by Tana Wojczuk
Inside the Tremont, Charlotte sank down into a plush velvet seat. The mixing scents of sawdust, varnish, shoe polish, hair oil, lavender water, and under it all, filtering through layers of damp, summer-weight wool and broadcloth, the yeasty, dirty-penny smell of sweat and excitement filled the air. Hundreds of bodies waited for the curtain to rise. Then Macready took the stage. He was handsome in his Roman armor, and his short tunic showed off his long legs. He had a mane of thick, dark hair; expressive, wide-set eyes; and full, sensitive lips. His Coriolanus “seemed a man of quick, irritable feelings, whose pride was rather galled than wounded,” both “the Coriolanus of Shakespeare and of nature.”
Coriolanus was a strange choice for an American audience. The play is unabashedly anti-democratic. The Roman general Coriolanus returns from battle and his fame ensures him a place in the Senate. Not-so-secretly, however, he despises the populace, comparing them to a ravenous belly and a many-headed monster. Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to demonstrate that the rabble are ill-suited to governing themselves. Written at the turn of the fifteenth century, it was the same criticism Americans still had to stomach from their former rulers in England.
But if the audience suspected anti-Americanism at the heart of Macready’s performance, they were too overawed to say so.
Leaning over the railing of her uncle’s box seats Charlotte could see families in the pit unwrapping a dinner of dark bread and cheese, apples, a whole roast bird pulled from a hamper and torn limb from limb. The women’s gallery was a murmur of silk, the self-satisfied sheen of beaver pelt, the glow of red fox, green cloth dresses, fashion-forward paisley silk from France. The ladies glinted in constellations, the gaslight refracting off their jewelry in the dark like stars.
Charlotte was impressed by Macready, but not so overwhelmed she couldn’t begin to see how it was done. Like him, she was drawn to heroic characters, but there were few of these written for women. To be a successful actress you ought to be beautiful. Charlotte knew she was not a beauty like the British acting legend Sarah Siddons or her niece, Fanny Kemble, a rising star. Still, she longed to perform. Opera had a better reputation than theatre and so she determined to become a professional singer.
She had reason to hope. Everyone who heard Charlotte’s voice said it was remarkable. Where most singers labored to perfect one range, Charlotte could sing in nearly a full two registers. She could sing soprano parts, stretching her vocal cords long and thin to reach the highest notes, and she had a deep, textured, resonating “chest voice” that could reach some of the deepest notes. She could also sing contralto, the lowest range for a woman—so rare that most opera companies cast these roles with male castrati.
Charlotte had been singing in the choir at the Unitarian church, where her pastor was a brilliant young scholar named Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was born in Boston as the son of a preacher. He entered Harvard at fourteen and when he graduated he entered the ministry. Emerson’s ministry allowed him to sketch out a radical philosophy that elevated the individual’s spiritual path above the hierarchies of the church. When Charlotte met Emerson he was newly married, and besotted with his nineteen-year-old wife, Ellen. When Ellen died suddenly of tuberculosis, Emerson was distraught and found that his faith gave him little comfort. Ultimately, he discovered he could not bring himself to give the sacrament in good faith and left the church forever.
Whether or not Emerson’s radical philosophy shaped Charlotte’s own, she shared his uniquely American belief that the path toward God could be charted by the individual. American Unitarians believed that one must exercise reason in interpreting the Bible. Strict interpretations of the Bible that held, for example, that Jesus’s reincarnation was real were hard to accept for more scientifically minded parishioners. But Charlotte, like Emerson, took this philosophy a step further, believing that if you cultivated your own moral character, then your own intuition would lead you down the right path. Young and ambitious, there was tremendous spiritual and intellectual energy coiled inside her and it seemed like the more she spent, the more she had.
Anxiety, too, drove her. In the four years since her father left, Charlotte had gone from being the protected eldest daughter of an upper-class family to a striving, working-class woman. Fear of artistic failure coupled with her sense of moral obligation to her family. If Charlotte could prove that she could support them, she could claim the right to be independent. Ironically, however, the price of that freedom was that all her creative energy had to be directed toward one goal: success.
* * *
In 1833 the famous, glamorous singer Mary Ann Wood arrived in Boston. She checked in to the Tremont House, a high-class residential hotel near the Tremont Theatre. Wood was in town to perform in Mozart’s comic opera The Marriage of Figaro, and she and Charlotte rehearsed at the same studio.
Wood was exactly who sixteen-year-old Charlotte dreamed of becoming: a world-famous opera singer with a trunk full of beautiful costumes, a woman who had parlayed her talent into fame and a successful artistic career. Wood also had taken the radical step of suing her first husband—successfully—for divorce in her native Scotland, and was now remarried with a young child. It was nearly impossible for a woman to get a divorce, and the very subject was taboo. And yet the divorce had not hurt her career. In fact, Wood had earned a fortune singing throughout Europe, a fortune she hoped to increase on her first American tour. She traveled with her husband, Joseph Wood, also a singer. When they reached a new city, they cast their supporting roles with local performers. When Wood said she was looking for a female singer to accompany her someone suggested Charlotte and she invited her to audition. It was the kind of opportunity that could turn a former choir girl into a star.
Charlotte began to prepare for her audition with Mrs. Wood, propelled not only by the promise of fame but by the determination to save her family from ruin. It was a difficult task. She had never been to a theatre outside Boston, had never heard Rossini’s Cinderella in Paris, or felt the heat from the oil lamps illuminating the cavernous La Scala in Milan. She was thoroughly unlike the glamorous divas, with their pulchritude and their jewels. Assessing her looks, Charlotte stated frankly, “I am not beautiful.” Talent would have to carry her, but her talent was still raw and untested. She had never even performed outside of church.
With her family’s fate hanging over her, Charlotte arrived at the Tremont boardinghouse and nervously found Mrs. Wood’s room. When she knocked, Wood opened the door wearing her usual fine silk gown, her luxuriant black hair cascading in tendrils over her shoulders. The difference was stark. Charlotte was tall and raw-boned, and wore her hair parted in the middle and looped over her ears, an old-fashioned style that emphasized her wide-set eyes and heavy, square jaw.
Throughout Charlotte’s audition Mrs. Wood was quiet, her delicate oval face inscrutable. After the last, soaring note died away, she simply got up and left the room. Charlotte waited uncomfortably in the elegant parlor until Wood returned with her husband, Joseph. Mrs. Wood asked if Charlotte would sing the song again.
Charlotte sang again. When she finished, both Mr. and Mrs. Wood jumped to their feet, clapping ecstatically. They assured her she had done very well and, as Charlotte later told her mother, “that such a voice, properly cultivated would lead me to any height of fortune I coveted.”
* * *
On the evening of the show, Charlotte performed for Boston’s elite as well as her family and friends. The show was a success, and newspapers raved not just about Mrs. Wood but Miss Cushman, the local girl whose voice would surely make her a star.
But just as important as Charlotte’s talent was her innate ability to draw people in. She was warm, enthusiastic, and a devilishly hard worker. Wood admired her and they became friends, though Charlotte developed an unrequited, Labrador-like crush that lasted long after Wood left Boston. Before she left, however, Wood introduced Charlotte to a local manager and singing coach named James Maeder. Maeder, too, saw Charlotte’s potential as a sin
ger and invited her to study with him. When she explained that she couldn’t pay, Maeder and his wife agreed to let Charlotte work off her lessons in trade as their maid.
James Maeder’s wife was the somewhat notorious Clara Fischer Maeder. Clara was a diva, a former child star who boasted that she had been acting since the age of six. She had played Richard III—hilariously, in a fake mustache—at twelve. Clara had made a fortune in her youth, but her extravagant tastes meant that the Maeders, with all their airs, were often broke.
Charlotte trained with Mr. Maeder and cleaned his house for three years. Finally, in late 1835, when she was nineteen, he cast her in a supporting role alongside his wife in Mozart’s comic opera The Marriage of Figaro. Though she was naturally a contralto, she sang soprano as the Countess Almaviva, a role at the very peak and precipice of her natural range. She did well at first, and when Mr. and Mrs. Maeder decided to bring The Marriage of Figaro to New Orleans, where the couple had theatrical connections, they asked Charlotte to come with them. She had never traveled outside of New England and never left her mother’s side. But she was ready.
chapter three Transformation
The water of the Mississippi was a thick, dark cloak sweeping solemnly aside as the steamship moved inexorably south. On board, Charlotte could feel the river hurrying them forward, and her thoughts raced even faster. She filled the many long, boring hours reading the kinds of books that might fill in the gaps in her education, which had ended at thirteen. Charlotte had never been out of New England and did not want to seem uncultured. New Orleans was said to be more European than American, a mixture of French, Spanish, and British influences. It seemed both thrilling and terrifying. Some called it “the City of Gomorrah” or “Southern Babylon” because prostitution was tolerated and because the Port of New Orleans was a key point in the southern slave trade.
As they came closer, Charlotte saw a few buildings protected from the river by a levee, a high embankment, without which, noted the travel writer Frances Trollope, “the dwellings would speedily disappear.” Then around a bend in the river rose New Orleans. Dripping with vines and Spanish moss, repeatedly soaked by rains that swept through it and strove to rot buildings as quickly as they could be built, the city was in a constant state of entropy. Energy in, energy out. Build. Destroy. Build again. Transformation was the rule.
Charlotte disembarked at the Port of New Orleans in December 1835, exhausted and nauseous, and found a boardinghouse near the St. James theatre where she would be working. New Orleans was a study in contrasts. Near the St. James was the fashionable Esplanade Avenue: women dressed in “la mode Parisienne,” in plaid dresses, and men in top hats, checked trousers, and coats cut away at the front to show their shapely legs. A few streets over was one of many large slave markets, where plantation foremen came to buy the men, women, and children slavers had captured from Africa.
It was head-spinning. Charlotte left her luggage at the boardinghouse and walked to the St. Charles Theatre for rehearsal. In the front of the theatre was a large marble staircase from which to gaze at the statues of Apollo and the Muses, flanked by Grecian pillars. A giant stone eagle perched above the entrance. But actors were not allowed to be in the “front of house,” so Charlotte went around to the rear, passing a coffin factory before she found the back door. Inside the ceiling soared. She was confronted by the four-thousand-seat auditorium, the largest outside of Milan. The theatre’s owner, James Caldwell, also owned the city gasworks, and he’d made the St. Charles an impressive advertisement for the power of gas. The walls and ceiling were brightly painted, covered in frescoes and gilt. From the center of the ceiling hung a glittering thirty-foot-wide chandelier, hung with twenty-three thousand dazzling crystal gems, lit by gas jets. The seats were draped in red, blue, and yellow silk. Caldwell had built the theatre for his young wife, a beautiful actress, spending more than $350,000—more than it cost to build the first White House.
On opening night, Charlotte sang The Marriage of Figaro at the highest part of her natural range. She struggled to fill the cavernous space, and soon she realized, with horror, her voice was failing her. The sophisticated New Orleans audience was merciless, and the critics savaged her the next day for the fact that she was nineteen and inexperienced. “The worst Countess we have had the honor of seeing,” one critic wrote. “Miss Cushman can sing nothing,” declared another. The kindest said she was merely “bearable.” The show was canceled after three performances.
But Charlotte had signed a contract and was bound to a certain number of performances. So she continued humiliating herself onstage night after night in other supporting roles. She had worked for three years with Mr. Maeder to achieve the clear, elastic tone of an opera singer, and it was suddenly gone. Her tone was now “aspirated,” roughened, and “woody.” Though tragic for an opera singer, the loss paradoxically also added something new. One friend said Charlotte’s tone was now like “the expression of wilful passion suppressed.”
Then, a few months later, in early 1836, a deus ex machina. Charlotte received an urgent summons to theatre owner James Caldwell’s office. Caldwell’s wife had died suddenly, and he was struggling to find someone to fill in for her at short notice. Although he was grieving his wife, the performance was a benefit for the theatre manager, William Burton, and Caldwell did not want to cancel. He asked if Charlotte would act in his wife’s place. She would fulfill her contract and have Caldwell and Burton’s gratitude. She agreed immediately, even though the part was one of the most famous and famously difficult roles for any actress: Lady Macbeth.
* * *
“Never fell in love with a lord, never made an immense fortune, and never played Lady Macbeth,” wrote one of Charlotte’s contemporaries. It was a role actresses dreamed of, and one typically reserved for a star.
The role was intimidating in part because it was so closely associated with the legendary British actress Sarah Siddons. Siddons was first cast in the role in 1785, a little more than fifty years earlier. At the time she was unfamiliar with Macbeth, and stayed up late reading the play by candlelight: “I went on with tolerable composure in the silence of the night (a night I can never forget),” Siddons wrote in her memoirs, “till I came to the assassination scene,” where Macbeth botches the murder of the king. To keep herself and her husband from being caught, Lady Macbeth must wrest the bloody daggers from his hands. As Siddons read, the play began to scare her so badly she had to put it down. She grabbed her candle and “hurried out of the room in a paroxysm of terror,” imagining that her own silk dress rustling behind her as she climbed the stairs was a ghost following her. It would be another six years before she agreed to play Lady Macbeth again, but she would eventually make it her signature role.
Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth (1797)
Slim and statuesque with large, dark eyes, Siddons was a celebrated beauty. And her feminine figure and seeming fragility aided her in getting the audience’s sympathy in tragic roles. Lady Macbeth, who brags about being steely enough to kill her own child, is one of the most unsympathetic women in theatre, but Siddons found a way around this. She decided her Lady Macbeth should be “fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile.”
Siddons dressed herself for the part in bridal white, with a nun-like white wimple that framed her guilt-stricken face. Her Lady Macbeth was a woman who used her beauty to seduce Macbeth into doing what she wanted.
Siddons had died in 1831, five years earlier, but thanks to a recent biography she was more on the audience’s mind than ever. Nostalgia elevated the great tragedienne still higher, and Charlotte seemed to be competing with a ghost.
Physically, Charlotte could not have been more different from Sarah Siddons. At five-foot-seven she was a towering figure onstage, taller than most men. Her body was strong, and she moved like a “pythoness.” Far from fragile, Charlotte had what one rival called a “lantern jaw,” wide shoulders, and large breasts and hips—erotic, perhaps, but not traditionally feminine. She had to find a new way
to play Lady Macbeth, and quickly.
With only a few days to learn the part, Charlotte rose early each morning and walked to the theatre, where she rehearsed for several hours with James Caldwell. At night she climbed up to the garret of the house where she boarded and sat on the floor reading the lines out loud to herself until she had them memorized.
She enjoyed the process of rehearsal, which could be surprisingly funny. The actors wore their everyday clothes to rehearsal, and she could watch an actor pacing around the stage in his overcoat, carrying an umbrella as he dripped water everywhere, reciting Shakespeare as though talking about the weather. Or an actress wearing clothes several seasons out of date, practicing her pirouettes while nearby “a couple of begrimed men in shirt-sleeves and smelling of tar and things are kneeling on the floor hammering away at the gas arrangements or something about the scenery.” Charlotte had a good sense of humor, and her jokes and delight in the absurd quickly made her a favorite among her fellow actors.
Charlotte Cushman as Lady Macbeth (1855)
Because they always rehearsed in street clothes, Charlotte was able to hide the fact that she had no costume for Lady Macbeth until opening day. All the actors were expected to supply their own wardrobe, but she lived paycheck to paycheck, sending home anything extra, and didn’t have the money to buy new clothes. As a novice, she also didn’t have a closet of costumes to pull from. Afraid she’d be fired, Charlotte waited until the very last moment to tell Caldwell. Alarmed, he quickly dashed off a letter and sent her running to an address he had hastily scribbled on an envelope. Charlotte hurried through the humid streets of New Orleans to the French Quarter and found the address. The celebrated French actress Madame Closel opened the door and both women burst out laughing. Charlotte was tall, thin, and lanky, while Mme. Closel was short, fat, and four-foot-ten-inches tall, with a waist twice the size of Charlotte’s and a very large bust. Mme. Closel was good-natured and empathized with Charlotte, so she got to work. She took a seam-ripper to one of her skirts and made an underskirt, taking in another dress “in every direction” to make a queen’s costume. “So it was,” Charlotte wrote, “I essayed for the first time the part of Lady Macbeth.”