Alcohol was the catalyst for most of these incidents. Junius claimed he drank to buffer the emotional wear and tear of acting. Unfortunately he had a taste for what his friends called the jolly god.36 Liquor pushed his delicately balanced mind out of kilter, and he became a potential danger to himself and others.
The demons waned on occasion. There were extended periods when he was entirely lucid onstage, a pleasure to live with, and a delight to know. His behavior was best at the farm. He purposely kept no liquor there, and, free of the need to please others, he could regain his peace of mind and expend his energies by hoeing in the turnip patch.37 Here he was at his happiest. Still accounted peculiar, he was accepted as an industrious person with a conscientious wife and good children, a man who paid his bills on time and left others alone. Said Aunty Rogers: “He was a gentleman and a gentle man.” Even at the farm, however, the storm could rage, as she well knew. When his favorite horse, Peacock, died, he broke down completely. Convinced that Mary Ann could bring the horse back to life, he forced her to wrap herself in a sheet and mount the dead animal. As she sat riveted with fear, he marched around her with a gun, reading from a book. Joseph Hall ran to fetch the Rogerses, who disarmed the father and led the terror-stricken mother to safety.38
Mary Ann never attempted to fix her wreck of a husband. How could she? She simply tidied up after him. Declining to question anything he did or said, no matter how extravagant, she picked up the pieces and carried on. John and his siblings were taught to follow her example and “regard these periodic tortures of mind, these seasons of abstraction, with sad and reverent forbearance.”39 Conventional, placid, and long-suffering, Mary Ann held things together, wrote James Young Jr., a friend of Aunty Rogers, through her patience and her ability to contend with whatever came next.40 Remarkably, she remained upbeat. “My mother was like sunshine,” recalled Asia.41 The journalist George Alfred Townsend felt her struggles ennobled her and lifted those around her. “The realities of a new country and a sinister, timorous life in a forest patch, her love for her handsome brood, and her despair of her husband raised Mrs. Booth. She made men out of mimes.”42
john’s formal education started before a small rectangular blackboard in a one-room schoolhouse across the road from the entrance to the farm. “He was by no means a studious boy,” recalled George Y. Maynadier, a classmate. “He was not deficient in intelligence and brains—very much in fact the other way—but he was not bookish, not devoted to his studies.”43
Better opportunities awaited at Bel Air Academy, where Edwin Arnold, a former Anglican minister with a doctorate in civil law, was principal.44 The strong-minded Arnold was a no-nonsense teacher who considered education a higher calling than the ministry, and he meant business when he tolled the deeply resonant bell in the cupola atop the fortress-like school to summon his pupils.45
John perplexed Arnold. The principal believed that young minds should feel a natural pleasure in learning, yet John was no case in point. Classes were difficult for him. Memorization was challenging, spelling problematic, and math nightmarish. Hunched forward over his desk, his mouth firmly set, John clasped his brow with both hands as if he could push knowledge into his head. The problem was that, unlike his brothers, he was a slower learner. “He had to plod,” recalled his sister Asia. “His was not a quickly receptive mind.” As a result he often lagged behind his classmates.46 These childhood struggles were reflected in an adulthood of mediocre writing and orthography. In one modern collection of fifty-five of his letters—the bulk of his known correspondence—he apologized in two-thirds of them for inelegant grammar or misspelling or blamed a bad pen, poor light, haste, or low spirits. “I am, at the best of times, the worst letter writer in the world,” he lamented to a friend.47
On a certain Friday night, when Arnold was believed to be safely out of the way, John participated in a memorable school “blow-out.” Deciding to throw themselves a party, members of the debating society spent the club’s dues on “pitchers of hot stuff ” purchased by the larger boys at a hotel. They played cards, sang songs, and drank. As the hot stuff disappeared, so did self-restraint. “Pandemonium broke loose,” recalled Maynadier, a happy participant in the near-riot that ensued. Hijinks and blood-curdling screams startled the sleepy village. John and a few others were caught, saved only by the fact “that so many were engaged in the affair, equally guilty, that expulsion as a punishment would have broken up the school.”
Though he was popular at the academy, John hated being there. He preferred hanging about the stable and watering the horses. “He was fond of the saddle and learned to ride with his first pair of boots,” wrote James Shettel, a historian who spoke with John’s classmates.48 Delighted when Rose gave him a saddle for his birthday, he quickly displayed the balance, coordination, and quiet attentiveness characteristic of a natural-born rider. “Booth, sitting his horse like a centaur, was no common horseman,” wrote the actor Charles Warwick. “His head erect, his riding whip more for ornament than use, his slender steel spur scarcely seemed to touch the stirrup as he rode.”49 He was exceedingly fond of Cola di Rienzi, his beautiful black colt, and taught him to neigh, stamp, bow, follow, and lie down as if dead.50 Cola provided John a power and sense of independence comparable only to that experienced by a modern-day youth with his first car. Riding the open country, plunging through streams, and exploring forest trails brought a sense of profound happiness to the boy, said his friend Thomas Harbin, later a famous Confederate agent.51
Early on it was clear that John loved excitement.52 “He had a twinkle in his eye that seemed to say, ‘If I could only think of a good joke to play on you, I should be supremely happy,’” recalled H. Stearns Smiley, who knew him professionally later in life.53 Maynadier caught the receiving end of his humor one July afternoon as he and others lounged on a porch in Bel Air. What seemed like a land mine suddenly went off under their feet. John had thrown fireworks at them from a nearby hotel just to shake things up. Another prank involved Cola. When John rode to Bel Air, he would lean out of the saddle with the colt at a gallop and snatch up any small child walking along. It was all in fun, and he never hurt anyone, but it was reckless, and he was ordered to stop it.54 “John was a wild and impetuous youth,” said Robert Hanna, a schoolmate who recalled these occasions in a 1906 interview. “The older folks just shook their heads.”55
Junius tried to channel this energy into something productive. The father had always admired furniture makers, whose artistry produced results more tangible than his own, so he fitted out a workshop for John with hammers, saws, and planes. Happily, the practical nature of woodworking appealed to the boy. He made a set of chairs with laurel wood bent cleverly into curves for the arms and back. He also built a handsome pine sewing table as a gift for his mother. The piece featured triangles of oak bark forming a six-pointed star inlaid in the center. Around the three-cornered base of the table were symmetrically spaced sycamore knots with laurel branches twining up like vines.56
The wood for these projects and even for the fireplaces and stove at the farm came from trees downed by age or storms. Junius ordered that no live tree on the property ever be cut and no animal killed for food. Horses and cattle employed for farm work were to be treated humanely. The livestock were to be watered twice a day, the dogs given clean bed-straw weekly. Hunting and fishing were strictly forbidden. Even snakes could not be harmed or flies swatted. Here, in one little corner of Maryland, the boar, the deer, and the partridge existed free from fear of man. The world was cruel enough, declared the father. “Let the poor devils live.”57
in 1845 baltimore drew Junius back. Its railroad connections were convenient for his professional travels and its opportunities superior for his children, so he purchased a house in the city, and the Booths split their time between there and the farm.58 The move had a profound effect on John. Baltimore, bigger than Philadelphia or Boston, was the second-largest city in the United States. It was a dynamic and enterprising warren of docks, factories,
mills, colleges, banks, roundhouses, and hospitals, all dominated by a skyline thick with church steeples. The contrast with the Harford countryside was striking. As a result John’s childhood was more cosmopolitan than that of most others who made their way to the Confederate cause. While their roots tended to be exclusively rural, his mixed the country with the most sophisticated city life the South offered.
The Booth house at No. 62 North Exeter Street was located in Baltimore’s “Old Town” just east of the city’s commercial core. It was a substantial brick town house with a roomy attic and a side passage leading to a sizable backyard. The house nestled unobtrusively into the neighborhood of residences and small shops. The Booths had a banker living on one side and a grocer living above her business on the other. The street before the house was tree-lined. Nearby residences were adorned with colorfully painted shutters, and doors had large brass door-knockers.59 The overall feeling along North Exeter was quiet, settled, and middle-class. Although their house looked plain (except for the Italianate touches in the door surround and cornice), Mary Ann and Rose worked hard to give it a cheery and comfortable interior. How proud they were when the actress Rosalie Pelby exclaimed, “This is a home, not merely a habitation.”60
John’s education continued with Susan Hyde, who ran a small school on nearby High Street. Preceptress Hyde was a young woman with glasses, corkscrew curls, and a handy rattan cane. As modest as her establishment, she was described by Edwin as “a woman all through—in the true sense of that word—gentle in manner, soft in heart, and low in her estimation of her worth.”61 Asia, also a pupil, met her future husband, John Clarke Sleeper, at the school. Irish-born Martin J. Kerney, John’s next teacher, was an energetic and civic-minded Catholic layman. Kerney encouraged his students in public speaking.62 This suited John, who was always ready to have his say. “From early boyhood he was argumentative and fervid in debate. His discussion was didactic,” recalled Asia. “When his turn came, he would wear his argument threadbare. He meant what he cared to utter.”63
When John was nine, he helped Edwin fit up a latticework arbor in the backyard as a playhouse. With a gaily patched bed quilt for a curtain and a row of tallow candles for footlights, the Theatre Royal, as it was cheerily called, opened for business. One large copper cent secured a seat in the best part of the house—the yard. Jack Sleeper, whose mother ran a small hotel, was lead support. Edwin fancied a career in comedy, Sleeper in tragedy. Ironically, they switched genres as adults and made fortunes. Nevertheless, Sleeper looked a perfect villain. Wrapped in a dark cloak and wearing a tall hat, he waved a dagger and threatened destruction, only to be dragged away and thrown over “yonder cliff,” namely a box on the edge of the stage.64
Since Edwin and Sleeper were older and larger, “they were wont to put on airs over us younger boys,” recalled Theodore Hamilton of himself, John, and their friend Henry Stuart (later known as Stuart Robson). “There was a great gulf between us.”65 When John stuck his head through a window to annoy them, one of the big boys threw an oyster shell, which whacked him on the forehead.66 He would not be deterred, however, so Edwin permitted him to play a triangle. Soon John graduated to speaking roles. On one occasion at the arbor playhouse, Edwin’s villainous Gessler forced John’s William Tell to shoot an apple off the head of his own son, played by a trembling youngster named Marion Kerner. John did this successfully, only to be asked by Gessler what he would have done if his arrow had missed and killed the boy. “I would have aimed an arrow at thee, my King,” John replied in a monotone.
“No, no!” exclaimed the elder Booth, suddenly bursting forward. “That is not the proper rendering. This is the way Tell would answer. ‘I would have killed thee, my King!’” the father said, emphasizing the pronoun.67 John required no second lesson about putting passion into his parts.
“Wilkes was immensely popular,” recalled George L. Stout, one of the childhood company. “All the boys liked him,” even after John, Stuart, and Hamilton stole the set-piece in an effort to start a rival theater. Stout and Sleeper tracked the miscreants down and won the scenery back in a fistfight. John enjoyed such rough-and-tumble. Edwin, who had a lamb for a pet, did not and often let others stand up for him. Stout remembered when Edwin was returning home with several of his father’s foils that he had borrowed, and a local bully grabbed and broke them. Edwin began to cry, and Stout was obliged to confront the offender. John would have pitched headlong into the troublemaker. “Wilkes was always ready for a fight.”68
Stuart was having breakfast one morning when he heard a tap on the window. “Looking up, I saw John, his nose flattened against the pane, motioning vehemently for me to come out.” The two went to a nearby wheelwright’s lot, where “he showed me two cats that he had tied up in such a way that a movement of the one would produce pain to the other. He seemed to thoroughly enjoy their discomfiture.” On another occasion Stuart saw John chase a cat up through an attic and out onto a roof so steep “that if he had made the least slip he would have fallen and probably killed himself. But he never stopped till he got the cat!”69 At the farm these poor animals fared no better. “He was always shooting cats and killed off almost the entire breed in his neighborhood.”70 Stuart observed that John, who was about twelve at the time, “had a mania for killing cats and went about it with enthusiasm that was quite remarkable.”
Behavior of this nature by a child is exceptionally troubling. It has been recognized for centuries as an ill omen. In 1693 the philosopher John Locke wrote of children who acted in this manner that “the custom of tormenting and killing beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds even toward man, and they who delight in the suffering of inferior creatures will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind.”71 Modern researchers note an association between repeated intentional abuse of animals and a later disposition toward a variety of antisocial behaviors, including all kinds of violence. The disorder is classically interpreted as the abusing child’s way to vent frustration and anger, often in response to parental cruelty, neglect, or mental illness. A child who exhibits such behavior is disturbingly insensitive to the suffering of other living things.72
Oddly, John’s ability to experience feelings of empathy with other animals was not compromised. He was fond of dogs. Once, when a fellow passenger on a ferry threw a setter into the river, “Booth pulled him [back] on board, caressed the dog, and bitterly denounced the fellow who would treat a dumb animal so cruelly.” Protective of butterflies and lightning bugs, “he would go out of his way to avoid injuring them,” recalled Asia. When she attempted to skewer a katydid for her insect collection, he rescued it, walked over to a tree, and placed it safely on in a leaf. “Katy shall sing tonight out in the sycamores,” he told her. His love of horses was unbounded. When he was in his twenties, John saw a teamster beat a horse that was unable to pull a wagon out of a mud hole. He was so incensed that he seized the whip from the man’s hand and punched him.73
“there was a skeleton in the father’s closet,” wrote the playwright and poet John Hill Hewitt. “It haunted him. He hoped, and so did the members of his family, that the rattling dry bones would not be exposed to public view.” Unfortunately, in 1846 that occurred. A woman named Adelaide Delannoy approached Hewitt’s desk in the business office of Baltimore’s Howard Athenaeum. She stated in accented English that she needed to speak to Booth. The woman was tall and refined and wore a black lace cap. She had once been pretty, but hard times had taken their toll, and both her beauty and her fortunes were as faded as her silk dress. Only a sense of dignity remained.74
Adelaide had a secret. The Brussels native was Junius’s legal wife. She had married him in 1815 and gave birth to two children, a son and a daughter, fathered by him. Junius then quit Minnie, as he called her, for Mary Ann. The couple never divorced. He did send her an annual stipend faithfully, but when this payment was insufficient, Adelaide sought charity from Junius’s brother actors and friends in London. The daughter died, and the son
, named Richard for his grandfather and Junius for his father, came to America in 1843. The intelligent and delicately built young man sought out Junius, saw his prosperous condition, and learned of his second family.75 The trans-Atlantic wife, as Hewitt, struggling for words, titled her, was apprised of the facts and came to see for herself. She spied out the Exeter Street house where John Wilkes Holmes and his family lived. (No one there was entitled to the Booth name, she insisted, since the father was not legally married to Mary Ann.) With such a home as well as a large estate in the country, Junius obviously was thriving. “My lawyer will fall on his back like a bomb,” she promised her sister Therese.76
“You here!” Booth exclaimed in a growl when he saw Minnie in Hewitt’s office. Adelaide, her arms folded, met his gaze defiantly and reminded him in a scornful tone that he had a son named Richard. Hewitt realized he was in the wrong place, hastily excused himself, and heard no more. All he knew was that a short time later a hackney cab was ordered and the visitor departed in it.
Adelaide went to the farm. Furious and menacing, she announced, “I am the wife of Junius Brutus Booth. I have come with my son to claim our rights.”77 Mary Ann was stunned. She knew that her husband had been married before, but she also thought he had been properly divorced and was free to marry again. It never occurred to her to question that.
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 3
