I finally understood him. “You mean you are going to be picketed?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Bad labor relations?”
“Communism.”
“You mean the Communists are going to picket you?”
The impresario of the Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet looked at me sadly, as though once again his faith had been unjustified. Then he began at the beginning. “I called you over here this morning because I was told that you were one of the best of the younger public relations men in New York, and I prefer to work with young people. As you may or may not know, my company is going to première an important new ballet tonight. The first major modern ballet we have presented in many years and the choreographer is a man named Jed Wilbur.”
“I’m a great admirer of his,” I said, just to show that I knew something about ballet. As a matter of fact, it isn’t possible to be around the theater and not know of Wilbur. He is the hottest choreographer in town at the moment, the most fashionable … not only in ballet but also in musical comedies.
“Wilbur has been accused of being a Communist several times but since he has already been cleared by two boards I have every confidence in him. The United Veterans Committee, however, have not. They wired me yesterday that if we did his new ballet they would picket every performance until it was withdrawn.”
“That’s bad,” I said, frowning, making it sound worse than it was: after all I had a good job at stake. “May I see their telegram?” Mr. Washburn handed it to me and I read:
To Ivan Washburn Director Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet Company Metropolitan Opera House New York City: WE HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THAT JED WILBUR IS A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND THAT COMMA TO PROTECT OUR CHERISHED WAY OF LIFE AND THOSE IDEALS WHICH SO FINELY FORGED A NATION OUT OF THE WILDERNESS COMMA THE SUBVERSIVE WORK OF ARTISTS LIKE WILBUR SHOULD BE BANNED PERIOD SHOULD YOU DISREGARD THIS PLEA TO PROTECT OUR AMERICAN WAY WE WILL BE FORCED TO PICKET EVERY PERFORMANCE OF SAID WILBUR’S WORK PERIOD IN A TRUE DEMOCRACY THERE IS NO PLACE FOR A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION ON GREAT ISSUES CORDIALLY ABNER S. FLEER SECRETARY.
“A poignant composition,” I said.
“We’ve had a bad season so far this year. We’re the fifth ballet company to arrive in town this spring and even though we’re the original Russian ballet it’s not been easy to fill the Met. Wilbur is our ace-in-the-hole. It’s his first ballet for this company. It’s his first new work in over a year. Everyone is going to be on hand tonight … and nothing must go wrong. That will be your job, too, by the way: to publicize the première.”
“If I’d had a few weeks of preparation I could have got Life to cover the performance,” I said with that modesty which characterizes my profession.
Washburn was not impressed. “In any case, I’m told that you’ve got a good many contacts among the columnists. They’re the people who make opinion, for us at least. You’ve got to convince them that Wilbur is as pure as …”
“The driven snow,” I finished, master that I am of the worn cliché. “But is he?”
“Is he what?”
“Pure as … I mean is he a Communist?”
“How in the name of God should I know? He could be an anarchist for all I care. The only thing I’m interested in is a successful season. Besides, what has politics to do with Eclipse?”
“With what?”
“Eclipse is the name of the new ballet. I want you to go over to the Met and watch the dress rehearsal at two-thirty. You’ll be able to get some idea of the company then … meet the cast and so on. Meet Wilbur, too; he’s full of ideas on how to handle this … too damn many ideas.”
“Then I am officially employed?”
“As of this minute … for the rest of the season, two weeks altogether. If we’re still having trouble by the time we go on tour I’d like you to go with us as far as Chicago … if that’s agreeable.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
“Fine.” Mr. Washburn rose and so did I. “You’ll probably want to make some preparations between now and two-thirty. You can use the office next to mine … Miss Ruger will show you which one.”
“That will be perfect,” I said. We shooks hands solemnly.
I was halfway out the door when Mr. Washburn said, “I think I should warn you that ballet dancers are very temperamental people. Don’t take them too seriously. Their little quarrels are always a bit louder than life.” Which, in the light of what happened later, was something of an understatement.
2
Until my interview with Ivan Washburn I could take ballet or leave it alone and since in earlier days I was busy writing theater reviews for Milton Haddock of the New York Globe, I left it alone: besides, the music critic always handled ballet and what with doing Mr. Haddock’s work as well as my own I had very little time for that sort of thing, between eight-thirty and eleven anyway. Mr. Haddock, God knows, is a fine critic and a finer man and it is a fact that his reviews in the Globe were more respected than almost anyone else’s; they should have been since I wrote nearly all of them between 1947 and 1949 at which latter date I was separated from the Globe, as we used to say in the army. Not that I am implying Mr. Haddock, who was writing about the theater the year I was born, couldn’t do just as well as I did … he could, but there is a limit to the amount of work you can accomplish on Scotch whisky, taken without water or ice, directly from the bottle if he was in the privacy of his office or from a discreet prohibition flask if we were at the theater: he on the aisle fifth row from the stage and I just behind him in the sixth row, with instructions to poke the back of his neck if he snored too loud.
In a way, I had a perfect setup; Mr. Haddock was fond of me in a distant fatherly way (he often had a struggle recalling my name) and I was allowed all the pleasure of unedited authorship for he never changed a line of my reviews on those occasions when he read them at all. The absence of public credit never distressed me; after all I was Harvard class of 1946 (three years must be added to my age, however, during which time I served the nation on at least one very far-flung battlefront) and most of my classmates are still struggling along in the lower echelons of advertising firms or working anonymously for Time and Life and worrying about their integrity as liberals in a capitalistic organization. Anyway I knew a good thing when I saw it but after three years of being the real drama critic for the Globe I began to feel my oats and I made the mistake of asking for a raise at the wrong time: a fault in timing which must be ascribed to my extreme youth and natural arrogance, to quote Mr. Haddock quoting the managing editor, and since I had unfortunately phrased my request as an ultimatum I was forced to resign and Mr. Haddock looked very sorry and confused the day I left, saying: “All the best, Jim.” My name is Peter Cutler Sargeant II, but what the hell; I shook his hand and told him that everything I knew about writing I had learned from him … which pleased the old fool.
For over a year now I have been in public relations, with my own office, consisting of a middle-aged lady and a filing cabinet. The middle-aged lady, Miss Flynn, is my official conscience and she has been very good to me, reminding me that money is not everything and that Jesus is my redeemer. She is a Baptist and stern in the presence of moral weakness. I firmly believe that the main reason she consents to work for me is that I constitute a challenge to her better instincts, to that evangelical spirit which burns secretly but brightly in her bosom. She will save me yet. We have both accepted that fact. But in the meantime she helps me in my work, quite unaware that she is a party to that vast conspiracy to dupe the public in which I and my kind are eternally engaged.