Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Then Sergei Melnikov, one of the Kirov technicians about to board the delayed Moscow flight, asked to be allowed to talk to him. To his question, “Why do you want to stay?” Rudolf replied, “Because they don’t let me live the way I want to. I have been under surveillance ever since I went to Vienna. Here, as well, people like S——G——and K——are watching me.* The dancer, he says, began to cry, saying that he understood he was a traitor and “a lost person,” but that he had made his decision and would definitely not return to Russia. “It’s not something I planned, but I was hoping it would happen like this,” he would later confide to a friend, also telling René Sirvin that he had gone to the Madeleine to pray for some kind of sign, or gesture, “and realized this was it.” As Melnikov moved across to give Rudolf a farewell embrace, one of the French policemen pushed him aside, escorted him out, and shut the door.

  Once all the Russians had left, the police began asking Rudolf a number of formal questions, including where he intended to live in Paris. A hotel would be too dangerous, they said, because the Russians would try to get him back—not necessarily by force, but by persuasion. “Is there someone who can take care of you? And do you have money?” Clara answered on his behalf, guaranteeing to get Rudolf a room. “You know, he’s a great artist. In a few days he’ll be dancing—you’ll see.” Alexinsky told her to beware on her own account: “You may have problems. They’re going to follow you in order to find him, so don’t see him for a few days.” Leaving Rudolf in their care, she again kissed him good-bye, promising to call as soon as she had found somewhere for him to stay. “Don’t worry, I have a lot of friends.” The two commissars then explained to Rudolf that, according to the rules, he must spend forty-five minutes in a room alone to reflect, away from all pressure, on the decision he had taken.

  The room, they told me, had two doors. Should I decide to go back to Russia, one door would lead me discreetly back into the hall from where I could board the Tupolev. Should I decide to stay in France, the other door led into their own private office.… By now I was locked in, safely alone, inside that small room.… Four white walls and two doors. Two exits to two different lives.

  But Rudolf was not “locked in.” For the first time ever he was free to choose for himself: “For me this was already a return to dignity.” He knew perfectly well that his flight would not only sever ties with the people he loved, it would lay them open to the very intimidation that he himself was escaping: “the systematic wearing down of the individual until his behavior exactly mirrors that of everyone else around him.” And yet there was no other way. “I was saving my life” he told a friend, by which he meant his life as a dancer, the only life that mattered to him. “If I’d gone back, Sergeyev would have thrown me out of the company, and perhaps sent me back to Ufa. No one would ever have heard another word about me.… I would have been squeezed off the stage eventually. So I jumped to this side where I felt I still would be able to dance.” Even though his immediate future was frighteningly bleak—“this would be utter solitude”—at least there was the prospect of being able to develop as an artist—“to learn, to see, to grow.” He got up and opened the door of the inspectors’ office.

  At 3:30, while the police took Rudolf out by a side entrance and drove him to the Ministry of the Interior to formalize his exile, Clara acted as a decoy. As she came into the lobby a crowd of about forty photographers and journalists surged toward her. “I was a star for one day: they had no one to photograph so they photographed me.” Forced into an impromptu press conference, she ignored questions of his whereabouts and answered others as obligingly as she could. “No, we are not engaged. He’s not married, but there was nothing serious between us,” she told the correspondent from the Daily Mail. “It didn’t appear to me that he was thinking of choosing freedom before this morning,” she remarked to a reporter from France-Soir. “Nor that he was having ‘une liaison sentimentale’ in Paris; he was a boy who worked a lot.”

  With a cavalcade of photographers on motorbikes following her taxi, Clara returned to the Quai d’Orsay. Her first call was to her friend Jean-Loup Puznat, who gladly agreed to let Rudolf stay in his large empty apartment overlooking the Jardin du Luxembourg. Then she spoke to Raymundo de Larrain, who was “very excited” and said, “Tell Nureyev not to worry about work. I’ll take him in the company tomorrow.” Immediately Raymundo volunteered to arrange a special performance in the dancer’s honor, but Clara explained that the French police had told Rudolf to lie low for the first week. From her window she could see already see two men who looked like cartoon KGB “gorillas” sitting in a car. “They were waiting for me to lead them to him.”

  At about five that afternoon, Rudolf was taken to the apartment on rue Guynemer. When Clara telephoned to say that she was not able to come to see him yet, “because they’re all around,” he had only one question: where he was going to take class. “I can’t go a week without my exercises.” “Listen,” she told him, “do your class in the apartment for the next few days, because for the moment you can’t go anywhere.”

  By now the Kirov had checked into London’s Strand Palace Hotel near the Opera House—the hotel frequented to this day by visiting Russian ballet companies. Alla Osipenko was immediately surrounded by reporters, who asked if she was aware that her partner had sought refuge in Paris (she knew nothing until Simon Virsaladze met her in the corridor “with huge eyes” and confirmed the story, which he had heard on the radio). At the London impresario’s welcoming party, a birthday cake was produced for Alla—“but none of us felt in the mood to celebrate.” Among the guests who came up to congratulate her was an English diplomat who had lived in Moscow, a balletomane well known to the company, who gave her a present and invited her to dine with him later at the Savoy. True to character, she accepted, even though the Soviet Embassy had just issued a new order forbidding the dancers to mix with foreigners. When she returned to the hotel that night, a KGB agent was waiting to admonish her, and at a meeting the following day she was denounced in front of the whole company. One “brave girl” stood up in her defense: “Alla Osipenko is a great ballerina,” declared Galina Kekisheva. “Surely she is entitled to have fans and presents.” But to no avail. Not only was Alla locked in her room after the performance every night, but for the next six years she was excluded from any tour to the West.

  Sergeyev and Korkin were also in trouble, branded by the Central Committee as “undisciplined men” whose failure to obey orders in time had led to Nureyev’s escape. On returning to Leningrad, Korkin was replaced by a hard-line party bureaucrat—the type who “could be in charge of a mine one day and of an orchestra the next”; Sergeyev was issued with “a severe reprimand.” But their immediate ordeal was having to mount the London season without the Kirov’s main star. “Rudik’s defection was a horror for us,” says Dudinskaya, explaining that Sergeyev had cast Rudolf in all four London premieres—“which shows that he had won the recognition of Konstantin Mikhailovich”—and had only three days in which to prepare four new soloists in the roles. “We were all helping him.… We didn’t eat; we didn’t sleep.… It was a tragedy that Rudik left us. He had no reason; everything was open for him—and that’s the truth.”

  Still in a state of shock, Rudolf spent his first hours alone in the apartment feeling strangely detached and tranquil: It was as if he had lived through it all before. “I had already danced in my mind everywhere.… I had already read that script, I wrote it myself, and now it was all happening according to it.” He slept deeply that night and was not even surprised to wake up in a room he did not know. “I had traveled a lot. I danced in Austria, Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Bulgaria, and the East. An artist often changes towns and decor. I opened the shutters and looked out at the view of the Luxembourg. Everything was marvelously calm and peaceful.” By the time Clara could join him, however, Rudolf was “going crazy,” and over the next few days he became seriously depressed. He had started to fret about the Soviets’ retaliation against his fam
ily and friends, especially Pushkin, who as his mentor was certain to be suspected of having influenced him. And without Pushkin’s support, without the discipline of the Kirov, how could he hope to preserve the purity of his schooling? “I have to work, I have to work,” he wailed. Clara had bought him a toothbrush, pajamas, and a few shirts, “white cotton, very simple, very nice,” as Rudolf had virtually nothing—less than fifty francs in his pocket, and only the clothes he was wearing. “But he was very difficult. Jean-Loup’s apartment was built in the 1930s and Rudolf never stopped complaining about all the marble. ‘I’m so cold,’ he kept saying. ‘I’m bored’…. He didn’t like the color of the shirts, and I thought, My God!” He demanded to have woolen knee supports, but it was Sunday and the pharmacies were either closed or didn’t sell them. “My friends were laughing: ‘How oversensitive he is.’ He told them, ‘I am not oversensitive. I am a dancer.’ ”

  The world’s press had cast Clara as the heroine of a Cold War thriller. “dance to freedom: girl sees Russians chase her friend” was the headline on the front page of the Daily Express, which reported that Nureyev had “skipped to freedom to the delight of a red-haired girl.” “Everyone called it a Romeo and Juliet story, but I say, ‘Pas du tout.’ I think for Rudolf, I was like a key to open things easily. It was nice for him to say, ‘I want this’ … and then—voilà!” Knowing that the only way to make Rudolf happy was to get him back onstage, Clara promised she would ask Raymundo to come and see him at once to talk about starting work.

  While there was no question of Rudolf joining the Paris Opéra Ballet (a certain end to French-Soviet cultural relations), his presence in the de Cuevas company would not only be a scoop, it could also be its salvation. De Cuevas’s widow, a Rockefeller heiress who didn’t share her aesthete husband’s passion for ballet, had made it known through her lawyer that the company could no longer depend on her backing. Troubled by creditors and half-empty houses, Raymundo realized at once that the new Russian star was the answer to his problems. Promising to make Rudolf a “super-vedette,” he offered him a six-year contract, but Rudolf, who had already mapped out his immediate future, said this was too long. “I accept only three months because I was determined to go to Balanchine. And also to go and study in Denmark with the teacher of Erik Bruhn, whom I considered the best dancer in the world.” “He was like those instinctive predators who know precisely where to land and take their prey,” remarks Ghislaine Thesmar, then a young soloist in the de Cuevas company. “He knew exactly what he could take from that situation and for how long.”

  Rudolf had gladly accepted Raymundo’s invitation to move into his own apartment, but was still proving impossible to please. “Right away he was difficult,” says Jacqueline de Ribes, Raymundo’s mistress and patroness. “I want this, I need that.… And already he had ideas about everything—staging, costumes. ‘Il est interprêté, pas créateur!’ Raymundo complained to me. They were always fighting, and yet they were friends at the same time.” The drawbacks of having Rudolf as a houseguest were turning out to be far greater than Raymundo had anticipated—not least because in sheltering “the betrayer” he was putting his own safety at risk. He had begun receiving threats by letter and telephone, and so had the Vicomtesse de Ribes, who returned home one day to find graffiti scrawled on the walls of her house, and “people outside screaming at me.” Rudolf was so terrified the first time he left the apartment that he crouched on his hands and knees in the back of Claire Motte’s car. “I didn’t know the source of fear, from where it will come. The danger. Fear was really that Russians will come and get you. And that came in a lot of nightmares.… It took a long time.”

  His fears were justified since 1961 was the year before the KGB reassessed its policy of “wet affairs”—the liquidation of major traitors.* Only recently its laboratory had manufactured a weapon that fired a jet of poison gas, causing death (undiagnosable to pathologists) by cardiac arrest. The Thirteenth Department assassin who used the spray gun to kill two victims—leading Ukrainian émigrés—defected later that summer, and it was not until the following fall that the widespread publicity generated by his trial led the Politburo to abandon assassination as a normal strategy outside the Soviet bloc. Even so, in November 1962, a campaign for dealing with defectors specified “special action” against Nureyev “aimed at lessening his professional skills.” The KGB dissident Vasili Mitrokhin, a former Soviet foreign-intelligence officer who for more than ten years secretly copied and smuggled out highly classified information from the archives, happened to be a passionate Kirov fan, who felt “a sense of personal outrage” when he read about the plan compiled by the First and Second Chief Directorates to maim Rudolf. “Subsequent FCD directives discussed schemes … to break one or both of Nureyev’s legs.” It was this particular example of “greater aggression” almost more than any other that strengthened Mitrokhin’s resentment against his country’s neo-Stalinist regime.

  To protect Rudolf, Larrain hired two private detectives to accompany him wherever he went. “This meant that I lived under constant surveillance, permitting only classes, rehearsals, lunch next door to the theater, then straight back to the apartment.” He had started work on The Sleeping Beauty in a small rented studio near the Salle Pleyel, at first alone, then with the ballerina Nina Vyroubova, another émigrée, who was also considered to be in danger. At two o’clock every afternoon bodyguards would arrive at her home, escort her to the Plaza-Athénée Hotel, where, crossing the grand entrance, she would make her way to a service exit in the kitchens. Outside, a taxi would be waiting to take her to the rehearsal. “I was trembling all the time.”

  The daughter of White Russian émigrés, Vyroubova had been brought up in Paris, where she was taught by ex-Maryinsky prima ballerinas Vera Trefilova and Olga Preobrazhenska, and became an étoile at the Opéra—a great Romantic ballerina whose limpid, feminine qualities were exotically colored by her Slavic features and temperament. “I am French in spirit but Russian at heart,” she always said. For the last three years Vyroubova had been under contract to the de Cuevas company, but having just turned forty she was approaching the end of her career. She was delighted to have the opportunity to be partnered by the young man whose debut had moved her to tears. After watching “le triomphe de Rudy” in La Bayadère, hardly able to breathe in case she broke the charm, she had gone backstage to congratulate him. At the time she found him affable and shyly grateful, but she faced a very different character on the day of their first rehearsal. “He was extremely difficult,” says Vyroubova, describing how Rudolf had rebuffed her attempt to establish a rapport by saying coldly, “You speak Russian, I speak Russian. That’s all.”* However, Vyroubova’s distinctive artistry soon won Rudolf over, as did her natural warmth. “I was very tender with him. For me, he was a little brother.”

  The marquise’s fortune had enabled de Cuevas to engage several outstanding dancers, another being the American ballerina Rosella Hightower, who soon became Rudolf’s favorite partner. In his view, though, their talents were wasted on a company that lacked a solid tradition. Aware that the choreography of the de Cuevas Sleeping Beauty was as eclectic as its style (it was begun by Bronislava Nijinska and completed by Robert Helpmann), Rudolf made up his mind to dance the Kirov version, “hardly changed from Marius Petipa’s original work.” “Grand Dieu! Rudik, darling, we don’t have time,” protested Vyroubova. “I would learn it with pleasure, but don’t forget you have other ballerinas to partner.” Rudolf knew very well that his demands were impossible, “but being a Tatar and so young, he was offended that a woman could be right.” Finally they reached a compromise: Alternating in the roles of Prince Désiré and the Blue Bird, Rudolf would perform his own variations in the Petipa choreography—“exactly the way I had danced them a month before”—but the ballet would remain as choreographed.

  He often found himself wondering in those first weeks whether he had not made a terrible mistake in leaving Russia. Having fought while he was there to revitalize t
he old roles and stamp them with his own interpretation, he had now become determined to do everything he could to preserve Kirov traditions. “He felt very fragile at first, and wanted to hang on to all his knowledge and habits,” said Ghislaine Thesmar, who watched with fascination as Rudolf took a solitary class in the theater foyer each day. “To begin with, he was doing pure Pushkin dancing. On his own, to keep in shape.” She, like Rosella Hightower, stood and marveled at the integrity of his training, which centered on his exaggeratedly turned-out fifth position—“Pushkin’s sign of the cross”—the sacred source of dance technique.

  It was to Pushkin that Rudolf’s thoughts returned again and again. When Sergei Melnikov had asked him at Le Bourget if he feared for his mother, father, and friends, Rudolf had replied, “Not for anyone except Alexander Ivanovich.” To a journalist’s identical question a couple of weeks later, he had much the same reply: “I am far more worried for my dance teacher in Leningrad. I have lived with him for several years; he is my best friend … certainly, he will be questioned. To him I have promised to return.”

  On June 15, the eve of Rudolf’s defection, the Royal Ballet had appeared for the first time in Leningrad, their season deliberately timed to coincide with the Kirov’s run at Covent Garden. Russian balletomanes had long anticipated the visit, the highlight of the year, which would give them the chance to see Margot Fonteyn (dancing two of her signature roles, in The Sleeping Beauty and Ondine), as well as La Fille mal gardée, a recent masterpiece by Frederick Ashton—“each of these names a legend.” But at the second performance, on June 16, the only talk among the fans was of Rudolf’s defection, news of which flashed through the theater as if telecast. Before the curtain went up, Tamara had been sitting on a velvet sofa outside the dress circle doing some last-minute revision for an exam the next day when Sergei Sorokin came up and told her as gently as he could that he had heard on the BBC World Service that Rudolf had asked for political asylum in France. She was confused. “Rudik’s never understood anything about politics in his life.” Sorokin began to explain, “But I was no longer listening. He had decided to remain in the West. Forever. But why?”