Lydia Lopokova (born Lidia Vasilyevna Lopukhova) was a Russian ballerina during the early 20th century. Her father, who was born a genuine 'serf', worked as the chief usher at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, so naturally the young Lydia wanted to be a dancer (as did her siblings). Lydia trained at the Imperial Ballet School, where she became a star pupil and she was chosen to join the Ballets Russes, on their European tour in 1910. Diaghilev knocked a year off her age and promoted her as a child star!
Whilst on the tour she accepted an American offer of ₤16,000 per month and after the summer tour left for the United States, where she remained for six years, enjoying tremendous success and legally changing her name to Lopokova in April 1914 ... apparently she had realised that she was never going to be a to dancer in Russia where the competition was fierce, and she wasn't really tall enough.
In America she was basically promoted as a novelty act on Broadway, and she eventually rejoined Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and her former partner Vaslav Nijinsky, in 1916 when they toured the USA, and later again in London. In 1921 she starred in a lavish London production of 'The Sleeping Beauty' staged by Diaghilev, in which she danced as both the Lilac Fairy and Princess Aurora. She then stayed in the UK working in various dance / ballet related activities. In 1933 she danced her last ballet role, as Swanilda in Coppélia, for the new Vic-Wells Ballet.
As well as being involved in English ballet, she appeared on the stage in London and Cambridge from 1928, and was a BBC presenter as well as appearing in a number of acting roles; she read "The Red Shoes" for a BBC broadcast in 1935 and later reprised it for a BBC television broadcast of the ballet. After her husbands death in 1946 she largely disappeared from public view (apart from the aforementioned broadcasts) and lived in Sussex until her death in 1981, aged 88. As usual its her 'private life' that provides the interest for this thread
While she was first in New York, she became '
engaged to be married' to the New York Morning Telegraph sportswriter Heywood Broun. In 1916 their engagement was broken off ... either by her or him depending on which version you believe. According to Fred Lieb, another sportswriter and a friend of Broun's at the time, Broun "
caught the enchanting Lydia Lapopka in the lap, so to speak, of her Russian director. ... [Broun] walked east on one street, knocking over every garbage and trash can he passed. Then he walked west on the street giving it the same treatment. Just as he was getting really warmed up to the sport he ran into the hands of the law. Heywood spent the night in the hoosegow [jail] before friends bailed him out the next morning." ... i.e. she was caught '
In flagrante delicto' with another man, cowboy style
Actually, as Diaghilev's interests were very much the same as hers, boys, she wouldn't have been caught "in the lap so to speak" of "her Russian director," but much more likely that of the company's Italian business manager, Randolfo Barrocchi, to whom she was soon married to after this scandal. And again as usual, the shifty business manager was a "
'glossy man of the world', who very quickly
stole all her money and earnings, but again as usual for many of our girls, he also turned out to be a
bigamist 
Once she had realised the enormity of her mistake, she embarked on a wartime (
it was on a European tour), on-off
love affair with the composer Stravinsky as
his mistress, he was also 'married' at the time.
In 1919 she was in London when her marriage to Barrocchi broke down, and she 'disappeared' for a time (allegedly with a 'white' Russian general), as she had done once before in America. She then reappeared in 1921 when she was in 'The Sleeping Beauty', where she came to the attention of the economist John Maynard Keynes. According to contemporary reports he "
sat every night in the stalls, enchanted by Lydia as the Lilac Fairy casting spells over the cradle", and the two soon
became lovers, and they were married in 1925 (obviously once her 'divorce' from Barrocchi had been obtained
). What makes this marriage interesting is that Keynes had been
swinging the same way as Diaghilev for years, in particular with the 'bisexual' painter Duncan Grant. "
Until I see him carrying on with L," Grant wrote to Vanessa Bell, "
I must give up trying to imagine what happens - it beggars my fancy" ... Those 'public schoolboy' educated Oxbridge Dons were all into '
bum, buggery and the lash' in those days. They remained married until Keynes death in 1947.
Trivia:
- All the Lopukhov children became ballet dancers
- Heywood Broun, later a member of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table coterie.
- She became a friend of Picasso, who drew her many times.
- Lopokova is represented as Terpsichore, the muse of dancing, in 'The Awakening of the Muses', a mosaic at the National Gallery, London, laid by Boris Anrep in 1933.
- She maintained friendships with many members of London's cultural elite of the time, including T. S. Eliot and H.G. Wells.
- She became Baroness Keynes when her husband was ennobled in 1942
Pictures:
Lopokova and JM Keynes
