Nijinsky (27 page)

The season was to begin on 2 March 1914 after only a month of preparation. Bronia and Sasha went to Russia to recruit dancers while Vaslav went to Paris to ask Bakst, whom he still believed to be his friend, to design the new scenery. Romola waited in the carriage when Vaslav went into his studio. He came down some time later with tears in his eyes. Bakst had told him that Diaghilev had made him promise that he would not work for Nijinsky.
‘He also felt
it was his duty to tell Vaslav the truth, that his dismissal from the ballet was not the end, it was the beginning, of a state of war which Diaghilev had declared against Nijinsky.'

Rehearsals began in Paris, with both Vaslav and Bronia working so hard they barely slept or ate. Under these strains there was no time for pleasantries. Bronia did not bother to hide her dislike of Romola, blaming her for what had befallen her brother.
‘I was the intruder
in the Russian ballet, in the family. She isolated herself behind a screen of ice which I could never penetrate. At Laroux's [sic], or at Viel's, I used to await them for lunch sometimes until four or five o'clock in the afternoon. But they worked and danced all the time.' Despite following the
ballet for all those months,
Romola had not grasped
the fact that this was what they had always done. The work of art came first: lunch, even with her, was just a distraction. Now, with a wife and expecting a baby, there was more pressure than ever on Vaslav; and no Diaghilev to wave his magic wand and make sure that the show would go on in the end.

As the opening night approached, it was evident that Vaslav had taken on too much. The administrative demands of running a company and managing the dancers were overwhelming, despite all the help Bronia could give him. On the day of the dress rehearsal, probably not coincidentally, Bronia received a summons to appear in court to answer charges of breaking her contract with Diaghilev. She missed the rehearsal, but the next day, by explaining that by allowing Fokina to dance her roles Diaghilev in fact had broken his contract with her, she won her case and was released. When she got to the theatre to dress for their first performance, Bronia found Vaslav dreadfully upset, having received an unexpected telegram: ‘CONGRATULATIONS BEST WISHES TO MUSIC HALL ARTIST. ANNA PAVLOVA.'

Their programme began after the comic singer, Wilkie Bard, whose most popular piece was performed in drag. Bronia and Vaslav stood on the darkened stage waiting for the music to begin; Maurice Ravel had reorchestrated Chopin's music for Vaslav's version of
Les Sylphides
. Bronia looked out over the audience and saw Diaghilev sprawled nonchalantly immediately to the left of the conductor. It was a deliberately conspicuous seat, intended to be noticed from stage. While they were dancing, Bronia's eyes kept flickering back to Diaghilev, whose gaze never left Vaslav.
Les Sylphides
had always been his favourite ballet. The sardonic smile he had been wearing before they started had disappeared and he seemed
‘to shrink
in his seat and his arms were tightly crossed' over his body, pudgy fingers tucked into his fists. ‘I do not believe that he applauded once, not during
Les Sylphides
and not at the end.' Their act was followed by the Bioscope, an early cinema.

Cyril Beaumont was in the audience as well, watching
‘with a pang
of disappointment'. Although Nijinsky danced with the same style and elevation, ‘he no longer danced like a god. Something of that mystic
fragrance which previously surrounded his dancing in
Les Sylphides
had vanished.' Beaumont knew Diaghilev, but he did not notice him at the Palace Theatre that night and nor did Romola; Bronia's is the only account that puts him there.

Alfred Butt was pleased with the nine encores Nijinsky received on the first night, the huge audiences he initially drew and the positive critical reception, which he reprinted in the Palace's advertisements, but Nijinsky was oppressed by having to shoehorn his soul into a vaudeville show. Almost worse was
‘the responsibility and
the necessity for constant supervision of details … He became subject to moods of intense irritability and depression, and he flew into a rage over the most trivial incident.' On one night it was the house lights being turned on while the sets were changed; on another it was a stagehand trying to flirt with Romola.

One afternoon Bronia and Vaslav walked out of the Savoy together, following a business meeting with Romola's mother and stepfather, Oskar Padany, who were trying to help plan the future of their son-in-law's small company. They almost collided with Bakst, who simply looked at them and walked quickly away. Both Bronia and Vaslav were devastated by his behaviour.
‘It was as if
our friend had lashed us with a whip.'

By the start of the second week disaster loomed. Vaslav's relations with Butt had already been soured by Butt's businesslike approach to his art, which he considered disrespectful – in Russia, tsars bowed to artists – and when Butt suggested that slowing ticket sales might be improved by adding a Russian number to his programme of Russian ballet he was irrationally furious, squatting down in Butt's office and angrily lashing out his legs in a few steps of the
prisyadka
, shouting,
‘Is this what
you want to see from Nijinsky?'

On Saturday, 14 March, Vaslav and his company danced matinee and evening performances, although Bronia had to persuade an enraged Vaslav to go on stage as the Rose because the orchestra had played Tchaikovsky –
‘a wretched choice
of music' – during the pause before
Spectre
began. This may have been the incident Cyril Beaumont heard
about, in which Vaslav became uncontrollably angry, rolling on the floor of his dressing room, refusing to get into his costume, with his dresser and some others wringing their hands and weeping. The theatre's manager Maurice Volny thought he was about to have a fit. He threw a jug of water over him and shouted at him to get up and get dressed, which Vaslav did. This was by no means Nijinsky's first backstage tantrum but it was the first without Zuikov to guard him inside his dressing room and Diaghilev to defend him outside it. It did not augur well.

She could not know it then, but that was the last time Bronia would ever dance with her brother or see him perform onstage. The next morning Romola telephoned Bronia to say that Vaslav was running a high fever. He was unable to dance for three consecutive performances – a breach of contract – and the season was cancelled. The Saison Nijinsky was replaced by (among others) the ballad singer and actress Evie Greene and Hetty King, a comic singer who performed dressed as a man.

Although she thought it was probably a relief for Vaslav – an end to the practical worries of trying to organise a company and, more importantly, an end to the effort of putting commerce before art – Bronia blamed Romola for not protecting Vaslav better in this, his first formally negotiated engagement. Since she knew so much about money and business, Bronia observed tartly, and spoke perfect English, she might have read the complicated document her inexperienced husband had signed.

While Vaslav recuperated from flu and what was perhaps his first nervous breakdown, preparations were in course for the first concert performance of
Le Sacre du printemps
in Paris. It had already been played once in St Petersburg, in February, and on 14 April at the Casino de Paris Pierre Monteux conducted it before an audience for the second time. Camille Saint-Saëns, who sat with Monteux's mother, was no more convinced by a second hearing – he kept repeating, ‘
Mais, il est fou, il est fou!
' – but others were. Stravinsky was carried out of the theatre on the shoulders of cheering fans. He never looked back.

It was after this triumph that Stravinsky began, as one historian has phrased it,
‘busily revising his past
'. His autobiography, ghost-written in the 1930s by Walter Nouvel, describes
Sacre
as having been a task
too great for Nijinsky's capabilities. He had apparently had misgivings about working with Nijinsky from the start, Stravinsky wrote, because
‘his ignorance of
the most elementary notions of music was flagrant. The poor boy knew nothing of music'.

Perhaps he hoped that belittling his collaborator would mean he could take all the credit for
Sacre
's revolutionary impact: though Nijinsky's
Sacre
was not danced again after its nine performances in 1913 until revivals in the 1980s, at the time
many believed his work
was more radical than Stravinsky's. Perhaps Diaghilev exerted pressure on him to cut ties with Nijinsky as he had done with Bakst, or persuaded him that the radical choreography had made
Sacre
unpopular (he told Massine it had failed as a ballet because Nijinsky
‘had attempted to do
too much … He had not realised that the eye and the ear cannot absorb simultaneously as much as the ear alone'). Almost certainly Stravinsky hoped that if he could persuade people to think of
Sacre
as concert music rather than a ballet it would be accepted as great more quickly. He was always, as Bronia put it,
‘very sensitive to
applause'. Only many years later, long after Nijinsky's death, did Stravinsky admit that he had been
‘unjust
' to Nijinsky and that his was
‘by far the best
' version of
Sacre
.

In May 1914 Nijinsky went to Spain to perform for King Alfonso at the wedding of Belle, the daughter of the American Ambassador to Spain, to Kermit Roosevelt, son of the former President. On his way back to a heavily pregnant Romola in London, he stopped in Paris to see the premiere of
Le Legende de Joseph
– the Strauss ballet that was to have been his. He took an unobtrusive seat in the stalls, but during the interval went up to Misia Sert's usual box. A frozen silence greeted him, and then Cocteau said,
‘This year
, your creation is a child. The Spectre de la Rose chooses the part of a father. How utterly disgusting is birth.' Vaslav replied, ‘The entrance of the Spectre de la Rose's child will be quite as beautiful as his own, which you always admired'. He bowed and left.

Following several months' intensive tuition with Cecchetti, Léonide Massine was dancing the part of Joseph. He was so gorgeous, and he wore such a skimpy sheepskin tunic (designed in part by Diaghilev), that wits called the ballet
Les Jambes de Joseph
. Vaslav saw straight through
him:
‘Massine's aim is
simple. He wants to become rich and learn everything that Diaghilev knows.' Elsewhere he would write that Diaghilev had given Aleksey Mavrin ‘a taste for
objets d'art
' to make him love him, and
‘Massine a taste for fame
. I did not take to objects and fame'.

Harry Kessler had tried and failed to persuade Diaghilev to retain Nijinsky as choreographer for
Joseph
. He and Strauss thought Nijinsky the only person capable of communicating Joseph's
‘terrible beauty
', which contained within its perfection a destructive element – Mephisto and God in one; but Diaghilev, still smarting, could not be convinced and had used Fokine.
Joseph
was one of the least successful of his ballets and would not be performed again after the 1914 season. ‘Everything goes much
deeper
than I thought,' Kessler wrote. ‘Diaghilev is mortified in his vanity, in his
sentiment
, in his pocket, in
everything
.'

The critics were divided about
Joseph
. One congratulated Fokine for bringing back to the Ballets Russes
‘all the
graceful attitudes and harmonious gestures which M. Nijinsky, with his grotesque ideas, sought to abolish'. Jacques Rivière remained loyal: without Nijinsky the Ballets Russes were nothing. ‘He alone gave life to the whole company.'

Lady Ripon also made several unsuccessful attempts to bring Nijinsky and Diaghilev back together. But although she persuaded the Drury Lane Theatre (today the Theatre Royal) to make Nijinsky's dancing with the Ballets Russes for three nights a condition of their appearance there that summer, she could not make the dancers welcome him back. The reception he received was glacial – they simply turned their backs on him when he arrived – and Diaghilev refused to see him at all. He lasted
‘one single excruciating
and humiliating rehearsal' before leaving London and returning to Vienna where Romola and their newborn baby were waiting for him.
*
‘Now I am beginning
to think that it was Diag. [sic] who suggested to Fokine that he should refuse to return to the Ballet if Nijinsky was there,' a disappointed Lady Ripon wrote
to Misia Sert, ‘or that anyway he has done nothing to make the thing possible.'

While Lady Ripon continued to consider Nijinsky her friend and had sympathised with his desire to marry, she found Romola
‘avaricious [and]
anaemic'. Ottoline Morrell, on the other hand, thought Romola delightful and pitied ‘the little dancer and his pregnant wife. In 1913, everybody had wanted to know him, now nobody did.' To Lytton Strachey in the summer of 1914 Vaslav was no longer an idol but – perhaps partly because of his marriage, a betrayal of Strachey's homosexual creed –
‘that cretinous lackey
'.

Vaslav returned to Vienna where Romola and their newborn daughter were waiting for him. When the baby was overdue and Romola and Vaslav were anxious for her arrival, a friend suggested they attend a performance of Richard Strauss's complex opera,
Elektra
: Kyra was born later that night. Despite having longed for a boy during Romola's pregnancy, Vaslav was so happy to be with his wife and baby that all their recent difficulties were forgotten; and when news came of the assassination of an archduke and his wife in far-off Sarajevo it seemed at first a distant and irrelevant tragedy.