February 24, 2021 • 33 mins
The comforts afforded by fame were forever clouded for Duncan by an ongoing series of tragedies, leading right up to the famous – and horrifying – way her life ended.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this
is part two of Isadora Duncan's story. And in the
first part of this two parter we talked about Isadora
(00:22):
Duncan's early life in San Francisco and her drive to
make a life for herself, her mother, and her siblings
that was less defined by financial instability, and she sort
of succeeded money would remain a problem for her for
the rest of her life. This second episode picks up
right after Isadora's triumphant engagement in Budapest, where she sold
(00:43):
out a month's worth of shows and had finally found
fame because Europe really embraced her. But the comforts afforded
by these things was forever clouded by an ongoing series
of tragedies, and this episode will feature those more unhappy
times and the affairs that dominated the last decade of
her life. And yes, we will of course cover the
famous and tragic end of her life, but we're going
(01:05):
to pick up while she is still in Europe enjoying
her acclaim and her new fortune, and turning her sights
on the country that she had long revered and imagined.
It is really no surprise that a woman who founded
her entire style of dance on the ideas she had
read as a young girl about the esthetics of ancient
Greece would want to make her way to those ideas birthplace.
(01:28):
Her siblings once again joined her and Dora as they
made their way to Greece. She describes them all as
being quote half mad with joy when they arrived there.
Quote we asked ourselves why we should ever leave Greece,
since we found in Athens everything which satisfied our esthetics sense.
When is it? Or's brother Augustine missed his wife and
(01:51):
daughter is a Dora, who at this point was in
a much better place financially thanks to her success in
Hungary and Germany, arranged for them to join the rest
of the family. Yeah. She's so matter of fact when
she writes about it, She's like, oh, yes, of course,
I just sent for them. She just threw money at
problems um. The family also took to wearing clothes in
(02:12):
the style of the ancient Greeks quote, much to the
astonishment of the modern Greeks themselves. That's according to Duncan.
The family also fell in love with a tract of
land atop a hill which afforded them a view of
the Acropolis, and they arranged to purchase it at a
fairly steep price from the five families who all had
a stake in this property. Like their properties, all met
(02:33):
kind of on top of this hill. And the plan
was that the Duncans were going to build a home there,
which Raymond designed despite having no architectural help. Uh. And
it was based on the Palace of Agamemnon. So this
already sounds a little dicey in the manner of tourists
taking on a culture like play acting, and that kind
(02:54):
of cringe worthy aspect, as echoed in Duncan's own writing
about the family temple that they were building in their
relationship with the country, quote, we were completely self sufficient
in our clan. We did not mingle at all with
the inhabitants of Athens. Even when we heard one day
from the peasants that the King of Greece had ridden
(03:16):
out to see our temple, we remained unimpressed, for we
were living under the reign of other kings. Agamemnon, Menelais
and Priam. Soon they realized that they had started building
their home. They're sort of Temple of the Arts on
land that had no water. So in spite of that,
(03:37):
the family did spend a whole year in Greece before
they headed back to Vienna. They just love slash hate.
But it's entertaining to me, like just the hubris of
like we're gonna go buy this land and we're going
to create ancient Greece. We don't want to talk to locals.
We just want to wear our togas and dance around
in this house. Also, we didn't check whether there was
(03:59):
water now, and they did try to see if they
could dig wells, but the land was just super dry.
I have to wonder if the locals were snickering off
somewhere else, like, yeah, we drove up the price on
that land and they bought it, and now they can't
even live there. Um. However, in nineteen o five, is
(04:22):
Adora decided to open her first true dance school. This
was a far cry from the crumbling castle mansion that
we mentioned in part one, and she opened the school
in Berlin. This was the first of many schools she
would have, and her students were nicknamed the is Adorables
by the press. That name persists even to this day.
She started the school initially with a co educational model,
(04:44):
with both boys and girls enrolled, but over time and
due to minimal interest, she started taking only female students.
Also in five Isaora met a man named Gordon Craig
while she was performing in Berlin. Craig was essentially in
is Theater Royalty. He was the son of Dame Ellen Terry,
who was one of England's most famous stage actresses. He
(05:07):
had become a theatrical designer and Isadora felt deeply in
love with him from the night she met him. She
stayed with him for two weeks. Her mother actually thought
she had gone missing. Duncan described Craig as quote one
of the most extraordinary geniuses of our epoch, A creature
like Shelley, made of fire and lightning. Yeah. He's often
(05:29):
described as like the great love of her life. Craig
and Duncan had a daughter together in nineteen o six,
named Dear Drew Beatrice, and they had not gotten married.
Gordon Craig was actually already married. He also already had
a number of children out of wedlock with other women.
Uh he would go on to have even more Their
romance ended after a few years, but the two of
(05:50):
them stayed lifelong friends. But all of this really significantly
strained Isadora's relationship to her mother, who had been horrified
by Craig and called him a lot of bad names
about being a seducer. And also uh was probably pretty
horrified that she was with someone who was cheating on
(06:11):
his wife since that had broken up her marriage and
the whole having a child out of wedlock really upset her.
Soon after the affair with Craig ended, Isadora started a
relationship with Paris Singer, the son of sewing machine mobile
Isaac Singer, who we have talked about on the show before.
This was an interesting relationship. Is Adora often found Paris
(06:33):
to be a spoiled, bullheaded man, and she was often
frustrated that he seemed to think himself above working people
who were the very same people who had built his fortune,
but she still loved him. Duncan and Singer welcomed his
son into the world in nineteen He was named Patrick. Yeah.
Their relationship is fascinating to me. Um. While she was
(06:56):
still pregnant. She toured the United States with German conductor
Walter Damrosch, and her performance and the very filmy drapes
of fabric which allowed her body to be seen beneath them,
was considered a revelation by some and absolutely shocking and
immoral by others. Remember, she had tossed all of that
belly convention out of the window. She really was like
(07:17):
going for the Grecian look, but in these very see
through filmy outfits. President Theodore Roosevelt eventually offered his take,
which quelled the detractors a good bit when he said, quote,
Isadora Duncan seems to me as innocent as a child,
dancing through the garden in the morning sunshine and picking
the beautiful flowers of her fantasy. Duncan had an experience
(07:39):
during a performance in Paris in that really seems to
have prophesied a great tragedy. She was dancing to Chopin's
Funeral March at the Trunk and Arrow when she had
what she described as a sense of foreboding regarding her children,
and she smelled quote white tuber roses and funeral flowers.
She later wrote quote, this was the first faint note
(08:01):
of the prelude of the tragedy, which presently was to
end all my hopes of any natural, joyous life for
me forever. After several days later, Isadora parted ways with
her children and their nanny so that the kids could
go home to rest after they had had lunch with
Paris Singer, who she refers to in her writing as Lohengrin.
(08:21):
After the Wagner Opera, Isadora had to go to rehearsal
for a show that she was contracted for, and the
nanny thought that the children were too tired to wait
through rehearsal. On the way home, the car carrying the
nanny and children stalled, and it was on a slope.
When the chauffeur got out to crank the engine, the
car started, but he could not get back in fast enough,
(08:42):
and the vehicle plummeted into the sin All three of
them died. Duncan described the moment that she heard what
happened from Paris himself, writing quote, I remember a strange
stillness came upon me. Only in my throat. I felt
a burning, as if I had swallowed some live cole rules,
but I could not understand. So this was a just
(09:04):
unimaginable loss, and Duncan understandably thought she was never going
to dance again or do much of anything. But just
as she always had, she let her emotions fuel her work.
She choreographed two pieces reflecting her sorrow. They were Mother
and March Funebra. These were to the piano sonata by
(09:26):
Chopin of the same name. Yeah, you can actually find
videos of modern performances of those dances if you want
to see them. Uh, you just googled. Literally, is a
Door Duncan Mother? Or is a Door Duncan marsh Funebra
And they will come right up. Uh. Next, we are
going to delve into how is it Door tried to
move on with her life, But before we tackle that,
(09:47):
we will pause for a word from the sponsors to
keep stuff you missed in history class going. Paris Singer
had wanted to marry Isadora Duncan, and he, you know,
proclaimed this after the deaths of the children, but she
refused to him. It was like, I can set you up.
(10:08):
You don't have to dance anymore. If you don't want to,
I will take care of you. But she really really
still hated the idea of marriage and as the two
of them struggled with their grief and their disagreement over
where their relationship was going. Things kind of fell apart,
and after feeling that she either had to end her
life or find some purpose to it, Isadora decided to
(10:29):
spend some time in Albania, where her brother Raymond was
working with refugees of the balkanmores Isadora next went to Italy.
She spent some time with close friend and actress Eleonora Douza,
who was nursing her own broken heart over the end
of her relationship with feminist playwright Lena Palletti. There's been
a lot of speculation about whether Duncan and Dousa ever
(10:51):
had a romantic relationship, but there's not really anything definitive here.
There is the possibility that Duncan had an affair with
Mercedes Dacostas several years later, and possibly with other women
as well, but it really does seem like Eleonora was
more of a best friend, and in her autobiography, Duncan
speaks of the closeness that she felt to Eleonora, and
specifically how Eleonora did the one thing that no one
(11:14):
else was able to do for her During this time,
she actually asked Isadora to talk about her children. She
wrote of her friend, quote, she never said ceased to grieve,
but she grieved with me. And for the first time
since their death, I felt I was not alone. For
Eleonora Douza was a super being. Her heart was so
great it could receive the tragedy of the world. Her
(11:37):
spirit the most radiant that has ever shown through the
dark sorrows of this earth. While in Italy, she met
Romano Romanelli, who was a sculptor, and even though she
barely knew him, she said to him, quote, save me,
save more than my life, my reason, give me a child.
She told Eleanora that she thought he was the next Michelangelo.
(11:59):
The two of them to not start a relationship. Romanelli
was engaged and intended to marry his fiance, and Duccan
was really bothered by this. Did get pregnant again, and
according to her quote from this moment, I entered into
a phase of intense mysticism. I felt that my children's
spirits hovered near me, that they would return to console
(12:19):
me on earth. But the hope of new life was
snuffed out pretty quickly. Her child, who was a son
died shortly after being born in August of nineteen fourteen.
As she heard the military mobilization outside yeah World War
One was starting. She had really believed that either Patrick
(12:39):
or dear Dre was going to be reincarnated in this
child that she had had conceived with Romanelli, So there
was a lot going on. She clearly again was still
working through a lot of very serious grief. By the
time she had the baby, she had moved back to Paris.
That was at the urging of Paris Singer, who was
still back in her life uh and was bankrolling a
(13:01):
new school for her in Bellevue, just outside of Paris.
But as her pregnancy progressed and she grew very, very tired,
Singer arranged for all of the students to travel to
England for two months so that Duncan could rest. In
addition to a depression that seemed to loom in her
third trimester, the events that had led up to World
War Two were playing out, and that made her feel
(13:21):
even more melancholy. She describes this sense of sort of
hopelessness with the world. Her school was also turned into
a war hospital during this time, so they basically like
commandeered it brought in cots and set it up in
this way. The students that had traveled to England were
housed in Singers Home in Devonshire to wait out the conflict.
After the death of her third child, Duncan traveled to
(13:44):
du Villa with her friend and she continued to be unwell.
She had a brief affair with her doctor, but soon
she left for New York and the hope of getting
a truly fresh start away from all of these memories
and sorrows. That affair with that doctor is very strange
and also full of coincidence, where allegedly he was also
(14:04):
the doctor that tried to save her children after they
had been brought into the hospital um after they had
their car had gone into the sin and so there
was just a weird dynamic at play between the two
of them. So she restarted her school anew after reuniting
with her siblings Augustine and Elizabeth in New York, and
(14:25):
she started performing again and at the end of a
performance she gave it the met. She improvised a dance
to the Marcies while wearing a red shawl to honor
the French troops, in the hopes that it would rouse
her u S audience. She had found the United States
to be shockingly indifferent to what was going on in Europe.
She wanted to try to inspire them to take action,
(14:47):
and the audience cheered as she finished, but it wasn't
really what she was hoping for. She also booked the
Century Theater for a new production, but she wanted to
transform it into a Greek theater for the performances. A
production of Oedipus, which her brother Augustine started, was playing
to a theater where blue curtains had been hung over
the boxes and the orchestra seating had been pulled out
(15:10):
and replaced just with a blue carpet. The show was
a critical success, but Duncan went bankrupt staging it. She
had also grown completely disillusioned with American audiences. She was
horrified that they wanted just to have a good time
while so many people were dying overseas. Thanks to the
generosity of a benefactor, she was able to book passage
(15:33):
on a ship back to Europe, specifically to Italy. Once again,
she met up with many of her students there. After
regrouping in Naples, they headed for Zurich and for the
relative safety of neutral Switzerland, but keeping this school running
in its nomadic state, having to rent new spaces all
the time was getting costly, so when a contract to
(15:53):
perform in South America was offered, Duncan took it to
keep the school going. Her boat made a stop in
New York en route to Buenos Aires, and her brother
Augustine joined her so that he could keep an eye
on her while she was in Argentina. On her first
night there, she was persuaded to tango with some local students,
and it turned out this was a problem because it
(16:13):
was technically a breach of her contract, as it was
written up in the papers as a performance. This put
her in violation of an exclusivity clause, so her tour
was basically over before it started, and she had received
word in the meantime that the money that she had
already sent to Switzerland to keep the school going had
been held up because of the war. She sent Augustine
(16:35):
ahead to Geneva with what money she had to try
to save the students from eviction, while she and her
pianist tried to drum up some additional money by booking gigs.
She did not enjoy any of this when they moved
on to Montevideo. They had greater success, and then in Rio,
her pianist was so popular that he decided to stay
(16:56):
when Duncan decided to head to New York. Yeah, he
was like South America loves me and stick around. UM.
I think he was probably also reluctant to return to
Europe because it was in the middle of a war.
By complete coincidence, Paris Singer was also in New York
and when he heard that Isadora was at the docks
by herself, with no money, he immediately went to help her.
(17:18):
She described him at this time as being in quote,
one of his kindest and most generous moods. And they
first went to Lynch with a friend and they drank champagne.
And after that Singer booked the Metropolitan Opera House, and
he arranged for all of their friends in the art
community of New York to attend a free gallup performance
by Isadora that night. Singer also wired money to Switzerland
(17:39):
for Duncan students, but at that point they had all
left and gone home. Their parents had come to collect them.
Her school was over, at least for the time being.
We really cannot overstate her attachment to this school. She
really considered her students to be her daughters, and a
lot of them even took the last name Duncan and
(18:00):
used it for the rest of their lives. She had
students that stayed with her for decades and then taught
the younger students. So it was a school, but it
was also more than that, and to lose the school
after losing Deirdre and Patrick, was just one more heartache.
Once again, with Singer's generosity, Isidora rented a studio and
(18:20):
she in Paris and Augustine and Augustine's children spent the
days together. She would later write quote in fact, for
the time being, life became wonderful through the magic power
of money. Soon as her health faltered in the face
of the New York winter, Singer arranged for her to
travel to Cuba with his secretary as her escort. The
time in Havannah really did her good, and from there
(18:42):
she traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, where Singer met her,
but she was still grieving, really heavily through all of this.
To outsiders, she seemed to have regained at least some
of the spirit that she had lost when her children died,
but she wrote a feeling extraordinary pain anytime time she
saw a child with its mother, and how this disparity
(19:03):
between her continuing grief versus people believing she was over
it like that was its own kind of pain. Simultaneously,
things were once again turning sour between her and Paris Singer.
He started to have jealous outbursts when she spoke with
other men. She describes this evening in her book where
she was teaching a much younger man how to tango
(19:25):
and Singer kind of grabbed her by the arm and
spun her around and started yelling at her about it.
So he left her rather abruptly. Um he did not
give her a warning, and he stopped paying for her
hotel and her school, and so she soon found herself
broke in New York with no way to get anywhere.
She pawned some of the gifts that Singer had given
her to get by for a while, and then she
(19:46):
took a contract that brought her back to California for
the first time in more than two decades. She also
reunited with her mother, who had moved back to California
because she did not like staying in Europe and from
whom she had been somewhat estranged for some time time
due to her unconventional lifestyle. California had its own surprises
and its own doses of disillusionment waiting for Duncan we
(20:08):
will get to that after we take one more sponsor
break Isadora was welcomed to something of a hometown hero
in San Francisco on this tour, and that gave her
the idea that it might be a great place to
start a school in her hometown. But there was a
(20:30):
problem because by that point there were already multiple dance
schools that taught her more modern, less structured style of dance.
They were kind of copycats of the schools that she
had set up with her sister years and years before.
So she once again found disillusionment. She felt that the
dance that she had envisioned to truly express the American
spirit had been watered down as it had spread in popularity,
(20:54):
and to make matters worse, no one was interested in
backing a school, even if it was run by the
origin senator of the form. So in nineteen twenty one,
she set out with a very new purpose. She wanted
to open a dance school in Moscow, The Russian Revolution
of nineteen seventeen had captured her imagination, and she was
(21:14):
convinced that she would fit right in in this newly
formed Soviet Republic. She envisioned something bigger than she had
ever been able to put together on her own, with
thousands of students to teach. According to her memoir, she
had been sent to telegram in the spring of nineteen
one which read quote the Russian government alone can understand
(21:34):
you come to us, we will make your school, and
she replied that she would indeed teach Russia's children to dance,
so long as they provided her with a school and
quote the wherewithal to work. She moved to her new
job with only one of her students turns teachers, which
was irma Duncan and is it. Dora did flourish in Moscow.
She choreographed new works, including The Revolutionary in nineteen two,
(21:59):
and she did indeed teach. She also met a young
man named Sergey yah Senin and they got married, which
surprises me. He was eighteen years younger than she was,
and the marriage was so that he could travel to
the United States on engagements. Right if they had not
been married, he would not have been allowed into the country,
and when she traveled to the US, Duncan was a
(22:20):
little bit surprised by the reception she received, which was
highly critical of her affinity for Russia and for Vladimir Lenin.
Both Duncan and her husband were accused of being Bolshevik agents.
They were apparently stopped in New York at the port
of entry. She responded to these criticisms by making the
point that though she was not particularly interested in the
(22:41):
politics of her new home country, she felt that all
artists are inherently revolutionary, so of course it made perfect
sense that she would be drawn to a revolutionary place.
During their time in the US, the relationship between Duncan
and her husband was reported widely. When he got drunk
at a party in the Bronx, the papers the next
(23:01):
day ran stories that he had become violent and had
given his wife two black eyes. When she left the US,
Is it or a swore she would never return. After
the two of them returned to Europe, he started to
exhibit increasing instability. Their relationship was deeply strained. In nineteen three,
(23:22):
you sent In returned to the Soviet Union by himself,
and in nineteen five he was found dead, apparently by suicide.
After the split with You sent in, Isadora lived in Nice,
she returned to France once again. She would claim to
anyone who asked that Moscow had been too bourgeois for her.
This was not a glamorous time in her life. She
was getting older. She recognized that she was not the
(23:45):
useful beauty she had once been, and she was prone
to drinking too much, and her finances remained perpetually on
the edge of ruin. In early nineteen seven, Duncan took
on a project that had been brewing in her mind
for quite some time. She wrote her autobiograph fe When
she started this memoir, she opened it with quote, I
confess that when it was first proposed to me, I
(24:06):
had a terror of writing this book. Not that my
life has not been more interesting than any novel, and
more adventurous than any cinema, and if really well written,
would not be an epoch making recital. But there's the rub,
the writing of it. Yeah, she was not a writer
up to this point, even though there were writers in
her family. And I will say her memoir is a
(24:28):
really fun read. Uh. Isadore Duncan may not have had
formal schooling after she was quite young. But she was
a very smart woman. Her writing style is filled with
really wonderfully expressive urns of phrase. It is incredibly frank
on topics of sex and love, and she doesn't seem
to really hide much of anything. And as some of
the quotes we have used here indicate, it also reveals
(24:50):
a person who in some ways was just incredibly ignorant
for all of her world travels. One of the things
that's really fascinating is how, even though it was written
when she was done with her Moscow phase, the ending
of this book really reads almost like Bolshevik propaganda. For example,
it ends with her arriving in Moscow, even though that
(25:13):
means it omits several years from her life after that.
The last two paragraphs read quote, when the boat at
last arrived, my heart gave a great throb of joy.
Now for the beautiful new world that had been created.
Now for the world of comrades, the dream that had
been conceived in the head of Buddha, the dream that
(25:34):
had been resounded through the words of Christ, the dream
that has been the ultimate hope of all great artists,
the dream that Lennon had by a great magic turned
into reality. I was entering now into this dream that
my work and life might become a part of its
glorious promise, a due old world. I would hail a
(25:56):
new world. Yeah. Reading that kind of bloom away, I
was like, whoa, Oh, this is like way after she
had already left the Soviet Union, and it had all
kinds of trouble because of her time there. She actually
finished writing this book in late August of nine seven.
She turned in a manuscript that was entirely handwritten. Why
she chose to end it in ninety one and ignore
(26:18):
her marriage to yes and In and her return to France,
It's just a mystery. We don't know. She had also
been reported as having gotten engaged to Bob Chandler, who
was a New York decorative artist, in nineteen seven, but
she claimed that had been a dinner party joke between
friends that had somehow reached the press. Yeah. It's interesting
(26:39):
when you read newspaper reports of of this last section
of her life, many of them do mention like, oh,
if only she had been able to marry Bob, everything
would have been different. She gave a quote to an
Associated Press reporter in September of nineteen twenty seven that
is often mentioned as early prescient. When talking about her
autobiograph Fee, she said, quote for the first time, I
(27:02):
am writing for money. Now I am frightened that some
quick accident might happen, and so that brings us now
to her very famous and grizzly death. The details of
this story have two different setups. One is that while
she was living in Nice in September is a door
met a young man driving a Bugatti convertible. She suggested
(27:26):
to him that she would love it if he would
take her for a drive, and he agreed. And the
other is that the car was hers, a new car,
and that her chauffeur was teaching her to drive it.
According to some stories, she turned to her friends as
the car started and said, Adu misamis jaz lagoire, which
is goodbye, my friends, I am going to glory. But
(27:47):
despite those inconsistencies, what is consistent is that at m
on September fourteen, she was in the vehicle on the
Promenade des Anglais when her long scarf was picked up
by the wind became entangled in the cars, where wheel
and her neck was broken. Today Isadora Duncan's work survives.
Her choreography has been passed down through generations of her students,
(28:09):
and you can see her work performed today. The Isabelora
Duncan Dance Company and Isadora Duncan Foundation are both run
by Laurie Bellilove, who's a third generation Duncan dancer. This
episode is kind of a bummer to end with, so
I don't want to do that to anybody, So to
(28:30):
finish on a slightly more upbeat note, I thought it
would be fun to end on a passage that just
struck me from Duncan's autobiography, which was published shortly after
her death. Obviously, because she had had died so suddenly,
she was not able to make any revisions to it,
so most of it's pretty pretty much entirely um transcribed
(28:51):
from her handwriting. The version I have has notes of
when like spellings were different and whatnot, but other than that,
it's pretty much word for word. And I like this
past it because it evidences that for all the flaws
that she had, she was also very sharp and funny
and self aware. She wrote quote, how can we write
the truth about ourselves? Do we even know it? There
(29:12):
is the vision our friends have of us, the vision
we have of ourselves, and the vision our lover has
of us. Also the vision our enemies have of us,
and all these visions are different. I have good reason
to know this, because I have had served to me
with my morning coffee newspaper criticisms that declared I was
beautiful as a goddess and that I was a genius,
(29:32):
and hardly had I finished smiling contentedly over this. Then
I picked up the next paper and read that I
was without any talent, badly shaped, and a perfect hearpy.
I soon gave up reading criticisms of my work. I
could not stipulate that I should only be given the
good ones, and the bad were too depressing and provocatively homicidal.
(29:53):
I love that quote so much because she is funny
and very interesting, and uh, it does sort of break
my heart that when you say her name, most people go, yeah,
and she dye in that gross car accident, which she did,
but obviously she had a whole, whole, interesting, very fascinating life. Yeah.
(30:16):
I do highly recommend her her autobiography because it is
a fun read, and that's a pretty quick read. Do
you have some listener mail for us as we wrap
this up. I do, I do um. The first is
from our listener Carla, who writes a Dear Holly and Tracy,
I just listened to your podcast on John Dalton. My
dad is red green color deficient. I very distinctly remember
(30:37):
learning this in the hardware store. We were standing in
front of a bunch of dowels that have been color
coated in varying shades of green. My dad, who was
a very even tempered man, grunted and said these idiots,
which was about the harshest thing he had ever said
in my presence. He asked me if I could get
the one that matched the size he needed. He then
explained to me why it was so bad to label
(30:59):
stuff in only color coding, because people like him could
not tell the difference. I'm very happy to hear of
the trend moving toward using the term color deficient visions,
since it helps people understand what's really happening. In middle school,
I corrected my science teacher when he said that color
blind people only saw in shades of gray. If my
dad wasn't color blind, as they used to say, I
(31:19):
would have just believed my teacher. I ended up giving
the class a lecture on why color coding by itself
is bad, just like my dad had done for me.
My dad has always been pretty comfortable with his color deficiency.
He'll make comments like, heck, I'm color blind, and even
I can tell that doesn't look good. I think the
funniest thing he's done was paint the living room wall purple,
thinking it was gray. Thank you for your thoughtful podcasts
(31:40):
to shed light on so many subjects. Every time I
listen to your podcast, I feel a bit smarter. Carla Um.
That's adorable. I, to the best of my knowledge, do
not have color vision divisiency and still painted my living
room purple. Um. I also wanted to mention a quick
email from Kathleen who does. She also wrote we mentioned
(32:02):
it in the last episode about the new information about
the diatlev pass. But there's a second part of her
email that I wanted to share because it's adorable. It's
a dog story. Second, I wanted to thank you for
your Hellhounds episode as it provided a middle name for
my newest dog, my first dog, Macki Mick's body butt.
Grogan got his middle name because when he gets shaved
in the summer, he turns into a Dalmatian under all
(32:24):
his fur. However, I'd had my second dog, Miriam for
months and still not been able to come up with
a middle name for her, but after your Hellhounds episode,
her middle name simply had to be Rugarou. She is
black and her nickname is Monster because she's a high
energy jerk who gets into everything she and I say thanks.
I hope these pictures of the destruction she can cause
and the videos of her being a turd dragging my
(32:46):
other talg around by his leash and running while carrying
a log bright in your one all the best, Katie Um.
She sent two videos of um miss Miriam Rugarou and
Mackie and they are adorable. I have a dog crush
on Miriam. It's exactly the cute flavor of dog I love.
It's a little black thing with perky pokey up ear.
(33:06):
Since she looks like she probably keeps you on your toes.
So thank you, thank you, thank you, because that did
make great. You can also write to us had History
podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can find
us everywhere in social media as Missed in History, and
if you would like to subscribe, you can do that
on the i heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or
wherever it is you listen. Stuff you missed in History
(33:31):
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from i heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this
is part two of Isadora Duncan's story. And in the
first part of this two parter we talked about Isadora
(00:22):
Duncan's early life in San Francisco and her drive to
make a life for herself, her mother, and her siblings
that was less defined by financial instability, and she sort
of succeeded money would remain a problem for her for
the rest of her life. This second episode picks up
right after Isadora's triumphant engagement in Budapest, where she sold
(00:43):
out a month's worth of shows and had finally found
fame because Europe really embraced her. But the comforts afforded
by these things was forever clouded by an ongoing series
of tragedies, and this episode will feature those more unhappy
times and the affairs that dominated the last decade of
her life. And yes, we will of course cover the
famous and tragic end of her life, but we're going
(01:05):
to pick up while she is still in Europe enjoying
her acclaim and her new fortune, and turning her sights
on the country that she had long revered and imagined.
It is really no surprise that a woman who founded
her entire style of dance on the ideas she had
read as a young girl about the esthetics of ancient
Greece would want to make her way to those ideas birthplace.
(01:28):
Her siblings once again joined her and Dora as they
made their way to Greece. She describes them all as
being quote half mad with joy when they arrived there.
Quote we asked ourselves why we should ever leave Greece,
since we found in Athens everything which satisfied our esthetics sense.
When is it? Or's brother Augustine missed his wife and
(01:51):
daughter is a Dora, who at this point was in
a much better place financially thanks to her success in
Hungary and Germany, arranged for them to join the rest
of the family. Yeah. She's so matter of fact when
she writes about it, She's like, oh, yes, of course,
I just sent for them. She just threw money at
problems um. The family also took to wearing clothes in
(02:12):
the style of the ancient Greeks quote, much to the
astonishment of the modern Greeks themselves. That's according to Duncan.
The family also fell in love with a tract of
land atop a hill which afforded them a view of
the Acropolis, and they arranged to purchase it at a
fairly steep price from the five families who all had
a stake in this property. Like their properties, all met
(02:33):
kind of on top of this hill. And the plan
was that the Duncans were going to build a home there,
which Raymond designed despite having no architectural help. Uh. And
it was based on the Palace of Agamemnon. So this
already sounds a little dicey in the manner of tourists
taking on a culture like play acting, and that kind
(02:54):
of cringe worthy aspect, as echoed in Duncan's own writing
about the family temple that they were building in their
relationship with the country, quote, we were completely self sufficient
in our clan. We did not mingle at all with
the inhabitants of Athens. Even when we heard one day
from the peasants that the King of Greece had ridden
(03:16):
out to see our temple, we remained unimpressed, for we
were living under the reign of other kings. Agamemnon, Menelais
and Priam. Soon they realized that they had started building
their home. They're sort of Temple of the Arts on
land that had no water. So in spite of that,
(03:37):
the family did spend a whole year in Greece before
they headed back to Vienna. They just love slash hate.
But it's entertaining to me, like just the hubris of
like we're gonna go buy this land and we're going
to create ancient Greece. We don't want to talk to locals.
We just want to wear our togas and dance around
in this house. Also, we didn't check whether there was
(03:59):
water now, and they did try to see if they
could dig wells, but the land was just super dry.
I have to wonder if the locals were snickering off
somewhere else, like, yeah, we drove up the price on
that land and they bought it, and now they can't
even live there. Um. However, in nineteen o five, is
(04:22):
Adora decided to open her first true dance school. This
was a far cry from the crumbling castle mansion that
we mentioned in part one, and she opened the school
in Berlin. This was the first of many schools she
would have, and her students were nicknamed the is Adorables
by the press. That name persists even to this day.
She started the school initially with a co educational model,
(04:44):
with both boys and girls enrolled, but over time and
due to minimal interest, she started taking only female students.
Also in five Isaora met a man named Gordon Craig
while she was performing in Berlin. Craig was essentially in
is Theater Royalty. He was the son of Dame Ellen Terry,
who was one of England's most famous stage actresses. He
(05:07):
had become a theatrical designer and Isadora felt deeply in
love with him from the night she met him. She
stayed with him for two weeks. Her mother actually thought
she had gone missing. Duncan described Craig as quote one
of the most extraordinary geniuses of our epoch, A creature
like Shelley, made of fire and lightning. Yeah. He's often
(05:29):
described as like the great love of her life. Craig
and Duncan had a daughter together in nineteen o six,
named Dear Drew Beatrice, and they had not gotten married.
Gordon Craig was actually already married. He also already had
a number of children out of wedlock with other women.
Uh he would go on to have even more Their
romance ended after a few years, but the two of
(05:50):
them stayed lifelong friends. But all of this really significantly
strained Isadora's relationship to her mother, who had been horrified
by Craig and called him a lot of bad names
about being a seducer. And also uh was probably pretty
horrified that she was with someone who was cheating on
(06:11):
his wife since that had broken up her marriage and
the whole having a child out of wedlock really upset her.
Soon after the affair with Craig ended, Isadora started a
relationship with Paris Singer, the son of sewing machine mobile
Isaac Singer, who we have talked about on the show before.
This was an interesting relationship. Is Adora often found Paris
(06:33):
to be a spoiled, bullheaded man, and she was often
frustrated that he seemed to think himself above working people
who were the very same people who had built his fortune,
but she still loved him. Duncan and Singer welcomed his
son into the world in nineteen He was named Patrick. Yeah.
Their relationship is fascinating to me. Um. While she was
(06:56):
still pregnant. She toured the United States with German conductor
Walter Damrosch, and her performance and the very filmy drapes
of fabric which allowed her body to be seen beneath them,
was considered a revelation by some and absolutely shocking and
immoral by others. Remember, she had tossed all of that
belly convention out of the window. She really was like
(07:17):
going for the Grecian look, but in these very see
through filmy outfits. President Theodore Roosevelt eventually offered his take,
which quelled the detractors a good bit when he said, quote,
Isadora Duncan seems to me as innocent as a child,
dancing through the garden in the morning sunshine and picking
the beautiful flowers of her fantasy. Duncan had an experience
(07:39):
during a performance in Paris in that really seems to
have prophesied a great tragedy. She was dancing to Chopin's
Funeral March at the Trunk and Arrow when she had
what she described as a sense of foreboding regarding her children,
and she smelled quote white tuber roses and funeral flowers.
She later wrote quote, this was the first faint note
(08:01):
of the prelude of the tragedy, which presently was to
end all my hopes of any natural, joyous life for
me forever. After several days later, Isadora parted ways with
her children and their nanny so that the kids could
go home to rest after they had had lunch with
Paris Singer, who she refers to in her writing as Lohengrin.
(08:21):
After the Wagner Opera, Isadora had to go to rehearsal
for a show that she was contracted for, and the
nanny thought that the children were too tired to wait
through rehearsal. On the way home, the car carrying the
nanny and children stalled, and it was on a slope.
When the chauffeur got out to crank the engine, the
car started, but he could not get back in fast enough,
(08:42):
and the vehicle plummeted into the sin All three of
them died. Duncan described the moment that she heard what
happened from Paris himself, writing quote, I remember a strange
stillness came upon me. Only in my throat. I felt
a burning, as if I had swallowed some live cole rules,
but I could not understand. So this was a just
(09:04):
unimaginable loss, and Duncan understandably thought she was never going
to dance again or do much of anything. But just
as she always had, she let her emotions fuel her work.
She choreographed two pieces reflecting her sorrow. They were Mother
and March Funebra. These were to the piano sonata by
(09:26):
Chopin of the same name. Yeah, you can actually find
videos of modern performances of those dances if you want
to see them. Uh, you just googled. Literally, is a
Door Duncan Mother? Or is a Door Duncan marsh Funebra
And they will come right up. Uh. Next, we are
going to delve into how is it Door tried to
move on with her life, But before we tackle that,
(09:47):
we will pause for a word from the sponsors to
keep stuff you missed in history class going. Paris Singer
had wanted to marry Isadora Duncan, and he, you know,
proclaimed this after the deaths of the children, but she
refused to him. It was like, I can set you up.
(10:08):
You don't have to dance anymore. If you don't want to,
I will take care of you. But she really really
still hated the idea of marriage and as the two
of them struggled with their grief and their disagreement over
where their relationship was going. Things kind of fell apart,
and after feeling that she either had to end her
life or find some purpose to it, Isadora decided to
(10:29):
spend some time in Albania, where her brother Raymond was
working with refugees of the balkanmores Isadora next went to Italy.
She spent some time with close friend and actress Eleonora Douza,
who was nursing her own broken heart over the end
of her relationship with feminist playwright Lena Palletti. There's been
a lot of speculation about whether Duncan and Dousa ever
(10:51):
had a romantic relationship, but there's not really anything definitive here.
There is the possibility that Duncan had an affair with
Mercedes Dacostas several years later, and possibly with other women
as well, but it really does seem like Eleonora was
more of a best friend, and in her autobiography, Duncan
speaks of the closeness that she felt to Eleonora, and
specifically how Eleonora did the one thing that no one
(11:14):
else was able to do for her During this time,
she actually asked Isadora to talk about her children. She
wrote of her friend, quote, she never said ceased to grieve,
but she grieved with me. And for the first time
since their death, I felt I was not alone. For
Eleonora Douza was a super being. Her heart was so
great it could receive the tragedy of the world. Her
(11:37):
spirit the most radiant that has ever shown through the
dark sorrows of this earth. While in Italy, she met
Romano Romanelli, who was a sculptor, and even though she
barely knew him, she said to him, quote, save me,
save more than my life, my reason, give me a child.
She told Eleanora that she thought he was the next Michelangelo.
(11:59):
The two of them to not start a relationship. Romanelli
was engaged and intended to marry his fiance, and Duccan
was really bothered by this. Did get pregnant again, and
according to her quote from this moment, I entered into
a phase of intense mysticism. I felt that my children's
spirits hovered near me, that they would return to console
(12:19):
me on earth. But the hope of new life was
snuffed out pretty quickly. Her child, who was a son
died shortly after being born in August of nineteen fourteen.
As she heard the military mobilization outside yeah World War
One was starting. She had really believed that either Patrick
(12:39):
or dear Dre was going to be reincarnated in this
child that she had had conceived with Romanelli, So there
was a lot going on. She clearly again was still
working through a lot of very serious grief. By the
time she had the baby, she had moved back to Paris.
That was at the urging of Paris Singer, who was
still back in her life uh and was bankrolling a
(13:01):
new school for her in Bellevue, just outside of Paris.
But as her pregnancy progressed and she grew very, very tired,
Singer arranged for all of the students to travel to
England for two months so that Duncan could rest. In
addition to a depression that seemed to loom in her
third trimester, the events that had led up to World
War Two were playing out, and that made her feel
(13:21):
even more melancholy. She describes this sense of sort of
hopelessness with the world. Her school was also turned into
a war hospital during this time, so they basically like
commandeered it brought in cots and set it up in
this way. The students that had traveled to England were
housed in Singers Home in Devonshire to wait out the conflict.
After the death of her third child, Duncan traveled to
(13:44):
du Villa with her friend and she continued to be unwell.
She had a brief affair with her doctor, but soon
she left for New York and the hope of getting
a truly fresh start away from all of these memories
and sorrows. That affair with that doctor is very strange
and also full of coincidence, where allegedly he was also
(14:04):
the doctor that tried to save her children after they
had been brought into the hospital um after they had
their car had gone into the sin and so there
was just a weird dynamic at play between the two
of them. So she restarted her school anew after reuniting
with her siblings Augustine and Elizabeth in New York, and
(14:25):
she started performing again and at the end of a
performance she gave it the met. She improvised a dance
to the Marcies while wearing a red shawl to honor
the French troops, in the hopes that it would rouse
her u S audience. She had found the United States
to be shockingly indifferent to what was going on in Europe.
She wanted to try to inspire them to take action,
(14:47):
and the audience cheered as she finished, but it wasn't
really what she was hoping for. She also booked the
Century Theater for a new production, but she wanted to
transform it into a Greek theater for the performances. A
production of Oedipus, which her brother Augustine started, was playing
to a theater where blue curtains had been hung over
the boxes and the orchestra seating had been pulled out
(15:10):
and replaced just with a blue carpet. The show was
a critical success, but Duncan went bankrupt staging it. She
had also grown completely disillusioned with American audiences. She was
horrified that they wanted just to have a good time
while so many people were dying overseas. Thanks to the
generosity of a benefactor, she was able to book passage
(15:33):
on a ship back to Europe, specifically to Italy. Once again,
she met up with many of her students there. After
regrouping in Naples, they headed for Zurich and for the
relative safety of neutral Switzerland, but keeping this school running
in its nomadic state, having to rent new spaces all
the time was getting costly, so when a contract to
(15:53):
perform in South America was offered, Duncan took it to
keep the school going. Her boat made a stop in
New York en route to Buenos Aires, and her brother
Augustine joined her so that he could keep an eye
on her while she was in Argentina. On her first
night there, she was persuaded to tango with some local students,
and it turned out this was a problem because it
(16:13):
was technically a breach of her contract, as it was
written up in the papers as a performance. This put
her in violation of an exclusivity clause, so her tour
was basically over before it started, and she had received
word in the meantime that the money that she had
already sent to Switzerland to keep the school going had
been held up because of the war. She sent Augustine
(16:35):
ahead to Geneva with what money she had to try
to save the students from eviction, while she and her
pianist tried to drum up some additional money by booking gigs.
She did not enjoy any of this when they moved
on to Montevideo. They had greater success, and then in Rio,
her pianist was so popular that he decided to stay
(16:56):
when Duncan decided to head to New York. Yeah, he
was like South America loves me and stick around. UM.
I think he was probably also reluctant to return to
Europe because it was in the middle of a war.
By complete coincidence, Paris Singer was also in New York
and when he heard that Isadora was at the docks
by herself, with no money, he immediately went to help her.
(17:18):
She described him at this time as being in quote,
one of his kindest and most generous moods. And they
first went to Lynch with a friend and they drank champagne.
And after that Singer booked the Metropolitan Opera House, and
he arranged for all of their friends in the art
community of New York to attend a free gallup performance
by Isadora that night. Singer also wired money to Switzerland
(17:39):
for Duncan students, but at that point they had all
left and gone home. Their parents had come to collect them.
Her school was over, at least for the time being.
We really cannot overstate her attachment to this school. She
really considered her students to be her daughters, and a
lot of them even took the last name Duncan and
(18:00):
used it for the rest of their lives. She had
students that stayed with her for decades and then taught
the younger students. So it was a school, but it
was also more than that, and to lose the school
after losing Deirdre and Patrick, was just one more heartache.
Once again, with Singer's generosity, Isidora rented a studio and
(18:20):
she in Paris and Augustine and Augustine's children spent the
days together. She would later write quote in fact, for
the time being, life became wonderful through the magic power
of money. Soon as her health faltered in the face
of the New York winter, Singer arranged for her to
travel to Cuba with his secretary as her escort. The
time in Havannah really did her good, and from there
(18:42):
she traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, where Singer met her,
but she was still grieving, really heavily through all of this.
To outsiders, she seemed to have regained at least some
of the spirit that she had lost when her children died,
but she wrote a feeling extraordinary pain anytime time she
saw a child with its mother, and how this disparity
(19:03):
between her continuing grief versus people believing she was over
it like that was its own kind of pain. Simultaneously,
things were once again turning sour between her and Paris Singer.
He started to have jealous outbursts when she spoke with
other men. She describes this evening in her book where
she was teaching a much younger man how to tango
(19:25):
and Singer kind of grabbed her by the arm and
spun her around and started yelling at her about it.
So he left her rather abruptly. Um he did not
give her a warning, and he stopped paying for her
hotel and her school, and so she soon found herself
broke in New York with no way to get anywhere.
She pawned some of the gifts that Singer had given
her to get by for a while, and then she
(19:46):
took a contract that brought her back to California for
the first time in more than two decades. She also
reunited with her mother, who had moved back to California
because she did not like staying in Europe and from
whom she had been somewhat estranged for some time time
due to her unconventional lifestyle. California had its own surprises
and its own doses of disillusionment waiting for Duncan we
(20:08):
will get to that after we take one more sponsor
break Isadora was welcomed to something of a hometown hero
in San Francisco on this tour, and that gave her
the idea that it might be a great place to
start a school in her hometown. But there was a
(20:30):
problem because by that point there were already multiple dance
schools that taught her more modern, less structured style of dance.
They were kind of copycats of the schools that she
had set up with her sister years and years before.
So she once again found disillusionment. She felt that the
dance that she had envisioned to truly express the American
spirit had been watered down as it had spread in popularity,
(20:54):
and to make matters worse, no one was interested in
backing a school, even if it was run by the
origin senator of the form. So in nineteen twenty one,
she set out with a very new purpose. She wanted
to open a dance school in Moscow, The Russian Revolution
of nineteen seventeen had captured her imagination, and she was
(21:14):
convinced that she would fit right in in this newly
formed Soviet Republic. She envisioned something bigger than she had
ever been able to put together on her own, with
thousands of students to teach. According to her memoir, she
had been sent to telegram in the spring of nineteen
one which read quote the Russian government alone can understand
(21:34):
you come to us, we will make your school, and
she replied that she would indeed teach Russia's children to dance,
so long as they provided her with a school and
quote the wherewithal to work. She moved to her new
job with only one of her students turns teachers, which
was irma Duncan and is it. Dora did flourish in Moscow.
She choreographed new works, including The Revolutionary in nineteen two,
(21:59):
and she did indeed teach. She also met a young
man named Sergey yah Senin and they got married, which
surprises me. He was eighteen years younger than she was,
and the marriage was so that he could travel to
the United States on engagements. Right if they had not
been married, he would not have been allowed into the country,
and when she traveled to the US, Duncan was a
(22:20):
little bit surprised by the reception she received, which was
highly critical of her affinity for Russia and for Vladimir Lenin.
Both Duncan and her husband were accused of being Bolshevik agents.
They were apparently stopped in New York at the port
of entry. She responded to these criticisms by making the
point that though she was not particularly interested in the
(22:41):
politics of her new home country, she felt that all
artists are inherently revolutionary, so of course it made perfect
sense that she would be drawn to a revolutionary place.
During their time in the US, the relationship between Duncan
and her husband was reported widely. When he got drunk
at a party in the Bronx, the papers the next
(23:01):
day ran stories that he had become violent and had
given his wife two black eyes. When she left the US,
Is it or a swore she would never return. After
the two of them returned to Europe, he started to
exhibit increasing instability. Their relationship was deeply strained. In nineteen three,
(23:22):
you sent In returned to the Soviet Union by himself,
and in nineteen five he was found dead, apparently by suicide.
After the split with You sent in, Isadora lived in Nice,
she returned to France once again. She would claim to
anyone who asked that Moscow had been too bourgeois for her.
This was not a glamorous time in her life. She
was getting older. She recognized that she was not the
(23:45):
useful beauty she had once been, and she was prone
to drinking too much, and her finances remained perpetually on
the edge of ruin. In early nineteen seven, Duncan took
on a project that had been brewing in her mind
for quite some time. She wrote her autobiograph fe When
she started this memoir, she opened it with quote, I
confess that when it was first proposed to me, I
(24:06):
had a terror of writing this book. Not that my
life has not been more interesting than any novel, and
more adventurous than any cinema, and if really well written,
would not be an epoch making recital. But there's the rub,
the writing of it. Yeah, she was not a writer
up to this point, even though there were writers in
her family. And I will say her memoir is a
(24:28):
really fun read. Uh. Isadore Duncan may not have had
formal schooling after she was quite young. But she was
a very smart woman. Her writing style is filled with
really wonderfully expressive urns of phrase. It is incredibly frank
on topics of sex and love, and she doesn't seem
to really hide much of anything. And as some of
the quotes we have used here indicate, it also reveals
(24:50):
a person who in some ways was just incredibly ignorant
for all of her world travels. One of the things
that's really fascinating is how, even though it was written
when she was done with her Moscow phase, the ending
of this book really reads almost like Bolshevik propaganda. For example,
it ends with her arriving in Moscow, even though that
(25:13):
means it omits several years from her life after that.
The last two paragraphs read quote, when the boat at
last arrived, my heart gave a great throb of joy.
Now for the beautiful new world that had been created.
Now for the world of comrades, the dream that had
been conceived in the head of Buddha, the dream that
(25:34):
had been resounded through the words of Christ, the dream
that has been the ultimate hope of all great artists,
the dream that Lennon had by a great magic turned
into reality. I was entering now into this dream that
my work and life might become a part of its
glorious promise, a due old world. I would hail a
(25:56):
new world. Yeah. Reading that kind of bloom away, I
was like, whoa, Oh, this is like way after she
had already left the Soviet Union, and it had all
kinds of trouble because of her time there. She actually
finished writing this book in late August of nine seven.
She turned in a manuscript that was entirely handwritten. Why
she chose to end it in ninety one and ignore
(26:18):
her marriage to yes and In and her return to France,
It's just a mystery. We don't know. She had also
been reported as having gotten engaged to Bob Chandler, who
was a New York decorative artist, in nineteen seven, but
she claimed that had been a dinner party joke between
friends that had somehow reached the press. Yeah. It's interesting
(26:39):
when you read newspaper reports of of this last section
of her life, many of them do mention like, oh,
if only she had been able to marry Bob, everything
would have been different. She gave a quote to an
Associated Press reporter in September of nineteen twenty seven that
is often mentioned as early prescient. When talking about her
autobiograph Fee, she said, quote for the first time, I
(27:02):
am writing for money. Now I am frightened that some
quick accident might happen, and so that brings us now
to her very famous and grizzly death. The details of
this story have two different setups. One is that while
she was living in Nice in September is a door
met a young man driving a Bugatti convertible. She suggested
(27:26):
to him that she would love it if he would
take her for a drive, and he agreed. And the
other is that the car was hers, a new car,
and that her chauffeur was teaching her to drive it.
According to some stories, she turned to her friends as
the car started and said, Adu misamis jaz lagoire, which
is goodbye, my friends, I am going to glory. But
(27:47):
despite those inconsistencies, what is consistent is that at m
on September fourteen, she was in the vehicle on the
Promenade des Anglais when her long scarf was picked up
by the wind became entangled in the cars, where wheel
and her neck was broken. Today Isadora Duncan's work survives.
Her choreography has been passed down through generations of her students,
(28:09):
and you can see her work performed today. The Isabelora
Duncan Dance Company and Isadora Duncan Foundation are both run
by Laurie Bellilove, who's a third generation Duncan dancer. This
episode is kind of a bummer to end with, so
I don't want to do that to anybody, So to
(28:30):
finish on a slightly more upbeat note, I thought it
would be fun to end on a passage that just
struck me from Duncan's autobiography, which was published shortly after
her death. Obviously, because she had had died so suddenly,
she was not able to make any revisions to it,
so most of it's pretty pretty much entirely um transcribed
(28:51):
from her handwriting. The version I have has notes of
when like spellings were different and whatnot, but other than that,
it's pretty much word for word. And I like this
past it because it evidences that for all the flaws
that she had, she was also very sharp and funny
and self aware. She wrote quote, how can we write
the truth about ourselves? Do we even know it? There
(29:12):
is the vision our friends have of us, the vision
we have of ourselves, and the vision our lover has
of us. Also the vision our enemies have of us,
and all these visions are different. I have good reason
to know this, because I have had served to me
with my morning coffee newspaper criticisms that declared I was
beautiful as a goddess and that I was a genius,
(29:32):
and hardly had I finished smiling contentedly over this. Then
I picked up the next paper and read that I
was without any talent, badly shaped, and a perfect hearpy.
I soon gave up reading criticisms of my work. I
could not stipulate that I should only be given the
good ones, and the bad were too depressing and provocatively homicidal.
(29:53):
I love that quote so much because she is funny
and very interesting, and uh, it does sort of break
my heart that when you say her name, most people go, yeah,
and she dye in that gross car accident, which she did,
but obviously she had a whole, whole, interesting, very fascinating life. Yeah.
(30:16):
I do highly recommend her her autobiography because it is
a fun read, and that's a pretty quick read. Do
you have some listener mail for us as we wrap
this up. I do, I do um. The first is
from our listener Carla, who writes a Dear Holly and Tracy,
I just listened to your podcast on John Dalton. My
dad is red green color deficient. I very distinctly remember
(30:37):
learning this in the hardware store. We were standing in
front of a bunch of dowels that have been color
coated in varying shades of green. My dad, who was
a very even tempered man, grunted and said these idiots,
which was about the harshest thing he had ever said
in my presence. He asked me if I could get
the one that matched the size he needed. He then
explained to me why it was so bad to label
(30:59):
stuff in only color coding, because people like him could
not tell the difference. I'm very happy to hear of
the trend moving toward using the term color deficient visions,
since it helps people understand what's really happening. In middle school,
I corrected my science teacher when he said that color
blind people only saw in shades of gray. If my
dad wasn't color blind, as they used to say, I
(31:19):
would have just believed my teacher. I ended up giving
the class a lecture on why color coding by itself
is bad, just like my dad had done for me.
My dad has always been pretty comfortable with his color deficiency.
He'll make comments like, heck, I'm color blind, and even
I can tell that doesn't look good. I think the
funniest thing he's done was paint the living room wall purple,
thinking it was gray. Thank you for your thoughtful podcasts
(31:40):
to shed light on so many subjects. Every time I
listen to your podcast, I feel a bit smarter. Carla Um.
That's adorable. I, to the best of my knowledge, do
not have color vision divisiency and still painted my living
room purple. Um. I also wanted to mention a quick
email from Kathleen who does. She also wrote we mentioned
(32:02):
it in the last episode about the new information about
the diatlev pass. But there's a second part of her
email that I wanted to share because it's adorable. It's
a dog story. Second, I wanted to thank you for
your Hellhounds episode as it provided a middle name for
my newest dog, my first dog, Macki Mick's body butt.
Grogan got his middle name because when he gets shaved
in the summer, he turns into a Dalmatian under all
(32:24):
his fur. However, I'd had my second dog, Miriam for
months and still not been able to come up with
a middle name for her, but after your Hellhounds episode,
her middle name simply had to be Rugarou. She is
black and her nickname is Monster because she's a high
energy jerk who gets into everything she and I say thanks.
I hope these pictures of the destruction she can cause
and the videos of her being a turd dragging my
(32:46):
other talg around by his leash and running while carrying
a log bright in your one all the best, Katie Um.
She sent two videos of um miss Miriam Rugarou and
Mackie and they are adorable. I have a dog crush
on Miriam. It's exactly the cute flavor of dog I love.
It's a little black thing with perky pokey up ear.
(33:06):
Since she looks like she probably keeps you on your toes.
So thank you, thank you, thank you, because that did
make great. You can also write to us had History
podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can find
us everywhere in social media as Missed in History, and
if you would like to subscribe, you can do that
on the i heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or
wherever it is you listen. Stuff you missed in History
(33:31):
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from i heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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