Lady Romeo

by Tana Wojczuk

Blinded by the water, she thought she had been swept overboard. The wave shook her like a doll, knocking her off her feet and across the ship, where she lodged under the bulwark and stuck there. The bulwark, it turned out, was all that saved her from being thrown into the sea. Panicked sailors pried her out “half-drowned” and took her, shivering, below deck, where someone gave her dry clothes. Even then she was still “a little afraid,” reminded of almost drowning off Long Wharf when she was a girl. But soon she regained her composure, even cracking jokes. “I was,” she wrote in a letter to her mother, “the most dripping young woman you ever saw.”

  The next day, the mood of the sea had changed completely; the sky was clear and “glaringly beautiful.” Charlotte, in a lilac dress with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders in the early morning chill, walked on the deck shading her eyes from the sunlight reflecting off the water. Looking up, she saw in the pale sky a few “fleecy” clouds and the slender new moon “in its first quarter.” Over the side she saw what she took to be a good sign: porpoises jumping from the water “and bringing a beautiful wake behind them.” Taking breakfast with the captain in the wheelhouse, round and windowed on all sides like a goldfish bowl, she could see the ocean surrounding her. She was the first passenger to hear the botswain shout out, “Land ho!”

  The shout brought everyone on deck, and Charlotte saw with alarm that they were within a mile of Fastnet Rock and speeding toward it. Fastnet Rock marked the southernmost point of Ireland, but with no lighthouse to guide ships around it, many crashed there, within sight of land. Thankfully the Garrick sailed deftly around it, and soon they were journeying past Wales. Looking up at the white cliffs where “the foam there curls / And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s,” Charlotte thought how close she’d come to being a body washed up on that shore.

  chapter nine Enemies Abroad

  What fairer seal

  Shall I require to my authentic mission

  Than this fierce energy?—this instinct striving

  Because its nature is to strive?

  —Robert Browning, “Paracelsus”

  (copied in Charlotte’s diary)

  The Garrick docked in Liverpool in November 1844, and before heading to London Charlotte spent a few days in Manchester with a couple she’d met on the ship. Although she’d made friends on board, Charlotte knew that most of the British people she would meet looked down on Americans as unmannered roughs. Charles Dickens had recently published his scathing American Notes, and Charlotte had made the mistake of bringing his new novel Martin Chuzzlewit on board. In the novel a young rogue is punished by being forced to immigrate to America. She’d also heard many “disgusting” arguments between American and British passengers during the trip and found herself acting in the role of cultural ambassador—not just for her country but for her profession. One Englishwoman told her how surprised she was to discover Charlotte was an actress. “Whether she means it as a compliment or not,” Charlotte wrote in exasperation, “I cannot know.”

  In Scotland, she went out riding every day. One afternoon, riding over the hills, she was stopped cold by the sight of a fox hunt. It was a scene of violence and beauty that could have been painted by Turner. Men in red coats and white breeches tucked inside tall black boots bent low over their horses’ necks to follow the hounds racing across the landscape, its natural beauty punctured by long, slim smokestacks rising along the horizon.

  When she returned to the house, there was a letter waiting for her. Macready wanted her to come to Paris, where his leading lady, the beautiful Helen Faucit, had just dropped out of a show. Charlotte relished the chance to turn her onetime friend down and knew it was a bad idea to debut as the replacement for an actress famed for her good looks. She immediately rejected his offer. He wrote back, “quite ill-tempered,” saying she was “taking an irreversible step,” and the next day sent a man from London to persuade her. But Charlotte remained firm, still resentful of him for standing her up at her benefit. When she read later in the newspaper that some small accident had kept him from traveling to Paris as he’d planned, she had a good laugh.

  Finally arriving in London, Charlotte and Sallie moved into modest rooms in Covent Garden, and lived simply, proud they could make “a pound of mutton last three days.” Charlotte went out every day to look for work, introducing herself to all the important theatre managers, who rejected her. She discovered that success in America not only carried little weight here but also might work against her, as the British were suspicious of American tastes.

  When Charlotte heard that J. M. Maddox was looking for actors for the Princess Theatre, and that he had recently hired an American, Edwin Forrest, she put her letters of reference in her purse and went to see him.

  At the theatre, Maddox invited her into his office, where he sat surrounded by portraits and mementos of the most famous British actors of the age, including Charlotte’s former costars Junius Booth and William Macready. Charlotte showed Maddox her references and clippings of her best reviews, but he, too, said no. He even suggested she might be too ugly to be an actress. Charlotte gathered her papers and started to leave but turned again in the doorway, fixing Maddox with the furious stare of Meg Merrilies. Falling to her knees, she looked up, raising a fist: “I know I have enemies in this country,” she thundered in a voice cracking with emotion, “so help me—I’ll defeat them!”

  Maddox recognized at once the energy of Lady Macbeth and Meg’s “prophetic spirit.” “Hello,” said Maddox to himself, “so help me, she’s got the stuff in her.” She was hired.

  Maddox was known to be a difficult manager, a strong negotiator, and “obstinate” in anything to do with business. Even his star actors had to wheedle for a pay raise, causing some, like the actor George Vandenhoff, to call Maddox—who was Jewish and spoke with a strong Yiddish accent—a “Shylock.” Charlotte, however, respected Maddox’s toughness and knew she was also a strong negotiator. When her brother Charles joined her in London in May 1845, he reported to Mary Eliza that Charlotte was “looking very well and is in very good spirits. Actually she is surrounded by friends who consider her the beau ideal of everything that is great… pleading a case of Mr Maddox: in the open [air], energizes her in an extraordinary manner.” Maddox in turn respected her vitality and stubbornness, two qualities she shared with her new American costar, Edwin Forrest.

  * * *

  If Charlotte was at a disadvantage because of her looks, Forrest had risen to fame thanks to his. As a youth, Forrest had made his debut in a female role, when the actress playing a captive odalisque suddenly fell ill. But he grew up, and up, and up, reaching a height of five-foot-ten, taller than most men, and so thickly muscled he was described as “the Farnese Hercules,” after the famous statue. “Sardonically handsome,” he wore his long dark hair swept back; bushy sideburns nicknamed muttonchops framed his face, and he chose costumes that exposed his strong and shapely arms and legs.

  As an actor, however, his reviews were mixed. The American critic William Winter described Forrest as an actor with “iron repose, perfect precision of method, immense physical force, capacity for leonine banter, fiery ferocity and occasional felicity of elocution.” But critics sometimes complained of his “stentorian” tone, more lecturing than levitating, and unclear pronunciation that made Shakespeare difficult to understand. He had tremendous power, however, and was “utterly unselfish” with his energy onstage. His brawn at times overwhelmed his brains, making him look like some “vast animal bewildered by a grain of genius.”

  Still, Forrest was America’s darling, the most famous actor they had yet produced. He had performed in Europe once before, and rumors of his success helped him make a fortune when he returned to America. Charlotte suspected, however, that Forrest’s manager had paid audiences and critics to make Forrest seem more successful than he was.

  Charlotte had negotiated with Maddox to let her play Romeo if she first played Lady Macbeth opposite Forrest. Maddox clearly expected the two Americans to have
good chemistry, but he was wrong. The Forrest/Cushman Macbeth opened to mixed reviews. Forrest’s Macbeth seemed strangely milquetoast, cowed by Charlotte’s energetic Lady Macbeth. The more she pushed the less he resisted; even his tone was subdued. “It was something worse than ridiculous,” a critic wrote, “to hear a man in such a great part as Macbeth—the sport of passion—the agent of supernatural powers—speak as cooly and easily as if his conversation were not upon treason and destiny, but upon the state of the weather.” Another critic called Forrest’s performance “the most unsatisfactory, the most inconclusive performance… known to the higher drama of this country.” Londoners were unimpressed by Forrest’s brawn and scandalized by his pronunciation. In a culture where caste and accent were synonymous, Forrest’s American-ese made him sound—unforgivably—like a laborer pretending to be a king.

  Though Charlotte was furious at Forrest for what she perceived as laziness, her own performance was surprisingly well received. Critics thought she feelingly evoked the “emptiness of ambition” and the “agony of gratified desire.” One dissenting observer was so startled by her physical strength he wondered whether Charlotte might haul off and hit her husband, but generally London reviewers thought she was one of the best Lady Macbeths they had ever seen and crowned her the new Sarah Siddons. Charlotte thought that, considering the English “don’t like Americans in the newspapers,” she had done well.

  The news of Charlotte’s success quickly crossed the Atlantic to her home country, much to Walt Whitman’s annoyance—he chastised Americans for failing to recognize her greatness sooner and was annoyed that the British seemed to be trying to claim her as their own. “Charlotte Cushman is no ‘second Siddons,’ ” he retorted in a column for the Brooklyn Eagle, “she is herself, and that is far, far better!” Furthermore, she was “ahead of any player that ever yet trod the stage. Fanny Kemble, Ellen Tree, Miss Phillips, &c.—Macready, Kean, Kemble &c.—all had, or have, their merits; all played well, and their acting has afforded many an intellectual man and woman a rich treat. But Miss Cushman assuredly bears away the palm from them all, men and women.”

  * * *

  Every evening Charlotte spent hours next to the flickering light of her lamp, reading and rereading old letters from Rose. She wrote to Rose almost daily but received nothing in return. She even wrote to Rose’s father hoping to find out what was wrong, but still nothing. She noted gloomily in her diary every day that passed without a letter.

  Charlotte was deeply homesick. Hoping to convince her family to join her abroad, she wrote a long letter to her mother, enclosing her press clippings as proof of her “brilliant and triumphant success in London.” The ecstatic reaction of the press was “far beyond my most sanguine expectations and in my most ambitious moments I never dreamed of the success that awaited me.” She was so popular, she wrote, she never went anywhere with “fewer than six people.” She didn’t mention late nights spent crying over Rose, tussles with Forrest and Macready, and the near failure with Maddox. “I have done more than any American has done in London. I truly have,” she wrote. “No American has ever succeeded as I have. And though my heart bounds for it, yet I feel so sick for home I hardly know what to do.” When she finally finished the letter, it was 3 a.m. “Play Lady Macbeth tomorrow,” she signed off wearily. “I have hardly the strength to hold my head up.”

  Charlotte’s performances continued to pack the theatre through the cold winter weather, and Maddox eagerly signed her on for the season, but the success was bitter on her tongue. She’d finally gotten a letter from Rose, which revealed that Thomas Sully had banned his daughter from having any further relationship with Charlotte. It seemed that a mutual friend had been gossiping about Rose and Charlotte’s not-so-innocent relationship, and word had gotten back to Thomas Sully. If he had suspected that their relationship was romantic before, the fear of public exposure made him act now. Rose returned the portrait Charlotte had commissioned of herself for Rose to hang in her bedroom.

  Instead of winning the admiration of her family and friends, instead of letters congratulating her on her hard-won success, Charlotte received criticism from her mother and chilly silence from Thomas Sully, a man she had called “father.” And Rose did not put up a fight.

  When Mary Eliza excoriated her for dragging the Cushman family name through the mud, Charlotte responded as a mother might to a petulant child. “I have not slept for three nights and look like a ghost,” she fumed. She had been looking forward to congratulations, she wrote, not more malicious gossip. The argument with her mother continued for weeks, sapping Charlotte’s energy and distracting her from her work. In early spring Charlotte received a final goodbye letter from Rose. Heartbroken, she went into mourning, not only for her lost love, but for the life they’d imagined together at Clover Hill. Still, the length of the ordeal lessened the blow—so did a new flirtation with a young woman who occasionally spent the night (telling her parents she was trapped by a snowstorm). For more company, Charlotte bought herself a dog and threw herself into her work. She was busy planning her next big role: Romeo. In preparation, she wrote to her sister, Susan, with clear instructions: she was to join her in London. Charlotte needed a Juliet.

  chapter ten Lady Romeo

  Casting Susan as Juliet had been Charlotte’s idea, and Maddox agreed, despite his skepticism. Susan was pretty and feminine, with large greenish-brown eyes and dark brown hair she wore parted in the center like her sister. She was shorter and slimmer than Charlotte, and her time at the Park had made her into a fine “walking lady” (a kind of acting jack of all trades). The idea of two sisters playing Romeo and Juliet was a novel one. In another twist, Charlotte also demanded that they work with the full text of the play, rather than the bowdlerized version from David Garrick that had been in fashion for decades. In the Garrick version, Juliet wakes before Romeo dies and the lovers are given “a mess of dialogue from [Garrick’s] own pen,” which, one critic wrote, “the best epithet for is balderdash.” Charlotte, an American, insisted on a purity and fidelity to the original that Shakespeare no longer enjoyed in his own land.

  At the time, it was a controversial choice. Other actors in the production “expressed in no uncertain terms the difficulty the ‘original text’ was giving them.” They saw Charlotte as a pushy American, and considered the restoration of Shakespeare’s text not in terms of purity, but as a regression to something “primitive.” While Charlotte and Susan rehearsed, their fellow actors complained about them behind their backs, deriding them as “American Indians.” But Charlotte continued to insist that they perform the play as written, even if that meant the whole company of actors would have to memorize new lines.

  In the end, she got her way. The controversy over the production and the unusual pairing of two sisters in the lead roles made for a good story and on opening night the theatre was packed.

  As a gesture of goodwill, William Macready sent Charlotte a dagger from one of his own performances with a note of encouragement. The superstition was that stage daggers never went dull, if kept in constant use. Before taking the stage on opening night, she slid the dagger into its sheath and belted it around her waist. In her dressing room she pulled on tall boots and smoothed her tunic of gold velvet. She had cut her hair short and curled it so that it fell in boyish waves around her ears. Susan was costumed in a tight-waisted, bare-shouldered dress of bridal white.

  “Love is a smoke,” Romeo declares at the start of the play, a troubled sea “nourish’d with lovers’ tears.” Though Garrick’s version cut out Romeo’s love affair with a girl named Rosaline, Charlotte had restored it for a reason. In Romeo’s first lines, Charlotte “disclosed that ardent, passionate disposition that waited but for the opportunity to break forth with irresistible violence, so that the first scenes contained the whole possibility of the tragedy.” Critics approved of the choice.

  The British audience also appreciated Charlotte’s clear enunciation of Shakespeare’s lines and her lack of a strong America
n accent. She had learned to speak well growing up among upper-class New Englanders and could pass for someone high-class. She had perfected the effect by copying Macready’s accent. In fact, wrote one jokester, she even looked a bit like him: “the bend of the knee, slight sneer of the lip / the frown on the forehead, the hand on the hip / in the chin, in the voice, ’tis the same to a tittle, / Miss Cushman is Mr. Macready in little.”

  Charlotte was a convincing swordsman; she dueled like someone “to the manor born.” During a fight scene with Tybalt, Charlotte hit her opponent’s sword so hard that his weapon went flying downstage toward the audience. The pit erupted in cheers. “Miss Cushman is the one person we have seen who can handle a sword in stage combat so as not to make the encounter seem ridiculously prearranged,” marveled one critic, “and at the same time give the affray the appearance of reality without savageness.”

  Her passion for Juliet also gave the appearance of reality, though with her sister as her costar, she was protected from further salacious gossip. Women found her Romeo an ideal lover: impulsive, sensitive, courageous, and cavalier. This sentiment was put best by an anonymous female fan: “Charlotte Cushman is a very dangerous young man.”

  Men, too, were moved by Charlotte’s Romeo. Audiences were used to seeing plays that emphasized men’s capacity for savagery, but she showed them something new. When Charlotte discovered Juliet dead in a tomb, she did not merely hold the cold, dead hand, as others did, she crushed Juliet in her arms and wept freely. As Romeo, Charlotte revealed emotions men were not supposed to express in public. Her Romeo even made critics uncharacteristically self-reflective: “The character of Romeo is one which every man of sentiment takes to himself, and estimates according to his own feelings and impulses,” wrote one observer. “Perhaps a more intellectual and at the same time a more theatrically effective performance has never been witnessed,” enthused another.