A rare artist
Sir: You did a considerable service to the history of music and ballet by printing in full (Arts, 2 November) the apologetic postlude added by Julia Kavanagh to her curious and cumbrous biography of Freddie Ashton, so short on idolatry and so long on homosexual gossip quite irrelevant to his extraordinary gifts. Alas, some of his long lifetime's male bedmates, particularly across the Atlantic, were happy to feed her all their dreary recollections, as irrelevant as well as so very much more innocent than the gory details of the 'goings-on' that, on their threatened exposure, ended in the sui- cide of Tchaikovsky, another giver of aes- thetic pleasure to the world for generations to come. What a pity Freddie did not stick to his earlier octogenarian oath, made to that best of British actors, Peter Eyre: 'I'll never talk to that woman again!'
Even in her mea maxima culpa postlude which you so discerningly chose to publish, she managed to reveal her surprising igno- rance of English 'gentlemen' by her absurd supposition that they do not very often both possess and indulge in 'an uninhibitedly scatological side'. Of the hospitality of the Queen Mother, so often enjoyed in Wind- sor Park and Sandringham by Freddie, Noel Coward once observed that it was delightful 'if it wasn't somewhat spoilt by one's continual fear of letting a "fuck" or two into one's conversation'. Still, one was pleased to read of a drunken Freddie being taken home by the senior member of the almost 100 per cent homosexual household staff at Clarence House, if sorry not to see the story repeated of HM ringing down to complain, 'I don't know what you old queens down there are drinking but this old Queen upstairs needs her martini.'
Apart from that admirable dancer and friend Alexander Grant, who understood him through thick and thin and who by chance was the one to find him dreamt away in sleep one morning, it is only his women friends who best understood and loved him. The ailing and absent Dame Margot's wonderfully apt words, read for her at his memorial service in the Abbey, `a rare artist, comparable to Shakespeare for his extraordinary understanding of the human heart and mind and his ability to illuminate them through his own art form'; have ever since stuck in my head and heart. So, too, the loving insights of the French friend Freddie and I were for- tunate to share, Ambassadress Martine de Courcel, in whose tiny Mediterranean beachside summer hideaway Freddie spent an annual fortnight for a decade. They had no secrets from each other, only a loving complicity, in short all that is so disastrously missing from poor, well- meaning Julia Kavanagh's deeply disap- pointing and abominably illustrated doorstep of a biography. Luckily, at every Ashton evening at Covent Garden, such as the one recently enjoyed by The Specta- tor's editor and myself, a ballet-lover may learn much more of value about the cher maitre and his oeuvre from the pro- gramme's 2,000 words on him from that best of ballet critics, John Percival.
Alastair Forbes
1837 Château-d'Oex, Switzerland
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