Tom Maguire was looking to hire an actress. With a fortune made from his San Francisco saloon and gambling house, he’d expanded into show business and was owner of the 2,000-seat Jenny Lind Theatre. To manage it, he hired John’s eldest brother, June Booth.1 Maguire knew that a sure way to pack a theatre was to put sex on stage, at least as much as sensibilities at the time allowed. In 1863 he had hired Adah Isaacs Menken, an actress who scandalized New York’s critics and delighted its audiences as Prince Ivan in Mazeppa, riding offstage wearing a revealing, flesh-colored body stocking. Sticking to his strategy of hiring the flashiest performers money could buy, Maguire sent his agent, Sheridan Corbyn, to New York in September 1864 to hire Fanny Brown, the most beautiful woman on the American stage, “at a good salary, payable in gold.”2
Despite great expectations, Fanny was a disappointment. The Boston Post’s critic told readers back home Fanny’s “beauty seems to eclipse her acting.”3 Another critic was more blunt: “We can scarcely chronicle a success for the lady. It was simply a mistake.”4 Fanny had not been the draw Maguire expected. A quarrel over money turned ugly. Fanny accused Corbyn of calling her “a fiend under the mask of a woman” and threatening to “break every bone in her body.”5
After Corbyn fired her, Fanny sued him for breach of contract. The New York Times’s correspondent couldn’t resist quipping, “she is great in breeches you know.”6
Fanny’s next job was at the rival Metropolitan Theatre where she reprised Adah Menken’s role in Mazeppa. The San Francisco Chronicle was particularly impressed with her swordsmanship. Fanny “would distinguish herself as a light cavalry officer in Sherman’s army. . .She possesses a rare fighting talent that ought not to be wasted.”7 During their New England tour the year before, John Wilkes Booth had taught her how to use a sword.
Audiences were not as enthusiastic. Fanny moved on to Worrell’s Olympic Theatre where she played a tambourine and sang “with much gusto ‘I’d Choose to be a Baby,’” a song written by Fred Buckley, Fanny’s ex-husband. The New York Clipper quipped that Fanny singing the baby business in his family nursery “wouldn’t be at all undesirable.”8
The “baby business” may not have been that far from Fanny’s mind. By then she had fallen in love. In 1866 she married William Lawrence, a circus acrobat who called himself “Signor Felix Carlo,”9 and accompanied him and his troupe on a brief tour to Portland, Oregon, and other venues in the Northwest.10
After their Northwest tour Fanny sailed for Australia with Carlo, who had signed on with John Wilson’s Circus Company.11 While Carlo was performing with the circus, Fanny reprised her role as Mazeppa at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne, “the first appearance in this quarter of the Globe of the Lady Equestriene and actress Miss Fanny Brown, Who will enact the role of Mazeppa, making the fearful assent to the back of the wild horse.”12 After Melbourne, Fanny took her act to New Zealand, whose audiences were just as enthralled as Melbourne’s to witness “this great spectacle.”13
Fanny and Carlo were back in San Francisco in 1868. While Carlo was making arrangements to tour South America with the Chiarini Circus, Fanny agreed to star in a parody of Antony and Cleopatra. But even for Fanny the play was too lewd. She backed out “to avoid mouthing disgusting passages.” Two other actresses backed out for the same reason.14
In 1879 Carlo died from kidney failure while they were touring in Jamaica.15 Broken-hearted, Fanny gave up performing, moved back to Boston, and bought a house on Washington Street. Several years later in 1885, she returned to San Francisco for a brief reappearance at Maguire’s Opera House. Although well into her fifties by then, she was still being advertised as the “beautiful actress.”16
A chubby Fanny Brown in her late forties. Courtesy of New York Public Library, Billy Rose Division.
Living in quiet retirement in Boston, Fanny had no idea someone in the government had become obsessed with her. Among the artifacts taken from John’s body and stored in the judge advocate general’s (JAG) office were the five tinted cartes de visite he’d kept in his pocket. The women in the photos were presumed to be actresses but were initially mistakenly identified. By the 1890s, four of the women in the photos in John’s pocket had been identified, albeit incorrectly for a time. Eventually they were correctly identified as Helen Western, Alice Gray, Effie Germon, and Lucy Hale. The identity of the woman in the remaining photo of Fanny Brown was still unknown. It also differed from the other four in that their images were all profiles whereas Fanny’s photo was a full-body image of her dressed in a gown and looking directly at the camera. Determined to track down her identity, a clerk in the JAG office secretly and unlawfully took the photo to the nearby studio of J. J. Faber where he had it duplicated with the label “The Mysterious Beauty” inscribed below it and circulated copies in hopes that someone might identify the last of John Wilkes Booth’s photos.
Fanny Brown. “The Mysterious Beauty.” Fanny’s carte de visite was found on John Wilkes Booth’s body when he died. Courtesy of U.S. National Park Service.
The photo was eventually identified, but it isn’t known when or by whom. All that is known is that years later John Simonton, the custodian of the JAG office, sent a copy to author Francis Wilson for a book he was writing about John Wilkes Booth. Simonton told Wilson the photo had been recognized as Fanny Brown and that the caption, “The Mysterious Beauty,” “had been effaced from the original.”17
In 1892, Fanny inherited a large amount of money from a friend of her mother and used some of it to build the Hotel Biner on Washington Street in Boston.18
Although getting on in years, Fanny missed the stage. At age sixty she boarded a train for Los Angeles for one last appearance at the Orpheum Theatre.19 She died six months later in 1891 at her home in Boston,20 one of the few women in John’s life who did not die in poverty or misery.