(4 of 5)
Odd, but M. Balieff is not a Russian at all. He was born in Erzerum, Armenia, of a merchant family which held up their hard worked hands in horror when young Nikita divulged a yearning for the stage. Nikita shrugged his not, in those days, so very hardworked shoulders, deserted the family, who promptly cast him off, and was presently heard knocking at the stage door of the great Art Theatre in Moscow. He got a job.
"All the directors of the theatre thought I was talent full," he relates, "but during the ten years of my service in Moscow Art Theatre from the period thousand nine hundred six till thousand nine hundred sixteen they gave me no one but one speaking part. All other parts were dumb."
It has been said a man is a genius in the ratio that he possesses woman's qualities (emotion, perception, tenderness, ruthlessness). Genius Balieff possessed one woman's quality, and it finally drove him to desert the Moscow Art. He craved to talk. To satisfy this craving he formed his own theatre; in its early days a sort of music hall cafe, and called it The Bat. "When I make the theatre in a cellar, as I go in one day. . . one bat was flying out and sat on my hat."
Moscow approved The Bat. The Tsar saw the show; invited M. Balieff to dinner. Came 1917 and revolution. In 1919 Nikita Balieff was jailed because he "was not consented with their views on poltique." He pointed his fingernails and skulking behind a long square beard escaped to Georgia (southern Russia) as a Persian.
Soon he turned up in Paris with 20,000 francs, hired the Femina Theatre, and put on a vaudeville with Russian emigres, only three of whom were professional performers. The first attempt was creaky but a "moral success"; its possibilities were recognized by Charles Cochran, London producer. Under Mr. Cochran's management M. Balieff took the troupe to London. Shortly afterward "that stupid man" appeared, M. Balieff and his vaudeville opened in Manhattan and played 65 consecutive weeks; toured; became a U. S. institution.
Nikita Balieff is bored with one thing—"The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers." Their famed mechanical march and the tune that went with it has been played, imitated, repeated over most of the civilized world. The idea came from a tradition of the autocracy of Tsar Paul I. Absentminded, the Tsar walked off the parade ground one afternoon, forgetting to give the command to halt. Because he was so cruel, nobody dared remind him. The soldiers went marching on to somewhere in Siberia before he remembered and ordered them to return. They arrived with beards. The Parade based on this legend is the most widely known of the Chauve Souris repertory.
People ask whether M. Balieff in private really speaks as broken English as he does for public consumption. He does not. But his dialect has become so completely a stock in trade that he uses it in conversation and correspondence. Says he:
"One was in Glasgow. I was coming to a pharmacy, and the pharmacist said to me: 'Mr. Balieff, I was yesterday at your show, but I cannot understand in what language you spoke, and I think if you could speak English well you would earn very big money.'
"I answered him: 'And you sir, are you a rich man?'