Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  As a springboard, Rudolf did intend to use the Vassily Vainonen version in which he danced as a student,* a production that had solved the problematic lack of a star ballerina role by having the child heroine Clara mature into act 3’s fairy-tale princess. But although he keeps Vainonen’s solo for the Prince in Act 2, the rest of the choreography is entirely his own. His main intention, naturally, was to create a more challenging opportunity for the male dancer, which he does by combining the role of Drosselmeyer with that of the Nutcracker/Prince. The faintly sinister avuncular figure of act 1 is now compellingly charismatic, cloaked like a sorcerer as he entertains the children, then magically transformed into the ballet’s dream hero. The interest the elderly Drosselmeyer shows in the Stalbaum family’s little girl, always disconcerting, now takes on far more sinister implications, his metamorphosis into Clara’s handsome young consort a virtual enactment of a pedophiliac fantasy. And this was Rudolf’s intention: not to make a sparkling Christmas ballet for children but something more Freudian and forbidden. Discarding the trivial Dumas version on which the ballet is based, he went back to the original source—E. T. A. Hoffmann’s much darker Nussknacker und Mausekönig. Clara becomes not just an observer of the ballet’s action but an active, Alice-like participant in a terrifyingly surreal world. The toy soldiers’ opponents are no longer the traditional “dear little furry mice, but horrible bald-stomached rats”; and when Clara’s relatives reappear before her, they have mutated into unrecognizable batlike distortions (a scene Rudolf kept altering “to make it more Hoffmannlike; more weird”).

  Rudolf had cast the company star, Gerd Andersson, as Clara but chose to work out the choreography on the Royal Ballet’s Merle Park—his partner for the London production. They had already danced together earlier in the year in Sleeping Beauty and Romeo and Juliet, but Rudolf had had his eye on her for some time before that. He had asked the ballerina to appear abroad with him as a guest artist in Giselle, but Ashton had refused his permission, grumbling, “I’m not here as an agent to provide Nureyev with dancers.” Until this point she had been viewed by the Royal Ballet as a soubrette, “but almost the next day my name was up on the board for Giselle.” As things turned out, Merle was unable to dance any major role because she was pregnant. After giving birth to a son in September 1966, she was back onstage six weeks later, determined to be taken seriously as a classical dancer. During the ’67 New York season she made her debut as Giselle, a performance hailed by Clive Barnes in the New York Times as “dramatically in the true line of succession from Ulanova’s.” She had not, however, established a partnership with anyone (her Albrecht, Anthony Dowell, had seemed to Barnes “more like a kid brother”), and so was overjoyed when Rudolf invited her to spend five weeks working with him in Stockholm. She had always felt they had a special rapport, and with her marriage to dance critic James Monahan on the verge of collapse, this was just the break and excitement she needed. Bringing her parents from Southern Rhodesia to England to look after the baby, Merle moved into Stockholm’s Palace Hotel on the waterfront, where, as one of her Royal Ballet colleagues put it, “she just fell into Rudolf’s lap.” They had, Merle recalls, “a fantastic time.” “Rudolf thought her a giggle,” Joan Thring says. “He was very flirtatious with her, and she was definitely after him a lot.”*

  When they began working on The Nutcracker, Rudolf did not confide his ideas about the ballet, but Merle would challenge anything she actively disliked. “She has the right temperament for me,” Rudolf conceded. “She will argue, and that is good.” Merle showed the same kind of spirit as a dancer, with a recklessness Rudolf exploited to the full. To begin with, though, he wanted her to portray a young girl’s delicate transition into adulthood, and their first duet is choreographed entirely from Clara’s point of view. She is still dressed as a child when he first bows deeply before her—as heart-stoppingly glamorous as the Nureyev of La Bayadère. Her timid bob-curtsy is followed by swooning bourrées and dreamy air walks—an homage to Ashton, the master of the romantic pas de deux. But as they take hands and move freely and easily side by side, Rudolf’s inspiration is Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, whose equality as dance partners would be his ideal. As the music grows more bombastic, the virtuosity of the movements increases, with Clara lowered into scissor splits or flung high in a short outburst of ecstasy, only to be reined in with English decorum and restaint.

  By Act 2 Clara has become a prima ballerina. The couple begins the grand pas de deux in a mirror image, balancing next to each other as their working legs rise slowly into a side-angled arabesque. Rudolf had always admired the beauty of Merle’s legs—slim and turned in like Pavlova’s, with the same highly arched insteps—and makes the arabesque in its many variants the theme of the duet. She was a fast dancer with a command of music that allowed her to take extreme liberties with the tempo, but it was Rudolf who convinced her that “you can’t be fast until you’ve learned to do things slow.” In The Nutcracker her movements acquire a new control and subtlety of shading—unhurried, expansive, very Russian, in fact, with large rangy movements conveying a sense of the enormity of the stage. As the dancing gathers speed, Park comes into her own, impetuous and totally fearless. The most spectacular moment is when she is flung into space and rolls horizontally before being caught in a stage-skimming fish dive, a terrifying feat the pair performs twice, as if to defy belief. The final image is a recapitulation of the beginning, the Prince now standing in an open arabesque with his ballerina balanced on his hip, her elongated legs aligned to the side with his—the subtext: “Your legs are beautiful, but so are mine.”

  The traditional his-and-hers solos that follow are made into an equal contest of virtuosity: Park given Rudolf’s favorite fast pas de chats and ronds de jambe as well as an almost impossibly difficult series of spins end-stopped with arabesques. His double manège of huge jumps is followed by the ballerina’s conventional fouettés—not the repetitive clockwise spins but a kinetic equivalent of tongue-twisters—each turn complicated by a developpé to the side and pas de bourrée. The couple comes together holding hands for the section they nicknamed “meowki” because of its multiple pas de chats. This is a speeded-up version of the stately tandem dancing of the beginning, which concludes with a competition, “seeing who could chaine faster”—and a playful ending during which Rudolf flashes repeatedly in front of Merle as if vying for the ballerina position of center stage. (She wins, but only just.) Idiosyncratic, witty, and perfectly constructed, this duet is Rudolf’s most outstanding piece of original choreography, one he would perform as his favorite showpiece with different companies throughout the world.

  When they began rehearsing with the company, Rudolf was astounded to see every dancer leave the studio on the stroke of four o’clock, regardless of whether or not they had finished a sequence. “Just you wait, girl,” he jeered to Merle. “It’s going to come to England soon.” His contempt was directed at the union rules, although in fact there was a good reason for the exodus. The Royal Swedish Ballet school shared the company’s studios, its classes and rehearsals taking place between four and seven o’clock, when the company then returned. If Rudolf was in charge, work would continue until midnight, “which meant you had to go home at four to have some food, see your kids. But this he didn’t like.” Rudolf, the Swedes felt, hardly set a good example himself. His itinerary for the fall of ’67 dictated a constant shunting among Vienna, Paris, London, Monte Carlo, Copenhagen, and Milan, and each time he reappeared in Stockholm, he would expect to see the kind of standards that could be achieved only if he were there. “We had a tough time with him coming in and screaming,” says Gerd Andersson. It was rare that he was on time for rehearsals, and at the start of the first stage call without orchestra he had kept everyone waiting as usual. When four o’clock came and he said, “Now we take from beginning again,” the dancers, as a body of one, walked out.

  In the auditorium Gösta Svalberg, who was head of the union, watched what happened next. “Rudolf gets
furious and goes down to the orchestra pit, to the conductor’s pulpit, and with his boots he trashed this pulpit. He destroyed it completely.” Almost immediately afterward Rudolf gave a television interview, his face still thunderous. Asked his view of the company’s future, his reply was cold and measured:

  You have an excellent chance with such a great artist as Erik Bruhn, who is going to direct the company, but nothing will happen if theater, society will not help him to break your routine, your lack of desire to work. Because to be dancer, it is sacrificial work. If you want to have double life, nurse your children, and just for physical fitness come and fiddle around and take place of somebody who wants to dance and wants to work—Nothing … Ever … Will … Happen … Here.*

  The dress rehearsal brought more problems. Rudolf had designed Clara’s fleet solo with Park in mind, but Gerd Andersson, not accustomed to the intricate petit allegro at which English dancers excel, strained a calf muscle “on the first little step.” Until this point Rudolf had been very deferential toward Andersson, but he lost his temper when she told him that she could not dance the first night. “He got so angry. He was screaming, ‘I come here to dance with you and you get sick!’ I had to quit. I was injured, I was overworked, but I really don’t think he believed me.” The premiere, which took place on November 17, 1967, in the presence of King Gustav VI Adolf, had company principals rather than stars in the lead (Marianne Orlando, known more for her dramatic abilities than for her technique, and Caj Selling—“not great but very blond and beautiful”). The local press, already hostile as a result of Rudolf’s public condemnation of the Swedish ballet, was grudging in its praise, the reviews ranging from tepid to downright scathing. “I remember one so well,” says Anneli Alhanko. “The headline was A PLAGUE OVER THE OPERA, and the critic hadn’t liked the choreography or the setting. I felt very sad about it.” Another panned the production’s heavy-handed attempts at humor and “depressingly unimaginative” divertissements, while the most common complaint was Rudolf’s insertion of small classroom steps into the grand pas de deux, which was thought to mar its flow and splendor.

  Eager to get an idea of what London would be seeing, Frederick Ashton had come over for the premiere. He was impressed, though with reservations. “He did some beautiful things.… The Snowflake Scene … the Valse des Fleurs.… I think the final pas de deux lacks grandeur and simplicity. It’s a bit overcharged.… When you’re young, you’re apt to overcharge because you want to impress. And so you put in everything. You enrich things too much.” Some problems of the scenario remained, such as Clara’s lack of involvement with what is happening in the second act, and there were descriptively explicit passages of music that Rudolf, for some reason, chose to ignore. The choreography itself veered from the exceptional to passages that were downright absurd. (The ensemble of Snowflakes repeating the same steps as they exit up a ramp is a reversal of the Shades’ entrance in La Bayadère—Rudolf’s self-homage—but the ugly, rhythmic movements led one critic to compare the dancers to “poultry going into a chicken coop.”) On the whole, though, with its seamless transitions and judicious use of male solos, this was Rudolf’s most successful and “most favorite” production, giving a flawed classic the star parts it had always lacked.

  He himself did not dance at all in Sweden. He was supposed to return later in the season as a guest, but the outcry his television interview had caused meant that, as Gerd Andersson said, “Erik simply couldn’t invite him back.” Erik, too, had not liked the random scattering of small Bournonville steps through the choreography and tried to tell him that it was musically unresponsive. “Then,” recalls Marit Grusen, “Rudolf was like a son against his father.” She likens their relationship to a Strindberg marriage—“explosive and passionate”—and says that Erik told them that he had no more energy for their battles. “I can’t be around him,” he said. “I don’t want to live like this anymore.” At the same time there were many tender interludes, “moments when Rudolf was like a little boy, and you saw a young man’s devotion to a master. He had that fine side. He didn’t have to be an enfant terrible all the time.”

  Mostly, however, finding him “a little boorish, not at all refined,” the Genteles chose not to see much of Rudolf without Erik. On one occasion when he did come for dinner, he had asked Marit to invite a few dancers who had caught his eye. Hearing her hesitant “Well, I don’t know so much about this group that you like,” Rudolf interrupted, “Don’t worry. I bring my own salt and pepper.” He arrived at the house that night “with two boys.” Marit also thought little of Rudolf’s “ungraceful” behavior toward Lee Radziwill, who had accompanied Ashton to Stockholm, eager to see both him and the Mongiardino designs.* Lee, however, was learning to accept Rudolf on his own terms. “Because of how he has to live—it’s an economy of time. Some people might say that’s not a real friendship, but he returns so much. It’s there for your taking.”

  They had a family Christmas together at the Radziwills’ country house, idyllic even in winter with log fires and scented flowers in every room, festive meals in the candlelit, Turgenev-inspired dining room. Rudolf loved the atmosphere and rhythm of Turville Grange, his inspiration for an English home of his own—a large, country-style house secreted among woods and parklands, but within an hour’s drive of central London.

  Rudolf had bought number 6 Fife Road for forty-five thousand pounds in November, having chosen it from a picture Joan Thring sent him while he was on tour. Leading to one of the gates of Richmond Park, Fife Road is the most exclusive street in East Sheen, a wealthy suburb of southwest London. When the Goslings went to inspect the property for him, they had thought it was too far out of town, “But Rudolf liked it because it was wild and beautiful,” said Maude. Originally a farmhouse built in a cobbled courtyard overhung with trees, its split levels contained six bedrooms and four large reception rooms, with servants’ quarters over the garages. The thirty-foot drawing room and master bedroom had huge windows looking over the garden and Sheen’s wooded common. The kitchen, with a low-timbered ceiling, was the oldest part of the house, and there was a small cozy library, where Rudolf kept his albums of classical music piled up against the walls. Impatient to start decorating in Mongiardino style, Rudolf bumped into Georgiadis’s assistant Martin Kramer in a London nightclub and said what sounded like, “I have corps de ballet and I want you to organize it.” Puzzled, Kramer then realized that he was talking about Cordoba leather. “He wanted me to figure out how to put it on his walls.”

  Once Rudolf had moved in, however, he began to think he had made a huge mistake. He was accustomed to city life, but Fife Road, with its stockbroker mansions, is a sheltered backwater with no passing taxis, the nearest shop a car ride away, and rush-hour journeys to the Baron’s Court studios or the opera house now nerve-rackingly protracted. His young Cockney friends, Tony and Nellie, received a telephone call one day in November from Joan Thring. “Thringy said to us, ‘Listen, Rudolf doesn’t like it. You’ve got to come and tell him how wonderful it is.’ ” Keith Baxter was also invited that day, and when he said he had already arranged to visit some actor friends, Joan told him to bring them along, too. “She was so anxious for him to be happy there, and wanted to fill the house with people.” In the end just the three friends came for Sunday lunch and, as soon as they arrived, were shown round the house by Rudolf. “The whole purpose of us being there was to browbeat him into liking it, so we all wandered around this vast place saying, ‘But it’s incredible—absolutely brilliant!’ which of course it was.”

  Later in the afternoon Rudolf and Keith went for a long walk together in Richmond Park. The extraordinary 2,500-acre expanse of open land with free-roaming deer and vast, moorlike stretches of bracken was once royal shooting terrain, and the eighteenth-century hunting lodge built for George II is now the home of the Royal Ballet’s Junior School. The garden of number 6 leads directly onto playing fields, and to reach Bog Gate, an entrance through the park wall known to locals, one must walk
for ten minutes through Sheen Common, an area of dense woodland, which Rudolf always said reminded him of Russia. But what on one day is a sun-dappled copse of silver birch trees filled with blackbird song can turn threatening on another, with rustlings in the undergrowth and paths suddenly ending in dark, cavernous bushes. “Rudolf kept looking around when we were walking,” Keith recalls. “He was still very nervous about being followed.”

  For the past year Keith had been appearing in a production of The Rivals, and going out with Rudolf “in a nonexclusive sense.” Hearing that he and Margot would be dancing together at the Paris Opéra, Keith remarked that he had never seen Giselle, “But you must,” insisted Rudolf. “Is my ballet!” They stayed at Margot’s favorite hotel, the Trémoille, where they spent three or four days, their last time together as lovers.

  One night Keith remembered going with Rudolf to a mixed gay and straight club—“an absolute revelation of freedom”—after one of Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent’s Sunday suppers at their Place Vauban apartment. Everyone there, particularly Yves, was charmed by the handsome young actor, as Chimes at Midnight had recently been released and was a great succès d’estime. The same group was at Maxim’s one evening when Aristotle Onassis sent a note to their table inviting them to join him and Maria Callas. Callas, Keith recalls, never took her eyes off Onassis. “She was not the least bit interested in anyone else at the table—not Yves, nor Margot, nor Rudolf.” Clara Saint was with them on both occasions as, having been introduced to Bergé and Saint Laurent by Margot, she was now a good friend and colleague.* She had also become very close to Margot herself, who frequently stayed in the chambre d’ami of her large rue de Rivoli apartment. Clara’s affection for Rudolf, on the other hand, had waned considerably: “My story with Rudolf was a little bit short. Strong, but short. He had so much money, and yet he never invited me even for a coffee. If we had dinner together he would wait for me to pay. I found it not so pleasant to see him, and more pleasant to see him onstage.”