At the play’s climax Meg and a band of her Gypsy followers stormed the prison where her adopted son, Harry, was held captive. One of the guards raised his pistol and aimed a shot at Meg, fatally wounding her. Charlotte, one critic recalled, came “staggering” down the stage, with a shriek “so wild and piercing, so full of agony… [it] told the whole story of her love and her revenge.” When Meg and her followers finally broke through and rescued Harry, she collapsed and died at his feet. A total silence fell over the theatre as Charlotte’s limp body was carried offstage. As much as she had terrified her audience, she now made them weep.
The audience saw no more of Charlotte until her curtain call. When she came out to take a bow, her face was bare, and she had combed out her hair, pinned it neatly, and changed out of Meg’s soot-stained rags. The effect was electric. It emphasized how different the twenty-year-old actress was from Meg, and made her performance seem even more impressive.
Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering
Charlotte had also added an essential bit of spectacle to the show. After Meg died, Charlotte had the rest of the cast sing a little “finale” which gave her more time to rush backstage, wipe off Meg’s “wild weird, intense face,” and return a sweet, pleasant young woman.
As with Lady Macbeth, Meg seemed to vindicate the widespread fear that female ambition would inevitably tilt into madness. “The Meg Merrilies of Miss Cushman,” wrote one critic, “seems to abstract and embody in itself—in a perfect individual reality—all we have seen or known or had presented to us in the stage or closet—of wild women—crazed prophetess—strange in attire—sore distraught in spirit—and borne above the common flight of their sex by something demoniac and supernatural.” Charlotte was careful to put distance between the actress and the “wild woman” she portrayed.
When it was all over, Charlotte returned to her dressing room. She was just getting ready to leave when she heard a knock and her costar Braham’s voice calling her. Charlotte wondered what she had done wrong, but Braham hadn’t come to scold her—he was staggered. How, he asked, did such a young actress learn to do something like that?
She could not explain. For Charlotte, a character was not only learned but grasped at once in a flash of intuition. Then she would distill the character through repetition. Charlotte’s Meg was so popular the show was extended. When her stockings wore out, Charlotte mended them rather than buy new ones, to keep up the appearance of age and poverty. When her entire costume needed to be replaced, she dyed the new one by hand, rubbing it with dirt and other mixtures she invented herself to age it. She continued to do her makeup and hair as she had done that first night. For a time, a young painter came to watch Charlotte get ready, to study how she did her makeup. “How,” the artist asked incredulously, “do you know where to put in those shadows and lines which so accurately give the effect of age?” But Charlotte only replied cryptically that she put them where she felt they should be.
When onstage, Charlotte disappeared into her character. “Unless one does,” she wrote to a friend, “he can never be an actor.” When Walt Whitman, the young critic and editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, came to see her Meg Merrilies, he was impressed by Charlotte’s empathy: “She seems to identify herself so completely with the character she is playing,” he wrote, “she loses, for the nonce, every attribute, except those which enter into the making up of what she is to pourtray.” (Still suffering from guilt over her brother’s death, losing herself was what she had in mind.)
The critical response was overwhelmingly good. Reviewers raved about Charlotte’s “virile energy,” “pythonic inspiration,” and her “noble frenzy of eccentric genius.” Her Meg had truly frightened and moved them, and for cynical New Yorkers, this was rare.
Charlotte’s success at the National finally helped her secure a contract with the Park Theatre. Once, she had been offended if anyone offered her less than a supporting role. But now, with her pregnant sister and mother to support, she happily signed a contract with the Park as another “walking lady.” She would be extremely busy, which was a good thing since she still hoped work would defang her grief. It was not fasting and praying, but it was close enough. She signed on for three years, at $20 a week.
Edmund Simpson, Charlotte’s new boss, had managed the Park Theatre for more than twenty years and was an important figure in New York culture and politics. He had hair that curled up from his brow, a wide forehead, full lips, and an aquiline nose. Simpson had been an actor but taken up managing when a tragic accident in the theatre during a performance of Doctor Faustus left him partly paralyzed. His business partner, Stephen Price, was a lawyer and son of a powerful New York businessman.
Simpson and Price had made the Park successful, and they could be ruthless to the competition. For example, when the African Grove—the city’s only theatre owned and operated by African-American actors—began to compete with the Park’s own minstrel shows (which featured white actors in blackface), Price leveraged his family’s political connections to get the Grove shut down.
Charlotte began acting at the Park in the sweltering heat of late summer 1837. She took up the grueling schedule of an ensemble actor, playing several different minor roles every week. At home, Mary Eliza helped her sew new costumes, learn lines, made sure she ate, and helped her
