Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  But Rudolf knew very well that Wallace longed to lead a more independent life, and would occasionally agree to release him. In October 1971 Wallace had toured England as a production assistant on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales, and now, five months later, was in Italy, working on a spaghetti Western directed by Franco Rossellini. From an isolated location in the mountains, he kept trying and failing to reach Rudolf by telephone—either because of the two- to three-hour Italian delays, or because, when the call finally came through, there would be no answer at Fife Road. Badly missing Rudolf, and disturbed by his own lack of ambition, Wallace laid bare his feelings in a long confessional letter.

  Went alone to see Mount Vesuvius after arriving in Naples. I’ve been in the worst state for the past 2 weeks. I’m so apathetic about everything; nothing excites me or interests me even. I don’t even care about finishing my 16 mm film.… I feel like a vegetable. When I think about doing something with myself or trying to become something I just get so depressed. I have a feeling I’m afraid to admit that I’m so in love with you I’m afraid of getting involved in my work or getting excited about anything in case it causes tension between us. I had sex with 2 different people when I first came here, but have not had the desire for over 4 weeks. Even when I think it may be exciting or rather that it should be exciting to have sex, when it comes down to going out & looking for it, it’s such a let-down. I get excited thinking about you, but then I start missing you and then I get depressed that I’m so dependent on you.

  This was the first time that Wallace had admitted to casual sexual encounters, although he did not tell Rudolf about the fling he had while in Rome with Hiram Keller. The pair “used to pal around” with actor and songwriter Paul Jabarra, who had appeared with Hiram in the original cast of Hair. Wallace was a close friend of Paul’s, never a lover, though Rudolf thought the contrary and had been so suspicious when they spoke on the telephone that Wallace immediately wrote a postcard to reassure him: “You sounded a little bit apprehensive when I said Paul was living here also. Well you shouldn’t be. I love you, Boo-Boo! I should be the apprehensive one: 6 weeks with David Wall etc.” It failed to work, as Wallace then received a call from Rudolf saying that things would be over between them unless he came back immediately. “So I got on a plane and went home.” In August they went together to La Turbie for a week, spending most of their time in Monte Carlo. “Much livelier than the last year when it seemed like a retirement colony,” Wallace told his parents, mentioning the fact that “the Burtons came on their yacht” and describing an open-air concert at the Palace of Monaco, where Mick Jagger had invited them the same night to Cannes to see Sviatoslav Richter give a solo recital. It was, as Wallace admitted, all too easy to “fall back on being Mrs. Rudolf Nureyev,” and for the next three months, while touring Canada and North America, he did exactly that—devoting any film work from then on entirely to Rudolf.

  It was Erik who had encouraged Rudolf to establish a link with the National Ballet of Canada, a company with which he had worked throughout the last decade as a dancer, choreographer, and coach. Not only did it have one of the finest schools in the world (its director, Betty Oliphant, had been his choice to revitalize the Swedish academy), but the dancers’ Russian and Cechetti—based training had produced an ensemble of unusual homogeneity and finesse. Needing a new production of Sleeping Beauty, its British founder, Celia Franca, had invited Rudolf to mount his version but had been “dead against” having the dancer himself as the star. Her mission all along had been to develop an indigenous ballet, her company had just returned from its first European tour, and she was not about to let it become what one critic described as “the parsley round the salmon of Rudolf Nureyev.” Sol Hurok, however, would not back an American tour without him, and so, in the summer of 1972, Rudolf joined the Canadians for six months. “Our kids were young; they were extremely well-trained,” remarked Oliphant. “They were too young to feel threatened.”

  Sergiu Stefanschi, at that time a principal in Toronto, had talked excitedly to his colleagues about what Rudolf had been like in Russia—“how extraordinary he was”—and on the day of his arrival the National Ballet’s sixty-five dancers waited apprehensively in the studio for the “living legend” to make his entrance. “What we hadn’t expected,” the company’s star, Veronica Tennant, has written, “was a man—who was not tall, oddly dressed in a woolen cap and tight leathers—a man—whose eyes twinkled … who made immediate, irrevocable contact with every person in the room.”

  A répétiteur from La Scala had already taught the company the steps, Celia Franca had distributed the roles, and Rudolf was impatient to get to work. Tennant, the company’s “unofficial prima,” was told that she and Nureyev would be rehearsing together, but when, after almost an hour, he still had not appeared, she decided to begin without him.

  I’d just got to the pas de chat section when Rudolf suddenly flew into the room and began dancing next to me. It was wonderful. Apparently he’d been late because of an intense argument with Celia Franca. He’d wanted to bring over his own ballerina—Marcia Haydée or Carla Fracci—and Celia had insisted that he dance with us.

  Rudolf had capitulated, but battles over casting continued. While rehearsing the Prologue his eye was drawn to one of the Fairies, a real beauty, with modern, fashion-model looks, and he demanded to know why she was not learning Aurora. Twenty-year-old Karen Kain, the company’s youngest principal, had been chosen by Franca to dance Swan Lake with Rudolf later in the tour, but was cast only in soloist roles in Sleeping Beauty. “I had just recovered from a serious illness, and Celia felt my workload was enough. Rudolf, though, was determined that I would dance Aurora, and it became this contentious issue between them.” In the opening performances Kain was to appear in the Blue Bird pas de deux with Frank Augustyn, a tall, elegant soloist for whom Rudolf had equally ambitious plans. “You, boy!” he would say, indicating that Augustyn should step in for him while he directed from the front. “I thought I was there as Rudolf’s body double, and it never occurred to me that I was being considered as the Prince.” The eighteen-year-old Augustyn remembers experiencing a strange combination of fear—“because of the power of his presence”—and something infinitely more comforting:

  It was like jumping into a kangaroo’s pouch. Rudolf knew exactly what he wanted to do and he was going to take us along with him. From the most arrogant to the shyest and most insecure dancer there—we all felt the same way. Something was happening that we’d never experienced before, and we knew it was going to be a wonderful ride.

  But while the youngest members of the company were feeling “as if a door was opening,” the established men were lining up outside the director’s office to complain. Rudolf had even bypassed his friend Sergiu, who “didn’t feel sour,” he insists, “because I knew Rudolf preferred to pick someone just starting whom he could nourish.” Someone also, no doubt, who would not question his decisions. On the first day, spotting Sergiu resting on the studio floor, Rudolf had walked up to him and, speaking in Russian, come straight to the point: “You know, Seryosha, you have to forget everything you remember about Sleeping Beauty because this is going to be completely different.” The two had been onstage together as pages in the Kirov production and “knew every step the way it was.” Having been told of their ex-teacher Igor Belsky’s outrage over his appropriation of the entr’acte music for his solo, Rudolf did not welcome the thought of any further caviling from Sergiu. “He just wanted to clear that up with me.”

  As in his Milan version, Rudolf aimed to contrast a Margot-like simplicity of style with Nico Georgiadis’s opulent designs. The latter came close to bankrupting the company. Originally estimated at $250,000, the budget ran over by $100,000, the production saved only when the chairman of the board mortgaged his house. No one in the company had ever seen extravagance like it, “Pillars were being thrown away because Rudolf said he had no room to dance.” The costumes were all made from the finest silks, brocades, an
d satins; Veronica Tennant, whose third-act tutu was so encrusted with jewels that she could hardly raise her arms, remembers one argument between Georgiadis and the technical producer about the carving on the back of the throne.* But Rudolf insisted on his vision. “There was no compromise,” recalled Oliphant. “Rudi kept saying that if Nico Georgiadis didn’t get his way, he was leaving.” In despair, Franca removed herself to the sidelines—or, as Rudolf put it, “didn’t get into my soup”—giving him sole charge of her company.

  He took class with the dancers each morning and worked with them until nine or ten in the evening, his intention to inspire, Augustyn says, rather than conventionally teach. “He wasn’t there to show you how to do a pirouette. You had to know the ABC of dancing. I remember him in the studio in his boots, tight pants, and toque, never actually doing a step.” What Rudolf did do was pass on everything he himself had learned about technique, artistry, and stagecraft. “Try to find impulse of movement,” he directed. “It is that impulse that gives attack and interest.” … “Dance boldly and full out. Hold back nothing! Timid is not interesting.… Take the stage and command it!… Audiences come to theater to see people obsessed by what they do!” Wanting to help Veronica Tennant with the perilously difficult Rose Adagio balances, he called Margot one night for advice. “She suggested you try for strength of equilibrium in the shoulders rather than thinking about balancing from the toes,” he told the ballerina, and instructed all three Auroras, “You have to give everything you’ve got on this piece because after that, I come.”

  In the lead up to the opening night, the production, now lasting more than three hours, had run into overtime fees, and Franca, using Betty Oliphant as go-between (she and Rudolf having long before stopped speaking), pleaded for the pas de cinq to be cut. Rudolf remained implacable—“Tell them to play the whole thing faster!” he scoffed—and, in the end, the intermissions were shortened by about seven minutes. But for all the distress it caused, Rudolf’s Sleeping Beauty brought the National Ballet returns beyond imagining. Broadcast soon after the premiere, the televised version won an Emmy Award and was seen by thirty-three million people when shown worldwide. To Frank Augustyn, they had “reached the stars, the real pinnacle of ballet,” and Veronica Tennant felt much the same. “With Rudi, we came of age and we grew. Because to dance with him meant to be taught by him, to be cajoled and inspired to share in his example and vision of what was possible in dance.”

  “Sleeping Beauty is so fantastic, so elegantissimmo!” Wallace wrote to Nigel and Maude, sending them a copy of the tour itinerary. He had made his own record of the ballet using the new high-speed film stock, and had also begun cutting act 2 of Raymonda. Life on the road was proving a lot of fun. They were traveling with a hired Moviola editing machine and viewer (nicknamed Johnnie and Janie because they had to ride like passengers in the backseat), and when they were in Montreal, Wallace had “dragged” Rudolf to see Alice Cooper perform in a stadium before an audience of twelve thousand people. “This was quite something as Rudolf hated rock music and would only let me play my records when he wasn’t there.” They were both equally intrigued by America’s burgeoning gay porn scene, and drove to New York City with the sole intention of seeing The Boys in the Sand, the first technically proficient hard-core gay feature film. This had opened at the end of December 1971 and proved an unprecedented commercial success, earning model-star Cal Culver celebrity status and launching the concept of “porno chic” (popularized by Deep Throat a year later). Wallace’s eight-page letter to the Goslings describes their astonishment at seeing men having sex on the big screen.

  It’s so surprising—there’s a complete lack of censorship now.… There’s not one “thing” that they can’t show and don’t.… Screw magazine is so hysterical—they review all the porno films now, straight or gay and like the old 4 star system, they rate the films by 4 phalluses.

  Their next stop was Boston, where the choreographer José Limón had arrived to teach Rudolf The Moor’s Pavane,* his 1949 classic focusing on the four main characters from Othello. A pupil of American modern-dance pioneer Doris Humphrey and a charismatic figure in his own right, Limón could have been crucial to Rudolf’s induction into the genre, but, as usual, he did not allow himself enough time to absorb the new style. Instead of internalizing the Moor’s rage into imploding, weighted movements he “let his feelings come seething to the surface,” as one critic would write; his desperate, rolling eyes and flared nostrils reminding another of a close-up from Ivan the Terrible. There was no other opportunity to collaborate with Limón, who died unexpectedly in December, but Rudolf considered The Moor’s Pavane, like Songs of a Wayfarer, to be a key work in his repertory, and was still performing it two decades later.

  The night before rehearsing with Limón, Rudolf had stayed up until 5 a.m. talking to cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and designer Barry Kay. His next major project was to make a feature film of Don Quixote, and as his every experience of dance for the camera had fallen short of his expectations, he was determined to take charge of this venture from the start. Although disappointed by the unimaginative way Romeo and Juliet and the BBC Nutcracker films had been shot, he was not at all in favor of a radical approach to dance on film, complaining, “The minute they get hold of you they start dancing with their cameras. They forget about the artist.” Valentina Pereyaslavec, who was with him in Vienna during the filming of Swan Lake, remembers his irritation: “One day Rudolf say, ‘What camera is this?’ And Rudolf point to corner. And cameraman say, ‘This is camera for your jump.’ Rudolf say, ‘I don’t want this camera here because we must see my jump, not one you invent with camera.’ … Rudolf control everything for movie. Light. Camera. Camera front. Camera side. Everything.”

  Even when working with someone as established as the English feature film director Bryan Forbes, Rudolf had insisted that all the cameras were in the wrong positions. Forbes, at the time, was shooting additional ballet sequences for the movie I Am a Dancer, which had begun as a television documentary by a young French director, Pierre Jourdan. EMI had brought in Forbes for the new footage and to blow up the 16 mm to the standard 35 mm. Admitting that this was his first venture into the closed world of the ballet, Forbes had five cameras in position at the London Coliseum at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. Seven hours later Rudolf appeared. It was, in Wallace’s view, a misunderstanding. “Rudolf would never have agreed to dance at that time; I don’t think any dancer would.” But Forbes was furious, and in no mood to accommodate Rudolf on technical issues. “Why don’t you put your feet in the rosin and start to dance and leave the filming to me!” he snapped. As far as he was concerned, the dancer was “fairly contemptible as a person”: Rudolf had apparently announced before filming that he would not perform unless he was paid in cash each day, and at one point, distracted by the sound of a camera shutter, he had spat in the face of the “inoffensive stills photographer.” Things were much calmer during the shooting of an extract from Tetley’s Field Figures, and Deanne Bergsma, Rudolf’s partner in the duet, remembers Forbes becoming so excited that he grabbed the camera himself and began moving among the dancers. But having decided from the first screening in Paris that he “despised the film,” Rudolf made no attempt to hide his displeasure. At the June 1971 premiere he had stormed out of the theater without so much as a word to Forbes, and was much quoted in the press saying that he would gladly pay to have the film destroyed.

  He now became fanatically intent on taking sole charge of Don Quixote. This would not be the usual television-style multicamera recording but a large-budget feature film, Rudolf wanting, as Wallace put it, “to do for ballet what Singing in the Rain and Jerome Robbins’s staging of the dance sequences in West Side Story did to advance the art of filming a musical.” Robert Helpmann, codirector of the Australian Ballet, the company Rudolf had chosen to perform with him, was also to codirect the film—at least that was the idea. According to Lucette Aldous, cast once again as Kitri, it had been “Bobby’s
absolute dream to get Don Quixote for the company so he could have that part.” Wanting to expand it for the film, Helpmann wrote to Rudolf in October outlining his idea for a silent preprologue featuring just the Don and his muse, Dulcinea. “They are to indicate to the audience the other adventures of Don Quixote and to clarify the storyline.” Rudolf, however, had no intention of allowing the title role to be anything more than a cameo, and planned to launch directly into the action in the town square, thereby accelerating his own entrance. Uncharacteristically Helpmann gave way. Although just as forthright and egotistical as Rudolf, he had devoted all his energies recently to establishing the Australian Ballet internationally, and he knew it was not his name but Nureyev’s that would guarantee their film’s success.*

  And Rudolf knew that Helpmann would be able to attract the best talent in the field. Leading the Old Vic company in the forties and fifties (appearing as Hamlet and in The Taming of the Shrew opposite Katharine Hepburn), Helpmann had been one of the great theatrical stars of his generation. Not only that, but his collaboration with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger on The Red Shoes had produced the definitive ballet movie, its influence extending from Singing in the Rain to the fight scenes in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. It was Helpmann’s network of connections that had secured the appointment of Geoffrey Unsworth and cameraman Peter MacDonald—the team responsible for the visual brilliance of Cabaret and 2001: A Space Odyssey. But there was to be no surreal or fantastical filmmaking in Don Quixote, both directors agreeing that the style should be “real as real,” with, for instance, genuine Melbourne market vendors employed as extras for the opening scene.

  Allowing virtually no preparation time, Rudolf arrived on the set on a Sunday with principal photography due to begin on the Monday. “We had a director for a day and a bit.” However, according to Wallace, Rudolf already had “nearly the entire film mapped out in his head.” As he later told director Lindsay Anderson in their 1974 television interview, “I set all the camera shots. Every frame, every second on the film is my responsibility, whether you like it or hate it. It’s me.” He wanted most of the dance sequences to be filmed in one long wide shot, each carefully and classically composed. And instead of relying on the traditional variety of full-length, close-up, and wide shots, there was to be extensive use of the crane—ideas that met with remarkably little opposition from the two experts. While Rudolf’s relationship with Peter MacDonald was “creatively adversarial,” in Wallace’s phrase, he was especially deferential toward Unsworth, “the kind of soft-spoken, old-world personality that he had a lot of respect for.” The crew found him easy enough—“provided you don’t delude him”—but after a number of clashes, the first assistant director withdrew from the project, and Rudolf “pushed” Wallace into his place. “Just because of the time constraints they took me.” The shoot had to be completed in three weeks, and soon the pressure of the deadline combined with the extreme summer heat began to take its toll. The set had been constructed in an unused hangar at Essendon Airport outside Melbourne, in which temperatures became so unbearable in the midday sun that the rubber paint on the floor was melting. There was no dressing room or canteen, and the dancers, who had been sitting around since seven o’clock each morning, were expected to be in peak form up to sixteen or seventeen hours later. It was midnight when Rudolf asked Gailene Stock to step in as one of the leading Dryads.