How the Sexiest Man slept through the White House
New book claims ballet icon Rudolph Nureyev seduced JFK’S wife, sister in law AND brother...
WHEN Jacqueline Kennedy first saw Rudolf Nureyev dance, she was utterly captivated. It was 1963 and Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn were leading the Royal Ballet tour as i t stopped in New York. The First Lady, a ballet devotee, clapped so energetically her hands were ‘black and blue pulp’, she said. The man who would go on to become an international celebrity and one of the greatest dancers of the 20th century had defected from the Soviet Union to the West only two years before. The KGB had tried to stop him, and, sensitive to the political ramifications of such a meeting, Nureyev’s manager initially rebuffed Mrs Kennedy when she tried to go backstage afterwards.
Undeterred, a few days later she flew Nureyev, Fonteyn and a few of their fellow dancers in a private plane for tea at the White House.
Referring to John F. Kennedy’s health problems, the intensely vain Nureyev flirtatiously told the First Lady: ‘ Unlike your beautiful husband, I have a powerful back — a strong Russian back for leaping through the air.’
According to a forthcoming book about Jackie Kennedy, from the moment she first saw him, Jackie was ‘mesmerised’ by Nureyev, and they soon embarked on an affair.
Not only that, say writers Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, but Nureyev also had a relationship with Jackie’s brother-in-law and reputed lover Bobby Kennedy. The bizarre love triangle became a square because the ballet dancer was also allegedly conducting an affair with Jackie’s equally beautiful younger sister, Lee Radziwill.
It would have been exhausting if all this was true, but Nureyev — as promiscuous as he was narcissistic — liked to boast he was the ‘sexiest man alive’ and simply ‘ too good a lover not to share my body with others’.
The forthcoming book, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, A Life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams, comes from a pair of seasoned celebrity biographers who have been dismissed by some as sensationalist muck-rakers.
However, it is not the first time the dancer has been amorously linked to Radziwill, or to Bobby Kennedy. Porter says his new claims are based on statements by the writers Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, both of whom were confidants of Jackie Kennedy.
A 2007 biography of the dancer by former ballerina Julie Kavanagh suggested Nureyev flirted with Jackie, but the dancer himself claimed he went much further with her sister, Lee, and made her pregnant — but that she later lost it.
According to Porter, the dancer also made this revelation to Jackie Kennedy, adding: ‘With you, I will make nine beautiful children — five boys, four girls.’ She retorted that she was ‘ not a breeding factory’. Lee, who is now 90, has denied she ever had an affair with Nureyev, though she admits she was besotted. But while Kavanagh acknowledged the two sisters competed fiercely for Nureyev’s attentions, the writer stopped short of saying Jackie ever had an affair with him.
Born on the Trans- Siberian Express as his mother was travelling to see his father, a Red Army commissar, Nureyev was acclaimed as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
He was only 54 when he died of Aids in 1993. Although he claimed to have slept with only three women, he had many, many male lovers. According to Porter, Jackie Kennedy’s casual affair with Nureyev lasted from 1962 to 1965 — beginning before her husband’s assassination in 1963 and continuing afterwards.
Lee Radziwill, the wife of a Polish prince, had two huge homes in Britain. She had warned the First Lady Nureyev was ‘99 per cent gay’, writes Porter. Both sisters, he claims, were determined to make the most of that 1 per cent.
Like Jackie after her, Lee became entranced after watching Nureyev dance in 1961. When he began dancing with the Royal Ballet a year later, she invited him to stay with her and her frequently absent businessman husband at their London house while he looked for his own place. They shared a passion for beautiful objects and luxurious fabrics, and would go midnight wi ndow- s hopping after hi s performances.
NUREYEV was ‘adept at sharing himself equally between the two sisters, photographed shopping on Fifth Avenue with Jackie, dancing with Lee in Monte Carlo’, wrote Kavanagh in her book Nureyev: The Life.
‘But there was a time when he was very much closer to Lee — a bond, she says, that her sister greatly envied.’ The new book, however, cites Capote as saying that Jackie was the sister Nureyev was more taken with. And what of the other Kennedy who was supposed to have admired Nureyev for more than his dancing? Knowing how f l am boyantly homosexual the dancer could be, Mrs Kennedy was reluctant to introduce Nureyev to either Bobby or to her son, John Jr, says Porter.
In Bobby’s case, perhaps, she needn’t have worried because the two men became good friends. The late Gore Vidal claimed in his memoirs that Nureyev was the object of Bobby’s ‘homosexual impulses’, and — according to the dancer — the pair once ‘shared’ a US soldier.
Still, for all Bobby Kennedy’s famously rapacious sexual appetites, it doesn’t quite sound like conclusive proof that Nureyev should join Marilyn Monroe, actress Lee Remick and Jackie Kennedy on the long list of Bobby’s sexual conquests. According to Porter, Jackie once told Capote ‘Rudi systematically plans to seduce every member of my family — even my son when he grows up’. She drew the line at John Jr falling into Nureyev’s clutches, reportedly uncharacteristically telling socialite Bunny Mellon: ‘I don’t want my son to grow up to be a fag.’
Quite how much Nureyev was ever seriously interested in women i s open to debate. Tracy said Nureyev told him he had slept with three women in his life, but he wouldn’t give names.
Were two of them Jackie and Lee? They remained close until the end. In May 1992, by then battling advanced Aids and so weak he had to be helped into his tails, Nureyev conducted Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo And Juliet in New York. In a note delivered to him backstage, Jackie Onassis — as she had become — sent ‘all my love and admiration on your great opening night’. The world ‘has a new Maestro — and he is my favourite’. Nureyev died eight months later.
JACQUELINE Kennedy Onassis, A Life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, is to be published by Blood Moon Productions in May