8

I CANNOT STOOP TO THAT WHICH I DESPISE

During the second week of May 1860, John was supposed to accompany Helen and Lucille Western for appearances in Petersburg and Norfolk, but their Norfolk engagement was cancelled when Helen had a relapse from tuberculosis.¹ John would not see Helen again for a year. When they met again, John was on his way to becoming a star himself.

John took advantage of the time off to spend a brief vacation with his mother and Rosalie in Philadelphia. Asia, now married and with a newborn baby, was living in her own house nearby.

One of the souvenirs John brought home was one of the pikes John Brown had intended to use to arm the slaves he expected to join his insurrection.² He was proud of the pike because it was given to him by Lewis Washington, a descendant of America’s first president. The inscription on the handle read, “Major Washington to J. Wilkes Booth,” in large letters.³

Most of the family was dismayed that John had broken his theatre contract and joined the militia, but not Asia. She listened attentively to the exploits of the brother she idolized. Basking in her esteem, John let his imagination get the better of him and exaggerated his brief military service. He hadn’t just prevented an abolitionist attempt to rescue John Brown. Instead, he boasted he had been “one of the party going to search for and capture” him. Asia admired the picture John handed her of “himself and others in their scout and sentinel dresses.”⁴

Booth historian Nora Titone saw resentment of Edwin’s success behind John’s exaggerations. “As John Wilkes settled into his mother’s home in Philadelphia,” she wrote, “he would see Edwin’s face staring down at him from the drawing room wall” with “a wreath of real laurel, the traditional hero’s crown” twisted there by his mother, as well as the scrapbook she kept of many complimentary letters Edwin received from prominent citizens in New York, Boston, and other major cities.⁵

John’s exaggerations were typical of the man. It wasn’t necessarily resentment but his need for approval, especially from his sister Asia, whose opinion very much mattered to him. Edwin’s spectacular rise from journeyman actor to the “most popular tragedian in the United States”⁶ was an inspiration, not a cause for jealousy. If Edwin could do it, so could he.

As a stock actor John was earning a paltry salary and was only occasionally mentioned in the papers. As a star like Edwin, he would receive a much higher salary or a percentage of the gross receipts and a regular “benefit” (a tradition in which a star received all the profits for his or her final performance with a company). His name would appear as many as five times in the advertisements, in larger and bolder type than the name of the play, and he would garner most of the attention from theatre critics. The mere fact of being billed as a star prompted audiences and critics to eulogize an actor as such. A stock actor was told what part he was to play, where to stand, when to enter, and when to leave the stage. Stars made those decisions for themselves; they were their own masters. The star was the sun around whom all the planetary stock actors revolved.

As Lincoln said about his bid for the presidency around the same time, the “taste” was in his mouth. John had the taste in his mouth by February 1860 when he wrote to Edwin about finding him a manager.⁷ When the season at the Marshall Theatre ended in May, John decided it was time to move on.

There was just one problem. An actor could not just become a star on his own. He could pay a manager to bill him as a star, but if the aspiring star bombed, it was a costly venture for a manager. Even if John had had that kind of money, pride would have kept him from paying for his own fame. The only other option was to forge a reputation that would convince a manager to take a chance and bill him as a star. It also helped if a fledgling star had connections and a name to trade on. John had both.

John was not the only Booth looking to the future. Mary “Molly” Devlin was a sixteen-year-old stock actress at the Marshall Theatre when she and Edwin first met in November 1856. Mary, the daughter of a poor Irish tailor in New York, debuted as an actress in 1852 when she was not quite twelve. At sixteen, when she signed on with the Marshall Theatre’s stock company in 1856, she was a seasoned stock actress. Edwin hadn’t given her a second thought when he first met her. Two years later, he began to notice. By then Mary was a confident, hardworking actress. Edwin noticed an innocence and sweetness about her; she was also pretty and unpretentious. When Edwin left for his next engagement at the Holliday Street Theatre in Baltimore, he asked John Ford if she could go with him. Ford agreed, personally believing she was “played out.”⁸ Edwin, however, believed Mary was leading lady material. Although there were rumors of more than a working relationship between them, Edwin told a friend there was no truth to the rumors but admitted he was attracted to her.⁹

Edwin, however, was ambivalent about women in general and actresses in particular, a product of his dissolute years on his own in California and Australia. He had been a drunkard and a libertine. He had tried to reform but found it impossible.¹⁰ Though less so than John, Edwin was also physically attractive and fawned over by actresses and women in his audiences.¹¹ “Hundreds of women flung themselves at him,” said his manager William Bisham. “They invited him to their houses, they offered to go to his.”¹² Edwin thought little of his flings with prostitutes and actresses, but he avoided “pure women,” said his lifelong friend Adam Badeau. He “never injured [seduced] a pure woman in his life.”¹³

Even though she was an actress, Edwin had begun to have feelings for Mary Devlin. She was, he confided to a friend, “a dear, sweet girl, innocent as a babe.” Despite those feelings, Edwin had affairs with other actresses, one of them ending in a venereal disease. With his affection for Mary growing, his affairs began to disgust him.¹⁴ He couldn’t get Mary out of his mind. By January 1859, Edwin was calling her “dear Molly” and visiting her family. In April 1859, when Edwin went on a drinking spree, she took care of him until he recovered. When he was away on tour, they wrote to one another. In July 1859, they were engaged.

When Edwin brought Mary home to meet his mother and sisters, Asia would not even see her. Even though her brothers and father were actors, Asia had the same low opinion of actresses most Americans did. For Asia, an actress was a “bold faced woman” who strutted before an audience every night and allowed “men of all kinds to caress and court her in a business way.” “That my good and noble boy should throw himself away so lightly is enough to break my heart.” “I wanted to love Ned’s wife, to let her be my sister,” she wrote her confidante, Jean Anderson, “but I cannot stoop to that which I despise.”¹⁵

Asia’s attitude toward actresses was not unique. It was commonly assumed that most actresses lived immoral lives on as well as off stage partly because actresses had to travel with male stars or business managers. “With the sole exception of prostitution, to which it was often compared,” writes theatre historian Claudia Johnson, no single profession was so loudly and frequently condemned. The catalog of immoral behavior included “‘heaving bosoms, lascivious smiles, wanton glances, dubious compliments, indelicate attitudes, kissing’ (and a) ‘variety of vain and sinful practices’ (including falling) ‘into the arms of men’ on stage” and illicit love scenes backstage.¹⁶

Many American churches regarded theatres as dens of iniquity and actors and actresses, especially actresses, as the devil’s disciples. The Boston Museum was so-called to assuage the guilty feelings of puritanical Bostonians who wanted an excuse to go to the theatre but sought to avoid moral condemnation by first visiting the Museum’s “Hall of Curiosities.”¹⁷

While some very famous actresses like Charlotte Cushman and Maggie Mitchell were accepted in genteel society, they were the exceptions. Most were snubbed. Clara Morris, another socially accepted actress, said her mother was “stricken with horror” when Clara told her she was going to be an actress. Richmond Enquirer editor William Ritchie’s marriage to actress Anna Cora Mowatt in 1854 shocked Richmond’s upper crust.¹⁸

Edwin felt the same misgivings about Mary being an actress as Asia. He told her that before he could marry her, not only would she have to give up her career as an actress, she would also have to live a year away from any contact with the theatre. Mary agreed and went to live in Hoboken, New Jersey, in a house Edwin leased for her and her chaperone, her sister Catherine.¹⁹

Edwin and Mary Devlin were married in New York on July 7, 1860. John was the only one of the family to attend the small ceremony.²⁰ Asia’s and his mother’s absences told John all he needed to know about what they thought about marrying an actress. Asia never did become reconciled to the marriage. When Edwin and Mary left for their honeymoon in Niagara Falls, Asia wrote Jean Anderson she hoped Mary would tumble under the falls or swim in the whirlpool and drown.²¹

After their honeymoon, Edwin and Mary moved into the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. They were a happy couple, wrote Lillian Woodman, one of their new friends.²² On December 9, 1861, Mary gave birth to a girl they named Edwina.