August 15, 1855, was a date John would never forget. It was the night he had his professional stage debut in Richard III at Laura Keene’s Charles Street Theatre in Baltimore.1
The evening was slated as a benefit for John Sleeper Clarke, Edwin’s boyhood friend. A day or two earlier, John had called on Clarke to ask if he could find a way for him to appear on stage at the Charles Street Theatre. Clarke promised he would do what he could, but he was not just doing John a favor. Having a son of the great tragedian Junius Booth appear in the cast would lure people to the theatre and drive up profits. To make sure John’s appearance would not be missed, Clarke placed three separate advertisements in the Baltimore Sun on the same day on two different pages.2
When John rode back to Tudor Hall the night after Clarke’s benefit, he was brimming. “Well, Mother Bunch [his nickname for Asia], guess what I’ve done! . . . I’ve made my first appearance on any stage, for this night only, and in big capitals.”3
The Charles Street Theatre was not a first-class theatre. It had no regularly performing stock company and rarely featured well-known talent. It was also summer, the slowest time of the theatrical season.4 None of that mattered to the seventeen-year-old. He had had his stage debut. He was exultant.
John’s mother was less sanguine. She chided that the sole reason he had been taken on was “to gain notoriety and money by the use of his name.”5 Despite his momentary elation, John would remember her admonition and repeat it to Asia when she was thinking about marrying Clarke.
Edwin returned in October 1856, wealthy from a tour in Australia. To help pay off Junius’s outstanding debts, Edwin and June had been sending money home to their mother when they could. As neither their mother nor John was up to running the farm, there was no point in their staying on. Edwin decided to move them back to Baltimore. Asia sighed, “the seriousness of life had come, the last happy days of childhood were recollections.”6
John could not have been happier. He longed to be an actor like his father and his brothers. He had some fond memories of Tudor Hall, but he also remembered how exhausted he had been looking after the farm and how close they had come to starving.7 None of the family ever lived at Tudor Hall again. The house was put up for rent, and the stock was advertised for sale.8
After settling his mother and sisters in Baltimore, Edwin arranged for John to live with Clarke in Philadelphia. By then Clarke was a leading performer at the Arch Street Theatre. Edwin asked his friend to put in a good word about hiring John for the stock company. Clarke agreed to talk to manager William Wheatley on John’s behalf. There was another reason he was so agreeable: he was courting John’s sister, Asia.9 Landing John a job could only make Clarke more attractive to the Booth family.
Wheatley did not need much persuading; he had known John’s father and may have taken John on as a favor to an old friend. Besides, nineteen-year-old John looked a lot like Junius. Perhaps he had some of his talent.
At that time Philadelphia was the epicenter of the country’s theatrical world, boasting three of the nation’s most prestigious theatres—the Arch Street Theatre, called the “first temple of drama in America,” the Walnut Street Theatre, and the National—as well as an opera house and other smaller theatres.10
The Arch Street Theatre troupe was typical of most stock acting companies. Each actor had his or her “line of business,” or character type, and was paid accordingly. The typical night’s fare was a five-act tragedy followed by a shorter comedy, interspersed with dance numbers and orchestral music. To keep audiences coming back, the play and accompanying pieces changed every night. It was grueling work.
Cast assignments for the next night’s venue were posted on a call board after the night’s performance ended. Every actor below the leads had to memorize not only his part for every play but also the parts of the senior player immediately above him so that he could fill the role in an emergency. Rehearsals were thorough but not necessarily long. For the lead players, they were often perfunctory so as not to expend their energy. Often they would teach the younger members of the company the basics of timing and entrances and exits.11 Male actors also practiced choreographed sword fights and took fencing lessons to make their performances more realistic.12
John’s first professional acting job with the Arch Street Theatre troupe was as a “third walking gentleman,” a part that required him to look gentlemanly and only speak a few lines, if any. The salary was eight dollars a week, which was two dollars more than what the “utes” or utility actors were paid. One of those “utes” was Irish-born John McCullough. Broad shouldered with a large head, he looked more like a farmer than an actor. McCullough would become John’s closest friend and a star in his own right. John’s last appearance on stage was at a benefit at Ford’s Theatre for McCullough.
Remembering his mother’s words about being exploited because of his name, John had himself billed as “Mr. J. B. Wilks.” He did not want to be admired as an actor “for his father’s sake,” he told Asia.13 In later years, John confided to actor Edwin A. Emerson that he had “played under the Wilks name, because his father had told him he would never make it as an actor. John changed his name so as not to tarnish the family name if his father’s prediction proved right.”14 In part, John’s craving for fame was to prove his father wrong.
For his professional debut, John played a guest at a masquerade ball.15 There is no record of how he did. The following night he was nervous and blundered through his part. To make matters worse, he showed up late for rehearsals. William S. Fredericks, the Arch Street Theatre’s stage manager, railed at him about being late and for not learning his lines. John invented lame excuses for his tardiness. One time he claimed he was late because he had run down Clarke’s horse after it had broken out of the stable. In reality, he was late because he had been out all night with another young actor, running down two sisters.16
John often murdered his lines, said journalist George Townsend, who witnessed some of John’s performances. In an often-repeated story, John was supposed to say, “Madame, I am Petruchio Pandolfo.” Instead, he stammered, “Madame, I am Pandolfio Pet. Pedolfio Pat . . . Pantucio Ped.” Then in complete frustration, he blurted, “Dammit! What am I?” The audience and cast roared. Though embarrassed, John laughed too.17 John protested he had memorized his lines. He had floundered, he said, due to a lack of confidence. It also may have been a lack of sleep.
Once he started earning some money, John left Clarke’s home for a boarding house near the theatre. The other boarders were aspiring medical students, artists, and actors. “The most ambitious and the most idle among us,” one boarder recalled, “was a young fellow who played inferior parts in the Arch Street Theatre . . . E. Wilkes [sic] . . . His whole purpose in life was simply to be known.” His “desire for notoriety” was a “devouring passion.” Over and over he would say, “I must have fame!”18
There was one kind of notoriety John preferred to avoid. One of the female boarders with whom he had become intimate pleaded to go with him when the season at the Arch Street Theatre ended and it was doubtful he would be returning. When John turned her down, she screamed rape. To stall for time, John may have promised to marry her (he would do the same to many more girls). Hush money, probably from Edwin, eventually kept her from pressing charges.19
“The handsome Wilkes had the sort of appeal that no woman would resist,” writes Stanley Kimmel. “His fascinating dark eyes and melodious voice made them susceptible to his advances.” Managing the entire affair with just a few intimate friends knowing, John gained a flattered ego and a false assurance. Like his father who had kept his first wife in the dark for decades about his other family, John considered himself adept at intrigue.20 It would not be the only time John had a narrow escape from an errant romantic affair.21
In late August 1858, Edwin persuaded manager John T. Ford, a friend of the Booth family, to let John play Richmond to Edwin’s Richard in Richard III at Edwin’s benefit performance at the Holliday Street Theatre in Baltimore. To please their mother, who was in the audience that night, Edwin had John billed under his own name. Although playing far above his previous experience, John did well. “Both were superb,” said one of the actors. “I shall never forget the fight between Richard and Richmond, in the last act, an encounter which was terrible in its savage realism.”22
It was realistic because it was not fake. When Edwin had returned from California, he took over as man of the house. John nettled at being slighted in the eyes of his mother and sisters. Edwin, meanwhile, resented that his mother said she was keeping their father’s theatrical costumes for John. After years of taking care of Junius’s wardrobe and stage jewelry, Edwin felt they were rightly his.23 The brothers generally managed to keep their rivalry under control. Now and then it came out, but they were never enemies. A. F. Norcross, whose house in Boston both brothers regularly visited when she was a young girl, often saw them together. Edwin adored his brother, she said, and would light up when he greeted him.24 In Edwin’s later years, when he lived alone in his home in Gramercy Park, there were two photos on his bedroom wall. One was his mother’s. The other was John’s.
What had started out as a novelty—two of the Booth sons on stage together—became a turning point in John’s career. John Ford was impressed enough with John’s performance that when Edwin asked him to take on his brother at his stock company at the Marshall Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, Ford agreed.25 In September 1858, twenty-year-old John Wilkes Booth debuted as a stock actor at the same theatre where, thirty-seven years before, his father had had his American stage debut in 1821.26
Home to about 37,000 people, Richmond in 1858 was one of America’s most elegant cities. The city was the industrial heart of the South, its wealthiest city, and the country’s second largest flour milling center. It was also a major slave market where men, women, and children were bought and sold like cattle at Lumpkin’s Alley. Four years later, Richmond would become the political capital of the Confederacy. After New Orleans was captured in the war, it became the Confederacy’s cultural capital as well.
The Marshall Theatre was the oldest and most prestigious playhouse in the city and Virginia’s only full-time theatre.27 Very aware of Southern sensibilities, Ford avoided hiring performers with Boston accents and actors known to be abolitionists.28 To increase respectability, Ford also refrained from selling alcohol in his theatres and barred known prostitutes from plying their trade in his theatre lobbies.29
Ford hired experienced, reliable actors for his stock company and tried to retain them from season to season. For their part, actors liked performing in Richmond and the South in general. “Social status for actors is nine times greater in the South than in the North,” George Townsend commented. “We place actors outside of society and execrate them . . . the South [takes] them into affable fellowship.”30 Actor John Barron felt the same: “No people ever paid more devoted homage to dramatic art than the citizens of Richmond.”31
Ford often hired novices like John for minor “lines of business” and promoted them when they proved their ability.32 As the company’s second juvenile,33 John was paid $11 a week,34 a sizable increase from the $8 a week he had earned at the Arch Street Theatre.
Although billed as “J. B. Wilkes,” no one was in doubt as to his real identity. Chagrinned at being unable to prove himself on his own merits, John wrote to Edwin a week after starting at the Marshall Theatre: “Everyone knows me already, I have heard my name—Booth—called for two nights.”35 “It is no secret in the profession ‘Mr. J. B. Wilkes’ is John Wilkes Booth, a younger brother of Edwin Booth,” the Louisville Daily Courier told its readers.36
John got on well in Richmond. Years later Asia wrote Richmond was the “idealized city of his love [and] had a deeper hold upon his heart than any feminine beauty.”37 The only thing about Richmond that distressed John was the climate.38
He liked the people and was liked in return “by everyone with whom he associated,” said George Crutchfield, an acquaintance.39 Men admired his dignity, his insouciance, and his dashing appearance in what would become his trademark “fur trimmed overcoat.”40 Though a newcomer to Richmond, he “carried himself like a Virginia Gentleman to the manner born.”41
“With women he was a man of irresistible fascination,” commented Edward Alfriend, another acquaintance.42 Girls “idolized him.”43 He had “beautiful eyes, with great symmetry of features, and an especially fine forehead, and curly black hair . . . There was a ‘peculiar halo of romance’ about him.”44
John Wilkes Booth wearing his trademark fur-collar coat. Courtesy of New York Public Library, Billy Rose Collection.
Soon after coming to Richmond, that “halo of romance” was kindling love letters from infatuated girls from Richmond’s prominent families. John had no second thoughts about romantic interludes with actresses. On the other hand, an affair with a girl from one of Richmond’s better families could only turn out badly for him when it ended. When John, thinking it would discourage her, didn’t answer the letters of one such girl, she became even more determined. She begged him to elope with her, so John turned to Mrs. Isabella Pallen Beale for advice.
Isabella Beale was the wife of Dr. James Beale, one of Richmond’s best known doctors.45 John had gone to see Dr. Beale about some minor illness shortly after coming to Richmond, and they had become friendly. The Beales were avid theatregoers. They had their own box seat at the Marshall Theatre and had seen John’s father when he appeared there. Edwin was a frequent guest at their home when he was in Richmond,46 and John became a regular guest too.
The Beales were also well-connected and knew everyone in Richmond’s upper class.47 They lived with their young daughter Mary in an elegant mansion within walking distance of the Marshall Theatre. Mary adored John and fondly recalled those days: “There was always a warm supper and a warm welcome for my father’s guests after the theatre doors were closed.”48
One night when John was a guest at the Beale’s, John asked Mrs. Beale if he could talk to her alone. John told her about the girl who kept sending him letters and wanted to elope with him. What should he do about discouraging her, he asked.
“Meet with her in person,” Mrs. Beale advised. “Otherwise she will just keep sending you letters and might do something foolish.”
John took her advice. He met the girl at Capitol Square, opposite the Beale home, and managed to persuade her there was no future for them together. The girl tearfully went home “a wiser virgin.”49
On September 13, 1858, the popular actress Maggie Mitchell began a two-week engagement at the Marshall Theatre. Unlike the Arch Street Theatre, where the lead stock actors were the stars, the Marshall Theatre featured a regular venue of touring stars who entertained for two weeks and then moved on to their next engagement. In the Marshall Theatre system, even the most senior members of the stock company had supporting roles. Stock actors had to learn their parts each day in rapid succession, whereas a star had a round of characters he or she played over and over again.
“It was study! study! study! study! rehearse! rehearse! rehearse! act! act! act!” recalled John Barron of his stock days at the Marshall Theatre. “Almost every night I would leave the theatre after playing two parts and not knowing a line of the two long parts of the next night, and so on through a 40 weeks’ season.”50 John wrote Edwin that he should let their mother know he might not be able to write her that week because he had “much to study” to be ready for Miss Mitchell.51