Testing Time in Albany

In her despair, Charlotte might have interpreted the dour signs exactly as Mary Eliza read them, but moving the family back to Boston, facing the ordeal of moving them anywhere else, would take money she did not have. Within a week, she knew she could not alter her plans. She would remain in New York, regain her strength, and watch for another chance.

That chance came within a few days when the Franklin Theatre in Chatham Square announced a benefit for all the Bowery people, a performance of Aladdin of the Wonderful Lamp on September 21. Back on her feet, her hopes partially revived, Charlotte would play Aladdin. And Simpson's people at the Park gave their own benefit and sent all the proceeds to Hamblin's actors. Two weeks later Charlotte played Patrick in The Poor Soldier in another Franklin benefit. In the meantime, E. Burke Fisher, editor of the New Yorker magazine, had written letters about Charlotte to Francis Wemyss of the American Theatre in Philadelphia and to Lewis Godey, editor of a new women's magazine, asking if either man could help a young lady, with a dependent family to support, who had already made quite a name for herself in New York.¹

Charlotte herself appealed to William Dinneford, manager at the Franklin. Regretfully Dinneford could offer her nothing permanent in New York, but she might write his partner, W. R. Blake, who managed the Pearl Street Theatre in Albany. In a few days a reply arrived from Blake, offering her a five-week contract. She was tempted to turn it down: ideally, she should remain in New York where she could accept at a moment's notice whatever job might open. But Albany was not really so far away, and a few brief weeks there would help her surmount her troubles.

Immediately after the Franklin benefit on October 7, she led Mary Eliza and Augustus aboard a sidewheeler for the long ride upstream past the wooded hills of the Hudson. Charlie Cushman would remain at his clerking job in New York. Susan was still in Boston with Isabella.

The town they reached in the late afternoon was a strongly Dutch city of some 30,000. Perched on a high outlook over the river, Albany impressed them immediately with its steep cobbled streets, the pinkish red bricks of its gabled houses, and its Greek Revival state house. Its handsome Pearl Street Theatre was one of its special prides. Greek like the state house, it had become famous throughout America for its stage equipment, its elaborate refreshment room, its ladies' boudoir, and its large punch room that extended the width of the building.² Under Blake's direction, the Pearl was among the most prosperous theatres in the country; his acting company, one of the most artistically sound. Charlotte was not long in discovering her good luck in landing a contract with it.

She found temporary lodgings at the Rising Sun Tavern on Pearl near the theatre. A few days later, after she had enrolled Augustus in a boarding school, the Greenbush Classical Academy, she and her mother moved to simpler rooms at the Republican Hotel.

When she reported for work, Blake gave her the happy news that the famous English actor, Junius Brutus Booth, would be the Macbeth for her opening night, October 11.³ Ideally, Booth's superior talents could serve her well, but Blake put her on guard. Junius Booth had a luminous power; long past his prime, he could still flash the genius that had gained him fame. But there was no predicting him. The stumpy little man who could disport himself like an emperor when he was sober sometimes forgot his lines, sometimes even forgot to appear.⁴ Charlotte must be ready for anything on stage with the erratic Mr. Booth, especially if he had slaked his thirst at a saloon en route to the theatre.

Charlotte would later dismiss the old actor as a first-class "mountebank," but for her first night in Albany, Booth remained on his good behavior. At the final curtain, when "the tall, thin, and lanky girl"⁵ and the imperious little veteran with the flashing eyes took their bows, raves and cheers poured over them.

If Mary Eliza listened to the ovation at the Pearl dreading some new calamity, Charlotte wasted no time on such gloomy thoughts. Albany's plaudits were all she needed to reaffirm her determination. Acting was the rightest possible life for her. She set to work with a vigor, learning the long list of roles she must act during her weeks in Albany.

Her efforts did not go unappreciated. Because of her opening night hit with Booth, because she cheerfully tackled a new part almost nightly, Dinneford and Blake extended her contract. The Albanians pronounced her "a real steamboat and no mistake"; the "Boston girl" would succeed "as she deserves,"⁶ reported the Spirit of the Times.

On October 31, she gave a clue to her broader talents. After her benefit as Count Belino in The Devil's Bridge, she delivered an original poetic eulogy, a tribute to Albany's firemen, inspired no doubt by her own unhappy loss in New York. The applause for her poem set her head spinning with an added range to her plans. Why not try augmenting her income with an occasional venture in writing? She sat down immediately and penned a vaguely autobiographical story, "Extracts from My Journal: the Actress," and sent it to Lewis Godey.

When Godey published Charlotte's sad little tale in February 1837, its popularity suggested a practical move.⁷ Writing for publication could serve a double purpose. She could add to her income, and just as important, the papers and magazines carrying stories and poems "by Charlotte Cushman" could spread her name before the public.

This early contact with Godey's indefatigable lady editor, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, began an enduring friendship--one based on each woman's admiration for the other's talents--though Charlotte's straightforward handshake with the world seemed strangely at odds with Sarah Hale's own gentle creed: Delicacy is woman's chief characteristic; after the Fall, "Divine Goodness mercifully exalted her sex to conserve the moral virtues of humanity and thus become the 'glory of man.'"⁸

In pages that glorified woman as the moral custodian of the universe, Charlotte's little story about the grieving actress seemed perfectly at home, perfectly attuned to the magazine's Victorian notions of womanhood. But when Charlotte wrote the story, it was a question of money, and she herself would never conform to the quaint restrictions the good Mrs. Hale recommended. The small girl who had once swung with the boys from the trees on Boston Common was not lost in the woman, now in her twenties, who could dazzle Albany audiences one night as a demure, proper, young lady, and the next as a swashbuckling hero bedecked in tights, doublet, and a flashing sword.

National recognition in the Spirit of the Times delighted her--it was good to be called "a very clever actress"--but the paper did not rest the matter there. Strangely enough, Mordecai M. Noah in the New York Evening Star had described her as a young lady of "notable beauty," but such a breech of truth was too much for the Spirit. In reply to Noah, the Spirit hooted, "As to her being 'lovely,' and all that sort o' thing, it's all a bam."⁹ In its outcry, Charlotte took another basic lesson in how to react to personal attack. Once she established herself in Albany, she could usually count on a favorable word about her acting, but it was a rare paper indeed that ignored her appearance.

A few weeks later, still jesting, the Spirit printed the plaintive lines received from a reader in Batesville, Arkansas: "I would like to see the pretty Miss Cushman, for Maj. Noah discourses so eloquently about her beauty that I am half in love with her."¹⁰ In the pain the comment caused her Charlotte could remind herself that such notice, for all humor the Spirit saw in it, was nationwide publicity.

When the Albany Microscope rose gallantly to her defense, she saw in the whole affair at least a flattering interest. "The 'Boston girl' seeks not to make people 'drunk' with beauty nor pierce tender hearted whiskerandos with the artillery of bright eyes."¹¹ The young actress now at the Pearl aimed at nobler things--at excellence in her lines and eminence in her profession. The Microscope challenged any paper in the country to know more about the matter; it had watched her performances nightly.

Pretty or not, during her five busy months in Albany, Charlotte managed to fill her leisure moments with active participation in Albany society. She had chosen her hotel wisely. At the Republican her Yankee shrewdness sparkled almost as brightly as her dramatic talent on stage. With several New York legislators boarding at the hotel she spent long afternoons around the fire in the lobby, debating political questions, weighing the pros and cons of such things as eventual statehood for Texas and England's galling arrogance toward America. For the men, Charlotte's bright talk was a novelty, and it gave them new insight into the backstage life of the theatre, where decency and respectability could obviously flourish, if this young Miss Cushman was a fair example. And it did her no harm at all to let it be known that she was a distant cousin, through the Babbit line, of the Governor, William L. Marcy. Charlotte soon found herself, to Mary Eliza's profound relief, a great favorite in Albany society. She later recalled the special kindness of the government people. "More of the [legislators] could be found at my benefit than at the Capitol."¹²

Still, Charlotte's most impelling routine centered in her work. Like Edwin Forrest, who had sprouted his own wings at the Pearl, she found there her most fundamental experience as an actress, her first real occasion to apply the instruction James Barton had given her. From the chance to act with talents like Junius Brutus Booth, she could note at close hand a broad range of acting techniques. Among the people in the Pearl company, acting was a serious, professional dedication, and by observing their work and their stable temperaments, she formed an attitude that became her most valuable tool. Though the Pearl was not really a drama school, it gave her the practical, exacting regimen she needed.

For one thing, she learned how to study in Albany. Since theatre language is the language of sound, Charlotte saw in the matter a method of study. To memorize her lines, she learned never to look at the page. Having skimmed through the play, she listened while someone else read her speeches aloud. When Mary Eliza, as her first backstage assistant, read a passage slowly and distinctly, she repeated whatever words she could remember. Then after listening carefully to the speech read slowly again, she repeated it. By the third reading, the speech was usually etched in her mind. From the start, in repeating her lines, she emphasized the "action" words; in practice sessions with Mary Eliza she tried to visualize the proper gestures and motions. After all, a play's stage "business" lay implicit in the words, though the actual blocking could wait for rehearsal, for the inspiration of physical motion linked to the other actors.¹³

Here at least, her early work with Clara Fisher Maeder served her well; Charlotte remembered Clara's conviction that no actress had a right to appear on stage until she thoroughly comprehended the play's language. Learning her words easily, she developed the habit of considering every possible connotation. Her almost scholarly scrutiny of every facet of meaning--"her excellence in her lines," as the Microscope noted--explained in part her resounding success in Albany. Once having learned a role, she rarely forgot it.

While her work went well at the theatre, while Mary Eliza contented herself at the hotel, Augustus sent happy letters from school, in which he made plain the tender bond he felt for "My dear, darling sister."¹⁴ When she offered to buy him a present with the earliest money she made in Albany, she was delighted he wanted a horse; she would have chosen the same.

About Augustus, there was no argument. He had always been her favorite, and he always would be. Now that ways were opening at last for her to put the family on a sound footing, her hopes and plans for Augustus gave her life the most meaning. This brother would make his mark.

Susan was another matter. Until now, she had posed no special problem. She was the younger sister at home, the girl who brightened her limited world with a quiet charm, a fineness of feature that contrasted strongly with Charlotte's own sturdy looks. Susan's dark hair framed a face of almost patrician beauty. Of late, her deepset eyes, her graceful chin and fragile nose had come to make the thirteen-year-old girl arrestingly attractive.

Practicality had dictated that Susan remain in Boston with Isabella until family affairs were settled. The decision had seemed sensible at the time, but it created difficulties. A friend of the family--though Elkanah himself did little for the family's wellbeing, he had a ready supply of willing friends--Nelson M. Merriman, offered himself as Susan's benefactor. He could help Susan financially; with his ample means, he could take her under his care and educate her, would willingly adopt her, if the family consented.

To Mary Eliza, adoption was no more thinkable now than it had been in Charlotte's case with the Judds, but Merriman's financial offer did meet an immediate need. She accepted it gratefully and relaxed, assured that all was well with Susan in Boston. But in due course, word came that Merriman's health was declining. On his sickbed, he devised a plan that caused Charlotte and Mary Eliza the deepest concern. Fearing an early death, Merriman wrote to Mary Eliza that he knew only one way to make certain that Susan received, after his death, the property he wanted to give her. Laws being what they were, he could make Susan his major beneficiary only if she was his widow. To protect the girl's practical interests, would the mother consent to the marriage?

The letter was troubling. Charlotte and Mary Eliza read it more than once to make certain they understood it. Marriage was hardly a matter of money. Even if Merriman died soon, the thought of Susan's marrying a man as old as her father, even a sick old man wishing her nothing but happiness, was difficult. Mary Eliza paced her room at the Republican. She had no word from Susan to indicate the girl's own feelings. At last she knew she must hurry to Boston to verify all the details. In Boston, Mary Eliza was dismayed to find that her stepchildren, Elkanah's elder son and daughter, thought well of the plan, even though young Susan declared that she herself was repelled by the whole idea. A presentiment of trouble delayed Mary Eliza's decision.

The plan did have a practical side. At last, Mary Eliza let expedience overrule her sentiments. With no enthusiasm on the part of the bride, the marriage of Susan Cushman, age fourteen, to Nelson M. Merriman took place in Trinity Church, Boston, on November 4, 1836.¹⁵

The story begins to read like a melodrama when Nelson Merriman's health improved miraculously soon after the wedding. In a short time, his normal vigor returned, and young Susan found herself trapped in a marriage she hated to a man who had lied. Another sad fact became clear soon afterward. One morning Merriman told Susan he must go to New York on business. He had hardly left town, however, before an army of creditors came pounding on his door. Susan could only face them, more dismayed than anyone else at the sudden turn her fortunes had taken.¹⁶ The months stretched ahead without any respite to her fears, or to those of Charlotte and her mother in Albany.

At the Pearl, Charlotte attempted to bury her own concern for Susan in the steady excitement of her work. In rapid succession she played a variety of roles.* Though most of them were flimsy concoctions, she found in each one an opportunity to test her resources, to plumb the range of her talents, from broadest farce to tragedy. Far from the inhibited beginner who needed the trick of a James Barton to unleash her feelings, she felt as easy in one night's pratfalls and laughter as she felt in the next night's hush and stifled sobs. Whether a power-bent, crown-obsessed Lady Macbeth or a Louise in Norman Leslie, by January 1837, she had become an immense favorite. She thrived under the rigorous schedule, content with the busy life she had chosen.

* Helen Macgregor in Rob Roy, Alicia in Jane Shore, Henry in Speed the Plough, Floranthe in The Mountaineers, Mrs. Haller in The Stranger, Mrs. Lionel Lyn in Married Life, Joan in Joan of Arc, Margaret in Margaret of Burgundy, Jack Horner in Greville Cross, or The Druids' Stone, Louise in Norman Leslie, Emilia in Othello, Alvedson in The Two Galley Slaves, Lucy Clifton in The Fiend of Eddystone, Henry Germain in The Hut of the Red Mountain, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Julia in The Hunchback, Tullis in Brutus, Jorilda in Timour the Tartar, Belvidera in Venice Preserved, Roxanna in Alexander the Great.¹⁷

In February, she played George Fairman in The Liberty Tree, or Boston Boys in 1773. In keeping with its theme, at the play's end she paid tribute to the great Edwin Forrest, who was reaping just then a remarkable success in London. Forrest's Drury Lane debut in October 1836 had met an ovation, however deep his fears had been that his American citizenship might create a bitter reception.

If many English hearts still carried memories of the American Revolution and the War of 1812, England had much to learn about the ambitious people who had fought her. Happily, Forrest's commanding performance in the American play, The Gladiator by Robert Montgomery Bird, had thrown Drury Lane into a delighted uproar. Something in the American's style suggested a debt to the great Edmund Kean, a debt incurred when Forrest had acted with Kean in Albany. And William Macready joined the ovation with praise for the actor's manliness and power. When one man stood up and shouted, "Welcome to England!" the audience took up the cry.

Forrest thanked them for their kindness; he noted his satisfaction that "England and America were joined by the closest goodwill, that obviously the more enlightened portion of their population was superior to any feeling of national jealousy."¹⁸ None too accurately, the London Age returned the sentiment: "We cannot conceal our gratification at finding that the country which has received with so much hospitality . . . every British performer who has visited its shores, should at least have given us an opportunity of returning the compliment."¹⁹

Forrest's English reception set off rejoicing throughout the sensitive United States, and Blake fostered Charlotte's wish to deliver a eulogy to the actor on the stage where he had made a high mark.

Friends of the drama! Patrons of the stage
From laughing beauty on to graver age,
You all remember one, who last stood here,
Basked in your smiles, or wrung perchance a tear
As from his lips the tide of feeling prest,
And in his bearing Genius stood confest!
I mean the Forrest of our native land.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He sought to grasp the sceptre of his art
That he deserv'd to win; all know full well
That he has won it, England's praises tell.
The Ocean Queen, Great mistress of the age,
Has bowed before this wonder of the stage.
She bends to genius--you his virtues scan.
She hails the Actor--you reward the Man.²⁰

In her work and in social flings Charlotte may have found time for romance. Years afterward she described an Albany friendship that caused her grief for a time. She never identified the man, never divulged much about him, but in her references to him, she declared that her affections had gone deep--at least deeper than anything she had felt for Charley Wiggin or Charles Spalding. He was a young man "in a higher position of life, who . . . seemed the impersonation of all that was elegant and refined." He courted her; she was almost swept off her feet. She let herself imagine a future with him--until the day she discovered that "his intent was not honourable, nor his purpose marriage." She broke off the friendship at once. During her remaining days in Albany she scrupulously avoided meeting him.

Describing the friendship to Geraldine Jewsbury many years later, she recalled that when she saw him approaching she hid herself as he passed. To Miss Jewsbury's comment, "You were strong!" Charlotte answered, perhaps a little nostalgically, "I, strong! Child! I was as weak as water, but I was kept from harm."²¹

Later, Charlotte recalled the affair as a serious matter indeed. "There was a time in my life of girlhood when I thought I had been called upon to bear the very hardest thing that can come to a woman." But a short time had shown, "in the battle of life which was before me, that this had been but a spring storm, which was simply to help me to a clearer, better, richer, and more productive summer." Without this early trial, "I should never have been so earnest and faithful in my art."²² In the spring of 1837 there was ample time ahead to test the permanence of her decision; the fact did not preclude a later change of heart.

By the first of April, after the five-week initial engagement with Dinneford and Blake had blossomed into a seven-month run, Charlotte was ready to bid Albany farewell. And the Albanians were prepared, however reluctantly, to send her off in a shower of praise. The months she had worked among them had brought steady delight at the Pearl, especially on the nights when she had tackled an unlikely role like Romeo.

Her playing the love-sick hero had resulted from an accident back in New Orleans, a happenstance that had pushed her into the tights and doublet of Patrick in The Poor Soldier when a regular actor had not been available. She had hardly seen the step as fortuitous; that night, she had merely filled a gap in the St. Charles company, unaware that she was adding a unique quality to her career. The skill she had brought to the role stemmed in part from her childhood. If her games on Boston Common and Long Wharf had taught her a masculine swagger, if the roughening change in her voice helped her affect a masculine tone, her playing male roles became a pattern before she or anyone else intended it. By the end of her Albany sojourn, upstate New Yorkers knew Charlotte Cushman as an able young actress especially adept in "breeches parts," so skilled in male impersonation that no one seriously objected to a woman's daring, in Victorian America, to change her skirts for the revealing costumes and aggressive demeanor of men.

At her farewell to Albany, an audience that had believed her fiend-driven Lady Macbeth saw her now as an impetuous youth afire with love for Juliet. Her Romeo's love-sick speeches to Friar Lawrence rang completely true. His supple gestures, his leaps over the garden walls, his impassioned words, the flash of his sword driving at the "Furious Tybalt" carried such conviction that few in the audience remembered that a woman's skill lay behind them.

Actors in women's parts seemed normal enough to Shakespeare. On stage, Edward Kynaston had impressed Samuel Pepys as "the loveliest lady that ever I saw."²³ To see Kynaston as Evadne in The Maid's Tragedy, Charles II waited patiently until the actor was "properly shaved." In similar fashion, decades before Charlotte, a parade of actresses had skillfully played men. Mrs. Siddons appeared as Hamlet, and recent times would see the Dane portrayed by Charlotte Barnes, Fanny Wallack, Eliza Shaw, Alice Marriott, and Mrs. Emma Waller. Even Clara Fisher Maeder had attempted the role.²⁴ Albany's "enthusiastic applause"²⁵ for Charlotte's Romeo was all the encouragement she needed to make him one of her standard roles.

Her final Romeo in Albany ended to great and ringing applause. She was making her way through the wings toward her dressing room, tired but fully content with her labors, when one of the actors rushed toward her, grasped her hand, and pulled her back on stage. As she entered, the curtain rose, the cast struck up a farewell song, and stagehands brought forward a large floral wreath to place on her head. Reporting the scene, the Advertiser commented, "Miss Cushman is about leaving us, but we hope only for a short time, as we feel she has no warmer or dearer friends than the Albanians."²⁶

In this small world of the Pearl Street Theatre, Charlotte rose from her bow--smiling at the cheering faces, the friends from the Republican Hotel, her colleagues, the social "names" she had come to know during past months--feeling an inexpressible joy at having found her place, a lifelong role for her talents. But above that joy would tower two emotional hurts that had little to do with the Pearl: "the first spring storm and hurricane of young disappointment "--the abortive love affair, such as it was--and the earth-shattering word that came from Augustus' teacher a few days after her farewell to Albany. On the ninth of April Augustus had sent down a note from school: "If the weather is good and the road is good, Mr. Bulkley talks of going east and I shall go with him." The time was spring vacation; the destination, a short distance over the line in Vermont.

"Oh, how I wish I could see you once more before you go to New York," Augustus had written.²⁷

The trip to Vermont had seemed sensible. Winter was breaking. Augustus would be safe with his teacher. Riding his own horse, he should come to no harm. Then the terrible report reached her in Albany.

In high good spirits, at the end of the holiday, Augustus had galloped off down the road toward home. The farmer who witnessed the accident wrote: "I was crossing the road from the house to the barn. I observed a little boy coming down the road a short distance from me on a high spirited horse. The boy appeared to be frightened and reined his horse very tight." The farmer had passed on into his yard, but "as I turned around, I heard him cry out once. . . . About twenty rods from me the horse jumped three or four times after I seen him. Before the boy fell, he pitched backward over the right hip of the horse head foremost."

"I went to him as quick as I could. He lay on his left side with his face turned into the mud. I took him up in my arms. . . . Before I got him to the house, I perceived that he breathed and I think groaned once or twice." The farmer had bathed him with camphor, but three quarters of an hour later, the boy had "died as one falling into a calm and peaceful sleep." The report ended: "I do not know as there can be any blame attached to any one."

Reading the words, Charlotte felt the world "liquefy" under her feet; "the waters went over my soul."²⁸ It was slim comfort to know that Augustus, "the cleverest of my mother's children," the brother who had been "the delight of my young eyes," had died without long suffering.

Two days later, when the coffin arrived back in Albany, Charlotte took the jacket Augustus had worn in the accident and packed it away. In the jacket centered all the bitter remorse Charlotte felt at having given Augustus the horse that killed him.

She placed the body in a vault against the day when she could decide on a proper place for burial. Then, mothering her grieving family, she left Albany immediately.