Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  In the back of the car was a young girl whom I had never seen before: very pale, quite tiny, and looking no more than sixteen.… She was introduced to me as Clara Saint.… Clara hardly spoke at all during the evening. She had lovely straight dark hair with reddish lights in it, which she had a habit of lightly tossing in a soft, almost childlike way. She would shake her head and smile, always silent. I liked her enormously from the first moment I saw her.

  Rudolf did not remember that he had encountered twenty-year-old Clara a few days earlier when Claire Motte had taken her backstage to meet the Kirov dancers. The only one who spoke to them was Rudolf. Having spent her early childhood in Buenos Aires, she had moved to Paris with her Chilean mother at the age of five, when her parents separated. Her father, who still lived in Argentina, was a wealthy industrialist, and Clara was the heiress to the family fortune. Attractive, intelligent, and worldly, she moved in the society of dancers, artists, and fashion designers, yet retained a quality of gentleness and understated style to which Rudolf had instinctively responded. Her fiancé was Vincent Malraux, the younger son of André Malraux, the French minister of culture. A “very spectacular” philosophy student, Vincent was tall and beautiful with black eyes and great charm and humor, but he did not share Clara’s love of ballet. Taking advantage of the fact that he and his brother were away for a few days in the South of France, she went to the Kirov with Claire as often as she could.

  Before inviting everyone back for supper at her mother’s house on the Quai d’Orsay, Clara took the three of them to see her new apartment on the rue de Rivoli. Although it was still in the process of being redecorated, Rudolf was clearly awed by its size and stunning views of the Jardin des Tuileries; he seemed relieved to discover that they would be eating in Clara’s mother’s kitchen. Exhilarated by the success of his performance and stimulated by the company of his French friends, Rudolf was more loquacious than ever before, surprising Clara with the range of his knowledge:

  I told him he must have had a wonderful education because he knew our music and spoke of French Impressionism and pointillism.… But he said, “I learned everything by myself. In Leningrad I go all the time to the Hermitage: I need it like food.” He was so happy that night, telling us about many things that he wanted to do. He never mentioned the idea of leaving Russia, but he said, “I dream of being free to come here when I want.”

  Eager to show Clara his favorite Kirov ballet, he offered to take her to Grigorovich’s The Stone Flower, in which he was not performing. The night of its premiere, May 23, almost every eye in the audience was focused on the VIP box in which the young couple sat side by side. A few boxes away were the Kirov officials, one of whom took Rudolf aside during an intermission and upbraided him for associating with foreigners. Rudolf mentioned nothing to Clara about the reprimand, or the subsequent ban on their friendship. They spent the rest of the evening having supper together at a bistro on the boulevard St.-Michel.

  Most of the following day Clara waited at home for Vincent to return. She had lent her Alfa Romeo to the Malraux brothers for the long Pentecost weekend, and when they still hadn’t appeared by midnight, she realized that something must have happened. Deciding to telephone their parents despite the late hour, she spoke to their mother, Madeleine, who said, “You mean you don’t know? Then it’s better that you come to see us straight away.” Clara learned as soon as she arrived that both Vincent and his brother, Gauthier, were dead, killed while driving at high speed on the perilous corniche of the Côte d’Or.

  The next few days passed in a blur for Clara. Given Valium injections by her doctor, she remembers almost nothing about Vincent’s funeral or about the occasion, more than a week later, when, feeling like a sleepwalker, she went to the Palais des Sports (the huge arena in the southern suburbs to which the Kirov had just transferred), for Rudolf’s Paris debut in Swan Lake. Some people were “a little shocked” to see her already out on the town, but the ballet helped her to forget, and over the next two weeks she allowed herself to be swept up by the activities of the three friends:

  We started to see him before class, after class.… Claire would say, “Come and have lunch with us! What are you doing later?” We took him everywhere: to Versailles, to Béjart’s Bolero, to the Crazy Horse Saloon.… He could hardly believe all those naked girls and was laughing so much! He wanted to buy an electric train so we went to Le Nain Bleu—a toyshop where he stayed for two hours, absolutely mesmerized while we were very bored. He wanted to see an English bookshop, so we took him to Galignani on the rue de Rivoli. He’d never seen a shop with so many shelves of books—he thought it was a library and didn’t realize that you could actually buy the books. Every day was a new experience, and he was so amused and excited about it all—kissing us and saying, “I’m so happy!”

  They noticed the way that, like a child, Rudolf wanted everything at once, ordering tea, a hot chocolate, and a Coca-Cola all at the same time. Claire, who was the big sister of the group, chided Rudolf by saying, “You’re very spoiled! Have tea now and something else later.” “Then he didn’t talk to us for two minutes.” “I’m not spoiled at all,” Rudolf murmured. “You can’t imagine how poor I was as a child.”

  The greed was all part of his craving for new experiences. But while Rudolf was devouring every aspect of Western civilization, his Kirov colleages spent most of their free time shopping, going to no more than one or two shows during their month in Paris. They were interested in seeing a rival Sleeping Beauty, which had just opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, performed by the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas—a company that was soon to acquire special significance for Rudolf. This opulent production—staging it had been Georges de Cuevas’s last extravagance before his death three months earlier—had been mounted at a cost of 150 million francs, forcing the marquis to sell his collections and Quai Voltaire apartment, but it failed to impress the Russians. “It was small-scale, dainty dancing. Nothing like the Kirov,” said Gabrielle Komleva. “Strange costumes with huge Folies-Bergères feathers, more like music hall,” according to Irina Kolpakova. Rudolf was equally critical, finding the elaborate designs distracting, the dancers lacking homogeneous schooling and emotional depth. All the same, when Pierre announced that they were taking him to dinner to meet the new director, Raymundo de Larrain, he was eager to discuss the two versions.

  As it was Larrain who had designed the rococo Sleeping Beauty, Rudolf was somewhat surprised to discover that his apartment on the rue des Saints-Pères, while extremely grand with its velvet-covered walls and eighteenth-century antiques, was decorated with impeccable restraint. Larrain himself was equally refined—an urbane, amusing character with an aristocratic manner that verged at times on the supercilious:*

  Retaliating against Larrain’s criticism of the Kirov’s old-fashioned repertory, Rudolf began mocking the de Cuevas company. “How long will you be performing Sleeping Beauty?” he challenged Raymundo. “For a month? That’s not ballet, it’s a musical run!” Pierre remembers Rudolf illustrating his contempt for the lavish designs by grabbing a crystal vase and balancing it on his head, “Look! A costume by Raymundo de Larrain!” “The boy is a mujik!” Raymundo muttered to Pierre. Yet despite their differences, Rudolf left under the impression that they had managed to part good friends.

  In Rudolf’s account of the evening, it was Soloviev who had accompanied him, but Pierre has no recollection of the dancer being there. Increasingly disdainful of company rules, Rudolf had long since ceased to get permission for his outings, or to take a chaperone along. He was given another of several warnings not to see friends described by the KGB as “politically suspicious people … from artistic Bohemia.” “Then we’ll have to stop,” Pierre remarked when Rudolf told him, but Rudolf reacted in dismay. “How can you say such a thing? Are you a good friend or not?” “Because it’s for you,” protested Pierre. “You have to be careful. We don’t want you to be punished.” “But I want to spend my time with the three of you. We have a
wonderful friendship. I’m not going to pay any attention to them.”

  Realizing that Rudolf’s “absolutely intolerable” conduct was not going to change, Vitaly Strizhevsky, the Kirov’s assistant director and KGB emissary, reported him to the Communist Party’s Central Committee. On June 3, Sergeyev and Georgi Korkin, the Kirov’s administrative director, received an order from the CCCPSU’s Commission on Travel to send Nureyev back before the end of the tour “with all the necessary precautionary measures,” following this up with a reminder dispatched from Moscow three days later. Instead of acting on its instructions the two Kirov directors and the Soviet ambassador decided to make a case for Rudolf to stay. How would they explain the sudden absence of the star largely responsible for the success of the tour? Nureyev was the dancer everybody wanted to see. His impact in Paris was so dramatic that even the Leningrad paper Soviet Culture had commented on it. Lately, too, he had been more cooperative, joining a propaganda photo session—an entente cordiale between French and Russian Communists—as he, Sergeyev, and a trio of Kirov ballerinas posed with French journalists and the dancer Michel Renault in the editorial offices of the Communist paper l’Humanité. It was Nureyev, more than any other Kirov member, who was bringing glory to the Soviet state: Earlier that week he had been awarded the Nijinsky Prize by Serge Lifar, who declared that for dance historians there would be three epoques: “l’époque Nijinski, l’époque Lifar, et l’époque Noureev.”

  Unaware that his fate lay in such a delicate balance, Rudolf capriciously reverted to form: His reception in Paris had made him feel invincible. One night, as he began his act 3 variation in Swan Lake, he slipped and fell, but instead of continuing to dance, he gestured for the orchestra to stop, and left the stage. His three friends were horrified, as Pierre recalls:

  We waited and waited in silence. When finally he came back and signaled to the conductor, “Go!” I thought, My God, you’d better dance well otherwise people will whistle at you. In France we hate that kind of thing. After the performance we said, “Rudolf, you took a big risk. Please don’t do that again. It’s better to put your resin on before the performance. If you keep that up, you’ll be in big trouble.” “Yeah, but I danced well.”

  It was true. He had danced superbly, bringing to the role of Prince Siegfried an authority and finesse that his Leningrad interpretation had lacked. Nevertheless the KGB’s vigilance over Rudolf was tightening by the day. “Look, there’s someone behind us!” he exclaimed to Pierre when they were out together one evening. Pierre laughed. “Are you dreaming?” “You don’t believe me? I know for sure. We’re being followed by people from the Russian embassy.” Pierre turned around to look but could see no one. “Of course,” said Rudolf. “Because now they’re hiding themselves.”

  A couple of Rudolf’s colleagues had warned him that he was being trailed. “It was uncomfortable to tell him,” says Olga Moiseyeva. “But we thought it would be fine, because although he would stay out late with his foreign friends, he would still dance beautifully the next day.” Others, staying in a different hotel, were delighted that the KGB were all sitting in the Moderne waiting for Rudolf, leaving them free to go shopping and walk the streets of Paris unaccompanied. “We even went to a nightclub!”

  During an evening on which the whole company were invited by the French impresarios to the “spectacle des girls emplumées” at the Lido, Rudolf, feeling bored, turned around to Janine Ringuet sitting behind him.

  “You know that there are people who want me to stay in France?” I didn’t understand. “What do you mean, Rudolf?” “If I left the company, what would you say?” He must have seen the expression on my face—if something like that were to happen it would be terrible for the work we were doing—because he said, “Don’t worry, I was just joking! I know perfectly well that I have to stay with the Kirov.”

  Several of the dancers were being encouraged to inform on one another. When one ballerina heard from another, a KGB mole, that Rudolf had been telling his French friends things he wasn’t supposed to—“that he was suppressed in the theater and they didn’t let him do what he should be doing”—she reported the conversation to the secretary of the Komsomol organization, even though she herself admits, “We were all complaining.”

  Yuri Soloviev was constantly interrogated about his roommate’s comings and goings. “One day he came to me and said, ‘Oh Rudka, they made me open your bags. I looked for your plane ticket.’ ” But although Soloviev tried to protect Rudolf, warning him to be careful, he was growing tired of the pressure and disrupted nights (Rudolf rarely came back before two or three in the morning), and he asked to be moved. This immediately fueled a number of rumors, one being that Soloviev had been set up by the authorities to try to seduce Rudolf in order to prove his homosexuality. A more likely version, confirmed by Soloviev himself, was that it was Rudolf who had made advances. Laughing scornfully at the suggestion, their colleague Sasha Shavrov, Soloviev’s closest friend, insists, “If Rudolf had tried anything like that, Yuri would just have hit him in the face in Russian tradition.” But this, according to Alla Osipenko, is exactly what happened. “Yuri told me that when Rudik made a pass at him, he smashed his face.”* Mikhail Baryshnikov, who knew Soloviev well, maintains that the idea that he may have turned informer is ridiculous. “Rudolf liked Yuri. He admired his dancing, and always said that he was a decent man.” Yet one story persists. Among the dancers questioned in Leningrad after Rudolf’s defection, only Soloviev insisted that the act had been preplanned. When word got back to Tamara, she went to see Soloviev herself to ask him for an explanation. The reason he gave was that, unlike everyone else in the company, Rudolf had not been spending his money on Western luxuries: He must have known that he was going to stay.

  Foreign tours provided the Russian dancers with their only chance to supplement their income, an opportunity to acquire items whose black market value at home was equivalent to a month’s rent. (One dancer who brought back forty nylon shirts from Paris was caught and punished by never being taken abroad again.) Rudolf did, in fact, buy a few Western clothes and trinkets for his family as well as a selection of musical scores for Pushkin, but everything he acquired for himself—with the exception of the train set, which may well have been a present for Teja—was accessories for his dancing: tights, leg warmers, ballet shoes, makeup. For his London debut in Giselle he was given a wig, “blond, like Marilyn Monroe,” by his French friends, who took him to Perruque Bertrand, the best wigmaker in Paris, when he complained that the Kirov’s were “horrible.” The designer Simon Virsaladze was pleasantly surprised one day when Rudolf asked if he would accompany him to a Lycra factory to help him choose costume fabrics for The Legend of Love (in which he was counting on making his debut the following season). “That’s the first time in my life I’ve ever had a dancer ask me to do that!” Virsaladze exclaimed to Alla Osipenko. “He spent almost his entire tour allowance at that factory. Alla, that boy’s really on the ball.”

  The Legend of Love fabric, like the Giselle wig, are evidence enough that Rudolf was not planning to defect in Paris. And yet the possibility continued to preoccupy him—it was just courage to carry it out that he lacked. Passing the place de la Madeleine’s Romanesque temple, he decided to go inside. Although he was not a believer, he had always loved the atmosphere and aesthetics of churches—“Mass is good show”—and the Madeleine’s interior with its softly colored marble, rich murals, and gilt Corinthian columns was breathtaking. On this occasion, however, he had come to pray: “I went to Mary, and I said: ‘Make it so that I stay without me doing it, you know, let it happen … that it will just happen … arrange so that I will stay.’ ”

  Shortly before he was due to leave, Tamara kept calling Rudolf’s hotel room through most of the night. “Finally he answered. ‘Rudik, where have you been?’ ‘I was walking. Looking at Paris.’ ‘So, how is it?’ ‘O.K. but I want to get to London.… The audiences here are stupid.’ ” On the afternoon of June 14, two days before the
Kirov’s departure, Rudolf went alone to La Librairie-Galerie de la Danse, the ballet world’s Shakespeare and Co., on the place Dauphine, having heard that it was exhibiting work by Bakst and Benois. Immediately recognizing Rudolf, and delighted by his visit, its owner, the dance writer Gilberte Cournand, said she would like to show him an extraordinary book that was in the process of being rebound. As the workshop was around the corner, she took Rudolf there herself, leaving him to browse through the book. After ten minutes Sergeyev came into the gallery with Dudinskaya. Neither of the three mentioned Rudolf, but Mme. Cournand was convinced that they hadn’t come by chance. “They must have followed him. Like policemen.”

  Rudolf would always believe that Sergeyev and Dudinskaya wanted somehow to prevent him from completing the tour. “They devised plan to send me back. So they would be asked to dance in London.”* He had heard that Sergeyev’s influence on Leningrad’s Communist Party was so profound that he had once been able to instigate the exile of Chaboukiani, his greatest rival, to Georgia. “Whisked away.…

  Things like that. They had extraordinary power. Political power.” But Rudolf was completely wrong in suspecting Sergeyev of holding him back. An apolitical, profoundly religious man, who Baryshnikov says “deep down hated Soviets so much,” the director was doing all he could to protect the young rebel. That day, June 14, he and Korkin had received their third directive from Moscow, which this time was “incontestable.” With a background in variety theater, Korkin was a very different character from the highly cultured Sergeyev, being far more worldly and authoritarian, but the two were united in their contempt for Soviet bureaucrats, “all anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, anti-Western and anti-art.” Once again they insisted “categorically” that they would not continue the tour without Rudolf, but by now the matter was out of their hands.