U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [380]
spinster artlovers when she danced on her second
American tour;
she took to drinking too much and stepping to the
footlights and bawling out the boxholders.
Isadora was at the height of glory and scandal and
power and wealth, her school going, her mil ionaire was about to build her a theater in Paris, the Duncans were the priests of a cult, (Art was whatever Isadora did), when the car that was bringing her two children
home from the other side of Paris stal ed on a bridge across the Seine. Forgetting that he'd left the car in gear the chauffeur got out to crank the motor. The car started, knocked down the chauffeur, plunged off the bridge into the Seine.
The children and their nurse were drowned.
-158-The rest of her life moved desperately on
in the clatter of scandalized tongues, among the
kidding faces of reporters, the threatening of bailiffs, the expostulations of hotelmanagers bringing overdue bil s.
Isadora drank too much, she couldn't keep her
hands off goodlooking young men, she dyed her hair
various shades of brightred, she never took the trouble to make up her face properly, was careless about her dress, couldn't bother to keep her figure in shape, never could keep track of her money
but a great sense of health
fil ed the hal
when the pearshaped figure with the beautiful
great arms tramped forward slowly from the back of
the stage.
She was afraid of nothing; she was a great dancer.
In her own city of San Francisco the politicians
wouldn't let her dance in the Greek Theater they'd
built under her influence. Wherever she went she gave offense to the philistines. When the war broke out she danced the Marseillaise, but it didn't seem quite re-spectable' and she gave offense by refusing to give up Wagner or to show the proper respectable feelings
of satisfaction at the butchery.
On her South American tour
she picked up men everywhere,
a Spanish painter, a couple of prizefighters, a
stoker on the boat, a Brazilian poet,
brawled in tangohal s, bawled out the Argentines
for niggers from the footlights, lushly triumphed in Montevideo and Brazil; but if she had money she
-159-couldn't help scandalously spending it on tangodancers, handouts, afterthetheater suppers, the generous gesture, no, al on my bil . The managers gypped her. She was afraid of nothing, never ashamed in the public eye of the clatter of scandalized tongues, the headlines in the afternoon papers.
When October split the husk off the old world
she remembered St. Petersburg, the coffins lurching through the silent streets, the white faces, the clenched fists that night in St. Petersburg, and danced the Marche Slave and waved red cheesecloth under the noses of the
Boston old ladies in Symphony Hal ,
but when she went to Russia ful of hope of a
school and work and a new life in freedom, it was too enormous, it was too difficult: cold, vodka, lice, no service in the hotels, new and old stil piled pel mel together, seedbed, and scrapheap, she hadn't the pa-tience, her life had been too easy; she picked up a yel owhaired poet
and brought him back
to Europe and the grand hotels.
Yessenin smashed up a whole floor of the Adlon
in Berlin in one drunken party, he ruined a suite at the Continental in Paris. When he went back to Russia he kil ed himself. It was too enormous, it was too diffi-cult. When it was impossible to raise any more money
for Art, for the crowds eating and drinking in the
hotel suites and the rent of Rol s-Royces and the board of her pupils and disciples, Isadora went down to the Riviera to write her
-160-memoirs to scrape up some cash out of the American public that had awakened after the war to the crassness of materialism and the Greeks and scandal and Art, and stil had dol ars to spend.
She hired a studio in Nice, but she could never
pay the rent. She'd quarreled with her mil ionaire. Her jewels, the famous emerald, the ermine cloak, the works of art presented by the artists had al gone into the pawnshops or been seized by hotelkeepers. Al she had was the old blue drapes that had seen her great triumphs, a redleather handbag, and an old furcoat