Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  What had so impressed him, Gibbs says, was the way Talitha had triumphed over her background. “She was sparkling and delicious, yet vulnerable and damaged at the same time.” And although what he was actually seeing was an exquisite, androgynous reflection of himself, Rudolf had never felt so erotically stirred by a woman, telling several friends that he wanted to marry Talitha. She was just as enthralled by him. When Claus von Bülow, Rudolf’s Belgravia neighbor, invited them both to dinner, she made him promise to seat them next to each other. For some reason Rudolf was unable to come that evening, and instead von Bülow invited the son of his business associate J. Paul Getty. The die was cast: J. Paul junior fell in love as soon as he saw Talitha, the woman who “would all but ruin his life.” By December 1966 she had become Mrs. Paul Getty, her wedding dress a white mink-trimmed miniskirt. The couple began dividing their time between Rome and Marrakesh, where they had bought a nineteenth-century palace in the ancient walled city, soon becoming friends of Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, who had themselves just acquired a house in the medina. Saint-Laurent’s immediate rapport with Talitha had seemed inevitable to Bergé—as inevitable as the “very, very close bond” he had observed between her and Rudolf: “People like Talitha, Rudolf, and Yves have the same flair—the same perception of life, more or less the same behavior. It’s a decadence, a mix of Burne-Jones and Rossetti. For these people the rest of the world is square.”

  They were all together in Paris in June 1967 at a performance of Roland Petit’s Notre Dame de Paris, the costumes for which Saint Laurent had designed. Rudolf was particularly interested in the ballet as it starred Claire Motte, one of his first friends in the West, who was now married to Mario Bois, a tall, good-looking director of a music publishing house.* After the performance, joined by the Gettys, they all went for dinner at a restaurant Bois describes as “chic avant d’être à la mode.” Talitha was looking particularly stunning that night, dressed in a sumptuous fantasy cloak and matching hat, which, later in the evening, Rudolf removed and imperiously placed on his own head. “You want it? I’ll give it to you,” she said, laughing. It was 5 a.m. when the group finally left the restaurant, and although everyone was fairly drunk, Claire and Mario drove Rudolf in their battered quatre-chevaux to the Ritz. The place Vendôme was totally deserted, and Rudolf, still wearing Talitha’s toque and somewhat disheveled, started to dance—tours en l’air followed by little burlesques. One was a self-caricature mocking his continuing infatuation with the married Talitha: an impersonation of the tragicomic Petrushka competing with his rival for the attentions of the Ballerina.

  With his fascination for Talitha combined with an innate passion for exotica, Rudolf would have been charmed by the sybaritic ambiance the Gettys had created at Le Palais Da Zahir (the Pleasure Palace). In gardens lit by camphor flares against a backdrop of the Atlas Mountains, dancing street boys balanced trays weighted with mint tea and candles; guests either dined outside on antique rugs among roses wound with mint, or in high-beamed rooms where huge fires of olive logs blazed at each end. Was it, then, his animal-like sense of potential danger that kept him away? With hallucinogens at their most fashionable by 1967, Da Zahir had become a mecca for the “hippie deluxe” set Cecil Beaton called “the druggists”—Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Chrissie Gibbs, Robert Fraser, Brian Jones, and Anita Pallenberg. At a 1968 New Year’s Eve party, amid the haze of kif smoke exhaled from hookahs, Paul McCartney and John Lennon were spotted flat on their backs. “They couldn’t get off the floor, let alone talk.” Following the example of Talitha—“the daring one”—Paul junior had started experimenting with increasingly perilous drugs, and together they floated off on the hippie trail around the East. Although claiming to be still very smitten, Rudolf refused to discuss Talitha’s heroin addiction—“He prefered to ignore bad things about people he liked.” And yet, with a growing aversion to any kind of drug, he had instinctively distanced himself, and unlike the susceptible Yves Saint Laurent, who was now “tripping regularly,” managed to resist Talitha’s siren call.*

  More enticing to Rudolf at that time was the discovery of a grand lifestyle. In 1967, while waiting to find somewhere permanent to settle, he was invited to stay in “two of the prettiest houses in England”—the town and country homes of Prince and Princess Radziwill. Like her older sister, Jackie Kennedy, Lee Radziwill was one of Rudolf’s most passionate admirers. Both sisters had inherited the Bouviers’ extravagance and daunting sense of entitlement—what Truman Capote called the sense of the right to luxury. Their determined, socially ambitious mother had brought up her daughters to believe that wealth and position ranked far above romance. Lee’s second husband was described by Janet Bouvier as a European version of her father. Nineteen years her senior, Stanislas “Stas” Radziwill, a Polish aristocrat, had an Old World prestige that was irresistible to Lee. Forming a partnership with a well-known London property magnate, he had made enough money to provide her with an Edwardian roster of staff, as well as everything Lee needed to dress and live well. He loved spoiling her, and overprotected her like a child-wife, “like Nora in A Doll’s House,” says her friend, actress Leslie Caron. “I had the feeling that she wanted to try out her wings and be independent in the same way.”

  Ever since she was a young girl, escaping the domestic tensions at home, Lee had let herself be swept up into a world of illusion and mystery: “The music, the painting, the atmosphere I’m most drawn to is always the nineteenth century. It was wild, romantic, soaring, out of control—oceans booming, horses galloping. Not in the least cold and pretty like the eighteenth century. I love all the dramatic composers, Debussy, Scriabin, Mahler, Ravel, and painters like David and Delacroix. They had such power and vitality, and such warmth.” It was only natural, therefore, that she would be drawn to Rudolf, and early in March 1966, she had telephoned Joan Thring to say that she knew his birthday was approaching and wondered if she could give him a party. “After that,” Joan says, “she never let go.”

  To begin with, Lee admits, Rudolf was deeply suspicious of her motives—“like a very alert animal: on guard and afraid of being caught or trapped.” He responded “quite warmly” when she began coming to watch him in class and rehearsals, but it was seeing “the way we lived, the way I did things” that finally lured him. Lee’s flair was remarkable—“not safe, good taste,” as decorator Nicholas Haslam put it, but something more theatrical. At Turville Grange, a rambling Queen Anne bakehouse set in fifty acres of Thames Valley countryside, the dining room walls were the work of stage designer Lila de Nobili, who had set portraits of the Radziwills’ two children into Sicilian kerchiefs painted over in “faded Russian-y blues.” De Nobili’s protégé was Renzo Mongiardino, who, in partnership with Lee, had transformed rooms in both Radziwill homes. His decorating style, a fusion of decadence with classicism, was “80 percent Lila” combined with the aura of the Genoese palazzo where he grew up, its fragrant, flowered-filled rooms and sunlight filtering through the half-closed curtains the inspiration behind Lee’s own interiors. The way in which Mongiardino could light a room and his architectural skill impressed Rudolf enough to use him as the designer of his next production. More crucial, though, were his interiors, which were paramount in forming Rudolf’s own taste in decor. He loved the “blaze of Turquerie” Mongiardino had produced in Lee’s London drawing room, but what he really coveted was the dining room with its walls covered in antique Cordoba leather—originally a Mongiardino set for Zeffirelli’s Taming of the Shrew. “It was heavy and dark, and Rudolf adored it. He’d never heard of Renzo before but he was always so curious and receptive.”

  Finding that they shared a passion for beautiful objects and opulent fabrics—“Eastern things particularly”—he and Lee would go midnight window-shopping after performances.* “The next day we’d go back.” Lee herself was “a fantasy girl,” whom many found a more intriguing personality than the relatively conventional Jackie. She had a dégagé quality, a much more nonchalant
elegance, and, as Cecil Beaton often pointed out, was also “infinitely more beautiful” than her more photogenic sister. Rudolf found her bright as well as beautiful. “After all,” he said, “she’s not just a socialite. She attracts people of substance.” He was adept at sharing himself equally between the two competitive sisters, photographed shopping on Fifth Avenue with Jackie, dancing with Lee in Monte Carlo, but there was a time when he was very much closer to Lee—a bond she says her sister greatly envied.

  Aware that Rudolf was becoming a major part of her life—“to care about, to protect”—Lee had invited him to live in their three-story house in Victoria until he found somewhere of his own: “I felt that he wanted desperately to live in a home. We were able to give him that, although our hours were quite different. He came home late and slept late, and would want lunch about four o’clock. Always a blue steak.”

  Although Rudolf rarely saw Stas Radziwill, who left early for his office, it was in the country that Lee made sure she had Rudolf pretty much to herself. Their rapport was quite different from the “very emotional friendship” she had established with Capote—“Rudolf was much more passionate, much more masculine”—and yet she vows that she never had any delusions about Rudolf’s sexuality. He had confided to her his “tremendous love” for Erik,† and she had already made up her mind that he was “ninety-nine and a half percent homosexual.” If a woman set her heart on Rudolf, she would, Lee says, “have to take the initiative” (as she had done when, at the age of nineteen, she had proposed to her first husband). And there are those who are convinced—“in the way that you just do know”—that Lee succeeded in getting Rudolf into bed. (A weekend guest at Turville Grange watching the pair stroll off into a meadow at sunset concluded “from their body language” that they were lovers.) But while Rudolf told Maude Gosling that he had made Lee pregnant—“And what do you think she did? She destroyed my baby”—Lee insists this is untrue.* She does, however, admit to having been completely besotted by Rudolf. “I only ever wanted him to myself. Always.”

  Marlene Dietrich felt much the same. She was crazy about Rudolf—“That Boy,” as she called him—once copying his picture with tracing paper and bringing it to him to sign. She also kept several other inscribed photographs of Rudolf, on one of which he had written, “To very dear Marlene with anough [sic] admiration.” According to Nico Georgiadis, though, Rudolf was not a Dietrich fan: “He found her false in the Sternberg films—he didn’t understand the stylization.” They met at the Goslings’ house the evening that Kenneth Tynan brought her as his guest, Rudolf “wondering who this old showgirl was.” Living close to Rudolf’s flat in Eaton Terrace, Dietrich would sometimes drop by unannounced or come on her own to the ballet. On one occasion Rudolf had asked Joan Thring to arrange tickets for Dietrich and a few friends whom he planned to meet after the performance at the Caprice. When Joan arrived at the restaurant she saw Dietrich sitting alone at a corner table, waiting “to have a tête-à-tête with Rudolf.” “I’m sorry, but you’re not,” she said firmly, ushering the star to the larger table, where Sean Connery and his wife, Diane Cilento, were sitting. When Rudolf appeared shortly afterward, he found Dietrich “attacking” Connery for no reason other than the fact that “she had a terrible dislike of tall people.” After dinner they went on to a party in Chelsea, but having been cornered by a gushing April Ashley, a well-known transexual, Dietrich insisted that Rudolf drive her home. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, you come and get me,” he instructed Joan, fearing that Dietrich “might chain him to the bed.”

  More and more Rudolf found himself regarding women as dangerous predators. He had even cast Margot as some kind of succubus. “Maybe … it’s that Margot has gained very much from this dancing with me, and me much, much less, until now I am sitting alone on the floor, tired and exhausted. Maybe it’s that she has taken from me because she wishes to be the one to survive.”

  Women, he had decided, were “silly, but stronger than sailors. They just want to drink you dry and leave you to die of weakness.” He hated being hunted down by obsessive fans who followed him wherever he went—one being Roberta Lazzarini, who admits that she “was everywhere.” In Vienna she threw flowers onstage after a performance of Tancredi, and she remembers “the shock and the look of absolute loathing on his face” when he glanced up and recognized her. Typically, though, Rudolf would use a character flaw to feed his dancing, and he drew on his new misogyny to define the personalities of his next two roles.

  He had finished a performance at the Palais des Sports in Paris in December 1965 when an elderly Frenchwoman, who had been waiting in the corridor outside his dressing room for the last of the admirers to leave, came inside. Without introducing herself, she asked him in English if he had heard of a ballet by Jean Cocteau called Le Jeune Homme et la mort. Still removing his makeup, Rudolf looked at her in the mirror.

  “Yes, Babilée created it.”

  “Would you like to dance in a film version of it?”

  “I wouldn’t know.… I have danced nothing but classical ballets.”

  “Would you like me to talk about it to Roland Petit?”

  “If you wish. He must create a ballet for me at Covent Garden.”

  Denise Tual was a cinematographer, director, and producer* who had been sent by Roland Petit, the choreographer of the role Jean Babilée made famous in 1946. When Rudolf traveled with the Kirov to Vienna for the 1959 youth festival, he had gone out of his way to make contact with Petit, whose sexy, vaudevillian style he found so new and strange. The ballet he saw was Cyrano de Bergerac, Antoni Clavé-esque sets and Saint Laurent costumes typical of the kind of modern Parisian chic reflected in Petit’s work. Of most interest to Rudolf now, though, was the choreographer’s flair for showcasing personality: Babilée had become a cult figure after Jeune Homme, and it was Petit’s Carmen, transforming Zizi Jeanmaire into “a sort of asexual fury”—her long black curls nail-scissored into the celebrated spiky gamine crop—which had made her a star throughout the world.

  A month later Petit and Jeanmaire were renting a house for the summer in St. Tropez, and Rudolf was expected to stop off with Erik on their way to La Turbie. They waited, Tual says, one day, two days.… “The third day a sportscar, blue and yellow, erupted into the garden and stopped at the edge of the swimming pool. Around the pool were a group of friends, among them a young journalist. Rudolf saw him and, cursing, flung his keys on the ground.

  It was a critic who was “quite naughty,” Zizi recalls, and Rudolf, furious at being forced to confront him, got straight back into the car. Erik began trying to reason with him, but Tual had to spirit the journalist away for a drive in the countryside before Rudolf would join the party. By the evening the two dancers had disappeared. In their absence a Monte Carlo garage called with a convoluted story about a “borrowed” car, incorrect papers, and a police summons for speeding on the Corniche, and when they returned the next day, Petit and Tual both felt that the atmosphere was hardly propitious for discussing the film project. In the end it was Rudolf who brought it up: He wanted to do Jeune Homme, he said, but it must happen quickly, sometime in September, the only gap in his schedule. He had not seen the 1951 film of Jean Babilée’s performance, but he knew that the ballet had made his career: “That idea alone excited him,” Tual says.

  Rudolf first heard about Babilée from Marika Besobrasova, who had been talking about a dancer with a technique so phenomenal that he could do a double manège of jetés entrelacés, and four more entrechat beats than Nijinsky. “Who is doing this?” Rudolf demanded, and Marika explained. It was in 1940, at the time of the German invasion of France that she received a call from Babilée’s father, a well-known Parisian eye specialist, begging her to take care of Jean. He was then seventeen and a star pupil at the Opéra school, but he was half Jewish (born Jean Gutmann), and his father wanted Marika to take the boy into her Monte Carlo home “to save him from Hitler.” Marika formed her own company in Cannes with Babilée as her leading
dancer, and when the war was over and the company disbanded, Babilée joined Les Ballets des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the troupe Diaghilev’s colleague Boris Kochno had just cofounded with the young Roland Petit. It was Kochno who commissioned Cocteau to write a new ballet, telling him that he must have a new Spectre de la rose for Jean Babilée.

  Apart from being a work for only two dancers, the story of Le Jeune homme et la mort has nothing to do with the earlier ballet but is, like Cocteau’s Orphée, a story in the Eros and Thanatos tradition in which death is personified by a beautiful woman. It begins with a young artist in his atelier lying, impatiently waiting, on a rumpled single bed. “Enter the young girl who is the cause of his distress. He throws himself at her. She repulses him; he begs her; she insults him, scorns him, and departs. He hangs himself.”

  Keen to get away from “the style of Petipa—ballerinas in tutus, carried aloft by male dancers,” Cocteau wanted the choreography to consist mainly of everyday movements electrified with emotional charge. Completely original—“like a wild boy,” an “angel-thug”—Babilée was incomparable at this, investing everything he did with meaning. Just the action of looking at his watch became an expression of violent internal revolt. He was the first contemporary classical dancer and, even in his seventies, would be an inspiration to Baryshnikov, who admired the way he could combine aerial lightness with a sinking, Grahamesque earthbound quality. Rudolf, however, intimidated by the idea of attempting a new genre, was not receptive to Babilée’s influence, and when, out of admiration, the older dancer offered to coach him in the role, Rudolf refused his help. “He had complexes about being in a modern situation for the first time,” says Tual. “This was a turning point for him.”