Physically, Charlotte could not have been more different from Sarah Siddons. At five-foot-seven she was a towering figure onstage, taller than most men. Her body was strong, and she moved like a “pythoness.” Far from fragile, Charlotte had what one rival called a “lantern jaw,” wide shoulders, and large breasts and hips—erotic, perhaps, but not traditionally feminine. She had to find a new way to play Lady Macbeth, and quickly.
With only a few days to learn the part, Charlotte rose early each morning and walked to the theatre, where she rehearsed for several hours with James Caldwell. At night she climbed up to the garret of the house where she boarded and sat on the floor reading the lines out loud to herself until she had them memorized.
She enjoyed the process of rehearsal, which could be surprisingly funny. The actors wore their everyday clothes to rehearsal, and she could watch an actor pacing around the stage in his overcoat, carrying an umbrella as he dripped water everywhere, reciting Shakespeare as though talking about the weather. Or an actress wearing clothes several seasons out of date, practicing her pirouettes while nearby “a couple of begrimed men in shirt-sleeves and smelling of tar and things are kneeling on the floor hammering away at the gas arrangements or something about the scenery.” Charlotte had a good sense of humor, and her jokes and delight in the absurd quickly made her a favorite among her fellow actors.
Charlotte Cushman as Lady Macbeth (1855)
Because they always rehearsed in street clothes, Charlotte was able to hide the fact that she had no costume for Lady Macbeth until opening day. All the actors were expected to supply their own wardrobe, but she lived paycheck to paycheck, sending home anything extra, and didn’t have the money to buy new clothes. As a novice, she also didn’t have a closet of costumes to pull from. Afraid she’d be fired, Charlotte waited until the very last moment to tell Caldwell. Alarmed, he quickly dashed off a letter and sent her running to an address he had hastily scribbled on an envelope. Charlotte hurried through the humid streets of New Orleans to the French Quarter and found the address. The celebrated French actress Madame Closel opened the door and both women burst out laughing. Charlotte was tall, thin, and lanky, while Mme. Closel was short, fat, and four-foot-ten-inches tall, with a waist twice the size of Charlotte’s and a very large bust. Mme. Closel was good-natured and empathized with Charlotte, so she got to work. She took a seam-ripper to one of her skirts and made an underskirt, taking in another dress “in every direction” to make a queen’s costume. “So it was,” Charlotte wrote, “I essayed for the first time the part of Lady Macbeth.”
The modern technology of the St. Charles helped Charlotte appear more natural than she might otherwise. Most theatres, like the Tremont in Boston, were lit by oil lamps set along the foot of the stage. The lamplight tended to converge on one central spot, leaving the rest of the stage in gloomy semidarkness. Actors had to play all their major speeches from the same place and exaggerate their mannerisms and expressions so they could be seen. Gaslight allowed Charlotte a freer range of movement and expression. For some, the effect was too much. One friend of James Maeder complained in a letter that Charlotte “was almost insane on the subject of display and effect… and altogether too demonstrative,” “commanding” rather than soliciting the audience’s attention.
But the critics agreed on one thing: like Hamlet thrusting his sword through a shadow in the curtains, Miss Cushman had hit immediately on a starring role. “She made the people understand the character that Shakespeare drew,” wrote one critic. “She was neither stilted, nor mock-heroic, nor monotonous, but so fiercely, so vividly natural that the spectators were afraid of her as they would have been of a pantheress let loose. It was impossible New Orleans should long retain such a woman.”
Finally completing the terms of her contract, and with her first wages in her pocket, Charlotte decided not to follow the Maeders back to Boston. James Barton was so impressed by her talent and work ethic that he wrote her a letter of introduction to a theatre manager named Thomas Hamblin in New York.
Two years earlier, in 1834, Hamblin had taken over and rebranded the failing Bowery Theatre as “the people’s theatre.” He took advantage of nativist, anti-British, sometimes anti-abolitionist sentiment among the white American working class in New York. Unlike the nearby Park Theatre, Hamblin’s theatre advertised to working-class audiences, and he was looking for new American talent. But his unpredictability, drinking, and reputation for violence made it difficult to keep that talent for very long. His source of actresses tended to be the underage prostitutes who were his mistresses. Under Hamblin’s management, the Bowery had earned the nickname “the Slaughterhouse,” for Hamblin’s fondness for bloody melodrama.
But Charlotte didn’t let any of these warnings stop her. In the fall of 1836 she boarded a steamboat aptly named The Star in the Port of New Orleans. It would sail up the Mississippi River to Philadelphia, where passengers could catch a train on one of the newly opened railway lines to New York. The steam engine fired up with an immense bellow, belching smoke, and Charlotte began moving slowly northward, against the current.
chapter four The Star of the Bowery
Train travel was deafening. At each stop from Philadelphia to New York Charlotte heard bells ringing, porters bawling out instructions, and passengers shouting at one another over the noise until finally the doors slammed and, with a “tremendous pop as of a colossal champagne-cork,” the machine started up again. Traveling this way was still a
