Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  It was indeed Joan who took charge of Rudolf’s entertaining, and “just did it all” until she found Alice, a tiny, eccentric Cape Malay housekeeper, who wore a blond wig and stilettos. She made no claim to cook but could, at least, make breakfast (startling Rudolf the first morning she came in to wake him without her heels, wig, or teeth). Her sense of humor was equally unconventional, and not at all appreciated by her employer, whom she took great glee in caricaturing. Rudi van Dantzig remembers Alice wearing an embroidered dressing gown with a towel draped like a turban around her head, Rudolf “coldly ignoring her act while she screeched and pointed and winked.” Nor did he approve of how, after a night spent dancing at the Hammersmith Palais, she would sometimes smuggle one of her partners back home. “Well, what about what you bring into the house?” Joan retorted when Rudolf complained.

  Hearing from Alice that Joan had asked to be given a list of everyone who visited the house, Rudolf told the Goslings that he was now convinced that Joan was working for the CIA. Finding her too controlling, he had begun looking for reasons to discredit her—not easy, given the parameters of her job. Chauffeur, cook, social secretary, unofficial manager, and accountant, Joan would even—to please Rudolf—accompany him to dubious bars and go over and “be nice to” anyone who took his fancy. So integral was she to his life that one demented fan, suspecting they were having an affair, took her revenge by telephoning and abusing Joan throughout the night and dumping garbage on her doorstep. Although theirs had always been an explosive working relationship—“We had our spats when I threated to leave and did leave”—Rudolf had come to resent his dependence on Joan and decided one day to bring things categorically to an end. As Maude recalled:

  He’d asked her to do something which she felt was unfair, which it probably was, and she said, “I’m sick of you: I’m leaving,” and he said “All right.” She still had the key to Fife Road and the next night walked in, saying, “I’ve come back.” He just looked at her, “No you haven’t. You said you’d gone.” And everyone thought, of course, Rudolf would never manage, because she did everything for him. But he did.

  And the reason he did was Claire, a French cook-housekeeper whom he had brought to London from his house in La Turbie. She had originally been living in Los Angeles, working for friends of Jean and Maggie Louis, when Rudolf persuaded her to return to France with him. Plump, motherly, and very respectable, she adored “le Patron,” always serving him first at dinner parties even though she had been told that this was not quite comme il faut. “She was a real peasant, so Rudolf and she understood each other,” said Wallace Potts. “She took everything in her stride, and Rudolf would put up with things from Claire that he wouldn’t from anyone else.” Maude Gosling agrees. “She was very strict, but Rudolf respected her so much, and she’d do anything for him. She was a darling. She’d even sew the elastics on his shoes.” Cooking French country cuisine—petite marmite, ris de veau, île flottant—Claire was able to tempt Rudolf to try more adventurous dishes than his usual blue steak. And although she spoke only “baby’s English” when she arrived, she was wonderfully good-natured about having to order every ingredient by telephone (the shops in East Sheen’s main street being more than a fifteen-minute walk away).

  When Rudi van Dantzig came to stay toward the end of 1969 he was amazed that Rudolf had chosen such an isolated place to live, remarking to Claire that he could never find a London cabdriver willing to bring him back at night. “That’s why he can’t find anyone to run his house,” she replied. “It’s a voyage around the world each day.” Rudolf had invited his “new discovery,” as Ashton called him, to live at Fife Road for two months while he created his first work for the Royal Ballet. In case Rudi needed help and advice, Rudolf had introduced him to the Goslings, his “parents in the West,” with whom he often stayed if it was too late to get back to Fife Road. Their Kensington house had a self-contained apartment that was always available for Rudolf, and was filled with his own antiques, records, and books. At Maude and Nigel’s suggestions Rudi moved in, soon followed by Toer, who used one of the rooms as a studio to construct the set he was designing for the new ballet.

  The commission, the first in the company’s repertory created entirely as a showcase for Rudolf, was all his own doing. “If I don’t hunt down the choreographers myself, nothing happens.” Called Ropes of Time after a line in a poem, again by Hans Lodeizen, it was meant to “communicate a little message for Rudolf—that there comes an end.” Rudolf had asked for an electronic score not only intending to “dust-down” Royal Ballet audiences but wanting the English dancers to share an experience from which he had just benefited. “They’ll learn what listening means.” Apart from stipulating that he should have no understudy and that all the other figures be secondary, Rudolf had left the casting to Rudi (expressing surprise, all the same, that he did not intend to use Margot—“Then success with the English is guaranteed”). Antoinette Sibley was chosen to be the driving force behind the protagonist at the height of his powers, and Monica Mason the ebbing current as his talent goes into decline.

  The first week of rehearsals Rudolf was “amenability itself”; just the fact of being on home territory gave him the confidence he had lacked in Amsterdam. He made it clear to everyone in the studio that he considered the ballet as much his enterprise as Rudi’s and, while they were watching rehearsals, it was often he who took charge, clapping his hands to stop if he was dissatisfied or even demonstrating a step to the dancers. “I was forced to say: ‘No, Rudolf, that’s not the idea.… I want it like this.’ ” As far as Rudi was concerned, his choreography still did not come naturally to Rudolf. “It is like somebody who speaks a different language and you can always hear the mother tongue underneath. I could always detect the classical training and the classical dancer that Rudolf was. It always came through and he never really, for me, grasped totally the modern side.”

  It crossed Rudi’s mind that Rudolf was sitting in on group rehearsals to keep track of how much time was left for him. “Don’t worry, Rudolf, you’ll be in the action from beginning till end.” “But surely,” countered Rudolf, “not the way it was in Monument, where I only stood and watched.” There was a time—in early performances of Giselle, for instance—when Rudolf would make a passage of stillness as dramatic as even the most climactic outburst of dance, but now he felt impelled to be moving nonstop. “If I don’t have steps … I will collapse and I will not be able to recover my full strength at the end of the ballet.”* The first real difficulties came during rehearsals with Sibley. It was the fact that she was Dowell’s partner—“a special challenge to Rudolf”—that Rudi believed had made him tense and distant, deliberately allowing movements to go wrong. “No, no, not at all,” Antoinette insists. “It was me … panicking.” As a dancer motivated entirely by the music—“music no later than Stravinsky, with tune and rhythm”—she had been shocked by Boerman’s score, a jarring din that sounded to her as if milk bottles were being thrown at a mirror.

  That expression “Does my head in” was made for this situation. I loved the idea of doing a modern ballet and adored Rudi van Dantzig, and so I was determined to find a way. I could see Rudolf and Monica lapping it up, which made me even more frustrated, but I just couldn’t cope, I couldn’t fight it anymore. It had started sending me over the edge, and I went into a deep depression.

  On her doctor’s orders Antoinette flew off for a vacation by the sea, and Diana Vere, a young soloist Rudolf clearly enjoyed helping, took her place. He himself vanished on a number of occasions to perform with other companies, and, unable to proceed without the focal point of his ballet, Rudi was forced to insist on a second cast. Provocatively, Ashton chose Anthony Dowell, a deliberate slight as far as Rudolf was concerned. On his return he sullenly retaliated, marking rather than dancing the steps full out until in despair Rudi called for Dowell to take over. It was Rudolf who strode back into the center. “Is your name Anthony?” Rudi snapped like a tetchy schoolmaster.

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nbsp; I had never felt so distant from him as at that moment, and I felt dreadful having to put him in his place like that, in front of the whole group but, on the other hand, I knew it had to happen sometime. At the end of the afternoon I informed Ashton that Rudolf had departed with the announcement that I would not be seeing him at rehearsals anymore. Ashton chuckled. “He’ll be back and otherwise you can just go on with Dowell.”

  An attempt at a rapprochement was made by Maude, who invited the two to dinner at Victoria Road, but the mood was strained, and Rudi went downstairs early to bed. A little while later Rudolf knocked on the door, asking if they could talk. They decided to go for a walk in nearby Kensington Gardens, each speaking in turn of the pressures they felt they were under. The Royal Ballet, Rudolf said, still considered him a stranger, “a barbaric intruder, a threat to their male principals.” But this of course was no longer the case: It was younger forces such as Dowell who were now threatening to overshadow him—the theme of Ropes of Time. The ballet illustrates the situation with a technical trial of strength between Rudolf and two young soloists (David Ashmole and Graham Fletcher) who step in after he has been dancing for twenty-five minutes and appear to outshine him. The idea was to show the star “gradually giving up his battle to be the best,” but naturally this was unthinkable for Rudolf. “I shall do everything in my power to be better than they are,” he announced, to Rudi’s dismay.

  There were many more arguments, and it was always Rudolf who was the first to make amends, suggesting lunch, or a shopping trip to Portobello Road, by which time the whole atmosphere would have changed. “Nothing stayed long with him. I could keep it up two weeks. He forgot it the next morning … he didn’t have this sort of smoldering on that I have.” Nevertheless Rudi remained upset that Rudolf, having agreed in the studio not to overintensify his interpretation, would revert to doing it his own way onstage. “He struggled, he really tried to do what I asked—what we wanted to do together—but in the end, he was thinking of his fans.”

  The audience gave Ropes of Time a frenzied ovation, showering daffodils down on Rudolf, who “took the tribute like a gladiator,” but the critics were almost unanimously disparaging. Although the ballet was, they conceded, an adventurous new direction for an Establishment company to take, it had proved in the main a failure. The chief complaint was the unrelentingly tortured nature of Rudolf’s dancing and emoting—“so similar to the performances Nureyev gave in Paradise Lost and Pelléas et Mélisande that one suspects he imposes too much self will on his choreographers,” wrote Mary Clarke, who was not alone in being bored.

  The American reviews were equally harsh, and as if responding to Arlene Croce’s reproach that such experiments were “the most wanton distortions of a great classical dancer’s technique and style,” Rudolf returned—albeit briefly—to his Russian heritage. He had been asked to mount his Don Quixote for the Australian Ballet, a company that, with Sadler’s Wells veterans Peggy van Praagh and Robert Helpmann at the helm, combined precise English schooling with the Australian dancers’ innate extroversion and vitality—the very qualities his original Viennese cast had lacked. “He could see the Aussies really having the guts,” said Lucette Aldous, a tiny, racy antipodean then in the Royal Ballet, whom Helpmann—“my Svengali”—wanted for the part of Kitri. The two went out to Fife Road to visit Rudolf, who, having seen Lucette sparkle in the Ballet Rambert’s staging of the Bolshoi version, already had her in mind as his ballerina. “He was so sweet and polite, and said, ‘Do you mind doing mine?’ ”

  While essentially a vehicle for three stars, Rudolf’s Don Quixote would also spotlight a trio of unknowns. Bypassing the company’s premier danseur (Garth Welch), he “zoomed right in” on late starter Kelvin Coe, who although lacking the foundation of training was very good-looking with a soft, youthful quality, “a bit like Anthony Dowell.” Rudolf gave Kelvin the Espada, the second male virtuoso role, and as his partner cast beautiful, sexy Marilyn Rowe whom, together with another outstandingly gifted corps de ballet dancer, Gailene Stock, he went out of his way to push. (Both were subsequently promoted “purely because of Rudolf.”) “He was on your tail the whole time,” recalled Gailene, who had been performing an entrechat six with great gusto “hoping he wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t a true six,” when Rudolf, watching from the wings, exploded, “This is entrechat piss!” “No other guest artist ever took that much interest in the company. Even in ballets that weren’t his.”

  Between rehearsals one day Rudolf’s Australian personal assistant, Roger Myers, came up to him looking unusually disturbed. He had been asked by the management to break the news to Rudolf that his “teacher, friend, father figure, mentor, from the Kirov” was dead. On the evening of March 20, 1971, Alexander Ivanovich had gone for his favorite walk over the Fontanka Bridge toward the Five Corners junction, where, like Crime and Punishment’s Marmeladov, who also frequented those streets, he was seized by a fatal heart attack and fell to the ground. “He died instantly,” Dimitri Filatov said. “But it was terrible, because he lay in the rain for so long.” The next morning, Baryshnikov, stopping off for breakfast at Rossi Street as usual, met a Vaganova teacher leaving the Pushkins’ apartment. Startled by her “upside down” face, he asked immediately what was wrong. “She pointed behind her and didn’t have to say anything. I just knew.” For Baryshnikov the shock was too much to bear. Battering his fists against the wall and door of the Pushkins’ apartment, he smashed right through the glass partition; when a friend met him later in the day, both his hands were bandaged.

  Rudolf’s own response was complete incredulity—“What? When? Where was he?” he demanded. And then he simply crumpled. “The only thing I could do was to just take him in my arms and comfort him,” Myers recalled. “I just held him in my arms and he cried.” But although it was cathartic to be able to mourn Alexander Ivanovich the way he could not his own father, Rudolf’s grief was compounded by guilt and regret. It was not so much his sexual betrayal as the knowledge that his defection had quite literally broken his teacher’s heart.

  In May, Wallace Potts heard that Rudolf was in New York and had been trying to reach him. He was now living in Los Angeles, having been accepted at USC Film School after submitting “what would now be called a pop video”—a visual realization of the Beatles song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” He had driven out to California with a friend, Bronte “Myron” Woodward, whom he had persuaded to try his hand at screenwriting. “I told him he had as much talent as any of the people I’d met in Hollywood.” (Woodward wrote the screenplay of Grease in 1978.) Myron, who had taken Rudolf’s call, had written down a number Wallace recognized as Monique’s. When he called, Rudolf himself answered, saying immediately, “Would you like to come to New York? I’m here in town.”

  I was in the middle of editing a film, but I had a Super 8 machine like a little rinkydink toy, which I could take with me. So this time we actually got along quite well, because I had something of my own to do. I remember sitting in his dressing room at the Met editing while he was onstage; I had these strips of film taped to his dressing room wall.

  When the week was up, Rudolf asked Wallace if he would like to join him for three months in Europe. Never having traveled outside the United States, he was tempted and hesitant at the same time. “But since we had gotten on so well in New York, I thought, Okay, well, let’s give it a try.” After going back to California to finish his film, Wallace took the Royal Ballet charter plane from New York to London, and then flew on to meet Rudolf in Milan. Although it was a disappointing start—“Milan is not the most glamorous place and it was very hot and humid”—they were driven through the French Alps to La Turbie, where they spent three days. “Dear Folks, Have never seen anything like it!” Wallace exclaimed on a postcard home. Their chauffeur as far as Turin had been “a crazy Greek girl,” Lisa Sottilis, a friend of Rudolf’s who had a jewelry business in Milan making Dalí-esque brooches out of twenty-four-karat gold. She was dark-skinned, striking, and self-drama
tizing—a Mediterranean version of Monique van Vooren, whom they also saw when they were in Belgium: “By the time we got to London, I’d had it with with the jet set. When Nigel and Maude came to dinner I was openly hostile to them. So sarcastic. Then I realized to my shame that they were not like Rudolf’s fancy friends; that they were dear, decent people, intelligent and a lot of fun too.”

  They were due to spend the second half of August in Paris. Hollywood producer Harry Saltzman was backing a multimillion-dollar feature film on Nijinsky, and had cast Rudolf in the title role opposite Paul Scofield as Diaghilev. Ever since he came to the West, people had been wanting to put Rudolf on the screen. One was Maggie Louis, who in a letter dated May 20, 1964, wrote that she and Loretta Young had been evangelizing about him to one of the founders of the Technicolor corporation:

  He is more than interested. If we can find the right story he will finance & produce a film for you. He is a man of great taste so it won’t be the usual Hollywood sequined junk. If you run across a story that interests you please let me know right away. Meantime Loretta & I will be reading everything in sight as a possible vehicle for you.

  Also in 1964 Luchino Visconti gave a dinner at London’s Savoy Hotel in Rudolf’s honor, the purpose, according to French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, was to discuss his own venture on the life of Nijinsky. In Brialy’s account, Rudolf discourteously got up and left after about ten minutes, dropping a tiny piece of paper on the actor’s plate as he passed. “Je t’ attends,” it said, followed by a telephone number. A sexual assignation (which duly followed) was then more interesting to Rudolf than a film project, and there were other occasions on which he resorted to “all kinds of hindering” to forestall the possibility of making a movie. The reason, he said, was Margot, who had convinced him that “as with Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann,” it wouldn’t do his dancing any good: “I thought if you do film it’s immediate success. It never came to my mind that it could be terrible flop.… The film will be too enormous; that I will not be able—with this gigantic fame—to fit into Royal Ballet. I wanted to be part of the company; on a par with all of them; and I thought that would have been great threat to me as an artist.”