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Kurt Andersen: Robert Gottlieb is one of the most important and successful editors in book publishing he was Joseph Heller's editor, he's Michael Crichton's editor and Toni Morrison's and he just edited Bill Clinton's gigantic memoir that came out this summer. He has also been a serious connoisseur of ballet since he was a kid, so it was a pretty big deal for him to work on Margot Fonteyn's autobiography thirty years ago, and now Gottlieb has organized an exhibition about her at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. Fonteyn was already a star in Britain when she first came to America in 1949 to dance Sleeping Beauty and here in New York she electrified audiences, and shortly appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. I toured the Fonteyn exhibit with Gottlieb to find out what made her such and important and beloved dancer- the most beloved of the modern era.
Robert Gottlieb: The name of the Show is: Margot Fonteyn in America: A Celebration… so Fonteyn in America began in October 1949, when her company the Saddler's Wells ballet made its famous debut here and had this extraordinary triumph. I mean classical ballet had never seen anything like it in America, and I had taken my New York Times ad down to the old Met and stood in line for hours and hours, and I was looking at the casting and the only ballerina we knew was Moira Shearer, because she had been the star of the movie The Red Shoes but she was second cast; first cast was always Margot Fonteyn, but we didn't know. But I dutifully got tickets for everybody doing everything and I must have gone about a dozen times.
Kurt Andersen: And what was so amazing about her? If I had been, or any of us had been sitting in the Met in October of 1949, why would I have been struck by her performance?
RG: Well those performances of Sleeping Beauty were so sublime that you would have been struck by everything. First by her nature; she simply was a radiant personality and a generous one and a happy one. She came on stage and your heart lifted (particularly in this role) and she had tremendous musicality. Everything was phrased in the most subtle and beautiful and organic way, nothing ever seemed forced. She was not a pyrotechnical dancer. I mean she always joked…she used to say 'oh my feet are like puddings no one would even take me into a ballet company now in the 50's or in the 60's'
KA: So she was not the greatest virtuoso?
RG: Not at all, nor did she want to be. But her communicative ability, her lyric quality, her dramatic intensity, everything made audiences adore her and she was loved in a way that no other ballerina…
KA: In this country by ordinary people?
RG: Everyone who saw her.
KA: So from the looks of these pictures, you have basically organized this show according to her signature roles.
RG: Well this first half of it, I would say that's true yeah. These are what we would call her iconic roles. The Sleeping Beauty in which she made her debut here which was her most famous role for many years
KA: And this is the tutu here?
RG: Those are the costume and the slippers that she wore on October 9, 1949. There is the Time Magazine cover which celebrated it shortly thereafter.
KA: Which is amazing.
RG: Which is amazing. The next year when she was touring…or two years later she was on the cover of Newsweek. She was a figure as well as an artist, and that grew and grew, and then when she began her famous partnership with Nureyev they became…
KA: Who had come from the Soviet Union in the early 60s.
RG: Yeah they became unbelievably chic…up here there is this picture of them…are they doing the Monkey? Are they doing the Twist?
KA: They are doing something back when dances had names.
RG: That is right…he is wearing some kind of trendy dinner jacket with like a cowboy tie of some kind and his hair is flopping over his face. She is grinning wildly and she is wearing a short dress that looks as if it's made of monkey fur or some kind of fringe…
KA: Feathers maybe?
RG: Whatever it is it is shaking as she is shaking. We love that picture, that's why we made it so big.
KA: Are there equivalents today as figures? I mean Madonna plus Jacqueline Onassis?
RG: You wouldn't want to see Madonna on Pointe…no it's a different world now because Margot, her hallmarks were: restraint, taste, elegance, deportment, generosity, simplicity, modesty…
KA: And that wasn't some spin that her PR handlers put out.
RG: That is what she was like. She was also stubborn and tough as steel, because you do not become the worlds most important ballerina and stay it for 25 years or whatever unless you are very, very strong, you have to be to survive that long.
KA: Her career…this luminous meteoric career that lasted from the middle of the 40's and 50's and 60's I guess in to the 70's, coincided with George Balanchine's great luminous career as a choreographer. Is there a sense among people like you who love ballet that that was the golden age, everything since has been sort of gray?
RG: I think not gray, but there has certainly been a falling off. And the glamour of ballet has receded you know there was this famous thing called the ballet boom which was fueled by New York City ballet, Margot and the Sadler's Wells and then the famous defections: Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov…
KA: Great Stories
RG: Great stories, great glamour, applause ovations, flowers, etcetera. There is nothing like that. Ballet has ceased to be that. Also, the great choreographers are gone.
KA: When dancers, young dancers today still dancing of the next or the following generation come to the show how do you think they'll react?
RG: I can't imagine it's really a different world.
KA: But certainly there must be a sense of 'my God those were the days.'
RG: Well…they were right, but these are the days too, just in different ways.
KA: Bob Gottlieb, thanks very much.
RG: And thank you.
