On April 3 he faced the ordeal of following Rudolf’s Giselle. His debut in the ballet in 1955, partnering Alicia Markova, had been described by P. W. Manchester as “The Matinee That Made History,” launching him as an international star. For this performance he decided not to attempt to dazzle the London audience with a “new” interpretation but to reveal the true spirit of Romanticism—Giselle being close in style, and of the same period, as the Bournonville ballets. “It is a pleasure to see how simple, how chaste ballet can be and still go to your heart,” Edwin Denby wrote of the Danish interpretation of the Romantic genre, but the English critics, missing the wild rapture that Rudolf had brought to the role, remained unmoved. “Bruhn is too reserved to give more than a hint of that romantic abandon and despair which are necessary in Giselle though no one can perform better than he does the exacting dances,” remarked Richard Buckle; while an unsigned review in Dance & Dancers avowed that the memory of Fonteyn and Nureyev had “dimmed down” the Nerina/Bruhn performance—“even though so much of what they did was excellent and perfectly right.”
The cool elusiveness of Erik’s performance, the impression he gave of being (in Arlene Croce’s phrase) “inwardly rigid, absorbed in his own perfection,” had the potency of an aphrodisiac for Rudolf—the paradoxical burn of ice. “Eighty percent of Erik’s talent was secret, and Rudolf didn’t have those secrets,” remarks the Danish actress Susse Wold. “It was like an iceberg. You saw so much, and underneath was the world. Rudolf showed the whole iceberg; he turned it upside down and showed it all.” Betty Oliphant, another close friend, agrees. “If you take two men: one very obviously sexy, and another who’s extremely attractive and sends shivers down your spine, yet doesn’t make you aware of him as a sexual object. That was Erik—a very, very understated artist, not this animal.” From the public’s point of view, however, “animal magnetism” was more alluring than glacial impassivity—and the box office figures were there to prove it.
The constant comparisons between the two dancers were inevitably affecting their private lives, becoming the cause of many violent scenes. On one occasion, angry enough to be deliberately vicious, Erik accused Rudolf of defecting to the West in order to destroy his career. “People would say that Rudolf was out to kill me and how could I put up with it? I never believed it. I only used it once against him.… He got so upset and [was] crying and said who could be so evil.… ‘Of course I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘I believe you.’ ”
It is quite true that Rudolf’s motive had never been to eclipse Erik—on the contrary, he needed him there as inspiration. As he himself admitted, watching a great dancer was a source of self-nourishment. “I receive. I am no longer empty.” Even in Russia he had made up his mind to seek Erik out in order, vampirically, to feed himself—or, as he put it, to “Go there and suck.” “He was draining Erik,” Sonia said, “absorbing everything that Erik had.” Sexually, too, Rudolf expected to be the recipient, and with just as voracious an appetite. “He was very demanding sexually and very possessive, which sometimes got too much for Erik,” Ray Barra says. “Possessive and yet still very promiscuous.”
In April, Rudolf received a postcard from a Hungarian dancer he had known in Leningrad, suggesting that they should try to see each other that summer. Rudolf replied immediately, describing his itinerary and adding, “From 7–9 July I will be in Italy. In August we’ll go to Greece for holidays. But if I would know where and when you would want to come, I will be able to come quickly.”
Viktor Rona, a tall, charismatic principal with Budapest State Choreographic Institute, was two years older than Rudolf, and had admired him since 1959, when they both appeared at Vienna’s international youth festival. He had seen the Kirov contestants perform only the pas de six from Laurentia but had been amazed by one dancer who stood out so conspicuously from the rest: “Who is he? I asked myself.” The Budapest company maintained close links with Russian choreographers and ballet masters, and at the end of that year, Viktor arrived in Leningrad with his partner and school contemporary, Adèl Orosz, to study the classics under Pushkin’s tutelage. On December 12, Viktor notes in his diary how they both rushed to the theater after class to see “new artists Kolpakova and Nureyev” in Giselle, and it was not long before Rudolf himself went out of his way to watch the young Hungarians dance. Alexander Ivanovich had told him that the couple knew the Lavrovsky version of Giselle, and Rudolf began coming to their rehearsals in order to learn the choreography himself. Sharing the same impassioned enthusiasm for dance, they worked late into the night, and then went across the road to the Pushkins’ apartment where Xenia would be waiting with dinner. “What had begun as a working relationship developed into true friendship,” says Adèl, who was born on the same day of the same year as Rudolf, and on March 17 shared a double celebration with him at Rossi Street. When the time came for the two dancers to leave, Rudolf and Alexander Ivanovich took them to the airport, where they parted in the hope of seeing each other again.
They kept in touch. When Rudolf made his London debut, he sent Rona a photograph of himself in the Ashton solo inscribed, “To beloved Viktor, Wish you big happiness on the stage and also in life, Your great friend Rudik.” But it was Pushkin who regularly corresponded with the dancer, sending affectionate New Year’s greetings from all three of them—“Kiss you a thousand times”—and reminding him in one letter how much Rudolf wanted to appear in “your Giselle.” In the winter of 1962 Viktor and Adèl came to London to film the Gayane duet for BBC’s Music in Camera series (transmitted on August 27), and were met by Rudolf at the airport. They were thrilled to discover that he was taking them to lunch with Margot Fonteyn, and he for his part seemed equally pleased to have news from home. In Leningrad, Rudolf and Viktor, a warmhearted young man with lively eyes and black curly hair, had rarely, if ever, spent time alone together, but it was over the next few days that, according to Adèl, “their deeper friendship started.”
A month or two later, following several letters from Viktor, a postcard arrived from Helsinki where the dancer was on tour, suggesting that they should see each other either in Berlin, where he was filming The Nutcracker, or in Italy or France, where he planned to spend a two-week vacation: “I will write you where and when I will be exactly. My best regards to Margot, Kisses, Viktor.”
As it happened, their next encounter was not a romantic tryst in Europe but a “cloak-and-dagger” rendezvous at the London airport at the end of the year. In the meantime Rudolf hoped that Viktor might be useful to him. The dancer was then preparing the part of Mercutio in Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet—a ballet Rudolf himself longed to perform in London. “Margot also wants it,” he wrote, “but everything depends on whether Lavrovsky will stage it.” Viktor was the obvious link, and he also had a direct connection with Pushkin. “I’m trying to call Alexander Ivanovich but no success,” Rudolf told him. “If you write him please give my telephone no: Fremantle 1603. He’ll need only first 3 letters.”
So far Rudolf’s only contact with his teacher had been through Xenia. Her many letters and cards (addressed “c/o Mrs. M. Fonteyn for Rudi, the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, London”) never mention Pushkin by name, but refer to him as “The Elder,” “your professor,” or “our teacher” (in English). She had recently told Rudolf how upset and worried Alexander Ivanovich became when there was no news from him. “And then he gets terribly irritated because all the time people get to him and tell him their fantasies and thoughts about you.” Xenia herself, forced to dissipate her emotional energy into her daily routine, had become as listless and confined as one of Chekhov’s women. “I have never had a diary in my life and now I am writing to you every day. I have nothing to write about day after day, my days are so much one like another,” she says, describing her walks to the market—even what she has for breakfast. Very occasionally a friend at the local library would discover an English article about Rudolf, unnoticed by the censor, which she would then translate for Xenia. “It was so that she could
still live with Rudik in her memory and mind—she missed him so much.” Refusing to abandon her hold on Rudolf entirely, Xenia scolds him for having danced too many pas de deux in succession. “That’s terrible—You are not thinking about your legs at all”—and warns him of potentially corrupting influences in the West. “Everywhere are attractive and unattractive people who may ask you to go out for a beer or invite you to a club. And this is not good for a dancer. With your nerves you have to be especially careful. It is so easy to get under the influence of evil. Remember you must stay the same, as I know you—an honest, true person.”
Often she ends her letters by admonishing, “Take care, be intelligent!” or “You have to be serious and educate yourself. Don’t waste your time on nothing.” In one she tells him about a Van Cliburn concert she watched on television, which reminded her of how sad she is that Rudolf no longer plays the piano. Using code names, she gives him snippets of news about his friends, such as “your ex-love Ella” (Ninel Kurgapkina) or “our beloved Bobik Sh” (Alla Shelest). The one person she never mentions is Teja. He was now involved with an Indonesian temple dancer studying at the Vaganova Academy. “You know how I was always inspired by the East!” he told Rudolf in a letter of his own, explaining, “After you left I missed you so much, I didn’t know whether to be alone or get married.” Xenia had disliked Nureini on sight. “She would say to Teja, ‘I’m inviting you but without your monkey.’ ” To her the relationship was not only a threat to their own bond but also a betrayal of Rudolf. “Everybody was supposed to wait for him,” said Tamara. “Xenia Josifovna felt that if Rudik had loved you, then you should never become close to anyone else. You had to be free and waiting for him.”
They were all waiting in suspense for the outcome of Rudolf’s trial, the date of which had been set for April 2. The process, which was closed to the public, took place in Leningrad’s Municipal Court, the panel consisting of a judge, a public prosecutor, a woman defense lawyer hired by the Pushkins, two jury members, and a secretary. None of Rudolf’s friends or relatives was called to give evidence, although Xenia, Alexander Ivanovich, and Rosa had recorded their depositions several months earlier. Hamet and Farida, “suffering from many problems,” remained in Ufa, relying on their daughter Rosa and the Pushkins for information. Desperate to know what was happening inside the courtroom, Rosa and Tamara had gone together to the municipal hall, where they were able to watch the opening stages through a slightly open door until they were spotted and the door was kicked shut.
One by one the five witnesses were interrogated in a small room overlooking the Fontanka Canal: Rudolf’s partner in Paris, Alla Osipenko; the director Georgi Korkin—the only person to speak unequivocally in Rudolf’s defense; the KGB’s Vitaly Strizhevsky; and two members of the company’s technical and administrative staff due to travel on the same flight to Moscow. As the trial progressed, the evidence appeared to be going in the dancer’s favor, with everyone united in saying that the defection had not been premeditated. Even Strizhevsky was forced to admit, “His things were on the plane to London, and he was preparing to fly there.” Making the point that Rudolf had not been seduced by the material temptations of capitalism, Korkin remarked how surprised he had been by his indifference to his clothes and appearance in Paris. “All his attention was paid to buying costumes for the stage. There was nothing except art for him.” The director also implied that Nureyev’s frustrations about the company were justified, as the young generation of Kirov dancers were being held back by Sergeyev and Dudinskaya, both equally unwilling to relinquish their roles. (He gave as an example the fact that the veteran stars had taken their costumes on tour even though they were under orders not to perform.) In fact the same charge had been made in a newspaper, which published a letter of complaint about their leadership signed by thirty-six Kirov members, including its leading ballerinas. Rudolf’s lawyer, Irina Otlyagova, read this aloud to the court.
From beginning to end the proceedings lasted less than four hours. The final summing-up was given not by the judge but by the public prosecutor, who also pronounced the verdict: “According to the tenets of article N64,” he said, “Nureyev has been proved guilty.” Ronzin continued by saying that Nureyev’s refusal to return from the West was a betrayal of the motherland, and that his defection, used by the bourgeois media for anti-Soviet slander, had caused considerable damage to the interests of the state. “However, taking into consideration Nureyev’s youth, his lack of experience, and his unbalanced character, together with the fact that our representatives mishandled his expulsion to Moscow, he will be given the minimum punishment of article N64.” Irina Otlyagova then intervened with the plea that article N43, which carries “a lower than minimum punishment,” be applied instead. The final verdict was that Rudolf was guilty according to article N64, but in view of his circumstances would be punished according to article N43: seven years’ imprisonment.
As a penalty for high treason, this sentence was light—light enough for some to suppose that Rudolf would now return home. Farida tried for several days to reach him by telephone but was unable to get through. “Maybe they’re interfering with the connection over there,” Rosa remarked when she wrote to Rudolf later that week. She made no mention of the trial or its outcome, but sent him a clipping of the published letter of complaint. “It’s possible to hope, I think, that your own episode happened as a result of the Sergeyev intrigue. This could justify you.” But Rudolf had no intention of coming home: He had just found out that the Royal Ballet was inviting him to become a full-time member of the company.
This news, though hardly surprising, was in fact a reversal of Ninette de Valois’s policy of having no foreign guest artists on a long-term basis. Unwilling to topple a structure that had been meticulously built up over thirty years, she was just as determined as Balanchine to prevent her company from becoming a backup team for a star. In Nureyev’s case, however, she was willing to break her own rules. “When a dancer of genius appears, the company has to submit.” Rudolf was to become what Lord Drogheda, chairman of the Royal Opera House, would call “a sort of permanent Guest Artist”; Erik, on the other hand, despite having been engaged long before Rudolf’s arrival, and having danced more than twenty performances to Rudolf’s three, would not be appearing the next season. As board meeting minutes note, “he was not playing to capacity.”
Hating the itinerant life of a guest star, and longing to be part of a company, Erik was devastated. He could not understand de Valois’s decision, as he felt the Royal Ballet was absolutely right for him. Which, of course, it was. His technical control, meticulous footwork, and reticent temperament were easily absorbed into the British style—a model of perfection to the young dancers. Anthony Dowell admits to identifying far more with what he calls “Erik’s withheld, aristocratic style” than with Rudolf’s wild Russian panache. When Erik staged Bournonville’s Napoli for the company, he cast the nineteen-year-old in his first featured role, and was just as formative an influence on the upcoming ballerinas. “There was the most wonderful atmosphere in the company when Erik was with us,” recalls Georgina Parkinson. “We gave ourselves completely to him; we were his students. We hadn’t had contact with many people from the outside, and here was someone who really knew what he was talking about, and was so generous about passing it on.”
When Rudolf arrived shortly afterward, the dancers felt blessed—it was even inspiring to watch the pair warm up together: They were like two star matadors performing mano a mano in the same ring—Los Dos—whose antithesis in styles could be summed up in Kenneth Tynan’s description of El Litri and Ordóñez at the great final bullfight of the Valencian fair: “When Reach was confronted with Grasp, Accident with Design, Romantic with Classic, Sturm und Drang with Age of Gold.” This was a time when, as Clive Barnes has written, “artistry was almost of secondary importance to charisma,” and the same thing was happening in bullfighting. The embodiment of the quality the Spanish call tremendísmo was twenty-five-year-ol
d El Cordobés, whose early career was strikingly similar to Rudolf’s.* Tynan first saw this wild, tousle-haired youth in 1961, the year the matador began his domination of Spanish bullfighting, and was reminded of a trend he had already encountered under several other names: “In France, the blouson noir; in Britain the mod; and in America the hipster.” Bringing something new into an old art form, Cordobés was the first hip bullfighter—“le Beatle des toreros,” Paris-Match called him—just as Rudolf was “ballet’s first pop star, the long-haired icon for the decade’s spirit of rebellion and sexual freedom.” Applause for the young Cordoban was a “collective madness,” the kind of delirium last evoked in the fifties by Elvis Presley, and Rudimania was equally phenomenal. Replacing the typical dance audience, described by Richard Buckle as “mad old maids in moth-eaten musquash [muskrat]” was a generation of “squealing bobbysoxers,” most of whom had never been to the Royal Opera House before. It is no accident that Ordóñez, abdicating to the new cult of personality, decided to retire in 1962. But while the antiacademic, antitraditional El Cordobés was intentionally vulgarizing classical standards, burlesquing the techniques refined by his predecessors, Rudolf was doing the opposite. It was his intention to fuse sensationalism with Apollonian refinement, and by the following year, he had done it, achieving what Ninette de Valois considered to be an astonishingly correct and noble style. “By the age of 25 his dancing was virtually perfect.”
In May, as Margot was on tour in Australia with a small group of dancers, Yvette Chauviré was brought in by the Royal Ballet as a partner for Rudolf in The Sleeping Beauty—a performance that did neither star much credit. Their Giselle twelve days later was even more of an anticlimax. Chauviré’s portrayal was only a blurred outline of what it used to be, her sophisticated, intellectual manner far too remote to interact with Rudolf’s boyish spontaneity. “He was always impressed by the intensity of Yvette’s concentration,” says Ghislaine Thesmar, “but unlike Margot, who was so communicative with him, Yvette was completely in her bubble. She wouldn’t let anyone in.”
Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342) Page 33