Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Almost daily Rudolf telephoned Mario Bois to find out how the Opéra negotiations were going, “hoping that he would get his way.” Maude was trying hard to persuade him to give up the show and return to Paris, telling him quite rightly that Pierre Bergé wouldn’t be there much longer. With the Opéra-Bastille losing millions of dollars a year, it was obvious that a new president would be chosen as soon as the Right resumed power. Bergé was seen to be “incompetent at the administrative level and still more on the artistic level,” and the list of musical titans who had now withdrawn their support included not only Pierre Boulez but Herbert von Karajan, Zubin Mehta, and Georg Solti. “Rudolf,” said Maude, “I think you should go back.” “But he told me, ‘There can only be one artistic director. If I’m not in full charge I won’t accept. Do you want me to go if I’ll be unhappy?’ Well, of course, I had to say no.”

  Also finding his authority undermined, Baryshnikov had abruptly left American Ballet Theatre in September. Jane Hermann had been named executive director and replaced Misha’s lieutenant, Charles France, who had been sick and on a year’s leave of absence. Naturally Rudolf expected to take over. “My name was proposed everywhere … on everybody’s lips.” When he realized that he was not after all being considered for the job, he began to rally support for himself in a self-defeatingly serpentine way, getting John Taras, for example, to advise the board to appoint Margot. “He always thought he would like to direct a ballet company with her,” says Maude. “Because she was a diplomat and he wasn’t.” But as Rudolf well knew, Margot was in no fit state to run a ballet company. Having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, she was receiving treatment for it in Houston, and since August had had two major operations.

  “I fired Taras,” says Hermann, “and then Rudolf got even nastier. Ultimately he thought that I owed it to him to give him ABT.” But not only did the board not want another Russian in charge, Rudolf, as Hermann says, had not considered how much harder it was to run a company in America, especially one with a five-and-a-half-million-dollar debt. “There was no money. I certainly didn’t want the job myself, but no good artistic director would have taken on a company under those conditions. It was just a big illusion on Rudolf’s part. Plus the fact you don’t bring in some AIDS-ridden guy.”

  He had another idea. When once asked if he could imagine himself at the age of sixty running the Kirov, Rudolf had replied without hesitation, “I can. This relation with the Kirov Ballet is something special. You can’t extinguish it. Neither could Balanchine.… I am sure that no dancer of the Bolshoi theater can have similar ties, similar feelings. You are forged for your whole life.” He had already reestablished a link with the company’s current director, Oleg Vinogradov, a Vaganova school contemporary, whom Rudolf had asked to mount his production of Paquita in Paris in 1988. And at the beginning of 1989, when he heard that Natalia Makarova had been invited to perform with the Kirov, he called Vinogradov saying that he would like to follow. “So come and dance,” the director had offered, and they agreed to talk later about dates. Rudolf’s trip took place just one week after the collapse of the Berlin Wall on November 6, a sign, in his mind, that this was somehow all fated. “I left USSR when the construction of the Berlin Wall had begun and returned when it was demolished—that’s a symbol, isn’t it?”

  Arriving in Leningrad, wearing his signature Missoni shawl and tam-o’-shanter, Rudolf was accompanied by Douce, Luigi, and Phyllis Wyeth, together with a number of international reporters and an American television crew. The first person to greet him was Tamara Zakrzhevskaya, who had been wondering, as she managed to slip past the uniformed guards, whether Rudolf would recognize her. “Well, at least Tamara came,” he grinned, and as they embraced, a cluster of cushiony babushki in woolen hats surrounded him, pressing straggly carnations into his hands. These were his Leningrad fans of three decades before—the pretty, plump smiling girls whose passion for their “Malchiska” was so intense that one had physically attacked Tamara out of jealousy. To Rudolf “they looked like people who came out of the Gulag. Strange, worn, shabby old people, like in one of those science-fiction films.… Depressing.” To the fans, however, despite the myths and rumors about his baroque lifestyle,* “he was still our Rudik.”

  Tamara remembers being surprised that no one from the Kirov Theater had come to the airport, although, coincidentally, Vinogradov had arrived around the same time on another flight. “He made a little bow to Rudolf, said a couple of words, and left.” The reason for the director’s offhandedness, she suggests, were the feelings of envy and inferiority that went back to their student days, when Rudolf was invited into the Kirov as a soloist and Vinogradov went to Novosibirsk to join the corps de ballet. “Rudolf was the star and he was a loser. Years fly by, Vinogradov is artistic director of the Kirov and Rudolf is asking him favors: All his youthful complexes came into play. These were not Yeltsin’s times, and he was very afraid that Rudolf, being director of the Grand Opéra, might receive an invitation from our cultural department to lead the theater.”

  If this was Rudolf’s ultimate aim, his immediate priority was less ambitious: “He had one intention—to arrange for the Kirov to stage his Cinderella.” But as this was the ballet that had been Vinogradov’s first major work as a choreographer, the director let it be known that “There are many better versions than Rudolf’s—mine, for example.” Rudolf was enraged. “The fucker is refusing to let me do it,” he exploded to Tamara, telling her also how Vinogradov was trying to sabotage his visit. He had wanted to perform The Overcoat, but Vinogradov had insisted, “It’s La Sylphide, Giselle, or nothing,” his motive, Rudolf felt, being to shame and “bury” him. Although aware that the effect of a fifty-one-year-old Albrecht would be devastatingly anticlimactic to an audience who remembered the genius of the “hooligan boy,” Rudolf had no option, and chose the Bournonville ballet. Vaganova, a pupil of Christian Johansson, had incorporated elements of Danish technique into her training (and La Sylphide had been performed by the Kirov since 1981), but, nevertheless Rudolf knew that everything he had learned from Erik and Stanley Williams would blow the dust off what many Russian dancers regarded as a museum piece.

  To Rudolf the most visible signs of glasnost in Leningrad were the photographs of himself, Makarova, and Baryshnikov now hanging alongside ballet history’s icons in the Vaganova museum. Followed by reporters and cameramen and stopping to sign autographs, the disgraced star made his grand comeback, his imperiousness giving way to genuine warmth when he spotted Natalia Dudinskaya, now a little old lady with a bad wig and smeared lipstick. “Zdrazvitya, Madame!” he beamed, hugging her hard. Later, visiting the hundred-year-old Anna Udeltsova and holding her trembling hand, Rudolf looked amused and touched by his teacher’s delighted cries of “Oi, oi, oi!” reminding her how she would give him treats like cucumbers marinaded in honey and mushrooms. “My greatest worry,” she said, “was to find things to build up your strength because you worked so terribly hard. The others had to be pushed to work, but you I had to hold back.” (He told friends, though, that when she teased him about the “dirty little Tatar boy” he had been, he felt slapped in the face—except expressed, Rudolf-style, in mat obscenities.)

  At the theater, with “the same old babushki sitting in every exit,” he noticed how run-down everything was. “Nothing had changed, and I found people there at the same level they had been thirty years ago.” But this was exactly what he planned to set right. When Makarova came to Leningrad she not only donated her costume and shoes to the museum, but charmed everyone at the theater by distributing gifts and souvenirs. Rudolf “brought nothing,” although he saw his visit as far more enriching in dance terms: “first take everything from there to the West, then take as much as possible back to Russia.”

  Wearing yellow clogs and a dressing gown over several woolen layers, Rudolf made his way to the studio, where an elegantly dressed Ninel Kurgapkina was waiting to begin the first rehearsal. He still used the formal vy to her informal ty, and yet
the authority of their roles had changed, and as Rudolf warmed up, performing Stanley Williams’s multiple battement tendu exercises, Ninel leaned on the barre listening to him explain the basics of this unfamiliar method. When he turned to face the other side she weighed him up and down with a professional eye although for the most part she took the opportunity to reminisce, giggling as she remembered one particularly outrageous incident of his youthful arrogance. Across the studio, waiting to begin, Rudolf’s Sylph, Zhanna Ayupova, sized him up in the mirror as he took off his cloth cap, his thinning hair plastered to his scalp with sweat. Stopping his solo midway, he collapsed onto a chair, but as the young ballerina began to dance, he instinctively rallied to instill a quality of port de bras that he noticed was missing.

  In a subsequent rehearsal watched by Tamara, he stopped four times to stretch out, exhausted, on the floor. This was depressing enough, but she couldn’t understand why, having brought his own “luxury costume” to Russia, Rudolf insisted on trying on “a whole pile of rotten old clothes” that he had found in one of the dressing rooms. “I was sitting next to a critic who had never seen him dance and said, ‘What kind of thing is that? It can’t be the great Nureyev.’ ” “No one wanted to take seriously the image that Nureyev presented of himself,” wrote Inna Sklarevskaya. “We were left with the hope that some kind of magical transformation would occur at the next day’s performance.” During the dress rehearsal, however, Rudolf felt something snap, and having arrived in Leningrad with an injured foot, now found himself with a torn calf muscle in the other leg. Instead of canceling, he decided to “show some style of the school of Margot Fonteyn.… If you can stand, you can improvise something,” although Ninel remembers the degree to which he was vacillating about whether or not to perform. “I can’t give you advice,” she told him. “You have to make that decision yourself.” Tamara, on the other hand, knowing that Rudolf had valued her frankness in the past, steeled herself to telephone him at his hotel and put him off.

  “Rudik, are you feeling okay?” “Yes. Why? I’m feeling wonderful.” “Really? It seemed to me you were having problems with your foot.” “My foot is absolutely fine.” “Well, are you really going to appear onstage in those old costumes? They’re a joke.” “You don’t like them? Well, you’ll just have to survive that.” “Rudik, you know I’ve survived a lot of things …” and then I hung up. We never talked again. I didn’t know that he was ill—if I had, I’d never have called.

  Gabriella Komleva had also spoken her mind. “I said, ‘Why are you doing this? It’s not what you should be showing yourself in.’ ” “You don’t understand,” Rudolf told her vehemently. “I’ve got to dance on this stage.” It was as if he believed that the Kirov stage had some miraculous power, a power that could return him to his former, prelapsarian state. “That stage is sacred.” “This was like a pilgrimage for my soul.… It was a kind of purification.” (He felt so passionately that he had even taken a photograph of its bare boards, and the reason he had wanted to dance in worn-out costumes was simply because they were Kirov costumes.) “All that time in the West I wanted to dance in Russia,” he confided to Ninel, and to a television journalist on his return he admitted that he had now achieved his dream. “It’s a circular kind of circle. Complete.”

  Compared with Rudolf’s recent form, his performance, recorded by CBS television, is surprisingly accomplished. Once again, despite his two injuries, he proved that he could still do double tours to both sides, and his grasp of Bournonville-style footwork was seen to be “brilliant.” What has gone is the refinement he acquired in the West, his hunched shoulders and stiff, flapping arms oddly reminiscent of his student performance of Corsaire. But while the majority of fans caught only “a hint here, and a stroke there” of the Rudik they remembered, Faina Rokhind, his great fan from the old days, saw much more. “I still argue about it to this day. I was sitting in the second row and he danced very well, and in the image he was famous for. I was amazed by the scene with the witch—so much sincere anger and passion. I think the acting was absolutely fantastic. He really danced with a soul. It made me understand even more clearly why I love him so much.”

  The contrast was too painful for Tamara. “The audience was giving him an ovation for his return. And maybe for the changes in our country that had allowed him to come. But I wish we could have seen him dance something worthy of him, something that showed us another side.” Only too aware that the Leningrad audience was the most discerning in the world, Rudolf knew, of course, that he should never have danced. And yet the horror of what lay in store for him was reason enough to indulge “a kind of caprice … for myself, nobody else.” Inscribing a photograph for Phyllis Wyeth of himself as James kissing the hand of Ayupova’s Sylph, Rudolf wrote, “To dear Philiss, this hideous moment in a few years will be the sweetest memory.”

  *He was less circumspect in later interviews: “I think not only Russia but the whole world is fortunate to have Mr. Gorbachev as the leader of this country. I think he deserves a Nobel Prize or something like that.” (Dutch TV interview.) And to Lynn Barber, Rudolf said, “Unfortunately [Gorbachev] was not consistent all the way, but it was a great landmark. The Russians are not ready, they are completely uneducated, they cannot think for themselves.”

  *And not only for Rudolf. Rostropovich, told by Luigi that Rudolf was on his way to Ufa, could not believe it. “It’s not possible,” he kept saying. “No, no, no, no! Not possible.” (Diane Solway, Nureyev.)

  *A reference to the story that Catherine the Great’s favorite minister, Grigori Alexsandrovich Potemkin, strove to impress her during her tours of the Ukraine and Crimea by constructing elaborate facades of villages whose inhabitants were forced to dance and act as if they were happy.

  *Now known as the Rudolf Nureyev Ballet School.

  *It took the authorities eighteen days to admit the extent of the disaster that took place at the nuclear power station in the Ukraine in April 1986, and even then the accounts were heavily expurgated.

  *Wanting to settle past scores, Rudolf confronted Kirstein by saying, “Why did you hate me so much?” “So many years had passed, but Rudolf felt he needed to know about that,” says Robert Tracy, who remembers how Kirstein, without attempting to reply, suddenly got up and left. The two never saw each other again.

  *The Golden Cockerel and Other Fairy Tales, by Aleksandr Pushkin, illustrated by Boris Zvorykin (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

  *The program, conducted by James Levine, included the new William Forsythe ballet In the middle somewhat elevated and Songs of a Wayfarer, with Jessye Norman as the soprano.

  †Evdokimova became Rudolf’s favorite partner in the latter stage of his career. Earning his high regard for her versatility (her multifaceted training combined the Royal Ballet, Bournonville, and Vaganova styles), Evdokimova could adapt herself, as he did, to numerous companies and a diversity of repertory, spanning Petipa to Glen Tetley.

  *By choosing her as his partner in Giselle—a January 1988 performance commemorating his fiftieth birthday.

  *In fact the word means “an old shoe.”

  *Invited to Florence by French diplomat friends, Alla was reunited with Rudolf for the first time in twenty-eight years. They saw a lot of each other, and, before he left, Rudolf asked her to come to Paris with him. Having long given up dancing, the ballerina had fallen on bad times (her ticket to Europe was a present from Makarova), and Rudolf was determined to help by offering her work at the Opéra. “We could celebrate the anniversary of June 16 and your birthday at the same time. Would you like to?” “That’s exactly how he said it, as if it were nothing at all. Just pure, simple, human benevolence.” Alla’s time in Paris did not last long—she had warned Rudolf that she was “a rotten teacher”—but, refusing to give up on her, he asked Marika to take her on for the summer season at her Monte Carlo academy. “That experience turned out to be one of the most interesting chapters of my life. And never once did Rudik breathe a word that he was the one behind it.”<
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  *“In town you would hear anything,” said Tamara. “Nureyev bought a Louis XVI palace and moved there with his lovers, opened a harem, and has a personal cameraman who is there to film all his love affairs.” (Radik Kudoyarov, The Myth of Rudolf, documentary.)

  20 A FATALITY TO LIVE

  Paris, January 10, 1990: “Rudolf quits,” Mario Bois notes in his diary. “Nine months of negotiations for nothing.” But it was not quite over yet. Pierre Bergé was proposing a role for Rudolf as principal choreographer, which would mean staging one new ballet a year and one revival. A meeting between the two was needed—“Only if Nureyev comes to my office.” “Only if Bergé comes to me”—but, as neither was prepared to give way, nothing could be finalized. Then Rudolf heard that his successor was Patrick Dupond, the audience-pleasing étoile whom he had been accused of overlooking. Since 1988 Dupond had been in charge of the Nancy ballet, nevertheless, as far as Rudolf was concerned his appointment at the Opéra was a travesty, threatening to undo everything he had achieved. “He’s a very nice boy. He’s charming at the dinner. But he doesn’t know classical dance.” Bergé, however, who had controversially engaged the less-known Myung-Whun Chung to replace Daniel Barenboim, wanted his ballet director to be just as tractable. “Dupond would be his poodle.”