Setting these roles aside, Booth gains admittance to Forrest’s pantheon for his work in three other plays. Not unsurprisingly, they were among the key pieces he played.
His Raphael in The Marble Heart was exceptional. Booth played a sculptor who had the misfortune to love a hard-hearted and materialistic woman. The play appealed to younger audiences who identified with Raphael’s hopeless passion. Since openness and sincerity were required for this character, the role was markedly different from the villainous Richard—its opposite, in fact—and it showed Booth’s range that he could realize it.112 Coyle wrote in the National Intelligencer that the part was peculiarly well suited to him, “and it is not to be wondered at that he has achieved in its embodiment his richest distinctions. By his earnestness, his vigorous grasp of genius, and his fervor of style, he claims the most brilliant honors of his art.”113 “His Raphael was simply matchless,” concurred John T. Ford. “He was ideal. He was the greatest that was ever seen.”114
Booth’s friend John Mathews thought Pescara in The Apostate was Booth’s finest role.115 An inheritance from his father, this dismal tale of the Spanish Inquisition was considered old-fashioned when Booth toured it in the 1860s, but he gave new life to the villainy, plots, counterplots, and gloomy ending in which all the leading characters perish. Pescara was a malignant and bloodthirsty villain. He was the biggest fiend on the Civil War stage, and Booth made that evident in every way. Even his makeup for the character was so frightening that he was once forced to pause his performance and reassure the youthful actress Kathryn Evans that it was just Johnny underneath.116
As Booth reached for the great dramatic intensity that the role required, his onstage demeanor astonished the audience. “The human face is my study,” Booth said, and his features as Pescara appeared supernaturally employed.117 Louis Weichmann, a government clerk who saw him play the part at Ford’s, was dumbstruck by “the hideous, malevolent expressions of his distorted countenance, the fierce glare and ugly roll of his eyes which seemed ready to burst from their sockets. I cannot use language forcible enough to describe Booth’s actions on that night.”118
A Boston critic wrote that while “Richard is doubtless his most popular effort, Pescara is certainly his most artistic one.” A New York scribe said, “His Mephistophelian sneer, his demoniac glare, and pity-murdering laugh, fairly curdle the blood and haunt one like the spectres of a dream.”119 Coyle felt Booth was without competition in the role. “He had made the part peculiarly his own and has excited the greatest enthusiasm in every city where he has played it. In this great character Mr. Booth is said to stand without a rival.”120 Edwin saw John’s Pescara at the Boston Museum on January 21, 1863, and theatrical tradition has it that he presented the younger brother with his own costume for the role. “I shall never play it again after seeing you.’ ” Edwin told him.121
The third role in Forrest’s required trio for greatness was the one Booth performed most often during his career, the title character in Richard III. “As Richard he was different from all other tragedians,” wrote the Clipper’s Brown, reflecting on his own decades as critic, agent, manager, and theatrical historian. “He imitated no one, but struck out a path of his own, introducing points which older hands at the business would not dare to attempt. In this character he was more terribly real than any other actor I ever saw.”122 The New York Tribune joined the praise, noting, “Booth is head and shoulders above those who ordinarily attempt Richard III in intellectual breath and powers of concentration.” The New York Times and Messenger felt that “his Richard is acknowledged to be without a rival upon the American stage.”123 Ford thought Booth’s Richard was unequaled by any contemporary.124 “He did not act Richard,” explained Isaac G. Reed. “He was Richard—hump and all.”125
When John Ellsler penned his memoirs late in life, he was hesitant to include too much about his friend Booth in the text. He paused the writing for a moment, then continued. “It is with a feeling of reluctance that I proceed further,” he stated. “Still I feel I may be pardoned for intruding my memories of him, whom I hold in such dear estimation.” Ellsler hoped that Booth’s great crime would not entirely efface his legacy as an actor. “It must be understood that young Wilkes was not finished. Far from it. He lacked age, experience, and discretion—attainments only to be acquired by time, study, and conscientious labor. In all his acting one was reminded of a blooded colt; full of action, full of fire, necessitating a master hand to hold him in check and keep him down to good work. It required time to remedy these defects. Unfortunately the period never came. He died in the very springtime of his life. But those who saw him still speak of him as an actor who, had he lived, would have stood head and shoulders above all the artists of his time.
“It is no disparagement to them to say so.”126
success meant wealth. “to those stars who hit the popular taste and become public favorites,” wrote the theatrical agent Wardle Corbyn, “the United States is an El Dorado and wealth flows in upon them in a golden stream.”127 Booth told Keach in December 1862 that his gusher averaged more than $650 per week for the season. In Chicago that month his weekly take soared to nearly $900. His profits upon his return to Boston in January 1863 are unknown, but it was reported that “his engagement was one of the greatest pecuniary successes known in the history of the Museum.” In the spring of that year Ford paid him $700 for six nights in Washington.128 Canning believed that Booth totaled $40,000 in one fifteen-month span.129 Such a sum was possible. The popular comedian John Owens made $52,000 over a similar period, and Laura Keene once took home $17,000 for eleven nights.130 The best guess is that during his peak earning years Booth averaged at least $20,000. That is what Asia thought, and a friend to whom Booth showed his bankbook recalled a figure in that range or higher.131 The star, who had never had his hands on real money before, was giddy with success. “My goose does indeed hang high,” he laughed.
“Wilkes hoarded, saved, grew miserly at last,” recalled Asia. And he invested. He purchased stock in the Boston Water Power Company, a business whose name hardly suggested that it made money selling lots of land created as the tidal flats of the Back Bay were filled in.132 He also bought bonds, purchasing three thousand dollars’ worth of U.S. Treasury 5-20s. These bonds had an interest rate of 6 percent (paid half-yearly) and were redeemable in gold after five years and payable in twenty years from date. Given his political views, it is ironic that he owned federal bonds designed specifically to finance the war, but such were his contradictions.
These investments show the influence of Joseph H. Simonds, a Boston bank teller about Booth’s age. A theater aficionado, Simonds knew Booth early on, even before the actor’s first appearance in the city, and they became close friends. Simonds was organized and precise and so fastidious that a speck of dirt on his coat or a blot of ink on his letter paper horrified him.133 Clearly, the two were an odd couple, but the clerk was honest and Booth trusted him. “I think I will have to make you my banker,” Booth wrote him early in 1863, “and give you an interest in my speculations, so that if we are lucky, you may be able in a few years to throw aside those musty ledgers.”134
Simonds’s guiding hand was shown in facilitating Booth’s purchase of a lot on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. Delighted with his reception in the city, Booth thought about building a house there, and this lot was located only two blocks from the Public Garden and a brisk ten-minute walk to the Boston Museum. The property cost about $8,200, which the actor paid in four installments in 1863 and 1864. He had his eye on other lots as well, telling Simonds to look out for good investments.135 Despite this expense, Booth had money enough left over to help Edwin buy a house for the family in New York City. With it their mother and little Edwina, Edwin’s daughter, would have a permanent place to live. “It will be a home for John,” the older brother promised.136
the war ground on, claiming the life of Booth’s first cousin George Mitchell. George was a teenager living at the Booth farm when John
was born. When his parents were evicted by Junius, he moved with them to Baltimore, where he made a living as a newsvendor. Enlisting at the war’s outset in the 2nd Maryland Infantry Regiment (U.S.), George served faithfully until shot in the thigh at Petersburg in June 1864. His death at a soldiers’ hospital in Washington followed a few weeks later.137
One of Booth’s preoccupations was the fate of prisoners of war, and it is notable that George had earlier been a prisoner, captured at Second Manassas in August 1862. But Booth’s concern over this issue was not sparked by George’s bad luck. In fact, family letters have nothing to say about George, living or dead. Booth’s distress grew from the arrest of Marylanders such as Marshal Kane. In the first year of the war the largest number of civilian prisoners from any state came from Maryland.138
One of those swept up by federal forces was Jessie B. Wharton. A resident of Clear Spring, Wharton was arrested shortly before Christmas 1861 for aiding the rebels by wrecking a feeder dam on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal above Washington. Confined in Old Capitol Prison, he proved to be a handful. On April 20, 1862, he allegedly lingered at a prison window in violation of the rules. When a sentry, Private Ambrose Baker of the 91st Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, ordered him to step back, Wharton unleashed a string of curses, “calling him ‘a d——d Yankee son of a b——h, a Northern son of a b——h, a d——d hired scoundrel.’ ” Baker repeated the order. Wharton threw open his coat, bared his breast, and exclaimed, “Shoot, you coward, shoot! I’m nothing but a prisoner.” The sentry did just that, wounding Wharton fatally.139 Baker was arrested, but when his comrades petitioned President Lincoln on his behalf, the soldier was immediately freed.140
Wharton’s death was reported in St. Louis newspapers on the same day, and the same page, as Booth’s second engagement with DeBar was announced.141 It was shocking news for the star. He and Wharton had been classmates at St. Timothy’s Hall. Wharton’s father, Dr. John O. Wharton, registrar of the Maryland Agricultural College (later the University of Maryland at College Park), was one of the parents brought in to broker an end to the student rebellion of 1853. After he left school, Wharton was a guest at Tudor Hall, where he flirted with Asia, writing her poems that he had published in the local newspaper. She looked encouragingly at the handsome visitor as he and John smoked and swapped stories, the former’s arm draped affectionately around the latter’s neck. Later she heard their laughter running down the narrow stairs to John’s room.142
Asia always feared her brother would become a martyr of some sort, but now Wharton had earned that distinction among Lincoln’s opponents. An unarmed civilian arrested in his own home, he had been shot on a peaceful Sunday afternoon when, after reading the Bible, he sought a ray of sunshine at the window of his dreary cell in which to stand and lift his heart in song. That is what his fellow inmates swore had happened, at least, and the Copperhead press believed it. Booth was incensed by the shooting, joining Wharton’s relatives in their conviction that Wharton had been murdered.143
Among those appalled by Wharton’s death was the Wisconsin editor Marcus M. Pomeroy. Booth was introduced to Brick, as he was known, in the bar under McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago. The turbulent journalist, who believed the war to be inhuman and corrupting, agreed with Booth that abolitionists were first-class sinners. Little wonder that Lincoln’s proposal to free the slaves in the rebel states was turning Pomeroy into a hater of the president. Brick liked Booth, however. The actor had ideals and lived by them.144 When his friend later murdered Lincoln, Brick wrote and published a pair of sentences that were surprisingly casual in tone for a time when the president’s death was still a painful topic for most Northerners: “One fine evening in 1865 a gentleman of the name of Lincoln, whose misfortune it was to be a tyrant as well as a fool, a despot as well as a blackguard, while taking his royal ease in a one-horse theatre of Washington, was waited upon rather unexpectedly by another gentleman by the name of Booth, whose misfortune it was to hate tyranny and love liberty. Booth invited Lincoln to git, and, using very persuasive arguments, Lincoln concluded he would accept the invitation!”145
Lincoln’s emancipation plans confirmed Booth’s worst fears. The entire war was nothing more than one gigantic John Brown raid, directed again at Virginia, a state he loved. June, who had returned from San Francisco to New York City to live, was disturbed to learn the depth of these feelings. “Knowing his sympathy for the South, I was very much afraid he might go over the lines, and I begged him not to be so foolish,” June later told authorities. “I feared he might join the South, tho’ he promised me that he would not for his Mother’s and his family’s sake.” While June wrung a renewal of that pledge out of him, their conversations were troubling, and so was the younger brother. One night in a Washington street, June noticed tears in John’s eyes as the latter turned his face toward Richmond and said sorrowfully, “Virginia. Virginia.”146
“The trouble with Booth, in my opinion,” thought Martin Wright of the Ellsler company, “was that he felt too keenly.”147 John Mathews saw the star’s emotions so engaged when speaking with his fellow actors E. L. Davenport and J. W. Wallack. The men described the suffering they witnessed at a soldiers’ hospital. The talk then turned to the war in general, Booth joined in, “and all of them expressed, more or less, feeling against the war,” recalled Mathews, who was present. “It was a feeling not of bitterness but of sorrow, that brothers should be engaged in killing each other.” Wallack and Davenport were uncommonly eloquent in expressing their desire for peace, and Mathews noticed that the power of their words made a profound impression on Booth.148
“It is terrible for a man to shed the blood of another,” Booth said. “The sight of blood drives me wild, and this war has been nothing but blood—blood. The land runs with blood!”149
Empathy had its limits, of course. On the evening of December 31, 1862, African Americans gathered at churches to await the day of liberation. At one “watch night” held at the Union Bethel Church not far from Ford’s Theatre, a minister exhorted his congregation to get off their seats and on their knees in gratitude to God and to Abraham Lincoln. The following afternoon—New Year’s Day 1863—the president signed the official copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. At about the same hour Booth finished a rehearsal of The Corsican Brothers at DeBar’s in St. Louis. Standing in the dressing room with the singer Con Murphy, he suddenly seized a large prop pistol and shoved it into the man’s ribs. “By ——, Murphy, if you were Lincoln, what a chance I’d have.”150
booth toured widely during his final year on the stage. Christmas 1863 found him in Leavenworth, Kansas. Although well received, he failed financially due to the weather. A blizzard, “believed to be the heaviest ever known in the plains,” pounded the area.151 The trip from Leavenworth to St. Joseph was an ordeal. To catch the steamboat he had to run four miles from the fort to the Missouri River, then help cut ice to allow the vessel to approach the dock. Booth was a self-described “dead-man” when he fell into a cold bed at the Pacific House in St. Joe.152
Michael F. Tiernan, an attorney, lived at the hotel. A former actor and admirer of the elder Booth, Tiernan joined in signing a public letter inviting Booth to give a reading at Corby’s Hall. Short of cash, Booth agreed. He excelled in reciting in intimate, salon-type settings. This would be a more formal affair for a paid audience, however, and call attention to his elocutionary (as opposed to his acting) skills. The result disappointed Tiernan. “The room was uncomfortably cold, the audience restless and at times annoying,” and Booth untrained and stagy. Nevertheless, the evening put $150 in the actor’s pocket.153
The brutal weather continued, with St. Joe recording a bone-chilling twenty-five degrees below zero and the Mississippi River at St. Louis locked in ice from bank to bank. Booth got as far as Cameron on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad line before snowdrifts closed the track to the east. Stranded, he became acquainted with Weston Bassett, the station’s telegraph operator. Since the one small hotel in this
hamlet was overwhelmed by snowbound travelers, Bassett offered to share his room at the depot with Booth. Neighborhood children discovered “Mr. Boots” and drew him outside for snowball fights. “Sometimes they would all join against him and give him much the worst of it, but he took it all in perfect good nature and was as rollicking and boisterous as the best of them,” recalled Bassett. “He played games with them and romped until dark.”154
Impatient to get to St. Louis, where he was overdue, he ultimately took matters into his own hands. Booth found a sled owner fool enough to drive in the frigid weather if the man could find someone fool enough to pay, so the two struck a deal. The driver would carry Booth down the line to the point where the tracks were clear enough for the trains to operate. Attaching four horses to the sled, they stuffed it with straw. Wrapped in a buffalo robe, Booth climbed in, waved a cheery good-bye to Bassett, and whirled away, “laughing and shouting, red-cheeked and happy over [his] release from the blockade.” There was danger in the trip, and, as Booth wrote Ellsler, “I never knew what hardship was till then,” but he reached St. Louis in time to perform on January 12, 1864. He had lost over a week of his engagement in a city where he always minted money.
Later in the month, while performing in Louisville, Kentucky, Booth still seemed shell-shocked by his frontier adventures. Krone of St. Louis met him on the street and thought “he looked worn out, dejected, and as melancholy as the dull, grey sky above us.” Colleagues reported troubling signs. Booth drank, spoke, and behaved more extravagantly than before. Krone was concerned. When the star remained quiet and gloomy over a beer at Dannerman’s Tavern, it was clear that more than good company would be required to cheer him up. Krone asked what was wrong. “Booth smilingly answered that no doubt it was the rough experience he had passed through lately.” His old bad luck had tracked him down, he felt.155
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 22
