WHAT WAS YVETTE

G.D.S. & Arthur Symons wrote about her; Toulouse Lautrec painted her; Duse became her dear friend and the incomparable Sarah her enemy, but how many people still remember Yvette Gullbert, the great vedetta of the end of the country -- of the ironic inflection and the long black gloves. Here is her story, a little sentimental, but without romantioizing the facts which these authors have gone to great pains to establish. Handicapped from the beginning, Yvotte Guilbert's vie- not touen rose- began in poverty and the abandonment of her father (a permanent scar). After odd jobs, sewing at home, etc. she got her start at 20 as a protege of Zidler of the Hippodrome. She found and easier success in the cafe-concerts than in the theatre, and after a crushing beginning, imposed her own style and within five years, after her appearance at the Moulin Rouge, was a star. Love was incidental to her career (the memory of her father), but still there was the early devotion of a writer, de Robert, then the total vassalage of Max Schiller, Whom she married, who submerged himself in caring for her. Her vogue, inevitably, diminished, but not her ambition to become a serious artiste in the theatre and she continued to tour, travel, lecture until WW II sent her in exile to the south of France...Hers is an interesting story, crossing as it does the lives of many famous people. The prose here is on occasion a floral tribute which the period and the extravagance of the adulation she once received may permit.