Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  While developing the ballet he also spent a lot of time with Charles Jude, whom he had chosen for the role of Morris Townshend, Catherine’s fortune-hunting suitor. Although the dancer was known to be somewhat mercenary himself—“Charles loves money—he has dollar signs for eyes”—it is unlikely that Rudolf was typecasting, as Jude says they both forgot the story while collaborating on the ballet. He remembers their complicity as they worked on a jazzy, Astaire-inspired sequence for Townshend and the Doctor, the two repeatedly exchanging places as they danced up and down a staircase. “We were like a father and son—and finally the son becomes the father of the man.” Jude also maintains that Rudolf intended Washington Square to represent the two countries in which he spent the most time—his reclusive Paris life versus the social clamor and dollar-driven culture of New York. The result was like the creation of two different ballets: the intimate, genteel world of James’s novel contrasted with phantasmagoric outdoor parade scenes of nineteenth-century Americana. And for this fantastic side, what Rudolf called “the freedom and cacophony of the street,” he chose the marching bands of Charles Ives: “Ives’s father was manager of a band and with son they would experiment: one orchestra marching towards square in one key; opposite would be another orchestra marching in another key and different rhythm. And they would clash. And [Ives] had that in his music.”

  He asked the Ives specialist Michael Tilson Thomas to be musical director and to make a selection of the composer’s pieces. Rudolf’s own idea was to use the composer’s chamber music for the interior scenes “as if Dr. Sloper were playing,” but later claimed that Tilson Thomas objected to not conducting throughout. Moreover, when Rudolf took it upon himself to change the order of the numbers, “he got very upset and walked out.” It is doubtful, however, whether even the atmospheric musical contrast Rudolf wanted could have made a success of Washington Square. Ives’s style, as he himself admitted, is “not at all Henry James,” since its brassy populism is completely at odds with the psychological subtlety of the book. The ballet itself is a bewildering mess. Ten minutes in, there is still no narrative, just one opportunity after another for Rudolf to dance, the audience given no clue as to the identity of the three different women he partners (dead wife, daughter, sister). His inspiration for the enigmatic emotional drama was Antony Tudor, whose work he had the chance to study while mounting the Opéra’s homage. A master at telling a story or specifying character through gesture, Tudor achieves his effect by anchoring one’s attention to the situation in hand, whereas Rudolf is constantly distracting the eye. And although the ensembles in the square’s Fourth of July parade are artfully staged in contrapuntal rhythms and crisscrossing blocs, the mood taking on an atonal edge of hysteria, the crowd action is never constructively fused with the family drama. Croce’s dismissal of Rudolf as “a choreographer of staggering incompetence” is borne out in the interior scenes by weak love duets and a truly awful, leg-clutching “comic” number—an exchange between Morris and the Aunt—to the melody of “God Save the Queen.” And yet, the ballet has its redeeming moments. One arrestingly telling scene is the pas de deux, during which Morris courts Catherine on a sofa while, in the background, dancing to a different tempo, is the disturbed, fluttery presence of the Doctor and his sister. The way Catherine keeps recoiling from her suitor’s touch in a slow, stylized contortion instantly reveals the character in the novel: a plain, gauche girl unable to cope with the role of romantic heroine. It is the kind of psychological imagery that came so easily to Tudor, and proves that there are isolated instances when Rudolf, too, was capable of making dance more eloquent than words.

  For the Parisians, however, Washington Square, with its abstruse story and razzmatazz of cowboys, soldiers, wildcatters, pioneer women, black-faced minstrels, Ku Klux Klan figures, and Statue of Liberty chorines was mystifying to an almost offensive degree. Few were familiar with the novel or the music, and only half the audience could see what was going on. Rudolf had planned the set to move with the action like a Steadycam, but had not managed to convey this to the designer, who constructed a cumbersome edifice depicting both the Square and the house, whose wall was blocking many people’s view. There was a near riot in the auditorium with boos and catcalls—“like the first night of the Rite of Spring”—and Rudolf, who had created this ballet against all odds, was devastated by the response. He had been going every day to the hospital “to have this stuff taken out of his lungs,” and then working for seven-hour stretches. By the time it was all over he appeared to be in a kind of daze, and when Monica Mason, who had mounted MacMillan’s Song of the Earth for the same program, came onstage to say good-bye, he hardly registered that she was there. “It had been years since I’d seen Rudolf, and I was really quite shocked by how thin and unwell he was. I remember wondering whether I’d ever see him again.”

  But Rudolf was allowing himself no respite. In September and October, taking Maude and Marie-Suzanne with him, he traveled to China and Japan to stage his Don Quixote. He had grown fond of Dai Ailian, the director of Beijing’s Central Ballet, a remarkable woman whom he called his “Chinese mother.” Regarded as a National Living Treasure, Dai Ailian was almost single-handedly responsible for establishing China’s ballet tradition, and adored Rudolf for his generosity toward her dancers. “You are a good friend for what you have done for us,” she wrote in one of her many letters. “You have a home in Beijing whenever you want to come.” But if Rudolf had agreed to mount and perform the ballet for a fraction of his usual fee, it was largely due to the rare opportunity to be onstage with a company that was glad to have him. It was the same with Japan’s Matzuama Ballet, which, in turn, benefited hugely from its Nureyev association (it had been invited to join his Friends season at the London Coliseum in July). In addition to a stint at the Edinburgh Festival and a week of performances in Manchester, he had spent the summer touring a number of towns in Italy, in a season arranged by his masseur, Luigi Pignotti, who had recently become an impresario. Needless to say, Luigi’s small-budget tours had upset Sandor Gorlinsky, who told Rudolf that this was not the kind of work a great star should be doing. “But it was a time Rudolf would have gone anywhere,” says Tessa Kennedy. “He just wanted to dance. Period.”

  Rudolf’s answer to what he called the Hiroshima Question—the question of when he was going to give up—was always the same: “I’ll stop dancing when people stop coming to see me.” For many of his fans and colleagues there were still “incredible moments of what it used to be,” the kind of “incisive strokes” that Edwin Denby described on seeing the fading Tamara Toumanova perform. Despite the “careless feet, limp wormy arms, brutally deformed phrasings,” she had so much vitality “that she made everyone else look as if they merely crept or scuttled about her.” The ballerina Marie-Christine Mouis felt much the same about Rudolf during a performance of Raymonda. “These beautiful young dancers were coming forward to bow, but the only person you could see was Rudolf: The energy he gave off was phenomenal.” And yet instead of modulating his performance to compensate for his age and failing technique (as Baryshnikov was soon to do), Rudolf continued trying to execute all the bravura steps he had danced in his youth. “He’s incredibly honest in his endeavor not to fake things,” said Wayne Eagling. “You never see Rudolf trying to fudge the difficult bits. The dishonest thing is within himself: He thinks he gets away with it.”

  Rudolf, however, had no illusions about how he looked onstage. He would joke about his “arabesque canapé,” referring to his horizontal, sagging back. Seeing Clara Saint after a gap of many years he said, “If you want to see un vieux con onstage, come and see me perform!” Dance was, as Violette Verdy realized, therapy he could not do without. “With the sweat comes much more than just mineral salts: A great deal of anger comes out, a great deal of nonsense and negativity—you burn all that when you do a good barre. My guess is that he’ll do a barre until he cannot walk anymore.” And it was dance alone that could distract Rudolf from his condition. “I think
that he was frightened at first,” said Michel Canesi. “And then afterward, seeing that things were going well, that he could dance and choreograph, he forgot his illness a little bit.”

  As such an intense schedule of performances made it impossible for Rudolf to continue HPA23 treatment at La Pitié-Salpêtrière, Canesi had volunteered to leave his patients with a replacement and go on the road with him. This meant that he could not only administer the daily injections but also keep an eye on falling platelet counts, which was the main side effect of the drug. There were those, Douce in particular, who questioned Canesi’s competence in the field of AIDS, but at no point did Rudolf lose faith in his doctor. It was a time when all sorts of theories were emerging about possible cures, from injections of ozone to a blood-cleansing procedure known as plasmapheresis, but Rudolf ignored them. For him having Canesi by his side was a way of deflecting the issue. “It was as if he was saying, ‘I’m handing this problem over to you. You deal with it because I have work to do.’ ”

  In November 1985 they both went on tour with the Nancy Ballet, starting off in Valencia and traveling to Florence and Germany. To the company, Michel was not Rudolf’s doctor but a young dermatologist, probably a boyfriend, who clearly relished being part of a star’s entourage. “I never had sex with Rudolf, though there was a moment when it could have happened. I wasn’t attracted to him, and anyway, I wanted to keep a certain distance.” It was an exhilarating experience nonetheless—“like traveling with the Beatles”—and Canesi admits being grateful for the chance it gave him to escape from his Paris practice. “Those were the years of horror. I was overwhelmed with AIDS patients in my office, and near to burnout. It was really dreadful; half of my patients were séropositif. They’d come and show me what they had on their skin, and I knew they had AIDS and were going to die in a few months. There was also the shame attached—bisexual men passing it on to their wives—and I found myself having to enter the most secret parts of peoples’ lives.”

  In France it was only in 1985 that people were becoming aware of the gravity of AIDS, and yet there was still no real sense of panic. This was the year the New York bathhouses had been closed down by the city, but in Paris business at gay saunas appeared unchanged, and the quais—especially between the Pont Neuf and the Tuileries—remained as popular as ever for late-night cruising. Advertisements for condoms were banned, and doctors were divided about whether or not it was their duty to alert AIDS patients to the danger they could inflict on others. Willy Rozenbaum believed that demonizing “this practice or that pleasure” meant destroying the confidence essential to the doctor-patient relationship; some gay members of the profession advocated caution, others considered this to be a new form of repression. Responding to an article written by the president of the Gay Association, which argued that there was no reason for homosexual men to change their behavior, Michel Canesi published a counterattack. “I said that it was not natural for human beings to have sex with a dozen different partners in one day, but people began calling me ‘Cassandra’—the prophet of doom.”

  Rudolf himself, according to Canesi, although very secretive about his sexual habits, was “sometimes conscious of the dangers and sometimes absolutely not.” Confirming this, Stephen Sherriff remembers how it was Rudolf who would suggest they use condoms—“though I’d have to go out and get them”—whereas Robert Tracy claims that there were a number of partners with whom Rudolf admitted having had unprotected sex. “A whole bunch of people. All dead.” And while some were struck by Rudolf’s attitude of “total denial,” others describe it more as an act of defiance. “Rudolf wasn’t a person to deny.” Certainly we know from biographer Otis Stuart’s eyewitness account of Rudolf servicing “a sylvan blond youth” that the dancer was still frequenting le Trap as late as the winter of ’85. “With one last swallow of his drink, [he] … mounts the stairs. First at a trickle, then en masse the entire room follows.… among the most fervently attentive audiences of Nureyev’s career.”

  Toward the end of December, Sandor Gorlinsky told Rudolf about a letter he had received from a Nice solicitor saying that Rosa had arrived in his office without an appointment and rambled without stopping for nearly two hours. “My own contribution may have lasted perhaps five minutes.” Clearly suffering from what seemed to be a state of paranoia, she spoke of espionage charges and surveillance by French police, which were making local shop owners “friendly at one moment and hostile at another.” Finding it impossible to deal with Rudolf’s sister, “who believes that everyone has it in for her, is persecuting her and stealing her money,” La Turbie’s BNP bank had refused to give Rosa a checkbook, which only confirmed her belief that everyone in the village was conspiring against her: “She is certain that a number of people are trying to poison her and therefore sleeps on the table in the kitchen because the ceiling is low and she is more able to wash and clean the various surfaces (including the ceiling) each day so as to dissipate the noxious substances.… Other rooms are subject to draughts and she suspects that the poisoners use such draughts to introduce the substances into the house.”

  Having learned the previous year that her brother was thinking of selling the villa at La Turbie, Rosa had become more and more disturbed, consulting the solicitor for the first time in November 1984 (and expecting Rudolf to pay the bill). She was refusing to move into the Monaco apartment and wanted to be appointed caretaker of Villa Arcadie: “Her strongest wish is to take care of her brother’s assets.” Clearly dictated by Rudolf, Gorlinsky’s reply to Armand Schonfrucht & Co. shows more impatience than compassion. “Mr. Nureyev does not wish her to be concerned with protecting his property in France. He is perfectly capable of doing so … and he does not wish to have any interference from her.… Also, Mr. Nureyev has no intention of appointing her caretaker of the villa as the whole atmosphere is so poisonous for her at La Turbie.”

  And yet Rudolf was worried enough to contact Canesi. “He called me one day and said, ‘Michel, I want my sister to be in a psychiatric hospital. At once. She’s crazy.’ I tried to explain to him that this was a rather Soviet attitude, that it is not easy in France to have someone sectioned [involuntarily committed], and he didn’t bring the matter up again.” But the situation only compounded Rudolf’s persistent sense of guilt. His defection had affected Rosa badly, preventing any chance of promotion in her teaching job, and the KGB’s intimidation further fueled her increasing anxiety. Banishment to the remote Villa Arcadie only made matters worse, and when Marika Besobrasova arrived there one day, she found Rosa “washing, washing, washing herself.” Visitors were warned that Rudolf’s sister kept a shotgun she was very likely to use, and Marie-Suzanne received a phone call from La Turbie’s mayor complaining that Madame François was not allowing tradespeople to set foot on the property. Most troubling of all was the fact that Rosa was refusing to cooperate in the divorce with Pierre François, now understandably expecting to regain his freedom.*

  “Bringing Rosa to the West was the one time in Rudolf’s life that he really made the wrong decision,” says Franck Raoul-Duval, who had visited her a few years earlier in Leningrad and observed that she had a job that occupied her time, and friends of her own.

  Rudolf wanted her to come because of the link with his family and mother, but he was too caught up in his own life to see that it wouldn’t work. Rosa hung on to him in a way he couldn’t understand and could never accept. This is very tragic. You can’t move a Soviet person who has lived in Soviet conditions all her life—what could she do in the West? When you uproot people who are used to a certain existence, they perish right away, or become resentful, or go mad.

  Rudolf, however, was now on the brink of his own descent into hell. This had begun in March 1986 with what his colleagues still refer to as “l’affaire Béjart.” At his invitation Maurice Béjart had come to Paris to create a new work for the company, and during rehearsals (when Rudolf was away on tour), appeared to be preparing the ground for some kind of putsch. “He was clearly gett
ing as much information as he could about the situation with Rudolf,” says Jean-Luc Choplin. “It was a time when there was a lot of criticism about his directorship, and also a lot of gossip about who was going to follow him. Béjart was finding out who would be on his side—trying to be friendly to me, to the general director—and I felt that he was ready to seize any opportunity to get the Paris Opéra.”

  This was certainly not something Rudolf had been expecting. Relations between the two men had never been straightforward, but recently both had expressed a keen desire to collaborate again. Béjart had written to say that he was looking forward “with joy” to working with Rudolf at the Opéra, and Rudolf had scheduled a Béjart soirée at the Palais Garnier “in love and admiration.” But having proposed a version of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin with Rudolf in the lead (greeted by him as “a miraculous Christmas present to me and the Opéra”), the choreographer had then changed his mind. Deciding instead on a comic homage to the Paris company—which he called Arepo, the word “opera” spelled backwards—he did not create a part for Rudolf, and seemed to be using the opportunity of his absence to fan hostility against him. When Rudolf returned in time for the premiere, the tension in the air was palpable. “We knew Béjart would try to do something,” Choplin recalls. “We both smelled it, and decided to post ourselves côté cour [stage right] in the wings.”

  The new ballet was enthusiastically applauded, and after the final curtain call the choreographer came onstage, silencing the audience to make an announcement. Taking the hands of two of the young dancers, Eric Vu An and Manuel Legris, he declared that he was nominating both as étoiles. There was a roar of approval in the auditorium, but the pair looked uncertain—as Elisabeth Platel put it, “They felt in their hearts that it was wrong.” Only the director of dance, after first clearing the promotion with the general director, had the right to appoint an étoile. In the past, however, it had been something of a Béjart tradition “to kind of consecrate” a major work at the Opéra by making étoiles of its leading dancers (as he had done with Jean-Pierre Bonnefous and Michael Denard). “Béjart was a little bit in love with Eric, and he wanted to do something special for him,” Legris has said. “He knew that Rudolf liked me as a dancer, so he figured perhaps if I make both étoiles …” Béjart himself now claims that he had tried without success to consult Rudolf before the performance, but at the intermission had been told, “Nureyev agrees, you can go ahead, you have the green light.” But although Rudolf appreciated Vu An’s considerable talent, he had never considered him to be a classical star. And in the case of Legris (who, along with Laurent Hilaire, he was forming in his own image), Rudolf had no intention of letting any advancement be decided by anyone other than himself. Turning to look at their director for confirmation, the two dancers saw him waving his index finger slowly and implacably from side to side in an unmistakable gesture of no.*