Dancing in the dark

By the time I got tested in 1989 my counts were already down, and they started me right away on AZT. I went to Egypt, then Austria -- or it may have been Spain and Denmark. I do remember Romania: I was there on assignment, monitoring the first post-communist elections and looking at the murdered Ceaucescus' solid-gold toilet fixtures. Amsterdam, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Madrid, Monte Carlo -- always, if I could, I went through Paris, where, on my 40th birthday, I had every hair on my body taken off by Tunisian ipileurs. Every single one, apart from a little tuft in the pubic region that was meant to rise out of my Speedo -- "pour la plage, Monsieur." I have no explanation for this episode, except that I wanted to see someone else when I looked in the mirror.

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Category: Film/Stage: She married into the Singer sewing machine fortune in 1909, although while unmarried she'd already caused a sensation in New York by performing pregnant in flowing, revealing Greek robes. When her children drowned in a car that rolled into the Seine, she left Singer and eventually married the poet Sergei Esenin, who left her after she bared her breasts and called them graceful art. For ten points, name this controversial performer who seduced a sports car driver minutes before catching her red silk scarf on the rear wheel and strangling herself in 1927.

-- College Bowl Quiz, 1996

All wrong, all of it. In the first place, Isadora never married Paris Singer. Secondly, it was a shawl that killed her, as I said before, not a scarf -- a big red shawl with foot-long fringes. And when her children drowned, she cut off her hair and threw it in the sea. "When real sorrow is encountered," she said, "there is, for the stricken, no gesture, no expression. Like Niobe turned to stone."

I left Vermont -- for good, I thought -- after signing for "Isadora," got an apartment in the city and enrolled in a clinical trial at Bellevue: ACTG 175, the grandmother of AIDS combination therapy. It was a blind study; I took thousands of pills, but it turned out later I was on AZT the whole time, and the rest were placebos. Lucky for me, because when new drugs came along, it meant I'd developed resistance to only one medication. It meant I was in it for the even longer haul. And I did most of the research for "Isadora" in three frantic years.

From the beginning, I felt rushed and pushed. This is going too fast, I said, but only to myself. It was no one's fault -- my life was too fast, both because I made it so and because I was living, secretly, on borrowed time. Secrecy speeds up the clock. You've got to do it while you can, while you can -- this played over and over in my head.

My contract with Little, Brown, much amended since, called for final delivery in 1995. I knew all along it couldn't be done, even assuming that the author would live and be well enough to try.

"Isadora was no nonentity," said George Bernard Shaw, "as I found when I met her" -- an understatement only a giant could make. Artist, dancer, philosopher, radical, courtesan, teacher, divinatrice -- when she wrote her own book in 1927, she told her publishers it would take at least 300,000 words and should be published in two volumes: "First: Memoirs of Youth. Second: Maturity. Kindly pardon me as I again repeat that the quality of my writing depends entirely on whether I have capital to write the book in peace of mind." She didn't, and stopped in the middle. American writer Glenway Wescott, in Nice that year with his lover, Monroe Wheeler, recalled:

She told me that it was the only thing she had ever done just for money, and she was ashamed, and having spent the money she could not give it up. It was worse than I knew, she said. Not only was the style poor and stilted, there was bad grammar in it. There had been many objections to her dancing, but there had been no bad grammar in that; and she wept. So I promised to come on the next Wednesday or Thursday and have a look. But when that day came she was dead, in the strangest automobile accident I ever heard of.

Next Page: My kidnapped nieces are found

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