Ballet's brilliant Queen Margot

Margot Fonteyn: A Life
By Meredith Daneman
Viking, 654 pp., illustrated, $32.95

The cover of Meredith Daneman's new biography of Margot Fonteyn is also a gentle cover-up. There the great ballerina is, posed as Odette, the white swan of ''Swan Lake." Her ivory skin and dark features make her look like a geisha. Her face betrays no feelings whatsoever: She is utterly serene. That is the image Fonteyn wanted to project to the world, the porcelain-perfect princess more regal than real royalty.

Daneman digs beneath the faade of the woman whose blossoming as an artist corresponded to the blossoming of classical dance in England, with the determined figure of Ninette de Valois transforming the Vic-Wells Ballet into the Sadler's Wells company and finally, triumphantly, into the Royal Ballet. Daneman writes as an insider, a graduate of London's Royal Ballet School, and now a novelist.

She also writes as a Brit. England's is more a literary culture than a music and dance one, and the English have an almost comical obsession with using the former to record the latter. At 654 pages, this biography begs to be called ''definitive," and it is. It's so packed with the day-to-day, though, that you have to search out the grand themes.

Among the juicier bits: Fonteyn was apparently insatiable when it came to sex, which she started to enjoy at age 16. She was insecure, acutely aware of the competition both from within the Royal Ballet and from foreign companies appearing in London. She was an avid collector of other famous people's autographs. Her real name was Peggy Hookham. Her mother's real name was Hilda, but the dance world nicknamed her ''the Black Queen." She and de Valois shared the building of Fonteyn's career.

The men in her life helped her to keep reinventing herself. She was the main muse of Frederick Ashton, the greatest classical choreographer England has produced. She married the dashing Panamanian politician/diplomat Roberto Arias, who was paralyzed in a 1964 election fray. Fonteyn's devotion to him made her look as heroic as her dancing during the blitz, as bombs dropped perilously near the theater. This so endeared her to the British public that she became ''a war mascot," Daneman writes. The 1961 defection of Rudolf Nureyev and the start of their legendary partnership spurred her to a new brilliance that, in its own way, would complement his.

Her real-life relationships were as dramatic as anything she danced onstage. Thanks to Arias's political ambitions, she was a player in a botched revolution in Panama, staged by her in-laws and their in-laws. For them, another overthrow of the government was routine. For Fonteyn, it was another chance to wear that famous mask of composure. For readers of Daneman's account, it's a bit like ''Monty Python." ''No one realizes how much a revolution costs," Arias complains. ''The telephone bills from London alone are incredible."

Fonteyn's initial reaction to performing with Nureyev, that it would be ''like mutton dancing with lamb," proved spectacularly wrong. Nearly two decades her junior, he revived her then-waning commitment to dance. Although she was in her 40s when they began their partnership, it became the most celebrated in ballet, one that lasted 18 years. Whether they had a love affair offstage as well is an ongoing subject of speculation. Nureyev, always impatient, once commented to ballerina Violette Verdy that making love to women took too long; sex with another man was quicker.

Arias, meanwhile, was more and more absent from her life: When not politicking, he was playing the Latin lover in a series of affairs with other women. Fonteyn didn't complain. Then, in a 1964 Panamanian election campaign, he was shot by rivals and paralyzed for the rest of his life.

Ruthlessness entered her repertoire. The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was making a new ''Romeo and Juliet" for dancers Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable. Seymour actually had an abortion so she could continue rehearsing the work. But Fonteyn and Nureyev persuaded management to let them dance the opening night. They changed MacMillan's steps freely. It was no longer his ballet, but theirs.

Arias's incapacity meant something of a role reversal in the marriage. Fonteyn took lovers, went to parties, and, in a famous incident in San Francisco, she and Nureyev were arrested at a wild drug-fest.

In 1979, on her 60th birthday, she gave the first of her ''farewell" performances, at Covent Garden. Arias died in 1989 -- just after Fonteyn received treatment for the cancer that, two years later, would kill her.

As a former dancer, Daneman can describe technical details and the care Fonteyn took with even the smallest movement: ''Retire," she notes, is usually a throw-away step, a preparation for something grander. Fonteyn in retire -- in which one pointed foot rises to the knee of the standing leg -- was as memorable as any other dancer's splashy tours de force. She gave the gesture its due, which is what Daneman gives her.

Christine Temin is a member of the Globe staff.