YOUNG AND PRETTY MAGGIE MITCHELL
Margaret Julia Mitchell, known throughout her career as “Maggie Mitchell,” was just a year older than John when she first appeared at the Marshall Theatre. By then she was already a star—although nothing like the superstar she would be in coming years.
When the 1857 season opened, George Kunkel, the Marshall Theatre’s manager, was not a happy man. He had put on “quite a variety of dishes, some truly unsavory.”1 Kunkel’s agony ended with Maggie’s Richmond debut. Unable to resist, young men smitten with “Maggie’s. . .poses and bewitching glances”2 were drawn to the Marshall Theatre like flies to honey.
Petite, attractive, and gray-eyed, with flowing, curly, auburn hair, Maggie had a “saucy face” and a “fairy figure.” “She is young, pretty, has a good bust, good arms, and ‘a knee round as a period,’” beamed an enthralled theatre critic.3 Several years later, Lincoln’s private secretary, John Hay, found her “vivacious,” a “dashing young girl, with fine eyes and a pretty mouth.”4 Theatre critics were charmed by her “natural sprightliness,” her “effervescing spirit,” and her “girlish innocence.” All the newspapers raved about her. One even admitted Maggie Mitchell was the “most bewitching little creature we have ever seen upon the stage.”5
John Wilkes Booth would have agreed. He became one of Maggie’s lovers, and later there were rumors they briefly and secretly engaged.6
Margaret Julia Mitchell was born on June 2, 1837, in Lower Manhattan, New York, to Anna and Charles Mitchell, Anna’s second husband.7 Both of Maggie’s sisters, Mary Anne and Emma, also became actresses, but neither ever came close to achieving Maggie’s fame.8
A few years after Maggie’s parents married, they left Maggie and her siblings with a neighbor and went back to England to visit family. One of the neighbor’s boarders was a fledgling actress who took fourteen-year-old Maggie with her to the theatre one day. Maggie was instantly stage-struck. When her parents returned, Maggie announced she was going to be an actress.9 Serendipitously, on the voyage back from England, her mother had become friends with an old English actor, John Moore, who at the time was the stage manager of Burton’s Chambers Street Theatre near City Hall. Seeing that her daughter was set on a stage career, Anna introduced her to Moore and asked him if there was any way he could get Maggie started in the theater. Luckily, Moore happened to be looking for a teenage actress to play the young girl in an upcoming play, The Soldier’s Daughter.10
On June 2, 1851, Maggie made her stage debut. Her self-confidence and perfect performance so impressed Thomas Hamblin, manager of the rival Bowery Theatre, that the next season he hired her at a starting salary of four dollars a week.11
Maggie was such a hit at the Bowery Theatre with the “b’hoys” in the cheaper gallery seats that she was called back on stage for her first “curtain call.” Hamblin knew a good thing when he saw it and raised her salary to six dollars a week.12 In her later years, even though she was making hundreds of dollars a night, Maggie recalled she was never more pleased with herself than when Hamblin bumped her wages by two whole dollars.13
Sensing her daughter had a bright future ahead of her in the theatre, Anna asked Hamblin for an even bigger raise the next season. When they couldn’t come to an agreement, Anna began booking Maggie into other theaters.
In 1853, when she was sixteen, Maggie joined James Robinson’s company and played flirtatious soubrettes. John Ellsler was in the audience for one of her performances. He promptly hired her away from Robinson and took her on a tour through Maryland and various western cities. In Chicago, future presidential candidate Stephen Douglas was so smitten with her that he gave her a gold watch.14
Maggie’s appearance in Cleveland ignited a “Maggie Mitchell craze.” Everyone wanted to look like her. Haberdashers couldn’t keep up with the demand for hats like the ones Maggie wore on stage. Songwriters composed dances with her name in the title.15 Playwrights wrote plays for her.16 Wealthy men named their horses after her.17
Maggie’s mother did her best to chaperone her daughter, but Maggie was still a teenager. One Saturday night after a show, she slipped away from her mother and spent the rest of the night and all of Sunday with an ardent admirer whom she married. Anna was as distraught as any mother. After tempers cooled, Anna managed to persuade Maggie never to see the man again, believing no permanent harm was done, and later arranged for the marriage to be annulled. After leaving Cleveland she spent the rest of that year and the next hopscotching from theater to theater, “the most charming, irresistible, radiant little Star that shines now in the theatrical galaxy.”18
In November 1857, Maggie had the first of several appearances at the Marshall Theatre. The New York Clipper commented it was not safe for young men to go to the theater when Maggie Mitchell was on stage because her poses and bewitching glances were “a kind of killing” without being actual murder.19 Rumors also began circulating that one of those “killed” was “a young Clevelander” about to lead Maggie to the altar.20 A month later the Baltimore Sun broke the news that the “young Clevelander” was a man named Paddock.21 Other papers denied there was any truth to the rumor.22
Though they were often seen together, Henry was just one of the men she dazzled. She would soon meet someone just as dazzling as herself.
In 1858, at twenty-one, Maggie was a seasoned entertainer with a reputation as a strict taskmaster. Actor John Barron had met her years before in 1855 at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. Even then he was “startled when that little elf came on the stage and began to give directions with a vim and exactness that made the old timers ask themselves what had happened.”23
Maggie preferred short plays at that time in her career. Some nights she staged as many as three a night and appeared in as many as seven different roles, not including the songs, dances, and skits she performed between plays.
For all that to happen, she had to inform the theatre manager well in advance what she was planning to put on so that he could cast each of his stock actors in supporting roles. Soon after receiving their assignments, the actors stayed up nights memorizing their lines and were up before noon to rehearse their parts before the next day’s evening plays.
Oftentimes a star did not care for the manager’s casting arrangements or the way scenes were blocked and changed them to his or her liking. That meant more rehearsals and more time and effort to cater to the star’s directions. The only respite was on Sundays when the theater was closed. Well-trained actors took it all in stride. Second-rate actors chafed. George Berrell was among the latter. Maggie Mitchell was all sweetness and charm on stage, he groused to his diary, but she was an overbearing autocrat at rehearsals—“It would be hard to find a more disagreeable, hateful, fault-finding little cat.”24
Maggie Mitchell. “Young and Pretty and Has a Good Bust.” Courtesy of New York Public Library, Billy Rose Collection.
She was a strict disciplinarian, actor John Barron recalled, “but she never required more of the ladies and gentlemen of the company than she herself was willing to do.” Before rehearsals were dismissed, she made sure “every member of the cast was letter perfect in the words and business of the two or three plays of the evening. The next day was a repetition of the day before, and so on through the entire engagement.”25
There is no record of Maggie’s first impression of John when she arrived at the Marshall Theatre, but she was as captivated by his looks as every other woman and sent him at least one letter. John’s roommate said John “often read me excerpts from letters couched in particularly endearing terms” and laughed that “no one of the writers compared with Miss Mitchell.”26
Maggie was back again in Richmond for more two-week engagements in February, June, and October of 1859. Hundreds packed the theatre each night to see her. The Richmond Dispatch told fans to go see Maggie at the Marshall Theatre “If you wish to enjoy . . . a ‘concord of sweet sounds’ as they pour forth from the lips of Richmond’s favorite.”27
When not on stage or rehearsing, prominent actors and actresses were often guests at the homes of Richmond’s theatre patrons. Maggie and John likely hobnobbed together in Richmond at this time since she had sent him an admiring letter earlier in the year.
Maggie left Richmond at the end of October for her next engagement. It would be a year before they saw each other again. In the meantime, there were other women and a superstardom John craved but could never have imagined.