Nureyev: dancing around THE LIES

Rudolf NUREYEV lied about his life so often, to so many people, that any responsible biographer or documentarian must virtually cross-examine every living source to separate his extravagant fictions from bottom-line certainties. Nureyev liked to say that when he was a child, his father beat him, but he also said that this same abusive parent bought him an accordion -- both assertions untrue and only the earliest deceptions in his complex and often contradictory life story.

Yet despite all this dissembling -- and the fact that it’s been nearly 15 years since the Russian-born ballet star died at age 54 of complications from AIDS -- he’s rarely been far from the spotlight. And soon he’ll be in its full glare again, with the publication of a massive new book about him and the telecast of a related PBS show revealing new facets of that life and his very, very fictionalized self-image.

Coming in the PBS “Great Performances” series on Aug. 29 (9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28), “Nureyev: The Russian Years” uses interviews with his friends along with previously unseen film footage to trace his rise from the poverty of his childhood through the acclaim he received as a member of Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet. It ends with an account of his becoming the first Cold War ballet defector in 1961 and a précis of his worldwide triumphs.

In a recent phone interview, the documentary’s writer-producer, John Bridcut, spoke of how the many previous films about Nureyev “always skipped over this early period quite fast because of the need to get to the golden years with [English ballerina Margot] Fonteyn. So I felt this allowed us a lot of opportunity to say something fresh on the program.

“I may be speaking out of turn here,” Bridcut continued, “but there is a general perception that Nureyev was a young, aspiring talent who was made by his defection and that the West is where his career really took off. What I hadn’t appreciated was that he was a big star in Leningrad before that.

“Not only was his time in Russia very fruitful, he seemed to have quite an amazing degree of artistic license in the Soviet Union -- probably more, in a way, than he would have been allowed in a Western company. The Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Ballet would have been much more severe with him if he’d started trying to break all the rules and to defy convention in the way that he had.”

Bridcut’s film makes extensive use of home movies shot by Teja Kremke, a young man from East Berlin who became Nureyev’s lover when they were both studying ballet in Leningrad. And Kremke’s tragic story (virtually unknown until now) is also one of the many fascinating byways in “Nureyev: The Life,” Julie Kavanagh’s exhaustive and often startling study of the dancer and his world, coming from Pantheon Books on Oct. 2.

Where Bridcut makes Nureyev a dedicated working-class hero (allowing for a few temperamental lapses here and there), a much darker view of the man emerges from Kavanagh’s research.

“Rudolf was never in love with Teja,” she said this month on the phone from London. “He was really using Teja for what he could do for him, and as soon as Rudolf met Erik [Bruhn, the Danish-born international ballet star], he had no purpose anymore and was just dropped.”

Kavanagh’s book cites newly discovered love letters to document what she calls “the extent of Rudolf’s passion for Erik, which I think will completely negate any question of whether he was in love with Margot: the fact that he canceled performances to go to Australia to be with Erik, something Rudolf would never do for anybody else.”

In the 10 years she spent on her book, Kavanagh gained access to Nureyev-related KGB files, did extensive personal interviews, read all the other biographies and, inevitably, had to debunk her subject’s alternately self-protective and self-aggrandizing tall tales. “He would tell one person one thing and someone else the complete opposite,” she observed. “Saying that he made Margot pregnant, for example. There were a lot of fictions. He would say things to shock, and in the end I had to go with my own judgment.

“I think when you spend such a long time on a biography, in the end you have a sort of psychic link with your subject. I think that’s what I had with Rudolf. I kind of knew what motivated him and when he was talking bull.”

Staying too long at the fair

Kavanagh’s book pays abundant tribute to Nureyev’s greatness as a dancer -- even, if you like, his genius. But for Southern California audiences, who saw much more of him in extreme artistic decline than at his height, there’s something alienating in all the poetic blather about how, during those endless, ghastly final tours and guest appearances, he was raging against the dying of the light, or denying death its dominion, or how, in the words of his friend and colleague Ghislaine Thesmar from the PBS documentary, “He went onstage and danced like some people go to the temple and pray even if they can’t walk anymore.”

Yes, but do those people charge the highest possible ticket prices for watching their “prayers”? And, in the process, do they trash the greatest achievements of others in that “temple” (George Balanchine’s “Apollo,” for example)?

“This was the nadir,” Kavanagh writes, “Rudolf lumbering through the same tired repertory like a bottom-of-the-bill vaudeville act.” And he knew how bad he was. After one especially excruciating performance, in a ballet he hadn’t wanted to dance, he signed a photo with the words: “This hideous moment in a few years will be the sweetest memory.” Fellow Kirov defector Mikhail Baryshnikov described the characteristic hauteur that Nureyev played for all it was worth as “the arrogance of the gods” -- but, added to all the lies and betrayals, it often seemed more like the cynicism of a con man.

Nureyev was far from the first dancer to keep dancing star roles long after he should have stopped, but he may have been unique in his attempts to make his need for attention and his sheer greed seem heroic, even spiritual. Yet that’s all part of the peculiar Nureyev mystique, and you see it being created -- in the book and documentary -- as he moves from Leningrad to Paris and beyond. Not only his technique changes but his whole persona. Missing in the coltish dance-for-technique’s-sake Soviet performances, something artificial and calculated takes shape as Nureyev begins to present himself in the West -- something so flamboyant that it comes to resemble a drag act.

Kavanagh presents all the evidence but never connects the dots: how Nureyev studied and adopted ballerina technique (including demi-pointe, or rising onto half-toe) and how the makeup and hair he chose deliberately feminized him. How his singular, exotic and (to some of us, anyway) faintly ridiculous image onstage and off derived from his rejection of the potent style of cavalier made indelible by such Soviet dancers as the Kirov’s supremely elegant Yuri Soloviev and the Bolshoi’s great-hearted Vladimir Vasiliev (each as fine a dancer as Nureyev at his best).

Instead, he substituted something not merely subversively androgynous but increasingly akin to the tempestuous, stylized, parodistic mannerisms à la russe of Olga Tchikaboumskaya, the memorable male ballerina in the transvestite troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.

A flair for the feminine side

Commenting on Nureyev’s 1969 Vienna “Swan Lake” (available, like dozens more Nureyev performances, on video), Kavanagh quotes British dance photographer Keith Money as saying “he looked like a cross between June Allyson and Doris Day.” But he wasn’t exactly effeminate. Great drag queens are never effeminate -- they’re supra-female and often intimidating too. And that’s what, in a much more ambiguous style of drag than literal female impersonation, Nureyev went for, body and soul.

We’re not talking about his homosexuality here but of an assumed identity, the role of a lifetime. He developed it early in his career, no doubt protectively, but also perhaps in the spirit of novelist Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley”: the belief that being a fake somebody was better than staying a real nobody. We can call that fake somebody “Nureyevna,” an ever-smirking, feline creature, beyond the norms of real men and women. Every possible breach of civilized behavior had to be tolerated to keep him, whatever he was, among us -- and dancing.

Looked at in this light, all the anomalies of Nureyev’s life and art that Kavanagh so details fall into place: not merely his look and style as a dancer but the incessant self-dramatization in his personal life, the violent theatrical rages when he was thwarted in any way, the constant absorption into family after family (perpetual domestic stardom) and the need for everyone to see him as a voracious queer predator when, as lover after lover attests, his sexual needs were, at most, “mechanical.”

“I should have charged him,” former New York City Ballet principal Robert La Fosse told Kavanagh. “It was like a call service.” “With me, at any rate, he was ferociously passive,” said actor Keith Baxter. “It was as if there was some inner loneliness, some sense of rejection that he could never overcome, and he provoked this frenzied eroticism to hide from it a little while.”

“Rudolf couldn’t be tactile with anybody,” Kavanagh said. “I remember [choreographer Frederick ] Ashton once saying to me that great beauties are terrible lovers. That’ll come across in this book” -- though she e-mailed later to add that “the biggest gap in my research is not having a woman describe Rudolf as a lover.”

A legacy in flux

Kavanagh might not see Nureyev as a sociopath, but that’s one conclusion you can draw from her 800 pages of anecdotes, testimony and carefully distilled use of previously published material. At one point, he even treated Fonteyn shamefully enough to make the usually permissive Thesmar object, though as he aged and newer defectors offered better behavior and dancing, his Nureyevna characterization morphed into something like the Dame Edna of dance.

He was reportedly worth his weight in czarist amber as a teacher and coach, but he was pretty much nothing but a conversational divertissement otherwise.

Kavanagh writes that an obsession with money “became almost pathological in Rudolf’s final years.” (No, he didn’t need it to pay his medical bills -- he wanted to buy an island.) But like everyone else, she honors his stoicism and endurance when it was touch and go whether he would complete his staging of “La Bayadère” for the Paris Opera Ballet before HIV claimed him. So should we all, though there’s one last lie on his deathbed -- a lie to himself about running a company inside Russia -- that leaves even Kavanagh agog over “his amazing spiritual energy” at the last.

And now he’s back, not in the role of Nureyevna (though there are glimpses of that creature in Bridcut’s post-defection footage) and completely free of Ripley-ism in performances that prove he indeed might have become the greatest ballet dancer of his time if he hadn’t chosen instead to become ballet’s greatest phenomenon. And you don’t have to know what happened to him later to get caught up in what he could do before the West finished him in more ways than one.

During his phone interview, Bridcut recalled that a lot of people working on “Nureyev: The Russian Years” approached him, “people who had no interest in ballet at all, like those who helped me edit the film and handled the sound, that sort of thing. And they said they were completely captivated by this man, particularly by that footage of him dancing in Moscow in 1958 [age 20], the first footage there is of him.

“They thought ballet meant nothing to them, and suddenly they were spellbound by him. And this is what all the people who saw him in the flesh still say. I found this really interesting -- that even now he remains a door into the world of ballet for people who are not otherwise drawn to it.”

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lewis.segal@latimes.com