Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (2 page)

Diaghilev was the foremost impresario of his age. His career began in St Petersburg with the launch of a magazine called
World of Art
. He organized a major exhibition of Russian portrait paintings, travelling across the vast country in search of forgotten artists and lost masterpieces. He had no home of his own. He lived in hotels where he sometimes left without paying the bill. He was neurotic, superstitious, disorganized. Rehearsals were a form of controlled chaos that somehow managed to come right on the night. For several years now he had refused to send letters, preferring the more immediate telephone or cable, which lent themselves better to panic and hysteria. In spite of all this he managed to run the finances, the publicity, the choice of ballets. He teetered permanently on the fringe of bankruptcy.

Diaghilev’s favourite place in the world was Venice. Something about the watery city soothed his troubled spirit. Here, after all, his great hero Richard Wagner had composed the second act of
Tristan und Isolde
in the Palazzo Giustinian and died in the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi on the Grand Canal. Like Diaghilev, Wagner’s life was characterized by political exile, turbulent love affairs and repeated flights from his creditors.

Diaghilev loved the shimmering waters of the Grand Canal, the palazzos in their Gothic glory, the pompous grandeur and self-importance of the Doge’s Palace, the sense that the entire place was a stage set waiting for one more performance, that opera singers or ballet dancers might suddenly drift out from behind the Hotel Danieli on the waterfront and perform in the great drawing room of St Mark’s Square. His favourite hotel was the Grand Hotel des Bains on the lido, built at the turn of the century for Europe’s rich, in flight from harsher winter climes. Diaghilev was consumed by the desire for artistic perfection. He was supremely Russian but now lived mainly abroad. To his great regret, he had never been able to take his Ballets Russes to St Petersburg. He had problems with the administration of the Imperial Theatre. He had enemies in the Imperial Court.

One of his famous ballerinas was very young when she joined the Ballets Russes and would later say that she always called Diaghilev ‘Sergypops’. Diaghilev’s paramour was the young dancer from the Imperial Ballet, Vaslav Nijinsky. He was already the most famous dancer in the world, apparently able to hang in the air and perform impossible leaps. He drew audiences into theatres like a human magnet.

When Thamar, Queen of Georgia, wakes, she waves a scarf through her window to entice a passing suitor into her castle. When the Prince arrives in his astrakhan cap and huge black cloak, she initially rejects his advances, but fervent dancing follows and the pair kiss. There is a wild Caucasian dance, a kaleidoscope of tossing sleeves and flashing boots where real daggers thud into the floor. The lovers embrace, then they leave the room and the Queen’s followers continue dancing wildly. When the Queen and Prince re-enter, she suddenly stabs him and he falls through a secret panel into the river below. The Queen returns to the window to signal to a new victim with her scarf.

The Covent Garden audience gave the performance a standing ovation. The ballet wasn’t long, but it was like no other ballet the audience had seen before. It was followed by another Diaghilev special, full of Eastern promise, called
Scheherazade
. When the stars and the corps de ballet came on stage for the final curtain call, there was one notable absentee. Originally it had been Adolph Bolm cast in the role of the Prince in
Thamar
, but he had been indisposed so an understudy had taken the role instead. The understudy did not appear to take his bow; his body was found below the trapdoor where the Queen had thrown him after she had stabbed him. But this was no mere Russian version of the ancient myth of
The King Must Die
. The understudy really was dead, stabbed through the heart with one of the daggers used in the dance, as he had been on the stage.

It was hours after the performance before they found the corpse. Sergei Grigoriev, the
régisseur
who was in charge of all administrative matters, found Diaghilev
taking a late supper at the Savoy Hotel with Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina, the ballerina who had danced the title role in
Thamar
. They were on the second bottle of champagne.

‘Sergei Pavlovich,’ said Grigoriev, ‘you must come back to the theatre at once! Something terrible has happened.’

‘What is it? Can’t you see I’m having my supper?’ The other diners turned to watch the animated conversation in Russian.

‘It’s Taneyev, the understudy who took Bolm’s place in
Thamar
this evening.’

‘He’s a promising boy, that Alexander Taneyev,’ said Diaghilev. ‘I promoted him to understudy Bolm myself.’

‘Well, he won’t be doing any more work as an understudy,’ Sergei Grigoriev crossed himself three times as fast as he could, ‘not now, he won’t. He’s dead. Stabbed through the heart with one of the daggers used in the ballet. We found him lying in a pool of his own blood.’

‘My God, this is frightful. What an inconsiderate time to die, right at the beginning of a new season. This could ruin everything. Stupid English policemen tramping round the sets of
The Firebird
and
Le Spectre de la Rose
in their great boots. God in heaven, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

Diaghilev stopped for a moment to comfort Tamara Karsavina, who was crying quietly into her oysters. ‘Calm down, child, calm down. You mustn’t ruin your looks.’

Even his critics admitted Diaghilev was a good man in a crisis. By now he had lived through so many of them.

‘Have you told anybody about this, Grigoriev?’

‘What do you mean, told anybody about this? It’s a quarter to one in the morning, for God’s sake! There was only Misha, the stagehand, and myself in the opera house looking for Alexander. Everyone else has gone back to their hotels. Misha is waiting for me to come back.’

‘So the authorities at the opera house know nothing about this? The English police have not been informed?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Very well,’ said Diaghilev, taking out his monocle and polishing it on one of the Savoy’s finest napkins. ‘This is the best I can think of for the moment. Go back to the opera house. Find a big trunk – I’ve seen plenty of them lying about at the back of the dressing rooms – and put Alexander in it. Close the lid. Lock it if you can find a key. Take it to that great storeroom in the basement that’s full of bits of old stage sets and other junk. Nobody’s going to find it in there, not for a while, at any rate. Then leave as quietly as you can.’

Grigoriev slipped away into the night. ‘Just one last thing,’ Diaghilev waddled at full speed to catch his colleague by the door.

‘What’s that?’

‘Just this, my friend. Don’t forget to throw away the key.’

Karsavina was still weeping softly at the supper table.

‘What about that poor boy, Sergei Pavlovich? You can’t just leave him in a trunk in that awful basement. What about his burial? What about his parents?’

‘You leave that to me, Tamara. I’ll think of something.
Come to think of it, we’ll be out of London in another five weeks. Maybe they won’t find the body until after we’ve gone.’

Diaghilev could well have been right about the body in the trunk not being discovered until after the Ballets Russes had left town. But there was one factor he had overlooked. Alexander Taneyev was not staying with the rest of the junior dancers and the corps de ballet in their hotel. He did have a room there, but he wasn’t spending the nights in the hotel most of the time. He was staying with his uncle, one Richard Wagstaff Gilbert, in a large house guarded by two stone lions next to Barnes Pond and close to the River Thames. Gilbert was a financier with fingers in many of the City of London’s tastiest and most profitable pies. When the young man didn’t come home the first evening, Gilbert presumed he had gone to the hotel with friends and stayed there. At that stage he wasn’t worried at all. Three days later, he moved into action. He sat on a charity committee with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The Commissioner was pressed into service. Gilbert was a trustee of the Royal Opera House and knew one of its principal patrons, Gladys Robinson, Marchioness of Ripon, a formidable society lady who used to move in the fast set around King Edward VII and Mrs Keppel. Oscar Wilde had dedicated his 1893 play
A Woman of No Importance
to Lady Ripon. By now she was a woman of considerable importance. She was a friend and supporter of Nellie Melba. The day after Richard Gilbert mobilized his forces, twenty policemen were sent to search the Royal
Opera House. They found the body just before the doors opened for the evening performance of
Carnaval
,
Thamar
and
Les Sylphides
.

Lady Ripon was in her box as usual. Her chauffeur drove her up to town every evening in her six-cylinder Napier motor car. The journey took about half an hour from her house in Coombe just outside London. No mention was made of the murder of Alexander Taneyev. Alfred Bolm was back dancing the role of the Prince in
Thamar
. There was no sign of Diaghilev. Lady Ripon had noticed that he was often to be seen during performances, watching from an empty box or peering round the curtain. She only heard about the incident the following afternoon when she received a telephone call from Richard Gilbert. Reports of the Russian’s demise were already circulating in the City of London.

Lady Ripon had Russian blood in her veins. She was descended from the 11th Earl of Pembroke, who married Countess Catherine Semyonovna Vorontsova, on 25 January 1808. Catherine was the daughter of the prominent Russian aristocrat and diplomat Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov. Like many in her circle, Lady Ripon had a great many acquaintances and very few friends. After she heard the news, she invited herself round to the Chelsea house of the one Russian lady she knew in London to tell her the full story. Natasha Shaporova and her husband Mikhail had been based in the capital for a number of years. Natasha was in her mid-twenties and was one of the most beautiful women in London. Mikhail’s father was one of the richest men in Russia. People said he was far wealthier than the Romanovs. Amongst his many financial interests was a large bank with branches all over Europe.
Natasha and Mikhail had just returned to London after a two-year spell in Cannes, where Mikhail had opened the Riviera office of the Shaporova Bank to cater for the needs of the wealthy Russian émigrés and their everlasting lust for expensive chips at the Casino in Monte Carlo.

‘Well, Natasha,’ Lady Ripon asked as she finished her story. ‘What do you make of it, this death at the Ballets Russes? I expect the news will be all over town tomorrow morning.’

‘I’m not an expert in these matters, Lady Ripon. Even Russians don’t usually go round murdering each other at the end of the ballet. Do you think there will be a scandal?’

Natasha smiled a rather wicked smile as she brought up the subject of scandal. It looked as though she would rather enjoy it.

‘Scandal? A scandal?’ Lady Ripon was horrified at the thought that she might be caught up in such a thing. It might not be well received in Society.

‘I tell you what the really interesting question is,’ said Natasha, who was a devotee of the works of Conan Doyle.

‘What’s that, my dear?’

‘It’s this. Did the murderer intend to kill the understudy Alexander Taneyev? Or was the victim meant to be Alfred Bolm, who was on the programme to take the role? I don’t suppose we know when Bolm cried off, do we?’

‘God bless my soul! I’d never have thought of that. I have no idea what the answer might be. That’ll be something the police will have to find out, I expect.’

Natasha started to giggle. Lady Ripon frowned.
Aristocratic young women weren’t meant to giggle like schoolgirls.

‘Forgive me, Lady Ripon. I’ve just thought of something. The police are going to have a terrible time. Diaghilev doesn’t know a word of English. He speaks Russian or French. The top people in the Ballets Russes like Fokine and Bakst all speak French but not English. The make-up artists and the technical people they bring with them from St Petersburg don’t speak French. They only know Russian. I met that lovely ballerina Tamara Karsavina when they were here last year. She doesn’t speak English either – she and her friends always carried a note with Premier Hotel, Russell Square, Bloomsbury written on it to show the taxi driver where to take them. It’s going to be chaos, pure chaos.’

‘What am I going to do?’ Lady Ripon was horrified at the prospect of her Royal Opera House and her Ballets Russes, as she always referred to them, turning into a Tower of Babel in the middle of Covent Garden. ‘I feel so responsible, you know.’

Natasha Shaporova suddenly remembered a hotel in St Petersburg where she had danced with a handsome investigator from London some years earlier when she was still Natasha Bobrinsky. The investigator was at the end of a difficult case involving an English diplomat found dead on the Nevskii Prospekt and was returning to London the next day. Natasha recalled asking him where the most romantic place in the world to get married was. She never forgot his reply: ‘There’s only one answer,’ he said, smiling at Natasha and feeling at least seventy years old. ‘Venice. You get married in the Basilica of St Mark or, if you can’t manage that, San Giorgio Maggiore across the water. You have your
reception in the Doge’s Palace. If that’s not possible, I’m sure you could rent a whole palazzo on the Grand Canal. It would be wonderful. Mikhail’s father and yours might have to throw quite a lot of money about, but the Venetians have been taking bribes for centuries. Anyway, you should all feel at home there.’