Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Dancer and choreographer spent their first hours in the studio taking each other’s measure. To Ashton, who felt overawed by the young Russian’s heritage—“a more wonderful schooling than I ever had”—Rudolf seemed reticent, ill at ease, and unconvinced by his authority. Struck by the dancer’s physical magnificence and more than a little frightened by his feral power, Ashton admitted being “perfectly willing to accept what he wanted to do” and in the end put in too many ingredients—much as Rudolf himself did when he went on to make his own work. The kind of choreography that Rudolf had seen evoked by Scriabin’s music was rhythm made visible in flowing, plastic, sometimes acrobatic movements, an impressionistic effect that transposed itself into the solo with Rudolf “darting round … dipping and weaving, turning in screws.” He had been allowed, he told Nigel Gosling, to follow his ideas “pretty freely.” And yet, although Nigel agreed that there was “not much of Ashton” in the solo, the choreographer had, in fact, drawn extensively on inspiration of his own.

  Seeing at once that Rudolf possessed the same overwhelming emotional impact—“an impact of personality”—as the two muses of his youth, Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan, Ashton decided to infuse the dance with memories of their performances.* In homage to Pavlova’s erotically charged Bacchanale (lasting, like the Scriabin piece, only a few minutes), as well as Isadora’s dramatic entrance with a cloak to Chopin’s Funeral March, Ashton soon had Rudolf “bounding passionately round the big rehearsal room … flourishing a borrowed white sheet.” His free and open gestures, expressing a sense of liberation with a hand defiantly raised, were based on Isadora’s Marche Slav, which represented a peasant rising from slavery to freedom. “Reeking of revolution,” the music of Scriabin perfectly served this atmosphere of revolt against destiny, and spoke, too, of Rudolf’s flight. And behind this sense of upsurge toward otherworldliness was a powerful erotic impetus that not only substantiated Rudolf’s view of creativity as “very much akin to sex, sexual drive or sexual appetite if you wish,” but also emphasized the “enormous sexual impulse” Ashton wanted to exploit: “a kind of animalism, a violence, a sort of tremendous physical intensity.”* Like the music, the dance verged on the histrionic, and as Ashton said, was “so charged with things that we really had to eliminate quite a lot because it was too exhausting to get through.”

  Margot and Colette, who had never seen Rudolf dance, watched the final rehearsal alarmed by the strain and violence of his exertions. He was “nervous, intense and repeating every step with all his might until he almost knocked himself out with the effort.” Colin Clark, who joined them at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, also described the sight as “really pretty frightening,” as Rudolf, leaping as high as he possibly could, would land each time with a crash on the slippery raked stage. That evening over dinner at the embassy with her husband and the Clark twins, Margot urged Rudolf to try to relax more in order to finish the dance as well as he began it. “But Nureyev declared that this was cheating, and if in Russia he couldn’t finish, he just stopped and walked off. This really panicked Margot and Celly.”

  As the curtain went up for the gala matinee at Drury Lane, a crack of applause broke out from the house, “palpitating with a lust for something new.” Standing at the center of an empty stage was a lone figure wrapped in a scarlet cloak. He struggled to release himself from its folds, then hurtled toward the footlights—a living symbol of Soviet repression set free. Long-haired, wild-eyed, and half naked in gray-streaked tights, a red-and-white sash striped across his chest, Rudolf seemed to the English audience to be a primordial force of nature. The shock produced by his savage intensity was compared by Alexander Bland to that of seeing a predator let loose in a drawing room. Other critics felt that the dance too obviously exploited Rudolf’s own story, its “mixture of sobs and spins … an unrelated obligato of anguished hair-tearing” seeming to Clive Barnes little more than a parody of a Soviet-style solo. But everyone agreed that the piece made thrilling theater, that in a matter of minutes Ashton had captured the very essence of Rudolf’s persona: “rebellious, charismatic, sensational and yet a figure of great poise and dignity.”

  Over almost before it had begun, the solo ended with the dancer sliding to the floor, his despairing arms reaching up toward the gods as the lights grew dim. Cecil Beaton described the immediate aftermath:

  The audience was for a moment stunned. Then, recovering, it produced its storm of lightning and thunder applause. The boy responded with charm, dignity and superb Russian pride. This 23-year-old creature from the woods was now, beatnik hair and all, a Russian emperor imperviously accepting the acclaim of his people.

  It was the grandeur and sweep of Rudolf’s front-of-curtain bow—“not so much what he danced, actually”—that made Ninette de Valois decide there and then that she wanted him for her company. “All I thought was, He’s doing that at Covent Garden as soon as I can possibly organize it.” His performance after the intermission had been technically erratic and uncontrolled. Partnering Rosella Hightower in the Black Swan pas de deux,* and looking oddly epicene in his Parisian blond wig, Rudolf had fought his way through the virtuoso steps, landing badly and throwing both himself and Rosella off balance. “Rudi didn’t believe in covering up his difficulties,” remarked Violette Verdy. “It was part of his barbaric quality. He was in the raw. But the way he burned the stage with his intensity was completely unique.” The audience thought so, too, responding to the point of delirium, and demanding that Rudolf repeat his solo as an encore.

  After the performance the stage door area of Drury Lane was a scene of “terrifying mob passions” as the two dancers tried to make their way to Fonteyn’s car. The whole theater seemed to be waiting in the street to see him, and surged forward, screaming and straining to touch Rudolf. (Rosella’s costume, carried over her arm, was ripped in the melee.) It was London’s first taste of Rudimania. Erik, who had stood in the wings with Sonia listening to the “hyena baying” and realizing that something incredible had just happened, found himself thinking, Where does that leave me?

  Fonteyn was thinking the same thing. Despite having been coached in Le Spectre de la rose by Karsavina, who had created the role, her appearance in the gala had made no impact, described by one critic as “a nostalgic shadow of past glories,” and dismissed by Rudolf as “unfortunate.” She looked tired, her technique was in decline, her best years seemed to be over. During the Royal Ballet’s tour of Russia that summer, hampered by a foot injury and nervous of appearing on the Kirov stage, she had given what she regarded as her worst performance ever of Aurora, her signature role. “Fonteyn didn’t have any success here,” said Tamara, remembering the ballerina’s low arabesque line and feeble attempts at pirouettes. Although still the company figurehead, she had been made guest artist in 1959 quite against her wishes, and had been expected to retire at the same time as her partner Michael Somes. Even Ashton appeared to have lost interest in her since Ondine, his last “Fonteyn-sonata,” and was now building his work on the Royal Ballet’s young dancers. Yet here was the twenty-three-year-old Russian star pleading to dance with her, and de Valois, who wanted Nureyev to dance Albrecht in Giselle the following season, urging her to accept. She asked to be allowed to think it over.

  At the post-gala cocktail party at the Duchess of Roxborough’s Bayswater flat, Rudolf, the guest of honor, handled all the compliments and questions with poise, deflecting Ambassador Arias’s curiosity about why he had been spending so much time in Copenhagen by replying darkly, “Is story better not told.” But he had been startled when Cecil Beaton came up and impetuously kissed him on the cheek and forehead, savoring the vellum-soft smoothness of the dancer’s skin. The photographer had been moved to tears when he discussed Rudolf’s performance with Ashton, recognizing the dancer as “something almost perfect in the taste of today.” This kind of ecstatic acclaim, though hardly new to Rudolf, was intoxicating all the same, giving him exactly what he needed: world confirmation of his talent. As the last guests w
ere leaving, feeling too elated to retire for the night, and yielding to the pull of the prowl, he asked to be dropped in the Kings Road.

  For those who had seen him dance, Rudolf’s impact reverberated for days. There was some degree of uncertainty about his true aptitude, which could not be judged from a fragmentary gala program; to Beaton he was a “genius,” to Colette a genius “in fits & starts—in flashes.… Sometimes he dances very wildly & undisciplinedly & other times like an angel, but he has this fantastic star personality & charm & looks & he will always be The Star wherever he is.… In the end Everybody male & female fell in love with him including, I think, Margot!”

  Richard Buckle was one of several critics to comment on Rudolf’s rough edges, and the jarring lack of elasticity in his landings, but he followed up his original review of the matinee with an article titled “More About the Man from Leningrad,” a select anthology of responses:

  Lady Juliet Duff (in a letter). Nureyev’s ballon may not yet be developed, but he has magic just as Nijinsky had. Have not been so stirred since I first saw Nijinsky and Karsavina dance the Spectre. I so long to see the new boy in that. Dying to know what Karsavina thought of him. Please find out and tell me.

  Mme. Tamara Karsavina (on the telephone). I agree with you about his landing badly, but he has a remarkable technique. Certain steps he does better than Nijinsky, but he is without Nijinsky’s gift for pausing in the air. On the other hand, he has not got Nijinsky’s overdeveloped thighs, which makes for better line. Erik Bruhn is certainly a wonderful dancer, but he lacks Nureyev’s nerve.… I certainly felt a thrill.

  Frederick Ashton (on the telephone). He has a marvellous engine inside him, like a Rolls-Royce. You could feel his power when he started up at rehearsals.… Chaboukiani was the most exciting dancer I ever saw; and Nureyev has some of his fire; but more grace. There is a strangeness about him. I feel he’s a mixture of a Tartar, a faun, and a kind of lost urchin. He’s the Rimbaud of the Steppes.

  Meanwhile Margot had made an overnight decision to dance with Nureyev. A refusal, she felt, would put her at risk of becoming “an absolutely back number, a nothing,” as he was clearly going to be the sensation of the year. She had reached this conclusion after a discussion with her husband, who had every reason to encourage her to prolong her stage career. As a glamorous Cambridge undergraduate, Roberto “Tito” Arias, the tanned, sleek-haired son of Panama’s ex-president, had been eighteen-year-old Margot’s first love but had disappeared from her life, breaking her heart, until the Royal Ballet’s 1953 New York season, when he turned up at the Met: a chubby, bespectacled delegate to the UN. By this time Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina assoluta and belle of New York, was ballet’s greatest star, and Tito was determined to make her his wife. Although married already, with three small children, he began courting her with diamonds, mink, and El Morocco suppers until, two years later, she finally relented—swayed less by his indulgence of her “one-track tastes … Dior, the Mediterranean, Cartier’s and the best” than the sense of well-being she felt in Tito’s company (she was part South American, after all).

  During her subsequent years as Panamanian ambassadress, Margot, now a Dame of the British Empire, had brought tremendous prestige to the embassy as well as undoubted respectability to her husband. Politically and socially ambitious, counting senators and movie stars among his friends, Tito was also a philanderer and gambler with a shady entrepreneurial side said to involve gunrunning and brothel keeping. He loved money, and when his own ran out, he spent his wife’s. Her retirement would clearly change all this, limiting not only his profligacy but the freedom of his double life. As Maude put it, “Tito always wanted her to carry on, because then he could carry on with his girls.” The following day Ninette de Valois received a call from Margot to say that she could go ahead and announce the Fonteyn-Nureyev partnership in Giselle.

  Immediately after the gala Rudolf rejoined the de Cuevas tour in Hamburg, learning to his dismay that the company was not performing at the Staatsoper but at a cabaret theater on the Reeperbahn, the city’s “sin center.” (Three months earlier a group of teenage Liverpudlians, also making their Hamburg debut, had been equally dejected to find themselves booked to appear not in the famous Kaiserkeller nightclub but a cramped basement strip club. It was in Hamburg that the Beatles learned to make a show, experiment with stimulants, and style their hair into the mushroom mop adopted by the Exis—the young existentialists.) But aware neither of the city’s youth culture nor its extremely clandestine homosexual club life, Rudolf hated Hamburg on sight. Its neon-lit garishness, and the overtness of its sexual trade, with prostitutes outlined in the pink-lit windows of Herbert-strasse, upset him “a lot.” And just as disturbing was the discovery that he had to share his role of Prince Désiré with Serge Golovine, who had been cast in the first act. He had been spending much of his time “nearly desperate” in his room when he received a call one morning to say that he had a visitor. It was a friend of Teja’s: Axel Mowitz.

  Having heard that the twenty-three-year-old, a graduate of Hamburg University, was unusually beautiful, Rudolf invited him straight up to the room. When Axel first saw the dancer he was sitting on the bed wearing a small towel and smiling provocatively. “It was clear that he was offering me the possibility.” But not only was Axel unattracted to someone his own age—“my contacts then were fifteen or sixteen years old”—he also felt overwhelmed by Rudolf’s stardom. “I was impotent with awe.” They decided to go out for breakfast and, finding much in common, spent the day together. Talking incessantly (in English, which Axel spoke fluently), they discussed European dance criticism as well as aesthetics, philosophy, and the work of Brecht, Axel’s major subject, on which Rudolf held his own. Also passionate about dance, Axel was a friend of the ballet historian Cyril Beaumont and a regular customer at his London bookshop.

  He took Rudolf to Hamburg’s own ballet bookshop and, wanting to show him the picturesque side of the city, gave him a tour of the Alster Lakes. As they walked along the western shore, with its exclusive nineteenth-century villas, watching the boating activity on the water, Rudolf suddenly stopped in astonishment at the sight of a red flag. “It’s a sign for danger,” Axel explained, which made the dancer burst out laughing. “He was still feeling the shock of his departure from Russia.” Recapturing his delicate interlude with Heinz Mannigel in East Berlin, Rudolf spent the rest of the week with the young German, in whose company he felt completely at ease. When they spoke of their mutual friend it was only glancingly, and rather condescendingly on Rudolf’s part. “Teja had become a light thing for Rudolf: his obsession was Erik Bruhn.”

  At around lunchtime on the day Rudolf was due to perform The Sleeping Beauty, a stagehand lowering the scenery pulled the wrong lever, and the fire-protecting sprinklers went into action. For twenty minutes as a mechanism prevented the water from being turned off, the crew and dancers grabbed buckets and set to work mopping up and rescuing what they could. Raymundo was in tears as he inspected the damage to his filmy sets, but Rudolf, who despised the costumes and decor anyway, viewed the scene with schadenfreude: “At that moment I was not sorry”—particularly because the cancellation of that evening’s performance meant that he could fly to Munich for the premiere of Erik’s Swan Lake with Sonia Arova.

  When Rudolf returned to Hamburg he was accompanied by Erik, whom he introduced to Axel as “my dear friend.” The student had prepared an elaborate lunch for the three of them, but sensed that Bruhn felt uneasy about the situation—“He could see how excited I was to be with Rudolf.” Axel, in turn, was in no doubt about the dancers’ mutual passion—“You only had to be with them to feel it. They made a very beautiful couple.” Nevertheless he was dismayed when Rudolf said to him as they were leaving, “Erik doesn’t have a ticket for tonight—could you give him yours?” “I’d been to every performance and felt deeply depressed by this suggestion. But after Erik arrived, he didn’t have any more time for me.”

  Italy was the next st
age of the tour, where Rudolf was delighted to be partnering guest star Yvette Chauviré, who was as much of a national heroine in France as Edith Piaf and was acclaimed all over the world. During her 1958 tour of Russia with the Paris Opéra Ballet, Rudolf had been in the audience on the night she was called to encore her “Dying Swan” solo three times: “Satisfaction for us.” When they were first introduced in a Paris studio he had kissed the ballerina’s hand with profound respect, and over lunch as they sat together, spoken in a very serious tone—“Moitié anglais, moitié français”—of the impact her performance had made on him.

  The essence of Parisian allure with her long slender limbs, langorous femininity, and swan neck, Chauviré in fact embodied three different schools, as she had acquired lightness from the Italians as well as strength and lyricism from the Russians. It was her rare ability to fuse classical clarity of line with Romantic feeling that had made her one of the great Giselles of all time. She noticed the way Rudolf was always watching her, but having been slightly intimidated at first, he felt as soon as they began to rehearse that they had “danced all life.” Chauviré felt the same, and the next time she performed the role sent Rudolf a card saying, “Giselle without you is not Giselle.”

  Between performances Rudolf flew back and forth to Cannes to rehearse with Erik, Sonia, and Rosella. The dancers had decided to form an experimental group along the lines of a musical quartet, providing a program of dance without the “orchestration” of elaborate decors or productions. Having just retired from the stage, Rosella had opened a dance school in Cannes with an enormous studio—“like they have in Bolshoi”—where the friends rehearsed from early afternoon until late into the night. Although the work was immensely strenuous, they were all glad of the opportunity to do exactly what they wanted without interference or interruption—Rudolf and Erik being especially delighted to have the chance to choreograph. In a small theater in Haifa, Rudolf had already experimented on Rosella—“grabbing me whenever he could”—to try out his own version of The Nutcracker pas de deux, which he had previously worked out on paper. Refining this for their program, he also added the Don Quixote pas de deux and Dances from Raymonda—all three being extracts from Petipa ballets he would later stage in their entirety.