Nijinsky (28 page)

IN LATE JULY 1914
they went to Budapest to introduce Kyra to her grandmother. From there they planned to travel to St Petersburg to see Eleonora and meet Bronia's little girl, Irina, but Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary on 29 July in response to the Empire's invasion of Serbia. All trains going east were suspended and it was impossible to find another way out of the city. There was nothing the Russian consul could do to help; he was trying to flee too. After a few days, a shy police officer, dressed in civilian clothes, came to Emilia's house and told Vaslav and Romola that as enemy subjects they were prisoners of war and would have to remain for the foreseeable future in Budapest under house arrest.

No one was happy about this turn of events. Emilia Márkus did not want a Russian living in her house and urged her daughter to divorce Vaslav so that she could be Hungarian again. Romola, however, did not want to live with her mother. Nijinsky was miserable because there was nowhere for him to practise; and the war troubled him deeply, as all around them euphoric soldiers with soft cheeks went off singing to the front.
‘All these young men
marching off to their death,' he said, ‘and for what?'

The servants distrusted their Russian house-guest and Vaslav did not
endear himself to anyone by refusing to dance a benefit for the Hungarian soldiers who were going off to kill his countrymen. His consolation for being in Budapest – hot chocolate layered with cream and Dobos torta at the old-fashioned Ruszwurm Patisserie near the Coronation Church – was soon curtailed by wartime rationing. Everything that went wrong was blamed on him: when the boiler broke down or when the unused parts of the house became damp. When Emilia's cat – a very ordinary sort of cat, Romola commented crossly – went missing, she accused Vaslav of killing it. What Vaslav later remembered of this period was being depressed; he and Emilia
‘quarrelled for eighteen months
on end'.

Thrown together in a hostile atmosphere, Vaslav and Romola learned to lean on one another: their relationship, their young family, was all they had. Though in some places in his diary he wrote of hating Romola, particularly her obsession with money, other memories make clear that they did love each other.
‘I loved her
terribly. I gave her everything I could. She loved me.' Living with the Márkus family (it has to be said, including Romola) was like inhabiting a den of snakes; Sigmund Freud, who published
On Narcissism
the year war broke out, would have had a field day with them. Romola believed her mother and stepfather were informing on Vaslav to the authorities; her sister, Tessa, charming but too heavy a drinker, tried to seduce Vaslav, inviting him into her room while she was undressed, deliberately lying on the bed in front of him, wearing
‘small silk panties
and thin camisoles'; if Emilia thought Oskar was looking at the servants, she would slap their faces.

When the wet nurse refused to feed Kyra any more because she was Russian, Vaslav took over her care, learning how to sterilise and prepare the bottles, and fed her himself. He painted her little nursery and its furniture in bright colours so that it looked like
‘an enchanted habitation
of a Russian fairy-tale'. Unlike his own father, Vaslav was tenderly devoted to Kyra, determined she would love him as he had not loved Foma. He spent hours with her, playfully childlike once again; she called him Tataka and no one else interested her.

Vaslav spent much of his time working on a system of dance notation, a concept to which he had been devoted since his time at the
Imperial Theatre School; he hoped to
‘invent signs which
will enable the gestures [of dance] to be fixed for all time' – and he was also thinking about future ballets. One was set to Richard Strauss's tone-poem,
Till Eulenspiegel
, about a Puck or Robin Hood figure, the irrepressible ‘merry prankster' of German folklore; another was set to Franz Liszt's
Mephisto Valse
. Sometimes for fun he would dance for Romola and her cousin Lily or her sister – wild gypsy dances he remembered from his youth, or imitations of the great ballerinas with whom he had danced (his parody of Kshesinskaya was their favourite).
‘But we loved it
most when he showed us how the peasant women flirt whilst dancing. He had an inimitable way of throwing inviting glances, and undulating in such a lascivious manner as to stir up the senses of the spectator almost to frenzy.'

In 1915 Lady Ripon managed to get word to them that she was trying to obtain their release and then, after a year, help came from an unexpected source. Diaghilev, who needed Nijinsky to star in a Ballets Russes tour of the United States that he hoped would pay off all his debts, had begun to agitate on their behalf.

As early as the summer of 1914 he had been making noises about one day working with Nijinsky again, whether to pacify Stravinsky and Harry Kessler, who still valued him, or because it was simply his pattern to fall out spectacularly with collaborators who questioned his authority and then readmit them, chastened, to the fold, is not clear. In June 1914 Diaghilev had suggested Kessler write a libretto for a ballet Nijinsky would dance with Karsavina and Massine; that November he had told Stravinsky that despite how stupidly he was behaving, Nijinsky should choreograph
Les Noces
– though he was not prepared to discuss it with him yet. At this stage, the gravity of Nijinsky's position in Budapest had not sunk in.

Throughout 1915 Vaslav's friends – including Diaghilev, Lady Ripon, the duke of Alba, the king of Spain, Otto Kahn of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and the Comtesse Greffulhe – lobbied the American ambassador in Vienna and the US Secretary of State on his
and Romola's behalf, and by early 1916 the pressure they had exerted on the Hungarian government had secured their release. With Kyra, a nanny, a maid and sixteen trunks that Romola (with the help of Madame Greffulhe) had managed to fill on their twenty-four-hour stop in Paris, they arrived in New York in April. Diaghilev, who had travelled out to New York in January with the rest of the company for a preliminary tour, was waiting for them on the dock with Massine, holding a large bunch of ‘American Beauty' roses for Romola. But there would be no real reconciliation.

The deal was that Nijinsky would be the star of the Ballets Russes's autumn season at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and then their extended tour around the United States in the winter. When they met Otto Kahn a few days after their arrival, Romola told him that Vaslav was only willing to dance if Diaghilev paid him the money he owed him from past seasons. After intense negotiations, it was agreed that Diaghilev would repay Nijinsky part of a total of $24,000 each week along with his salary – dashing Diaghilev's hopes that the American tour would make him financially independent.

A few days later, Diaghilev invited them to lunch. He was alone when they arrived at Sherry's, Massine having remained behind at the Ritz. At first he tried to speak to Vaslav in Russian, reproaching him for his demands for money; Vaslav spoke in French and insisted that Romola should be party to any business discussion they had. Romola recounted the conversation:

‘I now have a family
to support, but I am willing to do now, as in the past, my utmost for the Russian Ballet. I am the same; I have not changed towards you. I am grateful for your past friendship, and it only depends upon you for us to be united again in our common aim. My wife is part of me, and she understands this, and wants, as much as I do, to further the cause of the Russian Ballet. Please, please understand me.'

‘We never had any contract; there was never any question of money between us. What has happened to you, Vaslav?'

‘But, Sergey Pavlovich, you take money from the theatres, and you make them pay it in advance, too. Be just,' interrupted Romola.

‘No, it will become impossible for me to run the Russian Ballet. Fokina wants to manage Fokine and dance all the leading roles. You, Madame, are mercenary. How do you expect the Russian Ballet to exist under such conditions?'

By this time, Diaghilev had been in the US four months, and he was persuaded by Kahn to return to Europe leaving Nijinsky in charge of the company as artistic director. Kahn hoped that Diaghilev's absence would ease the pressure on Nijinsky; he was prepared for a small loss in return for the glory of having brought the Ballets Russes to the United States.
‘Everyone but Kahn
, Nijinsky and Romola realised this was madness,' wrote Sokolova.

Diaghilev left in early May with Massine and Grigoriev. Vaslav would spend the summer in the US and most of the rest of the company – minus Diaghilev, Massine, Grigoriev and the dancers trapped in war-torn Russia, including Bronia, Karsavina and Fokine – would regroup to begin their New York season and fifty-two-city tour of the United States in September, while Diaghilev would maintain a small experimental troupe in Europe.

At first New York was as exciting and new as Paris had been in 1909. Late at night Vaslav and Romola would sneak out to soda fountains for ice-creams, sitting on high stools at the counter, and he loved jazz, tapping out what he had heard with his hands and feet. Romola blossomed: living in New York as the wife of a feted artist was just what she had always believed life should be. But her desire for money, luxury and social success blinded her to the fact that her worldly goals
‘harmed rather than abetted
her husband'. Little by little the intimacy they had created and relied upon in Budapest began to wear away.

As soon as they were settled, Vaslav began working on
Till Eulenspeigel
and
Mephisto Valse
, which he planned to premiere that autumn. The young artist he chose to create
Till
's sets and costumes, Robert Edmond Jones, left an evocative account of working with Nijinsky over the summer of 1916. They met for the first time in a darkened New York drawing room on a stifling afternoon. Romola entered first,
‘extremely pretty
' and stylishly dressed in black. Vaslav followed, small and stocky,
with a delicate, precise dancer's walk. ‘He is very nervous. His eyes are troubled. He looks eager, anxious, excessively intelligent. He seems tired, bored, excited, all at once.' His manner was direct and simple, but when he smiled – which was not often, and never for long – his smile was dazzling.

‘I like him at once … I realise at once that I am in the presence of a genius.' What Jones meant by this was, he said, ‘a continual preoccupation with standards of excellence so high that they are really not of this world … incredible perfections'. He was struck, too, by Vaslav's ‘extraordinary nervous energy … an impression of something too eager, too brilliant, a quickening of the nerves, a nature wracked to dislocation by a merciless creative urge'. It may have been hindsight but he also noticed an atmosphere of something like oppression that Vaslav carried with him.

Nijinsky, Romola and Kyra decamped to Bar Harbor, Maine, with Jones in their wake.
‘I am quartered
in a huge old-fashioned summer hotel, all piazzas and towers, with curving driveways and mammoth beds of angry red cannas on the lawns. Nijinsky lives there, too, with his pretty wife – always a little
souffrante
from the heat – and an enchanting baby girl with oblique Mongolian eyes like her father's. He practises long and hard during the day with his accompanist in the lovely little Greek temple set among the pines by the shore of the bay. In the evenings we work together until far into the night.' As they created
Till
, Jones was astonished and delighted by Vaslav's
‘energy, his ardour
, his daring, his blazing imagination, by turns fantastic, gorgeous, grotesque' and by his ability to change in an instant from a wide-eyed, mischievous child to a demonic figure to a jeering clown to a tender, imploring lover.

He was constantly reminded what a surreal world Nijinsky inhabited. One afternoon they were invited to a club for a swim. Vaslav and Jones were dressing in adjacent cabanas after swimming when Jones answered a tap at his door. A tall man, exquisitely dressed in pearl-grey, with a silvery, scented moustache, was standing there. Without saying anything, he took a pearl-grey leather case from his pocket and opened it, holding it out to Jones. A tangle of cabochon rubies, emeralds, black
pearls and diamonds lay glittering in the sunlight on a bed of pearl-grey velvet. Jones heard Nijinsky putting on his shoes next door and burst out laughing at the situation in which he found himself. The pearl-grey stranger closed his case and silently walked away.

This strange idyll came to an end when they returned to New York at the beginning of September. The conductor Pierre Monteux met them there and found everyone in the company on edge. Vaslav, in particular, was
‘suspicious of everyone
and hostile'. Anatole Bourman, who had called Nijinsky
‘universally loved despite
the occasional fits of temperament which marked his genius' when he left the Ballet in 1913, said that in New York three years later he was conceited,
‘pompous [and]
… totally devoid of sincerity or naturalness'. Diaghilev had known how to manage Nijinsky, commented Lydia Lopokova, who danced opposite him during this period, and
‘when he came on stage
he was a god to all of us, but on tour he was rather tiresome'. She and Vaslav never gelled as a partnership and their offstage relationship remained uneasy.

The Met's young press agent, Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud's nephew, who would go on to become a public relations legend), marvelled at the way the company lived and worked:
‘I had never imagined
that the interpersonal relations of the members of a group could be so involved and complex, full of medieval intrigue, illicit love, misdirected passion and aggression.'

Lydia Lopokova was just one of the dancers who had joined the Ballet Russes for this tour. Dmitry Kostrovsky had been in the Bolshoy's
corps de ballet
in Moscow with Massine. Kostrovsky was an ardent disciple of Tolstoy; Romola often noticed him preaching to the other dancers Tolstoy's rational gospel of vegetarianism and pacifism. Along with his friend from the Bolshoy, Nicholas Zverev,
*
who had been a member of the company since 1913, he focused on Vaslav at once. Vaslav, whose
hunger for a spiritual life was not answered by the mundanity of his work – all the art having been removed by the need to administrate – nor by his sophisticated, selfish wife, responded eagerly.