Ballet dates from the lace-pants centuries, when kings and nobles were its patrons. Modern balletomanes, a tribe with a better-than-average quota of lacy characters, could probably think of likelier patrons of the ballet than Big Business—especially such a big business as Ford Motor Co. Yet at the New York World's Fair, Ford became the ballet's first industrial patron by launching a 17-minute production called A Thousand Times Neigh. A free show, performed twelve times a day in a plushy new $500,000 theatre in the Ford building, the ballet is done (in shifts) by 42 dancers recruited from the American Ballet...
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