Lady Romeo

by Tana Wojczuk

  Hattie’s sculptures argued eloquently, if silently, for women’s emancipation. Cleverly, she channeled her politics through a mythological lens—tackling classical subjects, as a man would, but with a twist. Her bare-breasted Medusa was captured halfway through her transformation, so that a gorgon’s head sat atop a mortal woman’s body. Her masterwork, however, was a statue of Beatrice Cenci, a character well known to nineteenth-century readers through Percy Bysshe Shelley’s play The Cenci. In the tragic tale, Beatrice’s father, Count Cenci, has his own sons murdered and keeps Beatrice captive, gets her drunk, and tries to convince her to participate in orgies with her own mother. When he tries to rape Beatrice, she kills him, and the very citizens who wished for the count’s death hang her for her crime.

  The most famous image of Beatrice to date was a portrait attributed to Guido Reni painted in 1600. It dwells on her weakness, depicting her as a barely adolescent girl wrapped in a bedsheet. Hattie’s Beatrice, on the other hand, is older, more womanly. She lays on a pillow, her bedsheets wrapped around her like a goddess gown. One bare arm trails off the side of her bed, and she cradles a rosary in her hand, her fingers wrapped idly through its strands. Her face is partly obscured as she looks not at the viewer for help (as the woman in the Reni portrait does) but toward contemplation of the rosary. She seems at peace; the muscles, clearly visible in her arms, back, and neck, are relaxed. It is an image not of penitence but of release.

  The other friend who joined Charlotte, Max, and Hattie in Rome was Sarah Jane Clarke. She wrote under the name Grace Greenwood and had become a successful novelist and the first female journalist at the New York Times. Her friend Nathaniel Hawthorne admired her novels, finding them sad, but beautiful. He hoped that after some time abroad she might decide to write something “with more sunbeams” in it. Her letters to him, he wrote, were “better than any man’s.” Hawthorne was suffering from writers’ block so severe it gave him a “detestation of pen and ink.” When she finally arrived in Rome, Grace found it so wonderful she wrote that he might find his inspiration there. She was right. When he and his wife, Sophia, finally came in 1858, the journey resulted in a novel, The Marble Faun.

  The novel follows a group of women artists living together in Rome. In one scene the artist Hilda and her friend even discuss Beatrice Cenci. “Beatrice’s sin may not have been so great,” argues the friend; perhaps murdering her rapist should be considered “virtue” given the circumstances.

  Hawthorne was deeply affected by Charlotte when he met her, and she was equally impressed with him. Although Hawthorne had previously sworn he would never sit for another portrait, when she asked him to do it (so she could have an image of him to hang in her house), he responded effusively, “After the impression of her own face which Miss Cushman has indelibly stamped on my remembrance, she has a right to do just what she pleases with mine.”

  The Jolly Bachelors seemed to charm nearly everyone who met them. When Hattie’s father, Dr. Hosmer, came to check on her, the women in the house liked him so much they adopted him as one of their own and began calling him “Elizabeth.” He didn’t mind a bit.

  A few people, however, found a group of women living together distasteful, and their artistic ambitions suspect. For example, the sculptor and poet William Wetmore Story had made his home in Rome years earlier and considered it his territory. He wrote back to friends in America about the disgusting spectacle he thought Charlotte and Hattie made, dressing in men’s pants and ties and riding far and fast across the fields like young men. He hid his dislike under seeming concern about the damage they were doing to their reputation—and to that of all Americans living in Italy. Hattie, he wrote, “takes a high hand here in Rome, and would have the Romans know a Yankee girl can do anything she pleases, walk alone, ride her horse alone, and laugh at their rules.” Apparently, on at least one occasion the spectacle of Hattie riding alone created such a riot that the police had to intervene. But Story was biased against women artists in general; he believed Hattie was a good copyist, “but if she has inventive powers as an artist… will not she be the first woman?”

  The group of expatriates living full-time in Rome was small, and Charlotte often met Story at parties. He scoffed at her habit of entertaining the guests with ballads, complaining that her voice sounded savage and too masculine. He called Charlotte’s group of artists a “harem-scarem,” and when his friend Henry James visited Rome, James also mocked them, as the “white marmorean flock.” Part of this dislike was the fact that the women in Charlotte’s circle were not only gifted artists but also successful ones. Story and his friends were not used to competing with women, and they didn’t like it.

  Harriet Hosmer with workmen circa 1850s

  Others, however, including Elizabeth and Robert Browning, found the Jolly Bachelors exciting, and Charlotte’s home soon became the epicenter of social life for expat artists living in Rome. In an echo of Christina Rosetti’s poem Goblin Market, one guest felt that anyone who sat down at their “Apician feasts” bore their sweetness on his lips forever. Charlotte, Max, Grace, Hattie, and their new friend Virginia Vaughan became known as the “Five Wise Virgins,” and only the brightest and most fascinating were invited to their regular Wednesday night dinners. The conversation was brilliant, the politics radical. Guests left inspired, having had “contact with every form and kind of art—quickened by the peculiar eagerness of all who were in a far and strange land.”

  One evening, a starstruck young man begged Charlotte to sing. She laughed it off at first, claiming she had lost her voice years ago, but sat down at the piano and began to play quietly, “just touching the keys so as to give a background to the picture.” Then she sang, “paint[ing] on the air the old ballad of Chevy Chase with such marvellous dramatic power that the whole story became real.” Charlotte sang ballad after ballad, finishing with an old Russian hymn, tears falling down her face until finally she broke off, bowing her head to weep.

  Charlotte and her friends wanted to expand the possibilities for all women. They befriended women’s rights reformers, like Jane Carlyle and Lucretia Mott, who believed that friendships, not marriage, formed the core of a woman’s emotional life. Charlotte went further, on one hand believing that marriage was sacred and on the other hand convinced that marriage was, for most women, more of an evil than a good, even a form of slavery. The artist colony Charlotte and the other “Five Wise Virgins” had built without men was novel, even utopian.

  Privately, however, the reality was that the house was full of passionate artists who fell in and out of love with one another. Brilliant as they were, they were not immune to jealousy. Charlotte noticed when Max and Hattie started spending more time together. She saw Max’s face flushed with excitement when she came home after visiting Hattie’s studio. Though Charlotte claimed to be retired, it pained her to hear Max gush about Hattie’s accomplishments. Meanwhile, Charlotte spent her days socializing and writing letters. Friendship, ambition, and desire were a volatile combination.

  Charlotte was hurt when Hattie began complaining that as “head of the house” Charlotte’s rule over their group was becoming tyrannical. She had some cause for this. In the winter of 1854 Charlotte decided to go back to work just as Matilda Hays was rebuilding her connections to the literary world. Hattie and others discouraged Max from going with Charlotte to London, but Charlotte needed her (and privately dreaded what might happen if Max stayed home with Hattie).

  When they boarded the train from Rome to London for a stay of several months, Charlotte clearly hoped the time together would help them reconcile. She’d even planned a romantic trip to Paris. But shortly after they arrived, Max changed her mind and went back to Rome and to Hattie.

  “I can never suffer so much again,” Charlotte later wrote to a friend about that winter. “God knows there is no need.” She felt tortured. Forcing herself through the snow to rehearsal, then back to her bed, at times she even felt suicidal. She dealt with her pain as she always did, by making it into
art.

  She threw herself into the role of Queen Katharine, the tragic heroine of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. In the play, Henry abandons Katharine, his first wife, for the young, fertile Anne Boleyn. Charlotte was thirty-eight and thought she might be getting a little old to play Romeo, but felt the aging Katharine suited her perfectly. Compared to the anguish and messiness of Charlotte’s private life, Katharine’s pain is wonderfully pure, closer to the suffering of Charlotte’s puritan ancestors. The role let Charlotte play the wronged wife, to bathe in the audience’s sympathy for a woman betrayed.

  She dressed for the role as if for a funeral, in black silk velvet, skillfully embroidered with gold vines that climbed her body. Invisible inside the hem was a band of extravagant hand-wrought lace, an opulent bit of perfectionism the audience would never see. The material was weighted at the hem, so that when she walked it looked like she was treading water. As she moved, her teardrop pearl earrings swung against the high ivory collar of her dress. Everything about her was pure and noble.

  Reviews were rapturous, some of the best she’d ever received. In London she was celebrated by poets, painters, composers, singers—artists of all kinds. She spent her vacation in Paris with a new friend who unlike Max had an upbeat temperament, and with her two dogs: a hound named Guy and a terrier called Gyp. She also bought a fast new horse and spent her leisure time riding.

  In the spring, Charlotte returned to Rome and Max came home to her, having spent a “miserable winter” without her. Charlotte was secretly thrilled at the reversal. “I believe in her suffering,” Charlotte wrote to Grace. “I am proud to say that, notwithstanding what she made me suffer, I still believe in Miss Hays.” Still, Charlotte had not been entirely alone in London, and Max was “very indignant to find my little friend had almost seemed to take her place. Very penitent and wretched. Having found and had the generosity to confess her mistake in having left me… And now that she has found her mistake, and in a short time, now, we shall be together again. Never again perhaps to be what she once was. But still perhaps better that I am not so dependent upon her and that she has tried others.” They lived together for the next three years, until finally tensions erupted so publically neither could deny that it was time to end it.

  It was April 1857, Charlotte was at her desk at home in Rome. She was writing a letter when Max came downstairs and demanded to know who it was addressed to. When Charlotte refused to answer, Max tried to snatch the letter from her. Charlotte ran across the room with the letter and stuffed it in her mouth rather than “give her the satisfaction.” “I’ll make you swallow it!” Max shouted, and chased Charlotte around the house trying to shove the note down her throat.

  Hattie arrived at that moment and tried to keep them apart, but to her shock Max only cursed at her and tore away. They continued arguing “like fishwives,” until Hattie left, disgusted. Two days later, Max wrestled her bags out the door into the chilly spring air and left Rome and Charlotte behind. If Charlotte thought she would come back again, she realized the finality of Max’s decision when she received a note from a lawyer; Max was suing her for more than $2,000. She claimed Charlotte owed her this because she had given up her career for their relationship. Though the two women weren’t legally married, Max felt she had a reasonable case and was in any event angry enough to drag Charlotte into court. Charlotte paid the amount in full, bringing the whole affair to a bitter end.

  The bust-up with Matilda Hays left Charlotte feeling skittish. Their passion had threatened Charlotte’s reputation as a matronly, “pure” woman who only experienced violent emotion onstage. She policed her public image to protect her private life. It was better to seem an old maid than a woman who loved other women.

  When Charlotte met Emma Stebbins, it was spring in Rome and the ground was warming, the banks of the Tiber thrumming with green new growth. Americans began to flood into Rome in larger numbers, resting against boulders after the steep climb to the Colosseum and filling the streets and cafés. Women sweated and fainted under a new extreme fashion called the crinoline—a wide brass or metal hoop that extended for several feet on either side and held the waist in a vice-like grip.

  Charlotte was immediately attracted to Emma’s sense of self-sufficiency and the quiet, ladylike demeanor that hid a talented sculptor. Emma had grown up comfortably, the daughter of a wealthy family in Boston. Now, at forty-one (the same age as Charlotte), she was following in the footsteps of other women sculptors, like Harriet Hosmer and had moved to Rome to learn from the old masters.

  Being with Emma made Charlotte feel calm and happy. Charlotte described her as a traditional woman, of noble character, high-minded and self-sacrificing. Charlotte’s friends noticed she became more ladylike around Emma. Charlotte had taken to wearing men’s fashions with Max, but now she emulated Emma’s more conservative dress—a hoop skirt and dark colors—abandoning her tie and jacket for white lace cuffs and collar. Emma’s family disliked Charlotte; they didn’t like the fact that she was an actress, and they worried Emma would be morally tainted by the association. Still, it wasn’t long before Emma moved into Charlotte’s large new house on the Via Gregoriana.

  Charlotte Cushman and Emma Stebbins

  Throughout the summer of 1857 Charlotte and Emma lived in relative domestic bliss. They woke at eight, breakfasted together, then walked down the Spanish Steps to the Via del Corso, where Emma shared a studio with Hattie. Charlotte read and watched her partner work until lunchtime. She wanted to be near Emma, despite the fact that sculptors’ studios were not romantic aeries but rough places with bare floors, plastered walls, a few old chairs and blocks of marble, with sketches of nude figures hanging on the whitewashed walls.

  chapter thirteen The Coming Storm

  In the fall of 1857 Charlotte again returned to America, along with Emma and Sallie. Charlotte had hired an unreliable financial manager, and she decided to go back on the road to replace some of the money she had lost. Through Hattie, whom she remained close to, she wrote to a respected St. Louis businessman named Wayman Crow, and he agreed to help manage her wealth, which was now considerable. Crow, like Charlotte, had worked his way to the top. He started his career as a young apprentice sleeping in a cot in the storeroom of a dry goods store and ended up buying the store and many others like it.

  Thankfully, the American public was as eager to see Charlotte Cushman as ever. Though still the minority, more women filled the seats of the theaters, and female critics amplified Charlotte’s fame with long features about her in magazines and newspapers. At forty-one, Charlotte had become an idol to young women, some who found the older actress irresistibly attractive, and were eager to take part in the women’s liberation movement beginning to gain momentum in America. One of them was the young writer Louisa May Alcott, who saw Charlotte perform in Boston and wrote afterward in her diary: “Saw Charlotte Cushman and had a stage-struck fit.”

  Another was Mary Devlin, a beautiful eighteen-year-old actress whom Charlotte hired to play Juliet opposite her Romeo in New York. Mary was a dark-haired Irish girl with a clear oval face, full lips, wide-set eyes, and a frank, somewhat wry expression. Charlotte thought she was talented, and when their New York run finished she invited Mary to come along on her tour to St. Louis.

  Mary idolized Charlotte, signed her letters “your Juliet,” and asked her for romantic advice. Mary had met and was falling in love with Edwin Booth, the American-born son of the British star Junius Brutus Booth and Mary Ann Holmes. The Booths were theatre royalty. Edwin’s two brothers, John Wilkes and Junius Jr., were also successful actors. Mary confided in Charlotte that Edwin wanted to marry her, but had broken off the engagement because his sister Asia was against the match. Asia hated actresses and hated that Mary was Irish (which she considered low class), and thought she was a gold digger, “an actress—not even second rate… who can stroll before a nightly audience—who can allow men of all kinds to caress and court her in a business way.”

  Asia idolized her brother
, but he had problems of his own. Like his father, he was an alcoholic who seduced the young women who played “utility parts,” hoping for their big break. Writing to his brother Junius Jr. in California, Edwin bragged that he had a “little sweetheart” who was crazy to go to California, too, but “I talked her out of it and my p… k into her… She is a singing chambermaid. I won’t mention her name—I think you know her.” Six weeks later he wrote to his brother again, worried he might have the clap.

  Mary Devlin Booth

  Edwin’s genius and “rawness,” at playing tragic figures like Othello, Shylock, and Hamlet, made him appealing both to men and women. Adam Badeau, a young critic, fell hard for Edwin and felt a “peculiar intimacy” between them. During the summer of 1858, while Booth was deciding what to do about his feelings for Mary Devlin, he invited Badeau to stay with him at Tudor Hall, his family home in Bel Air, Maryland. The house was nearly empty, and the two young men spent the night poring over Booth’s playbills and costumes before falling asleep in each other’s arms.

  Mary knew all about Edwin’s affairs, but “felt that her fate was to marry him” so, despite her reservations, Charlotte tried to be supportive. She advised Mary to start a rumor while on tour that she had another marriage proposal, which they both knew would drive Edwin mad with jealousy. It worked, and soon he was writing to Mary again. When Mary finished the tour she went back to New York and they were married.

  While Charlotte traveled west, Emma Stebbins stayed behind on the East Coast with friends and family. When she arrived in St. Louis, Charlotte wrote to Wayman Crow, her financial manager, to invite him and his family to see her perform. Crow came to see her as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and brought along his daughters, Emma and Cornelia. Emma Crow was disturbed and excited by Charlotte’s Romeo: “never having seen it until then, Miss Cushman as Romeo seemed the incarnation of the ideal lover,” she remembered a decade later, “and realized all the dreams that flitted through a girl’s fancy.”