“I?” She smiled an uncomprehending smile. “Why on earth should I be angry at you?”
“You didn’t answer when I knocked at your door several times, and then, when I spoke, you told me, in no uncertain fashion, to get out.”
“Don’t you know that, before a performance, I won’t talk to anyone?” she said sternly.
Then she kissed me.
“Don’t take me too seriously,” she smiled, patting me on the shoulder, “but, remember, I don’t want to see anyone before I go on.”
MARGOT FONTEYN
In Margot Fonteyn we have, in my opinion, the greatest ballerina of the western world, the greatest ballerina of the world of ballet as we know it. Born Margaret Hookham, in Surrey, in 1919, the daughter of an English businessman father and a dark-skinned, dark-haired mother of Irish and Brazilian ancestry, who is sometimes known as the Black Queen in the company, a reference to one of the leading characters in Checkmate. Margot was taken to China as a small child, where the family home was in Shanghai. There was also an interim period when she was a pupil in a school in such a characteristically American city as Louisville, Kentucky.
Margot tells a story to the effect that she was taken as a child to see a performance by Pavlova, and that she was not particularly impressed. It would be much better “copy,” infinitely better for publicity purposes, to have her say that visit changed the whole course of her life and that, from that moment, she determined not only to be a dancer, but to become Pavlova’s successor. But Margot Fonteyn is an honest person.
Her first dancing lessons came in Shanghai, at the hands of the Russian dancer and teacher, Goncharov. Back in London, she studied with Seraphina Astafieva, in the same Chelsea studio that had produced Markova and Dolin. At the age of fourteen, her mother took her, apparently not with too much willingness on Margot’s part, up to the Wells in Islington, to the Sadler’s Wells School. Ninette de Valois is said to have announced after her first class, in the decisive manner of “Madame,” a manner which brooks no dissent: “That child has talent.”
Fonteyn, in the early days, harbored no ideas of becoming a ballerina. Her idealization of that remote peak of accomplishment was Karsavina, the one-time bright, shining star of the Diaghileff Ballet. All of which is not to say that Margot did not work hard, did not enjoy dancing. In class, in rehearsal, in performance, Fonteyn developed her own individuality, her own personality, without copying or imitating, consciously or unconsciously, any other artist.