"To Dare and Do and Be"

After opening as Queen Katharine at Booth's, Charlotte tried to ignore all matters outside the facts as she saw them. If doing so narrowed her life in one sense, it helped her make the most of her time. The opening's special meaning became clear at the end of Act I, when cheers recalled her again and again to the footlights. In the wings, she threw up both arms joyously--insensitive now to all pain--and cried out: "How have I lived without this through all these years!"¹ At last, she was clear about acting's place in her life. She understood now that commitment reached much deeper than fame, or interest, or money, or critical praise. Charlotte had always said that her art was supreme, that her calling was full and enveloping. But words were inadequate now, and the difference centered in something that she, as a limited mortal, had only lately discovered. Lying in bed all afternoon to gather her strength for the night's work, gulping the comforting, whiskey-soaked biscuit Sallie made her eat between acts, she fended off the worried cries of her friends.

Seward's note on October 8 said he could not imagine the motive that had prompted her to return to acting, her making "an effort so prodigious and so incongruous" with her health. Was it in her case, as it was in his, asked Seward, "that the more sickness and infirmity attempt to chain you down, the more determination you summon to resist the fetters?"² Emma never stopped complaining that Charlotte's making herself act night after night was foolish and wicked: her public had no possible claim on her; the money could never justify all the pain. And Sallie was even less understanding. Why did Charlotte insist on working herself to death?

The phrasing was interesting, but it had little relevance now. Fully involved, she would act until death overcame her. When the Times welcomed her back, a gray-haired veteran with gaunt cheeks now but "an artist whose powers, ripe as they are, still show so much of 'progress' and so little of 'decay,'"³ when the Tribune's William Winter said her Queen Katharine cast "a radiant light"⁴ and in tribute placed a lock of her hair in a tortoise shell box along with one of Mrs. Siddons', when the New York Standard said that such applause as that greeting her entrance was "heard but seldom in a generation"⁵--she saw that her point was not lost. If suffering had enriched her art, she could accept it.

In younger actresses, a quieter, more natural style was emerging, but the critics, of whom New York now had several equipped to evaluate her, found her unique and incomparable. To John Rankin Towse, her "artful pauses" were always followed by "swift, bold, and perfect executions"--each of her actions inspired by "an unfaltering intelligence."⁶ John D. Stockton found in her style a "perfect balance of her passion and intellect," the "charm of reserved power."⁷

Charlotte was too deeply immersed in the nightly excitement at Booth's to give real thought to newer talents coming along, to Adah Isaacs Menken, Fanny Davenport, Clara Morris, or to their differing styles. She had built her art out of materials nature had given her. Since beauty was not among them, she had centered her craft on the vigor, the broad gestures, the ringing tones that best matched her figure and stature. Opposite a Booth or a Lawrence Barrett, she could complain about playing with such "little men,"⁸ but she would not trim down her interpretations.

Opposite Booth on October 19, when she played Lady Macbeth for the benefit of thousands left homeless in a devastating fire that had leveled much of Chicago, she drank in the applause, knowing that she had never played with greater conviction. She was "incarnate power,"⁹ wrote Winter: "towering above Macbeth and pointing beyond him to the coming Duncan who 'must be provided for,' hers was a talent reduced not at all by age or illness."¹⁰

Seward understood fully enough now her urge to keep on working. Back home, he wrote her encouragement. "Pray write to me at Auburn and tell me what will be the most convenient time and way for us to come together, review the events and incidents which have occurred in the interval since we parted, and contrive how we may come to live nearer to each other hereafter."¹¹

Though her body cried out in pain after the curtain each night and she had to let Sallie massage and bathe her left side with hot compresses, when she strode onto the stage for rehearsal in the morning, the company saw a woman, fully refreshed, determinedly ready for business. Working, she resorted to no impassioned outbursts. When the page to Queen Katharine muffed his approach to her throne, she quietly stepped down and showed him how to give the part the proper dignity and grace.¹² But she stopped the rehearsal when the Dominie Sampson introduced new tricks in Guy Mannering. After thirty-two years of practice as Meg, she would tolerate no tampering. "If you have any new business or any gags to introduce in this scene, please reserve them until I have left the stage."¹³

By the time her forty-two nights had ended, she and Booth were richer by $57,000. Managers throughout the country besieged her, but she was too tired to consider anything long range--her throat was too raw, and she was too shrewd a businesswoman to leap at their bidding. "My being careless whether they take me or not is a great thing, for of course they all want me the more,"¹⁴ she wrote Emma Crow. When a letter arrived from Isa congratulating her on the "great things you are doing," saying she and Mrs. Browning had always been women "of genius,"¹⁵ Charlotte smiled. Pondering her own success, she could pity Edwin Forrest, who had played to near-empty houses back in February, an infirm, embittered, rejected old man.

By late November, Charlotte was eager to tackle Boston, especially now that a public subscription had finally paid Emma in full for her Horace Mann statue. Watching from the wings at the Globe Theatre, Emma found it hard to remember that Charlotte was ill and suffering. After two performances of Macbeth the same day, George Vandenhoff--lately back from retirement--came off from his dying scene stumbling and groaning like an old woman, but Charlotte took her bows brightly and grandly, as if she had done nothing unusual. Yet a day or so later, Charlotte confessed that the pains in her breast had never been worse, that now at last she could feel a sympathy for Edwin Forrest, who had just retired in New Orleans quavering the words, "I would not lag superfluous on the stage."¹⁶

The Boston papers saw no decline in her. Meg's crooning, her haggard glee, her terrible death were points "rarely if ever excelled or even equalled."¹⁷ The Daily Advertiser tried to sum up her effects in a poem.

Such is the play her wondrous powers adorn,
She seems a sybil to the manner born;
In Katharine to the last she walks a queen
And startles Macbeth in the midnight scene;
She stands unrivalled in the dramatic play,
The noblest, greatest actress of the day,
With life unblemished, elegant, refined,
To see her, hear her, is a feast of mind.¹⁸

Watching Queen Katharine, Annie Fields said that Charlotte's "noble, sympathetic nature" spoke to "every woman's heart there."¹⁹ And Julian Hawthorne, now twenty-five, watched Charlotte's Meg, transfixed at "that wonderful face, those awful eyes!"²⁰ During the death of Queen Katharine, Thomas Higginson felt as if his own mother were "dying before me. . . . I would have given worlds to be able to look away for a moment, and yet I could not."²¹

But for Charlotte, such praise was no more interesting than a little drama that took place backstage. She had gone one afternoon to see Charley Wiggin, now a successful merchant. In the store, as soon as the floorwalker recognized her, he rushed back to call Mr. Wiggin. When Charley came out, ruddy-faced and white-haired now, he broke into a smile, grasped Charlotte's hands and held them for a moment, then escorted her to his office. Later, when questioned about the visit, Charlotte answered frankly. "When I see him now, rich and respected . . . and think what a good husband he has made, I sigh for what I've lost, and rejoice for what I've gained."²²

For Charley, the visit reaffirmed a hope that had formed in the back of his mind in April 1866, when the house Charlotte was born in was torn down to make way for a school. Immediately, Charley had broached a plan to the Boston School Committee: the new building should be named for Charlotte Cushman. But the idea had not met with universal enthusiasm. No Boston public school had ever been named for a woman and, said one irate member, a question of moral propriety was involved. To allow the name of an actress to appear "over a temple of learning in our godly city" would be "almost a crime." Since that meeting in 1866, the matter had gone unresolved; for nearly five years the five-story building had stood nameless.

But now, during Charlotte's run at the Globe, Charley reopened the question. The night the School Committee took its final vote, Charley rushed up Washington Street to the theatre. As Queen Katharine, Charlotte had already taken her place, ready for the curtain, when he rushed into the wings, waving his hat and whispering: "It shall be called the Cushman School." Then he rushed on stage to grasp her hand.

The news made her happy, but at that moment Charlotte heard the signal to clear the stage. "Get out now, Charley. There's the bell."²³ But Charley kept up his eager chatter, and the drop curtain was rising and the footlights in full view before he left the stage--leaving his tall silk hat where he had dropped it, at the foot of Charlotte's throne.

After the play, Charlotte savored the compliment the School Committee and Boston had paid her. "This from old Puritan stock, which believes that the public school is the throne of the state," was a "greater honor," she said, "than any I could have received,"²⁴ whether as woman or actress.

After Christmas at Hyde Park with Emma's family, Charlotte came back to Boston on January 5, 1872, for the dedication of the new Cushman School. * On the platform among the dignitaries, she delivered her grateful speech. To encourage whatever poor girls might be listening, she assured them that she herself had walked these same streets, a girl as poor as the poorest among them. Whatever she had attained she had won by giving herself to her work; hard work was the secret to whatever success her fifty-five years had brought her. To the girls hearing her now, she could say nothing more worthy than to encourage them all to "dare and do and be."²⁵

Cushman School lasted until 1941, when it was demolished to make room for the Charlotte Cushman Playground. Since then, the North End Branch of the Boston Public Library has been erected on the site.

Cheered by all the tributes in Boston, Charlotte could act now or not as her health permitted. She would accept an easier routine, reading from the platform when it suited her. To all managers who now dogged her steps, she gave the same answer. "I cannot work much or long, therefore I am obliged to ask five hundred dollars per night, deposited in advance."²⁶ If the terms did not frighten them, she would be pleased to hear from them again.

Charlotte had begun her new career as a reader in Providence on December 18, when she had stood a little fearful backstage while Sallie smoothed her skirts and adjusted her ruffle bodice, her hair dressed in a gray pompadour. But when she moved on, she knew at once the old certainty that had long sustained her. She could deliver the crowd's money's worth. Seating herself at a shawl-covered table, she smiled and relaxed a moment, then opened her book. "Ladies and gentlemen, I shall read--I trust for your pleasure, surely for mine, from the second scene in the third act of 'Henry the Eighth.'"²⁷

After reading the long scene in which Wolsey faces his downfall, Charlotte turned to passages from Much Ado About Nothing. The evening ended with great applause, as the audience told her unmistakably that she had managed to re-create all the important characters, not just the single role she normally acted in a full performance. When booking agents like James Redpath and James H. Roberts beseeched her to add her name to their lists, Charlotte did not demur. Though the audiences were primarily women, proving that American women were more and more hungry for intellectual fare, Charlotte gladly accepted the challenge.

At Jamie's suggestion, she developed a lighter program for some occasions, including pieces like Mrs. Southey's "The Young Gray Head," short pieces from Elizabeth Browning's "Casa Guidi Windows," and some of Burns and Tennyson. Hearing her read "The Young Gray Head" to a packed house at Tremont Temple on January 4, 1872, Thomas Higginson swore he could see "every fibre of thatch on the roof and every bristle on the dog's back."²⁸ Hearing her read "A Man's a Man for A' That," another listener said he could see Robert Burns himself come into the room among the nobles and gentry and, with a quick shrug and half-laugh, throw down "the gage of humanity among them."²⁹

The $3,000 Charlotte got from these first readings in Providence, Boston, and New Haven confirmed her decision to take the platform. With new confidence, she braved the winter rigors of a reading tour west by way of a week's visit in Auburn. Seward's home was a large yellow brick house in the midst of a three-acre lawn. Inside, he had filled it with mementoes from his long public career, many of which Charlotte recognized from his old drawing room on Lafayette Square. Seward looked "pathetically deplorable," with his paralyzed arm and hand. But he was delighted to see her--"as much as the poor soul could demonstrate this."³⁰

At Seward's, Charlotte wrote Longfellow to thank him for the book of his poems he had sent her--"And now I am going to ask you something!" Would Longfellow help her adapt Goethe's Egmont for an orchestral reading in Boston? In reply, Longfellow sent her a detailed breakdown of the cuttings he would include. When this was all over, he added, he wanted to show her something of his own, a tragedy called Judas Maccabaeius, "in which there is a character particularly for you." He would, he said, "be only too happy to have you read anything of mine."³¹

By the time she had ended her swing through Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Providence, Charlotte had developed a repertory that ranged from the comedy of Mary Mapes Dodge's "Miss Maloney and the Chinese Question," through the sentiment of Browning's "Hervé Riel" and Macauley's "Horatius," to the religious fervor of Bernard de Cluny's "The Celestial Country." In the terrible weather her good judgment had admonished her repeatedly to go back to Boston or Newport if she hoped to avoid illness from the overheated hotels and unventilated trains, the crush of people who jammed around her begging for autographs. But another wisdom had urged her forward, to combat the fears that always threatened to overcome her whenever she let herself idle.

To husband her strength, she adopted a new policy about autographs. There was perhaps no way to cure the plague entirely, but with her waning energies, she could make it count for something at least. From time to time, she sent a supply of cards bearing her signature to a charitable agency in New York. Then, for its own benefit, The Sheltering Arms could sell the cards for twenty-five cents. Collectors could offer no objection, and she would have a legitimate excuse for admirers who descended on her whenever she left the theatre.

High comedy had never been her long suit, but now, reading to afternoon crowds, usually in ordinary light, she felt a cushion of friendliness surrounding her. Whenever she set her audience roaring with laughter, she paused solemnly, then threw back her head and laughed with them; then just before quiet descended, she ripped through the rest of the lines. But by the time she reached Philadelphia in early April, she was weary and hoarse; she would have cancelled her bookings here and in other cities except for the nagging certainty that it was far better "to wear out," as she wrote Wayman Crow, "than to rust out."³²

The Academy of Music had been sold out since February for her reading April 4. Later in the month, when Couldock joined her to play Wolsey, the reunion would have worked out better if he had not recently lost a daughter and was now so miserable, acting so much "like an elephantine baby, without intellect or intelligence," that Charlotte would have stopped the show to weep with him, if they had not had a sellout crowd. But bitter humor restored her when an agent approached her to play with Edwin Forrest next season. "Ha! ha! ha! ha!"³³ she wrote Emma Crow.

Before she moved on to Providence the last of May, Charlotte went to visit old Thomas Sully, who at eighty-nine was decrepit now and forgetful--though from time to time in the conversation she saw his eyes light up and then squint in typical fashion as if taking her measure for another portrait. In Providence, playing Meg, she terrified six-year-old George Pierce Baker, who, years later, would clearly recall the evening when "in an early but intense recognition of the genius of Charlotte Cushman I was, for the good of the public, removed shrieking from the theatre."³⁴

Relaxing at Addison Childs' at Swampscott, Charlotte relished again the laughs she herself had gotten from the readings. Writing about them to Emma at Hyde Park, she felt a sudden impatience that she was not strong enough to take up her labors immediately. "I read the 'Skeleton in Armor' well, and the effect was fine. I made the 'fearful guest' speak in monotone, like the ghost in 'Hamlet,' and you cannot think how strange and weird it sounded."³⁵

Writing Seward, Charlotte looked back on the season with mixed emotions. Sometimes, she confessed, she had kept engagements when she should have taken to her bed, but "then you know, I am not a philosopher, nor a potentate. I cannot control absolutely everything and I have done the best I could. The rest is with God!"³⁶ Shopping in New York, she bought black and gold chandeliers to match the drawing room fireplace in the new house in Newport, and carpeting for all the reception rooms--in spite of the fact that Richard Morris Hunt had ignored most of her instructions. She could have cried about it if she had not been too tired to care.

But in June, riding in her open barouche up Newport's Touro Street past the old Synagogue, she did not regret her decision to build here. Coming home to Newport seemed a little like returning to Rome. Both were strong in their ties to the past--Rome to antiquity, Newport to colonial days. Longfellow might even be right in his "Skeleton in Armor" that the "lofty tower" still standing in Touro Park dated back to tenth-century Norse explorers.

In more recent respects, Newport had in common with Rome a certain air. Leisure and wealth and artistic taste poured into its summer cottages from Philadelphia and New York and Boston. Charlotte admitted that investing money in a Newport house for herself was foolish, but for Ned and Emma the future was different. She could honor Emma's wish to live in Newport, to bring up her sons there. Knowing Ned's folly with money, the best Charlotte could do for them was leave them the house, which she would call Villa Cushman. Debt free, it would guarantee his family a home. With her estate invested, with Ned left little management of it, she could rest easier.

But long thoughts did not trouble her as she and Sallie drove up to the house. Through the tall trees up Catherine Street, the Villa's roofs and towering chimneys emerged at last--"so much more than a cottage and almost a chateau." Stepping down, she looked up to the deep shaded porch, then turned for the view toward the open water.

Throughout the summer Charlotte busied herself buying the items needed backstairs in a working household, new horses and trappings for her stable, unpacking the treasures from Rome: her marbles, tapestries, bronzes, her massive antiques that began creaking and popping at night as if resenting being taken so far from Italy. She filled her "red parlor" at the back of the house with her favorite paintings and portraits. Together, she and Emma Stebbins decided the proper colors for their bedrooms upstairs. In her own, she placed her solid brass bed with its silken curtains from 1 Bolton Row, her silk-covered sofas and her claw-footed table under the red chandelier. In the wardrobes, Sallie hung up her costumes.

The party Newport friends gave her when the house was ready opened the social campaign she would command whenever she pleased. When the house was filled, she delighted again in singing or circulating in her reception rooms, injecting a quick conversational thrust here, cracking a joke there.

"This is Liberty Hall," she laughingly welcomed newcomers. "Everyone does here as I please."³⁷ Watching her dispensing smiles impartially, Colonel J. W. Forney said she resembled a radiant sun, "more like a retired queen than an artist." A neighbor, George H. Calvert, was cheered merely "to see her enter a room."³⁸

Yet very soon, she was plagued and distraught, often biting her lips in pain, "so confused and worried, I sometimes find myself wishing I had no house."³⁹ After her guests had left for the day, she confessed to Emma how hard she had fought to keep the hearty ring in her laughter, especially when so many afternoons and evenings the band concert across the street at the Casino penetrated cruelly into her rooms. Late in the summer, when Emma had gone to Hyde Park to be with her ailing mother, Charlotte wrote frankly about the terrible future she feared. "I pray God in his infinite mercy to take me quickly, that I may not wear out those who love me."⁴⁰

By late September, after Ned and the family had left for a long visit to St. Louis, Charlotte felt suddenly worse than when the tall rooms had echoed to the crush of visitors and the little boys sliding down the banisters or shrieking out on the lawn. "I suppose it is that I am weaker than ever before, and the summer has been a greater strain upon me than I knew." But "this is a confession of weakness; enough of myself."⁴¹

The time had come to get busy. She was in Portland, Maine, for a reading on October 10 when sad news reached her from Auburn. Seward's death that day only pointed up what wisdom had long ago taught her to do about grief. "Mr. Seward's death has been a fearful blow to me," she wrote Emma Crow, "but thank God I was working when it came!"⁴² On October 12, she was in Boston at the Music Hall to read a program of Macbeth cuttings and poems of Whittier and Tennyson when a knock came at her door backstage. The white-haired man who stood in her doorway introduced himself as Captain Cornelius Lovell of Cape Cod.

Years ago, said the Captain, he had seen a girl playing with some boys on Long Wharf suddenly fall over the edge and thrash about madly in the water below. He had torn off his coat, dived in, and pulled her out. As an old man now, he had come backstage to say that he was glad to have saved that talented girl who had grown up to give the world so much pleasure.

Charlotte grasped his hands, then turned to the other people in the room and told them the story. "Captain Lovell," she said then, "now what can I do for you?" "Nothing for me personally," Lovell replied, "but I wish you would give a reading for our church."⁴³ At the thought of what he had done, she gladly consented.

After playing another stand at Booth's in New York, she pushed west in mid-December for Chicago. The curly-haired young Irishman who played Macbeth at Ellsler's Theatre in Cleveland so impressed her that she drew him aside. If James O'Neill determined to "work, work, work,"⁴⁴ he just might make a brilliant career in the theatre. When he followed her on to Chicago, Charlotte told a reporter that playing with young O'Neill was making this one of her pleasantest engagements--and O'Neill was doubly certain that as an actress Charlotte Cushman got "more out of the language than anyone I have ever listened to."⁴⁵ In his long career, especially as the Count of Monte Cristo, James O'Neill remembered her early advice.

West of Cleveland, Charlotte missed connections with the train from Logansport to Chicago. Upset, she begged and cajoled--she was booked for James McVicker's Theatre that night--then finally fired off a telegram to the president of the railroad, who dispatched an engine and car for her. The blustery weather made difficult pulling for an engine headed straight into the wind. The little train made its way slowly forward, but as the blowing increased, the engine gave up at last and stood puffing and stymied in the gale.

About four, a brakeman with his cap tied on with a scarf inched forward to tell the engineer that Miss Cushman wished to see him back in her car. The engineer, a man of some spirit, told the brakeman to report that the engineer must decline the honor, that he would do his best with the train, that nothing else could make the least gain in their headway. But at that moment, the Irish fireman peered out his window and cried, "An' it is herself that is coming now, be jabers!"⁴⁶

When the engineer looked out, he saw Charlotte cling to the sides of the car, with the wind tearing at her, lower her head, grab at her skirts, and push toward the engine. The men leaped out and ran to help her inside the cab. Once in, she put on her grandest tones and began storming about the delay. But the engineer had done his reading.

"Rest assured," he told her. "After 'Hercules' has had time to breathe a little, I think he will take us on again. Working ahead of old Boreas" he was finding to be a harder matter "than any of the immortal labors of his great namesake." At that, Charlotte smiled, then changed her tactics. Couldn't they let her ride in the cab?

Since the rules forbade it, she finally let them hand her down to the ground and escort her back to her car. At last, when the wind died and the train began inching forward, the engineer looked back to see Charlotte lean out her window and wave, then gesture resolutely toward Chicago. When the train arrived at seven, Charlotte came forward to thank the men and get the engineer's name and address. Soon after, tickets for the play reached him.

In the year since the Chicago fire, McVicker had rebuilt his theatre, and now each night Charlotte played to packed houses despite drizzling rain and slush. The critics in both major papers were loud in their praise: on the twenty-fourth of December the Chicago Times declared that as Meg Merrilies Miss Cushman "rises to the summit of her great genius. No impersonation can be conceived more terrible, weird, and startling . . . it must stand as the representation of the most sublime and intense acting."⁴⁷ On the thirty-first, the eloquence of her face in the sleep-walking scene, "delineating the hidden thoughts and emotions that haunt the inner heart," was so touching and suggestive "that we do not need words to fill out the measure of the meaning."⁴⁸

James McVicker had every cause to be happy. Her price had scared him, but he now took heart in the fact that no run in Chicago had ever drawn such houses. On January 11, 1873, when the run ended, Charlotte could look back with pride on the courage required to complete it. Her throat had plagued her constantly--at times she had no voice at all until some last-minute gargle restored it enough to go on.

Immediately after the curtain on the last night of her run, she answered a written summons to the greenroom, where she found the company assembled. The stage manager asked her to come to the center of the circle; then he read her a short speech.

"We, members of Mr. McVicker's Theatre, desiring to express to you our appreciation, present, through our worthy manager, this circlet of gold, inscribed with the motto that has so endeared you to us, and which is no less engraven on our hearts, namely, 'kind words.' May your happiness here and in the great hereafter be only symboled by this golden circlet, 'endless.'"⁴⁹

Fingering the ring, Charlotte thanked them, then told them how lucky she was that doing with her life what she had most wanted to do, she had managed apparently to bring some joy to others. Leaving the room, she acknowledged the company's smiles and good wishes. But next morning, suddenly depressed by the ceremony's tone and fearing the worst, she sought out a lawyer to draw up a new will. She had too much property now, an estate too complex, to risk uncertainties.

Talking with him, she tasted again the sweet success her career had brought her. She settled on $1,500 annual income for Charlie, who was still in London, $750 each for Rosalie and Mabel (to be increased to $1,000 a year when they married), $1,500 a year for Emma, and $500 for Sallie. In a trust, she put Villa Cushman at Ned's disposal for his family's use. Emma Stebbins and Sallie were to have free quarters in it as long as they lived. Her holdings and her stocks were worth now at least $600,000. The income from these would be Ned's--its use to be subject to the judgment of her trustees.

After Chicago, Charlotte expected to play two weeks in New Orleans. "The greatest living actress, Charlotte Cushman, is coming," shouted the morning Picayune on January 7, 1873. Enthusiasm had been building up for a month. With Lawrence Barrett's company at the Varieties Theatre, her appearance would surely be one of the "most notable dramatic events" ever witnessed on the New Orleans stage, said the Picayune on the eighteenth.

Sailing down river, Charlotte only hoped she could fulfill the promise. In the fifteen years that had passed since she had played New Orleans, terrible changes had come to the land. She now glimpsed ashes and ruins, charred columns, tree stumps, and broken fences. Cotton fields had become sprawling tangles of weeds. Suddenly sad at the tragic price the war had exacted, Charlotte knew that age and illness had taken in her a similar toll.

At the first rehearsal, when Barrett confessed that he had never played Wolsey, Charlotte offered to run through the lines. Though she had not played the Cardinal for sixteen years, her reading of Wolsey's faltering speech when he knows that he has lost Henry's favor was so poignant that tears came to Barrett's eyes.⁵⁰ Her opening crowds were immense; reviews for the most part were glowing. Her Meg, said the Picayune, was "grand--one may say terrible. . . . Miss Cushman fairly electrified by her genius."⁵¹ The Picayune's man could see no evidence that her magic touch had suffered "in the lapse of years."

After Lady Macbeth the first three nights of her second week, Charlotte had expected to finish her run with three more nights of Queen Katharine; but by Thursday, she knew that her voice and her nerves could not carry the burden. In the hotel's stifling heat she caught cold; she could not sleep; suddenly her mouth broke out in sores. She hoped the audience and the Varieties' company could understand why the benefit ceremony they had planned had to be canceled. One cheerful note in the Picayune caught her eye. Busily forging ahead as a sculptress in Rome, Edmonia Lewis had snared two $50,000 commissions. But Charlotte's only real thought now was to move north as quickly as possible where a doctor she trusted might give her relief. She learned only later that the day she and Sallie left for Philadelphia, Isa Blagden had died in Florence; when Isa's own doctor could not be located, a strange physician had dosed her with a medicine she could not tolerate.⁵²

The slow trip north was agony, and Sallie could only bathe Charlotte's head and mutter about her foolishness--then assure her that she would be her old self once they reached Philadelphia. By March 1, weak but determined again after her doctor's treatment, Charlotte opened a run in Washington before President Grant and Generals McClellan and Sherman. Sherman came to meet her afterward, but exhausted, she did not meet Grant ("I had no curiosity") ; when Mrs. McClellan urged her husband to come backstage, Charlotte found him "common looking."⁵³

When a Washington charity approached her to appear for their benefit, she firmly declined. The time had come to protest against the system of making artists "pay so much more than the rest of the community" for charities in which they had no interest "and which had no claim upon them." Such affairs were one-sided, too easy a manner of doing good. Better a house-to-house visitation that would enable every citizen to help the poor of his city than "this cent-percent contract for so much money for so much amusement, and the poor thrown in."⁵⁴

In Philadelphia in April, she tried to complete her run at the Walnut, but though her Meg engendered enough excitement in young James Gibbons Huneker to make him call her "a hag spouting fire and fury, a terrible creature, who caused me more than one nightmare,"⁵⁵ she sent a note to Thomas Hall, the stage manager, explaining that she was simply too weak to continue.

News of Macready's death on April 27--survived by only three of his ten children--quickened Charlotte's memories of his tirades, but she regretted his passing. For all his faults, Macready was still the actor she most truly admired. As mentor and challenger, he had been a singular force in her life. About his Macbeth she could still say that he "grasped its heart and executed it with a splendor."⁵⁶ Neither Booth nor Forrest could match him.

For the season, Charlotte had pocketed $66,000. Her work had eased her through months which, however difficult, would have otherwise been impossible. "I try to forget by constant occupation," she wrote Emma at Hyde Park, "that I have such a load near my heart."⁵⁷

When Augustin Daly beseeched her to take on a New York run in the fall, she would not promise to act seven times in one week nor consider any contract. As for Daly's desire to extend her Meg role through more of the play, she refused. "As I give it--it reaches the extent of my power, and if increased would be only beyond it." Any apparent fault in the play could be met by competent actors--all of which prompted her to make an observation that Daly must keep confidential.

Considering the theatre in America, "the trouble now-a-days exists in the actors--they lack respect for the profession--or the characters they represent, think too much of how much money they can get, and how little they can get off with giving, in the way of real labour in their art! In a word, they do not forget themselves--and unless one does--he can never be an actor!" Penning her thoughts to Daly, she made herself clear. She had made her position by proving her artistry before the world. Yet never had she willingly, intentionally, downgraded or upstaged other talents. If she ever decided to do Meg for Daly, she and his company would move the town "not by the startling effects of our strong charcoal sketch but by the grand strong finished picture as a whole."⁵⁸

Writing Emma, she imagined the troubles her health was bringing those who loved her. "It is wicked of me to say anything about it . . . and yet, and yet, when we regularly face our real troubles, I believe they become more endurable." The thought conveyed in one of Emma's last letters from Hyde Park "that anything happening to me would kill you" gave her "much sad thought . . . we must school ourselves for what is inevitable."⁵⁹

All of this helped her laugh at the letter that reached her in Buffalo in December. "I am forty," wrote one H. W. Blair, "have long been struck by you, having long thought that you were unwise to remain unwed. Couldn't I come to see you, and acquaint you with my gentlemanly intentions? I reside in Chicago . . . my work is with pork packers." When Charlotte sent it on to Hyde Park, Emma added a note and returned it. "The man must be a born fool, not for wanting to marry you, but for presuming to have such a thought enter his idiotic brain!"⁶⁰

Late in January 1874, still unwed, Charlotte was back in New York for readings at Steinway Hall. During March she was in Baltimore, where Jamie and Annie Fields heard her from chairs that Charlotte had placed at the edge of the stage. Dressed in black silk and diamonds, Charlotte read, said Annie, like a workaday woman intent on doing her job well. "Now for work, now for having your laughter and your tears," Annie wrote a friend about Charlotte's manner. "Now let us see Charlotte Cushman do her best, and she does it."⁶¹

In April, she renewed an old friendship in Philadelphia. Adelaide Ristori was appearing in Elizabetta and Marie Antoinette. Charlotte sat in the director's box, holding lilies of the valley and roses to toss down to her. At the end of the second act, when Ristori returned for a bow, Charlotte lifted the flowers and gestured. At first, Ristori did not recognize her, but approaching the box, she suddenly broke into smiles. "Ah, cara amica!"⁶² she cried, throwing her arms out to Charlotte. While the two exchanged a few words, the audience applauded. Next day Ristori called at Charlotte's hotel to gesture her way through excited conversation, since neither had ever mastered the other's language.

In New York in May for more readings, Charlotte felt much better when a course of water treatments gave a sudden upswing to her health. Banking on that, she signed a contract for Booth's Theatre for October, though by now Booth himself, at age forty, was bankrupt and had lost all claim to the handsome house that carried his name. A reporter for Harpers begged her in July to write down some personal details--or let herself be interviewed--for a full biographical account that this return to the New York stage would occasion. But Charlotte demurred.

"I wish I had time or strength to tell you something of my early life, but I am far from well, and with my necessary care of myself, and my many duties, I am not able to do anything which would serve you." Perhaps Mary Howitt's 1846 article in England would meet the purpose, if a copy could be found. About the picture Harpers wanted, "Don't let me be more libelled than you can help." All her life, pictures had made her "a hag." Now, since bad photographs badly printed would keep alive a mistaken impression--when better truth should focus upon her art--let every care, she begged, be exerted. At fifty-eight, "I am a plain woman but do not like to go down to posterity so much more ugly than my looking glass and even the critics tell me I am."⁶³