Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Rudolf belonged to the generation that had not only benefited from Fokine’s “new ballet” (his Isadora-inspired, nonballetic plasticity was the foundation of Vaganova teaching) but was also familiar with more radical advances in choreography. Taking anticlassical experiments even further, Nijinsky’s 1912 L’Après-midi d’un faune was truly archaic, its meaning compressed into austerely angular, ritualistic forms. This was modernism at its most uncompromising—“a revolution in dance,” as Rudolf said—as well as a complete denial of Imperial Ballet virtuosity and personality. At the same time, taught even from his Ufa days that Petipa was the “king of ballets,” Rudolf still regarded the Maryinsky classics as his true heritage. These were works he felt should be preserved but not embalmed—dancers’ techniques and physiques having changed so dramatically over the century.

  For example, they had long tutu and long low arabesque … and they had pretty arms and just some headdress and jewelry and they didn’t need to dance so much, to do so many steps. [Then] they became more slim and … dancing and choreography had to be changed—actually not choreography—but way of doing those steps to bring them more alive, and mime and everything clarified and renewed from generation to generation.

  This was Diaghlev’s attitude, too. Commissioning Nicholas Sergeyev to stage The Sleeping Princess for his company in 1921, the impresario lifted numbers from different Petipa ballets and ordered others to be rechoreographed while still preserving the master’s basic style and steps. Rudolf admired Erik for taking similar liberties with the Bournonville repertory, making changes that communicate to a modern public. “I simply draw from the original source, from where I feel the life is,” Erik explained. In the English classical repertory, however, Rudolf saw no such development. “They terribly happy that they have that dead body—they think it will last for a long time, but it doesn’t.”

  He made up his mind that if he was going to appear in the Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake, there would have to be significant improvements. And while he had been genuinely impressed by Margot’s Odette/Odile, he was not prepared to stand to one side while she plaintively mimed her story. “I came to her, and I said, ‘Well you were so beautiful and … you did mime so well, but I couldn’t find place for myself. I can’t do that performance. I’ll destroy it.’ ” Looking him straight in the eye, Margot replied amiably, “Just you try.”

  In conversations with Nigel Gosling, Rudolf could not be held back from airing his views on the classics:

  “For me it’s very funny. You have a kind of theater like Old Vic or Stratford and you have very old and experienced players and I am sure they don’t go like they were playing in Shakespeare’s time, quite modern in construction and decor and everything and everybody accept it. And when it comes to ballet you have that old version—it’s dead.…”

  “What about period feeling in Giselle?”

  “I don’t care really. It have to be for me not in period but in spirit.”

  The two were then spending a lot of time together at Victoria Road carrying out the interviews for Rudolf’s autobiography. While in Paris, a week after meeting the Goslings, he had told the publishers Opera Mundi that he would not allow them to go ahead with the book they had commissioned unless “that Englishman” was brought in to rewrite it:

  I just really emptied myself totally. And when I read it I was horrified. And many things were misunderstood or made on purpose more clumsy. Then somebody from Sunday Times and he with his very anti-Soviet sentiments coloured into such venom … I practically fainted. And finally I met Nigel and he made it more palatable.

  One sentence that had baffled him was, “I leapt to freedom with a knife in my hand,” and when the Goslings explained what this meant, Rudolf muttered contemptuously, “I did not leap anywhere—I walked.” He hated the way the press had sensationalized his life, and was determined to be taken seriously—as Nigel immediately understood. “He wanted to work as a dancer and be judged as a dancer, an artist for whom the present and the future were more important than the past.”

  They would sit together by the large drawing room window, Rudolf in a low, dusty pink velvet chair, Nigel perched on the window seat with a tape recorder (which he had great difficulty operating). The microphone’s hurricane of interference combined with Rudolf’s thickly accented, idiosyncratic English makes some passages virtually unintelligible. (His description of Hamburg’s “lakes and rivers” was first heard by Nigel as “Legs & Ringwort.”) Gradually Rudolf’s solemn, monosyllabic replies become more playful and insinuating. Asked if he had any adventures on his first trip to London, he giggles, “Well even if I do have I don’t say it. I intend to be abstract.” And he is, summarizing events after Hamburg as “pages of private life.” When things begin to flag, Nigel reduced to asking, “Do you like ships?” and sighing, “Well, that’s Hamburg,” the conversation moves to Cannes. With another adolescent giggle, Rudolf throws in a surprise aside, saying that he “caught, probably, a tart” in a South of France bathhouse, adding enigmatically, “I got caught I think too.” Nigel chuckles. “You went there privately?” “Yes. Between performances. For five days.” Still chuckling, and hardly missing a beat, he goes on to ask Rudolf about Rosella Hightower’s Cannes studio.

  Nigel’s unshockability was to prove a vital part of their bond. His “riotous” year in Isherwood’s Berlin, like his apprenticeship in Roy de Maistre’s studio, had given him insider access to the louche, alternative world of artists like Francis Bacon, his “beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick.” And while completely at ease in homosexual company, he was detached enough to be gently satirical at times, depicting, for example, a camp and gushing ballet conversation in his novel. “ ‘My dear, you simply must see Gilpinsky; he’s divine.’ ‘Yes, I always say he’s got the nicest bum in the ballet. And his rez-de-chausées are impeccable.’ ”* It was this mixture of bawdiness and seriousness, of irreverence and kindness that made Nigel so immensely likable; his friend Terence Kilmartin remarked that he was so innocent of the usual resentments, snobberies, aggressions, and neuroses that “one was tempted to regard him as a sort of saint.” To Rudolf he was like Francis of Assisi, his ability to find a language compatible with those around him being so all embracing that he “could even talk to the birds and the beasts.” “Nigel was the only person who seemed to understand what he was trying to say,” remarked Maude, “because … he doesn’t like to open his ideas too much. They’re inside him, but to externalize them is not easy for him.”

  Their empathy was enhanced by the fact that Nigel understood what Rudolf was talking about. He had been an early champion of Balanchine (unlike the majority of English critics), and had even encountered Nicholas Sergeyev, whose classes he took for two years in London. Although intellectually Rudolf’s superior, he created an atmosphere in which the dancer felt he could talk freely and on equal terms, making the process of writing a true collaboration. Conceding to Rudolf’s greater knowledge of Russia and its artistic heritage, Nigel gladly incorporated his changes and elisions. Chapters in a final draft, filed in a torn cardboard folder marked “Nureyev His Corrections,” display their workings side by side: Rudolf’s emphatic, often misspelled scrawl three times the size of Nigel’s exact, scholarly hand. They also colluded in fictionalizing certain incidents, one being the telephone call Vera Volkova received from London the previous fall. Instead of it being Colette Clark who calls to inquire about the possibility of Rudolf participating in the RAD gala, a conversation is staged between the two stars themselves: “I knew nobody in England. Who could it be: It was a small, composed voice—nothing imposing. But the name made me jump. ‘It’s Margot Fonteyn here. Would you dance in my gala in London? It’s to be in October, at Drury Lane.’ ”

  Ignoring the incorrect date (which should be November), Rudolf has crossed out one sentence so vigorously that his blue ballpoint has almost sliced through the flimsy carbon paper. He was “sertanly not,” as he wrote and underlined in the margin, st
artled by the mention of the famous ballerina’s name: He had no intention of being portrayed as an ingénu when he was about to prove himself her peer.

  February 21, 1962: the date everyone in London’s ballet world was waiting for—at least, those lucky enough to have tickets for this, the first Fonteyn/Nureyev Giselle. (Seventy thousand applications were turned down.) “Not even the queen could get in,” bragged a clerk in the Opera House box office, while the scalpers outside were demanding £25 for a 37s.6d seat. As the curtain rose on act 1 there was a wave of excitement in the auditorium. When Rudolf appeared, the standees at the back of the orchestra “moved as one body forward,” but this was not the flamboyant star the London audience was expecting. “He came on stealthily,” remembered Maude, “He didn’t come on and say, ‘Here I am. Look at me. He wasn’t aware of the audience. He was right into his role.’ ” In their combined Observer review the Goslings dwelled on the way Rudolf did not actively project emotion but drew the audience into the world they were creating onstage. “(This is Ulanova’s style) … the true sign of a great artist greatly taught.”

  The element of nobility missing in the first Kirov performances was unmistakable that night, not only in his general bearing and the mannered elegance of his hands, but expressed in occasional telling gestures, like the way he kept pulling down his rough jerkin as if ill at ease in his peasant disguise. And yet, unlike the “playboy” of Erik’s interpretation, or the “complete cad” then standard in Russia, this was not a worldly aristocrat dallying with a pretty country girl but the same intense, infatuated youth of Rudolf’s Russian debut. Even when Albrecht’s guilt was disclosed, he seemed immature and impulsive rather than insincere, his betrayal motivated by no more than what the Alexander Bland review defined as postadolescent instability. “It is the James Dean charm of a boy who will always be in trouble and always forgiven.”

  Responding to his ecstatic displays of love, Fonteyn seemed to recapture much of the youthful esprit she had been lacking for many years. “The Giselle she gave that night with Nureyev was different,” wrote Clive Barnes. “More rhapsodic, more intense.” Rudolf, too, was more engaged than before; no longer diverting attention to himself by capriciously adopting an inert mask during Giselle’s Ophelia-like display of madness. (Even Erik—the paragon of dramatic restraint—had verged on the histrionic at this point, his performance described by Barnes as “the real thing, stark and raving.”) But while still leaving it to the audience to imagine the full extent of his grief, Rudolf now disclosed his horror in “one sudden glance.” To Tamara Karsavina, who was in the audience, this kind of naturalism was far too small-scale to register onstage.

  I wonder if it was not the present tendency of the Russian Ballet towards elimination of mime gestures out of dramatic scenes which may have influenced Nureyev to be sparing of gesture. It seems to me that he missed the great opportunity of expressing grief and contrition at Giselle’s grave in emotional gestures; Nijinsky’s acting of the scene was more poignant.

  Certainly Rudolf’s underplaying was at odds with the rhetorical bombast and semaphore mime favored by the Royal Ballet, which, as Barnes pointed out, appeared to be taking part in an English melodrama while he was playing Chekhov. “Here one would ultimately concede that everyone was out of step except Nureyev.” In the second act, a nocturnal reverie, there was no such disparity. On the contrary, the two dancers’ symmetry of line was so remarkable that, as Ninette de Valois remarked, “You couldn’t believe they both hadn’t sprung from the same school.” They seemed to hear the music in the same way, their instinct for filling out a phrase to their fingertips quite uncanny in its simultaneity. It was as if one were the other’s shadow or mirrored reflection—“two ends meeting together and making a whole.”

  New elements introduced by Rudolf were also perfectly integrated; there was nothing gratuitously showy about the Russian lifts; they intensified the slow-motion, vaporous effects of the second act, making the incorporeal Giselle seem prevented from floating away only by the restraint of her partner’s hands about her waist. Inspired by Rudolf, Margot had so totally immersed herself in the drama that the audience was hardly aware they were acting. Danced to the point of death by the vengeful wraiths, Rudolf lay in a state of collapse, his chest heaving with exhaustion, sweat polishing and highlighting the Slavic contours of his face. Gazing down at him for a long time as if transfixed by his beauty, Margot then half-swooned when he recovered, and he carried her forward, his face brushing against hers. At the climax, when she cradled his head in her arms, a quick intake of breath was heard throughout the house.

  When the curtain came down there was no applause for what seemed a minute. No one could quite believe what they had just seen: the icon of English ballet paired with a boy half her age, not the usual courtly danseur noble but an independent force who, with his huge personality and loping runs, seemed thrillingly alien and yet in perfect accord with Fonteyn. “My husband called it a celestial accident,” Maude said. “To probe into its components is like trying to analyze a moonbeam.” And despite her “practical, unmoonshiny qualities,” de Valois agreed. “Emotionally, technically, physically—in every way. They were just meant to meet on this earth and dance together.”

  When the two stars took the first of twenty-three curtain calls together, “all hell broke loose.” Pulling a red rose from the bouquet (sent by her husband), Margot gave it to Rudolf, who impulsively sank to one knee and covered her hand with kisses. This sudden gesture has become as legendary as their actual performance, the Dancing Times writing that it was the herald of a new era in ballet. Clive Barnes, with equal prescience, described it as the kind of act typical of a star capable of changing the public’s attitude toward an art form: “It has happened in opera with Maria Callas … possibly it happened with Nijinsky. A single personality who catches the public’s imagination.”

  To Margot it was only Rudolf’s way of expressing his feelings without resorting to standard social phrases like “Thank you for your help,” which seemed to strike him as stilted or false. Rudolf himself was bemused by the fuss. The tradition of what the French call le baisse main is alive to this day in Russia, where it remains a gesture of male esteem toward a woman (he had instinctively kissed Yvette Chauviré’s hand on first meeting her). By the second performance, the dancers had clearly rehearsed and toned down the culminating moment of their curtain calls; this time it was Margot who curtsied low to Rudolf and presented her hand to be ceremoniously kissed. “It is more effective than the impulsive prototype, but it was somehow right that the first performance should have just one unique flourish to it that was never to be repeated.”

  The critics agreed that although Fonteyn had surpassed herself—“brilliantly, wonderfully, surprisingly,” as Clive Barnes said—it was Nureyev’s night. They commented on how much more polished his technique had become, praising in particular his glittering series of entrechats. Interviewed on BBC radio, Karsavina spoke of his unusual ability to accelerate or decelerate his pirouettes in absolute accord with the rhythm, and also drew attention to the rare elegance of his line. The feminine aspects of his movements, the hallmark high retirés and attitudes “tending upwards,” as Karsavina put it, came as a complete surprise to Londoners accustomed to “those sturdy and violently masculine” Soviet males. From the moment he walked slowly onto the stage in act 2, his long cloak flowing behind him, an armful of white lilies held to frame his face, Rudolf was in his element—an embodiment of the Romantic image, “all lilies and languors.” “The entrance was so beautiful that people were practically in tears, some of them, before he started the dancing,” said Maude.

  But if Rudolf had modeled his androgynous, poetic look on Nijinsky, their interpretation of the character could not have been more different. Drawing on Alexander Blok’s lyrical drama The Stranger, Nijinsky’s Albrecht was a hero in search of an unattainable feminine ideal; Giselle to him—for all Karsavina’s resistance—was an abstract symbol, an alienated embodiment of
his own spiritual discord. For Erik, too, these wraiths, the Wilis, were figments of Albrecht’s mind—“all the things we are afraid of, that we have tried to escape.” Rudolf, on the other hand, transformed Théophile Gautier’s libretto into one of the great love stories. By portraying the doomed passion of a beautiful youth for an older woman, this Giselle and Albrecht aligned themselves with the more celebrated couples of nineteenth-century French literature—Stendhal’s Mme. de Renal and Julien, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Léon. The mutual tenderness and poignant contrast in age had been there in the Kirov performances with Alla Shelest, but now there was a difference: Rudolf understood the meaning of romantic love.

  In the film of the Fonteyn-Nureyev Giselle made three months later, we see to an almost voyeuristic degree the extraordinary sensuality Rudolf brought to the performance. The moment, for instance, when he tries to recapture the shape, feel, smell of Margot’s hand, holding his own hands against his face with eyes closed and lips half parted; or the erotic frisson, almost too subtle to catch, as she watches him lie panting on his back, his hand stroking down his chest and hovering for a fraction of a second above the swell in his “so-white, so-tight” tights. “What we were watching was a kind of seduction,” remarked the writer Brian Masters. “She responded to his advances—which is what they were—with a tremendous quiver of excitement which we all felt in the theater.”