When John Wilkes Booth was thirteen, a gypsy, passing through the Maryland countryside near John’s boarding school at Cockeysville, offered to read his palm for a few pennies. Johnnie (his boyhood nickname) thought it might be amusing to have his fortune told. He handed over the pennies and stuck out his palm. What the gypsy told him was so unnerving he wrote it down so he wouldn’t forget it.
He read and reread the gypsy’s prophesy, mulling over what to make of it. Several days later, Johnnie pulled his older sister Asia aside. He had something to show her. They walked to a nearby hollow and sat down, Johnnie leaning his head against Asia’s knees. He reached into his pocket and handed her a scrap of paper, by then well-worn from being folded and unfolded many times.
“See here,” Johnnie said, pulling the now ragged paper from his pocket, “I’ve written it, but there was no need to do that, for it is so bad that I shall not soon forget it.” “Only a Gypsey’s tattle for money,” he added as Asia straightened the paper out, “but who shall say there is not truth in it?”
Asia held her breath as she read the first few words of the boyish, penciled scrawl:
Ah, you’ve a bad hand; the lines all cris-cras. It’s full enough of sorrow—full of trouble—trouble in plenty, everywhere I look. You’ll break hearts, they’ll be nothing to you. You’ll die young, and leave many to mourn you, many to love you too, but you’ll be rich, generous and free with your money. You’re born under an unlucky star. You’ve got in your hand a thundering crowd of enemies—not one friend—you’ll make a bad end, and have plenty to love you afterwards. You’ll have a fast life—short, but a grand one. Now, young sir I’ve never seen a worse hand, and I wish I hadn’t seen it, but every word I’ve told is true by the signs.
Stuffing the prophecy back into his pocket, John said the gypsy had told him something else as she was gathering her belongings. “I’m glad I’m not a young girl,” she’d said, “or I’d follow you through the world for that handsome face.”1
As the gypsy predicted, John Wilkes Booth had a meteoric career. He was one of the highest paid actors of his time. He was generous and free with his money. He broke many hearts. He died young. And he certainly made a bad end. On April 26, 1865, twelve days after he shot Abraham Lincoln, he was “hunted like a dog through swamps, [and] woods . . . chased by gunboats till I was forced to return wet, cold, and starving, with every man’s hand against me.” Refusing to come out of a burning barn where he was surrounded, John was mortally wounded by a bullet that severed his spinal cord.
That the gypsy’s predictions were eerily accurate is pure drama. But how much of it is true? The story of the gypsy comes from Asia’s remembrances of her brother, penned in the 1870s, in a memoir written to humanize the errant brother she loved. Like many reminiscences, it smacks of elaboration. Is anyone’s memory of what someone said or read really reliable after thirty years?
Asia offered another story that “led one to believe that human lives are swayed by the supernatural.” Her mother told her that when John was six months old, she had had “a vision” in answer to a “fervent prayer.” She was sitting before the fire in their log house with John cradled in her arms. Staring into the fire, she had asked God to reveal the baby’s future to her. The flames in the fireplace “leaped up like a wave of blood,” she said, and the shape of the country appeared in the flames and then faded into “the boy’s own name.”
Asia’s stories about the gypsy and her mother’s vision implied destiny guided her brother’s hand when he shot Lincoln. He had no choice. The gods had sealed her brother’s fate from the moment of his birth. But John Wilkes Booth’s story was not a foreordained Greek tragedy. Like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, John Wilkes Booth was a “solid, self-respecting murderer.”2
He lived in a time of war. Ideologies tore families apart. Fathers, brothers, and sons chose different sides and wore different uniforms. John’s sympathies rested with the South. Like many Southerners, he had a deep-seated hatred for the man in the White House who he believed wanted to destroy the Southern way of life—a man he felt had become a despot like Julius Caesar. Someone had to do something. John felt it was his duty to be the South’s Brutus.
Historians typically veer in one of two directions regarding the assassination: some make the case that Booth acted on his own; others contend he was a tool of a government conspiracy. Those scenarios leave the basic question still unanswered. In his own time, Lincoln was far from the beloved president time has made him. He was widely despised and had a desk full of death threats. So, why John Wilkes Booth?
Booth family historian Stanley Kimmel pointed the finger at John’s family. “I had early come to realize that the motives for the assassination lay far back in the life of John Wilkes Booth,” Kimmel writes in the foreword to The Mad Booths of Maryland.3 Kimmel put the Booth family under the proverbial microscope. No one could understand what made John Wilkes Booth tick, he said, without knowing the Booth family history, starting with his father.
“Happy families are all alike,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, whereas “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”4 The Booth family was not a happy family. While John’s father, Junius, was still married in England, he fell in love with a girl of eighteen (John’s future mother) and ran off with her to America, deserting his wife and infant son. He told his wife he would be back in a year or two. He kept up that lie for over twenty years. When his wife eventually discovered Junius’s adultery, she came to America and publicly shamed him and his family. At that time in America, a bastard had the same moral social standing as a prostitute, thief, or beggar; the realization they were all tainted with illegitimacy humiliated his children and left them psychologically scarred.5
Junius was no model father. His career kept him away from home for nine months of the year. Much of the time, whether at home or on tour, he was drunk. Once he was so desperate for a drink he pawned himself for booze money. At one point a theatre manager locked him in a room before his performance to keep him from drinking. Junius would not be denied. He bribed someone to pour booze into a pipe fitted through the keyhole. Clarence Cobb, who as a boy knew the Booth family well, recalled that Junius “drank enough to float a man-of-war.”6 The night John was born, Junius wasn’t even home. He was drunk at the local tavern.7 When he was at home, he was distant and often suffered periodic lapses of sanity.
Asia was John’s older sister by two years and his confidante. Like her older siblings, Junius Jr., Rosalie, and Edwin, she had been humiliated by their father’s first wife’s screeds about their parents’ adultery and the taunts of illegitimacy. Despite living in a family of actors and marrying an actor, Asia was very status-conscious. She shared the opinion of a large segment of America that actresses were a small step above prostitutes. Since John was very close to Asia, her attitudes about actresses influenced his own.
Asia was also the family’s historian, but she never mentioned her father’s alcoholism—a silence not uncommon among the children of alcoholics. Asia’s father was a saint to her. She glossed over all his misdeeds, never mentioning the shame she undoubtedly felt being publicly humiliated as one of the “fruits” of her father’s “adulterous intercourse.” For Asia, her father’s adultery was merely a “boyish mésalliance.”8
John Wilkes Booth, the ninth of the American Booth family children, was his mother’s favorite. Everyone in the family was aware of it, but they didn’t envy him. He was their favorite too. He was a pampered child. He grew up a narcissist, a vain and egotistical man whose main ambition in life was fame. In spite of his narcissism, he was immensely liked (up until August 1864 when something changed him). He was “the gentlest man I ever knew. . .” said an old-time colleague, “universally liked by all his fellow actors and actresses.”9
John was always considerate of other actors, even the extras, said actor Martin Wright. “Of all the stars that came to play with us [in Cleveland] the one we loved and admired the most was John Wilkes Booth. . . .There was never a better fellow or a more perfect gentleman. He was not high and mighty, like most of the stars. Any supernumerary could go to him for advice—and was always sure to get it. Whoever went to him was received with gentle courtesy, and came away an ardent admirer.”10
He was charismatic. “If you ever came within the range of his personal magnetism and fascinations,” recalled a former roommate, “you would involuntarily be bound to him as with hooks of steel.”11 He “cast a spell over most men with whom he came in contact, and I believe all women without exception.”12 A long-time friend, comedian John Mathews, said John was the most winning and captivating man he had ever known. It was an opinion shared by everyone who knew him.
He was a man’s man. An excellent horseman. A marksman with pistols. A skilled swordsman. He was athletic but not ruggedly masculine—elegant, not brawny. He was a brilliant talker. He was cultured, eloquent, and good-mannered. He nearly always seemed unruffled and self-assured. His easy-going confidence attracted men and women alike.
To many women, he was a living, breathing aphrodisiac. Five foot seven (average for the 1860s), he weighed about 175 pounds. He had broad shoulders and gently sloping, muscular arms, yet his hands were shapely with delicate tapering fingers. He stood ramrod straight. When he moved, it was with the grace of an athlete. He had ivory pale skin. His hair was thick, curly, and inky black. He had sparkling, coal black eyes—said to be his most captivating feature. Heavy eyelids gave him a touch of mystery. Pearl white teeth accented his smile. Except for a silky trimmed moustache, he was clean-shaven. If there were a People magazine in the early 1860s, John Wilkes Booth would have been its “sexiest man in America.”
Actress Clara Morris fondly recalled, “It was impossible to see him and not admire him.” He was “so young, so bright, so gay.”13 John Mathews once said that if John were a woman, men would have fallen in love with him.14
Women packed the audiences wherever he played. He grouched they were not there to appreciate his acting but to gawk at him. When the play was over, they would cram together outside the stage door just to catch a mere glimpse of him up-close. They pawed at him for autographs. He was the first actor on record to have his clothes torn by infatuated women craving something of his as a souvenir to take home.15
At restaurants, “slammers of plates and shooters of coffee cups” competed with one another over who would serve him “like doves about a grain basket leaving other travelers to wait upon themselves or go without refreshment.” At hotels, maids stole into his room and pulled apart his already made-up bed for the sheer thrill of it and arranged his pillows so that they would be slanted at just the right angle.16 His friend John McCullough joked John “could be counted on to draw into the house three-hundred chambermaids, three-hundred wet nurses, and a score of widows.”17
Every day letters poured in from women “who periled their happiness and their reputations by committing to paper words of love and admiration which they could not, apparently, refrain from writing.” Other actors receiving similar “mash letters” passed them around and laughed at what they read.18 John received more than his share of love letters but never shared them. Even if he didn’t bother to read them, he snipped away the signatures at the bottom before tossing them. The letters were harmless, he said. “Their sting was in their tail.”19
Curious to see what they wrote, another actor picked up one of the letters whose signatures John had just removed. “I can read it, can’t I, now the signature is gone?” he asked, expecting a nod.
Deadly serious, John replied, “the woman’s folly is no excuse for our knavery, put it down please.” There was no missing the menace in John’s voice. He put it down.20
Actresses were as rapturous as his female audiences when they heard he was coming to their theatre. “To play the opposite part to this young genius was the dream of every ambitious young woman of the stage,” said actress Rachel Noah, John’s leading lady in Cleveland. She remembered how envious the other actresses and ballet girls were after her love scenes with John. From the wings, “She was conscious of a volley of ‘oh’s’ and ‘ah’s’ whenever he embraced me.”21
A chronic philanderer, John simply could not commit to just one woman until the very end—even then it may have been more manipulation than love. Like many actresses and “well-bred and wealthy ladies, married and unmarried, who did many foolish things for one of his kisses,” actress Henrietta Irving found him too easy to love and just as hard to hold on to. One night Henrietta saw John coming out of her sister’s room. In a jealous rage, she slashed him then ran off and stabbed herself. “It was impossible to know him and not love him,” said actress Clara Morris.22
The story of John’s plan to kill Lincoln and his eventual capture and death has been told many times. The standard account is that John shot the president in the back of the head on Friday, April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., while Lincoln was watching Our American Cousin with his wife, Mary, and their two guests. Twelve days later, John was cornered in a barn in Virginia. When he refused to surrender, the barn was set on fire. While still inside, he was shot. He was dragged from the barn alive and died several hours later. A military court later convicted eight of his accomplices. Four of them were hanged; four were sent to prison.
As John lay dying, his pockets were searched. Among his belongings were a pocket diary and photos of five women. Four of those women were stage actresses. The fifth was a photo of a U.S. senator’s daughter to whom he was engaged.
John Wilkes Booth was hungry for fame, touchy about politics, and a notorious womanizer. Many books have been written about his politics and his quest for fame, but the stories of those five women and the other women who loved him have been virtually ignored, glossed over as mere footnotes in history. Yet those women were famous women in their own right; they lived their own scandalous lives and were betrayed in love and marriage not just by Booth. They were women who coped with loneliness after affairs gone sour. Women who had once enjoyed fame and wealth but died in abject poverty. Women who became addicted to drugs to escape their turmoil. This book is as much about those women as it is about the assassin who loved callously, hated passionately, and died wretchedly—a man whose last words before he died were “Useless, useless.”