Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  As Rudolf got older and his conquests younger, he frequently assumed the sexually active role, though, as the dominant partner, was “aggressive, never tender or gentle,” Robert Tracy claims, and Robbie La Fosse agrees. Meeting Rudolf at the Dakota for what turned out to be their final encounter, he found him more exploitive than ever.

  I realized this man was not sensitive to me. He was not sensitive to the fact that I was young. Either that night or next morning I went into the kitchen and there was Robert Tracy, whom I knew from school. I couldn’t figure things out. I didn’t know what his situation was with Rudolf. We didn’t say anything to each other, but I thought, This is awkward, and I left.

  Robert was expected to disappear when Rudolf announced that his “boyfriend from Paris” would be arriving. Rudolf had met Franck Raoul-Duval before a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Palais des Sports in October 1977. The twenty-year-old had been taken to his dressing room by Paris Opéra dancers he had befriended when the company toured Russia earlier that year. He was in Moscow to study Russian, and had become so infatuated with ballet that on his return to Paris he started taking classes himself. He and Rudolf had struck up an immediate rapport, talking animatedly in Russian until it was time for the dancer to go onstage. Anticipating Rudolf’s intentions, Franck had turned down an invitation for dinner. Rudolf instructed Douce to seek him out at his business college (“She didn’t succeed because she’d got my name wrong”), but by this time Rudolf had begun to withdraw, suspecting that the boy, who also spoke perfect English, might be a KGB plant. After about a month of tentative encounters described by Franck as “one step ahead, two steps back,” they had dinner together at Douce’s apartment, and that night began a relationship that was to last more than a year and a half:

  Rudolf was not good at talking about emotional things, but eventually he told me about Wallace, and said he had put too much pressure on him. He felt a bit guilty for having kept him on a leash, so to speak, and he knew that I would not follow him like a little dog.… I was keeping my distance, but that suited him as he was always performing. “Do your own thing; go your own way,” he’d say. “And of course, finish your studies.”

  In the spring of 1978 they saw each other again during the Dutch National Ballet’s U.S. tour. Franck endeared himself immediately to Rudi van Dantzig and his dancers. “I think Rudolf was annoyed that he spent so much time hanging out with our young kids, but everyone liked him very much. He was so innocent, so unspoiled, and didn’t seem at all aware of what Rudolf wanted of him.” In San Francisco Jeannette Etheredge and her brother met the couple at the airport, taking them right off to sail on the bay. “Franck didn’t say much, but he was very charming. He seemed very happy all the time.” In London they had stayed with Nigel and Maude. “Franck used to love to come and talk to Nigel about books. He was such a cultured boy.” “I will be able to form him,” Rudolf had told the Goslings, meaning not only culturally but socially, as Franck, by his own admission, “was quite rough at the edges then.” Rudolf introduced him to Margot—“her gentleness, her manners were overwhelming”—and took him on a summer cruise of the Greek islands on Stavros Niarchos’s yacht. Flying from New York to Athens, Franck was picked up at the airport in one of Niarchos’s helicopters, dropped off at a beach, and told to wait there until a dinghy arrived to transport him to Atlantis II. “I sat there on the sand with my suitcase, jet-lagged from the flight, until I saw this huge white ship approaching. It was like a mirage.”

  • • •

  Rudolf had met Niarchos through Tessa Kennedy, who had decorated the Greek tycoon’s house in Nassau so successfully that she had been given the Atlantis II commission. “I was sent off in Stavros’s jet to see [Adnan] Kashoggi’s new yacht so that everything I did would outclass that.” Rudolf had been at the 21 Club in New York late one night in the spring of 1977 when Niarchos, who was there with a party of friends including Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and Jordan’s Princess Firyal, said immediately, “Tessa’s coming on a cruise with us this summer: Would you like to come too?” (“Stavros was always competing with Ari [Onassis] for publicity,” a friend remarks. “And since Ari had [had] Callas, Stavros decided he’d have Nureyev.”) Wanting to bring a couple of guests of his own choice, Rudolf had asked Tessa to arrange for Douce to be invited, and Wallace had “fixed him up with a friend from Hollywood,” a handsome part-time hustler by the name of Victor Davis. It was soon made clear to Rudolf, however, that the inclusion of “this blond nothing” on the trip was something of a social solecism. “None of us could see the point of him. He didn’t say a word.” The following summer Franck, on the other hand, was an infinitely more acceptable companion, liked by everyone from the formidable Marie-Hélène to Texan millionaires Oscar and Lynn Wyatt, who offered him a lift back to the States in their private Boeing.

  Rudolf’s immersion in the world of Greek shipping magnates was his first taste of what Princess Firyal calls “big money.” It was impossible not to be impressed by the wonders on board Atlantis II—the seventeenth-century olive-wood paneling, the collection of paintings by Delacroix, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec—as much as by the “James Bond stuff,” the dining room wall that rotated to reveal a huge screen or the swimming pool that rose up at night to become a dance floor.

  Like many Russians, Rudolf was a capitalist by choice, but his czarist appreciation of luxury was combined with a peasant’s distrust of banks. (Vacuuming under his bed one morning, Monique van Vooren’s maid pulled back the carpet to see what was causing the bump and found a thick wad of dollar bills.) Rudolf’s agent, Sandor Gorlinsky, had taken care of things, depositing Rudolf’s earnings in Swiss accounts in four different currencies and in numerous different names (among them “Nine Muses” and “Terpsichore Establishments”), the total in the mid-to-late seventies amounting to more than ten million dollars. He had introduced Rudolf to the Chicago lawyer Barry Weinstein, who from 1974 took care of his tax concerns, and in 1975 had helped establish the Ballet Promotion Foundation, a Liechtenstein organization intended to act as a repository for the dancer’s assets during his lifetime.*

  For Rudolf, however, this was not enough, and he made it known during the 1977 Palais des Sports season that “he was upset with Sandor because he was not making as much money as he should have been.” He had already begun seeking financial advice from well-placed friends, among them Jackie Onassis. “The first real money he made was under Jackie’s influence,” says Armen Bali. “She’s the one who made him buy gold just before gold went up by thousands.” Behind Gorlinsky’s back, the banker Charles Murland also offered investment advice. His company, Minster Assets, had taken ailing British Midland Airways into the black, and according to his close friend Geordano Ponticelli, “There was talk at one point of Charles taking over Rudolf’s financial matters.” Finally, though, it was Jacob Rothschild who won Rudolf’s unequivocal trust. A financial genius, he had amassed a personal fortune estimated at $1 billion and in five years increased the funds of Rothschild Investment from $66 million to $231. He was also the kind of man Rudolf most admired since his Renaissance-style breadth of culture and love of ballet was combined with great wit, urbanity, and personal charm. “What Sandor did was perfectly sensible and prudent,” comments Rothschild, “but I don’t think he’d have claimed to have spectacular skills as an investor.” Taking matters in hand himself, he wrote to Gorlinsky on July 26, 1978, including a list of Rudolf’s investments, which he recommended transferring from Credit Suisse in Geneva to the Rothschild Bank in Zurich. “I feel confident that we will be able to do better than Credit Suisse because we will care more.… If Rudi and you find that we do … I would hope you would consider giving us a bit more, and having seen the performances at the Coliseum I feel that he will rightly earn huge amounts in the future!”

  In the summer of 1979, Rudolf made another tour of the Greek islands with an entourage of Robert Tracy, Douce, Rudi van Dantzig, and Toer van Schayk, this time on Aspasia, the yacht owned by
Perry Embiricos. “Reading Byron non-stop,” and intent on re-creating his own Childe Harold journey as inspiration for a ballet, Rudolf persuaded his host, a fervent admirer since the mid-sixties, to end their two-week cruise on the south coast of Turkey. Rudolf, like Byron, who adored the lush textures and colors of Eastern clothes, had succumbed to Turkomania. He scoured the bazaars for antique fabrics, pelisses, caps, and burnooses, and as if in imitation of Delacroix’s portrait of the poet in his gold-and-crimson-velvet Albanian outfit, dressed in rich Turkish robes, his head imperiously turbaned. In Byron, as in Liszt, Rudolf recognized an alter ego, all three having experienced the same explosive kind of fame, peripatetic life, and passion for the exotic. The erotic charge of the poet’s Eastern tales, insinuating a dark subversiveness that aroused both mass adulation and secret fantasies, was exactly the impact of Rudolf’s own Corsaire; even the description of Byron as “a wild mountain colt” was a mirror image of the young Nureyev. But to Rudolf the most deeply felt link of all with Byron was the sense of alienation, “the feeling of belonging to no country,” their attraction to beautiful youths having forced each in his turn “To seek abroad, the love denied at home.”*

  The work Rudolf had in mind (for Paris Opéra Ballet) was based on Byron’s Manfred, a long poem that, more than any other, defines the cult of alienation at the heart of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Focusing on a reclusive magician figure living in his mountain eyrie and tormented by guilt, it presents an exaggeratedly diabolical version of Byron himself, a kind of atonement for the “crimes” of his youth: his propensity for boys, and the incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta. Rudolf had dismissed the character of Manfred as “a pompous bore,” but had been persuaded by Mstislav Rostropovich that Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony would be “a wonderful idea” for a ballet. The poem’s dominant theme of sexual guilt and anguish had understandably resonated with Tchaikovsky, and his first movement conveyed the profound sense of brooding that seeped into his Hamlet. But finding himself unmotivated by a program that was not his own idea, the composer had considered dispensing with the other movements and making a tone poem of the score.

  Rudolf, too, had been unconvinced by Manfred as a subject for a full-length work. “All that torment may be easy to demonstrate in five lines of poetry, but it is not easy to translate into dance.” Nevertheless he went on thinking and researching, and Nigel, who had begun the libretto, steered Rudolf toward Byron’s letters and journals. “I honestly think you will not get much from reading the poetry, most of which dates horribly.… It’s him [sic] who counts.” Rudolf admitted that he found the work itself more difficult than Shakespeare (giving up on Childe Harold after reading two-thirds), although he had been delighted by the wit and liveliness of Don Juan, and proclaimed Byron to be his “most favourite English author.” Characteristically he had extended his research to the poet’s contemporaries, becoming particularly interested in Shelley, whose work Nigel was then reading for him. Choreographer Antony Tudor, with whom the critic once discussed the two Romantic poets, had exclaimed, “Ah, maybe something there for a ballet—Rudi and David [Wall],” but Nigel himself was doubtful, telling Rudolf, “After reading [Shelley’s] Ariel I don’t find much material in their real life except their contrasting temperaments (Air and Fire). Obviously Shelley would be Petipa-ish to Byron’s more modernish; probably Byron secretly respected Shelley’s lofty idealism?”

  It was, however, the copy of The Romantic Agony that Nigel gave him which provided Rudolf with the approach he was looking for. “It became my ‘Bible’ and I grabbed from it everything that fitted my ideas. So much so that at first I wanted to call the ballet Romantic Agony.” Reissued in 1970 with an introduction by Frank Kermode, Mario Praz’s book is a classic of literary criticism with the same power attributed to Kott’s Shakespeare, Our Contemporary “to alter a reader’s understanding of the history of his society, and perhaps of his own history.” Recounting European literature’s scenes of cruelty and horror spiced with sensual pleasure, it seemed to throw light on Rudolf’s own epoch, the defiant mal-de-vivre described by novelist Martin Amis as “the heavy-gay, pre-AIDS sex-crypts of downtown Manhattan … the intent, aggressive, leathery, specialist sexuality of the Seventies.” And in the Romantic theory that life imitates decadent art, that the best means of expressing passions is to experience them for oneself, Rudolf found substantiation of his own belief. “As a creative artist you have to feel, you have to know how to be both. That’s what people with talent have: the ability to know what it is to be the purest and the dirtiest.” This duality was what had excited him about Byron, just as Byron in turn had identified it in Robert Burns: “What an antithetical mind!” he exclaimed of the Scottish poet’s “never-to-be-published” letters, “Tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness—sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!” These extreme contradictions between debauchery and the ideal were a motivating force for Rudolf, whether enacting Siegfried’s moral dilemma in Swan Lake, the plight of his schizophrenic Tancredi, or the “half dust, half deity” figure of Manfred himself.

  In his preliminary notes Nigel had written, “The music gives me the image of a procession of Goya’s flagellating monks, perhaps with B dragging his foot and his guilt (dim figures) hanging onto him,” an idea that Rudolf took almost literally as his opening. To alternate with him in the title role he had chosen Jean Guizerix, a powerfully virile dancer with the technique and dramatic authority to sustain the ballet’s one-hour duration. In rehearsals Guizerix had been puzzled by Rudolf’s repeated cry of “Laocoön! Laocoön!” thinking that it must be one of his Russian obscenities. In fact, what the choreographer wanted him to envisage was the Trojan priest of the Louvre’s statue Le Laocoön, whose incredible suffering, expressed by his face and distended muscles, was to Rudolf the very expression of “Romantic Agony.” His first solo combined sinuous movements to convey the sculpted serpents coiled across the priest’s shoulders with a cumbersome motif alluding to Byron’s lameness. Rudolf also drew on his and Guizerix’s experience of modern dance by incorporating some effectively anguished Grahamesque contractions.

  The ballet, however, was intended to showcase not only Manfred but “the whole Byron,” becoming a mingling of real characters with imaginary ones and visions. It is a technique Nigel compares to that of the Synthetic Cubists, who selected symbolic fragments of reality, “using them as elements in a dominating structure.” But it is mystifying why, when he admits how much harder this is to follow in a ballet than in a painting, Nigel provided Rudolf with such a bafflingly complex libretto. Even Tudor, ballet’s master of psychological nuance, would have been hard pressed to make a coherent scene of the following:

  Byron and Augusta [his half sister]

  Byron loves Mary [his cousin, Mary Chaworth, a youthful

  sweetheart]

  Byron loves Edleston [the boy chorister with whom he was

  infatuated]

  Byron loves Augusta

  Byron with wife

  (pas de trois—Byron, Edleston, Augusta—B dances with wife and

  thinks of Edleston

  Byron dances with Edleston and thinks of Augusta)

  The second tableau is more lucid, if somewhat regressive with its nineteenth-century-style ensemble of mountain spirits. This time the “real” figures are Shelley; his wife, Mary; and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Rudolf’s idea is to try to re-create the atmosphere of personal and intellectual complicity among Byron and his three friends during the three months they spent together in Switzerland. The Shelleys were famously liberal in their attitude to love, and it is this close entanglement that Rudolf captures in an elaborately intertwining, canonic pas de quatre, which is the ballet’s most inventive and successful choreography. The portrayal of amitiés amoureuses was enhanced by the casting. Shelley was performed by Charles Jude, newly married to Florence Clerc, who appeared as Astarte (Byron’s “Ideal Spirit”
), sharing her role with Jean Guizerix’s wife, Wilfride Piollet. Rudolf’s special rapport with Charles, reflected in the libretto by Byron’s mentoring of the younger poet, was expressed in Wayfarer-like duets, his erotic desire for the dancer betrayed by the fact that, as Nigel pointed out, there is nothing in the choreography to indicate that Shelley was not just another boyfriend.

  From this point until the curtain falls there is a dizzying confusion of Byron’s biography decipherable only to those familiar with its details. The stage becomes a blur of Greek soldiery; marauding pirates; visions of Corsaires; the reappearance of Byron’s mother; Edleston; the Contessa; and Augusta/Astarte, who by the end of the ballet has come to represent the figure of death. “Alas, alas,” wrote a French critic of the ballet’s Paris premiere on November 20, 1979. “One loses oneself in this confusion as much as in the amalgam of personages and situations, which are ill-defined and lacking any dramatic progression.”

  Rudolf had to postpone his own debut in the piece as he had broken a metatarsal bone in his foot and was limping badly. The five-thousand-seat Palais des Sports remained half empty, and, when the star returned to the stage two weeks later, his lackluster performances did little to create any new enthusiasm for the ballet. “Not only did the relentlessly difficult choreography he had devised for himself leave him out of breath and preoccupied with technique, but his usual stage presence and charm were absent.”