Excerpts from Part III - The Divine Golden Years

Louise Martin:

MY FAVORITE SCENE FROM THE PLAY IS: When she tells of her love for her husband and what love -- blind love -- truly means.

The time has come to speak of my husband, Jacques Dalama. I can’t avoid it any longer. Some times there are things in our life which are hard to talk about, hard to admit, and hard to resist. Dalama was all of those. My marriage was truly summed up by the title of a play by Bernard Shaw – Don Juan in Hell – for that is what he was and that is where he took me. At the not so tender age of thirty-eight, I fell madly in love with a twenty-six-year-old Greek diplomat and a career womanizer named Astridis Damala. The Jacques came later, when he became my leading man. Actors, always changing names you know. The way things look on a marquee can mean everything. But, not to avoid the subject any

Louise Martin as Sarah

further, Damala was terribly handsome. A man whose reputation as a heart-breaker was exceeded by reality.

 

I had met Dalama through my sister Jeanne shortly before I departed on my European tour and I was suspended between one breath and another when those glittering eyes undressed my with a glance, that was both blasé and blissful. He had a sensuous tremor to his upper lip that made my heart tremble in response. Jeanne introduced him to me at my studio and he promptly sat down and languidly removed a cigarette from a gold and jeweled case and lit it up. Knowing as all Paris knew, that I never aloud anyone to smoke in front of me. But I simply looked at him and thought, this is the most handsome creature I have ever seen.

His reckless romancing of the Parisian upper-class females had driven one woman to suicide and two to divorce. The French government decided it was time for Dalama to fish in foreign seas and he was sent to Russia. Though I had so far refused any offers to perform in Russia as soon as I heard he had been reassigned there I changed all my plans to insert a six month engagement in the middle of everything. Just for the chance to see him again.

That is the true meaning of blind passion. My son, my friends, my critics could say anything, do anything and I just thought, --- how handsome he was. Dalama could ignore me, debase me, slap me across the face with his infidelities, and I just thought, -- how handsome he was. I discarded loyal, professional actors to star opposite a rank amateur, because I thought – how handsome he was.

As many times as I had played Victor Hugo’s Doña Sol opposite Sulley or Angelo or Conqulin as Hernani, the lines of her first sweet speech had never rung so true as when I said them to Damala.

HERNANI By Victor Hugo Sarah as Doña Sol

Doña Sol:   We will leave tomorrow. Hernani, do not condemn me for my new boldness. Are you my demon or my angel? I cannot tell – but I am your slave. Wherever you go I will go. Stay or depart, - I belong to you. Why? I cannot say. I need to see you, and must have you near and have you all the time. When the sound of your step fades, then I think that my heart has stopped its beat. You are gone, and I am gone from myself. But no sooner does that beloved foot fall sound in my ear again, than I remember life and feel my soul comeback to me.

 

Finally in 1882, after he continued to copulate in every direction and squander my money on endless whores and mistresses, I ran away to England to marry him, because I thought – how handsome he was. Blind passion -- is living hell.