Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  The price Massine’s estate was asking for Li Galli was $2.4 million. “We argued for a while—then I remembered the prices of Hawaii and decided it was a very good deal.” Gorlinsky, however, thought otherwise, and sternly counseled against the purchase. In retaliation, Rudolf asked his Chicago lawyer, Barry Weinstein, to fly to Switzerland to review the portfolio of his properties. “He was irritated with his European advisers and said, ‘They’re treating me like a baby.’ He wanted to know more about what was going on in his life financially.” On September 14, 1988, the deeds of Li Galli passed from Massine’s name to Rudolf’s, a lineage that in itself explains much of Li Galli’s appeal. While interviewing Massine on Gallo Lungo in the summer of 1967 for a television program on Diaghilev, John Drummond had felt the Russian spirit permeating the place. “Voices were calling from the house in Russian, answered in French. I remembered Benois’s family scrapbooks of the Crimea before the revolution; the sense of history and continuity and Russianness was overwhelming.”

  Rudolf’s sixth season at the Opéra was marred by the “national catastrophe” of losing Sylvie Guillem. There had been warning signs for several months: The renewal of her contract was due, and she was not only demanding huge fees but a nonexclusive arrangement that would allow her to perform abroad. “We had endless meetings,” Jean-Luc Choplin says, “but Rudolf saw that he could not break Paris Opéra rules or single her out any more than he had already done. On the New York tour she had been very difficult, making us feel that she was no longer respecting the company. So we let her go.” The double blow for Rudolf was learning that Sylvie would be joining the Royal Ballet, a relationship he himself had initiated.* He had called angrily at midnight, and yet Sylvie was certain that he “deeply understood why I had to go. I was like him—I felt I was losing my time.” Determined to forge her own destiny, solipsistic, and impossibly demanding, she was indeed like Rudolf: She, too, would lay claim to the “le style anglais,” iconoclastically change choreography and costumes on a whim, and bring a contemporary relevance to nineteenth-century classical roles. Recognizing this, Rudolf, who kept a photograph of Sylvie beside his bed, freely admitted that he had never met any dancer who challenged him to such a degree.

  But no one, as Diaghilev announced after Nijinsky’s defection, is irreplaceable, and a new protégé, challenging in a completely different way, would emerge in no time. One day, after a Stanley Williams class in New York, Rudolf was approached by an astoundingly tall, astoundingly beautiful young Danish dancer whose name was Kenneth Greve. Hoping to secure an American visa, he was in the process of collecting influential signatures for a reference letter and asked Rudolf if he would mind adding his. “Well,” he replied, “first I must see you dance.” They stayed on together in the studio, Rudolf watching the nineteen-year-old perform a series of bravura steps. There was something of his young self in the boy’s Slavic cheekbones, sensuous lips, and flying mop, but there were traces of Erik, too. With his Apollonian proportions, blond hair, and Danish schooling, Kenneth was the dancer they might, had nature allowed, have created together—potentially the perfect Nureyev-Bruhn progeny. “I’ll sign your paper. No problem.” Rudolf grinned, taking things no further until a couple of months later. They were both in a class Baryshnikov was teaching, and when it was over, Rudolf went up to Kenneth. “Listen,” he said, “I need a big boy for Paris Opéra, and I think you have talent.” To be certain, he spent another hour and a half auditioning the dancer, commenting at the end, “You can do everything, but you need work.” “Rudolf told me that he realized what he was considering was provocative, but he wanted to take me because of what he thought I could become.” Not long afterward Kenneth was woken by the telephone at around four in the morning: It was Rudolf calling from Paris to offer him a three-year contract as an étoile.

  Before Kenneth started at the Opéra, even though he had never before performed a major role, Rudolf wanted him to appear as Siegfried in a Grand Palais season of the Nureyev Swan Lake. With only ten days to learn the ballet he was coached in turn by Rudolf, Pat Ruanne, and Genia Poliakov, finding the pressure “very, very hard.” “You have to get smart, my little peasant boy from Denmark,” Rudolf urged him. “You have feeling—use your feeling: I want to make a dancer out of you.” Kenneth received virtually no help from his partner, Isabelle Guérin, who was “not at all pleased to be dancing with this young inexperienced kid.” But he himself admits that he was “one huge baby—one metre ninety-five tall. I’d been growing forever, and was just starting to get control over my body.”

  At quai Voltaire on June 27, the eve of the performance, Mario Bois watched Rudolf, who was clearly besotted, sitting on the sofa at two in the morning with his hand on the teenager’s knee. The picture it brought to mind—an aging performer drawing inspiration from a young dancer—reminded Bois of Chaplin’s Limelight, the film in which a beautiful ballerina helps a music-hall clown achieve a last moment of glory. But the situation’s erotic undertow makes it closer to Ibsen’s The Master Builder, where we see how the potency of youth can dazzle an artist into believing that he still retains his former creative powers. “Imagine at my age being so blown over!” Rudolf remarked with no trace of remorse as, to him, this had become the only type of relationship that counted: the Diaghilev-Nijinsky dynamic of “art and love indissolubly entwined.” And for the moment, it was gratifying to see that in performing the proselytizing Tutor to Kenneth’s Siegfried, his conception of Swan Lake had never been more resonant or true. “Rudolf was always very direct about his attraction to me. He kept trying to convince me that I was gay and just didn’t know it. He said, ‘Dream … use your imagination.’ ‘I can’t,’ I told him. ‘I’m incapable. I’m sorry, I’m very flattered, but I love women—what can I do? I can only love you as a father and as a teacher.’ ”

  To the majority of Opéra dancers, however, the young Dane was “Rudolf’s little sexpot”; two of the boys had already tried to pick a fight with him, and during the performance, another had crouched, “mooning” Kenneth from the wings. “There was literally a guy there with his pants off showing me his rear end.” But there was no point letting the hostility upset him: He needed all his concentration to get through the ballet. Having seen the ending for the first time during Charles Jude’s performance the day before, Kenneth admits that he had walked into the fourth act not really knowing what to do. And yet to Jacques Loyau, who was in the audience that night, the dancer came across as “Very beautiful, very good.… Although the details weren’t yet there.” Studying the videotape with Kenneth after the performance, Rudolf, he says, reached much the same conclusion. “He’s a careful prince. And you can see that he’s pretty scared.”

  The reason the other dancers were so furious, Loyau insists, was because the young intruder had been a success although this is a view with which even Rudolf’s closest allies disagree. “The étoiles felt he didn’t have the technique,” says André Larquié, “and I think their opposition was quite right. I was very surprised by this choice of Rudolf’s, and, like the critics, thought: Why him?” “Rudolf is mad,” wrote Mario Bois, describing how, when Elisabeth Platel refused to have Kenneth as a partner, Rudolf told the ballerina that he no longer wanted her dancing any of his ballets. Genia Poliakov was convinced that Rudolf “knew he was wrong,” but if this was so, he was still determined to hold out. He wanted to make a statement, he told Kenneth, saying, “If I can’t decide, who can?”

  This was a period when Rudolf’s authority was seriously being called into question. With the reelection of François Mitterrand in March 1988, Jack Lang had resumed his role as minister of culture, and in February 1989 he appointed Jean-Albert Cartier as administrator general of the Opéra. One of Cartier’s first moves was to tell Choplin that he was no longer required. “This was the beginning of the end. For both of us. Rudolf had never liked Cartier, he had no trust in his taste, and he could see that from now on he was going to be working under bureaucrats. He would continue as head of the co
mpany, but in this reduced, secondary role.” Rudolf remained optimistic, nevertheless, that he would be able to count on the support of the new president of the Opéra-Bastille, Pierre Bergé (chosen by Mitterrand after he had helped him to finance his campaign). One of his first friends in Paris, the lover and business partner of Yves Saint Laurent, as well as a confidant of Clara Saint, Bergé was no bureaucrat, but an impresario of culture and vision. “When I was made head of the Opéra, Rudolf said, ‘All my problems will be solved,’ ” but Bergé told him, “Rudi, you’re wrong.… Maybe this is the beginning of your problems.”

  It was. Whereas most Opéra presidents had been figureheads, “like chairmen of charity balls,” Bergé, a diminutive man with huge self-regard, had creative ambitions of his own. In January 1989, “tired of being a businessman to someone else’s artist,” he fired Daniel Barenboim, the music and artistic director, prompting Pierre Boulez to resign from the board in protest. The president, Boulez remarked, had “delusions of grandeur … and no sense of the ridiculous.” Then one of the wealthiest men in France and, given his intimacy with the president, one of the most powerful, Bergé had a dangerous reputation, seen by his enemies as foul tempered, controlling, and vindictive. In January, however, when Bergé alerted Rudolf to the fact that his contract was coming to an end, he was also well aware of Rudolf’s achievements and had every intention of retaining him. But he was determined, too, to keep Rudolf under control—and that meant keeping him in Paris. “He wanted me to stay not for six months but twelve. I said, ‘Let’s not even discuss it.’ ” Jean-Luc Choplin believes that if the Palais Garnier had become the “temple of dance” they had planned, Rudolf would have devoted himself entirely to Paris Opéra Ballet. “He was very excited by the idea, and if those conditions had been met, would have stopped everything else. For him, though, the only way was full responsibility. Total artistic freedom.”

  “What can I do now?” Rudolf complained to Charles Jude one day. “I can’t just be in my office. I have to do something.” And that meant dancing. With the Opéra restricting his number of performances, he was now more intent than ever on finding opportunities elsewhere. While on tour with the company in Copenhagen, Rudolf ran into the choreographer Flemming Flindt, who was also staying at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. They were getting into the elevator when Flindt said, “I saw you in Swan Lake last night. It was awful.” “Was it?” replied Rudolf, with surprising meekness. “Yes, it was,” insisted Flindt. “You can’t do it anymore. You’re way too old.” “So what we do?” “Let’s do something which is right for your age and you will bring the house down.” “What’s that?” “Well, we could do Gogol’s Overcoat” Rudolf looked unconvinced. Akaky Akakyevich Bashmak, the impoverished clerk whose worn, shapeless coat is an object of mockery to his fellow civil servants, is “a mere fly” of a man, unworthy of anyone’s respect. “You know what his name is in Russian?” challenged Rudolf. “Bashmak means ‘doormat.’ ”* Then glancing imperiously at himself in the elevator mirror, he added, “Do I look like doormat?” “I didn’t say that,” protested Flindt. “I said we have to do something. You can’t carry on dancing Swan Lake—it’s ridiculous.” “OK. When we do this?”

  Flindt began trying to sell the idea of the ballet to different companies, but without success. “I have access to stage in Firenze,” Rudolf told him. “Poliakov is there—he will take it.” Commuting between Paris and Florence, having resumed his role of director of Maggio Musicale, Genia Poliakov was delighted by the idea. He had been begging his friend for years to give up virtuoso dancing and ease into more mature roles, and a ballet of Gogol’s story was precisely the kind of literature-based repertory he had in mind. (“We spoke about The Brothers Karamazov, King Lear, and Richard III, perhaps some Chekhov pieces.”) Poliakov gave Flindt a number of expressionistic Soviet films to watch to help him create an authentic atmosphere of St. Petersburg, and the result was a work that (in Alla Osipenko’s words) is “not simply a Russian ballet, it’s distinctly about Russia.”*

  It was also about Rudolf. The tale of Akaky Akakyevich’s quest for a new overcoat has been interpreted as anything from an allegory of sexual and material temptation to the quest for ultimate meaning. With Rudolf in the role one could expect the coat to take on the significance of Prospero’s cape, a symbol, perhaps, of youthful artistry (in Gogol’s description, the clerk “astonished by how animated he becomes when he wears his new coat”), but in the ballet the opposite occurs. This is an Akaky Akakyevich who feels liberated and fulfilled only without his fancy coat. During the party scene, when it is taken from him by a footman, the clerk begins to dance in imitation of the young Nureyev, performing almost step for step his signature Swan Lake solo, as well as coping with a number of technical hurdles. Rudolf had asked the choreographer if he could “do [his] own stuff” and Flindt had readily agreed.

  Who cares? I thought. From a dramatic point of view, I wouldn’t normally have stopped the action like that, and I certainly wouldn’t have given that freedom to any other performer. But this was for him. It’s very simple: When you’re making a vehicle for the greatest living star you’re not going to start arguing. This is a man with too many complexes, a man who never really grew up. He wanted to show his audience that he could still do double tours to the left and to the right from fifth. And I wanted to make him happy.

  Rudolf genuinely believed that he “could still pull it off,” but to the critic Judith Mackrell the visible effort this took was a deliberate manifestation of character. Reviewing the work when it was shown at the Edinburgh Festival, she persuasively argued that “it is out of the ruin of Nureyev the dancer” that Rudolf had created his searingly expressive portrayal of Gogol’s social misfit.

  As a ballet The Overcoat is in fact unremarkable, a somewhat rambling succession of scenes from Akakyevich’s life.… With almost any artist in the leading role the whole work would probably sink into deserved oblivion. Yet as a vehicle for Nureyev The Overcoat is guaranteed a place in dance history, for it extracts from him a performance of unquestionable greatness—utterly unfaked in its characterisation.… In his dusty trousers and flapping coat, making no effort to conceal his thinning hair, Nureyev allows himself to look much older than he really is.… Painfully exposed, [he] thus reveals how hard these moves now come to him, allowing the shakiness of the pirouette, the fumbled finish of the tours en l’air, the gravity-bound jumps to convey the absurd and pitiful extremes of Akakyevich’s aspirations and ineptitude.… One of the revelations of this role is its demonstration that the classical vocabulary doesn’t have to be a celebration of beauty and youth, that it can deal successfully with failure and age.

  On June 26, 1989, Mario Bois notes in his diary: “The Bergé/Nureyev tension is at its height.” It had been exacerbated by Rudolf signing a three-year contract to appear in the United States in a new version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I. “Why?” Bergé asked Bois. “Le fric,” he explained, and Jamie Wyeth agrees: “This was all about m-o-n-e-y.” The fee Rudolf had been offered was certainly large: a guaranteed annual income of more than a million dollars, with the amount increasing in the second and third years to $1,500,000 and $1,750,000. “Are you really in need of that?” Hugues Gall asked. “Desperately!” Rudolf replied. “I’ve got to be able to finance my island.” Jane Hermann and Sandor Gorlinsky were among those who “begged him not to do it,” but Rudolf had convinced himself that, with the team he now had in place, he could run the Paris Opéra Ballet from America. Choplin remembers how he had often directed in the past by telephone—“Thirty-minute conversations every day at 2 o’clock in the morning.… Rudolf’s sense of control did not allow him to become out of touch.” Pat Ruanne confirms this. “When he was away we knew exactly where he was—it’s not like he went off the map. He would leave his itinerary; he was always findable.”

  Understandably, though, Bergé wanted his director in the house. Not only that, but as negotiations continued, Rudolf was showing what Mari
o Bois calls a “near-suicidal” impulse. On one occasion he failed to turn up at a press conference (“I don’t have a contract,” he told Bois, “so why do you want to me to come and ‘blahblah’?”); on another, he forbade Jean-Yves Lormeau to continue dancing the Prince in The Sleeping Beauty. “Bergé was furious. He added another clause: The casting of Nureyev’s ballets, apart from the premiere, would be decided by the Opéra. But it was unthinkable to Rudolf to be dispossessed of the artistic ownership of his own works.”

  On July 11 Bergé wrote Rudolf a warning letter. It came, he insisted, not from the president but from “a friend of twenty-five years who loves and admires you infinitely” and yet its tone was headmasterly and condescending:

  Everybody is willing to respect you, but for that you have to be respectable. Your various misbehaviors in language or gestures are simply not up to your standard.… Now it is up to you: either you are ready to become this director of ballet I am talking about, or you believe that your past behavior is correct.… [If so] it would then be better to face courageously the situation, and find for yourself and the Opéra the best solution.… Do not forget I am your friend, that I admire you and love you, and will continue to do so regardless of whatever may happen.

  Rudolf was enraged, telling his real friends that he had received from Bergé “a terribly rude letter” (as Margot described it), and was definitely going to leave. “He might be happier without them,” she wrote to Maude, “but they will never find anyone else who could do the half of what he has done.”

  The breach that now existed between Rudolf and his young Opéra stars was revealed when Charles Jude alone joined that summer’s Friends’ tour of Mexico. But this was hardly surprising, as its main purpose was to give Kenneth Greve further opportunities to perform. Rudolf had cast him as the lead in Erik Bruhn’s version of Bournonville’s Flower Festival of Genzano—“a very hard version with even more beats”—as if wanting to conjure up images of the dancer he once worshipped. He often told Kenneth how much he reminded him of Erik. “He’d say things like, ‘Your accent, when you said that sounded just like him’ ”—and they spent hours discussing Bournonville and Stanley Williams. “It was the first time since Erik that Rudolf fell in love,” says Luigi. “He was getting back to the beginning of his life. Like going full circle.”