Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  *The Hollywood-style episode Rudolf related to Keith Money of an attempted snatch at Cairo airport is more likely to have been an account of thoughts that had run through Rudolf’s mind rather than an incident that actually took place. This saga, “which somehow, never reached the ears of the press”—and that certainly would have required the collusion of the Egyptian airport authorities—involved a pair of KGB agents who searched the plane for the dancer while the other passengers were waiting in a transit hut. As Rudolf hid in one of the lavatories, the “two goons” were diverted by a quick-thinking flight attendant who had remained on board. Money says that it was the vividness of Rudolf’s “replay of himself” that convinced him at the time that the story was true. (Keith Money, Fonteyn and Nureyev.)

  *So real and “germ-laden” was the atmosphere Bernhardt created during her death scene that when critic James Agate’s old family doctor saw a performance at the Manchester Hippodrome he kept commenting on the criminal folly of allowing a tubercular patient to receive visitors, repeating, “Everything she touches is infected.” (Gerda Taranow, Sarah Bernhardt.)

  †It was the element missing from the portrayal by Sylvie Guillem, despite the fact that she identified with Marguerite’s distress to the point of crying genuine tears.

  ‡Rudolf was dismayed by the misty-edged fastidiousness of director Pierre Jourdan’s camera, telling Elizabeth Kaye, “I hated that.… And all the Vaseline on the lens—oh gosh! I gave him hard time.”

  *Ashton had been reading Saint John of the Cross, whose doctrine on quiet was a major source for the ballet’s motif of stasis. “The soul waits in inward peace and quietness and rest.”

  †Rudolf did, however, cast himself. On tour later that year with Margot and a small group he attempted one more performance (about which Ashton would undoubtedly have heard, as Alexander Grant, his closest friend and confidant, also danced it that night). “It nearly killed Rudolf,” recalls the third male soloist, Ronald Hynd. “He took himself straight out again, and [American Ballet Theatre’s] Royes Fernandez took over.”

  *Greta Garbo had more success. Although not a ballet lover, she was keen to see this new version of Camille, and when she met Rudolf afterward they bonded immediately, recognizing in each other what Cecil Beaton called “the same untamed quality of genius, of not fitting.” (Diane Solway, Nureyev: His Life.)

  *“It was only little by little that my admiration for him was aroused and developed” he told ex-Vaganova colleague, Egon Bischoff. “[But then] I was bowled over by this man, and tried to see every film he’d ever made.”

  *Whose best-known creation was the sequins-and-skin dress that Marilyn Monroe had worn the previous summer to deliver her breathless rendition of “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy.

  *In 1966 he did buy a Monaco property with tax relief in mind. Lotus Bleu, on the boulevard du Jardin Exotique, is a one-bedroom, fourth-floor apartment with two terraces and good views, but Rudolf spent no more than two nights there. “And it didn’t change anything for him,” Marika says. “Because he had asked for political protection from France.”

  †When the Scottish soprano Mary Garden (Debussy’s first Mélisande) lived in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, she would give recitals at Arcadie, which was originally a barn and has wonderful acoustics.

  *In a “Letter from Moscow” published in The New Yorker (September 15, 2003), Victor Erofeyev writes definitively about mat, deriving from the Russian word for “mother,” a component of the key phrase yob tvoyu mat (“fuck your mother”), which until recent times was taken so seriously that the bloody brawls it incited often ended in murder.

  *Needless to say, “Russia’s Number One capitalist” danced that night.

  *Dani’s letter of thanks was written from jail. “I have got much time for thinking here, and I’m thinking about the wonderful time we had had and we could have had.” (Rudolf Nureyev Archive.)

  †This echoed a remark in Erik’s last letter, “Sometimes I can scream to forget my loneliness.”

  *It was to “Snakeskin” that Williams gave one of his favorite lines, “Nobody ever gets to know no body. We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!” On a night when Rudolf went out with Williams in the United States years later, he wore a snakeskin jacket. “It made me think of Nijinsky and how when he danced L’Après-midi d’un faune he dressed himself like an animal.” (Quoted in David Daniel’s interviews for Nureyev Observed.)

  *Rudolf’s main change was a new coda borrowed from another part of the ballet. “I don’t feel this was a very great crime, because it was still in the style of Petipa with actual Petipa steps and choreography.” But on his instructions, Margot had made up a diagonal bit of “business” for Nikiya’s variation with fast, overlapping footwork and a rippling torso, while Rudolf’s solo is flavored with his own improvised flurry of Bournonville-inspired steps.

  *It was Teja who was the Soviets’ prisoner now. He still hoped they might be reunited, telling Rudolf that after he completed his studies in Leningrad, “Then it is not long until you. I am even sure about this.” But Rudolf never again contacted Teja, who, for the rest of his life, was not permitted to travel beyond the Iron Curtain (not even to stage his own ballets, which were performed by companies as far afield as Japan). His family was punished, too: His daughter, Jurico, born with ideal ballerina physique, was refused permission to study at the state academy on account of her father’s association with a traitor, his sister’s telephone was tapped, his nephew exiled to Siberia for army service. Becoming a depressive and a heavy drinker, Teja met an early death in 1979, drowning under mysterious circumstances. His second wife, Jutta, also a dancer, who inherited his archive of films and photographs, knew all about his dangerous liaison with the Russian star, but not even Rudolf’s closest friends in the West had heard any mention of Teja’s name. “Teja always remembered,” says Jutta. “But he was behind the Wall, and Rudolf was in another world.”

  *Margot did indeed consider Rudolf “very mature artistically, but immature emotionally.” (Dance Magazine, January 1964.)

  *“Aquatic,” Simon “Blue” Robinson explains in his book, A Year with Rudolf Nureyev, means “sloppy.” “He reckoned I always put too much dressing on the salad.”

  †Also making an affair unlikely is a remark of Rudolf’s to Nigel Gosling when they were considering collaborating on a ballet based on Strauss’s Rosenkavalier. Margot, he said, “might be shocked” by the part of the Marschallin, an older woman who commits adultery with a young boy.

  *On October 23 Rudolf presented a significantly revised interpretation of act 2—“Gone were all the fireworks!”—making effects with Bruhn-like restraint and masterly control. “Nureyev,” wrote the critic Fernau Hall, “somehow managed to make the turns slow and elegiac, canted slightly forward, and expressing growing exhaustion as well as his tender feelings for Giselle. Only a dancer with complete command of the technique of the step could so alter its style and impact, in harmony with the dramatic situation.” (Ballet Today, December 1964.)

  *Only in Robert Helpmann’s fast-moving distillation of Hamlet did Rudolf have the starring role, one which, to the critic of Ballet Today, was his most impressive achievement to date. “He was particularly good in his exchanges with Ophelia [Lynn Seymour], whom he flung to the ground with terrifying but anguished brutality.” (Ballet Today, May—June 1964.)

  *It is now well known that Jimeinez had discovered that Tito was having an affair with his wife, a story Rudolf relished, later enacting the part of the gunman trembling with rage. “You know why he was shot? Because he was cheating on Margot. She was going to divorce him, and his friends … shot him. They missed because they had such fury.” (Simon Robinson, A Year with Nureyev.) Margot, according to Joan Thring, never let herself believe the truth. “Her head was in a bag all through that marriage. She used to attack ambassadors at dinner parties and say, ‘Why haven’t you arrested the man who shot Tito?’ They had a law allowing crimes of p
assion, that’s why.”

  *Mythologized as the incident in which Rudolf declared, “Nureyev does not serve himself,” this story has several versions. In one a plate of spaghetti is hurled at the wall; in another (also from Paul Taylor) Rudolf “generously gives everybody an extra performance by smashing several wineglasses against the wall.” Rudolf’s own explanation was that he had agreed to come to Menotti’s party “Only if I can sit down—because I was exhausted after being in the theater all day long.… So I did not serve myself, that was all. I did not want to stand in a queue. I was tired.” (“The Lynn Barber Interview: A Dance to Defy Time,” The Independent on Sunday, August 19, 1990.)

  11 SACRED V. PROFANE, EAST V. WEST

  In Leningrad early one evening in October 1964, Nigel and Maude Gosling were in their room at the Astoria Hotel waiting for Xenia. Rudolf had bought a fur coat for his mother, asking Maude to wear it through customs and Xenia to collect it from his English friends. It was a dangerous mission. Russian visitors were forbidden in the bedrooms of tourist hotels, where there was usually a watchful dezumaya sitting by the elevator on every floor. When Xenia arrived, Maude recalls, she looked terrified.

  The first thing she did was put a finger to her lips and wouldn’t speak until she had taken a pillow from the bed and put it over the telephone. Nigel had learned a few words of Russian, and she spoke a few in French, so between them they managed, but we could see that she was in a great hurry to put the coat on and leave.

  “Oh! Oh!” Xenia had cried when the fur proved to be much longer than the large loose raincoat she had worn to hide it, but Maude fetched a needle and thread, and together they sat on the bed turning up the hem. “Then we said, ‘This is for you.’ ” Rudolf had sent Pushkin a large art book, but Xenia shook her head, refusing to take it. Going over to the window, she opened the curtain and pointed across the square to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, gesturing, “Meet me there.” Before she left, Xenia took off her headscarf and tied it round her legs “to bunch up the coat,” and as she went out the door, she crossed herself.

  The Goslings were going to a performance at the Kirov that night, but duly sat on a bench in the light drizzle outside the cathedral waiting for her to reappear. After half an hour they gave up, took the album back to their room, and rushed to the theater. At the first intermission they were spotted by Pushkin, who came up to them and said immediately, “You weren’t there.” The couple, it turned out, had missed Xenia, who was at the back of the cathedral exterior while they had been at the front. Pointing to eleven o’clock on his watch, he said that his wife would be waiting in the same place. This time the three met and quickly exchanged presents: Nigel handing over a leather briefcase with the art book inside, Xenia giving them a pink bag—“Ah, Xana’s shopping bag!” Rudolf would exclaim when he saw it—which contained a box of chocolates and some sheet music. (Pushkin had borrowed a score Rudolf had asked for and had spent several nights copying it out by hand.) The Goslings’ last sight of Xenia was her “running” from St. Isaac’s with the briefcase.

  The following day at the Vaganova Academy they were introduced to Pushkin, who had to pretend that he was meeting them for the first time. After watching his “Class of Perfection,” they were shown around the school museum by Marietta Frangopoulo. There were no photographs of Rudolf, and she never mentioned his name but plied them with questions about Tamara Karsavina, a close friend of the Goslings. “ ‘Why doesn’t she come and see us?’ she kept asking. And we couldn’t say that Tamara had told us she would never go back. It would break her heart, she said.” At a performance in the Maly Theater, a Russian woman with a little girl stopped them in the foyer and introduced herself as Rudolf’s sister Rosa. “She was very thick-set, but you could see the likeness.” A day or so later a frightened-looking Rosa appeared at the door of their hotel room, this time without her daughter, three-year-old Gouzel. She had to come to deliver an enormous glass jar of caviar for Rudolf, and honey “for his chest.”*

  From Leningrad the Goslings flew directly to Vienna, where they were going to join Rudolf. Despite vigorous “tactics of obstruction” by the Soviet cultural attaché, the dancer was about to stage his first production of Swan Lake for the Staatsoper. His arrival on August 31 had been kept secret from the press, and, with Vienna only a short distance from the border of Soviet-controlled Hungary, he had been offered the protection of a bodyguard even though, according to the police report, Rudolf “felt neither threatened nor persecuted and needed no escort.”† It was also noted that when publicizing the production, the dancer had “cleverly avoided” any controversy, telling one interviewer, “Politics do not exist for me. But it simply was time for me to leave. I wanted independence.”

  It was a need for independence as well as what Rudolf called his “instinct for self-preservation” that had brought him to Vienna. “Already,” he confided to his biographer John Percival, “I didn’t trust the Royal Ballet to make my whole career for me.” At the beginning of April he had received a letter from Jean Louis’s wife, Maggie, who, concerned about his low spirits the previous summer, had been strenuously campaigning on his behalf. Now, having secured the necessary funds, she was writing to offer him the chance of forming a company and school of his own based in Los Angeles.

  Rudolf, however, who viewed the venture as “pure dilettantism,” never returned the enclosed letter of agreement. Although dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities in London, he knew that he could not do without the discipline and stability of an established company. The Royal Ballet provided him with a framework—in Ashton’s words, “A beautiful stone must have the right setting.” And yet Rudolf’s dilemma continued to be “how to become truly incorporated in the company and how to progress as an artist at the same time.” Once again, he decided that it was no use waiting for other people to create chances for him. “That’s why I took the initiative myself and revived the classical ballets that formed my own particular training.”

  Having mounted two Russian classics, he intended Swan Lake to be next, but the Royal Ballet already had its own new production. Not only that, but Ashton was unconvinced of Rudolf’s ability to handle a full-length classic. (He had not wanted to commission the skeletal Raymonda for the main company, explaining to the board that the dancer had “left no dramatic element in the ballet.”) It was, he avowed in a 1967 article on Petipa written almost as an open letter to Rudolf, as “impertinent” to tamper with the mime as with any other aspect of a nineteenth-century classic. “Things can be old-fashioned and dated, but many masterpieces are dated in the right way.… I do not like to see hotch potches of Petipa’s work with another choreographer imposing his own, often trite, ideas.”

  Curatorship of the classics is, as Arlene Croce has written, “a questionable business.” The record is fragmentary, and the master scores are based on the incomplete notation of Nicholas Sergeyev, who may not have worked from rehearsals conducted by Petipa, and who was unmusical to a degree de Valois described as bordering on eccentricity. Rudolf would have argued, too, that limitations in the classics were often dictated by circumstances. The reason, for example, that there is “nothing for Siegfried to do” in Swan Lake was that Petipa’s premier danseur, Pavel Gerdt, was over fifty when he created the part, and way past his technical prime. “So there were no chances for any other dancers.… Since today you cannot put on the classics without giving opportunities for the male dancers, to talk about reviving these classics just as they were then is so much nonsense.”

  Creating a credible character out of a hero who “sits on his ass for thirty-five minutes” during act 1, and spends the rest of the ballet doing little more than partnering Odette/Odile, was, Rudolf insisted, quite impossible. His Swan Lake would present a consistent, subjective view of Siegfried, who is, after all, the perpetrator of the action, with its focus not on the Swan Queen but on Rudolf himself.

  He began planning a new production of the ballet while he was in Spoleto, where the designer Nico Georgiadis�
�“a massively built Greek with a face akin to a pharaoh”—was spending the summer painting.* Together they went on several walks—“small Grand Tours”—around the famous Italian villas, Georgiadis, who had studied architecture in his native Athens and at Columbia University, answering Rudolf’s constant questions about their interiors as well as exteriors. While Georgiadis shared Rudolf’s view that tradition must be reappraised in contemporary terms, he was surprised to find when they began working together that the dancer was “terribly terribly uptight about classicisim,” resisting any ideas that he considered too avant-garde. “If you wanted to find other ways of doing things he’d seen in Russia he would feel very uneasy. In those days he imagined one would do a kind of nineteenth-century painted set.”

  And yet, as Georgiadis points out, the concept for Swan Lake was entirely Rudolf’s own—a concept that the dancer well knew was “too radical a departure” for Covent Garden. Recently, however, he had been approached by the director of the Vienna Opera Ballet, who was offering him “a free hand as choreographer to produce what he chooses whenever he wishes.” Aurel Milloss, a highly cultured man whose ambition to focus international interest on his company, had brought Massine and Balanchine to stage works in Vienna in 1963, agreed to commission a new production of Swan Lake—“not only in the original form but with a more creative input.” This was no great risk. With only three full-length ballets in their repertory and no classical heritage to protect, the Austrians were more than ready for their own Swan Lake—even a revisionist version as self-promoting as Rudolf’s.