The Magnificent Lunatic

MADAME SARAH by Cornelia Otis Skinner. 356 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95.

Max Beerbohm thought that she shed an aura of lurid supernaturalness. Dumas the elder described her voice as "a spring that ripples and leaps over golden pebbles." One awed critic wrote that watching her was as fascinating as watching a wild animal in a cage. She herself apparently felt like a great tigress stalking among fluttering doves; she always claimed that she once tried to persuade a famous surgeon to graft a tiger's tail to her spine so that she could lash it about when she got angry. To her fans, she was known as "Sarah the Divine," or sometimes "The Magnificent Lunatic."

There is no doubt that the great Sarah Bernhardt was the most fabled theatrical personality of her time. For nearly 61 years she captured the world's theaters and left her audiences enchanted, even though toward the end she was a grotesquely overpainted, raddled old crone. Her memoirs and a dozen biographies contain such a hodgepodge of legend that it is often hard to decide whether Bernhardt was truly a gifted actress or merely a canny show-woman. In this effervescent biography, Cornelia Otis Skinner, herself an actress and writer (Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals), expertly sorts out the conflicting mass of material. Her conclusion is that Bernhardt was both a genius and a lovable loony.

Long & Short. The illegitimate daughter of a pretty Jewish Dutch milliner turned Parisian courtisane, Sarah was a sickly, cranky and exceedingly homely child. Never in her life, in fact, did anyone suggest that she was beautiful. Her hair was a reddish-blonde mop, fuzzy and unruly, her nose overlong, her face hollow-cheeked and colorless, and she always emphasized her pallor by slathering on white powder. In an era when the feminine ideal was a dimpled and cushiony Venus, she was skinny as a slat. "An empty carriage pulled up at the stage door and Sarah Bernhardt got out," said one wit. A columnist declared that "she never needed an umbrella--she was thin enough to walk between the drops." Dumas the younger, who knew Sarah well because she appeared for years in his Lady of the Camellias and made wads of money for both of them, once said, "You know, she's such a liar, she may even be fat."

Bernhardt was 15 when the Duc de Morny, one of her mother's lovers, arranged for her to study at the French Conservatoire. Two years later, she was in the Comedie Franchise, and was acquiring a reputation as a tempestuous prima donna. By the time she was 20, she had taken a lover and given birth to an illegitimate son. Then began the long parade: short runs with a vast assortment of lovers, longer runs and growing fame on the stage. She was the queen in Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias, Phedre in Racine's classic, and she donned trousers as Napoleon's hapless son, the Duc de Reichstadt, in Edmond Rostand's L'Aiglon. Kings mooned over her, and audiences wept torrents over her magnificent death scenes.

Tame Lion. Offstage, no project or gimmick was too daring, too dangerous or too absurd for her. She took up sculpture and painting, the piano and writing, pistol shooting and fishing, ballooning and alligator hunting. She went down into a Pennsylvania coal mine, kept a tame lion in her house, and--though she claimed vehemently that she opposed capital punishment--attended a hanging in London, a garroting in Madrid and two beheadings in France. "If there's anything more remarkable than watching Sarah act," observed one admirer, "it's watching her live."

None of her activities ever interfered with her devotion to the theater. She earned about $9,000,000 in her long career, playing in the world's top theaters as well as tents and makeshift open-air stages. As she lay dying at 78, in her Paris house on March 26, 1923, she rallied from a coma to ask if there were any reporters outside. When she was told that there were, she smiled. "I can tease them now a little by making them cool their heels," she said. And then she died.

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