Divine Sarah Read online

  She made her way toward the end of the dock, past the auditorium and its ornate details and cathedral windows. She looked back over her shoulder. The King George was gone from view, leaving her comfortably lost, as though Athena’s fog was set solely around her, safe in her disorientation. Now she could be as far away as possible from that hotel room and the deadly newspaper that had littered the room. Her seeing that front-page story had initially overtaken every frame of her body, as though she had been a pliable, empty form that was easily filled and imbibed by seething hatred. Her anger had spoken in a secret language of consonants and plosives that hammered against the nerves. Mostly furious. Slightly wounded. Helplessly vicious.

  Coming across the newspaper was a fated accident. After checking in to the King George, she had been left standing for an interminable amount of time outside her room, leaning on a maid’s cart that sat temporarily abandoned. Even with the addition of forty years, the actress had still managed to climb the stairs faster than the Mexican bellhop, who despite the weight of her trunk, still should have maintained a steady clip past her, based on the pride his shoulder muscles showed beneath his undersize coat. She felt like she had waited forever outside her door, studying the blue Victorian patterns of the wallpaper and the fresh designs the vacuum had etched in the shorthaired carpet. How long could she wait for this failed matador to wrestle her valise up to her room and unlock her door? She paced the halls, making up rules that if the next person on the floor was not the bellhop then she would stomp down the stairs, grinding each one to dust, and demand that this Abbot Kinney himself come rectify the problem. It had been in that moment when she swiped the Los Angeles Herald from the cart. She had unfolded it just enough to see the headline “Future of Los Angeles Theaters in Doubt,” but closed it when she finally saw the struggling lackey, banging her case like it was a bum third leg. She restrained from scolding, figuring that French to English to English to Spanish was probably a fruitless effort. Instead she tucked the newspaper under her arm and stood hands on hips, with her foot tapping impatiently. Once inside the room she waved him off, only acquiescing to the gratuity by placing a quarter in his palm at the last second. His eyes had looked hungry.

  She had lain down on her bed, tired and lonely. The road was exhausting. The strange places started to seem even stranger. These days she felt less and less like an actor, and more like a commodity. Maybe she had done too many farewell tours of America. Or maybe the public didn’t care about an old woman, instead only going to see her in order to expand their cocktail repertoire (who even really cares that the plays are performed in French, because it is the Divine Sarah). They wanted their Sarah with an energy that burst from her eyes, a mouth that would say anything, and a radiance that outshone the moonlight. This time around she could sense the disappointment when she took the stage. In Santa Fe she swore she heard a collective silence as loud as any ovation. They were studying her, trying to find the Sarah that they adored despite the unfamiliar falling jowls and wrinkled eyes of the woman before them. Most only started to find true satisfaction by the third act when the power and intensity of her performance as Marguerite Gautier outpaced anything that the younger Sarah had ever done, a maturity that her predecessor never knew. She was beginning to hate the younger Sarah, the pretty younger sister that everybody compared her to. But in truth it was guilt. The terrible sense of having lost her. Of not having given that younger Sarah anybody to look up to.

  At first the Herald article gave a bit of background on the Los Angeles theater district, nothing that she hadn’t known (or really cared about). But her hands started to tighten and shake, her knuckles trying to break the skin, when she read her own name in the third paragraph: Due to the boycott’s apparent success, Sarah Bernhardt has been prevented from performing in Los Angeles.

  She didn’t even remember all the words that were said about her, only that they were said by a Bishop Thomas Conaty of the local diocese, and one of his parishioners, some woman named Dorothy O’Brien, all under the guise of the League of Decency, a group that proclaimed its mission of preserving the values of the parish and community by preventing the surge of indecencies that would pollute the area. They spoke from downtown Los Angeles, at the Cathedral of our Lady of Angels on Second Street, but the words and quotes lashed out at her as though the bishop, this O’Brien woman, and the writer, Vince Baker, were sitting across from her, spewing their frozen words through warm, sour breaths:

  She’s a pied piper. A slayer of decency. Cavorting from town to town with a troupe of sin-makers, whirling in and defaming the name of goodness and God with antics that would make the devil himself blush. Causing the vulnerable people of this town to somehow forget the fulfillment of belief, and think that their curiosity and needs can be filled by the dangerous frivolity that sends messages intended to dismantle the basic moral virtues of man.

  She ingested each sentence like it was a purgative meant to annihilate the soul.

  Sarah Bernhardt is at the heart of this sickness. Her spirit has clearly been taken, her virtue evaporated. I swear by the Father, that she has no sense of right and wrong, no place of decency. The woman wears men’s clothes, dresses up on the stage in pants, and glues beards to her face, and glorifies the basest of all human dignity. A sexual immoral. Taking partners out of wedlock. No doubt engaging in homosexuality.

  As she flipped over to page eight, the story seemed to go on forever. A boycott had been waged over the past week, and despite the relatively small number of active protestors, the League of Decency had succeeded in having her Los Angeles shows canceled. “I am in the entertainment business, not the political statement business,” one unnamed theater owner was quoted. “The last thing I need is attention from church ladies with picket signs.”

  The article did suggest that the bishop might have been furthering his agenda of relocating the cathedral to Ninth Street, where it could be a more dominant force “out of this slum.” But that seemed pro forma, the writer Baker’s perfunctory attempt at objectivity.

  She finally lost all control when she noticed the picture of the flyer the league had used. It was crude. A brutal pen and ink sketch of a face that looked contorted and evil. It was strikingly male, with exaggerated features, accentuating the Semitic traits that flowed nearly forgotten through half her bloodstream. A nose bursting from the center. Big fat lips that appeared to have been pummeled or swollen from a bee’s sting. The hair was obviously female, as chaotic pen strokes frazzled it in a big mound to the upper border of the page, then let the locks flow far past the face in rough stilted scratches. And written across the bottom: Boycott Sarah Bernhardt and anybody who supports her. Keep Los Angeles moral. Don’t commit sin. The Greater Los Angeles League of Decency.

  That was when she kicked the paper, cursing Los Angeles, the press, and the betrayal of the Catholic church, which had raised her in one of its convents. The hotel room became confining and hot, her lungs dry and flat, and her throat parched wickedly dry. And as the paper fluttered to the floor, that caricature stared right at her the whole way down, its horrid expression almost sneering. But that wasn’t her. Beneath the anger she knew all along that it was the other Sarah Bernhardt. That younger version that again took all the attention, and had picked all the fights, nearly enjoying the attention and celebrity more than her art. Before she slammed the door, Sarah turned to spit on the picture. She cursed the other Sarah for what she was doing to her life.

  It was not as if she had never fought battle after battle on American soil, defending her right to art against the puritanical fanaticism of self-made morality. But when she was younger it had had a certain air of gamesmanship to it. She did not take it so personally. Like when that Episcopalian Bishop What’s-His-Name in Chicago had stood in his pulpit before God and the Chicago Tribune proclaiming, “Sarah Bernhardt is an imp of darkness, a female demon sent from the modern Babylon to corrupt the New World.” The Tribune reporter had stalked her in the newly built Congress Plaza Hotel, trai
led her along the green-carpeted lobby, and across Michigan Avenue into Grant Park. “Madame,” he called out. “Do you have a comment on the bishop’s statement?”

  She hadn’t heard it, and when the reporter relayed the remark, she laughed out loud, her tiny frame feeling magnified and bloated in righteousness. From the corner of her eye she had seen a horrified Max Klein, wilting at the thought of the unlikely combination of confrontation and conflict. She could see him gathering his thoughts, trying to compose an appeasing retort that would serve to diffuse the bishop’s ire and keep his boss’s honor intact. But as Max had tried to fumble his way through a stuttering introduction clearly meant to give his brain time to organize, Sarah literally stepped in front of him, and said to the reporter, “To the bishop, I say this: Why attack me so violently? Actors should never be hard on one another.” She threw her head back and laughed, her red hair tickling her back.

  Even the reporter had smiled a little. He asked if he could use the quote, looking to Max for some kind of permission, the way men always do when a woman is in the presence of another man.

  “Of course you may,” she said, still laughing. “And since when does a reporter ask?”

  Her response had run the next morning. Max was mortified. He thought that maybe he should go to the Southern Theater to make peace with the producer, to diffuse any potential situation. Sarah told Max that he should relax. She laughed when he talked about not being able to afford a box office loss. “Now it is like a sporting match,” she said to him. “People will buy a ticket just to see who takes the next blow. You watch, the house will be full. That is America.” Then she told him to sit down next to her, patting the couch twice, as if calling a dog. She had spilled a little vial of cocaine on the glass tabletop and said they should enjoy this city as long as they are here. That was back in the days when Max had as much trouble resisting the spell of the drugs as she did. “One promise,” he had said, tilting his head up with closed eyes, letting the drug fall into his head. “Please give an opening statement tonight to reaffirm that you are not at battle with Chicago nor its religious community.” She smiled and nodded, then took her own hit.

  That night, in front of the hand-painted curtain of the Venice canal, Sarah had stood at the edge of the Southern Theater’s proscenium, looking up into the glowing lights that walled off the concentric arches, each seat fully filled from the orchestra to the balcony. Set alone in the footlights. She looked once stage left to see the silver silhouette of Max’s tentative but encouraging nod. She cleared her throat. From her tiny body a voice pure yet forceful filled the hall, almost as though it were its own being. “First off,” she said, “I thank all of you for being here tonight. Chicago is certainly the pulse of America.” The audience had roared, clapping and hollering despite the scenic erudition of gowns and black ties now immediately reduced to adulating fans. Her presence was that brilliant. Then she looked back to Max once more and shrugged her shoulders, cocking her head with a whimsical smile that precluded an apology. “As far as the bishop,” she began. There was already an undercurrent of laughter when she pulled a bank draft from the cleavage in her dress and bent over the edge of the stage to hand it to an elderly man with a neatly trimmed mustache. “I trust that you will give this to his Excellency and deliver this message for me,” she began. “When I bring an attraction to a town,” she stated, “I am accustomed to spending five hundred dollars on advertising.” Then she opened her arms to acknowledge the full house. “Since your Excellency has so gratefully done half the advertising for me, I herewith enclose a two-hundred-fifty-dollar rebate for your parish.” The audience had erupted into a tremendous cheer while the drop curtain rose, revealing the paint and nail streets of Paris from which Marguerite Gautier would soon appear.

  But aging has a way of sucking the venom out of the fight. And you find yourself starting to slink away, not out of cowardice or onset reticence, but more from the realization of the power of the situation. And the words and vitriol carry every ounce of spite intended, and it is you who is targeted. They are not aimed for play. They are aimed for hurt. So you mostly walk away, trying to assign some meaning to the action, without taking it personally. Sometimes it makes you want to give up.

  From the end of the pier, the ocean looked black, strengthening the power of the waves. These were the times when a strong hit of opium was the best solution. A moment when your head can be drained of pressures and filled with glorious truths. It held the power to whittle away the harshness of catechisms, and unblock fear at its worst moments—almost as good as being on the stage. Max worried about her abusing the drug. On occasion, he delicately brought it up in the same way that one brings up alcohol with a drunk, carefully timing it between the sober and the craving. She usually ended up angry with him, reminding him of how much he used to use, and then disappearing behind a bathroom stall where she could smoke without hassle and forget Max’s judgment. But following the last lecture in Santa Fe, she had promised him that she wouldn’t bring any opium in her trunk to Los Angeles. Poor Max didn’t know that she had only put it in his. What a mistake that was. Three days hadn’t seemed such a long way away. And she never could have anticipated knowing the intense rage that would bind to weigh upon her soul.

  In the lobby of the King George, the concierge greeted her with a polite fawning. His face showed some concern, as he had been on the blunt end of her waving hand when she had stormed out of the lobby. She smiled politely and nodded her head. The room seemed to stretch infinitely upward, with the hand-painted molding almost lost behind the twinkling glare thrown by the chandelier’s constellation. The furniture was stunning; these were not a set designer’s charade. The striking yellow and red velvets could only be the result of Italian craftsmanship. And seated on a love seat, plush and red with a high back and a gently carved mahogany border at the top, an old man was by himself, his gray nest hair sticking out in several directions. He leaned forward the way many lonely men do, staring out the door behind full black glasses, whittling his right index finger against his left. A strange molested smile hung on his face. She wondered if he was missing a cane.

  “Did Madame enjoy her walk?” the concierge asked.

  She immediately knew that he had read the article. She could see the collusion in his hard stare and nervous shoulders.

  “Is there anything I can do to help make your stay more pleasant?”

  She sensed that he was ushering her. On orders to keep her occupied, anything to prevent her from knowing the truth of the situation. And the thought of being in the epicenter of the secret started to infuriate her again. Where the concentric circle of deceit spun out from around her. Everybody she had met since arriving in California had figured her to be too stupid or unaware to know what was going on. A world of nameless gawkers who felt themselves privy to her darkest moment.

  She looked the concierge in the eye. Her expression stern and metered, swallowing one last breath as she prepared to expose the whole conspiracy. “Yes, you can help me,” she spoke in a controlled fury. “You can clear that shit of a newspaper from my room, and from the rest of the hotel, for that matter.”

  She smiled at the stranger in the dark glasses, then turned and walked toward the bar. Shoulders squared and proud. In full view of the other Sarah.

  Purposefully not turning around to see the mask undone.

  VINCE BAKER HAD BEEN GIVEN the assignment three days ago. His sonabitch editor at the city desk, Graham Scott, had told him that he had better talk to Bishop Conaty as soon as possible. They had a story to break. He was holding two page-one columns, and another half page for the jump. The rival Los Angeles Examiner had sucker punched them last year on the Vienna Buffet scandal, running a front-page story declaring the lack of morality of the Herald staff. The piece had placed Herald reporters at the Vienna Buffet, a restaurant of doubtful reputation, hunkered down in the underground passage with a bevy of questionable women, some of whom were called actresses, and some the Examiner kindly re
ferred to as “abandoned.” There were tales of booze, the drinks flowing at a modest twenty-five cents a shot, and then moved on to Mumm’s Extra Dry at a hefty three dollars per pint, all billed to the Herald tab in the name of journalism, resulting in charges being filed by the police commissioner for selling illegal liquor. Stories flowed throughout the city newsrooms of broads on laps and under tables. And the Herald just couldn’t get it straightened out. F. T. Seabright, one of their longstanding reporters who had been present at the Vienna Buffet, only dug the hole deeper when he tried to explain that Scott had sent him and another reporter down for an undercover investigative piece on the proffering of illegal booze. But his unnecessary details about the length and feel of the girls’ thighs threw his credibility into doubt. The Examiner was really sticking it to their rival now, recently drawing the religious and community leaders into the drama, as was that reactionary Harrison Gray Otis of the Times. The Herald was taking it from all sides. Threats of boycotts. Letters to the editor. A cry for penance. So when this loudmouth bishop and his cohorts started making noise about the indecency of Sarah Bernhardt and their intended boycott, Graham Scott saw it as a chance to make a righteous gesture to the community at large, but more importantly to finally shut up the bullshit Examiner editorial staff. So he sent his best man. Someone who could make the story sing.

  Vince Baker was fairly young by newsroom standards, having just turned thirty in mid-January. The old dogs in the newsroom were okay with him. They thought he had the balls of an old beat hound and they admired the grace with which he could turn nothing into something. He could make anything news. A natural at contorting information into stories where facts hung on the perimeter of truth, with a pinch of sensationalism. They loved that shit at the Herald. Took him off assignments like covering births at the zoo or the largest quilt ever made this side of the Mississippi and gave him the helm as their lead city man. Threw him stories right and left. Told him to chase down the rest. They fucking loved him. Slipped him fifty for a Christmas bonus. Sent him memos all the time saying, “That was great work.” He was going places. He was assigned all the gritty city hall pieces. Every power broker in town knew him by face. Doheny. Harrington. Huntington. G. G. Johnson. They all hated the garbage that his paper put out, but they talked anyway because they knew Baker would write it with or without their quotes. This town was packed tight in his fist. Although he knew he was really nothing other than the modern-day version of the town crier, Baker still managed to keep a sense of integrity and pride—he honestly believed in his role in exposing the ugly underneath. And now he was given the task of salvaging the paper’s reputation by burying the Vienna Buffet once and for all. Playing the pawn in a cheek-to-cheek dance where a grinding pelvis is followed by a knowing wink.