The life of the majestic, seemingly ageless, ballet dancer, Margot Fonteyn, as revealed in a new biography, was more surreal than joyful, writes Eileen Battersby.
Illusion is the medium of the elite artist as performer. Or so it may once have been, at least for the opera singer or ballet dancer. The matronly-looking soprano somehow manages to convince as a dying flower girl; the middle-aged dancer with crippled feet and a lined face becomes the doomed young Juliet - and all on the turn of a phrase, all in a fleeting gesture. Illusion is a good word, possibly the right word, for describing the ethereal magic that surrounds British prima ballerina assoluta Margot Fonteyn.
For all the legendary Russian dancers that came before her, as well as Londoner Alicia Markova (given her Russian name by Diaghilev), and all the majestic international performers that have since followed, from Lynn Seymour to Darcey Bussell and Alina Cojocaru, Fonteyn remains the defining untouchable, a classical artist whose elusive grace, beauty and consummate purity on stage defied technique. Nothing - neither time, nor the increasing physical vulnerability that became part of every performance, and not even the emergence of a host of gifted young pretenders - could, banish her, it seems. She danced and danced, an apparent immortal, until she was 60 and took leave of the stage without being pushed, to die at 71.
Night after night, in the theatres of the world, the middle-aged woman regained her youth. It is a story more surreal than joyful.
As told by Meredith Daneman, Australian writer and former ballet scholarship student at the Royal Ballet School, it makes compelling, often shocking, at times queasy, reading. This is an insider's biography based on a decade's research and hours, no, days, more like years, of talking to those who knew, and even danced with, Fonteyn, who died, as long ago, it now seems, as February 21st 1991.
Every cliché applying to the words "legend" or "legendary" seems apt. In the course of the high-speed narrative, which is close on 600 pages, Fonteyn's innate competiveness is often referred to. Immaculate good timing was another of her many assets - that, and the luck to secure early on the formidable Ninette de Valois as her lifelong champion. Another of her supporters was the prolific choreographer Frederick Ashton. He was initially hostile, but a tearful Fonteyn secured his compulsive loyalty. It was he who both created and sustained the ballerina's myth, which was based on her unique mix of "warm lyricism and cool classicism" as well as immense human appeal born of her simplicity.
As early as the prologue - in which Daneman asks: "How to explain why it is that when, to a particular strain of music, an ordinary mortal steps forward on to one leg, raises the other behind her and lifts her arms above her head, the angels hold their breath?" - it is obvious that this is an explicit book to be read for information, not literary style. Daneman's breathless, conversational, often slangy prose - "shelled out", "on the blower", "stumping up", "casing the joint", "caboodle", "not to put too fine a point on it" - is irritating. It does, however, convey her sheer excitement at tracking the Fonteyn mystery.
It is a strange experience. Anyone interested in ballet will know the facts of the career of a dancer most of us have never seen dance, apart from the late-career Nureyev partnership footage.
Little Margaret "Peggy" Hookham, born on May 18th, 1919, was not exactly obsessed by ballet, but she was good at it, a fact that helps to make any lesson easier. Her mother, the result of a South American businessman's fling, detected her daughter's talent and devoted herself to both the talent and the daughter. The famously passive Margot Fonteyn was nurtured, not pushed.
When it was time to fight for her place, she could always rely on the support of de Valois, Ashton's deliberately tailored choreography and that late-career salvation and rebirth that arrived in the form of Rudolf Nureyev. Nureyev's mercurial genius, initial sexual allure and encouragement excited her while pushing her to new technical levels on a diet of love and sneers.
The opening chapters carefully plot the making of the future ballerina. De Valois, ruthless and astute, recalls her first impression of the dancer she would support against all others: "Children are either gauche or graceful. Miss Hookham was both."
It was Mother, later unfairly nicknamed "Black Queen", who brought the promising child to lessons, having left her husband in Shanghai and returned to England in the pursuit of tuition. She also sat in on classes and generally made herself useful. The loyal, fussy, determined Mrs Hookham coaxed Peggy to eat good food, but the girl insisted on snacking and favoured baked beans on toast.
Fonteyn's career began with a last-minute solo part in The Nutcracker when she was hurriedly dressed in the Snowflake's costume. In September 1934, on reporting to Sadler's Wells for the new season, the young Fonteyn saw a cast list for The Haunted Ballroom, a ballet written and composed by Geoffrey Toye and choreographed by de Valois, which included Markova and herself. Fonteyn was then aged 15.
In the following year, she had her first experience of romantic fantasy in the form of an English male dancer, William Chappell. He knew nothing about her feelings. But an older married man, given to philandering, was soon to pounce - the composer and conductor, Constant Lambert.
At this point, the story begins to develop two elements: that of the dancer in pursuit of fame, and that of the girl looking for romance, only to find and enjoy easy sex. Her first major relationship, the one with Lambert, who wooed and abandoned with equal abruptness, introduces a theme which endures throughout Fonteyn's later marriage to Roberto Arias and her complex association with Nureyev - that of sexual humiliation. It will take the ballet fan by surprise to discover that Daneman's racy pursuit of Fonteyn the woman tends to overshadow that of her study of the ballerina and her place in dance history.
This is not to suggest that Daneman is not good on the dance material; she is. For all the gossip and personal detail, the narrative does embrace the evolution of British ballet in the shape of Sadler's Wells, renamed the Royal Ballet in 1956, and the many characters who played their parts. Above all, there is the triumphant New York début in 1949. There is a sense of the contrasting European legacy balanced against the US scene, where many Russian dancers had brought modernism, leaving Americans keen for more of the classical legacy.
Yet the book, with its chorus of voices, its famous names, its repetitive consensus on Fonteyn's enigma, its psychobabble and its authorial determination to present the dancer as a complex, exotic, yet utterly English amalgam of Mary Poppins and lonely wanton, is a tough, psychologically demanding read with echoes of the life of Maria Callas. Fonteyn had many lovers, two abortions, two nose-jobs, other surgery and a love/hate relationship with the press.
Fonteyn, made and sustained by roles such as Aurora, Cinderella, Ondine and Chloë, emerges as not exactly remote, but rather as a self-contained professional performance animal who danced rather than think deeply about anything except the performance of the moment. Sensitive about her scant formal education, she travelled the world, yet appears not to have seen it. In Autobiography, published in 1975 and revised in 1989, she reveals little. She does not even mention Charles Hasse, with whom she conducted an intense sexual relationship and friendship - including regular 2 a.m. phone calls - initiated by her.
Similarly, in this book, little is revealed of Fonteyn in her own words, in comparison with the opinions of others backed up by relentless fact. Fonteyn's abiding offstage gesture was the maintenance of a doomed marriage to Arias, whom she had loved at a distance for almost 14 years before he married her and began a ritual sequence of changing travel plans, avoiding her and indulging in numerous affairs. All of which Fonteyn, established in her lifetime as a 20th-century icon, accepted with her briskly polite smile.
When she finally conceded defeat and was prepared to divorce him, he almost died in an assassination attempt which left him paralysed. She was determined to nurse him. Arias had finally provided her with something she had wanted all her life, a person who needed her. Her dancing had compensated for her empty marriage, and its later stages paid for her husband's medical bills. Even then, the half-baked revolutionary rake - possessed of quick wit, charm and deviousness - cheated her by having an adoring, if insane, lover who killed herself on the day he died. The lover's funeral attracted the same mourners and, as ever, did not spare Fonteyn's feelings.
The abiding intelligence of this narrative is provided by the pragmatic de Valois, who delivers the best lines. It is ultimately a book about fame - its myths, its squalor, its reality - as much as it is about ballet. The critics assess the dancer, the public adore the dancer and, in time, the critics can't see beyond the legend either. After all the adulation, all the honours, the thousands of hours spent rehearsing, performing, travelling and simply being looked at, MargotFonteyn retreated in poverty to a tin-roofed farm shack in Panama surrounded by a herd of cattle. She relaxed, appeared content and finally allowed her hair its natural grey.
Illness struck and there was no hope. Neither her grace nor lightness could save her. The ashes of Britain's great ballerina are buried in a cemetery in Panama, at the foot of her husband's grave.
Ninette de Valois, the great survivor, spoke about her special dancer at a memorial service in Westminster Abbey. She had witnessed the entire phenomenon; after all, she had created Fonteyn the dancer. But the abiding revelation from this forensic study is that of the powerful, sincere love Mrs Hookham, who died aged 93, only three years before her famous daughter, had for her. Every little girl interested in ballet dreams of becoming Fonteyn the dancer. But most adult females would live in fear of becoming Fonteyn the woman.
Margot Fonteyn, by Meredith Daneman, is published by Penguin Viking, priced £20
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