by Lucy Moore
Diaghilev left in early May with Massine and Grigoriev. Vaslav would spend the summer in the US and most of the rest of the company – minus Diaghilev, Massine, Grigoriev and the dancers trapped in war-torn Russia, including Bronia, Karsavina and Fokine – would regroup to begin their New York season and fifty-two-city tour of the United States in September, while Diaghilev would maintain a small experimental troupe in Europe.
At first New York was as exciting and new as Paris had been in 1909. Late at night Vaslav and Romola would sneak out to soda fountains for ice-creams, sitting on high stools at the counter, and he loved jazz, tapping out what he had heard with his hands and feet. Romola blossomed: living in New York as the wife of a feted artist was just what she had always believed life should be. But her desire for money, luxury and social success blinded her to the fact that her worldly goals ‘harmed rather than abetted her husband’. Little by little the intimacy they had created and relied upon in Budapest began to wear away.
As soon as they were settled, Vaslav began working on Till Eulenspeigel and Mephisto Valse, which he planned to premiere that autumn. The young artist he chose to create Till’s sets and costumes, Robert Edmond Jones, left an evocative account of working with Nijinsky over the summer of 1916. They met for the first time in a darkened New York drawing room on a stifling afternoon. Romola entered first, ‘extremely pretty’ and stylishly dressed in black. Vaslav followed, small and stocky, with a delicate, precise dancer’s walk. ‘He is very nervous. His eyes are troubled. He looks eager, anxious, excessively intelligent. He seems tired, bored, excited, all at once.’ His manner was direct and simple, but when he smiled – which was not often, and never for long – his smile was dazzling.
‘I like him at once … I realise at once that I am in the presence of a genius.’ What Jones meant by this was, he said, ‘a continual preoccupation with standards of excellence so high that they are really not of this world … incredible perfections’. He was struck, too, by Vaslav’s ‘extraordinary nervous energy … an impression of something too eager, too brilliant, a quickening of the nerves, a nature wracked to dislocation by a merciless creative urge’. It may have been hindsight but he also noticed an atmosphere of something like oppression that Vaslav carried with him.
Nijinsky, Romola and Kyra decamped to Bar Harbor, Maine, with Jones in their wake. ‘I am quartered in a huge old-fashioned summer hotel, all piazzas and towers, with curving driveways and mammoth beds of angry red cannas on the lawns. Nijinsky lives there, too, with his pretty wife – always a little souffrante from the heat – and an enchanting baby girl with oblique Mongolian eyes like her father’s. He practises long and hard during the day with his accompanist in the lovely little Greek temple set among the pines by the shore of the bay. In the evenings we work together until far into the night.’ As they created Till, Jones was astonished and delighted by Vaslav’s ‘energy, his ardour, his daring, his blazing imagination, by turns fantastic, gorgeous, grotesque’ and by his ability to change in an instant from a wide-eyed, mischievous child to a demonic figure to a jeering clown to a tender, imploring lover.
He was constantly reminded what a surreal world Nijinsky inhabited. One afternoon they were invited to a club for a swim. Vaslav and Jones were dressing in adjacent cabanas after swimming when Jones answered a tap at his door. A tall man, exquisitely dressed in pearl-grey, with a silvery, scented moustache, was standing there. Without saying anything, he took a pearl-grey leather case from his pocket and opened it, holding it out to Jones. A tangle of cabochon rubies, emeralds, black pearls and diamonds lay glittering in the sunlight on a bed of pearl-grey velvet. Jones heard Nijinsky putting on his shoes next door and burst out laughing at the situation in which he found himself. The pearl-grey stranger closed his case and silently walked away.
This strange idyll came to an end when they returned to New York at the beginning of September. The conductor Pierre Monteux met them there and found everyone in the company on edge. Vaslav, in particular, was ‘suspicious of everyone and hostile’. Anatole Bourman, who had called Nijinsky ‘universally loved despite the occasional fits of temperament which marked his genius’ when he left the Ballet in 1913, said that in New York three years later he was conceited, ‘pompous [and] … totally devoid of sincerity or naturalness’. Diaghilev had known how to manage Nijinsky, commented Lydia Lopokova, who danced opposite him during this period, and ‘when he came on stage he was a god to all of us, but on tour he was rather tiresome’. She and Vaslav never gelled as a partnership and their offstage relationship remained uneasy.
The Met’s young press agent, Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew, who would go on to become a public relations legend), marvelled at the way the company lived and worked: ‘I had never imagined that the interpersonal relations of the members of a group could be so involved and complex, full of medieval intrigue, illicit love, misdirected passion and aggression.’
Lydia Lopokova was just one of the dancers who had joined the Ballet Russes for this tour. Dmitry Kostrovsky had been in the Bolshoy’s corps de ballet in Moscow with Massine. Kostrovsky was an ardent disciple of Tolstoy; Romola often noticed him preaching to the other dancers Tolstoy’s rational gospel of vegetarianism and pacifism. Along with his friend from the Bolshoy, Nicholas Zverev,* who had been a member of the company since 1913, he focused on Vaslav at once. Vaslav, whose hunger for a spiritual life was not answered by the mundanity of his work – all the art having been removed by the need to administrate – nor by his sophisticated, selfish wife, responded eagerly.
Lydia Sokolova said Vaslav made no effort to run the company at all: he didn’t organise the rehearsals properly, so no one knew what was going on from day to day, and he wouldn’t turn up for anything unless he was fetched. Romola’s account of the period in her 1932 biography of her husband, in which she describes him as the innocent victim of malign circumstance, was, according to Sokolova, pure fiction. ‘She puts into his mouth long speeches which would have taken him a whole week to say, as he always spoke in monosyllables. Reading her descriptions, one would think that poor Nijinsky conversed and behaved as a normal person, which was quite untrue.’ The only time Vaslav was not lost for words, apparently, was when he was angry.
Till Eulenspeigel was proving a challenge. Monteux, who had fought in the trenches, refused to conduct music by a living German, so another conductor had to be found. When Vaslav first saw Jones’s finished sets, he was furious. They were not as he had imagined them – ‘not high enough to give the effect of crazy exaggeration the maestro had visualised’. He summoned Jones to the theatre in a fury and screamed at him in Russian and broken French, before beginning a rehearsal in which he fell and sprained an ankle with a week to go before opening. ‘Your scenery is so bad that when our maestro saw it he fell down,’ the dancers chorused bleakly to Jones. When Jones visited Nijinsky at the Biltmore Hotel, he found him in bed, ‘drenched in pathos, sad as a dying prince out of a drama by Maeterlinck’, but still quite capable of haranguing and insulting him.
Mephisto Valse had to be abandoned, there wasn’t enough time to finish Till even though its premiere was postponed for a week, and the season had to open without Nijinsky dancing. After the abuse Nijinsky had hurled his way, Jones remembered standing with him hand in hand for curtain call after curtain call on Till’s triumphant first night, with Nijinsky smiling and saying how happy he was, but privately Nijinsky was dissatisfied with the ballet. Despite working so hard, needing the money for his new life, Till ended up ‘taken out of the oven too soon’. All the same, the American critics acclaimed it a masterpiece.
What we know of Till and Mephisto Valse suggests that Vaslav was retreating ‘from the front lines of experiment represented by Sacre’. His return to a style of ballet that in theme and setting was more like Petrushka than any of his own ballets, and to which dancing as audiences would recognise it was central once again, implies that he may have come to agree with Osbert Sitwell that Sacre was ‘the most magnificent and
living of dead ends’.
By late December, halfway through their four-month tour, they had reached the West Coast, playing to half-empty theatres, and Vaslav was desperate, unable to pay the dancers and musicians and begging Diaghilev by telegram to come to America or send him Grigoriev. The Met, sponsoring the tour, would eventually lose $250,000 and Diaghilev was paid $75,000 less than he had been anticipating. The audiences of Wichita, Spokane and Tallahassee were not ready for the Ballets Russes; one critic wrote of having to suppress his urge to leap on stage and thrash the repulsive ‘negro who makes love to the princess’ in Schéhérazade.
In Los Angeles, though, Vaslav found an admirer: Charlie Chaplin. He described Nijinsky as ‘a serious man, beautiful looking, with high cheekbones and sad eyes, who gave the impression of a monk in civilian clothes … The moment he appeared [on stage] I was electrified,’ wrote Chaplin. ‘I have seen few geniuses in this world, and Nijinsky was one of them. He was hypnotic, god-like, his sombreness suggesting moods of other worlds; every movement was poetry, every leap was a flight into strange fancy.’ He was most impressed by Faune (in fact, three years later it would inspire a scene in Sunnyside): ‘The mystic world he created, the tragic unseen lurking in the shadows of pastoral loveliness as he moved through its mystery, a god of passionate sadness – all this he conveyed in a few simple gestures without apparent effort.’
Vaslav took to Chaplin, inviting him into his dressing room to watch him make up – a privilege he never accorded his wife – and making gauche attempts at conversation. Chaplin invited him to come and watch him filming The Cure in a Hollywood that was still little more than a desert dotted with pepper trees and wooden shacks. For three days Vaslav sat on set, never smiling, looking sadder and sadder, as Chaplin created sequence after sequence of marvellously funny slapstick comedy. At the end of each day he would compliment Chaplin warmly on his ‘balletique’ comedy.
Despite his unwillingness to perform in music halls, Nijinsky had never looked down on popular entertainers. When asked in 1911 what was his favourite thing in London, he had unhesitatingly replied ‘Little Tich’ (Harry Relph), the music-hall comic whose most celebrated piece was a dance in which he wore twenty-eight-inch-long boots. Whenever he performed, Vaslav and Diaghilev watched utterly spellbound: Littler, as Vaslav called him, was, ‘un très grand artiste’.
Chaplin and Nijinsky seem to have responded to something similar in one another – it is not hard to imagine the critics Gilbert Seldes or Edmund Wilson describing Chaplin as ‘a god of passionate sadness’ and Ottoline Morrell thought the two men shared a quality of ‘intense poignancy’. Both had grown up in the circus; both could look anonymous in person, but had a highly recognisable stage or screen persona by which their audiences became obsessed; both used their bodies as their primary vehicle for communication, expressing complex emotions and vulnerability with an extraordinary economy of gesture. For Morrell, although Nijinsky was ‘far more impersonal than Chaplin, freer from temperament and freer from himself’, what they shared was an ‘intensity of passion and absorption in the ideas they express’.
In some ways Nijinsky had as much in common with the movie stars of 1910s and 1920s Hollywood as with the modernist artists by whom he was surrounded in Europe. The icons of the era – Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Valentino, Jack Dempsey and many others – tended to come from impoverished backgrounds and were often immigrants, with a position in American society not unlike that of Poles in Russia. They were possessed of driving ambition, but many found it hard to learn to live with their fame, adulation and newfound riches – drugs and insanity claimed more than their fair share. Nijinsky’s story, like so many of these lives, was helping to create the narrative for what would become an established trajectory of twentieth-century celebrity.
They saw in the New Year for 1917 in San Francisco. Lydia Lopokova’s first husband, who claimed to be clairvoyant, told everyone’s fortune. For Romola he predicted health and a long life, but in five years’ time a separation from Vaslav: ‘I see a divorce, but not exactly.’ Romola was shaken, but laughed it off.
Then he looked at Vaslav’s palm and, as if he had been hit, staggered back, covering his hands with his own. ‘I don’t know, I can’t say … sorry, it is strange …’
‘Am I going to die? Come on, say it.’
‘No, no, certainly not, but … but this is worse … worse.’
As the tour went on, Kostrovsky and Zverev’s hold over Nijinsky grew stronger. Romola regularly came upon the leeches, as she called them, in her and Vaslav’s train compartment, reading and talking in Russian (which she could not understand) for hours. Vaslav was becoming ever more silent and morose, contemplating giving up dancing altogether and living on the land in Russia as a kind of Tolstoyan peasant-monk. He began wearing rough cotton shirts and refusing to eat meat.
Even in their worst days in Budapest, or during the unhappiest moments of their dispute with Diaghilev, Romola had not seen him so withdrawn. When she tried to discourage them, Zverev reacted with open hostility. The other members of the company called him Rasputin because he was so manipulative, suggesting to Nijinsky that he run the Ballet in a more democratic way by allowing less experienced dancers to perform the central roles. In practice this meant Zverev dancing the part of the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade while Nijinsky, unrecognised, played the Eunuch; the audiences, who had paid to see Nijinsky, were not impressed by seeing Zverev in his roles.
Finally Romola snapped. She told Vaslav that he had to choose between them and her and that, while he thought about it, she would go back to New York, where Kyra had been living with a nanny. Six weeks later, when the company reached New York, Vaslav was wearing his silk shirts again and eating normal food, though he was lost, with no idea what to do or where to go next. Romola ‘felt as if [she] was abandoning a child’; she promised him she would not leave him, whatever happened, until the war was over. Diaghilev had invited him to Madrid to join his smaller company there and perhaps travel to South America that autumn. Vaslav allowed himself to hope, according to Grigoriev as well as Romola, that this meant Diaghilev wanted to work with him again, rather than just send him out on tour as his golden goose. He cabled Diaghilev that he would come to Spain to discuss his offer.
They made wills before setting sail into the torpedo-filled waters of the Atlantic and, one evening as they dined together, Vaslav slipped a cheque under Romola’s napkin: it was made out for the amount of his American earnings.
Vaslav, Romola and Kyra waited for Diaghilev in Madrid while spring came. Diaghilev had been with Massine in Italy during the winter of 1916–17, while Nijinsky led his faltering circus around the States. In Rome Diaghilev heard the news of the collapse of the tsarist regime in Russia and turned down a request to return to his homeland as the new Minister of Culture.
The young Sergey Prokofiev – who hoped to interest Diaghilev in his work – observed Diaghilev and Massine acting like lovebirds in Rome, even though Massine refused to share Diaghilev’s rooms in the Grand Hotel de Russie. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson so neatly put it, Massine was a ‘hot blooded heterosexual [and a] … cold blooded operator’, and from the start of their relationship he spent his time surreptitiously making eyes at the other dancers in the company – who all knew better than to bat their eyelashes back – and chasing prostitutes with Picasso, Diaghilev’s latest discovery. They were in Paris in May premiering Massine’s first ballet, Les Femmes de bonne humeur, followed by the avant-garde Picasso-Cocteau-Erik Satie collaboration Parade a few weeks later.
The other dancers had been amused to note that while the sapphires Diaghilev had given Vaslav had been set in gold, the rings he gave Massine were platinum. The sign that a fundraising trip to Paris had been successful was a new jewel gleaming on Massine’s little finger. Sinking into his mid-forties, Diaghilev was no longer the imposing, infallible creature he had once been, though his tyrannical tendencies remained unabated. He was eating and drinking to excess. One yo
ung visitor to the house he rented briefly outside Lausanne in 1917 noted that on his arrival Diaghilev called imperiously for Burgundy and crystallised cherries – ‘lots of cherries and lots of Burgundy’. Even his friends had begun to poke fun at him. Before he went to New York, Misia had written to Cocteau that Serge was getting ‘fatter and fatter, his clothes tighter and his hat smaller, rather “circus director” as Igor says …’
When he and Massine arrived in Madrid, Diaghilev ‘burst into the lobby of the Ritz and embraced Vaslav passionately … It was the Sergey Pavlovich of the old days.’ Diaghilev was even prepared to charm Romola. Vaslav’s happiness was matched only by his relief and he would not allow his wife to bring up the old matter of the contract. ‘Sergey Pavlovich is the same as ever; there is no need of discussion; he will be fair to me – let us give him the chance to prove it.’ Along with Picasso, Massine and Stravinsky, once again they talked of art and their ambitions through long lunches and dinners, and afterwards, late at night, they ventured out to dance halls to marvel at flamenco.
Vaslav gave an interview in June in which he described how with Sacre ‘the music and the ballet were composed together: they were born at the same time’. Though he had great affection and admiration for the older musicians whose work he danced to, like Chopin and Schumann, he said, he saw them more as parents he respected than contemporary inspirations. His real passion was for modern music which had a different spirit, closer to his own, and what he was aiming for when he choreographed a ballet was for the dancing to be not ‘stuck on to the music but, instead’ propelled by it.
