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REAL LIVES - turning points

Deborah

Williams was born in Queensland in 1944 and raised in a style typical of the middle classes just after the war, with little spare cash but plenty of drive and moral fibre. Her father was a doctor who had worked in New Guinea after the Japanese had retreated, and Deborah was three and her brother six when he eventually came home. She remembers a confused reaction against this returning stranger "with a yellow face, who dared to get into my mothers bed"; and life was further disrupted when Dudley Williams moved his wife Nina and the two children to Sydney...


Three more siblings followed, and though they all grew up assuming the boys would become lawyers or doctors and the girls would make good marriages ("as I finally did", Lady MacMillan drily remarks), there was pressure on all of them to do well at school: "We didn’t get a watch until we were top of the class."


Deborah wasn’t especially compliant, except in art class, but her parents encouraged her talent. "They left the walls of my bedroom bare so that I could draw on them, which all my friends thought was outrageously eccentric." Overall she remembers a happy childhood, buoyed up by a boisterous, affectionately argumentative family.


Then the 60s hit the Williams family, forcing a wedge between the generations and forcing Deborah’s life off its expected course. She had won a scholarship to art school, and, once there, appeared to run wild. She wore trousers to college (not done in Sydney, 1962), she started to voice dangerous opinions, and she fell in love with another student, Denis, who, to her parents' anguished view, appeared a total loser. Though Denis eventually married her, he wouldn’t even fake a promise of long-term commitment, and, after bitter rows with her parents, Deborah was cut off from the family.


After leaving home she supported herself and her marriage by teaching, until Denis's hippie fecklessness finally drove her to break with him. A friend advised her to take up modelling and you can still see why: the family genes have bequeathed her long, elegant bones, and she wears her clothes like a pro. Around this time she also drifted in with a crowd of drag queens and appeared in one of their shows, A Streetcar Named Beatrice. She even began an affair with the director ("after he'd decided he was straight") and eventually moved with him to London where he staged The Sound Of Mucus with Deborah "as a nun, and several Von Trapp children". But then in 1971 the three-year relationship ended: 27-year-old Deborah Williams was alone in London, temping as a waitress and with no clue as to her future until a friend invited her to the cinema and brought along Kenneth Macmillan.


His life story at that point barely connected with anything Deborah had experienced. He had been born into a working-class family in Scotland, had left home at 15 to become a dancer, and had recently been appointed head of the ballet establishment in Britain. Deborah had seen the film version of Romeo And Juliet but otherwise knew nothing of his work. As soon as they met, however, he embarked upon "an amazingly touching, old fashioned courtship", wooing her with a desire that was far more serious and complicated than a 42-year-old man simply lusting after a free-spirited young woman.


Macmillan may have been a celebrated artist, but he still thought of himself as an outsider, and an insecure one at that...


He had been one of ballet's first angry young men and it had made his early career, yet his modernity came under aggressive scrutiny as soon as he was made director of the Royal Ballet.
There was a powerful faction in the company which feared he might trash its classical traditions... Lady Macmillan still speaks with fury of an Opera House board which failed to support him. She felt that too many of its members were interested in defending their social ambitions. "They were terrified of being associated with failure."...


Macmillan himself coped badly with opposition. His childhood had been scarred by the war and by his mother's early death, and he had learned to retreat into himself when times were bad. By the 60s he was drinking heavily and suffering bouts of severe depression (exacerbated by the death of his sister), and he was hopelessly equipped to politics at the Royal.


Lady Macmillan admits he was his own worst enemy, hypersensitive to criticism and very unconfident about defending himself. Yet it was precisely that sensitivity she fell in love with. "Kenneth was skinless in a way that I think truly creative people have to be. He had this wonderful, watchful quality, and he was very tuned in to other people. He was the first man I'd ever met who I completely trusted. But he was also funny and incredibly generous. I came to the relationship with nothing, but from the moment we were together there was never any question of anything not being ours".
If she fell in love with his openness, he fell in love with her independence, her liveliness, her wit and her courage...


"We both felt that we were starting, something together and that we'd never do anything to jeopardise it. It sounds smug, but we'd both been through messy relationships. You make a decision not to mess up unless you're neurotic and messing up is part of the pattern.


The writer Colin Thubron got to know the MacMillans during the 80s and says they were ideally complementary. "Kenneth felt uncomfortable in the rather grand world he moved in and Deborah was everything to him. She was very beautiful, very charming, very intelligent, and though she was a rebel, she was very good at navigating the social world". Charlotte [their daughter] says her mother definitely ruled the roost. Dad found it hard to talk about himself and she was often his voice. When he got depressed about his work, she always said the things he needed to hear."...
Lady Macmillan remembers that when "Kenneth was in the middle of making a ballet, he was quite capable of sitting in the kitchen with me talking on the phone and Charlotte running around, and cutting himself off completely. He'd be single-minded to the point that I could crash a bread board over his head to get his attention.


Yet if Macmillan was obsessional about his work, he wasn't secretive. He always sought his wife's opinion and she always gave it straight. "I wasn't snowed by how lovely it all was, I was quite beady," she says. "And even if my judgements were way off the mark, Kenneth valued having an outside eye. During rehearsals your dancers are prepared to die for you. So Kenneth really needed an independent view."...


In 1983 Macmillan was knighted, which moved him and enchanted Lady Macmillan's parents. "I was, of course, seen to be back on the rails"; then, a year later, he was invited to become associate choreographer of American Ballet Theatre, which felt like being asked to Hollywood. Importantly, too, the Royal was urging him to create a new work and he began to consider a ballet to Benjamin Britten's three act score Prince of the Pagodas with a libretto by Thubron.


This was to initiate an extraordinarily creative last period for Macmillan, though it was nearly stalled by a massive heart attack. He survived it, just, but was put on a regime off heavy medication and appalling diets - concocted by his wife...


Then on October 29 1992, during the first night of a revival of ballet Mayerling, Macmillan suffered a second heart attack, which killed him. He was backstage when it happened and Lady Macmillan remembers mostly chaos, all this rushing and shoving while I just wanted, to get to the hospital with him"...


Thubron says he witnessed her anguish with a kind of awe. "Deborah had always been the strong one in the relationship but suddenly she seemed ravaged."...


A portrait which Macmillan painted of her husband in his last years hints at real, tangible familial love. He is in his dressing gown ("Kenneth always sloped around in his dressing gown") and is gazing out of the canvas with a wry, intimate affection that is almost too private for outsiders to witness. Since his death she can give more time to painting (she has shown regularly at Glyndebourne for the past four years) but her work bears fascinating witness to the life they lived together. Many of her canvasses are portraits and display an almost choreographic instinct for the tension and weight of the human body...


Macmillan also spends much more time alone with her garden and two dogs, "as I think one should! she says briskly. You find people tend to say the same thing over and over again as you get older. She entertains her small circle off friends ("mostly connected with the arts") at home in Wandsworth and she takes time out to visit her house in Greece every few months and to return to Australia every few years. Her parents are still lively and some of her closest friends are there too, for she reckons that she formed some of her most intense friendships when she was still young and still finds it harder to get intimate with the English...


In 1993 she was invited on to the Opera House board... In 1996 she was "nudged off" after questioning Lord Chadlington’s appointment as chairman - "I felt he’d been shoe horned in" - but continued her defence of the house's artists when she sat on the steering committee for Richard Eyre's report into London’s lyric theatres.


In 1996 she was appointed to the Arts Council, where fellow member Thelma Holt remembers her as "very larky, a breath of fresh air. I don’t know how she slipped through the net. She had that very Aussie forthrightness and she was very passionate in her defence of dance. She wasn’t rude but she didn’t value diplomacy at the expense of truth. There were a lot of people around who had agendas that weren’t always apparent. Deborah came with no baggage. She’s very staunch. I would quite like to be in a trench with Deborah. She’s never knife you in the back, but if she did have to put the knife in she’s do it properly."...


And, of course, her belief in, her husband's work continues to drive her. She has commissioned a biography (from critic Jan Parry) and she is determined to get the repertory into a good shape, so that when she hands it over to, Charlotte "she can take pleasure in it". She knows her mission, isn’t always going to make her popular. "But I do have a life outside ballet - I’m not some mad-woman banging on and on" and she does relish some of the grandstanding involved.


Quite soon after her husband’s death, Pagodas came back in to the repertory and she got into a dispute with members of the Britten estate over cuts she wanted to make, which had been authorised by both composer and choreographer. One small passage was a sticking point and in frustration she announced that she was "getting spirit messages from Kenneth. He says he’s very happy with the cuts and so is Britten, excepted that he’d like all the must be played on a synthesiser."


She grins. "I didn’t train with drag queens for nothing."

Judith Mackrell (2001)
"Keeper of the flame
London: Guardian Saturday Review, 11th August, 2001. pp. 8-9.
Extracted with permission.
Copyright Judith Mackrell, 2001.

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