Dancing in the dark

I was racing against death when I signed up to write Isadora Duncan's biography -- and winning wouldn't even be my strangest adventure along the way.

By Peter Kurth

Nov 12, 2001 | On the day I finished my book about Isadora Duncan -- a biography it took me 10 years to complete -- my computer gave up the ghost. I stopped writing on Nov. 29, 2000, and by midnight my hard drive was gone -- melted, disappeared, as if it never existed. My brother, who works for IBM, tells me this really isn't possible -- "It's in there somewhere," he says -- but he couldn't find it, either, and he doesn't know Isadora. I had backups of everything, but it seemed a strange coincidence.

Now, it's the car. Something to do with the starter -- namely, it won't. A year has passed. "Isadora" is printed, published, shipped to the stores, and the car dies on cue, just when I need to get around and just when a small wad of money comes in from an old royalty account. It's time for new wheels, even if they're old ones (which they'll have to be). My mother says I've got "an 11th-hour kind of life," and a lover I once had in Paris called me a jusqu'au-boutiste -- loosely translatable as a "whole-hogger," and a compliment from a Frenchman, I think. At least, that's how I chose to take it: 1993 was a difficult year.

I should be grateful; it could be worse. Isadora Duncan died just a few days after finishing her autobiography, "My Life," in 1927 -- strangled by her long silk shawl, as everyone knows, during a joy ride on the French Riviera. Then her first biographer, Allan Ross Macdougall, dropped dead of a heart attack in Paris on the day he mailed his manuscript to New York. True story: He was having lunch at the Cafi de Flore and just keeled over at the table, a fate we might all wish for ourselves -- but not now, s'il plait aux dieux, not when "Isadora" is finally out of the box.

Macdougall -- Dougie, they called him -- makes a quick appearance in Nancy Milford's new biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay; they were friends, and Macdougall edited Millay's "Letters" after her death in 1950. What people don't know is that when she died on the stairs at Steepletop, her house in upstate New York, Millay was holding a copy of "Isadora Duncan's Russian Days and Her Last Years in France," the book Macdougall had written 20 years earlier with Irma Duncan, one of the dancing "Isadorables," Isadora Duncan's students.

"It was under her head on the stairway," Macdougall told a friend, "and was spattered by her poor post-mortem blood. The bloody part was torn off by her sister Norma before she gave the book to me; and erased from the top of it ... I imagine Edna was going to take the book upstairs to consult when she [wrote] to the Guggenheim Foundation, backing my request for a fellowship to do the Isadora life. That, alas, was never done; and the Guggenheim people would not take the intention for the deed." Dougie himself died penniless in 1956, and his biography of Isadora wasn't published until four years after that, just a skeleton of the work he meant to produce.

So, you see, I'm lucky. I signed to do Isadora's biography 10 years ago, in another world, nation, century, millennium and life. My agent worked me like a dog on the proposal -- he kept sending it back. It's good, he'd say, but not good enough; more of this, less of that. I came down to New York from Vermont to meet some big editors, but ultimately decided to stay with Little, Brown. For a moment, I felt golden and secure. But I had two secrets no one knew about. The first was that I was dying of AIDS. The second was that I knew nothing about Isadora Duncan; nothing at all.

Next Page: The dead lover who'll probably haunt me

• View blog reactions