Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

by Alford, Terry

  Paradoxically for someone who often rushed toward danger, Booth suffered from hemophobia. The sight of blood might cause him to pass out. In 1864, when his friend Richard M. Johnson asked Booth to accompany him inside a funeral parlor to visit Johnson’s business partner who had been stabbed to death, Booth exclaimed, “My God, man, no, no.” Ironically, the man who slew hundreds onstage and became a murderer in real life could not stand to see the real thing. “I cannot bear to see blood nor a dead face,” he told Johnson. “They make me wild.” Johnson noted that Booth no sooner said those words than his countenance began to change. “He sank in a corner, and his face grew dark. His features worked violently. His eyes took on a wild look. He raised his hands as though warding off a blow. He trembled with the intensity of his excitement.” This extreme fear of blood, often caused by direct or vicarious trauma in childhood, was also displayed in his frequent references to blood in the “Alow Me” speech and his description of the stripes on the nation’s flag as bloody gashes.121

  The family never mentioned hemophobia as a factor in John’s failure to enlist in the rebel army, but they did bring up something else. Edwin informed historian Nahum Capen in 1881 that—given John’s politics—he had been curious about John’s lack of service and asked him point-blank about it. John gave an excuse that rang true to the brother: “I promised mother I would keep out of the quarrel if possible.”122

  This explanation has met with skepticism, but it is undoubtedly the principal factor for his wartime neutrality. Booth had “a pure, fervent and indescribable affection and love of a son for a mother,” and a vulnerability to her pleading, said Joseph R. Bradley Sr., a contemporary who studied his personality.123 Mary Ann needed him. She was a widow with no income beyond rents from the farm. June had not been home from California since 1854. Edwin and his wife, Molly, were about to depart for England. Clarke and Asia would follow them. Joe, having dropped out of medical school, was at loose ends and would soon wander off to Australia. The only other family member left within three thousand miles of Mary Ann would be Rose, who had no life outside the home. Who was there but John?

  Mary Ann’s premonitions of an early and violent death for him petrified her. Fearful of losing her favorite child, she refused to give her blessing to his enlistment. They discussed the topic exhaustively. “He begged his mother to allow him to go south,” wrote John T. Ford. “She most earnestly refused.”

  “You will not let me go,” he protested. “You know my heart is there.”

  He was packed and ready to depart, but she pled, she prayed, she wept, and, in the end, she won. “Ah,” he said resignedly as he put his hands on her shoulders. “You are no Roman mother.”124

  “John Wilkes is crazy or enthusiastic about joining for a soldier,” Asia wrote Jean Anderson. Then she added a sister’s special insight: “It has been his early ambition—perhaps it is his true vocation.”125 Booth might have made a good soldier, fighting well and filling a cavalryman’s grave by midwar. But the conflict would go on without him. To fulfill an obligation to his mother that he considered sacred, he made a fateful decision that went against his nature. “With all his faults he was devoted,” observed Ford.126

  He regretted the choice more and more as time went by. “I am sorry that I said so,” he later lamented to Edwin.127 But the die was cast. He would stay north and act. In August 1861, as friends and classmates filled out the rebel armies in Virginia, Booth gave his miniature silk eleven-star Confederate flag to Hannah Hanna, the wife of his landlord.128 When next heard from he was in Boston, bidding farewell to Edwin as he left for England.

  Back in Maryland, Stump packed hurriedly for exile, Yankee soldiers swept the Big Woods for hidden weapons, and a federal officer ripped down the Maryland flag flying on the Harford Road.129

  5

  ....

  Shining in the Rough

  john wilkes booth’s friends were not surprised that he became an actor. After all, it was the family business. His father was legendary, and Edwin possessed gifts that would take him nearly that far. June, while not as talented as Edwin, made a decent living onstage. Even Mary Ann had done a bit of acting before John’s birth.1 The young man came of age in the shadows of these seniors. Around him were promptbooks on the tables, rehearsals at the fireplace, poetry on the stairs, and songs in the parlor. In the background Rose stitched patiently away on costumes. In a sense John did not choose acting as a profession. It chose him.

  He had star-quality good looks. “His father’s finely shaped head and beautiful face were reproduced in him,” wrote Asia. “He had the black hair and large hazel eyes of his mother. These were fringed heavily with long up-curling lashes, a noticeable peculiarity as rare as [it was] beautiful.”2 Hazel is commonly a light brown, yet John’s friends described his eye color as dark (without specifying a color) or even black. Booth wore his hair in what the playwright Augustus Thomas termed “Civil War standard”—full, long, and parted on one side.3 His tresses were soft, dark, and inclined to curl without the use of hot irons or pomatum. His mustache added a rakish dash. The features of his face were regularly proportioned and classically molded. Booth’s complexion was unblemished. His teeth were white and perfect. He smiled often.4 “He is a rare specimen of manly beauty,” thought a New York acquaintance.5

  Booth was five feet eight or eight and a half inches tall—average for his time.6 This was the average stature of a Civil War soldier. With his well-developed arms and shoulders, his finely formed neck, and the fact that he acted big, Booth found his height no impediment in playing heroic characters. Of course, one could always improve on nature with heels and lifts if needed. (Edwin, who was shorter than John, measured five feet nine inches when dressed.7) As muscular as John was, however, he feared appearing square and solid. A natural grace, enhanced by fencing, boxing, and dancing lessons, allayed that worry. He also lost weight over the course of the war years, dropping ten pounds or more due to constant travel, an irregular lifestyle, and stress. An exercise fanatic, he burned calories at the gym as well. Once he stripped away his coat before a fellow actor and “showed the magnificent physical condition to which he had brought himself. He was trained to perfection, hard as iron, without an ounce of superfluous flesh anywhere. His eyes were bright and keen as razors, his head in fighting trim.”8

  More than a good face and figure were required of an actor, however. Certain personal qualities were indispensable, too. An actor must be smart, attentive, and energetic. An actor must be reliable, collegial, and versatile. An actor must be studious, hardworking, and authentic. An actor must speak well and understand that, as the comedian Joe Jefferson said, one employs the voice “as if you are quite sure the man in the last seat is a little deaf.” And John M. Barron, who played with Booth in Richmond, thought that an actor must also have passion. “Fire! Fire! My boy, give them fire—dramatic fire!” exclaimed the tragedian J. A. J. Neafie to Barron.9

  Booth’s father told him he did not have the stuff to become an actor, but he had proven the old man wrong.10 By the end of 1861, Booth had the benefit of three years of apprenticeship at major theaters in Philadelphia and Richmond. He had performed with the nation’s finest actors. He had worked for some of the best and most professional managers in the business. To this tutelage Booth added a season of leading roles in the Deep South and at small Northern theaters before the war. The twenty-three-year-old had learned a great deal. He had earned his wings. Now he would try them.

  when the actor Charles Krone first met Booth in St. Louis, where the aspiring star would fill two weeks at DeBar’s Theatre, he was highly impressed. “Young Booth was tall and graceful with a charm of personality that was dominated by dark and brilliant eyes that took fire in character or discussion,” recalled Krone. “He was very much liked by his colleagues. His manner was frank, manly, and cheerful. In the fullness of youth, life, and passion, with the glorious record and talents inherited from his father at his command, he gave promise of achieving the highest.
Most men predicted great things in his future.”11

  Ben DeBar, Krone’s boss, had brought Booth to St. Louis. A veteran actor-manager, DeBar was a heavyset fellow with a full, rosy face.12 The editor Frank Queen combined DeBar’s hardworking nature and potbelly frame into a one-word tease. The manager was “inde-fat-igable.”13 True enough. But the portly showman was also family, at least of a sort. He was the brother of Clementina DeBar, June’s ex-wife. Their daughter, Blanche, after her stay with the Booths, had been handed over to Ben to raise. He did well at the task, becoming (in the girl’s own words) “both father and mother” to her. Twenty-year-old Blanche was a beauty, with her striking face, fine figure, and lustrous dark eyes and hair. While she looked like a Booth, June was convinced she was not his daughter and insisted she not use the family name. Asia was equally unyielding, writing her friend Jean Anderson that Blanche was her brother’s stepdaughter. “I call that nothing,” she added. John was less hardhearted. He loved Blanche’s high-spirited nature, so much like his own, and he was proud to be her uncle.14

  Booth had wanted a Boston and not a St. Louis engagement, but managers like Davenport considered him a novice not yet ready for the big cities and brushed him off.15 Hence he turned west to prove himself. It would be tough work. DeBar had a reputation for being cheap. His theater was a rat-hole, complained the comedian William Warren, a Booth friend. The musty backstage, as cold as the street in winter, had a reputation among actors for being unhealthy. Perhaps that was why Ben’s company was loaded with scrubs. Kindhearted Ben tolerated no criticism of them, however. “Would you let them starve?” was his reply. “They had to get work somewhere!” The manager did frustrate them, however. Once his company cornered him dining on quail in a restaurant and insisted he pay them their wages. Ben exclaimed in mock surprise that it was astonishing they would demand salary when blackberries were in season.16

  To escape the drafty theater, Booth took his promptbook and rehearsed his lines at Billy Gleason’s saloon, which adjoined the theater. As needed, he called in the players and drilled them there.17 When show time approached, DeBar appeared on the stairs from his office above the saloon. Dressed in an old black velvet coat and vest, short trousers, and a pair of carpet shoes, he marched around behind the curtain, whistling Irish ballads. When the orchestra struck up the overture, he took his usual seat—not in a box, but on a box—near the stage. “My curtain waits for nobody,” he barked.18

  As was now his custom, Booth opened with Richard III. Its inevitable success would set the town talking. Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello followed, along with The Apostate, The Robbers, The Marble Heart, and The Lady of Lyons. This was the same package Booth offered the previous spring during the secession crisis, but the quality of his performances was much better. His months of study at the Eagle Hotel in Bel Air, where landlord Hanna heard him pacing in his room above the dining hall reciting his lines, had paid off.19

  The Daily Missouri Democrat and rival Missouri Republican agreed on little, as their names suggest, but they were of one mind about Booth. He was a fine actor. “Mr. Booth, as Hamlet, took the house by storm,” declared the Republican. “This gentleman is an artist of the highest order.” The Democrat reported, “Mr. Booth had a most rapturous reception as Richard III. He is an actor with all the fire and enthusiasm of his father or brother Edwin, being taller and better formed [and with] a fine expressive face.”20 Krone felt these compliments were fairly won, and he disputed the opinion later in the century that critics of the Civil War era were too easy on actors, particularly critics in western cities who allegedly knew little about good acting. “The critical spirit of those days was more severe than it is at present,” he said in 1906. “A set of hyper-critics were then on hand who could not have been satisfied with anything short of a theatre where Forrest and Booth were the boot-jacks and the archangels played the leading business.”

  Less than forty-eight hours after he closed in St. Louis, Booth was Richard again on the stage of James H. McVicker’s theater in Chicago. Fresh triumphs followed. “J. Wilkes Booth is a very youthful actor and as a consequence has hardly reached the point at which a full appreciation of his powers can be arrived at, but to judge from a single hearing, we would at once pronounce him a genius,” declared the Chicago Tribune. During his combat scene with Edwin C. Prior’s Richmond, Booth broke the other player’s heavy stage sword. The scene was so lifelike that the Tribune’s critic recorded in the huge notebook ostentatiously displayed in his lap that half the audience thought Booth actually intended to kill the other player. Booth’s Pescara, for which he received several curtain calls, was so popular that three newspapers asked McVicker to repeat it, and his Hamlet was declared the equal of Murdoch’s, considered by many to be the gold standard. “Young, ambitious, resolute, and unswerving in honest integrity, we bespeak for him a future in the history of the drama to which few may aspire and but one or two in a generation attain,” wrote the Evening Journal.21

  Offstage, Booth was also well received. John F. Stafford, a wealthy Chicago businessman and patron of the arts, took him in. “As a man he was a noble, generous-hearted fellow, full of honor and good purpose,” recalled Stafford. “With the exception of the faults of all young men, which he would have outgrown in time, he was in all respects a good citizen and a splendid actor.”22 The most recent “fault” was an after-hours drinking bout, a reference to which made its way obliquely into print.

  Highly pleased with his success, Booth kept his feet on the ground. His houses were crowded—and McVicker’s house could seat twenty-five hundred people—but Booth had no illusions about how far he had to go. He was attending a charity event when an organizer requested he sign autographs that could be sold as part of the fund-raising. He responded that his signature was worthless.23

  There was still no encouragement from Boston when Booth arrived in Baltimore for a three-week engagement at the Holliday Street Theatre. He was tired and lethargic. “As usual I began with excuses. I do not think my success here will be very great,” he confided to his Boston friend Joseph Simonds. “One’s native place is the last place in the world to look for such a thing.”24

  The Doric-fronted Holliday was a magnificent temple of a theater with three tiers of boxes and could seat as many people as McVicker’s in Chicago. Its acoustics were marvelous, its stage was deep, and its wings were wide enough to afford all the space needed for the complicated fixtures and machinery required for scenic display.25 John T. Ford owned the house. He had brought Edwin here two years earlier, and, notwithstanding the fact that Ford spent more than one thousand dollars on costumes alone for Edwin’s appearance, the response to his performance was only so-so.26 The impresario decided to give John a try. “He had more physical beauty and intellectual power than [Edwin or June]. He had a magnificent mind, great originality of thought, and he threw the vitality of perfect manhood into every character he impersonated. He was wonderfully energetic when acting,” stated Ford, “and spoke as though a whole army was listening to him.” Good looks never hurt, and “Booth was one of the handsomest men I ever saw.”27

  On February 17, 1862, Booth opened with Richard III, already being recognized as his play. Despite the poor weather, the theater was filled. Ford promoted the young actor to the city as an heir to the father, and the public came, curious to see this new scion of the great Booth. Familiar faces dotted the audience, casting the father’s troubling legacy about them. Even the stage on which Booth stepped was the one upon which many of them had seen the elder Booth bid farewell to Baltimore ten years earlier. Would the ghost of the father hover above it, directing him on, as spiritualists proclaimed?28

  Performing with Booth required all of one’s wits. Billy Ballauf, the property boy, discovered this when, “standing in the wings reading the plot-book and not giving any particular heed to the scene,” he narrowly missed being gashed in the face by Booth’s outstretched sword as Richard and his followers dashed from the stage.29 Booth then aimed a club at Thomas A. H
all, the play’s King Henry, and threw it at him. Owen Fawcett, one of the company, thought enough of the incident to record it in his diary, although he did not explain Booth’s behavior.30 This star did throw things. The following year he hurled a wooden wedge used to plumb scenery just above the head of an inattentive prompter to wake him up during a production.31

  Despite these stumbles and the fact that Booth was playing with a severe cold, his Richard was highly satisfactory. Audience members noticed some similarities to his father, but the acting was not derivative. It was dynamic and original. Ballauf thought that “Booth played with a fire and an earnestness that has seldom, if ever, been equaled. He was a remarkable figure.” “A bright and glorious success,” wrote another. “Booth received an ovation of genuine and continuous applause from an audience tremendous in numbers and brilliant in fashion.”32

  “Richard’s himself again!” exulted Ford in the next day’s advertising. He meant, of course, that the son was a worthy chip off the old block. Booth hated such statements. He told a friend, “Had the Almighty vouchsafed me whatever ability I now possess, and permitted me to have made for myself a name without the weight and prestige that my father has thrown about me, I should have been infinitely better satisfied.”33 He insisted that his uniqueness be stressed in the bills. Booth wanted to be judged as himself and had a fierce dislike of hearing comparisons between himself and others.34 Ford thought that Booth’s sense of individuality was so intense that it had a touch of irrationality to it.

  His success at the Holliday was indisputable. Richard Cary, an intimate friend of Edwin’s, complained that the actor ranted, and at least one critic agreed, writing more amiably that John overworked certain scenes.35 Generally, however, the press embraced “the pride and pet of Baltimore,” as Ford put it. “Mr. Booth has every reason to be grateful with his reception in his native city,” wrote one Baltimore newspaper. “Seldom have we seen more enthusiastic audiences.”36 Any rough edges were set down to youthful enthusiasm. A second journal opined, “He is making out a course of great originality. The force and timely discrimination with which he renders his characters are peculiarly his own, and stand forth strong, bold, and refreshing.”37 Reported a third, “That this young tragedian is destined to achieve great distinction and possibly peculiar eminence in his profession there can be no doubt.”38