Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  Never one to quit, Bernhardt doubled-down a few months later, going further into debt by signing a long-term lease on a new theater, the Théâtre des Nations, which, at 1,700 seats, was nearly twice the capacity of the Renaissance. Sarah needed a new start—to resurrect the formula that had always worked for her: size.

  The colossal backstage of the Théâtre des Nations afforded storage for multiple sets of scenery, allowing for a different play each night of the week. What’s more, the elevated proscenium put greater distance between the aging actress and her public. At fifty-five, Bernhardt felt self-conscious about the thick makeup she needed now to conceal her wrinkles.

  Sarah’s new dressing room was beyond opulent—a five-room suite complete with electric chandeliers and a proper bathtub, the first ever in a theater. Bernhardt personally supervised every detail of the new venue’s renovation, including a complete facelift of the foyer, adding paintings of herself by Mucha, Abbéma, and Orientalist painter Georges Clairin. Since she had signed a twenty-five-year lease on the place, Sarah felt it entirely reasonable to rechristen the theater with a new name: Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt.

  Why not? she thought. One year earlier, Teatro Brunetti in Bologna had changed its name to Teatro Duse, and Eleonora wasn’t even in residence there—it had simply been done in her honor. Sarah, on the other hand, would be putting sweat into her enterprise on a nightly basis. In fact, the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt was to be the only Paris venue where the diva performed for the remaining two decades of her life.

  In another courageous move, Sarah decided to launch her new theater by going where Eleonora didn’t dare: performing as a man. It was a feat Duse never attempted; not that she didn’t have the ability—she was an actor, after all. But wearing trousers held no appeal for Duse, whose sole focus remained her obsession to embody and articulate real-life female characters.

  Sarah had launched herself at twenty-five by playing a man, or rather a boy, in Le Passant. Now, in her fifties, almost as if in defiance of her aging body, Bernhardt would add another seven young males to her repertoire, including L’Aiglon. But first Sarah tackled what is widely considered to be theater’s greatest hero. On May 20, 1899, she strode onto the stage of the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt with a sword and black cape—as Hamlet.

  It was vintage Bernhardt: bold, controversial, and the hottest ticket in town. Sarah had rejected the standard verse translation and commissioned her own in prose, which preserved more of the original text than any of the productions of the day, whether in France or possibly even in England, where local theaters tended to abridge Shakespeare. Sarah’s version ran for an astonishing four hours—very demanding for the audience, who nonetheless showed up in numbers. After two weeks in Paris, she took the production on the road, beginning boldly in London, where British critics were preparing to raise their sabers in defense of their bard.

  The reaction was mixed. Longtime Sarah supporter Max Beerbohm was at a loss, writing: “The only compliment one can conscientiously pay her is that her Hamlet was, from first to last, [a] très grande dame.”

  But actress Elizabeth Robins vehemently disagreed: “Madame Bernhardt’s assumption of masculinity is so cleverly carried out that one loses sight of Hamlet in one’s admiration for the tour de force of the actress.”

  For the writer Maurice Baring, Sarah was “a marvel, a tiger, natural, easy, lifelike and princely.” But some thought she went too far in her attempt at masculinity, to which Sarah replied: “I am reproached for being too active, too virile. It appears that in England, Hamlet must be portrayed as a sad German professor. . . . They say that my acting is not traditional. But what is tradition? Each actor brings his own traditions.”

  Bernhardt’s choice to tackle roles for young men was an antiagist, radical feminist response to limiting and often demeaning professional and social opportunities afforded to women past their prime in Victorian Europe. She was saying, in effect, we can be anything. And yet it was Duse on the suffragette pedestal, not Bernhardt. Sarah simply couldn’t win.

  Not satisfied with stopping at the West End, Sarah took her Hamlet to Shakespeare’s hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon. Then she ventured north to Edinburgh, where, because her costume failed to arrive on time, she was forced to play the role in a kilt to the bewildered amusement of the Scots. After sweeping across Europe as the melancholy Dane, Sarah returned to Paris for an additional fifty triumphant shows. A scene from the historical performance—the sword fight with Laertes—was even captured on film for the Paris Expo of 1900, and survives to this day on YouTube.

  Just six years prior, the French Lumière brothers had won the race against Thomas Edison to produce the first viable movie camera. By 1900, visitors to the expo could pay one franc to see a series of short subjects, such as “Feeding the Baby” or “Fishing for Goldfish.” But all of these shorts were silent and felt more like home movies than works of art. Sarah’s Hamlet constituted the first attempt to capture high art on celluloid. What was truly groundbreaking was that technicians had also captured a sound recording of Sarah delivering her lines, which they ran in conjunction with the projector—using separate but synchronized technologies to make Bernhardt the first actress to speak on film.

  While Bernhardt, so often a pioneer, would go on to have some misgivings about the medium of film, she also harbored nagging concerns about the nature of her art, which, unlike a painting, is ephemeral. For Sarah, celluloid held the promise of immortality.

  • • •

  One year after Hamlet, Sarah, at age fifty-six, took the stage in full military dress to play the twenty-one-year-old Duke of Reichstadt, heir to the throne of Bonaparte. It was one of the greatest moments of her career. People wept openly, the ovations were unending. If Hamlet had been an artistic tour de force, her turn as Napoleon II was also infused with patriotic fervor, which made it, by some accounts, one of the most triumphant events in theater history. As reported by the New York Times: “Everybody distinguished in the worlds of literature, art, and politics was present to witness her performance, and repeated bursts of applause proved that she had added one more brilliant success to an already long list. Melancholy, despair, irony, anger, enthusiasm, and tenderness—all found in the role of Reichstadt—she interpreted to perfection.”

  Rostand had written L’Aiglon in the same manner as Cyrano: rhymed alexandrines, the twelve-syllable couplets employed by classical French dramatists such as Racine and Molière. Though he composed it at a time when most modern dramatists, such as Strindberg, Ibsen, and Pirandello, were writing their plays in prose, Rostand, like d’Annunzio, had chosen a more classical form for his work. Both writers felt their text was elevated by the rhythm of the verse structure. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge had half-jokingly remarked, prose was “words in their best order,” while poetry was “the best words in their best order.”

  But the movement toward prose in “realistic” theater was inevitable. Ironically, it had been Shakespeare—the master of verse—who had begun the prose tradition. Many of the Bard’s lower-class characters break from iambic pentameter to distinguish their speech from that of the more noble cast members. Even Hamlet delivers one of his poignant, heartfelt speeches (“I have of late . . . lost all my mirth”) in prose, and certainly shorter lines (“I pray you leave me”) are that way so as to ground the words in reality. Goethe took up prose in his playwriting, and by the nineteenth century the practice had become widespread. Certainly, most of Sarah’s repertoire (Dumas, Sardou, and others) was in prose. And yet, at the dawn of the twentieth century, both she and Eleonora had returned to classical forms.

  L’Aiglon culminated with the night scene on the battlefield of Wagram, “an episode whose sharp pathos pierces the heart and the imagination like a rapier,” wrote one critic. It was “Shakespearean in its character,” remarked another, while a third compared it to the Waterloo scene from volume two of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Reviewers described the moment in vivid detail:

  In the obscurity of the
night, you hear the voices of the dead legions rising from their graves. . . . And, when struck with terror before these apparitions . . . the heir of the Caesar, expecting some terrible malediction, his face blanched, his eyes dilated with horror, cries “Why do you open horror-sated lips? What will you speak?” The voices of the corpses utter a formidable cry in turn of “Long Live the Emperor!”

  It is the cry of pardon that the victims of the Corsican address to his son. And he then, in a sudden revelation, exclaims: “I understand. I am the expiation!”

  France, reeling still from the Dreyfus affair—and earlier still, the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War—was in desperate need of permission to be proud of its military. And who should give it to them but Sarah Bernhardt, the Jew who had sided with Dreyfus? In that moment, she became the expiation for all of France; all was forgiven, and her position as supreme national icon became permanent.

  After months of sold-out performances in Paris, Bernhardt took L’Aiglon to London, where it likewise proved irresistible. The young duke became one of her signature roles, and Sarah established the tradition of making it a part to be played almost exclusively, like Peter Pan, by women. Later that year, Maude Adams would star in the play on Broadway, where Bernhardt was scheduled to return with Hamlet—her other cross-gender sensation.

  There are similarities between the roles. Conventional wisdom considered both Hamlet and L’Aiglon “inappropriate” models for manhood—they were brooding, indecisive, even effeminate—which is why they could, and perhaps should, be played by females. But Sarah saw it differently: “There is one reason why I think a woman is better suited to play parts like L’Aiglon and Hamlet than a man. These roles portray youths of twenty or twenty-one with the minds of men of forty. A boy of twenty cannot understand the philosophy of Hamlet nor the poetic enthusiasm of L’Aiglon. . . . An older man . . . does not look the boy, nor has he the ready adaptability of the woman who can combine the light carriage of youth with the mature thought of the man.” And no one quite had the adaptability of Sarah Bernhardt—a grandmother still agile enough to play a teenager.

  L’Aiglon proved successful for Bernhardt for another reason, too: the play was perfectly suited for its time. It is no coincidence that, within a year of each other, both Sarah and Eleonora starred in patriotic pageants with militaristic themes and weaponry on the stage. As the new century began in earnest, the European powers entered a period of unrestrained nationalism that would soon lead to the Great War.

  • • •

  SARAH BERNHARDT IN L’AIGLON MAKES GREATEST TRIUMPH OF GREAT CAREER.

  So claimed a 1901 headline read throughout America, where Sarah was back on the road. After 250 performances in Paris of L’Aiglon, Sarah took the play on an extended American tour, which would last six months, twice the length of Eleonora’s overseas tours. Just like Duse, Bernhardt would end her run at the Met, but for two weeks instead of Eleonora’s one. A key reason for the tour’s success was that Sarah had chosen, this time, to alternate seasons with her rival rather than go head-to-head. Duse would be back again in 1902. Sarah would not return until 1905.

  George Tyler, a colorful impresario who managed both Bernhardt and Duse in America, came up with the marketing gimmick of dubbing Sarah’s outings, both in 1901 and the later one in 1905–1906, as “farewell tours” (she had surpassed the average life expectancy for a Victorian woman, after all)––but there would be two more. The farewell tours created a sense of urgency that led to a frenzied rush for tickets. During her late 1905 run in Texas, the indefatigable sixty-something Bernhardt made not one stop, but five—in Dallas, Waco, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. When it became difficult to secure venues large enough to accommodate the unprecedented demand, Bernhardt performed in a circus tent.

  George Tyler had, at first, proposed renting Barnum and Bailey’s largest big top, but Sarah dismissed the idea—she’d been mocked once as “Sarah Barnum” in the gossipy 1883 biography by actress and friend-turned-enemy Marie Colombier. Sarah commissioned a custom tent instead—to be built in Kansas City with a staggering seating capacity of five thousand. The tent offered a full acre of seating in an area just shy of a football field

  SARAH BERNHARDT’S TRIUMPHANT TOUR IN THE WEST, went a January 1906 headline in Theatre Magazine, whose story began:

  The present tour of Sarah Bernhardt is certainly the most remarkable one ever played in this country, not just by Madame Bernhardt, but by any other foreign or native player. Her receipts everywhere have been colossal, and the size of her audiences unprecedented.

  In Kansas City, while waiting for her tent to be made, Sarah performed in Convention Hall to an audience of just over 6,500, with an astonishing till of $9,984—“the largest single night receipts from a dramatic engagement ever known in the history of the stage,” said Theatre Magazine. And Sarah made it look easy.

  The play she had chosen for Texas was a classic that had never failed her: La Dame aux camélias. She had taken breaks from the role from time to time, most notably after seeing Duse play it, but Bernhardt always came back to Camille.

  While a drama about a prostitute was racy fare for many Texans of the day, they devoured it—a reaction that inspired the New York Times reporter to compose a rapturous poem, in iambic heptameter, no less:

  The Texans crowd into the tents and madly cheer and clap;

  The ceiling flounces to and fro; the walls bulge out and flap.

  Delighted cries of “Sarah!” sound amid the bravo! calls,

  Till Sarah smiles and sweetly bows and then the canvas falls.

  After opening night in Dallas, the tent and its attendant army of roadies traveled one hundred miles south to Waco, and then onto Austin. Rain was falling hard when the company arrived at the state capital. After Sarah inspected the tent site and determined it a muddy mess, she summoned her car and ordered the driver to take her to the Hancock Opera House in downtown Austin. Bernhardt had been barred from performing there; her tour hadn’t made a deal with the syndicate that controlled all the largest venues in the state. Marching inside nonetheless, Sarah, according to a newspaper report, “commandeered” the theater.

  It helped that George Tyler had telephoned the Texas attorney general and cited the decade-old Sherman Antitrust Act, suggesting that the syndicate’s stranglehold on Texas theaters might constitute a monopoly, which would be a violation of federal law. Suddenly, the Hancock’s manager was jumping to fulfill Sarah’s every request. But he couldn’t, on such short notice, provide the team of stagehands the diva required. So Sarah walked out onto Sixth Street and personally rounded up a crew.

  When the curtain rose that evening, attendees included the Texas governor, lieutenant governor, and distinguished members of the legislature, along with scores of adoring fans—people with every reason to revere Sarah for her determination to ensure the show went on despite the rains. That night she played the most sublime, glorious, pathetic, sickly, unfortunate, dignified, and ultimately heroic courtesan these Texas boys and girls had ever seen.

  • • •

  On nights like these, Sarah felt an “electricity” in the house—a current between the public and the stage. It flowed toward her, egging her on; and she may have wondered: was this Prana? Was this Duse’s Grace?

  Whatever it was, Bernhardt certainly knew how to harness it. There remained a power to her presence on the stage that could not be denied—even by Duse. Sarah had played her cards well. The recent alliance with Rostand, the bigger venues, reprising the old standards—each idea had been good. And Sarah still held a trump card.

  She had recently challenged the aging Victorien Sardou to write another play for her. The author’s previous Bernhardt vehicles had all been successes: Fédora, Théodora, and La Tosca—written for Sarah a decade before Puccini turned the story into an opera. Sardou, whose work Duse also performed, was independently wealthy and wrote for writing’s sake alone. He accepted Sarah’s challenge and created La Sorcière (The Sorceress), a d
rama set in Spain, pitting an accused witch against the tyrannical Inquisition. The plot could not have been more perfect for Bernhardt, who found herself increasingly under fire by the intelligentsia.

  The playwright was in his seventies by that time yet still utterly captivating. “Sardou looked a little like Napoleon, a little like Voltaire and a little like the smiling portrait of a malicious actress,” joked Italian writer Edmondo de Amicis. “He wore a large black velvet cap, below which fell long waving gray locks. . . . My attention was riveted by his strange face, without beard and colorless . . . lighted up by two keenly sparkling gray eyes, full of thought, the glances of which correspond with the rapid motion of the thin and flexible lips.”

  Sardou loved to talk, which was generally charming—except when the playwright insisted on attending every one of Sarah’s rehearsals. It did not take long for the thirty actors in her company to succumb to the playwright’s charisma, and suddenly, to Bernhardt’s chagrin, there were two directors on the set.

  Marguerite Moreno, a young actress in Sarah’s company, recalled an example of the frequent and storied bickering between the playwright and the diva during rehearsals for La Sorcière:

  Suddenly Sardou climbed up on a table. And what a sight he was in his eternal black velvet beret and white silk foulard. . . .

  SARDOU: [to Sarah] “I want you to sit still during this scene.”

  SARAH: “But adored master, I’ll look like a dead fish if I don’t move.”

  SARDOU: “Listen, ma petite, I’m not an idiot yet, and I tell you that if you move you’ll ruin the whole scene.”