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Funny Hair. Rudi is content right where he is. He likes London, partly because "nobody laughs at my hair." (They laughed at it in Stuttgart, especially when he turned up at rehearsals one day wearing curlers.) His favorite picture is a closeup of his head which looks like Simba the lion in repose. A restless creature, he roams the streets late at night looking like some shabby fugitive, in his black wrap-around leather coat and Dutch-boy cap. Three or four nights a week he drops in at a private, after-hours Soho club called the Ad Lib, where he twists along with such fellow members as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Nobody laughs at anybody's hair there.
Other nights he spends at the movies, laughing convulsively at the cartoons. His one abiding passion besides dancing is music. He has a collection of more than 4,000 records—Chopin, Bach, Callas arias, Scriabin, and every album Peggy Lee ever put out. He never travels anywhere without his portable phonograph. He plays the piano, can listen to almost any classical recording and tell who is conducting.
A creature of the night, he spends most afternoons lolling about his four-room furnished flat in London, playing records, sipping Scotch, chattering on the telephone, often with his good friend Erik Bruhn, who, he says, is "the only dancer who has anything to show me that I don't already know." He uses the phone like a postcard, calling dancer friends around the world, chitchatting in fluent, slightly accented English. When visitors arrive, he will emerge wearing high, tan moccasins, skintight, sky-blue pants and flowing fuchsia shirt. Scattered about the living room are effects that mark the mystery of the man —gilt-bound tomes of Balzac and Schiller next to a pile of toys that he amuses himself with: a soccer game, a Yo-Yo, a gun that shoots pingpong balls. And everywhere there are model train locomotives, which he collects in honor of his origin. He used his earnings of about $2,800 per performance to buy an $80,000 walled-in villa tucked away in the mountains above Monte Carlo, where he spends two or three months out of the year.
Hypnotic Moment. On the days of a performance, he falls into a semi-somnambulant state, eating little, seeing no one. "I am dying all the day," he says sadly. In the late afternoon he packs his gear and drives off to the theater in his beige Mercedes 3205L, arriving two hours before curtain time. Then, swaddled in layer upon layer of sweaters, sweat pants, leggings and scarfs, he goes onto the deserted stage. After a long series of careful and precise unlimbering exercises, he runs through every step of the evening's ballet in deep concentration, shedding clothing as he goes, until he reaches the point of exhaustion. Then he retires to his dingy dressing room and devotes a full hour to dressing and applying his makeup, painting his eyebrows heavy, black and fiercely catlike across his temples.
A few minutes before curtain time, he enters the wings and begins exercising again. Then, as the curtain ascends, his forehead glistening with sweat, his chest heaving, he steps out into a halo of white light. Turning slowly, deliberately, he fixes his enigmatic gaze on the audience for one hypnotic moment, then begins to dance. And, like the sound of the sea, there comes the great rushing gasp of an audience enchanted.