Moments, an all-male work, also involving four young soloists from the Scottish Ballet Company, premiered on September 19, 1975, at a dance festival in Madrid, John Percival’s review noting the emphasis on the upper part of the body, especially hands and arms. Quirky fractured lines—hands moving one way, arms another—combined with unexpected stops and starts of energy is stock-in-trade Murray Louis style. “I never gave him anything that frustrated him, and if it was awkward I’d modify it.” Eliminating jumps and leaps, Moments was tailored for a mature male dancer, whose inevitable isolation from the four young men was made its subject matter, although the work ended with Rudolf being supported on their backs.
Suffering from arthritis exacerbated by a punishing whirl of foreign guest appearances, Margot had also been limping recently. In November 1975, when the two stars appeared together in Fonteyn & Nureyev in New York, one critic described Rudolf having “to support Fonteyn way beyond the call of duty.” They were performing Amazon Forest, a 1975 Ashton duet originally made for Margot and David Wall, in which the movements had been specially designed to accommodate the last vestiges of her technique, the ballerina’s raised leg immediately held in place by her partner. In Marguerite and Armand, however, Margot’s arabesques were noticeably “left dangling,” and the program itself was poorly presented with an inept orchestra and canned music for the Béjart and Louis works. Sympathetic about the financial drain of Tito’s medical expenses, Rudolf tried to help by including Margot in his lucrative Broadway venture: “Well, Royal Ballet doesn’t hire us together.” And although he had gone through a phase of being “a bit browned off” about her dancing with increasingly younger rival partners* (complaining to Nigel that she was “trying to put me down”), their mutual respect had never wavered. “Genuine respect.… The oneness of thoughts; the oneness of aim.” They were still each other’s best critics—“After every performance I went to her and checked and re-checked”—and Margot was the only person with whom Rudolf was openly affectionate. “There was a physical closeness between them,” says Misha Baryshnikov, who remembers seeing them sitting drinking coffee and cuddling in the Opera House canteen. “He adored her.” Margot had asked Rudolf once, “When my time comes, will you push me off the stage?” And he had answered, “Never.” For each there simply was no alternative: Life was real only onstage.
At the end of the year Rudolf rejoined Martha Graham, this time performing Lucifer not with Margot but with Janet Eilber, on whom most of the choreography had been worked out. The company was celebrating two centuries of America’s independence by performing dance dramas rooted in the American heritage: Graham’s classic Appalachian Spring (with the composer, Aaron Copland, conducting); and the world premiere of The Scarlet Letter, based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, viewed by Walter Terry as “a work-in-progress but also as a work-of-promise.” To Clive Barnes, Rudolf’s “fierceness of belief” in the repertoire that season made him closer than anyone else onstage to capturing the original spirit of Martha Graham. “I don’t claim to be an expert in modern dance,” Rudolf told Newsweek, “but I improve with each performance. And I take back into classical dance a new awareness of myself.”
And just as he had learned how to pace himself with Graham technique—at first, he said, “I was hammering away. I was plunging, going crazy”—Rudolf had also found a teacher in New York who had made him realize that ballet class did not have to be strenuous. Poached from Denmark by Balanchine to teach at his school, Stanley Williams helped dancers not to waste their energy but to channel it directly where it should be. “Working this way alleviated any injuries. He was like a healer, almost—all your aches and pains went away,” said Lynn Seymour, who maintains that “the great Stanley Williams completely changed my life.” A slight, wiry man who spoke in a near-inaudible murmur, Williams had Pushkin’s gift for teaching with a logic and simplicity that verged on genius. Pupils describe how he instilled the sparseness of Zen Buddhism into dance, reducing passages of movement down to an initial impulse. Edward Villella claims that studying exclusively with Williams for two months gave him an extra fifteen years of dancing, and Seymour also credits the teacher for giving her, a ballerina in her thirties, “a technique for the first time ever.” She had been introduced to Williams by Rudolf, who “had already hit the magic, and he knew what it would do for me. Stanley extended everyone’s careers.”
Watching Rudolf in class for the first time, Williams noticed his tendency to sit in preparations for too long, the teacher’s own characteristically Danish approach being to disguise the difficulties of technique. “Even the preparation for the next step is a movement.… I don’t use any flamboyant steps. I don’t believe in showing off. I don’t use strength unnecessarily.” It was Williams, Rudolf said, who made him understand the importance of linking one step with another—the “cantilena” effect that Baryshnikov found missing in his dancing—though to begin with Rudolf had found the classes much too fast.
I used to work very slow: tendu and close fifth … and very often onstage I would lose balance because I didn’t know how to stand on my feet. It’s a system which confirms that technique comes from the feet.… The deportment, proportion of the body, the movement of the arms … everything comes from the feet. In Russia you hold your arms and you get kind of stiff. It’s Balanchine who invented and taught that. He used to tell Violette Verdy, “You have to be like a bird on your toes. The toes and the feet have to become the most intelligent part of the body.”
To strengthen the metatarsals Williams would set innumerable battement tendu exercises, “like a racing car that has an rpm from 0 to 5,000,” says Robert Denvers, another disciple. “You warmed up fast because of the differentiation in rhythm from the first battement tendu to the last, and after twenty minutes you were ready to do doubles tours and entrechats six.” He remembers Rudolf being mesmerized by the syncopation and the counterpointing of the steps, so different from the Russians’ even, regular musicality. “After the age of thirty-five you start to have problems with the huge jumps, and this acceleration in class made Rudolf’s muscles feel great. He started working with more elasticity, more speed, more ease.”
But if Rudolf was now working more constructively in class, he was still determined to “beat the hell out of myself,” convinced that he danced his best on a second wind. The combination of what he called “that awful confrontation of body and will” with his grueling transatlantic schedule proved to be far too much for even Rudolf’s constitution to endure. Having danced in Paris while ill with pneumonia and a temperature of 103, he flew straight to Los Angeles to appear with American Ballet Theatre in his production of Raymonda. A doctor had stood by in the wings, and although Rudolf completed the performance, he had to be rushed to the hospital later that night—February 17, 1976. He did not return to the stage until late March, when he had never felt so lacking in stamina. “I had some very rough moments. It was frightening.” Six weeks later, however, when the Royal Ballet was at the Met, he had drawn on superhuman reserves of strength to pull himself back into form, Anna Kisselgoff writing that “The old Nureyev magic has returned.… [He] is dancing better than he has in years.”
It was, as Merle Park said, Rudolf’s “forced rest” that had brought about this resurgence, and he was soon to have the longest break from dancing of his career. In September 1975 the movie director Ken Russell had sent Rudolf a script based on the life of the silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino, offering him the cameo role of Nijinsky (who is supposed to have taught Valentino the tango). Not long afterward Russell and his wife, Shirley, the film’s designer, had appeared in Amsterdam, where Rudolf was performing, and proposed the title role instead.* Rudi van Dantzig remembers how hesitant Rudolf had been about stepping into such an unknown medium, but what eventually made up his mind was the chance it would give him “to quiet down.” “I thought it would force me into a vacation. I don’t like holidays, without dancing.… That would force me to rest the muscles.” And if Rudolf was n
ow considered “mature” as a dancer, in movie terms he was still young enough to play romantic leads. The role itself was extremely tempting. Valentino had been a dancer before he became an actor, his voice, like Rudolf’s, was not known, and both were renowned for their exotic, androgynous allure. The quality that most interested Rudolf, however, was Valentino’s way of moving. “He would hold still and just turn his head or move his hand to indicate an emotion.… In those days film actors were very jittery. Valentino was much slower, more sinuous in his movements.”
François Truffaut once remarked during an interview with David Daniel that he found it understandable that Rudolf had not yet starred in feature films because the primeval traits in his character made it almost impossible for him to play opposite other men. “He would have to be filmed in nature with animals as partners.” (This was precisely how Dino De Laurentiis and one of The Bible’s four directors, John Huston, had pictured Rudolf in 1964 when they offered him the role of the snake in the Garden of Eden for their planned epic. “He will slither down the tree,” Huston remarked. “He will be a man-serpent, a kind of hybrid, homo-reptile.”) Truffaut went on to tell Daniel that it was seeing Rudolf in the film of MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet that had given him the idea that a man could play the part of a near-animal. The result was the 1970 Truffaut classic L’Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child), based on an early nineteenth-century memoir about the efforts to assimilate a feral child into society, the film posing questions about what is intrinsically human in human nature. In the same year the director had made Domicile Conjugal (Bed and Board), in which the image of Rudolf is crucial to the film, so potent that he virtually becomes another character. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel, a young husband who has developed a passion for a Japanese girl who works with him. His pretty wife, Christine (Claude Jade), has a secret fantasy life of her own. When the couple are in bed he is reading Les femmes japonaises and her book is Rudolf’s Autobiography, and at a later point, when she is alone, she removes Antoine’s photograph from a frame on their bedside table and reveals the hidden picture of her idol. This ability to arouse powerful erotic feelings was exactly what Rudolf and Valentino shared: “He gave [the public] fantasies to take home with them. I suppose I give fantasy to people when I dance—and it’s not just restricted to women.”
Rudolf was thought to be so key to the Valentino project that he had been allowed to sign his contract even before undergoing a screen test. Prior to principal shooting, the plan was for him to have a fortnight’s “holiday” during which he would be available for costume fittings and coaching with lines. “But then, this holiday shrank from two weeks to one week, then to four days, then to none. So I flew directly to Spain from New York—and that flying day was my only day off.” At least the Almería location was by the sea and the weather was hot—far too hot for the English, but Rudolf was “rather happy,” swimming for an hour early each morning before arriving on set. “Everyone was amazed at my tenacity … not carrying on, and surviving it all.” And although he insisted on viewing every take on a videotape playback machine, he had relaxed the kind of obsessive control he maintained throughout the making of Don Quixote. On the whole Rudolf liked what he saw.* His beauty and charisma were relished by the camera and enhanced by his personal wardrobe—the djellabas, Spanish gaucho pants, gangster-style pinstripes, and rolled-up shirtsleeves—every frame in which he appeared as magnetic as an authentic Valentino still. Unfortunately, however, he was no more able to adapt his Russian accent to Valentino’s Italian American one than to modulate his powerful stage persona to the subtle requirements of the screen. And Russell did nothing to help, freely admitting that he did not know how to direct actors. Rudolf told friends that he felt “abandoned.”
He had never much liked Ken Russell (the reason Rudolf claimed to have got him “fired” from the Harry Saltzman Nijinsky project), but he admired the director’s style, finding it “full of invention and daring.” Combining a love of German expressionism with Hollywood slapstick, it frequently lapsed into the histrionic, but Rudolf felt this approach worked in some of the films; Tommy, he said, “mirrored properly that bombastic epoch.” In a discussion with French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, Rudolf remarked of Russell, “The person is without doubt questionable, but he has a visual imagination that is unique.” And although he would fight the director over “stupid” lines in the script, he was trusting enough to agree to scenes that others would regard as excessive or exploitative. The main problem was not having the guidance he badly needed. Russell, who was “very keen on the girls,” appeared interested only in his female star.
Better known as a singer with the pop group the Mamas and the Papas, Michelle Phillips had been cast as the beautiful Natacha Rambova, Valentino’s second wife. Influenced by Bakst, Poiret, and Erté, Rambova was a gifted Art Deco stage designer, and had also been a ballet dancer—“a very fascinating type,” in Rudolf’s view. “Very temperamental, very cunning and intelligent.” Phillips, on the other hand, he found “hard and empty,” her lack of humor and lanky, fashion-model looks so unappealing that it made him physically recoil during their naked love scenes. “I hope you understand that I have no interest in women,” Rudolf told her at their first meeting, and relations between them deteriorated to such a degree that there was an ugly exchange of blows one day, which brought filming to a halt. “Just because you play cunt in film, doesn’t mean you have to be cunt in life,” Rudolf infamously remarked to Phillips, who remembers their encounter as the most miserable working experience of her life.
Valentino‘s other leading actresses, by contrast, were charmed by him. With Felicity Kendal (cast as screenwriter June Mathis), whose parents had run a touring Shakespeare company in India, Rudolf had “endless conversations” about Romeo and Juliet, which he was planning as his next production. Carol Kane, playing a kooky starlet, found him neither mean-spirited nor misogynistic but “so mischievous, so game, willing to try and fail”; while Leslie Caron, cast as silver screen star Alla Nazimova, proved most supportive of all—not only Rudolf’s main ally throughout filming but becoming a friend for life. “I was instantly touched by him, and by his tenderness. He was an extraordinarily intimate person.” Photographs taken the day Caron arrived on set for the first time capture their closeness, with Rudolf’s head resting on her shoulder displaying the inevitable complicity of dancers. Trained at the Paris Conservatoire, Caron was a deliciously gamine sixteen-year-old in Roland Petit’s Ballets de Champs-Élysées when Gene Kelly picked her to star with him in An American in Paris. An MGM contract and several box-office hits followed, among them Daddy Long Legs and Gigi, in which she appeared, respectively, opposite Fred Astaire, and Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan. Rudolf, she says, was “naively interested” in her Hollywood costars, particularly Astaire, and as if echoing her much-quoted declaration that she was not a ballet dancer but a hoofer, he used a tabletop dance in Valentino as an opportunity to improvise a convincingly dapper Astaire routine. To Caron, Rudolf had “the makings of great star,” and he was just as enthusiastic about her. Her Nazimova, a deliberate send-up of the Yalta-born actress known as America’s Eleonora Duse, made Rudolf laugh “like mad. It is completely different image than what people think of … absolutely contrary to Gigi.”
“Kenrussellisé à mort” was the phrase a French reviewer coined to describe Caron’s portrayal, one she agrees was pushed to its limit. “The Fellini of the North,” as she calls Russell, wanted everything to be overdramatized. “He only behaved in superlatives at that point in his career.” It is not surprising, then, that the film’s most effective scenes are those without dialogue. “All my films are choreography,” Russell once said, and his directing technique draws considerably on his own early dance training. “Most directors start from the text,” Caron has said. “With Russell it’s all visual.” In Valentino the star’s prowess as a dancer is emphasized time and time again. Rambova’s photograph of her lover posing as Nijinsk
y in L’ Après-midi d’un faune is enacted by Rudolf, naked except for a thong of vine leaves and patterned paint, and showing what Arlene Croce called “tantalizing” glimpses of authentic Faun plastique. The Valentino-Nijinsky tango lesson (one of several different tango sequences) becomes a memorable pairing of Rudolf with Anthony Dowell, the former stepping aside to allow his young rival to end their session with a Nureyev-style blaze of balletic virtuosity.
As it happened, Rudolf had by no means abandoned dancing for the duration of Valentino. In addition to replacing an injured Dowell for a number of performances at Covent Garden, he often worked until late at night, either trying out ideas for Romeo and Juliet on a small group of dancers in Donmar Studios, or learning Pierrot Lunaire, which Glen Tetley was finally allowing him to perform. After rising at 4 a.m. and filming at Elstree Studios all day (the studio had rented him a suite at Grosvenor House Hotel because Fife Road was too far away), he would be driven back into London and rehearse for several hours—amazing Tetley with his stamina. During the day he never took a lunch break but used the time to do his own training, surviving on sweet tea brought to him in a flask by Luigi. During a boxing sequence filmed inside the Blackpool Tower, Rudolf, wearing cobwebby woolen leg warmers and watched by a handful of extras, used the rope of the ring to do an hour’s barre practice to the accompaniment of Chopin Nocturnes crackling from a tape recorder.
Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342) Page 66