by Peter Rader
There was an apparent “selflessness” with which Duse took the stage that got misconstrued by some of her local admirers. For certain men, Duse’s art seemed to align perfectly with the Russian concept of zhenstvenost—an idealized notion of femininity that required women to be passively subservient in both public and private life so as to maintain the integrity of the family and the nation. Something about the way Duse behaved in the presence of her male costar prompted a Russian reviewer to write: “Duse devotes herself to men with the sincerity and heartfelt conviction of her whole feminine essence.”
True, in all of her performances, Eleonora’s commitment was absolute—but it was a commitment to her own role, to The Grace, to the women she hoped to channel, not to any man. Certain Russians knew exactly what she was doing. When the Duse Company moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow later that spring, her talent was beheld by a man who would go on to influence generations of actors: Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of “method acting.”
Actors had an even lower status in Russia than in the rest of Europe—until recently they had been serfs, quite literally the property of the nobility. Born into one of the wealthiest families in Russia, Stanislavski, like Eleonora, was determined to elevate the profession to an art. He pioneered “living the part,” staying in character for days at a time and going out in public disguised, for example, as a tramp or a drunk. “When you play a good man, try to find out where he is bad,” he once advised an actor, “and when you play a villain, try to find where he is good.” This became known as Stanislavski’s Principle of Opposites, a technique for creating multidimensional characters.
Eleonora gave nine performances in Moscow over several weeks in May 1891, and Stanislavski attended every one, along with several of his best students, who were riveted by her nuanced performances. Each moment seemed like a spontaneous creation, unpremeditated and unrehearsed. On a different night, she might play the same line in an entirely different way. And it was clear she knew how to create the space between the lines: the pauses, the glances, the character’s inner thoughts, which seemed almost audible.
Then there was the novel concept of the Fourth Wall, an invisible barrier between Eleonora and her audience, which made her appear to be unaware of anyone but the actors on the stage. It was revolutionary.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Bernhardts had finally arrived.
Sarah’s dilettante son, Maurice, had wed a princess from Poland, and now there was a royal heir. Sarah doted on her new granddaughter for exactly two seasons. Then in 1891—the same year that Duse was in Russia—Bernhardt set off for a tour of her own: but west, not east. She was scheduled to open on Broadway.
Sarah was not the first grandmother to headline an American tour, and she would not be the last—the Italian Adelaide Ristori acted well into her sixties, England’s Ellen Terry had a career spanning seven decades. But these women were by far the exception. Most actresses “past their prime” were shunned by managers because of their diminished drawing power.
Sarah knew that fame was elusive and worked daily to stay relevant, both on the stage and off. She courted the press at every opportunity with tales of her exotic, over-the-top life, prompting the New York Times to print: “To hear Mme. Bernhardt tell of her tour is like hearing a French comedy.” The enchanted journalist concluded: “She enters into the spirit of each recital with the eagerness of a child, and as she talks [she] sometimes breaks into quaint English, which makes her story all the more piquant.”
Bernhardt had equal fervor on the boards. In her indomitable style, she had recently played a teenager when she took the stage in 1890 as Joan of Arc and brought down the house as inquisitors demanded that she state her age.
“Nineteen,” declared Sarah, winking conspiratorially at the delighted crowd. But Bernhardt was not ageless; and she injured herself during Joan of Arc by falling repeatedly to her knees, as called for in the script. Her right knee became so inflamed that she was ordered to two months of bed rest—a near impossibility for the mercurial Sarah, who routinely ignored doctors’ orders. She chose, instead, to go on tour.
Bernhardt was well aware of Duse by now. La Dame de Challant, the play she had selected for her 1891 Broadway opening, had been written by Duse’s friend Giuseppe Giacosa, who had composed it in French expressly for Bernhardt. He had hardly kept it a secret from Duse, or the rest of Italy for that matter. In a series of very public lectures before departing with Sarah for America, Giacosa had attacked the Italians for not supporting local playwrights, suggesting he had been given no choice but to fashion his play for a foreign star—an idea that infuriated Duse. Prior to Sarah’s tour, Eleonora had cajoled Giacosa into translating the play into Italian for her; she had tried to upstage Bernhardt’s Broadway premiere by mounting her own Italian production two months earlier.
Duse’s La Signora di Challant opened on October 14, 1891, in Turin, and critics came from all over Italy for the sold-out premiere. The production was an expensive one, with opulent medieval sets reminiscent of Sarah’s productions, quite unlike Eleonora’s usual aesthetic—she seemed to be anticipating how Bernhardt might soon be staging her production on Broadway.
But Duse’s lavish scenery was singled out by critics as “distracting,” and the public had a tepid response. In translating his verse play from French into Italian, Giacosa had reverted to prose—a form more appropriate, he thought, for Eleonora’s modern style. But the play lost its lyricism; Duse’s Challant was a failure.
Bernhardt’s turn came two months later, and she performed it in the Symbolic style—more suited to verse. Sarah had yet to see the new theatrical style—Duse’s verismo—that had everyone talking, and it didn’t particularly faze her just yet. While an increasing number of prominent actors had started to experiment with a more naturalistic style—Stanislavski in Moscow, the American Edwin Booth, the English actress Ellen Terry—Sarah felt it was simply a fad that would come and go. Good acting was a subjective matter, after all, and legions of fans, along with numerous critics, continued to embrace Sarah.
While still “great”—the greatest, in the mind of many—Bernhardt was seldom thought of as a “serious” actress. Ellen Terry had made a career of acting in plays by William Shakespeare; Sarah gravitated toward more commercial fare. Even in weighty roles like Joan of Arc, Sarah might lighten the mood with a wink to the crowd. She relied on sensationalism such as carrying live snakes in her version of Cleopatra, which had been streamlined and heavily abridged.
And yet every time Bernhardt took the stage, she moved people deeply, even with the poses—for the public had been trained for millennia to accept the conventions of stylized acting as true.
“By all means see Sarah Bernhardt as la Comptesse de Challant,” exhorted the New York Times. “Go to medieval Italy by way of the Standard Theatre and see the romance and intrigue of that era illumined by genius. . . . Bernhardt’s acting has never been finer.” The unqualified rave went even further: “No one could ask to see a more exquisite portrayal of the mind distraught than she gives in the short fourth act. The pathos of that cannot be resisted. It leaves the spectator with something very like heartache, and there are tears in his eyes.”
Sarah was still making them weep. Even the men.
• • •
The grand tour made her the wealthiest actress in history. Sarah had insisted on being paid in cash before every performance, and her bags of gold sovereigns became the stuff of legend, appearing in caricatures in newspapers across the world. These cartoons were often anti-Semitic, portraying Bernhardt with a long, hooked nose, greedily hoarding her loot. As always, Sarah took the criticism in stride, even flaunted it. “This cherished blood of Israel that runs in my veins impels me to travel,” she declared to a reporter. “I often take the train or steamer without even asking where I’m going. What does it matter to me?”
This devil-may-care Sarah was irresistible; she never allowed herself to be a victim.
Sarah was fête
d at every port by emperors and kings. And they were not her only admirers—impetuous young men fought duels over her, others wrote sonnets. In Buenos Aires, Bernhardt had amused herself by taking two lovers in their early twenties. “Ah, Sarah! Sarah!” rhapsodized one eighteen-year-old poet. “Sarah is grace, youth, divinity! I am beside myself. My God, what a woman!”
She was showered with gifts. In Argentina, they bequeathed her thirteen thousand acres of land; in Peru, a cartload of guano (more precious, to some, than gold). In Australia, she had picked up a koala, a possum, and a wallaby to add to her growing menagerie, which traveled with her on tour, requiring a full-time zookeeper.
Red carpets met her at every stop, along with cannons, marching bands, and countless renditions of “La Marseillaise.” In Bucharest, a command performance before the queen of Romania was abruptly interrupted because Sarah had reduced the exiled queen of Serbia to convulsive sobs. Such was the Bernhardt effect: fainting women, swooning men. Among the many who idolized her was the young Oscar Wilde.
If every writer has his muse, for Oscar it was Sarah. She represented ideals that were very dear to him: defiance of authority and seizing control of one’s destiny. Whether playing trouser roles, sleeping in a coffin, or having a stuffed bat perched atop her hat, Bernhardt made no attempt to hide her eye-popping self-expression—even in sexual escapades, where she was open to both genders. She had an ongoing affair with the androgynous, suit-wearing artist Louise Abbéma. While the term “bisexual” had been introduced in 1886 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his landmark Psychopathia Sexualis, it was still risqué for Sarah to flaunt her relationship with a woman.
Abbéma painted Sarah on numerous occasions. She was talented, a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon, and one of a handful of female artists from France to have their work on display at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Another was, fittingly, Sarah Bernhardt, who chose to exhibit a bust of her fellow honoree Louise Abbéma. It had been bold enough to sculpt a well-known homosexual in the first place; now choosing to exhibit that bust at a World’s Fair—the most visible place imaginable—was scandalous.
Oscar Wilde, who had been observing Sarah for some time, was now officially enthralled. He had begun thinking about writing a new play attacking the prudishness and repressed sexuality of Victorian London. But Wilde needed a vehicle for his message, and a way to disguise it. He chose the story of Salomé.
Wilde completed his play in the spring of 1892, writing in French expressly for Sarah Bernhardt. He was giddy when the diva, back from her epic tour of the Americas, accepted the part. Sarah relished biblical figures, but it was not to be—at least not in London. The London Examiner of Plays, Edward F. Smyth Pigott, banned Salomé on the grounds of blasphemy, citing an obscure sixteenth-century statute, rarely enforced, that prohibits the representation of biblical characters onstage. In a letter to a colleague, however, he expressed what truly disgusted him:
It is a miracle of impudence . . . [Salomé’s] love turns to fury because John will not let her kiss him on the mouth—and in the last scene, where she brings in his head—if you please—on a “charger”—she does kiss his mouth in a paroxysm of sexual despair. The piece is written in French—half biblical, half pornographic.
Artists like Oscar Wilde were determined to shed light on the sexual hypocrisy of his Victorian times. In 1865, Edouard Manet had famously painted Olympia, a reclining naked prostitute. Exhibited briefly at the Paris Salon, Manet’s painting had caused an uproar. Society was even more repressed across the English Channel, which is what brought about the ban of Wilde’s Salomé.
Undeterred, Oscar and Sarah reconvened in France, where Wilde threatened to exile himself for good. As they began rehearsals for a French production in 1893, the Times of London ran a scathing review of the text, which had been published in England, although not yet performed:
It is an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred.
Yet this production, too, came to an abrupt halt, when Sarah bowed out before the play was ever staged. Though no documentation remains to explain Sarah’s sudden departure, it is possible she decided to distance herself from sensationalistic roles. As the Times had scathingly noted, Salomé was “not ill-suited to the less attractive phases of Mme Bernhardt’s genius.”
In other circumstances, Sarah may well have taken that affront as a challenge. It would have been easy—and likely quite lucrative—for Sarah to have gone ahead with Salomé, a surefire hit, given the titillation surrounding it. But because of Duse and others, Bernhardt had changed; she was tired of simply being a provocateur.
Oscar Wilde, for his part, felt bewildered by the sudden loss of his muse. He returned in disappointment to England, where he would soon be convicted of sodomy. After his prison time, Wilde would attempt to resurrect Salomé with a different actress. “Eleonora Duse is now reading Salomé,” he would write hopefully in 1897 to a friend. “There is a chance of her playing it. She is a fascinating artist, though nothing compared to Sarah.”
Yet, ultimately, both Bernhardt and Duse passed.
• • •
It was almost by chance that Sarah and an obscure Czech illustrator crossed paths; and the encounter would turn both into archetypes of Art Nouveau. His name: Alphonse Mucha.
Mucha worked at a print shop, where he was given a crack, one day, at a Bernhardt poster when a fellow artist got sick. With less than a week, he went to work immediately. The Czech artist had been developing a distinctive style in his illustrations, framing his subjects with wavy architectural curves—the language of a new style that would soon sweep Europe. It would be named “Modernism” in Spain and Britain. In France, they were calling it Art Nouveau.
Art Nouveau was a “total art style,” its adherents professing that art should be a way of life, surrounding us in everything we do—from architecture to utensils, jewelry, furniture, textiles, even lighting. This is the period when Louis Tiffany began producing his distinctive stained glass lamps in New York. In Paris, there would soon be Métro stops with curvaceous metal designs. But it was in graphic design, specifically the collaboration between Bernhardt and Mucha, that Art Nouveau became the fin de siècle rage.
When Alphonse Mucha presented his poster to Sarah in late 1894, it left her breathless. “From now on you will work for me, close to me,” she declared. “I love you already.”
Mucha had made her appear regal, like a goddess—but in a thoroughly modern way. First of all, the layout: he had chosen a very tall vertical rectangle, several meters high by one across, proportions that allowed for a life-sized portrait of Sarah’s full body with space above and below for titles and text. This alone was revolutionary. Posters by Toulouse-Lautrec and others of the time were far squatter rectangles, often horizontal rather than vertical. Then there was the striking line work.
Mucha had employed heavy lines in deep blue to delineate the figure and separate color fields, like the lead between panes of stained glass. Modern printing techniques allowed for a broader range of colors, and Mucha had chosen soft pastel hues, which stood in startling contrast to his deep blue lines.
Sarah was depicted in an exotic Byzantine full-length gown, her costume from the finale of the play Gismonda by Victorien Sardou. Framed in a mosaic arch, she wears a headdress of orchids and holds the frond of a palm. The effect is like a Tarot card—indeed, she is “The Priestess.”
Mucha had captured the beauty and dignity of her stage presence rather than representing her realistic features. It was as modern as Impressionism in its absolute rejection of classical photorealism. And yet there was something deeply romantic about this poster of a full-standing figure placed in a raised shallow alcove like a saint.
Both old and new, it was perfect for Bernhardt. She offered him a five-year contract on the spot. Not only would Mucha design Sarah’s posters, but he would also consult on her sets, costumes, and jewel
ry, and serve as a general artistic adviser for the theater.
Mucha’s Gismonda posters were up all over Paris on the morning of January 1, 1895, and they immediately became objects of desire for collectors, who used clandestine methods to obtain them, either bribing bill stickers or simply going out at night and cutting them down. Though the Art Nouveau craze would last only until 1910, the several dozen posters that Mucha and Bernhardt created together have remained iconic for more than a century, influencing graphic art to this day.
• • •
Poster design was not the only way in which Bernhardt had decided to be bold. She had recently leased her own theater—a rococo gem named the Théâtre de la Renaissance—that would be her new home as producer, director, and star for the next five years. To add gravitas to her endeavor, Sarah made the choice not to fall back on her repertoire of melodramas, but to launch with a classic seventeenth-century play by Racine. She also decided to surround herself with great actors this time, not lesser talents who ran little risk of upstaging her. One of her young costars, Edouard de Max, the son of a Jewish doctor and Romanian princess, would one day be known as “the male Sarah Bernhardt” for his theatricality and powerful impact on the stage.
Sarah asked de Max to play opposite her as Hippolyte in Racine’s Phèdre, the French classic in which she had performed in 1879 as a young ingénue in London with the Comédie-Française, where stage fright had nearly paralyzed her, before helping her pull off a spectacular performance. But would Sarah be able to repeat the triumph fifteen years later?
“Did you ever see such a get-up?” asked one old dowager when Sarah took the stage in Paris as Phèdre in 1894. “She’s too old; she can’t play the part; she ought to have retired ages ago.”
Others felt differently. Marcel Proust would one day memorialize Sarah’s performance as Phèdre in his seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, where the protagonist is floored upon seeing the diva onstage, gushing: