Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Then there was the question of his behavior.

  You have also reproached me with being violent and insulting. If during rehearsals or in the heat of the moment I am excessive in my language or comportment, it is only through love of the absolute and my desire to communicate to the dancers my wish that they perform to the best of their abilities. I have an impulsive temperament which leads me to do things I regret. And if it concerns the Michel Renault affair or others I am the first to reproach myself.… What counts in our arts are the results obtained in spite of the words I have used that could injure you and for which I ask your pardon.

  But although such obsequiousness was difficult for Rudolf, what he resented most of all was having to defend his competence in mounting the classics when, as far as he was concerned, he had nothing to defend. As he told the dancers, “It is in this domain that I have acquired my reputation … due to my experience in the Kirov or Covent Garden and other companies in which the classical repertoire has a more solid reputation than that of the Opéra de Paris.”

  The conflict was eventually resolved by “un gentleman agreement,” a compromise dividing the season’s twenty-five performances of Swan Lake into fifteen of Nureyev’s and ten of the Bourmeister. As a solution it was, as Fouquet remarks, “a bit silly,” but it did allow the company to see that Rudolf’s version was far preferable to the crudely literal Bourmeister with its Soviet-style happy ending. While serious flaws remain (the misplaced bravura solos for Siegfried in act 2 and Rothbart in act 3, and a perversely zany, Busby Berkeley distortion of the elegiac act 4), there is more craftsmanship in this production than in anything else Rudolf ever did.

  This time, with the exception of Charles Jude, Rudolf had been let down by even his new protégés, and yet he could not help admiring the dancers for standing up to him. “Among the youngest there are strongly individual elements.… They are attention-seekers and they create a spirit of competition which is excellent for a ballet company.” Elisabeth Platel agrees. “We are Latin by temperament, we like to argue, and Rudolf was not disappointed when we were fighting with him.” Guests from outside, however, felt otherwise. The young English choreographer David Bintley, invited by Rudolf, says he spent the first week in an office drinking tea because nobody turned up for his rehearsals. “It was the most frustrating time of my life. And when I did get to work with the dancers I found nothing but blank faces or terrible conceit. There was such unwillingness to any kind of change—they’d just shrug and walk away. I thought it must be because they didn’t like me, but then I’d watch other rehearsals—Rudi van Dantzig’s, for example—and it was exactly the same.”

  Both choreographers left Paris without completing their ballets, van Dantzig writing to Rudolf to complain that he had “felt cheated and not taken seriously at all.”* Lynn Seymour, who came to assist with rehearsals, was someone else who hated every minute of working at the Opéra. “I found the men were slightly more receptive than the women, who were full of preconceived notions and refused to break any old habits. They’re fabulous dancers, but they’re brainwashed from pretty early on into a particular manner—the Parisian Allure, which makes me want to vomit.” Rudolf claimed there was little he could do: “I can’t be a policeman. There’s no point putting them in straitjackets: they should become aware.” His frequent absences from Paris only exacerbated disciplinary problems. “Dancers are very spoiled, greedy children, and when he left, it always created an emptiness,” Thesmar remarked, and Monique Loudières, interviewed in 1986, said much the same. “He has no time when he performs to counsel people, and we need that because he’s fantastic when he teaches.”

  “Why don’t you smile at your dancers when we meet them in the passage?” Maude once asked Rudolf. “Because they don’t smile at me,” he replied. “I said, ‘That’s because they’re nervous, and if you smiled at them they’d eat out of your hand.’ ” But communication was at an impasse. “You reproach me with not talking to you, but I can tell you that you are not coming to talk to me,” he told the dancers during the Swan Lake meeting, and yet Rudolf did not make it easy for them. As Sylvie Guillem put it, “He wanted to go toward people but at the same time he couldn’t allow himself to do it because he was shy. Yet he didn’t seem to be shy.” And when he was not being reticent, Rudolf was exploding, astounding Murray Louis by the force of his fury. “I was in Paris watching rehearsals and saw him absolutely torture young people.” To “go and repair” Rudolf relied on his two lieutenants: the diplomatic Claire Motte and Genia Poliakov, who was also wonderful at placating dancers Rudolf had upset. “With Genia, nobody felt insulted. Everybody felt good.”

  Poliakov was also able to bring out the best in Rudolf, considering him to be “a lamb—very tender, very kind.” Soon to be diagnosed séropositif himself, Poliakov shared Rudolf’s guilt about his corruption by the amoral West—what a friend describes as “this bitterness Genia felt for sex without love”—but their real complicity was dance. Jean-Luc Choplin watched them at quai Voltaire animatedly “speaking with their hands” as they studied old-fashioned laser discs of Russian ballets. “Rudolf was so happy to have someone from his country with him in Paris, someone he could trust in terms of taste.” It was also “a gentle” Rudolf that Marie-Suzanne Soubie saw, her serene, Maude-like manner enlivened by the same unshockability and sense of fun. At home she found herself repeating Rudolf’s witticisms and remarks, leaving out definite articles, Russian-style, and adopting his favorite expletives. “My daughter reprimanded me one day; she said, “Maman, maintenant tu parles comme God! [their nickname for him].”

  Marie-Suzanne claims that the five years she worked with Rudolf were the happiest of her life, but for Douce, this Paris Opéra period was “terrible. Absolutely terrible.” Playing one off against the other, Rudolf relished his role of manipulator, telling Douce, “You must help my secretary,” and assuring Marie-Suzanne, “Don’t think you have to do what Douce asks.” Having been telephoned by Rudolf to say what time his flight arrived, Douce would drive to the airport, only to see “Marie-Suzanne hiding in a telephone kiosk.” One day he arrived at the office saying, “We’re divorced. Douce was driving me and nagging so much that I left the car and walked.” It was anxiety to please that led Douce to make dramas out of trivialities. “If Rudolf wanted osso buco for dinner and the butchers didn’t have it, Douce would turn it into a tragedy,” recalls Gloria Venturi. “A tragedy over a piece of meat!” Marie-Suzanne, on the other hand, was blessed with what one observer called “a rare quality of lightness. Too many heavy people weighed down Rudolf’s life, and Marie-Suzanne was light. She was fun.”

  Attempting to “dethrone Douce,” Rudolf had asked Marie-Suzanne to arrange his dinner parties, but she refused, saying that it was not her role. “I had a husband, a daughter.… My life was with them, not with Rudolf.” And so, “with no respect, thanks, or praise,” Douce continued to run quai Voltaire, luring a cook-manservant, Manuel Ortega, from the Chilean Embassy, and volunteering her own services as “une bonne à tout faire.” She would invite guests like Boris Kochno or director Patrice Chéreau, whose company Rudolf always enjoyed, and she often helped Manuel to prepare the food. Expected to note down her expenses in order to be reimbursed by Gorlinsky, Douce itemized everything from a box of tissues to a lemon, but presenting Rudolf with a bill to sign invariably triggered a row. “How do I know the cost of a kilo of carrots?” he demanded one day. “Come with me to the market, and you’ll find out,” she said with a laugh, only to be warned, “You are insulting me!” And yet Douce’s loyalty never wavered. Whether driving to quai Voltaire every morning to wake Rudolf at nine and take him to class, or arranging for a pair of tights he had left behind to be flown to Seoul by a representative from Korean Airlines, she was, as Leslie Caron says, the best friend he could have had. “She had this quality of energizing and supporting you and just being there.” But it was precisely Douce’s omnipresence that Rudolf resented. “You strangle me,” he would fume. “The only p
lace I don’t see you is in my bath.” As Ghislaine Thesmar says, Rudolf expected his women to keep a certain distance, and Douce could never do that. “She overdid things and lost his respect. She was running around like a little dog, doing things before he asked, so he just walked all over her. Douce was not very intelligent, but she had a big heart, existing entirely in order to care for other people. She needed to devote herself to someone; she couldn’t live for herself. She was a waste of a great mother.”

  It was in the spring of 1985 that Douce began to suspect that there was something she was not being told, “something Soubie was hiding.” Then she received a telephone call from a friend telling her that Rudolf had been spotted at an AIDS institute. “I said, ‘No, it’s not possible—I, of all people, would know.’ ” But she began noticing the way Rudolf was getting more and more tired, and one morning an envelope arrived returning a social security application she had made on his behalf. “The letter said, ‘We are sorry we are unable to process this because it is not in Mr. Nureyev’s name.’ Rudolf had been using a different name at the institute, but he still wanted to get his medical reimbursements!” Now that she had written proof, Douce went to La Pitié and asked to see Willy Rozenbaum, but the hospital staff, assuming she was a journalist, threw her out. The more anxious Douce became about Rudolf’s health, the more he detached himself, fending off her attempts to win his confidence with increasing outbursts of anger. Friends who were fond of them both begged him to be kinder, and Gloria Venturi urged Douce, “For once in your life say something really tough. But she was too afraid. She was afraid he’d tell her to go away.” Margot was also concerned. On a visit to Paris she had been driven by Douce to the airport at 6:30 in the morning and wrote telling Maude about it. “[Douce] had not read an interview with Rudolf in which he said how lucky he was to have a friend who looked after everything for him.… It cheered her up a bit, but I find her saddened.”

  It was during this trip that Rudolf brought his twenty-year-old protégée to her Palais Garnier box to meet Margot. It had been a long time since the Paris Opéra Ballet had produced an international star, but Rudolf knew that Sylvie Guillem had that quality and wanted Margot’s blessing. Until the age of eleven, when she decided she would rather be a dancer, Guillem had trained as a gymnast, an Olympic hopeful. At the Opéra’s school she was “this little girl—like nothing you’ve ever seen before,” and in the company, as just another corps de ballet swan, she had dazzled Rudolf with her singularity. Like an example of futuristic architecture, the curve of her insteps converging in perfect linear perspective with the concave planes of her hyperextended legs, Guillem redefined the image of a ballerina. Not only did her extraordinary flexibility liberate the confinements of the human frame, but what she presents when she dances is a miracle of spatial harmony and abstract form. Possessing what Rudolf saw as “un talent fou,” Guillem was, at the same time, completely lacking in maturity, turning into an angry child if she did not get her way. They clashed constantly, “screaming at each other like wildcats,” and in retrospect, Guillem wishes their encounter had come several years later. “I was too young. I had to make my own mistakes. He couldn’t talk. I couldn’t talk. We just communicated by our instinct. So that was a bit wild, sometimes. Because he was not a very patient speaker and I was not a very patient listener, it couldn’t work. We went directly to the point without all the talking before.”

  Expecting her to absorb and follow everything he wanted to pass on, Rudolf complained that the ballerina was not attentive enough. “Rudolf wanted to keep her, in a sense,” says Jean-Luc Choplin. “To be really a Pygmalion to her. But Sylvie was too rebellious.” Despite her young age, she had strong ideas of her own, convinced that there was little Rudolf could teach her about dancing or interpretation. It was too late for him to impress her with his technical prowess, and when he performed she saw not the character he was portraying but Rudolf himself. What she did learn from his example, however, was how to conduct her life.

  I learned a way of being. I saw someone fighting for everything, fighting for his opinions, fighting for other people, for something that was true for him.… So I saw that. I saw someone very strong, very lonely, and learned a lot from his behavior.… I had admiration for him that was not for the same reasons as the others. My admiration was from a woman to a man. It was not the Director, the Choreographer. It was just the man. Because he was an exceptional man.

  It was the maverick in Sylvie that Rudolf loved, and to him she was “an untamed young animal and une femme provocante at the same time.” Tall, with green eyes—“part Garbo, part gamine”—she was not the feminine mirror image that had attracted him to women like Talitha—it was Sylvie’s personality that matched his own. He said more than once that he would like to have married her, telling one friend, “I’d switch back. I’d switch back for Sylvie.” To formalize his esteem, Rudolf allowed the young ballerina to make Paris Opéra history by promoting her twice in the space of a few days. On December 22, 1984, after the corps de ballet’s annual Concours examination, Guillem was elected première danseuse, and on the twenty-ninth, after a performance of the Nureyev Swan Lake, Rudolf came onstage to announce to the audience that he was making her an étoile. “That,” he told a Paris-Match journalist, “is my raison d’être.”

  “Diaghilev Pygmalion” was the name of the character he invented for himself in Cinderella, the ballet he was soon to make as a special vehicle for Guillem. But it also encapsulated his bond with his other teenage discoveries: Laurent Hilaire, Manuel Legris, Elisabeth Maurin, and Isabelle Guérin, known as the “Chou-chou de Noureev.” Rudolf would take the coterie with him to perform galas abroad or New York seasons of Nureyev and Friends, disregarding the missed Opéra rehearsals or the growing resentment of the dancers he had left behind. “Going out with the boss implies certain favoritism,” says Thierry Fouquet. “Rudolf’s group earned a lot of money and prestige.” Inevitably there were casualties. The director’s relegation of Patrick Dupond, the most popular ballet star in France, to the position of guest artist was seen to be “a rare lapse in his otherwise sound business sense.” To Rudolf, however, Dupond was a crowd-pleasing demi-caractère dancer completely lacking in classical finesse. “Patrick was un voyou, très mal élevé,” says Hélène Traïline. “He had a special kind of force, youthfulness, and an aura that audiences loved. He would do twelve pirouettes, but it was dirty dancing—un peu style Lifar à son époque.” Hilaire and Legris, on the other hand, were near-clones of the young Nureyev. As the Royal Ballet’s Wayne Eagling observed, “You can see Rudolf onstage through them: the way they walk, their mannerisms, the way they take a fifth position or present themselves. His legacy goes on through those people that he was teaching.… You see a bit of Rudolf in all of them.”

  Wanting the dancers to acquire the refinement of le style anglais, Rudolf planned an Ashton evening at the Opéra, but the choreographer refused to allow any of his ballets to be staged. The dismally received 1954 Sadler’s Wells tour had left bitter memories. Ashton’s work had been described by Parisian critics as “somewhat unmusical,” the movements of the shepherds in Daphnis and Chloe compared to “Swedish gymnastic exercises,” their costumes to “tennis shirts with engineers’ trousers.”* “Freddie had a horror of the Paris Opéra,” says Alexander Grant. “He thought the French were so snooty about English taste.” It’s no coincidence that Ashton’s reply to Rudolf—“Maybe not this year … next year”—was an exact echo of Rudolf’s own words to him. “I’d tell Fred, ‘Not this year.… But next year.’ ” With the wisdom of hindsight, Rudolf now regretted the fact that he had not allowed Ashton to rehearse him in the classics when he first came to London: “I spurned this relationship.… This drove us apart.” But he did not realize the extent to which Ashton was a self-confessed “old elephant. I never forget.” Rudolf begged Sylvie Guillem to visit the choreographer in the hope he would allow the Opéra to stage his Ondine: “Please go and see Sir Fred.… You go and smile.” “W
ith my little English, I try, I try,” recalled the ballerina, but the result was, in Rudolf’s words, “No going.”†

  Antony Tudor was also proving difficult to woo. Rudolf had told the choreographer when he was in New York how much he would love to mount his masterpiece Lilac Garden at the Opéra, but the reclusive Tudor “soft-pedaled [his] response.” To their mutual friend Maude, Tudor explained that he did not know the company, and was concerned that the dancers would not grasp the subtlety their roles required. “[Rudolf] should know well that my approach to ballet has nothing of the assembly line … for I have always approached and choreographed my works as though they were plays.” Promised a whole evening at the more intimate Opéra Comique, however, Tudor was eventually persuaded, telling Maude, “The talk had gone on for so long that there comes a time. He is used to getting what he wants, and finally he may be in a work by the choreographer who eluded him. Till now.”*

  Maude, who had danced in the original productions of two of the three ballets (Lilac Garden and Dark Elegies), went to Paris for the Tudor homage, staying at quai Voltaire. Rudolf would have liked her to come much more often, and said that her visits were never long enough. “You bring light,” he told her. “You make people calm.” But because he was so busy she saw very little of him, and felt a burden to the friends he had asked to take care of her—Douce most of all. “In the evening she would fetch me and sit with me.… She looked after me as much as she looked after Rudolf.” After a few days Maude would find herself longing to be back in Victoria Road, where she felt closer to Nigel, something Rudolf understood only too well. At a New Year’s Eve dinner at quai Voltaire, while the other guests were chatting and waiting for the moment of midnight, he looked across at Maude and said quietly, “We need Nigel here, don’t we?” “Nothing escaped him. He was so caring.… He used to watch and at about half-past twelve, he’d say, ‘Maude, you’re tired.’ Somebody told him that twelve o’clock was the latest he should ring me after Nigel died.… At the time, I wasn’t sleeping very well and would have loved him to ring me up at two in the morning. But he wouldn’t because he’d been told that I couldn’t get back to sleep.”