The close physical and emotional association of actors working in the same company also led to temptation. John Barrymore, Mrs. Drew’s grandson, made this point in a legendary riposte. A society matron cornered him backstage and asked him if, in view of his knowledge of Shakespeare, he thought Hamlet had a sexual relationship with Ophelia. Barrymore famously replied: “Only in the Chicago production, madam.”15
Short, small-featured, dark-eyed, fair-skinned, and exquisitely shaped, Fanny Brown was said to be the loveliest woman on the American stage. “Beautiful and bewitching,” sighed Queen of the Clipper when she played with Edwin at the Winter Garden in New York. While not as gifted as Maggie, she was a talented vocalist, pantomime, ménage rider, dramatic artist, and dancer.16 Her wonderful physicality matched Booth’s own. She could wield a sword better than most men, leading one critic to suggest that “Fanny would distinguish herself as a light cavalry officer in Sherman’s army.”17
In the fall of 1863 Booth organized a company to visit some of the smaller New England cities, and he invited Fanny to join the troupe. “When on his theatrical tour through the country, accompanied by Miss Brown, he exhibited some little regard for her shaky reputation,” wrote a busybody. “When they stopped at hotels, Miss Brown, for the sake of appearance, was wont to room with an accompanying female friend.” The women would then pretend to have a falling-out, “the affliction of which she found comfort for in the adjoining chamber of the handsome and enticing John.”18 Once again an engagement was rumored; once again no wedding bells rang.19 But Booth remained fond of Fanny and carried her photo with him.20
Booth’s revolving courtships did not preclude visits to prostitutes at the same time, and often close relationships with them. In addition to Louise Wooster, the Alabama woman who a quarter century after his death would permit neither friend nor stranger to say a disparaging word about him, Anne Horton and Sally Andrews, both of New York City, were attached to him.21 His final relationship along this line was with Ellen Starr. A native of Baltimore, Ellen was expelled from that city’s Ladies Literary Institute (Asia’s alma mater) after accusing the Reverend John Jarboe, her principal, of sexual harassment. When Jarboe later saw her in the city and warned about the dangers of the street, she asked him what he expected. Her mother and sisters were in the business. Joining them, she became “a fashionable courtesan traveling over the country.”22
“She was one of the most beautiful women I ever saw,” said barkeep Ferguson about her.23 He also found the small, dainty blonde cold, but she was warm enough to Booth. “My darling Baby,” Ellen wrote to him in early 1865, “please call this evening or as soon as you receive this note. I’ll not detain you five minutes—for gods sake come.” After Booth shot Lincoln, she attempted to kill herself.24 “She was as fierce as a tigress in her devotion to Booth,” Ferguson added. “After the assassination, when she heard that I was the first man to report the murder at the police station, she sent me word that she would blow my head off the next time she saw me.”
When Booth was interested in a woman, he pulled out all the stops—poetry, flowers, jewelry, even sentiments etched on glass. Isabel Sumner was a sixteen-year-old student at Bowdoin School whose father owned a grocery market in Boston. She was a smallish brunette with blue eyes, soft pretty features, and a lively manner. Booth wrote a stream of letters to her over the summer of 1864. Six notes survive, affording a glimpse of the actor in full pursuit. “How shall I write you, as lover, friend or brother?” he began. She must know, he continued, how much he respected her goodness and purity. That was why it was agony to see so little of her. “I was about to say, I love you, well perhaps I do. But do you think the least little bit of me? Forgive me for asking such a question, but I know the world and had begun to hate it. I saw you. Things seemed changed.” It was hard, he explained, for him to express himself in the manner he wished. Would she help him learn to write a proper love letter? He knew he could trust her, trust her to keep his little secrets.25
Mother Booth had seen all this before. “You have so often been dead in love, and this may prove like the others—not of any lasting impression,” she cautioned her son. “A young man in love does not stop to reflect, and like a child with a new toy, only craves the possession of it. Think and reflect. You are aware that the woman you make your wife you must love and respect beyond all others, for marriage is an act that cannot be recalled, without misery, if otherwise entered into—which you are well aware of.” Knowing his probable reaction to her words, she closed, “I expect you will turn round and laugh at my preaching.”26
Isabel lived with her family above her father’s shop. To facilitate the romance, Booth checked into the Bromfield House, a hotel directly across the street from the Sumner dwelling, giving him a full view of her home. Earlier in the century another romantically minded young man loved a maid who lived at the same address. The suitor arranged for a hay wagon to drive by the house. His adored jumped from her room into the hay, and the pair hurried off to the altar. History would not repeat itself. Booth went all out, even sending Isabel a ring with a pearl set with tiny diamonds. The gift should have sent the young woman’s head spinning. But Isabel was a cautious girl. She had had Booth direct his letters to her to the post office, not her home, for example. Although details are murky, it appears that ultimately she decided to keep things merely friendly. According to neighborhood lore, “she lived, it was said, to give devout thanks, after the murder of Lincoln, that she had ignored Booth’s attempts.”27
The sheer number of Booth’s courtships and dalliances suggests that he enjoyed the chase as much as the catch—just as his mother said. In other words, he was in love with being in love. There was no headier intoxicant. A passion for passion pushed every other thought out of his head. Because of this, the playwright Addie Norcross, a Boston friend, believed Booth belonged to that class of individuals whom society indulged for their extravagances. “We forgive men of his type much for their exuberance and vitality,” she wrote. “They were handsome and clever and full of life. They lived and loved.”28
Men were drawn to him as well as women. Booth’s biographer Townsend, speaking with him for the first and only time over drinks at Washington’s Metropolitan Hotel in the spring of 1865, recalled his manner. The actor leaned on the bar, fingered his mustache, and “drew his face very near to mine, like a lover to a woman. There was not a foot between us.” Booth’s breath was sweet despite the actor’s years of drinking and smoking. “His white brow and dark eyes and excellent address were captivating. He looked the full man, gave his heart as well as his head, and seemed to admit me to his inner circle. He was soft as a duke, modest as virgin genius, without antagonisms, making himself like my old acquaintance yet without familiarity, as friendly as if he had taken an affectionate interest in me. The trait he left upon my mind was amiability. What an agreeable fellow!” Townsend thought.29
There was a naturalness to him. “One may know an actor off the stage by the formal strut, the affected manners he uses,” said Charles M. Wallace, who served with Booth in the Richmond Grays. “Booth was an exception to the rule.” John Deery, who operated a saloon in Washington during the war, agreed. “In common intercourse he was utterly devoid of that artificiality and ‘staginess’ so common to men of his profession. He never used to gossip about his professional work nor boast of his stage career as it is the general custom of actors.” In fact, Booth rarely spoke of the theater with those outside of it.30
Ordinarily Booth was quiet, even reserved in public. With people around him, he lit up, “convivial in his habits, and sprightly and genial in conversation.” That was why the Ford’s Theatre callboy William J. Ferguson disliked photographs of the actor. “Pictures in the main disclose him as saturnine. They show little of his quick excitability, nothing of his love of fun, no trace of his joyousness. For these qualities, which completely concealed the dark side of his character, I held him in admiration and high esteem. With me the extent of my regard and respect
for Booth fell nothing short of hero-worship.”31
Booth got along well with all classes of people. “He was extremely popular with everybody,” wrote Norcross. “Simple and democratic, he joked with everyone he came in contact with, even the girls in the laundry where he left his collars and cuffs. They always saw to it that Mr. Booth’s package was ready when he came in for it and vied with each other as to who should have the honor of delivering it. He joked with the cabmen at the stand corner of the Tremont House. In his quiet quizzical way he made friends everywhere.” It was easy for him to like Norcross, whose father was a wealthy journalist, but Booth’s friendships extended to the bottom of the social ladder as well. “By the unlettered and ignorant who came in contact with him he was almost idolized,” recalled John T. Ford. “His graciousness to that class was proverbial, his liberality unstinted. He astonished them with his strength, fearlessness, and wonderful gymnastic feats.” Said one: “He was a man to be liked because he enjoyed you.”32
The variety of these associations seems contradictory. The poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a friend so sweet he was described as “a stick of sugar candy,” told Annie E. Field at the time of the assassination that “we should not have been more astonished to hear he himself had done the terrible deed than he was Wilkes Booth. He was so gentle, gentler than I.”33 Yet Aldrich spoke of the same man who cleared out barrooms when angered and drinking.34 Townsend explained this contradiction by asserting that Booth was “hollow.” This is a tantalizing reference to the “empty vessel” syndrome common to some great actors in which a dazzling exterior with little beneath is lost without director or script.35 That was why Booth got along well with everyone, argued Townsend. “He had very little to communicate and therefore harmonized well with people.”36 He could sing sweetly with the poets or crack heads with the rowdies as the moment demanded.
Townsend quickly rejected his own thesis, however. He knew as well as anyone that Booth’s problem was not that he was empty. The problem was that he was full. His powerful personality harbored consuming likes and dislikes. Surpassing all was his hatred of abolitionists. He never lost an opportunity to excoriate antislavery leaders like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison for their extremism. “And yet,” wrote a Chicago friend, “he was precisely of that nature.” In an odd way he reminded the friend of John Brown. “These two murderers reached extremes. Both became permeated with the spirit of the faith which they adopted, each carried this belief into his whole life and brooded over it and nursed it till it became the absorbing controlling idea and he a monomaniac and murderer.”37 The result did not surprise Marcus M. Pomeroy, one of the nation’s most notorious Copperhead editors and a Chicago drinking crony of the actor, who said, “Booth was a very impassioned man, as we all know, and he never did anything by half.”38
Friends realized it was pointless to discuss certain things with him. He might listen and even pick up information from those whose knowledge he respected, but it was impossible to change his mind. “To argue with him would have been as effective as trying to widen the Royal Gorge of the Colorado by whistling in it,” said the actor John M. Barron.39 This closed-mindedness had a serious downside. In contrast to Lincoln, who showed an ability to learn and grow as a person, Booth never had a new thought after his core opinions were formed in his teenage years.
Compounding this defect was an inability to let go of his troubles. “While Booth was a very likeable young fellow, very courteous in his manner, he was quick tempered—also quick to forgive—unless the offence was of a grave character. Then he would brood over it,” said a Baltimore friend.40 For example, anger over the imprisonment of Baltimore police marshal George P. Kane roiled for months. Such worrisome thoughts lingered, festering away. When he lost his temper, “he would snap you up like anything,” said William Withers, Ford’s Theatre’s musical director.41
Booth developed the habit of rationalizing away bad war news. As his brother Junius knew, John did not hear what he did not want to. “Whenever I would mention any success of the federal arms, he would say that he had not heard it,” June wrote after the assassination, “or that it was a false report &c., and would soon be corrected.” The younger brother claimed that for each fact in a newspaper, there were a hundred lies.42 If Booth liked a person of differing views, he redirected the conversation. On late-night walks with Forney, who ran the Lincoln-friendly Washington Daily Chronicle, Booth seemed happy unless the topic of the war came up. Then he fell silent. “Forney,” he would finally say, “let’s talk about something else.”
Not surprisingly, he hated losing. Like most athletes, Booth was highly competitive, and hence he puzzled John Deery, operator of a classy billiard parlor above Grover’s Theatre in Washington. Deery regularly invited Booth to play, but the actor never picked up a cue. Since Booth loved the game, Deery was baffled. The fact was that Booth knew he could not beat Deery, who was the national billiard champion in 1865, and he did not want the embarrassment of losing before a roomful of people.43
With a few such exceptions, Booth was not unduly egotistical. “He was in general a modest man,” recalled his friend Thomas Harbin, a noted Confederate agent. “The only thing he was proud and almost boastful about was his physical strength. As a good spreer, fighter, good shot, good jumper, and lover of the open air, he felt supreme.” He was bold and self-confident in all things physical. A sweet-tooth for trouble got him into difficulties, but once in them he was composed and steady.44 The comedian John E. Owens expressed a common view when he declared, “He was all man from the child—and the feet—up.”45 Yet “all men at times are cowards,” as Booth put it. He was traveling on a Mississippi River steamboat once when rebel guerrillas opened fire on the vessel. A bullet whistled through the bonnet of Henrietta Vallee, Ben DeBar’s wife. When the gunfire turned his way, Booth jumped for cover as fast as anyone else, a fact he freely admitted.46
The “Booth full of fun and pranks” was very familiar figure to his friends such as Frank Drew. The two men were sharing a room at the National Hotel in Washington when their sleep was interrupted one night by hackmen quarreling below on Pennsylvania Avenue. The former occupant of the room had been a hard-drinking congressman who had left the bureau drawers full of empty whiskey bottles. Booth retrieved one, quietly opened a window, and dropped it on the street between the cabbies. Far from ending their ruckus, this raised it to a higher level as the hackmen accused each other of the attack. Booth then retrieved an armful of bottles and dropped one after the other out the window. As the missiles exploded like bombs on the icy pavement about their feet, the drivers scattered left and right while Booth stood at the window in his nightdress and laughed himself silly.47
“He loved fun of a rather rough sort,” wrote a journalist from his hometown of Baltimore.48 “This love sometimes carried Booth to extremes,” continued Ferguson, the callboy. The youth had dropped into a billiard hall near Ford’s to deliver parts when an argument broke out between two men at a table. Also present to observe the spat was Booth, an excited look on his face. “To egg on the altercation Booth found a bound book and threw the book at one of them. It reached its mark, square in the middle of the man’s back.” The victim wheeled around and accused a bystander of the assault. The accusation was resented, and a free-for-all started. Suddenly the lights were turned out to quell the melee as Booth fled the scene with Ferguson on his heels.49
Despite such incidents, a Philadelphia journalist asserted that “the disposition of this ‘star crossed’ murderer of the President was not vicious, nor was he, as has been represented, savage and morose. His address was remarkably winning and insured the friendship with all with whom he came in contact.” Willful and impetuous, yes, “but tempered with a general kindness of heart.” An employee at the Arch Street Theatre believed “he was not a bad man and after all was an innocent kind of fellow who would not do a mean action for the love of meanness.”50
It is no surprise that Booth had devoted friends who, in later y
ears when they felt safe to do so, spoke freely of his better qualities. Despite the trouble he brought upon the Ford family, Harry Ford, a younger brother of John T. Ford, always insisted that “Booth was one of the simplest, sweetest-dispositioned, and most lovable men he ever knew.”51 “Booth was a most winning captivating man,” agreed John Mathews. “That was the opinion of everyone who came in contact with him.”52 Deery felt him to be “the most charming of men, the most fascinating personality I have ever met in my long life. In his way, with his intimates, he was as simple and affectionate as a child. That much at least in his favor can with truth be averred over his grave, dishonored as it is over that of any other American.”
“He is, all in all, a strange compound of a man,” said a Chicago journalist, “a peculiar combination of mind and nature.”53 All who crossed his path agreed. “There were many things connected with this man which I was unable to understand,” said Forney. These friends could do no better than embrace the perspective of young Ferguson of Ford’s when he took stock of Booth six decades after the war. “I now can trace back through my memories of him and note tendencies, but they were then accepted without analysis as part and parcel of his high-spirited nature, of the dashing buoyancy I so much admired.”54
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 20
