Big Money (21 page)

With the money she made on her German tour she took the Duncans all to Greece. They arrived on a fishingboat from Ithaca. They posed in the Parthenon for photographs and danced in the Theater of Dionysus and trained a crowd of urchins to sing the ancient chorus from the
Suppliants
and built a temple to live in on a hill overlooking the ruins of ancient Athens, but there was no water on the hill and their money ran out before the temple was finished

so they had to stay at the Hôtel d'Angleterre and run up a bill there. When credit gave out they took their chorus back to Berlin and put on the
Suppliants
in ancient Greek. Meeting Isadora in her peplum marching through the Tiergarten at the head of her Greek boys marching in order all in Greek tunics, the kaiserin's horse shied,

and her highness was thrown.

 

Isadora was the vogue.

She arrived in St. Petersburg in time to see the night funeral of the marchers shot down in front of the Winter Palace in 1905. It hurt her. She was an American like Walt Whitman; the murdering rulers of the world were not her people; the marchers were her people; artists were not on the side of the machineguns; she was an American in a Greek tunic; she was for the people.

In St. Petersburg, still under the spell of the eighteenthcentury ballet of the court of the Sunking,

her dancing was considered dangerous by the authorities.

In Germany she founded a school with the help of her sister Elizabeth who did the organizing, and she had a baby by Gordon Craig.

She went to America in triumph as she'd always planned and harried the home philistines with a tour; her followers were all the time getting pinched for wearing Greek tunics; she found no freedom for Art in America.

 

Back in Paris it was the top of the world; Art meant Isadora. At the funeral of the Prince de Polignac she met the mythical millionaire (sewingmachine king) who was to be her backer and to finance
her school. She went off with him in his yacht (whatever Isadora did was Art)

to dance in the Temple at Paestum

only for him,

but it rained and the musicians all got drenched. So they all got drunk instead.

Art was the millionaire life. Art was whatever Isadora did.

She was carrying the millionaire's child to the great scandal of the oldlady clubwomen and 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 millionaire 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 stalled 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.

 

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 bills.

Isadora drank too much, she couldn't keep her hands off good-looking 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

filled the hall

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 respectable 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 tangohalls, bawled out the Argentines for niggers from the footlights, lushly triumphed in Montevideo and Brazil; but if she had money she couldn't help scandalously spending it on tangodancers, handouts, afterthetheater suppers, the generous gesture, no, all on my bill. 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 Hall,

but when she went to Russia full 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 still piled pellmell together, seedbed and scrapheap, she hadn't the patience, her life had been too easy;

she picked up a yellowhaired 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 killed himself. It was too enormous, it was too difficult.

 

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 Rolls-Royces and the board of her pupils and disciples,

Isadora went down to the Riviera to write her 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 still had dollars to spend.

She hired a studio in Nice, but she could never pay the rent. She'd quarreled with her millionaire. Her jewels, the famous emerald, the ermine cloak, the works of art presented by the artists had all gone into the pawnshops or been seized by hotelkeepers. All she had was the old blue drapes that had seen her great triumphs, a redleather handbag, and an old furcoat that was split down the back.

She couldn't stop drinking or putting her arms round the neck of the nearest young man, if she got any cash she threw a party or gave it away.

She tried to drown herself but an English naval officer pulled her out of the moonlit Mediterranean.

 

One day at a little restaurant at Golfe Juan she picked up a goodlooking young wop who kept a garage and drove a little Bugatti racer.

Saying that she might want to buy the car, she made him go to her studio to take her out for a ride;

her friends didn't want her to go, said he was nothing but a mechanic, she insisted, she'd had a few drinks (there was nothing left she cared for in the world but a few drinks and a goodlooking young man);

she got in beside him and

she threw her heavilyfringed scarf round her neck with a big sweep she had and

turned back and said,

with the strong California accent her French never lost:

Adieu, mes amis, je vais ä la gloire.

The mechanic put his car in gear and started.

The heavy trailing scarf caught in a wheel, wound tight. Her head was wrenched against the side of the car. The car stopped instantly; her neck was broken, her nose crushed, Isadora was dead.

Bye bye blackbird

 

ARE YOU NEW YORK'S MOST BEAUTIFUL
GIRL STENOGRAPHER?

 

No one here can love and understand me

    
Oh what hard luck stories they all hand me

 

BRITAIN DECIDES TO GO IT ALONE

 

you too can quickly learn dancing at home without music and without a partner . . . produces the same results as an experienced masseur only quicker, easier and less expensive. Remember only marriageable men in the full possession of unusual physical strength will be accepted as the Graphic Apollos

 

Make my bed and light the light

    
I'll arrive late to-night

 

WOMAN IN HOME SHOT AS BURGLAR

 

Grand Duke Here to Enjoy Himself

 

ECLIPSE FOUR SECONDS LATE

 

Downtown Gazers See Corona

 

others are more dressy being made of rich ottoman silks, heavy satins, silk crepe or cote de cheval with ornamentation of ostrich perhaps

 

MAD DOG PANIC IN PENN STATION

 

UNHAPPY WIFE TRIES TO DIE

 

the richly blended beauty of the finish, both interior and exterior, can come only from the hand of an artist working towards an
ideal. Substitutes good normal solid tissue for that disfiguring fat. He touches every point in the entire compass of human need. It may look a little foolish in print but he can show you how to grow brains. If you are a victim of physical ill-being he can liberate you from pain. He can show you how to dissolve marital or conjugal problems. He is an expert in matters of sex

 

Blackbird bye bye

 

SKYSCRAPERS BLINK ON EMPTY STREETS

 

it was a very languid, a very pink and white Peggy Joyce in a very pink and white boudoir who held out a small white hand

When Margie got big enough she used to go across to the station to meet Fred with a lantern dark winter nights when he was expected to be getting home from the city on the nine fourteen. Margie was very little for her age, Agnes used to say, but her red broadcloth coat with the fleece collar tickly round her ears was too small for her all the same, and left her chapped wrists out nights when the sleety wind whipped round the corner of the station and the wire handle of the heavy lantern cut cold into her hand. Always she went with a chill creeping down her spine and in her hands and feet for fear Fred wouldn't be himself and would lurch and stumble the way he sometimes did and be so red in the face and talk so awful. Mr. Bemis the stoopshouldered station agent used to kid about it with big Joe Hines the sectionhand who was often puttering around in the station at traintime, and Margie would stand outside in order not to listen to them saying, “Well, here's bettin' Fred Dowlin' comes in stinkin' again tonight.” It was when he was that way that he needed Margie and the lantern on account of the plankwalk over to the house being so narrow and slippery. When she was a very little girl she used to think that it was because he was so tired from the terrible hard work in the city that he walked so funny when he got off the train but by the time she was eight or nine Agnes had told her all about how getting drunk was something men did and that they hadn't ought to. So every night she
felt the same awful feeling when she saw the lights of the train coming towards her across the long trestle from Ozone Park.

Sometimes he didn't come at all and she'd go back home crying; but the good times he would jump springily off the train, square in his big overcoat that smelt of pipes, and swoop down on her and pick her up lantern and all: “How's Daddy's good little girl?” He would kiss her and she would feel so proudhappy riding along there and looking at mean old Mr. Bemis from up there, and Fred's voice deep in his big chest would go rumbling through his muffler, “Goodnight, chief,” and the yellowlighted windows of the train would be moving and the red caterpillar's eyes in its tail would get little and draw together as the train went out of sight across the trestle towards Hammels. She would bounce up and down on his shoulder and feel the muscles of his arm hard like oars tighten against her when he'd run with her down the plankwalk shouting to Agnes, “Any supper left, girlie?” and Agnes would come to the door grinning and wiping her hands on her apron and the big pan of hot soup would be steaming on the stove, and it would be so cozywarm and neat in the kitchen, and they'd let Margie sit up till she was nodding and her eyes were sandy and there was the sandman coming in the door, listening to Fred tell about pocket billiards and sweepstakes and racehorses and terrible fights in the city. Then Agnes would carry her into bed in the cold room and Fred would stand over her smoking his pipe and tell her about shipwrecks at Fire Island when he was in the Coast Guard, till the chinks of light coming in through the door from the kitchen got more and more blurred, and in spite of Margie's trying all the time to keep awake because she was so happy listening to Fred's burring voice, the sandman she'd tried to pretend had lost the train would come in behind Fred, and she'd drop off.

As she got older and along in gradeschool at Rockaway Park it got to be less often like that. More and more Fred was drunk when he got off the train or else he didn't come at all. Then it was Agnes who would tell her stories about the old days and what fun it had been, and Agnes would sometimes stop in the middle of a story to cry, about how Agnes and Margie's mother had been such friends and both of them had been salesladies at Siegel Cooper's at the artificialflower counter and used to go to Manhattan Beach, so much more refined than Coney, Sundays, not to the Oriental Hotel of course, that was too expensive, but to a little beach near there, and
how Fred was lifeguard there. “You should have seen him in those days, with his strong tanned limbs he was the handsomest man . . .” “But he's handsome now, isn't he, Agnes?” Margie would put in anxiously. “Of course, dearie, but you ought to have seen him in those days.” And Agnes would go on about how lucky he was at the races and how many people he'd saved from drowning and how all the people who owned the concessions chipped in to give him a bonus every year and how much money he always had in his pocket and a wonderful laugh and was such a cheery fellow. “That was the ruination of him,” Agnes would say. “He never could say no.” And Agnes would tell about the wedding and the orangeblossoms and the cake and how Margie's mother Margery died when she was born. “She gave her life for yours, never forget that”; it made Margie feel dreadful, like she wasn't her own self, when Agnes said that. And then one day when Agnes came out of work there he'd been standing on the sidewalk wearing a derby hat and all dressed in black and asking her to marry him because she'd been Margery Ryan's best friend, and so they were married, but Fred never got over it and never could say no and that was why Fred took to drinking and lost his job at Holland's and nobody would hire him on any of the beaches on account of his fighting and drinking and so they'd moved to Broad Channel but they didn't make enough with bait and rowboats and an occasional shoredinner so Fred had gotten a job in Jamaica in a saloon keeping bar because he had such a fine laugh and was so goodlooking and everybody liked him so. But that was the ruination of him worse than ever. “But there's not a finer man in the world than Fred Dowling when he's himself. . . . Never forget that, Margie.” And they'd both begin to cry and Agnes would ask Margie if she loved her as much as if she'd been her own mother and Margie would cry and say, “Yes, Agnes darling.” “You must always love me,” Agnes would say, “because God doesn't seem to want me to have any little babies of my own.”