The Last Impresario: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Sol Hurok. - book reviews

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1994 by Harris Green

Any reasonably thorough biography of the Ukranian-born American impresario Sol Hurok (1888-1974) would have to provide at least a capsule history of the American dance scene in the twentieth century. Though he made a fortune managing world-famous musicians, Hurok made and lost another presenting more dance than anyone else for over fifty years. Harlow Robinson, in his biography, The Last Impresario, is thorough to the point of repetition in not only chronicling the contracts, cancellations, and triumphs of S. Hurok Attractions, Inc., but also in recapturing the cultural bleakness its artists initially faced on tour.

Heartland America's hostility toward the male dancer was chillingly epitomized in this quote Robinson unearthed from a Dayton, Ohio, engineer who had just been privileged to see Nijinsky on tour with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1916: "How I'd like to take a sock at that guy! Why doesn't he work for a living?" Pavlova, whom Hurok eventually represented, aroused gentler emotions in her American public but rarely as the doomed Odette or Giselle; because there were no local ballet companies in the U.S. when she toured, she appeared most often in vaudeville. In 1920 when Hurok presented Michel Fokine and his wife, Vera, at Manhattan's 6,000-seat Hippodrome, they shared the bill with such equally acclaimed acts as Jacko the Crow and the Three Bobs.

Some things never change. Forty-five years later when Hurok artists Margot Fonteyn and Rodolf Nureyev appeared on television's answer to vaudeville, "The Ed Sullivan Show," they stood an excellent change of being preceded by Topo Gigio, a smarmy mechanical Italian mouse puppet, and followed by any one of a dozen crass stand-up comedians just in from Vegas. The road had improved by then, however; most major American cities and several minor ones had ballet companies, and modern dance was taking root. No one person can take full credit for this growing appetite for dance--Hurok Attractions had stopped booking any moderns by 1948--but no one person did more to whet it for classical ballet than Hurok. By general agreement, the key date was October 9, 1949, when England's Sadler's Wells Ballet, under Hurok's management and at his insistence, opened its U.S. tour with the first full-length Sleeping Beauty ever performed in New York City.

Robinson's biography is as necessary as it is welcome. The canny old presenter had puffed up his own reputation as shamelessly as that of any artist he managed. His ghostwritten "autobiographies," Impresario: A Memoir by S. Hurok (1946) and S. Hurok Presents: A Memoir of the Dance World (1953), were so fanciful that no self-respecting librarian would have placed either in the nonfiction stacks. Even worse was the 1953 Twentieth Century-Fox movie Tonight We Sing, a Hollywood biopic purportedly about Hurok that is rarely seen now on the latest of "Late Show"s. At Hurok's insistence, he was portrayed by David Wayne, who neither looked nor sounded like him (Isaac Stern said, "Hurok speaks six languages--and all of them are Yiddish").

A warts-and-all protrait such as The Last Impresario provides would have made a fascinating film. Robinson presents Hurok as an almost Falstaffian figure, resilient and incorrigible, admirable and deplorable in turn. Many of the most famous musicians of his time never regretted entrusting their careers to him, often on the basis of nothing more legally binding than a handshake to clinch the deal; yet the directors of the several companies known as someone or other's "Ballet Russe" were enraged by his intrigues and interference. (We are all in Robinson's debt for including an appendix that chronicles the various splinterings of "the Ballet Russe.")

At times Hurok's life resembles a slightly askew morality play. He scorned his first wife, Tamara, and saw to it that she was not mentioned in Tonight We Sing. He was so indifferent to their only child, Ruth, that he delegated the chore of writing her when she attended a summer camp to a secretary, who signed the tender missives with a rubber-stamped "Your loving father, sincerely yours, S. Hurok."

Ah, but what goes around, comes around. The second Mrs. Hurok, the alluring Emma Borisovna Rybkina Perper Runich--widow, divorcee, cabaret chanteuse--played him like a yo-yo for decades. At one point she decreed that she could no longer reside in their apartment on Central Park West. He dutifully rented another luxury pad on Park Avenue and moved into it while she made up her mind. After thinking it over for a year and a half, Emma decided that the CPW digs were acceptable, after all--for her. He had to remain on Park Avenue. She was still ensconced in that apartment the night of May 21, 1973, when just about everyone else who mattered to the old man was at the Metropolitan Opera House for the International Dimaond Jubilee Gala in honor of his eighty-fifth birthday. Emma did bestir herself enough to send "an oddly formal telegram of congratulations." As for the harassed directors of the various Ballet Russe troupes, they would certainly have felt avenged had they known about the years of frustration and torment Hurok endured in negotiations with Soviet cultural bureaucrats and Communist Party goons about his right to present the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets.