Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  But if his family was left with the impression that “he was estranged from Russia,” that it “hadn’t made any impression on him,” they were wrong. Back in Paris, he felt such nostalgia for Ufa that he announced to Janine, “I want to buy one of those wooden houses—can you help me?” “I was surprised, because I thought it was an awful provincial little town, but from that moment he wanted to keep his links with Ufa.” Rudolf had already re-created his own Bashkiria in Virginia, with its shuttered house and barns, streams, fields, and silver birch trees, telling his relatives that he hoped they would all come and live there one day. There was also a painting he had long coveted, and was now determined to have. This was Romney’s study of Alope with her baby son (Zeus’s love child) at her breast, which was owned by Jimmy Douglas. So resonant was the painting’s subject, not only the mother-son image but its story of a child cast into the wilderness under the protection of a god, that Rudolf persuaded Jimmy (who had bought it in the 1950s for a thousand pounds) to sell it to him for fifty thousand dollars. This was more than double its worth: In Christie’s 1995 Nureyev auction, the Romney sold for twenty thousand dollars.

  Rudolf would find himself increasingly drawn back to his homeland, but for now Paris was where he wanted to be, and his fifth season with the Opéra was proving to be the most stimulating of his tenure there. With Jacques Chirac’s Conservative government in force since 1986, Marie-Suzanne’s husband, Raymond Soubie, had been named the Opéra’s president, and although not the close friend and ally André Larquié had been, was firmly on Rudolf’s side. He had lost his “pillar,” Claire Motte, who died of cancer in the summer of ’86, but had appointed the superbly capable Patrice Bart as ballet master, a colleague who remained faithful to the end. Betty Anderton, who had proved unpopular with the dancers, had left (“she had a rather superior, colonial attitude that the French didn’t take to”), and Rudolf had invited Pat Ruanne (“more of a trouper”) to take over. Confident that he had a forceful new team in place, Rudolf began making big plans. The Bastille was soon to open, and his idea was that the Palais Garnier should be devoted entirely to dance, with Jean-Luc Choplin taking charge as its general director. “The Dance must have its theater,” they wrote in a manifesto outlining key points. “It must be a center of influence in Europe; of research; of information.” There would be an audiovisual department to record ballets for the archives and commissions to create dance for the camera, a center of choreology to notate the repertory, a medical center, a library, a museum, a dance journal, and an annual festival of dance throughout France. “We have to prepare today for the future. Vive la danse!”

  Rudolf was also showing himself to be more accommodating when it came to respecting French tradition. In October 1986 Igor Eisner had written urging him to reconsider his attitude toward Serge Lifar. “One can bring different historical judgments to the ballets of Lifar, but the fact is that he created a style and that his name will stay synonymous with a brilliant period in the history of Paris Opéra. Certainly, one must look toward the future, but one must also respect past memories.” As if in direct response, Rudolf arranged a homage to Lifar in January 1988, juxtaposing it two months later with his most avant-garde programming to date (Maguy Marin’s Leçons de ténèbres; William Forsythe’s In the middle somewhat elevated, and Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien, Robert Wilson’s three-hour ballet for the new generation of stars, led by Sylvie Guillem). These contemporary works were also to be shown during the New York summer season, since Rudolf had achieved his ambition of returning annually to the Met as the Royal Ballet had done in the past.

  In February, while holding a press conference in New York to announce his company’s plans, he discovered that Wallace and Jeannette were in town, staying with millionaire Howard Gillman, who was hosting the launch party for the musical Phantom of the Opera. Rudolf had not been invited, and having obtained a last-minute ticket for him, Jeannette was somewhat put out when he began procrastinating about whether or not he wanted to come. “He sounded very sad, and said, ‘Call me at intermission.’ So I did, and I told him the show was really great.” But in the end Rudolf couldn’t be persuaded to join them, which upset Wallace, who presumed it was because of his jealousy of Gillman: “Howard had this big thing on me—he was in love with me, I guess—and he was also part of Misha’s clan. All this interlocked in Rudolf’s mind, and the next day when we met I felt so much tension. He was saying things like ‘Who are you going to see more of?’ wanting everything to revolve around him. I felt I’d had enough, and flew back to LA that day.”

  Rudolf was still in an oddly somber mood when his friend Natasha Harley took him to lunch at La Côte Basque. Trying to cheer him up, she suggested that they go antiquing, and called her office to send a car to take them downtown. “With the driver following us, we walked, walked, walked. Then Rudolf said, ‘Basta. I’m going to go home.’ ” Natasha had not been home long herself when she got a call from Gouzel to say that Farida had died. She immediately called Rudolf, who already knew. Jeannette was convinced “he had gotten the phone call the previous day but hadn’t volunteered anything.”

  He had not even confided in Maude, “but he guessed that was why I rang,” she wrote to Wallace, who had been shocked to hear that Rudolf’s idea of mourning was to go shopping. “I can understand why,” she told him. “It helped him not to have to think about something that he could do nothing about … it helped to blur the pain that I am sure he was feeling.” With Jeannette, too, Rudolf had wanted to go to the downtown antiques stores later that day, and when she dropped him off at the Dakota, said bluntly, “We’re going to Mrs. Harley’s for dinner tonight. And by the way, my mother died.” “And then he slammed the door.”

  When Hamet died, the only person Rudolf had wanted to be with was Paklusha, and Natasha Harley was Paklusha’s New York equivalent, an adoring Russian earth mother, who had also been introduced to him by Margot. She; her Russian husband, André; and their two daughters, Tatiana and Tamara, had become another surrogate family, providing the Russian culture and background that were a source of constant pleasure to him. Both their parents had been patrons of Diaghilev, and André’s mother, Ginrietta Hirschman, had been a famous beauty whose Paris house was a salon for artists, writers, and musicians. Rudolf loved paging through the Hirschman’s guest book, which contained a poem by Balmont, bars of music by Prokofiev, a paean of praise to her by Stanislavsky, and inscriptions by, among others, Robert de Montesquiou; Rachmaninoff; Chaliapin; and Joyce.

  Natasha’s huge airy East Sixty-eighth Street apartment was itself a salon to visiting ballet companies (when Ashton saw her in London, he would exclaim, “Ah, New York!”) and it was she on whom Rudolf now depended to host his own dinner parties. One evening she cooked for Martha Graham and another for Lincoln Kirstein, “a very tense occasion,” when Rudolf had exploded because Kirstein was bringing caviar and Natasha had prepared the wrong kind of potatoes with which to serve it.* Natasha was a powerful figure in the cosmetics and perfume industry, but she could not have been more unassuming and sweet-natured; she seemed almost childlike, with her apple cheeks, uncoiffed hair, and school sandals. “When I think of her,” says Jamie Wyeth, “I see her gazing up at Rudolf with those huge dark eyes. She would do anything for him.” “From the very beginning Natasha was someone Rudolf could always trust,” adds Robert Tracy.

  When Rudolf’s niece Gouzel first arrived in the West it was Natasha whom Rudolf had asked to take her in. “She came with her husband, and we made room for them, but it was pretty much a catastrophe. She was against everything American, and would strew the living room with her shoes, her underwear.… She went to the country, but it was no better there.” Almost as if testing the limits of Natasha’s loyalty, Rudolf called her one day to say he had a favor to ask: “I’ve invited a friend to the farm for dinner and I can’t be there on time. Could you please go?” With no hesitation she went food shopping in New York and, taking her assistant with her, caught an early evening flight t
o Virginia. Finding the house practically unfurnished, they had just hunted up a board and cloth with which to improvise a table when the bell rang. It was Jackie Onassis, smiling and informal in blue jeans. (She was publishing a children’s book by Pushkin and wanted Rudolf to write the introduction.)*

  On the night of February 6, 1988, when Natasha answered her doorbell, it was Baryshnikov she found standing on the steps, apologizing for being early. Rudolf followed some time afterward with Jeannette, and while she and Natasha made dinner, the two dancers sat together, talking intently. At around midnight Andris Liepa and his young Bolshoi partner, Nina Ananiashvili, dropped in, invited by Rudolf, who clearly felt the need to surround himself with Russians. The ballerina, a dark, sophisticated Georgian beauty, was strikingly matched with the boyish, blond Liepa. They had come to America to make their debut with New York City Ballet, realizing Rudolf’s own dream of dancing the Balanchine repertory while still being free to return to Russia. (Liepa would be invited later that year by Baryshnikov to join ABT, becoming the first Soviet to win a contract abroad.) Natasha remembers how the couple themselves hardly said a word, but just sat rapt, listening to the advice and experiences of the two defectors. “It was a lovely, lovely evening. Very late, very cozy, very personal.”

  A month later the next ordeal facing Rudolf was his fiftieth birthday. Knowing that the best present anyone could give him was the opportunity to dance, Jeannette had cajoled Misha into offering him more performances of Giselle (the first of three was on March 17, the night of his birthday), and in June, he finally made his own debut with New York City Ballet. He had wanted to dance Apollo, but Peter Martins, who had succeeded Balanchine as director, told him that he was too old, and cast him in Orpheus, an old-fashioned mime role. Appearing in a ballet Arlene Croce has described as “an ashen meditation permeated by the sweetish odor of death” was hardly a momentous celebration, and it was left to Jane Hermann to give Rudolf the homage he deserved. Rounding up almost every partner, peer, and choreographer with whom he had worked in the West, she scheduled “a bang-up gala” at the Met, launching the Paris Opéra’s summer season.

  To everyone’s astonishment, Rudolf was appalled. “He accused Jane of trying to force him off the stage,” says Wallace. “He thought of this as a final tribute. The kind of thing people do when your career is over.” “He dreaded it,” added Maude. “ ‘This is burying me,’ he said. He felt it was an imposition, that afterward, everything would be finished.” On Sunday, June 26, the night before the gala, Rudolf was having dinner at the Café des Artistes with Maude, Wallace, and Jane, when the conversation turned to English critics. Getting more and more upset, he suddenly jumped up, cursed everyone at the table, and stormed out. “I rushed after him, and Jane rushed after me,” says Wallace. “It was so traumatic Maude developed shingles as a result.”

  Having threatened not to appear at all, Rudolf, in the end, couldn’t help being moved by his birthday gala. “The evening was quite spectacular,” Linda Maybarduk recalls. “Jane really out-did herself.” It was not so much the repertory that was memorable,* but what came afterward. To close, the Parisians performed their famous defilé for the first time outside France, the entire company and students from the school advancing to center stage according to their rank. There, lining up in an inverted V to await Rudolf’s entrance, were the great and good of international dance: Lincoln Kirstein, Peter Martins, Peter Schaufuss, Rudi van Dantzig, Murray Louis, together with Rudolf’s ballerinas—Margot, Maria Tallchief, Carla Fracci, Yvette Chauviré, Karen Kain, Cynthia Gregory, Violette Verdy, Yoko Morishita, Eva Evdokimova.† (Even Miss Piggy, whom Rudolf had once partnered on the TV program The Muppet Show, was there.) As he took his solo bow, a huge banner emblazoned with “Nureyev” unfurled from the ceiling, hundreds of balloons floated down, and gold and silver confetti rained on the stage. After leading his Opéra dancers forward he turned to his left, directly in line with Baryshnikov, who was waiting to embrace him, hugging him so exuberantly that he lifted Rudolf off his feet. He then continued down the line, greeting one person after the next, and only when he reached the end and turned around did he see Margot. “This was what everyone was waiting for, and when he kissed her the room just exploded,” says Marilyn La Vine. “It was exciting and gratifying to see Rudolf so appreciated. He looked very, very, very happy.”

  Maude maintains, however, that Rudolf was happy only because it was all over, and that his ongoing black mood was so engulfing that it had even distanced the two of them. “I certainly felt that my presence there didn’t give Rudolf any help in his unhappiness,” she told Wallace. “He has too much on his mind, too many things to resolve for his future, and the loss of closeness with Jane didn’t help.… She so hopes that Rudolf will come back to friendship again, but will leave it to him.” Others, Linda Maybarduk among them, felt that Rudolf had “no right to be so ungrateful”; that Jane Hermann had, after all, planned the gala as a great celebration, not an “obituary,” to use his word.

  To make it clear that there was no emblematic closure about his appearance in Songs of a Wayfarer (the image that evening of the older dancer being led offstage by Charles Jude had suggested to Linda that “he would never leave the spotlight of his own free will”), Rudolf insisted on dancing the ballet at every subsequent performance, arranging to have “By popular demand!” mendaciously blazed across the billboards, which further antagonized Jane Hermann. In addition to the Béjart piece, he was dancing in his productions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker (the U.S. premiere), causing Anna Kisselgoff to comment that he was no longer able to perform the easy steps, “but perversely, carries off the difficult ones.” Clive Barnes added, “Even so, enough is enough, especially in the cruel world of classical dance.”

  At La Scala, however, where he had appeared earlier that year in The Nutcracker and Giselle, Rudolf knew that he could still get away with his classical roles. As critic Vittoria Ottolenghi remarks, “Nobody in Italy would ever hiss him offstage. When you’re a maestro, you’re always a maestro.” Giorgio Cattarello agrees. An admirer from the beginning, he admits having “treasured the good times; and justified and pardoned the worst.”

  Vienna, too, was somewhere Rudolf “always had a job.” As a present to himself he had danced not Rothbart but the Prince at his fiftieth birthday performance of Swan Lake, an occasion that his fan Traude Klockl remembers as being hard to watch. “But Viennese audiences are very special: They go with an artist they love to the end. They’re still faithful and they still cheer.” And in Vienna was a family that Rudolf had come to regard as his own. Wilhelm “Papa” Hübner, his half-Russian wife, Lydia, and their children, Elizabeth and Waxy, had become Rudolf’s Austrian Romankovs, although this was a friendship that had taken a long time to establish. In the sixties, when the critic Linda Zamponi had him to dinner, asking Lydia to made pelmeni for the occasion, Rudolf had refused to eat, suspecting that the dish was poisoned. And when, some five or six years later, Papa Hübner, who was president of the Vienna Philharmonic, invited Rudolf to a concert followed by a meal at their home, it had been difficult, Waxy says, “to convince him that we were a normal family and were not leading him into a trap.” Their simple sitting room with its display cabinet of ornaments and profusion of framed photographs and books had much the same atmosphere as Tchaikovsky Street, and Rudolf soon dropped his guard. It is understandable why. A musician-guru father, Russian mother, nineteen-year-old medical student “sitting there looking beautiful,” with a sister who was an adoring Nureyev fan, comprised Rudolf’s dream unit. Not only that, but the Hübners were to prove his salvation, steering him away from the stage and toward what he had always claimed was his primary passion. “In the first place is music, which will remain with me to the end of my days; and then ballet, which someday will betray me.”

  In January 1982, Rudolf had adopted Austrian citizenship, and yet he did not consider Vienna a place in which to live. What he had coveted for many years was somewhere by the sea—“pied en
l’eau,” as the French say—and, failing to secure his Turkish peninsula, had been looking at real estate in Hawaii. Not for long. “Houses now cost $6, 7, 8 million and it’s not that attractive,” he told Lynn Barber. In July 1988, hearing that Luchino Visconti’s villa in Forio d’Ischia was on the market, Rudolf went to see it, only to find that it was “not on the water [and] in the middle of hotels.” He had even begun to consider a three-masted schooner: “Finally, I thought that only a boat in the middle of the sea might quiet my thirst for blue, for sun, for silence.” And then he was told that Léonide Massine’s island was for sale.

  Staying with Russian friends in Positano in the 1920s, Massine had looked out of his window and noticed an island several miles off the coast. Known as Li Galli, this was in fact an archipelago of three islands belonging to a local family, who used them only for quail hunting in the spring. Visiting Gallo Lungo, the largest, and overcome by the beauty of the view across the sea toward the Gulf of Salerno, Massine struck a deal with the family, paying what today would be around ten thousand dollars. Locals called him “the mad Russian who has bought a rocky island where only rabbits could live,” warning that he would never get anything to grow. But he spent several months helping the workers to terrace the neglected vineyards, planting new vines to make his own wine (“tastes like a poison,” Rudolf had been told), as well as cypress trees and southern pines. His industry impressed Rudolf. “He built so many things at a time there was no technical help, and he built those enormous houses, very comfortable, and made irrigation and big cisterns for gathering rainwater.” The terraced garden with its fountain and scent of rosemary faced Capri, and the five-bedroom house had views of the Lattari Mountains. But what especially appealed to Rudolf was the eleventh-century Saracen tower on the northern end of the island in which the choreographer had built a ballet studio.