Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Older now, and less idealistic, Rudolf had reconciled himself to the idea of appearing in a film, but still insisted on the right to choose the director, the scriptwriter, “stars—everything.” One of the names proposed by Saltzman was Herbert Ross, who “raised money in no time,” but Rudolf had more ambitious ideas. He wanted Franco Zeffirelli (in the summer of ’65 they had met in Rome with the playwright Edward Albee and talked about making a film together); and he even considered Ingmar Bergman. (“Nobody delved into dark side of human psyche as Bergman.”) But since the fall of 1968 the project had been in the hands of Jerome Robbins, choreographer and director of West Side Story, who had approached writers of the stature of Harold Pinter, and spent a considerable amount of time developing strategies of his own. The “really interpretive impressionistic film style” he envisaged may have been too uncommercial for Saltzman, producer of the Bond films, though Rudolf claims what “killed the subject” was Robbins’s insistence on taking nine months to film it. Then in London one evening Saltzman took Rudolf to meet Ken Russell over dinner and showed him the director’s television documentaries. Rudolf already admired much of Russell’s work, particularly his Debussy film, but did not like him personally. When Russell launched into a lecture on how he would have to commit totally to the project, canceling his New York season and “giving up everything for the picture,” Rudolf, feeling that he was being patronized, decided to bring things to an end: “I sent him away. Packing. Because I saw Isadora Duncan [The Loves of Isadora].… And he treated her … ungallantly. And I thought, well, that’s not possible—what is he going to do with Nijinsky? So he was fired.”

  Finally it was the turn of Tony Richardson. Oscar-winning director of Tom Jones, he was better known as a man of the theater, an innovator, whose Royal Court production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had been the catalyst for a revolution on the British stage. With Paul Scofield secured for the Nijinsky venture, Richardson presented Edward Albee* with an outline of visual ideas on which to base a screenplay, and sought the advice of Lincoln Kirstein, who had collaborated with Romola Nijinsky on the biography of her husband. In a letter to Richard Buckle, Kirstein airs his views on Richardson’s “sort of half-assed proposal”: “I can’t do much more than disapprove of Nureyev.… Have you seen DRUGSTORE [MIDNIGHT] COWBOY in which Dustin Hoffman plays Ratso Rizzo? I think he would be the perfect Nijinsky; he is an actor, not a dancer; he is small and very intense and he doesn’t look like Nureyev who doesn’t look like Nijinsky.”

  There is a sophisticated dance intelligence to Albee’s script (the description, for example, of the Maryinsky’s prima ballerina assoluta, Mathilda Kschessinskaya, doing a “very old-fashioned, almost pre-Petipa variation”), but what is unmistakably Kirstein’s imprint is its acknowledgment of the revolutionary importance of Nijinsky’s choreography. “Rudi liked it a lot,” Albee says,† and when they met in London they discovered they shared the same views about how the dancer should be portrayed on screen. The main premise, in Rudolf’s opinion, was that Nijinsky’s descent into madness was caused by the end of his affair with Diaghilev: “What is interesting to me was their sort of abnormal relationship, which produced very interesting things. The result was very beautiful and everlasting. Then there is the normal relationship, which produced zero.”

  In its frank depiction of the love between two men, Albee’s script is way ahead of its time—and this was the problem. Suddenly, in the middle of June, the producers announced that they were pulling out: “There was not enough money for the film.” Wallace wrote to tell his parents that their plans had changed. “Contracts not signed, Tony Richardson, the director dismissed, and Saltzman the producer upset by the stock market decline, so the film may be off although a million dollars has already been sunk into it.”*

  Nijinsky, as Albee and Rudolf imagined it, could have been extraordinary—not only the first mainstream movie about gay love but a chilling study of a disintegrating mind. In keeping with Rudolf’s greatest achievements, it was intended to be a breaking through of barriers, a trajectory into the future, but Hollywood was not ready for it.

  A week or two earlier, scouting for locations, Tony Richardson had gone to Leningrad with Renzo Mongiardino and Lee Radziwill. Through Xenia, Rudolf had asked Liuba Romankova, who could speak English, to entertain his friends, even though he must have known the possible consequences for her. As a scientist at Leningrad’s Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute she was forbidden to make contact with foreigners without special consent. Violation of this rule could put her whole career in jeopardy, as the certain withdrawal of her “certificate of secrecy” would render her unable to collaborate on projects with other research institutes. The only way to obtain permission was through the First Department, the company’s KGB division, but a written request had to be sent to Moscow’s Big House, where it could sit for “more than a week, sometimes a month.” She decided to take the risk.* After leaving Lee a note at the Hotel Astoria, they met later in the lobby, together with the “two handsome, very nice young men.” Over dinner in the Astoria restaurant, the visitors plied her with questions about the cultural life and sights of Leningrad while she, in turn, asked eagerly about Rudolf’s life in the West.

  Lee said to me that he is okay, that he is charming, amazing, wonderful, that he is a great dancer, that she loves him very much.… She told me that Rudolf is cheerful, but at the end of any evening party he suddenly becomes sad and begins to gaze off into the distance and she feels that he is very far from the place he is. “Damned Slavs!” she said. “Just like my husband. When they are sitting and do not react to the surroundings I know that they are mentally in their homeland at that moment.”

  The next evening Xenia joined the four of them for a performance at the Kirov and afterward they all walked together along the Neva embankment, which was lit with the pearly fluorescence peculiar to Leningrad’s white nights. With no shops, neon signs, or tall buildings, it was, Liuba could tell, a very special cityscape for the three foreigners. “Lee was full of emotions, and there were tears in her eyes as she spoke of how she understands Rudik better now, how impossible it must be to forget this wonderful city and never be able to return.” Lee would later describe that time in Leningrad as one of the most memorable of her life, telling writer David Daniel, “I know I never would have had the same feeling … had it not been for these charming friends of his. They showed such great love for him and concern over his well-being.” She could see how much Xenia, in particular, worshipped Rudolf from her hunger for details about his development in the West. “She was concerned about his dancing in modern works, really anxious that it might destroy his knees and ruin him for classical ballet. She begged me to persuade him against that.” Once so extroverted and glamorous, Xenia had grown thin, frail, and withdrawn, and seemed to the ultrachic American “a vulnerable creature” who looked much older than her years, with noticeably bad teeth. Parting from her, Lee could sense “Mme. Pushkin’s desperation, almost, to know about Rudolf and whether he had been corrupted.”

  Rudolf, however, settling for the first time into a stable domestic relationship, had never been less degenerate. He hardly drank, having switched from vodka to white wine. “He’d mellowed, and I’d adjusted,” says Wallace, who had found ways to deal with his lover’s extreme demands, treating any outburst with indulgence and good humor. Maude Gosling remembered how they would play together like children, “Wallace big and strong and galloping round the room with Rudolf on his back—both collapsing with laughter and falling onto the sofa.” They found they had similar cultural tastes, although Wallace admits that it was Rudolf who first educated him in world cinema and theater, taking him to see everything from an Ingmar Bergman season to Chekhov and Noh plays. Expected to attend most Nureyev performances, he also began learning about ballet—“I was like John Q. Public at first”—but sensed that it was a relief in a way for Rudolf not to have the kind of esoteric battles of the Erik years. And while Rudolf, he says, woul
d always be “really wired” after a performance, this was something Wallace knew exactly how to defuse: “Half the time our sex was mechanical—more like a release for him—and he quite separated it from any feelings of tenderness or romance. Afterward he used to read, and I would snuggle up until we fell asleep. He used to call me ‘Boo-boo’ [after the TV bear] because he liked the sound of it.”

  That summer each had an opportunity to meet the other’s ex-lover. In July of the previous year, Rudolf had heard from Erik for the first time since they parted:

  Just a little note to say hello.… It just occurred to me that this will be the first summer we are not in France together, it feels kind of sad but maybe it’s the beginning of something new.… I think of you very often and hope that I sometimes am a good thought to you too.…

  With much love,

  Erik

  Six months later a few more lines arrived: “I am tired, bored, I could scream … so let us dance dance dance, bless you, as ever.” Erik was eager to establish a friendship without ties, but would this unfamiliar equilibrium withstand an encounter with Rudolf’s new partner? Wallace admits how nervous they both were the night Erik came to Fife Road for dinner:

  I had heard all these stories about how much Erik drank, and how mean and vicious he could get. Well, I was so relieved when he came to the house that night. I really liked his wit and his sarcasm; I thought, Oh, thank God for some New York cynicism! We got along very well—in fact, at the time we had more to talk about than Rudolf and I had.

  Ed Barnum was also in England in July. He had been “quite hysterical” when Wallace first went on tour with Rudolf, threatening to shoot himself unless he returned immediately to Atlanta. “I came back to find all my clothes in the street. Literally.” Ed, who always carried a gun in a holster—“he had a lot of enemies”—was equally furious when Wallace and Myron Woodward moved to Los Angeles, even though they had never been more than soul mates. And when Myron’s car careered into the woods across the street one day (someone had cut the brake lines), they both immediately assumed that Ed had somehow engineered the accident. But however apprehensive Rudolf might have been about a rendezvous with Wallace’s volatile friend, he nevertheless offered to take him out to dinner. It was a shrewd move. In his note of thanks, Ed wrote, “I’m convinced now that Beanie [Wallace’s nickname] is happier with you than he’s ever been—this makes me happy.”*

  Toward the end of July the Kirov came to London for a six-week season at the Royal Festival Hall. In the six years since Yuri Grigorovich had left the company for the Bolshoi in 1964, its repertory had badly deteriorated, with Giselle the only complete ballet being shown on the tour. It was the Kirov stars—Alla Osipenko, Yuri Soloviev, Natalia Makarova—who carried the company, but no one generated more excitement than the new twenty-two-year-old Pushkin protégé, Mikhail Baryshnikov. No photograph of the dancer, or even a listing of his name, appeared in the playbill, but word had spread quickly, and in response to public demand a solo was added—Leonid Yakobson’s Vestris, which had been created especially for him. (Baryshnikov had won the gold medal when he danced this at the 1969 Moscow competition; the legendary Maya Plisetskaya, one of the judges, had given him thirteen out of a maximum twelve points.) Rudolf, who had gone with Margot to several Baryshnikov performances, was determined to find a way of meeting him, and as Chinko Rafique was Misha’s Vaganova contemporary and a mutual friend, Rudolf prevailed on him to act as go-between.

  The idea of spending a day with Rudolf Nureyev—whatever the repercussions—was too momentous an opportunity to turn down. During the last couple of years Pushkin had spoken at length about his ex-pupil—“mostly about his work, never about him as human being”—and granted this confidence to Misha alone. (The framed photograph next to the dinner table of Rudolf in La Bayadère would be missing if any other student were there.) Managing to evade the “four goons tailing him,” Misha was waiting for Chinko when he arrived early in the morning at the Strand Palace Hotel to drive him to East Sheen. Rudolf, Chinko recalls, was noticeably playing the “grand seigneur” as he received the younger artist. Misha, by contrast, was “like a little boy—impressed but determined not to show it.” As he was led around “this big, beautiful English house,” he was struck by how sparsely furnished it was, with no pictures on the walls, only books piled up on the floor. “It was interesting kind of emptiness … almost like nobody lives there, and at the same time it was him.” The atmosphere was warm, however, and he was made to feel very relaxed as they spoke in Russian about the school, the theater, people they both knew, making “jokes about this, jokes about that.”

  They sat down to lunch with Wallace and Chinko. Misha stayed sober because he had a performance that night, and Rudolf “got sort of emotional and drank this bottle of wine.” Later the two went outside and lay on the grass talking intently about different techniques. Misha, who had taken a few classes with the Royal Ballet, wanted Rudolf to explain why the barre practice had been so long. “Because with Russian exercises, it’s very short. You have to really warm up before the class [with the Kirov] because the barre is thirty minutes.” Rudolf then took him upstairs to a huge walk-in closet. Having sent Misha a few of his costumes when he first joined the Kirov, Rudolf was eager to show off his whole collection and to demonstrate the best way to construct a costume.

  He was pointing things out … putting a few on me … because Erik was teaching him to build the costumes. You know, that you could lift the arm and nothing goes here … it’s really the set and inner belt and all that kind of stuff which makes—sits around your torso so tight that it complements the line, and at the same time you could lift the arm very freely.

  They were standing, talking in the master bedroom, when Chinko arrived to take Misha back into town. “Rudolf being wicked as ever had pulled out all these gay magazines and strewn them across his enormous double bed. He was looking sideways at them interested to know if they would spark something in little Mikhail Baryshnikov.” Misha himself has no memory of this; only how touched he was when, on parting, Rudolf gave him an album of Michelangelo drawings and a scarf as a keepsake. He would later reciprocate by sending Rudolf a book from Russia with a note saying that he often remembered their meeting. It was to be another four years before the dancer would defect from the Kirov, but on September 4, the penultimate day of the London season, it was announced that Natalia Makarova had decided to stay in the West. Rudolf’s immediate response was complete dismay: “Oh fuck,” he exclaimed to Nigel Gosling, who called to break the news, believing like Xenia that “everyone will think he had something to do with her leaving,” that now it was even less likely he would ever see his family again.

  At the end of the summer Wallace went back to film school in Los Angeles, having narrowly missed being called up for military service in Vietnam. “On the new classification for the draft I was number 210, and the lottery got up to 195 that year.” Being apart after three months of living together was harder for Wallace, who had never been in love before and was completely consumed by it. Rudolf himself certainly missed having his faithful “dog there to jump in [his] lap,” but his feelings for Wallace were those of tenderness and need rather than the torturing kind of intensity that he had had with Erik.

  Rudolf once told me how in love he had been with Erik, how at that time he thought about him day and night to the point that this obsession was destructive not only to his career but also to their developing a sustainable personal relationship. He said that was why he didn’t want to repeat the same mistake with me. But who knows, maybe he wasn’t really in love with me and was only trying to give me a reason why he showed very little passion toward me.

  Terrified that he would be forgotten, and unable to focus on his film editing, Wallace wrote Rudolf a letter.

  I spend all my time missing you.… Each week is getting worse—I’m sure everyone around me simply thinks of me as a silly lovesick boy or as a bore. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been editing the Sh
aron Tate movie, which absorbs some intellectual interests … but my spiritual life is lacking. It’s you—I don’t know why I didn’t see it at the time. I was just afraid that if I gave myself completely to you and you dropped me I would have no place to go. That’s my ego talking, and as you can see from reading it’s gradually giving in. I love you so much that I’m physically aching. I want to come running back to you, but I linger here in the hope of being able to work.… I don’t think I can bear to wait till December to be with you, I love you too much.

  Rudolf, by contrast, had never felt more creatively fulfilled. For the past few weeks he had been working with Jerome Robbins, whose recent New York City Ballet masterpiece, Dances at a Gathering, an inspired plotless visualization of Chopin’s piano pieces, was being restaged for the Royal Ballet in October. Known to the world as the king of Broadway, Robbins was, in Rudolf’s view, “so wonderful,” his modern reimagining of classics from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as West Side Story, to Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun making him one of the century’s most innovative choreographers. (As far as Rudolf was concerned, this was next best to collaborating with Balanchine.) Robbins’s personal reputation, on the other hand, was notoriously unsound, one dancer after another describing the “mental outrage and physical anguish” they experienced during rehearsals. “We’d all heard the rumors,” says Antoinette Sibley, “but I can only say that there was no chair throwing with us. We all worshipped Jerry, and would have killed ourselves for him.”