowtie and even smoked an English cigarette in a long jade
holder. His face, felinely soft, was quite beautiful, and his voice, al
though undeniably affected, had an ingratiating ring to it. I, who in
tended to give Kochno a piece of our collective minds about his
merely prettyish poetry* was so awed by all this magnificence that I
couldn't go beyond a few urbane politesses in my best, hastily pro
duced, drawing-room manner. Kochno was accompanied by a middle-
aged actor whose heavy-lidded eyes gave him the look of a decadent
Pompeian. He spoke a few words in provincial Russian, his eyes
never leaving Kochno, and after we had exchanged a few urban
nothings, and I had promised "to do something" about the Screaming
Emerald, the pair left. I hardly could foresee that Boris Kochno
would become the scenarist of my two ballets: the Dukelsky Zephyr
and Flora (1925, Diaghilev Ballets Russes, Kochno-Braque-Chanel-
Massine) and the Duke Le Bal des Blanchisseuses (1946, Ballets des
Champs EIys6es, Kochno-Stanislao Lepri-Roland Petit), In 1921
TURKISH DELIGHT 75
Boris stood out chiefly for his looks and clothes, which contrasted
cruelly with the beggars' garb of so many of the others. Yet, I
couldn't help liking and even envying young Boris I, no social
butterfly at that remote time, in my semimilitary olive-green getup; I
kept my promise and did "something" about his Screaming Emerald
gave it to Nicky Slonimsky, who set it to music unhesitatingly and
got Madame Voronetz to sing it at one of our concerts. Boris, impec
cable in dark blue, reappeared with his actor friend, smiled content
edly and left after thanking Slonimsky and the singer. A week or so
later he went off to Paris, where he met Serge Soudeikine, the painter,
and his wife (now Mrs. Igor Stravinsky); they in turn introduced
him to Diaghilev, whose secretary, confidant and librettist he became.
It was here in Constantinople, too, that I met Pierre Souvtchinsky,
the musicologist, magazine publisher and, later, head of the Eurasian
movement (they believed that Russia wasn't either Europe or Asia,
but a continent in itself Eurasia). He listened to some songs of
mine (one of which, "The Wooden Church," is still, I think, an ar
resting piece of music) and displayed considerable enthusiasm, which
was to increase in 1924 with the birth of Zephyr and Flora and give
me a new lease on musical life in 1947, when I reappeared in Paris
with Le Bal des Blanchisseuses and the Third Symphony. Together
Souvtchinsky and I listened to a score by Theodore de Hartmann, a
man with a huge skull and the high-cheekboned face of a Tartar,
who was shortly to form* a symphony orchestra in Constantinople and
give a series of quite respectable concerts.
Nina Koshetz's accompanist, Nicolas Stember, the nephew of Nico
las Medtner, was playing Medtner's effective, if derivative, piano
sonatas and "Fairy Tales" all over town, and I was overjoyed when
he approved of my one-movement G-minor piano sonata, begun in
November, 1920, and completed in April, 1921.
Not all of my musical activities were on so elevated a plane.
Mother was doing her best to keep Alex and me well fed and clothed,
but the proceeds from the diamond sale were quickly gone, and her
salary from the kindergarten was barely sufficient for a Spartan exist
ence. I cast about desperately for a paying job and became a pianist
in a "salon trio" in one of the better Pera restaurants. Slonimsky was
already directing a similar group at Tokatlian's, Constantinople's
most fashionable cafe. We were both fed up with "O Sole Mio, M
Toselli's "Serenade," the "Berceuse" from Jocelyn, "Otchi Tchornya"
76 PASSPORT TO PARIS
and other such stand-bys, without which proper digestion is an im/-
possibility. For an evening's work, my pay was three liras; the job
lasted about two weeks, and then I transferred to a cinema, where I
had to supply suitable accompaniments to "silent" films.
A English colonel visited the restaurant where I held forth with my
violin and cello partners, and engaged me on the spot for a concert
in his barracks. The pay was good but I had no notion of what was
expected of me. On arriving, I found masses of enlisted men, roaring
drunk on Turkish beer, who greeted my entrance with hoarse shouts
and demands for songs like "K-K-K-Katy," "Tipperary" and "For
Me and My Gal," which I knew by heart; after a successful start, I
was urged to play various English folk ballads totally unknown to
me. Here I was seated at the rickety piano, bewildered by the singing,
shouting Tommies, who demanded encore after encore. God alone
knows what I played and how the Tommies were able to follow me,
or I them, but at the end of the evening, the tall cockney sergeant
shook his head and handed me five liras, adding, " 'Ere's yer money,
chum, even if you ain't much good as a pianoforte player."
I always had the enviable ability to talk about a flop as though it
were a hit (it proved most helpful in later years), and told awed
friends of having conquered the British. A young Greek decided that
I was ripe for the British Embassy and arranged for a recital there
with a portly Russian baritone. For this I was to collect ten liras, and
of course we joyously accepted; on the day of the concert it wa$
pointed out to me that we were to dress, meaning white tie. I don't
think I owned a necktie in 1920, white or colored, and as for tails,
they were associated in ray mind with the Russian Imperial Court or
the films. The possibility of my getting into one of those things never
entered my mind. Yet here it was tails or no ten liras, In despair,
I ran to the kind little Greek, who was short and somewhat crippled
and produced a morning coat and striped trousers from his own ward
robe. His tails were at the tailor's, but the morning coat was certainly
formal as hell, so no one could say I was not "correct."
I played my accompaniments looking as if my clothes had been
shrunk in a rainstorm, and at the end of the concert, after warmly
congratulating the baritone, the ambassador dismissed me with a
cool nod* I did get the ten liras, for which I would happily have
dressed in a barrel.
TURKISH DELIGHT 77
That first winter out of Russia I began to function (unofficially
and unprofitably) as Dufcelsky and Duke. I disliked popular songs,
owing, no doubt, to such exponents as Nyegin, and I loathed the
"arty" sex-serenades of the industrious Vertmsky, who was always
popping up unexpectedly. One afternoon after lunch, I saw the orig
inal Moscow Pierrot lolling dandiacally in the Mayak salon, all the
"well-born" waitresses (ex-gentlewomen, naturally) worshipping at
his impeccably shod feet. The master was at his most affable and was
reciting his latest sexotic, as Walter Winchell would have it, rounde
lay. He then distributed engraved cards bearing the legend The Black
Rose, Cabaret Artistique. The Moscow Pierrot had found himself
some well-heeled Armenian Harlequins, and they had provided him
with his own boite. 1 was too young and too poor to frequent such
dens, but I heard a few months later that the authorities staged a raid
in the place and unearthed quantities of cocaine and 100 per cent
syphilis among the lady servants and entertainers. No more Black
Rose.
But the Rose of Jazz, healthy and blooming, was by now firmly
planted on the European shore of the Bosphorus. Mayak patrons be
gan to request "Hindustan," "Tell Me" and "Till We Meet Again."
I promptly purchased all three, also Irving Berlin's earlier successes
and a thing mysteriously entitled "Swanee" by a man improbably
styled Geo. Gershwin. The Berlins were good in their way, but the
Gershwin sent me into ecstacies. The bold sweep of the tune, its
rhythmic freshness and, especially, its syncopated gait, hit me hard
and I became an "early-jazz" fiend. That's not quite what I mean, be
cause (shudder, ye New Orleans purists!) the "real" New Orleans
jazz and the true-blue blues impressed me considerably less. "What
can you expect from a long hair" did I hear you say? Perhaps I can
explain it best by admitting my admiration for the "musicality" and a
composer's inventiveness in young Gershwin, which was (and is)
missing from the "real" thing, largely a collectively produced mood,
anonymous and crude.
Daily I was glued to the piano, wrestling with the new medium.
This was like playing golf, after reading too much Schopenhauer. I
wanted to acquire the knack of writing popular tunes in the American
idiom. The purist will tell you haughtily that it's not jazz at all so
be it; but if "Tea for Two," "The Man I Love," "Night and Day"
78 PASSPORT TO PARIS
and forgive the plug my own "I Can't Get Started With You"
aren't jazz, you can have all the "Tiger Rags" in the world, and wel
come.
My tunes of the Constantinople vintage, 1920-1922, sounded as
if they were in the authentic American jazz idiom, but harmon
ically they weren't. Those first pop songs without lyrics, imitative
of Gershwin and early Jerome Kern, weren't signed Duke or Du~
kelsky: I coined the phony-sounding "Ivan Ivin," later replaced
by the Americanese "Alan Lane." Slonimsky, pounding away at the
Tokatlian, composed a Turkish-American fox trot called "Yok, yok,
effendi" ("No, No, Sir"), the lyric concerning a Turkish girl spurn
ing an "ally." The tune wasn't bad but jerky and a bit "crowded,"
just as my tunes were.
After my job playing at the Turkish cinema evaporated, I donned
a fez and went off for a holiday in Istanbul with some young Mussul
man highbrows. We visited Eyoub, a celestially restful retreat of
white mosques, white-bearded monks, and whiter doves, Boyouk-
Dere, a sumptuous summer resort, and humbler villages where Turks
played wailing jeremiads and snappy, although minor-keyed, two-
quarter-tirae dance tunes. The native bands included the already-men
tioned violins played cello fashion, the oud (like a mandolin), the
kanoun (a forty-stringed instrument played with two picks), and the
zourna (a clarinetlike reed thing).
The outcome of these agreeable wanderings was three Turkish
songs, which I harmonized, and which my Turkish friends succeeded
in having published by Pera's Maison Andr<. One of the three songs
was "Telgirafin Tellerine," a song about the beginnings of the tele
graph in Turkey, with which I can still liven up any Moslem gather
ing.
New faces appeared at the Lighthouse; Pavlik Tchelitchev for one,
now a distinguished painter, then an apple-cheeked Adonis fond of
exuberant laughter and good-natured practical jokes. He was a few
years older than I and easily sold me some cock-and-bull stories about
vicious Orientals lying in wait for me, 300-pound Galata belles plot
ting to seduce me, etc, I met the dancers Zimin and Kniasev (Kniasev
was later choreographer for de Basil and married to the great Spessi-
vizeva), who were both dancing at Constantinople caf6s at that time,
Zimin partnered Italian ballerina Bianca Fosca and asked me to
create an oriental ballet for him. The title was Conte d'une Nuit
TURKISH DELIGHT 79
Syrienne (Tale of a Syrian Night) and the music minor-league
Scheherazade-cum-Glazunov. Tchelitchev designed Bakst-like sets
and costumes, I wrote out parts for the eight- or nine-piece orchestra,
and the premiere at the Theatre des Petits-Champs (in 1921) was
fairly well received. Soon after, Tchelitchev left for Germany, where
he wound up designing sets for the Berlin Opera House.
Things seemed to be humming on all fronts, except the lowly, but
important, carnal domain. My adolescent technique of reciting verse
to the belle of the moment and then progressing to sentimental kisses
was a signal flop, because girls who liked poetry usually stopped
right there and those who had designs on me (a distinct minority)
didn't see any point in poetry prior to going to bed. Alas, it was the
going to bed that I dreaded, because, having adopted the pose of &
jaded rake, I was ashamed of my anatomical status, which was certain
to betray me. One uninhibited female, daughter of a naval officer,
cut me short in the middle of a fancy ode, and proceeded to take oS
her clothes, complying realistically with the urgent entreaties of my
verses. After a perfunctory caress or two, I invented some cockeyed
excuse and fled, cursing my ode, the cause of my predicament.
More of our relatives arrived with the supporters of Baron Wran-
gel, who had finally been beaten out of Crimea. Uncle Irakly (Prince
Toumanov), with a new wife and two infant sons, Uncle Nicholas's
divorced wife, Aunt Genia and her son Yura, a handsome naval cadet,
and my mother's brother Professor Alexis Kopylov, all appeared in
Constantinople on their way elsewhere. Yura died of consumption at
sixteen, in Gallipoli, where his naval academy was transplanted.
Uncle Alexis and his wife, Aunt Liza, went to Poland, where they
owned land. Prince Toumanov began to talk rhapsodicaUy of the
United States.
My artist friends such as Kochno, Tchelitchev, and others, were al
ready in Belgrade, Sophia, or Paris. Constantinople began to seem
like an outmoded health resort, peopled with dull patients.
A benevolent YMCA official offered to help Alex get a scholarship
in a good New England prep school (Cushing Academy in Ashburn-
ham, Massachusetts, made famous by its alumna Bette Davis). No
one offered me an education, as I was reasonably if sketchily ed
ucated but I was convinced that the United States couldn't get along
without me. Mother began losing her favorite pupils as their parents
deserted Turkey, Colonel Lvov was directed to American theosophist
80 PASSPORT TO PARIS
contacts, and Uncle Irakly threw his princely weight around with the
caste-conscious officials at the U.S.-sponsored Robert College, where
he lectured.
Our collective merits were weighed, the hard-earned immigration
visas supplied, and we sailed for New York on the not-so-good Greek
ship King Alexander in the autumn of 1921.
CHAPTER VII
THE BAD OLD DAYS
THE KING ALEXANDER, of German origin, was a ship of
about 22,000 tons displacement, cleanly scrubbed and reeking
of disinfectants the genteel refugee smell. Here again were squeal
ing children, the anxious eyes of their mothers bent on delivering
their offspring into the bountiful arms of the legendary Statue of
Liberty, unwashed journalists, pseudo-poets and gloomy bourgeois,
peering unhappily at their companions of the voyage, who at least
had their youth, and therefore no recollections of former comforts
and riches. We traveled third class, bunk fashion, and the trip from
Piraeus to New York took exactly one month.
Life aboard the King Alexander wasn't very different from the one
we had led on Proti; but the food was plentiful and devoid of corned
beef and condensed milk, and the faces around us were good old
faces. Colonel Lvov went on meditating merrily in the best Blavat-
sky fashion; the Berestnevs danced the one-step without musical ac
companiment; and Mother, when not suffering from seasickness,
watched us tirelessly, as if to make sure that we were there intact, with
no new dangers confronting us. There were no dangers to speak of,
except a huge Armenian diamond merchant, a San Franciscan of
recent vintage, who endeavored to initiate me into the joys of homo
sexuality after ensnaring me into a Turkish bath. His entreaties had an
unforeseen result I laughed myself sick at his amorous antics, which
so disconcerted him that he cursed me in Armenian and returned to
his ablutions.
Our delight at the first appearance of the yellowish-green Jersey
shore and the bluish-green Rubensian lady, identified with the free
dom and self-respect so long denied us, was as vociferous and spon
taneous as that of so many previous generations of immigrants. There
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was one difference Russians used to flee from the czar, we fled
from the czar's murderers. Ellis Island was Proti on a miniature
scale, with fewer trees and darker inmates, rather like a rehearsal of
Scheherazade in a hospital. The immigration officials were surpris
ingly kind, everybody talked like Krouglov and, the usual formalities
over, we were released into the New York streets, Mother proudly
clasping her hard-won first papers, which were issued automatically
to each legally entered immigrant. Alexis and I were too young to
have separate papers, so we were included in Mother's.
The Manhattan skyline in 1921 was not as impressive as the 1955
one, but we spent most of the first three days craning our necks and
just gaping. Mother, who had passed her fortieth birthday, would
not part with her favorite hat an odd straw number with arti
ficial flowers and a dark-green velvet ribbon tied under her chin
shepherdess style. This hat had been purchased from a Kiev modiste
just after the revolution, and I suffered agonies encountering ironic
glances and even sneers from uninhibited passers-by, startled by such
ludicrous headgear. Mother was unaware of this silent censure, so busy
was she watching us protectively as if afraid that we would be
crushed by the granite towers around us.
New York seemed even dirtier than Constantinople, but there was
electricity and feverish promise in the air. The town was new, un
gainly and cockily, awkwardly young, rather like a wolfhound pup
with legs too long for the rest of his body not only the town's
legs, but also the girls' were interminable, straight and perfect, like
so many miniature skyscrapers. The girls' small, birdlike heads under
the absurdly close-fitting cloches, the vogue of the day, were lit up by
shining eyes and teeth, exactly like so many electric signs suddenly
flashing up on Broadway at night. Like all wonders of the world,
the skyscrapers, along with the Paris Eiffel Tower and the Tower
of London, completely lost their fascination after a few days, but
Broadway at night was an awesome sight, nowhere equaled on earth,
On the suggestion of our YMCA protectors, we put up at a small
ish (by New York standards), though comfortable, businessmen's
hotel on Madison Avenue near 3 1st Street. Alex and I, left to our own
devices on the first afternoon, amused ourselves by examining the
big, fat, telephone book with a red cover. We chanced on the
letter "M" and discovered, to our consternation, that there was a
separate listing for "milliners," which we, with our imperfect knowl-
THE BAD OLD DAYS 83
edge of English, took to mean "millionaires." "God, there are so
many of them!" exclaimed Alex. "And they all seem to have foreign
names," I chimed in incredulously. "But where are the Rockefellers
and the Vanderbilts?"
The next morning Alex and I went off to Central Park, a rather
disappointing place, the trees poor and anemic-looking the sur
rounding tall buildings seemed to squeeze all the juice from the
joyless oasis. The park's meager charms failed to dampen my spirits.
Seized by a strange fervor, I pranced about the hilly slopes, singing
one of my Constantinople refrains at the top of my lungs. "What's
that?" Alex queried skeptically. "I like Irving Berlin." Whereupon he
whistled Berlin's newest air, then all the rage. "Oh, you do! Well, I'll
outdo Berlin, just you wait and see," I retorted. I'm afraid this
prophecy is still unfulfilled, and Mr. Berlin, whom I met many
years later, was never in danger of competition from this source.
There are several New Yorks. There's the amiable pre-Pickwickian
New York of Washington Irving; the elegant, Lady Blessington-
conscious metropolis of the unjustly forgotten Nathaniel Parker Wil
lis; the shopgirl's Manhattan of O. Henry; the immigrant's New York
of Gorky and Korolenko; the merciless monster of a city sung by
John Dos Passos; the hip-flask-flashing, girlish-thigh-revealing, bath
tub-gin-happy, debutante-studded New York of Scott Fitzgerald;
the stately, urbane literateur's club world of Henry James; Max
well Bodenheim's Greenwich Villagey daisy-chain conception of
the big town; the phony nobleman's favorite haunt as depicted by
Ben Hecht; the Harlem-cum-Montparnasse paradise of Carl Van
Vechten; the garment-center slicker's city of Jerome Weidman. We
saw, smelled and tasted a bit of each, but the refined Upper West Side
brownstone singing teachers' New York, the town of aging ex-prima
donnas of the dyed hair and the drooping gardenia, decked out in
Klein's best, of deadly "musicales" featuring Town Hall ballads and
music-loving Elks and Shriners, of tired chicken salad and tepid
Manhattans, remains unsung, and it's a pity, because it was quite
a place in the twenties, the place to which we were removed from
our Madison Avenue hotel.
Colonel Lvov and Mother sold the last Dukelsky diamond, scanned
the newspaper advertisements and triumphantly came up (or rather
down) with an inexpensive basement in the West Sixties. The pro
ceeds from the diamond sale constituted our capital; Mother and the
84 PASSPORT TO PARIS
colonel soon became factory workers (the match factory then
considered the thing by refugees) , Alexis was busily absorbing various
sciences, as he was about to enter the Gushing Academy, and I
volunteered to earn my keep by putting music to practical use.
That wasn't an easy task. I was seventeen, no longer spoiled
(the Revolution took care of that) , but unaccustomed to the dubious
ways of the world, and quite unknown. Making music pay for one's
keep is no cinch, even now that I have a name or, rather, two
names. How to be a composer without being a conductor or a virtu
oso instrumentalist is a tough proposition either get yourself a rich
wife or write music for music consumers, not music lovers.
The catalogue of my would-be "commercial" activities in the
1921-1923 period denotes an uncommon versatility, if nothing else.
I played accompaniments for ersatz gypsies in Second Avenue restau
rants; wrote "incidental" music for vaudeville performers, which
they commissioned and then declined to buy, declaring it unsuitable;
played piano on the stage for Alexander Oumansky's ballet vaude
ville act on the Keith circuit; played piano for a small-time adagio
team content with any old circuit as long as they got paid, which
wasn't often; wrote music for Horace Goldin, the famed magician,
who gave me two hundred dollars for labor involving a lullaby for
a trick rabbit, a tango for vanishing handkerchiefs and suddenly
appearing bouquets of roses, a languorous waltz for card tricks
and a diabolic galop to denote the time-honored feat of sawing a
woman in half; conducted an orchestra of five musicians for a bur
lesque show, an exploit that deserves a little digression.
I never could conduct, and the art of coordinating one's arm and
body movements with sounds emanating from a large group of in
strumentalists still seems inhumanly difficult to me. How I ever got
the job of conducting the pit band for Jazz Babies (the title of the
burlesque piece entrusted to me) is not clear, except that I remem
ber playing piano in a hired room at Leo Feist's for a bouncy blonde,
her hair the color of a ripe banana, who was the jazziest of the
gum-chewing Jazz Babies and who took a fancy to me. I remem
ber, too, the horror and the excitement of our first stage rehearsal:
ten meaty females this was the pre-Gayelord Hauser era in baby
rompers or tight bathing suits, wearily undulating and kicking their
outsize legs to my meticulously, but "comity" executed accompani
ments. "Stick to the rhythm, Kid, stick to the rhythm," admonished
THE BAD OLD DAYS 85
the bowlegged dance director, a half-chewed White Owl dangling
from his mouth. "This is Amurrica." At least one of that country's
citizens the banana-haired bombshell always rose to my de
fense by stroking my hair and giving me a hug.
Thanks to my benefactress, I was promoted from pianist to con
ductor, although, in reality, I was both, thereby saving some money
for the producers. My nightly task, after the show's opening, was
elementary and not very tiring, but the spectacle of all that un
savory flesh pounding the runway over my head, twenty bare legs
strutting lasciviously in a heady cloud of cheap talcum powder and
sweat, proved too unnerving. I mixed up my music, missed my cues
and was invariably and rightly upbraided for this by the White
Owl-loving dance director. He also resented the unmistakable ad
vances made to me by the banana-haired Jazz Baby, and consequently
I turned in my notice at the end of the week, or was fired I forget
which happened first.
Living as we did in the singing teachers' quarter, I soon began
meeting some of the clan. I was rather good at sightreading and so
began to pick up a few odd dollars helping out ex-prima donnas
by coaching the would-be prima donnas, their pupils. Through Koka
Stember, I met Isolde von Bernhardt, a good Wagnerian mezzo-
soprano, who provided me with occasional jobs. Koka mastered my
Constantinople piano sonata and especially praised the passages
that sounded like Medtner, of which there were not a few. Stember
was then serving as accompanist to Nina Koshetz, who moved her
enormous bulk, her slim water-color-painting husband, and her small
daughter, to a big, sprawling flat on Riverside Drive. It was a
delicious refuge for lost young souls like myself, who often repaired
to Nina's after an overdose of poor jazz or synthetic gypsy wailing.
We drank oceans of tea and devoured innumerable pirojki and other
Russian goodies; we talked of Rachmaninov and Scriabin and that
impertinent young coxcomb Prokofiev, who had locked himself up
in an abandoned Bavarian castle and was busily scribbling a new
piano concerto (this turned out to be his best the sparkling and
ever-fresh No. 3) as well as an opera based on Dostoievsky. One
evening Nina sat down at the piano, wrapped in a red Spanish
shawl, and accompanied herself in Prokofiev's songs on Akhmatova's
poems and one of his five "Vocalises" songs without words. The
eerie, uncannily simple and uninhibited, uncerebral music filled me
86 PASSPORT TO PARIS
with sudden ecstasy; I drank in every note, and the Jazz Babies be
came utterly unreal, as if they had never, never happened.
At Nina's I met Lazare Saminsky, the composer, and Aaron
Baron, the critic, a benign and fussy little man who wrote for Jew
ish and German newspapers and was fond of old ladies who gave
musical teas. Baron loved to act as escort and confidant of visiting
musical celebrities. I was no celebrity and I was not visiting, but
nevertheless little Baron took me in hand and introduced me around
as a promising one hundred to one longshot. It was Baron who
caused me to swallow innumerable petits fours and lettuce and cu
cumber sandwiches in settings of mangy potted palms, aspidistras,
keepsakes of McKinley's era, where vocalists hopeless and hope
ful regaled the bespatted attorneys and dentists with anything
from Nevin's "Narcissus" to Wagner's "Brunnhilde." "The boy is
a composer," Baron would whisper in the hostess's ear. A polite
smirk would ensue, followed by a Medtnerian prelude by myself,
a little indulgent applause, a few more petits jours.
But I'll ever be grateful to little Aaron Baron, for it was through
him that I met Karol Szymanovski, Chopin the Second of Polish
music, and it was through Szymanovski that I knew the Kochanskis
Paul, the great violin stylist, and Zosia, his bright and warm
hearted wife; and, had I not met the Kochanskis, my composer's
career would never have happened.
Mother gave up her exhausting match-factory labors and^ turned
to designing children's clothes for a Fourth Avenue establishment.
Alex was accumulating scholastic honors at the Gushing Academy.
The colonel was diligently punching the clock somewhere; thus,
everybody was honorably and regularly employed, except myself.
I led a fascinating but oddly unproductive life and earned nothing to
speak of. Lvov began muttering something about aesthetic "ne'er-
do-wells," and there were heated arguments with Mother, who de
fended me stoically behind closed doors. It was no use denying that
Mother and the colonel were the only providers in our family of
four (the colonel's position was somewhat unorthodox, as he was
neither a relative nor Mother's lover) , and whatever they succeeded
in saving was given to Alex and myself as pocket money. I was,
however, determined to make music pay and began turning over new
leaves every morning.
We were now "installed" in Washington Heights on West 172nd
THE BAD OLD DAYS 87
Street, our basement in the Sixties having proven something of
a hellhole during the first murderous heat wave we experienced.
This was a pleasantly nondescript neighborhood, too new to be red
olent of anything except fresh paint; the kind of place that was
described as "steadily growing," "making rapid strides," etc., by
the municipal authorities in 1922. The air was purer here because
of the proximity of the Hudson, and the rents were cheaper.
It was fun to take the subway at 168th Street every morning
and be surrounded by cleanly scrubbed young people hurrying to their
downtown jobs. I invariably alighted at 50th Street and would wan
der into the heart of Tin-Pan Alley, which was much noisier then than
it is now; every publisher of renown had at least a half-dozen song
pluggers thumping battered uprights and bent on selling material
to recognized vaudevillians. With the aid of a kindly song writer
named Lee David, I managed to get a hearing now and then, but my
songs were not in the idiom of the street and were instantly re
jected. They were not good songs, and the lyrics, concocted by my
self with the aid of a Russian-English dictionary, were deplor
able. I remember two one was called "Spooning on a Crowded
Bus" and featured the startlingly rhymed climax: "Underneath the
bridge our paradise we cross, spooning on a crowded bus"; the other
was ingeniously titled "Don't Waste Your Time Wasting Your Time
on Me." The publishers didn't.
On one especially humid afternoon, I wandered into a cheap barber
shop, several rejected manuscripts under my arm. The barber was a
small Sicilian named Baretti and, prior to cutting my hair, he pointed
at my piano copies and desired to know whether I was a song
writer. "No, I'm a composer," said I with dignity. "Same thing,"
was Baretti's rejoinder. He began cutting my hair, then suddenly
stopped, the glistening scissors high in the air. "Say, Kid, I have an
idea. I'm a great composer myself, only I can't write down the
notes my parents always wanted me to be a barber, not a musi
cian. How would you like to write down some of my stuff? I'll cut
you in on the royalties or else it's five bucks per." (I thought this
over quickly and settled for five bucks per. This turned out to be a
smart decision, as I discovered that Baretti published his music him
self and was in the habit of presenting it to steady customers with
a suitable autograph. I don't think he ever sold a copy.) Baretti sang
in a loud and intensely nasal voice, but he sang in tune and writing
88 PASSPORT TO PARIS
down Ms ditties was no problem at all that's how simple they
were. His favorite was a waltz entitled "Pay More Attention To Me,
Dearie," which I suspected was swiped from an old Irish air, but I
pocketed my five bucks and said nothing. I harmonized three or four
of these songs and was ready for more when Baretti suddenly de
cided that I was too expensive and made me an offer of ten dollars
for three new ones, which I haughtily declined. Baretti became
indignant and I had to switch to a Washington Heights barber who
had no musical leanings.
Lee David introduced me to Leo Edwards, Gus's brother, who
was then producing a night-club revue for Murray's Roman Gardens
on West 42nd Street This was Jazz Babies on a higher and more
refined level; the girls were slimmer and cleaner, most of them had
garment-center "boy friends" (a term I always detested) who gave
them Guerlain scents, fur coats and (very occasionally) diamonds.
In the time-honored chorine tradition, these girls always fell for the
trombone player or the drummer they still do and thought
the piano-playing foreign kid (myself) too skinny and too young.
I, in turn, thought Murray's girls too brassy, their faces too blatantly
painted, their bodies too extravagantly scented. Thus we worked in
comparative harmony, but not for long; although the revue's theme
song proudly asserted that "in Murray's Roman Gardens there's never
a lull," pretty soon there never was a customer there either.
Without realizing it, I was already leading the dual musical exist
ence which became my trade-mark in the thirties. Out of an odd sort
of self-defense, I began to torture and complicate the musical dialec
tics in my "serious" output; thus, the simpler and more down-to-
earth my tunes, the more cerebral and voulu my "good" music became,
until it was practically indistinguishable from that of the twelve-
tone boys. I sounded off with ten songs on avant garde Russian
poems, including one by myself. These were exhibited to Nina Ko-
shetz, who attempted to decipher them, couldn't, and worked her
self into a violent diatribe against young men who are born old
and would rather die than be caught red-handed with a melody.
She was right. Poor melody became (unwittingly) a tawdry 32-
bar refrain by Alan Lane or Ivan Ivin (Vernon Duke was yet to
make his initial appearance), whereas Dukelsky, thus robbed by
himself was in danger of sinking in a harmonic marsh. The
songs, disdained by Nina, were then taken to Eva Gautier, that
THE BAD OLD DAYS 89
remarkable and cruelly unrewarded exponent of new music. Madame
Gautier, looking not unlike an amiable Siamese cat, liked two of the
songs and proposed to perform them at an International Composers'
Guild concert. The reader is not likely to remember that there
were two new-music citadels in the twenties in New York: the I.C.
Guild and the League of Composers. The former was a militantly
aggressive organization headed by the admirable Edgar Varese, one of
the few authentic new voices in music, and his less radical but most
able colleague, Carlos Salzedo, who revolutionized the harp. The
Guild's concerts were packed with explosive excitement, as some
highly debatable and indigestible music was always played; it was a
joy to see the hall jammed to the doors with extroverted young
people who made rude sounds at the slightest provocation, reacting
violently and noisily to whatever novelties were served up by the
Guild. The hissing and booing in counterpoint with shouts of ap
proval that accompanied the premiere of one of Carl Ruggles's
harsher pieces was as thrilling to me as was the occasion when
Stokowski had to repeat Stravinsky's "Renard," so great was the
audience's insistence! Such things do not happen today, and a living
composer is lucky if he manages to duck into the wings before the
patronizing applause dies down.
The League of Composers was another matter. It had more solid
financial support and there was a reassuring aura of nice bureaucratic
tedium about the goings-on. A lot of middle-of-the-road music was
being played and it was as if the sponsors were bent on selling
the customers the idea that new music could be conformist and re
spectable. Ditto for my reception by the two groups; the League, in
response to my timid inquiry, became frigidly noncommital on hear
ing my "no-name" name and rattled off something about mem
bership fees, etc. On the other hand, the fact that I was totally
unknown served as a password to the Guild, and I was instantly
invited to a Greenwich Village gathering where my hand was
shaken by Varese, an imposing hunk of a man with superbly chiseled
strong features and a bomb-thrower's manner, the feline, impec
cably mannered Salzedo and an odd, birdlike pipe-smoking creature
in shabby tweeds who turned out to be the blood-curdling eardrum
smasher Carl Ruggles. They liked my two songs well enough to
accord them a place on one of their programs and fed me cheese
and Chianti.
90 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Madame Gautier mastered my songs even provided English
translations and sang them at the next Guild concert. The au
dience reception was indicative of other such receptions traditionally
accorded new, but not too new, music the sort of reception where
the hopeful composer asks his best friend, "Well, how did it go?"
and gets this answer: "Pretty well, I thought, how did you think
it went?" The critics said nothing much and nobody "hailed" me
except a swarthy young man named George Gershwin, whom I
first knew as Geo. Gershwin, the creator of "Swanee," the copy of
which was by now gathering dust on the big piano in the Russian
Mayak in far-off Constantinople.
Gershwin impressed me as a superbly equipped and highly skilled
composer not just a concocter of commercial jingles. His extraor
dinary left hand performed miracles in counter-rhythms, shrewd can
onic devices, and unexpected harmonic shifts. "Where did you study?"
I asked, after listening to him play. George laughed, a cigar stuck
between his white teeth. "Oh, I didn't study much some piano and
harmony with a man called Charlie Hambitzer, some lessons from
Rubin Goldmark but on the whole I guess I'm just a natural-
born composer."
When I informed him of my years with Reinhold Gliere, the
difficulty I had had mastering counterpoint and orchestration at fif
teen, he was vaguely impressed. "Gee, it must be great to know so
much," he said, eyeing me with curiosity. "But now that you've
learned it all what are you doing with it?" By way of reply I
played an extremely cerebral piano sonata. Gershwin listened, rather
impatiently, I thought, and then shook his head. "There's no money
in that kind of stuff," he said, "no heart in it, either. Try to write
some real popular tunes and don't be scared about going low
brow. They will open you up!"
This rather startling remark of George's "they will open you up"
stayed with me through all the years that we were friends. Too
many people have climbed on the bandwagon of George's posthumous
glory. Yet, together with two or three others, I was as close to him
as a friend can be. This friendship lasted until his last trip to Holly
wood, which brought about his tragic and untimely death at the age
of thirty-eight
I doubt that Gershwin, then just beginning to "hit it," liked the
strange little songs I wrote. As he expressed it to me later, he was
THE BAD OLD DAYS 91
surprised by the fact that so young a man (I was five years his
junior) should write such dry and intellectual stuff. Eva Gautier sang
three of George's songs at her own recital (composer at the piano)
and the audience literally shouted the place down with approval. A
few months later, Marguerite d' Alvarez, then at the height of her
fame, "stopped the show" with more composer-accompanied Gersh
win. Odd that some of our present-day recitalists don't hire Duke
Ellington (or the other Duke Vernon for that matter) to in
ject a little much-needed life into their Town Hall appearances.
I was now branching out in all directions. Greta Torpadie, the
Norwegian, sang three more songs of mine. Marie Kiekhoefer,
then an executive of the Wolfsohn Musical Bureau, took me in
hand following the Guild initiation and suggested I write an or
chestral piece. I had always wanted to write an overture to the
Russian acmeist-poet Gumilev's "Gondla" a high-flown' post-
romantic tale of Iceland in beautiful marblelike verse. I went to
work happily and completed the job in little over a week. The over
ture, which I orchestrated hesitantly, was shown to Dirk Foch (the
father of film actress Nina Foch), the colorful Dutch musician who
had just formed the short-lived New York City Symphony, and that
courageous man accepted it for performance. This was quite a jump
from the intermezzo of my short-pants debut, and I sat in a blissful
haze through the two rehearsals, and bowed from a box after the
Carnegie Hall performance just before the more than meager ap
plause died down. H. E. Krehbiel, the then all-powerful New York
Tribune critic, called my "Gondla" a "farrago of atrocious noises,"
and most of the others dismissed it facetiously, but it was a start, and
playing the misunderstood genius at so early an age was good fun.
The Foch, Gautier and Torpadie "breaks" gave me my first taste
of the contemporary composer's plight; he gets a performance
then, perhaps, another performance then a seemingly interminable
lull. Thirty years ago most of us had the same trouble perform
ances led to nothing because the new-music market, as today, was
extremely limited and there was far too much supply and far too
little demand.
I remember sitting idly on a Central Park bench after the first and
last performance of "Gondla," pondering my fate. There wasn't
much pondering to do, really. It all amounted to the same thing:
I must make music pay but how? The pudgy little man with a
92 PASSPORT TO PARIS
glistening checkbook who runs up to you after a brilliant premiere,
wrings your hand and shouts, "Great! You've got what it takes
I'll give you ten thousand a year and here's five on account;
just sit tight and write music," doesn't pop up these days, and I
suspect he wasn't accessible in the days gone by not unless his
name was Ludwig of Bavaria and yours Wagner. So, back to synthetic
gypsies I went, as accompanist to one of the tribe in a pseudo-Russian
midtown night spot.
The first clash between the embryo Duke, the wage earner, and
Dukelsky, would-be composer, occurred there and then: one evening
when I was about to charge into the obnoxious "Otchi Tchornya/'
who should walk in but the impeccably clad Karol Szymanovski, a
half-dozen composers in tow. This, as I presently learned, was to be a
banquet tendered the Pole by his admiring colleagues Alfredo
Casella, Emerson Whithorne, Aaron Baron, Lazare Saminsky and
several others. Words cannot describe my despair and mortification.
Here were my senior contemporaries, proudly practicing their craft
nay, my craft! and here was I, a young fellow composer, about
to prostitute myself publicly. I closed my eyes, raced through the
hateful "Otchi" at breakneck speed, causing the gypsy diva intense
discomfort and annoyance, then excused myself and buttonholed
Saminsky. "I'm so sorry," I stammered miserably. "Try and under
stand why I'm doing this." Saminsky shrugged his shoulders philo
sophically. "Don't worry, I understand perfectly. One must eat, mustn't
one?" Nothing was more obvious than this truth, but Oh! how it
hurt at the time.
The next morning, I had a long talk with Mother. I told her that
the hellish humiliation of my lower-than-lowbrow jobs was not justi
fiable in view of the pittances I received for them, that I would
seek and obtain something more remunerative and that I would for
ever renounce the metier of an eatery piano player. Dear Mother
agreed completely, as she always did when my music and my musical
progress were at stake. The "Otchi Tchornya" interlude proved to be
an epilogue, and never again did I have to don a red silk blouse
and black dress trousers (part of a dinner suit, purchased on Eighth
Avenue for seven dollars) to entertain hiccuping customers. I called
up Gershwin and asked him whether he would listen to some freshly
written tunes of mine. George said he sure would and I was off to
West 103rd Street, a new hope in my heart.
THE BAD OLD DAYS 93
When not playing ping-pong on the ground floor with brothers Ira
or Arthur, George could be found at his piano, playing tirelessly for
hours, never practicing in the Czerny sense, just racing through new
tunes, adding new tricks, harmonies, "first and second endings" and
changing keys after each chorus. He was a born improvisatore yet
never changed tempo, nor played rubato, the relentless 4/4 beat car
rying him along it was physically difficult for him to stop. This was
just what he was doing when I walked in and sat down to listen.
George's sister, Frankie, a chubby chestnut-haired flapper, ran in,
and after singing a chorus in a husky little voice, with "gestures,"
ran out again. George then switched to a blues, closed his eyes and,
pushing out his lips in an oddly Negroid manner, began intoning
Ira's lyrics. There was the "feel" of an incantation in George's "vo
cals," and no subsequent performer of his songs has ever invested
them with such arresting fervor. Chorus No. 3 became a duet with
mild, bespectacled Ira, who sang "harmony" to George's lead and
provoked his brother's ire by screwing up an especially juicy pas
sage. The music stopped, a heated argument ensued; this was my
chance and, by breaking up the argument, I hastily slid onto the piano
stool.
"O.K., Dukie, let's have it," said George, baring his teeth and
lighting a pipe. The Brothers Gershwin called me Dukie long before
George baptized me Duke. The first two tunes were shrugged off
politely, but on hearing the third, George's attitude changed. He "
took the pipe out of his mouth and ordered me to repeat the chorus.
"That's a funny chord you got in the second bar," George said re
flectively. "It's good, though. It's so good that I'll tell you what I'll
do take you to Max Dreyfus." Max Dreyfus, as most everybody
knew, was the musical-comedy potentate publisher. This was the real
article at last.
Harms, Inc., Dreyfus's firm, was then located on West 45th Street
and consisted of an old-fashioned suite of offices. In the waiting
room sat members of the Dreyfus "stable" Vincent Youmans ("Tea
for Two"), Joe Meyer ("California, Here I Come"), Phil Charig
("Sunny Disposish"), Harry Ruby ("Thinking of You"), Oscar
Levant ("Lady, Play Your Mandolin") and a few others. The
place was like a political hell, with Boss Dreyfus dispensing pa
tronage to the Faithful and selling producers on commissioning
entire musical-comedy scores to the older and better-established
94 PASSPORT TO PARIS
"boys," or interpolated numbers to promising beginners. Most of
these privilege characters were drawing small weekly advances against
future royalties on a yearly basis and that's what I was after.
Dreyfus, looking not unlike a well-groomed Mahatma Gandhi,
sat at his huge mahogany desk, puffing on a long cigar. He handed a
similar one to George and managed a thinnish smile. George was
definitely a comer and a special favorite, but mine was a new face,
young and unfamiliar. After some jocular shop talk concerning the
new Kern musical (Sitting Pretty) and the eccentricity of You-
mans, an unpredictable creature, Gershwin lit the Dreyfus cigar and
said, "Max, Dukie is a Russian and writes classical stuff. I want you
to hear a tune he wrote that I like." Dreyfus looked me over, this
time unsmilingly, and waved me to the Steinway with his cigar. "Go
ahead, young man," he said shortly. I attacked the Gershwin-ap
proved chorus, but was stopped at the tenth bar when the "funny"
chord reappeared. "Just a minute," said Dreyfus. "What kind of a
chord is that?" I carefully translated the Russian conservatory term
for the chord. "Oh ... all right, continue," was the new order. I
modulated into a brighter key and stole a look at mighty Max. His
eyes were closed, his face set he was listening attentively. I man
aged to go through the prescribed 32 bars. Long silence. "Why do
you like that tune, George?" Dreyfus queried calmly. I don't re
member George's answer, but I do remember taking leave of the
potentate a few minutes later his hand was cold and so was the nod
I received, signifying dismissal. "Funny," mused George as we left
Harms, Inc., "if I were Max, I would have signed you up on the spot."
It was Nina Koshetz who restored my rapidly vanishing faith in
myself. She needed someone to coach her for a forthcoming concert
with Leopold Stokowski and gave me the job. Nina took a house
in Monmouth Hills, New Jersey, and invited me to spend a month as
her guest and collaborator; outside of playing accompaniments I was
engaged to orchestrate Rachmaninov's "Vocalise" and Moussorgsky's
"Gopak," the two pieces Nina was to sing with Stokowski's orchestra.
My knowledge of orchestration was distinctly sketchy, but I was
grateful for the invitation. There is no greater satisfaction for a
composer young or old than to have a performer turn to him and
say: "I need you. Come and help me." Unfortunately, they usually
reserve such pleadings for their managers or lovers.
I was given a comfortable room and an old Chickering piano,
THE BAD OLD DAYS 95
which suited me fine. Armed with Gevaert's and Widor's orchestra
tion manuals I did the job reasonably well, and working with Nina
was fun because she was not only a musician, but also had a sense of
humor the two seldom go together. There were always young peo
ple around the house, including Salima, a florid blonde of nineteen
who was vaguely reported to be Nina's niece; we had romantic de
signs on one another that came to naught. The younger element went
in for tennis, swimming, some typically Fitzgeraldian petting in Stutz
rumble seats and Saturday outings to the Monmouth Country Club,
which was reputed to be the last word. I wasn't good at sports and
couldn't drive a car; as for the country club, I never had enough cash
and was too proud to sponge off of visiting Princeton and Yale men.
When not flirting with Salima, I composed or orchestrated and was
happy to be able to work away from sleazy rehearsal rooms and
Second Avenue samovars.
Then it was back to New York, the relentless heat strangling the
big town, its pavement strewn with the discarded festoons of the sum
mer. I saw Arrow-collar-type young men in their Wanamaker or
Brooks Bros, suits, according to the social strata, returning home
from vacations the younger ones soon to be off to college, the older
back to Daddy's bank or Uncle's soda fountain. They seemed to have
a purpose in life and a well-planned future, as did their "dates,"
pert, slim-limbed city sirens, complete with the new boyish bob, ori
ental earrings and a long cigarette holder, bent on marriage or a "ca
reer"; they all had fresh memories of energetic necking at Princeton
house parties or on the less recherch6 sands of Coney Island. I again
felt suspended in thin air as I returned to my daily pursuits of Eu
terpe and greenbacks.
Through Alan Tanner, a wistfully handsome youth much in de
mand as accompanist, I had met Vadim Uraneff, whose claims to
fame were a Moscow Art Theatre apprenticeship and a small part in
John Barrymore's Hamlet. Uraneff, who had distinct directorial tal
ents and some (not enough) ambition, thought of putting together
a double bill of an abridged "Song of Songs" in pantomime and a
one-act playlet by Alexander Blok, the Russian poet of pre-Revolu-
tion despair. I looked dreamy and arty enough as did Uraneff
and copiposed what was then regarded as "modern music," so I
was introduced to the regal Edna James, actress-backer of the pro
posed venture, and asked to write incidental music for what proved
96 PASSPORT TO PARIS
to be a mild amalgam of Meyerhold eroticism and the Bible. I wrote
my score, not an unpleasant one, for seven instruments, with a piano
part for myself; there was nothing incidental about the music, which
flowed copiously from the overture to the curtain without a single
break. Our bill was put on at the Lyric Theater, 42nd Street, for
a "limited" engagement of three weeks, which had to be further
limited to two because of lack of patronage. One of the critics wearily
mentioned the music and printed my name.
Eva Gautier took me to a gay party given by Adolph Bolm, the
ex-Diaghilev premier danseur de caractere, who then had his own
"intimate" ballet company, with Ruth Page as the prima ballerina.
Bolm had successfully choreographed Carpenter's Krazy Kat and
had a ballet synopsis, a rather stilted harlequinade, which he handed
me after some concerted sales talk by Eva, Alan Tanner and Aaron
Baron. I composed industriously, and the results were not altogether
wasted, as I used some pages in Boreas's variation in Zephyr et Flora
two years later. Bolm never produced the little ballet, as he soon
disbanded his small company and went on to more lucrative
things. At about the same time, my new friend and youthful sponsor,
Gershwin, was "arriving" at a tremendous pace. Outside of the long
runs of George White's Scandals (of which he wrote several edi
tions), there was Sweet Little Devil, with songs like "Virginia" and
"Innocent Ingenue Baby" of sassy, full-blodded freshness, at which he
banged away at all the best parties, the guests clamoring for more.
On top of all this came the evergreen Rhapsody in Blue.
I am still young enough to sigh for the Bad Old Days, and not old
enough to long for the Good Old ones. "I wanna be Bad" was the
sophomoric motto of my New York companions, and how they loved
achieving badness, not the involved post-Freudian aberrations, just
drink and lechery in very large doses. My composing career was not
panning out right; the nearest thing to a "break" I got was the Ko-
shetz performance of the two Russian pieces I orchestrated. This
took place in Detroit; no one needed me there, so I didn't go and con
sequently didn't hear my versions. With the sweeping abandon of
youth, I decided to go bad in a big way. This proved simpler than
chasing .the Muse and the Moola at the same time. I was under twenty,
not unattractive and wore my secondhand or borrowed clothes with
an air, though without a cent. Obliging mentors turned up on all sides;
there were gay Englishmen like Oswald Balfour, certainly the most
THE BAD OLD DAYS 97
diligent diner-out of his day, Lord "Naps" Alington, and their
American cronies, Johnny McMullin and Lester Donahue, the "social"
pianist. These men were fashion dictators (McMullin wrote on
men's clothes for Vanity Fair) , salon habitues for salons thrived
in New York in 1923 and occasional shimmers in Harlem, then on
the crest of a gigantic wave, and in Greenwich Village, which com
bined Montparnasse and Montmartre with a touch of Rue de Lappe.
I'm not sure just why I was taken up by such established dandies but,
thanks to the Koghanskis, I frequented musical Fifth Avenue and
dined at Hoytie Wiborg's, or Dorothy Monroe Robinson's, or Mrs.
Otto Kahn's, three somewhat "intellectual" hostesses who entertained
splendidly and liked to mix Gershwin's airs with Burke's Peerage's
graces.
Theirs was a Bohemia on a grand scale, complete with butlers
and white tie de rigueur. The doyen, the real animateur of Bed-
lam-in-Gotham was none other than Robert Winthrop Chanler, six
feet eight inches of massive man, screen painter, one of the Astors
and ban vivant extraordinary. Chanler's high priestess and mistress
of ceremonies was Louise Hellstrom, widow of the Swedish novelist,
who possessed the rare knack of raising Cain imaginatively and at
all times. Bob Chanler had a brother named Willie, generally sup
posed to be potty; when Bob married the tempestuous and highly
publicized beauty Lina Cavalieri, Willie cabled him: "Who's loony
now?" Willie had something there, because the Chanlers were soon
divorced in a manner that brought about a major disaster in Bob's life.
He painted a large screen on which he depicted a white deer being
bitten to death by a black panther; he would often take new friends
to the cellar, where the screen was displayed, and, shedding drunken
tears, would beat his breast and hint at the symbolic nature of the
screen the deer was himself, the panther Cavalieri.
Louise was of medium size, sparingly put together. Her hair was
red of a striking redness, made still redder by the bluish-whiteness
of her skin; she had oddly shaped green eyes, her best feature, talked
in a hoarse baritone, pausing just long enough to inhale the smoke
of her cigarette or gulp down her highball; unless you knew her well
and were used to her mannerisms, her speech was extremely difficult
to follow, as she was fond of interspersing her narrative with un
intelligible mumbling. Here's a sample: she'd say, "My dear, how can
you possibly like that pot-bellied bastard, he's so mzz, bzz, mzz,
98 PASSPORT TO PARIS
bzz." This accompanied by violent grimaces and much shoulder-
shrugging. Or, "I saw Kitty and Johnny last night at T. R.'s and we
had one hell of a good dinner, then T. R. and I went into the library
and had some of his scotch and when we came back to the living
room Kitty and Johnny vzz vzz vzz on the sofa," Louise would now
animate her pretty legs, attempt a lascivious leer and then burst out
laughing delightedly. I later learned that the mumbling was an
imitation of Bob Chanler's speech. You knew eventually that with both
of them "mzz bzz" signified things boring and unworthwhile, whereas
"vzz vzz" indicated epicurean and priapean delights, also anything
cozy and gemutlich. To Louise all people and she met hundreds
daily were either "mzz bzz" or "vzz vzz" (caressingly intoned) and
were immediately and ruthlessly screened: The "mzz bzzers" never
went farther than Louise's Village flat, from which they were often
forcibly ejected; the "vzzers" were reinvited, this time to mix with
some established members of the Hellstrom group, and if met with
general approval, accorded the supreme honor of being taken to Bob
Chanler's of an evening.
Chanler's house was the goal of all pleasure seekers, because life
there consisted of one continuous party nightly, after sundown
into the not so small hours. I don't remember the servants, although
they must have been remarkable characters too, but whoever opened
the door to admit a new arrival, was invariably followed by Louise
or Carlotta, Louise's big Spanish rival in Bob's affections. A "mzz
bzzer" daring to crash the sacred gates would find the door shut
tight in his face even if brought by friends of the family a "vzz
vzzer" would be greeted with piercing shrieks of joy in which Bob,
suddenly emerging from nowhere, would join, roaring like a de
mented lion. The guest would then be literally carried upstairs to
the third floor, where uninterrupted revelry reigned. The second floor
was known as "respectable" (strictly "mzz bzz") and given over to
Chanler's debutante daughters, who'd occasionally appear on the
staircase, white-gloved and disdainful, to greet a white-tie eligible
creature and make sure that he didn't make a mistake and wind up
on the wrong floor. Because of my youth, non-Chanlerian looks and
correct clothes, I was once ushered into the daughters' sanctum and,
after dancing rapturously with a tall dark divinity, her Coty-
scented arms locked around my neck, upon being asked the name
of my fraternity, gave an answer so unorthodox that I was thrown
THE BAD OLD DAYS 99
out instantly. I cannot say that I felt very much at home where I be
longed on the third floor not being good at either drinking or
lechery; but Bob and Louise took to me, rather like one takes to an
absurd yet somehow endearing trinket or piece of furniture, and
made me feel that no party was complete without my presence.
They nicknamed me "Dodo,'* I was pronounced strictly "vzz vzz"
and I will always have a soft spot for the strange and lovable "bad"
couple, whose badness artfully disguised that very rare commodity
a big heart.
I suspect Louise was something of a snob in her own way, the
way in which I, also, am a snob. She cared very little for titles, fat
bank accounts or social-register listings, but collected people of tal
ent literary, theatrical, painting or musical preferably, but
not necessarily, touched by recognition and accompanying publicity.
To her great credit she helped and mothered many so-called "strug
gling" artists, making sure first that they had some art with which to
struggle; Bohemian hangers-on and career charlatans she detested.
The inmates of "Chez Chanler" were an astonishingly motley crew.
The "regulars" consisted of T. R. Smith, the publisher and antholo
gist of erotic poetry, a small belligerent-looking man wearing pince-
nez; Joseph Stella, the Italian Brooklyn painter, whose 14-year-old
daughter danced bare-breasted for the guests on one occasion; Marcel
Duchamps, the celebrated abstract painter; E. E. Cummings; Carl
Van Vechten; the Russians Ivan Narodny and David Burliuk; and
many others. Two other Russians, Bobritsky and Alajalov, who
did well in the ensuing years, were then making a living as batik
painters and dwelt in Fourth Avenue in daytime, at Charter's at
night. Louise's own circle determinedly dernier cri was no less
colorful, but rather out of Chanler's orbit, finding his coterie too
mixed for comfort. The circle was made up of women like Jane Heap
and Margaret Anderson, the Little Review masterminds; Djuna
Barnes, the novelist (both Margaret and Djuna great beauties);
Georgette Leblanc, Maeterlinck's ex-wife; and Yvonne George, the
Edith Piaf of her day, who died young. Yvonne, much feted all over
New York, lived at the Brevoort, undermining her robust good looks
by a steady diet of morphine. She once took a slight shine to me but,
on finding little cooperation from this source, said, "Tiens, tu aimes
les gargons. II jallait me le dire!' It was useless to tell her that the
gargons meant nothing in my young life and that neither did the
100 PASSPORT TO PARIS
whole sex business, which still filled me with uncomprehending ter
ror.
The above enumerated stalwarts, when at Chanler's, were soon
joined by assorted visitors of note or reasonable promise. In the course
of a few months, I saw Somerset Maugham, Jack Buchanan, Bea
Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence (who had just taken New York by
storm in Chariot's Revue; Gertie's singing of "Limehouse Blues" is
still one of my most poignant memories), Arnold Bennett, Jane
Cowl, Dorothy Parker, Judith Anderson, John Murray Anderson,
Augustus John, Alexander Woollcott, Arthur Bliss, Noel Coward
(then broke and fighting for recognition), Marguerite d' Alvarez,
Sam Hoffenstein, H. L. Mencken, Burton Rascoe, Arthur Guiter-
man, John Dos Passes, etc., etc., as well as the young actresses
Blythe Daly and Tallulah Bankhead.
John Murray Anderson, looking like an amiable cockatoo, was al
ways surrounded by young boys and girls who adored him. He had
the gift of curt and deliberately cruel repartee, and I never knew
whether to be insulted or enchanted by his cryptic and very per
sonal remarks. Murray was then producing Jack and Jill, with music
by Augustus Barratt, who was better known for his monocle than
any particular talent. Elizabeth North and Barbara Bennett, later
Mrs. Morton Downey, were in the chorus and smuggled me into the
show's rehearsals, held at a Third Avenue German Bierstube which
reeked of hops and sawdust. It was wonderful to watch the labor
pains of a musical comedy even from the sidelines; Murray paid
not the slightest attention to me and would not listen to my songs, for
which I did not blame him they were simply not good enough. I
remember Barbara Bennett, who was the heaviest and, I thought,
the prettiest girl in the show (the two usually went together with
me), developing acute hysteria in the middle of an intricate dance
routine, and being carried out by two husky chorus men. There was a
big party at Murray's penthouse on top of an early-vintage sky
scraper in East 34th Street following the opening; but the notices
were grim and Jack and Jill folded shortly afterwards. Murray was
then chiefly known for his imaginative Greenwich Village Follies,
which usually employed my pantomimic friend Jimmy Watts. The
two Murray and Jimmy were in the habit of dropping in at
Bob Chanler's and having a heated argument with Louise, who loved
arguments more than anything else in this world.
THE BAD OLD DAYS 101
Chanter's celebrated third floor consisted mainly of a long and
narrow living room with a well-stocked bar at the end; this led to
two mysteriously partitioned-off beds, hidden by Chanler-painted
screens. As often as not the guests, after copious libations and much
noisy talk, "would pair off and disappear behind the screens; they
never escaped the eye of their host who, towering over his screens,
would delightedly watch the proceedings, vzz vzz vzzing under his
breath.
These Peeping Tom activities of Chanler's sometimes led to trou
ble, as on the occasion when he discovered an especially virile
young man in the screened-off bed, with the wtong girl; the young
man's official girl friend, also present, was indignantly notified of
this by the host, who then obligingly helped her pull the offender
out of bed. Another bit of pulling quickly followed when the girls
went at each other's hair, with the entire entourage forming a semi
circle around the contestants, Bob beating his breast and guffawing
ecstatically. . This was a typical climax to an evening which started
most innocuously with Ivor Novello, then an entirely too beautiful
youth, playing "And Her Mother Came, Too," an agreeable little
tune which pleased Gershwin, also present. Following the hair-pull
ing act, two Chinese servants appeared with champagne to celebrate
Virtue's victory, the girls kissed and made up and we all repaired to
Harlem to hear Florence Mills. Everybody was mad for Shuffle
Along and Liza, the two reigning Negro musicals, shortly to be
followed by the "immortal" Blackbirds. At 6. A.M., a group of inti
mates was driven at breakneck speed to a Long Island spot where
we were fed a breakfast of steamed clams and coffee.
Notwithstanding all this depravity, I managed to compose a piano
concerto for Artur Rubinstein. He was not the success then that he
is now, and was more receptive to new music, playing Szymanovski
and Stravinsky superbly. On hearing some piano pieces of mine at
Zosia Kochanski's, he suggested that I write a one-movement
concerto, pianistically grateful and "not too cerebral." Were it not for
Artur, I would have probably gone back to "Otchi Tchornya,"
although he never played the concerto, through no fault of his or
lack of willingness but I'm anticipating. It is sufficient to say that
in a life made up of turning points as well as of "points of no re
turn" the concerto proved a turning point of major proportions.
Mother was seriously worried about the frenzied existence I led
102 PASSPORT TO PARIS
and in her many letters, made available to me by the addressees after
her death in 1942, spoke feelingly about "poor luckless Dima, who
never seems to get started." Yes, the title of my subsequent song hit,
"I Can't Get Started," could well be applied to this early chapter of
my life. Mother and I knew that the Hellstrom and Chanler parties,
the fancy waistcoats artlessly copied from Oswald Balfour's, the oc
casional sorties into the great, glittering world of well-heeled art
patrons were not for me not yet that I had no right to think my
self a part of fashionable Manhattan; that this was merely a desper
ate cover-up and that, when stripped of my secondhand finery, I was
a badly frightened young man.
The concerto, my first well-knit and technically adroit piece, was
finished by Christmas 1923. I tried it on Koka Stember, who liked it
instantly and volunteered to learn it, then on Gershwin, who became
enamored of the lyrical second subject and made me play it at
parties as an aftermath to his "Do It Again" and "Stairway to Para
dise." Thus encouraged, I took it to my new mentor, Rubinstein,
who received me dressed in a brocaded silk dressing gown, with a
large pearl stick-pin in his tie, affable and courtly as is his wont. The
one thing I dreaded was a polite brush off: I had learned the concerto
painstakingly, but, having given up practicing long ago, was barely
equal to my task. I gave a fairly good account of my work, never
theless, and Artur, bless him, was quite transported. He grabbed
the manuscript and began looking it over page by page, his large
bulging eyes shining. "It's amazingly good, far, far better than I
expected. Forgive me, but I expect very little from new composers,"
he said. "They all have two faults which make their work hopeless
for a pianist who must earn his bread; firstly, they have no melodic
gift or are ashamed to display it and secondly, they don't know how
to write for the instrument. They think the piano is a kettledrum.
Thank God, you don't. Also, the concerto is full of tunes." He sat
down at the piano and essayed the first solo, then added: "Yes, I'll
play this music only not here; the managers won't let me play
what I like they're always complaining about poor KaroPs
[Szymanovski's] things, which I love. As for concert! they don't
hire me too often to play with orchestras, and when they do, it's
always Tchaikovsky, Beethoven or Liszt. No, the place for you and
your concerto is Europe. Go to Paris, where I'll be this summer."
I was speechless with excitement and gratitude. I knew, of course,
THE BAD OLD DAYS 103
that Paris was ever the Mecca of young composers. Having learned
all about New York the hard way, I hoped I might have something
to offer this big, hard-boiled city, but my time hadn't come; I needed
a Parisian passport first.
The decision having come so swiftly, so irrevocably, I was not
worried about the main requisite for a trip to Europe money. I
just knew I'd get it somehow. I sprang the plan on Mother that
evening and pleaded my cause with such infectious eloquence that
she became persuaded I should go. The colonel thought anything
better than my Sybaritic way of life and even gave me a theosophical
blessing.
The next morning I was on the telephone to Gershwin; told
him of my decision, assured him that I didn't want to borrow money
but simply had to make some and would he have ideas on the sub
ject. George, with his customary generosity and big-brother kind
ness to me, told me to come right over. When I did so, he was argu
ing violently with his father, the legendary New York Micawber, who
is yet to find a Dickens to immortalize him. Pa Gershwin liked me
and I always felt at home with him. "Well, young man, and how are
you? Still writing those long symphonies?" he enquired facetiously.
"O.K., Pop, see you later," George countered; he was habitually
rather snappy with his father, but they loved each other and the
arguments were the food of their love. Pa exited, whistling a non-
Gershwin tune.
My hunch was good. Things began to work out at a swift pace. It
transpired that George, overburdened with work, needed a "ghost"
writer for a black-and-white ballet a simple bit of ragtime for
a high-kicking precision routine for the Tiller girls, who were to
appear in the 1924 edition of George White's Scandals. I turned
out the thing in a few hours and was paid $100 by George. Deem
ing the job satisfactory, George then desired to have me try my
hand at "piano copies," publishable voice and piano versions of
songs to be used in the revue. I arranged six of these and was paid
twenty dollars a piece by Harms, Inc. The songs I "arranged" were
the ever-popular "Somebody Loves Me," "In Araby," "Kongo
Kate," "Tune in on Station J-O-Y," "Year After Year," and a rhythm
song, the name of which escapes me. I was quite proud of the "fill-
ins," I provided for "Somebody Loves Me" and was amused to
find that they were also used in the stock orchestration obvi-
104 PASSPORT TO PARIS
ously, the arranger thought them eminently Gershwinesque, which
indeed they were. That was another $120.
Last, but certainly not least, George entrusted me with the piano
solo version of the "Rhapsody," for which I was paid $100, the
personal check signed by Mighty Max. My pockets suddenly bulg
ing with money, I next invited Zosia Kochanski to lunch and started
selling her on my European venture. I didn't have to oversell, be
cause Rubinstein had already told Zosia of the good impression my
concerto made on him and she was ready to do her darndest to
help. We compared our listings of rich and influential people and
Zosia picked Dorothy Monroe Robinson as the most likely and will
ing victim. Mrs. M. Robinson (now Mrs. Elbridge Gerry Chadwick)
came of a prosperous and cultured Boston family, was pretty in
the New England way than which there is nothing more seduc
tive and was an amateur ballet dancer. A seance at the lady's
house followed: I played, Rubinstein and the Kochanskis lent
weighty support, and a day later I was richer by $500. My luck
changed literally overnight.
In 1924, the sum of $800 was more than enough for a young
musician's needs for a six months' sojourn in Paris. Mother was
elated at my good fortune and even the stern colonel began refer
ring to me as a "composer of promise." It wasn't altogether clear to
anyone, including myself, just what Paris would do for me, but,
supremely confident, I was determined to do something for Paris.
I felt I needed some letters of introduction. From my social mentors
I obtained three to Princesse de Polignac, Baron de Meyer (then
the Vogue photographer) and Misia Sert. Szymanovsky gave me a
letter to Henry Pruniferes, the editor of the Revue Musicale. Now
that Max Dreyfus paid me for Harms-published arrangements, I
felt free to ask him for a letter to Salabert, the top Paris publisher
of light music. The customary interview was obtained, complete with
the thin, long cigar, a thinner smile and few, very few words. The
secretary appeared, was told to type the "usual" letter, then a curt
nod, a vague circular gesture with the cigar, indicating, I hoped,
bon voyage and good luck and back to the waiting room I
went to hear Joe Meyer's latest joke and Harry Ruby's newest base
ball story.
The ship I sailed on was the Rochambeau, a small, rickety vessel,
but the passengers wide-eyed students, for the most part were
THE BAD OLD DAYS 105
young and in search of happiness, the food excellent. Before sailing
Mother gave me a small Greek Orthodox icon, that had been in the
family for generations, a little theosophical pamphlet and a thick
wool sweater, knitted by herself. "It is significant," said she, "that
Mother was Anton Rubinstein's favorite pupil, and that you are now
going to Europe sponsored by another Rubinstein Artur!"
CHAPTER VIII
PASSPORT TO PARIS
EVERY great city and there aren't many deserving that adjective
has an immediate and special effect on one exposed to it for
the first time. New York hits you between the teeth, London makes
you straighten your tie and roll up your umbrella, Venice soothes
and saddens you, Rome turns you into an actor, Berlin forces you to
dislike the human race, Copenhagen causes you to like it again,
Constantinople lulls you into a sweet sleep, Vienna . . . forgive
me, I've never been there . . . Paris enchants and exhilarates you
as no other place can. From the moment I was ushered into my
room at the Hotel Majestic and made up for the poverty of my
luggage by the excessiveness of my tip to the bellhop, from the sec
ond I opened the window and looked down on the busy street scene,
catching that first unforgettable whiff of crushed lilacs and gasoline
the nowhere to be equaled Paris smell I knew that I loved
Paris and would love her until my dying day.
The Majestic was, of course, a big mistake, as the Kochanskis,
whom I met in the lobby, told me concernedly. They knew my
finances to a franc and remonstrated with me, pointing out that I
was no spleen-killing tourist, merely a poor aspirant to recogni
tion and a Paris endorsement, and had better try the Left Bank. My
finances may have been low, but my spirits never higher. I agreed
with my benefactors thoroughly, assured them that I would move
that afternoon, but stayed one whole week. "Stayed" is certainly the
wrong word, as I was in a state of perpetual motion from the time I
landed, bent on discovering Paris for myself without anyone's help,
unarmed with Baedekers or Michelins. By walking about ceaselessly,
lounging in cafes, riding in the Metro, buses, horse carriages and
bateaux mouches, by chatting, arguing and exchanging pleasantries
PASSPORT TO PARIS 107
with natives, I learned to my delight that the Left Bank was more
Parisian than the Right; that ordinary oeufs sur le plat and salade
de tomates were ambrosiacal and assuredly more than just eggs and
tomatoes; that the subway was more attractive and comfortable than
the New York variety, but that you needed a gas mask if traveling
second class; that the French girls often had mustaches under their
noses as well as under their arms; that their often chunky bodies and
voluminous busts were supported by bony toothpicklike legs, usually
too short; that the men were smallish and exceedingly badly dressed
even dandies had an oddly overdressed "wrong" look; that the
"flics" (cops) were corpulent, untidy and bewhiskered and spent
most of their time arguing with even untidier taxi drivers, when the
latter weren't too busy insulting one another; that the lady con
cierges were addicted to beards and glared at you until you gave
them un petit -franc, at which point they displayed the most ex
quisite manners; that the urinoirs on street corners were none too
safe as they were the habitual haunts of pederasts on the prowl;
that the wine was incomparable and the beer deplorable; that
the French didn't like foreigners but were intrigued by them; that
Paris was a most virtuous city (this is even more true today) be
cause, unlike New York or London, where sex is in<Mged in for
health or athletic reasons, it's very hard to get a woman to sleep
with you; that it's either le grand amour, in which case the girl
moves her belongings into your flat, whether invited to do so or not
and starts darning your socks or you've got to pay up; that the
method of paying varies from so much per hour in a "house" to so
much per dress at a good couturier's or so much per jewel; that for
a modest sum you could indulge every known and unknown vice
from massage sous I'eau to necrophilia; that Bois de Boulogne at
night wasn't a healthy place, unless you wished to participate in a
partouse or become prey to elderly voyeurs; that there is no pastime
more delicious than bookhunting on the quais (that's where my
bibliomania began, trivially enough); that kissing a girl in a cafe
in full view of curious strangers was most agreeable; that bathrooms
were scarce but with practice you could perform wonders with a
bidet (which always looks like a cello made of marble to me) ; that
some people eat to live, others live to eat, but the French eat to eat,
and no nonsense; that a Frenchman shakes a friend's hand by lifting
it up in the air and then pulling it downward with a sudden jerk;
108 PASSPORT TO PARIS
that Paris dogs are the best front men and mixers of their kind
they sit outside their owners' cafes, make with the charm and lure the
customers in; that Paris children are the best-looking in the world,
which argues well for the city's future; that when eating his excellent
bread, a Frenchman places a piece of it directly against his navel,
holding on to it firmly with both hands, then breaks it noiselessly
and proceeds to wipe his plate clean with it in order not to miss any
of the sauce; that no one can smoke a cigarette as artfully as a
Frenchman, who sticks it in a corner of his mouth, lights it, purses
up his lips (this is very difficult) and then proceeds to talk rapidly,
the dangling cigarette and the pursed-up lips giving him the desired
"tough" look try it the next time you smoke; that the prettiest
American girls hung out in Rumpelmayer's tearoom or the Ritz and,
galvanized by "Gay Pay-ree," were chronically on the make; that
music was everywhere, from Salle Pleyel to Le Jockey in Montpar-
nasse; that everybody gave parties and most everybody who knew
how to kiss a lady's hand was invited; that taxis were cheap and un
safe and telephones bewildering and unreliable; that snobs read
Proust and Claudel, not the Almanack de Gotha or the social register,
and went to concerts, not just dinners, weddings and horse races; that
everyone gate and took, and no one gave a damn in short, that
Paris was Paradise.
Educationally speaking, I was doing fine, but I was spending too
much money and not progressing along the self-prescribed lines. The
initial fever over, I took myself to 150 Boulevard Montparnasse and
descended on Pavlik Tchelitchev and Alan Tanner, then sharing a
big, untidy flat which by a stretch of the imagination could have been
called a "studio." The living room had the right kind of light in it
and all the painter's paraphernalia. It also housed an upright for
Alan to practice on which he did but seldom, as he was lazy and
preferred to linger in bed pushing the keys of a tiny piano muet
(soundless), while Pavlik painted diligently. They were an odd pair;
Alan pale and willowy, his small mouth in a perpetual pout, while
Pavlik was healthier than ever, all golden hair and plump rosy
cheeks, shouting and gesticulating out of sheer exuberance. Their
painter friends were always in and out pugnosed Tereshkovitch
with a shrewd peasant's face; small, silent Pougny (both recognized
"masters" now); Count Lanskoy, who later switched to abstract
painting and gained a reputation by so doing; and Boris Shatzman,
PASSPORT TO PARIS 109
with the head of a minor prophet, his fine eyes glaring at Tchelit-
chev's prospective customers, forever dropping in but seldom buy
ing anything. Among the "non-customers" was Nicolas Nabokov, a
tall youth a year older than myself, who had studied composition
with Rebikov, the now forgotten "whole-tone scale" champion, prior
to coming to Paris. He played some music of his Omar Khayyam
songs and an overture in the Satie manner; we liked neither, but
Nabokov himself was an engaging young man with an open Russian
face and the disarming clumsiness of adolescence.
Tchelitchev, as I soon found out, had made a name for himself in
Berlin, where he painted sets for the opera house. He was entrusted
mainly with Russian operas and, since "Russian" was synonymous
with "garish" in those days, adopted a flowery Bakst-Soudeikine-
Rabinovitch manner which delighted the Berliners. It didn't satisfy
the painter who, in spite of his youth, had a genuine capacity for
self-discipline; he, therefore, gave the echte russische Kunst a swift
kick in the behind and retreated to Montparnasse to learn painting
from scratch.
We dined that night, my first in Montparnasse, at Rosalie's, which
'is around the corner on Rue Campagne Premiere, still full of memo
ries of Modigliani, whom the good woman fed when the painter was
ill or broke or both. The tiny place was crowded with tousled Swedes
and awkward Texans with cornfed grins and big feet; the ample-
"bosomed Kiki sat in a corner with Foujita on another night I
saw Helene Perdriat, Juan Gris and Kisling, but not together. The
food was not bad and very cheap. Pavlik picked a quarrel with one
of the painters present and, when the shouting and fist-shaking died
down, we paid the modest bill and returned to 150 Montparnasse.
"Well, let's hear this music that you came to conquer Paris with,"
Tchelitchev said, winking good-naturedly at Tanner. I sailed into
the concerto with gusto and was rewarded by the astonished faces of
my two listeners. "What's gotten into you, Dima?" Alan queried,
pouting no longer. "This is a really good concerto a little too much
Prokofiev, a bit of undigested Rachmaninov here and there, but you
*can write music of that there is no doubt." Pavlik roared with
pleasure, then sat down, suddenly pensive: "Yes, you might do ...
for Beaumont, not for Diaghilev. Diaghilev is too great a snob and
wants names. However, the Count de Beaumont is launching a ballet
.season with Picasso, Massine and Satie, is calling it Soirees de Paris,
110 PASSPORT TO PARIS
and we all know him. He may commission a score from you." Alan
made a face. "What about Valitchka?" he asked Pavlik. "Not
Valitchka Bolm, surely?" I cut in. They both laughed. "No, silly
Nouvel, Valitchka Nouvel; Diaghilev's business manager and admin
istrator a man, not a girl. He's crazy about Alan and who can
tell may take a fancy to you," went on Tchelitchev. "He knows a
lot about music, having founded the Contemporary Music Group
with Nourok in Russia. Valitchka is a crotchety old boy, but he
means well."
I expressed my delight at the prospect of meeting the male Va
litchka and Alan promised to telephone him in the morning. My
two friends then helped me move to the small and smelly Hotel de
Nice, practically across the street from their home, where the prices
were right and the company wrong, principally whores and travel
ing salesmen. I don't know just what the salesmen sold, but they
seemed to travel mostly from one whore's room to another's.
While waiting for Valitchka to materialize, I decided to put my
letters of introduction to good use and began with Salabert, then sit
ting on top of the world with Maurice Yvain's gay and unrefined
musicals like Ta Bouche, Pas sur la Bouche and others. I told the
receptionist I had a letter from the great Dreyfus and was imme
diately ushered into Salabert's office. The publisher shook my hand
cordially, waved me to a chair, and opened Dreyfus's letter. His
face fell. "Haven't you played your music for Max?" he asked icily.
"Yes, Mr. Salabert, I have indeed. , . . Why?" I faltered. "Well,
read this." I glanced at the letter, which was very short. "Dear Mr.
Salabert," it said. "The bearer of this letter is Mr. Dukelsky, a young
man who composes music. Any courtesies shown Mr. Dukelsky will
be greatly appreciated. Faithfully [etc.]." Needless to say, the door
was the only courtesy shown me; on returning to my hotel, I gave
myself to a fit of rage and tore up all the other letters. From now
on, my music alone was going to make or unmake me.
Nouvel showed up that same evening a pint-size, natty man
with an old-fashioned pince-nez under bushy eyebrows, a clipped
mustache and a fierce scowl, a little too fierce to be authentic. Dear
Valitchka was, in reality, one of the sweetest of God's creatures, but
also a frustrated composer (like his friend Diaghilev), frustrated
lover, frustrated sybarite he loved luxury and could not afford
it and I think was genuinely angry at himself for possessing so-
PASSPORT TO PARIS 111
kind a heart. He was fond of cutting and artfully insulting remarks,
which he made often between puffs on his eternal cigarette, and
would follow them with a snakelike sound a cross between a hiss
and a chuckle winding up with an asthmatic cough, which would
make him angrier still. In a perpetual rage at himself, he covered it
up by being ingeniously unpleasant to people especially if he
liked them.
After kissing Pavlik on both cheeks and pinching Alan, Valitchka
clucked contentedly and turned to me: "I hear you write music
must you?" This sally was accompanied by the hissing-snake act,
followed by violent coughing. No answer was expected, obviously,
and Nouvel went on: "Don't be scared by me; nobody is scared by
Valitchka any longer; they took out my fangs and they won't let me
talk. Seriozha [Diaghilev] occasionally listens to me, but never
agrees with me. What kind of music do you write?" This very
abruptly. I was somewhat taken aback. "Good music, I hope," I re
plied. More clucking from Valitchka and then: "They all say that.
I once said that about my music I was the only one who said it.
Let me see if Aliousha's piano is in tune." He hobbled over to the
upright, struck a few disjointed chords and let out a yell. "How can
you play on this casserole? I'm prejudiced against your music al
ready." There was some violent shouting on the part of the hosts,
which permitted me my habitual sneaking maneuver of taking pos
session of the "casserole."
The concerto was again rattled off, and this time greeted by
thoughtful and (to me) ominous silence. "I don't know whether
Seriozha will like your piece," Nouvel said finally. "I don't think he
will, but you never know with him. There is too much Prokofiev in
this music and Diaghilev now hates Prokofiev. I keep telling him
that he is a better composer than Stravinsky, but what's the use?
Chout was a failure, so Prokofiev is out. Play something else not
as longwinded as the concerto, khe, khe, khe. ..." I played part
of the second sonata and, to my surprise, Valitchka liked that better.
He asked me to repeat a certain passage, cocked his head amusedly
and then rose, glancing at his watch: "I must go now and sup with
Serge at the Cabaret [Diaghilev's favorite restaurant]. I promise
nothing, but I'll tell Diaghilev all about you and maybe get him to
listen to you. I understand you know Boris Kochno?" "I met him in
Constantinople." "Does he like your music?" "He's never heard it.
112 PASSPORT TO PARIS
He didn't like my poems too well and, frankly, I wasn't insane about
his." "Good, very good. Khe, khe, khe ..." A long hiss this time,
kisses all around and Valitchka took his departure.
The next day I was offered a diminutive, but cheerful, room next
to Alan's and, gratefully accepting it, said good-by to the smelly,
small hotel and the whoring salesmen. I was fast becoming a real
Montparnos, nursed "bocks" at the Dome or the Rotonde for hours,
danced with American girls, who thought me terribly foreign and "so
different" at the Jockey, and with French painters' models at a stu
dents* ball, a pale replica of the famous Quatz Arts; apparently, not
ten minutes after I left the ball (at 3 A.M.) everybody took their
clothes off. My timing was bad and still is.
A few days later Valitchka telephoned and in a slightly pompous
voice announced that I was invited to Diaghilev's box that night and
should I pass the inspection, would most likely be taken to a supper
party for Stravinsky after the performance. I was to wear tails or, at
least, a dinner jacket. Did I own one? I most certainly did. "All's
well, then," Valitchka said. "Oh, youth, youth! khe, khe, khe . . ."
and rang off.
Could this be happening to me? I was to meet the great man, the
aesthetic dictator of the century, in his own lair and so easily, so
painlessly only within a few weeks of my arrival in Paris. Life was
good and so was Valitchka Nouvel. "Just you wait, Pavlik," I said
gaily to Tchelitchev. "I'll get a ballet commission and you'll do the
sets." "No, I won't," Tchelitchev replied. "I hate the theater."
I, for one, loved the theater that evening. It was a Stravinsky gala
and featured Les Noces, with the music of which I was only vaguely
familiar. In the box sat Misia Sert, covered with glittering jewels, a
square-headed important-looking woman with a massive jaw and
rather a mean mouth; a young-old man in tails with an Italian accent;
and Koribut-Kubitovitch (nicknamed "Pavka"), a benign sexa
genarian of the type known as "venerable"; he had the whitest of white
beards, the pinkest of pink lips, an expression of infinite benevolence
and turned out to be Diaghilev's cousin. Diaghilev was busy back
stage, settling a quarrel between two dancers, as I overheard Koribut
say. Decked out in my inoffensive Eighth Avenue dinner jacket, I
was overwhelmed by the distinguished company, who paid not the
slightest attention to me, and, modestly tucked away in a corner, be
came absorbed in the proceedings on the stage. Gontcharova's
PASSPORT TO PARIS 113
black-and-white decor for Les Noces, the choreography, shrewdly
mixing paganism and geometry, and best of all, the luminous "un
dressed" uncannily persuasive music, the four pianos clashing and
clicking their teeth, the constantly changing rhythms chasing each
other without stopping for breath, fibred my whole being. At the final
curtain I screamed "Bravos" with the rest of the Stravinskyites, with
such undisguised abandon that even the majestic Misia rewarded me
with a smile and studied me with mild interest through her tortoise-
shell lorgnette.
Shortly afterwards the door behind me opened and in walked a man
of an appearance so remarkable that it will be hard to give the reader
a faithful pen portrait of him. Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev was a big
man slightly over six feet tall broad and big-limbed, but not
corpulent; his head was enormous, and the face a world in itself;
you hardly noticed the rest of his body. The still-abundant graying
hair was parted meticulously on the side and displayed the oft-
described silver-white patch in the middle no crafty coiffeur's
trick but, from all accounts, something of a birthmark. When I first
gazed at Diaghilev's face, I thought instantly of a decadent Roman
emperor Caligula, perhaps although Diaghilev was allergic to
horses among other things, then the Tartar in him possibly Genghis
Khan or even a barbarous Scythian, became visible and
lastly, what he really was: a Russian grand seigneur of Alexander in
vintage. The eyes had a piercing, mocking intensity about them, soft
ened by unusually heavy eyelids, and he was fond of closing them
slowly, as if persuaded by some unseen Morpheus, but only for a mo
ment; they were soon peering at you again, not missing a thing. The
mouth was cruel and soft at the same time, the mustache even more
close-clipped than Valitchka's, the smile irresistible and oddly fem
inine. Sergei Pavlovitch carried monocles in all his pockets and had
a habit of dropping one into his left hand, producing another with the
right and screwing it into his eye languidly, making a lazy chewing mo
tion with his mouth the while, as if munching spinach. He was well,
although not conspicuously well, dressed and wore his Davis dinner
jacket as if it were a dressing gown. His voice seemed monstrously af
fected at first the Imperial Page's voice of aristocratic St. Peters
burg but you soon knew that he must have, too, been born with it.
Diaghilev spoke French superbly, and English adequately.
He walked straight up to Misia, took her head in his hands and
114 PASSPORT TO PARIS
kissed her on both cheeks. "Mon Serge! Mon anger cooed Misia,
and started an excited and unpunctuated monologue. She had the
rare knack of talking to one person in a room full of people in a loud
and even booming voice, but with intonations so intimate and a vo
cabulary so special, that the monologue was unintelligible to all but
the person addressed. That was an essentially Paris-snob stunt and I
was being treated to it for the first time. Little Valitchka soon ap
peared, emerging from the dark of the avant-loge, with Boris Kochno
on his heels, handsomer than the dancers on the stage and smiling at
no one in particular. Boris patted me on the back, somewhat tenta
tively, and then ran up to Mme. Sert, bowing low to kiss her bejeweled
hand; Misia went right on talking, with barely a nod to Boris. Diaghilev
soon turned to Nouvel, exclaiming: "Heavens, hadn't we better go
off to supper? Stravinsky is in a good enough mood, but he must be
starving." Valitchka adjusted his pince-nez, obviously nervous, and
muttered: "Seriozha, this is Vladimir Dukelsky, the young composer
I told you about." Diaghilev then noticed me, dropped his monocle,
adjusted another in its place and did the spinach-munching routine,
the three actions permitting him to examine me minutely. "Ah, a
good-looking boy," he drawled. "That in itself is most unusual. Com
posers are seldom good-looking; neither Stravinsky nor Prokofiev ever
won any beauty prizes. How old are you?" I told him I was twenty.
"That's encouraging, too. I don't like young men over twenty-five;
they lose their adolescent charm and sleep with any woman who
gives them the nod. I fire most of my male dancers when they reach
that age." More spinach-munching, then an amused smile. "This
is all very simple. If your music is bad I can always hire you as a
dancer. N'est-ce pas, Misia?" Misia smiled thinly, wrinkling up her
small nose, and surveyed me again through the lorgnette. I was
embarrassed by this initiation, well aware of the fact that I'd never
do as a dancer my body was too thin and unmuscular. "Oh, so
you still can blush," Diaghilev went on. "Valitchka, I think him a
very pleasant young man and I want him to come to supper with us.
Come with Boris I believe you two already know one another.
Viens> Misia." The regal Mme. Sert nodded, permitted herself to be
enveloped in her evening cloak by the taciturn old-young man, whose
name I never learned, and they went out, followed by Diaghilev,
Valitchka traipsing daintily behind him, Boris and I the last to leave.
PASSPORT TO PARIS 115
Supper at Pre Catalan in the Bois was a very Parisian affair. I re
call the crimson-and-gold decor of the room, the excellent cham
pagne and the superlative food Diaghilev was an accomplished
gourmet, but his palate was so jaded that he had to pour virtually a
whole shaker of salt and another of pepper on whatever he ate, and
then cover the dish with a thick layer of Savora, his favorite condi
ment, in order to taste anything at all. Five or six elegantes were
present including Misia, Daisy Fellowes, Daisy de Segonzac,
Lady Abdy and one of the d'Erlangers; Stravinsky, in tails, was not
unlike an emaciated Pickwick, accompanied by the faithful Win
kle and Snodgrass George Auric and Francis Poulenc, two husky
and amiable youths, one fair, the other dark and the amorous
Tupman Valitchka Nouvel. To continue with the possibly far
fetched analogy, these gentlemen were soon joined by an overdressed
Jingle Jean Cocteau of the fallen-angel face, sleeve-cuffs un
buttoned to permit the bourgeoisie to feast their eyes on the fireman-
red lining (a sartorial must with him) and the fanciful, if not always
intelligible, line of gab. These people, including Stravinsky, talked of
Stravinsky and I drank in every eloquent word.
I wasn't asked, but managed to tell Igor Fedorovitch how trans
ported I was by Les Noces, which effusion was graciously received.
Coco Chanel walked in, looking like a jockey in drag, and de
manded to know who the new young man (me) was, and whether,
by chance, I wasn't a new dancer. When told that I wrote music,
she looked at me without interest, and turned an appreciative ear
to Cocteau's newest epigram. I was too happy to care. My departure
was as unspectacular as was my entrance and I went back to Mont-
parnasse in a cab and in a daze.
Two days later the ever-punctual Valitchka telephoned again and
told me that Diaghilev desired me to play my concerto for him; and
would I come to the Baron de Meyer's house that afternoon, as the
baron had an especially good piano and it was in tune?
So the big moment had come, though, in the anticipation of it, my
new self-assurance vanished. It was all working out too well; to a
young man already used to the bitterness of bad breaks, such per
sistent good fortune appeared suspicious. "What does he want with
my concerto?" I thought sadly. "Nouvel doesn't really like it and I
myself think it reminiscent in spots." I made up my mind to at least
116 PASSPORT TO PARIS
play it well and, pushing the indignant Alan off the piano stool, went
on a four-hour practice jag.
The de Meyers lived in un hotel, which, in this instance, meant a
private dwelling (hotel particulier) , not an inn. The house and its
owners were typical of the all-powerful tout Paris set Louis XV
and Marie Laurencin with Vogue trimmings. There was a faint tinge
of violet in the beautiful white hair of both de Meyers a decorative
pair, aggressively agreeable, as people of their class are, when re
ceiving; the class that labels everything that comes their way as
either divin or d'un ennui mortel be it music, a new novel, a new
restaurant or a new concubine. I was brought by Diaghilev, the
magician and explorer, therefore there was a good chance of my
being divin. I don't think they knew that the frail youth with jet-black
hair was in their home "on approval" and that his fate hung peril
ously in the balance.
I was the first to enter the de Meyer drawing room a regrettable
mistake, as no one divin is ever punctual. My embarrassment was
somewhat relieved by the cordiality of my hosts and the perfection
of the dry Martini I was offered, a drink still misunderstood by Pari
sians, who call it un dry pronounced "dree" and make it al
most entirely of vermouth, using gin as sparingly as if it were Fernet
Branca. Some small talk followed, very small indeed on my part, and
then Sergei Pavlovitch entered with Boris in tow, both splendidly
shaven and eau-de-cologned.
I was much too nervous to listen to the gossip that made up the
general conversation. I drank two more Martinis and, just as I emp
tied the second, was asked by Diaghilev to show him the concerto I
had Brought with me. After carefully wiping and then adjusting one
of his monocles, he began perusing the manuscript, humming to him
self in a strange catlike voice and conducting with a pudgy index
finger. I watched the performance with awe and astonishment.
Diaghilev, who never missed anything, smiled indulgently and put
down my music. "Few people know it, but I'm a compositeur
manque," he remarked. "I was always behind in my harmony lessons
with Rimsky-Korsakov, but once managed to write a piano piece,
which I showed him. It was very bad and he said so." Sergei Pavlo
vitch then rose brusquely and led me to the piano. "Let me hear your
concerto: I'll turn the pages for you."
With the determination of despair and, encouraged by the excel-
PASSPORT TO PARIS 117
lence of the instrument, I gave a creditable account of my "Passport
to Paris." I remember vividly thinking as I played on: "I don't care,
here it is. It's the best I can do, take it or leave it." When I hit the last
crashing C-major chord, there was a moment of dreadful, complete
silence I didn't turn around but knew that the two de Meyers and
Boris were looking at Diaghilev, awaiting his verdict. To my astonish
ment, the great man began clapping his hands thunderously and with
such determination that the others soon joined in the applause.
"Bravo, jeune homme, and congratulations. Best new music I've
heard in years. Now what shall we call your ballet?" he inquired
suddenly. I was completely taken aback. "What ballet, Sergei Pav-
lovitch?" I queried. "The one you will write for me, of course. You
-will write one, won't you?" Kochno now intervened. He got up, em
braced me and, smiling knowingly, declared that he already had an
idea for "my" ballet and that the idea was certain to please Sergei
Pavlovitch. I dimly remember that I was then made much of by the
de Meyers and that a bottle of champagne appeared mysteriously
and toasts to the new Diaghilev composer were drunk by all, includ
ing the toastee.
I was taken home to 150 by Diaghilev himself Kochno stayed
on to dinner at the de Meyers' in a large chauffered limousine. My
discoverer had his arm around me and talked softly and earnestly
about my talent, the future before me, the task he was entrusting me
with and his hope that I would fulfill his expectations; I was so dazed
and drunk with the Martinis, the champagne and my crashing, com
plete success, that I only understood half of what Sergei Pavlovitch
said, but loved every word of it. He deposited me in Boulevard Mont-
parnasse, kissed me heartily on both cheeks Russian fashion, and
departed. Both Alan and Pavlik were out; I dined alone extravagantly
on a corner terrace, paying eleven francs for a copious meal, and,
exhausted by the events of the day, went off to bed. That night I
cried my first, and probably last, tears of happiness and realized that
Victorian novelists had something there, for never did tears taste so
sweet to me.
What ensued was equally dreamlike. The next morning, my recital
to Tchelitchev and Tanner, to which they listened with eyes popping
and mouths ajar, was interrupted by Valitchka, who dashed in with
out bothering to telephone this time. He declared himself delighted
with my success, there was more embracing all around, and then
118 PASSPORT TO PARIS
I was let in on the newest developments; apparently Diaghilev, Boris
and Valitchka had supper late the night before and Boris talked a
great deal about the proposed ballet. All I could learn about it was
that two leading male dancers' roles were envisaged one for Dolin,
the other for Serge Lifar, the remarkable new Russian boy for whom
Diaghilev entertained the highest hopes; that a girl called Alice Niki-
tina with the "most beautiful legs in the world" was a hot candidate
for the female lead, and that I had better drop everything and con
centrate on my job as if my life depended on it. This was easy, be
cause there was nothing for me to drop and I had no other life than
the one that was so miraculously opening before me.
The news of a new Diaghilev protege emerging from out of no
where Russia via the United States was an unheard-of beginning
spread rapidly through the Paris salons. Diaghilev nicknamed me
Karsavina, as he claimed that I bore a striking resemblance to that
dancer, and this led to obvious speculations as to the nature of our
relationship; idle ones, I must add, because, quite outside my own
"normal" leanings, I just wasn't Sergei Pavlovitch's "type." I quickly
formed lasting friendships with both Auric and Poulenc, whose gay,
lilting music was a relief after the strenuous Varese and Ruggles diet.
I liked Auric's Les Fdcheux with Braque's decor even better than
the universally popular Les Biches (Marie Laurencin Nijinska)
by Poulenc. There was a splendid ruggedness, a bittersweet savor
about the former, an uncouth but very personal harmonic language,
and the rough-edged, graceless orchestration fitted the music per
fectly; the ballet (produced in 1923) was only a moderate suc
cess, perhaps because of the rather pedestrian choreography. Les
Biches, on the contrary, was (and still is, wherever revived) an em
phatic hit, and rightly so because it is the perfect period piece and
typified the twenties as did no other ballet. The morbid prettiness of
Laurencin's decor was happily underlined by Poulenc's ingratiating
music, slyly frivolous or voluptuously romantic by turn; he had a
rather coy trick of perversely harmonizing the simplest Schubert-
cww-Chaminade tunes, which alternately caressed and intrigued
the ear. Nemtchinova's entrance, with her sleek black hair, tiny
blue jacket and long, dreamy legs in white tights, to Poulenc's best
tune in the score was a great and unforgettable coup de th6dtre.
Auric also liked to pepper his pseudo-seventeenth-century airs with
"wrong notes" artfully distributed and I much preferred this some-
PASSPORT TO PARIS 119
what naive device to the out-and-out vulgarity of Milhaud's Le Train
Bleu, whose unashamedly cheap strains would have probably gained
by a little shrewd mutilation.
Auric and Poulenc were wonderful company; Poulenc much
more of a mondain than his friend. Auric was a big, unwieldly crea
ture, a megot always dangling from his lips, the smile childishly good-
hearted, the small Balzacian eyes malevolent and crafty. Francis, on
the contrary, although fairly portly, too, spoke and moved with the
easy assurance of a salon habitue; his voice lazy and nasal, his
clothes unobtrusively right, his light hair cut en brosse, somewhat in
the Prussian military manner, Poulenc was at his best when playing
the piano, which he did with an impish nonchalance immediately
attractive to the listener.
Auric and Poulenc returned favorable verdicts on my gifts and I
was now maneuvered into a pilgrimage to Stravinsky's quarters, in the
Pleyel building. The master, surrounded by multi-colored inks, eras
ers, pens, pencils and music paper of every conceivable variety, all
in meticulous order, sat in an ultra-modern chair behind an even
more aggressively modern writing desk. As he got up to greet me with
the rather fussy politeness so typical of him, I became conscious of
the enormous goggles he wore, propped up above his eyes, the chin,
in its turn, propped up by an elegantly tied ascot emerging from a
monogrammed sport shirt. Stravinsky's body was small, taut and
compact, but in common with small men, he was fashion crazy, not
unlike Ravel, who spent a young fortune on a light-blue tailcoat once,
"launched" it at one of the Princesse de Polignac's bigger soirees
and then, to his mortification, heard a marquis ask a count: "Who is
the little fellow who didn't bother to dress?"
Igor Fedorovitch was on the whole very nice about my concerto.
"What pleases me particularly," he said, gently puffing on a cigarette
in an extra-long holder, "is your technical proficiency; you are al
ready a professional. There is nothing like Russian conservatory
training and your young French friends would have been better off
had they studied with Taneiev, Glazunov or their pupils. As to the
music itself well, it's good honest conservatory music, too, and
how can it be otherwise?" Since the concerto, which I had had to
perform daily for several weeks now, had begun to bore me, I didn't
disagree. "Play something else something not quite so formal and
correct," Stravinsky asked. I don't know why, but I plunged into the
120 PASSPORT TO PARIS
allegro from my prematurely frozen Icelandic overture. Stravinsky
smiled engagingly and patted me on the back. "That's the kind of
music I expect from young men it has meat in it, and it's musical
meat, not fancy little ornaments." I remember him saying, "You
should be able to write a good ballet Diaghilev is seldom wrong."
I was most anxious to meet Prokofiev, whose third concerto was a
model for my first and so far only one. Diaghilev warned me
against seeing his "second son." "Serjosha is certainly very talented
and full of melody which Igor is not but Igor is intelligent
whereas Prokofiev is an utter imbecile. He always can be counted
on doing the wrong thing fancy calling a symphony 'Classical';
it's almost as bad as Scriabin we detested one another labeling
his orchestral poem 'Divine.' " I was no longer afraid of Diaghilev
and protested violently. "How can an imbecile write a piece as well
constructed as the third piano concerto?" I wanted to know. "And
those fresh, lyrical themes what charm that music has!" Dia
ghilev winced a bit, then grew thoughtful. "Yes, charm ..." he
said quietly. "That's something impossible to acquire. Stravinsky est
le seul musicien slave qui ria pas du charme slave"
If Stravinsky was reputed to be politely indifferent to everyone ex
cept himself, Prokofiev was feared by many for his bluntness, not to
say boorishness. He carried this attitude to somewhat childish ex
tremes, as when Siloti, the old pianist and Liszt's last living pupil, in
troduced him to pert and pleasant Lady Dean Paul, who, under the
name of Poldovski, wrote Debussyan salon music. Prokofiev declined
to shake hands with the woman, who was thrilled by his presence at
her concert, because "she wrote bad music," as he put it. I was
luckier than the unfortunate Lady Dean Paul, because Serge the Sec
ond (I often think the twenties the Era of the Three Serges
Diaghilev, Prokofiev and Koussevitzky) received me most cordially;
I was brought to his flat by Souvtchinsky on June 17, 1924 a sig
nificant date in my life, as a great and durable friendship began on
that day. Souvtchinsky, spouting enthusiasm on the way, declared
that I had nothing to fear from this new "test" as I had the makings of
a "grand style" (in the French sense) and was already "com
pletely autonomous." Prokofiev, looking like a cross between a Scan
dinavian minister and a soccer player, didn't go to quite such giddy
heights, but, with some reservations, thought the concerto a good,
solid job, convincingly melodious. His lips were unusually thick, ex-
PASSPORT TO PARIS 121
plaining to some degree the "white Negro" sobriquet, and they gave
his face an oddly naughty look, rather like that of a boy about to
embark on some punishable and therefore tempting prank. His pretty
wife, Lina Ivanovna, was part Spanish, sang well, and was a good
housekeeper and mother (they had two sons), which didn't prevent
Serge from picking fights with her hourly and throwing her out of the
room at the slightest provocation. Prokofiev pumped my hand ener
getically, asked me whether I played chess (I did, badly) and sug
gested I write him in Brittany, where he was going for the summer, to
report my progress or lack of same.
Summer was upon us and Diaghilev had made up all my plans for
it. He told me that he wanted a ballet combining classicism with
Russian overtones tutus with kokoshniks, as he put it. Sergei Pav-
lovitch, who began his career as a sponsor of painting, adored Ve-
nezianov, Borovikovsky and Levitzki Russian "classical" paint
ers of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and was es
pecially fond of Venezianov's peasants clean, graceful creatures
in white, their dress a fanciful amalgam of peasant headgear and a
Russian landowner's conception of Olympian fashions. These land
owners had their own theaters on their country estates, and it en
chanted them to see their latest favorite a Douniasha or Parasha
endowing her rustic charms with godlike attributes of a Flora or
Psyche. Diaghilev was a barin of the old school; one of his ancestors
had owned such a theater and this perverse conception of theatrical
mythology was understandably dear to him.
The story selected and "rearranged" by Kochno was that of
Zephyr and Flora, already "balletized" by Didelot, and also carica
tured by Thackeray in 1836, but these antecedents only added spice
to the idea. Zephyr was to be impersonated by Anton Dolin, Boreas
by young Lifar and Flora by Nikitina of the perfect limbs. Diaghilev
admonished me to stick to Glinka and Dargomijsky as models and
to steer clear of Prokofiev; this I promised to do, meekly volunteering
to add a dash of Dukelsky. The plan was for Boris and myself to go
off to a small retreat in the country, near Paris, and go to work without
delay. Boris became most industrious and businesslike, and a few
days later we were in the Chevreuse Valley, sharing the second floor
of a tiny house owned by one Veuve Gicquel, who ran a small village
bistro underneath our quarters. The honest bourgeois who patron
ized her establishment must have been bewildered by the distinctly
122 PASSPORT TO PARIS
un-French sounds emanating from upstairs, but no one seemed to
mind. The bourgeois drank, I composed, and Boris went about the
fragrant countryside faternizing with the villagers, a favorite pastime
of his in those days.
Kochno's synopsis was craftily made and gave a composer a
free hand with his material. A word of advice in passing here may
not be amiss keep your ballet story to five or six lines and stay
away from literature or editorializing of any kind; the simpler and
more direct the scenario the happier the composer and choreogra
pher, the more pleased the audience. Boris had (and still has) a rare
knack for presenting his ideas with the utmost clarity yet with
great poetic feeling and when you had so good an initial "peg"
and an atmosphere as unmatchable as that provided by Diaghilev's
presence, his enthusiasm, his quiet eloquence, his uncanny intui
tion it wasn't easy to go wrong.
I began with the joyful Concert des Muses and the Nouvel-
approved scherzolike episode from the second sonata for Lifar's
first entrance. After this start, the next three "numbers" wrote them
selves; never before and certainly never since (except perhaps in
the 1946 Bal des Blanchisseuses, written in three weeks also on a
Boris Kochno "argument") have I experienced such delicious free
dom in composing. I played what I wrote to Boris of an evening, the
smell of freshly mown hay mingling with other assorted odors of the
French countryside. There were a few roughly clad customers of
Mme. Gicquel's drinking vin blanc au citron below they got used
to the mad foreigners upstairs and were not above offering us un
pinard. Boris loved what he heard, made detailed notes for the chore
ographer (not yet chosen), and then we trotted downstairs to join
the pastoral drinking, happy and young and full of music. A few days
later the result of our labors was exhibited to Diaghilev, who never
came to see us in our Chevreuse retreat, but remained in Paris rais
ing money for his next season. On this occasion I had my first glimpse
of Lifar, a coltish youth with an unusually dark complexion and
Ukrainian features. Lifar wore a perpetually ecstatic expression and
talked mostly in excited monosyllables, like a young savage savoring
the fruits of European civilization for the first time. His ecstasy at
what he heard of Zephyr was so noisy that I couldn't hear Diaghilev,
who was whispering animatedly in a corner with Kochno. But there
was no need to worry. If Sergei Pavlovitch liked the concerto enough
PASSPORT TO PARIS 123
to commission a ballet from me, a total nonentity, he was enormously
gratified by my new effort, particularly because, as he put it, "he
was not sorry he had had faith in me.'* He thought the style exactly
right, melodious and Russian but "minus samovars." That night Boris
and I were driven back to Chevreuse in someone's town car, faintly
Guerlain-scented and with a chauffeur of excessively good looks. I
began to feel important, a dangerous feeling when one is twenty.
Valitchka turned up in our Chevreuse working quarters one eve
ning, drank a great deal of red wine, listened to the new music,
liked it and then produced a contract for me to sign. I'm a little
hazy as to what was in the contract, but recall that the royalties
were to be paid me through the French Performing Rights Society
(of which I became a member through Boris's good offices) and
that Diaghilev agreed to give me 1000 francs a month while I was
working with him, "and maybe more later," said Valitchka darkly,
"if your ballet is a success and you're asked to write another. I
wouldn't count on it if I were you, khe, khe, khe. . . ." In 1924
you could live in France on 1000 francs a month about as well as
you can in 1954 on 100,000 just enough for a decent existence
sans faire des folies. This arrangement was most welcome; my tastes
were modest but Mrs. Monroe Robinson's money was dwindling rap
idly.
Three more weeks chez Mme. Gicquel, who had got used to her
strange tenants and was loth to see us go; about 40 per cent of
Zephyr and Flora was written and approved by Sergei Pavlovitch,
who declared that I would finish the score in Monte Carlo.
On August 4th, I wrote Gershwin:
My dear George,
Your letter was forwarded to me about two weeks ago, but,
being extremely busy and lazy, I didn't manage to write you at
once.
The thing is that Diaghilev ordered me (sic) a large ballet
score on a rather difficult book for the coming 18th season of
the "Ballets Russes"; this is to be produced next Fall, first in
Monte Carlo, then in Paris. Of course, you understand that
nothing better could have happened to me, and, although speed
is not required in this particular case, I'm writing and writing.
In two weeks I'm going to Monte Carlo to join Diaghilev, finish
124 PASSPORT TO PARIS
the score and start rehearsals. My concerto is to be played in
U. S. A. in January; I also received an offer to play it myself in
Paris next Spring. [Nothing came of these two projects.]
Your letter was adorable in its unselfish simplicity, but one
thing makes me sad: you don't even mention the rhapsody
that is the Real Thing. Now this is most important. I spoke
about you to Diaghilev and played nearly all your tunes to his
secretary, who finds them amazing. I also have a most interest
ing proposition for you (Diaghilev's) . Do come to Paris before I
leave.
Love,
On August 31st, Diaghilev wrote Lifar:
Dukelsky came yesterday and played me the music for Flore et
Zephyre, which I liked enormously. I made such comments as I
thought fit, and he very nicely said he would take note of it all,
and go on working at it in Monte Carlo, under my eye, all of
which pleases me greatly. For his twenty years he's extremely
gifted and developed.
To Monte Carlo we then journeyed by a slow and rather nasty
train; my head chronically in the clouds and my heart wonderfully
light. The company was soon to go on another tour and Diaghilev
and Kochno were going along they now trusted me to complete
the job alone and assured me that I was on the right track. Diaghilev
warned me to keep away from women, whom he professed to abhor,
not merely as useless (to him) sexually but because of their colos
sal stupidity and greed. Sergei Pavlovitch was, I'm afraid, overfond
of such generalizations; along with women, his pet peeves were homo
sexuals and balletomanes. This intelligence might appear startling
in view of his being both of these things himself. However, he ex
plained the paradox by insisting that he only liked manly and virile
youths, afraid or suspicious of women, and thus falling into the able
hands of the likes of him. Simpering and mincing tantes he detested
and thought worse than women, whom they aped unsuccessfully.
He was most sympathetic when I confessed to not being homosex
ual. "A pity in a way of course," he mused. "Poor Piotr Ilytch Tchai
kovsky was always on the verge of suicide, so afraid was he that
people might discover that he was a pederast; today, if you're a com
poser and not a pederast you had better put a bullet through your
PASSPORT TO PARIS 125
head." When I protested and cited the names of three especially suc
cessful living composers of old-fashioned habits (that is, heterosex
ual), Diaghilev retorted: "Nonsense. Two of them are des tantes
ratees (would-be pederasts who failed to make the grade) and the
third is impotent." He laughed uproariously, then shook a well-
manicured finger at me. "Don't get mixed up with women, Dima
. . . not now, anyway, while you're working for me. All they are
good for is gold-digging or venereal disease ghastly things both." I
assured him that women played no part in my life and, to give weight
to this statement, reluctantly admitted my still virginal status.
"A virgin at twenty most interesting," drawled Diaghilev, drop
ping his monocle. "That reminds me of an uncommonly beautiM
young man who was in the Horse Guards; about your age he was,
too. I wined and dined him nightly with not the slightest success. He
didn't seem to care for girls and, strange to relate, in spite of his su
perb physique was entirely allergic to sex, in his own admission.
This began to nettle me, so I took him to the famous old Dr. Botkin,
the inventor of the Botkin drops [a staple drug in prerevolutionary
Russia]. Botkin was an irritable old party and fit to be tied after ex
amining my frigid Horse Guard. 'What's your diagnosis, Doctor?' I
asked him anxiously. 'Diagnosis? Hell, the young man is beyond all
hope,' Botkin growled. 'I asked him whether he liked women. "I do
not, Doctor," said he. "Do you like boys?" "No, indeed." "Do you in
dulge in solitary pleasures?" "Certainly not, sir." "Perhaps a slight
affinity to canines or young sheep, then?" "What a horrible idea!" I
was fast becoming exasperated. "Well, damn it, do you have dreams?"
"Oh, yes, I dream occasionally." "Ah, now we're getting somewhere,
Kindly describe a typical dream!" The young man concentrated for a
minute. "It's really quite silly, but I often dream of waiting for a train
at the Tzarskoe Sielo station. I wait and wait . . . and then I hear
the chugging of the approaching train in the distance . . . chug
. . . chug . . . chug . . . chug . . . nearer and nearer . . . it's
practically upon me . . . and then ..." "Yes, yes, go on!" "And
then I have an orgasm!" Naturally, I threw the idiot out of my
office.' "
Diaghilev's aversion to balletomanes was more justifiable than his
contempt for women his truest friends and admirers as well as
financial backers were women after all, and he loved them and
was touchingly grateful to them. Sergei Pavlovitch considered the
126 PASSPORT TO PARIS
musical score the axis of every ballet, sets and costumes came next
in order of importance, then choreography and lastly a good or at
least an adequate performance by the dancers, who, to him, were
choreographers' tools no more. "A balletomane I was one my
self in the Marinsky-theater days has a fixation: the dancer's legs
and feet. To him a ballet is a jewel box with his idol be it a he or a
she the jewel. They have no ears for the music, no eyes for the
decor they are nothing but fetishists," he told me. "God help us
if they ever become critics!" Alas, most ballet critics today are
balletomanes; one has only to read a typical account of a ballet
premiere in a London or New York newspaper or magazine and see
the music dismissed with "poor" or "brilliant," the decor barely
touched upon, the choreographer given plenty of space, but most of
the space devoted to the interpreters. That was not so in my Diaghilev
days, as music critics (and sometimes composers), both in Paris
and London, wrote ballet criticism. It is still possible to get a non-
amateurish notice for one's ballet score in Paris but not in London
or New York.
Sergei Pavlovitch and Boris alighted at the Hotel de Paris their
habitual quarters in Monte Carlo whereas I, my first ballet pay
envelope in my pocket, went off in search of a cheap and "amusing"
hotel. The establishment I selected in Monaco which I thought
had more character than Monte was sensationally cheap, all
right, but it proved anything but amusing. It was run by a pale and
perpetually scowling Auvergnate with watery eyes and a distrust of
foreigners, in which category she included every out-of-towner. She
couldn't for the life of her see why a young Stranger like myself
should want to stay at her inn, inhabited mainly by croupiers and
professional ballroom dancers; and when she took a look at my Nan-
sen (League of Nations) passport I had no separate American first
papers at the time > being merely "written in" on Mother's her dis
pleasure became complete. She eyed me up and down, asked inter
minable tricky questions and, I'm sure, would have frisked me had
she had the right to do so, but, the moment I produced a month's rent
in advance, a benign smile appeared on her squeezed-out lips and I
was admitted. The reader will wonder why I made so great an effort
to secure so sorry a lodging that's easy: the view was magnificent
and the room clean.
There was a horrible harridan of a chambermaid at the place, a
PASSPORT TO PARIS 127
Jill-of-all-trades and second in command to the patronne. She was
all caky make-up and gold teeth and, in her own confession, liked
two things pastis (the anisy drink of the Midi) and young boys.
The creature herself must have been somewhere around fifty, but
her latest acquisition was a seventeen-year-old Marseillais named
Honore, a fervent sportif but none too agile as bellhop; Honore was all
muscles and pimples and the harridan promptly took him in hand.
Her room was right next to mine, the walls were very thin, as is usual
in French hotels, and I was often treated punctually at 6 P.M.,
when I returned to my room to shave and, occasionally, change
to an erotic duet that filled me with terror; the duet consisted of a
cantus firmus performed by the rickety bed squeaking rhythmically,
a highly involved aria by the harridan, full of ecstatic roulades and
well-executed tremolos, the whole punctuated by double-basslike
grunts and snorts by the athletic Honore. It made for fascinating,
if gruesome, listening, and I once cut myself badly with the razor,
shocked by a sudden tumultuous crescendo by the overvocal lovers.
The food at the hotel was unfortunate it was bad and there
wasn't enough of it, as the well-worn story has it. My appetite was
ravenous and I would often gulp down the unpalatable dinner and
then dine for the second time with Diaghilev and Boris at their excel
lent brasserie; they seldom took their meals at the highly gastronomic
and costly Hotel de Paris, and then mostly on festive or important
business occasions. My first impression of Monte Carlo and of
the Riviera in general was decidedly mixed and still is. I never
could see why such astonishing natural beauty should be ruined by
dingy and pretentious villas and, above all, the ever-present dirty-
orange of the Riviera rooftops. The three colors which predominate
in that land are orange, blue (the Mediterranean) and green (the
flora) a poor blend. I don't know why the roofs weren't painted
pink, crimson or even pale blue in the first place.
The hideousness of the Monte Carlo casino is too well-realized
without any further vilification on these pages. The whole square, with
the birthday-cakelike Hotel de Paris, the rotonda in the middle
with benches occupied by has-beens ex-lorettes of the Felix Faure
day and retired British colonels living off a roulette "system" by
which, if you possess inhuman restraint and self-discipline, you are
"guaranteed" 2000 francs daily and the casino in washed-out
pink, is one of the saddest sights in the world, second only to a foggy
128 PASSPORT TO PARIS
afternoon in Manchester, England. I hated the casino because I
lost the last few thousands of non-Diaghilev money there at roulette
in slightly under ten minutes; yet Fate decreed that I should com
plete my Zephyr within its dreaded walls. There was no piano at my
hotel in Monaco and anything more advanced than "0 Sole Mio"
or "La Violeterra" was unsuitable for the Hotel de Paris and its
clients, so Diaghilev made arrangements with the administrator of the
casino, who obligingly moved to other quarters, to lend me his cabinet
de travail, which boasted a good Erard and thus became a composer's
workshop. It was wondrous strange to compose ballet music right
under the gambling hell; by opening the windows I could occasion
ally catch the bored rien ne va plus of the croupiers over my head
and wince remembering my shameful loss. However, the Theatre
de Monte Carlo one of the most attractive of its kind in Europe
was next door, my good genius Diaghilev was across the street and
all was well with Zephyr and Flora and the world in general
Shortly before Sergei Pavlovitch and Boris went off with the com
pany, I decided I had had enough of my Monaco rattrap and, by
walking in the streets of hilly Beausoleil, found a "vacancy" sign
in the window of a pleasant little house grandly styled Villa des Genets.
I rang the bell and soon beheld an unusually thin dark Italian lady
with huge Giottoesque eyes, whom I instantly liked and who turned
out to be Veuve Marcellin, the villa's owner. She greeted me in warm
Italian fashion and was soon joined by a Mile. Doucet, who was as
fat as Mme. Marcellin was thin and whose hair was the reddest red
known to nature or science. Mile. Doucet was, technically speak
ing, an old maid, but there was nothing old or maidenly about her;
she was amiable and coquettish in the extreme.
After showing me an agreeable room on the second floor and
learning that it suited me perfectly, the two ladies offered me a Cin
zano and we all sat down. "May I ask, sir, the nature of your busi
ness?" the widow said gently. "I write music." "Ah, c'est beau, la
musiquef" sighed Mile. Doucet, adding, "So cultural and it aids the
digestion." "The voice of the heart," Mme. Marcellin offered, clutch
ing hers. "And of the soul, too. It's very dignified to be a maestro
compositore and we are honored to receive you." "But we have no
piano here," Mile. Doucet suddenly remembered and looked at me
with anxiety. On learning that I had my working quarters elsewhere
and that I wrote for the Ballets Russes (next to gambling, Monte
PASSPORT TO PARIS 129
Carlo's greatest magnet in those days) the two women expressed
sincere delight at renting their prize bed-sitting room to so accom
plished a young man and my health was drunk in another Cinzano.
There was a smaller room, next to mine, occupied by various tran
sients at uncertain times, but deemed unsuitable for a prolonged
sojourn otherwise, but for the owner and her dame de compagnie,
the Villa des Genets was empty.
With the departure of my collaborators, my Monte Carlo life as
sumed a duller but more regular pattern. I'd get up early, breakfast
with the two ladies, walk over to the casino, compose for two or
three hours and then take a bus to the Larvotto beach, which in
1924 was an unpretentious petite plage de famille. After a short im
mersion in the Mediterranean I swam very badly I'd lie in the
sun for an hour and return to Beausoleil to lunch in one of the many
small restaurants in that area. I would buy fruit or sweets for my
worthy landladies and spend an inspiring half hour discussing the up
lifting qualities of Art, music especially, and partaking of refresh
ments; then return to my casino quarters and work until six, when
one of my new friends among them the Comte de Segonzac,
Daisy's husband, and Henri Gautier-Vignal, witty and gracious peo
ple both would fetch me and we'd go on a motor trip to Eze, or
la Turbie, or St. Paul de Vence. Dinner was at somebody's villa, as a
rule, then more talk over brandy and cigars, occasionally a bad fox
trot played by me somewhat disdainfully (I was now a maestro com-
positore) for the delectation of my hosts who, initiated by the Boeuf
sur le toit, already had a distinct "penchant" for American jazz, and
so to Beausoleil and bed.
Cocteau was summering in Villefranche at the Hotel Welcome
and I was taken there a few times by Gautier-Vignal. Jean, in good
form, was surrounded by admiring disciples, mostly the youths in
search of Beauty and Truth (or Fun, at the very least) so aptly de
scribed by Maurice Sachs in Sabbat. He ran around the room,
talking incessantly, the disciples just sat and worshipped. Somehow
I could never fall under the man's spell, which, I fear, annoyed him
not a little it's always embarrassing to a hypnotist to try to lull to
sleep a man who stubbornly stays awake. In spite of the marked and
flattering interest Cocteau displayed in me, in spite of an enjoyable
cruise in his famous boat Ange Heurtebise and the fact that he
nicknamed me "Le Due Exqiiis" (Dukelsky), I didn't very much
130 PASSPORT TO PARIS
care for these Villefranche outings. They were rather like drinking
verveine tea with a snake charmer in a hothouse.
I much preferred my sunbathing sessions at Larvotto's beach.
There were attractive young people about, disporting themselves on
the sand or splashing in the incredibly blue water. Their meeting
place seemed to be a small raft not quite a quarter of a mile away
from the shore, and I gazed enviously at the gay group of American
and English teenagers whose chief occupation seemed to be diving
off the raft and then climbing back on again. One of the best swim
mers of the group was a Nordic nymph with green-grey eyes,
sunflower-colored bobbed hair, sugar-white teeth and a body so brown
that the color seemed painted on her lithe but solid frame. She'd only
linger on the beach for a minute or so and then would swim out to
the raft, using a powerful and faultlessly executed crawl. I soon
learned from one of the guards that the nymph's name was Karen,
that her friends nicknamed her "Khaki" and that she was half-
Danish, half-English. Watching the girl disappear in this manner ev
ery morning was torture to me as I was eager to get to talk to her; in
order to win her attention I signed up for a course of swimming les
sons with a big, stalwart Monegasque and told him that my aim was to
swim well enough to be able to reach the raft. The Monegasque nod
ded knowingly and we began our lessons the next morning at an hour
early enough not to be heckled by watchers.
I was in no way an exceptional pupil but, after six or seven lessons,
mastered the common breast stroke and could even float on my
back with some difficulty. Two more lessons and the Monegasque
told me to go ahead and swim out to the raft, solemnly promising to
come to my rescue, at no extra charge, should I fail to make it.
Filled with romance and courage I waited for Karen to reach the
raft, then started out, acutely conscious of the inadequacy of my
"sissy" stroke, but determined to get to her. I was pretty tired by the
time I reached the enchanted spot, but reach it I did, and who
should help me climb aboard, my teeth chattering and breath heavy,
but Karen herself! She gave me a beatific smile and looked me over
with mocking curiosity. "That was quite a feat," she said encourag
ingly. "You're not much of a swimmer, are you?" I swallowed that
and managed a smile myself. "If you must know the truth, I learned
swimming to get to this raft and meet you," I said. Khaki broke out
in a gay laugh, then shook my hand with some warmth. "I like that.
PASSPORT TO PARIS 131
. . . It's flattering and it's sincere. I hope we'll be friends." This was
a very healthy beginning and I inwardly blessed my Monegasque and
reminded myself to give him a fat tip. After a few wonderful minutes
on the raft, the assorted Anglo-Americans wondering who the in
truder was, Khaki and I swam back together, which was much eas
ier, the girl slowing down her progress not to embarrass me, breast-
stroking diligently alongside her.
Following this somewhat Saturday Evening Post-like kickoff, we
became inseparable. Khaki's father was a manufacturer, in fairly
comfortable circumstances, and he was expected momentarily
from London; meanwhile she was staying alone at a typically English
pension, patronized either by young vacationists or the already
noted retired colonels with unbeatable systems at roulette. Karen was
nineteen and more or less engaged to a rising Cardiff football player
known simply as Biddy. I thought myself in love, although it was
probably autosuggestion; no matter, for it came at the right time and
I wouldn't let any Biddies or British manufacturers stand in my way.
I was glad of this new development because, with the departure
of Diaghilev and Kochno, I learned something about loneliness. I
like loneliness now and have learned to live with it quietly and har
moniously for the most part. There is no getting away from it, you
are lonely alone and you die alone and so being lonely at intervals
is like a series of leisurely rehearsals for death. You create alone,
too, but almost everything else you do in a crowd; a crowd of two
if you're lucky and have a lover, a larger crowd depending on the
number of friends you have worst of all, a kaleidoscopic proces
sion of fellow mortals, totally indifferent to you and not especially
pleased at finding you still alive. Theirs are the faces you see around
you most often, theirs are the unwelcome telephone voices, theirs the
letters destined for the wastebasket before you open them; but, as long
as your business is a communal enterprise, a mass effort and what
business isn't? you will go on seeing these phantoms more often
than you'll see friends or lovers.
I didn't know all this when I was left alone in Monte Carlo to com
plete my Zephyr and Flora music a clever move of Diaghilev's,
because he knew that I'd have more time on my hands, and would
have to use it to compose. When not composing, I'd turn to letter
writing (still a favorite recreation of mine, bewildering and annoying
to my friends, because I foolishly expect replies and just as foolishly
132 PASSPORT TO PARIS
become indignant when I don't get them; nobody writes anymore)
and send Mother and Alex long and detailed reports of my miraculous
progress. Alex was doing fine at Gushing and Mother had now
switched to Russian embroidery and cross-stitching, much in de
mand at the time, to keep her younger son properly clothed and fed.
She soon moved to Boston, to be near Alex, and stayed with
the Irakly Toumanovs in Jamaica Plain. Both Mother and the inde
structible colonel were now enamored of Krishnamuti, and the colo
nel, formerly hostile to my Muse, took to writing me theosophical
treatises on the Cosmic Significance of my Art.
All this was dear and reassuring to me, but there already was a
strange unrealness about the New World I left behind to recapture
the Old. Khaki was, on the contrary, extraordinarily real and close
to me; I never experienced anything more sensuously vital than the
simple pleasures of dining & deux, oblivious to the surroundings but
grateful for them being there, slowly walking down to the beach, my
arm around Khaki's waist, and then lying on the cool sand close to
the girl, kissing her lips, hair and bare shoulders smelling of salt water.
It seemed clear to me that Fate decreed that, to become a man,
I should also become a husband. Forgetting Diaghilev's advice, 1
proposed to Khaki about ten days after we first met. My proposal was
received with a somewhat evasive but encouraging counterproposal
to "wait a few days.'* On returning to the Villa des Genets, I wrote
Mother the first of a long series of letters announcing the first of my
several forthcoming marriages, none of which took place.
CHAPTER IX
FAME DID NOT DELAY
DIAGHILEV soon returned from his travels, and with him Boris,
Lifar, Valitchka and Serge Grigoriev, the tall and somewhat
military-looking regisseur of the company. My newly written music
I completed the score slightly ahead of the deadline was
noisily approved (except for a very complicated variation for three
Muses, subsequently cut) and there was a lot of even noisier kissing.
When I mustered enough courage to spill the news of my impending
marriage, the kisses gave way to agonized screams. Then came an
other venomous antifeminine monologue by Diaghilev, with a stern
warning not to mix matrimony with ballet composing. Torn between
what I imagined to be love and what I knew to be my life's work,
I suggested that Diaghilev meet Karen and have it out with her; I
naturally hoped that Diaghilev, woman-hater though he was, would
be unable to resist the girl. "I'll be glad to see the creature," Serge
said more calmly. "But beware; I'll tell her that you're homosexual
and penniless." "How horrible of you!" I exclaimed. "You know it's
not true I'm not homosexual and I'm earning a living." "You're
earning just enough for one, and I'll see to it that you don't earn more.
As for truth, the only thing that's true is that you've written good music
for me and I always lie in the interests of the truth." This Machiavel
lian twist brought the discussion to an effective close and Diaghilev
turned to other matters.
Fortunately for the fate of my ballet, Karen became more and
more engrossed in Biddy, who arrived, sensing the danger; she re
served every evening for the big, powerfully built, football player. I
was eaten up by jealousy, but Karen's perfidy prevented an ill-timed
showdown, which might have resulted in a fatal rupture with Dia
ghilev.
134 PASSPORT TO PARIS
After the Zephyr was completed, there remained the task of or
chestrating the music, choreographing it and having sets and cos
tumes designed. Choreography and scenery were Diaghilev's prov
ince, orchestration mine alone, and I plunged into it, unaided and
frankly, unprepared. The sum total of my orchestrating experience
amounted to three or four half-hearted stabs. Did I confess my al
most complete ignorance to Diaghilev? I did not. With the wondrous
impudence of youth, I went to work, the two Rimsky-Korsakov vol
umes on orchestration and a score of Petrushka by my side. Mean
while, Auric, fortified by his Les Fdcheux experience, was scoring
Les Matelots, the other ballet commissioned by Sergei Pavlovitch
for the 1924-1925 season. When Auric fell ill, I grandly offered
to orchestrate his colorful finale; luckily, the Frenchman was smart
enough to decline my services with thanks.
The matter of the choreographer came up next. Lifar tells the
story in his biography of Diaghilev: "The arrangement was that
'Zephyr' should be produced by Nijinska but, having for some reason
taken offense because Diaghilev had entrusted me with the part of
Boreas, she left the company. I vividly recall how astonished, how
shaken I was when Diaghilev . . . said I was to be responsible for
the choreography of this ballet, for I knew well the importance at
tached to it by Diaghilev; knew too, how much he admired the
music of the young Dukelsky, whom he had recently discovered.
Enthusiastically, and with immense zeal, I took on the task of pro
ducing the new ballet. Nevertheless, in the early days of the New
Year 1925, I began more and more to feel irresolute and somewhat
doubtful of the whole thing . . . because I feared that, by wholly
devoting myself to a new art, I should fall behind as a dancer, just
when I was beginning to succeed. Strongly influenced by this motive,
I did my best* to persuade Sergei Pavlovitch to be reconciled with
Massine, in order that the latter might return as choreographer to the
Ballet. A period of long and painful indecision followed, but finally
... he yielded, and Massine began to work on 'Flore et Zephyre.' "
I'm sure there was more to it than the "persuasion" by a young and
untried dancer that resulted in Diaghilev's choice.
Arnold Haskell and Valitchka Nouvel, whose biography of Dia
ghilev appeared in 1935, gave an entirely different account of Mas-
sine's return to the fold: "For some time Massine had been seeking to
rejoin the Ballet, and Diaghilev found that it would now be wise to
FAME DID NOT DELAY 135
make the peace. Nouvel and Wollheim (the London ballet agent)
were entrusted with the negotiations, and they proved almost inter
minable, for Massine had learned the value of independence. Finally
a contract was signed by which he was engaged as choreographer
only, and entrusted with the novelties for the next Paris season."
Whatever the facts, Massine arrived in Monte Carlo and, as the cur
rent phrase has it, we were in business.
I well remember the audition, in the course of which Massine
heard both Zephyr and Les Matelots played piano-duet fashion by
Auric and myself. Leonide Massine, although of small stature, was
an arresting figure; his head was of extraordinary beauty, the eyes
flashing and hypnotic, the smile rare and therefore all the more be
guiling. His movements were brusque and oddly, determinedly virile,
with none of the unmasculine grace and softness too often typical
of male dancers. Massine's legs were a mystery, as he always wore
loose, Spanish-type pantaloons at rehearsal and it was maliciously
whispered that his legs were not the best part of the spruce, springy
body of the man. His manner was distant, inaccessible and reserved
in the extreme, possibly because of Diaghilev's aloof and barely civil
politeness to his former favorite and Nijinsky's successor. Although
nicknames and diminutives reigned in the company, Massine always
addressed Diaghilev as Sergei Pavlovitch and Diaghilev stuck to
Leonide Fedorovitch when speaking to the Beautiful Joseph of his
past (Massine made his debut in Richard Strauss's ballet of that
name). To my delighted surprise, this forbidding and admittedly diffi
cult master, certainly the top choreographer of his time, took to me
and my music almost immediately. He smiled repeatedly, nodded his
head (he sat directly opposite me while I played) and then went into
a long huddle with Sergei Pavlovitch and Boris, the only account of
which, made by the latter, was, "Funny. Leonide likes nobody, but
he liked you. I hope it's a good sign."
At about the same time I was introduced to the ballet company
by Diaghilev, an incomparable showman, in the theater as well as
the reheasal room. I was ill at ease in the long, low-ceilinged salle
with its heady body smells and an occasional welcome whiff of
resin or powder; ill at ease especially because of the two or three
dozen young and not so young ballerinas, disappointingly un-
feminine in their ugly black or gray tights, breathing noisily and
perspiring copiously all over the place. They were in the middle of
136 PASSPORT TO PARIS
a class, conducted by one of the older ballerinas, who shrilled:
"ee-raz, ee-dva" (and one, and two) as the dancers went through
the prescribed "manual of legs," to paraphrase the army term. Dia-
ghilev stopped the class and made a short introductory address in
which I was presented to the company as the composer of one of
the two new ballets. The dancers were obviously astonished by my
youth and there was some barely audible snickering from the male
dancers and agitated whispering among the girls. I was horribly em
barrassed when three of the younger ones curtsied with mock rever
ence and intoned: "Bonjour, Maitre" in chorus, which brought a
satanic laugh from Sergei Pavlovitch.
I soon got to know them all girls and boys and even became
quite popular with them; I was their age and I was Russian also, too
much of a new face to be a "Diaghilev spy." There were two or three
such informers in the company, who, knowing the great man's un
manly passion for gossip and scandal, kept him well advised about the
members* ambitions, jealousies, deeds, misdeeds and sleeping ar
rangements. Diaghilev himself was always feared as an incomprehen
sible superman, detested for his stinginess (poor S.P. wasn't stingy,
just perpetually, grandly broke, having to live in princely fashion as a
necessary "front") and secretly adored by most. Grigoriev and Tcher-
nicheva represented the "administration" and were unpopular; Woi-
zikovsky, a Pole, and Sokolova, English in spite of her stage name,
the next "ranking" couple were among the "rebels" and universally
liked. Nemtchinova, exquisite on the stage, was not even pretty in
private life, but replete with charm; the beauties of the company were
Maikerska, a languid Polish Venus, chic Doubrovska of the mile-long
legs, dark and well-rounded Nina Nikitina (Nikitina II as Diaghilev
billed her), piquantly seductive Dorothy Coxon of Kensington and
statuesque Ninette (then Nina) de Valois of the quick Irish wit and a
friendly, direct manner (now Dame Ninette, the female Diaghilev of
Sadler's Wells).
Zephyr's sets were entrusted to Georges Braque, who had done so
beautifully by Les Fdcheux a season before and whose deep browns
and greens in that decor were promptly styled "Braque colors."
Coco Chanel attended to the costumes. An odd and utterly Parisian
coupling; only Diaghilev could have hit on such a combination,
which worked out surprisingly well. Coco was then in "residence"
aboard the Duke of Westminister's yacht lying in the Monaco harbor,
FAME DID NOT DELAY 137
and often came to lunch with Diaghilev and his satellites. Misia Sert
appeared out of nowhere one afternoon, all jewels and furs, and de
manded to hear the music of my ballet. Misia's gruff speech and des
potic air always intimidated me, but she knew and "felt" music, and
having heard glowing and certainly exaggerated reports of my
score, was excited by the prospect of hearing it. There is no greater
incentive to a performer-composer than a rich and influential patron,
thrilled in advance by his work, and I played like one demented.
Misia was wild about Zephyr, clapped her plump hands transportedly,
and declared that "ce cher Serge and especially his dancers must be
so grateful for such music it would make a corpse dance/* She
then took me to dinner with Picasso of the crafty peasant's face (as
was Braque's on a larger and cruder scale) and his pretty red-haired
Russian wife. Picasso was very pleasant and asked me to sit for a por
trait, which I did a few days later (in Antibes). I don't believe the
portrait was ever completed, although there were four or five sittings.
Most of my evenings were spent in the company of Massine, which
annoyed Diaghilev, who insisted that Leonide had no soul, no heart
and no taste and was only interested in money; from what I heard,
Massine drove a hard bargain with Sergei Pavlovitch and the two new
ballets were costing him plenty. Diaghilev grudgingly admitted that
Massine was a capable choreographer "but only in my hands," he
added significantly. I, for one, found Leonide a stimulating compan
ion, although he detested crowds, organized gaiety, disorganized
drinking, and was the world's worst ballroom dancer; it is strange but
true that most ballet luminaries are helpless on the dance floor. I
clung to Massine also because Khaki made up her mind not for
long, it soon transpired to take on a football-playing fiance rather
than a piano-playing one and went off to London, following the cus
tomary bittersweet scene, complete with imaginary heartbreak and
mutual reproaches. The much-married Leonide (he and Balanchine
are alike in this respect, if in no other) laughed at my sorrow and sug
gested that I had better make my mark in this world first and then
marry, if marry I must.
I was too engrossed in the activity around my Zephyr to suffer from
this separation too long. Massine staged a pretty pas seul for the
poetic-legged Alice Nikitina as a first essay in his new choreographic
assignment, and Diaghilev, adoring it in spite of himself, decided to
give a foretaste of our work to the potentates of Monaco, These were
138 PASSPORT TO PARIS
an attractive young couple the hereditary Princess Charlotte, a
striking slim brunette, married to the blond soft-spoken Prince Pierre
(ne de Polignac), lovers and supporters of ballet both. I accompa
nied Nikitina at the piano and our little duet was extremely well re
ceived, as was the rest of the bill (the program of which, emblazoned
with a golden crown and the date January 31, 1925 is before
me); it consisted of excerpts from Les Sylphides (Nemtchinova,
Tchernicheva and Dolin), others from Carnaval and Les Femmes
de Bonne Humeur, the beautiful "Nocturne" from Auric's Les Fa-
cheux (danced by "Antoine Doline," as he was then styled) and
for a triumphant coda dances by Alicia Markova, then fourteen
years old, with music by Delibes and Rubinstein.
The "royal" approbation of my three-minute "variation de Flore"
brought a flock of invitations to various social gatherings, such as din
ners with the Dukes of Connaught and Sutherland, where I was made
much of, but felt ill at ease in the presence of so many faultlessly
dressed lions; my secondhand dinner jacket was by now dilapidated
and shone brilliantly in the wrong places.
On the day my new dinner jacket arrived, flashily cut by a very
bad Monegasque tailor, Massine suggested we celebrate both the new
clothes and the forthcoming ballet by going to the Carlton, a none-
too-respectable boite in Monte Carlo. Dressed to kill, we dined elab
orately en ville and then, filled with champagne and fancy food, ven
tured to the Carlton, where a ringside table was reserved for us. A
spuriously American band, called something like Karol's Karlton
Kids was holding forth, and wasp-waisted playboys were piloting
short-skirted and heavily perfumed hussies through transatlantic gy
rations.
Leonide and I were content to sip champagne and take in the fes
tivities. Directly across from us sat three maharajahlike young men,
sulky and intense-looking, playing host to three flashy demimondaines,
obviously English, judging from their stodgily cut evening frocks. The
tallest and prettiest of the three was a well-built blonde, her extra-short
skirt provocatively accentuating shapely silk-stockinged legs. With
the aid of my monocle, to which I clung in spite of the shoulder
shrugs, I perceived that the luscious creature stole repeated flirtatious
looks at me, pursed up her lips in my direction, winked outrageously
and even waved once all this while dancing with one of the sulky
pseudomaharajahs. Massine, too, noticed her behavior and laughed
FAME DID NOT DELAY 139
encouragingly: "You've made a conquest, Dima. Go to it" "What do
you mean?" I queried nervously. "She is flirting with me, I can see
that; but she is not alone. What about the three Indians?" "Oh, non
sense," retaliated Leonide. "Go over to their table and ask her to
dance. Your hair is brilliantined gigolo fashion, your dinner jacket is
the tightest I've ever seen and they'll- take you for a professional
there are dozens of them around to make the women dance. Don't be
a fool, up with you." As if hypnotized, I did as I was bid, made my way
"across the crowded room," alighted at the Indian table, bowed from
the waist without losing the monocle, which is hard and se
cured the blonde for a fox trot.
I noticed at once that the girl's mind was not on dancing. She
clung to me as if in danger of falling flat on her face, although stone
sober; her legs seemed to be glued to mine and her belly performed
such sinuous undulations that dancing unless you were a danse du
ventre expert, which I was not became difficult. This was new,
exciting and bewildering. The blonde's laughing eyes scrutinized
every bit of me, including the telltale blush which I knew was spread
ing rapidly the blush that plagued my entire youth. "You are noth
ing but a silly child, and yet you wear that absurd monocle. Why?"
the girl whispered. Completely abashed, I tried to think of a properly
worldly rejoinder and, failing, muttered something like, "The better to
see you." The blonde gave me an umnaternal squeeze for this clumsy
compliment and then, her face suddenly serious, her lips practically
enveloping my ear, said: "You're a funny monkey, but I like you. H
you really want to see me, give me a key to your place, go there now
and I'll soon join you. Be quick." As if in a trance, I reached in my
pocket, produced the key and even managed to furnish the proper
directions to my room at Mme. Marcellin's. "Room, eh? Young and
poor, I see. But then, so am I and so au revoir and ah tahn-tot, as
the Frogs say. Are you a Frog?" "No." "Foreign, anyway that suits
me. Not queer, are you?" "No." "Good. Now take me to my table." I
did so, bowed from the waist again to the gloomy potentates, and re
turned to Massine, who was enjoying himself hugely.
He congratulated me on my good work and suggested that I return
home quickly and wait for the girl. Retreat was impossible this time,
so I assumed a rakish air and took leave of Leonide, my heart beating
furiously. I woke up poor Mme. Marcellin as I had no duplicate key,
played drunk convincingly, causing the good widow to shake her
140 PASSPORT TO PARIS
head and say the proper thing about my mother not being there to see
her son in this state, etc.; once in my room, I selected my best pair of
pajamas, undressed in a great hurry, and hopped into bed.
The next hour was exceedingly trying: I listened eagerly for unfa
miliar footsteps, torn between the necessity of playing the impatient
lover and the prosaic yet acutely realistic desire to sleep. I finally
succumbed to the latter; no sooner was I in the middle of a fairly in
teresting dream, than I was instantly awakened by a piercing electric
light, which made me jump and sit up straight. Facing me was the
blonde, stark naked which was most becoming after all that
Shaftesbury Avenue finery grinning invitingly at me. "Asleep, little
boy?" she intoned teasingly. "Well, if this doesn't wake you up, noth
ing will."
When I got up in the morning, there was no girl by my side. I had
slept so soundly that I hadn't heard her dress and leave; had she stayed
beside me, my vanity might have been pricked again by another brutal
remark about my now lost virginal status. And then I made the deflat
ing discovery that my watch had departed with Sally. (Some weeks
later, the girl was deported for playing a similar trick on someone
bolder than I was.) Dressing in a hurry, I sauntered out in the limpid
Riviera air and headed straight for the morning rehearsal of my ballet.
Three of the Muses were already there, wrestling with the "undancea-
ble" variation, and Massine, in his wide black pantaloons, a big black
book in his hands, was inventing a step, his eyes never leaving the
opened book while his feet shuffled tentatively to my oddly rhythmed
music. Massine's black book was the object of much excited specu
lation in the company; no one had any idea of its contents and no one
was bold enough to steal or borrow it and make sure. Some said that it
was a seventeenth-century treatise on choreography, a priceless rar
ity; others, that it consisted of perfectly blank pages and was used to
intimidate dancers. Whatever the contents of his book, I never saw
Massine choreograph anything without the huge volume before him.
So absorbed was Leonide in his work that he didn't even know I was
in the room. A few minutes later, however, he stopped the pianist, dil
igently struggling with my variation, walked up to me and said; "Dima,
this music seems to end before my dance design can possibly be
brought to a close. I have an idea and I'm going to try it. Watch!" He
gave a sign to the pianist and the three Muses were set in motion again.
To my astonishment, when the music stopped the way I wrote it
FAME DID NOT DELAY 141
the girls went on hopping unconcernedly. "What are they doing? The
variation is over," I whispered. "Sh-h," hissed Massine, scowling.
"That's the idea. They dance on without music. That's it. Felia
down up pile hands so together together finish.
How do you like it?" I didn't and said so. Leonide didn't like my not
liking it and said so. A quarrel was prevented by the welcome arrival of
Tamara Gevergeva, the new beauty of the company; Gevergeva was
the first wife of Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze George Balan-
chine to you. The four of them Gevergeva, Alexandra Danilova
(still flourishing as ballerina assoluta), Efimov (a good character
dancer now at the Paris Opera) and Balanchine fled from Russia in
1924 and were annexed by Diaghilev, who saw them dance at Missia
Serfs Paris house in November of that year.
Tamara, part Tartar, was the standard Nordic beauty pale and
fair-haired, with cool blue eyes and a perfectly proportioned body. I
first caught a glimpse of her at a rehearsal of the hateful Scheher
azade, already outmoded then, but ever popular with the audiences,
especially English ones. She startled Grigoriev, the stem disciplinar
ian, by wearing pink Russian boots to rehearsal; since Scheherazade
is a character, not a classical, ballet, he let it pass. She also wore a
pink ribbon in her lemon-blond hair and had seductive little wrinkles
at the corners of her mouth when she smiled I never saw a prettier
girl. I paid little attention to George, a slender slight man with Geor
gian (Georgia, Caucasus, not U.S.A.) features and a barely percepti
ble facial twitch, which caused that irrepressible name-inventor John
Murray Anderson to tag him "Mr. Tick" in later years. Unaware of
George's prodigious gifts as choreographer I thought he was merely
an inevitable nuisance in his lucky role as Tamara's husband. Gever
geva was one of the nine Muses, and I loved watching her as she easily
mastered Massine's complicated dance patterns.
I wasn't allowed to linger long and exchange Russian badinage with
the quick-tongued Tamara, as Nouvel arrived to whisk me away for
a press interview. Diaghilev had a genius for well-timed publicity, and
various French and English scribblers, paid and unpaid, always
swarmed about at the advent of a new production; now that a new
composer was about to be launched, they were dined and wined by
Sergei Pavlovitch with a complete disregard for expense someone
would foot the bill eventually, nothing except wild drumbeating mat
tered now.
142 PASSPORT TO PARIS
The next day I lunched with Poulenc, who, too, had been sum
moned by Diaghilev for an avant-propos on his new musical discov
ery. I played the entire score of Zephyr for my already-famous young
confrere (only five years my senior). The talented and wealthy com
poser (Poulenc Brothers is one of France's biggest chemical prod
ucts firms), a far better pianist than I, was a wonderful audience and
wrote his impressions for a Paris music journal, titling his article
"Dukelsky A New Russian Musician." In it he said:
I cannot adequately express my joy at our meeting, away
from musical groups, and their sinister concerts. Dukelsky is
not one of those laughable creatures, more concerned with sys
tems than with music, that one meets in avant-garde magazine
offices, always on the scent of an article or a first performance.
Too strong and too conscious of his strength to stoop to musical
politics, freedom alone suits him.
Although only twenty-one, Dukelsky already knows all music
and both continents. Leaving Russia at seventeen, he spends
three [sic] years in America before coming here. As music,
alas, does not feed her man, he composed varius Blues [sic]
in an astonishing melodic style akin to that of Gershvin [sic];
but, too intelligent not to realize the danger assimilating such
music to his, this musician who knows the technique of jazz
profoundly gave it a kick in the pants ["punch in the nose'* in
the original] after helping himself to it, in such a way that no
trace of Negro exoticism is discernible in his symphonic pro
duction. Isn't it the most beautiful lesson to those who believe
that jazz is destined to renovate music? I know few works as
heavy with music as "Zephyr and Flora." Dukelsky, without
archness or affectations, touches the heart by the freshness of
bis melody. The harmony, always direct, and the boldness of the
development give his charm the framework indispensable in liv
ing music. A desire for pigeonholing will make the public attempt
to place this new arrival in a neatly defined category. His art,
rather remote from the great Stravinsky, is perhaps closer to that
of Prokofiev, but, if there exists a spiritual relationship, the real-
izati6n differs profoundly in one and the other. Truly, Dukelsky
is already himself. Listen, without prejudice, to this new voice,
and I wager that you'll be conquered by its poetry.
FAME DID NOT DELAY 143
Such a testimony from so representative a young musician carried
considerable weight, and the atmosphere of feverish expectancy that
surrounded me was, as I now see, unhealthy, though undeniably satis
fying. I was fast becoming famous by virtue of so much favorable
hearsay, without a note of my music performed to substantiate my
premature fame. Easily persuading myself that I could do no wrong,
because my contemporaries thought me right, I went on orchestrating
serenely in the naive belief that, since the music was right, the or
chestral coat of paint was bound to be right, too.
The conductor for the Monte Carlo Ballet season was a native of
Monaco Marc-Cesar Scotto by name, a capable, well-routined
musician, but no Nikisch; just the man to suit Diaghilev, who despised
primadonna conductors. "There's nothing worse than a 'titan of the
podium,' " he told me. "If it weren't for the composer who put little
black notes on white paper, the titan couldn't wave his stick, strike
leonine poses, thrill women and earn lots of money. What does the
composer get? Take yourself you have nothing and I pay you very
little but even that little is more, far more, than most of them re
ceive. No, the only conductor for me is the kind that does what he is
told by the composer, and never talks back."
This was logical and laudable, but like nearly every dictum of Dia-
ghilev's, paradoxically at variance with his oft-expressed contempt
for most composers; he thought there were far too many around
hardly a half dozen of them writing worthwhile music. It is well known
that he rejected Ravel's "La Valse," which prompted a complete
break with the composer; hated Delius (he pronounced it Dehlius)
and Sibelius; despised Schoenberg and all the atonalists, although
vaguely interested in Alban Berg and, later, Hindemith. He asked
John Alden Carpenter for a ballet score, had it read to him by my
self and, although the work was entitled "Skyscrapers" renamed it
"Massacre du Printemps" and rejected it after one unsatisfactory
hearing. With so many offered and so few chosen, becoming a Dia
ghilev composer in the twenties was quite a feat. Like Prokofiev, the
big man could be cruel to those whose music he didn't care for.
Boris and I once persuaded him to go to Benedetti's cello recital in
Monte Carlo. On the program was a cello sonata by Alexandre
Tcherepnine, who accompanied Benedetti in his own work; and, al
though you could tell by Sergei Pavlovitch's signs and grunts that the
sonata was not his dish, he bore it patiently and good-naturedly. But
144 PASSPORT TO PARIS
when, right in the middle of the proceedings, the tall, awkward-look
ing composer got up suddenly and executed a few raps on the piano
lid with his knuckles, certainly a novel effect, Diaghilev decided he
had had enough. He rose in the middle of the movement, pushed his
big body past the startled ticket holders and said in an audible whis
per: "They are heading for a knockout let's leave before blood is
drawn." With this we three staggered out, turning a deaf ear to in
dignant shushes and hisses.
I, the pampered and tenderly nursed Benjamin of the troupe, had no
complaints. Orchestral rehearsals had begun and I sat alone in the
empty hall, enjoying myself unreservedly. There were many mistakes
in the orchestral parts to be weeded out (there always are) and, with
the orchestra constantly stopping, like a faulty motor, it was hard to
tell whether the orchestration was good, adequate or downright poor.
In all fairness, it must be admitted that it was no more than adequate
for the most part. At times, what seemed like a lofty musical concep
tion became muddled and distorted almost beyond recognition; the
harmony seemed too thick, the basses that boomed so splendidly on
the piano were hardly discernible and the inner voices stuck out for
no good reason. The orchestration was, in the main, correct aca
demically speaking; in other words, heavy and flat. The music man
aged to overcome this self-imposed handicap to some extent; Pro
kofiev on hearing Zephyr in Paris dismissed the orchestration with:
"Too much Glazunov and not enough Dukelsky."
These faults were not immediately apparent to me nor, luckily, to
Diaghilev, Kochno or Massine, who blamed whatever defects were
easily detected on the perspiring Scotto and the orchestra. I even
wrote Mother that Zephyr sounded beautiful in its orchestral dress
and Francis Poulenc seconded this opinion.
Lifar had this to say in his Sergei Diaghilev about Zephyr: "The
work was by no means easy, for though Dukelsky's music proved
very refreshing, its rhythmic design was somewhat difficult and but
little helped by the manner of its scoring."
Lifar nearly caused a catastrophe by falling heavily at reheasal,
dislocating both ankles. Diaghilev was almost forced to give the part
to Thaddeus Slavinsky, one of the better dancers in his company, be
cause the doctor averred that fully six weeks must elapse before Lifar
"could dream of dancing." Yet, owing to Lifar's determination and
effective treatment, he danced at the opening on April 28, 1925,
FAME DID NOT DELAY 145
and "nobody in the audience had the least idea of the state of his feet."
Diaghilev was kindness itself he gave me an autographed pro
gram inscribed: "To Dear Dima, hi memory of a significant day,"
and a portrait of himself with the legend: "To my dear Third Son to
commemorate his baptism." The premiere, before a bejeweled and
befurred audience, went off without a hitch; the ballet obtained a siz
able success, all three principals the ethereal Alice Nikitina,
bouncy Dolin and fervent Lif ar were applauded and cheered to a
faretheewell, although the latter had one of his ankles "dislocated
three times during the performance and it had to be reset on each oc
casion." Ailing Lifar's program was inscribed thus by Diaghilev: "To
dear Boreas, the young and irresistible wind, on the day when he first
swept through Monte Carlo." At the final curtain, following the bows
of the three principals, Braque, Massine and myself appeared on the
stage and I was presented with a laurel wreath of such gigantic pro
portions that, on accepting it, I almost fell under its tremendous
weight. I didn't know what to do with the unwieldy thing (another Dia
ghilev offering) until either Dolin or Lif ar put it over my head, making
another bow an impossibility.
There was a gala supper for Zephyr's creators and dozens of
staunch Diaghilevites after the premiere. Sergei Pavlovitch insisted
on my drinking champagne, and since many toasts were made, sev
eral of them to me and my music, I threw all discretion to the winds
and drank glass after glass, winding up in such a haze that I had to be
escorted home by two male dancers, as I couldn't have found the
Villa des Genets without their help.
The Daily Mail correspondent's was the first comment on Zephyr:
"The music is by a new Russian composer, Dukelsky. It successfully
blends classic idiom with a moderate jazz influence in a close-woven
texture and was warmly appreciated. The Duke of Connaught at
tended both the dress rehearsal and the public performance and
warmly congratulated M. Diaghilev. The Prince and Princess of Mon
aco were also delighted." The royal approval was fine in its way, but
I was far happier when the faithful Poulenc lent me his competent
hand once again. Writing in Figaro on May 5th, Poulenc had this to
add to his previously expressed views: "Dukelsky, whose name is as
yet unknown in Paris, will be famous before long. At a time when
young musicians hesitate between most arbitrary harmonic systems
and a false simplicity, smacking of plain foolishness, Dukelsky,
146 PASSPORT TO PARIS
armed with a strong technique (the secret of all success) offers us a
perfectly rounded work, always well-integrated yet spontaneous.
The score of 'Zephyr,' consisting of separate numbers, owing to the
demands of the story, is never loose or disconnected. It is as if created
in one breath; one cannot resist so much fresh invention and espe
cially such authentic youth. When, at the insistence of the audi
ence, the author appeared on the stage, holding a huge laurel crown
[sic], one thought of a young athlete playing hoops."
The local papers were all complimentary, but they didn't matter.
The word got around that Zephyr was a success and Diaghilev, with
out waiting for the Paris verdict, started talking to me about another
ballet, which made me as proud as a peacock. There were a few dis
cordant notes, such as the anonymous violinist who scribbled at the
bottom of his part: "Do we have to play such utter nonsense?" and
an unprintable epigram, circulated by certain members of the cast,
which, freely and politely translated, went something like: "Music by
Dukelsky, story by Kochno lo, it's a new hit and it hit a new low."
I happily attributed such stabs to jealousy or ignorance and went from
party to party convinced of my greatness and making not a few con
verts to that idea.
Diaghilev now began active preparations for the all-important
Paris season, for which the Gaite Lyrique Theatre, which he disliked,
was booked. Massine was busy rehearsing Les Matelots, to be un
veiled in Paris as it was too late for a Monte Carlo tryout. Lifar's leg
was so badly swollen that Zephyr, in spite of its success, was given
only once in Monte Carlo; there was some further talk about replac
ing Lifar by Slavinsky, but the new Diaghilev favorite was surer and
surer of his ground and wouldn't hear of it. I used my well-earned
"siesta" to flirt with Nina Payne, the American tap dancer, then the
rage of the Riviera. We once sat in a night club in Cannes, deserted
except for a fortyish tart, a regular at the establishment. The woman's
evening was a fiasco as she had no clients; she sprawled in a corner,
a Felicien Rops-like ferociously painted lorette, sipping her fine &
Veau. Nina and I, both young, well-dressed and playing at love, kissed
rapturously throughout the evening, oblivious of the sleepy barman
and the brandy-guzzling woman. After watching us sullenly for an
hour, the tart sprang up and delivered a shrill and inflammatory
speech about dirty foreigners corrupting la belle France with their
lewd behavior. Although the help knew the woman to be no better than
FAME DID NOT DELAY 147
what she was, her arguments, brought about by her failure to secure a
client and her loneliness, were so strident and impassioned, stressing
the patriotic note with such fervor, that the bewildered barman asked
us to stop kissing or leave. We left.
On May llth, I was back in Paris, and on the 16th, a month before
Zephyr's premiere, wrote Mother from the Hotel d'Antin (where
Valitchka always stayed) : "I'm doing nothing at present, except try
ing to clarify my affairs; contacting publishers, authors' societies,
etc. anything to make a little money, of which I'm in dire need. I
can't expect any further income from Diaghilev until July, when I'm
to start work on a new ballet, and then we'll be back together on the
usual terms. As for now, Diaghilev is willing to help but he ow6s me
nothing for Zephyr. All my hopes are in jazz, which is well paid in
London and in great demand everywhere." Thus, Duke was already
stirring in Dukelsky's breast, ready to come to his rescue.
On entering the Hotel d'Antin, I found Valitchka in his room, coat-
less, stretched out on his narrow bed, his short arms behind his head
(his favorite posture), smoking energetically and gazing at the ceil
ing, rapture and boredom in his gaze. "Welcome, welcome, jeune
homme" he greeted me absent-mindedly. "How is the young genius
today?" The young genius was down to his last three francs, otherwise
pretty well. Valitchka was a generous man, but he was poor, and lend
ing his friends money (which he did often) made him both angry and
strangely elated. I suspect that one's indebtedness to him puffed up his
badly shrunken ego and also gave him the coveted opportunity for a
sternly administered lecture on the subject of idleness, women, drink
and other ruinous excesses. The lecture was duly delivered along
with some fascinating gossip about Beaumont, anti-Diaghilev in
trigues, Satie's Mercure, in which Picasso featured three brawny
men representing nymphs (seductive in bright green, with large mel
ons simulating breasts) Valitchka couldn't get over that, although
Mercure was no longer news and Prokofiev's Second Symphony
about to be premiered by Koussevitzky. "Do you know him?" Nouvel
queried. "No I would certainly like to." "Get Prokofiev to intro
duce you. Koussevitzky, too, likes young men, but not for Diaghilev's
reasons khe . . . khe . . . khe . . ." Valitchka, now delighted
with himself and the sly dig at his boss, produced a well-worn wallet,
sighed tragically, and made me richer by a hundred francs.
My next visit was to the Parfenovs, he a busy lawyer whose sister
148 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Sophie was my uncle Prince Irakly Toumanov's second wife, she,
born Vera Vajevska, an excellent lyric soprano (one of Opera
Comique's best Melisandes) and a very handsome girl. I, vaguely re
lated to Parfenov, and a fellow musician to his wife, was received in
cordial Russian fashion and fed superb food, in return for which I
displayed my new songs to words by Bogdanovitch, the amiable
eighteenth-century poet; he was the best exponent of the peasant girl-
turned-Greek-goddess-school so dear to Diaghilev. Under Sergei
Pavlovitch's influence, I produced three works in that manner
Zephyr and Flora, the three Bogdanovitch songs and "Dushenka," a
duet for women's voices on excerpts from that poet's delicious long
poem of that name. The three songs were Stravinsky's special favorites
(as I reported to Mother at the time) and Mme. Parfenov's was just
title right voice for them clear and limpid and truly lyrical.
I was impatient to acquaint Prokofiev with the music of Zephyr.
Sergei Sergeivitch had a rigorous working schedule, which was self-
imposed shortly after his graduation from the St. Petersburg Conserv
atory; any interference with this schedule was instantly checked by
Lina Ivanovna or the housemaid, who under no circumstances would
admit visitors before lunchtime. Mornings from nine to one were de
voted to composing, an hour was allowed for lunch, another hour
for disposing of people and routine errands, then two or three hours
for orchestrating, proofreading and polishing the results of the morn
ing's toil. This made reaching Prokofiev quite difficult, as he wouldn't
come to the telephone in the morning, disliked being disturbed at
lunch and was usually attending to business, bills, etc., prior to the
"orchestrating period." I soon learned the trick of catching him im
mediately before he sat down to lunch, at which time he was in rea
sonably good spirits, especially if the composing had gone well that
morning.
It hadn't gone well that particular morning, and Prokofiev's voice
was even more gruff than usual. "What do you want?" he boomed.
"This is Dukelsky. . . ." "I know it's Dukelsky and I'm Prokofiev,
and Prokofiev is very busy even if Dukelsky isn't." "But, Sergei Sergei
vitch ... I want you to hear my Zephyr. . . . You told me . . ."
"I know what I told you probably even told you that you're a com
poser I may have been wrong. What do you mean by calling me in
the morning?" "Sorry, S.S., but it's ten to one." Silence for cooling-off
purposes. "Why didn't you say so? All right then, come to lunch and
FAME DID NOT DELAY 149
bring your ballet." Quickly I taxied to Prokofiev's house, was admitted
by the master himself, whose face wore a scowl and a smile simulta
neously and whose, this time friendly, greeting sounded as if he were
giving me more hell. Such was Prokofiev, one of the most lovable and
rudest men that ever lived.
Lina Ivanovna, her eyes red from weeping, was grateful for my en
trance as she and her husband were not on speaking terms that day.
She, too, volunteered to sing the Bogdanovitch songs, about which "she
had heard from the omniscient Souvtchinsky. Prokofiev snorted,
"Don't try to ingratiate yourself with him. Learn how to sing a scale
before you get to new music." Lina Ivanovna let out an agonized
shriek, burst into tears and ran from the room, slamming the door with
all her strength. "Good," said Prokofiev with another half-scowl, half-
smile. "We can talk now." I was to witness many such scenes, and
never knew how to act under such circumstances, so took refuge in
polite silence. Sergei Sergeivitch mellowed rapidly, finished his wine
and leapt from the table with startling suddenness, making me swallow
my dessert in one gulp.
Prokofiev's working quarters were unlike Stravinsky's; the room
was tidy and sunny, but presented rather a Spartan appearance, and,
besides a concert grand, a pile of manuscript paper, a ruler and some
pens and pencils, had no luxurious modern improvements or fancy
gimcracks like the great Igor's. Sergei Sergeivitch threw himself into
a chair, grabbed my orchestral score and ordered me to play. In the
middle of the Muses' variations, Prokofiev jumped up and walked to
the piano, puffing out his cheeks, his arms on his hips, his stomach
pushed out to the limit; when I reached the final chord of the coda,
he most unexpectedly kissed me full on the lips and blurted out:
"Zdorovo!" (Zdorovy means healthy in Russian, but Zdorovo is oddly
untranslatable when used as a term of approval "swell" would be
the nearest to it in Americanese.) Elated by this ejaculation, unex
pected, as were most of Prokofiev's actions, I played on to the end
with new confidence of all my listeners, including Stravinsky, I
valued Sergei's opinion most. After all, I always loved Prokofiev's
music I only admired Stravinsky's.
When I finished, Prokofiev banged the score shut and summed up
thus: "The music's fine, the scoring only fair; too bad you couldn't
show me the orchestration before giving it out to be copied. It's too
late now, also it would cost Diaghilev too much money to have it
150 PASSPORT TO PARIS
redone. Don't tell Sergei Pavlovitch you played your Zephyr for me
it won't do you any good. Come on, come on, Lina, never mind the
tragedy Dima passed his exams." Lina Ivanovna emerged from the
bedroom, still dabbing at her heavily powdered eyelids, but smiling a
martyr's courageous smile. "Ah? Lina, ah?" went on Prokofiev, ac
companying his pleasure with a sizable smack on my backside.
"Here, for once, is singing music melody and more melody. I'm
very pleased with you and now for a game of chess." He then
smacked his wife's buttocks, which token of aSection brought on an
other pout, a very mild one. "I heard it all from my room and I must
say I agree with Seriozha, although he is not a bit nice to me. I hope
you beat him at chess," said Lina Ivanovna, smiling more roguishly
now. No such luck; I was checkmated on the tenth move, as Proko
fiev was the best of all chess-playing composers and used to boast of
trimming Alekhine, the chess champion, on one occasion.
To further indicate his satisfaction with Zephyr, which he thought
a great step forward after the piano concerto, Prokofiev took me to
the Samoilenkos, his best Paris friends, in Champ de Mars, one of the
loveliest parts of Paris. Boris Samoilenko, a hearty, perennially happy-
go-lucky sort of man, delighted in having people in his spacious flat,
particularly Russians "who did things." His Mussulman wife, Fatima-
Hanoum, a woman of infinite candor, zest and spirit, had a rare talent
for living fully and richly without being rich; the warmth of her wel
come, the carefree wit of her observations and the springlike, easy
feeling she gave everyone who came to see her, made the Samoilenko
ground-floor flat with its tiny, immaculately kept garden the most un
usual salon in the city. Every Russian of note, and several of charm
and nothing else, flocked to Avenue Emile Deschanel, where a con
tinuous performance by the guests, regardless of the hour, and entirely
unrehearsed, took place; the performance consisted simply of the
guests being themselves, and since all of them were either amusing or
worthwhile, or both, no one was ever bored at the Samoilenkos and
everybody adored them. One usually saw one of the three celebrated
Russian painters there Shukhaiev, Grigoriev, and Jacovlev. Ja-
covlev's beauteous niece Tatiana, subsequently Countess du Plessis,
and now Mrs. Alex Liberman, the wife of the New York Vogue's able
art director, broke a good many hearts, including that of Vladimir
Mayakovski, Soviet Russia's greatest poet, who managed to obtain a
permission to visit Europe in the twenties, and promptly fell in love
FAME DID NOT DELAY 151
with intrepid Tanya. I remember him well, a big bruiser of a fellow,
fond of billiards and Turkish baths, peculiarly handsome in his way,
with an outsize lower jaw and a look of great determination and force-
fulness which didn't prevent him from taking his life, at the age of
thirty-seven, in 1930, because of an unhappy, and, likely, trivial love
affair. Of the musicians, Stravinsky and Koussevitzky were frequent
guests, but only Prokofiev was an everyday "dropper-in," and as in
dispensable to the Samoilenkos as they were to him. I was taken home
in Sergei's big Ballot, a French car now obsolete, with which he was
always tinkering and whose unpredictable behavior mystified and
fascinated him. "I'll tell Koussevitzky and Eberg, my publisher, what
I think of your music," Prokofiev shouted over the tremendous noise
of the Ballot. "Your chess is no good." And off he went in a dirty-blue
cloud of gasoline. I hadn't seen much of Diaghilev of late; he spent
most of the time at the Gaite Lyrique, where rehearsals of Les Mate-
lots were progressing feverishly, or lunching with his patrons and pa
tronesses, who were invariably mobilized by Sergei Pavlovitch at the
beginning of the ballet season, to talk nothing but ballet, to give balls
for the ballet and to keep tout Paris, the most capricious and unreli
able snob aggregation in the world, ballet-conscious at all costs.
Kochno delighted in this sort of thing and his help was priceless to
Sergei Pavlovitch.
Zephyr's Paris premiere took place on June 15th; my ballet was
flanked by Stravinsky's adaptation of Pergolesi's Pulcinella and that
peerless bravura display, La Boutique Fantasque an all-Massine
bill. Zephyr obtained a good success with the audience, but nothing
like the frenzied, ecstatic ovation granted Les Matelots two nights
later. I was, however, recalled several times and garnered several new
addicts, notably Milhaud and Sauguet. The first, declared himself de
lighted with my melodic invention, whereas Henri Sauguet, a droll
and cuttingly witty little man wearing huge glasses, waved his arms
excitedly and said that he especially liked that "big tune" from
Zephyr, then he proceeded to sing something that bore not the slight
est resemblance to it.
Most of the notices accorded my work were favorable, and some
too much so. Emile Vuillermoz, for instance, praised my score to the
sky the more to belittle Auric's; he was violently anti-Les Six and I
was picked as a suitable pawn in his journalistic machinations.
I never knew the real "inside" of the Vuillermoz- Auric feud, but in
152 PASSPORT TO PARIS
a place like Paris such feuds are everyday fare and are seldom of any
lasting importance. At the time I was quite startled by the amount of
fist-shaking and name-calling around me, but very little of it involved
me, not as yet a Parisian figure, so I wisely let well enough alone.
Vuillermoz wrote: "We are in the presence of a vigorous, living and
muscular work of music [Zephyr]. One senses that happy sponta
neity, that superior ease that sweep away all objections. A musician
like Dukelsky, armed with an excellent technique, discovers in one
fell swoop a liberated style for which we, in our country, are search
ing in vain. The score of "Zephire" offers a richness and an abun
dance of rhythms and a savor of sounds that make it a perpetual treat
for the ear."
That splendid all-around musician and delectable operetta com
poser Andre Messager, who, among his many accomplishments, con
ducted the legendary premiere of Pelleas with Mary Garden as
Melisande, wrote in Figaro and made me very proud and, perhaps,
justifiably so: " 'Zephyr' is a copious work, filled, I would almost say
stuffed with music, which reveals qualities of the first order. The ex
treme youth of the author explains his abundance and his indecision.
He is at the age where one doesn't know yet how to curb one's lan
guage, where one accepts with a little too much complacency all
the ideas, without having the courage to choose. But can you think of
a more praiseworthy defect? So many composers have nothing to
choose from, since they have nothing to say! With Dukelsky, the mix
ture of sureness and inexperience is almost continuous. The style is
irresolute, yet the ideas are personal; the orchestration is brilliant, not
without heaviness and, at times, a bit empty. However, certain parts
are developed with uncommon mastery and numbers like the 'theme
and variations' show rare ingenuity where studied elegance does not
shut out the natural. It seems to me that, since Stravinsky, we have not
assisted at a manifestation so characteristic of what appears to be the
new tendency of Russian musical art. This is a debut that contains
more than merely promises and Mr. Dukelsky can be proud of a most
merited success."
The Paris Herald Tribune chimed in with: "Dukelsky's cleverness
is disconcerting. His 'Zephyr et Flore' is an excellent ballet in the first
manner of Stravinsky." Poulenc threw all discretion to the winds and
in a third article on my ballet summed up his impressions by saying:
"This score, so new and so alive, seems to me, next to the gigantic
FAME DID NOT DELAY 153
production of Stravinsky's, one of the most significant works of mod
ern music, and Russian music in particular."
All this must have incensed my detractors who, luckily, were none
too numerous. They were led by the acid-tongued Andre Coeuroy,
who wrote: "The musician's friends committed the great imprudence
to announce the arrival of a new Messiah . . . who could possibly
doubt that for a musician of twenty-one years, this is a beautiful
achievement. No uncertainty in the disposition of this quasi-classical
suite in separate numbers, not a blemish of taste in the orchestral sen
sibility, no shocking surprises in the rhythmic monotony; a precious
ensemble of virtues NEGATIVE ONES. Here's an occasion to re
flect, yawning a little, on the dangers and the merits of abstract art."
The other detractors extolled George Auric at my expense, but their
comments were more on the line of: "Well, the greenhorn doesn't
know his business, but has some talent will do better one day," On
the whole, neither Diaghilev nor I could have dreamt of a better press.
I got quite a few dirty looks in the foyer of the theater on the evening
of the second performance as I paraded up and down with Souvtchin-
sky, complete with tails, monocle and the usual outlandish flower in
my buttonhole with age I switched to carnations, but this was the
rose and orchid period. I perceived a fine-looking man in a splendid
fur-lined overcoat he was about to leave the theater who looked
at me with amusement and interest; he was standing next to Nicolas
Slonimsky, that indefatigable Boswell of so many musical Dr. John
sons. Nicolas was then secretary to Koussevitzky, and I knew that the
remaining Serge of the Three Great Serges was before me. Slonimsky
introduced us and Koussevitzky said without any preamble: "I just
missed your ballet but I already know about it from Seriozha Proko
fiev and our friend Nicolas here. I want your ballet, both as conduc
tor and publisher, and I want you to write a symphony for me." (Kous
sevitzky was the founder and owner of the Editions Russes de Musique,
which published nearly all Scriabin, Stravinsky and Prokofiev.) Be
fore I had -a chance to stammer a word of thanks, Koussevitzky shook
my hand and concluded: "I must be oS. If you have time tomorrow,
go to 22 rue d'Anjou and see Mr. Eberg, the director of my publish
ing house I'm sure we'll agree as to terms. Good night and good
luck." Slonimsky added a sotto voce postscript about telephoning me
in the morning and they vanished.
The next day I received a check for 6000 francs for Zephyr from
154 PASSPORT TO PARIS
the very pleasant Mr. Eberg, who told me that Koussevitzky wanted to
sign me to a life contract, whereby he'd be obligated to print every
thing I wrote in return for the exclusivity of my services as composer,
I said, very nervously, that I'd be delighted to accept, if I hadn't al
ready promised the piano concerto to Heugel, a prominent French
publisher, Eberg smiled indulgently and suggested that "his firm might
consider overlooking this little slip," and we made arrangements for a
business meeting the following week. I knew I had three people to
thank for this wonderful turn of events : Prokofiev, Slonimsky and
Diaghilev, who issued my passport to Paris, which was now miracu
lously turning into a passport to fame.
CHAPTER X
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE
HEUGEL bought my piano concerto, for which I received 5000
francs, and it proved a poor investment for the publishers, be
cause the work which caused Diaghilev to commission Zephyr was
never orchestrated and, consequently, never performed, Diaghilev
wanted me to play it in Monte Carlo, the two Rubinsteins Artur
and Beryl made half-hearted inquiries as to its availability, but
I was no longer sure of the piece, too transparent a mixture of several
ill-digested styles; in Zephyr the influences were slight and the
score had an unmistakable "presence" not so with the concerto,
in spite of its pianistic effectiveness.
A week after the last (fourth) performance of my ballet, I
experienced my first Channel crossing, accompanying Diaghilev, Boris
and Nouvel, who were London-bound four months ahead of the
ballet season; this time the company was to appear at the huge
Coliseum, a place even less suited for ballet performances than the
hateful Gaite Lyrique. To travel by sea with Sergei Pavlovitch was a
trying experience as the man suffered from chronic hypdrophobia, and
the mere sight of a ship's interior threw him into a helpless panic.
The weather couldn't have been better or balmier; nevertheless,
Diaghilev was carefully wrapped in a heavy woolen blanket on
top of a beaver-fur coat, a cashmere muffler around his neck, his
large face barely visible, encased as it was in the thick fur collar,
the too-small Lock hat over his eyes, to prevent even the tiniest
glimpse of the "raging" Channel, which was as still as a Swiss lake.
He fingered a small icon of Saint Nicholas with his left hand and
crossed himself repeatedly with his right, his lips moving noiselessly
in prayer. Boris and I, entranced by the bracing sea air, ran about
the ship, the high summer sun beating upon us, and would occasion-
156 PASSPORT TO PARIS
ally, for manners' sake, come down to the first-class "saloon" where
Sergei Pavlovitch sat all a-tremble, his powerful back turned to the
offending water, his eyes closed. "Sergei Pavlovitch, come out on
deck it's beautiful outside and so calm!" I exclaimed thoughtlessly.
Diaghilev gave me a withering look and shrilled in a high falsetto, a
sure sign of great displeasure, addressing himself to Kochno, ever the
diplomat, "Boris, tell this impudent young hooligan to go drown
himself!" He then pulled the fur collar over his face so that it prac
tically joined the hat, sighed tragically and went back to his prayers.
For once, he did resemble "a bear wrapped in Russian gloom," in
Harold Acton's phrase.
A half hour later Diaghilev got bored with so passive a resistance
to the spheres, and gave vent to his feelings by a violent diatribe
against England and the English, as if they were responsible for the
dangers and discomforts of the English Channel. He began by de
nouncing the language, which he likened to the barking of a bull
dog; then switched to women, claiming that Englishwomen were
even worse than the French or Russian variety. Eric Wollheim, the
agent and a subject of the unfortunate kingdom, winced but re
mained silent until, provoked by an especially vicious dart of Diaghi-
lev's, he attempted to check his boss by reminding him that he
would be interviewed on arrival and that it would be smart to be
pleasant and obliging. "Obliging?" snarled Diaghilev, crossing himself
at the advent of an imaginary wave. "I assure you that I'll be most
considerate of the poor beggars, the reporters. On one condition
that it will be 7 who will ask all the questions." "Whatever do you
mean, Mr. Diaghilev?" inquired the agent nervously. "Just that I
don't want the reporters to wear themselves out by interviewing me
I'll interview them. I ask the questions or no interview." The
unhappy Wollheim shrugged his shoulders and gave up.
Diaghilev was as good as his word; on arrival at Victoria, he gra
ciously received the press and requested permission to ask his ques
tions u to save you trouble, gentlemen," as he put it suavely. The
nonplussed reporters exchanged worried glances, then nodded ac
quiescence. "Thank you," Diaghilev went on in honeyed tones.
"And now for the questions: Why aren't Englishwomen the pret
tiest in the world?" Astonished silence. "Why is English food in
edible?" Silence. "Why are there no good English composers?" More
silence. More questions, some of which were frankly unprintable
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 157
there were a few titters, hastily scribbled notes and the baffled newspa
permen, loyal British subjects all, were greatly relieved by the final
"Good day, gentlemen" and a hearty handshake from their tormentor.
Once comfortably installed at his beloved Savoy, Diaghilev changed
his belligerent tune and talked of Zephyr and Flora to the represent
ative of The Observer in great detail. "Though there were four
performances in Paris," he said, "I regard it as scarcely having been
done at all, for it has been completely reshaped. The music has been
revised, and instead of one scene, there are now three, so that the
work of Georges Braque has become the most important he has yet
done for the theater.
"Braque is the only wise shall we say? and settled person
ality in the whole combination, for he alone has reached years of
discretion, whereas the combined ages of the composer, the author of
the scenario and the principal artists, Nikitina, Lifar and Tcherkas
(who replaced Dolin, no longer with the company) come only to
ninety-nine years. It is truly a ballet of youth. The composer,
Dukelsky, is the third I have discovered. His two elder 'brothers,' Stra
vinsky and Prokofiev, are too well-known to need discussion. If you
ask me by whom Dukelsky is influenced, I should say that he has
nothing in common with Stravinsky; that you could perhaps detect
his admiration for Prokofiev, though in any case he is more classical;
and that he is inclined rather to trace his heredity from his 'Grand
father' Glinka." Following the Observer interview, Diaghilev and
Boris started unpacking and suggested Bloomsbury as a locale more
commensurate with my finances than the opulent Savoy. I stumbled
into the Brighton Hall Hotel, near Russell Square, a somewhat de
pressing neighborhood; the sunless room with the big, creaky bed,
a cracked washbasin, overstarched towels and a slatternly maid in
black cotton stockings, who asked me whether I would care for "a
cup o' tzea" in the gloomiest tones imaginable, made me inexpres
sibly sad. I'm always sad during the first few hours in a place I've
never seen before Paris the exception. Strange sights and smells
give me a horrible, sinking feeling of being detached from the busy
Sfe around me, of "not belonging." The first London meal only
intensified my unhappiness; never did I imagine that harmless Brus
sels sprouts and a thin sliver of middle-aged mutton could taste like
boiled toilet paper. When I ordered coffee and liquid boot polish
appeared in a thick, badly chipped white cup, on the heels of some-
158 PASSPORT TO PARIS
thing called "suet pudding" and a fishy-smelling "savory" for a final
discord, I was ready to weep. The maid returned with offers of a hot-
water bottle, although the evening was exceedingly warm; I laughed
grimly, scaring the wits out of the poor thing, and fell asleep in
stantly.
The next morning, after a decent breakfast not even the Eng
lish can ruin eggs and bacon, and I wisely ordered tea instead of so-
called coffee I sauntered into the street and bought several news
papers. Finding my name in most of them in the drama and music/
sections, I immediately felt better. Funny what the sight of one's own
name in print can do to one's sagging spirits. I marched on jauntily,
through the dreary squares of Bloomsbury, past the squalid Greek
and Italian grocery stores and supposedly French restaurants of Soho
into the more animated but strangely shabby Shaftesbury Avenue.
Things were getting livelier by the minute; big red buses, antique
Daimler taxicabs, policemen twice the size of the French "flics," signs
lauding Bovril, Guinness and Players' cigarettes, unfamiliar products
all, had a cozy, comfortable look about them naive and out
dated, perhaps, but oddly resassuring. If Paris smelled of lilacs and
gasoline, the prevailing London odor was that of rotting apples.
Theatrical posters were everywhere and the names of the plays as
well as quotes from critics in English were good to see after too much
French, crammed too quickly into one's brain.
As I reached Piccadilly, I was ready, nay eager, to be converted
to things English except, certainly, food. Never have I encoun
tered so many faultlessly turned out men, bowlers and Homburgs at
just the right angle, suits beautifully yet unobtrusively cut, ties a
model of sobriety, umbrellas, like trained black eels, dangling ef
fortlessly from the left arm, in spite of the blazing sun; the whole
effect one of studied expensive simplicity with just a dash of amiable
complacency and condescension. I caught a glimpse of myself in a
mirror and was horrified: ill-fitting suit, trousers too short, tie too
loud, shirt too French, hat beneath contempt an outsider, obviously.
Quickly I slipped into the nearest pub a fascinatingly moldy yet
clean establishment and asked the buxom barmaid for a "glass of
beer." With a knowing glance at my "wrong" clothes (maddening
thought!), she bared her upper plate and demanded to know whether
I desired bitter, ale or lager. The bitter sounded unpromising and I
had never heard of lager, so settled for a tankard of warm, potent
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 159
ale. Thus fortified, I next visited the Burlington Arcade and spent
half my money on shirts, ties, a hat and the thinnest, most eel-like
umbrella obtainable. "I'll show them!" I thought elatedly.
In contrast with the magnificent male, the London women struck
me as peculiarly frumpy and ill-kempt. A good many of the girls
were pretty, in the fresh Anglo-Saxon way, with the well-advertised
glowing skin and sturdy, substantial legs, but the clothes were for the
most part deplorable ill-fitting, cheap "suits," sleazy prints and
shapeless "utility" shoes; the color schemes, too, looked vile, un-
matchable shades clashing willy-nilly and destroying the wearers'
natural good looks. I spied a few impressively and rather severely
clad mondaines, uptilted noses high in the air, teeth and feet a shade
too large but solid and obviously built to last as most things
were in the old Empire.
At noon I telephoned Boris to find out whether my presence was
needed for one reason or another. Boris sounded a bit irritated.
"Where on earth are you keeping yourself?" he asked. "Come to the
Savoy at once; Edwin Evans is lunching with us and you are to tell
him all about your music he knows a great deal and writes well.
Hurry, Seriozha is very angry with you." But when I got to the hotel,
Sergei Pavlovitch was beaming and cracking jokes with Evans, a
bearded Bohemian looking not unlike Pissaro, with a soft cultivated
speech and rather a diffident manner. Evans spoke good French, which
endeared him to Diaghilev, who didn't like to speak English, al
though he knew the language tolerably well. After some unavoidable
blasts at Ernest Newman (with whom he was always scrapping), the
pro-Germanic stolidity of the British musical mind, and the long-
suffering "Dehlius" and Sibelius, Sergei Pavlovitch ordered steaks
minute all around, patted me on the back and said to Evans: "This
boy is good, so be good to him." Evans smiled carefully and began
interrogating me in English, while Diaghilev and Boris turned to
business matters. I gave the bearded sage a suitably colorful account
of my beginnings, confessed that my love for jazz was never platonic,
due to my friendship with George Gershwin, admitted also that a
fashionable New York lady reporter had told her readers that my
early "Gondla" was "barbaric in its harmonies, Icelandic in its frozen
remoteness, and decidedly hunchback [Gumilev's hero was a crip
ple] in its form." Asked about my ideas on music, I made a few
reasonably snappy remarks, subsequently printed and reprinted in
160 PASSPORT TO PARIS
so staid a publication as the Boston Symphony Program Notes: "I
hate all 'modernism' and I love being modern. I believe only in
construction in the truly classical sense, knowing that it is more
difficult to construct a fox trot than to write a thousand 'poems' on
golden fishes, bald Chinamen, or oyster shells as the so-called 'modern
ists' do. I find that jazz is 'classicism for minors' and, therefore, very
useful. We must and will, undress music; it doesn't need the heavy
coat of harmonies and more winter is gone."
So impudent a pronouncement from a young man not quite
twenty-two was, doubtless, dismissed by the older British musicians as
bloody cheek, but it exhilarated the struggling young and filled them
with curiosity. This was 1925 and English music was in a sad state;
today England can boast any number of gifted composers, but thirty
years ago, with the exception of Vaughan Williams and little-known
Philip Heseltine, who used the pseudonym Peter Warlock, and who
killed himself in 1930 when he was thirty-six, the picture was
dreary indeed. The great men of English music were such purely local
figures as Elgar (whose "Dream of Gerontius" was dismissed by
George Moore an Irishman, I hasten to add as "holy water in a
German Beer-barrel") and Diaghilev's bete noire, Delius. Of the
younger men, Arthur Bliss and Eugene Goossens were the only ones
with any spunk at all and I was pleased when told by Diaghilev that
the latter was engaged as conductor for the Ballets Russes season.
The- next day Goossens himself telephoned me and invited me to
dine with him en famille. The famille that evening was composed
of Boonie, his tall Renoiresque wife, and a painfully thin, sandy-
haired young man whose name was William Walton. Unlike Eu
gene Goossens, a consummate dandy, Walton was almost shabbily
dressed and had a downtrodden, yet eager, look, bringing to mind a
Chekhov hero. The dinner was very good and so were Boonie's looks
and the music talk. Both men were familiar with Zephyr and Flora
and professed to admire it unreservedly. Walton, eighteen months
older than myself, with an engagingly modest mien told me of his
beginnings as an organist, his discovery by the Sitwells and his struggle
to obtain a hearing; so far only a string quartet, given at Salzburg at
an I.S.C.M. concert, and the first (1923) version of Edith
Sitwell's "Facade" were played in public. He wanted to show me his
new "Dr. Syntax" overture and have me meet his friends the Sitwell
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 161
brothers; Walton then stayed with Osbert in 2 Carlyle Square, Chel
sea. We parted friends.
Pedro Pruna, the Spanish painter whose scenery and costumes
contributed not a little to the universal success of Les Matelots, did
a rather mannered drawing of Kochno and myself; on it I'm repre
sented seated, one foot bare, the other beslippered, while Boris, stand
ing, is holding a mongrel pup with his left arm (the pup, who must
have been uncomfortable, appears to be legless) and a large peas
ant straw hat in his right hand. We are both wearing white toweling
robes and manage to look beautiful and effete at the same time
Pruna's trick, not ours. This drawing, executed in Barcelona from
memory, appeared in the October 1925 issue of the London Vogue
on the "We Nominate for the Hall of Fame" page. The caption
read, in part: "Dukelsky went to America where, like his friend
Gershwin, he became interested in the serious potentialities of jazz.
Diaghilev, with his flair for new talent, suggested his writing the
music for 'Zephyr and Flora,' which we hope to see in London. He
had also written a musical comedy which is soon to be produced here."
This was inaccurate, as the "musical comedy" was far from
written, but had reached merely the talking stage. It all began
with Massine, again on the outs with Diaghilev, signing a pact with
C. B. Cochran, who can with some justice be called the Diaghilev
of the light-musical stage, to put on ballets for a forthcoming
revue as well as for the Trocadero cabaret. My friendship with Leon-
ide continued unabated and I lent a willing ear to indignant words
against Sergei Pavlovitch, his tyrannical unconcern for his collabo
rators and the lucrative vistas that would open before me were I
to enter the commercial field under his, Massine's, and Cochran's
auspices. My money earned in France was fast disappearing, also I
had grandly ordered two suits and a tailcoat from the best Savile
Row tailor and although almost anybody's credit was good in London
in the twenties, I hated being in debt and fully intended to pay the
man. While fascinated by Massine's proposals, I decided to defer all
active steps in the "lowbrow" direction until after Zephyr's opening,
for fear of antagonizing Diaghilev, my sponsor and benefactor,
although my banker no longer.
Diaghilev left for Italy with Lifar in early August and this gave me
an opportunity to tinker with a few tentative jazz tunes. London
162 PASSPORT TO PARIS
musical shows were of much better quality then than they are now,
and the best of them was Primrose at the Winter Garden, with
Gershwin's music and Desmond Carter's pithy and well-turned
lyrics. This was George's second London musical, written especially
for the English stage and never reproduced in America. The first was
an unsuccessful revue by A. de Courville, Edgar Wallace (later my
collaborator) and Noel Scott called The Rainbow, produced in 1923.
George often told me that he considered The Rainbow his poorest
score, and it certainly couldn't compare with the exhilarating Scandals
music or such gems as the unjustly neglected "Innocent Ingenue Baby"
and the striking "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise," which Carl Van
Vechten considered "the most perfect piece of jazz yet written." Yet,
at least two numbers could bear a revival the shrewdly Englished
"Sunday in London Town" and the Kern-like ballad "In the Rain"
both with good lyrics by Clifford Grey the latter with five-
bar phrases in the verse, which would be considered daring in 1954.
On the whole it must be admitted that The Rainbow score wasn't
much; Primrose was another matter. The star of that show was the
tantalizing Heather Thatcher, who, like myself, belonged to the
monocle-wearing brigade, but was certainly pretty enough without
that unfeminine appurtenance. The music and lyrics of Primrose
were consistently delightful and I'll never know why "Wait a Bit,
Susie," its best song, was never transplanted across the ocean. I was
greatly influenced in my light-music exercises at the time by both
Primrose and Tell Me More, Winter Garden's next tenant, with
Gershwin tunes, and Heather Thatcher again; the new musical, a
failure in the States, achieved a sizable run in London and contained
the lilting "Why Do I Love You?" this title reappearing many
years later in the more celebrated Kern-Hammerstein ballad.
I wrote several fair-to-middling songs with Beverley Nichols, ex-
secretary to Dame Melba, busy journalist, generous host and author
of 25, his autobiography and still his best book. He lived in a
very small and very pretty house this was before his infatuation
with gardens and wrote facile and deft profiles of his celebrated
guests, who were always in and out of Beverley's living room, drinking
his excellent liquor and joining in the polite merriment. Our songs
were not as good as the dry Martinis, the house's specialty. I remem
ber demonstrating four or five pieces to P. G. Wodehouse, an old
friend of Nichols's and one of the best lyricists in his day. Well-
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 163
mannered P.G. smiled broadly when we started, thinly as we sang
and played and not at all when we finished.
This, of course, was the heyday of the Bright Young People, ably
recorded by Beverley, Lord Donegal and, especially, Patrick Balfour,
whose book Society Racket was published in the early thirties. Patrick
summed up the London twenties as "an age, in the course of which
. . . actors and actresses tried to be ladies and gentlemen and ladies
and gentlemen behaved like actors and actresses, novelists were men-
about-town and men-about-town wrote novels, persons of rank be
came shopkeepers and shopkeepers drew persons of rank to their
houses, the speed king supplanted the Guards officer as the beau ideal
of modern woman and modern woman herself grew each day slimmer
and slimmer and slimmer." To this summation I must add that it
was also the age wherein Armenians and Russians (Michael Arlen
and myself, to name two) tried to be Englishmen and arty English
men would give their back teeth if someone thought them Russian,
normal men and women carried on as if they were homosexuals,
and homosexuals just carried on.
But let Patrick Balfour tell you about carryings-on: "What par
ties they gave! Parties for the Blackbirds; an unforgettable Russian
party in Gerald Road, with a Negro band ... the swimming party
in the St. George's baths; David Tennant Mozart party, where the
eighteenth century was recaptured for a night; Tallulah parties;
Guinness parties; impromptu wild parties, in fancy undress, in the
Royal Hospital Road. Between parties we went to the Cafe Anglais,
to hear Rex Evans singing about white mice and snowballs and the
wrong end of his horse . . . above all, there was Chez Victor,
where Hutch, in his prime, would sing. ..." Hutch was Leslie
Hutchinson, a light-sknined Negro, svelte and dashing, who played
a "lot of piano," as the phrase has it, and made a lot of love to a lot
of wellborn hostesses, who worshipped at his feet or was it his
fingers? One of Hutch's most ardent champions was snub-nosed and
energetic Zena Naylor, vaguely related to Lord Alfred Douglas and a
great friend of Willie Walton's, who was a habitue of Zena's house
in Hill Street, where a party was always on. I went to them all
wasn't my portrait in Vogue, my ballet announced and extolled by
Almighty God Diaghilev himself, weren't my clothes Anderson
& Sheppard's best? The people one always saw at these mad bac
chanals were Lady Eleanor Smith, the Guinness girls (Tanis later
164 PASSPORT TO PARIS
became Mrs. Howard Dietz), the Jungman sisters, Elizabeth Pon-
sonby, the David Tennants, Brian Howard, David Plunkett-Greene,
Hermione Baddeley, Madge Garland and such accomplished fun
lovers as Oliver Messell, Cecil Beaton, Noel Coward and Boonie
Goossens. I well remember one of Boonie's twins saying to Lloyd
Mitchell of the "Blackbirds" (having been briefed) : "Are you col
ored?" Lloyd Mitchell: "Yes, I am." Twin: "I am colored, too; my
color's white."
Noel, the talk of London and the most sought-after playwright-
actor in Mayf air his dream, which he achieved at an early age
was invited everywhere and charmed peeresses to his and their hearts*
content. He had a knack (by screwing up his face and looking
deliciously impish) of making them feel as if he were about to let
them in on a jealously guarded secret of the Paris underworld had
he not written Parisian Pierrot? when, in reality, a conventionally
sprightly exchange of well-turned trivialities was taking place. His
manner, build and general demeanor were wickedly, endearingly
"right" and although no one could touch Jack Buchanan for
sublime tails, it was impossible to approach Noel's perfection when
attired in a gray flannel suit and brown suede shoes. I often won
dered whether his success would have been quite the same had he the
physique of, say, Arnold Bennett.
Noel was then appearing in his own Vortex at the Royalty
Theatre and held court nightly in his dressing room. Massine, never
good at social small talk, but determined to bring us together, took
me to Noel's pleasant abode in Ebury Street, where we could talk
business. Coward received us in a resplendent dressing gown (I
made a mental note to get its duplicate regardless of cost), listened to
my little tunes with every evidence of pleasure, played a few of his
own and wound up with a first (for me) performance of "Tea
for Two," then the rage of the United States. Noel didn't play well
and his voice was curiously flat and unmusical; I thought "Tea for
Two" dull in the extreme and said so. I love the song now as who
doesn't? but still marvel at the nonsensical lyric which never gets
back to the title; no one does any tea-drinking in the song, which is
probably understandable as the song was not meant for English
audiences, but then why call it "Tea for Two"?
At that time Noel wasn't too sure of his ground as songwriter;
in Present Indicative he tells how: "Cochran's armour of evasive
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 165
politeness cracked, and he was forced to say that he frankly did not
consider my music good enough to carry a whole show." It was Mas-
sine's thought that Coward and I could collaborate on music and
lyrics, with me attending to ballet music as well. I remember playing
a very Gershwinesque refrain, which Noel liked enough to try writ
ing a lyric to then and there. Nothing came of the proposed col
laboration, because "Cockie" finally gave in and let Noel compose
the entire score for the revue. He, too, went to too many parties
and met too many people; he, too, "indulged a long-suppressed
desire for silk-shirts, pyjamas and underclothes," but Noel was pro
digiously industrious and never let pleasure interfere with business.
At twenty-two, I never let business spoil my pleasure and had a
childish and unreasonable conviction that Lady Luck had singled
me out as her own particular pet and all I had to do was let her oper
ate.
After Diaghilev's departure, Willie Walton and I became close-
friends. He lived on the top floor of Osberfs Chelsea house and I
was taken there shortly after the Goossens dinner. Two Carlyle-
Square could perhaps be described as an exclusive annex to such
meccas of "Smartistic" London (the word is Patrick Balfour's) as
Lady Colefax's the Lions Comer House, as the envious had it
Emerald Cunard's and Christabel McLaran's establishments. Osberf s
house was small and appeared even smaller as you entered it, owing
to the great number of precious objects and knickknacks, all of which
reflected the special tastes of the owner. The painter whose work pre
vailed on Osbert's walls was Severini, who, in spite of his early
reputation as "Futurist," always seemed a bit saccharine to me. Ital
ian and Persian art mingled freely in the Sitwell house; in a letter
to Mother, I recorded with some astonishment that even the John
boasted a number of Persian miniatures. There are people who as
pire solely to wit, others to chic, still others to money Osbert
Sitwell's niche was majesty. His looks, speech, walk and the ponderous
graciousness with which he received his guests made you feel that you
were in the presence of royalty and that your host's literary activities
were rather like the present King of Denmark's penchant for or
chestra conducting. Since I am not easily awed, Sir Osbert's awesome
manner failed to intimidate me, which was doubtless wrong of me;
I soon noticed a marked reserve in the Sitwellian remarks addressed
to me in the course of the excellent luncheon Willie and I were
166 PASSPORT TO PARIS
offered, and even more marked remoteness about the cold steely eyes
of my host, and was much relieved when the time came to rise from
the table.
Willie and I always enjoyed ourselves hugely in his attic and I did
much to veer him away from the pitfalls of atonality. I was brutal in
my denunciation of the Schoenbergian string quartet and other like
efforts, warmly welcoming the fresh water-color quality of "Ports
mouth Point," the overture then being written and orchestrated. This
ingenious piece was first dedicated to me, and I well remember my
hurt feelings when "To Siegfried Sassoon" appeared on the printed
score.
On November 12th Zephyr had its Coliseum opening with Braque's
beautiful additional sets and a good orchestra, well-rehearsed and
spiritedly conducted. If the Paris premiere had but a moderate success,
there were no such reservations to be made of the London one. In the
pet phrase of society columnists, it was rapturously received. No laurel
wreath this tune, but I wore a large white chrysanthemum in my but
tonhole to match the floral tributes bestowed on Alice Nikitina by
Lord Rothermere. Except for the outrageous chrysanthemum, re
ported by the tabloids the next day, my clothes were those of a gentle
man at long last, thanks to Messrs. Anderson & Sheppard, and, like
Noel in Present Indicative, I "savoured to the full the sensation of
being well-dressed for the first time."
Two wonderful, fairytalelike things happened to me that evening.
C. B. Cochran came to see me backstage during the intermission, his
perpetually red, friendly little face beaming, his hand outstretched to
grasp mine. Cockie looked more like a Surtees squire than a theatrical
producer, but a shrewder appraiser of theatrical wares never lived. He
told me that he thought the music of Zephyr extraordinarily exhila
rating, fresh and young, and would I write a musical-comedy score
for him? There is really no relation between the two media, and
Cochran's proposal was, in the conventional sense, just as unusual, as
if Ziegfeld had asked T. S. Eliot to write him a "Follies" score on the
strength of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." One must also
bear in mind that Cockie had never heard any of my jazz pieces
(probably it was just as well), though he might have had some
comments by Coward or Massine. I accepted the offer with dispatch
and promised to show up at Cochran's office for further discussion on
the next afternoon.
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 167
No sooner did Cochran leave than he was succeeded by the arrival
of Willie Walton, breathless and slightly disheveled; he told me in a
dramatic whisper that Frances Doble, "the most beautiful girl in
London," wanted to meet me, that she was entranced with the ballet,
my music and, apparently, my looks. Miss Doble asked Willie to take
her backstage after the last ballet and bring me to supper with her
at somebody-or-other's house. No party was planned for that evening
Diaghilev, Boris and I were to sup quietly with Goossens, Evans
and Wollheim in the Savoy Grill; I asked Willie to wait and ran
up to Sergei Pavlovitch, who was standing in the wings with Lifar,
to ask his permission to join Mr. Walton for supper. Although I
purposely omitted Miss Doble's name in my request, Diaghilev's
mocking glance told me at once that he knew the truth: "A girl
again. What a perfect young ass you are; Zephyr is a real London
victory. I'm proud of you as a composer; as a man, you're incurable.
Run along now!" I thanked Sergei Pavlovitch warmly, feeling a bit
remorseful here I was plotting to "sell my soul" to Cochran and
my heart to an unknown enchantress both actions certain to dis
please Diaghilev.
Frances ("Bunny," as everyone called her) Doble, the daughter
of a Toronto banker, was a gifted young actress and a great Mayfair
favorite. I knew that her sister Georgia ("Baby") was about to
marry Sacheverell Sitwell, Osbert's younger brother, with whom T
was on the friendliest terms. I knew too that Bunny was celebrated
for her beauty in a town noted for professional pulchritude (the
term "glamour girl" was not yet invented) , but I was not prepared
for the celestial vision that appeared out of nowhere on the huge
Coliseum stage, which was peopled with madly chattering ballerinas,
stagehands scurrying about and young guardees not above a little
post- Victorian stage-door- Johnnying, their mustaches all a-twirl, their
"I say's" and "ripping's" straight out of Wodehouse. Yes, Bunny
Doble was indeed rarely beautiful with her shining, almond-shaped
eyes, voluptuous yet shy mouth, dark-brown hair, the natural sheen
of which set off the cool, even pallor of her skin, almost free of
cosmetics; her figure didn't quite match the perfection of her face,
but it was a dressmaker's figure and Bunny's frock showed it off
seductively. Our first meeting was an exact duplicate of countless such
meetings in countless third-rate films, where the hero and heroine,
speechless and dumbfounded by each other's charms, utter unbearable
168 PASSPORT TO PARIS
banalities, while the audience's collective heart palpitates wildly and
enviously. I plead guilty to a scene which in cold print must look
very cold indeed, and assuredly inane, but we were both galvanized
by one another and went through the motions of that legendary
cataclysm love at first sight with utmost sincerity. I hope the
reader doesn't become nauseated by my narcissism, which never
extended to my looks, only to my clothes, but I must report that
Bunny's opening gem-bit was: "Oh, but you are beautiful!" I gasped
and retaliated with: "You are the most beautiful thing I ever
saw . . ."; thus having assured ourselves that we were the two most
beautiful people on earth, we walked off arm in arm, gazing at one
another with unbelieving eyes. Willie, astonished and amused,
following us at a respectful distance. I don't remember a thing about
the supper that followed.
The London notices were fully as good as the Paris ones; in
some instances, even better. In the light of my subsequent strange and
nonconformist career as composer, I feel I should again submit a few
quotes. Luckily for me Ernest Newman didn't cover my opening for
the London Sunday Times, but Dyneley Hussey did. "As for the mu
sic," said he, "it is a pleasure to welcome a work which not only
avoids mere silliness but shows that the young composer really has
something to say. It is not all on a level but some of the movements,
such as the slow solo for Flora after Zephyr has been wounded, were
beautiful. The ballet was received with great enthusiasm." The
accomplished and erudite Francis Toye (who wrote the splendid
biographies of Rossini and Verdi) was very complimentary: "It
would hardly be true to write that Dukelsky's music had, except for
a certain elegance, even a remote flavor of the 18th century, but it
struck us as by far the most interesting of all the compositions
associated with Mr. Diaghilev's most recent ballets. . . . Here is a
young man who, despite the discordant idiom of the times, knows
how to shape a musical phrase and conceive a musical idea. Strange
though it may appear to many people in the audience, M. Dukelsky
has a real gift of tune, and some of his contrapuntal writing is
extremely happy." Hubert Griffith added another bouquet: "Dukel
sky's music is a relief for sore ears after too much musical comedy.
Dukelsky may or may not be a great composer. His music last night
was a delight." Vogue thought it "spirited and stimulating, possess
ing a pleasant acidity somewhat reminiscent of Prokofiev." Lastly,
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 169
my erstwhile interviewer, Edwin Evans told his readers: "It is a rich
score possibly even a little too rich, for there are things in it which
scarcely come through and does not need any of the indulgence
that one accords to an early effort, for, apart from a certain youthful
exuberance, its style is unusually settled and consistent." Clearly, I got
off on the right foot.
Looking back at my London debut, which took place almost thirty
years ago, it becomes clear to me that I missed my big chance and
made the unpardonable mistake of dissipating the excellent first im
pression my music made, by not taking myself at all seriously. Had I
but the stick-to-itiveness of, say, a Prokofiev (I am not comparing his
gift with mine), I would have followed Zephyr with a yet better
work, would have orchestrated the early concerto a sure applause-
getter whatever its faults and, first and foremost, gotten back to
study, especially study of orchestration. I had Diaghilev and Kous-
sevitzky where I wanted them, my meteoric rise gave me an entree
to almost any conductor you could name, and, on top of it all,
Cochran, the greatest showman of his time, was commissioning a
musical comedy from me me, who had not a single printed song
to his credit! Yet, with all these wondrous opportunities, I let all
these birds in my hand fly away and did little of consequence for
the next three years except, in the current colorful phrase, have
myself a ball.
I went to see Cochran at the appointed time, was told that Arthur
Wimperis, then one of the top author-lyricists in the game, would
write the book for my score, signed a very pretty-looking contract
and pocketed a check for .300 a sum of money that would not be
called inconsiderable even today. I doubt that Cockie paid out such
large advances as a rule, but I was a "young man of the moment"
and bagging Diaghilev's newest composer must have given the enter
prising showman a real kick especially because he was aware of
Diaghilev's savage and vociferous disapproval of any theatrical
entrepreneur who dared lure "his people" away from him as was
the case with Massine. Had I asked Sergei Pavlovitch's permission to
work for Cochran, he would have first thrown a fit and then thrown
me out of his room and his life. What was I to do? The new ballet,
although seemingly a certainty, wouldn't bring me enough to live on
and there were Mother and Alex to think about.
On graduation from Gushing in 1924 as salutatorian, Alex passed
170 PASSPORT TO PARIS
the college entrance examination and was admitted as a freshman at
M.I.T. His first scholarship was granted by the Russian Relief in
1926, Alex beginning to show promise as an architect. By this time
Mother had moved to Boston to save Alex from alcoholic excesses, as
the Berestnevs began brewing their own bathtub vodka. Mother then
obtained a scholarship for Alex through Koussevitzky.
She worked in Mme. Ouspensky's dress shop, specializing in
Russian cross-stitching; everything Russian was then very popular. In
1928 Alex graduated with a bachelor of science degree with top
honors, was granted the Fontainebleau Scholarship and went back to
Tech to get his master's degree, which he received in 1929, with a
traveling scholarship for a year's study abroad. While these distinc
tions were being achieved, Alex subsisted solely on what Mother
was able to earn by hard work, and the two of them needed help
urgently. I was determined to do everything in my power to provide
that help.
Prior to meeting Bunny Doble, I met and liked Sacheverell Sitwell,
as "easy to be with" a man as Osbert was difficult Sachie, as he was
known to his friends, had none of Osbert's glassy perfection; his
clothes were baggy, his shirts rumpled, so was his unruly blond hair.
Although some likened him to Bacchus, he looked more like an over
grown urchin with his odd, shy giggle and awkwardly angular gestures.
There was something touchingly gauche about the man's appearance;
you would hardly suspect that he was a master of colorful, yet metic
ulous prose and warmly sensitive poetry, that he was by far the best
author of the three writing Sitwells which estimate will not please
him. The Sitwell trio's mutual devotion is too well-known to need
discussion on these pages; to criticize one in the presence of the
others is to invite a verbal explosion and a permanent ouster from
the exalted Sitwellian spheres. There is a priceless paragraph in Cecil
Beaton's Photobiography in which the author, with artful naivete,
tells of how he "as each week passed, became more panicstricken lest
I should fail completely in adult life. Then one day a delightful and
wise friend said to me, 'Don't worry so much about becoming any
thing very definite. Take it easy for a bit more and become a friend
of the Sitwells.' " Cecil took the advice and things worked out beauti
fully for him. As for me, having "become very definite" indeed, I had
the impudence to tell Sacheverell that I thought Osbert's Before the
Bombardment a boring and almost unreadable book the strident
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 171
scene that ensued is not one of my happier recollections. Vernon
Fane, reviewing Sir Osbert's The Scarlet Tree spoke of the author's
"intense egocentricity" and "none too elastic view of life." Ego-
centricity not being one of my many faults I sincerely dislike
talking about myself for the unusual reason that I know all there is to
know about me and would rather hear about others and elasticity
not being one of my few virtues, I was regrettably unmoved by the
trio of Sitwells, who have always made it clear that they regard
themselves as being apart and endowed with exceptional gifts. They
have succeeded in securing an almost general acceptance of this
belief by an unflinching and at times belligerent insistence.
My attentions to Bunny were, in reality, of the most inoffensive
sort. We saw each other every day, held hands, walked through
Chelsea or Hyde Park, kissed a great deal and talked all manner of
childishly romantic nonsense but that was all. Through my entire
life I was cursed, or possibly blessed, with a dual personality as lover
as well as composer. I have desired and I have loved, certainly, but
with two exceptions I never desired those I loved, never loved those I
desired. To further entertain members and disciples of the psycho
analytical cult, I will admit that I was never capable of sublimating
sex, nor degrading love, with elaborate variations of the sexual act.
I have read all about "love and sex being one and the same" or
"going hand in hand" so should music and money but Duke
and Dukelsky know better. I've never been married and my stock
answer when asked why not is, "Because, should I be married to
one woman, I'd be unfaithful to all the 'others.' " The real reason
is not as pat and snappy as that, but it is a more valid one.
To save money in order to help Mother and Alex, not forgetting
my own expensive outings and clothes, I moved to cheap digs in
Torrington Square in the heart of Bloomsbury. The room, as I re
member it now, had that very special London squalor about it, but the
rent was infinitesimal and Mrs. Dupont, my sad-eyed Belgian land
lady, had a way with beef and mutton, which was an added advan
tage on lean days when I wasn't asked out to dine. I composed
what little I did compose on an antiquated upright, perpetually
and fascinatingly out-of-tune no piano tuner could help the pre
historic beast, which would be on its good behavior for a week, and
then get back to complete acoustic anarchy.
It is a sad and probably little-known fact that composers are usu-
172 PASSPORT TO PARIS
ally jealous of one another and inclined to speak disparagingly of
their contemporaries' work. There is no jealousy in my make-up ei
ther in love or in music. I always liked all good music good to
my way of thinking, that is and was always ready to give it a
hand, exactly as if it were my own; I, too, felt, and still feel, that a
really worthwhile new composer is so rare a bird that he should be
caged at once and that the cage should be gold, not merely gilt, as is
too often the case. Thus, on hearing Vittorio Rieti's "Noah's Ark"
(1925) I became entranced with the man's talent and began "sell
ing" him to Diaghilev; there might have been other salesmen too
at any rate, Diaghilev lent a willing ear and Rieti's Barabau, a
hilarious "folk" ballet with inventive and dazzlingly fresh choreog
raphy by Balanchine, was put on at the Coliseum on December llth
and applauded to the echo.
In 1925-1926 I acted as a sort of an unofficial "musical secre
tary" to Sergei Pavlovitch and performed my duties with great zeal.
Always a facile sightreader, it became my job to play new works
submitted to Diaghilev, and, on occasion, to write composers and
their publishers. Willie Walton's great ambition was to compose a
ballet for Diaghilev, and I suggested that he play "Portsmouth
Point" for him. Willie had a young friend named Constant Lambert,
a product of the Royal College of Music, who had similar ambitions;
while Walton pursued his goal through me as a go-between, "Kid"
(as he was known to his intimates) Lambert had other ideas. He
used to haunt the corridor outside Diaghilev's door at the Savoy
Hotel and sit on the floor with the determination to waylay the
great man and obtain a hearing. Diaghilev, who had an efficient
bodyguard in Boris, was used to ducking composers and creditors
alike, and outsmarted poor Lambert daily by sneaking into his suite
before the boy had a chance to open his mouth. Kid Lambert was
rather typical of arty Chelsea and insisted on wearing an unusually
loud bright-orange shirt with a black tie. This trade-mark infuriated
Diaghilev, who called me in to complain about the "infernal
nuisance that Chelsea tapette [fairy] who haunts me." I laughed
heartily, knowing Lambert to be quite a ladies' man; I knew him
slightly and thought his manner curt and disagreeable, but certainly
not effeminate. Willie, with his habitual kindness, suggested that
Lambert join him for the Diaghilev audition, which I succeeded in
obtaining. I heard Lambert's newly composed "Adam and Eve" bal-
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 173
let, and thought it very mild fare, but promised to try and smuggle
the Kid in. In this I succeeded, although Diaghilev grumbled un
pleasantly at the sight of the orange-shirted prowler; Willie played
first he was no pianist, and got an icy reception from Sergei
Pavlovitch, who then told me what he thought of "Portsmouth Point"
in Russian, and it wasn't much. Lambert, a self-assured and efficient
performer, went on next, gave an excellent account of his skimpy
piece and miracle of miracles was rewarded by a beatific smile
by the listener.
"Are you English?" he queried. "Yes, I am, why?" countered Lam
bert. "That's most surprising. I don't like English music, yet I like
your little ballet. I'm going to produce it, but not with that silly title,"
Diaghilev went on. He took a big red pencil, crossed out "Adam and
Eve" and wrote "Romeo and Juliet" over it. Constant burst into
uncontrollable tears.
I was very upset by this turn of events, as I considered Willie's
music immeasurably superior to that of Lambert's. At my insistence,
and with some help from Goossens, "Portsmouth Point" was given
as an interlude at His Majesty's Theatre in the summer of 1926.
Arnold Haskell reported the Lambert "christening" thus: "Through
London friends, he [Diaghilev] had discovered a young English
composer, Constant Lambert." The London friends were Willie and
myself. I have before me a clipping from either the Times or the
Telegraph which reads: "The composer, Constant Lambert, is still a
student and is not yet twenty-one. His music was brought to the notice
of Mr. Diaghilev by Vladimir Dukelsky, the composer of 'Zephyr
and Flora,' and Diaghilev, liking it, thought he could fit no more
thoroughly British story to it than Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet.' "
Kid Lambert was wretchedly poor at the time and Willie asked me
whether I couldn't find some remunerative work for the young man,
who not only didn't thank me for the Diaghilev audition but seemed
to resent my role in bringing it about. Massine gave me five Albeniz
piano pieces to orchestrate and I was glad to share the assignment
with Lambert, whose orchestrating skill was superior to mine. Eight
years later Lambert favored me with a single mention in his scrappy
Music Ho! subtitled "A Study of Music in Decline": "Diaghilev was
far more than a mere impresario. Though not, strictly speaking, a
creative artist, he had very much more genius than many of the artists
who worked for him, and it hardly seems worth while examining the
174 PASSPORT TO PARIS
work of such minor composers as Dukelsky, Sauguet, Nabokov, and!
others, apart from their connection with Diaghilev. They were merely
the gunmen executing the commands of their Capone, who, like all
great gangsters, never touched firearms himself."
In mid-December on moving to Torrington Square, I fell victim
to a form of gastric fever and spent two depressing days in bed,
drinking tea, reading Stendhal and playing chess with Indian stu
dents, fellow inmates of Mme. Dupont's establishment. On the
second night of my illness, Walton stormed in to tell me that Viva
and Willie Booth, of the St. John's Wood Branch of the Bright
Young People, were giving a party for Bunny after her opening in
a new comedy and that Bunny announced that she wouldn't come
unless I came too. I felt wretched, but, my protests and excuses
proving of no avail, allowed myself to be persuaded by faithful
Willie, dressed hurriedly and, bundled up securely, ventured into the
icy December air. On arriving at the Booths', I was received with
mingled gaiety and solicitude and given a double brandy, on downing
which I promptly fainted. I came to just in time for Bunny's trium
phant arrival; she was radiant in shiny silver lame, grateful for the
plaudits she received at the theater and happy to see me among her
welcoming friends. The crackling fire, Hutch's soothing singing and
piano playing and Bunny's tenderness should have cured me instantly,
but I felt gradually more and more ill and had to be taken to bed,
Bunny playing nurse. The next morning, instead of recovering, I got
steadily worse and, thanks to Willie's kind offices, was removed to 2
Carlyle Square Osbert was vacationing in Italy.
I will always be grateful to Willie Walton for the friendship and
concern he showed me during the next week, which caused me
actually to enjoy my illness. Bunny came to see me and we had an
emotional scene which started with the girl kneeling at my bed and
crying, as she imagined herself responsible for my condition, having
insisted at my turning up at her party. There was talk of marriage, of
never leaving each other Bunny in tears, I in bed with a high
temperature which, according to the girl, gave me a magnificent
color. Bunny then left and, I fear, Love left us shortly afterwards.
What a relief it must have been to all our ill-wishers.
At Christmas time, I wrote Mother a long letter in which I said
that my main and basic desire was to see her as soon as possible and,
most important of all, to provide her even temporarily with some
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 175
semblance of security. I continued: "Diaghilev is very much satisfied
with my ballet and myself. As a token of his appreciation, he plans
three exclusively Russian novelties for the 20th, i.e., Jubilee season
of his ballet. The three composers are to be Glinka (Russian and
Ludmila in an unusual scenic presentation), Stravinsky and myself.
I keep good company, don't I? My new ballet will be, apparently, in
two acts and the libretto is being developed by Boris. A large number
of theatrical 'tricks' is being planned, but no musical ones; on the
contrary, I'm plunging deeper and deeper into the purest lyricism.
... So far I have no competitors; young Russian composers have
failed to put in an appearance in Europe."
Prior to leaving for Berlin with the company (Zephyr scored an
other emphatic success in the German capital), Diaghilev had but
two meetings with me. On one occasion he came to lunch at Osbert's,
accompanied by Boris; he sat at the table wrapped in his beaver-fur
coat (fear of catching a cold) and refused to sample the excellent
oysters (fear of ptomaine poisoning). Following lunch, I played my
Bogdanovitch songs, which he praised immoderately; Diaghilev then
told several wildly improbable stories and departed majestically. Os
bert's own majesty paled somewhat next to that of Czar Sergei's no
one could touch Diaghilev when he chose to be regal.
The other meeting was less pleasant. I composed some insignificant
"arrangements" for Massine, who was then staging cabaret shows for
Cochran at the Trocadero, and promptly forgot all about it. One
night Sergei Pavlovitch, Boris and I went there for supper and, to my
intense discomfort, one of the dancers performed a pas seul to the
strains arranged by me. Following the dance, one of Cockie's hench
men came over to the table to congratulate me on the success of "my"
music. Diaghilev went blue with rage, said nothing, drummed on the
table with his knuckles and demanded the bill. I was handed my coat,
ebony walking stick and brand-new top hat by the hat-check girl; no
sooner were we out in the street than Diaghilev knocked my top hat
off my head with my own stick, trampled upon it savagely, reducing
it to a messy pulp, and with a one-syllable parting shot, "Whore!"
disappeared in the dark.
Following my recovery from my illness, Willie went off to Amalfi
to join Osbert, Sacheverell married Baby Doble and Bunny was
reported to be in love with her leading man. Cockie was in the
hospital about to be operated on for gall-stones, while I went back
176 PASSPORT TO PARIS
to partying in an attempt to combat a serious attack of London
loneliness. My outlandishly elegant clothes, eighteenth-century walk
ing sticks and botanical arrangements, far from attracting English
females, usually convinced them of my "queerness." This I didn't
bargain for and was torn between a passion for sartorial effects and
a new and more natural craving for carnal conquests. While I was
asked about a great deal and made much of by women at parties
and opening nights, I'm afraid they regarded me more as a decorative
object and, if not a full-grown lion, at least an acceptable lion cub,
rather than a normally functioning male.
There was a lovely Nordic-looking dancer, whom we shall call
Lita Maine, who had a part in Cochran's revue at the Pavilion and I
decided to "give her a whirl." She whirled willingly enough
when it came to the Embassy or the Cafe de Paris, where on one
occasion I stepped on the then Prince of Wales's foot while he was
earnestly mastering the Charleston with an American partner, and was
charming company at dinner but that's as far as it went. What I
didn't know was that Miss Maine was Cockie's special favorite and
that it would have been far smarter to leave her in peace; my rivals,
detractors and just plain busybodies apparently reported my friend
ship with Lita to the ailing producer, painting it in vastly exaggerated
colors. I doubt that clever Cockie let such a puny matter interfere
with his theatrical projects, but he dropped my musical comedy on
his recovery and sent me a most polite note of regrets. He, 'however,
retained my services as arranger and orchestrator (!) to Massine,
then staging another ballet for the Trocadero.
Arthur Wimperis and I wrote two or three songs for the projected
musical, an adaptation of a French farce, the procedure much in
vogue in those days. Prior to going to the hospital, Cockie introduced
me to William Allen, head of Asherberg, Hopwood & Crew, the old
music firm, then a rival of ChappeU's in the operetta field; Bill
Allen, a sweet old Cockney with a walrus mustache, signed me to a
contract at 250 per annum against royalties to be accrued from
the sale of my music. Although my contract with Koussevitsky stipu
lated an exclusive lifetime partnership, I was permitted to prostitute
my muse and publish such unworthy outpourings elsewhere, on condi
tion that I find a suitable nom de plume. On my discussing this with
Gershwin, he suggested that the family name was easily enough trun
cated to "Duke," but the Christian name presented some difficulty.
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 177
There was nothing resembling "Vladimir" in English, and all the
Anglo-Saxon names beginning with "V" already had Russian counter
parts except Vernon. The name "Vernon Duke" had a somewhat
purple-fiction ring to it, but since musical comedy was not an espe
cially elevated form of art, that did not seem to constitute an obstacle.
Thus my first published song, "Try a Little Kiss," was signed with the
Gershwin-invented handle, which stuck through all these years until
it became my official name and relegated the Slavic "Dukelsky" to the
status of a pseudonym.
Through Allen, who was bewildered but somewhat impressed by
me I'm sure he had never feasted his eyes on so exotic a creature
I met redoubtable Jimmy White, the self-made Croesus and operetta
lover extraordinary. The operettas he loved were aU Viennese,
crammed with luscious waltzes, skittish primadonnas with parasols
and choruses of young men in white flannel trousers stilted and
intensely British versions of the Mittel-Europa originals. White's love
for these imports was so great that he rented old Daly's Theatre for the
purpose of installing an all-Viennese regime there; his calculations
proved wrong eventually as the regime was already tottering and
"bloody Yanks" were brazenly competing with Lehar, Oskar Straus
and Emmerich Kalman by forcing "lewd and obscene jazz" down
honest Londoners' throats. At the time of our meeting, Jimmy White
was still sitting on top of the world, lording it at the Stock Exchange
and czaring it at Daly's with a successful production of Katja, the
Dancer, with Jean Gilbert's music and regal Lilian Davies in the title
role.
If Bill Allen spoke the purest Cockney, Jimmy's speech was im
pure Lancashire; he couldn't finish a sentence without spicing it with
a bad word, usually so comically mispronounced as to take the sting
out of it. He took me on to "pep up" Katja, then in its second year,
reasoning that a few "saucy" interpolations would further prolong
the show's life. "You're a young man, Dulazy [which is how he
pronounced my name], and I want young ideas for the old girl;
give me that bloody Yankee monkey music I hate the stuff myself
but I'll try it." It is a mystery that White should have applied to
me, a Parisian Russian, according to the London press, for Yankee
monkey music, but he handed me a very welcome contract and I
started a career of "doctoring" ailing Viennese operettas and "jazzing
'em up" to suit the changing tastes of Daly's audience.
178 PASSPORT TO PARIS
I began by interpolating "Try a Little Kiss" (with a Wimperis
lyric) and "Back to My Heart" into Katja, and got a big thrill from
hearing my first "jazz" tunes sung by "name" actors on a West End
stage. Fred Leslie, the dance director, although not an American, did
his best to create an American-style dance routine to "Kiss," the
genteel Maida Vale chorus maids traipsing daintily through brazen
Yankee steps. I hardly think the box-office receipts skyrocketed as a
result of my interpolations, but Jimmy was pleased and hired me on
a yearly basis to tinker with his forthcoming productions, of which
the first one was to be Yvonne, also with a Jean Gilbert score. "I
think the old man came a cropper with this one," said Jimmy.
"You'll bloody well start from scratch, Dulazy." "Right you are,
guv'nor," I said smartly and went back to Bloomsbury, new contract
in my pocket
Balanchine was then practically my neighbor, and I really got to
know him. George, probably the most lovable creature that ever
lived, was already his well-known unpredictable self mixing sheer
lunacy with phlegmatic laissez aller, carried to unheard-of lengths.
Ever a diligent and inspired worker, he lived in a cozy little world
of his own, disorganized and ill-assembled to the naked eye, but very
dear to him. Untranslatable Armenian jokes and good Russian food
were enough to make him happy; money meant (and means) noth
ing to him, and I'll wager that he is the poorest of all choreographers,
although certainly the best. In the many years that I've known him,
George turned down job after job in order to create ballets for his
beloved New York City Ballet Company.
In his early London days, George spoke very little English and just
enough French to make himself understood; he was fond of playing
the guitar and, since non-Russian-speaking guests were always in
and out of his place, learned a song or two in English and sang them
in a peculiarly mournful voice. His after-dinner favorite was a
Balanchinesque version of the then popular refrain: "Everybohdy
lohves my bohdy, but my bohdy lohves nobohdy but me." George's
constant companion was a middle-aged character dancer named
Kremnev, a sly tow-headed Russian jack-of-all-trades whose suppos
edly perfect English was the object of Balanchine's great envy and
admiration. In reality, Kremnev knew scarcely a hundred English
words and mispronounced them atrociously, but to George, Krem-
nev's English was the purest Oxford and he was fond of saying:
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE 179
"Ah, Kremnev, if I could only speak English like you!" The wily
little Russian would then shrug his shoulders self-deprecatingly and
reply with mock modesty: "It's not difficult with my talent for lan
guages." This finally got George's goat and, unbeknown even to his
wife, he began sneaking off to Berlitz's of an evening hi an effort to
prove to his friend that he too was a talented linguist. It must be
added that Balanchine and Kremnev habitually breakfasted together
on Sundays at Lyons' Corner House (not Lady Colefax's). As a rule,
Kremnev ordered breakfast in loud, imperious tones, with Balanchine
gazing at his friend reverently. On a certain Sunday, having acquired
a bit of workable Berlitz English, George took his polyglot friend
to Lyons' and, as they sat down, waited poker-faced for Kremnev to
start operations. "Veitresss!" yelled the dancer with authority born
out of practice. The Nippy duly arrived and awaited orders. "Veit-
ress ekky-bekky, plizz," said Kremnev; the girl, obviously new in
her job, looked at the polyglot with consternation. "I beg your
pardon, sir?" she stammered apprehensively. "You breeng ekky-
bekky, veitress. . . ." went on Kremnev, frowning. This was Bal-
anchine's opportunity. "No-o, veitress, no-o-o . . ." said George
soothingly. "No ekky-bekky . . . Yeggs and beycon!"
Balanchine was fond of my Zephyr music and Diaghilev promised
him, on the strength of Barabau's tumultuous success, that he would
be entrusted with the choreography of the Three Seasons, Diaghilev's
name for my projected new ballet. The three seasons were winter,
spring and summer with autumn omitted, as Sergei Pavlovitch
detested that time of the year.
CHAPTER XI
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER
MY FINANCIAL situation having become stabilized, I gave up
my Torrington Square "digs" and took an attractive service flat
in Pall Mall, under a similar one rented by Gershwin, who arrived
in London early in 1926 and soon became the darling of Mayfair.
He was showered with invitations, including those of Prince George
and the Mountbattens. (Prince George gave him a photograph of
himself inscribed: "From George to George.") When not busy with
a London production of Lady Be Good, the Astaires' showpiece, then
in preparation, Gershwin accepted these invitations with joy, because
he loved to play piano for people who loved to hear him. George's
superb piano playing took London completely by storm; clubmen,
guardees and debutantes surrounded the American Liszt, architect of
musical skyscrapers and the first transatlantic composer with a voice of
his own. Europe was just discovering jazz and its musicians hastened
to climb aboard the strange new bandwagon; Milhaud led the pack
with the curiously prophetic Creation du Monde, Krenek bowdlerized
jazz mercilessly in his Jonny Spielt Auj, Stravinsky toyed with it
unconvincingly in the early Ragtime, and even the young Englishmen
helped themselves to its formulas, as witness Walton in some portions
of Facade and, later, Lambert in his vulgarly garrulous Rio Grande.
Florence Mills was the chic diva of the period and no Mayfair
shindig was complete without a flock of "Blackbirds," imported by
Cochran with enormous success. Most of the Blackbirds were sin
cere and talented performers and it was good to hear them at parties
and in the theater; but things got out of control when their orches
tra drummer's wife slashed a London matron with a razor, on finding
her husband in the lady's boudoir. The drummer was duly deported
and the lady repaired to Paris and temporary oblivion. It was at one
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 181
of the Blackbirds' parties that Noel Coward performed a solo
Charleston in virtuoso fashion another token of his amazing ver
satility.
The lyric for Gershwin's "I'd Rather Charleston," interpolated into
the Astaire show, was written by gentle, sloe-eyed Desmond Carter,
a wonderful lyric writer who died young and who was to supply
words to my Yellow Mask tunes in 1928. George and Carter were
major kingpins in the House of Chappell, the London branch of
Harms (or was it the other way around?), run by Max Dreyfus's
brother Louis. Still smarting under Max's nonappreciation of my
talents, I became determined to achieve success without the omnipo
tent Brothers Dreyfus. I knew, however, that kindly old Percy Green-
bank, who wrote the lyrics to my music for Yvonne, was no match
for Carter, whose verse was always smartly turned, and I was
fascinated as Desmond, a model of tact and reticence, sat in an
armchair, pencil in hand, while George, a big cigar in his mouth
and eyes shining, played "I'd Rather Charleston" over and over
in every existing key.
In late March I went to Monte Carlo with Walton, having con
cluded arrangements with Daly's to return in the end of April for
rehearsals of Yvonne, starring Ivy Tresmand, who had made a hit as
a soubrette in Katja, the Dancer. We first alighted in Paris, and I
introduced Willie to Prokofiev, just back from the States. While on
Ms American tour, Serge had stopped off in Boston and visited Mother
and Alex, for which I was most grateful to him. Walton and I
played our new music for Prokofiev, who puffed out his cheeks,
made jokingly rude remarks and insisted on a game of chess with
me. When I feebly remonstrated, knowing myself to be no match
for him, Serge said that it delighted him to see me walk into every
trap he laid for me, which pleasure was denied him by better op
ponents. He claimed that my game was hopeless, but my mistakes
fascinating and "not devoid of genius."
Walton and I put up at the Hotel Cote d'Azur in Monaco, a big
and almost empty place whose only clients seemed to be a group of
petites mains from a dress designer's establishment, cheerful and
sparrowlike little Paris gamines, intoxicated by the Riviera sun and
the blue Mediterranean. Unlike most such places, our hotel had no
rules about noisemaking; the petites mains ran about and laughed
delightedly, Willie and I banged away on the piano and everybody
182 PASSPORT TO PARIS
was happy. One of the girls, a small mischievous brunette named
Monique, happened to live across the corridor from my room, was
always dashing in and out, humming the latest "Java" or "beguine"
(these are always in 34 tune, notwithstanding Cole Porter's classic),
bumping into me and running off with, "Oh! Je vous demande par
don, monsieur . . . comme je suis maladroite" This led to the in
evitable "nuit d* amour" and the nuit d'amour to Monique's luggage
being transferred to my room in the morning, without the small
matter of consulting me about the desirability of such an arrange
ment. This one-sided idyll lasted about a week, at the end of which I
presented Monique with a dress and a pair of shoes, went through
the motions of a sentimental farewell and saw her to the station in
a Victoria. At the time of this not very romantic escapade, Willie
was completing his Siesta for chamber orchestra, a pretty lyrical
piece which I called "very remarkable" hi a letter to Mother.
But it was time to return to London and the new Duke-Dukelsky
partnership. The book for Yvonne proved to be unusually inane,
and Percy Greenbank, an amiable and easygoing man, found my
American-style tunes rather difficult to lyricize. Some of Gilbert's
melodies were retained, but the bulk of the score was mine (nine
or ten numbers) and, on the average, the music was mildly pleas
ant, comfortably Kern-like in spots, uncomfortably Leslie Stuartish
in others. Ivy Tresmand's first song was prefaced by this sort of
dialogue:
IVY: Would you like a spot of tea, men?
CHORUS MEN (in blue blazers and white flannels): Jolly good
idea!
IVY: I always find it rather nicer to be naughty with a
few handsome young men to be naughty with
ha, ha! (Business of pinching chorus men's
cheeks.) (Song: "It's Rather Nicer to Be Naughty
[than to be always quite good]")
The orchestra was large, very brassy and conducted by Arthur
Wood, a benign, rotund Victorian type of musician, a great pet of
White's, It was at one of Yvonne's rehearsals that the famous
timpani episode occurred, since erroneously reported in joke books
and other people's reminiscences. At the final orchestra rehearsal,
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 183
White sat in an upper-tier box, reveling in the deafening noise
made by the Wood-led men; he didn't know much about music and
liked only two kinds brassy marches and dreamy waltzes. All of
a sudden, Jimmy noticed the timpani player, his arms folded on his
chest, standing idly by at the back of the band. " 'Ere, 'ere, Arthur,"
White bellowed. "Who is that barstid with the three drums?" "He's
the timpani player, guv'nor," said the startled conductor, stopping
the orchestra with difficulty. "Now, then, why isn't this timbly fella
playin'?" "Beggin' your pardon, sir, he's tacet, sir." "Well, you tell
that bludy tacet to jolly well play, or I give 'im the sack!"
When told that the Charleston was all the rage, and given a
demonstration of that pagan dance by Fred Leslie, Percy Green-
bank, still living in his Our Miss Gibbs memories and visibly shocked,
said hesitantly: "Don't you thinV Daly's patrons might resent so
immoral an exhibition?" He offered to take the sting out of the
number by calling the Anglicized version of it the "Dainty Charles
ton."
Thus I went into Jekyll-and-Hyding. But my "secret" was im
mediately discovered by the Daily Sketch snooper, who reported
while we were still in rehearsal: "By the way, composers of ultra
modern ballets are not above picking up quite an honest penny or
two by being a trifle lower in the brow for the nonce. Dukelsky, for
instance, has written some songs, duly approved by Mr. James White,
for 'Yvonne' at Daly's under the name of 'Vernon Dukes' [sic}. 9 *
Yvonne opened at Daly's on May 22nd after a "tryout" in
Manchester, where the dirty-green fog is so thick it shuts you off
from the rest of the world, whose leading hotel is a cross between
a catacomb and a house of detention, but whose inhabitants love the
theater. I had never been to an imchic musical opening before
Cochran's or Coward's first nights were always the peak of fashion
and the atmosphere of upper-middle-class respectability at Daly's,
the thicknecked stockbrokers and Midlands' financiers White's
friends for the most part with their blowsy wives in Regent
Street's best, made me feel like a goldfish out of Diaghilev's pure
water. No aesthetes were present the Croesuses sat in the stalls
and vociferous Cockney "theayter" lovers in the gallery. The gal-
leryites thought little of the piece, and when the jeune premier, a
plump and self-satisfied Public School boy, executed some awkward
entrechats while singing the title song, not a happy idea of Fred
184 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Leslie's, there were some audible titters and a rude remark or two.
I saw Hoytie Wiborg, who didn't know what to make of the Viennese-
Russo-American hodgepodge, leave in the intermission and felt an
urgent need for a double brandy. The supper afterwards, at the
"wrong" place, was substantial but dull, as was the show, and the
notices the next morning ranged from lukewarm to downright in
sulting. The only hit in Yvonne was made by Hal Sherman, the
"eccentric" little American dancer, who did a Chaplinesque rou
tine to another tune of mine called "Don't Forget the Waiter," and
brought down the house. My best songs were "Magic of the Moon"
(a fair mixture of Kern and corn) and "Daydreams," agreeably
sung and danced by Ivy Tresmand.
Jimmy White thought highly of Miss Tresmand's talents and kept
the show going, which, considering that he had a lot of money, was
not difficult. The show achieved a respectable run of 280 perform
ances and could, by stretching a point a bit, be put down as a moder
ate success. I was anxious to keep Diaghilev and Kochno out of
Daly's, but I believe they went there on the sly, because neither
spoke to me for three days.
Nevertheless, money was now coming in from several sources.
I was able to send some of it home fairly regularly, and Dukelsky, in
return, was doing all he could to help Duke and his "Yvonne the Ter
rible." Kindly Eberg, the head of Koussevitzky's publishing house,
died and was replaced by Gabriel Paitchadze, a Georgian like my
grandmother, and a man of infinite tact and wisdom; he soon got to
be close friends with both Stravinsky and Prokofiev a miraculous
feat. Zephyr and Flora finally appeared in print, and so did the
stillborn piano concerto. The 1926 summer ballet season was ex
ceptionally brilliant and the Bright Young People never shone so
brightly. Zephyr was revived, with two additional sets, and again
almost unanimously approved. My old Icelandic overture, "Gondla,"
was dusted off by Goossens and played as a "symphonic interlude"
between ballets (a laudable practice of Diaghilev's that should be
revived), leaving the listeners nonplussed. Koussevitzky announced
the suite from Zephyr for Boston's next season and offered me an ap
pearance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra as soloist in my
concerto; aware of my rusty piano technique, I was compelled to de
cline regretfully.
Best of all, from the point of view of sheer excitement, I was en-
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 185
gaged to play one of the four pianos (Auric, Poulenc and Rieti
tackled the other three) in Stravinsky's Les Noces, about to have its
London premiere. We learned our parts diligently, Goossens con
ducted cannily as usual, but every time we rehearsed the inhumanly
difficult work, terror seized us, helpless terror mingled with an odd,
elemental sort of ecstasy rather like one's first airplane flight. The
opening could best be described as a scandalous triumph, unique
in London's theatrical annals and, according to the people who wit
nessed both, second only to the famous Sacre du Printemps battle in
Paris. The noise was deafening boos, hisses and catcalls mingling
with cheers and thunderous applause. Diaghilev was delighted, but
his delight turned to fury after he'd read the ghastly and, frankly,
idiotic press reviews. The music was denounced as "barbarous, not
even barbaric," consisting of "sounds, which the nursery knows
as 'chopsticks,' " "amorphous," "hideous," etc. We four came in for
some unexpected backhanded compliments and a good deal of pity
and commiseration. The mysterious "Crescendo," after making short
work of the "barbarous" ballet, stopped in his tracks suddenly to
say, "I must be mistaken; if I am right, how could four men like
Auric, Poulenc, Rieti and Dukelsky be induced to take part in
'Noces'?" "What they played," commented Philip Page, "was prob
ably very difficult, for these accomplished young men cast glances
of agony at the conductor; but if they had played not a note the
composer had written and if they had come in consistently at the
wrong moment, the effect would have been the same." H. G. Wells,
our one "vigorous champion from an unlikely quarter" (C. W. Beau
mont), wrote an indignant letter to The Times in which he stated:
"I do not know of any other ballet as interesting, so amusing, so fresh
or nearly so exciting as 'Les Noces.' I want to see it again and again."
But Wells's letter wasn't published until June 18th, four days after
the premiere, and the damage was already done. The chief culprit
was that arch enemy of Diaghilev's, England's Beckmesser-in-Chief,
Mr. Ernest Newman. Not content with "quartering" us performing
composers, he went after Stravinsky and exclaimed that "the world
was tired of the moujik and his half-baked brain." It wasn't clear
whether Newman was referring to a Russian peasant, to Diaghilev
or the composer, but Sergei Pavlovitch was beside himself with
rage. He called the "four quarters of a composer" into the manager's
office at His Majesty's Theatre a half hour before the second per-
186 PASSPORT TO PARIS
formance of Les Noces and said with studied Olympian calm: "Gen
tlemen, I have it on good authority that Mr. Ernest Newman is in
my theater again tonight. In his dastardly review he has insulted
Russia, Igor Stravinsky, myself and you, my collaborators. Mr. New
man should be punished and I have evolved a most efficient plan for
such punishment." He scribbled something on a small bit of paper,
rolled it up, then rolled up three more bits of paper, leaving them
completely blank and continued: "You see here four bits of paper,
one of which contains Newman's name. You will draw lots and who
ever draws the Newman-marked lot, will don white gloves, approach
Newman's orchestra seat just before curtain time, ask him, 'Are you
Ernest Newman?' and on receiving a reply in the affirmative, will
pull his nose, in full view of the audience."
We did as we were told. As luck would have it, I drew the slip
of paper with Newman's name. White-gloved and strengthened by
whisky, my heart beating, I advanced to the location of the critic's
stall, indicated to me by the theater's press agent. To my complete
consternation, on arriving at the place, I found the seat empty.
Whether Newman was tipped off by one of my colleagues (who
alone knew of the conspiracy) and fled, or whether the prospect
of seeing and hearing the moujik saga again proved too much for his
Wagner-trained eyes and ears, is not for me to say. Whatever the
reasons for Newman's disappearance, he was barred from the Russian
Ballet's performances by Diaghilev and in later years never lost an
opportunity to make critical mincemeat of the Man Who Almost
Pulled His Nose.
Les Noces achieved seven performances and drew full houses.
Londoners never got to like that remarkable ballet, but it was "the
thing to see" and no dinner conversation was complete without some
reference to Stravinsky's masterpiece flattering or otherwise. I
moved to a very sporty flat in Hanover Square and got my tailors to
have some unusual cloth specially woven for me the latest wrinkle
in masculine fashion. The enterprising tailor came up with a spectac
ular number in gun-metal cloth the only suit of that material ever
worn by a male, I'll wager and the shocked expression of staid
dowagers on their first encounter with that creation was a joy to be
hold. I don't remember what prompted me to choose so outlandish a
color, but it's possible that my subconscious helped select gun-metal
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 187
as a discreet warning to Diaghilev's detractors. Wasn't I a gunman
according to my protege Mr. Lambert?
My life had now assumed a fascinating new pattern. My compara
tive financial solvency permitted me to travel, and I adopted the habit
of shuttling between London and Paris, taking in a few undiscovered
spots as well. In this I was often helped by Prokofiev, a passionate
traveler himself and an ardent motorist, although the big, clumsy Bal
lot seemed always to be suffering from some "temporary" disorder.
On my return to Paris, I visited Stravinsky, who told me he thought
the Bogdanovitch songs "my best music," talked of his new ballet for
Diaghilev (their collaboration was of the "on again-off again" vari
ety) and left for Nice a few days later, inviting me to come spend a
week end.
Prokofiev was on vacation in Fontainebleau and wrote me a funny
letter in which he congratulated me on becoming a 'full-fledged
cocotte" (he must have heard of the Diaghilev Trocadero incident),
but nevertheless extended a pressing invitation to the cocotte to join
him an "honest composer," as he put it in his humble retreat
The temptation was great, as no one's company exhilarated me as
much as Serge's, but with my two celebrated seniors composing like
njad, I realized that I had better get to work myself.
I found just the place for productive solitude in Villennes-sur-
Seine, some thirty miles away from Paris, a tiny pavilion with what the
French coquettishly call une terrasse fleurie and a lovely view. Boris
came to see me and brought me some notes and notions for the
Three Seasons, adding that I had better get busy as Diaghilev ex
pected me in Italy in early autumn, with the score at least half com
pleted. Kochno was in good humor, embraced me expansively and
set off to Venice to join Sergei Pavlovitch. I spent a restful, bucolic
month in Villennes, writing a little music, rowing on the Seine, swim
ming with occasional visitors and awaiting the Italian visa. With four
or five numbers of the ballet completed, I left Villennes for Paris on
September 8th, picked up Balanchine, who was to stage not only the
Three Seasons but also Sacheverell Sitwell's and Lord Berners's Tri
umph of Neptune: the last two were already in Florence, where
Diaghilev had established his working headquarters after the annual
holiday in his beloved Venice.
Balanchine and I, delighted with the exciting prospect of a col-
188 PASSPORT TO PARIS
laboration, boarded the train for Turin; disliking the food on the din
ing car, we got off at Dijon to buy various succulent goodies, ran
back and nearly, but not quite, missed the train. On regaining our
compartment we ate a whole roasted chicken and drank two bottles
of red ordinaire, then fell asleep, exhausted and slightly tipsy. On
awakening we found ourselves in Turin, where we were to change
for Florence, of which fact we were not cognizant. Consequently,
we remained in our seats until a tall, bewhiskered Piemontese de
manded to see our tickets; on examining them, he informed us in tol
erable French (most North Italians speak it) that we had just missed
the Florence train and that the train we were on was bound for Milan
that is, in the opposite direction. He sat down, had a drink with us
and, becoming very friendly, suggested an escorted tour of Turin
his native city. Since there was no decent train for Florence until
night, we happily agreed to the proposal and spent a most edifying
afternoon visiting points of interest and not forgetting occasional liba
tions in local bars our Piemontese seemed to be related to most
of the bartenders. Properly fortified, he suggested a visit to the leading
brothel.
That establishment proved an ornate, pointedly respectable sort
of dwelling with a smiling maid in a starched apron and the sedate,
discreetly mannered Madame with aristocratic pretensions. Our
conductor-cicerone placed himself modestly in a dark corner, while
Balanchine and I discussed the weather in French with Madame.
This went on for quite a while, when, like hellish bolts from the
blue, two young maids, dark and plump and entirely naked except
for jade earrings and necklaces, burst into the "salon" and jumped
on our knees without the slightest preamble. Madame smiled and mut
tered something about youth being soo-o impetuous, but George and
I were panic-stricken as the bold hussies proceeded covering us
with noisy kisses between shouts of: "Ah, che belli ragazzi" We
finally shook them off with great difficulty and started a whispered
consultation with the conductor, assuring him that we would be
happy to pay the girls "for their trouble" but had no intention of par
taking of their charms. The Italian, perplexed, stroked his mustache
and remarked that such conduct was "out of order" and might offend
the good Madame; he then grandly volunteered to take care of both
charmers and let us compensate them for their services only because
of his own slight pecuniary embarrassment. We thanked him pro-
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 189
fusely for his manly offer and went on chatting with Madame while
our new friend was "in retirement" with the girls. He emerged from
the inner sanctum a few minutes later, stroking his mustache with a
bit less of a flourish and, as we paid up and took our leave ceremoni
ously, was heard to confess rather haltingly that he was "not quite as
young as he used to be."
On arrival in Florence, we put up at a noisy albergo in the com
mercial part of the city, and then reported to Diaghilev, installed in
grand style in the old Hotel Palace on the opposite bank of the Arno.
Boris, Lifar, Sacheverell and witty and gifted Gerald Berners (a fre
quent visitor of Beverley Nichols's, where I first met him) were in the
lobby and we all had tea together. After the Englishmen took their
leave, Sergei Pavlovitch suggested that I move to the Palace, so that
he could "watch over me," also because "you are rich now," he
drawled slyly, "so rich, that I won't give you any money for the
Three Seasons until you finish it." "But, Sergei Pavlovitch . . ." "It's
useless to insist. If you need money, you can always get it from Coch-
ran or that mad bricklayer friend of yours." (He was referring to
Jimmy White.) "And now we'll all go for a walk. Come along, Serge,
Boris, and you, Mr. Balanchivadze." Balanchine was still a little un
easy with Diaghilev, the last of the grands seigneurs, an extinct race
in Soviet Russia, where George's youth was spent, and there was a
touch of courteous coolness in their relationship, although Sergei
Pavlovitch thought highly of his new choreographer after Barabau
and George always admired Diaghilev unreservedly. We went out into
the warm evening street and walked in silence, drinking in the incom
parable beauty of Florence.
Mother preserved a record of my initial impressions in a letter I
wrote her on September 14th from a cafe in the Piazza Vittorio Eman-
uele glorying in the name of Bar Sportmen and described by the
proprietor as "L' elegante Ritrovo della Firenze sporttva." "This is
the most miraculous city of all cities," I wrote (I was later to think
that of Venice). "One feels like remaining idle permanently here; it's
impossible to do anything except look, think and absorb."
My happiness was intensified by daily walks with Diaghilev, who
knew Florence better than any Florentine and who enjoyed our
wide-eyed wonder and Lifar's expansive shrieks at discovering more
and more beauty wherever we went. In Boboli Gardens Sergei Pavlo
vitch stopped suddenly, his eyes misty with uncontrollable tears. "To
190 PASSPORT TO PARIS
think that one day I must die and not be able to see all this again
ever." We returned to the hotel in silence, our hearts heavy, our
youth subdued as it always is when a mortal contemplates immor
tality,
Diaghilev and Boris were too busy with Neptune to worry about me
and my lagging ballet, which wasn't progressing too well in spite of all
the optimistic things I said about it to Mother. I was just as happy, as
Sergei Pavlovitch's preoccupation with the English work enabled me
to explore Florence in the company of Harold Acton, whose mem
oirs succeed in being both witty and petulant, and Violet, Lady Tre-
fusis, who also published a gay record of her comings and goings.
We dined at Acton's villa, La Pietra, one of the show spots of
Florence, and in Fiesole with Vittorio Rieti, good composer and good
companion. On one occasion, I dined a deux with Balanchine,
whose Italian was as bad as mine that is, nonexistent and who,
desiring milk and, not finding it on the menu, attempted to describe
it to the perplexed waiter in pantomime. On all fours, he made a stupid
face and uttered several heart-rending "moos"; the waiter smiled,
snapped his fingers, nodded repeatedly and, a few minutes later, tri
umphantly produced a large steak.
By October 1st, I was back in Paris, although my original plan for
the Italian voyage included visits to Rome and Venice. I don't re
member the exact reasons for the change in my plans but, in a letter
home, I admitted that "traveling alone even in Italy can be
unbearable. 5 * Balanchine was no longer with me, while Diaghilev was
too busy raising money for another ballet season; apparently the Ber
lin venture, although an artistic success, was something of a finan
cial disaster. In Paris, I renewed my friendship with Valitchka Nouvel
and Auric, who wrote a musical sketch for Spinelly, the French
star, culminating in a rather tentative "fox trot*' a far cry from his
1953 best-selling song from Moulin Rouge! Prokofiev was back
from Fontainebleau and played me the recently completed fifth so
nata, which I found dry and excessively complicated and lost no
time in letting it be known to the composer. He blurted out: "You're
a fool. Listen again," but before he had a chance to turn the first
page, two fashionably dressed American women slipped into the
room, led by smiling Lina Ivanovna all three daintily on tiptoe, but
unasked and unwelcome. I knew that Serge, already irritated by
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 191
my dislike of the sonata, would not stand on ceremony with the in
truders, but what ensued was a bit strong even for Prokofiev. He rose
from the piano abruptly, crossed his arms on his chest, pursed up
his thick lips, puffed out his cheeks and uttered: "Get out!" in Eng
lish and without raising his voice. The women smiled sheepishly, es
sayed a cordial greeting, then, realizing the absolute futility of their
advances, turned on their heels and meekly trotted out. Prokofiev
resumed the sonata and on discovering that I didn't like it any better,
threw me out, too, with a short speech in which "lazy London tarts"
and "lousy chess players" figured prominently.
It was high time to resume my London chores and try to replen
ish my wallet, which had shrunken visibly as a result of my continen
tal junket I played a few excerpts from the Three Seasons to Dia-
ghilev before leaving Paris and got a qualifiedly favorable reaction,
but not the immediate enthusiasm that had greeted a similar amount
of Zephyr music. Sergei Pavkratch said, however, that he'd work on
my ballet as soon as he got the Triumph of Neptune out of the way.
Owing to economic difficulties, I returned to 55 Torrington
Square, a practice which soon became a barometer of my
finances. When in funds, I invaded Mayfair or, at least, Knights-
bridge and Chelsea when broke, returned to Bloomsbury; Mme.
Dupont knew me and understood me well and I was always al
lowed to stay in her house without paying a penny for food or lodging
until the month was up a most welcome arrangement when one is
forced to give up Boulestin's or the Savoy Grill for bread and marga
rine and fish and chips at a dingy tearoom.
Yvonne, kept alive by Jimmy White, was celebrating its 250th
performance, but I had drawn my share of the royalties in advance
and my future at Daly's didn't look too rosy. There was an American
bandleader in London, Jay Whidden by name, who had replaced me
in White's affections while I was luxuriating on the Continent; he
was hired by Jimmy to lead a jazz aggregation in a melange of
Yvonne's tunes and engage in a "Battle of Jazz vs. Music" (as the
advertisements read), "music" on this occasion being represented by
the amiable Arthur Wood and his pit orchestra. This was done to
bolster the box-office receipts, but although the adversaries made a
great noise, as did their respective followers, I don't recall any
marked improvement in Daly's business. Arthur claimed to have
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won; nevertheless, Whidden was hired to "Americanize" White's next
production, Lehar's Blue Mazurka with only one song of mine
added to that score.
This was a blow, as I fully expected to be commissioned to write
an original musical for Daly's. Diaghilev's new season did not include
Zephyr and Flora, and I began to suspect that all wasn't well with the
new Three Seasons. Asherberg, Hopwood and Crew were still pay
ing me four guineas a week, but even in Torrington Square you
couldn't do much with so paltry a sum. The only hope seemed to be
Koussevitzky, who asked me to write a symphony for his Paris con
certs, was printing the songs and agreeing with Prokofiev that I was
the most promising of the new Russians. It would have been a de
pressing winter were it not for the stacks of engraved invitations re
posing grandly on Mme. Dupont's grimy mantelpiece. I now dined
out every night and, owing to the easily soiled stiff shirts and back
less waistcoats, spent most of my meager earnings on laundry bills.
One of my favorite recollections of that winter is the time when I
donned a morning coat and striped trousers to lunch at Mrs. Benja
min Guinness's only because all my other clothes were being pressed
and I didn't have enough money to redeem them from the tailor's.
On starting for Mrs. Guinness's, I debated with myself over the choice
between a dark-red carnation for my buttonhole or a ride in the Un
derground all I had left in the world was sixpence. Vanity won; I
grandly gave up my last coin for a fresh flower, and walked two miles
to Mrs. Guinness's, topper, morning coat, tightly rolled umbrella and
all all, that is, except a single penny in my pocket. On arriving at
my hostess's fashionably late, I was rewarded by a dowager who ap
praised my superb attire with great interest and asked coyly: "You're
a diplomat, of course. Which South American power, may I ask?"
When not partying, I concentrated on writing salable songs. Blue
Mazurka opened and, although not without merit, flopped sadly.
Three weeks after its opening, I was summoned by Jimmy White
whom I hadn't seen in months and, on entering his office at Daly's,
found that every songwriter in London was there too. White didn't look
well and was in one of his "moods." "Gentlemen, I asked you to
come here to help me," he started with outward calm. "I have a
grand play on my stage, but the people won't come to see it. Why, you
may well ask? I'll tell you why, gentlemen . . . because there isn't
a good waltz in the whole bludy show!" White now glared at the as-
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 193
sembled writers, as though they were responsible for Blue Mazurka's
deficiency, banged the desk with his fist and came to the point:
"Now, I want you, lads, to write me the greatest waltz in history
and I pay one thousand pounds to whoever writes it. Arthur Wood,
Idris Lewis [his Welsh musical assistant] and I will be the judges
I give you one week. I wish you good day and don't come back with
out the bludy waltz." We trotted out unhappily, like a horde of back
ward school children given an overdose of homework by too exact
ing a teacher.
Nevertheless, most of us, including myself, were back in a week,
waltzes in hand, spurred on by that thousand-pound prize. As White
listened to each new waltz, he grew gloomier and gloomier, until after
a particularly feeble sample by one of the older "boys," he jumped up
and roared like a wounded tiger. "No, no, no, dammit they're no
good. The whole bludy lot of 'em. Idris, bring us a mirror." "A mirror,
guv'nor?" stammered poor Idris, uncomprehendingly. "That's the idea
a ruddy mirror I'll show you distinguished barstids a new
waltz, since you can't write worth a damn. Now, get it" The mirror
was produced speedily and Jimmy placed a copy of the "Merry
Widow Waltz" on the piano, pushed Idris to the piano stool and
shrieked: "Go on play what you see in the mirror!" A horrified
gasp came from those present, but Idris, gritting his teeth, struck up
a chord and played the "Merry Widow Waltz" backwards. "That's
it that's what I want. Arthur, have it orchestrated at once and
let that be a lesson to you, gents. Come again!"
The "Mirror Waltz" was never added to the Blue Mazurka score,
and the show expired after 140 performances. A month after its
closing on June 29, 1927, Jimmy White, having failed to bring off
a gigantic coup on the stock exchange, committed suicide.
In the early spring of '27 I was again asked by Koussevitzky to
play my concerto with him at one of the four Paris concerts he was
planning that season. Having lost my faith in that work and knowing
it to be too difficult for me, I suggested writing a short piece for piano
and orchestra instead. The idea appealed to Koussevitzky and I be
gan work, helping myself to some odds and ends, such as discarded
Zephyr material and an andantino from the Three Seasons which
Diaghilev thought too pretty. A letter to Gershwin, dated May 24,
1927, tells of my efforts on both fronts, prior to again invading Paris
as composer:
194 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Dear old George:
How is your precious self? I'm dying to see you and to hear
the very latest "Georgeousness" as Mrs. Aarons [Producer Alex
Aarons' wife] puts it. I congratulate you on "Someone to Watch
Over Me" which is excellent how is "Strike Up the Band"?
As to me, I had rather a dreary winter in London went
to fairly boring parties and wrote a lot of music. "Yvonne" ran
for 34 weeks but otherwise was the worst show I've ever seen.
I sold about ten songs to different managers two of which are
in "Two Little Girls in Blue" [Vincent Youmans's early success
with Ira Gershwin's lyrics]. What do you think of "Somebody's
Sunday" which Eastman has sent you [a song interpolated into
"Little Girls" with lyrics by myself]? I write all my lyrics my
self now and find it great fun. [The fun didn't last long.] Jackson
[Frederick Jackson, American playwright] and I are working
on a show called "Half a Wife." On June 4th I am playing the
piano part in my "Sonata" for orchestra which Koussevitzky is
doing in Paris. "Zephyr" was played recently by the Boston Sym
phony and was very well received [a distinct exaggeration.]
Since Two Little Girls in Blue was a Chappell publication, I had
to be "loaned" to the Dreyfus firm by Billy Allen, who wasn't any too
pleased. Neither were the backers of the musical, but for a differ
ent reason: the show, in spite of a lilting score ("Oh Me, Oh My" was
in it) and a willing, youthful cast headed by the American Barry
Oliver, touted as a "Second Astaire," expired on the road. "Half a
Wife" was not even half a show, as we stopped working in the middle
of Act I. The suite from Zephyr gave Bostonians the first taste of my
music and, from all accounts, they found it but mildly palatable.
Philip Hale, the "Boston Terror," thought more of Boreas than of the
amiable Muses. More than once "the hearer was tempted to cry out
in the words of the old song: 'Cease, rude Boreas, blustering railer.' "
Sergei Pavlovitch, although giving me the well-known runaround
with the projected ballet, was again on the best of terms with me and
even flattered me by stating that, although my conduct was "de
plorable," my taste in music other people's music was well-
nigh "impeccable." I was by now a little tired of the tra-la-la mu-
siquette of the twenties, the salon romps with deliberately banal tunes
garnished with spicy "wrong notes" for flavor, and so was Diaghilev,
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 195
who felt the need for powerful, "muscular" music after too many
frivolous confections. I seized the opportunity to resell him on Pro
kofiev and was helped in this by Nouvel, who couldn't abide the
"Chaminade lemonade," as he called the then prevailing Paris mu
sical tendency. I am proud of the part I played in the subsequent
rapprochement of the two Serges, although it resulted in the com
missioning of Le Pas d'Acier, a pseudo-Soviet epic. Diaghilev flirted
with the Soviets at intervals, intensely interested in Russia's artistic
and theatrical life, and was not above shocking his capitalistic lis
teners by maliciously praising the Communist regime a pure bit
of perverse bravado, as he was mortally afraid of the idea of returning
to his native land while the Bolsheviks were still in power. According
to Jacques Emile Blanche, "Lenin offered Diaghilev the post of Peo
ple's commissar for Soviet Stage Production, but in spite of the over
powering curiosity which Serge confessed and the sway which he
could exert artistically at Moscow, the fear possessed hfm that life
would be unendurable under the eye of the *Red Tzar.' "
Whatever the worth of the political aspects of Le Pas d'Acier
and Diaghilev was undoubtedly 'leading with his chin" with so equiv
ocal a theme: "a hymn to the Soviet Workers" whatever the merit
of the "constructivism" of Yakoulov, the Russian painter and set de
signer, specially brought over for the production, there was no deny
ing the tremendous vitality and power of Serge's music, startling and
invigorating after an overdose of syrup. Pas d'Atier's opening night
caused another fracas as did Lambert's jejune Romeo and Juliet,
not because of the harmless music, but because the Leftists disap
proved of painters Ernst and Miro, fellow radicals working for that
staunch capitalist Diaghilev! and Diaghilev was in a state of ex
treme anxiety, since he felt certain that there would be a terrific up
roar, and that "the Russian Emigres would stage a mass protest," in
lif ar's words. There was no mass protest but plenty of noise, deafen
ing cheers and piercing catcalls; Lifar is, certainly, wrong in re
cording that "the performance was received calmly, even tepidly."
I sat in Diaghilev's box with Prokofiev, and, when he returned from
backstage, flushed with his success and bewildered by the anti-
Russian outbreaks in the audience, I asked him to come out for a
smoke and talk things out. Once in the corridor, I told Serge of my
great admiration for the massive, sinewy music of his ballet, which,
in my opinion, would deliver a crushing blow to the decadent Pa-
196 PASSPORT TO PARIS
risian musiquette. No sooner bad I uttered that last word, the only
French word in the entire speech, when Cocteau appeared from
out of nowhere, screamed out: "Dima, les Parisiens t' envoy ent de la
merde!" and slapped me, then vanished just as suddenly as he came,
before I had a chance of retaliating. Prokofiev opened his mouth
in astonishment, but was immediately whisked away, as he was ur
gently needed backstage; I ran down the corridor in pursuit of Coc
teau, who must have ducked into his box as I couldn't find him. A
minute later I ran into Diaghilev, white as a sheet, who grabbed me
by the lapel and whispered: "I know all about Jean. Whatever you
do, don't start a fight here in the theater; I'm having enough trouble
with the authorities already ... we could all be deported. No fight,
understand?" I understood, but at this point began seething with un
comprehending rage, because, outside of the words "Paris" and "raw-
siquette" Cocteau couldn't possibly have grasped the meaning of
my tirade since he spoke no Russian; I therefore shook Diaghilev
off, assuring him that I wouldn't do anything rash, and raced on,
hoping to get the elusive Cocteau. Soon he appeared, several "dis
ciples" in tow, waving his arms, and cried out hysterically as he saw
me: "Rends-moi ma gifle, Dima, rends-moi ma gifle. . . . Battons-
nous." Remembering Diaghilev's orders, I composed myself, as best I
could and said in measured tones, "You're wearing a summer suit,
Jean, whereas I have my best tailcoat on; I have no intention of ruin
ing it ... therefore, I won't fight you here, but hereby challenge
you to a duel." "A duel?" Cocteau shrieked, taken aback momentarily.
"I have never used firearms in my life. Slap me, slap me back at once,
coward!" I was about to throw myself at the man when some mem
bers of the Diaghilev entourage pulled me back and admonished me
to stick to my promise to Sergei Pavlovitch.
I then arranged with two ex-officers of the Wrangel army who were
in the audience to act as my seconds and told Prokofiev of my chal
lenge to Cocteau. I was about to leave the theater when Mrs.
Paitchadze, the publisher's wife, appeared in our box, greatly agitated,
and implored me not to leave by the stage door as Cocteau was mak
ing an inflammatory anti-Russian, anti-Dukelsky speech to a large
crowd of "admirers" and I would, doubtless, be torn to shreds were I
to show myself. This so incensed me that I pushed the good woman
aside and went backstage at such a clip that she had to run fast to
catch up with me. There was a sizable crowd outside the stage en-
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 197
trance, with Jean, somewhat Hyde Park-oracle fashion in his light-
tan gabardine suit with shocking-pink lining displayed by artfully
unbuttoned sleeves, leaning on Desbordes, his newest "literary" discov
ery, addressing les Parisiens and shaking his bony fists. The moment
he saw me, out went a long oracular finger, and stopping in the mid
dle of a grandiose sentence, he cried menacingly: "Beware, Dima!"
The effect of this cry was somewhat doubtful as no one in the group
of les Parisiens knew who in hell "Dima" was; Dima contented him
self with promising to send his seconds to 10 rue d'Anjou (where
Cocteau lived) in the morning and was quickly whisked away in a
taxi by Mme. Paitchadze.
My "seconds" ruefully admitting that they couldn't get past Coc-
teau's servant the next morning, I donned my morning coat with
striped trousers and drove to Cocteau's house. Jean's servant opened
the door, and perceiving so splendid a visitor, admitted me with a
hesitant bow and bade me wait. I heard an agitated whispered con
versation behind doors and a few minutes later the master emerged,
pale and visibly nervous. "So you want to be slapped back?" I said
steadily. "Here you are," and slapped him without awaiting a reply.
"Now will you accept my challenge?" The effect of my action
was most unexpected: Cocteau grabbed me in his arms, embraced
me and sang out: "Embrassons-nous, Dima, embrassons-nous!" I
disengaged myself with some difficulty and left, utterly nonplussed. A
day later Diaghilev received a letter from Cocteau explaining his
reasons for declining a duel with me and describing my "cowardly"
visit to him. We haven't spoken since.
I now had other things to worry about. My hastily contrived sonata
for piano and orchestra (I didn't dare call it concertino) was an
nounced by Koussevitzky and rehearsals were about to start. Sergei
Alexandrovitch Koussevitzky then lived in Auteuil and held court
daily. Most of his visitors were composers good and bad, young
and old; they sat around, scores in hand, drinking tea poured by in
scrutable Natalya Konstantinovna (his second wife) and smiling po
litely at one another. In contrast with Diaghilev, "partisan of a chosen
few," who closed his eyes and ears to everything that he instinctively
felt was "not for him," Koussevitzky's tastes were determinedly eclec
tic. It was not, however, the usual eclecticism of an unprincipled
conductor, not a mere passion for "first performances" (the
conductors' occupational disease) but an unflagging curiosity about
198 PASSPORT TO PARIS
all genuinely "new" music. "Write it and I'll play it." This typi
cally direct approach gave many a struggling and disappointed
composer an incentive to work. Starting with a championship of
Russians Scriabin, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, whose music he not
only performed whenever and wherever possible, but also pub
lished in toto, Koussevitzky lent an untiring hand to Schoenberg,
Berg, Bartok and Hindemith at the time when such "shockers"
spelled certain death at the box office unwieldy and unpopular
French "lone wolves" like Albert Roussel, and little-known Russian
refugees like Obouhov, Vogel, Louri6, Berezowsky and Lopatnikov.
Most of these men were constant visitors; I remember particularly
courteous and self-effacing Albert Roussel, who liked my music and
wrote flatteringly about it; also Ravel, with his fine face and elabo
rately elegant clothes, who didn't care for my Zephyr and told Pro
kofiev that "Diaghilev made a mistake by sponsoring the young man."
Some composers arrived with their wives, always warmly welcomed
by Koussevitzky, particularly when they were pretty like Mesdames
Tansman, Lazar and Ferroud. The husband of the last-named was an
extraordinarily active man, always busy with running music socie
ties, making valuable "contacts," writing articles, going off on mys
terious music missions in the remotest corners of Europe, a man
full of good learning, good ideas and good will but, unfortunately,
a dry and dull composer. Ferroud formed the important Triton, a
modern chamber music society, and saw a great deal of Prokofiev,
whose brusque manner he imitated, and whose services he enlisted on
behalf of the organization; he died tragically, at the age of thirty-six,
in a horrible motor accident. Poor Filip Lazar, a handsome Rouma
nian, his devoted friend, couldn't endure life without Ferroud and
died a few months later.
Koussevitzky's Paris concerts, financed by Natalya Konstanti-
novna, were not too well attended, and caused her to grumble a bit
about the determinedly "uncommercial" programs, but her adoration
for her husband was such that she never dared to protest openly, pre
ferring to voice her discontent when he wasn't present. I recall sitting
in her box when a particularly insipid concoction of Ferroud's was
being performed; the applause was meager, but Ferroud, his face
shining, kissed the lady's hand, and exclaimed, "Beautifully played!"
Whereupon she whispered in my ear; "... and wretchedly com
posed."
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 199
My so-called sonata was well-enough liked by musicians;
Souvtchinsky ran up to me after the performance- shouting: "The
purest champagne!" But it was, in reality, distinctly small beer. In
style it was not unlike Zephyr, but my repertoire of Russo-classical
tricks was now exhausted and this kind of amiable music was no step
forward, dangerously akin as it was to the selfsame musiquette. As to
the notorious Oxford bags previously described* I should have re
membered the remark made to foppish Whistler by Degas: "You
dress as if you had no talent" Koussevitzky thought the sonata meri
torious, the critics were kind and I was told to complete the synt-
phony, for which I stored away some rather promising thematic ma
terial.
Following my shaky debut as piano- soloist, the Prokofievs and I
went on a long motor trip to the Haute Savoie mountains Sofro-
nitzky, the pianist, and his wife, Scriabin's daughter, were also with
us. The trip, in spite of the unsurpassable food we ate (it was because
of these early gastronomic trips with Prokofiev that I began to put on
weight and lose my Karsavinesque looks) proved something of a sore
trial, because of the constant quarrels between the Prokofievs, ter
minating in Jupiter-like shouts from Serge and copious tears from
Lina. Chi my return to Paris, I wrote an article for Souvtchinsky's
Eurasian magazine Versty (Miles) on Diaghikv and his work. In it
was my first, as yet indirect, criticism of Stravinsky's "neoclassical"
period, which has since ceased to be merely a period (in the Picasso
sense) but has become the composer's settled and only manner.
My disillusion in Stravinsky, man and musician both, began a year
earlier, when I dined at his house in Nice and listened to him talk, A
day or two prior to this dinner, the invitation to which flattered and
excited me, I ran into Nika Nabokov, who, on learning of my good
luck, asked me to show Igor Fedorovitch his piano sonata; I said
that I would be happy to do so and took the manuscript along.
Stravinsky received me with the utmost cordiality; we drank vodka,
talked music and sat down to a copious family dinner with Mrs.
Stravinsky and the children. What astonished me was the passionate
anti-Diaghilev monologue into which the composer plunged almost
immediately on my arrival. Omitting the more personal barbs, I can
recall Stravinsky's ire at the "execrable" orchestral performances,
the cynicism with which his music was mutilated, the disgracefully
inadequate rebeaisals, etc.., etc. Worshipping DiagMLev as I did and
200 PASSPORT TO PARIS
knowing full well the shaky finances of his organization (it was a
miracle that it existed at all, as money had to be raised at the eleventh
hour every season), realizing that before me sat a Diaghilev-made
composer, who owed Diaghilev his entire career, I became intensely
uncomfortable. It was not for me, a hopeful beginner, to contradict
the master, but, profoundly grateful as I was for being "put on my feet"
by Sergei Pavlovitch, by the touching care with which he prepared
Zephyr for production, I restrained myself with difficulty from what
would have been an unpleasant argument and kept silent. I showed
Stravinsky the Nabokov sonata, and, after perusing it carefully, he
pronounced it "not stupid."
The after-dinner conversation centered mainly around my host
and his recent appearance as pianist at the Venice festival of the In
ternational Society for Contemporary Music. It seems that Stravin
sky had been contracted to play his piano sonata at the festival for a
five-hundred-dollar fee. A short while before leaving for Venice, he
got an infected finger and was seized by fear of being unable to appear
at the concert; on the eve of that event he visited a church and
prayed fervently for his finger's recovery. Stravinsky appeared on
the concert platform, his finger bandaged, and made a short speech
of apology, pointing to the bandage and begging the audience's in
dulgence. Just before attacking the sonata, he removed the bandage
and, Eureka! the infection had subsided and the finger functioned
normally. All this was told with pontifical, profound seriousness
the manner always adopted by Stravinsky when talking about him
self. Four years later I glanced at the score of the Symphony of
Psalms (1930), in my opinion the last of Stravinsky's important
works and, probably, his best and was not startled to read on
the back of the title pager^'This symphony composed to the Glory
of God, is dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the oc
casion of its fiftieth anniversary."
No sooner did I return to London than the shocking news of Jimmy
White's suicide rocked the town. The future of Daly's now appeared
uncertain and I had to seek employment elsewhere. My sonata's half
failure and Koussevitsky's generous readiness to perform my sym
phony should I write it made me feel like doing serious work
again, particularly since Billy Allen was no Dreyfus and couldn't
hand me a new show on a platter. I was overjoyed when Sir David and
Lady Baird asked me to spend a month or two with them in their place
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 201
at Newbyth in southern Scotland. I brought reams of manuscript
paper and very fancy golf clothes, since the Bairds and their friends
golfed daily at North Berwick. I had never wielded a golf club be
fore, and the dour old professional at the club said I had "no golfing
ability whatsoever" after two lessons. This didn't faze me unduly, as
just to inhale the extraordinary air of Scotland, go sight-seeing in
Edinburgh with Jean, Sir David's redheaded daughter, and flirt stren
uously with Rosemary Hope-Vere, another deservedly well-advertised
beauty of the period, were enough to make me forget my Paris tribu
lations and London debts, which were accumulating fast, the re
minders and bills causing the Bairds' letter box to swell suspiciously.
The symphony "wrote itself' in such ideal surroundings, but was
unusually short only sixteen minutes of music; the first and last
movements had a lot of Prokofiev about them, the slow lusciously
Italianate cantilena of the middle one was yanked bodily out of the
dormant Three Seasons.
Lady Baird, a kind and worldly woman of the Victorian-matriarch
variety, occasionally entertained Americans, and I always marveled
at the highly "special" manner in which they were treated. U. S.
visitors she considered quaint, colorful, oddly provincial and not al
together civilized. "One must never forget that they are really cow
boys and Indians in Savile Row clothes. I like all colonials, mind
you," she said to me, "but they are quaint, aren't they? The other day
a rich woman from Chicago, or some such place, came to tea; I
thought her rather attractive and asked her to dine. *Is it going to
be formal?' the woman wanted to know. Tormal? No, indeed; gay and
spontaneous, I hope/ " Lady Baird was maternally fond of me, but I,
too, baffled her. I wasn't a bona fide White Russian as I had no title
and wrote music for a living. I came frrm America without being
American, and looked and talked not unlike her daughter's "aes
thetic" English friends, without being English. "I suspect you are
what's known as 'cosmopolitan' nowadays, my dear," Lady Baird
sighed. "I'm not sure it's a good thing to be. Cosmopolitans have no
roots, you know neither have Americans. I think you'd do well to
marry an American girl." I'm afraid the good woman suggested such
a step because she was aware of the attentions I lavished on some of
her daughter's friends. She needn't have worried English and
Scottish girls are just as good as any other at spotting the "right" man,
and there was nothing "right" about me, except my clothes.
202 PASSPORT TO PARIS
On my return to London, I teamed up with Jimmy Dyrenf orth for a
song, "For Goodness' Sake," which we sold to the producers of a
typically British "intimate" revue, entitled Bow-Wows; the ditty, sung
by Elsie Gregory, was perhaps my first respectable effort in the idiom
and had an unusual rhythmic pattern, which attracted some atten
tion. Among the attentive ones was Julian Wylie, the pantomime pro
ducer, who had West End ambitions. I was broke again and getting
discouraged; my spirits rose instantly when Wylie, a large, bilious,
warm-hearted man, began sounding me out as to "terms." I had no
agent and would have accepted anything within reason, but Wylie
was not ungenerous and offered me 1 per cent of the gross receipts
as well as 150 advance to compose the music for the Yellow Mask,
Edgar Wallace's heterodox attempt to wed a "mystery thriller" to a
musical comedy. Prior to signing me up, Wylie insisted on hearing a
few tunes from my pen, and when I obliged, complained about the
lack of rhythm in my performance. "The only thing those American
chaps have is rhythm can't say much for their melody. Your
chimes are catchy but whereas the rhythm?" He swallowed his tea
and sighed "Have you ever heard Maisie ply?" I didn't know any
Maisie and apologized. "Smith, send Maisie in," Wylie said lugubri
ously to his secretary. "She is a wizard on the pianoforte, that she is."
Maisie, a tall, bony peroxide blonde with teeth large enough to serve
as piano keys, entered, beaming. "Maisie, ply us a chorus of 'Darda-
nella/ there's a love," Wylie asked. The blonde rattled off the chorus,
14th Street player-piano fashion, stomping her foot and lifting the
pinky refinedly at the end of each flourish. Wylie and I drank more
tea and applauded. I got my contract. Laddie Cliff was to direct
and co-produce, Desmond Carter (he was being 'lent" by Dreyfus
hallelujah! ) to write the lyrics, Aubrey Hammond then top man
in his field to design the scenery and Bobbie Howes, West End's
most promising young comic, to get his big chance in the play.
I lived again. Poor Mme. Dupont read the papers and knew all the
symptoms; four times I had achieved temporary solvency and four
times, having achieved it, hastened to leave her hospitable but de-
pressingly ugly oasis in Torrington Square. This time, I knew I'd not
return, and so did Mme. Dupont, who invited me to a "farewell tea,"
her still-handsome wrinkle-ridden face even sadder than usual. She
also asked the other "distinguished" but evasive tenant, one F. A. K.
Dais, a mammoth of a man in his seventies, a solicitor by profession
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 203
and a wretched bassoon player in his spare moments. F.A.K. had a
rich and mysterious past in which peers of the realm, Gaiety girls,
and polo players in India played a significant part; I always suspected
that Dale spent some years in prison for I know not what offense, as
his reminiscences (often startlingly purple-shaded) went only so far
as the turn of the century then he'd sigh deeply, imbibe some cheap
port, light a pipe and mumble something about, "Fortune, that faith
less jade.'* The faithless jade had not been treating the old boy right
for quite some time, as he barely eked out a living in an unspeakably
dingy office in the City, bereft of a telephone or secretary, and was
hopelessly behind in his rent. On Mme. Duponf s suggestion, I took
him on as a C.PA., or whatever the English term for that office is;
at this Dale proved surprisingly successful, as he had his own vastly
effective methods of dealing with the income-tax people. He'd write
them interminable and scarcely legible epistles about his clients*
predicaments, their ailing aunts and unemployed brothers, their
"essential" expenses far exceeding their income and so on, The
Crown would reply impatiently, admonishing Dale to stick to the
facts and send a check pronto; another twelve-page letter would
follow, another still more impatient rejoinder, and so the matter
would drag on for months until the Government representatives
would give in and settle for one tenth of what was coming to them. I
doubt that Dale's method would have had much success in this
country.
The Yellow Mask rehearsals started on October 20th, and with
the help of Wylie's advance, I was able to send Mother some much
needed funds. It was gratifying to be surrounded by experts people
like busy, ferretlike Laddie CM; Leslie Henson, the English Bobby
Clark, at whom I had laughed in the Gershwin musicals and who
was lending "valuable assistance"; huge, gloomy-faced Aubrey
Hammond; and the Master of Mystery himself, Edgar Wallace, a
bland, impassive individual with an extra-long cigarette holder and
the precise manner of a successful stockbroker. Volatile Bobby
Howes was bent on a "killing" (which he accomplished, as the
Yellow Mash catapulted him into stardom) ; Malcolm Keen strutted
and ranted as the villainous Li-San, governor of the province of Chi-
Fu; and London's favorite, Phyllis Dare was archly genteel as Mary
Bannister, the heroine, complete with the parasol without which
where would British musical comedy be?
204 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Wallace, almost as good a dnimbeater as C. B. Cochran, called
Julian WyEe The Rajah of Revue and wrote an amusing "close-up"
of the producer for the London Tit-bits in connection with our re
hearsals: " The trouble with this piece,' Wylie said gloomily, surveying
the empty stage, 'is that if s British. All the artists are British; you're
more or less British.' 'I am a Wallace/ I said, coldly. 'Haven't you
seen my tartan? Vernon Duke isn't British, his name is Dukelsky and
he's a Russian; so how can you say * 'For the purpose of his play,
he's British,' said Julian, stolidly. 'Anyway, he's not American. Don't
ten me he was with George Gershwin for two years, because I know
it We haven't a single American number or a single American co
median that's going to ruin us!' " The non-American musical show
was already a drug on the London market in 1927, but the Yellow
Mask did not ruin Wylie far from it, as it achieved quite a suc
cess, although not of gold-mine proportions. We opened in Birming
ham to unanimously excellent notices and crowded houses.
I returned from the provinces encouraged by the show's recep
tion and, especially, by the royalty checks that began to come in
regularly, once the advance money was deducted. Prokofiev arrived
in London to play a recital and it was good to get back to "music talk"
after English theatrical slang, which is a queer mixture of Cockney
and Broadway. Serge listened to "Dushenka," a prettily melodious
effusion in the Russo-Italianate manner, and was especially curious
about the symphony, which I had completed while rehearsing the
Yellow Mask. He liked both, made some insulting remarks about
"DushenkaV orchestration and demanded that I score the symphony
without delay, offering to help me should "prostitution" interfere. Pro
kofiev brought me a program sent on to him from Kiev on which my
Bogdanovitch songs figured surprisingly; the singer's name was un
familiar to me, but I had quite a pang on seeing B. Yavorsky (my
Kiev teacher) listed as accompanist. While considered a "deca
dent bourgeois" and a "lackey of bloodthirsty capitalists," Serge
somehow managed to get performances in Soviet Russia and even
appear in concert in larger cities there. Since he never talked poli
ties, I thought it best not to question him too closely about conditions
in Russia. He jokingly offered to become my musical salesman and
said that he was engineering a production of Zephyr in Moscow, "to
annoy Diaghilev," he added, exploding with laughter. I was wise
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 205
enough to refrain from exhibiting the luckless Three Seasons, except
for the andantino, now the middle movement of the symphony, the
movement he particularly liked. We dined at Simpson's in the Strand,
drank a great deal of lager and wound up in a gaudy night club called
the Silver Slipper. A loudly dressed tart brushed past us and suddenly
stopped with a wide-eyed stare at me. I wanted to duck but it was too
late Sally, my Monte Carlo nemesis, stood before me. "Blimey, if
it isn't the Monte boy wonder. . . . You're getting fat, me lad," she
screeched familiarly. "I wouldn't dare to talk to a man you treated
so shabbily, if I were you," I retorted stiffly, and motioned to Prokofi
ev, inviting him to leave the place. "On our 'igh 'orse, ain't we,
your 'ighness?" Sally rattled on scornfully. We hastened out into the
fresh air; I remained stubbornly silent and wouldn't explain anything
to Prokofiev. He left in the morning with a promise to write Kous-
sevitzky about the symphony and with an invitation to join him on a
gastronomic tour of the South of France, which I accepted ecstati
cally.
I had abandoned Bloomsbury for Chelsea 14 Church Street,
to be exact to be near the Embankment, which I loved. Carlyle
Square didn't mean much to me any longer as I was on the outs with
the Sitwells and saw less and less of Walton, who was always either in
Rome or Amalfi; but Tony Gandarillas, art-loving South American
diplomat, was nearby in Cheyne Walk, where I often dined with him
and Christopher Wood, the promising painter who died before fulfill
ing his promise, or, occasionally, George Auric, who always put up at
Tony's when in London; the Beaufort-Palmers, Francis and Sylvia,
were practically across the street, and Ewart Garland in Paultons Gar
dens, a few blocks away. Ewart, who was good to be with because his
brow was neither too high nor too low and his heart very much in the
right place, became my everyday companion and we delighted in
roaming London and the countryside in his trusty little Lea Francis.
Through Ewart I acquired Gibbs, a non-Jeevesian manservant with a
talent for cooking, answering the telephone glibly, and evasively when
necessary, drinking my liquor unnoticeably and, as I found out later,
padding my bills outrageously. He was pious and patriarchal-looking,
somewhat on the lines of Dickens's Rev. Stiggins, with a nose of lush,
tropical redness and a manner that went beautifully with my Jacobean
furniture, Staffordshire dogs on the mantelpiece (no self-respecting
206 PASSPORT TO PARIS
Londoner would live without them) and the soft candlelight which
was my only illumination the flat had no electrictiy and I was
aflergic to gas, except in Victorian novels.
On February 8, 1928, the Yellow Mask opened at the Carlton
Tlieater in London with every evidence of lasting success not
tks "biggest home-fared musical comedy success for years and
years," as the Daily Mall put it, but a sizable one nevertheless. Alan
Parsons, whom I saw at all the better parties, gave me this pat on the
back: **Not so long ago I had the pleasure of congratulating
M. Vladimir Dukelsky on the score of the ballet 'Zephyr and Flora.'
I have the same pleasure in congratulating Mr. Vernon Duke on the
music of the *YeIk>w Mask.* " The first-night audience had almost a
Russian Ballet-opening elegance and shouted its approval when
Wallace, complete with a yard-long cigarette holder, made a deft
little speech of thanks. I spotted Willie Walton in the intermission;
his greeting was of the coolish variety, which rather upset me, but
not for long there was a party at Wallace's after the show and I
was to fetch my girl of the moment backstage.
AD we needed now was full houses; they were full for three or four
months, then business began tapering off, for reasons that were not
quite clear to anybody they never are in the theater.
Whatever side of the ledger the Yellow Mask finished on, it did
well enough for the rest of the year (1928) to enable me to take a
deep breath, followed by a long pleasure trip. Gershwin wrote to con
gratulate me on the success of my **first complete score" and an
nounced his impending arrival in Europe this time family fashion,
with sister Frances, brother Ira, and Ira's good-looking wife, Leonore,
known to all Gershwinites as Lee. After a flying visit to London
(where I barely missed them, having just left for France) the
Gershwins alighted at the selfsame Hotel Majestic where I had first
set up residence in Paris. True to my 1928 form, I paid them a call
attired in the already-described gunmetal creation (now a little tight
for me), a pale-yellow Sulka shirt, an orchid in my buttonhole, the
wbote structure supported by a magnificent eighteenth-century walk
ing stick, a Christmas present from myself, purchased in Bath, So stag
gering a facade didn't fail to render the Gershwins speechless; they
stared at me, then at one another, then back at me, and had good
enough manners not to laugh out loud.
Ira Gershwin describes that memorable meeting in his diary:
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 207
"Paris, April 6th Friday (Weather sunshine at last). Letter from
Selwyn to George saying 'Strike Up the Band' would be done next
season. All of us happy about it. Dukelsky came in for an hour or so.
Argued with George about parts of 'American in Paris' saying
that George was 1928 in his musical comedies and in most of his
concert music but that in 'A.I.P.' he allowed himself to become
somewhat saccharine in spots. When he left, Walton, an Eng
lish composer friend of George's and Dukelsky's in London came in.
Played us a parody waltz, a tune and part of his symphony which
had been done recently by Koussevitzky. All pretty bad. Walton told
George to disregard Dukelsky's advice as Duke was influenced by
Prokofiev and thought anyone who wrote in another style old-
fashioned; also, that nothing of Duke's had become popular, etc.,
etc., Most interesting what they all think of one another."
I was then ignorant of Willie's reappraisal of myself and was de
lighted to run into him in Koussevitzky's music shop. We chatted
gaily and arranged to display our recent work to one another. I
played my three-movement piano sonata, written that spring for Bo-
rovsky (who never learned it), which Willie seemed to like; he did
make a remark which, in the light of the recently unearthed Ira
Gershwin testimony, appears understandable it rather stung me at
the time. "Very good, Vladimir," Willie said. "I'm really amazed be
cause I was told in London that you didn't write music any longer."
I then went to see Prokofiev, who knew I still wrote music and was
doing everything in his power to get it played; Armed with gastro
nomic guides, cook books and treatises on the wine industry, we
drove in the Ballot just the two of us with the minimum of hig-
gage and a huge chess set in the trunk of the car. Our schedule was
simplicity itself we'd spend the night at an inn in the country, get
up early, breakfast on coffee and croissants, and push off to the near
est gastronomic citadel. Proudly flashing our gourmets' manuals, we'd
be escorted to the best table, given the best service and regaled with
the best that the house could offer. We never hesitated ordering an
other speciaUte if the first proved to be up to snuff. It was at the
Hotel Commerce et Poste in Perigueux that I made an utter pig of
myself; having fallen in love with the extravagantly caloried pate de
joie gras for which the region is noted, I bought a pound of it from the
rnaitre d'hotel when Serge wasn't looking. On awakening the next
morning, I ordered the usual frugal breakfast and, when it arrived.
208 PASSPORT TO PARIS
unpacked the delicacy and began gulping it down, smearing it on
the hot croissants and taking great care not to masticate so vigor
ously as to awaken Prokofiev, who snored peacefully in the adjoin
ing room. Small wonder that I was ill the rest of the day, to Prokofiev's
intense annoyance; no sooner was he rid of women, he complained,
than here he was stuck with an invalid. I paid the penalty of not being
served the best bouillabaisse in Toulon the next day at lunch, and
watched Prokofiev devour two huge helpings of it. In the evening we
arrived in Monte Carlo to pay a visit to Diaghilev, then preparing the
new ballets Stravinsky's Apollon and Nabokov's Ode. It was Serge's
Idea; he wanted me to play the symphony to Sergei Pavlovitch and
get him to reconsider the abandoned Three Seasons. On entering
the administrator's quarters, I saw Sergei Pavlovitch, Boris and Na
bokov, whose greeting was cordial and worried it was now his turn
to earn his place in the sun.
I don't think Nabokov's music ever really excited Diaghilev, al
though there were several good things in Ode, a badly integrated bal
let whose abstract scenery had no connection whatever with the
ultra-Russian Glinkaesque music. In Lifar's testimony: "The Ode
frankly bewildered Diaghilev, both in its music and choreography, and
he could hardly decide to allow us to put it on. It did not interest him
at aH."
I wasn't pleased at having to play my symphony with another pro
spective Diaghilev child in the room (although Nabokov never got
to be the "fourth" son, Markevitch earning that distinction in 1929),
but Sergei Pavlovitch was most encouraging and so I tore into the
opening energico. On getting to the end of the slow movement, I sud
denly realized to my horror that I had just played the big pas de deux
from the Three Seasons, the piece Diaghilev had already heard. I
didn't dare to look at the man and charged into the bustling finale at
breakneck speed. When it was all over, Nabokov and Kochno looked
at each other enigmatically. Diaghilev was on his best diplomatic
behavior and all he said was: "A very good symphony, but I like
Zephyr better." How often was I to hear similar, maddening observa
tions in later years! Eugene Goossens, whom I'd meet every five years
or so, when shown a new work of mine would exclaim dreamily: "Ah,
Zephyr and Flora there was a score!" In the commercial field,
aH I have to do is demonstrate a song to the head of a recording com
pany for him to moan: "Gee, that "April in Paris' there was a
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 209
song!" I often wonder why Leoncavallo, who never wrote anything
decent outside of Pagliacci, or Charpentier, who couldn't top Lou
ise, didn't put bullets through their heads. Prokofiev tried to console
me by remarking dryly that Diaghilev had a "better taste in boys than
he has in music," but I couldn't help feeling depressed, until the next
gastronomic gtape restored my spirits somewhat.
At the end of our three-week trip I was at least fifteen pounds
heavier and couldn't get into my clothes. Without a doctor's advice
I put myself on a murderous diet of lemon-and-orange juice and
pickled fish virtually soaked in vinegar, and black coffee; such is
the resistance of youth that I experienced no dangerous aftereffects
and lost a lot of weight, only to regain it on eating normally for one
week. These ups and downs became a regular and most trouble
some part of my life after that trip with Prokofiev; when encounter
ing a friend I haven't seen for a month, I'm always greeted with, "Put
ting on weight, aren't you?" or, "You don't look so good to me
getting too skinny." I've been on every imaginable diet through these
twenty-five years and found them all excellent and most efficient //
you become a recluse and stick to them. What happens if you dine
out four times a week? Try and ask your hostess to serve you a half a
carrot and two cups of shredded black figs with a teaspoon of lemon
juice and a glass of soybean milk.
On May 29th, I took both Diaghilev and Prokofiev to hear Gersh
win's piano concerto played by Dmitri Tiomkin at a concert in the
Paris Opera conducted by Vladimir Golschmann. Whether the fault
lay with the French musicians, notoriously allergic to jazz, or with
Mr. Tiomkin, an able pianist, but certainly no Gershwin, I cannot
say. Diaghilev shook his head and muttered something about "good
jazz and bad Liszt," whereas Prokofiev, intrigued by some of the pia-
nistic invention, asked me to bring George to his apartment the next
day. George came and played his head off; Prokofiev liked the tunes
and the flavorsome embellishments, but thought little of the con
certo (repeated by Gershwin), which, he said later, consisted of
32-bar choruses ineptly bridged together. He thought highly of
Gershwin's gifts, both as composer and pianist, however, and pre
dicted that he'd go far should he leave "dollars and dinners" alone.
One afternoon at Koussevitzky's I met a tall, stooping, hawk-faced
young man who, Sergei Alexandrovitch told me in Russian, was the
new "white hope" of American music and who answered to the name
210 PASSPORT TO PARIS
of Aaron Copland. A short piece of his had been conducted by
Golschmann at the Tiomkin concert and didn't give me enough of
an idea of the man's talent. Copland seemed intelligent and was flat
teringly impressed by my dandiacal air and radical views on mu
sk;, aired with complete disdain of established values and reputa
tions; I bought him a drink at Fouquef s and we spent an agreeable
hour talking music.
My first symphony was by now orchestrated (with Prokofiev's
help), copied and accepted for performance by Koussevitzky,
who was preparing for his annual invasion of Paris concert life.
Meanwhile, I was elated to hear of my brother Alex's successful grad
uation from M.I.T.; he had received a Fontainebleau Scholarship
and was about to sail for Europe.
The program of Koussevitzky's concert, which took place on
June 14th, contained the first performance of Prokofiev's Angel oj
Fire (fragments of his opera of that name) as well as that of my sym
phony. I sat with the Prokofievs and the Paitchadzes and it was
thrilling to bow from the box from which Serge also took his bow. In
spite of so formidable a companion piece, my music apparently
held its own. Koussevitzky was much gratified by the symphony's re
ception and programed it for his next Boston season. He wired
Mother: "Dima's symphony dedicated to you. Wonderful piece.
Great success at my concert, Paris. Congratulations."
Alex arrived a few days later, bronzed and happy and very col
legiate. I met his train at the Gare St. Lazare and he had difficulty in
recognizing me that's how much I had changed in the four years
since we had seen each other. He was surrounded by rah-rah boys
and girls bent on raising a little traditional Franco-American hell. I
wound up my Paris affairs and, accompanied by Ewart Garland,
joined Alex in Fontainebleau a week later. My brother's enthusiasm
for everything French, especially food and scenery, was contagious,
and I loved impersonating a true Parisian and showing him the sights.
Then Garland and I ventured to Germany, for the excellent reason
that we had never been there. I don't think anyone ever disliked Ber
lin as much as I did. For sheer ugliness you couldn't beat the mis
shapen Berliners with their robotlike, ill-fitting clothes and evil-
smelling cigars, porcine necks and triple chins; or the ludicrous
and pathetic make-up on Kurfurstendamm fairies. The two musical
Schlagers of the season (1928) were crude exercises in Americano-
AFTER THE BALLET IS OVER 211
mania. One was Jonny Spielt Auf, Krenek's tuneless and jazzless jazz
opera; the other was Evelyne, an elephantine operetta by Bruno Von
Granichstadten, fully as unpalatable and Teutonic as the composer's
name. The badly lipsticked and atrociously garbed chorus girls kicked
sausagelike legs and shrilled, "Yes," "Okay," and "Get hot/' at the
top of their beer-greased lungs, to the accompaniment of three trom
bones, a tuba and the inevitable celeste and xylophone, all played in
unison, which, to anyone familiar with German musical comedy, is
an orchestrator's "must."
I didn't exactly expect a Welcome Home demonstration on my
return to London, but thought that with Zephyr, a show running in
the West End, and a successfully premiered symphony, I would in
stantly go on to bigger and better things. To my dismay, I soon real
ized that my three accomplishments were not of triumphant, definitive
caliber that Zephyr was already forgotten, the Yellow Mask on
the skids and the symphony unknown to London. I learned, too, that
ballet composers, while perfectly acceptable in their frivolous
sphere, were not easily transplantable into the loftier symphonic re
gions of England. Ballet was bad enough in the eyes of the saturnine
satraps who ruled that country's musical opinion, but all that "Ver-
non Duke" nonsense was really inexcusable; to this day, the august
B.B.C. hasn't touched a note of my music.
In the realm of the commercial theater I could have said with
Denry in Arnold Bennett's The Card that "I had committed the sin
of not being a native of England." Although the Yellow Mask was
no box-office smash and producers were in no hurry to sign me up,
a regular hue and cry began in the London press on the subject of
"alien" composers taking the bread out of their native colleagues*
mouths and coining fortunes in the West End. Especially noisy was
Hannen Swaffer, who resorted to editorials denouncing American
and other "alien" influences in musical comedy and leading the
pack of the "England 
