became too outspoken about the management for the conservative Comédie. She left in 1880 to form her own company.

Later that same year, she set out for America, bringing along her troupe, her domestic staff, some hundred pieces of luggage, and her spirit of quand même. She left from Le Havre on October 15 aboard the worn old steam sailer L’Amérique. The weather was rough, and the Divine Sarah spent the first three days of the voyage seasick in her cabin, comforted by her leading man and lover of the moment, who billed himself simply as Angélo.

After she had recovered sufficiently to venture on deck, she noticed a stout, sorrowful-looking woman clad in mourning black. As Bernhardt watched, an immense wave sent the lady rolling helplessly across the deck. Bernhardt managed to seize one of her legs before the woman went headfirst down a companionway. They introduced themselves. “I am the widow of Abraham Lincoln,” said the woman in black. Bernhardt was horrified. “I had rendered this unhappy woman the one service she did not want,” she wrote in her memoirs, “that of saving her from death. Her husband, President Lincoln, had been assassinated by an actor and it was an actress who prevented her from joining him.”

In America, the advance publicity orchestrated by a canny British impresario, Edward Jarrett, was generating tremendous curiosity. Quite aside from the chance to enjoy a great theatrical experience, everybody, it seemed, wanted to see the eccentric marvel who—Jarrett made sure they knew—kept a tiger cub as a household pet and slept in a satin-lined coffin.

To Jarrett’s secret delight, scurrilous anonymous pamphlets—one of them called “The Love Affairs of Sarah Bernhardt”—added piquancy to his client’s image. They accused her of bearing four bastards sired by the czar of Russia, Emperor Napoleon III, Pope Pius IX, and a man guillotined for murdering his father. “Absurd,” Bernhardt remarked when the canard reached her attention ashore, “but it would be better than to have four husbands and no children, like some women in this country!”

Clergymen denounced this “monster of the Apocalypse” and threatened theatergoers who saw her with eternal damnation. In Orange, New Jersey, mothers convened to mount a campaign “against this European courtisane who is coming over to corrupt our sons.”

L’Amérique dropped anchor in New York Harbor at approximately six-thirty on the balmy, sunny morning of October 27. Thousands were already up and waiting on the pier to catch a glimpse of the legendary actress, while a small steamer, the Blackbird, set out, bearing scores of city officials, persons of consequence (including Henry Abbey, Jarrett’s American partner and one of the country’s foremost producers), and eager newspapermen. Approaching L’Amérique, the Blackbird hoisted the

tricolor flag, and a brass band broke into the “Marseillaise.” At the sight of the multitude clambering aboard, threatening to engulf her, the actress retreated to her cabin and locked herself in. Only Jarrett’s reminder of how much she needed a friendly press persuaded her to come out, ascend to the salon, and face the crowd.

“The apparition,” reported The New York Times the next day, “… was somewhat ethereal yet womanly. Mile. Bernhardt is a lady of middle height, erect in carriage, and of girlish, not angular physique. A perfect head, set almost defiantly on a slim and delicate neck, is crowned by a wealth of silken hair with a tint of burnished gold. Wonderful black eyes, which seem as fathomless as they are earnest and dauntless, rivet the beholder’s attention. A faultless nose of the best Hebrew type reveals in its delicate chiseling the aesthetic artist and her race. In repose the mouth is large but refined and as firm as the will which won the great actress her place on the stage….”

Bernhardt carried a large velvet handbag. A customs officer who insisted over her protests on looking inside found a pair of baby shoes. They had been worn by her adored son, Maurice, now 16 and at school in Paris, who had been born of a brief liaison with the witty Belgian prince Henri de Ligne. (Once, when returning from a long voyage, the prince was asked by his wife whether he had been faithful to her; he replied, “Often.”)

Henry Abbey had booked his prodigy a second-floor suite with balcony (last occupied by Ulysses S. Grant) at the fashionable Albemarle Hotel on lower Fifth Avenue. After slipping into a white robe with a girdle of turquoise and gold, she reluctantly admitted the horde of reporters and submitted to an inquisition, Jarrett serving as interpreter. To most of the questions she replied with indignation, mockery, or both. No, she did not always sleep in a coffin, sometimes dress like a man and smoke cigars, feed live quail to her lions. What dish did she favor? “Mussels.”

Her public’s anticipatory excitement, meanwhile, had continued to grow. With seats priced at the then outrageous rates of ten, fifteen, and $25, the lines to the Booth Theater at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street circled the block. Long before curtain time on opening night, the house was sold out.

On November 8, 1880, the curtain rose on Adrienne Lecouvreur, by Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé, a tearjerker about an actress whose rival for the love of a nobleman murders her by sending her a bouquet of violets with a poisonous aroma. With the exception of Racine’s Phèdre and Victor Hugo’s Hernani, all the plays that Bernhardt brought to America were lightweight; chosen for audiences of which only a minority understood French and which therefore appreciated a simple plot easy to follow, they also afforded

the actress an outlet for the high-flown histrionics at which she excelled. Victorien Sardou tailored four plays to her requirements, the most popular of which was La Tosca (like Adrienne Lecouvreur, the basis for an opera). But Bernhardt scored her supreme success as the tuberculous courtesan Marguerite Gauthier in Alexandre Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias (which Verdi borrowed for La Traviata). She portrayed Marguerite first in New York on November 16, and thereafter some three thousand times.

From the first word she uttered the audience sat mesmerized. “In Sarah Bernhardt’s voice there was more than gold,” Lytton Strachey once wrote, “there was thunder and lightning, there was heaven and hell.” She could inject feeling and passion, it was said, into a recitation of the alphabet. She was extremely slender, with a shape, as depicted in innumerable posters and paintings, of such sinuosity as to have inspired, so some contended, the Art Nouveau curve. The composer Reynaldo Hahn, a close friend, wrote: “In all her gestures there is something of the spiral…. She sits down in a spiral-like movement, her dress twists around her body, clings to it tenderly in a spiral.”

The critics too were captivated by Bernhardt’s personality, though they had reservations about the depth of her artistry. “That she fell very short of really impressive power in the great scene of the play,” the New York Times reviewer argued after her opening night, “seems to us unquestionable…. She is, in all likelihood, a woman of extraordinary talent, rather than a woman of genius; but she is undoubtedly a positively great artist.” According to the New York Daily Tribune critic, “She is an extraordinary woman; less, however, in her art … than in the constitution of her nature, wherein she stands almost alone.”

She took 27 curtain calls. Thousands followed her carriage back to the Albemarle Hotel a block from the theater and stood beneath her balcony, applauding and cheering until she appeared, bowing and throwing kisses. A band serenaded her with the “Marseillaise.”

Her four-week New York engagement ended on Saturday, December 4; it had generated receipts of nearly $100,000. Under Bernhardt’s contract, she received $1,000 per performance, plus 50 percent of each performance’s gross if it exceeded $4,000. In New York alone, she earned more than $46,000.

The next stop on the Bernhardt itinerary was Boston, but on Sunday she took a detour in a publicity ploy devised by Jarrett and Abbey and went south to Menlo Park, New Jersey, to visit Thomas Alva Edison. The inventor showed her around his laboratory, then two of his assistants recorded a duet of “John Brown’s Body” on a cylinder and Edison himself recorded “Yankee Doodle.” The actress declaimed a few alexandrines from Phèdre, and the squawky playback sent her into gales of laughter.

BOSTON, DECEMBER 6–19: After a performance

of La Dame aux Camélias, the Boston Herald wrote: “In the presence of such perfection, analysis is impossible.”

A dock on the Charles River became the scene of one of Bernhardt’s most bizarre adventures. Beside the dock floated a whale, with two harpoons in its flanks, which had been sighted at sea in that condition by one Henry Smith, who operated a fleet of codfishing vessels. He approached Sarah Bernhardt with an invitation to view the behemoth. Amused, she accepted, and Jarrett escorted her to the dock, where Smith, a squat, little figure, greeted her, doffing a fur hat. He persuaded her to climb up onto the whale’s back. Supported by Jarrett, she slipped and slid along the icy surface and, at Smith’s suggestion, retrieved a sliver of whalebone “for good luck.”

NEW HAVEN, DECEMBER 20: As Bernhardt entered her hotel, she found Henry Smith, fur hat in hand and smiling as if he anticipated her appreciation of what she was about to see. A moment later an enormous carriage filled with singing minstrels rolled past the hotel. On the panels of the carriage was a crudely painted depiction of the Divine Sarah atop the whale. Sandwich men followed the carriage bearing on their placards: “Come and see the enormous cetacean killed by Sarah Bernhardt who herself pulled out its fins to be used as whalebones for her corsets, which are made exclusively by Madame Lily Noé, the famous corset maker. … Address all orders to Mr. Henry Smith, sole representative of Madame Lily Noé for the entire United States.” Bernhardt spun around and fetched Smith two staggering slaps in the face.

MONTREAL, DECEMBER 21–25: From his pulpit the Roman Catholic bishop of Montreal fulminated eloquently against the wicked Frenchwoman and her immoral plays. “My dear colleague,” Bernhardt replied, “why attack me so violently? Actors ought not to be hard on one another.”

After her last performance, cheering members of the audience unharnessed the horses of her sleigh and hauled it to her hotel.

CHICAGO, JANUARY 15–22, 1881: Another denunciation from a bishop. This time Henry Abbey wrote a rejoinder: “Monseigneur: It is my custom when I come to your city to spend five hundred dollars on publicity. But, as you have done it for me, allow me to send you two hundred and fifty dollars for your poor.”

NEAR NEW ORLEANS, FEBRUAY 6: Rising floodwaters had so weakened the piles of a railroad bridge across St. Louis Bay that they threatened to collapse. The Bernhardt troupe occupied a special train consisting of three cars and the engine. Warned of the danger ahead during a station stop near the bridge, the trainmen proposed to backtrack and set out again for New Orleans via another route. But this would cause a day’s delay.

In the show-must-go-on tradition, Bernhardt was all for taking a chance. Quand même. Jarrett conveyed her wishes to the engineer, who finally agreed, with one proviso: He wanted twenty-five hundred dollars, which he would telegraph to his wife, refunding the money if he survived. Bernhardt, who herself demanded payment before each performance in twenty-dollar gold pieces, unhesitatingly handed over the requisite number of coins.

“I had the vision of the responsibility I had taken upon myself,” she wrote later, “for it was risking without their consent the lives of twenty-seven persons.” The train sped across the bridge, which an instant later collapsed. Bernhardt let the engineer keep the twenty-five hundred dollars “but my conscience was by no means tranquil and for a long time my sleep was disturbed by the most frightful nightmares.”

BUFFALO, MARCH 20: Bernhardt visited Niagara Falls.

NEW YORK, MAY 3: For the final performance of the tour Bernhardt chose the ever-popular La Dame aux Camélias. The next day hundreds of people shouting, “Long live Sarah! Bon voyage!” ran after her carriage to the pier, where she once again boarded L’Amérique. Within seven months she had given 156 performances in 51 cities and netted $194,000.

And then, six years later, she was back. In March 1887, Bernhardt embarked on a grand tour of South, Central, and North America with a company that included her former paramour Angélo as well as her current one, Philippe Gamier. The men apparently got along fine with each other.

After conquering the major cities of Argentina, Uruguay (where Jarrett died and an associate, Maurice Grau, replaced him), Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Panama, she reentered the United States at Texas, leading on a leash a tiger cub named Ninette, the gift of an Ecuadorean naval officer. Later, in a Chicago restaurant, Ninette sank her teeth in a waiter’s arm and attempted to bite the maître d’hôtel.

This was Bernhardt’s first “Farewell American Tour,” so proclaimed by Henry Abbey and his new partner, Grau, who figured correctly that a last chance to see Bernhardt would bring people to the box office in numbers larger than ever. Actually, Bernhardt made seven more American tours, four of which were billed as farewell tours. During the voyage home in 1887, Bernhardt took a fall, landing on her right knee. The injury led to orthopedic complications that were to torment her for the rest of her life.

On February 2, 1891, the actress began a world tour that lasted almost three years. During the first month, when she played New York, she introduced La Tosca to an American audience. She also enacted Sardou’s Cléopâtre, using a live garter snake to represent the asp with whose venom the Egyptian queen kills herself. Backstage Bernhardt wore the snake around her wrist like a bracelet. Neither on this tour nor on the two that succeeded it—1896 and 1900—did

Abbey and Grau resort to the farewell-tour ruse. The great Constant Coquelin accompanied Sarah in 1900, and they appeared together in both Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and his L’Aiglon at New York’s Garden Theater. Bernhardt also performed the most daring of her “trousers” roles— Hamlet.

During the summer of 1905, Bernhardt (now managed by the Shubert brothers, Sam and Lee, and their partner, William Connor) undertook her second “Farewell American Tour,” covering both South and North America. On October 9, the eve of her departure from Rio de Janeiro for New York, she played La Tosca. The last act required her to fling herself over the parapet of Rome’s prison castle into the Tiber. To cushion her landing, mattresses were piled beneath the parapet out of sight of the audience. But a careless stagehand had misplaced them, and Bernhardt’s already weakened knee struck the bare boards. She suffered such pain that she could not take a curtain call, and, in minutes, the whole leg swelled. Her companions implored her to remain in Rio for treatment, but she would not hear of it. The United States part of her tour was to start in Chicago during early November, and the ocean trip to New York took 20 days.

At sea, the ship’s doctor tried to examine her. She noticed that his hands were soiled, the fingernails black, and she refused to let him touch her. Left untreated for three weeks, her condition deteriorated, and when she finally was hospitalized in New York, she had to rearrange her itinerary. She was unable to walk until November 15. Five days later she resumed her tour in Chicago, then she moved back east, then south, and then west to California, playing, in all, 62 cities.

A cabal of Western theater owners agreed not to book her because when one theater in a city announced her coming appearance, the others could sell no tickets. (Prices for a Bernhardt performance ran high, and people preferred to save their entertainment money for the French star.) Bernhardt proposed a simple solution: Let the Shuberts erect a big tent. The brothers complied, and Sarah Bernhardt traveled circus fashion through the West, playing under canvas.

For her third and fourth farewell American tours, 1910–11 and 1912–13, she cast in the dual service of jeune premier and inamorato an actor of Dutch origin, Lou Tellegen, who neither onstage nor off exhibited any quality beyond an Apolloesque physique and profile. An artist’s model before he tried acting, he had posed for Rodin. Tellegen was a serial lecher who later published an autobiography entitled, in magnificent understatement, Women Have Been Kind to Me. At the outset of their liaison, Bernhardt was 66, Tellegen 27. When the novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau asked Bernhardt at what age she expected to renounce love, she replied, “With my dying breath.”