Dancer

Epigraph Paris 1961

What was flung onstage during his first season in Paris:

ten one-hundred-franc bills held together with an elastic band;

a packet of Russian tea;

a manifesto from the Front de Libération National representing the Algerian nationalist movement, protesting the curfew imposed on Muslims after a series of car bombs in Paris;

daffodils stolen from the gardens in the Louvre causing the gardeners to work overtime from five until seven in the evening to make sure the beds weren’t further plundered;

white lilies with centimes taped to the bottom of their stems, so they were perfectly weighted to reach the stage;

so many flowers that a stagehand, Henri Long, who swept up the petals after the show, had the idea of creating a potpourri, which he sold, on subsequent evenings, to fans at the stage door;

a mink coat that sailed through the air on the twelfth night, causing the patrons in the front rows to think for a moment that some flying animal was above them;

eighteen pairs of women’s underwear, a phenomenon that had never been seen in the theater before, most of them discreetly wrapped in ribbons, but at least two pairs that had been whipped off in a frenzy, one of which he picked up after the last curtain, delighting the stagehands by sniffing them flamboyantly;

a headshot of Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut, with a message at the bottom reading Soar, Rudi, Soar!

a series of paper bombs filled with pepper;

a precious pre-Revolutionary coin thrown up by an émigré who had wrapped it in a note saying that if Rudi kept his cool, he would be as good as Nijinsky if not better;

dozens of erotic Polaroids with the names and phone numbers of women scrawled on the back;

notes saying Vous êtes un Traître de la révolution;

broken glass thrown by Communist protesters, stopping the show for twenty minutes while the shards were swept up, and provoking such a fury that an emergency meeting of the Parisian Party branch was held because of the negative publicity caused;

death threats;

hotel keys;

love letters;

and on the fifteenth night, a single long-stemmed gold-plated rose.