Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Immediately an order was given for the curtain to be brought down, and Rudolf strode out onstage. “Poisson d’avril!” (April Fool!) he quipped coldly to the dancers, and then, turning to Béjart, unleashed his “monstrous anger.” “It was a very bad moment for the whole house,” recalls Platel. “The company had been so happy, and one minute later everyone was crying.” A crisis meeting was called in the general director’s office in order to prepare a press release: Whatever the dancers had been led to believe, the administration had to take an institutional position. “Maybe Béjart thought we would not dare undo his decision because it had been witnessed by the public,” says Choplin. “But we did.”

  Rudolf had threatened to walk out that night if he did not have the Opéra’s full backing. “They gave it to me.” EMBROUILLE A L’OPÉRA: “BÉJART A TORT” (“Turmoil at the Opéra: ‘Béjart Is Wrong’ ”) blazed the front-page headline of Le Matin de Paris. But on the lunchtime broadcast of TF1, two days after the premiere, the choreographer got his revenge. Whereas Rudolf, as Michel Canesi says, “lacked the weapons to speak to the media in French,” Béjart was a friend of the celebrated television journalist Yves Mourousy, who had given him this opportunity to answer back. With Zola-like intensity Béjart called Rudolf a liar, and accused him of bringing the Opéra to ruins by destabilizing Claude Bessy’s school and France’s “grande danse traditionale.” M. Nureyev, he went on, had insulted Roland Petit and sidelined Patrick Dupond; he was a terrible choreographer, and as director was a “phantom of the Opéra” because he was hardly ever there.

  Seizing this image, the press pitted “Mephisto contre le fantôme,” and Robert Denvers, a week away from the end of his teaching engagement at the Opéra, felt so caught between the two—“both very close to my heart”—that he asked Rudolf to let him go: “For me, this was a turning point in my perception of Béjart. He was always a cool person, the intellectual, and Rudolf more of the visceral one. Actually it was Béjart who lost his control and became aggressive and resentful and really overstepped the boundaries of his role. Rudolf behaved incredibly well and with incredible dignity. He won that battle fair and square.”

  It had all been extremely unpleasant and an affront, and yet this was not what had really shattered Rudolf over the previous few days. That month Erik Bruhn’s doctor friend Lennart Pasborg had received a telephone call from the dancer saying that he was “really sick.” Erik, now fifty-eight, had always been a heavy smoker, getting through at least three packs of cigarettes a day, and he had been coughing badly since the winter of ’85. “He’d asked me what he should do. ‘Get yourself X-rayed and give up smoking,’ I said. But he just laughed.” Now, more than a year later, Erik had discovered that he was in the final stages of lung cancer. Deciding to leave immediately for Toronto, Lennart went out to buy a supply of the alternative medicines that had helped to prolong his father’s life. “My father had cancer for some years and found mistletoe injections enormously effective. I told Erik, ‘He was helped—you can be helped too.’ ” But although Lennart administered the medication, within half an hour of arriving at Erik’s apartment, he could see that it was too late.

  On March 20 Erik was admitted to Toronto General Hospital. The National Ballet’s artistic administrator, Valerie Wilder, had contacted Rudolf though a mutual friend, urging him to come immediately, but he made it clear that the furor at the Opéra was going to delay him. “Erik asked about his visit daily and was very distressed when it kept being put off,” she says. “This was of great concern to me, too, because I was not sure if Rudolf would get to Toronto in time.” On Friday, March 28, two days after his trial by television, Rudolf went straight from the airport to the hospital, where he was met by Lennart and Erik’s partner, Constantin Patsalas, who then left the room so that the two dancers could be alone.

  Only recently the pair had been making idealistic plans for a future together, talking about starting a ballet academy in Spain, or building a house in Turkey. “The idea … is beginning to sound very attractive to me,” Erik wrote on July 5 the previous year. “I am not going to run a company forever … [and] it would be nice to retire to a beautiful place sometime.” But over the last few days Erik had significantly withdrawn into himself, and although still conscious, was so drowsy and confused that he barely acknowledged Rudolf’s presence. “We didn’t have contact,” Rudolf told Charles Jude on his return. “He’s already dead for me. It was like something had been cut.” After staying only about a quarter of an hour, Rudolf went straight to the National Ballet’s studios: He badly needed the catharis of class. “He looked pretty shaken,” says Veronica Tennant. “We didn’t talk about why he was in Toronto. Though of course we all knew.”

  The following day he went to the hospital again, where Constantin was in the room with Erik. “Don’t worry,” Rudolf heard him whispering. “It will be wonderful up there. You’ll find lots of friends.” “Rudolf was shocked by that,” said Maude. “It was the sort of thing he would never have said.” Erik, however, was now oblivious to anything and anyone. The morphine was making him hallucinate, and while Rudolf sat alone beside him, he began talking about putting on his makeup for Moor’s Pavane. “Erik was totally out of it,” he told his Toronto friend, the dancer Linda Maybarduk. “Finally all I could do was get into bed and just hold him in my arms.”

  Returning to Paris, Rudolf then left again almost immediately, taking a small group of Opéra dancers to perform with the Ballet du Louvre in the Seychelles. On the afternoon of April 1 Lennart called to say that Erik had just died. It had been 2:45 p.m. Toronto time. Rudolf took the news with little emotion, his voice soft but steady, and mentioned nothing to his dancers during dinner that night. Maude was there, too, and after everyone had gone to bed, they sat together on the balcony between their adjoining rooms. It was a balmy night, the air thick with the scent of tropical flowers, and as they rested their legs on the railing, looking up at the stars, Rudolf said simply, “Erik died today.” Maude took his hand. “Doesn’t something like that make those attacks in the press seem trivial?” “Yes, it does,” he replied. “And that was all he said.”

  Erik’s last letter to Rudolf had been darkly prescient in tone. Written on January 10, when he had no idea of his own fatal illness, it tells of the death the day before of Lucia Chase, American Ballet Theatre’s director, and that, two days earlier, of National Ballet’s young conductor in a car crash. “Death,” wrote Erik, “is very confusing and upsetting but something we must accept.” To Rudolf, however, this was heresy. He refused to allow himself to believe that he could die from AIDS. Not only was he convinced that a medicine would be discovered in time to help him—“They cured syphilis,” he declared to Robert Tracy—but illness, like injury, was something he felt he could overcome, just as he had managed to overcome every other obstacle in his life. Remembering the time he was hospitalized in Leningrad for tearing a ligament in his leg, Rudolf said, “A furious desire to defeat the injury was born in me, a determination not to let fate overwhelm me.” Erik, on the other hand, on learning that he had cancer, had showed no desire to fight but, as Lennart put it, “went into his death process with all his psychic power.” “He did leave us with astounding speed,” adds Valerie Wilder. “He always said he would go quickly, and it is almost as if he willed himself to do just that.”

  The difference between the two dancers extended even to the grave. In stark contrast to Rudolf’s state funeral seven years later, Erik asked to be cremated without any service. On April 20 fewer than a dozen people, including his sister, lawyer, housekeeper, and a few close friends, gathered for half an hour in Mariebjerg Church cemetery in Lyngby, outside Copenhagen. They were there to honor this great dancer’s final wish: to have his urn of ashes placed in the Unknowns’ Grave.

  Meanwhile, in Paris, the campaign to oust Rudolf as director continued, Roland Petit now aligning himself with Béjart. “It was the same old story.” Choplin smiles. “ ‘We should run the Paris Opéra’—two frustrated c
horeographers trying to pretend.” In the May 5 edition of Le Figaro, a joint letter appeared outlining proposals to put France’s national ballet “back on the rails.” Although not mentioning Rudolf by name, it criticizes his retrospective approach to the repertory—describing the Petipa classics as “works other companies have created long ago”—and derides the choice of a star dancer at the helm of a major institution. “We demand the formation of a national enquiry to stop the star system of personalities unqualified to run a company.”

  More than a decade later, in his short book Temps liés avec Noureev, Petit castigates himself for having allowed “a renowned choreographer” to persuade him to cosign “this perfidious, tasteless message.” And yet, in an interview with Gérard Mannoni appearing two weeks before the Figaro piece, the choreographer had volunteered an unprovoked, anti-Rudolf diatribe of his own.

  The Opéra Ballet does not have to wait for M. Noureev to know how to dance. We have no need of ce monsieur, neither at the level of the school, that is admirably run by Madame Bessy, nor at the level of the corps de ballet. I do not think that Maurice Béjart wishes to take on the Opéra de Paris. Neither do I, but we must be able to work there in all sympathy with an administration which is for us and the dancers.… I will not go to the Opéra while M. Noureev and his administration are there.… I do not want to depend on a director who slaps a professor, who insults a choreographer, says April Fool to another choreographer who has just made an announcement with which he had agreed before.

  Petit admits in his memoir to having refused several attempts made by Igor Eisner, the minister of culture, to unite the two estranged friends. “I was only waiting for a sign from the monster for the reconciliation for which I hoped.” And which he got. “My dear Roland,” Rudolf had written in December 1985, “Let’s forget the past. The Opéra must restage your works or else commission new ones. Let’s talk about this as soon as possible.” It was André Larquié who met the choreographer later that month, having been warned beforehand by Rudolf that they must commission only proven Petit successes, and “avoid works like Chat Botté.” Although an agreement could not be reached, the administration was confident that “it was just a matter of time before Petit would come around” (three years to be precise: Notre Dame de Paris was revived in November 1988).

  Nevertheless it was galling for Rudolf to be constantly aware that French ballet had turned against him. “They don’t like foreigners here, you know,” Lifar had warned Balanchine in 1928, and it was this sense of being “le sale étranger” that was making Rudolf’s job increasingly unpleasant. “We must not be suspected of chauvinism … [but] our tradition is a French tradition,” the Figaro letter had crowed, a view with which Claude Bessy, who fervently admired Béjart and disliked Rudolf, was in fierce accord. Responding to his client’s threat to leave and withdraw all his ballets, Mario Bois wrote advising Rudolf on his legal and moral responsibilities, warning him to be prudent, as he might end up forfeiting a lot of money. But Jean-Luc Choplin remembers their director handing in his notice at least a dozen times. “My secretary would be in tears as she was typing his letter of resignation, and Rudolf was so sensitive to Sophie’s crying that he would rip out the paper and tear it up.” Finally, after turning to Jean-Claude Carrière to help him compose a reply to recent accusations,* Rudolf announced his intention to stay. “Because cowardice and inconstancy are not part of my character, it would be inconceivable and totally illogical and unfortunate for the whole Opéra Ballet if I were to renounce my duty.”

  A major tour of the United States just days away was reason enough to hold on. Transatlantic success could transform the image of a company overnight, just as Sadler’s Wells triumphant New York debut had brought instant world fame to English ballet in 1949. In his previous role as administrator of Roland Petit’s troupe, Jean-Luc Choplin had forged a strong link with the director of the Metropolitan Opera House, Jane Hermann. “Because I was successful in persuading her to take the company with Rudolf and Makarova as guest stars, it was easy for me to sit down and negotiate a season for Paris Opéra.” The groundwork, however, had already been laid by Rudolf. Intuiting that beneath Hermann’s tough-talking, abrasive facade was a middle-aged romantic, unashamedly susceptible to his appeal, he went out of his way to flirt with her, “holding hands when we were walking … and sometimes crawling into my bed to look at television.” He took her on vacation, invited her to dinner and to the movies, and in response Jane expedited things for him. “I’d cash his checks, get him tickets, dispatch one of the Met’s cleaning staff to the Dakota—I never said no.”

  And it was Jane Hermann who would go to greater lengths than anyone else in the world to pay tribute to Rudolf’s achievement. “There was no artist I admired more,” she has said. As part of Lincoln Center’s “France Salutes New York” festival she arranged a fund-raising gala to launch the Paris Opéra’s season, the high point of which was Sylvie Guillem and Patrick Dupond causing “a near-hysterical standing ovation” with their explosive Corsaire duet. As it was a joint affair with Baryshnikov’s American Ballet Theatre (the million-dollar proceeds to be shared by the two companies), there was a Franco-American slant to it all with “La Marseillaise” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung as an overture; Laurent Hilaire partnered ABT’s Cynthia Harvey in the pas de deux from Lifar’s Suite en Blanc; and Rudolf and Baryshnikov hoofed onstage together in an Astaire-inspired number with Leslie Caron “as the butter to bind them.” The critics’ verdict was music to Rudolf’s ears: “This was very much the Paris Opéra Ballet’s show,” declared Anna Kisselgoff; “The French won hands down!” echoed Clive Barnes. For the first time since Baryshnikov’s defection, Rudolf felt that he was outshining his young rival, convinced—and rightly so—that he was the more inspired leader.

  Misha Baryshnikov and me—both of us loved and worshipped Kirov Ballet and both of us tried to reproduce or re-create Kirov Ballet in the West. He created his Kirov Ballet by repeating exactly the same choreography, the same mannerisms of the company; I created the idea of what Kirov should be—most beautiful line, most precise, most lyrical … I did not deny what was West … I didn’t make them caricatures of the Kirov.

  “Rudolf thought himself a choreographer and a post-Petipa improver, which Misha did not,” says the dance critic Robert Greskovic, pointing out how much closer Baryshnikov’s productions are to the original Russian text, something Rudolf was the first to admit. “I think Kirov and Moscow will just die if they saw Paris Opéra when they do Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake or Raymonda or Don Q. They can’t compare.” Rudolf had never shown any compunction about rechoreographing the classics to suit himself, although not everyone saw these innovations as improvements. His signature obsession with Bournonville petite batterie—what Joan Acocella calls “Nureyev’s goddamn ronds de jambes and those little steppy things”—made his choreography almost comically cluttered at times. Ghislaine Thesmar agrees. “Nobody dares to clear the ballets out a bit, which is a pity.”

  Of far greater value to the companies Rudolf influenced was his merging of native style with genuine Maryinsky schooling. In the sixties his Shades scene from La Bayadère had literally retrained the English ballerinas, bringing out a Russian classical side of themselves they hardly knew was there. “This kind of dancing was new to the Royal Ballet, but they did not deliver a carbon copy of the Kirov production,” writes the British critic Zoë Anderson. “They kept their own Ashtonian arabesques, their British épaulement.… [It was] Petipa grandeur with a Royal Ballet accent.” To Elisabeth Platel, one of the great exemplars of French schooling (and what Edwin Denby might have called the company’s “central dynamo”), Rudolf’s arrival was a whole new education. “We learned … a pure classical style that he inherited from the Kirov.… We were able to find his energy in ourselves, we found his severity and above all else, his respect for all of the teachers and partners that he knew at the Kirov.” To Thesmar, too, Rudolf had “brought back the structure of classical balle
t with such authority; put everything back in its place in a space of two or three years.” Not in Arlene Croce’s opinion, however:

  The real surprise was the impoverished classical style of the Opéra dancers. The bad things one had always known about them—the things that the Nureyev regime, with its illustrious new stars, was supposed to have changed—were right there on the stage: weak lower backs, unworked turnout, careless feet. Lots of pretty faces, to be sure, and charming manners. The Paris dancers are virtuosos of charm. But the legs have no force.