My Double Life

"Sarah Bernhardt wrote My Double Life at the peak of her fame. I chose her autobiography because of her centrality to the history of celebrity. Sarah Bernhardt was born in France in 1844 to a Jewish Dutch courtesan who made her living in Paris. No one ever knew who Sarah Bernhardt’s father was. She discusses him quite a bit in her autobiography, but she never names him. That establishes, right from the start, her willingness to be a social outlier: she trumpets her illegitimacy. She was very enthusiastic about not being like other people and the image she presents of herself in her memoir is the one she cultivated as a star: defiant, eccentric, willful and rebellious. Bernhardt’s career coincided with the emergence of photography, sound recording and, when she was in her sixties, film. She made use of each of these technologies to take control of her own image. Beginning in the 1860s, ordinary people could easily buy cheap photographs of celebrities. These images were sold in stationer’s shops, tobacco shops, anywhere that books or newspapers were sold. If you lived in a more remote location, you could easily order small-format photographs through the mail. People kept albums of these images and enjoyed perusing them just as today we enjoy looking at pages on Pinterest or Tumblr or fan sites. Sarah Bernhardt also coincided with the rise of the mass press. In the 1830s, more and more people began to buy and read newspapers, which were getting cheaper and being published more frequently. In order to keep people’s interest, editors had to publish not only news about the economy and what was going on in the legislature, but also entertaining tidbits, which included gossip about celebrities. The daily newspaper also covered live theater in great depth, since from the 1870s through the 1900s, theater was the primary form of entertainment. During this period, often called theater’s golden age, many stage actors became famous. But Sarah Bernhardt didn’t just become famous as an actor—she also became famous as a personality. She often appealed to the public when contesting bad publicity in the press. Her autobiography reprints many newspaper articles that she feels were unfair to her or misrepresented the facts, and she rebuts them at length. She uses her autobiography to settle scores and set the record straight. It’s impossible to understand today how important theater was. Twelve million people a year went to the theater in places like London or Paris or New York, and even the smallest towns had at least one theater or opera house. People of all classes attended some form of live performance three or four times a week. Travel also played a very significant role in Bernhardt’s superstardom, as touring still does for music stars today. Sarah Bernhardt became a superstar because she could take a steamship and get from France to the United States in six weeks—which she did five times over the course of her life. When she came to the US, she would stay for a year. The railway networks in place by the 1860s meant that she could almost everywhere in the US. She didn’t just go to Chicago and New York and Philadelphia. She went to Louisville, Memphis, Leavenworth, and many places I’ve never been or even heard of. Also, because of another technological innovation in the 1860s, the telegraph cable, news about Bernhardt travelled quickly. People in Leavenworth would read about how her performances were selling out in New York. They didn’t want to feel provincial, so they wanted to see her too. What this teaches us is that celebrity is an intersection of live presence and virtual representations. No one becomes a celebrity through live presence alone, and, conversely, no one becomes a celebrity solely through virtual representations. If the public doesn’t feel that it could at least in theory see the person, it’s less compelling; the crucial elements of realness and unpredictability are lacking. To this day, movie stars will go live on late night TV so that the public can have a sense of how they seem in ‘real life’ versus onscreen. The interplay between the representation and the presence makes celebrity. Bernhardt used insights gleaned as a performer to tell a good story. She grabs the reader’s attention by embedding her story in historical events, like the Franco-Prussian war, and by affiliating herself with people who were even more famous than she was and likely to command recognition a hundred years from now. “Victor Hugo was so moved by her performance that he sent her a gift of a diamond in the shape of the tear he shed watching her act” She emphasized her relationship with the great writer Victor Hugo, in part because she knew that his written works would be preserved and his name recognized long after his death. She also wanted to point out that Hugo was so moved by her performance in one of his plays that he sent her a gift of a diamond in the shape of the tear he shed watching her act. His admiration elevated her. At the same time, in the 1870s, Bernhardt’s willingness to perform in Hugo’s plays helped a new generation connect to his work. Hugo was already quite old in 1871. Bernhardt was the it-girl of the moment, who helped make the venerable Hugo more contemporary and more current. I did a lot of research to reconstruct Bernhardt’s acting techniques. Today, when people see a clip of her on YouTube in the 1912 film of Queen Elizabeth , they say, ‘Nobody would think she was a good actor today!’ Her acting style was designed for the stage and on film it looks very exaggerated and over-the-top. I thought it was important to try to understand why her contemporaries thought she was a great actor. By unearthing very detailed and thoughtful reviews and comparing them to accounts by ordinary people who went to see her, I was able to establish how she used her body and voice in ways that thrilled theatergoers. I also learned that audiences at the time wanted to be moved. Now we sometimes find that kind of emotional response, especially to live theater, a bit embarrassing. We’re much more willing to be moved by musicians; we turn to popular music to feel big sweeping emotions. How people respond now to Taylor Swift or Beyonce offers a good comparison point to how people felt when they saw Bernhardt perform."