Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  It was a typical New York gala audience, its familiar society figures including Monique van Vooren, who had come to make peace with Rudolf. “It was kind of wonderful,” recalled Wallace, “because it was as if she hadn’t missed a beat. She just got into Rudolf’s car and they drove off together through the tunnel at Lincoln Center.” Back at the Dakota the postperformance party went on until 3:30 in the morning, with Rudolf swathed in scarves and “all puffed up with pride.” “Everybody was paying tribute to him and adoring him so much,” said Georgina Parkinson. “Sylvie was sitting on the floor at his feet.” As far as Rudolf was concerned, though, this was not the “farewell New York” performance Jane Hermann had intended, but an opportunity to solicit further engagements. Being his “own impresario” once again, he asked NYCB’s director Peter Martins, “When am I going to conduct for you?” and, during a discussion with Frank Augustyn, he finalized a plan to conduct in Ottawa. “I wanted Rudolf for a gala, and asked him what he charged. ‘Pay me whatever you can,’ he said, and when I suggested a fee, he laughed. ‘Well, that’s a lot more than ABT gave me!’ ”

  The next morning Rudolf went straight to his farm in Virginia for a few days to recuperate. Jeannette baked corn bread, Wallace barbecued, and Waxy Hübner arrived from Washington. “You know what?” Rudolf confided to Waxy when they were alone. “I just feel terribly tired.” “I don’t know if I was able to answer; probably I said nothing. But it was a moment when I thought that maybe he had stopped fighting a little bit. A little bit. And then it came back to him.”

  After conducting a Rossini and Mozart program in Vienna, Rudolf flew to San Francisco in mid-July to lead an orchestra of University of California students in selections from Romeo and Juliet and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony—a concert that, although he did not realize it at the time, would be his last. Accompanied by Jeannette and Armen, he went on to spend a couple of days in the Napa Valley home of Natalia Makarova, eating extremely well because the chef Jeremiah Tower and a restaurateur friend were also visiting. “They went into the vegetable garden and picked things to make incredible salads,” says Jeannette, who also remembers being taken to see the little Russian chapel that Makarova had had built—“the kind of thing White Russians had on their land before the Revolution.” Rudolf seemed greatly amused by this, quipping, “It will take more than a chapel to save her soul!” But shocked by how sick he was, Makarova says that she “couldn’t be cross with him anymore.” All the same a hint of the old combativeness surfaced when she challenged Rudolf to a game of chess. He won but was too tired to continue, and so Jeannette offered to teach him gin rummy. They were still playing long after everyone had retired. “Natasha came down and said, ‘It’s very late. You should get some sleep.’ But Rudolf didn’t want to.” Early the next morning, Jeannette had not been long asleep, when she woke to see Rudolf standing at the foot of her bed. “What’s wrong?” “It’s cold in my room. Where’s Armen?” “He was looking for my mother so that she could warm him up. I couldn’t remember which room she was in either—so he got into bed with me.”

  • • •

  Returning to Paris toward the end of July he began work on La Bayadère, which was due to be premiered in October. Set in fifth-century India, Petipa’s ballet takes its name from the bayadère, or temple dancer, Nikiya, with whom Solor, a noble warrior, is in love. Like Swan Lake, La Sylphide, and Giselle, it is another story of infidelity and broken promises; by agreeing to marry the Rajah’s daughter, Gamzatti, the hero indirectly colludes in Nikiya’s murder, which takes place during his betrothal ceremony. Still in her thrall, Solor conjures up Nikiya’s spirit during an opium trance, a glorious hallucination in which she appears to have been multiplied thirty-two times by the corps de ballet. This is act 3’s Kingdom of the Shades scene (staged in Paris by Rudolf in 1974), a transcendent distillation of classical dance, and a total contrast to the melodrama and vivid spectacle that has preceeded it. Act 1 of the original 1877 version was almost entirely pantomime, while act 2, in which Solor makes his entrance on a full-scale elephant, called for 230 dancers and supernumeraries to fill the stage as black children, slaves, bayadères, armed guards, Brahmans, courtesans, and hunters. Not surprisingly the full-length ballet remained unperformed outside Russia until 1980, when Makarova, making one act out of Petipa’s first two, staged it for ABT. In Rudolf’s view, however, her severe cuts were a mistake, removing much of La Bayadère’s color and exuberance. “Petipa had great esteem for folkloric dance, and I try to stay faithful to Petipa.”

  To help him create “une Bayadère Petipa, Kirov, vraie,” Rudolf brought Ninel Kurgapkina to Paris, although he still had every intention of adding more dancing for the men. This was to be expected, Ninel claiming that she “was not there to authenticate the ballet, but just follow Rudolf’s ideas.”* What was surprising, though, was his volte-face on the value of mime. Had he staged the ballet as he longed to in his twenties, he would almost certainly have disdained the traditional gesturing for “I love you,” “She’s beautiful,” and so on, just as he had boycotted Margot’s mime sequence as Odette in 1962. Working with him on the role of Solor, however, Charles Jude remembers Rudolf getting Ninel to demonstrate “what they do in Russia,” and then complying immediately with, “Okay do that.” The reason, Charles believes, was because Rudolf no longer had the force to argue or make improvements, but there was also the fact that his ideas had changed. Since creating the role of Juliet and joining him at the Opéra as répétiteuse, Pat Ruanne noticed a profound difference in Rudolf’s attitude. When she began to rehearse his Swan Lake he had warned her that the French dancers were very “resistant” to mime, as resistant, in fact, as he himself had once been. But whereas in Romeo and Juliet he had wanted all the emotion to be expressed through movement, he had come to understand that mime is an essential part of the classical repertory, and was, Ruanne says, “very precise in his directives to maintain its clarity and formality.”

  The jealous confrontation between the two rivals for Solor’s love is conveyed entirely in high melodrama (“It’s a duo,” says Patrice Bart, comparing the ballerinas to a mezzo and soprano in a Verdi opera), and it was this scene that Rudolf considered so important that he wanted to tackle it first, while he still had the strength. Helping to stage the ballet, both Bart and Pat Ruanne had expected that Rudolf would want to augment the choreography in the early acts, but found that he was “leaving things be.” Ruanne explains:

  I think he felt that the simplicity of the choreography was telling enough, and would prepare for the tour de force of the Kingdom of Shades.… But I have no doubt that his failing health was also a factor. Many of the dances he intended to rework had to be left in their original format, as he was just too ill by that time. The things that he did change were for a few people, and therefore controllable and reasonably quick to do.… I think the unpredictability of his strength was the main element. You can’t totally restructure a big waltz in one rehearsal when you’re not sure that you’ll be up to it the following day.

  Having commissioned Ezio Frigerio and his wife, Franca Squarciapino, to create what he called a “Thousand and One Nights” vision of the Orient, Rudolf had hoped to get the designer to reproduce Bayadère’s long-lost ending. Abandoned in Russia since 1919, act 4 of the ballet, the wedding scene, not only provided a logical conclusion to the plot, but was also a thrilling coup de théâtre. Enraged by the marriage between Solor and Gamzetti, the gods exact revenge by causing the entire edifice of the temple to collapse, crushing everyone with the exception of the hero. Makarova’s production had restored the final act with its destruction of the temple, but the music she used consisted more of John Lanchbery’s pastiche than of Minkus’s own score. Rudolf, on the other hand, had at his disposal the pages copied and transcribed in Russia of the complete work. Kurgapkina remembers him asking Frigerio how much it would cost to stage a simulated earthquake. “A million dollars,” replied the designer. “Then skip it,” countered Rudolf—a disappointment
that was, Pat Ruanne believes, a blessing in disguise. “There was no longer a full reference to the original work to use as a guideline, and I think he realized that he simply would not have the strength to start a whole new act from scratch.” As it was, Kurgapkina found herself having to take on Rudolf’s battles over the design. The scenery department had refused to make the elephant; Frigerio intended to do away with the famous ramp for the Shades’ entrance—“He can’t have ever seen Bayadère!”—she exclaimed during a panicky call to Rudolf; and they were both equally worried that far too little room had been left for the dancers. “Rudolf didn’t like the Frigerio sets,” claims Charles Jude. “ ‘This is shit,’ he said. But he didn’t have the energy to fight.”

  With rehearsals coming to an end because of the August vacation, Rudolf had arranged to go to Li Galli with Wallace, who had flown to Paris from LA with his two dogs. Rudolf had been to the hospital for a cardiogram, and the night before they were due to leave Michel Canesi called to say that the CMV infection had returned, and they should call off their trip. “But Rudolf wanted to go to the island even if it meant he was going to die,” said Wallace. “Which I think was what he felt would happen.” That same evening, Neil Boyd had given in his notice, as he had been offered a job in Australia, and Wallace found himself in sole charge of a terminally ill man—the reality of which proved even more daunting than he had feared.

  We arrived to find the building work half finished because Rudolf hadn’t paid the contractors. The electrical wiring was hanging out of the walls, and there were more wires, and tubes were running all over the place. There was mildew, so much mildew that you could watch paint falling off the ceiling. There was only enough fuel to run the generator for half of the day, there were amoebas in the water supply, and the temperature was 110 with humidity at 100 percent. It was a nightmare. I lost ten pounds in that time, and I thought I was going to die there as well.

  Their daily routine hardly varied. Rudolf would get up for the meals Wallace had prepared and then go back to bed. After dinner they sat watching television, as neither had the energy for conversation. “But at least my dogs were there, and he enjoyed playing with them. They were the only thing that made him laugh.” Out of desperation Wallace began calling up people in Rudolf’s address book who he might invite over for a meal. A new boat had been delivered, a motor cruiser that Rudolf decided to call Margot, and together with a replacement assistant found by Maude (Barry Joule, who had been “sort of a handyman” to Francis Bacon toward the end of his life), they went on various excursions. Rudolf was much cheered by a visit to Gore Vidal, letting “his AIDS-wasted body collapse beside [Vidal’s] pool” while drinking white wine and keeping his host amused with a fund of gossipy revelations. On another day they anchored the boat outside Zeffirelli’s gates and hooted until a servant arrived. “He disappeared and came back with an invitation to lunch.” Having long forgiven Rudolf, Zeffirelli was appalled and upset by the state his friend was in, telling Wallace that he would not make it to Christmas. Joule’s photographs, on the other hand, show Rudolf in good spirits that day. Wearing jazzy shorts and a loose Missoni top, he sunbathes on a lounge bed, playing with the ear of Zeffirelli’s terrier, and poses with the director, both dressed in identical blue-and-white-striped djellabas. One of these snaps, showing a gaunt Rudolf with his head turbaned in a towel, was given by Joule to Francis Bacon, who was so taken by the image that he “stuck it on the wall of his chaotic studio.”*

  After ten days Wallace flew back home thinking that he would rest up for a week, leave his dogs in LA, and return if necessary. By this time, however, Liuba and her husband, Slom, had arrived from Leningrad to take over. Refusing to think of himself as an invalid, Rudolf would not talk about his health, bringing an end to their anxious questions by saying, “Don’t you have any other topic to discuss?” On a night when they had all dined with Zeffirelli and were trying to locate their boat, Rudolf was swigging from a bottle as he weaved along the quay. “It was like being with a Russian tramp,” remarks Liuba. “He was drinking to block things out.” As they reached Li Galli the inlet was in darkness, the sea rough, and the wind blowing hard, and yet Rudolf, as weak as he was inebriated, refused to take Slom’s hand to help him disembark. Jumping from the deck, he lost his balance and would have fallen on the rocks if Slom had not “caught him and thrown him through the air.” To Liuba he seemed more willfully reckless by the day. “We were walking on the path together when suddenly he said, ‘Instant death.’ ‘Rudolf, it isn’t so easy,’ I told him. ‘One has to earn it.’ ” A day or so later, he took his watercycle and asked her to come for a ride. “He started driving with this mad velocity toward the rocks, and I thought, My goodness, he wants ‘instant death’ and he’s going to take me with him.” Rudolf stopped just in time, and yet Liuba is convinced that he was thinking of ways to kill himself. “He wanted to die, he wanted to drown, he wanted a boat to go down.”

  But it was not in Rudolf’s nature to give up on life, any more than it was for Byron’s Manfred, who could not find what it took to release himself from despair.

  I feel the impulse—yet I do not plunge;

  I see the peril—yet do not recede.…

  There is a power upon me which withholds.

  And makes it my fatality to live.…

  “Life stirs my mind, it stirs my blood inside,” Rudolf once said, admitting the extent to which he was “thrilled, excited by beautiful things—and maybe ugly things.” And however self-deluding it may seem, he was still making serious plans for his future. Shortly before Liuba left he asked her to look for a house for him to buy on the Neva Embankment, and he also asked her to help him get the position of director of the Maly Theater, the city’s second-largest opera house. “Impossible,” she told him. “The director is appointed by party committee.” Rudolf argued that, just as anywhere else in the the world, it would be a question of networking. By extraordinary coincidence an opportunity presented itself the next day. While sailing in the Mediterranean, Anatoli Sobchak, St. Petersburg’s fiery radical mayor, stopped off at Li Galli.* A mutual friend, Vladimir Renne, had offered to take him to meet Rudolf, and, as Renne had anticipated, these two charismatic men took an instant liking to each other. Hearing Rudolf talk about his dream of starting his own ballet company in Russia, Sobchak offered his help. He could not fail to have been aware of the star’s condition, and yet Liuba insists that the mayor meant what he said. Urged by Rudolf to follow up, she managed to speak to the mayor by telephone. “Sobchak was very kind. He said to me that he didn’t see any problem—Rudolf could use the stage of the Hermitage Theater. He also talked about restoring an old theater on Krestovsky Island.”

  Soon after this, however, Rudolf’s condition suddenly deteriorated. When Gloria Venturi called to arrange to come and see him, she heard his voice suddenly change after she had told him that it would not be for a few days. “No. Please come tomorrow,” he said. “Then I understood that it was very serious.” “Glorinski,” as he called her because of her Russian grandmother, was another of Rudolf’s adoring women prepared to follow him across the globe. “But not like poor Douce. If he asked me to come somewhere and I was busy, I could say no.” Extremely wealthy and well connected in her own right, she believes Rudolf liked the fact that she was not drawn to his celebrity. “I didn’t need his money, his famous friends. I was interested in him as a human being, and I could be very natural with him.” But knowing how she had always been willing to extend her own privileges to him—whether offering to send a car or hosting a dinner—Rudolf was now counting on Gloria “to make things happen.” Arriving on the island, she found him in the care of Marika Besobrasova and the dance critic Vittoria Ottolenghi—both completely out of their depth.

  It was a disaster. The man was dying, and these people didn’t know what to do. For lunch Vittoria had prepared a soup, and suddenly Rudolf got up and went back to his bedroom. They said, “Follow him. Ask if he wants something.” So I knocked and went in.
“Please, Rudolf, come and eat. Or would you prefer to rest?” “You know as well as I do.… Soon I have one very long rest.” I started to cry. “But it’s true,” he said. Not gently, he was angry.

  Gloria went out and immediately made a call to Sorrento, booking a helicopter to take Rudolf back to Paris the following morning. In her Nureyev book Valeria Crippa describes the dancer kissing the rocks of Li Galli as he left, “knowing he would not return.” But Rudolf was not yet bidding his island good-bye. In a letter dated September 14, two weeks later, Liuba tells him that she has found people through whom he can buy a Russian war helicopter. She also says that she knows someone willing to be a security guard. (The Italian ex-policeman Rudolf currently employed for six hundred dollars a month was demanding a four-hundred-dollar raise. Russian labor rates would obviously be a lot cheaper.)

  Time was at a premium, nonetheless, and Rudolf was desperate to finish La Bayadère. There were less than six weeks before the premiere on October 8—a performance he would also be conducting. Charles Jude was still with his family in the South of France when he got a call from Rudolf asking why he had not come back to Paris. “Because rehearsals don’t start until the eleventh,” he replied. Returning at the beginning of September, Charles went directly to quai Voltaire, where he was surprised to see a large black dog. “What’s this?” “It’s mine,” said Rudolf. “You were not here. So I bought a dog.” Choosing a young Rottweiler from a dog pound near the Châtelet, Rudolf had decided on the name of Bayadère’s Solor, changing it to Solaria on discovering that he had mistaken the dog’s sex. “The masculine has become feminine—never mind.” Rudolf wanted the dog constantly with him but, clearly maltreated at some point, she would disappear in fear when called, skidding along the polished parquet. She was also unhouse-trained, and Maude, who was staying there at the time, remembers “wading through puddles.” There was now a slight taint of squalor to the czarist splendor of quai Voltaire, with burned-out candle stubs in the chandeliers, vases of dead flowers, and unwashed glasses and crockery littering the neoclassical tables. Commuting to and from Monte Carlo, Marika did her best, but was hugely relieved when Mario Bois offered the services of his maid. “I’m capable of making food but I can’t wash floors.” Ghislaine Thesmar remembers arriving one evening to see if she could help and finding a glorious sunset over the Seine, which was barely visible through the dirty panes of glass. “I asked Rudolf why he didn’t get someone in to clean the windows, and he said, ‘I’m not going to pay for that—who needs clean windows to die.’ ” But it was also the fact that Paris, the city that had rejected him, no longer held any romance.