"FATE’S PLAYTHING.”

Shannon News, 8 November 1927, Page 3

"FATE’S PLAYTHING.”

ISADORA DUNCAN’S TRAGEDY,

The classic dancer, Isadora Duncan, lost her life while motoring along the Promenade des Anglais at Nice. Her flowing scarf caught in a wheel of the car and she was pulled out of the vehicle and . strangled. LONDON, Sept. 17. While London is mourning “poor, tragic Isadora Duncan,” her death and its strange circumstances have prompted the gossip writers to let loose a flood of anecdote concerning her life. She dubbed herself the plaything of Fate, in a bitter moment, says one writer. “Perhaps there was much truth in that description, for all through her life Fate played her strange tricks. Her death is just another.”

Few women have lived a stranger, more fantastic, more eventful fortyseven years of life than she. One moment she was rich and adored, the next she was poor and neglected. Now she was at the height of happiness, then she was suddenly plunged into' grief. Within a few brief years, two of her children and their governess were drowned when their motor-car plunged into the Seine; her husband, the Eussian poet Serge Yessinin} committed suicide, and she herself fell off the Promenade des Anglais at Nice after a scene at a studio party,- but was rescued. -

A f 2w years later, when Fate bludgeoned her again, she announced that she was going to publish her love letters. “I’ll publish them just to show that love is not the saered tiling that poets talk about.” “Love is an illusion: it is the world’s greatest mistake. I ought to know, for I’ve been loved as no other woman of my time has been loved. Men. have threatened suicide, they have taken poison, they have fought duels for me. All kinds have come to me—geniuses, poets, millionaires, artists, musicians; ■ but now there is no one to whom I have appealed for the loan of £25 who has responded. “There is love for you! I’ll show them up. I’ll publish their names. I’ll name that American millionaire who is now worth a billion dollars and who avowed eternal devotion to me.” But it all came to nothing. Fortune smiled on her, and the letters never saw print. i All her fantastic dreams; too, came to naught. Her love match >yith Serge Yessinin, the boy poet, failed disastrously. At first they did not know each other’s language, so they used drawings to express their thoughts.“I couid not adopt him, so I married him,” she said. “You know how wonderfgul he is, like all Russians. He starts reciting verse at two o’clock in the morning.” Then he took to drink, and they fought openly, whereupon the boy poet fled to Russia, declaring: “If she follows, I will go to Siberia. Russia is big. ” , But a 'ittle later lie wrote a poem in his own blood and- then strangled himself.

The- whole of her life tragedy can be traced to* her fierce love for beauty She was a very practical eugenist, and totally disregarded the laws of morality. • _ “I have' the right to- choose the father of my own children,” she declared, and then wrote to a famous literary man: “Will you be, the father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle th-3 world” —but he replied: “T must decline your offer with thanks, for the child might have my beauty and your brains. ” A few weeks ago she went to Paris to stage a dance, but it was a fiasco. “Isadora is fat; she Avaddles,” the critics said.