by Peter Rader
I grant that Sarah’s elaborate Mona Lisa smile, with the conscious droop of the eyelashes and the long carmined lips coyly disclosing the brilliant row of teeth, is effective. . . . And it lasts a minute, sometimes longer. But Duse, with a tremor of the lip, which you feel rather than see, and which lasts an instant, touches you straight to the very heart.
There was one moment in Eleonora’s performance that most astonished Shaw:
She began to blush; and in another moment she was conscious of it, and the blush was slowly spreading and deepening until, after a few vain efforts to avert her face or to obstruct his view of it without seeming to do so, she gave up and hid the blush in her hands. . . . After that feat of acting I did not need to be told why Duse does not paint an inch thick.
While Duse had spent years nipping at Sarah’s heels, she had never quite shaken Sarah’s reputation as the preeminent actress of the age—until now. Bernhardt’s miscalculation had been to take her rival head-on, to allow audiences to see the two back-to-back. It was the comparison that ruined Sarah forever in the eyes of George Bernard Shaw, who had seen the future and knew theater would never be the same:
I doubt whether any of us realized, after Madame Bernhardt’s very clever performance as Magda on Monday night, that there was room in the nature of things for its annihilation within forty-eight hours by so comparatively quiet a talent as Duse’s. And yet annihilation is the only word for it.
The verdict was unequivocal: “I should say without qualification,” Shaw wrote, “that [Duse’s] is the best modern acting I have ever seen.”
• • •
Sarah wasn’t nearly as done for as some believed. Shaw’s scathing indictment notwithstanding, Sarah had a number of distinguished supporters in the London press. One of them, twenty-two-year-old Max Beerbohm, who had succeeded Shaw as theater critic of the Saturday Review, had written a piece that was in complete opposition to Shaw’s. For Beerbohm, it was Bernhardt who possessed “majesty, awe, and beauty,” while Duse’s performances were all the same, “so many large vehicles for expression of the absolute self.” He found her work indulgent and repetitive.
That these two opposing views appeared the same week in competing papers conveys a sense of the intensity of the debate. There was bias, certainly, on both sides. It’s possible that Shaw, a longtime bachelor, was intimidated by Sarah’s overt sensuality. As biographers Gold and Fizdale speculate: “One suspects that the man who made love chiefly through the mails could not find attraction in a woman who, had she been Eve, might have devoured the snake along with the apple.”
For Beerbohm, it was Duse’s quiet power that proved off-putting: “My prevailing impression is of a great egoistic force.” American writers had used that phrase, too, in describing Duse; her quiet strength onstage seemed to intimidate certain types of men like Beerbohm, who went on to express the sexism typical of the era: “In a man, I should admire this tremendous egoism very much indeed. In a woman, it only makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it. I resent it.” Not so much egoism, perhaps, as the aura of one who radiates an unwavering certainty that her compass is true. Bernhardt projected that same quality, of course, while steering her performance in the opposite direction.
The polarity in the reviews by Shaw and Beerbohm underscored what no one could deny: Eleonora and Sarah asked theatergoers to profess profoundly different faiths. “Art is Bernhardt’s dissipation, a sort of Bacchic orgy,” wrote American author and critic Willa Cather. “It is Duse’s consecration, her religion, her martyrdom.”
Put in dualistic terms, Sarah became a kind of priestess of materialism and sensual gratification. Her sets and costumes radiated opulence; she was paid in gold and seemed surrounded by it.
For Duse, redemption lay in other realms. The material world was a place of deep suffering—so said the First Noble Truth of Buddhism and other mystery schools to which Eleonora was increasingly drawn. It was in transcendence of materialism and communion with The Grace that Duse found her peace. That’s what she offered to her audience on a good night: a secret doorway into a space where we glimpse ourselves in the other, and realize we are not alone. This, for Duse, was theater’s true purpose.
• • •
Bernhardt arrived in New York harbor aboard the steamer La Champagne in late January 1896, brooding about something that had happened a few months prior, when Duse had blithely poached her longtime manager, José Schürmann, one of the best impresarios in the business. Schürmann had thought little of Eleonora early in her career; now he wanted to take Duse on another grand tour of America. Far from discouraged, however, Bernhardt booked her own tour of the United States, scheduled to arrive in New York one month before the Italian. It was London redux.
From the dock, Sarah was chauffeured to the Hoffman House, where apartments had been prepared for her on the second floor. More determined than ever, she got to work—beginning, naturally, with the press.
“The great French actress looks in decidedly better health than she did the last time she came to this country,” wrote one reporter. “She also looks a few years younger.”
Sarah, deeply satisfied, joked flirtatiously with the pressman: “If I came again five years hence, I would be too young . . . Americans would not recognize me.”
Bernhardt, as always, gave them plenty of copy, chatting about her love of bicycling, and offering the requisite update on her menagerie of animals. But there was something new in her stump speech this time: Bernhardt had started talking to reporters about her art. And the words she used sounded remarkably like Duse’s:
I like all the characters that I play, but I do love Camille. I can cry every time I play the role. Oh, I feel the character so much in the pathetic parts of it that after a while I fancy I am participating in a drama in real life. You know, there are many such scenes in real life.
Then the reporter noted “a suggestion of a sigh,” hinting perhaps at memories of her own sordid youth; Sarah was working him like a sorceress.
America, like England, remained deeply divided about the Duse-Bernhardt rivalry, and so, in a calculated move, Bernhardt decided to feature a new play, which she had never performed in the country, called Izeyl and Prince Siddhartha.
Like Camille, Izeyl is a courtesan—but hers is a tale of sin to salvation, set in the Himalayas five centuries before Christ, where, after attempting unsuccessfully to seduce the royal heir, Izeyl surrenders to Lord Buddha and becomes his spiritual disciple. It was a role more suited to the mystical Duse, which is certainly one of the reasons Sarah chose it. If Bernhardt had been on the defensive since the showdown in London, she showed no signs of it. Not only had Bernhardt once again upstaged Duse by arriving one month earlier in New York, but she was also attacking Duse at her core in a tale about the mysteries of the Orient. But it also played just fine in the Christian West, for, beneath the exotic veil, the biblical reference was clear: Sarah was Magdalene to the Hindu Christ. The part required reverence, devotion, even stillness; Bernhardt somehow pulled it off. In fact, the New York Times found her performance exalted:
She is still the greatest of living actresses, as powerful in great climaxes as ever, as strong and fascinating in repose, as strikingly original, and as wonderfully graceful in her gestures and poses.
When Sarah first premiered the part in Paris two years earlier, the newspaper had been equally ecstatic, calling Izeyl “the greatest of her many triumphs,” and adding: “The role takes her to the extreme limit of every shading of her art; an art so perfect that it seems living.” The words may well have been written to describe a performance by Duse. Coming from the New York Times—not known to dispense superlatives—there’s only one explanation: Bernhardt must have been deepening as an actress.
She was also picking more timely plays. Eastern mysticism had come into vogue after Swami Vivekananda from Bengal made headlines for his 1893 address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Like Siddhartha, Vivekananda had renounced great wealth in order to lead a spiri
tual life. An enlightened man, he was also, like Sarah, gifted with great charisma.
Swami Vivekananda had brought the crowd to its feet by opening his talk with: “Brothers and Sisters of America!” After the ovation, Vivekananda went on to introduce the United States to yoga—the idea of attaining a “union” between body and soul. It was akin to Duse’s state of Grace.
One night while performing Izeyl, Sarah became intrigued by a turbaned gentleman in her audience who turned out to be none other than Vivekananda. She told her stage manager to invite the swami backstage.
Vivekananda was entranced by going behind the scenes to reveal the artifice of the theater. It recalled a central idea in Vedic philosophy: we live in a world of maya, a cosmic trick or illusion, in which we are but players in a spiritual pageant of karma in service of a greater purpose.
The diva, charmed by the swami, invited him to a dinner party she was hosting after the show, where Sarah would facilitate one of the great meetings of the minds between East and West, by introducing the swami to another notable guest: the brilliant physicist Nikola Tesla. They had crossed paths once before at the World Parliament of Religions, but this evening in 1896 gave the two luminaries a chance to exchange ideas.
Translations of sacred Sanskrit texts had been in circulation for decades, and Tesla was well versed in them. He knew of Prana, the energy field, according to Vedic cosmology, in and around creation, which can be accessed through yogic breathing and meditation practices. Tesla had wild dreams of building a machine to harness this Prana as an infinite source of energy for all of mankind. Vivekananda might have laughed—such a machine already existed: the human mind.
One wonders if Sarah, having heard that her rival was drawn to just this type of mysticism, was intrigued. Was Prana just another word for Duse’s Grace? Was this the secret to the new style?
• • •
When Schürmann learned of Sarah’s plan to upstage their arrival on American shores, his delight only increased. He knew the battle of the divas would boost ticket sales. He also made the calculation to bypass Broadway and start Duse’s tour in the nation’s capital, where Eleonora had never been; and she liked its Jeffersonian architecture far more than the skyscrapers of Manhattan. President Grover Cleveland and the first lady attended Eleonora’s premiere, along with a number of dignitaries, a sizeable Italian contingent among them.
When Bernhardt had thrown down the initial glove with Izeyl—a Duse vehicle if there ever were one—she was saying, effectively, if she can do it, so can I. Now in her Washington debut before the president and first lady of the United States, Duse returned the favor by performing the French play she had hijacked from Bernhardt: Camille.
Neither diva had any intention of backing down. Duse had been making the play her own for over a decade now, and, apparently, she brought her A game on this presidential soiree. “The almost hypnotic power of the remarkable actress eclipses everything,” wrote the Washington Post. “She is at times a tiger, a panther, a snake fascinating its victim, and the eyes are compelled to follow her every step.” Animal magnetism was a quality associated more with Bernhardt than with Duse, which makes one wonder if Eleonora’s stage presence hadn’t taken on a new dimension, influenced perhaps by her rival. Whatever fueled it, Eleonora’s performance so mesmerized President Cleveland that he returned for every one of her shows. According to theater historian Thomas Bogar:
The moment the curtain descended each night [the president] initiated the applause and signaled for the audience to join in. On the second night, presumably with Frances’ blessing, he filled Duse’s dressing room with sprays of white roses and chrysanthemums. At the end of the week he hosted a White House reception in her honor.
It was a first. No actor—and certainly no actress—had ever been invited to the White House. Schürmann felt a deep sense of satisfaction—the Washington ploy had worked brilliantly. From a publicity point of view, its worth was beyond measure, with Duse vaulting from the theater pages to page one of every major paper in America.
• • •
As she sailed back to Europe in June, after five long months in America, Sarah began plotting new ways to upstage her rival. Night after night, she had dutifully put on her makeup and taken the stage, playing twice the number of shows as Duse. But Eleonora’s Camille had consistently drawn greater revenue due to higher ticket prices and, yes, higher demand. It made Bernhardt want to rethink her Camille entirely—which is precisely what she did. Never one to back down from a fight, Sarah returned to Paris and mounted another run of Camille, with significant changes in the way she staged the play.
In prior productions, Sarah had made Camille’s boudoir and costumes as lavish as possible to showcase the extravagant lifestyles and latest fashions of the Parisian rich and famous—which is to say, of Bernhardt herself. Part of the evening’s entertainment would be a fashion show of Sarah’s most ostentatious gowns; she used to have fun blurring the line between her offstage persona and Camille.
The 1896 production was far more realistic, stripping down the sets and employing authentic period costumes from forty years prior, when the original story was set. Bernhardt chose simple, flowing garments for Camille, just as Duse had. A newspaper clipping wrote that they gave her “the sad and innocent look of a street-girl.”
For someone who relished appearing in public like an empress, “street-girl” was an enormous shift. There can be no doubt about it—she was trying to be like Duse. How humbling that must have been for the Divine One, now fighting daily to keep her increasingly fickle audience—an audience that showed up to this staging of Camille for the novelty of it. (The production also benefited from even more media attention than usual, for this run marked Sarah’s thousandth performance in the role.) But in attempting to sway with the times, was Sarah going against her own fundamental instincts? Or had those instincts changed? Impressive either way for a woman of fifty-two, who’d been wowing them for three decades in sequins and jewels.
Sarah had begun spending time at mortuaries, too, to help her work onstage. So many of Bernhardt’s plays ended with the heroine’s tragic death; so she studied the expressions of the corpses on their slabs and the limpness of their bodies, taking mental notes, sometimes sketching even. If Sarah was going to die onstage, she wanted it to be real.
• • •
In late 1896, her fellow actors in Paris decided to host an event that would become “Sarah Bernhardt Day,” for despite her many laurels overseas, Sarah had yet to be honored at home. Bernhardt accepted the honor with great dignity, writing an open letter to Le Figaro:
I have ardently longed to climb to the top-most pinnacle of my art. I have not yet reached it. By far the larger part of my life is behind me, but what does that matter? . . . The hours that have flown away with my youth have left me courageous and cheerful, for my goal is unchanged, and I am marching towards it.
After the recent defeats by Duse, Sarah showed a newfound humility, evident in the gracious, albeit Duse-like, conclusion to her letter:
French courtesy was never more manifest when—to honor the art of interpretation and raise the interpreter to the level of other creative artists—it chose, as its symbol, a woman.
It was not the first time Sarah had made the front page, and it certainly would not be the last. Festivities on “Sarah Bernhardt Day” included a “Hymn to Sarah Bernhardt” performed by a choir, along with five sonnets written in her honor and read aloud. Sarah was deeply moved by the tribute. According to one guest, “She stood with heaving breast. . . . Her trembling lips tried to shape themselves into a smile, but the tears gathered in her eyes. Her hands were clasped over her heart as if to keep it from bursting.”
Of the five sonnets, the most powerful was that composed by not-quite-thirty Edmond Rostand, who would soon write the brilliant Cyrano de Bergerac, and then collaborate with Sarah on his next two plays. He read his sonnet to Sarah like a lover.
. . . In this dim age, you light a torch for u
s:
You speak verse; die for love; expiring stretch
Arms of pure dreams out, and then arms of flesh.
Your Phèdre turns us all incestuous.
Avid for pain, you win hearts. We have seen
Flowing down your cheeks––for ah, you weep!––
Tears of our souls’ inmost sufferings . . .
But, Sarah, you will know, during a scene
You’ve sometimes felt the touch of Shakespeare’s lips
Bestow a furtive kiss upon your rings.
Testimonials like this would inspire the ever-intrepid Sarah, in a few short years, to stage Hamlet. She had played Ophelia once before, but this time, she would be wearing a black doublet as the male lead.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“As if she were preparing for a new role, Duse imagined her love affair with d’Annunzio before she lived it,” wrote biographer Helen Sheehy. Though five years Eleonora’s junior, the warrior-poet Gabriele d’Annunzio was already a national icon. His mythic name had first captivated Duse’s attention: Gabriel of the Annunciation, as in the Archangel who delivers to Mary the news that Divinity would soon manifest within her. This idea of indwelling Divinity would become something sacred between the two lovers: d’Annunzio saw The Grace within Duse and she would recognize the same spark inside him. But while this spiritual union was significant, their relationship was primarily sexual. “My soul is no longer impatient to go beyond my body,” Duse admitted. “I have found harmony.”
Duse was deeply in love with d’Annunzio when she sailed home from America in 1896. They had been lovers for over a year, and after months of separation, she was eager to see him. Duse did not expect monogamy from d’Annunzio, a proud hedonist. He had other women—courtesans, prostitutes—but no one she knew. So Eleonora could never have imagined, while she was overseas, that her lover, Gabriele d’Annunzio, had secretly visited the Paris boudoir of Sarah Bernhardt.