Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Rudolf badly wanted to reinstate their original positions of master and disciple, but the balance had irrevocably tilted. Remembering how, in the beginning, his obsessive idolatry had seemed to drive Erik away, he noted with surprise the extent to which Erik’s passion had increased as his own desperation had abated. (“In those days,” commented Richard Buckle, “I guess, he had not read Proust.”) Now it was Erik wanting to telephone him all the time—“and believe me, it’s not money that’s holding me back”—even wanting to follow him to Australia. Also, the tone of recent letters had been dismayingly self-abasing:

  How wonderful of you to call me just after so much work, excitement and strain for you, and still you find time and desire to call me and think of me.… This is the most wonderful thing to me, that in spite or because of everything, you are involved in that I have a place I hope, no one else will take in your life. [November 30, 1963] … I hope you have a moment for me now and then in the midst of all your work and activity. [March 22, 1964]

  Rudolf was indeed extremely occupied, choreographing a new polonaise and mazurka for the Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake and mounting assorted Russian variations. Leningrad’s maverick of three years ago was now its greatest traditionalist and proselytizer, declaring, “Soviet ballet is the best!” He reacted furiously when he saw that Christopher Gable and Anya Linden, whom he was coaching in The Flames of Paris duet, had added an extraspectacular lift: “What you do change—eh?”

  “But Rudi,” Anya protested, “it’s just for a gala.… ”

  “Disappear!”

  He trusted “nobody from the West”—not even Ashton—to rehearse him in the classics. “Big handicap I was protecting my school; trying to keep my style undiluted. I’d tell Fred, ‘Not this year.… But next year.’ … And I was evading every year.… Finally he lost interest and got cold hands. And that’s the birth of Anthony Dowell.”

  For his new ballet, a one-act version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ashton had cast the twenty-two-year-old Dowell as Oberon. A flawless product of English schooling, he was, the choreographer believed, more suited than Rudolf to his vision of the ballet. “My approach is much more lyrical; softer, understated, under-stressed—the antithesis of his in a way.” In fact it had been Erik who first exploited Dowell’s potential, and Rudolf who claimed to have brought it to the attention of Ninette de Valois. Sitting next to her during a performance, he said, “Madam, there is your first truly classical dancer.” Ashton’s Dream not only gave Dowell his first leading role, it launched his partnership with Antoinette Sibley, their perfectly matched proportions and reciprocal musicality allowing them to move together as one body. Although it was a lost opportunity for Rudolf to have been passed over for Oberon—a part for which he was virtually typecast—The Dream is still imbued with his presence. The climactic reconciliation between Oberon and Titania, a danced conversation that subsides into a mirrored, moving image of each other, sublimely enacts Rudolf’s insistence on male equality; his declaration that a pas de deux must be a dialogue (“How can there be conversation if one partner is dumb?”). In addition, Rudolf’s Swan Lake solo is the model for Oberon’s adagio control, whose cantilena phrasing was taken by Dowell to a zenith no other male dancer has ever reached. As Alastair Macaulay has written: “It was Dowell who went beyond Nureyev in making a male dancer’s line poetic.… But Dowell would not have happened had it not been for Nureyev.”

  “Anthony seemed right and would do exactly what I wanted,” Ashton said, whereas Rudolf had the “sort of superior attitude” that had always displeased him (the story of how Ashton was unable to work with the young Margot until she had “really conceded” to him is well known). Rudolf’s arrogance was, as he later acknowledged, misjudged in many cases, one being his response to Ashton’s offer to cast him in La Fille mal gardée. With its clean yet virtuosic variations drawing on both Bournonville and Russian techniques, the role of Colas would have been a wonderful showcase for Rudolf, its charm and humor also revealing an unknown side to him. However, well aware that, after the intermission, Lise’s lover spends much of his time hidden behind a drying hayrick, Rudolf could not resist asking, “What happens to me in the second act?” Ashton said. “So I told him, ‘If you feel like that, that’s all right, but I’m not going to change it. The second act remains as it is.’ So we dropped the matter.”

  Resenting the unfavorable comparisons with Balanchine, the constant challenges which “stopped [his] flow,” “Fred,” in the words of a friend, “got so rubbed up the wrong way by Rudolf.” After Marguerite and Armand, Ashton never created another major role for the dancer.

  Kenneth MacMillan was also “never very comfortable” with Rudolf, and made only a quirky little gala solo and three minor pieces for him. One was a pas de trois in a ballet based on a Shakespeare sonnet, and premiered on the same anniversary program as The Dream.* Danced to an ineffective commissioned score by Peter Tranchell, and prefaced with loudspeakered quotations, Images of Love was an endless-seeming suite of divertissements in semiabstract style, the most original item of which was sonnet no. 144: “Two loves I have of comfort and despair.” This closely intertwined ménage a trois among a witch-wigged Lynn Seymour (the “bad angel”), Christopher Gable (the “better angel”), and Rudolf (the authorial character), was, as one critic put it, “a very kinky modern interpretation of the situation hinted at by Shakespeare.” Interesting psychologically rather than choreographically, it was not only an attempt to explore ambivalent sexuality in dance, but also the aspect of professional rivalry. MacMillan, as Keith Money points out, had been clever at spotting Rudolf’s rather “guarded insecurity” about the success of the Seymour-Gable partnership (significantly, the pair was the only alternative cast for Marguerite and Armand). And this, augmented by the intense rivalry between the two young men, provided a charged subtext to which only insiders were privy. As Money recalls:

  The Comfort and Despair was extraordinary, and years ahead of its time. Quite electrifying. Christopher coming out of the shadows and just floating beside Rudolf into that second jump, matching him to the millimetre; it was a flawless mirror image: The two Crown Princes. The third jump travelled downstage, straight at the audience, and you couldn’t mistake the parity on display. It must have been very unnerving for Rudolf. Christopher was clearly the stronger, just then, and nobody could drag their eyes away from him; there was a sort of golden glow about him … like something out of a Lord Leighton painting.

  One Royal Ballet dancer, sitting in on rehearsals, was just as struck by the element of competition between them:

  A point evident from day one was that Christopher had worked very often with Kenneth and knew how to deal with his creativity, and Rudolf was at a complete loss. This threw Rudolf, as Christopher was always three steps ahead of him. Christopher was charming and always very sweet, but Rudolf was not coping and swearing his usual Fuck and Shit. However, as it progressed there evolved something very sexual in the atmosphere. It was like Rudolf was provoking Christopher. For me, Lynn faded from the trio.… There were just these two beautiful fascinating men vying for something. Control, creative expression, power over each other. The pas de trois had become a pas de deux, and a very erotic one.

  In April and May, Rudolf and Margot spent a month together guesting with the Australian Ballet, but while he was elated to be dancing every night, the element of competition was taking its toll on Margot, who was exhausted by the end of the tour. Rudolf, she noticed, seemed to have lost his natural spontaneity onstage, and now needed a kick-start of excitement before every performance: “He did it by getting angry.” Onlookers were amazed by the ease with which she was able to subdue him—“She’d just walk up to him and say, ‘That’s enough’ ”—but they also saw that the ballerina herself was clearly under strain. “She was so worried about Tito, about being away from him,” recalls Noel Pelly. Margot had counted on being reunited with Tito in Miami in time for her birthday, but he was running as a candidate for Pa
nama’s National Assembly, and told her that it would be impossible for him to leave the campaign. Resigned, she consoled herself with the thought of their spending time together at their new house in Panama—a quiet, “heavenly place,” with a lawn sloping down to the beach—but instead, when she arrived, she found Tito oblivious to everything but the outcome of the election. Feeling lost amid all the political excitement, she left soon afterward for Europe and yet more performances.

  Defeat was not in Margot’s nature—“Somehow, against the odds, she’d keep paddling along, steadily”—but she made herself face the fact that her marriage was over. Knowing she would be in Rome for several days with Rudolf, she asked Tito to meet her there so that they could discuss the subject of divorce. Once again, though, he never turned up. While she went back to the hotel every few hours to call Panama and try to track her husband down, Rudolf, Joan says, would go sightseeing. “He really didn’t care—it wasn’t his problem. He kept out of it. We both did. The only one who really got involved was Keith. She did cling to him a lot at that time.”

  From Rome, they went straight to Bath, where the two dancers were due to perform a new MacMillan duet at Yehudi Menuhin’s annual music festival. They had all arranged to meet for dinner with the choreographer and his designer, Barry Kay, but Margot, in a strange state of agitation, wanted to be alone with Keith. “We walked all over town for hours and hours: she was reviewing her whole life. I thought how is this day ever going to end.… She was almost hysterical, and kept talking about a friend of theirs who had been shot. ‘It couldn’t happen again! It couldn’t happen again!’ she kept saying.”

  It was about ten o’clock by the time they arrived at the new, fashionable Hole in the Wall restaurant, and not long afterward a waiter came up to Margot and whispered something. Everyone at the table became aware of the sudden change in atmosphere, especially Rudolf, who was acting like an animal sensing danger. “The nostrils were twitching.” The press was waiting outside, and the moment they stepped through the door there was a volley of flashbulbs, followed by running feet and car doors slamming—“hardly the behavior of society photographers.” Back at the Francis Hotel, Diana Menuhin was waiting at the entrance, “looking anxious but not saying why.” Seeing the paparazzi trying to snap the two stars by each other’s side, Joan instructed Rudolf to go up to his room. “For once he did as he was told.” By now she had heard what had happened. Newly elected as a deputy, Tito was being driven though a suburb of Panama City in midafternoon when a political associate pulled up alongside at an intersection, leaped from his car, and fired point-blank at him. One of the four bullets had lodged next to his spine, and it was not yet known whether he would live.

  Deciding that Margot might be calmer if she were surrounded by their “cosy little group” from dinner, Joan began telling her what had happened, but refusing to listen, Margot let out a scream and flew down a corridor. As Keith said, “It must have been horrifically spooky for her. She had almost prefigured it earlier in the day.” Someone sent for Rudolf, who came downstairs to find the ballerina crumpled in an armchair in an empty ballroom. As he took her into his arms, Joan called Tito’s brother in Panama for more news. By now the assassin had surrendered to the National Guard. It was Alfredo Jimeinez,* who, it was said, had been enraged by the fact that he had not been chosen as Arias’s second-in-command, entrusted to serve in his absence. “No, no you’ve got it wrong. He’s our best friend,” Margot protested when Joan told her, but she was greatly relieved to hear that Tito was out of danger, and said that she would stay in Bath for the opening the following night.

  In the morning there was an encampment of press outside the hotel, complete with Movietone cameras on ladders. But instead of making a quick getaway with her chauffeur positioned nearby, Margot chose to walk with Keith to the rehearsal, followed “at a diplomatic distance” by Rudolf and Joan, a rush of newsmen surging after them. Although as bemused as everyone else by the way she appeared to be “her usual giggly self,” Rudolf was trying hard to concentrate on their new ballet; from his perspective, as Keith remarks, “all that 24 hours was simply ‘crazy private lives—why mess up important things?’ ” He had been extremely diligent in learning MacMillan’s Divertimento (a piece especially choreographed for the occasion and accompanied by Menuhin playing Bartók’s sonata for solo violin onstage), finding the sinuous movements interestingly new. The critics thought otherwise, Clive Barnes commenting that the duet could have been an addendum to Images of Love without anyone being the wiser. Leaving Rudolf to perform La Sylphide with an underrehearsed Lynn Seymour, Margot flew to Panama.

  Her first sight of Tito flat on his back on a narrow table like a sheet-covered corpse was shocking beyond measure, although in fact his condition had significantly improved: He had regained his ability to speak, and though he was paralyzed, the doctors now believed that it might be only temporary. Despite intense Arias family resistance, Margot began arranging for him to be transferred for rehabilitation treatment to England’s famous Stoke Mandeville Hospital. By June 17, she was back in London, dancing in the Royal Ballet’s summer season at Drury Lane and rehearsing Rudolf’s new production of Raymonda.

  The two had already danced a scaled-down version of act 3 for the world tour, but Rudolf was anxious to stage the complete ballet while he still remembered the steps. With Ashton unwilling to commission “a costly old warhorse—even if it is Petipa”—Rudolf resigned himself to mounting the ballet for the Royal Ballet Touring Company in time for July’s Spoleto Festival. It was to be the most expensive production Gian Carlo Menotti’s festival ever incurred, and—still unknown to Rudolf—the Covent Garden administration had placed restrictions on the design budget. It was only when he arrived in Italy that he saw Beni Montresor’s sets for the first time. He was appalled. Having jettisoned most of Petipa’s impenetrable medieval libretto, he found that the designer, himself intent on stripping away the “tinsel” of traditional ballet, had provided a set consisting of virtually nothing but gauze scrims. As Rudolf remarked, he would not have gone to the trouble of “filleting out the trash” if he had known the extent to which Montresor had already removed the period details. With the choreography unremittingly exposed, the audience’s attention would now be focused entirely on the dancers, and as the young “second company” was clearly being stretched beyond its capabilities, this meant that the ballet’s success depended principally on Margot—“the star in an avowed star vehicle.”

  Like Arlene Croce, Rudolf held the view that the main reason for mounting a full-length version of Raymonda was its large and glorious ballerina role; and according to Keith, he began to realize the weight he was making her carry. “The whole enterprise now has overtones of Sadler’s Wells hoping to woo New York with the Sleeping Beauty of ’49”—perhaps the most testing performance of Margot’s career. On the day of the final rehearsal the ballerina was in her dressing room putting on her makeup when Joan came in to tell her that she had booked a flight for her immediate return to England: Tito had had a relapse.

  As Margot was being hustled away in a car to the Rome airport with her mother, Rudolf was arranging to prepare her understudy for the premiere. He was lucky to have Doreen Wells as a standby, an attractive, technically feisty dancer, although film footage of their rehearsals shows her either ignoring or simply not seeing the Dudinskaya-inspired inflections in his demonstrations. He did what he could with his cast, but when Ashton arrived in Spoleto, he was shocked by the standard of dancing. Rudolf was now beside himself with suppressed nerves, and when Joan happened to walk backstage during a rehearsal break, he hurled a stray pointe shoe at her head. “It thudded into one of the new gauze flats with surprising force, about four feet off target.… Joan just blinked and scarcely broke stride, and said, ‘Stop it!’ as if she were admonishing a slightly fractious child.”

  Things came together for the premiere and subsequent four performances, however, as Noël Coward recorded in his diary: “He was fine. She perfectly ef
ficient and the ballet well danced but not enthralling.” Rudolf, however, was not happy—as he made clear when he arrived late for a party at Gian Carlo Menotti’s villa and found that not only did he have to stand in line at a buffet table but that most of the food had been eaten. Paul Taylor, whose troupe was performing at the festival on alternate nights, watched what happened next: “What he did—which … was just what people wanted—was pick up a wineglass and throw it on the floor and walk out. And it was the talk of the town for a while.”*

  And then Margot returned. By now, despite the suitcases she had left in Spoleto, no one had expected her, but she had arrived in time for the final performance and promised to continue with the tour to Lebanon. Having miraculously survived a fever of 108 degrees, Tito had been pulled back from the brink of death. It would take a long time for Margot to accept the fact that her husband would probably be a quadriplegic for life, but, practical as ever, she had taken stock of their alarmingly depleted finances and told herself, “No performance, no pay.” Blanking out her interminable hospital vigil, the bottles, ugly gadgets, feeding and breathing tubes, she came onstage and danced so dazzlingly that to those who had seen previous performances, it seemed another, quite different ballet. “Such was the irradiance Fonteyn’s personality threw over the whole stage and anyone on it,” wrote the critic of Ballet Today. Noël Coward had stayed on another day to see the Fonteyn-Nureyev matinee, and described it as “one of the great moments” of his theatrical life. After their thirty-two curtain calls, Coward took the two stars out to dinner and drove to Rome afterward with Margot sleeping all the way on his shoulder (Rudolf having decided to hop into a Ferrari with some friends). Earlier that day Keith Money noticed that for the first time in two weeks Rudolf had allowed himself “a tiny smile.”