Jean Maurice Eugène Clément
Cocteau ( July 5 1889 – October
11 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual
artist and critic, best known for his
novels Le Grand Écart (1923), Le Livre Blanc (1928), and Les Enfants Terribles
(1929); the stage plays La Voix Humaine (1930), La Machine Infernale (1934),
Les Parents terribles (1938), La Machine à écrire (1941), and L'Aigle à deux
têtes (1946); and the films The Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles
(1948), from his own eponymous piéce, Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orpheus
(1949), and Testament of Orpheus (1960), which alongside Blood of a Poet and
Orpheus constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy.
Cocteau was born in
Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a town near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife,
Eugénie Lecomte; a socially prominent Parisian family. His father was a lawyer
and amateur painter who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine.
From 1900–1904, Cocteau attended
the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a physical relationship with
schoolmate Pierre Dargelos who would later reappear throughout Cocteau's
oeuvre.
He left home at fifteen.
He published his first volume of
poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen.
Cocteau soon became known in
Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he
published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom
every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the
Heavenly City..."
In his early twenties, Cocteau
became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice
Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the
Ballets Russes; the principal dancers being Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav
Nijinsky. During World War I Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance
driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire,
artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and
artists with whom he later collaborated.
Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded
Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade in 1917. It
was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire
and the music by Erik Satie. The piece was later expanded into a full opera,
with music by Satie, Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel. "If it had not
been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull
shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would
have gouged our eyes out with hairpins”
He denied being a Surrealist or
being in any way attached to the movement.
Cocteau wrote the libretto for
Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, which had its original
performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on May 1927.
An important exponent of
avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a
group of composers known as Les six. In the early twenties, he and other
members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit,
a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking. The popularity was due in no
small measure to the presence of Cocteau and his friends.
Cocteau's experiments with the
human voice peaked with his play La Voix humaine. The story involves one woman
on stage speaking on the telephone with her (invisible and inaudible) departing
lover, who is leaving her to marry another woman. The telephone proved to be
the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, feelings, and
"algebra" concerning human needs and realities in communication.
Biographer James S. Williams
describes Cocteau's politics as "naturally Right-leaning.” During the Nazi
occupation of France, Cocteau's friend Arno Breker convinced him that Adolf
Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France's best interests in
mind.
In his diary, Cocteau accused
France of disrespect towards Hitler and speculated on the Führer's sexuality.
Cocteau effusively praised Breker's sculptures in an article entitled 'Salut à
Breker' published in 1942. This piece caused him to be arraigned on charges of
collaboration after the war, though he was cleared of any wrongdoing and had
used his contacts to his failed attempt to save friends such as Max Jacob.[10]
In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent,
Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful.
He also worked with Pablo Picasso on several projects and was a friend of most
of the European art community. Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and
directed, were particularly important in introducing the avant-garde into
French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave
genre.
In 1945 Cocteau was one of
several designers who created sets for the Théâtre de la Mode. He drew
inspiration from filmmaker René Clair while making Tribute to René Clair: I
Married a Witch.
Jean Cocteau never hid his
homosexuality. He was the author of the mildly homoerotic and semi-autobiographical
Le livre blanc (translated as The White Paper or The White Book), published
anonymously in 1928. He never repudiated its authorship and a later edition of
the novel features his foreword and drawings.
Frequently his work, either
literary (Les enfants terribles), graphic (erotic drawings, book illustration,
paintings) or cinematographic (The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, Beauty and the
Beast), is pervaded with homosexual undertones, homoerotic imagery/symbolism or
outright camp.
In 1947 Paul Morihien published a
clandestine edition of Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet, featuring 29 very
explicit erotic drawings by Cocteau. In recent years several albums of Cocteau's
homoerotica have been available to the general public.
It is widely believed that
Cocteau had affairs with Raymond Radiguet, Jean Desbordes, Marcel Khill, and
Panama Al Brown. In the 1930s, Cocteau is rumored to have had a very brief
affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and
herself a sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong.
Cocteau's longest-lasting
relationships were with French actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, whom
Cocteau formally adopted.
Cocteau died of a heart attack at
his château in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on October 11, 1963 at the age
of 74. His friend, French singer Édith Piaf, died the day before but that was
announced on the morning of Cocteau's day of death; it has been said that his
heart failed upon hearing of Piaf's death. Actually, according to author Roger
Peyrefitte, since early that year Cocteau had been devastated after a breach
with his longtime friend and extremely wealthy and generous patroness Francine
Weisweiller: since 1960 she was having an affair with a minor writer, which
cooled her off towards Cocteau. He had a very severe heart attack on April 22.
According to his wishes Cocteau
is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in
Milly-la-Forêt.[20] The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the
chapel reads: "I stay with you" ("Je reste avec vous").