Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  Every time she returns to Italy, it seems that the public, the majority of the public, go to the theatre to judge her coldly, as if she were making her debut that evening, and her fame almost harmed her. Now, at the peak of her glory, she has in Italy neither a theatre nor an audience that is hers. Every time she performs she has to hire the theatre, win the public.

  Contrast that with Bernhardt confidante and early biographer Madame Pierre Berton’s description of a recent homecoming for Sarah:

  When she returned to France, warships fired salutes, the entire city of Havre was beflagged and illuminated, and some of the most distinguished persons in France were on the quay to greet her.

  As Bernhardt was being embraced by her country, Duse was being dismissed by hers. Why? One could argue the French were more patriotic; the Italians, more cynical; that Sarah was more visible in the public eye, and so on. But it really comes down to something far simpler. France had been a nation for more than a century; Italy, at half that age, was still largely tribal. And Eleonora, the perennial nomad, didn’t have a tribe—no one knew where she belonged.

  • • •

  Sarah could not believe what she was hearing: Duse had signed a contract to play the 1905 season in Paris. But not with a reputable troupe. No, she was joining a small, experimental theater company: the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, founded by radical actor-director Aurélien-Marie Lugné, whose matchbox theater was open only to subscription holders. While elitist, the director was also egalitarian—the monthly dues subsidized a hundred free tickets given away to the public.

  Aurélien went by his stage name, Lugné-Poë, in honor of the hero of the French Symbolists: Edgar Allan Poe. Though disparaged by contemporary American writers like Emerson as “a jingle man,” Poe was considered a genius in France for his work, which boldly rejected romanticism and yet was hardly an embrace of realism. Poe’s stories were not in any sense “real,” and yet they were—grotesquely so. This is the landscape where d’Annunzio thrived, along with other contrarians who felt there was something fundamentally pedestrian about realism. The biggest proponent of this thinking was a woman named Sarah Bernhardt. Oddly, this put her in the same camp as the iconoclastic Lugné-Poë. Though he’d later embrace Ibsen, Lugné-Poë had been an early rejecter of naturalism. It was he who had finally staged Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, after the risqué play had been passed on by both Sarah and Eleonora.

  As before, Bernhardt reached out to her rival. “Ma petite, je suis désolée, désolée, désolée,” she wrote, informing Duse that Lugné-Poë’s theater would be far too small for her. She offered Eleonora, once again, the use of her own bigger space, the same tactic she’d used in 1897 when Duse came for her Paris debut. The results eight years ago had been mixed, so it’s unclear what Sarah was hoping to accomplish.

  But Duse refused the hospitality this time; she wanted nothing to do with Sarah. Duse was yearning to reconnect with the fearlessness of her youth—that’s what had inspired the alliance with Lugné-Poë, a fellow admirer of Henrik Ibsen. Duse had bonded with Lugné-Poë over their shared love for the Norwegian’s plays.

  While in Paris, Eleonora performed an intimate staging of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre. On other nights, they ran A Doll’s House, The Master Builder, and The Enemy of the People, all Ibsen plays, but Eleonora watched these productions from the audience. In a gesture of humility, Duse had agreed to share the season with Lugné-Poë’s talented wife, Suzanne Desprès.

  Eleonora quickly became enamored of them as a couple, perhaps even a little envious. “You two possess the best of happiness, working together, struggling together,” she wrote. Duse signed the note—along with other letters to them—Sociétaire de l’Œuvre, meaning tenured-member or “lifer” in the company. She was proud to be associated with a group of vanguard actors doing exciting work and essentially donated her time to them.

  “I asked her what her salary would be,” wrote Lugné-Poë.

  “What do you pay the boy who’s so good as the lunatic?” she asked, naming a minor role from Peer Gynt.

  “Ten francs,” answered Lugné-Poë.

  “Then pay me that,” she said, according to Lugné-Poë’s memoir, Sous les étoiles.

  As Duse fell in love with l’Œuvre and the Lugné-Poës, she took Suzanne aside one evening to discuss something that had been gnawing at her, according to Lugné-Poë. He quoted Duse in his autobiography as saying to Suzanne: “If, once . . . your husband, if I possessed him . . . once . . . just once . . . you wouldn’t bear me ill will, would you? It’s the hinge of friendship.”

  Suzanne looked at her incredulously. Was she serious?

  No—at least, not yet.

  • • •

  Some months later, Duse was back in Italy in bed with a fever. Feeling sorry for herself, she wrote to Lugné-Poë:

  The only thing I know how to do in my life is to cry, to suffer and to die! Ah! Why have things gone this way? I feel so lost, so out of tune with life.

  She was disenchanted with contemporary theater, which, while changing, was still rooted in the nineteenth century. Her actors chafed during the long rehearsals she demanded of them as she attempted to teach them about Ibsen. The text cannot simply be memorized, she would explain in exasperation—it must be studied . . . as a work of Art. You can’t just deliver the lines, you must know the play’s theme and understand your role in it. You must know your character’s thoughts, for it’s between lines that plays become interesting.

  There was head scratching and blank stares. In Eleonora’s frustration, she became hard on the other actors, even her costars, berating them in public and demanding to be addressed as “La Signora.”

  “Your acting is hopeless! Pitiful!” she told one actress. “Go on, cry, cry! It will do you some good.”

  Then Eleonora took a breath and softened: “Practice at home to put every word you speak deeper inside you, down in your body, not up in your head or in that little nose.”

  Other advice was harder to enact. When actors perform from the ego, she explained, there is nowhere to go. “We have an enemy within us,” she would say. “We have to confront it and overcome it.” But the idea of ego as enemy was still way ahead of its time.

  • • •

  As if making up for the years lost being faithful to d’Annunzio, Eleonora began an affair with Lugné-Poë. It wasn’t the first time she had slept with a married man whose wife was a friend. Eleonora had already crossed that line with Robi Mendelssohn, the husband of her former traveling companion Giulietta, and now her financial adviser as well. It was in misguided retaliation, perhaps, for d’Annunzio’s intense attraction to Giulietta, and for his obsession with her fictional counterpart, Donatella Arvale, in The Flame.

  The misguided tryst with Lugné-Poë began during a 1905 to 1906 tour of Scandinavia. There were legitimate reasons for the two to be seen together, which created an ideal smoke screen. Lugné-Poë had become Eleonora’s manager, and since she and his wife, Suzanne, were both leading ladies, they rarely crossed paths onstage.

  The Scandinavia tour was calamitous. King Christian IX of Denmark died, which canceled their engagements in Copenhagen. On their way to Christiana (now Oslo), they received word that Ibsen was dying, too.

  “Soon I shall go into the great darkness,” Ibsen told his son, Sigurd, who had named his third child Eleonora in honor of the actress.

  By the time Duse and Lugné-Poë arrived in Norway, Ibsen was too ill to receive them. Eleonora was devastated. After sending a note and a bouquet to Ibsen’s wife, she dragged Lugné-Poë through the thick snow to wait beneath the master’s window, lest he should appear and wave to well-wishers as he had been known to do. But Ibsen never rose from his deathbed.

  • • •

  That same winter, Eleonora wrote a letter to Suzanne Desprès, who remained oblivious to Duse’s dalliance with her husband:

  I feel and I hope that “a tomorrow” of our work and our art lies in you—and this is why I s
peak to you and tell you—you alone—the sweet sorrow there is for me in this decision—now taken—to leave my work. . . . To my art I have given my love, my strength, my youth, my life: all—all—I have therefore decided that, this year, my work will be directed towards freedom.

  Duse was, apparently, retiring from the stage.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  In the months following Eleonora’s letter to Suzanne Desprès, Bernhardt ventured into her rival’s terrain. Whether she knew of Duse’s intention to retire is unclear, but Paris is a small town where gossip abounds—especially in the theater world. Here’s what we do know: Bernhardt tried her hand at Ibsen.

  She gave one, and only one, performance of The Lady from the Sea in Geneva. She also talked about performing in A Doll’s House, though that never materialized. Sarah quickly decided that Ibsen was not for her. But in November of 1906, Sarah played a part that may as well have been written for Duse: Saint Teresa of Ávila, a sixteenth-century mystic.

  There were snickers, of course, when Sarah took the stage as a virgin saint. But the 1906 play, La Vierge d’Avila, by iconoclast Catulle Mendès, was actually quite racy in its suggestions about the taboos and fantasies of a cloistered life. The shocking play quickly became the must-see of the Paris season—Sarah’s “most sublime creation,” according to one influential critic.

  Things changed when Bernhardt took La Vierge d’Avila on the road. In Spain, La Vierge was deemed a sacrilege. The archbishop of Ávila ordered his congregants to circle the town walls in prayer to exorcize the demons unleashed by the scandalous play, written by a Jew for a Jewess. Mendès was thrilled. But these grand productions were beginning to take their toll on Sarah, now over sixty. The constant need to top herself was exhausting.

  Jean Cocteau described a curtain call he saw as a teenager by a thoroughly spent Sarah, leaning on the proscenium arch: “Like some Venetian palazzo, Sarah listed under the weight of her chokers and her fatigue, painted, gilded . . . and propped amid a columbarium of applause.”

  The play may have been risqué, but Sarah herself felt dated. Bernhardt at sixty had become at once glorious and grotesque, as Cocteau described her, “her body . . . like that of some splendid rag doll,” her time on the stage “one long swoon broken by screams of rage.”

  But then Cocteau took the modern audience to task for mocking her. “We are so ridiculous,” he wrote, “as to . . . take as an insult to ourselves the first unfamiliar sign of greatness.” The old-school poses, once de rigueur, had become foreign to modern audiences.

  So Bernhardt, to her credit, changed the way she performed. There was a new element to her splendid poses, one clearly influenced by Duse: Sarah now went still between each, creating a series of theatrical tableaus, frozen in time like a sequence of photographs—influenced perhaps by the advent of cinema and its early precursors such as flip-books. W. B. Yeats described the effect, after seeing her in London:

  For long periods the performers would merely stand and pose, and I once counted twenty-seven [beats] quite slowly before anybody on a fairly well-filled stage moved, as it seemed, so much as an eyelash. . . . Sara [sic] Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us say, her right breast for some time, then move them to the other side . . . and then, after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one out, and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the gestures of uplifted hands.

  Was it ridiculous—or brilliant? While opinions differed, Bernhardt’s ticket sales did not falter. In fact, she was more sought-after than ever.

  • • •

  The leg had been bothering her for years, decades really. Surgeons had told Sarah there was no choice: amputation was the only option. But it was hardly the first time she had heard that. Bernhardt had never stopped to let her leg properly heal after an injury playing Joan of Arc in 1891.

  By 1902, P. T. Barnum, the American circus impresario, had asked for a meeting with Sarah in which he reportedly said: “I hear you’re planning to cut off your leg” (or words to that effect), according to Madame Pierre Berton: “Barnum then proceeded to offer Bernhardt ten thousand dollars to use her severed limb ‘for exhibition purposes.’ ”

  He wanted the actress—part of her, at least—to be an attraction for his traveling circus, The Greatest Show on Earth. Sarah, astounded and appalled by the proposal, lifted her skirt and petticoat to show the audacious American her less-than-impressive leg, “which had shrunk a good deal owing to the injury,” noted Berton. “ ‘I am afraid that you would lose on your bargain,’ said the actress to P. T. Barnum. ‘Nobody would believe that that,’ she wiggled it, ‘was the leg of Sarah Bernhardt!’ ”

  Despite her flippant response, the prospect of becoming a sideshow freak horrified Bernhardt—which is why she postponed dealing with her leg well past that point. But the swollen knee caused her so much pain that Sarah was unable to perform full-length plays in proper theaters when she embarked on her second “Farewell Tour” of America ten years later, in 1912. She was limited, instead, to half-hour shows on the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit, where customers expected a quick, inexpensive laugh. Common people came in numbers to see the legendary Sarah Bernhardt. While on tour, she was propositioned by another pioneering showman from America: Adolph Zukor, who would one day control Paramount Pictures.

  Once a furrier, Zukor had entered show business as an entrepreneur, establishing Famous Players, with the slogan “Famous Players in Famous Plays.” His proposal for Sarah was simple: he wanted to turn her into a motion picture star.

  For the tidy sum of $360 per day and 10 percent of the gross, Bernhardt appeared in Elizabeth, Queen of England, a rare four-reeler running nearly forty-five minutes. The film, about Elizabeth I and her ill-fated love affair with the Earl of Essex, was a big success. It earned $80,000 across America on an investment of $18,000 and was instrumental in pushing dime-show exhibitors to accept longer, “feature-length” productions. A full year before silent film legend Charlie Chaplin signed his first movie contract, Sarah Bernhardt became the original international movie star.

  • • •

  It was high time, grumbled Sarah, upon learning she was to receive France’s highest accolade: being named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Her artist friend Louise Abbéma had been accorded the honor years earlier. Bernhardt’s knighting in early 1914 became the event of the season. “There is only one Sarah,” affirmed the press:

  She has given her heart and soul to the French drama. She is endlessly active, conquering, Napoleonic. . . . In honoring Madame Sarah Bernhardt the State is honoring an Ambassadress of French poetry.

  Once knighted, Bernhardt decided the time had come to give back to her profession. Using her theater as a school, one day per week, she began tutoring actresses of all ages, handpicked by audition—from beginners to more established players. Critic James Agate’s sister, May, was one of Bernhardt’s pupils in her early twenties and described the scene in her book Madame Sarah:

  We all sat around in a wide semi-circle. Madame Bernhardt was installed behind the producer’s table down-stage . . . in her easy-chair, swathed in her famous chinchilla coat, rug over her knees, elbows on the table, and chin cupped in hand.

  Getting the Bernhardt stare must have been intimidating, but “to the younger pupils [Bernhardt] was a veritable Mother Superior, and often the theater took on the aspect of a convent.”

  It was Bernhardt’s attempt to fill the shoes of Reverend Mother Sainte-Sophie, who’d been so kind to her at the Couvent de Grand-Champs.

  According to Agate’s account, the Divine One regaled her new charges with mocking tales of her “old-school” instructors at the Conservatoire, who taught:

  Ridiculous exercises . . . they called l’assiette—that is to say, the way in which you sat down. There was the assiette which said “so pleased you have called,” quite different from the one which said “I wish you hadn’t!” The special gesture for “Sortez, Monsieur!” with its accompanying ferocious
expression of face, and other absurdities of the old régime which she said she did her utmost to forget immediately.

  Sarah was recasting herself as the rebel who had overturned the system—in other words, as Duse. She wanted to make sure that’s how she was remembered, and it seemed to work, at least with students like May Agate, who wrote thirty years after the fact:

  My outstanding memory of her lessons is of one long outcry against the old school of acting. Their arm-waving and barnstorming must have been grotesque, but nobody saw it until Sarah came along and said it was meaningless.

  Nobody but Duse, that is. But she was in retirement now. Bernhardt had outlasted her younger rival. She had the stage to herself again.

  • • •

  On August 3, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared war on France. As the massive German army marched on Paris, all of Sarah’s friends fled to the provinces for refuge. But Bernhardt, now almost seventy years old, wouldn’t budge. She had remained in the capital during the Franco-Prussian War, even helped with the wounded. Why should she leave now? Evidently, there was cause: friends had heard reports that Sarah’s name was on a list of prominent hostages the Germans planned to take back to Berlin. Bernhardt laughed; even this would not sway her. Besides, she had her own reason for staying put. His name: Dr. Samuel Pozzi.

  A close friend, handsome and worldly, Sarah called him Docteur Dieu (Dr. God), for he was the only surgeon she trusted. A gynecologist to the stars, Pozzi was also called “the love doctor” because of his many conquests, the actress Gabrielle Réjane and Sarah herself among them. John Singer Sargent captured Pozzi in a striking painting that hangs today in Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum: Pozzi cuts an impressive figure, standing, very relaxed, a full-length maroon robe complementing his neatly trimmed beard.

  But Sarah’s interest in Pozzi in 1914 was strictly professional. She needed a doctor she could trust. Six months earlier, Bernhardt had written to him in desperation: