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NEWSREEL LII 1 страница




 

assembled to a service for the dear departed, the last half
hour of devotion and remembrance of deeds done and work
undone; the remembrance of friendship and love; of what was
and what could have been. Why not use well that last half
hour, why not make that last service as beautiful as Frank E.
Campbell can make it at the funeral church (nonsectarian)

 

BODY TIED IN BAG IS FOUND FLOATING

 

Chinatown my Chinatown where the lights are low
Hearts that know no other land
Drifting to and fro

 

APOPLEXY BRINGS END WHILE WIFE READS TO HIM

 

Mrs. Harding was reading to him in a low soothing voice.
It had been hoped that he would go to sleep under that in-
fluence

 

DAUGHERTY IN CHARGE

 

All alone
By the telephone
Waiting for a ring

 

Two Women's Bodies in Slayer's Baggage

 

WORKERS MARCH ON REICHSTAG
CITY IN DARKNESS

 


RACE IN TAXI TO PREVENT SUICIDE ENDS IN
FAILURE AT THE BELMONT

 

Pershing Dances Tango in the Argentine

 

HARDING TRAIN CRAWLS FIFTY MILES THROUGH MASSED
CHICAGO CROWDS

 

Girl Out of Work Dies from Poison

 

-152-

 

MANY SEE COOLIDGE BUT FEW HEAR HIM

 

If you knew Susie
Like I I know Susie
Oh oh oh what a girl

 


ART AND ISADORA

 

In San Francisco in eighteen seventyeight Mrs.
Isadora O'Gorman Duncan, a highspirited lady with a
taste for the piano, set about divorcing her husband, the
prominent Mr. Duncan, whose behavior we are led to
believe had been grossly indelicate; the whole thing
made her so nervous that she declared to her children
that she couldn't keep anything on her stomach but a
little champagne and oysters; in the middle of the
bitterness and recriminations of the family row,

 

into a world of gaslit boardinghouses kept by
ruined southern belles and railroadmagnates and swing-
ing doors and whiskery men nibbling cloves to hide the
whiskey on their breaths and brass spittoons and four-
wheel cabs and basques and bustles and long ruffled
trailing skirts (in which lecturehall and concertroom,
under the domination of ladies of culture, were the cen-
ters of aspiring life)

 

she bore a daughter whom she named after herself
Isadora.

 

The break with Mr. Duncan and the discovery of
his duplicity turned Mrs. Duncan into a bigoted femi-
nist and an atheist, a passionate follower of Bob Inger-
soll's lectures and writings; for God read Nature; for
duty beauty, and only man is vile.

 

Mrs. Duncan had a hard struggle to raise her
children in the love of beauty and the hatred of corsets

 

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and conventions and manmade laws. She gave piano-
lessons, she did embroidery and knitted scarves and
mittens.

 

The Duncans were always in debt.

 

The rent was always due.

 

Isadora's earliest memories were of wheedling
grocers and butchers and landlords and selling little
things her mother had made from door to door,

 

helping hand valises out of back windows when
they had to jump their bills at one shabbygenteel board-
inghouse after another in the outskirts of Oakland and
San Francisco.

 

The little Duncans and their mother were a clan;
it was the Duncans against a rude and sordid world.
The Duncans weren't Catholics any more or Presby-
terians or Quakers or Baptists; they were Artists.

 

When the children were quite young they man-
aged to stir up interest among their neighbors by giv-
ing theatrical performances in a barn; the older girl
Elizabeth gave lessons in society dancing; they were
westerners, the world was a goldrush; they weren't
ashamed of being in the public eye. Isadora had green
eyes and reddish hair and a beautiful neck and arms.
She couldn't afford lessons in conventional dancing,
so she made up dances of her own.

 

They moved to Chicago. Isadora got a job dancing
to The Washington Post at the Masonic Temple Roof
Garden for fifty a week. She danced at clubs. She went
to see Augustin Daly and told him she'd discovered

 

the Dance

 

-154-

 

and went on in New York as a fairy in cheesecloth
in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream with
Ada Rehan.

 

The family followed her to New York. They
rented a big room in Carnegie Hall, put mattresses in
the corners, hung drapes on the wall and invented the
first Greenwich Village studio.

 

They were never more than one jump ahead of
the sheriff, they were always wheedling the tradespeo-
ple out of bills, standing the landlady up for the rent,
coaxing handouts out of rich philistines.

 

Isadora arranged recitals with Ethelbert Nevin

 

danced to readings of Omar Khayyám for society
women at Newport. When the Hotel Windsor burned
they lost all their trunks and the very long bill they
owed and sailed for London on a cattleboat
to escape the materialism of their native America.

 

In London at the British Museum

 

they discovered the Greeks;

 

the Dance was Greek.

 

Under the smoky chimneypots of London, in
the sootcoated squares they danced in muslin tunics,
they copied poses from Greek vases, went to lectures,
artgalleries, concerts, plays, sopped up in a winter
fifty years of Victorian culture.

 

Back to the Greeks.

 

Whenever they were put out of their lodgings for
nonpayment of rent Isadora led them to the best hotel
and engaged a suite and sent the waiters scurrying for

 

-155-

 

lobster and champagne and fruits outofseason; nothing
was too good for Artists, Duncans, Greeks;
and the nineties London liked her gall.
In Kensington and even in Mayfair she danced at
parties in private houses,
the Britishers, Prince Edward down,
were carried away by her preraphaelite beauty
her lusty American innocence
her California accent.

 

After London, Paris during the great exposition
of nineteen hundred. She danced with Loïe Fuller.
She was still a virgin too shy to return the advances
of Rodin the great master, completely baffled by the
extraordinary behavior of Loïe Fuller's circle of crack-
brained invert beauties. The Duncans were vegetarians,
suspicious of vulgarity and men and materialism. Ray-
mond made them all sandals.

 

Isadora and her mother and her brother Raymond
went about Europe in sandals and fillets and Greek
tunics

 

staying at the best hotels leading the Greek life
of nature in a flutter of unpaid bills.

 

Isadora's first solo recital was at a theater in
Budapest;

 

after that she was the diva, had a loveaffair with
a leading actor; in Munich the students took the horses
out of her carriage. Everything was flowers and hand-
clapping and champagne suppers. In Berlin she was the
rage.

 

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

 

-156-

 

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 be-
fore 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 au-
thorities.

 

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

 

-157-

 

wearing Greek tanics; 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 Polig-
nac 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.

 

-158-

 

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 goodlooking 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 re-
spectable' 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

 

-159-

 

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 pa-
tience, 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 diffi-
cult.

 

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

 

-160-

 

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 à la gloire.

 

The mechanic put his car in gear and started.

 

-161-

 

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 côte de cheval with ornamentation
of ostrich perhaps

 


MAD DOG PANIC IN PENN STATION

 

-162-

 

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 some-
times 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 put-

 

-163-

 

tering 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 win-
dows of the train would be moving and the red caterpil-
lar's eyes in its tail would get little and draw together as
the train went out of sight across the trestle towards Ham-
mels. 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 com-
ing in the door, listening to Fred tell about pocket billiards

 

-164-

 

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

 

-165-

 

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."

 

Margie had to go over on the train every day to go to
school at Rockaway Park. She got along well in the grade-
school and liked the teachers and the books and the sing-
ing but the children teased because her clothes were all
homemade and funnylooking and because she was a mick
and a Catholic and lived in a house built on stilts. After
she'd been Goldilocks in the school play one Christmas,
that was all changed and she began to have a better time
at school than at home.

 

At home there was always so much housework to do,
Agnes was always washing and ironing and scrubbing be-
cause Fred hardly ever brought in any money any more.

 

-166-

 

He'd lurch into the house drunk and dirty and smelling
of stale beer and whiskey and curse and grumble about the
food and why didn't Agnes ever have a nice piece of steak
any more for him like she used to when he got home from
the city and Agnes would break down, blubbering, "What
am I going to use for money?" Then he would call her
dirty names, and Margie would run into her bedroom and
slam the door and sometimes even pull the bureau across
it and get into bed and lie there shaking. Sometimes when
Agnes was putting breakfast on the table, always in a
fluster for fear Margie would miss the train to school,
Agnes would have a black eye and her face would be
swollen and puffy where he'd hit her and she'd have a
meek sorryforherself look Margie hated. And Agnes
would be muttering all the time she watched the cocoa and
condensed milk heating on the stove, "God knows I've
done my best and worked my fingers to the bone for him.
. . . Holy.saints of God, things can't go on like this."

 

All Margie's dreams were about running away.

 

In summer they would sometimes have had fun if it
hadn't been for always dreading that Fred would take a bit
too much. Fred would get the rowboats out of the boat-
house the first sunny day of spring and work like a demon
calking and painting them a fresh green and whistle as he
worked, or he would be up before day digging clams or
catching shiners for bait with a castingnet, and there was
money around and big pans of chowder Long Island style
and New England style simmering on the back of the
stove, and Agnes was happy and singing and always in a
bustle fixing shoredinners and sandwiches for fishermen,
and Margie would go out sometimes with fishingparties,
and Fred taught her to swim in the clear channel up under
the railroad bridge and took her with him barefoot over
the muddy flats clamming and after softshell crabs, and
sportsmen with fancy vests who came down to rent a boat
would often give her a quarter. When Fred was in a sober


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