ARTS

never talk to that woman again'

Julie Kavanagh, the biographer of Frederick Ashton, reveals how she almost ruined their friendship Fairly early in our acquaintance, Fred- erick Ashton wrote in the book I had asked him to sign, To Julie Who will hold (soon) all my secrets, With Love?

Fred The question mark was meant as a warn- ing. It was a symbol of provisional trust, implying that if I betrayed his confidence in any way I would automatically forfeit his friendship. This happened all too soon.

I had got to know Fred when I inter- viewed him in 1984 for Vanity Fair, a longish profile written to mark his 80th birthday. We struck up an immediate rapport (owing mostly to the fact that I am married to the then Royal Ballet dancer, Ross MacGibbon, whom he liked very much), and after listening to a continuous flow of witty, well-honed anecdotes about his life and his friends, I knew that I wanted to write his biogra- phy. What I didn't know was the degree of intricate fly-fishing that this was going to involve.

Ashton has always been considered a very private man — 'What he has wished to tell the world about himself is told in his ballets' — and the two books written about him to date focus entirely on his work. The main reason for his reticence was his attitude to his homo- sexuality. Privately, this had never been a source of guilt or anxiety, but it was a side of his life that he did not want scru- tinised. He hated the prurience and plundering of modern biography 'Digging into people's lives. So squalid. Sordid' — and although he liked nothing Fre more than sitting reminiscing for hours, talking with surprising candour, he was unwilling, for reasons of both laziness and circumspection, to put anything in writing himself.

At least a dozen letters among his papers are from publishers trying, sometimes two or three times, to persuade him to change his mind. He always declined, even when George Weidenfeld proposed sending his friend, the writer Frances Donaldson, to record their conversation with a tape- recorder — 'We'd have sent each other to sleep,' he said. The Queen Mother, who loved Fred's company, urged him on sever- al occasions to write his memoirs, but his reaction was just as firm. 'I told her, "No way, Ma'am."' Consequently, when I first brought up the idea of a biography, I was quite taken aback when, instead of refusing outright, he eluded the question with a tour de force of teasing. 'You're crazy! It's going derick Ashton as the Spectator in Nocturne, 1936, photographed by Gordon Anthony that, according to a courtier acquain- to be the dreariest book in the world. Nobody's going to read it and nobody's going to buy it. There'll be boxes of it in Charing Cross Road at a quarter of the price. And [to Ross] you will go on at her and say, "Why did you waste all that time?" You should start right now.' It wasn't exactly yes, but neither was it no.

We continued to see each other sporadi- cally throughout the summer of 1984. I would take him out to lunch, or to see a film or a play, until one day our new friendship was brought to an abrupt end. I had agreed to show Fred my Vanity Fair piece before sending it off to New York and as I sat opposite him, watching him sigh his way through the pages and chain- smoke in his singular way — cigarette held between his middle fingers as he sucked in the smoke (Fred never properly inhaled), then switched to thumb and first finger as he exhaled, his hand rotating to pause close to his cheek — I noticed him suddenly blanch. I had written briefly about his closeness to the Queen Mother, a subject, he told me sternly, that I was forbidden to mention. I had quoted nothing incendiary, only a few lines about how the two of them would giggle together, talk French and do imitations (`She does American ladies very well'), but I had referred to his liking for the faded elegance. of Sandringham, the fact that the carpets are threadbare in places, and this, he felt, might be mis- construed. The real issue, of course, was that I had exposed his indiscretion, showing him, however innocuously, to have broken the code of silence imposed on friends of the royal family. The para- graph had to go.

Fred's 80th birthday was on 17 September, and ten days later I opened the Times, which had bought the British rights to my piece, and saw that his ,remarks about Queen Elizabeth, which I p had crossed out in the text (these were pre-word-processor days), had been reinstated. With a racing heart, I imme- diately took a taxi to his flat to break the news, but deduced from his expression that the damage was irrevocable. The following morning I heard from my actor friend Peter Eyre, who had seen Fred at a dinner the night before, that he had brooded about it obsessively, confiding his distress to Princess Mar- garet and Gore Vidal, and telling Peter, `I'll never talk to that woman again.' And for almost a year he didn't. It made no difference that the Times had written to him to apologise and exculpate me, or among members of the royal family. Fred, as one of his friends remarked, was a `good hater', and, at any gathering at which we saw each other, I was theatrically and humiliatingly snubbed.

It was only later that I understood the full implications of what I had done. Dur- ing his last few years, Fred's friendship with the Queen Mother had been one of the most important in his life. She had written suggesting that it was time she abandoned the formalities and instead of addressing him as 'Sir Frederick', called him simply `Freddie' (society knew Ashton as Freddie, the dance world as Fred). The privilege of riding by her side in a carriage or sitting at her right hand at table brought him immea- surable delight, not least because it seemed the ultimate acknowledgment of his achievement. 'Who would have thought this of little Freddie Ashton from Lima, Peru?' was a favourite catchphrase of his, familiar to many.

For all his anxiety, however, Fred found that nothing had changed. Invitations to Sandringham and Clarence House contin- ued to arrive, and by June 1986, when he and I saw each other at a party, he made it clear that I had been forgiven. (A few weeks later, when his remarks were quoted again in a profile of the Queen Mother, he was even able to quip wryly, 'Those thread- bare carpets, they'll haunt me till I die.') Our friendship resumed and deepened over the next two years, based, I suppose, on mutual give and take. If Fred needed a lift to Chandos Lodge, and his usual roster of chums couldn't oblige, Ross and I would chauffeur him. This was a prospect to which we greatly looked forward, as he would enliven the journey with a non-stop commentary, pointing out a gruesome pink velveteen chair on the pavement in Leyton- stone that looked like a commode, for instance, or a lorry that overtook us labelled `Gayfreighf — 'Do you think there are a toad of old queens inside being dumped in Suffolk?' Ross and I would spend the night in a nearby inn until he began insisting that we stay with him. In return, the deal was that we supplied the food. 'I can't cope, you see,' he'd say plain- tively.

The two-day Chandos routine hardly var- ied. We would arrive around noon, in time for coffee prepared by his housekeeper, Mrs Dade, who sat straight-backed on the edge of a stool in his Wemyss-stocked day- room, filling Fred in on village news in her soft Suffolk burr. Then I might plant the cowslips or sweetpeas that I'd grown for him from seed, or Ross might be instructed to dig holes for a collection of new conifers according to strict, choreographed direc- tions. Drinks before lunch — Bloody Marys or Bucks Fizz — lasted until late afternoon when Fred, who regarded any meal as an unwelcome distraction from drinking, smoking and conversation, finally agreed to sit down and eat. My brief was to cook eas- ily chewable and digestible dishes, his favourites being consommé with a blob of sour cream followed by sole Veronique, but he would have been just as happy with puréed nursery food. Lunch rolled into tea, when Mrs Dade would bring a pot of PG Tips and a plate of vol-au-vents made with the lemon curd Fred always bought at the Sandringham flower show. We learnt to devour the lot, knowing it would be our only sustenance until 10 or 11, when he could be persuaded to have supper. After midnight he was at his peak: springing up to imitate Isadora's abandoned run; grip- ping the mantelpiece to demonstrate Nijin- ska's exaggerated use of the upper body at the barre; borrowing Ross as a partner to show how an authentic South American tango should be languorous rather than jerky and angular. We were always the first to fade, tearing ourselves away at about two and trudging upstairs to the pretty guest room, heated in winter by nothing more than a lacy Victorian heater that gave out as much warmth as a 40-watt bulb.

Fred complained more and more about the indignities of old age, but, despite the physical deterioration he so resented, we never thought of him as old. No generation gap existed between us, any more than it did between ourselves and the two friends we grew to love from his 1920s circle, Bar- bara Ker-Seymer and Billy Chappell, both of whom had a sense of humour that was irreverent and sharply contemporary. All three were wonderful company and totally unshockable. But whereas Barbara and Billy were always the same, in Fred's case there was a marked division between the public and private persona. Countering his popular image as the ultimate English gen- tleman was an uninhibitedly scatological side. Changing-room obscenities peppered his speech, and grumbles about the acidity of the Bucks Fizz would be accompanied by a prolonged belching session. For all his social fastidiousness and restraint, he loved gossip and took a novelistic interest in other people's lives. When the young Ital- ian dancer Alexandra Ferri left the Royal Ballet to join American Ballet Theatre at Baryshnikov's invitation, he sat with her in a corner at a party one night and whis- pered, 'Fuck him if you want to, but don't fall in love with him' (later quizzing a mutual friend, 'Well, did she?', meaning the former).

Fred needed a great deal of time alone, sitting for hours chain-smoking, listening to music and staring into space, claiming that he was thinking of absolutely nothing, but in fact semi-entranced in the state of lam- bent calm that sustained his choreographic mind. He also needed an audience and found his biographer to be his most avid lis- tener. In his Mrs Tiggy-Winkle kitchen, peeling grapes for the Veronique sauce, I would hear a cry of 'Fuck the food! Come back!' He enjoyed the company of women almost more than that of men, offering me advice on clothes, make-up, love affairs, and encouraging an intimate exchange of confidences. Then he would remember my journalistic role and regret his indiscretion, rounding on me with irritation. Once, when he'd asked me whether he could eat a tin of ancient anchovy paste and I'd asked him what the sell-by date was, he exploded, He's the poofter who drinks alcohol-free lager.' `You're always asking me dates!' And I would overhear him complain to the coterie of friends who rang him every night, 'She's hauling my guts out, of course.'

Nevertheless, by 1987, Fred had signed a note of authorisation giving me access to general archive material and told me, 'You can do it — but only when I'm dead.' Cru- cial characters in the story, however, were starting to appear in the obituary columns with worrying regularity, and I felt that unless Fred actively forbade it, I should press ahead with my investigations, although I also felt guiltily vulturish in doing so. To begin with, he appeared not to mind. He listened intrigued to my account of a conversation I'd had with Virgil Thom- son in New York and how I'd traced the location of their original St Theresa from Four Saints in Three Acts to a shabby nurs- ing home in Queens. When I announced that I was going to Peru and Ecuador to research his background, he scoffed, saying that he'd always thought I was a bit mad. Although a couple of his close friends warned me that he was not at all happy about it, the impression he gave me was not so much that he was concerned I would be excavating his past, but rather that I might stir up distant South American relatives with whom he deliberately stayed out of touch (one complained that she hadn't had a Christmas card from him for 50 years). `Don't go,' he pleaded. 'Because then they'll all be on to me.'

Far from having a divisive effect, the Peru trip seemed to bring us much closer; I'd come home and find a message on the answerphone saying, 'It's Fred. Old Fred. Ring me.' He craved company during this period and he wanted attention, making meek, heart-rending requests for soup and thermal vests. I'd grown to love him so much that, if I hadn't been married, I think I would have devoted all my free time to taking care of him. But Fred excelled at acting pathetic and I discovered there were at least half a dozen other women whom he had running round, competing to attend to his needs. He was self-absorbed by nature, never one to put himself out for anyone Cecil Beaton used to say that he was the most ungenerous man he'd ever known but although Fred never paid for or pro- duced a meal in the years I knew him, he could be touchingly solicitous in his own way. I was in an advanced state of pregnan- cy towards the end of 1987 and he kept an avuncular eye on my progress. When I told him I was making a pilgrimage to Piero's `Madonna del Parto' in the Monterchi Chapel in Arezzo (believing, like the gullible local village girls, that she would bring me luck), he clucked with disapproval at the risk I was taking — 'With your first child and at your age' — even though he was every bit as superstitious as I was he couldn't understand why I didn't just light a candle at Brompton Oratory as he always did before starting a new ballet, and he instructed me to be sure to come to see him before I left so that he could bless me, which he did with great solemnity, tracing a cross on my belly. Soon after my return, he offered to perform the Ring Test on me in order to ascertain the sex of the child. I'll always remember him struggling on to his creaky knees one night as I lay on the floor and dangling my wedding ring, tied to a single hair, over my bump, until it began to swing resolutely round and round. 'A girl [wrong]. Very determined. Just like her mother.'

He kept telling me to have my children and forget about the book, but stubbornly I persisted. By now it had become a voca- tion. The unspoken understanding between us was that Fred would co-operate by answering my questions way into the night. Sometimes he allowed me to tape him, sometimes not, complaining that it stopped his flow. But I noticed that he was becom- ing increasingly perturbed by my consulta- tions with anyone other than himself. Although I would invariably ask his permis- sion before contacting a new source, he began forgetting that he had agreed — 'I hear you broke my rule and went to see Edith,' he would snap, or 'How dare you inflict yourself on poor Rose.' He was always a touch shamefaced when I remind- ed him of the preparatory conversation we'd had, but he was getting so unpre- dictable that I decided not to tell him when I tracked down my most prized source, Guy Watson, the key not only to his Lima child- hood but also to his school days at Dover College. One morning when I rang Fred, he burst out, `I'm furious with you. Why do you want to see Guy Watson? I could have told you everything he can. But no. You always take no notice and do what you want. Why can't you wait till I'm dead?'

This was the crux. He had no real objec- tion to my seeing Watson, a genial ex- banker, apart from the fact that he'd then been forced to resume contact with some- one with whom he had nothing but his early years in common. But the book had now become synonymous with his mortali- ty. 'It's the finality of it — knowing you're grabbing as much out of me as you can before I die.' I'd foolishly told Watson that my biography had Fred's blessing, a claim that was far too unequivocal, too presump- tuous, in the light of our ambiguous under- standing. During the telephone tirade he had threatened to put a notice in the news- papers disclaiming his authorisation, and, as I later found out, had indeed telephoned several friends forbidding them to co-oper- ate with me. 'If I catch you seeing anyone else I really won't speak to you again. Give me a ring one of these days when I've had a chance to cool down.'

Fred at his most imperious was quite ter- rifying. I didn't contact him for a month; my baby was almost due and I'd made up my mind to abandon my research for the time being, although I surreptitiously did make an appointment to see Guy Watson: at 83 he was too important to miss. I'd arranged to meet him on the morning of 19 March, but half an hour before I was due to leave the house, I went into sudden, advanced labour — exactly as my subject would have wished.

Fred died that summer, granted the easeful death he'd prayed for. We'd made our peace and for the past few months enjoyed the kind of friendship without strings that we should have had all along. When I rang him one evening to make a date to bring his pink sweetpeas to Chan- dos, he complained about being more and more rickety but sounded content enough: the phlox and daisies he loved were in flow- er, his beloved Alexander Grant was com- ing to stay and his diary for the week was full of engagements. His last words to me were, 'Send a kiss to my godson.' It was Billy Chappell who broke the news over the telephone, his statement, 'Fred's dead', having a terrible, knell-like rhyming finality about it. 1 found that I missed Fred dread- fully, missed not being able to tell him things and hear his cynical, witty retorts. But each Ashton ballet I saw, drenched with his presence, brought him back, and so did work on my book: his gravelly, aris- tocratic inflections, wonderful stories and snuffly chuckle captured on hours and hours of audio tape.

The following year I was given access to Fred's papers by his executor, Anthony Russell-Roberts, and took possession of The Box — a vast cardboard receptacle of treasures ranging from love-letters, note- books, congratulatory telegrams and Bal- lets Russes programmes, to correspondence from some of the most lus- trous names in 20th-century arts and soci- ety. It even included a mouse-nibbled manuscript of a play by Gertrude Stein, annotated in her own hand. Fred had always taken pettish pleasure in telling me that any letter he received went straight into the wastepaper basket, but this turned out to be completely untrue: he had kept virtually every one.

It was liberating finally to be able to launch into research unimpeded by the old restrictions, even though one or two sources, citing Fred's edict, refused to see me. Because the English dance world had never before been exposed to biography in the conventional sense, any question stray- ing from the path of Fred's professional career was likely to be regarded as prying. Among the 'widows', as Dickie Buckle called the ex-lovers, only the two Ameri- Specialist subject: the safely of British beef' cans, Dick Beard and Tony Lizzul, would talk freely about their relationship with the choreographer and allow me to see his let- ters. Michael Somes, by contrast, was so chary of me that he wouldn't even answer a question about Fred's mother.

The usual justification made by the biog- raphers of recalcitrant subjects is that their book will help to illuminate the work, but in Fred's case, I don't feel that I can make that claim. Does the knowledge that the Young Girl in The Two Pigeons is a reincar- nation of the male chemistry student with whom he was infatuated really add a valu- able new dimension to the ballet's achingly sweet reconciliation duet? If anything, it is a distraction, diminishing the work's power of suggestion, the raison d'eire of dance. It was this — the fear that exposure of the prosaic reality of the lived life would destroy the delicate subterfuge and poetry of his art — that, I believe, fuelled Fred's resistance far more than any sense of pro- priety. 'Choreography is my whole being, my whole life, my reason for living,' he once told an American journalist.

For me the most important discovery of writing Ashton's biography has been the extent to which his life generated his work. His genius was subjective, he lived by his heart and imbued his work with the sense of yearning and suffering that he himself exiferienced. pour into it all my love, my frustrations, and sometimes autobiographi- cal details . . . In many ways, it has more reality than the life which I live.' Fred was not a happy man; much of his adulthood was spent half-consciously seeking unre- quited emotional situations that would inspire him and activate what Petrarch called the resonance of sighs. But sorrow had its beauty: from it came the ballets.

This book both is and is not an autho- rised life. Often while researching it, I felt akin to a date-rapist opportunistically inter- preting no as yes, even though I knew that Fred realised a biography would eventually be written — his preservation of his papers is indication enough. 'I have kept your let- ters of appreciation,' he told Kenneth Clark in the 1960s, 'so that one day a future Mr Beaumont or Ivor Guest can find them and quote from them.' Beau- mont and Guest were dance historians; the book Fred had in mind an analytical study of the ballets such as David Vaughan pro- duced so effectively in 1977. My book is a very different matter, almost an act of transgression, and yet, grudgingly and con- ditionally, Fred put his life in my hands a privilege I have spent ten years striving to honour. The result is full of secrets, secrets about the Ashton antecedents that I kept from him, and secrets about his muses that he tried to keep from me. What I'll never know, Fred, is whether that question mark still stands.

Extracted from Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton by Julie Kavanagh, published by Faber and Faber on 18 November (f25).