In the fall of 1864, with the Civil War well into its fourth year, the attention of most Americans was on Atlanta, where General Sherman, having captured the city, was resting his troops before their march to the sea. The attention of the New York theatrical community, however, was on the Winter Garden, where rehearsals were taking place for a special benefit performance whose proceeds would go toward erecting a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, the vast public greensward that had opened seven years earlier. The benefit would mark the first time that the celebrated Booth brothers, sons of the late Junius Brutus Booth, would act on the same stage. As the playbill put it, in the overbaked public-relations prose of the time, “The evening will be made memorable by the appearance in the same piece of the three sons of the great Booth, JUNIUS BRUTUS, EDWIN, and JOHN WILKES, ‘FILII PATRI DIGNO DIGNIORES,’ Who have come forward with cheerful alacrity to do honor to the immortal bard, from whose works the genius of their father caught its inspiration, and of many of whose greatest creations he was the best and noblest illustrator the stage has ever seen.” In a twist that would pique lovers of irony in the years to come, the brothers had chosen to perform Julius Caesar.
The playbill listed the brothers in descending order of age. Had they been listed in order of renown, as was usually the practice, Edwin would have come first. At thirty, he was widely acclaimed as the greatest American actor of his day, having eclipsed the legendary Edwin Forrest, for whom he had been named. His twenty-six-year-old brother John, however, was not far behind. John’s bombastic, athletic style—it was said that he often slept smothered in raw oysters to soothe the bruises earned in overzealous stage fights—was the antithesis of Edwin’s subtle, measured approach. Yet some theater critics, especially in the South, believed that John had surpassed his famous brother. Junius, or June, as his family called him, at forty-two the eldest Booth brother by twelve years, was the least well known, a serviceable but uninspired actor who had made his reputation as a theatrical manager in the West. (A fourth brother, Joseph, had inherited neither the Booth talent nor the inclination for the stage, and worked as a messenger boy.) Although the brothers looked remarkably similar—variations on their father’s short stature, tousled black hair, and lustrous brown eyes—they were vastly different in temperament. June, who possessed the stolid, well-fed air of a middle-aged banker, was a cautious, practical businessman rumored never to take a chance on an untried actor. Cast against type, he would play Cassius, of the “lean and hungry look”—his father’s role. Edwin was a slender introvert said to suffer stage fright everywhere but on stage. He usually played Cassius, but this time, deferring to his elder brother, took the part of Brutus, the conflicted assassin. John was the darling of the family, a dashing, impetuous bon vivant fond of poetry, pool halls, and brothels. Although his older brothers tut-tutted over John’s excesses, they couldn’t help being charmed by his boyish enthusiasm. Both June and Edwin considered him their favorite brother. John had shaved his trademark mustache to play the demagogue Mark Antony.
Given the nomadic nature of an actor’s life, there were rarely more than two Booth brothers in the same place at the same time. Yet the brothers were loyal and affectionate, if not intimate. June had helped Edwin get his theatrical start in San Francisco; several years later, Edwin had promoted John’s career in the East, and recently, after June had made some poor real estate investments, Edwin had paid off his brother’s debts and invited him to help manage the Winter Garden. (That this would bring “The Brothers Booth,” as Edwin called them, together for the first time in many years had given him the idea for the benefit.) As always when they came to New York, June and John stayed at Edwin’s house on East Nineteenth Street, where their mother, Mary Ann, and their spinster sister, Rosalie, also lived.
Yet while the playbill noted the “cheerful alacrity” with which the Booth brothers had volunteered for the benefit, tension was growing between Edwin and John. Like many families, the Booths were divided by the war. Edwin sided with the North. John was passionately, outspokenly, for the South. Although Edwin disliked conflict of any sort, he was fed up with what he called John’s “patriotic froth” and tried to reason with his hotheaded younger brother. June, who shared Edwin’s pro-Union sympathies, acted as peacemaker, observing that the war was like a family quarrel in which both sides would eventually reconcile. The more desperate the southern cause, however, the more vitriolic John’s pronouncements. That summer, the fraternal arguments grew so heated that Edwin forbade the discussion of politics in his home. John, for his part, wrote to their sister Asia, “If it were not for mother I would not enter Edwin’s house.”
John’s support of the Confederacy was far more than mere “froth.” Even as they rehearsed the assassination scene in Julius Caesar, John was devising his own elaborate plot: to kidnap Abraham Lincoln, smuggle him south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and exchange him for rebel prisoners of war. For several months, he had been pouring his earnings as an actor into horses, rifles, knives, field glasses, handcuffs, and other supplies. (It was a busy summer even for the peripatetic John. As he worked on his plans to kidnap Lincoln, he was also dashing back and forth to western Pennsylvania to oversee his oil-field investments and staying up late at night to write love letters to a sixteen-year-old Boston girl, all the while preparing for Julius Caesar.) The fraternal arguments, as well as John’s plotting, were temporarily suspended in August when John contracted a severe case of erysipelas, a skin infection that in the nineteenth century could be fatal. When John fainted from the pain, June carried him upstairs to bed. It would be three weeks before John, cared for by his mother and his brothers, recovered.
On the night of November 25, 1864, some two thousand people, paying up to five dollars a ticket, more than six times the usual price, packed the Winter Garden, the largest audience in its fourteen-year history. “The theatre was crowded to suffocation, people standing in every available place,” Asia recalled. When the brothers made their entrance, side by side in Caesar’s retinue, they were greeted with an ovation that seemed to shake the building. At the end of the first act they stood in front of the curtain, bowing to the audience, to one another, and, finally, to their sixty-two-year-old mother, who beamed down from a private box as the applause swelled, handkerchiefs waved, and shouts of “Bravo” resounded. Asia, listening to people around her compare the brothers, heard someone exclaim “Our Wilkes looks like a young god,” and turned to see a southerner watching the stage intently. Even the finicky New York critics were impressed. “Brutus was individualized with great force and distinctness,” wrote a reviewer for the Herald. “Cassius was brought out equally well—and if there was less of real personality given Marc Antony, the fault was rather in the part than in the actor. . . . He played with a phosphorescent passion and fire, which recalled to old theatregoers the characteristics of the elder Booth.” Indeed, some thought that the youngest Booth had outshone his brothers. Asia, who respected Edwin but adored John and may not have been the most objective witness, observed, “Edwin was nervous; he admired Wilkes and thought that he never beheld a being so perfectly handsome. I think he trembled a little for his own laurels.”
The evening was a critical, familial, and financial success—it would raise $3,500 for the statue fund—aside from an unsettling incident at the beginning of the second act. Soon after the curtain rose on Edwin Booth, as Brutus, pacing the orchard before dawn, the audience was startled by several firemen who rushed into the Winter Garden lobby shouting “Fire!” People stood in confusion; some scrambled toward the exits. Panic threatened until Edwin walked to the footlights and in a quiet but firm voice announced that there was nothing to fear; the fire, in the hotel next door, was under control. People returned to their seats, the hubbub subsided, and the play went on.
The following morning, over breakfast at Edwin’s, the brothers read in the Herald that the fire had been one of more than twenty set in Manhattan hotels the previous evening by Confederate saboteurs in “a vast and fiendish plot to burn the city.” June said that the arsonists should be hanged in a public square. John defended the fires as a reasonable response to the atrocities committed by Union troops in the Shenandoah Valley. Edwin took this moment to tell his brothers that he had cast his ballot for Lincoln in the recent election—the first time he had ever voted. John, increasingly agitated, told Edwin that he’d regret his vote when Lincoln made the United States a monarchy and had himself crowned king. Edwin told John that he was not welcome in his home if he was going to express such treasonous sentiments.
That afternoon, the brothers parted. Edwin and June headed to the Winter Garden, where Edwin gave the first performance in what became the legendary hundred-night run as Hamlet that would establish him as the country’s greatest Shakespearean actor. John returned to Washington, where he took a room in the National Hotel and began to recruit more rebel sympathizers for his plot to kidnap the president. Although the brothers had agreed on a second benefit performance—Romeo and Juliet, with John in the title role—scheduled for April 22, 1865, circumstances would conspire to keep that event from taking place.
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Like many children, I was fascinated by the War Between the States. For my ninth birthday, my parents gave me The Golden Book of the Civil War, which I spent much of the next year poring over, its maps of the major battles illustrated with platoons of tiny, meticulously painted soldiers positioned with historical accuracy on olive-green fields. For Christmas I was given a plastic replica of a Civil War cannon whose tennis-ball-size ordnance I fired at Ned’s legs. That spring, when we visited our grandparents in Virginia, I spent several weeks of saved allowance on a Union forage cap that I wore as Ned and I reenacted the Civil War in the fields behind our grandparents’ house, whose bricks were pocked with real bullet holes made by real Union rifles. Ned, of course, played Johnny Reb to my Billy Yank, for while I secretly admired the South’s audacity and was intoxicated by the romantic scent of defeat that even in the 1960s seemed to linger in the sultry air, I was too much the good boy to be anything other than a Union man.
I was fascinated by the Civil War for the same reasons boys are fascinated by any war—my interest in this case no doubt enhanced by my interest in the civil rights struggle unfolding on our television set exactly one hundred years later—but I found something especially intriguing in a conflict so frequently described as pitting “brother against brother” at a time when my own life could have been summarized by the same words. That the phrase was meant not only figuratively but literally seemed incredible to me, for despite my fraternal skirmishes, I found it shocking (and titillating) that brothers from the same family had fought on opposite sides of the war, in some cases in the same battle. The war’s association with brothers was reinforced when I read my parents’ coffee-table volume about Lincoln and learned that his assassin, the perpetrator of the most reviled act in American history, had an older brother who had become America’s most admired actor. How could two brothers grow up in the same family and be so different? Could something like that happen to my brothers and me?
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History is full of brothers so different that it seems impossible they could have the same parents. A brief sampling through the ages might include the Arouets (Armand was a sanctimonious, evangelical Catholic; his younger brother François-Marie, better known by his pen name, Voltaire, was a witty, irreverent satirist and a savage critic of the Catholic Church); the Robespierres (Maximilien became the rigid, merciless overlord of the Reign of Terror, known to supporters as the Incorruptible; his younger brother Augustin became a self-indulgent lover of luxury known to friends as Bon Bon); the Melvilles (Gansevoort became a dutiful, responsible lawyer; his younger brother Herman became a world traveler and iconoclastic writer known to his family as “the runaway brother”); the Carters (sober and pious Jimmy became president; his younger brother, Billy, played the court jester and drunken buffoon); and the Newtons (Walter became a street hustler, Melvin a professor of sociology, and the youngest brother, Huey—torn between fraternal poles—a book-loving, poetry-quoting, street-fighting, home-burgling co-founder of the Black Panther Party). Brothers may end up on opposite sides of a moral issue, like John Brown, the cynical, hard-drinking Rhode Island profiteer who became one of the country’s wealthiest slave traders, and his idealistic, abstemious younger brother Moses, who became a leading Quaker abolitionist. Brothers not infrequently end up on opposite sides of the law, like Al Capone, who, expelled from school at fourteen for punching a female teacher in the face, became the most powerful gangster in Prohibition-era Chicago, and his eldest brother, Vincenzo, who, running away from his Brooklyn home at sixteen, worked as a circus roustabout, enlisted in the infantry during World War I, served as town marshal and Boy Scout commissioner in Homer, Nebraska, and became a Prohibition enforcement agent responsible for busting up illegal stills.
How can siblings, who share so much genetically and environmentally, be so different? For many years, social scientists assumed that a family affects the children within it almost identically, and that siblings, raised under the same roof by the same parents, tend to be far more similar than not. But over the past three decades, studies of intelligence, personality, interests, attitudes, and psychopathology have concluded that siblings raised in the same family are, in fact, almost as different from each other as unrelated people raised in separate families. The psychologist Sandra Scarr puts it dramatically: “Upper middle-class brothers who attend the same school and whose parents take them to the same plays, sporting events, music lessons, and therapists, and use similar child rearing practices on them are little more similar in personality measures than they are to working class or farm boys, whose lives are totally different.” Paradoxically, the longer they live with each other, the more different siblings become.
The answer to sibling difference is, in part, genetic. Biological siblings share, on average, half their genes; if personality traits were entirely genetic, siblings would be 50 percent similar as well as 50 percent different—even before factoring in the effects of being raised in the same family by the same parents. But biological siblings have personality correlations of about 15 percent. (Even identical twins have only about a 50 percent overlap.) Although siblings share about half of each other’s genes, not only is the genetic contribution of each parent halved, but the sequence of those shared genes is rearranged through a process called recombination. The behavioral geneticist David Lykken has observed that, genetically speaking, siblings are like people who receive telephone numbers with the same digits arranged in a different sequence. Just as those telephone numbers, when dialed, will result in entirely different connections, genes that have been scrambled will express themselves in widely different personalities.
But this is only part of the puzzle. A growing amount of research suggests that siblings may be influenced most strongly by the things they don’t share: birth order, age, friends, teachers, and the vagaries of chance. And they don’t even really share the things they appear to have in common—if not identical genes, then seemingly identical parents, homes, and often schools—because each of them perceives those things differently. Psychologists say that the experience of each child within a family is so distinct that each grows up in his own unique “micro-environment.” In effect, each sibling grows up in a different family.
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If Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, born less than five years apart, grew up in two essentially different families, it is in large measure because their father, Junius Brutus Booth, lived two essentially different lives. One of those lives he lived on the stage, as the greatest American actor of his day, a man of such prodigious talent that fellow performers were sometimes too moved to deliver their next line, and hostesses besieged him with dinner invitations merely so they could hear his tear-inducing rendition of the Lord’s Prayer. (“His genius was to me one of the grandest revelations of my life, a lesson of artistic expression,” recalled Walt Whitman, who as a sixteen-year-old saw Booth in Richard III.) But Booth, a drunkard judged to be insane by all who knew him, was known no more for his acting than for his erratic behavior, instances of which were legend in the theatrical community: the time, playing Iago, he made his entrance, crossed the stage, walked out the side door, and disappeared for several days; the time he was found naked in a snowstorm at midnight, drunkenly declaiming lines from King Lear; the time, playing Hamlet, he deserted Ophelia and scooted up a ladder to the rafters of the theater, where he crowed like a rooster. Not surprisingly, audiences flocked to see “The Mad Tragedian,” as he was sometimes billed, never sure whether he would stir them to tears or shock them with a psychotic outburst. (Some suggested that his madness was itself an act designed to sell tickets, but it seems unlikely; at least twice Booth tried to kill himself, and at least twice he tried to kill a fellow actor.) Booth, for whom the line between acting and reality often seemed to blur, blamed his madness on the strain of performing—one reason he urged his children never to go on the stage.
Booth’s theory of insanity may have had some truth in it, for he lived a relatively sane second life in a four-room log house in rural Maryland, three miles from his nearest neighbor, twenty-five miles from the nearest theater. Here, Booth created a 150-acre sanctuary, complete with dairy, stables, vineyard, orchard, vegetable garden, swimming pond, and cow-dotted fields, to which he could retreat between professional engagements. He called it the Farm. Here he was known not as The Mad Tragedian but as Farmer Booth, an eccentric but diligent gentleman who subscribed to agricultural journals, hoed his fields barefoot, pioneered the use of animal bones as fertilizer, and drove his milk and eggs to the Baltimore market, where he hawked them in his famously stentorian voice. Here he was a devoted family man to Mary Ann and their ten children (only six of whom would survive childhood), leading them in choruses of “Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow,” reading aloud to them each evening from a library stocked with Milton, Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Keats. Although he occasionally succumbed to the madness his children referred to as “Father’s calamity” (he once dug up the body of a daughter who had died of cholera two weeks earlier, believing he might be able to revive her), life on the Farm seemed an idyll, albeit a peculiar one. Booth subscribed to a hodgepodge of beliefs cherry-picked from the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud; he attended Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish services with equal fervor. (Apparently, he set little stock by the Seventh Commandment; it was common knowledge that Booth was already married when he met Mary Ann, the eighteen-year-old Covent Garden flower girl with whom he emigrated to America.) Kind, charitable, and, when sane, a firm believer in the sanctity of human life, Booth, unlike most Marylanders, refused to own slaves, though he compromised his principles enough to rent them from his neighbors. Like his hero Pythagoras, he believed that men’s souls were reborn into animals’ bodies, and thus forbade the eating of meat (at least one newspaper blamed Booth’s insanity on the lack of beef in his diet) or fish (dining out while on tour, he shouted “Murder!” every time an oyster was cracked open at a neighboring table), as well as the felling of trees or the picking of flowers. At their father’s insistence, the Booth children weren’t permitted to see doctors; their illnesses were treated with home remedies concocted from chamomile, sassafras, pennyroyal, and green figs. The boy who grew up to commit the most infamous murder in American history was raised as a vegetarian, forbidden to kill even a mouse or to brand a cow for the pain it would cause the animal.
It is tempting to imagine what might have happened if John Wilkes Booth had been born before Edwin Booth and not the other way around. If he had, it is a fair bet that Abraham Lincoln would have lived to serve out his second term. For it would have been John who grew up on the road with his father, who was forced to fend for himself from early on, who came of age in free-state California—and Edwin who grew up coddled by his mother and sister on the family farm in slave-owning Maryland, encouraged to believe that greatness was his birthright.
Instead, it was Edwin who, when June outgrew the task, was taken from school at the age of thirteen to barnstorm the country as his father’s dresser: brushing his wigs; applying his makeup; adjusting his robe; keeping track of his swords; putting on his boots; making sure the crumpled-cloth hump he wore as Richard III was securely fastened; once even obtaining, when Junius tired of the carved pumpkins or molded dough supplied to Hamlet by provincial theater managers, a real skull to stand in for Yorick’s. It was Edwin who was charged with keeping his father sober for the show, sometimes locking him in his hotel room on the day of a performance, reading aloud or playing the banjo and singing English ballads as his father paced the floor, and then, after the final curtain, tailing him down to waterfront bars and waiting outside, while his father sang ribald songs and recited Shakespeare, before helping him back to the hotel. And it was Edwin who, whenever his father was overtaken by shrieking, hallucinating, clothes-rending madness, was expected to lure him back to sanity. Of all the Booths, Edwin alone seemed able to pacify his father. Although his father urged him to become a cabinetmaker (career advice about as effective as a circus ringmaster counseling his son in the front row to become a cobbler), Edwin listened to the play night after night through the keyhole of the dressing room in which he had been left with his schoolbooks, and made his first professional appearance onstage at the age of fifteen, playing Tressel the messenger to his father’s Richard III.
In 1852, at the age of eighteen, Edwin squired his father to San Francisco, where June had become a prominent theater manager. His father left for home after three months; Edwin stayed on to make his own name as an actor. When Junius Brutus Booth died of a fever on his way back to the Farm, Edwin blamed himself. Edwin, who had spent most of the last five years on the road, would spend four more years away from home: barnstorming the roughneck towns of Gold Rush California, playing Shakespeare, melodrama, and blackface minstrel shows for hard-bitten but critically demanding prospectors who, if they didn’t approve of the way an actor played Desdemona’s death scene, might grab Othello from the stage and toss him in a blanket; joining a jury-rigged theatrical tour of Australia that nearly left him stranded in the Sandwich Islands; working his way up the theatrical ladder in a San Francisco only slightly more civilized than Australia. With no one to take care of but himself, Edwin drank heavily (like his father, he was often noticeably drunk on stage), frequented brothels (he contracted a venereal disease that caused him temporary physical discomfort and lifelong guilt), and at least once gambled his way to insolvency (in part because he sent home some of his earnings to pay for his younger brothers’ schooling). But older brother June, who had witnessed his father’s excesses, took Edwin under his wing, warning him to drink less and work more. And after casting him as Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet, June, sensing that Edwin was letting his good reviews go to his head, demoted him for a time to utility roles in comedy, farce, and burlesque. Years later Edwin would recall it as an invaluable lesson, a taste, perhaps, of the parenting he’d given his father but rarely gotten himself. In 1856, when he returned east at the age of twenty-three, Edwin was already being advertised by one hyperbolic promoter as “The Hope of the Living Drama.” But his hurly-burly youth had left scars. “Before I was eighteen I was a drunkard, at twenty a libertine. . . .” he wrote a friend. “I grew up in ignorance, allowed by an indulgent mother who knew nothing more than that she loved her child, and a father who, although a good man, seemed to care very little what course I took. I was allowed to roam at large, and at an early age and in a wild and almost barbarous country where boys become old men in vice very speedily.” In later years, Edwin often said he had never had a childhood.
If Edwin never had a childhood, Johnny, as he was called by his family, enjoyed a perpetual adolescence, right up to his death at the age of twenty-six. While Edwin was babysitting his father in cities and towns across the country, Johnny was being spoiled by his mother on the Farm. While Edwin grew up in the company of men, traveling by stagecoach on muddy roads, eating and sleeping in flea-ridden beds at theatrical boardinghouses, Johnny spent most of his time with his older sister Asia, a moody, talkative, tomboyish girl who would devote much of her adult life to writing about her father and brothers in an effort to restore the family name. (There were two other Booth children at home: Johnny’s older sister Rosalie, a frail, reclusive girl who stayed close to her mother, and his younger brother, Joseph, a morose fellow who was sent away to boarding school.) In The Unlocked Book—an affectionate memoir of John written in secret in 1874 but, hatred of her brother still being strong, not published until 1938, fifty years after her death—Asia described the insular world of the Farm, where she and Johnny were, as she put it, “lonely together.” Even allowing for sisterly spin, their life sounds like an Arcadian fantasy: walking hand in hand through the woods; playing “Christopher Columbus” by using poles to hop from rock to rock across the brooks that veined the farm; digging for Indian relics; collecting geological specimens that Asia would treasure for the rest of her life; talking for hours by the fireplace; reading Byron and Hawthorne aloud under the cherry tree; playing duets, with Johnny on flute and Asia on piano or guitar; riding horses by moonlight, singing as they rode. While Edwin was mending costumes, running lines, and tracking down his drunken father, Johnny was swimming, climbing trees, and catching (and releasing) butterflies.
Edwin and John were a split of their father not only geographically but temperamentally. If Junius Brutus Booth had been born 150 years later, he would likely have been diagnosed as bipolar. It seemed as if Edwin and John had each inherited a different pole. On the night Edwin was born, there had been a spectacular meteor shower, a sign of good fortune; he had also been born with a caul, a transparent membrane encasing the face, another harbinger of luck. Despite being thus doubly protected, Edwin, who carried his caul in a leather pouch around his neck, always felt a vague sense of doom—“the feeling that evil is hanging over me, that I can’t come to good,” he told a friend. From childhood, Edwin was shy, somber, introspective, and frequently depressed. He rarely smiled, his laugh was soundless. His natural reserve was reinforced by shame over his illegitimate birth, especially after his father’s wife showed up in America and hectored her estranged husband whenever he brought his produce to the Baltimore market. (Although the legal Mrs. Booth eventually agreed to a divorce and, when Edwin was seventeen, his parents married, the shame occasioned by the circumstances of his birth would be lifelong. It would be compounded by other humiliations: his father’s public intemperance and insanity, his own youthful indiscretions, and, most painfully, his younger brother’s crime.) The boy who spent years as his father’s shadow looked something like a shadow himself: a skinny, dark-eyed wraith with an El Greco face and shoulder-length black hair. When he wore his favorite Spanish cape, he resembled a despondent Gypsy. Although Edwin’s physical appearance remained preternaturally youthful well into adulthood, even when he was a child his affect was as weary as an old man’s—not surprising, perhaps, given that at the age of thirteen he had been saddled with the responsibilities of an adult. It wasn’t all acting that enabled him, at twenty-two, to play a convincing Lear.
Johnny reflected his father’s manic side. From childhood, he was gregarious, headstrong, unpredictable. On the day Johnny was given his first pair of boots, he ran to the stable and, though he had never ridden before, jumped on a horse and galloped off down the lane, to the delight of his parents. In Asia’s telling, the man who killed Lincoln grew up with an optimism that might have made Pollyanna gag. “No setting sun view for me, it is too melancholy; let me see him rise,” Johnny told Asia, explaining why he preferred his bedroom facing east. In the woods, he liked to throw himself facedown on the ground, inhaling what he described as the “earth’s healthy breath” or nibbling at roots and twigs (“burrowing,” he called it). Asia recalled: “Once he burst out with the joyous exclamation, ‘Heaven and Earth! how glorious it is to live!’” Whenever Asia was in one of her gloomy moods, her teenaged brother tried to talk her out of it. “Don’t let us be sad,” he told her. “Life is so short, and the world is so beautiful. Just to breathe is delicious.” While Edwin liked being alone, Johnny preferred a crowd; he made friends easily and at school became the magnetic center of a circle of boys. Like all the Booths, Johnny had his lugubrious spells, but while Edwin suffered through his with stoic resignation, Johnny fought them off with a determined gaiety. Both Booths had “that touch of ‘strangeness,’” the actress Clara Morris would recall. “In Edwin Booth it was a profound melancholy; in John it was an exaggeration of spirit, almost a wildness.” Indeed, other than June, John seemed the sanest of the Booth children.
If Edwin grew up expecting doom, Johnny grew up expecting glory. One night, when his mother sat by the hearth nursing her six-month-old and praying to know his future, the dying flames revived and, in rapid succession, formed the shape of an arm, the word country, and—the grand finale—all fifteen letters of her son’s name. To Mary Ann Booth, the vision suggested not that she possessed a hypertrophic imagination (or an extraordinarily versatile fireplace) but that her third son had been singled out for greatness. The proud mother told the story so often—“a hundred times,” according to Asia, who immortalized the incident in an ode entitled “The Mother’s Vision”—that it began to take on the aura of manifest destiny in the Booth household.
Whether it was his mother’s vision, his optimistic nature, or even his name (Edwin had been named for actor friends of his father, John Wilkes for an eighteenth-century English radical imprisoned for defying the king), Johnny grew up believing he was destined for fame. All the Booth children had been steeped in models of heroism, having been raised by a father, himself named for the founder of the Roman Republic, who declaimed speeches from Shakespeare, read aloud from Plutarch’s Lives, and decorated his parlor walls with engravings of classical scenes like “Timon of Athens” and “The Roman Matron Showing Her Husband How to Die.” But Johnny took these models most to heart. Imitating Agesilaus, a Spartan king known for his frugal lifestyle, Johnny chose for his bed the hardest mattress and straw pillow; he galloped through the forest, tilting at trees, on a horse he’d named for the Roman patriot Cola de Rienzi; he memorized The Giaour, Byron’s epic poem about a man who risks everything for an act of revenge (years later, he could still recite all 1,300 lines); he devoured the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Asia blamed the “unhealthy tales of Bulwer” for feeding to “fever heat . . . that wild ambition born in Wilkes Booth,” but she added fuel to the fire. “Seated together in the broad swing under the gum trees and hickories,” she recalled, “we would build fantastic temples of fame that were to resound with his name in the days that were coming.” At school, Johnny told his friends that he would win undying glory with some extraordinary act.
In much of this, Johnny was no different from most histrionic nineteenth-century boys—he was certainly not the only one to sign his letters to friends “Thine till Death”—but he never outgrew his obsession with fame. Asia wasn’t sure whether it would be won on the stage or in politics. To Johnny, it didn’t seem to matter how he won it, it was the fame itself that counted. But after making his first appearance on the stage at age seventeen, as Richmond in Richard III, Johnny rushed home from Baltimore and told Asia that he had found his calling. Sitting in the swing-seat with his sister, he poured out his dreams, saying, recalled Asia, “He could never hope to be as great as father, he never wanted to try to rival Edwin, but he wanted to be loved of the Southern people above all things. He would work to make himself essentially a Southern actor.”
There was another factor that made it seem as if Edwin and John had been born into different families: John was his parents’ favorite child. This, too, was partly a matter of timing. Two years before John’s birth, eleven-year-old Henry Booth, his father’s beloved, had died of smallpox. When John was born, the Booth parents transferred their hopes for Henry to their new son. But John’s place in their affections was also a matter of temperament. In contrast to cautious June, reclusive Rosalie, reticent Edwin, and prickly Asia, Johnny was easy to love: cheerful, charismatic, exuberant, and, in an extraordinarily good-looking family, handsome to the point of beauty. Such was Johnny’s appeal that even after Joseph, a well-behaved but subdued child, was born two years later, Johnny remained the adored baby of the family, the center of attention. Of all the children, Johnny most resembled his high-spirited father in both looks and manner, a fact that surely contributed to his favored status. On the road, Junius relied on Edwin. At home, he all but ignored Edwin and devoted himself to Johnny. As Johnny took center stage, Edwin retreated still further. For Edwin, acting, at least in part, was a way of getting the attention he hadn’t gotten as a child; for Johnny, it would be a way of continuing to get the attention he had gotten since birth.
Charmed by his personality and cautious after Henry’s death, the Booths didn’t have the heart to discipline Johnny, reinforcing a sense of entitlement he would carry to his grave. (Edwin didn’t need disciplining; he disciplined himself.) Alone among the Booth children, Johnny dared defy their father’s edict against hunting. After Junius Brutus Booth died when Johnny was fourteen, his mother was even less inclined to restrain the child in whom the mercurial spirit of her husband seemed to live on. The adolescent Johnny spent his time playing cards, getting drunk, starting fights, skipping school, pulling pranks. He set off fireworks on a hotel porch, scattering a group of fat-chewing old-timers; he honed his marksmanship on stray cats; he was the architect of a wild drinking party for the school debating club. Home for a visit, June tried to rein in his sixteen-year-old brother as he had reined in Edwin in California, but his mother told him to say nothing that might upset John; she wanted to keep things pleasant while they were together. Two years later, when Edwin returned, he, too, was warned by his mother not to discipline his brother; Johnny would find his own way. But Edwin must have been hurt when, needing some costumes for his upcoming eastern debut, he sorted through his father’s theatrical wardrobe, with which he was, of course, intimately familiar, and, finding several that he wanted, was told by his mother he couldn’t have them. She was saving them for Johnny. John would inherit his father’s entire collection, including the spurs Edwin had worn as Tressel in his first stage appearance—the same spurs that would catch in the Treasury Guard flag, nine years later, when Lincoln’s assassin leaped from the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre.
* * *
The notion that parents should treat their children equally is relatively new. In the Bible, favoritism begat favoritism: Abraham favored Isaac, Isaac favored Esau; Rebekah favored Jacob, Jacob favored Joseph (“But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him”). Indeed, until well into the twentieth century, Western parents made little attempt to conceal their filial preferences. Thus Louisa Whitman made no secret of her partiality for her second-born, Walt, whose siblings may have been stung but not surprised when, after their mother’s death, they came across a scrap of paper on which she had written, not long before the end, “dont mourn for me my beloved sons and daughters. farewell my dear beloved walter.”
The Victorian editor and publisher Arthur Waugh had been terrified of his own father, a country doctor known as the Brute, who, to toughen up his timid, asthmatic son, liked to perch him on a tree branch from which he was unable to climb down, then sneak back hours later and fire off a gun inches from his ear. Determined to give his firstborn son the childhood he never had, Arthur took Alec to Shakespeare plays and cricket matches; read aloud each night from Kipling, Tennyson, and Browning; wrote poems to him; and walked hand in hand with him across Hampstead Heath while conducting animated discussions about literature. When Alec went off to his father’s old boarding school, 150 miles from home, Arthur wrote him every day, visited him each weekend, and telegraphed his grades and cricket scores to friends and relatives throughout the country. When Alec was kicked out of school for kissing other boys, his father told him he shared his pain, writing, “The nails that pierce the hands of the Son are still driven through the hands of the Father also.” All Arthur could talk about was Alec, whom he was convinced would become a great cricket player or a renowned poet. “I have built my earthly hopes on him,” he confided to a friend. He said several times that without Alec his life would be over.
Arthur hardly seemed to notice that he had a second son. In later years Evelyn Waugh told friends he had been an unwanted child; indeed, his parents made no secret of the fact that they would have preferred a daughter and had been deeply disappointed when a long, difficult delivery yielded a son. For Evelyn, five years younger than Alec, there were no Shakespeare plays, no cricket matches, no literary give-and-take, and no pet nicknames (although his brother referred to him, early on, as “It”). When eleven-year-old Evelyn asked for a bicycle, Arthur bought one for Alec and gave Evelyn a box of theatrical facepaints instead. When Alec asked for a billiard table, Arthur had it installed in Evelyn’s nursery. The banner that greeted Alec on school vacations—WELCOME HOME THE HEIR TO UNDERHILL—was taken down only after Evelyn asked his father, “And when Alec has the house and all that’s in it what will be left for me?” Alec attended his father’s old boarding school; Evelyn was sent to an inferior institution, which his father rarely visited. At home, conversation revolved around Alec’s achievements, and whenever Arthur pointed out Evelyn’s shortcomings, he invoked Alec’s sterling example. Arthur signed his letters to Alec “Your devotedly loving Daddy,” “Ever, Dearest Boy,” or “With deep love and unfaltering trust, still and always, your ever devoted and hopeful Daddy.” To Evelyn, he simply wrote “Your loving father.” Years later, Arthur wrote his first grandchild, Alec’s son: “The three great things in my life have been my mother, my wife, and my son—your father. Nothing else has mattered much to me but their love.”
It was parents like Arthur Waugh that pediatricians and psychologists had in mind when they began churning out books on child-rearing and behavioral development in which they urged mothers and fathers not to play favorites. Nonetheless, contemporary Arthur Waughs abound. In the 1950s, in one of the first major studies of siblings, the psychologist Helen Koch interviewed 360 five- and six-year-olds, and found that two thirds claimed their mothers showed favoritism. Firstborns were especially likely to report that their mothers paid more attention to their younger siblings. Studies of older children yielded similar results. Looking at it from the parents’ point of view, only a third of mothers in a more recent Colorado study reported feeling equal affection for both of their children, and only a third—presumably the same third—said they gave equal attention to both. In most instances, again, it was the younger children who received the lion’s share. In an attempt to measure the prevalence of favoritism objectively, the sociologist Katherine Conger interviewed 384 adolescent sibling pairs and their parents once a year for three years, and concluded that 70 percent of fathers and 65 percent of mothers exhibited a preference for one of their children; in this case, however, the favorite was usually the elder child. Favoritism may be in the eye of the beholder. In a survey of thirty elderly mothers and their grown children, 80 percent of the mothers admitted, often reluctantly, that they had a favorite. Eighty percent of their children agreed—but when asked which sibling was the favorite, the majority guessed wrong.
Treating each child according to his or her needs is natural and unavoidable. A restive infant demands more attention than one who sleeps through the night, a rambunctious toddler more than her independent six-year-old brother, a sick child more than a healthy one. “Diverse children have their different natures: some are like flesh which nothing but salt will keep from putrefaction; some again like tender fruits that are best preserved with sugar,” wrote the seventeenth-century poet Anne Bradstreet, herself the mother of eight. “Those parents are wise that can fit their nurture according to their nature.”
But the line between differential and preferential treatment can be thin. Even the most well-meaning, Spock-indoctrinated parent may be unconsciously drawn to the child who is higher-achieving, less demanding, or more affectionate. The way a parent reacts to a child depends, of course, on that parent’s own upbringing and temperament. Like the biblical Jacob, a parent may repeat a pattern of favoritism ingrained in his own family; on the other hand, like Arthur Waugh, whose treatment of his elder son was in part a reaction to his own upbringing at the hands of the Brute, he may reverse it. Like Junius Brutus Booth, parents may be drawn to the child who most resembles them, physically or temperamentally. Like Isaac, who loved Esau “because he ate of his game,” they may be drawn to the child with whom they share interests. They may be drawn to a child because of timing. “In one era, the parents may be stressed and unhappy, and a child born at that time may be seen as a burden,” writes Stephen Bank, a psychologist who has studied the effects of favoritism, “while in a more felicitous circumstance the same parents may be prepared to give more to a different child.” This may depend on whether the pregnancy was wanted or unwanted, planned or unplanned—some 50 percent of all conceptions are unintended—or even on whether the birth was easy or difficult. After the birth of their first child, John Cheever’s aging, quarrelsome parents had no desire to have a second, a fact they went out of their way to let him know. “If I hadn’t drunk two manhattans one afternoon,” his mother told him, “you never would have been conceived.” Furthermore, she said, his father had urged her to have an abortion—he had even invited the abortionist to dinner (a scene that would find its way into Cheever’s fiction). Although their dinner guest’s services were never utilized, Cheever’s parents treated their second-born as little more than an appendage to their beloved first (they often referred to John merely as “Brother”), which surely contributed to his lifelong need to be desired. As a friend observed after Cheever’s death, “If there’s someone who never loved himself, it was John.”
In her studies of sibling difference, the psychologist Frances Schachter found that parents almost invariably describe their first- and second-born children as being vastly dissimilar—“as different as day and night.” Stephen Bank points out that such pigeonholing can start even before birth: one parent may interpret an unborn child’s kicks in the womb as a sign of strength or independence, while another may interpret them as a sign of aggression or anxiety. Often, the firstborn is said to resemble one parent, physically or temperamentally, while the second, almost by default, is said to resemble the other—a dynamic Schacter called “split-parent identification” that is almost certain to divide a family along parental lines. Consider how often parents search their newborn’s face and evaluate his every gesture to determine whether he resembles the mother, the father, a grandparent, an uncle. The child who isn’t associated with one parent may feel rejected, and compensate by turning to the other. (The Bible doesn’t tell us why Rebekah favored Jacob. Perhaps it was only to counterbalance Isaac’s preference for Esau.) Thus the young Evelyn Waugh said to his mother, “Daddy loves Alec more than me. So do you love me more than Alec?” His mother, not wanting to play favorites—although, in fact, she preferred Alec—told Evelyn she loved them “both the same.” This didn’t seem fair to Evelyn, who immediately perceived the imbalance. “In which case,” he said plaintively, “I am lacking in love.”
Anecdotal evidence suggests that favoritism can have enduring consequences. “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success,” wrote Freud, whose parents treated him like a hothouse flower at the expense of his six younger siblings, cultivating a sense of entitlement that he would flex for the rest of his life. (Freud, whose mother called him “My golden Sigi,” didn’t bother to discuss the effects of favoritism on the nonfavored child.) Benito Mussolini was convinced that being breast-fed by his doting mother, instead of being handed over to a wet nurse like his younger brother, Arnaldo, helped explain why he became Il Duce, while Arnaldo, who introduced himself as “Mussolini the Little,” served as his advisor. Alec Waugh, five-foot-five and prematurely bald, strode through life with cock-of-the-walk bravado. In later years, he admitted that being his father’s favorite had given him a superiority complex: “I was confident that I was going to make a considerable mark in the world.” Evelyn, no shorter and much hairier, grew up fretful and insecure. Freud’s disciple Alfred Adler, whose older brother held favored status in the Adler household, would not have been surprised. Comparing children with trees, he wrote: “If one grows faster because it is more favored by the sun and the soil, its development influences the growth of all the others. It overshadows them; its roots stretch out and take away their nourishment. The others are dwarfed and stunted.” Children who receive less affection than their siblings are more likely to be anxious, angry, or depressed; to engage in antisocial behavior; to experience feelings of incompetence.
Being the parental favorite, however, may be a mixed blessing. The preferred child may earn the envy or even the enmity of his siblings. He may grow up assuming that the world owes him a living. A Hong Kong study found a higher incidence of low self-esteem and suicidal ideation in adolescents who believed their parents played favorites. Surprisingly, the higher rate held true for both the favored and the nonfavored child. Favoritism, in some cases, may indirectly benefit the less-favored child, whose redoubled efforts to catch a parent’s attention may encourage a persistence that serves him well outside the family. (Adler, having pushed even harder to win his parents’ approval, became a lifelong striver.) Biographers note that parental disfavor often plays a role in the development of writers and artists, who, feeling relegated to the family perimeter, may develop an outsider’s perspective—or may feel pushed into the wider world to find the appreciation they cannot get at home. Alec Waugh, the sun around which his parents revolved, became a mediocre middlebrow novelist. Evelyn, watching from the sidelines, covered up his insecurity by developing an acerbic, satirical tongue, which he trained on his father’s sentimental Victorian world to become the voice of youth and change in twentieth-century England. In effect, he usurped his older brother’s birthright, becoming the great writer his father believed Alec was born to be.
And yet as Evelyn grew into middle age, he became more and more like the father who had ignored him—an old-fashioned fussbudget, a technophobe, a throwback to the Victorian era he professed to despise. The boy who hated his childhood home turned into an inveterate homebody, filling his modest estate (which he referred to as “Stinkers”) with painstakingly selected furniture, books, and paintings. Though he claimed to dislike children, he had seven. Like his father, he played favorites, giving his eldest son the best of the children’s bedrooms, calling him (only half-jokingly) “my son and heir,” and taking him on trips to London and the south of France. Evelyn showed little interest in his second son, whom he called “dull as ditchwater.”
Alec Waugh played no favorites. He treated his three children with equal indifference. If his own father had been suffocatingly close, Alec gave his children space—an ocean’s worth. The heir of Underhill spent his adulthood living out of suitcases in hotels, ship’s cabins, and gentlemen’s clubs around the world. Breezing through two marriages and innumerable affairs, he described parenting as a “civic duty,” one he did his best to avoid. For most of his life, he visited his family for only a few weeks a year. At one point, he went six years without seeing his children. When a friend pointed out that his children might never get to know him, Alec suggested that they could read his books. Not long before he died at the age of eighty-three and his ashes were interred in his parents’ grave, he wrote of his children, “I hope I have not been a nuisance to them.”
* * *
John Wilkes Booth had been nine when Edwin first left home to tour with his father. He was eighteen when Edwin returned from San Francisco. Although John admired Edwin, and Edwin, like almost everyone who met John, couldn’t help liking his younger brother, they hardly knew each other. But the Booths were a clannish family, bound by their eccentricities and their embarrassment over their father’s erratic behavior. As June had helped Edwin, Edwin tried to help John. In 1858, not long after John’s debut, Edwin had his brother cast as Richmond to his Richard III, Horatio to his Hamlet, and, eventually, Othello to his Iago. John’s early efforts at acting were crude; he lacked confidence, stuttered, and forgot his lines. But Edwin complimented him at every opportunity, covered up his mistakes, arranged the staging so that John was never out of range of the footlights, and gave him more prominent billing than his experience warranted. It was on Edwin’s recommendation that John, after three years of stock, was hired for the first time as a leading man. As his brother’s reputation grew, Edwin seemed proud that there was more than one famous Booth brother onstage; he considered John’s achievements a family triumph. After seeing John star as Pescara in The Apostate in Boston in 1863, Edwin wrote gleefully to a friend: “I am happy to state that he is full of the true grit—he has stuff enough in him to make good suits for a dozen such player-folk as we are cursed with; and when time and study round his rough edges he’ll bid them all ‘stand apart’ like ‘a bully boy, with a glass eye’; I am delighted with him & feel the name of Booth to be more of a hydra than snakes and things ever was.”
It was easier, of course, for Edwin to be happy for John. Edwin was, after all, the acknowledged star in the family. For John, things were more complicated. It must have been difficult to find his niche in a profession that counted his father and older brother among its most celebrated practitioners. Although John had told his schoolmates that he was the Booth who would be remembered, he wanted to make his own mark in the world. When he decided to become an actor, he performed for three years under the stage name J. Wilkes. Once he’d made his reputation, he told a friend, he would take back the family name. But he looked and sounded so much like Edwin that he was often recognized. In 1858, while appearing in Richmond, twenty-year-old John wrote Edwin a chatty, contented letter about his life in the theater. “There is only one objection,” he added, “and that is I believe every one knows me already. I have heard my name—Booth—called for, one or two nights, and on account of the likeness the papers deigned to mention me.” Even after he reclaimed the name Booth, John was irritated at always being linked to more famous family members, as when the playbill for his first Washington appearance announced him to be “SON OF THE GREAT JUNIUS BRUTUS BOOTH AND BROTHER AND ARTISTIC RIVAL OF EDWIN BOOTH.” For an 1862 Baltimore run, John had a quote from Richard III printed on his billboards: “I have no brother. I am no brother . . . I AM MYSELF ALONE.”
Several biographers have explained Lincoln’s assassination as an extreme case of sibling rivalry, suggesting that John was a second-rate thespian who, realizing he’d never eclipse his older brother and inherit the paternal mantle, was driven to seek fame on another stage. Certainly, John was sensitive to his position. A proud man accustomed to getting his way, he may have resented being given direction by Edwin in their early joint appearances. He must have felt patronized when, after one performance, Edwin led him to the footlights and announced to the audience, “I think he has done well. Don’t you?” But while John wanted to make it on his own, he also yearned for his older brother’s approval. In 1862, when Edwin was touring in England, John sent him his reviews, including one that compared his rendition of Richard III favorably with those of his father and Edwin. And when Edwin suggested that each of the three Booth brothers take a section of the United States for his theatrical territory—Edwin the North, John the South, and June the West—John complained to Asia that Edwin was selfishly trying to keep the sweetest piece of the show business pie for himself. Newspapers played up the competition, but the brothers were mutually supportive. A vain man in most things, John was realistic about his own acting and in awe of Edwin’s. If there was a theatrical sibling rivalry, John had no doubt who was the winner. At a rehearsal one day, at the height of John’s renown, some actors were discussing well-known Hamlets with him, including his own. “No, oh no!” John interrupted. “There’s but one Hamlet to my mind—that’s my brother Edwin. You see, between ourselves, he is Hamlet—melancholy and all.”
As a leading man, however, John was no slouch. His rise from “third walking man” to touring star was meteoric. Within five years of his stage debut he was earning more than $20,000 a year, the equivalent of about $560,000 today. Though John Wilkes Booth is now remembered only as Lincoln’s assassin, at the time of his death he was one of the most popular actors in the country, with reviews as glowing as those of any other performer—excepting, perhaps, his brother Edwin’s. The Daily Missouri Democrat pronounced John “the greatest tragedian in the country,” while the Daily Journal of Louisville simply called him “a young man of extraordinary genius.” Some biographers have suggested that John’s fan base was limited to the South, where he was praised as much for his pro-Rebel politics as for his acting, but northerners were no less enthusiastic. “The genius of the Booth family has been bequeathed to this third son,” concluded the Detroit Daily Advertiser, while the Philadelphia Press called the last act of his Richard III “a piece of acting that few actors can rival, and is far above the capacity of Edwin Booth.” John was a special favorite in Boston, the cradle of the abolition movement, whose Transcript described his achievements as “almost without parallel in the records of the stage.” Comparison of the brothers was inevitable. While each reviewer had his preferred Booth, there was general agreement that Edwin was better suited to playing dreamers, deep thinkers, and tortured souls; John to lovers, swashbucklers, and mysterious strangers. According to the Boston Post: “Edwin has more poetry, John Wilkes more passion . . . Edwin is more Shakespearean, John Wilkes is more melo-dramatic; and in a word, Edwin is a better Hamlet, John Wilkes a better Richard III.” Years later, recalling John’s celebrated 1864 Boston run, John T. Ford, owner of the theater in which Lincoln was killed, observed, “Doubtless he would have been the greatest actor of his time if he had lived.”
It was difficult to compare the two, in part because their styles were so different. Edwin, who had grown up watching his father on stage, was moving away from the strenuous, scenery-chewing, capital-letter “Acting” that had defined the early-nineteenth-century stage toward a (relatively speaking) more quiet, conversational style—an embryonic version of what, in the twentieth century, would be called “naturalistic” acting. “He was the least extravagant actor imaginable,” wrote a biographer. “He seemed most to stir audiences not by the violence of his feelings but by the repression of them.”
John kept nothing inside. He was all raw instinct and undisciplined bravado. (Edwin was often asked whether his subtle, nuanced Hamlet was sane or not; when John played Hamlet, he left no doubt that the Danish prince was mad as a hatter.) Although some dismissed John as a “ranter,” in the parlance of the times, others found his over-the-top approach galvanic. John Ellsler, a Cleveland actor and theatrical manager who had performed with Junius Brutus Booth, said that “John has more of the old man’s power in one performance than Edwin can show in a year. He has the fire, the dash, the touch of strangeness.” After a performance in Albany, a group of local spiritualists issued a statement saying that Booth’s acting had been so like his father’s that the parental spirit must have been hovering onstage above the son. A natural athlete, John threw himself about the stage with abandon. The actress Kate Reignolds recalled that when playing the slain Desdemona to John’s Othello, “I used to gather myself together and hold my breath, lest the bang his scimitar gave when he threw himself at me should force me back to life with a shriek.” (In contrast, when Edwin played Othello to Ellen Terry’s Desdemona, he was chiefly anxious that he not smudge her with his Moorish makeup: “I shall never make you black,” he told her. “When I take your hand I shall have a corner of my drapery in my hand. That will protect you.”) For Macbeth, John had the stage crew build a rock ledge more than ten feet high, from which he could make his entrance with a gasp-inspiring leap. Though an expert swordsman, John fought with such desperate passion that he was badly cut at least three times. (However heavily bleeding, he always finished the battle.) Ellsler recalled of John’s Richard III that “his fight with Richmond was a task that many a good swordsman dreaded. John Wilkes, as Richard, never knew when he was conquered, consequently he was never ready to die, until it was evident to him that his death was necessary to preserve Richmond’s life according to the story and the text of the tragedy. In many instances he wore poor Richmond out, and on one occasion Richmond was compelled to whisper, ‘For God’s sake, John, die! Die! If you don’t, I shall.’”
If the brothers’ acting styles differed, so too did their motivations. Edwin sought excellence. John wanted renown. Early in his career, when John received several dispiriting reviews, his roommate recalled that rather than studying his lines, he paced the floor of their boardinghouse bedroom, muttering, “I must have fame! Fame!” If Edwin hadn’t also been a theater manager, he might have shunned all publicity; he made one impresario take down posters that billed him as “The World’s Greatest Actor.” Edwin avoided curtain calls whenever possible, stammered when thanking an audience (in a voice barely audible beyond the first few rows), and seemed surprised by their applause. John acted as if the applause was no more than his due. Edwin was a student of the theater; he liked to discuss technique and interpretation with fellow actors, and would stay up long after a show, smoking his pipe, studying his lines, and reading about great thespians of the past. Although John was known for his eagerness to try out unusual approaches and new bits of stage business, he had little patience for hard work, was easily bored, and, used to getting his way, sometimes bridled at being corrected. In retrospect, Asia believed that things had come too easily for John, that he had been spoiled by spending the first few years of his career in the South, where, she wrote, “even his errors were extolled and his successes magnified. The people loved him; he had never known privation or want, was never out of an engagement, while Edwin had had the rough schooling of poverty, hardship in far distant cities, struggles in his professional experience, fiercer struggles with himself. He had gone through the drudgery of his art through the fire of temptation, and he overcame and was victorious.”
The brothers’ acting styles reflected their personalities. Although he could be merry with his family or a few longtime friends, Edwin was formal and remote with strangers, “sometimes moving in the throng, but never of it,” as a theater critic put it. Louisa May Alcott, glimpsing him at a Boston reception, described him in her journal as “a handsome, shy man, glooming in a corner.” Embarrassed by his limited schooling, Edwin had an awe of the well-educated that bordered on fear. He never traveled by trolley, worried that someone might recognize him and engage him in conversation. He seemed most relaxed in his letters, filling them with breezy wordplay and atrocious puns for which he immediately apologized. (Always the gentleman, he never wrote “hell” or “damn,” always “h__l” and “d__n.”) Many people assumed that his favorite role was Hamlet, but in later years he told his daughter how relieved he had been to change the bill after a long run as the prince. Acting offered a respite from being himself. “He wished to forget his own identity, as it were,” wrote his daughter. “In Hamlet he was less able to achieve this, so closely was it allied with his own temperament and mood.” It was because of Edwin that “Booth-like” became a commonly used adjective to describe someone dark, handsome, and brooding; he likely suffered from what would now be called clinical depression. In the first few days after Lincoln’s assassination, when it was said that a madman named Booth had killed the president, not a few Americans assumed it was Edwin.
In photos, Edwin looked as if he were retreating, John as if he were about to pounce. A veteran actor compared John with a stallion: “You have seen a high-mettled racer with his sleek skin and eye of unusual brilliancy chafing under a restless impatience to be doing something. It is the only living thing I could liken him to.” If Edwin was most comfortable alone in his study, John was most at home at the center of a party, telling stories, playing practical jokes, chatting expansively about politics, literature, war, nature, the theater. He was a familiar sight in Washington’s bars, billiard rooms, tenpin alleys, shooting galleries, and brothels—and an expert in all these arenas. As a child, John had been the center of attention on the Farm; as an adult, he was no less eager to see and be seen. “In his leisure he liked to stand in the front of the theater, twirling his mustache and frankly exhibiting himself,” a twelve-year-old program boy whom Booth befriended at Ford’s Theatre recalled years later. On stage, he performed with his sleeves rolled up so audiences could admire his biceps. Just as his father had impressed dinner party guests with his pull-out-the-stops version of the Lord’s Prayer, John drew crowds in saloons and hotel parlors with his dramatic renditions of Poe’s “The Raven” or—his favorite—“Beautiful Snow,” a maudlin poem about lost innocence that brought even its reciter to tears. After the assassination, when his name was anathema and merely to be found with his carte de visite was to risk arrest, people still spoke of his magnetic charm. Indeed, the lawyer for one of Booth’s co-conspirators would use Booth’s charisma in his client’s defense, suggesting that he was a Svengali who brainwashed his client into cooperation through the sheer force of his personality.
Part of John’s appeal was aesthetic. He was commonly described as “the most handsome man in America.” Like Edwin, John had wavy black hair, fair skin, an aquiline nose, and unnaturally long eyelashes, but where Edwin had the haunted, epicene look of a doomed poet, John—an inch taller at five-foot-eight, far more muscular (he exercised regularly), and sporting a thick mustache to which he was exceedingly attentive—had a dashing, virile quality that turned writers’ prose purple. “Picture to yourself Adonis, with high forehead, ascetic face corrected by rather full lips, sweeping black hair, a figure of perfect youthful proportions and the most wonderful black eyes in the world,” wrote a fellow actor. (Those wonderful eyes, after the assassination, would be described by one editorialist as “blazing with hellish malignancy.”) John had outgrown his youthful fascination with the Spartan life to become a renowned dandy. Clad in a flowing cape with an astrakhan collar and a slouch hat worn at a rakish angle, his surprisingly delicate hands sheathed in kid gloves, he was instantly recognizable to most passersby. Even those who didn’t recognize him usually turned for a second look.
Especially women. From childhood, Booth had been accustomed to the adoration of the female sex, beginning with his mother and his sister Asia. “As the sunflowers turn upon their stalks to follow the beloved sun, so old and young, our faces smiling turned to him,” wrote the actress Clara Morris. John was besieged by adoring female fans at stage doors; received a hundred love letters a week from women he’d never met; was propositioned by women of every social station; and, according to the author of The Matinee Idols, was the first actor on record to have his clothes shredded by groupies. (One can only imagine the trauma Edwin would have suffered under such close examination.) While there is ample evidence that John was more than willing to meet some of his admirers halfway—his first biographer described him as “one of the world’s most successful lovers”—he was not a “seducer,” as duplicitous Don Juans were called in his day. Deluged with letters from flirtatious women, he tore out and destroyed the signatures so the writers’ reputations could not be compromised, and it was counted in his favor that, as another early biographer put it, “he never knowingly deflowered virgins.” At his death, a pocket in his red leatherbound diary contained photographs of five women—four well-known actresses, along with a senator’s daughter to whom he was secretly engaged.
Indeed, in most things, John was unfailingly thoughtful. Harry Ford, treasurer of the theater in which Lincoln was shot, recalled him as “one of the simplest, sweetest-dispositioned, and most lovable men he ever knew.” Though desperate for fame, when John achieved it he didn’t play the prima donna. While Edwin preferred the company of his fellow actors, John idled with the stagehands, gossiping and buying them drinks. “The gentlest man I ever knew . . . ,” recalled an actor. “In rehearsal he was always considerate of the other actors, and if he had a suggestion to make, always made it with the utmost courtesy, prefacing it with; ‘Now, Mr. ——, don’t you think that perhaps this might be a better way to interpret that?’” A friend recalled, “In his ways with his intimates he was as simple and affectionate as a child.” John once took up sign language in order to converse with a deaf poetess.
But even as John’s theatrical fame grew, he longed for a more tangible form of glory. Edwin’s heroes were the great actors of the past, Edmund Kean and Edwin Forrest; the rebel heroes of John’s youth, Brutus and William Tell, remained the heroes of his manhood. (After John’s death, one of his friends asserted that the actor’s oft-proclaimed admiration for Brutus, the tyrant slayer, was the “mainspring of the assassination.”) It wasn’t the cause that impressed John but the grandness of the gesture. Early in his career, while acting in Richmond, he had impulsively joined a militia bound for Charlestown to guard the abolitionist John Brown as he awaited hanging. Despite their antipodal stances on slavery, Brown became a hero to Booth for daring to take history into his own hands. “John Brown was a man inspired,” he told Asia, “the grandest character of this century!” Wanting to be such a hero himself, John tried to pass for heroic. In the matter of John Brown, for instance, he allowed people to believe he had assisted in Brown’s capture, although by the time Booth arrived on the scene, the abolitionist had long since been behind bars. When telling a story about himself, John tended to inflate his role, as if he were a character in a Bulwer-Lytton saga. After traveling to an engagement sixty miles by sleigh through a Missouri blizzard, he embellished an already impressive tale by boasting that he had fought off an attack by a pack of wolves. In 1863, after having a fibroid tumor removed from his neck, John asked the doctor to report the injury as a bullet wound. The doctor refused. But whenever John was asked about the scar, he bragged that he had been shot.
Although their personalities and their interests could hardly have been more contrary—it is hard to imagine John sitting still while Edwin smoked a pipe in his study, even harder to imagine Edwin accompanying John to the saloons and shooting galleries of which he was so fond—the Booth brothers shared a deep fraternal devotion. If John was in awe of Edwin’s discipline and talent, Edwin would have liked to possess some of John’s easy charm. When their work kept them apart, they wrote each other chatty, affectionate letters. When Edwin married in 1860, John was the sole family member present; after the ceremony, held in a clergyman’s study in New York City, he impulsively threw his arms around his brother and kissed him. In 1863, after Edwin and his wife had temporarily moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts, for her health, John, appearing for three weeks at a Boston theater, visited almost every day. When she died of pneumonia later that year, John cancelled his performances in Philadelphia, posted “A Card to the Public” in which he wrote that he “felt the necessity imperative upon him to join his afflicted Brother,” rushed to Boston to be at Edwin’s side for the funeral in Mount Auburn Cemetery, and spent several days helping Edwin pack up his wife’s possessions.
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In 1874, the Victorian polymath Francis Galton published English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture. A banker’s son whose IQ was later estimated to be 200, Galton would, over the course of his nearly eighty-nine years, explore uncharted regions of southwest Africa, pioneer the use of weather maps, devise a technique for classifying fingerprints, and, shortly before his death, write a utopian novel. But ever since the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species, by his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton’s main interest had been heredity. In English Men of Science, he reported the results of a questionnaire he had sent to the Fellows of the Royal Society, an association of scientists, in which he asked, among other things, their educational background, their religious beliefs, the circumference of their heads, the color of their hair, the number of siblings in their family, and the order of their birth, in an effort to determine whether their achievements were attributable more to innate intelligence or to environmental circumstances. Although Galton did not reach a definitive conclusion, he remarked, along the way, that a disproportionate number of eminent scientists happened to be firstborn sons. He explained that “elder sons have, on the whole, decided advantages of nurture over the younger sons. They are more likely to become possessed of independent means, and therefore able to follow the pursuits that have most attraction to their tastes; they are treated more as companions by their parents, and have earlier responsibility, both of which would develop independence of character.” Galton was himself the youngest of nine children, though he had more than enough money to follow his diverse pursuits. He nevertheless maintained that birth order had a significant effect on sibling difference.
At the time Galton was writing, that notion might have seemed self-evident. After all, primogeniture, the tradition by which a family’s entire property is left to the eldest son, had been practiced in England since the arrival of William the Conquerer in 1066. In an effort to make sure the family estate remained intact, the eldest son got the land and the money (and, usually, the girl, in the form of an advantageous marriage), while later-born sons were forced to go off to war, seek their fortunes in the New World, or enter the ministry. This arrangement predictably led to cases in which a dim-witted elder son frittered away the ancestral wealth while his better-qualified younger brother was killed in battle or disappeared in the wilds of Canada. Darwin, himself a second son, commented to his friend Joseph Hooker, “Primogeniture is dreadfully opposed to natural selection; suppose the first-born bull was necessarily made by each farmer the begetter of his stock!” Not surprisingly—America being itself a kind of surrogate younger brother to England—primogeniture was abolished throughout the United States after the Revolution. But a kind of informal primogeniture persisted, in which American parents often invested more heavily in their eldest son, making sure he got an education or offering him first chance at taking over the family business.
Differential treatment of siblings according to birth order has been culturally sanctioned, even institutionalized, for much of recorded history. In biblical times, of course, firstborn sons were entitled to their “birthright”: a double portion of the inheritance. A 1974 survey of thirty-nine non-Western societies found that in every culture, firstborns have been accorded greater status and respect than later-borns. In ancient Japan, younger siblings were known as “cold rice,” a reference to the tradition of feeding them leftovers after the firstborn had eaten his fill. In China, although brothers inherited equally in their father’s estate, Confucian thinkers held that younger brothers should show the same deference to their older brothers that they showed to their father or to the emperor. This philosophy was reflected in Chinese law. Younger brothers who assaulted or killed their older brothers were punished with death by beheading or slicing (a grisly procedure in which the executioner systematically lopped off strips of flesh), while older brothers who assaulted or killed their younger brothers were merely imprisoned or banished. In some cultures, birth order has been literally a matter of life and death. Just as certain species of animals will, in times of stress, kill some of their offspring to ensure the survival of the rest of the litter, parents in traditional societies may, in times of famine or drought, kill the younger of two closely spaced children to ensure that at least one child lives. Such infanticide has been condoned only in the case of the younger sibling, never the elder, who, already past the dangerous first years of life, is considered the better bet for survival. Having outlasted more childhood diseases, older children are more likely to live into adulthood and more likely to reproduce sooner than their younger siblings. Investing in firstborns, therefore, makes evolutionary sense, as the likeliest way to ensure the parents’ genetic heritage will endure.
In a 1937 paper, Alfred Adler suggested that birth order has psychological ramifications as well. Observing that “the psychic situation of each child differs because of the order of their birth,” Adler declared that the firstborn child, having been “dethroned” by the arrival of a brother or sister, struggles to maintain his dominant status and is likely to become a kind of surrogate parent who cleaves to law and order. The second-born child, said Adler, “behaves as if he were in a race, as if some one were a step or two in front and he had to hurry to get ahead of him. He is under full steam all the time. He trains continually to surpass his older brother and conquer him.” Unthreatened by the possibility of dethronement, the last-born tends to be spoiled; overshadowed by elder siblings, however, he may develop an inferiority complex. In keeping with the truism that psychologists tend to devise theories that reflect their personal circumstances, Adler was a second-born who struggled all his life to surpass his elder brother. Even at the height of his success, when he was recognized as one of the foremost psychological theorists of the twentieth century, the otherwise affable Adler remained envious, referring to his brother, a provincial businessman, as “a good industrious fellow [who] was always ahead of me—is still ahead of me!”
Subsequent research has refined and expanded on Adler’s observations. Born into a hothouse environment in which they enjoy undivided parental attention, firstborns tend to be precocious achievers. They walk and talk earlier than later-borns. They have higher IQs—three points higher, on average, than that of their next eldest sibling, according to a 2007 Norwegian study of more than 240,000 young men. They have been described as assertive, ambitious, conscientious, responsible, organized, and self-reliant. The only children to have known the privileges of a sibling-free state, firstborns zealously defend their territory against encroachment, trying to maintain their alpha sibling status. Hence, they are more likely to be conservative, to identify with their parents and other authority figures, to support the status quo. Leaders in their own families, they often become leaders in the outside world. Not only scientists (Victorian and otherwise) but American presidents, British prime ministers, members of Congress, Rhodes scholars, Ivy League students, Nobel Prize winners, MBAs, CEOs, surgeons, pilots, and professors are more likely to be firstborns. Of the first twenty-three American astronauts in space, twenty-one were firstborns and the other two were only children—only children being considered by birth-order theorists to be a kind of über-eldest.
Being the eldest can be a burden as well as a privilege. First-time parents tend to be anxious and may transmit that anxiety to their child—part of the reason firstborns are also characterized as defensive and neurotic. Parents are more likely to project their dreams and ambitions onto their eldest, who is liable to work especially hard to live up to them. “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre,” wrote John Adams, himself the eldest of three sons, to his namesake, John Quincy, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer at the time. “If you do not rise to the head not only of your profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own Laziness, Slovenliness, and Obstinacy.” Many sons might have withered under such pressure, but though John Quincy, a brilliant perfectionist who suffered from depression, didn’t rise to the top of the legal profession, he did rise to the top of his country, becoming its sixth president. His two younger brothers, of whom his parents expected far less, also became lawyers, but, undone by alcohol, sank to the bottom of their profession.
Firstborn sons are encouraged to be role models. “You know I’m the oldest of my family, and I’ve got to be the example for a lot of brothers and sisters,” young Joe Kennedy explained—bragged?—to a friend. They are expected to act as substitute parents. “You must not reckon yourself only their brother,” the Prince of Wales told the ten-year-old future King George III in 1749, “but I hope you will be a kind father to them.” (George tried, but his eight siblings, an unusually profligate and promiscuous lot, proved to be no less difficult to control than the thirteen colonies.) They are expected to be babysitters, nursemaids, and nannies. “In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies,” wrote James Baldwin, the eldest of nine children in an impoverished Harlem household. “As they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other.” Benjamin Spock, who grew up feeding, changing, and rocking to sleep his five younger siblings, would, as the author of best-selling baby-care books, become pediatrician-parent to a nation. They serve as mentors. The young A. E. Housman encouraged his six siblings to write poetry, taught them the names of trees, and demonstrated the movements of the heavenly bodies by arranging them on the lawn and setting them in orbit. (With characteristic modesty, he cast himself as the moon and not as the sun around which his brothers and sisters revolved.) When Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff spent the summer of 1961 together before Tobias left for boarding school in the fall, Geoffrey, a recent Princeton graduate, took it on himself to prepare his younger brother. He corrected his pronunciation, showed him how to dress like a preppie, and gave him a customized tutorial in English literature by assigning him a book every day and an essay every week. “I was a tin-pot despot,” he recalled. For Tobias, who, like his brother, would become a writer, the lessons were life-changing: “Ever since I was eleven or twelve I’d written tales of mystery and horror and adventure, and had notions of being an ‘author,’ but after that summer I never really wanted to be anything else.”
Stanley (“Bunny”) White was, according to his younger brother Elwyn, a born teacher who “imparted information as casually as a tree drops its leaves in the fall.” Stanley would become a professor of landscape architecture; Elwyn (E. B.) White would become a writer for The New Yorker.
He taught me the harmonic circle on the pianoforte. He gave me haphazard lessons in the laws of physics: centrifugal force, momentum, inertia, gravity, surface tension, and illustrated everything in a clowning way. He taught me to paddle a canoe so that it would proceed on a straight course instead of a series of zigzags. He showed me how to hold the scissors for trimming the fingernails of my right hand. He showed me how to handle a jacknife without cutting myself. Hardly a day passes in my life without my performing some act that reminds me of something I learned from Bunny.
Henry Kissinger’s pedagogical approach was more forceful. Kissinger, whose family fled Germany three months before Kristallnacht and eventually settled in the United States, was drafted shortly after turning nineteen. As he finished basic training, he passed along what he’d learned in a letter to his younger brother, Walter, soon to enter the service himself.
Always stand in the middle because details are always picked from the end. Always remain inconspicuous because as long as they don’t know you, they can’t pick on you. . . . Don’t become too friendly with the scum you invariably meet there. Don’t gamble! There are always a few professional crooks in the crowd and they skin you alive. Don’t lend out money. It will be no good to you. You will have a hard time getting your money back and you will lose your friends to the bargain. Don’t go to a whore-house. I like a woman as you do. But I wouldn’t think of touching those filthy, syphilis-infected camp followers.
Henry closed on a softer note: “You and I sometimes didn’t get along so well, but I guess you knew, as I did, that in the ‘clutch’ we could count on each other. We are in the clutch now.”
The line between teacher and boss—and between boss and bully—can be thin, and depends, no doubt, on one’s point of view. (Perhaps only a younger brother can fully appreciate the chilling catchphrase in George Orwell’s 1984: “Big Brother Is Watching You.”) In 1718, twelve-year-old Benjamin Franklin, the eleventh of thirteen children, was apprenticed to his twenty-one-year-old brother James, printer and publisher of the first independent newspaper in the colonies. The elder Franklin was a stern taskmaster, and “the blows his passion too often urged him to bestow upon me” led the younger Franklin, at age seventeen, four years before his term of indenture would expire, to run away to Philadelphia. (Later, Franklin would allow that his brother had taught him more than typesetting. “I fancy this harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life,” he wrote archly in the Autobiography.) At Anthony Trollope’s boarding school, older brothers were responsible not only for their younger brother’s academic performance but for their discipline. “The result was that, as a part of his daily exercise, he thrashed me with a big stick,” Trollope recalled of his brother Thomas. (Perhaps Trollope was fortunate. Like most older brothers, Thomas beat up his younger brother for insubordination. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry beat up his younger brother for refusing to listen to him recite his poetry.) An elder brother’s domineering doesn’t always take physical form. When young Lyndon Johnson found out that his worshipful nine-year-old brother, Sam, had managed to save $11.20 doing odd jobs in town, Lyndon, in an early version of the manipulative tactics he would perfect as a politician, suggested they “go partners” and use Sam’s money to buy a bicycle “together.” Sam was thrilled. Lyndon chose the bike, which was just the right size for the gangly older brother but useless to Sam, whose feet couldn’t reach the pedals.
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Like the biblical Jacob, the second-born child, unable to compete physically with his larger, stronger brother, learns to work things out with words. Second-borns tend to be mediators, compromisers, peacemakers. They are often described as cooperative, sociable, empathetic, flexible, agreeable. Second-borns may also become fiercely competitive as they struggle to keep pace with their older siblings. (I remember identifying with the Avis Rent a Car ads, ubiquitous when I was a boy, whose slogan promised: “We’re Number Two. We try harder.”) Yet the second-born sibling may feel that no matter what he does, his older brother has done it before him. Henry James wrote that his brother William “had gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months’ experience of the world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him.” The second-born’s sense of being second best may be reinforced by parents (the Duchess of Marlborough famously referred to her two sons as “the heir and the spare”) or by peers (the English actor Rupert Everett’s boarding-school classmates dubbed him “Everett Two,” his older brother, of course, being “Everett One”). An elder brother’s shadow can loom especially large when that brother is famous. The renowned nineteenth-century animal behaviorist Frédéric Cuvier habitually deferred to his older brother, an even more renowned naturalist; when he died, his tombstone read, “Frédéric Cuvier, brother of Georges Cuvier.”
The second-born child may get less attention. He may also get less pressure. With Joe Kennedy Sr. grooming Joe Jr. for the presidency, Jack had more freedom to chart his own path. “I believe that Jack was very glad Joe had taken on the obligation of his father’s ambition,” one of Jack’s Harvard roommates recalled. “He felt that Joe, as the number-one son, had to face a lot, as it worked out, that he would just as soon avoid. The situation gave him a certain independence that he valued.” As a perk of primogeniture, being fitted for orthodontia may not be in the same league as being groomed for the presidency, but when his older brother got braces and he didn’t, Arthur Miller saw a (nonmetallic) silver lining. “My teeth were no less prognathous, but I was not the eldest son and to my great relief even then was not regarded as worth the money,” wrote Miller in his memoir, Timebends. “If this put me down, it also freed me from Kermit’s weighty responsibilities, which I had much respect for but no desire to share.” For Kermit, those responsibilities would include trying to rescue their father’s failing coat-manufacturing business during the Depression. Arthur, free to pursue his interests, became a playwright and distilled the family dynamics into Death of a Salesman. “As the eldest son he had all the responsibility, and I had all the fun,” noted Miller. All five DiMaggio brothers grew up playing baseball in the sandlots of San Francisco—indeed, the second son, Mike, was reckoned to be the hardest hitter in the family. But their father, a Sicilian immigrant, said that baseball was a child’s game and insisted his sons work on the family fishing boat. Tom and Mike dutifully quit school by the eighth grade to join their father. The third son, Vince, however, fought bitterly with his father and left home to become a baseball player. In doing so, he cleared a path for his younger brothers. When the father tried to make his fourth son, Joe, a shy, self-conscious fellow two years younger than Vince, work on the fishing boat, his wife told him to let Joe alone. Vince, Joe, and Dom would all go on to long careers in professional baseball. (Tom eventually quit fishing to manage a restaurant for his brother Joe; Mike continued to fish and drowned at the age of forty-four.)
With less time and energy to spare, parents tend to be more relaxed and less strict with later-borns, who, in turn, tend to be more relaxed and less hidebound than firstborns. A friend of mine still recalls the resentment he felt when his mother criticized him for getting an A–on a fourth-grade paper, while cooing over his younger brother, a less conscientious student, for getting a C. (That same friend remembers how unfair it seemed that when his father sat him down for a facts-of-life talk in the sixth grade, he invited his fourth-grade brother to attend—enabling his brother to get possession of the facts at an infuriatingly younger age.) When the Prodigal Son returns home after many years, having squandered his inheritance on prostitutes and wine, his father dresses him in his best robe, gives him a ring, and throws him a party. The older son, working in the fields, hears the celebration and is resentful. “Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends,” he says to his father. “But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your living with harlots, you killed for him the fatted calf!”
If the second-born is a middle child, he may occupy a kind of noman’s-land in the family, getting neither the privileges of the eldest brother nor the attention of the youngest. Like Edwin Booth, he may feel lost in the shuffle, which may explain why middle children are more likely to suffer from low self-esteem and to look outside the family for companionship. With two heroic brothers and four sisters ahead of him, and one sister and a baby brother behind him, Bobby Kennedy had to fight for a toehold in his family. His task was complicated by his temperament; unlike his brothers, he was small, shy, and so sensitive that his grandmother worried he’d become a sissy. “Bobby felt he was weak,” said a friend. “He felt he had to toughen himself up and get rid of that vulnerability everyone had remarked on since he was a boy. This was the way for him to get someplace in the family. The drive was incessant, just fierce. He simply remade himself. He got so he could just go through a wall.” Despite his diminutive size and limited athletic talent, he fought his way onto the Harvard football team, and played so tenaciously—through a dislocated shoulder and a fractured leg—that the coaches awarded him a varsity letter, something neither of his older brothers had won. Bobby would employ his hard-earned pugnacity as Jack’s campaign manager and, later, as his attorney general, doing the political dirty work that allowed his brother to remain above the fray. Bullied political opponents and browbeaten staff members alike would grumble, “Little Brother Is Watching You.”
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If firstborns often are the achievers and middle children the peacemakers, last-borns are the entertainers and spotlight-seekers. Some of history’s greatest satirists—Swift, Voltaire, Franklin, Twain—were born at or near the tail end of large families, and many of their spiritual heirs, twentieth-century comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Will Rogers, Oliver Hardy, Jimmy Durante, Red Skelton, Sid Caesar, Danny Kaye, Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Mel Brooks, Jim Carrey, Billy Crystal, Eddie Murphy, and Steve Martin, are last-borns. (Stephen Colbert is the eleventh of eleven.) Last-borns are also more likely to be pranksters and risk-takers; they are overrepresented among the ranks of explorers, entrepreneurs, firemen, and fighter pilots. Last-borns are said to be charming, affectionate, spontaneous, mischievous, and—because the baby of the family tends to get infantalized—pampered, temperamental, irresponsible, and manipulative. All these adjectives describe John Wilkes Booth, who, though not a last-born, was treated as if he were.
The last-born of nine, Teddy Kennedy was the family mascot, an object of affection and teasing. He reacted to both by being sunny, cheerful, and eager to please. “If my siblings found themselves in trouble with Dad,” he later wrote, “they would sometimes send me into his room ahead of them to ‘soften him up’ before the reckoning began.” Seeing his rolypoly, freckle-faced youngest child, Joe Sr. couldn’t help smiling. At the same time, Teddy was so much younger than his brothers—Joe, seventeen years older, and Jack, fifteen years older, were more like fathers to him—that he was often on his own. At dinner, he and his sister Jean ate at a separate little table while the rest of the family gathered at the big table. Because of his family’s frequent moves—by age thirteen he had attended ten schools—Teddy learned to make a good impression quickly, to make friends of strangers. This attribute would help him become the most natural politician in the family.
If last-borns can be coddled, they can, like Joseph Booth, also be overlooked. Less may be expected of them. They may not be taken as seriously. “How feeble and diluted, of necessity, must the parental instinct be, trickling down,” Alice James observed in her diary, writing about a Victorian family with twenty-five children but perhaps thinking, too, of her own. Henry James Sr. and his wife were so infatuated with their precocious eldest son, William, and their sweet-tempered second-born, Henry, that they paid scant attention to Wilky, a chubby, good-natured boy his father described as “more heart than head,” and Bob, an energetic but unpredictable fellow. Much of the younger boys’ care, and Alice’s as well, was delegated to their aunt Kate. (Bob would look back and say that at times he had felt so peripheral that he assumed he was a foundling.) Henry Sr. believed that his brilliant elder sons would achieve greatness in medicine or science; Wilky and Bob, he told friends, were “destined for commerce.” When the Civil War began, the father took pains to keep his elder sons out of the conflict (easy enough, as neither was keen on going into battle); he encouraged his younger sons to fight. Both would have distinguished war careers. Both would leave with scars. Wilky, wounded during the charge at Fort Wagner under Robert Gould Shaw, would limp for the rest of his life, while Bob, who enlisted at the age of sixteen, would return home an eighteen-year-old alcoholic.
After the war, William and Henry shared the third floor of their father’s house while Henry wrote and William tried to decide what to do with his life when they weren’t taking turns traveling in Europe on their father’s dime. Wilky and Bob, kicked from the nest and told to earn a living, ended up as railroad payroll clerks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. By his mid-thirties, Wilky, the most robust and lighthearted of the brothers in youth, was crippled with rheumatism, Bright’s disease, and depression. Both Wilky and Bob had money problems—Wilky was forced to declare bankruptcy—but when Henry Sr. died in 1882, he left Bob a reduced share of the inheritance and omitted Wilky entirely from his will. Wilky succumbed to kidney failure a year later. Bob, who survived a nervous breakdown and several long asylum stays, died, alcoholic and alone, in 1910. It would be two days before his body was discovered.
The further down the birth-order ladder, the less likely a sibling is to be represented in family photo albums, the less likely to get his vaccinations, the less likely to be given the education his older siblings got. Unless a parent intervenes, it is usually the last-born who gets the smallest piece of chicken on the plate, who gets cast as the robber in games of cops and robbers (last-borns, of course, are more likely to want to play the robber), who gets press-ganged into left field in baseball games. Hence Eli Manning was relegated to center in family football, while his older brothers Cooper and Peyton took the glamour positions of quarterback and wide receiver. Hence Christopher Lukas was made to play Hitler and Stalin in his older brother’s family theatricals, while the future Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist J. Anthony Lukas took the role of Roosevelt. Last-borns often get the short end of the stick in more serious matters as well. In Muslim “honor killings,” in which brothers are expected to kill a sister alleged to have brought disgrace on her family, it is usually the youngest who is chosen to carry out the murder.
Such scapegoating may explain why so many fairy tales revolve around youngest sons outwitting their elder brothers. The plot usually involves a father who sends his sons out into the world on a seemingly impossible task, saying that whoever succeeds will inherit his fortune. The elder brothers tend to be arrogant, selfish, conventional, and a little thick; the youngest, belittled by his siblings as incompetent, turns out to be ethical, courageous, and able to think outside the box. In the end, he outwits his elders, finds the treasure, and marries the princess. An analysis of 112 Grimm’s fairy tales found that in those involving three children, the youngest “won” 92 percent of the time. One suspects that a disproportionate number of the country folk whose stories were collected by the Brothers Grimm may have been youngest sons.
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Not all eldest brothers, of course, are responsible and high-achieving. And youngest brothers can be conscientious, neurotic, and humorless. Yet birth order seems imprinted on our consciousness, and threats to the hierarchy can be disorienting. After his mother’s death, Philip Roth urged his father to leave his inheritance to Philip’s older brother, who had greater need of it. Several years later, when his dying father told him he had followed his advice, Roth was unexpectedly upset. “Didn’t I think I deserved it? . . .” he wrote in Patrimony. “Was I a younger brother who suddenly had become unable to assert his claim against the seniority of someone who had been there first? Or, to the contrary, was I a younger brother who felt that he had encroached too much upon an older brother’s prerogatives already?” Leonard Nimoy, best known for playing Mr. Spock on TV’s Star Trek, was more comfortable as a supporting actor, he said, because as a second son he had learned “not to upstage” his older brother. When birth-order roles are circumvented or reversed, it can seem unnatural. In the Godfather movies, after his eldest son is murdered, Don Corleone taps his youngest son, Michael, to be head of the family, passing over Fredo, the marrowless middle brother. Humiliated, Fredo betrays Michael to another Mafia family. Michael confronts his older brother:
“I’ve always taken care of you, Fredo,” he says.
Fredo looks at Michael incredulously. “Taken care of me? You’re my kid brother! You take care of me? You ever think about that? You ever once think about that? Send Fredo off to do this, send Fredo off to do that. Let Fredo take care of some Mickey Mouse nightclub somewhere! Send Fredo off to pick somebody up at the airport! I’m your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over.”
Subconsciously, we are ambivalent about eclipsing our older brothers. We spend a lifetime competing with them, but part of us wants them to remain supreme. Even in old age, the eldest will still be the eldest, the youngest the youngest. Not long after William’s death in 1910, Henry James wrote a friend, “I sit heavily stricken and in darkness—for from far back in dimmest childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through all the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector, my backer, my authority and my pride.”
* * *
In the late 1970s, the psychologist Frances Schachter proposed that siblings, taking into account innate strengths and weaknesses, develop different or contrasting identities in order to minimize rivalry. “Sibling deidentification,” as she called it, is especially pronounced when siblings are of the same gender, close in age, or both. According to Schachter, we shape our personalities in reaction to our siblings; like protean jigsaw pieces, we smooth off sharp corners and develop new bumps as we find our places in the family puzzle. Thus, when Joe Kennedy became the family’s ambitious, conscientious, responsible son, his younger brother Jack became its underachieving iconoclast. At Choate, Joe was a top student, eager to achieve even in subjects he didn’t like. Jack worked only in subjects that interested him, like English and history, and settled into the lower half of his class without a fuss. Joe played varsity football and hockey, edited the yearbook, and tried to set an example for the entire school, as he had for his eight younger siblings. Jack was habitually late to class, dressed carelessly, left his clothes on the floor, and devoted his energy to girls and practical jokes. “Psychologically I was enormously interested,” Choate’s headmaster recalled. “I couldn’t see how two boys from the same family could be so different.” After nearly expelling Jack for his part in a prank, the headmaster sent him to a Columbia University psychologist. “A good deal of his trouble is due to comparison with an older brother,” wrote Dr. Prescott Lecky, after interviewing Jack. “He remarked, ‘My brother is the efficient one in the family, and I am the boy that doesn’t get things done. If my brother were not so efficient, it would be easier for me to be efficient. He does it so much better than I do.’” Commented Lecky, “Jack is apparently avoiding comparison and withdraws from the race, so to speak, in order to convince himself that he is not trying.” (Underneath Jack’s feigned indifference, of course, lay a fierce determination to eclipse his older brother. Eventually, he would.)
Following an older brother who excelled in the classroom and on the basketball court, the Pittsburgh teenager Robby Wideman turned to a life on the streets. Years later, after John Edgar Wideman had become a Rhodes scholar, an English professor, and a prizewinning novelist, Robby, in prison for armed robbery and being an accessory to murder, explained himself to his older brother in what, as psychologist David C. Rowe has pointed out, could stand as a textbook description of sibling deidentification: “See, it was a question of being somebody. Being my own person. Like youns had sports and good grades sewed up. Wasn’t nothing I could do in school or sports that youns hadn’t done already. . . . Had to figure out a new territory. I had to be a rebel.”
In the symbiotic dance of deidentification, the roles siblings try on can easily calcify into stereotypes: the family scholar, the family jock, the family rebel. Asked about his siblings, a young friend of mine, the middle of three brothers, says reflexively: “My older brother’s the screwup, my younger brother’s the golden boy, I’m the creative one.” Parents may reinforce these roles. Neither Kennedy parent thought Jack was in the same league as their beloved Joe, and made no secret of it. In third grade, when Jack was found to have a higher IQ than Joe, Rose contacted the school and insisted that the teacher must have been wrong. (She wasn’t.) Sibling deidentification helps explain the pernicious process by which boys often get pigeonholed as the “good” brother or the “bad” brother—the dichotomy of which Cain and Abel were the prototype, and the basis of innumerable myths, novels, and Hollywood melodramas—and why it so often seems that the better the “good” brother becomes, the worse the “bad” brother gets. The more heroic the deeds performed by the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, the more ambitious the scams perpetrated by his con artist younger brother, Frank. The more sanctimonious President Jimmy Carter’s behavior, the more outrageous his hard-drinking younger brother Billy’s. Such polarization may be possible because, at bottom, “good” and “bad” brothers aren’t so different after all—a point chillingly made in Sam Shepard’s play True West, in which a mild-mannered, well-to-do screenwriter and his bullying, thieving, ne’er-do-well older brother essentially switch identities by the time the curtain falls.
The psychologist Frank Sulloway likens sibling deidentification to a kind of natural selection at warp speed. Like Darwin’s finches, which solved the problem of competing for food in the Galápagos Islands by evolving into different groups, each adapted for a different source of food, children compete within the ecosystem of the family for another form of vital nourishment—the attention of their parents—by developing their own niches. In Born to Rebel, Sulloway used this theory to suggest that birth order was linked to the capacity for creative thinking. Analyzing the lives of some six thousand scientists, inventors, and revolutionaries, he concluded that throughout history, innovators and radical thinkers were more likely to be later-born children. Firstborns, he said, naturally identify with power and authority. They tend to conform. Sulloway, the third of four brothers, maintained that later-borns, in an effort to find an unoccupied family niche, are more likely to take risks, experiment, and explore, both geographically and intellectually. Assembling data on 3,890 scientists who took sides on twenty-eight different scientific innovations of their day—the Copernican revolution, Newtonian physics, Einstein’s theories of relativity, and so on—Sulloway found later-borns twice as likely as firstborns to support the innovations. The Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution, too, says Sulloway, were driven largely by later-borns. (“Sibling strife, not class conflict, lay at the heart of the Terror.”) Not surprisingly, later-borns were almost five times more likely than firstborns to endorse the theory of natural selection.
Sibling niches may be psychological; they may also be vocational. “It is highly expedient that brothers should not seek to acquire honors or power in the same field, but in quite different fields . . .” wrote Plutarch in De Fraterno Amore. “For brothers to seek eminence or repute from the same art or faculty is precisely the same as for both to fall in love with one woman and each seek to outstrip the other in her esteem.” Encouraged to become artists by their widowed mother, who moved them to Paris for twelve years, the eldest brother, William Morris Hunt, became one of nineteenth-century America’s greatest painters; the second-born, Richard Morris Hunt, one of its first and most celebrated architects; and the fourth-born, Leavitt, a noted photographer. (The third-born, Jonathan, took the revolutionary step of becoming a doctor.) Even when brothers end up in the same profession, they usually pursue different subspecialties. The Booths were theater folk, but June was a producer, Edwin a tragedian, John an ingenue. (Joseph, the youngest brother, who did his best work in the theater when he served as a ticket taker at the age of eighteen, delivered messages for Wells Fargo and dabbled in real estate before earning his medical degree at the age of forty-nine. Suffering from spells of what he called “melancholy insanity,” he would work sporadically as a doctor until his death in 1902.)
Niches may be geographical. According to Roman mythology, after overthrowing Saturn his rivalrous sons divided up his dominions: Jupiter took the heavens, Neptune the ocean, and Pluto the underworld. It wasn’t just love of Michelangelo that induced second-born Henry James to spend most of his life in Europe, ceding the United States to his formidable older brother, William. Although they were, in their way, as close as two brothers can be, writing each other long, affectionate letters, and paying each other occasional transatlantic visits (which left both exhausted), they got along better with an ocean between them. (One is struck by how often one James was leaving a continent just as the other James was arriving: fraternal ships passing in the night.) The Emanuel brothers of Chicago didn’t deem it necessary to scatter quite so far. Bright, ambitious, and savagely competitive, the three brothers found their familial niches early on. Ezekiel, the eldest, an A+ student, was the brain; Rahm, the middle child, who mediated his brothers’ fights, was the politician; Ariel, the youngest, who was both hyperactive and dyslexic, was the jock. The brothers were close, but so rivalrous that they instinctively gravitated to widely disparate careers in distant cities. “We couldn’t possibly be within a thousand miles of each other, because the force fields just wouldn’t let it happen,” Zeke, an oncologist who heads the bioethics department at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, told The New Yorker. Rahm became a politician in Chicago, Ari a Hollywood agent. (The brothers suspended their fraternal diaspora for a few years when Rahm came to Washington as chief of staff for President Obama and hired Zeke as a health policy advisor.) All three brothers talk often by phone.
* * *
When Edwin suggested that each Booth brother adopt a section of the United States as his theatrical niche, he characterized it as a way to maximize profits. Privately, he considered it even more desirable as a way to minimize friction with John as their positions on the war grew increasingly polarized. Edwin, who had spent much of his life in the West and Northeast, and whose friends were northerners, naturally sided with the Union. John had grown up in Maryland, where slavery seemed to be the status quo everywhere but on the Booth farm; where, during his two years at military school, he was friends with the sons of some of the South’s most prominent slave-owning families; and where, in the 1860 election, only one in every forty votes was cast for Lincoln. John was passionately, virulently for the South. But the brothers’ allegiances weren’t just a matter of geography. Temperamentally, the restrained, circumspect elder brother was a northerner, and the impetuous, feather-ruffling, rebellion-loving younger brother a southerner. Unlike Edwin, John had a southern gentleman’s patrician sense of social order, reinforced by the sense of entitlement he enjoyed as the family favorite. As a young man he had been an enthusiastic member of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party. Under Junius Brutus Booth, it had been the custom for the family to dine with the hired hands at harvest, but when John ran the farm after his father’s death, he refused to allow his mother and sisters to sit down with the help, lest their delicate sensibilities be offended.
When the war began, John’s mother, terrified of losing her favorite son, made him promise he wouldn’t join the rebel army. Whether John had intended to enlist cannot be known, but Edwin, who repeatedly asserted that he wasn’t “political,” clearly had no intention of giving up the stage for the battlefield. “If it were not for the fear of doing my country more harm than good, I’d be a soldier, too; a coward always has an ‘if’ to slink behind, you know,” he wrote a friend. “Those cursed bullets are awkward things, and very uncivil at times; and as for a bayonet charge, I don’t hesitate to avow my readiness to ‘scoot’ if there is a chance. Bull Run would be nothing to the run I’d make of it.” And so the brothers waged the Civil War over the breakfast table at Edwin’s house. Any rivalry they may have felt over their theatrical careers found expression in those heated arguments. June and Edwin tried to dissuade John from his position, but even as a schoolboy John had never let go of a political debate until he had exhausted his adversary into submission. June would hear him out, but Edwin was dismissive of John’s “patriotic froth”; John, who wanted to be taken seriously by his older brother, felt patronized.
In 1863 John was arrested and briefly detained in St. Louis for saying he wished “the whole damn government would go to hell.” That same year he throttled Asia’s husband when he spoke slightingly of Jefferson Davis. Such outbursts, reported in the paper and repeated in backstage gossip, were mortifying for the thin-skinned Edwin. Yet even as he railed against the North, John remained devoted to his brothers. In July 1863, he happened to be staying at Edwin’s during the New York draft riots, in which white thugs roamed the city killing black men, women, and children. When a wounded northern officer, a friend of Edwin’s, came to the house to convalesce, John helped carry him to an upstairs bedroom, dress his wound, and nurse him in shifts. “Imagine me helping that wounded soldier with my rebel sinews!” he later told Asia. What John didn’t tell his sister was that he had also helped hide the wounded Yankee’s black servant in the basement, feeding him for four days while mobs surged through the streets. Throughout the war years, in letters to mutual friends, John always sent his love to Edwin.
John’s theatrical fame was a point of pride for the South, whose reviewers repeatedly asserted John’s superiority to Edwin; if the South was losing the war of brother against brother, it would, at least, claim victory in one fraternal battle. But John found it increasingly shameful to be playing the hero on stage while, fifty miles from the theater, fellow southerners were fighting and dying in earnest. In 1864, he began turning down roles in order to work sub rosa for the rebel cause: buying black market quinine from northern hospitals, then smuggling it in his horse’s collar through the northern lines to beleaguered Confederate troops. He hinted to Asia that he was also passing intelligence to the South, but given his penchant for tall tales, the extent of his involvement may never be known. John’s behind-the-scenes role wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to do something more visible. Kidnapping the president would not only be a dramatic expression of his political beliefs, it would catapult him, he believed, into the company of Brutus and William Tell, fulfilling his mother’s early vision and winning him the “undying fame” he had always sought.
A month after their breakfast-table quarrel, John spent Christmas, as always, at Edwin’s. There was a coolness between them. A few weeks later, in a letter to June, John wrote, “But dear brother, you must not think me childish when I say that the old feeling roused by our loving brother has not yet died out. I am sure he thinks I live upon him.” Nevertheless, he stayed with Edwin several more times that winter, and there is evidence that he was in the audience at the Winter Garden on March 22 to see the last of his brother’s record hundred nights as Hamlet. (On that visit, he also availed himself of the services of a bootmaker and a brothel.)
All his life, John had been an optimist, but in the late winter and early spring of 1865, as it became clear the South would lose the war, he grew increasingly cynical, irritable, and combative. After his kidnapping plan fizzled when the president failed to appear along the anticipated route, his tirades against Lincoln became even more reckless. Rather than the heroic figure he had dreamed of becoming, John was now seen as a blowhard. He drank heavily, sometimes downing a quart of brandy within a few hours. He seemed to be coming to a boil. In February, his mother, worried that he might do something rash, dispatched June to Washington in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade John to come home. On April 12, June wrote John, once again urging him to have nothing to do with the rebellion, reminding him that they would see each other in New York on April 22 for the benefit performance of Romeo and Juliet.
It is not clear exactly when John decided to assassinate Lincoln. Asia thinks that when Richmond fell on April 3, something in her brother snapped. A few days later, when he traveled to Boston, he may have known. There, after dazzling a crowd at a shooting gallery with an impromptu demonstration of trick shots, he visited Edwin in his dressing room at the Boston Theatre, where he was rehearsing Hamlet. Edwin expressed satisfaction that Richmond had fallen at last, but John uncharacteristically didn’t rise to the bait. “Good-bye, Ned,” he said. “You and I could never agree on that question. I could never argue with you.”
A week later, on the night of April 14, while Edwin was onstage at the Boston Theatre playing the villain in the popular melodrama The Iron Chest, John entered Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre, held his single-shot Philadelphia Derringer pistol two and a half feet from the back of the president’s head, and pulled the trigger.
* * *
Francis Galton may have championed the importance of heredity in shaping one’s life, but he also noted that “the whimsical effects of chance” often play a vital role. Siblings may share family milestones—a move, parental job loss, parental depression, the illness or death of a parent—but they may experience them very differently, according to personality or developmental stage. In 1824, when John Dickens was hauled away to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, his eldest son, Charles, was an impressionable twelve-year-old working in a blacking factory, while his younger sons were not quite two and four—too young to feel the disgrace that would fuel Charles’s determination never to end up like his improvident father. In 1855, when Henry James Sr. took his family to Europe for three years, twelve-year-old Henry Jr. was introduced to some of the themes that would preoccupy him for most of his writing life, as well as to the places in which he would spend much of that life, while thirteen-year-old William was confirmed in his suspicion that he belonged on the American side of the Atlantic.
For John Adams’s three sons, timing was everything. In 1778, when Adams was appointed by Congress to argue the American cause in Europe, he took along ten-year-old John Quincy. Too young for the journey, seven-year-old Charles and five-year-old Thomas remained with their mother, Abigail, on the family farm. John Quincy would spend seven years abroad with his father, traveling from capital to capital; hobnobbing with Jefferson, Franklin, Lafayette, and a host of European artists and intellectuals; serving, at the age of fourteen, as secretary to the American envoy in St. Petersburg; acting as his father’s personal secretary in Paris; taking five-mile walks each morning before work with his father, who was grooming the child he called “the joy of my heart” for greatness. Meanwhile, his younger brothers worked at their lessons, did their chores, and submitted to their domineering mother. When Abigail joined her husband and eldest son in Europe, leaving her younger sons in her sister’s care, Charles and Thomas went entirely parentless for two years.
Given such curricula vitae, it was, perhaps, not surprising that John Quincy Adams became, among other things, minister to the Netherlands, United States senator, Harvard professor, minister to Great Britain, secretary of state, and president. Or that genial but feckless Charles spent more time drinking than studying at college (he was one of several students reprimanded for running naked through Harvard Yard), struggled to establish a law practice, squandered the $2,000 his older brother left him in trust, abandoned his wife and two small daughters, and died, alcoholic and broke, at the age of thirty. Or that Thomas, unable to sustain a legal practice, served a year in the state legislature before quitting abruptly to become a drinker and gambler who failed to provide for his wife and seven children. Described by a nephew as “one of the most unpleasant characters in this world,” Thomas died, also alcoholic and broke, at the age of fifty-nine.
The pattern would repeat itself in the next generation. In 1809, John Quincy Adams was appointed minister to Russia. He brought along his wife, Louisa, as well as his son Charles, who, at the age of two, was too young to be left behind. He entrusted eight-year-old George and six-year-old John to the care of an aunt and uncle. John Quincy spent a good part of each day with his youngest son, reading to him, tutoring him, taking him for long walks, as his father had done with him. He raised his elder sons by mail. (When the family was reunited after six years, John Quincy didn’t recognize fourteen-year-old George.) The results were predictable. Charles, who had received the full force of parental attention, compiled a career that, while hardly as spectacular as his father’s, was nevertheless impressive: wealthy attorney, influential political pamphleteer, doting husband, conscientious father of seven, respected congressman, indispensable minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. The eldest son, George, graduated in the middle of his Harvard class, abandoned his legal studies, and was such an indolent and irresponsible fellow that he was placed under his grandfather Adams’s supervision on the family farm. After his grandfather’s death, George boarded with relatives and disgraced himself by impregnating a young serving girl. Summoned to Washington by his father, twenty-eight-year-old George leaped overboard from the steamship to his death. The second son fared little better. One of thirty-nine students to be expelled from Harvard for taking part in a student riot, John Adams II appeared to be uninterested in the law—or, for that matter, in any other profession. His exasperated father hired him as his private secretary. But John became an obese, disorderly alcoholic who couldn’t take care of himself or his wife and children. In 1834, he fell into a coma and died at thirty-one.
Events experienced by only one sibling may have life-changing consequences. Numerous biographers have suggested that Teddy Roosevelt’s hell-bent-for-leather personality was forged in large part by his having had to work so hard to overcome a frail, asthmatic constitution. His charming younger brother Elliott also faced health difficulties—a series of inexplicable seizures—but seemed less able to cope with adversity. He became a feckless, philandering alcoholic who jumped out a window to his death at the age of thirty-four. After the United States entered World War II, Prescott Bush Jr. dropped out of Yale to enlist in the army but was rejected because of near-blindness in one eye. His younger brother, George, enlisted in the navy on the day he turned eighteen, and his heroics as a pilot in the South Pacific jump-started a career that led to the presidency. Prescott would work as an insurance broker, raise money for his younger brother’s political campaigns, and serve as town meeting representative in Greenwich, Connecticut. On the other hand, J. R. Ackerley and his older brother, Peter, were both sent to the front during World War I. The younger brother was shot in the buttocks and lived to write about it. The elder was decapitated by a cannon shell two months before the Armistice.
Consider the Darwins. Brilliant, hardworking Erasmus was the pride of the family. Charles, four years younger, a self-absorbed, unfocused boy, was a disappointment. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching,” his father wrote Charles when he was fifteen, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Charles followed his older brother into medical training, but while Erasmus seemed headed for a distinguished career as a doctor, Charles judged most of the lectures to be “stupid” or “incredibly dull,” discovered that the sight of blood made him queasy, and dropped out after two years. He was slightly more successful at the study of divinity, but devoted less time to reading scripture than to collecting beetles, gunning down grouse, gambling, and drinking.
Circumstances would reverse the brothers’ career arcs. In 1829, poor health forced Erasmus to give up medicine at the age of twenty-four. He spent his remaining fifty-two years as a melancholy, opium-eating London bachelor who exercised his considerable intellect at literary soirées and the occasional séance. In 1831, twenty-two-year-old Charles decided to apply for the position of naturalist on a ship heading for South America. His father, who wished his son to become a clergyman, refused to fund his passage. But Darwin’s uncle, having offered to drive Charles home to Shrewsbury, convinced his father to allow Charles to accept the post. Even then, the position was not assured. The Beagle’s captain was a disciple of Johann Kaspar Lavater, the eighteenth-century Swiss physiognomist who believed a man’s character could be read in his facial features, and, as Darwin recalled, “he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.” The captain evidently overcame his doubts, and the Beagle, with Darwin aboard, set sail. The ne’er-do-well younger brother would go on to become the most influential scientist of the nineteenth century, an outcome that depended, as he would marvel in his autobiography, on “so small a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive me 30 miles to Shrewsbury, which few uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape of my nose.”
* * *
If John Wilkes Booth had succeeded in his original plot to kidnap Lincoln—before the war had ended—he might have been hailed as a hero, at least in the South. Now, on the run through the forests and swamps of Maryland and northern Virginia after killing Lincoln—cold, wet, hungry, feverish, broken-legged—John still believed that his act would win him a place among his pantheon of heroes. Indeed, he seemed less concerned about getting food and medical care than about reading reviews of his deed. He was devastated to find his act reviled throughout the United States. His hometown paper, the Baltimore Clipper, called it “cowardly and vile,” and even Jefferson Davis described it as “a blot on American civilization.” This was a crushing blow. “I am here in despair,” John wrote in his daybook. “And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat.” (He would have been comforted to know that after his death, an anonymous poem circulated through the South memorializing Booth as “Our Brutus.”)
Even in such dire circumstances, John played to the audience: quoting Macbeth in a proud note to a man who had begrudged him shelter; impressing three ex-Confederate soldiers with his composure; beguiling a farmer’s children with his pocket compass and tall tales. Thomas Jones, a farmer and rebel sympathizer who brought him meals and newspapers, couldn’t help noting that “though he was exceedingly pale and his features bore the evident traces of suffering, I have seldom, if ever, seen a more strikingly handsome man.” (This without his trademark mustache, which John had shaved off during his escape in a rare concession to prudence.) The twenty-nine Union soldiers who finally cornered him in a tobacco barn remarked on his bravado as he challenged them to fight in what one of them described as a “full, clear, ringing voice, a voice that smacked of the stage.” (“Well, my brave boys, prepare me a stretcher, and place another stain on our glorious banner,” he sang out.) Even after the barn had been set aflame and John, looking so much like Edwin that one officer was momentarily worried they’d “made a mistake,” had been dragged out, mortally injured by a soldier’s bullet, he played his part to the end. (As he lay dying, the farmer’s wife who had tended to his wounds secretly snipped off a lock of his hair for a memento.) Throat swollen, lips purple, slowly suffocating, barely able to speak—the bullet had severed his spinal cord—he managed to whisper, “Tell my mother that I did it for my country, that I die for my country.” And yet one wonders whether in the end he may have realized the futility of his act, whether he may have been referring to more than just his hands when, not long before he stopped breathing, he asked a soldier to lift his paralyzed arms and, looking at them, gasped, “Useless, useless!”
* * *
Although many people refused to believe that the charismatic John Wilkes Booth could be the assassin, the moment Edwin Booth learned of the president’s death—and read in the newspaper of the brandished dagger, the cry “Sic semper tyrannis!,” the leap to the stage—he recognized his brother’s histrionic touch. He later told his actor friend Joseph Jefferson, “It was just as if I had been struck on the head by a hammer.” For weeks, Edwin sat in silence in his New York City apartment. Worried that he might turn to drink, go mad, or even commit suicide, friends took turns sleeping in his room. He received letters saying that he would be killed, that his house would be burned down. (Although June was imprisoned for eight weeks on suspicion that he might have known of the plot—he hadn’t—and Joseph was arrested and briefly detained, Edwin, at the request of influential friends, was merely placed under a kind of house arrest.) He did what he could to distance himself from his brother’s act. A few days after the assassination, Edwin took out an advertisement in the newspapers in which he spoke of his family’s “abhorrence and detestation for this foul and most atrocious of crimes.” No one knows whether John saw it. And he did his best to distance himself from the man described in the newspapers as a “Savage Beast” and a “Monster.” Writing to Asia during the twelve days John was on the run, Edwin advised, “Think no more of him as your brother; he is dead to us now, as he soon must be to all the world, but imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his spirit, in another world.” Called to testify in the trial of John’s co-conspirators, Edwin, who had spent much of the previous summer with John, had hosted him the previous Christmas, and had received him in Boston two weeks before the assassination, told the lawyer that he “knew less of his brother probably than anyone” and had had nothing to do with him for years.
Month after month, like a wounded animal in its den, Edwin stayed in his study, “chewing my heart in solitude,” as he put it, venturing outside only after dark and in the company of a friend, even then disguising himself, and keeping to the shadows for fear of what people might do to him. His fiancée, whom he had met a year after the loss of his beloved wife, broke off their engagement; her father made her promise never to marry into the family of Lincoln’s assassin, never to bear children with the name of Booth. (Edwin eventually married another woman, but his wife went mad after the death of their newborn child and was shuttled in and out of institutions until her own death. He spent hours rocking her in his arms as she sobbed; it seemed, perhaps, a kind of penance. Or perhaps he did for her what he wished—but never would have allowed—someone to do for him.)
Believing his career was over, Edwin vowed never to return to the stage. But within a year of the assassination, needing money to pay off family debts, he appeared at the Winter Garden as Hamlet. “The blood of our martyred President is not yet dry in the memory of the people, and the very name of the assassin is appalling to the public mind; still a Booth is advertised to appear before a New York audience!” wrote the Herald, suggesting that Brutus, Caesar’s assassin, would be “the most suitable character” for Edwin to play. There were rumors that he would be shot, but when the curtain rose on scene two to reveal him sitting in a chair, head bowed, the audience rose to its feet, flung bouquets, and sent wave after wave of applause toward the stage. Edwin would perform for another quarter-century, but he would always wonder whether the crowds came to see “The Hope of the Living Drama” or the brother of the man who had shot Lincoln. He rarely took curtain calls, ordering the houselights up as soon as the play ended. In 1876, he toured the South for the first time since Lincoln’s death. He was gratified by his warm reception, but people were so eager to touch the brother of John Wilkes Booth that Edwin persuaded his manager to hire a member of the company to impersonate him whenever their railway car stopped at stations along the route. Just as John, early in his career, had resented being known as Edwin’s brother, now Edwin resented being known as John’s brother. Seeking fame for himself, John had inadvertently made Edwin even more famous.
Over the decades Edwin played nearly every city in the United States except Washington, which, even when he was asked to perform there by President Chester Arthur, he refused to set foot in or pass through. For the rest of his life, he did his best to repress the events of April 14, 1865. He couldn’t bear seeing a photo or drawing of Lincoln. He quietly reimbursed the Virginia farmer whose tobacco barn had been burned down during his brother’s capture, writing, “Your family will always have our warmest thanks for your kindness to him whose madness wrought so much ill to us.” Edwin forbade his family to touch the funds John had left in a Montreal bank. He wrote to the government for years in an attempt to recover his brother’s remains; when he finally succeeded, he could not bring himself to be in the room when his brother’s body was identified, though he was present in Baltimore’s Greenmount Cemetery when John was buried in the family plot. In 1869, perhaps hoping to associate the family name with a theater other than Ford’s, Edwin built the Booth Theatre, an ornate, five-story theatrical temple that cost more than $1 million, in New York City. Edwin lived in an apartment above the stage. One night at three a.m. he told his longtime attendant, Garrie Davidson, to accompany him to the furnace room. There Davidson saw a trunk bound with ropes. Edwin asked him to fetch an axe, cut the ropes, and open the trunk. Inside lay a trove of theatrical costumes and props. Davidson realized immediately to whom they had belonged. One by one, Edwin drew out the wigs, togas, swords, jewelry, belts, jerkins, leggings, and boots his brother had worn to play Romeo, Mark Antony, Shylock, and Othello. He held them up for a moment and then handed them to Davidson, who fed them to the furnace. Many of them, of course, had originally belonged to Edwin’s father, including the bejeweled velvet shirt and fur-trimmed cloak Junius Brutus Booth had worn in Richard III on the night Edwin had first appeared on stage. There were photographs, too, and sheaves of letters. When the trunk was empty, Edwin told Davidson to chop it up. They threw the wood and the ropes into the furnace, and watched until everything had burned.
The actor whose most famous role was that of a man haunted by the ghost of his father was in life now haunted by the ghost of his brother. Edwin had always been taciturn; after April 1865, he retreated still further into himself. As he aged, he was said to sit up through the nights (he called them his “vulture hours”), smoking his pipe till dawn, reading the memoirs of actors and contemplating their portraits and death masks, which decorated his walls. In his summer home he dozed for hours in the porch hammock, its canvas sides drawn up to make a womblike cocoon. Although John was always just below the surface of his thoughts, Edwin went nearly thirty years without uttering his name. Whenever he was asked how many brothers and sisters he had, he included those who had died in childhood, but omitted John. One night, near the end of his life, reminiscing about his youth at a postperformance Christmas Eve party in his rooms in Boston, Edwin slipped. “Yes, my brother John and I . . .” The room fell silent. “Yes, my unfortunate brother, John . . .” Edwin continued. He began to weep. Then he pulled himself together. “Come, come, I have displaced the mirth,” he said. “Let us drink to a Merry Christmas.”
In 1889, Edwin founded the Players Club, a gathering place for actors on Gramercy Park South, where he lived in two rooms upstairs. Four years later, when he suffered a massive stroke and died at the age of fifty-nine, there was a portrait of John on his bedside table.