Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Margot was pizda, too (sometimes negligibly softened to pizdushka)—frequently, on this tour. Ballet master Ronald Hynd had watched several times in disapproving silence as Rudolf carried her off into the wings and thumped her down to the floor, but seeing her rush out the door one day following a particularly “nasty scene,” he was concerned, and asked if she was all right. “Oh, I’m not scared of him,” she said nonchalantly. Certainly Margot knew better than anyone how to handle Rudolf, evidence of which is captured in the journal and photographs of Keith Money, who was with the dancers in Athens. He was taking pictures of the ballerina in practice clothes on the stage of the open-air Herod Atticus amphitheater when a very tanned Rudolf appeared wearing casual clothes and a mutinous expression. Hearing him announce that he “probably” would not dance that evening, Margot frowned, but carried on rhythmically darning her pointe shoe as she began what Keith calls “a fine little pavane of applied reason—and reasonableness.”

  “Well, that’s for you to decide.” … Stitch, stitch …“I suppose I can do one or two extra solos.” R stared at her, at this. She was not reacting correctly!…

  “But I expect they won’t be satisfied with that,” she said, after a longish pause. “Perhaps we’d better just give the money back?”

  “Huh?”

  “Give the money back. If you’re not dancing.”

  At this R became interested in the stonework.… “I see,” he said rather distantly, and then strolled off through one of the arches …*

  Keith Money’s “odyssey” of photographing Margot (resulting in a quartet of books), began with an image taken from a television screen of the 1962 Fonteyn-Nureyev Giselle. He was working in London as a professional illustrator when he was asked to contribute sketches of Marguerite and Armand for a commemorative album and decided to try his hand at dance photography. As the “new boy” at press calls, positioning himself to one side, he discovered his métier—ballet reportage that appeared snatched from the wings: spontaneous, sweat-soaked, and slightly off-limits. To begin with he found that Rudolf, who had picked up on Margot’s “genuine phobia” about cameras, and learned from her how to terrorize photographers, would turn a photo session into a tiger shoot—“You might get the beast, but then again, the beast might get you.” Gradually, though, he relaxed his guard, noticing the degree to which Margot had come to trust the young New Zealander. With his wide-ranging interests, wit, and discretion, Keith soon found himself fulfilling the functions of a cavalier, escorting the ballerina to official receptions. After Greece, however, once Erik had left, Margot and Rudolf again became inseparable.

  “In many ways they were very bad for each other,” says Annette Page, one of the Royal Ballet principals on tour, and the wife of Ronald Hynd: “Margot had always been so serious and professional, but she changed entirely when Rudolf was around. They were never on time, and we’d sit in the bus waiting to go to rehearsal until finally they would roll up giggling and joking like a couple of children.”

  There was none of the team spirit of the previous year, when Margot toured Australia with David Blair, and the dancers felt that they were there only as a road-show backup for Fonteyn and Nureyev. When Annette and Royes Fernandez followed a dazzling performance of the Don Quixote duet by repeating the coda, they were furiously upbraided by both stars for slowing down the program. “We only did it because the audience wouldn’t stop clapping,” Annette said. The next night, however, Margot and Rudolf danced the Black Swan pas de deux, and they, too, performed an encore. Behaving like “a big diva,” Rudolf would change the repertory on a whim, and the only company member beside Margot who was prepared to challenge him was Robert Helpmann (her first partner), who, as someone once said, had the presence and personality to outface the devil himself. The writer Francis King, then living in Japan, witnessed the following exchange:

  “Tonight I dance Corsaire.”

  “No, it’s Swan Lake tonight,” Helpmann corrected him.

  “No, tonight Corsaire.”

  “Dance what you like, Ducky. The orchestra will be playing Swan Lake.”

  Everyone on tour that summer had observed how flirtatiously tactile Margot and Rudolf were with each other—“always hugging and kissing.” Having bade the two stars good night in the hotel elevator, Alexander Grant met them again in the elevator the following morning. “Margot had an enormous love-bite on her neck. It was very very obvious, and she hadn’t done anything to cover it up.” On another night there was a rooftop party at which everyone, according to Annette, “got fairly sloshed, including (unusually) Margot, who was lounging on a mattress with Rudolf.” The next morning, as the dancers were once again sitting in the bus waiting to leave, “BQ” who traveled everywhere with her daughter, was heard to remark, “I don’t know what’s got into Margot. She was sick this morning.” When at last the pair appeared, Margot, who was wearing dark glasses, sat in the back of one of the cars, “very quiet and rather slumped.” En route to class they passed some beautiful ruins at the water’s edge and decided to stop for a quick dip. Revived by the sea, her hair hanging loose, Margot, as Ashton often said, was like an ondine when she swam. But when she came up to the surface this time her face was white. Since last seeing Tito she had been wearing his ring above her wedding band, and being too big for her, it had slipped off. Everyone began diving down to the seabed to help her find it, but they eventually gave up and returned to the cars. Margot—“a devastated heap”—sat next to Ronald, who longed to put a comforting arm around her. “But you didn’t do that with Margot.” “She was unbelievably upset,” says Annette. “We did sort of wonder then if she had betrayed Tito. But it was all supposition.”

  From then on the mood of the tour “disintegrated—certainly darkened.” Margot, who had damaged her calf muscle, was dancing with difficulty, and “always ringing up and wanting” her husband. It was troubling for others to see the degree to which she was bound to a man whom, as Joan Thring says, “everyone took for granted was a shit.” But her feelings for Tito had come full circle, and she had reverted to “the formerly love-sick girl” of the 1930s. The metamorphosis of the glamorous Latin American undergraduate into a paunchy married man who hunted her down some twenty years later in a stifling and vulgar courtship had left Margot emotionally numb. She came to realize, however, that Tito was the only person with whom she felt “just fundamentally complete,” and now, as her biographer Meredith Daneman says, it was in his “very elusiveness that his true romantic power lay.” Tito had promised to be with her for the whole of the tour, but at the beginning decided that he would have a better time if he stayed in Monte Carlo. Annette, who shared a dressing room with Margot, remembers her continuing to hope that he would change his mind. “She’d say, ‘Well, maybe he’ll come next week,’ but was always being disappointed.” It was Margot’s idea to include Ashton’s Scènes d’Amour in the program, and in Greece she asked Ronald Hynd to partner her. This short, plaintive duet, created as a gala item for Fonteyn and Somes in 1959, depicts the passionate leavetaking of a young girl and her lover on the eve of his departure for the Crusades. Holding his cloak as he walks away until it slips from her fingers, she is left alone—“desperately unhappy, desperately in love, and losing her lover to goodness knows what.” Annette, who had never seen Margot dance the role more movingly, told her she had been “just incredible.” “Well, it’s the story of my life,” she said, smiling. “Saying good-bye to Tito.”

  Rudolf, on the other hand, was in his element on tour, walking off into the night after dinner, when he and Helpmann could be spotted “competing with each other on the waterfront.” He was particularly happy to be back in Israel, charmed as much as before by its “south of Russia” ambiance, its climate, and people. He had renewed contact with friends he made in the summer of ’61, and struck up a new encounter with a swarthy young man called Dani to whom he sent gifts of cuff links and a sweater.* Erik, meanwhile, who had heard nothing from Rudolf for several weeks and wasn’t tempted to
what he called “fill the time with anyone,” was finding their separation unendurable. “Erik was basically very very fastidious and chaste,” remarked Glen Tetley. “But Rudolf was lusty and wanted to experiment. He wanted a game. It was all a big, wonderful game.”

  From California and Hawaii, the final stages of their trip, Rudolf returned to London in October and the reality of living alone in furnished accommodations. Now, as Margot noted, there was something tragic in the sight of him “diminishing in perspective down a desolate street after the uproar of laughter and gaiety over supper.” On an evening he spent with Svetlana Beriosova and her friends, he went back to his flat and began a letter to Erik, its tone of bleak nihilism almost an imitation of Erik’s own:

  My very very dearest Erik, it is so sad that the world is such a cruel machine, and it seems the only [solution?] is to try to [illeg.] for some time before it … destroy you. I feel incredibly sad, and have feeling that I can’t explane, I need you every second, I feel that we are so alone in this world, very offen I have feeling that I am on edge of madness and whant to scream.† I whant to cover you with my hands and body and not to [illeg] to anybody my very dear and very much beloved one. Missing you enormous It’s very hard without you. Today [November 17] I danced on TV Diana and Acteon with Svetlana and it was not specialy bad, but after show I had dinner with people of Svetlana and sadenly all my inside been so distorted and I felt emptiness and uselesness of everething and I was missing you so impossibly hard, I was screaming inside and tearing all of myself to pieces.

  Rudolf, influenced by Erik, was now drinking to a serious degree. Walking past the Brompton Road taxi stand in the early hours of the morning, the English actor Peter Eyre saw a young man lying curled up in the luggage compartment of an empty cab. “It was Nureyev. He was very drunk and quietly whimpering.” Eyre waited until the driver returned and, although Rudolf’s flat was only around the corner in Ennismore Gardens, begged him to take “the most famous dancer in the world” to his front door. When Tennessee Williams met Rudolf the previous summer he recognized him as someone condemned to be lonely—like himself, and like his own Stranger in a snakeskin jacket from Orpheus Descending—“both sort of hunted creatures.”* The two were having dinner at the Pimlico house of Maria St. Just, the playwright’s great friend, and on this occasion it was Williams who was helplessly drunk. Agreeing to “take him out for a while,” Rudolf drove Williams to Ennismore Gardens, where they talked for a long time. “I discovered,” Williams said, “that he was deeply devoted to Russia and very depressed that he was unable to return there.”

  Rudolf’s debut in Petrushka on October 24, 1963, conveyed much of his own character as the archetypal outsider and rebel. Fokine had built the role of the fairground puppet around the fragile spirit of Nijinsky (who six years later would be certified insane), one that, as Alexander Bland wrote, is “virtually impossible for any rational performer to imitate.” Rudolf had worn a similar red wig and exactly copied Nijinsky’s twisted, flaked-paint makeup. “But it just didn’t go with me. My mouth is not that small so, if you extend those lines it becomes really gigantic. I had an eternal smile.” Petrushka was also physically built round its short, stocky creator, who had an astonishing ability to combine bravura dancing with the heavy, swinging, soulless motions of a sawdust-filled doll. Nijinsky could make himself ugly and stooping, whereas Rudolf’s danseur noble stature—what novelist Colum McCann calls “the Michelangelo of him”—was always discernible. It was an interpretation that, as one critic wrote, had “too much blood and no sawdust.”

  If Petrushka proved disappointing, Rudolf’s next Royal Ballet venture was a triumph. As soon as he joined the company, Ninette de Valois, seeing how Rudolf’s gifts extended far beyond those of a performer, had told him that if he was interested in trying his hand at choreography, he had only to ask for a group of dancers. “He teaches dance most perfectly—a sign in the right direction,” she wrote to Nigel Gosling in October 1962. What Rudolf most wanted at that time, however, was not to create new work himself but to preserve his Russian heritage by staging the classics. He had first asked if he could mount La Bayadère—“the whole of Bayadère”—for the school, but not surprisingly, an unknown Russian classic with spectacular crowd scenes was considered too ambitious for a student performance. Ashton, who had taken over from de Valois as director in September, suggested that the company should perform only the abstract “white” scene from act 4. Even this, though, according to Assistant General Administrator John Tooley, provoked tremendous opposition from “the old diehards,” who were outraged that a temperamental, untried twenty-five-year-old could be entrusted with the role of producer. When Michael Somes refused to fit Bayadère into the schedule, using as his excuse the upcoming tour of America, Ashton, “although very much in the hands of Michael, was bold enough to insist.” “I said, ‘I’m sorry, but you’ve got to get it in.’ … The company needed something at that time; we had a marvellous corps de ballet, and so I fought for it … and we got it. And he staged it beautifully.”

  Rudolf had been preparing for this for years.

  At the Kirov Theater I was all eyes and nothing else. I just looked at every step, at every member of the company moving whether to the right or to the left, which way they would make a bow or which way they would take off their hat, what they had in their hands, how they carried their partner, how they behaved, where the servants are, where the rich people were and who are the nobility and how they all behaved in relation to the other. I was very aware of all this and I took mental notes of everything.… I loved those productions which I saw. So they stayed in my memory. And they became rather useful.

  From Leningrad, Xenia sent him detailed notation of the Kirov version, which a young friend had transcribed from company archives, using a system of little pin men on musical staves. When Karsavina came for dinner at the Goslings one night, Rudolf questioned her in Russian about the ballet (it was her last performance at the Maryinsky, in May 1918). “She was holding on to our mantelpiece and showing him some of the steps.” A link between the Maryinsky traditionalists and innovators like Fokine and Diaghilev, Karsavina was a guiding light to Rudolf, who intended to create a reconstruction of the Petipa original revitalized with touches of his own.* In the famous “scarf duet” (when a length of chiffon, held taut or softly festooned by the couple, becomes part of the dance itself), Rudolf adapted the male role to allow him to mirror the ballerina’s movements—his favorite choreographic device.

  Initially, he had doubts about casting Margot in the lead—“She’s not what you would call a robust ballerina in the Soviet style”—but he should have known by now that she was always at her greatest when challenged. Goaded by Rudolf to “pull up [your] socks. Compete with me,” she did exactly that, executing Nureyev-style marvels such as a thrillingly fast diagonal of chaînés that overturned his and everyone else’s vision of her. “We didn’t think it was the sort of body that could go much further,” said Georgina Parkinson. “And then she suddenly loosened up. She pushed the frame out.”

  It was Maude who suggested which three ballerinas Rudolf should use for the demanding Shades solos. “He needed to be told because he hardly knew the dancers, really.” Not only that, but in his view, the company itself was “mediocre,” redeemed only by Margot’s presence. “Suddenly everything was perfect. And nobody saw that Royal Ballet was really nothing. She dazzled everybody.… When you see her onstage this confidence, this brilliance—it is a light reflected from everybody.”

  Coaching each of the soloists individually, Rudolf cast Merle Park, renowned for her fleetness and daredevilry, in the fast dance. He made her move in a way that completely contradicted her Royal Ballet training—“our arabesque arm had always been in front of the nose”—but she loved the element of novelty and risk, and responded by combining her own terre-à-terre precision with wafting Russian port de bras and astonishing suppleness in the torso. Monica Mason, a dancer with great strength, danced the waltzing-ca
briole solo, which Rudolf made even slower than the Kirov version to showcase Mason’s big jump. “He wanted it done like a man’s variation.” He encouraged her to exploit hidden reserves of power and to create theatrical tension by making the audience aware of the effort involved. For her, working with Rudolf was a revelation—“the beginning of understanding something about the art.” As she recalls, “I’d never been taught anything so precisely, so absolutely exactly. He described everything with such nuance … and he could demonstrate it so that you could see.… But he didn’t just leave you with a picture of him doing it. He then described to you how you would feel doing it.”

  Rudolf gave Lynn Seymour the variation she calls “the slow stoppy one which doesn’t have any wow factor to it,” telling her, “It’s because I know you’ll make something of it.” Recognizing a fellow maverick with a fierce dance intelligence of her own, Rudolf was particularly sensitive in his approach. “He was very clever the way he asked for things: It wasn’t ‘Do this, do that’ or anything very specific, it was just a gift he had for drawing out the individual. With me, it was an elegance, a calmness, and serenity.”

  The young ballerinas understudying the trio of Shades—Antoinette Sibley, Deanne Bergsma, and Georgina Parkinson—were also outstandingly talented, ambitious and eager to learn. “We gave ourselves to the whole experience,” says Parkinson. “Rudolf was very warm with people who wanted what he did. He took the blinkers away and opened our eyes.” Anxious to instill in every member of the cast his belief that “plastique is what makes magic onstage,” he taught the corps de ballet the essence of St. Petersburg schooling. “All of the body must dance.… You must dance the turn of a head. You must dance the lifting or the lowering or the placing of the arms. There can be no mannerisms but there must be total body feeling in total body movement.”