Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  For some time before Rudolf’s arrival, Erik, lacking the stimulus of competition, had felt that he had reached a dead end. “Seeing Rudik move was an enormous inspiration.… It was through watching him that I could free myself and try to discover that looseness of his.” One afternoon when he and Maria were warming up onstage, he asked Rudolf to give them both a Russian barre. Halfway through, however, Erik suddenly announced, “I am so sorry but this is so different for my muscles that I have to leave.” Like all Danish dancers, he was accustomed to a short, fast barre. Most of the exercises concentrate on the feet, ankles, and calves in order to achieve the brilliance and lightness of Danish technique, but make little use of plié and fondu—the deep, sinking knee bends that both launch and cushion the Russian leap. (The Bournonville jump, which gives the impression that the dancers hardly touch the floor, is much bouncier than Russian elevation.) Since attempting to improve his plié during training in America, Erik had been plagued by knee trouble, and he feared that if he continued with the heavy adagio exercises he would not be able to perform that night.

  Although Rudolf knew the reason for Erik’s departure, he felt slighted all the same. “At beginning I came to him with compliments, took my heart on my knees. And he stamped on it.” He was “like a starry-eyed boy” in the presence of his idol, and wanted to be with him all the time. “Rudy used to sit in Erik’s dressing room and just stare at him,” said Maria. “He would look at how he made up, how he tied his tie.…” While flattering at first, this adoration had begun to irritate Erik, who had always valued his independence. Glen Tetley, who was touring Copenhagen at the time with American Ballet Theatre, remembers Erik remarking over a drink one evening, “Maria’s here pursuing me, and so is this Russian boy I’m supposed to be meeting. Well, he can wait!” Ordering another round, he stayed at the bar chatting and laughing with Tetley and the dancer Scott Douglas, his singular, “rather sinister Mephistophelian” guffaw ringing out across the room. Suddenly they heard a cry from the seating area: “We saw this wild-eyed Tatar face, totally incensed that we were monopolizing Erik. Rudolf stormed off, and Erik groaned and said, ‘I’d better go and find him.’ Scott and I followed behind, and were given a very cold greeting by Rudolf, who was waiting outside. Then he and Erik went off somewhere together.”

  The next morning when Maria went to collect Rudolf for class, he was not in his room. “I went to the theater to wait for him, and eventually he came rushing in very late with Erik. I could tell they’d spent the night together.” Until this point all three dancers had tried hard to establish a constructive, uncomplicated friendship, and in the studio, where they often practiced together, had developed an exceptional rapport. “It was marvelous,” said Maria. “We criticized, we helped each other. Rudolf was especially good in helping me with elevation.” As a result, they had become inseparable, forming such a close Jules et Jim threesome that when Maria, relishing her Jeanne Moreau role, was invited to the American ambassador’s wedding, she was not sure which of the two to bring. But the moment Erik and Rudolf began their affair, moving in together at a downtown hotel, the situation changed completely. “The men were becoming emotionally involved, and because of it Erik was pushing me away, which I found upsetting. I valued our artistic collaboration, and derived a great deal of inspiration from it. I didn’t want it to end.”

  Each day became a battle for attention. When Erik, whom Rudolf had asked to watch his private class with Vera Volkova, discovered that Maria was already sitting in the studio, he immediately left, causing offense all around. On another occasion when Rudolf told Maria that he and Erik wanted to have lunch alone, she created a major scene, threatening to leave Copenhagen unless they included her. Then there was an evening at Erik’s house when Rudolf thought that he was paying too much attention to Maria. Announcing that he was going back to the hotel, Rudolf went out into the hall and ordered a taxi, surprising the other two with his command of English. “The period in Copenhagen was a puzzling time,” Maria wrote in her memoir. “For all his bravado, Rudolf was easy to get along with. He wasn’t devious. Erik, on the other hand, was very manipulative, and I could never understand what he was after. Being between them, I could never quite tell who was in control.” “In retrospect,” Erik remarked to John Gruen, “I can see that it was not an easy time for her, and it wasn’t an easy time for me. It was certainly a confusing time for Rudik.”

  Professionally, too, it was a period of great uncertainty for Rudolf, as he did not know what he was going to do next. He badly wanted to leave the de Cuevas company where he felt he was treated “as a freak, or a curiosity,” but when his holidays were over at the end of September that was all he had to go back to. “It must have been horrible for him watching Erik and me rehearse for our performances. We were busy having a great success, and he was feeling very sad and very left out. Only studying with Volkova gave him a purpose.” Twice a day Rudolf had private lessons with Volkova, an original personality with an amusing way of mixing up her English colloquialisms and using onomatopoeia and vivid images to get the effect she wanted. “You must svoooosch your foot!” she might remark before an assemblé, or say of a misplaced working leg in attitude, “You are hugging one of zose red English pillar-boxes [cylindrical mailboxes]. You must hug ze gasworks!” As a pupil of Vaganova and Nicolai Legat, Volkova had been the first exponent of the Kirov method in the West, and was deeply revered at the Royal Danish Ballet, where she had taught for the last decade. When she arrived, the company was set in amber, its dancers, although extremely gifted and beautifully schooled, badly lacked range, as they had no experience of any style other than their overprotected, Romantic Bournonville tradition. “She brought her Russian training and somehow combined this in a wonderful way for us because we could still keep our heritage,” says ballerina Kirsten Simone.

  Rudolf, however, was unsettled by reverting to Kirov-based teaching at this stage—it was not what he had come to Copenhagen to learn. “I couldn’t understand why I was there. It was very strange.” He had hoped that Volkova would help him fuse the dynamism of Russian ballet with the lightness and precision of the Royal Danish system, but in fact discovered that he knew far more about Vaganova training than she did. When Volkova studied in St. Petersburg, Agrippina Vaganova was just starting to formulate her teaching method and only later, mostly under the influence of Fokine’s poetic choreography, evolved the liquid, quintessentially Russian way of harmonizing the whole body in motion. “What [Volkova] had was base of school. It was beginning of alphabet.… Just first letter.”

  Erik, who felt indebted to Volkova, resented the way that Rudolf, as he watched her general class, would repeatedly say, “That’s wrong … it’s not Russian!” and tried to explain that there was more than one way of approaching a step. But Rudolf was equally equivocal about pure Danish style, finding it “quite dull. Very dry, very small, rather empty.” Although he liked the speed, complexity, and wit of the enchaînements, he noted the paucity of adagio movement and of virtuoso pirouettes, and saw steps he “didn’t have any desire to dance.” What he admired was the prominence Bournonville gave to the male dancer. In his duets a couple will often perform the same variations side by side, so that instead of being just a foil and partner to the ballerina, the man can eclipse the woman with his strength and virtuosity. Particularly brilliant at nurturing young male stars (Peter Martins would be among them), Vera Volkova had done much to give Danish dancing a more forceful and contemporary edge, but to Rudolf her influence was not evident enough. “I did every day the same class. It was given by different teachers—the same class, the same steps, the same combinations.”

  This obsessive preoccupation with classroom technique was what had driven Erik to leave Copenhagen in order to forge his own identity, and since then he had never ceased trying to push against the boundaries of his art. “I want so much to go beyond everything that is supposed to be correct,” he told Rudolf. “To feel I am dancing and not working.” Returning from America,
Erik had attempted to teach his colleagues how to revitalize and “play” with their classical base without losing its essential purity, but in Rudolf’s view he alone had succeeded. “When Erik dances—that not so Bournonville, he has understanding.… He make it alive.” For him every glimpse of Bruhn in class or onstage was a tutorial, an opportunity to study male dancing at its zenith.

  He learned from Vera Volkova, too, but mostly outside the studio, in her own home. Reminding him of his childhood mentors Voitovich and Udeltsova, Volkova was a White Russian, the daughter of a hussar officer, who had been brought up in an elegant house on the Neva. At the outbreak of World War I she and her sister were sent to Odessa with their French governess, but then they were on their own. Surviving on dried mushrooms strung into necklaces, they reached Moscow, where they lived with other refugees on the station platform until finally being reunited with their mother in Petrograd. By 1929 Volkova was dancing with GATOB, the state ballet organization, which became the Kirov, and while on tour in Vladivostok she defected. She had intended to join the Ballets Russes but, hearing of Diaghilev’s death, decided to settle in Shanghai, where she danced in the company formed by the Russian émigré George Goncharov and taught at his school. (Among Volkova’s first pupils was Peggy Hookham, a gifted thirteen-year-old, who would soon make her London debut as Margot Fonteyn.)

  Volkova loved to reminisce about her youth, and Rudolf enjoyed listening, but it was her life in the West that held him in thrall. In 1937 she moved to London with her husband, an English painter and architect, opening a studio in West Street, which throughout the war attracted all the leading English dance figures and any visiting foreign star. Frederick Ashton, whom Volkova eased into shape after military service, considered her to be his most inspiring teacher since Nijinska, while Fonteyn, who had modeled her own style of dressing on Volkova’s ballerina chic, was as much in awe as she had been as a girl. When Volkova began teaching the Sadler’s Wells company and school, she was largely responsible for establishing the technical and artistic standards that led the company to international fame, a vital influence on shaping Fonteyn’s signature role of Aurora and on Ashton’s postwar masterpiece Symphonic Variations. Although Ninette de Valois had offered Volkova a permanent position as resident ballet mistress, it was on condition that she close her West Street studio, which she refused to do. (As a result the offer was withdrawn, and the company was forbidden to attend her classes.) In 1950 Volkova decided to accept an invitation to be artistic adviser to the Royal Danish Ballet, “to the lasting shame of the English who had her and let her go.”

  Yet even in Copenhagen, Volkova continued to be a pivotal force, staying in close touch with Fonteyn, and commissioning Ashton to create a new ballet for the Danes: his 1955 Romeo and Juliet. One evening over dinner at her house with Rudolf, Erik, and Maria, the friends were discussing Rudolf’s future—“We all loved Rudy and were worried by how low his spirits had fallen”—when Volkova came up with the idea of recommending him to the Royal Ballet.

  As it happened, at exactly the same time Margot Fonteyn had been trying to make contact with Rudolf. President of the Royal Academy of Dancing and responsible for attracting stars for its annual fund-raising matinee, she was looking for a replacement for Galina Ulanova, and had been told by her co-organizer, Colette Clark, that the young Kirov defector would be the perfect choice. The daughter of the renowned art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, Colette was a passionate balletomane, quick-minded, and unusually perceptive about dance. Her twin brother, Colin Clark, had recently married Violette Verdy, and had been just as electrified by Rudolf’s Paris performances.

  Wanting another opinion, Fonteyn decided to consult her friends Nigel and Maude Gosling, who had also seen him onstage. Better known under their joint pseudonym of Alexander Bland (The Observer’s ballet critic), the couple had gone to Paris in June to get a preview of the Kirov company before its London season, and during a performance of The Sleeping Beauty had “just sat up” at the entrance of the Prince. “Even his walk made him different from everyone else.” Although uncertain of his name (names in Kirov playbills rarely corresponded with those of the performers onstage), the Goslings went back to London and told almost everyone they knew—including David Webster, general administrator of the Royal Opera House—about the extraordinary young Russian. “You must try and get this boy,” they urged. “He’s floating around Paris and he’s marvelous.” But by this time Rudolf had defected, which made it impossible. Webster told them not to have anything to do with him. “We’re due in Moscow and Leningrad in a few weeks’ time. If we touch him, if we even mention his name, the Russians won’t have us.”

  He was not the only member of the English dance establishment to regard Rudolf as a political hazard. The eminent critic Arnold Haskell, in a letter published in August’s Dancing Times, sounded off about “The Sorry Affair” of Nureyev’s defection, which, he said, not only showed lamentable disloyalty to the organization which had schooled him but threatened all future cultural exchanges between Russia and the West. In a counterblast in the following issue, headed “A Sorry Affair Indeed!” Nigel Gosling defended Rudolf’s right to freedom, and was seconded in another letter from critic James Monahan.* No stranger to political scandal herself, Fonteyn was unfazed by the controversial issues surrounding Nureyev and, having been convinced of his uniqueness, was now determined to include him in her gala. With Colette Clark assigned to make the initial approach, there followed two weeks of thwarted attempts to track Rudolf down, until, hearing that he was in Copenhagen, she happened to call Vera Volkova on a night when he was with her. Negotiations began, with Vera and Colette passing numerous messages between the two stars. Nureyev could not come to London that month to discuss the gala, Fonteyn was first told, because he did not have enough money for the fare. This was not a ploy. According to impresario Paul Szilard, who knew the details of his contract with de Cuevas, Rudolf’s salary was “a joke.” The Goslings were consulted again, and as a result The Observer agreed to provide the dancer with a ticket in return for an exclusive interview.

  Responding to Rudolf’s next concern—that his visit would be seized on by the press. (“They follow me everywhere … it’s terrible.”) Fonteyn gave her assurance that his trip would be kept secret even from the Royal Ballet. Rudolf then agreed in principle to perform at the matinee in December, but only as Fonteyn’s partner. Ever since he was a student, it had been his dream to dance with Margot Fonteyn. Even in photographs he could tell that she embodied the kind of understated classicism he admired—elegant, immaculate, and yet warmed by a lyric beauty. Fonteyn, however, who had formed no such fulsome image of Rudolf, resented being dictated to by a dancer half her age. “I thought, well, I’ve never seen this boy … why should he insist that I dance with him?” Word came back to Rudolf that Fonteyn would be happy to welcome him to London as her guest, but that they could not dance together: She already had a partner. “Rudy was so upset,” recalls Maria. “When he showed me the telegram he had tears in his eyes. And I said, ‘Believe me, Rudy, once Margot sees you she’ll never want to dance with anyone else.’ ”

  *A nude shot, either pirated from the studio or copied from one of the prints that Rudolf took away with him, did appear in the late sixties in the magazine of a U.S. gay rights organization. A New York dance critic also spotted a grainy Avedon nude of Nureyev blown up as a life-size poster—“like a copy of a copy of a copy”—at the entrance to a male porn film house on Broadway during the 1970s.

  *Awarded the Legion of Honor for bravery as a reconnaisance pilot in World War I, Weiller was a pioneer in the aircraft industry, eventually creating the airline that became Air France.

  *Ninette de Valois always maintained that Rudolf had been unfairly critical of Shelkov—“a nice old boy,” in her opinion. (Letter to Nigel Gosling, October 10, 1962.)

  *Although the correspondence was brought to a close by the editor, the debate went on for months, with Haskell hounding Gosling in private with his
views on the Nureyev affair:

  My Dear Nigel,

  No personal feelings of course … [but] I believe that there are many circumstances where opting out is selfish in the extreme and in no sense a heroic gesture. I believe in the owing of a certain loyalty to one’s country.… I can wax very indignant about the whole Pasternak business but I do not think it illiberal to believe that Nureyev has done the wrong thing.

  7 JAZZ, LONDON

  It was seven o’clock in the evening when Maude and Nigel Gosling arrived at the Panamanian Embassy in London, a large Georgian terraced house in Thurloe Place, where Margot Fonteyn, the ambassador’s wife, had invited Rudolf to stay. “Margot had rung us that first day and said, ‘You’re the only ones who’ve ever seen this boy. Will you look after him? I’ve got three seats for you to bring him to my Giselle.’ ”* With the performance due to start at 7:30 and still no sign of the dancer by 7:05, the couple was sitting in the formal drawing room wondering what to do when the door opened and a tousled youth appeared wearing stovepipe trousers and a sports shirt. “I’m sorry. I was asleep,” he said, adding by way of explanation, “I was supposed to be met but they miss me.”

  Rudolf’s flight had arrived early, and after waiting three hours at the airport for Fonteyn’s chauffeur, who had failed to find him, he made his own way to the embassy. “I looked too scruffy for the chauffeur,” he later told the journalist Elizabeth Kaye. “He was used to Duchess of Roxborough or something. He came twice to airport and would not recognize me.” When Rudolf arrived at the embassy, he was greeted by Colette Clark, whom Margot had entrusted to settle him in and to discuss plans for the next few days. But exhausted by his journey, and clearly put out at being welcomed by someone other than his hostess, Rudolf was “terribly squashing” toward any attempt at conversation, dismissing Colette’s first nervous question, “Is it a surprise to be here?” by looking out the window and replying superciliously, “What surprises me are these houses which are all exactly the same.” By the time the Goslings arrived, however, his mood had improved. Bowing courteously, he calmly disappeared, only to return five minutes later, appropriately dressed, much to their relief, in a well-cut dark suit. “I am ready,” he said with a grin. They arrived at the theater just as the curtain went up.