Farewell Miss Cushman

Charlotte had never lied to herself; she had always faced facts as she saw them. Now in Boston in October 1874, to read an address at the opening of Beethoven Hall, she decided one afternoon to drive out to Mount Auburn cemetery. Nearly thirty years ago she had written Mary Eliza the somber suggestion that with all the success that was coming to her in England, she ought to be able soon to retire and look ahead to comfortable leisure and eventually to "a quiet corner in some respectable graveyard."¹

No doubt she ought to be choosing that corner. The attendant in charge suggested a ride up along Mount Auburn's green hills, where at various stops, Charlotte considered the view. "They are all grand," she told the attendant, but wasn't there one lot with an open view over Boston?

There were still a few back of the tower. At last, standing on a corner just under the brow of the tallest hill, Charlotte said quietly, "This is a delightful spot; see, yonder lies dear old Boston."² To the east across the Charles stretched open woods, a scatter of farms, and in the far distance the towers and domes of Boston. At the office, she wrote out her check and drove back to town, content.

In earlier times she had grandly tossed out the word "retirement" and sailed off to Europe, determined not to look back, but the word struck her differently now. "Let all who have work to do thank God for it,"³ she wrote Emma Crow. To retire now would be to back up into the grave. When the time came to be old and take her bow, she would try to bend with grace and finality, but on October 14 she received a troubling letter. A Dexter Smith wanted to know when she planned to retire? What was he suggesting? Surely, such a matter was hers to decide. She read his words thoughtfully, then replied: "I can only say that I am about acting a series of engagements in various places, which will probably be the last of my dramatic performances; but with regard to the place where I shall take my final farewell of the stage, or whether I shall ever take any formal farewell, anywhere, it is impossible for me to say."⁴

Before she left for New York, another small scene from the past took place backstage. She had just finished a reading, when the lyceum manager, Major J. B. Pond, knocked at her door. "Miss Cushman, I intended to hand this envelope to you on the platform, but I was so busy in front of the house that I could not get an opportunity. Please pardon me." "That is all right, Major Pond," said Charlotte. "Sit down and have some supper."

In the envelope, Charlotte found a check for $1,000; Pond explained. "Miss Cushman, that $1,000 check of this evening is the interest on twenty dollars that you invested in me in 1857."⁵ He then proceeded to tell her about the boy who had escorted her from the theatre to her hotel each night in St. Louis, the callboy who had fallen ill the last night of her run; she had wished young Jimmy Pond an early recovery and slipped a twenty-dollar gold piece into his hand.

On Monday night, October 19, when she began her engagement at Booth's, Charlotte felt the old power surge through her as she swept on stage as Katharine in her velvets and ermine, encompassing the house with one great sweep of her eyes. True, the papers reported later, she had lost some of her "elasticity of limb"; she could not always manage now to conceal the "age" in her voice. But, she was happy to note, the papers saw no decline in her "awe-inspiring presence."

To the audience, that presence still rang through her lines. The intensity of feeling that exploded in the audience was not lost upon Charlotte. Such moments as these were always the high points in the play, when the crowd cried out its response to a job well done. If her heart cried out in 1871, "How have I lived without this through all these years!" how much more urgently her heart cried now, "Without this, could I go on?"

Could she face the months or years--if there were to be years--without this nourishment? Noble as the papers found her acting, it was to "a great soul that we would dedicate the thought and feeling of this moment." Only a woman of royal nature, said one paper, could so fill Shakespeare's "massive and tender ideal." In the Tribune, William Winter found in her life a quality like that "which hallows the lonesome sea, in the gloaming, and on the eve of tempest." We here might call it "genius," but it could not be described.

On the twentieth, John Rankin Towse in the Post noted "the sadness of this hour" when New York was seeing the end, not only of a great dramatic career, but of an acting tradition. The front rank of her profession was long ago conceded to Charlotte Cushman, said Towse; she had earned it by genuine hard work, and no profession could afford to lose at any time the impulse and example of such a life. But, observed Towse with words that struck like a bludgeon, too many actors tended to cling to careers too long--as if loathe to acknowledge the fact that the actor's art dies with him--until at last the pit, however painful the justice, must hiss him tottering from the stage.

With that, the word spread through New York that Charlotte meant this engagement at Booth's--in spite of her firm denials--to be her last. Reading the papers, she saw the implications: the public knew she was making herself go on at the cost of terrible suffering; the time had come to bid farewell. Charlotte could not really argue the point. Certainly she could not go on acting and reading forever. If the public wanted to express its appreciation, could she be less than kind? To be honored and sung of in one's harvest years was, after all, to be given a small extra lease on time.

The four-page announcement that Booth's Theatre published on October 31 gave New York the clinching details. On November 7 a great public ceremony was to be given in tribute to Charlotte Cushman. "The illustrious actress appears once again on the stage--for a few nights only--and then to pass away, and professionally, to be seen no more."⁶ The reluctant curtain would sweep down, and all that remained of America's greatest tragedienne would be tradition.

But for Charlotte, things were happening too fast either to be understood or tolerated. She would not let herself be hurried off into the wings before she was ready; all emotions aside, she could not ignore her commitments to other cities, her agreements to appear on other stages. New York might call its ceremony a farewell if it pleased, but she herself must consider the affair from a different angle. The time to bid her art an honest good-bye must be hers to decide.

To the President of the Arcadian Club, she phrased her reply carefully. She would accept the Club's wish to "do me honour at Booth's Theatre on the last evening of my present engagement in New York,"⁷ but she would not call it a formal farewell. She was more explicit to H. D. Palmer, one of the managers at Booth's. In her dressing room, she confronted him head-on: "I see that you have announced my farewell appearance, Mr. Palmer. I did not quite intend that, at this time. I shall not at once retire." Palmer met her objection. "The announcement is only your farewell appearance in New York, Miss Cushman. The public will be deeply interested. There will be a splendid house; and you know, you are not obliged to make it final!"

That made a difference of course, but the matter was serious. In forty years she had learned much about theatre managers. From W. E. Burton and Maddox on down, her list carried the names of men who had had to be watched and shrewdly outwitted. Granted the public would be interested, but Charlotte made no attempt to veil her meaning. "Very well, Mr. Palmer. And what are you going to do for me?"

"R. H. Stoddard, the poet is to write an ode for the occasion, which will be read on the stage, after the performance," said Palmer. "And we shall engage the fine elocutionist, Charles Roberts, Jr., of New York University, to read it." The plan had merit. The audience would enjoy the pomp. Charlotte could agree that Stoddard was truly a poet, but . . .

"The venerable William Cullen Bryant," Palmer went on, "has consented to deliver an address." She could play this game from long practice. "I shall, indeed, be honored. Mr. Bryant is a great poet. But--what are you going to do for me?"

"The Arcadian Club will send a laurel crown to be presented to you on the stage." All the actors in New York would be invited to assemble around her. Boucicault and Jefferson and Wallack and Gilbert and many others would be there.

"Yes, but . . ."

"And then, of course, you will deliver a speech."

"I suppose so," Charlotte agreed. "It would be expected. But what . . ."

Two hundred members of the Arcadian Club, with lighted torches, would escort her in her carriage from the theatre to her hotel, and there would be a band from the New York Militia.

"They are indeed kind, those gentlemen. It will be very pleasant. But, my dear Mr. Palmer, what are you going to do for me?"

And after Miss Cushman reached her hotel, she would take her place on the balcony to observe a magnificent fireworks display in her honor.

That would be fine, she liked fireworks. "But Mr. Palmer--what are you going to do for ME?"

Her implication was clear. The laurel crown and the speeches were stage effects and good show. The fireworks and the band were spectacle for the crowd. She knew that Palmer understood her.

"Well, Mr. Palmer?"

"Well, Miss Cushman, we are going to give you $1,000 extra for that night."

"Noble boy!"⁸ she replied. The money was fine, but other details she would not condone: the white horses and the open carriage, the escort of torches to her hotel. If Palmer carried out this part of his plan, she would remain in the theatre all night.

Throughout the days before November 7, Charlotte continued to think her way through the meaning of the approaching ceremony. She refused to call it farewell, but the program would be legitimate. No one would buy a ticket against his wishes. If the crowd wanted spectacle, spectacle it would get. Her Lady Macbeth would carry all the verve and conviction she had ever felt for the role. And with George Vandenhoff as Macbeth, the audience would receive its money's worth. During this final week, she played to "the finest audiences of the season." For the eight performances, including the Thursday matinee, the box office averaged $3,000.

Much as playing the gypsy hag might have bored her, Meg still gave her a thrill. Playing it even now, no twenty minutes she ever spent on stage quite compared to her twenty minutes of Meg. Exhausting, almost impossibly painful, the part was little more than trash when she looked at it squarely, but the frozen motion, the suspended breath, the frightened eyes it created out front were always new.

After one performance, said one paper, the stormy applause shook the building--until she came back on stage to look one moment upon her triumph, and "calm with her smile this raging sea of admiration."⁹ When Miss Cushman retires from the stage, said another, "there can be no question that art will have lost the grandest tragedienne since the days of the great Sarah Siddons."¹⁰

And Harpers still wanted to publish her memoirs. Since Miss Cushman had associated with all the best artists, wrote its editor, since she had witnessed the successes of many young actors, since she had lived near the center of her country's political life, her memories included a veritable roster of bright names. Harpers' query tempted her, but when she looked at the labor involved, she declined. Better for writers to write the actual words.

During the week, the New York press used Charlotte's approaching retirement as the focal point for wide-ranging discussion about acting as art. Say what one might, said the Post, about the "stilted and pompous" mannerisms of the style she had inherited from Kean and Macready, in Charlotte Cushman it had wonderful points. "What glorious repose there is about it!" What eloquence there was in her manner. "Why, in Miss Cushman's very walk there is power!" In speaking like a queen, her heart dilated--like Macready's--to the stature of majesty.

Though her dignity stamped her a carry-over now into a period when an actress either "raves or rants" to express emotion, Lawrence Barrett observed that Charlotte Cushman had become an actress at a time when one must do more than "carry expensive costumes upon an attractive body and wander through a play." The shallow beauties now taking over the American stage bore about the same relation to a formidable presence like hers that a military march bore "to a symphony of Beethoven."¹¹ Said the Spirit of the Times, only Kate Field, who was due to make her stage debut at Booth's on the fourteenth, seemed to offer any hope. Perhaps as a woman of brains, Miss Field could pick up the gauntlet Miss Cushman was casting down.

In the tributes to Charlotte's nobility on stage, there was, nevertheless, a hint that change was coming. If Towse could label her art "moribund," he could declare as accurately that her art reflected a moribund theory of life. No one could finger the day the change had set in or point to its origin exactly. But in audience reaction to players, one found the audience reflected. The living stage took its measurements inevitably from the living men who watched it.

One paper said it gracefully: it was a sad hour when genius leaves the field and greatness bids adieu to the generation it has "instructed, thrilled, elevated, and honored," especially since Miss Cushman's leaving the stage would empty it of all "majestic power and intellectual character."¹² Looking beyond Charlotte's end, John Gilbert saw the time when Shakespearean tragedies would be impossible to act in America, where so little effort was being made to groom able talents.

The little effort held the clue to the change. The pendulum was swinging toward a sharper realism. It was the age-old pattern, the perpetual question of faith versus reason, of spirit versus mind. The theatre of grandeur, the edifice of poetry, would soon be replaced by the theatre of ordinary life expressing itself in prose. Nobility in man and classic belief in heroism were becoming stage contrivances. If the trend continued, said John Gilbert, audiences soon would prefer to applaud prosaic man and his comfortable resemblance to themselves. There might always be appetite for spectacle, for decorated display and beautiful effects, but the new drama would soon be written in tighter language out of more earthly details.

Charlotte had seen the change coming. "We of the old school endeavored to hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own features, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," she had said before 1869. And even if Charlotte's own audiences remained large, the old acting genre was seeing its houses dwindle. Forrest too had suffered. "We must have been wrong," said Charlotte, "or the public."¹³

Wrongly or not, tastes altered; concepts changed. If the actor failed to touch his audience's sensitivities, he failed in the only court of judgment that mattered. Into Katharine of Aragon and Lady Macbeth, Charlotte had poured a personal creed, the distillation of her temperament. As the time approached when she must look back upon them, she saw in them now what the papers and the public were seeing--not only her personal valedictory, but a farewell to a culture's image of itself, the philosophy of an age.

About the ceremony on November 7, she became increasingly nervous. Could she stand the physical strain, the threat of surprises? And for all its origin in humbug, might the ceremony itself strike her too deeply? What would she do if she forgot her speech? To play a role was one thing, but to confront one's self in the heart of it--to be met with praise on her own, apart from her art--for that, she doubted her strength.

Saturday morning's Tribune made her feel better. Tonight's ceremony would be recognition, not only of Miss Cushman's genius, said Winter, but of the honor she had reflected upon her profession by "her noble and stainless character." If she had brought honor to a profession that had always been forced to defend its decency, she could accept, in all humility, the crowd's accolade.

On Saturday Emma made her rest as long as she could in her darkened room at the hotel; then together they entered the flag-draped door at Booth's where she hurriedly dressed for the night's performance.

"The sight in the theatre was magnificent," she wrote Emma Crow later. "I wish the children could have seen it; it was a thing they should have seen, to remember in connection with their 'big mama.'"¹⁴ Under the gas chandeliers, the hall was a welter of flowers, bunting, and flags. Banners festooned the upper circle; red, white, and blue swags draped the balconies. In the lower box at stage right, Charlotte glimpsed William Cullen Bryant and officials of the Arcadian Club. At stage left, a box carried a banner reading "Army and Navy Club." At each end of the stage tall silver fountains sprayed streams of perfumed water. The hall itself was crowded with people representing New York's literature, art, learning, and society--a rare sight in theatres today, said the Tribune.

Along with the printed programs, the audience held special souvenirs printed on yellow silk. Two gentlemen who owned a specialty store at Broadway and Twentieth had had a poem inscribed for the occasion.

"Lord and Taylor to Charlotte Cushman on Her Farewell to the Stage"

And is it true, that we no more shall hear
The thrilling accents of thy glorious voice?
That we no more shall bend the listening ear,
And drink those tones which bid the soul rejoice?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thou art a queen! Yes, and far more a queen
Than was 'bluff Harry's' pure and injured wife
The crown laid on thy brow by genius hath been;
The sceptre thou dost wield is thine for life.¹⁵

Charlotte was determined to treat the play seriously, but the audience insisted differently. At the end of her scenes, cheers brought her back to the footlights; ushers handed up armloads of flowers until bouquets formed an unbroken line across the apron. She tried to give her usual strong performance, but tonight the clenched hands of Lady Macbeth trembled from time to time and the occasional breaks in her voice were not mere histrionics.

To Charlotte's surprise, the heavy curtain slowly came down when she finished the sleep-walking scene; the performance was ending where it had ended at Mrs. Siddons' farewell.

To bed, to bed, there's knocking at the gate . . .
What's done cannot be undone.

For tonight's festivities, these seemed hardly the words.

Her spirits high but her energies flagging, Charlotte returned to her dressing room, where Sallie quickly exchanged her drab robes for gray silk, white gloves, and diamonds. Nervously, she listened to the band playing out front. For a quick moment she caught Sallie's eye. The ceremony would not honor the loyal woman who had seen her through the long years, but her smile and her hand placed on Sallie's cheek tried to express her feelings. A knock announced that the ceremony was ready.

The stage had been reset as a drawing room. A standing semicircle of people faced forward. At her entrance, the curtain rose slowly, and as the audience caught sight of her, it leaped to its feet cheering. Smiling but feeling suddenly shy, Charlotte took her place beside William Cullen Bryant. Around them stood Governor Dix of New York, Governor-Elect Samuel J. Tilden, New York's Mayor Havemeyer, Cornelius Vanderbilt, her Newport neighbor, W. H. Vanderbilt, Emma's brother Henry, Richard Henry Stoddard, R. B. Roosevelt, Park Goodwin, John Hay, C. Delmonico, Dion Boucicault, Joseph Jefferson--who would follow her at Booth's next week as Rip Van Winkle--John Gilbert, Lester Wallack, John Brougham, and Clara Morris, the rising star who was playing one of Charlotte's old roles, Julia in The Hunchback, at the Union Square Theatre.

Professor Roberts stepped forward to read Stoddard's long ode.

SALVE, REGINA

THE race of greatness never dies;
Here, there, its fiery children rise,
Perform their splendid parts,
And captive take our hearts.

Men, women of heroic mould,
Have overcome us from of old;
Crowns waited then, as now,
For every royal brow
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To those was given the laurel crown,
Whose lightest leaf conferred renown
That through the ages fled
Still circles each gray head.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Shakespeare! Honor to him, and her
Who stands his grand interpreter,
Stepped out of his broad page
Upon the living stage.

The unseen hands that shape our fate
Moulded her strongly, made her great,
And gave her for her dower
Abundant life and power.

To her the sister Muses came,
Proffered their marks, and promised fame;
She chose the tragic, rose
To its imperial woes.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Salve, Regina! Art and song,
Dismissed by thee, shall miss thee long,
And keep thy memory green,--
Our most illustrious queen!¹⁶

To the applause, Charlotte nodded; then Bryant turned to her. "Madam," he began, "you remember the line of the poet Spenser--'The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors.'" Well was that line applied in the present instance. The laurel was the proper ornament for the brow of one who had won so eminent and enviable a conquest in the realm of histrionic art. Listening to Bryant, Charlotte felt her hands trembling.

"You have taken a queenly rank in your profession," he continued. "You have carried into one department of it after another the triumphs of your genius; you have interpreted through the eye and ear to the sympathies of vast assemblages of men and women the words of the greatest dramatic writers; what came to your hands in the skeleton form you have clothed with sinews and flesh, and given it warm blood and a beating heart."¹⁷

Bryant turned to the purple cushion on the stand at his side, to the circle of leaves resting on it. "Receive then," he said, settling it upon her head, "the laurel crown as a token of what is conceded to you, as a symbol of the regal state in your profession to which you have risen and so illustriously hold."

The thousand coronation scenes she had played were a pale show to this. Packed to the walls, the theatre had thrown open the doors and windows so that the crowd standing outside might follow the proceedings. At the crowning, a roar from outside poured in to join the applause.

Now it was time for her own words. In a clear voice that concealed her nervousness and exhaustion, she delivered her speech from memory. "Beggar that I am," she began, "I am even poor in thanks, but I thank you." She paused to adjust the leaves. Then she continued.

"Gentlemen, the heart has no speech; its only language is a tear or a pressure of the hand, and words very feebly convey or interpret its emotions. Yet I would beg you to believe that in the three little words I now speak, 'I thank you,' there are heart depths which I should fail to express better, though I should use a thousand other words. I thank you, gentlemen, for the great honor you have offered me. Thank you, not only for myself, but for my whole profession, to which, through and by me, you have paid this very graceful compliment.

"You would seem to compliment me upon an honorable life. As I look back upon that life, it seems to me that it would have been impossible for me to have led any other. In this I have, perhaps, been mercifully helped more than are many of my more beautiful sisters in art. I was, by a press of circumstances, thrown at an early age into a profession for which I had received no special education or training; but I had already, though so young, been brought face to face with necessity.

"I found life sadly real and intensely earnest, and in my ignorance of other ways of study, I resolved to take therefrom my text and my watchword. To be thoroughly in earnest, intensely in earnest in all my thoughts and in all my actions, whether in my profession or out of it, became my one single idea. And I honestly believe herein lies the secret of my success in life. I do not believe that any success in any art can be achieved without it."

To other actors who would follow her, to younger people now dreaming the dreams she had entertained at the outset, she must say this: "Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

"To my public--what shall I say? From the depths of my heart I thank you, who have given me always consideration, encouragement, and patience; who have been ever my comfort, my support, my main help."

But let there be no mistake about the meaning of this grand occasion. It could not be wholly good-bye; other commitments still had to be filled. She might even be back in New York before long, at the reading desk.

"To you, then, I say, may you fare well and may I fare well, until at no distant day we meet again--there. Meanwhile, good, kind friends, goodnight, and God be with you."¹⁸

In the throng now cheering--she sensed an emotional electricity. When the band began playing "Auld Lang Syne," the cast took up the words, the other actors joined in, and the song welled up in a strong diapason from the waving audience. Adorned in her laurels, she stood before them and accepted the demonstration. Back in her dressing room, a tearful Sallie helped her change for the short carriage ride to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

Benevolent promises at a time of high tribute are meant, perhaps, to be broken. When Charlotte came through the door on Twenty-Third Street and let herself be handed into a closed carriage, she found herself surrounded by a mass of torches, engulfed in an ovation from a crowd so dense that movement through it was out of the question. Too late now to retreat, she could only settle back in the cushions and meet with a wistful smile the smiles and cheers. Policemen closed in around her carriage to run interference toward Fifth Avenue.

Palmer and his business manager, Joseph Tooker, had hired supers to carry the torches. The fireworks, left over from a recent Tammany Hall celebration, included a colossal rocket that would burst in a gigantic portrait of Boss Tweed. The short trip down the long block between Booth's and the hotel took more than an hour, while the carriage inched through the crowd and the torches flamed around her. When she finally arrived, she was rushed through the covered arcade into the lobby. Crowds in the corridors pressed toward her to grasp her hand, to offer good wishes.

Almost staggeringly tired, she moved out onto an upper balcony facing Madison Square. Below stretched a sea of faces calling up cheer after cheer. There was music from the Ninth Regiment Band, its brasses and drums nearly drowning the shouts. Overhead, a thousand stars began bursting and cannon blasts boomed from the rockets. She waved her greeting, then stood on her balcony, bathed in the colored light of the fireworks. John Gilbert and Palmer and Joseph Tooker stood beside her.

When a thrust of light, bigger than the rest, shot up, a gigantic face blossomed in sparkling pinpoints of light over the Square. "Who is that, Mr. Tooker?" she asked. With a silent apology to Boss Tweed and Tammany, Tooker answered, "That is Shakespeare, Miss Cushman."¹⁹

The demonstration continued for half an hour; then John Gilbert tapped her shoulder. It was time to go in, lest she take cold from the draft. Again, Charlotte waved her thanks to the crowd, then turned and passed through the tall doors.

Laurence Hutton summed up the affair soon after. Paraphrasing Tennyson's tribute to Macready at the actor's farewell, he wrote:

Farewell, Miss Cushman, since to-night we part:
Full-handed thunders often have confest
Thy power, well used to move the public breast.
We thank thee with one voice, and from the heart.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Farewell, Miss Cushman; moral, grave, sublime,
Our Shakespeare's bland and universal eye
Dwells pleased, through twice an hundred years on thee.²⁰