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.
Newsreel LIII
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
Margo Dowling
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 alclass="underline" “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.