A Woman's Heart and Mr. Macready

Opening night, September 22, Charlotte left no doubt in the crowded house about her determination to succeed, whether tonight as Mrs. Racket in The Belle's Stratagem with Clara Maeder as Letitia, tomorrow night as someone else, or throughout the season as the most energetic theatre manager Philadelphia had ever seen. If hard work and shrewd planning could promise victory, she would need no such word as "failure."

To make her intentions clear to the public, a few nights later she stood before the curtains to deliver her manifesto as a manager. "Theatrical representations were once given in this city, in a manner and style that secured the constant attendance of a respectable and cultivated audience," not merely the people of fashion who came to see some favorite star. Happy families filled the boxes; the pit listened with delight to innocent amusement. So it could be again, "and shall be if my efforts can make it so." Her plays would afford "healthy morality and generous sentiments."¹ And to avoid offending Philadelphia's Sunday morals, she would ring down her Saturday night curtain no later than eleven o'clock to give her clients time to be home by Sunday.

To help celebrate the new venture, Fanny Kemble sent her a note and a package. In the process of making a temporary break with Pierce Butler, Fanny had recently found at the country house the girdle and headband she had worn as Julia in Knowles' The Hunchback. "I do not know whether you would have any value for it on that account, but it has occurred to me that perhaps you might, I send it to you. If you do not care for it, you can but toss it into the Walnut St. wardrobe."² Other notes and more costumes followed.

"I am going to the Yellow Springs," wrote Fanny, "where I shall be very glad to see you if you come down." But Charlotte was much too busy as actress and manager to think of any such pleasure. When George Vandenhoff arrived from England to play a run in October, it was Election Week and business was off, but Vandenhoff was immediately impressed with Charlotte's "rude, strong, uncultivated talent," if not always her accuracy. In Hamlet she shocked him with her reading of Gertrude's line: "What wilt thou do? thou wilt not kill me?" instead of "thou wilt not murder me?" When he noted the error, she felt "abject," though too harried with business correspondence to worry for long.

If her double duties made her sometimes "negligent" in rehearsals, as it seemed to Vandenhoff, success at the Walnut now required her to keep a constant eye on the till and ledger. If her Nancy seemed altogether too "fearfully natural," too "horribly real," she was merely channeling her efforts where they could do the most good.³ If Vandenhoff found Susan a pretty creature without "a spark of Charlotte's genius," though so popular with the young men that he could rank her the best walking lady in America, Charlotte could welcome the report primarily for what it meant to business.

As for Susan, there was further cause to be happy these days. When Nelson Merriman's Philadelphia relatives learned how shabbily he had treated his wife, they offered to pay the full costs if Susan would sue for divorce. The decree was granted on grounds of desertion, and within a few months word came that Merriman had died "somewhere in the Far West."⁴

At her desk, Charlotte pursued her managerial labors. While Forrest was appearing at the Walnut in late October, she wrote her concerns to Chippendale. "Dear Chip. Your kind letter I rec'd duly, and should have answered immediately but have been crowded with study, with Forrest. If it will suit you better, we will not play you until Friday, 'Road to Ruin' and 'Dr. Bilworth,' or not in the farce at all unless you wish it. 'The Pretty Girls' is doing capitally, and we wish to run it as long as possible. Have you ever played Strickland's part in 'King O'Niele,' General Count Dillon? I want to do it on Saturday, it is not long and very good. I suppose I may put you in for it with some one of your farces. I want to keep 'She Would etc.' for my night next week. 'The Maniac Farmer' I will do as soon as you get here as you like. We will do 'Wild Oats,' 'Love Chase,' 'The Beaux Stratagem'! Will you play in the latter, and what? Next week after you come you can put me up to many things for our mutual benefit, that in the hurry and confusion of business I don't think of. 'Jack Cade' did very well last night $500 odd. We shall do 'London Assurance' week after next. I wish I could get hold of 'West End.' If by any chance you get hold of a copy of 'Love's Sacrifices,' let me have it immediately if not sooner. Tabitha is well but outrageous with Forrest, who does not lord it with me as usual but lets her have it all. Charles, Mother etc. etc. desire kindest remembrances.

And believe me, Dear Chip,
I will have a room for you,
but am sorry you don't come to us.

Yours truly,
C. S. Cushman"⁵

Later in the fall she prevented John Brougham, the Irish comedian, from running afoul of the blue laws. As "The Irish Lion," he had just taken his seat on stage and started a speech when he saw the curtain descending. He wheeled toward the wings, crying, "Is the house on fire?" But Charlotte, gesturing her regrets, came forward and explained that in Philadelphia, late Saturday night, laws were laws.⁶ For her trouble, Bennett's Herald soon had comforting words: in Philadelphia "Charlotte Cushman takes the lead in talent and respectability."⁷

To relieve the mounting tedium, Charlotte cultivated another Philadelphia friendship. After morning rehearsals, when time permitted, she stopped at the home of a young writer, Annie Brewster, for talk over a cup of tea, to read with her the current play's passages aloud. To Annie, "the deep contralto voice of my friend" had in it "a sweet tenderness"; Charlotte herself seemed a Miranda from an Enchanted Isle.⁸ And to Charlotte, the mornings were not just a break in her heavy routine. Through the readings with Annie, she found a new pleasure in her profession. Until now, she had studied her lines as an actress, ever alert to the staging and movement implied in the words. But with Annie, plays suddenly became literature. Reading the lines, when sudden new insights came she would cry, "It is a new world!"

Phrases in Shakespeare took on new meanings; new references became clear. The talk often lasted into the afternoon. During a performance, her mind still tingling with the new light, she would dash off a note to Annie at intermission. At other times, they read aloud Lessing's criticisms of acting; in Annie's opinion Charlotte made Lessing's Dramaturgie a Bible.

By spring 1843, Charlotte had to confess to herself--if no other-- that the shoe of theatre management pinched severely. The country's money ills seemed dead set against her, and however much she regretted the fact, she often found herself unable to pay her actors their weekly salaries. And among some of the men, she heard the word "domineering" applied to herself. To the public, a female theatre manager might seem novel, but to male workers backstage, the commands of a woman were irritating.⁹ She sensed especially W. R. Blake's resentment and the bristling hostility that welled up in her when, playing opposite her in comedy roles, he always seemed to receive the major share of the calls.¹⁰ She confided her griefs to Colley Grattan in Boston.

Grattan gave her his sympathy, but her talk of "quitting the profession in a year" was foolish. "I expect to see you stand very high indeed in it by that time." Charlotte was perhaps tinged by a "sensitiveness" too common among actors. "Beware, not of jealousy," Grattan warned, "for I am sure you are above its reach, but of overanxiety to please those whom the ardor of your temperament leads you to overestimate."¹¹

There were other irritations. Philadelphia theatres had their loyal supporters, but theatre people had no cause to rejoice at their treatment in public. In church, where one surely expected a welcome, Charlotte's status as actress created a scene. When she and Susan and Charlie attended the First Unitarian Church one Sunday in April, the pewholder they were to sit beside objected so strongly that the head usher noted the matter in his diary. "When I told him it was for Mr. Cushman for himself and sisters, he objected at once to going into church with persons who were employed upon the stage." Deeply offended, the pewholder left the church, and his wife moved to another seat.¹²

The pain was especially intense in light of Mary Eliza's headshakings and doubts. And Blake's ridicule had grown worse. The company was aware of what Blake labeled Charlotte's "social ambitions." When word got about that Susan had joined a certain female "status" organization, the greenroom smiled to Blake's questions about associations designed to promote actresses into "the upper ten sphere," about "the female sacred button-hole society."¹³ Blake could act, unfortunately, or Charlotte would have fired him. Socially ambitious or not, she expected some credit for a certain nobility of purpose.

Probably through Fanny Kemble's insistence, Charlotte made her way to the portrait studio of Thomas Sully, cousin of Pierce Butler. Then at the height of his fame, Sully reigned the supreme portraitist in America. The man whom Gilbert Stuart had blessed in Boston, whom Benjamin West and Sir Thomas Lawrence had encouraged in London, Sully wielded his brush year after year to record the notable faces that came to his door. More than once he had painted the tempestuous Fanny Kemble.

The portrait he painted of Charlotte fully explains his popularity. From his English mentors Sully had learned a valuable trick: by softening chin lines and cheeks he could emphasize any beauty he found in the eyes. In the picture Sully delivered on April 27 Charlotte saw a vibrant, appealing, young face with great luminous eyes, a softly molded jawline and chin--all of it flushed with a sunny brightness and undeniable feminine charm. The picture was stunning, but it was hardly a portrait. She wrote Sully a playful note; he had worked wonders with "my unfortunate 'Mug.'" "I have established it in my mind," as a settled fact, at last, "that I am beautiful."¹⁴ Such an error explained, did it not, her un-Yankee-like mistake in overpaying one of the installments on the $80 fee she owed him?¹⁵

Much as Sully's brush flattered, Charlotte's time in his studio brought even happier results. His family welcomed her as one of their own. A friendship with his daughters, Blanche and Rosalie, brought her almost daily to the Sully house. Rosalie had inherited a fair amount of her father's talent. Two years younger than Charlotte, gentle in temperament where Charlotte was strong, Rosalie Kemble Sully was a painter in her own right. Between them soon flowed an intuitional understanding. The hope of friendship that had so attracted Charlotte to Fanny Kemble and the interest that had brightened so many of her mornings with Annie Brewster now became almost totally centered in the young woman whom she would soon call "beloved."

Charlotte's diary--one never intended for publication--details the progress of the profound attachment. Its penciled pages refer again and again to daily visits to Rosalie, to Rosalie in the front room, to Rosalie in the upstairs parlor sitting "beside me" on the sofa, to Rosalie at church, in her painting room "working away as for her life," stopping now and again to look at an unfinished canvas on her stand. For Charlotte, Rosalie's miniature portrait of her became a special treasure.¹⁶

When Charlotte established the family at 277 S. 8th Street, she took separate quarters for herself in suburban Clover Hill, to Mary Eliza's strong disapproval. Rosalie became a regular visitor. At Clover Hill, Charlotte surrounded herself with a growing store of books and music, her painting and miniatures, and her pet cardinal.

The affection between them sustained Charlotte through a difficult spring and summer. Receipts at the Walnut dropped steadily; in spite of her labors to decorate the bills with attractive names like Forrest, Junius Brutus Booth, Yankee Hill, John Brougham, Yankee Dan Marble, James Hackett, and Josephine Clifton, the money did not come in--hands held it for needs more vital than nights at the theatre. At the Chestnut Miss Maywood had already given up any attempts to make a go of her management. To Vandenhoff, returning to the Walnut in April to play Mercutio to Charlotte's Romeo, the season of 1842-43 was one of the worst known. Even the Park had had to drop its prices. And if Vandenhoff correctly sensed a mood in the staid Philadelphians, Charlotte's playing Romeo did not enhance her personal position among them.

The whole idea of a woman's playing a masculine role repelled Vandenhoff. She had "unsexed" herself to no purpose "except to destroy all interest in the play, and all sympathy for the ill-fated pair." The only good point in "this hybrid performance" was her skill with a sword, a trick Vandenhoff claimed credit for teaching her. In killing Tybalt and Paris she looked neither man nor woman; her passion was "epicene."¹⁷

Was Vandenhoff specifying the cause of a later heartache in Charlotte's friendship with Rosalie? Charlotte's vague diary notations and an inference in one of Rosalie's letters suggest an affectionate regard between them that was not universally approved, though the written endearments that passed between them said nothing that might not have appeared in any number of Victorian expressions of female friendship. Elizabeth Barrett liberally sprinkled her letters to Mary Russell Mitford with such endearments as "Love me, Miss Mitford." And many of Jane Welsh Carlyle's letters to various women sound no less oddly romantic to a later age.

However deep the attachment, to the parties involved the friendship was the brightest note in their private lives during 1843 and 1844. In Rosalie Sully Charlotte found her emotional needs totally fulfilled. Without the sustenance she found in Rosalie, her resounding failure as manager of the Walnut Street Theatre would have been more difficult to take.

On July 10, 1843, she took her last bow as full manager. She had tried to play her managerial cards adroitly, she had given the job her full energies, she had acted with all the power she possessed, but the till inevitably measured a theatre's success, a manager's effectiveness. By its charts she had failed. To replace her, W. R. Blake became her "assistant,"¹⁸ a word used in the papers to protect her feelings. She would serve under him only so long as she could tolerate him, acting in the company he would manage alternately at the Walnut and the Chestnut.

Free of the Walnut's burdens, Charlotte knew by fall that in her latest setback good luck had again protected her. The English tragedian William Macready, the man whose acting had so thrilled her in childhood, the man who with Edmund Kean and John Philip Kemble composed the great triumvirate of English actors, sent word in October that when he played in Philadelphia, he wished Charlotte to play opposite him.

Charlotte confided her fears to Annie Brewster. Underlings in his cast suffered a special kind of stage fright, knowing the Macready temper, the tenseness on stage that put him off balance if a breath was misplaced, a syllable wrongly emphasized.¹⁹ Philadelphia had heard of his terrible treatment of Mrs. Sloman at the Park. Dressed in black velvet, point lace and pearl beads, she had made the appalling mistake of catching her pearls in Macready's costume during the murder scene in Macbeth. The string broke, the beads fell dribbling across the stage, and the sound had infuriated Macready. As soon as he had delivered his final line, he had thrown the terrified actress off the stage.²⁰

For his Philadelphia opening, Macready would play Macbeth to Vandenhoff's Duncan and Charlotte's Lady Macbeth. In a sense, the chance to perform with the fabled star was cause for joy. Had this not been a dream ever since Uncle Augustus had led her into Macready's regal presence at the Boston Theatre on Federal Street? But to appear with him now would lay her open to the most explosive temperament on the English-speaking stage, to an ego that fed by aggrandizing itself, to a suspicious introspective nature that left all comers convinced that the only play Macready ever approved of was a five-act monologue written solely for himself. The fact was well known that Macready despised the acting profession; he had a snob's contempt for its greasepaint and pretense--and other actors.²¹

To withstand the strain before Macready arrived, Charlotte busied herself with reading about him, especially about his techniques. His mirror practice was famous. "I know that in gesture I do not excel," Macready had once explained, "and facial expression is what I principally depend upon." At home, hands tied behind him, he practiced before several large mirrors that would play up any tendency to exaggerate, all as an effort "to keep the features, perhaps I should say the muscles of the face, undisturbed, whilst intense passion would speak from the eye alone."²²

Charlotte told Annie Brewster a few days before the Macready run, "I mean to prepare Lady Macbeth in that way." But she soon gave it up as a bad job. "If I act that way when Macready comes, I'll kill myself." Mirror-pointing might work for Macready, but "it plays the mischief with me."²³

At the Chestnut, the night of October 23, Charlotte made her first appearance with William Macready. The hand that held Macbeth's letter trembled, but the voice that read it was firm, her manner controlled. And before Charlotte sensed the fact herself, the audience noted the strong resemblance between her face and Macready's. Except for his hair, bunched over his ears in "Newgate knockers," Macready and Charlotte might have been brother and sister. He had the same depressed nose, the same chin, the same broad brow that had always been Charlotte's own private grief. During an early performance, so ran a story, when a child in a box asked his father which was Macready and which was Miss Cushman, the father replied, "whichever you please, my little dear!"²⁴ Even Mary Eliza confessed to an eerie feeling when she saw them together.²⁵

The resemblance did nothing to spoil Macready's own appreciation of Charlotte's acting. Watching the sleep-walking scene from the wings, Macready nodded approval, and at a backstage party afterward, he toasted his "quondam murderous consort's health." The words brought blessed relief. Relaxing, Charlotte commented, "My Lady Macbeth has improved somewhat since I acted it in New Orleans at my debut. Then I wore a dress which you, Mr. Macready, could have worn, and could have cut off from the superfluous skirts enough to make me a gown."²⁶

Later that night Macready wrote in his journal, "Called for warmly, and warmly received. The Miss Cushman who acted Lady Macbeth interested me much. She has to learn her art, but she showed mind and sympathy with me; a novelty so refreshing to me on the stage."²⁷ And next morning, Charlotte voiced a newly refurbished dream. "I mean to go to England as soon as I can. Macready says I ought to act on an English stage and I will."²⁸

Before Macready left Philadelphia, he contracted with Charlotte to support him in Boston. "She would be glad to go for $50--it would be worth my while to give it."²⁹ Unfortunately for Charlotte, the work in Boston did not materialize. The theatre manager's daughter had already been appointed when she arrived. Uncertain of the next proper step, she stayed on in Boston to watch Macready work. The note she sent to him at the Tremont House regarding his Othello put the actor's famous ego on guard: "Shall I tell you that I feared for you," Charlotte wrote, "that when you raised your hand to your head, I was prepared to see you faint in reality from the violent reaction? I was in agony . . ." She explained the poem she had enclosed by saying: "What folly you will think me guilty of in writing to you as I do, but you are kind in indulging my whims. . . . God bless you, dear sir, and believe me, I am ever your grateful Charlotte Cushman."³⁰

All of which was too much for the suspicious Macready. "I am in a strange country," he told his diary, "and I think it is only a duty to myself to be strictly circumspect. I have not the slightest purpose, dream, or intent of wrong or folly. . . . Wrote to her, promising to see her tomorrow, which I will do in the common room."³¹

When she sent him flowers and more of her poems to read--her verses on Babington's conspiracy impressed him as "very powerful and clever"³²--he called on her next day, again in the common room of the Tremont House. "Talked with her a little and took leave of her most kindly, but without the slightest indication that our acquaintance is to become more intimate. She kissed my hand, but I was only kind."³³ He paid her the $50.

About her poetry, Charlotte had little cause to apologize. Though they were frankly efforts to pad her income, they were scarcely the awkward work of a mere dilettante. Fitz-Greene Halleck's poem "Forget-me-not,"³⁴ in the Knickerbocker in July 1843, challenged from Charlotte a serious reply. Halleck's lines had concluded:

There is a flower, a lovely flower,
Ringed deep with Faith's unchanging hue;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Yet deep its azure leaves within
Is seen the blighting hue of care;
And what that secret grief hath been,
The drooping stem may well declare.
The dew-drops on its leaves are tears,
That ask, 'Am I so soon forgot?'
Repeating still, amidst their fears
My life, my love! forget-me-not!

Published in October, Charlotte's "Lines to Fitz-Greene Halleck" read:

Like to the flower when autumn comes
To seek its folds with chilling breath,
And winter's earliest whisper roams
Its heart among, to tell of death;
Thus on man's heart, as o'er the flower,
Falls tears, with grief and anguish hot,
And speed the cry to Heaven's high power,
Forget-me-not! forget-me-not!

Now, in Macready, she had a subject that interested her even more, and she soon used him in verse.

For December, she agreed to a killing task. She would return to Philadelphia to continue acting at the Chestnut and the Walnut but would go by train to New York every second day to appear at the Park with Macready.³⁵ The New York appearances brought mixed results. Appearing at all with an actor of Macready's fame was an advantage, working with him would broaden the technical knowledge of any young actress, but the tiring pace of the long train ride every other day, plus Macready's wholly unpredictable temper, kept her nerves at high pitch. As Louisa Lane Drew later recorded, acting with him gave one the pleasant sensation of knowing that "you were doing nothing that he wanted you to do, though following strictly his instructions. He would press you down with his hand on your head and tell you in an undertone to stand up!"³⁶ Charlotte had already tasted such irritants in the ego of Edwin Forrest. The two "grandeurs" had much in common.

Still, Macready's scholarly skill outshone all other acting she had ever seen. His Macbeth was a great general, "devil-ridden by his imagination,"³⁷ haunted from the time he sees the "air-drawn" dagger, allowing it to rise slowly, a dagger of the mind, turning its handle "inexorably to his hand." Gripping the dagger stained with Duncan's blood, he spoke in halting, electrifying whispers, the storm outside matching the storm inside his agonizing brain. With his cry, "Wake Duncan with thy knocking: I would thou couldst!" with his crazed eyes averted from the dagger, he let himself be dragged from the stage, leaving his audience terrified. To Charlotte, Macready's Macbeth radiated an indescribable "splendor."³⁸

Watching him work and catching his shadings gave her new light on Lady Macbeth. And from it all, she later realized, acting became on its highest level a scholarly effort to distill into form every hint of a role's meaning, every fugitive impression.³⁹

When Macready was happy, bliss reigned backstage. But let a supporting actor garble a rhythm or delay a cue and frenzy descended. Charlotte watched Macready's temper boil over on stage when a fearful novice bearing the dread news about Birnam Wood momentarily froze.

"My lord--my lord--" he began, "my lord--my lord . . ."

"Go on, sir--go on, sir," Macready hissed.

"My lord, as I did stand my watch upon the hill, I looked toward Birnam, and anon . . . anon . . ." Despite the prompter, the messenger's words stuck in his throat. Macready had been working himself up for the great point of the scene but at last broke out in fury, "Liar and slave!" and struck wildly with his truncheon. The messenger fell to his knees, shrieking, "As I did stand my watch upon the hill . . ." Sensing the truth, the audience set up a delighted roar. "Get off, sir! Get off!" Macready spat through his teeth. When the trembling actor sprang to his feet and bolted, the audience dissolved.⁴⁰

For Charlotte, the episode carried a lesson in acting. Macready's skill might have saved the scene and, incidentally, exhibited his artistry. Instead, unable to remove himself from the character, he lost the scene. Charlotte took note of the error.

And she held herself tensed for the moment when the Macready rage might vent itself upon her. Hopefully, she would give him his just deserts, like the brave actor whose fame had spread when he dared to oppose Macready in Hamlet. When Claudius insisted on dying at stage center where Macready as Hamlet had expected to die, Macready had grunted audibly, "Die further up stage, sir. What are you doing down here, sir? Get up and die elsewhere!" But Claudius had sat bolt upright and replied clearly, "Look here, Mr. Macready, you had your way at rehearsal, but I'm King now, and I shall die where I please!"⁴¹

Charlotte kept her own counsel about Macready's faults. His lapses of temperament were unforgiveable; his mannerisms annoyed. As Macbeth, his listening to the witches with his mouth open wide made one long "to pitch something into it."⁴² And his pauses--suspensions in the rhythm meant to suggest thinking--sounded at times like stuttering. With Fanny Kemble, Charlotte could label Macready's style of speaking poetry a matter of ignoring all punctuation and "chopping it up into prose."⁴³

But, in the long view, one could learn from such an actor: habits of articulation and movement, other refinements that could spell the difference between adequacy and authority--in short, a style that owed much to the classic art of the Kembles. Had not Macready acted with Sarah Siddons herself and exposed his own style to "the impulsive intensity" of Edmund Kean? To this combination, he had added a mannered formality that, no matter how obvious, could sway an audience at his will.

Following Macready's lead, preparing a role now became patient study, careful analysis of text and characters, a probe into subtleties beneath the surface which she had never before suspected. Charlotte soon realized that, in order to gain his favor, adopting a style reminiscent of his own was mandatory. Macready demanded almost worshipful imitation. In her own case, good fortune altered the imitation into a style appropriate to her own temperament, though audiences seeing her work with Macready in Philadelphia and New York were not long in seeing a resemblance deeper than facial. A certain "trick of face," a tendency to quiver her "r's," a similarity in gait and gesture and voice tones almost as deep as Macready's added new authority to her acting.⁴⁴ About Macready's voice a London critic had written: "While the highest pitch of declamation is still vibrating on the ear, the loud tone abruptly stops, and falls precipitately into the deepest colloquial whisper."⁴⁵ The fact that Charlotte's voice had suddenly become a ringing instrument of much broader flexibility and range, striking the ear now with a new virtuosity, was a debt she owed to Macready.

The Macready whisper was a trick that, handled intelligently, kept attention at its peak and wrung every possible effect from a line. Charlotte also found in Macready a model of word control. "I fail," he insisted, "when I allow my tongue and action to anticipate my thought."⁴⁶ Valuable leads, indeed, for any disciple to follow.

But Macready's spitefulness and jealousy were something else. Macready wrote in his diary on December 4: "Rehearsed the play in a wretched state; Miss Cushman, who had her part when I was in Philadelphia, reading!--knowing nothing of what she had to do! How can there be artists when this lady, one of the most intelligent and ambitious, so entirely disregards the duties of her calling?"⁴⁷ If he throttled his spite, his disgust was obvious, particularly when the performance itself went smoothly, with Charlotte letter-perfect in her lines.

She wrote her mother ecstatically: "In great haste I write only a few words, with a promise to write again tonight after the play and tell you all particulars of my great and triumphant success of last night,--of my reception, of being called out after the play, and hats and handkerchiefs waved to me, flowers sent to me, etc."⁴⁸ In the Spirit's report Macready had been "well received," but Charlotte had been cheered "enthusiastically."⁴⁹

The cheers for Charlotte were lost on Macready: "Looked at some American Saturday papers, which state that Miss Cushman more than shared the applause of the audience with me. If it was so, I never heard one hand of it. She is an intriguante, I fear, a very double person."⁵⁰ His diary's scorn continues two days later, "Acted Melantius fairly; called for. They called for Miss Cushman here, who gets puffed in the papers, very absurdly"--the Spirit's praise on December 16, for example. Miss Cushman "appears to more advantage than any lady who has graced the Park boards for many years."⁵¹

The irritation Charlotte sensed in Macready stemmed in part from reactions like those of a visiting Englishman watching this run at the Park. "Even with this great and cultivated artist she held her own. She had not his experience, but she had genius. There were times when she more than rivalled him; when in truth she made him play second."⁵² At times she threw such energy, physical and mental, into her performance "as to weaken for the time the impression of Mr. Macready's magnificent acting."

To punish her, when Charlotte asked Macready to play for her Saturday benefit, he refused. "I have thus fixed Miss Cushman."⁵³ But aware now of his scarcely veiled hostility, Charlotte airily dismissed his thrusts. She showered him with detailed flattery. "Your Werner is to me painful in the extreme, although so beautiful! It seems to harrow every feeling of the heart, good and bad, and it is this which causes pain." The expression on his face caused a "heartsickness." The spirit actuating his conceptions "was caught from the death sigh of an Angelo or Da Vinci."⁵⁴

But by the end of her New York run with Macready, she could no longer hide her resentment of his arrogance, and she wrote him accordingly. Macready replied from Baltimore: "I assert, and, if my assertion heeds confirmation, will prove, that I never have by word or act been wanting to you in delicacy and consideration, nor in manifestation of kindly feeling, since I have had the pleasure of knowing you,"⁵⁵ though in his diary he expressed other sentiments: "Letter from Miss Cushman--oh! I do not like thee, Dr. Fell!"⁵⁶