Booth played seven nights for Grover, starting April 11, 1863, at the manager’s New National Theatre, on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. He offered his usual fare of drama and melodrama. Critics were kind and none more so than John Coyle. One of the owners and editors of the National Intelligencer, Coyle was an aesthete, theatrical investor, and Peace Democrat. He had known the actor from his boyhood and took a deep interest in his career. Booth had the one indispensable ingredient Coyle demanded in every would-be star: the ability to strike fire in the hearts of theatergoers. Intelligence could not create it. Study could not produce it. Practice could not fashion it. “It is the lightning of the soul and cannot be taught. This young actor plays not from stage rule but from his soul, and his soul is inspired by genius.”98
About this time Booth grew annoyed by a lump on his neck. It had been increasing in size and had become painful. He was scheduled to play The Marble Heart on Monday, April 13, and the role of Phidias called for him to dress in a slate-colored tunic that hung on the shoulders and would, of course, expose the blemish to the audience. “On his fine youthful skin it made a bad impression,” thought Canning. So the agent drove him that morning to the home of Dr. John Frederick May, arguably the finest surgeon in Washington.99
May’s examination revealed the lump to be a fibroid tumor located about three inches below the left ear on the neck’s large muscle. “You will have to submit to an operation to be relieved of it,” he told Booth. The procedure was a fairly simple one, barring complications. The actor “desired to know if the removal of the tumor would prevent him from fulfilling [his] engagement. I told him if he would be careful not to make any violent efforts, he would not open the cicatrix” formed after the removal.
Do it now, Booth said.
May hesitated, reluctant to proceed due to Booth’s physically demanding schedule, but Booth brushed away the doctor’s concerns. His mind had been made up. “You cut it out right now,” Booth ordered. “Here is Canning who will be your assistant.”
All of Booth’s friends knew he carried the agent’s bullet in his body from the accidental shooting in Georgia, and now at last, or so the yarn would go, they could exorcise it. Booth and Canning would say in the future that by some miracle the ball had “migrated” from his rear end to his neck—a fine joke. Canning later told Townsend this preposterous tale, and the star said the same to anyone silly enough to believe it. Booth even attempted to recruit May into their hoax by asking him to inform inquirers that a bullet was found at the spot.
Declining to respond to such an odd request, the doctor readied himself. His thirteen-year-old son, William, stood by with a basin to catch blood while Canning was told to pull back the skin as the doctor cut it.100 There was no anesthetic. Booth threw himself into a chair, leaned his head to expose the neck, and said, “Now cut away.”
May sliced, and black blood gushed out. Gasping at the sight, Canning thought, “He seemed to have cut the man’s head partly off.” Booth blanched but remained motionless. The doctor carved on, complimenting Canning for his ability as a nurse, but the agent felt his stomach give way. The next thing Canning knew he had collapsed to the floor. Weak from loss of blood, Booth swooned and fell out of the chair.
May’s stitching closed the wound tightly, and the doctor was pleased with the result. “I congratulated him upon the slight scar which would be left,” recalled May.
Trooper that he was, Booth played the dual roles of Phidias and Raphael in The Marble Heart that evening. When he repeated the performance on Saturday, a special guest was in the audience: Tad Lincoln, the president’s ten-year-old son. The play was a boy’s delight; Booth’s character screamed, wept, shuddered, tottered, threatened, collapsed, jumped about, argued with invisible people, threw clothes on the floor, laughed maniacally, ran about on a spooky darkened stage, and finally fell dead. The passions of the love-struck leading man ran wild in this “emotion drama,” as it was called.
“I’d like to meet that man,” said Tad. “He makes you thrill.” Between acts Grover took Tad and his companion Gus Schurmann backstage.
“Mr. Booth, this is the president’s son,” said the manager.
Booth smiled and shook hands with the boys. “He continued his makeup, asking us how we liked the play, and we telling him the parts we most admired,” recalled Gus. “On our leaving he handed us each a rose from a bunch that had been presented him over the footlights. Booth shook hands with us and smiled in the pleasantest fashion imaginable.”101
It is unclear when the president first saw Booth act. Joe Whiting, a cast member, said that Booth, playing Richard at Grover’s, accidentally knocked a dueling opponent into a stage-level box where Lincoln was sitting. The following day’s newspapers, however, reported that the president spent the evening three blocks away at the Washington Theater. This tale is typical of stories placing the president and his assassin together in 1863. Another putative Lincoln watched Booth perform Richelieu and give a secessionist reading of a certain line, directed personally at Lincoln, while the Bourbons in the gallery cheered at the president’s discomfort. But Booth never played Richelieu in Washington. Mary B. Clay of Kentucky alleged that she attended a play with the Lincolns in which Booth’s character put a threatening finger near Lincoln’s face, causing the president to remark, “He looks pretty sharp at me, doesn’t he?” There are chronological flaws in her account, however.102
There is no doubt, though, that the president saw Booth act at Ford’s Theatre on November 9, 1863, when a party of the Lincolns, presidential secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay, and several other guests attended. Once again The Marble Heart was the featured play. Set in ancient Greece and modern France, it was refreshingly nonpartisan for war-weary American audiences. In fact, it lacked a single redeeming political or social virtue—with one incongruous exception. Booth’s Raphael is mocked by a rival for shedding tears over the fate of the slaves.
When Raphael ignores the jibe, the antagonist continues his insults. “Yes, I see I am right. I presume from the ardor with which you applauded the liberal sentiments [of Uncle Tom’s Cabin] that you are in favor of the emancipation of the blacks.”
“Death and dishonor!” cries Raphael, and he moves threateningly toward the man. The sudden appearance of Raphael’s lady love averts a fight, however, and the incident passes. But the stage moment let Booth do something remarkable. He had, in character, rebuked emancipation before Lincoln from the stage of Ford’s Theatre.
John Hay found the evening rather tame. Tame is an adjective no one applied to a Booth performance, particularly the role of Raphael, which was an explosion of emotions. Hay meant that the play had no blasting trumpets, dancing banners, tramping soldiers, and clanging swords. Booth looked daggers in The Marble Heart, but he did not brandish any.103
While Hay was unimpressed, Lincoln admired Booth’s acting, stated Joseph Luckett, an old hand on the Washington theatrical scene.104 Grover and Ford said the same thing and added that the president returned to see him act on multiple occasions, always applauding his efforts.105 The actor was coldly indifferent to Lincoln, however. “Booth said he would rather have the applause of a negro.”106
“I know President Lincoln was an admirer of the man who assassinated him,” said Frank Mordaunt, who worked for McVicker in Chicago. Tad introduced Mordaunt to his father, and the actor had several conversations on drama with the president. Mordaunt discovered that Lincoln knew exactly who Booth was and liked his acting. “He told me that he desired to meet him, and I said I could arrange it.” It was a promise Mordaunt could not keep. He approached Booth several times on the topic, but the star found excuses to avoid an introduction.107 So the president and the actor never spoke. Lincoln knew him on sight, of course. He would smile in greeting as they passed.108
charles culverwell, an Englishman acting under the name of Charles Wyndham, was hired by Grover to support Booth. When the relatively inexperienced Wyndham came onstage for his first rehearsal, he se
ttled in at a little table that afforded a good view of the set. “John Wilkes noticed me there and smiled,” recalled Wyndham. A few moments later the stage manager saw Wyndham and rushed up in agitation. “It seemed I had been sitting at the star’s table whereas my proper place was far back in the wings. I apologized, of course, but Booth didn’t seem to mind.”
Socializing with Booth after hours, Wyndham was captivated. “A most charming fellow, a man of flashing wit and magnetic manner, he was one of the best raconteurs to whom I ever had listened. As he talked, he threw himself into his words, brilliant, ready, enthusiastic. He was unusually fluent. He could hold a group spellbound by the hour at the force and fire and beauty of him. And yet, throughout the spell he wove upon his listeners, there were startling breaks, abrupt contrasts, when his eccentricity and peculiarity cropped to the surface. No one pretended to have an understanding of this strange man.”
Dismissed for incompetence by Grover, Wyndham soldiered on in the profession, ultimately earning acclaim as an actor and manager and becoming a giant in the English-speaking theatrical world. As such he had seen hundreds of players come and go over the decades, but one of them lingered. “There was but one John Wilkes,” he mused, “sad, mad, bad John Wilkes. As an actor [his] natural endowment was of the highest. His original gift was greater than that of his wonderful brother Edwin—more spontaneous, possessing a higher degree of inborn inspiration. He was one of the few to whom that ill-used term of genius might be applied with perfect truth. He was a genius and a most unfortunate one. His dramatic powers were of the best.” But he was an unpolished jewel. “His was not a nature to submit to discipline, adversity, or a long routine of study. When he achieved some notable triumph of his art, it was a divine flash, a combustion of elements within him. What he had he could use, but he never brought his gift to flower because, it may be, his race was destined to quickly run.”109
“He had no master to form his style upon,” explained Asia in her brother’s defense. True, there were actors whom he greatly admired. Booth loved listening to Murdoch. No one spoke more clearly or beautifully. Davenport was equally magnificent, so elegant and exact onstage. As for Forrest, Booth’s admiration of him was unbounded. Yet, he lamented, “these are not [to me] as father was to Edwin. If I shine at all, it must be in the rough. Whatever talent [I] possess will be nature’s own legacy.”
What he had to do, he told his sister, was to persevere in all things.110
6
....
Life’s Fitful Fever
may 27, 1859, was a pleasant evening in Centreville, Rhode Island, and Albert Slocum, a farmer, took advantage of the weather for a stroll. Friends were out as well, carrying groceries, entering churches, and popping into shops. In the midst of their familiar faces Slocum noticed a stranger. Dressed in a loose-fitting overcoat and a low crowned cap, the man loitered nearby and watched. It was none other than John Wilkes Booth, disguised in heavy whiskers. Before him a streetlamp illuminated the storefront of the merchant Burrill Arnold. Under its light Booth observed Arnold seated with his back to a window. When the street cleared for a moment, Booth stepped up to the window and at a distance of two or three feet raised a pistol and fired. The bullet shattered the glass and struck Arnold between the shoulders. “My God!” the shopkeeper gasped and then fell dead.
Before anyone could realize what had happened, Booth bolted into the shadows and disappeared.
Slocum told this story in 1904. He wished no publicity for doing so, he insisted. He only wanted the truth to come out at last, and the truth was this. Booth was visiting his uncle, who lived in the village. When the actor discovered that Arnold was prosecuting the uncle for trafficking in illegal liquor, he committed the murder in revenge. It was the future assassin, beyond doubt, his false whiskers trimmed to a theatrically villainous point. Thousands of old Union soldiers read Slocum’s account in the leading veterans’ newspaper.1
In fact, Slocum was mistaken. Booth had no family in Rhode Island. In 1859 his only surviving uncle was James Mitchell, widower of his late aunt Jane, his father’s sister. Mitchell lived in a tenement in Baltimore, where he eked out a living as a peddler. He had no connection with Rhode Island. The Booth arrested in Kent County for violating Rhode Island’s prohibition laws was one Hiram Booth, a man entirely unrelated to the Maryland family.2
Slocum’s story fit a pattern, however. It was one of dozens of postassassination accounts telling some dreadful tale about Booth. The young actor was said to be an opium addict, a sexual predator, a home wrecker, a thief, a cutthroat, and a debauchee. These fictions found ready readers. Since history had proved that Booth was capable of the unthinkable, it was tempting not to add to a truth already disturbing enough.
But the question is well raised—who was John Wilkes Booth?
mathew canning knew Booth well. In 1886 the star’s longtime friend and manager sat down for an interview with George Alfred Townsend and told him an unappreciated fact. For all Booth’s fame on the stage and infamy in public life, neither the theater nor politics was his chief passion in life. First, last, and always it was the ladies. “Booth was a very slave to his almost insatiable amorous propensities.”3
Booth’s attitude toward women was generally chivalrous. When in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1860 he was said to have stepped in to protect several actresses from the insulting behavior of Henry Thomas, the drunken son of a prominent planter. Thomas pulled a knife and slashed Booth severely. Yet this is another event that never happened. Thomas did stab two theater employees who attempted to defend the actresses, but that incident occurred the year before Booth arrived in Montgomery.4 The story seemed believable, however, because friends knew it was just the sort of thing he would do. “I have nothing to say in favor of Booth, because he committed one of the worst crimes in history,” said the actress Kathryn Evans, “but I cannot refrain from telling those who never saw him that he was the finest gentleman I ever met.”5
Evans and countless others were attracted to Booth’s polished manner. The Washington publisher D. C. Forney found him “a thorough master of all the graces and courtesies of high-born life which he naturally inherited as well as acquired.”6 He spoke intelligently, correctly, and cleanly. “I have heard him talk by the hour but never heard a vulgar, obscene or ungentlemanly expression fall from his lips,” said James P. Ferguson, who kept a tavern adjoining Ford’s Theatre. When a reporter replied skeptically that he heard Booth was something of a cad, Ferguson grew agitated and snapped, “Don’t believe a word of it! Wilkes Booth was a gentleman.”7
When Booth became a public figure, his romantic life grew complicated, and he struggled at first to find his footing. While acting in Richmond, he received scented letters from a young woman from one of the city’s elite families. When Booth did not reply, the writer grew bolder, telling him she was ready for anything. A wrong move here would damage his reputation in a city he had grown to love, so the young man, away from home and the counsel of his mother, turned for advice to Isabella Pallen, the family friend and stalwart of Beth Shalome Synagogue. She arranged for Booth to meet the woman in a public place. There, at the foot of the Washington statue on Capitol Square, “he appealed to her better nature,” recalled Isabella’s daughter, Mary Bella, “disabused her mind of the idea that everything and everybody was jolly behind the scenes, and sent her back to her father’s house a wiser virgin.”8
In time Booth’s self-confidence in these matters grew. As it did, he acted on his own inclination, pulling women in or pushing them away as suited the moment. Nevertheless, “he was licentious as men, and particularly as actors go, but not a seducer,” thought Townsend. If anything, the opposite sex pursued him.9 “I have to communicate,” an unidentified woman wrote him. “I make use of the only means of approach to you. I am about your own age, possibly a few months younger. You will probably wonder that a woman …”10 The remainder of this missive is torn away, leaving the imagination free to fill in the rest, but the letter had the hal
lmarks of a regular correspondence Booth received. “Booth’s striking beauty was something which thousands of silly women could not withstand,” wrote the actress Clara Morris, who met him in 1863. “His mail each day brought him letters from women, weak and frivolous, who periled their happiness and their reputations by committing to paper words of love and admiration which they could not refrain from writing.” Since he did not like being chased, “a cloud used to gather upon his face at the sight of them.” Booth cut off the signatures and tore them into tiny pieces, then piled up the unread letters. “Harmless now,” he said to Morris. When a fellow actor picked up one of the neutered notes and started to read, Booth said sharply, “Lay that letter down please!”11
“It is scarcely an exaggeration to say the sex was in love with Booth,” Morris wrote in Life on the Stage, her best-selling autobiography published in 1901. “At depot restaurants those fiercely unwilling maiden-slammers of plates and shooters of coffee-cups made to him swift and gentle offerings of hot steaks, hot biscuits, hot coffee, crowding around him like doves about a grain basket. At the hotels maids have been known to enter his room and tear asunder the already made-up bed that the turn-over might be broader by a thread or two. At the theatre, good heaven! as the sunflowers turn on their stalks to follow the beloved sun, so old or young, our faces smiling turned to him.” Some of these fans became pests, and he was forced to change his address to escape them. Two of them became stalkers, or “lunatic adorers,” as they were known at the time.12
Actresses were no more immune to his charms than anyone else. The effervescent Maggie Mitchell became a star during the war years, invited to the White House for tea with the Lincolns. She had looks, brains, and personality fired by a vitality so impressive that it was said she was still in her twenties when she died at the age of eighty-one in 1918.13 In the small world of traveling actors her path often crossed Booth’s. Maggie found him smart, fun to be with, and unbearably handsome. He dressed like a prince, owned the body of an athlete, and had the most beautiful hair in the world. Booth was intrigued, as were many others, by the sprite-like woman with bewitching gray eyes. In St. Louis their time overlapped, and they went horseback riding together. He followed the rides with gifts of forget-me-nots. She was soon wearing the flowers as a decoration, and their intimacy began. Since Booth had often played Romeo, and now Maggie was his Juliet, there was some good-natured teasing between them. Nevertheless, the relationship seemed serious, and word reached the East that the pair was engaged. Maggie admitted up front that she couldn’t sew and couldn’t cook—but who expected such things from a sunbeam? The two would never wed. They did remain friends, however. Booth sent Maggie flowers from time to time, and on the night Lincoln was shot she dreamt of Booth, handsome as ever and dressed stylishly in a short Spanish coat lined with crimson satin.14
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 19
