Artist and Businesswoman

If Charlotte came home in September 1857 primarily to refill her pockets, she chose an unlikely time. Since her "irrevocable" farewell five years before, American business had gone wild. The country had overextended itself in industry and land speculation; it suddenly found itself now, with the end of the Crimean War and the resulting slump in foreign markets, in deep depression. Charlotte's own hopes for a lavish life ahead found little encouragement as she and Sallie observed from their carriage the changes that New York had undergone. The city had obviously gone on growing; new five-story buildings now towered where empty lots and family houses had stood before. But boarded-up shop fronts stared at them now; in the shadowed doorways tattered figures sat huddled, raising empty hands to the glum faces passing by.

But W. E. Burton ushered them jovially into his office at his New Theatre on Broadway, tossing off Charlotte's worried questions. True, recent months had been the darkest season in memory; the dozen theatres in New York were indeed suffering difficult times, but a glittering name like hers on a marquee could still create excitement; hands would gladly dig deep to see Charlotte Cushman. Besides, greenrooms all over New York had guessed her secret; her timing was perfect. She had kept herself out of the limelight just long enough to enhance her appeal now as some foreign exotic.

Charlotte might have countered Burton's interesting theory with a simpler story, but if her "timing" paid off, for whatever reason, she could hardly complain. Stardom was, of course, only partially talent. It was no less a pose, a pose that required a star to maintain a certain distance. No star could remain long in the public view lest it come to see her at last as an ordinary mortal. The proof would be in the box office, beginning September 28 with Fazio.

At her hotel, Charlotte had hardly taken off her bonnet and cloak when callers came knocking. It was good to be back in New York, but in the sudden crush of visitors, Charlotte wondered if she could possibly work. When James Murdoch called, protesting that actors ought to despise the custom, Charlotte cried at him: "You astonish me! Look there," she said, pointing to her bulging calling card stand. "I have all those to return, though I have been busy at it ever since my arrival. One cannot be too careful of popular interest,"¹ especially if popular interest meant cheering crowds at Burton's.

For her opening gun in this new American campaign, Charlotte had chosen her play carefully. Many eyes would be seeing her now for the first time. Upon them she must register all her range and power, almost as if this were a fresh debut. She was not long into Bianca's woes and sufferings when she knew she had triumphed again. The Tribune next morning delivered the proper verdict. "She is all she ever was, and more. Time has not touched her with a feather of his gray wing." She had gained weight, to be sure, but in the process Miss Cushman had returned to the American stage "less metallic in her passions . . . more tender, more delicate."²

The sellout houses fully confirmed her hopes. No outcry complained that she had rescinded her word "farewell." Instead, nightly crowds jammed Broadway, lamenting that all the seats, even standing room, were gone long before curtain time. During the month-long engagement she played her old standbys: Lady Teazle, Mrs. Hailer, Lady Gay, Rosalind, La Tisbe, Queen Katharine, Meg ("She was born for the part," cried the Spirit, "and having performed it, her destiny is fulfilled"³)--even Romeo. The Evening Post doubted that anything had "ever been seen on the stage more perfectly successful" than Meg Merrilies. For her Rosalind, the Spirit pulled out its rarest adjectives: "What fine and novel coloring, what new meaning by emphasis alone."⁴ Watching the frenzied ovations Charlotte drew night after night, Burton extended her contract for most of November.

Engulfed in the cheers, Charlotte concluded that as an artist she could not let herself off so easy. To test her powers in a role wholly new to her, she would play Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII on November 13. Burton approved the idea, partly because he, along with Wagner, saw that age and poundage had unfitted Charlotte at last for her old heart's love, Romeo. Playing "the scarlet sin" presented difficulties, but she welcomed them now, in spite of the noisy evidence each night that she could go on acting forever the old titanic characters that had cemented her fame.

To carry conviction, her Wolsey must match, in bearing and impact, the other male roles, especially in the high-tension scenes when the wily Cardinal knows at last that he has lost Henry's favor and must counter the attacks of Surrey and Suffolk without the royal grace to support him--maintaining all the while the lofty, compelling state of Shakespeare's brilliant "high Cardinal." She must forget all her innate sympathies. As Katharine's demon assailant, her Wolsey must show not the slightest compassion.

Audience sympathy inevitably went to the suffering Queen, yet Charlotte's Wolsey attracted more than a little compassion. Discredited at last, replaced by other men in Henry's affection, Wolsey could only croak his regrets and advice: "Go, get thee from me, Cromwell. I am a poor fall'n man, unworthy now To be thy lord and master. Seek the King. That sun, I pray, may never set! . . . Some little memory of me will stir him--I know his noble nature--not to let Thy hopeful service perish too."

Later, even Katharine could feel a sympathy for any Cardinal who could cry out, "Cromwell, Cromwell! Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my King, he would not in mine age Have left me naked to mine enemies."

The cheers that exploded over the words confirmed Charlotte's own satisfaction in the role. No living actor, one critic declared, could equal the power this actress had injected into the Cardinal's fall. "She made old playgoers recall the times of Cooke, Kean, and Macready."⁵ Later perfomances sustained the verdict. Charlotte Cushman's Cardinal was "one of those intellectual triumphs which indicates the actor's power to depict thought as well as passion."⁶ In her deep rich tones, sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, New York had never known a grander Wolsey.

November had seen the worst box offices in New York history. To stay open at all, theatres had dropped their prices to almost nothing. One night when more than 15,000 people in all New York had bought theatre seats, the average cost was twenty-seven cents.⁷ Yet Charlotte closed her seven-week run with bursting pockets, firmly certain that western cities would now pose no problem. She wrote full instructions ahead: "I think Macbeth a bad first night play because Lady M is not on in the last scene, and much of the effect of my drawing, I think, depends upon the first night." For it, "Fazio . . . is better."⁸

While Emma Stebbins stayed in New York with her sisters, Charlotte took to the circuit through Troy, Albany, Buffalo, and down to Philadelphia. For a send-off, the New York Express praised her for championing American status abroad: "Just now, when our race horses are distancing competitors, and our yachts have won leading honors in England, we have a little pride in pointing to the stage also, and claiming American prominence there. England has no actress like Charlotte Cushman."⁹ Unique in her art, she typified the success that seemed particularly American. "With her, position has been won, step by step, against disadvantages and early disappointments that would have crushed an ordinary woman." In her victory, her countrymen took pride.

Another proud name in the American theatre soon came to Charlotte's notice. Young Edwin Booth had just begun a career that might destine him for the top of the ladder. The son of irascible, unpredictable, old Junius Brutus had so impressed Julia Ward Howe one April evening in Boston, playing Richelieu, that she turned to her husband and cried, "This is the real thing!" A night or so later, Booth's dreamy, poetic Hamlet convinced her anew that a great new star had risen. When Booth's manager came to ask Julia to write a play for him, she joyously agreed, and when the austerely beautiful young actor himself came calling, Julia found him so "modest, intelligent, and above all genuine" that she began planning her drama immediately. In her plans, some miracle must entice Charlotte Cushman into the cast.

When Julia wrote Charlotte that her play would follow the Phaedre-Hippolytus story, Charlotte took an interest. Throughout the fall of 1857, Charlotte filled her letters to the "Dearest and best of Giulias" with advice and suggestions. Julia must pattern her chorus after Antigone. "You know--during pauses in the acted drama while the action seems to rest, the chorus play their parts on each side of the lower (or audience part of the) stage, the strophe, antestrophe, and general chorus. This I want done."¹⁰

Julia fired off a delighted reply. "Well, dear, your letter quite changes the world for me. That you should appear in a play of mine is already in itself a success, and what you do cannot fail." Her words, said Julia, sprang from a double joy. In the triumph Charlotte Cushman had achieved as a woman, "I feel much better about womankind."¹¹

"Can you not send me a fair copy," Charlotte answered, "such as one would act or read from?" the better to visualize the staging. Alongside Edwin Booth's young fire, Charlotte imagined herself as the Phaedre, burning with passion for the foolish Hippolytus who scorned his stepmother's advances. For playwright and actors alike, the play could be an American triumph. "If woman can accomplish it," Charlotte assured Julia, the play would be produced in Boston no later than next January.

Unfortunately, one woman's excitement could not accomplish what another female, more strategically placed, could. Reading the script, E. L. Davenport easily imagined the play's success at his Howard Athenaeum in Boston, in spite of its "dark" subject, but when his wife disliked the small part in it for her and threatened to make trouble, Davenport returned Julia's play.¹²

Bitter and disappointed, Julia Ward Howe determined never to write again for the stage; the risks for American playwrights were far too great in this strangely uncultured country. And Charlotte stood helpless and angry, while the fire that had surged in her died. If reports about young Booth were even half true, America could have seen a genius create a role to challenge anything ever done by the boorish Edwin Forrest. Deflated herself, she could only scoff now at Davenport's stupid weakness. Writing Julia, Charlotte affected no foolish modesty. "My dear," she cried, "if Edwin Booth and I had done nothing more than stand upon the stage and say 'good evening' to each other, the house would have been filled."¹³ It was lamentable proof of America's naïveté that just now no other manager would risk bringing out a "dark" American play.

To get on with the business at hand, Charlotte braved a six-day train ride in mid-January 1858 through the snows of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. She played to full houses at James McVicker's new theatre in Chicago and afterward assured a reporter that she might visit California during the spring.

Charlotte then moved down to St. Louis for a two-week run at Wood's Theatre where, between stints, she could meet Wayman Crow, Hattie's friend and adviser. At her opening as Romeo, the grace of the bird-like Juliet almost overpowered her. Mary Devlin's limpid talent outshone all the skill Charlotte had ever seen in a Juliet. The girl's face was not truly beautiful, but it glowed with a delicate charm which the dark ringlets at each side of her face only enhanced. This girl might rise to the heights if properly trained and encouraged. Watching out front, Wayman Crow's daughter thrilled enviously during the balcony scene when Romeo returned again and again, hungering for another embrace, finally pressing one of Juliet's curls to his lips.¹⁴

Next morning, when Charlotte entered Wayman Crow's book-lined office, she confronted a commanding figure, a strong face set with animated blue eyes that radiated character and judgment. In the talk that followed, hearing Crow spell out the pros and cons of various investments, she concluded that this man--unlike most others she had known--had a canny brain that could serve her well. Remembering her bitter losses with Harlan, she would not give Crow control of her property, but he could advise her through letters about the wisest means of keeping her money at work. Crow echoed her heartily; railroads, mines, and city real estate were sure to pay off in time. In the country's present ills, she must expect no miracles from her new investment counselor--but in this great America, crises could not last forever.

When the business conference ended, Crow ushered in his nineteen-year-old daughter Emma, a spirited, dark-haired beauty that reminded Charlotte of Hattie, though Emma was all ruffles and lace--not at all the type to care about making a name in a man's world. When the Crows invited Charlotte out to their lavish house overlooking the Mississippi, her friendship with the family deepened as, day after day, Crow sent his carriage for her. Nights when she played Meg Merrilies, she took Emma Crow backstage to watch her put on her makeup, though the time was no social occasion and the girl sat quiet and unnoticed in a corner. Watching Charlotte, Emma Crow sat disbelieving as the woman she happily claimed now as a friend transformed herself into some grand unknown character. After Queen Katharine's dying scene, she rushed back each night to make sure the death had only been acting. When she found Charlotte in her dressing room, her healthy self still, she fell laughing into Charlotte's arms.

Together, Charlotte and Emma Crow went for carriage rides along the teeming river where steamboats took on or disgorged their cargoes, past wagon yards filled with stamping mules and ox-teams and leather-faced men whipping wagon trains into line for their long westward roll through Indian country. Already, rumor had it that by September regular stagecoaches, pulled at top speed, would shrink the 2700 miles between St. Louis and San Francisco to a mere twenty-six days. Thinking about that trip, Charlotte figured she might someday brave it herself, might even take along this bundle of gaiety beside her--the perils of the trip notwithstanding.

At Wood's Theatre, Charlotte made another lasting impression. When she told the prompter she needed a boy to carry her heavy basket of stage jewelry each evening to and from the theatre, the prompter pointed to J. B. Pond, a lad who lived on the seven dollars a week he made as callboy. "I must have somebody that I can rely upon who will walk faithfully by my side,"¹⁵ she said. She would pay a dollar a night.

Throughout her run, Jimmy Pond carried her basket faithfully. On her last Saturday, when the boy failed to report, she found him backstage in the shadows, curled up ill on a pile of drapes. She spoke to him a few minutes, then slipped a twenty-dollar gold piece into his hand.

Next day, when the Crows bade her good-bye at the gangplank of the Baltic, the steamboat to New Orleans, Charlotte kissed her fingers to the girl waving tearfully down below and vowed in her heart that letters must somehow maintain this friendship. Downstream, Charlotte mailed back letters that struggled to express her feelings for Emma Crow. "Who but the dearest 'little love' in the world" would have put up the delicious lunch that "comforted me marvelous much on my tedious journey to Cairo?" she wrote, or "sent me such a pretty, nice, sweet, loving, clever note as the 'dear little love' I have inspired in my old age?"

At her writing desk in the lounge of the Baltic, Charlotte remembered again the parting scene in St. Louis. "I have to thank you, dear, for all of these and do thank you and love you very much for them and more than these for the bright tears you gave me." Time, of course, would make the girl wonder that she ever declared so fervent a love for an old woman. "However I will trust you . . . my sweet little love, and believe that you will ever be true and devoted."¹⁶

In New Orleans, Charlotte played Romeo with a fresh verve and passion "eminently characteristic of the great poet's creation," as the Picayune said, mirroring the new affection that had blossomed in St. Louis. "Time has dealt very kindly with our accomplished tragedienne, and we do not remember ever seeing her look better."¹⁷ After her happy days up river, New Orleans at carnival time offered Charlotte the perfect match for her own high spirits. To rehearsals, she brought a new zest. When a scene in The Actress of Padua required her and the walking lady to kneel reverently at a shrine, Charlotte coached Catherine Reignolds for more than an hour in order to achieve the right tone. When her terrible Meg made Catherine forget her lines and stand speechless, she glared down amused at the girl, then reached out, lifted her firmly, and set her down where she belonged.¹⁸

Charlotte's fourteen nights netted her $5,310, an incredible take in the light of the country's depression. Her delight increased even more her last evening when a white-haired, bent old man in a black silk coat came to her dressing room. R. D. Shepherd, her old benefactor in Boston, had come to tell her that he had just witnessed the fruit of his early hopes. In the midst of her delighted cries Charlotte grasped Shepherd's hand and promised to sit for a portrait as soon as she got back to Rome. Giving Shepherd a marble bust for his library was the least she could do to repay him.

Moving north aboard a series of bouncing coaches, Charlotte bore up under the dust and the splashing mud and the late spring snows by planning the times ahead. Shrewdly placed, all this new money ought to support her plans for England and Rome. Soon she could say another quick farewell to Boston and New York. Meanwhile, she proved in Nashville again what a trouper does in an emergency. Once before, she had covered her shock on stage when she snagged a heel in her train and fell to the floor. Now, when she held her candle too close and her veil burst into flame, she continued her speech, all the while ripping off the veil and quickly stamping out the fire with her foot.

Writing St. Louis, Charlotte poured out her hopes that Emma Crow could visit the new apartment in Rome next winter. With the letter she enclosed a bracelet made from her own brown hair twined in gold. When the other Emma of her heart, Miss Stebbins, joined her in May in Washington, Charlotte counted her blessings complete; she had cast loneliness and grief behind her.

She and Emma declined Senator Seward's invitation to stay in his home on Lafayette Square, but she filled her afternoon visits with him conjecturing about states' rights and foreign policy, then sat attentive while Seward, his long Roman nose bobbing up and down, punctuating the air with his big cigar, spelled out his dreams for a great America that would one day include all of Canada and Mexico. "The improvability of our race is without limit."¹⁹ She laughed at his quick anecdotes, all the while realizing just how closely she and Seward thought alike, even paralleled each other in temperament. She and Emma rode with him one afternoon up Capitol Hill to see the slow progress the builders were making on the tall dome.

Leaving Washington, Charlotte chuckled at the note Seward had enclosed with her new passport. Charlotte must complete the form it contained and return it for filing in the State Department. Seward imagined the satisfaction "it must give you to have an opportunity to describe yourself, your face, complexion, glossy hair, chin . . . and lastly your age," but the record would be useful in history, and in the meantime, "if you shall get the country into any (scrapes) while you are abroad, we shall have the satisfaction of knowing just what the subject of controversy is, an advantage which belligerent states seldom enjoy."²⁰

After Providence, Charlotte was ready to tell Boston another good-bye. At Elizabeth Peabody's bookshop on West Street, she invited a crowd of old literary friends to the theatre, then smiled on stage when she saw the eccentric Miss Peabody, clad in an outlandish tall hat and black shawl, peering at her from one of the boxes. Elizabeth sat raptly watching Charlotte's Katharine blend slowly "the infirmities of dying with the majesty of her spirit." "In the very death," she said later, Charlotte "went out of the body almost visibly."²¹

The playbills had advertised this two-week run as Boston's last chance to bid a proper Godspeed to "the greatest living actress."²² But watching Charlotte's acting, Edwin Forrest's good friend "Acorn" lamented that it "startles and thrills" but it "does not please." Full of Macready mannerisms, Miss Cushman's Lady Macbeth was too much a bully: Macbeth would have hurled such a shrew out of his castle. But "Acorn" admitted that whatever differences might exist in the minds of critics, Charlotte Cushman was "a woman of extraordinary intellectual strength and power."²³

That power registered deep on young Louisa May Alcott. "Saw Charlotte Cushman," she told her diary, "and had a stage struck fit."²⁴ Louisa never became the actress she dreamed that night of being, but as a novelist she later used the excitement she had felt when she made the actress, Miss Cameron, in Jo's Boys, a near-translation of Charlotte. "Miss Cameron had lost her lover years ago," she wrote in 1886, "and since had lived only for art." When Josie confesses her dreams to Miss Cameron ("I don't expect to be a Mrs. Siddons or a Miss Cameron, much as I long to be"), the actress replies: "It would be pleasant to me to know that when I quit the stage I leave behind me a well-trained, faithful, gifted comrade to more than fill my place, and carry on what I have much at heart,--the purification of the stage."²⁵

To Charlotte's last nights in Boston, another girl who would make her literary mark reacted strongly. "The other day, upon returning from Boston," Kate Field wrote in her journal, "after having become excited over Miss Cushman, I shut myself up and wrote some verses to her," in reply to which "I received a cunning little note from Charlotte Cushman. She says she will write again. Oh, if I could only have a European correspondence with her, how delightful it would be for me."²⁶

But the most astonishing visitor Charlotte received was the shambling, tousled figure who came hat in hand to her door at intermission. Mr. Topliff, her father's cutthroat old partner, was destitute: could Charlotte lend him some money? She stood silent, letting the amazing request sink in. Her eyes blazing, she glared at Topliff, while he shuffled his feet, abashed and downcast. Her first thought was to hurl the wizened old crook out the door. But she recognized in the scene a beautiful justice. Still unspeaking, she untied her purse, took out some large coins, and thrust them into his hand. He could not miss the scorn in her gesture, the canny revulsion in her eyes. But he could not guess her motive. Topliff's name had always stood for all her earliest pains and struggles, but she recognized now a peculiar debt she owed him.

That night, standing on stage among the farewell bouquets the ushers laid at her feet, Charlotte delivered the curtain speech that echoed her feelings about Topliff. "On the 8th of April, 1835, then eighteen years of age . . . I launched my tiny craft upon the sea of public opinion, in a course of alternate storms and calms, which has known no retrogression, but which has ever been onward." Boston's approval, among the earliest breezes, had always filled her sails, but "I have met many land rats, and water rats (pirates, I mean) cruisers under false colors, mermen and mermaids, rocks, shoals, and quick-sands." But with hope at the prow and a steadfast will at the helm, "I have, after twenty-three years' voyage, come into the port of friends' esteem, with the colors of independence nailed to the masthead."²⁷ Saying the words, she knew now that without Topliff's bitter part in Elkanah's failure, she might never have found her role.

New York gave her a send-off as warm as Boston's. On July 6, answering the roaring applause out front, she pushed through the curtains at Niblo's Garden to make a grand, sweeping bow, then announced her intention to retire forever, unless "fortune should prove adverse" once again. Memories might have questioned the meaning of Charlotte's word "farewell." They had believed her once; could they believe her now? The Times next day took her seriously. Charlotte Cushman had cut off her American career "unnecessarily." A law ought "to prevent her doing so."²⁸

For Charlotte, the word was sincere as always. In 1852, she had cut her ties honestly; acting involved too many sordid contacts. Now, she was tired. With Emma Stebbins wanting to get back to work, she could return now to the rich life in Europe with a fortune safely invested. So far as anyone could predict, on this midsummer eve of 1858, she need never go back on her word.