Warming to the task, Charlotte tried more “honeyed” words with the captain, who “felt the power of her personal magnetism.” “She had put new life into me, and it seemed as if the Hercules drew strength from my touch, for the steam-gauge ran up to almost blowing-off.” Charlotte went back to her car, grabbing the step guards just before she was blown past the train entirely.
As the train began to move, the captain looked back and saw Charlotte watching him through the top window of the smoking car. She nodded and smiled at him, “her great eyes agleam with excitement and a look of suppressed power in her face I never saw lined on any human countenance.”
When they arrived in Chicago, Charlotte came to say goodbye. She asked the captain where he was staying and his room number and shook his “grimy” hand “as cordially as if it had been dressed in immaculate kid” leather. Half an hour later the captain was settling in to his rooms when a messenger arrived with two tickets to Charlotte’s performance that night. The captain remembered until the end of his life watching Charlotte perform and seeing her notice him and nod from the stage.
Traveling from New York to Chicago to St. Louis, Charlotte continued to see success in each city, her popularity growing beyond even her imagination. She tried out a new role, Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII, and this, too, was a hit. When she turned east again for her triumphant hometown return to Boston, she was celebrated as an American hero. In Boston, she was delighted to be introduced to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Just a few years earlier Charlotte had written lines from Longfellow’s novel Hyperion in her diary, and now he was calling on her, writing a play for her to star in. The two became friends, bonding over their admiration of the German composer Mendelssohn, and their mutual friend Samuel Laurence. Longfellow and Max became acquainted as well, discussing literature in English and French. Longfellow’s passion for his wife, Frances, bloomed as wildly as the lilacs outside their house, and he noticed, in contrast, that Max had a “vague sense of sadness… some bitterness, as of disappointment.”
Charlotte, too, worried about Max’s happiness, even as she could not ensure it. The decision to leave England had been painful. Some of Max’s friends, suspicious of this new relationship, accused Charlotte of “selfishly sacrificing” Max’s happiness to her own. One friend in particular behaved so inappropriately that Charles Dickens jumped in to defend Charlotte “very prettily,” reminding the woman that Max’s decision was none of her business.
Toward the end of the tour, Charlotte and Max posed for a photo as a souvenir. Dressed alike in bow ties and men’s waistcoats, they look in opposite directions, tired and tight-lipped.
While privately struggling to keep her relationship together, publicly Charlotte was enjoying unprecedented levels of national fame. As Macready had predicted, the “foreign stamp of approbation” gave Americans the permission they needed to like her. She had become an “empress,” “nodding but to be obeyed, smiling but to be worshipped.” She was talented, intelligent, independent, and now rich, demanding equal pay to Macready and Forrest, two of the most famous actors in the world.
For the first time, America had a true celebrity of its own. Newspapermen dined out on her, reporting where she went and with whom. In Brooklyn, Walt Whitman reprinted a notice from the Cleveland Plain Dealer that Charlotte had been spotted leaving her hotel in the resort town of Sault Saint Marie in men’s clothes. Whitman was delighted:
Miss Charlotte Cushman, who is spending a quiet vacation in that inspiring clime, astonished the guests of the St. Marie Hotel one morning by appearing equipped cap-a-pie in masculine attire—hat, coat, unmentionables and all. You who have seen her personation of ‘Hamlet’ can easily understand the grace and ease with which she wore her new ‘toggery.’ Here was a single motive of triumph; not a mere desire to astonish the dinner table, and then, like the ghost of Banquo, to vanish away and go back to petticoats and whalebone. No, she rode in it; and for ought that we can learn, had determined to wear it for the remainder of her days—at least, of her maidenhood.
Charlotte’s cross-dressing was not a stunt, Whitman realized, it was an expression of her true self. Whitman also made a sly nod to Charlotte’s sexuality, predicting she would continue dressing like a man for the rest of her life, or her maidenhood (which for a woman who loved other women was essentially the same thing).
Though Charlotte sought success, celebrity wore her down, and she sometimes felt like a “thousand mouths (were) feeding on
