Lady Romeo by Tana Wojczuk

Author:Tana Wojczuk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

chapter eleven The Greatest American Actress

I have had a very interesting American visitor, Miss Cushman, the tragic actress—a very superior woman. They say she is an actress of great genius,” wrote the celebrated playwright Mary Mitford when she first met Charlotte in 1845. Since her arrival in England, news of Charlotte’s great talent had continued to spread throughout the British literati. Mitford’s friend Elizabeth Browning was eager to meet her, as was Samuel Taylor Coleridge; his wife, Sara; and the American radical Lucretia Mott.

Once they did, people usually found that Charlotte lived up to the myth. Tall and commanding, she was a magnetic personality and a stunning conversationalist. During one meeting, she deeply impressed the radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who wrote to a friend, “What a wonderful creature Miss Cushman is… After producing her America may win pardon for a million half-alive women.”

As her popularity began to grow, newspapers began to report on more than just her performances. One headline simply read “How Charlotte Cushman Made Her Fortune, $600,000.” Soon, she was even famous enough to blackmail. The mother of one young woman claimed that Charlotte had sent her daughter a flirtatious note. She threatened to go public, but Charlotte met attacks on her reputation and livelihood with cold steel. “Of course the mother [meant] to intimidate me and mine,” she wrote to her theatre manager about her would-be blackmailer. “They have made a mistake.” She immediately spoke to a lawyer, declared the love note was forged, and produced several similar ones, all sent to people in the theatre by someone claiming to be her. If her enemies thought she was a “pantheress” only onstage, they were wrong.

Instead of settling down into her new role as one of London’s social elite, Charlotte still burned with ambition. In the winter of 1848 she was celebrating the four-year anniversary of leaving America, and still yearned to prove herself to the country that had once ignored her. No other American was as celebrated or well known in England than she was; she had succeeded where Forrest and many others had failed, becoming the first American celebrity.

She planned her return to America with military precision. Charlotte wrote to Mr. Price, the new manager of the Park Theatre in New York, appealing to him as a fellow American and criticizing the “stupid farces” then dominating the London stage “which by constant repetition get loaded with the actor’s own jokes. And so pass current.” She casually name-dropped to prove that she was familiar with the American theatre scene, proclaiming how much she was looking forward to Helen Faucit’s upcoming role (a serious part in a new comedy), and displayed her industry knowledge when she mentioned that she knew Edwin Forrest was making $3,000 a play, but that “most likely he will go to the Broadway Theatre. The Park was always too good for him.”

“You seem to have no stars,” she wrote, pointing out that Macready had not returned to America that season, and lamenting that with his long engagement elsewhere there will be “no stars to come to America in a long time.

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