26. A Star Performer’s Macabre History With Cars
Isadora Duncan’s career commenced in childhood, when she began to give dance lesson to neighborhood kids. From early on, she demonstrated a free-spirited style that set her apart. In her late teens, she performed in Chicago and New York but felt constrained in America. So she emigrated first to London, then to Paris, where her career took off and she quickly became one of the world’s most famous dancers. Professional success was mixed with personal tragedy, however. In 1913, her two children, aged three and five, drowned in a car that plunged into the Seine. Later that year, she was herself injured in an automobile accident, as she would be again in a car crash in Leningrad, in 1924.
On yet another occasion, she narrowly escaped death by drowning when her car drove into water. It was almost as if there was a macabre jinx with Duncan and cars. On September 14th, 1927, Duncan tested a new car in Nice, France. As was her wont, she wore one of her signature long and flowing hand-painted silk scarves. A gust of wind blew one of the scarf’s ends out of the car, where it became entangled in a wheel. It dragged the famous dancer out of the vehicle and into the roadway. Her neck was broken in the accident – the latest, and final, episode in Duncan’s macabre history with automobiles.