Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Sunday 25 March: It seems he is with R again. O Frabjous day—calloo callay!

  Wallace, who had spoken to Rudolf only once since leaving London, was living downtown near the Shrine Auditorium in a tiny apartment with no telephone, his “total cutoff” a deliberate policy to allow him to work without interruption on his Einstein film. He had also been steeping himself in the novellas of Jorge Luis Borges, an author Rudolf had “badgered” him to read, having become so inspired by The Circular Ruins that he had immediately written, in a single session, the synopsis for a film—“an animated-pornographic film.” The new market for porn was proving irresistibly lucrative, he explained to his parents. “Cinematically (& erotically) they are a pile of trash, but people pay $5 a head to see them.” Rudolf, who, according to Terry Benton, “thought Wallace’s pornographic film thing was a nonsense,” did not hide his disappointment. “I’m sure he had wanted his project for me to be a bit more serious,” Wallace told the Goslings, adding, “I’ve been filming the ‘fuck’ sequences out here since I have a film lab that will process it. Finally we went over it and [Rudolf] seemed placated if not amused.” Determined to make things work this time, Wallace joined Rudolf on the road, traveling first to Arizona, then overnight to Las Vegas. “Allan Carr … ‘The King of Las Vegas’ arranged a gigantic suite for us at the Tropicana Hotel and to see the Ann-Margret Show,” he went on. “We arrived here in San Francisco Monday morning and Armen Bali as usual is going crazy preparing activities for us.”

  They had been in Rudolf’s dressing room on an earlier tour with Robert Hutchinson and his new partner when a note, written in Russian, was delivered. “I am Armen Bali,” Rudolf read. “I am Armenian. I have Armenian restaurant and tonight, after the performance I want to treat you Armenian way. Please, do not refuse.” Deciding that this sounded like more fun than the formal Royal Ballet reception at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, Rudolf sent Wallace down to the stage door. Armen Bali, a vivacious woman in her late forties, wearing large owl glasses, was waiting in the crowd outside with her daughter, Jeannette Etheredge, when she heard a voice over the loudspeaker calling her name. Excitedly, the pair followed Wallace up the stairs and into the star’s dressing room, where Rudolf was at that moment emerging from the shower, a towel around his hips and water still dripping down his body. Grinning and throwing open his arms, he cried, “Well, greetings to the Armenian! Let’s get acquainted!” And without a second’s hesitation Armen threw herself into his wet embrace.

  They sat down together and began talking as intently as if nobody else were in the room. “Just instantly connected,” Jeannette recalls. “Rudolf was a Tatar and my mother was Russian Armenian—both people who, under the Russians, didn’t fare very well.” Brought up in Manchuria, to which her parents had escaped during the Turkish Armenian massacre, Armen had married a man from Tsingtao, north of Shanghai, where Jeannette was born. When war broke out, the family was interned in a Japanese POW camp, during which time Armen gave birth to a son. Suspected of being a spy because he spoke Japanese, her husband was beaten by his captors and was never able to readjust to normal life, but Armen was made more and more resilient by their experience. After spending two years in a United Nations relocation camp in the Philippines, the family emigrated to San Francisco, where Armen opened a restaurant. By the 1970s, Bali’s, on the port, had become that city’s Russian Tea Room, a favorite literary and show business haunt. With carved wooden screens and brass light fixtures, its decor was as Middle Eastern as its cuisine, and later that night, Rudolf sampled the dish for which Bali’s was famous—rack of lamb marinated in pomegranate juice. He stayed talking to Armen until it was light outside, his undivided attention a result of having learned something of great interest to him. Situated opposite the restaurant was San Francisco’s Customs and Immigration office, whose employees Armen had got to know well over the years as they often called on her to translate for them. It was this connection that led to contacts in the U.S. State Department, contacts that had helped her to bring her parents, sisters, and their children from Communist China to the West.

  During a stopover in San Francisco a month or so later, Rudolf walked into Bali’s wearing exactly the same outfit—a Nehru jacket and tight pants. “Do you remember me?” he asked with uncharacteristic meekness. “After that,” Jeannette says, “he became part of our family.” At Rudolf’s invitation Armen traveled to London to stay with him, and every time the Royal Ballet toured San Francisco she would tell him to bring anyone he wanted to the restaurant. Often after a performance Rudolf would arrive with the entire company and order rack of lamb all around, Wallace helping out by waiting on tables. “Pay? That never,” scoffs Armen. “He didn’t know how. He’d bring a hundred people and never even tip. What Rudolf gave you was himself.” And ever since the local press had reported the fact that “Nureyev preferred dinner at Bali’s,” his frequent presence there had been amply reimbursed in publicity. “I could not wish for more. The proof of what this sensational advertising did for many years to come served me beyond imagination.”

  With Rudolf sharing equal billing, the National Ballet of Canada made its New York debut at the Met in April and May 1973. By now he had forged a partnership of his own with Karen Kain, who, although too tall for him, had invigorated his dancing with her youth and glamour. “You make me dance taller,” he told her. He had come to prefer taller ballerinas as their waists were directly in front of his hands and he did not have to bend to support them. Their first Swan Lake in Montreal had been a revelation to them both, and since then Rudolf had been more determined than ever that Kain should dance Aurora. Despite Celia Franca’s resistance, he began to rehearse her whenever he had spare time, goading her to push herself far beyond her limit. “His belief in me was so much stronger than my own that I did things out of a kind of will to please him,” she says, remembering how Rudolf would give her tips on how to make her arms appear longer, her face rounder. “ ‘Do like Margot—puff up hair!’ he’d say.” Together they worked on creating different dance textures, helping Kain to arrive at a style of her own, her riskily distended phrases described by one critic as “an unexpected blend of the fluid and the almost clenched.”

  New York had fallen in love with Canada’s beautiful new star, but intending the other ballerinas to grow from their Met experience, Rudolf went out of his way to provoke a sense of rivalry between them. “With Karen he would stand in the wings and say things about me, and vice versa,” Veronica Tennant recalls with a laugh. “He’d try to stir things up, but we’d tell each other what he’d said. ‘You Canadians—I can’t make trouble!’ he’d complain.” When Rudolf had first partnered Tennant in what she admits was then “a scared-rabbit, neophyte performance,” he seemed to be directing all his energies not at her but at his public. “The audience knew it was hubris,” wrote one Philadelphia critic. “But instead of punishing him for it they applauded, screamed, cheered.” By the time the company got to New York, however, Tennant was dazzling audiences in her own right, and, wanting to reward her, Rudolf did not come out for his call after their pas de deux one night, leaving her to experience the acclaim alone: “He was telling me that this was my moment. He was so pleased when we were all lifted to another realm of achievement. I’d never really listened to audiences before, to that roar you get at the Met, and thanks to Rudolf, I learned to understand that live theater is a connective art, a dialogue, and a moment never to be repeated.”

  In July Rudolf was in Paris for twelve performances of Swan Lake, partnering his two favorite étoiles, Noëlla Pontois and Ghislaine Thesmar, as well as Natalia Makarova—the last an event that made world news. The two defectors, who had never danced together in Russia, had recently appeared in London in Sleeping Beauty and Romeo and Juliet, which “went rather well,” in Rudolf’s view, although rehearsals had been tempestuous. Like most Russians, Makarova was an adagio ballerina by nature, melting one movement into another in a long, liquid line, her phrasing more luxuriantly legato than that of
anyone else before her. To Rudolf, however, now accustomed to the sharply defined shapes and rhythms of Western ballerinas, such indulgent tempi were “totally unmusical.” “We are from different cultures now,” he shouted at her (in English) during one of their many altercations. “You underestimate the West. They know more about our art than we do.”

  Feeling “older and wiser,” he was determined to subjugate “Fuck-arova” as he called her—“much pleased with his own joke”—before committing himself to a regular partnership with the ballerina. What he failed to see, though, was that Makarova was at precisely the vulnerable stage he had been on his arrival in the West, clinging to her Kirov schooling as a way of maintaining control. Appearing “isolated and inviolable,” her Swan Queen was an expression of this—“a drama about freedom,” as Arlene Croce has written, “the fate of a slave.” Makarova was one of the great Odette-Odiles of her time, her exquisite Kirov plastique forming the kind of inhumanly supple, “swept-wing” swan shapes of which Ivanov could only have dreamed. “She was the best I’d ever seen,” said Ghislaine Thesmar. “But Rudolf hated all those feathers and flourishes we all took from the Russians. He used to tell me to ‘Stop being so baroque!’ ” A diplomat’s daughter with innate elegance and refinement, Thesmar easily achieved “the ladylike effect” Rudolf wanted, “the clean lines and neat dignity of Margot.” So did Pontois, a delightfully feminine dancer with perfect proportions and an effortless technique—“a petite plume,” in Thesmar’s phrase. But Makarova had no intention of changing her style to please Rudolf—or of substituting her usual Black Swan duet for the Nicholas Sergeyev version he had danced with Margot.

  It began to look as if the first night would never happen. The production—a huge venture featuring forty-seven swans and seating for more than six thousand people—was taking place on an open-air stage in the courtyard of the Louvre in one of the worst summers on record. As the public began filtering in, the dancers were refusing to perform because of the wind and rain—all except Rudolf, that is, who was very deliberately warming up onstage. “He was showing that he was ready to go on so the others had to do the same,” says Paris Opéra’s Hugues Gall, who had arranged the event and was himself helping to mop the treacherously wet stage. Shivering under rugs and coats, the audience, resolutely sticking it out, then witnessed what was to become the most infamous Nureyev-Makarova moment. Having reached the pirouette-penchée sequence in act 3, the ballerina performed the doubles a count later than Rudolf was expecting and, moving too far away for him to support her, fell flat on her back—or, as Rudolf put it, “decided to be Sleeping Beauty at that moment.” Ghislaine Thesmar was watching from the wings at the time. “He was so taken aback that Natasha dared do what maybe was not on the musical count he wanted that he didn’t react. He didn’t make her fall, she just went past him and he was taken by surprise. But her head went choc parterre, and for one second she was stunned. You could see him thinking, Oh my God.… And then she stood up, took a preparation, and they went on.”

  Chilled and shaken, Makarova refused to dance the Variations and Coda, which drove Rudolf into a fury: This, after all, was his big moment. “What about the people out there?” he demanded of Gall. “They have paid their money. I want to dance. Fetch Pontois, announce half hour delay.” Then, in full view of the audience, he stamped across the stage in leg warmers and boots to Makarova’s tent, where he began violently haranguing her. The ballerina got her way, and after dancing only three of her scheduled six performances, flew to Canada, “announcing to the world” that she would never again dance with “that man.”

  The incident reverberated for weeks. Retaliating against her “bitchy remarks,” Rudolf himself spoke out to the press, complaining that the ballerina was immature and unmusical, and had decided to “make a big fuss” only because she had not received enough attention in Paris. Mutual friends tried to intervene. Armen Bali and Paklusha told Rudolf that Natasha was just waiting for “an apology and a bunch of flowers.” Gorlinsky took his more established client’s side and urged Makarova to write to Rudolf and apologize. Two weeks later in New York, Makarova had dinner with Erik, who sent Rudolf a letter saying that naturally they had talked about “the slip-up,” and that Natasha “was very sad and sorry about the whole thing.” In the meantime Rudolf had told John Tooley that he might consider partnering Makarova again. “But not yet. I danced with her too soon: I should have waited another year until she learned more about the West.”

  In late August, Rudolf was with Wallace at La Turbie, where they spent most of their time by the coast, “swimming at a private beach of a girl whose family owns half of the mountain.” Douce François was the niece of Arturo Lopez-Perez, a Chilean tycoon of incredible wealth who, before the war, had bought ten hectares of hillside stretching down to the sea. With her brilliant smile, high cheekbones, and gamine dancer’s frame, she had made an instant impression on Rudolf when they first met in 1969. She had traveled to London with the layout of a book of Raymundo de Larrain’s Nureyev photographs. Because of legal wrangles the book project (with a text by Alexander Bland) came to nothing, but Douce, who was then Larrain’s girlfriend, began “spending more and more time with Rudolf and less and less with Raymundo.” Her house in Villefranche, a two-story Mediterranean villa, was not grand, but it had a wonderful view of Cap Ferrat Bay, where Rudolf loved to swim, diving off the rocks directly below the house.

  Staying with him and Wallace at La Turbie were Marcia Haydée, Rudolf’s Raymonda, and her young lover, the American dancer Richard Cragun, also a principal with the Stuttgart Ballet. Having declined the “very overt advance” Rudolf made when he first guested with their company—“I was one of the few babies he didn’t bite”—Cragun presented an enticing challenge to Rudolf, who remained playfully insinuating whenever they were together. “Something in his manner was always saying: I know you’re Marcia’s, but I’ll flirt with you anyway.” And yet both dancers could see from Rudolf’s behavior toward Wallace just how solid their attachment was. “It was what he didn’t do, and didn’t say … it was his quiet reflection—the way he looked at Wallace, or said his name … that made me think, Ah, there’s something very serious here.” But also apparent to them was the difficult choice that Wallace was then having to make: whether to stay in Europe “and tag along with Rudolf,” or go back to Los Angeles and get on with his own life. “It was very painful for them both,” says Cragun. “Rudolf had found a really good fellow, and I sensed a sad situation of right person, wrong time.”

  In London several months later, Nigel sensed much the same thing. “Silence from Fife Rd for a week,” he noted on December 13. “This always makes me slightly uneasy: W is not basically content & inherently volatile. Hope everything is OK: R is the kind to clam up when in trouble.” The two had spent most of the fall together in London, Rudolf dancing at Covent Garden and Wallace making his porno cartoon in an upstairs bedroom.* There had been wonderful moments, Wallace galloping around the house one night “like Batman” in Rudolf’s new sable coat,† but an underlying melancholy was always there. Over a late supper at Fife Road with the Goslings in December, Rudolf suddenly sighed and said, “Oh, the time is getting so short!” By the beginning of February he had flown off to Toronto to tour America with the Canadians for six months, and Wallace, who had been engaged as a gofer on a new Mike Nichols film, left London for Hollywood a few weeks later.

  Soon after their departure, Rudolf’s domestic support—“very important to him”—began to collapse. At Fife Road, Claire, who must have been at least seventy, was having health problems and suffering from cafard (which Nigel translated to Rudolf as “longing for her cabbage patch back home”); while at La Turbie, Natalie, the cook-housekeeper found by Marika Besobrasova, had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy. A White Russian, she—like her husband, Serge Ivanov, who acted as chauffeur and shared the household duties—was “very proper but not off-puttingly so,” according to Wallace. “Rudolf liked them a lot
because they knew how to keep their distance.” Trying to find a solution, Nigel had spoken to Gorlinsky, who was hardly much help—“not really his job, anyway”—suggesting that Rudolf should let the Ivanovs go and replace them with a retired policeman and his wife. “I told him it would have to be a retired policeman with a Russian wife—should we advertise?” joked Nigel, and, trying to downplay the “chaos at home” to Rudolf, wrote saying, “If you run across an Ideal Couple in Milwaukee, snap them up as I can see your present case needs covering.”

  Meanwhile Nigel took things in hand himself. Since Joan Thring’s departure, Rudolf had not employed a secretary to deal with his correspondence, and so Nigel had assumed the responsibility of sorting through black garbage bags crammed with unopened fan mail, in case, Maude said, “there were sad letters or a letter from someone who really should have an answer.” Throughout that spring it was he who arranged repairs for Rudolf’s car; for the silver to be stored in Gorlinsky’s safe; and for new locks to be fitted on the house. There was one day in May when he drove out to Fife Road at 9 a.m. to meet the locksmith, returned at midday to take Claire to the airport; and went back again at 11 p.m. to check that a door was secure. Being on the telephone side of the bed, it was always Nigel who took the nocturnal calls from all over the world. “Did I wake you up?” Rudolf would ask. “Yes.” “Good.” And they would have a long conversation, after which Rudolf would want to talk to Maude. “So I’d have to say hello, then try to go back to sleep.” On May 26 the 3 a.m. call was from Paris: “He wanted some costumes from Fife Road to take to Vienna. Managed to wake Tommy [Wallace’s brother] & eventually decided to go out v early & pick them up, but his telephone went out of order so I couldn’t fix for him to let us in. Rang Paklusha early & arranged for her to bring them. Maude didn’t sleep much after all this.”