Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  As expected, the Comédie-Française terminated Sarah’s contract. In ten years they’d be begging for her return.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was ironic and, frankly, depressing—the only way for twenty-two-year-old Sarah to move out from under her mother’s roof was to enter the family business. This was a price for independence she was willing to pay. And Sarah did nothing in half measures.

  Before long, the consummate actress had attracted a group of regular patrons who were prominent, wealthy, and well connected. She slept with an occasional amant de coeur as well, such as her first true love, a handsome young hussar and nobleman, Le Comte de Kératry.

  Then there was a broken heart and a pregnancy. Sarah, foolishly, had allowed herself to develop feelings for an aristocratic client: Prince de Ligne from Belgium. Worldly and charming, he had wooed Sarah with whispers of running away from his family and eloping with her. She had believed him. But when she became pregnant, the prince cruelly severed ties with Sarah and refused to recognize the child. The boy, Maurice, was born in 1864.

  Quand même, thought Sarah—I was raised a bastard and managed to hold my head up high. I shall raise a bastard, too.

  And she did so with zeal, doting on the child as her own mother never had on her. Years later, when twentysomething Maurice announced his engagement to a Polish princess, his estranged father hinted that he might be willing to recognize Maurice as his heir. But, with Sarah world-famous by then, Maurice told the Prince de Ligne he preferred to remain a “Bernhardt.”

  • • •

  Some years after being fired from the Comédie-Française, Sarah began performing with the rival Théâtre Odéon—she got the job herself this time, not through her mother’s patrons. The Odéon was a more popular theater intended for the masses. It was here, in 1869, that Sarah had her first big success—but not as a prima donna. She landed the part of Zanetto in Le Passant by François Coppée, the first of many men she would play onstage. It was a tradition that went back centuries: women putting on pants to portray youthful men. These so-called trouser roles culminated for Sarah in 1899 with the most famous male role of all: Hamlet.

  Le Passant was simple by comparison: a one-act play set during the Renaissance in the Tuscan countryside, about an encounter between Sylvia, an aging courtesan, and Zanetto, a wandering minstrel. These plays are known, in theater parlance, as “two-handers,” meaning Sarah would share the stage with only one other actor.

  Le Passant’s playwright, François Coppée, had limited expectations: “My little work had already given me great pleasure in creating it,” he wrote in his journal. “I awaited its public presentation without illusions and without impatience.” But when the curtain rose, he became intrigued.

  Bernhardt had never before performed a male role, and she acted the part with gusto. The playwright was effusive, declaring, “What profound emotion, what intoxication, what joy, what madness of youth in my Zanetto!” He was captivated by Bernhardt’s passion and charisma.

  The passion was genuine; Sarah loved the part. “It’s not that I prefer male roles,” she later told a journalist, “it’s that I prefer male minds.” Bernhardt liked being direct, not coy.

  “It was in this role that the poetic talent of M’lle Bernhardt was first made manifest,” wrote Edgar L. Wakeman, an American author and journalist on a European tour, who published his observations in a syndicated column entitled “Wakeman’s Wanderings.” What impressed Wakeman most about Sarah was “the witching music of her ‘voice of gold.’ ”

  He was not alone. Critics and theatergoers alike would soon become enamored of Sarah’s melodic voice—she had worked tirelessly at it. Bernhardt seemed to weave music out of written words—especially so here, for Coppée’s play had been composed in verse, and gentle music underscored the major speeches. Over time, many of Sarah’s more elaborate productions would involve a style the French dubbed “mélodrame,” drama enhanced by a melodic orchestral accompaniment that gave the audience added emotional cues. Even in modest plays, Sarah had a way of turning the most mundane lines into poetry. From her turn in Le Passant, it became clear that Sarah was destined for stardom. Wrote Wakeman: “The piece and its interpreters were lauded to the skies.”

  As a “man,” Sarah became the most-talked-about actress in Paris. She’d play the part 140 times, culminating in a command performance at the Tuileries Palace for the emperor himself. Through her mother’s circles, Sarah had already met Napoleon III, who likely did not remember their first encounter, but he was quite taken with her onstage. They are rumored, at some point, to have met in the bedroom.

  Like other loyal subjects in the Second Empire, Sarah was a Bonapartist through and through, which is why she stood solidly by her emperor when he declared war, in 1870, on Prussia, a military powerhouse. It wasn’t long before the Prussian artillery had Paris surrounded. The Prussian cannons, cast in steel, not bronze, could deliver larger projectiles over a far greater range.

  But the Prussians were not the only enemy. The French were also fighting among themselves in a de facto civil war—on the one side, the followers of the Bonaparte emperor, on the other, the Republicans, Victor Hugo among them, who called for an end to the monarchy and restoration of the short-lived liberties that had been gained in the revolution.

  On September 2, 1870, when Napoleon III was taken prisoner in the Battle of Sedan, the Republicans seized Paris to form a “Government of National Defense.” But the new leaders could do nothing to halt the Prussians.

  Ahead of the imminent siege of the French capital, Sarah secured safe passage for her mother, sisters, baby son, and aunt, and dispatched the family to Holland. But she wouldn’t hear of joining them herself. The new darling of Paris was about to take on her most dramatic role. As the rockets soared overhead, Sarah did something that would forever endear her to the French public—with the blessing of its owners, she turned the Théâtre Odéon into a field hospital.

  Caring for wounded soldiers was not an act; it took tremendous energy, perseverance, and courage. Although not a trained nurse, Sarah tended with great attention to the men, who poured in by the cartload. One miserable fellow she remembered vividly. “I raised my lantern to look at his face,” she wrote in her memoir, “and found that his ear and a part of his jaw had been blown off . . . a wild look in his eyes.” Sarah gave him brandy through a straw. There was little else she could do. They saw men like this every hour.

  Fortunately, she was not alone, for Bernhardt had used her notoriety to attract numerous volunteers to the cause. As the prototype celebrity do-gooder, “[Sarah] set every woman and child of her acquaintance to work, making bandages and folding lint,” recalled Madame Pierre Berton, who visited with her mother during the siege and who would one day write a biography of Bernhardt. The experience left quite an impression on the wide-eyed child. “How I loved Sarah Bernhardt in those days!” she remembered later as Sarah’s friend and confidante. “She seemed to me to be glory personified.”

  In a time of rationing and shortages, Sarah did all she could to secure the requisite supplies, using her celebrity wherever possible, including the time she paid a personal visit to the prefect of police—he turned out to be none other than the Comte de Kératry, her first love. They had had a brief but passionate affair eight years prior, when Sarah was eighteen.

  “I never thought I was coming to see you!” she exclaimed. “I am delighted, for you will let me have everything I ask for.”

  The comte laughed good-naturedly as Sarah pulled out her shopping list and demanded bread, milk, meat, vegetables, sugar, wine, brandy, potatoes, eggs, and coffee. Not only would her former lover accommodate all of Sarah’s requests, she also walked away with his personal overcoat. That winter was so cold, people burned their furniture to stay warm.

  • • •

  Bernhardt had been a Bonapartist, but the demise of the Second Empire did little to hurt her career prospects. Sarah’s wartime heroics had earned her the nation’s es
teem, and she would soon join forces, both onstage and in bed, with another national hero—the bearlike Victor Hugo, France’s poet emeritus returning from exile, his beard now white. Despite an almost forty-three-year difference in age, it was a natural partnership: “The Goddess and The Genius” was how they became known. She stood in awe of him, the first man perhaps to affect her so. He recognized the raw talent in her and a stage presence like no other. It was the meeting of icons—one aging, one in the making.

  Anticipation mounted as the public prepared for their 1879 revival of Ruy Blas, a controversial play by Hugo about a commoner who falls in love with a royal—it had been banned, along with many others, under Bonaparte for its reformist themes.

  Madame Pierre Berton set the opening night scene: “Every seat had been taken days in advance, and hundreds crowded in to the space behind the back rows and stood up throughout the entire performance.” The giddy Republican audience had not seen anything by Hugo for nearly two decades. Sarah took the stage with a vengeance. By the final curtain they were enthralled, summoning her to twenty curtain calls.

  “She often told me,” continued Berton, “that never again in her long career did she act so well as she did that night.” Sarah was using poses, to be sure, but in her singular interpretations of them, she invoked the archetype—a queen like no other. Sarah had connected deeply to the play’s ancient themes.

  Afterward, Hugo rushed to meet Sarah backstage, dropped to his knee, and kissed her hand saying, “Thank you! Thank you!” Even the critics were giddy. As Francisque Sarcey wrote: “No role was ever better adapted to Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt’s talents than that of this melancholy queen.”

  At age thirty-five, Sarah was now the queen of the Parisian stage. The public had fallen in love with her. It was time to take the world.

  • • •

  Later that year, Sarah traveled to London as a reinstated member of the Comédie-Française; the company had entreated her return. Sarah insisted on receiving Sociétaire status, meaning tenured for life. Though Madame Nathalie and other senior members of the company balked, they had no choice. Sarah was the one the British impresarios wanted—without Sarah there was no tour.

  British papers had been covering Bernhardt’s exploits since her career-launching turn as Zanetto ten years prior, and London critics, who often reviewed Parisian plays, had lauded Sarah’s recent collaboration with Victor Hugo. So the public had been primed for her arrival.

  “A sight I shall never forget was our landing at Folkestone,” recalled Sarah. “There were thousands of people there, and it was the first time I had ever heard the cry of ‘Vive Sarah Bernhardt!’ ” Among the throng of admirers was the young Oscar Wilde, who would one day write Salomé with Sarah in mind. “Hip, hip, hurrah!” he shouted. “A cheer for Sarah Bernhardt!”

  The highlight of the London engagement was to be Phèdre, the classic French tragedy by Racine, written in the seventeenth century and considered, in stature, akin to Hamlet. It had previously been performed in London by France’s iconic Rachel, an international star of the prior generation, who, like Sarah, was Jewish and had had a tryst with Napoleon III. Comparisons between the two would be inevitable.

  Rachel’s 1843 version of the play had been stripped down to its essentials—spartan sets, an economy of gestures—that helped it to achieve a feeling of authenticity. According to the French writer and critic Théophile Gautier, when Sarah’s predecessor performed the part, “she was not Mademoiselle Rachel, but Phèdre, herself, the illusion lasting every minute.”

  Theatergoers across Europe had been seduced by Rachel, one of a select group of nineteenth-century actors who had attempted, like Duse, to act more naturally onstage. But Rachel’s impact was cut short by her premature death at age thirty-six of tuberculosis. Nonetheless, Sarah was feeling the pressure to match the star’s success in her first performance before a foreign audience.

  “Don’t force your voice,” counseled François Regnier, the company’s administrator. “Push the role toward suffering and not towards fury; that will be better for everyone, even Racine.” Sarah would be speaking French, of course. London theatergoers were accustomed to watching plays in foreign languages; a scene-by-scene synopsis was often part of the playbill.

  As she waited in the wings for her entrance, Sarah began to sense the telltale gnawing in her belly: stage fright, after all these years—but a specific sort, “not the kind that paralyzes, but the kind that drives one wild.” It was turmoil that could be harnessed in service of her character—perfect, in fact, for the tortured Phèdre in her forbidden lust for her stepson, Hippolyte, played by Jean Mounet-Sully, a senior member of the Comédie-Française.

  Something happened to Sarah that night—similar, perhaps, to Duse’s epiphany in Verona. “The gods were with me,” Sarah would later recall. She had transmuted her fear into the fuel that carried her performance; the experience left her spent. “When the curtain fell, Mounet carried my inert body to my dressing room.”

  Oscar Wilde was so moved, he composed a sonnet for Sarah, which begins:

  How vain and dull this common world must seem /

  To such a One as thou.

  Wilde would later jokingly declare that Bernhardt was one of three women he would actually consider marrying (the other two being actress Lillie Langtry and Her Majesty Queen Victoria).

  Sarah had gone to England as a celebrity; she returned to France a legend. She would soon quit the Comédie-Française to form her own touring company and travel across Europe and America, taking her son with her to every stop. Though not the first to do so—Rachel had toured overseas, as well as Italy’s Adelaide Ristori, and others—Bernhardt raised international stardom to another order of magnitude. Rachel and Ristori were names known to sophisticated theatergoers, but Bernhardt was a name known to everyone. She had moved from the theater pages to the front page.

  The terms for Sarah’s first American tour in 1880 were unprecedented—$1,000 per show, plus 50 percent of all receipts over $4,000. This tour—the first of nine she would do in America—increased Sarah’s net worth by 900,000 francs, equivalent to $5 million in today’s dollars. She was not yet forty.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Five months after her epiphany as Juliet, Duse, still fourteen, found herself back in Verona—though this occasion was not so jubilant. Instead of playing Juliet, she was performing in one of the many third-rate melodramas that dominated the Duse Company’s repertoire—variations of the same basic plots and crude translations, often, of popular French plays. There were too many to count. The company rotated plays nightly in hopes of attracting repeat customers.

  Learning a new piece was not difficult for Eleonora, since they had a prompter on the stage with them, as did most Italian companies at the time. The public had grown accustomed to hearing the prompter’s disembodied voice, often louder than the actors themselves, feeding lines so the cast rarely had to be off book. Actors needed only to assume the posture and wait for the line.

  Eleonora had been promoted recently to prima donna, but under unfortunate circumstances: her mother, who had suffered from tuberculosis for some years, had been hospitalized in Ancona, on the Adriatic coast. As the lead actress in the company, Duse was now expected to learn quickly the roles of Pia de Tolommei, La trovatella di Santa Maria, Gaspara Stampa, and countless other women. Though barely an adolescent, she was playing full-grown adults.

  Her young voice was now a problem, “still feeble when I forced it in big speeches,” she later recalled, sometimes so much so that “someone behind the scenes hissed at me that I should speak louder, still louder.” Her limited life lessons raised issues, too. “There were so many things that my young, inexperienced soul did not know or understand,” she later confessed “and I do not know what woeful instinct led me to find the proper accent and shrieks that were needed to shake the miserable crowd from which we expected our daily bread.”

  Eleonora prayed that her mother might return to the company. Then ca
me the telegram, dated September 15, 1873, and delivered backstage to Eleonora between acts on the rickety platform in Verona. It read simply:

  MAMMA MORTA.

  Eleonora was devastated. She kept her distance from her fellow actors at her mother’s funeral, many of whom did not know quite what to make of the broody girl gazing numbly at the coffin. Unable to afford a mourning dress, she had sewn a fold of black crepe onto the bodice of the one dress she owned, which brought frowns from other actresses in the troupe. “Why don’t you cry,” asked one. “Why don’t you dress yourself in mourning,” demanded another. “If my mother died, I would sell myself to dress in proper mourning clothes.”

  If Duse’s understatement of emotion had a beginning, it was here—at the burial of her mother. Others trumpeted their grief; Duse contained it.

  • • •

  The company fell apart after the loss of Angelica. Eleonora sank into a depression, as did her father. They called it la smara, a Venetian malaise that descends on you like a black fog; Eleonora would struggle with it for life. While others went their separate ways, father and daughter stuck together, joining a series of touring companies. She was the bigger draw, although demoted to seconda donna. Her father became promiscuo (utility player) or generico primario (general, background actor). They changed companies practically every season between 1875 and 1878.

  No one was overly impressed by Eleonora’s talent. Luigi Pezzana, a popular, older actor who had performed with the famed tragedienne Adelaide Ristori, is reported to have yelled during a rehearsal, “What makes you think you’re an actress?” Her silent pauses and natural delivery were driving him mad. Pezzana was not alone in his disdain for her style; several colleagues even told her to quit. The public, too, didn’t understand Eleonora’s style; she was sometimes booed offstage. How jarring it must have been to have one actress attempting a subtle performance while others were still gesticulating.