Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  In April, Nigel, confined to St. Thomas’s, was fretting about Rudolf, who had been calling almost daily from quai Voltaire. “He doesn’t sound too happy, he isn’t sleeping, worrying, I think, about the Paris job.” What Nigel would never know was the extent to which Rudolf was then fearing for his own health. Thierry Fouquet, his newly appointed dance administrator, was with Rudolf when he received a phone call telling him that a young Canadian friend had just died with all the symptoms of the new disease. “I could see that he was very worried. Worried for himself.” Rudolf now realized the importance of finding a discreet doctor in Paris, and at the end of January, Charles Murland had succeeded in doing just that. After a performance at the Opéra, he had met Michel Canesi, a fresh-faced young man who had recently opened his own practice after completing studies in dermatology and venerealogy. A group went on to dinner, and as Michel spoke good English, he and Charles spent most of the evening talking. Rudolf’s name did not come up, but the next morning Charles telephoned the doctor to ask if he would come right away to quai Voltaire as Rudolf Nureyev wished to consult him on a medical matter. Excitedly canceling a previous engagement, Michel went straight to the apartment, where Charles greeted him and took him into the bedroom to meet the star. “It was sympathy at first sight,” he says, and as they were talking and laughing, he took a sample of Rudolf’s blood. “He was someone who was very active sexually, and wanted me to check for syphilis.” The test proved negative, and although there had been no mention of “gay cancer,” either on this occasion or the night before, it was a sign of extraordinary intuition on Charles’s part to have singled out Michel Canesi. Then working in the very specific division of sexually transmitted diseases at the Institut Vernes, he was one of a small community of Paris doctors who had begun preparing themselves for the onslaught of this new plague. “We said, ‘It’s in America, but it must come to Europe, so we must be ready.’ What we didn’t know then was that we were at the beginning of something incredible.”

  Until then antibiotics had made gay men invulnerable to what Edmund White calls the “puritanical menace” of such venereal diseases as syphilis and gonorrhea. But what was now being referred to as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) responded to no medical treatment and spread itself in ways that were still not understood. Tessa Kennedy remembers having an intense conversation with Rudolf around this time. “He was asking me in detail: Did I know how it could be transmitted? I said, ‘Rudolf, you must be careful!’ And he just looked at me without saying anything.”

  On a night in mid-May when Rudolf arrived in London, Tessa had driven him directly to St. Thomas’s to see Nigel. “I could see in the car how much he was dreading it. It paralyzed him.” Maude, who was with them, explains why: “Rudolf had never been in a hospital in his life before, ever. He’s horrified of illness; doesn’t like even to talk about it. He doesn’t ever talk about his own injuries, and he hates to hear about other people being ill. He always sounds as if he’s unsympathetic but it’s really because he has a real horror of it.”

  Compounding it all was the knowledge that this was probably the last time he would see Nigel. “It’s losing my father—more than that,” he had confided to Rudi van Dantzig. But Nigel was in “unbelievable form,” joking about the view of Big Ben outside his window—“the best bedside clock anyone could ask for!” He had managed to make the visit almost enjoyable, and when Rudolf left with Maude for Victoria Road, he pleaded with her to bring Nigel home. “But I said, ‘No, the doctors say he’s better there.’ ‘Well, then, I can’t go away.’ ‘Yes, you must,’ I told him. ‘It’s your only holiday, and we don’t know how long Nigel will live.’ ” So Rudolf went off the next morning, leaving Maude in the care of Charles Murland—“a rock for me to lean on.” On May 21 she spent all day and evening at Nigel’s bedside, and around midnight was woken in her chair by a nurse, who told her that her husband had just died. “Then Charles arrived. He’d said to people at the hospital that when it happened they were to call him—whatever the time.” She spent the rest of that night at Trevor Place, and Charles telephoned Rudolf with the news.

  He was back in London in time for the funeral, the only one he had ever attended. It was held in Roehampton’s ugly suburban crematorium, where one incineration was taking place after another. Tristram Holland remembers seeing Rudolf huddled in a big dark coat as they all waited outside the chapel for someone else’s service to finish. “Afterwards, we went back to Victoria Road, and he sort of hovered around the kitchen looking pale and withdrawn and obviously not knowing what to do with himself. Then I remember him sitting on the sofa, very quietly having lunch, as all the other mourners milled about. I guess it was about the first time he hadn’t been the prime focus of attention in the house.”

  One of the first things Rudolf asked Maude after Nigel died was if she would come and live with him. When she explained that she didn’t want to leave home, that Victoria Road contained too many memories, he replied, “Then I stay too.” “That was it,” says Maude. “He never went back to live at Fife Road.” It was an unconventional menage. Claire moved in upstairs so that she could do the cooking and housekeeping, Maude’s South African friend “Tiny” did the shopping,* and Luigi slept in a little room next to Rudolf’s on the ground floor. With clothes, books, videotapes, and cassettes strewn across a threadbare carpet, Rudolf’s own room looked like an undergraduate’s. The only sign of its occupant’s star status was an antique icon on one wall and a painting of Catherine the Great above the fireplace. But this was now Rudolf’s London base, his massage table permanently extended; a small modern piano keyboard balancing on a cluttered table; his clothes, practice things, and costumes crammed into a single cupboard and chest of drawers. He spent most of that summer at Victoria Road, performing every night at the Coliseum, and taking Maude with him.

  He would sit me quietly in a box with Sandor Gorlinsky, so that I wouldn’t be alone. I remember once I went backstage because we were going out to supper afterward, and one of the older dancers came up and flung his arms round me. Of course I burst into tears, and Rudolf just took my arm and whisked me into his dressing room to sit down while he took off his makeup—rescued me straightaway. And as soon as the season was finished he took me with him to New York—in Concorde, which I’d never been in before.… He really got me through the most terrible year.

  Until now Maude had always kept somewhat in the background. Nigel had been the one to take Rudolf’s calls and write him letters, and Maude had done little more than scribble a few lines at the bottom. After his death, though, it was Maude alone who came to “mean home” to Rudolf, their relationship more tender than any other. “I can’t tell you how much love he has given me,” she wrote to Gregory King. “And how kind he is to me—so gentle—very few people know that side of his nature.”

  Conjoined to the saint, though, was always the sinner. In September, Franco Zeffirelli invited the dancer to Positano to receive an award from the town. The director had spent the whole summer entertaining friends at his idyllic Mediterranean home (that week the guests included movie star Gregory Peck, the Hollywood producer Dyson Lovell, and playwright Christopher Hampton). Built on a hill above the bay, Villa Treville is made up of three separate houses, one of which was where Diaghilev had stayed with Nijinsky, the Russian owner reputedly having had the villa’s interior walls removed and the floor sprung so that the dancer would be able to practice. Rudolf had been irked to discover that it was not he but Peck and his wife who were in the “Red House,” but he appeared in high spirits nonetheless. Hampton remembers his mischievousness at the award ceremony, when, during the mayor’s interminable speech in Italian, he had played with a tape measure he wore suspended from his belt, “extending it to indicate the enormous size of his member.” After the presentation dinner, when Zeffirelli’s motor launch brought them back to the villa, Rudolf remained behind on the rocks, “making out, we all presumed.” The following evening their host took everyone to a restaurant in t
he town, where he had very deliberately separated Rudolf from a French boy he coveted, the lover of one of Zeffirelli’s close friends. The boat then took the party back, and Rudolf, expecting “more of the same,” lurked behind. When Luigi arrived three-quarters of an hour later (instead of coming by sea, he had walked the long, circuitous route back), he found Rudolf in a rage. Not only had the rendezvous he planned been foiled, but the gates leading to the villa had been locked. “He was like a hurricane. Whatever was in his way—pah! pah! pah!—he start to destroy.”

  Villa Treville’s terraced garden—an Eden of pines, cacti, and cascades of bougainvillaea and plumbago—has a precipitous stone staircase leading down to the beach. Symmetrically placed at intervals were eight-foot-high pithoi—Ali Baba—style Cretan vases containing exotic shrubs—which Rudolf began pushing over, leaving behind a devastation of earth, uprooted plants, and terra-cotta shards. Confronting Zeffirelli, who was enjoying a game of Ping-Pong and not sufficiently apologetic, Rudolf picked up a wrought-iron chair and hurled it, “narrowly missing Franco.” He then stormed into the main drawing room, grabbed a curtain rod and began using it to smash a collection of Majolica pottery displayed along one wall. Hearing the noise, Christopher Hampton rushed in, and Rudolf, pausing for a second, said with ironical, Jeeves-like civility, “Oh, good evening.”*

  No more was said. Rudolf went into his room and proceeded to fling various objects out the window. At this point Zeffirelli arrived with an ex-footballer as reinforcement, and launched himself at Rudolf. Luigi joined in, trying to separate them, but in the fray was injured himself, his white suit now splattered with blood. “Rudi,” I said, “let’s go. Now.” After grabbing their belongings, Luigi went into town to find the taxi driver who had brought them from Rome, and Rudolf, wearing tight shorts and high-heeled boots, set off alone on the corniche. “Come along, pony!” he called out to his bag on wheels, dragging it behind him as he walked.

  Dyson Lovell has described how, when he unlocked the gate to let Rudolf in, the dancer, wanting to demonstrate his contempt for Zeffirelli’s hospitality, had defecated on the stone steps. Luigi, however, insists that this is not true. “Everybody tried to make more, more, more of this story. Come on—this is not Nureyev style.” But Hampton confirms that it happened—presumably before Luigi arrived. “And I heard what Rudolf said about it.” Yet what was even more shocking about this notorious episode, Hampton says, was the way the dancer had demonically cursed Zeffirelli’s house as he left, turning around and gesturing with his index and little fingers raised. “This is what really upset Franco.”

  It may be that no successful man was ever more primitive or more extraordinarily refined,” Elizabeth Kaye has written. “He was brutal and tender, spiritual and carnal. In the span of a few minutes, he could evoke Christ on the cross and Mephistopheles.” And once again Rudolf would use dance to explore these rival impulses in himself. With a ballet version of Shakespeare’s Tempest now taking shape in his mind, he decided to make Ariel and Caliban represent conflicting sides of Prospero’s nature, the pair first appearing from within the magician’s cloak as if born out of his own body. Airborne and white-faced like Pierrot, Rudolf’s Ariel somersaults and dances on wires above his master’s head, while Caliban, his features lined with black, emerges fecally from between his legs. Impervious to Prospero’s attempts to educate him, he remains “a devil, a born devil … a thing of darkness,” whereas Ariel is seen by Rudolf as embodying the magician’s “higher spirit, his better self restraining him.” When Prospero is about to strike his brother, Ariel appears just in time to snatch the staff from his hands, much as Ithuriel, the angelic guard in Rudolf’s Fuseli painting, surprises Satan, his spear raised in fury, and prevents him from pursuing his evil schemes. “The tempest,” Rudolf told an interviewer, “is not something which happens from outside so much as within. Prospero makes the tempest. He has this rage. He has to overcome something.” Asked to define the cause, Rudolf then gives what is clearly an analysis of his own state of mind. “Well, … I think he’s come to a dark forest. I think his age—he’s kind of over forty.… End of desire, whatever. It’s an unpleasant time.”

  Dedicated to Nigel and staged by the Royal Ballet, The Tempest was the first major work that Rudolf had attempted without his mentor’s help, although he had “quizzed” him on several aspects of it. He had seen and admired Tetley’s 1979 ballet for Rambert, but decided that its Prospero was not prominent enough; he wanted to give this lonely, isolated figure the Romantic centrality of a Byron hero. The six weeks he spent working on the libretto at Victoria Road were surprisingly effortless, as The Tempest, a highly visual spectacle staged by an enchanter, is a far more suitable source for a ballet than Manfred. “Spare, intense, concentrated to the point of being riddling,” in Anne Barton’s view, it compels from its audience the kind of imaginative response provoked by dance, both sharing the same “aura of suggestion … a meaning at once irreducible and mysterious.” Barton continues:

  More perhaps than with any other work of Shakespeare’s, this is a drama which the actors could walk through silently and still manage to convey much of its essential nature.… Nor should one forget the omnipresent background of music, the sheer number of songs in the play, and the manner in which they draw to themselves and translate emotions which words alone seem inadequate to express.… Even the comic scenes … [are] of an essentially non-verbal nature.

  As with his Romeo and Juliet, wanting to explain what happened before the play began, Rudolf begins his one-act ballet with a prologue set in Milan before Prospero’s deposition. As he stands alone and crowned, a phantasmagoria of events reels through his mind, a hallucinatory, flashback device that Rudolf borrows from Robert Helpmann’s highly condensed Hamlet. Tchaikovsky’s Tempest overture begins when Prospero is already in exile, but Rudolf, wanting ominous-sounding music that would suggest the duplicity of his courtiers, chose to preface it with the fugue, divertimento, and polonaise. “First I didn’t want to touch the polonaise because Balanchine had choreographed [to] it in Theme and Variations … so I had to do something bigger and better.” It inspired him to attempt his most Balanchinian composition since the ’64 Raymonda: The opening section becomes an abstraction of a story ballet with a mass of black-and-gold-clad dancers ebbing and flowing in artfully complex patterns. Then, all of a sudden, as the pillars of Nico Georgiadis’s set collapse, the stage empties into a black void and Prospero, stripped of his finery like the protagonist of van Dantzig’s About a Dark House, crouches in stunned shock on the island.

  In a catalog of Fuseli drawings he owned Rudolf had been struck by an image of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo running hand in hand, with Ariel above them, and this image influenced his idea of the inseparability of Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban. Dressed in gold, white, and black, they entwine, tussle, and tumble, their bulging codpieces and bondage overtones of leather straps giving their threesome a provocatively sexual edge. With Miranda the only significant female role, the prevailing dance style of The Tempest is sinewy and athletic, the Royal Ballet’s new generation of young males performing with unprecedented machismo. Ninette de Valois was amazed, exclaiming to Maude in the intermission, “We have to get him back here! Look what he’s done for those boys!” Rudi had cast the company stars Wayne Eagling and David Wall as Ariel and Caliban, and had worked out all the steps on himself—“The usual Rudi sort of thing,” Eagling says. “Lots of very fast knitting of the legs and feet.” And although Anthony Dowell was the first night Prospero, his commanding presence, plastique, and speed the defining qualities of the role, the ballet remains the “concert of one” that Henry James saw as Shakespeare’s indulgence in The Tempest. Its Prospero is the Prospero of the end of the play, the work serving as a kind of confessional in which Rudolf could admit his own failing powers.

  By having several episodes take place onstage at once, Rudolf leaves room for long, reflective solos, which, far from complementing Prospero’s great speeches are disappointingly l
acking in invention. Twirling his long staff like a drum-majorette, he appears to be doing no more than marking time, while his use of the staff as a vaulting pole looks like a desperate attempt to recapture his legendary elevation. In poignant contrast to the sixties Nureyev, his cloak blazing behind him, we see him halfheartedly flicking, swishing, and winding Prospero’s cape around him like a shroud. But in defiance of anyone who might view The Tempest as his voluntary valediction to his profession, Rudolf makes the other dancers literally drag him off into the wings as he reaches back yearningly toward the stage. “The whole thing is metaphor,” he acknowledged. “The cloak is his metaphor for art, and finally he has to renounce it.”

  Rudolf believed The Tempest was his best original work. Though dramatically far from clear, it is full of imaginative touches, such as Ariel appearing to land on Prospero’s finger, and also strong on theatrical effects (the instantaneous scene changes from court to island, and island to storm-racked boat). “We switch in a flash,” wrote David Dougill. “From our island viewpoint of the tossing galleon to being right there in it, on deck amid tearing sails.” “All that was conceived by me,” insisted Rudolf. “Every single thing they attribute to Georgiadis in fact he fought against!” But Georgiadis himself remembered The Tempest as a particularly harmonious collaboration. “We were very much on the same wavelength.… It had very very good things, and I never understood why they dropped it.”