Isadora: a Sensational Life. (Book review: dancing queen).

Isadora: A Sensational Life * Peter Kurth * Little, Brown * $29.95

At the turn of the last century she was living at times in near poverty, but by 1902 Isadora Duncan was capturing the world's imagination. The 20-something American maverick became known for her immodest tunics as she danced in the salons of Paris for artists, intellectuals, millionaires, and royals. But from the first, her fame amounted to much more than notoriety. Duncan's anticlassical expressionist dancing was nothing less than an artistic and cultural revolution.

Nearly a quarter century later, George Balanchine called her a "drunken, fat woman ... rolling around like a pig." In between, as Duncan herself modestly put it, "I had created an Art, a School, a Baby."

In his fast-paced, illuminating biography, out author Peter Kurth (Anastasia, American Cassandra) admits that he completely surrendered to Duncan's legacy as an artist and a woman. No wonder. Born in San Francisco in 1877, Duncan was, in her words, a "Gift of Isis." Kurth reports that her earliest memory was being tossed from the window of a burning building. She kept flying.

At age 13, she was already performing in her hometown of Oakland, Calif., and, soon afterward, in Chicago and New York as well. From that point on, Kurth provides a wealth of detail as he reconstructs Duncan's dramatic successes and failures.

In Paris, Duncan set out to lose her virginity. She was so naive in the beginning that she didn't know why a homosexual man had passed up her advances, nor did she realize that her patron Winaretta Singer (the sewing machine heiress) was a famous lesbian. And though Duncan was a (levotee of the Sappho's poems, their lesbianism "went right over her head," according to Kurth.

The naif became the world's most famous exponent of bohemian life and, of course, a star in Parisian gay society. She socialized regularly with, among others, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and Janet Flanner, who reported in The New Yorker that on the Continent, Duncan was "more widely known today than any other American."

Duncan challenged conventional mores and politics and preached free love without apology. Her official relationships, especially with the famous Russian poet of the '20s Sergei Esenin, are dramatically recounted. The notorious lesbian vamp Mercedes de Acosta also comes up. De Acosta, whose lovers included Marlene Dietrich and, reportedly, Greta Garbo, rescued a down-and-out Duncan in Paris in 1926.

Pleading lack of evidence, Kurth stops short of calling their liaison a lesbian affair. Instead, he quotes Alice B. Toklas's remark: "Say what you want about Mercedes, she's had the three greatest women of the 20th century." Certainly Duncan sizzles in a note found in De Acosta's papers: "I have played with your flames and been horribly burned ... but I accept it because the source is so beautiful. But how to live with this passion in my veins ... I may die from it."

Kurth vividly paints the social backdrops of Paris and Moscow, where Duncan was a pied piper for the study of dance, attracting throngs of students. Some viewed her as a mystic. Omens appeared to her not long before her children were drowned in a freakish auto accident (the car plunged into the Seine). Indeed, a friend foretold Duncan's violent death--her neck famously broken when her shawl tangled in the spokes of the wheel of a sports car she was riding in--but Duncan laughed the warning off: "I would go all the quicker if I knew it would be my last ride."

Although Duncan's fortunes ebbed during her lifetime, her charisma remains. Her farewell on that last night was prescient in more ways than one: "Goodbye, my friends, I go to glory!"

Whittington writes for Dance magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer.