Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Also relished by Rudolf was what Seymour describes as her “sort of Russian thing.” She had been trained in Canada by Russian teachers, and the lift and yield of her upper body, her expansive, floating port de bras, and the way her arms, legs, and head moved seamlessly together in one single line were Vaganova hallmarks. To Kenneth MacMillan she shared “the same liquid quality” that Galina Ulanova had, the quality that had made Lynn his muse. The flow of Seymour’s dancing had influenced his choreography from the beginning, but in Romeo and Juliet, the ballet he was now creating for her, the steps seemed to grow out of her body “as if she had drawn them on the air.”

  Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet was a work Rudolf had coveted for years. Through Viktor Rona, he had tried courting its original choreographer, Leonid Lavrovsky, who, in November 1963, did in fact agree to produce his ballet at Covent Garden, but withdrew a year later when Lavrovsky discovered that he would not be free. Instead Ashton, who had earlier created his own Romeo and Juliet for the Danes, decided to commission a new three-act work from the company’s resident choreographer. MacMillan was more than ready for a challenge on this scale. He chose Nico Georgiadis as his designer and took as his inspiration Franco Zeffirelli’s tearaway, anti-Romantic Old Vic production of 1960, with Judi Dench and John Stride. “Kenneth was determined that his ballet, full of slashing vigor, should overflow with the same vital accent on youth.” As Romeo to Seymour’s Juliet, he cast not Rudolf (whose satirical, catlike qualities he felt would make him an ideal Mercutio) but the “Cockney kid” Christopher Gable.

  This came as no great surprise. Not only had the choreographer already created a masterly balcony scene on Seymour and Gable for Canadian television, but he was someone who felt comfortable collaborating with a small coterie of friends. Because Lynn and Christopher were dancers he liked and trusted, he encouraged them to contribute their own ideas, and as the work took shape, the three became inseparable, “living every moment of the ballet—‘our ballet.’ ” From Lynn’s point of view, much as she loved Rudolf, she was grateful to be partnered by Gable, a dancer with whom she felt fearless. “We were able to take death-defying risks, each knowing almost intuitively what the other was going to do.” Her Juliet had been conceived by MacMillan to be the driving power behind the action—“a modern free spirit who knew exactly what she wanted and would risk all to get it”—which in itself ruled out what she calls a “dangerous” Romeo. The perfect foil to her reckless intensity, Gable only had to be himself: wholesomely handsome, gentle, and levelheaded. He, together with the puppy-plump Seymour, seemed exactly the kind of Kings Road teenagers that Zeffirelli would later pick for his 1971 film: fifteen-year-old Olivia Hussey and sixteen-year-old Leonard Whiting from Palmers Green. In Vogue’s description: “Neither dancer fills a balletic cliché. They simply break hearts.”

  Romeo certainly did break hearts—those of its three creators. Not long before the first night, David Webster called a meeting at his house in Weymouth Street and announced that he wanted a first-night cast change. Using as an example the way that Lavrovsky’s Juliet at Covent Garden in 1956 had been Ulanova, “succeeded by other fine dancers,” he said that the premiere must be danced by the company’s prima ballerina in her famous partnership with Nureyev—“a decree against which there was no appeal.” MacMillan was shocked into speechlessness. “He knew that he would have to admit Fonteyn and Nureyev, but not for the opening,” said John Tooley, who witnessed it all. “That hit him only that dreadful morning at Webster’s house. It was, in my view, a huge mistake.”

  Why then did Ashton, as artistic director, not challenge Webster’s decision? He may have felt threatened to a degree by the fast rise of his younger rival, but he had always supported MacMillan (encouraging him to choreograph a new Romeo and Juliet when he could just have revived his own version). It was a practicality about theater management that seems to have held sway: Margot needed a new ballet for the American tour and, as Ashton told the board in September the previous year, MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet would be ideal. He did, however, genuinely believe that this was not just a Fonteyn-Nureyev vehicle, but a work expansive and important enough to shed luster on each of its five different casts. As he said to Lynn and Christopher, “Everyone’s going to be a success in this ballet. No one can fail.” But as Lynn remarked, “Fred’s comfort was cold comfort, really, but at least he said something to us: everyone else carried on as if it just wasn’t happening. The only ones who showed concern were Margot and Rudolf. They were both very sweet about it—absolutely divine. But it was out of their hands.”*

  With the choreographer at breaking point, it fell to Lynn to teach the role to Margot, which, quite apart from the emotional strain, proved extremely difficult. Molded on her own idiosyncratic line—not classically perfect but something that “melts and flows and extends itself in heroic sweeps of movement”—the steps simply would not curve into the same oblique shapes on Margot’s symmetrical physique. More crucially Margot’s Romantic interpretation made mockery of the ballet’s new realism—MacMillan’s version of Zeffirelli’s Italian verismo. Certain moments were designed to be “almost revolting, not pretty,” such as Seymour’s retching after taking the poison, an action so violent that it pulled her up on pointe; or the way her body became a loose, heavy corpse falling into positions too mockingly distorted to fit in any dance lexicon. Margot, Lynn said, “instinctively made adjustments.” Instead of daring to sit frozen on the edge of the bed throughout Prokofiev’s long, turbulent passage of music, she expressed her inner turmoil in a flurry of dance. Nor did she choose to die in a manner that was jarringly unballetic. Her Juliet, one critic wrote, was among her “most refined, most perfect portrayals,” but to MacMillan it was an act of sabotage.

  “We were trying to honor Kenneth’s vision,” Lynn explains. “But Margot and Rudolf were both putting an old concept onto the new production.” A case in point was the balcony scene, for which the three collaborators had very consciously devised a series of spinning, reeling steps, all slightly aslant, to create a sense of continuous flow. Teaching Rudolf his role, Gable was distraught to see him break the duet up with an explosion of “double something or others round the stage.” This was partly because, as Gable says, he felt it did not focus enough on Romeo, and wanted to give the audience a thrill. On the other hand, to Rudolf there was nothing contrived or old-fashioned about expressing a surge of excitement with a spontanous virtuoso manège. Less justifiable was his deletion of any lift—the “pendulum” one for example, where Juliet hangs suspended down his back—that he felt would sap his energy from his solo. In the end, too dejected to fight to maintain the integrity of his conception, MacMillan let the stars make their changes, and continued to regard the Seymour-Gable cast as his template.

  Certainly Rudolf’s Romeo was anything but the “nice, normal fellow” envisaged by the choreographer. Combining the poetry of Gielgud with the raw impulsiveness of Olivier, he was electrifying from the moment he first appeared. Enveloped in a black cape and slowly stalking his way down the staircase, his absorption in the character was so complete that, even when he was not moving, his body seemed to speak the text. He made his costume part of the performance, too, allowing his cape to slip meltingly to the ground as he stood beneath the balcony, his back to the audience—“so still you can almost hear his heart beating.” And an image associated for some reason with Rudolf alone was the sight of his shirt billowing to bursting point as he danced for Juliet—a dazzling intensification of his own speed, energy, power, and ecstasy.

  Margot, too, had little in common with MacMillan’s headstrong heroine. Seymour’s Juliet, shaping her own destiny rather than waiting for events to take their course, had a character close to Rudolf’s own, whereas Margot’s was shyly submissive.* On the balcony, while Lynn projected what Alastair Macaulay calls “this great whoosh of sexual need,” Margot was at her most “moonlit,” an arm drifting romantically up toward the stars. But if her duet with Romeo was bashful and de
corous, there is a moment toward the end more erotically charged even than the climax of their Corsaire. Kneeling at Margot’s feet, Rudolf spreads his fingers and gathers up the hem of her dress to kiss it, hungrily, as if the fabric itself were erogenous. Shuddering, Margot pushes him away with instinctive modesty, and runs to the corner only to return a second later, her resistance in vain. As she succumbs, Rudolf lifts her by the thighs until she is lying horizontally above him, pushing her up and lowering her down, again, rhythmically, up and down, as the chiffon of his shirt and her fleshy dress flow into each other like fluids. By the end the audience is left in little doubt that this union has been consummated long before the bedroom scene.

  As the final curtain came down there was thunderous roar lasting almost forty minutes. Margot and Rudolf may not have been MacMillan’s “darling, terrible children,” but most people weren’t aware of the choreographer’s vision for the ballet and were swept away by the impact of their performance. Among the dancers, however, the feeling of antipathy was “company-wide.” The injustice of “that Romeo and Juliet business was like a turning point for us all,” Annette Page says, adding:

  When Christopher and Lynn danced the full call in the big studio it was the first time we’d actually seen anything of the pas de deux. They were so wonderful that everyone had a lump in their throat. Then two days later Margot and Rudolf took over. Neither really knew the choreography and Rudolf [still in pain from his Toronto injury ankle] marked most of it. I looked around and saw that almost everyone had a look of frozen horror on their faces.

  What might have seemed to outsiders a minor matter of casting precedence was devastating for the members of the company, who were shocked by the clear power that the star duo could exercise. It was mainly this that drove MacMillan to leave the Royal Ballet for Berlin, where he became director in 1966, taking the “shattered” Seymour with him. Later that year Gable gave up dancing altogether to pursue an acting career.

  The New York premiere presented a double blow. After seeing all five casts, The Financial Times’s Andrew Porter spoke for many when he wrote that it was hard not to take Seymour and Gable’s performance as the definitive reading. Predictably, though, despite the London critics’ enthusiasm for MacMillan’s original cast, Sol Hurok insisted on a Fonteyn-Nureyev first night and Ashton supported him, telling MacMillan that for an international success he must have the two stars. Not giving the public a chance to get to know other young principals was damaging to the company, but Hurok had gauged the mood of his city: Fonteyn and Nureyev, the most famous partnership in world ballet, were now “the symbols of the Royal Ballet in New York.”

  This time no attempt was made to share the spotlight: Rudolf had it virtually to himself. In addition to the double-page spread of Irving Penn photographs in Vogue and the long profile by Clive Barnes in the New York Times, there was “the extreme rarity” of a cover story in both Time and Newsweek. The Royal Ballet’s ebullient Australian press officer, Bill Beresford, had been “aglow” at having duped the American correspondents into believing that each had an exclusive on the star, and yet it was mostly due to Rudolf’s adroit two-timing that the ploy came off. (When Barnes met him for a late lunch in South Kensington, the dancer had refused anything to eat and sat toying with a Negroni before confessing that this was his second lunch of the day.)

  To all appearances Newsweek had the scoop, its photograph of the “New Nijinsky” in a Romeo pose far more alluring than the unrecognizable, blurry fetal face in Time’s Sidney Nolan portrait. And while Newsweek’s Hubert Saal had spent a long night on the town with Rudolf, wooing “The New Nijinsky” with caviar at the Connaught (so much that the hotel’s supply ran out) and nightclubbing until 4:30 a.m., without equivalent access Time was reduced to padding its piece with digressions about the history of dance. And yet, Time had been granted a glimpse inside Rudolf’s apartment. The gilt-bound volumes of Balzac and Schiller incongruously scattered about the living room among model trains and such other toys as a soccer game, a yo-yo, a gun that shot Ping-Pong balls were indeed “effects that mark the mystery of the man.”

  On May 16 Rudolf and Margot danced together on the Ed Sullivan Show, an appearance that made such an impact that they were invited back by popular demand the following week. It was no accident that dance in the United States and all over the world began to explode at just this time, the excitement of their extraordinary celebrity turning an elitist art form into mass entertainment. The Fonteyn-Nureyev curtain calls—“almost an encore, of the ballet they had danced”—became an essential ritual for the fans. Far more demonstrative than their English counterparts, the Americans would scream their applause and shred their playbills into confetti, sending it raining down onstage like a ticker-tape homage. The emotional impact could be overwhelming; one New Yorker named Marilyn LaVine, whose discovery of Rudolf on this tour was literally life changing, said that she was transported into a “state of bliss.” LaVine’s description of losing all sense of self and merging into a collective unconscious—“unified on a spiritual level, understanding the inexplicable—like a truth, like being part of a truth”—echoes Nietzsche’s on hearing the music of Wagner. (“Each person not only united, reconciled, and blended with another,” Nietzsche wrote, “but altogether fused.”)

  For the majority of fans, however, the experience was more mundane. The mid-sixties saw the development of the groupie, a species of which five-thousand strong had keened and howled at JFK airport the previous year when the Beatles arrived to conquer the States. The summer of ’65 belonged to the Rolling Stones, who needed police protection to escape the hundreds of screaming girls outside the theater. Meanwhile at the Met mounted police were brought in to prevent Rudolf from being mobbed—a phenomenon in itself, as never before had a dance audience demonstrated the kind of group hysteria usually reserved for rock stars. The Stones’ biographer Philip Norman must have been thinking of Rudolf when he compared Mick Jagger “to a male ballet dancer with his conflicting and colliding sexuality: the swan’s neck and smeared harlot eyes allied to an overstuffed and straining cod-piece.” In many ways the two were mirror images of each other. To Cecil Beaton, Jagger was simultaneously “archangel and satyr … sexy, yet completely sexless,” while Violette Verdy, almost paraphrasing him, called Rudolf “totally profane and totally Sacred.… He creates another type of sex altogether.” The erotic ambiguity both stars projected was so potently and disturbingly physical that it affected even the most conventional. As David Daniel put it, “In the sixties there were straight boys who would sleep with Rudolf who never looked at a boy before or since.”

  Sensing “a British renaissance,” the owner of Arthur, New York’s first high-fashion discotheque, had timed its launch on May 5 to coincide with the Royal Ballet’s arrival in town, and with the opening of the first New York Vidal Sassoon hairdressing salon on Madison Avenue—the powerhouse of sixties chic. Sybil Burton had modeled Arthur on London’s Ad Lib, whose rousing music and anything-goes atmosphere had made it the favorite hangout of the Beatles and other glamorous young revelers. The first-night mob mixed “celebrity investors and the most marvellous looking girls” with Sybil’s film, theater, and ballet friends. “People like Steve Sondheim and Lenny Bernstein put in a thousand dollars each, and someone had invited every model from an agency. Tiger Morse was there in a dress that lit up.” The “dowdy little Welsh mouse,” in Shelley Winters’s phrase, who had recently lost her husband to Elizabeth Taylor was hardly recognizable that night. Platinum blond and beautifully elegant in an outfit of pink silk and ostrich feathers, she frugged for the cameras with Rudolf, who was dancing “like a poker” in a tweed sports jacket. Later one of the models, “a pert young girl” called Susan, took him in hand. “He can’t dance a damn step, I was trying to teach him,” she said affectionately. Journal American’s gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen watched the pair writhe together under blue and red spotlights, then voyeuristically followed them to a dark corner near the telephones “where
they could cuddle and neck in comfort, if not exactly privacy.”*

  A week or so later, at Andy Warhol’s silver-sprayed Factory on East Forty-seventh Street, Rudolf was dancing in the arms of architect Philip Johnson’s boyfriend David Whitney, “a young kid who worked at the Castelli Gallery.” The occasion was the “Fifty Most Beautiful People” party, but as guests included Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, the rule of entry seems to have veered from an aesthetic elite to the usual Warhol imperative that everybody be somebody. This was the party “when the stars went out and the superstars came in,” according to Gerard Malanga, poet, experimental film-maker, and founding member of the Warhol entourage. Indelibly described by Factory groupie Mary Woronov as “dressed in black leather with a Boxex camera in one hand and a bullwhip in the other,” Malanga was referring to people like himself, pioneers of artistic far-outness, “for whom life was a 24-hour stage.” It was certainly true, as he said, that more people were staring at underground superstar Edie Sedgwick, “looking beautiful and laughing a lot with the Rolling Stone drummer Brian Jones,” than at Judy Garland, whose vaudevillian entrance from the Factory’s freight elevator on the shoulders of five young men nobody except Warhol seemed to notice. He looked on as, too inebriated to walk unsupported, she was picked up again by her cavaliers, who carried her over to a couch, from which she suddenly sprang up and yelled out, “Rudy!” “She staggered forward with her arms out toward Nureyev, who yelled back. ‘Judy!’ and walked toward her, and it was stagger/step/Rudy!/Judy! Back and forth until she fell around his neck.”