by Peter Rader
My beloved Docteur Dieu: I beg you to take this letter seriously. On February seventh my leg will have been in a plaster cast for six months. I was suffering more than ever and asked the surgeon, Denucé, to remove it.
Dr. Denucé had not heeded Sarah’s wishes, and now the situation had grown intolerable.
Listen to me, my adored friend. I beg you, cut off my leg a little above the knee. Do not protest. I have perhaps ten or fifteen years left. Why condemn me to constant suffering? . . . With a well-constructed wooden leg I’ll be able to give poetry readings and even make lecture tours.
Bernhardt, in a rare moment of weakness, was vastly underestimating herself.
On the day of the surgery, Sarah reported to the operating theater at ten sharp, and seemed very calm. She sent for her son, Maurice, who came to embrace her. “Au revoir, my beloved, my Maurice,” she said, “au revoir.”
Mademoiselle Coignt, the nurse anesthesiologist, couldn’t believe her ears. “It was the same voice I had heard in La Tosca, La Dame aux camélias, L’Aiglon,” she marveled. “It was a great joy for me to be so close to the actress, who, one might say, has ruled the universe through her art.”
Then the Divine One turned to Dr. Denucé, who had at last agreed to perform the operation, and said: “My darling, give me a kiss.”
To the star-struck anesthesiologist, she said, “Mademoiselle, I’m in your hands. Promise you’ll really put me to sleep. Let’s go, quickly, quickly.”
Mademoiselle Coignt fumbled nervously with the gas mask. Bernhardt had some trouble, at first, with the ether. She complained, then finally muttered: “Ah! That’s good, It’s working, working. I’m going, going, going. I’m gone.”
Mademoiselle Coignt shook her head in wonder. “In all of this one could not help but see the tragedienne putting on an act. I felt I was at the theater.”
One never knew with Sarah.
• • •
The twentysomething Béatrix Dussane was a rising star in Paris’s fringe theater scene when she received word in 1916 that Sarah Bernhardt wished to speak with her. Béatrix was part of the counterculture; she detested Sarah Bernhardt and what she stood for. “Our generation reacted badly, perhaps unjustly, to her fame,” she explained in her book, Queens of the Theatre. “It seemed monstrous somehow for anyone to have been idolized for so long a time. ‘Why doesn’t she retire?’ we’d say.”
Béatrix was part of the Théâtre des Armées, a ragtag group of actors who traveled to the front lines, putting on comedic skits in the muddy encampments so that bloody and exhausted men could remember how to smile. When she heard that the legendary Sarah Bernhardt wanted to volunteer, Béatrix had scoffed at first in derision. The idea of “The Divine One” joining the scrappy Théâtre des Armées was laughable. “The front was not pleasurable or brilliant, it was exhausting,” explained Béatrix, even for young people. “Many of us, in fact, left a part of our young health behind.”
It could never work with an amputee: “How could she be transported from barn to barn, from makeshift stages to army trucks?” It was impossible given “her bouquets, her furs, her sovereign luxury”—all the things she had never done without. “She would fall ill the first day, and that would be the end of the tour,” Béatrix avowed. But her companions outvoted her; they saw some possibility in combining the old and the new.
Béatrix was dispatched to meet with Sarah. She recalled the meeting thus:
I was ushered into her white boudoir. She was seated in the depths of a large armchair . . . with her thousand folds of satin and lace, her rumpled red hair . . . her wrinkles covered with every imaginable kind of makeup. It was upsetting, sad and upsetting. There she was, the great, the radiant Sarah, so small, so weak—a little pile of ashes.
But Bernhardt came to life as the actresses began to converse, rehearse, and order tea. Béatrix was in awe: “Like many before me, I witnessed a miracle . . . the little pile of ashes [began] throwing off sparks . . . [and] an inextinguishable sun burned under the painted, frilled decrepitude of the old actress.”
Ever the patriot, Sarah felt it her duty to support the troops. The Great War had shaken the earth. France alone would lose a million men.
Bernhardt was accepted into the Théâtre des Armées, which valiantly set forth into the war zone. They would be playing a repertoire of patriotic scenes, along with some comedic ones—anything to lift the spirits of the shell-shocked infantrymen.
Sarah and Béatrix—the lone females—became roommates during the nights they slept near the front. “I helped her dress,” recalled the younger actress. “She went from chair to table leaning on my arm, or hopping on her poor, seventy-two-year-old leg, saying with that infectious laugh of hers: ‘Look, I’m just like a guinea-hen.’ The way she ignored her handicap was beautiful—a victory of the spirit over the failing flesh.”
On the day of their first performance, the troubadours entered an army camp near Commercy in northeastern France to bewildered stares. The sight must have been almost comical: Sarah in her floor-length tiger skin coat, carried by attendants like a Byzantine empress in a sedan chair. She disliked using a prosthetic.
“She smiles at every one who looks at her, so they don’t dare pity her,” Béatrix reminisced in admiration. Bernhardt had never liked playing the victim. And Sarah, like so many of the soldiers in these camps, was now an invalid—there were far too many of them, not enough beds in the hospitals back home. One might have thought she’d be a hero to these men. But when Sarah was deposited on the rickety stage, the reception was chilly:
We waited for an ovation but it was long in coming, and even then there were only a few scattered bravos. . . . Illustrious names meant nothing to these sturdy farm boys. Sarah sensed this and shuddered. Then she began. Her every word was vibrant, delivered in a pounding rhythm that mounted like a charge into battle. . . . With her final cry “To Arms,” the band attacked “La Marseillaise” and three thousand young Frenchmen rose to their feet to cheer.
Sarah had roused the entire camp.
• • •
From sparks that still smoldered within the ashes, the great fire returned. It was like a resurrection: Sarah, back on the boards performing the most famous plays in her repertoire, from Camille to Hamlet. No prosthetic, no crutches, not even a cane. Bernhardt, instead, arranged the onstage furniture so that there would always be places to sit or something to lean on—a chaise here, a settee there, and a few hops in between. Sarah was indefatigable.
The writer Colette remembered a morning that they had tea. “Don’t I make coffee every bit as well as Catulle Mendès,” asked Sarah, referring to their mutual friend, the iconoclastic writer of La Vierge d’Avila. As the Divine One stretched forth her hand to serve her young caller, Colette took note of Sarah’s
delicate faded hand offering a full cup; the cornflower blue of her eyes, so young, caught in a web of wrinkles; the laughing interrogative coquetry of the turn of her head. And that indomitable, endless desire to please, to please again, to please even unto the gates of death.
Who could resist her?
• • •
No sooner had she lost part of her leg than Bernhardt booked passage across the Atlantic for her third “Farewell Tour” of the United States. She adored the Americans. “I am sure the Americans must be great lovers,” she had once said. “They are so strong, so primitive, and so childish in their ardor.”
Bernhardt’s motives were partly diplomatic. The Great War raged in Europe, yet America remained neutral. Sarah had decided to use her tour as a propaganda campaign to rally support for the war. A wave of patriotic fervor had been aroused in Bernhardt during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870; now nearly a half century later she was again using her celebrity in service to the French cause. But her motivation, in both cases, transcended nationalism—it was humanitarian.
Almost fifty years earlier, Sarah had witnessed the final breaths of soldiers in makeshift hospital beds at the Théâtre Odéon. This time she’d
been to the front lines, seeing the glazed eyes up close, the bleeding amputees, too many to count. Sarah was determined to do her part to end the Great War, and that meant getting Americans to care about it. Woodrow Wilson had won the presidency in 1916 on the slogan of “He Kept Us Out of War.” One year later, Bernhardt was running her own opposition campaign, giving speeches at every stop of her tour. It was unprecedented for a nonpolitician—let alone an actress. As The Nation put it:
Her dedication to this cause (and her sheer endurance) forged what we still assume to be the dimensions of the celebrity’s role in society. . . . The notion of the actor as our social conscience, above politics but on the side of the people, originated with Bernhardt.
Sarah’s program at every stop of her American tour was always the same. She began with her most patriotic number, which she had written herself: Aux champs d’honneur (To the Battlefield). As the curtains rose, Sarah appeared seated, dressed as a wounded soldier in a torn and bloodied uniform. Her right leg was clearly amputated—a bandaged stump for all to see. The effect was chillingly realistic, and made for fantastic theater.
“Her makeup was dead white,” remembered Margaret Mower, a bilingual actress who accompanied Bernhardt on the tour as an interpreter. “Her red mouth was wide and her eyes were deeply shadowed with blue kohl. She wore puttees and soldiers’ shoes. The effect was miraculously youthful in a macabre, melodramatic way.”
Bernhardt always triumphed in that patriotic opening monologue. “I was bowled over,” said Sir John Gielgud, who saw her at age thirteen at London’s Coliseum, following Sarah’s American tour. “She appeared lying on a tree trunk from which she pulled out as if by miracle the French tricolour, before declaiming a long patriotic poem in French.”
You didn’t need to know the language to be swept up by Sarah’s performance. As a newspaper in Philadelphia wrote: “She is not in need of the consideration of having been the greatest actress of a former generation. She does not evoke admiration because of her many recent sufferings but purely and simply because she is the greatest living actress.”
For act two of Bernhardt’s American tour, the wounded soldier transformed into the splendid Marguerite Gautier, a courtesan of means. But Bernhardt had a severe limitation in the role. Because of her handicap, she performed the chosen scene on a bed, doing all of her acting with her arms and hands, making her antiquated style even more antiquated.
It was one thing to cheer an injured soldier, quite another to embrace an overacting, one-legged courtesan. Audiences snickered, as did her employees. “Sarah’s actors were respectful only in her presence,” reported Mower. “Behind her back they callously referred to her as the old madwoman, or simply as the old lady.”
Reviewers, like The American Spectator founder George Jean Nathan, were vicious:
To contend that Madame Sarah Bernhardt is still a great actress is to permit chivalry to obscure criticism. . . . The public goes to the theatre less to venerate Sarah Bernhardt the actress than to see Sarah Bernhardt the freak.
It is unknown whether Sarah read this particular review, but she would have likely laughed it off, at least externally. Another American critic had used the same verbiage to describe her 1900 portrayal of Hamlet, recommending the play “to the particular attention of persons who are interested in the study of freaks.” Bernhardt had seen far worse. Vitriolic diatribes against Sarah had been printed throughout her career, and she, unlike the obsessive Duse, ignored them.
• • •
Sarah sailed back to France in the fall of 1918, just before Armistice Day. But while the fighting had stopped, there was another danger—influenza. Sarah lost a dear friend that winter to the highly contagious disease: playwright Edmond Rostand. The influenza pandemic would eventually take one hundred million lives, 5 percent of the world’s population.
As Europe began to rebuild, great changes swept across the continent. With Queen Victoria gone and Victorianism, too, it was no longer taboo for Sarah, an illegitimate former courtesan, to be hosted at Windsor Palace. In 1920, she gave a command performance for Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, who was astonished at the septuagenarian’s stamina and advised her to take more rest. Sarah’s reply: “Your Majesty, I shall die on the stage: ’tis my battlefield.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They lined the sidewalk, five rows deep, waiting below the balcony for the news. It came at eight on the evening of March 26, 1923. The shutters opened, a doctor leaned out and said gravely to the crowd: “Sarah Bernhardt is dead.”
There was a gasp. Reporters rushed to their motorcars. Papers across the globe, for weeks now, had been running headlines on Bernhardt’s deteriorating health, just as they had covered each paltry detail of a kidney operation Sarah had undergone in 1917.
Her son, Maurice, and his family were present with her at the time of her death, along with Sarah’s lifelong friend, painter Louise Abbéma. Earlier in the day, the diva had noticed the crowd outside her window getting larger. “Are they journalists?” she had asked Maurice.
“Some of them are,” he had replied.
“Then I’ll keep them dangling,” Sarah declared with a fiendish smile. “They tortured me all my life, now it’s my turn.” Those were the last words she spoke.
News of Sarah’s death traveled quickly. That evening, all actors in the French capital paused their performances to observe two minutes of silence in her honor. Nearly a million people would line the streets for Bernhardt’s funeral procession, which was filmed as a Pathé newsreel and distributed around the world. The Los Angeles Times, like papers everywhere, ran the story on page one:
There is but one sentence today on the lips of Paris—“Bernhardt is dead.” It has been uttered alike by concierges and Cabinet ministers, midinettes and princesses. One hears it spoken softly in cafes and whispered in churches. . . .
Her body lay in state for public viewing for three days; twenty gendarmes were needed to keep the crowd flowing.
Sarah had been working until the end, having recently signed a contract with Hollywood for another film: The Fortune Teller. Since Bernhardt’s health prevented travel, they had brought the production to her—turning Sarah’s attic atelier into a motion picture studio, with cameras, scaffolding, and harsh lights that made Sarah blink so often she had required dark sunglasses between takes, along with eye drops.
Mary Marquet, a young actress who was part of the cast, remembered sadly: “There was nothing left to her.” Wasted, with dull eyes, huddled in her chair, the seventy-eight-year-old Sarah clutched a small monkey, part of the scene. Marquet, a onetime student of Sarah’s, watched nervously as the director leaned forward in his chair and called: “Camera!”
All at once, Marquet witnessed, like actress Béatrix Dussane and writer Colette, the miracle of Sarah igniting herself from within: “Her face lit up, her neck grew longer, her eyes shone . . . [and] her voice . . . was young and strong.”
But Sarah’s ability for resurrection had its limits. Bernhardt declined in the ensuing weeks; she wasn’t able to finish the film. And then, suddenly, she was gone.
The obituaries were hagiographic, even revisionist in their exaltations. FACE OF GREAT ACTRESS SUBTLE EVEN IN DEATH, was the Los Angeles Times headline. Sarah had done many things in her seventy-eight years of exuberant life—“subtle” was not one of them.
• • •
Eleonora Duse read the news with great sadness.
In 1909, three years after the letter to Suzanne Desprès and desiring a simpler life without suitcases, Eleonora had indeed retired from the stage and settled into a modest house in the town of Asolo, not far from her Venetian roots. Her abode, which stands to this day, formed part of the medieval city walls with spectacular vistas across the hills. When Eleonora opened the shutters of her bedroom window, she had a view of Mount Grappa. “I put two pots of flowers on the windowsill. Here’s an altar,” wrote Duse, who rarely traveled anymore, leading an almost cloistered life. But the news of Sarah’s
death reached everywhere, even Asolo. It came as a surprise to Eleonora. She had always wondered if Sarah, with her inexhaustible spirit, might have outlived her.
Despite their rivalry, despite their differences, Bernhardt had always been the vanguard for Duse, inspiring her until the last bow. Duse recalled the time their paths had first crossed all those years ago at the Teatro Carignano in Turin, when Eleonora was an impressionable ingénue and Bernhardt was already a legend. Eleonora was dazzled by Sarah at the time; she couldn’t help but feel a deep admiration for this woman of profound inner strength, fully in control of her own destiny. And Duse’s awe of that part of Sarah never diminished. Eleonora had recently been bowled over again when, just six months prior, Sarah had given her final stage performance at age seventy-seven, again in Turin.
The play had been Louis Verneuil’s Daniel, about a sculptor addicted to morphine—in a few years, this role would become Sir John Gielgud’s film debut.
“Now that the public is willing to accept me as I am,” Bernhardt had told a critic, “I’m going to do new things.” The comment hinted at a deeper truth perhaps: that Bernhardt wanted to be “seen” unvarnished on the stage, like Duse, and be loved for it. So Sarah donned trousers again, pinned up one leg, and took the stage as a jittery dope fiend—influenced no doubt by her late sister and husband, both of whom had died of morphine overdoses.
Eleonora was so impressed that she arranged to have two hundred roses delivered to Sarah’s Turin dressing room. Bernhardt accepted them graciously—but was disappointed that her rival had not come herself.
Eleonora had wished to but felt her health wasn’t up to it. Duse had even fantasized about how the encounter might have gone: “If we had met, she would have nonchalantly said, ‘I lost a leg, and you, what have you lost? And I would have said, ‘a lung.’ ” The divas actually missed each other.