Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  On June 15 Korkin sent for Nicolai Tarasov, a stagehand, and Sergei Melnikov, head of lighting, telling them that they would be flying back the next day to Moscow along with Natasha, the French translator, and Alexander Grosinsky, the administrator in charge of transport. “Nureyev will be coming too,” said Korkin, “but he doesn’t know about it yet.” That night was the company’s farewell performance in Paris. Rudolf was dancing Swan Lake with Alla Osipenko, who had been attracting acclaim as effusive as Rudolf’s (for Olivier Merlin, their names were “joined with those of Karsavina and Nijinsky in the land of the sylphs”). Renowned for her ravishing long legs and neoclassical line, Osipenko already had a large following in Paris, having appeared there while touring with the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Ballet in 1956.

  That night, as she and Rudolf left the artists’ entrance of the Palais des Sports, they spotted their friends and fans waiting on each side of the fenced corridor. Strizhevsky, who—following established KGB practice—was always a few paces behind, heard the dancers’ plans to join a large group for a farewell supper, and refused his permission. Assigned to escort Rudolf back to Moscow the following morning, he was taking no chances. Realizing what was happening, some of the fans set up a chant of: “Let them go! Let them go!” Turning to Strizhevsky, Alla said, “Vitaly Dmitrievich, if you don’t let us go, there’s going to be a scandal!” Far from being a typical KGB roughneck, Strizhevsky was a well-educated man with a good sense of humor. “He understood everything about the Soviet system, but it was all in his eyes, he never talked about it.” Like many men, he had a soft spot for Osipenko, with her fiery temper and femme fatale ways. Besides, as she reminded him, it was their last night in Paris, and also the eve of her birthday. Reluctantly he agreed to let them go. “But if Nureyev doesn’t come back to his room,” he told her, “you will be responsible.”

  They went in different cars, Rudolf with his friends, Alla with hers. A maverick in her own way, she, too, had been mixing with “undesirable” company, spending time with French friends and expatriate Russians, several of whom (including the choreographer Léonide Massine), had been trying to persuade her to stay in France. More imprudently still, she was having an illicit affair with a married man, a principal in the Paris Opéra Ballet: “X and I were having a wonderful romance in Paris. We would escape together to a room he’d rented in a little hotel outside the city. I don’t know why the KGB didn’t follow me. With Rudolf, they seemed to want to provoke him, to catch him.”

  At the restaurant that night the French dancer asked Alla if she had received her bouquet of birthday flowers, in which he had hidden a surprise present. “Strizhevsky had asked me who the flowers were from, and I realized then that he must have confiscated the gift—X was very upset about it.” In the middle of dinner a waiter came over to the table and told the ballerina that she was wanted on the telephone. It was her mother calling to wish her a happy birthday. She had tried Alla’s hotel first, and been given the number of the restaurant: The dancers’ outing may have been authorized, but they were still under surveillance. As Alla left the table, Rudolf called out, “Ask your mother to call Alexander Ivanovich and tell him about our success. Tell him it was a performance of genius!”

  It was long after midnight when she and the French dancer got up to leave. “Rudik,” she said playfully, “I hope you’re going back to your hotel to bed!” “Of course, Alla, where else would I go? I have to finish packing. And, Alla, are you going home to bed?” “We wished each other good night and parted in laughter, knowing that neither of us had any intention of turning in for the night.” While she and her lover drove out of the city to their hotel on the Seine, Rudolf and Clara stayed on at the restaurant long after everyone else had gone home.

  “Then he said we should have a last walk together,” Clara says. “He wanted to see the Seine and the illuminations one more time.” It was a warm June night, and Paris had never looked more beautiful, “so we walked and walked and walked.” Crossing Pont Neuf, they stopped to sit on a bench, still deep in conversation. It was one of the rare times they had been alone together, and to Clara, their friendship had become very special. She spoke a little about Vincent Malraux, but Rudolf was not very interested in hearing about her life. “He was very narcissistic.” To her he revealed nothing close to his heart, never mentioning Teja, and concealing his Pushkin ménage by claiming to live in Leningrad with a girl from the Kirov—Alla Sizova. “With a girl!” Clara exclaimed in surprise. “Yes,” he replied. “Two rooms.”

  If Rudolf was already a coup de foudre for Clara, his own attraction to her was all part of the romance of Paris: He had fallen in love with the city itself. He spoke that night of how much he would miss Paris, although he was looking forward to England, the English style of ballet, and especially English audiences, which he believed would be more discerning than the French. Finally, at around six in the morning, they found a taxi, and Clara dropped Rudolf off at his hotel. “It was not a sad farewell because we were coming to London in a few days to see him.” While Rudolf went upstairs to pack, Clara took the taxi on to the Quai d’Orsay and went to bed.

  Olga Moiseyeva could see as soon as Rudolf came into her room to check the time of their departure that he had been up all night. “You’re so late!” she exclaimed. “I know. We were walking.… I’ll go and get my things.” They sat next to each other on the familiar blue bus that had ferried the Kirov group, with the exception of Rudolf, around Paris. “In the bus they gather all the tickets.” When they arrived at Le Bourget, then the city’s international airport, he recognized among a dozen or so people standing by the bar the friends he had asked to come and say good-bye. He was not expecting Clara, whom he had just left, or Claire, who was on tour in Malaga, but he saw Pierre talking to Sergeyev and Dudinskaya, as well as Claire’s Paris Opéra partner, Jean-Pierre Bonnefous—“jeune, beau et blond”—and Olivier Merlin, whose adulatory articles had pleased him. He went over to join them all for a last drink, and stayed on chatting until he saw the company start to head toward the departure gate. As Rudolf joined the line he was taken to one side and told that he would not be going with the others to London.* Instead, he would be boarding a plane to Moscow in two hours’ time, as he was needed for an important concert at the Kremlin. “Khrushchev wants to see you dance.”

  Rudolf’s first reaction was one of disbelief: How could the dancer who had brought such phenomenal success to the Kirov Ballet have no place on the London plane? “Corps de ballets have place; carpenter have place, but I have no place.” But when Korkin went on to tell him that he was also being sent back because his mother was ill, Rudolf was certain that he was being duped. It was not true—he had talked to her the night before and she had been fine. And if she really had suddenly fallen ill, why stop in Moscow first for a concert? Then he remembered a conversation he had had before leaving Leningrad, and his French friends watched him “go white like enamel.” “Bad news from home” was the “terrible trick” played on Valery Panov, the Maly Theater dancer who had been recalled to Russia two years earlier while on a tour of the United States, and victimized ever since.

  Early in May, Rudolf had gone to talk to Panov to find out what had really happened to him in America and after. Everyone in the Kirov had been warned to learn from Panov’s example, but the exact nature of his misdemeanors was never made clear—either to them or to him. Waiting until the dancer had finished his rehearsal, Rudolf listened intently to his story. What had made him appear a potential traitor, Panov realized in retrospect, was acting “like an adolescent in love” with the variety, pace, and abundance of “mighty, magical” America; what had finally indicted him was the 16-mm camera bought with his advance wages, which was viewed by the KGB as payment for espionage. Sent home in disgrace, Panov found himself a scapegoat—“a warning to others to beef up fear of the enemy”—and barred from any further trips abroad.

  Rudolf, whose own transgressions on tour had been far more reckless, knew exact
ly what lay in store: “No foreign travel ever again.… I would be consigned to complete obscurity.” Sobbing, almost fainting, he told Korkin that he was going to kill himself, because this banishment would have terrible consequences for his life. People began rushing up to see what was the matter. “It will be all right,” promised Janine Ringuet. “Our organization is strong enough to help you. We can speak to Mme. Furtseva.…” But Rudolf hardly heard a word. “I am a dead man!” he told her, “crying and crying like a child.” Seeing Olga Moiseyeva and Alla Osipenko coming toward him, he held up four fingers crossed like bars to show them that this was the equivalent of being sent off to prison. “We all understood what it implied. Everybody was very upset—Dudinskaya and Sergeyev too. People knew that if he went back to Russia it would be really bad for him.”

  Most of the ballerinas—even those who had always been openly against me—started to cry.… They all begged me to go back without any fuss, promising that the first thing they would do upon their arrival in London would be to go to the Soviet Embassy en masse. They would explain my attitude, convince them that there was nothing political in my way of life, that I was simply an artist … [who] needed to be left alone and understood. “They” will understand, you’ll see, and fly you straight back to London. Go to Moscow. Don’t do anything foolish.… You’ll commit yourself forever if you do.… But I knew better … I thought to myself: This is the end.

  “Go and get me a taxi,” he called to Jean-Pierre Bonnefous, one of the French dancers standing at the bar. But the eighteen-year-old was too afraid, “No, no, no. I can’t.” “I say, all right.… OK, well, go and call my girlfriend.” With her Malraux connections, Clara might well be able to help. It was now nearly 9:00 a.m. and the Moscow flight was due to leave at 12:25, which meant a wait of three and half hours. As soon as the Kirov had left for London, Strizhevsky suggested that they sit in the Aeroflot lounge, but Rudolf absolutely refused.

  “Don’t touch me. If you touch me I will start screaming.” So they let me stay on spot. I thought if they get me into separate room for Soviet pilots or something there would be no control … or nurses who were dying to inject me with things.… “If you move me one inch I will start screaming.”

  Escorting him instead to Soucoupes Volantes, the bar in the main lobby, Strizhevsky, accompanied by Romanov, another KGB guard, offered him a drink. “Nureyev did not want a coffee: he was too nervous.” Rudolf was desperate. His French friends were still standing around, clearly at a loss what to do. No one was taking any action, and time was running out. Olivier Merlin had parked his eight-cylinder Norton right by the exit and thought of suggesting to Rudolf that they make a speedy escape together, but this was a fantasy: Not only was the dancer hemmed in by his two custodians, as in a film, but there was a third KGB guard blocking the way. Trofimkino was a man Rudolf already knew well by sight—“During our whole Paris season he had spied on every gesture of mine.”

  Clara had not been asleep long when she was awakened by a telephone call from Jean-Pierre Bonnefous. He breathlessly explained what had happened, and asked her to come right away to Le Bourget. Quickly dressing and tying a silk scarf over her tousled hair, she rushed out to find a taxi and arrived at the airport in just over half an hour. Bonnefous immediately came over to greet her, pointing out where Rudolf was sitting. “He looked very small wedged in between the two men and so sad. He wasn’t crying, just very pale.” “What can we do?” she asked Bonnefous. “I don’t know. It’s very difficult to speak to him.” She decided to try. “I went up to the Russians and said in French, ‘Est-ce que je peux dire au revoir à mon ami?’ ” They nodded. “I kissed him and whispered, ‘So, you’re not going to London?’ ‘No, I’m going to Moscow, but all my luggage is on the other plane.’ ‘Is it terrible for you?’ ‘Yes.’ Then, very, very quietly, he said, ‘I want to stay here.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes. Please, please, do something.’ ” At that moment Strizhevsky called out to Rudolf to return to their table. “I said, ‘Au revoir, au revoir!’ and kissed him again.”

  Going straight up to the French group who were “white and very worried-looking,” Clara told them what Rudolf had said. No one, not even Pierre, was willing to get involved: the dancers wanted to be able to perform in Russia, the impresarios to maintain their good relations with the Soviets.* “Don’t take any risks!” George Sorio warned: “You don’t know these people—it could be very dangerous for you.” But Clara, who had nothing to lose, knew she had to act on Rudolf’s behalf, even if it meant doing it alone.

  It was almost ten o’clock; she didn’t have much time. Seeing a POLICE DE L’AEROPORT sign, she went upstairs and on the second floor found Le Bourget’s chief of border control, Gregory Alexinsky,* sitting in a small office with his deputy commissaire, Jagaud-Lachaume. “You know, there’s a problem downstairs,” she said, explaining about the Russian dancer being held against his will. “Where is he?” asked Alexinsky. “At the bar. Waiting for the next plane.” “Are you sure he wants to stay?” “Yes. I’m completely sure—I’ve just talked to him.” “And are you sure he’s a dancer?” “Yes. He was dancing at the Palais des Sports yesterday evening. He’s from the Kirov company. Why?” “Because if he were a scientist it could be very dangerous.” “Well, he’s not. He’s a very great dancer. If you go over there now you can see him. What can you do to help?” “We can do nothing. It’s against the law for us to go to him, he has to come to us.” “But that’s impossible. He has two men guarding him.” “Well, of course we can go downstairs and stand by the bar, but he has to come to us. He has to say, ‘Je veux l’asile politique’ and then we can take care of everything. Can you go and tell him that?” “I’ll try.”

  She went back to the table where the KGB men were sitting drinking cognacs. “I forgot to say something to Rudolf,” she said, smiling at Strizhevsky, who once again nodded his assent—the girl was clearly infatuated with Nureyev and reluctant to let him go. Whispering very quickly, she said to Rudolf, “You see the two men there at the bar? They’re French policemen. You have to go to them and say that you want to stay.” “Then we made a big play of saying good-bye, and I left him, went to the bar, and ordered a coffee.”

  Valery Panov had been given a similar opportunity to defect at the airport in New York by FBI agents who suspected that his recall to Russia foreshadowed trouble for him. They had allowed him through passport control, then detained his escorts by scrutinizing their documents. But whereas Panov had “inched away from the FBI men in pathetic fear,” Rudolf realized that this was his only chance. “So I decide right there and then that I’m not going back. This was good-bye time.” He jumped up from his chair and rushed toward the bar, but Strizhevsky came after him, and asked him what was wrong. “Nureyev was silent. And then he said, ‘I’ve made up my mind.’ He didn’t say what that was, but repeated that his decision was firm, final, and he wasn’t going to change it.” Then Rudolf walked slowly—“six steps exactly”—directly up to the two French commissars. “No jumping, no running, no screaming, no hysteria. Quietly I say: ‘I would like to stay in your country.’ ”

  Immediately two KGB men grabbed hold of him, with Trofimkino running up to help. There was a tussle—“They were pushing and pulling Rudolf”—until finally, one of the French policemen cried out, “Ah non! Ne le touchez pas—nous sommes en France.” Knowing they were powerless to take Rudolf by force, the Russians rushed to a public telephone to call the embassy. Meanwhile Alexinsky and Jagaud-Lachaume took Rudolf up to the commissariat with Clara (who heard cries of “Vous êtes folle!” as she passed the French group) following behind. Asked by the police if he would like anything to drink, Rudolf replied, ashen faced, “A cognac.”

  After contacting the embassy, Strizhevsky and Romanov also went upstairs in search of the dancer. “We were insisting on being allowed to see Nureyev, but the French tried to deny the fact he was there.” Shortly afterward, in a great fluster, the USSR’s general consul, Mikhail Klementov, arrived. “I must speak to
him,” he cried, bursting into the room. “Nureyev is a Soviet citizen,” Rudolf heard him say to the inspectors, “You must hand him over to me.” “This is France, Monsieur, and Monsieur Nureyev has placed himself under our protection,” came the reply. Klementov began talking to Rudolf in Russian, a monologue lasting about twenty minutes, to which the dancer repeatedly answered, “Nyet!” Janine Ringuet, who had picked up Rudolf’s trench coat, beret, and camera in the hall and was waiting outside the office to hand them over to the police, heard him plead in Russian, “Leave me alone, leave me alone.” “He was completely wild and mad.” But just as eyewitnesses in the terminal building have recalled increasingly melodramatic images of Rudolf in distress—“He literally fell down!” … “He took a paper knife out of his pocket.” … “He was banging his head against a wall!” … “Osipenko said—she swore—that she saw me jumping through barriers. And on the runway!”—there are several versions of what went on upstairs. Rudolf himself described a nurse “screaming” that he was mad and must be given an injection to sedate him; Grosinsky has claimed that the Russian consul, incensed by Rudolf’s refusal to change his mind, suddenly slapped his face. “It’s not true,” says Clara. “I was in the office the entire time.”

  Strizhevsky was then given a chance to talk to Rudolf. Adopting a reasonable tone, he said, “You’re making a mistake. You’re completely wrong about your recall to Moscow. You know that the decision to stay in France is a betrayal of your motherland—a shame for a Soviet man.” Strizhevsky was determined to do everything he could to sway him, knowing that he, too, was about to be disgraced. Nureyev’s defection could have been stopped, the Central Committee would inevitably conclude; his own lack of vigilance made it possible “for the betrayer to succeed with his goal.” (In his defense, Strizhevsky would later insist that he was unable to prevent the escape because of “the violence” of the French police; there were not two but six plainclothesmen involved, he claimed, five of whom tried to tie his hands and hold him down, “while Nureyev went away with the sixth.”) Thinking that if he offered to take Rudolf straight to rejoin the Kirov this might weaken the dancer’s resolve, Strizhevsky promised that he would personally escort him to London on the next flight. “He didn’t believe any of it. He said, ‘I want to stay here and have political exile.’ ”