Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America's First Celebrity - Softcover

Wojczuk, Tana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501199536 ISBN 13: 9781501199530

Verlag: Avid Reader Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Finalist for the Marfield Prize

For fans of Book of Ages and American Eve, this “lively, illuminating new biography” (The Boston Globe) of 19th-century queer actress Charlotte Cushman portrays a “brisk, beautifully crafted life” (Stacy Schiff, bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra) that riveted New York City and made headlines across America.

All her life, Charlotte Cushman refused to submit to others’ expectations. Raised in Boston at the time of the transcendentalists, a series of disasters cleared the way for her life on the stage—a path she eagerly took, rejecting marriage and creating a life of adventure, playing the role of the hero in and out of the theater as she traveled to New Orleans and New York City, and eventually to London and back to build a successful career. Her Hamlet, Romeo, Lady Macbeth, and Nancy Sykes from Oliver Twist became canon, impressing Louisa May Alcott, who later based a character on her in Jo’s Boys, and Walt Whitman, who raved about “the towering grandeur of her genius” in his columns for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She acted alongside Edwin and John Wilkes Booth—supposedly giving the latter a scar on his neck that was later used to identify him as President Lincoln’s assassin—and visited frequently with the Great Emancipator himself, who was a devoted Shakespeare fan and admirer of Cushman’s work. Her wife immortalized her in the angel at the top of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain; worldwide, she was “a lady universally acknowledged as the greatest living tragic actress.” Behind the scenes, she was equally radical, making an independent income, supporting her family, creating one of the first bohemian artists’ colonies abroad, and living publicly as a queer woman. And yet, her name has since faded into the shadows.

Now, her story comes to brilliant life with Tana Wojczuk’s Lady Romeo, an exhilarating and enlightening biography of the 19th-century trailblazer. With new research and rarely seen letters and documents, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman’s life, set against the excitement and drama of 1800s New York City and featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries who changed the cultural landscape of America forever. The story of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable forgotten figures in our history and restores her to center stage, where she belongs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tana Wojczuk is a contributing editor at Guernica and teaches writing at New York University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Believer, Bomb, Narrative, Vice, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize judged by David Shields, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation fellow, Tin House Summer Writers Workshop poetry fellow, and research fellow in the New York University Global Scholars program. She received her MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. A Boulder native, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her first book, Lady Romeo: The Radical, Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America's First Celebrity was a finalist for the Marfield Prize National Award for Arts Writing, Publishing Triangle award, and a LAMBDA Literary Award.

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Prologue prologue


The crown was made of pale green laurel, fit for a Caesar, and tied with a white ribbon to symbolize royalty. A handsome young actor carried it onstage on a cushion of purple velvet. Charlotte had chosen a simple dress for the occasion, in a gray silk that matched the steel in her hair. Now in her late fifties, Charlotte had already spent a lifetime being judged by the press, who found her “lantern jaw” ugly but her performances “electrifying.” One friend said her mouth was like “the Arc de Triomphe” (it was both a jibe and a compliment). As she greeted the audience, her large, deep-set gray eyes lit up with pleasure.

“She is the rage. Gentlemen reproduce the color of her favorite mulberry morning gown in their scarves and cravats—ladies emulate each other in exactly copying the motion of her hips as she walks the stage,” reported the New York Tribune, “the press follow her from the first preparatory ‘hem!’ of her entrance to the final movement of her embroidered handkerchief as she soothes the tragedy-startled rouge upon her cheek.”

It was November 1874, and it felt as though all New York City were crowded into Booth’s Theatre for Charlotte Cushman’s farewell performance. An enormous crystal chandelier presided over the grand room, the beautifully dressed men and women crushed and breathless below. Edwin Booth, who owned the theatre, had hung red, white, and blue drapery in honor of Charlotte, the “American Queen of Tragedy.” New York’s wealthy, famous, and powerful sat in the box seats, crushed against blue velvet, or leaned, smoking, against Grecian pillars that shone richly with golden gilt. Politicians joined socialites and actors: Governor of New York John Adams Dix; Governor-elect Samuel Tilden; Mayor Havemeyer and his successor, William Wickham, who was negotiating with the French over how much their Statue of Liberty should cost New Yorkers; railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt; and Peter Cooper, inventor of the American steam engine and founder of Cooper Union. Above them dangled “clinging vines and branches of artificial grapes.”

Standing on the apron of the stage, Charlotte could see thousands of fans crowding excitedly into every available space in the theatre. They stood along the aisles at the back, and in the galleries they leaned precariously over the railings. At a signal from the orchestra the audience turned their faces up to be beatified. Tonight, Booth’s Theatre was a place of worship.

Charlotte, however, could see the machinery behind the marvel. She could see the musicians watching her from the sunken orchestra pit, a new innovation in theatre. Booth’s boasted other new technologies, like a sprinkler system to douse overzealous special effects, hydraulic lifts to move scenery, electric spotlights, and forced-air heating.

That night, Charlotte bookended her career by performing the same role she had made her debut in forty years earlier, Lady Macbeth. Throughout her career she had given Shakespeare’s characters new life, keeping Shakespeare himself alive when his work could have become a dead thing on the page. She had become famous for her “breeches parts,” competing with male actors for men’s roles over four decades: Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII, Hamlet, and especially Romeo. Though often described as mannish, even “epicene,” Charlotte had dazzled fans of every gender as Romeo in her brilliant red-and-turquoise tunics and skintight leggings, with a dagger strapped to her thigh.

A professor from New York College read an ode by Richard Stoddard written in Charlotte’s honor. It was called “Salve Regina,” translated as “Hail Holy Queen,” and modeled on a hymnal of the same name. “Shakespeare!” the poem began, invoking the god of the theatre. “Honor to him and her who stands his grand interpreter. Stepped out of his broad page upon the living stage.”

Another speech, this time by American literary critic and poet William Cullen Bryant—white-haired and white-bearded, the elder statesman of arts and letters and the powerful editor of the New York Evening Post. To Bryant and the assembled elite of New York society, Charlotte was America’s “bright, particular star,” and its most profitable commodity. To the working-class audience who’d waited in line for hours to buy tickets, she was “our Charlotte.” Everyone was so familiar with Charlotte’s work Bryant did not have to list her famous roles by name. Then the Arcadia Club presented Charlotte with a large bouquet of flowers, and Bryant placed the laurel wreath on her head amid a maelstrom of applause. Thus it was that in America in 1874 a fifty-eight-year-old Shakespearean actress was crowned queen.

“I was, by a press of circumstances, thrown at an early age into a profession for which I had received no special education or training,” Charlotte explained to the audience. “I had already, though so young, been brought face to face with necessity.” She spoke for once in her own words, rather than those of the Bard. “To be thoroughly in earnest, intensely in earnest in all my thoughts and in all my actions, whether in my profession or out of it, became my one single idea,” she continued in that unusual voice: warm, woody, and worn to splinters by years of overwork. She paused as the audience applauded. “Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.” The theatre erupted.

Charlotte left before the applause had died away. She gathered her things, and her maid, Sallie, collected her costume. Then they left the theatre through the back door, at 23rd Street near Fifth Avenue. Edwin Booth and his colleagues had built her a bower of pine branches, sweet and herbaceous, and lithe young actors lit her way with torches. They would likely have carried her on a palanquin, but she was too stout for that. Charlotte climbed into her carriage, and collapsed against Emma with relief. Emma Stebbins had been Charlotte’s wife in all but name for more than two decades, even putting her own promising career as a sculptor on hold to take care of Charlotte in her illness. The press referred to Emma as Charlotte’s “friend” or “companion,” but they called each other by other names. Early in their courtship, Charlotte began calling Emma her Juliet and signing letters “your Romeo.” To friends, Charlotte referred to herself as the man of the house. Though she and Emma were not, Charlotte admitted, as passionate as they once were—Charlotte had played Romeo to more than one Juliet since they’d been together—they had made homes in five cities and on several continents. They had survived war, infidelity, and Charlotte’s celebrity. Hopefully, they would now survive Charlotte’s fans.

Whipped into a frenzy of adulation, the crowd surged against the carriage and almost knocked it over. As the driver urged the horses forward, policemen ran ahead, trying unsuccessfully to untangle the snarled traffic. But more people kept arriving, jamming against streetcars and then pouring out into the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Avid Reader Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1501199536
• ISBN 13: 9781501199530
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande