Word: cocteau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Williams described his Provincetown acquaintances in a letter to his friend, Novelist Donald Windham, in the summer of 1940. Now the playwright has returned to that scene. But somehow that raffish and fantastic crew has fled his memory, and the characters on the stage of Manhattan's Jean Cocteau Repertory would not shock a novitiate...
...Lavoir. It was a public of admiring consumers, the cultivated gratin of Europe, people who needed a modern Rubens. Moreover, there had been a general recoil from extreme avant-garde art, on principle, after 1918. What seemed necessary was reconstruction, not more iconoclasm, or, in the words of Jean Cocteau, a rappel à l'ordre (call to order), which would place art under the normalizing sway of classical nostalgia. "Revolutionary" art simply did not look good around the 16th Arrondissement after October...
...American jet-set. Maugham received hundreds of visitors there during his life, mostly men, later using many of them as material for his books and plays. Here, Morgan's style becomes lighter and slightly disjointed as he skips from one anecdote to another. Visitors included Noel Coward, Jean Cocteau, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Gladys Stern, whom Morgan describes as "bursting fat." Morgan looks back to Maugham's youth, when he had to live in the unfashionable section of London and take the streetcar, instead of a taxi, to attend the smart dinner parties to which...
...Fauré gave her piano lessons. Ravel dedicated La Valse to her. Stravinsky presented her with the score of Le Sucre du Printemps. Diaghilev made her his ally; she was the only woman with whom he could feel intimate. Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard, Renoir, Vallotton painted her, sometimes obsessively. Cocteau modeled the heroine of his novel Thomas l'lmposteur on her. In the masterly hands of Proust she became two people, Princess Yourbeletieff, the young sponsor of the Ballets Russes: "One might have supposed that this marvelous creature had been imported in their innumerable baggage, and as their most...
...died in 1950 at 78. Her last years were lonely and idle; she was dependent on drugs. Her closest friend remained Chanel, who desperately wanted to take over her crown, her legend. There was nothing to inherit. As Cocteau said of Misia: "Angels fly because they take themselves lightly." -Martha Duffy