Flight of the Swan Read Free

headlines appeared in the press accusing Madame of dancing away fifty thousand dollars, which was really spent on our costumes and stage decors bound for Cuba. Apparently Mr. Rabinoff was in the middle of a divorce, and the money he lent Dandré had belonged to his wife, who had inherited it from her family. She filed suit in court, but the Cuban fiasco made it impossible for Dandré to return any of it. That’s when we received the first of several anonymous threats, telling us that if we didn’t pay up, our lives would be in danger.
    Madame, on hearing this, was incensed and wanted to return to New York. She was sure she could contact another millionaire there who would finance the rest of the trip to South America. But Bracale was adamant. He refused to pay for the company’s fares north, or to count on the dubious promise that they would find a patron to subsidize their way to Río de Janeiro. The best thing the company could do was to reach Puerto Rico and make some money there. He cobbled together a fresh itinerary for us, and after waiting an anguished week for our names to be put at the top of the passenger list on one of the local steamers that sailed from Santiago de Cuba, where the company gave one last performance, we finally boarded the S.S. Courbelo , bound for San Juan, on April 4,1917. The first day on board Dandré looked solemn and morose. He was dressed all in black, as if to underscore the seriousness of our situation. That morning he brought us all together and came sternly to the point: business in Cuba was a fiasco, and he simply was not in a position to risk another disastrous season. Either the dancers would have to accept a temporary solution—a 25 percent reduction in salary, which meant we would be making three dollars a day—or the tour would have to be abandoned. To some, this was onerous. Smallens, the English orchestra director, for example, spent three dollars a day on beer alone, but most of us were used to living on air, and we even paid our own expenses just to be able to dance on the same stage as Madame.

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    W E HAD NEVER HEARD of Puerto Rico before, but as it was on the way to Panama and Peru, where Dandré had scheduled numerous performances for us during the coming months, we gladly boarded the ship. Dandré pointed out that the island was the smallest of the Greater Antilles and that it was a possession of the United States. “Under the American flag there’s bound to be progress,” he said, dusting off his bowler hat before putting it back on as we walked up the ship’s gangplank. “The island was until recently under military rule. There will be order and discipline and we will be paid in dollars,” he added, looking satisfied with himself and plucking at his mustache, as he did whenever he didn’t want anyone to contradict him.
    None of the dancers cared for Mr. Dandré very much, and we felt sorry for Madame, who, in spite of being a star, couldn’t live without him. He took care of her as if she were a child, and lavished attention on her. When we were on the S.S. Courbelo , for example, the captain improvised a pool made of canvas and pumped it full of seawater, so Madame could cool off from the heat. She spent hours diving and swimming in it, but when Dandré begged her to come out, calling “Nanushka! Nanushka! Please, it’s time for dinner,” she would laugh and shriek, and send Poppy, her terrier, scrambling out of the water to jump all over him, so he would get dripping wet.
    Mr. Dandré was very organized and solved all the logistical problems of our tours. He planned the itineraries and made the reservations, contacted the impresarios and thrashed out the contracts with them, figuring out the expenses of the trips as well as the possible profits and losses. But money often seemed to evaporate mysteriously in his hands, and then we’d find ourselves at the mercy of people like Bracale, who would send his thugs to threaten us or to supervise our