sNureyev-Fonteyn, RIP
Carlson, Richard W.
he first time I met T Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn they were hiding behind a chimney on a tenement roof in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Nureyev was kneeling in the...
...A fter so many years, the reality of that night is reflected more in my notes of the time and in the memory of the film we shot...
...in the damp fog...
...Tell him the most exciting thing that happened all night was a bunch of people got caught smoking dope and watching a dirty movie...
...Only about three feet separated us from the next roof, which had a small square structure and a large chimney inits middle...
...ABC went to the extraordinary length of feeding it live to London on the Early Bird Satellite, one of the first times news film had been transmitted that way...
...I didn't go...
...Is this yours...
...We jumped over and I shined the light...
...I had seen their photo in that morning's Chronicle...
...A pen knife...
...The petals were damp...
...But Nureyev was ever commanding...
...It is a classic...
...People cheered as Nureyev and Fonteyn came out of the building...
...The herd was crushed together—seventeen of them in all, mostly behind the chimney...
...The one problem was the reporters on the police beat at the Hall of Justice...
...The Tartar was sandy-haired and arrogant looking...
...He had a face like a Tartar...
...Neo-hip decor: Indian bedspreads, and Country Joe and the Fish at Winterland posters for wallpaper...
...Fobbs and his partner went back to lock up the flat, and Lance and I decided to leave...
...Now we were working full-time for ABC-TV...
...Artie Fobbs took charge, barking and giving orders like it was an everyday event...
...I was happy to remember them leaping from roof to roof...
...Nureyev strutted back and forth in front of the cheesy kitchen sink piled high with dishes and trash and kept pinching his lips with thumb and forefinger when Fobbs asked him questions...
...He told everyone to line up in single file, jump back across, and follow him down into the kitchen through which they had collectively thundered...
...Billy laughed," he said, "He couldn't be less interested...
...With a flourish, he bowed and as his head lowered his arm came up with the roses and he switched them back and forth like a whisk broom across my face...
...Though nobody knew who these people were, it was evident we thought they were important, and hence they must be important...
...Oh, that herd...
...e did show up at the Opera House to see The W Exit, however...
...A sheet was tacked in the doorway to the dining room as a screen...
...Lance picked up a Marlboro hard pack on the table with the film...
...The poet and I ended up arguing and shouldering each other back and forth...
...A marijuana cigarette...
...Everyone else seemed to be trying to look nonchalant as if there was a logical reason for this rooftop gathering at 3:30 a.m...
...Is this yours...
...Hundreds were gathered along a roped-off red carpet that led from the side of the Opera House to a waiting limousine...
...The story made front pages everywhere...
...As luck would have it, "the one to worry about" called just a few minutes before the herd was to be loaded in the wagon for the run downtown...
...We had teamed up in 1965 to make a documentary film on hoboes, shooting on trains, on skid rows, and in the hobo jungles remaining from the thirties...
...The poet was shouting about a connection with this event and the day's travail for Nureyev and Fonteyn...
...As Nureyev walked back to his place on the bench he suddenly said to the Sergeant, "You know, if we were somewhere else you would have to pay a lot of money to see me...
...As I walked up the stairs, people were running through the apartment like a herd of buffalo, yelling and screaming...
...A half dozen hippies were crowded near the end of the carpet...
...It was about 3 a.m., July 11, 1967...
...I think the rest climbed the back fence...
...Lance carried a hand-held newsreel camera and I carried a floodlight...
...Nureyev intervened with his fingers clamped on his lips, standing close to Delaney and mocking him...
...It was typical of the time and place...
...He looked at me and smiled even more broadly...
...He was looking down at a woman who was lying on her back in an alley moaning...
...People crushed in...
...I never heard of you...
...Peter Jennings was the anchorman that night in New York...
...Tolerance was my middle name in those days, but I said, "You boys are going to have to move your act over there, to the side, because we are two newsreel madcaps who need this space right here...
...Billy was a sad lush...
...He and his partner Bill Delaney had just brought in a prisoner and had booked him...
...I decided he was giving new meaning to the phrase "blank verse...
...Charades...
...The four of us trudged to the roof...
...It was very old...
...For one thing the Mayor was a loudmouth, and was always throwing his weight around with the police...
...Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev and their fifteen friends were bailed out about noon that day...
...We filmed the crowd as they packed into the old blue van...
...Artie," I said...
...He wasn't popular with the cops and he wasn't popular with his confreres, like Lance and me...
...Lance and I were nervous that we wouldn't be able to keep this story to ourselves, that the competition wouldmove in on us...
...Lance and I wandered back,in the apartment...
...Nureyev looked insolent but he sat down and was silent...
...It missed and hit the wall...
...Sure will...
...A sergeant is sitting behind with an old standard typewriter filling out forms and asking questions...
...That evening, the pair performed to a packed audience at the gilded Opera House...
...He called the Lieutenant in from the field, and then they all called the Captain at home and woke him up...
...Excuse me," said a man in a bathrobe from the doorway of the house next door...
...Bits of roof detritus clung to the hairs of her white coat...
...And he held up the brown bomber between thumb and forefinger about three inches from the balletomane's nose...
...The Sergeant had typed "Omaha...
...Dame Margot just smiled, a broad glistening smile that seemed permanently affixed...
...Times a few years before...
...He was a big guy, rather bison-like, with a great deal of hair...
...he said to us...
...Why don't you be a good fellow and forget this whole thing," said El Capitan...
...Evvv...
...The poet was blocking him...
...Nureyev stopped and held the flowers out...
...And so they did...
...He wouldn't be happy if celebrities were arrested...
...They would...
...She was on her back and when I stared down at her she smiled broadly, and quite incongruously...
...So knock it off or I'll lock you up right now...
...Lance and I entered the debate about this time...
...At the time, I was too young to feel sorry for the father...
...Ayyy...
...Only one was female and she lay on her back in a white ermine coat, her eyes closed tightly...
...An 8mm projector was set up on a coffee table...
...This was not so easy...
...You can do it," said Fobbs encouragingly...
...It's Billy Wimbush from the Chronicle," he said, holding his hand over the phone...
...I tried to state this reasonably but I couldn't seem to get the tone right...
...Oh, I'm afraid we can't do that," I said...
...The guys with the guitars were pushing...
...Capital of Bashkir, USSR...
...Behind him was the woman...
...A marijuana cigarette...
...Sixteen dollars in bills, 35 cents in change...
...Not knowing what else to do, Fobbs called for a paddy wagon and had everyone hauled to Park Station...
...We had just completed an awkward session with a man from Connecticut who had been reunited with his daughter...
...They had opened the San Francisco ballet season the night before in Paradise Lost...
...Some lying, some standing, some sitting on each other...
...They put the Captain on the phone...
...The critics said they were brilliant...
...Fonteyn was lying next to him wrapped in a full-length ermine coat...
...Yes, indeed," I said...
...And think hard...
...The last one was the girl who went over the rail...
...Let me back up a half hour...
...The other men seemed subdued and worried, although there was a lot of nervous giggling...
...Fobbs hopped across and turned to the man...
...A woman had fallen from a fourth-floor balcony and was badly injured...
...It was all quite a big deal...
...It was...
...he asked...
...No one else seemed to be around...
...At the precinct station all seventeen lined up on a wooden bench as their fate was debated...
...Artie Fobbs looked at me like I was speaking Polish...
...RN: "Nurrr...
...She twined her fingers with his and gracefully leaped across, leaning into him as they waited for the others...
...One money clip...
...She'd been brought in by police because her father had put up a reward of $500 to anyone who found her...
...We were still shoving when the door at the other end of the rug opened...
...He wants to know if anything is going on out here...
...When it came Nureyev's turn to be booked the dancer stood in front of the Sergeant smirking and tossing his shaggy blonde-red hair as he spelled his first name slowly and gave his age as 29...
...The Russian Defector and the British Dame might just as well have been two burglars from the Tenderloin...
...Lance was trying to-film...
...She was considered quite a prize among the underpaid Park Station police, who devoted considerable energy to finding her...
...held the light as Lance filmed the girl with the broken / back being carried to the ambulance in a litter...
...The general feeling among the cops was that it would be a lot less hassle just to let everyone go, smart-alecky attitudes or not...
...He leaped to his feet and snapped, "Listen, a--hole, you're not that big a name...
...The deskman answered a ringing phone nearby and yelled at Fobbs...
...We flicked the movie on...
...Nureyev had told him his birth place was Ufa...
...Also, they were often drunk and asleep...
...They were each carrying an armful of red roses...
...Fobbs said, "She ran right over the railing...
...I think her back is broken...
...We used our old Auricon sound camera and a couple of things stand out in my mind...
...ack in the apartment nobody was talking, though the B place was small and now filled with people...
...I gave the poet a solid shove...
...That's not that big a deal...
...Tell Billy it couldn't be quieter," I said...
...Another lesson in my young life about how the world makes its important decisions...
...Nureyev and Fonteyn disappeared into the limousine...
...Nureyev supposedly was the greatest male dancer since Nijinsky, or something like that...
...Doubtful...
...RN, doing a slow pirouette: 1,'Ennn .." SERGEANT, typing: N . . . RN (another slow pirouette the other direction): "Yuuu...
...If you think he looks young now, picture him twenty-six years ago...
...We had become partners after working together at the L.A...
...Our thesis was pretty simple: You guys are free to do what you want...
...We knew we would have an exclusive as soon as the seventeen were brought downtown to the City Prison and locked up where the press couldn't get to them and where TV cameras weren't allowed...
...Look, stupid," says the cop...
...She was away from her new friends and locked in a holding tank as quick as you could say Timothy Leary...
...He was dressed all in white...
...The women were partly dressed, the man wore only his socks, his hat, and a moustache...
...Then he laughed, too...
...Will you tell those cops there's a herd of people on my roof...
...Would Fobbs and Delaney drive over and tell them to knock it off...
...He leaped to the step, gripped a long vertical handhold, curved his back into a deep arch, and leaned back waving to an imaginary crowd...
...An ambulance came down the street behind us...
...The typewriter seemed as old as he was, and the scene went like this: SERGEANT, poised at the machine: "Now Rudi, tell me your last name...
...The Sergeant had never heard of the two people Fobbs described as celebrities...
...Maybe you've seen it, too...
...Symphony is emptying his pockets as we film...
...Lance snorted at that line and Nureyev popped a gum ball out of his mouth and winged it across the room at Lance...
...I know who these people are...
...This is the third call about a loud party on Belvedere Street," he said...
...I don't think it is," he said weakly...
...She was wearing both her ermine coat and the dazzling smile...
...Important people mean trouble...
...The police deskman called to me and Lance...
...He is standing in front of a long booking desk...
...A railroad, or shotgun flat...
...Shortly after, as Lance and I drove towards downtown we heard Fobbs's voice over our police radio...
...The place was a mess: clothes all over the place, beer cans, booze bottles...
...The stories that day had brought reporters and camera crews and interested citizens from out of the woodwork...
...I shined the light on the pair...
...Did they think their parents were coming home...
...One set of keys...
...Lance and I stationed ourselves at the very end, near the car...
...He is placing their contents on the table and the Sergeant is describing them aloud as he logs them...
...Usually they covered for each other so there was only one to worry about at a time...
...Well, yes, it is," says the symphony person with a kind of sluggish honesty...
...They were the greatest dancers in the world: "The Reigning Monarchs" was a typical press description of them...
...A woman next to me grabbed the bouquet and crushed it to her chest...
...We found Art Fobbs on the back porch of the fourth-floor flat...
...I watched him bundle the kid off to a cab heading for the airport...
...She was living in a crash pad with a dozen other pasty-faced kids and was not happy with being dragged home...
...Nureyev was kneeling in the gravel facing the chimney, his _body pressed against the bricks...
...I could smell marijuana...
...I was sitting on a bench in the dingy squad room of Park Police Station on the rim of Haight-Ashbury...
...Do you get it...
...The deskman told him that, then hung up...
...The problem clearly was Lance and me...
...The New York Times headline said "Fonteyn and Nureyev Are Seized Fleeing Hippie Raid...
...He was calling for an ambulance...
...RN, gathered to full height, speaking with a kind of aggressive femininity: "Nureyev...
...Getting to the point, the Captain said-, "Well, f--k 'em, tell Fobbs to book them all...
...This is Nureyev and Fonteyn...
...Victorian construction, semicircular living room over the street, fireplace boarded for safety...
...Now let me ask you again...
...At one point Delaney became irritated with her, demanding to know what she found so funny...
...CI...
...Delaney's face was red, and a vein throbbed in his neck...
...We obliged...
...She was nasty and sullen and made faces during the interview I did with her father...
...says the Sergeant incredulously...
...Lance Brisson and I had been filming a documentary on runaway teenagers...
...As they came down the walk arm in arm towards us I saw a flicker in her eyes as she recognized us...
...I had seen it before...
...The first is the guy from the Seattle Symphony...
...Lance and I filmed the stilted reunion...
...Sunshine," a San Francisco cop who had smoked a marijuana cigarette in front of reporters and cameras on the steps of the Hall of Justice...
...What do I tell him...
...Just because you arrest hippies everyday on a whole lot less evidence and send them to state prison is no reason you shouldn't let a couple of world-famous, rich people skate away free...
...Was it guilt from watching this lewd but laughable old film that drove Fobbs's herd of buffalo from the apartment...
...We found Fobbs and Delaney in the apartment, rummaging around for more dope...
...It was filled with a dozen "bombers," little fat marijuana cigarettes...
...Delaney ended the moment by pushing him into the van and slamming the door and padlocking it...
...It was called "Model T Hitchhiker...
...A fraternity meeting...
...This gesture of solidarity with oppressed dope smokers had caused him to be now sitting in prison...
...SERGEANT: "I said spell it, buddy, don't just say it...
...It featured a fellow and two women having sex in and around a Model-T Ford...
...A small man in a pea coat, tight white trousers and slippers was first in line...
...Lucky for you buster," said the Sergeant and threw it into a wastebasket...
...It went on like that...
...Nureyev stopped in front of us...
...Two were playing guitars, and one fellow was reading a poem written on behalf of "Sgt...
...I couldn't back up, my hip was against the car...
...We could hear the music a block away when we drove up," Fobbs continued...
...He sneered at Fobbs and sprang over the chasm like a gazelle...
...The Sergeant had suffered through ten minutes of the spelling dance and was running short of patience...
...Our film was in great demand...
...The Sergeant pecked out the answers with two fingers...
...We were packing up and gossiping with a friendly young black patrolman named Artie Fobbs...
...He carried a pistol in his cowboy boots and was known to pull it out in the press room when he was in his cups, which was often...
...He sounded excited...
...Delaney was kneeling next to her...
...Among the hairdressers and waiters sitting on the bench was another personage, of sorts, the Assistant Director of the Seattle Symphony...
...The smile wavered for a moment and her lips formed a slight frown...
...He turned on a toe in the gravel and extended his right arm, long slim fingers fluttering at the woman...
...Later when I made a copy of the booking documents I noticed that the Sergeant had spelled it "Noureev" which is how it is listed in the records of the SFPD...
...You're being booked for being in a place where dope was used...
...Are you going to run a story about this if we let them all go...
...It was cool and foggy in San Francisco...
...SERGEANT, not typing: "You want to spell that for me...
...That's 'possession,' understand...
...Listen you," he said with supreme contempt, "if you tell me this is your joint then I'm going to charge you with a serious felony...
...A police car was parked in front of 42 Belvedere, a four-story wood frame apartment building with its front door open and lights in the upper windows...
...He was at the Belvedere address...
...She said something to Nureyev...
...Ah, no...
...How about turning off that camera for a minute...
Vol. 26 • May 1993 • No. 5
