Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  After Keith had gone back to London, Rudolf went to another evening on Place Vauban, where Paris’s chic intelligentsia was out in force. Rudolf, however, was interested only in making the acquaintance of a stunning youth he had spotted. Like Helmut Berger, the actor Pierre Clementi* was a protégé of Luchino Visconti, and an idol of “les années pop.” He had the slightly feminine beauty of a corrupt angel, but he was not homosexual and made that quite clear. After Rudolf’s advances became more insistent, there followed what Gilles Dufour, one of the guests, describes as “a friendly fracas. It was physical pushing—but no drama. Just amusing.” Unperturbed, Rudolf then turned his attention to Gilles himself, the other decorative youngster in the room, a twenty-one-year-old trainee fashion designer known for his striking “Tatar physique.” “Rudolf liked me because I was looking a bit like him. He was very direct about picking people up—asking them to come with him or forget it. I was shy then, not free like I am now, and I was also dating girls at this time. I didn’t want things to be that open, so … I didn’t go.”

  A few days later Gilles came with a friend to see Rudolf backstage, and was imperiously ignored. His interest now aroused, he contacted a mutual acquaintance in order to meet the dancer again, and this time, Rudolf’s approach was entirely different. “He asked me to come back with him to the Ritz and sleep—just sleep—because he had a performance that evening.” At five o’clock they walked to the Palais Garnier together and, as they were saying good-bye, Rudolf invited Gilles to London. “He wanted me to spend some time with him at his house.”

  Gilles came over the following weekend intending to see Rudolf’s performance at Covent Garden. Because of ice and dense fog his plane was severely delayed, and by the time he got to Covent Garden, everyone had left. He took the cab on to Fife Road, where Rudolf was waiting for him at the door with slippers—“He was very charming.” There was a baronial dinner party in progress, its guests—who included Roland Petit and the Goslings—all eyeing Gilles, he felt, “as if I were Madame de Pompadour.” But it was his innocence that Rudolf liked—the reason he called Gilles “the Child.” And like a child, he would trail after the dancer as he pursued his usual routine: class and rehearsal at Baron’s Court on Saturday; a visit to the cinema; dinner in Kings Road; nocturnal window-shopping for antiques. The second London weekend followed much the same pattern, and by the third, despite the fact that the physical side of their liaison had not amounted to much—“sex was just mechanical. Rudolf had the most beautiful body but was not tactile at all”—Gilles found that he was falling in love. “Rudolf could see that I was much too clinging. I was exhausting him. It was Sunday morning when he explained to me that he was not the right person for me to be with because the main thing in his life was dancing. He told me nicely, and said he’d like to have me as a friend. And then he left.”*

  A year or two earlier Rudolf would have used Erik as the reason he could not commit himself, but now it was love itself that was the obstacle. He no longer wanted to be a victim of the kind of obessesive passion he had experienced in the first stages of their affair, the Romantic agony he called “the Curse.” Although this had been, without question, the sustenance of his artistry—the motive force for his great rhapsodic performances with Margot—Rudolf had come to believe that emotion of such intensity was destructive to his career. He would never, he decided, repeat the same mistake. “I had to cut out all personal involvement. Do you read me? No personal involvement, that’s been abolished. So it doesn’t distract me from dancing.”

  *BMB, Bureau de Musique de Mario Bois, is responsible for the contracts of Nureyev productions.

  *Arriving for a lunch at her London house, a beautiful Thames-side property once owned by Rossetti, Rudolf was told by the butler that Mrs. Getty had been unavoidably detained but wished the meal to proceed without her. Only later did the painter Michael Wishart, who had been another guest, learn that that morning Talitha had been rushed to the hospital, unconscious from a heroin overdose. By June 1971 she was dead.

  *As a remarkable token of her affection, Lee bought Rudolf a Russian double-headed eagle of solid gold studded with diamonds and rubies, which he kept hidden in a secret alcove of his enormous fireplace at La Turbie.

  †Rudolf told Lee that he had “torn up all their correspondence,” leaving her to believe that it was his own letters that he wanted destroyed (as, in fact, they were). “Having a very suspicious nature, he thought Erik might use the letters against him somehow. Maybe he was ashamed of showing such passion. He thought it would reveal a great weakness, and it was a side he didn’t want to share with the public.”

  *Two decades later Rudolf was still making the same claim. When Ninel Kurgapkina showed him photographs of Misha Baryshnikov with his children, asking Rudolf why he had not had any of his own, he replied, “Because women are fools. The first—Xenia—was afraid; the second—an American woman—was also afraid. They thought I would not pay attention to the child.”

  *The wife of surrealist Roland Tual, she had made documentaries on Luis Buñuel (her previous husband, Pierre Batcheff, had starred in Buñuel’s Un chien andalou) and on the filming of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Working with Stravinsky and Cocteau, Tual was responsible for reviving the stage production of Oedipus Rex.

  *According to Keith Money, who has a photograph of him as La Sylphide’s James in Athens, Rudolf had begun doing “horrendously disfiguring eyebrow make-up—great smears like black bananas”—as early as 1963. Becoming self-conscious about the thinness of his hair, he had also begun teasing and lacquering it with hair spray—the result, combined with his vivid turquoise-shadowed eyes, comes as something of a shock in the first close-up of his Vienna Swan Lake film. “With the coiffed hair he looked like a cross between June Allyson and Doris Day,” remarks Money.” I discussed it with Margot who said, “I simply daren’t mention it.”

  *Petit told Baryshnikov, when they came to work together in the 1975 version of Jeune Homme, that he wanted it to be his version. “Roland, who was in perpetual conflict with Babilée, didn’t want me even to look at any of the earlier films.”

  *“This boy has extraordinary lips.… They hang off his face like giblets … the lips start spreading into the most languid, most confidential, the wettest, most labial, most concupiscent grin imaginable. Nirvana!”

  *The Lucia Wayne Collection of 8-mm films is now held in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.

  *It was Rudolf, Segerström says, who first taught him the meaning of “aplomb.” He had a particular gift for working with children and, as Lynn Seymour observed after watching him work with the Royal Ballet schoolchildren for the London version, could make “little knobbly boys all feel like princes.”

  *Rudolf’s first attempt at production was his re-creation of the Vainonen duet in 1961, while on tour in Haifa with the de Cuevas Ballet. Rosella Hightower “lent herself for experiment,” and they danced it together on BBC television, and for the concert group they formed with Erik and Sonia Arova in Cannes and Paris in January 1962.

  *Her husband evidently thought so, too. After spending a few days in Stockholm at the end of August, Monahan came back and told the New Zealand dancer Gail Thomas, their dangerously pretty twenty-two-year-old lodger (with whom he had begun an affair), “There’s something going on.” Rudolf would once again claim that his affair resulted in a pregnancy—a claim Merle emphatically denies. Her marriage to Monahan dissolved two years later, and Gail, a Royal Ballet coryphée, subsequently became the critic’s third wife.

  *Having heard every word, Svalberg told the reporter that he would like to address Mr. Nureyev’s complaints. “I used one of our ballerinas as an example of someone who had significantly grown as an artist after having had children.” Considering it important to back Svalberg, whom Betty Oliphant had chosen as the school’s new director, Erik came up to him afterward and thanked him for what he had said.

  *It has not been possible to asce
rtain why Ashton did not want the Mongiardino sets for the London production—or to get a real sense of what they were like. Nico Georgiadis, who was commissioned instead, was busy with a new staging of Aïda, so that the London premiere of The Nutcracker, intended for Christmas, was postponed until the end of February 1968.

  *With most of her inheritance spent, and realizing that she would have to find a job, she had suggested to Bergé—“I never would have thought of Clara working”—that she handle the press for the just-starting Rive Gauche ready-to-wear range.

  *Pierre Clementi was Fellini’s first choice for the role of Ascylto in Satyricon, but as he demanded too much money the director cast Hiram Keller instead.

  *Rudolf asked his cook-housekeeper to make breakfast for Gilles. “My tears were dropping into the eggs.” (In 1995 he bought the silver egg cups at the Nureyev sale.)

  13 TIME TO CRASH THE GATES

  On February 25, 1968, Hamet Nureyev died from lung cancer, two days after turning sixty-five. Farida had been distraught to hear that there was nothing more the hospital could do and had taken him home, where she nursed him herself until the end. A telegram from Rosa broke the news to Rudolf, and later a photograph arrived. It showed his mother, vigilant, next to the bed on which his father’s body was laid out—the custom in many Russian households, where the washed and dressed corpse is displayed until the day of burial. Some years later, while helping to clear out the library at Fife Road, the Goslings came across the picture and were shocked by the starkness of the image. “It made my blood run cold,” Nigel remarked in a letter. “How terrible for you to get that, poor Rudi. We shut it away.”

  Rudolf did much the same with his emotions, and yet he can have felt little grief. It had been seven years since they last had any contact, and it was only Farida or one of his sisters who ever made the trip to Ufa’s post office to telephone him.* If father and son did not make their peace, Hamet’s anger had nevertheless abated with time. “He became much softer toward Rudolf and what he did,” Razida says. The letter of denunciation he wrote in the aftermath of the defection is not something for which he should be held to account. As his granddaughter Alfia realized, “He was afraid for the family. When Rudolf left he thought they might take our home away. He just wanted them to leave us alone.”

  Alfia remembers the funeral being small, “not fancy,” the factory having provided an open truck for the coffin and a little band of musicians. Colleagues helped to dig the grave, relatives and neighbors provided vodka and a couple of chickens for the pirousa broth. “People liked my grandfather. Everybody said, ‘He is different.’ ” In this, and other ways too, Rudolf was his father’s son, both disgraced, in Soviet eyes, for mingling with foreigners, and both sharing the same passion to educate and improve themselves, to escape from the world into which they were born. Rudolf told most people that he hated his father, but there were also those to whom he admitted that he wished he had known him better.

  There was no time to dwell on it as the London premiere of Rudolf’s Nutcracker was a couple of days away. He had coached the young stars Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell to perform the first night, and they were, as the critics acknowledged, “just about ideal,” as perfectly symmetrical in the parallel duet as the two wings of a bird. For Ninette de Valois, Rudolf’s version was “the best Nutcracker England ever had,” although Ashton was less enthusiastic, complaining, “The trouble is, he can’t be simple. He feels he has to produce a step for every note of music.” A new solo the choreographer created for Rudolf in the March revival of Birthday Offering was nothing if not a caricature of this, giving John Percival the impression that Ashton had “worked on the principle of trying to establish how many steps could possibly be fitted into one dance.”

  Ashton’s latest ballet, Jazz Calendar, which premiered in January, had also been made in a flippant frame of mind. Paired with Sibley, Rudolf performed Friday’s Child, with its theme of “loving and giving” reduced to Petit-style bumping and grinding—a send-up of Paradise Lost’s somersaults, floor slithering, and mirror-image movements. The couple wore two-tone unitards designed by Derek Jarman, a Slade protégé of Nico Georgiadis. At their first costume fitting, the embarrassed twenty-six-year-old found himself being mercilessly put to the test by Rudolf, who met him completely naked, drying himself from a shower. Picking up the costume between two fingers and contemptuously dropping it, Rudolf then lectured the designer on the desirable texture and color of tights. As Jarman had suggested a wig, Rudolf turned up at the next rehearsal with “an awful black plastic number from Woolworth’s,” wearing it back to front to amuse his shrieking colleagues. It would have been no use appealing to Ashton to intervene; he had warned Jarman at the beginning of their collaboration: “Nureyev you’ll have to deal with yourself.” Jazz Calendar, moreover, with its in-jokes and stylistic parodies, was only “a little ballet” in the choreographer’s view—one Rudolf clearly shared. Nevertheless, against all expectations (and his doctor’s orders), he performed the first night with a temperature of 102, providing what everyone agreed was one of the highlights of the evening.

  In April the company heard that Ashton, much against his will, would be stepping down as director in 1970. Kenneth MacMillan’s tenure with the Berlin ballet was coming to an end, and it was de Valois’s wish that the younger choreographer should now take charge of the company. For Rudolf this was not good news. His current Royal Ballet contract, due for renewal in July 1970, was both generous and flexible. Paying a fee of £1,250 per performance and granting him long periods of absence, it promised to try to ensure that he appeared in at least one new production a year. Rudolf thought it unlikely that MacMillan would continue the arrangement. The rift that had occurred between them during the making of the 1965 Romeo and Juliet was soon to widen even further. Anxious to make amends by demonstrating his enthusiasm for the choreographer’s work, Rudolf had flown to Berlin in November 1968 to see Cain and Abel, a new ballet, which MacMillan would be asked to restage in London early the following year. He had devised the role of Cain around the sensational jump and dramatic power of Frank Frey, a German dancer he wanted to keep in the Royal Ballet production, with Rudolf cast in the role of Abel. Having seen the ballet, Rudolf, needless to say, felt that he should be Cain. De Valois took his side—“Frey’s not even a star—he’s just a beginner,” she protested, but MacMillan refused to mount the ballet without him. “He was the only one,” said director Peter Wright. “Kenneth never found anyone who matched Frank’s extraordinary virility.” Deadlock was reached, and in the end MacMillan’s feeble Olympiad (without Rudolf) was performed instead.

  Aware of Rudolf’s disappointment, Margot suggested that Roland Petit be invited to create another ballet for them both. Rudolf agreed, but with reservations. His last collaboration with Petit—at La Scala, Milan, in September—had not been a success. Still “much obsessed and possessed” by Scriabin he had been excited by Petit’s idea of using the composer’s masterpiece, his Poème de l’extase. Instead of attempting to reflect Scriabin’s expression of the sublime, however, the choreography had been banal in the extreme—“a direct affront to the literary content of music,” in one critic’s opinion. Now Petit was proposing another challenging score: Schoenberg’s symphonic poem based on the Pelléas and Mélisande legend. A one-act work was commissioned and scheduled for the spring (something new was needed for the American tour, and could also be included on the program planned to celebrate Margot’s thirty-fifth anniversary on the stage in March). Hearing about the new piece, MacMillan was furious. According to Maude Gosling, he assumed, unfairly, that it had all been Rudolf’s plot, that his own ballet had been sabotaged in order to make way for a new Fonteyn-Nureyev vehicle. She had said, “That wasn’t true at all—Rudolf would much rather have done Cain and Abel. But from then on there was great coolness. Kenneth was coming to dinner with us all, but rang up at the last minute and canceled. He never did anything for Rudolf after that. Rudolf had to beg to be given Manon
[MacMillan’s 1974 three-act work].”*

  Rudolf’s next course of action was quite clear: “If Covent Garden can’t provide you with work and incentive, you go and get it somewhere else. Get off your ass; go, telephone, organize, provoke, make performance somewhere else.” After all, winning the freedom to dance how, when, and where he wished—“everything everywhere, the new ballets and the old”—had been the main impetus behind his defection. “Idea was not just, ‘Here I am, the best, the greatest.’ I came to learn.” The crucial difference now, seven years later, was that Rudolf was no longer inhibited by the fear of tainting his schooling. “When I came to the West, I arrived with what I was taught by the Russians. It was hammered into our heads that Russian ballet dancing is the best—the ghosts of Diaghilev and Nijinsky were constantly hovering over us. We are the best!”

  Veneration for his Vaganova training had been tangible in the exactness with which he would take even a simple preparation, “his whole foot seeming to caress the floor,” as Mary Clarke put it in 1966. With ballet rooted in these basic positions—the origins from which a dancer proceeds—it was as if Rudolf was clinging to them in the belief that losing even the slightest element of precision would be the beginning of losing everything. “It has taken a very long time of observing and experiencing to live down whatever I saw or learned of the grandeur of the Kirov company which is very overpowering … it does take a long time to accept other forms of movement.”