Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  For the new pas de deux Béjart had chosen Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, a work that attracted him by its “very personal” relevance for the composer, even though its subject—the despair of a spurned lover—has nothing to do with the ballet. Mortality is the main theme of Béjart’s Songs of a Wayfarer, as omnipresent here as in his 1970 Serait-ce la Mort? to Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. It is another Le Jeune Homme et la mort, with the Wayfarer led away at the end by the “Man of Death,” who is, at the same time, his reflection or other self. Shadowing him throughout, Bortoluzzi, who was slenderer and more elfin than Rudolf, moved sometimes contrapuntally, sometimes in unison, each executing a perfect tour en l’air to chime with a climactic note in the score. “Rudolf, of course, wanted to dance better than Paolo,” says Denvers, who remembers him complaining that he had “nothing to do,” meaning that Béjart was not getting the best out of him. “But what Béjart made him do was so different from anything he’d danced before, and I think he finally realized that, although he didn’t have his double assemblés and cabrioles, the emotional impact of this pas de deux—something that was coming from deep inside him—allowed him to go in another direction, and to have much the same success.”

  This was also a new direction for Béjart, who admits that the discipline and restraint Rudolf showed in rehearsal led him to create a work significantly different from the one he originally had in mind. “[Rudolf] understood that he had to dominate his instincts. Without this I might perhaps have conceived for him a more brilliant, more exterior role, but he helped me without realizing it, by his silent presence, to go further in my intentions to interiorize the ballet.”

  Béjart’s audience, however, was as riotous as ever. On March 11, 1971, a mob of 5,800 packed Brussels’s vast sports arena of the Forêt National, spilling into gangways and, as soon as the twenty-minute piece was over, letting rip with a clamor that astonished even Rudolf:

  Public carried on and carried on and carried on. It was ridiculous, exaggerated.… I thought the reason for that was acoustics. It was a dome and the more they screamed and yelled and clapped the more they get worked up, and excited. They heard themselves … they became the performers. We were the public … two of us were the witnesses and they were the performers. From three sides they were around us. A quite incredible experience.

  Giving a more measured evaluation, Tania Bari, who danced with Rudolf on the same program in Rite of Spring,* described his interpretation of Wayfarer as “very, very interesting, but not Béjart. I saw it later with [Jorge] Donn and [Daniel] Lommel, and it spoke more to me. They moved like one body when they were together, whereas Nureyev and Bortoluzzi, the two stars, always were separate.” Rudolf himself would dance with both these performers as well as several others over the next twenty years; he had asked Béjart for a duet he could “take everywhere,” which is exactly what Wayfarer became: as much a signature role in Rudolf’s later years as Albrecht had been in his youth.

  So, had he found a choreographer at last? Béjart says that it was already too late for them to establish the kind of master-muse relationship that he then had with wild child Jorge Donn, the inspiration behind so many of his ballets. “I took Donn when he was seventeen. When I met Rudolf he was already a star.” And although Rudolf was eager to perform existing works in the repertory, such as the full-length Faust, he was not prepared to adapt his schedule in order to give the requisite amount of time to learn it. “Béjart and Rudolf never really got on,” Denvers says. “There was a lot of respect on both sides, but they remained like two cats circling around each other.” In the end, far from being a Béjart disciple, Rudolf went out of his way to appropriate his role of mentor—certainly as far as Denvers was concerned.

  Rudolf took me away from Béjart. He said, “You have to get out of there because otherwise you have no future. If you don’t start to know about a classical repertory, when you finish with Béjart you can bring his tea or be his ballet master, but that’s the end of the line.” He kind of pushed me.…“Why don’t you go to Cranko, to Stuttgart?” … But I was not ready to leave Béjart. He organized something, but I didn’t go to the audition, because Béjart said, “Stay with me.” Rudolf was very annoyed, because he’d stuck his neck out and I’d let him down.

  But Rudolf did not give up, and two years later, when he mounted his Sleeping Beauty for the National Ballet of Canada, he arranged for Denvers to be engaged as a soloist. The other dancer who left Béjart soon after Wayfarer was Paolo Bortoluzzi, although his friends insist, “He knew—he didn’t need Rudolf to tell him—that it was time to fly,” Paolo’s encounter with Rudolf had been akin to a religious conversion. “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I felt in the presence of an incredible force that I had to grab hold of. He communicated to me an extraordinary sense of exultation.” The following year, determined to make an international name for himself, Bortoluzzi joined American Ballet Theatre, plunging “with a sort of drunkenness” into the classical repertory: Giselle, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty—the Nureyev roles.

  In Brussels with Rudolf throughout this time was Wallace, his constant companion for the last four months. In November, Ruth Potts had handed her husband a letter telling him that it would “blow [his] mind”:

  Dear Mama & Daddy,

  Well, I really don’t know where to begin, so I’ll tell you the current news first.… Anyhow, I’m on my way back to Rudolf in London.… I basically love to make films (to direct, to edit, to light, to act, etc.) but I miss Rudolf—I love him and I think he loves me.… I hope all this isn’t too much for you to fathom because I really love you and I hope this doesn’t alienate us. Please bear with me.… I know now that I can work and function in Rudolf’s milieu with confidence which I didn’t have last summer.… Anyhow, I’m on my way to happiness. I don’t know how you rate that.… I know you put a lot of emphasis on happiness through working and I know Rudolf would not love me if I were following him around so I realize I have a lot of pressure from all sides.

  Your son,

  Beanie

  Wanting to compensate for having abandoned his studies, Wallace had immediately started to make a short film at Fife Road: an exploration in dance of Einstein’s theory of relativity, using three Royal Ballet members, David Drew, Vyvyan Lorrayne, and Wayne Sleep. Rudolf then being on tour, he had dismantled the Jacobean four-poster and converted the master bedroom into a studio. “I put up these Cartesian grids and had the dancers move like electrons against them.” Encouraged by Nigel Gosling, he had filled out an application to join the Royal College of Art’s film division, but then everything had been put on hold: Rudolf was going to be out of the country for the next few months, and expected Wallace to be with him. Having watched daily video footage of the Wayfarer rehearsals, Rudolf had rediscovered the value of film as an aid to improving his dancing, and on their last day in Brussels he bought a 16 mm Aeroflex camera so that Wallace could record his subsequent performances.

  Their first stop was Buenos Aires, where Rudolf had been invited to mount The Nutcracker, a city which has always drawn great stars as guest dancers and choreographers (among them Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Isadora, Pavlova, Massine, Nijinska, and Balanchine). The fee being offered was certainly not the lure in Rudolf’s case, as they were forced to travel like students, flying tourist class, Rudolf sleeping in one of the aisles. Wallace’s letter to the Goslings described how “wrecked” the two of them were on arrival, both having developed some kind of virus.

  The ornate Teatro Colón is one of the world’s most beautiful opera houses, but as Rudolf soon discovered, it held a company in chaos. “The director refuses rehearsals and/or says they have to pay all the dancers,” Wallace wrote to his parents, adding that Rudolf was nevertheless enjoying a huge success—“partly because of the production but mostly because of his halo!” Intending to film all three acts of the ballet from a box at the back of the orchestra, Wallace spent most of his time at the theater familiarizing himself with the ch
oreography, the entrances and exits. “It was a process of trial and error. I tended to go in for close-ups, and generally Rudolf wanted to keep things wide to show the complete body at all times. But I was having to work with existing light, and had never shot dance before, so the result was almost useless.” After almost a month in the city, “feeling like a fifth wheel” and frustrated by not being able to resume his Einstein project, Wallace found himself a cheap hotel and went into hiding. “I was unhappy; I had to think things out.” After a few days Rudolf, who had been searching for him, noticed Wallace in the street. “Rudolf said something like, ‘Oh, there you are. C’mon back.’ ”

  There was a professional as well as private reason for Rudolf to initiate a rapprochement: In the last week he had been offered three performances of Apollo, the Balanchine work he loved more than any other, and he wanted Wallace to film him. The company’s Balanchine heritage had been established during the American Ballet Caravan’s 1941 tour of Latin America, the ballets continuing to be performed by the Teatro Colón although the choreographer, according to Balanchine’s assistant Barbara Horgan, paid little attention to their legality or artistic integrity: “That’s just the way he was: Out of sight, out of mind. And what Rudolf would do is contact companies that had Apollo in their repertory (legitimately and not legitimately) and offer his services.… Who knows, Balanchine might have even enjoyed the fact that Nureyev was so anxious to dance this role. It certainly didn’t hurt either’s reputation.”

  The oldest and most revered of Balanchine’s extant works, Apollo is the ballet the choreographer himself considered pivotal to his career, the one in which he dared “to not use all my ideas.” Diaghilev is said to have described it as “pure classicism, such as we have not seen since Petipa’s,” but it was Balanchine’s departure from tradition that created the masterpiece. The contemporary spin he puts on Apollo’s very first gesture (the arms are raised in an academic fifth en haut, but with hands horizontally hinged) is, as Edward Villella exclaimed, “Neoclassicism … exemplified by that single move!” To Rudolf, Apollo was the blueprint for all his beliefs about the need to regenerate tradition, but unlike Villella, who was nurtured in the role by the choreographer, he was forced to create every opportunity to perform it himself. “Royal Ballet would not let me dance Apollo, so I went to Vienna and had them produce it for me.… I did it at La Scala in Milan, and in Amsterdam. I came to London with the Dutch National Ballet and danced it at Sadler’s Wells, and finally the Royal Ballet was forced to give me the role.” (Rudolf’s Covent Garden debut in Apollo on July 6, 1971, is considered to be one of his finest performances in the West.)

  Aware that he was “dying to do that ballet in New York,” Alexandra Danilova, on whom Balanchine had created the role of Terpsichore, had, at Rudolf’s prompting, tried to use her influence to get the choreographer’s permission. When he refused, Danilova was hardly surprised. “Nureyev is anything but Apollo.… He is Adonis, he is David. Because, to me, Apollo should be tall and blond. That is my picture of Apollo.” The image, however, of a Hellenic ideal of manhood—the refined deity of the Apollo Belvedere statue—was not Balanchine’s initial conception. His Apollo was “a wild, half-human youth who acquires nobility through art”; his first interpreter, Serge Lifar, described by a contemporary reviewer as “Etruscan” and “archaic.” When New York City Ballet’s John Taras coached Rudolf in the role in Vienna, he, too, urged the dancer to bring out Apollo’s initial primitiveness—something Rudolf hardly needed to be taught. The character’s rite of passage from raw naïveté to artistic refinement and worldliness was a process he understood only too well. “He becomes god by the end of the ballet through his research of space around him … he start to measure himself, relate himself to the earth and to the surrounding … you can see that exploration of space brings despair to him, but then he takes control. In the end.”

  After she had watched Rudolf’s performance in London, Danilova admitted that she had been mistaken, that he was “really extremely good in it—the best I saw after Lifar.” And yet she had been right in saying that Apollo is a role antithetical to everything Rudolf stood for; he was a Dionysus who, as a classical dancer, constantly strove to be what Stravinsky called “the perfect expression of the Apollonian principle.” It was Erik, the quintessential classicist, who had been taught “the meaning of every moment” of the role by Balanchine and who, in turn, had first taught it to Rudolf. Their difference as dancers was in itself a visualization of the Apollonian/Dionysian duality—the eternal conflict to which art owes its evolution. And it was precisely this sense of struggle in Rudolf’s performance that, as Horst Koegler wrote of his Vienna debut, added a whole new dimension to the ballet: “All his elementary powers and instincts steer him towards a free life, free from moral considerations, free from social obligations. But the gods have chosen him … and he has no choice but to accept their call.… Apollo has finally conquered Dionysus, but it was a tragic victory, for it alienated him from his very nature.”

  At the same time Rudolf had a natural affinity with Apollo—the golden youth with uncut hair whose other name, “Phoebus,” like “Nur,” means “light.” The image of Balanchine’s young god, a suspicious, awkward pupil imprisoned in winding sheets, is the Soviet Rudolf, who becomes free only when he starts to dance. It was also the young Balanchine. Asked by Villella the meaning of Apollo’s opening and closing of hands, the choreographer explained, “You know, I was in Soviet Union, awful place no color, no paint. Lousy. No light. I went first time to London to Piccadilly Circus. Saw for first time flashing lights.” Apollo’s growing sense of wonder and delight is marvelously depicted by Rudolf in the Buenos Aires footage, particularly the moment he hears the lute played for the first time. Listening so intently that you start to listen with him, he then registers the sound of the melody just with the expression in his eyes.

  Having to formulate an interpretation almost entirely on his own meant, as Violette Verdy points out, that there was no possibility for him to explore a new facet of himself “that only a Balanchine might have detected and wanted to play with.” Exactly the kind of thing, in fact, that Balanchine was doing with Villella, a kid from the streets of Queens, when he described one leg movement as the “Soccer Step … Man kicking ball.” “He was telling me to be myself in the role.” Rudolf, on the other hand, had no choice other than to be faithful to the choreography as it was taught to him by John Taras, Verdy says, and consequently his conception of Apollo was, “strangely enough,” one of the most classical she had ever seen. But that was later; Wallace’s footage of Rudolf’s 1972 Covent Garden portrayal shows movements that are much more sculpted, more recognizably Balanchinian. Rudolf’s Buenos Aires Apollo, like his Vienna and Dutch National performances, was technically still a work in progress, and yet it was much closer in spirit to Balanchine’s vision. “I remember him being very unspoiled,” remarks Rudi van Dantzig. “So different from the traditional picture of Apollo—more like a faun. He wanted to make a real transition, and that’s what he did. It was very moving.”

  In March, while Rudolf was in Buenos Aires, Monique van Vooren was in Ufa and Leningrad visiting his family. It was a return favor for the kindness he had shown when her fiancé—“the beautiful Francesco, the man I adored”—was killed in a car crash. Monique had been staying in La Turbie when she heard the news, and Rudolf, gently supportive, insisted that she accompany him on his travels. They went to visit Jean and Maggie Louis in Malibu before driving up to San Francisco. “He made me part of everything.” Knowing that Monique would soon be herself again (she was, Bob Colacello once said, always heartbroken but never missed a party), Rudolf had given her a Jean Louis dress as a present, an apt combination of funereal black crepe embroidered with mirrors. Before long she was back in the society pages, and a week or so after giving a dinner for Franco Rossellini, with Salvador Dalí and Princess Irene Galitzine among the guests, she was traveling by train from Moscow to Ufa.

  Visiting Farida
in her “two humble rooms,” Monique had been amazed by the extent to which Rudolf’s mother had absolutely no comprehension of his world or his fame. “She wanted to know if he needed food. She told me how much he loved trains, and gave me a wooden toy to give to him, the toy he’d had as a child.” Rudolf had asked Monique to take his mother to Leningrad to join Rosa, and to call on Xenia, which she dutifully did. They all went to the ballet one evening along with Rudi van Dantzig, who happened to be in Leningrad at the time. Wearing gold hotpants and suspenders under a long sable coat Monique caused a sensation in the Kirov foyer. “I didn’t want to be seen with her,” Rudi recalls. “I was there on business talking to teachers and dancers, and she looked so shocking with her green contact lenses and her bosoms hanging out.” When Monique went to check her coat, Rudi’s Dutch ballet master tried to prevent her from taking it off. “The babushka was pulling it, and Ivan was closing it!” During the performance of Sleeping Beauty, Farida had wept because this was the ballet in which she had last seen her son dance, and wept again later when Monique took everyone back to her room at the Astoria and called Rudolf collect. “I put his mother on the phone, and Rosa and Xenia and the dresser he had at Kirov. There were tears and laughter and it took forever and ever.” When Rudi van Dantzig next saw Rudolf he offered to show him the few minutes of home-movie film he had shot in Leningrad. Sitting huddled on a bench in the snow with her granddaughters and Rosa, Farida looks unsmilingly at the camera, pushing a strand of white hair under her scarf and wiping a drip from her nose with the back of her hand. But Rudolf never saw the footage, the reel having stuck just before his family appeared. “It’s meant to be like that,” he said gruffly to Rudi.

  There were a number of other emissaries. When Rudolf heard that Marika Besobrasova was going to Russia, he asked her to buy four of anything she got for herself—“bigger sizes and one small size (for my mother).” She found herself traveling to Leningrad with thirty-three kilos of fur coats and evening gowns, Rudolf wishing, as she says, “to show the Soviets his worth.” Farida was so proud of her black fur coat and matching hat that she had a studio portrait taken so that her son could see how well it fit—“just as if it was made for me.” Not wanting to return to Ufa, she was still staying in Rosa and Gouze’s room in Ordinarnaya Street, where their cramped conditions were “very bad,” she said. In her letter of September 4, 1971 (transcribed by Alfia in an impeccably neat schoolgirl hand, as her grandmother could write only in Arabic), Farida confesses that she has been forced to sell some of Rudolf’s other gifts because her pension is so small—just twenty-five rubles a month: “Forgive me, don’t be offended, but what can I do—I have to live.”