Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  Bernhardt bolted to the privacy of her dressing room to calm her nerves. She gulped down another glass of champagne and stared at her reflection in the looking glass.

  When the curtain fell to rapturous applause, she rushed onto the stage to embrace Eleonora, and then, using her own epithet to underscore her supposed enthusiasm: “Divine! Dear, you were simply Divine!” But to Paris police commissioner Ernest Raynaud, who was also backstage that evening, “she looked very much as if she would rather have choked her than hugged her.” It was an impossible act to follow.

  Le trac—stage fright—came on more strongly than usual for Bernhardt that night. She had opened the evening reciting an ode, which was simple enough. But now as the “headliner,” she was the final act, with everything that entails. Sarah battled through her fear to give one of the most memorable performances of her career. According to a retrospective piece written in 1925 in the New York Times, “It is a matter of theatrical history that Bernhardt surpassed herself that day, and followed Duse up with a performance that she never equaled before or afterward”—a significant claim, given that these words were written with almost thirty years’ hindsight. Just as Sarah had been an early inspiration for the teenage Duse, it appears that Eleonora had now become something of an artistic mentor to the French diva—though Bernhardt would have been loath to admit it.

  Countless dignitaries, including the president of France, attended Duse’s performance of A Spring Morning’s Dream the following night. But Sarah was conspicuously absent—busy, she claimed, with her upcoming tour. Whether still flustered by the previous evening or simply exhausted, Sarah, apparently, didn’t miss much.

  D’Annunzio’s bizarre play received predictably poor notices, though most of the criticism was aimed at the writing, not at La Duse. D’Annunzio’s text included elaborate stage directions, nearly as verbose as the dialogue, in which he indicated specific classical poses to be performed on given lines:

  She touches her hair at the back of her neck and on her forehead with a shudder, then stares at her hands.

  Eleonora underlined that direction three times in her copy of the play: although she didn’t usually map out her acting, this particular direction was one she could work with. Duse used her hands often and quite naturally touched her hair onstage.

  Later, in the margin, Duse scribbled the words “all the perfumes in Arabia” from Shakespeare—reminding herself, in playing a madwoman, to recall Lady Macbeth, the greatest of them all. Eleonora had been toiling, it seems, to figure out how she might adapt her singular style to suit d’Annunzio’s text. He wanted theatrical tableaus, the antithesis of how Eleonora approached her craft. It was far more suited to Bernhardt.

  Indeed, after Duse’s bomb, Sarah announced her own plans to perform the Dream in its French translation—a direct challenge that mystified even critic Sarcey, a longtime supporter of Bernhardt. “What fly is biting her?” he wrote. “If she wishes to engage in a duel . . . she should take refuge rather in those inaccessible regions which it would seem Duse could never penetrate, and act Phèdre.”

  But Bernhardt had her talons in d’Annunzio’s flesh, with no intention of releasing him.

  • • •

  The Paris bout had been brutal on both of them. Duse had called it a “prison of a city,” in a letter to d’Annunzio. Sarah had likewise been unnerved by the episode. She complained bitterly in a letter to Count Montesquiou, who had introduced her to Duse:

  I was extremely courteous and polite to her. She was supposed to perform ten times in eleven days; instead she performed ten times in thirty days. This cost me a great deal of money.

  You are aware of all the pettiness and infamy I have been exposed to since La Duse’s arrival. I have had my apotheosis . . . now they want to bury me. All this is bad, including La Duse who has played a shrewd role—Oh how shamelessly shrewd! It’s all ugly, despicable. The Italian artiste is an underhanded, ignoble creature. Imagine, she didn’t even write to thank me or bid me farewell! It makes my heart sick.

  To Sarah’s dismay, even her own Sarcey, who had panned Eleonora’s opening-night performance in Camille, was becoming intrigued by Duse. He saw her a second time in Magda, then a third time in Claude’s Wife. His verdict:

  La Duse then leaves victorious. . . . She has won us by the sheer power of the truth. . . . she leaves behind her an example which it would be well for all to profit by.

  It was a hint, perhaps, for Sarah: learn from Duse’s example or become passé.

  • • •

  The duel over d’Annunzio continued into 1898, when both actresses appeared onstage in his work. Duse was at the Teatro Valle in Rome, launching the Italian premiere of A Spring Morning’s Dream. If the French reception had been cool, in Italy there was open hostility. The audience limited its show of disapproval to snickers and shuffling feet, however, because Queen Margherita was in attendance. Had the monarch not been present, they might have thrown objects at the stage.

  In her infatuation with d’Annunzio, Duse seemed oblivious to the reaction. The play was ahead of its time, she reasoned. D’Annunzio didn’t particularly care. Though he prided himself on commercial success along with his artistry—all his novels had been best sellers—d’Annunzio wasn’t that invested in A Spring Morning’s Dream. He knew that Dream had never truly been a play: it was a monologue in verse, built upon the thinnest of plots. He had written it in less than a fortnight. The Dead City, on the other hand, was a play for which he had high hopes.

  One can only imagine how Duse felt as d’Annunzio boarded the train to be at Sarah’s side for the world premiere of the play that should rightfully have been hers. In true Bernhardt style, it was a lavish production with evocative scenery of Greek ruins in Mycenae. The Dead City involves Leonardo, a young archaeologist, who inadvertently opens an ancient crypt and releases dark spirits, which are unleashed upon his party of companions: his sister, Bianca, a poet named Alessandro, and Alessandro’s blind wife, Anna—the role to be played by Bernhardt.

  Anna, a seer, is able to predict, but not stop, the machinations unleashed by the ancient energies of Agamemnon and his tribe. Both Alessandro and Leonardo become beguiled by Bianca. Alessandro is willing to betray his wife for her. Leonardo, when tempted to have an incestuous affair with his own sister, murders her in the bloody finale, designed to be controversial, as was often the case with d’Annunzio’s work. And no one fueled controversy better than Sarah Bernhardt.

  In the adrenaline leading up to the premiere, Bernhardt invited d’Annunzio back into her boudoir, where they were perfectly matched, it seems. D’Annunzio had boasted about having seduced a thousand women; Bernhardt claimed the same number of men. Sarah paraded her Italian writer about town in a series of soirees. Then came opening night. As reported by the New York Times:

  The first performances were accompanied by the excitements of intrigue and cabal. The rumors concerning [d’Annunzio’s] private life did little to dispose the public more favorably towards him.

  The gossip was everywhere: here was the world premiere of a play written for Sarah by the lover of her archrival, Eleonora Duse.

  Eleonora’s cohort convened in Rome that evening in Palazzo Primoli at the invitation of the count, who felt guilty for having brokered the initial encounter between d’Annunzio and Bernhardt. Eleonora’s writer-friend Matilde Serao was there, along with another journalist, Ugo Ojetti, who wrote a vivid account of Eleonora’s agitated state: “La Duse . . . dressed in gray . . . stretched out over a sofa, with a hot water bottle on her stomach, her hair already disheveled by her constant drawing her hand over her brow.”

  D’Annunzio’s frequent betrayals were well known; Eleonora forgave his infidelities as weakness of the flesh. But artistic duplicity was harder to take. And she hadn’t yet realized that her lover had also been in bed with her rival.

  The Duse camp had a spy embedded at the Renaissance—Matilde Serao’s husband, Edoardo Scarfoglio, who had promised to sneak out between acts
to send them updates by telegram. ACT ONE WELL RECEIVED came the first cable. All eyes turned to Eleonora, who, apparently, remained unruffled. As Ojetti reported:

  La Duse spoke calmly of the drama, scene by scene, at times quoting the words of the text as if she already knew them by heart. . . . We were all prepared to speak ill of Sarah Bernhardt, even Primoli, but Signora Eleonora drove chivalry to the point of defending her. Looking up at the ceiling, she declared: “Sarah is the mistress of the public because first and foremost she is mistress of herself.”

  On the one hand, it appeared to be a compliment. It was, after all, something that Duse admired in her rival. Bernhardt did things on her own terms, and never apologized—just like d’Annunzio. It’s the way in which they approached their work, too: as dictators. This was where Duse parted ways with both of them. Yes, a healthy dose of ego was needed to navigate the world—especially as celebrities. But when it came to Art, one needed to surrender—Duse believed true Art could not come from ego. So the apparent compliment (“mistress of herself”) was, in fact, derogatory, as Duse continued:

  “A hundred performances: always the same in every gesture, precise as clockwork. In La Dame aux camélias I saw her three times. When she asks Armand to go back to his father, she sits down at a table on which there is a coffer and she nervously starts twisting the little key. In all three performances, she turned it the same number of times: five. I counted.”

  More telegrams arrived reporting increasing success, and Eleonora launched into a eulogy in praise of d’Annunzio’s poetry. Everyone wondered why she was being so forgiving.

  “It was only when she fell silent,” Ojetti recalled, “that I realized, as she had spoken, she had taken, one by one, all the flowers from a nearby vase and ripped off each petal with her nails.”

  The telegrams from Paris had been misleading, however. Though their spy, Scarfoglio, was a newspaperman—he and Serao had founded Il Corriere di Roma, Italy’s first daily paper—he had reported only part of the story. The energy in the crowd that night had everything to do with witnessing the great betrayal of Duse by d’Annunzio and nothing to do with d’Annunzio’s writing. The only person truly invested in the play was d’Annunzio himself.

  As the tragedy built to its denouement, d’Annunzio felt a surge of adrenaline—the final scene was his favorite. Sarah was about to enter and come upon the slain body of Bianca. As the blind seer runs her fingers over the corpse, d’Annunzio’s text spelled out explicit instructions for the acting he had in mind:

  She shudders from head to foot at the clammy touch, then utters a piercing shriek in which she seems to exhale her soul. “Ah . . . I see! I see!” she says as her sight is restored.

  D’Annunzio was pleased when Sarah followed his directions precisely—the shudder, the shriek, the soul-exhale. Eleonora, he knew, would have chafed against them, then done things her own way. Bernhardt, on the other hand, gave his words the passion and size they needed. “Je vois! Je vois!” shouted Sarah, and the curtain fell. But the lively applause that d’Annunzio had expected did not come.

  Sarah put on The Dead City a dozen times to half-empty houses, then dropped it from her repertoire. It was a fiasco; Sarah regretted ever having been intimate with d’Annunzio. His eyes, she said, “resembled little blobs of merde.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  At nearly forty, Eleonora was more obsessed with d’Annunzio than ever. She’d written him letters from Paris beseeching a reunion: “I lose the harmony of my soul—and of the world . . . when I go away from you.” Then, two days later:

  Where, where would I go, dear soul, without the great promise? . . . I cannot tell you! Only you know how to say beautiful things; I know only how to listen to you! This anguish, and joy, and harmony of listening to you . . . oh!—it must not be taken from me!

  She was besotted. The “great promise” referred to the pact they’d made—the one d’Annunzio had already broken—to create great Art together and with no other. Duse still had faith in it; she was overjoyed, therefore, when d’Annunzio informed her in early 1898 that he was writing another play. He required privacy, however, to be productive. That’s why, at Duse’s expense, they rented not one but two villas in Tuscany—side by side, separated by a hedge. D’Annunzio spent a fortune (of her money) renovating and redecorating his villa in an over-the-top style that posed quite a contrast to Duse’s spare and natural decor. His “d’Annunzian” motifs were martial and masculine—dark tapestries, swords and suits of armor, oversized heavy furniture painted in dark shades, busts of Wagner and his other heroes. His life of princely splendor included thirty-eight borzoi dogs, ten horses, fifteen servants, and two hundred doves.

  Duse was happy to foot the bill. “I have earned a few pennies,” she said philosophically, “I will earn more . . . what do you want me to do with them? Buy a palace? . . . Can you see me surrounded by liveried servants, giving the parties of an actress grown rich? No, no! Art has given me joy, intoxication and money; Art shall have the money back.”

  She was convinced that, despite the dual fiascos of his first outings in the theater, d’Annunzio was on the verge of making “Art” on the stage. They would cocreate it, in fact—which would finally bring Eleonora the joy she claimed to have received from her own work but had not, in truth, fully realized. Duse had high hopes for her poet and every reason to think his inspiration would come. Their villas were in the village of Settignano in the foothills northeast of Florence, with spectacular views of the Renaissance capital—where Dante was born and Michelangelo had carved his Pietà. In fact, they were living on the very street where Michelangelo had grown up.

  D’Annunzio got down to work, which meant a lot of sex. He believed that intercourse with a variety of partners fueled his creativity—another of the reasons why he required separate quarters. He also liked to keep round-the-clock hours when he wrote, often fueled by cocaine or sugar cubes soaked in ether, which acted as a stimulant. He could be highly productive in these states. Just as he had dashed off A Spring Morning’s Dream in ten days, it took him less than a fortnight to produce a new play, La Gioconda.

  The plot involves another triangle: a sculptor, his model (mistress, also), and his wife—not blind this time but destined to become a cripple. The denouement has the two women coming to blows in the studio. When the sculptor’s greatest work starts to teeter on its podium, the wife dives to save it. The bust is a depiction of her rival—yet the wife treasures it as his “Art.” So the heavy marble falls upon her, destroying her hands.

  D’Annunzio would go on to write three more plays for Eleonora, for a total of six, and in nearly all the central character suffers terrible calamity: blinded in The Dead City, mutilated in La Gioconda, driven mad in A Spring Morning’s Dream, murdered in Francesca da Rimini, and burned alive in Iorio’s Daughter.

  Duse dutifully acted in all of them, with the exception of Iorio, which came after the two were no longer on speaking terms. She fully accepted the violent theme that d’Annunzio was exploring as an artist: the struggle between man’s higher and lower natures and the destructive aspect to love. But the problems for Duse came when d’Annunzio acted on this conflict in real life, which was often.

  “So poor deluded Duse has succumbed to that beast d’Annunzio,” wrote philanthropist and art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner in a letter to art historian and fellow expatriate Bernard Berenson, who happened to be a neighbor of the lovers in Tuscany.

  THE DUSE’S OWN SAD TRAGEDY proclaimed a Boston headline, with a subtitle: SHE LOVES WITHOUT HOPE D’ANNUNZIO . . . PASSION IS EATING HER AWAY.

  • • •

  In early 1899, Eleonora traveled to Egypt to escape the lingering winter. Enrichetta, now seventeen, accompanied her—one of the rare occasions in which Duse allowed her daughter to join her on tour. They would have plenty of time together on the boat and between shows, thought Duse, something the teenager badly needed and rarely got. Eleonora’s letters to the girl, while loving, were always brief�
�a sentence, maybe two, in sharp contrast to the tomes she wrote to d’Annunzio.

  While it was nice to be traveling with her daughter, it was not, for Duse, a vacation. She needed time with her scripts and fellow actors, she required space to prepare. And Enrichetta would not, of course, be attending the performances. That was Eleonora’s rule. Duse never permitted Enrichetta to see her act, for fear of corrupting her young soul. Given her ancestry, it would not be surprising for Enrichetta to have had stage aspirations; Eleonora had no intention of feeding that. The actor’s life, as Duse knew well, was one of suffering and indignities.

  • • •

  After she returned to Italy, d’Annunzio’s third play, La Gioconda, had its world premiere on April 15, in Sicily, of all places—and the location was inopportune. In one of his more notorious affairs, d’Annunzio had bedded, then dumped, a Sicilian princess, which made for open hostility in Sicily toward the poet. Crowds of the princess’s supporters packed Palermo’s Teatro Bellini to hiss at the stage. The irony of the situation could not have been lost on Duse. Here she was, acting in a play where the heroine is caught in a triangle between an artist and his mistress, and ultimately she chooses to sacrifice herself in the name of his “Art.”

  “This is not a home,” says La Gioconda to her rival in the play. “This is a place beyond all laws, beyond all common rights. Here a sculptor makes his statues.”

  Perhaps it’s not surprising that the seven years that d’Annunzio spent with Duse mark the most fertile period of his career. By now, d’Annunzio had churned out three plays for Duse—his latest, a political diatribe entitled La gloria, which premiered in Naples two weeks after the disaster in Sicily, nearly incited a riot.

  Scholars uniformly agree that La gloria was d’Annunzio’s worst play, though its patriotic fervor and Nietzschean themes would go on to inspire the rhetoric of Mussolini. D’Annunzio was ahead of his time again, and the audience wasn’t quite ready for it. Several cried out: “Death to d’Annunzio!” The play opened and closed on the same night. Yet Duse was still not ready to give up on d’Annunzio.