Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  Then, a few hours later, Sardou received a second telegram: “I am not dead, I am married.”

  The wedding had taken place on April 4, 1882, at St. Andrew’s Church in London, which presented a convenient workaround for Bernhardt (officially Roman Catholic) and Damala (Greek Orthodox); they could not have been married in Paris unless Damala converted to Catholicism. The Church of England was far more lenient on the question of mixed weddings.

  It seemed an impulsive decision. When asked later by Sardou why she had wed so recklessly, Sarah responded flippantly that it was the only thing she had never done. She was thirty-seven, ten years older than her husband. It was she who proposed to Damala, and he seized the chance of getting closer to her wealth. Sarah’s son, Maurice, seventeen at the time, despised the man. But Sarah hoped to facilitate a rapprochement between her son and her new groom.

  Upon the couple’s return to Paris, Sarah purchased the Théâtre de L’Ambigu in Maurice’s name and made Damala its manager, a disastrous decision that would cost her a half million francs.

  Sarah’s peers were baffled by her decision to dismiss professional actors so she could perform alongside an amateur. But Sarah was besotted. “Won’t he make an excellent Armand?” she had asked the disapproving Alexandre Dumas fils. The two had already toured Europe together one year prior, ending in Turin, where they had crossed paths with Eleonora.

  That fall, Bernhardt and Damala found themselves back in Paris, on separate stages this time. She was at the Vaudeville performing in Fédora, but Sardou had refused to approve Damala as her costar. So Damala was by himself at the Théâtre de L’Ambigu in a lesser play, Les mères ennemies by Catulle Mendès. His leading lady was Madame Agar, the veteran actress with whom Sarah had performed her breakout “trouser” role as Zanetto. Sarah triumphed in Fédora; Damala flopped. He disappeared for a few weeks on one of his increasingly frequent binges with drugs and women.

  Damala would die of a drug overdose years later in 1889. Sarah had by then developed a separate career as a sculptress, and she carved a marble bust of Damala for the sarcophagus in which he was buried. The intricacy in the carving is exquisite: the folds of the cloth, his beard, rose petals, all immaculately rendered and polished to a soft sheen.

  She had begun studying sculpture at age twenty-five under Mathieu Meusnier and Emilio Franceschi, two masters in Paris. Five years later, in 1874, Sarah was exhibiting her work at the very prestigious Paris Salon. Then Sarah commissioned an haute couture designer to create a special sculpting outfit for her—a pajama-like garment in white silk, complete with a foulard. But being the first woman of fame to wear a pants suit was not simply playacting for Sarah; she valued her time in the studio and took the work seriously. Bernhardt’s fifty sculptures would eventually be displayed in museums across Europe and America.

  She took special care in her portrait of Damala, still her husband at the time of his death. The elegance of the composition, the noble expression on his face, the dignity in the closed eyelids—all demonstrated her continued love for him, and her forgiveness. As Sarah once said: “We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing, remain indifferent a great deal, forgive often, and never forget.”

  • • •

  The auction of Sarah’s jewels at the Hotel Druout in early 1883 raised 178,000 francs—not nearly enough to settle her many obligations. It wasn’t simply her own debts that were crushing her. Her son, Maurice, now eighteen, had developed an insidious gambling habit and he certainly wasn’t planning to get a job anytime soon. It was up to Sarah to produce income.

  The first idea: what about mounting another production of Camille? The thirty-year-old warhorse had never failed her (she would revive it no less than twenty-two times over the next decades). But Sarah hesitated. Not another Camille, she sighed. Too tired, too old.

  A bold and public revolution in the arts was taking place all around her. Impressionists had taken to the streets to paint in natural light. This new “naturalism” was not photorealism, but there was something more subjectively truthful in the intricate play of light and shadows, the painters said. By deconstructing reality in a radically new way, Monet, Renoir, and the other Impressionists had broken ranks with the Académie des Beaux-Arts and become the toast of Paris. Their paintings depicted scenes of everyday, contemporary life, not the mythological or historical scenes favored by the classical painters.

  The same revolution was under way in the theater. While the old guard—Sardou, Rostand—still produced plays about queens and empresses, modern playwrights—Ibsen, Sudermann, Chekhov—were now writing about housewives and the alienation of the bourgeoisie. Sarah found this insufferable. People attended theater to escape their everyday lives, she felt, not to face a mirror. Bernhardt wouldn’t know what to do as Nora or Hedda Gabler. She preferred mythic figures from the past: Cleopatra and Joan of Arc.

  Yet Sarah prided herself on being thoroughly modern, too; her showy embrace of the latest technologies, whether motorcars or hot air balloons, sold many a newspaper. During the 1880 tour of America, Sarah had famously detoured to Menlo Park to visit the laboratory of Thomas Edison, where she immortalized her voice in one of the earliest phonograph recordings. Later she would become the first world-class actress to appear on film. But somehow Sarah resisted modernity on the stage.

  Critics were starting to take note of Bernhardt’s dated style. When she toured Russia in 1881, writer Ivan Turgenev had called her a “grand poseur.” Anton Chekhov, still a medical student at the time, condemned her as “ultra sensational,” her so-called art nothing more than “enchantment smothered in artifice [and] premeditated trickiness.” In a private letter to Turgenev, he wrote: “the unbearable Sarah Bernhardt . . . has nothing except a wonderful voice—everything else about her is false, cold, and affected—together with the most repulsive Parisian chic.”

  The English actress Ellen Terry, a contemporary of Bernhardt, was more nuanced in her evaluation of Sarah’s acting: “On the stage, she has always seemed to me more a symbol, an ideal, an epitome than a woman. . . . No one plays a love scene better, but it is a picture of love that she gives, a strange orchidaceous picture rather than a suggestion of ordinary human passion as felt by ordinary human people.”

  But just as Bernhardt had no interest in being ordinary, she rarely cared what the critics had to say. “The Divine One” was as popular as ever—and the public seemed never to tire of Camille, which is why the role remained Sarah’s favorite. The play itself was at once both old and new. It was thoroughly modern—risqué, even—in bringing the audience into a demimonde boudoir. But its heroine, the love-struck courtesan Marguerite, is one in a line of mythologized women of ill repute going back to Mary Magdalene.

  Sarah had begun to hear talk of this new Italian, Duse, who had adopted Camille into her own repertoire, performing the role in a radically different style; and certain critics had begun to favor Eleonora.

  Sarah knew how easily she could be forgotten if she committed the cardinal sin of any artist: being boring. She needed to keep topping herself.

  Then, a sudden thought—Victorien Sardou.

  • • •

  “She conducts business, like everything else, at breakneck speed,” playwright Sardou told a journalist in 1884, “letting herself be robbed left, right and center, and taking on things that she cannot hold to. This leads to anger, rancor, and hatred which is all the more destructive for not always having an outlet.”

  When the playwright went to visit her, he found Sarah in a state of “violent over-excitement, writhing, rolling on and gnawing at the carpet, weeping in sheer exasperation.” The scene, likely staged by Sarah and certainly embellished by Sardou, made good copy. The newspapers flew off the rack, as the public anticipation mounted: Bernhardt was collaborating again with Sardou, who had written Fédora—Bernhardt’s last hit. Now a new play was in the works, the title strikingly similar: Théodora. Sarah had played queens, Sarah had played harlots. In Théodora she would play both
within the same character—a combination she hoped would prove irresistible to her fans. Set in sixth-century Byzantium, Théodora tells the mostly true story of a brothel-girl-turned-empress-of-Rome whose improbable rise to power mimicked the trajectory of the play’s leading lady.

  Sardou was not a modern playwright by any stretch. George Bernard Shaw coined the term “Sardoodledom” to describe his baroque but well-meaning work. But his outsized, mythologized heroines were perfect for Bernhardt, and she knew it. She also knew her audience better than anybody.

  While the play may have been larger than life, Sarah insisted that it be accurate in its details. Sardou did extensive research, determined to give nineteenth-century Parisians an accurate picture of life during late antiquity.

  Théodora’s father had been the bear keeper at the Hippodrome of Constantinople, where his daughter began her career as an underage belly dancer. Her most famous routine involved geese pecking seeds off her bare torso while she writhed suggestively on her back. Théodora used her eroticism to woo increasingly powerful men and was soon wed to Emperor Justinian. From her throne, she became an ardent champion of the rights of women, urging her husband to pass laws against pimping and sex trafficking. Like Bernhardt, she used her power to elevate the status of actresses, giving them more of a say in their careers. Théodora also granted women greater control of their dowries and inheritances. But her inevitable downfall came when she fell in love with a commoner, one who happened to be plotting against the emperor.

  In the final scene of Sardou’s play, the emperor Justinian catches them together and murders Théodora by strangling her with a silk scarf. It was a perfect death scene for Bernhardt, especially as staged by Félix Duquesnel. The former director of the Théâtre Odéon, where Sarah had her first success as Zanetto, Duquesnel had now assumed the directorship of a new theater: the Porte Saint-Martin. Though not as prestigious as the Odéon, it was an extremely popular venue, and enormous, which allowed for formidable sets and grand productions. Duquesnel brought in the showy Sardou as his house playwright.

  Sarah had not performed in six months when she took the stage as Théodora on December 26, 1884. Her entrance was delayed, a clever calculation by Sardou to allow the public to first take in the sumptuous scenery. There were rugs of incomparable richness, a sofa of tiger skins backed by a peacock’s tail of enamel and rare jewels. A journalist writing in the New York Times was awed by the “attendants, guardians, eunuchs, all in costumes of endless variety and color, but as exquisitely harmonized as if the tableau were a canvas painted by an artist of discretion.” When Sarah made her entrance—wearing a dress of bleu de ciel satin, with a train four yards long covered in embroidered peacocks with ruby eyes and feathers of emeralds and sapphires—her subjects prostrated themselves to kiss her feet. If the entrance was calculated to produce an ovation, it worked.

  Over 4,500 gems had been sewn by hand onto Théodora’s gowns. The costume budget alone exceeded that of most productions. Sarah had supervised her wardrobe’s design, traveling to Ravenna to make sketches from the mosaics of the Byzantine empress at the Basilica di San Vitale. It had taken an army to construct the sets, too, and the staging involved two hundred people at times to capture the teeming energy of Byzantium. The audience was dazzled.

  Émile Perrin, director of the Comédie-Française, called it “the greatest achievement in mise-en-scène of the nineteenth century.” A write-up in Le Théâtre declared unequivocally: “Théodora is the most beautiful and most complete creation of Madame Sarah Bernhardt’s career. . . . In it, she is both a tragedienne and a comedienne, energetic and supple, gracious and terrible. She is incomparable. She is extraordinary.”

  As a playwright, Sardou certainly had his detractors. Henry James referred to Sardou as “that supremely clever contriver.” But Sarah was exonerated for Théodora’s convoluted plot. Wrote a critic: “The press is unanimous: Sardou’s play does not exist, only Sarah exists!”

  The press was not, in fact, unanimous. To increasing numbers of critics, Bernhardt’s style felt hopelessly dated. But the public was slow to sway.

  Théodora was an unprecedented success. The production ran for three hundred performances until Christmas of the following year, returning Sarah to her rightful place in the spotlight, where she had every intention of staying.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sailing back to Italy in 1886, Eleonora felt the weight of the world. It was thrilling, on the one hand, to be coming into her own power—a power that would soon give her freedom to pursue her “Art” in the manner she saw fit. But her personal life was empty. She admitted to her manager Rossi that she had begun to feel “a sadness without a name.”

  As a Catholic, Duse could never divorce; she and Tebaldo would be permanently separated, which made Eleonora a single parent—something she, so often traveling and self-absorbed, was ill equipped to be. Enrichetta would soon be dispatched to an expensive boarding school.

  In February of 1887, still part of the Rossi Company, Eleonora traveled to Milan. The city was abuzz in anticipation of Giuseppe Verdi’s new opera, Otello, his first work since Aïda, written sixteen years earlier. Though Duse had met Verdi’s librettist, Arrigo Boito, she was shy about asking him for a ticket to the premiere, since the event was apparently sold out. Still, she longed for a chance to meet the composer, and fortunately another writer who knew Eleonora secured her a spot in the coveted author’s box, alongside Verdi and Boito. An unforgettable night, the opera was interrupted so many times by ovations that La Scala management would write an open letter begging the public to hold their applause until the end of each act. Eleonora was thrilled to share the company of true artists.

  One week later, she invited Verdi and Boito to a play she was performing in Milan called Pamela—a classic, written in the 1750s by Carlo Goldoni, a man ahead of his time. Like Eleonora’s grandfather, Goldoni had rebelled against commedia dell’arte tradition, writing more realistic roles and less predictable plots. He was considered the founder of Italian realistic comedy—a man close to Eleonora’s heart.

  Duse felt anxious as the gavel sounded to hush the crowd. The curtains parted; she glanced furtively toward the boxes, breaking her rule of not making eye contact with the crowd. There he was: the noble Giuseppe Verdi, along with his writer, Arrigo Boito, who smiled at her in encouragement. She needed it. She was about to perform a century-old play in a thoroughly modern style: a radical choice she hoped to showcase for Verdi—but even more so for Boito, to whom she was increasingly drawn, because he was both a writer and a spiritualist. Pamela’s story—the ennobling of a servant girl—was close to Eleonora’s own. The patricians appreciated her performance, roaring with laughter from their first-tier box. Backstage at intermission, Boito and Duse were seen holding hands. Within a week they would be lovers.

  Boito was forty-five to Eleonora’s twenty-eight, which made him something of a father figure. They had met three years prior, when Boito saw her perform in Camille at the Teatro Carcano; already smitten, he had asked for a photograph. Boito was the son of an Italian painter and a Polish countess, a bespectacled, proper gentleman with a walrus mustache who had composed the opera Mefistofole and written librettos for many other significant works. In Boito, Eleonora had found the pedigreed partner she sought.

  Eleonora called him “The Saint” for his quiet brilliance and loving guidance. “Boito seemed to have been sent to her by some higher power,” explained actress and confidante Eva Le Gallienne. Certainly, he was wholly unlike her first love, Martino Cafiero. Though all three of her significant romances—Cafiero, Boito, and later d’Annunzio—were with writers, only Boito had a deep, spiritual inclination. Thus, beyond being a literary mentor, Boito also became her guru.

  “Up, upwards toward the Vision!” he would tell her. Boito, like Duse, believed that “Art” came from a realm beyond the human mind. The job of artists was to cast their egos aside in order to become channels for this higher inspiration.

  Though Carl Jun
g was a mere teenager at the time, concepts like the collective unconscious were already popular in certain circles. Russian medium Helena Blavatsky had founded her Theosophical Society in 1875 and then published Isis Unveiled, mapping out an “Ancient Wisdom” that underlay all the world’s religions. In America, the Transcendentalists had been exploring Eastern mysticism and its expansive embrace of indwelling divinity. As described in the essay “The Over-Soul,” published by Emerson in 1841: “within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE.”

  Across continents, there was a movement under way to broaden the definition of “God.” Far from a bearded man throwing down lightning bolts, the Divine for these seekers was intimate. In a letter written to Boito six months into their relationship, Eleonora promised to keep looking for spiritual inspiration. “You’ll see,” she wrote, “if I stay well, I hope to see the Vision every night. You’ll see!”

  In a subsequent letter, she wrote: “The supreme power spoke to me of what I must do in my life. I bowed my head . . . and said—so be it.”

  Boito inspired Eleonora to expand her repertoire. In a bold move, she formed her own theater company in late 1887 using her own funds, just as Sarah had done, which allowed her to handpick her fellow actors. She chose onetime lover Flavio Andò for her leading man, along with other actors she admired—ones, she thought, who would be open to the new style that increasingly obsessed her. Eleonora knew it would take time to get the others to shift their paradigm and was wise enough not to force the issue. Rather than lecturing her actors, she preferred at first to lead by example.