You're Dead to Me - Sarah Bernhardt

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by Prof Sharon Marcus and comedian Isy Suttie to learn about the actor Sarah Bernhardt, a global icon in the 19th and 20th centuries who died a century ago. Bernhardt was one of the most famous people on the planet, coming from humble beginnings as the daughter of a sex worker to dominate theatreland first in France and then across the Atlantic. Sarah’s life was almost as dramatic as her profession, with a love life that included marrying a soldier who may have inspired Dracula to a decades-long relationship with another woman.Research by Caitlin Rankin-McCabe Written by Emma Nagouse, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve HankeyYou’re Dead To Me is a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

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Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are shining our historical spotlight on the 19th century French actress

and global sensation, Sarah Bernhardt. And to help us learn more about one of the most famous actresses, who time has forgotten, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, she's the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York,

where she specialises in literature, drama, theatre, performance studies, as well as gender and sexuality. You may have read her excellent 2019 book, The Drama of Celebrity. One of my faves, it's Professor Sharon Marcus. Welcome, Sharon. Hi, everybody. Fantastic to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, actress, musician and writer. You might remember her as Dobby in Peep Show or for her radio show Pearl and Dave, which won the Sony Gold Award and the Radio Academy Awards. She's the author of two books, The Actual One and Jane is Trying. And Radio 4 listeners will know her delightful musical comedy series Izzy Sooty's Love Letters.

It's Izzy Sooty. Welcome, Izzy. Hello. That was a good hello, wasn't it? It sounded like a hello. I enjoyed it. It's showing your radio class. Thank you. You are a newbie for us. So I have to do the contractually obligated question. Do you like history? Yes.

Oh, good. All right, we'll carry on then. I like it, but I don't think, I don't know enough about it. And if I say to you, Izzy, the name Sarah Bernhardt, in French, Sarah Bernhardt, does that mean anything to you? Is it ringing any bells? So the thing that I know about her comes from my friend Chris Neal. He said, she's gay, she's gay. And he was like, she's gay, she's brilliant.

So that's all I know, that she's gay and she's brilliant. And they seem like two very good facts. We're going to cover both of those. Good. So, what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I'm guessing you probably don't know very much about Sarah Bernhardt,

which is weird because she was a global superstar only 100 years ago. And I don't use that phrase lightly. I genuinely mean superstar. Mark Twain wrote, There are five kinds of actresses. Bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses. And then there is Sarah Bernhardt. He gave her her own category.

But despite her incredible life and talents, she has not been the subject of any big biopics or box sets since Glenda Jackson played her in 1976 in The Incredible Sarah. Now, she does make an appearance in the recent Booker Prize long-listed novel After Sappho, and keen gardeners will know of the Sarah Bernhardt variety of peony, if you like your flowers. Baking fans will know of the Sarah Bernhardt cookie.

But how have we forgotten about this incredible transatlantic sensation? Let's find out, shall we? Right. Professor Sharon, Sarah Bernhardt or Sarah Bernard, she wasn't born with that name. So can we start with the childhood and her family situation? Who was she? Well, she was christened Henriette Rosine when she was born. But I think the most important thing to know about Sarah Bernhardt is how little we know about her. People can't even agree on when or where she was born. You go to Paris and there's three different streets claiming to be her birthplace. So Bernhardt always said she was born in 1844.

It's probably a little bit earlier. But we do know that she was the daughter of a high-end sex worker named Judith Bernard. We have no idea who Bernhardt's father was. So here's a childhood story that Bernhardt liked to tell. When she was a little girl, her mother placed her with a nurse in Brittany, very common at the time. And Bernhardt claims that at age four, she refused to answer to any name but Milk Blossom. One day when her nurse was out, Sarah tried to break out of her high chair and accidentally fell into the fire. Her nurse's husband was bedbound, and so he couldn't get up, and he cried for help. And when the neighbors came running and found the little girl on fire, they flung her into a pail of fresh

milk. And after that, people kept trooping into the house with gifts of butter to make poultices for milk blossom. Now, probably not a word of this is true, but it tells us how Bernhardt wanted people to see her. She was a willful, impulsive daredevil, narrowly escaping death, only to rise literally from the ashes. And from a young age, she knew how to create drama and attract an adoring audience. Wow. Okay. Wow. What a story.

Flung into a pail of milk and people were bringing butter. Now, what is a poultice? a pail of milk and people were bringing butter. Now, what is a poultice? A poultice is a kind of mush or mash that you apply to a wound or a burn. I'm sure there are some people who are like, I only have Waitrose butter on my burns. I will not have unsalted butter. I love that story. I love that she, the fact that it's made up and the fact that she wanted people to know that story about her is more important than whether it's true or not because it's such a lovely story it's like a folk story or something from the 14th century so she's got a flair for the dramatic very young is he i mean you're an actress you are a performer were you equally dramatic at four

dramatic in a way we moved house when i was six from hertfordshire to derbyshire and i didn't know anyone at all and i put a sign on in the window saying six-year-old girl wants kids to play with please knock at the door oh and then for the whole of the six-week holidays nobody knocked at the door and apparently i used to sit in the window crying looking out of the which is possibly why no one knocks at the door. And apparently I used to sit in the window crying, looking out of the, which is possibly why no one knocks at the door, because I'm not sure it looks like someone's going to be that much fun if they're sitting in the window crying. Yeah, so I suppose in a way I was dramatic.

So she wanted to be known as, was it Milk Blossom? Milk Blossom. Sharon, how does a daughter of a Jewish sex worker end up in a Catholic school? Well, it wasn't that uncommon at the time. In France, there were quite a few practicing Jews, but there were many assimilated Jews. And her mother was probably also wanting to bring her up to be able to blend with more mainstream society, even if only as future clients. So they were not in a practicing Jewish household. And there weren't a lot of public girls' schools at the time.

So if you wanted your girls to get an education, a convent school was one of the main options. But I think that Bernhardt, again, played this up when she was older. When people would ask her, did you always want to be an actress? She said, no. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a nun like all the teachers at my convent school. And I think here again, you know, she really liked presenting herself as a creature of contradiction. So masculine and feminine.

She was something of a sexpot, but she also played a lot of trouser roles in youth, middle age and old age. She presented herself as very generous, but also incredibly vindictive. So why not also Jewish and Catholic? There's some accounts that suggest that Bernhardt's mother wanted her daughter to follow in her footsteps and was trying to sell her off to the highest bidder.

The story in Bernhardt's autobiography goes that when Bernhardt was around 16, her mother held a meeting with her paramours to decide what her daughter's future should be. And Sarah kept pleading to be allowed to take vows as a nun. So one of her mother's lovers, the Duc de Morny, observing this performance, commented, that child should be on the stage. Now, the duke was very well connected. He was the emperor's illegitimate half-brother. And he pulled strings to get Sarah an audition at France's top acting school. She got in and she studied at the conservatory from 1860 to 1862.

Izzy, have you ever had a duke pull strings for you? I mean, it sounds like the most incredible euphemism I've ever heard. No, I've never had a duke pull any strings for me. It's making me wonder if, you know, the thing about you want to do the thing that goes against your parents you know like if you get really cool parents often the kid will go oh i'm into classical music i don't like punk you know it's like wanting to be the nun is the thing that isn't expected of her and it's railing against and i wonder if they'd all said oh great yeah go and be a nun she might have been like oh actually

i don't really i don't really want to be a nun. I want to be an actress. So, I mean, we clearly got a talented young woman here who knows what she wants, or at least knows what she doesn't want. Is she an instant overnight sensation? Sharon, does she sort of land on her feet? She did not. It's a little hard to know why, because critics at the time did tend to demand that young actresses have sex with them to give good reviews, and she would not have sex with the main critic of the time, Francesc Sarsi. So she got a very, very bad review in her 1862 debut. She debuted playing the title role in Jean Racine's Yves Eugénie, and after the curtain call, the story goes that she asked her teacher for forgiveness.

And he replied, I can forgive you and you'll eventually forgive yourself. But Racine in his grave never will. That's a brutal review. I didn't know about the critic demanding. That's creepy as hell. Yeah, it was creepy times. But it's tough also for your first performance to get a brutal review like that, Izzy. I mean, obviously you've never had that, Izzy. You're a star and always were, but like...

Oh, I always get five stars. I mean, yeah. Quentin Letts said once that I couldn't sing for Toffee. And it's amazing how you remember. I remember that line. You never remember any good reviews, do you? You just remember those and you just think, if I ever meet Quentin Letts, I'm going to just start singing and he'll see. So I really admire her. I'm sure that that must not have been the norm to refuse to have sex with the critics. And I think that's absolutely brilliant. It makes me like her even more. Sharon, at this stage, this first early performance in the play by Jean Racine, was she performing as Sarah Bernhardt in that debut performance, or is she still Henriette Rosine Bernard? When does the name change happen? She always performed as Sarah Bernhardt. So again, no one's exactly sure why she changed her name. But one thing that's interesting is that Sarah is a much more Jewish name than Henriette or Rosine, especially in France at the time.

Bernhardt didn't want to seem like she was trying to hide her Jewishness. Anytime there was something that people tried to shame her about, she would respond by flaunting it. And I think she was also trying to put herself in a lineage of great French actresses who were Jewish, because the greatest French actress who preceded Bernhardt in the 19th century was known by one name only, Rachel. Again, a very Jewish sounding name in France at the time. And finally, I don't think that when Bernhardt started out, she was planning to be a global star. But as it happened with this uncanny instinct for celebrity that she had, Sarah turned out to be a great name because it's easy to pronounce in almost any language. She'd be so young at this point, right? If she was born in 1844, give or take, and this is 1862,

then that's a young, young woman who's already establishing her brand and choosing a name. Izzy, have you ever thought about a different stage name? Well, my mum's maiden name is La Balestier, which is French. My mum's side is Jewish. And I always thought La Balestier would have been a great stage name. So you never know, maybe when I start doing period drama, if I get my part in Downton, shall I change my stage name? Isabelle LaBalestio.

1862, 1863, we have here a very young woman who has been acting for about five minutes and Bernhardt is not going to be making friends left, right and center? Well, she had a temper. And in January 1863, her sister Regina, who was also in the Comédie-Française with her, accidentally stood on the gown of a leading actress in the Comédie-Française. This senior figure whose gown had been stepped on pushed Regina off the gown, and Regina fell and hit a stone column, it being the Comédie-Française, there were stone columns everywhere, and she gashed her forehead. So in retaliation, Bernhardt went up and slapped Madame Nathalie. It's very French. If you've ever seen a French movie, if no one slaps anyone, it's not a French movie. And the chief administrator of the Comédie-Française insisted that Bernhardt apologize to Madame Nathalie.

You'll be shocked to hear Bernhardt refused to apologise. And so she got fired. And that was the first time she got kicked out of the Comédie-Française. The first time. So the milk blossom has already curdled. But you've got to stand up for your sister, haven't you, Izzy? What would I do if someone pushed my sister over for standing on? I think I'd try and reason with them first, actually.

Maybe I would have written a poem about it or something and performed it about how terrible this actress was. OK, so things are going a little bit wrong there. Bernhardt has been fired. She strikes out, lands a couple of gigs at the Gymnase and the Audion theatres. Then she makes her return to the Comédie-Française, this grand institution in 1872. All is forgiven, is he, briefly.

And then it all goes wrong again quite quickly soon after. They go on a tour and they go on tour to London in 1879. And can you guess what Sarah Bernhardt does to upset her theatre boss this time while in London? I imagine it was something to do with loyalty and her own ethics. Refusing to play a certain part because she didn't believe that the part was... Psychic. Really? And I promise you with all my heart,

all I know is that she's gay and brilliant. I do not know anything else about her. But you're feeling her. You're feeling her. There's a couple of things going on here. There's a bit of cash stuff as well, isn't there? But there is also that creative control. Tell us about it. So first of all, she goes with the Comédie-Française to London.

They've booked the Gaiety Theatre, gay, gay, gay, for the summer. And Bernhardt's the big hit. Everyone just wants to see her. And her boss and the rest of the company seem to resent her success. Because remember, it's supposed to be an ensemble and the senior actors are supposed to take precedence. And here's this young woman kind of eclipsing everybody else. Everyone in London wanted to see Bernhardt and only Bernhardt.

She also kind of struck out on her own a little bit. She was always entrepreneurial. She gave some private performances. She wasn't the only one, but the Comédie-Française had it in for her. So they were really mad that she did private performances, but they were paying her really poorly. So what was she supposed to do? And then, and this is where, Izzy, you were right on the mark.

Her boss tried to force her to perform in a play that she hated, in a role that she thought was really contemptible. So she resigned. And then the Comédie-F Francais sued her for breach of contract. And it went to court. And the court ordered her to pay the Comité Francais 100,000 francs. And it took her several years to settle that debt. 100,000 francs was a lot of money in like 1997. So in 1879, that is a fortune that she's been forced by a court to pay back.

And would she have to pay them a proportion of her wages? Did she reach some kind of agreement with them, do you think? Or could she kind of say, okay, I'm going to give you this amount now? I think it was a combination of the money that she'd had to invest as a shareholder that they were claiming. And weirdly, I believe the amount of money they said they were losing by having her resign. So they assessed her value to them as very, very, very high. It was too much to pay back all at once. She was about to go and make a lot of money. And so she was able to pay them back. Also, a little note, because I said, remember, she was very generous, but she also really liked her revenge, was that in 1907, the Comédie-Française had a terrible fire. And she pitched in, I believe it might have actually

been 100,000 francs to help them at that point, like making a little point, like, well, now I will voluntarily give you the money you extorted from me because I'm so successful having left your popsicle stand. I'm so successful that I can. That's very cool, isn't it? I mean, we say she's a young performer at this stage. Actually, by this point, she's in her mid-30s, isn't she, by 1879 or so.

She's 35, probably. So not a young starletlet but rather an established actress and yet this actually is a sort of moment of huge transition for her because she's going to go somewhere after London do you want to guess where it is Izzy? It's not going to be France I don't think I think she's I think I'm going to say Italy. It's a good guess. It's actually where Sharon is sitting right now. It's an American tour. Wow. Good for her.

She hops on a steamer and she tours the USA and Canada. It's a 50-date North American tour. It takes over a year to achieve. The box office is a whopping 2.5 million francs. Absolutely huge amount of money. She eventually would tour America nine times in her life. And this is the career turning point, Sharon. Yeah, I think the best way to sum up what that trip did for her is that it convinced her that she could be 100% her own boss and her own person. She had had a lot of health problems up until then, and I think some of them were

ways of expressing her discontent with being bossed around by the Madame Nathalie's and the Comédie-Française directors of her world. And she ends her memoir by describing her return to France from America, and she makes this declaration. My life, which I had at first expected to be very short, now seemed likely to be very, very long. And it gave me great joy to think of the infernal displeasure that would cause my enemies. I resolved to live. I resolved to be the great artist that I wished to be.

And from the time of my return onward, I dedicated myself to my life. It's also got that incredible line in the middle of that paragraph you read out, so Sharon, I mean, I dedicated myself to my life is a good motto. You know, it's just like a good Instagram post. But my favorite line is, it gave me great joy to think of the infernal displeasure of my enemies. Ah, it's amazing. That's what people really want to put on Instagram. these. Ah, it's amazing. That's what people really want to put on Instagram. I love that. So Bernhardt, as we've heard, made a lot of money touring North America and she used it to found her own theatre company. And that gave her, for the rest of her life, financial and creative independence. She produced, she would raise the funding, she would commission the plays. She also had the last word over costumes, sets, publicity. But overall,

she did very, very well. Presumably, it was quite unusual for a woman to be doing this at this time, was it? So I think one thing that happened with Bernhardt is that she went to London, and she saw that Henry Irving had his own theater, the Lyceum, where he had complete creative control. And then when she went to the United States, her first stop was, of course, New York. And she had a long booking in the Edwin Booth Theater. And Edwin Booth was another actor who had transitioned from being an actor to a director. And I think Bernhardt just didn't really ever let her gender stop her particularly. So she was like, if they can do it, I can do it.

It was very uncommon, though. But I want to ask you, Izzy, can you imagine what it is about her performance style that is making her so distinctive? Well, first of all, I assume that she's brilliant because of what Mark Twain said. But what do I think? So it sounds like you're talking about some skill on top of being good. Now, what could that be? I don't know, maybe speaking different languages. We've talked about her playing men and women.

It could possibly be that. The feel that I'm getting about her is that she is very brave in her choices because she really sticks to her guns. So that just makes me think that she must really commit to the character which I suppose comes under the umbrella of being good but that's I don't feel like she's got a special skill like that she's 10 foot tall and that's why people go and see the tall lady doing acting I think she's just probably absolutely fantastic we do have a sort of special physical attribute here, Sharon. There's

two things really, there's the voice, and then there's the physicality. So do you want to talk us through the voice, first of all? To Izzy's point about speaking multiple languages, one of the extraordinary things about Bernhardt is that she became an international star in Russia, in Sweden, in the United States, performing only in French. So her performances communicated to people even when they didn't really understand anything she was saying. I think a good analogy is when you go hear opera, you didn't really know what anyone was saying, but you could feel it. And of course, that connects to the fact that she had a voice that people found truly magical and also a bit elusive because no one was ever quite sure how to describe it. I've read countless debates about

whether her voice was more silver or more golden. And when we listen to it now, it sounds almost alien because she has this vibrato, so her voice warbles, but she also varies her pitch a lot when she speaks, stretching out some syllables and then hitting others like hammers. But to your point, Izzy, even today, I think, across the weirdness of the Crackley recordings, you can feel the energy pouring out of her voice. There is something very commanding and dynamic about her performances. Izzy, do you want to hear that voice?

I mean, yes, absolutely. We can play you a clip. It's over 100 years old. It's very, very crackly and fuzzy and fizzy. Steve Producer has tried to clean it up a bit. You're going to hear about 20 seconds of some serious French acting, but it's the voice that's so extraordinary. Wow. Well, it's given me ASMR and I don't really get ASMR from sounds that often. That's amazing. What an achievement.

Sarah Bernhardt, big on YouTube. Yeah, exactly. If she was alive now, she'd be making millions from whispering into microphones and stroking them with makeup brushes. But also, it kind of sounds like she's half singing. It's so great. There's something a bit haunting about it. I think if you try and disregard the quality of it, that's still there. There's something almost hypnotic about it. Could it sustain a full hour in Edinburgh? I mean, imagine if someone went to another festival speaking like that now. Incredible. And she also had a very loud voice, didn't she, Sharon? Like,

she could project. Yeah, very loud. And she never really had any vocal problems. Her voice lasted until old age. There were two things, Lizzie, that we said were particularly distinctive. The first is the voice. The second is the physicality. Now, Sharon, by this, we mean literally the way she moved her body on stage. But there's also other elements too, aren't there? Well, I think there were a few. So one was that people felt that she was really able to control her body, to manage her physical instruments. And her control, they found actually hypnotic. They found her ability to move her body in a way that was both very abandoned and clearly very rehearsed, mesmerizing. We have a letter that a very young Sigmund Freud, who was studying medicine in Paris, wrote to his fiancée in 1885. I wouldn't

have liked to get this letter if I was his fiancée because this is what he wrote. He said, get this letter if I was his fiancee, because this is what he wrote. He said, I went to see Sarah Bernhardt. Every inch of that little figure lives and bewitches. It is incredible what postures she can assume and how every limb and joint acts with her. Reading a lot of accounts of Bernhardt, I would assume that she was what's called hyperflexible. If you've taken a yoga class, you know those hyperflexible people because they can bend really easily. And she, in fact, did often bend her body into a serpentine shape, an S shape. I think if you want to imagine what her physical style was like on stage, you want to think

about somebody doing some kind of erotic dance move or a particularly challenging yoga pose while performing classical French tragedy or modern melodrama. And in her most famous death scene, she was known for twirling like a dervish and then falling backwards onto a couch. And I've read an account of her rehearsing that scene. And she had carpenters in there sawing that couch to the exact height it needed to be for her to be able to execute her backwards fall perfectly.

She's the Tom Cruise of the 19th century. She's doing all the stunt work. We talk now about like an electrifying performance, but genuinely the word electrifying is what people are describing it as, aren't they, Sharon? Yes. When I was researching Bernhardt, I went to archives in London and Paris and New York and Ohio and was looking up newspaper clippings. But I also went through people's diaries and letters who might have seen her. And it's remarkable among the amateurs and the professionals how consistent the response was. People would describe her as convulsing audiences, as causing fevers, administering jolts, chills, electric shocks. And electricity was kind of a

novelty at this time. So everybody was like, yeah, you know that new thing, electricity? She's electric. But not everyone was a fan. When she was young, a lot of those male journalists in France would make cruel jokes about her, especially about how thin she was, because at the time, male taste ran to very curvy, fleshy women. There's a famous painting of Bernhardt with a greyhound, and one reporter quipped, look, a dog and its bone. And that was one of the nicer jokes about her thinness. But, you know, I said earlier, Bernhardt, anytime anybody made fun of her for something, she leaned into it. So her response to the people who said she was too thin,

which was actually the title of an early trashy book someone wrote about Bernhardt to cash in on the Bernhardt craze in the US, too thin. She responded by wearing tight dresses that accentuated how skinny her arms were. Good for her. I just think you should always lean into it. It takes away, it reminds me of, I've read a lot of John Ronson's books and he always says, you know, you lean into things or dissipates any scandal much more quickly. There's something really lovely about going, yeah, so. The amazing thing there is you literally hit upon her motto in your answer there.

Her motto in French was commem, which means so what? No matter, never mind. Her motto, she embossed on all sorts of things, on her makeup boxes and on her branding, and then she put it all over the place and she would carry it on, commem. So it's really interesting that this defiance becomes a kind of career manifesto for her as well. Does she do sort of hilarious farcical comedies where she's, you know, slapstick and bouncing off sofas? Or are we talking here

about Lady Macbeth, Iphigenia, you know, really strong, dark characters? It's a mix. So she definitely was typecast as a kind of exotic femme fatale, like think Cleopatra. But she did play about 70 roles in 125 plays over the course of her career, both female and male. In the beginning of her career, she was in some comedies, but she didn't shine in those roles. But in 1906, one of her fans said, what a range the woman has. The incestuous Fedra, that's from a Racine play, the sexless Joan of Arc, the crafty Fedora, the delicious Princess Faraway, and now the saintly Therese. And she played male roles well into old age. When she died, she was filming a script where she had acted in the play and they were

making a movie out of it and she was playing a male role. And when she was 56, she decided to play Hamlet. It was 1900 and there was a World's Fair in Paris and she thought, how can I be the star of this World's Fair? And she decided to do it by playing Hamlet. She called that role the Titan of Tragedy. And then a bit later, she toured the US. Every tour billed a final tour, of course. And on that tour, she played Shylock and Portia on alternating nights in The Merchant of Venice. She becomes a superstar. And that then means that she becomes consumed and devoured and gossiped about. We're talking about an era where celebrity is an incredibly powerful phenomenon as a sort of institution.

And the big, big story really is the birth of her son, which is a bit of a scandal, isn't it? Because she is unmarried. Yes, in 1864, so when she was still quite young, Bernhardt gave birth to her son Maurice, who would be her only child. We don't really know who the father was. It's often assumed he was a Belgian nobleman, but Bernhardt never confirmed that. And she actually gave Maurice her own last name, which was very unusual at the time. A lot of actresses had children without being married to the fathers, but they did tend to

give those children the father's name. And not only did Bernhardt give her son her last name, but she was really open and unashamed about being a single mother. So she liked to go to parties and bring Maurice when he was a teenager with her, and she would deliberately have herself announced as Miss Bernhardt and son, lest anybody think she was trying to pass herself off as a married woman by being called Madame. She was like, no, Mademoiselle Bernard et fils. So rather than hiding the kind of the possible scandal, again, leaning back into it, just saying, yep, single mum. Here's my kid. Deal with it. So what? Come in.

What a great life for him to have that role model. I just I think she said she and I had gotten really well. She and her son got along very well. He was a bit of a degenerate gambler, so he cost her a lot of money. But eventually he settled down and married and then Bernhardt became a doting grandmother. Oh, OK, that's nice. You talk about him getting married, but actually Sarah Bernhardt got married. And that's perhaps a little surprising given how independent she's been so far. So is this a sort of grand

sweeping romantic affair is it the up the other way is she decided to go respectable and settle down with a sensible duke that she found or what's the uh the love affair here that ends in marriage can i guess who it was yes yes yes okay i'm gonna try so i don't so when you said that greg i just thought no no not not our not, not our Sarah. I don't think she'd go for a duke or I think it would be someone that no one would expect. I think she would follow her heart. But control is important to her. So I think it would be someone who didn't lean on her financially. I think it would be something where she retained control.

it would be something where she retained control. So I'm going to say someone who isn't in the industry, like someone who works with ceramics. Oh. You are on the right track of one of her lovers. Okay. This is a little different, but I think you've got a good feel for her. So there was nothing respectable about Bernhardt's only legal marriage. She,

in 1882, so she was 38 years old, or probably a little older, she married a Greek military officer named Jacques Damala. He was 12 years her junior. Yes. And he was an opium addict. She probably met him through her sister, who was also an opium addict. And actually, both Jamala and her sister died of opium addiction not too long after that marriage. She did put him on the stage with her briefly, but it was more of a, not exactly a publicity stunt, but it became clear they'd make a lot of money if they went on stage together. So they did. By all accounts, he was terrible. But I think she preferred having been married to him to the actual marriage. So after he died in 1889, you know, with that flair for drama, she created this beautiful marble funerary bus to him.

And for the rest of her life, she did occasionally like referring to herself as the widow Damala. And for the rest of her life, she did occasionally like referring to herself as the widow Damala. But right after they got married, she gave an interview and told the press that they were going to live in separate but adjoining houses, which again, I have never seen anybody else say in the 19th century openly. So, you know, we don't know a lot about Damala, but Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, met him once. And Stoker described Bernhardt's husband as having dead eyes and a white waxen face. And some people think that Damala might have been the inspiration for Dracula. Wow.

So she was nearly a bride of Christ in becoming a nun, and then she swapped it for becoming the bride of Dracula. in becoming a nun and then she swapped it for becoming the bride of dracula this guy is the ultimate person you your parents don't want to meet you know when you bring your boyfriend home for the first time you're like hey this is damela um he's just going to do some opium in the garden he won't go near the lawnmower it's fine and we have other affairs supposedly that she embarks on with many many many men that are alleged victor hugo is one of them so the great victor hugo who would have been 70 probably at the time yeah but nothing stopped him he was he was quite the lover the one relationship we do need to talk about and the one that really matters,

is one that Izzy, you've probably been seeing coming a long time, since you shouted out early on, brilliant and gay. It's with a woman, right, Sharon? And this is the story that doesn't get talked about very often, but this is the one with the longevity. So do you want to tell us about this relationship? Yeah, absolutely. So Bernhardt reportedly had many affairs with men,

and I would guess that she was today what's called pansexual. But her longest relationship was with the artist Louise Abema. They met in 1874, so when Bernhardt was around 30, and they remained close until Bernhardt's death almost 50 years later. The newspapers reported that Louise Abema, along with Maurice, was with Bernhardt when she died. And their relationship was quite independent and modern. They were both ambitious, independent women with successful careers. Abema as a painter who supported herself through her work as a painter, and Bernhardt, obviously, as a global superstar. It's unlikely that they were monogamous.

Bernhardt certainly traveled a lot, and I don't think was celibate when she was on the road for years on end. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, sure. And you mentioned ceramics, Izzy, as your guess. Louise was a painter, but the ceramics was actually more Bernhardt, right? Both of them sculpted, yes. And that was one of the ways that they expressed their relationship in a kind of semi-public way. So Bernhardt was actually very, very discreet in terms of publishing and talking to the press about her sex life. She really didn't talk about any of her lovers, male or female. And in her memoir, she mentions Louise Abema, but she doesn't call her her lover. Journalists knew about it because there are cartoons and caricatures of Bernhardt that show Abema in this way where it's like, wink, wink, we know who that lady is. But the two women actually did create a lot of artworks that expressed their bond. And so Bernhardt was an amateur sculptor, and she made a bust of

Louise Abimah. She made a point of posing with it in several publicity images. So that would be a little wink to those in the know. There's also a very beautiful sculpture of the two women's hands intertwined, which was a common type of sculpture, but almost always reserved for married couples like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Whenever I think of two ceramicists together, I think of the scene from Ghost, but I imagine they were a bit more skilled than Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. When they first met, Abema did a lot of paintings of Bernhardt in intimate situations with her. Like there's one of Bernhardt having breakfast with Louise Abema's family.

Abema also sketched Bernhardt a lot. She would go to rehearsals and then sketch her acting. And some of those sketches give us the best idea we now have of what Bernhardt looked like in motion. There's finally this beautiful painting of the two women in a boat on a lake in the Bois de Boulogne. And when someone donated this painting to the Comédie-Française, the letter accompanying the painting said, this is a painting by Louise Abema done on the anniversary of her love affair with Sarah Bernhardt. This is a woman who is living her life large in the papers and all that,

and yet managing to maintain this long-term love affair over, was it, five decades, Sharon? She lived until 1923. So, yeah, about that. Sometimes when I'm hearing about historical figures and I'm doing this now, I think, what would it be like if they were alive now in the age of social media and in the age when, you a motto like and so is something that i think we could all use you know would she be posting on social media i like to think she wouldn't have any social media she'd be you know she although would in a way would she embrace it and go okay i'm gonna monetize this because she was very clever wasn't she well absolutely and

let's let's move to that sort of area of her of her life actually let's talk about the the instagram of actually a visit to sarah bonehart's house was quite the extraordinary feast for the eyes i think there are two things in her house that are extremely memorable the first one was a coffin obviously obviously and the second one was her menagerie of exotic animals i mean i've got those in my house we've all got we've all got those i mean well let's do a checklist have you got a parrot a monkey a chameleon a wolf dog a lynx a tiger cub cheetah boa constrictor alligator uh unfortunately the alligator does die die because Bernhardt feeds it champagne and milk. Milk again. She can't get away from milk.

She also had a hat that she wore with a stuffed bat on it and another hat with two stuffed golden eagles mounted on it. I mean, Sharon, what is it with the wild animals? I think that her point was both that she had the power to tame these wild creatures. They could live with her and they weren't going to eat her or bite her. And I think that was also her way of saying that she had the power of these rare wild creatures herself. So people, you know, they found Bernhardt beautiful sometimes, but much more often fascinating and a little bit scary, just the way they felt about wild animals. And she,

again, leaned into it. She embraced this identification with strange exotic beasts because she was never afraid of making herself repulsive. And then we have the coffin, right? We have to circle back to the coffin. The coffin is, sometimes it's been described as a publicity stunt by historians of Bernhardt and celebrity culture. Where do you stand on it, Sharon? Sometimes she claims she got it to practice for her own death because she had a lot of pulmonary issues in her 20s and 30s. And she sometimes said that she was getting it for her sister who was very ill, who did die young. Who knows? I think I'm going to lean on the side of publicity stunt, actually. And in the 1870s, this photographer, only one name because he was French, named Melandry, took a photograph of Bernhardt sleeping in this coffin in her bedroom.

So it was a very notorious, sensational photograph. It sold a lot of copies. It made a lot of money. It created this myth about her. And she liked creating a myth. It's slightly repulsive because you can't quite tell if she's asleep or dead. And she did have very goth taste in interior design. And every you see depictions of her homes, it's not minimalist. Let's just put it that way. She hasn't gone to Ikea, has she? No. Hasn't gone to Ikea, has she? No. Yeah, no, no, no higgah for her.

It's all like curtains and skulls and skeletons. And this author, Pierre Loti, who was part of the decadent movement, was fascinated by her bedroom. He called it sumptuous and funereal. So the walls, he wrote, the walls, ceiling, doors and windows are all hung with heavy black Chinese satin embroidered with bats and mythical monsters. She did supposedly keep a skeleton, not in her closet, but in her house. And she had a human skull, like that's a Hamlet kind of thing, right? In this case, it was given to her by Victor Hugo. So that was a little, I guess, romantic present. And he inscribed it with a verse written in honor of her performance in his historical drama,

Hernani, which was revived with Bernhardt in it. And it was one of her first big hits. And she did this self-portrait sculpture of herself, which is kind of amazing. It depicts her as a sphinx with bat wings. So it's very dramatic. It's very creepy. It's very over the top. You're literally describing a mechanical romance video there, aren't you?

I mean, Izzy, I mean, is this how you would decorate your house if you were, you know, 19th century superstar or are you going the other way? Well, you know, they have got a big skull section at IKEA. You just have to go through the secret door. I'd like to know how it was for Morris growing up with a coffin and this animal. You know, I'm thinking I've got a three-year-old, I've got an eight-year-old. The three-year-old would be crawling into the cages. It would just be, you know, be feeding them crayons. I mean, it's an incredible, incredible thing, isn't it? But it's also this sense here that she is to a certain extent performing the role of the Grand way to fend off the media because she would appeal

directly to the public and the media would need her more than she needed them because the media needed to cover the people that the public wanted to read about. One of the things that was very interesting about her was throughout her life, she was an early adopter of new technology. So she had the good luck to start her career as a theater actor right when photography was becoming commercialized and you could buy postcards of any famous person, whether it was an actor or an author or a duke, that was very common as well. And she also later in life became an early adapter of sound recordings. That's why we can hear that crackly vibrato to this day. And of film.

She made hundreds of films, many of which have been lost. But she was always interested in new technologies. And when she visited new cities throughout her career, but especially on that first tour of the United States in 1880, she would always make sure that her first stop was the local celebrity photographer. So we can see that she was probably deciding how she was posed because she does the same pose in all the pictures or similar poses in all the pictures, even though the photographers are all different.

What do you think that pose is, Izzy? I don't think it would have been any kind of coquettish pose, you know, hand on hip and smiling and trying to look pretty or attractive in any way I mean I want to say it would be like punching towards the camera or pretending to be dead but I think she's a bit too clever for that so she would have had an eye on the fact that it had to be in some way commercial I like to think that she probably wasn't smiling, maybe hands on hips and looking straight down the lens.

Oh, yeah, spot on. So she rarely smiled in photographs or paintings. And when she did have a hint of a smile, she never showed her teeth. And one of the really interesting things I noticed after looking at dozens and dozens and dozens of photographs of her was that she almost never had herself photographed with a co-star. And that was, again, really unusual for a female actress because even the most famous ones tended to act with equally famous male actors and would be depicted with them together. Bernhardt was like, I'm the only one in this frame. And most female actresses, even if they weren't super coquettish, they wouldn't look head on at the camera. They'd gaze slightly to the

side and maybe tilt their head a little bit. She really liked to confront the viewer head on with a bold stare. And she didn't really put her hands on her hips that much. She would sometimes be holding something like a whip or an umbrella. So she'd be quite upright and just the sense of somebody looking right at you. It's confrontational, but it's also very intimate. It establishes that direct connection with the audience. And we have this iconic memoir, which has a lovely title, Ma Double Vie, My Double Life, but it doesn't tell us very much.

It's one of those annoying, you know when celebrities write books that don't tell you any of the good stuff. It's a little bit euphemistic, isn't it, Sharon? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a little bit a way of saying, like, there's a bunch of lies here, you know, there's my real life and then there's the life I'm handing to you guys. And also it was published in 1907, but it ends in 1881. So it doesn't even cover the majority of her life to that date.

So it's a sort of volume one that she never got around to doing volume two or three. Volume one sold so well, I think she was like, why bother? I'm doing great here. And it paints a very flattering light. But there's a book that comes out, Izzy, that is very much attacking her fame. And it's written by a former friend, that is very much attacking her fame. And it's written by a former friend, Marie Colombier, a much less talented actress, who falls out with Sarah Bernhardt and decides to absolutely destroy her with a novel.

It's meant to be about Bernhardt, but she changes the name to Sarah Barnum. And she really, really goes for Bernhardt's... I mean, we're not quite sure why they've had the huge falling out, I suppose, but it's kind of really nasty in a couple of ways, isn't it, Sharon, both in terms of sexual scandal, but also in terms of anti-Semitism? Yes. Well, we do know why Colombier was mad at her. Sarah Bernhardt fired her from her acting troupe for being a terrible actress. And then I think Colombier decided to cash in. I think maybe Bernhardt had had some late night, you know,

confidences with her on the train while they were barreling their way through the East Coast on that U.S. tour. I've read it and I'm not easily shocked, I have to say, but it's quite disgusting. I mean, it reads more like revenge porn, I think, than like even a tell all. And it also really attacks Bernhard for being Jewish. really attacks Bernhardt for being Jewish. So the front cover shows this frizzy haired Bernhardt in profile so that you can see her very exaggeratedly large hooked nose. And just in case people didn't get the point, Bernhardt is crowned with a Star of David. So the book came out around 1882. And that's a moment where actually there's a big uptick in anti-Semitism in France. And Columpier was cashing in on that as well as on the fact that she knew Bernhardt a little bit. moment where actually there's a big uptick in anti-Semitism in France. And Colin Piait was

cashing in on that as well as on the fact that she knew Bernhardt a little bit. I mean, Izzy, what kind of reputation do you think Sarah Bernhardt has in France at this point in the sort of, you know, 1880s? I think they're probably, she's very revered and they're slightly afraid of her. I imagine that if they encountered her on the street, they'd go, I don't want to get in the coffin with you, but I think you're great. Sharon, the French people kind of, they're not big fans of Sarah Bernhardt. There's an arc. So, you know, they took it really personally that she'd walked out on

the Comédie Française because that was a national institution. And I've read articles from a hundred years later where people are still saying Sarah Bernhardt would have been a great actress if she had stayed at the Comédie Française. And they really didn't like it that she went to the United States to become a big star. They felt that that undercut their power as the cultural center of the world. But she did two really, really smart things to win the French back in the short term. So one was that when she came back from London and she'd been fired from the Comédie-Française and everyone was pissed at her, she was like, well, people may not like me in Paris anymore, but, you know, it's a big country.

And no one from Paris ever goes to these provincial cities like Marseille and Lyon. So I'm going to do a tour of France. And she was such a hit. Later in life, during World War I, she became a national hero. She invented the idea of performing for the troops. So she went around performing for the French troops. And she toured the United States, encouraging the United States through a very propagandistic one-act play to join the war and help France defeat Germany. So I think by the time she was in her 60s and 70s, the French understood that she had become one of their most effective ambassadors. She gets the Legion d'honneur in 1914. So she's a knight of the French Republic

by that point. But the interesting story that we haven't touched on is her physical health. We've mentioned it, the pulmonary illnesses when she was young. The other thing, Izzy, is that she did all her own stunts. She really hurt herself. She fell off a very high stage, I think at one point, and really banged up her knee and lived with pain for many, many years. And so in 1915, she decided she would have her leg amputated rather than continue living with the pain. And she continued to act.

We're not entirely sure to what extent she's fully in control of how she was seen on the stage, because there's a sort of idea of camouflaging the missing leg, so she would be propped up on a couch or on a litter, but she would be carried around as well. Also, I don't imagine it was as easy to have a leg amputated then as it is now, but it doesn't surprise me, having heard everything I've heard about her, she would just thought, right, well, I don't want the leg anymore.

It's hurting me. But she starred in 125 plays and all those movies that Sharon mentioned. She's renowned for her dazzling death scenes, the physicality of them. But in 1923, she finally lives one for real. And this is when she died at home. She was 79. She died in Morris's arms. What is the coverage like, Sharon, for her death? Are the French people moved by her passing?

Her death itself was on the front page of newspapers for at least a week around the world. And it was a protracted death. It was her final death scene, and she played it to the hilt. And on the day of her funeral, a very large crowd walked with her coffin to Père Lachaise, which was not that close to her house. A week after she died, the Queen Consort of England ordered a mass for her at Westminster Cathedral. And three years after her death, an American man described visiting her grave. And he said he found it decorated with offerings from people of all nations. So Izzy, before we sort of wrap up, where do you stand on Sarah Bernhardt now? We started

with brilliant and gay. What's your final thought? Brilliant, pansexual, as Sharon said. Gay in terms of her humour, funny, powerful, frightening, persuasive. I imagine she would have been fantastic to go out for a drink with. She sounds very unusual, actually, as well as being extremely talented. I think she sounds delightful and I wish I'd known her. The nuance window! This is where Izzy and I sit attentively in the front row to watch a grand performance by Professor Sharon. She takes centre stage with two uninterrupted minutes

to tell us why we need to perhaps revisit how we think of Sarah Bernhardt's legacy, perhaps something along those lines. So without much further ado, Professor Sharon, take it away, please. So the man who visited Sarah Bernhardt's grave said that she was immortal, but sadly, she was not. It is very rare today to find anyone who has heard of Sarah Bernhardt. The most common response I got during the 10 long years I was researching a book that had Bernhardt at its center was, oh, that's so nice. You're writing a book about Sandra Bernhardt. I always thought her affair with Madonna was so interesting. And I was like, not that one. And now I don't think anyone even knows who Sandra Bernhardt is. But the thing is, it's very rare for actors to really be famous

after they died. And I don't think that today we are in a great position to appreciate Bernhardt's acting style anymore. It was cutting edge realism and naturalism in her moment. But even by the time she was an older woman, people were saying that she was a bit mannered. I think what remains her significance today, why we should all know about her, is that she was really a pioneer of modern celebrity and a pioneer of female self-determination. of female self-determination. So she decided on her own life. She set the terms for her career.

She was an early adapter of new technologies. She was very adept at managing the media. I think she would 100% have been one of the early people on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and probably one of the early people to leave them. And, you know, I think we've grown out in some ways of her acting style, but maybe we finally grown into who she was as a person, this pansexual, polyamorous, entrepreneurial, very, very independent woman who, as Izzy said, was very unusual, and was proud of it. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Beautifully said. And it is interesting,

there aren't any big sort of statues in Paris to her. There aren't mementos and memorials. Don't get me started. Well, Izzy, we have confronted you, Bernhardt style, with an extraordinary life. Yes. But it's time now to see how much you can remember. And we have talked an awful lot here. I mean, there's a lot of names, a lot of dates, a lot of facts and figures, but it's the quiz. So what do you know now? How are you feeling? Are you going to be muttering a kind of commem, Bernhardt style, and so what kind of motto? Or are you passionately invested?

Well, I like to think I'm commem, but I think I'm actually very much je veux le win. Okay, 10 questions. Question one, who was Sarah Bernhardt's mother? She was a sex worker. Her name was Judith. Question two, before becoming an actress, what rebellious vocation did a young Sarah consider? Oh, none. None. It was none. Yeah. I got thrown by rebellious because I was thinking nuns aren't rebellious. They're the opposite of rebellious. Yes. Question three. In her mid-fifties, Sarah Bernhardt played which iconic male role? The Titan of Tragedy, as she called it. Oh, gosh. She played Cleopatra, but that's a female, not Titus Andronicus. Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Liev Schreiber, Ethan Hawke.

They've all done it. It's escaping me. Izzy's having a breakdown right now. It was Hamlet, I'm afraid. Oh my God. How can I remember Judith, but not Hamlet? Don't worry. Question four.

What shape was Sarah Bernhardt famous for being able to contort her body into while performing? Well, I want to say an S. It was an S. Question five. Name three of Sarah's many, many exotic pets. Alligator, a monkey of some kind and, well, do you count the bat as a pet? I know it was stuffed. I think she would have counted it as a pet.

It was on a hat. Yeah, I'll count it. Thank you. Question six. What was the name of Bernhardt's 1907 memoir? Ma double vie, ma double life. Well done. Question seven.

What was unusual about the name she gave to her son, Maurice Bernhardt? The fact that he had her surname. Exactly right. Question eight. How did Sarah Bernhardt like to pose in photographs? Looking straight down the lens, not smiling, not looking away from the lens. Question nine. With whom did Sarah Bernhardt have a 50-year-long relationship?

Louise something like Amand. Abema. Louise Abema. I'll give you that. Yeah. And this for nine out of ten. How many times did Sarah Bernhardt tour the USA in her life? It was more than I thought.

I think it was probably, say, nine times. You got nine out of ten, Izzy Sooty. Well done. Thank you. Well remembered. I mean, that's a lot of history. We absolutely have smushed so much history at you there. And who cares about Hamlet?

I mean, no one. Over Dan. Over Dan. Well, we've had a lovely conversation. It's been absolutely fascinating. so much history at you there. And who cares about Hamlet? I mean, no one, no one. Overdone, overdone. Well, we've had a lovely conversation. It's been absolutely fascinating. And my thanks to both Izzy and Sharon. And listener, if after today's episode, you want to learn more about 19th century celebrity,

why not listen to our episode on the history of fandom? That was a live episode. Or if bisexual French actresses with violent tempers are your thing, then why not check out our episode on Julie Daubigny from the 17th century? You will find them all and more on BBC Sounds.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, and make sure to subscribe to Your Dit to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But all that's left for me to say is a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we had the wonderful Professor Sharon Marcus from Columbia University in New York. Thank you, Sharon.

Thanks for having me. This was so much fun. And in Comedy Corner, we had the excellent Izzy Sooty. Thank you, Izzy. Thank you. I'm now known as Isabella Balestier, so I'd like to be credited, please. No worries. Okay.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we pull back the curtain on another dramatic historical subject. But for now, I'm off to go and find a hat with three golden eagles on it. In your face, Bernhardt, I'm going three. Bye! You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. The research was by Caitlin Rankin-McCabe. The episode was written by Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Neguse and me, and produced by Emma Neguse and me. The

assistant producer was Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, the project manager was Isla Matthews, and the audio producer was Steve Hankey. Hello. My Radio 4 podcast series, Amol Rajan Interviews, features global game changers, pioneers and maverick thinkers. It includes Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg and Sir Ian McKellen, as well as Novak Djokovic, Billie Jean King and Nile Rodgers. Nothing is off the table and all give an insight into their remarkable worlds. You can subscribe and listen on BBC Sounds. Thank you. This is the first radio ad you can smell.

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