Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Now in her late seventies, her eyesight and hearing slowly deteriorating, Maude did not want Rudolf worrying about her when it was he who was causing concern. In a letter to Wallace written on March 8, 1985, she urged him to get in touch with Rudolf, saying how much he now needed the support of old friends.

  It’s a lonely job running a huge company … and when he has finished his long days in the theatre (no rests in the afternoon like he used to have) and he gets home, often at 8 o’clock or later, he doesn’t want anything except to relax by the T.V. or play Bach on his harpsichord, and go to bed where he doesn’t sleep well. As ever. Then of course, because what he still wants to do more than anything else in the world is to dance himself, he dashes off all over Europe for a couple of nights, either to Vienna, Venice, all over Italy, Berlin, and last week even 2 nights in Stratford on Avon. He lives on planes now, more than ever, and never seems to rest at all. Only a giant could stand the pressure, and he wonders why he is tired. At the moment he is also having—for 15 consecutive days—to go to the hospital for 3 hours every day to have some sort of vaccine, I think, put into his blood, and that sometimes means getting up at 6 or seven to go to the hospital in order to fit everything in. For instance, last Sunday he left the house a 7 a.m. went and had his session at the hospital, then caught a plane to Modena in Italy, where he did a matinee and evening perf with a small group from the Opéra, dancing himself in almost every ballet (Apollo, Wayfarer etc). Then another plane at 7 a.m. the next morning, back to hospital for next treatment, then straight back to the Opéra for rehearsal until about 8 o’clock again.

  The treatment Rudolf was undergoing was transfusions of HPA23 (antimoniotungstate), a compound known to inhibit virus replication. In the February 23, 1985, issue of the Lancet, a letter to the editor appeared signed by nine of France’s AIDS pioneers—Willy Rozenbaum and Luc Montagnier among them. It describes how four patients, three of whom had been diagnosed with AIDS in May 1984, had started HPA23 in July and were all alive a year later. The treatment had had no significant effect on their immunodeficiency but had nonetheless reduced LAV replication, and one patient showed no further deterioration in his previously rapidly progressive Kaposi’s sarcoma. As this was the first demonstration of inhibition of the growth of LAV, the doctors had been encouraged to try HPA23 in eleven more patients.

  Willy Rozenbaum had first heard about the drug in April 1983 and seized the chance of giving his AIDS patients HPA23, even though it could not be guaranteed to work. “Sometimes faced with the moral distress of the patient and the fear of his entourage, we were carried away by anger, and for my part, I would have been ready to prescribe virtually any tentative treatment.… People who are sick with SIDA truly have nothing to lose.” He arranged for Rudolf to come to La Pitié three times a week for slow infusions. Marie-Suzanne drove him there at seven in the morning and sat quietly by his hospital bed for the three hours the treatment took. Five months later the movie actor Rock Hudson flew to Paris to begin a course of HPA23, too (it was administered by Dominique Dormont, another signatory of the Lancet letter). After the fourth week, Hudson, who had stopped losing weight, was convinced that the drug had worked. “I don’t have AIDS,” he exclaimed elatedly. “I’ve licked it!” Rudolf, however, was more circumspect. To Charles Jude, who knew he was having hospital treatment but not what it was for, Rudolf confided, “If it works, I’m alive, if not …” And he shrugged.

  Conserving energy for his work, Rudolf, as Maude observed, had become very reclusive. “I’m not like I used to be—wind machine! I find that I can concentrate and read without this constant dialogue with the world outside.” Paris friends like Jacques Loyau found him “more tranquil and less amusing” since he had been running the Opéra. “The rue Dauphine days were over.” There would always be a new boy around, and during this period it was Stephen Sherriff, a Royal Ballet dancer now working in the Netherlands, who began an affair with Rudolf during the making of The Tempest and often came to Paris by train to see him. Stephen never had any money, wore hippyish clothes, and had long tousled hair. Rudolf called him the Gypsy, clearly appreciating his affectionate, uncomplicated nature. The sexual side of things was very minor, Stephen says, “more like a relief for him,” and although they sometimes went out to dinner, Rudolf preferred to spend evenings at home, trying to cook scrambled eggs. Mostly, though, he chose to be alone. “With age you learn to live with yourself. You finally accept this marriage and you find your own company great.” His regular “confident de nuit” was now his Ruckers, the Stradivarius of harpsichords, which he had positioned overlooking the Seine. In another room an organ—“the rival clavichord”—occupied one entire wall. “I can play for hours in a row on one or the other instrument, according to my mood.” Invariably it was Bach in any form, the music more therapeutic to Rudolf than any medication. “It makes me feel that life is all right, that I can go and do it.”

  *Wanting to keep his link with the dance world, Franck began a business making ballet shoes, which is now the internationally successful Sansha dance accessories company.

  †When Robert Denvers became a director Rudolf advised him to schedule nothing but Petipa, Bournonville, and Balanchine for the first couple of years, saying, “If they’ve done that they’re ready for everything. This should be your programming, and then you should do the moderns.”

  ‡Yvette Chauviré, Lifar’s muse, had created roles in more than a dozen of his works. Claude Bessy, the director of the Opéra school, continued to view him as “my master, my spiritual father,” while Claire Motte was another “adoratrice.”

  *This “accident of an evening” took place after the Ballet National de Marseille’s season at the Met in July 1983. Rudolf, guest-starring with Natalia Makarova, had arrived at the last minute, not leaving himself enough time to learn the part of Quasimodo. The performance itself was lamentable—“Rudolf was improvising,” says René Sirvin, aware that the dancer was making a mockery of the role. “He didn’t like being deformed.” Adding insult to injury, Rudolf then failed to bring Petit out onstage for a curtain call. (“It was actually Natasha who had forgetten,” says Jane Hermann. “But Roland blamed it on Rudolf. He said he was hogging the bows, which was absolutely untrue.”) Later, at Hermann’s postperformance party, Rudolf, who was sitting next to Martha Graham, called out to Petit, telling him to come and say hello to her. “Pissed off and sulking,” Petit refused. “Finally Rudolf stands up. He says, ‘You fucking get over here or’ … and Roland says, ‘If you talk to me like that I’m taking all my ballets away from Paris Opéra.’ ”

  *In 1929, soon after Balanchine had been elected ballet master at the Opéra, he contracted pneumonia, and Lifar was asked to take charge. “When he came back, door was locked,” said Rudolf. “They wouldn’t let him in.” Invited to be guest ballet master at the Opéra in 1947, Balanchine would have stayed on if it had been possible to divide his time between Paris and New York. But, according to Bernard Taper, “Balanchine found himself in the midst of intrigue, plots and counterplots. Lifar adherents were constantly active on his behalf.”

  *La vie est une maladie sexuellement transmissible constamment mortelle (Paris: published by Éditions Stock, 1999).

  *Shown on the same program with Lifar’s Les Mirages, The Tempest was loathed by the French, provoking a noisily hostile reception from sections of the first-night audience, and condemned as turgid and pretentious by critics. By comparison, wrote one, Lifar’s forty-year-old ballet appeared to be the true creation of the evening. Not to John Percival. It was hard to understand, he countered, why an audience that rejected Nureyev’s ballet should receive the dated, “monumentally stupid” Les Mirages with such warmth.

  *When Platel danced Swan Lake with the Royal Ballet she had wanted to perform the Bourmeister pas de deux, but Rudolf insisted that Merle Park should teach her the English (Nicholas Sergeyev) version. “He said, you just have to learn—learn, learn, learn. And when you are older you will choose.”

 
*The directrice had taken against Rudolf the moment they first met in 1961. When they had dinner at her apartment with Claire Motte and Pierre Lacotte, she had been irritated by his opinionated ways, and her dislike was later compounded by the fact that the one de Cuevas star whom Rudolf completely eclipsed was her future husband, Serge Golovine. “Overnight he looked dated,” says Robert Denvers.

  *When Rudi decided to return to Paris, Rudolf greeted him with a bear hug of gratitude, and No Man’s Land was premiered at the Opéra on April 16, 1984.

  *Rudolf suspected that Lifar, who had had no success in England or America, was behind it. “The French dance critics were all great friends of his.”

  †Alexander Grant was with Ashton when Rudolf came to ask if he could stage La fille mal gardée. “Freddie didn’t say anything, and Rudolf took that to mean he’d agreed. He announced it in press, Freddie heard about this and went crazy. He prevented Rudolf from doing it and Rudolf had to get another version (by Joseph Lazzini).”

  *Rudolf was to have danced the Buddha in Shadowplay, but presumably because of Tudor’s misgivings the idea was dropped. “God knows what they are going to do with Shadowplay & Buddha’s countenance of serenity if Rudolf does it with all his face contortions,” the choreographer told Maude. “So, if I’ve always been disregarded by France, this will not be much worse.”

  18 DANCING WITH THE DEVIL

  In the spring of 1985, while mounting a revival of his Romeo and Juliet at the Palais de Congrès, Rudolf came down with pneumonia. He was dancing the part of Mercutio and so troubled by an incessant cough that just before the point at which he mimes drinking from a goblet, he would stand near the wings so that Marie-Suzanne could fill the cup with tea or bouillon. “And then I’d run around to another wing to fill it again.” Rudolf had suffered from problems with his lungs since childhood (and Michel Canesi had confirmed that this was not the HIV-related pneumocystis carinii), but even so he had convinced himself that his illness was fatal. “You know I’m dying,” he said to Jimmy Douglas one night during dinner. “It can’t be possible,” protested Douglas, but he, too, suspected the worst.

  Of the many ballet versions of Romeo and Juliet, only Rudolf’s is so permeated by death and disease. Drawing on Boccaccio’s Prologue to the Decameron, it begins with a tumbril of dead bodies pulled across the stage, all victims of the Black Death, which swept Italy at the time the story is set. We see Romeo’s sudden shudder when the beggar to whom he has tossed a coin rolls over dead—an indication of the fear of contagion that is the direct cause of Romeo and Juliet’s tragic conclusion. “The infectious pestilence” was real enough to Shakespeare himself, who as an infant escaped a major epidemic in Stratford-upon-Avon, and to Rudolf, three centuries later, it was again a chillingly contemporary issue. (Petrarch’s words in a letter to a friend could just as well be from Edmund White’s Farewell Symphony: “There was a crowd of us, now we are almost alone.… One minute someone hears that another has gone, the next he is following in his footsteps.”) It was as if this Romeo and Juliet were one of Rudolf’s “premonition dreams,” tauntingly playing out his own battle with mortality. Watching his Mercutio from the wings, Franck Raoul-Duval remembers the dancer’s hoarse whisper as he passed by, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.”

  Rumors about the ailing Rudolf had begun ricocheting around the world. There was talk among Royal Ballet dancers that he was so weak he needed a wheelchair waiting in the wings to transport him back to the dressing room. In New York, Richard Buckle, who was staying at the Dakota apartment, took it upon himself to inform Robert Tracy, “who appears to know nothing,” about Rudolf’s pneumonia, which was now compounded by hepatitis. In a diary entry dated May 15, 1985, the critic recorded their subsequent exchange:

  Robert: How’s the morbid one?

  RB: How’s the sordid one?

  Robert: I’m amazed that someone with your intelligence should have such a morbid side.

  RB: I’m not morbid, just realistic, and I wanted to tell you—

  Robert (yelling): I don’t want to hear! I don’t want to hear! Asshole! Asshole!

  RB (yelling louder): Don’t try to shout me down. I’ve just been told that Ballet Theatre is rife with rumours about Rudolf’s illness. You’d better be prepared to deal with the press. The building may be surrounded.

  Robert: Asshole! Asshole!

  Hearing about this, Rudolf instructed Robert to “throw [Buckle] out of the house,” but there was no stopping the speculation. The New York Times’s Anna Kisselgoff asked Jean-Luc Choplin outright whether the pneumonia was caused by AIDS (“I said I didn’t think it was”); and when Robert Gable, Rudolf’s great New York fan, next saw the dancer he rushed over to inquire about his health. “Rudolf said, ‘I’m O.K., Bob.’ It was a wonderful denial, and it put me to rest. The implication was, ‘Tell the others there’s nothing to worry about.’ I did. And we believed it.” But Rudolf’s nightmare—the fear, in Roland Petit’s words, “of no longer dancing and of being sidelined if the ballet world learned that he had signed a pact with the devil”—threatened to become a reality. Anxious letters were arriving daily. “I heard a terrible rumour about your health,” wrote John Lanchbery from Australia, and Antony Tudor, who had learned from Maude about Rudolf’s “miserable pneumonia,” begged him to take care of himself. “You have proven yourself irreplaceable in your dance career, and already with your job at the Paris Opéra you will have proved again that as Directeur, you are also irreplaceable.… This may seem a dumb letter but too many people are of a like mind with me. We owe you too much.”

  Erik’s friend Arlette Castanier had called him in Toronto to say that Rudolf had been spotted at an AIDS hospital. “I must go to him!” cried Erik, but when he rang to announce his arrival in Paris, Rudolf sounded surprised, and asked whether it was because he wanted to see Tudor’s Lilac Garden. “Can you believe it?” Erik exclaimed to Arlette. “I’m coming especially to see him and he tells me that!” But although he did not succeed in getting Rudolf to admit the truth, Erik, who had been “heartbroken to watch what Rudolf was doing to his career,” decided to use his friend’s ill health as an opportunity to convince him to stop performing. “I am sure your problem with your lungs could be solved with a long rest from the company and the dancing. I got very worried when I heard you were doing a season in London again dancing every night. I know how much being on the stage means to you and how little you seem to care about your life and now your health.”

  Upset by the rumors, Margot had arrived in Paris without alerting Rudolf, so that he couldn’t put up a brave front. After reassuring herself that everything was fine, that it was nothing more than a cold, she returned to Panama, telling Maude that Rudolf was right to go ahead with his scheduled performances of Giselle. “I know just how he would feel. It’s better to get back on the stage and keep going.” But as the old Shaker hymn goes, “It’s hard to dance with the Devil on your back,” and Rudolf was forced to cancel. As a special favor, Baryshnikov flew in to replace him, and, alarmed by Rudolf’s deterioration, called Jeannette Etheredge as soon as he got back to New York. “Misha told me, ‘He’s really sick. If you’re any kind of friend, you should pay attention.’ ” So Jeannette joined Rudolf in Cleveland, where he was taking a group of Paris Opéra dancers on a short tour of the States. “I kept looking for signs that he wasn’t well, but he didn’t seem very different to me. I’d heard about night sweats and AIDS, and looked at his sheets, but I thought, ‘Well he’s always slept like that—all bundled up.’ He just looked a little thin and was coughing a lot, but then he had pneumonia.”

  Rudolf had asked Maude if she would come to Paris and stay with him. “He wanted me to be with him because he was feeling so terrible.” But he also wanted to break the news to her himself. She had been badly shocked by the rumors, telling Marie-Suzanne, “It’s impossible—it’s only gossip!” But when Rudolf asked her calmly one day, “Maude, you know what I have in my blood?” she just answered, “Yes.” “And he
never mentioned it again.”

  Rudolf was working at the time on a new ballet based on Henry James’s Washington Square, and to fill Nigel’s role in helping with the libretto had turned to the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. An integral part of Peter Brook’s Paris team, Carrière was becoming increasingly interested in the theater, and had first encountered Rudolf when the Bouffes du Nord Theater opened. “I saw him coming alone. He was the very first one to enter and buy a ticket—he was that kind of a man.” They had since become friends, and dined on several occasions at each other’s homes. Rudolf had encouraged conversations about French writers, particularly Proust, which he admitted had been difficult for him to understand. “Finally, he read it in Russian.” With Washington Square Rudolf asked Carrière to guide him in choosing important moments, even though he was bursting with ideas of his own—few of which had any relevance to the novel. “One of the things that preoccupied him most was the notion of guilt; guilt toward whom you don’t remember.” This would manifest itself in the way the heroine’s father, Doctor Sloper (performed by Rudolf), appears to be punishing himself for the loss of his wife. It is an excuse for a tortured, Grahamesque solo, and another example of Rudolf wanting to explain what has taken place before the actual story begins.