PANAMA: Bullet Ballet

Margot Fonteyn—Dame Commander of the British Empire,* star of Covent Garden's Royal Ballet, top ballerina of the Western world—cast a large, limpid brown eye through her camera view finder and pressed the little button. A flashbulb's white glare froze a busy scene against the black of a tropic night on the Gulf of Panama, in the Pacific. Dame Margot's husband Roberto ("Tito") Arias—scion of one of Panama's 20-odd leading families and recently (1955-58) his nation's Ambassador to the Court of St. James's—was happily at work transferring machine guns, pistols and other trappings of rebellion from an outboard-motor boat to a shrimp boat.

Frightfully keen on Caribbean uprisings (she was a stout supporter of Fidel Castro), Dame Margot joined Tito in Panama a fortnight ago just as he decided to have a go at overthrowing President Ernesto de la Guardia. But Tito ran into trouble from the moment he tried to get his arms and his seven-man army together on an invasion-bent shrimp boat named Elaine (he is part owner of a fishing fleet). In a chartered yacht named Nola, he rendezvoused with Elaine and a pair of arms-laden outboard-motor boats. One of the outboards' cargoes was transferred to Elaine without mishap, but when Tito turned to the other it was gone—pulled under the water by a too-heavy anchor on a short line in a rising tide.

Pas de Deux. Undaunted, Tito and Dame Margot a few days later assembled Nola, Elaine and a second shrimper, Mary Ann, to raise the sunken arms. As they brought up the boat, Tito talked enthusiastically of his plan to attack a National Guard post. Mary Ann headed for port, Elaine took the outboard in tow, and Tito headed for a secluded island to finish the arms transfer undisturbed except for the pop of Dame Margot's flashbulbs. But the spoilsport crew of the Mary Ann, reaching port, spilled the whole plan to the National Guard.

The Guard hired a light plane to spot the invasion fleet and a pair of lumbering launches to chase it. Tito divided his forces, left Dame Margot weeping aboard Nola as he and Elaine churned off over the horizon. When the Guard's launches appeared, Margot led them away from Elaine, then scooted back to Panama City. Tito went ashore close to his family farm, 75 miles west of the capital, and hid.

On with the Dance. Beset lately by riotous students and rebellious political opponents, President de la Guardia angrily scooped up Dame Margot and clapped her in jail. "I don't believe in sacred cows," he snapped. Dame Margot of the moon-white skin spent a night in what Panamanians call "the presidential suite" of the jail—and was then deported.

In hot pursuit of Tito, National Guardsmen found some of his luggage containing a memorandum from Actor John Wayne mentioning $682.850 he had sent to Tito. Wayne said that he is a partner in Arias' shrimp business. Dame Margot flew to New York, then quickly hurried on home to England and mother. Tito ducked into the safety of Panama City's Brazilian embassy, his bullet ballet a flop. The very day he sought cover, a 55-ft. boat shoved its nose into a sandy beach on the Caribbean side of the isthmus and unloaded 50 men—apparently members of a Tito invasion force, trained in western Cuba.