Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Forgetting all about the ballet and her exam, she rushed to a pay phone and rang the Pushkins. No one answered, so she called the Pazhis. “Tamara, dear, is it really true?” began Elizaveta Mikhailovna before bursting into tears. Heading straight for Vosstaniya Street, Tamara spent the rest of the evening with the Pazhis, “talking, weeping, going through various theories,” all the time aware that there was nothing they could do. They kept trying the Pushkins without success. Knowing that Alexander Ivanovich suffered from high blood pressure, they were “afraid that someone would tell him suddenly and he would go into shock.” It was only the following morning that Tamara finally reached him: “I already know” was all he said.

  “Immediately the KGB began interrogating Alexander Ivanovich and destroying him,” said his pupil Nicolai Kovmir. “At once he became ten years older.” Pushkin didn’t even have the support of Xenia, who at the time was on vacation at their dacha in Estonia. On the morning of June 17 she received a deliberately cryptic telegram from Tamara: “Mahmoudka [their nickname for Rudolf] in trouble. Fly home.” She returned at once, and that evening was seen by Slava Santto at the Kirov Theater “looking like an Egyptian mummy with no expression on her face.” He started to talk about Rudolf, but Xenia fiercely silenced him: “Don’t speak now!”

  Liuba, who had been away in the country until the evening of Sunday, June 18, ran up the stairs of the Tchaikovsky Street apartment, hearing a persistently ringing phone. It was a friend who had been trying all weekend to reach her. “Liubka, the Voice [the Voice of America] has announced that Rudik is staying in Paris.” For a long time afterward she stood by the telephone, its receiver still dangling, “thinking with anguish that for us Rudik was dead. He had gone to another world forever.”

  As far as his friends were concerned, Rudolf had done the unthinkable. The first Russian artist to defect, he was, as Arlene Croce has written, “Mikhail Gorbachev’s advance man.” But although his act was regarded as so damaging to Soviet propaganda that it was blacked out of the national press, politics were never Rudolf’s motive: There was only the compulsion to dance. The one member of Rudolf’s circle not in the least disturbed by the news was Teja. “Molodetz!” (Good for you!) he exclaimed; as his sister remarks, “He had prepared this flight.” Concerned about Rudolf’s safety, he decided to write and warn him not to think of returning. “Soviet security is dealing with your case, and if you come back, you’ll be arrested instantly.” As he had no idea where to find Rudolf, he sent the letter to a balletomane acquaintance in Hamburg asking him to forward it to Paris.

  In Ufa, Farida and Hamet didn’t hear what had happened for several days. Knowing that no one in their neighborhood had a telephone, Rosa sent her parents a cable from Leningrad asking them to call her immediately. Although Farida was obviously distraught, her main concern was that her son had enough money. For the patriotic Hamet, though, the disgrace was almost too much to bear. Characteristically he did not express his feelings, but the shock caused such an extreme physical change in him that even the factory party leaders took pity. “They didn’t throw him out of the party or dismiss him from his job, but they constantly interrogated him,” said a colleague. “He never discussed his son with us, but we could see his distress—he became much older, much thinner, and much more closed. He was afraid to say a single word.”

  Paris, meanwhile, was going “crazy, crazy, crazy for Rudolf.” There were posters everywhere announcing his first performance, and ticket lines stretching past the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées as far as the place de l’Alma. At Rudolf’s first press conference, on June 22, he sat casually on the steps of The Sleeping Beauty’s stage set, facing a blitzkrieg of flashbulbs, and calmly admitted that he had been wanting to leave the USSR for some time but had made the decision only on the spur of the moment because he was being sent back to Moscow. He remained just as poised when individual reporters cornered him for “exclusive” interviews, fielding personal questions by saying contemptuously, “In Russia we are just not accustomed to people putting their noses into one’s private life. Only the secret police does this.” To Patrick Thevenon, a close friend of Clara’s, he was more confiding:

  In Leningrad it was very hard. There were two schools at the Kirov, those of the traditionalists who, with Sergeyev, wanted absolutely nothing changed, not a costume, not a wig, and then the others who would like very much to modernize the dance a little. Naturally I was one of the “moderns,” and I was very badly thought of by the directors. They didn’t want me to dance very often and they held back roles.… I will never return to my country, but I truly believe that I will never be happy in yours.

  Rudolf’s first appearance with the de Cuevas company on June 23 (the same night that the Kirov opened with The Sleeping Beauty in London), was more of a political event than a performance. There were police cars outside the Champs-Élysées theater, a legion of photographers and news cameramen in the foyer, plainclothes inspectors mixing with the public, and three bodyguards posted outside Rudolf’s dressing room, refusing to open the door even to friends. Slipping into the auditorium among a young, fashionable crowd, Clara managed to remain unnoticed, despite the fact that U.S. press agents were offering a million dollars for paparazzi images “which took her by surprise.” Inspired by the tangible sense of anticipation, Nina Vyroubova, performing Aurora’s Rose Adagio, held her balance as never before. At the first entry of Prince Désiré in act 2, the static in the air was almost crackling, and after Rudolf’s first variation, the audience called him back five times. Vyroubova, in turn, received four curtain calls, and by the end of their duet both Russians had tears in their eyes as they stood taking their bows, Rudolf resplendent in his pale blue costume, his hand resting on his heart. But all the emotion suddenly became too much, and in his dressing room between acts he broke down. France-Soir headlined its ecstatic review the following day “Noureiev [sic] a pleuré en voyant Paris à ses pieds.”

  Yet despite the final ovation, with more than two dozen curtain calls, there were cognoscenti in the audience who were disappointed by Rudolf. “I’m not very impressed,” whispered choreographer Jerome Robbins to Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s partner. Nor, for that matter, was Harold C. Schonberg of the New York Times who noted that Nureyev was “not the most finished of artists.”* But it was precisely Rudolf’s rawness—his “exposed, vulnerable quality”—that so overwhelmed ballerina Violette Verdy that night. To her he seemed not so much wild as uncorrupted: “He had conceived the part of the prince as a man in search of an ideal, with the wonder of discovering it—and with that extraordinary sense of being mesmerized by what he was looking for, and being mesmerized by what he was finding.… You could see the purity right away in his dedication and total involvement.”

  A week later, minutes before he was due to appear onstage, this time in the role of the Blue Bird, the Soviet Embassy delivered three envelopes to Rudolf’s dressing room: from his mother, his father, and Pushkin.

  The letter from Pushkin was shattering. The one man who really knew me well didn’t seem able to understand me. He wrote that Paris was a city of decadence whose rottenness would only corrupt me, that I would lose not only my dancing technique but all my moral integrity if I stayed in Europe. The only thing left for me to do was to come home immediately, for no one in Russia would ever understand my action.

  My father’s short letter was to say that he couldn’t bring himself to believe that a son of his could betray his fatherland and that for what I had done there was no excuse.

  Come home, begged my mother’s telegram, come home.

  Devastated, yet determined not to give in to emotional blackmail deliberately timed by the Soviets to sabotage his performance, Rudolf resolved to go out onstage and let the dance obliterate his thoughts. He had been impatient to show the West “the real Maryinsky Blue Bird,” suspecting that he would make a far greater impression here than in Russia, where his interpretation had been widely criticized. (“The duet is a tender invoc
ation of love, but Nureyev savagely tore into its fine cloth,” Vera Krasovskaya had written.) But Rudolf had just made his entrance toward the end of the second act, when a cacophony of booing and whistling broke out. A gang of about forty or fifty Communists planted in the audience had been waiting for this moment to stage their demonstration. “Á Moscou! Traître!” cried one voice. “Á Budapest!” echoed another, their jeers counterpointed by cheers of “Bravo! Vive la liberté! Vive Noureev!” from fans in the balcony. There was virtually a riot as stink bombs were let off in the auditorium, tomatoes, banana skins, and coins thrown onstage. Rudolf could hardly hear the music, yet kept on dancing, feeling a strange sense of detachment and serenity. The destructive behavior of the Communists had made him feel surer of himself. For the first time, he told René Sirvin, he knew that he was right to have cut himself off from the USSR—“avec son régime de salauds.”

  There would be satisfaction, too, in discovering that his least successful role in Russia was suddenly to become his signature piece. Before, no one had understood that he was trying to counter the standard portrayal of the Blue Bird “softly moving his arms and body as if poised for some gracious but meaningless flight.” What had appeared to Leningrad’s critics as “slipshod and improvised” was, in fact, Rudolf’s deliberate attempt to convey a sense of urgency and idealism—“to show a bird … tense with a strong desire to really fly away.” But now, buoyed up by a feeling of peace and lightness, he knew that the audience was seeing not just a great dancer imitating the weightlessness of a bird, but a symbolic tour de force: “Nureyev choosing freedom right there before our eyes.”

  *The Soviets’ mastery of space was a topical issue: Yuri Gagarin had just orbited the earth for the first time in history on April 12.

  *“I wanted to learn both English and French,” Rudolf once told the journalist Lynn Barber. “There was an old lady in Leningrad who spoke French and she said, ‘Yes, I will teach you. The only thing is that you will have to carry the bucket of dirt every morning’—there were no toilets. And I thought, No, I was too grand. I was a dancer.… So of course I never learned French. But now I tell young people, ‘If you want to achieve something, you want to learn something, you have to carry the buckets of dirt.’ ”

  *“Sergeyev suggested I should put in another solo, but he did not say which,” he told John Percival (Nureyev: Aspect of the Dancer). “On the first night I danced my Corsaire solo and had a big success. But then I took Solor’s solo from an earlier act of the ballet [the variation from the wedding scene].” There is some controversy over Rudolf’s claim. Both Irina Kolpakova and Olga Moiseyeva, his partner that night, believe he could only have danced the act 2 La Bayadère solo. “This is absurd. It would be impossible to dance the Corsaire variation in Bayadère,” insists Kolpakova. But why, as Percival asks, “would Rudolf have made this up?” In an interview with documentary director John Bridcut, Pierre Lacotte confirms that Rudolf did indeed dance his Corsaire solo that night. “It was from another ballet—from Corsaire, which we’d never seen either. When he told me that afterward, I said, ‘My God, I never heard such a thing!’ ” The critic Olivier Merlin wrote in his review, “It’s the solo of Solor the Warrior which won a deafening ovation at the premiere for the young Soviet artist. He had, in effect, arranged his own variation and executed a feat never seen before at the height of the turn, a double tour en l’air incorporating a grand saut du chat, with one leg tucked under him. (Le Monde, May 24, 1961.)

  *According to Hugo Vickers, editor of Alexis: The Memoirs of the Baron de Redé, Raymundo de Larrain’s claim to be Cuevas’s nephew was apocryphal. “Larrain was in fact a Chilean gigolo, and one of Cuevas’s boyfriends … a nervous creature, with a long nose, and even longer manicured fingers.”

  *This is confirmed by a remark his wife, Tatiana Legat, made to Diane Solway. Soloviev, she said, had been “so startled by Rudik’s advance that he had slapped him across the face and avoided him for the rest of his stay in Paris.” Soloviev himself told a mutual friend, Terence Benton, “Rudolf was always trying to get into my bed. So I said, ‘If you don’t stop, I’ll report you.’ ” When Benton questioned Rudolf, he laughed and said, “Yes, it’s absolutely true. He reported me.” But this possibility is discounted by a theater character report, written after Rudolf’s defection, which states quite clearly that “during the time Nureyev was in the Kirov there were no signals of immoral behavior.”

  *When it was known to the London critics that the couple would not be dancing, a letter was sent to Korkin at the Royal Opera House, where the Kirov was already installed, asking if he could schedule their appearance in a performance of Giselle. The request, Clement Crisp recalls, was sincere enough. “In view of their age, etc. I think the evening would have been a disappointment, although the year before Nadia Nerina had danced Giselle at the Kirov with Sergeyev, and told me that he was sensationally good as a partner.… Maybe their appearance here could have been a triumph. We shall never know. Because the answer was ‘Nyet.’ ”

  *In his autobiography Rudolf claims that it is a “smiling Sergeyev” who tells him: “Rudi, you won’t be coming with us now. You’ll join us in London in a couple of days” (he had always mistakenly believed that Sergeyev “was instrument. He’s the one.”). Pierre Lacotte also recalls seeing Sergeyev “suddenly call Rudolf and talk to him,” but all the accounts of the episode in Rudolf’s KGB file cite Korkin as the administrator responsible for breaking the news of his recall.

  *Earlier, when Rudolf begged him to help, Pierre went with an interpreter to try to reason with Sergeyev, who had been very friendly at Le Bourget, inviting the French dancers to have coffee with him and Dudinskaya. “I said, ‘If Rudolf is being punished because he went out with us in Paris, I can assure you—I could even sign a letter—that he never said anything against you, and we never talked about politics. I take the responsibility for everything, but I don’t want him to be punished.’ ” Implacably Sergeyev replied, “He’s not being punished. His mother is ill, he’s going to Moscow, and after that, he’ll come back.”

  *Researching her Nureyev biography, Diane Solway discovered that the commissioner was in fact a White Russian by birth, but fearing that the Soviets would suspect a conspiracy, he decided not to reveal his nationality.

  *Kirov dancers employed by the KGB: “They were a team,” said Alla Osipenko.

  *A New York Post article published on March 17, 1975, claimed that Anatol Golytsyn, a former KGB major who had defected to the United States in the early 1960s, told CIA agents that Khrushchev had talked about “eliminating Rudolf Nureyev.”

  *Rudolf’s froideur could have been an attempt to disguise the awkwardness he felt in the presence of educated White Russians. When Clara once took him to Dominique’s, an Old World Russian restaurant, he had insisted that she order his meal for him rather than address the elegant, white-haired waiters himself. She did not understand at first, and then realized that he must have been ashamed of his provincial accent.

  *Few people noticed that in the coda, without any warning, Rudolf abandoned Petipa’s choreography and substituted his showy Taras Bulba variation in order to make a more climactic end. Nina Vyroubova was not amused, and rebuked Rudolf by saying, “C’est un crime de lése-majesté!”

  6 MAKING LUCK

  To reward Rudolf for his success and allow him to unwind, Raymundo and Clara suggested that they should all go to the South of France for the weekend. They flew to Nice and stayed at La Reserve, a terra-cotta pink villa-hotel in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, with its own private beach and port. Rudolf could hardly believe the affluence of Riviera life—the yachts, floodlit casinos, and fast cars—but what excited him most was the Picasso museum at Antibes, the Matisse interior of the little white chapel at Vence, and swimming off the rocks of Cap d’Antibes. Falling in love with the Côte d’Azur—“We said, ‘Even in winter it’s like this’ ”—he gazed at the hills above Monte Carlo and told his friends that he was going to own a house there one day. />
  The rest of July 1961 passed uneventfully in hot, empty Paris with Rudolf teaching himself French from an Assimil book he carried with him, and attending almost everything, from a Gustave Moreau exhibition at the Louvre to a visiting Mexican ballet company and a French version of John Ford’s Jacobean melodrama ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Directed by Luchino Visconti, it starred the exquisite young “fiancés of Europe,” Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, both making their theater debuts. “Delon couldn’t act onstage, but who cared?” says Peter Eyre. “The audience was full of queens—just staring at him. He was so beautiful.” Mostly, though, Rudolf went out of his way to extend his knowledge of the cinema, seeing a show devoted to the work of silent movie pioneer and visual sorcerer Georges Méliès, as well as several films starring the romantic idol of the forties and fifties, Gérard Philipe. Philipe’s sanctification had been ensured by his recent death, and in his soulful beauty and complex liaisons on screen (most famously in Le Diable au Corps and Le Rouge et le Noir), Rudolf saw a reflection of himself.