The divine Miss B

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, By Robert Gottlieb, Yale University Press, 256pp. £18.99

ACCORDING to Henry James, if the trade of celebrity hadn't been invented before Sarah Bernhardt arrived in London it is certain she would have initiated it. "She has in a supreme degree what the French call the génie de la réclame– the advertising genius; she may, indeed, be called the muse of the newspaper." The astute novelist also predicted that she would triumph in the land of the brave and the free. "She is too American not to succeed in America. The people who have brought to the highest development the arts and graces of publicity will recognise a kindred spirit in a figure so admirably adapted for conspicuity."

Hearing of her arrival, Oscar Wilde, no slouch in the PR department himself, rushed to Folkstone to greet her. "Madame, do you mind if I smoke?" he asked. "I don't care if you burn," said she. Wilde later wrote Salomewith Bernhardt in mind. As the lord chamberlain deemed the text blasphemous, however, it wasn't professionally produced until well after both their deaths.

Having arrived ostensibly as an ordinary cast member of the Comédie Française, Bernhardt left London a major star, with enough pulling power to contemplate leaving the theatre that had both nurtured and constrained her. The French weren’t best pleased. In her own memoirs she quotes anonymous letters that greeted her return.

“My poor skeleton,” ran one such. “You will do well not to show your horrible Jewish nose at the ceremony the day after tomorrow. I’m afraid it would serve as a target for all the potatoes that are now being cooked specially for you in your kind city of Paris.”

Robert Gottlieb’s deeply engaging biography is part of a Jewish Lives series published by Yale University Press with the laudable aim of “eliciting lively, deeply informed books that explore the breadth and complexity of Jewish experience from antiquity to the present”, and in Gottlieb, a legendary editor in his own right, Bernhardt has found an eminently elegant champion of her genius, which rather trumps her Jewishness – and that’s quite as it should be. Bernhard harnessed her prodigious energy and indomitable will power to art, not nationality, and made a point of saying so: “Once the curtain is raised, the actor ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible – to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second and not to disappoint the third.” As true today as ever it was, and as difficult to achieve, as any actor will acknowledge.

Not that she was ashamed of her origins. Far from it. “I am a daughter of the great Jewish race,” she wrote, “and my somewhat uncultivated language is the outcome of our enforced wanderings.” Being perceived as Jewish paled by comparison with getting a foothold in the theatre. We forget how few options the late 19th century presented for daughters of dubious origin with no real stake in society. If one was neither peasant nor aristocrat, and was without a basis in either trade or commerce, it was all to do with living on one’s wits and making the most of one’s assets. Ominously, these were considered to be almost entirely sexual.

Gottlieb refers to what he calls “a repulsive scene” in a notorious roman à clef written by a contemporary friend-enemy in which Sarah’s mother, a minor courtesan with little time for sentiment, encourages Sarah to kiss one of her ageing “friends” with designs on youth and beauty. “Instantly the old man’s eye glowed like a live coal played upon by a jet of oxygen. The young actress, absolutely transfixed by the maternal glare that never left her, suffered herself to be caressed while concealing her disgust, though she was powerless to subdue the shudder that passed over her each time the cold lips of M Regis touched her throat or glued themselves to her delicate chin. Her docility was rewarded by the gift of a banknote.”

Quand même, it was thanks to the same well-connected "M Regis" that she was granted her first audition, and the good news for all aspiring thespians is that her initial stage appearances were greeted with complete indifference. The critics were cool. "She is a tall, pretty girl with a slender figure and a very pleasing expression and the upper part of her face is remarkably beautiful. She holds herself well and her enunciation is perfectly clear. That's all that can be said for her at the moment."

Those apprenticeship years, during which she tried and failed and lent herself to what an early biographer described coyly as “somewhat questionable entertainments in the homes of titled acquaintances”, could easily have seen her share the fate of countless pretty and, by the standards of the day, highly immoral young women not considered fit for proper society.

Finding herself pregnant, the 19-year-old Sarah was incensed when the titled acquaintance deemed responsible promptly showed her the door, remarking snidely, “Mon cher you must remember that when you sit down on a bundle of thorns, you can’t tell which one of them is pricking you.” Ouch! But rather than causing her to collapse in a forlorn heap this casual cruelty seemed only to have strengthened her resolve.

Giving birth to her son, Maurice, to whom she was spectacularly devoted, is credited by many of her contemporaries as turning her into an astute operator as intent on making serious money as she was on artistic repute. Her son returned the compliment. The day she morphed from figure of scandal to magnificent venerated artist occurred in December 1896, declared “Sarah Bernhard Day”, when 500 eminent guests gathered in Paris to applaud that “lithe and slender body that scarcely seemed to touch the earth” and Maurice apparently wept with joy, saying “Nobody knows my mother and what a good fine woman she is”. Indeed she was. She gamely paid his gambling debts, indulged his serial womanising and was reasonably kind to both his wives, neither of whom was left in the slightest doubt about who came first in his affections. She herself is quoted as saying, “All I expect from Maurice is to be well dressed.”

Although long forgotten now, the only time she ever fell out with her son was over the Dreyfus affair. It’s a minor caveat, but Gottlieb might have made a little more of her bravery in taking on the virulent anti-Semitic vibe the case gave rise to. She stood full square behind Zola when he wrote his impassioned J’accuse despite headlines screaming “The Great Actress is with the Jews against the Army!” and at the risk of losing her beloved son’s affections, which indeed she did and for at least a year, much longer than any Jewish mother I know could bear.

This biography is impeccably researched and written with great narrative thrust. The legendary editor deserves a standing ovation for having done his equally legendary subject so very proud.

Jeananne Crowley is an actor