Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  On February 11 the final performance of The King and I took place in San Francisco. The show was closing because of scathing reviews and minimal box-office takings. Anyone who had seen it recently, such as American Ballet Theatre’s assistant artistic director David Richardson, was not in the least surprised. “I felt Rudolf wasn’t respecting it. He was leaving his hotel at curtain time, and was just walking through it. It was a gruesome performance, and when we met afterward at Jeannette’s bar* I found a way to pass over it, but he wanted to hear more. It was painful the way he was looking for approval.” True to character, Jane Hermann was more direct. “I told him it was awful, which it was. He didn’t even know his lines.” But this had only compounded Rudolf’s hostility toward Jane, now the artistic director of ABT, a job he thought he should have had, and he still blamed her for his not getting it. “She never had the guts to speak to me about the company.” They were in a restaurant when Rudolf, who had been drinking too much, started obscenely to berate her, an occasion she remembers as “that ghastly night he made his ‘Jewish cunt’ speech.” “Gorlinsky warned me not to get too emotionally involved with Rudolf. ‘He’s ruthless,’ Sandor said. And he was right. He ruins your life—but that’s because I let him. I should have extricated myself, not put myself in harm’s way. But I really loved Rudolf.”

  It was the same night, Jane later discovered, that Rudolf had learned that the Hammerstein estate was withdrawing the rights to The King and I, but even so, she decided that this time he had gone too far. “There was no one close to Rudolf who could say, What are you doing? To the one promotor who has given you most loyalty.” In fact Armen Bali had said exactly this when they were alone together later, reminding Rudolf, “She knows the business and she adores you.” In the end, though, Armen took his side, saying, “All of a sudden she turns against him because he called her names. This is the thing he couldn’t understand; why people are so sensitive.”

  And yet she herself had been hurt when, in San Francisco, Rudolf chose to stay not with her as usual but with Jeannette. “My mother didn’t know he was ill, so I told her it was because I had a VCR machine and he could watch his films at night. Before, he’d be naked in the bathtub, and she’d be scrubbing his back as they quoted Pushkin, but now he didn’t want her to see him that way.” Changing the sheets one morning Jeannette noticed a lot of loose pills under the bed—“He’d been throwing them there.” She called Michel Canesi, who begged her to make sure that he took them. “So I would just stand there until he did. But it was hard for him to swallow this stuff. They were like horse pills.” (Gay activists would later suggest that it was “in accord with a sound instinct” that Rudolf did not always take the prescribed doses. “Like many tens of thousands of others,” wrote John Lauritsen, “Nureyev was poisoned with AZT.”)

  To fill Rudolf’s blank calendar Luigi had promised to take him “around the world to dance,” hastily setting up what would be billed as the “Farewell Tour.” Rudolf’s fan Bob Gable caught the show in Washington, where the dancers were performing “in a small room, not even a theatre.” Despite the telegram that had arrived in 1986 from Béjart “forbidding any and all performances by Nureyev,” Songs of a Wayfarer was included on the program, and so was Apollo, which the Balanchine estate had also vetoed. “He was terrible in them both, and he even did The Lesson badly—old standard things that were just beyond him now. That was hard for me to take.” But Maude’s line on hearing of the “total disaster” of the tour was, “Well then, don’t go and see him.” She would point out that there were people who still derived pleasure from “certain things Rudolf can do that nobody else can: the way he holds himself, and his intelligent approach to a role.” Marika Besobrasova had long given up seeing Rudolf onstage, and yet she, too, understood why he kept going. “Getting old, you refine these internal feelings that are so much stronger than your body. Rudolf felt in spirit so strongly, so clearly, that he thought he was that being, and he did not see the image that we saw. Now I would go to watch him perform, but only with my spirit watching his spirit.”

  Baryshnikov was also sympathetic. “Definitely, for him, it was a death to be offstage. No matter how he was dancing. At least it was killing time, because he knew time was killing him.” Rudolf admitted this himself. “When the lights are extinguished I die. But tomorrow, I will dance; tomorrow, I will be reborn.” The act of extreme exertion—the astonishing resilience that boxers call “heart”—was in itself a kind of redemption. “It is as if by way of the most strenuous exigencies of the physical self a boxer can—sometimes—transcend the merely physical,” writes Joyce Carol Oates. “He can, if he is lucky, be absolved of his mortality.”

  Rudolf was convinced that he had found a way of extending his longevity as a dancer. “Practice in nice warm weather. Good climate. Not in winter; not up north. Then no problem.” To have sunshine all year round he signed the deeds on a seafront house on the tiny Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy.* With dark wooden shutters, it was as simple as a Russian dacha—“No paintings, no statues, no harpsichords”—and situated off the single-track coastal road that runs along the wild, southeastern side, a world away from the Parisian cafés, restaurants, and designer boutiques of St.-Jean and Gustavia Harbor. Rudolf had bought the house complete with everything in it, from an ugly upright piano with termites in the wood, to the kind of plastic-cushioned cane-and-plywood furniture one finds in an English seaside bed and breakfast. Jackie Onassis, who went there for tea one day, was unimpressed. “If Rudolf invites you to visit, say no,” she told a mutual acquaintance, but Rudolf would not have minded. “My houses are all strange, isolated places that would not appeal to society people. They are not presentable.” His only major addition was a vast driftwood-gray deck jutting vertiginously over the rocks—a stage, in fact, its backdrop the shadowy outline of St. Kitts and a changing panorama of sea and sky. Under the deck was a little grotto, and when he failed to get planning permission to turn it into a bedroom, Rudolf had a mattress-size platform built, intending to spend nights sleeping in the open, a few feet above the waves. (The next owner found candles in crevices of the rocks.) He had once compared his solitary houses to “wolves’ lairs,” but never had he craved such a primitive existence. “Like a wild animal—close to the essential.”

  In April 1990, the moment the house was officially his, Rudolf went there with Douce, Charles Jude, and Simon “Blue” Robinson, a young English PA he had employed toward the end of The King and I tour. Tall, sporty, and good-natured about rebuffing his boss’s occasional advances, Blue had met Rudolf on St. Barts six months earlier while working as a professional mate on a racing yacht. (His experience as a boy friday would be recorded in a sharply observed memoir, both amusing and poignant, entitled A Year with Rudolf Nureyev.) Padding around barefoot Rudolf allowed himself easy days, stretched out napping in the sun on a floral sheet, naked except for a women’s straw hat, or attempting to swim—“always naked”—in the swirling surges of surf below the house. On the nearby nudist beach Rudolf would always have with him the water- and sand-proof Walkman that Blue had bought him. “He wore a hat and the headphones and nothing else and listened to symphonies while he followed the score on sheet music that often blew away.” Mostly, though, he sat at the piano solemnly working his way through Bach. “You can play him at any tempo and his music does not disintegrate no matter what speed and how badly you play.”

  Trying to convince himself that he could do something else, “to trick his mind into believing that he didn’t have to be onstage all the time,” Rudolf had begun seriously studying music. He claimed to have asked Herbert von Karajan how he managed to stay so energetic. “My son,” the maestro replied, “if you want to live long, you need to finish dancing and conduct.” And it was von Karajan’s idea that he should start by teaching himself Bach’s forty-eight Preludes and Fugues. With Leonard Bernstein (Rudolf’s Dakota neighbor), and John Lanchbery both pledging their support, Rudolf was confident that it was not too late to
switch to a career that would allow him to stay in the dance world, continue to earn big money, and travel the world. What he lacked in technical schooling he believed he could make up for with his own charisma, qualities of leadership, and ferocious determination. As he told Blue, “I have decided to be conductor, so I will be conductor.”

  In May 1990 the meeting with Bergé finally took place (on the neutral ground of Mario Bois’s premises), and to seal his new arrangement with the Opéra, Rudolf announced that he would be mounting La Bayadère. There was no complete Minkus score available, but when he was in Russia, Rudolf had hunted out the original and, with Douce’s help, had clandestine photocopies made, which she then smuggled through customs under her clothes. La Bayadère was, in Rudolf’s view, Petipa’s masterpiece—the one full-length Russian classic he had always wanted to bring to the West. “Without [it] there would not have been Swan Lake.” And as the work of a Frenchman, with a libretto influenced by Théophile Gautier’s Sacountala, it rightly belonged, as he said, to the patrimony of France. “I have brought it back to its own country.” Not only that, but to Rudolf the ballet had become a parable of sorts, replaying his unhappy relationship with the Paris Opéra Ballet. “A love story which ended badly. It’s a betrayal. It’s like La Bayadère.”

  The Opéra, he told Elizabeth Kaye, could not decide the extent to which it wanted to maintain its link with him. “They want my ballets, but they don’t want me to be around.… They want to do what Lifar did many years ago with Balanchine. He was pushed out. They did the same to Fokine. And before that, same with Jules Perrot.” But having felt bitter and unprized in Paris—“Nobody’s dying to delve into my baggage of knowledge” … [teaching is] “dry bread and it’s ingratitude”—during a brief spell of working with the Royal Ballet, he reverted to being what Monica Mason called “the Rudolf of twenty years before. You could feel what the dancers felt for him. He was warm and loving; he talked to them, watched them. With us he was the most unselfish, giving person. He so believed in the art form that the more people he could convert to his passion, the better he felt.”

  The occasion was a gala performance of Romeo and Juliet, whose purpose was to raise money for Margot. “She’d really been living from hand to mouth,” said John Tooley who, in his role of general director, had helped the ballerina financially at various times during the eighties. “She rang me one day to say that her medical insurance was about to be cut off, but when I suggested a benefit evening she was very resistant to the idea.” “I can’t accept it,” Margot told a close friend, finding it too demeaning. Tooley, by then retired from the Opera House, came up with a face-saving plan to donate the proceeds to a trust for young dancers, the interest from which would go to Margot. This she agreed to, although she still felt reluctant to attend the occasion itself. “Rudolph [sic] seems to be trying to blackmail me to go to the May 30th gala!” she wrote from Panama to Maude. “It is not going to be easy for me so I still haven’t made up my mind. I pray that either way he will dance Mercutio.”

  With Sylvie Guillem and the twenty-seven-year-old Jonathan Cope as the lovers, the company had planned to cast a young Mercutio, but not only had Rudolf taken it for granted that he would be dancing the role, Margot had declared “it would be criminal not to.” (As Maria Tallchief once said, “He was still her Romeo. Her Armand.” And Maude felt the same. “They should have let him do Romeo.”) In fact, though, Rudolf hated MacMillan’s version of Mercutio, particularly the death scene—“It just goes on and on, it’s embarrassing”—and instead of going to a rehearsal, he had stayed in bed at Victoria Road.

  To the gala audience that night, which included Princess Diana and Princess Margaret, it was entirely fitting that Rudolf should be performing for Margot, “the dear friend of my soul,” but few of the cognoscenti were able to look at the stage. “It was heartbreaking,” said Monica Mason. “Because of course it was a reminder of what happens to us.” From the wings Stephen Sherriff called out encouragement. “I was trying to pump him up, saying, ‘Go for it, Rudolf!’ But he knew how awful he was. He knew, he knew.”

  Not wanting to see anyone after the performance, Rudolf was waiting at the stage door for a cab when Anya Sainsbury came to tell him that Margot was looking for him. “She doesn’t need me,” he mumbled, but Anya told him how distraught he was making her. “I begged him to stay, and he did. But he was really upset about something.” It was not only his pitiful performance—his last appearance on the Royal Opera House stage—but the sight of Margot, whose glittering Saint Laurent gown did little to disguise how seriously ill and emaciated she had become. In Paris, when they last had seen each other at a quai Voltaire supper, she had been in radiant form, and, sitting by her side, Rudolf was clearly loving every second of their time together. “He was being so gentle with her,” recalls Stephen Sherriff, “like he was with Maude.” They had been reminiscing about the old days, and Stephen heard him say, “You were the dance.” “No,” said Margot, reaching for Rudolf’s hand, “we were the dance.”

  Now, however, unable to walk without a cane, Margot was so weak that at a dinner the night before Rudolf had been impelled to carry her on the stairs. And whereas they had always been there for each other in the past—“Things that could not be faced alone, they could face together”—neither would confide in the other about their illnesses. “You’ve got two twin souls there,” said Margot’s close friend Ana Cristina Alvarado. “For them it was almost degrading to talk about it.” Rudolf had been shocked when The Observer’s Lynn Barber asked during an interview whether the ballerina’s death would be a great loss to him (“You don’t say things like that,” he later protested to Maude). To Barber he replied, “Why, why should we speak about it? She looks very well, the English doctors gave her not one week, but she went away, she had the operation, kept her chin up and checked up the cancer, and there she is.”

  He longed to be able to spoil Margot—“Oh, take her here, there”—but within weeks she was back in Houston having treatment, and all he could do was make arrangements for money to be transferred to help with the bill. Jeannette remembers the phone calls and the “kids’ funny backpack” that he wanted sent to Margot. Romantically alluding to their Marguerite and Armand, Rudolf tried to have camellias delivered to her room, but the closest the florist could get were butterfly orchids. Fighting his phobia of hospitals, he made several visits to Houston, though he never stayed long. “He couldn’t cope with seeing Margot like that. It would break his heart,” said Ana Cristina, vividly recalling the jocular act he put on when the ballerina was resisting having her leg amputated.

  Rudolf said, “What’s wrong with crutches? You lose one leg? You have another leg. Do as Doctor Benjamin says. You have to be well. This thing [never cancer] has to be removed. Losing a leg is not difficult. You hop.” Margot laughs and picks up the phone to doctor. “Rudolf thinks it’s a very good thing that I should have this operation. He thinks it’s going to make me well.” Rudolf goes out. Starts crying like a baby in the corridor.

  And he could not cope when Margot’s mind started to wander. They were having a telephone conversation while he was on St. Barts, but nothing was making sense. “Rudolf just sat there, looking beaten down by sadness. ‘I can’t …,’ he said. ‘She’s gone.… I can’t understand what she says or …’ ” Blue took the phone from his hand, and Rudolf walked away.

  He was on tour in Chicago in February when a handwritten fax in broken English arrived at the Hilton from Douce. “Dear Rudolf, Margot had gone to open the door of the paradis. I am deeply concerned about the sadness you must feel.” The ballerina had died on February 21——the anniversary of their first Giselle. Spending the rest of the day in his room, not even contacting Charles Jude, who was waiting to have lunch with him as usual, Rudolf arrived at the theater with barely enough time to get ready. After the performance Charles went to his dressing room. “ ‘I heard about Margot. I’m very sorry.’ He just look at me. ‘C’est la vie.’ He’s ill and he know that
it finish.”

  Unlike Margot, who found great inner peace as the end approached, Rudolf was desperately afraid of death. At the Russian Orthodox funeral of Alexandre Kalioujny, a teacher he had come to love, Charles remembers the wide berth he gave the open coffin. “I see him sweating. He didn’t want to go past.” It was not Hamlet’s fear of something after death—“When you’re dead, you’re dead,” Rudolf believed. “Finish! Full stop!”—but the thought of a force he could not control taking over his body. Hearing that Charles’s father had died of cancer, Rudolf had wanted to know every detail of how it happened and how much he had suffered. And when he learned that Leonard Bernstein had died in the next-door apartment at the Dakota, Rudolf had immediately left the building. Not only was he fleeing from the proximity of the corpse, he also felt let down. Like von Karajan, Bernstein had promised, “Conductors live a long, long time,” but now both maestros were dead.

  In late February 1991, a bitter winter, Rudolf had sequestered himself in his overheated apartment, his croaked reply to Blue’s cheery “How are you?” never varying. “Alive.” With Natasha Harley cooking, Robert Tracy often arranged for friends to come by, the idea being to convince Rudolf that nothing in his life had changed. (It had not been like that in Paris, where, as Jean-Luc Choplin recalled, “Nobody had respect for him at that time. I remember how tough it was; how often I went to dinner with Rudolf alone because nobody else wanted to come. We’d be there, just the two of us, watching TV and eating something prepared by Manuel.”) It was Robert’s intention, Violette Verdy says, “to keep him going through the bad times by continuing with the dinner parties so that Rudolf felt that it was still the same … his dancing and his popularity.” But his efforts went unappreciated by Rudolf, who complained that Robert was arranging dinners with people he did not want to see in order to enhance his own connections. The fact he was allowing “that shit-boy” to live rent-free at the Dakota entitled him, he believed, to an unpaid social secretary, house sitter, and amanuensis (Robert carried out any research he wanted, and had recently edited a collection of Nigel Gosling’s art criticism, Prowling the Pavements. Again to little avail. “He provided me with tiddly bits about life of Shakespeare,” Rudolf once acknowledged, with the stinging caveat, “But he was bluffing most of the time.”)