Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

Keenly observant with a photographic memory for detail, Duse would record every aspect of the girl’s appearance decades later in her unfinished autobiography, from the bare and swollen feet to the extreme pallor of her face. She took inventory of her clothing: “a ticking petticoat, a triangular handkerchief embroidered with little colored flowers knotted on her breast.”

  A crowd soon converged; Eleonora saw the girl’s hysterical mother claw her way through the gawkers, crying out to the girl “with all the names of the heart.”

  The woman wailed, picked up her daughter—but she barely had the strength to carry her off. Eleonora’s mother, Angelica, watched in horror alongside her neighbors. There was little they could say or do.

  But Angelica stepped forward suddenly and invited the distraught woman into the cottage where they lived. Working together, the two mothers laid the lifeless girl upon Eleonora’s little bed, and tried to remove her mud-soaked clothes; they could not bury her without first cleaning her. Eleonora was horrified and fascinated; the incident would remain etched in her mind.

  With a naked corpse laid out upon her bed, Angelica grabbed an item from Eleonora’s wardrobe—the only dress she owned—and offered it to the bereaved mother for the burial. The gift was profound. It forced Eleonora to think about her own mortality—like a spectator at her own funeral. She imagined the girl animate and gay one moment, then inert the next.

  Where did her spirit go?

  Whether Angelica had intended it as such, it became Eleonora’s first awakening. She felt outside herself, almost as if she were watching a scene unfolding in a play.

  Two years later, Duse experienced a second epiphany after traveling to Verona in 1873 to play in Romeo and Juliet. Eleonora had been poring over the role of Juliet for months. It was a mainstay of their repertoire—albeit a streamlined, simplified adaptation of Shakespeare’s original. But the themes were all there; and Eleonora was intrigued by them.

  Is there a love that can conquer death?

  She dove headlong into the role; and Juliet transformed her. This was the story she repeated to close friends and lovers—authors, two of them, who would one day write about it. The events have undoubtedly been mythologized, especially by Eleonora herself—but it hardly matters. What happened in Verona changed Duse profoundly; of this there is no doubt.

  As she entered the city’s ancient gates, fourteen-year-old Eleonora clutched her script to her bosom, obsessed with the coincidence that Verona was Juliet’s birthplace and Juliet was, herself, fourteen at the time of her death. Duse later described the feeling to lover Gabriele d’Annunzio, who made it a pivotal scene of his novel about their affair: “The gossip of the Nurse buzzed in my ears,” says Foscarina, the fictionalized version of Eleonora: “Little by little my destiny seemed to be getting mixed up with the destiny of the Veronese maiden.”

  It was Duse’s first visit to the bustling city, whose two-thousand-year history was apparent everywhere she looked. Eleonora saw coffins and imagined the body of Juliet inside them. She began to feel her own identity slip away, convinced she was a reincarnation of Shakespeare’s heroine.

  The performance was to take place in the vast Amfiteatro, a Coliseum-like outdoor arena that seated twenty-five thousand spectators and dated back to Roman times. The Duse troupe would not draw those kinds of numbers—they’d be lucky to have twenty-five. Municipalities like Verona built little wooden platforms in the corners of their amphitheaters to accommodate the strolling players that performed outdoors. Only a handful of larger, established acting companies in Italy could command an indoor stage and upper-class patrons.

  Eleonora was happy to be outdoors that evening, for it was a sunset like no other. There was magic to that golden stage in the ruins of the ancient theater. It put the young actress into a heightened state. “At intervals,” says the heroine of d’Annunzio’s book, “my eyes would travel to the long grasses growing at the summit of the walls and there seemed to come to me from them I-know-not-what encouragement to what I was saying and doing.”

  Primordial muses hidden among those weeds seemed to beckon to her. Eleonora surrendered to them, and her “words flowed with strange facility, almost involuntarily, as if in a delirium.” She was not, herself, speaking the lines; they were being spoken “through” her.

  Eleonora felt she had become a channel, whether to the spirit of the Capulet maiden or something else. As d’Annunzio’s heroine continues: “Every word before leaving my lips seemed to have passed through all the warmth of my blood. There was not a fiber in me that did not contribute to the harmony. Oh, Grace, it was a state of Grace!

  “When I heard Romeo saying: ‘O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright,’ truly my whole being kindled. I became a flame.”

  By the final act, the sun had faded; it was dark when Juliet awakened in the Capulet crypt to find Romeo dead. She felt herself plunging into the bleakest of emotions: “My eyes sought the glimmer of light at the top of the wall. It had gone out.” She felt the crowd impatient for the finale; some had been deeply moved, others deeply disturbed by her performance. There was the sense of a sacrificial rite as “Juliet” unsheathed her dagger. The arena hushed—they wanted her blood. Suddenly, Eleonora stabbed herself in a manner that seemed so real it shocked the crowd, “which let out such a great roar that I was terrified.”

  “Juliet” lost consciousness. The next thing she remembered was hearing the pealing of church bells and smelling roses she had used as a prop and the sooty torches, whose burning pitch irritated her nostrils.

  After the show, Eleonora walked for hours through the streets of Verona, trying to make sense of what had transpired. Her mother followed at a respectful distance. Angelica knew something unique had happened to her daughter onstage that night, though she’d be hard-pressed to put it into words. Others in the blue-collar crowd had been electrified, too. Eleonora’s fellow actors hadn’t noticed anything particularly different. The boy playing Romeo likely shrugged it off to one of her many moods.

  But something happened that night which she could not deny: the play became real. Eleonora was scared—and fascinated. She needed to walk, and think.

  “We crossed a bridge, walked along the Adige,” remembered Eleonora, “then crossed another bridge, entered a small street, lost ourselves in the dark alleys, found a square with a church. . . . My mother asked me now and then: ‘Where are we going?’ ” Eleonora wasn’t sure. She hoped to find a Franciscan convent, housing the hidden tomb of Juliet. She searched all night, but such a place, she realized, did not exist.

  The following morning when it came time to move, Eleonora found herself riding in the back of the cart, gazing wistfully at shrinking spires and praying silently to this new force she now called The Grace.

  “She had received her revelation,” Count Giuseppe Primoli, one of Duse’s numerous admirers, wrote many years later in writings that were never published. Acting was no longer simply the family business. For Duse, it had become Art.

  * * *

  I. Time magazine (July 30, 1923) reported the mythology of her origin even more erroneously: “Born in a wagon among the musty properties of a band of strolling players on the outskirts of Venice, she grew to womanhood behind the flickering footlights of mean country stages.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Not quite a generation earlier, Sarah Bernhardt had entered the world with three strikes against her: she was the illegitimate daughter of a courtesan (well meaning, but largely absent), she had an unknown father, and she was Jewish.

  This was Paris, 1844. Sarah’s mother, Youle Bernard (Sarah would later change the spelling of her surname), was a runaway from Amsterdam. She had left Holland as a young teen in the early 1840s after her own mother died—fleeing to Germany with her younger sister, Rosine. The idea of two barely pubescent girls setting off on their own across Europe makes one wonder about conditions at home. Their father, Maurice, an oculist, had remarried; whether the girls escaped their father or new stepmother remains unclear. B
ut run they did, supporting themselves by any means necessary, including sex. Youle soon found herself pregnant with twins by an unknown father, two girls who died within a week of their birth. Pregnant again a year later, she moved at age sixteen to Paris—where she gave birth to Sarah.

  It was an exhilarating time to be in this vibrant metropolis. On the bridges and quays, one could marvel at acrobats, sit for a haircut, consult fortune-tellers, or dictate a letter to a sidewalk scribe. Napoleon III would soon be named president of France—the first elected by popular vote. But he would discard the constitution and seize power as emperor when parliament denied him a second term. The self-proclaimed sovereign (nephew of the original Bonaparte) had a grand vision for his reign. He began his makeover of France with a grand reconstruction of Paris, carving modern boulevards through the hive of narrow streets, adding monuments and gas streetlights that illuminated, among other things, the women of the night. And just beyond these brightly lit boulevards, in the dark and crooked alleyways, was another Paris, one where the poor lived in shacks in the shadows of grand palaces. Even the Louvre had its nearby shantytown of clapboard homes with raw sewage and rodents in the alleys.

  Sarah’s mother found employment as a seamstress. But it wasn’t long before Youle, with her street smarts, took a good look at the class divide. There was high society, the haut monde, with its corsets, top hats, and paisley shawls; there were the have-nots living in misery; and there was the rising middle class, at once rebelling against the aristocracy and aspiring to be like it. Youle, with a newborn and younger sister in tow, knew they could not remain in the gutter.

  The petit bourgeois way of doing this would be to marry the right man, which is the path Youle’s eldest sister had taken in Martinique. But Youle chose a different path. She and Rosine, one year younger, were pretty, with auburn hair and petite figures. They played piano and knew how to entertain—both in the salon and in the bedroom.

  It was a line of work not entirely frowned upon. Unlike in Italy, Catholic morality in France had lost much of its sway. Parisian society was far more permissive than the palazzos of Rome, with the pope so near. Many even admired the nocturnal ladies of the demimonde who threw the best soirees, wore the latest fashions, discussed the arts, and dazzled in bed. These were the “kept” women who dined at elegant cafés, attended the opera, mingled with counts. Some of these courtesans—such as the four who became known as Les Grandes Horizontales—attained almost legendary status. As the writer Maxime Du Camp expressed it: “One does not know today whether honest women are dressing like prostitutes, or prostitutes are dressed like honest women.”

  Youle had no shame about her profession, which is why she would have few qualms about encouraging her own daughters to follow in her footsteps. It’s a testament to her guile and formidable willpower that Youle, in a few short years, managed not only to raise a child, but also to build up a respectable salon with some distinguished patrons, including composer Gioachino Rossini, author Alexandre Dumas père, the Duc de Morny, and Baron Hippolyte Larrey, the personal physician of Napoleon III. Many of them would one day assist Sarah in her career.

  As Sarah began her memoir: “My mother was fond of traveling: she would go from Spain to England, from London to Paris, from Paris to Berlin, and from there to Christiania [Oslo]; then she would come back, embrace me, and set out again.” These passages from My Double Life, published in 1907 when she was in her sixties, have a languid, almost carefree tone—belying the likelihood that Sarah felt abandoned. A kept woman was expected to travel about Europe on the whims of her patrons; the baby was a nuisance. So Sarah was dispatched to the care of a wet nurse in Brittany, a peasant woman who nicknamed the child “Milk Blossom” due to her fair complexion. The nurse was “a good, kind woman,” Sarah wrote, who, “as her own child had died, had only me to love. But she loved after the manner of poor people, when she had time.”

  • • •

  One morning, the nurse went off to work in the fields, leaving baby Sarah in a high chair under the supervision of her invalid husband, who was bedridden. Sarah managed to escape her chair and found herself entranced by a nearby fireplace with its mesmerizing flames. Within moments, her clothing had caught fire. The husband, unable to move, croaked out to summon help, but his wife was too far away in the potato field. Neighbors, luckily, heard the child’s shrieks.

  “I was thrown, all smoking, into a large pail of fresh milk,” recounted Sarah, almost proud of the incident:

  For the next four days that quiet part of the country was ploughed by stage-coaches that arrived in rapid succession. My aunts came from all parts of the world, and my mother, in the greatest alarm, hastened from Brussels.

  Youle was accompanied by patron-du-jour Baron Larrey, the royal physician. (Larrey’s father had invented field ambulances and codified triage as battlefield surgeon to the first Napoleon.) A colleague accompanied Larrey on the country jaunt, so little Sarah, while her burns were minor, was attended by two of the finest doctors in France. The esteemed medics, in their top hats and English tweed, deferred to country wisdom, consenting with chuckles to the Breton peasant remedy for Sarah’s burns: pigs’ bladders stuffed with fresh butter and applied every two hours as a poultice.

  Sarah was delighted to be the center of attention, a position she would come to expect in her adult life. She now had the luxury to observe her beloved mother up close. Sarah idolized the beautiful, often-absent woman, whom she likened to “a Madonna” (in appearance if not in virtue)—“her golden hair and her eyes fringed with such long lashes that they made a shadow on her cheeks when she looked down.”

  As she wrote her memoirs in later years, Sarah remained certain her mother “would have given her golden hair, her slender white fingers, her tiny feet, her life itself, in order to save her child to whom she had not given a moment’s thought the week before.”

  • • •

  The drama of Sarah’s childhood continued when Youle moved Sarah and her country foster-parents to a pied-à-terre in Paris, where they would be more accessible should another crisis occur. But Youle never visited; she was forever leaving Paris on the arms of her numerous admirers. Sarah, not yet six, felt frustrated and lonely, and she acted out. As described by Madame Pierre Berton, a close acquaintance and early biographer:

  One afternoon the janitor’s wife returned from an errand and heard screams coming from the loge. Hastening there she discovered the butcher’s son, aged six, stripped to the waist, and the diminutive Sarah laying on to him with a strap. “I am playing at being a Spaniard,” she said in explanation, Spaniards having then a great reputation in France for cruelty.

  Sarah, like Eleonora, playacted with great fervor. Duse did it with furniture, Bernhardt with boys—sometimes as their tormentor, if Madame Berton’s 1923 memoir is to be believed. The story is certainly plausible, given who Sarah was, and what Berton describes as “her single-minded will to conquer.” Most interesting, perhaps, is Madame Berton’s conclusion: “I have never doubted that a streak of the primitive existed in Sarah.”

  • • •

  The sickly foster father died; with little sentimentality, the peasant widow then married a concierge who lived in a better part of town. But while the neighborhood may have been a step up, their accommodations were not; Sarah was forced to sleep in a cramped, windowless room. The poor girl missed the open skies and fresh air of Brittany. Tuberculosis, which both Sarah and Eleonora would suffer from their entire lives, began to take root in her lungs.

  Youle, traveling in ornate carriages across Europe, was unaware of her daughter’s new address. Then came a turn of events described by biographer Robert Gottlieb as straight out of Les Misérables. As told by Sarah:

  One day I was playing . . . when I saw my nurse’s husband walking across the courtyard with two ladies, one of whom was most fashionably attired. I could only see their backs, but the voice of the fashionably attired lady caused my heart to stop beating.

  “Do any of the windo
ws look onto the courtyard?” she asked.

  “Yes, Madame, those four,” he replied, pointing to four open ones on the first floor.

  The lady turned to look at them, and I uttered a cry of joy. “Aunt Rosine! Aunt Rosine!”

  By uncanny coincidence, Aunt Rosine, the sister with whom Youle had fled Amsterdam, was apartment hunting in the very building where Sarah’s new foster father served as concierge! The girl dashed into the courtyard. “I buried my face in her furs, stamping, sobbing, laughing, and tearing her wide lace sleeves in my frenzy of delight,” gushed Sarah in her melodramatic memoir, which now delivers its denouement.

  Sarah begged to be taken back to her mother. Aunt Rosine, embarrassed, promised to come back the following day and emptied her purse into the hands of the befuddled nurse, who whisked the little girl back into their apartment. But Sarah, apparently, jumped from the second-story window to catch the departing carriage, breaking her arm, shattering her kneecap, and passing out.

  Like many stories in My Double Life, this one has the feeling of being embellished. Yet even if the events are contrived, they remain vivid windows into Sarah’s emotional life: in this case, a child crying out for her mother’s love. Whether she truly jumped from the window, her dramatics produced the desired result—another reunion between Sarah and Youle. And, of course, more heartbreak.

  • • •

  “I will pass over these two years of my life, which have left me only a vague memory of being petted and of a chronic state of torpor,” says Sarah in her memoir. She was seven at the time, still fatherless, unschooled, unable to read, write, or even count. The solution: boarding school.

  When Youle, who was pregnant again, delivered the news of another prolonged separation to her temperamental daughter, everyone expected a tantrum. But Sarah, who used tantrums now only when they served her, appeared jubilant instead. Perhaps it was the beautiful blue velvet dress she was given to mark the occasion, or the promise of being able to play with girls her own age. Sarah, like Eleonora, had not one friend—a shared solitude that made them develop active imaginations and fierce independence.