Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Each day I write, or I read your letters full of love and also suffering and suddenly, it seemed like that is our future, our life together, sitting always, writing about our love, our longing and suffering, putting everything we feel so strongly for and about down on paper … to reach the other, on the other side of the world. We haven’t been able to spend much time together lately and in the future it seems we will have even less time. The only time we really were a long time together was in London last year, but I don’t think either of us were happy all the time. No excuse can be made, not even my bad foot, my aunt’s death, or even later my mother’s death, no excuse either for whatever other ambitions we might have had too. We had little consideration for each other at that time, and later too. We thought perhaps as we worked so hard and we did, and for selfish reasons which are most natural to us. Perhaps we thought that happiness was something we deserved … but neither of us deserved it, and now we sit in each part of the world and suffer from it, and our love and our desperate dreams of meeting for a few hectic days, now and then, so we can for get in each other’s arms our aching feet and muscles, so we can forget the sound of the audience, our responsibilities and our own expectation to stay on top and ahead, our craving and hungry ambitions for life in this society. Yes my darling, we do work very hard for it and we deserve everything we get, because we worked for it, but my dearest we do not deserve happiness.… I can see myself or you, … forever sitting so far apart writing down all our love without having it near us, it is unnatural our love cannot grow that way, only our dreams about love and happiness will grow.… Oh my darling, there is nothing untrue or unreal about my love and desire for you, it is so big, it is destroying me because there is only paper to release it on. If we need distraction, we might as well go out in the street and pick up a few hours of love, but I am afraid that is too late for me, because I do know how much I love you and nothing can compensate or replace it, that’s my big suffering. Darling, help me find a way, I cannot do it alone I am not that strong, and could we make it if we were together? Or should all our ambitions for everything else as well make us unhappy. My darling how to say I love you anymore, you know I do please help love, Erik.

  Within a matter of days, however, having surfaced from his despair, Erik continues as if this “long and honest letter” had never been written, counting the hours until they meet and believing in a future together—even the unlikely prospect of working with Balanchine at the same time. Arriving in London on February 6, he moved into Rudolf’s rented apartment, impatient to see “all the new things” in his Royal Ballet repertory.

  • • •

  Rudolf’s ambition to collaborate with contemporary Western choreographers had been one of the main reasons for his leaving Russia, and yet, in London, he found himself dancing the same roles as before—a situation Ninette de Valois acknowledged when she admitted, “We were after his past and he was after our present.” In January, as the conniving Etiocles in John Cranko’s 1959 Antigone, he had his first opportunity to try a new style, revealing a stark angularity and air of menace that had not been seen before. The ballet itself amounted to little, its combination of American and Greek modern dance dismissed by Edwin Denby as “pompous and … delivered with a BBC accent.” To Rudolf, however, it was the experience that counted. “It is more important that you work, work and something good comes out. You try … mistakes, bad, old-fashioned or something like that. But work onstage really provides knowledge and develop art.”

  Two weeks later, he was back in the role of the Prince, dancing Swan Lake with Margot for the first time in London. Mary Clarke’s review described the “cold wave of disapproval” felt in sections of the house when Odette danced her introductory passage with Siegfried instead of miming it. But if Margot had capitulated to Rudolf over the question of mime, her own mark on him had never been more apparent. What the audience was seeing was a complete transformation—“a new Nureyev, an English Nureyev” as Richard Buckle called him. “A beautifully behaved modest and controlled Nureyev, giving simply and splendidly a well-thought-out, carefully rehearsed performance. For who could show temperament, or be other than on their best behaviour in Fonteyn’s presence?”

  Turning an enchaînement into a musical phrase was a Fonteyn speciality: Her quick, light connecting steps were a highlight of her performance—“an expression of spirit, some burst of joy,” as Violette Verdy put it. And it was seeing Rudolf begin to join steps together in a continuous line rather than tackling each one separately that made Margot realize the extent of her influence. It did not stop there. With her vertical carriage and squarely angled limbs, she may have lacked the plastique, breadth, and voluptuousness of Russian-trained ballerinas, but it was in this orderly restriction that her artistry lay. A great actress probably without knowing it, she could give meaning to a glance or the smallest gesture—the reason that both Peggy Ashcroft and Irene Worth made a point of going to watch her performances. Her Odette, in the words of Robert Greskovic, was “a little symphony of shifts and shades,” and it was to this that Rudolf responded, her every nuance evoking an instinctive response from him. Understanding between the two dancers reached its peak in Swan Lake; as Alexander Bland remarked, “They seemed aware of each other even when their backs were turned.… When their eyes met, a message passed.”

  A year earlier Clive Barnes had commented on the need to find a way of taming Rudolf without breaking him—“He cannot be allowed to ride roughshod over everything”—and it was Margot who, like a horse whisperer, had achieved this. “She’d just go over and sort of pat him,” said Maude. “Almost like patting a racehorse.” Pushkin had had the same power over him, a power made possible, Margot believed, by the difference in their ages and professional experience. “Had I been younger, I would have found it extremely difficult to accommodate to Rudolf’s very fixed ideas and his, shall we say, outspoken way of expressing them. Quite simply, we were so far apart that we could come together.”

  Margot as the target of Rudolf’s abuse was hard for outsiders to accept; in terms of ballet protocol, it was shocking for a young person to insult a senior. Royal Ballet colleagues attributed her tolerance either to the masochism of a woman in love—“That’s when you put up with anything”—or to her recognition that, like the comedown after the rush of a drug, the exhilaration of dancing with Rudolf inevitably had unpleasant side effects. “We could see that she didn’t mind,” says the ballerina Anya Sainsbury. “Having found someone who gave her so much, she could laugh it off.”

  There was also the fact that Margot was surprisingly submissive in her relationships with men. As a young dancer in the Vic Wells company she had spent eight years in thrall to Constant Lambert, the brilliant conductor and composer—“a kind of Diaghilev to her”—who opened her eyes to Proust, paintings, and the world outside the ballet. Along with Lambert’s immense culture went a roistering, wayward side, and Margot had taught herself to ignore his “bouts of whoring,” just as she later refused to acknowledge that her husband was unfaithful to her. With Tito, however, who had none of Lambert’s erudition, her meekness was harder to understand, and Rudolf often wondered if she could be playing some kind of role. But Margot, as Keith Money has written, was “two distinct people.” Shoring up the vulnerable femininity was a steely stoicism—the quality Rudolf particularly admired in her. “He was always saying that she had the mind of a man,” remarks Maude Gosling. “It was the reason he respected her so much.” Because Margot was fundamentally as tough as he was, Rudolf’s taunts and tantrums rarely bothered her, and if they did, she would simply leave the room.

  Rudolf’s izyuminka—which he translated as “what you call ‘charisma’—abnormal drive, nervosity, which are accepted onstage but in real life are rejected”—was also tolerated by de Valois. “It was only fair that we had to put up with it.… We must accept in him the quality of stardom—the inner fire … which surmounts the usual standards of critics.” Brought up to do exactly what was expected of
them, the other dancers could hardly believe their disciplinarian director’s acquiescence toward Rudolf. They watched in amazement as he ripped off his wig and snarled his contempt for the bulky costumes Philip Prowse had designed for Diversions, the new Kenneth MacMillan ballet. “He was so badly behaved,” recalls Georgina Parkinson. “But he was obviously insecure. This was his first foray into contemporary dance, and he wasn’t used to Kenneth’s acrobatic lifts.” Hardly in top form himself, MacMillan was ill at ease with Rudolf—“He hated the whole thing of him being such a star”—and produced an unexceptional, plotless work, which nevertheless was a baptism of sorts. For the first time, as Clive Barnes remarked, Rudolf was performing with the Royal Ballet rather than having the company provide a decorative setting for him. And yet, although he had clearly mastered the new technique, he still appeared an outsider, dancing with what Barnes called “a mixture of romantic ardour and sulky heroism that needed a lot of toning down.”

  In Marguerite and Armand a month later, there was no question of Rudolf having to subjugate his individuality; the ballet actually exploits what Ashton called the impact of personality—the stage presence of his stars. The choreography for Armand not only incorporates Nureyev-patented steps, it absorbs his personal style, blending the feline plastique of Corsaire with Albrecht’s romantic intensity. By now Rudolf had realized that even without Balanchine’s decisiveness in rehearsals Ashton was a “kind of genius.” He may not have demonstrated or articulated the actual steps he wanted, but a mysterious process of osmosis took place. “You have extrasensory perception and feel that.” At the same time, determined to retain the choreography, Rudolf decided to take charge of rehearsals himself. “I start to observe what we did. Try to remember.… Then I start to do tortuous, step by step, movement by movement creating those passions.”

  Hardly surprisingly, the process resulted in a number of eruptions. And while Ashton “gave as good as I got, my dear!,” he could not endure Rudolf’s rough treatment of Margot, even though he could clearly see that she didn’t mind. “It was only me with that natural exaggerated sense of courtesy, I suppose you could call it. I was brought up to believe that a ballerina is a sacred object.” This was a period when Margot was no longer Ashton’s sole muse, but all the same he felt hurt and undermined to see her completely under Rudolf’s sway. In the past, if they disagreed over a point, she had always deferred to him—“ ‘You’re always right in the end!’ she’d say”—whereas now it was Rudolf who inevitably had the final word. Quite justifiably, “Fred felt that he was stealing her away,” says Maude.

  Emotions reached their height at the dress rehearsal, which even de Valois recalled as “really awful.” Watched by about fifty photographers, Rudolf ripped the collars off two shirts, flung a riding crop at the stage manager, partnered Margot “abominably,” and “with extraordinary passion” tore Armand’s jacket into small pieces. Clutching publicist Bill Beresford’s arm, de Valois finally could stand it no more, and strode up the ramp onto the stage.

  I told him, “Rudi, this can’t go on. I’m not making you another shirt. What’s worrying you?” What he had on was a gentleman’s dress suit—white tie and tails. But he kept saying, “I don’t like it. It makes me look like a waiter.” And I couldn’t imagine what he meant until I remembered that in the Soviet Union, the only people who wear tails are waiters! And you see, this conflicted with his vision of nobility.

  But there was more to it than that. The designer of Marguerite and Armand was Cecil Beaton, whose main inspiration for the costumes was the 1937 film Camille. And while Garbo’s ravishing, bare-shouldered ballgowns perfectly suited Margot and offset the play of épaulement in Ashton’s choreography, the buttoned-up formality of Robert Taylor’s outfits—however authentically en lion—was completely at odds with Rudolf’s own carefully careless Byronic style. Having seen Camille in Leningrad, he well remembered how ludicrously overdressed Taylor looks at times, and he also resented the way the long jacket foreshortened the line of his leg. Rudolf’s “rehearsal outburst” was staged specifically for Beaton, though he knew, too, of course, that subsequent newspaper reports of the “Fiery Russian” ripping off his collar would only heighten the atmosphere of thrilled expectation surrounding Marguerite and Armand.

  No Royal Ballet premiere had ever been so eagerly anticipated as the charity gala on March 12, 1963. It had been a risk submitting a nineteenth-century penny-novel melodrama to a public just waking up to a new era of kitchen-sink reality (even Ashton admitted his story was “old hat”). But to Peter Brook, reviewing the ballet for The Observer, the dancers’ depth of conviction not only brought dramatic credibility to their roles, it breathed life into the genre itself, making “the most artificial of forms suddenly seem human and simple.” There was certainly nothing conventionally “balletic” about Margot’s display of anguish, the kind of raw, visceral emotion said to have defined Sarah Bernhardt’s* portrayal of Marguerite.† It was a starkness that derived from the novel, not the play, which is as trite, sentimental, and far removed from the original as the 1966 film of Marguerite and Armand is from the stage version of the ballet.‡ Ashton wanted a kind of jarring effect from his dancers, their primal lack of inhibition countering the billet-doux sweetness of what had gone before. Keith Money still remembers the bluntness of the closing image: “When at last he let her hand fall away, she let it thump of its own weight onto the stage. Audibly. It was simply gut-wrenching, and so final. I’d never experienced quite that sort of theatrical involvement before—of being absolutely wrung out.”

  The first-night audience (which included the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret) gave Marguerite and Armand a tumultuous ovation. royals and subjects delighted 21 curtain calls … a euphoric Ashton cabled a friend. The critics, however, were more circumspect, the consensus being that the ballet would be expendable without its two stars. But then, as Richard Buckle volunteered, “What is Le Spectre de la rose without Karsavina and Nijinsky?”

  Rudolf’s next debut in an Ashton ballet two weeks later required him to suppress every trace of exhibitionism and submit completely to an ensemble. Created in 1946, Symphonic Variations is the choreographer’s manifesto, its lyrical purity and understatement a paradigm of native style. This was exactly the kind of twentieth-century classicism that Rudolf admired—the English equivalent of Balanchine’s reminting of the language of Petipa: idiosyncratic, contemporary, yet true to tradition. Only too aware of the expectations surrounding this near-sacred piece of work, Rudolf found the rehearsals an ordeal: struggling to master the slow, sustained lifts, the play of Ashton’s musicality from literal exactness to a complete departure from the beat, the anomaly of dancing collectively. Like a sextet of musicians, the cast of six was required by the choreographer to form a unity. “They’re all equal … it’s not a display piece … you’ve got to be together with the other two boys, and that was a problem for Nureyev. It all has to be dovetailed, and nobody can shine out. They can, of course, if they have radiance.”

  Ashton was alluding here to Margot, the inspiration and “unintentional star” of Symphonic Variations. Its qualities were her qualities, those around which the company’s style had been formed, and it was she who, as he said, “gave the clue” to the ballet, an exultant expression of the religious faith he had rediscovered during the war. Standing hypnotically still at the side of the stage, she appeared to be in a state of grace, in that state of suspension during which the Carmelite mystics believed visions could occur.* “A deep, almost mystical, ecstasy” emanated from Rudolf, too, deriving in part from the extraordinary potency of his willed restraint. Several critics commented that Symphonic Variations had never been more highly charged, nor Margot more intensely luminous. “Something of this emotional dimension … seemed to transfer itself to Fonteyn,” wrote one. “She adds a certain rapt quality. The impassive delicacy has thawed into positive serenity.” But Ashton did not want Margot’s pure, undemonstrative lyricism augmented in any way, any more than he wante
d a rapturous private exchange between two of his “perfect sextet of instrumentalists.” After that one performance on April 1, 1963, Ashton never cast Rudolf in the ballet again.†

  The next hurdle was the uncertainty over his participation in the Royal Ballet’s spring and summer tour of the United States. Since its landmark debut in 1949, the company had been represented there by the powerful impresario Sol Hurok, whose Russian performers included both the Kirov and Bolshoi companies. Hurok had also been responsible for sending several of his American clients on tours to the USSR, among them Igor Stravinsky and the pianist Van Cliburn. The aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis had led to an important change in East-West cultural relations, one Hurok was in no mind to disrupt by promoting a Soviet defector. “Of course I understood,” Rudolf would later comment. “He was afraid that he might lose all the lucrative Russian engagements and Russian artists.” Used to having total casting control over the dance companies he presented, Hurok, however, met outright resistance from Ninette de Valois, who told him, in effect, “No Nureyev, no Royal Ballet!” As a result, the impresario traveled to Moscow in February to explain his predicament to the Russian minister of culture, Ekaterina Furtseva. Their subsequent conversation was described in the KGB report as “unpleasant.” In the end, according to the conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, who made his own decision to leave Russia in July, it was Khrushchev himself who intervened, giving the impresario his personal agreement that he could take Nureyev to America without forfeiting his Soviet business.

  Negotiations for Rudolf’s participation on tour had also involved a hasty trip to Moscow the same week by the head of the Royal Opera House, Sir David Webster. The Russians had recently finalized a cultural exchange agreement with the British government and were now threatening to cancel the Bolshoi’s Covent Garden season scheduled for July. While supporting de Valois’s insistance on including Rudolf, Webster was determined to “play him slowly,” a decision that, as he remarked in a letter to Lord Drogheda, was as much out of concern for diplomacy at home as abroad. “In ballet as it is not in a way in opera, THE COMPANY is the thing,” he wrote, warning of the dangers of stirring up jealousy among the dancers. As a result, the Royal Ballet opened its season at the Metropolitan Opera House on April 17, 1963, with no casts advertised in advance and no star billing, the dancers’ names being listed in alphabetical order. At the traditional opening performance of Sleeping Beauty, Margot’s partner was David Blair.