Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

In fact, all Rudolf was doing was inhabiting his role to the full, acting out the Stanislavskian principles of “Emotion Memory” and the “Dramatic I” with complete conviction. “I was Albrecht, and Albrecht was in love with Giselle; on the stage I was seeing her with the eyes of a lover.” From that evening on, however, audiences would interpret the ardor they saw in Rudolf as the “Real I,” believing in a real-life, offstage romance. So would Margot, who sensed “a strange attachment” forming between them, despite the fact that she knew he was “desperately in love with someone else at the time.” Even Erik, who had stood in the wings watching their performance, found himself overwhelmed by a confusion of private emotions and professional rivalry. “He stare. He stare.… He just couldn’t understand that kind of success and why it should be.” And instead of waiting for Rudolf, he fled from the theater. “I was running after him and fans were running after me. It was a mess.”

  *They also had a record of the night he and his current girlfriend had spent together in the Europa Hotel.

  *Immediately after the defection, Tamara, like Pushkin, had written to Rudolf, leaving her unsealed envelope with the teacher, who gave it and his own to the KGB agent who arrived at the school the next day to collect them. Not knowing what to say, she had sent a few lines by the nineteenth-century patriotic poet Nikolay Nekrasov, whose work often contains real depth of feeling beneath its pamphleteering facade:

  Alas! The wife will be consoled,

  And friend forgets the dearest friend.

  … In all the world I only saw

  Tears, that are saintly and sincere—

  The tears of mothers are the ones!

  They can’t forget their poor sons.

  (From “Harking to Horrors of War,” translated by Alexander Storozhuk.)

  *A more balanced and informed appraisal appeared in Dance and Dancers, which paid tribute to the striking qualities of all four performers but was crushingly dismissive of the choreography in the program itself.

  *Hilda Hookham, an archetypal stage mother, was known as BQ (Black Queen), a name most people in the ballet world associated with the fearsome protagonist of de Valois’ ballet Checkmate, but which some say referred to her black-market activities during the war. “If you wanted a pound of butter or a length of silk, you went to BQ—Queen of the Black Market.” Although she was hardly the comforting maternal type to whom Rudolf was drawn, he admired BQ’s toughness, and the fact that she had devoted her life to her daughter’s career. She was also unusually game for someone of her generation—“You couldn’t shock her; she’d just roll her black eyes,” according to Terence Benton—and once she had learned to cook steak to Rudolf’s liking, he regularly stopped off for lunch at her rooftop studio a few paces from the company premises in Talgarth Road.

  *This is not, as it may seem, a joke at the expense of the English dancer John Gilpin (who would have been only seven years old at the time) but self-mockery of the hero, Richard Gilpin, who is trying to amuse the girl he is pursuing. “Rez-de-chaussée” (French for “ground floor”) in this instance is a nonsense pun on the sliding step, chassé.

  9 THE BEATNIK AND THE PRINCE

  There was nobody missing that night, Saturday, March 10, 1962. Word had spread quickly of the “Dream Duo,” whose Giselle—“the success of the century”—had made a paragraph in Time. And even though Rudolf’s U.S. stage debut was taking place not in Manhattan but at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), it seemed as if the entire dance population of the city crossed the East River to see him. His sole appearance, lasting only ten minutes, was in the Don Quixote duet (included on a Chicago Opera Ballet mixed bill), but as one critic put it, “Le tout New York was there, Brooklyn or no Brooklyn.” Richard Avedon, who had taken a party of friends including Gloria Vanderbilt and Leonard Bernstein, sat at the very front of the auditorium. “You looked around and saw the oldest dancers, the youngest dancers … and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is it!’ ” A few rows back, beside Alexandra Danilova, was Balanchine—the only person Rudolf had come to America to impress.

  He entered with authority, performing the adagio with a quiet, self-effacing dignity, admirably attentive to his ballerina, Sonia Arova. The audience watched intently but impatiently, their excitement rising with the crescendoing drum roll of the climax: It was his solo they were waiting for. At last the dancer took up his starting position at the back of the stage, and with his first double cabriole came “an audible sigh of relief and pleasure.” Avedon saw the conductor cross himself. “As the baton went down, Nureyev went up. My memory of it is he simply rose; you never felt there was preparation for it.” The ovation that followed Rudolf’s final flourish—“a veritable Niagara roar”—modulated into an insistent rhythmic pounding until he repeated the variation, when it exploded into a tumult of whistling and shouting.

  A number of dancers and celebrities came backstage afterward to meet and congratulate the new star. But not Balanchine. Having no plans for the rest of the evening, Rudolf had gladly accepted Avedon’s invitation to supper, but decided to go first to the opening-night party in the hope of seeing the choreographer there. On entering the room, he was instantly surrounded by admirers, several of them White Russian émigrés anxious to talk about the motherland. Rudolf ignored them. “I like when I am in America to meet American people.… I didn’t stay for Russians to cry about Russia.” There was no sign of Balanchine. When Anatole Chujoy, the editor of Dance News, led him aside to conduct a short interview, he took the opportunity to address the choreographer indirectly. “Mr. Balanchine’s ballets are a new field for me, very different from the field where I work now, and I should like to know it better. It would be perfect for me if Mr. Balanchine would accept my working with the Royal Ballet part of the year and with the New York City Ballet part of the year.”

  It was well after midnight when Rudolf took a taxi to Avedon’s Park Avenue apartment. Most of the other guests had already gone home, but he found his host sitting in the kitchen talking to movie director Sidney Lumet. “When Rudi walked in, he said almost immediately, ‘Can you find out what he thought?’ ” Offering to make Rudolf scrambled eggs, Avedon said that he didn’t know Balanchine well enough to call him himself, but would ask a mutual friend. “It was left in the air.”

  Balanchine, Rudolf had decided, was the only choreographer in the world who could use him to the full measure of his talent. His first collaboration with Ashton had been a disappointment; he found the Scriabin solo derivative—“It wasn’t his idea. It was the idea of Isadora Duncan”—and even trite. “Run forward and throw yourself at the mercy of the West!” Certainly Ashton, inhibited by the fact that Rudolf knew more about classical schooling than he did, had been far too accommodating with him, admitting, “He made very good suggestions which I promptly adopted.” Rudolf would soon learn to appreciate Ashton’s genius—in his words, “a magician of theatre, of dance”—but what he sought at this point was a master. He craved new roles, in particular the kind of repertory that Fokine had tailor-made for Nijinsky. The choreographer had interpreted the dancer’s quiddity—his unconventional appearance and aura of strangely barbaric, fin-de-siècle perversity in early works like Cléopâtre and Scheherazade; his androgynous Romanticism and expressive use of the whole body in Chopiniana and Le Spectre de la Rose. “It was a great fortune for him to have Fokine,” Rudolf told Margot. “Who find way to have this jewel surrounded by setting.” And to Clive Barnes he made the same point. “Fokine discovered those peculiar talents of Nijinsky and he creates the real Nijinsky, and discovers, sees his potential: because of Fokine, Nijinsky blossoms and blossoms to whatever he is.”

  Women, not men, were Balanchine’s inspiration. His muses, the ballerinas with whom he was in love, were as influential as Dora Maar and her predecessors were for Picasso. Talking softly of Fabergé and Van Cleef, and playing up his St. Petersburg charm, Balanchine flirted constantly with the young women in the company, and for the most part ignored the men. “We were all striving to be nu
mber one,” remarked his “Prodigal Son,” Edward Villella, “but the men knew they could never be.” To Balanchine a woman’s body was faster, more flexible, and more musical than a man’s. She was queen, he was consort, “the accompaniment,” “only the second half.” And yet Rudolf was well aware of the glorious roles that Balanchine had made for male dancers: Apollo and The Prodigal Son (created on Diaghilev’s orders for Serge Lifar), or the serpentine, acrobatic adagio in Agon, a duet of real equality.

  Moreover, it was not only as a performer that Rudolf needed Balanchine. “I wanted to learn everything I could from him—his choreography especially.” Again he envisaged the kind of collaboration Nijinsky had had with Fokine, whose great mind “soaked … rubbed off” on the dancer, enabling him to build on his mentor’s achievements while forging an extraordinarily innovative choreographic language of his own. And although not an intellectual, Balanchine was an artist of the magnitude of Mozart or Stravinsky, as well as what his friend W. H. Auden called “something deeper, a man who understands everything.” His affiliation with Stravinsky was as monumental in the history of ballet as that of Tchaikovsky and Petipa a century before, Petipa being the master from whom Balanchine himself claimed descent. It was on the Russian classics that he modeled his own hierarchy of dancers—corps de ballet, female soloists and their cavaliers, principal couple—as well as basic structural devices that merge and separate ensembles in symmetrical lines and polyphonic patterns. In Balanchine’s hands this nineteenth-century material is made completely new—filtered, accelerated, intensified, concentrated to embrace what Arlene Croce called “physical and metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic implications Marius Petipa never dreamed of.”

  Having seen the original Swan Lake at the Maryinsky and remembering it lasting “all night” with as much mime as dance, Balanchine distilled his own version into one act of only thirty-five minutes, while Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty was “kind of foreshortened or telescoped” by him into Theme and Variations, the ballet that had so impressed Rudolf in Russia. Had Balanchine attempted to stage a full production of this classic (in his view a work of sheer genius, he told his amanuensis Solomon Volkov), he would not slavishly reproduce Petipa’s work but would develop his own ideas, making additions and cuts where necessary, not abandoning the mime completely but making these sequences understandable to the public today.

  Ballet isn’t a museum, where a painting can hang for a hundred or two hundred years. And even a painting needs to be cleaned once in a while. If it cracks, they restore it. But every museum has rooms where people don’t stop, they just look in and say, “Ah, it’s boring in here, let’s go on.” Ballet can’t survive like that. If people are bored at the ballet, they’ll stop buying tickets. And the theater will simply disappear.

  This, of course, was Rudolf’s own view. “The art must grow.… Fokine modernized Petipa and Petipa modernized his predecessors. We can never stop.… We must explore.” And it is why he had been so contemptuous of the Royal Ballet’s “dead body” of a repertory—their scrupulously faithful classical productions. But although in his opinion English ballet was “not much more modern than what we have in Russia,” this emphatically was not the case. On a mixed bill that season, for example, was Ashton’s modern masterpiece Scènes de Ballet, an abstract treatment of a Stravinsky score, excitingly innovative with its diverse tempi, shifting dynamics, and contrapuntal rhythms, the music’s tonal dissonance mirrored in an angular stylization of classical positions. Ashton’s particular favorite among his ballets, it has what he called “a cold, distant, uncompromising beauty,” standing as a testimony of his personal extension of the classical style, its traditional idiom stamped with playful and poetic embellishments that make it quintessentially his own.

  It is quite possible that Rudolf had not yet seen Scènes de Ballet (Maude Gosling has no recollection of him talking about it), but it is equally possible that he saw it and dismissed it. Like Theme and Variations, it is an outright homage to The Sleeping Beauty, which had influenced Ashton much as it had Balanchine. Beauty was the Petipa ballet that, more than any other, epitomized the St. Petersburg style. Balanchine had not only seen the original performed at the theater for which it was created but had forged a living collaboration with Stravinsky—also a “true Petersburger”—whose music repeatedly proclaims his lineage from Tchaikovsky. With no firsthand knowledge of this heritage, Ashton, in Rudolf’s view, did not understand classical dance. “He said, ‘Rudka, let me rehearse you, let me prepare you … you know in Russian school you learn it as it is not supposed to be,’ … and I said, ‘I have no courage, I just can’t yet, let me do this year the way I learned from Pushkin, from Kirov, from Sergeyev … the way it was passed on.’ ”

  Balanchine, on the other hand, using his pure St. Petersburg schooling as the basis for a continuous exploration of ballet, was exactly the teacher and mentor Rudolf sought; as Violette Verdy remarks, “There was potentially a magical affinity between them.”

  The following day, having heard nothing from Balanchine, Rudolf “rather uncertainly” telephoned him. Although sounding very distant, the choreographer agreed that they should meet, suggesting Castellano, the bar and restaurant opposite New York City Ballet’s old home on Fifty-fifth Street. When Rudolf arrived, he saw Balanchine sitting with his assistant, Barbara Horgan. “The atmosphere was a bit constrained. I sensed he had not much enjoyed my performance.” Rudolf was right. As an audition piece for Balanchine he couldn’t have picked anything worse. This “old chestnut” duet represented exactly the nineteenth-century Soviet legacy he had been striving for years to eliminate—the virtuosic showpiece that always rouses the most applause. As for the excited fans themselves: “Behind me were about twenty-five boys with red lips sitting and screaming, ‘God! Oh God!,’ ” Balanchine told the writer Leon Harris. These were “sensationalists” attracted by a superstar, the kind of audience Balanchine despised. To him they were reincarnations of the philistine Maryinsky balletomanes who would sit in the theater smoking room discussing the scantily dressed figures of their favorites. This new public swooning at the young Russian’s undeniable erotic force was in Balanchine’s view a dismaying regression to the days when ballet was considered not an art but a form of titillation: “Actually when you dance, there are no erotic impulses at all. Absolutely none! It’s out of the question, completely!… The stage eliminates sex.… It’s pure technique.”

  The change in Balanchine’s manner was hard for Rudolf to understand. At the Russian Tea Room in January he had seemed so enthusiastic about the possibility of their working together. Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, Rudolf asked Balanchine outright if he would have him. “Came out very bad.” “You know I don’t have pas de deux in my company, my ballets are very dry,” the choreographer told him. “But I like them dry,” replied Rudolf. Which was true. Most Russians, not understanding the concept of abstraction, found the ballets lacking in “soul.” (“It’s not that he didn’t care about the soul,” as Joan Acocella has written. “He just thought that the soul was in the feet.”) But while there is no doubting Rudolf’s genuine appreciation of Balanchine’s work, his grasp of the Balanchine aesthetic was almost nonexistent. It was the ballets themselves that the choreographer felt should draw the public, not the box-office appeal of a particular dancer. When Edward Villella, on tour in Russia in 1962, succumbed in desperation to the cries of “Encore! Bis!” that followed twenty-two curtain calls, Balanchine snubbed him for days. Violette Verdy explains why:

  [Balanchine] does not compromise. He has a company which is very consistent in its policy—a sort of selflessness in which it’s understood that everybody will dance at his best, but chiefly to serve the choreographer.… As a dancer with Balanchine, it is your duty to show what extraordinary choreographic material we have in that company. A dancer cannot show himself off either at the expense of the ballet or of the rest of the company. Balanchine does not want to set that kind of example.

  The Brook
lyn performance had made it quite clear to Balanchine that Rudolf was already too much of a star to become part of the ensemble he had spent so long establishing. His presence would violently unbalance the proportions of the company, which in 1962 was a much more fragile institution than sixteen years later, when Mikhail Baryshnikov joined. “It takes teamwork to win at polo or baseball. That’s what we have and Rudi doesn’t. He’s a one-man show, ‘I, me, a beautiful man, alone.’ … Frankly, we don’t need this.”

  But frankly neither did Rudolf. He hadn’t defected from Russia to be only “small part of big machine,” constantly chastised for failing to learn “that the leading role is after all only part of the artistic whole.” The definition of New York City Ballet discipline—“total cooperation—not to any individual ambition, but to the principle of a general humane alliance”—was the dictum of communism. Balanchine’s criticism of Rudolf was just a rephrasing of the Soviet charge against him of “insubordination, nonassimilation, and dangerous individualism.” How could someone with a mind as inquisitive as Rudolf’s submit to a regime in which “nothing was described or discussed”? He believed, just as Erik did, that only when a performer understands what he is doing does he become creative; that without an idea behind it, movement does not communicate. Balanchine did not want anyone analyzing his part; his credo was “Don’t talk. Just do.” He would not have tolerated Rudolf’s control of his own career, nor his crusade to raise the status of the male dancer. Balanchine dancers, as Villella has written, were all part of a preordained structure. “No one was allowed to violate or disrupt it. Balanchine could clearly make his displeasure felt when some other dancer detracted from the Chosen ballerina. He chose who got the spotlight.”

  It was for this reason that Erik had not remained a member of the New York City Ballet. “Rudik always claimed … that I would do exactly what I wanted without regard to others,” Erik had said, and to Balanchine he was the epitome of the egocentric star. And although Erik had come to New York in 1959 at the choreographer’s invitation, he was made to feel so ill at ease by Balanchine—“the most destructive and negative relationship I have ever had”—that he left after spending less than three months there. “He likes [Balanchine]. He admires him completely,” Rudolf told Nigel, “but all those tricks he hates.… And someone like Erik has something of their own to say. It’s impossible.” Why, then, did Rudolf not see that the situation would be just as impossible for him? Balanchine, as Violette Verdy remarks, “was the only one who could be a master for Rudi, but he was already becoming too much of a young master himself. Balanchine wasn’t ready to make room for that.… He didn’t want someone polluting New York City Ballet with ideas other than his own.”