Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  It was that evening at Castellano that Balanchine made his famous statement, “When you are tired of playing at being a prince, come to me.” Barbara Horgan says that Balanchine was trying to explain to Rudolf that if he joined the New York City Ballet he would have to “commit to it,” in other words, give up the idea of dividing his time between London and New York.* Although NYCB dancers were not tied to formal contracts, there was an unwritten rule that if you danced between seasons with other companies, “Mr. Balanchine would not have you back.” He made exceptions, allowing Verdy, for example, to guest abroad. “She probably gave him the impression that she really wanted to work with his company, really wanted a permanent repertory situation,” Horgan says. And Verdy was already a Balanchine dancer, whereas Rudolf would have to relearn how to dance. As a principal with the company, he would need to be taught several dozen new roles, roles that not only demanded knowledge of “the higher mathematics of twentieth-century music” but were technically and stylistically completely different from anything he was used to. (Even Baryshnikov, in his first season with the New York City Ballet in 1978, was described by one critic as “terrible.”)

  Rudolf, as Balanchine was well aware, wanted to dance “on circuit”: His plan was to spend eight months of the year in London and two with Balanchine. “Only two. Not long. Just for myself to learn the choreography.” This was deemed “too selfish” by the choreographer, but from Rudolf’s point of view it made sense. He could hardly think of giving up the partnership he had just established with Fonteyn, and however much he craved a modern repertory, he felt that it was more pressing to “work up again” and perfect the classical roles he had learned in Russia.

  People don’t seem to understand that I must first be seen in roles that I know—a prince in Swan Lake, a prince in Sleeping Beauty, a nobleman in Giselle—so that I can be seen to the best advantage. Once I have done this, I will not have to play at being a prince and can experiment with my career. Then to Balanchine.

  But although in advising the dancer to go off and play his princes, Balanchine was telling him exactly what he wanted to hear, Rudolf still felt as if he had been spurned, telling the journalist Lynn Barber in 1990: “So I go to Balanchine but he rejected me.” To study with Balanchine and with Erik Bruhn had been his two obsessions on arriving in the West; and the fact that the Erik goal had been so easily achieved made this seem even more of a failure—the first major setback of his career. Instead of examining the reasons, Rudolf looked for pretexts: “There was some kind of black cat that ran between me and Balanchine for many years.” … “The rift, I think, began between us when an article about me appeared in a magazine. The writer who interviewed me put words into my mouth about why Balanchine didn’t do ballets for men. I think Balanchine heard about that.”* “The thing misfired. It was mishandled. I didn’t really know how to go about it properly. He was probably annoyed by some idiotic letters he received about me. The press sent out stupid information. I think it was instigated by the de Cuevas company … they wanted a permanent contract. I said no. I will dance with you only for three months, because I want to go to Balanchine. So they sent bad publicity ahead.” …“I had some wrong people handling it.”

  On the other hand Rudolf’s intuition was right. There does appear to have been an element of conspiracy involved in the decision not to allow him to join the New York City Ballet—an obstructive force embodied in the towering figure of Lincoln Kirstein. Dance scholar, art critic, poet, patron, polemicist, Kirstein was not only a force in the cultural life of New York—“the twentieth century’s truest successor to Diaghilev”—but the man responsible for bringing Balanchine to the United States in 1933. The son of one of the owners of Boston’s Filene’s department store, he had, by providing financial support, helped make it possible for the choreographer’s genius to evolve freely for thirty years. Although Balanchine alone formed the company aesthetic, created a school, and honed sleek all-American girls into his modern muses, Kirstein, who had dedicated his life to the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, was always there, a permanent spectator at rehearsals and performances, “hustling, animating, inspiring, bullying, proselytizing in the service of their great cause.”

  Included in a lengthy, gossipy correspondence between Kirstein and the English ballet critic Richard Buckle is the following aside dated April 18, 1962: “Master Nureyev is making peeeteeyous Russky noises about how I stopped Balanchine taking him. He wants six months with us and six with the Royal Ballet; think of our repertory and how much time he would give himself to learn it. No; Mrs. K says defunutely: Nyet.”

  Maria Tallchief was with Rudolf at City Center one night soon after his BAM debut when Kirstein came up to them in the lobby. Without any initial pleasantries he began furiously to berate Rudolf. “Lincoln was outraged that he’d defected from Russia. It was very violent, and very shocking.” Enormously tall—in Christopher Isherwood’s phrase, “like Gulliver among the Lilliputians”—Kirstein not only looked physically threatening, with his glowering brows, hawk eyes, and convict crop, but was known to be quite capable of losing control in public, once having gotten into a sudden fistfight with Lucian Freud on the way to the painter’s favorite pub. The sheer force of his personality and intellectual intensity makes Maria certain that he helped sway Balanchine against taking Rudolf into the company: “Absolutely. Lincoln was very vociferous.” Barbara Horgan disagrees: “Absolutely not. He’d listen to Lincoln … but when it came to what happened onstage, Balanchine was the master. He did what he wanted to do.”

  Kirstein, though, had always anticipated and seconded Balanchine’s aims. It was by mutual agreement that there were to be no Swan Lakes, no Giselles, and no guest stars. For decades he had been railing in print against the star system, blasting at audiences seduced by the showstopping formulas of Russian ballet. Since his student days, Kirstein’s “life’s breviary” had been Eliot’s famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which had helped form his own creed, that art is not the expression of personality but an escape from it. “Hymns against the horror of unleashed egotism appear everywhere in the pages of Kirstein’s anti-personal aesthetic,” his literary executor, Nicholas Jenkins, has written. As a prime example of “picturesque, romantic, marketable narcissism,” Rudolf was the natural target of his contempt. “Rudi was so shaken. He couldn’t believe it,” recalls Maria. He was even more taken aback a couple of weeks later when, in an article in the New York Times, he was lambasted again for leaving Russia—and, in effect, for being a star. Written by John Martin, then the most influential dance critic in America, the piece pours scorn on the frenzied reception at BAM—in Martin’s phrase, “an advanced manifestation of ephebolatry,” (his pompous coinage for “the cult of youth”—ephebe deriving from the ancient Greek word for “early manhood”) which he saw seeping into all realms of art. “It is a virus to which Mr. Nureyev’s resistance is weak; it has already seriously jeopardized and may actually have destroyed his career as an artist.”

  Rudolf may not yet have known that John Martin was a confidant and ally of Lincoln Kirstein. In a letter of appreciation for what may have been financial support, Martin wrote to Kirstein, “I wish I could tell you in words of one syllable as a parting gesture how deeply grateful I am to you for everything. But I know you don’t want to hear it and I can’t say it. I can say, however, that I love you very much.”

  In the early years of New York City Ballet, Martin had, in fact, been actively hostile to the company (in a published diary he dedicated to the critic, Kirstein thanked him for this initial lack of support, explaining, “Without your first notices and final confidence, we would never have been as stubborn, insistent or directed as we have been”). For the last decade, however, he had been New York City Ballet’s prime champion. It was Martin whom Rudolf had met in Paris and quizzed “to the point of unmannerliness” about Balanchine. Their conversation took place after a performance at le Palais des Sports—the occasion on w
hich he had left the stage in the middle of his variation. Having described this “shocking breach of theatrical responsibility” in his BAM review, Martin then linked it to the “starry-eyed gullibility” he claimed had led to the downfall of an enormously gifted dancer:

  If he had had the sophistication to resist the blandishments of Paris … and behaved with more circumspection, he … would not have been picked up by the Soviet authorities to be sent back to Russia ahead of schedule. Day after day he was told by word of mouth and in print that he was the greatest dancer in the world and with his naïve wishful-mindedness he may well have believed it and blamed the Kirov for not having told him so.… He has thrown himself to the lions.

  Appearing after a unanimously positive press—one critic claiming that Rudolf had conquered New York “as immediately and decisively as perhaps no other dancer has done since Margot Fonteyn”—Martin’s attack was baffling, and not only to Rudolf. “About John Martin’s apparent antipathy to Rudy,” wrote a friend of Sonia Arova, “everyone says in New York that he is influenced by political issues, so I don’t think that it is too hard to understand.” Certainly, with his condemnation of Rudolf’s “appalling lack of discipline,” his description of the defection as a “tragic” mistake, Martin’s tone is decidedly pro-Soviet. He had, in fact, been championing Russian ballet since 1956, when he spent two weeks in the Soviet Union—“the two most fully lived weeks of my life.” In a long paean of praise published in the September issue of Dance Magazine, Martin called Leningrad the ballet capital of the world, and contrasted its great school and tradition with the lack of cultural background in American ballet, where “they don’t know anything except barre exercises.”

  At the same time, without going into Stalinist history, he admitted in this essay that the Russian repertory was severely limited, explaining that its compulsory realism and ideologically acceptable themes were the result of a regime in which the arts had been controlled by nonartists, and cut off from all outside influences for more than forty years. The lack of finesse and subtlety in Soviet productions—“the elements of Barnum and Bailey” and “the last days of Pompeii”—he saw mirrored in the aesthetic coarseness and technical excesses of the dancing itself, especially that of the men, whose style he found blunt and unpolished. “There is much refinement yet to be done,” he remarked, suggesting that the solution would be a cross-fertilization of the two dance cultures, “which could well prove to be a revolution in the art as powerful as that caused by Fokine’s insurgency in 1909.”

  That, actually, was precisely the fusion Rudolf had already achieved. His awareness of the Soviet male’s “bulky and prosaic quality” (Martin’s phrase) was what had led him to draw on the inspiration of Kirov ballerinas to refine his line and, on arriving in the West, immediately seek out the two exemplars of noble simplicity and purity of style from the Danish and English schools. Unchallenged by ballets like Corsaire, “with its quaint complexities of plot and its lurid melodramatics” (Martin again), Rudolf had come to America to experience exactly what the critic had proposed Russians should do: get “an eager eyeful of fresh aesthetic forms.” Why then denounce him for finding the Kirov old-fashioned, and for choosing to leave?

  The reason was simple enough: Martin was protecting his own relations with the Soviets. Whatever his politics may have been, he was clearly exhilarated by the idea of acting as a kind of cultural bridge between Russia and the West, a position he would immediately forfeit were he to champion the young defector. Not only that, but at the time his piece appeared, negotiations were being carried out for New York City Ballet’s first visit to Russia in which Martin himself was closely involved.

  Arranged by the U.S. Department of State in exchange for the Bolshoi’s American season in September, this extended tour was due to take place that October—a particularly precarious time for diplomatic relations (in fact, the Moscow run in October coincided exactly with the Cuban missile crisis). The possibility of taking his company to Russia, where he had not been since 1924, had been on Balanchine’s mind for several years. In a letter to Kirstein in 1955, Edwin Denby remarked: “Moscow! mercy me, George would talk himself into jail. You’d want to send John Martin to take care of the official side.” It was not only that Martin had the connections (when he saw the Bolshoi for the first time in 1956, it was at a Kremlin state banquet in honor of Marshal Tito), he was indispensable to the company as a propagandist voice. As Kirstein himself later acknowledged, “When you came with us to Russia in 1962 you sent back coverage justifying us on an international level as well as clarifying the return of Balanchine to Russia with its local effect. This was an historical service which no one else could have provided.”

  With Rudolf as a member of the company, there could have been no question of a season in the Soviet Union. And yet, while Kirstein and Martin almost certainly colluded in making sure the tour took place, as far as Balanchine was concerned this was not the issue. Much as he wanted to take his dancers to Russia, he also didn’t want to make ballets for a male star. Having the New York City Ballet dominated by a brilliant young renegade would never have worked; Balanchine realized this immediately, but Rudolf was too bewitched by the choreographer’s genius to admit it.

  Back in London, Rudolf spent his first birthday in the West at Victoria Road with the Goslings, Erik, Margot, and Frederick Ashton, “very very happy” to be surrounded by the people he liked most. After dinner Nigel suggested they all go down to the basement, where he had set up a projector to watch a 1957 film about Martha Graham, A Dancer’s World. “Oh, I don’t think Rudolf would be interested in that,” remarked Margot, to which Erik countered, “Oh yes he would.” “Erik was jealous of Margot,” his close friend Ray Barra says. “He felt she was too much a part of Rudolf’s life, and she didn’t like him any more than he liked her.” As Maude recalls, Rudolf was tremendously excited by the film. “He couldn’t wait to meet Martha Graham and see more of her work.”

  This was the period when Erik had an almost total hold over Rudolf. For three months the two stars were in London, guesting with the Royal Ballet and living together in a rented flat in South Kensington. To the English dancers they made a stunningly glamorous couple—“a Beatnik and a Prince,” one critic called them—arriving for class every morning in Rudolf’s new white Karmann-Ghia sports car (even though neither had a license yet). As Erik’s English was much better than Rudolf’s, he found himself acting as go-between, often having to explain what Ninette de Valois had been trying to say to Rudolf. “That became a bit tiring.… I sometimes felt like a secretary.” The March issue of Dancing Times had featured Erik Bruhn as “Personality of the Month,” its photograph captioned “And as for being the world’s greatest male dancer—if he isn’t, who is?” But the magazine had gone to press before Rudolf’s Giselle, and since then, although Erik was making his debut with the Royal Ballet, Fleet Street had virtually ignored him. “There was no sensation in the arrival of a modest and self-effacing Dane.” Guilty about the fact that his idol was being overlooked, and aware that the situation would worsen in May, when his autobiography was to be serialized in The Observer, Rudolf went out of his way to generate publicity for Erik. “He was very considerate. That was enough for me. The rest I could not control.”

  All the same, this was not a happy time for Erik. The partner he had been delegated was Nadia Nerina, a ballerina he had to “learn to like.” Her triumph the previous year, guesting with the Bolshoi, had injected her dancing with real Russian aplomb—exploited wonderfully by Ashton in La Fille mal gardée—and after their scintillating performance in the Don Quixote duet in May, it looked as if Erik would prove the catalyst for Nerina that Nureyev had been for Fonteyn. Five weeks later, however, in their first Swan Lake, it was clear just how ill matched they were. Nerina did not have the lyrical temperament for Odette and lacked an inner, musical rapport with Erik, that sixth sense that allows one dancer to intuit what the other is going to do. In the audience, Rudolf was distressed to see
his idol dancing way below his usual standard, his low-key performance prompting one reviewer to remark that he seemed “anxious to efface himself.” Why, Rudolf asked Sonia Arova, sitting beside him, did Erik not insist on another partner? “It’s Erik’s fault,” he muttered. “He won’t put his foot down.”

  When the two dancers began to prepare Giselle, Rudolf came to every rehearsal until Nerina, noticing the extent to which Erik was unsettled by his presence, refused to continue unless Rudolf left the studio. Somewhat sheepishly, he did, but remained outside the closed door, watching through the glass. Oppressed by Rudolf’s burning insistence on analyzing every gesture, Erik was losing confidence in himself, astounding his ballerina one day by confessing that he was not a classical dancer. He had reached this state of crisis before, while working under great pressure with Vera Volkova. “It got to a point where I couldn’t move … and it finally dawned on me that I was thinking too much.” Sonia, who was living in a flat nearby and often had dinner with the couple, tried to ease the tension, saying, “You are two of the most fabulous dancers there are, and there shouldn’t be this thing disturbing either one of you.” But to Erik it felt as if people had placed bets on which of the two was going to survive.