Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  It was while he was on St. Barts that Rudolf heard that Robert Tracy was suing him. Jeannette had taken the call from Barry Weinstein and passed the phone to Rudolf, who was lying in his usual place in the alcove. When she returned, the receiver was on his chest. “You finished?” He nodded. “So what was that about?” “He wants to live in dignity.” “Who?” “You know who.” In April 1992, as Robert was witnessing the execution of the will, he noticed that no provision had been made for him, and Rudolf’s friends began to suspect that he had the Dakota apartment in mind. As Barry Weinstein warned Gorlinsky: “People have a sense of entitlement in this country.” Not only that, but there were rumors that Robert considered Rudolf responsible for infecting him with the HIV virus. At Rudolf’s request, Wallace agreed to confront him, and later wrote an account of their conversation:

  Robert was evasive, saying only that he felt Rudolf owed him the capabilities of living the rest of his life in dignity. He said he didn’t expect to get the Dakota … [but] only wanted a roof over his head—meaning, I guess, a decent apartment—and some money to get by on. I asked him how much he had in mind. Robert said that he felt a thousand dollars a month seemed reasonable.… Robert denied that he was going around town telling people that Rudolf gave him AIDS, however, moments later, he interjected: “But you know that it is possible considering the kind of sex we had.” … We talked for a good fifteen minutes. At times he was quite emotional. Digressing and making off-the-wall remarks about the governments of the world nefariously conspiring to keep HPA-23 off the market, Robert said people were unfairly siding with Rudolf and didn’t want anything to do with him.

  Hearing this, Rudolf made no comment. “He knew that Robert had already contacted Marvin Mitchelson, a lawyer who isn’t renowned for settling for the kind of small stakes Robert told me he wanted.” Feeling that he “had to be protected,” Robert hoped to get Wallace to join him in a two-party suit, and called him a couple of times during the summer, ostensibly asking about Rudolf’s health. “During one of our phone calls, Robert changed the subject unexpectedly and asked about my financial standing.… He said that he felt Rudolf should take care of both of us. That he owed it to us after all we’d done for him.… I told him that Rudolf had already given me so much during my lifetime that I expected no financial gift from him.” According to Armen, Rudolf would sometimes despair at this element of self-abnegation in Wallace. “He’d get angry that Wallace was not doing more for himself. He’d say, ‘Look at Tracy—he gets everything out of me. Why doesn’t Wallace do the same?’ ”* And yet, there had been no lover whose loyalty Rudolf valued more. “I should have stayed with him,” he told Tessa. “Wallace was the true one.”

  Meanwhile on the island Rudolf was testing to the limit the loyalty of his two other close friends. “The money I spent!” says Jeannette. “You wouldn’t believe the cost of Château Montrachet in the Caribbean.” Adopting the role of volunteer “AIDS Buddies,” they shaved and showered him, even getting into the stall themselves. “I’d fetch Charles to help Rudolf onto a little table. I’d shampoo his hair, and then I’d give him the mitt, and point and say, ‘Your turn. Scrub it!’ He’d scrub it.” On good days they bundled Rudolf in layers and went to the beach—“Gustavia, the fancy one, which was empty because it was off season”—and Charles would support him under the water as if he were a child learning to swim. Michel Canesi had given them a box of medicines, but Rudolf was refusing to take anything, claiming that the pills made him nauseated. It was starting to get very difficult and frightening at times, especially when Rudolf fell into lapses during which he would not remember where he was or who they were. Charles grew increasingly anxious to take him back to Paris for treatment, but on their last day Rudolf did not want to leave. “He knew it was finished. But we always have hope, and if I’d known that he had such a short time left, I’d have stayed with him on St. Barts until the end.”

  Jeannette went back to San Francisco, and Wallace flew to Paris. “One of the reasons I was there was to make sure that a nurse was installed at quai Voltaire because Rudolf still didn’t want one.” François “Frank” Loussassa, a hefty young émigré from Guadeloupe, soon won Rudolf over, opening the curtains to let in the light and refusing to treat him like an invalid. But the women were always on hand, Marika making food “that he could swallow, that he could eat with a certain appetite”—what Rudi van Dantzig referred to as “some mashed substance” and she called “des fruits de Monte Carlo.” Douce had been barred from quai Voltaire at that time. “Someone told him, ‘Douce must now be so rich with all the money she took from you.’ It was a fantasy, but he was trusting nobody, and suddenly the door was closed to me.” Ghislaine Thesmar went in relays with a few friends from the Opéra. “We’d make a simple dinner of roast veal and a bit of rice, clean everything up, and leave him when he was starting to get tired. We just wanted to be helpful. To make a little atmosphere.” Natasha Harley spent a week in Paris cooking for Rudolf, and one night thought she would encourage him to eat in the dining room. “There was a chandelier with candles. All gone. So I called my limo service, and said, ‘I don’t need a car, just some candles in about two hours’ time.’ It was a Sunday, and all the stores were closed, but a driver arrived with about a dozen—he’d taken them from a church!” With Ezio Frigerio’s help they got Rudolf to the table, but instead of facing ahead, he turned toward an icon on the wall. “He was staring at it for the longest time. And it was the only time I wondered if, maybe, he feels something. Something religious.” Or maybe something Russian. “I think at the end he would have liked to be surrounded by the people who loved him—not for his talent and brilliant career,” says Liuba, “but merely as the human being. As Rudik.”

  Although wincing every time he swallowed, Rudolf never uttered a word of complaint. “He seems to accept his being ill like an animal, resigned, without protest,” remarked Rudi van Dantzig. Nor did he ever talk about AIDS. “By not discussing it, he did not have to recognize its existence,” Linda Maybarduk said. “And if it didn’t exist, he hoped to defy it—and death itself. There were times when we thought he just might succeed.” Rudolf talked to Natasha Harley that week about plans for the summer, about his farm in Virginia, which he wanted to turn into a ballet academy. “There was a big stable and a lot of outbuildings, and his idea was to have different teachers come and teach a different method of ballet in each of those barns.” There were still things that soothed him—a good massage, a passage of music, or a visit from Maude, but Maude did not come often these days, her sight and hearing having deteriorated badly. “She was afraid she might fall,” says Marika, “and I think she didn’t want Rudolf to be too aware of how miserable she was.” Then, like a tornado, Jane Hermann arrived.

  I was astounded—the home care was appalling. It was filthy. That hideous dog was crapping everywhere, there was no proper laundry coming in. I was petrified that Rudolf was going to get bedbugs, so I threw everything out. I had the washing machine fixed, I was washing floors and doors. Why? Because I wasn’t going to stand by and see one of the greatest artists the world has ever known dying in such disgraceful conditions. I couldn’t watch it, it was revolting. And I guess Rudolf knew it. He was going back to the peasant life—or maybe he liked the fact that people served him.… All the people closest to him were subservient to him. When my daughter arrived and saw the setup, she got so furious that I was letting myself stay in this shithouse. She told me, “Are you nuts? You gotta get out of there.” Rudolf couldn’t stand up, he couldn’t go on his own to the john.… He was being taken care of by amateurs—but he wouldn’t pay for first-class professional care. That guy was a nurse like I’m a nurse. He urgently needed medical care, and I was the one who called Canesi to have him taken to hospital.

  She was not much more impressed by the care at Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours, having arrived the next morning to find Rudolf still wearing his street clothes from the night before. “I took him into the bathroom and washed his face.
” By the time Maude got to the hospital a few days later, Rudolf’s skeletal arms were trembling constantly, and he had bronchoscopy tubes down his throat. “ ‘You’re having a horrible time,’ I told him, and very quietly he said to me, ‘It’s so humiliating.’ ” He weighed so little that when Tessa Kennedy visited she was able to pick him up and carry him to the bathroom. “As he caught sight of himself in the mirror over the basin this look of horror came into his face.” Other friends came and went: Jerome Robbins, who was rehearsing at the Opéra, looked in every day; Yasemin brought a Thermos of chicken soup “the way we cook it in Turkey”; Waxy Hübner, whose eyes now fill with tears at the memory of Rudolf lying there in his little hat, was greeted with “only a glimmer of recognition”; Douce was still under instructions to keep away, but would go to the hospital at 6 a.m. when there was a gap between the night and day nurses. “She would sit there for two hours. I don’t think Rudolf even knew.” André Larquié, who had been making plans for Rudolf’s funeral, came into the room one day exclaiming, “We’ve got a plot!” Rudolf had wanted to be buried on Li Galli, but as the islands were going to be sold, Larquié had offered him a more realistic alternative. “I asked which he would prefer: Père Lachaise or the Russian cemetery in Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois, which was about twenty-three kilometers from Paris. ‘Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois,’ Rudolf said. ‘But not next to Serge Lifar.’ ” Now, however, like Gogol’s Arkaky overhearing discussions of the choice of a pine or an oak coffin for his funeral, Rudolf flinched at the news of Larquié’s success. “He just didn’t want to know,” says Tessa.

  In mid-December Wallace got a call from Michel Canesi telling him that Rudolf might die at any moment. “So I put my dogs in the kennel and got on the first plane to Paris. But Rudolf pulled out of that real high fever—106 degrees—and went into another a few days later. Then he pulled out of that one, fevers any normal person would have died from. The body was wasted, but you could see it shaking, fighting to survive. I begged him, ‘Rudolf, give up. Please, please give up.’ ”

  By now Rosa had arrived from Monte Carlo, and immediately stepped in to take charge. When she found Marika in her brother’s room “they began screaming at each other like banshees,” causing such a commotion that the hospital threatened to ban any visitors. When Rudolf, drifting in and out of consciousness, woke up, Wallace told him that his sister had arrived. “It took him ten or fifteen seconds to understand what I said, and then he slowly got out, ‘I had a feeling she was here.’ And I said, ‘Well, do you want to see her?’ He didn’t answer. And then I said, ‘I can bring her up here for an hour each day.’ Then another ten or fifteen seconds passed before he was able to say, ‘Too much.’ ”

  But Rosa insisted on feeding Rudolf the greasy chicken broth she had brought, and refused to listen to the protests of Michel Canesi or anyone else. It was the family’s prerogative, she believed, to keep vigil at the deathbed, and she tried hard to get rid of Rudolf’s friends, taking Gloria’s arm one day and saying, “You must go away. My brother keeps your soul. If you don’t leave, maybe you die too.” There was also a confrontation with Wallace at quai Voltaire, which ended with him picking her up and depositing her outside the apartment. “I went back inside wiping the spit from my face. But the next day she had returned, holding out a stubbly chicken she wanted to singe on the gas flame. It was as if nothing had happened. I saw so much of Rudolf in Rosa—the temper that flares and subsides and is forgotten.” Marika, too, felt that “the power of these Mongol people” gave her a deeper insight into Rudolf’s character. “That mixture of great power, great presence, and then some things that are absolutely out of our habits.”

  A bodyguard had been hired to prevent unwelcome visitors from slipping into the room—“the trustees were afraid of someone taking a photograph”—and Wallace, in particular, was concerned that Rudolf might be served with a legal suit by Robert Tracy’s lawyers.

  We didn’t want him being presented with some paper he didn’t know he was signing, so Douce, Frank, and I would do shifts, with one of us sitting outside the room at this little fourth-grade desk with the bodyguard, Damien. He was half French/half Italian, very handsome and a lot of fun. We all got along, though Douce was looking so traumatized and unkempt—like a bag woman—and she was telling Rudolf off-the-wall things like, “There’s a sale on at Galeries Lafayette!”

  On December 23 Charles Jude told Rudolf that he would not be able to see him on Christmas Day because he had a performance in Germany. “Are you taking Joanna?” Rudolf wanted to know. “Yes, of course,” said Charles. “Bon Papa,” murmured Rudolf. Liuba and her husband, Slom, then arrived from St. Petersburg, only to be told by Michel Canesi that Rudolf would be unlikely to recognize them. When they went into his room, however, Liuba was sure that she heard Rudolf gasp. “Michel told me that his reaction was merely a reflex one. But I don’t think so, because the next day he asked Gloria, ‘Will Liuba come?’ ” She read him the letter she had brought from her mother (“It told Rudik he must survive until the spring when we would bring him to Leningrad, and our doctors would save him”), and she spent most of her days in Paris sitting by Rudolf’s bedside holding his hand. He was seldom conscious now, and on December 27, when Charles returned from his trip, Rudolf had stopped speaking. “Serrez-moi la main,” Charles urged, and three or four times felt his hand being squeezed. But a few days later Gloria was sure that she heard him murmur something. “It sounded like ‘Moby-Dick,’ and I thought, What can this mean? And then I looked up at the television, and I saw Gregory Peck in a movie that was playing.” It was John Huston’s 1956 Moby-Dick, and the two words of its title were the last Rudolf ever spoke. “But still there were things he understood,” Gloria maintains. She was in his room telling Frank that she had to go to a meeting in London when she felt Rudolf tighten his grasp on her hand. “I was so shocked, because I didn’t think he had that kind of strength left. It was like a vise, and the nurse had to come and release it.”

  “When it seemed that he had less than a month to live, he held on for two months,” said Michel Canesi. “When we thought there was maybe only a week left, he lived on for two weeks.… Finally, when we thought death was imminent that morning, Rudolf held on until the afternoon.” It was 3:45 on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 6, 1993 and shortly after this Gloria, who had left the hospital for London at 10:30 that morning, received a telephone call from Frank. He had also broken the news to Tessa. “He had been with Rudolf, and told me that he was very peaceful and very calm.” Later that day, hearing an announcement on his car radio, Charles drove straight to the hospital. “There were a lot of people milling about, but nobody was in the room. I asked a nurse, ‘What time did it happen?’ ‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘Nobody was there.’ ” A postmodern choice, then, of two alternative endings—both equally convincing. It is as fitting for Rudolf, a million love songs later, to have died in the company of a virtual stranger as it is for him to have died alone. “He is, you know, with all his friends. He is absolutely alone.”

  On January 11, the eve of the funeral, the simple oak casket in which Rudolf lay dressed in his conducting tails and “funny little hat,” was brought to quai Voltaire from the hospital by his friends. It was placed on the long, low coffee table in the salon—“the Coffin,” as he had presciently called it, which was actually a trunk in which he stored his kilims, and which itself was covered with a length of antique fabric.* According to custom, the coffin lid was raised that night for the Russians to say their farewell, and when the family had gone to bed, Frank kept watch until the morning, “reassuring him that he had not been abandoned.” As a violent storm broke over Paris, many of Rudolf’s circle, spending the night next door at the Hotel Quai Voltaire, were kept awake by the thunder and rattling windows. “Boy, was the room shaking!” recalls Linda Maybarduk, who was not alone in wondering whether this could be one final manifestation of Nureyev rage. “It occurred to me that it had been caused by Rudolf gate-crashing once again.…
this time through the gates of heaven.”

  A police motorcade escorted the convoy of family and friends from quai Voltaire to the Opéra—the route that he himself had taken every day as director. Posted along the Garnier’s grand staircase was an honor guard of “petits rats,” the students from the school, and at 10 a.m., six male dancers carried Rudolf’s coffin slowly to the top. The civil ceremony took place in the rococo foyer, where the crowd of mourners—from French nobility, seasoned jet-setters, and international ballet elite to his sisters, two small babushki in black wearing peasant headscarves—was a reminder of the dancer’s global reach. Five friends read extracts from poems in five languages, a chamber orchestra played Tchaikovsky and Bach, including Fugue no. 14, with one of the most abrupt endings in music, and symbolic here of Rudolf’s unfinished life. At a climactic point a medal was placed on a velvet cushion on the top step. It was the Légion d’Honneur—the highest award the French can bestow. English newspapers covering the event reported that Nureyev had been “brought home to lie for a moment among those who loved him best”; that “the Opéra had been his fortress and those who prayed were his real family”; that Paris was “his home, his real home—and here, too, he returned to die.” Those who knew him knew better. And as the funeral cortege finally arrived at the cemetery of Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois, this “little piece of Russia” with its blue-onion-dome chapel, silver birches, and elusively poetic atmosphere left no one in any doubt that Rudolf’s life was ending where it had begun.

  As he would have wished, the most moving tributes that day were those of the dancers: the sight of Charles Jude among the sextet carrying the coffin aloft to the accompaniment of Mahler’s Wayfarer songs, “Now, in death, as in the duet … leading Rudolf to his fate”; the eloquent lines sent by Baryshnikov (and read by Jack Lang), “He had the charisma and the simplicity of a man of the earth and the untouchable arrogance of the gods”; the moment at Saint-Geneviève when Paris Opéra ballerinas threw their toe shoes into the open grave. But the greatest epitaph of all came two weeks later. There was, as Laurent Hilaire said, “a kind of doomsday feeling” to the January 29 performance of La Bayadère, the sense “of a cycle coming to an end.” The hypnotic repetition of the corps de ballet’s long, slow, two-phrase entrance in act 3 had become the dirgelike ritual of a Roman Catholic funeral procession, its line of mourners inching their way through the streets—two steps forward, one step back. Its monotony and melancholy seemed to reinforce the Cleopatra-like lament, voiced by Ghislaine Thesmar, that after Rudolf’s death there was nothing left remarkable in their world. “There is no motivation. We realized after he went away how much we depended on his energy, and the whole thing didn’t mean anything to many of us. So we just kept on doing our duty and keeping the values he would care for. But it was as if the sun had faded out.” There were many, however, who found consolation that evening, telling Laurent Hilaire when they saw him later, “Oh God, we sensed him through you.” The dancer himself remembers feeling blessed at being able to transmit the qualities Rudolf had instilled. “I left the stage overjoyed, and told myself, ‘What luck. We are always with him.’ ” And ultimately, the final impression left by the Shades is transcendental. There is the sense, as Arlene Croce has written, of the annihilation of all time—“No reason it could not go on forever. It’s Elysian bliss and its setting is eternity.” And this eternity—a “nirvana of pure dance”—was Rudolf’s idea of heaven.