Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  When he came to scoop me around the waist I wasn’t ready, which made him really angry. He grabbed hold of the chain necklace I was wearing and started dragging me around, and because I was resisting, the metal was biting into my neck. When he said we had to do it again, I refused and the crew backed me up. We struck, and they made him apologize to me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you’re still stupid.” By this time I’d had enough. I was leaving the company anyway, and as the filming was virtually over, I decided not to come back on set.*

  “I’m amazed that nobody got killed,” says Wallace, laughing. “It was chaotic—a nightmare. It’s unheard of to make a feature film in three weeks.” Postproduction work was just as rushed, as Rudolf was needed for the second lap of the Canadian tour, and he was determined to see the finished edit before he left. He had been furious when the producers of the Sleeping Beauty film cut several variations without his authority, Nigel Gosling witnessing the scene in a Chinese restaurant when his temper “suddenly boiled up & he hit one culprit on the knuckles with his wooden chopsticks so hard that S. let out a yelp. A few shits & fucks went with the blow, finally breaking into doubtless unprintable Russian.” This time Rudolf literally moved the Australian film editor into his house. Anthony Buckley would sit in front of a Moviola machine in a corner of the master bedroom at Fife Road cutting shots together while Rudolf was rehearsing, and at the end of his day, or at night after his performance, they would work on the edit together. Knowing that he was still concerned about “what Bobby may do to the film” in his absence, Buckley wrote a note to reassure him:

  London Monday night 1:30 a.m.

  Dear Rudolf,

  Today was my last day on DQ. In the morning I fly home.… The film is exactly as you left it and absolutely no alterations.… The film is in the laboratory so no one can alter what we have done, and Bobbie goes to America on Wednesday so he won’t be a problem either.*

  For the time being the only problem was Wallace. The situation in Australia had been awkward for him, having been allowed to work on Don Quixote only through Rudolf’s insistence. “He really forced them to take me. But that certainly didn’t ingratiate me with the crew.” And things were not any easier now they were home, and he was having to watch Rudolf edit the film—exactly what he felt he should be doing on his own. The only answer was to get away and, not wanting an emotional scene, he wrote Rudolf a letter, leaving it by the front door on his way to Heathrow.

  Rudolf,

  I know this seems very secretive and premeditated.… I have gone to Los Angeles. I suspect you think I’m returning to Myron, but in Los Angeles I know the film arrangements much better, and I thought I would find a cheap apartment and finish that goddamn Einstein film once and for all. I have to refilm my titles completely—they fucked up the whole film. I know you would think why I didn’t want to do it here. Well it’s taken 2 years so far here and with you too here editing … and your hectic ballet schedule I don’t feel happy here working on something that you all may regard as a toy or self-indulgent. Anyhow, I won’t write a self-pitying letter, just that I’m unsatisfied with what I’m doing right now. I think once I finish that film it will help me spiritually. I think I will stay in Los Angeles until you arrive there, then if you are still interested in the Raymonda film we can work then. I thank you for asking if I wanted to work on it, but I think Don Quixote must take priority now. I will take Raymonda workprint with me but leave the negative here, & am taking that Borges book, too, and perhaps I can make a short film of one of his stories though I have a feeling LA is not one of his archetypal cities. I will call you when I have found an apartment. Dance well tonight, edit well,

  Love,

  Wallace

  Rudolf was convinced that Wallace had gone for good. Onstage that night when he launched into his Corsaire solo “like a raging tiger,” Nigel Gosling, who had heard a rumor that Wallace had “crept away,” knew then for certain it was true. “My professional half couldn’t help thinking ‘If that’s what it does to his dancing, I wish Wallace would leave him more often!’ ” But the jocular tone is misleading, as both Goslings had grown very close to Wallace and were deeply saddened by his sudden flight. “I really love W & so does Maude. He will make a hole in our lives & it is the end of something so beautiful & good for R.… But he is surviving fantastically. ‘I will dance harder & better, that’s all,’ he says. And he will—but I fear for the next year alone.”

  *When Béjart’s company came to London, Rudolf invited Menia, Jorge, and Suzanne Farrell to Fife Road, where Margot, who had heard all about Menia, greeted her with special warmth. “She was wonderful, and spoke with me and Jorge in Spanish.”

  *A performance that was, Bari recalls, “like a wild animal’s. It was the contrary of what he was doing in the Mahler.”

  *Wall was soon to achieve Rudolf’s greatest ambition: the acquisition of a classical repertory tailor-made to his talent. It was Kenneth MacMillan who was the first to exploit the dancer’s power as an actor, detecting a dark, debauched undercurrent to his naturally sunny stage persona, and giving it full expression in Mayerling—the first Western three-act ballet ever created for a man.

  *On his thirty-fifth birthday, in jokey retaliation, the dancers presented their gift to him onstage—a jewel-encrusted, fur-lined dance belt custom-made by the wardrobe master.

  *Rudolf had asked Hurok for a modern work to perform on tour, and planned to make his debut in a tryout performance in Baltimore in October before premiering it in New York.

  *The two, in fact, got on remarkably well, much appreciating the other’s wit and pornographic sense of humor. “Privately is where they really connected,” says Aldous. And although as Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s first danseur noble Helpmann had epitomized the kind of old-fashioned cavalier and mime artist Rudolf scorned, as de Valois protégés and Margot’s most famous partners they had much in common, doing more than any other male dancers of their time to popularize the art of ballet.

  *Stock got her revenge. Her expensive watch had disappeared while on set and she had reported its loss to the police, who telephoned her at home early the following morning. “I was barely awake, and when they asked if there was anyone I suspected, I said, half-jokingly, ‘Rudolf Nureyev.’ I heard later that two policemen had turned up on set to question him.” Stock, who had applied to join the National Ballet of Canada, Rudolf’s next port of call, also heard that when the director, Celia Franca, asked Rudolf if he knew her, he replied without a moment’s hesitation, “Take her.” “Which I thought fantastic.”

  *According to John Percival, Rudolf was not at all happy with the sound that was added in his absence. “I shall know next time,” he said. “It’s not enough to lay your own eggs, you have to hatch them, too.”

  15 NEW BOY IN TOWN

  Rudolf spent the rest of January 1973 “terribly nervous and wrought up,” worrying his friends with the crazy recklessness of his driving. When it was suggested that he should hire a chauffeur to take him to and from the Opera House now that Wallace was no longer there to do it, he contemptuously refused. “That’s so pompous,” he sniffed. With only one person in the house, Fife Road was not the tranquil refuge it appeared, the stairs and floorboards mysteriously creaking at night “as if people were literally walking around.” (When Wallace’s mother stayed there by herself she was so terrified that she moved her bed against the door as a barricade and slept with a police whistle around her neck.)*

  Because they had been together so much as a foursome, the Goslings had feared that, with Wallace gone, Rudolf might keep his distance. “But not a bit of it.” He began to use their house in Victoria Road as his sanctuary, the place he came to rest before a performance and to have supper afterward. As Maude cooked in the tiny galley kitchen he would flop down on the sofa, pick up a newspaper, or watch an old film on television, and not talk. “Then I’d say, ‘It’s ready.’ And we’d go and sit down. Once Rudolf started to eat, he came to life again. He liked being here beca
use he didn’t have to make any effort with us.” The couple had been astonished to hear of the dancer’s New York routine—“invited out every night followed by a retinue, drinking etc”—because in London he rarely went to parties, kept calling for more sodawater to dilute his white wine, and chose to spend his one free evening with them. Only in their company could he be completely himself. “Sometimes it hurt, even,” Nigel admitted in his diary, “to see him switching [the charm] on for other people—& then off again for us!” It had taken five years before he had been anything more than polite and faintly affectionate with Maude, and there were times during this period when he had been so distant with Nigel that the writer wondered if Rudolf actually liked him. Now, however, a decade later, finally able to accept that these were the two people in the world who would never let him down, Rudolf had mellowed, becoming “as gentle & caring & careful … as you could wish.”

  The Gosling’s own son, Nicholas, was a few years younger than Rudolf, and people often wondered what he must feel about his parents’ intense devotion to the Russian star. But as Rudolf came into their lives at around the time that Nicholas went to Oxford and was starting to lead an independent life, he says he never felt threatened. “I was an only child, and at the age when one wants to break away from one’s mother and father, so if anything, it was rather useful to know that they had their own interests.” He did not share Maude and Nigel’s passion for ballet, describing himself as “a bemused bystander to all the mania,” but he was crazy about films and after graduating, worked for over a decade in feature films and television. It was Nicholas who initiated what Rudolf used to call “Roxies,” setting up his projector and screen in the living room after dinner, and showing two or three films he had rented—“usually classics of Western cinema and underground films.” It was at Victoria Road that Rudolf first saw The Red Shoes, as well as several Garbo movies that were new to him. “And he had never seen the Eisenstein films,” said Maude. “So you can imagine his excitement—he became a real film buff. Sometimes on a Sunday we’d go to two movies, one after the other.” When Wallace appeared, “Roxies” became even more frequent. “He and I got along really well,” says Nicholas. “We had very similar aims.”

  The Goslings were the hub of a small inner circle of London friends, among them Charles Murland, a company director, who kept his gay life a secret from his City colleagues. Plump and cheerful with red hair and a ruddy complexion—“like a character out of Dickens”—he was a man of great taste and culture, who loved to surround himself with beautiful young men, especially dancers. His house in Trevor Place, Knightsbridge, was “an all-party place” where the food and wine was always wonderful and where you could be sure to find the Royal Ballet’s most decorative males, from David Wall and Wayne Eagling to the newest member of the corps de ballet. Treasurer of the Royal Ballet School and on the board of the Festival Ballet, Murland had hoped to be appointed a Royal Ballet governor, but both Lord Drogheda and John Tooley refused to have him, saying that he was “too involved with the dancers.” In Rudolf’s case this was certainly true, as being considerably well off with a flexible work schedule, Charles was able to follow the star around the world, arranging chauffeurs or giving parties in whichever city they happened to be in. “That’s what Rudolf got out of it,” said a mutual acquaintance: “Convenience. And Charles got to be a friend of the god. He was always everywhere; he’d just book a plane and turn up.”

  Like Charles Murland, Terence Benton and Paklusha Bicat were fans who had become friends of Rudolf and several other stars. They always reserved the same aisle seats in row F of the Royal Opera House orchesta stalls so they could go straight down the steps and through the pass door backstage before the curtain calls had finished. The granddaughter of a White Russian oil magnate, Paklusha was brought up in Paris, when her parents, the Chermoyeffs, fled the revolution, taking with them the family jewels and documents as proof of their ownership of the vast Caucasian and Georgian oil fields. In 1958 when Terence Benton left Kansas for London—“ignorant of life, tactless but veneered with good manners and a deeply nurtured Englishness”—a friend introduced him into the White Russian colony, and within a few months he had met Paklusha. Although married to André Bicat, an Anglo-French artist, and the mother of their three children, she fell in love, and Terence found himself part of the free, Bloomsbury-like bohemia of their family life in Oxfordshire. The couple soon discovered a mutual passion for music and ballet, and when the Bolshoi and Kirov began coming to London, they would throw parties for the dancers at their elegant Carlos Place apartment. Having “known Margot forever,” they naturally longed to befriend Rudolf, and it was the ballerina who volunteered to bring them together. They met at a restaurant in Jermyn Street, Terry looking like Count Dracula with his black cape and slicked-back black hair, and Paklusha as round and serene as a matrushka doll. She was the quintessential Russian earth mother whose straightforward, unshockable manner immediately won Rudolf over. “She had a wonderful quality about her—the aura she exuded,” recalled Wallace. “Paklusha could get along with anyone from a doorman to a duchess.”

  Although they had not known each other long, Paklusha was the only person in whom Rudolf had confided at the time of his father’s death. And on tour in March 1973, when he heard that Xenia had died, it was Paklusha who undertook to discover the cause. Rudolf had received a telegram from Margot (whom Baryshnikov had managed to contact), saying how sad she was for him, and Rudolf, “in great agitation,” had immediately called and asked Paklusha to find out more. He was unaware that a year and a half earlier Xenia had undergone surgery for stomach cancer. She had told only two or three of her closest friends and begged them to keep it a secret. “I didn’t know anything for months,” Baryshnikov says, “maybe because she wanted to keep me away from another traumatic experience [after Pushkin’s death].” She certainly did not want Misha or anyone else to see her when she was ill, telling Alla Bor that she felt ashamed she “let it happen,” that she was unable to will the cancer away. She would, in fact, have lived longer had the local hospital not given her a transfusion of the wrong blood type. “She took a taxi home and was dead two hours later.” Since losing Alexander Ivanovich, Xenia had greatly changed, becoming reclusive and withdrawn, but nevertheless she and Rudolf had stayed in touch, their telephone calls his only source of Kirov news and gossip. “Xenia was his last link with Leningrad,” noted Nigel in his diary. “Now he will have nobody; he is really cut off. And she was quite young. Oh what bad luck.”

  Thinking it a good idea to have someone living at Fife Road while Rudolf was away, the Goslings had arranged for Wallace’s brother to house-sit. Tommy Potts, then studying in London, was glad to oblige, but Nigel could not help slightly resenting this amiable, rather gauche young man for not being Wallace. The couple had been invited for dinner by Claire, the housekeeper, who was also missing Wallace’s company and thought it highly unlikely that he would be back. “Came away feeling low,” wrote Nigel. “This is the saddest news: I am convinced R will never find anybody so nice.” The Gosling group—a private fan club of five—who met often in Rudolf’s absence (on one occasion, over dinner at Daphne’s in South Kensington, all signing a tablecloth to send off to him), set about trying to engineer a reunion. Terry Benton had managed to find out Wallace’s address in Los Angeles, to which Nigel wrote, saying how distressed they had been by his sudden departure, and how much he was missed. “I see Rudolf will be in LA at the end of the month so give him our love too,” Nigel added as a hopeful postscript, keeping a note of any progress in his diary.

  Monday 26 February: Charles M reported that he had heard … W had visited R there.… In any case, good news. “Ça va mieux” was the report.

  Saturday 17 March: R’s birthday; the first one since his arrival in the west that we have missed.… He rang … sounded v cheerful, says they are booked solid everywhere.… what’s more, had a “terrific” time in LA with Wallace (who is joining him again briefly later). That
is great news.

  Wednesday 21 March: Niko [Georgiadis] rang & said he had talked to R.… Wallace answered the phone … isn’t that great. How I hope that continues.