Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  It had not been long before Rudolf set Armen to work on the project he had had in mind for her all along: to get his family out of Russia. With his signed letter of authorization, she had made contact the previous summer with the American consul general in Leningrad appealing for temporary exit visas for Farida and Rosa. Letters from the consulate and the embassy in Moscow were then sent to the relevant authorities in Ufa, the U.S. State Department having requested to be informed of any progress. In June ’74 Armen traveled to Russia, taking clothes and twenty-five thousand dollars to buy gifts while she was there;* the cash, taken from her own account, was intended to help not only the Nureyevs but a Russian singer she had known in Manchuria, who now lived in Leningrad. She met her friend and his two daughters in a park near her hotel, and was distributing the contents of her package when Rosa, who was also there, suddenly started shouting and snatching things out of Armen’s hands. “She thought I’d been spending Rudolf’s money.”

  Soon after Armen and Rudolf met she had written Rosa a letter saying how guilty she felt to be having “all the joy” of her brother while Rosa herself was so far away. “I said, ‘I wish for the day that you’ll be able to enjoy the glory that he has and be proud of him.’ ” But to Rosa this had seemed like gloating and, from the moment they met, she had made her resentment clear. Farida, too, had been cold and unwelcoming: “I had tears in my eyes when I asked, ‘Do you miss him?’ but it was absolutely like she was mute and dumb, with a heart made out of ice. She kept looking at Rosa, and said not a word except when I gave her my mother’s ring and beads of coral—the Tatar national stone. Then she thanked me.”

  It was almost as if she knew that Armen had hopes of casting herself in Farida’s role, once having asked Rudolf to “Please accept me as your mother.” (“No,” he had replied emphatically, “you’re not my mother, you’re my friend.”) Nevertheless the plan was for Farida to stay with Armen in San Francisco, and by the time of Armen’s departure at the beginning of July all the necessary papers were in order and air tickets were being held by the U.S. ambassador. A week later, though, Rudolf, in a state of fury, woke Nigel up at three in the morning.

  At the v last minute Rosa rings from Leningrad (she had wanted to come too—R didn’t want her) to say the Collektiv had vetoed the trip. Apparently she had once been a Party member & been expelled. R exploded, said he would go to the Press, kick up a “Panov” row etc. Said he would spill all at an interview with Time next day. Managed to dissuade him, & let it run for a few days.

  Three weeks earlier the dancers Valery and Galina Panov, who for two years had been living in Leningrad under virtual house arrest, had finally been allowed to emigrate to Israel. In recent years a number of Jewish or half-Jewish Russians had been granted affidavits to come to the West on grounds of “family reunification,” and when this entitlement was withheld from the Panovs, the couple, with the help of influential foreign friends, were able to arouse spectacular support from abroad. Thousands of fellow performers, including some of the greatest names in theater and dance, signed petitions, and held demonstrations and all-night vigils to show solidarity, their outcry taking effect on June 7, when the Panovs learned that they were free to leave. At no point had their English friend and chief activist, Patricia Barnes, Clive’s wife, tried to enlist Rudolf in the campaign—“It would have been an imposition: he had too much to lose.” But even though, after speaking to Valery sometime later, Rudolf had expressed regret at not having done anything to help, the international crusade to “Free Russian Jewry” was not one to which he subscribed. On the contrary—“I will fight with the Arabs!” he once declared during a heated debate on the subject, an issue that had sparked his most malign expressions of anti-Semitism. “Sure it did,” said Wallace. “He was very upset that Russian Jews were getting out, and his mother wasn’t.”

  When he performed in Paris in October, Rudolf’s spirits sunk even lower. Le Monde had given him “a disastrous notice,” and Wallace had telephoned several times threatening to kill himself. “It had got to the point where I couldn’t live without him, and I couldn’t live with him.” Rudolf told the Goslings that he was going to get Wallace on the first plane out of Los Angeles, but Nigel, who had received a letter from Wallace of similar bleakness, had already written to persuade him to return to Europe. “It would make a lot of sense. We are all going through a tough patch (Rudolf too—he is in the most difficult part of his whole career obviously), and we need each other’s support. Everybody asks after you. What could tempt you back?” A strong inducement was the fact that the Goslings themselves were to be in Paris at that time, and when Rudolf flew to New York for one night to launch Paul Taylor’s season, he returned with Wallace in tow.

  W rang, quite cheerful & said we should all meet for dinner at 7pm: then later rang again, suicidal, to say R had walked out on him & he was going to drink himself to sleep if he didn’t put himself out of the window. Wouldn’t come out or let us go there. So we went & dined & found a message from R to meet them at the Club Sept as usual, around 9, We arrived late & found W red-eyed with crying & almost incapable of speaking: he cheered up slightly slowly. Next day we lunched together & he seemed better but that evening at a private dinner (about 10) he suddenly left the table & was found in the next room shouting into the street through the open window.

  During the performance the following night, Rudolf had slipped and hurt his leg after the final assemblé turn, and when the Goslings saw him in his dressing room, his mood was ominously dark. “Wallace seems better,” they volunteered, but Rudolf glowered; this relationship was proving an unnecessary drain on his energy. “If he gives more trouble I will kick him out,” he said to Nigel, whose “heart froze,” as he remembered how sweetly solicitous Rudolf had been on the first night, feeding Wallace as if he were a child. “It was the reaction of fury at falling etc, but it might happen again.”

  The end of the year saw Rudolf presenting the first Nureyev and Friends venture in New York, his small ensemble this time including Louis Falco, a Limón protégé, and four members of Paul Taylor’s company. The point, he said, was to introduce a Broadway audience prone to “burst into screams” to modern, more challenging works. “These are not spectacular ballets: these are ballets to contemplate. It’s to the great credit of the public that they respond the way they do.” For this, and every subsequent season, the Uris Theater was sold out for five weeks, though it was Rudolf’s name, not his choice of repertory, that had filled the two thousand seats. To Alan Kriegsman of the Washington Post, Rudolf was turning himself into “the ballet world’s no. 1 missionary.” “Nureyev is trading on his own box office galvanism, but not for even remotely venal reasons. Nothing would have prevented his continuing in the conventional mold, guesting with one troupe and one partner after another, making ostentatious pas de deux a life work.… He has chosen a far harder, more visionary, more courageous course of risk and adventure.”

  Not everyone agreed. Asked once again by Rudolf to be Iago to his Othello, Erik had turned him down. “I said to him, ‘Rudik, I cannot be one of your “friends” on that program, because there isn’t one person on it who is a real friend.’ ” And hearing of Rudolf’s latest project, Ninette de Valois had been incensed by its “egotistical vulgarity,” complaining to Nigel, “I am convinced that Nureyev’s attitude is undergoing a sad change.… He is not only dance mad but money mad.”

  But ever since he arrived in the West, it had been Rudolf’s belief that how much you were paid was a sign of how much you were worth. His Broadway scheme may have been motivated by what Kriegsman called “Nureyev’s own magnanimous artistic conscience,” but it was also an inspired business idea involving minimum overheads, no scenery, and only a handful of dancers and musicians. For the Palais des Sports season Rudolf had received 5 percent of box office takings in addition to his fee of three thousand dollars a performance, while his share of the Uris run was as high as $45,000 a week. Broadway is big business—the reason that Balanchine h
ad finally allowed Rudolf to perform Apollo in New York, reckoning that the 5 percent of the gross he demanded for the five-week run would rescue his school from what Barbara Horgan called a “perilous” financial situation. “I think it came out to about twenty-five thousand dollars, which was more money than you could possibly imagine in those days.”

  Whether providing dance numbers for legendary hoofers or a troupe of elephants, Balanchine had relished his spell in commercial theater—choreographing four Rodgers and Hart shows among many others—going on to spice his masterworks with a hint of low culture, and lavishing the money he had made on a Long Island house and ermine coat for his Hollywood-star wife, Vera Zorina. To the spartan de Valois, on the other hand (who even in old age was renowned for refusing the offer of an Opera House car in favor of taking the underground), the Broadway Nureyev was impossible to understand. She could no more see why he would want to surround himself with “a senseless moneymaking gang of friends” than she could condone his crusade to bring minority-interest modern works to the masses. She had never made a secret of her contempt for most modern choreographers—“She loathes [Hans] van Manen too—& Tetley, it appears,” remarked Nigel—and she was furious that Anthony Dowell, “a truly great & dedicated artist,” had profaned himself by appearing with Rudolf in Songs of a Wayfarer. “I would not enter into a discussion over the pretentious Béjart work,” she told Nigel, “except to quote Nureyev, ‘We do everything up to conceiving on the floor.’ I hated seeing Dowell in it.”

  It was, she believed, “the hysterical effect of freedom” that had led to Rudolf’s downfall, his multitude of talents driving him “to lick the whole map as fast as he could” in order to explore them all. “He never would stay anywhere more than five minutes, so no one could get very far with him. Which of course is very much the reaction of any Russian exile from being so boxed up.” It was upsetting to her that this lifestyle had taken its toll on Rudolf’s classicism, once “the most aristocratic style” she had ever seen, and she blamed Nigel for ignoring this in his reviews. Recent Alexander Bland pieces had, she complained, focused on Nureyev far more than on any other Royal Ballet artist, though in his letter of defense Nigel points out that he (or rather, they, “for Maude reads—and often emends—every word I write”) had inevitably written at length about Rudolf as he had featured prominently in three of the six current works. “It is possible that we rate … Nureyev’s performances differently,” he went on. “Everybody has their own priorities and so ends up with different assessments.” But this infuriated de Valois even more. “Do you really think this is a correct attitude from a critic? It is, to me, too subjective,” she snapped in the two-and-a-half-page polemic she wrote in reply. “I ask more of Nureyev than you do.… You say that Nureyev suffers from ‘nerves’ in London. Of course. He is no fool & knows that most of the time he is ill-prepared.… I would ask him not to learn Manon in 5 days & make a mess of it.”

  De Valois was probably justified in accusing Nigel of being “especially indulgent” toward Rudolf. In his introduction to Observer of the Dance (the 1985 collection of Alexander Bland criticism), Rudolf describes Nigel as “totally objective,” “completely without prejudice,” and “extraordinarily detached”—which is straining to prove a point. Nigel himself was only too aware of conflicting interests, questioning if he had been fair to Makarova in his review of Song of the Earth—“knowing that I start with a personal prejudice against her.” His relationship with Rudolf was, by his own admission, “one of the most exciting and enjoyable bits of my life,” his guru status increasingly more stimulating to him than his job as a critic. This is tangible in Nigel’s letters, his description, for example, of a “fabulous pas magnetique” in a pre-Petipa Sleeping Beauty with choreography by Espinosa, “in which the Prince dances with Aurora while she is still asleep, then he kisses her.… Could you use it some time? It is annoying to think that you won’t!” In recent months, however, he had been overstepping into Gorlinsky’s territory by assuming a more impresarial role and steering Rudolf away from projects that he felt to be unwise.* With Charles Murland, who had been offered the chairmanship of London Festival Ballet, Nigel was also playing power games, advising Charles to think seriously about accepting the post as a way of “maybe replacing Beryl Grey [the current director] with R.” Through Terry Benton, the archivist at the Opera House, with access to board minutes, Nigel received inside information denied to his fellow critics, and on December 4, 1974, wrote a confidential letter “on a slightly delicate subject” to John Tooley:

  A few weeks ago Rudi Nureyev asked me if I knew where he could get a copy made of his ms piano score of La Bayadère, in case it got lost.… [It] transpired that [the archives] already have a photograph record of the whole score, presumably made when the “Shadows” episode was being arranged in Jack Lanchbery’s day.… I well understand Jack’s zeal in snatching the opportunity but I am sure you will realise that [Rudolf] would be very upset if he knew about it. I am inclined to sympathise.… Would you let me know if you agree?… 1977 will be the centenary of the premiere of La Bayadère in St. Petersburg and, having seen the single ballet in Leningrad, I think it might be well worth while using the excuse for a (Rudi-Fred?) revival.

  In Marina Vaizey’s review of Observer of the Dance, she claims, quite rightly, that Nigel was more ambitious for the arts he discussed than for himself, quoting his own definition of the critic as “a modest figure with a diminutive power to help and a little more to hurt.” There can be no doubt, however, that at this point in Rudolf’s career, both he and Maude were compromising their critical impartiality by doing far too much to help. As if aware of this, the Goslings had always been careful about maintaining a front, never going to see Rudolf backstage except when they were abroad—“because nobody knew us.” And when their colleague Oleg Kerensky joined them at Fife Road one night for dinner, Nigel confessed to having been “a bit alarmed” by the fact that Kerensky might detect just how intimately linked to Rudolf they were. “We left all the adjectives to the other people,” Maude would insist, a claim also voiced by Nigel in a letter written to Rudolf in the spring of 1971:

  It suddenly came over me, during Apollo, how horrible it is that by your letting me be your friend you have stopped my pen from saying outright … just what a fantastic thrill I get from your dancing. I have to try to look cool and detached and all that and leave the superlatives to my colleagues. So I just wanted to put in a private word to say that I still get the same shiver down my spine when you walk on and the same tingle when you start to move.… Not to mention that you have the most seductive bum in the business, but that is a different—but related—matter. Anyhow this is to say that after ten years I am turned on just exactly the same, damn it. I supposed it was around June 12th 1961 when you first walked across my eyeball (in the Hunting Scene in Sleeping B in Paris) … [and] this is a token to show I did not miss the anniversary … just accept it as a kind of chaste little love-bite. Loveski, N

  Richard Buckle was not alone among London’s dance critics in believing that Nigel was in love with Rudolf. “Everybody knows that. He was a queen when he was young.” And yet despite Nigel’s sojourn in Berlin, there is no evidence of youthful homosexuality in the early diaries or in his autobiographical novel, Thicker Than Water (about two young men competing for the love of a girl). In one of the three existing 1970s journals, Nigel admits to having been “pleased of course” when Rudolf kissed him on the mouth for the first time while saying good-bye. “Since then always à la Russe [on each cheek three times).” But although mentioning the fact that he had briefly and inadvertently seen Rudolf naked when the dancer was sitting on the stairs with a towel around his loins, his matter-of-fact comment—“It is big & solid like a club”—is hardly evidence of any lascivious feelings. “Nigel was only writing in terms to which Rudolf would relate,” maintains Tristram Holland, referring to the “anniversary” letter. “He loved all that joshing—and it was exactly the same with Wallace.”
Certainly, although genuinely mystified by Wallace’s idiosyncratic treatment of Borges’s Circular Ruins, Nigel would use this and other pornographic pursuits as an opportunity for fun. “Now, Wallace,” he once wrote, “the question is—what are the prospects of Members Only or Mr. Gooniverse or whatever the name is of your film (what about Coming Shortly?).”

  Throughout his life the friends Rudolf chose were always those who were in some way useful to him. And yet Alexander Bland’s panegyrics—a veritable Nureyev industry—were not the reason he counted the Goslings as “family.” Maude herself admitted that Rudolf rarely, if ever, read their criticism (if anyone raised an eyebrow about an especially favorable review, he would reply with just one word: “Love”). It was Nigel’s writing on art that he admired. A critic “instinctively sympathetic to what was new,” Nigel was among the first to champion British and American modernists from Henry Moore to Roy Lichtenstein and Mark Rothko. It was through the Goslings that Rudolf had met the avant-garde directors, writers, and artists “who excited me with their ideas,” and it was at the Victoria Road “Roxies” that he was introduced to the films of Jean Genet, Gregory Markopoulos, and Kenneth Anger, enabling him “to catch up on some of those things that I had left Russia to find.”