Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  In May ’67, while Margot and Rudolf were dancing at the Met, across Lincoln Center plaza at the New York State Theater Erik and Carla Fracci were guesting with American Ballet Theatre—the combination making it the ballet calendar’s most memorable events of the year. But if few of the Rudolf regulars were interested in seeing Erik—“He simply didn’t have that life force”—to Fracci’s husband, Beppe Menegatti, just watching the four stars take class together was a profound artistic experience.

  “It was if those four dancers were naked in the soul. It was not an exposition of bravura; of what or who were better, but an exposition of faiblesse, of where they are weak. They discuss very simple things: where has to go the finger and the thumb in a port de bras.… Things Margot had been shown by Karsavina she was now showing to Carla.”

  The previous spring Arlene Croce had commented on “the first fraying threads” of Erik’s technique, but what distressed her more were his new stage mannerisms. “Here he was, lifting and extending monumental palms in an apparent parody of danseur-noble deportment … a wish to appear grand and important in a way even the dullest member of the audience would not miss.” This was, of course, Rudolf’s influence. And in the ’67 season, by choosing roles now associated with the younger dancer, Erik seemed perversely to have gone out of his way to invite direct comparisons. His Albrecht, though elegant in the extreme, did not, in the view of Winthrop Sergeant, have “quite the uninhibited boyishness of Mr. Nureyev’s.” Likewise, memories of Rudolf’s Romeo made Erik’s restrained, unattainable character seem merely blank and unengaged. Fracci herself admits that Erik was a “little bit absent” when they first danced Romeo and Juliet’s Balcony Scene (the Bruhn version). “I had to pull him, get him to react!”

  But if Erik had at last established a legendary partnership of his own, his hold on Rudolf had never felt less sure.

  My dearest Rudic,

  I am suddenly awake in the middle of this terrible night, and feel very strangely that I know something about you, that I did not know before, or understand.… Suddenly I see very clearly why you cannot be alone. I had hoped and believed you were able to wait for me, till I could come to London. I would have believed you loved me, like I do and still do with all my heart and soul. If your secret is, that it is impossible for you to be alone, that there must be someone with you, then perhaps this letter is already too late.… This night I saw you, before I woke up, your life, as it has been before you met me, and I saw it continue without me, with others.… It was a dream, but not a good one.… If your nature is … that you are even afraid of staying one or two nights alone … then you don’t really know true love. I would like to believe you do and if you are not with someone else already … then you can give me all the strengths, all my belief and hope back, by writing or calling me to tell that you are able and strong enough in your love to wait for me. If I do not hear from you, I shall understand. My love for you will remain the same always and any way.… God bless you and give you strength when you should need it the most.

  The letter is undated, and it can never be known whether Erik received a reply, but its gentle, valedictory tone suggests that he is finally letting Rudolf go. It was not only the emotional strain he could no longer endure, but physically, needing time to recover between performances, he could not keep up with Rudolf’s pace. “Erik was almost too old at that time,” Kirsten Simone says. “The legs, the strength all begin to go.… You help someone to become clean, but then your own dancing begins to go.” Needing to talk about his suffering Erik arrived one night at Carla Fracci’s Broadway apartment. “He was very upset. He told me, ‘I love him but I don’t have the strength to be with him.’ Maybe this is when Erik start to understand that it was impossible to go on. He was happy to stay home and be together, but Rudolf needed to go out, to see people.… He was like a bird in a cage. He felt the need to escape his prison.” Fracci’s account is an echo of Holly Golightly’s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: “You can’t give your heart to a wild thing. The more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky … If you let yourself love a wild thing, you’ll end up looking at the sky.”

  Life for Rudolf had never been so much fun. Among the fans crowding his dressing room one night was a forty-two-year-old shapely blond actress who had brought along her trophy boyfriend—a faun-eyed youth of quite astounding beauty. Monique van Vooren had invited Rudolf to dance with her at the opening of Arthur, and since then they had met several times for lunch at the Russian Tea Room. More interesting than the European jet-set type she appeared to personify, she was, as Bob Colacello has said, the kind of “hypersophisticated, hyperdramatic, hyperhysterical” character who exists only in Fellini movies. Her eccentricity made Rudolf laugh, he liked the parties she took him to, and then, of course, there was the boy connection: Monique was renowned for her very young, very attractive lovers. Her current escort was Rusty Underkoffer, a twenty-three-year-old from Georgia who had come to New York “to be a movie star.” The first thing he had to do, Monique told him, was change his name. So Rusty became Hiram Keller and joined Lee Strasberg’s acting classes at Carnegie Hall, soon finding, however, that he “just couldn’t get into it.” Through the agent she shared with Sybil Burton, Monique got Hiram a job waiting tables at Arthur (which he also quit almost immediately), and when Rudolf met him in the late spring of ’67 he was “kind of aimless.”

  After the performance Monique had planned to take Hiram to the Copacabana to hear Diana Ross and, realizing Rudolf would enjoy this, too, told Hiram to go back and ask if he would like to join them.

  I wait and wait and wait. Hiram doesn’t appear. I go again to the dressing room and everybody’s gone. I go to the Copacabana—no Rudolf, no Hiram. I know Rudolf is leaving for Boston the next day, so I call the Navarro where he’s staying. There’s a Do Not Disturb message on the phone. I’m beside myself: Rudolf had taken Hiram.

  The boy had been impossible to resist. Not only stunning-looking—an exotic, even more ravishing mirror image of Rudolf himself—he was also obligingly bisexual. Rudolf, he told Diane Solway, “expected me to be his boyfriend, and I thought, ‘Why not?’ ” But what had been an easy conquest proved in the event to be extremely disappointing. As Monique put it, “They had both been expecting Superman, and it just didn’t happen.” Things got worse. Hiram became increasingly bored sitting around waiting for Rudolf, and resented his supporting role. “Rudi had a hard time being with people who were as attractive as he was. He always had to be the one.” Rudolf, in turn, complained that Hiram spent all his time in the hotel room running up enormous telephone bills, and that “After the sex there wasn’t anything else.”

  A couple of days later, when Rudolf was back in New York, Monique went to the Russian Tea Room knowing that he would probably be having lunch there. Spotting him at his usual table, she marched up to confront him, angry and pale from not having slept for two nights. “Rudolf, how could you do that? You could have anybody in the world: why did you take my friend?” “Don’t be stupid, bitch. Sit down; have soup. He’s not interesting at all. He’ll be back at your house tonight.”

  Sure enough, “Hiram came home. And I forgave him.” But all along the boy had never amounted to much more than bait for Rudolf. It was Rudolf with “his pale skin, his Slavic bones, his awesome body, his terrifying anger,” who had bewitched Monique, and her fantasies eventually found expression in a bodice-ripping roman-à-clef that she later published. Its hero is a Russian defector, the beautiful Vladimir, “the most spectacular ballet dancer since Nijinsky,” who dresses in black Nehru suits with knee-high leather boots—“a sexual magnet to both men and women”:

  Suddenly the urge to fling herself at this young man erupted from the most profound depths of Mariela’s being. She moved toward him, and before she could take a breath, Vladimir had crushed her in his arms.… Clasping her waist, he picked her up and, kicking the door open with his
boot, carried her into the bedroom.… Obsessed, he ripped open the bodice of her negligée.… His hungry hands caressed her hair, her eyes, her shoulders.… He unhooked the filmy net brassiere. The luscious breasts spilled out.

  And so on.… But although the publication of Night Sanctuary abruptly ended their friendship, this was well over a decade away, and for now Rudolf was happy to humor the almost comically vampish Monique, sensing, no doubt, that she could prove more useful to him than any other female admirer.

  San Francisco, where the Royal Ballet performed for a week in July, provided Rudolf with another stage-door adventure. The year 1967 was the Summer of Love, when Flower Power was at its height, its antimaterialist, antipolitical ideals the inspiration behind the Beatles’ “Love Is All You Need,” and the making of an instant hit by a British group called the Flower Pot Men: “Let’s All Go to San Francisco.” Its epicenter was the Haight, a neighborhood of large, run-down Victorian houses in the vicinity of Haight and Ashbury Streets, which had been colonized by the “peaceniks”—hippies, beat poets, ecologists, and youth culture icons like Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. The older dancers, Leslie Edwards among them, dismissed the hippies as “scruffy and irksome,” but Margot was fascinated—“I can’t take my eyes off those people,” she told Rudolf—and he was just as intrigued. “All I hear is Haight Ashbury,” he remarked to Alexander Grant, who was sharing his dressing room. “I told Rudolf I was going to walk around there after the performance was over,” said Grant. “And I have always felt a bit guilty about putting the idea into his head.”

  As Margot and Rudolf were leaving the theater, a figure with a biblical beard stepped out of the crowd and asked if they would like to come to “a freak-out.” Hesitating only because they had planned to join a group for dinner at Trader Vic’s, Margot nevertheless took down the address. Rudolf, in the meantime, had been approached by a flirtatious blond youth in tight jeans and knee-high boots who told him—“audacious, but what the hell—that I would like to make love with him.” Rudolf beamed, “Well, come with me,” and, taking Margot by the arm, he led the way down the aisle of parting fans to a waiting white limousine. As the three settled themselves side by side in the backseat, Margot looking particularly svelte in a calf-length white mink coat, Rudolf introduced her to his new acquaintance: Robert Hutchinson. “Being the most gracious of women, she said, ‘It’s wonderful to meet you,’ although she had no doubts at all about what was happening.” Telling Robert that they were thinking of going to a hippie party in the Haight Ashbury area after dinner, Margot asked if he knew the way. “Sure I do,” he said. “I’ve already had dinner, so why don’t I meet you later outside the restaurant and show you how to get there?”

  It was well after midnight when they took the Cadillac to a typical Victorian house in Ashbury Street. With other “escapades of pleasure” in mind, Rudolf had been far from eager to go, but Margot persuaded him to give it a try “just for twenty minutes.” They walked up several flights of stairs to where music was playing, but there was no sign of any “happening.” “It wasn’t a hippie party at all. There were no zonked-out people on the floor, but it was awkward because we didn’t know anyone.” Somebody took Margot’s coat, adding it to a pile in a bedroom, and the new arrivals were asked what they would like to drink. Could they have tea? Margot and Rudolf both asked, but there was no tea, coffee, wine “or any of the usual things.” Hearing a girl being sent to buy a “half lid [of marijuana]” Margot said quickly, “For heaven’s sake don’t get it for us; we don’t smoke.” The three were just sitting down when a man ran up the stairs, shouting, “It’s a raid! The police are here!” Everyone seemed to be heading for the kitchen, and as Rudolf had been one of the first to flee, Robert stayed behind to make sure Margot had her coat and knew where to go. At the kitchen door he was stopped by the police. “Whose apartment is this?” “I don’t know.” “Where are your friends?” It was clear by now that everyone else had climbed out of the kitchen window via the fire escape and was hiding on the roof; Margot had folded her mink inside out and was sitting with it on her knees, Rudolf, in a double-breasted jacket, tight pants, and cowboy boots, was hiding some distance away, stretched out flat behind a chimney. When he was confronted by the police, he made no attempt to resist, “but didn’t look too happy about it,” allowing himself to be herded with the others back down to the living room. As no one would confess to ownership of the apartment, the police told them they were trespassing. “You’re going to be taken to the precinct, fingerprinted, and booked.”

  A group of about sixteen sat waiting for at least two hours for the paddy wagon to arrive. A few people there worked in the entertainment business; their bearded host was a philosophy graduate from Trinity College, Dublin. There was little conversation. Rudolf was silent and sulky; a girl who had fallen from the fire escape onto the sidewalk was crying loudly, and Margot, fearing that she might have broken her back, had asked for an ambulance to be called. Searching the apartment, the police had discovered marijuana cigarettes, a smoking pipe, and several reefer butts scattered on the front steps—evidence enough for them now all to be arrested on a narcotics charge. At around 3 a.m., as Margot and Rudolf were walking out into the street, there was a volley of flashbulbs and floodlights blazed on the house. “All of a sudden we realized that they knew who we were. The police were making a real issue of it, and had alerted the press.” As they climbed into the Black Maria, Rudolf, retaining his “proud, tight look,” remarked dryly to Robert, “Now you know what it costs to go to bed with me.” Seeing how tearful and frightened the boy was, Margot was more consoling. “Don’t worry,” she said softly, “I’ve been in jail before [in Panama]. It will be just fine.” He put his head in her lap, she patted his cheek, and away they went.

  There was another gaggle of press waiting at Park Police Station. The two stars were the next day’s lead story, their pictures—taking up most of the front page of the San Francisco Examiner—flippantly captioned, the end of the trip is a ride; ballet greats make a new and different scene. For the Movietone news footage, which caught them waiting to be put in the cells, Rudolf gave one of his sexiest performances. Staring at the lens with utter contempt, he modulates his glare with shades of hauteur, irony, and flirtatiousness, signaled by a barely perceptible wink. He and Robert then found themselves locked up in an enormous concrete room with an open lavatory in the corner and a narrow concrete bench rimming the four walls. It was “a free-for-all of all types,” most either drunkenly slumped or snoring, no one giving the newcomers a glance. “So Rudolf and I had some time to get acquainted. We walked around talking, and at eight o’clock they came and yanked him out.” As Rudolf left, he told Robert to call him later at the St. Francis Hotel, adding meaningfully, “I’ll see you there this afternoon.” Vernon Clarke, the Royal Ballet manager, had arranged for the two stars to be released on bail of $330 each (later, charges of disturbing the peace and being on premises where marijuana was found were dropped on the grounds of insufficient evidence). After calling his attorney, Robert was let out two hours later. “He couldn’t believe I was involved; he said, ‘It’s world news!’ ” That evening hippies in their thousands flocked to the opera house to stage a love-in. Wearing their tie-dyed robes, beads, and flowers in their hair, they had come to pay tribute to the new patrons of counterculture and freedom—to ballet’s “dope stars.”

  The U.S. tour ended on August 6, 1967, and on August 11 Rudolf flew to Stockholm, where Erik, recently appointed director of the Royal Swedish Ballet, had asked him to mount a new production of The Nutcracker (intended as a tryout for Rudolf’s staging for the Royal Ballet). It had taken three years for Göran Gentele, the general director of the Royal Opera House, to persuade Erik to accept the post, and in that time he and his wife had become the dancer’s close friends. He had been unwilling to be tied down for a long period, Marit Grusen, Gentele’s widow, recalls, “But my husband made it very easy for him so that he could take time off to perform elsewhere.
” The other reason for Erik’s procrastination had been his dismay at the standard of the company—“I felt they didn’t know how to dance.” Following Balanchine’s example, Erik decided to make the school his starting point, and had brought over Betty Oliphant from the National Ballet of Canada to revolutionize the training. When Rudolf arrived, Erik was away performing in Oslo, but he met Betty after what had clearly been a particularly trying rehearsal, greeted her warmly, then continued contemptuously, “It’s like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.”

  But if Rudolf was “raging some days about fat ballerinas, sloppy dancing,” he was patient and encouraging with students from the school. In Kirov style he had decided to use a lot of children—not just to gambol around in Act 1’s party scene but to perform in Petipa rows like a mini-corps de ballet. He also picked out a twelve-year-old star-in-embryo, Anneli Alhanko, casting her in an act 3 pas de trois with her future partner Per-Arthur Segerström* (five years later the pair were dancing The Nutcracker’s leading roles). Having all fallen in love with the glamorous Russian star, the Swedish students were shocked when the ballet was put together and they saw how differently he behaved with the company. “We discovered that he was not the guy we thought he was,” Anneli says. Erik returned to a full-blown scandal: Rudolf had been accused of trying to strangle one of the dancers. He continued, however, to give his full support, aware that Rudolf “had to be rough because the company was just too lethargic.” Erik also gave him carte blanche with the production. With little of the original Ivanov choreography surviving, apart from that of the grand pas de deux (whose authorship is itself disputed), Rudolf was free to come up with a fresh and individual adaptation. All the same Erik had his doubts about Rudolf’s abilities as a choreographer, telling the Genteles, “It will be fine as long as he keeps to what he remembers from the Kirov.”