I most enjoy interviewing women about their girlhoods, because it is before they learn that women don’t do this, that and the other thing that their imaginations fly and they search eagerly for the direction that their lives will take. Girls are hungry for achievement, they ache for recognition. That is why, with their parents urging them on and fed by praise from their teachers, they do so well in elementary school until puberty arrives and the messages get reversed. I have never interviewed a woman who did not, at some point in her girlhood, entertain a powerful desire to be something that she learned women couldn’t be.
     Beatrice Hillhouse was a little girl with big aspirations. (Her memory of being inspired by the great Russian ballerina Pavlova appeared in the June issue.) The seeds of her ambition were her good health and vitality, nurtured in a home where both parents worked at demanding careers. Her mother was a driven woman who had already made herself into something women couldn’t be. She wanted to go to college, and she graduated with honors. She got a job on a newspaper, and she was able on her own merits to rise from the society desk (where the new women journalists were parked) to the position of music critic, a rarified position for any woman in that period.
     The first wave of feminism reached its apex during Beatrice’s childhood. She was ten years old when women won the right to vote, old enough to have been conscious of the feverish excitement and the animosity in the air. I can only imagine and wonder at the pent up energy, the sublimated and repressed ambition that must have been released among women of all ages by that momentous victory in 1919. At the same time, women's changing status meant that we had to learn how to express ambition beyond the quest for a husband, a skill most are still struggling to master. Women's fledgling efforts at self-expression instead of self-sacrifice resulted in much painful conflict that persisted throughout the century, not only between the genders but between the generations. The mother-daughter relationship was profoundly stressed; mothers did not really know how to raise daughters who could take advantage of new freedoms; daughters, on a scale greater than at any previous time in history, set out to build lives that were different from anything their mothers had known.
     In the 17th century the belief that the earth was the center of the universe collapsed. In the 18th century, the concept of the divine right of kings was shattered. The 20th Century may be the last to accept the notion that women are inferior to men. Certainly it will be known as the century when women challenged the old “rules” about their “place,” and began the arduous and courageous process of self-redefinition.

BEATRICE HILLHOUSE
My Russian Chapter

I can date the beginning of my ambition to be a dancer from the first time I saw the great Russian ballerina, Pavlova, dance; I was six years old.
     Ballet has become one of this country’s dominant art forms, but when I was young it was just beginning to arouse and attract the attention of the American public. My mother was not interested in my desire to become a dancer. No, not at all. She had wanted to be a singer, but wasn’t able to realize her dream, and I was the one selected to carry forth her ambitions. She wanted me to become a singer, and I was given voice and piano lessons. I took dance lessons too, but in my mother’s mind these were important only as part of my musical education. To pursue dancing seriously I had to fight, and this struggle with my mother made for a lot of pain and a lot of disorganization and a lot of turmoil in my childhood. Eventually, after lots and lots of battles, I won, and I was going to New York to study and to pursue a career in dance.
     My mother was the music critic for the Cincinnati Enquirer. Father was the drama critic for the Times Star. They were both very involved in the cultural life of the city. They were members of the McDowell Society. Two or three times a year the members would get together at our house after the symphony for a party. People would be nicely dressed, lovely food was served, and somebody would, impromptu, play the piano or sing or perform. Usually the soloist who was featured at the concert would be there as a guest, and the party and the music would go on until the early hours of the morning. I can remember coming down the long flight of stairs from the second floor, dressed in my nightgown, and sitting on the steps and listening to the music until somebody would notice me and say, “What are you doing down here! You should have been asleep a long time ago! Go on back to bed.” These evenings helped shape my personality, building a love of music and the performing arts.
     A number of great entertainers and performers came to perform in Cincinnati in the nineteen twenties and thirties. One company in particular that my family always looked forward to was the Slovene-Souris, a vaudeville company whose performers were all Russian emigrés. They were very popular and played in France, Germany and Canada, as well as the United States. Their program consisted of singing, dancing, comedy sketches, Cossack numbers and acrobatics, but was not at all like an American vaudeville show.
     When my parents finally agreed that I pursue a career in dance, my father, through his newspaper connections, made contact with Madam Tatiana Balieva. Madame was the widow of Sergei Balieff, the founder, director and master of ceremonies of the Slovene-Souris. She agreed to accept me as a boarder while I continued my studies in ballet. I was eighteen or nineteen when I arrived in New York to live with Madam Balieva. My younger sister came with me. Mother brought both of us; we drove.
     In Cincinnati I had grown up in a big, old, country house that had been built by my grandfather, a Victorian mansion full of cubbyholes, with a great big attic. Madam Balieva’s studio-apartment was a loft on the third floor of a building on East 54th Street near Sixth Avenue. The ground floor housed a garage. The second floor was the quarters of a harp factory which became one of my delights in this building’s unusual occupancy. The factory was owned by two brothers who both made and repaired harps. A harp is a beautiful instrument to look at as well as to listen to. Musicians who came to buy or claim their instruments would often play them, and I would be enthralled by performances of music by Ravel, Debussy and other French composers who had written for that instrument.
     Madam Balieva’s loft was big. On the walls of the main room were six large posters, each one six feet long by four feet wide, depicting scenes from the acts of the Slovene-Souris. The posters were by a noted Russian artist, Serge Soudekine, and very valuable, and they gave the apartment a unique and arresting atmosphere. Everything else in the loft was painted blue, even the hot water tank. The kitchen, bath and Madam’s bedroom were at the rear, as were two very small rooms which she rented out. Each of these was just big enough for a single bed, dresser, closet and chair. It was into one of these tiny rooms that I moved.
     Madam’s loft was quite different from the home I had grown up in, but I never felt the least uncomfortable. My parents entertained many European people. I was used to dynamic and ambitious women because my mother was one. So life with Madame Balieva wasn’t the cultural shock it might have been had my childhood been more provincial. I kind of fell right in with it.
     Once a month Madam held open house. During those evenings most of the Russian ex-patriots who lived in New York came to visit. The guests brought Russian goodies. Vodka was plentiful. Madam’s gastronomic contribution to these gatherings was a piroque, a kind of meat pie that consisted of a special dough made from three equal parts of butter, flour and cottage cheese rolled out, filled with sauteed ground beef mixed with onion, hard cooked eggs and dill. It was fitted into a large rectangular pan, and a fresh sprig of dill was laid under the top crust. It was delicious, and was consumed by the guests almost as soon as it was placed on the table.
     In one corner of the loft was an upright piano, and guests who had any musical training soon found their way to the instrument and the evening would continue with some very good performances of the classics. As the evening wore on, tears began to flow, influenced by the vodka. These people were educated, sensitive, thinking adults who had barely survived the Russian Revolution. They had been forced to flee their country, their lives had been completely disrupted, they had lost their professions, their families, their environments. They were utterly baffled by the events that had wrenched them from their homeland, and many were in deep and bitter pain over what they had lost.
     I spoke no Russian, but there was a feeling of community in which I felt very comfortable. I would pack up my little practice costumes in my little suitcase and go off to dancing class, and I’d come back. This was the milieu that I lived in as I continued my studies in dance.
     For three years I lived in that little blue room. I might have stayed longer, only Madame got sick and had to give up the loft. My sister and I took a small apartment, and from there I made the rounds of the casting offices, and I continued going to dancing school.
     My career as a professional dancer was brief and was brought to a close by an accident to my knee while doing stretching exercises at the bar. For a time I was desolate and unhappy, but I carried on. I took a secretarial course and found a job with a publishing house, Appleton-Century-Crofts, now defunct. Today I look back on those years with Madame Balieva with a sweet nostalgia. Living with these people added a cosmopolitan element to my personality; I have never felt a sense of estrangement from people because they come from a different culture, because they look different, or because they speak a different language. I feel quite at ease with and I enjoy people whose customs are different from mine. Dance, music, the performing arts are just as important to me now as ever; that love doesn’t diminish with time.
     Every morning, Monday through Friday at nine-thirty, I would leave Madame’s all-blue loft and go to study with Mr. Vecheslav Sivoboda. His dance studio on East 57th Street near Sixth Avenue was a large room with mirrors, bars and a small grand piano. My class was held from ten o'clock until eleven-thirty. We were about twenty students. Mr. Sivoboda and his wife, Maria Yureva, were expatriated Russians. As former members of the Moscow Ballet, they were consummate artists. When Mr. Sivoboda demonstrated a step or combination, we, his students, were held spellbound by the technique, the control, the discipline, the grace, the style, the movement which flowed from one gesture to another and conveyed feeling.
     The subtle turn of a head.
     The lift of an arm.
     As students, we made valiant efforts to reproduce the master’s movements.
     Somehow artistry emerges from within.
     What is perceived?
     What is communicated?
     What is meaning?
     What is memory?
     A shadow? A sigh? A fragrance?
     A residue is left that lingers and, though indefinable, is somehow enriching.
     Dancing.

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