The merchant prince of ballet.

After sex, money is the aspect of Nureyev's offstage life that most often causes little beads of sweat to bubble across the foreheads of his friends and colleagues. Conversation comes to a withering halt, glasses of wine disappear in a gulp, and the subject is closed as soon as it's been opened. (I actually saw a veteran European choreographer, a man not known for keeping his mouth shut, turn sheet-white at the very mention of Nureyev's vast financial holdings.) Everyone agrees that Nureyev was not a man to squander his cash, except on himself. "When Rudolf traveled," a colleague from the

Paris Opera recalls, "he bought and bought and bought; never for anyone else, always for himself." Guests in his homes, however, wanted for nothing. Nureyev was a generous, gregarious host, and his table was consistently firstrate. In public, in nightclubs and restaurants, Nureyev became famous for an impediment in his reach. "Rudolf was not cheap in the way that very famous people can be," a second French friend explains. "He just never carried money on him." A third Opera colleague is more blunt: "In a restaurant Rudolf considered it your privilege to pick up the check, for the privilege of his company."

No one has a precise answer for how Nureyev became the wealthiest man in ballet, with an estate estimated in Vanity, Fair at $80 million. The British estimate in The Sunday Times was noticeably less, between 1O[pounds] and 15[pounds] million, or $15 and $25 million.

"Do you realize the amount of money that is," a prominent New York socialite and Nureyev friend for decades said not long after his death, still slightly stupefied by the sum. "That's not the kind of money a person makes, God forbid. you're Donald Trump. That's money someone is born into. Rudolf had seven homes. He had his own island, for God's sake. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to maintain seven homes? The overhead expenses have to be astronomical: the insurance, the staff, the upkeep. The taxes alone would kill you. A friend and I actually sat down with paper and pencil and tried to work out the figures. It's impossible. The most I ever heard of any ballet dancer making was ten thousand dollars a performance, back when people were flying to the Met to see Misha and Makarova. Even if Rudolf made that kind of money every night of his life, you're not talking anywhere near eighty million dollars. And for a ballet dancer! Someone was very smart somewhere."

In attempting to unravel the mysteries of the Nureyev Industry--and make no mistake, Nureyev was a oneman show business empire--the only verifiable fact is that the brains behind the operation belonged to Nureyev himself, a sharp, careful businessman with a close eye on the purse strings who hated taxes more than death. "Rudi," Nadia Nerina explains, "had his feet on the ground when it came to money: He knew what it was to have to survive and eat and was not going to throw his money around. He managed his own career well and was quite aware of his own financial value." Sonia Arova, another of Nureyev's earliest partners in the West, agrees with Nerina: "Rudolf really knew what he was doing with his career. Nothing was done on impulse when it came to that."

Nureyev was also savvy enough to surround himself with world-class financial advisors. His financial trust was not easily won. During his first months in the West, Nureyev insisted on being paid in cash. The spotlight on his defection made Nureyev as bankable a name as existed, and producers agreed to the cash payments. (There are reports as late as 1977, the heyday of the "dance boom," when the Kirov emigres were making up to $10,000 a performance, that Nureyev still demanded cash payments on occasion and still got them.

Despite the amount of money he was already making with the de Cuevas company and from his first television appearances, the largest sum of money Nureyev's dazzled eyes had ever seen, he kept such a tight fist on his income that he wouldn't even open a bank account during his first six months in the West. He finally did so only by default, when Arova refused to walk around any longer with $60,000 in cash in her pocketbook. (Another old friend remembers going to the apartment Nureyev was renting during his first visit to New York. She tried to help Nureyev clean up a bit but had trouble with a floor rug with several odd mounds that would not flatten. When she finally pulled the rug back, she discovered that the mounds were piles of money Nureyev was hiding.) Arova opened a bank account on her own in the name of a mutual friend and told Nureyev about it only after the deed was done: "Rudolf was furious. He went green."

Once advisors were proven trustworthy, however, Nureyev stayed with them. He worked with the same business manager, a crackerjack Hungarian consultant named Sandor Gorlinsky, from 1962 until Gorlinsky's death in May 1990, and he was equally loyal to his attorneys.

Despite the amount of money he eventually accumulated, and the obvious pleasure Nureyev took in being rich, rich, rich, it's unlikely that avarice was a factor in his choice to remain in the West. Ballet dancers are not only cherished public figures in Russia, but they live in relative comfort and security: good clothes, the choicest of city apartments, summer dachas. (One of Nureyev's first purchases after joining the Kirov was his first automobile, the status symbol of choice in the Khrushchev era. His choice of vehicle was early evidence of the pennywise Nureyev: he opted for a Soviet make rather than the more expensive Western automobiles preferred by his friends.) Once he was on his own in the West, however, Nureyev caught on to his financial prospects almost immediately, and he quickly developed clear, considered opinions on how his new wealth was to be handled.

The British merchant banker Charles Gordon, Nadia Nerina's husband, was Nureyev's first unofficial advisor in the West. Gordon remembers a conversation over dinner with Nerina and Erik Bruhn in the early months of 1962: "Without any ceremony Nureyev immediately said to me in his halting English, `Charlik, Erik say you help me. I am poor man; no money. I want to make money. Tax free!' The last two words somewhat startle me and I perceived that he wa watching me closely to see ho I would react to his use of term with which even literate accountants were not then entirely familiar."

A comparable acuity and attention characterized Nureyev's financial dealings to his deathbed, literally. Under Gorlinsky's careful guidance, Nureyev had long since established charitable foundations in Europe and America as a means of reducing his taxable income. The Rudolf Nureyev Dance Foundation in the United States owned his apartment in the Dakota in New York City as well as the majority of his financial concerns in America, and his European interests were the property of the Ballet Promotion Foundation, based in Liechtenstein, the tiny European principality wedged between Austria and Switzerland. The arrangement had one final benefit for the beneficiaries of Nureyev's estate: since Nureyev was not the official legal owner of his holdings, his estate was not subject to the standard inheritance taxes and remained intact.

Nureyev's first great stroke of luck in stabilizin, and extending his business affairs was Gorlinsky. According to Charles Gordon, who introduced the two men in 1962, Gorlinsky was "a gravelly voiced, cigar-chomping Sol Hurok manque with a heart of gold." For Nureyev, he was the right manager at the right time with the right connections. The two men hit it off immediately. "Gorlinsky really helped Rudolf to make the right decisions from the very beginning," Arova remembers. "He really was there to help, and he did." At the suggestion of Gordon, Gorlinsky established Nureyev's first international tax shelter in 1962, a move that would serve his new client well for years and become a model for their future business activities. "In those days." Gordon explained in the Spectator "for non-residents and off-shore investment, Luxembourg was very practical. I advised Sandor that unless he had already done so for his other clients . . . he should form a special Luxembourg company, and that this company `owned by Rudi' was to have the sole right to receive any fees earned by him, that is, paid without any deductions. This essentially tax-free structure would secure Nureyev's cash flow and establish an increasing net worth. I told Sandor who to contact in Luxembourg and he did his stuff to perfection." Gorlinsky remained on top of the game for the rest of his association with Nureyev and is regarded widely as the man who secured Nureyev's fortune. "I suspect Rudolf let Gorlinsky handle everything," Nerina, also a Gorlinsky client, suggests, "but part of Gorlinsky's success was due to the fact that, on major engagements and decisions, he always consulted thoroughly with his clients. With clients like Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi, Sandor was experienced in dealing with stars. Sandor and Rudolf got on well because there was trust. There were others who were sharper, but they did not match Sandor's integrity."

An influential French ballerina who was a long-standing friend of both Nureyev and Gorlinsky remembers a chance encounter she had with the latter in the late 1970s: "I met Sandor on the street one day and he was in an exceptionally good mood. I commented on his high spirits and he told me that it was because he had just managed to double Rudolf's money. There had been a fluctuation in the international market, some sort of very unusual shift in the price of gold at the Bourse for about forty-eight hours. Sandor noticed it immediately, knew what it meant, and doubled Rudolf's worth almost overnight."

Gorlinsky was also smart enough to realize that representing Nureyev was the opportunity of a lifetime, and the numbers were there to prove it. Nureyev was a top-dollar attraction from day one. Until his arrival in the West, the highest recorded salary for any ballet dancer was the $2,000 a week Sergei Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo paid Maria Tallchief in 1954. Tallchief, of course, had been a ranking star for almost a decade at the time, and her career as de facto prima ballerina of Balanchine's New York City Ballet in the early 1950s made her the most celebrated woman in American ballet, the first American-born ballerina to have her photograph on the cover of Newsweek. (Tallchief was literally Native American. the granddaughter of an Osage chief.)

Nureyev was offered $2,000 a week for his first job in the West, the six months he spent touring with the de Cuevas company in 1961. In October of that year he received $4,000 for a twenty-minute guest shot on German television. By the midsixties the money was rolling in from constant guest appearances around the world at an estimated $3,000 to $5,000 each. Nureyev was receiving his first residual fees for his ballets (he received a fee every time the Royal performed his version of the Bayadere Kingdom of the Shades scene) and a record $42,000 annual salary with the Royal. (The sum is based on the approximate value in dollars of the sterling in 1965. The list of Nureyev's acquisitions through the 1960s suggests a man with a solid sense of financial security: 1 00,000 for the La Turbie villa in the foothills just above Monte Carlo in 1962, at least $135,000 for his Richmond Park estate just outside London in 1967 (six bedrooms, four reception rooms, and a thirty-foot drawing room), and a Mercedes-Benz convertible.

With Gorlinsky at the helm, the Nureyev Industry was in full swing, as were the Nureyev Wars with tax bureaus on both sides of the Atlantic. Neither would abate. A full decade after the Rudimania phenomenon of the midsixties, a four-week Paris engagement by his Nureyev and Friends concert group at the six-thousand-seat Palais des Sports played to 97 percent capacity every night. Even Nureyev's last sad tour of Britain in the spring of 1991 opened to a storm of demands for ticket refunds over the pathetic decline in Nureyev's dancing. The stormy confusion of the opening belied the fact that performances were sold out at every stop on the three-week tour. Even on its closing night, in the very same theater where the first public protest had taken place, it was sold out.

As early as 1963, Nureyev was crossing swords with the English authorities over his tax status. The same year, after an audit, Uncle Sam slapped him with a bill for $30,642.70 in overdue taxes from his American earnings. Nureyev paid the bill but subsequently informed the Internal Revenue Service that he had been overcharged $213 in Social Security deductions. Yet another record in a lifetime of precedents, Nureyev forced the IRS to give him back the money. The disputes that led to his departure from the Paris Opera Ballet in 1989 began with yet another skirmish in Nureyev's endless war with the French tax system. "Give money to the government," Nureyev told Arova his first year in the West. "Why? I do the work."

Nureyev's introduction to Hurok was his second stroke of good fortune. Nureyev and, as Edwin Denby called him, "Da Hurok," shared a considerable amount of common ground. They were both Russian emigres who had grown up in bitter poverty. Masters of their respective fields, they both developed a taste for the lavish. They both knew how to work a cape in public. If Nureyev was the new Nijinsky, Hurok was the last Diaghilev, a master impresario of the old school. By the time he and Nureyev met in 1963, Hurok had been booking the best in the business for more than half a century, Melba and Chaliapin; Pavlova, Duncan, and Mary Wigman; Andres Segovia, Artur Rubenstein, Van Cliburn, and Marian Anderson....

Nureyev didn't officially join the Hurok stable until 1965, but Hurok was clearly aware of his box-office possibilities when he joined Sir David Webster on the 1963 visit to Moscow to straighten out "the Nureyev situation." As the man who sponsored the Russian tours to the West that were so lucrative for both sides, Hurok's presence in Moscow during negotiations added considerable clout to the British argument for keeping Nureyev at Covent Garden. When Nureyev joined the official client list of Hurok Concerts, his life changed once again, and not just because the Hurok organization created the "Rudi" phenomenon. Hurok knew how to keep a diva happy, and he was famous for the personal attention lavished upon his clientele. "If they're not temperamental," Hurok once said, "I don't want them. . . ." Nureyev got the full Hurok treatment and loved every minute of it. Hurok insured Nureyev's legs with Lloyd's of London, and, according to [John] Wilson [a senior member of the Hurok staff for many years], he bought Jose Limon's classic Othello quartet, The Moor's Pavane, for Nureyev and brought in Limon himself to teach it to him. "What Rudolf wanted," Wilson concludes, "Rudolf got."

Nureyev's life wasn't the only thing that changed when he hooked up with Hurok, particularly after Nureyev, headlining his Don Quixote on the Australian Ballet's first visit to America in 1971, sold out an eleven-week tour at every stop, without Fonteyn. The Australian tour also introduced another new development in Nureyev's career, the one Nureyev had been waiting for: the most important element in its success was the fact that Nureyev danced at almost every performance on the tour, thanks to the attentive scheduling by the Hurok office that allowed him the rest periods necessary to pull off this unprecedented feat. Light bulbs lit up in many a head. However ethereal, ballet is a business like any other, and, when Hurok was involved, it was big business. The Hurok organization, Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times in 1975, was "almost unique in the large-scale arts organizations in that it needs to make a buck. It needs a profit and it is not subsidized." When Hurok discovered that all he needed to rake in the cash was Nureyev, not a mammoth effort such as the Bolshoi or Royal Ballet tours, but Nureyev, dancing with anyone, the future of ballet companies around the world was written.

The North American tours of the Royal Ballet sponsored by Hurok Concerts through the sixties--first in 1963, on the wings of the "Rudi" mania the Hurok office had generated by 1965, and then once each in the last three years of the decade--always included stops in Canada. The links between the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada were strong; the National Ballet's founding director, Celia Franca, was a Royal alumna. Nureyev was a frequent visitor to Toronto through the 1960s, particularly once Erik Bruhn had signed on in Toronto as an associate artistic director in 1963.

After his success with the Australians and Don Q, Nureyev approached Hurok about a new project: a touring version of The Sleeping Beauty with the National Ballet of Canada. "The idea was Rudolf's to a great extent" John Wilson remembers, but it struck Hurok favorably. For a long time he'd wanted a Beauty that could tour. Beauty was a solid money-maker, but the productions Hurok had sponsored with the Royal and with the Kirov were really too big for travel. Certain cities were especially difficult to play because the sets were built in such a way that they couldn't be reduced to accommodate smaller stages."

Hurok was taken by Nureyev's idea. His involvement with the new Sleeping Beauty, Nureyev staged for the National Ballet of Canada in 1972 was even more hands-on than usual. "Until Rudolf's tours with the Canadians," former Hurok publicist John Gingrich explains. "Hurok essentially took existing productions and presented them to new audiences. With Rudolf's Sleeping Beauty, Hurok moved from a booking role to a role closer to that of a producer. It was a shrewd move. Hurok went to a company that would be thrilled to get to New York and the Met, and his professional stature generated enough Toronto-based money to underwrite the production. Nureyev's Beauty became a new model for how to tour a production. The production looked great, but it was portable." Designed by Nicholas Georgiadis and with a budget estimated at almost $400,000--Nureyev made his entrance aloft, on a curtained litter held by four serving men--Nureyev's Sleeping Beauty for the National Ballet of Canada turned out to be a gold mine for all concerned: Hurok, Nureyev, and the Canadians.

In an unprecedented marketing strategy, Nureyev and the Canadians shared equal billing on all promotional material and advertisements: the same typeface and exactly the same size. Not everyone was thrilled by the idea of equal billing, and, by 1975, Nureyev was back in the vortex of a tornado. While he and the Canadians were in the middle of their third summer visit to the Metropolitan Opera House, the Toronto critic John Fraser, writing in the New York Times, published a scathing account of the Nureyev years at the National Ballet of Canada: "We have learned to cope with Nureyev's temperamental quirks: shouting at dancers onstage during performances, outrageous tantrums in rehearsals and during intermissions, and indifference to the national aspirations of the company. Such is the price a troupe pays when it hitches its lot to a passing star." When the Toronto newspapers began making reference to "Nureyev's National Ballet," Nureyev refused to speak to the Canadian press for four years.

Unhappy as some of the locals were, however, Nureyev's Sleeping Beauty for the Canadians also introduced two of his most important legacies to contemporary ballet companies. Over the next ten years, they would reshape ballet companies from Boston and Berlin, from Zurich to Paris. With Nureyev as their headliner, struggling regional companies suddenly found themselves in the exalted surroundings of Hurokland, performing in major theaters to huge audiences they could never have reached without Nureyev's name on a marquee. "By his very presence," Celia Franca concludes about Nureyev's time with the National Ballet of Canada, "we were given the opportunity for a kind of exposure we'd never known before. The tours were long, which meant steady employment, and the dancers got used to performing, and to performing often."

Most important of all, at Nureyev's insistence, a host of young dancers were thrust into an international spotlight. The unbroken line of Nureyev discoveries extends from Karen Kain and Frank Augustyn with the National Ballet of Canada---both of whom Nureyev yanked out of the ranks under much protest from administrators and company directors and set on the path to world stature--to the fleet of ecstatic young star dancers Nureyev cultivated at the Paris Opera in the 1980s. His tenure with the Canadians established some important precedents for Nureyev's career as well. Until the end of the 1970s, Nureyev was an annual summer presence at the Metropolitan Opera House, contributing significantly to the financial health of the Met by filling the house for several weeks between the end of its spring season and the opening of the new opera season in the fall. At the same time, a new phrase entered the ballet lexicon: "Presenting Rudolf Nureyev and . . ." It would soon become familiar to audiences around the world, and one of the oldest traditions in ballet management disappeared. Until Nureyev and the Canadians, the ballet company itself was the event. Its stars were the icing on the cake. Nureyev and the Canadians shifted the balance of power. "We weren't selling the Canadians," a Hurok staff member explains. "We were selling Rudolf and the Canadians." Nureyev found himself in the professional situation of his dreams: dancing his own version of the classic repertory and raking in an enormous personal salary as dancer, choreographer, and coproducer. Even better, his contract guaranteed his appearance at every performance, matinees excepted.

Nureyev's success with the Canadians led to the career move that would keep him onstage for the next sixteen years and expand his audience beyond measure. In the summer of 1974, Nureyev had performed a two-week chamber program with a group of seven other dancers at the Palais des Sports in Paris. The venture proved not only successful, but, with only the barest overhead, lucrative as well. The day after Christmas 1974, Nureyev appeared on Broadway at the Uris Theater for three weeks with another concert troupe, Nureyev and Friends, this time sponsored by Hurok. Backed up by Merle Park of the Royal Ballet, the American dancer and choreographer (and sometime Nureyev flame) Louis Falco, and members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Nureyev danced an eclectic program of short ballets: an extract from Balanchine's Apollo, Limon's Moor's Pavane, Taylor's Aureole, and the Pas de Deux from Bournonville's Flower Festival at Genzano.

From a business angle, the idea was inspired. "The performance involved only a minimum overhead," John Wilson explains. "There were very few dancers, fourteen musicians, and no scenery. That's why it made so much money." Business only got better as the Nureyev and Friends concerts evolved into regular Broadway events. By the third season in 1978, three weeks of Nureyev and Friends raked in more than $500,000, with unofficial estimates on Nureyev's take running as high as $45,000 a week.

The performances were also attracting an audience that would never consider sitting through a three-act ballet. As Ben Weinstein, a clothier from Queens, told the New York Times during the second Nureyev and Friends season at the Uris, "Merle Park, if they had her name plastered all over town I wouldn't go because I don't know her. Generally I'm not fond of ballet at all. You may not like baseball, but when you know Babe Ruth is playing, you go. I wanted to see Nureyev." Nureyev had evolved from an industry into an institution.

Enter Nureyev, the man who wanted to dance everything and did. Onstage and off, he was always a walking set of contradictions: generous and tight-fisted, violent and endearing, funny and cruel. The most surprising incongruity of all is the fact that a man who spent a lifetime pummeling his stubborn body into the outline of a premier danseur invested as much time and focus as Nureyev did in realigning his body into its exact opposite: the angular, temporal, and earthbound dimensions of a modern dancer. Over the course of his long career in the West, Nureyev worked with more choreographers than any other star dancer in the history of ballet. The majority of them were not ballet choreographers but choreographers working in the grittier territory of modern dance.

Six months later [after Nureyev's funeral on January 12, 1993] back at the Garnier, in a quiet, comfortable dressing room that hardly could be more distant from the gilt and glamour of Nureyev's last rites, it is another working day, just like any other. It's late in the afternoon and things are winding down. There's no performance tonight. A sense of the daily, of the anonymous, hangs over the backstage area.

Manuel Legris, the youngest of the Opera's principal men, is just back in his dressing room from a rehearsal for the male lead in Balanchine's Theme and Variations. Legris knows the role is a handful, and his eyes are less than ablaze with inspiration. Barely twenty-five, Legris wasn't born when Nureyev decided to leave Russia. It's hard to imagine that the two men, not just generations but worlds apart, could ever have had any common ground. They could hardly be more different, either in temperament or physicality. Onstage and off, Legris is diffidence itself, a polite, deferential paradigm of the well-brought-up young Frenchman, with blinding batterie and a jump like a javelin.

He wouldn't be sitting where he is, preoccupied with Theme and Variations, if Nureyev had gotten on that plane back to Moscow all those years ago, and the reasons run deeper than six years under Nureyev's tutelage at the Paris Opera Ballet. To be sure, Legris benefited from the Nureyev revolution at the Opera through the 1980s. When Nureyev went after the Opera's stifling hierarchy, Legris was one of the figures yanked from obscurity onto center stage. After Nureyev decided that dancing more and more of the full-length nineteenth-century classics was exactly what the Opera dancers needed to develop a lasting technical base, Legris was one of the young dancers who suddenly found himself baby-faced Prince Siegfried. And when dancers were needed to fill out the Nureyev and Friends tours, the core group he turned to most often regularly included Legris, who picked up a world of practical experience in the process. "I think I have some gifts," Legris explains, "and maybe they would have gotten me somewhere, but, basically, Rudolf gave me everything I have."

"I think about Rudolf all the time now," Legris concludes. "Everybody does. It is very strange how we all think so much about Rudolf, now. Every day someone remembers something else. `Oh, you know, Rudolf used to say that this step was . . .' His corrections, the things he tried to get us to do. I don't just mean that I think about him in rehearsal or when I see something that reminds me of him. I mean, when I am just sitting here. When I am by myself. Maybe putting on my makeup before a performance."

There is a long, surprised pause, and then a slight, surprised smile: "Rudolf, he knew a lot."