It was seven o’clock in the evening when Maude and Nigel Gosling arrived at
the Panamanian embassy where their friend Margot Fonteyn had secretly
invited 23-year-old Rudolf Nureyev to stay on his first visit to London.
Dame Margot, 42, was both the ambassador’s wife and England’s prima ballerina
assoluta. It was late 1961, a few months after Nureyev had defected from
Russia to the West in dramatic scenes at a Paris airport.
Still barely known even to western ballet aficionados, he had been missed by
Fonteyn’s chauffeur on flying into London that afternoon and had made his
own way to the embassy in Kensington.
The Goslings had tickets to take him to watch Fonteyn dance Giselle with the
Royal Ballet. But where was he? Time was pressing – the performance was due
to start at 7.30. At 7.05, a tousled youth appeared wearing stovepipe
trousers and a sports shirt.
“I’m sorry. I was asleep,” he said. Bowing courteously, he disappeared,
returning in a well-cut dark suit. They arrived at the theatre just as the
curtain went up.
Fonteyn’s performance that night was not her best. Nureyev’s only comment was:
“She uses her eyes well.”
She had invited him to London to appear in a fundraising gala for the Royal
Academy of Dance. The Goslings had seen him perform with the Kirov Ballet in
Paris and had urged her: “You must try to get this boy.” But he had promptly
defected, and the Royal Ballet wanted nothing to do with him for fear of
jeopardising a tour of the Soviet Union.
Fonteyn was unperturbed. She had always relished a plot. She had even helped
her husband, Tito Arias, and a ragtag band of Cuban communists launch an
abortive revolution in Panama.
On the day after her disappointing Giselle – and deriving obvious pleasure
from putting Nureyev’s secret identity to the test – she took him to the
Royal Ballet’s rehearsal studios, where she introduced him as a leading
Polish dancer due to appear in the gala.
Much to Nureyev’s distress, Fonteyn rejected his demand to dance with her in
the gala. Ever since he was a ballet student he had dreamt of partnering
her. But she resented being dictated to by a boy half her age. She would
soon realise her mistake.
As the curtain went up for his solo performance, a crack of applause broke out
from the house, “palpitating with a lust for something new”. Long-haired,
wild-eyed and half naked in grey-streaked tights, Nureyev seemed to the
English audience to be a primordial force of nature. The shock produced by
his savage intensity was compared by one critic to that of seeing a
preda-tor let loose in a drawing room.
Afterwards the stage door was a scene of “terrifying mob passions” as Nureyev
and Fonteyn tried to make their way to her car. The crowd surged forward,
screaming and straining to touch Nureyev. By contrast, Fonteyn’s appearance
in the gala had made no impact. She looked tired, her technique was in
decline, her best years seemed to be over.
Overnight she changed her mind: she would dance with Nureyev. She felt the
alternative was to risk becoming “an absolute back number, a nothing”. Yet
she appeared to have no inkling of the impact her decision would have on the
ballet world and their lives. Almost from the moment they appeared on stage
together, some people would be convinced that the middle-aged Dame Margot
and the young Russian were having an affair.
Fonteyn decided to bet her professional future on Nureyev after a discussion
with her husband, who had every reason to encourage her to prolong her stage
career.
As a Cambridge undergraduate, Roberto “Tito” Arias, the tanned, sleek-haired
son of Panama’s ex-president, had been the 18-year-old Fonteyn’s first love
in the late 1930s; but he had disappeared from her life, breaking her heart,
until the Royal Ballet’s 1953 New York season, when he turned up at the Met:
a chubby delegate to the UN.
By this time Fonteyn was ballet’s greatest star, and Tito was determined to
make her his wife. Although married already, with three small children, he
began courting her with diamonds, mink and El Morocco suppers until, two
years later, she relented.
Fonteyn brought undoubted respectability to her husband. Politically and
socially ambitious, counting senators and movie stars among his friends,
Tito was also a philanderer and gambler with a shady entrepre-neurial side
said to involve gunrunning and brothel keeping. He loved money, and when his
own ran out he spent his wife’s.
Her retirement would change all this, limiting not only his profligacy but the
freedom of his double life. As Maude Gosling put it: “Tito always wanted her
to carry on, because then he could carry on with his girls.”
For his part, Nureyev was having an intense affair with another of his icons,
the Danish ballet star Erik Bruhn. Their relationship was tempestuous. Bruhn
had a furious temper that was lurking, mean and caustic, whereas Nureyev’s
tended to be more melodramatic and physical.
“Once the Dane had had his whisky, and the Russian his vodka, it didn’t take
much to set them off,” said Rosella Hightower, Nureyev’s dancing partner at
that time.
She, Nureyev, Bruhn and another ballerina, Sonia Arova, had decided to form an
experimental dance group – travelling to Cannes to rehearse in Hightower’s
studio. Rehearsals were discordant, however, and what took place afterwards
was “absolute pandemonium”. Hightower would hear from Arova, who shared the
men’s seafront apartment, how the pair had run through the rooms at night
chasing each other with knives “as if wanting to end everything”.
For his first role with Fonteyn, Nureyev would play Albrecht to her Giselle.
He indirectly invited himself to the Panamanian embassy for the duration of
the rehearsals. She remembered: “He stood in my dressing room, looking like
a little boy, and said: ‘Tell me. I must be in London long time . . . I
cannot stay so long in hotel. What do you think I do?’”
He clearly enjoyed the comforts of the embassy but he found it hard to
accustom himself to traditional English cooking, although it was two weeks
before he confessed to hating cold roast beef. Beef – preferably in the form
of an entrecôte steak – had to be thick, blue and hot before he would eat
it; when it arrived he would slice off a piece to see if it was rare enough,
then test the temperature with his tongue – sometimes even his cheek.
Only steak, he believed, could give him the extra stamina he needed onstage.
When Fonteyn took him to meet her formidable mother, Hilda, for the first
time, they heard him mutter when the food appeared: “Chicken dinner, chicken
performance.”
He was more forthright in getting what he wanted during rehearsals. From the
first day it became clear that he planned to make his Albrecht more
important than her Giselle – “something of a jolt” to Fonteyn, who had
danced the role for 25 years. But she was impressed by the intensity of his
involvement in his role. Visual proof of her growing trust in him was
witnessed by Nigel Gosling when he visited the studio and watched Nureyev
hold her way above his head in a Soviet lift as she shrieked and giggled
with delight: “Put me down – it’s much too high!”
With their first performance just a couple of weeks away, Nureyev flew to
Copenhagen to be reunited with Bruhn and to absorb further insights into his
own role. The Dane was regarded in the West as the Albrecht.
Bruhn was standing in the wings on June 21, 1962, when Nureyev and Fonteyn
made their debut together at the Royal Opera House. Seventy thousand
applications for tickets had been turned down, and the touts were asking £25
for a 37s 6d (£1.88) seat.
When the curtain came down at the end there was no applause for what seemed a
minute. No one could quite believe what they had seen: the icon of English
ballet paired with a boy half her age who seemed thrillingly alien and yet
in perfect accord with Fonteyn.
In the film of the Fonteyn–Nureyev Giselle made three months later, we see to
an almost voyeuristic degree the sensuality he brought to the performance:
the erotic frisson as she watches him lie panting on his back, his hand
stroking down his chest and hovering for a fraction of a second above the
swell in his “so-white, so-tight” tights.
“What we were watching was a kind of seduction,” remarked the writer Brian
Masters. “She responded to his advances – which is what they were – with a
tremendous quiver of excitement which we all felt in the theatre.”
In fact, all Nureyev was doing was inhabiting his role to the full. As he put
it himself: “I was Albrecht, and Albrecht was in love with Giselle; on the
stage I was seeing her with the eyes of a lover.” From that evening on,
however, audiences would interpret the ardour as the real thing, believing
in a real-life, offstage romance. So would Margot, who sensed “a strange
attachment” forming, despite the fact that she knew he was “desperately in
love with someone else at the time”.
Erik Bruhn, standing in the wings watching their performance, found himself
overwhelmed by private emotions and professional rivalry. Nureyev recalled:
“He stare. He stare . . . He just couldn’t understand that kind of success
and why it should be.”
Instead of waiting for his lover, Bruhn fled from the theatre. “I was running
after him and fans were running after me,” said Nureyev. “It was a mess.”
Did Nureyev and Fonteyn have an affair? One Sunday he was crossing the King’s
Road when he was knocked over by a scooter, injuring his foot. To be near
the Royal Ballet rehearsal premises in west London, he moved in with Fonteyn
at her mother’s studio house in Barons Court, where she had been living
since Arias’s ambassadorship came to an end.
Now increasingly involved in Panamanian politics, he was not there “99% of the
time”, and Bruhn was also away for several months, dancing in New York –
which led a number of journalists “to make copy out of the fact that Nureyev
was staying at Dame Margot’s apartment while recovering”, as one writer put
it.
Colette Clark, a balletomane who was close to Fonteyn, was one of many friends
who believed they had cause. Visiting Margot in her dressing room after a
performance she had been surprised to encounter Arias, whom she had not seen
for well over a year.
According to her, he explained: “When I read in the newspaper he moved into
the flat, I think it’s time I move back.” Fonteyn, meanwhile, was
“frantically” powdering her nose in the mirror. “For the first time ever she
was not beaming and smiling at Tito . . . She was livid.”
To Clark the episode spoke for itself. “She was definitely in love with
Rudolf. You could see it shining out of her and in the way she couldn’t stop
talking about him.”
Certainly the tremendous change in her stage personality, the way – as Nadia
Nerina, a Royal Ballet ballerina, put it – she had “somehow become very
feminine and relaxed, and swayed and swooned”, seemed confirmation enough to
many people that they were having an affair.
Everyone on a Royal Ballet world tour early in their partnership observed how
flirtatiously tactile they were with each other – “always hugging and
kissing”. Having bid them good night in a hotel lift, the dancer Alexander
Grant met them in it again the following morning. “Margot had an enormous
love-bite on her neck. It was very very obvious, and she hadn’t done
anything to cover it up.”
There are just as many, however, who remain convinced that the relationship
was platonic – like Joan Thring, an Australian who worked “24 hours a day”
as Nureyev’s personal assistant. She makes the point that the couple were
rarely alone. “I’ve tried and tried to believe it could have happened, but I
cannot see where, or when. Most nights the three of us would have dinner in
my house in Earls Court, and sometimes Rudolf would throw plates at us
because he’d want to go and find a boy. Margot was like me, she treated him
as a child most of the time.”
Thring also dismisses the idea that Arias would have been jealous. “He didn’t
give a damn. It didn’t occur to him they would sleep together, and it wasn’t
a threat to him anyway. Nothing was a threat to Tito Arias.”
When the choreographer Frederick Ashton and his Norfolk neighbour Keith Money,
the ballet writer, discussed the matter, each was “adamantly certain” that
nothing took place; and when questioned in his eighties, Ashton had not
changed his mind. “I don’t think that he awakened in her any sexual thing.
You always love the person you dance with for that moment, and something
must emanate from you that communicates itself to the audience.”
When asked directly, Nureyev would tell some people that he had not made love
to Fonteyn and others that he had – even claiming, as he did about a number
of other women, to have made her pregnant.
Before his death in 1993, talking to his (straight) assistant Simon Robinson,
Nureyev made a curious allusion to Robinson’s sloppy, overdressed salad.
“Perhaps I should have married Margot,” he said. “But I had many women, and
it was like your ‘aquatic’ salad. Bang-bang-bang . . . Hammering away for
hours and hours.”
This is a remark that in itself could be taken as strong evidence for the Case
Against, Fonteyn having been praised by more than one admirer for the
dexterity of her pelvic floor muscles. (“She can activate me of her own
accord,” her former lover Constant Lambert, the composer, told a friend.)
Fonteyn’s own response when asked if she and Nureyev were lovers was
dismissive: “That’s all I need.”
If they were not, the conclusion must surely be Colette Clark’s: “Well, then
they were jolly nearly.”
© Julie Kavanagh 2007
Extracted from Rudolf Nureyev: The Life, by Julie Kavanagh, to be published by
Fig Tree tomorrow at £25. It can be purchased for £22.50 including postage
from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Talitha, the ‘hippie de luxe’ Nureyev wanted to marry
Talitha Pol was a wild child of the 1960s – Tatler’s Girl of 1965 and “a
total, complete transfixer of men”. She was a difficult person for anyone to
be in love with as she had several strings to her bow – young and sexy;
lecherous and old; doting aristocrat; dim pretty boy . . . all of whom she
kept expertly wound up. She was very seductive and very touching, and at the
same time a little bit aware of how to put these qualities to work.
When they met for the first time at a party in early 1965 Rudolf Nureyev was
captivated. Born in Indonesia, where she had survived a Japanese prison camp
as a child, Talitha had alabaster-white skin and high cheekbones and eyes
much like his own. Although he did not find her particularly intelligent,
she was intuitive and sympathetic, and they instantly seemed to recognise
something in each other.
Although what he was actually seeing was an exquisite, androgynous reflection
of himself, Nureyev had never felt so erotically stirred by a woman, telling
several friends that he wanted to marry Talitha. She was just as enthralled
by him.
When Claus von Bülow, Nureyev’s Belgravia neighbour, invited them both to
dinner, she made him promise to seat them next to each other. But Nureyev
was unable to come and von Bülow invited the son of his business associate J
Paul Getty. The die was cast: J Paul Jr fell in love.
Talitha became Mrs Paul Getty, her wedding dress a white mink-trimmed
miniskirt. The couple bought a 19th century palace in Marrakesh, soon
becoming friends of Yves Saint Laurent.
With his fascination for Talitha and passion for exotica, Nureyev would have
been charmed by the sybaritic ambiance the Gettys created at Le Palais Da
Zahir (the Pleasure Palace), which became a mecca for the “hippie de luxe”
set, including Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
But with a growing aversion to any kind of drug – she had become a heroin
addict – he distanced himself; and, unlike the susceptible Yves Saint
Laurent, who was now “tripping regularly”, he resisted Talitha’s siren call.
She killed herself with an overdose in 1971.
Jagger came into his orbit when Nureyev appeared in an avante garde ballet,
Paradise Lost, at Covent Garden. Never to be forgotten by anyone who saw it
was the ballet’s coup de théâtre, a passage in which he ran around the
stage, continued at full tilt up a ramp and dived head first through a gap
in a pair of huge Warholesque lips.
Jagger, sitting in the audience, found this moment “absolutely fantastic”. The
plushy red lips on the backcloth were a version of his own.
His stage performance had always been essentially an act of making love to
himself, and in Nureyev he recognised an idealised physical reflection.
“It was like seeing himself there on the stage,” his girlfriend Marianne
Faithfull remarked. They had the same chickenbreast-white skin, hairless
torso and androgynous appeal, as if (as Violette Verdy, the ballerina, said
of Nureyev) they had created another type of sex altogether – “something
wild and very beautiful”.
Jagger, friends claim, “hugely admired – possibly even desired – Rudolf”.
Faithfull remembered: “He was always saying how much he wished he could have
been Nureyev.” They arranged to have lunch at a restaurant in the King’s
Road, an encounter that, far from being momentous, proved “dead boring”. The
pair had little to say to each other. According to Joan Thring, Nureyev’s
personal assistant, who had been “dragged along”, they “just grunted every
so often”.
With no interest in pop music, Nureyev had never seen Jagger onstage and knew
nothing of his hypnotic power as a performer. He remembered: “I didn’t
smoke, I didn’t take dope: we didn’t have much in common.”
By contrast, Nureyev was smitten by Peter O’Toole, the actor. Having seen his
portrayals of Lawrence of Arabia and Hamlet – “which totally burned” – he
was so in awe that he did his best to match O’Toole’s excesses.
Nureyev needed no encouragement to drink. O’Toole’s ex-wife, the actress Siân
Phillips, remembers seeing him arrive at a smart Belgravia dinner.
“Picking up a smallish bottle of plum brandy . . . [he] drained the lot in
what seemed like seconds while we all watched in silence.”
That night he danced on the table, threw up violently, and curled up to sleep.
O’Toole, seized him by the legs and began to bump him down the thickly
carpeted stairs, before they made their way into the street.
