Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  It was also Nigel and Maude who had given Rudolf his first sight of Martha Graham on film, and taken him to a performance when she toured London with her company in 1963. Having vowed at the time that he “had to see more,” Rudolf was delighted when, more than a decade later, he learned that the choreographer had suggested creating a new ballet for him. The diva of modern dance, Martha Graham had formulated what Rudolf called “the complete alphabet,” an extraordinarily innovative language that her biographer Agnes de Mille compares to that of Finnegans Wake. But while James Joyce never went on to write another book in the same idiom, the Graham vocabulary was copied, adapted, and developed by the leading choreographers of the next generation—“the Children of Martha.” “Merce [Cunningham] and Paul [Taylor] made what Martha was doing more palpable,” noted Rudolf. “They translated Martha’s language to our day.” Among the century’s choreographers, only Balanchine had anything comparable to Graham’s influence on dance. She brought to it not only a new method but new subject matter, reflecting, in Joan Acocella’s words, “the post-Freudian psyche—fear, wrath, sex—and, by wedding that subject to ancient myth, ennobled it.”

  It was Night Journey, Graham’s version of Oedipus Rex, that had “hypnotized” Rudolf when he saw her dance in London. As Jocasta she had an intensity and forcefulness the like of which he had never encountered, “an incredible command and focus of every movement.” When the Goslings took him backstage to meet the dancer he was still so struck by her performance that he simply stared at her without saying a word. With her long, Oriental-black hair, white skin, scarlet mouth, and skeletal cheeks, Graham was in any case a startlingly inhibiting presence. And yet she had always been a lusty, highly sexed woman who, as Paul Taylor once remarked, seemed to view men, even homosexual men, as no more than “giant dildos.” Considered shockingly explicit at its 1947 premiere, Night Journey depicted Jocasta expressing “the cry from her vagina” on meeting Oedipus, her leg raised high as she surrendered herself to a violent contraction. Faced with the silent young Russian in her dressing room, Graham had assumed that “he did not like my dance,” but years later Rudolf told her that he had not said anything because he had been so moved. “I’m not very good with words, so I just gave my admiration.”

  The admiration was mutual. In New York he would go to watch Graham’s company and school, and she would come to his performances, even heretically kissing his hand after a particularly exciting performance of Corsaire. In Rudolf she recognized the kind of “brutality, even savagery” that had drawn her to her dancer lover and muse, Erick Hawkins, and even though Nureyev, the ballet star, stood for everything against which she had fought, he also embodied the very essence of her art—the intense passion, attack, and ferocity. “That was that,” recalled Rudolf. “From there we had a comparlance.” This was inevitable, as the two had much in common, both creating ballets out of a necessity to perform, Graham’s mythical works centering on a single woman—Medea, Joan of Arc, Clytemnestra, Hérodiade—all ultimately versions of herself, just as Rudolf used the classics to explore conflicting aspects of his personality. Each was as solipsistic as the other—“enraptured selfishness” Graham’s manager called it—and both had dedicated themselves totally and mercilessly to their art. The chasm between their two dance genres had by now sufficiently narrowed, Graham felt, for her to shatter the idol of her own making and invite not only Rudolf but Margot, too, to collaborate on her new ballet. More to the point, as Graham herself admitted, “there were bills to be paid.” To help the company settle debts of $75,000 and to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the two stars agreed to give the premiere of the new piece at a fund-raising New York gala on June 19, 1975, and also offered to perform the pas de deux from Swan Lake as their own gift to Graham.

  The subject and title of Graham’s ballet was Lucifer, not the biblical devil but the principal angel fallen from grace, whose name means light. Rudolf had described Nijinsky as “a lucifer—he brought light with him onstage. What Margot did”—and so was gratified by the concept, which, as Graham said, was almost type-casting for Nureyev. The five weeks they spent together proved to be equally stimulating for them both, the only time, Graham admitted, that she had allowed herself to live through another person. “Rudolf is not a substitute for myself,” she told the New York Times’s Anna Kisselgoff, “but working with him gives me a very definite identification.” Kisselgoff had hoped for Rudolf’s own views on this historic alliance, but he had not wanted “to gibber-jabber,” wary of “sounding like a monkey” by attempting to mimic Graham’s famously verbose pronouncements.* It was her dance vocabulary he was after—“Martha had movement and I was stealing it.”

  Although Graham claimed to have taught Rudolf the basics herself, it was actually a member of her company, David Hatch Walker, who gave Rudolf his first private lessons. When his knee began to swell after only two classes (“because of her fourth position”), Graham, concerned lest he injure himself further, instructed him to “Go directly to repertoire.” “Martha wouldn’t let me take class with the company. I would have felt more comfortable being behind someone copying the exercises and seeing what they do.” But the Graham movements—the “bourrées on the knees, jackknife turns, hinge falls”—were not something that a classical dancer, even one as assimilative as Rudolf, could pick up in a matter of weeks. Inspired by the Kundalini, the Hindu system of spiritual energy that motivates physical movement, not an arm or leg could be lifted until “the life impulse” had risen to its highest level. What in classical ballet is a simple retiré, a drawing up of the leg, becomes in Graham terms an expression of “inner being.” Aware that feelings could be communicated by the upper body—“Arch the spine and you have emotion”—Graham concentrated on the torso, her hallmark contraction (the spasm of the diaphragm muscles used in coughing) driving the limbs by its percussive force, “much as the thong of a whip moves because of the crack of the handle.”

  Having spent most of his years as a dancer rigidly corseted in nineteenth-century-style costumes, Rudolf found Graham’s pliantly eloquent torso as unnatural as he did her use of the floor, not to be resisted in a balletic defiance of gravity but succumbed to as if in quicksand—“a descent and lowering in thighs and back … a melting and sliding, a communion with the ground and then a recovery and regalvanizing.” And even though Graham had made Margot’s role of Night the Temptress more classically oriented than the others, the ballerina found a side fall so difficult to master that Graham offered to substitute something else. Rudolf was not impressed—“Be comfortable,” he scoffed and, rising to a familiar Nureyev challenge, Margot made herself perform the step perfectly, dissolving into the floor “like silk.” Rudolf, in turn, was determined to work until he got things right; as one member of the company observed, “This was not a lark.” At first Graham had been intent on fusing their two styles, but Rudolf preferred “to stick to her, then meld the two.” He began to suspect, however, that what he was doing was not “really Graham,” and he was right. The Martha Graham of 1975 offering to make things easy for her dancers rather than hurling philosophic edicts and mocking their lack of passion, was not the Circe-like figure of before. This was the Disco Graham with aspirations of her own to be a superstar—appearing beside Rudolf and Margot, for example, in a glossy magazine promotion for Blackgama minks—and whose style, according to Joan Acocella, bore “not a shred of continuity” with that of her past.

  In 1969, at the age of seventy-four, Graham had given her final performance, the subsequent deprivation of not dancing turning her into a bitter alcoholic, so self-destructive that she twice came close to death. In 1972, after her second collapse, she began to rehabilitate herself, and it was around this time that Ron Protas, a young photographer, came into the picture. Making himself indispensable to Graham, Protas encouraged her to make a complete break with her former life, a renaissance that required the elimination of the original Graham image from her company’s performances. “This was not just a new perio
d in Graham’s life. It really was a new life.… One by one the veterans left, and Protas took their place as Graham’s primary adviser.” Graham had made only four short pieces in the six years since she retired, and Protas got her working again, seeing an association with an international star as a way of capitalizing on her new phase. Graham, he told Rudolf, had become disillusioned with modern dance, which she felt had become as conservative and stagnant as ballet had been when she first began her revolution. Now was the moment for change; she wanted to begin fusing both genres, and would even consider ballets being performed by her company.

  Lucifer premiered on June 19, and the celebrity audience included ex-Graham pupils Woody Allen and Betty Ford, who had paid up to five thousand dollars for a ticket. As a result of spraining his ankle before he arrived in New York, Rudolf wore a bandage that seemed to cover more flesh than his costume, which consisted of a gold jockstrap designed by Halston. Studded with Tiffany jewels, it was as ornate as the joke one given to him by the Canadian dancers, and yet, as Arlene Croce wrote in her review, Rudolf did not appear ridiculous. “The element of camp in his personality frees him for incongruous undertakings such as this.” Incandescently lit, his hair “blown out like an angel by William Blake,” he looked absolutely stunning as the ballet opened, the men surrounding him falling backward as if blinded by his brilliance. The Lucifer choreography itself was considered to be not much more than a recapitulation of all Graham’s other tortured-hero roles, Rudolf’s interpretation described as “a passable portrayal in a Graham work which is itself barely passable.” But the fifty-six-year-old Margot fared even less well with the critics. Clive Barnes decided to remain tactfully doubtful about her involvement. Rudolf himself had no delusions about the enterprise—“a publicity stunt with me and Margot, Martha, Betty Ford, Woody Allen and Halston.… It was all like an MGM promotion.” Nevertheless, this was just the beginning of an intermittent, decade-long association with Martha Graham, and his repertory eventually included her few master roles for men.

  Rudolf had spent most of the summer in New York, where Wallace had been living and working and where wealthy acquaintances had offered him a room in their Upper East Side house. Elena Rostropovich, the cellist’s daughter, lived on the top floor, and it was through her that Wallace had met the millionaire benefactor Howard Gillman, who had put up four-fifths of the money for a new film—a live-action porno venture called More, More, More. It was Rudolf who had arranged for Wallace to come to New York. “He thought it would be more creative and stimulating than L.A.” And never more so than now. The city had become a bohemia, a melting pot of the performing and graphic arts, where dance was no longer confined to proscenium stages but had spilled into galleries, lofts, and churches. The performers themselves were more liberated than ever before, often not formally trained and required only to perform everyday movements without regard to grace or technical skill. “Why do grands battements when you can push a mattress round the room and carry a pot of paint?” quipped the choreographer Murray Louis, who often saw Rudolf at these postmodern happenings. “All over Soho the Loft scene was opening up, and Rudolf went everywhere—he loved watching this stuff. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, and people were so flattered that this giant took it seriously. That same freedom permeated everything. It was just a very wild, indulgent, careless, promiscuous period.”

  The Golden Age of Promiscuity, the gay world called it, when, as Edmund White has written, “life was radically different from anything before unless we go back to The Satyricon of Petronius.” A seasoned habitué of the infamous bathhouses—St. Marks, the Club Baths, and the Everard (“Ever Hard”)—Rudolf took Wallace along with him to the Club Baths one night. With anonymous multiple encounters becoming “the new reality” of urban gay life, Wallace knew that he would have to accommodate Rudolf if their relationship was going to work. “I’d never been to the baths before, and as chance would have it, I was very successful and he wasn’t. People recognized him and were intimidated. I’d say, ‘Well, Rudolf, he was fine with me!’ ” Soon a regular himself of New York’s “venereal boiler rooms,” Wallace got hepatitis at exactly the time the Royal Ballet was in town, and every dancer in the company had to get a shot of gamma globulin, as the virus, which attacks the liver, can be life-threatening. The night before he was diagnosed, Wallace and Margot had eaten food from each other’s plates, and she had flown straight to Panama the next day. “We tried to track her down to warn her, and finally succeeded, but she paid no attention.” “Gamaglobulin gobbledygook,” Margot had laughed. “I’m not going to worry about it!” The Goslings had not been quite so laissez-faire. “Tell your Hepatite friend that we had our haemoglobbery shots and feel fine,” Nigel wrote on July 31. “How is he? He must be careful or he can wreck his liver for good, eg no alcohol at all for months.”

  Rudolf and Wallace were then staying with Douce in Villefranche, where the atmosphere between the two men was increasingly tense. “Sex was a problem. We were both very aware that I still might be infected, so that side of things was just a mess.” Rudolf kept complaining to Douce that Wallace did not understand him, and she remembers how he began ostentatiously “to kind of flirt with people” in Wallace’s presence. One was a youth their mutual friend Jimmy Douglas describes as “someone very special,” a fellow guest at a grand party on Cap d’Ail. With long hair, sleepy brown eyes, full lips, and hippie-chic clothes, Patrice was a Rive Gauche icon—“a kind of star,” whom Rudolf had instantly homed in on. When Wallace went upstairs he was confronted with exactly the scene he had been expecting: “Rudolf fucking with a Frenchman.”

  Well, I saw red with rage.… I thought it was a cliché. But no. Well, actually, you don’t see red, you see pink. Everything just went totally pink, and I remember when he came back downstairs, I picked him up—my adrenaline was really pumping—and threw him across the room. He crashed into the bar … glasses, bottles flying everywhere, and I left the party in a very dramatic sweep.

  Unhurt but very groggy, Rudolf was dragged out of the house by Douce, who half carried him on her shoulder. Wallace, meanwhile, drove up into the hills:

  I wandered around there for a couple of days, and then I think we ran into each other at the Rocks—this cruising place in Nice, where I don’t think anything much was said. Soon after that I went back to New York, and that was pretty well the end of our romantic relationship.… I don’t remember him being angry with me.… I think he understood that I just couldn’t live with him the way he needed—touring with him and not having a life of my own.

  Feeling that he had become too fond of Wallace, Rudolf may also, as Terry Benton believes, have actively pushed him away. “My view is that Rudolf was afraid. Maybe he was thinking, Here’s Erik again—No thank you.” Rudolf himself, in answer to Lynn Barber’s question about why he could not live with anyone, said, “I’m too problematic, too independent … one wants to, but then it’s too painful, it’s too dangerous. One cannot share, a dancer cannot share life with anybody. No go.” And talking sometime later with Linda Maybarduk, a Canadian dancer who had become a friend, Rudolf insisted that he was entirely to blame for the breakup with Wallace. “I expect people to be there for me, and when they need me I can’t be there for them. Until I stop dancing I won’t be able to have a permanent relationship again.”

  And how much longer would that be? Since 1973 Rudolf had been dancing with a permanent tear in his leg muscle; he had destroyed his Achilles tendons by years of landing too heavily; he had heel spurs; the bones were chipped—so that even basic walking gave him pain. When he emerged from his dressing room, slowly limping in his clogs and full-length bathrobe, he looked more like a hospital patient than a ballet star, often making straight for the special chair put aside for him in the wings. He now employed a full-time physical therapist to accompany him on his travels. “Without him I could not get on,” he told Nigel. “I am at the end of my teeter [tether].” Luigi Pignotti was working in an exclusive health club in Milan
when one afternoon he received a call asking him to go to the Hotel Continental to give Rudolf Nureyev a massage. He had not heard of the dancer, but the recommendation had come from the conductor Zubin Mehta, one of his clients, and, despite the suspicious “slit, cat-eyed look” from Rudolf on their first meeting, the two men struck up an immediate, wordless rapport:

  I found Rudolf in very bad condition because he had a problem with his calf. Both calves were like wood. And on top of this he was a very nervous person, so the body all the time was very hard. I worked on each foot for twenty minutes. Rudolf was totally abandoned. He say he pay me double what I ask, and after I learned how stingy he was—I realized he must really have liked me. “Come back tomorrow,” he said. And then he start to ask me how much salary I made a month. And before he left Milano he say, “Do you want to work for me?”

  Wanting Luigi to accompany him on the Canadian tour of the United States, Rudolf had instructed Sol Hurok to “treat him well,” which in monetary terms amounted to six hundred dollars a week with a thirty-dollar-per diem. A fair deal, as Luigi would double as a bodyguard if necessary: Murray Louis recalled an incident in a New York saloon bar when “someone got wise-assed” with Rudolf. “Luigi walked up to this guy and laid a hand on his shoulder and the guy crumpled—just from the strength of that arm.” The same power was required to penetrate Rudolf’s muscles, now as gnarled and compacted as an ancient olive trunk, during the forty-five-minute massage he was given every afternoon. This was preceeded by a two-hour siesta and followed by a scorching hot bath, while the rest of the time Luigi would shadow Rudolf, carrying a bulging shoulder bag stuffed with bandages. “So,” Rudolf admitted, “it’s always bandages, heelpads forever.”

  When Glen Tetley took Rudolf backstage to meet Murray Louis, then touring London, he had watched entranced as the choreographer removed a bandage from his foot. “In those few minutes we talked silently, we talked foot talk.” “How do you do that?” Rudolf asked, and Louis promised to show him how he made the special bandage he used when the skin on his feet split. Rudolf had been wanting for some time to work with Louis, a descendant not of Martha Graham but (through his teacher Alwin Nikolais) of Mary Wigman, the 1920s German expressionist. Linking him with Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham, Rudolf saw Louis as a choreographer “for male dancers in particular. They invent strange movements and enrich [them] to incredible degree.” As Louis himself admits, his knowledge of ballet was nonexistent. He would say, “The leg is up behind you” if he wanted an arabesque, but being exceptionally smart and fun to be with, he soon became as much of a soul mate as a collaborator. “We’re comfortable with each other,” Louis once remarked. “We challenge each other.” Choreographing Moments, his first piece for Rudolf, Louis says that he spent most of their time teaching Rudolf to get his “long heroic spine” to move fluently. “The torso can’t be supple when the legs are locked. But Rudolf’s legs were trained to secure him all the time, so I had to choreograph the leg action to go with it. He learned that, but it didn’t come naturally. He would bend his knees when it should have been an extension of the chest—not a knee movement.”