Sarah Bernhardt and the invention of celebrity
Dominic Green
The French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was the first global celebrity: the first artist to be eclipsed by her image in her own lifetime, and the first to inhabit that image on multiple continents. Bernhardt first became renowned in France as a tragic actress, but then became a celebrity, as notorious for her exotic offstage life as she was admired for her onstage roles. In Britain and America, however, she began as a famous French actress, a figure combining the spectacle of theatrical performance with the spectacle of offstage celebrity.
Before Bernhardt’s American tour of 1880-81, a couple of British novelists, Dickens and Trollope, had toured the U.S. But no sensible person, then or now, stops a novelist in the street. The proliferation of Bernhardt’s image and legend, her deliberate confusion of her onstage and offstage identities, and the media-induced excitement that accompanied her progress made her first American tour the template for the performance of international celebrity. Between 1888 and 1891, she accomplished the next step, the world tour: Europe, Egypt, Russia, Turkey, South America, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Samoa.
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In America, Bernhardt traveled in a private train and performed her greatest hits in skating rinks in Atlanta and Savannah. Change the train for a private plane and the skating rink for a football stadium, and you have the benchmark of the modern rock business, from the Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour to Taylor Swift’s current Eras Tour. On her 1906 American tour, Bernhardt played at San Quentin penitentiary, more than 60 years before Johnny Cash did. That tour was the second of an eventual four farewell tours of America. Only The Who have said goodbye so many times.
The exhibition “Sarah Bernhardt,” now at the Petit Palais in Paris, shows how acclaim can often become renown, renown can sometimes become celebrity, and celebrity can rarely become fame. The exhibition’s subtitle, “Et la femme crea la star” (“And the woman created the star”), is a play on the title of Roger Vadim’s 1956 movie Et Dieu crea la femme (“And God created woman”), which launched Brigitte Bardot on the world. Vadim’s title was a nod to Genesis 5:2: “Male and female He created them.” Stardom turned the ancient division between immortal God and mortal humanity into modern fame’s division between the immortal star and the mortal public.
“Fame: I want to live forever,” sang Irene Cara in the movie Fame. And who wouldn’t? The ancients understood. Fame, from the Latin “fama,” means “renown” and “reputation.” The two were not identical. In Rome, you could only win renown through noble deeds, but a reputation could also be won through ignoble ones such as crime, prostitution, and acting. This dual sense continues in our time; hence the Georgian phrase “house of ill repute.”
Kim Kardashian won renown for her callipygous posterior, but its vigorous exercise in a sex tape of ill repute made her reputation. Oscar Wilde, whose renown was also eclipsed by his reputation, said that “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” This was unusually profound of him, for the Proto-Indo-European root of fama is “bheh,” “to speak.” To be famous is to have people talking about you when you are not there. Normal people fear this, but famous people seek it out. “Fame is the mask that eats the face,” wrote John Updike. This was buyer’s remorse. Nobody becomes famous by accident. Anyone who obtains even a morsel of fame has worked hard to taste it. Even murderers, who require a certain modesty if they are to have a career, feel compelled to promote their work. If this is obvious to us, it is because our minds and values are saturated in fame.
Fame as we know it, border-crossing brand recognition, was born in the 19th century. Napoleon Bonaparte was probably the first person to be born in obscurity to become internationally famous in Europe, with his printed image the advance guard of his fame. The first non-politician to be famous merely for being famous was Lord Byron. His versifying was a bit old-fashioned, a kind of sexed-up Augustan style, but his character was Romantic and modern: mad, bad, and exciting to know about, especially in his sex life.
A new word was needed to describe this kind of figure. For the Romans, “celeber” had meant “honored,” which was the right kind of fame. In medieval England, admittedly not a glamorous place, a celebrity was a “solemn ceremony,” not a person. The sense of celebrity as an upmarket ritual declined into the 16th-century sense of “celebrity” as a state of being notorious, the wrong kind of fame. The 19th century was the age of individualism in its liberal and heroic modes, and also the age in which mass literacy rose to meet the supply of mass media. The first printed reference in English to a “celebrity” as a person appeared in 1849.
From the first, celebrity was down-market. In English Traits (1856), Emerson mentions “a man of wit” who is “one of the celebrities of wealth and fashion,” but still feels like “a low plebeian” when he enters the house of an aristocrat. In 1863, Matthew Arnold’s essay “Spinoza and the Bible” asserts that Spinoza’s successors only “had celebrity,” while Spinoza “has fame.”
Sarah Bernhardt was the daughter of a Belgian Jewish courtesan and, it recently emerged, an attorney from Le Havre. She was born in 1844, around the time that Theophile Gautier coined the term “modernité” to describe the raised pulse of urban life; not coincidentally, the French were the first to revalue “celebrité” to describe a famous person, in 1831. Bernhardt’s father paid for her education, and her mother’s lover, the Duc de Morny, decided she should become an actress.
After an apprenticeship at the Comedie Francaise, and having an illegitimate son by Henri, Prince de Ligne, she became an overnight star in 1868 in a revival of Kean by Alexandre Dumas. All this is lost in theatrical time, like the recording of Bernhardt’s voice, which sounds absurdly stagey. Yet the moment of Bernhardt’s first renown and reputation is also when the exhibition becomes strangely topical.
Henry Irving, the king of the late 19th century London stage, is today a footnote to the history of Shakespeare performance. The only 19th-century American actor whose name we remember is John Wilkes Booth, and not for his Shakespeare. If Bernhardt’s British contemporary Ellen Terry is remembered today, it is not for her Lady Macbeth, but for John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her as Lady Macbeth.
Bernhardt’s image lives on in multiples, sometimes in tragic character (Lady Macbeth, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Hamlet), sometimes as herself in the role of Sarah Bernhardt (actress, lover, mother, sculptor, impresario, grande dame, patriot). As her image proliferates, the stagey portraits of Bernhardt as a tragic heroine, the staged portraits of Bernhardt at home in her theatrically overdone villa, and the deliberately candid portraits and snapshots of Bernhardt engaged in almost normal activities all reinforce a single impression: her face.
“Famous people glow, it’s often said,” Leo Braudy wrote in The Frenzy of Renown, a history of fame, “and it’s a glow that comes from the number of times we have seen the images of their faces, now superimposed on the living flesh before us — not a radiation of divinity but the feverish effect of repeated impacts of a face upon our eyes.” The face before us does not need to be living in the physical sense. To look at Bernhardt’s face as she moves from renown to fame is to see the invention of modern celebrity and modern media. It also shows the invention of the modern public. We suspect, Braudy writes, that the famous may be “somehow more real than we are and that our insubstantial physical reality needs that immortal substance for support.”
If stars reflect our public lives and private desires, looking at the incarnation of Sarah Bernhardt is like looking down a telescope at the Big Bang: this is when we became who we are.
“Sarah Bernhardt: Et la femme crea la star” is at the Petit Palais in Paris until Aug. 27.
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Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.