Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Phyllis Wyeth, one of the few members of the Nureyev circle who was fond of Robert, felt that he was “badly used.” Natasha Harley agrees. “I always felt that Robert was some kind of commodity for him—somebody who would take care of the apartment. Rudolf didn’t want to pay for anybody. Not even a maid.” During the weeks they were living in the Dakota, Blue said that Robert was growing noticeably edgy. “When Rudolf left New York, Robert sometimes became so upset that I had to go out and leave him alone.… He wanted to hear from Rudolf, and Rudolf wasn’t interested in him any longer.” Wallace had sensed much the same. “It seemed to me that their relationship had deteriorated even further. Rudolf at that point appeared to tolerate his presence, but that was about it. I’m pretty sure he would have been very happy if Robert had walked out of his life.” Asked by a mutual friend if he felt responsible for Robert, Rudolf replied, “Not at all. We screwed fifteen years ago.” In fact he was now becoming so determined to have the Dakota apartment to himself that he had asked Tessa Kennedy to tell Robert to find somewhere else to live.

  “Rudolf, it’s not for me to do that.”

  “Please, it’s making me sick. I can’t stand having him there any more. You can at least put the idea into his head.”

  So I did, but Robert wouldn’t go. And it got worse and worse, with Rudolf losing his temper all the time.

  The reason for the urgency was that Rudolf had decided to settle permanently in New York, and by the spring of 1991 had begun bringing over many of his possessions from quai Voltaire. “I guess I’ll close that French chapter,” he announced, telling a journalist that twice he had been “barking up the wrong tree” (meaning his choices of London and Paris). “America has been the most generous and faithful, and they still come to see my performance.” First, though, resigned to the fact that “the only thing left for me is to dance,” Rudolf intended to put England’s loyalty to the test one last time.

  Managed by a small-time promoter, the twenty-one-day Farewell Tour worked its way south from Sunderland on April 26, ending up on the coast in Brighton. The cover of the souvenir playbill was a dazzlingly glamorous 1970s photograph of Rudolf, and with this image in mind, he would sit in front of his dressing room mirror, silently watched by Luigi and Blue. “I had such beautiful hair,” he said softly.… After a long while, just staring and thinking, he’d pinch his cheeks. “What d’you think, Shluigi? Should I have a cheek job? Couple of tucks?” Meanwhile, in the auditorium, ushers were giving women in the front orchestra seats a pink rose to throw onstage, but with the star appearing in The Lesson and The Moor’s Pavane—“walking dances,” Blue called them—the final curtain went down on a sense of anticlimax. This was the nadir: Rudolf lumbering through the same tired repertory like a bottom-of-the-bill vaudeville act, and despite his vow never to dance to taped music was now performing to a disastrously faulty sound system. “If you don’t have an orchestra,” he had been told, “you can have more money.” The Times reported “cries of refund, refund”; the Sunday Telegraph claimed that touts were offering tickets at half price, and published a vengeful photograph of a snarling, geriatric Rudolf with a walking stick (omitting to mention that he was in the character of Dr. Coppélius). “Your newspapers are edited by Kitty Kelley. You are only interested in character assassination,” he told one journalist, adding, “Maybe it’s time to turn my back on England.” Maude remembered feeling physically hurt by the brutality of the reviews, but it was affecting Rudolf, too, and during a long car journey back to London he started to open up.

  He said, “Maude, why do I go on? I should really stop, shouldn’t I …” “Well, it’s up to you, Rudolf. You’ve got plenty of other things you could do.” “But it keeps me well.” Rudolf truly couldn’t comprehend how he could live without doing a class every day and working every night. It distressed me terribly, of course. I tried not to go round with him when he was doing those tours because it made me so sad on his behalf.

  Balanchine had predicted this. “He’ll end up badly, you’ll see,” he told Cecil Beaton. “He is too selfish and a dancer cannot afford to be selfish.… He’ll be like Pavlova.” But Balanchine was only half right, because, if there were young dancers to be helped, there was no one more generous than Rudolf. Blue describes him standing in the wings during a rehearsal in Edinburgh, shouting, “Mooskva! Mooskva!” at André Fedatov, who was performing Le Corsaire. Another dancer explained. Rudolf was implying, “Go to Moscow! Distance! Travel! Stretch! Extend yourself!” as he was using this British tour to introduce and train potential young stars. “Some came from Russia; it was a big break for them, and good money.” And despite commenting on the “shit towns” in which they were appearing, Rudolf was not apologetic about his troupe performing in the provinces. “Those are the people to dance to. They came, brought family, enjoyed dance. Get out, do it. Show dance to people.” It was the kind of audience for whom Pavlova had danced across the globe, “injecting” the thirteen-year-old Frederick Ashton with his passion when she appeared in his then-hometown of Lima, Peru. And it was a ballet performance in Ufa’s opera house twenty-eight years later that had decided the fate of another enraptured young boy.

  Rudolf’s last appearance on a London stage was on May 3 at the Wembley Conference Centre. The ninety-three-year-old Ninette de Valois had made her way out to the suburb by public transportation and she asked Maude to take her to Rudolf’s dressing room. “The moment she came in, he just lit up. They talked awhile, and she said, ‘Rudolf, you’re still great.’ She came back to the house afterward and they talked and talked until two in the morning. Ninette could still see the quality in what he was doing.” But that was not the case. Five years earlier de Valois had confided to a dance writer, “Between you and me it’s tragic, dear, I wish he’d stop.” This, as Rudolf knew, was an act of friendship; de Valois wanting to express gratitude for the past, and to say good-bye. “He sent her flowers the next day.”

  At the end of May, Rudolf made his debut in Death in Venice, a two-act ballet Flemming Flindt had created specially for him. Far from being the ailing, pathetic figure portrayed by Peter Pears in Britten’s opera, or by Dirk Bogarde in Visconti’s film, Rudolf’s Aschenbach was more reminiscent of Jay Gatsby, svelte and agile in a white flannel suit with twenties cropped hair. “Britten and Visconti were fixated about their own sexuality, but I didn’t think of this as a homosexual story,” Flindt says. “It was more about a journey to God.” To Rudolf it was a quest for lost youth, and although Flindt insists that his choice of Bach’s Passacaglia—the music of Jeune Homme et la mort—was not deliberate, it powerfully reinforces memories of the twenty-eight-year-old Nureyev. (At the start he even dances with the same props—a table and simple wooden chair.) He saw an image of his former self in Tadzio, the beautiful boy, just as he did in each of the academic nudes that hung on the walls of quai Voltaire. “When you start to look,” says Luigi, who was more familiar than any lover with Nureyev’s body, “they all have something of Rudolf—his neck, his chest with no hair.… Rudolf was totally in love with himself. And he wanted to make love to himself.” Coming at such a late stage of his career, this was an astonishing performance, Rudolf calling up hidden reserves of strength for feats of acrobatic partnering that would have taxed a healthy dancer half his age. It was, however, stamina he was reserving for nothing but the stage, and when Flindt offered him a second beer at a bar one night, Rudolf replied, “I have to choose: either that or I lift the boy tomorrow.”*

  Exhausted by the short run of Death in Venice, he went to Li Galli to recover, growing, in Blue’s account, increasingly reclusive and misanthropic. At night the pair would sit watching television or videos of old Hollywood movies, mostly Fred Astaire’s. “One night we were watching a documentary about wildlife in the Florida swamps. Somebody tossed a dead sheep into the water. At once there was a frenzy of alligators feeding on it. ‘Ah!’ Rudolf said. ‘Paris Opéra.’ ” If any tourists came too close to the island he was furious, immediately jumping on h
is Kawasaki Jet Ski and driving it maniacally toward the trespassing boat. Once, when he saw a woman disembark and start strolling around, he lost all control. “He ran down and cursed her and she cursed him back until he was in a frenzy,” recalled Blue, who was forced to come between them.

  Rudolf was now even more money obsessed, convinced that he was being cheated out of television repeat fees, and sending off angry faxes to the head of the Royal Opera House, accusing “Mr, Sir or Lord [Jeremy] Isaacs” of owing him £5,000 and claiming to be too poor to afford even a taxi to Covent Garden. Blue was struggling to cater for them both as Rudolf gave him so little money to buy provisions in Positano—“yet Nureyev could have bought the grocer.” Benito, a local builder working on the property, was aware of Blue’s difficulties, and provided an occasional cash handout, which he then absorbed into the construction costs. Benito’s wife had taught Blue how to cook risotto, and this became the pair’s sustenance, “thirty days in a row.” Rudolf must have realized that imposing such a spartan existance on his young assistant was unfair, as he strolled up one day and asked, “How long can you live here?” Blue, who was indeed starting to despair at finding himself on “a rugged chunk of rock” as gaunt and isolated as Alcatraz, did not answer immediately. “Foof! Too slow!” exclaimed Rudolf, strolling away. Blue’s slow-wittedness had earned him the nickname “Death”—“Here comes death …” his employer used to drawl, clearly aware of the irony of their situation. Rudolf had anyway decided that he could do without any human companionship, that music was all he needed to fill his life. “This is preparation for my solitude.… I will sit in front of my clavichord.” It was only Bach he played, not only because the music was more instructive to him than any other composer’s, but because it provided the kind of spiritual peace others find in religion.

  Now that music was assuming more and more importance in his life—“a consolation in the moments where I felt myself injured”—Rudolf was grateful when an opportunity arose to learn to conduct. It was through the Hübner family that he had been introduced to the director of one of Vienna’s leading music venues, the Palais Auersperg. Dr. Franz Moser who, together with a young Austrian conductor, had met Rudolf at Victoria Road in May, was enthralled by the idea of launching the star in a new career, but needed reassurance that this was something within Rudolf’s grasp. It would be simple enough to teach him how to use a baton—and even how to get an orchestra to play together and in tune—but to be merely competent he would have to transmit a huge amount of musical information, the gathering of which can be a lifetime’s work. In his New Yorker article exploring the complexities of conducting, Justin Davidson marvels at the way this constant flow of minutiae—“How quick or flexible the pulse should be, how biting a staccato, how distended a pause, how graceful a phrase, how heavy a march”—is channeled to a hundred players by one person with a stick. A maestro’s art is, as Davidson says, “a mysterious mechanism … a gestural form of communication”—but then so is dance. Rudolf, who had been seeking out different versions of scores and reading them for pleasure since his student days, was undaunted by the challenge, and after a five-hour grilling had managed to convince his two Austrian interlocutors that he was up to it.

  The first lessons in baton technique took place in the Hübners’ summerhouse situated in vineyards forty-five kilometers north of Vienna. The atmosphere had been made as informal as possible with a cellist and two violinists (one being Papa Hübner) playing Mozart as they sat around a large pine table cluttered with cups of tea. Rudolf, however, was decidedly tense. He knew that a maestro has to project authority and put his musicians at ease, but here the situation was reversed. The two young string players had been asked by Papa Hübner, “Please, help him,” and their skeptical response of “Hmmm, we will see” was matched by Rudolf’s unease. “They were professionals who knew he was a beginner,” remarked Blue, who observed it all. “They would notice every mistake he made. Even worse, they would spot mistakes he didn’t know he’d made.” But once Rudolf saw that he had gained the musicians’ respect his confidence began to grow, and it was not long before Hübner had moved him to the Palais Auersperg so that he could work with a full orchestra.

  Taking charge of a large group of performers waiting expectantly in a rehearsal room was something that came naturally to Rudolf. When he first mounted La Bayadère for the Royal Ballet in 1963 he had compared himself to “a conductor in front of an orchestra,” while his favorite method of choreographing—moving an ensemble of dancers in contrapuntal blocs—was very similar to that of a maestro bringing in the wind, brass, and strings. Papa Hübner had advised him not to look at the score, as it was important to develop a rapport with the players, keeping their attention through eye contact, but Rudolf was still feeling the need to prove himself, and replied that he had to show that he could read music. Watching these early rehearsals, Waxy Hübner could see that he was not really in control, though he had been aided considerably by the fact that this was a group of young people, all open-minded and intent on just doing their job. “He wasn’t superfast at coping, but this kept the musicians alert and so it was good because it was all very alive.”

  Blue videotaped the sessions so that Rudolf could study his performance. There is no standard semaphore in conducting; every maestro develops his own personal dialect of face and body language—sometimes communicating just by lifting an eyebrow. “What one conductor achieves with a minuscule vibration of a finger, another will accomplish with a sledgehammer swing of an arm,” writes Justin Davidson, who watched the way that Robert Spano’s rapid series of gesticulations were instantly picked up by the musicians. “He made as if to squeeze an orange (the message: ‘Give me a succulent tone’). He then mimed sliding a toy car down a ramp (‘But don’t drag; push right into the next beat’), whisking eggs (‘Keep the sound vibrant’), and swatting a Ping-Pong ball (‘Give the phrase a sharp, light bounce’).”

  Rudolf, the world’s most explosive dancer, was remarkably restrained on the podium. Waxy Hübner was reminded of the aging Karl Böhm (one of the first conductors to encourage Rudolf), “in that he was clear with the baton but did very little.” To La Scala’s resident conductor, Michael Sassoon, little was not enough. “Rudolf had a good ear—when the second trombone didn’t come in, he would know. But he didn’t speak the music language of the musicians. Transferring that to an orchestra needs professional signals.” Vienna ballet’s director Gerhard Brunner thought that Rudolf should never have put himself in the spotlight so soon, but “moved to Austria and not been seen or heard for a while to give him time to learn.” Time, though, was precisely what Rudolf did not have. He had told only Waxy, a doctor, his reason, and although the Hübner parents never spoke of Rudolf’s condition, they, too, seemed aware of it. “It would have been a different story if we knew he was going to have fifteen to twenty years to conduct,” Waxy says. “My father would have worked with him for a year or two before he made his debut.”

  The mixed program of Haydn, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky took place at the Palais Auersperg on June 25, 1991. Video footage of the concert shows that Rudolf had already managed to establish an empathy with the Wiener Residenz players, particularly its first violinist Naomi Kazama, who encourages him with little smiles of complicity. “It was an attempt,” Brunner concedes, and the braveness of the attempt was what continued to impress. Six months later, attending a performance of Rudolf conducting The Nutcracker in Poland, Elizabeth Kendall described a local music critic leaping to his feet at the end and shouting “Molodetz!” which in Russian means, “Good for you, you did it!” Thierry Fouquet, on the other hand, says that he never really took Rudolf’s conducting phase seriously. “He was a good actor and could make himself look like a maestro in front of a nicely disposed orchestra. But any pianist or composer could have done the same thing.” Papa Hübner would have disagreed. When Maude asked whether Rudolf could have made a great conductor given another ten years, he replied, “In far less time than that.” Ye
t this, as Rudolf admitted, was work he had “made myself want.” Conducting Stravinsky’s Apollo five days after his debut, the score he followed was the one used when he danced the role in Vienna in 1967. On the opening page was written: “To wait until Nureyev arrives in the middle of the stage and raises his arms.”

  After the intense activity in Vienna, Rudolf went straight to Li Galli to recover, sleeping most of the time. Every morning at nine o’clock a tourist boat circled the islands, the female guide giving a running commentary, first in Italian, then in English, about their famous inhabitant. It made Gore Vidal, whose Ravello villa was another port of call, “feel as if I were being forced to listen in on an extension telephone where I am being discussed,” whereas Rudolf rather enjoyed waking up to an account of his glorious past. What most preoccupied him during those three weeks was the decoration of a room underneath the house, which he was having tiled from floor to ceiling. Staying the previous summer with Mario Bois in Seville, Rudolf had chosen the azulejos he wanted, insisting that they be delivered two weeks later to his house in Italy. Hearing that October was the earliest he could have them, he had protested, “I have no time,” and returned himself soon afterward with two vans to collect them. “He wanted to die on Li Galli,” says Jeannette. “Why do you think that room was all tiled?” Long and domed, it was Rudolf’s mausoleum, dedicated to Farida, whose name was spelled out in Arabic motifs. When Carla Fracci visited the island, he showed her the room with pride, oblivious to her surprise at the primitive conditions he had chosen for himself. “There was no bed, Rudolf was sleeping on a carpet on the floor. And he was living on potatoes—basta!”