Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  If Rudolf never completely mastered his first contemporary role, it was generally agreed, when he performed it exactly a year later with Dutch National Ballet in London, that he gave it “a pretty impressive shot.” In Roland Petit’s Pelléas et Mélisande for the Royal Ballet, however, not even the combined forces of Rudolf and Margot could prevent “yawns of exasperation” from audience and critics alike. Summed up by Cecil Beaton as “ugly … pullings across floor on bottoms,” the ballet was unanimously dismissed as nothing short of a disaster; with “Oh dear!” heading the Dancing Times review. The “contemptible farrago” fared no better when premiered in New York, and only served to fuel the current backlash against the Fonteyn-Nureyev stronghold. Writing to Richard Buckle, Lincoln Kirstein described the two stars as the worst thing that ever happened to British ballet “except for that Royal Charter,” adding that their presence had demoralized the male dancers in the company and unbalanced the whole principle of esprit de corps.

  At this particular time, though, Kirstein was mistaken. Pressured by assistant directors Michael Somes and Jack Hart (who, according to Keith Money, saw their principal task as “getting rid of Margot”), Ashton had become more determined than ever not “to run a national company for the benefit of two people.” Peter Wright’s new production of Sleeping Beauty coincided exactly with the twentieth anniversary of the ballet’s historic New York premiere, Margot’s crowning glory, but Wright insists there was never any question of mounting the role of Aurora on the company’s prima ballerina assoluta—nor, indeed, that of the Prince on her famous partner. The first night, both in London and New York, was danced by Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, on whom Ashton’s new “Awakening” duet had been created. To Arlene Croce, Dowell was “the finest classical stylist before the public,” while to Beaton the dancer had “discreetly become even more of a star to rival Nureyev.”

  Having been responsible for pairing Margot with Rudolf, Ninette de Valois was only too aware of the box-office rewards of big-name casting. Ashton himself was unashamedly starstruck—the lush extrovertism of his Romantic style having been forged by such star personalities as Pavlova and Garbo. Left alone, it is more than likely that his theatrical pragmatism would have nurtured the phenomenon a good deal longer; instead, Money remembers, he became very agitated about Margot and Rudolf: “He was made very unhappy by the constant bullying from Somes and Hart, who strove ceaselessly to set up Antoinette and Anthony as the replacement hot ticket. They worked on him in tandem, like synchronized trip-hammers.”

  And to a degree they achieved their end. The Fonteyn-Nureyev blaze had dimmed considerably by the end of the decade; Sibley, Park, and Beriosova were now each capable of filling the house, and Dowell and David Wall could provide their own English style of youth and glamour. Even so, no other Royal Ballet pairing would ever achieve the level of transcendence reached by Margot and Rudolf, that ineffable effect Clive Barnes struggled to define in his review of their New York Swan Lake: “There are times when even the most devoted ballet fans wonder just what ballet can convey without the poetically vague, yet always imaginative specifics of words. And then you see a ballet by Balanchine or Ashton, a performance by Fonteyn and Nureyev, and you realize the challenging eloquence of silence.”

  In his book Fonteyn: The Making of a Legend, Money quotes the Barnes piece in its entirety, believing that it illustrates “exactly why the management of the Royal Ballet felt threatened by finding themselves in the grip of forces which they simply couldn’t control.”

  Rudolf’s companion in New York was Robert Hutchinson, the young architect arrested with him and Margot in the summer of ’67. They were staying in the East Sixty-sixth Street home of Monique van Vooren, then in Europe, who had offered Rudolf the use of her apartment whenever he came to town. Decorated in Mae West—fifties Hollywood style with gold candelabra, a white carpet, tigerskin rugs, and a mirror above the bed, it was the natural habitat of the “va-va-voom” Monique, but a surprising setting for Rudolf to choose for himself. The white grand piano had no insides—“It was just a shell, a kind of cocktail table”—and directly opposite the bedroom window was the Russian consulate. Day and night, armed soldiers were visible on the roof, and although Rudolf kept the curtains closed, he was always aware of their presence. “When we went outside he’d say, ‘Don’t look up! They want me. They want to punish me.’ He never stopped thinking he was going to be snatched and flown in a helicopter all the way back to Moscow.”

  Rudolf had seen Robert on and off over the last two years, sometimes making a special detour to San Francisco to pay him a visit. “He’d fly in, and I’d pick him up from the airport and whisk him home so we could have a night together.” Describing himself with a grin as “one of the great homosexual studs of the nation” and going on to elaborate why, Robert had proved quite a catch. The success of his own career as a specialist in “sculpturesque” architecture and interiors had given the young American more than usual self-esteem:

  Rudolf couldn’t take advantage of me because I felt equally important. He didn’t have to pay for me; and if I was with him and he misbehaved, I could walk away proudly—something that he both despised and loved. When he got angry I’d ignore him and drive off, leaving him standing on the street. He wouldn’t see me for two days, and then he’d call up and it would be on again. I think he was pleased to find sexual contact with somebody who was presentable. When we went to see Marietta Tree or someone like that he knew I could converse with people because I was not just some little tramp he’d picked up and was going to say good-bye to.

  If he was at ease in grand drawing rooms, Robert was also indispensable as an entrée to what he calls “the dark side of life.” Since Life magazine’s 1964 feature about San Francisco’s burgeoning underground, the city had became a mecca for homosexuals from all over the United States. Bars and coffeehouses like the Head Hunters, Last Resort, and Rendezvous were as welcomingly unclandestine as the city’s bathhouses—no longer the seedy Turkish bathing establishments catering to “the pansy men of the Nation,” but modern, flourishing, gay-owned institutions. Encouraging Rudolf to cruise independently, Robert understood that anonymous sex in a dimly lit walk-in locker smelling of sweat and urinals was a necessary release for him—“a blank moment of irresponsibility and escape from all the pressure.” He never resented Rudolf’s promiscuity—“because I was the same”—although he admits being infatuated with him for a time, happy enough to indulge Rudolf’s cozy side by massaging his feet late at night—“his big toes with their bunions.” All the same, he says he knew perfectly well that they could never have a long-term relationship: “He was always here today, gone tomorrow. And although there was that temptation to go with him—and he kind of let it be known that I could—it would have meant being an assistant: answering phones, carrying luggage, seeing that other people were taken care of.… I’d had a taste of that already and thought, No, I’m not the type.”

  Not having a willing “vagabond lover” meant finding someone new in every port of call: “Is there anyone interesting in Atlanta?” Rudolf asked Monique. “Let me find out from Hiram,” she replied. Son of a state supreme court justice, Rusty Underkoffer, as he was then, had been a habitué of Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, a gay cruising zone, his “partner in crime” one Ed Barnum, a successful real estate developer, who claimed to have lost an arm in the Korean war but in fact had been born with the disability. Hiram remembered that the previous spring when Ed paid him a visit in New York he had brought with him a friend from Atlanta, a twenty-one-year-old student. “How do they look?” inquired Monique. “One good-looking; one not so good.”

  Wallace Potts was, in fact, quite stunning. Not girlishly pretty like Hiram, but handsome and muscular, with long shiny hair and an irresistible soft Southern drawl. Having just graduated from Georgia Tech as a physics major, he had been more interested in theater and cinema than in what he was learning in college; in what was happening in New York’s East Village and the hip
pie culture out west than in the Southern Gentlemen’s fraternity culture. “And as I was discovering hippiedom, I was discovering other aspects about myself. And I guess one of them is that I was gay—or half-gay, as a friend of mine used to say. Because I still had relations with girls.”

  Having moved on from his “drug period” to a phase of physical fitness, Wallace was walking from the gym one night to the waffle house on Peachtree Street when Ed Barnum pulled up in his Lincoln convertible and offered him a ride. Unaware that “Atlanta’s Sunset Boulevard” was the main gay pickup strip, Wallace nevertheless admits that by then he knew the score. Their assignation turned into an affair, and before long they were living together (though when Ed’s intensity proved too suffocating, Wallace moved into one of his apartments). “I was never in love with Ed, but he fascinated me. I was attracted by anyone with real passion.” Far from being an “effeminate swishy queen,” Ed was conventional-looking and extremely cultivated. He introduced Wallace, who had begun taking acting lessons, to all the theater people he knew and took him on cultural trips to New York. In April 1968 they went to see the new Broadway production of the hippie musical Hair, in which Hiram was appearing as a “member of the tribe.”* They met up with him in Monique’s apartment, and it was as a result of this encounter that Rudolf was offered the use of Ed Barnum’s guesthouse a year later when the Royal Ballet toured Atlanta.

  In June, having arranged special clearance, Ed collected Rudolf and Margot in his open-top car directly from the plane—“He did the grand number”—Wallace having stayed behind to finish painting the ceiling of the converted garage they were hurriedly redecorating. Watching Rudolf walk into the room was nothing less than “awe at first sight” for Wallace, who had never seen the dancer perform and yet felt he already knew him. (An ex-girlfriend was a fan, and had papered her bedroom with Nureyev posters and photographs. “So when I’d go over to her house, I’d be surrounded by him.”) For Rudolf, the image of this paint-splattered youth poised on a ladder in blue jeans—an all-American incarnation of Cocteau’s jeune homme—was an outright invitation. “He moved very fast. After, I guess, ‘Hello, how are you?’ we fell right into the sack.”

  When Wallace saw Rudolf onstage that night it was, he said, like having sex again. “It was extraordinary—the wild animal we’d all heard of. I mean, you’ve never seen anything like it—especially in Atlanta.” Ed, who had taken Wallace out to dinner with the two stars—“He was happy to use me as a toy”—then left town on business. “He must have thought that would be it, that Rudolf would move on to the next one, and I would go back to my summer job as a waiter.” Within hours of taking Rudolf to the airport, however, Wallace got a telephone call from New Orleans asking him come out to Los Angeles for a couple of days:

  So here I go from working tables in some joint in Atlanta to living in a bungalow that joined Jean and Maggie Louis’s house in Malibu. It was a period when the rich and famous—even the conservatives in Hollywood—were having hippie parties, and at the party for Rudolf there was Jimmy Stewart and Burt Lancaster and Ryan O’Neal and Ursula Andress … all in hippie drag. I felt very outside my element, but Rudolf treated me just like one of them. He didn’t tow me around; he always introduced me.

  Margot was rather formal and offhand with Wallace at first, probably, as he says, because she assumed this was just another passing fling. “Why get involved with someone who might be gone tomorrow?” She liked him enough, though, to take him to the zoo when Rudolf was rehearsing—“I was wearing cut-off denims, a tank top and was actually barefoot, but she didn’t bat an eye.” She also showed an interest in his subject. “I remember we talked about the latest cosmological theories of the universe. She didn’t know physics in depth, but she could hold a conversation.” Wallace had been equally impressed by Rudolf’s awareness of things outside ballet, although he admits that, at this point, sex more than anything else was the bond between them. “I was very … as they say in England ‘randy’—a word Rudolf also loved.” Wallace remained on the tour as far as San Francisco, by which time he had had enough: “It was just that Rudolf was so difficult—screaming at the waiters when they brought him overcooked eggs.” The moment of decision came when Robert Hutchinson, “innocently trying to impress Rudolf with pleasure, and not knowing his friend’s capacity to perform,” arranged a foursome in their hotel room:

  I don’t know what Rudolf was trying to tell me at that point, whether he wanted an open relationship, or didn’t want to be committed to me, but I was very uncomfortable with the idea of having sex with more than one person. I remember sitting in the window of the St. Francis Hotel kind of sulking while three of them performed on the bed. And I couldn’t do it.

  Wallace went back to Atlanta, and Rudolf set about finding someone else. That summer, while staying at La Turbie, he pursued Charles Jude, a sixteen-year-old Vietnamese ballet student whom he would later describe as his favorite partner after Margot. Charles had been lying on the beach at Eze when someone came over to tell him that Rudolf Nureyev was looking for him. Much against his will—“My father wanted his children to be involved in the arts”—he was studying dance at the Nice Conservatoire and had been taken by his teacher to see a Fonteyn-Nureyev performance of Giselle. He had found Rudolf “good but not much more,” and consequently when the star asked if he would like to have lunch with him, Charles shyly declined, saying that he wanted to be with his friends.

  Rudolf had better luck with dancer Robert Denvers. They had met briefly in Portugal the previous summer when Robert, a member of Maurice Béjart’s troupe, had felt “some headlights” from him. But it was not until the Béjart company was in Paris in October 1969 that Rudolf, after watching Robert onstage, made it very clear at the postperformance party that he wanted to spend the night with him.

  Well, I did, of course. If I have to find out that I’m gay.… But it didn’t work: I couldn’t get turned on by a man. This was probably the first time ever for Rudolf that something didn’t cook. But he was most endearing—like the big bear you hold—and I felt unbelievably at peace with him. It was very tender, wonderful, but there was nothing sexual. After one week he said, “For Chrissake, Robert, we’re like two dykes together. We have to stop this now.” From that moment I felt that I had become different to him, because somehow I had gone through the ritual of wanting it. I mean, I loved the man, but it had nothing to do with his dick.

  Rudolf also sought out anonymous encounters. London’s Jermyn Street Turkish Baths were nothing like the New York and San Franciscan “tubs” with their buddy booths, glory holes, and graffiti-emblazoned bondage and fisting rooms—“daisy chains of fucking and sucking, exploding cocks, exaggerated genitalia.” It was old-fashioned and respectable, such action as there was being immensely discreet. Open all day and night, the baths were “a bit of a melting pot,” with anyone from members of the venerable White’s Club around the corner dozing off an overindulgent lunch to rent boys from Piccadilly Circus with nowhere to sleep. One regular was Talitha’s friend Christopher Gibbs, who says he often saw Rudolf there. A key player in the Getty-Stones-Marrakech set dedicated to the quest of hedonistic oblivion, Gibbs once dropped acid at the baths, leaving “completely out of my head.” But with his Mr. Fish shirts, Blades jackets, and Anello & Davide boots, he was more sixties dandy than dopehead, as well as being an antiquarian decorator of exceptional flair. His shop in Chelsea’s Elystan Street was a fantasy chamber of treasures combining European history with echoes of the Orient—a Chinese screen from Hampton Court, a chaise longue from Napoleon’s house on St. Helena draped with a four-hundred-year-old carpet piece from Isfahan. Rudolf would often pass by to “shop and flirt,” the proprietor, who was exactly his age, being just as beguiling as his wares: witty and intelligent with the flop-haired charm of a slightly debauched English public schoolboy.

  Gibbs remembers one “crazy night out at Sheen” with Talitha and Hiram, who had met in Rome during the filming of Satyricon (Fellini gave him only one
direction: “You are evil and you lay everything in sight.”) and were having an affair. After dinner and huge quantities of vodka, the mood turned amorous. “Rudolf I think liked the idea of taking Hiram from Talitha, but instead started flirting with me.” The two ended up in Rudolf’s canopied, carved oak Jacobean bed. Abiding memories of that night? “Gamy, wild, and romantic … somber and glittery … the act itself quite vigorous and stagy. We did it again on a few more occasions.”

  In the middle of a more formal evening, Rudolf’s housekeeper came into the dining room to report that two youths were waiting for him at the front door. “Nice looking. They say they have an appointment with Mister Rudolf.” Jumping up to investigate, Rudolf was heard a few minutes later going upstairs with the new arrivals, leaving the guests around the table to continue their meal. They included Margot and the wheelchair-bound Tito, the Goslings, Joan Thring, and Sandor Gorlinsky with his wife, Edith—“la croqueuse de diamants” as Rudolf called her. (“Every time I’ve been on tour, she acquires another diamond.”) Suddenly Joan, unable to contain herself any longer, burst out laughing. “That’s just the way he is,” she said, slapping one hand on the other and flipping them both over. “He tosses them like pancakes!” The group smiled politely. When the front door had slammed shut, Rudolf returned to the table still aglow from his pleasurable amuse-bouche. “And was it nice?” Margot asked sweetly.

  Even on sexually abstemious nights there was something Saturnalian about Rudolf’s style of hospitality. Banquet-size dinners, beginning at midnight, would be held in the shadowy, Cordoba leather—walled dining room, from which emerged two life-size bronze candle-bearing arms—an homage to Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. “Twelve courses served on silver plate,” reported Richard Buckle. “Gargantuan throne, chairs of ebony, vast goblets of wine,” echoed Cecil Beaton—both having dined there once with Vanessa Redgrave (Rudolf later complaining that she had wrecked the evening by being “a totally humourless bore”). Beaton’s opinion of Rudolf on this occasion was just as caustic: “A vague host, without manners or responsibility, leaves everything to Joan Thring [chatelaine], who must suffer a lot.”