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Introduction: A Strange Human Cryptogram
- Southern Illinois University Press
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1 Introduction: AStrange Human Cryptogram NEWSPAPERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY carried Clara Morris’s obituary on Saturday, 21 November 1925. The celebrated seventy-eight-year-old actress and writer had died on Friday in New Canaan, Connecticut, having been an invalid for almost two decades. “At one time the most famous actress in America,” Variety reported, she had long suffered from “inflammatory rheumatism,” and “from 1910 on, physicians had despaired of her life.”1 She had not been seen in public since 1909, the year of her last stage appearance, after which illness kept her confined to her home and curtailed her activities. Nevertheless, she had remained in public view through the many articles she continued to publish and the stories journalists wrote chronicling her travail. Her death was front-page news in the New York Times, which identified her as a “noted tragedienne” who “made her stage debut in Cleveland at 15 years” and “won fame” in New York in 1870. Complete with a photograph of Morris in her twenties as an ethereal Camille, the sympathetic account detailed her shattered health: Clara Morris had been known of later years as “the woman of sorrow,” because of her temporary blindness, illness, and financial reverses in 1907. Years before she had been recognized as the greatest emotional actress of the English-speaking stage, but she had put so much feeling into her roles that she suffered a complete nervous break-down at the height of her career, and it was only after a long retirement that she was able to return intermittently to the stage.2 The Times acknowledged that “very little was ever known about the origin and early life of Clara Morris” and provided information, much of it incorrect, about the remarkable trajectory of her career. Actually, the turbulent life of Clara Morris (1847–1925) rivals the melodramas in which she starred for more than three decades. After a bleak childhood and a long theatrical apprenticeship in a Cleveland stock company, she made a 2 Introduction triumphant New York debut in 1870 and rapidly became one of America’s leading actresses. Praised for the passion and power of her stage performances, she specialized in sensational roles requiring both graphic realism and emotional pyrotechnics. Had she died in the 1870s, she would be remembered as the gifted equal of Charlotte Cushman, still recognized as one of the nineteenth century’s greatest performers. Instead, although rumors of her death circulated frequently, she lived for years after the peak of her acting career. She did not leave the stage at the height of her popularity but continued performing long after she should have retired. In her own lifetime, debate swirled around her. She had both detractors and defenders. Some people were simply bewildered. Drama critic Nym Crinkle called her “one of the strange human cryptograms that nobody can read.”3 Many agreed with him and found her an enigma, always a contradiction , whimsical to the point of dramatic aberration, imbued with a sense of her own insecurity. Others considered her a “heart actress” and named her “Our Modern Niobe,” the “Empress of Emotional Acting,” the “Sarah Bernhardt of America,” the “Queen of Hearts,” “Queen of Tears,” and, more negatively, “Queen of Spasms.” When daunting health problems and changing tastes brought her stage career to an end, Morris turned to writing. With characteristic resolve, she produced hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on topics of current interest and published nine books in as many years: six works of fiction and three memoirs: Life on the Stage (1901), Stage Confidences (1902), and The Life of a Star (1906). She also kept a fifty-four-volume diary from the 1860s until 1924 that reveals enormous private pain. Fearful of rejection by critics and audiences , exploited by the husband she married in 1874 and supported ever after, Morris became a morphine addict in her late twenties. Although she distanced herself from her stage creations, her diary and literary works suggest a strong connection between the roles she played and her “real” self. Suffering shaped her life and art. So did secrecy. Determined to suppress the lurid details of her personal life, she carefully edited the stories she offered the public. In her three autobiographical volumes (officially nonfiction but fictionalized nonetheless), she presents herself as the personification of piety, industry, and patriotism. There is not a hint of scandal, no mention of morphine or marital discord, few references to emotional deprivation, unresolved identity issues, or her own unconventional...