A successful breaking-in season was given at the Alhambra Theatre, in London’s Leicester Square. While this was in progress, we set about at the most necessary and vastly important business of trying to build a public for ballet in America, for this is a ballet impresario’s first job. That original publicity campaign was, in its way, history-making. It took a considerable bit of organizing. No field was overlooked. In addition to spreading the gospel of ballet, there was a Sponsors’ Committee, headed by the Grand Duchess Marie and Otto H. Kahn. Prince Serge Obolensky was an ever-present source of help. It was a chilly and fairly raw December morning in 1933 when I clambered aboard the cutter at the Battery, to go down the Bay to board the ship at Quarantine. It is a morning I shall not soon forget. I was in ballet up to my neck; and I loved it. There have been days and nights in the succeeding two decades when I have seriously played with the notion of what life might have been like if I had not gone aboard (and overboard) that December morning. I took with me the traditional Russian welcome: a tray of bread, wrapped in a white linen serviette, a little bowl of salt, which I offered to de Basil. I was careful to see that the reporters and camera men were in place when I did it. De Basil’s poker-face actually smiled as I handed him the tray, uncovered the bread, poured the salt. But only for a moment. A Russian word in greeting, and then there was an immediate demand from him to see the theatre. We were on our way. Driving uptown to the St. James Theatre, the arguments commenced. There was the matter of the programme. There was the matter of the size of de Basil’s name; the question of the relative size of the artists’ names; the type-face; the order in which they should be listed; what was to become the everlasting arguments over repertoire and casting. But I was in it, now. I believed in the “star” system--not because I believe the system to be a perfect one, by any means, but because the American public, which had been without any major ballet company for eight years, and which had had practically no ballet activity, had to be attracted and arrested by something more than an unknown and heretofore unheard-of company and the photograph of a not particularly photogenic ex-Cossack.