Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  To what extent, though, did Manfred reveal Rudolf as a choreographer? In notes marked “Private” by Maude, who “has seen them and agrees,” Nigel gave Rudolf what was probably the most critical appraisal of his work. “The great merit of the ballet lies in its pace and power, its ensemble patterns … [but] except for Byron’s striking solos there are few exceptions to the twisting, swirling, arm-waving style. Some of the duets seem interchangeable, with movements arranged more to match the music than to make a dramatic point or identify a character.”

  This was all true, but encumbered with its libretto, the ballet never stood a chance. To Ninette de Valois, Rudolf had “a certain talent as a choreographer, but not very much,” and he himself once admitted to Marika Besobrasova, “I know I’m not a choreographer, but I have to do things” (meaning, provide a repertory for himself). Few would contest Rudolf’s gift for orchestrating large numbers of dancers, either en masse or canonically in groups—“I can move hundreds!” he once boasted—but the composition of innovative, dramatically telling movement did not come naturally. His ballets pay homage to the choreographers he valued most, particularly Bournonville, whose busy petite batterie and multiple ronds de jambe became, as Baryshnikov says, “sort of his trademark.” Comparing the founders of English and American dance, Rudolf described Ashton as “not a vocabulary giver,” whereas Balanchine had provided him with the new language he craved on arrival in the West. What he never learned to apply to his own work, however, was Balanchine’s “lesson in simplicity.” Every Nureyev ballet is so overloaded with steps and ideas, so richly full, that Violette Verdy was reminded of “all those threads in a kilim carpet.” Then director of Paris Opéra, Verdy was well aware that the ballet she commissioned had not worked, but nevertheless continued to admire what she calls Manfred’s “layers of recognition.” Most of the critics dismissed the ballet altogether, and Alastair Macaulay, in his review of the London premiere, drew attention to Rudolf’s lack of skill in depicting his own persona in dance: “It’s baffling to see him chunter through steps that are both exposing and inconveniently rapid, like meaningless chatter, if one is used to thinking still of Nureyev in terms of a grand sweep of heroic temperament.… Strange that the dancer who made his personality a major glory of recent theatre is working as a choreographer to cancel himself out.”

  In fact this was far from the case. As an anthology of all the dance influences in Rudolf’s career—Petipa, Bournonville, Balanchine, Ashton, MacMillan, Graham, Béjart, Tetley, with “a few flashes of bravura variations reminiscent of Le Corsaire”—Manfred is an act of self-glorification, not obliteration. It was Rudolf’s most autobiographical ballet to date, as confessional and solipsistic as Manfred was for Byron “the beginning, the middle, and end of all his own poetry—the hero of every tale—the chief object of every landscape.”

  Working outside the Opéra in the more intimate setting of the Atelier Berthier (where the scenery was constructed), both Jean Guizerix and Charles Jude had the impression that the Paris Opéra company was “le troupe de Rudolf” at that time, so strong was the solidarity and affection among them all. Rudolf was already considering making Paris his base. “He really hates England,” Nigel noted in his diary on March 14, 1981. “He feels rejected here, unlike in Paris where he is the grand vedette.” He had recently bought an apartment on quai Voltaire, with magnificent views of the Seine and the Palais du Louvre. Plans for basic structural changes had been drawn up in January 1979 by Douce’s architect brother Pierre François, and Rudolf had appointed Renzo Mongiardino’s “right hand,” Emile Carcano, as his designer. It was the opulently theatrical Mongiardino style Rudolf was after, and having a few rolls of Cordoba leather left over from the decoration of Fife Road and the Dakota, he asked Carcano to find an artisan to reproduce it for the grand salon of quai Voltaire. He had already begun his serious collection of furniture, paintings, fabrics, kilims, and Ptolemaic maps, and the sixième’s antiques dealers and informed friends tempted him daily with possible new acquisitions. “Herewith the Superbed,” wrote Nigel, enclosing a photograph of a six-foot scroll-ended, Karelian birchwood chaise longue priced at £25,000. It was Douce who took the practicalities in hand, arranging the installation of a new kitchen; the rewiring, heating, and plumbing; as well as making regular excursions to the flea market and country sales in search of rarities: a copper bath, ancient parquet flooring, black-and-white eighteenth-century stone floor tiles for the entrance hall. “Douce was incredible,” says their mutual friend Leslie Caron. “She coordinated everything in that apartment from the door handles to the last chandelier.”

  Until now Rudolf had based himself at Douce’s rue Murillo apartment in the exclusive Eighth Arrondissement, moving Claire, his housekeeper, into an upstairs room so that she could cook for him. Doting on Rudolf, Douce insisted that he should have her own bedroom, its French windows overlooking a pretty little garden with a gate leading directly into the Parc Monceau. The apartment had been a gift from her Chilean great-aunt Ana Santa Maria de Lopez-Perez, one of the richest women in France, who had raised Douce in a huge hôtel particulier on the avenue Wagram and wanted her to continue to live in the style to which she had become accustomed. Douce’s mother, a beauty painted by Boldini, with huge eyes and a swan neck, had died when her daughter was ten days old. Her father had returned to their home in Santiago and “Tatanita” had taken charge of the children, sending the boys to school in Switzerland and employing someone to look after the baby. Living with a formidable and aged aunt who always wore black was a dismal upbringing for a child, tempered only by Madeleine, Douce’s nanny and governess. In her early teens she found herself becoming “la petite protégée” of the Paris beau monde, drawn into the set surrounding her wealthy uncle, Arturo Lopez, a world once compared to “a small 18th century court.” “I didn’t need Rudolf as an entrée to society,” said Douce. “Marie-Hélène de Rothschild was already receiving me like a goddaughter.” On the contrary, it was Rudolf who needed her. “I didn’t want him in my group. I thought he belonged to the stage. He didn’t belong to the salon,” the Vicomtesse de Ribes dismissively remarked, and Rudolf was only too aware of the Proustian clannishness of Paris society. Gloria Venturi remembers how he held on to her hand like a frightened child when they arrived together at an exceptionally grand soireé, and Leslie Caron had also observed Rudolf’s insecurity on such occasions. “Rudolf never knew what fork to use, or how to dress. He didn’t know the form, the terms of address.… So he felt at ease with Douce because she knew all that and she knew everybody. It gave him the sense of having arrived.”

  Douce took control of Rudolf’s social life, and in return, he would occasionally reward her, once buying her a ravishing Marie Antoinette gown to wear to a ball. Being “a little devil, an adventuress, and oodles of fun,” she made any event sparkle, but in private Rudolf was disturbed about her increasing fixation on him, complaining to friends, “Douce eats my air.” “He became her everything,” remarks her confidante Yasemin Pirinccioglu. “She was crazy for him like a child,” says Gilles Dufour; “It was a passion but a childish passion.” Like Byron’s Lady Caroline Lamb, Douce went out of her way to appeal to Rudolf’s transgressive side, cropping her hair, dressing like a boy and, “motivated by a kind of delirium,” would even go cruising with him in the Bois de Boulogne. She was ferociously possessive, and “got in between” other women, Leslie Caron among them, when she felt they were getting too close. “She was so completely in love with him, and so jealous that I just didn’t fight.” Rudolf’s boys posed less of a threat. Franck, whom Douce described as “not serious—a little breakfast,” spent most weekends with Rudolf at rue Murillo as his own room was on campus outside the city. “Douce was always trying to accommodate Rudolf. If I was in favor she’d be nice; if not, she’d ignore me.” On first meeting Robert, she had surprised him by saying, “I must be careful of you,” but soon realized that this was someone she would have to accept.

  For about six months the two
boyfriends had been “overlapping” and Rudolf relished the game of playing one off against the other, even to the point of having them both to stay with the Goslings at the same time. “Robert was madly jealous,” Maude recalled. “They were such different characters,” says Rudi van Dantzig. “Franck seemed a bit embarrassed by the whole situation. There was not a trace or suggestion of anything sexual between them, whereas with Robert it was so obvious.” By the spring of ’79 Rudolf, who had developed “a fairly regular relationship” with Robert, began making it clear to Franck that he was letting him go. “At forty you know how to handle things, and it pretty much evolved in a very natural manner. I told Rudolf, ‘You know where to find me. Whenever you need me, call me.’ For me it had always been much more emotional than physical, so staying friends wasn’t going to be a problem.”

  Having inherited his father’s entrepreneurial skills, Franck had maintained his independence all along, showing signs of wanting to start up on his own. Robert, on the other hand, was prepared to devote himself entirely to Rudolf. “He was good for Rudolf. He’d get things done,” says Charles Jude. He was indeed unusually efficient, supervising travel arrangements, restaurant reservations, and Dakota dinner parties, tracking down scores in the Harvard library, and even taking on the role of unofficial press officer.” I was the liaison between Rudolf and ‘Suzywoozy’ [Aileen Mehle, who wrote the daily “Suzy” gossip column in the Post].” And whereas Franck preferred to see Rudolf alone—“I couldn’t care less about the social side”—Robert was never happier than in the company of what Maude called “Rudolf’s rich ladies.” “He would disappear in the function of harmonizing everyone with Nureyev,” remarked Violette Verdy. Robert was, as he well knew, “Rudolf’s slave,” but admits that this was his own choice. Besides, as Rudolf pointed out, “being slave means that you do something without pleasure,” whereas Robert was enraptured by his new life. “Those were the great years. I was twenty-five, dancing around the world, writing books, and loving being with Rudolf—I don’t think things could have been any better.”

  Their summer holiday in 1980 was another cruise of the Greek islands and the coast of Turkey on Perry Embiricos’s yacht. Rudolf liked sailboats, and unlike the liner-size Atlantis II, Aspasia was a sloop that slept ten. The Goslings were on this trip, and Nigel noted any particularly memorable images of Rudolf: “In a floppy straw hat, a jersey & a tiny jock-strap standing in the harbour to watch a boy do a high-dive, sensationally shocking the local inhabitants but quite unaware.… R doing a barre on deck in the harbour after dark, watched by a dozen children on the jetty.” Their days were spent swimming in deserted wooded coves and following Rudolf on “fantastic scrambles” to look at sites to build a house. He had decided that Turkey, with its dirt tracks and little wooden houses, “smelt like home,” telling the Goslings that the backyard of one tiny café—“all flowering creepers & chickens & wooden sheds”—was just like his Bashkirian isba. He had been amazed at how many words—including his family’s names—were the same in Tatar. “ ‘Farida’ is ‘Feride’; ‘Hamit’ or ‘Hamitola’ is very common; ‘Razida’ is ‘Reshide’; ‘Gouzel’ means ‘beautiful,’ ” said his Turkish friend Yasemin Pirinccioglu. And he had been reminded of Ufa every time he saw people sitting on cushions on the floor; peasant women spinning from raw wool as they walked, or carrying water in two cauldrons hung on a stick across their shoulders—“just like my mother used to do.”

  Toward the end of the trip there was one emotionally fraught night when Rudolf seemed intent on reminding everyone of his transition from peasant boy to superstar. Instead of dining on the boat as they did most evenings, eating wild boar shot by the captain, the party went to a café on the water’s edge, joined by the crew, a local priest, a schoolmaster, and a policeman. When it transpired that there was nothing on the menu but greasy little fish and bread, Rudolf, who had spotted more enticing fare at the rival café, suddenly got up and walked off. As Nigel wrote in his diary: “The meal concluded with considerable embarrassment. As we left for the boat we passed R sitting alone at his café eating his big fish. He started to say something but Embiricos, who had also drunk a lot by now, spat at him that it was unforgivable, shut himself up in his cabin & did not emerge until R had left 24 hours later.… R said simply, ‘He wasn’t looking after me properly.’ ”

  This was the solitary, misanthropic Byronic hero “soaring beyond or sinking beneath the men with whom he felt condemn’d to breathe.” But it also showed a nihilistic side that was surfacing in Rudolf, a sense of the absurdity of social conventions. He had been gripped that holiday by Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer—“he took it everywhere,” Nigel remembered, “reading snatches on deck, in the cabin, on beaches, among the pine trees in the mountains”—and it had served to fuel his own increasing embitterment against the world, the belief that he, like the writer, had been given “such a rough deal.”

  Rudolf’s lifelong conviction that no one could be trusted now included even his closest friends.* That spring, for the first time in thirty-two years, the Paris Opéra Ballet had been invited to perform in New York, but only on the condition that Rudolf appear with the company as guest star. General Director Hugues Gall had been in his office when a union representative arrived, accompanied by Charles Jude. “Charles sat there telling me, ‘If you have Rudolf as guest, we won’t dance.’ Okay, I said, I’ll cancel the tour. The union members were doing their job, but Charles should have said he couldn’t be part of this. After everything Rudolf had done for him, I thought he was a real pig.” Others, Jacques Loyau among them, also considered Charles “un vrai traître,” but the dancer insists that he had no choice. “I told Rudolf, ’There are eight performances and you’d be doing seven of them. In my position at the Opéra I can’t support the system of that.” Jean Guizerix was equally divided in his loyalties.” Rudolf called me and said, “Vous traître! Vous êtes dans quel camp?” and I told him I was with the majority. It was the Paris Opéra, not Nureyev and Friends. But it was a very difficult moment for me.” And yet for Rudolf, their action only proved what he had come to accept: “There’s always the betrayal … betrayal—yes, like The Moor’s Pavane.”

  His next big project at the Met had also come to nothing. He was to have made his directorial debut in July collaborating with David Hockney and John Dexter on a revival of the Ballets Russes work Parade, but fell out with them both over what Clive Barnes would call the production’s “phoney thematic links.”* Then, at the end of November, came the really “cruel blow.” Balanchine, who was mounting a Tchaikovsky Festival in 1981, had promised to include Manfred and invited Rudolf to come to New York to cast the ballet. This, as Nigel reported in his diary was “Fantastic news—even if the critics slaughter it,” especially as the company’s most glamorous principal, Peter Martins, had volunteered to alternate with Rudolf.

  28th [November]. In the morning the telephone rang & after much crackling & buzzing it turned out to be R ringing from Paris where he had just arrived. I asked whom he had picked for Manfred & heard him reply “It didn’t work out.” From the little I could hear, he seemed to say that “Balanchine hadn’t liked the ballet” … Presumably he had been watching the scraps of tiny 8 mm rehearsal film—not a very fair guide! To be fair I always thought it a weird choice—Manfred is the opposite of the NYCB in style, mood & content.

  Barbara Horgan surmises that Rudolf “must have ‘talked’ a good ballet to Mr. B.” and consequently, Balanchine had offered to see the film. “After all, what could he say: ‘I don’t want to consider it’? Who knows, it could have been great!” But Balanchine, whose devotion to Tchaikovsky verged on the fanatical, had clearly decided that Rudolf’s muddled Manfred had traduced a sacred score. All the same, to have let the project go as far as to suggest Rudolf should choose his cast was, as Nigel remarked, “a sadistic way of dealing with it.” “I remember him sitting in the car and sobbing like a little child,” says Robert Tracy. “Balanchine had rejected him again.”†


  A month later it was the Royal Ballet who were “the biggest traitors.” He had been upset by the postponement of the new Hans van Manen ballet for him, complaining to Nigel that the administration was “Mickie Mousing him”—which Nigel understood to mean playing cat-and-mouse. Rudolf had made sure that Ninette de Valois knew about the situation, sending her a message saying, “Lately there has been a separation, this will mean divorce—with custody of the children!” (his Royal Ballet productions of La Bayadère and Raymonda). He had also been upset by the London Festival Ballet’s change of decision to produce Manfred in 1981, and, by voicing his resentment to its newly appointed director, John Field, had managed to antagonize “both companies within a month.” Through Gorlinsky, John Tooley had bluntly told Rudolf, “No choreographer wants to do a ballet for you,” and this had immediately been borne out by a letter that arrived from Netherlands Dance Theater’s Jiří Kylian. Taking three pages to recount how, when he left Czechoslovakia for England in 1967, Rudolf’s performances had been his “inspiration for the years to come,” the choreographer nonetheless remained implacable in his decision. “It is strange that this love and respect I feel for you makes it impossible for us to work together. It sounds paradoxical, but it is true.… I would feel totally unfree, and would have constantly a feeling of a student before a master, which is a totally wrong relationship between a dancer and a choreographer.”