On June 30, 1821, the light freighter Two Brothers docked at Norfolk, Virginia. Junius and Mary Ann were the only passengers on board. After disembarking, Junius settled Mary Ann and their luggage at a hotel about fifteen miles south of Richmond and then headed for the Marshall Theatre.
From Richmond, Junius embarked on a whirlwind tour, appearing in New York, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, Augusta, and New Orleans. Alone in a strange country and with Junius on the road to New Orleans, Mary Ann gave birth to Junius Brutus Jr. on December 22, 1821, in Charleston, South Carolina. Junius did not learn he was a father for a month.1 A year later, Junius rented a four-room log house in Harford County in Maryland, three miles from the village of Bel Air and about twenty-five miles from Baltimore.
In the 1820s, Baltimore was the country’s second largest city. Located at the center of the eastern theatre circuit, it had two theatres of its own, the Front Street Theatre and the Holliday Street Theatre. Living near the city allowed Junius to stop over at his home between tours. Junius’s daughter Asia would later write her father settled in rural Harford County rather than in the city to escape the yellow fever epidemic raging in Baltimore.2 More likely his real motive was to avoid the possibility of running into someone who recognized him from London.
Adultery was no trivial matter in nineteenth-century America. If anyone he knew saw him with Mary Ann and their son Junius Jr., the scandal would end his career.3 In 1825, when Junius’s former rival Edmund Kean appeared at the Park Theatre, he was hissed at and pelted with fruits and nuts and obscenities for an adulterous affair he had had in England. The American public regarded marital fidelity as sacrosanct. A cabin in rural Maryland was far enough away from Baltimore to ensure Junius’s secret would not be discovered.
The “Farm,” as the family called their cabin, was cozy. Whitewashed on the outside, it had four rooms, a loft, and a kitchen. Servants cooked bread in a round Dutch oven. Food was served on pewter platters with a well-worn silver spoon, a legacy from Junius’s silversmith grandfather. The Farm also housed an extensive library of Junius’s books.4
Soon after moving in, Junius invited his father to come live at his new home. Mary Ann would need someone for protection and help while he was away. Six months later, Richard knocked on Junius’s door, toting his books and clothes. There were now four people living in the house—Junius, Mary Ann, Richard, and Junius Jr. A year later there were five. On July 5, 1823, a second child, Rosalie Ann, was born.
Junius liked the solitude of rural Maryland. He decided he would like to try his hand at farming when not on tour and leased a nearby, 150-acre plot for one hundred years (he could not buy land since he was not a citizen). Then he hired some of the local men to move the log house onto his new property.
Since coming to the United States Junius had turned mystic. Animals had souls, he instructed his family. They were not to be killed. Cows were only for milk. No one in the family was allowed to eat meat. When Junius was home, the family followed the rules. When he was away on tour, there was meat on the table.5
The Farm was Junius’s refuge from his rigorous stage life. In the summers when he was home, he tilled the land, planted fruit trees and a vineyard, and arranged for a stable to be built for horses and a barn for cows. In fall, if he was still at home, he brought his farm-grown vegetables to a nearby, open-air market in Bel Air. On matinee days, when he did not appear before the curtain went up at the Holliday Street Theatre in Baltimore, the manager would send stagehands to his market stall to get him to the theatre, but Junius refused to leave until all his crops were sold. After a number of setbacks, the manager sent someone to buy whatever produce Junius hadn’t sold so that he would leave.6
In his earlier years, Junius wrote to Mary Ann from his various theatre engagements with instructions for the care of the farm and children. “My love for you,” he assured her, “is still undiminished. Take care of your Health & don’t be dull or fretting.” To his father, he confessed he was sick of acting and would much rather be home.7 Richard, meanwhile, was often at the local tavern. Junius pleaded with his father to stop drinking. “Madness will be the result if you persist.”8 For Junius to warn his father about drinking and madness was sheer irony. He had started drinking himself and was lapsing into episodic insanity.
Fame had once been Junius’s burning ambition. Now his name on a playbill was enough to fill any theatre. He could command a hundred dollars a night, but the intensity he brought to each performance took its toll. Five-hour shows were common. Some theatre managers interpolated songs into Shakespeare’s plays. Critics often complained the dramas were just fillers for the songs and musical numbers. One manager inserted thirty songs into Shakespeare’s The Tempest.9
Theatre in antebellum America was also participatory. If someone in the audience enjoyed a show or a performer, he might climb onto a chair and wave his arms to get the rest of the audience’s attention. While the performer remained on stage, the fan would praise him or her.
Most theatregoers did not question songs or long-winded interruptions from the audience, but the interrupted performers would often lose their concentration. Many, like Junius, started drinking to take the edge off after a performance and sometimes to prepare for the strain before going on. In Junius’s case, one bottle became two then three. At times he was drunk on stage.
Madness followed, albeit sporadically. One day, Junius was idly chatting with fellow actor Jacob Woodhull in the theatre lobby when Junius’s face suddenly blanched. He told Woodhull he felt an urge to cut somebody’s throat. That moment, actor Henry Wallack walked by. Had some bystanders not intervened and disarmed him, Junius would have killed Wallack.10
By 1827, Junius was hitting the bottle hard and suffering serious mental lapses. At the Tremont Theatre in Boston, Junius nodded to the prompter several times during the play’s first two acts to feed him his lines. A little into the third act, he turned to the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he blurted, “I really don’t know this part.” As he was led off the stage, he was overheard pleading, “take me to the lunatic asylum.”11
At home, life had become a nightmare for Mary Ann. In 1833, a cholera epidemic took the lives of three of their children: five-year-old Mary Ann, four-year-old Frederick, and two-year-old Elizabeth. The five-year-old was the last to succumb. “News of my poor child’s decease,” Junius said, “tore me from Richmond to prevent its Mother following it to the Tomb . . . or the Mad-house.”12
Junius was the one more likely to wind up in the madhouse. Back at home, he dug up his daughter’s body, brought it into the house, and placed it in his bed next to Mary Ann. When his favorite horse died, Junius forced a terrorized Mary Ann to wrap herself in a shroud and sit on the horse. While she sat in terrorized silence, Junius walked around her reading a funeral service until concerned neighbors came to her rescue. Subdued, Junius asked them if they wanted a drink.13 Another time, he built a funeral pyre of chairs and tables and forced Mary Ann to climb on top. He would have set fire to it had Mary Ann not been rescued again by neighbors.14
In March 1836, Junius tried to hang himself. When Mary Ann woke in the middle of the night, she found him hanging by the neck. Somehow she managed to get him down and send for medical aid.15
Despite his episodic madness, Junius was still fathering children. In 1833, Mary Ann gave birth to their seventh child, a boy they named Edwin Thomas. As usual, Junius was away on tour when his son was born.
Still caring for her younger children at home, Mary Ann delegated her eldest son, fourteen-year-old Junius Jr., “June,” to chaperone his father when Junius was away from home. Touring with his father as his dresser, June became as stage-struck as his father had been as a boy.
By 1835, Junius admitted his drinking was “rapidly reducing him to imbecility of mind and to crookedness of passions.” It had “kept his wife in misery and fear for the past several years,” he told Dr. James Rush, a physician summoned to treat Junius’s alcoholism. Rush told Junius his drinking would kill him if he didn’t stop. Junius promised he would. Less than four hours later, Dr. Rush found a note from Junius on his door: “Thanks for the advice of being temperate; I’ve broke my promise, and am again intoxicated.”16
Mary Ann gave birth to their ninth child in May 1838. They named him John Wilkes. Some historians assume he was named after an English politician and ardent supporter of the American Revolution, but John Wilkes was also a family name. As usual, Junius was not at home at the time of the birth. This time he was not on tour but drunk at the local tavern.17 Two years later, thirty-eight-year-old Mary Ann gave birth to yet another child, her tenth, a boy they named Joseph Adrian.
With so many people living at the Farm and the assumption that his other family wouldn’t discover his secret, Junius rented a home in Baltimore so that his children could go to better schools. Except for summers, they stayed in Baltimore. Six years later, in 1846, Junius bought a two-story, brick house in Baltimore at 62 North Exeter Street. Not long after, the skeleton in Junius’s closet would come out of hiding.
Junius was still sending money to Adelaide. Rarely, if ever, was he thinking about their son Richard. Richard, on the other hand, often wondered about his father in America. He was also curious about the country he had heard so much about. In 1842, he wrote to Junius saying he would like to come visit and travel with him around the country. Could Junius send him money for the trip? By then June had gone off on his own. Junius wrote back saying Richard could be his dresser and travel with him during his tours. That way he could keep an eye on him and keep him from finding out about his other family.18
Richard tagged along on the tour with his father for three years, never suspecting his father was living a double life. It took ingenuity for Junius to slip away and visit Mary Ann without Richard’s awareness. Richard would have gone back to England none the wiser had it not been for an offhand remark from a stagehand who taunted Richard by calling him a bastard. Didn’t he know his father’s real family was living in Baltimore?19
Richard was dumfounded. He wrote his mother, telling her his father had another family. He pleaded for her to come to Baltimore to prove he was not a bastard.
Shocked, Adelaide gathered her things and left for America. Richard did not let on to his father that he had discovered his secret. He made an excuse about tiring of theatre life, found a place to live in Baltimore, and eked out a meager living teaching Latin and Greek while he waited for his mother to arrive.
Junius was oblivious about Richard’s leaving. Perhaps it was a load off his conscience to have him gone. Nearing fifty, Junius was looking forward to living a quiet, uneventful life in his new house on North Exeter Street.
Once settled into a room Richard had rented for her, Adelaide lost no time hiring a lawyer. She was going to make Junius pay dearly for making a fool of her.20 In early March 1847, Junius was in the middle of a rehearsal at the Holliday Street Theatre when Adelaide charged onto the stage, Richard in tow, screaming that the real Mrs. Booth had arrived.
Junius was taken by surprise. He had not seen Adelaide for more than twenty years. Somehow the theater manager coaxed her into having it out with Junius inside his office. Actors and stagehands did not have to put their ears to the door to hear Adelaide screaming for Junius to admit Richard’s legitimacy. Junius was heard shouting just as loudly for her to go home. Adelaide left, promising to stay as long as it took to get Junius’s last “franc.” She vowed to prove in a court of law that Junius’s other children were all bastards.21
The only way Adelaide could force Junius to make that admission was to sue him for divorce, claiming adultery. But Maryland had a residence requirement: anyone suing for divorce in that state had to reside there for two years. With no money other than what Richard earned as a language teacher at St. Mary’s College, Adelaide lived in a second-story apartment and bided her time.22
Only known image of Adelaide Delannoy Booth. Courtesy of St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 9, 1891, 12.
By then, she was fifty-seven and in failing health. She had little money. There was no one besides Richard to help her, and he did not earn enough for both of them. She had to do all the housework herself and had to trudge up and down two flights of stairs for water and firewood.23 In her spare time, Adelaide haunted the Bel Air market every Saturday where Junius and Mary Ann sold vegetables. Loud enough for everyone to hear, she cursed Junius and shrieked that Mary Ann was a harlot and her children were all bastards. Humiliated in public, Mary Ann did her best to comfort her children who were shunned by former friends.
Junius tried to offer Adelaide money to settle out of court and leave.24 Adelaide took the money but still demanded Junius publicly recognize Richard as his legitimate son. Junius refused. When the judicial waiting period ended in February 1851, Adelaide filed for divorce, charging adultery.
Junius had no legal defense to contest Adelaide’s accusation. She had their marriage license. He was forced to admit he had abandoned her in London and his children with Mary Ann were illegitimate. The divorce decree was granted on April 18, 1851.25 A month later Junius and Mary Ann officially married on May 10, 1851. It was John’s thirteenth birthday.26
The divorce was not the end of Junius’s and Mary Ann’s troubles. Junius was running out of money and still drinking heavily. Drunkenness and bouts of depression kept him in his room when he was supposed to be on stage. With June away in California, Mary Ann had to send either fourteen-year-old Edwin or nine-year-old John to chaperone their father. Edwin, being older, was assigned the unsavory job as his father’s babysitter.
Even if John had been the older son, Mary Ann still would have sent Edwin. John was “his mother’s darling.” She wanted him home.
Aware of his mother’s financial straits, Mary Ann’s oldest son, June, ventured back to the Farm in May 1852 to persuade his father to come to San Francisco, assuring him he would be able to pay him handsomely as a touring star. In July 1852, Junius, June, and Edwin docked in San Francisco.
Junius Brutus Booth and his thirteen-year-old son Edwin Thomas Booth. Edwin was his father’s “dresser.” Not only did he look after his father’s wardrobe, he also did his best to keep Junius from drinking and arriving at the theatre late. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library.
Despite an initial sellout to see the world-renowned actor, June barely made expenses.27 Junius was so drunk he fell twice on the stage. Nevertheless, Junius demanded and was paid every penny his son June had promised him.28 Junius left San Francisco in October. Edwin would have left with him, but Edwin had become stage-struck like his brother and father. Junius told Edwin to stay with June and practice his acting skills.
Their father did not make it home. Before leaving San Francisco, Junius had arranged an appearance in New Orleans on his way back. He came down with “consumption of the bowels” after drinking from the Mississippi River and died on November 30, 1852.29
Mary Ann had received a telegram in Baltimore that Junius was ill and had left for Cincinnati to help him make the rest of the trip back home. A second telegram that Junius had died never reached her. After recovering from the shock of Junius’s unexpected death, Mary Ann had another crisis to deal with. She did not have enough money to ship him home, and Junius had no money on him because he had been robbed. Since Junius had been a Mason, Mary Ann turned to the local fraternal group for help. They collected enough to have him embalmed and shipped in a metal coffin to Baltimore.30
Junius was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. Adelaide and Junius’s son Richard did not attend the funeral or burial.31
Adelaide remained in Baltimore until she died seven years later in 1858 at the age of sixty-six.32 In 1860, Richard moved back to England, changing his name to Richard Delannoy. He died from typhus in December 1868.