{"id":54973,"date":"2016-11-03T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2016-11-03T16:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/?post_type=article&p=54973"},"modified":"2025-06-04T17:01:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T21:01:47","slug":"the-high-wire-of-jean-cocteau_2016-11-24","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2016\/11\/24\/the-high-wire-of-jean-cocteau\/","title":{"rendered":"The High Wire of Jean Cocteau"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jean<\/a><\/a>

Magnum Photos<\/p>

Jean Cocteau with Ricki Soma and Leo Coleman, New York City, 1949; photograph by Philippe Halsman<\/p><\/figcaption><\/div><\/figure>\n

Jean Cocteau (1889\u20131963) was a controversial figure, during his life and now. He is the subject of Claude Arnaud\u2019s magisterial and definitive biography, now translated from the French. Cocteau once told of someone placing a chameleon on a piece of plaid to keep it warm; except for the fact that the chameleon soon died of exhaustion, one could say he was that chameleon, a friend and defender of the bantamweight champion Panama Al Brown and just as intimate with Barbette, a transvestite high-wire artist from Texas. Cocteau was a poet and a sensationally successful playwright and cinema director (perhaps best known today for his masterpiece Beauty and the Beast<\/i>). He admired his own long, white, nervous hands and had them frequently photographed. He was so productive that people said he was as many-handed as the Hindu god Vishnu\u2014another idea for a picture of his hands and several additional ones.<\/p>\n

Cocteau loved famous friends and would even swallow their insults masochistically. Picasso was certainly his most famous friend; it was Cocteau who had convinced him to design sets for the ballet Parade<\/i> during World War I, a step that had cemented his international reputation. Cocteau admitted that meeting Picasso was the major encounter of his life. But years later when Picasso was safely off in Barcelona he gave an indiscreet interview in Spanish, assuming it would never get back to Paris:<\/p>\n

Cocteau is a thinking machine. His drawings are pleasant; his literature is journalistic. If they made newspapers for intellectuals, Cocteau would serve up a new dish every day, an elegant about-face. If he could sell his talent, we could spend our whole lives going to the pharmacy to buy some Cocteau pills, and we still wouldn\u2019t manage to exhaust his talent. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cocteau was so distressed when this interview was translated into French in L\u2019Intransigeant<\/i> that he thought all the young artists he was trying to impress would suddenly doubt that he\u2019d ever been Picasso\u2019s intimate. Surprisingly, he thought these words were a real blow to his prestige. That his writings were \u201cjournalistic\u201d! That his work was like \u201ca new dish\u201d or a \u201cpill\u201d!<\/p>\n

Cocteau dashed off a letter to his mother, in which he invoked the family Catholicism, though he was nonpracticing (only much later, in 1924, would he make his spectacular conversion back to Catholicism as an adept of the theologian Jacques Maritain, though two years later Maritain published a letter announcing their rupture.) Cocteau wrote to his mother:<\/p>\n

My dear, yesterday I received the hardest blow of my life…. Picasso expressed himself about me as only my worst enemies would…. I didn\u2019t throw myself off the balcony only because of you and the Church…. I think I\u2019ll never have the strength to come back to the city…. Pray for me. I\u2019m suffering atrociously. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But then Cocteau had an inspiration. The Spanish were such idiots that they could have easily confused the name of the much less important painter Picabia with Picasso. Yes, he could tell everyone Picabia had said those terrible things about him. Soon afterward, during an intermission at the theater, Cocteau\u2019s mother came swarming up to Picasso and told him that she and her son had been so comforted to discover that the horrible interview hadn\u2019t been given by him. Then she asked Picasso directly, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t you, was it?\u201d Picasso\u2019s Russian wife Olga, who was very fond of Cocteau, took pity on him and said, \u201cNo, it wasn\u2019t him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cocteau was born in the quiet, wealthy Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte in 1889, a few hours before the Eiffel Tower, that bold symbol of the modern, was inaugurated. It was a town devoted to horse racing. He came from a prosperous Catholic family of stockbrokers and notaries. His father committed suicide when Jean (the youngest of three children) was only eight; he didn\u2019t leave a note behind but there are reasons to think he might have been homosexual. Cocteau was raised by his self-dramatizing mother and a German nanny. (He could speak German and right after World War I he surprised everyone by bringing out an anthology of German poetry\u2014a palm branch extended to the enemy.) As Arnaud observes, \u201cNot a word, not a regret, not even an allusion would recall\u2014throughout their entire, abundant correspondence\u2014the memory of the suicide. Did mother and son secretly take advantage of the father\u2019s disappearance?\u201d<\/p>\n

Although he went to the elite Condorcet high school, where Proust had studied as well as the Goncourt brothers and a whole regiment of celebrities, and where Jean-Paul Sartre would teach philosophy, Cocteau was an indifferent student, remarkable for his lack of application. He who would become one of the two or three most brilliant conversationalists of his day and was curious about everything, from dance to religion to painting to poetry, evidenced none of this mental agility in school.<\/p>\n

Cocteau, however, was precocious and enterprising and he arranged to have his poems published while he was still in his teens. His second collection was called, fatally, The Frivolous Prince<\/i>, a name that stuck. In it we read:<\/p>\n

Disdainful, frivolous and slender,
\nDaydreaming and childish,
\nI was born to be a prince,
\nA little prince in exile.<\/i> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cocteau arranged to have his poems read out loud by \u00c9douard de Max, one of the leading actors of the day, in a theater to just a few hundred intimate friends. De Max was such a notorious homosexual that, as Cocteau recalled years later, his mother\u2019s friends would say to her, \u201cYour son knows de Max, he is lost.\u201d The extravagantly dressed de Max would motor around Paris every afternoon with Cocteau and other high school boys as passengers.<\/p>\n

Proust tried to warn Cocteau, who was two decades younger, that mixing with society people and frequenting their salons and dazzling them with his chatter would destroy his talent. Proust was shocked by how blas\u00e9 the adolescent Cocteau had already become; he was, he said, like someone who\u2019d nibbled on marrons glac\u00e9s<\/i> all day on New Year\u2019s Eve and had no appetite left for real food. As Arnaud puts it, \u201cThen life brought Proust back to his masterpiece, and Cocteau back to his flight into society.\u201d<\/p>\n

During World War I Cocteau, who was judged too weak to serve in the army, went to battle anyway in a uniform designed by Paul Poiret, the leading couturier of the day, and joined an ambulance corps where he met a fake officer (the inspiration of Cocteau\u2019s insouciant war novel, Thomas the Imposter<\/i>). Cocteau must have cut quite a figure in his chic uniform and heavy makeup. (The Comtesse de Chevign\u00e9, the main model for Proust\u2019s Duchesse de Guermantes, once forbade Cocteau to kiss her lapdog: \u201cYou\u2019ll get face powder on his nose!\u201d) He struck his comrades as courageous and merry as bombs exploded on every side.<\/p>\n

He smoked opium most of his life, as did many of his well-heeled friends. Colette, his celebrated and hard-working neighbor in the Palais-Royal, wrote about the smart opium set in her book The Pure and the Impure<\/i> (though there is no evidence she was a user\u2014nor did she write about Cocteau in that book). Cocteau loved to visit Colette and has left an indelible portrait of her:<\/p>\n

Between the dust-cloud of her hair and the scarf knotted around her neck, set in that triangular face with its pointed nose and its mouth like a circumflex accent, were eyes of a lioness at the zoo who becomes the audience instead of the show, watching those who watch her, with folded paws, and a sovereign disdain. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Colette also wrote memorably about Cocteau in her World War II memoir, \u201cParis From My Window,\u201d in which she described his apartment in the Palais Royal:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just right for a man of the theater, since in order to reach his room, the daylight has to touch the pavement below and reflect back up under the arches, like footlights. If you happen to glance up as you pass by, you may see…even the author himself, with his tuft of frizzled hair, his greyhound leanness, his shirt-sleeves rolled back from hands with veins like branching vines. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although Proust and Cocteau should have been friends (both homosexual, both fascinated by society, both famous writers, both sons of the rich bourgeoisie), Cocteau was often exasperated by the older and wiser but frailer Proust. Once toward the end of World War I Cocteau was reading a book-length poem to friends. They had assembled at ten and waited for Proust, who only arrived at midnight (because of his asthma he had to wait till the dust in the streets had settled). As Arnaud writes:<\/p>\n

Suddenly, at midnight, Proust finally arrived, with a naturalness bordering on off-handedness. \u201cGet out, Marcel, you\u2019re spoiling my reading!\u201d shouted Cocteau, with a virulence unusual for him. Then followed a cycle of letters and protests, reproaches and justifications, at the end of which Proust would accuse Cocteau \u201cof being, beneath all the appearances of a young poet, an old dandy….\u201d Proust then confided to a friend: \u201cIf I had Jean\u2019s talent\u2014something I\u2019d like very much\u2014I don\u2019t think I\u2019d attach any importance to my work, and even less to its reading.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Proust was accompanied by the handsome bisexual American Walter Berry, whom both Edith Wharton and Henry James were infatuated with. Cocteau was very anxious because he had changed his manner from the transparence and charm of his early poems to something much more \u201cmodern\u201d and difficult, dedicated to the heroic pilot Roland Garros and influenced by the experimental work of his new friend Guillaume Apollinaire. The society ladies were puzzled and confused; few had seen Cocteau since the beginning of the war. Now that the war was over, he had \u201cmolted\u201d into something new, as his friends Stravinsky and Picasso would do so often in their long careers. The poem, called The Cape of Good Hope<\/i>, was a flop.<\/p>\n

It seemed that from one day to the next Cocteau had changed his graceful Symbolist style for something like Futurism, celebrating steel, propellers, and war. He was reading in his new machine-gun delivery in the stifling heat of mid-August; his audience was visibly wilting. Cocteau was furious at Proust for being so late and deflecting the audience\u2019s attention. There followed an exchange of letters; to a friend Proust said that even though Cocteau was a young brilliant poet, he was acting like an old narcissist (\u201cun vieux beau<\/i>\u201d)\u2014like Robert de Montesquiou, the original model of Charlus.<\/p>\n

Cocteau (people said his name was the plural of \u201ccocktail\u201d) wanted above all to be avant-garde. He was very taken by the Ballets Russes and its impresario Sergei Diaghilev and star male dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. It was Diaghilev who stopped one day on the Champs-Elys\u00e9es and said to him, \u201cAstonish me!\u201d As Arnaud adds, \u201cThe impresario obviously meant: \u2018Don\u2019t imitate us, stop wanting to please us, become what you are.\u2019\u201d Cocteau liked nothing more than these arbitrary, imperious orders; soon he had conceived and plotted out a ballet, Parade<\/i>, with Picasso\u2019s sets and Erik Satie\u2019s music. Now, in 1917, he had his own \u201cscandal\u201d to rival the earlier 1913 Rite of Spring<\/i> Stravinsky-Nijinsky \u201cscandal,\u201d during which the audience became so violent, resorting to fisticuffs, that the stage manager had to raise the house lights.<\/p>\n

Parade<\/i> had a strange assortment of characters: a Chinese man, a little girl, an acrobat, stage managers, and an anonymous voice crying into loudspeakers. Making the ballet sound like a John Cage\u2013Merce Cunningham work avant la lettre<\/i>, Cocteau wrote in a 1917 essay that later appeared in his collection Rappel \u00e0 l\u2019ordre<\/i>, \u201cTheir dance was an organized accident, false steps that were prolonged and alternated with the discipline of a fugue.\u201d Picasso did the Cubist sets and the curtain. Satie refused to adapt his existing music; he composed a brand-new score. To make it more \u201cscandalous,\u201d Cocteau added foghorns and typewriters to the orchestra. In writing the program notes Apollinaire invented the word \u201csurrealism,\u201d three years before the artistic movement began.<\/p>\n

One of the young soldiers at his poetry reading who refused to praise him\u2014and who walked out on his recitation\u2014was Andr\u00e9 Breton, who eventually became the \u201cpope\u201d of Surrealism. He and his friends despised Cocteau, partly because they were hostile to all homosexuals, and partly because they disliked his particular brand of classical references and high-class kitsch. Cocteau was very \u201cright bank,\u201d with his titled ladies and couturiers and opium dreams; the Surrealists drew on a mixture of communism and Freudianism and left-bank bohemianism. Breton also despised writing, once his idol, Duchamp, had given up making art. As Arnaud puts it, he \u201cdreamed of destroying literature, and so focused his aim at a man who could never do without it.\u201d Until the Surrealists sputtered out after World War II (Breton sat out the war in New York), they were invariably hostile to Cocteau, even though he had probably invented Surrealism.<\/p>\n

Cocteau was a master of the autobiographical essay. His essays are at once wonderfully intimate and revealing and<\/i> philosophical. Opium<\/i> is a journal kept during a detoxification cure and contains the memorable entry: \u201cPicasso said that the smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world. You could compare it only to the smell of a circus or of a seaport.\u201d He wrote it during a hospitalization in 1928 and it is scarcely a denunciation of the drug and its \u201ceuphoria superior to health.\u201d More practically he tells us that the first sign of getting off opium is a return of sexuality as well as yawning, sneezing, and the production of snot and tears.<\/p>\n

He also tells us that everything one does in life if one is not smoking opium is headed toward death, has to do with dying or death, whereas opium addiction is something else, a way of getting off the \u201ctrain\u201d that\u2019s death-bound. Cocteau drew constantly while writing the book; he said, \u201cWriting, for me, is to draw, to tie the lines together in such a way as to turn them into writing or to untie them so that the writing becomes drawing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1919 he met a brilliant young novelist, the fifteen-year-old Raymond Radiguet. Just as the nineteenth-century encounter between Paul Verlaine and the teenage Arthur Rimbaud changed the life and the poetry of the older, married Verlaine, in the same way Cocteau fell half in love with the myopic boy, who (like Rimbaud) was the dominant partner, both artistically and psychologically. Despite Radiguet\u2019s inconvenient heterosexuality, he was willing to sleep (just sleep) with the infatuated Cocteau, and it is no accident that Cocteau\u2019s most inspired collection of poetry, Plain Song<\/i>, is about lying, pensive and awake, next to the sleeping beloved; Radiguet once bragged in his diary that he never \u201crefused\u201d himself to anyone. He couldn\u2019t help it, could he, if his body didn\u2019t happen to respond to a man?<\/p>\n

The intellectual union between a prodigy and an experienced Parisian fourteen years his senior was very productive, and Arnaud calls it one of the richest collaborations in history. Both writers decided to submit to the influence of novels of the distant past that observed with restraint the workings of the passions\u2014La Princesse de Cl\u00e8ves<\/i>, Les Liaisons dangereuses<\/i>, and Adolphe<\/i>. Radiguet produced the impeccable The Devil in the Flesh<\/i> and Cocteau eventually wrote his tragedy about brother\u2013sister love, Les Enfants terribles<\/i> (sometimes translated as The Holy Terrors<\/i>). This short novel is chaste in its form and its language but transgressive in its sympathetic picture of brother\u2013sister incest and the profligate, whimsical life of rich teenage orphans\u2014a formula for tragic disaster. It made a splendid movie with a score by Bach and starring one of Cocteau\u2019s boyfriends, \u00c9douard Dermit, who\u2019d been a coal miner before becoming a film actor. As Arnaud mentions, Cocteau attributed everything good to his young acolyte:<\/p>\n

The pair\u2019s influence on each other was reversed in Cocteau\u2019s mind. He was convinced that his early advice\u2014\u201cBe ordinary, write like everyone else,\u201d had in fact been uttered by Radiguet, probably because he had made better use of it than Cocteau. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Despite his literary success, Radiguet drank a bottle of whiskey and of gin every day; he contracted typhoid fever and died at age twenty leaving behind nine hundred pages of fiction, including the unfinished Count d\u2019Orgel\u2019s Ball<\/i>, which Cocteau trimmed by 9 percent and spruced up with his natural gift for epigrams. Coco Chanel and the great patron of the ballet Misia Sert arranged for the funeral of Radiguet\u2014all in white, the color consecrated to dead newborns and children. White coffin, white suit, white horses. For years afterward Cocteau was inconsolable; jeering enemies called him le veuf sur le toit<\/i>, \u201cthe widow on the roof,\u201d after the hotspot where Cocteau\u2019s crowd dined and drank, Le Boeuf sur le Toit (The Ox on the Roof).<\/p>\n

Cocteau\u2019s memoir, The Difficulty of Being<\/i>, has memorable pages on his eccentricities as well as his style:<\/p>\n

I attach no importance to what people call style and by which they like to think they can recognize an author. I want people to recognize my ideas or, better, my way of doing things. I want to make myself understood in the briefest way possible. I\u2019ve noticed that when a story doesn\u2019t connect with the mind it\u2019s because it can be read too rapidly, the slope is too slippery. That\u2019s why in this book I contort my style…. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He wrote this book in the late 1940s, after directing his successful movie, Beauty and the Beast<\/i>, under wartime and postwar deprivations and while suffering from a painful skin disease. The title of the memoir is an echo of the eighteenth-century philosopher Bernard de Fontenelle\u2019s remark to his doctor when he was dying at nearly age one hundred, \u201cI\u2019m feeling a certain difficulty of being.\u201d He draws verbal portraits of famous friends and also, like Montaigne, dissects himself, even his looks:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always had my hair growing every which way, my teeth and the hairs of my beard as well. It must be that my nerves and my whole soul grow that way too. That\u2019s why I\u2019m so hard to figure out for people who go all in one way and can scarcely conceive of a colic. That\u2019s what upsets those people who can\u2019t cure me of my mythological leprosy. They don\u2019t know by which end to grab me. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A glance at a chronology of Cocteau\u2019s life, as compiled by Arnaud, reveals how hard he worked and how constantly and in how many media. For instance, he spent the month of February 1938 in Montargis with his lover, the movie star Jean Marais; there he wrote in eight days the play Les Parents terribles<\/i> (it was produced in 1995 on Broadway as Indiscretions<\/i>, starring Jude Law, Kathleen Turner, Eileen Atkins, and Cynthia Nixon). The following September he wrote a long poem dedicated to Jean Marais. On November 14, Les Parents terribles<\/i> was premiered; it was forbidden at its original theater\u2014it deals with mother\u2013son incest\u2014but it was a triumph when it opened at a second theater. The play was published in 1939. All this was the work of just one year.<\/p>\n

In 1940 he not only wrote a play, Sacred Monsters,<\/i> but also a one-act curtain-raiser, The Handsome Indifferent Man<\/i>, which was a revised version of The Human Voice<\/i>. This time the woman, who is pleading with her lover not to leave her, is talking directly to him, not on the phone as in the original. And now the role was assumed by Edith Piaf. He went for another opium detox. And he published a new book of poems and Sacred Monsters<\/i>. The next year he wrote The Typewriter<\/i>, a play, and a verse drama based on Tristan and Isolde<\/i> as well as publishing two collections of poetry. When he couldn\u2019t write he drew. As Arnaud puts it:<\/p>\n

Though Cocteau needed to immerse himself [in the works of others], it was his own universe that he served. He produced Verlaine-like poems, a film that could be described as Surrealist, a Sartrean play, yet he can always be recognized in the least of his phrases or poems: flitting from branch to branch, chirping here and dancing there, but always in the same tree. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cocteau had always wanted to write a novel about homosexuals, but he decided to wait until his mother\u2019s death. She died in 1943 and he\u2019d already been \u201cscooped\u201d by yet another of his discoveries, the thief and jailbird Jean Genet, who was already publishing Our Lady of the Flowers<\/i>, a masterful account of Divine, one of the first drag queens in literature. Cocteau could console himself with Le Livre blanc<\/i>, a rather tame gay book he had already published anonymously in the 1920s; but to the degree that the story was mild, the illustrations (added two years later in a second edition) were sulphurous\u2014and acknowledged by Cocteau as his own work. \u201cPeople have said that The White Notebook<\/i> was my work. I suppose that\u2019s the reason why you have asked me to illustrate it and for which I have accepted,\u201d Cocteau coyly wrote in an open letter to the publisher.<\/p>\n

Cocteau was a great impresario, the soul of generosity, capable of sponsoring younger, usually male talents. He was a man of excess\u2014a nonstop talker, a passionate if short-lived Catholic convert, a drug addict, a devoted friend who was often lonely. His record as an anti-Nazi is ambiguous. During the war, one reason for his cooperating occasionally with the Germans was that the French fascist collaborators (of the C\u00e9line sort) were so hostile to him and Jean Marais, throwing ink on the actor during a performance of Britannicus<\/i> and beating up the two of them one night on the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es. In order to win them some protection in high places, he wrote a positive article about Hitler\u2019s favorite sculptor, Arno Breker, who was having an exhibit at the Orangerie. To be fair, Cocteau had known Breker since the sculptor studied in Paris in the 1920s, and he chose to be buried twenty years after the war under a statue by Breker. He remained postwar friends with Breker and his wife. But many left-wing French friends condemned Cocteau for praising the favorite of Hitler, who\u2019d imprisoned and slaughtered so many of their friends.<\/p>\n

Cocteau was notoriously criticized by Andr\u00e9 Gide, the Surrealists, and Catholics like Fran\u00e7ois Mauriac (especially, as Arnaud makes clear, after Cocteau abandoned his spectacular conversion to the church in order to return to boys and opium). But he and Marais were idolized by the public, especially after Marais starred in a glossy wartime film The Eternal Return<\/i> for which Cocteau wrote the script (it was a semi-mythical update of Tristan and Isolde<\/i>). It is shot in sumptuous black and white but the acting is stiff and Cocteau\u2019s scenario is portentous. Hordes of teenage girls lingered in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal hoping to get a glimpse of the movie star or even of their pet dog Moulouk. In fact, Cocteau and Marais were the first well-known gay couple in the world, though Cocteau was reluctant to pronounce the dreaded word \u201chomosexual.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cocteau knew Sarah Bernhardt, the leading actress of the 1890s, as well as Andy Warhol in the 1960s. (Andy was a fervent admirer of this early genius of self-promotion.) His life was long and fruitful. He is perhaps most highly regarded today for his movie Beauty and the Beast<\/i>, his screenplay for and narration of Les Enfants terribles<\/i>, his book-length poem Plain Song<\/i>, and his Portraits-Souvenirs<\/i>. Like Colette, he never wrote a bad line or great book\u2014his excellence was honored when he was made, improbably, a member of the august French Academy, just as she was the first woman received into the Belgian Academy. The beloved, hard-living legend Edith Piaf died just before Cocteau\u2014just long enough for him to fire off his homage in carefully selected words before he expired.<\/p>\n

Gide thought Cocteau was silly, and certainly his very virtuosity made him suspect. Gertrude Stein ridiculed his homoerotic drawings. The playwright Jean Giraudoux deplored his slick plays of the sort the French call \u201cboulevard.\u201d He was an intolerably brilliant conversationalist and in other ways exactly what the English, for instance, hate about the French\u2014nimble, a constant source of paradoxes and ironies, a Jacques of all m\u00e9tiers<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jean Cocteau (1889\u20131963) was a controversial figure, during his life and now. He is the subject of Claude Arnaud\u2019s magisterial and definitive biography, now translated from the French. Cocteau once told of someone placing a chameleon on a piece of plaid to keep it warm; except for the fact that the chameleon soon died of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"template":"","categories":[18760,18761,18757],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3952],"class_list":["post-54973","article","type-article","status-publish","hentry","category-biography-memoir","category-in-translation","category-literature","article-type-book-review","article-form-review","_issue-2016-11-24","author-roles-by","author-cap-edmund-white"],"acf":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/nybooks.com\/articles\/2016\/11\/24\/the-high-wire-of-jean-cocteau\/","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"The High Wire of Jean Cocteau","url":"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2016\/11\/24\/the-high-wire-of-jean-cocteau\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2016\/11\/24\/the-high-wire-of-jean-cocteau\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":""},"articleSection":"Biography & Memoir","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Edmund White"}],"creator":["Edmund White"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The New York Review of Books","logo":""},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2016-11-03T16:00:23Z","datePublished":"2016-11-03T16:00:23Z","dateModified":"2025-06-04T21:01:47Z"},"rendered":"