Music: Slim Legs

London’s balletomanes were bursting with pride over a local girl who had made good. Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express boasted that the 26-year-old prima ballerina of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet was “greater than Pavlova.” Slim-limbed Margot Fonteyn was the hottest thing in English ballet since London-born Alice Marks became the great Alicia Markova.

The Express’ enthusiasm, like its politics, was excessively nationalistic. Englishmen like to call London’s 15-year-old Sadler’s Wells company the National Ballet, and take pride in the fact that it owes little to the Russians. Margot Fonteyn is, in a complicated way, English. She was brought up in Shanghai, the daughter of an English tobaccoman named Hookham and a Mexican mother from whom she inherited an exotically high-cheeked face. She joined Sadler’s Wells at 14. Two years later Fonteyn’s arabesques appealed to the patriotism of the Morning Post: “Here, at last, is an English girl who dances with her soul. . . .”

Last week Sadler’s Wells added two more weeks to its season so that everyone who wanted to could see Margot Fonteyn in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Sleeping Beauty. One fact every critic noted and agreed on—Fonteyn had the handsomest legs in English ballet. W. J. Turner wrote: “English dancers in general are of more slender, more graceful, more mobile physique than Italian and French dancers. You will not find among them—men or women—these grand-piano legs.” Margot credits Sadler’s Wells, not the English climate. Says she: “Bad training develops big leg muscles. Most of us have slim legs.”