Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  It did not take long for another manager to swoop in—a Yankee, this time, named George Tyler. He, too, made the case for America, dispatching his European representative, Joseph Smith, to propose a six-city tour for the fall of 1902. But again, the same obstacle—d’Annunzio had, according to Tyler, “gained the contempt of every woman in the land.” Many in America had read The Flame, and everyone had heard about it.

  While Duse eventually acquiesced to the Americans’ demands that he stay home, she informed the tour managers that she intended to perform exclusively in his plays—The Dead City, La Gioconda, and Francesca da Rimini.

  D’Annunzio, in his narcissism, took this as a given—but woe to Duse if she dared to suggest her artistic fidelity to him should warrant sexual fidelity in return. Conversations of this kind quickly devolved into fights. It was in the middle of one of these battles that Duse set sail in September for her third tour of America; her company would follow on a different ship. Cherishing her solitude, Duse never traveled with her costars; and she had returned to her practice of shunning the press.

  Duse docked two weeks later in New York harbor in a better mood. The ocean had calmed her nerves and Central Park shimmered with fall color. Arriving at the Holland House in midtown where she had stayed on her first tour, she was given the same room, which comforted her. Eleonora settled in, as always, by unpacking her trunk of books, which included d’Annunzio’s poetry, accounts of Saint Francis and other mystics, esoteric books on the occult, and some French literature. She lit a candle and set up a little altar of mementos, crystals, photographs, and other memorabilia, a ritual that went back to her youth, creating a feeling of “home” wherever she happened to find herself. Meditating for a moment at the desk, Eleonora placed a sheet of hotel stationery on the blotter, picked up the quill, and tried to make peace with d’Annunzio. But he never wrote back.

  • • •

  As was typical for a tour by a foreign artist, Duse’s run did not begin on Broadway—the thought was to build steam in lesser markets before tackling the biggest one. In this case, George Tyler had chosen Boston, thinking that America’s intellectual capital might be most receptive to the heady d’Annunzian themes they were stuck with. The instinct proved wise; there appeared to be insatiable curiosity about the Duse-d’Annunzio collaboration. Tyler decided to capitalize on this excitement by offering the first week’s seats at auction to the highest bidder. Tickets for the early shows were quickly bid up to an impressive twenty-six dollars. Among the Boston elite in attendance was the sister of soon-to-be Harvard president Abbott Lowell. No one could have guessed that shy and closeted twenty-eight-year-old Amy Lowell would become so smitten with Duse that she’d embark on a literary career that would be crowned one day by a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

  Duse had been spellbound by the dazzling New England fall; the Boston Common, not far from her hotel, was almost numinous in its beauty. The Grace was all around her when she took the stage at the Tremont Theater.

  Lowell, in the audience, was entranced. Like the other women in the patriarchal Lowell family, Amy had been forbidden from pursuing higher education. Yet she had dreamed since childhood of being an artist, which is what drew her to Duse. Later that evening, she composed “Eleonora Duse”—what many have called her first “adult” poem:

  Seeing you stand once more before my eyes

  In your pale dignity and tenderness,

  Wearing your frailty like a misty dress.

  Lowell would later admit that the composition contained “every cliché and every technical error which a poem can have.” But the act of writing it, after witnessing a magnificent performance by Duse, was life changing: “It loosed a bolt in my brain and I found out where my true function lay.” This is how Duse preferred to share her Grace: onstage, in the work. Not in the pages of a salacious novel. Eleonora’s artistry was something Amy Lowell would remember forever. Others, apparently, agreed.

  “If you could see how many roses I have in my rooms!!!!” wrote Eleonora to d’Annunzio, with four exclamation points.

  She had opened with the least controversial of his plays, La Gioconda, which, while it ended like the others in tragedy, avoided at least the spectacle of murder and incest. This choice had prompted the Boston Herald reviewer to advise his readers—to the relief of all—that La Gioconda carried “very little moral danger to the spectators.”

  When it came to The Dead City, however, the reviews turned scathing. A PLAY OF GREAT SUPERFICIAL BEAUTY, BUT FUNDAMENTALLY DECADENT was the New York Times headline. One critic called it “positively vile,” while keeping circumspect about precisely why, for “decency forbids us to enter into more details concerning the plot of this play.” Reviews only got worse when Duse took the play to New York, where the Evening Post printed the following excoriation: “[A] ghastly piece, the latest product of a diseased and morbid fancy.”

  But the bad press seemed to whet the curiosity of a sufficient number of theatergoers to make the tour, while not a smash, reasonably successful. Duse had promised d’Annunzio the generous royalty rate of 12 percent of ticket sales, which amounted to a small fortune. His share from Francesca da Rimini alone came to fourteen thousand lire, or ten years of rent on his Tuscan villa—and that was for just five performances.

  As always, Duse, with her delicate constitution, needed to pace herself and therefore limited the number of performances on the road. Compounding her exhaustion was the fact that she gave her all every time she walked out on the stage, slipping like a chameleon into the different characters of her repertoire, a feat that didn’t go unnoticed. As d’Annunzio’s English translator wrote in an introduction to The Dead City: “this wonderful woman . . . seems to have effaced the boundary that separates nature from art.”

  • • •

  When the road-weary Eleonora returned to New York at the end of 1902 to wrap up her American tour with a few farewell shows, she was no longer jubilant. The leaves had fallen long ago from the Central Park trees, whose bare branches seemed to match her somber mood. She stared despondently through the window as the carriage rattled along Broadway. They came to a tall building, nicknamed “The Yellow Brick Brewery,” home to New York’s largest theater—the Metropolitan Opera House. This was the original Met, built across from the Garment District, twenty-five blocks south of its current home at Lincoln Center. The building had been constructed in 1883 by a consortium of businessmen excluded from joining New York’s former opera house, the Academy of Music at Union Square.

  Tour managers George Tyler and Joseph Smith were there to greet Duse, and they escorted her through the stage door. Needing a moment to herself, Eleonora strolled onto the colossal stage to take in the empty house. The place was huge, with five tiers of balconies soaring up some eighty feet, and a capacity approaching four thousand.

  Eleonora had planned to play Francesca on this storied stage. Standing on the boards, she pictured herself in the role, as she did often before performing—a quick mental flash through the narrative arc, from the first scene to the finale. In Francesca, the heroine is forced to marry a man she despises, who murders her in a jealous rage.

  Not exactly uplifting. Eleonora, sensing a bleak mood descending, decided spontaneously to change plays. To the jubilation of George Tyler and Joseph Smith, Duse informed her American tour managers that she was done with d’Annunzio. She would perform Magda. Instead of getting slaughtered for her transgressions, Magda defies her controlling father. In the finale, he raises a gun to her head, but, unable to fire, he has a stroke that ends his life—and an emancipated Magda goes off to pursue her dreams. After months of nothing but d’Annunzio, it would be a relief, finally, to play a woman who felt empowered.

  But shaking off d’Annunzio did not revitalize Duse. There was something missing in her Magda that night. Her timing was off; she felt disconnected.

  “Time and again,” wrote the New York Times critic in apparent exasperation, “she does absolutely nothing but wait for
the last word or action to sink in more deeply.”

  Her novelty was suddenly old.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The sordid tale of the diva and the playwright made for good copy. However, this one was more of a fling than a serious romance. He was in his thirties, after all; she, almost twice that age, though there was no denying it—Sarah Bernhardt was aging brilliantly.

  Just as she had launched herself by bedding Napoleon III, among others, Sarah continued to use her boudoir to advance her career. The current target: playwright Edmond Rostand. Duse’s affair with d’Annunzio had resulted mostly in a series of failures. Bernhardt and Rostand, on the other hand, were a good match.

  Many considered Rostand to be France’s greatest living poet at the time. He had just written one of the masterpieces of French theater, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Bernhardt wanted to make certain she was first in line for his next play, which was all but assured. Rostand adored Sarah and was thrilled at the prospect of her performing in his latest work. To cinch matters, Sarah lured Rostand to her bed, which happened—this time—to be on a moving train.

  It was the fall of 1899, the waning months of the nineteenth century. They were crossing the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Bernhardt had been touring. As she and Rostand enjoyed each other’s company one afternoon in a private salon in one of several train cars she had commandeered, Sarah noticed something passing in a blur outside the window: the word WAGRAM, on the dusty wall of a remote railway station.

  Wagram, exclaimed Sarah. We are passing Wagram!

  Rostand looked up with interest. Wagram was the site of a decisive, century-old victory for France in the Napoleonic Wars, where Emperor Napoleon I had driven the Austrians back across the Danube. It was also the site of an important scene in the new play that Rostand was writing for Sarah: L’Aiglon (The Eaglet), which told the story of young Napoleon II. Sarah was planning to don trousers to play Napoleon’s exiled heir, who spent his short life under house arrest in Austria. The part would require a physical miracle from Bernhardt—who, in addition to switching genders, would have to shave three decades from her age. This is what Sarah lived for on the boards—the spectacular provocation, the supreme feat that only a true champion would attempt.

  Sarah was obsessed with historical accuracy, along with correctness of wardrobe and design. It was among the reasons for this tour of Austria—part of Bernhardt’s rigorous preparations for her new production.

  Upon arriving in Vienna that evening, Bernhardt summoned her Austrian tour manager to her hotel suite and demanded he schedule an immediate tour of the famous Wagram battlefield.

  “Organize a pilgrimage to Wagram? You cannot be serious, Madame,” he protested. “There is nothing of interest in that dreary hole.”

  But there was no swaying Bernhardt.

  “Most divine of living beings,” stammered the Austrian tour manager, “you are demanding the impossible.” The battlefield was miles from the train station. They would require horses, carriages, cooking equipment—even lights, since the days were getting shorter. And the whole thing would be pointless, insisted the manager: “There is nothing to see but beetroots and potatoes.”

  Sarah was adamant: she would visit Wagram.

  The story, as recorded faithfully by Rostand, picked up one week later. After touring and performing in Brno to the north, they were back on Sarah’s train, returning to Vienna and approaching, once again, the forgettable rural station—but this time the locomotive screeched to a halt.

  You’d hardly recognize the place. Wagram station had been thoroughly transformed by hundreds of flaming torches, garlands of paper flowers, soldiers standing at attention in gleaming helmets and shiny boots. . . . An incredulous, bleary-eyed Sarah emerged from her carriage to a cannon salute as a portly gentleman stepped forward to kiss her hand—the mayor of Wagram, humbly begging for the honor of escorting her to the site made famous by her esteemed countryman Napoleon, a site that would now become even more sacred by the grace of her own footsteps.

  Sarah caught a glimpse of the station clock, which read—it could not be true—two o’clock in the morning?

  She frowned. “Is something wrong with the clock?”

  “No, Madame,” replied the mayor. “The clock is in perfect order.”

  Bernhardt glanced at her Austrian tour manager, who, grinning with pride, had clearly pulled off an exceptional feat. But her divinity notwithstanding, Sarah was an exhausted mortal on a demanding tour with another show that very evening in Vienna. To hell with Wagram, her sleep came first. Spinning toward the engineer, she commanded: “Start the train! En route! En route!”

  “Oh the mayor and the officials!” lamented Rostand. “I shall never forget their faces when the train began to move, their stupor, their frightened round eyes as Sarah retreated while the mayor was still ‘speechifying.’ I can still see him, his dignity shattered, surrounded by his committee and those sad paper flowers.” As the train gathered speed, Sarah sank languidly into her fabled chinchilla coat and fell asleep as though nothing had happened.

  Despite the aborted trip to Wagram, Rostand completed his play, which culminated in a scene on the epic battlefield. While deeply patriotic, the play is also bittersweet in that Napoleon II would never soar to the heights of his formidable father. This plot was personal to Rostand, whose father was a distinguished economist and man of letters. The playwright had an equally daunting standard to live up to of his own making: Cyrano, a play that had received so much acclaim that many doubted whether Rostand could ever match it. The stakes were personal for Bernhardt, too, who had been once, but was no longer, the undisputed empress of the stage. Sarah needed a play like this.

  When Rostand read his completed text to Bernhardt and her company of actors, they were moved to tears. The curtain rises on the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, the seat of the Austrian court, where the young Napoleon II and his mother, the Austrian duchess Marie Louise, are living, having been exiled from France. While his tutors have tried to avoid the subject of his father’s colossal legacy, the lad dreams of glory. Secretly, with the help of Flambeau, a grizzled veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, he practices military maneuvers using chess pieces and toy soldiers in the hope of assembling an army to reclaim the imperial throne. In act five, a dramatic torch-lit scene takes us to Wagram where the Bonaparte heir awaits a militia of coconspirators willing to march with him on France—but no one comes. Instead, the boy, consumptive and feverish, has visions of ghostly soldiers from his father’s campaign, a delirious glimpse of the glory that will never be his.

  It was a story meant for Bernhardt, who, as the century turned, had lost some of her luster. And there was another reason that Sarah needed a patriotic role—she had been tainted of late in the eyes of her countrymen.

  Just two years earlier, Sarah had slipped precipitously from national icon to national pariah when she stood all but alone alongside the infamous Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish descent who had been accused of passing secrets to the Germans. She declared that he had been falsely accused.

  Throughout her career, Sarah had been subjected to anti-Semitism. There were mean-spirited caricatures in the press, depicting her as avaricious with a hooked nose. She had been bombarded with rotten eggs onstage, had stones pelted at her carriage with cries of “Kill the Jewess.” But Sarah was proud of her heritage and defended Dreyfus. It was she, according to playwright Louis Verneuil, who stirred writer Émile Zola to write “J’Accuse,” his highly controversial open letter to the president of the Republic, which was printed on the front page of the paper in January of 1898. Zola’s letter accused the French army of trumping up evidence of treason against Dreyfus in order to protect “one of their own”—that is, a gentile officer. After its publication, Sarah dispatched the following note to her dear friend Zola:

  Dear Grand Master,

  Allow me to speak for the intense emotion I felt when I read your cry for justice. As a woman, I have no influence but I am an
guished, haunted by the situation, and the beautiful words you wrote yesterday brought tremendous relief to my great suffering. . . .

  A surprisingly modest Bernhardt was suggesting she had “no influence” as a woman—but, if Verneuil is to be believed, it was she who had inspired Zola to begin with, in earlier letters, one assumes. Sarah’s position on Dreyfus was so unpopular that even her own son, Maurice, was against her—they did not speak for months. When Zola’s letter appeared in print, an angry mob descended on his small home in Paris’s rue de Bruxelles, calling for his death. They threw rocks at the shuttered windows, until the wooden panes were flung open and a figure appeared—not Zola, but Bernhardt.

  Sarah had been visiting Zola to commend him in person on his courage. Now, framed in the open window, Sarah was suddenly and unexpectedly “onstage.” So she squared her shoulders to face the bloodthirsty crowd and addressed them in her distinctive, much-adored voice. The precise words Sarah used that morning were never recorded—but whatever she said, Bernhardt caused the crowd to return to their homes. Her position—and very public defense of it—were the most courageous acts she would perform, going well beyond what she had done for wounded soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

  Newspapers the following morning put the incident on the front page. SARAH BERNHARDT AT ZOLAS, read one headline; THE GREAT ACTRESS IS WITH THE JEWS AGAINST THE ARMY, went another. All week, there were angry demonstrations outside the Théâtre de la Renaissance—and it was around this time that Sarah Bernhardt decided to shutter it for good. Despite some artistic achievement, running the theater had been financially draining, with a series of flops culminating in the disaster of d’Annunzio’s play earlier that year. So Bernhardt put her beloved theater up for sale.