by Tana Wojczuk
By the time Charlotte heard the news in Rome, it was a week later. She was horrified. She had known and worked with John Wilkes Booth, and disliked him intensely, calling him reckless, drunken, a “dare-devil.” Her grief for Lincoln was profound. His death made her feel how far away she was, and “brought the war home” to her. “My heart feels as if it was cramped in a vise,” she wrote, circling again and again back to the tragedy, in anger and disbelief; it was everywhere.
She also worried about Edwin Booth and his daughter, Edwina. They were hiding out in a hotel room in New York. Edwin was afraid they would be killed by a mob if they left, anticipating that his brother’s crime would attach itself to him and his family “forever and forever!” Drinking heavily and suicidal, Edwin seemed only to want to disappear. But friends convinced him to speak out publicly against his brother’s actions. Finally, he published a letter on behalf of the rest of the Booth family, declaring their loyalty to the Union and grief over Lincoln’s death, which went some way toward appeasing the mob.
After the assasination, John Wilkes Booth had fled the theatre, hiding with other conspirators on a farm outside Virginia. On April 26, 1865, he was captured and killed by government troops. A doctor was called to identify the body, and he lifted the traitor’s head to look on the back of his neck. As a teenager, this doctor had been assisting in his father’s surgery when John Wilkes Booth came in for an operation to remove a fibroid tumor in his neck. But after the operation the wound was reopened and healed badly, leaving a long scar that looked like a burn. The doctor reported that it had been Charlotte Cushman who had accidentally ripped open the would during a violent onstage embrace.
As the nation quickly realized, the assasination had been part of a broader conspiracy. Members of the same group had also attacked William Seward and other members of the cabinet, trying to destabilize the government. Young Fred Seward bravely fought off the assassin sent to kill his father but was badly injured in the attack. He survived his injuries, but Mrs. Seward never recovered from her terror and died weeks after the conspirators were hanged. Charlotte was “much broken down with anxiety” about Seward and his family and was further devastated when, a year later, young Fanny died of tuberculosis.
In her anger and grief over the assault on her government, Charlotte composed an open letter on behalf of American expatriates in Italy, which she presented at a memorial to Lincoln at the American Legation in Rome: “We have heard with mingled emotions of horror and regret too deep for utterance, the appalling intelligence of the cruel and cowardly attack,” she wrote. “In common with every true-hearted American, at home and abroad, we regard the loss of Abraham Lincoln as a national bereavement of unsurpassed magnitude.”
Lincoln’s death, and the subsequent end of the war in April 1865, made Charlotte wish she were closer to home, to share her country’s grief and recovery. She was also feeling physically sick again, like a “worn out broken wrinkled lunatic.” “I think,” she wrote to her friend Helen Hunt, “I may perhaps be carrying my own death warrant. Yet, after all, who does not.”
Charlotte’s homesickness finally overwhelmed her when, in 1869 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Charlotte decided that aggressive surgery was the best option and Emma Stebbins took time away from her work to care for her. The press reported on her illness and surgeries with morbid curiosity. Her surgeon was the famous Scottish doctor Sir James Simpson, who had pioneered the use of chloroform for anesthesia. But during the lumpectomy to remove tumors in her breasts, Charlotte refused anesthetic. She was not being brave; she had been researching her condition in medical journals and learned that although chloroform was the drug of choice—even used on Queen Victoria during the birth of Prince Leopold—it could have lethal side effects.
Although the surgery seemed successful at first, the tumors came back. Charlotte did not lose hope and kept up-to-date on the latest treatments, reading medical journals in German that friends in the field sent to her. She wrote to her doctor asking about a new herbal remedy using the bark of a tree, which had only just been discovered in Ecuador, and wrote to the secretary of state in America asking him to put her in touch with the Ecuadorian ambassador.
Though she scaled back to be Charlotte’s caregiver, Emma Stebbins continued working on The Angel of the Waters. It would celebrate the completion of the Croton Aqueduct, which would bring clean drinking water to much of the city. The Angel—which Emma modeled after Charlotte—symbolized health and healing.
* * *
The era of the Jolly Bachelors had ended with the war, and Charlotte dreamed of a home in American big enough for Ned and Emma Cushman’s children. “Newport is the place to live,” Charlotte wrote to a close friend. “New York to work and Boston, if you are independent and impudent, to know your heart in.” After the war, Newport became a destination for New York intellectuals and artists, but also for inventors, scientists, educators, and city planners. Residents included Julia Ward Howe, Henry and William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Singer Sargent, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edwin Booth, and many others. Charlotte asked her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had a house in Newport, to find her a house big enough for her; Emma Stebbins and her sister; Ned and Emma Cushman and their children; and a rotating cast of friends. With Charlotte’s wealth and connections it wasn’t hard to find one. They called the new house Villa Cushman.
chapter fifteen Villa Cushman
In Winslow Homer’s etching The Bathe at Newport, the water rises to eye level. The bathers soak up to their necks in the calm water. A man with brilliantined hair and a handlebar mustache splashes a woman in an elegant bathing costume floating on her back. Bodies seem to connect underwater. It’s a somewhat cartoonish depiction of the Newport bathing glitterati, but it captured the decadence and sensuality of the seaside paradise, which with Saratoga in Upstate New York was one of America’s first two resort towns, entirely devoted to pleasure and leisure.
A few hours up the coast from New York City, Newport offered quiet, natural beauty, and the healing sea air. Some, like Washington Irving, found it “too gay and fashionable” with its dance halls and expensive restaurants and flocks of summer beachgoers, but Charlotte agreed with Henry James, whose favorite thing to do in Newport was “Nursing a nostalgia on the sun-warmed rocks.”
The Bathe at Newport by Winslow Homer
The “Villa Cushman” was completed in 1872 and Charlotte and Emma immediately moved in full-time. It was expansive and expensive, with a large, wraparound porch from which Charlotte had a view of “my sea and my sunsets.” Windows on three levels faced the water, and there were enough bedrooms to host the whole Cushman family when they came for the summer. The children were Charlotte’s greatest joy. They were “very well & happy,” and when they came to visit they brought her “little offerings” until their small, magical gifts and flowers “surrounded me on every side.”
But when the high season ended and the children left, Charlotte’s depression returned. To remedy the situation, Emma Stebbins’s sister, Mrs. Garland, moved in with them temporarily. Charlotte found her a “timid, shy, proud person” with “a sweet poetic mind” and liked her very much. Charlotte also wrote to several friends, including the novelist Helen Hunt, inviting them to come stay in the house. Also born and bred in Massachusetts, Hunt was an activist who wrote frequently about the treatment of Native Americans in the United States. She was also an advocate of other writers, corresponding frequently with Emily Dickinson and encouraging her to publish her poems: “It is cruel and wrong to your ‘day & generation,’ ” Helen would write to Emily in 1884, “that you will not give them light.” Charlotte encouraged Helen to keep writing, even after her latest collection of poetry was panned by the critics. “I don’t believe any of our American men know how to criticize your poems,” Charlotte wrote, “because they are so full of feeling.”
Charlotte hoped to recreate at the Villa Cushman what she’d had in Rome: a gathering of writers, artists, and fa
mily, knit together under one roof and watched over by her and Emma Stebbins. But the relationship had never recovered from Charlotte’s continuing passion for Emma Crow Cushman. When Helen Hunt called Emma Stebbins Charlotte’s wife, Charlotte corrected her. “You are wrong dear in your term ‘wife Emma,’ ” she confided, explaining that she and Stebbins had not been more than friends since the arrival of Emma Crow Cushman, “the gentlemanly little person of whom we have spoken.”
Still, Charlotte was happier in Newport than she had been in many years, until one day when she woke feeling chilled, then had attacks of fever. With despair she felt again a hard mass growing in her breast and knew she would likely need another operation. Sickness made the demands of daily life seem suffocating, the “immediate present seized, held, grabbed, clutched, clawed, demanded, asked, begged, entreated & coaxed” her until she no longer felt “mistress of my soul.” She felt she was wasting the little time she had left, and that her intellect was declining without use. “Can’t even hold my pen straight enough to spell correctly & a disordered stomach & weak driveling ideas!”
Rest seemed to have helped for a time, but it was no complete cure. The only thing Charlotte felt she could do was to go back to work. Though she was too weak to stand for an entire performance, she could still give an excellent dramatic reading, leaning on a podium or sitting in a chair. Even after all this time, she had not lost her talent for oration and capturing an audience’s imagination. Her magnificently harrowed voice made a garden appear where only the bare ground of the stage once stood. “I won’t give up reading, Ever, while life lasts!” she swore, though she often had to perform with a doctor waiting in the wings.
Audiences rewarded her return to the stage with excitement and passion. Many of the older patrons remembered Charlotte from their youth, and connected her career with some of the most memorable and happy times of their lives. Everything now was divided into before and after the war, and Charlotte reminded them of a simpler time.
“When I wish to be antediluvian,” wrote Henry James, “I live over a small incident of childhood, very young childhood.” He was referring to a cold, dark winter night when he had sat with his brother William alone at home, their heads bent over a book, a lamp held between them. Their parents were out at the theatre, watching Charlotte Cushman in Henry VIII at the Park Theatre. Mr. and Mrs. James were so moved by Charlotte’s performance, they rushed “from the far down town” during an intermission and retrieved William so he could catch the remainder of Charlotte’s performance. Henry was left alone in a small pool of light to read while his brother experienced a “sudden infinite widening of this little lamplit circle, to soul and sense.”
Seeing Charlotte perform was like being dipped in consciousness. It was a rite of passage.
Years later, James bought a ticket to see one of Charlotte’s staged readings. He initially thought she looked sickly. Yet even weakened by cancer, sitting alone in a chair, her magnetism reached out to him. As she read from Henry VIII, her frailty added realistic pathos to her portrayal of the weakened Queen Katharine. When he left the theatre, he was stirred. It was “one of the most ineffaceable in my tolerably rich experience of the theatre… a vivid vigil in which the poor lonely lamplight became that of the glittering stage, in which I saw wonderous figures and listened to thrilling tones, in which I knew ‘Shakespeare acted’ as I was never to know him again.”
Far from being a pale imitation of the play, Charlotte’s voice did as much to fill a theatre as a whole troupe of actors. Thomas Wentworth Higginson discovered that just by listening to Charlotte recite a poem he could “see every fibre of thatch on the roof and every bristle on the dog’s back.” The critic George T. Ferris called her a “magician,” bringing Shakespeare’s characters back to life: “She has but to wave her wand to unlock from the prison-house of Shakespeare’s pages all the immortal phantoms that brood within them,” Ferris wrote. “It is for her alone to invest them with a splendid and subtle life.” Now in her sixties, Charlotte was helpless to stop the illness that was clawing its way into her. But she could, if only for an hour, wake Shakespeare from the dead.
chapter sixteen Contrary Winds
The cold February air brought the smell of the sea beyond Long Wharf. “Twice a day,” wrote Emerson, “the flowing sea took Boston in its arms.” It was 1876 and Charlotte had returned home to Boston for medical treatment. She left the opulent downtown Parker House, where she and Emma Stebbins were staying, and walked by herself through the city where she had spent her childhood. During her walk, Charlotte caught a cold. The next day she stayed in bed, shivering and feverish. Her cold quickly turned into pneumonia, known at the time as the “captain of the men of death.” As Emma Stebbins brought her medicines and warm drinks, she could hear a storm starting up outside the window.
Blocks away, the Great Elm on Boston Common thrashed in the winds. In its trunk was a hole “big enough for a nine-year-old boy to hide in,” and despite its immensity, inside it was rotten. The Great Elm was more than two hundred years old, and the city had grown up around it. When the storm finally stopped, a crowd of people gathered in the Common, standing around the corpse of the great, fallen tree.
Ned and Emma Cushman arrived to help, and Sallie never left Charlotte’s side. For a day or so she seemed to recover, but the chills and fever came back raging the next morning with a strange trembling the doctor called “rigor.” She coughed constantly, and faded in and out of sleep and fever dreams:
She was twenty-nine, wandering among gravestones, new to London, far from her family and the girl whose ring she wore, and miserably homesick. She was composing a poem called “The Place of Graves.” The theme was mortality and the ephemerality of fame. She was on the cusp of such fame, which seemed still a “vanity” and “feverish dream.”
Then, she was a little girl on her mother’s lap.
Then, she was playing with Ned and Emma’s children, her children, and they ran and put their arms around her, kissing her on the lips. Only God knew how much she loved them.
In Charlotte’s rooms in the Parker House the doctor took Emma Stebbins to the side. He spoke gravely to her and she ran out of the room crying.
Ned brought Charlotte a glass of milk punch. It reminded Charlotte of a story she’d read by Mark Twain in the last issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
In 1875, the new Harlem line of the New York streetcar had opened, and instructions for the conductor were posted on the wall, in sight of the train riders. The words were oddly rhythmic, and Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley, two newspapermen who were riding the Fourth Avenue line and couldn’t get the words out of their heads. They published the instructions as a poem, which then got stuck in Mark Twain’s head. He then wrote a story called “A Literary Nightmare”—to get it out:
Conductor, when you receive a fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
Chorus.
Punch brothers! Punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare.
If the Tribune poem tormented a few hundred readers, Twain’s story reached thousands. It told of a literary infection that torments a writer until a friend, who he infects, keeps bursting out in snatches of “Punch brothers! Punch with care!” in the middle of a funeral.
Back in Parker House, Ned helped Charlotte sit up to take the drink. “Come auntie,” he cajoled, “here’s your milk punch.” Smiling, Charlotte recited: “Punch, brothers! Punch with care!” And then she fell asleep.
* * *
On February 18, 1876, one hundred years after the birth of the United States, its greatest actress, Charlotte Cushman, died. She was fifty-nine years old.
On the day of her funeral, her body lay in state in the Parker House. Hundreds of friends, family, and theat
re colleagues came to pay their respects. There were so many flowers delivered that the room was transformed into a bower fit for a fairy queen.
Mourners waiting to be admitted lined up along Tremont Street, the crowd stretching past the Commons, where men groaned over the hundred-foot branches of the Great Elm, sawing them down to size.
After the viewing, the body was brought to King’s Chapel for the funeral service. Family, intimate friends, and colleagues sat in the wooden pews facing the coffin while the public found whatever space they could in the galleries above. Many who had bought tickets could not get in, and the street outside grew so packed no one could get in or out. Police were stationed around the church. Charlotte’s body had not been carried by train around the country, as Lincoln’s had been, but her death cast the whole nation into mourning. Thousands of people came to Boston from across the country for the funeral, waiting in line for hours just to get a glimpse of her coffin.
Inside the chapel, young girls from the Cushman School, recently renamed in Charlotte’s honor, walked solemnly down the long aisle between the pews. Against their white dresses they wore black sashes, and each girl carried a small bouquet of fresh flowers, which she laid inside Charlotte’s open casket before taking her seat.
The chapel was “profusely ornamented” and scented with flowers, which like the dignitaries filled “every available space.” A large cross made of ivy sat on the altar, surrounded by white floral stars made of creamy, sweet-smelling camelias, lilies, white lilacs, and tea roses. Maidenhair ferns drooped among rosebuds, violets, heliotrope, and “rare orchids.”
Reporters from around the world, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Irish Times, were in attendance. They made notes as the coffin was carried out and placed into a carriage that slowly led a long and winding procession up the slope of Mount Auburn. It was a scene to rival the finest Greek drama. “We find little difference,” said one pastor who included Charlotte in his sermon that Sunday, between “the true aim of both actor and preacher.”