The Divine Sarah Bernhardt’s Theatrical Meltdown in Seattle
When the legendary French actress discovered her grand stage at the Columbia Theater had been booked for a minstrel show, she didn't just walk off—she unleashed a legendary, multi-lingual tantrum.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
When Sarah Bernhardt drove up in front of the Columbia Theater last Saturday evening and waited for her ancient and tardy valet to assist her from her coupée, she was metally shocked to see a monstrous three-sheet poster pasted upon the billboard at the entrance to the theater. This poster announced that, beginning with tomorrow night and continuing for a week thereafter, Wythe's Only Original and Genuine Georgia Minstrels would hold high carnival upon the boards which the divine Sarah herself had hallowed with her tread. This tawdry profanation sent the bile surging through every artery and vein in her system. She cried 'Mon dieu!' and then she cried 'Par blew!' and a moment thereafter she shrieked 'Sacre bleu!' Immediately following the monosyllabic trill there burst from her pale, thin lips a stentorian soliloquy of profanatory expletives that left the atmosphere unassailable. Monsieur Alphonse, the ancient lacquey, came bustling from the theater to find his sweet mistress tottering upon the very verge of hysterics. Manager J. M. Hill rushed down from his private office, bounding five steps at a time, to find her pointing a quivering index finger at the awful three-sheet poster and sobbing, 'Mon dieu! Par blew! Oh, dat bill! Dat minstrel bill!' Sarah insisted that she would not play if the minstrels remained. 'For a week,' said Sarah, bitterly, 'I haf been doing ze grand truhadee for ze public, and on Saturday I do dope megro d'oeuvre one times and I do him tonight. Is it not an insult to ze great Sarah to put a minstrel bill in theater while Sarah be here? Take him down tout sweet, else I do not play tonight.' There was but one alternative: the three-sheet poster had to come down.
“Is it not an insult to ze great Sarah to put a minstrel bill in theater while Sarah be here?”
Long before modern battles over corporate hegemony in Seattle’s arts scene, the city’s early theaters were sites of intense friction between high art and popular entertainment. The 'Columbia Theater'—located near the footprint of the modern Pioneer Square district—served as a stage where visiting titans of the European stage clashed with the populist, often exploitative trends of 19th-century American variety theater.
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