by Tana Wojczuk
The modern technology of the St. Charles helped Charlotte appear more natural than she might otherwise. Most theatres, like the Tremont in Boston, were lit by oil lamps set along the foot of the stage. The lamplight tended to converge on one central spot, leaving the rest of the stage in gloomy semidarkness. Actors had to play all their major speeches from the same place and exaggerate their mannerisms and expressions so they could be seen. Gaslight allowed Charlotte a freer range of movement and expression. For some, the effect was too much. One friend of James Maeder complained in a letter that Charlotte “was almost insane on the subject of display and effect… and altogether too demonstrative,” “commanding” rather than soliciting the audience’s attention.
But the critics agreed on one thing: like Hamlet thrusting his sword through a shadow in the curtains, Miss Cushman had hit immediately on a starring role. “She made the people understand the character that Shakespeare drew,” wrote one critic. “She was neither stilted, nor mock-heroic, nor monotonous, but so fiercely, so vividly natural that the spectators were afraid of her as they would have been of a pantheress let loose. It was impossible New Orleans should long retain such a woman.”
Finally completing the terms of her contract, and with her first wages in her pocket, Charlotte decided not to follow the Maeders back to Boston. James Barton was so impressed by her talent and work ethic that he wrote her a letter of introduction to a theatre manager named Thomas Hamblin in New York.
Two years earlier, in 1834, Hamblin had taken over and rebranded the failing Bowery Theatre as “the people’s theatre.” He took advantage of nativist, anti-British, sometimes anti-abolitionist sentiment among the white American working class in New York. Unlike the nearby Park Theatre, Hamblin’s theatre advertised to working-class audiences, and he was looking for new American talent. But his unpredictability, drinking, and reputation for violence made it difficult to keep that talent for very long. His source of actresses tended to be the underage prostitutes who were his mistresses. Under Hamblin’s management, the Bowery had earned the nickname “the Slaughterhouse,” for Hamblin’s fondness for bloody melodrama.
But Charlotte didn’t let any of these warnings stop her. In the fall of 1836 she boarded a steamboat aptly named The Star in the Port of New Orleans. It would sail up the Mississippi River to Philadelphia, where passengers could catch a train on one of the newly opened railway lines to New York. The steam engine fired up with an immense bellow, belching smoke, and Charlotte began moving slowly northward, against the current.
chapter four The Star of the Bowery
Train travel was deafening. At each stop from Philadelphia to New York Charlotte heard bells ringing, porters bawling out instructions, and passengers shouting at one another over the noise until finally the doors slammed and, with a “tremendous pop as of a colossal champagne-cork,” the machine started up again. Traveling this way was still a novelty, and not a pleasant one. Even compared to traveling in a coach with four horses, the train went so fast that the towns between Philadelphia and New York became unreal, “like pictures on the wall.” Outside the window flowers by the side of the road became “streaks of red or white,” while fields of grain became “great shocks of yellow hair” and “fields of alfalfa, long green tresses.” Charlotte found the experience both exciting and tedious. It was so enervating and exhausting that many travelers had to recover under a doctor’s care. The Lancet reported a new study on “train-induced fatigue.” The boredom of train travel, wrote the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, made one want to “howl like a dog.”
The train finally let Charlotte off in New Jersey, at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station, and she paid the fare for the ferry to Lower Manhattan. New York was experiencing a summer heat wave, but the wind across the river was cool. Charlotte stood on the deck as the boat churned through the river water. She was always a bit seasick on boats and the fresh air calmed her stomach. The island of Manhattan stretched out along the Hudson River from the green cuff of Battery Park peeking out from the weft of dense buildings, to the north where the buildings petered out into farmland and marshland around 28th Street, and the forested area near Harlem, which was close enough for a weekend ramble and a picnic.
Charlotte disembarked from the ferry and began walking through Lower Manhattan. She searched for a cab to take her to her boardinghouse in the stifling humidity and heat, wearing a boned corset and several layers of petticoats, unable to avoid the smell of rotting garbage and unwashed bodies. It was not exactly glamorous. Around her she could hear a babel of languages and accents: Polish, Russian, German, Chinese, Yiddish, Spanish, French, rhyming Cockney, Irish brogue. The architecture, too, spoke a thousand dialects. The financial district had its elegant marble facades, its streets populated by men in dark suits with worried expressions. St. Paul’s Chapel, where George Washington had prayed, and the Washington House, where he prepared for battle, and the elegant Park Theatre on Chatham Row with its rhythmic arches and columns. Continuing up Chatham Street, one found the ostentatious Bowery Theatre with its screaming eagle over the door, covered in gold gilt, looking to one overheated observer “as if he could clutch almost anything in his talons, from Indian babies to Mexican candlesticks.” The eagle was part of Hamblin’s plan to whip up the audience’s patriotism “till they feel a comfortable assurance that every American can ‘whip his weight in wild cats.’ ”
As the cab’s horse picked its way slowly through the streets, stopped every few feet by someone dashing across the road, Charlotte saw a curious thing. Amid the crowded buildings there was a great empty space, like a row of missing teeth. Her cabby knew this neighborhood well. It was called the Burned District.
Where one of the greatest financial centers in the world once stood was now a charred mass stretching seventeen blocks from Beaver Street to Water Street in Lower Manhattan. Less than a year earlier, on the freezing night of December 16, 1835, the Bowery had blazed like a world in hell. Copper roofs poured down themselves in great molten drops, iron doors buckled, clapboard houses were quickly swallowed by fire. An icy wind blew snow and ash into the faces of onlookers and forced back the merchants trying to save some of the goods from their stores. One person remembered the smell of coffee being burned and looking down to see fine lace trampled into the snow. Temperatures were so low the rivers froze, stranding ships in the harbor, and water moved through the firefighters’ pumps in a slow trickle of icy sludge. Ships moved to the middle of the East River for safety from the blaze, only to find hours later that they were frozen in midstream.
By the time it was over, the fire had destroyed most of the financial district. Banks, stores, and the Merchants’ Exchange were wiped out, sparking a financial crisis that still reverberated months later. Yet, as Charlotte was now discovering, everything in New York—even destruction—was a spectacle. A guidebook to New York City published the year Charlotte arrived included the Burned District as a tourist attraction. If you had the money, you could buy a pair of gum arabic shoes “as wide as they were long” and hire someone to lead you on a walking tour through the mud—a slurry of animal feces, ash, human waste, and industrial garbage—that stood six inches deep in the streets.
Thomas Hamblin, like his contemporary P. T. Barnum, understood the attraction of spectacle. He specialized in “blood-and-guts” melodrama and used dangerous special effects like gunpowder and real fire to excite the audience. Although Charlotte’s manager in New Orleans had written her a letter of introduction to Hamblin, she wrote first to Edmund Simpson, the man in charge of the Park Theatre. The Park was the most prestigious theatre in New York. Compared most often to London’s Royal Theatre on Drury Lane, it catered to New York’s elite. But Simpson’s response disappointed her. She would need to audition first, and even then he could not guarantee her a job. She was offended. After her success as Lady Macbeth in New Orleans, it was hard for Charlotte to imagine making her New York debut in anything but a starring role.
Only then did Charlotte write
to Hamblin. When she arrived in his office, he was impressed, even more so when she showed him her reviews. He told her she was exactly what he was looking for at the Bowery, a woman of hurricane-force passions who would not be dwarfed by his elaborate sets, special effects, or by himself. Six and a half feet tall, Hamblin had a “horror of little women” as he put it, and appreciated Charlotte’s height. She would look good next to him onstage. With thick, curling dark hair and a square, dimpled chin, Thomas Hamblin was a lady-killer. (Two of his wives actually died under mysterious circumstances.) His alcoholism and violent temper meant that actors rarely stayed with him very long, but he had still pulled the Bowery out of bankruptcy. He was less interested in Charlotte as a romantic conquest than as a unique attraction for his audience.
“If a philosopher wishes to observe the ultimate product of civilization, and has strong nerves, and senses not over-delicate, he may do well to take a seat in the pit of the Bowery,” wrote one contemporary observer. Fights broke out frequently, and the audience even sometimes climbed onstage to intervene in stage battles if they thought it wasn’t a fair fight. From the stage, an actor could see “apple-munching urchins” and women in the pit nursing babies and men on the infamous “third tier” having sex with prostitutes. Hamblin had drilled peepholes for police to watch the spectacle from a private room. He made his special effects greater and greater to capture the audience’s attention, using so much gunpowder in one battle scene the audience had to run to the windows and throw them open to breathe. Once when an actor playing a king pretended to fall asleep, some of the audience got onstage and took turns trying on his crown.
Despite their troublemaking, the Bowery audience was engaged in the show and passionate about Shakespeare. It was the best school a young actress could get. When the Gallery Gods in the top tier got bored, for example, the actors knew it. They “amused themselves by throwing pennies and silver pieces on the stage, which occasioned an immense scramble among the boys” who jumped onstage to gather up the coins. A serious flub might occasion “a rain of vegetable glory.”
“Throw not the pearl of Shakespeare’s wit before the swine of the Bowery pit,” went one popular saying. And yet it was the working-class Bowery audience that kept Shakespeare on the stage in New York night after night. The slums in which the Bowery “b’hoys” and “g’hals” lived were densely populated, dangerous, and crowded with half-starving children. Abandoned by parents too poor, infirm, or addicted to care for them, some of the children who survived formed themselves into gangs with names like “the Dead Rabbits.” The theatre was their one amusement. Though many were illiterate, they knew most of Shakespeare by heart.
William Shakespeare intentionally wrote for both working-class and wealthy audiences. His heroes are often royalty made powerless in some way. His villains are frequently comic, turning aside to share a bawdy joke with the audience. Shakespeare had to be a master equivocator to survive in paranoid Elizabethan England, where a playwright could be “racked” and tortured for seeming to support the wrong political or religious party. Rather than pick sides, his plays move fluently between spectacle, drama, and poetry, between high and low culture.
“Theatre is divided into three and sometimes four classes,” explained Charlotte’s friend, the actor Joseph Jefferson. Each class of people had different ideas for what made a great night of entertainment, and the actor’s challenge was to appeal to them all. Jefferson’s solution was to act as broadly as possible. In his eyes, each “suggestion should be unmistakable; it should be hurled at the whole audience, and reach with unerring aim the boys in the gallery and the statesmen in the stalls.” It was an artificial style that flattened the characters until they seemed like shadows flickering on a screen. As audiences tired of this style, special effects became all-important. But many longed to be swept up in the drama, to feel with the character and see their own lives reflected even in the kings and queens onstage.
After a very brief period of rehearsal Charlotte prepared to make her New York debut as Lady Macbeth opposite Hamblin’s Macbeth. But just before opening night she fell dangerously ill with rheumatic fever. She lay in bed shivering, then burning, in excruciating pain. Rheumatic fever, wrote one contemporary physician, “licks the joints, but bites the heart.” On September 12, still weak and feverish, she was finally able to take the stage.
The Bowery audience immediately embraced Charlotte as one of their own. As she performed, they burst out in spontaneous applause, interrupting her speeches. She understood the character and made Lady Macbeth seem horribly real. Although one critic complained “she had no charmes of person, for she was ugly beyond average ugliness”—he admitted her “homely” face could come alive with a light that was “transcendently beautiful.” Her “ungraceful form” could “quiver with a passion that was electrical,” and her “wiry voice” became “tremulously sweet,” as though intoxicated by love, and then “gutturally savage with the demoniac rage of intense, venomous hatred.” Rare for American actors, it was said that Charlotte enunciated beautifully and with sensible line readings showed she had carefully studied the part. She was declared “the star of the Bowery.”
On her first day off, a week later, Charlotte took a coach to Harlem and went for a long walk in the woods. By the time she got home, however, her fever and chills had returned. She could not act for weeks. While convalescing, Charlotte left her costumes at the theatre, feeling they were not yet hers since Hamblin had paid for them. But while Charlotte was at home recovering, one of Hamblin’s special effects went out of control. The Bowery Theatre caught fire and burned to the ground. The sets, props, and all of Charlotte’s costumes were inside. With no theatre to run, Hamblin canceled all the actors’ contracts. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Charlotte’s mother, Mary Eliza, had just sold the boardinghouse and come to live with her in New York. At twenty years old, Charlotte prepared to start over—for the third time.
chapter five American Genius
You must exercise your Genius in some form that is essential to life.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Looking at her mother’s face in profile as she gazed at the Hudson River out the train window, Charlotte could see a grim set to her mouth, the worry lines in her brow even at rest. She was devoted to her mother; “after some important event,” wrote a friend, “[Charlotte] could not rest till she had written her mother about it.” Her brother Charlie was working as a sales clerk in New York, and Susan was staying with relatives. So it was Mary Eliza and young Augustus who would be joining Charlotte in Albany. Augustus would go to school nearby in Greenbush while Charlotte worked. It was a sacrifice for everyone, but she was convinced it would be worth it.
By now, she believed that acting was her divine path. As her former pastor Mr. Emerson put it, “to create is the proof of a Divine presence… whoever creates is God.”
“God helped me in my art-isolation,” she later wrote. Even her father’s disappearance had pushed her toward this goal. “If I had been spared this early trial,” she wrote to a friend, “I should never have been so earnest and faithful in my art… given my entire self to my work.” While most women her age were having children, she determined to be married to her art. What she did want was to keep working so she could give her family some financial security and her little brother a new life.
Augustus sat next to her on the train. For him, travel was still a novelty. She loved having him close, and had found him a good school just across the river from Albany. Charlotte looked forward to the day when Augustus would surpass her. She believed he was the cleverest in the family and, though born into greater poverty than she, “keener, more artistic, more impulsive, more full of genius.”
Greenbush Classical School was a small boarding school for the sons of New York’s elite. Many of Augustus’s future classmates were the children of New York state senators who worked across the river. The ancient pine forests the area was named after rose up around it, deep green and intoxicating.
Charlotte, who loved horses, admired the wide open meadows.
After getting Augustus settled, Charlotte and Mary Eliza continued on to the capitol. Crossing the Hudson River, they traveled along one of a series of roads that radiated from the center of Albany like a star, or like the wheel of fate. It was called a turnpike, named after the spiked wheel medieval kings placed across roads to defend against enemies or extort tolls from their people. The theatres here drew large crowds of many races, made up of the merchants who brought goods to and from the largest port on the Eastern Seaboard and to ships bound west along the newly completed Erie Canal—which connected the Hudson River at Albany with Lake Erie.
Charlotte performed almost nightly in starring roles. She and Mary Eliza lived in a hotel occupied by members of the state senate and house of representatives, and they soon discovered that one of the outgoing representatives was Mary Eliza’s cousin. The connection helped them gain the trust and patronage of the wealthy and powerful politicians who ran the city. The joke was that “more of the members of both houses could be found at [Charlotte’s] performances than at the capitol.”
In the mail one morning Charlotte received an invitation to the extravagant “fireman’s ball,” an annual dance and benefit that was also an opportunity to mingle. Making an impression there, she knew, could help her career, but it had to be the right one. On the night of the event she spent several hours getting ready, adding a surprising final touch to her usual simple silk dress. On top of her head she pinned an “immense bird of paradise,” with eye-catching orange-and-purple plumage. With her height, heeled shoes, and the bird on her head she towered above her companions.