Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (41 page)

It does the trick. Isadora allows Rodin to take her outside. Hand in hand, the two of them glide to her studio in the rue de la Gaîté. Once there, she changes into her tunic and Rodin sits back while she dances an idyll of Theocritus:

Pan aimait la nymphe Echo

Echo aimait Satyr.

After dancing for a while, Isadora comes to a halt. She has developed various theories of dance that she is keen to share with Rodin, but she quickly discovers that a lesson in dance theory is very far from his thoughts. ‘Soon I realised that he was not listening. He gazed at me with
lowered lids, his eyes blazing, and then, with the same expression that he had before his works, he came toward me. He ran his hands over my neck, breast, stroked my arms and ran his hands over my hips, my bare legs and feet. He began to knead my whole body as if it were clay, while from him emanated heat that scorched and melted me. My whole desire was to yield to him my entire being and, indeed, I would have done so if it had not been that my upbringing caused me to become frightened, and I withdrew, threw my dress over my tunic, and sent him away bewildered.’

In later life, she comes to regret this sudden attack of the scruples, a seizure she ensures will never be repeated. ‘What a pity! How often I have regretted this childish incomprehension which lost to me the divine chance of giving my virginity to the Great God Pan, the mighty Rodin. Surely Art and all Life would have been richer thereby!’

Despite missing his one and only chance (or perhaps as a result of it), for the rest of his life Rodin remains one of Isadora’s most devoted admirers. A full fifteen years later, she is back on stage in Paris, and he is shouting fit to burst, his passion undimmed. As Isadora lies prone on the stage at the end of
Pathétique
, ‘his arms went through the air like the wings of a windmill, and he seemed to shriek, although his voice was lost among the general shouting’.

Auguste Rodin never gets over her. ‘Isadora Duncan is the greatest woman I have ever known!’ he confides to a friend ‘... Sometimes I think she is the greatest woman the world has ever known.
Elle est suprème!
’

UPSTAGES

Hôtel Welcome, Villefranche-sur-Mer

September 18th 1926

Now aged forty-nine, penniless and plump, Isadora Duncan has seen better days. ‘I don’t dance any more, I only move my weight around,’ she says. The waspish New York wit Dorothy Parker nicknames her ‘Duncan Disorderly’.

Isadora is living in a ramshackle studio at the far end of the promenade des Anglais in Nice. The block is surrounded by empty tin cans and discarded bicycles. Her front door is graffittoed with messages from friends and lovers. Next to its handle is a heart with ‘Jean’ written across it in Jean Cocteau’s distinctive handwriting.

The studio is filled to bursting with clutter from her eventful life: Louis XV furniture from the Galeries Lafayette, dyed bulrushes in fake Sèvres vases, aspidistras in pots from Oriental bazaars. There is a rusting bathtub in her dressing room: in the old days, she is said to have bathed in champagne, but nowadays the tub is filled with yet more clutter. Her bed is swathed in ageing mosquito nets, the walls of her bedroom decorated with fading photographs of her many lovers. No one knows how many she has had, least of all Isadora. ‘It became fashionable to boast of having had a week with Isadora,’ reminisces Agnes de Mille. ‘Whether true or false, the chance of contradiction was slight.’

Her love life is already the stuff of legend.
¹⁸⁸
‘She was like a great flowing
river through which the traffic of the world could pass,’ says Edna St Vincent Millay, herself no slouch. There is a tall story that, ten years ago, Isadora begged George Bernard Shaw to have sex with her, saying that a baby with her body and his brains would be a world-beater. ‘Yes,’ Shaw is said to have replied, ‘but suppose it had my body and your brains?’

She is a well-known sight in Villefranche, walking around the streets barefoot in a scarlet négligée, all topped off by hair of vivid magenta. She generally heads to the jetty, on the lookout for young men. Sometimes she attracts abuse from the less bohemian citizens of Villefranche. She imitates their tut-tuts: ‘That Bolshevik! She’s always carrying young men with her! She says he’s her secretary! Have you heard of her last scandal! Such a vile woman!’ Recently, when Isadora attended a dinner in Paris, a fellow guest, an American woman, turned to their host, Count Etienne de Beaumont, and exclaimed: ‘My dear man, if I had known that you would have that red whore here, I would never have set foot in your home.’ For a moment, Isadora looked taken aback, but then she turned to the butler, smiled, and said, ‘Do you have something sweet in the house? I feel the need of it just now.’

On this particular day, a party is being thrown at the Hôtel Welcome to celebrate the seventeenth birthday of a painter called Sir Francis Rose. His mother, Lady Rose, has appointed Jean Cocteau master of ceremonies, and he has decided to make the most of it. Dressed in a beige suit lined with black satin, with his chair covered in red velvet, he has a bust of Dante on the table beside him.

The other guests are quite a mixed bag. The conventional Lady Rose has invited only English officers and their wives, but others have slipped through the net: a priest in purple socks with a vast Greek cross hanging around his neck, an author in a Spanish clerical hat, carrying a gramophone with a tortoise-shell trumpet, and the bulky Lady MacCarthy in a frilly green dress, giving her the appearance, according to Cocteau, of ‘a cabbage reeling on tiny feet’. But some remain excluded: Lady Rose puts her foot down when an uninvited guest tries to bring his donkey in with him.

To the horror of Lady Rose, her son Francis,
¹⁸⁹
crowned with roses,
arrives at his own party arm-in-arm with Isadora Duncan, who is wearing a diaphanous Greek toga and is wreathed in flowers.
¹⁹⁰
Cocteau describes her as ‘very fat and slightly drunk’, and ‘enveloping the young man like a placenta’. The couple are accompanied by two gay young American men, who Isadora calls her ‘pigeons’. Outside the hotel, fishermen are pressing their noses to the windows, ready to see what happens next.

A deathly silence turns the guests to statuary. Isadora laughs, and continues to drape herself over the birthday boy. ‘She even dragged him into the window recess,’ recalls Cocteau. ‘It was then that Captain Williams, a friend of the family, played his part ... He strode across the dining room, approached the window, and shouted in a tremendous voice, “Old Lady, unhand that child!”’ With that, the Captain hurls a large silver watch in her direction and brings down his cane on her head, blackening her eye and ripping her toga. Isadora falls to the floor.

But she has never been one to take things lying down. She has always been prone to rage, and her progress around the world has been marked by the splinters of hotel furniture. Sensing an eruption, one of her pigeons seeks to calm her down. Isadora picks up a lobster covered in mayonnaise and throws it at him.

Alas, she is a poor shot, and the lobster lands in the lap of Lady MacCarthy, showering her frilly green dress with mayonnaise. Lady MacCarthy is furious, and leaps from her chair, ready to launch herself at Isadora. At this point, Cocteau intervenes, restraining Lady MacCarthy from behind as her little fists pummel the air. A general affray ensues, with French and American sailors randomly taking sides. ‘Mother remained indifferent and behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening,’ remarks Sir Francis several years later.

Eventually, peace returns to the Hôtel Welcome. The lobster is restored to the table, the mayonnaise renewed, and the guests all return to their seats, ready to tuck in. Only Captain Williams is missing. He is later discovered spreadeagled on the balcony, covered in blood, a whisky bottle at his side.

OVERWHELMS

The
Karoa
, South China Sea

February 1936

Jean Cocteau is riding high. Buoyed up by the success of his new film,
Le Sang d’un poète
, he plans to retrace the voyage of Phileas Fogg in
Around the World in Eighty Days
. Craftily, he has managed to persuade
Paris-Soir
to subsidise the trip; in return, he will send them a series of travel articles. Accompanied by his Moroccan boyfriend Marcel Khill, who he rechristens ‘Passepartout’, he travels from Rome to Brindisi to Athens to Cairo, from there to Aden and Bombay and Calcutta, and then on to Rangoon, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong.

As he travels across the South China Sea from Singapore on an old Japanese freighter, the
Karoa
, Cocteau takes his usual peek at the passenger list. A fervent name-dropper, he is delighted to discover perhaps the most droppable name in the whole wide world: Charlie Chaplin, who is on a trip to the Orient with his wife, the actress Paulette Goddard, to celebrate the success of his own film,
Modern Times
.

Cocteau is cock-a-hoop. ‘He amassed names chiefly to drop them,’ writes his biographer, ‘dropping them so familiarly, however, as to give the impression that there existed between him and various celebrities a kind of crazed empathy.’ He loses no time in instructing his steward to take a note to Chaplin, inviting him to his cabin for an aperitif before dinner. At first, Chaplin does not know whether to reply, as he suspects a hoax. But having checked with the purser’s office that Jean Cocteau is indeed aboard, he and Paulette Goddard pop their heads around the door of Cocteau’s cabin at the suggested hour. Cocteau’s own account of their encounter, which he shares with his readers in
Paris-Soir
, has a mystical, almost fairy-tale quality about it.

‘Two poets follow the straight line of their destiny,’ he marvels. ‘Suddenly it comes to pass that these two lines transect and the meeting forms a cross
or, if you prefer, a star ... So many people planned that meeting and tried to be its organisers. Each time an obstacle arose, and chance – which has another name in the language of poets – throws us aboard an old Japanese freighter carrying merchandise on the China Sea between Hong Kong and Shanghai.’

He makes no mention of the nudge he has given destiny with his note to the steward.

‘You cannot imagine the purity, the violence, the freshness of our extraordinary rendezvous, which we owed solely to our horoscopes,’ he continues. ‘I was touching the flesh and bone of a myth ... As for Chaplin, he shook his white locks, removed his spectacles, put them on again, grasped me by the shoulder, burst out laughing, turned towards his companion, and said again and again, “Is it not marvellous? Is it not marvellous?”’

In Cocteau’s account, the two men – both, aged forty-six – hit it off immediately. ‘I don’t speak English. Chaplin doesn’t speak French. And we spoke without the slightest effort. What happened? What language was it? The language of life, more alive than any other, the language born from the desire to communicate at any cost, the language of mimes, of poets, of the heart.’

The two exchange all sorts of intimacies, according to Cocteau: Chaplin confesses to an inferiority complex, fills him in on all the details about his films and tells him about all his future projects. Their conversation goes on deep into the night. Over the next few weeks, so Cocteau says, they become inseparable. ‘My meeting with Chaplin,’ he assures his readers, ‘remains the delightful miracle of this voyage.’

But Chaplin’s version of the very same meeting is rather different, and, as far as one is able to judge, it has more of the ring of truth about it. According to him, ‘the language of mimes, of poets, of the heart’ in fact proved insufficient. All their communication took place through the faltering and haphazard translations of Marcel Khill: ‘Meester Cocteau ... he say ... you are a poet ... of ze sunshine ... and he is a poet of ze ... night.’

Chaplin agrees, however, that their initial meeting is a success, with the two men experiencing an immediate rapport, carrying on chatting into the early hours, and then agreeing to meet for lunch.

But they go too far, too soon. Upon waking, Chaplin feels he can’t face any more of Cocteau at lunchtime, and sends him a note of apology. Over the next few days, Cocteau attempts to arrange another rendezvous, but each time they make an appointment, Chaplin contrives to miss it. From then on, he dines with Paulette, and Cocteau dines with Marcel. Before long, the two men have grown too embarrassed even to exchange glances. If one sees the other coming, he ducks into corridors and darts behind the nearest doors. Separately, the two of them grow familiar with parts of the ship they had never known existed.

‘We had had more than a glut of each other,’ Chaplin concludes in his autobiography. ‘In the various stopping-off places we rarely saw each other, unless for a brief how-do-you-do or farewell. But when news broke that we were both sailing on the
President Coolidge
going back to the States, we became resigned, making no further attempts at enthusiasm.’ Instead, Chaplin gets stuck into a new script; by the time the ship reaches California, he has written 10,000 words.

It is all a question of appetite. Cocteau’s hunger for celebrities is insatiable, but Chaplin’s is only fitful, and can fast turn to revulsion. On meeting Arnold Schoenberg or Albert Einstein or Thomas Mann, he feels an instant bond, but then retreats back into privacy. He has always possessed a remarkable ability to extract whatever he wants from a stranger in a very short time, but then feels replete. Strangers misinterpret this rapacity; what they take to be a firm bond invariably proves to be no more than a passing acquaintance: the prospect of a lifelong friendship suddenly reduced, as if by magic, to the memory of a chance encounter.

PLAYS STRAIGHT MAN TO