Pin-Up Ballerina

London's famed Sadler's Wells company was putting on a new ballet. The orchestra struck up Haydn's cheerful "Clock" Symphony. Onstage, the audience saw a twelve-foot grandfather clock with human hands and a swinging pendulum of dancers' legs. But to go with Haydn's rippling music, Choreographer Leonide Massine had scraped up a trivial love story between an insect princess and a human clockmaker, and set it dancing with steps that were largely borrowings from a dozen Massine ballets. About all that made the evening enjoyable, particularly to the men in the stalls, were the pretty legs and graceful dancing of the princess, redhaired Ballerina Moira Shearer, who has become the pin-up girl of British ballet.

Moira Shearer's pert, clean-limbed dancing is by no means up to the superb technical and dramatic skill of Sadler's Wells' prima ballerina, Margot Fonteyn. But Moira does have what one starry-eyed London critic called "deerlike littleness and midsummer coloring."

Daughter of a Scottish civil engineer, Moira had her first dancing lessons at six in Southern Rhodesia from a former member of Diaghilev's famed company. Two years ago she made her first big London hit as Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty.

Though she is only 22, Moira Shearer has already decided that a ballerina has too little future; she'd rather become a stage actress. Says she: "It's so awful to become a ballet dancer who is past her prime and have the audiences make allowances for you. I'd rather leave ballet before I begin to drop off."

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