Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth
Page 2
on his sixtieth birthday in 1898, the actor Owen Fawcett was in a reflective mood. Sitting down at his desk in his Manhattan apartment, he took up a blank octavo scrapbook with black-and-white marbled board covers and a brown leather binding. Nearby were scissors and a glue pot. In spidery letters on a title page he wrote the words “John Wilkes Booth,” then set to work pasting in a pile of clippings he had saved over the years.14
Booth would have been sixty that year as well. He and Fawcett had often performed together. Once they played before Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. On another occasion they shared the stage before a vast crowd of America’s cultural elite at the Winter Garden in New York City to raise money for the Shakespeare statue in Central Park. How handsome, charming, and fun Booth had been, Fawcett recalled. How talented. And yet how odd.
It was difficult to know how to measure such a man. So Fawcett turned to the sacred canon of his profession—to Shakespeare. Below Booth’s name on the title page he added three lines from act five, scene two of Othello—a caution for himself and an exhortation for those of us who would come after:
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.
1
....
BRIGHT BOY ABSALOM
on an october morning in 1934 a short, stocky man with a long face and a crown of thick black hair walked along a country lane in Maryland. Rows of maple trees flanked the road and formed an autumn canopy of orange and red over his head.1 The setting was so beautiful that the traveler paused. Stanley Kimmel—author, musician, and self-described soldier of fortune—wanted to experience it. He wanted to take in everything. His footloose life had convinced him that “we are nothing more than tiny rubber balls bouncing about a world. Other worlds exist, too. Other people on them. Whoever is responsible [for our existence] is keeping us in mystery. So why fuss about it? When the end comes, we are like an autumn leaf blown across a graveyard.”2
Even so, there was one leaf Kimmel intended to revivify. In Paris in the twenties he had met Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. He thought they were all amazingly talented, but the writer he most admired was Carl Sandburg. A friend and fellow Illinoisan, Sandburg was well into his multivolume Lincoln biography, and Kimmel was stirred. While it might be unfair to say he envied the older man, he admired and emulated him. Like Sandburg, Kimmel sang and played the guitar and wrote poems and smoked pipes, and now he would attempt some history of his own. He wanted to write a biography of the Booths, America’s great acting family.
The tree-lined lane led to a gate. Beyond it a gravel drive wound up to a quaint-looking brick house shaded by a sycamore. Ella V. Mahoney, a severe-looking white-haired woman, lived here, and she answered his knock. Yes, this was the Booth home, she told him. Her husband, Sam Kyle, had purchased it from the family in 1878. She married Sam the following year and came here when she was a bride of twenty. Sam was long dead, as was a second husband, but she still lived on the old place. Her entire life had been spent within one mile of this house. She was now seventy-five years old.
Mrs. Mahoney welcomed Kimmel inside, built a fire in the dining room, and fixed the traveler breakfast. She knew little about the Booths when she came here, she explained, but over the years she met neighbors who remembered them, actors who shared their stages, even Booth family members. Most were strangers who just wanted to touch base with their own past and knocked on the door as he had. Once Woodrow Wilson came by. H. L. Mencken, too. Each visitor had a memory, and her interest grew. She began to read, collect relics, and write down stories she heard. Back before the Depression she had even published a little book about the Booths and Tudor Hall, as the house was known. Time and circumstance had made her the custodian of their legacy, and she was proud of it, proud of the Booths, proud even of John Wilkes. One thing more. She was “tired of hearing so many good things about Lincoln,” she told Kimmel. The man was crude and uneducated. Were he alive, he could never be elected president today. “Wait till this country has to put down its first great uprising of the blacks against the whites,” she warned. “Then people will not have the regard for Lincoln they have. The people will then see that J. W. B. was right.” As a journalist Kimmel was trained to listen to all sorts of nonsense, so he heard her out with the politeness required of an uninvited guest. Little wonder, he thought, that people called Mrs. Mahoney “the Keeper of the Flame.”3
There were a few locals around who still remembered the Booths, and Mrs. Mahoney offered to take Kimmel to interview them. Their first stop was the home of Elijah Whistler, a former schoolmate of John Wilkes Booth. At ninety-three, the retired dairy farmer retained a sharp mind and strong opinions. His older brother William had died while serving in the Union Army. Understandably, he was no unreflective Southerner like Mrs. Mahoney. Lincoln’s assassination was terrible, he told Kimmel. “Everybody was stunned—couldn’t believe Booth would do such a thing,” he said. Well, Kimmel speculated, the assassin was probably bad from the start. Some people just were. After all, “he once shot a Negro on the farm.”
“That’s a damn lie!” exclaimed Whistler, visibly upset at the statement. The old man was so agitated that Kimmel feared he might work himself up to a heart attack or stroke. Settling back in his chair, Whistler jabbed a finger at Kimmel and said, “Johnnie was kind and gentle.”4
mrs. mahoney’s farm was located twenty-seven miles northeast of Baltimore between the hamlet of Churchville and the village of Bel Air in Harford County. John Wilkes Booth was born here on Thursday, May 10, 1838, in a log house no longer present at the time of Kimmel’s visit.5 Mary Ann (or Anne) Holmes Booth, the baby’s mother, was thirty-five at the time. Junius Brutus Booth, his father, was forty-two—and drunk at a local tavern. He was hauled home “in a very jolly condition” to meet the newborn.6
It was erroneously reported in 1865 that the name Wilkes was given to the baby to honor the Baltimore merchant Jim Wilkes, a friend of the father.7 In fact, the name was long established in the Booth family. The baby’s great-uncle was Wilkes Booth, a London silversmith. This man had a son named John Wilkes Booth, Junius’s contemporary and first cousin, who handled annuities that Junius inherited from their grandmother. These family members were named for John Wilkes, a relative who was a noted political radical and onetime Lord Mayor of London. The Wilkes name attached to the family because the mother of Richard Booth, the baby’s grandfather, was a Wilkes. Richard lived most of his life in London, admired Wilkes greatly, and imbibed the politician’s potent democratic principles. It was said that he brought Junius as an infant into Wilkes’s presence for a benediction toward the end of the great radical’s life. John Wilkes Booth grew up of proud of his middle name. “It meant liberty,” he would say.8
Junius was a noted English actor, and Mary Ann the daughter of a Lambeth seed merchant. She was selling flowers outside a theater the night they met. The two fell in love and married at a friend’s home on January 18, 1821. A few weeks later they sailed for Brazil, but during a stopover on Madeira, they decided instead to go to the United States. Over the next year Booth performed as far north as Boston, as far south as Charleston, and as far west as New Orleans. Having sized up his new country, he settled in Baltimore. The city was attractive and centrally located to his work, but when outbreaks of yellow fever and smallpox hit, Junius’s proclivity for reclusiveness took over, and he searched the countryside for a place of refuge.9 Outside the village of Bel Air he leased a tract of 150-plus acres for a period of one thousand years.10 (As a legal alien he couldn’t own the land outright.) Junius knew no one here, nor did he care to. “They wished to be retired from so much company and only have a few acquaintances in this strange land,” recalled Elizabeth Rogers, one of their new neighbors.11
The young couple chose an isolated spot. The property was located off the rough coach road connecting Bel Air and Havre de Grace. A narrow track of white clay
, still looking more like a gulley than a lane when John was born sixteen years later, led off the road into thick woods. One-quarter mile down this crooked trail was a clearing with a strong spring. At this sheltered site the Booths put down their American roots. “A sharper contrast to life on the stage, with its travel, glare, and tumult, could scarcely be fancied, and this was no doubt what the actor sought,” wrote Walter E. McCann, one of John’s contemporaries.12
Junius erected a two-story log house here. A kitchen was added on the east side of the cottage, and another addition, never finished, was begun on the west side. The cabin was plastered and whitewashed, with window-sashes, shutters, and doors painted red. The result was unpretentious but snug. The four-room interior was equally simple. Furnishings, like a rustic chair made of tree roots, were odd or old-fashioned. Heavy pewter plates dressed a well-worn maple table. Two or three shelves of books of history and literature formed a library; a few engravings on historical themes adorned the walls. There was a spinning wheel, a corner cupboard, and a row of wall pegs on which hung coats, newspapers, and an almanac. A high brass fender screened the large fireplace. Over the next few years, at intervals in his acting tours, Junius planted fruit trees and built a dairy, a barn with stables, a cider-press, and a pond. A traditional zigzag fence enclosed the property.13
Mary Ann, a native of London, the largest city in the world in the 1820s, did not like this pioneer-like existence, but her husband did, and that was all that mattered to him. “Anything is better than a nagging shrew,” he warned her, and she took his words to heart.14 Mary Ann never argued with him, recalled Elizabeth, their neighbor. It startled her to see how unprepared the newcomer was for such rough rural conditions. She found the family eating hardtack out of a barrel since Mary Ann did not know how to bake. Elizabeth jumped in, teaching her how to make cornbread, wheat bread, and beaten biscuits, consoling her for her frequent and laughable failures at the round Dutch oven. The two women, who were the same age, became best friends. “Aunty Rogers,” as the Booth children called her, helped deliver John into the world and nursed him when he was a baby.15
Richard Booth, Junius’s father, arrived at what he termed “Robinson Crusoe’s Island” in 1823 to join the family.16 Tall, thin, with long white hair worn in a queue, he was an antique dressed in knee breeches and buckle shoes.17 The elderly London lawyer had no aptitude for farming, but when his son Junius was away, he was competent to pass along orders to the hired hands as well as provide an additional adult presence at the farm. He could also be counted on to help slaves run away to Pennsylvania, forcing Junius on occasion to compensate their owners in an effort to keep the old man out of trouble. In addition to his well-known crutched walking stick, Richard had obviously brought from England a hatred for despotism that ensnared his idol John Wilkes in trouble with the British government. A love of classical heroes showed in his naming Junius for a Roman general who put to death two of his own sons who favored monarchy. John T. Ford of Baltimore, later a famous theatrical manager, termed these beliefs “French or red-republican ideas.” As a child Junius had been steeped in these ideas, forced to copy down as sacred truths any stray political thoughts that occurred to Richard. John was one year old when the grandfather died and had no memory of him, but he did receive as a legacy a disposition toward political extremism. “John Wilkes Booth had the family trait the grandfather had,” continued Ford, who worked with three generations of Booth family actors. “Some called it ‘an eccentricity of genius.’ It was akin to madness, if not actual insanity. Thousands can recall it.”18
John was the ninth of ten children born to Junius and Mary Ann. Junius Jr.—called June—was the eldest, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1821. Thereafter the floor cradles at the farm filled with clocklike regularity—Rosalie (1823), Henry (1825), Mary Ann (1827), Frederick (1829), Elizabeth (1831), Edwin (1833), Asia (1835), and John Wilkes (1838). Joseph, the final child, was born in Baltimore in 1840. Four of this number died of illnesses in childhood. Henry died a few years before John’s birth when Junius was on a visit to London, and he was interred there. Mary Ann, Frederick, and Elizabeth died at the farm within weeks of each other and were buried in a hillside meadow west of the house.19 Born after their deaths, John knew these siblings only by their small mounds behind a cast-iron fence that enclosed the family cemetery. Later, when he farmed the property in the 1850s, he mowed carefully and quietly around the burial plot, never speaking about his long-dead sisters and brother.20
“so lovable,” edwin said of his younger brother. “He was of a gentle disposition, full of fun. All his family found a source of joy in his boyish and confiding nature.”21 The playful youngster was the hands-down favorite of both parents. He delighted Junius.22 “But,” wrote their contemporary Frank A. Burr, a journalist who studied the family, “John developed too early and was too restless and emphatic to suit the grand old man.”23 Edwin was more tractable, so Junius turned to him for companionship. While Mary Ann always thought June was the handsomest of her sons, perhaps because he looked the most like his father, she said John “was the most pleasure and comfort to me of all my sons, the most affectionate.”24 Over the years a special, some would say psychic, bond developed between them. “The love and sympathy between him and his mother were very close, very strong,” wrote Anne Hartley Gilbert, a character actress who knew the family well. “No matter how far apart they were, she seemed to know, in some mysterious way, when anything was wrong with him. If he were ill, or unfit to play, he would often receive a letter of sympathy, counsel, and warning, written when she could not possibly have received any news of him. He has told me this himself.”25
As John toddled into childhood, he grew much attached to his sister Rose. Handed much of the household management, as eldest daughters in large families often were, Rose busied herself in the dining room, the kitchen, the pantry, and the springhouse, where everyone took it for granted that the uncomplaining teenager belonged. Peaceful and sympathetic, she was a sort of unbeatified saint, and her little brother followed her around like a puppy. “John was her idolized favorite and pet,” recalled Mrs. Mahoney.26 On Sundays she would dress him, take his hand, and walk with him the half mile along the post road to Mount Zion Methodist Church, where the Reverend John S. Gorsuch was visiting pastor. They went often enough for John to earn a book as a reward for faithful attendance.27
John’s favorite outing with Rose was a visit to Aunty Rogers. A stout woman with a happy face and smile wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, she was the Booths’ immediate neighbor, and the trip across the fields to her kitchen was always rewarded with a slice of buttered bread with sugar. The two women would watch in amusement at how quietly he sat while eating it. When trouble with John arose on the farm, Aunty Rogers came, like the day he got a large cut on his head and she was called to dress and stitch the wound. “John was so kind, tender-hearted, and good,” she remembered. “A light-hearted, happy little boy. Full of jokes and fun.”28
Not long before her death in 1899, she told Mrs. Mahoney that “when JWB was a fugitive [in 1865], she baked a ham and kept other food cooked to give him if he should come to her, for provisions to eat in hiding or on a flight to Canada. She sat up all night watching for him with a light placed as a signal in her window to guide him.” As Aunty Rogers explained, “I loved him.”29
With Junius often absent on tour and Mary Ann overwhelmed with household and family responsibilities, two other people helped keep the farm—and to some extent even the family—on an even keel. Ann Hall was an African American woman in her twenties when John was born. She was described as having “an ample figure, serious face, and long yellow cheeks.” Her husband, Joseph, was a tall, dark-skinned man who wore a broad hat and carried a spelling book in hopes of learning to read. He handled the chores of field and barn while Ann took care of domestic matters. Joseph was free when John was born, thanks to Junius, who hired him and allowed him to work for wages. Joseph saved the money, hiding it behind a sill a
long the back wall of the stable, until he had enough to purchase the freedom of Ann and their children. Rowland Rogers, her owner, would not permit Ann, while still a slave, to live with Joseph, and once he refused to summon her when her child was choking to death. She was understandably bitter about her bondage, but Junius was kind, and she was profoundly loyal to the actor and his family. She spent so much time tending to John that he was jokingly referred to as her foster child. When a neighbor asked Ann after Lincoln’s death if she would give the assassin food and shelter should he come her way, her answer made clear that John had won her heart as surely as he had Aunty Rogers’s. “Indeed, I would, honey,” she replied. “Give him all dat I have.”30
junius explained to his children that he made his living in a very simple way. “I amuse,” he said.31 At this he was exceptional. During the 1820s and 1830s he was the leading tragedian on the American stage. When on point, he was a uniquely gifted performer capable of powerful emotion and excitement. When distracted or disinclined, he mumbled lines, dressed inappropriately, annoyed audiences, refused curtain calls, walked out on performances, or failed to appear for them.
Added to these eccentricities was something darker and more ominous. Edwin traced it to an episode in June 1824, when his father was acting in New York City. Believing a false report that Mary Ann had died, Junius went mad and attempted to stab another actor, Henry John Wallace, who happened to walk by.32 This was the first in a series of disturbing incidents that brought the father and the family shame and notoriety. By the time John was born, Junius had compiled an unenviable résumé of trouble. He had shot one man in the face, assaulted others, attempted suicide on three occasions, and been jailed in four states. With the deaths of the children in the mid-1830s, Junius grew even odder and the number of disturbances increased. In 1835 he wrote to Andrew Jackson threatening to cut the president’s throat.33 He wandered naked in a snowstorm, sought Christian burial for a bushel of pigeons, and tried to sell his son Edwin for five dollars. The father’s torments were at flood tide at the time John was born. Two months before the event, Junius made an unprovoked attack on the comedian Thomas Flynn, a friend. He seized an andiron and attempted to kill Flynn with it while he slept. Flynn fought back, breaking Junius’s nose.34 A leading newspaper in Baltimore published a rebuke of the actor. Its headline asked a question on many minds: “Is this man a maniac?”35