It was exactly 130 years ago this winter that the famous French
diva made her long-awaited appearance in America. Thanks to a
barrage of advance publicity and sulfurous rumors, Americans were
dying to see the wicked Sarah Bernhardt, believed to be a painted
femme fatale who had seduced every crowned head in Europe,
not to mention the pope. Instead, they discovered an elegant young
woman with a thrilling, highly musical voice and polished
stagecraft.
When she finally came to the stage door after the 29 curtain
calls of her opening New York performance, the mob scene was
surreal: jostling, delirious fans tried to touch her, to snip a
lock of her hair or snatch an ostrich plume from her hat. Men
presented their shirt cuffs for her to autograph. Finding her pen
out of ink, a hysterical girl with an autograph book plunged her
teeth into her own wrist and dipped the point in her blood.
Panicked, Sarah beat a retreat back to the theater, where she tore
off her hat and chinchilla cloak, put them on her sister, and sent
her out to impersonate her while she slipped out by another
door.
Americans fell for Sarah and the feeling was mutual. “I adore
this country,” she said, particularly admiring the “graceful
independence” of American women. After her first visit in 1880, she
crisscrossed the land in following years in eight more lengthy
tours. Besides playing big-city theaters, she recited the
alexandrine verse of French classics in huge rural tents, cornstalk
stubble tearing at the frontier women’s Sunday best. At one Texas
stop a cowboy rode up and asked for a seat. None was available
until he pulled his six-shooter. Entering the tent, he drawled in
passing, “Say, what does this Bernhardt gal do anyway, sing or
dance?”
In his timely new biography, Sarah: The Life of Sarah
Bernhardt (Yale University Press, 233 pages, $25), Robert
Gottlieb traces the meteoric, improbable, epic life of the
illegitimate daughter of a high-flying Paris courtesan who became
the most famous actress in theater history. On her American success
Gottlieb quotes expatriate American novelist Henry James, who had
caught her act early on in London and realized he was seeing a
phenomenon more than a mere actress. “I strongly suspect that she
will find a triumphant career in the Western world,” James wrote
presciently. “She is too American not to succeed in America.”
Besides her talent and dramatic technique, what James was
referring to was Sarah’s indomitable will to succeed and her
precocious knack for self-promotion, creating the first
international personality cult. Gottlieb describes the spell she
cast over the great and good of the day: A smitten Mark Twain
contended there were five kinds of actresses: bad, fair, good,
great — “and then there is Sarah Bernhardt”; railway magnate
William Henry Vanderbilt attended every one of her New York
performances one season, weeping openly into a large handkerchief;
Sigmund Freud, who kept a photo of her in his waiting room, fell
for her “[a]fter the first words of her lovely, vibrant voice.” In
Saint Petersburg, where they ran a red carpet over the snow to the
stage door, Czar Alexander III called on her after a command
performance at the Winter Palace. As she was making a deep curtsy,
he stopped her: “No, Madame,” he ordered, “it is I who must bow to
you.” And so he did before his entire court.
It was all enough to make Sarah the most celebrated woman of the
Victorian era besides — and maybe including — Queen Victoria
herself. The Divine, The Eighth Wonder of the World, as she was
often called, was the first to create outsized, mythical,
Beatlesmania stardom. When Variety listed the 100 top showbiz
figures of the 20th century, she was number one as “the first
superstar-diva.”
SARAH BERNARD, as she was initially known, was born in the early
1840s (the official birth records were lost) in Paris, the
illegitimate daughter of a woman of dubious morals from Amsterdam
and an unknown, probably French, father. Pathologically skinny, she
was emotionally unstable and sickly. At 15 she overheard doctors
telling her mother that she had only a few years to live. Death
became an obsession, and she asked for a pretty coffin so she could
get used to it. The resulting rosewood and satin model became one
of the many stage props in her life; countless postcard photos of
her lying in the flower-strewn casket were sold in Europe and
America.
Her mother, Julie, busy with her male patrons, turned her over
to a succession of nurses and boarding schools for the few years of
formal education she received. A high-strung, rebellious enfant
terrible, she seemed fit for nothing but her mother’s
profession until the Duc de Morny, one of Julie’s wealthy lovers
and Emperor Napoléon III’s half brother, suggested sending her to
the Paris Conservatory. When Morny got the teenager a seat at the
Comédie Française, Sarah sobbed uncontrollably at the drama: the
girl who would become the last of the great Romantic actresses was
hooked on the theater.
Gottlieb tells us that she was “a dedicated — some say
obsessive — student” at the Conservatory, then considered the
world’s finest drama school. It was solid training, but mostly a
bore for Sarah, who relied on instinct and raw emotion. Her
trademark became extravagant acting in the grand, three-hanky
style, running the gamut of tigerish passion, melting seduction,
and unbearable sorrow. She didn’t walk across the stage, she glided
as if on little wheels. Descending a spiral staircase she made
magical: “It was as though she remained immobile and the staircase
turned around her,” marveled one critic.
As a young woman she could turn herself into an 80-year-old
crone, simulating blindness by showing only the whites of her eyes.
And she convincingly played the 19-year-old Joan of Arc when she
was 65. Sarah even played some 25 male parts, from Prince Charming
to Cyrano de Bergerac, Judas, and, most controversially, Hamlet.
True to her own character, her Hamlet was resolute and determined.
“All his philosophizing and temporary hesitation does not alter the
basis of his character,” she explained.
Her technique had to be good, for she was no great beauty. In a
day of opulent, Rubensesque women, she was skeletal. She’s so thin
that when she swallows a pill, she looks pregnant, boulevard wits
said. “When she takes a bath, the level of the water goes down,”
went one caricature. But she had what Victor Hugo called a golden
voice. And those startling, enigmatic eyes that, the author writes,
“changed color, from gray to green to blue, depending on her
mood….The effect is mysterious, intense. She looks like no one
else in the world.”
In an age when actress was virtually synonymous with
courtesan/kept woman, Sarah also played that role with panache.
Gottlieb writes that she formed “what might be best described as a
consortium of wealthy and powerful men, who shared her favors
consensually and without rancor.” Her platonic admirers ranged from
writers like Zola, Flaubert, and Oscar Wilde, to statesmen like
Gambetta, the Prince of Wales, U.S. ambassador Myron T. Herrick,
and Theodore Roosevelt.
To be received chez Sarah was to act in a play she herself
staged. In her Paris townhouse her furnishings included a skull on
her desk and an anatomical skeleton named Lazarus, plus the famous
coffin in which, gossips said, she received her lovers. She
welcomed visitors reclining on a cushion-strewn divan on a raised
dais canopied with oriental hangings. Padding around her was a
menagerie that could include her enormous wolfhound Osman, a
friendly lynx on a leash, and a baby tigress named Minette.
BUT SOME OF SARAH’S greatest roles were played in real life.
When Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly sentenced to
Devil’s Island in 1894 on trumped-up, anti-Semitic charges of
treason, Sarah took his side against most French popular opinion.
Though many of her friends stopped talking to her, she helped
persuade Emile Zola to write his famous J’Accuse article
that turned the tide in Dreyfus’s favor.
When spreading gangrene infected her right leg in 1915 as a
result of osteoarthritis of the knee, doctors hesitated to amputate
it because she was 71 and suffering from chronic uremia. They
agreed after she threatened to shoot herself in the knee. Eschewing
an artificial leg and wheelchair, she opted for a specially
designed litter chair and was carried around like a Byzantine
princess. She altered her stage business and kept on acting. (When
showman P. T. Barnum cabled her offering $10,000 for the leg, she
shot back, “If it’s my right leg you want, see the doctors; if it’s
the left leg, see my manager in New York.”)
After the amputation she visited the hellish WWI front lines
near Verdun to perform for French troops in mess tents, hospital
wards, and ramshackle barns. Propped in an armchair, she recited a
patriotic piece to war-dazed men back from the trenches. When she
ended with a rousing “Aux armes!” clutching the French
tricolor, they rose cheering and sobbing.
When Sarah suddenly collapsed in the spring of 1923 at the age
of 78, all Paris theaters observed two minutes of silence.
Parisians thronged the streets as her monumental funeral procession
wound its way to Père Lachaise cemetery, where Molière and her
admirers Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde were buried. In contrast to
the famous cemetery’s ornate tombs with flowery inscriptions, only
two words were needed to adorn the simple granite slab of the first
superstar: Sarah Bernhardt.
