Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Rudolf demanded to be alone with Petit and Jeanmaire during rehearsals, and when filming began, shut himself in his dressing room. He had stipulated in his contract that he would be responsible for his own makeup, dismissing any attempts to persuade him how much more subtle it needs to be for the screen. When he emerged, Tual says, he looked terrible, “The eyes outlined in blue, the wings of the nose red, the eyebrows so arched they make him look like a doll. Realizing this, Rudolf is furious and demands a makeup artist.”* Eventually Rudolf became less guarded, allowing the rehearsal process to be filmed and photographed.

  As he subsequently did for other interpreters of Jeune Homme, Petit adapted the role to bring out Rudolf’s own qualities and beauty: As one writer put it, “We get the perfume of him.” There are close-ups of his tiger crouch, and movements that are far more classical than they were in the original. The frenzied solo of erotic frustration is now much longer, and where Babilée violently swings and flings a chair, Rudolf partners it like a ballerina. The outcome, Babilée has complained, is not the same ballet, which is true: The film, which jettisons Cocteau’s rooftop scene, is not a literal version of the stage production but a newly conceived work for the camera. It is, however, not correct to say that in Rudolf’s interpretation “Cocteau is no longer there.” Babilée’s character was un homme fatal, so “infernal” that he frightened his new wife, Nathalie Philippart, dancing the part of La Mort. “She used to say, ‘You’re crazy—you’re going to kill me!’ because I would grab her with such … verité. If you don’t reach that point it’s not le Jeune Homme.” Rudolf, on the other hand, drawing on his own early experience, makes the character more of an innocent—an intense, high-strung youth of ambiguous sexuality who is in the thrall of a strong-willed older woman. As Jeanmaire says of her role, “She seduce him during that ballet.” The way he is both helplessly drawn and repelled by La Mort’s advances introduces undercurrents of misogyny and homosexuality to the ballet that are intrinsically Cocteauesque.

  Jeanmaire’s own conception is also entirely different from that of the first stage versions. Philippart had danced with no emotion—“I was hors-lyric”; the proud, unattainable Claire Sombart had cruelly rebuffed her clinging lover; whereas Zizi’s character resembles La Mort of Orphée, who involuntarily falls in love with her victim. “Beware of the sirens,” the hero is warned in Cocteau’s film, to which he replies, “It is I who charm them.” Zizi admits that she herself had “great feeling for Rudolf. I loved him very much—my God, he was attractive.” Far from being a starkly glacial belle dame sans merci, she dances like a sexually responsive vamp, striking Casino de Paris poses, and caressing herself with the tips of her long manicured nails.

  When Jeune Homme was created, it was Cocteau who “did everything,” Babilée claims, whereas the film, with its slick veneer of Hollywood glamour, is pure Petit.* Instead of a softly flowing dress, Zizi wears a tunic as revealing as her Carmen corset in order to vaunt the famous legs, while Rudolf’s sexuality is magnified by the camera’s homoerotic relish of his naked torso and taut, denim-skinned thighs and buttocks. In fact, though, Rudolf’s look—the teased hair, the lips outlined and glossed, is totally in tune with Tom Wolfe’s sixties—the “Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes.” It is, as Baryshnikov says, “a high camp beauty parlor” Jeune Homme, and it was instigated by Petit, who has always adored artifice. “The diamonds, the eyelashes, the makeup—everything is fake but everything seems sumptuous, everything fostering dreams.… It’s the supreme art of eye shadow. It’s magic.” He admits encouraging the dancer to enhance his beauty, reminding him to touch up his lipstick before they shot the next take. When Rudolf asked, “Am I good on the screen?” Petit would assure him that he took the light like Marilyn Monroe. “I would tell him how photogenic he was. And he was so happy.”

  Paradise Lost, Petit’s first ballet for both Rudolf and Margot, would go even further in merging ballet with sex and high fashion, bringing to the Royal Opera House stage “the world of nightclubs, a touch of sadism, flashing lights, pop and op art.” Even at the age of eighteen, when he staged his wartime recitals in Paris with dancer Janine Charret, Petit had shown a Diaghilevian flair for attracting the era’s most modish painters and musicians. Members of Cocteau’s circle, including Christian “Bébé” Bérard, Marie Laurencin, Henri Sauguet, and composer Georges Auric, were among his first collaborators, and following the success of les Ballets des Champs-Élysées, Petit, then twenty-one, was idolized by the Parisian artistic elite. Christian Dior, who frequented the same restaurants on the avenue Montaigne, introduced his young assistant Yves Saint Laurent to the choreographer. This was the start of a working relationship that would continue over thirty years, Petit and the designer each seeking to promote the overlap between art and fashion. In 1965 Andy Warhol began exhibiting in Paris, and no one was considered more “dans le coup” than the artist and his coterie (in particular his suave manager, Fred Hughes, viewed as a new Proustian—“un Swann ‘Pop’ ”). The following fall Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche line came out. It was a homage to Warhol, its baby-doll dresses emblazoned with the pop art images of red lips and comicbook faces. Exactly the look that Petit had in mind for his new ballet.

  Paradise Lost was based on a poem by French writer Jean Cau, the first line of which is, “Every paradise is found in order to be lost.” But although its starting point was the Fall, Petit changed the story and made another version of Jeune Homme. It’s a vignette of an ardent youth at the mercy of an emasculating woman—and Margot’s character, Cau writes, is “le même que celui de la mort.” The designer Petit chose was the New Realist painter Martial Rayss, whose use of neon, plastic, photographs, and fluorescent colors was Warholesque in the extreme. They had recently worked together on a ballet with Petit’s long-term collaborator Marius Constant, the composer of Paradise Lost. Margot and Petit also had a history of their own, in his words, “A big flirt with lots of tenderness and love games.” And after the war, feeling at a stale point in her career, she had taken a break in Paris, where the choreographer had just formed his own company and was offering to create a new work for her. An egotistical parable of a young man (Petit) who succeeds in making a woman out of a pure white cat, Les Demoiselles de la nuit caused quite a stir, Margot’s short, cutaway tutu as provocative then as the white vinyl miniskirt Petit would dress her in for Paradise Lost.

  Before they began work Margot had warned the choreographer, still a close friend, not to allow “le joli moujik” to get the upper hand. Apart from an initial squabble, however, Rudolf could not have been more accommodating. He found the quirkiness of the movements great fun, amiably carrying out a series of slow somersaults while conventionally supporting Margot in a rotating arabesque. As in all Petit’s work, the style of Paradise Lost was acrobatic and eclectic, the flexed foot borrowed from Balanchine, the angularities from Martha Graham. Most of the steps were designed, as were Margot’s miniskirt and the straining codpiece of Rudolf’s white tights, to lead the eye to the crotch—“the erogenous zone of the sixties,” in Mary Quant’s view. (“The way girls model clothes, the way they sit, sprawl or stand is all doing the same thing.”) Petit’s trademark, “body sculptures à deux,” was never put to better use, with Margot and Rudolf appearing as twin halves, their clean-cut positions of exact anatomical geometry both an endorsement of male equality and a refashioning of the Fonteyn-Nureyev synchronization—one body perfectly complementing the other.

  Although five male dancers made up the snake of temptation, and a large corps de ballet represented life outside Eden, they counted for little; what the audience watched were the two stars—individually and in the ballet’s revelatory extension of their partnership. They both responded superbly to the unclassical idiom, Margot looked stunning, despite her cruelly young guise as a Kings Road dollybird. Never to be forgotten by anyone who saw it was the ballet’s coup de théâtre, a passage in which Rudolf ran lopingly around the stage, co
ntinued at full tilt up a ramp, and then—in a pop art update of Nijinsky’s spectacular leap through the window in Le Spectre de la rose—dived headfirst through a gap in the Warholesque lips.

  One member of the audience who found this moment “absolutely fantastic” was Mick Jagger. The plushy red lips on the backcloth were a version of Jagger’s own—the “two peculiarly gross and extraordinary red lips” famously extolled by Tom Wolfe.* (Five years later, much the same design would be used as the logo of the Rolling Stones’ record label.) Jagger’s stage performance has always been essentially an act of making love to himself, and in Rudolf he recognized an idealized physical reflection—“It was like seeing himself there on the stage,” his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull remarked. They had the same chicken-breast-white skin, hairless torso, and androgynous appeal, as if (as Violette Verdy said of Rudolf) they had created another type of sex altogether—“a kind of dancing creature … something wild and very beautiful.” Both made the concept of the star into a twentieth-century god, celebrity of a kind that, as Faithfull once remarked, cannot be understood by comparisons in the modern world. “You must go back to Louis XIV, the Sun King, or to the gilded boy despots of ancient Rome and Egypt.”

  Each curious to meet the other, Rudolf and Jagger arranged to have lunch one day at a restaurant in the Kings Road, an encounter that, far from being momentous—what Lincoln Kirstein might have called a twinning “of Harmodius and Aristogiton, Damon and Pythias”—proved “dead boring.” The pair had very little to say to each other, and, according to Joan Thring, who had been “dragged along” as the driver, “just grunted every so often.” Rudolf also remembered the occasion as uneventful. “I didn’t smoke, I didn’t take dope: We didn’t have much in common.” Not even an esteem that was mutual.

  Always responsive to the intricacies of new movements and rhythms, from ballet to Balinese lion dancing, Jagger, friends claim, “hugely admired—possibly even desired Rudolf.” “He was always saying how much he wished he could have been Nureyev.” Rudolf, on the other hand, never having seen Jagger onstage, knew nothing of his hypnotic power as a performer. His large record collection included only two albums that weren’t classical (one by Edith Piaf and one by Marlene Dietrich, who had given it to him), and he dismissed any form of pop or jazz as background music—“I wouldn’t sit and listen.”

  By contrast, Rudolf was smitten by Peter O’Toole, one of the New Aristocracy—actors, photographers, pop stars, interior decorators, models, hairdressers, even villains—whose celebrity and/or youth cut across the class divide. David Bailey commemorates them in his Box of Pinups, in which Rudolf appears among a gallery of thirty-six contemporary icons. Having seen his portrayals of Lawrence of Arabia and Hamlet—“which totally burned”—Rudolf was so in awe that he did his best to match O’Toole’s excesses. He recalled that O’Toole once drank until five in the morning and “then woke me and said: ‘Buy me a taxi.’ Of course my day was ruined.” “Dazzled by Rudolf” in turn, O’Toole often took him on the town, Twisting one night away with a couple of hostesses from Al Burnett’s club, their inseparableness prompting the rumor that reached John Gielgud in February 1964: “Peter O’Toole and Nureyev are shacking up in Hong Kong or somewhere during Lord Jim.” At this point, though, Rudolf needed no encouragement to drink—“a little habit I picked up in the West.” O’Toole’s ex-wife, the actress Siân Phillips, remembers seeing Rudolf arrive at a smart Belgravia dinner and make straight for the drinks cart. “Picking up a smallish bottle of plum brandy … [he] drained the lot in what seemed like seconds while we all watched in silence.” Rudolf’s classic drunken behavior that night, of dancing on the table, throwing up violently, curling up to sleep, was sympathetically interrupted by O’Toole. “Come on, munch,” he barked, and seizing him by the legs, began to bump him down the thickly carpeted stairs, before making their way into the street. Once settled into a taxi Rudolf became “angelic,” Siân recalled, “wanting to kiss us all.” But despite the white nights, Rudolf never lost sight of what Verdy calls “his real business—the sweat, the toil, the going back to the first position every morning. The getting up early no matter what time he’s gone to bed the night before.”

  Now as much of a trend-setter as Twiggy or the Beatles, Rudolf could be seen in striped bathing trunks on the cover of Men in Vogue, or in a white canvas raincoat for a feature on Courrèges—the embodiment of swinging London fashion. His was not the foppish eighteenth-century look adopted by pretty-boy pop stars Brian Jones and Jim Morrison, with their lacy cuffs, velvet pants, flowing scarves, and floppy-brimmed hats, but the spruce English mod. The collarless suits and trousers tucked into space boots derived from Pierre Cardin, who, anticipating the “peacock revolution,” had extended his ready-to-wear strategy to men’s fashion. Rudolf, wearing his boots thigh-high with a matching ponyskin jacket, and suits buttoned tight to emphasize his tiny waist, made the style completely his own. “When Russian student caps take the suburbs as well as the Kings Road by storm, you know who launched that craze,” wrote the Daily Express. Rudolf’s “natty ‘Nuri’ way” of hanging his leather jacket from his finger was even copied by Jagger. According to Philip Norman, “He too began to experiment, slipping off his Cecil Gee Italian jacket and dangling it on his forefinger.”

  Rudolf’s sixties superstardom was a phenomenon that no longer exists in ballet. In London the crowd after a Fonteyn-Nureyev performance jostling elbow to elbow along the length of upper Floral Street was the equivalent of today’s celebrity-mad horde crushed behind the barriers at an Oscar ceremony in Hollywood. As far as Rudolf’s fans were concerned, the performance began at least two hours before the curtain went up, with drinks in the Nag’s Head pub, the exchange of photographs and ballet gossip. The thrill of the ballet itself could be prolonged by at least half an hour of curtain calls, and the strewing of the stage with daffodils. Then followed what Roberta Lazzarini calls “the fearful ritual of the stage door”:

  His car would draw up—that was the first excitement—and there was more pushing and shoving and the old stage doorman would say, “Mr. Nureyev will sign tonight.” Then he went into a sort of a booth, usually in a magnificent fur hat, and signed. And we were thrilled, we’d really had our money’s worth then. I don’t know why, because he rarely even looked up.

  During the first New York tour, in ’63, Rudolf wouldn’t stop at all to give autographs. “You couldn’t get near him, he’d just bolt. He thought they were following him, and they probably were.” Robert Gable, “the oldest living Rudi fan,” hadn’t known how to pronounce Nureyev’s name in 1961, but had cut his picture from Paris-Match, struck by “the greatest face I’d ever seen.” By 1967 Rudolf in New York was lingering at the stage door and making the acquaintance of a few of his admirers. When Gable came up to him at a bar across the street from the Met, he stood up and very formally shook his hand. Gable told him he had painted his portrait from an Avedon photograph. “Bring it to theater,” Rudolf said, which Gable did, thrilled to find himself invited into the star’s dressing room. “I told him it was his if he wanted it, and never saw it again.”

  It was Hurok’s policy not to release casting details in advance, but through Bob Gable and others who had graduated from the stage door, fans were able to get advance information as to when Rudolf would be dancing. Tickets would go on sale at ten on a Sunday morning, but a phantom line of those in the know would already have formed four days earlier. Someone would have been delegated “head of line,” responsible for gathering signatures, and people would add their names to a list, be given a number, and check in at the theater every twelve hours. (On Saturday this changed to every hour.) Gable’s friend’s brother had a car he could sleep in; others brought sleeping bags and bedded down in the subway tunnels, “like London during the Blitz.” By Sunday morning there would be more than a thousand people waiting for the box office to open.

  Compared with the London line, which was orderly and polite, New York’s equivalent was camp, expert, an
d extremely belligerent. The first time Marilyn La Vine went to buy a ticket for a Nureyev performance she had set her alarm for 6 a.m. to be at the Met several hours before the box office opened. “But when I arrived the line was already round the block with people who’d spent the night on the street. I was screamed at: ‘You can’t get on this line—we have numbers.’ There was this whole other society I didn’t know about—a hierarchy with secrets and group rules, and people who lorded over and manipulated the other fans.”

  Other New York diehards were the Perry sisters; Rose Curcio, known as Rose Curtain-Call; Nancy Sifton; Bonnie Prandato, who got herself a job at Sotheby’s with a view to being transferred to London so that she could be near Rudolf; Helene Britton, an unofficial, unpaid girl Friday—“the only one who could touch his costume, wash his tights, sew his shoe elastics”; Arks (Anne Rosemary Kathleen Smith), who met Bonnie on the line and became her closest friend, their perpetual topic of conversation “Rudolf, of course.” “You couldn’t talk to those Nureyev people about anyone else,” said Baryshnikov’s lieutenant, Charles France—“they didn’t want to know.”

  As the only available photographs, released through Hurok’s office, had been taken at London press calls, there was an enormous market among the New York fans for more candid shots. Shooting from the first stage box with his quiet Leica and telephoto lens, David Daniel made enough money selling his black-market photographs of Rudolf during the Royal Ballet’s six-week season to live in Europe for the rest of the year. Arks, Bob Gable, and Luis Peres also took good photographs, while Lucia Wayne, a tiny, chain-smoking New York character who always dressed in black to be less conspicuous, would film Rudolf’s performances from the fifth ring.* Marilyn La Vine paid one hundred dollars for a silent amateur cassette of Rudolf’s Bayadère. “You felt fortunate if Toby, manager of the Ballet Shop, chose to sell you a copy. The film was so dark the action could hardly be seen, but it was all we had. It was priceless.”