Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Asked two decades later about the ’65 season’s fan mania and celebrity “madhouse,” Rudolf said that he remembered only the pictures. “You didn’t have the chance to enjoy it all. It was such a struggle to get in the car and get away.” Just one famous face had impressed him—an encounter lasting no more than a few seconds that had taken place outside his dressing room before his New York debut in Giselle. “A strange lady pass by my door and stared at me. She had a velvet beret.” With her oval head, melancholy eyes, and smooth hair looped Russian ballerina—style over her ears, she looked strangely familiar. Then he remembered. Marietta Frangopoulo had kept a framed photograph on her desk of Olga Spessivtseva, the only Maryinsky dancer of whom Balanchine had spoken with awe; whose supernatural lightness and tormented soul had made her possibly the greatest-ever interpreter of Giselle. For twenty-two years Spessivtseva had been incarcerated in an American mental institution, rescued only recently by her friend the dancer Anton Dolin, who had moved her to a rest home in upstate New York. It was Dolin who had brought “the Sleeping Ballerina” backstage to meet Margot. Although she was frail, her raven hair now completely white, her manner and composure were still those of a grande dame. For a few seconds she and Rudolf looked at each other without saying anything. “And then she went away.”

  Rudolf was desperately missing Russia. He had taken David Richardson, a young New York City Ballet dancer whom he was pursuing, to the Jean and Maggie Louis party at El Morocco, luminous with Hollywood stars, when suddenly he ran out into the street. Richardson followed him, and they walked together for about twenty blocks while Rudolf reminisced. “He talked and talked about his country; his mother. I was surprised—I had no idea that he had this soft and sad side. I tried to ask questions, but it was making me feel I wasn’t smart enough. ‘You’re a kid,’ he said, ‘You’re not a Russian—there’s no way you can understand.’ ”

  Back in London in October, the Finnish dancer Leo Ahonen, one of the four foreigners who had shared his Vaganova room, paid Rudolf a visit on his way to Amsterdam, where Leo was taking up a new position as principal dancer and ballet master. “He let me stay in his apartment. For two weeks I sleep on couch.” Eager to impress an old schoolmate, Rudolf took him to The Scotch in Mason’s Yard, the rival “jumping night place” to the Ad Lib, where Leo was indeed wide-eyed at the password rule of entry, the “live fish and very very rich people.” Touchingly protective, Rudolf never left his side. “I was in his armpit—he always liked to keep me close.” Later they walked down Jermyn Street window-shopping for Michael Fish shirts and Indian dressing gowns. Leo saw that Rudolf “had everything”—a ten-thousand-dollar Mercedes-Benz, a brick of brand-new pound notes next to his bed—yet felt that he was not happy in the West. Rudolf seemed to envy Leo for having a wife and children, and when they began talking about Russia and Pushkin, he became distraught. Defensively responding to Leo’s assumption that he had lost touch with their teacher, Rudolf glowered. “I talk with Alexander Ivanovich all the time!” “But he had to go into a little alley and cry for a while. He couldn’t help it. Probably I hit him right at the head [sic].”

  In fact Rudolf rarely if ever spoke to Pushkin. If the teacher happened to pick up the receiver when he called, he would say nothing and pass it immediately to Xenia. “Everything went through her,” said a mutual friend. “It was Xenia who did all the talking and keeping up.” Aware that his first responsibility was toward his pupils, Pushkin was naturally afraid that any contact with Rudolf would jeopardize his position at the school. But it would have been far too emotional for him to speak to Rudolf, from whose loss he never recovered.” Alexander Ivanovich was deeply hurt that his star pupil had chosen to go. And he never fully understood his reasons.* Having heard all kinds of rumors about Rudolf—“I was drunkard, I was neurotic”—Pushkin genuinely believed in the corrupting influence of the West. When he was shown a newspaper photograph of the long-haired dancer leaving a London club, he had laughed dryly. “Look at our girl! What is he doing in the West anyway? What does he think he’s doing?”

  Pushkin’s detachment can only have been increased by the fact that he now had another outstanding protégé, one who was himself already a legend at the Vaganova school. In September 1965 Pushkin had come home one evening in a state of elation, telling Xenia that he had just accepted an extraordinarily gifted pupil. “What, better than Rudik?” she asked cynically. “Completely different,” he replied, “but no less talented.” Still looking like a child at seventeen, with wide-open blue eyes and a small, compact physique, Mikhail Baryshnikov was a time-bomb of power and precision, able to perform unimaginable technical feats—not as a display of acrobatics but as a thrilling extension of classical form. Even at his most virtuosic, every movement—every linking step—would be executed with such sublime and flawless artistry that Clive Barnes, watching the student in class during a visit to Russia, described him in his diary as the most perfect dancer he had ever seen. There can be no doubt that Rudolf knew about Pushkin’s phenomenal new pupil: There was, as Baryishnikov says, “quite a lot of traffic between London and Leningrad.” Sleeping on the sofa where Rudolf himself had spent so many nights, “Mishenka” was now “their pride.” And while, in Xenia’s eyes, he would always be the “Little Prince” to Rudolf’s “Big Prince,” to Alexander Ivanovich he was something Rudolf could never be: an embodiment of the classical ideal.

  Retaining his St. Petersburg schooling was still Rudolf’s greatest concern. In his continuous search for a strong and inspiring teacher, he had recently sought the help of the Russian-born Valentina Pereyaslavec, who had been Vaganova’s assistant in Leningrad and was now on the staff of the American Ballet Theatre school. They had gotten to know each other when she was invited to teach the Royal Ballet Company for three months in 1963 and 1965, her main goal having been to “give something a little extra in the arms, épaulement, arms, arms, arms … to make every step fluid [as] in the corps de ballet in Bayadère” A tiny, spirited disciplinarian, Madame Pereyaslavec shared several of Pushkin’s qualities. She, too, was a teacher of few words who did not believe in correcting or analyzing but whose steps were instructive in themselves—combinations that, even at the barre, were as beguiling as miniature ballets. More to the point, like Alexander Ivanovich, she could be trusted to tell Rudolf the truth. “He don’t like you come after he dance and tell, ‘You is wonderful. You is beautiful.’ This is not important for him. He always tell me, ’Why are you so quiet? Tell me what you don’t like. And … he listen.… I say, ‘You like me tell you what little bother my eye?’ And he say, ‘Tell me.’ And I tell him.”

  Frankness was also what he had come to expect from the Joffrey School’s teacher and choreographer Hector Zaraspe, an eccentric Argentinian, who from their first class had been the one in control. Refusing to prepare for a pirouette from fourth position, Rudolf had argued, “I’m sorry. We take from second in Russia.” “I’m sorry,” countered Zaraspe. “We are in America—from fourth position.” “He loved that,” Zaraspe says. “He loved when the teacher demand.” But neither teacher would ever be a mentor to Rudolf, able to provide the kind of spiritual and intellectual guidance lavished on him at Rossi Street, with its nightly discussions about classical style, costumes, past productions—they were too much in awe. “He so inspire me to teach,” Pereyaslavec says, “and he always use his schooling, what he learned at home.” “He is my touchstone,” adds Zaraspe. “I teach his way, his movement, his expression.” But both knew Rudolf only as an artist, not as a friend. Like Zaraspe, who “try never to move in closer,” Pereyaslavec deliberately withheld her affection. “Because I don’t want bother him.… I don’t want be friendly too much.”

  Rudolf had never been more alone. At the end of October Erik wrote to him from Chicago, lamenting the distance between them. “It seems like a terribly long time since I saw you felt you and looked at you.… Sometimes I feel like maybe it was just a dream that we knew each other … but I do wish and pray for you that
you are all right and happy somehow.”

  Nor did he see much of Margot, all of whose free time was spent in Stoke Mandeville Hospital with her husband. When Tito came off the critical list, she had taken a room at a mediocre hotel in Aylesbury, and after a performance would catch a train with a bag of sandwiches for supper, and sleep there until six the next morning so that she could feed Tito his breakfast. With a single bed and an unheated communal bathroom at the end of the hall, it was a such a grim existence for a prima ballerina that anyone who witnessed it could hardly believe the extent of Margot’s self-abnegation. Their manservant, Buenaventura Medina, was one: “Everyone thought that when he became paralyzed she would just pay someone to take good care of him and that’s that. But she said, ‘No, I’m going to show the world that I can dance and I can take good care of my husband.’ And she did it—right up to the end.”

  To the Arias family Margot’s sense of responsibility toward Tito was that of a true Latin American wife, but some skeptics found her “volte-face from prospective divorcée to wifely martyr” hypocritical, or at least, an act of some kind. “Tito didn’t want her there, so what was the point?” says Joan Thring. “The whole situation irritated Rudolf, as it did me.” Margot, however, was not playing a role—she had what she wanted: Tito by her side on whom to lavish love and devotion, an end to suffering the pain of his roving, and a sense of duty as unconditional as her dance vocation. But where did Rudolf fit in?

  More often than not he would have dinner on his own. He liked La Popote in Walton Street, where the food was mediocre but the waiters exceptionally pretty; or the Casserole on Kings Road, which had in its basement the added attraction of Le Gigolo, one of London’s first gay clubs. Rudolf was having his usual steak at La Popote one night when his eye was drawn to a young man who had just walked in. Somewhere in his early thirties, with thick black hair, he had the classically handsome looks of a Jean Marais or a dark Erik Bruhn. Rudolf stared at him without smiling, but seeing a waiter with a menu on his way to take the young man’s order, he called him over and penciled something on the back. It was just one word: “Hello.”

  Keith Baxter knew exactly whom the message was from. He was an actor who two years earlier had come close to making a big-budget film of the Bible with Rudolf, to be directed by a quartet of well-known names including Orson Welles.*

  That night at La Popote, two years later, Keith—showing no sign of interest in Rudolf—began talking to a critic at an adjoining table. Sitting in a corner across the room were Francis Bacon and a companion in a Merchant Navy uniform, so drunk that he had slumped across the table. Rudolf paid his bill and ordered another coffee at the same time. When he saw the young man ask for his own bill, he immediately got up and left. As Keith got into his car, there was a flash of headlights from a Mercedes parked opposite. Rudolf pulled out, waited to be followed, and they drove in convoy to Belgravia.

  The apartment was comfortable but ordinary and anonymous. As Rudolf went into the kitchen to get them a drink, Keith sat down. Minutes passed. He was taking off his shoes when the door opened and Rudolf appeared carrying two glasses of vodka. He was naked. “I had no time to touch my drink. He lay on his stomach on the rug. It was all quite mechanical. When it was finished, he got up and went into another room. I waited to see if he would return, but he did not appear. It seemed a pity to waste the Stolichnaya, so I drank mine, then his.”

  Putting on one shoe (which was the only thing he had taken off), Keith went into the kitchen with the glasses, preparing to leave. As he was picking up his car keys, Rudolf suddenly appeared. “No keys. You stay,” he said.

  I did not want to stay. I don’t know how much he understood, but I told him he should hire a robot. Also, he had been dancing that day, and his body had a staleness to it. “You stay,” he said, holding my keys behind him. When he grinned he was irresistible; the scar on his top lip made him look like a street urchin. I went into the bathroom and ran a bath. He was watching me with wide eyes. I made him climb in, and I washed him. He was laughing and splashing me, but he found it very arousing, and so did I. I dried him and put a towel on the bed, and as he lay on it I rubbed baby lotion into his skin. His body had the musculature of an athlete, and only his dancer’s feet were slighly misshapen. I turned him over. His back of course was beautiful, and he was justly proud of it.

  The sky was lightening by the time Keith left for home. Rudolf had not asked what he did for a living and he had not told him—not even mentioning the Welles connection. “I really had no plan to see him again.” They exchanged numbers, and a few days later Rudolf called him.

  Arriving at the apartment, Keith was glad to find two youngsters there—an attractive girl and her equally attractive husband. Nellie Liddell worked as a model booker at Nev’s agency and Tony, a Bermondsey Cockney, was a painter. The couple were fans, whom Rudolf had literally picked up one night outside the stage door. They had been walking down Floral Street after watching a performance when the star’s convertible, followed by a running, squealing horde, drew up beside them. “Get in,” he said. “We go to eat.” They went to La Popote, where they spent most of the evening just looking at one another—not just because of the language obstacle, but because the couple were extraordinarily striking. Nellie, who was petite enough to have been a dancer, wore miniskirts not much wider than a belt with black Anello & Davide boots, or mannish pantsuits long before Yves Saint Laurent’s “smokings.” Tony had long raven black hair past his shoulders, clothes that were as eyecatching as his wife’s, and the same androgynous sixties beauty. Being with Rudolf that night, they said, “was like meeting a soul person.”

  As Tony and Nellie lived in nearby Victoria and were such good playmates, he began seeing a lot of them. They would go to the movies or dancing at the Ad Lib, and occasionally Tony would borrow something of Rudolf’s to wear. “ ‘Bitch!’ he used to say, because I looked much better in it. But he never tried to make a pass—he knew Nell and I were an item.” In a sense they were London’s version of Leningrad’s Romankov twins, young and fun yet able to provide Rudolf with the homely kitchen culture he so missed. Even when they moved much farther away to public housing in Clapham, Rudolf still made the effort to go and see them. “He’d come round for a meal and we’d sit on the floor and ’ave a laugh. Maybe because we’d had the same poor upbringing, we could all relate to each other. I think for him we must’ve have been like his sisters or whatever he was missing.” If they went to a restaurant, Tony insisted on paying for the three of them. “But I’ve got lots of money,” Rudolf would argue. “I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to sponge off of him.” He told the couple they could use his flat in Monaco at any time, but they couldn’t afford the fare. They were neither sycophantic nor impressed by his grand admirers; in fact they were in his dressing room one evening with Lee Radziwill, when he asked Tony to escort the princess to the stage door. “If she found her way here, she can find her way back,” Tony said conclusively. The pair had nothing to offer Rudolf except their friendship, a simple, touching bond that lasted, they noticed, “until he became aware of what money was.”

  On that first evening with Keith, Rudolf left the three of them to take a telephone call in another room. It was Farida, calling from Leningrad. Out of politeness Keith asked whether Tony painted landscapes or portraits. “ ’ouses,” he said. He was a painter and decorator. Nellie looked hard at Keith: “Haven’t I just seen you on the telly?” He had appeared that week in a detective drama, and when Rudolf came back more than an hour later, Nellie told him that Keith was an actor. “He was surprised I hadn’t told him myself.” The four went on to La Popote for dinner, but having first wanted the Liddells with him for support, Rudolf soon began seeing Keith alone, clearly appreciating his intelligence and sense of fun. Keith recalls: “I took him to Les Enfants du Paradis, and he was enthralled. But he liked the Bond films and the ‘Carry On’ films too. I tried to get him to come to Twickenham to watch Wales play England, but he would have nothing t
o do with it.”

  As they were rowing on the Serpentine one afternoon, their boat was bumped by another with four men in it, all rowdy and shouting. Rudolf was frightened and wanted to leave. It was beginning to rain with no taxis in sight, so they walked to Hyde Park Corner, and Keith took him into Apsley House. Once the home of the Duke of Wellington, it has in the entrance a colossal white marble nude of Napoleon—Wellington’s trophy—with a staircase winding around it. Keith started climbing up, followed by Rudolf, who suddenly stopped and, with a huge grin, pointed to the massive curves of the emperor’s buttocks. “Look! Is me!” he exclaimed, prompting Keith’s nickname for him of “Modestivich,” which he thought very funny.

  While between homes, Rudolf stayed in Keith’s Thames-side apartment in Westminster, astounding the cleaning woman with the strange items of washing—the jockstraps and tights—with which he festooned the bathroom. They would listen to music, drink Stolichnaya—two bottles one night. “Rudolf got very sad when he was drunk—that typical Russian melancholy.” And they spent a lot of time in bed. Keith was determined to teach his “very apt pupil” that love-making could last more than five minutes, although sexually he found Rudolf extremely unsophisticated, interested only in following the particular pattern that satisfied him: