Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Back in New York, it had not been long before Rudolf began taking control of the Wyeth sittings. “I think Jamie has caught his interest as he has become opinionated on what is right or wrong,” wrote Phyllis. “The right leg was turned out too much making everything stiff … that ‘James’ must put on the neck & head right.” But if Jamie had been allowed nearly two hundred sessions in which to complete the Kirstein portrait, he had “an incredibly difficult time” with the dancer, who was in town for only three weeks and had no time to pose.

  Rudolf spent April 1977 in London working with the Festival Ballet on his new production of Romeo and Juliet, and in early May he returned to America to appear before Congress in Washington. The Helsinki accords were due to be reviewed in Belgrade that summer, and in a letter to the New York Times on March 31, Rudolf had written a plea for freedom of movement and human rights to be observed.* “I feel that I have created only goodwill for the country of my birth, and I urge the Soviet authorities to demonstrate their sincerity at Helsinki by allowing my family to visit me.” The Washington tribunal had come about as a result of Armen Bali’s petitioning on his behalf, and she had paid for her attorney “to teach Rudolf how to talk,” but nevertheless he dreaded the cross-examination. Conservatively dressed in a brown turtleneck sweater and blazer, he appeared extremely nervous and spoke in low, hesitant tones, his voice so inaudible at times that Representative Dante Fascell had to tell him he could not be heard. The hearing had created an enormous amount of publicity, covered by all the television news channels—but to no avail. At the beginning of June, Armen received the following letter from the Bilateral Relations Office of Soviet Union Affairs: “The White House and Department of State are following this matter closely, and our Embassy in Moscow and Consulate General in Leningrad are in touch with the family. We have made representations to the Soviet authorities in support of their exit visa applications, but unfortunately the Soviet Government has not relented to date.”†

  Launching that summer’s Nureyev Festival at the London Coliseum, Rudolf’s full-length Romeo and Juliet may have been choreographed in record time, but it was, in fact, a ballet he had been mentally preparing for years. In August 1973 Nigel had received a postcard from Wallace in La Turbie with the news that Rudolf had been reading Shakespeare’s play and two books of criticism. Wanting to let himself “be carried by MacMillan’s choreography,” Rudolf hadn’t read the text when he first performed Romeo, but he had noted several titles—a “formidable” list of books he now sent Nigel to track down. Many were out of print, but in a long letter Nigel included the notes he had made on two of them, Not Wisely but Too Well, by F. N. Dickey and Shakespeare’s Young Lovers by E. E. Stoll (“A silly book debunking play”), as well as his own summary of the prose narratives, plays, and poems in Olin H. Moore’s The Legend of Romeo and Juliet—an account of the origins of the story before it reached Shakespeare. Dozens more pages arrived with quotations from famous Shakespearians, general notes on key themes, and personal thoughts from the “Useless Suggestions Dept.” But it was the long introduction to Nigel’s own Penguin New Shakespeare edition of the play that proved fundamental in setting the tone of the ballet.

  “The mutual passion of Juliet and Romeo is surrounded by the mature bawdry of the other characters,” writes T. J. B. Spencer. “In this highly-sexed world … the innocence of the lovers is emphasized.” Rudolf would follow this idea to the letter, making Juliet’s Nurse a lusty young woman caught in a compromising clinch by her charge, and hinting at an adulterous complicity between Lady Capulet and Tybalt. “Juliet’s family is very libertine,” he told Nigel. “I want her to see her father’s hand on her mother’s crotch, the boys pushing the girls against the wall.” More crucially it was Spencer’s attention to the interplay of chance and choice, fate and character, that struck a chord, one quotation being emphatically underlined by Rudolf.

  Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,

  Shall bitterly begin his fearful date

  With this night’s revels.

  The idea of an outside force controlling his future was unthinkable to Rudolf, whose mantra throughout life was “You make your own luck.” He did, on the other hand, share the Elizabethan susceptibility to superstitions and auguries. “I have dream, like premonition. I used to know what is going to happen next day—where the dangers are coming. I just knew; I couldn’t prevent them. I used to kind of herald it in advance and say: well, that is going to happen.” To him fate was “the central thing” in Romeo and Juliet, and he decided to emphasize this by beginning and ending the ballet with a group of sinister cloaked figures playing dice (“Gods playing with human distini [sic]” he scrawled in the margin of the typed scenario).

  Almost all ballets of Romeo and Juliet are based on the libretto devised by its first choreographer, Leonid Lavrovsky. Thinking of ways to make his production different, Rudolf had initially wanted to use music from the period in which the story is set, but then reckoned that several hours of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century music might become “very tiresome.” The solution came from reading the play, and deciding that, instead of omitting the scenes which narrate the cause of the tragic climax, he was going to tell the full story. “For people who knew the play he wanted this to be a production that honored the original. And he wanted to explain to those who didn’t know the piece how it all came about.” Rudolf’s determination to prove that he had understood every nuance of Shakespeare’s imagery, including words “that were stumbling blocks” for him, would make the ballet overliteral at times—nowhere more so than act 3’s personification of Death who, in reference to Juliet’s avowal—“I’ll to my wedding bed, / And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead!”—really does appear onstage to have his way with her. As a consequence, the young lovers’ bedroom duet is completely superfluous, its desperately acrobatic movements an attempt to compensate for its lack of emotion.

  And yet it is Rudolf’s approach to Shakespeare as a Russian that makes his Romeo and Juliet so fascinating—its Slavic pessimism one that (to use his own description of Innokenty Smoktunovsky’s films of Hamlet and Lear) “is definitely not cups of tea!” His “bible” became a book by the Polish scholar Jan Kott—Shakespeare, Our Contemporary—which also views the plays through personal experience. Kott is, as Peter Brook remarks in his Preface, “the only writer on Elizabethan matters who assumes without question that every one of his readers will at some point or other have been woken by the police in the middle of the night.” And to Rudolf, Russia’s brutal social order was at one with the tyrannies of Elizabeth’s England, Kott’s “cruel and true” portrait of Shakespeare convincing him that Verona of the Renaissance and Elizabethan London “had in common sex and violence and were singularly close to another age: our own.”* His designer, Ezio Frigerio, and lighting designer, Jennifer Tipton, were told to construct a Verona “that was dark, anguished, dangerous, full of shadows,” so much so that the first-night audience could hardly distinguish one character from another.

  It had made sense for Rudolf to create his Romeo and Juliet for the London Festival Ballet, a company with which he had established an easy rapport while staging his Sleeping Beauty in 1975. His first Juliet was Patricia Ruanne, whose talent he had spotted when she was “a brand new corps de ballet baby” dancing in his Spoleto Raymonda. “There was a lot of affection there, a great tenderness,” says Frederic Jahn (then Werner), Pat’s Australian boyfriend, whom Rudolf had got to know from his seasons with Australian Ballet. The couple, now both principals with the Festival Ballet, together with two former Royal Ballet dancers, Nicholas Johnson and Elizabeth Anderton, had been happy to work late into the night after Rudolf returned from the set of Valentino. And although all four would be rewarded with leading roles (Johnson as Mercutio, Jahn as Tybalt, and Anderton as the Nurse), at the time nobody was quite sure which character they would be playing. “At first I did Paris, then Romeo, then Tybalt,” says Jahn. “Betty filled in as Lady Capulet. Then everything chang
ed around again.” This workshop atmosphere continued to a degree thoughout the making of the ballet, with Rudolf encouraging an improvisatory, Stanislavskian approach. “The death of Juliet was never choreographed,” Ruanne says. “Rudolf would say, ‘Explore. Ad lib.’ ” Nor would he allow the confrontation between Juliet and her parents to be rehearsed. “ ‘Don’t cook it,’ he said, because he wanted to create the kind of confusion you get in a family row, where everyone shouts and no one makes sense.”

  Rudolf’s choreographic style was just as experimental, as he intended to include the contemporary technique he had learned. Act 3’s oddly stilted quadrille for Lord and Lady Capulet, Paris, and Juliet was a nod to José Limón’s Moor’s Pavane, while the inspiration for Juliet’s off-balance whirling in the love duets derived from a film he had seen of Turkish dervishes, and from the principle of the spiral he had learned from Martha Graham. Pat Ruanne, who had had no training in modern technique, recalls how she was constantly falling over. “The center of weight is not the same when you’re on pointe. I watched and tried to imitate, but it was a hit-and-miss thing.”

  Rudolf had not passed on to Ruanne any of his background research, but he did insist that she reread the play, “and read it my way.” What he meant, of course, was a reinterpretation of the traditional romantic image of Juliet as “a pretty, drifting little thing”—a departure she admits was difficult for her at first. “I knew that I had to change my point of view and realize that she was the strength in the play.… Because if Rudolf had had his way, Juliet would have been a boy.”

  He had become fascinated with the Elizabethan tradition of boy actors playing women’s roles, as well as by the image of the androgyne in art and literature—girlish boys like Michelangelo’s Bacchus and Donatello’s David; boyish girls like Botticelli’s Flora, the master-mistress of the Sonnets. The multilayers of amorous disguise in Twelfth Night and As You Like It, where a boy dresses up as a girl, who disguises herself as a boy, was exactly the kind of ambiguity Rudolf wanted from Ruanne, a ballerina whose gamine delicacy belied her exceptional strength. “I tried my best to be a counter-role. Because as a woman, basically, I know I’m playing a boy playing a girl. It’s complicated … but it was a truly new approach.”

  A compromise of sorts was the way Rudolf choreographically reverses the genders. In the lovers’ first duet it is Juliet who takes the lead, Romeo always a step behind her, imitating her movements. Pat describes how she was made to share the load of partnering as if she were a man: “Two men dance together in a very different way, there’s an equal dispersal of strength, and of balance, a counterpoint. It’s why today’s Juliets find the pas de deux so difficult: You’re pulling into play muscles you don’t normally use; it’s a question of strength in the arms and wrists. You both take the weight; you both carry the can.”

  As a contrast to his “tough-cookie Juliet,” Rudolf envisaged Romeo as a much weaker, more indecisive person. “He is bottled up, probably a virgin.… Juliet releases his juices.” It was a notion influenced by the first Romeo and Juliet he had seen in the West—the 1961 version arranged for Paris Opéra by the German dancer Peter van Dyk, whose “gentle” Romeo he had liked and admired. When he danced the MacMillan ballet in which Romeo, as Rudolf remarked, is “a winner from the start,” he refused to convey any kind of passivity, but as the choreographer himself he faced a dilemma: “I see it one way. Public will not want to see that way. Public will want double assemblés,” he complained to Ruanne. “I felt that he had two Romeo and Juliets up his sleeve: one that he would dream to have done, and one that would bring the public in, the acceptable production.” Again Rudolf compromised, allowing Romeo a manège of spiraling turns as a climax to his most euphoric solo, but for much of the time “almost making himself invisible.” Now, as Jahn comments, “he knew the balance of the production depended on all of us.”

  For Rudolf the ballet was intensely personal and a reflection of the literature he had read. To the critics, however, its plethora of quotations, dense narrative, and relentless activity were excessive, and more than one of them expressed a longing for an occasional calm interlude of simple lyricism. Dancing twenty-five consecutive performances, Rudolf was not able to see the flaws, and although he would later make a number of changes, his Romeo and Juliet remains to this day something of a work in progress: “when good,” as James Monahan put it, “very, very good, when bad, horrid.”

  The Coliseum season included what Alastair Macaulay described as “one extraordinary week” (July 4–9, 1977) when Rudolf and Margot appeared in their last-ever Marguerite and Armand, and, performing the Corsaire duet with Natalia Makarova, he showed himself to be in sixties-style, “heart-stoppingly exultant” form: “Until and including that week, Nureyev was the greatest star I have ever seen.… The real crash came in the seventh and final week.… He was lurching forwards in arabesque every time.… His spine had lost its strength. Nor did it ever recapture its former power. Within months, his whole lustre seemed to drain away.”

  This was soon to happen, but not quite yet. But what became apparent over the next few months was a much greater disparity in the quality of Rudolf’s performances, verging from “uneven and uneasy” to “suddenly brilliant and dazzling.” On July 17 he flew with the Festival Ballet to Australia, and over the next three months (in the Philippines, America, and Canada), inspired some of the most exuberant reviews of his career. His return to Vienna in December was “triumphant,” his technique notably smoother than it had been two years before, his preparations “less forced and separate” (evidence of Stanley Williams’s influence). Martin Bernheimer remarking in the Los Angeles Times that Rudolf’s career had entered its “twilight zone,” apologetically retracts this a week later, confessing that the star had “made a liar” of him. In Venice, in March, partnering Elisabetta Terabust in Giselle, Rudolf’s dancing “seemed forced in the first act but found mysterious strength for the double cabrioles and tours en l’air of the second.” He was still capable of pulling off a consistently brilliant display in places where it really mattered. In April 1978, “roaring back into New York” “at his most thrilling old self,” Rudolf added the Corsaire duet to his Nureyev and Friends program to prove that he was “still perfectly capable of wondrous things.”

  While still in New York he appeared in a season of new modern ballets by Friends who had “choreographed for him.” Dancing Murray Louis’s work was in itself an elixir of longevity—“like having a ball of energy inside your body.” Vivace, his ten-minute solo to a Bach fugue, made no real technical demands, its movements echoing the variants and developments of the musical phrases; while Canarsie Venus, to Cole Porter melodies, provided Rudolf with a rare comic role. He performed this delightfully, although he had been “as corny as hell at first,” Murray recalls.” I did a lot to clean him up in terms of humor. He would purse his lips and deteriorate into cutesy. “Rudolf, don’t be cute,” I’d say, and he would cringe.” Toer van Schayk’s Faun was also a lighthearted piece, a modern reworking of Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun music, in which Rudolf is a factory janitor and his nymphs two assembly-line girls. Sauntering onstage with a trolley of detergents and suggestively polishing a horizontal pole, he then swaggers and lolls about while taking his lunch break, jokily alluding to Nijinsky’s famous pose by tilting his head back and sensuously feeding on a bunch of grapes. The piece was largely dismissed as “a feeble try at humor,” and the New York critics liked Rudi van Dantzig’s latest Nureyev vehicle, About a Dark House, even less. A Kafka-esque, psychosexual melodrama, it cast Rudolf as an intruder at a macabre dinner party, held aloft, dragged about, and left in total isolation at the end, stripped virtually naked while still in the company of the formally dressed guests.

  Learning the two new works in Amsterdam in March, Rudolf had insisted on adding to the program Four Schumann Pieces by Hans van Manen, whom he much admired. But by not giving himself enough time to prepare all three, he often turned up tired and confused from one rehearsa
l to another, “trying out steps from Faun during Schumann Pieces and rehearsing Dark House in the movement idiom of van Schayk.” Amateur film footage records this perfunctoriness, showing the dancer defining the steps so haphazardly that he hardly looks trained. In complete contrast, Rudi van Dantzig remembers their two weeks on Broadway as “a spell of pure unsullied joy,” his company and its guest star in peak form, Rudolf’s behavior as enchanting as that of “a tame foal.” When they next worked together, however, Rudi was shocked by the change in his friend. It was at the end of the year in Vienna, where they collaborated on Ulysses, a showpiece for Rudolf commissioned by the Staatsoper, the whole experience, Rudi recalls, disintegrating into a miserable failure. “We walked in the city a lot and he was very negative, torn to pieces. A total mess. I had absolutely the feeling that something awful was happening in his life. The Vienna Opera situation, the dancers he didn’t like … but it was something else.”

  Shortly after the January 7, 1979, premiere, the choreographer flew to New York to stay with Rudolf in his new apartment in the Dakota, minutes away from the Met. Infamous now as the site of John Lennon’s murder in December 1980, it has the gloomy exterior of a Teutonic town hall, with high gables, dormers, balconies, and balustrades, but its rooms are light and spacious with palatially high ceilings and views of Central Park. Rudolf could only just have moved in, as the apartment looked more like a warehouse, most of the furniture still in crates and a clutter of statues, paintings, and huge rolls of Cordoba leather stacked against the walls. Van Dantzig had arrived there “with a sinking feeling,” knowing that his first task was to tell the dancer that he could no longer invite him to guest with their company. “His artistry had deteriorated to such an extent that I did not feel I could defend why he should appear with the National Ballet … except for selfish reasons: the tours and publicity.” “So, you mean you’ve sacked me!” sneered Rudolf. “Am I too old, or what?” Certain that he had precipitated an end to their friendship, and embarrassed to be taking advantage of the star’s hospitality, Rudi volunteered to find a hotel. “Of course not,” insisted Rudolf. “You stay here.”