Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Rudolf also called Rossi Street that night to wish the Pushkins a happy New Year. He told Xenia that he had left the de Cuevas company and was now in Copenhagen, doing exactly what he had always planned: studying with Erik Bruhn. He described the situation at le Bourget that had forced him to stay in the West—something Pushkin’s abrupt letter arriving the night of his debut had not taken into account. “Tell Alexander Ivanovich that if he’s got nothing better to say—and Tamara hasn’t either—they shouldn’t write at all.”* Desperate to reassure him of their love and support, Xenia responded immediately. “Don’t be angry with Pupik,” she wrote. “He didn’t know the whole adventure. He is an honest man and a good man.” Tamara, alone and unhappy on New Year’s Eve, sent her own pledge of fidelity to her “Rudenka”:

  Nothing has changed for me. My attitude is the same. It’s just that now I have a feeling of longing—desperate longing—and endless questions: Where is he now? What’s happening to him?

  News that Rudolf was safe was “like a sedative” to Xenia, who turned Russian Christmas on January 7 into a special celebration in his honor. As a memoir and billet-doux, Teja and the Pushkins made a film of themselves at Rossi Street, completing their ménage à quatre of old by playfully seating an outsize teddy bear in Rudolf’s usual chair. Candlelit and wonderfully evocative of old St. Petersburg, it begins with a close-up of tea being poured from an antique silver pot, milk from a silver jug into bone china cups, and closes in on Alexander Ivanovich spooning jam into his tea. He eats a piece of cake, delicately, fastidiously, while Xenia, wearing a ravishing rose-printed satin dress, takes a pear from the fruit bowl, holds it to the light, and sensuously peels it. Pushkin pours champagne into crystal glasses and gives one to Xenia, who, as usual, makes the first toast to him. Then Teja, dressed in a jazzy black-and-white sweater, toasts Alexander Ivanovich, and both Xenia and Teja turn toward a picture on the wall: her favorite study of Rudolf in a pose from La Bayadère. Pushkin raises his glass to it, and so does Xenia with a special smile.

  In another, more intimate scene, Xenia is sitting in her bedroom, applying her makeup while Teja stands behind her, slowly and attentively brushing her hair. Since Rudolf’s defection they had become much closer, each taking comfort from the other as a way of extending their ties with Rudolf. “Xenia transferred all her desires to Teja when Rudik left—they were seen together everywhere.” Watching this Turgenev moment of tender rapport between the radiant older woman and beautiful boy feels like spying until we realize that, with the handheld camera, Pushkin must be there, too. So is Rudolf. As if reassuring him of this, Xenia picks up his framed photograph on her dressing table and places it lovingly in front of her with the candles and perfume bottles forming a little shrine.

  Ending with footage of Rudolf’s Leningrad—the Kirov Theater, Pushkin’s studio, the Hermitage from across the Neva, the circular route of his favorite walk—the film, which eventually found its way to him, acted as a potent siren call. And just as affecting were the sentiments expressed in Rosa’s latest letter. She tells him that she, their parents, and the Pushkins have all come to the conclusion that his quest to learn new forms of dance in the West is a dangerous mistake. “I’m afraid that you will lose yourself.… Rudik, be careful! Those years in school and at the theater: this was great work.” Leningrad, she says, is where he belongs—the place where he became a man, where people understand him and where his heart is. “This is where you can completely open yourself up in terms of creation.” Anticipating his fears of reprisal, she tells him of a Georgian defector who returned to the Soviet Union to face no more than a community court hearing. More enticing still was her promise that if Rudolf came back, the Kirov would accept him into the company in exactly the same position, provided that he is contrite and admits that he was in the wrong. Rosa then urges Rudolf to contact Russia’s ambassador in London, one Soldatov, in order to arrange the practicalities of his return—a suggestion that would immediately have alerted him to the fact that this was a letter written to order as “Soldatov” was hardly a name his sister would have known. His suspicions were confirmed a week or so later by the arrival of a second warning from Teja, sent at great personal risk, just over a month after his Stasi interrogation.

  I couldn’t write for a long time. I hope you understood that. In Russia everybody knows where and from whom I get correspondence. You probably received one letter from me, but there was no truth in it. Others I sent you didn’t get to you: They were caught by our government people. In one I wrote a lot of things which you can’t say in this country, but I implore you not to tell that to anybody.

  Black Cat [Tamara] and others are collecting all your photographs, etc. They’ve set up court procedures here—but without you.

  I envy you, because the atmosphere here is terrible. Impossible. If you want to come back—it shouldn’t be now. But I don’t think you want to do such a stupid thing. If you ever call me, talk to me very carefully. They are listening to everything that I say.… Berlin is closed now. It’s very hard for us to go to Western Europe. But that’s not a problem. First of all I have to complete my studies, and then we’ll see what will happen.… I’ve heard a lot here about your success. Xenia and Alexander Ivanovich will be very happy if you send a picture through the person who will give you this letter, and I will pass it on.… In Leningrad everything stays the same. Soloviev has broken his leg but probably you’ve been told all this on the phone. The most important thing is that the government departments are not done with you yet; they want to capture you. If you want to come back, think carefully—the circumstances are not good.

  Obviously, it was now impossible for Rudolf, the West’s “new revelation,” seriously to consider returning home. January was the month when Paris was vibrant with what The New Yorker’s Janet Flanner called “the kind of collective balletomania that used to seize upon the Diaghilev crowds on a great first night here.” And Rudolf was its cause. At the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on January 12, the Cannes quartet gave the first of two “peculiar, pinch-hit galas,” performing without costumes on an empty stage, yet people went wild, throwing flowers and shredding their playbills into confetti: “I think to this day that was the most excited audience I’ve ever been in,” exclaimed the music critic of The Boston Globe. Writing with a great deal more enthusiasm than knowledge, both he and Janet Flanner focused their reviews entirely on Rudolf, referring only in passing to the other members of the ensemble. “Everybody was only interested in Nureyev,” recalled Sonia Arova. I thought [Erik] … needed to talk about it or else he was going to make himself ill.”*

  Just before the second evening Erik injured a tendon so badly that there was no question of his going on. Without a moment’s hesitation Rudolf volunteered to take over his roles—even the Bournonville duet, which he had observed in Paris but never danced.

  In the Bach Fugue I danced all parts. I was without stopping … in Raymonda I did all his coda and his part, and after came my Don Quixote. I just felt warmed up and went out and danced better! I didn’t know the [Flower Festival] choreography and just three minutes before they show me what to do. I just changed costume and I went on; it was quite a risk. I made up what I couldn’t remember. I wasn’t very wrong! I enjoyed that. It was my first Bournonville ballet.

  The quartet was due to disperse the following morning, since despite having received several offers to tour the program, each of the dancers had decided that they wanted the freedom to work on their own. “It was strictly for the experiment,” Erik told an interviewer. “We could make a lot of money in concert work, but it would leave us all exhausted, and the artistic effect in the long run could not be as satisfying as working in a ballet company.” Sonia had a freelance engagement in New York, and Erik had planned to travel with her, as he was expected to appear in a televised duet from Flower Festival with Maria Tallchief. With Erik hardly able to walk, this was clearly out of the question, and a situation Rudolf was again quick to turn to his advantage. Making sure
that he was awake before seven, he went downstairs to the hotel lobby to meet Sonia, and as they were saying good-bye, he remarked as casually as possible, “If you can arrange it so that I can take Erik’s place, it would be nice.”

  Here was the perfect opportunity to make his U.S. debut, particularly since a previous attempt had fallen through. At a dinner of Raymundo’s in Paris, he had met Paul Szilard, who offered to act for him in America, only to discover that as yet there was no interest in Nureyev there. Negotiations for an earlier television project had come to nothing, and Rudolf wasn’t even able to take up Balanchine’s invitation to see the New York City Ballet in September, as he was unable to get a visa in time. Now, though, with recommendations from both Sonia and Maria as well as a promise from Erik to act as coach, the NBC executives agreed to let the young Russian be flown in as a replacement, and they pulled strings to fix the necessary immigration papers within days.

  The excitement Rudolf felt at the prospect of going to New York was somewhat dampened by the ordeal of getting there. This journey, the longest time he had ever spent in the air, gave him his first real experience of the phobia that would haunt him all his life. “I am used to flying, but … the fear grows.” Buffeted by atrocious weather conditions—“they said one plane had crashed”—his flight was diverted to Chicago for three hours before the pilot made another attempt to reach New York. As they circled for an hour Rudolf had convinced himself, “Well, soon we drop!” but when at last they landed, he found his nerves soothed by the smoothness of the arrival itself. “Very beautiful, no custom difficulties.… No journalists, very quiet, like real vacation.” Determined to see Martha Graham and her company perform that night, he went straight to the theater from the airport, but felt too jet-lagged and disoriented to watch the whole program. “I saw the first ballet, and she had to appear three ballets later, and I get dizzy and I left. But what I saw I liked very much.”

  Erik had arranged for them both to stay with his agent, Christopher Allan, a New York publicist who was famous for his all-night parties. “Opera singers partnered ballet dancers, people sang and acted out scenes, and everyone had a ball.” While Erik and Chris Allan settled in at his East Seventy-second Street apartment “for some heavy-duty drinking,” Rudolf would take a cab across town to City Center every evening to see the New York City Ballet perform. Waiting at the stage door with his ticket was Balanchine’s assistant, Barbara Horgan, who remembers how “smitten” she and her colleagues were by the idea that Rudolf Nureyev should even consider joining their company. “It was a big, big deal to have him around. Nothing like Rudolf had ever happened in our world.”

  Even Alexandra Danilova, onetime star of the Ballets Russes and Balanchine’s early muse, was enthralled to meet Rudolf when they came across each other at the theater. He recognized her immediately. At school he had been shown photographs in secret of the early, poetic duets which Balanchine had created for Danilova, his partner and ex-schoolmate, before they and several other dancers left Russia for a tour in the West. And although, since giving up her stage career, the ballerina, now a teacher, had fallen on hard times, her imperious carriage, showy jewelry, and large, heavily made-up eyes still projected an aura of old Maryinsky glamour.

  I said, “Ah, Nureyev!” And he said, “Ah! Danilova!” Then I said, “How do you do and how very exciting that you are here.” And I remember his first impression was, “Oh, I don’t like America. I don’t like anything here.” And I said, “Well, don’t come to conclusions when you don’t know. You are sort of under the Margot Fonteyn wing in London. That’s why. But we will see later when you come and dance.” And he said, “I don’t want to dance in America. I don’t like.” And so I said, “Well, you will see it, how you will change.”

  Intent on not appearing the wide-eyed émigré, Rudolf was adopting a deliberately misleading attitude. Having expected “some monsters, building monsters,” he had been delighted by New York, and was even more taken by the dance he saw there, telling the Goslings when he got back to London, “I want to feel Balanchine. I want to eat it.” In Russia he had been almost alone in appreciating the stark beauty of Theme and Variations, which Teja had filmed in his absence, because he understood at once that this was not a work devoid of feeling but a “story of the body.” To him it represented exactly the kind of choreography he wanted to explore in the West: classical dancing, independent of plot or design, which served the music so precisely that the timbre of each instrument seemed visible in the steps.

  Included in the repertory that week was Apollo, the only Balanchine ballet Rudolf had seen staged in Russia; Serenade, the choreographer’s American debut, made in 1934 for students in his new school; and the extraordinary Agon, in which Stravinsky’s new twelve-tone style is translated into a dance syntax distorted to new extremes of asymmetry and expression. This was classicism made thrillingly new, just as the performers themselves were not typical ballerinas but healthy, athletic, all-American girls, whose “reach, get it, take it, go!” energy had a force and reckless speed that exactly reflected the pulse and dynamism of the city. Rudolf found the dancers technically stronger than his Kirov colleagues, and admired their long, sleek bodies—especially the extra pull through the thigh that he had always strived for himself. Their breadth and clarity of movement was as inspiring as their musicality, its phrasing so clear and detailed that, to the critic Edwin Denby, a crescendo and decrescendo could be detected within the thrust of a move.

  Just as exhilarating was the freedom of expression Rudolf saw in other New York companies. He “went gaga over” Jerome Robbins’s Opus Jazz, and was intrigued by Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, a modern interpretation of the meanings and ecstasies of black hymns. “I love the Americans,” he would say years later. “They have the liberty to create. They are not oppressed by the European past.” And yet, at the same time, Rudolf felt a certain equivocation about the work he was seeing, finding it too abstract, too collective: “Everything tends to neglect or to overpower the individual dancer.” It is telling that he was talking here of Robbins, not Balanchine, because the impersonality of the New York City Ballet style, with its imperative to keep “self out of the picture” was something Rudolf would never fully comprehend.

  When Erik joined the New York City Ballet in 1959, Balanchine, uneasy about the dancer’s star status, had made a point of telling him that he was interested only in the performer, not the person. To help adapt himself to this new approach, Erik turned to the discipline of Zen. “I was still stuck with what I was … [and] tried to think in terms of ‘to be’ rather than ‘I am.’ It was not Erik doing this or that step; I had to become that step.” Rudolf, however, had the feeling that Balanchine wanted to get to know him: “To be close … to see what kind of man I was.” They met for the first time together with Alexandra Danilova in the Russian Tea Room, where Balanchine, a courteous, patrician man, was extremely friendly. As Maria had already observed, he and Rudolf were strikingly alike in many ways; quite apart from their passion for music, both were born pedagogues with the same religious devotion to their profession and a fierce contempt for any half measures. “Why relax?… What are you saving yourself for? Do!” Balanchine would urge a dancer, adding with a Marvellian relish for carpe diem, “Now is the time! Relax is for the grave, dear.” (A near echo of Rudolf’s own endorsement of the present: “If you look back, you fall downstairs.”) But although Balanchine’s interests were much wider-ranging than Rudolf’s at that time (itemized by his first biographer as “Braque, Pushkin, Eisenhower, Stravinsky, Jack Benny, Piero della Francesca, science fiction, TV Westerns, French sauces, and American ice creams”), over dinner that night he seemed willing to confine the conversation to their homeland. As they reminisced about Russian literature and Tchaikovsky’s adaptations of Pushkin, Rudolf discovered small differences of taste in their choice of operas—“I loved Pique Dame, his preference was Eugene Onegin.” And when Balanchine began talking about the Kirov, which had toured New York in December, he
became more aware of disparities between their artistic ideas.

  In reply to Rudolf’s question about his view of the company, Balanchine, with characteristic directness, said that he found the style lacking in attack and much too heavy. Russian dancers have a tendency to settle back on their heels, to sit in plié before a jump or pirouette, whereas he had evolved a technique that projected the weight forward and upward with the least amount of visible preparation before each step. “Balanchine wanted linkage, the steps linked to one another, the dancing linked to the music,” his male star Edward Villella has written. “Imperial grandeur and posturing—posing—were passé, no longer a vital part of twentieth-century dancing.” In developing a modern American style of classicism, Balanchine had drawn on the Bournonville method, which he studied while on tour with his company in Copenhagen by watching children’s classes at the Royal Danish school. Rudolf had instantly spotted the Danish influence on the NYCB style, but although he envied the dancers’ speed and brilliance, he nevertheless missed seeing the kind of smooth, legato work in which he had been trained. “He doesn’t seem to go in for adagio,” Rudolf remarked when Nigel Gosling debriefed him on his return.

  Balanchine, however, could tell immediately that Rudolf had just left a Russian company that was fifty years behind the times. To him, as Arlene Croce has written, adagio and allegro technique were not polarized but complementary, “each partaking of virtues once thought exclusive to the other: fullness of volume in allegro, crispness of accent in adagio.” After thirty years in the United States, inspired by its open spaces, energy, and popular culture, Balanchine had embraced the American scene so wholeheartedly that his patriotism was apparent even in the clothes he wore—his own elegant version of a Wild West dude’s garb, with pearl-buttoned shirts and black string ties. For Rudolf, though, it was still too soon to “put the ‘Russe’ legend” completely behind him. The need to retain the purity of his Kirov schooling remained a sacred obligation, and he was not yet convinced that any other company in the world could give him the same quality of teaching and discipline. Not only that, but the letters he was receiving from home had taken effect, making him long to see his family and friends. When he mentioned that he was thinking of returning to Russia, Danilova pounded the table. “You must not!” she cried. “They’ll throw you in jail … [then] what kind of a dancer will you be?” Rudolf just shrugged. “I do what I must do. But I do not know now what that will be.”