#301: THE DIVINE SARAH.  One time some years ago, a friend and I, staying in Paris, had detoured away from our hotel to investigate a noble looking pile we’d noticed days before.  It turned out to be the Théâtre de l’Odéon, now one of the six national theaters of France, long associated with the troupe managed by Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud; I’d not known at the time it had also been one of the buildings occupied by student protesters during the May ‘68 riots.  The theater was closed, but the doors were open, and we snuck in to take a look around.  At one point I noticed that my companion, a longtime amateur actress, was nowhere to be seen.  I looked around the lobby, down the corridors, outside in the street: no Linda.  I was just beginning to be concerned when she popped back out from one of the corridors, apologizing profusely: she’d found one of the doors open onto the stage, and for one moment had the chance to stand on one of theatre’s sacred places: the stage which had seen the early performances, in Racine, in Dumas, in Hugo, of Sarah Bernhardt.  At that, of course, all was understood and forgiven.  Some opportunities don’t come twice.

        I suppose it would be difficult, short of utter incompetence, to write a dull biography of Bernhardt, but in 2010 Richard Gottlieb more than rose to the occasion with his book Sarah, published in the Jewish Lives series from Yale.  Bernhardt lived the classic rags to riches story (lots and lots of riches—she’d make a fortune, blow it on a dud production, replay one of her most famous roles and make a fortune all over again; repeat cycle) as the illegitimate daughter of a courtesan who rose to be the most famous actress of her time, keeping a whole cast of wealthy, successful, wealthy, artistically gifted, wealthy, possibly even a few royal, suitors serially and simultaneously on the boil; she had a menagerie of writers hot to do her theatrical bidding, to complement her keeping of a famous menagerie of outlandish and unlikely pets.  This latter and famous habit was continued right through her final train tour of America, accompanied (in her private train car) by an Airedale, a Pekingese and a lion cub named Hernani II, who, Bernhardt’s granddaughter tells us, “made large messes” and—the classic cat owner’s cry—”always on the carpet.”

        This is, easily, to capture the extravagant side of Bernhardt’s story, for whom the word “extravagant” seems almost to have been invented.  Gottlieb captures as well the gritty truths: her long labors to succeed, her facing down of anti-Semitic prejudice, the pearl-clutching over her illegitimate son Maurice, who accompanied her everywhere, the amputation, at the age of 71, of her right leg above the knee.  He repeats the old suspicions that much of her dashing from one man to another might well have been from her inability to have an orgasm; more simply and movingly, he quotes a letter of hers, written at the peak of her fame and wealth:  “You must realize I was not made for happiness...That is how I shall be until my life is worn away… You must not be angry at me. I’m an incomplete person.”  Apparently no matter where you go, no matter how famed or wealthy, there you are.

       But even after the sad last pages detailing her final exhaustion and death, and, artistically, her having slid to some degree into self-parody, you can’t bar the door in the story of Bernhardt’s life on amusement and delight.  There was just too much of her, it was all to brightly colored, it all lived too vibrantly at the center of a great period of France’s theatrical and social history. Gottlieb’s book has a generous sheaf of photos of Bernhardt in her great roles, so gorgeously redolent of French theater at its heavily upholstered, exotically costumed, Romantic heights.  She was photographed by Nadar, painted by Bastien-Lepage and Alfred Stevens, sketched by Lautrec, and featured in some of the best poster designs of Alphonso Mucha.  We have lost, of course, truly what made her so mythic a presence, and which we will only ever know by report: her mastery of spoken verse, her exquisite voice, her indefatigable devotion to performing, her having transformed the heavily gestural stage acting of France to something more naturalistic.  But the stories, the hearsay, the verified facts are of a life wild and marvelous by any standard.   She had plays created for her by Rostand (whom she called “my poet”) and Sardou; she performed the lead in La Dame aux Camelias over a thousand times; she reduced even the irascible Jules Renard to breathless devotion.  She performed for the French troops in World War I; she entranced American audiences, most of whom couldn’t understand what she was saying; was condemned as immoral by the Bishop of Montreal; she went to England and returned home with a cheetah, a parrot, a wolfhound, and (a gift) six chameleons.  In one of her American tours she played under circus tents, in skating rinks, and at San Quentin penitentiary, and in 1920, in her seventies and minus a leg, she played (apparently successfully) a thirty-year-old male drug addict with a death scene met by thunderous applause.  Robert Gottlieb’s account of this tumult is vivid, amused, informed and comes in at 233 brisk, wildly entertaining pages.  Let him introduce you to a legend.

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, by Robert Gottlieb.  Yale University Press, 2010.