Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  But although Rudolf’s foisting of Kenneth on the Paris Opéra Ballet is considered to be his only blatantly unprofessional move, it was not entirely the irrational coup de foudre it appeared. “He saw in that Danish schooling all that he adored in Erik Bruhn. And he wanted to bring that to the boys at the Opéra,” says Elisabeth Platel, the ballerina whom Rudolf expected to benefit most from having this young colossus as a partner. (“He was always telling me I was a giant.”) But although she could see that her director was following Balanchine’s example in importing that other Apollonian Dane, Peter Martins, for Suzanne Farrell, Platel still maintains that his decision was misjudged. “Kenneth was beautiful, but he was not ready. ‘Take him into the company,’ I told Rudolf. ‘Let him do one exam; one year in the corps de ballet; make him work with us.’ ” Flemming Flindt agrees. “If you know how the Paris Opéra Ballet runs, Rudolf was completely out of line and stupid. You can’t take a nineteen-year-old foreigner and make him an étoile. Forget it. It’s way off. If he’d taken Greve as a sujet for a couple of years, then premier danseur …” But Rudolf, as Platel now realizes, was fighting time. “He was in a hurry. He thought he might not have one more year.”

  On September 15, 1989, the Opéra dancers delivered a letter to the general administor threatening to strike if Kenneth Greve danced that season. It was Elisabeth Platel, Rudolf believed, who had initiated it, “and for the whole of that year he didn’t say hello to me.” Distressed by the chaos he was causing, Kenneth begged Rudolf to back down. “Just forget it,” I told him. “I’ll go someplace else,” but Rudolf was implacable. “ ‘It’s not to do with you, it’s to do with me,’ he said. ‘They can’t come and tell me how to run this company.’ ”

  Once again, he found himself imitating Diaghilev, a man whose power was so absolute that he could force the eighteen-year-old half-formed Léonide Massine on Michel Fokine, insisting that he dance the lead in Fokine’s new ballet. It was at the Moscow opera that the impresario, still mourning the departure of Nijinsky, had spotted an extra of compelling presence and beauty, deciding that he should be the star in Fokine’s new La Légende de Joseph. After his audition, Diaghilev took the boy directly to the Hermitage Museum, “and from there presumably to bed. Massine’s education had begun.” Kenneth himself remembers asking Rudolf once, “Do you really think I can dance, or are you just after my ass?” “He said, ‘Well, if I am, I can’t get it.’ ” With or without any return favors, Rudolf was determined to mold his protégé just as assiduously. He had begun showing him paintings in the Louvre, bought him books (Madame Bovary, Hamlet, Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature) and taken him to Venice, the place Diaghilev had so adored. Later that summer, he brought Kenneth to Massine’s island.

  For two hours every day the pair worked together in the tower’s studio, Rudolf exploding with anger if Kenneth complained of being tired.

  “What’s tired?” he’d say. “You have to work through that.” But physically I couldn’t handle what he was asking me to do. He might have perceived it as laziness, but at that point I didn’t know how to find it in myself. I had to be pushed. He knew that when he stood there and forced me, I would do it. He tried to give me this drive, but it’s one of the things I don’t possess the way he does. This total concentration. As much as I want to have it, I don’t. But the times we had alone in the studio were amazing. I infuriated him, but I also gave him a thrill. Because when he got me to do it, when I’d finally get my act together, his face would light up with this radiant smile. He was just in heaven! So it was a two-way thing: I was taking all these pearls from him, but I was also making him happy—giving him back a life of joy or joy of life, however you want to put it.

  And Rudolf loved the fact that Kenneth was unusually practical, taking pleasure in repairing cars, houses, “getting the stones between my hands.” “You’re so smart,” Rudolf would say. “Fix it, fix it for me!” Wanting Margot’s blessing—just as he had with Sylvie—Rudolf called her in Texas one day, standing on a rock to get a signal from his mobile phone (the island having no line), saying, “You have to speak to this boy!” And as the two dancers he loved most tried to make themselves heard on the crackly line, Rudolf hovered next to Kenneth, “like an excited little kid.” “I’m sure the Danish boy is good if Rudolf thinks so,” Margot wrote to Maude. “But 6’8” must be basketball height. [It] will help him to defend himself among the Opéra dancers!” Maude, however, who was staying on Li Galli at the same time, was convinced that it was Kenneth from whom Rudolf needed protection. “I was terribly afraid he would get hurt. He’d become much too fond of the boy.” When Kenneth asked her if he could go to the mainland to ring his girlfriend in New York, Maude persuaded him not to. “I said it would be unkind. Too painful for Rudolf.” But when she told Rudolf of her concern, he tried to make light of it. “Just let me enjoy having him around, Maude. He’s so beautiful and so young.”

  In New York, Robert Tracy was also disturbed by the dancer’s hold on Rudolf. “He was gaga about this boy. His new Erik.” August 11 was Kenneth’s birthday and, wanting to give him a party at the Dakota, Rudolf had asked Robert to draw up a list of guests. “I was inviting a young crowd. Absolutely not. Rudolf wanted people there like Alwin Nikolais—basically, a lot of old queens.” Rudolf was irrationally jealous of Kenneth’s best friend in New York, a young Greek man, and the night when Kenneth went to a party at his apartment, he had not been able to conceal his distress. “When I came back that night he was so nice: He said, ‘I’m sorry, I realize I have to give you space.’ And I told him, ‘Rudolf, you’re talking as if we were a couple. You know it’s not like that.’ ” Kenneth’s relationship with his New York girlfriend was coming to an end as he had met someone else, but Rudolf did not want to hear about it. Instead, thinking perhaps of Rothbart destroying Siegfried’s love for Odette by sexually blinding him with Odile, Rudolf, who had called in a hustler for himself one night, asked beguilingly, “Do you want me to get someone for you?”

  At no point, Kenneth says, did Rudolf ever mention the fact that he had AIDS. “But he gave me so many hints. I remember him saying, ‘I don’t know how much time I’ve got, and I want my island to be finished.’ And sometimes it seemed as if he was indirectly screaming to me, ‘I’m very sick. Be careful!’ ” One such occasion was when he saw Kenneth about to drink from his mineral water bottle, and snatched it away, snapping, “We don’t know. Do we?” He had reacted with the same concern during a rehearsal with Pat Ruanne. A dancer’s hairpin had scratched his nose, and when Pat wiped it with her finger, exclaiming, “Famous drop of blood!” Rudolf had immediately asked her to come to his dressing room. “Wash your hands, please,” he said quietly. “Then I knew.” “Oh, Rudolf—” she began, but he cut her off. “Don’t talk. There’s nothing more to say.” And yet there were times when he was astonishingly ignorant about the risk of contagion, suggesting to Charles Jude, for example, that they mix their sperm in a test tube in order to give his wife, Florence, a designer baby. “He wanted to have a boy with my body and his head.” Rudolf even went so far as consulting Michel Canesi about it. “Would it be a good idea for me to have babies?” he asked one day. “Impossible,” Canesi replied. “Okay, forget it.”

  For some months now Wallace had been sending Maude clippings from American newspapers about the latest HIV treatments, “hoping that she would pass them on to Rudolf, that they would seep into his consciousness and he’d take care of himself.” It was the antiviral drug AZT that was being most talked about, and Rudolf asked Michel Canesi to give it to him. With its side effects already known to be severely debilitating (they included muscle-wasting disease and kidney damage), Canesi, naturally, was reluctant to prescribe it. “I was worried that it would affect Rudolf’s dancing, but he was furious with me and demanded to have it.” Having started the course, however, Rudolf would stop taking the pills as soon he felt significantly better. “He didn’t seem to realize that this was something you had to do regularly,” Wallace says. “H
e hated taking any kind of drugs. He believed in sweating out toxins, whether they be from alcohol or disease.” Rudolf, who was then living in the Dakota, was made wary, too, by Robert Tracy’s alarmist views about AIDS. Tracy was among those who believed that the disease was a form of chemical warfare designed to destroy minorities, and was incensed by the medical establishment’s routine distribution of AZT. “It was banned in the fifties for being too toxic.”

  Rudolf had come to New York to begin rehearsals on The King and I, a role he had been tempted by ten years earlier—“all dancers dream of being on Broadway”—but had turned down, as he thought it would impede his dancing. Having recently fitted an old pipe organ into a wall of the Dakota apartment, he began having singing lessons at home, voice coach Don Pippin giving him scales and arpeggios in an attempt to “redirect the croaking.” Yodeling, “Ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya” to the tune of “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” would make Rudolf crack up with laughter, but he felt, nonetheless, that Pippin “somehow did manufacture some semblance of singing.” Rudolf also consulted with Baryshnikov, who was then appearing in a production of Metamorphosis, wanting to know “how many weeks I rehearsed, how I learned the text, what I feel from performance to performance.”

  Pauline Kael, reviewing Valentino, had pointed out Rudolf’s resemblance to Yul Brynner—the “high cheekbones, his imperious sniff, and the set of his full mouth.” But although some famous mannerisms were imposed (the spread-leg stance with hands on hips, for instance), it was not Yul Brynner he was attempting to impersonate, Rudolf insisted, but the king of Siam. “King is like me,” he told Linda Maybarduk. “He loves absolute power and control. He has burning desire to learn everything.” Since its choreography was by Jerome Robbins, Rudolf had assumed that the part would come easily to him—“Dancing is very much related; both are dependent on the music. Music means phrasing”—but, in fact, he had badly underestimated the demands of musical comedy: his delivery of the lines was self-consciously arch, his singing inept enough to cause snickers. “Let’s say he got through it,” says Robert Gable. “But he wasn’t good and he knew it.” Wallace agrees. “He should have taken it more seriously. But he looked upon doing musicals as less than using all of his talents and resources, and he didn’t get any satisfaction out of it.”

  It was hardly surprising: Rudolf was a pedagogue of genius, not a “dumb-footed” pupil. Rarely focused on the action onstage, he spent every free moment either on the telephone to the Opéra or coaching Kenneth Greve. “We’re going to make a two-metre blond Basilio of you,” he promised, having persuaded Poliakov to stage his version of Don Quixote. While The King and I was playing in Toronto, Rudolf asked Karen Kain to rehearse Kenneth, hoping that she would perform with him. “He was angry with me when I said I couldn’t go to Florence.” Finding her young partner capable but far too inexperienced, Karen was amazed to see Rudolf “so smitten.” Linda Maybarduk felt the same.

  On the sofa in our house he was touching, pawing, kissing Kenneth—we’d never seen him being demonstrative like that. He was totally in love. And from the way the kid was responding, we assumed he must be gay; he was playing Rudolf like a fiddle. It made Bill, my husband, so angry that he took Kenneth aside at one point and said, “Listen, either give this up or walk out.”

  Like most dancers, Kenneth was unself-consciously physical, thinking nothing of scrubbing Rudolf’s back in the bath, or giving him scalp massages. “But I could see how much it tortured him.” Finally Rudolf could take no more. They had been to the Russian circus with the Maybarduks, dining afterward in the star’s hotel room, where they stayed until around five in the morning. It was then, after Linda and Bill had left, that Rudolf came into Kenneth’s bed “and pounced.” Having been alerted the next day by Karen Kain to the fact that Kenneth had decided to leave, Linda called Rudolf to invite him to a family dinner. “I don’t know. I’m not much company,” he said, but allowed himself to be persuaded. “And then who should arrive with Rudolf but Kenneth. So we thought, Oh well, they must have patched things up.” At intermission the next night, however, Rudolf called to ask if they would come and have dinner with him after the show. “Because, this time, Kenneth really had walked.”

  A month later, however, Kenneth was back on the road with Rudolf. Marie-Christine Mouis, who had left the Paris Opéra to join the Boston ballet, received a phone call from Rudolf saying, “I’m coming to town with Kenneth Greve. Would you be able to partner him in Don Q?” He had always liked her Kitri, inviting her to perform the role in a number of Nureyev and Friends seasons, and now he saw that at five foot seven—an unusual height for a ballerina—she would make an ideal match for Kenneth. Remembering him as a student in Stanley Williams’s classes and thinking at the time that he was talented, though not nearly ready, with some trepidation Marie-Christine agreed to help. But at their first rehearsal she hardly recognized Kenneth as the same dancer. “I was blown away by what Rudolf had done; the work must have been incredible. The level of his technique was so high that I found myself wondering what that whole Paris Opéra Ballet fuss was about.” Personal relations between teacher and pupil, on the other hand, had deteriorated even further. There was a fight in their hotel room, one or the other having pushed over and broken the television set, and a second incident in which Marie-Christine was directly involved.

  We were trying out a lift backstage and missed it. And as we were both holding each other, laughing, I suddenly saw Rudolf come walking toward us very fast. Confronting Kenneth, he slapped him across the face, saying, “How dare you!” I had no idea what was going on. “No, no,” I told Rudolf. “He’s doing really well. He’s a very good partner.” But Kenneth was very upset, and later he told me about what was happening. He said, “I respect Rudolf, I owe him everything. But he wants more and I can’t give it to him.”

  Luigi then received a phone call from Rudolf. “Why don’t you come to Boston?” he said. “I need you.” Discovering that he was needed as an intermediary, Luigi volunteered to take Kenneth to a restaurant and plead Rudolf’s case. “You know, don’t you, that Rudolf is in love with you. He needs to dedicate his life to somebody, and he wants to help you.” Once again Kenneth explained that he could not give Rudolf “something else,” expecting the heterosexual Luigi to understand. And later, when they were in Florence together, he begged Luigi not to tell Rudolf that his new girlfriend, who was also a dancer, was with him. “But between Rudolf and me was big feeling. He was my brother. So I told Kenneth he had to stop playing games.” But this was no game. The dancer was soon to become Kenneth’s wife and the mother of his first child.

  When Nijinsky committed the unpardonable sin of getting married, Diaghilev vengefully punished him by firing him. Rudolf, by contrast, continued striving to create opportunities for his protégé. “He took a passionate interest in making sure the boy was happy,” says Robert Denvers, then director of a company in Flanders.

  It was the only time I saw Rudolf go head over heels about someone. He called me and said, “Please take Kenneth, he’s beautiful—he’s this, he’s that.” He was really pushy, and called me all the time. So, given Kenneth’s facility and his looks, I took him into the company, only to find that he had absolutely no ambition. We had Camelot created on the boy, and on the day of the premiere he was shopping in the afternoon and came in with a camera. He was a tourist, not really serious about his career.

  But Rudolf’s faith in Kenneth has proved well-founded. Having made his name as an international guest artist—winning great acclaim for his partnership with the Royal Ballet’s superbly Amazonian Zenaida Yenowsky—he is today, at the age of thirty-nine, establishing himself as a choreographer and a coach. Like Rudolf, he was photographed dancing in the nude by Richard Avedon, who was overwhelmed by his physical beauty, describing him as “a god, a Nordic god.” But if he has not attained the superstardom his mentor had in mind, it is, Kenneth maintains, because he chose to have “more of a life.” (Married for a second time, he is now the
father of three.) Rudolf always vowed he could detect an aura of domesticity around a dancer. “It shows onstage. You watch and you can see, he or she has a family, children, a cottage in the country and goes there every Friday. Dancing can’t be a job, like going to the office. It means everything.” And Kenneth admits that, without Rudolf there to force it out of him, he did not have that extra dimension, the ability to dedicate himself to the point where nothing else exists. “Rudolf gave the possibility, the option, but I also wanted a family. And in the end I think I’ve taken the best from both worlds.”

  In the fall of ’89, as The King and I tour headed west with no deal struck for a Broadway run, Rudolf made up for his disappointment by keeping abreast of the box-office takings. “Almost every day he was checking how they were doing so that—God forbid—they couldn’t be cheating him out of his percentage.” Friends dutifully traveled great distances to see the show. Rudolf’s Vaganova roommate Leo Ahonen drove with his dancer wife, Soili Arvola, from Texas to Tampa. Grateful for any words of praise (“He died very well”), Rudolf asked Leo to tell Margot that he had enjoyed it, as someone had sent her bad reviews. Spending Halloween with the Wyeths while playing in Wilmington, Rudolf appeared in good spirits, though he was reprimanded by Phyllis when she spotted him doing ballet exercises instead of practicing his scales. “They were making a huge to-do about his singing.” Rudolf’s costar, Liz Robertson, did her best to help—“She was wonderful with him”—but to no avail. The Wyeths found Rudolf’s performance “pretty painful to watch,” as did Maude and Wallace, who also saw the show in Wilmington. “He didn’t ask us what we thought, and we didn’t volunteer.”