Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Watching the gala premiere on December 2, 1982, was Rosa, who had succeeded in getting a three-week visa to visit her daughter in London. Rudolf had asked Tessa Kennedy to sit beside her and to drive her after the performance to Fife Road, where he was hosting a party for the whole cast. “I thought she might be worried that I was KGB,” says Tessa. “So as soon as I saw her, I said, ‘I’m from Rudolf.’ ” With neither able to speak the other’s language there was little communication, though, oddly enough, Rosa’s single comment about the Opera House—“Like teahouse”—was exactly the same as her brother’s to Nigel and Maude in 1962. Rudolf was excited that his relatives were managing to thwart the Soviets by getting to the West, since a reunion with his mother now seemed far more achievable. Having recently bought the farm he wanted in Virginia (a 415-acre property with a beautiful eighteenth-century house, three cottages, and a barn), “his big fantasy” was to bring his whole family from Russia to live there. “He really was trying to do everything he could,” says Franck Raoul-Duval. “He felt a debt toward them. He’d had all the glamour for twenty years while they had suffered as a result of his act.”

  As Rosa’s visa was soon to expire, the only way of legally keeping her in London was through marriage to a Westerner. Douce sounded out her brother Pierre. “I said I wasn’t opposed to the idea, but would have to ask Mengia, the woman I’d lived with for twenty years.” Persuaded by Douce, Mengia agreed, and the François siblings immediately boarded a plane for London, accompanied by Rudolf. Seeing that Pierre had no tie, he bought one at the duty-free shop—“I feel as if it’s my wedding!”—and, still in jovial spirits on the flight, ordered two bottles of champagne. At Fife Road, Rosa, “looking like Rudolf in a skirt,” was rolling pelmeni for a celebratory supper, and seemed pleased with the gift of lace handkerchiefs brought by her husband-to-be. Later that night, Douce and Pierre went off to stay with Maude, and arranged to meet at Richmond Register Office at nine the following morning. As it turned out, they arrived considerably later, having stopped their taxi en route and rushed into a jeweler to buy two rings. A small gathering of guests waited for the ceremony to begin: Gouzel and her Ecuadorian husband, Sandor and Edith Gorlinsky, Maude—but not Rudolf, who had decided not to attend. “He thought he’d be recognized and the story would be leaked to the press,” says Pierre. The service took three times longer than usual, with the couple’s vows translated from English into French and Russian. No wedding breakfast followed the ceremony; after a few photographs had been taken, the groom flew straight back to Paris.

  Now that the plan had been successfully accomplished it was incomprehensible to Rosa why Rudolf chose to go on living with Maude instead of being with his own family in his big, beautiful house. As Maude explained:

  He told me—it seems unkind—that when his sister came to the West he didn’t want to be near her because she drove him mad.… He always had this weak chest—which was one of the things that Rosa kept fussing about. He must have had it when he was a child. After she’d rung him up here once, he came back into the room in an absolute rage. “That bitch! Do you know what she said? That I should stop dancing because of my health.”

  The prospect of Rosa applying her peasant remedies—the emollients of goosefat or honey rubbed into his bronchial chest—must have seemed absurd to Rudolf in the current climate of fear. That month’s Harper’s & Queen magazine, featuring a model cuddling a baby white rabbit and advertising “Parties of the Year” and “Christmas Food and Wine,” also carried the jarring cover line, HERPES AND THE OTHER HORRORS. Titled “Plague,” Michael Pye’s article described the two sexually transmitted diseases holding America “in a grip of chastity and terror,” reporting that of 634 known AIDS victims in September more than 40 percent had not survived. The subject of mortality had never seemed more pervasive. Balanchine was now terminally ill and confined to New York’s Roosevelt Hospital with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In January Rudolf went to the New York State Theater to see the choreographer’s sublime Mozart Divertimento No. 15, and to the hospital to bid him farewell. The designer Rouben Ter-Arutunian accompanied Rudolf, suggesting that they take caviar and Château d’Yquem (which so delighted the dying man that his eyes lit up and he reached out to embrace them). “We talked Russian and French. It was very sad. I wanted to see if he would give a number of his ballets to the Kirov … but he was totally uninterested. He said, ‘When I die, everything should vanish. A new person should come and impose his own new things.’ ” Rudolf must have stayed on alone, as when Balanchine’s doctor, William Hamilton, went into the room he found the dancer still there, kneeling by the bed, weeping. Balanchine died at age seventy-nine on April 30, 1983.

  Charles Murland was now critically ill. He spent a few weeks that summer at the little house he owned in Malta, and when he returned to London it was in a wheelchair. After being admitted to a private clinic he was transferred to St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where, as Maude informed Wallace, the doctors did every possible test and never revealed what they had found. Charles’s own doctor, William Davidson, confirms that they suspected AIDS. “It was very early days, but in medical minds the syndrome existed.… Charles fitted the criteria.” What were becoming recognized as AIDS-related symptoms—Kaposi lesions and candidiasis, a fungal infection of the mouth—had brought doctors to St. Mary’s from all over the country. “They were coming to look.” Charles himself was still telling friends that he had leukemia, but Pat Ruanne was among those who were not convinced. She and Ric Jahn had been told not to touch anything, and given protective clothing to wear—helmets, gloves, suits, and boots. “It was hard to get a straight answer from the staff, but when I glanced at Charles’s chart and saw he wasn’t taking any medication, I thought, This has got to be It.” Monica Mason had seen Keith Money shortly after her visit, and told him of the hospital’s draconian precautions. “Then she stared at me wide-eyed, and said, ‘But surely this is AIDS!’ ”

  Tessa Kennedy brought a Catholic priest with her to St. Mary’s together with about six of Charles’s friends. “It was Father Rooney’s idea that we should hold hands in a circle around the bed, which wasn’t easy in those big thick gloves. To Charles we must have looked like weird astronauts.” She had asked a nurse, “Is this so he doesn’t catch anything from us?” and been told, “No, no. It’s so you don’t catch what he has.” But despite fear and ignorance about the contagion of AIDS in 1983 (Charles had been enclosed in a plastic bubble to be transported from one hospital to the other), virtually everyone the banker had known well, including his cleaning woman, had been to St. Mary’s to visit him. Everyone, that is, except Rudolf. He had heard how Charles had become so emaciated that he was barely recognizable. Rudolf’s own recent weight loss had become more apparent—“his cheeks are very hollow now,” Maude had remarked in May. He would have to wait another year before a definitive AIDS test became available, but, according to Tessa, Rudolf had long been convinced that he, too, was “one of the first.”

  *Ferdinand’s cry in The Tempest, act 1, scene 2

  *Rudolf had never given any credence to the cult of Andy Warhol. Although agreeing in 1972 to be featured in Interview magazine and photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, he became so irritated by the vacuity of Warhol’s questions that he canceled the session. “Following that, Andy popped a Polaroid. And another. And another. Rudy [sic] demanded to see the results. The first, a beautiful portrait, he signed. The second, ditto. But the third, a close-up of dancedom’s most famous crotch, provoked a sneer, a snarl, and a smile as he flung the offending image to the ground. Andy, not one to be stopped, knelt to pick it up. Rudy, equally unstoppable, set a slippered foot down squarely on the photo. Quick-thinking Robert Mapplethorpe focused his Polaroid on that possessive foot. Rudy grabbed the camera, pulled out the undeveloped photo and crumpled it into a useless wad. ‘Don’t you like your foot?’ queried Robert. ‘My foot, yes …,’ replied Rudy.” (Andy Warhol’s Interview, June 1972.)

  *In August 1975, thirty-f
ive nations, including the Soviet Union, met in Helsinki. Among the human-rights areas covered by this conference were those calling for greater freedom of travel, particularly for Russians wishing to visit, or be reunited with, relatives abroad.

  †The plan was to create a Panov-type public clamor, and active committees, whose members included Beverly Sills, Edward Albee, Paul Taylor, and Frederick Ashton, were established in New York, London, Vienna, Geneva, and Paris, resulting in the collection of more than 56,000 signatures.

  *Recent theater productions by Terry Hands (1973) and Trevor Nunn and Barry Kyle (1976) had also brought out the “shocking violence” of the play.

  *There is a poignant letter to Rudolf from Kyra Nijinsky dated August 24, 1973, hoping that he, or one of his “good jet-set friends,” might be interested in buying a Marie Taglioni letter for fifteen hundred dollars. “Forgive me,” she writes. “I have to help myself to get somehow on my feet.… I long to see my son and my grandchildren … and even my mother in her old age.” She also has Weber’s score of Le Spectre de la rose to sell, and several “gorgeous pictures” of her father. Signing herself, “your friend in Christ, Kyra Nijinsky,” she tells Rudolf about a small sketch she copied from a program of him dancing in La Sylphide. “I have [it] in my prayerbook.”

  *This was not impossible. Susie Hendl describes how Balanchine got his revenge after Edward Villella had broken an unspoken NYCB rule by performing an encore during the company’s 1962 tour of Russia. “A few days later he called Eddie to the wardrobe for a costume fitting. Eddie is rather small anyway and discovered that Mr. B. had cut him up in all different colors.” “Good,” said Balanchine with mean, ferrety glee. “You know it looks like you’re dancing on your knees.”

  *Balanchine’s Ballerinas: Conversations with the Muses by Robert Tracy with Sharon DeLano was published by Linden Press/Simon & Schuster in 1983.

  *Wanting to capitalize further on tax benefits, Rudolf wrote to Prince Rainier of Monaco on October 8, 1975, requesting Monegasque citizenship. He had been advised to make the letter “the most sentimental possible,” mentioning the apartment he already owned in Monte Carlo and emphasizing the fact he wanted to be “in a country which is a country of Arts” and would continue the great tradition started by Diaghilev and continued by Colonel de Basil and the Marquis de Cuevas. A reply from the prince himself followed on October 27, favoring Rudolf’s request and inviting him to make the necessary application.

  *An entry in Hobhouse’s diary dated October 5, 1809, confirms that “Pederasty … is practised underhand by the Greeks, but openly carried on by the Turks.”

  *Compounding this was the 1987 U.K. edition of Monique van Vooren’s Night Sanctuary (published in the United States in 1981), with its fictionalized version of Rudolf as its protagonist. Even the motive for Vladimir Volodin’s defection was the same—a false claim made at the airport that the dancer must return to perform at the Kremlin. But whereas fifteen years earlier Rudolf might have been amused by Monique’s audacity, in his current state of mind it was just another betrayal—especially as the actress admitted that she had written the novel for the “six-figure advance.” “I don’t want to be poor.” (Women’s Wear Daily, October 22, 1981.) He refused any further contact with her.

  *As all three works date from 1917–18, Dexter used a World War I theme to link them.

  †Rudolf later seized an opportunity to restage Manfred. In the spring of 1981 he had approached Patricia Neary, the ex—New York City Ballet dancer who was now director of the Zurich Ballet—“George Balanchine’s European Company.” “Why doesn’t your company do Manfred?” Rudolf had urged, but knowing its history, Neary hesitated. “Mr. B. didn’t really want us to do it. We might have had an enormous fight, and he could have withdrawn his name.” (Ballet News, May 1983.) In the end she decided it was worth the risk; the Zurich Ballet had never succeeded in touring America (the Met had wanted “no more second-rate companies tagging along with Rudolf” [Nigel Gosling, diary entry, October 13, 1981.]), and Manfred, Neary felt, could be the entrée they needed.

  Feeling he should clarify the ballet, Rudolf had prefixed each tableau with Byron quotations intended to be read aloud, and commissioned Nico Georgiadis to design costumes that would make it easier to distinguish the characters from one another. In the end, although there was little significant difference between the two versions, Rudolf considered Zurich’s Manfred to have been a worthwhile undertaking. With 80 percent of its dancers Balanchine trained, the company was able to give his choreography a satisfyingly sleek and speedy NYCB edge—which, if nothing else, was consolation for the Tchaikovsky Festival disappointment. It remained to get Balanchine’s approval. Waiting until he had actually arrived in Switzerland in December, Pat Neary told Balanchine firmly that the ballet was now part of the Zurich repertory. With little option and good grace, Balanchine admitted that Patricia Neary had done an excellent job, and was even grudgingly positive about Manfred itself. “Not bad, but too many steps.” (Ballet News, May 1983.)

  *Rudolf had much admired James Toback’s 1978 cult thriller, Fingers, the movie that inspired Jaques Audiard’s brilliant 2005 remake, The Beat That My Heart Skipped. The main character in Fingers, Harvey Keitel, an urban guerrilla and aspiring concert pianist obsessed by playing Bach, was yet another example of a man continually pulled in two by the warring sides of his nature. The hero of Exposed—a musician with a handgun—seemed much of the same. Toback cast Rudolf in the role of a classical violininst involved in an international terrorist cell. With Keitel cast as the villain and Nastassia Kinski playing a Wisconsin girl turned fashion model, the leading actors were first rate, and just as propitious was the appointment of Henri Decaë, one of Truffaut’s collaborators, as cinematographer. The main problem proved to be the dialogue. Rudolf claimed that Toback would make up his lines in the taxi journey to the set each morning, the result sounding so stilted and pretentious that cinema audiences were bursting into laughter every time Rudolf spoke. He had begged “the Maestro,” as he called Decaë, to make him look young and beautiful, but it is the ravishing 22-year-old Kinski who dominates the screen, virtually eclipsing her middle-aged costar. “Rudolf hasn’t seen even one take of the film and doesn’t intend to,” Maude told Wallace. “He has always said that, even while he was filming it.”

  *When Antoinette Sibley made her comeback in the mid-eighties—a glorious Indian summer conclusion to her career—it was Rudolf who insisted that she dance La Bayadère in order to regain her confidence. “He said, ‘If you can do that, you can do anything.’ But it was utter faith to entrust it to me at 45—to give me back what he first gave me all those years before. It was an act of a friend. An artist friend.”

  *Muriel Monkhouse—a staunch Red Cross volunteer—had came to England to be Maude’s bridesmaid and never left, becoming a kind of companion-lodger. Rudolf was fond of her because she always videotaped films and programs she thought would interest him.

  *Robert Tracy believes that Rudolf’s fury had been rooted in the fact that Zeffirelli had chosen to cast Vasiliev instead of him in the film of La Traviata, a theory that Zeffirelli himself emphatically refutes.

  17 PYGMALION DIAGHILEV

  He’ll be a director,” declared Ninette de Valois. “He’ll know a good choreographer when he sees one, he’ll know a good teacher, and above all things, he’ll know a good dancer.” De Valois was right, of course, as right as she had been when she predicted the Fonteyn-Nureyev partnership, and yet this was no radical change in direction for Rudolf. Ever since coming to the West he had been regenerating every company he joined, enriching the classical repertory, and picking out potential principals—from the twelve-year-old Anneli Alhanko and Per-Arthur Segerström in Sweden to Michael Birkmeyer in Vienna, Karen Kain and Frank Augustyn in Canada. And this is not necessarily a gift bestowed on legendary dancers. Margot Fonteyn would agree only grudgingly to coach young colleagues; Baryshnikov, although he had been director of American Ballet Theatre for four years
, was no pedagogue. As a performer he was the perfect exponent of what he called “the mystery and exultation and quietness of the St. Petersburg school,” but he was not able to pass this on. His maverick American partner Gelsey Kirkland complained that he was “unable to explain either how or why he produced a step in the way he did … to articulate his approach either in Russian or in English.” Baryshnikov may have been Alexander Pushkin’s greatest creation, but Rudolf was their teacher’s rightful heir—the messiah of pure classicism, and a molder and maker of stars.

  In Paris Rudolf had already spotted a whole generation of dancers, all in their teens, whom he was determined to elevate into a pleiad of étoiles. Achieving this, however, meant having to overthrow one of the Opéra’s most ancient traditions, “la sacro-sainte hierarchie,” which, as Ghislaine Thesmar explains, still functions to this day. From bottom to top, this hierarchy comprises quadrilles, coryphées, sujets, premiers danseurs, and étoiles. “From the moment you’re taken into the company you’re competing in front of a jury for a certain number of free places that come up every year. It’s very simple, very primitive, but it works. The technical competition is what makes the strength of Paris Opéra Ballet: You have to be the best.”

  Although virtually every dancer dreads the Concours de Promotion, nobody wanted the system changed. “Rudolf tried to put an end to it, but everyone in the company gave him total veto,” says Thesmar. “He really couldn’t touch that.” Within months he was handing in his letter of resignation over “intolerable” opposition to his choice of casting, and threatening to withdraw his productions from the repertory. But although Rudolf never succeeded in ridding the Opéra of its harsh annual examination, he soon found ways of circumventing it. He began breaking rules by picking corps de ballet members to accompany him on his private tours, and using the company in Vienna as a workshop for Parisian étoiles. “All those young dancers made their debuts in Vienna—and not one of them a soloist yet,” says Gerhard Brunner, former director of the State Opera Ballet. “Rudolf was determined to promote them as speedily as possible.” “If you were good, there was no question of waiting. With Rudolf you were given your chance,” Florence Clerc confirms. “He knew the importance of time,” adds Sylvie Guillem, “because dancers don’t have the time.”