Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Undeniably Aurora’s ballet, Sleeping Beauty could not be colonized by Rudolf as a showcase for himself. He did, however, make act 2, the Hunting Scene, revolve around the Prince—and with cause: Désiré, as Arlene Croce has pointed out, is a fantasy version of the Sun King. Rudolf had read the new English edition of Saint-Simon’s memoirs and drawn inspiration for the Prince from descriptions of the louche, sumptuous life at Louis’s hunting lodge. With the same hypnotic presence, ruthless streak, and vast appetite for life and beauty, Rudolf made a dazzling reincarnation of Louis XIV, always the cynosure, almost by divine right.

  The court dances in this act are, as one critic noted, “mere breathing pauses for our hero.” Despite Rudolf’s vow of fidelity to Petipa, he was never going to stage a nineteenth-century classic without providing more dance opportunities for the Prince. Following Konstantin Sergeyev’s example, he added an extra solo, then went one better by appropriating Tchaikovsky’s musical entr’acte for himself.† A passage usually reserved for the first violinist, spotlighted in the orchestra pit, this became an opportunity for a five-minute dance described by Alexander Bland as “certainly more Nureyev than Petipa in style.” Dense with favorite fiddly Bournonville steps, it twists and turns back on itself as if trying to express indecision and introversion but looking only awkwardly improvised. Carla Fracci remembers Rudolf hurriedly choreographing it after one of their rehearsals. It was the evening when Erik had just arrived. Rudolf had asked his opinion a couple of times, “but I don’t think Erik said too much.” (Once again Erik’s silence was heavy with censure.) With Désiré now consigned to the “sad dynasty to which belong the princes Siegfried, Albrecht, and Hamlet,” this was one too many of Rudolf’s soulful soliloquies. All the same Rudolf was proud of his La Scala Sleeping Beauty, a production he would always consider his most successful. He told Nigel Gosling how disappointed he was that no one from the Royal Ballet made the effort to see it. In fact, the opera house’s John Tooley did see one performance in Milan: “When we had dinner afterward, Rudolf asked me if he had overdone it, and I told him absolutely you have.”

  Learning that the National Ballet of Cuba was due to appear at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in November 1966, Rudolf went to Paris, hoping that Menia Martinez would be with them. At the general rehearsal, trying not to be recognized, he sat far back in a side balcony seat, but once he had spotted Menia onstage, he asked the company régisseur to deliver a note to her during a break. Rumors that Nureyev was in the auditorium had already filtered backstage, and it was with great excitement that Menia read the message Rudolf had scrawled on a scrap of paper: “When you’ve finished, go to the Hotel des Ambassadeurs. I’ll be waiting for you.” The subterfuge had not escaped the notice of director Alicia Alonso, who, supported by her husband, Fernando, forbade Menia to leave. As a member of the National Ballet she was a representative of her country. Nureyev had betrayed the motherland, he was known to be a friend of Jacqueline Kennedy.* If she met him she would not only compromise the company but put her own political standing in jeopardy. (This in itself was considerable. When Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev met in New York for the first time, in September 1960, it was Menia who was chosen to be their translator.) Menia refused to be deterred. “I don’t care,” she told the couple, “Even if you fire me, I’m going. He was my best friend.” The impasse was finally broken by a colleague who had “influence on the Alonsos,” and who volunteered to chaperone her.

  It was only a short walk from the theater to the hotel, where Rudolf was standing outside. Seeing Menia’s male companion, he raised an ironic eyebrow. “Cuban KGB?” “No,” she said firmly. “This is my friend.” Her colleague left them, and they fell into each other’s arms. They were still “grasping each other” when dance critic Claude Baignères passed by: “I saw Rudolf take the girl to the hotel. They looked as if they were going to stay there for three days without leaving!” In fact they left soon afterward to go for dinner, and as they were walking toward a taxi stand, noticed that they were being followed by a photographer. “No pictures! No pictures!” snarled Rudolf, throwing his jacket over Menia’s head and saying to her softly, “I don’t want them to hurt you.” Under her coat she was still wearing her rehearsal clothes, but despite her protests, Rudolf insisted on taking her to Maxim’s. It was important to him that she be made aware of his enormous change in stature. He introduced her to Brigitte Bardot, and later they went on to Régine’s nightclub.

  As if anxious to justify himself, Rudolf began to explain almost immediately why he had stayed in the West, recounting every detail of the Le Bourget trap. He had hoped to stay in Paris, he said, but the French had not wanted him because of their cultural alliance with Russia, which was why he had gone to England. He told her how much he had learned from Margot—“she was like a mother to him, he said”—and what a great revelation working with Erik Bruhn had been. “But you’re Nureyev and you come from Pushkin,” Menia protested. “Yes—but I’m so much cleaner now.” She was “surprised, yes—very surprised, no”—to hear from Rudolf of his long affair with Erik. “Erik Bruhn was a very big personality, and I understood that Rudik would have wanted him to be a passage of his life.” Rudolf told her about their problems, saying that it had been so hard being constantly apart that Erik had finally decided to end things. “It’s finished,” he said, breaking down. “He’s the love of my life, but it’s finished.” There had been no dramatic breakup, he told her, and they would always stay good friends. “But now,” Rudolf said, “now I am alone.”

  At that moment I could have gone to bed with him: It was so wonderful to see him again. He told me that there was something about me that he’d never found in anybody else, and he start to cry again, saying, “I love you.… Please, Menia, stay with me. I want you to stay with me.” I realized then why the Alonsos hadn’t wanted me to go.*

  Rudolf was flying to Vienna first thing in the morning—the company was waiting for him to teach them Don Quixote—but this made him all the more insistent that Menia should accompany him: Vienna was exactly where he had proposed to her eight years earlier. “But why now?” she wanted to know. “I always thought you asked me only to leave Russia.” “Well, I’m on the other side, and I’m still asking,” he replied quietly.

  Her first thought was that with the Cuban premiere scheduled for the following day she could not let her company down, but longer-term considerations made the idea of elopement seem even more “impossible.” She planned, as soon as she could, to return to Russia to dance with the Kirov or the Bolshoi. “I wanted to prepare Giselle there—in Cuba only Alicia Alonso danced Giselle. And for me it was very important to have this freedom—to open the door of my life as a dancer.” Rudolf, more than anyone, could understand her obsession with “only dance, dance, dance,” and consequently kept contradicting himself. “He was saying, ‘Come … please come!’ And then ‘No, I can see that you can’t.’ ” Finally the answer Menia gave him was just as equivocal. “I told him not yes, not no, but pattamō [because].”

  It was after five in the morning by the time they left Régine’s and Rudolf dropped Menia back at her hotel. As she lay in bed, her thoughts still racing, she felt very sad, wondering if she had made a mistake. But instead of being impressed by Rudolf’s enormous celebrity, it had made her “a little afraid,” and she knew without any hesitation that she did not want to spent the rest of her life just following him around. “A few days later, I think it’s good that I say pattamo.”

  For Rudolf this had been an episode he would not repeat. Never again would he try so fervently to recapture an encounter from his past, which, however sweetly nostalgic, had only served to augment his belief that one should never look back. Taking the taxi on to the Hotel des Ambassadeurs, he went inside—not to sleep but to collect his luggage: He had another plane to catch, a new ballet to stage.

  *Rosa had telephoned Rudolf in London and “screamed blue murder at him” for thinking that their mother could be seen in Ufa wearing a
Western fur coat.

  †It was Joan Thring who had “slightly exaggerated” the danger to the authorities—and with reason: She remembered what had happened in Sydney in April 1954 when the wife of the Soviet defector-spy Evdokia Petrov had been frog-marched onto a BOAC plane by KGB apparatchiks and “escorted” back to Moscow.

  *Having seen Georgiadis’s designs for Cranko’s Daphnis and Chloe and Kenneth MacMillan’s The Invitation, Rudolf had wanted him for Raymonda, but the designer declined the commission because of the insubstantial fee he was offered.

  *When Rudolf left Vienna, Birkmeyer was promoted to demi-soloist and began appearing in the role of the Prince. He was appointed principal dancer in 1972.

  *The hero of this 1976 version was Ludwig II of Bavaria, obsessed by imagery of the swan and tormented by his homosexuality. Like Siegfried, Ludwig himself died by drowning in a lake.

  *Toronto Ballet’s Swan Lake, which premiered on March 27, 1967, also included a lyrical and “murderously difficult” new solo in act 1 to establish the brooding, introspective character of the Prince. But although Rudolf claimed that Erik had stolen “everything” from his production, this was not, of course, the case. The Bruhn version conflated the ballet into two acts, and, exploring his own dark bond with his mother, transformed Rothbart into a woman. “I called her the Black Queen. I wanted to equate the Prince’s relationship to Von Rothbart with that of his mother, the Queen. Well, everybody, including Rudik, got very upset over this major alteration, because the whole ballet was now seen in Freudian terms.” (John Gruen, Erik Bruhn.)

  *A corps de ballet member coming to the end of her career, Zamponi had begun to write about dance. She was to review all of Rudolf’s Vienna productions for Dance Magazine, and was one of several pet critics whom he went out of his way to befriend. Not only did she fill the role of amanuensis—articulating in print what he had been trying to achieve—but being well educated, speaking perfect English, and having access to several apartments in Vienna, she could be extremely useful to him. “Rudolf used her as a private secretary,” says company manager Traude Klockl. “She would do things like drive him to and from the airport because she really worshipped him.” But, inconveniently for Rudolf, Zamponi had also fallen in love. “Moody,” she writes in one of her letters. “You might prefer to sleep with boys, but it is the female that puts its mark on your art. Why do you close yourself up towards me? Don’t you realise I’ll always be there for you?… How can one compromise and live among MIDGETS—after knowing you?”

  *In her biography of Margot, Meredith Daneman points out how the episode preyed on the ballerina’s conscience almost to the end of her life. At a private dinner given after a fund-raising gala for her, she was overheard asking Lynn Seymour to forgive her. “Lynn, with customary largesse, was conducting herself as if there was nothing to forgive.” And Seymour was right. Keith Money was present at a lunch with Margot and Sol Hurok in New York in January 1965, when Margot tried hard to persuade the impresario to open with Seymour and Gable. “Margot wanted to do the ballet in her own time,” says Keith Money. “To ease into the NY season in the second or third week. Less pressure; less strain.… When we left the lunch, I really thought she might have won her case.” In the event, Hurok phoned London within the hour, and said, “Fonteyn or else.… “The rest is history except that nobody gets it right. It’s a better story to see a powerful diva cutting a swathe through weak-kneed management, and “grabbing” the ballet for herself. In fact, Margot, behind the scenes, was possibly Lynn’s biggest advocate. She did everything, at the time, to un-grab; and, she adored Lynn.

  *Her own model was Galina Ulanova—the only other person, Rudolf said, who was vulnerable on the stage. From Ulanova she learned the art of longevity, how to transform herself, even without makeup or costume, into a radiant fourteen-year-old.

  *The Royal Ballet’s Alexander Grant, who was also at Arthur’s, was taken aback by how possessive of Rudolf Robert Kennedy was that night. The two dancers had been standing talking close together against a wall when the senator came up and said “Hey! What’s going on between you two? Break this up!” “It was very strange, because it was only kind of jokey, and I thought, ‘Why should he care?’ ” In Rudolf’s own account, told to Gore Vidal, “Nothing happen.” But if he was indeed the object of Kennedy’s “homosexual impulses” (Gore Vidal, Palimpsest), he did not seem inclined to take things further. When they went out to dinner in a group after his appearance with Margot on the Ed Sullivan Show on May 16, Maria Tallchief was surprised when Rudolf made “a big point” of taking her home. “It was very unlike him. But then it occurred to me that he was leaving the field clear for Bobby and Margot.”

  *It was only after Rudolf had sent his teacher the film of Romeo and Juliet (Joanne Woodward had helped him to have a 16-mm print made) that he received a letter from Pushkin, with his blessing. “Now he say that I had done well in the West.” (Quoted by Jean Battey Lewis, Washington Post, June 9, 1974.)

  *In the film, which was never made, Welles wanted Rudolf for the role of the Angel of God who wrestles at Peniel with Jacob (to be played by Keith Baxter), a sequence to be shot against the rays of the sun. “How much speak?” asked Rudolf. Welles explained it was an important part, but silent, and added that he wanted Rudolf to be naked. “Agreed. But no speak? You want me to make with muscles only?”

  *On July 29, 1964, Henze wrote to say he was sorry they had just missed each other, but talks of an earlier encounter with romantic memories. “My dearest Rudolf.… Please write to me soon, and let me know where you are and where I can meet you. For me it was a rencontre of splendour and beauty: To listen to your voice, seeing your eyes and to absorb a sense of energy and elegance who support a soul which must be deep—and far away—as all Asia! For you I hear music. All my love, Hans.”

  *Baryshnikov and Xenia’s friend Alla Bor remember the efforts at Rossi Street to aid Rudolf’s “factory of productions.” Both Alexander Ivanovich and Xenia would handwrite each part, movement by movement, some described in Russian, some in French. On one occasion, unsure of a detail, Xenia went specially to see the ballet itself in order transcribe it accurately.

  †The Vienna production which premiered in December fell flat. Although Rudolf himself danced with electrifying commitment, his Kitri (Ulli Wuhrer) had none of the charm or heel-kicking spitfire quality of a Ninel Kurgapkina. Nevertheless, Horst Koegler, writing for Dance and Dancers (February 1967), recognized the ballet’s potential. “What a roaring finale this must be, if danced with the right swing—which unfortunately it wasn’t.”

  *The choreographer was amazed by the passionate intensity of both performers and spectators when he witnessed Spanish national dancing during a tour of Andalusia in the 1840s.

  *Adapting himself to Fracci’s Sylphide—“coquette, terribly sweet, and brainless”—Rudolf had toned down the high-Romantic element. According to Freda Pitt writing in The Dancing Times, his “virtually immaculate” James was now much closer to Erik’s, although he still brought enough glamour to justify “the folly of the happy free creature of the woods preferring the love of a mortal to the delights of a superhuman world.”

  *Insisting on no trace of flamboyance, Rudolf had told Fracci he wanted her to do only two pirouettes in the grand pas de deux. In particularly good form one night, she was spinning into her third turn ready to finish on the music, when Rudolf suddenly brought her to a halt just as she was facing him. Staring into her eyes, he very deliberately turned her back in a counterclockwise direction so that everyone in the audience knew there had been a blunder.

  †Nico Georgiadis told Nigel Gosling (July 1, 1981, diary entry) that Fracci “failed to turn up for a rehearsal during which he was to arrange the act 2 Entr’acte solo for her. After waiting for half an hour, he said, ‘Well, I will grab it for myself.’ And he did.”

  *One of the conspiracy theories surrounding John Kennedy’s assassination had involved Fidel Castro.

  *Eight male corps de
ballet dancers defected in Paris at the end of the season, not, according to Menia, for political reasons, but because they were all homosexual, “and Alicia Alonso was not d’accord with this.”

  12 WILD THING

  As in the old romances, where the virtuous beauty is offset by a sorceress—Una by Duessa, the primeval female emanating destruction and death—Menia had a dangerous counterpart. A wild child of the decade—Tatler’s Girl of ’65—Talitha Pol was “a total, complete transfixer of men.” To her friend Christopher Gibbs, a fellow enfant terrible, she was as lethal as Wedekind’s Lulu, a ravishing young woman who “had elevated flirting into an art form.”

  Talitha was a difficult person for anyone to be in love with as she had several strings to her bow—young and sexy; lecherous and old; doting aristocrat; dim pretty boy … all of whom she kept expertly wound up. She was very seductive and very touching, and at the same time, a little bit aware of how to put these qualities to work.

  When they met for the first time at a party in early 1965 Rudolf had been totally captivated. Born in Indonesia, Talitha had alabaster-white skin and high cheekbones and eyes much like his own. Although he did not find her particularly intelligent, she was intuitive and sympathetic, and they instantly seemed to recognize something in each other. Her family had been living in Bali when the Japanese arrived in 1943, and interned them in appalling conditions. Talitha learned to feed herself by stealing, and retained horrific memories of the prison camp. Her mother, who never recovered from their ordeal, died in 1948, and Willem Pol, a Dutch painter, moved to England, where he soon remarried. The daughter of Augustus and Dorelia John, Poppet Pol had all the sophisticated flamboyance of her parents, and Talitha’s upbringing changed almost overnight into a bohemian idyll. In a mirrored dress from Lebanon, or a Berber wedding gown with shawl and Kings Road canvas boots, Talitha created what Vogue called “her own inimitable fantasies” as one of London’s first hippies. (When Rudolf took her as his guest to a royal gala he had to ask Joan Thring to lend her something suitable to wear.)