Lady Romeo

by Tana Wojczuk

  Both men and women met her with flowers at the stage door.

  Actors were sometimes criticized for making “points,” or playing just for the big scenes, which made the story seem disconnected and artificial. But Charlotte, as the Times of London wrote, gave the play “the vivifying spark, whereby the fragments are knit together and become an organized entirety.” It was this coherence, Coleridge claimed, that characterized the best interpretations of Shakespeare. She clearly saw Romeo as “an impetuous youth whose whole soul was absorbed into one strong emotion and whose lips must speak with the inspiration of his heart,” not merely a “fine speech maker” or maudlin “stage-lover.” In her hands he was “a creative, a living breathing ardent human being.”

  A few, however, were furious that Charlotte would try to “ape a man” onstage. Women had played Romeo before, but the goal was to titillate the men in the audience, who enjoyed seeing a pretty actress in a short tunic. Charlotte, however, acted like a man rather than a woman in tights, besting men at swordplay. Then, when her chivalric Romeo collapsed weeping in the final scene, she gave men in the audience the dangerous impression it was okay to do the same.

  A controversy broke out in the press and between audiences and critics. Charlotte might “split the ears of the groundlings,” wrote one of these critics, referring to the working-class audience who cheered Charlotte on from the pit, but he still believed she was nothing but a male “impersonator.” Eventually even Queen Victoria weighed in. The young queen declared that while Charlotte “entered well into the character” of Romeo, no one would have ever imagined her a woman, her figure and voice being so masculine.

  The one thing everyone agreed on was that Charlotte made a convincing man. The performance was complete. When a joker in the audience faked a sneeze during one of Charlotte’s love scenes, she stopped the performance. Most actors would have ignored it, but Charlotte, still in character, led Juliet offstage “as a cavalier might lead a lady from a place where an insult had been offered her,” then returned to the stage and commanded: “Some man must put that person out, or I shall be obliged to do it myself.” The offender was lifted up by the crowd and carried away. “The audience rose en masse and gave three cheers for Miss Cushman,” who then went offstage to retrieve her Juliet and continued the play “as though nothing had happened.”

  Charlotte had swagger, or what the Italians called “sprazzetura,” a kind of studied nonchalance. As Romeo, she walked like a man, spoke like a man, moved her body with the confidence of someone used to taking up space. The most manly thing about her was her sense of freedom.

  In fact, some argued, she was a better man than most men. Her love speeches had a poetic cadence that, they argued, no male actor could achieve. Alternately the chivalric cavalier and the tender lover, she was perfect in each. One reviewer declared her Romeo was one of the “most remarkable pieces of acting ever witnessed.” Another wrote that, after seeing Charlotte Cushman, “lovemaking, as practiced by the other sex” would seem “a very stale, flat, and unprofitable affair.”

  * * *

  As Charlotte’s fame increased, she attracted more of London’s rich and famous to the theatre. One night, Charlotte heard that an important critic was there to see her: James Sheridan Knowles, a former actor, had become one of the most famous living playwrights in the world. His opinion meant something. Knowles was steeped in Shakespeare, borrowing from Othello, Titus Andronicus, and Winter’s Tale in his own work. From the stage Charlotte could see him, recognizable in his high-necked white shirt, black suit, black silk cravat, and shawl-collared coat. He had a dimpled chin, winged black eyebrows that made him look elfin despite his advanced age, and deep-set, appraising eyes.

  Knowles watched “with astonishment” as Charlotte threw herself on the ground to take the measure of an unmade grave. “There is no trick to Miss Cushman’s performance,” he later observed. “No thought, no interest, no feeling seems to actuate her, except what might be looked for in Romeo himself, were Romeo reality.”

  Charlotte reminded him of the famous British tragedian Edmund Kean, whose Othello was the stuff of legend. There are some transcendent moments in watching a play that stay with you always, pressed, as Shakespeare said of love, like a seal into wax. And as with falling in love, the impression stays with you even as the details fade. For Knowles, Kean’s third act of Othello was one of these moments. The third act is when Othello kills Desdemona for what he believes is her infidelity. A moment later he discovers she was innocent and he is therefore a murderer. Ever since seeing Kean’s interpretation, Knowles had hungered for another such moment, and it was with pure delight that he took in Cushman’s Romeo. She was at least as good as Kean, he later wrote to a friend. In fact, he was tempted to say better. It was a performance “of topmost passion!—Not simulated passion—no such thing—real, palpably real! The genuine heart-storm was on—on in the wildest fitfulness of fury!—and I listened, and gazed, and held my breath, while my blood ran hot and cold.”

  Knowles could only assume the rest of the audience was responding as he was, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away long enough to check. He watched, enrapt, until “a thunder of applause” brought him back to himself. He felt that as soon as Charlotte walked onstage everything about her “attest[ed] the lover.” Knowles watched as Romeo tried and failed and tried again, with “aid of palm, and eye, and tongue,” to tell Juliet how he felt.

  Theatre was Knowles’s life, and he felt Charlotte had given him a great gift. “My heart and mind are so full of this extraordinary—most extraordinary performance,” he wrote, “equal to the proudest of those which I used to witness years ago and for the repetition of which I have looked in vain until now.”

  * * *

  By the spring of 1847 Charlotte was surprised to find herself welcomed into the London home of Samuel and Anastasia Laurence for their Sunday evening salons. The young couple surrounded themselves with artists and radicals, and Charlotte was the newest addition to their bohemian group. Samuel was a portrait painter, and his famous clients stared down at her as she entered his crowded sitting room.

  The group modeled their salon after the radical thinker Charles Fourier, the man who had coined the term “feminism” around the time Charlotte was making her stage debut. Charlotte and Fourier shared the conviction that women should be allowed to hold a job, as well as a suspicion that marriage was primarily a legal agreement that did women no favors. Salons like the Laurences’, in England and France, inspired the playwright Henri Murger’s celebrated drama Scènes de la Vie de Boheme, and were a safe haven for people who wanted to move away from the mainstream.

  Each week, the guests had plenty to talk about. In America, Whitman had used his pulpit at the Brooklyn Eagle to denounce America’s invasion of Mexico and had been fined. Abolitionists worried about what a new Southern state would mean for their cause. One night, ensconced in an armchair, Charlotte listened to Jane Welsh Carlyle’s arguments for women’s right to hold property; she became friends with journalist and editor Mary Howitt, who was writing a long advocacy paper against capital punishment of women, and who soon took Charlotte under her wing. Howitt frequently wrote about her new actress friend in Howitt’s, the journal she edited with her husband. Mary’s feature on Charlotte and Susan—“the Misses Cushman”—helped make Charlotte even more of a celebrity. In it, she revealed Susan’s teenage pregnancy and her husband’s abandonment. Charlotte’s “heart bled” for her sister, wrote Howitt, and she determined to help her make a new life: “Charlotte’s was a character on which her sister, disappointed and heartbroken, could lean and from which she could derive strength.”

  This new explosion in the use and power of the popular press meant Charlotte’s new writer friends were in high demand, and many women found jobs at newspapers and magazines, especially in New York and London. Mary Howitt immediately introduced her to other women writers, many of whom found her fascinating. She was a witty conversationalist, and continued to read voraciou
sly even with her busy schedule. Though she was not particularly interested in politics, she continued to love literature—Jane Austen, George Sand—and poetry. She was young, intelligent, wildly talented, and self-supporting. “I am my own business-man,” Charlotte liked to say. Soon, others came to see her as a kind of mascot for women’s rights, and Charlotte was flattered by the attention.

  But many of the women Charlotte found herself surrounded by were not only interested in her mind. They found her magnetic, and her strength intensely appealing. This made her both loved and hated. Jane Carlyle, a poet whose miserable marriage to the eminent critic Thomas Carlyle led her to rely heavily on her female companions, wrote bitterly that her intimate friend Geraldine Jewsbury was “all in a blaze of enthusiasm about Miss Cushman the Actress.” Geraldine’s letters were so full of praise of Charlotte that Jane wrote her a furious letter that she expected “will probably terminate our correspondence.” Geraldine, in turn, was frustrated by these rivalries. She hoped that recent advancements in women’s rights meant that women could live a normal life, and that if women were “taught not to feel their destiny manque if they remain single,” they would not make themselves unhappy in bad relationships and could be better friends to each other.

  Charlotte’s new friendships were further complicated by the arrival of Eliza Cook, a gallant young writer whose poem “The Old Arm-Chair” had been published when she was just seventeen, and whose work was widely read and pirated on both sides of the Atlantic. One evening at the Laurences’ Charlotte was deep in conversation when she saw a woman in her twenties striding through the crowd in a man’s shirt, a skirt, and woolen cloak. The woman “rather sauntered than walked” over to the fire, where she pulled up a chair and put her feet up on the fender. Leaning back precariously, she shouted for a beer. Her dark ringlets cascaded messily over her collar, and Charlotte, catching her gaze, found herself staring into the girl’s large blue eyes. Introducing themselves, Charlotte struck up a conversation, and Cook revealed that she had already seen Charlotte as Romeo and been so starstruck she wrote a poem about her.

  Not since Rosalie Sully had Charlotte felt this strongly about a woman. They began going everywhere together, and Eliza was so energized by Charlotte’s company she wrote more and faster than ever before, completing a manuscript in months. When Eliza’s publisher delayed publishing the book, Charlotte wrote to admonish him. The volume, with a dedication to Charlotte, arrived in bookstores a few months later. One afternoon Charlotte and Eliza were out walking when they were caught in a sudden rainstorm. They sheltered under a tree, smelling the wet warmth of each other’s bodies. Then Charlotte began to sing, her voice rising up through the branches, soft and sad. The song was one of Eliza’s favorites, a Scottish ballad called “Jock O’Hazeldean,” which her mother had sung to her when Eliza was a girl. Charlotte’s voice was warm, worn, rough as the road the dead traveled on, shot through with wild longing.

  The ballad tells the story of a woman pining for a lover she cannot have. Their love, forbidden, drives him away and he is now dead, forever beyond her grasp. Her parents try to force her to marry another young man in the village, but the day of the wedding the bride escapes through the veil, “ower the border and awa’ wi’ Jock O’Hazeldean.” It was a song of love, outlawed.

  Charlotte sent a copy of Eliza’s poems to Geraldine Jewsbury, who read them feeling like she was meeting her own ghost. She wasn’t impressed by the poems, judging the writer too in thrall to her subject to write well. “If you ever quarrel,” she wrote to Charlotte cattily, Eliza “will write a much finer poem on you.” Charlotte pretended to be ignorant of Geraldine’s jealousy while consciously inflaming it. “I am not an angel but a wild cat,” Geraldine warned her, “and I’ll scratch you if I can’t beat you.” Geraldine tried to temper her affection, knowing she would be “made miserable for it someday.”

  Charlotte and Eliza stayed together for nearly two intense years. And when Eliza finally felt Charlotte drifting away, it made her so anxious she became seriously ill. She searched Charlotte’s face, finding signs that the woman she loved did not love her back. Charlotte had moved on, and it broke Eliza’s heart.

  By 1848 Charlotte had become famous and was playing Romeo to many women. “Darling,” she wrote to a young actress named Sarah Anderton, whom she met during an engagement in Sheffield, “I love you. And that will give you courage, will it not? Looks of love have a more healing power with me than all the doctory stuff in the world,” she wrote to Anderton in the winter of that year.

  Charlotte also craved her own household and was happiest when surrounded by friends and family. Her brother Charlie, who had joined her in London shortly after she arrived, remarked that she never went anywhere except with an entourage. Charlotte had also convinced her mother to follow Susan to London, and now she had her whole family with her, even little Ned.

  She and Susan continued to perform Romeo and Juliet to enormous crowds across Great Britain. With the help of Mary Howitt, Eliza (who remained her friend), Geraldine, and others, Charlotte became a household name.

  Charlotte began to lease her image to make more money, and a Staffordshire figurine depicting Charlotte as a heroic Romeo with Susan leaning against her in a half swoon soon decorated mantelpieces across England. Newspapers rushed to publish etchings of her likeness. She encouraged the publicity but half-joked to a friend about “the libels which have been perpetrated upon me in the way of engravings… I am made virtually a hag.” By the end of 1848 Charlotte seemed to know someone in every circle. Her connections and visibility as an actress gave her new power. When Charles Dickens received a letter from her, he wrote to his friend Macready, “I ought to answer immediately.”

  Finally, the exhausting life on the stage lost its allure for Susan. While touring in Liverpool, she caught the eye of a scientist named James Sheridan Muspratt, and he soon proposed. She would have to leave the stage to marry him, but despite the lost income Mary Eliza urged her daughter to do it. Charlotte again protested that Susan was not in love, and to marry anyway would be to “sell her soul.”

  Young Ned did not like Muspratt, and Susan’s new fiancé was not eager to raise another man’s son. Charlotte and Ned had always been close—he called her Big Mama—and she was happy to keep him with her. Charlotte played peacemaker between Ned and Susan, reminding him that his mother had given birth to him very young, when she was still a child herself. Finally, Charlotte wrote to the American government to have Ned’s absent father declared dead, and when the paperwork came through she adopted him and he took the name of Cushman. Susan became pregnant again shortly after her marriage, and Charlotte knew Susan would never again go on the stage. It was time to find a new Juliet.

  chapter eleven The Greatest American Actress

  I have had a very interesting American visitor, Miss Cushman, the tragic actress—a very superior woman. They say she is an actress of great genius,” wrote the celebrated playwright Mary Mitford when she first met Charlotte in 1845. Since her arrival in England, news of Charlotte’s great talent had continued to spread throughout the British literati. Mitford’s friend Elizabeth Browning was eager to meet her, as was Samuel Taylor Coleridge; his wife, Sara; and the American radical Lucretia Mott.

  Once they did, people usually found that Charlotte lived up to the myth. Tall and commanding, she was a magnetic personality and a stunning conversationalist. During one meeting, she deeply impressed the radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who wrote to a friend, “What a wonderful creature Miss Cushman is… After producing her America may win pardon for a million half-alive women.”

  As her popularity began to grow, newspapers began to report on more than just her performances. One headline simply read “How Charlotte Cushman Made Her Fortune, $600,000.” Soon, she was even famous enough to blackmail. The mother of one young woman claimed that Charlotte had sent her daughter a flirtatious note. She threatened to go public, but Charlotte met attacks on her reputation and livelih
ood with cold steel. “Of course the mother [meant] to intimidate me and mine,” she wrote to her theatre manager about her would-be blackmailer. “They have made a mistake.” She immediately spoke to a lawyer, declared the love note was forged, and produced several similar ones, all sent to people in the theatre by someone claiming to be her. If her enemies thought she was a “pantheress” only onstage, they were wrong.

  Instead of settling down into her new role as one of London’s social elite, Charlotte still burned with ambition. In the winter of 1848 she was celebrating the four-year anniversary of leaving America, and still yearned to prove herself to the country that had once ignored her. No other American was as celebrated or well known in England than she was; she had succeeded where Forrest and many others had failed, becoming the first American celebrity.

  She planned her return to America with military precision. Charlotte wrote to Mr. Price, the new manager of the Park Theatre in New York, appealing to him as a fellow American and criticizing the “stupid farces” then dominating the London stage “which by constant repetition get loaded with the actor’s own jokes. And so pass current.” She casually name-dropped to prove that she was familiar with the American theatre scene, proclaiming how much she was looking forward to Helen Faucit’s upcoming role (a serious part in a new comedy), and displayed her industry knowledge when she mentioned that she knew Edwin Forrest was making $3,000 a play, but that “most likely he will go to the Broadway Theatre. The Park was always too good for him.”

  “You seem to have no stars,” she wrote, pointing out that Macready had not returned to America that season, and lamenting that with his long engagement elsewhere there will be “no stars to come to America in a long time.” Charlotte positioned herself as the hero defending American theatre: “America hereafter will be the only ground for the drama,” she boldly wrote. “Here it is dying out as fast as it possibly can.” Europeans, she explained, were obsessed with French drama and short farces, and it was time for Americans to develop a “drama of our own.” In England, “the axe has been laid at the root [of the theatre] and while two of their sickly branches are suffering one in a sort of isolated grandeur, the stem is dying fast! I see this more and more the longer I am here.”