Alicia Markova

by AGNES DE MILLE

1

GREATEST dancer in the world" is a press agent’s label that is regularly worked to the limits of credulity whenever it seems profitable. What is usually meant is “greatest classic ballet dancer,” and ten years ago Alicia Markova, an English girl, was tagged with this handy appellation. Today the pressmen are busy crying up Margot Fonteyn, another English girl. American connoisseurs have a third they think worth consideration — a Cuban, Alicia Alonso; while the Soviets boast their Ullanova and will hear of no one else. But surely classification is silly. All are flabbergasting artists, quite different and most blessedly contemporary. When performers reach this standard of excellence, choosing between them becomes a matter of personal taste.

Markova’s body line is legendary. The pure luxury of ease and melting continuity of motion, the delicious phrasing, the sincerity of approach, ravish and satisfy the most inexpert beholder, Her arabesque, for example, more fragile, aerial, and brilliant than anyone else’s, possibly because of the almost double-jointedness of her thigh and back, brings the shock of delight one experiences from the high E of a great coloratura. One old gentleman sitting beside me gasped, “It is not possible, but I see it with my eyes, so she must be doing it.” And always about her there is an aroma of sadness, a hint of death in the moment of consummated effort, the gift of universality. In the heart of her rhapsodies, even the most capricious, one finds a burning and a mourning. This is her Jewish heritage as it was Anna Pavlova’s, who made her world-wide reputation with a dance of death, the “Dying Swan.”

On reflection, she seems for all her delicate beauty unphysical, even unsexed. Admittedly no great ballet dancer is physically sensual — is, preferably, the instrument of sensuous release — but Markova, more than anyone else with the possible exception of Fonteyn, can suggest romance while preserving always the chaste austerity of classic discipline. It could almost be said that the passion of her discipline, like all great restraints, is in itself a kind of sensuality.

All choreographers agree she is a delight to rehearse, doing precisely what is asked and nothing else. But she knows what will suit her, and her suggestions are valuable. Her memory is legendary; she can remember not only everything she has done, but — much more unusual — what she has merely seen. She can compose nothing, not even a schoolroom continuation of steps. She is tiny, dark, and brilliant, her skin alabaster white, wax white. Compact and delicate as Venetian glass, her log and ankle seem so remarkably slender, her hand so tapering, one feels they will snap off with the first jar; a tennis champion’s wrist or a surgeon’s arm is probably a weaker instrument. She has the kick of a stallion in those delicate leg bones, and although she appears not to have the virtuosity of, say, Baronova or Toumanova, actually she can do anything. Her technique is prodigious; her technique is bolts of lightning and steel. It takes, however, a professional eye to recognize this. She seems, before the laymen, to float in a mist, and they are bemused.

Her expression is demure, the dark lashes resting tranquil against the exquisite pale cheek, a fixed Mona Lisa smile on the noncommittal lips until she suddenly glances up in childlike wickedness and chuckles with a tiny sound like something very valuable breaking.

She is in face and body astonishingly like Anna Pavlova — the same black and white beauty, the serene brow, the dark, burning eyes, the precise, patient mouth, the swanlike neck. Indeed she is well aware of the likeness and has been in the past accused of modeling her style too closely on her great predecessor.

She does not have the gift of downright hypnotism that was Pavlova’s, but she does have the same quality of dancing in an aura, and she has won the same widespread adulation. All dancers admire her, even avowed enemies of ballet. And all men and women are entranced, even people who hate dancing and are dragged to their initial evening of the experience.

2

I SAW Markova first when she was seventeen in London, at the Coliseum, with the Diaghilev Ballet, dancing the Blue Bird variation. She appeared like any string-bean adolescent, the diamond band around her bobbed hair heightening the impression of a little girl dressed up in her mother’s parly clothes. She had all the voluptuousness of a grasshopper, but she hit the stage like a veteran, with a brio faster than the eye could follow. I think she must have weighed seventy pounds.

For all her youth, she was a veteran, and had already been at the business for nearly twelve years. She was born in London, the daughter of a Jewish engineer, Marks, and an Irishwoman. Her mother on marriage adopted the Jewish religion in its most rigid and orthodox form and was married in a synagogue. “Think of the strength of mind of that woman, think of the character,” said Alicia soberly, fixing her great dark eyes on me as she spoke; “an Irish Catholic giving up her entire background and family, and accepting, for love of her husband, a way of living so strange and overwhelming.”

The father died when Alicia was thirteen. They had been very close. The father wanted a son, and he shared with his oldest girl all the interests he longed to develop in a boy. To this day Alicia rushes off in spare moments to rugger matches or ice hockey. It is touching to think that Marks’s first-born, his companion at sports, turned out to be “Giselle.”

At her father’s death Alicia took the role of head of the family and as responsible heir became adviser in all family councils. It was she who at this immature age shouldered the support of her mother and three sisters, and the responsibility served as spur and whip to her ambition. Her first important job at ten had been as principal dancer in a Christmas pantomime — not principal child dancer, but leading performer. At thirteen Diaghilev saw her in the ballet classes conducted by Astafieva in Chelsea and invited her to join his company at Monte Carlo. She was at this point a slight, thin youngster with black hair cut in a Dutch bob and she wore white socks and middy blouses. A governess took her to rehearsals and brought her hack to her hotel room. The nights she did not perform she was in bed by seven-thirty.

At fourteen her family trouble sealed a dedication already well begun. Diaghilev gave her a lead role in “Rossignol,” Balanchine’s first choreography. And she made a notable première at the Lyrique in Paris with Stravinsky conducting. Her success earned her the promise of longer and better roles. Unfortunately Diaghilev died in 1929, and the immediate disbanding of the company brought Alicia’s career to an abrupt stop.

It was at that point that the young choreographer Frederick Ashton introduced her to Marie Rambert’s tiny Ballet Club Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, London, and there devised ballets for her. The little auditorium seated only 150, and its stage was scarcely 9 feet square, but for several years it was the only place in which she could perform. Her salary was 10/6 a performance, a sum worked out to cover the exact cost of new slippers and taxi fare. Rambert thought she could very well use buses and dance like the others for 8/, but Number 52 did not run after 11 P.M. and Alicia won out. This was a good thing from a prestige point of view because it ensured her and Ashton (also 10/6) the highest salaries at the Ballet Club.

Ashton was her artistic mentor and coach; but there was another, a protégé of Diaghilev who had danced with the greatest and who believed in her fabulous promise. He became her partner and in a sense her alter ego. Anton Dolin (born Sydney Francis Patrick Chippenhall Healy-Kay) had studied beside her in the Astafieva classes and had watched her progress in the Diaghilev troupe where he himself starred. He was now busy making a strong commercial career in the music halls and took her on as a partner. She did the two and three a day with him with surprising zest. From time to time, they made more legitimate forays on the Continent with a concert group. But she always returned to the Ballet Club in between times.

In 1934 she was invited to join the Ballet Russe as a soloist, but decided instead to throw in her lot with the budding Sadler’s Wells Company on the promise that they would mount all the great classics for her on a normal-sized stage. This decision plunged her advisers into acute consternation; they implored her not to bury herself in a group of students in the suburbs. But she followed her instinct and in January, 1934, the first English full-length “Giselle” was presented with Markova as star. Marie Rambert took me to the première. People were very proud of Alicia. She was a home girl and doing nicely, but, of course, not to be compared to the Russians—to Toumanova, Baronova, or Danilova, for instance. Rambert thought otherwise. Rambert based her opinions not on current comment but on exactly what was before her eyes, and her eyes were among the sharpest and clearest in England. I was present when the older woman took Alicia’s head gently in her hands and kissed her. “You have come of age,” she whispered.

“Giselle” was followed by “The Nutcracker” and the complete “Swan Lake.” She now had the three great classic roles under her belt, something she never could have achieved in twelve months with any other company. She left the Wells to help form the Markova-Dolin Company (1935-37) with Nijinska as chief choreographer, but in 1938 joined Massine and the Russians and started touring the world, wishing to give herself serious competition and wider challenge. In the Russian company she was just one of the incredible group of soloists which included Danilova, Toumanova, Youskevitch, Delarova, Slavenska. Her name was, at this point, practically unknown in America. She could not possibly consider herself a star until the night she danced “Giselle” in New York with Lifar. That night everything she did provoked an ovation, an eventuality Lifar had not foreseen. He grew excited and upset; and somehow, in being set down from a high lift, her foot became broken. “However,” Alicia said, “I continued the whole solo variation, little hops on point and all. Think of it, right across the stage on one toe on a fractured foot. In the mad scene I began to feel something was wrong, and it seems at the end I passed out cold.” Mia Slavenska had to finish the ballet for her, dancing Act II in a style and appearance which varied markedly from Act I But New York had witnessed enough to know what moved before its dazzled eyes, and the city and all its press were at Markova’s feet, broken or sound. Backstage there was a good deal of explanation in Russian about what had happened.

When the Ballet Russe split into two sections after phenomenal quarrelings, threats, and lawsuits, Markova joined the Massine faction and toured with them for some years. The schismatic section was called the Ballet Russe de Alonte Carlo as differentiated from the Original Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and both troupes functioned simultaneously to the public’s unrelieved bew ilderment. Markova compounded confusion by moving from the Ballet Russe to the American Ballet Theatre in one of those swift coups that proceed so naturally and spontaneously from lunch at the Russian Tea Room.

When she joined the junior organization, she came complete with classic repertoire, fame, and prerogatives. Dolin had been a choreographer-star in the American company since its inception in 1940 and had been anxious to install in the new fold his great colleague and partner, and she, for her part, was nothing loath to rejoin him, for he had proved over a long period more understanding in setting dances for her than anyone else. He is moreover a remarkable theatrical figure in his own right, and is acknowledged generally as an unmatched partner for classic work. Markova was annexed as top star. Gollner, Baronova, Stroganova, their noses just a touch out of joint, stepped obediently aside.

Dolin treated her in many ways like royalty. He insisted that the red carpet be spread. She always, for instance, had the star dressing room, the best accommodations, the biggest billing, the longest orchestra rehearsals, and the largest salary with one exception — his own. At the time she worked for Ballet Theatre she got the largest salary of any woman in the business — $400 a week. (It has been multiplied since.)

3

MME. MARKS, as she used to be called at Ballet Club, also knew her own wishes. She never shared her dressing room with another woman. She insisted that every costume be cleaned each time she wore it. (The costumes almost invariably belong to the company — not, as in opera, to the star performers — and two or three ballet stars have to share the same dresses.) Nora Kaye came off stage one night during “Romeo and Juliet” and held out her arms for the next costume, a cloth-of-gold robe. She was informed that Markova had visited the theatre that afternoon and the overeager dresser had sent the other costumes to the cleaners — there would be no further changes during the current performance. On hearing this news, Miss Kaye’s face was, as they say, a study.

At that time Alicia lived sparsely in unmodified hotel rooms, without a personal maid. She had instead a kind of acolyte — neither dresser nor maid, a young humble professional, who ran errands, stood by, listened, sympathized, handed things, and worshiped. She was always present and silent. Besides her recompense she received instruction and coaching in ballet technique and the daily opportunity of watching genius. Alicia always talked in front of her as though she were not there, with regal imperviousness to human criticism, two or three intimate attendants constituting for her complete privacy.

It goes without saying that her discipline about sleep, food, and drink has been rigid, continuous, and lifelong. She does not even smoke. Alicia’s only real expenditure was on ravishing clothes by name designers. But these did not include furs or jewels. She held herself to a severe budget , permitting herself a first mink coat only after the South African tour (1950). About twenty-five years of dancing paid for this. She supplied always all her own tutus, to ensure their freshness, her own headpieces and accessories and, of course, all slippers and tights, a very sizable expense. She rarely entertained. Dolin seemed to be living high and fancy but he was doing public relations for both of them and she always paid for half. He was prodigal with time; she was busy.

It was always Dolin who held court in his dressing room, for columnists, civic functionaries, movie stars, and fans, while he talked his way through cold cream and towels. His dressing room had the air of a levee, but he usually remembered to point out the quiet little figure, already cleaned up and dressed impeccably, sitting in attentive silence.

When they went out socially, it was Pat with his Irish wit who had the most fun; Alicia, looking exquisite, sat on a nimbus of attention and chirped. She was not seen too often without him. One of his jobs as big brother and partner was to escort her to dinner and to see that she amused herself in her scarce leisure moments. I have known him, with this in mind, to take her out to watch him play bridge. Alicia does not herself play bridge, but it’s fun watching others. If by any maneuver you could sneak her away, get her feet up, her hair clown (metaphorically, of course; not a hairpin is ever loosened even by her speedy daily activities), a very small drink in her hands, you would find her reminiscences worth the effort. The fact that she rarely took time out to comment does not mean that much has passed unremarked.

4

IN the summer of ‘41, Dolin organized a school and concert series at Jacob’s Pillow, Massachusetts, Ted Shawn’s farm, using the personnel of Pallet Theatre, spiced with visiting guest soloists. I was to be weekend spice. I arrived on a rainy Wednesday night to find matters in considerable turmoil. There were tales of Markova hurrying from several classes in tears, Baronova was crying down the road in a neighboring farmhouse.

Everyone rushed around very busy with housekeeping and rehearsal chores. They stopped only to snarl at each other.

I was assigned to a dormitory room with Lucia Chase, who wasn’t crying that summer, Nina Stroganova who was, and Nana Gollner, who moved through all with good-natured bland untidiness.

When I arrived at Jacob’s Pillow, Markova had been closeted upstairs for two days and showed no signs of coming down although the weekend performances were imminent. Passing across the upper hall, I peeped unkindly through the half-open door. She lay in Ted Shawn’s great double bed. She lay stretched like Rachel on her death couch, the dark silken lovelocks unmoving against the waxen shoulders. The eyes neither open nor shut stared in sealed misery.

Few changes had been made in the room, beyond replacing the photographs of Shawn and his young men naked in the wind by more maidenly symbols, the ballerina’s tutus suspended as always inside out, beyond tossing a satin ribbon on the dressing table and a silk robe over a chair, the great star had done nothing to transform the farm bedroom. She does nothing to transform any of her hotel rooms. She is a transient everywhere except in the theatre dressing room. In that room she is at home, and half an hour after she takes possession, all the implements of her trade and her working comforts are out and in place.

In the farm bedroom the little head remained unmoving against its pillow. I watched for some time in fascinated shame. Tears trickled down her cheeks in an unending stream. In an adjacent room another lady devotee of Dolin’s lay ill and weeping. (Most great male dance stars, I have noticed, seem to have one or more of these dedicated followers who trail around them asking, and getting, absolutely nothing except the privilege of attending to mail, doing a little shopping, keeping a list of the star’s social engagements, and waiting hand and foot on the brilliant center of their attentions. Sometimes they are paid as secretaries and sometimes they foot their own bills.)

Downstairs the new master of Jacob’s Pillow sat at dinner. The hoi polloi or ballet ate in a kind of barracks. But I, as guest artist, was entitled to a place on the host’s right.

“Rooms full of weeping women,” he said spooning up his soup vigorously. “I wish they’d either get. well or —”

“Or what, Pat?” I asked.

“Or — well, now look here, duckie, the house is getting positively soppy with tears. And what good does it do them to go on like this? I must say I think they enjoy it. I really do, but I certainly don’t. For one thing, the weather’s too damp.”

“I think Alicia is not enjoying herself.”

“Then why doesn’t she stop? Women are too preposterously silly.” He called to the cook, “Send a tray up to Mine. Markova.”

It was promptly returned untouched.

“Pat, what is the matter with her?”

Parenthetically I wish to remark that for all his naughtiness, capriciousness, and flamboyance Anton Dolin is one of the kindest-hearted men in the dance world. Where there is genuine trouble he is the first to help. He labored for years to try to make it possible for the insane Nijinsky to find asylum in America. He succored Spessivtzeva in her lamentable illness. He has helped innumerable young artists with money, advice, and jobs. In the case of Markova it was an alliance of friendship and ambition. He was devoted to her, even dependent on her, but he could not resist mockery. He could never resist wicked Irish mockery.

Alicia continued crying until it was nearly performance time, and active measures had to be taken. An old friend and balletomane, a father and head of a household, used to family tantrums, advanced into her chamber of melancholy, pulled her from the bed, and shook her until her teeth rattled. “Alicia,” he said, “if you don’t start getting ready for this afternoon’s performance, I’m going to turn you over my knee.”

She whimpered and started to pick at her makeup. He left her to the care of assistants, who, scared to death and speechless, rushed to propel her through the preparations. She was supported across the yard to the theatre. The porches still dripped with summer rain. There was the smell all about of wet pinewood and the green glitter that promised a brilliant sunset.

Alicia leaned in her dressing gown against a dank post. Her acolyte (at this point Patricia Barker) waited round-eyed beside her with the tray of powder, hairpins, and mirror. I was about to do a comedy dance and stopped to say that I hoped she felt better. Alicia gave me a graveyard smile and looked west to the Berkshires. Paddy Barker shook her head with the air of a nurse who knows that the end is inevitable but hopes it will be quick. When I left the stage, Alicia was in her skirt and trying out the points of her slippers. Her breath still came unevenly from crying. Belowstairs, while I changed I listened to the music of the Prelude from “Sylphides” and felt the slight jarring of the floor overhead from the great soft descents. At the conclusion, there was a full six seconds of silence and then tumult.

Several girls drifted below and stood dazed. “What happened?” I asked. They sat unable to continue with their changes. It seems she had never before approached the beauty of her performance that afternoon.

I hastened to offer my congratulations. Alicia was bouncing around upstairs in the farmhouse clad in a darling dressing gown and as happy as Christmas morning, purged, delivered, vindicated. She had tied a bow in her hair. “It was rather good, you know,” she said to me with brilliant eyes. “I can’t say I was too displeased.”

“The girls said it was transcendent.”

She put her head on one side and considered. “ It was all right,” she said, and she scampered off down the hall to visit the other invalid’s room, whence presently came peals of girlish giggles. They sent down for enormous trays of food.

That night there was a barn dance. Alicia kept to her quarters as becoming one so recently in decline, but Pat Dolin managed everything down to the last detail and even went through the bushes with a flashlight, flushing out two indiscreet youngsters who were having a bit of heterosexual fun. Pat was simply furious; he said the place would get a bad name. In a long and distinguished career, Dolin has functioned in every possible capacity, but the role of custodian of public morals is the one I find most striking.

As to Alicia, this kind of goings-on may seem foolish, but, on the other hand, no person who reaches the absolute top in her art can really appear silly. Theatre folk, particularly dancers, have the reputation of being tumultuous, capricious, unreliable, given to temper and nerve explosions. It is my experience that they are the most controlled and durable people I have ever met. Their lives are based on crises. Several times a year they are called upon to face situations that combine the worst emotional aspects of a house fire, grievous family illness, business failure, and pre-battle preparations, all endured while trying to think clearly and balance instincts, when a mistake of judgment might wreck a career. The average businessman or housewife wouldn’t last a week.

I do not know why Alicia carried on in this way. I do know that she had only one concern in life — to dance better and better and better. This was all she did. She did not interest herself with one other thing. Alicia has never married — never, as far as I know, even been engaged. She was given over from early childhood to a dedicated and exacting vocation. Outraged nature must have backed up on her from time to time and taken blackmail payments. The sacrifice she made was enormous. Whether or not it was necessary is a question she has probably asked herself from time to time at lonely moments. In the fullness of time she and Dolin have separated. They now go their individual ways.

But from a professional point of view, at that point she was doing fine. Her press got better each year until John Martin of the New York Times threw caution away: “not only the best living ballet dancer, but probably the greatest who ever lived.” One cannot go beyond this recognition; this is absolute.

5

ALICIA comes to the theatre as a rule before anyone else. On the days of a gala she is in and out of the place all day, but for each routine appearance she is on hand at least three hours ahead of time. Her room seems as businesslike and as prophylactic as a surgery. The dressing table has pristine dainty skirts and spotless cloths laid over the make-up. On a white-covered table lie her shoes, pair by pair, long and exceedingly narrow, triple A. Markova’s feet are flawless — white, supple, and unmarked. Most dancers’ feet look like the ace of clubs, gnarled, jointed, skinned, bruised, with blackened horny nails and rubbings and scars that have bitten into the tissue. Barefoot dancers’ feet cannot be imagined; they are hoofs. But Markova has given hers solicitous — almost medical — care and they are dreams. She takes ten minutes to put on her shoes. She cleans everything she owns every day. She putters and fusses and mends — the acolyte sometimes sits around helping her clean, or watching her. But often Alicia is alone and wants it so.

She is like a young mother assembling her first layette. She is cutting off connections with the world, she is becoming part of the theatre. She is already beginning to connect with the audience. They do not know this. It is afternoon still. Many of them are at their offices. It will be an hour yet before they gel reach for dinner. After some while of this meandering she will put on practice clothes and her make-up base and go on stage for a lesson from her coach, in New York Vincenzo Celli. Celli puts her through an hour to two hours of everything he can think of. In lieu of a barre, she hangs on to the wardrobe trunks or the tormentors. Other members of the company appear and start practicing, but apart from her. When she leaves the stage to go to her dressing room, she is dripping. Her acolyte waits with a towel, for from now on she has to keep in a light sweat. (Her audience is probably now having cocktails.) She sponges off and finishes her make-up. She gives half an hour to her hair.

Twenty minutes before curtain she strips and gets into her all-silk tights. I have seen Alicia stripped. She has no body at all. She has no bust, no stomach, no hips, no buttocks; she has two long supple arms and two long strong legs, joined by a device that contains in the most compact manner possible enough viscera to keep her locomotive. She is utterly feminine but as incorporeal as a dryad. Her slenderness, her lack of unneeded flesh, is a rebuke to everything gross in the world. The tights are held taut by elastics and tapes that wrap around her 21-inch waist. Her toes are swathed very exactly in lamb’s wool to prevent shoe friction, and the priceless little mummies are then inserted in the flawlessly clean satin boxes which are glued to her heel (Pavlova used spit in the heel of her shoe — this is in the old tradition; Alicia uses LePage’s glue — it is stronger) and the ribbons sewn. She has to be cut out of her shoes. Five minutes before curtain she steps into the tutu. As the orchestra starts she walks on the stage. It always takes four men to help her on the return journey with the flowers.

I happened to be backstage the day after Martin’s incredible pronouncement was printed. In my minor way, I was going through the process of warming up, quieting down and cutting off from daily life. I passed Alicia’s room. She was standing alone, rubbing the toe of a slipper with a piece of gauze soaked in benzine.

“Alicia,” I said, slipping onto her sofa, “tell me something. As one human woman to another, how does it feel to read in a newspaper a statement like Martin’s — ‘the greatest ballet dancer of all time’?”

“That’s all very well and good,”said Alicia, placing the slipper precisely beside its fellow, drawing her silk dressing gown up neatly, and sitting down with crossed ankles. “It’s easy to write something like that but it’s I who have to live up to it. What am I to do the next day, I ask you? I said to Celli I must work all the harder. I mean, duckie, the audience is going to expect something after reading that bit. It will be hard lines if I let them down. There’s always the next performance to think of. That’s what I said to Celli.”

Dolin was in the next room entertaining Elsa Maxwell.

Alicia has now reached the age (not a great one) when in the days of the Imperial Pallet the stars were forcibly retired and pensioned — but she is dancing better than ever, with virtuosity and an enormous brilliance of dynamics and power. Instead of slacking off with the years she seems to be reaching greater and greater physical and emotional strengths, and more subtle and exquisite refinement of style.

Building her reputation has been hard, maintaining it harder. When Pavlova danced, she was the only great ballet star most of us had seen, and brought with her the excitement of revelation. But everyone dances today. The theatres are bulging with dandy technicians, and the beady eyes out front are knowledgeable and blase, while in the wings stand the ready and able to crowd the star off center spot. If Markova seems at times mettlesome to the girls and boys who work with her she is only fighting as she feels she must for her position and her future. One mistaken step from an assistant, one hand on a wrong light lever, can undo a hundred hours of her practicing. She may have the proverbial nervous tempers of a ballerina; she also has the responsibility. She may seem fragile, childish, and gentle, but cross her will, or turn on the wrong light, or make a damaging mistake in tempo and you will know why Britain withstood the Blitz and held Gibraltar and girdled the world, and lasted as long as any other country in recorded history.

After an ovation, this airy, fairy, feathery little thing has been know’ll to place an armful of white orchids deliberately on the floor, pass silently and exquisitely over to where the bead electrician waited uncomfortably, and break him in two.

She has been acclaimed the greatest ballet dancer for just one reason: she intended to be.