Interview - T. Coleman

Arts Guardian

Saturday

June 24, 1972

By Terry Coleman

Terry Coleman interviews Rudolf Nureyev, who stars in 'I am a Dancer,' which receives a Royal premiere on July 4
HAVING a map of Asiatic Russia with me, I asked Rudolf Nureyev if he could show me where he was born. He said his mother was in a train at the time, on the trans-Siberian railway. In southern Siberia on the map, north of Mongolia and the Gobi desert, he found Lake Baikal and pointed to the southern shores, about 200 miles from Irkutsk and 3,000 miles east of Leningrad. His passport gives his place of birth as near Vladivostok, which was where his father was stationed and where his mother was going to join him. But Nureyev says that is wrong. "She told me, 'By the lake'."
Mr. Nureyev is a bit difficult for a reporter to talk to. This does not matter, except that at times you cannot be sure whether you have quite understood him. His English is sometimes fluent, but at other times hesitant, and he often gets stuck for words. This means you can't chat, but have to ask direct questions, which is not the best way. Also the day we met, a lunchtime between rehearsals at the Royal Ballet School in London, he had a cold and his throat was so sore that he was practically croaking.
When he doesn't like a question he either just stops, or else says, "Wrong kind of interview." This does not mean that he is unfriendly. He is fierce when you ask silly questions, and so he out to be, as he was when I asked some nonsense about destiny. But apart form that he is kind and gentle. Having croaked: "Wrong kind of interview," he patiently waits for you to go on with the right kind.
He was born in 1938. His mother was a Tartar peasant and his father was a politruk in the army, teaching soldiers about the revolution and instilling the right kind of political consciousness. Early in the war when he was about three years old, Nureyev remembers that he was at an army camp somewhere outside Moscow. He remembers the Moscow Metro: "Great fear of being cut by the closing doors. The train going into the tunnel - and two eyes, two red eyes."
He remembers a day of panic when everyone ran from Moscow, and he remembers himself being pushed in a wheelbarrow, and a kettle swinging at the back of the wheelbarrow. He thinks they went into Siberia, to Sverdlovsk.
The they went to Ufa, in Bashkir Republic, about 1,000 miles east of Leningrad, and there he spent the rest of his childhood. Two of his three sisters still work in factories there. He was constantly hungry. The ration was 300 grams of bread a day. The family was poor, and he sold drinking water from cans in the square.
Then, he said, he was extra. I did not understand, so he made the sign of carrying a spear. He carried a spear and did folk dancing with the Ufa Opera. But he did no classical dancing until he was 15, when he met Udeltsova, who had danced in the corps de ballet for Diaghilev. She watched him dance.
What did she say? "Well, you are born to dance, you are the most gifted, and all that." When she said that, did he believe her? "Yes, I believed her. I think first of all everybody in the street told me I should be dancing. How wonderful for a kid at that time, that we could just run in the street, and play. One car an hour. Go through the puddles. Not asphalt streets. Through the puddles. Run in bare feet."
After a year, Udeltsova said she had nothing more to teach him and that he ought to go to another teacher in Ufa. But there was such rivalry between these two teachers that the second would not take him, saying he had been ruined by the first. He then tried to get to Moscow, and was given letters of introduction, but in the end he could not go because the fare was 200 roubles, and another 200 roubles to get back if he failed, and his father was earning only 500 roubles a month.
Later he did get to Leningrad and joined the ballet school there. He was already 17 and they kept telling him he was too old, but he carried on. In two years he worked his way through the entire classical repertory, and joined the Kirov. He toured in Cairo, Beirut, and Vienna, and then, in June, 1961, he danced with the company in Paris. The company then cam to England. At Le Bourget Airport, just as they were about to leave for London, Nureyev was told he was going to Moscow instead, and he ran up to two French policemen shouting in English that he wanted to be free. He has never since returned to Russia.
Why had he chosen that moment to decide he wanted to stay in the West? "That day chose me."
The way Mr. Nureyev tells it, his decision had nothing to do with his political views. He probably did not have any. His father had been a politruk, but he had seen little of his father, who was always away in the army. He says there was an intrigue against him in the Kirov company. He was a young man pushing his way up. Older dancers wanted to dance the roles he was being given, and there was an intrigue to push him out.
What happened? "The moment I realized they were sending me home, that would be the end." Where were they sending him? "It would be bad new, whatever it was."
For some time before that, he had been taking private English lessons in Russia. So, had he been thinking for some time that he might leave Russia and come to England? "Wrong kind of interview," croaked Mr. Nureyev.
So, we talked about the right kind of things for while. He had seen Cassius Clay on television and admired him because he seemed to be pretty fit. He had seen El Cordobes fight, but had been disappointed, because he said the matador ran away from the bull. He thought the floor of Covent Garden would make good firewood because it was hard and would burn slowly. It was like cement to dance on.
Had he ever been asked to make a film of Nijinsky? "Quite a few times. There were a few producers I didn't quite trust, so I tried to make their lives difficult."
Why? Because, he said, they were only interested in a commercial success. If he did it, he would want to make a picture he wouldn't be ashamed of. It was a story which would have to be approached with great delicacy, or it would make a great ham picture. There was the triangle of Diaghilev, Romola, and Nijinsky, and it would be difficult not to make it schmaltzy.
Did he mind when people compared him with Nijinsky, as a dancer? Very nice, he said, only those people had never seen Nijinsky, or if they had they didn't remember.
At this point Margot Fonteyn came into the room to ask if he wanted to go to the theatre that evening. He didn't know, and said he had a cold. She said perhaps he ought to go home and look after himself, but gave him a number to ring in case he decided on the theatre after all. They kissed on the cheek. About this time a girl brought him his third big mug of tea within half an hour. The tea was all he had for lunch. He ate nothing.
He had just got back from America. In a few days he was due to go off to Mexico, and later on to Australia. He was all over the place. Was it really true that he had once said that since he had been born between two stations on the trans-Siberian railway, this showed it was his destiny always to be restlessly traveling? "Well," he said, looking up from his mug of tea, "I guess when they ask crappy questions, you feed them crap."
Some time ago Nureyev took part in a film which is called "I am a Dancer" and is supposed to be a study of his personality and dancing. EMI say it is yet another distinguished EMI film from a list of productions which has included "The Railway Children" and "The Tales of Beatrix Potter." Nureyev says that there is no conception of it, and that parts are hideous.
You can get some idea of what happened from EMI's own handout. The film, they say, germinated from an idea that was completely different from what will be seen on the screen. [Quite normal.] It started as an hour-long television programme, but then Evdoros Demetriou, or Demmy "as he is popularly known," decided that he wanted "a certain amount of accent on the very special partnership" of Nureyev and Fonteyn.
Later still, Bernard Delfont and Bryan Forbes came along, thought what good box office Beatrix Potter had been, and added more bits. The commentary contains kitsch phrases like "Grown organically within the organically chosen context." As the handout says: "Few pictures of any worth are made which don't have their production ups and downs."
And after the ups and downs, what did Nureyev thin? "I screamed, I yelled, and did everything possible to cancel it. I wanted to buy it, to burn it, to destroy it." He offered them £30,000 for it, but they did not take his offer, and the film will have a royal premiere in London on July 4 in the presence of Princess Margaret. Nureyev says he will picket outside the cinema.
If he does, he may welcome the publicity, which is something he does not usually welcome. He has a thing about the press. Soon after he came to the West, 11 years ago, he said he was apprehensive about living in completely strange countries. He now says that naturally he was apprehensive. "But it was an unfortunate remark. I made it to a friend and, of course, he betrayed me and printed it in his paper."
Does he feel he is falsely reported? "Well, they cook me in their way. You have a salad and they put their own dressing, you see." There were little distortions. He read a report about himself in the paper and felt that it was his face there, and that everyone was reading the piece and spitting on his face. But all the same, he said, freedom of the press was a great thing.
So if something was true it was fair enough to report it? If he did slap an Italian dancer's face during a performance at Trieste, and she went off crying, it was fair enough to report that? "It happened. It happened. It happened."
He did it? "Yes."
Why: - "Let's say that they have to sell their newspapers." But why did he slap the girl's face? "The story's dead. Don't discuss the subject. It's closed."
But he was very sweet about it, and explained amiably: "When I don't like, I stop." [Laughter.} Then we found other things to talk about again.
He said film and television cameramen and directors sometimes didn't know what they were doing and you had to demand things and make a fuss. Incompetence of any sort enrages him, and this is most attractive. He says he often doubts his own abilities as a dancer, while he is dancing and afterwards, and that so does any dancer worth speaking about. He thinks he may last another five or seven years as a classical dancer, but asks you not to retire him yet.
Would he agree that, as a boy from Ufa, the odds had been very great against his becoming a dancer at all? "Yes. I waited 11 years to get to the school." So that but for one or two bits of luck...? "No." he said. "Determination."
And did he think there was any chance that he might one day be able to go to Russia as a guest, a visitor, and dance there again" "Ah," he said. "I think of a French saying, 'Never say to a fountain, I am not going to drink your water.' So whatever happens, will happen."