Laurette Taylor on Sarah Bernhardt

I snapped the above at the late Mari Lyn Henry’s place just over a year ago.

She was a big Sarah Bernhardt buff, and today being Bernhardt’s birthday, I thought I would share this wonderful tidbit she shared with me a few weeks after we met. As All Hallows Eve approaches, I hand you now over to Mari Lyn, who will hand you over to Laurette Taylor, who will hand you over to Bernhardt, three beautiful female spirits.

Mari Lyn: Before her death in 1945, Laurette met with the artistic directors of a regional theatre who were planning to write a play for her after The Glass Menagerie.  I found the transcript of the interview in a Theatre Arts Magazine (1950) and it is most evocative of her narrative regarding being a handmaiden at the Palace Theatre for Bernhardt’s last Farewell Tour performance. It is rare to read eyewitness accounts.

LAURETTE TAYLOR (1884-1946) and SARAH BERNHARDT, from an article entitled “Recollections of Laurette Taylor”, Theatre Arts Magazine March, 1950 (posthumously published)

“Bernhardt was playing at the Palace. It was her last engagement in New York. It was after the amputation of her left leg and she played everything either seated on a throne or in an armchair or a bed or arranged on the floor, with piles of flags and banners draped around her. This was a special matinee at the Palace in the spring of 1917; a benefit, I think, for the Franco-American Red Cross. Marechal Joffre had been over here and Cardinal Mercier and everyone in New York was madder than ever about anything French. Sarah Bernhardt’s final farewell tour was the culmination of the ecstasy. Fifth Avenue had been decorated with flags all the way up and down its length and everyone called it “The Avenue of the Allies.”

Now Ethel Barrymore and Jane Cowl and I had been asked to appear with Bernhardt for one afternoon as a special kind of tribute from the American stage to an old lady who was unquestionably the greatest actress who ever lived. A great French star who was playing twice a day, twelve times a week, at seventy-three, with one leg gone, and still packing ’em in!

Well, the arrangements went askew at the last minute and it was finally Marguerite Clark, Billie Burke and I that showed up at the stage door of the Palace an hour before the battle. The play was to be Phedre, and we were to be handmaidens and to appear before Sarah’s entrance, backing in before her, holding hot and dusty garlands in our hot and dusty hands, and kneeling—with our backs to the audience—while Sarah was helped onto the throne whence she would play the scene, and then recite something at the end about “l’Aigle Americain” coming to the rescue of the gallant gallic rooster who used to crow at the beginning of the old Pathe News. . . remember?

Well, things kept going wrong at the Palace: at the stage door no one knew us! We’d been hustled into a tiny dressing room, given horrid clothes to put on, and garlands of prop paper roses in which to entangle ourselves. By the time we were down on the set—straightening out our costumes and untangling ourselves from the roses, Billie and Marguerite were about ready to quit. Marguerite’s sandals wouldn’t fit her and she kept muttering “The damn costume woman hasn’t heard of Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs! (Marguerite’s vehicle that winter.) “

Finally we herded out onto the stage and placed down near the curtain line with our backs to the audience and told to kneel the minute Bernhardt appeared. Billie Burke was most unhappy—they’d made her cover her hair. Suddenly the curtain was up! We could hear the murmur of the audience behind us, as it looked up at the three derrieres on the stage of the old Palace that afternoon—of the three best young actresses in America. And not applauding!

Because they were already watching the doorway of the Palace from which Bernhardt was going to make her first entrance. Suddenly, Marguerite grabbed my arm. “Look in the wings!” she whispered. It was Bernhardt, waiting for her cue between two immense black men dressed as Nubian slaves. Those two giants were going to help her across the stage to the throne. For in spite of having only one leg left, Bernhardt refused to wear an artificial one and refused to be carried. She was going to try to maneuver the thirty-five feet from the wings to the throne on one leg, supported by the Nubians, each holding her beneath an elbow.

Now whether it was because I had heard about the divine Sarah all my life—or because her reputation was incalculably greater than that of any actress who ever lived—I suddenly felt as if God had kicked me in the pit of the stomach. I fell to my knees, too, and noticed that Marguerite was already kneeling. And Billie was kneeling on the other side of me, pulling at my costume. I knelt lower and held out my paper roses to immortality! The trio in the wings started toward us. And Billie and Marguerite and I put our foreheads to the floor, as we had been told to do, and remained still.

I peeked up; Bernhardt was coming on and on, supported by the two immense black men, into whose shoulders we could see her scarlet fingers digging. You know, the weight of supporting her, and yet making it look. as if she were walking along and not just hopping, must have been terrific! Her costume seemed to be made of bangles and draped Turkish rugs, and hanging lamps turned upside down on her bosoms, and her eyes heavy with kohl and her face powdery with Turkish paste. Not a bit like a make up in the American theatre. She was so close to us now that we could see the cracks in the most famous face in the world. Like the cracks in the baked sand of a parched desert.

When they had heaved her alongside of us, and the three of them stood towering above us, they paused. Bernhardt was looking down at us with that infinitely tender smile. I thought we were supposed to kiss her sandal—and it was right in front of my nose, but that wasn’t her idea. The slaves held her rigid and she reached with her scarlet fingers, alive with rings, down to the three of us and touched our heads one by one, Billie Burke’s, and Marguerite Clark’s and mine. “Mes enfants! Mes cheres, cheres enfants!” in that voice of molten brass. It was never golden.

By that time I was crying; and I think. Marguerite was; and I know Billie was; she was crying before she knelt down even.”

When asked if she ever saw her again, Laurette responded.

“Only once. Bernhardt was so pleased that the three of us had walked on in her play that she insisted on coming to a performance of each one of our plays in turn. She wore the same sable coat and sable hat to each of our morning matinees and was photographed with each of us. She would be wheeled into the stage box and the audience would rise, and Bernhardt would bow and wave her hand. She gave each of us a photograph of herself in the last act of Camille. Mine is inscribed, “A la petite Tailleur en homage de Sarah Bernhardt “.

The morning after we had acted our play she had been sitting in her wheelchair in the middle of the center aisle for the last act and had watched and watched intently. She motioned me down into the orchestra to sit by her. She talked at length about simplicity, and honesty, and feeling. And the need that the actor should never forget, of submerging himself completely into the emotional work of his role. Bernhardt had a kind of glitter about her. There was something about that crooked, smiling face, and the deathless vitality it betokened—a vitality that transcended death and misfortune and a long illness”

*****

Not just moving, but thrilling, eh? A sort of time trip via leap-frog. More on the Divine Sarah and vaudeville is here.