Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  Duse didn’t quite know what to expect as she took her seat at Turin’s Teatro Carignano on February 25, 1882, to see Bernhardt act for the first time. She held her breath as the gavel sounded three times to mark the start of the performance. She watched the curtains part to reveal Camille’s drawing room. The set was more lavish than the rudimentary scenery to which Eleonora was accustomed. As Sarah prepared to make her entrance, a hush of anticipation fell over the crowd. Then, suddenly, Sarah took the stage the way a general seizes his battlefield. Her power was palpable, and the house erupted into enthusiastic applause. Sarah blew kisses to the crowd and winked coyly, before folding into an exquisite curtsy. The ovation from the Italian crowd felt like it would never end.

  Eleonora gazed at the diva’s shimmering gown. Eleonora had imagined (and would one day use) a far simpler wardrobe, reflecting the struggles of a woman for hire. But, creative differences aside, Eleonora could not take her eyes off Sarah. Damala appeared opposite Sarah as her young bourgeois lover Armand, and his clumsy performance must have been distracting; but not enough to diminish from Sarah’s radiance.

  Despite ill health, Eleonora attended all of Sarah’s performances. “I went every night and cried,” she wrote. As an actress in residence at the Carignano, Duse would have received discounted seats—but still appearing nightly was an extravagance. It was also conspicuous.

  Sarah’s manager, José Schürmann, remembered scanning the crowd from the wings one evening and noticing Eleonora. He described her as “a dark young girl, her hair badly coiffed, the purest of Italian, not beautiful but with an extremely expressive face, which, in the grip of an emotion, almost becomes beautiful.” Eleonora, apparently, was feeling every one of Camille’s emotions—acting from her seat as the play progressed onstage. Though this Camille was performed in the original French, Eleonora was familiar with the text and did not miss a word.

  Schürmann, who would one day also represent Eleonora, did not see much hope for her at the time. In an interview he gave years later for a 1926 biography on Duse, he recalled thinking: “With that physique, I do not believe she will ever amount to much in the theater.” Schürmann might very well have been right. Duse’s frailty made her seem almost sickly at times. Sarah, too, was considered thin. By Victorian standards of feminine beauty, Bernhardt was practically emaciated—and yet she seemed statuesque and indelible. There was a power to Bernhardt onstage that transcended her petticoats and diamonds—an inner strength that aspiring actresses would be wise to emulate. It was one thing to gaze at Sarah on a souvenir postcard, which Eleonora had done for years, quite another to see her in the flesh. Indeed, crossing paths with Sarah in February of 1882 would be key to propelling Duse to her own stardom.

  As Duse recalled years later, she was enthralled by Sarah’s visit—not just by her star power, but also by her business acumen: “A woman had achieved all that!” Eleonora had finally discovered a female role model. And so, Duse explained, “I, too, felt myself released; I, too, felt that I had the right to do what seemed right to me, and something quite different from what I had previously been compelled to do.”

  But if Duse was inspired by seeing Bernhardt, the experience emboldened her to go in an entirely new creative direction. As the Rossi Company toured Italy in the years that followed, Eleonora began to take the stage quietly and in character, ignoring the audience altogether, sometimes pausing in the corner of the room to notice a speck of dust on the bookshelf. She kept her costumes simple. Her movements were never forced for the sake of blocking—they sprang from intention, an impulse from the “mind” of the character she was portraying.

  Like Sarah, Eleonora had star power, but a quieter sort. She had a new sense of purpose that made Cesare Rossi and other theater managers wary. “They did not interfere with me after that,” she wrote with evident satisfaction.

  • • •

  In 1885, the Rossi Company booked a South American tour. Duse would be playing to non-Italian spectators for the first time. As she boarded the ship in Genoa in late April, Eleonora felt excited. It would take three weeks for the ship to steam its way from the Mediterranean to the South Atlantic. “I’d like a sea journey in order to live twenty days alone,” she wrote a friend, “breathing fresh and wholesome air that will renew my body and soul.”

  Though she and Tebaldo remained married, theirs was more of a professional relationship at this point—he managed her career and finances. They booked separate cabins on the ship: she in a stateroom befitting a prima donna, he in lesser accommodations.

  Duse needed solitude. They had decided to leave their daughter in capable hands back in Italy, to spare Eleonora from the screams and entreaties of a three-year-old as she prepared herself to face her first overseas crowd. This would become a lifelong pattern. Though Eleonora was not nearly as heartless toward her daughter as Sarah’s mother had once been, the rule was clear: art came first.

  Eleonora had begun to write the word with a capital A in her letters—and she wrote many of them. Ever since seeing Sarah onstage, Duse had been pursuing her “Art” with a purpose; she, too, had begun managing her image and career. Acting as her own press agent, Duse would write to certain critics to explain what she had been trying to do onstage.

  “I use everything that I pick up in my memory and everything that vibrates in my soul,” she wrote to Francesco D’Arcais of l’Opinione. “I have never known and will never know how to act! These poor women in my plays have so entered my heart and my head . . . I stand by their side, with them . . . not because I crave suffering, but because feminine compassion is greater, more concrete, sweeter and more complete than the grief that men are used to allowing us.”

  Duse would one day be embraced by feminists and suffragettes, though this was never intentional. She simply strove to express the truth as she felt it—and those feelings could be profound. In an era when doctors like Jean-Martin Charcot, Josef Breuer, and Sigmund Freud focused on women’s limitations, Duse attempted to portray females who were multidimensional, shaded, and complex.

  One production that highlighted this was Denise by Alexandre Dumas fils, who had written the piece expressly for Eleonora. In fact, it was her story: when a young girl is seduced by an older man, she becomes pregnant with his child and is forced to give her baby to a foundling home where the newborn dies from neglect.

  Eleonora had recounted the tragic episode to Count Giuseppe Primoli, an aristocratic admirer who fell deeply in love with her after seeing Eleonora act in Rome. Primoli, whose mother was a Bonaparte, was well connected in France and mentioned the incident to Dumas, who wrote a play about it for Duse to “create,” which is to say to originate the role and thus set the standard for its performance. Eleonora must have been flattered; she was now like Bernhardt—an actress for whom playwrights specifically composed works. But this particular incident was so personal that it felt uncomfortable, an invasion of her privacy.

  Dumas completed his play at the end of 1884, and in early January, Count Primoli arranged to read it to Eleonora at his palazzo in Rome. “You can well understand how her heart was beating,” he later wrote Dumas. “The first act . . . charmed her, but she was still waiting for her part. The second act interested her, but she was still waiting.”

  Duse was waiting for the confession scene: the moment when Denise courageously admits her affair and its tragic outcome to another suitor—this one a decent man, who accepts her past and marries her nonetheless, a radical act of forgiveness in this stuffy Victorian era.

  As Eleonora listened to the scene, “she remained breathless, her color changed; from her staring eyes tears fell on her cheeks. She got up suddenly . . . and was compelled to hear the end of the speech from behind a screen.”

  Yes, she would create the role.

  What made the play even more poignant for Eleonora was the recent passing of Martino Cafiero, who had died of cholera (along with half the citizens of Naples). Eleonora still loved Cafiero in some way, and his death left her desol
ate. There was another loss, too. Some weeks before the premiere of Denise, Eleonora suffered a miscarriage.

  Tebaldo Checchi was quite upset, particularly because he had reason to believe he was not the father. Throughout the previous year, there had been rumors of an affair between Eleonora and her leading man in Camille, Flavio Andò, for whom she displayed unabashed passion onstage, even kissing him on the mouth for a minute at a time. Her performance was scandalous, quite erotic, and drew sold-out audiences of men—sometimes as many as five in a box. Most were familiar with Sarah Bernhardt’s histrionics in the role; now they were entranced by Eleonora’s electrifying passion and subdued inner strength.

  Eleonora ventured even deeper into a character’s psyche in the role of Denise, a character she was unable to shake after each performance. The public was aware of the parallels to her own life—it was similar to the link between Camille and Sarah. But Bernhardt forgot the role with the first sip of after-stage champagne, while Duse wept in her dressing room for hours following each performance. “Oh, this Art consumes my life,” she lamented—dramatically, as always.

  • • •

  One of the reasons Duse found herself sailing to tour South America in 1885 was that critics beyond Italy had begun to notice this quiet revolution on the Italian stage. A British reviewer for the Atheneum had traveled to Rome to watch Duse perform Denise at the Teatro Valle, and praised her naturalism—although, to much of the British public, the apogee of contemporary Italian theater remained Adelaide Ristori, a distinguished tragedienne who had played London in 1856, one of the first-name actresses to perform outside her own country. After her tours in America, she became known as “The Columbus of the Dramatic Arts.”

  Ristori, like her contemporary from France, Rachel, was an actress who attempted to act in a more natural manner on the stage. In fact, this duo from the prior generation had their own Franco-Italian rivalry, not unlike that of Duse and Bernhardt, though on a far smaller scale.

  Ristori had met Eleonora in Rome, even acted with her. She respected her younger colleague, whom she characterized in a press interview as the archetypal fin de siècle woman “with all her maladies of hysteria, anemia and neurosis.”

  Though Ristori was herself in the natural school, she maintained a certain regal dignity in her performance. Eleonora was entirely uninhibited onstage, even wild at times—hence Ristori’s descriptors of “hysteria” and “neurosis,” which had come into vogue, thanks to Sigmund Freud, to label free-spirited women who did not fit into the Victorian mold.

  Duse was not alone in her deliverance. Others exploring this new theatrical emancipation included Konstantin Stanislavski in Moscow and Rachel in France. But one singular distinction separated Duse from all of them—including Ristori and Rachel. For Duse, acting was spiritual.

  Audiences were beginning to feel the energy Eleonora seemed to emanate when she took the stage. As one reporter had noted, there was a “mysterious . . . sympathetic communication” between Duse and the audience that transcended language.

  “I will make Art, always!!!” Eleonora wrote exuberantly to the critic D’Arcais, using three exclamation points, as she often did. “I will go to America . . . Spain. I will go to Vienna. I will go . . . I will go . . . I will take my name as far as I can.”

  In these moments of mania, Eleonora was able to overcome the doubts that she certainly still had about her disruptive role in the theater. A critic like D’Arcais knew that Duse took the stage relying on her intuition in the moment and nothing else. Her performances could vary significantly from night to night. It was terrifying at times, and deeply fragile—which is why, save d’Arcais and a few others, Duse avoided journalists. She was very selective about those with whom she chose to share the mystery of The Grace.

  So it enraged her when, landing in Montevideo for the first stop on her tour of South America, Duse learned that a series of interviews had been arranged by Tebaldo Checchi, her manager and husband. The two shouted at each other. He could not fathom why Eleonora would be so press-shy just when her career was poised to take off. She thought his attempts at publicity clumsy and inept. Tebaldo was jealous of the primo attore Flavio Andò, though it’s unlikely at this point that Eleonora was still involved with him. “Il était beau, mail il était bête,”I she later wrote to a girlfriend.

  The only man she had truly loved was Martino Cafiero—a cad, perhaps, but at least he had been a man of letters. Eleonora was desperate to meet another writer with whom she could collaborate and make “Art.” Her poet would come soon enough, but for now she remained far from home in an empty marriage, which ended abruptly when Eleonora caught Tebaldo in bed with another actress in the troupe, a girl who was underage. Tebaldo agreed to leave the company and remain in South America. Eleonora fell into one of her bleak moods, and it seemed to spread—the tour unfolded poorly for all. Many of the Italians contracted yellow fever in the tropical clime; one died.

  In Rio, the theater was huge, as big as an opera house—tier upon tier of boxes, with a constant murmuring coming from each, which threw Eleonora. “I felt small and helpless,” she remembered later. “For my voice to have carried, I would have had to say ‘I love you’ in the same voice that one says ‘Begone!’ ”

  “A complete fiasco for your little Nennella,” she wrote to Matilde Serao, her girlfriend from Naples, using the diminutive that Martino Cafiero had coined. She was desperately lonely. She even missed her father, who had finally retired from acting and settled in Venice to paint, the avocation he had wished to pursue all along.

  Eleonora had nowhere to turn, no one at her side. Her only ally was within. So one night in Rio, she prayed—she did that often, especially onstage. “There before those footlights, hateful and blessed, I said: ‘Madonna, show us your Grace.’ ” Slowly, sweetly, it came.

  Now weeping openly as she played Denise, she moved her Brazilian audience to tears and the local critics exalted her. “Dumas made Denise,” wrote one, “and Deus made Duse.”

  The culmination came with a visit by Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II, who saw Eleonora perform La Dame aux camélias. Deeply moved, he summoned her to his box after the performance.

  Eleonora felt apprehensive. “It’s hard for me to speak with a sovereign!” she wrote to Adelaide Ristori, who had given Eleonora a letter of introduction to the emperor.

  Dom Pedro presented Eleonora with a heavy gold bracelet as the audience stood facing the imperial box in enthusiastic applause. Eleonora Duse had become an international star.

  * * *

  I. He was beautiful, but stupid.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In February 1883, Sarah Bernhardt declared she was on the verge of bankruptcy and announced a “humiliating” public auction of her jewels. Imagine the stir—only a few years prior Bernhardt had headlined the most lucrative world tour in acting history, and yet now her reserves were fully depleted, or so she said. It was a good story.

  The big difference between Bernhardt and all the stars that preceded her—including Ristori and Rachel—was that other divas received their press coverage in the theater section. Bernhardt’s exploits usually made it to the front page.

  Knowing there was no such thing as bad publicity, Sarah bragged about her extravagant lifestyle and constantly mounting debts, like the substantial sum she still owed to the Comédie-Française, which had sued her for reneging on a ten-year contract; the French court had no choice but to fine Bernhardt 100,000 francs (around half a million dollars today).

  Bernhardt had plenty of treasures to sell. During her grand tour of Europe, she received gifts from kings and emperors, including a diamond brooch from the king of Spain, a precious Venetian fan from the king of Italy, and an emerald necklace from Archduke Friedrich of Vienna, who insisted that she stay in one of his palaces. An exchange of favors was expected in these circumstances, but Sarah apparently declined—out of loyalty, she said, to Aristides Damala. This was the story the press could not resist—the diva and her leading man
, whose drug habit had now expanded to include cocaine. On one occasion, a doped-up Damala tore Sarah’s dress midperformance, exposing her bare buttocks to the audience.

  It was great theater. Not a day had gone by that past year without a piece of gossip about Sarah appearing somewhere in print. Every city in the world now had its daily tabloid; some, like New York, had several competing for headlines and market share. The name Sarah Bernhardt sold newspapers.

  Sarah insisted to reporters that “this ancient Greek god is the man of my dreams.” There was some truth to that. She had real feelings for him despite his many shortcomings. But the popular papers preferred to mock the couple. One cartoon featured Sarah holding Damala like a puppet, manipulating his limbs. The cartoonists had gotten it wrong, however; the roles should have been reversed. It was Damala who did what he pleased.

  In spite of his addictions and infidelities, Sarah always forgave him and begged for his return. The gossip of Paris was that Damala seemed to be the only man who could satisfy her sexually, that Bernhardt had been unable to achieve orgasm until she met her “Greek god.”

  But even if it were true, her devotion to Damala went beyond the sex. Part of it stemmed from compassion. Sarah’s sister Jeanne had also succumbed to morphine addiction, often lying comatose all day behind closed doors. Damala, for his part, avoided sunlight altogether. The writer Bram Stoker later admitted that Damala had been the inspiration for Count Dracula.

  In the spring of 1882, after just a year as a couple, Bernhardt and Damala found themselves in London. Sarah had been corresponding with playwright Victorien Sardou, in preparation for her creation of the lead role of his new play, Fédora. She and Damala were having one of their frequent fights, which left Sarah depressed. She dispatched the following telegram to Sardou: “I am going to die and my greatest regret is not having created your play. Adieu.”