by Tana Wojczuk
Macready convinced her, and Charlotte decided to follow his advice. She was still paying for her family’s room and board but began putting away some money in secret to go to London.
chapter eight First Love
Macready had convinced Charlotte that London was the only place to advance her career. Americans followed where European culture led them, and they would not take Charlotte into their hearts until she had conquered England. In any case, 1844 was an election year, which would have made it even harder to capture newspapers’ attention stateside. Both instinct and good sense told her to go to London, but she delayed actually leaving because she had fallen in love.
Rosalie Sully was the daughter of the famous American portrait artist Thomas Sully. His fluid, soft, idealized portraits of the rich and famous, and especially women and children, were extremely popular. Sully had nine children and supported his late brother’s children on the income he received as an artist. Rose and Charlotte met after she commissioned Mr. Sully to do her portrait. It took longer than expected because Charlotte was difficult to capture in a still image. Sully threw out his first painting of her, convinced it didn’t do her justice.
Rose also wanted to be a painter, and she, too, began working on a portrait of Charlotte—a miniature. Sully encouraged his daughter’s career and had made a portrait of her holding a portfolio full of paper and a pencil, her hat on a bit askew, ready to journey into the hills to sketch. In another portrait by her father, Rose peers like a satyr over her sister Blanche’s shoulder, her dark ringlets bouncing merrily, smiling gleefully as she meets the viewer’s gaze.
Since meeting Rose in the fall of 1843 through a mutual friend, Charlotte had spent every weekend at her house, equally enamored of Rose and her large, close-knit family. The chaotic Sully house delighted her with the noise and children and the electric glimmer of Thomas Sully’s famous clients. Whenever she arrived at the house, she raced eagerly to visit Rose in her own art studio, to sit and read while Rose painted or walk or ride with her through the countryside. To Rose’s family Charlotte was an entertaining, if somewhat eccentric, new friend: she went walking with Rose’s oldest sister and mother and came regularly to dine, where she would give command performances of Shakespeare’s monologues, sing, and recite poetry. But behind Rose’s closed studio doors Charlotte became Romeo begging for a kiss.
After an exhausting week of performing in New York, Charlotte would race back to Rose. They would saddle their horses and ride to Clover Hill, the new house Mr. Sully was building for his family. Charlotte was a passionate and confident rider and preferred a horse that responded to open ground by running flat-out as fast as it could go. Neither rider nor horse cared about conserving energy. Competition brought a flush to Charlotte’s face, and she often challenged Rose to race. When Rose inevitably lost, Charlotte made it up to her with jewelry.
Miniature of Charlotte Cushman in her twenties, by Rosalie Sully
Rose expressed her love in a different key. For Charlotte’s birthday in July, Rose gave Charlotte a miniature portrait of herself that Rose had worked on for weeks. Holding her own image cupped in her lap, Charlotte could see herself as Rose saw her: glossy chestnut hair, parted neatly in the middle and gathered at the nape of her neck, expressive, large dark eyes gazing straight out, unafraid, her mouth beginning to twist into a smile. It was not the most accurate portrait, Charlotte thought, but she looked beautiful.
* * *
Rose’s love gave Charlotte confidence, and she decided to try what was acknowledged as the most difficult role in Shakespeare’s canon: Hamlet. Sarah Siddons had first played Hamlet in 1776, but no American actress had done it successfully. It was a complicated, challenging role, essentially a character study, and she would have more than fifteen hundred lines. Hamlet is a philosopher, and she would need to show her understanding of the sense of Shakespeare’s lines, lines that also held private meaning for her.
She debuted the role on May 13, 1844. The gas light gave off a smell like burning butter, and under the lights onstage an actress could feel like she was being roasted alive. In the half dark beyond the stage’s hemisphere, prostitutes prowled through the men’s upper gallery, their cries occasionally breaking the silence.
In the pit the audience passed applejack and peeled boiled eggs as they waited for the curtain to rise.
Who’s there?
Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.
The audience continued talking through the first scene and most of the second. They talked as the ghost of King Hamlet glided across the stage in white greasepaint and rags, as Claudius entered holding Gertrude possessively by the arm. Finally, Charlotte strode onto the stage dressed as Hamlet. She wore tights and a loose doublet, her breasts disguised under heavy brocade, her large head bowed. Hamlet is a young man, and Charlotte’s smooth woman’s face made her a better fit for the role than a male actor of similar experience.
Charlotte was critical of actresses who took on breeches parts for the titillation the performances offered men. Their “limbs are apt to cling helplessly together,” she wrote a fellow actor. Charlotte’s Hamlet, however, was utterly masculine, but her actually being a woman made her love scenes especially effective; they were, wrote one critic, “of so erotic a character that no man would have dared indulge in them.” Some critics who came to see her Hamlet said she was more convincing playing a man onstage than playing a woman in life.
Both audiences and critics appreciated the way she interpreted Hamlet. A reviewer in the entertainment rag Amusements would later write that Charlotte “appreciates the influence of the supernatural upon [Hamlet’s] mind, she does not therefore, fall into the error of representing him as one who is merely playing a part… she enters into his melancholy.” Privately, Charlotte was herself melancholy, despite her success. Her love for Rose had deepened. It wasn’t enough to spend every day together; she wanted a household with Rose, even a family. Instead, in public she had to pretend that Rose was just a friend. Dressed as a young man, she stood as if naked before the audience, pleading, “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!”
* * *
As a result of her success as Hamlet, by Christmas Charlotte had almost saved enough money to go to London. Rose was supportive, and as a Christmas present she gave Charlotte a diary. Inside the front cover of the pocket-sized book was the phrase “for persons of business.” It was bound in bloodred cloth with marbled endpapers, and inside was a blank page for every day of the year, to record “interesting daily occurrences and future engagements.”
Although Charlotte confided her plans to Rose, she concealed them from her family as long as she could. Because she was the family breadwinner, all her earnings were meant to be committed to paying room and board for Mary Eliza, Susan, and Ned. Her brother Charles’s earnings as a salesclerk were only enough to support himself. Charlotte, as a “person of business,” took her responsibility seriously, recording every expenditure, from cabs to penny candy for her little nephew.
Still, since talking with Macready, she had kept back some of her money for herself, putting it away secretly for a transatlantic passage. Rose would not be joining her. Charlotte promised the trip would be only six months, assuming that by then she would know if she’d succeeded or failed.
To some extent, her success would depend not only on her own talent but on the social circles who could put her in contact with the right people. She was a fiercely devoted friend and correspondent, and despite the fact that she often wrote half a dozen letters a day (recording every one in her diary), most of her letters began with some form of apology for not having written sooner. Some of these friends, like Macready, were connected directly with the theatre world, but she also now had a large, devoted circle of women friends who promoted and supported one another.
Charlotte’s devotion as a friend did not mean she was uncritical, however, and marriages often got in the way of her friendships with other women. In
Philadelphia, she had been overjoyed to meet the famous Fanny Kemble through a local circle of women artists there. Fanny had been her idol since childhood, a British actress who had overwhelmed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic with her tragic beauty. She allowed Charlotte into her inner circle, even confiding in Charlotte about her miserable life with her husband, Pierce Butler, a Southern gentleman she had married without knowing he owned a plantation worked by hundreds of slaves. Pierce’s cruelty had driven her to seek a divorce, but without proof of his infidelity she was trapped.
Charlotte had learned a few things from her friends in the Bowery: The only way Fanny could get a divorce was to catch Pierce Butler in the act. And the only way to do this would be to hire a woman willing to seduce Fanny’s husband and then bear witness against him in court. Thinking to help, Charlotte spoke about this idea to Fanny, who was horrified. Charlotte was thrust out of Fanny Kemble’s circle of intimates as quickly as she had been brought in.
Charlotte thought marriage between men and women was foolish. Though she believed it was a covenant with God, she also believed that very few women should enter into it. For most of her friends, marriage was not a love match but an economic necessity, or at least a confusing combination of the two. One “bold and impulsive” friend married a man Charlotte thought “narrow” and “strange” and lost her joie de vivre. It pained her that friends often shut her out once they were coupled. Charlotte and Rose had also discussed committing to each other in a kind of marriage ceremony, but Charlotte found herself distracted by other women. She felt herself possessed by one singer’s beautiful, expressive face, and in the diary Rose had given her, she noted other “exquisite” actresses she met in New York.
Charlotte was still traveling nearly every day between New York and Philadelphia, where she was finishing up her contract with the Walnut Street Theatre. In New York, she continued acting opposite Macready, who had promised to perform in a benefit to raise money for Charlotte’s trip to London. She had bought a ticket on a ship aptly named the Garrick, after a famous actor, and had very little left over. She paid $100 for the ticket, a large outlay considering that her mother’s board was $10 a month and that the exchange rate was more than five dollars to one pound. Most of her salary went to her family, and she had hired a maid. Sallie Mercer was an intelligent, literate, African-American girl of around fourteen. Sallie’s mother was hesitant to let her daughter travel to London, but Charlotte reassured her that she and Sallie would be safe.
As she neared her departure date, Charlotte began to have misgivings about leaving Rose and her family behind. She became ill and jumpy. Thankfully, the weather in New York was so terrible it made her eager to go. One morning Charlotte woke at 6 a.m. thinking someone was calling her. The rain pounded in such a fury against her leaky window it sounded “as though the flood gates of heaven were opened.” Charlotte huddled in her apartment all morning. She took the train all the way to Philadelphia that afternoon, only to discover that the show was canceled. Another theatre refused to pay her money she was owed. Frustrated, she scribbled in her diary that she couldn’t wait to “get away from this horrid place.”
She had exhausted herself working to make money for her trip. On a typical week, Charlotte played Portia on Wednesday, Lady Macbeth on Thursday, Goneril in King Lear on Friday, Queen Elizabeth on Saturday. Still, she made time for a widening circle of friends, and sometimes was their benefactor. When one friend suddenly fell ill, Charlotte lent her husband money for medical expenses. (When the poor woman died a day later, her husband returned the three dollars.)
As the time for her departure to London neared, she and Rose began to make plans to commit to each other in a secret ceremony. Charlotte bought Rose a ring, and they agreed that, though they did not have a marriage contract, they would be married.
Charlotte spent the rest of the month tying up loose ends: collecting money owed to her, making sure her clothes and costumes were repaired and ready for London. Sallie sewed tassels and braided trim on Charlotte’s silk-linked handbag, and Charlotte bought Sallie a new hat and gloves for the journey. Then on Friday, July 5, a little more than two weeks short of her twenty-eighth birthday, Charlotte took a cab to Rose’s house, had dinner with her family, and spent the night. The next morning, she and Rose were privately married. “Slept with Rose,” she giddily recorded in her diary. “Married.” As a wedding gift, Rose gave her a tiny, coin-shaped portrait of Fanny Kemble, whom Charlotte still admired, attached to a tightly woven bracelet of Rose’s light brown hair. A week later Charlotte and Rose slept together again. Afterward, Charlotte went home and spent the afternoon burning letters she didn’t want her mother stumbling on while she was away.
Hoping to spend her ocean voyage improving her mind, Charlotte filled her suitcases with books. She chose authors who might be talked about in London’s high society, including Mme. de Staël, eighteenth-century France’s most celebrated female intellectual (ironically, a famous letter writer); the economist Adam Smith; Charles Darwin, whose book The Voyage of the Beagle had become a bestseller (Charlotte listed his name in her diary under the heading “imagination unchecked”); and the Romantic poets Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose poems made her curious about “nature-worship” and “pantheism.” Like the Romantics she admired, Charlotte often saw her passions reflected back to her in nature: in cloudburst, tempest, and the sudden reemergence of the sun after a storm.
In early October 1844, Charlotte performed in a benefit performance for Macready, and he had promised to perform in hers the following day. In the morning, however, she discovered with horror that Macready had sailed to London in the night. She scrambled, managing to find an actor she had performed with before, George Vandenhoff, but he was not as big a name and she fumed over the money Macready had lost her.
On October 26, Charlotte boarded the Garrick to set sail for Liverpool. Sallie Mercer accompanied her, though she sailed in a separate, third-class berth. When Mary Eliza discovered Charlotte had been putting aside money in secret, she was furious, but she agreed it was a good idea. Mary Eliza had her own reasons for wanting Charlotte out of the country. Someone had been gossiping about Charlotte’s relationships with women. They’d found out about her marriage to Rose and also about a flirtation with a young woman named Lizzie Gardette. “I have always said that time’ll show whether I deserved all the unkind feeling that has been believed and harbored against me,” Charlotte later wrote to her mother, “and I think time will show it.”
The boat shoved away from the dock with a great bellow, and the passengers watched as New York became an island and then a horizon and then disappeared from view. As Manhattan faded, Charlotte wrote a quote from Longfellow’s novel Hyperion onto the front of her diary: “Look not mournfully into the past, go forth to meet the dark and shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.”
In her berth, Charlotte opened her trunk to begin unpacking. In her luggage, alongside dresses, gloves, shawls, books, and a few precious pencils for writing in her diary lay a clutch of apples: Golden Russet, Golden Pippin, Carpenters. She planned to save the seeds to plant with Rose at Clover Hill when she returned.
Immediately, Charlotte felt nauseated. Like a woman gripped by morning sickness, she was wrung by competing urges to seal herself in her bed and climb up and out onto the deck to gulp fresh air. Every time she thought of home it made her “more wretched.” Rose’s sister Blanche had warned her that when she was seasick she “could not think of anything at all,” yet Charlotte couldn’t stop thinking. She heard Rose’s voice as plainly as if she stood in front of her. “I see Rosalie in her painting room,” she wrote miserably in her diary. “I hear her sigh for her absent friend and spirits fall. I feel almost her arms about me… I wonder what I should do without her, I would not care or wish to have another home, deprived of her or of her affection.”
Charlotte had rarely had so much time to think, and she didn’t like it. She worried that Rose
would forget her or fall in love with someone else. She worried she would fail and this would all have been for nothing. She cried, feeling like her “heart would break.”
Sallie was also miserably seasick, and they took turns taking care of each other. Once Charlotte had to rush to Sallie’s room to help her close the porthole. Sallie had been vomiting, and one of her bunk mates had opened the porthole for fresh air, not realizing that when she did the water would rush in. Another night Charlotte felt so sick she begged Sallie not to leave her alone and fell asleep on Sallie’s knee. She dreamt she was in the front room at home sitting on the sofa. Rose was by her side with her arm around her neck, cheek brushing her cheek, then Rose’s lips brushing hers. “I truly believe if I had her in my arms at this moment I could press the breath out of her body,” she wrote when she woke, yet in the dream something was wrong. Rose was mysteriously sad, and like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle Charlotte felt she had been away a long time.
In the morning, she ate breakfast on the deck sitting on a coil of rope, for once “not sea sick but sick of the sea.” Two weeks into the voyage, Charlotte discovered that if she stayed on deck in the fresh air as much as possible, she could avoid the worst of her sickness. She got in the habit of walking the deck in any kind of weather.
One evening when the captain warned her of a coming storm, she decided to keep reading, rather than go down to her putrid berth. The squall came quickly. Before she had a chance to race belowdecks a giant wave reared up over the side of the ship and crashed down on her.
