On the Town

The girls in their summer dresses might well have arrived by bus from Waterloo, Iowa. Some of the boys looked like members of the chorus of West Side Story. Except for the slightly waddling walk that characterizes ballet dancers, few Sunday strollers would recognize them as the youngsters of the Bolshoi on their day off. Every Sunday since they arrived in the U.S. four weeks ago, they have been wandering . happily around New York like a family of prize mallards.

All week long they have no time-off at all. Even on tour, the company takes lessons in the morning and rehearses in the afternoon, so a dancer's day begins at 10 a.m. and ends at 11 p.m., when the final curtain drops at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. They lack time--or money--for gaiety. Though in Moscow their salaries are excellent on the Russian scale (some even have their own cars), the corps de ballet dancers are getting only $50 a week in the U.S., plus rooms and one free meal a day at the Hotel Governor Clinton. They cannot afford to eat in the better restaurants, and they apparently prefer not to eat in people's restaurants, such as Horn & Hardart's. Most buy groceries and eat cold suppers in their hotel rooms after the evening performance.*

Also Kotleti. But on Sundays they could relax. Seemingly willing to try anything, they ate goodies that might have produced a sort of ballet ptomaine. Cotton candy. Canarsie pizza. Chocolate ice cream sundaes with thick chocolate syrup and primed with gooey marshmallow sauce. Soft drinks. Spaghetti. Sosiski (hot dogs). Kotleti (hamburgers). More ice cream (called ice cream in Russia).

One Sunday, Mrs. Rebekah Harkness Kean, whose great personal fortune had its headwaters in Standard Oil, invited the Russian dancers up for a party. "If they're going to be exposed to capitalism, they might as well get it all in one fell swoop," said Mrs. Kean. No one went hungry at Mrs. Kean's swoop. She lives in a 15-room duplex apartment that covers the entire top of the Hotel Westbury like a two-acre astrakhan hat. She had Russian-speaking waiters up there passing champagne and beef Stroganoff on sterling silver platters. She had Henry Fonda, Robert Preston. Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly. She had jazzman Ted Straeter, with a five-piece band. The young people of the Bolshoi loved every minute of it. When Straeter flooded the place with twist music, members of the corps de ballet were soon writhing to its rhythms.

Incredible Pyramids. Last week the Russian dancers took a boat ride around Manhattan Island. They stared in utter disbelief at the vast automobile crematoriums of The Bronx, where the dead cars are piled up beside the Harlem River in unstable pyramids. Almost every dancer has a camera--movie or still. Awed by the triple run of traffic on the Major Deegan Expressway, they hastened to record the incredible sight. A sparkling cabin cruiser roared insolently by. A male dancer asked if it was privately owned. "Yes," said an interpreter. The dancer grunted: "It figures."

One girl said she thought New York would be "much worse, darker and more suffocating." Others said they were suffocating anyway, trying to breathe New York's sooty atmosphere after the pure air of Moscow. In Greenwich Village's Washington Square, they talked with shabby slovens, and possibly mistook the beats for the beaten down.

There was little trace of cold war nerves. Once, when a dancer was asked a question in Russian, he demanded suspiciously: "Are you from the State Department?" But most of the time, the Russian sense of humor, which is generally left at home by everyone, poured out uninhibitedly. At a street festival in the city's principal Italian colony, for example, the group was confronted by an earnest patriot who was trying to pin small American flags to the blouses and lapels of everyone in the jammed crowd. One Russian boy let himself get pinned. Others laughed at him. With a grin, he turned the lapel over, exposing a metal button with a picture of Nasser on it.

* Simultaneously, the New York City Ballet is en route to Moscow. The U.S. dancers took with them dozens of cans of tuna fish, vegetables and soup. Evidently they plan to cook. Ballerina Melissa Hayden reportedly has 24 cans of Sterno in her trunk.

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