Peter Kurth

The author of the new biography of Isadora Duncan discusses the legendary dancer whose short life was a whirlwind of art, stormy love affairs and tragedy.

By Amy Standen

Nov. 12, 2001 | When Isadora Duncan finally sat down to write her memoirs, she received a much needed advance from the eager publisher, along with a telegraph: "ENOUGH WITH YOUR HIGHFALUTIN IDEAS SEND LOVE CHAPTERS MAKE IT JUICY." Luckily, biographer Peter Kurth was not forced to make that choice. "Isadora: A Sensational Life," his new 652-page book about the world's first great theatrical dancer, not only catalogs the tempestuous antics of Duncan and her numerous lovers, but it does a terrifically engrossing job of chronicling a life devoted to art and beauty.

"Isadora" is pieced together from a vast archive of love letters, magazine clippings, diaries, drawings and photos -- to the extent that Kurth's job occasionally appears as much editorial as biographical. It's a good thing he took this approach: Many of the papers quoted in the book were lost in a 1999 fire that consumed the Manhattan apartment belonging to Duncan's great-niece. "Isadora" took 10 years to write, a period full of tumult in Kurth's own life, and it's easy to see why he feared he might never finish it. But the real challenge, he says, was learning to sympathize with his subject.

Duncan was childish, vain and brilliant. She would greet visitors only while reclining on a divan and insulted her friends and audiences just as impulsively as she heaped praise upon them. She spent all her money as soon as she had it, then hit her friends up for more. Once, appearing late for a recital in front of a peeved American audience, Duncan remarked that Americans must learn the value of repose. Later in life, when her friend Mercedes de Acosta asked her what she had done with the money she had borrowed from her friends, Duncan replied petulantly, "I spent their money, which is just what they should have expected me to do. Please don't scold me. I'm hungry."

Her alcoholic bouts were so desperate that she'd mix a cocktail out of "eau-de-cologne and the dregs of empty wine bottles." And she was a legendary flirt, the kind of woman who'd tell a man she'd just met, as Kurth reports, that "she never slept at night and to phone her after midnight." More than anything, Duncan was devoted to her art. She was barely out of her teens when she reinvented dance; and when no one understood her work, she traveled across the globe until she found audiences that could. She believed that her dance was a gift to the world.

Duncan's love affairs were nearly as stormy as they were numerous. She had three children by three different men, two of whom abandoned her, while she cheated on the third so openly that she virtually forced him to leave. Her rampage through the United States with the heroic (and unstable) poet of the Russian Revolution, Sergei Esenin, fell into alcoholic, violent ruin, dragging down Duncan's reputation with it. And things continued to go downhill as her later performances met with little acclaim and lots of ridicule, especially when the top of her Greek-style tunic developed a habit of falling off.

Duncan is perhaps best know today for her own dramatic death in 1927. In Kurth's telling we learn how the 49-year-old dancer had picked up a young French-Italian race-car mechanic at a local restaurant and coyly suggested he stop by her apartment to take her for a drive in an Amil Grand Sportscar along the French Riviera. As the car took off, she reportedly shouted to her friends, "Adieu, mes amis, je vais ` la gloire" -- Goodbye my friends, I go to glory!" Moments later, her shawl caught in the rear wheel of the car, breaking her neck. But Duncan's life hinged on another horrific tragedy that occurred almost a decade and a half before her death. In 1913, her two children -- Deirdre, fathered by theater designer Gordon Craig, and Patrick, fathered by Paris Singer, the wealthy heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune -- drowned in the Seine when the driver of their car stepped out to crank the engine and failed to secure the brake. The Renault pitched over the embankment, trapping the two children and their nanny inside. One year later, a third child, who Duncan believed would be the reincarnation of either Deirdre or Patrick, died a few hours after birth.

Duncan's life was full of both glory and tragedy, much of it self-generated, and she was a seductively dramatic individual. Kurth, who spoke with Salon recently from his home in Vermont, said that telling her story meant keeping her at a distance.

You've said that you expect the reviews of "Isadora: A Sensational Life" to focus more on Duncan than on you, her biographer. Did you try to keep yourself out of her story?

Well, I tried very hard not to put myself into it. A lot of biographers are doing that now, not just Edmund Morris with Ronald Reagan, but Nancy Milford with Edna St. Vincent Millay. And I might have been able to do it like that, but I don't actually believe in biography that way. So I tried to draw on my emotional experience when I wrote it, rather than making any direct parallels, and my editor helped me a lot with that. I would have things in there and she would say, "This doesn't read the way you think it does. You're making points that would make sense to people who know you, but won't to anyone who doesn't."

Next page: "I look at my life as sort of the same as hers"