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.” Charlotte positioned herself as the hero defending American theatre: “America hereafter will be the only ground for the drama,” she boldly wrote. “Here it is dying out as fast as it possibly can.” Europeans, she explained, were obsessed with French drama and short farces, and it was time for Americans to develop a “drama of our own.” In England, “the axe has been laid at the root [of the theatre] and while two of their sickly branches are suffering one in a sort of isolated grandeur, the stem is dying fast! I see this more and more the longer I am here.”
It was a stunning letter for a performer to write, much less a female one.
Charlotte understood her value as an American star—and she made sure others knew it. “I purpose coming to America in August next,” she wrote to Price around 1848, “and shall begin to work in October.” The plan, she stated, was simple: “Gallop through the country as fast as I can. And make as much money as I can.” She demanded nothing less than what her male costars Forrest and Macready were making, “a clear half the house each night.”
Charlotte’s plans were coming together. There was just one complication: a new flame named Matilda Hays, “Max” to her friends. Max was a writer who had made a successful career as the English translator for George Sand. Sand was the nom de plume of the French writer Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, a prolific and popular novelist and playwright infamous for leaving her husband for an actress. Her subsequent affairs with both men and women were well publicized, and her translator was equally progressive in her relationships. Slim and tall, Max dressed like a man of letters in button-up shirts and bow ties.
At first, Charlotte wooed Max by convincing her to appear alongside her as her new Juliet. For a few months Charlotte gave Max acting lessons and they performed their budding love in public. Max initially agreed to the arrangement because she needed the money, but her interest in acting was temporary, and she quickly gave up the role for that of Charlotte’s offstage wife. Their romantic relationship was never acknowledged by the press, who referred to them always as friends or acquaintances, when they mentioned Max at all. But it was not a secret. When Charlotte and Max went out together to parties or dinners it was as a couple, dressed nearly identically in collared shirts, ties, waistcoats, and skirts to the floor.
When the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning met Charlotte and Max in Rome, she was disturbed
