"Immortal Swan"

Five years ago last month a slender, waxen-faced woman of 45 lay ill with pleurisy in a hotel room in The Hague. A sedative had been given to spare her pain. Quietly, as if entranced, she spoke to her maid: "Marguerite! My swan costume!" As if she were hearing an unseen orchestra, Anna Pavlova lifted her arms, fluttered her hands. "Play that last measure softly," she murmured. And before the world realized that she was seriously ill the great Russian dancer was dead.

Few who saw Pavlova have been able to forget her impersonation of the swan, a creature who first hovered lightly on her toes, typified all Death when she crumpled to the floor in a motionless mound of tarlatan and feathers. Last week at the Regal Theatre in London Pavlova danced again, in a series of cinema films linked together and called The Immortal Swan. Producer was her husband, Victor Dandre, who was releasing the pictures for the first time to raise funds for a Pavlova Memorial Fountain to be executed by Swedish Sculptor Carl Milles on a site already approved in London's Regent Park.

The audience sat reverently quiet through the showing of two full-length ballets, eleven solos. Music was played by the London Symphony, conducted by Vladimir Launitz, onetime Russian aviator, who once was Pavlova's musical director. Effects on the screen were sometimes hazy. Many of the pictures had been taken in 1923, some in South America, some in Australia. But it was still possible to marvel at the dancer's incomparable grace, that ethereal quality which made it seem as if she floated through air.

Most effective was the Swan Dance, filmed by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford when Pavlova visited them in Hollywood in 1930, a few months before her death. Strangest shot was one taken by Dandre in Pavlova's garden in Hampstead which showed her in a simple gingham dress, stretched out on the flagstones beside a pool and talking to a pet swan. Dandre hid behind a bush to take the picture with a small sound camera, recorded his wife's curious, high-pitched voice as she called: "Come on, Jack, come Jacko, oh darling." Members of the audience who knew Pavlova regretted the intimate scene. The dancer allowed no intrusion into her private life, kept her marriage secret for 17 years.

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