Charlotte Cushman and Emma Stebbins
Throughout the summer of 1857 Charlotte and Emma lived in relative domestic bliss. They woke at eight, breakfasted together, then walked down the Spanish Steps to the Via del Corso, where Emma shared a studio with Hattie. Charlotte read and watched her partner work until lunchtime. She wanted to be near Emma, despite the fact that sculptors’ studios were not romantic aeries but rough places with bare floors, plastered walls, a few old chairs and blocks of marble, with sketches of nude figures hanging on the whitewashed walls.
chapter thirteen The Coming Storm
In the fall of 1857 Charlotte again returned to America, along with Emma and Sallie. Charlotte had hired an unreliable financial manager, and she decided to go back on the road to replace some of the money she had lost. Through Hattie, whom she remained close to, she wrote to a respected St. Louis businessman named Wayman Crow, and he agreed to help manage her wealth, which was now considerable. Crow, like Charlotte, had worked his way to the top. He started his career as a young apprentice sleeping in a cot in the storeroom of a dry goods store and ended up buying the store and many others like it.
Thankfully, the American public was as eager to see Charlotte Cushman as ever. Though still the minority, more women filled the seats of the theaters, and female critics amplified Charlotte’s fame with long features about her in magazines and newspapers. At forty-one, Charlotte had become an idol to young women, some who found the older actress irresistibly attractive, and were eager to take part in the women’s liberation movement beginning to gain momentum in America. One of them was the young writer Louisa May Alcott, who saw Charlotte perform in Boston and wrote afterward in her diary: “Saw Charlotte Cushman and had a stage-struck fit.”
Another was Mary Devlin, a beautiful eighteen-year-old actress whom Charlotte hired to play Juliet opposite her Romeo in New York. Mary was a dark-haired Irish girl with a clear oval face, full lips, wide-set eyes, and a frank, somewhat wry expression. Charlotte thought she was talented, and when their New York run finished she invited Mary to come along on her tour to St. Louis.
Mary idolized Charlotte, signed her letters “your Juliet,” and asked her for romantic advice. Mary had met and was falling in love with Edwin Booth, the American-born son of the British star Junius Brutus Booth and Mary Ann Holmes. The Booths were theatre royalty. Edwin’s two brothers, John Wilkes and Junius Jr., were also successful actors. Mary confided in Charlotte that Edwin wanted to marry her, but had broken off the engagement because his sister Asia was against the match. Asia hated actresses and hated that Mary was Irish (which she considered low class), and thought she was a gold digger, “an actress—not even second rate… who can stroll before a nightly audience—who can allow men of all kinds to caress and court her in a business way.”
Asia idolized her brother, but he had problems of his own. Like his father, he was an alcoholic who seduced the young women who played “utility parts,” hoping for their big break. Writing to his brother Junius Jr. in California, Edwin bragged that he had a “little sweetheart” who was crazy to go to California, too, but “I talked her out of it and my p… k into her… She is a singing chambermaid. I won’t mention her name—I think you know her.” Six weeks later he wrote to his brother again, worried he might have the clap.
Mary Devlin Booth
Edwin’s genius and “rawness,” at playing tragic figures like Othello, Shylock, and Hamlet, made him appealing both to men and women. Adam Badeau, a young critic, fell hard for Edwin and felt a “peculiar intimacy” between them. During the summer of 1858, while Booth was deciding what to do about his feelings for Mary Devlin, he invited Badeau to stay with him at Tudor Hall, his family home in Bel Air, Maryland. The house was nearly empty, and the two young men spent the night poring over Booth’s playbills and costumes before falling asleep in each other’s arms.
Mary knew all about Edwin’s affairs, but “felt that her fate was to marry him” so, despite her reservations, Charlotte tried to be supportive. She advised Mary to start a rumor while on tour that she had another marriage proposal, which they both knew would drive Edwin mad with jealousy. It worked, and soon he was writing to Mary again. When Mary finished the tour she went back to New York and they were married.
While Charlotte traveled west, Emma Stebbins stayed behind on the East Coast with friends and family. When she arrived in St. Louis, Charlotte wrote to Wayman Crow, her financial manager, to invite him and his family to see her perform. Crow came to see her as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and brought along his daughters, Emma and Cornelia. Emma Crow was disturbed and excited by Charlotte’s Romeo: “never having seen it until then, Miss Cushman as Romeo seemed the incarnation of the ideal lover,” she remembered a decade later, “and realized all the dreams that flitted through a girl’s fancy.”
In the balcony scene, Emma watched two women make love in plain
