Ada Gray, the actress John had had a brief affair with in Nashville, went on to have a brilliant career afterwards but also died destitute and alone.
In 1865 Ada took a job in Albany as leading lady at the Trible Opera House. In 1872 she married Charles S. Watkins, her manager, and spent the next two years as a homemaker. Boredom set in and after two years she resumed her stage career (with Watkins still her manager).1 Two years later, she was a major star on Broadway, billed as the “Celebrated Tragedienne.”2 For the next twenty years she appeared across the country, almost exclusively in East Lynne, nearly two thousand times in all.3 East Lynne, a cynic wrote, “kept women crying in the best theaters of the country for more than a dozen years.”4
Some theater critics had seen the play so many times they’d become inured to its appeal. East Lynne was “better suited to such communities as Peoria than Washington,” said one of the more unmoved journalists,5 reflecting what by then was the characterization of Peoria as the bellwether city of American taste. At one time, “will it play in Peoria” was the watchword for middle America’s theatrical sensibilities.
During her tours in the west two actors joined her company who would later become famous—not because of their acting ability. One was William Jennings Bryan, four-time presidential candidate, who acted under the name “Mr. Jennings.”6 Years later, long after Bryan had given up show business for politics, Ada said she was shocked to see him as a presidential candidate. “It was a big jump,” she said.7
The other was twenty-one-year-old D. W. Griffith, destined to become the preeminent director of the emerging silent movie industry.8 Griffith would only stay one season with Ada when he joined her company in 1896, acting in Ada’s vintage East Lynne and other less well-known plays during her farewell tour.
The company played in small towns in Indiana during the winter months to initially favorable reviews. As the winter became colder, so did the audiences. Trade journals reported attendance had started out as “good” and gradually faded to “moderate,” “poor,” and then “extremely poor.”9 Ada might have toughed it out, but by then her health had also given out.
Just before her death at age fifty-seven, Ada was living alone in a little cottage, a penniless, helpless invalid.10 The little money she had saved had disappeared, and she was forced to make do as best she could with what little she had left.
“For more than forty years of her life she had known little else but tears and heartaches in her role in East Lynne,” the Washington Post told its readers, “it was her misfortune in her closing years to bring those tribulations from the stage into her real life. Failing health forced her to give up her career.”11
Ada died in August 1902 in New York in the Home for Incurables in Fordham, New York. The cause of death was said to be “locomotor ataxia”12 and stomach cancer.13 Her obituary mentioned that she had acted opposite John Wilkes Booth.14