In the 1967 Summer of Love, international ballet stars Rudolph Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn were booked at the San Francisco Ballet to perform Romeo and Juliet. They were also booked into City Prison.
By 1967, Nureyev and Fonteyn were the most famous dancers in the world. She was 48; he was 29. But despite their age difference, they evoked a romanticism seldom seen in ballet.
Their appearance in San Francisco was to include several different of their most famous works, including Giselle and Romeo and Juliet. After their July 10th, Monday night performance of Paradise Lost, the two dancers and a group of friends went to Trader Vic’s late night food and drinks. They drank and ate until the bar closed and then decided to accept an invitation to a rooftop party in the Haight Ashbury district.
The cops were called to quiet down the party around 3 a.m. Upon entering the apartment on Belvedere Street, they smelled marijuana and found twelve hand rolled joints, two suspicious white capsules and “a pipe commonly used to smoke marijuana.”
When the police entered the apartment building, the party goers scattered. Nureyev was discovered on the rooftop of an adjacent building, lying down, hoping to evade arrest. Dame Margot, in a spectacular mink coat, “fled via a rickety back stairway – littered with banana peels – to a neighboring roof” and was caught crouching behind a parapet.
The two stars, along with sixteen others, were taken to Park Station and then transported to the 6th Floor of the Hall of Justice jail. All eighteen were charged with being in a place where marijuana is used and with disturbing the peace. Nureyev and Fonteyn were bailed out at 7:30 a.m. The next day all charges were dismissed.
The arrests were front page news in San Francisco and elsewhere. The Examiner ran a side story declaring, “Arrests Stun Society,” with the subheadline of, “Society Agog.”
“It was as if Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip had been picked up for brawling in a pub,” gushed an Examiner staff writer. The blame for this indiscretion fell clearly on the hippies of the Haight Ashbury. The Chronicle printed a lengthy interview with Hans Brant, the maitre d’hotel at Trader Vic’s, detailing the types of drinks (Tonga Punch) they ordered and their meal of hors d’oeuvres and Chinese food.
According to the photos of their time in custody and of reports by those who encountered them, Dame Margot seemed to find the whole caper amusing, while Rudi was sullen and annoyed.
As he was being released from jail he mugged for the television cameras and blew into the lens of one to fog it over. “As he left the Hall of Justice, he told reporters, ‘You’re all children.’”
In spite of their arrests and the “scandal” that ensued, Nureyev and Fonteyn performed Romeo and Juliet with the Royal Ballet that night in San Francisco and then moved elsewhere for the rest of the tour.
The Chronicle made the escapade its lead editorial with a tongue in cheek title: “A New, Exciting Rooftop Ballet.” “We thrill to and envy the splendid spirit of adventure displayed in the rooftop flight of Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev amidst the skylights, sun decks and clotheslines of the Haight-Ashbury district. They have brought the sprightly, leaping whirl of ballet off the stage and into the wider audience of the city’s daily life, have shown that the city’s heart is yet young, as is Dame Margot’s, and have shown, once again, that the fiction of reality is beyond conjecture.”
(All photos from the San Francisco Examiner collection housed at the Bancroft Library)
