Books: Dancer's History

DANCE TO THE PIPER (342 pp.]—Agnes de Mille—Little, Brown ($3).

One afternoon in a Los Angeles auditorium, a little girl gazed while Isadora Duncan, trailing a costume that resembled a set of colossal portieres, danced about the stage for the entire length of a Beethoven symphony. At curtain call La Duncan, scarcely winded, characteristically urged her exhausted audience to go right out and run barefoot through the hills. The little girl promptly took off her shoes and tried —to the exasperation of her mother, who spent several hours tweezing out the cactus spines.

That afternoon was in the pattern of the next two...

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