Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  But these were early days—during which “half the dancers were with Rudolf and half weren’t.” Nor did he have the backing of Claude Bessy to instill his ideas in the students, and without a school, there can be no homogeneous, integral company style. Nevertheless, to Marie-Christine Mouis, who left the Paris Opéra Ballet in 1981, the standard of dancing was now unrecognizably high; and to Jerome Robbins, “the company had moved under Rudolf from being not really first class to quite superb.”

  During Paris Opéra Ballet’s 1948 New York debut, under Lifar, the repertory was viewed as “woefully dated.”* And yet (as if wanting America to support his antipathy toward his predecessor’s work), Rudolf had chosen to bring back Lifar’s turgid Les Mirages. But whereas the only Petipa offering by “Lifar’s company” had been his Divertissements from Sleeping Beauty, Rudolf’s intention was to showcase the French dancers’ new mastery of the classics. In this he was only partly successful. Cut almost in half to fit the program, Raymonda seemed to Croce not so much authentic Petipa as “Nureyev trying to be creative,” while his intrusively prominent, predatory Tutor in Swan Lake was not liked by anyone. It was the inclusion of Washington Square, however, the season’s only contemporary offering, that proved Rudolf’s biggest mistake. Knowing that it had been choreographed with an American tour in mind, Jane Hermann had considered it a risk worth taking.

  I wanted the American public to see Rudolf as Dr. Sloper because it’s a part that has character and maturity. And I wanted them to see how this work filtered through his mind and became what it is: a view of America that could only be taken by someone like him. What everyone else would have done was a chamber ballet, but Rudolf’s vision is so large and monumental that you begin to see a lot of deeper ramifications in James’s novel.

  To the critics the ballet was “unforgettably awful,” “an ignominious assault,” and only served to heighten Rudolf’s shortcomings as a choreographer. And yet their final verdict of the Paris season was positive in the extreme: This had been one of the Met’s most successful foreign engagements, “a resounding transatlantic triumph,” “the sensation of the year.” Rudolf had not only worked a minor miracle by pulling together a world-class troupe in such a short period of time, but he had also reconquered New York. As he stood onstage for over twenty minutes acknowledging the cheering and bouquet hurling, he looked happier than he had in decades. Paris Opéra, Clive Barnes wrote, should start making plans for a follow-up tour, the message from America being, “Come back soon!”

  The rest of the summer was blissfully carefree. Rudolf had decided to rent a caïque and sail the southwest coast of Turkey, craving, he told Maude, “Absolute peace—nothing but putting in at little deserted bays and bathing and reading and sleeping.” The trip had been arranged, as in previous years, by a young Turkish woman, Yasemin Pirinccioglu, who had become a friend. Having also won Douce’s confidence, she would observe how Rudolf—“the Sultan,” as she called him—“made these women go crazy,” scolding him by saying, “You just love this Byzantine intrigue!” “Those powerful eyes,” he said laughingly. “They see right through me.” For some time now Yasemin had been helping Rudolf look for a plot of land in the Fethiye region, which is much greener than most of Turkey’s sun-scorched terrain. Having set his heart on a particular peninsula on the western side of Gemile Island, he had gone so far as to write to the president of Turkey, hoping to facilitate the purchase. Heavily forested, the land turned out to have no deeds, electricity, or infrastructure, but Rudolf was determined to keep searching. As Yasemin recalls, “He had this dream of building a house with a dome to put all his kilims.”

  The collecting of antique kilims had become a serious passion, and Rudolf often headed straight from the airport to the bazaars. There is a ritual involved in rug buying, a kind of courtship, which Rudolf relished, beginning with the ceremonious pouring of apple tea or syrupy coffee. Friends remember how amused he would be by the way the initial etiquette of evasion and flirtation could often crescendo into desperate bargaining, with the merchant chasing after him in the street, shouting, “A hundred dollars off! Two hundred dollars off!” Theirs is not always a reputable trade (marchand de tapis is a perjorative term in French), but these were people with whom Rudolf felt a natural kinship. As a Tatar he had in him the spirit of the nomadic Turk, whose most important piece of furniture was a rug. “They would fold it up and take it with them.”

  Picking out interesting pieces from among the crammed piles was an art in itself. It was easy enough to spot the kilims mass produced for the tourist market with their garish colors chemically dyed, their thick-pile wool of poor quality. But it took knowledge and skill to distinguish an authentic eighteenth-century prayer rug, say, from a convincing fake rewoven from old wool. Rudolf only ever wanted the muted shades produced by vegetable dyes, the primitiveness of some reminding him of the Bashkirian fabrics of his childhood. Creating dyes had once been a treasured craft. The old recipes combined roots, nuts, leaves, fruits, dried herbs, and dead insects. Some recipes, such as this mixture for the pale sky tint called Birbul’s blue, are as sensuously poetic as a passage from the Song of Songs: “Take cinnabar, indigo and alum, grind and sift lighter than the light dust of the high hills.” These colors found their way into Rudolf’s ballets. “When he was choreographing Romeo and Juliet he was into reds, but with Raymonda it was different shades of rust,” recalls Tessa Kennedy, also an ardent collector. And just as inspiring were the patterns themselves, their spatial harmony and the fusing of tradition with the personal and spontaneous a parallel art to his own. “Look!” he exclaimed to Yasemin. “You see this design, how intricate it is? This is how I choreograph my ballets.”

  After a few days of kilim buying, swimming, and trekking up into hillside villages, Rudolf was a different person—“free and happy because nobody knew him.” And that summer he had surrounded himself with the ideal circle of friends. As Maude was nervous about the sea and had declined to come in previous years, Rudolf had gone out of his way to renew links with Wallace. “He knew that would make me feel safe. He’d say, ‘You’ll come if Wallace comes, won’t you?’ And then to Wallace, ‘You’ll come if Maude comes, won’t you?’ ” With nothing much changed in Wallace’s life (he was out of a job and painting houses while working on a screenplay), he decided that enough time had passed for him to consider a vacation with Rudolf. “I no longer had any emotional entanglements, or felt intimidated, anxious or whatever.” Nor was he fazed by Robert Tracy’s presence on the trip. “There wasn’t much happening between them; in fact, I probably got along better with Robert than Rudolf did.” Completing the party were Michel Canesi and Douce, who recorded much of the journey on video. Wearing nautical white, Maude rarely strays from Rudolf’s side, while he, either swaddled in woolen layers and a turban, or totally naked except for a snorkel and mask, is seen to be in exceptionally high spirits. At one moment, taking charge of the camera, he directs a high-diving display; at another, holding a motorized float he exclaims, Wodehouse-style, “It’s the tops!” For the whole group this was a wonderful two weeks—“The best summer of my life, bar none!” says Wallace—and for Rudolf, it was to be his last taste of real contentment.

  His immediate task on returning to Paris was to choreograph a new ballet for the autumn season. In March 1985 he had written to Frederick Ashton to ask for his Cinderella, hoping that news of the Tudor homage might change his mind about working at the Opéra. “The time has now come for the success of English choreographers in Paris.… At last!” But with Ashton refusing to budge, Rudolf decided to do his own production, having already spotted a designer he admired. It was Petrika Ionesco’s suggestion to set Cinderella in a movie studio, and although Rudolf was unconvinced at first, he found the idea “eating me up until I couldn’t think to do it any other way.” There was undoubtedly an element of wish fulfillment in the prospect of being able to stop the clock, as Cinderella does when she signs a movie contract, “thus assuring her immortality.” And it was
the ballet’s preoccupation with time that Rudolf was eager to explore. In addition to the traditional divertissements for the four seasons, he planned a clock dance, as well the appearance of an allegorical “Mae West kind of figure” who passes through the clock and emerges as an old crone.

  In the back of his mind as a model for the heroine was his niece Gouzel, who had ambitions to cast off her lowly origins by becoming a Hollywood star. (Jeannette Etheredge remembers her “calling me up to ask if I knew Mickey Rooney. She said, ‘I’d like to be in his next movie.’ ” Gouzel also contacted Rudolf’s friend Gloria Venturi, announcing that she was “coming to Roma to try to do a movie.”) There would be several other private jokes. Cinderella’s Prince Charming was a Valentino look-alike; the name of the movie producer (Rudolf’s own role) was “Pygmalion Diaghilev,” a character who then turns into a composite of Sandor Gorlinsky and Groucho Marx—complete with cigar and joke Jewish nose. And although the ballet was a showcase not for him this time but for Sylvie Guillem, Rudolf could indulge his passion for old Hollywood movies by getting the ballerina to embody his icons by donning a derby and baggy pants as Charlie Chaplin, and paying homage to Fred Astaire by partnering a coat rack, as he did in Royal Wedding. (“If you want to make fast, flying footwork,” Rudolf told his dancers, “you need to know Bournonville, Balanchine—and Astaire.”)

  With “You want, you take!” as her motto, Sylvie could never be a convincingly downtrodden heroine, and even at the start is more Cyd Charisse than Cinderella, her high-fashion physique enhanced by designer Hanae Mori, a protégée of Coco Chanel. This was Rudolf giving the French the chic and novelty they loved, but in doing so he compromised what he had always described as his “principal goal”: the movement itself. The ballet is held together by its gimmicky concept rather than the choreography, which is dismally lacking in originality. “These superb artists deserve better than this,” complained Gérard Mannoni in a vituperative review, but to René Sirvin the new ballet was “a triumph—the word is not too strong.” Audiences were just as delighted and, going with the flow, Mannoni did a complete turnaround a week later, admitting that Cinderella “still triumphs.… It is the composition of a great artist.”

  But it was as a dancer that Rudolf was still determined to triumph. At the beginning of the year, on a train to Venice, he had confided to Luigi that he was HIV positive, saying, “I’m going to be very sick, but I want to dance as much as I can.” Understanding that this was Rudolf’s way of “distracting the mind from the tunnel of death,” Luigi proceeded to make it happen, even toward the very end. Baryshnikov was also aware of Rudolf’s need to keep dancing, and offered him two opportunities to appear with American Ballet Theatre in Giselle—“a ballet he could still do.” His May 8, 1987, performance drew unexpectedly laudatory reviews, Dale Harris calling it his finest in New York for a decade. Reiterating what Rudolf himself believed, the critic remarked how much there was for young male stars to learn from watching the mature Nureyev, whose sense of commitment and motivation no one then performing with ABT seemed able to achieve. This Albrecht, “burdened with guilt, grief and repentance,” was Rudolf playing the man he had become, the moment at which he is compelled by the Wilis to dance himself to death deriving its feverish power from his own desperation.

  Over the next few months, there followed what Ghislaine Thesmar called “a bulimia of performances.” Rudolf had recently signed up with Andrew Grossman of Columbia Artists Management, Inc., purely, Wallace says, “because Grossman could get him the gigs.” In addition there were a number of provincial tours with the London Festival Ballet, the Northern Ballet Theatre, the Ballet du Louvre, and the Nancy Ballet (dismissed by art historian Roy Strong as a company of “second-rate awfulness, pounding their way through a program called Homage to Diaghilev”). Even the partisan John Percival was now urging Rudolf to give up roles such as Le Spectre de la rose, but with fewer and fewer engagements on offer, he was determined to seize any chance that came his way. Dancing, he believed, “depends on demand and supply: no demand, no supply.”

  And what inevitably ceased if he no longer danced was the supply of money, an obsession that became almost pathological in Rudolf’s final years. “When things get really bad I can live in Virginia and grow potatoes,” he told close friends, appearing genuinely to believe that he risked ending his life in the poverty in which he had begun it. “Rudolf was terrified of going back to being poor again,” says Jeannette. “There had always been a bit of that in him—it’s why he never paid for anything—but it started getting much worse.” The conviction (planted by Margot) that Gorlinsky was cheating him out of money also began to obsess Rudolf. This, as Barry Weinstein confirms, was complete nonsense. “Sandor was a heads-up guy. As an agent he was entitled to 10 percent, but he never took a nickel that didn’t belong to him. He loved Rudolf, and had always taken special care of him. He had no children of his own, and I sensed some kind of paternal feeling there.” But in July 1987, when Rudolf learned that Gorlinsky, without consulting him, had sold the house in Fife Road, he was outraged: It didn’t matter that he hadn’t lived there in years. He felt it was not only a betrayal on Gorlinsky’s part but a sign that things were starting to spiral out of his control.

  In late July, Rudolf tried to repeat the Turkish vacation of the previous summer. Yasemin had arranged to charter the same boat, and the group gathered at Victoria Road on the eve of their departure included Jane Hermann; Douce; Wallace, who had flown in from Los Angeles with his brother, Tom; and Stephen Sherriff, a last-minute invited guest. The young dancer had driven Rudolf back from a taping of the Dame Edna Experience television show which had not gone well, his performance coming across as crudely scripted and unfunny. “It was pretty clear that it was an endeavor he shouldn’t have agreed to,” Wallace says. “It was done purely for the money.” Compounding the palpable edginess in the house on this, the hottest night of the year, was the fact that Maude, who had recently broken her ankle, was insisting that she was not fit enough to travel. “We’ll carry you,” Rudolf pleaded, trying again and again to get her to change her mind. “I could see how upset I was making him, but my doctor had told me that on no account was I to go.” At around two in the morning, the temperature still chokingly hot, Rudolf went downstairs to pack. Shortly afterward a violent crash was heard, followed by the sound of breaking glass. Intending to take his portable keyboard and failing to fit it into the box, Rudolf had flung the instrument against the door, shattering several glass panes. It was, Maude said ruefully, the only time she had ever known Rudolf to be angry in their house.

  The night of “heat, chaos, temper” was a sign of things to come, as the trip proved tense and problematic from start to finish. Rudolf and Douce were not on speaking terms, and Rudolf was snarlingly unpleasant toward Wallace, resenting Tom’s presence and refusing to participate in any vacation activities. “Jane and I had a lot of fun, and Rudolf would get upset at that, but when we tried to include him, he just wasn’t in the mood.” Having recently lost his mother and discovered that he, too, was HIV positive, Wallace found it hard to sustain his high spirits for long, a fact that only exacerbated Rudolf’s bad humor.

  When Stephen Sherriff felt trouble starting he would take himself off to the prow of the boat, sitting with his legs dangling in the sea. There was no longer any romantic interest between the two dancers; in fact, as if finally conceding to Yeats’s view that it was only the young who belonged in each other’s arms, Rudolf had helped to matchmake Stephen with the captain’s hunky son. And instead of practicing on board as he would have done in the past, Rudolf gave a barre to Stephen without joining in himself. He had been suffering from an injured knee, and after one long trek returned with it swollen to three times its size. “He should never have gone scrambling up goat tracks,” Stephen remarks, “but he’d been there with Maude and Nigel and was determined to see the same view again. He could hardly walk after that, and must have thought: I can’t even get up a hill, so how am I ever go
ing to dance?” Also feeling feverish, Rudolf began spending more and more time in his cabin, and when he reappeared was silent and withdrawn. “He was sick—he knew he was sick,” says Wallace. “It felt as if we were watching him implode.” The image he describes was that of a supernova, which after driving blast waves into the atmosphere collapses inward. “It was the death of a celestial star.”

  *In April 1986 Rosa agreed to take French nationality as a first step toward consenting to a divorce.

  *Three months later, on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Rudolf nominated Legris as an étoile. Eric Vu An, however, who never progressed beyond the secondary rank of grand sujet, decided to leave.

  *Among the points he makes in a letter of self-defense to the dancers, Rudolf writes, “Roland Petit pretends he withdrew his ballets from Opéra repertoire because ‘I had insulted him.’ Actually it was after a quarrel with Bernard Lefort in 1981 or 1982—I was not there—that Petit withdrew his ballets.… [And] how can one believe I ‘hate’ the dancer Eric Vu An when I myself promoted him by sending him to Vienna Opera to perform Don Q?”

  *An exception was Palais de cristal, a masterpiece in four movements to Bizet’s Symphony in C (now the title of the ballet), which Balanchine created for Paris Opéra in July 1947. Included by Rudolf on the New York tour, it caused a roar of approval from the audience.

  19 A CIRCULAR CIRCLE. COMPLETE

  Dear Rudik,

  A good friend of mine, an acupuncturist, was flying to Ufa to spend the summer with a colleague, and I asked him to visit your mother.… Unfortunately, Evgenii Petrovich Kozhevnikov found your mother in a very bad way. She wasn’t moving, and was all hunched up and unable to speak. Obviously she has had a stroke. EP was there with his colleague and they managed with the help of needles to rouse her a little … [and] your mother started to react to words. But EP returned very disturbed by what he had seen: he said your mother’s life is waning. I don’t know what to do about it. I think you will not be able to bring her to you: she would not survive the journey and I think she wouldn’t want it. Come yourself? Problematic. Fortunately we have different times now and things are improving. Unfortunately there are fools and idiots who remain, but it’s harder for them to act. So I can’t advise you about it. I do think, though that it would be a good idea to call that Ufa doctor, who is very well-known in the city. First of all you will get firsthand information … and second, maybe you can arrange for medical help.… Don’t delay—in Evgenii Petrovich’s words, there’s not much time left.