CHAPTER XIX
Nowadays almost anything can be said about a theatrical star and her manager is glad. He knows that the more she is written about, the more she is talked about, the larger will be the receipts of the theatre at which she is playing. Even the ancient and eminently respectable Comédie Française has been obliged to accept this point of view—though not without some pangs, I imagine. Witness the celebrated escapade of Mlle. Cecile Sorel, great and exquisite interpreter of Molière, who two years ago visited a public gallery and smashed an uncomplimentary “portrait” of her by Bib, a young cartoonist. The press of the world was full of the incident, but, so far as is known, the actress was not hauled over the coals by the administration of the Comédie Française.
But in the seventies and eighties a different view was taken of such matters. An artiste was supposed to be contented with reviews of the plays she appeared in, and the Comédie Française especially deplored any effort on the part of an individual actress to make herself known by any other method than the excellence of her acting.
Thus it may be imagined that Sarah was rapidly making enemies for herself. One could not open a newspaper or a magazine without reading some article devoted to her, without seeing an account of some escapade of hers. Sarah herself has said in her “Memoirs” that she regretted this publicity, without being able to suppress it, and that she never read the newspapers. Perhaps she may be pardoned this slight lapse of memory.
Many times I have found her in the morning, her bed covered with marked copies of publications sent her by friends, and by writers of paragraphs about her. She gloried in them. She did not care what people said about her, so long as they said something. She herself, to my certain knowledge, inspired many of the most far-fetched stories.
When she found that the cartoonists had seized upon her slender figure and fuzzy hair as heaven-sent objects on which to exercise their talents, she wore clothes that accentuated her slimness, and her hair became more studiously unruly than ever. When she found that every foolish thing she did was immediately commented upon in a score of newspapers, hostile as well as friendly, she spent hours thinking out new escapades, and made foolishness an art.
She was the first actress who really understood the value of publicity.
Genius can be as eccentric as it pleases, but eccentricity without genius becomes a boomerang, to hurl fools into oblivion.
Had Sarah been a lesser woman all this publicity would have ruined her, but she really was a genius, and not only possessed a talent for self-advertisement, but had a genuine passion for work. People who had read dozens of idiotic stories about her would visit the theatre prepared to scoff—but they remained to applaud her frantically.
She was bigger than all the publicity she obtained. Her art justified all. But her manager, Perrin, and the committee of the Comédie could not see things that way. They were horrified and disgusted at the notoriety that had descended on the venerable House of Molière, as the result of the follies of their star.