The night that Lincoln was shot, Maggie was in Louisville at a boarding house with her mother, her sister Mary, Mary’s husband, John Albaugh, and Kitty Blanchard. In the middle of the night, Kitty was awakened by a gong at the front door rung so fast and furiously her first thought was fire. She hopped out of bed, wondering what the commotion was about. Just then the door was pushed open, and “Miss Mitchell appeared in the dark passage, as white as a sheet and trembling like a leaf.”
Stammering, she blurted, “President Lincoln—tonight—Washington—shot—news just come—don’t known the details or who did it. Johnnie [John Albaugh] has gone to the telegraph office to find out and get the next dispatch.”1
Minutes later, Mary and the others assembled in Maggie’s room, huddling together to wait until Albaugh returned. An hour or so later, he came into the room and dropped into a chair. No one said anything, waiting for Albaugh to tell them what he had heard. Maggie broke the silence.
“Tell me what happened!” she exclaimed.
Albaugh’s face was white.
“Tell me,” she repeated.
Albaugh looked up at her and in a hoarse whisper said two words: “John Booth.” Maggie was so shaken she cancelled her scheduled engagement in Louisville.2
Almost twenty years later, Maggie Mitchell claimed to have dreamed—on the very night of the assassination—that she was standing on the stage at Ford’s Theatre when John Booth assassinated Lincoln.3 It was what psychologists call “false memory.” She felt so close to John that years later she imagined she was there, if only in a dream. Many people are positive that they have envisioned some eventful occurrence at the time it was happening, even though they are thousands of miles away. The mind often juggles its memories.4
Imagining being at Ford’s Theatre was not as strange as it might have been for someone else. Maggie had been the featured star at Ford’s Theater many times and knew its layout. She knew where Lincoln would have been sitting when he was shot and knew John would have had to cross the stage to escape through the back door.
Moreover, her relationship with John made it easy to place him in one of her dreams. John Wilkes Booth was not some matinee idol she had once seen on stage. She had personally arranged for his benefit in Montgomery before the war and had wrangled an invitation for him to attend the St. Andrews banquet there. They had acted on stage together, stayed at the same boarding house, and gone riding together.
Those who knew Maggie were aware of her feelings about John Wilkes Booth. “It was such as a woman’s life was worth in those days to have had an intimate friendship and acquaintance with him, but I braved all this and secured the lock of his hair,” she confessed to the same journalist she told about her dream. “No one ever had more beautiful hair than he,” she mused. “’Twas the loveliest hair in the world.”5
By May of 1867, Maggie had been working nonstop and decided to go on vacation with her mother on what was being billed as a “Mediterranean Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land.” All the accommodations were guaranteed to be first class. The trip’s organizer, Charles C. Duncan, boasted that only passengers of high moral standing would be taken on board. To eliminate any undesirables, potential passengers were told they had to submit their requests in writing and their applications would be vetted by a special committee. In reality the only vetting that was done was by Duncan himself. The only criterion for respectability was payment of $1,250 per passenger with a down payment of ten percent at acceptance.6
Duncan was an early proponent of celebrity endorsements, although in his case he didn’t bother to ask permission to use the names he put in his advertisements. Almost as soon as the list of “stars” was publicized, most of them bailed out. The first to cancel was the clergyman and former abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. Upset at Duncan’s using his name to lure passengers on board, Beecher remembered he had a previous commitment.7 General William T. Sherman bowed out for similar reasons, claiming he was needed to protect his beloved country against the Indians. Mark Twain was overjoyed Sherman bowed out. Duncan had furnished Sherman’s room like a palace. With Sherman gone, Twain was next in line for what he said was a “promotion” to Sherman’s room.8
Maggie was the next to back out. Before she signed on, amateur performers had been booked for the entertainment aboard ship. When Maggie joined, Duncan told reporters Maggie would like nothing better than to entertain the passengers. When she learned what Duncan had been promising in her name, she balked. All she had wanted was a quiet, uneventful vacation voyage. Even though she had paid the ten percent deposit for herself and her mother, she forfeited it and booked another trip to Europe on a less publicized ship.9 The only celebrity to stay with the announced voyage was Mark Twain, who later wrote about the trip in The Innocents Abroad.
At thirty-six, Maggie was beginning to feel lonely. In October 1868, she married Henry Paddock.10
When the newspapers found out about their marriage, they delved into Henry’s past. A hatmaker by trade, he was said to be “better educated than most commercial men” and quick-witted. He had moved to New York after Maggie left him in Cleveland, was twenty-three when the war broke out, had served three years in the Ninth New York Regiment, and had been honorably discharged after being wounded in the head. After he recovered from his wound he relocated to Toledo and went back into the hatmaking business. Whenever the time and opportunity allowed, he continued courting Maggie.11
Two years after marrying Henry, Maggie gave birth to a girl she named Fanchon, after the character in the play that had made her famous. There had been complications during the birth. The newspapers reported Maggie had become paralyzed and was not expected to recover. A few days later she rallied. By July the papers were reporting she was no longer in danger.
Four months later, Maggie was back on stage with Henry as her new business manager—not that she needed anyone to manage her money. Maggie had begun investing her earnings as early as 1863 when she bought shares in Ford’s Theater.12 Stage appearances were garnering her as much as $10,000 a month. She was also earning money as a celebrity endorser for a skin beauty product, L’Email de Paris.13 With all that money pouring in, Maggie bought real estate in New York and New Jersey.
Besides a large home near Fifth Avenue in New York, Maggie paid $200,000 for a summer home in fashionable Long Branch, New Jersey. She furnished it with paintings, statuary, rare and costly books, and Japanese artifacts. She called it Cricket Lodge, after the character that had made her rich and famous.14 Summers were spent at Long Branch with family, including her brother’s two children, whom she had adopted in 1878 after her brother and his wife died in Memphis of yellow fever.15
Now into her fifties, Maggie began putting her energy into other business and real estate ventures. In 1888 Maggie announced she was planning to build a theatre on a site she owned in Harlem. The news took a number of New York investors by surprise, especially a syndicate of prominent land speculators—among them theatre manager and composer Oscar Hammerstein—who were buying up property in Harlem’s still largely uninhabited farm land.
Hammerstein and his syndicate believed they could entice New Yorkers moving further uptown to their Harlem development by building a theatre that featured the leading stars of the day. To secure the property they needed, they unfortunately hired Harlem real estate developer and con man, twenty-year-old, self-proclaimed millionaire Allen H. Wood, authorizing him to pay upwards of $250,000 for Maggie’s Harlem property.
Maggie was an astute businesswoman and a lot wilier than the Hammerstein syndicate. She found out about their plan and hired an architect to draw up plans of her own for a theatre.16 She had no intention of constructing a theatre of her own, but if the Hammerstein syndicate believed she was, she could demand a higher price for her property. Leaving them to stew, Maggie sailed for Germany to see her daughter who was in school there, leaving her new business manager and new leading man, Charles Abbott, to negotiate the sale of her property if it came to that.
Acting on Maggie’s behalf, Abbott accepted Wood’s offer of $110,000 for lots Maggie owned at the corner of Seventh and 124th Streets. Wood gave him a down payment and a promise to pay the rest from the mortgage he was arranging.17 Wood started construction on the new theater before his mortgage deal was finalized but ran out of money to pay his contractors. The property reverted back to Maggie. She immediately put it back up for sale. With the walls Wood had partially erected it was now worth more than what Maggie had originally sold it for.18
It was not all smooth sailing for Maggie. The reason Charles Abbott and not Maggie’s husband, Henry Paddock, was looking after her business interests is that by then Maggie had divorced Henry.
Maggie and Henry had been married for fifteen years. There was not “a happier or kindlier couple in the world,” the Washington Post told its readers.19 A year later their marriage was on the rocks. While sorting through their mail Maggie chanced to come across an envelope addressed to Henry. Thinking it was a business letter, she opened it. It was a love letter to Henry from a woman in Syracuse named Minnie Moore. When Henry came home she fired him as her manager and told him to move out.20
Maggie filed divorce proceedings a year later in 1888 but was persuaded by friends and family to forgive Henry and try for a reconciliation. The reconciliation didn’t last. Maggie filed for divorce again, offering Henry what she thought was an equitable settlement.
Maggie was worth about half a million dollars (about twelve million in today’s dollars) at the time. Henry felt he was entitled to more than what she had offered. Unless Maggie gave him a much larger payoff, he said he would contest the divorce. He also countersued for the money he said Maggie owed him as her manager for the last fifteen years.21
Maggie wasn’t someone to toy with. She threatened to countersue on grounds of adultery and said he wouldn’t get anything. Despite the Minnie Moore letter, Paddock denied he had been unfaithful. Maggie’s lawyers called Minnie Moore as a witness. She testified under oath she had been intimate with Henry and hadn’t known he was a married man. Minnie’s mother also testified that she was aware of Minnie’s affair with Henry. She said she also hadn’t known he was married. Henry was dead in the water. The divorce was granted in April 1889.22 Maggie didn’t have to pay him anything.
Newspapers following the trial reported Maggie “gets cleverly clear of the fellow by process of law.” Asked why it had taken her a year to divorce Henry after she had learned about his infidelity, Maggie said it was because she was not in the habit of airing her personal affairs in public and was “adverse to any whiff of public scandal.”23
Maggie Mitchell, age fifty-six, at the time of her divorce. Courtesy of New York Public Library, Billy Rose Division.
Two months later, in June 1889, Maggie secretly married Charles Abbott at her Long Branch home. Maggie was fifty-three; Abbott was thirty-five. Like the stars of today, Maggie was followed around by the paparazzi of that era. By chance one of them happened to look at the register at the hotel in Brockton, Massachusetts, where she was staying and noticed Abbott, who was still acting as her leading man, signed the register as “Charles Abbott, wife, and maid.” The hitherto secret marriage made front page news in the Chicago Daily Tribune.24
Maggie often said she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she quit acting but did retire in 1892. For the remainder of her life she alternated her time between her home in Long Branch and her home in New York.
In August 1917, Maggie fell ill and was confined to her home. On March 18, 1918, she lapsed into a coma. Four days later, at the age of eighty-one, she died.
Newspapers across the country noted her passing in articles ranging from a half to a full column in length. In its final tribute to her, the New York Clipper eulogized that “she left a niche which has never been filled, and possibly never will be.”25
In 1907, Maggie’s daughter, Fanchon Paddock, married a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman named Harry P. Mashey. The “P” in Mashey’s middle name, like the “P” in Julian Mitchell’s name, was for “Paddock,” but they were not related. One summer when Harry was visiting his parents in Long Branch, he was curious about the neighbor who had the same last name as his middle name. Harry arranged to meet Fanchon and found they had other things in common besides their same names.26 A short time later they became engaged.27