Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  This was a voluntary return to his Tatar peasant roots, a bizarre riches-to-rags regression, but the combination of self-indulgence with willful miserliness was driving away the faithful Blue. In Vienna he had resented having to scrounge money from Franz Moser to pay off a masseur who had given Rudolf a hand job for five hundred dollars—half Blue’s monthly salary. But the final straw was discovering that Benito had been shortchanged for his work on the island. “[Rudolf] had got what he wanted. He was indifferent to other people’s needs. This was Nureyev at his worst: selfish and dishonest.” Asking for six weeks leave to take a butlering course in London, Blue never saw Rudolf again.

  After carrying out conducting engagements in Deauville, Vienna, and Romania, Rudolf was suddenly struck by severe abdominal pains. On the advice of Waxy, who specialized in urology, he was admitted to a hospital in Vienna, where he underwent surgery for an obstructed kidney. The moment he awoke from the anesthetic Rudolf had tried to get up and leave, but Lydia Hübner, being physically much stronger, managed to hold him down. Eight days later he had discharged himself and was back in Paris, where Mario Bois urged him to calm down and rest for a while in one of his houses. Rudolf’s reply was now his catchphrase: “I have no time.”

  Telling Maude that he needed the money to pay for his “enormous hospital bills,” Rudolf had his mind set on spending a month dancing in Australia. He was still in considerable pain and would have to perform with a catheter hidden inside his costume—“the plumbing,” as he called it. But when Charles Jude and Luigi told him that he could not possibly dance in such bad shape he refused to cancel the tour, agreeing only to a change in the program. (Songs of a Wayfarer, which Béjart had once again begged him “de ne plus interpreter,” was replaced with a shortened version of Afternoon of a Faun.) Undertaking the role of full-time nurse, Luigi put the ailing dancer to bed and took him to the bathroom, while Charles Jude had become Rudolf’s real-life Wayfarer companion. “In Paris I had my wife, my family, but on tour I was always with him. We stay in the same hotel, we eat together, we’re together twenty-four hours. This is why he wanted so much to go. We didn’t talk about his malady, and I tried to get him to evacuate all thoughts. But it was a good time for him—the sun, the swimming.”

  Before the trip Maude had been convinced it was “really the end of his dancing,” but Rudolf’s swan song was still to come. On April 9, 1991, he had received a letter from a Hungarian writer, Ildikó Kóródy, who was working on a libretto commissioned by the Hungarian State Opera for a three-act ballet based on the life of Christopher Columbus. He had been feeling that his work was “not complete, not total,” when the idea came to him to cast Rudolf as a central figure, “the spirit of Cristoforo,” who directs events from the first scene until the last. “You have been sent to us by the Lord!… Let’s call you Angel.” Telling the opera administration, “I have no time for this. I accept only a small part,” Rudolf arrived in Budapest in February 1992 to prepare his cameo role as the Columbus’s guiding Angel in Gábor Keveházi’s Cristoforo. Wearing a little woolen hat, his wizened monkey face and eyes now bearing the startled expression common to HIV victims in their final phase, Rudolf peered out above vast Loie Fuller—size wings, his feeble manipulation of the Angel’s engulfing mantle evoking a mocking, evanescent memory of the young Nureyev’s flying cape.

  At a press conference before the premiere one of the first questions had been, “Excuse me, Maestro, do you have AIDS?” Seemingly unfazed, Rudolf had replied, “I’m very ill, but I don’t have AIDS.” To the Hungarian National Ballet’s director, however, he had already admitted that the rumors were true. Rudolf had clearly warmed to Roland Boker, an admiring, multilingual young man whom he had got to know while performing Death in Venice in Verona. “He wanted to speak Russian with me,” says Boker, who discovered that Rudolf was spending most of the day in his hotel room watching Russian television. “He liked to hear everything that was happening at home.” At two o’clock one morning he was woken by a phone call from Rudolf. “He said, ‘Roland, please come to me. And bring yogurt, please.’* He couldn’t sleep, and he didn’t want to be alone.” Opening up to Boker in a way that he had not felt able to do with close friends, Rudolf claimed that he had been HIV positive for more than ten years. “I had courage, and so I had no time for thinking about this. But now when I work only a little I feel very bad.”

  To remedy this Rudolf had arranged to fly between his two performances of Cristoforo to Berlin, where he was making his debut as the wicked fairy Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty. Pat Ruanne, who had mounted the production, remembers this as an extraordinarily highly charged performance. Looking like a crazed, overpainted English dowager, Rudolf “broke all his own rules regarding subtlety of interpretation,” she said. “But I know that he had a great time.” On March 1 he returned to Budapest, repeating his role as the Angel, and after that, there were no more engagements.

  The conducting continued, however, taking Rudolf to Russia later in March. Learning from a radio broadcast that he wanted to go to Kazan in memory of his mother, Kazan Opera’s general director, Raufal Tziaynov, had invited him to conduct Romeo and Juliet there. Arriving on the overnight train from Moscow, Rudolf expressed surprise that there were no TV cameras or press there to meet him. “But no one thought his appearance such an event,” says Tziaynov. Nor did the musicians, who grudgingly credited the foreign guest with “knowing the right rhythm for the dancers,” but very little else. “He was dancing the music in his head, and only then putting it in movements of his hands,” remarked first violinist German Drushenitsky, and his colleague, violinist Natasha Novinova, agreed. Rudolf, she felt, knew the music only because he had danced to it, but was clearly unfamiliar with the instruments and separate sections of the orchestra.

  The question is whether the conductor gives you his vision, and Nureyev did not. I can see that it was hard for him being at the top of the artistic world and having to go all the way to the bottom. But with his wealth, his fame, he could afford to do this as a hobby. It was just a caprice. If he’d been really cultured, he’d have seen that our instruments were terribly old and broken; he could at least have presented new ones for the orchestra. It would have been a thousand times better than just conducting—it would have helped our culture.

  Rudolf had been traveling through Eastern Europe with a bearded young Russian conductor, Vladimir Keradjeyav, who was there to help him rehearse the various orchestras. The Kazan musicians felt he was doing too much, and evidently so did Rudolf. “He was often swearing at Volodya with mat words,” says Drushenitsky, remembering how Keradjeyav had taken offense and suddenly left. “And I don’t think he was ever paid.” This orchestra, as Novinova says, could play itself, but Rudolf seemed to feel that he was in charge. Overshadowed by Keradjeyav, he had been stony faced and uncommunicative with the musicians, but now began to relax. “He softened and became a totally different person,” Tziaynov recalls. “I think he liked feeling that he was in a kind of family.” Kazan, with its frozen river, streets shored up with dirty snow, and isba-style wooden houses, reminded Rudolf of an Eastern version of Ufa, and he made the most of his time there, drinking the Puligny-Montrachet he had brought from Paris, and provocatively asking Tziaynov, “Do you have ass in Kazan?” He had summoned a masseur to his hotel bed, but when a woman arrived, he muttered, “No. Only man,” and pulled the blanket back over his head.

  Rudolf had taken along his new assistant to Russia, an obliging young Australian by the name of Neil Boyd, and he also had Douce in tow. Having fallen out the previous summer, they had been reconciled at a Christmas party at the Rothschilds’, Douce carrying out an elaborate charade en travestie designed to amuse and win back Rudolf. “He didn’t stick to people unless they did something for him,” says Leslie Caron. “Douce was the greatest energizer; she had this quality of picking you up and supporting you.” She also had a video camera, and spent hours filming Rudolf on the podium and recording the high points of their journey. “I
hope you have this—don’t look at me,” he snaps at one point in the footage, indicating a church wall entirely covered with golden icons. Then, accompanying Rudolf to a military banya, a laughing Douce films right inside the pine-paneled steam room, pointing her lens at fat naked officers, and following them as they plunged into an icy pool.

  It was after this occasion that Rudolf caught pneumonia, his temperature soaring so high that the alarmed Raufal Tziaynov had tried to take him to a hospital. “No. No hospital,” countered Rudolf, determined to press on with the next stage of the tour. This was in Leningrad, where he moved into Ninel Kurgapkina’s apartment, surprising his old friend by how frugal his expectations were. “He didn’t want luxury of any kind. I asked him what he liked to eat and he said, ‘Schi [cabbage soup] and porridge—I love Russian food.’ ” The forthright Ninel had immediately confronted Rudolf with “I hear you’ve got AIDS,” but although he emphatically denied it, he collapsed soon after his arrival and had to be rushed to a hospital. No one at Leningrad’s Military Medical Academy, the best clinic in the city, had known how to treat him as he refused to have a blood test. But almost immediately he checked himself out, and when Ninel called a doctor to her home, “spat out the medicines he was given.” Needed at the theater and worried about leaving Rudolf alone she asked Liuba to come round to the apartment. “But he wouldn’t stay there,” said Liuba. “He insisted that I take him to see Jerry Robbins’s ballet [In the Night] at the Kirov. I tried to stop him but it was useless.”

  As Rudolf was determined to carry out his commitment to conduct Scheherazade in Leningrad, Ninel had asked a concertmaster she knew to go through the music with him. In Yuri Gamaley’s account, Rudolf, who began by opening his score at the wrong place, hardly knew what he was doing.

  He confessed that he was lost and asked me to play once again from the beginning, but slower.… I started to show him where and which voices are most important. With my directions he marked those places and important entrances for instruments. Very soon I realized that Nureyev had no experience working with a score. I was teaching him like a beginner; stopping a lot and giving serious instructions. That way we groped to the end of the first part.

  After two hours Ninel arrived to collect Rudolf, whispering to Gamaley that she would get in touch about paying for the lessons. He had not expected any money, “perhaps a big bouquet of flowers, or a bottle of good brandy,” but when Ninel saw him on a subsequent occasion, she opened her bag and took out four notes Rudolf had given her to pass on. “Twenty-five rubles—less than one dollar. That was how the millionaire paid me.”

  Rudolf was supposed to go on to conduct in Yalta, but as his fever was still raging, Douce went behind his back and canceled the engagement. She had intended to take him straight back to Paris, but March 17 was his fifty-fourth birthday, and Rudolf did not want to disappoint Liuba, who had invited two dozen people for a sit-down dinner at Tchaikovsky Street. The gathering included Romankov relatives and their children; Kirov star Altinai Assylmuratova; Faina Rokhind, Rudolf’s devoted fan; and Jerome Robbins, who felt so moved by the event that he stood up to make a speech. “Everyone who speaks to you here seems to be part of your second family,” he told Rudolf. “I’m not part of your family, but part of your world family, and I want to toast you and thank you for all you have done for the ballet in our country particularly. And I saw what you did in France, and saw your influence.… I always have very much love for you.” Sitting at the head of the table beside his beloved Leonid, Rudolf was smiling, although he looked sicker than ever, his face leached of color. Liuba’s sister, Marina, a doctor, had warned her that he had AIDS, advising her to keep his plate and cutlery separate. But Rudolf hardly ate that night, and the next day, when Liuba took him to the airport, he seemed to have deteriorated even further. “He was so weak, and frankly speaking, I thought this was the end.” As Rudolf was going through passport control, he turned toward Liuba and murmured, “Light a candle for me.”

  Rudolf’s assistant, Neil, also thought that he was about to die, and when their plane made a stopover at Helsinki airport, arranged to move him into a private room. “His clothes were drenched. I was drying them with a hairdryer, but in the end I bought an ‘I love Helsinki’ T-shirt for him to wear.” On landing in Paris, Rudolf was taken straight to the Ambroise-Paré Clinic in Neuilly, where it was discovered that he had a cytomegalo virus infection of the heart, which had caused a liter of fluid to build up around it. The doctors were convinced that if he had stayed another day in Russia he would not have made it back. But when Rudolf was told they were going to operate he panicked, gabbling, “No, no, I go out. I have a dinner.” Charles Jude, who was with him, begged him to come to his senses. “Okay, I stay,” he said gruffly, but he wanted the dancer to promise that he would still be there when he came out of the anesthetic. The next day, hearing that Charles’s wife and daughter were also at the hospital, Rudolf asked to see the five-year-old Joanna. “They told me it wasn’t a good idea to let her see him like that,” but feeling that Rudolf might draw strength and energy from the child, Charles brought Joanna to his bedside. “He took her hand and I saw his eyes light up.” “I’m alive, I’m alive!” Rudolf exclaimed.

  It was soon after this that Jane Hermann arrived in Paris. She was in her hotel room one night when she got a call from Andrew Grossman. “He had long given up finding gigs for Rudolf, but he told me, ‘I think you should go over if you want to see him again. He’s refusing medication.’ ” There had been no contact between the dancer and impresario since that terrible night in San Francisco, and Jane admits that there was no longer any affection on her side. Nevertheless, “mainly out of tremendous sentiment,” she went as quickly as she could to quai Voltaire. Rudolf welcomed her warmly, and they began to talk as if they had seen each other just the day before. Then Jane heard herself saying, “You’ve gotta behave yourself and take your medicine. Because I have a plan for you to conduct at the Met.” Rudolf did not believe her at first—in his current condition he could no more have stood on a podium for several hours than danced a full-length ballet—but Jane convinced him that this was a serious proposition. “I was doing it for both of us. He was the most significant artist in my career, and it kind of shut the door for me. I knew it was the last time he’d ever do anything important in the U.S., and so I offered this last great chance to him in the hope that maybe, before he died, he would understand what a true friend is. He really did thank me tremendously.”

  “Jane gave life back to Rudolf with that,” said Wallace. “Knowing that he had the Met kept him going, because otherwise I think he would have just given up.” Back on his medication, and receiving infusions of ganciclovir into his heart every two hours, Rudolf was soon sitting up in bed wearing headphones and familiarizing himself with the score of Romeo and Juliet. He was to conduct the American Ballet Theatre orchestra with his protégés Sylvie Guillem and Laurent Hilaire dancing the lead roles, an epic feat that Michel Canesi was allowing only on condition that Rudolf employ a full-time nurse. Hearing that this would cost him four thousand dollars for the two weeks, however, Rudolf not only refused to pay for the nurse but when Canesi exploded in frustration, told the doctor that he would no longer be needing his services. Three days later, realizing what he would be jeopardizing, a penitent Rudolf called to apologize.

  Canesi had been dreading telling Rudolf that the time had come to put his affairs in order, but in fact this turned out to be what he describes as “one of those moments of great quietness, calm, and friendship between us.” On April 14 Rudolf’s American lawyer, Barry Weinstein, accompanied by attorney Jeannette Thurnherr from Liechtenstein, arrived at quai Voltaire to draw up a will. If the lawyers made a suggestion Rudolf didn’t like, he said nothing but picked up a newspaper and held it over his face. His own wishes were very clear. “While he provided for their well-being, he never wanted his family to have everything,” maintains Weinstein. “He wanted them to work and educate themselves.” The only friend Ru
dolf singled out was Maude, unequivocally instructing Weinstein to establish an income for her. “He didn’t care about providing gifts or benefits for anyone else. I think he finally realized that Douce should not be left in the cold, but it was out of some guilt. It didn’t come naturally.” Among other documents executed that day was one establishing the Rudolf Nureyev Dance Foundation, to which the dancer would bequeath all his personal property and real estate located in America. In addition a Ballet Promotion Foundation (now known as the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation) would receive his European assets, both organizations undertaking to perpetuate Rudolf’s name and legacy through financial support of individuals, organizations, and events.

  Arriving in New York on April 21, sixteen days before the performance, Rudolf began working each morning with Charles Barker, the principal conductor of ABT, and a pianist. He was too frail to have more than a single rehearsal with the orchestra, but the musicians were already united in their esteem for him, and determined to do their best. “They were helping out a legend,” says ABT’s David Richardson. “It was payback time.” On the night of the performance, May 6, 1992, Rudolf had to be assisted into his conductor’s tails by Maude and Wallace, both of whom were convinced he would not make it through the evening. “He didn’t even have the strength to fasten the buttons, but somehow he got out there and did it.” He made some errors (the mandoline dancers began before the music and had to start again; the tempo of the last two acts was funereally slow), but Rudolf had never commanded more respect from an audience. “It was thrilling,” Richardson recalls. “Not perfect, but there was something so heroic about his determination to do it. I think everyone was excited to be at a performance which we knew was giving him a little more life.” In a note delivered to Rudolf backstage, Jackie Onassis had written, “For dear Rudolf with all my love and admiration on your great opening night. Now the world has a new Maestro—and he is my favorite.”