"Monstrous Exhibition"

Serge Lifar is a dancer who likes more than a moderate share of applause. He hardly minds at all when he is quoted as saying, "I was magnificent." Often, at performances of his Paris Opera Ballet, curtain bows run into the dozens--long after a good part of the audience has already left the hall. So when Russian-born Ballet Master Lifar brought his Opera Ballet to Manhattan in 1948, and was greeted by a picket line denouncing him as a collaborationist,* he could hardly contain his indignation. Last week, in Paris, it looked as if Lifar might be having his revenge.

The opening-night performance of the small Ruth Page-Bentley Stone Ballet Company, the first U.S. troupe to appear in Paris since the war, was a preview. Invited guests filled the Theatre des Champs-Elysees' orchestra seats; only the balcony seats were sold. Soon after the curtain went up a barrage of boos and catcalls whistled down.

It was all the doing of Lifar's friends, charged outraged Company Manager Thomas Fisher, husband of Ruth Page. They had bought up a block of balcony seats, he said, and caused the disorder. One member of the Page-Stone troupe swore a Lifar protege had told him: "We are going to make it impossible for an American ballet troupe to appear in Paris after what happened [to us] in New York."

That was Manager Fisher's explanation. A little harder to explain was the fact that the second-night audience was just as hostile. Lifar himself was not talking. But if revenge was what Lifar's friends were looking for, they found it even sweeter in the reaction of Paris ballet critics. In the press next day, they did their share of booing and catcalling, too. Wrote one: "Frankie and Johnny . . . was a disaster, a monstrous exhibition ... in the worst of German taste."

*For dancing for the Nazis during the war, a French artists' purge committee, in 1945, forbade Lifar to dance for one year in France.

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