Clara Morris was in Columbus, Ohio, touring with John Ellsler’s stock company when she heard about the assassination. She was as horrified as everyone else at the news that President Lincoln had died. She and her roommate, Hattie, were tacking black cotton swatches—bought at triple the usual cost because of the demand—on their outside window when a man passing by told them the assassin had been discovered: the actor Booth!
The girls both laughed. Hattie laughed so hard she almost swallowed the tack she was holding in her mouth. It was a poor joke, Clara told the man, and they both went back inside. A few minutes later they heard a knock on their door. Clara was preoccupied pressing one of her costumes but heard Hattie exclaiming, “Why—why—what!”
Clara turned quickly towards the door. John Ellsler came slowly into the room. He was usually very dark complexioned, but his face was blanched. Even his lips were drained of blood and his eyes were glassy. Clara knew he was devoted to his children. Her first thought from the look on his face was that something dreadful had happened to them.
Ellsler sank down in a chair. Wiping his brow, he looked stupidly at her. Then in a very faint voice, he said, “You—haven’t—heard—anything?”
Clara and Hattie turned toward each other at the same instant. Their minds instantly turned to what minutes earlier they thought was a stranger’s ill-timed joke. Hattie managed to stammer, “A man—he lied though—said that Wilkes Booth—but he did lie—didn’t he?”
“No—no! he did not lie—it’s true,” Ellsler answered in a faint voice.
Clara and Hattie were both overwhelmed and began sobbing. Ellsler got up and left.
Actress Clara Morris. Clara wrote loving anecdotes about John Wilkes Booth. Courtesy of Library of Congress.
Sometime later, Clara saw Ellsler’s wife, Euphemia, whom she had never seen shed a tear for any sickness, sorrow, or trouble of her own, break into tears “for the mad boy.”
A mass meeting was held in front of the Capitol building to publicly mourn the slain president. Ellsler urged all the actors to stay away, lest their presence arouse ill-feeling. Clara went anyway. The crowd was immense. The police watched for any sign of a riot, periodically glancing anxiously toward the theatre.1
Clara was the only one of John’s acquaintances to write about her reactions when she first heard about John’s killing Lincoln. And that was only because, at the time she wrote, many years had passed since the assassination, and it was safe to mention any possible acquaintance.
Clara had met John in December 1863 when he was the touring star at Ellsler’s Academy of Music theatre in Cleveland and she was a teenage ballet girl. Like John, Clara was illegitimate. She was born in Toronto in 1847, the oldest of three children. Her father, Charles La Montagne, a French-Canadian taxi driver, had married her mother, Sarah Jane Proctor, when he was still married to another woman. When Sarah learned about her husband’s bigamy, she put her two other children up for adoption and left with three-year-old Clara to Cleveland. Taking her grandmother’s maiden name of Morrison, she worked as a housekeeper and cook. Watching her mother being cruelly overworked, Clara jumped at the chance to earn some money when another young boarder told her that the manager of the Academy of Music theatre was looking to hire some ballet girls for an upcoming production.
John Ellsler hardly looked at the fifteen-year-old applying for a ballet job. Ungraciously, he told her he wanted women, not children, for the part. As he turned to leave he noticed Clara’s eyes. They had looked blue a moment before. Now they were almost fully dilated and black. “All the father in me shrank under the child’s bitter disappointment; all the actor in me thrilled at the power of expression in the girl’s face.”2 He told her to come back in a few days. After Clara stepped into a bit part of an older girl who had suffered an attack of stage fright, Ellsler invited her to join the company next season as full-time member.
Clara was earning fifty cents a night as a ballet girl and occasionally playing small parts when John appeared as the Academy of Music’s star in 1863. Years later she recalled the moment she fell in love with him. She and two other girls were cast as part of a statue in The Marble Heart, a play about a sculptor in love with a woman whose heart was “as cold as marble.” In the play they were supposed to stand carefully posed and strongly lighted against a black velvet background. Although draperies covered the girl in the center straight to the floor, the legs of the girls on either side were visible to the audience. During rehearsal John noticed that one of the girls on the side had legs like “broomsticks.” “I believe I’ll ‘advance’ you to the center,” he said to the girl as he switched their positions. “It was quickly and kindly done,” said Clara. The girl was not only spared mortification, in the word “advance” she saw a compliment.3
Clara stayed on at the Academy of Music in Cleveland until 1869. Ellsler’s was a “family” stock company, which meant he played the male lead and his wife or daughter were always the leading ladies. There was no chance for Clara to go beyond second leading lady if she stayed. Clara decided to leave and take the job of leading lady at Wood’s Theatre in Cincinnati. Her big break came at the beginning of the next season when Augustin Daly, famed director of the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York, hired her as a comedian.
Once again fate stepped in. When Agnes Ethel, Daly’s leading lady, refused to play the lead in Daly’s opening play of the season, a dramatization of Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife, he reluctantly gave the part to Clara. Daly was impressed. He assigned her more roles. Two years later, in 1872, Clara was being hailed as the greatest emotional actress of her day, especially renowned for her role as Camille, a courtesan heroine suffering from tuberculosis. “She has moved to tears more Camilles of real life than ever thronged to the matinees of any other American Actress,” wrote an appreciative critic.4 Watching Clara as Camille, actress Sarah Bernhardt, who had played the part herself, was astounded. “My God!” she exclaimed, “this woman is not acting, she is suffering!”5 Clara was not beautiful. She was slim. Her face was ordinary. Her voice was not melodious. What she lacked in aesthetic appeal, she made up for in intensity. “She had no equal in depicting human suffering,” said another theatre critic.6
A year later Clara had a falling-out with Daly. She felt he was too authoritarian; Daly felt Clara was too defiant. At the end of the season Clara left for the rival Union Square Theatre.
Clara’s meteoric career faded by the 1880s. Managers hesitated to hire her because she was often so ill other actresses had to be substituted for her at the last moment. “Clara Morris’s engagement in that city [New York] has been even more unsatisfactory than it was here [Chicago],” the New York Times told its readers. “It is certain she will never be able to make an engagement here again, unless the house where she appears is guaranteed against financial loss.” It wasn’t only her illnesses she had to contend with. By then she was addicted to morphine. The usually cited cause was a childhood injury. It was more likely syphilis, “which was epidemic in the theatre world. Many if not all of her recurrent ailments,” writes Clara’s biographer, “are consistent with manifestations of untreated syphilis or gonorrhea.” Clara’s career was also in trouble for another reason. The public had lost its taste for the grand gestures of emotional dramas, preferring instead the new trend in realism drama. Stuck with roles that had once made her famous, Clara was now like “an insect trapped in amber.”7
In retirement, Clara began writing magazine articles on acting and the theatre for McClure’s and the Century magazines, regular pieces for Sunday supplements on topics like “Temptations of the Stage” and “If I Were a Girl Again,” novels, and books of her personal reminiscences. An article in the Boston Herald and a chapter about John in one of her books was a turning point in the public’s impression of the disgraced actor.
Lincoln’s wartime secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, had written an article in the Century magazine characterizing John as an “indifferent” actor who owed what little success he had more to his beauty than any talent.8 Clara was incensed at what they had written and wrote her own account of what she personally knew of John.9
When she had first seen John, she said, “It was impossible to see him and not admire him; it was equally impossible to know him and not love him. . .He was a gentleman in speech, manner and thought as he was in bearing. He was a great favorite with the men and the women adored him.” She wasn’t defending him, she said, nor was she apologizing for him. She had no sympathy for what he’d done. But “those who are writing history [meaning Hay and Nicolay] should be fair. . . .he was not a bravado, or a commonplace desperado. . . .as Messr. Nicolay and Hay state.” He was ever gentle, considerate, and kind. In condemning him or the fearful crime he committed, there was no need, she said, “to rob him of those gentler qualities which endeared him to his friends” or deny “that ability which made him one of the most promising of the foremost actors of his day.”10
The article brought her a flood of telegrams thanking her for her courage and sincerity. One of them was from Edwin: “My heartfelt thanks, Clara. I am so glad it was for you to say the first word of compassion for John Wilkes.”
Clara was not simply setting the record straight. She had a special affection for John. In Life on Stage, her first book about her career, she wrote a long, detailed, and loving chapter devoted to John. Anecdotes from that book are staples in every biography about John—the time another actor cut him during a rehearsal swordfight and instead of lashing out in anger, John told him to fight as hard during the night’s performance; when he knocked over a street urchin, picked him up, and used his own handkerchief to wipe the boy’s dirty nose; how waitresses fought over who would serve him; how housemaids made and remade his sheets; the letters from women whose signatures he snipped to protect their identity and even then wouldn’t let anyone else read them; and how the supporting actresses in her company envied the actress lucky enough to be embraced by John on stage.11
By 1910, Clara was totally blind and impoverished.12 She was unable to pay her $30,000 mortgage. She had bought the home in Yonkers when she was at the height of her career and managed to keep living there by supporting herself from her writing. It was too expensive to keep up solely on her earnings, and she’d had to take out a $25,000 mortgage in 1904 and then a second mortgage for $1,800 in 1908. Other actors pitched in to make the payments at least three times.13 Inevitably, the house she’d lived in for over thirty-five years was sold in 1914, and she moved to Whitestone in Long Island to live with relatives.
Dubbed in her final years as the “woman of sorrow” because of all her troubles, Clara died in 1925 at age seventy-nine of heart disease.14 Once hailed as the greatest emotional actress on the American stage, Clara Morris is known today for little else than the chapter she wrote about John in her autobiography, Life on Stage.