Walking Lady at the Park

Family tradition had always maintained that "Cushman" meant "cross-bearer."¹ In her despair, Charlotte could not dispute the claim. Nor could Mary Eliza. Charlotte knew by heart all her mother's reasons for hating the stage. Nor could she meet her mother with reason for reason why she should remain on it, when Mary Eliza found it the evil cause of their woes. Charlotte could not blame the theatre. Grief was a thing to expect anywhere, a threat to face with whatever moral courage she could muster.

She would spend no time debating her course, though in one sense she was as Calvinist as any Cushman. Not even her mother could scoff at her faith in labor. She would work her way out of her grief; she would commit her thoughts and efforts to the tasks at hand. If her heart had less incentive now that Augustus was dead, her mind held a new vision. "Knowing very little of my art as art," she would seek to place herself in a position where she could "learn it thoroughly."²

Susan was married; she might even be happy some day. Charlie was self-supporting; her mother was secure. The family's needs were met. A few months short of her twenty-first birthday, Charlotte was free at last to answer a voice deep inside her. Outside of a possible marriage some day, she could center her course now on her own aspirations. She sat down immediately and wrote Edmund Simpson at the Park. She would take any position Simpson could offer, even a "utility" place in his company. His quick reply offered her twenty dollars a week as "walking lady," the contract to begin with the new season in September.³

The work would be heavy. The Park was famous, even notorious among actors, for its constant change of bills, a system that had gained it a dubious reputation for plays sometimes under-rehearsed, performed by actors always overfatigued. Yet the price was small for the glory one might reap on its fabled stage. Against its simple settings--usually a series of painted wings and drops, a rear wall obscured by canvas, and the simplest furnishings--one could easily bury one's grief in bodily and mental exertion.

To keep busy meanwhile, Charlotte would take a short run at the National, the once proud Italian Opera House that had promised so much for New York's musical tastes in 1833. Badly located in a disreputable neighborhood, it had reluctantly faced the fact that its only hope lay in legitimate drama. Reopened as a theatre in 1835, the National now courted the crowds with its high quality bills and the brilliant lamps and gaslights it had erected from the corner of Broadway down Leonard to its doors. Charlotte took quarters for herself and Mary Eliza at 77 Bowery.

It is regrettable that dramatic criticism was only sketchily developed in the America of 1837. Without recorded words of the critics, Charlotte's early career lies obscured in vague notices, advertisements, and short mentions of her name in theatre gossip columns. A decade would pass before critical journalism would become a serious craft. Yet for all her apparent early obscurity, the three years she now began were her busiest and most productive.

The show went on strikingly well with this first reappearance in New York. As a "lady-actor of gentlemen," she was perfectly favored in looks, voice, and manner. To the New York Courier, "a casual observer would have found some difficulty, on Saturday evening, in realizing the fact that Romeo was played by a girl."⁴ With a little more fire in the impassioned scenes, a little more emphasis to his grief, Romeo would have been "faultless." But if Charlotte had emphasized the real grief she felt, the performance might have dissolved in a flood of tears. Three nights later she scored again as Patrick, a broad leap from the sublime of Romeo; two nights after, she was the Count in The Devil's Bridge.

Accounts debate the circumstance that first assigned her Meg Merrilies in Scott's Guy Mannering; in Charlotte's own recollections names and places contradict. But her appearance as the weird gypsy on May 8, came hardly a month after Augustus' death, when a last-minute illness in the cast forced her on stage.

If Charlotte remembered the broad outlines of Guy Mannering from her appearance in it as Julia in Boston in 1835, she had paid little attention to the nondescript old hag who dominates the last twenty minutes of the play. But when a knock at her door brought word that she must appear that evening as Meg, she had no choice. The play was already advertised; no one else was available. Too late for any real study or proper costuming, too late for any rehearsal, Miss Cushman must make the effort; she might carry the book if she liked.⁵ Two years backstage had made Charlotte familiar with emergencies. Now, too much the trouper to panic, she listened carefully while Mary Eliza read her the lines. Inspiration on stage might suggest the proper business.

Though this dramatized version of Scott's novel had been popular in Scotland since 1816, it was a flimsy play. Guy Mannering lacked any real interest beyond the forceful Meg herself. Immediately sensing this, Charlotte determined to inject whatever spark she could into the humdrum story of Henry Bertram, heir to the Ellangowan estate in Dumfries. As a child of six, Henry was kidnapped and smuggled to Holland by the wily lawyer plotting to get his property. Now grown, thinking his name is Brown, Bertram serves with the British army in India, falls in love with the daughter of his commanding officer, follows her to England, and eventually arrives in the gloomy, robber-haunted neighborhood of Ellangowan Castle. His disheveled old gypsy nurse, Meg Merrilies, recognizes him and succeeds in restoring his claims to Ellangowan.

In haste, Charlotte contrived some rags for a costume, but the lines themselves gave her no clue to the character. The second act curtain was up; she was standing in the wings before the dialogue gave her a lead:

"This moor, ye must know, is not in great reputation. There's thieves and gipsies haunt it . . . there's an old woman, Meg Merrilies, the queen of 'em, that deals wi' the devil, they say, and can make 'em do any thing, if she but lifts up her finger."

"What does Meg Merrilies say; she, whom we must all obey?"

"She say! Why, she doats; . . . she's turned tender-hearted, and swears she'll hinder us from lifting a finger against the lad of Ellangowan, and that if we attempt to keep him from his own, we but fight against fate!"⁶

In the words "she doats" Charlotte found the character. The tattered gypsy was suddenly a weirdly bent, hollow-eyed, shriveled crone clutching a crooked staff in skeleton fingers, still endowed with a tenderness for the child, now grown to manhood, whom she has just seen return. At once, Charlotte was aware that Meg Merrilies must horrify but elicit a deep pathos as well.

At her entrance, Charlotte darted from behind a tent, advanced silently, then gazed at the young man. When Bertram turns and discovers Meg looking at him, he says in fright, "My good woman, do you know me, that you look at me so hard?" At this point, the mood of the play changes. It is suddenly Meg's show, every action and lilt in meaning colored now by the impact of the gnarled old hag.

John Braham, the English tenor, was Henry Bertram to Charlotte's first Meg, and his reaction suggests the shock that carried over the footlights. Where Braham had expected to see the healthy young woman he had met backstage, he started in sudden fright at the wizened face, the demented eyes glaring at him through shredded gray wisps of hair, the wrinkled skin and twisted bones held rigid. After a hurricane-like swoop to the middle of the stage, she stood up suddenly tall, breathless, gripping her forked staff, staring.⁷

When Braham finally managed to stammer, "My good woman, do you know me, that you look at me so hard?" Charlotte's hollow tone curdled his blood: "Better than you know yourself."

"Your manner is wild and oracular enough; come, give me a proof of your art."

"If, with a simple spell, I cannot recall times which you have long forgotten, hold me the miserable impostor. Hear me, hear me, Henry--Henry Bertram!"

Meg then croons the lullaby she had often sung to Bertram as a child. Singing it, Charlotte made no effort to recapture the force of the voice she had lost in 1835. Her tones emerged now in sounds that trembled and broke with feeling.

Oh, hark thee, young Henry,
Thy sire is a knight,
Thy mother a lady,
So lovely and bright
The hills and the dales,
From the towers we see,
They all shall belong,
My dear Henry, to thee.

At the curtain, Charlotte rushed off to glance again at her lines. A knock at her door informed her that Braham wished to speak with her. Had Braham come to reprimand her for misinterpreting the lines? A utility actress could hardly dare take such liberties.

But the little man grasped her hand, smiling. "Miss Cushman, I have come to thank you for the most veritable sensation I have experienced for a long time. I give you my word, when I turned and saw you, a cold chill ran all over me."⁸ He could assure her, had she done such work on a London stage, her future would have been made.⁹ Braham's compliment, the accolade of England's most popular tenor, was no idle praise, and Charlotte accepted it gratefully.

Braham's praise came at a fortunate time. If the theatre was to be her life, if the world outside was too much the pawn of circumstance, it was comforting to know that London, the capital of the English-speaking theatre, might one day sing the praises of "the Boston girl," who lived almost solely now for the life she could know at work.

The prominence Charlotte gave the part from the first displayed the growing assurance she now felt on stage. Tempered by sadness, strengthened by personal conviction that the center of the stage was her rightful place, more and more she would make her work a matter of artistic creation, a proof of the creative spark within her, evidence of her power to change the suggested outlines of a character into a fully realized personality. If James Murdoch, the actor who had witnessed some of her ups-and-downs in New Orleans, could dismiss Scott's character as a "dramatic nondescript,"¹⁰ if another could call it a "melodramatic monstrosity,"¹¹ the actress with range and active imagination she was now becoming could turn the "nondescript" into a figure almost classic.

Charlotte's remaining weeks at the National carried the afterglow of excitement she felt at the success of her Meg Merrilies. An added delight was the chance to act at least four times with James W. Wallack, the handsome transplant from England, who had seen in his youth Mrs. Siddons, Edmund Kean, and John Philip Kemble. To act with him was to sense a little the brilliance one might have witnessed in the fabled people themselves, to study the effects Wallack remembered and used as patterns. With Wallack she was Elvira in Kotzebue's Pizarro; she was Romeo to Wallack's Mercutio, Gertrude to his Hamlet. On the seventeenth of May, she again riveted all eyes upon herself as Meg Merrilies.¹²

The change of characters and the rapid preparations would have dismayed a talent less fully committed, but in the steady round of work Charlotte found the salvation her grief required, the buoyancy her sensibility relished. It was a different matter for her mother. Lacking any heartfelt commitment to life outside her own feelings, Mary Eliza suffered in private. The small quarters they occupied held her locked in grief. It was Charlotte's need of her help that eventually paved the way for Mary Eliza's return to practical life. As they had worked together in Albany, so they worked together now. While Charlotte listened carefully, her mother gave her her lines, reading and rereading them aloud until Charlotte had mastered them. The daily routine distracted them both from sorrow.

Personal griefs aside, the summer of 1837 was a difficult time for any person wresting a living from a public luxury like the theatre. By the end of Charlotte's run at the National, the American economy was deep in depression. Panic hung like a cloud over all theatres. The New York gentleman Philip Hone complained in his diary: "'Gold and silver we have none,' and there is no change either in our prospects or our currency."¹³

A general panic in stocks resulted in sudden bankruptcy for men who had thought themselves unassailably wealthy. On New York sidewalks, sales of rich furniture and other elegant household effects became common. When New York banks suddenly suspended payment and other banks in the country followed suit, unemployment reached calamitous proportions. Major cities saw "bread" riots. Every man tensed himself for the next financial blow.

As a relative beginner in the theatre, Charlotte felt the pinch as deeply as anyone else. With no assurance of steady work until fall, she learned as well as any actor the direct connection between general prosperity and the fortunes of life backstage. Fortunately, work for her soon opened in Boston. Beginning the thirtieth of May, she served notice to the Boston public who remembered her as a promising young singer at the Tremont that she was now back among them, an established actress with success to her credit.

Her few days in Boston did nothing to alter her plans. Charley Wiggin could still offer marriage, but marriage had little place just now in the major dream of her life. And Charley and the rest of her friends in Boston soon realized that the uncertain girl who had made a tremulous operatic debut at this same Tremont Theatre had vanished in the confident young woman now burning with dramatic intensity. To Boston's astonishment, her somber words, her throbbing language could drive home in great hammerings of sound Lady Macbeth's self-absorbed determination. The melodius singing voice was now veiled forever in declamatory speech that rang to the farthest tiers. She amazed the town with her range, control, and forthright conviction, whether as Portia in The Merchant of Venice, as Madge Wildfire in Scott's Heart of Midlothian, or the comic Henry in Speed the Plough.¹⁴

Watching the girl's astonishing versatility one man in the audience, Colley Grattan, the British consul, went home and contrived a play expressly for her. The playwright's lines that accompanied it underscored the compliment it implied: "I would give much to see you look Aline, though there is nothing in the words of the part worthy of you."¹⁵

After Boston, she was ready to tackle new country. She retraced her route to New York and Albany, then ventured west on a packet boat on the Erie Canal for the long slow trip to Buffalo, where she had contracted a brief engagement. The journey behind the three-horse team plodding the towpath through New York state's remote hinterland took more than a week. Lazing away her days as the empty scenery moved past, she found ample time for reflection, perhaps the occasion to write poetry. Her sonnet, "There Is No God," expressed an Emersonian faith that would have found encouragement in the quiet landscape, a promise that temporal griefs could be met.

"There Is No God"

"There is no God"--the skeptic scoffing said--
"There is no power that sways or earth or sky;"
Remove the veil that folds the doubter's head.
That God may burst upon his opened eye!
Is there no God? You stars above array'd,
If he look there, the blasphemy deny;
Whilst his own features in the mirror read,
Reflect the image of Divinity.
Is there no God? The purling streamlets flow
The air he breathes, the ground he treads, the trees,
Bright flowers, green fields, the winds that round him blow,
All speak of God; all prove that His decrees
Have placed them, where they may His being show;
Blind to thyself, behold Him, Man, in these!¹⁶

At Buffalo, she played briefly at the Eagle Street Theatre, then moved on to the high adventure of a sailing voyage to the small town of Detroit, far to the west in the new state of Michigan. Charlotte arrived August 8 in Detroit, a dusty muddle of 10,000 people, with "not a paved street in it, or even a foot-path for a pedestrian."¹⁷ She settled herself at the makeshift National Hotel, where in a forthright bid for favor from the local newspaper, she invited the editor of the Free Press to call.¹⁸ At a reception at the home of Governor Stephen T. Mason, she met an English literary light, whose friendship she enjoyed for the rest of his life.

Captain Frederick Marryat was then barnstorming through the United States gathering material for a travel book. Charlotte counted her meeting with the short, sturdy little man in Detroit one of her high moments. Marryat's eyes twinkled with a bounding wit; in his blue coat with yellow buttons, his white naval-cut vest tied loosely with a black handkerchief, his ruddy face bright and intelligent, Marryat could talk as brilliantly as a comic character in a Sheridan play.¹⁹ Unfortunately, the book that came out of his travels was hardly so charming. His Diary in America (London, 1839) was anything but complimentary to the life and scenes he witnessed. The most extraordinary national libel the press of England had yet given to the world, one American journal called it, while another decried such British arrogance that looked only at the surface of American society, saw the worst, and concluded that England and English institutions surpassed everything American. "Sam Slick," T. C. Haliburton's popular "Down-Easter," voiced the American sentiment toward travel writers like Marryat: "I seldom or never talk to none o' them, unless it be to bam 'em. They think they know everything. . . . I wouldn't give a chaw of tabackey for the books of all of 'em tied up and put into a meal-bag together."²⁰

But Charlotte saw a charm in the English wit, despite the tilt of his English nose. At the Governor's reception and during the days that followed, they exchanged verses. A flirtatious game sprang up between them. On his voyage back to Buffalo, Marryat continued it in a playful letter: "Should you observe a tremulous motion in my handwriting, do not ascribe it either to love or to having indulged last night in too many mint juleps." The true case was that the steamboat, "like most of the inhabitants of the waters, waggles his tail as he goes along."

Marryat had been thinking over their meeting. "A certain young lady was a little affronted when we met," wrote Marryat, "but if I did not know the way to her heart, I did to her head and she was easily pacified. I told her that [I was] aware of her determination to remain single and not to be the slave of one when she could reign despotic over thousands. I ascribed any man as insane who would trust himself more than 24 hours in her company, without prudentially resorting to absence as a cure for the wound already inflicted by her brilliant eyes." He ended his letter with the hope that when they met again, Charlotte would give him a poem. "It will keep you out of mischief till I come back. . . . Farewell, and be a good girl, if possible."²¹

The jaunt out to Buffalo and Detroit and her little encounter with Marryat were pleasant enough, but Charlotte never lost sight of the fact that during this summer of 1837 she was biding her time.

When late August came, Charlotte was back in New York, thrilled again at the bustle of life about her, the constant urge in the air, the city's opulence. Life along these streets was a digest of all humanity, a portrait of man en masse, as Walt Whitman would soon describe it. To Lydia Maria Child, "the enterprising, the curious, the reckless, and the criminal" in New York made life a perpetual game.²²

Negro beggars lined the curbs along Broadway, their hands outstretched, while street vendors cried at intervals: "Hot corn! Hot corn! Buy my lily white corn!" After dark, children still roamed the streets, "prolonging the task of selling something" to avoid starvation.²³ Wherever one looked, advertisements demanded attention. Even the sidewalk pavements carried the names of shops and the wares they sold. Marryat called them "horizontal tombstones."

A stroll up Broadway and a right turn at City Hall Park led Charlotte along Park Row to the front of a dirty white building, "which," said Whitman, "you internally set down in your mind as the most villainous specimen of architecture you ever beheld." This was the famous Park Theatre. Across from it, in its open tree-planted park, stood City Hall, "a redundance of marble tracery and ornament."²⁴ A little beyond was Tammany Hall and the notorious Five Points, the gloomy slum that festered in New York's east side.

This was to be Charlotte's neighborhood for the next three years. She would learn its cobblestones and crannies. She would stroll its streets without fear, seeing in the life all about her the stuff of a million dramas, recognizing in the faces the features of all the emotions she could ever hope to suggest on stage.

And she would soon learn not to be put off by the Park Theatre's "contemptible aspect." Inside, it was elegantly white and gold. The Irish comedian, Tyrone Power, found it, with its three tiers of boxes and its horseshoe form, as handsome and well appointed as any theatre outside of London.²⁵ Three great oil chandeliers, "a wonder of the age," lighted the 2,500 seats where New York's brightest society congregated in the lower boxes, where less elegant faces and prostitutes peered down from the higher galleries.

Quickly at home on the Park's broad stage, Charlotte felt none of the fears that had troubled her at her Boston and New Orleans openings. She was now a contracted professional, a name that had already achieved national publicity. Settling herself into her appointed place in the Park's company, she learned quickly the rapid routine that Simpson, the Park's plain-mannered, well-meaning manager, and his partner, the irascible Stephen Price, once manager at Drury Lane, demanded. Here she would work with the brightest names of the English-speaking stage, for it was a rare week that Simpson and Price did not present a visiting luminary from Europe. Tyrone Power and Edmund Kean, Charles and Fanny Kemble, and William Macready had begun their American tours on its boards. And in the regular company, Charlotte found ample challenge to her best efforts. Peter Richings, for one, an English actor of the old Siddons-Kemble school, gave her constant contact with the tradition she had first encountered in her hectic sessions with James Barton.

At the start of her season, Charlotte had only one serious misgiving, and it had nothing to do with art. She had received incredible news from Susan. Unthinkably, the young Mrs. Nelson Merriman was pregnant. And following a pattern that Charlotte now knew to expect, for reasons she could hardly appreciate, her mother and Susan looked immediately to her for help. For a time a bitter debate raged inside her, but the chilly resentment suddenly ceased when later word arrived from Susan that her husband had suffered a "loss of reason"²⁶ and, mumbling something about going south on business, had abandoned her in Boston. Charlotte now knew what she had to do. In New York, she and her mother could help ease the girl's troubles; their quarters at 86 Frankfurt could accommodate her and the child. In a few days the unhappy Susan arrived.

A larger meaning was not lost on Charlotte herself. She saw no incentive at all toward marriage. If it held any advantage, any great extension of the good that life could offer, she could see little proof. The men she had known thus far were millstones around the necks of the women forced by circumstance to suffer them and the offspring they quickly ignored. Her career was totally absorbing, and it left little time or inclination to ponder the good of any romance--if love should ever challenge the odds in her mind against it.

As she had hoped, her work pressed heavily enough to outweigh all other concerns in her thoughts, all the grief in her heart. If the Park's playbills guaranteed anything, if it was a rare play that ran two nights in succession, it was a rare actor who did not appear almost nightly. She could find no cause to complain. The grueling stock company routine was sound training, even if it forced one to start on the lowest rung of the ladder.

In their company, Simpson and Price maintained an exact hierarchy. Rank brought position in the cast and definite assignment of talent. The leading man played protagonist roles in tragedy and the more serious ones in comedy. The light comedian played fine gentlemen. To the first old man fell the prominent elderly characters that in youth would have been assigned to the leading man. The walking gentleman took the parts of dashing young men; the utility man and utility lady were jacks and jills of all trades. The leading lady played the starring female roles in serious plays, though she might command the better comic parts as well. The walking lady ordinarily played ingenue roles.²⁷

Charlotte was the walking lady at the Park, though Simpson recognized her versatility early and used her more often as a utility lady. As such, in the course of a season she could display the whole range of her talent. Her first year at the Park, she played old women, young men, chambermaids, tragic queens, and comic ladies.

Her three-year stint began on August 26, 1837, with one of her standby roles, Patrick in The Poor Soldier. George C. D. Odell, the indefatigable historian of the New York stage, would later see a "preposterous" irony in the fact that a woman of Charlotte's talents made her debut at America's foremost theatre in a part that gave her so little scope.²⁸ But in 1837 Charlotte still had the highest levels of fame to achieve, and her art was hardly the finely tooled instrument that time and labor might make it.

Next day the New Yorker hailed her arrival: in the light of Miss Cushman's "histrionic advantages, combined with her musical taste, we predict that she will become a general favorite." Talent, not beauty, would be her fortune, for Miss Cushman was no pretty face with no intelligence behind it, and audiences could rejoice in that knowledge.

Charlotte understood the intention. Praise was welcome wherever praise rightly belonged. But at twenty-one, the word that even suggested a hint of beauty in her face would have sounded sweet. The hunger for that word would never leave her.

Pretty or not, true daughters of Boston were practical above all else. Good looks would have been a blessing, but although the face in her glass showed no trace of girlish charm, it had acquired in late months a womanly integrity and poise. Beneath the dark chestnut hair she now wore in a middle part smoothed over the ears and knotted in back, the great blue eyes reflected confidence and a burning energy. The jaw line would never be beautiful--her chin projected, her nose was "retroussé"²⁹--but the smile radiated vivid health and zest. In the years Charlotte could now envision at the Park, she would grasp every chance to prove the insight and intellect her face suggested. True life was seldom a matter of mere surface charm.

On such a foundation she would attempt a career among the dedicated professionals in Simpson's company. However jealously they guarded their rank in the billings, they laid aside all questions of status in the greenroom, partly because they recognized quickly Charlotte's obvious gifts. W. H. Chippendale and his wife, John Povey, William Creswick, and Peter Richings were especially friendly. And William Fredericks made her almost a protégée. The big Irishman's resonant brogue could ripple and snort in conversation, but on stage he could fill the theatre with his classic purity of tone. What James Barton had been to her in New Orleans, William Fredericks soon became in New York, suggesting a bit of business, commending a reading.

Charlotte found additional help in the steady procession of visiting stars. She studied closely as George Handel Hill, the famous "Yankee" impersonator, went through his paces in Knight of the Golden Fleece. Playing opposite him, Charlotte fully appreciated "Yankee" Hill's skilled professionalism, a comic whose slapstick set off gales of laughter because he had calculated every effect. As Sy Saco, or Solon Shingle, or Sam Slick, or Solomon Swap, Hill's shrewd, wily stereotype of the Yankee peddler was internationally famous, suggesting in the bargain that Yankee character epitomized American character in general. His recent acting triumph in England had delighted the British and further confirmed their notion that Americans, whatever else they might be or become, were tricksters who needed watching.

Charlotte studied an even better performer on September 19. The legendary Edwin Forrest, the man whose success in England had inspired her eulogy in Albany, appeared at the Park as King Lear. Unquestionably a star of the first magnitude, Forrest's promise had been apparent to Edmund Kean as early as 1825. "I have met one actor in this country," Kean remarked at a banquet, "a young man named Edwin Forrest, who gave proofs of a decided genius for his profession, and will, I believe, rise to a great eminence."³⁰ The night Charlotte first acted Cordelia with Forrest brought her the keenest thrill she had known as an actress. The magnetic force in the man carried over into the girl who observed his every gesture, listened keenly to his reading of every line.

Forrest was blessed with a magnificent voice embodied in a gladiator's physique. "The million" claimed him. Forrest had crudities of style, his roarings and bellowings could shake the rafters, but he could make an audience weep and shudder. He could seem so real on stage that a critic compared his acting to the "blare of trumpets and clash of cymbals," to the "thundering surges of the sea."³¹ In Edinburgh, his reading of Hamlet's line, "My father's brother!--but no more like my father than I to Hercules!" had caused a Scot in the pit to cry: "Hoot, awa', mon! Dinna talk damned nonsense! Ye are just Hercules himsel'!"³²

Offstage, the great Edwin was no less impressive, though his unpredictable temper made him a good deal less easy to like. The polished gentleman, the man of intellectual dignity, moral refinement, and strength, could suddenly become--without warning or provocation--"a creature of uncivilized bluntness and untempered brutality."³³ An unfortunate actor who once stumbled through his lines caught the full blast of Forrest's rage:

"You are a butcher by trade, are you not?"

"No, sir, I am an actor."

Grabbing him by the collar and dangling him at arm's length, Forrest cried: "An actor! You are not, sir; you are a butcher. Go resume your calling, kill sheep, kill oxen, kill asses, if you must, but never kill Shakespeare more."³⁴

Charlotte's first brush with Forrest at the Park left her unscathed. "This wonder of the stage," as she had called him in Albany, fully deserved all the honors England and America had showered upon him, "a combination and a form indeed, where every God did seem to set his seal to give the world assurance of a Man!"³⁵ After Lear she could still sing his praises.

Nor would she ever discount his power to dominate a part, to invest it so fully with his personality that audiences trembled with his electrical effects. In the bombastic, inflammatory, herculean Mr. Forrest, his meticulous care with words, his almost physical manipulation of them, Charlotte could recall the earliest acting advice she ever received, the admonitions of Clara Maeder and James Barton to let the role breathe and move with its words. To these earlier guides, and now to Forrest, Charlotte owed some credit for the fact that she soon became the best reader in the Park company.

Playing Cordelia to Forrest's Lear was like being engulfed in a cyclone. King Lear was the actor's show from start to finish; Lear was his greatest role. And Charlotte learned, like all the actors who ever appeared with Forrest, that everything else in the play was secondary, mere stage business meant as a frame for the star. When Lear's delirious prayer to nature reverberated through the theatre, lightning seemed to flash all around him. To appear with Forrest was unforgettable, but to Charlotte it was a little like not being on stage at all: she learned immediately where the enraptured eyes of the audience centered.

A few nights later she was Nahmeokee to Forrest's brave Indian, Metamora. Since 1829 the actor had appeared repeatedly in John Augustus Stone's sad tale of the noble red man who refuses to "forsake the home of his fathers and let the plough of strangers disturb the bones of his kindred."³⁶ Forrest had personally commissioned the play, the role suited him perfectly, and it had brought him a fortune--though so little profit to Stone that the playwright had drowned himself in the Schuylkill. As Metamora he could posture and declaim all over the stage. Poised like bronze on a rocky crag, his legs planted firm and his arms held high, Forrest's roarings could vibrate the stage.

In the final scene when Metamora has lost all his warriors, when his child has been murdered, he and his wife, Nahmeokee, hear white men approaching. Knowing the end has come, Metamora embraces Nahmeokee, then quickly stabs her. As he lowers her body to the ground, one thought gives him comfort: "She felt no white man's bondage--free as the air she lived--pure as the snow she died!"³⁷ Though few eyes ever wandered from Metamora, a Herald reporter commented next day: "By the way, Miss Cushman played the Indian wife remarkably well. Her qualifications are eminently suited to such brusque characters."³⁸

On October 19 Charlotte played another brusque character, Goneril to Forrest's Lear. On November 18 she was Laura in Sargent's The Genoese with Josephine Clifton, an American actress who had recently scored in London. The aura that surrounded Miss Clifton's beautiful head, her great kindness, strengthened in Charlotte an idea that had been slowly forming. She remembered John Braham's praise of her Meg Merrilies. Had he spoken honestly about her chance for success in London?

Another English visitor in New York recognized her qualifications for London. "In one of my evening rambles about the city," the unnamed observer wrote, "I found myself passing the Park Theatre, and I was moved to go in." In the part of Emilia, "I saw a large-sized, fair-complexioned young woman, not of handsome, but of impressive presence." Her denouncing of Othello after his murder of Desdemona was "electric." Her power and passion made Emilia the dominant role in the scene. Adding his own cheers to the rapturous applause, "I knew that there was no ordinary artist in this then comparatively unknown young woman."³⁹

Soon, one of Charlotte's regular fans at the Park was the Knickerbocker wit, Fitz-Greene Halleck. At forty-seven Halleck made a career of observing New York's passing scene. Charlotte knew to expect him in the same seat almost nightly, sitting with one hand cupped behind a partly deaf ear, noting every movement on stage. His quick eye, his ready applause often greeted the sudden flash of genius he detected in a new actor. Park Theatre people knew to watch him. His approval could brighten any newcomer's chances. Charlotte never discounted the value of his support.⁴⁰

Charlotte's life was now almost totally committed to the Park and its people. Though no one could yet call Charlotte Cushman a star, she was secure enough now to pass along some of the help that had come her way. An aspiring playwright, Adrien de Montfort, appeared at her door. Would Miss Cushman read one of his plays? The youth's earnest tone, his eagerness, matched a familiar feeling. She invited him in, gestured him to a seat, quickly read his manuscript, then laid it aside. The language was good; the tone, impressive. But the play lacked dramatic effect. "The quiet home dramas would have little chance of success in our day," she told him. "The public require stronger food, I might almost say unnatural stimulant."

But Charlotte encouraged him, "Some day or other, when I can find time, I will give you a plot for a play, and you may make another trial. I think that a dramatic version of the story of some of the 'Spartan Mothers' would give you an excellent opportunity to write, and me to act. I reverence the characters of these noble women to whose greatness we have not given due recognition."⁴¹ In the meantime, she gave de Montfort a note to an influential friend--Fitz-Greene Halleck, perhaps--who could help him publish his stories.

But although Charlotte made friends in the Park company, she also made enemies. The passions she could detonate on stage occasionally exploded behind it. For a reason not clear in the record, a scene painter touched off her wrath. She was "terrible" to him, "a tiger when her passions were aroused, capable of anything." When the report reached his friend, William James Stillman, he himself gained her ill will. Later, when Stillman had met her, he was firmly convinced that Charlotte's fury at times stemmed mainly from an impatience with some man's ineptness, some masculine "stupidity" blocking her way.⁴² But such storms were rare, though intense while they lasted.

When occasional free time allowed it, she rambled alone through New York's teeming streets. The free Negroes captured her interest, their airs and clothes and manners reflecting the white airs and postures about them. In place of the Park, the blacks had their own theatre, the African Grove at Bleecker and Mercer. In the townhouses where she was a guest, conversation centered more and more on the pros and cons of abolition. In 1838, the fear was steadily growing that slavery would one day devastate the country.

With the Judds (once she had made plain her determination to keep on acting) she exercised her talent for conversation. National concerns held the floor: the ever-rising tide of pioneer migration beyond the Cumberland and the Mississippi, the reports coming in from Texas, new towns springing up along the frontier. For all his exaggerations, her friend Marryat was right in saying that America was changing so rapidly that he "who would describe America now" would have to correct himself in ten years, for "ten years in America is almost equal to a century in the old continent."⁴³

Charlotte kept a steady eye on theatre news pouring in from the South and West. New playhouses were opening in St. Louis; Galena, Illinois; Dubuque, Iowa territory; Iberville, Louisiana; Columbus, Mississippi; Huntsville, Alabama; and the small village of Chicago expanding like a mushroom at the tip of Lake Michigan. The ambitious little hamlet, Houston, was celebrating in verse its own attempts to found a permanent drama: "To other climes, our native drama long hath been indebted," but in these changing times "here let genius dwell and tuneful lyres, with proud ambition strung, raise high their notes, to native music sung."⁴⁴ To every American Charlotte's age, the country's financial pains could scarcely discount its unquenchable hopes. And for Charlotte at the Park, top theatre in the city where America's driving ambitions centered, the promise seemed boundless.