Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  He had invited Rudi to New York for a purpose, and the following morning pushed a thick wad of paper across the breakfast table, saying, “Read this.” It was a script for another Nijinsky film, conceived this time by Jean-Claude Carrière (Luis Buñuel’s collaborator on The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire). Entitled Nureyev’s Nijinsky, it would feature Rudolf (as himself) dancing extracts from the legendary roles and choreographing a ballet based on Nijinsky’s life. What Rudolf proposed was a van Dantzig restaging of the 1913 ballet Jeux as Diaghilev had originally envisioned it—a flirtation during a tennis game between a man and two boys. In his memoirs Nijinsky claims that it was his mentor’s dream to have two lovers at the same time. “He often told me so, but I refused.” A ballet with a homosexual theme was, Rudolf enthused to Rudi, “something right up your street,” but the filmmakers immediately vetoed the idea. Their meeting in New York with Carrière’s cowriter, John Heilpern, was “all a bit bleak,” Rudi recalls, and he sensed that Rudolf was in any case having second thoughts about the project. “I hate it,” he had said of Heilpern’s script, and the film’s director, Anthony Page, witnessed the extent of Rudolf’s antipathy when they all met in Paris to discuss the first draft: “It was at Maxim’s after a revival of La Sylphide. Heilpern had been to see it and hadn’t said anything about the performance, which angered Rudolf. It was not far into dinner when he suddenly turned on John and said, ‘The script is shit. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with it. It’s too trivial to be even worth discussing.’ ”

  It was, Page says, “too journalistic” for Rudolf, but its conclusion may also have been too autobiographical. The Nureyev of the story discovers that an old man who filmed Nijinsky’s final recital in Switzerland (when all he did was repeat four simple arm movements over and over again) had in fact taken more footage of Nijinsky actually dancing on that occasion but had destroyed it in order to perpetuate the myth. A decade earlier, at the time of his final rupture with Erik, Rudolf believed that Nijinsky’s insanity had been precipitated by the end of his affair with Diaghilev. Now his view had changed. Nijinsky’s “mind broke,” he said, “because he could no longer dance”—an explanation more likely than any other for his own recent despair.

  Rudolf’s life was anyway imitating fiction. The script begins with a press conference at which he announces his “Diaghilev Season”: Spectre de la rose, Petrushka, and L’Après-midi d’un faune—the same three ballets that he was soon to perform for Robert Joffrey’s company in New York. Acting on Erik’s advice, and not wanting to be seen “jumping on dead man’s bones,” Rudolf had deliberately avoided the Nijinsky repertory (except for Petrushka and Les Sylphides), but now, as a fortieth-birthday present to himself, he decided that it was “time to indulge, to be foolish if I wish.” It was, as he realized, one more experience to be gained from the West, the famous Ballets Russes works known in Leningrad only for their notoriety.

  The teachers used to talk about Diaghilev but in a hushed voice as though it was about a scandal. We learned about Faune from the gossip point of view.… You must remember that Diaghilev is something which happened to you, not to us.… Even today when he is officially accepted, people in Russia are still trying to relate to him. He was a bit unreal and exotic, like a rich uncle who turns up suddenly in America.

  As far as Rudolf was concerned, dancing the Nijinsky roles—learning “what he was about, how he moved, what goals he had, what discoveries he made”—was a way of bringing the history of his art to life. An eleven-minute distillation of ballet modernism, Nijinsky’s Faune developed and crystallized the innovations made by Fokine: the turned-in leg positions from Petrushka and the two-dimensional, sideways-angled body from Cléopâtre.

  The most ephemeral of the performing arts, ballet owes its survival to the baton-passing knowledge of veteran performers, and aware of this, Rudolf went out of his way to consult those closest to the source. He learned Spectre from Alexander Gavrilov, who took over from Nijinsky; he asked Baryshnikov to show him the version he had learned from André Eglevsky (taught by Fokine), and Margot to lend him the notes she had taken from Tamara Karsavina, who created the role of the young girl. For Faune he got Charles Jude to demonstrate the version he had learned from Nijinsky’s replacement, Léonide Massine:

  We were all laughing at the rehearsals because Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava, had come over from America and set it. Then Lifar arrived and showed another version, then Nijinsky’s widow came and tried to change that. I guess they arrived at some sort of compromise. Then I went to the Ballet Rambert who had learned it from Diaghilev’s own dancers and worked with William Chappell and Elizabeth Schooling; even they each had different ideas. So in the end I had to make up my own mind.

  Choreography, he said, was like an item of clothing—“you have to try it on and move around and make it fit your own body.” Naturally the same went for costumes. Designer Rouben Ter-Arutunian had steeped himself “in the atmosphere of Bakst” to arrive at his authentic designs, but to Rudolf the pink, petaled skull cap that Nijinsky wore as the Spectre looked “like a skin disease.” He commissioned Toer van Schayk to come up with something more flattering, and soon adapted the original makeup—the red eyes and pointed Dr. Spock ears—that Ter-Arutunian had overseen for Faune. “There are two ways of going about a reconstruction. Either petal by petal, just as it was, or whether it suits you or not.… You try to make the thing alive. You have to try to say it with your own tools.” It was far more important, Rudolf believed, to convey the spirit of the original. When Nijinsky’s sixty-four-year-old daughter Kyra came to his San Francisco dressing room, a poignant figure wearing a little sequinned hat, her teeth stained with lipstick, Rudolf claimed that from the way she lifted her heavy arms to strike one of her father’s Spectre poses, he could tell what power Nijinsky must have had, power that “comes from inside.”*

  Baryshnikov would argue that no contemporary dancer, himself included, has ever excelled in the Nijinsky roles. “Those Diaghilev pieces didn’t work on anybody: They’re better than anybody who danced them.” Indeed Rudolf’s Joffrey season made little impression—least of all La Spectre de la rose, which looked dated and sentimental as Rudolf strained to prove his virtuosity instead of recapturing the Spectre’s evanescent aura. He had more success in Faune, and Arlene Croce praised the “creaturely warmth” that bonded the two dancers, as well as the power they showed in slow motion. Rudolf had closely studied the still photographs of Faune—but that led to the problem Croce saw as a “pose to pose performance … too anchored in static oppositions.” For this production of Petrushka, wearing almost no makeup, he seemed to be relying on his own “expressive, hollowed-out Slavic face.” But if Jerome Robbins “could not lose Rudi,” in other words see him in character, Croce was far more damning: “He is a truly terrible Petrushka—waggling, flapping, hunching like a small boy in need of a bathroom … and his effortful bad acting is inflamed by pathos.”

  And yet despite the critical hammering, Rudolf was much happier than he had been. Not only was he performing to full houses seven times a week for a month, he had received “a gift from God”: the chance to collaborate with Balanchine for the first time. He had been crushed the previous summer on learning that Baryshnikov had achieved his own dream of “entering the ideal future of the Maryinsky Ballet” by becoming a member of New York City Ballet. But although Baryshnikov had gone to Balanchine with the highest expectations, the choreographer, who was then seventy-four and suffering from heart problems, was not well enough to create any new ballets for him. What Rudolf had been offered was the title role in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, a new version of a work Balanchine had created twice before (in 1932 and 1944). Using the score written by Richard Strauss as incidental music for Molière’s play, it was a ballet intended not for his own company but for New York City Opera, who would be presenting it on a double bill with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. “Tell Rudolf if he wants to participate, that’s fine,” Balanchine had sai
d, a proposal Rudolf described as “Nothing much. Very cryptic.” But even this was too good to be true. “I’m not an optimist,” Rudolf told a journalist. “So I said, ‘Keep me posted. I’ll believe it when I’m there.’ ” He was right to be skeptical. According to Susan Hendl, the ballet mistress on Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the only reason the choreographer had agreed to take on the project was because the opera was in financial difficulty, and being a good friend of NYCO’s codirector Beverly Sills, Balanchine wanted to help out: “Nureyev would sell tickets.”

  When rehearsals began in February 1979 the choreographer, finding that he could not recall a single step from his earlier versions, had been forced to start over, though focusing once again on the young lovers, Cleonte (Rudolf) and Lucile (Patricia McBride), who succeed in outwitting her father, the credulous parvenu Monsieur Jourdain (Jean-Pierre Bonnefous). There had been surprisingly little advance publicity about Rudolf’s arrival—“no hype or hullabaloo like the other guy [Baryshnikov]”—but this had made it possible for Balanchine to accept him as a dancer, not a star. “I think Balanchine was surprised at how easy it was to work with him,” remarked Patricia McBride. He seemed genuinely impressed by Rudolf’s versatility, commenting on his adroit way of moving his head like an Oriental in the ballet’s Turkish initiation ceremony, and congratulating him on taking the right amount of time to bow. “Americans don’t know how to bow,” Balanchine said, laughing and breaking into Russian. Balanchine had chosen Flemming Flindt for several of the works he mounted at the Paris Opéra, and Flindt remembered he would say, “Here’s a male variation: Do what you think you do best.” Rudolf was given much the same freedom—Cleonte’s solos becoming a compendium of signature Nureyev steps. Susie Hendl was struck by how almost comically curious they were about what each thought of the other. “What’s he saying about me?” Rudolf would ask over dinner. “And then Mr. B. would ask exactly the same thing.”

  It soon became apparent, however, that Balanchine’s health was fast deteriorating (in May he would undergo a bypass operation), and he was often unable to finish a rehearsal, leaving Susie to take over. On the day Rudi van Dantzig watched a rehearsal, Balanchine seemed absentminded and uninspired.

  He tried out some steps and asked Rudolf: “How would you do this?” “Does that feel right to you?” or: “Don’t make this too complicated, it should be simple, just a little joke, a little nothing,” then nosing around like a mouse and coming up with a few weird little moves. Rudolf copied the master, but the essence was gone. All that seemed natural and obvious with Balanchine gained an unnatural emphasis when Rudolf tried it out. Frighteningly little else, happened at all; it saddened me, was this Rudolf’s great dream?

  It was at this point that Jerome Robbins told Rudolf that he should feel free to withdraw from the project, adding, “If anything happens to George, it will be on your conscience.” But having finally achieved his ultimate wish, Rudolf had every intention of keeping the choreographer in good-enough health to see their collaboration through. “Are you going to go home and lie down or something, have lunch?” he would ask, and when Balanchine refused to oblige, he began getting Luigi to bring borscht or chicken soup each day from the Russian Tea Room, even going as far as to feign stupidity, pretending to need extra time to work out the counts, in order to force Balanchine to rest. (“He learns so slowly,” Balanchine complained to Barbara Horgan.) Soon, though, the choreographer became much too ill to continue, and both Robbins and Peter Martins stepped in to contribute dances of their own. When Balanchine returned in time to complete the ballet, Rudolf’s relief was palpable. “All I can remember is Rudi’s warmth, so warm and so funny,” said Patricia McBride.

  And yet with only one classical pas de sept making it identifiably a Balanchine ballet, Le Bourgois Gentilhomme (premiered on April 8, 1979) can only have disappointed Rudolf. Two-thirds mime, it is at times as farcical and old-fashioned as the creakiest sections of Don Quixote—in Arlene Croce’s tactful phrase, “one of those developments in [Balanchine’s] career which lie outside his creative life.” She believed that by having Cleonte assume the disguises of those employed to make a gentleman out of Jourdain—the tailor and dancing and fencing instructors—Balanchine was making fun of “the quick-change artist that Nureyev has become, hopping from company to company, from role to role.” Certainly Balanchine had a vengeful streak, as his biographer Robert Gottlieb confirms.” This was a complicated man. He would find a way to get his point across, to say: ‘You’re not such a star.’ When Gelsey Kirkland saw Baryshnikov in Prodigal Son wearing his newly designed costume, an ugly loose overall, she found herself wondering “if he had any idea that Balanchine was making a fool of him.”* The same thought occurs when Rudolf, with effortful brio, flings himself into the kind of nineteenth-century Russian solo that Balanchine deplored, the feather in his turban only emphasizing the ballet’s grotesque caricature of the Nureyev of Corsaire and Bayadère.

  Rudolf was not unaware of a subtext to Gentilhomme, but he told friends he suspected that by giving him what was essentially a character role Balanchine was telling him to retire. Richard Buckle was more direct. “My advice to you is to give up dancing. You are getting past it,” he wrote to Rudolf in June. “There are many more important things which only you can do. Don’t listen to Nigel: he is a senile old fool.” It was advice Buckle claimed had never reached Rudolf because, “believe it or not,” he told Lincoln Kirstein, “Nigel Gosling intercepted and suppressed my letter.” A month later Nigel received a Buckle admonishment of his own. “You may think me manic, but I always say what I mean. I think Rudolf should retire. His Spectre, seen in New York, with open gasping mouth and terrified eyes and jump one foot from the ground was painful to watch. By all means repeat this. I am much too fond of him not to say what I think.”

  For that summer’s Nureyev Festival, Rudolf invited Margot, who had just turned sixty, to appear with him in two works from his Diaghilev season. But with the ballerina hardly able to rise on pointe in Le Spectre de la rose and Rudolf, who had broken a toe, also struggling with the up-and-down kneeling in L’Après-midi d’un faune, these were performances that brought to mind Misia Sert’s description of the fading star Serge Lifar: the Spectre of a Faune and Afternoon of a Rose. William Chappell, who coached Rudolf in Faune, remembered how exhausted he had been throughout the rehearsal period. “So I asked him, ‘Why do you overwork? You don’t need to.’ And he said, ‘If I stopped dancing for a minute, I’d die.’ Very firmly, he said that. The trouble is his legs are turning into stone. He’s torturing himself—he really will become immovable.”

  • • •

  Rudolf was now pursuing lovers almost half his age. “He was always talking about my youth. He felt his own was being taken away from him.” One of a dozen students from the School of American Ballet used as extras in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, twenty-three-year-old Robert Tracy was, as Murray Louis said, “wonderful for Rudolf at that time—fun and fresh and vivacious.” Both were late for a rehearsal one day and started a conversation about Greece, where Rudolf had begun spending his summers, which led to the subject of classical literature. Robert had studied ancient Greek at university, and Rudolf was then drawn to the idea of eromenos, the ethos of boy worship by the Greek gods. Casting himself as Zeus, he saw Robert as “his Ganymede” and, inviting him back to his hotel for tea, seduced him that afternoon. “That’s when everything started.… He was the master and I was the apprentice.” (The dancer’s role in the ballet as “the lackey who carried the Moët & Chandon bottle” coincided neatly with that of Ganymede, Zeus’s cupbearer, Rudolf describing to friends how Robert “ran messages for him, as it were, and brought him drinks.”) They soon discovered a mutual obsession with Balanchine; Robert was in the process of taping conversations with the choreographer’s muses for a book.* At Skidmore College he had been taught by Melissa Hayden, who although not a favorite Balanchine ballerina, was renowned in the company for her staying power, intelligence, and exceptional arti
stry. “It was Melissa who prepared me for Rudolf.” Then, in the spring of 1978, before winning a scholarship to Balanchine’s school, Robert had danced with Chicago’s Lyric Opera Ballet, whose director was Maria Tallchief. And yet, although he was not untalented as a dancer—Danilova used to call him “the Fly Boy” because of his high jump—Robert saw his future not as a performer but as a dance historian. “I was an academic. My hero was Lincoln Kirstein.” For Rudolf it was Robert’s intelligence combined with his extreme youth that was the major part of his allure. Maude remembered their first conversation. “Rudolf said, ‘Robert’s interesting. He can talk about books and music and he listens to good music on the radio.’ Rudolf liked Robert because he had a brain, but I don’t think he was ever in love with him. It wasn’t like it was with Wallace. Not at all. He was just a young boy who was carried away with admiration for this star.”

  Determined not to get involved again, Rudolf had warned Robert that “there were going to be lots of boys around.” “But there were lots in my life, too. I was wild … it meant I was free.” If Rudolf had an assignation planned, he would ask a friend to “take Robert someplace.” Gilles Dufour, then working in New York and also living in the Navarro Hotel on Central Park South, remembers how “the poor guy was always coming to my room and waiting.” There was one point, Robert claims, when Rudolf wanted him to participate in a Jeux-style multiple coupling with two dancer brothers, Robert and Edmund La Fosse, although both insist that this was never offered to them as an option. Rudolf had enjoyed his brief fling with Edmund in the spring of 1976, after meeting him at a Royal Ballet party, and he had homed in on Robbie, a member of American Ballet Theatre, when he guested in the company’s Swan Lake in April 1978. Spotting the young dancer standing at the bar of Studio 54, Rudolf succeeded in sweeping him off that night to Pennsylvania to stay with the Wyeths. “You don’t say no to Rudolf: What he wants, he gets.” But if Robbie felt ill at ease at Chadd’s Ford—“I was aware that everyone knew what I was there for”—he became even more disenchanted by the star after a visit to his suite at the Pierre Hotel some months later. “I should have charged him. It was like a call service.”