Divine Sarah Read online

  Divine Sarah

  Adam Braver

  In Divine Sarah, Adam Braver, whose previous novel was described as "richly imagined" by the Washington Post, renders a portrait of the great actress Sarah Bernhardt in the twilight of her career as she explores her relationship to art and asks herself, "When does art become the artist?"

  Sarah was truly the first international star, and she caused a sensation wherever she went. Set during the course of one week in 1906 California, the novel opens with controversy. Facing protests from the League of Decency, she is forced to move her latest production from Los Angeles to the new development of Venice Beach. And though this is only the most recent skirmish she has faced in her tumultuous sixty-one years of life, Sarah is exhausted and beginning to lose the will to fight.

  Plagued by maladies of the flesh and the spirit, she begins to search her soul, revealing the truths of her life, including the self-doubt and insecurity hidden beneath an extravagant and confrontational lifestyle. Yet Sarah is not alone in her battle. Vince Baker, an ambitious newspaper reporter, faces his own demons as he tries to uncover the truth about the great actress.

  With a fierce imagination, lyrical delicacy, and a uniquely passionate vision, Adam Braver not only gives us an unforgettable Sarah Bernhardt, he probes the depths of artistry and what happens when it begins to do battle with itself.

  DIVINE SARAH

  ADAM BRAVER

  FOR ALISSON AND ADDISON

  I would rather go to the theater and feast my eyes on the scenery, in which I find my dearest dreams artistically expressed and tragically concentrated.

  These things, because they are false, are infinitely closer to the truth.

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  PROLOGUE

  December 4, 1880

  American Debut, Performance No. 27

  Booth Theater, New York City

  SHE has paced the boards for nearly three hours. Twirling and jumping and falling. She hasn’t even noticed her dresses weighted down by Lepaul’s embroidered pearls and roses. She has been Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camélias for five acts, portraying a moment-by-moment life in tragic pursuit of Armand Duval.

  Feet gliding effortlessly.

  Wincing and smiling while changing partners.

  Moving in delight along the freedom of the stage.

  Absorbing the lines of the script.

  Smelling the Parisian air.

  Ingesting the calm of Bougival.

  Clutching the bitter eyes of those who betray her.

  Embracing the eyes of those who will love her.

  Tasting the pain of regret and longing.

  Higher than morphine, opium, and hashish all ingested together.

  And now it is the final scene. A mid-afternoon light breaks through the window. In her bed. Her entire body convulses and she sits upward, then melts and slumps against the mattress. Cells ravaged by tuberculosis while her heart pounds with its first true honest emotion—fear. And the breath slips out of her chest, rising and falling in rapid rhythm. She tries to capture each exhalation. Hold on to it. Confine it into her memory as though her brain can be a repository, a subterfuge that cheats the lungs of their intended malfeasance. On her upper lip is a smudge of red theater paint to simulate the last exit of blood that has trailed through her nose. As she lies on the damp sheets, the weight of dying having shoved her from her body, she grips down for the floorboards, clawing at each plank with the secret hope that one will break from its nails and allow her to crawl away into a world where the murder of disease cannot find her. Her eyes are barely open. She swears she sees blood drop down the sheets and onto the floor. Her own blood, falling and betraying her. Then she grasps one more time at the floor, her last measure of strength to escape consumption’s embrace. And there in her bed she dies. Leaving her eyes partway open, because the dead really only close their eyes under the physician’s hand.

  And a curtain drops.

  The steady rattle of applause. The tentative clapping from the front, not wholly positive about the appropriateness of their timing, and not quite willing to concede the mood and return to the necessities of finding coat-check tickets, deciding which exit to take, and which social fraternities to avoid.

  But soon it spreads. Is it a thunderstorm? The crashing of waves? A pounding white noise fills the theater until it is no longer a sound, but the norm of silence.

  Behind the curtain she has difficulty lifting herself up. The vestiges of disease still debilitate her. She wipes the back of her hand against her nose. It is dry. No trace of blood. Just a thick oil paint. She should hold a hand for balance but is not quite ready for human contact. Her eyes are still partway closed. She is not fully of this world yet.

  The curtain rises, and through the lighting of the footlights she sees the ghostly outline of the front-row patrons rolling back and multiplying into the balconies. They are all on their feet. Eyes focused on her. Every ounce of energy that wills them to life is directed to her, a thousand beams of force funneled and aimed. Love. Adoration. Thankfulness. It rocks the walls. Swings the chandeliers. Artificially pumps her heart.

  Twenty-eight more times the curtain rises and falls. Each time the clapping and cheering sound as loud as they can get. Then she steps back onto the stage, and there is another surge, rising the volume to a new level. She bows. She tries to reach out a hand to every member of the audience, mouthing merci, her eyes glistening, genuinely touched, her body weakened from having battled dying and the subsequent reincarnation.

  After the twenty-ninth curtain call she instructs the promoter, a man named Jarrett, to turn on the houselights. She collapses on the backstage couch. Her entire being racked by exhaustion. Max Klein, her manager, is there. Her sister is there also. The road through America has been one grand circus of an adventure. But tonight she is fatigued. The soul of Marguerite Gautier has stripped her bare. There will be no parties. No nightclubs. No drugs. No sex. She will just go back to the Albemarle Hotel and collapse into her bed. Let the dying take her into a slumber that leaves her void of the workings of the heart and mind for the next eight hours.

  But then Jarrett tells her that there are at least five thousand people waiting at the theater door. Many have been there since she first entered. Trying to cut her hair from under her feathered hat. Pinning broaches on her. Handing off bouquets. Begging for signatures. In books. On cuffs. On forearms. And all those hands had tried to touch her. No real purpose, no assigned motive other than the possibility of wanting to connect, to feel adoration. And she was gracious. She might have stayed longer if the scissors had not aimed for her hair, whence the security guard grabbed her to be ushered into the safety of the Booth. Now the crowd has multiplied. She is no longer just the center of Paris, and then Europe. She is now the center of New York City. She is conquering America. The world. They all want her presence. As if her presence is somehow a sign of hope.

  She is tired. Resigned. She says she will just wait. The crowd has to go away at some point. Right? They have to sleep. Even in New York City. Then Max Klein gets an idea. A sacrificial lamb of an idea. He drapes her boa around the sister’s neck, and then puts her coat around the sister’s shoulders. Drops a bouquet in the sister’s lap, and tells Jarrett that the two of them should get in Madame’s carriage now and begin the impersonation. Meanwhile she and Max will slip into the sister’s carriage and take the quiet but expeditious ride back to the hotel.

  For a moment they all sit and stare at one another. Contemplating. They are all about to become part of her theatrical production. And like the actors in her company, they wait for her to make the first move. She tries to breathe in enough energy to proceed with Max’s plan. She thinks about the first night she had entered the Booth: a young girl, probably her
age, wanted a signature, but the girl’s pen had run dry. She could have borrowed another. Instead, the girl scratched the nib across her skin’s surface and drew blood for ink. It was exhilarating and revolting. Something no one would ever want to see again. Finally Sarah lifts her tiny body. The drama is strength. She looks only at Max. She tells him that it is time to go.

  Under the cover of darkness, and the willingness for belief, the crowds at the door fall for the deception. She and Max lag a few steps behind. They watch the promoter and the imposter bull their way through into the cab and proceed slowly through the crowd and into the night. At least two-thirds of the crowd follows the carriage, running and pumping a little faster as the coach gathers speed.

  She and Max step unmolested into her sister’s ride. They watch the traces of hysteria. In the midst of this comedy, she thinks that there is no place like America. Where the convergence of celebrity and art fall together under one footstep. Where art leads to fanaticism.

  It is beauty.

  A true raison d’être.

  CHAPTER ONE

  May 13, 1906

  SHE barely noticed the blind man’s cane lying by the side of the road. In fact if she were forced to describe it, Sarah Bernhardt might have said that she assumed it was white with those little red soldier stripes near the top, although she couldn’t be certain. She would recall that it was unusually long, a detail she’d remember because it would seem almost impossible to lose something of that size. The crook at the top formed a handle. Other than that, the only other notable aspect was that there were two spent cigarettes beside the cane. One that had been stamped and crushed, creased by the impatient imprint of a boot’s sole. The other lay smoldering. Smoked down to the end, but with a corner still bright in ember red, and a disfigured trail of smoke streaming out. It was hard to imagine that a blind man would just lose his cane. He should be stumbling around, his arms extended, fingers reaching for direction in Oedipus’s fear.

  She looked one way up Rose Street, then back down the other.

  Empty.

  She envied the thought of the mysterious blind man liberated from his cane, suddenly free to stumble and fall, with no hardwood guide clanking against metal streetlamps to keep him on track, as though he were actually seeing. She became jealous imagining his discovery of accidentally stumbling along the rough face of a concrete wall, his virgin hands feeling the intense heat and sharpened cracks. Or the feeling of his heart skipping a beat as he stepped off the ledge of the sidewalk, momentarily uncertain at the sensation of falling, only to discover the pleasure of solid ground. Everything would be new and free from constraint. He probably threw the cane away, declaring freedom for the first time in his monitored and scripted life.

  What she had really wanted to do was pick up the cane and smash it through the nearest window in intense anger, rewarded by the sound of shattered glass. Instead, Sarah left the cane by the side of the road as a sign of hope, praying that the blind man didn’t find that freedom was too deadly.

  She tried to find a street sign. Sarah Bernhardt was sixty-one years old and again found herself walking down unfamiliar streets. She didn’t want to get lost. Lord knows she was a compass with no needle. Practically blind herself outside of a theater or hotel or restaurant. She sometimes wished they would stencil in blocking patterns along every street she trudged, then she could just travel back and forth between white V’d line to white V’d line. Sarah looked over her shoulder at the King George Hotel, raising her stare until it settled on the fifth floor, just beyond halfway, to the window in the center. She wanted to make sure she had left a light on as a beacon. A North Star to guide her back. She was so furious when she had left, and she couldn’t recall exactly what she had or hadn’t done, other than try to kick the newspaper across the room, and when it wrapped stuck around her toe, she ripped it off and heaved it violently toward the mirror, where it sailed down in confused grace into little paper boats and tunnels. When she slammed the door, she heard the papers rustling in a discomforting little whisper. She was pretty sure she had turned on the light out of habit. She hadn’t cared. All she had wanted was to get away from the room, past the doting concierge, and out into the faceless night.

  She was accustomed to playing Los Angeles—where she always played—and she didn’t need any beacons or stage marks to find her way along Broadway, passing theaters like the Merced, where she remembered seeing the booking on the itinerary. Today had actually started last night in Tucson, Arizona, at the tail end of a restorative two-day retreat. Max had reached her by phone, speaking with an almost conspiratorial lack of words, saying he was glad that he had found her, and that he hated having to be five hundred miles away right now. “There has been a slight change of plans,” he had said.

  She asked him what.

  “Venice.” His voice was quieter than usual, void of the routine banter.

  “Italy?”

  He had been kind enough not to laugh or condemn her for the obviousness of her question. That should have been the first sign. “We’re taking La Dame aux Camélias up the road to Ocean Beach. Venice of America,” he had said. “Things have gotten suddenly complicated in Los Angeles.”

  “Like what?”

  “It is too much to explain by telephone, but it’s all for the better, believe me. I’ll be there a day and a half behind you.”

  “A day and a half by myself?”

  “You won’t even be there until tomorrow night. That’s really only a day alone. I’m getting out of Santa Fe as fast as I can. But it’s all set. Terms are negotiated.”

  “But, Molly, I need you here to run through lines.”

  “Marguerite Gautier’s? You have said those a thousand times or more.”

  “It is the last part that is troubling me. The final scene. I can’t manage to let the disease take her. I am too much in control of the sickness. I am giving it its life.”

  “You are overthinking it.”

  “It is a matter of control. Recently, Marguerite’s consumption has lost the power and insidiousness. I just can’t find it right now. The sickness just doesn’t subsume me. It feels so tangible.”

  “I will be there soon.”

  “Or perhaps I am bored with it.”

  “We will run through that final scene as much as you need in your room.”

  “In my railcar?”

  “You have a suite booked at the King George Hotel.”

  “An English place? Where is the car?”

  “Once the crew arrives, we’ll have your private car parked. Apparently it will work out perfectly, there are some leftover construction tracks right on the pier. You’ll be able to have your privacy, and get away during rehearsals and preproduction. You do not need to worry…”

  “You are sure my railcar will arrive? These situations tend to be accompanied by problems.”

  “It was a stipulation. No need to worry. You know I wouldn’t keep you from your comforts. Nor would I upset the Vanderbilts’ generosity.”

  “Dear Molly. My protector. Through all of Christendom.”

  “If you need anything between now and then—Abbot Kinney. Call on him. He’s the proprietor of the hotel, and the whole town for that matter. He is available if you need anything.”

  She was beginning to dislike his seriousness. “Does this Kinney get the opium, as well?”

  Max didn’t say anything. In the silence there was the clicking and static of shared phone lines, and she finally gave in with a laugh and said she was only kidding.

  “It wasn’t funny.”

  “I was only trying to raise a smile from my sweet Molly.”

  “You just need to make it one more day.”

  “You are no fun today, Molly…I would much rather play Los Angeles.”

  “I’ll see you in one day.” The conversation had sputtered, with Max giving her the travel specifics and placating her by saying that in addition to negotiating a higher fee out of Kinney, he had also managed to arrange for her to fish
off the pier the next morning. He knew how she liked to catch her breakfast, something she said that she had done every summer as a girl, and it would give her something to do until he arrived. “A day and a half,” he said. “Forget about Marguerite. Use the time to rest up for the crew…Do a little fishing…It’s really only a day.”

  This strangely clean carnival town was empty and silent. A vacant Ferris wheel arched into the sky, poking its perfect skeleton above the amusement park. She passed the large barn-shaped dance hall, the walls quieted by night, strolling by a series of rides made more mysterious by their elusive names like the whip and the Virginia reel and the Great American Racing Derby. She continued to walk toward the giant auditorium, built toward the end of the pier, the sunset leaking across its giant red rooftop. Behind her, Venice of America extended beyond the pier into streets carved and gutted into canals, where gondolas sailed throughout the day, captained by gondoliers in requisite black striped shirts and thick dark mustaches, accents thick enough to make you question your surroundings. And according to information in the lobby, minstrels strolled the sidewalks with lutes in hand, and at one corner at half-past three every day—including Sunday—the richest set of vocal cords you could imagine sang Verdi in a sweet baritone that silenced the waves. And there were brass bands and magicians and fire. “It’s another world,” the literature read.

  Sarah pulled up on her skirt, trying to preserve the flower trim that dragged mercilessly along the dirty pier, then let it fall again. She pushed back her shirtsleeves, feeling the silk caress her skin, and appreciated the sting of the ocean breeze. She sniffed the shirt cuff, hoping to take in some remnant of the Parisian air but instead only found the staleness of stowed-away trunks and luggage cars. Her foreignness felt astounding. The artifice that permeated this California coastline in some vision of natural bliss was tragically beautiful. At once there was a sense of history without the years, freedom without the bloodshed. And life without the living. She continued to walk forward into the slowly deepening night. Her feet trembling along the fragile pier. Air thick with salt. And the lump of orange sun falling into the horizon cast a light that turned everything an otherly pale shade of pink and blue.