Success Sto ry Moira Shearer. By Pigeon Croule. (Faber. 2 I
s.) IT is not very easy, one would think, to write the life of a young dancer, even of a famous young dancer, when she has barely reached the age of twenty-four. It is a help, of course, that she should also be a film star ; in fact, that is perhaps the raison d'être of this book. But the author, we notice, calls it a portrait, not a life ; and the verbal portrait accompanies forty-seven photographic portraits of Moira Shearer, from the age of three to twenty-three, which to her numerous admirers will in themselves justify this book. Among them all I find Roger Wood's action picture of Moira Shearer and Michael Somes, with the corps de ballet in Cinderella, the most exciting, but all are beautiful and interesting. This is a perfect gift-book for children and childlike adults, who have no particular acquaintance with ballet ; they will find in it also a slight sketch of the beginnings of classical ballet and the growth of its tradition, as well as a formal introduction to the great names with which more sophisticated ballet-goers are well acquainted. There are also some interesting glimpses of ballet classes by great teachers such as Nicholas Legat and Vera Volkova, and the story of the making of the film of Red Shoes is dramatic and even agonising. The single-mindedness of the author has saved her from insipidity, and she has told her success story of the chaining young Scottish ballerina and film-star in such a way as to make her glimorous without offending the modesty for which all who know Moira Shearer have always praised her.
The difficulty, of course, about a monograph on a member of a ballet company is that, while not consciously aiming to keep her in the centre of the picture, the author is impelled by circumstance to do so. If we quarrel with this we must remember that this is not a history of ballet, nor a choreographic study ; it is only a sketch of the meteoric rise to fame of a young dancer, who appears to have had no adventure outside her beautifully sheltered career. She was not, like Toumanova, born in a refugee train ; she was neither a Cinderella nor a slum child dancing to a barrel-organ in an East End alley. Even in Red Shoes she was the thoroughly respectable niece of a society lady. Perhaps, after all, that was the most sensational antecedent for a ballet-dancer. It is interest- ing to learn that Moira Shearer comes of a very musical, indeed professionally musical, family. This helps to explain the musicality for which, like Margot Fonteyn, she is remarkable. It was certainly this quality, even more perhaps than her striking appearance and beautiful line, which made Ashton choose her for leading roles in Symphonic Variations and Scenes de Ballet. One remembers her as a constant visitor, often during a time of strenuous rehearsals, at the private clavichord recitals of the greatest of all clavichord players, the late Violet Gordon Woodhouse, and with what absorp- tion and intensity she listened. Several passages in Miss Crowle's monograph recall that memory to one's mind ; they reveal also the steely quality of Moira Shearer's will. It is true that no obstacle was ever placed in the way of her career. No dancer has ever been more warmly encouraged by her family or more authentically gilded by Nature. But, and here we strike the moral of the success story, the golden fleece, perfect instep and peri-waist would have availed her little without the rapt submission to an appointed discipline without which no star stays in its course.
There is one more point. Moira Shearer has great elegance, beauty and even nobility. She has great integrity of purpose. All these qualities are illustrated in this monograph. But neither text nor photographic illustrations shows her as yet possessing the fire of genius, which doubtless cannot be acquired, but may suddenly break out of its sheath like the scarlet flower of the flamboyant. We look forward to this in the second chapter.
BERYL DE ZLWTE.
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