Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  He also went several times to a studio in the place Clichy to watch Violette Verdy in class. Raymundo had recently introduced them, and they had bonded at once, each equally impressed by the other. Having seen Rudolf dance both roles in the de Cuevas Sleeping Beauty, Violette had been mesmerized by his plasticity. “He wasn’t just using his body in a square manner, as an ordinary dancer would. He was using it poetically—as an instrument of poetic exploration.” Then contracted to New York City Ballet, she was not performing in Paris at the time, but Rudolf was fascinated to see her work with her mentor and coach Viktor Gsovsky, who had been a pupil of the Imperial ballerina Eugenie Sokolova. When class was over Rudolf would wait for Verdy, eager to discuss Gsovsky’s Old Russian methods and idiosyncratic phrasing of exercises. “Rudolf was still testing his own ground then, and he had a little more time to talk with everyone. He was absolutely darling to me … very open and curious and interested in anything good.”

  Increasingly infatuated with Paris—“its people, its freedom, its flâneries”—Rudolf now walked around without protection, even though, as KGB secret records show, his safety was still seriously under threat. When he was not alone he was usually with Clara, whose culture and chic he continued to identify with the allure of the city. “Our relationship was about all the things we did there together.” One day, sensing that she was becoming too attached—“He was 23, I was 21, it was a very romantic feeling”—Rudolf showed her a photograph he kept in his wallet of his friend. “It was a boy. Rudolf told me that he lived in Cuba and danced with Alicia Alonso’s company. Of course I knew what he was trying to say: I was young but not completely innocent.”

  Compulsively evasive, Rudolf had conflated Menia with Teja, who recently had been much on his mind. One night, feeling especially lonely, Rudolf called him at his mother’s apartment in Berlin, knowing he would be at home during the school vacation. His sister, Ute, remembers two or three telephone calls from Rudolf that week, one lasting around forty-five minutes. “He said to Teja, ‘Come to me, I am alone. We can be together here, and both make our careers in the West.’ ” Six months later, wanting to protect his family by dissociating them from his defector friend, Teja would claim to the Stasi that these calls had caused “big arguments” with his mother, who demanded to know who was contacting him from the West. “I calmed her down by telling her that it was only someone from the Kirov Ballet who was in Paris at the time.” In fact Johanna Kremke knew all about her son’s friendship with the famous Nureyev, whom he often mentioned in his letters. Their only conflict was over Teja’s intention to join him. “He had to choose: his best friend or his mother.” A powerful character determined not to relinquish control over her children—especially after their father had moved out and distanced himself from their lives—Teja’s mother insisted that he must first get his diploma in Leningrad. “Wait until you’ve graduated—it’s only two more years. Then you can go.” Although “really disconcerted,” Teja agreed, and accompanied his mother and sister on a vacation by the Baltic.

  The end of July was Collections Week in Paris, and while shooting couture for Harper’s Bazaar, New York photographer Richard Avedon arranged a sitting with the young Russian star. There had been intense competition between America’s two leading fashion magazines for a world exclusive: Vogue had Irving Penn standing by, but Harper’s Bazaar won because of Avedon’s connection with Raymundo. Penn’s Nureyev photograph appeared a month later in the October issue of Vogue. In May, Avedon had shot a double portrait of the director and Jacqueline de Ribes as a mirror image of each other—“a study in narcissism”—which had led to Raymundo asking him as a favor to take publicity pictures of Rudolf. “I said I would do them on condition that Nureyev posed for the magazine.” At thirty-eight, Avedon had already photographed many of the artistic deities of the century—Jean Cocteau, Marilyn Monroe, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Alfred Hitchcock, Leonard Bernstein, Brigitte Bardot, Mae West, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound—while he himself was almost as celebrated as his subjects, and was the inspiration for the 1956 film Funny Face, in which, as fashion photographer Dick Avery, he is played by Fred Astaire.

  Accompanied by Clara, who did not stay long, Rudolf went to a hired dance studio a few doors down from the Hotel San Régis, where the photographer and his team were waiting. The first stage of an Avedon session was always a well-practiced ritual of social interaction: Drawn into a charmed state of intimacy and relaxation, the sitter provided glimpses of the authentic private self the portraits would lay bare. Completely at ease from the start, Rudolf amazed Avedon with his intelligence and sense of wonder.

  “He was so open, and wanted to communicate, to connect. He said he’d read Catcher in the Rye, which I found stunning.” The admiration was mutual. In brilliant, boyish Dick Avedon, with his “Holden Caulfield vocabulary,” Rudolf found a kindred soul with the same passion for art in all its forms, and the same endlessly voracious appetite to learn. “I felt that I was meeting my first Occidental friend.”

  In homage to Rudolf’s glamor and beauty, Avedon focused as much on the dancer’s face and naked torso as on the shapes he made in space, capturing myriad expressions—challenging, wry, off guard, and giggling, languidly sensual with rumpled hair and half-closed eyes. After several hours Avedon told Rudolf that he would like to photograph him in the nude. “Your body at this moment should be recorded. Every muscle. Because it’s the body of the greatest dancer in the world.” Rudolf needed little persuasion. Like many in his profession, he was not prudish, regarding his sexuality as just another manifestation of his physical prowess. “Who better to do it than me?” Avedon told him, and Rudolf agreed. He felt in complete accord with this fellow artist—the most theatrical of photographers, all of whose “occasions are performances; all his subjects, actors, all his images, scenes.” Stripping off his remaining practice clothes, Rudolf began to collaborate with Avedon on a series of flying poses that were breathtakingly abandoned while still discreet. Then, without any prompting, he stopped moving, faced the camera, and stared into the lens.

  As I went on photographing, he slowly raised his arms, and as his arms went up, so did his penis. It was as if he was dancing with every part of himself. His whole body was responding to a kind of wonder at himself. I thought this was the most beyond-words moment—too beautiful to be believed. A narcissistic orgy of some kind. An orgy of one.

  The next morning, full of remorse, and remembering the words of Pushkin’s letter—that Paris was a city of decadence that would corrupt his moral integrity—Rudolf decided to call on Avedon and beg him to destroy the final frames. “He just walked in the door and said, ‘I’ve left Russia—that in itself is a scandal. Now I’m doing exactly what they expect of me.’ ” Convincing Rudolf that he must safeguard the pictures—“Because when you’re an old man, you’ll want to look at the miracle you were”—Avedon summoned an assistant who went into the darkroom and returned with an envelope he handed to Rudolf. The dancer then moved in very close and lifted up Avedon’s glasses. “Look at me,” he whispered, “and tell me these are all the negatives.” Avedon stared back, his eyes bloodshot with exhaustion after working through the night in the developing room, and repeated, “These are all the negatives. But don’t destroy them.” Satisfied, Rudolf left the studio.

  There was an unfinished roll left in Avedon’s camera. Thirty-seven years later, wanting to feature the dancer as an erotic icon of the decade, he used one of the few remaining full-length, full-frontal Nureyev nudes in his book The Sixties. Rudolf would occasionally feign hostility toward Avedon, once preposterously claiming that he had sold one of the nudes to the CIA, “who used it in an antihomosexuality booklet.”* In fact his rancor amounted to no more than a caprice; not only did he eagerly return for several subsequent Avedon sessions over the years, but he admitted when seeing the pictures for the first time, “I knew that he had understood me.” Revealing the same sensitivity to movement that the photographer admired in Fragonard, the frames translate R
udolf’s sexuality into images of perfect control, yet keep “the nervous edge of it alive always, not simply a pose”; while the explicit nudes are the “terrible et merveilleux miroir” that Cocteau described to Avedon in a telegram of thanks: evidence of vulnerability as much as superhuman virility—the exposure of having entered a new life with no possessions, “almost as naked as when I was born.”

  It was around this time that Rudolf, determined to contact Balanchine and “not daring” to do it himself, asked Olivier Merlin to write on his behalf. Not only was the critic his most effusive champion, but Rudolf knew that Merlin and Balanchine were on very good terms. (In 1947, when as guest ballet master at the Paris Opéra after Lifar’s dismissal, Balanchine found himself caught up in a political nightmare of plots and counterplots, it was Merlin who went out of his way to support the unwelcome intruder.) In a letter dated August 6, Merlin tells Balanchine that “Noureev” is anxious to come to America, and has expressed a desire to perform with the New York City Ballet. He gives details of the dancer’s present contract, and says that he will be in New York in September, when the de Cuevas company was due to break for its holiday.

  Arriving two weeks later, Balanchine’s reply is friendly but firm. While he is clearly eager to meet his young compatriot, he makes it clear that Rudolf will not be able to dance with the company in September as there won’t be time for him to learn the repertory; nor, he adds, will he consider presenting the dancer’s own ballets.

  This is what I suggest. When Noureev is here in September he can come and see all our performances, talk with me, and decide for himself if he likes our ballets, our style of dancing, our music, our small stage, and meet the people he would work with in a relaxed atmosphere.

  As you know our company is not made for Guest Artists. We haven’t anything that shows only one dancer. If Noureev comes to us, I want to include him as a permanent member of our company, and this is why I propose to him that when he visits us in September, he can observe us, and make up his own mind as to whether or not we would be able to work happily together.… Would you also tell Noureev that we do not sign long contracts.… In this way people are never bound for any long periods of time, so they are always free to plan their future.

  The choreographer’s response came as a disappointment to Rudolf, who told Avedon the next time they were in touch that Balanchine had invited him to join the company but not as a star. “Do you think if he sees me dance he’d make an exception?” Rudolf asked. He resolved to wait for an opportunity.

  Later that month he and Raymundo went back to the Riviera, this time taking two days to drive through France, bronzed and windswept in their open-top white Chevrolet. Raymundo had decided to educate Rudolf in savoir-vivre, dressing him in designer suits and shirts—he had never seen cufflinks before—and taking him to the finest restaurants en route. With his striking resemblance to Jean Cocteau, Raymundo was not at all the “petit voyou” (pretty boy) type that Rudolf found appealing, and yet the dancer told several friends that Raymundo had been the first man to seduce him. “Absolutely not,” insists Jacqueline de Ribes, who was closer to the director than anyone else at the time, but she says that Rudolf did confide to him during their trip that he was a homosexual. “He said he’d left Russia because it made his life too difficult there.” An American expatriate named James Douglas, who knew both young men well, is just as skeptical. “Raymundo was too feminine, too scrawny and bizarre. But they’d have had a great time together as he was very amusing and outrageous.”

  Raymundo was indeed an entertaining traveling companion, although he could be maddeningly unpredictable and high-strung: “Everything was a drama.” He, in turn, however, became increasingly disenchanted by Rudolf’s “insupportable” behavior, particularly his lack of gratitude. “He was very spoiled and took everything for granted—all the time playing the big big star with the big big story.” They had been invited to stay in the South of France with Commandant Paul-Louis Weiller,* a wealthy financier and patron of the arts. Among his twenty-four properties (including the Villa Trianon at Versailles), was La Reine Jeanne, which he had built in the commune of Bormes-les-Mimosas in the early thirties. It was there each summer that the commandant assembled his carefully chosen court—the reason Greta Garbo called him Paul-Louis XIV—the usual group comprising grands bourgeois mixed with Saint-Germain jeunesse, European monarchs both crowned and uncrowned, international politicians, financiers, economists, writers, stars of the silent movies and the Nouvelle Vague, as well as the latest society beauties. Name, talent, intelligence, and grace were the criteria of selection—“It was a combination of les nouveaux riches et les nouveaux pauvres.”

  After passing through the great entrance gates, Rudolf and Raymundo drove on a long private road through dense pine forest, finally reaching a sumptuous Provençal-style villa built on a cliff above a long sandy beach. Having just left one world for another, Rudolf was now entering a third—a paradisal enclave devoted to pleasure, once described by Lady Diana Cooper as the “Babylon of beauty, shame, flesh and hedonism.” Jacqueline de Ribes was already there to greet them, a little contemptuous of their flashy convertible. “I was amused that Rudolf could be so easily impressed.” To begin with, they were the only guests, wonderfully treated by Weiller who was always especially charming in the presence of stars. As a mondaine star herself, feted by the press for her elegance and high style—the Vicomtesse was given the best suite. “Rudolf’s was second best and Raymundo’s third.” The first newcomer to appear was an attractive young starlet featured in that week’s Paris-Match but, finding her uninteresting, Rudolf made no attempt to talk to her: “He wasn’t friendly with anybody—possibly because he spoke very bad English. Let’s face it, he was not brought up for our world. He was like a refugee then—très sauvage et sovietique. He didn’t understand about kindness or politeness—how to say the right words at the right time.”

  After a few days, quietly observing and making the occasional remark, Rudolf began to feel “like a prisoner in a golden cage.” The commandant was possessive about his guests and disapproved of anyone leaving the property—even to go shopping in St. Tropez. But although it meant he would miss the arrival of his idol Charlie Chaplin, Rudolf suddenly insisted that he was unable to stay any longer.

  At almost exactly the same time, Teja and his family had cut short their Baltic vacation after hearing rumors from other tourists of Russian tanks in East Berlin. They had been camping “outside civilization” with no radio, and returned home to the shock of finding that, like everyone else in the city, they were prisoners. “In July, Teja was free to go,” said Ute Kremke, “in August there was the Wall.”

  Rudolf’s family and Russian friends were all experiencing the repercussions of his defection. Within only a few days, after questioning his English teacher, Georgi Mikhailovich, the KGB had called on Liuba at her Physics Institute, demanding to know whether the dancer had mentioned anything to them about staying in the West. Unaware of Rudolf’s conversation with her brother, she was able to deny it with conviction. Leonid did not betray Rudolf’s secret, but nevertheless received no promotion for the next ten years. Tamara had been immediately expelled from the university with the explanation that being a teacher implied trust. Spending most of the summer depressed and apathetic, she lay around the house just “thinking, remembering.” As she had no telephone, she would visit the Pushkins every day in case they had received any news. The three were together when Rudolf’s luggage was returned, and with strangely ambiguous feelings, they went through it. “When we came across the Legend of Love costume, we knew one thing for sure: Rudik wasn’t planning to defect.”

  Pushkin was convinced that he could have persuaded Rudolf to be more circumspect in Paris if only someone had put them in touch at an early stage of the tour. “He blamed Sergeyev very much for not doing this,” said his old friend Dimitri Filatov. Now they were asking Alexander Ivanovich to go to Paris to bring the dancer back, but it was too late: His weak he
art would never withstand the journey. He and Xenia were under enough strain, not only relentlessly interrogated but dropped by the majority of their friends, who would cross the street to avoid greeting them. And because they were both regarded as mentors to the traitor, parents were forbidding their sons to visit the Pushkins’ home. Miraculously, though, Alexander Ivanovich was saved from the humiliation he dreaded most—dismissal from his job. This was entirely due to the intervention of someone Rudolf had always considered an enemy: Valentin Shelkov. Out of loyalty to his ex-teacher, the director had managed to convince his superiors that Pushkin should be allowed to stay. “With all my antipathy for this man, I respect him for that,” Baryshnikov had said.*

  In return Pushkin was obliged on several occasions to go to Moscow to report to the Ministry of Culture and condemn his pupil’s behavior. “He knew Rudik would understand that his denunciations weren’t sincere.” Belonging to the generation that survived the terrors, he was “very spooked by it all,” Baryshnikov says. “Alexander Ivanovich was a product of the Soviet regime, and totally suppressed.” Even with close friends, Pushkin rarely talked about Rudolf or his interrogations. “But Xenia Josifovna told us what had gone on, and with lots of humor,” said Dimitri Filatov. With no career of her own, Xenia had nothing to lose. Unintimidated by the authorities and desperate to make contact with Rudolf, she sent him one telegram after another, all of which were returned to her, address unknown.

  In Ufa the KGB was hounding Rudolf’s family, which had also received death threats. But while Hamet was angry enough to feel compelled to reject Rudolf, Farida was unflinchingly supportive from the start. When instructed to “deny” her son at a party meeting, she threw her membership card onto the table and walked out. And, infuriated by a remark made at one of many interviews at the KGB house on Lenin Street—“If you miss him so much, tell him to come back”—she retaliated by saying defiantly, “It’s only because you want to send him past me in a van with barred windows.” But when the KGB provided her with a European phone number and ordered her to call her son, even knowing that their conversation would be monitored, she was hardly able to hide her delight, so grateful was she for the chance to speak to him.