Up and down it went for Menken. Tragedy followed hot on the heels of triumph. Over the few frantic years left to her, she would hurtle through such a rapid sequence of victories and setbacks and twists that her life lost all sense of scale and proportion.
The French, even more than the British, were wild to see Menken. So she entered into negotiations with a theatrical producer and began making arrangements to perform in Paris.
The producer felt that a new play was required. Parisian audiences weren’t likely to go in for the English-language Mazeppa. Instead, Menken was offered the lead in Les pirates de la Savane. At last—a suitable dramatic vehicle. While the Tartar warrior was the source of her fame, Menken had long been hungry for a role that would allow her to be taken seriously as an artist. Ada Clare and Artemus Ward had both promised to write her such a play, but neither had come through. In fact, nearly every person with literary ability whom she encountered—and their numbers were legion—had promised to write her a play, yet none had delivered. Now it looked like her situation was about to change.
Pirates was a swashbuckling adventure tale that had made its Paris debut several years earlier. In advance of the new production, its co-writers, Ferdinand Dugué and Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois, reworked the script, adding a couple of plot contrivances. Menken’s character, Leo, was turned into a mute, whose tongue had been cut out in an Indian attack. It was an elegant solution to the challenge of getting the tempestuous actress to memorize her dialogue—in French no less. Now, she could play her part without uttering a word. The playwrights also added a climactic scene, where Leo was . . . well . . . stripped down, strapped to a horse, and sent off on a wild ride.
Initially, Menken chafed at playing a role that had become nothing more than a silent French Mazeppa. But the chance to conquer Paris proved an even greater enticement. Pirates opened on December 30, 1866, at the Théâtre de la Gaîté. The play was an instant sensation. The crowd loved it, and the critics piled on the accolades. To cries of “Vive Leo!” Menken made nine curtain calls that first night. A review in Le Moniteur Universel praised Menken as “a very beautiful woman, svelte and admirably proportioned, who mimes with rare intelligence.”
Pirates managed a run of 150 sold-out performances. In Paris, as in London, Menken devoted her time offstage to cultivating people who could help her career. Often, she was spotted out strolling in the Bois de Boulogne, arm in arm with Alexandre Dumas. The author was an old man now, easily thirty years Menken’s senior, and was decades removed from his greatest successes, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. He was living in a cheap flat on the boulevard Malesherbes, dependent for income on an allowance from his son.
One day, Menken and Dumas decided to visit a studio and have their picture taken together. In the photo, Menken rests her head against the author’s chest, one arm wrapped around his neck. Both wear oddly amorous expressions, sleepy eyes and languid smiles, as if they have just finished making love. Or that would have been the natural conclusion—particularly in a more demure age—had anyone happened to see this very private and intimate portrait.
Predictably, everyone in Paris did. Somehow, the photograph was leaked to the public. One suspects that Dumas was the instigator. In his prime, he had been a lothario of epic proportions, who boasted of bedding thousands of women. Here was evidence—photographic evidence—that he’d lost none of his prowess. Menken may have been a willing party to the leaked picture, although she professed to be mortified.
Along the boulevards, newsstands did a brisk business selling copies. Doctored versions became especially popular, featuring Menken’s and Dumas’s heads attached to images of naked bodies in various sexual positions. Parisians delighted in crafting doggerel verse and bawdy songs about the supposed sex partners. The truth—did they or didn’t they?—was immaterial. The scandal worked its magic, as so often happens, benefiting both parties. After a long, painful absence, Dumas was back in the public eye. Soon a Paris newspaper began a serialization of The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, his last major novel. Menken, quite simply, was the toast of Paris.
What else was left? Menken had pretty much seen and done it all. In the summer of 1868, she withdrew from public life, suffering from a mysterious ailment. She settled into a Paris hotel room, confined to her bed. “I am lost to art and life,” she told a visitor. “Yet, when all is said and done, have I not at my age tasted more of life than most women who live to be a hundred?” She spent her last days and devoted her remaining strength to battling to get her poetry collection published.
During the morning of August 10, her breathing became shallow, and a rabbi was brought to her bedside. He delivered last rites in Hebrew, and then Menken slipped away. Despite all the money she had made, the actress left nothing behind. Somehow, in her last years, she managed to squander everything on extravagances such as a custom-made coach and team of horses. In true Bohemian fashion, Menken died penniless in Paris. She was thirty-three years old, according to the best estimate.
Her passing was a major news story. “The Menken is dead,” reads one obit. “The bare-faced, bare-limbed, reckless, erratic, ostracized, but gifted, kind-hearted, successful, yet ill-starred, Menken is no more. . . . She has exchanged for the stage the coffin, and for the saloon the cemetery.” As the writer continued, he couldn’t resist slipping in a cautionary note, a pattern with the numerous obituary notices she received: “But, alas! her soul, almost from her birth, was given over a prey to a Demon, whose earthly name is A Morbid thirst for Notoriety.”
The cause of Menken’s death, like the date of her birth, remains a mystery. Various accounts attributed it to tuberculosis, appendicitis, an abscess, cancer, or—most dramatically—complications from a horse-riding accident. She did have a serious onstage mishap while performing in Paris, so even this is plausible.
Only one week after her death, her poetry collection finally came out. Entitled Infelicia and published by the English house of John Camden Hotten, the book was rushed into stores to capitalize on the upsurge of interest following Menken’s demise. Dickens had not been involved. While intrigued by Menken’s stage act, he was always privately dismissive of her verse. Nevertheless, Dickens did provide a “dedication” of sorts. Menken had cobbled it together by combining passages from two of his rather formal letters to her:
Dear Miss Menken: I shall have great pleasure in accepting your dedication. I thank you for your portrait as a highly remarkable specimen of photography. I also thank you for the verses inclosed in your note. Many such inclosures come to me, but few so pathetically written, and fewer still so modestly sent. Faithfully yours, Charles Dickens.
This appeared prominently, on the opening page of the volume. As endorsements go, it wasn’t exactly ringing. Infelicia was soon forgotten.
Menken, too: she’s buried in Paris in Montparnasse cemetery, laid to rest underneath a shade tree. In this case, though, rest doesn’t exactly seem fitting. It’s hard to picture Menken as anything but the vibrant creature she was in life. Time may have passed; the memories may have faded. But there was a moment—a few brief, fever-tinged years—when the whole world was captivated as the bold and alluring actress was strapped to a horse and sent thundering off, taking that notorious wild ride.
Adah and Artemus, Artemus and Adah: their fates had always been oddly bound together. They had often seemed to move along the same path. After the Civil War, Ward made the same decision as Menken, choosing to travel abroad in search of opportunity.
Ward arrived in London in the autumn of 1866, peddling a new act. The British public had never been exposed to The Babes in the Wood. But Ward felt confident that fresher, more topical material was the way to go.
His new act spoofed moving panoramas, then a very popular type of entertainment. They consisted of a long canvas (stretching for hundreds or even thousands of feet), which could be unwound from a spool, revealing a sequence of images. A forerunner of the m
otion picture, moving panoramas proved especially effective as the backdrop for a speaker who was describing a trip to an exotic location. A very successful one was devoted to an Arctic journey, for example, but the era’s biggest hit reproduced a paddleboat voyage down the Mississippi, unspooling the sights one might see on the river while steaming along.
Ward’s panorama depicted various scenes encountered on the trip to Virginia City, Nevada, and environs. Obviously, this called for a far more elaborate production than his earlier routine. In fact, it required several additional personnel such as a pianist along with what Ward called a “crankist” (someone to spool the panorama) and a “moonist” (someone to handle lighting effects). But Ward’s comedic formula remained much the same. Often, he put on a befuddled air when an image didn’t line up with the story he was trying to tell. He also had great fun with the amateurishness of his production. As Ward attempted to describe the beauty of the Great Salt Lake at night, for example, the moonist proved unable to hold the lantern steady, creating a chaotic play of light on the image—and driving the comedian to ever-greater distraction. Another bit involved Ward telling a dramatic western tale, accompanied by staccato runs of piano. The piano soon grew so loud, however, that the audience couldn’t make out what Ward was saying. It was possible only to see his mouth moving and his hands wildly gesticulating. Just as Ward reached the climax of his tale, the piano stopped, and it was possible to hear “ . . . and she fainted on Reginald’s breast.” Then: mock embarrassment as Ward realized the crowd had failed to follow the story. He tried again, but the pianist proved equally enthusiastic, and once again the only audible line was that final, maddeningly enigmatic “ . . . and she fainted on Reginald’s breast.”
Crowds loved Ward’s new act. His peerless instincts as a showman were once again confirmed. For the British, Ward’s inimitable humor combined with scenes from the distant and intriguing American West proved a winning formula. The Times of London praised the comedian for jokes of “that true Transatlantic type,” adding that he possessed an “air of profound unconsciousness, we may almost say melancholy, which is irresistibly droll.” A publication called the Queen was emphatic: “The audience fairly laughed till they could laugh no more.”
Old habits die hard, though. Whenever he finished a show, Ward enjoyed carousing in London until dawn, often in the company of journalists. He fell in with a set that included some writers for Punch. He even contributed some articles to the celebrated humor magazine. But years of following his demanding comedy act with late hours and hard drinking were starting to take their toll. “He had that unfortunate desire for the second round of applause” is how someone who knew Ward in London describes it.
Soon, Ward had grown so worn down that he had trouble performing his act. Along with a moonist and a crankist, he arranged for a pharmacist to be available backstage during shows to dispense drugs to keep him going. Although the precise varieties are unknown, he was probably taking patent medicines laced with stimulants. He even adjusted his act, contriving to do a portion of it seated to conserve his energy. Two months into his London run, however, Ward became so exhausted that he was unable to take the stage. His remaining shows had to be canceled.
A doctor was summoned, and Ward received a grim diagnosis: he was suffering from tuberculosis. His condition was startlingly advanced. Most likely, he’d been aware of his affliction for a while, but had kept it secret. It was certainly not something a popular entertainer would want known. No doubt, his condition was exacerbated by his tireless pursuit of that second round of applause.
Ward traveled first to the Isle of Jersey and then to Southampton to convalesce. It was midwinter now—not that this part of the world provides a therapeutic climate in any season. Ward was mostly confined to his room in various inns, growing progressively sicker. He’d always had a mournful streak. It must have felt sad and strange to Ward, far from New York City, away from London even, just an off-season visitor of lonely seaside resorts. “I am so fearfully weak,” Artemus wrote in a letter to his agent. “I am so utterly ‘gone’ now the excitement is over.”
On March 6, 1867, Artemus Ward died in his room at Radley’s Hotel in Southampton. He was thirty-two years old.
Ward’s body was placed on board the liner Deutschland for passage back across the Atlantic, and then on to Waterford, Maine. He was buried in the same dour little hamlet where he’d been born, the wellspring of his pioneering humor.
The deaths were piling up fast: Ludlow, Menken, and Ward were gone. It was like a Jacobean-era tragedy where all the major characters get killed off. In the autumn of 1865, George Arnold, the Poet of Beer, died at age thirty-one from undisclosed causes. Shortly thereafter, Charles Halpine, the stammerer of inspired phrases, suffered at age thirty-nine a fatal overdose of chloroform, a drug he was using recreationally. Fitz-James O’Brien, Clapp’s first recruit, was by now long departed, a casualty of the Civil War. The New York Times was amazed by the toll: “Death has gathered the greater number of the jovial wits that wasted life under the Broadway sidewalk.”
Yet not all the Pfaff’s stalwarts met untimely ends. Several even managed to become respectable. William Winter settled into his job as drama critic of the New York Tribune, a post he would hold for forty-four years. Thomas Aldrich, Clapp’s deputy on the Saturday Press, became the editor of the Atlantic. Aldrich, who as a young man wrote the line “We were all very merry at Pfaff’s,” would spend his later years at the very heart of the literary establishment, piloting the erstwhile SP’s most hated rival. After leaving New York, however, he would always describe himself as not “genuine Boston” but rather “Boston plated.” To prove it, he continued to smoke a little clay pipe, a vestige of his wild youth.
Edwin Booth also managed to reach an accommodation—albeit an uneasy one—with the world. For the actor, who had traveled in Bohemian circles and was close friends with such mainstays as Ludlow and Aldrich, the time immediately after Lincoln’s assassination was agonizing. Federal marshals tracked brother John to his hideout, a hay barn in the Virginia countryside. They tried to take him alive, but in the ensuing chaos a marshal opened fire. John—who wished to be loved by the Southern people, who wanted so very many things, but who held as his deepest desire “fame, I must have fame!”—was killed. The main conspirators were quickly rounded up and hung.
Edwin spent eight months holed up in his home, while death threats rained down on him and his remaining siblings. Then he took once more to the stage, working tirelessly to restore the Booth name. He managed to stay sober and proclaimed that he never touched anything stronger than milk. Through discipline to his craft, he would emerge as arguably the greatest actor of the nineteenth century, eclipsing even his father, the Mad Tragedian. But his past would prove impossible to escape. Edwin suffered terrible bouts of insomnia where he was visited by agonizing memories, what he called “the vultures.”
One night in 1873, Edwin awakened at three and summoned his manservant. Together, they went down to the basement of Booth’s home, where an old trunk sat waiting, gathering dust. It was filled with John’s theatrical costumes. The manservant stoked the fire in the furnace. One by one, Edwin tossed in his brother’s costumes, for roles such as Iago and Romeo and Hamlet. Edwin had experienced far more than his share of chaos; wherever possible, he wished to banish its traces.
Others weren’t so fortunate.
In 1866, Ada Clare published a novel with a small New York house. Only a Woman’s Heart is an overwrought tale, featuring one main character that’s a thinly veiled Clare and another that’s a barely disguised Louis Gottschalk (the famous pianist suspected of fathering her son, Aubrey). There’s even a shipwreck that only the two lead characters survive, a flimsy conceit that allows them to wind up on a desert island where they drone on endlessly about love and art and life—and love. Reviews were savage. “Stale lager-bier cannot be a pleasing beverage even to a Bohemian, and this book is to literature wha
t stale lager-bier is to imbibables,” wrote a critic for a magazine called the Round Table, adding, “The authoress has no conception of a plot, no skill in dialogues, no knowledge of human nature, no acquaintance with society.”
Clare was deeply wounded by her novel’s reception. While there were only a handful of reviews (a slight of its own), it was enough for a consensus: Only a Woman’s Heart was a very poor effort. This was the first time that Clare’s writing had ever met with any kind of significant criticism. She had always been celebrated for her thoughtful and trenchant prose, in the Saturday Press and later in the Golden Era.
Adding to her pain: Clare must have felt robbed of glory by the vagaries of timing. Only a few years earlier, when Bohemianism was the rage, Thayer & Eldridge had planned to bring out Clare’s Asphodel shortly after Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But the firm went bankrupt, and the novel was never published. It’s possible that Asphodel was a superior work to Only a Woman’s Heart; it’s further possible that the novel was lost during the turmoil of the war (no printer’s proof can be found, let alone a manuscript). Regardless, Clare decided to give up writing.
“I shall withdraw from the literary domain,” she announced in a letter to a friend. Henceforth, acting would be her vocation. She adopted a stage name, Agnes Stanfield. Going forward, she would insist that theaters use it in billing her. “If the name Ada Clare appeared it would cause a constant buzz all around the country,” explained Clare in another letter. While buzz was the word she chose, one suspects that brickbats were her real concern and that she was worried critics would be less kindly disposed toward Ada Clare than the unknown Agnes Stanfield. She wanted a new start under a new name.
Acting had never been Clare’s strong suit, though. She’d already tried it during her early days at Pfaff’s and had been roundly criticized for a weak and unemotive stage voice. Now in her thirties, she found it difficult to break into the profession again. About the only work Clare was able to find were bit parts in small-time productions at various regional theaters. While touring, she met a journeyman actor named J. Franklin Noyes. They were married and moved—along with Clare’s teenage son, Aubrey—into a cheap Manhattan boardinghouse.
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