16. The Problem With Long Scarves
American dancer Isadora Duncan (1878 – 1927) was famous in the late 19th and early 20th century for dance themes derived from Greek art, and for wearing long flowing scarves. Her career began in childhood when she started giving dance lesson to neighborhood kids, and from early on, she demonstrated a free-spirited style that set her apart. By her late teens, Duncan was performing in Chicago and New York, but felt constrained in America, she emigrated first to London, then to Paris. Overseas, her career took off and she quickly became one of the world’s most famous dancers. She won high acclaim and garnered accolades, and ended up living in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from age 22 until her death in 1927.
On September 14th, 1927, Duncan was testing out a new car in Nice, France. As she almost always did, she was wearing one of her signature long and flowing hand-painted silk scarves. That was unfortunate because a gust of wind blew one of the scarf’s ends out of the car. There, it got tangled in a wheel, and yanked Duncan out of the vehicle and onto the roadway, breaking her neck. Duncan’s death was but the latest, and final, the episode is an unfortunate history with cars: in 1913, her two children, aged 3 and 5, had drowned when a car carrying them plunged into the Seine. Later that year, Duncan was injured in an automobile accident, as she would be again in a car crash in Leningrad, in 1924. On another occasion, she narrowly escaped death by drowning when her car plunged into the water.
