Peter Kurth

In Duncan's later life she became closely associated with the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. It turned her into something of a pariah, especially in the United States. But she's constantly contradicting herself on this; one gets the sense that she doesn't really understand the movement she'd supposedly identified herself with.

No, I don't think she understood anything about it. I mean, that said, she was hardly alone in 1917 in assuming that the Red Dawn really was dawn, that it was going to lead to something glorious. A lot of people felt that way, especially Americans. It wasn't until the late '20s that it started to become clear exactly what sort of regime it was going to be. There's a lot to be said about that. But she was entirely emotional about it. To her it was just all these hungry little children who needed her, and communism meant that there would be no rich people; everyone would be equal. It was utopian and fuzzy. But no, I don't think she ever had a really political idea in her head.

It's the same way that she wasn't a feminist in any organized way. In fact, just the opposite: She didn't care whether she had the vote or women had the vote. It just wasn't her issue. She didn't feel that she was repressed in any way. Her feminism was physical, the liberation of the individual.

There is no film of Duncan dancing and only a few still photos. It must have been hard to write about an artist for whom there is almost no visual record of her work.

That was a huge challenge. Almost all of the stuff that's been written about Isadora has made the mistake of trying to describe the dancing, trying to delineate it, which for one thing is tedious. My goal was to make sure that the story never stopped moving. I hoped that by the time it was over, people might have an impression of how she moved. And that would have to come from the reader's own imagination.

Duncan seems to have had an incredibly powerful sense of entitlement. She never seemed to doubt for a moment that she was a genius and that as a genius she was exempt from all of the rules that govern normal people. She felt the world owed her everything.

Yes. She made no bones about that. It really was everything to her in the end. Even with that last nuttiness with Esenin in Russia, which even she knew was a disaster from the beginning. She said, "Well he's a poet, and poets aren't the same. He needs me. Genius needs me."

She did think of herself as, if not a goddess, a demi-goddess. She lived constantly in her mind, drawing on the philosophy of the Greeks. She did that as consciously and deliberately as someone else might to EST or something. She said it was her birthright.

She thought everything -- a lover, children, huge acclaim, great art -- should be possible and that they should be possible for her. And I'm telling you, I've not found one thing written by her, or heard her quoted by anybody, that contradicts that view that she carried throughout her life.

She never thinks she's doing anything wrong. I mean even that crazy scene in the end when she grabs the pearls off that woman's neck and throws them in the water. They couldn't get her to apologize for that. She said, "Well, she shouldn't have those pearls. I can't have my school, she shouldn't have those pearls." I mean, I don't know how you "psychologize" a person like that.

She was in many ways monstrous in that sense, monstrous in the way the French say it. Nothing got through beyond this idea she has [of her art]. Nothing brings that down. So that even in the end when anyone could say, and did say, "She must stop dancing; she just looks ridiculous," she would say, "That's not the point." I am creating beauty and if people don't see it as beauty, I still experience it as beauty.

She was obviously a huge egomaniac, if that's even a strong enough word.

Was it difficult to write about someone who could be so unlikable?

That was what scared me most when I started, that and the fact that I had absolutely no background in dance (though she didn't either, really). But what scared me most was, how can you make someone like this sympathetic and how can you make a story flow dramatically with a character that essentially doesn't change?

Still, we need to remember that people then had a very different idea about artists than we do now. Art was regarded by many, not just by artists, as a sacred thing. Artists were expected to be difficult, temperamental and impossible. You'll find that [to be true] even as late as the great female movie stars of the 1940s, like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. They didn't change either. They were sort of cut out of marble in the way that they lived. It wasn't even a question of being callous and stepping over people to get ahead; they already were ahead. Or they thought about themselves as being ahead. No one was in their way. They never backed down. I don't know who we have like that now.

But in the end I loved her. I suppose I fell in love with her in the way you do with someone you spend that much time with. Either that or you don't do it. You can tell immediately when someone's written a bio of someone they don't like. You can always tell. And I really had to get into her heart somehow, before I could do it.

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