Danseuse Noble

The most successful ballet season in U.S. history ended last week at Manhat tan's Metropolitan Opera House. Impre sario Sol Hurok's Ballet Theatre, during a six weeks' run, had attracted 150,000 beholders for a gross of approximately $250,000.

Canny Sol Hurok had bedizened his season with sure-fire box-office draws.

From Hollywood he had imported Igor Stravinsky to conduct his own Petrouchka, Vera Zorina to glamorize a new ballet called Helen of Troy. But the real balleto manes, who study pirouettes and entre chats as devoutly as a prizefight fan studies left hooks, knew that the season was no great shakes esthetically. They went to Sol Hurok's ballet very largely for one little reason. That reason was a five-foot-two-inch dancer named Alicia Markova.

Alicia Markova is, by practically unanimous consensus, the greatest ballerina . alive. Only the cautious conservatism of ballet's experts keeps her from being hailed unreservedly as a ballerina assoluta, a rank in the choric hierarchy attained in recent generations only by Marie Taglioni and the late great Anna Pavlova. Well above a mime dansante (like Irina Baro-nova), immeasurably superior to a soubrette (Zorina's rating), Alicia Markova has attained to the category danseuse noble, and she may get to be a ballerina assoluta yet. She has a combination of flawless classical technique and an ability to project emotion that bowls over even the uninitiates in the audience. Balleto manes may discuss the superb qualities of her sustained Arabesques (balancing on one toe) and battements de gages (kicks from a tiptoe position), but even the man from the street can tell that Markova is a sensation in tights.

Weak Arches Cured. This queen of the current Russian Ballet was born, not in Russia, but in London, and her real name is Lillian Alicia Marks. Her father, Arthur Marks, was a globe-trotting Brit ish mining engineer who went to school in the U.S. and once worked on the Nile's great Aswan Dam. A serious-minded tot, Lillian would probably have embarked on a career in medicine but for the paradoxi cal fact that she had weak arches. To cor rect them she took up dancing at the age of nine. A year later, in 1921, she danced her first engagement -- as a child prodigy in the traditional Christmas pantomime Dick -Whittington at London's old Kennington Theater.

After three years of methodical study Lillian was picked by the Ballet Russe's late great Impresario Sergei Diaghilev for the title role in Nightingale. Youngest ballerina in the history of Diaghilev's troupe, 13-year-old Lillian Marks became Alicia Markova, with a special permit from the London County Council exempting her from regular school classes. For 14 years she toured Europe and, as war approached, moved on to the U.S.

Bedtime Earned. Markova earns around $350 a week, wears out three pairs of ballet slippers doing it. Though a danseuse noble, she keeps on studying with the enthusiasm of a tyro. In Manhattan she arrives every morning at 10:30 at the studio of her trainer, a Svengalian Italian ballet master named Vincenzo Celli. He ruthlessly analyzes her shortcomings, puts her through an hour's workout that would wilt a professional athlete. By noon she is on the Metropolitan stage, dressed in tights and a black velvet tunic, ready for hours of rehearsal. With scarcely time for a cup of tea and a cat nap, she is in her dressing room two hours before curtain time. By the time her performance is over, Markova is ready for bed.

Her 98 pounds are sustained by the appetite of a longshoreman. She eats five or six meals a day, takes three vitamin pills, and is a chain drinker of chocolate milk shakes, which are delivered almost hourly to her dressing room. "Fragility, hah!" snorts Trainer Vincenzo Celli, "she has a Rolls-Royce powerhouse constitution."

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