The Divine Sarah
J.T. Kittredge
Divine Sarah" (by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Alfred Knopf, New
York, 1991), and it was a luscious read.
Sarah Bernhadt was an French actress who lived 1844 to 1923. She was
the queen of the international stage for fifty years. From the sound
of it her style of acting would be considered over-sized, over-heated,
and melodramatic, but those were the tastes of the time. She led an
over-heated, over-sized and melodramatic life. For instance she
continued to act (appearing in silent movies) after her leg was
amputated in 1915. She had great success in the role of Hamlet, which
she first undertook at the age of fifty-four.
The illegitimate daughter of a courtesan of Jewish extraction,
Bernhardt had a son by a Belgian Prince whose connection to royalty
was illegitimate on both sides. She earned several fortunes on tours of
England, the US, Latin America and Central Europe and she spent more
than she earned on her own glamorous productions and an ostentatiously
exotic life style.
Before she found her way in show business, she made her living as her
mother had, and throughout her life (at least into her seventies)
maintained an impressive appetite for men. (There is some evidence
that she didn't confine herself to men). When reading the book, it
seems that a man is almost never mentioned in conjuction with her name
(as actor, director, impressario, critic, etc.) without being
mentioned as a lover too, the members of her considerable coterie of
homosexual admirers excepted.
To give you some sense of the flavor of this book
"Early in 1882, Sarah met a young Greek called Aristidis Damala. He
was twenty-five, twelve years younger than she. ... He was addicted
to morphine, wrecked the lives of several highborn French-women,
and was said to have an eye for the boys as well."
At Bernhardt's insistence, Damala marries her. She makes him her
leading man despite his lack of any acting talent, but he becomes
bitter at his failure in acting and her success. "One day with no
warning, he bought a red-caped uniform, ... and left Paris to join the
saphi troops in Algeria." Bernhardt soon takes up with the
poet-playwright Jean Richepin. She writes him letters like:
"Jean, you must forgive my foul temper. You left me without giving
me time to think, while I was still moist from your arms, still
perfumed by the intoxiating scent of your body. I looked at our
bed, thought of our night together, our awakening, our embraces,
our _______. All right, all right, let us pass over that."
But her husband doesn't stay gone:
"Sarah took him [Richepin] on as a lover when Damala left her for
army life in North Africa. But it appears that soldiering was less
to her husband's taste than a life of indolence and the pleasures
of mistreating his wife, for when Sarah returned from her tour,
she found him lying in her bed, calmly reading the papers. The
sight must have had its attractions, for she not only asked him to
stay on, but dismissed Richepin -- and with him her happiness. It
was a dark passage in her life. Damala had always taken morphine,
but now he was hopelessly addicted. He gave himself injection after
injection and thought nothing of plunging the needle through the
cloth of his trousers when his need was overpowering. Sarah
thrashed her sister, Jeanne, with a riding crop ofr smuggling drugs
into the house. But violence was futile. At her wit's end, she
asked for a legal separation, sent her unfortunate husband to a
clinic, and went back to Richepin. Six months later, Damala was
back under her roof. Richepin, understandly jealous, was told to be
patient, to remember that she loved him, not Damala, whom she kept
on only to save him from himself. To show her determination, she
went to Damala's pharmacy and broke an umbrella over the
drug-dealing pharmacist's head, which accomplished nothing except
to leave her with one umbrella less."
One of her friends remembers, "Sarah bought a tiger club that was
sometimes allowe to walk about the dinner table, which excited and
made him fractious, and I was always rather relieved when he tottered
snarling past my plate without paying me any marked attentions."
In any case after finishing, this book I felt I lived in a paler age
where the divas seem mundane by comparison.
Yours, JonTom jon...@ileaf.com
--
"I feel, my dear boy, my arm around you. I feel the pulsation,
thereby, as it were, of your excellent future and your admirable
endowment" -- Henry James to his protoge' Henrik Anderson
(as quoted by Fred Kaplan)