Lady Romeo

by Tana Wojczuk

  In the balcony scene, Emma watched two women make love in plain sight. “At the moment of impassioned parting,” she remembered, “Romeo returned again and again for a last embrace and finally pressed one of (Juliet’s) ringlets to his lips.”

  After the performance, Wayman Crow introduced Charlotte to his family, and during the rest of her time in St. Louis, Charlotte spent all her free time with nineteen-year-old Emma. By the time Charlotte finally left Missouri, the two women were in love.

  “Darling mine, I wish you would burn my letters,” Charlotte wrote to Emma Crow on June 20, as she departed for Albany, New York: “You do not know into whose hands an accident might make them fall.” “If you do not promise to burn them I shall have to be careful how I write and you will not like that,” she warned, “You can always keep one and when another comes then destroy the old one,” she advised. But Emma Crow ignored the request. And even after Charlotte returned to Rome that winter with Emma Stebbins she continued to write to her “little lover” with abandon.

  * * *

  Charlotte settled back into her domestic routine in Rome, but after the breakneck speed of her tour, her days seemed prosaic. She rose at 7 a.m., had breakfast with her household at 8, and then said goodbye to Emma Stebbins, who began the mile-long walk to her studio. Charlotte’s friends, it seemed, were looking more ragged than before. Hattie was often out at all hours, going to parties, and their mutual friend Elizabeth Barrett Browning worried she might be taking drugs. (Elizabeth herself was addicted to opium.)

  The physical pain Charlotte often felt after the rigors of performing and after the nausea of ocean travel did not retreat even after days of rest, and she often was too tired to complete even the simplest daily tasks. The weather was bad that winter, the paths too slippery and treacherous for riding. She felt stifled and ill, and the only cure seemed to be her letters from Emma Crow.

  In letters to Emma Crow she now referred to her partner as “Miss Stebbins” and claimed they were only good friends. Emma Stebbins knew about the other Emma but thought it was a passing flirtation. When she found out that Charlotte was still writing to her, she was furious.

  Charlotte denied that she had done anything wrong and went ahead and invited Emma Crow to Rome. As a buffer, she also invited Ned to come at the same time. Now grown-up, Ned had been working in India and had recently recovered from a long illness. In her letters to Emma Crow, Charlotte bragged about Ned’s good looks, especially his new beard, which she said made him look more manly.

  When Emma Crow arrived, she was hurt that Charlotte avoided her, trusting her together with Ned. Ned seemed interested, and after several weeks together he proposed. Emma married Ned and by a kind of transitive property took Charlotte’s name, becoming Emma Cushman. The arrangement was meant to placate Stebbins, but it also gave Charlotte and her little lover license to spend as much time together as they wanted.

  Even after the marriage, tensions in the household grew, and finally the newlyweds decided to move back to America. The move was painful for Emma Cushman, who had married Ned believing she could continue her love affair with Charlotte. When she became pregnant, Emma hoped for “a little Charlotte,” and after she and Ned moved back to America, Charlotte wrote to her daily, openly wishing the unborn baby was her and Emma’s child. When Emma miscarried late in her pregnancy, they were both devastated. But Emma soon became pregnant again, and when the little boy was safely delivered, Charlotte rushed across the Atlantic to be at Emma’s side.

  Though she was deeply wounded by the affair, Emma Stebbins was too well bred to storm off to London as Max had done. She and Charlotte remained committed to each other, and though Charlotte did occasionally return to the stage in brief, frenetic burtsts, she dedicated herself to Stebbins’s career. When Stebbins was competing for a commission to make a statue of Horace Mann for the Massachusetts State House Charlotte sent free theatre tickets to Horace and his wife, the former Mary Peabody. Emma got the commission.

  Emma also began working on the statue that would be her masterpiece, Angel of the Waters for the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Emma got the commission in 1862 from her brother Henry—who was then chairman of the New York Parks Committee on Statuary. The Angel shares Charlotte’s powerful body, her strong thighs and hips, her powerful back and shoulders. The fountain would commemorate the opening of the Croton Aqueduct, which brought clean water to New York City, and would stand at the end of the Poet’s Walk in Central Park. The Angel holds a lily, the symbol of healing. This was particularly symbolic because by the time she began designing the statue, Emma knew that Charlotte’s migraines and recurring colds were symptoms of breast cancer. Though no women were celebrated on the Poet’s Walk, Emma used the opportunity to make the Bethesda Fountain a secret tribute to Charlotte.

  chapter fourteen Civil Wars

  In May 1854, a Democratic senator from Illinois named Stephen A. Douglas, along with President Franklin Pierce, won passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed slavery to be voted on state by state. Many believed Douglas would be Pierce’s successor. The act, however, angered Abraham Lincoln, who decided he would not let Douglas win without a fight. Lincoln and Douglas debated each other across the country. The debate over slavery revealed that nothing had been solved by the Compromise of 1850, and bit by bit the American people became so divided that a major conflict became inevitable, even as Lincoln assumed the presidency in March 1861.

  The war began in April. The Rebel Army bombarded the garrison at Fort Sumpter and took it over, raising the Confederate flag. Then Virginia seceded from the Union. Despite this, many people assumed the war would be over by the end of the year, even William Seward, Lincoln’s newly appointed secretary of state. Seward and Charlotte were good friends, and he wrote to her in Rome that he believed the war would be short-lived, she disagreed, telling him she was buying cotton shares.

  In July 1861, Charlotte came to America for a brief tour and stayed with William Seward and his family in Washington. Seward took her to the White House to introduce her to the newly elected President Lincoln. He led her to Lincoln’s office on the second floor, where the President rose to greet her, lanky and in his serious black suit. He dressed like someone for whom clothes were a regrettable necessity, but his personality was warm and welcoming: “Standing beside the flag in front of his marble fireplace, tilting back in his black leather chair, Lincoln drawled his eager references to the theatre, especially Shakespeare, to plays he had seen recently when he had slipped unannounced into a box.” He had not seen Charlotte onstage, but he made her promise not to retire before he had seen her in Macbeth, his favorite play.

  After Charlotte returned to Rome, the war continued to escalate. Thousands of volunteers joined the Union and Confederate armies, including many immigrants and free black men. Few had any military training. The Union Army was defeated at the Battle of Manassas (later known as the Battle of Bull Run) on July 21. More than 4,500 men died in that battle alone, though this was just the beginning; more than half a million more would die before the war’s end.

  By 1863 it was clear that there was more war to come than had already passed. In Rome, Charlotte read about the war with growing fear for her American friends and her homeland, “so heart sick that I hardly know how to talk or write about it.”

  Determined to help, she decided to return to America to raise money for the Union Army’s Sanitary Commission, an organization that provided medical equipment and support to doctors and nurses on the battlefield. She knew that the more star power she could muster the more money she could raise, so she wrote to her old friend and former costar Edwin Booth about playing opposite her in Macbeth. Edwin, however, was in deep mourning for his wife, Mary, who had died suddenly of pneumonia in February, leaving Edwin to raise their daughter Edwina alone. Charlotte urged Edwin to say yes to her offer and do his part nevertheless.

  Edwin agreed to do it, though he tried to talk her out of doing Macbeth. He had a small, lithe physique and
his acting style tended to be meditative, while Charlotte was often described in terms of natural disasters like a “whirlwind” or wild animals like a “python” or “pantheress.” It could also be argued that the nation’s mood was not right for such a dark, morally difficult play. But Charlotte had a promise to keep.

  In June of 1863 she sailed for America from England on a Cunard steamer. The passengers were divided according to their Northern or Southern sympathies and during the entire voyage the two groups refused to socialize with one another. Charlotte tried to stay on deck as much as possible, pacing the boards of the ship talking with the other passengers, including a merchant named Henry Swift. Swift was a seasoned traveler who imported goods from South America. He loved the theatre, and felt his children’s education would not be complete until they had seen Edwin Booth and Charlotte Cushman onstage.

  After many weeks at sea, recalled Swift, a call rang out for land. Though they were still a long way off, the horizon came into view as a few pilot boats raced toward the ship. Charlotte and the other “faithful ones” commandeered the gangway, “so they would be the first to hear the news the little boats carried.” The first man climbed from his boat and the crowd “gave three rousing cheers and a Tiger.” (A nautical saying: Mark Twain describes a “tiger” as three cheers followed by a loud growl.) “What news?” asked Charlotte and the others, their hands on their hats, ready to throw them up if it was good. The news was bad, the confederacy had rallied and won another victory. Union supporters dropped their heads. Suddenly, according to Swift, “Miss Cushman’s little foot resounded on the deck with a positive protest and she said ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ turned upon her heel and marched away with the tread of a Spanish Cavalier.” Nearby, Swift turned to a friend and said, “Three cheers for Charlotte Cushman.”

  * * *

  When she arrived in Washington on October 9, 1863, Charlotte again stayed with the Sewards, whose house had become a social hub of Washington society. It was a large, two-story red brick building just northeast of the Capitol, with trees that grew so thickly that you could hardly see a visitor coming up the walk. William Seward was elegant and handsome and his wife, Frances, was beautiful and intellectual. Both were committed abolitionists. Their nineteen-year-old daughter, Fanny, was as brilliant as her parents and hoped to be a writer. She was used to the comings and goings of great artists, thinkers, and politicians, but Charlotte was special. She had made a lasting impression on Fanny during her visit two years earlier. To Fanny, Charlotte was proof that an unmarried woman could be happy and successful—a model for the single life she planned to lead.

  During this visit, Fanny studied every detail of Charlotte’s speech and appearance and made extensive notes about her in her diary. Fanny meant these notes to be a script for her future life. When Charlotte arrived, Fanny noted that she dressed almost in a military fashion, with a “drab traveling duster” and a dress of the same fabric. Under those serious traveling clothes, she sometimes also wore a pin-striped skirt and linen pin-striped shirt, with the collar and sleeves showing beneath her dress. Fanny noticed that Charlotte was “very tall—a good deal taller than myself,” and stout, with steely gray hair that tended to wave, and which she wore pulled back on the sides and rolled forward at the top. Fanny thought the style balanced Charlotte’s exaggerated features, her “massive brows,” “expressive” eyes, a face full of “energy & firmness.” Fanny guessed Charlotte was in her mid-fifties (she was forty-seven) but seemed girlish. She had a queenly grandeur and seemed lit up from within, and despite what others said, Fanny declared her beautiful, “far more beautiful than youth or regularity of features alone could be.” Charlotte’s mercurial expression was difficult to capture in painting or photographs, but Fanny found her face “possesses sublimity.” Intelligent, full of good humor yet deeply impressive, it was the face “of a great, true woman.”

  Emma Crow Cushman had been traveling with Charlotte since June, and Fanny found her friendly and intelligent, but was not smitten as she was with Charlotte. When Seward came home, Charlotte joined the men talking politics. She spoke easily of current events, observed Fanny, “with the ease and air of habit which is usually confined to men,—her views comprehensive, clear, far-sighted.” The men often kept her up talking until late at night. As the hub of an enormous network of friends and acquaintances—and with a massive correspondence she kept up meticulously—Charlotte had access to excellent information, and she was not shy about connecting people she liked if she thought they could do each other good. She was also widely read, funny, engaging, and an excellent conversationalist.

  President Lincoln came nearly every night to dine with Charlotte while she stayed with the Sewards in Washington. Much had changed since she met him in 1861, when they still hoped the war would be over quickly. Now, three years into the war, Lincoln, like Macbeth, was “in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

  During her last visit, Lincoln’s “ready good humor” had made her laugh so much she forgot what she wanted to say. Now, however, Lincoln’s face seemed “so overspread with sadness” he resembled Shakespeare’s sad clown Jacques, “translated from the forest of Arden to the capital of Illinois.” Yet he lit up when he spoke on subjects that interested him, like his favorite play.

  “I think nothing equals Macbeth,” Lincoln had written to the actor James Hackett three months earlier. He preferred to read Shakespeare himself, which let him study the text the way he also studied the Bible, but he also enjoyed finding out how an actor’s conception of the play differed from his own. In fact, when a congressman brought the actor John McDonough to the White House one night, Lincoln kept him talking for four hours about Shakespeare. “Lincoln was eager to know why certain scenes were left out of productions… He was fascinated by the different ways classic lines could be delivered,” McDonough recalled. During their conversation Lincoln often lifted his “well-thumbed volume” of Shakespeare from the shelf, reading aloud some passages, reciting others from memory. Charlotte, who had seen Hackett perform in 1845 and declared him terrible, was celebrated for her understanding of the sense as well as the effect of Shakespeare’s lines. Lincoln was eager to see her and had tickets for the night of October 17.

  A few days before the performance, Charlotte and Fanny took a tour of the new Ford’s Theatre. The theatre was only a few blocks away, on Tenth Street, so they walked, talking animatedly the whole way. Inside Ford’s Theatre daylight streamed in through the high windows. In a nod to growing female audiences, the building had a separate ladies’ entrance and exit. Charlotte entertained Fanny by revealing stage secrets. Next to the prompter’s box was a long, hollow piece of iron filled with dried peas hung on the wall. Charlotte took hold of it and shook it mightily, making thunder.

  * * *

  On the night of October 17 Lincoln walked to Grover’s Theatre, a few blocks from the Capitol and within spitting distance of Ford’s, its rival. Grover’s was not well insulated, and was known to be cold in winter and hot in summer, but Lincoln had been there more than a hundred times, sometimes with Seward, sometimes alone. “Exceedingly conversant in Shakespeare,” Lincoln turned to the Bard to help him in a time of great stress. As with the Bible, Shakespeare gives no straightforward answers, but riddles, which, when puzzled out, offered a method for thinking through a problem.

  Macbeth begins on a battlefield, the war already lost and won. It is a play not about war but what comes after, themes already on the President’s mind: “o’er-leaping ambition” that jumps over the top step and falls on the other side. Ambition is, as in the Bible, an “illness” rather than a virtue (a profoundly un-American sentiment). Ambition makes Macbeth paranoid and makes Lady Macbeth mad.

  That freezing October night the dead still lay unburied on the field at Gettysburg, where they had been rotting since July. On Lindon’s desk lay an unfinished draft of the Gettysburg Address.

  In the icy auditorium, Linco
ln watched Charlotte as Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking scene. She seemed to glide downstage silently as a ghost, violently wringing her hands, trying to wash away the unseen gore: “Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard?”

  The scene echoes the Old Testament’s Matthew 27:24, where Pontius Pilate washes Jesus’s blood from his hands. With his long study of Shakespeare and the Bible, Lincoln would have recognized the way the Bard associates Lady Macbeth and her husband with Pilate the traitor. He may also have recalled Pilate’s next lines: “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” Pilate announces. “You shall bear the responsibility.” And the people answer, “His blood be on us and on our children!”

  A year later, in 1864, Edwin Booth and his brothers, Junius Jr. and John Wilkes, performed together at the Winter Garden in New York, in a benefit production of Julius Caesar. The event raised more than $5,000 to fund a statue of William Shakespeare for Central Park.

  John Wilkes Booth thought he saw a message in the play. Though he played Marc Antony, he saw himself as an avenging Brutus murdering the tyrant Caesar and restoring the republic. It was a role that would eventually consume him, and on the night of April 14, 1865, he shot Lincoln from behind on the balcony of Ford’s Theatre. Then he jumped onstage waving a gun crying out “sic semper tyrannis,” an echo of what Brutus is thought to have shouted as he murdered Caesar.Thus always to tyrants. In the balcony the President slumped in his chair, a bullet in his head. Nine hours later, the great emancipator was dead.