Forget Lady Gaga and her meat dress; no one has ever grasped the art of eccentric showmanship like Sarah Bernhardt, the foremost actress of her age, who liked to accessorise with a dead bat, never went on tour without her own coffin and once travelled round America accompanied by an alligator called Ali-Gaga (who died, sadly enough, as a consequence of consuming too much milk and champagne). Her performances were legendary and her affairs lurid, matched only by a prodigious ability to convert both into hard cash.
In fact, it's a pity she didn't have a small country to run. She might have made a better fist of it than Napoleon III (a one-time lover) or Edward, Prince of Wales (with whom she also enjoyed a brief dalliance). An example of her formidable tenacity occurred during the siege of Paris in 1870, when she co-opted her theatre, the Odéon, and transformed it into a military hospital, filling the dressing rooms, auditorium and stage with cots of injured and dying men and bullying her coterie of lovers into supplying provisions, including, allegedly, the overcoat off one unfortunate's back. Decades later, during the first world war, she elected to have a leg amputated rather than suffer the pain of an old knee injury before launching herself on a gruelling tour of the front, where she entertained the troops in mess tents and ruined barns while hopping about, in her own words, "like a guinea hen".
The book reviewed, Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, written by Robert Gottlieb (2010) also mentions that:
Proust immortalised her as the actress Berma in À la recherche du temps perdu, while George Bernard Shaw despised her, describing her acting as "childishly egotistical" and observing "she does not enter into the leading character: she substitutes herself for it".
The alligator was just one of her pets--others were less flamboyant; she loved animals and her menagerie included, over her lifetime, 3 domestic cats, a tigress, lynx, wildcat, lion, and cheetah, just to mention the felines.
You could say Marie of Roumania (1875 to 1938) DID have her own small country to run. She was no slouch in the self publicizing business also. And she chose to dress as Sarah Bernhardt at some royal balls.
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