by Peter Rader
SARAH: “I’d rather ruin it than sit still.”
SARDOU: “Good God, Sarah, you are irritating.”
The playwright must have realized his audacity in offering that particular suggestion, since sitting still was what Eleonora did onstage. Duse would be seated and do nothing but listen. Yet her listening was so alive that her thoughts became almost audible to the crowd. Duse was interested in having the character’s thoughts arise spontaneously—meaning she never wanted to force them—so this was not a “pose,” not something you could plan and rehearse in advance, which is why Sarah remained wary of doing it.
But Sardou, who had worked with Duse on plays like Fédora and Divorçons, was gently nudging Sarah precisely in that direction—to stop “performing” and start simply “being” in the scene. He was trying to bring his dear friend Sarah—the nineteenth century’s greatest actress—into step with modern times.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The beginning of the end came in 1903, on Duse’s return from America. Exhausted from her tour and wary of another reunion with d’Annunzio, Duse became acutely ill on the ship home. Her fever made the Atlantic crossing the worst she had experienced.
When Duse arrived at the twin Tuscan villas, she discovered that d’Annunzio, as feared, had a new mistress installed in a Florence apartment: the Art Nouveau dancer Loie Fuller, who had been an inspiration for Toulouse-Lautrec. An irate Duse stayed just long enough to regain her strength, then set off for a northern tour from which she sent d’Annunzio the following telegram:
No more pain will come from me.
I will tie myself to work
In the past—the moment her father died, the loss of her newborn son—Duse had used her pain to feed the work onstage. “I play them well,” she had said of Ibsen’s heroines, “because I am filled with sorrow.” Now it appears Duse was counting on the stage as a means to escape her pain.
As was her pattern, she followed the telegram with a letter the same day:
You are free towards me as towards life itself. I can no longer live beside you.
She had come to realize that d’Annunzio would never change and admitted her “blindness” to a friend: “It seemed to me that it would have been in vain to make a new form of art without a new form of life.” In fact, d’Annunzio believed that the way he lived was itself a work of art. He did as he pleased, no matter the consequence—even if it hurt the one he actually loved. D’Annunzio saw no need to alter his ways, nor his politics. “I am beyond right and left,” he had told the press: “I am beyond good and evil.”
• • •
No longer artistically exclusive to d’Annunzio, Duse returned to her beloved Ibsen and presented Hedda Gabler in Vienna in March. D’Annunzio, a free agent as well, licensed Francesca to another company and began work on a new play, La figlia di Iorio (Iorio’s Daughter), a tragic allegory about a simple peasant girl with spiritual gifts who is feared by ignorant villagers and burned at the stake as a witch. With uncanny synchronicity, d’Annunzio had flashed upon his idea at nearly the same moment that Sardou had conceived The Sorceress for Sarah.
Even a half century before Arthur Miller penned The Crucible, “witches” were a preoccupation of the time. The widespread practice of witch hunting and witch burning, which had claimed some thirty-five thousand women since it became formal church practice in 1481, had continued through the early nineteenth century, and the persecution was ongoing, at least in spirit.
Eleonora and Sarah were both spiritually gifted women, and it makes sense that their respective lover-writers might compose plays about witchcraft for them. The stories were allegories, in a sense, for their lives as celebrities—surrounded by the frenzied mob, the harsh critics, and fickle public.
Both d’Annunzio and Sardou would write their plays over the summer months of 1903. One witch would soar, the other would wither.
• • •
D’Annunzio, to his dismay, was feeling blocked again. Without his muse, the writing just wasn’t coming. He had intended to model the protagonist of Iorio’s Daughter on Eleonora as a young girl, but he wasn’t feeling it anymore; he needed to be near her. So, in the summer of 1903, d’Annunzio proposed “an experiment in peace”—they would rent, once again, side-by-side luxury vacation homes, this time on the coast south of Rome, with bucolic views of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Eleonora agreed. Though no longer lovers, Duse and d’Annunzio remained friends; and, while nonexclusive, they still maintained a professional commitment to each other. Duse clung, in fact, to the continued collaboration—the fantasy of creating “a new form of art” with d’Annunzio.
“I will never forget the sweet hours of hope—life and art and pain—that I lived next to you,” Eleonora wrote d’Annunzio, while admitting her continued weakness “for your work, which still enchants me.”
She wanted to be a part of this new play. But the other enchantment was over for her. “I am neither beautiful—nor young, nor happy—nor forgetful,” she wrote. At forty-four, Duse was feeling old.
• • •
The sea breeze, briny and fresh, did wonders for Eleonora’s lungs; she felt both healthy and happy. With d’Annunzio busy writing in the villa next door, Duse played host to the famed American starlet Alice Nielsen, a headliner of opera and Broadway. Barely thirty, Nielsen was already the biggest draw in America, touring over forty thousand miles a year—which outpaced even Sarah. But Nielsen felt that her fame had been getting in the way of her art; she was visiting Duse as a pupil.
Eleonora loved to mentor younger actresses she thought were sincere. She had never forgotten her own experience as an ingénue in Naples when she joined the company of established star Giacinta Pezzana, who had been surprisingly unthreatened and supportive of Eleonora’s radical work. Pezzana’s nod had given Duse just the boost she needed.
When two talented young sisters, Irma and Emma Gramatica, joined the then-rising Duse on a tour of South America, she did everything she could to support the girls and help them find their true voice as actors. That was the hope of Alice Nielsen for her summer with Eleonora. The American star was moved simply to be in the presence of Duse, who appeared saintlike to her, quite literally glowing: “A luminous unearthly sort of light emanated from her face and seemed to form a halo round her turbaned head.”
“In her merry moods, Duse seemed to be joy incarnate,” recalled the young American in her journal. But Eleonora was troubled, nonetheless, by things she rarely discussed. “Although she never mentioned it,” Nielsen continued, “growing old was eating into the very marrow of her being. Often she would look searchingly into my face and sigh: ‘Ah, you do not know how fortunate you are to be so young and fair.’ ”
It was an area where Eleonora may have envied Sarah, who, while fourteen years older, still appeared ageless on the stage with the help of makeup. Duse herself succumbed, finally, to makeup, both onstage and off. Yet for all her fretting, Duse was still handsome—photographs from this period show her striking face framing mournful, slightly drooping eyes. “Her face is unchanged,” a critic would write of Duse later that year, “the face that blends the mystery of a tragic mask with the open, wide-eyed gaze of a child.” Wrinkles or not, Duse’s eyes remained forever young.
With d’Annunzio working long hours, the play came together like lightning—which tended to happen when d’Annunzio was within the vibrational sphere of his muse. As was his custom, d’Annunzio invited a few close friends to sit with Eleonora as he read the finished play to her.
The plot involves Aligi, a young shepherd, who gives shelter to Mila, a peasant girl suspected of witchery. But after Aligi protects her from superstitious villagers, he, too, is banished, and the two are forced into exile in the hills. One day his father catches Mila alone in the woods, accuses her of bewitching his son, and starts to rape her. Aligi stumbles upon the scene and savagely kills his father with his axe.
In the finale, Mila and Aligi have been caught by the townsfolk, who condemn t
he boy to death for patricide. But Mila intervenes and takes the blame. Offering herself up as a sacrificial lamb, she admits to bewitching Aligi—it was she who murdered his father, not Aligi, she says. Every villager is held rapt by her confession; none more so than Aligi, who knows the truth.
The girl drops her shawl and, knowing that the lamb must be slaughtered, quietly does it herself. Stepping onto the burning funeral pyre, the “witch” gazes back at the poor villagers, lost in their delusion. She smiles at Aligi and says “the flame is beautiful,” before fire immolates her body.
Eleonora was in tears when d’Annunzio put down the manuscript. She called it a “divine work” that had touched her soul. She knew Mila; she was Mila—quite literally, the inspiration for the character. There was only one problem: Mila was a child of fifteen. Could she really be played by a woman in her midforties?
Duse sought answers in her mirrors. Certainly, she thought of her rival—this would have presented no impediment whatsoever for Sarah, who had played the teenaged Joan of Arc in her forties (she’d do so again in her sixties). But it was a real quandary for Eleonora, who felt torn between competing allegiances. On the one hand, verismo demanded an unequivocal commitment to “Truth” in all its details. Anything false on the stage would call attention to itself, making it harder for the audience to enter into the “make-believe” of the play. It was a different experience, in Duse’s mind, from the suspension of disbelief required of audiences watching plays in the old style: “Look, there’s Sarah Bernhardt, yes I know she’s a grandmother, but isn’t she glorious? Let’s pretend (together) that Sarah is a teenage girl.” That required far too much fussing.
In verismo, the actor and audience merge as one in the “Truth” of the play and its theme, one as transmitter, one as receiver. It was sacred—and fragile. Wouldn’t it be jarring for Duse, who strove to avoid calling attention to her persona and personality onstage, to “pretend” to be three decades younger?
Yet here was Eleonora’s dilemma. Naturalism was built on the idea of acting from the inside—from the level of the soul, which is ageless. There are no limits to the magic that can emanate from this realm. Duse believed she could pull it off, and she wanted to prove it to d’Annunzio.
But d’Annunzio had his own dilemma. While the role called for a younger actress, he still needed Duse’s name on the marquee. D’Annunzio considered Iorio his finest play yet and had no intention of compromising on its casting. So he came up with a devilish plan. Among Italy’s up-and-coming ingénues was a pair of sisters: Irma and Emma Gramatica, the same actresses Duse had mentored on her first visit to South America and continued to correspond with. His eyes set on Irma, d’Annunzio met secretly with Virgilio Talli, the director of her company, and proposed the following deal: Eleonora would temporarily join the company as a “visiting artist” and premiere in the role of Mila, before ceding it several shows later to her new protégée, Irma Gramatica.
• • •
Duse caught a bad cold that winter, deep in her lungs—the coughing became violent, day and night. It was the pattern for Eleonora after an emotional upheaval—like her debut in Paris, or the death of her father—where Duse had canceled a string of performances and taken to her bed. It transpired again in January of 1904, when d’Annunzio dropped the bombshell of finally telling Eleonora about the secret pact he’d made with Irma Gramatica and the Talli Company.
Eleonora was stupefied—another professional betrayal, even more awful than the last. Not that Irma was without talent—it was her age that was enraging. Gramatica was by now in her thirties, hardly the nubile teenager called for in the script. The message was unambiguous: at forty-five, Duse was over the hill. Yet, astonishingly, Eleonora agreed to comply with d’Annunzio’s humiliating plan—she would premiere the role, then step down.
Why? Sarah had just premiered her witch in Paris to gushing notices: “Madame Bernhardt is incomparable, prestigious, glamorous,” enthused one. “Never has she been more beautiful,” raved another. “Never has her voice been fresher . . . never has her charm and tragic appeal been more devastating.” La Sorcière, indeed. The Divine Sarah, at fifty-nine, was drinking from the fountain of youth.
Duse needed to prove to d’Annunzio that she, too, could still play a teenager—even if only for a single performance. Yet even this was not to be.
Her nagging cold deteriorated to the point where she lost her voice, and Duse asked d’Annunzio to postpone the play. But he balked: all the arrangements had been made. The production was already in deficit by 100,000 lire, a sum covered by Eleonora’s banker friend, Robi Mendelssohn.
Eleonora’s loyal friend Matilde Serao was with her on March 2, when d’Annunzio’s La figlia di Iorio opened with Irma Gramatica at the Teatro Lirico in Milan. This time, Duse gave specific instructions that she preferred not to receive telegrams between acts. She still acted out the part, however, line by line, as she had with The Dead City—wistfully picturing herself onstage.
No one knew if the play could succeed without Duse. Ruggero Ruggeri, the lead actor of Iorio, recalled the tense mood at the theater:
When the curtain rose, the immense crowd plunged into a deep silence from which it never emerged, not even for a moment, during the whole first act, which is quite long. . . . As the curtains closed, a sepulchral silence followed in the house. We looked at one another, all of us dumbfounded. Was it possible? What was happening? Was the work being received by a cold, hostile silence? But it was as if the audience, under the poetic spell of the work of art, had to make a collective effort to recover itself.
D’Annunzio’s powerful ending—the “witch” choosing to immolate herself as a sacrificial offering upon the pyre—had been played to perfection by Irma Gramatica; her naturalistic performance had left the house speechless. It took a moment for the crowd to “emerge from the . . . fiction, and see again the theater, the actors, the performance behind the poetry.” Then: “The ovation exploded in a formidable din.”
D’Annunzio had scored the biggest success of his playwriting career. After years of struggling with artistic failures, with all the criticism, with the ridicule, he’d scored his only unbridled triumph—and Eleonora had had nothing to do with it. The hurt she felt was profound.
Duse began to picture a life without d’Annunzio. She was depressed, even suicidal, according to Matilde Serao. When her strength returned, Duse traveled back to Tuscany to collect some things from her villa. Underneath the pillows of the guest room, she found two golden hairpins belonging to another woman. The realization that her lover had had the callousness to host a mistress in Duse’s home sent Eleonora into a rage. She was inconsolable as she charged outside, flaming torch in hand, running through the moonlit hedges of d’Annunzio’s opulent villa next door. The dogs began to howl, horses snorted apprehensively in their stalls.
“You want the flame?” she yelled. “Take it! Take it!” sending embers in all directions as she slashed madly with the burning torch. She set fire to some drapes, an oriental screen. Servants scattered in search of water. “The flame! The flame!!” she cried. “It’s necessary!”
She was twisting the final line of d’Annunzio’s play: “The flame . . . it’s beautiful!”
It was the end, finally, to one of the theater world’s most complex romances—one that gave rise to some of its most grandiose productions and fanned one of its greatest rivalries. Duse’s seven-year attachment to d’Annunzio’s belabored plays may well have cost the actress her rightful place in history. Ultimately, the alliance served d’Annunzio better than it did his muse—and brought her far more pain than she could ever have imagined. As a young actress, pain was something Eleonora had thought she needed for her work. Now, she was done with it.
• • •
Just two weeks after the final break with d’Annunzio, Eleonora was back at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, the very theater where Iorio had premiered without her. She was presenting La Dame aux camélias—as far as she could get from d’Ann
unzio, who considered the fifty-year-old play to be dated and banal. Duse’s choice of play and venue was certainly a swipe at d’Annunzio, but the decision had been largely a practical one.
D’Annunzio had left her with a head-spinning debt of 200,000 francs for a play she hadn’t even acted in. It would have meant bankruptcy, if not for the intervention of Robi Mendelssohn, who covered the loss and assumed management of Duse’s money and business affairs. Eleonora was forced to resort to Bernhardt’s tactic of paying the bills by dusting off La Dame aux camélias—for which Eleonora was guaranteed 7,000 francs per show. And yet to do so, she needed d’Annunzio’s permission, since the exclusivity clause in their contract was technically still in force. So Duse wrote dutifully to her former partner, asking for his authorization—but he never replied.
On opening night during intermission, Duse received the following telegram in her dressing room:
Is it true you have changed, you have renounced the mission?
Eleonora was outraged. The “mission” was their joint pact to elevate Italian theater and culture, which meant no more frivolous French plays. Coming from a man who had broken their exclusivity pact twice now, this was insolent.
That night, as she took the stage for the final act, Eleonora put her anguished feelings on display for all to see. She would later state: “I was Marguerite as I had never been before.”
It was a different Marguerite, to be sure. In a binge of shopping therapy, Eleonora had commissioned new costumes from the House of Worth, her Paris designers, to spruce up her Camille. If she had to do a crowd-pleaser, what was the point of holding back? Though she’d be the last to admit it, it was a nod to Bernhardt. Given Duse’s penchant for sartorial understatement, this change did not go unnoticed.
“This new incarnation of Marguerite moves, enfolded in white pepla, starred with rainbows of diamonds, like a figure of dreams and poetry,” wrote a critic for L’Illustrazione Italiana. Yet the public yawned. As critic Ugo Ojetti wrote in the fall of 1904:
