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126 7 Marriage and Macbeth A 23 JUNE 1874 diary entry records Morris’s arrival in Liverpool after a smooth crossing. “All well,” she wrote, indicating that she and her traveling companions were fine. They included her mother (“Ma”), Union Square actress Roberta Norwood (“Norwood”), and Frederick C. Harriott (“Fred”), her fiancé of more than a year. Scion of two established New York families, the Harriotts and the Havemeyers, nephew of William Havemeyer, then in his third term as mayor of New York, “Fred” had entered Morris’s life shortly after her arrival in the city.1 According to the Spirit of the Times, Harriott was a wealthy flour merchant who also taught elocution and “dramatic art.” The two met when Morris came to study with him, and “it was not long before rumor had the teacher and pupil engaged.”2 He had appeared in her diary on 8 September 1872 when she wrote, “Mr. Harriott and Mr. Halliday called.” They visited again on the 15th, and on the 19th, Morris “went for drive with Mr. Harriot [sic].” She mentions “Fred” frequently after that, noting his gifts of floral arrangements, caged birds, and bottles of perfume, as well as his kindness to her mother and attentiveness to her business affairs. He supported her legal battle with Daly, helped negotiate her contract with Palmer, and would soon assume the management of her career. The couple had been engaged since 5 November 1873. A relieved Morris wrote in her diary, “Fred has told his father, and he is not angry, but has allowed Fred to send me his picture (Mr. Warren Harriot’s [sic] picture I mean) Oh what a load is off my heart!”3 Such alliances were not uncommon. Although a stigma against the stage still existed, especially if a young woman married an actor, socially prominent men encountered few objections when they wed actresses. In his History of the Union Square Theatre, Palmer mentions several actresses who succeeded in “stepping from public to private life honorably and happily” and makes such a leap sound like a worthy career goal. He cites Agnes Ethel, who “won her triumph” professionally and “retired to a life of ease, social distinction and great wealth.”4 That, undoubtedly, was what Morris anticipated with her upcoming marriage to Harriott, who had avidly pursued her. 127 Marriage and Macbeth Morris was in London when she received a letter from Palmer sending her on a theatrical mission. He had bought the rights to Octave Feuillet’s Sphinx, then the rage in Paris, and planned to star her in an Americanized version at the Union Square in the fall.5 He wanted her to see the French production, paying particular attention to Sophie Alexandrine Croisette as scheming adulteress Blanche de Chelles, the role Morris would have in New York. Although she does not mention the French Sphinx in her diary, she discussed it at length in a New York Telegraph article (“When ‘The Sphinx’ Shocked New York”) written almost thirty years later. She “hurried” to Paris” but found that intense heat in the city had forced the production to close prematurely. She was thus unable to study Croisette’s performance or to judge the effectiveness of the death scene in which Blanche, having ingested poison, reportedly turned green before expiring in agony.6 Eager to play the part for Palmer, Morris returned to England. She and her party left Liverpool on the steamship Republic, which docked in New York on 30 August after an uneventful ten-day voyage.7 Translated and adapted by George Fawcett Rowe, The Sphinx was in rehearsal by the first week in September, with a reading on the third. Morris wrote in her diary on the ninth, “I don’t like the piece.” It was her only entry about the play, which opened at the Union Square on Monday, 21 September. She did not discuss it in her memoirs either, although there is a photograph of her as a pensive Blanche in a black riding habit, complete with helmet and crop, in Stage Confidences. Specific information about her interpretation comes from other sources, mainly the aforementioned article, Palmer’s recollections, and reviews of the New York production. Morris had signed a contract with Shook and Palmer on 18 May in which she agreed to a nine-week fall engagement at the Union Square, as well as a shorter one the following spring at an unspecified New York theater, for a weekly salary of one...

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