Twain in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

“Mark Twain—An Intimate Portrait” (1910)

[92] === “Mark Twain—An Intimate Portrait” (1910) Henry Watterson In early 1874 Twain drafted—or at least slightly rewrote and then copyrighted —a five-act play based on The Gilded Age (1873), a novel he wrote in collaboration with his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner (1829– 1900), editor of the Hartford Courant. Twain sold rights to the play to the actor John T. Raymond (1836–1921), who regularly starred in the part of the daydreaming Colonel Sellers from 1874 until his death. Twain based the character on his “mother’s favorite cousin, James Lampton. . . . The real Colonel Sellers, as I knew him in James Lampton, was a pathetic and beautiful spirit, a manly man, a straight and honorable man, a man with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man to be loved; and he was loved by all his friends, and by his family worshipped” (Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography 8). Henry Watterson (1840–1921), the influential editor and publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, recorded his and Twain’s impressions of their mutual relative by marriage. Watterson also remembered a practical joke that he, Twain, and others played on Murat Halstead (1829–1908), editor of the Cincinnati Commercial and a stalwart Republican. Watterson impersonated Halstead in an interview with the New York World (4 May 1874, 1). In an unsigned and untitled editorial in the New York Tribune the next day (4), the writer (probably John Hay) quipped that Watterson “had the happy thought to make Mr. Halstead an old-line Democrat.” although mark twain and I called each other “cousin” and claimed to be blood-relatives, the connection between us was by marriage: a great uncle of his married a great aunt of mine; his mother was named after and reared by this great aunt; and the children of the marriage were, of course, his cousins and mine; and a large, varied and picturesque assortment they were. We were lifelong and very dear friends, however; passed much time together at home and abroad; and had many common ties and memories. The last time I saw him, a little less than two years ago, he came to lunch with me at the Manhattan Club, in New York, where he greatly amused my [93] son . . . by his intimate reminiscences of Col. Sellers, of the “Earl of Durham ,” and of other fantastic members of our joint family. Just after the successful production of his one play, The Gilded Age, and the famous hit made by the late comedian, John T. Raymond, in its leading rôle, I received a letter from him in which he told me he had made in Col. Mulberry Sellers a close study of a certain mutual kinsman and thought he had drawn him to the life, “but for the love of Heaven,” he said, “don’t whisper it, for he would never understand, or forgive me, if he did not thrash me on sight.” . . . Another one of these mutual cousins was the “Earl of Durham.” About the middle of the eighteenth century, before the War of the Revolution, there came to Virginia four brothers Lampton, younger scions of the House of Durham. From them the American Lamptons are sprung. Sam Clemens and I grew up on old wives’ tales of estates and titles, which—maybe it was a kindred sense of humor in both of us—we treated with shocking irreverence. It happened some forty years ago that there turned up, first upon the plains and afterward in New York and Washington, a straight descendant of the oldest of these Virginia Lamptons—he had somehow gotten hold of or had fabricated a full set of documents—who was what Theodore Roosevelt would call “a corker.” He wore a sombrero, with a rattlesnake for a band, and a belt with a couple of six-shooters, and described himself and claimed to be the Earl of Dunham. “He touched me for a tenner the first time I ever saw him,” drawled Mark Twain, “and I coughed it up and have been coughing them up, whenever he’s around, with punctuality and regularity.” The “Earl” was indeed a terror—especially when he had been drinking. His belief in his peerage was as absolute as Col. Sellers’s in his millions. All he wanted was money enough “to get across” and “state his case.” During the Tichborne trial,1 Mark Twain and I were in London, and one day he said to me, “I have investigated...