BALLET & THE KGB

I wrote three stories about the KGB. The one called KGB And The Cellist is about the great cello virtuoso, Mstisav Rostropovich. It tells of his life long battle with the KGB, a battle that he loved because even a cello was something even the KGB took second place to in the Soviet Union.

My personal contact with him took place when I was in charge of the stage at Northrop at the U of MN, the home also of the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra. Rostropovich spent a week with the Orchestra, a week of great Cello and laughs as he made fun of his KGB body guards.

The second was KGB And The Zamboni as told to me by Morrie Chaflan, owner and originator of the numerous Holiday On Ice productions that toured around the world. This hilarious story is told in Morrie’s words. Morrie was a great story teller. It describes how the Soviets got their first Zamboni ice rink shaver with a lot of help from the KGB. A laugh a line. And certainly one of my most popular and commented on blog posts.

There’s more of Morrie and his entrepreneurship that included buying and selling the Mpls Lakers, now the LA Lakers basketball team among other things, in the post ON ICE III.

My third KGB story was a personal encounter with a KGB agent, a woman doing double duty, as an agent and a wardrobe mistress with the touring Kiev Ballet. But alas, Word Press stepped in and the original was lost. Thus Kiev Ballet and the KGB is my attempt to bring it back to life.

KIEV BALLET AND THE KGB

Northrop found it’s greatest replacement for the Met Opera when the Met stopped touring, namely great dance, both modern and classical, US and other countries, including the great troops from Russia like the Kiev Ballet.

Jim Mc worked the in as a local union hand. Jim Mc was a good worker with a fair understanding of our end of the business. His regular job was that of a U of MN cop. When he knew we would be pressed for hands on a big show coming up, he got in touch with me and worked out his cop schedule so he could work as a hand.

If Jim Mc had a fault it was he was a talker. He talked with the same fervor as a gum chewer chews gum.

I had put him hauling the personal trunks and suitcases of the ballerinas in the dressing rooms on the second floor. A hand or two would boost the personals up to the overhang. Jim Mc would hoist it up the last bit and then bring it to the correct room. I had told Jim to keep any necessary conversation with ballerina to a minimum. But a minimum to Jim exceeded the maximum to me, by far.

I was called into Eddie Drakes’ office. The wardrobe mistress had lodged a complaint concerning Jim Mc talking with the ballerina. She demanded Jim Mc be fired at once and thrown out of the theater, never to return to work the Kiev. When I walked into the office, she stopped screaming at Eddie and turned her wrath on me. That brought a smile to Eddy’s face and he raised his ever present stein filled with a little water and a lot of vodka in a salute to me. She didn’t see it.

I was amazed. Not only did this woman facing me remind me of Rosa Klebb, main antagonist of James Bond, in the movie, From Russia With Love,by her words and actions, she even resembled the actress, Lotta Lenya, who played the part. I guess Rosa’sorganization, in From Russia, SMERSH shared a great deal with her organization in reality, the KGB. I kept glancing down at her shoes, praying killing spikes would not pop out of the front of them.

Oh, I know she was head of wardrobe for the ballerinas. But a dollar to a doughnut, her main task was that of a KGB agent. Russian ballet stars were defecting and ending up in the US, in great numbers, ever since Rudolf Nureyev started the exodus by defecting in the Paris airport in 1961. Mikhail Baryshnikov, the biggest Soviet ballet star since Nureyev, defected from the Bolshoi while in Toronto in 1974. He danced with the Canadian Ballet for a year and then migrated to the US where he was the star of the American Ballet Theater, ABT for years. Alexander Godunov, defected from the Bolshoi during a press conference in New York in 1979. And many lesser lights throughout that period.

I shudder to think what happened to those KGB agents when a defection happened under their watch. If they were lucky, they were shot. If they were unlucky, they ended up in a gulag.

(Baryshnikov lived with Jessica Lange, the American actress and they had a daughter, Aleksandra.

Lange, during this time, lived in Stillwater, Minnesota, and I saw both of them several times while shopping, and many times in later years, when he brought his White Oak Dance project to Minneapolis. His daughter, who lived in Minneapolis always visited with him at the theater. By then he could talk excellent English. He was always a pleasure to work with.)

But I digress. ‘Rosa Klebb’, I was never introduced to her so I had no idea of the name she was going under as wardrobe mistress, demanded I fire Jim Mc at once. I told her no way. He finishes the call. I laughed in her face when she accused Jim of trying to encouraged the dancer to defect. I pointed out the dancer was only a member of the chorus line and a long in the tooth member at that. Hell, she wouldn’t even qualify to join the Dinky Town Dancers. And dance instructors were a dime dozen here in the Twin Cities. Now if she plays her cards right, who knows, she might be placed in the Kiev wardrobe department.

Next Rosa suggested, perhaps he is trying to ‘hook up’ with her. I didn’t feel up to telling her that Jim Mc and his wife were happily married with a year old daughter, only to have her argue that don’t mean he had no bad intentions as regards the dancer. To prove her point she might say something like she knows men, and I would find myself laughing in her Lotta Lenya face.

I lied and told her that Jim was gay. And I thought that she was going beyond her duties by supervising the morality of the dancers.

Who supervises the supervisor?’ I asked. ‘So, say she did defect, would they transfer you to the KGB office in northern Siberia?’

She gave me a if-looks-could-kill stare and proclaimed she did not understand what I was saying. I glanced down at her shoes.

I took a risk, but the opportunity was there and I had it up to here with this woman. ‘Do you know what the KGB and a bicycle seat have in common?’ I paused and finally answered my question, ‘Because they they both make my ass tired.’

At this point Eddie Drake pulled the plug. ‘Okay. Okay.’ He held up his vodka bottle and offered a drink to Rosa, while apologizing because it probably wasn’t as good as she was use to.

She briskly told Eddie, she did not drink when she is working. ‘Well, when I’m working and a situation like this comes up, I need a drink,’ Eddie said, ‘And I have to get back to what I an paid to do. So take your BS out of my office! Please!’

‘Tell you what, Ma’am’, I said to her as we were walking out of the office, ‘ Jim Mc finishes out the day, but he won’t work any of the shows or the out. That satisfied Rosa, who did not know Jim couldn’t work show or the out. His real job as a U of MN cop didn’t let him. And if she looked carefully during the out, she might recognize the cop directing traffic around the auditorium so the semis could get out and on the road.

Next stop, second floor to chat with Jim Mc. ‘Just what in the world were you and that dancer talking about in the first place?’

‘The weather,’ Jim said. ‘We were comparing winters in Minnesota to winters in Kiev.’

I never bothered to share this harmless revelation with Rosa, who was constantly staring at me the entire week. It was evident that in her mind she had picked out a hut in Siberia that she would like to send me. Where the winters there surpassed winters in both Minnesota and Kiev…and lasted all year long.

And so wraps up

The Ballet & the KGB

and my dealings

with the later