Word: shawns
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...brilliant piece of journalism. The New Yorker's editors had practically stumbled into it. Originally, they planned to print Hersey's report in four articles. Then able, shy co-managing editor Bill Shawn, suggested running the whole thing at once. It took a while to convince Harold Ross, the New Yorker's terrible-tempered editor, a man given to juvenile and profane tantrums, and intuitive, often shrewd judgments. Ross is convinced that everyone on his staff but himself is in danger of going holy. One factor helped decide him: most of the magazine's regular departments...
...week's end the response to Shawn's hunch, and Hersey's restrained, first-rate reporting, was the biggest thing in New Yorker history. Book Critic Lewis Gannett called Hersey's piece "the best reporting . . . of this war." The New York Times, Herald Tribune and leftist PM applauded solemnly. Manhattan newsstands sold out early on publication day. Showman Lee Shubert tried to get the dramatic rights. In Princeton, N.J., the mayor asked all citizens to read the piece. Knopf planned to publish it as a book. A radio chain wanted Paul Robeson, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne...
From their 20-year-repertory, the pair danced the pastoral Tillers of the Soil, the romantic Josephine and Hippolyte. St. Denis soloed her Indian Rajput Nautch, and Shawn whirled through 540 gyrations in his Mevlevi Dervish. At the end, after a Brahms waltz, which showed her still-youthful white body shimmering under turquoise veiling, he carried her off stage, just as he had done many a time long ago. One sentimentalist in the audience whispered: "Maybe they'll go home together." It was sentiment, but not romance, that had brought Ruth St. Denis from California to help Shawn raise...
Rhythms for Hymns. Ruth St. Denis was a Belasco dancer in 1902 when she saw a figure of the Egyptian goddess Isis in a cigar-store window, and turned to oriental dancing. In 1914 she married Ted Shawn, a Methodist divinity student. They explored native American dancing, trained such successors as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman...
Then St. Denis turned mystic, dreamed vaguely of a Christian dance church in which body rhythms would replace orthodox hymns and sermons. Shawn was more interested in Indian lore and athletic male dancers. They disbanded their Denishawn partnership. "Ted and I are not divorced," she said, "only esthetically separated. I am full of temples and he is full of boy ballets...