Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  *Art historian David Scrase vividly remembers Rudolf’s parodying Graham in Margot’s dressing room. “He came in nude except for a plastic laundry bag, and ‘yearned and yearned’ as Margot ticked him off.”

  *Rudolf had enjoyed hearing that when Margot asked rising star Fernando Bujones to dance with her, he had come back and solemnly replied, “I’m afraid my mother says you’re too old for me.”

  *In a letter dated January 22, 1974, Sandor Gorlinsky tells Rudolf about an earlier feature film offer—an approach by Michael Powell, who wanted Rudolf to costar with Omar Sharif in Taj Mahal, a project that never saw the light. “It sounds a super film with some ballet, but not a ballet film, and it may open the road for some future prospects.”

  *Though when Lord Snowdon, commissioned to take photographs on set, sent one of his assistants with stills for Rudolf to approve, the dancer took one transparency and stabbed it right through with his ballpoint, scoffing, “Eyes like elephant arseholes.”

  *Elwes did in fact commit suicide in September 1975.

  16 THIS THING OF DARKNESS

  New York’s “Culture of the Night” was inaugurated in the spring of 1977, when Bianca Jagger made her legendary appearance on a white horse at the newly opened Studio 54. Wearing white with Manolo Blahnik stilettos, she was led by a near-naked youth whose black skin glittered with silver dust. For one defining moment Bianca’s birthday party focused media attention on an unknown West 54th Street discotheque much as the Summer of Love had blazoned the name of Haight-Ashbury exactly a decade before. Owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager transformed an old off-Broadway theater, staking out a huge parquet dance floor with strobe-lit tubular columns, leaving the original balconies as a seating area, and implementing a shamelessly partisan door policy. Ruled by whim as much as aesthetic principles, it granted entry to “one big mix” of revelers from pretty preppy couples, visiting English aristocrats, models, fashion designers, and pop celebrities and, incongrously, to such distinguished figures as concert pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Regulars included the Studio eccentrics—Disco Sally, a septuagenarian who loved to dance; a Jewish couple in Nazi uniform; a Harpo Marx character with HERPES VIRUS inscribed on his costume; and Rollerina, “supposedly a prim Wall Streeter by day,” whose signature rollerskates were worn with a ballgown and tiara. Friends of the owners, among whom were the core group of VIPs—Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol, and Truman Capote—were fenced into their own private sanctuary, though Capote preferred people watching from the DJ’s booth above the dance floor. “Isn’t it too bad that Proust didn’t have something like this?” he exclaimed.

  Rudolf had danced with Rollerina, spent the whole of one Friday night at the club, walking out into the sun with Capote the following morning, and yet Studio 54 was not really his scene. He enjoyed eyeing and propositioning the coquettish, mostly gay busboys bobbing about in nothing but silk baseball shorts and sneakers. And it was a useful way of impressing potential conquests, sweeping them past the implacable Marc and his fellow bouncers on the door, and introducing them to the likes of Halston and Martha Graham. But Rudolf had never liked disco dancing or the drug and soft-core-sex culture that went with it. He had no intention of taking advantage of the “best things” served in the VIP lounge—the Thai sticks, Quaaludes, and cocaine (the club’s motif was the man in the moon snorting “snow” from a spoon)—any more than he would have joined the exhibitionists flaunting their naked genitalia on the dance floor or carrying out Kama Sutra antics on the balcony. “You would look around and you’d see somebody’s back,” said one observer. “And then you’d see little toes twinkling behind their ears.”

  Commenting on her visit to Studio 54, Lillian Carter, the former president’s mother, said, “I don’t know if I was in heaven or hell. But it was wonderful!” To Rudolf, however, it was nothing. In the sulfurous backrooms of the downtown fetish bars, which he far preferred, the predators in their black leather or jockstraps, army boots, and nipple clamps made Studio’s bouncy busboys seem as innocuously teasing as Playboy bunnies. The Mineshaft on Washington Street was a seventies corroboration of Shakespeare’s “Hell is empty, / And all the devils are here!”* In almost total darkness, men pressed themselves to a wall pierced with crotch-high “glory holes,” or wandered into an amber-lit labyrinth of barren rooms, their walls and floors made of concrete blocks that could be hosed down daily. “You’d glance in and see whips and chains, or somebody lying butt-up waiting to be fucked.”

  Meanwhile, at the Anvil nearby on Tenth Avenue, the entertainment witnessed by Wallace one Sunday night was “a guy whose act was to be fist-fucked on the bar. And that was in the front room.” Emerging at 2 a.m. into the meatpacking district was, he said, “too Dante-esque,” the sidewalks splattered like Jackson Pollock canvases with fresh blood, and “huge, dangling, slabs of raw meat coming at you” as carcasses lurched along moving overhead hooks from the trucks to the warehouses. The nightly row of trucks was another sex destination for Rudolf, either there or parked farther afield by the wharves at the Hudson end of Christopher Street. To Edmund White the immense expanse of rotting piers was like a vast ruined cathedral: “We were isolated men at prayer, that man by the font (rainwater stagnant in the lid of a barrel), and this one in a side chapel (the damp vault), that pair of celebrants holding up a flame near the dome, those communicants telling beads or buttons pierced through denim.”

  To Rudolf, however, sex was sex, and only dance warranted any form of consecration. “Stage is a cathedral,” he once said, and morning class was his rite of purification, its daily articulation of first position his own genuflection and sign of the cross. “There’s almost a fanatical religious quality about it,” agrees Violette Verdy. “Dance is Rudolf’s great purifying, sacred touchstone. That is his faith.”

  In March, Rudolf had made his New York debut as the “always white, always pure, always innocent” Pierrot Lunaire, a role he had long coveted. His conversation with Margot for her Magic of Dance television series expresses his fascination with this commedia dell’arte figure, “a kind of spiritual being,” whom we first see suspended like an acrobat on Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s scaffolding abstraction of Pierrot’s tower.

  He’s soaking in moonlight; getting drunk on moonbeams, being tickled by it. He’s absolutely in delirium.… His tower is his home and he protects it and caresses it with the joy of innocence.… Later, Brighella and Columbine, they rob him of his tower … they take his personality, they take his dress, his hat, his jacket … and all his whiteness also disappears. So he loses his innocence. He dies many times, but he comes back to life.

  Pierrot’s spiritual degeneration was, Rudolf believed, akin to his own situation since arriving in the corrupting West—a view Ninette de Valois shared. “There was an innocence about his dedication when he first came out of Russia that invested his performances with an unforgettable detachment and purity far removed from the screaming fanatics that surrounded him,” she wrote in her memoir, Step by Step, also published in 1977. “But now he is their slave, and travels and dances where they bid.” This was the reason Glen Tetley had withheld his ballet from Rudolf, feeling that an international superstar could never portray Pierrot’s qualities of innocence and insecurity. According to Flemming Flindt, the dancer and choreographer who was then artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet, Rudolf “went behind Glen’s back” to ensure that he got the role. Discovering that Flindt had an open contract with Tetley to cast whomever he wanted in Pierrot Lunaire, Rudolf had invited the Dane and several of his dancers to be part of his “Friends” season: “In New York they hate Glen Tetley, and I managed to persuade him to stage Pierrot on Broadway with Rudolf. I said, ‘It’s a good chance for you, Glen. They’re not going to pan your ballet with Nureyev in it.’ And little by little he realized how good Rudolf was.”

  Tetley, who had put a lot of autobiographical detail into the role, agrees that he soon began to see the extent to which Rudolf was responding to many of the same things. “Pierrot
is, above all, a dreamer, an outsider. It’s why I had the idea of putting him up in space. Later, I realized the enormity in Rudolf of the loner: He’d left everything behind—his family, his country, his language.” Working with the dancer in London during the Valentino period, he found him in extraordinarily good physical shape, impressively strong in his upper body, but struggling to submerge his own personality into that of Pierrot. “I had to work on him to show vulnerability,” recalls Tetley, who began by teaching Rudolf the principals of Oriental technique. “You have to empty out everything inside you, to give over being you. You go into the deepest subconscious areas and remain suspended there.” In the New York performances Rudolf was “wonderful,” he says—“He was Ariel, he was pure”—but later the dancer began playing to the audience and “doing things in a surface way” that disappointed Tetley. In his Magic of Dance Pierrot (filmed for TV in 1978), Rudolf is dismayingly winsome, with wide-open eyes and mouth opening and shutting “as if hungering for someone to kiss,” having to feign virtues he was long past feeling.

  This duplicity—the glimpse of worldliness beneath the Pierrot mask—is brilliantly captured in a portrait by the American realist painter Jamie Wyeth. Entitled Nureyev—Purple Scarf it shows Rudolf wearing full stage makeup with street clothes, something Wyeth says he was then in the habit of doing. His painted face is still that of Pierrot, and yet with its haunted expression is far more reminiscent of Dirk Bogarde’s Von Aschenbach in the final scene of Death in Venice, whose white skin, khol-lined eyes, and lips ripe as strawberries are a desperate attempt to conceal age, decay, and mortality. “That was what totally intrigued me about Rudolf,” says Wyeth. “The pathos, the split personality.” The artist had planned a whole series inspired by “this mix of theater and real life,” but Rudolf forbade him to continue, so that it was only after the dancer’s death that Wyeth was able to “revisit” the painting. “Which I did with a wonderful freedom.”

  Watching Rudolf apply his Pierrot makeup was, Wyeth says, “what triggered my thing,” an obsession that resulted in more than thirty small-scale studies. When he had first approached the dancer three years earlier, Rudolf had refused to cooperate, and Wyeth had turned for help to Lincoln Kirstein—“the only ballet person I knew.” A close friend of his father, the painter Andrew Wyeth, Kirstein had commissioned the sixteen-year-old Jamie to paint him in 1965. The result is such a masterly evocation of his patron’s eagle profile and awe-inspiring presence that, in Kirstein’s view, it immediately established Jamie as the finest American portrait painter since John Singer Sargent (a pronouncement he makes in his introduction to the catalog of the first Wyeth exhibition, at New York’s Knoedler Gallery in 1966). Encouraging the handsome prodigy to work in a room on the top floor of his Nineteenth Street town house, Kirstein was, as Jamie realized, “completely beguiled” by him, and remained so over the next decades. But when asked to use his influence to persuade Rudolf to change his mind, Kirstein had flown into one of his rages. “Why are you interested in Nureyev?” he demanded. “He’s a star and nothing to do with dance.” After Kirstein had tried to sabotage the project, Jamie “pursued it elsewhere,” by which time Rudolf, presumably discovering the Kirstein connection for himself, had agreed to collaborate. “That was in the back of his mind. He was very aware of these things: what people could do for him.” Certainly, in Rudolf’s philosophy, there was “always some reciprocal factor. You have to do this, and then you can do that. It’s always tit for tat. Life is tit for tat.”

  Jamie had suggested Warhol’s Factory as a place to work (where the two artists had completed portraits of each other the year before), but Rudolf refused to sit for him there.* “Something about Warhol bothered him. ‘He’s so ugly,’ he said. ‘Why do I want to be there?’ ” So Jamie “just bird-dogged him around,” catching Rudolf in his hotel room, dressing room, or ballet studio during the March ’77 Nureyev and Friends season. “To me a portrait is not so much the actual painting, but just spending the time with the person, traveling with him, watching him eat.… It’s really osmosis.” And it was also “the act of recording”; Wyeth wanted to “record this creature” with the kind of clinical exactitude he had applied to dissecting bodies while studying anatomy at a Harlem hospital morgue. Employing calipers to get the proportions correct—“tools of torture,” Rudolf called them—he focused on the dancer’s face and naked torso, using the background color of his tan board for flesh, contrasted with white highlights and dark washes. Rudolf had not liked the first of the large portraits, Profile in Fur, so Jamie and his wife had taken it to Lincoln Kirstein for another opinion. “There wasn’t great approval,” Phyllis Wyeth noted in her diary, but an exchange she had with Kirstein that night provided exactly the kind of benefit to himself that Rudolf had foreseen:

  I then asked Lincoln why hadn’t he ever had Nureyev dance for the New York City Ballet. He was full of excuses—They had no stars; They couldn’t have him.… Now that American Ballet Theatre had Baryshnikov—Balanchine only had girl stars. But it ended up with Lincoln saying if he had his way he would have him tomorrow. I really think something may come of the conversation.

  As indeed it did. An invitation soon followed for dinner at Kirstein’s. “It was just the four of us,” recalls Jamie, “and Lincoln was wonderful to him.” Finding himself left “quite cold” by Baryshnikov, Kirstein was to become so enamored of Rudolf that he would go to see Valentino ten times. Also, knowing that the fee for the Nureyev Apollo had virtually saved the School of American Ballet, he began regarding Rudolf as “the next heir apparent,” hoping to persuade him to take charge of Balanchine’s school. “Finally,” remarks Jamie, “Lincoln was able to see him for the remarkable creature that he was.”

  Rudolf had first met Phyllis Wyeth, a tall, elegant blond, at Elaine’s restaurant, when he had been surprised to see her reaching under the table for the crutches she needed to walk. At the age of twenty-one her neck had been broken in a car accident, but she had never allowed her disability to interfere with her life. “You have spirit and enthusiasm,” Rudolf told her admiringly that night, and he began inviting her to performances, getting his masseur, Luigi, to put a special chair in the wings. “Last night I went to see Pierrot again,” her diary continues. “I saw R warming up before his performance—he casts an eye & smile just to see if you are watching.” At Rudolf’s suggestion, she joined him and Martha Graham at an Iranian Consulate party and, a night or so later, at a postperformance dinner at the Russian Tea Room with American Ballet Theatre principal dancers Natalia Makarova, Cynthia Gregory, and Lucia Chase. Not being part of their world, she “hadn’t known what the hell they were all talking about,” and admits she began to wonder why this great star was being so kind to her.

  While Rudolf had genuinely warmed to Phyllis, telling Maude how tremendously brave and determined she was, he was also well aware that she could prove useful to him. “One thing he wants is to get his money out of Europe and is looking for a farm to buy,” she noted at the time. Within weeks of meeting him, Phyllis was arriving at Rudolf’s suite at the Pierre with photographs of possible properties in Virginia and Pennsylvania, where the Wyeths themselves had a farm. Late one night after a performance Rudolf had driven to Chadd’s Ford to find Phyllis still waiting up to make him supper, and had felt immediately at home. Looking up at the collection of baskets hanging from the kitchen ceiling, he had remarked, “This is for cheese, that’s for potatoes, and that one’s to sift wheat”—the only visitor, she says, who had ever commented on their use. “They were like the ones he remembered from Russia.” The next morning Rudolf was already sitting in the dining room expecting to be served breakfast, but when he sent the toast back for the crusts to be cut off, Phyllis had exploded: “Rudolf, if you stay here you cut off your own crusts!” She had passed the test—forthright enough to earn his respect (“I was never scared of him—whoever the hell he was”), and from that day on he would come into the kitchen in his clogs and make his own tea.

  C
hadd’s Ford looks out across the valley of the Brandywine River with the railway tracks so close that each passing locomotive rattled the windows of the old house. “I want farm with railroad through it; river and barns,” Rudolf had announced, describing, in effect, the Wyeths’ own property. “Phyllis was so crazy about him that I thought, ‘My God—she’s going to give it to him!’ ” The more Rudolf went there the more he grew to love Chadd’s Ford: riding with Phyllis in summer in her horse-drawn carriage along the riverbank wearing one of her straw hats strewn with roses; or down a muddy track in winter, exclaiming, “This is like road I took to banya once a week in Ufa!” One night when they were out in a big four-in-hand it started to snow, and the snowflakes settling on Rudolf’s fur hat and coat made him look like a character from Doctor Zhivago—“just fabulous, unbelievable—and of course he knew it.” If Phyllis was finally closer to Rudolf, Jamie, who nevertheless “adored him,” knew that he was there to work on his project. Rudolf was genuinely interested in the dynastic aspect of the artist’s talent (Jamie’s grandfather was the famous illustrator N. C. Wyeth), and enjoyed his encounters with the eccentric Andrew Wyeth, who appeared wearing a World War I uniform the first time they met.