Afternoon and evening of a faun
Richard Buckle
The subtitle of Tamara Nijinsky's book, `Two Lives from Birth to Death Indissol- ubly Linked' is clearly inaccurate, because the dancer and the Hungarian debutante were in their twenties when they met: but Romola certainly did her best to care for Vaslav in sickness and in health till he died in 1950. I might almost claim that I too had been indissolubly linked with Nijinsky and his family from school days till old age. I will explain why later.
The early part of the book, dealing with Romola's youth in Budapest and elsewhere contains new material, and Tamara has recollections of Vaslav, but only after he had retreated from normality. This second daughter of the famous pair was brought up from an early age by her grandmother, Emilia Markus, Hungary's greatest actress, and what Romola did not tell Tamara about the past, Emilia did. Emilia's well- born first husband Pulszky, born in High- gate, shot himself in Brisbane. The whole story is so sensational in itself that it seems unnecessary for Tamara's collaborator (presumably) to have embellished it with lush epithets — restaurants are 'noted for their cuisine', roses are 'long-stemmed', china is 'bone china' — more appropriate to a romantic novel.
The middle part of the book is a retelling of the years 1913-1918 when Nijinsky met Romola, toured with and without Diaghilev, married Romola, was dismissed then re-engaged by Diaghilev, fathered a daughter Kyra, became ill in Switzerland and was confined.
In mid-1918, Romola decided to try another spell of home life as a cure and took her husband back to their isolated mountain villa. Knowing that Vaslav had always wanted a son, she wondered whether he might become normal again if she gave him one. In September 1919 her mother and step-father were apparently on a visit when Romola went to Vaslav's room to renew Marital relations with him. Tamara was born on 14 June 1920. Here it is necessary to introduce Dr Peter Ostwald, author of the second inter- esting book under consideration. He has recently found medical records at the Bellevue Sanatorium, Kreutzlingen, to which Nijinsky returned very soon after Romola's experiment. On 2 and 3 Decem- ber 1919, that is, a month or less later, a male nurse described the patient's condi- tion as 'intolerable'. He 'had been assaultive, trashed the room, destroyed the furniture, throwing his food on the floor and then eating it off the floor.'
The deduction is that Romola was a very brave woman. Years later, Tamara's first husband Mild& Szakats, a brilliant actor, was told by Tamara's step-grandfather that a young doctor attending Vaslav had been in love with Romola, and that Romola, suddenly fearful of giving birth to a mad child, asked him for an abortion. He refused. Romola reported to the medical authorities that the doctor, a married man, was father of the child. The doctor was sus- pended and — according to what Szakats told me himself, on my one meeting with him — committed suicide in prison. Peter Ostwald, whose book is a clinical study deserving a specialist's judgment, considers this episode, giving the doctor a fictitious name (Greiber), and thinks he and Romola may have been having an affair. When the charming Tamara Nijinsky and her warm-hearted daughter Kinga came to lunch with me in 1988, I thought the former very like her mother, with no trace of the Tartar look and high cheek-bones which all other members of the family have in common, but that Kinga did have some- thing of the Nijinsky look.
Ruthless Romola may have been, but she was inexhaustible in trying new cures for the sick man — including Dr Sakel's shock treatment — and in trying to raise money, often with success. She usually travelled luxuriously and stayed at good hotels. I sometimes wonder if she was the bread- winner for Nijinsky or if he were hers. Her first book, Nijinsky (1933), was a best- seller, and led to lectures throughout America. It was dedicated to a dead Dutch girl, for whom Romola had a passion. This relationship had been preceded by one with the film star Lya de Putti. In the Sixties her great love would be for a Japanese actress who played male roles, whom she called Terry.
`I believe there are some plain-clothes policemen on duty.' Romola's book, which thrilled me, had a very different effect on her mother. Her descriptions of her 'maltreatment' by Emil- ia when she, Vaslav and little Kyra were her guests in Budapest in 1914 and 1915 more or less in open arrest because Nijin- sky was a Russian citizen — left Emilia in a state of prostration. (This was before Diaghilev engineered his release.) Never- theless, the Nijinskys returned to the haven of Emilia's house in 1940. Romola was very cold towards her younger daughter, who had begun to act, and forbade her to use the name Nijinsky. Kyra had married Diaghilev's last boyfriend, Igor Markevitch. When Nijinsky, calmer after his shock treatment, but usually mute, was living at Schloss Mittersill in Austria in 1947, Tama- ra went with her grandmother and step- grandfather to visit them. She then saw her father for the last time; and she did not see Romola again until they met in Canada 13 years later.
Tamara's life, work and hardships during the Russian occupation of Hungary con- trast strangely with the incessant travels, projects and lawsuits of Romola, which occupy the last part of the book. The story, which ends happily with Kinga married, with a son, and settled in Phoenix, Arizona, would make a television series far more exciting than Dynasty.
In Boulestin's restaurant in 1969 I asked Romola point blank, 'When you travelled on the SS Avon to South America in 1913 with the Ballet in order to be near Nijinsky, were you in love with him?' She replied, `No. But I came to love him later, because he was so good.' Yet on that ship she accepted his unexpected proposal. Bronislava Nijinska, Vaslav's sister, had told me, 'Rom°la wrote the book (in 1931- 3) solely to sell it as a film and make money.' I realised that the melodramatic tale of a lovelorn girl who saves the inno- cent hero from a fate as bad as Diaghilev was a lot of bunkum, oversimplified for Hollywood. Romola had just been a 'fan'.
Romola's Nijinsky was reprinted in paperback without a word changed, a fault corrected or a lie deleted in 1960. She exacted five per cent on sales of my biogra- phy (published 1971). When it appeared she wrote, `Vaslav would have loved it.' But she was soon telling the press, 'Buckle's book is just a compilation from various sources'.
I had forgotten that while Terence Ratti- gan, commissioned by the BBC, was work- ing on a play based on my book, Romola was planning another play about Nijinsky with Robin Maugham. She asked Rattigan to withdraw his, which he did. It is safe to conjecture that whatever film or play had been produced, Romola would have sued. She died in Paris in June 1978.
When I think of my instant reaction on seeing the photograph of Nijinsky as Le Spectre on W.H. Smith's bookstall in 1933, which 'turned me on' to ballet; of my Ballet magazine; of my sight of Nijinsky's no long-
er expressive face in a box at the Prince's Theatre in 1948, and of declining the opportunity of shaking his hand; of being one of the pallbearers at his funeral soon afterwards; of the Diaghilev Exhibition of 1954, which led, in the course of time, to the Sotheby sales of the Diaghilev wardrobe, which led to the Theatre Muse- um; of my talks in California, Paris and London with Nijinsky's wonderful sister Bronislava and her daughter Irina, while I was researching my biography (which was followed by lives of Diaghilev and Balan- chine); of my interviews and correspon- dence with Romola, who called me sometimes Tricky Dicky and sometimes Dear Coz; of all the films and plays about Nijinsky in which I was involved which never came off, I wonder whether Nijinsky and Romola have 'made' my life or ruined it. Here I am, aged 74, reviewing books about them.
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