Word: cocteau
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...Dietrich Ingrid Bergman, all the Rothschilds' and most of the Rockefellers. A musical version of her life, enhanced by Katharine Hepburn but stripped of most of the real drama, put Coco on Broadway. She was on a first-name basis with people too famous to need first names: Cocteau, Colette, Diaghilev, Dali, Picasso. Yet at the time of her death, the woman Picasso termed "the most sensible m the world" had a Paris wardrobe consisting of only three outfits...
...never to happen. Cocteau hungered after the friendship of the men whose greatness he recognized. Unfortunately, as he well knew, he was a man who "weeps because the very seals in the zoo aren't crazy about him." Friends tired of his flattery and aggressive bids for attention. Stravinsky called him "an embarrassing young man": Picasso concluded that he was "the tail of my comet...
...least one young genius returned Cocteau's unbridled affection. Raymond Radiguet was 14 when he began his conquest of literary Paris. Cocteau sponsored him, fell in love with him and, as he never tired of boasting, locked him up in a room to make him relinquish alcohol in favor of ink. The result was the minor classic Devil in the Flesh. But shortly after the book's triumphant publication in 1920, Radiguet died of typhoid...
...Cocteau was never whole again. He tried everything from other boys to the sacraments, but the twin solaces turned out to be opium and work. He puffed on the pipes on and off for the rest of his life. In a befogged period of the '20s, he retired to Villefranche and spent his days staring in the mirror and drawing his own picture. Intermittent cures were painful and ineffectual. During one, he wrote: "In my legs there is a queue of ten thousand people standing waiting for the opening of ticket windows that don't open...
...Despite Cocteau's creative exuberance, there is no one work or art form for which he will be especially remembered. Rilke once said that his work "admits to the realm of myth, and he returns from its radiance aglow, as from the seashore." Cocteau was a mythmaker, retreating again and again to myths and fables-Orpheus, Oedipus, Antigone. Angels abound in his writing and painting. He wanted to enchant his audience rather than move them to pity and terror. "I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost." He would have been delighted with Auden...