Word: cocteau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ship is sinking," Jean Cocteau mourned last week when he was told of Edith Piaf's death. It was a typically melodramatic lament for the waning of a French world that began with cubism and ended, more or less, with existentialism. Several hours later, Cocteau himself died of a heart attack at the age of 74. In one day France had lost both an esthetic arbiter of its intellect and a guardian-or at least a mascot -of its heart...
Best at Conversation. Pain seemed foreign to Jean Cocteau because it was in such bad taste. In the sweep of French life and letters, he was the incomparably protean, mercurial, acrobatic, magical virtuoso-"a one-man band," as he called himself. He was the eternal dilettante-novelist, poet, farceur, essayist, film maker, actor, painter, sculptor, choreographer, composer, actor-and above all, talker. "Nothing he has written," said one of his friendly critics, "is worth half an hour of his conversation." He despised the limitations of professionalism. "The only way to make a good film is to know nothing about film...
...volume of poetry, La Lampe d'Aladin. Its success plunged the reedy young poet into the world of Proust, Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. Many give him credit for scattering ideas in a dozen surrealistic arts, but it will never be clear precisely who inspired (or copied) whom. Of Cocteau's ballet, Parade, Andre Gide wrote: "Cocteau knows the sets and costumes are by Picasso and the score by Satie, but he wonders if Picasso and Satie...
Living to Shock. Turned down for military service during World War I, Cocteau roamed the battlefields on his own, caring for the French wounded. After the death of his lover, Novelist...
CHRONICLE (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* An attempt to explain what makes a Frenchman tick, through dramatized excerpts from the works of Camus, Cocteau, Anouilh, De Maupassant and Balzac...