Jean COCTEAU shares his memories of Picasso, Apollinaire and Radiguet.

Jean Cocteau (1889.1963)

Signed autograph manuscript – Theater memories .

Five pages large in-4°. Slnd.

Small collage of paper under the signature.

Very beautiful manuscript, first draft, by Cocteau remembering with detachment the scandals, criticisms and other absurdities that resulted from his theatrical work. He largely returns to the hostility aroused in 1917 by his ballet Parade and to his friends who collaborated on the piece, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso and Erik Satie.

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 Theater Memories.

What's terrible is that I already have the theater memories that people ask me for. But rest assured. I cannot tell the words of the actors, since I almost always confine my performers in masks and carcasses which instantly prevent me from corresponding with them. So I give orders like a submarine captain among the divers.

The theater memories that strike me the most are memories of scandals. For example, I will always watch the intermission of Parade at the Châtelet. Scandals are also progressing. Parade scandal was more terrible than that of the Rite of Spring Hernani scandal must have been a very small thing. Tomorrow we will use explosives.

Guillaume Apollinaire had the extreme kindness to preface Parade in the program. The term “New Spirit” was launched through the title of this notice, which was to become so popular. Apollinaire did even better. Thanks to his uniform and his injury which forced him to wear a sort of leather tiara on his head, he saved me from a ridiculous danger. We were leaving the backstage together after the piece that the public had just performed in the hall and we were getting ready to go to the dressing room where Picasso was waiting for us, when a singer, Mme M., a real gorgon, recognized me and exclaimed: “ Here's one” (one of the authors), stirred up the crowd and threatened to put out my eyes with his hatpin, if Apollinaire had not intervened and if the madwoman's husband had not pulled her by her skirts. The poor guy gave me a knowing look which meant: they are irresponsible.

During this same intermission we heard, Picasso, Satie and I, a fresh word capable of restoring our strength if we had ever weakened. But, I swear, the scandal neither made us proud nor dejected us in the least. One gentleman said to another: “If I had known it was so stupid, I would have brought the children.” » This gentleman from the orchestra gave us the most secret flattery.

One evening, leaving Jacques Hébertot's theater after Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel , Raymond Radiguet heard a lady say to his companion: "My dear, I do not dare ask you for forgiveness for this evening" and the companion, very polite, answer: “Don't worry, we're always happy to see how far human stupidity can go.” Certainly.

Another evening, I ran to a friend's dressing room to watch a change of the final scene of The Married (which rarely happens to me because I always monitor my shows as if it were the first performance, a surveillance that the directors take for novice fever). After the play, a friend having named me, too loudly, a very elegant and very pretty young woman who was putting on her fur in the neighboring dressing room, leaned into ours to whistle in my face. A charming anger suffocated him, preventing him from whistling and leaving him only to shed tears. I had to calm her down and tell her that under no circumstances should she put herself in such a state.

I also relate the very funny anecdote of a spectator who complained that Married  did not go well on the ramp. Now, as the natural complaint was that they were passing it on too much, because of the masks, the costumes and the megaphones, I asked him his reasons. “It's because,” she replied, “I love Maurice Denis's ceiling which adorns the theater so much that I take the highest seats , which prevents me from seeing and hearing what is playing on the stage. the scene. »

These anecdotes are innumerable and would provide a thousand legends to Gavarni. I skip the classic stories. For example, the concierge at the Champs-Élysées theater where Quo Vadis and Le Boeuf sur le Toit were performed on both floors and to whom I complained about the theft of shoes, shouting: "It's always these Christian thugs who take what they find. » Also the beautiful story of the Christians who, said the tamer, “scare the lions and prevent them from bellowing. »

I will end with a line from Madame Rasimi, director of the Ba-ta-clan, a line which depicts the entwined, ecstatic couples better than any genre painting. As I asked her why her audience applauded very little for the revue scenes which were performed three hundred times in a row, she replied: “It's because they don't have their hands free. " Jean Cocteau.