Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  By being natural on the stage, Duse appeared lifelike and approachable. Her Camille was a real woman, misunderstood and mistreated by the men around her, which is why American women were among her early champions. As described in the New York Evening Sun: “She seems to say for them the word they dare not or cannot speak. She shows them the beauties of love and self-sacrifice, the horrors of remorse, the power to suffer in silence.”

  Duse was human; she was them. Only hers was a version of femininity, in its raw emotion, that prim and proper society women could never quite express. Though this was never her intention, Duse became a poster girl for American suffragettes. Given her impoverished upbringing, Eleonora felt more akin to working-class women toiling in sweatshops—those who could never afford to see her onstage. Even with accolades and material wealth, the feelings of being an underdog never left Duse.

  It was the opposite of the entitlement with which Sarah had entered the world. Bernhardt, from the earliest days, saw herself as royalty, which is why she thrived playing queens and empresses, expecting absolute submission and loyalty from her subjects. As the Chicago Tribune had reported in 1880 when Sarah went to Amsterdam, her family’s hometown:

  It was set down in the agreement that she would not be obliged to play unless received at the railroad terminus by the Burgesses and Burgomaster, and escorted to her hotel in a carriage drawn by four white horses, by the Royal Guard, and the students of the University in their caps and gowns.

  She had the clout to demand what she pleased—but it came at a price. As the Evening Sun critic delighted in pointing out: “The tantrums of the divine Sarah prevented her from ever shining as an exemplar, even in her most illuminated moods.” The problem went beyond Sarah’s self-indulgence, however. As a bastard and former-courtesan with a bastard child, Bernhardt could never be a role model for the proper American suffragettes.

  But, curiously, it was Bernhardt, more than Duse, who actually cared about the issue—at least she said she did. In 1892, Sarah had announced briefly her intention to leave the stage and run for a seat in France’s Chamber of Deputies. Appealing for support to the French League for Women’s Rights, Sarah’s declared intention as a candidate was “to obtain special legislation for women.” The irony, of course, was that members of the league, which had been established ten years prior, would need to persuade their husbands to cast ballots for Sarah, since French women could not vote—it would take another half century for that. And while Sarah certainly cared about the rights of women, her short-lived candidacy was, of course, a publicity stunt. Even the papers knew it. One headline following her announced candidacy read: SARAH BERNHARDT’S LATEST FREAK.

  They never wrote sensational headlines like that about Duse, who projected an image of saint-like purity to the media, despite her failed marriage, messy affairs, and the fact that she was an absentee mother. Duse was focused on her work and nothing else—that was the story she had managed to sell. So the American press eventually overcame prejudice against Italians to laud her as an artist—despite not really understanding what she was up to onstage. And American women fell in love with her.

  The suffragettes may have placed Duse on a pedestal, yet puritanical clerics called for a boycott of her Camille on moralistic grounds. There had been no such boycott the previous season for the Camille played by Sarah Bernhardt—even when, on her first tour of America, she had been denounced by local clergy. The Episcopal bishop of Chicago called her the modern version of the biblical Whore of Babylon. Sarah promptly instructed her manager to send him a note saying:

  Monseigneur:

  I am accustomed to spending $400 on publicity when I bring an attraction to your city. But since you have done the job for me, I am sending you $200 for your parish’s needy.

  Sarah’s run was sold out. But in 1893, Duse’s Camille was deemed too real. While Sarah was playing, in effect, a version of her own sordid past, which made it very real in one sense, the way she acted it in the Symbolic style made it “pretend” real. No need to boycott that.

  And the Duse boycott backfired, of course. Now everybody wanted to see her shockingly real Camille.

  Among the other plays in Duse’s rotation was Francillon, also by Dumas fils, and summed up as follows by a reviewer from the San Francisco Call: “Like all French plays, it borders on the immoral.” In Francillon, Duse was portraying Francine, a woman who tells her cheating husband that she plans to have an affair of her own––then actually carries out the threat.

  “The delicate subject is discussed with an abandon that is shocking,” declared the titillated reviewer. The play and its plot seemed more exciting to many because in Duse’s rendition it felt very immediate. “Her acting . . . was most beautiful in all its details,” said the New York World, which continued: “A player less truly inspired might have made Francine more immediately and theatrically effective, and would not hesitate to sacrifice truth to that end.”

  Truth was suddenly a commodity in the theater, when only years before, it had neither been valued nor expected on the stage. The New York Herald identified her “latent power” as being the greatest charm of her work, saying: “We feel that the woman has given vent to only a part of the tremendous passion, anger or grief that fills her.” There was a sense with Duse that she had vast reserves of hidden treasure that would slowly reveal itself over time. This reviewer, like many caught between the old style and the new, was speculating that Duse’s restraint onstage could be a form of modesty. Given the potency that radiated from her when she took the stage, perhaps Duse was capable of acting more powerfully. In the meantime, a new word entered the American vernacular as a result of Eleonora’s presence on the stage: doozy, based on a mispronunciation of her surname, and meaning something outstanding and thoroughly unique.

  • • •

  When Eleonora sailed to England to continue her tour, the London press corps, which had kept its distance when she first performed in the West End ten years earlier in 1883, now joined in singing her praises. The topic du jour: comparisons to Sarah Bernhardt. Critic William Archer wrote with gusto that experiencing Eleonora’s novelty after the contrivance of Bernhardt was like “passing out into the fresh air from an alcove redolent of patchouli.” As Ibsen’s English translator and champion, Archer had come around from his earlier dismissal of Eleonora and was now unapologetic, declaring Duse to be “the most absorbingly interesting actress I ever saw.”

  Archer had been confused initially, like others, by Duse’s use of realism in melodramatic plays; it was an entirely new language that took some getting used to. Now, with Ibsen, it made perfect sense—and Bernhardt suddenly felt very dated.

  The London leg of Eleonora’s tour had been planned as a brief extension of her run in America, where the impresarios hoped she would be critically embraced, predisposing favorable press on the other side of the Atlantic. The strategy worked, prompting thoughts of an encore season in London the following spring. But first, Eleonora needed a long break.

  While running her own company gave Sarah energy, for Eleonora, it was depleting. “You know that next year I am resting,” she wrote to Cesare Rossi, the well-regarded manager of the company she used to tour with, before setting off on her own—a decision she was beginning to regret. Being in charge of thirty people took an enormous toll on Duse: “If my health does not . . . ‘reflower’ as that stupid Marguerite Gautier [Camille] says, I will never manage a company again.” She italicized “reflower” in the letter to Rossi, underscoring the fact that she took offense to Camille’s romanticized notion of illness. Lung disease was a touchy subject for Eleonora, who had lost her mother prematurely to tuberculosis, and whose own health remained compromised. It’s the reason why Duse was inviting Rossi into a partnership—to join her company as an actor and comanager. She would lead creatively, he would fuss with all the details that drained her.

  “I will write you later from the country at length, from Switzerland, where I plan to take refuge at the beginning of
July,” she went on. “There—we will speak with peace and confidence of what (if I live) we can do in the future.”

  Eleonora did live and began rehearsals with a company assembled by Rossi for the spring season in London. The best way for people to understand the new style—she had decided this in America and remained convinced of it—was to see verismo applied to plays they already knew. Thus, the carefully curated repertoire for Duse’s 1894 season in London would consist largely of dated Bernhardt vehicles, including Camille.

  Duse insisted her fellow actors be entirely off-book—as she always was—because prompters were frowned upon in the West End. So she drilled her company to exhaustion—herself, too. If another period of recovery was later required, so be it.

  • • •

  When Bernhardt heard the news, she plummeted: Duse would be giving a command performance for Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Sarah, too, had played galas for royalty, but she had never been accorded this particular honor. Curious though Queen Victoria may have been to see the world’s most-talked-about actress, Sarah’s illegitimacy proved problematic—she could not very well invite a bastard to Windsor Castle. Such exclusion was maddening to Sarah and reflective of great societal shifts happening across Europe as the nineteenth century waned—Sarah’s bastard son could marry a Polish princess, yet she could not play before the English queen.

  Queen Victoria’s daughters were the ones who had prodded the sovereign to request a performance by Eleonora, whose radical work came up frequently in London society talk. Duse had wanted to present Camille, but that was quickly vetoed by the royal princesses as being too risqué. So she settled instead on a classic play by Carlo Goldoni. The event, by all accounts, was a smash. As Her Majesty’s diary notes pleasantly (although with less florid enthusiasm than the fawning press): “She is nice-looking, with a most attractive voice and way of speaking, and her acting is admirable.”

  The royal endorsement guaranteed continued success for Duse’s London engagement. And so, in June of 1894, Sarah Bernhardt quietly crossed the English Channel to observe Duse onstage for herself. Duse had been in London for six weeks, giving only twenty-three performances, which seemed paltry to Sarah. During Bernhardt’s last English tour, she had performed at double that pace.

  “If I played Camille twice two nights in succession, especially the death scene, I should die,” Duse had told a reporter, sounding remarkably like Bernhardt. “I am sure I should die; the part is so real to me.”

  Bernhardt must have chuckled. Here was her rival, taking a page from Sarah and finally courting the press. But what melodrama to imply that the death scene from Camille actually sapped her life away. Bernhardt had played the scene a thousand times, sometimes twice in the same day. She still made them weep, still got the ovations—and, after a quick champagne flute backstage, she was done with it. That was true acting, for Bernhardt—this new verismo remained a mystery to her, and it was clearly unhealthy. The toll it appeared to take on Duse was precisely why theater scholar Denis Diderot, in his 1830 essay The Paradox of Acting, had admonished actors not to exhaust themselves by “feeling” their parts internally, but “to act” them from the outside in by feats of mimicry. This was Sarah’s forte—the talent she had honed and perfected; for three decades, it had made her the most-talked-about celebrity/actress in the world.

  But Bernhardt was no fool—she knew the arts were changing. It was time to see this verismo for herself. That’s why she had obtained tickets, without fanfare, to attend Duse’s closing night performance of Camille.

  Eleonora received word backstage that Sarah was in the house and, apparently stimulated by the presence of her rival, gave the performance of a lifetime, sweeping her audience away “in a whirlwind of emotion and enthusiasm,” according to William Archer.

  Sarah’s reaction was not recorded—but she avoided the role for the next two years.

  • • •

  In 1895, en route to her third consecutive season in London, Duse stopped in Paris, where she crossed paths with Bernhardt, although not socially; they had yet formally to meet. Duse simply returned Sarah’s favor by obtaining a ticket to see Bernhardt onstage with the great actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin at the Théâtre de la Renaissance. Duse’s escort was fellow Italian Giuseppe Giacosa, her writer friend, now a Bernhardt worshipper. Afterward, Duse wrote a bitter note to Boito:

  Giacosa—and others of your friends—have declared those Two [Bernhardt and Coquelin] “unparalleled”—true, unparalleled in everything, in nonsense, too. . . . A man like Giacosa, so limited in heart and in talent, bourgeois to the roots of his hair—must find that whole world in excellent taste!—Well, that’s their business!

  Bernhardt had performed a two-hundred-year-old play by Molière, Amphytrion, a choice Duse may have found pretentious. But what certainly galled her was the next title in Sarah’s rotation: Magda, a play that Eleonora had “created” a year earlier. Even though playwright Hermann Sudermann had modeled his flamboyant heroine, to some degree, on Sarah Bernhardt, he had been bowled over by Duse’s premiere performance of Magda the previous season in Berlin. “To describe her art is something I am incapable of doing,” he wrote the next day to his wife. “Imagine our ideal Magda and add thousands and thousands of surprises and revelations.”

  Featuring themes to which the times were sympathetic––the rise of the “New Woman,” the revolt against patriarchy—Magda was a perfect vehicle for both Duse and Bernhardt. Indeed, the play, about a woman who becomes pregnant and walks out on her tyrannical father to make a career for herself as a singer, would become the most successful drama of the nineteenth century’s final decade. And, just as Duse had appropriated Camille as a featured part of her repertoire, Bernhardt was now taking her own shot at Magda. But was it really a threat?

  Eleonora must have been secretly amused by the thought of Sarah attempting this complicated, modern role in the old style—and even more so when Bernhardt’s production bombed. “The Parisians had little patience for its Ibsenesque theme,” concluded Bernhardt biographers Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale. What made this especially delicious for Duse was that Magda was the very play with which she planned to open her London season.

  When Sarah learned of Eleonora’s plans, however, she dialed her recently installed rotary telephone to inform her impresario that they, too, would be performing in London in June.

  The first play in rotation: Magda. The premiere? Two days before Duse’s opening.

  CHAPTER TEN

  There was a rush of anticipation as London prepared for the arrival of the dueling divas. Tickets to the competing premieres quickly sold out and the London papers readied their best critics for what promised to be the theatrical event of the decade. For the London Times, that meant sending George Bernard Shaw. Not a playwright quite yet, the thirty-eight-year-old was London’s most eloquent and acerbic critic, read religiously by all true theatergoers.

  Notebook in hand, Shaw went first to Daly’s Theater to watch Sarah’s performance of Magda. Then, he trotted across the street to Drury Lane to see Eleonora’s version of the same play two days later. His review promised to be the definitive comparison of the two most-talked-about actresses of their time. Printed on June 15, 1895, just five days after Sarah’s performance, it began:

  The contrast between the two Magdas is as extreme as any contrast could possibly be between artists. Madame Bernhardt has the charm of a jolly maturity, rather spoilt and petulant, perhaps, but always ready with a sunshine-through-the-clouds smile. . . . Every dimple has its dab of pink. . . . But the incredulity is pardonable, because, though it is all the greatest nonsense, nobody believing it, the actress herself least of all, it is so artful, so clever, so well-recognized as part of the business, and carried off with such a genial air, that it is impossible not to accept it with good humor. One feels, when the heroine bursts on the scene, she adds to her own piquancy by looking you straight in the face, and saying, in effect: “Now who would ever suppose that I am a grandm
other?” That, of course, is irresistible.

  Thus far the review appeared to be an underhanded compliment. Then Shaw lashed out.

  The childishly egotistical character of her acting . . . is not the art of making you think more highly or feel more deeply, but the art of making you admire her, pity her, champion her, weep with her, laugh at her jokes, follow her fortunes breathlessly, and applaud her. . . . And it is always Sarah Bernhardt in her own capacity who does this to you. The dress, the title of the play, the order of the words may vary; but the woman is always the same. She does not enter into the leading character: she substitutes herself for it.

  Nothing in his critique, while more vivid and persuasive perhaps than most, was terribly new. Papers had been writing this for years—certainly since Duse appeared to rival the Divine Sarah. But Shaw was not done. The review then pivoted to Eleonora:

  All of this is precisely what does not happen in the case of Duse, whose every part is a separate creation. When she comes on the stage, you are quite welcome to take your opera-glass and count whatever lines time and care have so far traced on her. They are the credentials of her humanity; and she knows better than to obliterate that significant handwriting beneath a layer of peachbloom from the chemist.

  Ephemeral though it was, Shaw was determined to convey, as best he could, the actual experience of watching the actresses onstage.