Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  But having tried at first “to force” the dancers into his own tradition, Rudolf admitted that he was wrong. “They naturally take from me what is good for them.” The result was a wonderful fusion of Russian breadth, fluidity, and risk with the precision of what Arlene Croce called “good old British Cecchetti technique.”

  It was La Bayadère that instigated the golden era of the Royal Ballet, and at the same time marked the true integration of Rudolf into the company. The dancers it excluded, of course, were the Royal Ballet men. There was one male role, the lead, and this was danced only by Rudolf for the first season. He was well aware that he was considered a threat—or, as he put it, “ ‘Cuckooshka’ because I threw all out of nest”—particularly by the established principals. “Kingpin at the time” was David Blair, who had all the technical swagger for Bayadère but was a demi-caractère dancer, not a classicist, and so was overlooked to the advantage of tall, dark Donald MacLeary—the ultimate cavalier. Gracious, attentive, and self-effacing, MacLeary was a dancer in the mold of Michael Somes, embodying the kind of traditional qualities that Rudolf disdained. Christopher Gable, on the other hand, the third cast Solor, was his only serious rival. Pretty yet rugged, he had a contemporary glamour and naturalism quite new to ballet, and one which, as Keith Money points out, had “absolutely paved the way for Rudolf.”

  In 1961, Christopher became a sort of Cliff Richard of the Provinces with the touring company … and he brought all that right into London, when Ashton’s Two Pigeons first opened. He had a huge effect on the public. He made them receptive to the whole “pop star” bit, not least the slightly long, unruly hair. They loved it!… Anyway, post Pigeons, apparently out of nowhere, along comes Rudolf, who neatly scoops up this juicily pre-softened audience. It was tragic for Christopher, really.

  Although Gable was highly jealous of Rudolf, he also welcomed him as a role model. The young Russian’s “very floaty, romantic arms” were lyrical in a way no English dancer would have dared to be at the time, the tradition being wooden, reserved, and “male with a capital M.” But Rudolf also found himself disarmed by Gable’s allure and popularity, the pair often acting, Keith Money says, like two adolescent rivals in a school playground. He vividly remembers a day in a rehearsal room when Rudolf was trying to get the attention of Gable, who was sitting on the floor with his head down. “Eventually he positioned himself virtually on top of Christopher and began doing pirouettes à la seconde above his head, just skimming his hair. And still Christopher wouldn’t look up!” Ashton’s Daphnis and Chloe was revived that season, with the boyishly tousled Gable in his element as the modern-dressed young lover. The stage rehearsal was in progress when Rudolf suddenly appeared in practice clothes, held on to a ledge of scenery, and started to warm up. Marching straight up to him, the stage manager asked him to leave, and would have been punched had some dancers not intervened and physically dragged Rudolf into the wings. “It was very tense and nasty,” Ronald Hynd recalls. “And it upset a lot of us.”

  January 15 saw the first cast change in Bayadère’s “frighteningly exacting” lead roles. Donald MacLeary’s partner was the exquisitely graceful Svetlana Beriosova, but both were so ill at ease that they “made rather a hash of it,” according to Annette Page. When it was the turn of Gable and Page a week later, they decided to “throw caution to the winds and send it up slightly.” Exaggerating her arms in mock-Soviet style, and taking liberties with the timing, Page danced dazzlingly, but although Gable’s explosive run onto the stage created what The Dancing Times called “the authentic frisson,” nothing else quite matched the potential implied in his entrance. Not only that, but both he and MacLeary had omitted the “diabolical” double assemblées en tournant in the second variation, which are so integral to Solor’s role that, Clive Barnes noted, “to duck them seems rather like a tenor omitting the traditional top C … at the conclusion of Manrico’s Di quella pira.”

  Rudolf, as de Valois often said, altered the status of male dancers overnight by setting an unprecedented standard to which they could aspire. “As Gable showed,” wrote Peter Williams, “one can dance as well—if not better than any British dancer ever has danced—and still miss the mark.” Knowing that the public now expected a much higher level of technical proficiency, Gable’s generation had no choice but to deliver it. They eventually got the measure of “those double-double things,” but whereas Gable “always looked centred, even if he wasn’t,” Rudolf attacked them with far greater force and risk. Ease, not strain, is classical ballet’s defining characteristic, but Rudolf’s aim was to make an audience sweat by recklessly leaving himself open to failure. “He comes onto the stage as if into an arena,” Violette Verdy said. “Is he going to be eaten by the lion or not? That is the feeling of danger we get from seeing him perform.”

  In fact, although rightly lauded for revolutionizing male dancing, Rudolf, as Hynd says, “didn’t really bother much with the boys.” It was the ballerinas who were blessed with his hands-on attention, finding themselves cast against type to increase their range. Of course Rudolf’s greatest “donation” as he put it, was to Margot, to whom, in her forties, he gave not only a Russian technique but almost an entire Maryinsky repertory. As one critic remarked at the time, “If he were to fly away tomorrow, he has already now achieved enough to ensure that British ballet will be forever in his debt.” La Bayadère profoundly affected not only the dancers but native dance itself; Monotones, Ashton’s ultimate distillation of native classicism, was made, as Arlene Croce says, “in what must have been a moment of direct inspiration.” The calm, slow, sustained monotony of the Shade corps’ entrance has the very qualities that Croce sees embedded in the Ashton ballet: “Royal Ballet virtues” such as “chaste and flowing arabesques” … “limpid contrapposto harmonies” … “strict épaulement.” And for an audience it is the same “uncompromising experiment in concentration” that Monotones is; with no set, character, or drama, the ballet had, in Alexander Bland’s words, “a stern severity” previously unmatched by anything in the Royal Ballet repertory. “He has given us a glimpse of the spare simplicity which forms one often unnoticed side of the Russian temperament. ‘I love thy severe harmony,’ wrote the poet Pushkin of his adored home city, and he might well have been talking of La Bayadère. It is a little chip of Leningrad.”

  It was during the Bayadère performances in November that Rudolf received a letter from Teja, now dancing at the Staatsoper in Berlin. He had married Nureini, his Indonesian girlfriend, and they were expecting their first child in January. As her father had forbidden them to meet, they had hastily arranged a secret wedding—“an exciting Romeo and Juliet story” for her, but for Teja, according to his sister, no more than “a project.” Having decided to extend his training to include a teaching course, he planned to return to the Vaganova Academy for a further two years. In the meantime, he suggested that Nureini, who still had her Indonesian citizenship and, unlike him, was free to travel, could bring Rudolf his pictures and films. [Those] “I tried to send you were seized.… I wanted to see you so much, but you know that they have closed the way for me.”*

  Rudolf also had a plaintive letter that winter from Viktor Rona, written on the first anniversary of their London meeting. “I am already not interesting for you. I do not understand why, but that’s life. You will see how much I adore you. Perhaps we will not meet again in our lives—I don’t know—but all the time I’m with you I wish you success and I thank you for your help!!!… I kiss you strongly.” Viktor was right. Only Erik counted, and even he was not fulfilling Rudolf’s expectations. “When I came to the West,” Rudolf told Maude, “I thought Erik would be a guide for me. He was my god. But then I found that I was much stronger in spirit than he was.”

  It was Margot who was now his prime inspiration, her English restraint and simple, seamless dancing helping him to reach the pinnacle of his art. “Forging as a dancer happened at Covent Garden,” he acknowledged; “Becoming of a dancer happened here.” To Margo
t, he even applied the same term with which he had once described Erik: “Sometimes, like in Swan Lake,” he said, “she has coolness which burns.” But she also had the very qualities Erik lacked: strength and stability. In Violette Verdy’s remark, “Margot was Home,” her smiling, undevious nature and common sense leading him to discover a more humane and restful aspect of himself. “I really felt that he created through her a whole family of women—the sisters and the mother he had lost.” Unlike Erik, Margot was never mournfully introspective, believing that it was work one took seriously, not oneself. “She was very cheerful and concerned for me. That I am too grim and gruff and miserable.… She made great effort to shake me out of my miseries.” With Margot he could open up and be himself—“There was no condescension, no English politeness. It was wonderful”—and he loved the fact she shared his own “carnivorous” approach to knowledge: “She ate everything … Volkova, Ashton … Roland Petit … comes young boy; me. 23. tells her Giselle is not so good.… She embrace, she indulge, she doesn’t shrink from it.”

  Contrary to her gracious image, Margot also had a sense of humor as profane at times as Rudolf’s—the result of her bohemian years with Constant Lambert. She was as unfazed by his foul language as she was by his errant libido, instructing a friend while on tour, “Go next door and find out what the boy is doing. And be careful to knock!” Margot herself had a stable of picturesque, predominantly homosexual young admirers (at least one of whom she “kissed properly”), while the description in her memoirs of a soft-eyed soldier who had enchanted her, his battle dress hung with hand grenades and a knife, is a frank admission of what Freud called Schaulust—sexual pleasure in looking. The picture that emerges from Meredith Daneman’s biography of Margot is of a woman with a warm, liberal, “completely natural” outlook toward sex.

  One Sunday in early December Rudolf was crossing Kings Road when he was knocked over by a scooter, injuring his foot. To be near the Royal Ballet premises, he moved in with Margot at her mother’s studio house in Baron’s Court, where she had been living since Arias’s London ambassadorship came to an end. Now increasingly involved in Panamanian politics, Tito was not there “ninety percent of the time,” and Erik was also away for several months, dancing for Balanchine in New York—the consequence of which led a number of journalists “to make copy out of the fact that Nureyev was staying at Dame Margot’s apartment while recovering.” Colette Clark was one of many friends and colleagues who believed they had cause. Visiting Margot in her dressing room after a performance, she had been very surprised to find Tito there, whom she had not seen for well over a year. “Heavens, Tito, what are you doing here, my boy?” And he said, “When I read in the newspaper he moved into the flat, I think it’s time I move back.” Margot, meanwhile, was “frantically” powdering her nose in the mirror. “For the first time ever she was not beaming and smiling at Tito.… She was livid.”

  To Colette the episode spoke for itself. “She was definitely in love with Rudolf. You could see it shining out of her and in the way she couldn’t stop talking about him.” Certainly the tremendous change in the ballerina’s stage personality, the way—as Nadia Nerina put it—she had “somehow become very feminine and relaxed, and swayed and swooned,” seemed confirmation enough to many people that the two dancers were having an affair. There are just as many, however, who remain convinced that the Fonteyn-Nureyev relationship was platonic—like Joan Thring, who since the world tour ended had been working “24 hours” a day for Rudolf as a full-time personal assistant, and who makes the point that the couple were rarely alone. “I’ve tried and tried to believe it could have happened, but I cannot see where, or when. Most nights the three of us would have dinner in my house in Earl’s Court, and sometimes Rudolf would throw plates at us because he’d want to go and find a boy. Margot was like me, she treated him as a child most of the time.”*

  When Norfolk neighbors Frederick Ashton and Keith Money discussed the matter, each was as “adamantly certain” as the other that nothing ever took place, and when questioned in his eighties, Ashton had not changed his mind. “I don’t think that he awakened in her any sexual thing.… I don’t think that at all. You always love the person you dance with for that moment, and something must emanate from you that communicates itself to the audience. Like I loved Karsavina when I danced with her; and Karsavina must have loved Nijinsky.”

  Rudolf was, of course, as Margot well knew, passionately in love with Erik. But this would not be his first time to have a triangular liaison with a man and an older woman—in fact, in the case of Tallchief and Bruhn it was as if coition were a compulsory first step toward absorbing the Balanchine and Bournonville styles. When asked directly, Rudolf would tell some people that he had not made love to Margot (“No. I missed the bus,” was his reply to Colette), and others that he had—even claiming, as he did about Xenia and a number of other women, to have made her pregnant. In the nineties, talking graphically about heterosexuality to his straight assistant, Rudolf said, “Perhaps I should have married Margot. But I had many women, and it was like your aquatic salad.* Bang-bang-bang.… Hammering away for hours and hours”—a remark that in itself could be taken as strong evidence for the Case Against, Margot having been praised by more than one admirer for the dexterity of her pelvic floor muscles (“She can activate me of her own accord,” Constant Lambert told a friend).†

  Margot’s response when asked at the time if she and Rudolf were lovers was dismissive: “That’s all I need.” Her marriage was complicated enough. It was to spare Tito from retrospective jealousy that she prolonged what amounted to a conspiracy of silence about her relationship with Lambert, whom she barely mentions in her autobiography. And yet, by all accounts, Rudolf was never a threat to Tito—certainly not enough to instigate his sudden return to London. “Very un-Tito,” remarks Keith Money: “I can see Colette making jokey remarks to Tito in the dressing room, and if Margot was livid it was because Colette was getting into areas where she might risk annoying Tito on his ‘fleeting visit.’ The idea of Tito ‘moving back in’ anywhere, is ridiculous. He simply never stayed in the same place more than 48 hours.”

  Joan Thring agrees. “Tito would never have said ‘time to come back.’ He didn’t give a damn. It didn’t occur to him that they would sleep together, and it wasn’t a threat to him anyway. Nothing was a threat to Tito Arias.”

  Whatever Tito’s reason for coming back, his presence at Baron’s Court promptly sent Rudolf back to his own flat where, in answer to press speculation, he had himself photographed drinking whiskey, “listening to Mozart,” and relaxing with his bandaged leg propped up. “I returned here as I always like to be alone,” he is quoted as saying. That night he went to the opening of The Comedy of Errors at the Aldwych Theatre where Margot arrived late with Tito, and where Rudolf sat with Alfie Lynch, one of London’s new breed of working-class actors. “Very Cockney, very bright and full of joie de vivre,” according to director Anthony Page. Lynch was then having a fling with Rudolf, and the pair left together after the play.

  If Rudolf and Margot were not lovers, the conclusion must surely be Colette Clark’s: “Well, then they were jolly nearly.” And yet Ashton’s theory is equally valid. The reckless ardor that convinced every onlooker that they were playing out their own story happened only when they danced together. Margot, as Keith says, allowed herself to be “in love” with Rudolf on the stage: “That seems plausible to me … the more so because I believe that, deep down, that’s where she thought the real world was, anyway.” Rudolf maintained as much himself: “Margot always said that for her, real life comes when she’s onstage. I absolutely agree. We functioned between those snatches of real life onstage. We only lived when we danced.”

  It was the same kind of intensity that Balanchine’s muse Suzanne Farrell described when trying to explain their own unconsummated bond—“extremely physical and extremely gratifying in that kind of way [but] more passionate and more loving and more more than most relationships.”
“A love affair without scars,” one “consummated on the stage” was also how Erik described his parnership with Carla Fracci, but he was too insular a dancer, “too absorbed in his own perfection,” as Arlene Croce says, to transmit physical passion. “He remains Erik Bruhn, possibly the only major male star in ballet who can’t walk toward a woman and appear to love her.”

  Together in Copenhagen in the New Year, taking classes with Vera Volkova, Rudolf and Erik were able to recapture some of the productive intimacy of their first months together. Yvette Chauviré was staying at Gentofte, too, relieved, after the dramas she had witnessed in Stuttgart, that there were “no tensions” between them. She was there to rehearse Giselle with Erik, who was making his Paris Opéra debut in February. (Rudolf himself would have danced the ballet in Paris with Chauviré had not the management canceled his performance to prevent difficulties with the Soviets.) Wary of stealing Erik’s thunder, Rudolf flew out for the second night, avoided the press, and told Erik that he wanted to see no one but him. When they went to Maxim’s for a late dinner, however, it was the usual story: “Everybody knew who he was and nobody knew who I was,” Erik commented. It seemed strange to Erik that Rudolf had made no comment about Giselle, which, with Volkova’s help, he and Chauviré had radically reappraised. Finally Rudolf told him that he had planned to include the ballet in the repertory of his Australian tour with Margot that spring, but, having seen their Paris version, felt he could not dance it again.” I told him … he should rethink and rework his interpretation of the role, and I believe that’s what he did.*