Booth, James Hubbard, James Wilcox and James K. Hackett were other Americans whom Sarah counted among her warmest friends. Hackett represented the American stage at her funeral.
It has often been commented upon that Sarah Bernhardt never had an American lover. I heard her speak of this one day with regret.
“I am sure the Americans must be great lovers,” she said; “they are so strong, so primitive, and so childish in their ardour. The English are wonderful men to love, because they possess the faculty of bending one to their likes, dislikes and moods without seeming to make it an imposition; but the Americans are greater, for they bend themselves to suit you.”
This absence of Americans in Sarah’s sentimental life is best explained by the short duration of each of her tours of America and the distances covered during them. Many towns in America saw Sarah only for twenty-four hours, and the whole period was a ceaseless whirl of arriving, rehearsing, playing and departing. She was a genius at organisation and insisted on attending to the larger details of her tours herself.
After three weeks in America, Sarah learned sufficient English to know the simpler expressions, and before 1895 she spoke it very well. On her tours in America she invariably travelled by special train, the “Sarah Bernhardt Special,” but this was not by her own arrangement, and she did not like it.
“They will not put one’s special coaches on the fast trains,” she explained, “and at night they back one’s car into a siding, where one is kept awake by the noise of the goods trains being made up, shunting, arriving and departing.”
On her last two visits to America she did not use either a special train or a special car, but travelled in drawing-room sleepers. She said she found it easier and “beaucoup plus pratique.”
CHAPTER XXIII
Sarah’s first tour of the United States and Canada occupied seven months, during which she visited fourteen states and four provinces, played in more than fifty theatres and appeared before the public more than 150 times.