Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  Duse opened at the Met on Monday, October 29, playing Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. The ticket line for the evening performance began forming at 8:00 a.m. and soon stretched across Thirty-Ninth Street and down Seventh Avenue, wrapping back on Thirty-Eighth to Broadway—around the block. The 3,867 tickets sold out in ten minutes. Morris Gest would later report total revenues of greater than thirty thousand dollars for that one show—obliterating the record (not quite $10,000) Sarah had set in Kansas City in 1906. Inflation aside, the difference was that ticket prices in the Midwest were as low as a dollar, whereas a ticket on Broadway cost ten times as much.

  The audience at Duse’s sellout show included Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, and Hollywood royalty: John Barrymore, finally getting his chance to see her, along with his sister Ethel, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, and Lillian Gish, who insisted on a seat in the wings to be closer to Eleonora. The New York Times reported that “every seat and all the standing-room . . . was filled,” with audience members filing in “three and four deep in the space at the rear of the orchestra seats. . . . More than one hundred and fifty extra seats in the musician’s pit helped take care of the crowd.” It was an audience to give even the world’s greatest living actress stage fright.

  “Duse came onstage,” recalled Gish. “She swayed, as if she were about to faint. Then something mystical took place. There was thundering applause as the audience stood up and sent its strength to her. She absorbed it, seemed to grow taller, and went on to fill that huge theater with magic.”

  Later in the tour, Duse performed Ghosts at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles, where D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation had had its world premiere. “A hush crept over the house as soon as the curtain rose,” wrote Los Angeles Daily Times critic Edwin Schallert. “There was expressed an uncanny feeling that something mysterious and supernatural was about to happen . . . it was as if some legendary being had suddenly assumed form and substance.” The following day’s headline read: GENIUS ENTHRALLS THRONGS WITH HER ‘SUPER-ART.’

  One of the biggest stars in the world was there to see her that evening: Charlie Chaplin. Awestruck, he later wrote:

  Eleonora Duse is the greatest artiste I have ever seen. Her technique is so marvelously finished and complete that it ceases to be a technique. . . . Bernhardt was always studied and more or less artificial. Duse is direct and terrible. . . . [In] the climax . . . Duse sank in to a chair and curled up her body almost like a little child in pain. . . . She lay quietly and almost without moving. Only once through her body ran a sort of shudder of pain like a paroxysm. . . .

  I confess that it drew tears from me. . . . It was the finest thing I have seen on the stage.

  The following month in Detroit, Chaplin’s United Artists partners Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks witnessed Duse’s magic and were left speechless. It was like that everywhere.

  • • •

  On Monday, May 5, 1924, Benito Mussolini dictated the following dispatch to Prince Gelasio Caetani, his ambassador to the United States:

  I request your Excellency to proceed to Pittsburgh in order to pay the homage of the Italian Government to the great actress just departed and to take steps to insure the transportation of the body to Italy.

  Eleonora Duse had passed away in Pennsylvania, her death, like her birth, occurring in a hotel room.

  After Detroit, Duse’s tour had landed in Pittsburgh, where she checked into the stately William Penn Hotel on April 1. She soon changed her accommodations, however, after learning that the Hotel Schenley would be much closer to her theater, the Syria Mosque. Rumors had been circulating about Duse’s faltering health; she kept oxygen tanks in her hotel and dressing rooms. Did she have the stamina to continue?

  On a very rainy April 5, Eleonora and her assistant appeared at the Syria Mosque but were met with confusion; the stage door appeared to be locked. It was ironic, since Duse was there to perform a play called La Porta Chiusa (The Closed Door) by Marco Praga. As they waited for the door to be unlocked, the actress’s clothes became drenched, exacerbating her already precarious lung condition. She managed to get through the show that evening, even impressing the local critics—but afterward she would be bedridden for weeks, forced to cancel her next stop in Cleveland.

  She refused to be hospitalized, however; Eleonora had a lifelong fear of hospitals because her mother had died in one. So streams of medics came to her hotel room. “Ah! Asolo, Asolo,” cried Duse between coughs, “how far away you are!” Despite public denials that anything was amiss, her condition worsened. On April 21, at the age of sixty-five, Eleonora Duse died of pneumonia.

  After a small service in a local funeral home, Duse’s body was moved to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, where hundreds of thousands paid their respects at the open casket. “She was my Madonna,” said dancer Isadora Duncan, a lifelong friend, “my Beatrice the most beautiful of all.”

  Duncan had spent the summer of 1913 with Duse, after the tragic loss of both her children in an automobile accident. A bereaved Duncan later recounted that Duse “seemed to take my sorrow to her breast.”

  “I had not been able to bear the society of other people,” Duncan continued, “because they all played the comedy of trying to cheer me with forgetfulness.” Instead of shrinking from the tragedy, Duse encouraged Isadora to express her pain.

  One night, she and Duse put a disc on the gramophone, and Isadora danced for the first time since her loss. Eleonora watched her, choked up with emotion. Afterward, when she went to embrace her, Duse said: “You must return to your art. It is your only salvation.” Heeding the advice of her friend, Isadora went on to create dances in honor of her loss, entitled Mother and Marche Funebre.

  Duncan was hardly the only artist in awe of Duse. Many had fallen under her spell, including poet Sara Teasdale, who composed a series of sonnets to the actress.

  Oh beauty that is filled so full of tears,

  Where every passing anguish left its trace,

  The glory and the sadness of your face,

  Its longing unappeased through all the years.

  In Italy, Gabriele d’Annunzio was grief-stricken. Upon hearing of the death of the woman who had most deeply touched his soul, he wrote the following telegram to Il Duce, who had given him a generous stipend and the title Prince of Montenevoso:

  The tragic destiny of Duse could not have been fulfilled in a more tragic manner.

  Far from Italy, the most Italian of hearts has been stilled. I beg that the beloved remains be brought to Italy at the expense of the State. I am certain that my grief today is shared by all Italians.

  Mussolini heeded the request of the national poet. He sent a wreath to St. Patrick’s Cathedral with the inscription: TO ITALY’S FIRST DAUGHTER. Then the body was shipped to Naples on the Duilio, a luxury ocean liner. After an official state funeral in Rome, Eleonora’s coffin was laid to rest in Asolo, where she had lived her final years. She was buried with a mystical glass prism, given to her by her spiritual mentor Arrigo Boito.

  • • •

  The day after Duse’s death, the New York Times published the following editorial:

  The last to linger of the great histrionic group of the 1890s, Eleonora Duse has left the least legible character on the page of theatrical history, and the record that will soonest fade.

  Bernhardt had said as much in her 1907 memoir. And she was prescient. Today, few but committed stage actors are aware of Duse, while Bernhardt remains, to some extent, a household name. The revision of history began, perhaps, with their flip-flopped epitaphs: Duse was posthumously labeled “histrionic,” while Bernhardt, according to the Los Angeles Times, was “subtle even in death.”

  The media mix-up was probably not an accident. Sarah had worked the press her entire career, taking great pains to fashion herself as an icon, while Duse had shunned publicity and disappeared into her roles. “The actor vanishes without a trace,” she had once said—which is not to suggest that she had no lasting
impact. Both Duse and Bernhardt changed theater forever in very different ways.

  According to the U.S. Census, the number of women who declared “actress” as their profession rose sixfold, from 780 to 4,652, in the decade of 1870 to 1880. By 1910 that number was 15,432, with 25 new women on the stage for every new man. This huge jump had much to do with the influence of Bernhardt and Duse, who had demonstrated how women could obtain wealth, mobility, and social power through their dominance in the theater. Bernhardt had been the vanguard here.

  As early biographer Madame Berton attests: “It was Sarah Bernhardt, more than anyone else . . . who transformed, with her magic touch, the theatre in France from the superior, intellectual toy of the cultured few to the amusement and recreation of the many.”

  The “amusement and recreation” of the crowd was never a goal for Eleonora, who was obsessed with one thing more than anything else: the Truth, something that held only passing interest for her French rival. Indeed, when the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris held a retrospective in honor of Sarah Bernhardt some seventy-five years after her death, they used the subtitle The Divine Liar.

  As the Guardian reported in its recent review of the retrospective: “Bernhardt lied herself into being, and in so doing made herself captivating.”

  EPILOGUE

  Future cornerstones of American acting, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg watched in 1923 as Eleonora Duse took the New York stage. Both were twenty-two at the time. Though Strasberg, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, would one day be known as the Father of Method Acting, he had yet to act professionally. Stella, on the other hand, had begun acting at the age of four, pushed onto the boards prematurely, like Duse, by her father, Jacob Adler, who had fled Russia in 1883 after a ban on Yiddish theater. The Adlers eventually settled in Lower Manhattan, where they founded the Independent Yiddish Art Company.

  Stella felt a kinship with Duse. She, too, had been robbed of her childhood, had wed impulsively and early, later leaving her husband to raise her only child, a girl. And she, too, desired to act with all her soul. But Adler had few female mentors: Seeing Duse that night was a revelation, an emancipation, similar to what Eleonora had experienced when she first saw Bernhardt in her Turin theater four decades before. It was a life-changer for the young ingénues—the experience of seeing these powerful icons of the stage.

  They were in awe of these women. And watching them perform was like a sacrament. Night after night, Sarah Bernhardt would enact a passion play as the “martyr” for all humanity. To see Sarah die—it invariably sold the most tickets—was unforgettable. She met her demise onstage with seizures lasting for minutes at a time, writhing spasms, flails of anguish, and guttural moans. Always, the house would erupt in ovation; women dabbed their eyes, men stiffened their lips. It was catharsis. Sarah had died for all of us—and, as the curtain rose again for the calls, the diva was “reborn” in all her radiance.

  Duse’s liturgy was different. It began with the mysterious communion between the actress and her audience. “There was something that seemed like a ray that came from her and captured the house,” recalled Eva Le Gallienne. Eleonora also “died” on the stage, but it was a quiet death: the dissolution of her ego.

  Within a decade of seeing Duse in New York, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler would team up with Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and an assortment of other theatrical renegades to form the Group Theater, which would become the most influential theater collective in American history. But Adler and Strasberg would have a falling-out, feuding—like Duse and Bernhardt—over a fundamental difference in technique.

  The debate about what constitutes “true acting” continues to this day—a conflict going back to Quintilian, through Diderot and William Archer, between “actors” and “indicators.” There is an apocryphal story of a conversation that took place on the set of Marathon Man, between Sir Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, who was in a state, apparently, about how to “feel” the torture scene. He didn’t know how to be in the moment; Hoffman didn’t have references from his own life that he could bring to bear, something that was essential for method acting. How was he going to pull it off? Sir Laurence gave the young American a quizzical look and simply said: “My dear boy, it’s called acting.” What a revelation. When you can’t feel it, fake it. This was blasphemy to the purists.

  Central to The Method—as taught by Lee Strasberg to students including Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Steve McQueen, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Jon Voight, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Anne Bancroft, and Faye Dunaway, among others—was the use of Affective Memory, a technique adapted from Konstantin Stanislavski in which actors recall emotionally charged moments from the past to summon the feelings they need onstage.

  Stella had no quibble with an actor drawing from his past; this was a component of what she did in preparation for a part, along with detailed research on the time and place in which the play was set. Duse also thought about the connections between her own emotional life and that of the character. It was all part of their rehearsal process. What struck Adler as absurd was to bring that process onto the stage. It was “schizophrenic,” she contended, to split your focus between autobiographical references and the thoughts and memories of your character.

  Carting Affective Memory onto the stage was, for Adler, a clumsy overlay that took away from the magic of a spontaneous performance—precisely the reason Duse had rejected poses the century before. For Stella, as for Duse, performance was all about one thing—imagination.

  Both actresses would prepare exhaustively for a role, marking up their scripts with notes on every page. They would use all their creative faculties to get inside the character’s head—to know her thoughts, her history, her feelings—so that, come the actual performance, they could let go of their preparations and be entirely free. Though both Duse and Adler had strikingly similar processes in the way they approached their work, they had come upon their approaches independent of each other. But when Stella saw Eleonora’s spontaneous freedom on the stage, she felt vindicated—and emboldened.

  “You act with your soul,” Adler would later tell her students. “That’s why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.”

  Adler devised all sorts of provocative exercises to stir her students’ imaginations. As Broadway star Elaine Stritch recalled:

  One morning she said, “You are all chickens. And in your chicken coop there is a radio. Over the radio comes news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I want you all to react as chickens.” All the bad actors began running around the auditorium going “bwak buk buk”—hollering chicken noises because Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

  One fellow just sat in the corner and calmly laid an egg. Stella, intrigued, asked him why he had made that choice. His reply: “I’m a chicken, what do I know about bombs?” That was Marlon Brando, who instantly became her favorite student—and she, his guru.

  “I no longer know how to read or to study or to think or to memorize without inviting Stella into my consciousness,” Brando admitted in 1990. “She taught me everything.”

  After Brando’s explosive debut in A Streetcar Named Desire, everyone wanted to be like him—raw, unpredictable, impulsive. As James Franco wrote in a 2014 op-ed for the New York Times: “Brando’s performances revolutionized American acting precisely because he didn’t seem to be ‘performing,’ in the sense that he wasn’t putting something on as much as he was being.” He could have been describing Eleonora Duse.

  In seeking to imitate Brando, many, if not most, American actors in the decades that followed would assimilate the Duse-Adler lineage. Any actor who walks the stage today and creates, by ignoring the audience, the illusion of a Fourth Wall is part of the Duse legacy. But even film actors—especially film actors—must act from within. It’s all in the eyes, as they say—particularly if those eyes take up a thirty-foot screen. When asked the secret to her screen acting (which resulted in ten Academy Award nominations), Bette Davis is quoted
as having said: “Talk softly, think loudly.” Duse could not have said it better.

  Duse never codified her technique. She never taught, per se, except for a select few she mentored privately, like Eva Le Gallienne and Alice Nielsen. If Eleonora’s legacy could be contained in a single maxim, it would be to be bold and take risks—something she had learned from Bernhardt.

  Both actresses would have agreed with Stanislavski’s greatest instructions: “Create your own method. Don’t depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.”

  Five-year-old Eleonora stood proudly in the one dress she owned for this 1863 photograph with her mother, Angelica, who recognized her gifts early and supported them.

  Youle’s indifference to her daughter’s aspirations tormented Sarah and contributed to a lifelong battle with stage fright.

  While Eleonora was crushed by her mother’s premature death, Sarah, seen here at age twenty in an 1864 photograph by Felix Nadar, could not wait to leave home and start life on her own.

  Both Bernhardt and Duse had their dresses made by Paris designer Jean-Philippe Worth. Sarah adored wearing elaborate gowns onstage, which in her mind added to the theatricality and importance of her roles.

  For Eleonora, the stuffy costumes she was forced to wear as a young ingénue were stifling. As her fame grew, she abandoned corsets and gowns in favor of free-flowing garments that allowed her to move without inhibition onstage.

  Sarah played male parts—so-called “trouser” roles—throughout her career, from the breakout role that launched her (Zanetto in Le Passant, upper left), to Hamlet (upper right), Pierrot (lower left), and Daniel, a doomed morphine addict (lower right), which was the last role she ever played in a theater.