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xiii Preface: ATale of Two Cemeteries THE SETTINGS ARE SIMILAR, but the two gravesites are striking in their differences. Mount Auburn Cemetery, consecrated in 1831 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was America’s first garden cemetery and a pioneer in the rural cemetery movement. Now a national historic landmark covering 175 acres in a busy urban area, its shaded walkways provide a tranquil landscape for reflection . The Kensico Cemetery, founded in 1889 in Valhalla, New York, is equally picturesque, although at 461 acres, it is more than double Mount Auburn’s size. Dotted with gardens and ponds, it features a variety of deciduous and evergreen trees on its slopes and lawns. Each cemetery is a veritable museum of memorial sculpture and architecture , with urns, obelisks, statues, and mausoleums marking its graves. Noteworthy people buried in Mount Auburn include Christian Scientist Mary Baker Eddy, Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes, author Julia Ward Howe, and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Its roster of the illustrious dead contains surnames evocative of Boston’s Brahmin past: Bulfinch, Eliot, Everett, Gardner, Lodge, Lowell, Quincy, and Sears. Kensico houses a more diverse group: among them, entertainer Danny Kaye; actress Billie Burke and her husband, impresario Florenz Ziegfeld; fashion designer Henri Bendel; and baseball great Lou Gehrig. Actors, however, were not barred from Mount Auburn. The grave of Edwin Booth, brother of assassin John Wilkes Booth, lies between Anemone and Pyrola paths; that of Charlotte Cushman, who is of particular interest to this study, occupies a grassy plot encircled by Palm Avenue. When she died of cancer on 18 February 1876, Cushman was the leading tragic actress on the American stage and had won an international reputation. A towering granite obelisk marks her grave, with only her name, not her birth or death dates, carved in capital letters on its base. Kensico houses the grave of another actress: Clara Morris, who saw herself as Cushman’s heir apparent and pointedly made her Shakespearean debut on xiv preface the New York stage as Lady Macbeth, one of her predecessor’s signature roles. Morris lies in the Pocantico Plot atop a hill. When I visited the cemetery in November 2000, I was pleased to find the grounds well maintained. As I approached the gravesite, I saw what I assumed was her monument: two large urns flanking a kneeling, weeping woman. The Niobe-like figure, covering her face with one hand while holding a wreath of flowers in the other, was perfect for Morris, who specialized in theatrical suffering. Much to my surprise, however, the statue was not hers. It marked the grave of Greta Hughes Witherspoon, the urns belonging to Witherspoon relatives Adelaide Manola Hughes and Marion Manola Gates. Neighboring headstones bore other inscriptions but not Morris or Harriott, her married name. Although I had stopped at the office upon entering the cemetery and had a map of the grounds, I assumed that someone had made a mistake. I drove back to the office where an obliging staff member checked the records and confirmed that I had been in the correct location. I returned to the site and explored the area, searching each gravestone for Morris’s name. I soon came to the distressing conclusion that she lay in an unmarked grave with nothing to identify her as its occupant.1 It was a sadly inappropriate resting place for a woman who had imagined herself as Cushman’s successor, but whose life had followed a very different course. Compounding the irony of this discovery was the presence of a monument on a plot adjacent to Morris’s. A small, granite obelisk had the family name Failing inscribed in raised capital letters at its base. In the right light, it would cast a shadow over Morris’s gravesite, linking her irrevocably to what she always feared would, and eventually did, happen: failing at her chosen profession. Finally, as if scripted, I realized there was another headstone, lying just beyond the Failing obelisk, that completed the triad. This one marked the graves of Bradford Field and Lee Bottome, two members of the Story family. Standing over the windswept gravesite on that gray November day, I found the scenario as melodramatic as the material in which Clara Morris had specialized. It was as if the placement of the gravestones were sending me a message: tell her story! A saga of resilience and tenacity, as instructive as it is idiosyncratic, it also helps to illuminate the turbulent era in which she lived...

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