Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Valentino was due to be released in the United States in July 1977 and in the United Kingdom three months later. Rudolf, according to Tristram Holland (who edited an Alexander Bland book on the film), “expected it to be nothing other than excellent.” He had told Carrière that what Russell needed were des couilles en fer (iron balls) to maintain the violent statements of his style from start to finish. This, though, turned out to be the main problem. “He gives you no respite, he needed to temper it,” comments Caron. “John Ford used to say, ‘Let them rest,’ but Ken goes unrelentingly from one climax to another.” In Pauline Kael’s opinion, however, nothing could have salvaged Valentino: “There is no artistry left in Ken Russell’s work. By now, his sensationalist reputation is based merely on his ‘going further’ than anybody else.… His films have become schoolboy Black Masses—a mixture of offensiveness and crude dumbness.… Spitefulness is almost the sole emotion of Valentino.”

  What had particularly nauseated Kael—more even than the sight of the star “smeared in vomit and forced to soil himself”—was Rudolf looking as prematurely aged and effete as the duc de Chartres from Valentino’s film Monsieur Beaucaire, “a textbook example of a director’s sadism toward his own star.” With the right director and photographed with care, he could, she believed, have been “supremely entertaining” as a film actor. “Seen up close … Nureyev has the seductive, moody insolence of an older, more cosmopolitan James Dean.” Opening on both sides of the Atlantic to unanimously bad reviews, Valentino proved a regrettable showcase for Rudolf’s big-screen debut. And yet he had turned the experience to his advantage, widening his own directorial expertise by studying Russell’s working methods. “Process often more interesting than result.” The greatest benefit of Valentino, however, was allowing him, in Luigi’s words, “what he never have: a vacation for his body.” After he rejoined the Royal Ballet on November 18, 1976, his hair still styled in a twenties crop, Rudolf over the next six months gave some of the greatest performances of his career.

  His playmate on location had been Armen’s daughter, Jeannette, who was then going through a divorce. “You have to get away,” Rudolf had said, urging her to come to London and stay in his suite at Grosvenor House. “So I did. And he couldn’t have been nicer, keeping me with him and introducing me to everyone on the set.” The first night when shooting was over Rudolf was getting into the car when Jeannette said that she would see him later.” I told him that some of the boys had asked me to go to the pub. And he looked at me and he said, ‘Bitch! I’ve been working on this movie for two months and nobody has ever invited me for a drink.’ Rudolf enjoyed debriefing Jeannette on her adventures with the crew, and expected her to accompany him on his nocturnal “cottaging” expeditions in Hyde Park: “I’d have to stand there waiting outside the public lavatories.” Until this trip she had always felt a little intimidated by Rudolf, though he had thought of her from the beginning as an ideal sister—fun and free-spirited in ways that Rosa, Razida, and Lilia could never be. He also took an avuncular interest in her nine-year-old son, volunteering to babysit a number of times. “I’d done some errands and was coming back through Chinatown when, all of a sudden, I see this sable coat walking down the street—it’s Rudolf with Devin on his shoulders!” On another occasion she got home to find the pair watching a football game on TV, Rudolf drinking Heineken out of a bottle with his feet slung up on the coffee table. “He was very eager that Devin should be a guy,” says Jeannette, remembering how he rebuked her once for dressing her son as a butterfly for a children’s party.

  Their friendship had flourished on the understanding that there was no romantic expectation on her side—“I’ve gotta say he didn’t appeal to me as a man I could be sexually attracted to.” Consequently she couldn’t have been more taken aback when, skinny-dipping together in a lake en route to Santa Barbara, Rudolf casually asked Jeannette if she would like to have his baby.

  And I looked at him and said, “Why?” And he said, “Because it would be nice to have a baby.” “Well, what would I do: have this child and give it to you to raise?” And he said, “Well, yes.” And I said, “Well, no.” I was in my early twenties and this wasn’t something in my game plan—I’d had my baby. And besides I was married then, and a good Catholic girl.

  Rudolf (like Jean Marais before him) wanted a son by a woman who, in Cocteau’s words, was “willing to be used for that purpose only.” “If he could have been an androgyne and made the son himself he would have been delighted,” says Ghislaine Thesmar. But there was someone else Rudolf had in mind as the perfect brood mare. Described by her actress friend Candice Bergen as “the mother we all wanted to have and to be,” Tessa Kennedy had five children, four of whom were boys. They had recently met when film director Milos Forman brought Rudolf to lunch at her house in Hyde Park Gardens. A successful interior designer, she was then married to her second husband, producer Elliott Kastner, her movie milieu being one reason she and Rudolf had bonded immediately. “Elliott was a member of the academy, so we had all these films—films not even finished yet.” The other reason, she reckons, was her sons—“I’d had all these boys, so he thought he’d be sure of having a son with me.”

  But there were many other appealing sides to Tessa—not least her Slav roots and intriguingly colorful past. One of twin daughters of a Yugoslav shipping family, her mother was a wealthy beauty known as the “Pearl of Dubrovnik,” and Tessa had created a romantic label of her own. In 1957, when, at the age of eighteen, the blond, melting-eyed debutante eloped with journalist Dominick Elwes to Cuba, she was feted by the press as an icon of young love—the “Runaway Heiress.” Hunted by Interpol, she and Dominick, an irrepressible character of whom Kenneth Tynan (quoting Shakespeare) once said, “He speaks holiday,” drove a pair of pastel blue and pink Cadillacs, and hung out in bars with Ernest Hemingway and members of the Mob. Reality hit in Tessa’s early twenties, when, while she and her husband were living in London with their three small sons, Dominick developed chronic depression. “I thought one day the children would find him dead and they’d never get over that. Which is why I had to leave him.”* Having apprenticed herself to decorator David Mlinaric for five pounds a week, Tessa was running her own company within three years. Her spirit and energy were as invincible as Rudolf’s; neither went to bed before the early hours, and if he did not share the taste for gambling Tessa had acquired in Havana, he loved her juxtaposition of male savvy and business acumen with feminine allure.

  Being “very married at the time,” she, like Jeannette, was unwilling to conceive to order, but welcomed Rudolf’s mentoring of her own boys. Knowing that Cary Elwes had ambitions to be a movie actor, Rudolf insisted that he first learn to speak the lines of Shakespeare, and when Damian decided to be an artist said, “He’s got to suffer. Tell him to read [Mario Praz’s] The Romantic Agony.” “Rudolf adored education. He used to say, ‘You can lose your country and all your possessions, but they can never take away your knowledge.’ ” His desire for a child—and specifically for a son—was partly a reflection of his desire to have someone he could mold—“though probably he would disappoint me in so many ways. If he doesn’t live up to my expectations.” And it was partly a means of self-perpetuation; having felt “a slight anxiety that it will soon be over,” Rudolf now wanted, as Thesmar says, “to clone himself.” He had passed his thirty-ninth birthday in March 1977, and was suddenly aware of “warning bells,” remembering his father’s caution: “You don’t see men dancing after 40.” He told Rudi van Dantzig, who was concerned about the signs of distress Rudolf was then showing, “I must expand my horizons … do other things.”

  • • •

  He had put his faith in contemporary dancing as a way of extending his performing career, regarding this other vocabulary as an investment in his future. “But by the time he worked with me he was a pretty old dog,” says Murray Louis. “Misha came to this technique when he was much younger.” And this in itself was another cause of Rudolf’s agitat
ion. It was “astounding” to van Dantzig that he should feel so threatened—“was there no room in the world for two such talented people?”—but Baryshnikov’s superiority as a contemporary dancer was too striking to ignore. His physique, gift for mimicry, and exceptional coordination had allowed him to make the transition more naturally than Rudolf, whose achievements had come about only through tremendous effort and will. “It’s a different lightness and breakup in the body that Misha intuitively understands,” says Glen Tetley, while to Violette Verdy and others, Rudolf would never look anything other than a ballet dancer in modern roles. “He adapted himself, but only up to a point. There was a look that was almost right. But at the core it was still the great Nureyev doing that thing.… His identity was too established. He conjugated; he didn’t disappear.”

  And because Baryshnikov (in Jerome Robbins’s words) “could drop himself and become the character,” he was a lot more popular with choreographers, who also found him much easier to work with. Tetley describes how Misha’s “playful quality” helped to create an open atmosphere—“the ideal situation in which movement can happen.” And Murray Louis, remembering the way Rudolf would always “mark” the steps rather than fully perform them, says, “I let him get away with murder.” It was, however, the rehearsal aspect of dancing that Baryshnikov enjoyed most. “I was bored when they start to perform.… [Rudolf] was completely opposite. He wanted to do very fast, learn very fast and go.”

  Rudolf was the first to acknowledge this. Congratulating Misha after seeing him in Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove, the 1976 piece that brilliantly showcased his improvisational and comic talents, Rudolf remarked, “You move so well.… And I know, I know it takes a lot of time.… And I don’t have it!” But he was becoming increasingly resentful of the way the younger dancer was “aping” him. Theme and Variations, the first Balanchine ballet he had vowed to learn, and had subsequently danced with American Ballet Theatre a year after coming to the West, had returned to ABT’s repertory in October 1974 at Baryshnikov’s request. Rudolf had been the first male star after Babilée to perform Petit’s Le Jeune Homme et la mort; Misha had been the next. “I went the same way in a way,” he admits. “[Rudolf] worked with Paul Taylor, I worked with Paul Taylor; he worked with Martha Graham, I worked with Martha Graham.”

  And it did not stop with dancing. Rudolf had set out “to create Russian ballet in the West,” Misha immediately following suit by staging The Nutcracker and Don Quixote. Both stars had made their debuts as screen actors the same year, but whereas Valentino had been written off as a disaster, The Turning Point, despite its soap opera script, had earned Baryshnikov an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. “I remember how jealous Rudolf was that Misha had been such a success,” says Tessa Kennedy. “He always thought he was a much better actor.” Furious that Misha was now “taking things away” from him—that is, opportunities to stage the classics—Rudolf had begun making jibes about him. “There are no secrets in the ballet world,” remarked Charles France. “So Misha would hear about things Rudolf was saying. But he looked on it with a sense of: well, if he has to do that—fine. I don’t.”

  Rudolf had instructed Gorlinsky to tell the Canadian ballet that under no circumstances did he ever want to appear in any season “where they book him at the same time.” And yet the last thing he had to fear was that Baryshnikov would try to emulate his long crusades with foreign companies around the world. “Rudolf was looking for gigs.… I was not that hungry for work.” In fact, although he would never have admitted it, Rudolf was indebted to the New Boy. In May 1973, a year before Baryshnikov’s defection, he had “a terrible dream.” He was in an elevator that kept going down and that he could not stop. “Not hard to interpret,” he told Nigel, who in turn noted in his diary, “Poor R. Maybe he won’t go any higher but he has a long way to come down before others find him on their level.” The last three years, however, had seen Rudolf, galvanized by the element of competition, in exultant form. To a new generation of balletomanes who had missed the Fonteyn-Nureyev phenomenon of the sixties, there was “a triumvirate of three equally great male dancers”—Rudolf, Baryshnikov, and Dowell. To quote critic Alastair Macaulay: “Nureyev was a key part of my life for that short period: 1975–77. I was twenty and twenty-one, and he was part of the end of my adolescence. He was my first Florimund, my first Siegfried, my first Colas, my first Oberon, my first Apollo, my first Prodigal, my first Jean de Brienne, my first Albrecht, my first Drosselmeyer, in my first Dances at a Gathering.”

  Natalia Makarova had also reinspired the classicist in Rudolf. In December 1976, with no special announcement, the two stars had appeared at the Royal Opera House together in Swan Lake, as the ballerina’s regular partner, Anthony Dowell, had been injured. Two months later they were together again in Paris dancing La Sylphide at the Palais des Sports—“the happiest of reconciliations”—and in May Rudolf had included Makarova among his “Friends” in New York. Later that summer Rudolf would dance a mixed program with Seymour, Fonteyn, and Makarova, the two Russians’ Corsaire duet “making even senior critics feel that time had stopped and that Nureyev was still dancing as he had with Fonteyn in Corsaire in 1962.” “We had all right vibrations this time around,” Makarova told a journalist. “He is softer now. We are getting to know each other.” As Murray Louis witnessed one night during a dinner in New York, the pair almost immediately, “like two conspirators,” had fallen into conversation in Russian. They discussed fouetté technique and the difference between Russian and American musicality, Rudolf explaining to Natasha how Broadway dancing had restructured rhythmic phrasing, and how this had influenced Balanchine when he first arrived in America. He was holding her hand as they were talking, and both their hands were resting on Louis’s stomach.

  I felt like a mother with two children on her lap.… I am sure if Baryshnikov were there, his hand would have also joined theirs and the three would have found their communion back to Kirov and back to the heart and soul of Russia, which none of them have ever left or ever will or can. No matter how long they live in the West, they will always be Russian. No matter how they insult and slander each other, they are a family and can never be separated.

  *Rudolf’s peace of mind was not improved by an anonymous letter that had just arrived warning that he would soon be receiving a letter bomb. Sure enough, a parcel was delivered but was found to contain nothing more than a number of photographs and a note. They were from someone Rudolf had come to call “the Mad Irish Girl,” a fan who, like many others, seriously believed him to be in love with her. She was the most bothersome because of her ability to locate Rudolf, and however often he changed the phone number she somehow always managed to find out the new one. The calls stopped abruptly when Scotland Yard, alerted to the bomb scare, paid the young woman a visit, “and frightened the living daylights out of her.”

  *Aptly called the Blue Room because of its blue carpet and paisley wallpaper. The animated figures used male movie stars’ heads superimposed onto photographs of naked muscle-men—“like cut-out dolls fucking each other.” When Wallace came down to breakfast one morning he found a cut-out on the kitchen dresser.” It must have blown out of the window and been put there by Claire. She didn’t say a word about it. And when I mentioned it to Nigel and Maude, they said, “Don’t give it another thought. Claire used to be a chambermaid at the George V—she’s seen everything!” After dinner at Fife Road, Wallace showed the Goslings the finished film on a viewer, the projectionist at the screening room he had hired having found it too “distasteful” to continue running it. In Nigel’s view, Wallace’s cartoon was “v original & has a real style but straight porn-homosexual. I fear using Brando’s head will be the real stumbling block.”

  †The coat was what Rudolf called “quiet money” to compensate for having been excluded from Hurok’s birthday gala in favor of Bolshoi dancers.

  *The Manon duet had never been so excitingly performed, Rudolf and Merle Park making the two lovers insa
tiably sexy by continuing kissing long after the music had stopped. In the biggest climax he spun her two full revolutions while lifting her diagonally upward, and then let go only to catch her a second before she hit the stage. “We hammed it up!—which it needs,” Park says with a laugh. “We’re both peasants and we both know how to ham.”

  *The boy had demanded four hundred francs for his services, which Rudolf refused to pay.

  *Imported goods from Intourist shops—“anything from car tires to candy” (Armen Bali)—were available only to foreigners, and parcels sent to Rudolf’s family by Gorlinsky’s office had recently been refused by the Russian authorities. Barclays Bank money orders had arrived (three hundred British pounds to Farida in Ufa, and another three hundred to Rosa in Leningrad) but the state took 40 percent and paid the remainder in rubles at the swindling “official” exchange rate of 66 kopeks to the dollar.

  *A New York agent had recently sent Rudolf the first draft of a new Tennessee Williams play, This Is (an Entertainment), to be directed by Frank Dunlop. He was being offered the dual role of a chauffeur who in act 1 is having an affair with a countess, as well as the commanding general of a revolutionary army, who becomes the countess’s lover in act 2. Williams told the writer David Daniel that he had designed the two parts to “bring out what he thought were the contradictory and complementary sides of Rudolf’s sexual allure.” But finding it “far too obscure and precious,” Nigel sent Rudolf a letter outlining “GOOD POINTS (e.g. a good author and director for a debut); BAD POINTS (The verbal style demands great speaking technique …); and GENERAL POINTS: (I cannot see this being in any way a widely-popular long-running money-making play).” The end result was that Rudolf turned it down.