by Peter Rader
Eleonora walked the stage without makeup so as to not obscure her facial expressions and to allow for greater subtlety in her performance.
Duse was particularly interested in moments of stillness onstage, the pauses between the lines, and the places where she could be silent for long intervals, inviting the audience to read her mind.
Eleonora Duse by Michele Gordigiani, c.1885.
Eleonora Duse by John Singer Sargent, 1893.
Sarah Bernhardt by Georges Clairin, 1871.
The divas were captured by numerous artists. Paintings of Duse tended to be moody and impressionistic; those of Sarah, opulent and lush.
Illustration of Eleonora in her dressing room by Ilya Repin.
A sketch by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec of Sarah as Phèdre, restrained by her nurse as she finds herself unable to control her lust for Hippolytus, her stepson.
Mixed media portrait of a wistful Duse by Franz von Lenbach.
Dynamic charcoal portrait of Bernhardt by Giovanni Boldini.
Drawings revealed the essence of each actress. Duse seemed chronically fatigued, often depressed and sickly; Bernhardt appeared indefatigable. Many sketches were done while they were touring, which Duse found exhausting. For Sarah, it was exhilarating.
Sarah became a gifted artist in her own right, studying sculpture at age twenty-five under Roland Mathieu-Meusnier and Emilio Franceschi. Her evocative work was exhibited multiple times in the prestigious Paris Salon, as well as the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
Après la tempête (After the Storm), 1876, depicting a heartbroken mother holding the corpse of her drowned son, in the vein of Michelangelo’s Pietà.
Funerary bust for the coffin of Sarah’s husband, Aristides Damala, who died of a morphine overdose in 1889.
Aristides “Jacques” Damala, a midlevel diplomat from Greece, became an actor after meeting Sarah. He was wooden onstage, but apparently quite skilled in the bedroom. (Pictured below with French actress Jane Hading.)
Warrior-poet Gabriele d’Annunzio (above and below) boasted that he had slept with one thousand women—the same number of conquests claimed by Bernhardt.
Both Bernhardt and Duse fell in love with men who were cruel to them, both hedonists and serial philanderers.
Eleonora suffered postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, Enrichetta, whom she raised as a single mom, as did Sarah (pictured above) with her son, Maurice. Duse was largely an absentee mother, while Bernhardt took her bastard son everywhere with her.
Duse left Enrichetta’s father, Tebaldo Checchi, after four years of marriage, and was constantly surrounded by male admirers. (Pictured below with girlfriend Matilde Serao.)
While Eleonora was very private about her interest in mysticism, Sarah flaunted and exaggerated her fascination with the occult, claiming to sleep in a coffin to better understand death and dying and wearing a hat adorned with a stuffed bat.
The role of Cleopatra, based on adaptations or translations of Shakespeare, became de rigueur for nineteenth-century actresses of all nationalities. Duse (above) played it in 1887, Bernhardt in 1890.
While Eleonora shunned publicity, Sarah invented the culture of celebrity, the first actress to lend her name to a series of product endorsements.
Despite being press shy, Duse became the first woman to grace the cover of Time magazine in 1923.
Modernist Henrik Ibsen (left) was Duse’s favorite playwright. Bernhardt preferred Victorien Sardou (right), who had one foot in the past. Yet even when his plays were grand and operatic, he did his best to encourage Sarah to embrace a more natural style of acting.
Though Bernhardt clung to traditional poses, she attempted to elevate them to high art.
When Duse retired temporarily from the stage in 1909, it allowed her to spend more time with friends and family. She entrusted her finances to a German banker friend, Robi Mendelssohn (pictured in center, gazing at Duse). They had had an affair—even though he was married to a good friend, Giulietta Gordigiani (pictured to the right of Robi). Giulietta and Robi felt so close to Duse that they named their two daughters (pictured on chair and with Duse) Eleonora and Angelica, after Duse’s mother.
After the Great War, the deutsche mark collapsed and Duse lost all her savings. Forced out of retirement, she turned to cinema, which was still in its infancy. In 1916, she was cast to costar in Cenere (Ashes) opposite Febo Mari, who also directed the film. Duse asked him to keep her face in shadows—more cinematic, she thought.
Sarah starred in a number of films based on her most famous roles, such as Camille and Hamlet—but they were essentially filmed versions of the plays, fairly crude and static. Then, in 1923, Bernhardt was offered the lead in La Voyante (The Fortune Teller). Too old to travel at seventy-eight, she insisted they shoot the film in her own apartment.
Bernhardt had to wear dark sunglasses between takes to protect her eyes from the harsh lights, and was forced to act alongside a trained monkey. But Sarah died of kidney failure halfway through the shoot and the movie was never finished.
Nearly a million people lined the streets for Bernhardt’s funeral procession, which was filmed as a Pathé newsreel and distributed around the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I believe writers are conduits; and inspiration arrives from a realm that has many names. I like to think of it as the Source, and I am deeply grateful for its presence.
This story first came to my attention through Michelle Weissman, a writer, actress, and spiritualist who had studied with Stella Adler. We wrote it together in the form of a screenplay, initially. Subsequently, to deepen the narrative, I decided to explore the subject in book form. I am greatly indebted to Michelle for her blessing in this endeavor.
I owe special thanks to Daniel Manning, who studied theater at New York University; he did essential research for me on the historical feud between actors and “indicators.” Thanks to Nina Luzzatto Gardner for leading me to Lavinia Pelosi, who did indispensible research for me in Italy.
Profound thanks to my agents, David Kuhn, Becky Sweren, and William LoTurco, for getting this into the hands of Priscilla Painton, a truly gifted editor, and her assistant, Megan Hogan, who were instrumental in shepherding this manuscript to publication. Thank you to my lawyer, Debby Klein, who read an early draft of this story in script form and has been a consistent supporter.
I feel deep gratitude toward my parents. Among the many gifts they bestowed was our childhood in Italy and, later, London. Thank you to my sister, Claudia, who was an ardent champion and early editor of this manuscript. Our connection to Italy runs deep, and it led me to my wife, Paola, the most profound of blessings. Paola has championed me through thick and thin. Thank you, Paola. And to our beautiful sons, Matteo and Luca—I love you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
©PAOLA DI FLORIO
Peter Rader, who resides in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons, began his writing career as a screenwriter. His first script, Waterworld, was released by Universal in 1995, starring Kevin Costner. Rader went on to develop projects with industry leaders such as Steven Spielberg, John Davis, and Dino De Laurentiis.
His first book, Mike Wallace: A Life, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2012.
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NOTES
PROLOGUE
“always swooned on the left”: Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 230.
“By her extraordinary power of swooning”: Jean Cocteau, quoted by Leigh Woods in New Theatre Quarterly 37, no. 10, vol. 10, part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 22.
“too American”: Henry James, quoted in Robert Gottlieb, Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 81.
“Sarah Bernhardt . . . is eminently a Russian princess”: Jules Lemaître quoted by Robert Gottlieb, Sarah, 118–19.
“the player must always divide his attention”: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rules for Actors (Frankfurt: 1803), 40.
“It would be hard to imagine”: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, The Divine Sarah (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 138.
“If the actor were full, really full”: Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. Walter Herries Pollock (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), 38.
“to speak and not declaim”: Karl Mantzius (authorized translation by Louise von Cossel), A History of Theatrical Art in Ancient and Modern Times, Volume V, Great Actors of the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth & Co., 1909), 245.
“Quintilian . . . is very explicit”: William Archer, Masks or Faces?: A Study in the Psychology of Acting (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888), 42–43.
CHAPTER ONE
“She did not choose to be an actress”: Eva Le Gallienne, The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleonora Duse (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 26.
“Inanimate objects ‘in their silence’ ”: Helen Sheehy, Eleonora Duse: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 12.
“She learned, early and without metaphor”: William Weaver, Duse: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 17–18.
“Disheveled, giggling and shouting”: Duse, Frammento autobiografico (unpublished, unfinished memoir), printed in Bibliotecca Teatrale, July–September 1996, 121–56.
“She was my first friend”: Le Gallienne, The Mystic in the Theatre, 28.
“a ticking petticoat”: Duse, Frammento autobiografico.
“The gossip of the Nurse”: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Il fuoco (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1900), 319.
“my eyes would travel to the long grasses”: Ibid., 448.
“When I heard Romeo”: Ibid., 447.
“We crossed a bridge”: Ibid., 451.
“She had received her revelation”: Le Gallienne, The Mystic in the Theatre, 16.
CHAPTER TWO
“One does not know today”: Maxime Du Camp quoted by Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 92.
“My mother was fond of traveling”: Sarah Bernhardt, My Double Life: Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt (London: William Heinemann, 1907), 1.
“I was thrown, all smoking”: Ibid., 2.
“her golden hair and her eyes”: Ibid.
“One afternoon the janitor’s wife returned”: Madame Pierre Berton, as told to Basil Swoon, Sarah Bernhardt as I Knew Her: The Memoirs of Madame Pierre Berton (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1923), 37.
“her single-minded will”: Ibid.
“One day I was playing”: Bernhardt, My Double Life, 4.
“I will pass over these two years”: Ibid., 5.
“gave herself airs”: Ibid., 7.
“these gentlemen were to make arrangements”: Ibid.
“I would thrill in every fiber”: Ibid., 10.
“My part involved some pretty realistic acting”: Berton, Sarah Bernhardt as I Knew Her, 45.
“head in the bedclothes, like an ostrich”: Ibid., 48–49.
“The idea that my wishes”: Bernhardt, My Double Life, 11.
“the most gentle and smiling face”: Ibid., 17.
“We certainly thought about you, dear”: Ibid., 29.
“it was now felt necessary to pamper and spoil me”: Ibid., 56.
“Well, you have completely failed”: Ibid., 89.
“most envied of actresses”: Ibid., 57.
“The very fat and very solemn”: Ibid., 101.
CHAPTER THREE
“My little work had already given me great pleasure”: François Coppée, Theatre Magazine, vol. 8, 1908.
“It’s not that I prefer male roles”: Sarah Bernhardt, quoted in Gottlieb, Sarah, 142.
“the poetic talent of M’lle Bernhardt”: Edgar Wakeman, “Wakeman’s Wanderings,” syndicated column, February 1869.
“I raised my lantern to look at his face”: Bernhardt, My Double Life, 184.
“She seemed to me to be glory personified”: Berton, Sarah Bernhardt as I Knew Her, 140.
“I never thought I was coming to see you!”: Bernhardt, My Double Life, 162.
“Every seat had been taken”: Berton, Sarah Bernhardt as I Knew Her, 154.
“She often told me”: Ibid.
“melancholy queen”: Gottlieb, Sarah, 61.
“A sight I shall never forget”: Bernhardt, My Double Life, 297.
“she was not Mademoiselle Rachel, but Phèdre, herself”: Théophile Gautier quoted in John Sayer, Jean Racine: Life and Legend (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 279.
“Don’t force your voice”: Ibid., Jean Racine, 275.
“not the kind that paralyzes”: Gold and Fizdale, The Divine Sarah, 150.
“The gods were with me”: Ibid.
CHAPTER FOUR
“still feeble when I forced it in big speeches”: d’Annunzio, Il fuoco, 307–8.
“Here was a young woman”: Guido Noccioli, Duse on Tour: Guido Noccioli’s Diaries, 1906–07 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1982), 3.
“her way of acting is the truest and most natural”: L’arte drammatica, May 27, 1878.
“It was because I needed love!”: Henry Russell, The Passing Show (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926), 93.
“element of worship”: Le Gallienne, The Mystic in the Theatre, 32.
“Save me from the solitude of my silent room”: Sheehy, Eleonora Duse, 34.
“seeing her so alone”: Weaver, Duse, 32–33.
“What can humanly be done to make a woman happy”: Ibid., 33.
“How much whispered slander and open ridicule”: Ibid., 56.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Bernhardt prided herself on her ability”: Berton, Sarah Bernhardt as I Knew Her, 245.
“People spoke only of her in town”: Jean Huret interview, May 24, 1887, quoted in Sheehy, Eleonora Duse, 46.
“I went every night and cried”: Weaver, Duse, 35.
“a dark young girl”: Camillo Antona-Traversi, Eleonora Duse: sua vita, sua gloria, suo martirio (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1926), 35–36.
“A woman had achieved all that!”: Mario Fratti, Eleonora Duse (New York: Breakthrough Press, 1967), 25.
“They did not interfere with me after that”: Le Gallienne, The Mystic in the Theatre, 36.
“I’d like a sea journey”: Sheehy, Eleonora Duse, 69.
“I use everything that I pick up in my memory”: Ibid., 53.
“You can well understand how her heart was beating”: letter from Primoli to Dumas, Jan. 4, 1885, published in Fortnightly Review, June 1900.
“with all her maladies of hysteria, anemia and neurosis”: Claude Schumacher (editor), Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre 1850–1918 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 442.
“mysterious . . . sympathetic communication”: Corriere della Sera, May 5, 1884.
“I will make Art, always”: Eleonora Duse letter to D’Arcais, May 15, 1884.
“Il était beau”: Le Gallienne, The Mystic in the Theatre, 39.
“I felt small and helpless”: Ibid., 38.
“There before those footlights”: Weaver, Duse, 53.
“Dumas made Denise”: Sheehy, Eleonora Duse, 71.
CHAPTER SIX
“this ancient Greek god”: See Dean Kalimniou, “Toy Boyz,” Diatribe, October 27, 2008, diatribe
-column.blogspot.com/2008/10/toy-boyz.html.
“I am going to die”: Bodeen DeWitt, Ladies of the Footlights (Pasadena, CA: Logan Printing & Binding, 1937), 80.
“We ought to hate very rarely”: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 22, 1877, 23.
“enchantment smothered in artifice”: Anton Chekhov, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), excerpted: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/chekhov-undiscovered.html?mcubz=1.
“to me more a symbol, an ideal”: Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 280.
“She conducts business”: La Chronique Parisienne, Oct. 31, 1884.
“attendants, guardians, eunuchs”: New York Times, January 19, 1885.
“the greatest achievement”: Perrin is quoted by Félix Duquesnel in “A Propos de Théodora,” Le Théâtre, February 1902, 3.
“Théodora is the most beautiful”: Ibid.
“The press is unanimous”: http://lafayette.org.uk/theodora_lit.html.