Nijinsky (35 page)

Romola's myth-making
Nijinsky
, edited in part by critic and writer Arnold Haskell and dedicated to Dezentje, was published in 1934 and became a bestseller. But while it eased Romola's financial worries, the portrait she unwittingly painted of herself was of a manipulative, selfish and superficial woman and the book turned both her daughters against her (there was no mention of Tamara at all) and made public her old rift with Bronia. The following year, Stravinsky (aided by Nouvel) published the first volume of his autobiography in which he was bitingly derogatory about Nijinsky's choreography for
Sacre
.
By then his masterpiece
had already been hailed (possibly initially by Diaghilev) as being what, for the twentieth century, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was for the nineteenth.

Hoping to capitalise on the interest in his old schoolmate, in 1937 Anatole Bourman brought out
The Tragedy of Nijinsky
. Aggressively ghostwritten by Miss D. Lyman, it placed Bourman at the heart of Vaslav's story for almost fifteen years and present at every important event in his life. Although Bourman had been Vaslav's contemporary at the Imperial Theatre School and had danced in the Ballets Russes's
corps
, and so cannot be discounted, many of the scenes he and Lyman described, especially later in Nijinsky's life, were entirely invented. But, as Kirstein would observe,
‘sometimes one can snatch
the residue of Bourman's actual reminiscences from the airy lies of his collaborator'.

The same year Romola published a severely cut (by almost half) and edited version of Vaslav's diary. The polished result was intended to make Nijinsky sound like a noble, romantic, tormented genius, so she removed all references to defecation and most references to sex and rearranged the structure to make it more coherent. Any unflattering descriptions of her – for example,
‘My wife is an untwinkling star
' – were left out.

She had asked Sigmund Freud's advice about Vaslav, but he bluntly told her analysis was no use in dealing with schizophrenia; Carl Jung (another friend of Binswanger's) also refused to get involved. When she approached Alfred Adler, he was willing to look at Vaslav's case – and at her request wrote a piece intended to be the introduction to the published diary – but she disagreed with his conclusions and did not use his article. Adler theorised that Vaslav suffered from an inferiority complex. His life had been a series of punishments:
‘punishment at school
for being a prodigy; from Diaghilev, his surrogate father, for creating masterpieces, as a god might challenge his creator; punishment for marrying Romola'. Adler recommended greater understanding of his problems; Romola just thought he needed better – or more – medicine.

The drama critic John Heilpern, whose 1982 article in
The Times
revealed Adler's suppressed work on Nijinsky, agreed with many of Vaslav's friends that Romola was more a part of his problem than its cure. Having trapped him into marriage, and into a cycle of needing to dance for money, he ‘fought back … finding cover from her domination behind his illness while enslaving her with his dependency'. Tamara Nijinsky could not argue with this assessment of their destructive interdependence. While her mother was fond of
‘this exceptional, gentle
human being, guilt and anger must have entered her soul for maybe ruining his life', and – though Tamara did not say this – quite possibly also for Vaslav ruining hers.

In 1937 Nijinsky's family gathered for the first and only time at Kreuzlingen. Tamara came from Budapest with Emilia and Oskar Padany and Tessa, her aunt; and Kyra joined them with her new husband – not by coincidence, Igor Markevitch, Diaghilev's last protégé – and their baby son, Vaslav. Although Romola had barely seen Vaslav for over a decade she still
‘complained about everything
' to the doctors at Bellevue and was as negligent about paying her bills as Diaghilev. Tamara said that when Romola was with Vaslav, ‘she was every inch the gentle, devoted and understanding wife … And then, the incredible metamorphosis – the moment he was out of sight the poised, cold, elusive Romola was
back.' She was, Tamara wrote elsewhere,
‘incapable of showing
unfeigning warmth and tenderness toward a child'.

Romola would not allow anyone else, even the nurses, to be alone with Vaslav. Once when she was called to the telephone, Tamara, aged seventeen, was left with her father for a few minutes. Nervously she picked him a bunch of flowers.
‘Silently, he gazed
at the daisies, lifted them upward to the sky … like an offering, then sank back in his chair, shut his eyes, and pressed the flowers to his heart.' Even behind the veil of madness Nijinsky's eloquence as an actor was unmistakable.

Later that year Anton Dolin organised a charity gala to raise funds for Nijinsky's care, at which he danced with Margot Fonteyn and, in the most beautiful moment of the evening (for Dolin), Tamara Karsavina talked about her memories of Vaslav. Ottoline and Philip Morrell were members of the committee of the new Nijinsky Foundation, formed with the proceeds. The money was desperately needed because Romola had decided – against the wishes of the Binswangers – to have Vaslav treated with insulin shock therapy. These massive (and expensive) injections were designed by Dr Manfred Sakel (now discredited) to provoke severe hypoglycaemic shock that would jolt the patient's system out of insanity.

By modern standards, the amount of medication Vaslav was given was staggering – insulin, bromides, barbiturates, morphine, neuroleptics, scopolamine, opium – but Romola was determined to believe he would recover. After his insulin cure began, she let it be known that soon Nijinsky would be dancing once again and in 1940 she released a photograph of them, their faces strained in rictuses of optimism.

In about 1939 Lifar visited him for the third time, with Romola, his brother Leonid Lifar and some press photographers; another gala was planned and they wanted to promote it. After the shock therapy, he found Vaslav more sociable and less obviously anguished – his nail beds were no longer torn and bloody – but the shy, childlike, confiding smile was gone. He talked to himself constantly, mostly unintelligibly, in a mixture of languages. When he was offered strawberries, he ate them with exquisite delicacy, exclaiming,
‘How good!
How good!'

Lifar wanted to dance for Vaslav (and the photographers) and he changed into practice clothes and began warming up at a barre which had been installed for him. Behind him Vaslav said, ‘You might fall into the air.' Romola and Leonid Lifar were astonished when, after Lifar had performed
Faune
with Vaslav correcting his steps, Vaslav joined in as Lifar danced
Le Spectre de la Rose
, executing an
entrechat-six,
a
bourrée
and some
cabrioles
. When they had finished, Vaslav giggled and retreated back into his private world.

Convinced that Vaslav was better in her care than at Kreuzlingen, and with nowhere else to go and no way of obtaining papers or passports in wartime (a particularly difficult task because most countries, including Britain and the United States, were reluctant to admit someone with a mental illness, even if he was Nijinsky), Romola took Vaslav to Budapest when war broke out.

They arrived in 1940 to find Emilia and Oskar had left the city rather than being there to welcome them home. Though family tensions again ran nearly as high as international ones, Tamara was overjoyed to be with her father for the second time in her life. Torn between her warring grandmother and mother, aware of the violence simmering inside her father – once she watched him smash Emilia's favourite chair to splinters – most of the time she
‘simply relished being in his presence
because there he always radiated serenity and love'.

When life in Budapest became too dangerous for Vaslav and Romola, as well as for Emilia and Oskar (though he had converted to marry Emilia, he had been born Jewish and they were sheltering Jews in their house), the Nijinskys moved for a few months to Lake Balaton before receiving a visit from the local police who suspected them of being Russian agents. They returned to Budapest and then found a rented house outside the capital. In 1943 they moved closer to the Austrian border to await the longed-for German retreat, living very humbly in a tiny hamlet in the woods.

They survived desperate living conditions and heavy American bombing throughout 1944 and into 1945. One day Romola arrived
home to find a dust-covered Vaslav standing silently in a roofless room. Sometimes he stayed at the local hospital, where she hoped he might be safer, until the afternoon when he was brought home by a nurse who told her they had received orders to exterminate their mental patients the following morning. In March 1945 the Western press reported that the Nazis had killed Nijinsky, but that August he was seen alive again. Because they were using false papers there was no way of looking for or identifying them.

The war brought out Romola's best qualities: charm, resourcefulness, energy and devotion. Mr Quand, the ballet-loving young general manager of the National Bank of Hungary, whom Romola had invited herself to meet when she and Vaslav needed money, always magically managed to replenish their account when it looked as though it might be empty. For five years she managed to keep them both fed, clothed and alive, while she looked after a seriously ill man in the most challenging of conditions.

The Russian soldiers who occupied their part of Hungary near Sopron once peace was declared gave Vaslav a new lease of life. For the first time for many years he could speak Russian once again, and shyly he began to engage with them, listening to their folk songs and stories, even dancing with them as they sat around their campfires.

With peacetime came their first move, along with Romola's devoted cousin Paul, to Vienna where the manager of the Sacher Hotel agreed to allow them to stay. While they were in Vienna they were ‘found' by Margaret Power, a ballet-loving widow of thirty-seven who worked for the Allied Commission in Vienna. Before she left London, Cyril Beaumont had told her to try and look out for the Nijinskys, as they would almost certainly be in need of money and help. She brought them a parcel of tea, biscuits, chocolate and toothpaste and became very close to Vaslav. Although he barely spoke, he expressed his affection for her in gentle patting.
‘I fell in love
with him with Vienna,' Power told biographer Richard Buckle, ‘and have remained so ever since.'

In Vienna, the Russians made a bid to woo Vaslav back home, putting on a performance in his honour at the Ronacher Theatre by the company which was the descendant of the old Mariinsky, inheritors of
the traditions with which he had grown up. It began with a piece from the
Nutcracker Suite
and went on to include Russian and Polish national dances and a gypsy
divertissement
, before ending with
Les Sylphides
. Vaslav followed the dancers with perceptible movements of his own body and at the end applauded with all the abandon of a student.

Romola was increasingly obsessed by the hope that Vaslav might return to sanity, issuing reports in 1945 of his ‘complete recovery' and proposing to the Met in New York that he might even be well enough to dance
Petrushka
for them. But her ideas were roundly condemned in a
News Review
article of October that year: Lydia Lopokova declared her sadness at the prospect and cabled Vaslav not to make the attempt; the Met was accused of
‘sensation mongering
and bad taste' and Tamara Karsavina was provoked to an outspoken ‘cruel, very cruel'.

In the summer of 1946, helped by the money left over in the Nijinsky Foundation's account and by Margaret Power and Anton Dolin, who had been raising money for Vaslav in America during the war, Vaslav and Romola went to Switzerland again. Power visited occasionally from Vienna and played table tennis with Vaslav.
‘Sometimes he would kiss my cheek
, always quite unexpectedly – not in greeting or farewell, but just out of affection.'

Late the following year Romola obtained her British passport and permission for Vaslav to live in England too. After spending Christmas of 1948 in a hotel courtesy of Romola's friend Alexander Korda, they rented a house near Windsor. Still focused on his recovery, Romola hoped to take Vaslav to America to consult doctors there. She and Lifar paraded Vaslav in front of press cameras to publicise a gala performance in November to raise money for the trip, but it brought in an inadequate £132 rather than the £1,000 they had been expecting; grandly Romola refused the money, donating it instead to the Sadler's Wells Benevolent Fund.

Encountering him at the BBC in 1950, Arnold Haskell thought Vaslav looked like
‘a plump and well-contented
suburban commercial traveller. He watched the proceedings [a reheasal of a Lifar ballet] with no interest and the only reaction I saw was one of pleasure when the tea
was brought in.' A journalist who met him during this period described him as being
‘like a docile child
until he flashed an eternally-wise smile that made everybody else in the room seem a thousand years behind him'.

In early 1950 they moved to a house in Sussex.
‘Like gypsies
,' Vaslav said sadly as Romola packed their things again. Despite living a more normal life than he had done for decades, Vaslav's physical health was declining and on 8 April 1950 he died quietly of kidney failure after a short illness, with Romola at his side. He only had £30 to leave to her. Although, because of the rift with Romola, Vaslav had barely seen her in recent years, Kyra was named as his daughter in the obituaries; there was no mention of a second child.

His first funeral was held at the Catholic Church in Spanish Place, St James's, on 14 April. At the last minute George Balanchine could not come, so the pall-bearers were Serge Lifar, Anton Dolin, Frederick Ashton, Richard Buckle, Michael Somes and Cyril Beaumont. Of these, Buckle noted, only Beaumont had seen Nijinsky
‘in his glory
'. Lifar laid a wreath of primroses by the grave. It was a beautiful spring day; the buds on the trees were about to burst into leaf. The mourners at the burial at the Marylebone cemetery in Finchley Road included Marie Rambert, Tamara Karsavina and Lydia Sokolova, as well as Margaret Power and the Indian dancer, Ram Gopal.