Charlotte disembarked at the Port of New Orleans in December 1835, exhausted and nauseous, and found a boardinghouse near the St. James theatre where she would be working. New Orleans was a study in contrasts. Near the St. James was the fashionable Esplanade Avenue: women dressed in “la mode Parisienne,” in plaid dresses, and men in top hats, checked trousers, and coats cut away at the front to show their shapely legs. A few streets over was one of many large slave markets, where plantation foremen came to buy the men, women, and children slavers had captured from Africa.
It was head-spinning. Charlotte left her luggage at the boardinghouse and walked to the St. Charles Theatre for rehearsal. In the front of the theatre was a large marble staircase from which to gaze at the statues of Apollo and the Muses, flanked by Grecian pillars. A giant stone eagle perched above the entrance. But actors were not allowed to be in the “front of house,” so Charlotte went around to the rear, passing a coffin factory before she found the back door. Inside the ceiling soared. She was confronted by the four-thousand-seat auditorium, the largest outside of Milan. The theatre’s owner, James Caldwell, also owned the city gasworks, and he’d made the St. Charles an impressive advertisement for the power of gas. The walls and ceiling were brightly painted, covered in frescoes and gilt. From the center of the ceiling hung a glittering thirty-foot-wide chandelier, hung with twenty-three thousand dazzling crystal gems, lit by gas jets. The seats were draped in red, blue, and yellow silk. Caldwell had built the theatre for his young wife, a beautiful actress, spending more than $350,000—more than it cost to build the first White House.
On opening night, Charlotte sang The Marriage of Figaro at the highest part of her natural range. She struggled to fill the cavernous space, and soon she realized, with horror, her voice was failing her. The sophisticated New Orleans audience was merciless, and the critics savaged her the next day for the fact that she was nineteen and inexperienced. “The worst Countess we have had the honor of seeing,” one critic wrote. “Miss Cushman can sing nothing,” declared another. The kindest said she was merely “bearable.” The show was canceled after three performances.
But Charlotte had signed a contract and was bound to a certain number of performances. So she continued humiliating herself onstage night after night in other supporting roles. She had worked for three years with Mr. Maeder to achieve the clear, elastic tone of an opera singer, and it was suddenly gone. Her tone was now “aspirated,” roughened, and “woody.” Though tragic for an opera singer, the loss paradoxically also added something new. One friend said Charlotte’s tone was now like “the expression of wilful passion suppressed.”
Then, a few months later, in early 1836, a deus ex machina. Charlotte received an urgent summons to theatre owner James Caldwell’s office. Caldwell’s wife had died suddenly, and he was struggling to find someone to fill in for her at short notice. Although he was grieving his wife, the performance was a benefit for the theatre manager, William Burton, and Caldwell did not want to cancel. He asked if Charlotte would act in his wife’s place. She would fulfill her contract and have Caldwell and Burton’s gratitude. She agreed immediately, even though the part was one of the most famous and famously difficult roles for any actress: Lady Macbeth.
“Never fell in love with a lord, never made an immense fortune, and never played Lady Macbeth,” wrote one of Charlotte’s contemporaries. It was a role actresses dreamed of, and one typically reserved for a star.
The role was intimidating in part because it was so closely associated with the legendary British actress Sarah Siddons. Siddons was first cast in the role in 1785, a little more than fifty years earlier. At the time she was unfamiliar with Macbeth, and stayed up late reading the play by candlelight: “I went on with tolerable composure in the silence of the night (a night I can never forget),” Siddons wrote in her memoirs, “till I came to the assassination scene,” where Macbeth botches the murder of the king. To keep herself and her husband from being caught, Lady Macbeth must wrest the bloody daggers from his hands. As Siddons read, the play began to scare her so badly she had to put it down. She grabbed her candle and “hurried out of the room in a paroxysm of terror,” imagining that her own silk dress rustling behind her as she climbed the stairs was a ghost following her. It would be another six years before she agreed to play Lady Macbeth again, but she would eventually make it her signature role.
Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth (1797)
Slim and statuesque with large, dark eyes, Siddons was a celebrated beauty. And her feminine figure and seeming fragility aided her in getting the audience’s sympathy in tragic roles. Lady Macbeth, who brags about being steely enough to kill her own child, is one of the most unsympathetic women in theatre, but Siddons found a way around this. She decided her Lady Macbeth should be “fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile.”
Siddons dressed herself for the part in bridal white, with a nun-like white wimple that framed her guilt-stricken face. Her Lady Macbeth was a woman who used her beauty to seduce Macbeth into doing what she wanted.
Siddons had died in 1831, five years earlier, but thanks to
