My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy by Titone Nora

Author:Titone, Nora [Titone, Nora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

THE WORKING OF THE HEART

Glory grows guilty of detested crimes,

When, for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part,

We bend to that the working of the heart

—Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.1

THE GOLD RUSH OF 1849 HAD BEEN A BONANZA FOR AMERICAN ACTORS, drawing fortune seekers on the perilous journey by sea and through the Panamanian jungle to theaters in California. The Northern home front now presented actors with a similar opportunity. “It was the harvest time for theaters, the years of that disastrous war,” John Wilkes’s sister Asia remembered. Her younger brother skimmed a generous share of these profits in what would prove the peak years of his work as an actor, from November 1861 through June 1863. “He made great sums of money,” Asia said, “and so did other theatrical men.”

This period may have been the happiest of the young man’s life. The North was for the moment entirely his. He could play on stages from New York to St. Louis, from Boston to Chicago, free from Edwin’s authority and far from the shadow of his talent. “John Wilkes is off on his travels,” Asia wrote on November 16, 1861. Recovered from his injuries, the actor packed his trunks and launched himself westward, riding trains across Michigan and over the prairies of Illinois at the furious speed of thirty-five miles per hour.

“His face has fortune for him,” a newspaper observed of John Wilkes Booth at this time. John’s features, a close copy of his dead father’s, were indeed his strongest advertisement. Unlike Edwin, John Wilkes possessed the face, one critic testified, that “called up afresh to the memory of men of the last generation the presence… of his father.”

John’s excitement when he first rode a train to Chicago in January 1862 can only be imagined. He was booked for a two-week engagement at McVicker’s Theatre, a three-story edifice at 24 West Madison Street, not far from Lake Michigan. The auditorium held 2,500 patrons and had been erected at the eyepopping cost of eighty-five thousand dollars. McVicker’s was one of the largest, most profitable venues John Wilkes Booth would ever play, as he made three separate visits to the city over the course of this year.

News of Booth’s performances packed McVicker’s to the brim. Many of his patrons visited the next-door saloon, the Green Room, which specialized in cream ales and German lager beer, prior to buying tickets. A disgruntled critic observed that the people coming to see Booth appeared to be so drunk they could have “turn[ed] a somersault.” The excited crowd made a constant “noise of boots upon the stairs, in the lobby and down the aisles,” he complained. “The first acts are completely lost by the eternal tramp, tramp, tramp. At the same time a little police authority to put a stop to the loud talking would be wholesome.”

These particular Chicagoans were less concerned with hearing Booth’s dialogue than watching what he did with his sword. They bought tickets to see Shakespeare’s villains served up raw, in blood-and-thunder style, with purposeful swordplay and plenty of noise, and certainly received their money’s worth.

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