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88 H I G H L I F E M A G A Z I N E . C O M . A U

in Nepal. “For the first time in my life I saw serious poverty; children begging in the streets of Kathmandu. It affected me deeply and aroused my social conscience. I decided I wanted to work with children, in childcare.”

Back in Jersey, he trained as a social worker. His first childcare job was in a residential home for disruptive boys. “I did enjoy it; I had some good colleagues and thought it was a job worth doing,” Blue says. “If you're going to work at something, have some pride in it. Don't just make a bucket-load of money.”

Moving to London, he worked for Barnardo’s in a special unit for violent and antisocial adolescent girls. That was another eye- opener: it taught him that girls could be as violent as boys, sometimes more so. Despite the high-stress nature of the work, there was enough satisfaction to convince him he had found a career. But the stress never let up, and in 1988, when the chance cropped up to take a sabbatical and crew on a yacht in a transatlantic race, he jumped at it. He never went back to Barnardo’s; sailing became his new career.

Blue ran into Rudolf Nureyev in 1989 at a St Barts restaurant where the crew and passengers of Ocean Leopard and other yachts had gathered on the night before a race. Seeing the eccentrically dressed dancer sitting conspicuously alone in the crowded eatery, Blue went over and invited him for a sail on the yacht the next day. Rudolf accepted at once.

From then on things moved fast. After the race, Rudolf took Blue out for dinner to thank him for the day and then invited him to his sea-front house for tea the next morning. When Blue arrived, he was amazed: the place was a mess, with a layer of sand, salt and dust over everything and dirty dishes and pots in the kitchen sink.

“Where is everybody?” Blue asked.“Who?” Rudolf retorted.“The cook, the driver, the cleaner, the bodyguard...”Rudolf shrugged, indicating there was nobody. He was alone.

But, he said, he was about to start a new assignment in New York and his contract required him to have an assistant. Would Blue like the job? Just like that. As Blue would soon learn, this was typical of Rudolf. He was not impulsive; he simply lived life at the speed of light and made decisions in microseconds.

Not taking the question seriously – because the rich and famous were always issuing throwaway invitations like that to yacht crew – Blue said yes. However, aware of Rudolf’s sexual inclinations, he insisted that any association they might have was to be strictly professional. No hanky-panky.

“I thought the offer was a joke,” Blue says. “But it was no joke for Rudolph. He was very decisive. He had absolute determination. He believed every action must be positive and forceful, otherwise you fail. By the time I met him this determination had been honed to perfection. Go there! Do that! Do it NOW!”

So a deal was struck in seconds. Blue had a new job. Which was how he found himself in a theatre in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, watching a performance of Swan Lake excerpts from the wings in 1990. That was the start of Blue’s year with Rudolf. It is documented vividly in Blue’s 1997 book A Year with Rudolf Nureyev, which he co-wrote with his uncle, Simon Robinson, a novelist twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

“I knew zero about ballet before I started with him,” Blue says. “I’d heard of Rudolf Nureyev, maybe Margot Fonteyn, but that was it.”

What did Rudolf see in Blue?“I was solid and reliable, and I wasn’t going to fall in love with

him, like so many others who wanted to work for him,” Blue says. Although Rudolf did not really want anybody around him at all, he realised he needed a Mr Fixit, a Mr Diplomacy, to manage his off-stage life for him. So Blue globe-trotted with the great man – to Cleveland, New York, Paris, London, Milan, Verona, Vienna, the islands of Li Galli (Italy) and St Barts – fixing and being diplomatic and doing myriad other jobs to boot.

At the time, Blue was 27 and Rudolf 52. Debilitated by AIDS, his body in steep decline, yet still driven by his furious energy and unbounded ambition, the maestro was determined to battle on until he could dance no more. Blue has never doubted that the man was a genius. But genius can be an explosive package and Blue says working for the dancer meant living perpetually on a knife-edge. He once told Rudolf that his experience looking after sociopathic teenagers had trained him well for coping with the dancer. Rudolf laughed.

H I G H L I F E M A G A Z I N E . C O M . A U 89

Despite his illness, Rudolf retained a great deal of physical strength. “Try lifting a woman above your head, without twitching, and then letting her down as lightly as a feather, time after time. Rudolf had been doing that and much more for over 30 years. He had biceps like a middleweight,” Blue writes in his book.

Just how dangerous was the mix of Rudolf’s unpredictability and physical strength became evident once in the dancer’s New York flat. Blue had challenged his boss over a point in their contract. Rudolf did not like being challenged. He lost his cool and punched Blue in the stomach before storming out of the room. “It was a good punch,” Blue writes.

Rudolf believed good dance was impossible without good food. Fortunately for Blue, he fuelled his high-energy lifestyle with carbohydrates and his tastes were relatively simple: he lived mostly on risotto. “In one period I cooked risotto for him 30 days in a row.”

Massaging the maestro was another of Blue’s tasks, usually first thing in the morning. “Dance was pain, and massage was medicine. Rudolf didn’t want to be soothed. He wanted to be hammered back into working shape… I never massaged hard enough for him, but then neither did the professionals,” Blue writes.

Towards the end of 1991, Rudolf’s health was so poor that Blue had to carry him upstairs, bathe him, carry him to bed, undress him, put his nightclothes on him and settle him in bed. “The decline was very sad, and that was why I didn’t want to stay with him to the end. It wasn’t going to be fun.”

Blue quit in October 1991. Nureyev died in Paris on January 6, 1993.

“I admired him for his achievements,” Blue says. “I did like him, and he grudgingly liked me. I think we genuinely liked each other.”

Blue’s year with Nureyev changed his life. It introduced him to a part of his character he never knew existed and taught him lessons that he has been putting into practice ever since. “If you were with Rudolf, whether you were a make-up artist or a dancer or a lighting technician, you worked to your absolute maximum. You might have thought you could get away with less, but you were pushed to your limit. So you learnt how good you could be.

“I certainly learnt that. It instilled a lot of pride.”After leaving Rudolf, Blue took a butler course in London.

This not only gave him new skills but also polished the ones he had picked up on the job in the previous year. With his new qualification added to his practical experience of managing the life and assets of a wealthy celebrity, Blue found work with British, Spanish and Saudi royals as well as the owners of very large yachts.

Blue has been managing other people’s assets since he settled

in Sydney’s Manly in 1995, where he married Jane, his girlfriend from Jersey days, and lived until moving to Fitzroy Falls.

“Probably a third of my week is taken up with woodwork; the rest of the time I am in Sydney,” Blue says. “When I come home, the chips fly and the bandsaw whirls and it is a very pleasing creative process, working with some amazing timber. Maybe one day I’ll do it full-time.”

Sailing will always be a part of Blue’s life. He crews on ocean racing yachts every year and sails regularly with the Southern Highlands Sailing Club on Fitzroy Falls Reservoir. Once a month he writes a 1500-word column for International Sailing magazine.

As I’m leaving, I ask Blue where his nickname came from. It’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask since I met him. His father gave it to him, he says, but by the time Blue got around to asking him why he had chosen it he had forgotten. So it will remain a mystery for ever. HL

FROM FAR LEFT: BLUE ON A YACHT ON SYDNEY HARBOUR; BLUE AND THE ECCENTRICALLY-DRESSED RUDOLPH NUREYEV; BLUE IN HIS FITZROY FALLS WORKSHOP. BELOW: PIECES BLUE HAS CREATED ON DISPLAY IN HIS GALLERY.