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1. A Stone’s Throw: Charlotte Cushman
- University of California Press
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one A Stone’s Throw Charlotte Cushman charlotte cushman arrived in washington, d.c., on the evening of Friday, October 9, 1863, to play Lady Macbeth later that month. She had returned to the United States earlier that year from Rome, where she lived, to deliver a series of benefit performances of Macbeth to aid the United States Sanitary Commission. A fiercely pro-Union native of Massachusetts, age forty-seven in 1863, Cushman had already performed in Philadelphia and Boston by the time she got to Washington, and she would go on to take the stage in Baltimore and New York. Her five-city tour resulted in a donation of more than $8,000 to the commission.1 With her outsized ego, Cushman knew people would pay to see her—the most famous American actress of her generation and the most famous Lady Macbeth—and she was right. That first evening in Washington, she arrived at the Lafayette Square home of her good friend Secretary of State William Seward, making a vivid impression on Seward’s eighteen-year-old daughter Fanny. “When the front door opened Anna and I ran down stairs & met Miss Cushman on her way up—Anna first,” Fanny wrote in her diary, describing her reaction and that of her sister-in-law Anna Seward, wife of her brother Fred. “After kissing Anna she gave me also a warm kiss saying she was glad to see me here.”2 Then Cushman stepped into the parlor, and she was larger than life. “She stood talking and taking oª her hat & cloak which I received,” Fanny wrote, 7 awestruck, noting all the details of the famous actress’s dress. “She wore a drab travelling ‘duster,’ and black Neapolitan bonnet, trimmed with purple—Her dress was alpaca with white pin stripe—made in a skirt & short loose sack, the latter worn over a striped linen shirt, & showing the collar & sleeves.” Fanny then gave her impressions of Cushman’s prepossessing figure, big for a woman at the time—“She is very stout, but also very tall—a good deal taller than myself I believe.” And she noted other details of her appearance: “Her hair, gray and inclined to wave a little, she wore drawn back from the sides of her face, but rolled forward—A black silk net at the back.” Of Cushman’s face Fanny wrote, “At all times it is full of soul—and it will always seem to me, what ever others may call it, beautiful, far more beautiful than youth or regularity of features alone could be. . . . It possesses sublimity from intellect, it glows with benevolence, it sparkles with humor, it wins with earnest tenderness, it is cheerful, frank, natural, grand, thrilling, awful. I love the face as that of a great, true woman. . . . She seems to live as God intended life—filling each moment.” A photograph of Cushman taken a few years earlier gives some sense of the person Fanny saw that evening (fig. 1). In the next few days Cushman made an equally vivid impression on the rival managers of Washington’s two most prestigious theaters, John Ford and Leonard Grover. Meeting with each man, she considered where and when she would stage her performance and decided later that week to play at Grover’s National Theatre, swayed by Grover’s willingness to oªer the experienced professional actors Lester Wallack, Jr., and Edward Loomis Davenport in the roles of Macbeth and Macduª. On the night of Saturday, October 17, some twenty-five hundred people crowded into the theater, located on E Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets, Northwest, to see the play.3 The theater had been open in a refurbished state for only eleven days. A slightly later photograph of the building, which existed only until 1873 (when it burned down), shows the venue where Cushman performed (fig. 2). The Washington newspapers described the performance only in general terms, reporting that it gave “the utmost satisfaction,” that “the audience was enthusiastic throughout the play,” that Abraham Lincoln and his family were in attendance, and that at the end Cushman stood before the curtain and received “an elegant bouquet from the ladies in Mr. Seward’s box”—Fanny, Anna, and Emma Crow Cushman, the actress’s niece, who accompanied her to Washington and also stayed at the Seward house.4 Fanny a s t o n e ’ s t h r o w 8 [3.234.246.109] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:07 GMT...