The Care & Feeding of Artists

No matter how great the artist, Promoter S. (for Sol for Solomon) Hurok always gives himself top billing. Says he: "Audiences . . . know whatever S. Hurok presents is hokay."

Last week chunky little Sol Hurok, America's leading independent salesman of culture, published his memoirs (Impresario; Random House, $3). The press-agent (Ruth Goode) who ghosted the book makes Hurok out a kind of warmhearted mother superior to a gang of temperamental darlings. But the dollar sign keeps peeping through the mother superior's habit. Sol Hurok is an expert at devising ways to make culture pay.

He arrived in the U.S., a Russian immigrant, at 18, with three rubles ($1.50) in his pockets. For a while he peddled pins & needles and was a trolley car conductor in Philadelphia. The words "S. Hurok presents . . ." first appeared outside the huge (6,000 capacity) New York Hippodrome in 1916. Hurok advertised that the King and Queen of the Belgians would attend a symphony concert with pianist Josef Lhevinne. The flag-draped royal box was empty--but Hurok took in $4,000.

Hurok obviously enjoys hobnobbing with his famous clients. Hot summer weekends he is apt to be lazying beside Marian Anderson's Connecticut swimming pool. He so admired his first big name artist, Feodor Chaliapin, that he followed him to Europe to get his business--and lost $100,000 on him. Once Chaliapin and Hurok, dressed in rags, spent a night in a Bowery flophouse. It was a gag on Chaliapin's part; Hurok saw to it that newspaper photographers found out about it.

What Is Beauty. The Hindu dancer ShanKar would not board a train unless he was well supplied with movie fan magazines. Hurok learned to handle all such oddities of temperament--all but Isadora Duncan's. Once in Boston's Symphony Hall, Isadora's husband, an enthusiastic Communist, waved a red flag from a dressing room window, made a speech to the crowd below. While she danced, Isadora's dislike of her Brahmin audience got the best of her. She stopped, pointed indignantly at the Greek statues against the wall, shouted to the audience: "They are false! And you are as false as those plaster statues. You don't know what beauty is!" Isadora stripped open her costume, bared one of her breasts. "This--this is beauty!" she cried. Next day one of Boston's shocked newspapers reported that she had given a speech in the nude. Some of the other papers hinted that something scandalous had happened. Thereafter, says Hurok, the press reported Isadora as if she were a stripteaser.

The 25-Minute Test. Hurok's own musical accomplishment consists in having once played the balalaika badly, which puts him in a class with Caesar Petrillo, who was bad on the trumpet. Hurok lets the public pick his artists. He spends hours in the box office, listening to what price seats customers ask for, to judge what traffic an artist will bear. During intermissions he slips quietly through the crowd, eavesdropping on customer comment. Says he: "When I discover an artist I sit in the audience just like the public. ... If you sit 25 minutes without squirming and your eyes and ears are still in his direction, then I personally believe that artist will be a success." In a Paris concert hall he once heard a little-known American Negro contralto, offered to sign her on the spot. Today Marian Anderson is his biggest moneymaker ($175,000 a year for herself, about $50,000 for Hurok).

His big gamble was ballet. When he imported the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1933, he lost $65,000 the first year. In 1937 he got some of ballet's wealthy enthusiasts to guarantee losses and Hurok wrote up profits.

Since its U.S. arrival, the "Russian ballet" has broken into a number of pieces, some of them put back together under curiously similar names. Ballerinas like Tamara Toumanova (see cut) were lured away by Hollywood. The latest of the companies recently broke with Hurok because its 40 dancers wanted to be known under their own name, Ballet Theatre, while Hurok insisted it was more glamorous to bill them as Russian.

Hurok's new company, "S. Hurok's Russian Ballet Company," to open in the fall, will be the first troupe to carry his name as producer. He expects no trouble in casting it: "Our American democracy seems able to produce ballerinas ... as well as it turns out low-price automobiles."

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