Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

By the beginning of 1981 Rudolf was seriously considering retiring, telling Nigel that he was thinking of asking Ashton to create a new ballet for him as a swansong. “He saw me in, so it would be nice if he could see me out.” Several times over the coming weeks he mentioned giving up dancing, saying he “had better cope with it,” and wondering if he would “crumble” as a result. Certainly the indecision appeared to be taking its toll. During dinner at Charles Murland’s house in March, Rudolf got violently drunk and abusive. Guests watched aghast as the scene crescendoed, the dancer smashing the glass of a picture frame and roaring, “May you all burn in hell!” as he lurched out into the night.

  Charles, who had immediately followed him and driven him back to Victoria Road, had been, Nigel wrote, “wonderfully forgiving about the damage.” This was behavior he had come to expect from Rudolf, who, soon after they had met in the early sixties, had flung the contents of his dressing table at him. But then Charles himself had a malevolent side, his personality marked by what a newspaper once described as “an Ulsterman’s predilection for not forgetting those who thwarted him.” With Rudolf, though, Charles was never anything other than indulgent, and however often “hurt and stung,” would continue cravenly putting himself at the dancer’s disposal. “Maybe I wish to be more helpful to you than you wish or need or closer than is tolerable for a loner like yourself. Anyhow, suffice it to say I would do anything for you.… I love you—sort of!”

  To Rudolf this constant eagerness to please was as stifling as Charles’s omnipresence. He was always there—whether eavesdropping (“somewhat dubiously,” in Nigel’s view) on the Palais des Sports clash with Makarova, or going as far as to retrace Rudolf’s steps in New York’s sexual ghettos. “How else did a London banker discover the West Side trucking scene? I can hardly believe he was looking for the Queen Elizabeth!” Charles loved ballet gossip and the glamour of dancers, but the art itself eluded him. “He would often arrive at the Opera House, knock back two glasses of champagne, take his seat and be snoring quietly within three minutes, only to wake up with the applause.” There was a certain closeness between them (“Charles was like an overprotective older brother”), but it was the element of expediency that Rudolf valued most in Charles’s friendship. Not only could he be relied on to take care of Maude and Nigel, he was impressively shrewd about money matters.

  But by the summer of 1980 it became apparent that Charles himself was in severe financial difficulties, and the strain seemed to be telling on his health. In April 1980 Nigel had described him in a letter as “slim and pale which means love, I guess—or maybe dieting which is just as bad,” but by the following April, Charles was bedridden. The night of Friday the fourteenth was the grand celebration he had planned for his fiftieth birthday, but Charles was able to put in no more than a brief appearance. “We all knew something was seriously wrong that night,” says Teddy Heywood. He was never ever ill.” Two weeks later Charles was admitted to hospital with infectious mononucleosis, pleurisy, and pneumonia.

  It was in the spring of 1981 in California and New York that doctors were becoming aware of a startling increase in the number of cases of a rare lung infection: Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. At the same time a relatively benign skin cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, common among the elderly, had started afflicting young men in a far more aggressive form. By June the general public was beginning to talk about a new “plague” afflicting American homosexuals, although the disease did not yet have a name. Concerned about the rumors, Rudolf, who was then completing negotiations for the feature film Exposed,* refused to have the blood test that was required for insurance purposes. (“My doctor will send you a paper for the insurance company,” he told the director, James Toback.) Having previously been confined to medical journals, articles about “gay cancer” were now appearing in mainstream newspapers and magazines, fanning panic in the backroom bars and bathhouses of New York and San Francisco with their message: “Security lies only in celibacy.”

  Rudolf had no intention of changing his sexual habits. It was the summer he had been “inseparable” from Flaubert’s travel notes and letters from Egypt, an account of the young writer’s 1849 tour—a period saturated with immense vices. “Speaking of bardashes …” Flaubert told his close friend Louis Bouilet, “here it is quite accepted. One admits one’s sodomy, and it is spoken of at table.… It’s at the baths that such things take place … you skewer your lad in one of the rooms.” Rudolf had been tremendously excited by Flaubert’s frankness. “Those letters are fantastic—huh? Aren’t they great?” he exclaimed during an interview with Elizabeth Kaye. It was not only the discovery of Flaubert’s “how you call it?—bawdy” side that delighted him, but the fact that the novelist’s journey anticipated almost exactly the trip up the Nile that he had recently made with Douce. “Suddenly you come across the same feelings, sentiments, the people, the color of the country, the erotic side of it, still quite the same.” In The Romantic Agony, Mario Praz points out that Flaubert can scarcely have had any illusions as to the real significance of his longing to travel to “the lecherous, blood-stained Orient.” “It was a means of providing an outlet for the ‘fond noir à contenter’ that troubled him.” This was something Rudolf understood all too well. “Sex was very liberating for Flaubert. Well, for me, too, it’s liberation … liberation,” he told a journalist in 1981, and, as if equating Flaubert’s “venereal souvenirs” with the current perilous sexual climate, his voice had faded “ruefully” as he repeated the last word.

  In July, Rosa’s daughter, Gouzel, telephoned Rudolf to say that she was in the West. She had married an Ecuadorian geology student in Leningrad and once in Quito had immediately applied for a visa to the United States. As a past member of the Communist Party she was found to be ineligible, but a telegram to the American Embassy from the secretary of state in Washington, D.C., had led to the granting of a waiver by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. On July 21 Mrs. Valarezo, “niece of ballet artist Nureyev,” an attractive nineteen-year-old with the family high cheekbones and almond eyes, flew to San Francisco, and on August 12 arrived in New York. The Goslings, who were then staying at the Dakota, had never seen Rudolf so nervous as he sat waiting to meet the relative he had last seen at Leningrad airport as a baby in Rosa’s arms.

  We opened a bottle of champagne.… A long chat. R was v reserved when she left. “She must make up her mind what she is going to do.” After fixing her up financially, he is making it clear he can’t/won’t take her under his wing. (He was just off to Miami, Puerto Rico, Caracas, Verona, Stockholm, etc!) He says he doesn’t mind what she does so long as she is put into some kind of school. “Needlework, if necessary.” He thinks she will come to no good in NY. She is quiet, buttoned-up, probably obstinate. I can foresee some confrontations.

  It was Nigel whom Rudolf was more concerned about. In the autumn of 1980 he had undergone an operation for a bladder complaint, and since then his health had been deteriorating rapidly. He was soon to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and although neither he nor Maude ever mentioned the fact that it was terminal, Rudolf had instinctively feared the worst. “This is not easy for me to say,” he had told Rudi van Dantzig when they last met, “but if you want to see Nigel, you’ll have to do it soon. He is dying of cancer.” By September 1981, when Rudolf and the Goslings were staying with Niarchos on his private island of Spetsopoula, it was clear that Nigel was in great pain, but the two men were aware of how little time was left, and spent most of the week collaborating on a new project. Rudolf was planning a ballet based on Strauss’s Rosenkavalier, and Nigel had begun the libretto, discussing each scene as they sat together on the terrace, “the incessant swing of waltzes on Rudolf’s cassette player,” or shouting to make each other heard over the roar of Niarchos’s helicopter transporting Rudolf to and from his performances in Athens. Already thinking of the choreography, Rudolf had asked Tessa, who was joining them, to bring out a Chinese checker board so that he could plot the dancers’ entrance
s and exits. Nothing came of it, as Strauss’s son-in-law withheld his permission for the score to be used for a ballet, but another idea had presented itself that week. It was Nigel’s remark that Niarchos was like Prospero—king of an island, “a magic abode,” and able to conjure almost anything at his will—that sparked the beginning of a new idea.

  On November 25, 1981, Nigel noted in his diary that the Royal Opera House had “surrendered to R’s demands” by offering him several performances of Swan Lake and La Bayadère. Having learned not to expect anything from the Royal’s administration “except bucket of shit,” Rudolf was determined not to appear other than cynical. It was “another city, another place, another company,” he shrugged to Barry Norman during a BBC Omnibus program celebrating his return. Privately, though, despite the fact he had recently dismissed the Royal Ballet to Nigel as “company of boiled eggs,” he was elated by the prospect of mounting his Kingdom of the Shades on a “new crew.” With its glorious fusion of Kirov plasticity and Royal Ballet precision, La Bayadère was the work that, more than any other, revealed his imprint on English ballet. In the sixties it had made stars of its three soloists (Lynn Seymour, Merle Park, and Monica Mason) and consecrated the corps dancers as the finest in the world. This time, he cast Bryony Brind, Ravenna Tucker, and Fiona Chadwick as the leading Shades, and, for the second performance, chose twenty-one-year-old Brind as his surprise Nikiya. A soloist just beginning to perform principal roles, she was too tall for Rudolf, and yet her lyrical, Russian quality of movement complemented him perfectly, their arms falling naturally into Fonteyn/Nureyev—style painterly lines. With her swan neck, russet gold hair, and slender, swayback legs, Brind was a beautiful dancer with the fragile nerves of a thoroughbred filly. Colleagues watched her blossom under Rudolf’s guidance, his faith spurring her into technical feats no English ballerina had ever attempted.

  To the young male dancers, however, the arrival of this great star had been something of an anticlimax. As they watched him for the first time in class they saw “an old man—and we really did think of him as old” with virtually no muscle tone. “But then this transformation took place,” recalls Bruce Sansom. “Rudolf had such control of his body that he could forcibly mold himself into shape.” Sansom, along with Stephen Beagley and Stephen Sherriff, was among the new generation of gifted, good-looking youths whom Rudolf began singling out for special attention. And having feared he would be “cold-shouldered” by the company as a whole, he had been greatly touched by their response.” They were marvellous, and kind of exuding love.… I don’t know how long it will last, but it was there.*

  This rapprochement had only intensified Rudolf’s deep disappointment that he was not going to be appointed director when Norman Morrice retired in 1986. His Royal Ballet comeback had coincided exactly with the culmination of negotiations for the directorship of the Paris Opéra Ballet, who were now offering him a definite contract. “I had no doubt that Rudolf would bring enlightened and inspiring direction to the Royal Ballet, but I feared that many of these benefits would be eroded if he continued to dance,” says John Tooley. As Rudolf intended to carry on performing, he declined the invitation. “Paris applied no restrictions, enabling him to direct and dance.”

  Rudolf had been asked a decade earlier if he wanted to head the Opéra Ballet. “Yes, why not!” he told General Director Rolf Lieberman of the Paris Opéra and Hugues Gall over dinner one night, “But only on condition that you fire at least fifty percent of the dancers and I will bring fifty percent from London.” It was, as Gall puts it, “End of question.” Until, that is, the election of François Mitterrand in May 1981, when the problem of what to do with the Opéra came up again. Since Lieberman’s departure in 1979 the theater had suffered a crisis of identity with a succession of different directors, and what Minister of Culture Jack Lang now sought was a personality who could bring a new strength to ballet. Optimism was high at this point in French politics—a moment one observer defined as “the ecstasy of socialism”—and it has been said that Lang wanted to rename his role as minister “of Culture, Beauty, and Intelligence.” The idea of a star of the magnitude of Nureyev heading the Opéra was in tune with this mood, and discussions began in earnest. When the Soviets attempted “une menace de veto,” Lang took the matter to the presidential level. “Okay, Mitterrand agrees” was the verdict, but there were still Rudolf’s conditions to be settled. He was insisting on foreign guest teachers, better studios, compulsory classes, a contract that enabled him to perform for another five years, and one that committed him to reside in Paris for no more than six months a year. Having put all this to Lang’s inspecteur générale de danse, Igor Eisner, Rudolf challengingly quoted from Verdi’s Aïda as they parted, “Ritorna vincitor! Return when you have won!”

  By March 1982 this appointment looked definite—it was to be officially confirmed in February the following year—but Rudolf could not help having serious doubts about accepting. “When I think about it, all of a sudden, it gives me a funny feeling in my—how do you call it?—spleen,” he told Nigel. “The end of youth and all that!” And yet it was the logical next step. Baryshnikov was now director of American Ballet Theatre; Erik was about to become director of the National Ballet of Canada; and for Rudolf to end up as director of the Paris Opéra Ballet in the city where he first arrived in the West had a compelling symmetry. Nigel tried to convince him: “It sort of seems a good idea. You could make it the finest company in the world, just when NYCB and ABT and RB are fading.… Exciting anyway—and I think it could make a useful switch in your dancing career; probably better two years too early than two years too late (I’m not thinking of a sudden total retirement of course, only a weeding out of roles).”

  • • •

  By now Nigel had started radiation treatments, and Rudolf, who (through Gorlinsky) had offered a specialist at his expense, was seeing him as often as he could. In February, having come to Victoria Road from Rome at 2:45 a.m., he sat up talking to Nigel until 4:00, awoke two hours later to catch an 8:00 a.m. flight for Zurich, flew on to Copenhagen, rehearsed, performed, and returned on a private plane, appearing again at the Gosling’s around two, “chatting very cheerfully till 4.” When Nigel was admitted to St. Thomas’s Hospital at the beginning of March, Rudolf, in a panic, immediately got in touch with Wallace: “He wanted me to go to London and see what I could do for Nigel and possibly bring him back to New York, because at that time we thought American hospitals were better for treating cancer. But as soon as I arrived, I could see that Nigel was too sick to make the transatlantic trip.”

  Instead Wallace persuaded the doctors to let him have Nigel’s X-rays and medical records, and drove to Heathrow late that night so they could be couriered on the next morning’s Concorde. Meeting the plane at JFK airport was Niarchos’s chauffeur, who then “whipped them off to the tip-top consultant in NY” who, it turned out, was no more able to help than the London consultant, Nigel’s cancer having metastasized too far by this stage. Knowing the end was coming, and overwhelmed by his friend’s love and attention, he wrote to Rudolf for the last time—“not exactly saying Thank you etc (I’m too Britishly inhibited for that)”—but reminding him of how blessed his life had been.

  March 9th 1982:

  Rudi, mein lieblings schlagerisches little Pumpernickel!… I wanted to write so often from the hospital but didn’t quite feel up to it—and then there was always that nice strong supportive voice from Boston to keep me going.… I have probably been softened up by all that … & medicine, but I did find myself lying there & looking back (which usually gives me a stiff neck) and thinking just what an incredibly lucky fellow I have always been.… Spoilt & happy childhood, a little tiny delicate pretty mother whom I adored, a good firm father who took little interest & so let me get on with things as I liked. A cushy kind of war, then a chance introduction to the career which suited me exactly & then—well, you know the rest, that I should somehow have acquired a family like Maude, Nicholas & you is quite incredi
ble. One of the things I like most about you is that you were a Surprise Packet: the chance of you turning up from Ufa must have been millions to one …—you are my something specially special as you know. (Oddly the first para I ever wrote about you, when you came over here as a boy, described you as “extraordinarily extraordinary.”) If only I could put my clock back forty years, what mischief we might have got up to together! There—I am getting sentimental: but your ringing & thinking & caring has really helped fantastically.… A few more Bayadères & I should have been OK … I know I have long passed my [illegible] so just send you the biggest & lovingest of hugs,

  N.

  P.S. Delacroix is fantastic! Echoes of Flaubert here & there. I am reading the letters, but the journal is the real thing. Can’t get it in paperback here or I would send it to you.

  Rudolf had said nothing about the letter, but a day or two later just dropped into their conversation the fact that he had started the Delacroix journals, the dancer’s way—Nigel believed—of telling him that he had read his “sentimental” farewell. And yet Rudolf had been genuinely enthralled to discover another nineteenth-century soul-mate. It was not only the orientalism, literary intelligence, and turbulent sensuality that linked them both to Byron, but their shared interest in evil: Delacroix had illustrated the poet’s most satanic verses as well as the darkest scenes of Faust. Reading Mario Praz’s chapter “The Metamorphoses of Satan,” Rudolf had become intrigued by the idea that he might be a descendant of Milton’s Satan—that charismatic archangel, whose ruined statue was the dancer’s own image of his mature self, his splendor and heroic energy diminished, and yet still he stood out “proudly eminent” above the rest.

  At the beginning of the year he had asked Nigel to look out for a Fuseli painting of Satan, and when Fuseli’s “lost” masterpiece, illustrating a scene from Paradise Lost (Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel’s Lance), came up for auction at Sotheby’s in 1988, Rudolf bought it for £770,000 (more than a million dollars—almost triple its reserve price). He now considered himself to be, as Fiona MacCarthy wrote of Byron, “a man grandly and fatally flawed, who had lived so intensely and sinned so outrageously that he, and he alone, was doomed to suffer the retribution of the gods.” Friends recall how obsessed he became with the concept of guilt. “He was talking about it all the time,” said Nico Georgiadis. It was almost as if he had come to accept his fallen state and the homily being delivered in the popular press: “God has put his foot down.” … “You get what you deserve.”