Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  His immediate priority was to perfect his Bournonville technique for the January 19 broadcast of the Flower Festival duet. The remaining days were spent in a studio rehearsing with Erik and Maria with none of the tensions of Copenhagen—“We were too busy working.” The only setback was the order Rudolf received from the conservative sponsors of the Bell Telephone Hour to get his hair cut. As far as he was concerned, this was out of the question. When he appeared in his debut solo in London, it was his unusually long, flying hair—“both an expression of his individuality and a harbinger of the rebel era to come”—that had contributed so dramatically to the impact he made. He now realized that the “frightful yellow disintegrating wig” he had insisted on wearing for the pas de deux had been a mistake—“Everyone was saying ‘pity about the wig’ ”—and he had seen for himself in the German TV extract from Giselle just how unattractive a bad wig could be. For his upcoming London performance he wanted to base his appearance on the famous portrait of Nijinsky looking like a great silent movie star, his head tilted to show his swan neck, his long tousled hair—a wig he had deliberately “ruffled up”—curling onto his collar. But to NBC, Rudolf was forced to give way when word came back that another dancer would be found to replace him. “Ordinarily he would never have consented,” said Maria. “But he desperately wanted to appear on American television … so he let me take him to a barber. He gave the man directions for every snip.”

  When Rudolf makes his entrance in the nine-minute television broadcast, we see that his hair is not exactly short, but so brilliantined against his head that it looks painted. His blue knee-breeches, white tights, and white shoes designed to draw the eye to the choreography’s clean, multiple beats, also emphasize the vast improvement in the finish of his own technique—the first really clear manifestation of Erik’s influence. Rudolf has triumphantly mastered the elasticity of Danish style (the ballon he so noticeably lacked at the gala in November), as well as its clarity and crispness. By contrast, the Russian-trained Tallchief is conspicuously miscast as a Bournonville ballerina, being much too tall and expansive, her timing too languorous, her long feet lacking in precision, her flowing arms unnaturally coy in the foreshortened, Romantic lithograph poses. She admits that she felt ill at ease in the pas de deux (on pointe she is almost a head taller than Rudolf), but agrees that he was “incredible” in their performance. Transmitting the sheer joy of the Flower Festival dances—“movement where your total being is involved”—his solos not only flaunt his new Danish correctness but fuse it with Russian height and breadth. His jumps are not just bouncy but huge, swinging, and shaded with Vaganova épaulement, his landings softly plastic. In one of the most impressive film performances of his career, Rudolf made the nineteenth-century choreography seem new-minted and distinctively his own. As Alexander Bland remarked when he danced it later that year in London: “This was not quite Danish, but it was something just as good.” With two thousand dollars in cash in his pocket, he left New York for London, knowing that he would be seen by millions of Americans—Balanchine among them.

  As usual, back in London Rudolf went straight from the airport to a performance: the Ballet Rambert’s Giselle, which was playing at a theater in the suburbs. He was taken there by Colette Clark, as Margot, with whom he was again staying, had a social engagement that evening. Having arranged to meet for a late dinner at the Brompton Grill near the Panamanian Embassy, Margot invited Marie Rambert to join them, thinking that the dynamic, Polish-born director was someone bound to fascinate Rudolf. “Rythmichka,” as her Ballets Russes colleagues nicknamed her, had been Nijinsky’s assistant during the creation of Le Sacre du printemps (employed by Diaghilev because of her training in Dalcroze’s system of gymnastic rhythms), and in the 1920s founded the first English ballet company. Uniting tradition and experiment, the Ballet Rambert was considered “the Tate to the Royal Ballet’s National Gallery,” its productions mounted with authenticity and impeccable period style. Asked by Nigel what he had thought of the company, Rudolf replied, “I liked, yes, I liked,” and certainly he had been impressed by two of the dancers, telling Madame Rambert when they met, “You have good hunt” (Hilarion the Hunstman, played by John Chesworth), and commenting on the neat feet and “edible legs” of the Giselle, Lucette Aldous, whom he would choose twelve years later as his partner for his film of Don Quixote.

  In Marie Rambert, a voraciously curious seventy-three-year-old, Rudolf had immediately spotted a kindred spirit—“An extraordinary woman. Very large-minded. Such a life!”—although she for her part felt somewhat intimidated by him. “Mim liked sweet, good, innocent people—not stars,” remarked Colette, who herself still felt ill at ease with Rudolf. Usually delightful company, quick minded, and perceptive about dance, Colette was extremely withdrawn that night, and remembers the dinner proving “a total flop” as Rambert had decided to switch from speaking Russian to English, and Rudolf made it clear at that point that he was not interested in anyone except Fonteyn. “He knew she was the important one.” Then, after what seemed an interminable length of time, Margot arrived—“gorgeous and all sweetness and giggles”—and everyone relaxed.

  While visiting the ballerina backstage after her performance in Monte Carlo earlier that winter, Rudolf had indirectly invited himself to the Panamanian Embassy for the duration of their Giselle rehearsals: “He stood in my dressing room, looking like a little boy, and said, ‘Tell me. I must be in London long time.… I cannot stay so long in hotel. What do you think I do?’ ” He had clearly enjoyed the comforts of Thurloe Place, and, unintimidated by its formality, considered it “not an embassy just a house.” On this second visit, however, it became apparent soon after his arrival that he was anxious about something, though reluctant to appear ungrateful to his hostess by revealing what it was. Finally he could contain himself no longer. “I am like dying,” he told Margot. “Four days I hear no music.” Distracted by its rhythms, she rarely played music at home, and for Rudolf this silence was strange and dispiriting. He was also finding it hard to accustom himself to traditional English cooking, although it was two weeks before he confessed to hating cold roast beef. Beef—preferably in the form of an entrecôte steak—had to be thick, blue, and hot before he would eat it; when it arrived he would slice off a piece to see if was rare enough, then test the temperature with his tongue—sometimes even his cheek. Only steak, he believed, could give him the extra stamina he needed onstage, and when Margot took him to meet her mother for the first time,* they heard him mutter disapprovingly when the food appeared, “Chicken dinner, chicken performance.”

  He was considerably more forthright in getting what he wanted during rehearsals. From the first day it became clear that Rudolf planned to make his Albrecht more important than Margot’s Giselle—“something of a jolt” to the company’s prima ballerina assoluta, who had danced the role for twenty-five years and was accustomed to most of the limelight. But although radical to the English, the idea that the action of the ballet revolved not around the heroine but around her partner had been accepted in Russia since the thirties, when Leonid Lavrovsky conceived his Bolshoi production as a Pushkin-like drama of regeneration. (Shaken from his youthful philandering by the peasant girl’s madness and death, Albrecht is transfigured by the tragedy into an acceptance of his betrayal and an awareness of a far more profound kind of love.) Margot’s debut in the role at the age of sixteen had been opposite the almost comically self-promoting Robert Helpmann—“If he was on the stage, no one was going to look at me, frankly”—an experience that had quickly taught her how to make her own presence felt, and since then, she had come to expect her partners to defer to her way of doing things.

  In London it was Frederick Ashton who acted as mediator, writing in The Sunday Times, “This is a classical ballet where the two roles are of equal importance … there has been no loss of integrity on either side.… There is harmony between the two protagonists.” And although the choreographer had revised the production with the help of Karsav
ina, he, too, had acquiesced in several changes and additions, including the entrechat sequence Rudolf had introduced at the Kirov, and a new ending in which Albrecht is left alone onstage as the curtain falls. “It would have been absurd and lacking in imagination and tact to have attempted to squeeze Nureyev into a preconceived mould,” Ashton remarked. “Fortunately for his future he is not above taking criticism … if he is convinced that it is better than what he has thought out for himself.”

  The negotiating that had led to “a fifty-fifty compromise” between the Kirov and Royal Ballet versions of Giselle was exactly the process of give-and-take through which the two stars achieved their own equilibrium. Each immediately sensing the other’s intelligence, and realizing how much each could do for the other, they began to exchange ideas and experiment with different ways of doing steps, while discovering at the same time a deep mutual respect. “She can accept me young and not experienced. Not just English politeness but real interest.” Visual proof of Margot’s growing trust in her partner was witnessed by Nigel when he visited the studio one day and watched Rudolf hold the ballerina way above his head in a Soviet lift as she shrieked and giggled with delight, “Put me down—it’s much too high!” What had so impressed her was the intensity of Rudolf’s involvement in his role, the extraordinary conviction that had also helped to win Ashton over: “He is completely engaged in his part, and therefore the image is true.”

  Once again Rudolf’s model was Nijinsky—“I study photographs of him whenever I can.… I see in those photos that he is totally engulfed in his characterization. Incredible!”—but it was the teaching of Stanislavsky that had influenced them both. Although not part of the Vaganova school syllabus, the Stanislavsky method was second nature to Russian theater people. “It was there. We lived and breathed it,” says Rudolf’s ex-classmate Gabrielle Komleva. Guided by Diaghilev, Nijinsky had steeped himself in Romantic music, painting, and literature in order to find the essence of the character, while Rudolf, who regarded Stanislavsky as “one of the earliest of my teachers,” alluded directly to the principle of “Before Time” when he told Nigel, “I could describe for instance, exactly when I first met Giselle and how.”

  The drama unfolding in the studio reached such an emotional pitch that onlookers felt they were watching a performance, not a rehearsal. “I remember corps de ballet crying,” said Rudolf. “Just standing there with their tears dripping.” In class, too, his level of commitment astonished the English dancers, especially Margot, who made a point of coming to watch and learn from him. “Never had I seen each step practiced with such exactitude and thoroughness. It was paradoxical that the young boy everyone thought so wild and spontaneous in his dancing cared desperately about technique.” Wanting to pass on his own knowledge to her—“everything that I had learned about dancing at the Kirov”—he began teaching her Russian bravura skills. She was rehearsing Swan Lake at the time, and having more trouble than usual with the multiple fouettés of act 3. “Left arm is too back,” Rudolf remarked after watching her struggle through the sequence, suggesting that she also try the “mechanic” of keeping both arms held out at the sides, and using the impetus of her shoulders to help her leg whip around. “It did work and suddenly she could do those thirty-two fouettés!” David Blair, then the Royal Ballet’s male lead, had, since Michael Somes’s retirement the previous year, been cast opposite Margot in this and several other ballets. But although an excellent partner, handsome and virile, with a flamboyant technique and breezy charm, the thirty-year-old Blair had not brought out the best in her. Only too aware of this, Margot asked Rudolf if he would dance with her in Swan Lake later that season. To her surprise he did not agree immediately, telling her that he wanted to see the Royal Ballet’s production before making up his mind.

  With his London debut in Giselle just a couple of weeks away, Rudolf flew to Copenhagen to be reunited with Erik, and at the same time to take the opportunity to absorb further insights into the role. Regarded in the West as “the Albrecht,” Erik had always maintained that age and experience had enabled him to give a more complete portrayal of the character—“In a more mature state, one has more imagination as to what a youth would do.” And his conviction that “without an idea behind it, the movement will not communicate” had sanctioned Rudolf’s own belief that there must be a reason for each step and gesture. “Without this it could have no truth—otherwise it is immediately seen by audience and everybody that it’s wrong.” Burdened by family pressures, however, Erik was in no mood to lend his support. “Forgive me if I did not help enough,” he wrote later. “I hate to see you upset, it hurts you, and it hurts me.” It was he who needed stimulus from Rudolf, not the other way around; for more than two years, he had felt jaded and purposeless, no longer able to use his dancing as an escape. “[But] I have seen a little glimpse of beauty and of love and I believe in it, I know it exists.… You have given me more hope and more belief in every way and beauty too.”

  As they walked together by the lake in Gentofte, each experienced a sense of completeness—“that kind of hypnotic, physical, deeply erotic love”—neither had found before. And inevitably Rudolf’s departure on the morning of February 7 left Erik feeling desolate. “Now, as it is evening, I feel like I have a big empty hole inside me, which you fill up, when we are together.… If you can, and will be able to wait for me, while I must be here, it will make my time here much easier. You are in my heart, on my mind and in every fiber of my body.”

  He wrote again the following day.

  My baby Rudik,

  I do not know why I call you baby—you are not a “baby” but not old either, still it sounds nice to me and it expresses something of me to you, which is good.… I look at the telephone, wanting it to call me to hear your voice and to tell you that … to be with you this moment would mean more than anything, than this present world could offer me.… You are the secret of my life, a secret that will show itself freely … a paradox but so true.

  On June 23 Rudolf, having promised Margot that he would be back in time to see her Swan Lake, sat in Ninette de Valois’s box to watch the performance. “I suddenly see extraordinary thing … when Prince meets Odette they have a mime … they start gesticulating. It was a great shock to me.” He had been just as dismayed during a general rehearsal of Giselle to discover that the Royal Ballet retained the long mimed monologue by Berthe, the heroine’s mother, which recounts in traditional gestures the Slavic legend of the Wilis—the pitiless ghosts of jilted girls who rise from their graves at midnight and dance any man they encounter to his death. Basically outlining the background to the plot of act 2, this long sequence, though part of the original libretto and strangely chilling if well performed, not only interrupts the flow of the dance but virtually brings act 1 to a halt. “In some theaters in south of Russia we have also … I find it isn’t necessary at all.” Like Odette’s narration of the plight of the bewitched swan-maidens now bothering Rudolf, these passages had been omitted by the Kirov because they were of no interest to audiences, most of whom knew the story already. “In the West they use old mime.… In Russia they had it also, but they forget it after the big influence of Stanislavsky,” Rudolf told Clive Barnes who, in a long piece criticizing the Royal Ballet’s Giselle the previous year, had already commented on the fact that the Russians and Danes had abandoned “the stilted Maryinsky style of mime we guard so zealously.”

  Western classical repertory had been based on notated scores smuggled out of Russia in 1918 by the Imperial Ballet’s chief régisseur, Nicholas Sergeyev, a pupil of Petipa and Ivanov. He was an impoverished émigré living in 1930s Paris, “a lonely little man with his great volumes,” when de Valois invited him to London to mount the Maryinsky classics for her company. The music-based notation from which Sergeyev worked—in some cases just rough floor plans—give only an approximate idea of steps, leaving out important gestures and upper-body nuances, and, as a consequence, certain solos have become mechanical. Nevertheless the Royal Ba
llet’s Swan Lake was as close as it is possible to get to the original production—a fault, not a virtue, as far as Rudolf was concerned. “There had been a revolution in Russian dance since Sergeyev came to England to show that version.”

  Though held in great esteem in the West, Nicholas Sergeyev had long been discredited in Russia. To dissidents like Michel Fokine, who left the company to join Diaghilev’s community of artists, the Sergeyev regime was stagnant, authoritarian, and hostile to change. A brilliant choreographer whose ideas were as revolutionary and influential as those of the French theoretician Jean-Georges Noverre a century earlier, Fokine wanted to rid the art of its tired formulaic combinations, and in a famous letter to The Times outlined his principles for reform: freedom of choice for subject matter, music, and costume; the expressive use of the whole body; and the elimination of set mime. At school in Leningrad, Rudolf had devoured Fokine’s writings on dance, applauding these and other innovations (especially the promotion of the male dancer from porteur to the ballerina’s equal). Consequently, when he saw The Firebird for the first time at Covent Garden, he could hardly believe that this was the work of the same man. “Fokine said … he fight against pantomime [but] plenty silly pantomime all through the performance. I was horrified.”