18

STORMING ABOUT THE COUNTRY IS SAD WORK

The vagabond life of a touring star was grueling. Touring stars were freelance performers. Unlike stock actors, touring stars were not attached to any theatre. They played for a limited engagement in plays they chose to perform and in parts they chose for themselves. When the engagement ended, they or their manager packed their trunks and moved on to the next theatre.

John was tiring of opening in a different city each week on a Monday, rehearsing different plays during the day, playing to an audience at night, taking a benefit on Friday, ending on Saturday, and then travelling on Sunday to another city for his next opening. If he had a two-week engagement, the routine would be repeated except for the Sunday interlude. With matinees, a star could appear in twenty plays during a fortnight engagement.¹ “Storming about the country is sad work,” Edwin told his friend Larry Barrett. “Successful as he is, my brother [John] is sick of it.”²

It was especially grueling for a physical actor like John who threw himself into every role and was accident-prone to boot. In February 1861, he almost killed himself in Albany during the final act of The Apostate when he fell onto a prop dagger and cut a three-inch gash in his armpit.³ In Portland, Maine, in The Corsican Brothers, he was supposed to slide across the stage on a plank while holding a rapier in the air. The plank hadn’t been properly greased. Instead of sliding smoothly, it stuttered across the stage, jolting John’s head back and forth. The audience howled watching him being “unwillingly jerked along.”⁴ In Columbus, Georgia, he was shot in the thigh.⁵ In Cleveland, he was almost blinded when he was cut just above one of his eyes during a sword fight.⁶ In Richard III he took turns driving his opponent over the floodlights into the audience and going over the floodlights himself during their swordfight.⁷ “When he fought, it was no stage fight,” said actress Kate Reignolds, one of his leading ladies. At night he would try to palliate his bruises by soaking them “in steak or oysters.”⁸

John was not just tiring of travelling; he was also having serious misgivings about acting. During one of his melancholy moods, he complained that actors were nothing more than “mummers, of the quality of skimmed milk. They know little, think less, and understand next to nothing.”⁹ He began to think about alternatives to acting besides real estate.

In 1859, discovery of large deposits of oil near Franklin, Pennsylvania, had touched off a frenzy like the California gold rush of the late 1840s. Kerosene made from petroleum oil had “revolutionized home lighting.”¹⁰ Compared to $2 per gallon (about $200 per gallon in today’s prices¹¹) for “spermaceti” oil from the sperm whale people used to light lamps, kerosene from oil cost only 58 cents a gallon.¹² It was not only nearly four times cheaper, it was also easy to produce, smelled better, and didn’t spoil on the shelf like whale oil. There was money to be made cashing in on the newly discovered oil fields. John wanted a piece of it.

While he was at the Academy of Music in Cleveland in November 1863, John asked John Ellsler, the Academy’s manager and a friend, what he thought about investing in the Pennsylvania oil fields. Ellsler was just as excited at the prospect of sudden wealth. They got together with two other of Ellsler’s friends, Thomas Mears and George Paunell, and formed a partnership to buy leases to drill near Franklin. They called their venture the Dramatic Oil Company.¹³

In mid-December, John, Ellsler, and Mears took the train to Franklin and leased drilling rights on property south of Franklin in Venago County.¹⁴ They then left Mears to get the project started while John and Ellsler fulfilled their theatre commitments for the season. If all went well, they would return in June 1864 to start drilling. Days later John left for Leavenworth, Kansas. It was the farthest he had ever travelled and an engagement he would come to regret.

Leavenworth was a small outpost that provisioned nearby Fort Leavenworth and travelers heading west on the Oregon Trail.¹⁵ The town was not on any theatrical circuit and was not easy to get to. There was no obvious reason for John to have sought a booking there other than an opportunity to make some money before his next engagement.

From Franklin, he boarded a train that took him to Ohio where he changed trains for Chicago. From there he took another train to Hannibal and then another train to St. Joseph, Missouri. From St. Joseph, he took a train to Weston where he boarded a steamboat to take him across the Missouri River to the town of Leavenworth, four miles from Fort Leavenworth.¹⁶ On December 22, 1863, he opened for the first of nine performances at Leavenworth’s Union Theatre. He was still in Leavenworth when a brutal cold snap hit the Midwest.

On January 1, 1864, on one of the coldest days in the Midwest in recent memory, one of John’s ears was frostbitten after walking in the bitter cold to say goodbye to some friends staying at Fort Leavenworth, four miles away. Before returning to Leavenworth, John handed his pocket flask to a black man named Leav, whom he had hired to carry the flask and other items. Somehow Leav lost the flask on the way back. John could have found liquor in Leavenworth, but he had a special attachment to that “treasured flask.” Despite the cold, he headed back. Coming up to the Fort, he later described how he inwardly groaned seeing a wagon “crushing my best friend” (his flask) just in time to “kiss him in his last moments by pressing the snow to my lips over which he had spilled his noble blood.”¹⁷

Downhearted, John rode back to Leavenworth in time to catch the boat that would take him back across the Missouri River to Weston. From there he could make connections with trains that would get him to St. Louis for his next engagement at Ben DeBar’s Theatre on January 4, 1864. After helping to cut the ice on the river so that the boat could dock, John arrived in Weston in time to board the train for the thirty-mile trip to St. Joseph where he booked a room at the Pacific House Hotel and went to bed “a dead man.”¹⁸

John woke the next day expecting to catch the train from St. Joseph east to St. Louis. The weather was of a different mind. A major snowstorm had battered the Midwest overnight, leaving more than two feet of snow on the ground. Trains buried under snow were unable to move. “Here I am snowed in again,” he wrote the friend he had visited in Fort Leavenworth, “and God knows when I shall be able to get away.”¹⁹ John telegraphed Ben DeBar not to expect him for several days. The days dragged on. January 4 came and went and John was still stuck in St. Joseph along with everyone else in the city.

“Our people are in a terrible fix,” the St. Joseph Morning Herald reported. “The snow has effectually shut us out from ‘all the world and the rest of mankind’ and there is no prospect of relief. Yesterday the white flakes came down thicker and faster than ever.”²⁰

With nothing else to do and “down to my last cent,” John arranged to give a dramatic reading at Corby’s Hall on January 5,²¹ for which he received $150.²² He was asked to give another reading the next day. Though short of money, he declined. It was so cold inside (the temperature was down to nine degrees below zero in the morning²³) that the constant foot stamping and moving around to keep warm made such a racket he could hardly hear himself. The St. Joseph Morning Herald lamented on how “full grown men . . . on such an occasion of last night could stamp like elephants and move chairs like anvils, plainly they were ‘stupid dolts.’”²⁴

Three days later the storm was still battering the Midwest. “This is a big storm,” the St. Joseph Morning Herald agonized on January 8. “In the memory of man, no such cold weather, and no such a fall of snow has been known as we are now suffering.”²⁵ A traveler who had made it to St. Joseph by sleigh from Breckenridge said he had seen trains covered with as much as thirty feet of snow and figured it would be more than ten days before they could move.²⁶

John could not wait that long. He was losing a lot of money by missing his play date in St. Louis. If he could get to Breckenridge, he could catch the train still running to Macon and from there go on to St. Louis. With the $150 he had earned for his reading, he hired a four-horse sleigh for $100. On January 9, he set off for Breckenridge sixty miles away.²⁷

John opened at DeBar’s Theatre on January 12, 1864, “worn out, dejected and as melancholy as the dull, gray sky above.”²⁸ “It was hard enough to get to Leavenworth, but coming back was a hundred times worse. Four days and nights in the largest snow drifts I ever saw . . . I never knew what hardship was till then.”²⁹ When the conductor stopped the train on account of the deep snow, John put a gun to the conductor’s head and threatened to kill him if he didn’t keep going.³⁰

After five nights of his scheduled two-week run at DeBar’s Theatre, John left for a three-city engagement at George Wood’s Theatre at a $300 a week guaranteed payment. John arrived in Louisville on Sunday, January 17, 1864, and opened at Wood’s Theatre two days later on Monday.

Kitty Blanchard, a young dancer at Wood’s Theatre at the time, had never met John. He was, she recalled, a “good actor, ‘extremely’ handsome. Good-natured. Very dissipated. A great lover of horses.”³¹

Ada Gray was John’s leading lady at Wood’s Theatre. It was her first season in Louisville where she had become an audience favorite.³² She also became John’s favorite—for the time being.

Little is known about Ada physically other than she was described as “large of stature.” Being tall was a handicap for an actress. When she “towered way above her leading man,” it made love scenes, “to say the least, unsatisfactory and undramatic.”³³

Ada Gray. John Wilkes Booth’s love interest in Nashville, Tennessee, “towered way above her leading man.” Courtesy of The Players Foundation for Theatre Education, New York.

Ada was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1845 and made her debut at fifteen at the Boston Museum as an extra. She had impressed the manager enough that he promoted her to a “utility” spot. A Rochester theater manager happened to be in the audience at one of her performances and offered her a job as a “walking Lady” at his theater. Ada continued to impress and was offered bigger parts, rising to second billing and eventually to leading lady at Ben DeBar’s Theatre in St. Louis before moving on to George Wood’s theater in Louisville.³⁴

Although five foot seven, John was too self-possessed to be embarrassed beside the taller actress or to have any hesitation about romancing her at night. When he left Louisville for Nashville he asked George Wood to let him take Ada with him as his leading lady. Whatever relationship they had in Louisville soured soon after they came to Nashville.

In the hotel room next to theirs, Sara Jane Full Hill heard what sounded like a drunken brawl. She opened her door to see if there was anyone outside who might lend a hand and buttonholed a chaplain passing by. Not to bother, said the chaplain. It was John Wilkes Booth in the adjoining room and his leading lady “who was also his mistress.”³⁵

The two apparently made up because John’s reviews showed no sign of ill feeling. The Nashville Daily Union reported John fulfilled all expectations and his Nashville appearances would not be forgotten.³⁶ Mrs. Hill would not forget his Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew when John sent fake hams flying over the stage during the banquet scene. One of the fake hams bloodied an orchestra musician when it hit him in the nose. Another landed in the lap of a woman sitting up front.

Mrs. Hill thought Mr. Booth had to have been drunk to have acted so recklessly. “He was a very handsome dark man, but my impression of him,” she recalled, “was that he was of a wild and undisciplined nature and inclined to dissipation, that he liked to pose, and was theatrical.”³⁷

John never shared the stage with Ada again. Nor is there any record of their ever seeing one another again. Ada was just a passing fancy, someone to idle away the time with when he was not out cavorting with his new friend, Tennessee’s Military Governor Andrew Johnson, or with one of Nashville’s 1,500 known prostitutes.³⁸ Before Johnson left for Washington on February 8, 1864, he and John were seen together escorting two sisters around Nashville.³⁹ John later may have capitalized on Johnson’s lechery to pin down his whereabouts on the night of the assassination.

John’s health began to deteriorate noticeably after Nashville. He was scheduled to open with Richard III on February 15, 1864, at Wood’s Theatre in Cincinnati. Instead he opted for the less demanding role of Othello. Even then, a local newspaper commented that he seemed “indisposed.”⁴⁰ Tuesday night he was visibly ill on stage. Wednesday he was too sick to go on at all. One newspaper commented that Mr. Booth “should have been in the care of a physician.”⁴¹ Another newspaper reported John “was so ill, his physician positively prohibited him from leaving his room.”⁴²

Thursday he rallied and was back on stage, although it was clear he had not fully recovered.⁴³ By Friday, he was reported to be whole again.⁴⁴ Just before leaving for his next engagement in New Orleans, John wrote to Richard Montgomery Field, the Boston Museum’s new manager, that he had been “very sick here, but am all right again” and would be in Boston for their agreed engagement beginning April 25.⁴⁵

John arrived in New Orleans on March 10 and opened at the St. Charles Theatre four days later. The New Orleans Times-Picayune’s critic was the first to pick up on John’s nagging hoarseness, commenting that it had worsened to the point that “his playing suffers in proportion;”⁴⁶ his performances were disappointing.⁴⁷ A few days later on March 25, the New Orleans Times-Picayune commented again about John’s hoarseness.⁴⁸ The next day he was so ill he wasn’t able to go on. The St. Charles Theatre’s manager alerted theatregoers that the night’s performance was cancelled “in consequence of the severe and continued cold under which Mr. Booth has been laboring for several days [and] he is compelled to take a short respite from his engagement.”⁴⁹ Resting in his room, John wrote Field at the Boston Museum he had been too sick to respond to Field’s last letter.⁵⁰ John was still too sick to appear on Sunday. By Monday he felt well enough to go back on stage, although it was “still evident,” the Times-Democrat noted, that “the gentleman is still afflicted by hoarseness.”⁵¹

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which had been rough on John, was conciliatory about his last performance on April 3 before he left for Boston. “He would have been much more of a success,” it conceded, “had he not during his entire stay labored under the disadvantage of a hoarseness.”⁵² The Times-Democrat, which had always been friendly, likewise commented on how John had soldiered on during his three-week engagement while laboring “under a violent hoarseness.” Most actors would have cancelled their entire booking, but he was determined “to disappoint neither management nor public.”⁵³

John’s hoarseness was nothing more than a periodic strain of the actor’s trade, writes John’s biographer Michael Kauffman. While some critics noted John’s voice problems in their reviews, Kauffman comments that other critics watching the same performance did not mention it. Though John was hoarse from “time to time, the problem was not chronic,” says Kauffman. It only cropped up after a long journey and usually in severe weather. “Knowledgeable critics took such things into account.”⁵⁴ Kauffman points out that Edwin and June (and many other actors) also experienced bouts of hoarseness.⁵⁵ However, their spells were few and far between compared to John’s, whose hoarseness persisted even after he left New Orleans.

It’s also possible, Kauffman notes, John’s hoarseness could have been caused by being run down from all the difficult travel and severe weather on his way back from Leavenworth and in New Orleans.⁵⁶ John was undoubtedly weakened from all that travelling and the terrible weather. His hoarseness could have been symptomatic of bronchitis, an inflammation of the lining of the airways. Had it been bronchitis, he would have been coughing all the way through his performances. None of the newspapers mentioned any coughing. More likely his recurrent hoarseness was symptomatic of something much more serious—like syphilis.

Although John’s engagement at the St. Charles Theatre ended on April 4, he stayed on in New Orleans, for whatever reason, for another week before leaving for Boston. That last week in New Orleans involved his singing “The Bonny Blue Flag,” the second most popular patriotic Confederate song after “Dixie.”⁵⁷

According to Ed Curtis, half-brother of John’s New Orleans landlord, John and some friends were walking along the street after they had just finished playing billiards when one of them dared John to sing the popular song. General Benjamin “Beast” Butler, New Orleans’s Union military commander, had forbidden anyone from singing, whistling, or playing the tune, declaring it treasonous. To show he meant business, he fined Armand Blackmar, New Orleans’s first music publisher, five hundred dollars and raided the stores of every music seller in the city, confiscating and burning every copy of the song.⁵⁸

John was well aware of what it meant to sing “The Bonny Blue Flag” in public. Without a second thought, he began chanting its opening lines, “We are a band of brothers, and native to the soil,” loud enough for anyone to hear. The men with him were dumbfounded at John’s deliberate offense and scattered as he continued singing, “fighting for the property [slaves] we gained by honest toil.”

In less than a minute he was surrounded by Union soldiers brandishing pistols. John remained unperturbed. He claimed he was a visitor to the city and had only just heard it on the streets. It was a catchy tune. He had not known it was illegal to sing it.

Anyone else would have been arrested after giving such a lame excuse, said Curtis. “But Booth could do pretty much as he pleased. He had a way about him which could not be resisted, the way which permits a man to overstep the boundaries of the law and do things for which other people would be punished.”⁵⁹ Had he been arrested, he would have been sent to Ship Island, the prison off the coast of New Orleans, for the rest of the war.

John left New Orleans en route to Boston on April 9. It was another long journey starting by boat up the Mississippi River to Cairo, Illinois, or St. Louis, Missouri. From there it was a week-long trip by train to Boston. He arrived in Boston on April 16⁶⁰ and checked into Amelia Fisher’s boarding house on Bullfinch Place, a popular hostel for actors. There was a reason John settled in at Amelia’s rather than the more luxurious Parker House Hotel. Maggie Mitchell was boarding at Amelia’s.⁶¹