Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  But Teja, Ute remarks, “was writing and laughing,” meaning that his story was concocted to appease his interrogators. There was never any lasting rift, and Chinko Rafique, who was one of the few people to whom both young men talked in retrospect about their affair, confirms that theirs was “a very deep passion.” For Rudolf, it was the rapture of a first infatuation, the highs and lows all the more intense for being illicit. For Teja, however, who remained in love with Rudolf much longer, their involvement—or rather, its consequences—would mark the rest of his life.

  With Teja laid low by a painful abscess on his calf, Rudolf went for his last long walk in Leningrad with Tamara. It was early May, and the white nights were just beginning, their pearly light making the familiar landmarks of the city recede like a stage set behind a screen. As they strolled the streets until the early hours, Rudolf spoke of his concern about how the French audiences would receive him. “Paris to us was the capital of the world so it was going to be like a big audition for him.” When Tamara heard that the Pushkins would be at the airport to see him off later that morning, she wanted to say good-bye there and then (Xenia was still ostracizing her, looking straight over her head whenever they met), but Rudolf insisted that she come.

  Arriving at Pulkova Airport after a night of virtually no sleep, he saw Xenia and Alexander Ivanovich sitting on a bench on the opposite side of the hall from Tamara. Then he saw Rosa making her way toward him with her new daughter in her arms, and his shame about the baby’s illegitimacy made him very cruel. “You shouldn’t have come,” he hissed. “Go home at once!” It was humiliating for his sister to be turned away under everyone’s gaze, but Rudolf was implacable: there could be no gossip. It was the reason he had instructed Teja not to be there. There had been rumors that a member of the company was going to be sent back from the airport, and it was only when he saw a dancer being led away from the group, ostensibly for having the incorrect documents, that Rudolf felt able to relax. When Leonid Romankov arrived, he found Rudolf, jauntily dressed for his destination in a black Basque beret, “very excited, and full of jokes.” His mood was catching. As the friends stood together at the barrier after finally waving him off, Xenia suddenly turned to Tamara and said, “Alexander Ivanovich is going to work. Why don’t you and I go to the Sever Café together?” Taken completely by surprise, Tamara agreed, and headed off with her to Nevsky Prospekt. Ordering a celebratory selection of blinichkis followed by profiteroles and coffee, the pair chatted like schoolgirls, exchanging stories about Rudolf and trying to imagine the impact he would have on the West. It was the beginning of a new bond that mutual dependence would soon deepen into real friendship.

  *By the time he finished his studies, he had shot the exercises in Vaganova’s famous tract on ballet using Baryshnikov as a model, and taken the photographs for an illustrated history of the Kirov with a text by Marietta Frangopoulo. (Rudolf is conspicuously absent from this book, which was published six years after his defection.)

  *He was able to leave Egon Bischoff eight hundred deutsche marks with which to buy one for him.

  5 SIX STEPS EXACTLY

  At a backstage reception following the Kirov’s gala opening at the Palais Garnier on May 16, 1961, the guests divided themselves into two formations: the Russians on one side of the elegant Foyer de la Danse, the French on the other. Three Parisian dancers were chatting together when they noticed a young man edging little by little away from his group and coming toward them. Like all the Russian men in their strangely cut, old-fashioned suits, he appeared “dressed but not dressed,” but what singled him out was his intelligent, animated expression. “Look, this one is completely different,” said Pierre Lacotte. “You can see from the way he’s looking around that he’s interested in everything: he’s talking with his eyes.” Like an inquisitive wild creature, Rudolf inched even closer. “Now we were sure he would come to us.” “Do you speak French?” Pierre asked. “No, English,” he replied. Then, turning to the two women, he smiled and said, “I recognize you.”

  Tall, slim Claire Motte, newly appointed danseuse étoile, had performed on several occasions in Russia, and during the first days of the Kirov tour, she, along with fellow étoiles Claude Bessy and Attilio Labis, had been the only Paris Opéra dancers either to watch or take part in the Russians’ classes. To Rudolf their eagerness to compare techniques and teaching methods had immediately established them as kindred spirits; he had nothing but contempt for their indifferent colleagues rehearsing in studios next door.

  Although he himself had not appeared onstage that evening, he had been dazzling as Prince Désiré in the dress rehearsal of The Sleeping Beauty seen by the two ballerinas the previous day. Also present was the young dance critic René Sirvin, who would write ecstatically of a “jeune phénomène aérien … d’une virtuosité et d’une légèreté stupéfiantes” (“a young aerial phenomenon of a stupefying virtuosity and lightness”). Sirvin’s article, headlined: “Les Ballets de Leningrad ont leur homme de l’espace”* (“The Leningrad ballet has its spaceman”), was published in L’Aurore on May 17, the day after the Kirov’s opening, with the promise that the twenty-two-year-old Nureyev would appear again as the Prince that evening. In fact, he did not dance any of the scheduled performances of The Sleeping Beauty, even though Rudolf claimed that Ekaterina Furtseva, the Russian minister of culture, had specifically asked for him to be given the opening night. At a welcoming reception held at the Hotel Moderne he described how Furtseva had entered the room and come straight toward him.

  Without saying hello to the company or to Sergeyev or anybody. And she said, “This country waits for you to dance here.” She glanced at Sergeyev, who rushed in. “And you make sure he dance first night and you send him to Cannes Film Festival to dance.” She wanted to make sure I go to Cannes and present myself. Sergeyev said, “Yes, yes, yes.…” So. He didn’t give me first night of Sleeping Beauty. He gave me dress rehearsal. At that time, like in all Latin countries, dress rehearsal was the performance. Because all the press came. It didn’t matter who dance first night. So—his plan failed.

  Once again Rudolf suspected Sergeyev of jealousy, though Alla Osipenko saw it differently. She suggests that by casting Irina Kolpakova and her husband, Vladilen Semyonov (who received only politely appreciative reviews), the director was vindicating himself to the French impresarios. “It was so that Sergeyev and Dudinskaya could say, ‘You see, we gave the premiere to the young dancers and they didn’t have any success.’ If Nureyev had appeared, he would have been a sensation.” Whatever the reason, the snub had made Rudolf even more determined to do exactly as he pleased. While the company was being shown the sights of Paris on supervised tours, he had already gone his own way, jumping off the charter bus and running down the street in order to explore the city alone. And now he even felt grateful that Sergeyev had unwittingly provided him with an unexpected opportunity. “He gave me chance to go to Salle Pleyel and hear for the first time Bach cantatas and sonatas with Yehudi Menuhin. Was extraordinary thing.” It was after this performance, on May 16, that he joined the company in the Foyer de Danse.

  Charmed by such an unusual, beautiful young man, the French friends, who had planned to have supper together at Claude Bessy’s apartment, invited Rudolf to accompany them. “I’d love to,” he said. “But I’ll never get permission.” “At least we could try,” suggested Claire Motte. “We’re not doing anything suspicious, we only want to talk about dance.” In a delegation of three they went over to ask permission of Sergeyev and Dudinskaya. “They were both very embarrassed: ‘As you know it’s not permitted,’ Sergeyev told them. ‘The dancers have to work so hard and should get to bed early. But,’ he added, relenting, ‘perhaps if you take another Kirov member with you we can make an exception.’ When Rudolf heard the good news, he was amazed: The dancers were forbidden to do anything independent of the group. Rudolf told them that he would bring the boy with whom he shared his hotel room: ‘He’s called Yuri Soloviev.’ Having just seen Solo
viev in the Blue Bird pas de deux with Alla Sizova, the French dancers were delighted to have the chance to meet the performer responsible for the evening’s ‘coup de tonnerre.’ ‘For me it was Soloviev who was the Kirov’s most impressive dancer,’ Claude Bessy remarks. ‘His quality of jump was incredible—lighter than a cat’s. But Nureyev was the one who wanted to make contact with us.’ ”

  Claude lived on the rue de la Rochefoucauld, within walking distance of the Opéra, and en route, while Soloviev looked ill at ease and hardly said a word, “comme un figurant” (like a film extra), Rudolf talked enough for them both. He had been struck by the electric charge of Paris—“like a perpetual party”—finding the French flâneurs especially intriguing. Why, he demanded, did everyone seem to be walking without any sense of purpose? My God, Pierre thought, this one has a lot of opinions about everything—a view shared by Claude, whose elegant apartment drew a barrage of comments from Rudolf from the minute he arrived. “It was his first contact with a style of life completely different from the one he knew. For him it was all too chic, and he was very critical.”

  But while Claude found Rudolf haughty and disagreeable, Claire and Pierre were soon won over by his evident delight at being in their company, and by his hunger to learn. “I would like to talk to you about the past,” he told them. “To find out all the things you know that maybe we don’t anymore.” With Pierre, who was fluent in English,* acting as translator, they went on to talk “about everything. About Paris, about architecture and painting, about how ballet had started here with Louis Quatorze and Versailles.… Rudolf already knew it all.”

  After “a fantastic time” together, Claire and Pierre drove the two Russian dancers back to the dismal Hotel Moderne, dropping them, at Rudolf’s request, on the corner of the place de la République rather than at the entrance. “Because they observe us.” Rudolf was so reluctant to leave his new friends that when they presented him with a box of chocolates as a memento of the evening, he took two and asked to leave the rest behind. “That way, I can take two tomorrow and two the next day.” “Rudolf,” Pierre said with a laugh, “are you afraid we won’t see each other?” “Yes, of course.” “Well,” he said, “you must trust us. Take the chocolates now and I guarantee that we’ll see each other tomorrow.” “But how? What can we do?” “I’ll come and watch you in class and afterward, I won’t speak to you, but we’ll meet for a drink. Do you know that little bar at the back of the Opéra on the rue Auber? I’ll see you there. I promise.”

  The principals’ class had already started when Pierre came into the studio. Dudinskaya, who was teaching it, welcomed him warmly and invited him to sit down. Immediately spotting Rudolf and Soloviev, Pierre also recognized Alla Sizova and Irina Kolpakova. “But Rudolf stood out from them all: Even at the barre he had such presence.” When the dancers moved to the center, Rudolf began to show off, glancing out of the corner of his eye to make sure that Pierre was watching. “He wanted to give me a performance, and he danced like an animal. Technically, it was superb: I realized then that he was absolutely exceptional.”

  When class was over Pierre deliberately avoided any contact with Rudolf but went straight to the Café Pampam to wait for him. “He arrived with a big smile and immediately asked me what I’d thought. ‘Rudolf, if you dance like this at your first performance it will be a triumph!’ ‘That’s what I want more than anything,’ he replied. ‘Nijinsky and all the great dancers made their names in Paris. But, tell me frankly, did you notice anything wrong? What can I fix?’ ” Having learned that Pierre, an independent choreographer and director, was not only a product of the Paris Opéra school and company but had also been a pupil of the Maryinsky ballerina Lubov Egorova, who had worked with Cecchetti, Rudolf resolved to absorb as much from him as he could.

  With time on his hands, being between companies and recuperating from an injury, Pierre was more than willing to oblige; over the next couple of days they went to Sainte-Chapelle and Notre Dame, to Ben Hur (which Rudolf loathed), and to West Side Story (which moved him to tears). As they came out into the street, in a burst of euphoria he launched into an impersonation of the Jets, cha-cha-chaing along the Champs-Élysées.

  When Pierre took Rudolf to his apartment on the avenue Wagram, he immediately made himself at home, “like a cat on a cushion.” On one occasion he curled up and fell asleep there, but not for long—he couldn’t afford to waste a second, and was constantly asking questions. Pierre’s passion was for ballets of the Romantic era on which, through a series of meticulously researched restorations, he went on to become France’s leading authority. Discovering that Pierre had danced Le Spectre de la rose at the Paris Opéra, Rudolf begged to learn it (the Spectre was one of the legendary Nijinsky roles, which he was determined to inherit). Having studied the famous photographs of Nijinsky with his petal-covered head framed by tendril-like, Art Nouveau arms, Rudolf already had his own clear idea of the style, and when Pierre attempted to elongate the exaggerated curve of his port de bras, gave a cry of protest, “Don’t kill my inspiration!”

  They continued to work together in Claire Motte’s studio, with Pierre also demonstrating steps he knew from ballets by Balanchine. What had begun as a creative alliance soon evolved into a friendship. “He was so happy and charming, and said to me, ‘You’re like a member of my family now.’ ” Over the coming weeks Rudolf would reveal tantalizing details about his life in Russia, describing his difficult childhood, telling Pierre about Menia, his Cuban girlfriend, and talking often of Pushkin. But he never confided anything of a truly private nature. “He was very discreet at that time. I didn’t even know that he was homosexual. All that concerned him then was to visit, to know, to learn.” Nor at any point did Rudolf speak out against the Soviet system, although he did protest bitterly about the lack of opportunity in the Kirov, saying that he had often felt that he was suffocating.

  A document in Rudolf’s KGB file claims that Pierre was the main perpetrator of a plan to persuade Rudolf to stay in France. Pierre, however, insists that neither one ever mentioned the idea of defection. On the contrary, Pierre spoke of plans to come to London to see Rudolf’s Giselle, and promised to visit him in Leningrad. “Rudolf would complain, ‘They’re against me all the time. I can’t say or do what I think.’ But I’d tell him, ‘Listen, as a dancer you need that discipline. Remember that you’re here in Paris and dance like a god.’ ”

  May 19, the day of Rudolf’s debut, arrived. Act 4 of La Bayadère, “The Kingdom of the Shades,” was shown in a mixed program, which included the Cossack scene from Taras Bulba, a showpiece of Soviet machismo, in which Rudolf also appeared. The audience, most of whom had never seen La Bayadère, one of the great Russian classics, the audience was entranced from the moment the curtain rose. Their first impression of the long, single file of corps de ballet dancers embodying Petipa’s vision of bliss as they hypnotically repeat the slow arabesque sequence that seems to last forever, was of a poetic beauty and purity beyond belief. Then, after a pas de trois for three principal Shades, Rudolf suddenly appeared. Pierre felt very nervous, “because although he’d been so wonderful in class, with the emotion of a performance you never know what might happen. But the way he ran on without music made people start to whisper.… Because he was like a tiger.”

  To make a spectacular impact, Rudolf had decided to dance his trademark solo from Le Corsaire.* Pouncing on the first beat in a ballerina-high attitude, he began his now-famous diagonal of sauts de basques, launching into the air and sitting there, his legs tucked under him like a Buddha, then sinking into a deep predatory lunge as if tensed to attack. At the dress rehearsal, René Sirvin had watched Rudolf stop the orchestra and shout abuse at the conductor—either for objecting to inserting a passage from another ballet into the score or for failing to play at the speed Rudolf wanted. (The tempo itself had to hover as he strove for that miraculous moment of levitation basketball players call “hang time.”) Finding that the Kirov’s elaborate, old-fashioned costume restricted
his elevation, Rudolf had simplified the design, changing the color to an ultramarine blue, and accentuating the preening arch of his torso with a décolleté neckline and white sash, his Tatar cheekbones with a plumed turban—“How he shone!” remembers his partner, Olga Moiseyeva. The West had never seen anyone like Rudolf—the paragon of animals—with his mix of hauteur and savage intensity, his “façon féline,” created by the upward stretch and lightness of his line. “Maybe his legs were not as long as they should have been,” Baryshnikov would later say, “but it was like a touch of earth there, with that man’s butt and overdeveloped calf. It was very masculine and at the same time [had] a touch of the feminine.… That gave him a sort of sexuality nobody around had at that time. It was so exotic.”

  The furor that followed the end of the solo was deafening. “People screamed,” says Pierre. “I’ve seen hundreds of Rudolf’s performances, and never did he dance like that. Never!” There had not been a comparable ballet event in Paris since the first appearance of Nijinsky in La Saison Russe more than fifty years earlier—a debut that, by coincidence, fell on the same day of the same month. “C’était déjà le Nijinski de l’Oiseau de feu,” wrote Olivier Merlin in Le Monde, but octogenarian Lubov Egorova, who had been partnered by Nijinsky at the Maryinsky, vowed that Rudolf had something even greater than his predecessor. “He is taller, longer, slenderer, which makes him appear lighter.… And he has the same presence [as Nijinsky].” To those who had seen “the soaring angel” for themselves, Rudolf’s arrival was a second coming, and to those who had not, it was just as much of a wonder. “He opened the eyes of the West to Russian ballet,” Irina Kolpakova remarked. “Through him, people in the West fell wildly in love with our art all over again.”

  Right after the performance Rudolf joined his French friends, who were waiting to take him out for a celebratory dinner: