Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1935
Chapter XV Underneath the Surface
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"[p.178] Sarah Bernhardt came here several times-usually to play in vaudeville. Life was never monotonous during the period of her visits. The first time [1906] she went to live in a hotel at Venice by the sea and insisted that she should catch the fish for her own dinner every night. The press agent of the Orpheum had to hire old sea-dogs to catch fish; put them in a tub under the wharf and see that Madam's fish-hook arrived in the tub. On her last visit they hired a floor of a Hollywood hotel for her; but she was adamant; she would go back to Venice-by that time a wreck of the gay resort she had visited. Coming back to the theater for an evening performance, her car bumped into a truck loaded with iron pipe. She catapulted into the front seat of her car and hurt her knee. She finished the evening journey riding on the lap of the truck-driver. I was so unfeeling as to write a newspaper story about it and she hired bill-boards all over town to denounce me and my iniquities . . . the press agent following with a second detachment of bill-board stickers to paster over the [p. 179] denunciation. Madame Bernhardt never recovered from the injury to her knee. When she got to Paris, her leg was amputated-and this was the beginning of the end. She made one more visit, being carried onto the stage in a wheeled chair and supporting herself by a table as she went through the motions of acting. Her greatest rival, Duse, also made one of the last appearances of her life in Los Angeles. In those days my newspaper work was concerned largely with the world of sports as well as the theater.