Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

by Alford, Terry

  The season began on the evening of Saturday, September 4, 1858. George C. Boniface, an actor who worked with Kunkel and Moxley, recalled the managers’ routine: “A popular play was selected and all the company appeared in it. When the curtain rose, we were standing in a row and sang ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ Then the curtain fell for a minute, and the play began.”54 The attraction for opening night was a double bill, Town and Country; or, Which Is Best?, followed by 1,000 Milliners Wanted for the Fraser River Gold Diggins. As the titles suggest, both plays were lightweight comedies. Interspersed throughout were orchestral pieces, jokes, singing, dancing, and musical burlesques. The evening pleased the critic of the Richmond Dispatch, who wrote that “the theatre [was] uncomfortably crowded from the parquette to the highest gallery—the audience being the largest on the first night in four years.” The cast was young and attractive, the writer continued, and “about fifty percent better than that of last season.”55 They were so well received that the Marshall’s audience not only clapped but also pounded sticks and canes on the floor.

  Booth’s contribution to the entertainment is unknown. Even his roles cannot be determined. Both were apparently as insubstantial as were the evening’s featured plays. The New York Clipper, the nation’s leading theatrical newspaper, failed to mention the young actor in its notice of opening night. Nevertheless, the lengthy bill had accomplished the managers’ purpose. All the old hands and all the fresh muffins had been brought forward and introduced. A new season was under way.

  “I would have written to you before this,” Booth reported to Edwin on September 10, “but I have been so busily engaged, and am such a slow writer that I could not find the time. I have played several good parts since I have been here [and] believe I am getting along very well. I like the people, place, and management, so I hope to be very comfortable.” Unhappily, “I have heard my name—Booth—called for one or two nights,” he lamented. “Everyone knows me already.”56

  Booth also added that he had been ill since his arrival in Richmond. He did not explain further, saying only that the sultry climate did not agree with him.57 Unable to shake the sickness, Booth called on Dr. James Beale, a prominent city physician, who put him on an unnamed medication. Although Booth’s illness was not severe enough to keep him off the stage, it was apparently recurrent and the medicine one he had taken before. Unfortunately the drug caused him to feel languid and thickheaded, making things tough for a young actor needing all his wits to establish himself in a new city.

  An acquaintance of the elder Booth, Dr. Beale was to become an important friend of the young actor. When Beale was a boy working in his family’s blacksmith shop, he had been rebuked by his father for being too fond of books. Chief Justice Marshall, overhearing the remark, took an interest in the child and provided for his education. Dutifully Beale studied law but later found his vocation in medicine, becoming a man of wealth in his profession. His home, opposite Capitol Square, was a beautifully furnished mansion with winding stairways, artwork, and an outstanding library. From here “Beale dispensed elegant hospitality to nearly every visitor of any note,” assisted by his wife, Isabella Pallen, and their little daughter, Mary Bella. “Dr. Beale was a very entertaining and congenial man,” recalled Herbert T. Ezekiel, a historian of Richmond’s Jewish community. His lively nature made him particularly popular with young people.58 His knowledge of literature and the arts was daunting, his nature cosmopolitan. Although his ancestry was Italian, he became a Presbyterian, whereas Isabella and Mary Bella attended Beth Shalome Synagogue, to which he contributed liberally.

  Unlike most Presbyterians, Beale held no prejudice against the stage. “Almost every night my father would drop in [at] the Richmond theatre, where he had a box, and it was very seldom that he came home alone,” Mary Bella reminisced years later. “Many a night [John Wilkes Booth] would return home with my father after the play was over. There was always a warm supper and a warm welcome after the theatre doors were closed.”

  Booth’s affection for children, observed by all his friends, was apparent at the Beale home. The first thing he did upon arriving was make for the nursery to rouse Mary Bella. The girl’s birth mother had died when she was born, and she was adopted by her aunt Isabella. Although she was much loved and well treated, there was a touch of sadness about her that aroused Booth’s sympathy. “He would hold me up aloft and straddle me across his shoulders,” she recalled. Off they went, her pigtails flying. “I remember one night his taking me downstairs and sitting me on a silver butter salver that stood embedded in flowers in the center of the table.” That was too much for the girl’s nurse, who came to her rescue, muttering, “Them play actors is the debble.”59

  booth quickly made friends among the Marshall company. “Booth’s personality was most attractive,” said Jimmy Wells, one of the theater’s musicians. “He was well set up, of medium height, courtly to a degree, and possessed a magnetism which attracted all who came in contact with him.” The New York actor Benjamin Ringgold, a fellow newcomer to the city, thought him a man of extraordinary beauty and charm. Edwin F. Barnes, a novice actor, found him “a handsome, grave-eyed man, with a quiet, dignified and determined air, and strangely gifted with personal charm.”60

  One of the company grew especially close to Booth. Sam Chester was an acquaintance from boyhood days in Baltimore. As an apprentice in a city printing shop, Sam was sent around to the theaters to pick up their advertising copy. A chance meeting with Edwin awakened a fascination for the stage that grew into a calling.61 Sam’s birth name was Samuel Chester Knapp, but as Knapp sounded somnambulant for an actor in the age of melodrama, he reversed his middle and family names, being reborn in the profession as Samuel Knapp Chester.

  Now in the fourth year of his career, Sam had grown into a stout young hulk, imposing enough to play the heavy. Appearances aside, he was a mild, quiet sort offstage, much attracted to the effervescent Booth. “I was on terms of close friendship with him ever since I knew him,” Sam recalled in 1865.62

  Harry Langdon, the Marshall’s leading man, was another key friend. The two were roommates, in fact, and that posed a problem. Harry was a heavy drinker. A New York Times critic quipped that the actor had a “predisposition to indisposition.”63 In retrospect it is astonishing that he was able to postpone until 1910 his death from cirrhosis of the liver. Struggling to be a teetotaler at this time, Booth was highly sensitive to anything that brought the family curse too close. Happily, Harry himself was attempting to reform, starting the new season sober, and Booth was able to spread the word that Langdon had stopped drinking and they got along well together.64

  Ten years John’s senior, Langdon was a model for Booth since he, too, had commenced his career at the Arch Street Theatre and gone on to play leading roles. Langdon was a handsome man with a deep voice and was a capable actor up to any role when not “indisposed” for the evening. He had much to teach about the world of the theater, both in what to embrace and in what to avoid. Young Booth was a project, and Langdon, lacking any petty jealousy over newcomers, decided to give him a hand. “I took a fancy to him,” Langdon explained. “He had a manly side to him.”65

  “John Wilkes Booth was a country looking boy,” Langdon recalled in an 1883 interview. “His clothes, style, and everything were countryfied. I showed him how to read [his lines], got him a grammar, and made him commit [to memory] every day a certain number of words from the dictionary and pronounce and define them.” It was a struggle, Langdon remembered, “as he always had trouble committing his lines to memory.” Booth, in turn, annoyed his roommate by sitting up most of the night smoking cigars.66 Nevertheless they persevered, and “it was very pleasing to see his growth.” Since Booth’s stage success in time exceeded Langdon’s significantly, it was with pride that the older actor claimed, “I taught John Booth the rudiments of acting.”

  The “star system” under which the Marshall players operated was quite different from that Booth had known at the Arch, where the res
ident senior actors always took the key roles. In this arrangement Kunkel and Moxley brought a steady stream of traveling stars to Richmond. These actors would stay for two weeks generally, performing their most popular plays. It was often not until the conclusion of an evening’s play that Booth and the other stock members were assigned their individual secondary, minor, or walk-on roles for the following night. While the city slept, they studied. One stock actress recalled, “It meant very hard work for the beginners, as there were six new parts a week to study, and frequently the farces [which followed the plays] as well, but it was great practice.”67 With a new play or two each night, and with another star with a different repertoire on the way, the pace at the theater was brisk and the demands on the company challenging.

  Kunkel promised that he would bring the leading entertainers of the nation to the Marshall during the 1858–59 season. To a large extent he did. Julia Dean, James W. Wallack, James E. Murdoch, Barry Sullivan, and A. J. A. Neafie appeared, all highly competent dramatic actors. Avonia Jones, a fine tragedienne, came to town, as did the Florences, a pair of first-class comedians. Wheatley brought laughter from Philadelphia, as did John S. Clarke, recently announced in the family as Asia’s fiancé. The amazing Maggie Mitchell and brother Edwin rounded out the visitors. Unfamiliar as these names would become to later generations, they were the nation’s top entertainers in their day. They knew the elements necessary for success, even directing the plays in which they starred. During rehearsals they drilled the company, showing the cast any special business they required, from where to stand to how a key line should be delivered. The process was a tutorial in the craft of acting. “The stock theatre was a college in itself,” recalled William Seymour, who performed with Booth in 1864.68

  Booth developed a profound admiration for several of these players. James E. Murdoch, who performed in March of 1859, was an intelligent and versatile actor connected with the stage for thirty years.69 Murdoch had known Booth’s father, with whom he acted in 1832, and he managed June’s early performances in Boston ten years later. Amazingly, after reaching his thirties, Murdoch succeeded in adding an extra octave to the range of his voice, allowing him to produce some startling vocal effects onstage.70 His performances were highly polished and inclined to the ideal. “He was a natural and most effective, though not always a patient, teacher,” recalled one Kunkel employee.71 Although Booth’s mature style was quite different, he had great respect for Murdoch’s acting. “Murdoch was his ideal of grace and perfect elocution,” wrote Asia.72

  Few playbills from the Marshall during the two years of Booth’s residence survive, but one of these is for a night when Murdoch and Booth shared the stage.73 On Monday, March 21, 1859, De Soto, the Hero of the Mississippi, was presented. This play was written expressly for Murdoch by George H. Miles of Baltimore. The star had performed the play dozens of times throughout the country, and it was a proven applause-catcher for him. Styled a “Grand Romantic Tragedy,” the five-act drama featured Murdoch in the title role. There were also five tableaux vivants in which historic scenes were represented by Booth and his castmates costumed and posing silently without movement. To ensure a complete success, Murdoch even brought with him to Richmond the costumes he wished the company to wear.

  Langdon was cast as the lead heavy, De Soto’s vengeful adversary the Indian chief Tuscalooza. Booth played the part of Gallegos, a soldier in De Soto’s army. As the seventh name in order of prominence on the playbill, “J. B. Wilkes” had a minor role. “My horse, Gallegos!” orders De Soto in one act, sending the younger man scrambling off the stage. But in truth every actor except Murdoch must have disappeared in this riot of fur and feathers. The play commenced with an ambush and went on to a hostage-taking, the marching of troops, a triumphal entrance, “Indian vengeance,” a solemn oath scene, treachery, a “View of the Mississippi by Sunset,” and a grand battle in which Tuscalooza is defeated and his village destroyed. The tableaux vivants were interspersed among the acts, and there were frequent parades of “Pages, Knights, Banner Bearers, Priests, &c., &c.,” no doubt recruited from any loiterers found sober in the alley behind the theater. A chorus or two were thrown in, and the play ended with all the characters, red and white, joining in a dirge at the burial of De Soto. Before the audience was let out for the evening, Moxley had Kate Pennoyer pop out and dance. Kate and her pretty “stems” were completely unrelated to the play, but Moxley knew it was bad business to allow patrons to leave the theater in a glum mood.

  During this time together Murdoch was startled to observe Booth’s excessive love of applause. The younger actor would do anything to obtain it.74 But Booth was not the actor his father had been, in Murdoch’s opinion, nor did he or his brothers ever achieve his father’s greatness. “Without belittling any other genius known to him in his career,” Murdoch felt, the elder Booth was the greatest actor he had ever seen. When the son of his beloved mentor and friend murdered Lincoln six years later, “the revulsion of feeling in Murdoch’s heart was profound.” He was bedridden for weeks. “It is the truth that afterwards life was never the same for him,” wrote Murdoch’s family friend and biographer Edmund Russell.75

  Glimpses of the Marshall days are few. Isabella Pallen recalled Booth standing in the wings during a production of The Sea of Ice. A small child had a role in the play, and Booth was so tender to the little thing “that she would nestle in his arms until her time came to go on stage.”76 James Pilgrim remembered seeing the youthful actor in the character of the majestic General Putnam, an odd bit of casting.77 Far more people saw another side of Booth shortly before Christmas 1858, when he stopped a farce from becoming a tragedy. During the play Our Gal the young comedienne and vocalist Kate Fisher, wearing a large, loose-fitting merino dress, came too near the gas footlights, catching her skirt on fire. Audience members, seeing what was happening, shouted to the actors to help her. “Mr. Wilkes Booth promptly extinguished the fire,” reported the next morning’s Richmond Whig. In true theatrical tradition “the performance progressed as if nothing had happened.”78

  “There is a young gentleman named Wilkes, a good deal like Edwin Booth in face and person,” read a notice in the Richmond Examiner. “He is a man of promise, and might, with the approbation of the audience, be cast for a higher position than he usually occupies.”79 Others agreed. Walking home from one disappointing performance, O. Jennings Wise, a diplomat recently returned from France, told his brother John that “the only performer of merit in the [cast] was the young fellow John Wilkes Booth. In him, he said, was the making of a good actor.” Knowing Jennings to be familiar with the best theaters in Paris, John Wise wrote that “the criticism made an impression on me, who remembered the man and the name.”80 John T. Ford of the Kunkel partnership was equally pleased, feeling John’s early performances were better than Edwin’s, and Edwin had become a star.81 The management relented on occasion and gave Booth better roles, but generally he played those small parts that the second juvenile man must.82 The names of these characters—Sir Benjamin Backbite, Lord Tinsel, Cool, Trueworth—indicate the limited nature of the parts. Booth was often frustrated since his ability was unquestionable.83 His mother wrote to his brother June, “John is doing well at Richmond. He is very anxious to get on faster. When he has a run of bad parts, he writes home in despair.”84

  Booth raised his spirits in part by making friends, although he knew that Richmond society was not fully open to the city’s actors. The false reality of the theater, as well as its risqué themes, morally ambivalent characters, emotionalism, extravagance, dancing, coarse audiences, and historic association with prostitution, led some families to oppose the institution on principle. As late as 1860 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States reaffirmed its opposition to “stage plays and all kindred amusements calculated to awaken thoughts and feelings inconsistent with the Seventh Commandment” on adultery.85 Evangelicals considered the theater fire of 1811 a clear judgment and built a church on the spot of th
e disaster to underscore the point. The dead theatergoers were entombed below the sanctuary—a bizarre sort of caution.

  Proud of the stage, Booth defended it as best he could. While performing subsequently in Louisville, Kentucky, he had a polite disagreement over the morality of the stage with a Virginia-born woman named Mary Brown.86 A pious person, Brown was a fifty-year-old schoolteacher raising two nephews and a niece. William Booth, one of the nephews (and no relation to John’s family), became friends with the actor. Star-struck, William decided to become an actor, too, “but shuddered to think what my family, who were intensely religious people, would think of it, for the stage was then in disrepute—under the ban, I may say—with most of the better class of people.” William implored Booth to go and “try his powers of persuasion upon my aunt, as I had great faith in his imposing appearance and agreeable manners to set aside her religious scruples.” Booth agreed and called at the Brown home. There he met “with a most frigid reception, a complete throw-down of such a sinful idea,” and left the house in defeat. When William gathered the courage to creep home that evening, his aunt was waiting for him. “I got a lecture I shall never forget,” he recalled. William became a bookkeeper.

  Friendlier voices urged these nontheatergoing critics like Miss Brown to come and witness what they condemned without seeing. The overwhelming majority of plots rewarded virtue amply and punished evil with a vengeance. The Sea of Ice, for example, was acclaimed by one Richmond critic as “a moral lesson of the most impressive character,” a play suitable for the most scrupulous Christian.87 Such plays refined and civilized the community.88 The theater is “the literary gratification [most] within the reach of the multitude,” wrote the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville. “It is the most democratic side of literature.”89 As Joseph Whitton put it, stage characters awaken “the lively emotions of the heart, excite curiosity, and arouse sympathy.” In a weary world, actors “serve as time-killers and care-quellers for humanity, to prod the tedium of our idle hours and quell the worries that may rise from out our busy ones.”90