Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  What was hard, she says—“because we were all top principals and pretty busy”—was Robbins’s insistence on the dancers learning several other numbers as well as their own. For Rudolf this was ballet heaven. As a student in Leningrad he had taught himself Sleeping Beauty‘s Fairy variations, and now hoped that Robbins would consider him for one of the girls’ solos. “He’d fallen in love with it and felt that he could do it better,” the choreographer said with a smile. Sibley, who had been paired with Rudolf in Etude, op. 25, no. 5, remembers how he had also “absolutely set his heart” on another duet (Waltz, op. 42), which they had nicknamed the “giggle dance.” “Whenever Monica [Mason] and Mick [Michael Coleman] rehearsed it, he’d be there pulling me up, saying, ‘Come on, we must do this.’ ”

  As with most Robbins ballets, the dancers did not know until a day or two before the premiere which specific role was theirs, but Robbins claimed Rudolf “accepted that very well.” Extreme perfectionism and a refusal to compromise were qualities common to the two men, and, as Lynn Seymour remarked, “they really, really admired each other.” She noticed, all the same, how “terribly respectful and cautious” the two artists were at first, “both of them treading carefully.” There were certainly weaknesses to be concealed on either side. Robbins, who had always felt that he did not belong in ballet and gave classes in order to learn more about the classical lexicon, would have been immediately aware that Rudolf’s knowledge of the genre was far greater than his own. The choreographer, on the other hand, was demanding qualities for Dances at a Gathering that went against everything for which Rudolf stood. Like Balanchine, Robbins expected his dancers to serve his work, deploring the old-fashioned concept of the heroic, self-thrusting star. “I don’t want the audience to know who you are until you’re off the stage,” he warned Rudolf. And whereas much of the thrill of a Nureyev performance came from the audience being made aware of the difficulties and risk involved, Robbins never wanted the mechanics on display. “Jerry just wanted us to be natural,” Sibley says. “No turning out, no standing in positions, no breaking of the flow.” In his diary Robbins confided, “Rudi—is Rudi—an artist—an animial—& a cunt. A child & a smart cookie, he was plenty to handle.” But to Rudolf’s Royal Ballet colleagues his compliance in this ballet was unprecedented. “He felt very subservient to the great masters,” Lynn Seymour remarks, and Anthony Dowell agrees: “The ego didn’t get in the way when he knew something was good.”*

  When the curtain rose Rudolf was alone onstage. Wearing calf-boots he began walking contemplatively until, as if compelled by the music, he swayed, and gently swung into a solo—Mazurka, op. 63, no. 2. He was one of ten young dancers who performed, either alone or in groups of shifting numbers, moving spontaneously in space and seemingly unaware of the audience. Described by Robbins as a ballet that celebrates “love & being & togetherness,” Dances at a Gathering had no story but was delicately brushed with touches of character and emotion, the changing of partners suggesting a community of friends or lovers. Folk gestures in the movements, like the fragments of tunes and rhythms in the music, invoked Poland, Chopin’s homeland, but never appeared grafted on. In the words of Robbins biographer Deborah Jowitt:

  There are heel-and-toe steps; feeting stamping; heels clicking together; hands placed on hips; men dancing in a line, their arms across one another’s shoulders.… But these mingle with classical steps that have been eased to look natural and unposed. No man plants himself to spin, and women rise onto pointe as if such an act were the natural consequence of drawing breath. Women fall into men’s arms and are spiraled up to sit on a shoulder without visible effort on either dancer’s part.

  Part of an ensemble and yet all having the chance to make their own impact, the dancers were, in Sibley’s term, “individual equals.” Rudolf, it was agreed, had never been better in a contemporary work. “He conforms, but he is also the catalyst that brings an extra ounce of performance out of his colleagues,” commented the Dancing Times. This time, instead of feeling threatened by an element of competitiveness with Anthony Dowell, Rudolf clearly reveled in their duet’s playful combat. For sheer deftness and academic clarity of line, Dowell was technically the better of the two, but Rudolf gave each movement a unique sense of weight described by one critic as “a feeling of the muscularity of the dance and what sculptors call ‘mass.’ ” This quality was also shared by the role’s creator, Edward Villella.

  After some sixty minutes the dancers all came together onstage as if, having gone through the vicissitudes of their various relationships, they were returning to their roots. To Sibley it meant, “We’re all still alive, we’re all still on the earth, which is the important thing—the earth.” Robbins wanted them to imagine that “it’s a place you’re coming back to years later that you danced in once.” The gesture that symbolizes this—the most evocative in the ballet—took on additional meaning for London audiences watching Rudolf in the role. “He knelt down,” said Maude Gosling, “and when he put his hand on the ground it brought tears to your eyes because you knew exactly what he was feeling.”

  Even though there are upbeat elements of Robbins’s musical comedy work in Dances at a Gathering, it was a ballet that marked a departure for him, being not, as he put it, “punch & sharp & dramatically or theatrically effective … [but] romantic, lyric, sensuous & delicate.” It was a rarity for Rudolf, too. For the first time he looked as if he really belonged to the Royal Ballet, triumphantly achieving his wish to be “part of the company; on a par with all of them.” Robbins was delighted. On the night of the premiere, admitting that he found it difficult to express himself when they spoke together, he wrote Rudolf a note of gratitude:

  Dear Rudi—October 20 1970

  First of all I thank you very deeply for your huge contribution to “Dances.” You achieved all I asked of you and more: understanding your place in the entire piece—and delivering your dances beautifully! Your modesty and enjoyment that is so evident in your performance is a remarkable and recognized part of the work you have done for me, the ballet, and mostly for yourself. I hope we will work together again and soon.

  *When the Nureyevs got a phone of their own Rudolf could sometimes hear his father coughing in the background but neither asked to speak to the other.

  *In fact, though, in April 1972, almost as if in revenge, MacMillan made the lamentable Sideshow, a knockabout burlesque for Lynn Seymour and Rudolf, who played a circus strongman.

  *Monique had invested in Hair after someone defaulted, and as a return favor, Michael Butler had agreed to see Hiram. When he was in a show out of town, Monique had rehearsed him on the telephone, singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” but after the audition Butler had called her and complained, “That friend of yours can’t sing and can’t act.” “Yes,” protested Monique, “but he’s so beautiful that everyone will be talking about him.” This proved true enough. It was Franco Zeffirelli’s seeing Hiram in the chorus that led to him being given a lead role the following year in Fellini’s Satyricon.

  *Rudolf told a Newsweek reporter in May 1970, “What I have done is develop a number of devices to preserve myself. I know, for example, that I dance best when I am on to my second wind. So before the actual performance I go through every move that I will make onstage … so that my body is near exhaustion. Then, when the body is under great stress it will move despite any mental block.”

  *In 1973 Tony Richardson directed the film of Albee’s Pulitzer-winning play A Delicate Balance, with Paul Scofield starring opposite Katharine Hepburn.

  †To Christopher Hampton, who was brought in at a later point to write a more acceptable Nijinsky script, Rudolf said, disloyally, that the Albee version had been “terrible,” his reason being that there was “too much Diaghilev.” When they met in New York to discuss the project, Hampton promised Rudolf that Nijinsky would be on screen from beginning to end. Once again, however, nothing came of it.

  *Exactly ten years later Herbert Ross directed his own Nijinsky fil
m produced by his wife, Nora Kaye, with Alan Bates as Diaghilev and George de la Peña as Nijinsky—a venture considered to be a “brave attempt at a gay love story, but not brave enough to work.”

  *Sure enough, having spent the weekend with the foreigners, Liuba was summoned to the First Department on Monday, and interrogated by a KGB officer. “He began to ask me about Lee’s companions, about the topic of our talks, many different questions. But I repeated over and over again that we talked about ballet and about the arts generally. Then I was asked to write a statement. They were angry but could not do anything with me. I was not punished, but for many years I had no promotion and did not receive a permission to participate in any international conferences because I had become a ‘suspicious’ person.”

  *Some years later Barnum was arrested on a murder charge. Having found a boy squatting in one of his apartments he claimed to have shot him in self-defense, and was released without charge. He himself met an early death following an arson attack on one of his properties. It was a Victorian house on a hill, “not unlike the one in Psycho,” recalls Wallace. “Ed was in a second-story bedroom with a boy, but when the trick jumped out the window, he went back and burned to death in the flames. It was real Southern Gothic stuff.”

  *There was, however, one near-showdown between choreographer and star on the afternoon of the opening night. Rudolf was insisting on wearing light-colored tights because, as designer Joe Eula put it, “you could see the veins in his cock and the cheeks of his ass better with white.” Robbins, who was determined that he should wear the tights Eula had made for him (“the earth color was the whole point—the guy was part of the earth”), went into the dancer’s dressing room before curtain up. “Whatever transpired, Mr. Nureyev came out in the brown tights.” (Greg Lawrence, Dance with Demons.)

  14 CAMERA FRONT, CAMERA SIDE

  Rudolf’s close affinity with the Royal Ballet did not last long. He spent the rest of the year working with other companies, including the Australian Ballet, with which he guested from December 1970 until March 1971 and danced sixty-eight of the company’s seventy performances while on an American tour. Then, without taking a break, he flew straight to Brussels to begin work with the choreographer Maurice Béjart. Since its creation in 1960, Béjart’s Ballet of the Twentieth Century had been regarded as one of the world’s most exciting contemporary troupes, its “total-theater concept of dance” performed by youngsters whose energy, athleticism, and street fashion—“the boys in their blue jeans and long, sweat-matted hair”—attracting huge audiences new to ballet. To the dancers, Béjart, a philosophy graduate, was “a genius—a marvelous theater man.” And with his piercing, Mephistophelian features and hypnotic presence, he had the qualities of a cult leader, relating to each person in a way Robert Denvers describes as almost psychic. “Working with Béjart meant becoming metaphysically involved. It was like being in the Actors Studio: He was pulling out of you as a performer what you are as a person. We were his family, a very tight-knit set.” The question was whether Rudolf, himself a guru to young dancers—“the guru of classicism”—would submit to Béjart’s method of mind control.

  The two had met socially several times, one occasion in February 1969 being particularly memorable to the choreographer. “Rudi was very depressed, and felt that what he was trying to do was not understood by people in Europe.” Their conversation preyed on Béjart’s mind, and a few days later he wrote Rudolf a letter:

  Rudi,

  Please, you are killing yourself and the other night I was really sorry because you deserve better than that life of yours.

  Go back to Russia, be yourself, a wonderful young boy made for work and creation, made to be happy … and you are not. Go back to Russia.

  Rudi I have the feeling you are a real person … and believe me I have met very few … a real person! Your name, your fame, your money all this is nothing.… Keep your purity of Russian boy and don’t let them spoil you with their money and their publicity.

  I don’t know if I can help you, I just want to come to another human being and say “you are great and strong, don’t be scared and sad, go your way … but the real way and spit on that world of nonsense around you.”

  I am not very clever to write in english, but I have to because when we meet it is allways in a situation where it is difficult to talk.

  Courage. Je vous embrasse de tout mon coeur et le jour ou vraiment vous avez besoin de moi, je ferai cette heure là, ce que je pourrai pour vous aider.

  Ou alors quittez ces pays stupides et retournez chez vous, en Russie, vous pouvez les aider et c’est la seule chose importante, aider les gens qui le meritent.

  Maurice

  This was a bleak time in Béjart’s own life: His diary entry before their February 21 meeting elliptically notes, “Agitation. Vide. Paresse. Absence de Dieu. Quitter Paris, vite.” And on February 22 he writes, “Why seek to save others if I am not capable of saving myself?” And yet the choreographer did genuinely believe in the corrupting power of money and success—“that world of nonsense”—which he saw engulfing Rudolf. To Denvers he was like a Lutheran priest preaching the necessity of “suffering, sweat, and work. He was the complete opposite of Roland Petit. Both were French, but one was hieratic and communistic, the other light and social, loving shopping and beauty, Yves St. Laurent, parties, Folies-Bergères.… Béjart had absolutely no patience with any of that.”

  Nor had Béjart ever condoned the kind of glamour brought by big-name guest artists, although just recently things had changed. After a falling-out with Balanchine, New York City Ballet’s ballerina Suzanne Farrell had joined the Brussels company, and for the first time “Béjart fell in love with stars.” To the New York dance intelligentsia Farrell’s departure was incomprehensible. Why forfeit virtual ownership of leading roles in some three dozen Balanchine ballets and choose “an alien and diseased repertory” whose main purpose was to provoke football-style frenzy from a mass audience? It was, in Joan Acocella’s words, “as if Farrell had run off with a biker.” And yet it was not long before a kind of osmosis took place. Accustomed to a young generation with “come as you are” shreds of temperament and technique,” Béjart could not fail to be influenced by one of the great classical artists of the age. Farrell herself, meanwhile, would eventually return to the New York City Ballet, having acquired what even Arlene Croce, the most strident Béjart-phobe of all, conceded to be a new, unaffected style. Now, clearly, was the moment for a Béjart/Nureyev collaboration, and although both choreographer and dancer were reluctant to make a direct approach, Rudolf urged Robert Denvers to intervene. “Basically, I brokered it. I arranged for Rudolf to call me one afternoon when I knew that Béjart was going to be there in my apartment. I put him on the phone to Rudolf, and that’s how the whole story started.”

  True to form, Rudolf had enlisted more than one matchmaker. Trained in classical ballet, Italian dancer Paolo Bortoluzzi had joined Béjart’s company at its inception, submitting to its rigid mandate—“no other star than Béjart himself.” Lately, however, he had begun guesting with foreign ballet companies, achieving the duality of technique to which Rudolf himself aspired—the ability to dance a Petipa duet on the same program with a modern piece. Exactly the same age, he and Rudolf became friends when they were performing at La Scala, Milan, and had subsequently met at each other’s homes in Brussels and London. Having often discussed with Paolo the possibility of working with Béjart, Rudolf went out of his way to remind him to speak to the choreographer on his behalf. It worked, Béjart promising that he would create a pas de deux for the two of them “if Nureyev will accept.”

  An added attraction of the Ballet of the Twentieth Century was that Menia was now performing and teaching there. She and Rudolf had seen each other the year before, once again in Paris, where she was dancing Béjart’s Opus 5. Having dyed her hair blond, Menia was hardly recognizable except for the Vaganova imprint on her technique—the beautifully supple Russian back and wafting arms. After the
performance they went to a restaurant with a group of Béjart dancers, one of whom was Menia’s new husband, Jorge Lefebre. Also Cuban, and a choreographer of note, Lefebre had known Menia slightly in Havana, and fallen in love the previous summer, when he went back to mount a new piece for the National Ballet of Cuba and took her with him. The dark, Hispanic Lefebre was a handsome, macho figure, and Rudolf found him “very sympatico.” Lefebre was equally at ease, despite the fact that Menia had told him all about her “history with Rudik.”*

  Having absorbed a great deal from watching Pushkin at work, Menia was particularly gifted at teaching male dancers, and she taught the men’s class every morning. “She could charm the pants off you,” Denvers says. “Seducing you to try out things you didn’t know you were capable of. She’s an excellent teacher and also very beautiful—which is rare.” The Béjart dancers noticed how close she and Rudolf were, but even so she stood firm in refusing his request to slow down the tempo of her class. For him, venturing once again into an unfamiliar world, it was comforting to have this link from home, and throughout the rehearsal period he asked Menia to be there in the studio. “Always I was with him. He want that.”