Colum McCann - Dancer

Clarinda found the magazines and stacked them strategically under the three Ionesco plays. I felt like a naughty son, yet I kept my jaw solid, said nothing.

The hotel room was full of assistants, lights, wires, hairdressers, waiters with trays. The makeup artist whispered that Avedon was likely to make a flamboyant entrance. I watched the door, waited. It was a trick, a good one. In reality he was there all along, among his assistants, watching, getting to know me, preparing the angles in his mind. He told them all to leave and the champagne was opened. When I took my clothes off he said: Me oh my.

In the morning I awoke crazed with fear. Gillian called his studio and threatened to sue if he ever published the pictures. Avedon sent me a telegram: Your (big) secret is safe with me.

Erik lay back and fell asleep. (I recalled Anna making Sergei’s imprint on her pillow.) His breath was uneven and stank of cigarettes. Song of a Wayfarer. I kissed him and packed.

Instead of coming through a tunnel the limousine driver wanted to cross the upper deck of a bridge. He said I should see the city lit up. My escorts thought it would be uninteresting, they said the bridge was old and decrepit, but I shouted: Let’s go across the fucking bridge! The driver grinned.

The city was a crazed jewel. I stuck my head out of the window. One of the escorts kept repeating that fewer apartments were lit up as it was a Jewish holiday. (Another neurotic kike.)

I couldn’t stand their chatter anymore so I switched seats and sat with the driver up front. On instructions he closed the glass screen behind us. He was listening to Charlie Parker on the radio. He says they called him Bird because he never had his feet on the ground.

(Nijinsky declined to come down at all. Perhaps every madman prefers it in the air.)

Walked up and down by the newsstand, watched people pick up their copies of The New York Times, thinking, I am en l’air in a million arms. The photograph caught me in perfect line.

Sasha! Tamara! Mother! Father! Ufa! Leningrad! Do you hear me? I am hailing you from the Avenue of the Americas!

Snow and not too much traffic. The fur coat drew laughter and a few smiles. Outside the Apollo a woman recognized me and a crowd gathered. Someone said: Do a Sammy Davis! I stood on a fire hydrant, pirouetted and they roared.

Back down St. Nicholas Avenue in the car. (Nobody believes me when I say there are no beggars in Russia.)

On The Ed Sullivan Show he simply couldn’t pronounce my name.

He had no interest in ballet and he said as much. But he was a pure gentleman with perfect manners. Each hair combed into place. He said that dance was Jacqueline’s joy, so for years he had been trying to develop an honest interest. He claimed that watching Margot and me on television had changed his perspective completely (a brazen lie of course and quite stupid).

He ushered us into the Oval Office. His suit was cut beautifully and his tie was slightly loose. He swung in his chair the whole five minutes. Towards the end of the pleasantries he looked at my feet, said I was a symbol of pure political courage.

Outside, on the lawn, the secret service agents were hovering. Later Jacqueline came in carrying tea and he had to excuse himself.

Walking Margot and me to the helicopter, Jacqueline hooked her arm in mine, said she hoped we would return, that she and her husband hold us both in the highest artistic esteem. In the helicopter we sat in an awed silence while the figures on the lawn grew smaller. (I was momentarily climbing a staircase in Leningrad and the police were chasing me.)

Newsweek: You seem to plow your soul under in order to seed your very own Albrecht.

(a sudden panic imagining Father at the garden plot.)

Pardon me?

For Albrecht you successfully create a new persona.

I am an actor.

But surely you are more than—

Oh no more stupid questions please.

In the room next door I could hear her, already awake. I went to greet her. She smiled and began stretching — neckrolls and leg stretches in a carefully timed sequence. Without thinking, Margot was able to put both her feet behind her head and carry on a conversation. The irony is she claims to be afraid of growing old.

(Lesson: continue to work always for mobility.)

The cover of Time and Newsweek —in the very same week. Gillian was ecstatic.

November 22, 1963. The weeping started outside the windows in the late afternoon, but nobody told us until six o’clock. Margot turned to the pianist, asked her to play Bach, but she was too overcome by grief, her fingers shaking above the keys. We sat in silence, then sent a telegram to Jacqueline. Our performance was canceled. In the streets people carried candles.

In the Russian Tea Room the maître d’ asked for a minute of silence, disturbed only by some fool who knocked his fork from the table.

A letter came through from Yulia to say she is divorced. She has nowhere to live. Our shithole country.

Another twelve hours in preparation for Raymonda. It is strange that the corps is so surprised when they come to watch me rehearse or when I give class. They sit in the corridor, smoking foul cigarettes, which makes me want to kick them in the ass down to the Ministry of Labor, if there is such a thing. They are lazy shits, their weak legs, unworked turnout, careless feet, they need to be transformed, one and all. The trombones sound like sick cattle, the pianist even worse. Not to mention the stagehands, who threatened yet another strike because the parrots are real and their shit falls from the cages in the wings. The poor bastards complain because they have to mop up.

Margot could hardly talk, her voice quivered uncontrollably. She said the bullet entered Tito’s chest and came out the other side.

In Stoke Mandeville Hospital, after the visit with Tito (lying in bed, saying nothing), we were guided around the wards. The fourteen-year-old girl paralyzed from the neck down said she often imagines being Margot and then her legs can move.

A beautiful eight-year-old had drawn a crayon picture, using her teeth. It was a picture of me dancing in a field, and the little girl had drawn herself watching from the perch of a flowering tree. There was a loveheart on the flip side, both our names in the middle, Oona and Rudolf.

I told her I would hang it in my dressing room. The child could barely move her head and there was spit on her lips, but her eyes were bright blue and she almost was able to turn her mouth into a smile. She said she didn’t wish for much but if she ever got to heaven the first thing she would want to do is dance.

(Some asshole photographer caught me weeping in the corridor.)

Tito will never walk again so Margot must go on performing to pay the hospital bills. Of course she is so very English, she doesn’t see the irony of this. (I am loathe to tell her that Tito deserves what he got.) Outside, she switched her handbag from side to side, dabbed a handkerchief at her eyes, then rushed back in to see him once more.

The telegram from Princess Grace for the opening night. Quite daring: Merde! With love, G. Other greetings, the King of Norway, Princess Margaret, etc. Twenty different bouquets in the room. Out the window the rain seemed to shine in a dozen colors. The hotel doorbell rang — a bouquet from Margot to say everything is all right, she wished she were dancing.

All Italy was there. Yet the presence of fame does not compensate for the absences in my performances. The Raymonda pas de deux was, of course, abysmal without her, but even the solo was a bucket of shit. Afterwards Spoleto seemed to have lost its magic, and the thought of the hotel room was depressing. I canceled dinner, dismissed everyone, remained all night to repair the evening’s mistakes.