After chatting with Bill Howell for a while, John asked if he could share Howell’s room at his hotel. He was short of funds, he said. He had had to pawn his prized gold-headed cane to get by.1
Howell was more than agreeable. Reminiscing about the time he spent with John in Baltimore, Howell waxed nostalgic. He had not liked John when he first met him, he said, but after you came to know him, “you would scale the mountain’s peak, breast the ocean’s billows or pour out your heart’s blood to serve him . . . .You could not resist his captivating manners, his genial smile and his personal magnetism.. . .his heart and soul beamed out of his eyes. . .[he] was that sort of man that if you ever came within the range of his personal magnetism and fascination you would involuntarily be bound to him as with hooks of steel.”2
Howell was one of the fortunate actors who still had a job. Theatres across the country had closed. With men leaving home by the thousands to join the army, and anxiety about the war dampening enthusiasm for entertainment, the theatres were empty. A short time after John left Albany, the Gayety closed and was reconverted into stores. Theatres in the South were faring no better. All over the country, actors and actresses found themselves without a job.
John spent his days writing to managers to arrange play dates for the upcoming season, playing billiards, and drinking with other actors who, like him, were hibernating until times got better. Most of the time he hung out at a hotel that was a favorite with out-of-work actors. The hotel had two bars. Actors who had not been long out of work hung out at the more fashionable bar upstairs where drinks were 15 cents. When their money began to run out, they loitered at the downstairs bar where drinks were 10 cents each.3
Evenings John would sit in the audience at the Holliday Street Theatre taking in the plays and waiting for Howell. After returning to their hotel room they talked for hours about their prospects. Howell recalled how John “would crayon out for me his hopes and desires in a way that was irresistibly fascinating.”4
They also naturally talked about the war. Maryland was militarily and politically tense. Less than a week after the bloody riot in Baltimore that left four soldiers and twelve citizens dead, Union forces occupied Baltimore and imposed martial law, and Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, meaning that anyone considered a Southern sympathizer faced imprisonment without trial. There was zero tolerance for dissent. Any pro-Southern statement or show of support meant immediate arrest and detention at Fort McHenry, where Baltimore’s mayor, chief of police, the entire city council, and other officials were already incarcerated. Thousands of Marylanders slipped across the Potomac River into Virginia and became part of the Confederate army’s “Maryland Line.” John and Howell toyed with the idea of stealing off to Harford County, where John had grown up, to raise a company to join up with the “Maryland Line” or some other regiment. After federal troops occupied Baltimore, they decided it was no use.5
When John was not writing to managers for engagements, playing billiards, or drinking, he was out looking for female companionship. Walking with Howell during one of their morning strolls, John noticed a strikingly beautiful girl through a millinery store window on nearby Gay Street.
Ask your friend at the Baltimore Sun to find out who she is, he said. Howell’s contact told him Miss W (he never disclosed her identity) came from one of Baltimore’s best families. That piqued John’s interest. Respectability, like fame, was important to him.
Learning she sang in the choir at the Methodist church, John saw an opportunity to meet her. He borrowed money from his long-time friend, Stu Robson, and redeemed the gold-headed cane he had pawned, so that he could impress Miss W. John was not a churchgoer, but he was sitting in a pew alongside Bill Howell on Sunday, waiting for the choir to come out and sing. After the service was over the two men stood in the vestibule trying not to stand out. But it was a neighborhood church. They were noticed.
When Miss W. came down the choir stairs, John thought it was his chance to meet her. “To our chagrin,” said Howell, “three or four young fellows who had made themselves obnoxious to us while we were waiting, hastened to gather around Miss W. like a body guard and went off down the street tittering.”
The next morning John received an anonymous letter. “Your impertinent attention to and constant following of Miss W. have been observed by a number of her gentlemen friends,” the letter read. “In case you persist in trying to force yourself into the lady’s presence,” said the letter writer, her friends “will give you what you richly deserve.”
John handed the letter to Howell and asked his opinion. Howell saw John was nettled and it would be best to make light of it. Those fellows were miserable plug uglies (a notorious Baltimore street gang), he said, not worth John’s notice. The comment mollified John. He put Miss W. out of his mind. There would always be other Miss Ws.
John craved fame, but he wanted it on his terms. Unable to afford an agent or business manager, he was managing his own career, setting up engagements and negotiating terms. Less than a year out as a star, he was already receiving offers from theatre managers. E. L. Davenport, manager of Boston’s Howard Atheneum, offered him a booking in November. John turned it down. “He thinks me a novice crazy to play in Boston and that he will get me for nothing. Which to tell the truth is nearly as much as he has offered me,” he told Joe Simmonds, a cashier at the Merchants Bank in Boston who he had met that summer and with whom he had become close friends.6
As much as an engagement in Boston (the “Athens of America”) would have been a big step up from the smaller theatres he had appeared in, John was not going to be taken advantage of by managers who thought they could hire him on the cheap because he was just starting out.
John had a scheme to make Davenport come up with more money: he would manufacture a bidding war. John urged Simmonds to talk to some of the people connected with the Boston Museum (the Atheneum’s main rival) and tell them that Davenport “wants me bad” but they were wrangling over payment.7
The plan didn’t work—either Davenport didn’t bite, or Simmonds didn’t follow through. Either way, John embarked on his own whirlwind tour that brought him the fame he coveted. “The genius of Booth the senior has descended in no small measure to the son,” said the Providence Daily Post; “he has extraordinary physiognomical power” (Buffalo Daily Courier); “fully sustained all that has previously been said of his superior qualities as an actor” (Detroit Free Press); “rarely so spell-bound by the delineations of any actor” (Cincinnati Daily Commercial); “the most original actor we have seen in a great many years” (Louisville Daily Democrat); “possessed with genius in the highest degree” (Indianapolis Daily Journal).8
Not all his time was spent on stage. Part of his time in Buffalo he was under arrest at a police station. Walking by a Buffalo store displaying captured Confederate trophies, John impulsively broke the store’s plate glass window, was arrested, and fined fifty dollars.9
Despite John’s “patriotic froth,”10 and Asia’s belief that soldiering was “perhaps his true vocation,”11 John never enlisted in the Confederate army.
According to Colonel Richard Johnson, with whom John had become friends, John’s fear of blood kept him from combat. Johnson said that he had asked John to go with him to a funeral home to pay his respects to Johnson’s deceased friend. “I would have gone in with you, but the sight of human blood is terrible to me,” John allegedly said, “the sight of blood drives me wild.”12 It was an improbable excuse. John had seen blood many times and it had not driven him “wild.” He’d had a nose bleed during a performance of Romeo and Juliet and not lost his equanimity. He’d merely turned his back to the audience to keep them from seeing the blood running from his nose. Another time he smeared blood on his own face to enhance his fighting scene in Richard III.13
John once told Asia his “soul, life, and possessions are for the South.”
“Why not go fight for her, then?” she snapped. “Every Marylander worthy of the name is fighting her battles.” As soon as it was out of her mouth, Asia regretted saying it.
John was silent for a while. Then he explained he had not enlisted because he believed he could do so much more as an undercover agent. “My brains are worth twenty men, my money worth an hundred.” His profession as an actor and his name were his passport, he said. It let him travel wherever he wanted. “My beloved precious money—oh, never beloved till now!—is the means, one of the means, by which I serve the South. . . .Not that the South cared a bad cent about me, a mere peregrinating play-actor,” he groused.14
It was narcissism in the extreme, pure and simple. No one ever considered John brainy. There is no record of his donating any money to any Southern cause. As for his name allowing him to travel wherever he wanted, after he left the South he never returned. His travel in the North was unhindered.
The other reason he gave for not enlisting was simpler and more straightforward. He’d promised his mother he would “keep out of the quarrel, if possible.”15
John’s mother was a widow with no income beyond rents from the farm and the money John was sending her. Her eldest son June was in California. Edwin was about to leave for England. Her youngest son, Joe, was floundering. Asia was married with her own family. Beyond her dependence on him, everyone in the family knew John was her favorite, their mother’s “darling.”16
“The love and sympathy between him and his mother were very close, very strong,” said actress Ann Hartley Gilbert, “no matter how far apart they were, she seemed to know, in some mysterious way, when anything was wrong with him. If he were ill or unfit to play, he would often receive a letter of sympathy, counsel, and warning, written when she could not possibly have received any news from him. He has told me this, himself.”17 Among John’s last words just before he died, as he lay gasping for breath, was “mother.”
Mary Ann had a mother’s talent for instilling guilt in her favorite son. “I am all alone today,” she wrote him, a month before the assassination. “I am going to dinner by myself. Why are you not here to chat and keep me company? No, you are looking and saying soft things to one that don’t love you half as well as your old mother does . . . It’s natural it should be so, I know . . . I cannot expect to have you always.” A week later, Mary Ann wrote that she was lonely and feared for his safety when he mentioned he was thinking about enlisting. “I never yet doubted your love and devotion to me—in fact I always gave you praise for being the fondest of all my boys, but since you leave me to grief I must doubt it. I am no Roman mother. I love my dear ones, before country or anything else.”18
Regardless of all his other faults, John was devoted to his mother. He kept the promise she had forced on him, but he brooded over it throughout the war.19 It was during one of those brooding moments that he broke the glass window in Buffalo displaying captured Confederate trophies.20
The New Year of 1862 began with two weeks at Ben DeBar’s theatre in St. Louis, a block away from the Planters’ House hotel where he stayed during his engagement. John felt at ease with DeBar.21 Like him, DeBar did not hide his Southern sympathies. On more than one occasion the provost marshal cautioned DeBar about catering to “rebel tastes” at his theatre.22
Like Maryland, Missouri was divided in its loyalties. On May 10, 1861, Maggie Mitchell had been onstage at DeBar’s in Fanchon when gunfire from a minor skirmish nearby panicked the actors and audience. The next day Maggie packed her bags and left Missouri for the relative safety of New York and other eastern cities.
Federal troops ended the brief show of resistance in St. Louis and restored order, but audiences were slow in coming back. In August, the city was placed under martial law. “All dance houses, theatres, concerts, negro minstrels, or any other places of public resort, of like character,” were ordered closed at 10:30 p.m. Any disturbance of the peace would not be tolerated.23
Unable to keep his pro-Southern feelings to himself, John was arrested in St. Louis for disorderly conduct when he was overheard saying he wished “the whole damned government would go to hell.” To gain his release he had to swear allegiance to the Union and pay a $500 fine.24
McVicker’s Theater in Chicago was the next stop on John’s tour. All the pent-up feelings about not fighting in the war came out on stage during his swordfights. John’s role as Pescara in The Apostate so riveted audiences, three of St. Louis’s newspapers requested repeat performances.25 The Evening Journal summed up John’s tour in Chicago with a rave review. “Mr. Booth has but few equals upon the tragic stage, which is saying much of a young man not twenty-two years of age,” but ended its encomium on a sober note. “He may be the head and front of the American stage, or he may add another to the list of victims of a fatal appetite, upon whose breakers so many bright lights of his profession have perished.”26
Basking in the praise he had received in Chicago and throughout his western tour, John returned to his native Baltimore more confident in himself than ever. For his opening at the Holliday Street Theatre he had the playbills print his appearance with the heading:
I have no Brother, am like no Brother
I am—myself alone.27
It was a clear declaration that he was his own man, not a facsimile of his brother Edwin or his father. Baltimore’s theatre critics were as effusive in their praise as those in the West.28
What the papers did not report is John’s almost killing actor Jim Herne in a fight over a woman.
Twenty-three-year-old James A. Herne (he changed his name from James Ahearn) was as handsome, rugged, spirited, and just as much a carouser and skirt-chaser as John.29 Herne’s big break as an actor came in 1861 just after America went to war with itself. John T. Ford, manager of the Holliday Street Theatre in Baltimore and the Atheneum in Washington, was having trouble keeping stock actors going into the army or leaving for other theatres, and offered Herne a job.
For the next three years Herne shuttled back and forth between Ford’s Holliday and Atheneum theatres, eventually becoming the company’s leading male. He was still one of the Holliday Street Theatre’s stock actors when he met John, the Holliday’s star. The two men liked each other and became friends—until they got into an argument over a woman. In a violent burst of temper, John almost killed Herne.30 The argument likely occurred on the night of February 20, 1862. Up until then Herne was listed in the cast with John. After February 20, his name was no longer included in the advertisements for John’s appearances.31
On March 3, Maggie Mitchell opened in Baltimore at the Front Street Theatre.32 John appeared there a week later for a benefit on behalf of George Kunkel, his former manager at the Richmond Theatre. There is no mention of how much time they spent together.
John finally got the booking he had longed for at the Boston Museum. Although he was confident in himself, “he felt timid” about appearing before “coldly critical” Boston audiences.33
Despite his determination to be judged on his own merits, the audience’s first thought was how he matched up to Edwin.34 The Boston Post wrote:
Shut your eyes, and listen, you will think Edwin is before you; many of the tones are so like his; but now open your eyes, and you will see a better Edwin standing before you.
His face has the real Booth Cut, the gleaming eye, the thin lips curling downward, the marked angle of the jaw, the delicate aquiline of the nose. The head seems not quite so large as his brother’s but more statuesque, more Byronic; and the forehead, when he takes the stage hat off, seems always, even in repose, as full and square, and beautiful as the brow of Brutus.
He is taller, and more closely knit in muscle and frame than his brother, with shoulders square and the broad chest more like his father’s. His whole movement speaks of energy and animation, rather than grace and melody . . . the intensity the Old Booth had to the extent of frenzy . . . he has given to his son, John Wilkes, in a far greater measure than to Edwin . . . We have never seen such [stage] fighting, behind the foot-lights, since old Booth died.35
Kate Reignolds, John’s leading lady at the Boston Museum, vividly remembered how John completely immersed himself in his characters. And how frightened she was when he did. “How he threw me about! Once [he] even knocked me down, picking me up again with a regret as quick as his dramatic impulse had been vehement.” On one of the nights when they were in the last act of Romeo and Juliet, the buttons on John’s cuff caught in Reignolds’s hair. Trying to tear them out, John shook her, stepped on her dress and tore it apart. When the curtain came down at the end of the play, Romeo had a sprained thumb, Juliet’s hair was on his sleeve and she was in rags, her two white satin shoes lying in the corner of the stage!36
Women in the audience were sexually aroused at the way John rough-handled Reignolds. “The stage door was always blocked with silly women waiting to catch a glimpse, as he passed,” Reignolds grumbled. “It is my earnest belief that if ever there was an irresponsible person, it was this sad-faced, handsome boy.”37 At matinee performances (when respectable women could attend unaccompanied by men),38 they would surround the exit door. So eager were they to see him and to touch him that stage manager Edwin F. Keach had to come out and restrain them.39
By the end of the season in June, John had performed 162 times in eleven cities. Reviews had almost always been positive. Theatres had been filled to capacity. His popularity was at its height. His income had soared “to figures only dreamed of by others in the profession.”40 Women jammed the exit to the stage door after each performance. His cartes de visite sold by the hundreds.
“Dear Miss,” John wrote to a fan pleading for one of his cartes de visite, “I have come to the conclusion that a noncompliance with your request would be a crime, especially if my not refusing will afford you the pleasure you mention.”41
The carte de visite was an inexpensive pocket size (two-and-a-half by four inches) portrait or full-length image of an individual or group of people, who had their pictures taken in a studio. During the Civil War, they were a way for soldiers and their families to keep the images of their loved ones fresh in their minds. They were also a major commercial enterprise for photographers who advertised them in newspapers and for theatre managers who sold images of favorite actors and actresses by the thousands to fans.42 An actor or actress whose carte de visite was being offered for sale was a sure sign of their stardom.
Richard Marshall Johnson, a St. Louis criminal lawyer and a drinking buddy of John’s, wrote him about a sad experience with a girl to whom he had given John’s carte de visite as a gift. The girl thanked him and said she wanted one with his autograph. Johnson promised that the next time John visited the city he would bring John to her house and he would personally give her an autographed carte. “Today she sleeps in Bellefontaine Cemetery having died shortly after I gave her the picture,” he wrote John. “When I visit her family and see her album,” Johnson continued, “I see the name of J. Wilkes Booth written at the bottom of your photograph and think of the unfulfilled promise that she should know you. . . . She was a woman of rare and beautiful excellence.”43
Along with the fan mail there were offers from theatre managers from all over the country. He could pick and choose his appearances, the plays, and the salary and benefits he expected.44 In August he wrote the manager of the Metropolitan Theatre in Indianapolis that his time until after March was filled except for two separate weeks. If he wanted him, it would be for half the take after the manager’s eighty dollars, and half of everything at benefits.45
At the start of the next season John was making over $650 a week, and sometimes as much as $900 a week. “My goose does indeed hang high (long may she wave),” he beamed.46