23

ANYTHING THAT PLEASES YOU: ELLA STARR

After Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to General Ulysses Grant on April 9, 1865, the war was essentially over. John was depressed and drinking even more heavily than usual, sometimes quaffing a quart of brandy in less than two hours.¹ John’s friend John Deery thought his drinking was more than just a spree. Deery sensed John was tormented by some inner stress.

The day after Lee’s surrender, John bumped into Henry Phillips, one of the stock actors at Ford’s Theatre. Phillips was on his way to Jesse Birch’s saloon with some friends. He invited John to come along. John nodded. “Anything to drive away the blues,” John said.²

“What gives you the blues?” Phillips asked.

“This news [Lee’s surrender] is enough to give any man of right feelings the blues,” John answered. Phillips and the men with him didn’t say anything. After John left, Phillips turned to his companions. “He is a rank rebel,” he grumbled.³

The next day John’s emotions swung from blue to raging red. Standing outside the White House with Lewis Powell and David Herold and thousands of others, John waited to hear Lincoln speak about his plans for the future. When Lincoln told the crowd he was considering giving the vote to black soldiers who had fought for the Union, John became livid.

“By God, I’ll run him through. That’s the last speech he will ever make,” he muttered.⁴

John could not change the outcome of the war. There was no longer any point to abducting Lincoln. But if Lincoln were dead, there would no longer be talk about turning the country over to the black man.

The day after Lincoln’s speech, on the afternoon of Thursday, April 13, John was on his way to pick up his mail at Ford’s Theatre when he bumped into actor Edward Emerson. John was visibly agitated. In the course of their conversation John swore that “somebody ought to kill the old scoundrel.”⁵

Emerson was startled at John’s outburst. He told him he didn’t want to hear such talk and was leaving. John’s temper was too far gone for him to stop. In one quick motion he snatched Emerson’s cane from his hand and slammed it down on Emerson’s shoulder, breaking the cane in pieces.⁶

At that instant John made up his mind that the “somebody” who ought to kill Lincoln was John Wilkes Booth. And he thought he knew how.

With the idea of killing Lincoln now rattling inside his head, he hastened over to Grover’s Theatre five blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue. Grover’s and Ford’s were Washington’s two main theatres. John had played in both and was on personal terms with both their managers. He had heard that C. Dwight Hess (most acquaintances called him C. D.), part owner and manager of Grover’s Theatre, was planning a spectacular illumination, in addition to Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, the play for Friday night. Lincoln had been a regular guest at both Ford’s Theatre and Grover’s Theatre. Lincoln preferred Grover’s Theatre and often invited Leonard Grover to sit in the box with him. John thought it likely Hess would be sending Lincoln complimentary tickets for the show.⁷

John’s mind was racing. It would be a golden opportunity to kill the scoundrel, his chance to avenge the South. He would be remembered forever for killing a tyrant. He would be Brutus to Lincoln’s Caesar. And he would kill him in a theater. It would be the consummate act of his career.

Acting on his hunch, John made his way to Grover’s Theatre. Nonchalantly, he asked Hess if he was planning to invite Lincoln to see the illumination on Friday night. Hess said he had in fact intended to send Lincoln an invitation but forgot. He thanked John for reminding him and sent the invitation right off.⁸

At long last John felt that fate was on his side. He would kill Lincoln at Grover’s Theatre while he was sitting in the presidential box.

After leaving Hess, John went upstairs to Deery & Simpson’s Billiard Saloon. He chatted with John Deery, an old friend, then said something that surprised Deery. John asked him to buy him a ticket for Friday night in a seat next to the presidential box. Deery was puzzled. John could have had a ticket for free from Hess. Why did he want to buy one? John said something about wanting to pay for it himself and handed him some money, saying he would pick up the ticket later.⁹

John was too excited to sleep that night. Around 2:00 a.m. he wrote a cryptic letter to his mother telling her “everything is dull; that is, has been until last night,” apologizing for its brevity with “am in haste.”¹⁰

The letter wasn’t written from his room at the National Hotel. Walter Burton, the proprietor and night clerk at the National Hotel, said the bed in John’s room had not been slept in that night.¹¹ Although engaged to Lucy Hale, John most likely spent the night with his favorite prostitute, Ella Starr.

At nineteen, Ella Starr, a.k.a. Nellie Starr or Ella Turner, was “a rather pretty, light haired little woman.”¹² Jim Ferguson, owner of the Greenback saloon and restaurant next to Ford’s Theater where John often ate with Ella on occasion, said Ella was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. It was obvious that John was very fond of her, said Ferguson, and she was as “fierce as a tigress in her devotion” to him.¹³

Like John, Ella was a bastard. Her mother, Ellen Flynn, had married John Starr in Baltimore in 1831. He died four years later, leaving her destitute with two children, John and Mary Jane. With no means of support, she did what many other women with two dependents and no family did—she became a prostitute. Ella was born in 1844 or 1845, fathered by one of her mother’s visitors. Ellen had no idea who the father was and gave Ella her dead husband’s name.

In 1852, when she was about seventeen, Ella’s sister Mary Jane married Henry Treakle, a “very respectable typo” (a printer). After their marriage Mary Jane moved from Baltimore to Petersburg, Virginia, with her new husband and brought Ella to live with them.¹⁴ Her brother’s whereabouts at that time are unknown.

Mary Jane’s “matrimonial knot” came undone a short time after she married. Whether they divorced or simply separated isn’t known. Like her mother, Mary Jane had no money and took up the only profession open to her. She spent a brief time in Richmond and then moved to Washington to work at her mother’s brothel. By this time Mother Starr was the prosperous madam of a bawdy house in Washington where the “Cyprians,” “Daughters of Eve,” “Fallen Angels,” “Painted Jezebels,” and “Women of the Town” practiced the world’s oldest profession.¹⁵

Prostitution had always been rampant in Washington, but nothing like it was during the war. By 1862, “women of the town,” gaudily dressed in gaily feathered hats, satin dresses, and jewelry, openly promenaded or rode with officers in their carriages along Pennsylvania Avenue and dined with them in restaurants next to the city’s respectable citizens. One army officer was said to have attended a minstrel show at the Old Fellow’s Hall with a harlot on each arm.¹⁶

At the height of the Civil War sex trade, Major William Doster, Washington’s provost marshal, tallied more than 450 bawdy houses of all types in the city. The better-known houses had names like “The Haystack,” “The Ironclad,” “The Oven,” “The Wolf’s Den,” “The Devil’s Own,” and “The Blue Goose,” or “Madam Wilton’s Private Residence for Ladies.” With thousands of off-duty soldiers, bureaucrats, politicians, office seekers, professionals of every sort, gamblers, and laborers, Washington was a magnet for prostitutes from towns and cities along the East Coast and Midwest. Ambitious madams from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and as far away as Chicago and St. Louis closed their houses and headed for Washington with their best girls. Any place and every place was a potential sex mart. Bawdy houses were surrounded by saloons, groceries, local businesses, and private boarding houses. Prostitutes in the better class bawdy houses lived where they worked. Those in lesser houses lived in the same boarding houses as other working men and women and often plied their trade in their rooms, or at hotels, private homes, the back rooms of gambling dens, music halls, saloons, or in parks and alleyways.

Mother Starr’s three-story bordello at 62 Ohio Avenue was one of Washington’s more fashionable bawdy houses in “Hooker’s Division,” in present-day Federal Triangle.¹⁷ It was called “Hooker’s Division” because it was where General Joe Hooker’s troops were stationed when he was in charge of defending the city.¹⁸ It was just a coincidence that the general had the same surname as the slang term for prostitute. Prostitutes were already known as “hookers” when Joe Hooker was in short pants.¹⁹ During his evening buggy rides with Mary, Lincoln would have seen the comings and goings at many of the brothels and saloons in “Hooker’s Division” and heard their “inmates,” many of whom had strong secessionist leanings, cheering for Jeff Davis and shouting Stonewall Jackson would soon be there blowing the city to hell.²⁰

After Mary Jane took over her mother’s brothel, the house became known as Mollie Turner’s, the name Mary Jane began calling herself to avoid being found if someone were looking for her. Ella also adopted the Turner surname. A year or two later Mary Jane married John C. Burns, a pimp, about whom nothing else is known, but she never took his name.

Mollie’s bawdy house was one of John’s favorites. It was an exclusive house with just three “inmates”—Mary Jane (Mollie), Ella, and Fannie Henderson, as well as its own cook. According to Washington’s provost marshal’s listing of all the city’s brothels, Mollie’s was a class 1 brothel (ratings ranged from class 1 to “very low”).²¹ Upscale brothels like Mollie Turner’s were left alone by the police because of the embarrassment that might occur if a senator or other important dignitary were among the “johns” taken into custody during a raid. Besides, police officers and detectives were also among their clients.

John Deery recalled a particular time that he and John were regulars at Mollie Turner’s. Deery was there to see Mollie, the “young landlady,” while John was there to be with “her rather cold younger sister” who he said was “slavishly devoted to him.”²² Several years later Deery repeated the story, saying that his lady of the night was Mollie Turner. He didn’t recall her sister’s name.²³

Although Ella was a “working girl,” John, like many army officers and politicians who caroused in public with their favorite prostitutes, occasionally took Ella out to eat at restaurants like Jim Ferguson’s and sometimes took her with him when he went out of town. As usual with John, he never confined his attentions to only one woman. By February 1865, he was seeing less of Ella and paying more attention to Senator John Hale’s daughter, Lucy.

Desperate to see him again, Ella sent him a note:

           My Darling Boy,

                 Please call this evening as soon as you receive this note & I’ll not detain you five minutes—for god’s sake come.

                 Yours Truly

                 E. S.

           If you will not come send a note.²⁴

Another letter, this one signed only “N” for Nellie and dated Friday 6:00 p.m. implored him to “Please try and come down tomorrow as soon after two as possible? You can dine privately with me [dine was underlined]. So do not mind your dinner. Be very good [very underlined] until I see you. Anything that pleases you will be acceptable.”²⁵ There is no indication that John answered her note or called on her until April 13, 1865, the night before he assassinated Lincoln.

There was another note from yet another prostitute that John never saw. It was sent from New York and dated that same day, April 13, 1865, but was postmarked April 19. It carried the signature “Etta” and stated that she had received John’s letter dated April 12 saying he would be in the city on the sixteenth. Etta wrote that she sympathized with John and had also had the blues since the fall of Richmond “and like you, feel like doing something desperate.” Etta said that due to a misunderstanding, her landlady had told her to leave, and she was now living in a hotel and had used up all the money John had given her when they last met. She needed him to send more, she said, now that she was keeping herself “secluded as a nun . . . as you desired . . . which is not agreeable to me as you have found ere this, but anything to oblige you darling . . . Don’t let anything discourage you.”²⁶

After the assassination, Colonel John A. Foster, at the Judge Advocate’s Office, believed if he could find out who the mysterious “Etta” was, it would lead him to other links in the conspiracy. He sent a copy of the letter to Police Superintendent John Kennedy in New York asking him to search all the brothels in New York to find “Etta.”

“After eighteen hours constant search [of] every public and private house of prostitution of a class such as Booth could visit,” Kennedy wrote back he hadn’t been able to locate anyone named Etta. John was a frequent visitor at many New York brothels and was said to be fond of Sally Andrews, the landlady of No. 67 West Street. Kennedy also learned from another prostitute, Anne Horton, at No. 3 Clark Street, that she had had a close relationship with John, but he had broken it off. She had tried to win him back but hadn’t seen him for three months or more.

Neither Anne Horton nor Sally Andrews fit the case of “Etta,” Kennedy reported back. He was convinced the letter was a hoax. He had not been able to find any instance of a boarder who had had a misunderstanding with her landlady and had not found anyone registering in the hotel where Etta said she was staying. “A letter written Thursday 13^th, not posted until Wednesday 19^th tells its own story,” said Kennedy, “especially when the tenor of it, and other circumstances have already made it fishy.”²⁷

If the Etta letter were a hoax, as it seems, it begs the question of who concocted it and why. The author must have been someone from New York who was aware of John’s affairs with at least two New York prostitutes. The mystery of the Etta letter has never been solved.