33

HENRIETTA IRVING

Nothing good ever came of knowing John Wilkes Booth. With one or two exceptions, every actress he was involved with experienced marital strife, heartbreak, substance abuse, or destitution.

Henrietta Irving, the star-crossed lover who tried to disfigure him in a jealous rage and then turned the knife on herself, took a long time to recover from her near fatal suicide. Either her injuries were very serious, or she was so traumatized she just needed to get as far away as she could to recover her health and sanity. So she moved to Milwaukee.1 What she did for the next two years is a historical blank.

The first indications that she had recovered are advertisements in late 1863 in several New York papers for Henrietta’s appearances at the Park Theatre in Brooklyn and the Olympic Theatre on Broadway.2 The Boston Post’s theatre critic was impressed. “New York,” he told his readers, had “a new actress, a Miss Henrietta Irving, a handsome, graceful and self-possessed young lady, with the most efficient black eyes, and a pleasant voice.”3

The New York Tribune’s critic praised Henrietta for bucking the current trend of actresses dressing up in expensive costumes. An actress “may be as empty [headed] as you please,” the New York Tribune sniffed, provided she appears radiant. Other actresses, it urged, should follow Henrietta’s example.4 Henrietta was such a favorite at the Olympic Theatre that its musical director, Thomas Baker, wrote a polka he named after her which featured Henrietta’s full-length portrait on the cover.5

At the end of 1864, Henrietta signed on at the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans6 where thirty-two-year-old Edward Eddy was actor and manager.7 Meeting Eddy was destined to be a turning point in her life; at the time it was just another engagement.

Six feet tall, handsome, with a powerful voice, Eddy had been a favorite melodrama star at the boisterous Bowery Theatre in New York for many years before coming to New Orleans. When Henrietta first met Eddy, he was happily married to Mary Matthews, a retired actress, and had taken her and their son with him to New Orleans. A week later, tragedy struck. Eddy’s wife fell ill and died.8 Eddy was inconsolable. When Eddy returned to New York to bury his wife, Henrietta moved over to the Varieties Theatre.9

If Henrietta thought she had put the past behind her, she was mistaken. After the assassination, newspapers all over the country dredged up her almost murdering Lincoln’s killer in Albany four years previously.10 Oddly, none of the newspapers interviewed her about her relationship with John. Whatever her reaction was when she heard her former lover had shot President Lincoln, she kept it to herself.

Later that year Eddy was back in New Orleans at the St. Charles Theatre, acting once again with Henrietta. Eddy was lonely. So was Henrietta. Never a star who traded on her looks and no longer youthful, she was as much in need of someone to be with as he was. Their professional relationship turned into more than camaraderie. In April 1867, they married.11

By the 1870s, Eddy was past his prime and in failing health.12 Henrietta was also losing her appeal.13 By 1875, Eddy was struggling to find work. In November he and Henrietta left for Kingston, Jamaica, where they were booked for an extended engagement. Five days after their arrival, Eddy developed a fever. On the morning of December 16 he suffered a stroke. His last words were “My God! What is the matter with me?”14

Despite receiving $25,000 for his New York house at auction in 1872, Eddy had squandered it all.15 Henrietta had not saved much either. Suddenly widowed, Henrietta was “without funds.” She managed to borrow enough money to bring Eddy’s remains back to the United States, expecting that Eddy’s Masonic lodge would remunerate her since Eddy was a thirty-third-degree Mason. Although they buried him with full Masonic pageantry,16 the lodge refused to reimburse her because Eddy had not paid his dues.17

Eddy’s death and her financial distress were too much to cope with, and Henrietta fell ill. With nowhere else to turn, she appealed to the New York Sun newspaper for help. She had been confined in bed for weeks, she said, “by illness brought on by grief and want. I am without the common necessaries of life—fire, wood or medicine. God help me if this my appeal to you should fail.” Her illness was being made worse, she said, by constant letters from Jamaica demanding repayment of the loans she had incurred, including one for the shroud in which Eddy was buried. “I am heart-broken.”18

The New York Sun was moved by her plea and sent a journalist to visit her. Entering her room, he was startled to see a large Newfoundland dog sitting by her bed, “looking as though he knew that his mistress was in trouble.” Henrietta was thin, pale, very weak, and nervous from long illness.

Henrietta rose from her bed to hand him the bills and dunning letters from the people in Kingston demanding repayment. Inability to pay them back, she said, was keeping her sick. Eddy had left her nothing and she had no savings of her own. She did not have to say how grief-stricken and discouraged she was, said the reporter; it was all in her face.19

Reading about Henrietta’s plight, Pomeroy’s Democrat, a Chicago newspaper, editorialized there was something sad about the acting profession:

           Forty-nine out of every fifty actors, actresses or professional people live the most unhappy lives. They are nervous, restless, rambling and desultory. Year after year they are knocked around from pillar to post, mussed, squeezed, tumbled, seduced, forsaken, deserted, as a luscious orange is picked, squeezed sucked dry and the skin at last thrown in the gutter . . . It is not the person, so much as the vagabond life actors and actresses lead that cause their grief—having no homes, always on the move, thrown into all manner of temptations. While we like to see a play or performance, we had rather bury a child than see it embark in such a hazardous calling, that is, if it was a child we loved.20

Henrietta Irving toward...

Henrietta Irving toward the end of her career. Courtesy of New York Public Library, Billy Rose Division.

Henrietta eventually recovered, and with help from friends she repaid her debts and was able to resume her career.21 But offers in New York were few and far between. In 1880 she agreed to hire on as the leading actress in Helena, Montana, at the Sawtell Theatre and at theatres in the outlying towns around Helena.22

When the company closed its season in Helena, Henrietta formed her own touring stock company out west.23 When that venture flopped, she headed back east and toured with various stock companies.24 By 1888 she was suffering from uterine fibroids (growths in the uterus that cause excessive menstrual bleeding and associated weakness), for which the only treatment at that time was an abdominal hysterectomy, “one of the most critical operations known to surgery.”

Henrietta was still broke. She couldn’t afford the operation unless the Actor’s Fund helped out. She had used money the Actor’s Fund had already sent to pay past debts for board. Before that she had sold her theatrical dresses. Please look into my case, she pleaded with the Actor’s Fund’s manager. “I do not think you can find a more deserving one. I have always been faithful to my duties and endeavored to the last to help myself without the assistance of others.”25

Henrietta never got money for the operation. She continued to suffer but had to keep working. In 1891, a New York Dramatic Mirror journalist recalled how in her younger days Henrietta had been “a young and dashing actress” and sighed that now she was relegated to playing “a chastened and refined representative of old women’s parts.”26

At sixty-two, Henrietta was drained, ill, and destitute. Her last seven years were spent as a patient of the Home for Incurables in Fordham, New York, paid for by the Actor’s Fund.27 She died November 29, 1905. Her death certificate listed uterine fibroids and cerebral apoplexy as the cause of death.28