Nureyev: A Star On, Off the Stage

I’m not a balletomane, as those deeply in love with the form are called, and I’m an aria-lover not an opera-lover. But Rudolf Nureyev, who died on Wednesday, apparently of the complications of AIDS, will forever mean ballet to me, as Maria Callas will for me forever symbolize opera at its grandest.

In 1962, the year after Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union and the Kirov Ballet, he gave his first performance as a resident artist with the Royal Ballet. New in London, I was the arts correspondent for Time and had the magazine’s tickets for that “home” debut in the majestic Opera House in Covent Garden.

It was a black-tie, medals-will-be-worn evening, electric with anticipation. Nureyev danced a short, showy piece, “Le Corsaire,” which featured his incredible soaring leaps. It seemed impossible that any man, in or out of the Olympics, could stay airborne so long and land so lightly, as if the rules of gravity had been suspended on his account. You thought of hang- time, as with punts. It was art edging toward vaudeville, possibly, yet that it was art there could be no doubt.

After each leap, and there were several, the audience as one gave sighs of astonishment and wonder that sounded like wind in the trees. The ovation lasted two or three times as long as the dance, and the flowers, carried up or thrown by his admirers, carpeted the lip of the stage.

A few years later, I was there again to see his “Romeo and Juliet” with Dame Margot Fonteyn. She was then 50ish, playing a love-doomed teen-ager, but only her arms, wiry with work and discipline, hinted at the deception. The romantic tragedy had never seemed to me so romantic, or so tragic. Their passionate partnership was unforgettable as art, and as drama.

Not long after I joined The Times, Nureyev and Fonteyn came to Los Angeles to dance a benefit for a ballet company that was then in the planning stage (and at the time never left it). I went out to LAX to do the jet-age equivalent of the old shipboard interviews.

It was the end of a cross-country tour for Nureyev and I was curious whether he found much difference in the sophistication and appreciativeness of the audiences from city to city. I think he heard an implication I may or may not have intended.

He drew himself up, as they say in novels, and said haughtily, “I dance as well for an audience of polar bears.”

During that visit, the dress and costume designer Jean Louis and his wife, Maggie, gave a party for Fonteyn and Nureyev at their Malibu beach home. It remains in memory as the starriest Hollywood party I ever attended. Marlon Brando was there with Anouk Aimee as his date, Cary Grant with Dyan Cannon, to whom he was not yet married, and so it went.

Nureyev made a splendid entrance, down a stairway from an open mezzanine, in a stylized suit of tan gabardine. Not long after, Loretta Young arrived, in a pantsuit that looked like a motorcyclist’s get-up duplicated in black velvet and that was unquestionably stunning on her slim figure. Nureyev, who had noted her arrival, quietly slipped back upstairs. A bit later he reappeared, having changed to his own, very black equivalent of a motorcyclist’s outfit. He was not a man to be outdone.

Toward 2 in the morning, Nureyev and Shirley MacLaine were frugging to a four-piece rock group in the living room, with the rest of the crowd watching in a great semi-circle. Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein were perched side by side on the back of a couch for a better view.

It was the last time I saw Nureyev plain, as they say, and then as always he was at the center of the stage.