Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Margot, who had never made much of an impact in Les Sylphides, said that it was Rudolf who revealed to her a whole new way of looking at the ballet. She began to time the takeoff of her jumps to land in unison with his, and he taught her the fluid, slow-breathing phrasing that is the mainspring of the Vaganova system. She followed everything he showed her, and together they became one body, one movement, their lines a natural extension of each other, their fingertips simultaneously marking out the arc of a phrase. There were many discussions and tryouts behind this appearance of spontaneous symmetry, but Margot herself had noticed that “something quite special” happened when they danced together, something they had not consciously worked to achieve. “It’s odd … yet there in the photos both heads will be tilted to exactly the same angle, both in perfect geometric relationship to each other.”

  While of the same Romantic period of style and setting as Giselle, Les Sylphides does not have the joint passion of the earlier ballet; there are moments of euphoria generated by sheer rapture of movement, but its overall mood is elegiac and impersonal. In total contrast was the storm of emotion taking place in the studio where Rudolf and Margot had begun to work with Frederick Ashton on Marguerite and Armand, the ballet he was creating especially for them. The choreographer had thought of adapting Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux camélias for Margot after seeing Vivien Leigh in an English version of the play in 1961. Margot seemed to Ashton to be the epitome of Marguerite Gautier, from the chime of their names to the way each embodied opposites of great sophistication and great simplicity, but having found the existing score to be too long and elaborate, and nothing else suitable, he dropped the idea. Then, one evening in the spring of 1962 he heard Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor played on the radio, and envisaged the whole ballet—the music’s circular structure and single encapsulation of the sonata form suggesting to him how the narrative could be speeded up and told in flashback, “pared down to nothing.”

  Added to this was the fact that by now, as Margot said, Rudolf had “burst headlong into our world.” Contained in Liszt’s masterpiece were all the extremes in the dancer’s own nature of demonic intensity, flamboyance, and violence, combined with heartbreaking lyricism and tenderness. Rudolf himself was almost a reincarnation of Liszt, whose Romantic beauty and charisma as a performer had inspired the same kind of idolatrous worship in audiences a century earlier—the reason Ken Russell’s 1975 film Lisztomania starred a rock singer (Roger Daltrey) in the lead. Similarities abound, from their vagabond lives to their shared passion for Byron and Bach—even their love for the exoticism of Turkey. Eyewitness accounts of the two artists are interchangeable at times, “the divine soul” shining from the face of Liszt at the piano closely anticipating a fan’s description of Rudolf: “He was transfigured when he danced. I’d never seen such unearthly beauty. He seemed unreal; not of this world—like an archangel.”

  Ashton’s choice of music appeared almost predestined when he then discovered that the model for Marguerite, Marie Duplessis, the most remarkable young courtesan in Paris, had had an affair with the composer. It was reading about their brief but ecstatic attachment that made Ashton wonder whether Liszt’s recollection of Mariette, as he called her, could have inspired this very sonata. “It may not have been, possibly not in the least. But you see, it could have been.”

  Certainly for Rudolf it was the Lisztian pursuit and transmission of passion that drove his performance of Armand. The character, as he said, “Was sitting already in me”; while for Margot the real Marguerite, with her long black hair and fragile ballerina shoulders, was a woman to whom she felt strangely linked. In the love duets she abandoned herself as never before in a display of recklessness that amazed even Rudolf, “Margot throw herself—God knows where—and I have to wrestle.”

  In the play the heroine is so dominant that she overshadows her young lover, but Ashton’s ballet was created for Rudolf as much as for Margot, the change of inflection endorsed by the title. Far from resenting the division of this famous diva vehicle (played definitively by Sarah Bernhardt onstage and on-screen by Greta Garbo), Margot was enormously stimulated by Rudolf’s demand of an equal share in every stage moment. “He brought her to a higher pitch of approach,” Ashton said. “He came at a period when she had lost Michael [Somes] and it was all rather run of the mill. Suddenly this enormous impulse came, and she just responded to him.”

  Michael Somes had been Margot’s partner for fourteen years, and presumed that when he retired, she would follow suit. They were supposed to have danced for the last time together at the gala in which Corsaire was performed, but Somes found to his distress that he had been taken off the program without even a telephone call of warning. True, Ashton had cast him in the new ballet as Armand’s father, but it was in a walk-on character role, whose function was to provide a cold and static contrast to the emotional furor (a situation some suggested could be intentionally allegorical, showing Somes, “a symbol of duty and morality,” frowning on his former partner’s new rhapsodic freedom). Somes certainly did disapprove of Rudolf’s inflammable, thrusting nature, which was so alien to his own disciplined, conventional approach. He felt, too, that people’s memory of his partnership with Margot had been wiped out by the young Russian, who made him seem as ploddingly predictable as a shire horse.

  And yet, in Rudolf’s account, Somes is no stiff, reproving outsider but a collaborator who was intimately involved with the ballet’s creation. Even the passionate duets, Rudolf claimed, were “Totally improvised by four of us—we had like kind of orgasm.” So intoxicating were the first rehearsals that Somes, usually an exacting and pedantic répétiteur, was unable to pin down and rehearse the choreography. This began to infuriate Rudolf:

  Nobody remembered not one step and we had to start all over again from beginning. Each time came something else. It was very unsettling to me. That’s why I was all the time speaking of Balanchine saying he would give you language exactly and exact steps. And that way I don’t have to delve into myself and dig out of me something. I wanted from Fred to give something definite. So I had quite a few tantrums.

  In addition to the “hellish tensions” in the studio, Ashton often had to wait for his two stars to finish other rehearsals, only to find that when at last they were able to start work, Rudolf “would sit down every two minutes.” He was having treatment for a dislocated ankle-bone, which, while not sufficiently severe to prevent him from filming Les Sylphides on November 19, was reason enough for him to cancel the rest of the year’s performances and to announce that he was going to Australia for a rest. The premiere of Marguerite and Armand, scheduled for December 13, was postponed until March.

  Rudolf was desperate to join Erik, who was also finding their separation “almost impossible to bear.” But having sent a telegram to say that he would soon be coming, Rudolf then canceled his flight. Word had spread about his arrival in Sydney, and Erik, fearing a repetition of the Stuttgart situation, when “all the publicity started and many questions and gossips,” seemed to have changed his mind about wanting Rudolf there: “I hurt you on the phone like many times before. You ask to tell you OK to come, to be with me [but] I am looking for someone who would come anyway regardless. I wish this someone to be you and you only. When I give you ‘no reasons to come’ that’s the time to come to help me and love me.”

  Concerned that he might have gone too far this time in testing Rudolf’s love and loyalty, Erik sent a telegram—MISSING YOU PRAYING YOU WILL COME ALL LOVE E—as a result of which the trip was rescheduled for December.

  Rudolf’s injury was genuine enough (Erik refers to it in a letter dated November 21), but the press implied that his “foot condition” was, in fact, a convenient way of getting out of an embarrassing double booking. Having “definitely agreed” to perform in Chicago with American Ballet Theatre over the Christmas period, the dancer was also billed to appear at that time in Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden. This was due entirely to lack of communication between
the press office and the management (committee meeting notes confirm that de Valois had known about the Chicago engagement at least six weeks earlier). However, the affair only exacerbated Rudolf’s reputation for wildness; indeed, Time magazine quoted a Covent Garden official saying: “I’d rather deal with ten Callases than one Nureyev.”

  Rudolf’s absence in Australia meant that he would also be letting Margot down, her annual gala taking place as usual in December. Before he left he promised that he would teach her the duet from Gayane, suggesting as her partner his young Hungarian friend Viktor Rona. The idea that Margot Fonteyn would invite a completely unknown foreigner to dance with her was so unlikely that when the ecstatic Viktor first broke the news to his colleagues in Budapest, not one of them believed him. He hardly believed it himself, especially when he arrived at London Airport to find the ballerina waiting to meet him together with a large press corps. Although responsible for giving the twenty-seven-year-old the greatest break of his career, Rudolf kept out of sight, aware that publicity about their friendship could jeopardize Viktor’s position in Hungary. However, the two young men were briefly reunited in the airport parking lot, where they just had time to run through the Gayane dance before Rudolf’s Sydney flight was called.

  Seriously frightened, not only by the prospect of being twenty hours in the air, but also by the possibility of abduction by the Soviets, Rudolf traveled under an assumed name, and had obtained permission to stay aboard the aircraft at all scheduled stops.* He had also been filled with anxiety by Erik’s latest cable which warned, EMBASSY INFORMED RADIO NEWSPAPERS TODAY BE PREPARED AT ARRIVAL FOR MUCH PRESS. As it happened, however, Rudolf arrived at Mascot Airport to find only one person waiting for him, a smiling Australian in his mid-thirties, who, as he stepped forward to greet Rudolf, handed him a note.

  My dearest dearest Rudic,

  I am so happy you are here. I am waiting for you in a car. The man who is giving you this letter you can trust. He will get you through as easily as possible.… No matter what the world knows or thinks, my darling, you are here and I am waiting for you.

  A few days earlier Erik had summoned the company publicist, Noel Pelly, and, swearing him to secrecy, asked him to try to persuade the head of customs and immigration to allow Rudolf to leave by an entrance off-limits to the press and general public. Apart from being ambushed outside the terminal by an enterprising reporter and photographer from the Sydney Daily Telegraph, everything went according to plan: Erik was indeed sitting in a car parked nearby, and they drove immediately to his apartment overlooking Double Bay. “Rudolf couldn’t wait for us to get there,” recalled Pelly. “It was as if this was Mecca.”

  Euphoric at being reunited, the two dancers spent their first days at the beach and going for long walks, both grateful that they could be out together without Rudolf constantly being recognized. At the theater, where the new director was Peggy van Praagh, a teacher-friend from Rudolf’s de Cuevas period, he was made to feel completely at home, and although he was receiving physiotherapy for his ankle, he did not let the injury trouble him. He took company class each day with Erik, and even demanded taxing Danish footwork—“You give me knitting!” he would say to the Volkova-trained ballet master Ray Powell. Impressed by the vitality of the Australian dancers, Rudolf regularly watched performances from the wings, often calling out directions. “He loved our company,” says Powell. “He was watching and planning for the future, and thinking about what could be done. It wasn’t long before we were learning Raymonda and Don Q.”

  Sonia Arova, who was Erik’s partner on the tour as well as a constant companion, remembered Rudolf’s visit growing increasingly strained as the weeks went by. “You could feel the tension. Erik was trying to pull away … he began to realize that, as far as his career went, he had to do something drastic.” In his letters, however, Erik gives quite the opposite impression. More in love with Rudolf every day, he pledges his determination that they should have a future together “even if I have to just follow you around.” He finds himself drawing strength from working with Rudolf, now his own “dancing ideal,” telling him, “You have been my inspiration and also sometimes my frustration because in you I see everything I want to be able to do.” Rudolf’s departure for America left him desolate and directionless. On Christmas Day, preferring to be on his own rather than “crying inside” with friends, he retraced the steps of their last walk along the harbor. Hearing no word from Rudolf over the coming week, and hardly able to sleep, he sank even lower, overcome by a sense of doom that made him afraid to be with people and afraid to be alone. “I hope it stops because it makes me feel like I could break down.… Oh darling I miss you so or am I going crazy?”

  The last thing Rudolf wanted to accept was the knowledge that Erik was at breaking point; he was having problems enough of his own. Unimpressed by the standards and style of American Ballet Theatre, which had engaged him for three performances in December 1962, he found himself frequently at war with its artistic director, Lucia Chase, and furious that bungled advance publicity (in the Chicago Tribune he was billed as “Rudolph Douglas”) had led to a week of dismal houses. A bad cold forcing him to cancel one performance hardly improved his “crabby mood,” but at least by this time Erik was able to rally himself to lend strength and support: “My dearest beautiful monster.… Don’t get upset over silly burocracies [sic] or people. Sit down and relax when they choose not to understand you.… just keep looking at them till they do better for you.”

  Rudolf’s ABT debut should have been a landmark for him—the opportunity at last to dance not only his first Balanchine work but the one that had so impressed him in Russia. He was even to appear with the same ballerina, the Chilean-born Lupe Serrano, renowned for her powerful technique. Erik himself had taught Rudolf the role, a modern incarnation of a Petipa prince, intended to be danced at breakneck speed. But having found the St. Petersburg adagio element lacking in Balanchine’s work, Rudolf took it upon himself to reinstate it, performing the variations with such exaggerated rubato that Serrano says, “It was not Balanchine as I knew it.” The taxing sequence of tours en l’air interspersed with pirouettes became so weighted down that it was a struggle for Rudolf to stay in control. Even the devoted Maude Gosling commented, when shown amateur film footage of Theme and Variations, that Rudolf was “all over the place.”

  After a few days with Erik in New York, Rudolf returned to London followed by a flurry of letters. The Australian Ballet’s plea to Erik to return in the spring, together with the offer he had received from Balanchine to rejoin the New York City Ballet six months later, meant that they would be spending another year dancing on opposite sides of the world. In the view of Susse Wold, this situation suited Erik better than he would admit. “If you’re emotionally afraid, and uncertain of commiting, it’s much easier to love from a distance. You don’t have the day-to-day routine.” Certainly the troubadour style of Erik’s letters—“dreaming that my dreams, or our dreams will be true one day soon.… I am under a magic spell.… I am thirsty and hungry for you in every way”—express a language of longing too conventional at times to be convincingly real. Rudolf’s own side of the correspondence is harder to judge, as only two notes have come to light (suggesting that Erik alone honored the pact they had made to destroy each other’s letters). Undated, unfinished, and unmailed, they were found among a batch of Erik’s correspondence Rudolf kept in a suitcase of miscellaneous papers at the Goslings’ house. One contains the following lines:

  My dearest and only one Human in the world I spoke with you only in morning and I still can’t not to think about you. I am completely lost and alone and no satisfaction at all I am sertanly [illeg] from life just what I deserve. Our situation probably … difficult and for you it is not easy to[illeg]. I still hope that it exsist the way to be together and even to work. I need very much to see you, to feel, to look.… You are the esense the focuse off all my world take my life if you want you so dear to me I don’t [know?] what to offer to
you else. I get into very strange mood I don’t now why may be because of your sade voice or music or after performance[illeg] I probably dreaming always.

  Rudolf must have mentioned the letter in a telephone call, as Erik’s reply, dated January 17, 1963, asks him to send everything he writes—“however mad or hysterical.”

  We have nothing to hide from each other.… Darling I love you, not only you as an ideal or an exciting idea but I love you for all you are and what you are.… I am glad we are not like most “normal” people who are neither strong nor weak. We have got something even more beautiful coming, and perhaps also something of great suffering ahead, but please darling let us share that and all to come together. Let us face it together, let us not be alone.… I have found you, I hope you have found me too.

  They were kindred spirits in solitude, but although Rudolf would often sink into Russian dushevnyi, it was a Romantic kind of melancholy, not the dark, suicidal lack of motivation from which Erik suffered. Erik was in this mood—wanting “just to take some pills and no more think, no more dreams”—when Rudolf telephoned on the night of January 26. Their contact brought Erik a few minutes of comfort, but then all the doubts returned: