Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  By late August, Rudolf had rejoined the de Cuevas dancers in the Normandy resort of Deauville, which still retained much of its social cachet from the twenties and thirties. The marquis had been on excellent terms with Monsieur André, the owner of the casino, and it was a company tradition to perform there during the summer season.

  Rudolf was staying in the Normandy, the most elegant hotel in town, half-timbered like a regional manor house, and overlooking the sea. When the telephone rang in his room one day he was amazed to hear his mother’s voice. “I mean, what do they know about Deauville—they never heard of Deauville!” Primed by the KGB, Farida immediately launched in with, “Oh your country, your mama, your papa and all this …,” only to be interrupted by Rudolf. She had forgotten to ask him one important question. Was he happy? “Ty schastliv?” she asked. Yes, he was, he told her. “End of discussion. Sometimes you have to remind … That my duty is not only to be eternal son, but also life have to belong to me. She gave me birth. And I’m on my own. I have to make my life.… I have duty … more important … in front of my talent.”

  People who had already served their purpose in advancing that talent inevitably became dispensable. People like Clara, who was immersed in a world that was no longer of such interest to Rudolf. She had followed him to Deauville but, discouraged by his egotism and relentless demands, was beginning to withdraw her affection. “I admired his application to work: It was never enough—again and again.… With partners, do it again. And he was always right. But in life … impossible: too tiring and too demoralizing.” A photograph taken earlier that summer in a chalet garden in Geneva shows a tactile accord between the couple as Rudolf, wearing nothing but tight swimming trunks, cajoles Clara to pose for the camera, his arm around her shoulders. Dressed with characteristic chicness and modesty, her dress covering her knees, her classic pumps pressed together, she leans on Rudolf’s thigh and shyly hides her face against his neck. She admits that she was incredibly infatuated with the dancer, finding him funny, intelligent, and seductive, but all the same she was not prepared to sacrifice her own life. “I was still really moved by him, but after a while, you’re ready to say, ‘Oh, please!’ That happened to me.” “Clara helped him to get the freedom and after that, well … Rudi is Rudi,” said Pierre Bergé. “He was not a gentleman, and he knew very well how to manipulate people. Clara couldn’t accept that.”

  As things turned out, all Rudolf’s attention had transferred to someone else who had arrived in Deauville that week—a woman directly connected to the two people he wanted more than any others to meet: The thirty-six-year-old Maria Tallchief, America’s most celebrated prima ballerina, had been not only wife and muse to George Balanchine but was also the partner of Erik Bruhn. (It was their Black Swan variation, performed during American Ballet Theatre’s Leningrad season, that Rudolf had watched in Teja’s footage over and over again.) Experiencing difficulties in her subsequent marriage, and deciding to travel to Europe for a break, Maria had come to France with her three-year-old daughter, Elise, to pay a surprise visit to her sister, the ballerina Marjorie Tallchief. An étoile with the Paris Opéra Ballet, where her husband, George Skibine, was joint étoile and director, Marjorie had seen Rudolf’s performance of the Blue Bird and immediately written to Maria about “this sensational boy.” As the Skibines had already left on a company tour of South America when Maria arrived, she decided to take Elise and her Swiss nanny to the seaside for a few days, and booked rooms at Deauville’s Normandy. On her first afternoon while exploring the town, she spotted Rudolf’s photograph on a de Cuevas poster and, when she returned to the hotel, immediately recognized him standing in the lobby.

  Before I could catch my breath, he came rushing over. He introduced himself by reaching out for my hand and shaking it. “I am very glad … to meet you, Miss Tallchief.… I am very familiar with your career.”

  I smiled and said, “Thank you,” trying to be polite, and turned away. But he wasn’t going to let me go.

  This was exactly the kind of fateful moment that Rudolf had seized before. A chance to enact his belief that in life you have to control destiny and make your own luck. “Please,” he ventured. “I have proposal.… Tonight please come see me dance.” Maria shook her head, telling him that she had only just arrived. “Tomorrow, perhaps.” But no, it had to be that night. She looked at the young dancer staring intently at her, so alluring and so boyish, and stared back. “I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.” “Okay,” she said. “Tonight.”

  Deauville’s casino stage, where Rudolf danced the Don Quixote duet with Rosella Hightower, was tiny, but Maria found his performance thrilling all the same, never having seen chaînée turns done at such speed. “I remember thinking that Rudy was a phenomenon. Unique.” After the show they went out for a drink, and Rudolf listened fascinated to every word she spoke about Balanchine, admitting that he wanted to go to America to work with the choreographer, but not mentioning the fact that they had already been in contact. “He kept talking about a home movie that a friend had taken of my performances with Erik in Russia.” One reason he had defected, Rudolf told her, was to learn to dance like Bruhn, and he was determined to go to Denmark to study with Bruhn’s teacher, the Russian-born Vera Volkova, a childhood friend of Pushkin’s. About to make her debut with the Royal Danish Ballet with Bruhn as her partner, Maria offered to take him with her to Copenhagen to meet them both.

  The two dancers saw each other every day in Deauville, starting with company class in the morning. With her steely technique, Maria embodied the power, speed, and amplitude of American neoclassical style, being, in the legendary critic Edwin Denby’s view, “the most audacious and the most correctly brilliant of allegro classicists.” Immensely impressed, Rudolf tried to persuade her to give him a private lesson in Balanchine technique, but she refused, explaining that there was no specific Balanchine class—“One day he would do this, another day that.” And, just as awestruck by him, she “wasn’t about to tell Rudolf Nureyev how to point his toes.”

  When the company dispersed for the summer break, Rudolf asked Maria to accompany him to Frankfurt, where he was booked to dance Le Spectre de la Rose and extracts from Giselle for German television. As she had time to spare before going to Copenhagen, she agreed. Leaving Elise with her nanny in Deauville, and giving Rudolf a few driving lessons en route, Maria drove through Germany and France to the Skibines’ house in Sèvres, narrowly missing the two dancers themselves.

  His mood darkened when they flew to Frankfurt and he discovered that there had been a misunderstanding: He was expected to dance Le Spectre de la Rose without being taught the choreography. Apart from the few poses he had learned from Pierre Lacotte in Paris, he was forced to improvise the rest—a travesty of the real thing, with Rudolf, absurdly girly wearing a headband of roses, swooning in the chair vacated by the Young Girl Gisela Deege, adding a lot of frilly business when his arms drooped above his head, and inserting an incongruously virile manège of chaînés and barreling jumps. But what strikes one most is the deterioration in his classical placing, the lack of rigorous, daily Kirov training resulting in a performance as shoddy as those he would give while paying “Homage to Diaghilev” thirty years later. His interpretation of Albrecht opposite Irene Skorik is more refined, though with his strawlike wig and baggy tights he looks lumpenly Soviet—still light years away from the romantic Nureyev who would enrapture the West in Giselle.

  An atmosphere of mutual antagonism developed between dancer and the program’s director, Russian-born Vaslav Orlikowsky, who had made his name as a choreographer in Germany but found he had no authority over Rudolf. “Nothing impresses him but his own perfection,” he complained to a journalist, citing how the dancer had repeatedly asked him to delay the final take because he wanted more rehearsal time.

  Compounding the tension on the set was the fact that Rudolf badly missed home. Orlikowsky comments on the way he sat by the river embankment staring at the factory buildings o
pposite as if reminded of the Neva, and spent most of his day listening to music, playing a Scriabin symphony “sometimes three, five, ten times in a row.” Then largely unknown in the West, Scriabin was Rudolf’s favorite composer, and a figure of cultish idolatry in Russia. Like the silver age poets Rudolf also loved, Scriabin believed in art as a superior form of knowledge, a means of elevating man’s spirit and providing a transcendental passage to divinity. Rudolf did not have the religious faith to aspire to Scriabin’s fusion of a “superindividualistic I” with God—for him, solipsism was an end in itself. Nevertheless, Symphony no. 3 (The Divine Poem), with its insurgent hero striving for the victory of freedom, seemed to narrate his own story, articulating in its slow movement all the vicissitudes of doubt and anxiety he himself was going through.

  With his heavy case of records that accompanied him everywhere, Rudolf reminded Maria of the young Balanchine—“music was his whole life.” He told her how envious he was of her musical training (she was a first-rate pianist), and said that he wanted to be a conductor one day. Although their conversation rarely strayed from “ballet, Balanchine, and Erik,” as they walked together or sat at night by the river holding hands, Maria found herself growing “very fond” of this beautiful, romantic youth—“a real Russkie malchik.” Tall and long limbed, with dark, exotic looks inherited from her father, an American Indian of the Osage tribe, she, too, was striking, but what interested Rudolf was her knowledge and experience. He also liked the fact that he could be direct with her, and made no attempt to hide his homosexuality, openly flirting with boys they passed in the street. Once, while walking back late to their hotel, they were approached by an American serviceman who made a pass at Rudolf: “Now whether Rudy had made some kind of eye contact or advance, I don’t know. But when I said, ‘How dare you!’ he suddenly took out a knife—a switchblade. Rudy grabbed my arm, and we ran down the street to get away.”

  Rudolf also told Maria—“he even boasted”—that he was attracted to women, recounting the story of his affair with Xenia. This time she was shocked. “But Rudy, this was the wife of your beloved teacher. Why did you do it?” “Because she wanted to,” he replied. One evening she came back to the room they shared to find Rudolf in her bed. Giving herself time to compose her thoughts, she pretended not to notice. “And then Rudy said—it was so cute!—‘Maria … you don’t see me?’ ” Rudolf had no qualms about carrying out his invitation; as one dance historian aptly put it, “Whatever it takes, he will go the whole way. There is nothing he will not dare to fulfill his destiny.” And while Maria, now aware of an unfaithful side to Rudolf, had resolved not to get involved, she “wasn’t going to shy away from a little excitement either.”

  It had been years since she had had so much fun. Every night they hit the town like teenagers, going to the movies, and to nightclubs where she taught Rudolf the Twist. Accustomed to intimacy with an older woman, he showed no sign of flagging in the physical side of their liaison—“On the contrary,” Maria laughs—although she did notice that he had not been exaggerating when he said that he was obsessed with Erik Bruhn: “He couldn’t drop the subject, and repeated over and over how much he admired him.”

  As it happened, she herself was infatuated with Bruhn—“probably in love.” During the 1959–60 New York City Ballet season they had formed a near-perfect partnership onstage, but Bruhn, recoiling from Maria’s emotional demands and distressed by an increasing lack of rapport with Balanchine, had decided to return to Denmark. In the early summer of 1960 the two stars were reunited on American Ballet Theatre’s six-month Eastern bloc tour, but tensions ran high. Desperately missing her baby daughter, and unable to dance with Erik, who had canceled his performances because of an injury, Maria was left “utterly forsaken.” By the time they got to Moscow, with Erik in perfect form, she was consoled somewhat by the rhapsodic response to their Black Swan duet, but could not fail to see that he spent most of his time trying to avoid her. In Tbilisi she became “very demanding, very aggressive,” and as the tour reached its close, Erik decided to put an end to the situation by severing all contact. “I simply couldn’t handle it and told her that I no longer wanted to dance with her, talk to her, or ever see her again.”

  By the following spring he had recanted, and during Ballet Theatre’s Broadway season they performed the Black Swan duet again, as well as collaborating closely on Miss Julie, Birgit Cullberg’s choreographed version of Strindberg’s play. A few months later, having heard of their success in the ballet, the new director of the Royal Danish Ballet persuaded Erik to invite Maria to dance it with him in Copenhagen. As this would make her the first American ever to be a guest with the Danish company, she had decided to accept, and it was while out walking in Frankfurt with Rudolf one afternoon that she stopped to call Erik collect from a pay phone to give him her answer.

  Erik’s first reaction on hearing that she planned to come to Denmark was to make sure that she agreed to the condition he had outlined in his letter: that they would not see each other outside the theater. “But of course,” said Maria dismissively, telling him that she was in Germany, and making him guess the identity of her companion. When Erik refused to believe that she was standing in the street with “her wonderful Russian dancer,” Maria handed the receiver to Rudolf.

  For a few seconds he found it almost impossible to speak. Erik Bruhn was the one dancer he regarded as his peer—even Pushkin had described him as a revelation. Teja alone had been disparaging. “Bruhn is cold,” he remarked when they watched the film together, prompting Rudolf’s now-famous oxymoron, “Yes, he’s so cold he’s like ice; you touch it and it burns you.” Soon regaining his composure, Rudolf told Bruhn how much he wanted to come to Denmark, and, watching him, Maria noticed the way his eyes had become bright, his expression rapt as if realizing he now had the world before him.

  When they arrived in Copenhagen, Elise and her nanny were already there, staying at the Langeline, a small boardinghouse near the theater, where Maria had made reservations for them all. Hearing that he would sleeping in a separate room, and that there would be “no more anything,” Rudolf grinned amicably and looked at his watch: “So … How long it last?” Late that afternoon they went across the square to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, where Maria ordered “Red Specials” (champagne with berry juice) and called from the bar to invite Erik to join them.

  It was an unusually warm late summer day, and when Erik came into the bar he was surprised to see that the young man sitting beside Maria was wearing a sweater. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he noted that Rudolf, exactly ten years his junior, was extremely good-looking with “a certain style … a kind of class,” while Rudolf, slyly studying Bruhn in turn, was struck by the classic beauty of his noble, Nordic face, whose perfect proportions had been undiscernible in Teja’s grainy images. Although neither dancer looked the other in the eye, Maria could see that they were attracted to each other. They began by talking about Rudolf’s immediate plans as, in halting English, he said that he wanted to dance with a leading European or American company but was not sure how to go about it. To make conversation, and give Erik an idea of the intensity of his admiration, Rudolf mentioned how he had spotted the two dancers at the Bolshoi on their first night in Moscow. “He knew who he was looking for and he saw us there,” Erik told his biographer, John Gruen, while Rudolf confirmed, “I was dying to speak to those dancers … but I didn’t dare, because I was warned that I would be expelled from school.… So I radiated words through my eyes—by just looking at them.”

  The awkwardness between Erik and Maria, which they tried to cover with a lot of forced conviviality, was obvious even to Rudolf. “Of course, I could see that Rudi could see that there was something up,” said Erik. “[He] mentioned much later that he had hated the sound of my laugh. Anyway, it was all I could do to get through that hour we spent together.” Eager to leave, Erik offered to pay the check, but Maria insisted on adding her share, adding Rudolf’s contribution from a supply of cash th
at he had asked her to safeguard. As Rudolf seemed mystified by the expression “going Dutch,” Erik explained that in America people often split the bill. “But we’re not in America,” shrugged Rudolf, no wiser.

  Over the next few days he saw Erik in company class every morning, when they would exchange a few words. After barre, when the dancers divided into two groups, Rudolf automatically went to the center of the first group, while Erik chose as usual to be at the back of the second group. Although this meant they were able to watch each other, Rudolf was troubled by the fact that Erik was not given pride of place by his colleagues, and asked, “Why do the Danish people not respect you?” In fact it was he whom the other dancers held in low esteem. Shocked at the way Rudolf thrust himself to the front or stopped the whole class if the tempo was too fast for him, they failed to understand why the great Erik Bruhn was hanging out with this Russian boy whose dancing they found so impetuous and rough-edged. Their training, formulated in the mid-nineteenth century by choreographer and ballet master August Bournonville, had taught them to be meticulously controlled and to disdain what Bournonville described as “the obvious lascivious tendency” of Russian virtuoso dancing. To the young Danes, Rudolf was “a dirty dancer. Not clean … sort of messy.”

  Erik, on the other hand, while aware that Rudolf was still raw, was able to appreciate his tremendous force and vitality. Capable himself of dazzling pyrotechnics, he had always been more open-minded than his insular compatriots. After he graduated in 1947, feeling that Denmark had sealed itself off from advances in world ballet, he joined London’s Metropolitan Ballet to encounter “different lives, different bodies, different thinking,” and six months later accepted an offer from American Ballet Theatre. “It was certainly not that I was ungrateful to the Danish Ballet, but somehow the unknown attracted me more than the known.”