An Artist's Growth in Philadelphia

Shortly before Charlotte led her family onto the train, she dashed off a note to Sam Judd: "The recollections of your kindness will ever be fresh in my heart."¹ For whether they knew it or not, ever since 1832 the Judds' hopes for her happiness had spurred her best efforts, even if they could never approve of her career. At age twenty-four, the day she turned her back on New York in July 1840 and headed toward Philadelphia, she needed their confidence. For all the force and command others might see in her, the authority in her manner could hardly belie the trembling in her heart.

Leaving New York, she could relax in the knowledge that in the move she had everything to gain professionally. Out of it might eventually come stardom. But what of the family? Would Burton's promises justify the flurry of the past few weeks, the pain of tearing up roots only slowly put down? And what of her own feelings? Facing the new uncertainties, could her courage withstand another possible onslaught of "judgments"?

Safely arrived in the Quaker City, she sensed immediately a difference in atmosphere. With a population of 90,000 Philadelphia seemed hardly more than a large town; it maintained a poised air that New York had long since discarded. Nestled in Quaker dignity around Independence Hall, Philadelphia was a cluster of red and white houses, whose "perfect silence and solitude" impressed Charlotte now, as they had impressed the newly arrived Fanny Kemble eight years before.²

The Philadelphia Charlotte came to know centered its enterprise on the docks along the Schuylkill. Its red brick sidewalks were seldom crowded; its housewives took vigorous pride in the polished brass rails and scrubbed marble steps at their doors. In Captain Marryat's opinion, a newcomer could easily believe that any day of the week he had arrived on was Sunday. At night, except when the theatre doors stood open, the silence of the narrow streets was broken only by the occasional sound of a carriage passing.

Charlotte quartered her family--Charlie had quit his job in New York--at the Washington House in Chestnut Street, "for less than we could keep house, and in a first class hotel at that," she wrote Sam Judd.³ From the hotel, a short walk each morning would take her and Susan to rehearsals and, under Charlie's escort, performances each night.

Every time she walked that easy distance, Charlotte knew the thrill of seeing her name carried high on the daily playbills tacked to the front of Burton's new National. And the theatre itself imparted a similar thrill, with its new paint and shiny brass, its clean curtains. On August 31, when Burton dedicated his new house--"the first in the Union," he called it--Charlotte parted the heavy drapes to deliver some lines she had written herself, a hopeful prologue to the new season. And then, playing Lydia Languish to Susan's Lucy in The Rivals, she began this latest chapter in her career.⁴

The week following, playing six different roles, she made it clear to Burton and all the company that she would bend every effort to make her mark. On September 1 she was Ellen Rivers in The Patriarch and the Parvenu; on the second, Gabrielle in Tom Noddy's Secret. Three nights later she shocked the Quakers with her tattered Nancy; on the seventh she was Beatrice in Much Ado; the eighth she played Smike in Nicholas Nickleby.⁵

By now, the daily grind and nightly change of characters was so standard a life for a stock company actor that Charlotte thought little of it--beyond her steady sweet taste of top billing. On the twenty-seventh she played Mrs. Page to James H. Hackett's Falstaff and left Hackett himself reeling from her determination to succeed. To Hackett, the young actress had faults, but there was no gainsaying her promise--and her probable victory. "There is nobody strong enough to question her right, after she has made up her mind,"⁶ he said.

Throughout September and October, she and Susan "bloomed and flourished."⁷ Most nights found them together on stage, though Philadelphia soon saw in Charlotte's magnetism a threat to Susan's conventional grace. Backstage, some even detected a show of temper in Susan that might stem from resentment. By late in the month, Charlotte wrote Sam Judd that she had made "a decided hit." It was not bragging to say that among the Philadelphians "I have established myself at once a favorite."⁸ If she envied the ovation Baltimore had just given the English dancer, Fanny Ellsler--admirers had drawn her carriage through the cheering streets--might she not hope, some far-off day, to hear similar cheers for herself?

In her leisure hours Charlotte often found herself in the studio of James Hamilton, Philadelphia's celebrated marine painter, and when rehearsals allowed it, she spent mornings cantering out to Hamilton's country home in time for good conversation and breakfast with the admiring fans and moneyed patrons that circulated around him. The horseback jaunts relieved tensions that sometimes built up on stage, and she found in the bright talk at Hamilton's table a welcome outlet for a mind that teemed with ideas. And no less important, contacts to be made through Hamilton were a matter of "minding the main chance." If any trait in her had become uppermost by the time she finished her contract in New York, it was alertness for practical openings. At this point, Charlotte made certain that Fanny Kemble should enter her life.

Niece of Sarah Siddons, brilliant star in her own right, Fanny Kemble's name excited the dreams of any actress. Following a stunning debut at Covent Garden, she and her father had crossed the Atlantic in 1832 to reap an acclaim no less incredible on American stages. Up to that time, Fanny was the most brilliant actress ever seen at the Park; her Julia in The Hunchback had created the wildest sensation. Marriage in 1834 to the very eligible Pierce Butler of Philadelphia had led to her retirement in "Butler Place," a house of great style set at the head of an avenue of trees in suburban Germantown. But as a pampered wife, Fanny had not found happiness. Even before the marriage, her friend Catherine Sedgwick had foreseen trouble. "Steeped to the lips with genius," Fanny had glorious faculties, delightful accomplishments, and, alas, "half a hundred faults." Pierce Butler was an amiable sort but "infinitely inferior" to her.⁹

For all her talent, by 1840 Fanny knew she could never play the submissively proper wife Butler wished to exhibit to Philadelphia society. Her British disdain for American "provincialisms," her determination to speak out and write as she pleased, to ride horseback whenever and wherever she liked made her a difficult mate for a conservative like Butler. In letters home to England Fanny confessed herself "a stranger here, and fear I shall continue to do so until I die." Her enormous confidence puzzled Philadelphia's matrons, though Whitman early confessed that her New York performances inspired parts of his Leaves of Grass. And when Emerson came to know her at her summer home in the Berkshires, he found her "marvelous."¹⁰ Charlotte echoed the sentiment. The glamorous Fanny was a compound of everything desirable. Perhaps flowers could open her door.

A thank you and a friendship with Fanny immediately followed: "I am very much obliged to you for giving me such a very agreeable acquaintance," Fanny wrote.¹¹ Charlotte's horseback rides to Butler Place were soon returned by Fanny's regular attendance at Charlotte's performances. The friendship flourished, despite Charlotte's occasional disbelief that the niece of the Divine Sarah could possibly interest herself in Charlotte's efforts. Flowers from Fanny brought firm reassurance: "You are quite mistaken in your reading of my countenance this morning at church. I had not the pleasure of seeing you, being rather short sighted. Had I done so, I am very sure the greeting I should have been happy to offer you would have satisfied you. . . . I am at home always from one o'clock until half past four or five and again in the evening from eight til ten, and either morning or evening should be very glad to receive you any day and every day as often as your inclination prompts and leisure serves you to visit me."¹²

Fanny's visits highlighted the fall, though the night of December 19 brought special excitement at the theatre. Burton gambled his entire resources on a production entirely new to the American stage. Set in an immense Rhine grotto, his Naiad Queen featured a hundred thinly clad girls draped about the stage on gigantic shells painted gold and silver. From time to time these Lorelei maidens bestirred themselves and plunged into an immense pool at stage center. At the height of the scene the figure of Charlotte Cushman slowly emerged from the water and expanded into a wide open flower. In another scene the maidens became warriors, with Charlotte as their drillmaster leading them through a lavish display of military precision.

Philadelphia found Charlotte as the Naiad Queen "fresh and imposing" in her helmet of white ostrich plumes, breastplate of gold scales, flesh-colored tights, and red sandals. Brandishing her shield and her battle axe, she dominated the show; one fascinated male frankly confessed, "Such a display of ladies legs no mortal man could resist the opportunity of seeing."¹³ For her success on opening night, "the theme of praise on every tongue,"¹⁴ she could exact from Burton a certain regard befitting her popularity.

Burton's investment paid off, but throughout the season, with the country's money still tight, his theatre delicately balanced between slender success and failure. Charlotte sensed the difficulties. "Theatricals are assuming a most dismal shape--nothing but trouble from all parts of the country," she wrote her friend Mrs. William Creswick. So far the National was doing a paying business, "yet rumour says we are going to close."¹⁵

For Burton she could feel little sympathy, despite her appreciation of his skill as a comedian. Like managers she had met before, the man had a miserly streak that spoiled him. "I was compelled to go to N.Y. last week on business and asked Mr. Burton's permission to leave me out of the bills one night. I did not go at that time, but waited until my name was out of the bills, and was gone two days. When I sent for my salary, I found it was all the week deducted for those two nights. Pretty good that, and so it has been ever since I have been in Philadelphia, and he has insulted me in every possible way."

To make matters worse, things were not well at home. Susan and Bub had been sick for a month with scarlet fever, though both were slowly improving by the end of January, and Charlotte herself had been far from well.¹⁶ It was some comfort to know that her worth to Burton was not completely unrecognized. Bennett's New York Herald congratulated the Philadelphia National on having some of the best actors in the country: "It would be impossible to find any superiors in their line to Charlotte Cushman, Peter Richings, and Burton himself."¹⁷

By February, business at the National was "I blush to say . . . bad, bad, bad." She poured out her troubles to the Creswicks: "For eleven weeks we have been upon two thirds and for the last three weeks no salary at all. Last Saturday Burton closed the season and reduced the salaries of all who remained. I have withdrawn Susan altogether from the Theatre. I remain myself under a reduced salary."

In desperation, she sought legal advice but found that if Burton chose he could "keep me out of any money until next September," when her contract expired. "So I have had to give it up as a bad job. I shall remain until I can better myself and then go. I have been most heartily disappointed."¹⁸ The only bright note was Tyrone Power, who "is playing with us for three nights." Susan was ill again, "Baby is very poorly and I--I am as thin as Job's turkey." To eke out expenses, she sold an article to the New York World and a poem, "The Peasant Boy," to the Philadelphia New World.

And now Charlotte suffered additional worry over her father. In Boston, Elkanah was "quite infirm and miserable." For years he had lived in a small house on Commercial Street with his daughter Isabella Weld and her husband. Charlotte's recent business trip to New York had been to arrange for a loan, on Elkanah's behalf, from Sam Judd. The matter was embarrassing, but the fact was "that Mr. Weld is ashamed to let anybody know that he will not support father, as he is quite able to do it, and therefore refuses."¹⁹ Elkanah's needs, at age 72, could not have come at a more difficult time.

By spring, the picture brightened somewhat when desperation prompted her move with Burton to the National Theatre in New York. The family remained in Philadelphia against the day when Charlotte could see her way more clearly. Out of the ragtag remnants of companies left stranded by the perilous times, Burton assembled a powerful list of actors for his New York house. Several nights in April and early May, Charlotte delighted full houses as she snapped her Rhine maidens through their military paces, though the Spirit was not impressed with Charlotte's own part in the show: "It is a sad pity that a clever woman like Miss Cushman should be wasting time and a strong intellect in show pieces."²⁰

Be that as it may, intellects still had families to feed, and finding this further proof of her worth to Burton was comforting. For his high-handed treatment of her in Philadelphia, she levied upon him his portion of humble pie. She delighted in delaying rehearsals until Burton sent a cab to fetch her in style.²¹

She held firm to her job, though affecting the grand lady with Burton did not help her income. By late May she sold Bennett some articles but had to go into debt nonetheless. Putting up her wardrobe as security, she borrowed $150, then persuaded the lender to release some of her costumes by giving him a thirty-day note. "I thank God that is off my mind for a time."²²

If Charlotte ever learned of Hackett's opinions about her "obsessive" determination, she proved him right in late May. By now there was no way to explain calamities. One met adversity and stood firm. When she heard the frantic cries, she held herself ready. The National Theatre was ablaze. Her job and her costumes gone again, now deeply in debt, she could only assume a twisted smile. And now a letter from her cousin, Winthrop Babbit, reached her from Boston the middle of June. "This day at 20 minutes before 8 o'clock departed this life your Father."²³ In her small quarters in New York, in the midst of her suffocating worries, Charlotte struggled to feel the proper filial grief. But tears came slowly now, when for all practical purposes her father's death had been an accomplished fact for years. Elkanah's passing, like the flames that devoured the National, were part of an old story, a narrative punctuated with the ups and downs of experience.

To recoup some of her loss Charlotte made a trip in July to the wilds of Pennsylvania, to Lancaster, "eighty miles in an inland town, playing on a stage 6 feet by 10 to a parcel of Germans who do not understand one single word of English." But half a loaf was better than none, and in a drape of velvet and a makeshift fur she could palm herself off as Lady Macbeth before the staring eyes.²⁴ For the fall, aware at last of her worth, Simpson was offering her good reason to return to the Park--at $50 a week--"but I am too terrified to decide." Burton was opening a new house and wanted her to join him, "but he has so swindled me that I am afraid of him." She confessed to the Creswicks, "I wish I knew what to do."

The thing to do was accept Simpson's offer. By August she and Susan were back at the Park, ready with Midsummer Night's Dream, a play not seen in New York in fifteen years, with Simpson's playbills expressing the humble hope that admirers of Shakespeare would extend "their patronage to an undertaking somewhat hazardous and requiring more than ordinary skill and attention."²⁵ When Charlotte stepped on stage as Oberon, the ovation that greeted her return was the most heartwarming response she had ever received.

Once the play was underway, the applause for Susan was no less sincere. The Spirit happily celebrated the fact that both sisters displayed a poetic feeling "for which we were quite unprepared": Charlotte had never enunciated her lines so well, and Susan's Helena was "decidedly the most effective personation in the whole cast."²⁶ On succeeding nights they played to full houses, the only difficulty at the Park being a "rude and unladylike" Miss Clarendon, who "poutingly"²⁷ rejected Charlotte's offers of help during rehearsals.

In spite of the country's depression, his own healthy box office encouraged Simpson to gamble again on October 11, when he brought out Dion Boucicault's new comedy. London Assurance marks a dramatic change in American staging. Breaking all convention, Simpson discarded the simple painted backdrops and wings normally used and dressed his stage as a drawing room furnished with rich carpets, ornate furniture, and works of art; as an Elizabethan garden with statues, walks, and a distant view of Gloucester; as a morning room with a wide view through great French windows over the lawn.²⁸ Never before had an American audience been offered so elaborate a spectacle.

In such a setting, London Assurance had a better than average chance of success, but it would have made its mark regardless. As Lady Gay Spanker, Charlotte did not appear until the third act, but from that point she dominated the action. Exuberant, aggressive, self-assured, her Lady Gay's domineering control of her pip-squeak husband was the comic heart of the play. If her effects met mixed reactions--some found her face "greatly against her"²⁹--her vivid acting and the elaborate staging filled the house for an unprecedented three full weeks. Whitman was so impressed that he ranked her Lady Gay with Junius Booth's Richard III and Forrest's Metamora: "I cannot conceive anything finer"³⁰--though later, in his novel Franklin Evans, the play itself seemed "one of those flippant affairs that pretend to give a picture of society and manners among the exclusive . . . the most nauseous kind of mock aristocracy tinging the dialogue from beginning to end."³¹

Whitman's enthusiasm for Charlotte's acting did not reflect everyone's. The editor of the New World, Park Benjamin, labeled Charlotte's Lady Gay a "blustering hoyden," an ill-bred, "loud-talking Amazonian."³² For reasons not wholly editorial, Benjamin preferred Miss Clarendon, who played Grace Harkaway. Simpson had originally cast Susan in that part, but Benjamin had pressured Simpson into substituting his good friend by threatening to turn the full force of his paper against the expensive production. Simpson acceded and the pretty Miss Clarendon played.

But Miss Clarendon did not please. The Spirit said she lacked "force," and Bennett's Herald said bluntly, "The audience bore the affliction as a man does the rheumatism."³³ Outraged, Benjamin fired off a letter to Barry, Simpson's stage manager, accusing Charlotte of having written the Herald strictures: if there was any virtue in a New York audience or the New York press, Charlotte Cushman should be hissed from the stage.

No less angry, Charlotte immediately returned the fire: "You accuse me of being the author of an attack upon Miss Clarendon in the Herald. Most positively do I deny this, and dare you to the proof." Mr. Benjamin's "private feelings" for the lady had made him forget himself; his indignation was cause for "wonder and astonishment." As for being hissed from the stage, "I think you have business of more importance."³⁴

Bennett printed the exchange in full: "Park Benjamin has organized his troops for hissing tonight. Poor Charlotte Cushman! To set herself up on two straight elegant limbs, in opposition to Park Benjamin and his 'notice.'"³⁵

But Charlotte felt no need for anyone's pity. Night found the Park full to the chandeliers. When Max Harkaway announced Lady Gay's approach across the lawn, loud cheers--not hisses--greeted her. Her speech to Meddle the Lawyer, "Harkee, Mr. Meddle, if you don't be quiet, I shall horsewhip you," left no doubt she could as readily horsewhip Benjamin the editor. At the curtain, bravos called for "Charlotte Cushman!"

Bennett's paper happily reported, "The dashing Charlotte will not neglect to make many points" out of Benjamin's cowardly attack.³⁶ Whitman tossed off her attacker as a "vain pragmatical nincompoop," no more a critic than a "witless ape."³⁷

Flush with her victory, Charlotte knew that the play's New York success--and the healthy publicity Benjamin's anger had brought it--guaranteed its success throughout the country. Always alert now for practical opportunities, she wrote Noah Ludlow and Sol Smith, theatre manager in St. Louis: "I know of a marked copy of 'London Assurance' which has been doing wonders for us. Knowing that it will be an impossibility to procure a copy on acct. of the anxiety of the parties in possession to keep it, I have thought that perhaps you would be glad to obtain this."³⁸ The St. Louis men could have it for fifty dollars. Simpson, of course, must hear nothing of it.

The dust settled quickly; Charlotte and Susan appeared on November 20 as Lady Blanche and Lady Anne in Sheridan Knowles' Old Maids, carrying the major burden of a "dull" play. Though "without them, it would hardly have been heard through," Washington Irving found Charlotte "in the garments of the 'opposite sex,' very cheerful" and worth the applause. Susan expressed "deep feeling and force" in her "sweet and flowing elocution."³⁹

In December, when they played in London Assurance in Philadelphia, the garden scene featured real grass, real flowers, and real orange and lemon trees. In Boston Charlotte had the added delight of appearing on stage with her childhood friend, John Gilbert. She was back in Philadelphia on February 1, 1842, when Boston lavished a testimonial dinner on its celebrated visitor, Charles Dickens. For the occasion, Joseph M. Field regaled the diners with a poem, beginning,

Remember wot I says, Boz
You're goin' to cross the Sea;
A blessed vay avays, Boz,
To wild Ameriky;
A blessed set of savages,
As books of travels tells;
No Guv'nor's eye to watch you, Boz,
Nor even Somivel's.⁴⁰

Dickens himself closed the friendly affair among "the savages" on a rather more serious note, the matter of an international copyright. America had great writers who would live for all time, as did England. But, said Dickens, "I hope the time is not far distant when they, in America, will receive of right some substantial profit and return in England from their labours; and when we, in England, shall receive of right some profit and return in America for ours." Without adequate copyright protection no country could ever develop and keep a literature of its own. Dickens offered a toast: "America and England, and may they never have any division but the Atlantic between them."⁴¹ Charlotte could only confess that Dickens spoke of matters to which her Meg Merrilies and Nancy had contributed.

The spring before, when the National burned, an idea had circulated among Charlotte's New York fans that she deserved her own theatre. Nothing had come of the thought, but in March 1842 the Sun reported, "A popular theatre is soon to be erected in the most frequented part of Broadway, and placed under the management of that universal favorite, Miss Charlotte Cushman."⁴² When Whitman got wind of the venture, he cheered Charlotte's efforts in his Aurora and noted the impact of Dickens' visit: "Let us have an international copyright law, and we shall have a national drama, and literature also." The citizens of this great republic must be more just to themselves. "Let us respect our own capacities and not hide our lights under bushels."⁴³

Bennett pledged the full support of the Herald. To push the project herself, Charlotte flooded the mail with letters. Several features in the plan recommended it. As her own boss, she could avoid the mistreatment she had always resented from managers like Burton and Price, she might increase her income, and if her dreams truly materialized, she might make the difference Whitman predicted. "Having heard of your liberality as connected with a fondness for the arts," she wrote Campbell P. White, "I have ventured to solicit your valuable aid and influence." Surely, among the other true arts, the drama had stood too long neglected in America. Was it not shameful that P. T. Barnum could lead New York astray with his freak shows when such better things were possible in a legitimate theatre? Men of taste and refinement like White must help raise the American theatre "from its present glooms."⁴⁴

As late as June, Bennett was still hopeful: "A new theatre, by the friends of Charlotte Cushman, is to be built near the Tabernacle on the ridge of Broadway. The ground is secured and the subscriptions filling up."⁴⁵ But again the plan fizzled; "the present gloom" would continue. Charlotte and Susan accepted a run in Trenton. The western New Jersey town had no theatre; plays were given in a hotel ballroom. To attempt Romeo and Juliet with no balcony, without any stage equipment was a tall order, but when the Trentonians insisted, the hotel manager suggested a makeshift: Juliet could stand on a chair; a bedspread or quilt held in front could suggest the balcony rail. The manager himself would hold one end of the quilt; the Negro bellboy, the other.

The performance began; candles were quickly blown out. Capulets and Montagues took over the acting area. For all the make-do, it appeared that the show might work out. Then the balcony scene was in progress. But just as Susan was saying, "At what o'clock tomorrow shall I send to thee?" a bell sounded downstairs in the lobby. Suddenly, the boy's grin appeared from behind the quilt, and a voice said, "I's sorry, Miss Cushing, I hear my bell ringing. I is obleeged to let my side of de house DRAP!" And down it went.

The audience fell into gales of laughter, and the manager quickly declared an intermission. Laughing, Charlotte and Susan took refuge in a bedroom until the show could go on, with the bellboy's reshouldering his side of the house.⁴⁶

By August, Philadelphia seemed a likelier place than New York to pattern a program around her own name. The Walnut Street Theatre needed a manager, and E. A. Marshall, the lessee, offered the job to Charlotte. Her competition would be another female manager, Mary Elizabeth Maywood, recently appointed at the Chestnut. In Marshall's view, a healthy excitement might be built up in Philadelphia if the theatres could be matched against each other as the personal projects of two determined women.

On the second of August, 1842, Charlotte wrote to Chippendale in New York. "I have made arrangements with Marshall for the next season. He is now the only paying man and consequently one to seize upon in desperate times. What do you say to joining me next season?" Together, they ought to be able to do something handsome. Hard as the times were, "you can make more capital out of the Philadelphians in one year than you can of the New Yorkers in six."⁴⁷

At the Walnut, she took over a top-quality company that included some old friends: William Fredericks, J. M. Field, Peter Richings, E. L. Davenport, and her former mentor, Clara Fisher Maeder, now returned to the stage as a fully committed actress. The reunion with Clara was a sort of measuring point, proof of how far she had come since her opera debut in Boston. The house itself at the corner of Ninth and Walnut was "beautifully clean, white, and very nice,"⁴⁸ buttressed by a respectable tradition that went back to 1809. The 1,300 seats in the pit were padded in red plush; there was a large balcony and elegant boxes on each side. The stage was a full forty feet wide and eighty feet deep.