Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

But there had been times when Duse had wanted to throttle her rival. The low point surely had been a memoir that Sarah had published before the war, in which she had belittled Duse’s talent, writing:

  Eleonora Duse is more of an actress than an artist. She walks in the tracks left by others.

  “Others” meaning Sarah, of course. It was catty and mean-spirited—a low blow, even for Bernhardt.

  She does not imitate [others], to be sure, since she plants flowers where there were trees, and trees where there were flowers, but no personality emerges from her art that can be identified with her name.

  Sarah’s point was not without merit. Eleonora’s art had been one of dissolving her “personality” and becoming invisible. It had maddened Sarah, who had taken great pains as the pioneer of celebrity culture to fashion an unforgettable persona in her professional as well as personal endeavors. The Divine Sarah was larger than life, a legend that would outlive its mortal frame by decades, if not centuries. Duse, on the other hand,

  puts on the gloves of others, but inside out. . . . She has not created a being, a vision, that will evoke her memory.

  In 1915, the writer Colette was desperate to leave war-torn France. Though travel was difficult, she had managed to slip away from Paris for a spring vacation in Italy—a country that had not yet entered the war. In a matter of months, Italy would send five million men into the trenches alongside the Allies. But none of this militarization was apparent on a humid day in mid-May on the streets of Rome, when Colette and a companion decided to duck into a cinema, where the friend noticed: “Behind us, that lady in the back is Eleonora Duse.”

  So it was. Colette gazed at the actress with respect. Though she had not seen Duse onstage for the better part of a decade, Colette later wrote:

  I recognized the luminous hair, combed back, flame-like, across her forehead, and held in check by a black hat, and the great, deep hollows that set off the brilliance of her eyes by enclosing them in shadow.

  The film that night was mediocre, but Eleonora was caught up in it, nonetheless. That celebrated face, inclined first to one side and then to the other, was following the episode of a miserable film drama with an expression of great, tender, trusting naïveté.

  Eleonora couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t going to the movies simply for enjoyment. Duse was there as a professional, studying this new medium that everyone seemed to think was the future. She had seen Sarah’s success with Elizabeth, Queen of England, and now Duse was being courted out of retirement by her own Hollywood titan: D. W. Griffith, who had recently released his seminal and controversial twelve-reeler The Birth of a Nation. Griffith had heard of Duse’s reputation and wanted to work with her.

  The offer could not have come at a better time; Duse was nearly broke. She had recently been forced to pawn her rings in Florence for two thousand francs. She had even swallowed her pride and asked her own daughter—now married to a professor in England—for a loan, suggesting to Enrichetta that she sell a pearl necklace Eleonora had given her.

  In this rare period where Duse was without romantic entanglements, Enrichetta had become the outlet for her hypergraphia. As she had done with d’Annunzio, Eleonora sent her multiple letters, sometimes on the same day. “The fever in my heart, ever since Griffith’s offer, I have dreamed only of films,” Duse wrote her daughter, explaining that the thought of pursuing cinema had come to her in meditation:

  I closed my eyes . . . sleepless. I said: All right, calm down. Eleonora, you have always worked, so retrace your steps . . . if your cough prevents you from speaking, then make films! The art of silence!

  “I could still sell my soul a little, as I did in my youth,” she joked, “before my emphysema worsens.” But Duse had her doubts about making a pact with Hollywood: “So far I haven’t signed . . . because making a film is a spiritual problem.”

  • • •

  During the war, Duse had reconnected with her former lover Arrigo Boito, the erudite librettist of Giuseppe Verdi. “The Saint,” she was fond of calling him, for what he had had to endure with her. She and Boito had taken up their perennial conversation about “Art,” which got Eleonora wondering about the future of cinema. The medium was in its infancy; in the right hands, she believed it could offer the promise of greatness. But she abhorred the sensational work of Cecil B. DeMille, who was already putting out ten films a year and making truckloads of money.

  Night after night, Eleonora had gone to the cinema, hoping to catch a glimpse of a film that would feed her soul. She was always disappointed. Capturing The Grace on film seemed impossible to her, something more ephemeral than “a flash of lightning.” For Duse, the magic happened in communion with a live audience, who acted as cocreators. As always, Duse wanted to use the new medium, but not as others had.

  Following the success of Elizabeth, Bernhardt had made two more films: La Tosca and La Dame aux camélias. But all three had simply been filmed versions of plays—very static, and unimaginative. They never went outside in natural light or used creative angles, let alone motion. The only thing moving in the frame was Sarah, and because the early nonautomated cameras were often “under-cranked,” Sarah jerked about the frame like a hyperactive puppet. Eleonora made a mental note to remember the power of stillness, if and when she were to star in a movie.

  She wanted, above all, to work with Italians. The fledgling industry had innovators in Italy. Director Giovanni Pastrone had recently invented the dolly for his 1914 masterpiece Cabiria, featuring subtitles by Gabriele d’Annunzio. With its erupting volcanoes and impressive scenes of Hannibal crossing the Alps with an army of elephants, this pioneering Italian film influenced American directors like Cecil B. DeMille to create their own epics.

  But these types of films did not appeal to Duse. “Trash—shame!” she lamented, “nothing that stimulates the soul—nothing that . . . frees the imagination!—Nothing of what is not seen and weaves life.” Which is to say, The Grace.

  But Duse had been in touch with a group of renegades in Rome who encouraged her to launch an enterprise called contre-cinéma as a way “to initiate something beautiful and worthy.” She knew that good films must feature human drama, not simply sensationalism. A movie, like a play, required strong underlying material—a compelling situation with universal themes. Determined that her first film be based on an Italian story, Duse dove into her country’s literature, reading exhaustively, searching for some book she could adapt. Finally, she came upon Cenere (Ashes) by Grazia Deledda, who would one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The story’s themes were powerful and personal to Duse. “The Book,” as she capitalized it in a letter to her daughter, “is based on the necessity (no matter why) of a separation of a mother from her son.”

  The story takes place in the rugged mountains of Sardinia, where Oli, an innocent fifteen-year-old daughter of a local shepherd, is frolicking on midsummer eve when she’s seduced by a married man, Anania. When Oli becomes pregnant, she is disowned by her father and community, and she must raise her child in abject poverty.

  Desiring a better life for her son, Oli gives the boy up, abandoning the infant on the doorstep of his father, who works for a wealthy agriculturalist. As the boy receives an education and becomes a man, he continues to wonder about the identity of his mother—whom he wishes to redeem from the errant and sinful life he has been told she lives.

  Oli is desperately poor, very sick, and quite old when he finally finds her. The son, who is engaged to be married to a prominent young lady, suggests to his fiancée that they take in his mother—but the fiancée is confused and resistant. Oli can see that her son is torn by conflicting loyalties, so she takes her own life to give her son his freedom.

  Eleonora was so taken with the story that she decided to write the adaptation herself. She would be collaborating on Cenere with actor-director Febo Mari, who would costar as her estranged son; Mari, like Duse, was dedicated to breaking new ground in this nascent medium.

  Duse worked tirelessly on th
e script, her first, intent on getting it right. “I must learn the technical things,” Eleonora wrote to her daughter. Her whole life she’d been searching in vain for a writer with the right voice for her. Now, finally, she was doing it herself—a prospect that both thrilled and daunted her. “I want the execution to be modern,” she explained.

  It was. They filmed outdoors, in natural settings, embracing both shadow and light. She pushed director Mari to “keep me in the shadows and don’t, don’t show my hands, because hands reveal the face.” Duse hid her face often as she turned away in shame from her son.

  When Grazia Deledda, the book’s author, came to an early screening of the film, she was deeply moved. “You have made something beautiful and alive out of Cenere,” she wrote to Eleonora.

  Now the work is yours, no longer mine, just as a flower belongs more to the sun that gives it warmth than to the earth that gives it roots.

  Eleonora was proud of her work on the film, throughout which she never speaks. She had used the silent medium as it was meant to be used. In a dream sequence, the boy, now separated from his mother, imagines her reaching up to him from below his moonlit balcony. As Colette described it: “Those hands were such loving, beating wings, prolonged, extended by their shadows right up to the window sill.” Duse knew instinctively in this medium of light and shadow that cinematography could be as important as acting; she contrived a way to manipulate the image with her arms. It was, according to Colette, who had recorded her impressions after seeing the film in Italy in 1916, Duse’s “most beautiful scene.”

  At a time of war when Italian mothers were separated en masse from their soldiering sons, Duse embodied an archetype. “Women came into the dark room and voilà, the mamans understood,” Eleonora wrote her daughter. Without speaking, Duse had conveyed the universal language of motherhood.

  But Cenere was a flop commercially—the general public preferred lighter, more entertaining fare. They wanted spectacle.

  Undaunted, Duse began planning her next movie, an adaptation of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, the last play she had performed prior to retiring from the stage in 1909. It was another narrative that lit up her soul. The longing of Ellida for her lost maritime lover reminded Eleonora of the feelings she had as a child, gazing out at the Adriatic.

  But as she was preparing for production with the same company that had done Cenere, Eleonora had the scare of her life. She and two men from the production team had been scouting locations, taking a winding road along the Italian Riviera. The driver had swerved and collided with an oncoming vehicle. In a letter to her daughter, Duse chose to downplay the seriousness of the incident:

  Pupetta [her nickname for Enrichetta], I prefer to tell you this myself, because those stupid newspapers say all sorts of things. But the situation is this: (1) I am well, (2) nothing bad has happened to me, (3) it is stupid to tell these things, but I’m afraid of the newspapers, so I will tell you myself, (4) voilà: a little auto accident.

  The collision had occurred on a cliff with a sheer drop to the sea. The windshield had shattered and showered Eleonora with glass splinters, causing nineteen minor wounds to her face. “I was thrown forward and banged up a bit, nothing serious,” she assured Enrichetta. But it must have been a terrifying reminder of her mortality.

  With lacerations on her face, she would not be acting on camera anytime soon. The Lady from the Sea was put on hold for good; Cenere was the one and only movie Duse would ever make.

  • • •

  Duse had entrusted all her savings to Robi Mendelssohn, who had invested everything in Germany. By 1921, because of the devalued deutsche mark, there was nothing left. In the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, a single loaf of bread cost two billion marks; Germans carried their currency in wheelbarrows to buy groceries.

  Thus, at age sixty-three—after all that she had accomplished, all the accolades and all the pain—Eleonora Duse ended up exactly where she had started: as a pauper.

  So in May 1921, twelve years after retiring, Duse made her return to the stage, performing The Lady from the Sea in Rome, the same play that had marked her retirement in 1909, and that she had once hoped to bring to film. She had agreed to a short season with the company of a former manager from the d’Annunzio years; as usual, she took over all aspects of the production.

  Eleonora took great comfort from the fact that Sarah had acted well into her seventies. But it was not easy. More than a decade had passed since she had faced an audience, and the rehearsals proved challenging. Duse was unaccustomed to speaking so continuously after the protracted years in relative silence in Asolo. Now she was back in the nation’s capital, working long hours on her feet, and not particularly confident. Her fragile lungs went into coughing spasms at the dress rehearsal. But everything, as always, came together for opening night.

  Renato Simoni described in Corriere della Sera that first performance: “From act to act, we saw her rising to greater heights, yet the greatness of her presentation was veiled by the stark simplicity of her speech . . . every word revealed a mystery to us.”

  The Grace had returned. Duse seemed to have a new aura around her—a fresh, mystical presence. In the week prior to the performance, Duse had spent a day in silence, meditating in Genoa and communing with the sea.

  “I’m trying to forget myself. . . . That way, perhaps I won’t be so afraid,” is how she explained it to American actress Eva Le Gallienne, who would soon write a book about Duse.

  Among those who saw her perform was future director Luchino Visconti, who would one day win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his masterpiece Death in Venice. Even at fifteen he understood that Duse had “what the old actors called ‘guts’ and the romantics call ‘heart.’ ”

  Then there was American legend John Barrymore, who stumbled upon Duse in the lobby of the Hotel Danieli in Venice. “I was drunk, as usual,” Barrymore recalled, “and broke, as usual.”

  “I saw a little old lady sitting alone in the corridor. She was dressed all in black—shabby black, I remember, and her gloves were black, too, and worn.”

  When Barrymore finally realized it was Duse, he was in awe; though he had not yet seen her perform, he knew of her legend.

  “I would kiss your feet,” he told Duse, “but I cannot do that in this public place. It would be my only way of telling you how great you are and what an ineffable inspiration you have been to artists all over the world.” He had tears in his eyes. Duse regarded him for a moment.

  “You are American?” she asked in her limited English.

  “Yes, Madame,” responded the Hollywood superstar.

  “You are perhaps an actor?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “A very good actor, I think.” She smiled.

  “A very bad one, I am afraid, Madame.”

  He would soon get a chance to see her onstage.

  • • •

  Duse’s compromised health limited her performances to once or twice a week, even though the company was contracted to rent theaters on a weekly, not nightly, basis for their tour of Italy; a single performance was unlikely to offset that cost. So Duse was back at work, but losing money.

  Eleonora added Ibsen’s Ghosts to her repertoire, a scathing indictment of societal norms that ends with an aging mother debating whether or not she has it in her to inject her syphilitic and suffering son with a lethal dose of morphine. Eleonora’s performance was chilling.

  Another play she revived was d’Annunzio’s The Dead City. During the war, d’Annunzio and Duse had reconciled. The compulsive hedonist had become a war hero after serving with amazing valor—first in the Italian cavalry, next as the captain of a torpedo boat, and finally as a pilot, where he had been wounded in action, losing an eye in a dogfight. Even after the armistice, he had refused to lay down his arms. In 1919, as a private citizen, d’Annunzio had led an army of mutineers in a campaign that made him a legend—taking over the disputed border town of Fiume (in modern-day Croatia) and
installing himself as its artist-dictator for fifteen months.

  Fiume became a model city-state, so politically innovative and culturally enlightened that it drew poets, socialists, anarchists, and refugees—the Haight-Ashbury of its day. D’Annunzio even received a pot of caviar from Vladimir Lenin, who called him the “only revolutionary in Europe.”

  Mussolini took note. Il Duce also asked for an introduction to Eleonora Duse, who, after repeated entreaties from d’Annunzio, consented to meet him. The encounter took place in her room at Rome’s Hotel Royal on December 4, 1922. The dictator arrived at three sharp, not quite two months after he had seized control of the country. Mussolini was eager to meet—and possibly co-opt—this icon of Italian theater. The enthusiasm was not reciprocated. Duse was cordial, but when Mussolini later offered her a pension, she refused. It seemed like a bribe, a way of keeping her in the fold. Mussolini, like Lenin, believed that all art was political; for Duse, it was sacred. Given the direction in which the country was headed, she considered leaving Italy for good. The thought of moving to America had even crossed her mind. And why not?

  Three months after Bernhardt’s death made headlines worldwide in early 1923, Eleonora Duse made some news of her own, becoming the first woman to grace the cover of Time magazine. SHE HAS PLAYED THE GREATEST ROMANCES OF ART AND LIFE read the headline, which could have applied equally to either actress. In this case, Time was announcing Duse’s comeback tour of the United States.

  In the fall of 1923, Eleonora made her fifth landing in New York harbor. Her entourage this time included a clairvoyant mystic, Bathsheba Askowith, whom Duse called “La Russa.” Before setting sail, Duse had made a statement to the press regarding her mission:

  I should like to raise myself through my work—and for my work—to the level of the really great subjects—sacred subjects—to the very heart of the Mystery. The theater sprang from religion. It is my greatest wish that, somehow, through me—in some small way—they may be reunited.

  Her tour, this time, was managed by Morris Gest, a visionary impresario who was also overseeing the concurrent tour of the Moscow Arts Theater, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, who had been deeply influenced by Duse. Both Duse’s and Stanislavski’s 1923 tours would have lasting impacts on American acting.