by Tana Wojczuk
Theatre folk knew how to camouflage flaws. For example, men concealed bandy legs under layers of padded stockings to create the illusion of fullness, while women dyed their hair or wore prosthetic bosoms. But instead of minimizing her oddities, Charlotte exaggerated what many considered her defects.
The effect was mixed. Men and women disagreed about her appearance; to many men she was simply ugly, a “bull in black silk,” while women tended to admire the way she embodied both masculine and feminine. One female critic described her face as “harsh, but harmonious as Beethoven’s chords and discords.” It pained Charlotte to be judged by her appearance, but she refused to hide and at the fireman’s ball she danced all evening. The local newspaper reported that, at the ball, Charlotte was “magnificently attired… she was the observed of all observers, the bright particular star of the evening.”
Fame can be fickle, but Charlotte had a canny sense of occasion, and knew how to use it to appeal to her audiences’ emotions. At one of her benefit performances, an evening where she would receive all the proceeds from ticket sales, she made the occasion about “Albanians” rather than herself. Before the performance, she found out the names of all the firemen in the city, including the name of every foreman and engineer and of every fire engine. After the benefit, she read a poem she’d composed in honor of the firemen. The literary critic for Ladies Companion magazine praised her writing, marveling that she had managed to fit in every name “without injuring the harmony of the verse.”
Charlotte’s fame grew, and her performances at the Pearl Street Theatre attracted Albany’s most fashionable crowd. She began to get offers to perform with famous actors. In October 1836, the legendary Junius Brutus Booth came to town and asked for her to be his Lady Macbeth. Charlotte had grown up hearing Booth’s name; when she was celebrating her first birthday, he was publishing the first volume of his memoirs. Booth was British, but America was his adopted home. He had abandoned his first wife, a flower-seller, in England, and had now had several children out of wedlock. Though bedeviled by alcoholism (a lifelong affliction he had passed on to sons John Wilkes and Edwin), Booth was a brilliant actor. Still slim in middle age, he had a handsome, tragic face. The production of Macbeth was a success, and Charlotte held her own alongside one of the most experienced actors in the world.
By the winter of 1836 Charlotte was so busy she struggled to keep up with her family’s lives, and she missed Augustus. She paid for his school, room, and board but rarely got to see him. Her typical day included morning rehearsal, evening performance, and dinner with friends—which now included some of the powerful Albanians who regularly came to her shows. Usually getting home around midnight, she stayed up later studying lines, sometimes with just a few hours to learn a new role before rehearsal the next day.
Rehearsals are an actor’s school, and Charlotte always tried to excel, but the process was still new to her. She was confronted every day with the theatre’s foreign language, a maze of new words—downstage (toward the front), upstage (toward the back), stage left (the audience’s right), stage right (the audience’s left), carmine (rouge), scrim (a thin screen at the back of the stage), cork (burnt cork to darken the actor’s skin), and a hundred others—that allowed the actors, craftsmen, and stagehands to communicate quickly and efficiently. It was like being on Long Wharf again, listening to sailors speaking of keels and crosswinds.
She also had to learn to manage her salary and negotiate her own contracts. An inexperienced actor could find her salary whittled away by fines if she wasn’t careful. If she stayed too long getting her makeup on in the green room and missed her cue, she would be fined, and fined again for coming late to rehearsal or failing to be “off book” (having her lines memorized) along with the actors around her. Charlotte was confronted every day by the fact that she knew far less than the other actors and had to work doubly hard to prove herself. It made her long for Augustus, who always made her feel secure and at home. In the few hours she had to herself, she responded to Augustus’s adoring, ardent letters.
“My Dear Darling Sister,” Augustus wrote to her on February 19, 1837, “I am sending you a (play)bill for an exhibition we are going to have next Friday evening.” He clearly missed her, too. Still, he was making friends. At eleven years old, Augustus took after Charlotte in his personality. He was funny, intelligent, and friendly. Though Charlotte’s moods and health sometimes suffered from overwork, Augustus was healthy and happy. Charlotte longed to have him by her side, but she hoped the separation would be short-lived. Though normally exceptionally careful with money, she bought Augustus a lavish gift. She took some of her earnings and went to the horse-trader to pick out a horse for him. Then she went to the tailors and ordered him a little riding jacket, cut out of bright blue wool. He could go riding as soon as the weather warmed.
Springtime was dreary, with cold rain and frost still hard in the ground, but Charlotte was feeling optimistic. She had almost made enough money to take Augustus out of school and move the whole family back to New York. There, she hoped to try again at the prestigious Park Theatre.
One day in early April 1837, Charlotte heard someone knocking at her door and was surprised to find a messenger holding a telegram. She opened it, and read with horror that Augustus was dead. “The ground liquified under me,” she would later write. “I felt the waters go over my soul.” Her horror deepened when she learned he had died after falling from the horse she had so lovingly picked out for him.
After Augustus’s death, Charlotte fell into a deep depression. Although mentally and physically exhausted she had to continue performing almost nightly despite her grief. It was a distraction, but her heart was no longer in it. The vision that kept her ambition alive was of her family together again, safe and happy as they had been before her father left. But she felt she’d failed to keep Augustus safe, and she blamed herself for giving him the very instrument of his death.
In her misery she asked God what kind of sign this was meant to be. Should she give up or push on through her grief? The answer came in the form it nearly always did—an emergency that pressed her into service.
Susan Cushman, Charlotte’s sister, had been living with half siblings who seemed to pay little attention to her, their needy relation. Susan was fifteen—pretty and penniless. She soon caught the eye of Nelson Merriman, a man more than fifty years older than her. Though Susan did not encourage him, Merriman wrote to Mary Eliza suggesting that he adopt Susan as his daughter so she could inherit his fortune when he died. When Mary Eliza refused, he proposed marriage to Susan instead. “I am on my deathbed,” he swore, claiming he only wanted to be Susan’s benefactor. Finally, Mary Eliza agreed, believing she was securing her daughter’s future. Charlotte, who was busy preparing to debut her Romeo, was too distracted to realize the significance of her mother’s decision, and merely expressed her disgust that Mary Eliza would allow Susan to marry someone she did not love. What she didn’t know was that Merriman was also a fraud.
A few weeks later, Charlotte and her mother packed their things and returned to Manhattan. Work would be a welcome distraction from grief, but Charlotte still mourned, remembering the child-brother she once rocked in her lap. Packed in her suitcase was Augustus’s last letter and his little blue riding jacket. She would bring these with her wherever she went.
chapter six Gypsy Queen
Labor saved me,” Charlotte later wrote to a friend about the weeks following Augustus’s death. She did not want to be crushed by grief, so she conquered it by working herself into exhaustion. Her plan was to “suffer bodily to cure my heart-bleed,” to “strew ashes over the loss of my child-brother.” So she took a job where she knew she could flagellate herself with “all the mortifications in my profession”: the Park Theatre.
When she first returned to New York City in May of 1837, Charlotte went to work at the National Theatre in New York as a “walking lady,” taking any part they would give her. But she also wrote to Edmund Simpson, the manager of t
he Park Theatre, hoping to get a contract there. Meanwhile, the National put her to work immediately in Guy Mannering, a musical adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s novel. Guy Mannering is an adventure story that follows a band of gypsies and their queen, Meg Merrilies. Meg adopts an orphaned boy who is secretly a nobleman’s son and raises him lovingly as her own. When the boy grows to be a man, his true identity is revealed and bandits immediately kidnap him for ransom. Meg ultimately sacrifices her own life to save her boy. Charlotte was cast not in a starring role but as a “singing gypsy.” A comedown from her triumphs as Lady Macbeth and Romeo, but she wasn’t in Albany anymore. “Albanians” had appreciated her talent but the goodwill she’d earned there had a poor exchange rate. She would have to prove herself all over again.
She had to be satisfied with small roles, for now. But she was in the center of American theatre, a paid actor with a contract at a good theatre. It was spring. The dogwoods were blooming, and the city was shaking itself off and putting forth new life.
Then, in early May 1837, nearly twenty banks failed. The financial crisis put stress on the theatres, who relied on audiences’ disposable income to survive. Edmund Simpson and the co-owner of the Park, Stephen Price, needed something new to lure audiences into their shows and keep them coming back.
One morning Charlotte got word that the actress playing Meg Merrilies was sick and she would need to fill in from her manager at the National that very night. Meg was a leading role, with many lines, and Charlotte had less than a day to learn them. She raced to the theatre to pick up a copy of the full script. Managers normally only gave a full copy of the play to the leading actors, limiting the number of manuscripts in circulation to keep them from being sold to a competing theatre.
But Charlotte had already had her eye on the starring role. When she wasn’t onstage singing and dancing in ridiculous musical numbers, she had been hiding in the wings, listening for clues to Meg’s character, and noticing where the lead actress—Mrs. Chippendale—made mistakes. Mrs. Chippendale, a British actress, interpreted Scott’s Gypsy queen as a young woman. But Charlotte had realized that if Meg had raised a baby boy from infancy into manhood, she would not be young. In fact, since Meg was not the boy’s biological mother, she could be very old.
Charlotte went to rehearsal the day of her debut as Meg still hoping to “catch some inspiration.” Unlike many actors in a starring role, she didn’t pay attention to just her own character, but also to how other characters talked about her. Rehearsing onstage with her script in hand, she heard one gypsy say to another that Meg “rules the tribe” and yet “she doates,” meaning that she is too tender and maternal. Off to one side, Charlotte took notes, but kept her plan a secret.
That night, when the order for “places” was given, Charlotte did not come to the stage. She was still in her dressing room. John Braham, a “sweet-voiced” young English tenor who was meant to play opposite Charlotte, waited anxiously in the wings for his new costar. Then behind him in the darkness he heard a sound, and when he turned what he saw gave him a cold chill.
From the velvet gloom a thing of supernatural power came forward. The face was deeply carved with dry creek beds of wrinkles, her dark hair, parted in the middle, escaped in uncombed tangles down her back. Her tattered dress was simple and dark, reaching to the floor. The sleeves were cut short to reveal well-muscled arms. She seemed to glide when she walked, like an apparition. In her hand was a tall staff of power, forked at the end. Braham gasped, then realized with a shock that this crone was Charlotte Cushman.
Charlotte had likely taken some of her inspiration from one of her favorite poets, John Keats. Keats’s ballad “Meg Merrilies” imagines the character as an emblem of romantic wildness, not beautiful in the traditional sense, but in the way that craggy hills are beautiful. She weaves garlands of woodbine, crooning eerily to herself. Old Meg is “tall as Amazon” but copies womanhood with a tin ear: her cloak is an old red blanket, and she wears a “chip hat,” out of fashion for nearly fifty years. Like Lady Macbeth, her power is not quite human.
Moments before the curtain went up, Charlotte crept into the gypsy tent that had been placed for her onstage. Her gray-clad figure seemed to hover, ghostly in the silver moonlight. When the show began and she finally spoke, her voice sounded as if it came from another world, hoarse and broken.
In her next scene she leapt from the wings onto the stage with a “strange, silent spring,” terrifying the audience. Then she stood suddenly straight “like a great, withered tree,” with her arms outstretched and a “look of fire,” as she began to prophesy: “The dark shall be light / And the wrong made right”
“If ever the dead come back among the living,” Meg crooned, “I’ll be seen in the glen many a-night after these crazed bones are whitened in the mouldering grave.” A mere month after Augustus’s death the image of bones moldering in a grave was not an abstraction for Charlotte. Spilled blood never dried, “it crie[d] night and day” from the deepest dungeon “to the blue arch of heaven.”
At the play’s climax Meg and a band of her Gypsy followers stormed the prison where her adopted son, Harry, was held captive. One of the guards raised his pistol and aimed a shot at Meg, fatally wounding her. Charlotte, one critic recalled, came “staggering” down the stage, with a shriek “so wild and piercing, so full of agony… [it] told the whole story of her love and her revenge.” When Meg and her followers finally broke through and rescued Harry, she collapsed and died at his feet. A total silence fell over the theatre as Charlotte’s limp body was carried offstage. As much as she had terrified her audience, she now made them weep.
The audience saw no more of Charlotte until her curtain call. When she came out to take a bow, her face was bare, and she had combed out her hair, pinned it neatly, and changed out of Meg’s soot-stained rags. The effect was electric. It emphasized how different the twenty-year-old actress was from Meg, and made her performance seem even more impressive.
Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering
Charlotte had also added an essential bit of spectacle to the show. After Meg died, Charlotte had the rest of the cast sing a little “finale” which gave her more time to rush backstage, wipe off Meg’s “wild weird, intense face,” and return a sweet, pleasant young woman.
As with Lady Macbeth, Meg seemed to vindicate the widespread fear that female ambition would inevitably tilt into madness. “The Meg Merrilies of Miss Cushman,” wrote one critic, “seems to abstract and embody in itself—in a perfect individual reality—all we have seen or known or had presented to us in the stage or closet—of wild women—crazed prophetess—strange in attire—sore distraught in spirit—and borne above the common flight of their sex by something demoniac and supernatural.” Charlotte was careful to put distance between the actress and the “wild woman” she portrayed.
When it was all over, Charlotte returned to her dressing room. She was just getting ready to leave when she heard a knock and her costar Braham’s voice calling her. Charlotte wondered what she had done wrong, but Braham hadn’t come to scold her—he was staggered. How, he asked, did such a young actress learn to do something like that?
She could not explain. For Charlotte, a character was not only learned but grasped at once in a flash of intuition. Then she would distill the character through repetition. Charlotte’s Meg was so popular the show was extended. When her stockings wore out, Charlotte mended them rather than buy new ones, to keep up the appearance of age and poverty. When her entire costume needed to be replaced, she dyed the new one by hand, rubbing it with dirt and other mixtures she invented herself to age it. She continued to do her makeup and hair as she had done that first night. For a time, a young painter came to watch Charlotte get ready, to study how she did her makeup. “How,” the artist asked incredulously, “do you know where to put in those shadows and lines which so accurately give the effect of age?” But Charlotte only replied cryptically that she put them where she felt they should be.
&nbs
p; When onstage, Charlotte disappeared into her character. “Unless one does,” she wrote to a friend, “he can never be an actor.” When Walt Whitman, the young critic and editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, came to see her Meg Merrilies, he was impressed by Charlotte’s empathy: “She seems to identify herself so completely with the character she is playing,” he wrote, “she loses, for the nonce, every attribute, except those which enter into the making up of what she is to pourtray.” (Still suffering from guilt over her brother’s death, losing herself was what she had in mind.)
The critical response was overwhelmingly good. Reviewers raved about Charlotte’s “virile energy,” “pythonic inspiration,” and her “noble frenzy of eccentric genius.” Her Meg had truly frightened and moved them, and for cynical New Yorkers, this was rare.
Charlotte’s success at the National finally helped her secure a contract with the Park Theatre. Once, she had been offended if anyone offered her less than a supporting role. But now, with her pregnant sister and mother to support, she happily signed a contract with the Park as another “walking lady.” She would be extremely busy, which was a good thing since she still hoped work would defang her grief. It was not fasting and praying, but it was close enough. She signed on for three years, at $20 a week.
Edmund Simpson, Charlotte’s new boss, had managed the Park Theatre for more than twenty years and was an important figure in New York culture and politics. He had hair that curled up from his brow, a wide forehead, full lips, and an aquiline nose. Simpson had been an actor but taken up managing when a tragic accident in the theatre during a performance of Doctor Faustus left him partly paralyzed. His business partner, Stephen Price, was a lawyer and son of a powerful New York businessman.
