Every evening Charlotte spent hours next to the flickering light of her lamp, reading and rereading old letters from Rose. She wrote to Rose almost daily but received nothing in return. She even wrote to Rose’s father hoping to find out what was wrong, but still nothing. She noted gloomily in her diary every day that passed without a letter.
Charlotte was deeply homesick. Hoping to convince her family to join her abroad, she wrote a long letter to her mother, enclosing her press clippings as proof of her “brilliant and triumphant success in London.” The ecstatic reaction of the press was “far beyond my most sanguine expectations and in my most ambitious moments I never dreamed of the success that awaited me.” She was so popular, she wrote, she never went anywhere with “fewer than six people.” She didn’t mention late nights spent crying over Rose, tussles with Forrest and Macready, and the near failure with Maddox. “I have done more than any American has done in London. I truly have,” she wrote. “No American has ever succeeded as I have. And though my heart bounds for it, yet I feel so sick for home I hardly know what to do.” When she finally finished the letter, it was 3 a.m. “Play Lady Macbeth tomorrow,” she signed off wearily. “I have hardly the strength to hold my head up.”
Charlotte’s performances continued to pack the theatre through the cold winter weather, and Maddox eagerly signed her on for the season, but the success was bitter on her tongue. She’d finally gotten a letter from Rose, which revealed that Thomas Sully had banned his daughter from having any further relationship with Charlotte. It seemed that a mutual friend had been gossiping about Rose and Charlotte’s not-so-innocent relationship, and word had gotten back to Thomas Sully. If he had suspected that their relationship was romantic before, the fear of public exposure made him act now. Rose returned the portrait Charlotte had commissioned of herself for Rose to hang in her bedroom.
Instead of winning the admiration of her family and friends, instead of letters congratulating her on her hard-won success, Charlotte received criticism from her mother and chilly silence from Thomas Sully, a man she had called “father.” And Rose did not put up a fight.
When Mary Eliza excoriated her for dragging the Cushman family name through the mud, Charlotte responded as a mother might to a petulant child. “I have not slept for three nights and look like a ghost,” she fumed. She had been looking forward to congratulations, she wrote, not more malicious gossip. The argument with her mother continued for weeks, sapping Charlotte’s energy and distracting her from her work. In early spring Charlotte received a final goodbye letter from Rose. Heartbroken, she went into mourning, not only for her lost love, but for the life they’d imagined together at Clover Hill. Still, the length of the ordeal lessened the blow—so did a new flirtation with a young woman who occasionally spent the night (telling her parents she was trapped by a snowstorm). For more company, Charlotte bought herself a dog and threw herself into her work. She was busy planning her next big role: Romeo. In preparation, she wrote to her sister, Susan, with clear instructions: she was to join her in London. Charlotte needed a Juliet.
chapter ten Lady Romeo
Casting Susan as Juliet had been Charlotte’s idea, and Maddox agreed, despite his skepticism. Susan was pretty and feminine, with large greenish-brown eyes and dark brown hair she wore parted in the center like her sister. She was shorter and slimmer than Charlotte, and her time at the Park had made her into a fine “walking lady” (a kind of acting jack of all trades). The idea of two sisters playing Romeo and Juliet was a novel one. In another twist, Charlotte also demanded that they work with the full text of the play, rather than the bowdlerized version from David Garrick that had been in fashion for decades. In the Garrick version, Juliet wakes before Romeo dies and the lovers are given “a mess of dialogue from [Garrick’s] own pen,” which, one critic wrote, “the best epithet for is balderdash.” Charlotte, an American, insisted on a purity and fidelity to the original that Shakespeare no longer enjoyed in his own land.
At the time, it was a controversial choice. Other actors in the production “expressed in no uncertain terms the difficulty the ‘original text’ was giving them.” They saw Charlotte as a pushy American, and considered the restoration of Shakespeare’s text not in terms of purity, but as a regression to something “primitive.” While Charlotte and Susan rehearsed, their fellow actors complained about them behind their backs, deriding them as “American Indians.” But Charlotte continued to insist that they perform the play as written, even if that meant the whole company of actors would have to memorize new lines.
In the end, she got her way. The controversy over the production and the unusual pairing of two sisters in the lead roles made for a good story and on opening night the theatre was packed.
As a gesture of goodwill, William Macready sent Charlotte a dagger from one of his own performances with a note of encouragement. The superstition was that stage daggers never went dull, if kept in constant use. Before taking the stage on opening night, she slid the dagger into its sheath and belted it around her waist. In her dressing room she pulled on tall boots and smoothed her tunic of gold velvet. She had cut her hair short and curled it so that it fell in boyish waves around her ears. Susan was costumed in a tight-waisted, bare-shouldered dress of bridal white.
“Love is a smoke,” Romeo
