A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage

A Spectacle of Suffering Clara Morris on the American Stage Barbara Wallace Grossman A Series from Southern Illinois...

Author: Barbara Wallace Grossman

130 downloads 1391 Views 6MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

A Spectacle of Suffering

Clara Morris on the American Stage

Barbara Wallace Grossman

A Series from Southern Illinois University Press robert a. schanke Series Editor

Other Books in the Theater in the Americas Series Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theater, and Film in the McCarthy Era Milly S. Barranger

Stage, Page, Scandals, and Vandals: William E. Burton and NineteenthCentury American Theatre David L. Rinear

The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays Translated by Adam Versényi With an Essay by Jacqueline E. Bixler

Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity Jon D. Rossini

Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937 Jonathan L. Chambers

Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy Edited and with an introduction by Robert A. Schanke

Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience Dorothy Chansky

“That Furious Lesbian”: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta Robert A. Schanke

Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta Edited and with an Introduction by Robert A. Schanke

Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-OffBroadway Wendell C. Stone

Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing Jodi Kanter Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process Bruce Kirle Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater Sonja Kuftinec Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy Felicia Hardison Londré Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Tice L. Miller

Teaching Performance Studies Edited by Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer With a Foreword by Richard Schechner Broadway’s Bravest Woman: Selected Writings of Sophie Treadwell Edited and with introductions by Jerry Dickey and Miriam López-Rodríguez The Humana Festival: The History of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville Jeffrey Ullom Our Land Is Made of Courage and Glory: Nationalist Performance of Nicaragua and Guatemala E. J. Westlake



Clara Morris on the American Stage Barbara Wallace Grossman

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale

Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09

4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grossman, Barbara Wallace, 1948– A spectacle of suffering : Clara Morris on the American stage / Barbara Wallace Grossman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2882-6 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8093-2882-8 (alk. paper) 1. Morris, Clara, 1848–1925. 2. Actors—United States— Biography. I.Title. PN2287.M7G76 2009 791.4302'8092—dc22 [B] 2008026834 Frontispiece: Cabinet photograph of Clara Morris as Anne Sylvester, the role in which she became an overnight sensation in Augustin Daly’s production of Man and Wife, 1870. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library. Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞

For Steve, whose optimism is empowering

Contents List of Illustrations xi Preface: A Tale of Two Cemeteries Acknowledgments xvii

xiii

Introduction: A Strange Human Cryptogram 1 1. That Fair Peak of Triumph 7 2. The Making of an Emotional Actress 17 3. Theatrical Apprenticeship in Cleveland 35 4. Leading Business in Cincinnati 57 5. A Western Actress in New York 74 6. The Dramatic Meteor 100 7. Marriage and Macbeth 126 8. Morphined in Miss Multon 155 9. Queen of Spasms 186 10. Diary of a Working Actress 215 Conclusion: A Story of Woman Courage 251 Notes 271 Index 313

Illustrations Frontispiece: As Anne Sylvester in Man and Wife, 1870 In Camille, 1874 xxii In Article 47, 1872 11 In Alixe, 1873 16 Sarah Jane Proctor Morrison 20 A young Morris in Cleveland 34 John A. Ellsler 37 Morris in The Lancashire Lass 50 In Cleveland, ca. 1869 60 Augustin Daly 75 Morris in Madelein Morel, 1873 96 Morris, ca. 1874 103 Albert M. Palmer 105 Morris as Camille, 1874 121 Sarah Kemble Siddons and Charlotte Cushman as Lady Macbeth 143 Morris as Lady Macbeth, 1875 150 In Miss Multon with Bijou Heron and Mabel Leonard, 1876 170 Diary entries for 5-8 May 1877 showing Morris traveling, rehearsing, and performing on morphine 178–79 Morris and Frederick C. Harriott, 1891 212 Frontispiece, Life on the Stage, 1901 238 Frontispiece, Stage Confidences, 1902 242 As Sister Genevieve in The Two Orphans, 1904 247 Souvenir Program, Clara Morris Benefit, 1909 254–55 Diary pages, 1917 260–61

xi

Preface:

A

Tale 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 xiii

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. With this book, I intend to do both. Editorial Method I have quoted extensively from Morris’s fifty-four-volume diary because I want her voice to be heard throughout this book. Nevertheless, my intention is not to create a facsimile version of the diary. I have not tried to reproduce entries exactly as they appear in the original volumes, in which punctuation is usually

xiv

preface nonexistent and looping handwriting scrawled on narrow pages often leaves space for only two or three words per line. I have taken the liberty of running lines together, sometimes with missing punctuation marks provided in brackets, in order to reduce the number of pages required to print this book. Words that Morris underlined appear in italics here. On the other hand, I have not corrected her unorthodox spelling, unconventional usage, or convoluted syntax, and have noted “sic” only when I thought her mistakes might be taken for mine. For the errors that do appear—and I certainly hope there are none!—I bear full responsibility.

xv

A

cknowledgments

AS A “GENETIC DEMOCRAT,” to quote my husband, Steve, I am tempted to paraphrase U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton and claim it took a village to produce this book. While that would be hyperbolic, there are many people who were kind and helpful over the years to whom I am grateful. That includes all those who asked, “How’s the book?” whenever they saw me and genuinely cared about the answer. For someone toiling in the archives and working in relative isolation, their interest and encouragement meant a great deal. Certain individuals, though, deserve recognition. First, I want to thank Marshall Parker, then a graduate student at Tufts University, who knew I was searching for an actress with a diary and told me about Clara Morris. Next, the late Sherwood Collins, a former chair of the Department of Drama and Dance, who suggested I apply for a fellowship at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute, where my work on Morris began. To Bunting Director Florence Ladd and my “sister fellows” in the 1994–95 cohort, especially Tina Packer and Laura Harrington, thank you for believing in Clara and encouraging me to find my voice. Thank you, too, to Harvard undergraduate research assistants Connie Chung and Tamar Gordon. I am thankful for the tiers of support I have had at Tufts for more than a decade, beginning with splendid graduate student teaching and research assistants, many of whom have since begun their own distinguished careers: among them, Paula Alekson, Virginia Anderson, Natka Bianchini, Kyna Hamill, Jenna Kubly, Daphne Lei, Heather Nathans, and Jennifer Stiles. I appreciate the deans who saw merit in this project and gave me time to work on it: Susan Ernst, Leila Fawaz, Kevin Dunn, and Andrew McClellan. Thank you to Robert Sternberg, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, for research stipends that helped make this book possible. Thanks to my colleagues in the Department of Drama and Dance, especially Joanne Barnett, Downing Cless, Claire Conceison, Tom Connolly, Rita Dioguardi, Ted Simpson, and, above all, Fletcher Professor of Oratory Laurence Senelick. Ever my teacher, he acquired xvii

acknowledgments material belonging to Morris and her first biographer, George MacAdam, which proved invaluable. I am grateful to President Lawrence Bacow and Adele Fleet Bacow, as well as Jamshed Bharucha, provost and senior vice president, for their friendship and encouragement. Thank you to colleagues in the field, particularly Professors Kim Marra, who generously shared her unpublished material on Augustin Daly, convinced me of the importance of this study, and read this manuscript in its final stages; Stacy Wolf, who shares a love of musical theater and urged me to complete this project; Don Wilmeth, who encouraged me to write about Morris; the late Bruce Kirle, who thought I should approach Southern Illinois University Press; and Robert A. Schanke, editor of its Theater in the Americas series, who welcomed my proposal and helped me shape the book it became. Thank you to Kristine Priddy, acquisitions editor; Kathleen Kageff, project editor; Barb Martin, editorial, design, and production manager; Mary Rohrer, graphic designer, and Mary Lou Kowaleski, copy editor, for their invaluable advice and meticulous attention. I am indebted to the following librarians, curators, and archivists for their assistance: Charlotte Brown (UCLA Special Collections), Diana Carey (Schlesinger Library), Vicki Catozza (Reference Division, Western Reserve Historical Society Library), Cathy Cherbosque (Huntington Library), Annette Fern (Harvard Theatre Collection), Rhonda Green (Cleveland Public Library), John Haas (Ohio Historical Society), David Hansen (Halifax Regional Library), Holly Hinman (New York Historical Society), Sara S. Hodson (Huntington Library), Deborah Kelley-Milburn (Widener Library), Pamela Madsen (Harvard Theatre Collection), Jeanne Newlin (former curator, Harvard Theatre Collection), Allen B. Robertson (Rannoch Research, Halifax), Ellen Shea (Schlesinger Library), Anne B. Shepherd (Cincinnati Historical Society), Frederic Woodbridge Wilson (Curator, Harvard Theatre Collection), and the librarians at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. I have benefited from the insights of physicians Kevin Kaufman, Joseph Pines, Martin P. Solomon, and especially my father, Joseph S. Wallace (of blessed memory), into Morris’s health problems and morphine addiction. I am grateful to family and friends for their patience, good humor, love, and support: Diane Fassino, Rabbi Wesley Gardenswartz, Shirley Grossman and Mary Ellen Grossman, Liz Krupp and George Krupp, Aviva Lask, Ellen Richards, Molly-Jane Rubinger, Harold Schwartz and Linda Schwartz, Sue Sherman and Joel Sherman, Ruth Sidel, Jeanne Stanton and Donald Stanton, Dina Usherov, Ellen Wallace, and “study buddy” Charlie, my Springer Spaniel. I owe my wonderful children and grandchildren a special thank-you for caring about Clara and making me laugh: David Grossman, Mary Jo Sisk, Will, and Carina;

xviii

acknowledgments Benjamin Grossman and Rebecca Walker Grossman; and Joshua Grossman. To my mother, Bernice L. Wallace, who has not lost her editorial prowess, thank you for loving encouragement throughout this long process and, at the end, for helping me make painful but necessary cuts. Finally, to Steve, who has never stopped believing in me and who read manuscript chapters on the treadmill, thank you for being my life partner and most ardent advocate always.

xix


Cabinet photograph of Morris as Camille, 1874, which appeared in many of her obituaries in November 1925. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

Introduction:

A

Strange 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 1

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 aspirations. A public hungry for sensation would have been disappointed by Morris’s sanitized account, but she was shaping the events of her life in the pattern of the personal success story, the preferred format for traditional American biography.4

2

Introduction

Inscribing moral norms through her narrative, she opted for the familiar ragsto-riches rise to fame, acceptance, power, and respectability. To that typically male plot, she added the more conventionally female destiny: the escape from childhood poverty to the security of a happy marriage.5 She did not deal with the unexpected twists her life took, and she omitted any details that would have compromised the integrity of the public persona she crafted so carefully. Thanks to the vagaries of popular taste and her own selective presentation of autobiographical events, the “true” story of her life has never been told. Even the efforts of previous biographers failed to materialize. Journalist George T. MacAdam strove to discover the truth about her early years and family relationships but died in 1929, leaving only fragments of the book he planned.6 Although Mildred Langford Howard produced a dissertation on Morris’s acting in 1956, she never completed the biography she envisioned.7 The enigmatic Morris is an elusive subject, her unpublished diary surprisingly opaque. There are tantalizing gaps in the record, lacunae she never explains, as she chronicles her daily activities for decades. Marginal notations, erasures, excised passages and pages all suggest that she edited the volumes, modifying some, destroying others, in an attempt to shape the story she chose to tell. The earliest entries date from July 1868 when she was a young actress touring with a Cleveland-based troupe. Despite such tribulations as oppressively hot weather, a cast member who breaks her fan with his big feet, tedious travel by horse and buggy, inedible food, demanding roles, and poor business, Morris’s pride in her accomplishments is unmistakable. The entries convey her impact on audiences, especially her ability to make people weep. They show that she worked hard, often on several roles at once. They also suggest the beginning of health problems that would eventually end her stage career. There are frequent references to illnesses, doctors, and medicine: “I did not go to rehearsal, was very sick all day, had to go home before the performance was over tonight”; “I am wretched, I am sick”; “very sick all day with headache.”8 Other entries offer insight into Morris’s psyche, a sense of the internal conflicts with which she wrestled as she tried to reconcile her determination to be an independent professional woman with the accepted domestic ideology of the day. A rich source of information about her career on the American stage, the diary records the untold story of her life in the theater: the stress of one-night stands on seemingly endless cross-country tours, the gnawing anxiety caused by contract disputes, financial losses, disappointing bookings, incompetent actors, jaded audiences, and hostile critics. Morris rose to fame in “modern” melodramas, plays based on mainly French originals and considered avant-garde. Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou provided examples of stunning theatricality. Emile Augier, Alexandre

3

Introduction

Dumas fils, Octave Feuillet, and others supplied innovative subject matter, exploring domestic and social problems with penetrating insight. The resulting adaptations riveted audiences and scandalized critics with their bold presentations of controversial issues. Some admired these plays for their uncompromising realism. Others considered them artistically deficient and morally subversive, dangerous because they exposed such evils as prostitution and adultery and blamed society for its unjust treatment of women. Their central female characters typically were the “victims of social usage,” and Morris excelled at playing them.9 People marveled at her ability to interpret roles so different from her own life experience. The tormented women she routinely impersonated bore no resemblance to the respectable Morris they knew from interviews and newspaper society columns. She certainly took great care to ensure that people did not confuse her with her stage creations. In that sense, Morris was representative of the era in which she lived. Given the stigma against the stage, still a reality in late nineteenth-century America, many actresses portrayed themselves as the epitome of gentility and refinement, drawing a clear line between their personal and professional lives. Although she would never admit it, however, Morris’s theatrical performances mirrored her troubled private life. As the diary reveals, she wrestled with her personal demons in play after play. She repeatedly mined her dark memories and used them freely over the years in her fiction, as well as in creating her signature stage roles. The publications and the performances provide a window on her Dickensian past and illuminate aspects of the story she chose not to tell but which shaped the woman and the artist she became. Acting out versions of her experience, Morris spoke to themes in American culture. However unique her life was, it also can be seen in terms of dominant societal tropes. The victimized women she played resonated with nineteenthcentury assumptions about acceptable roles for women and what happens to those who defy proscribed social norms. A study of her stage career must consider options for and images of women in this era, particularly women in theater. Her highly publicized failure as Lady Macbeth in 1875 reveals as much about the bias of the critics who rejected her interpretation as it does about her strengths and weaknesses as an actress. There is the disturbing fact of her morphine addiction, which figured prominently in her sickness and suffering. Like so many others at the time who sought relief from chronic pain, Morris was first “morphined” by her physicians with the cure becoming an illness in itself. In many ways, the female morphine addict was simply another kind of “invalid woman,” a familiar archetype in nineteenth-century life and literature. Far from being an aberration, Morris’s fragility fit the era’s prevailing stereotypes of women as weak and vulnerable.

4

Introduction

Yet she denied reports that she used “stimulants” of any kind and played on public sympathy as audiences applauded her appearances straight from the sickbed. In spite of her many statements to the contrary, the diary reveals her inability to escape from the escalating spiral of substance abuse. Beyond the voyeuristic glimpses it provides of her personal struggles, Morris’s diary illuminates the transformation of American culture and society in the late nineteenth century. Theater is always a sensitive barometer to change, and her career has to be understood in its historical context. Thanks to the railroad and the burgeoning entertainment industry, remote areas once isolated from the cultural mainstream could now enjoy a variety of live offerings. Traveling stars crisscrossing the country could profit as long as there were people eager to see them in their signature roles and latest stage successes. Yet there also were negative consequences as touring hastened the decline of the stock-company system and forced countless actors into nomadic careers that played out in an exhausting series of one-night stands. In The Life of a Star, Morris regaled her readers with recollections of an appearance in San Francisco. On stage in the title role in Jane Shore, she discovered the ruby velvet costume she had borrowed was infested with fleas. Ever the stalwart trouper, she wriggled her way through the performance and won an ovation from the appreciative audience.10 When writing in her diary, however, she viewed such experiences with horror, not humor, and depicted the grime rather than the glamour of theatrical life. Like her novel, A Pasteboard Crown (1902), her entries show the tawdry underside of American show business and the toll it takes on its vitiated participants. Morris’s complex experience touches on the issues of aging and ageism in a society that privileges youth and beauty. Particularly problematic for a performer, few roles remain for the older actor, especially when that actor is a woman. James O’Neill was in his late sixties before audiences questioned his appearance as Edmond Dantes, the young hero of The Count of Monte Cristo, a part he had played for years. Morris, in contrast, was only in her mid-thirties when critics complained that she was too unattractive to continue as teenaged Alixe, one of the roles on which she had built her reputation. Actually, they never considered her appearance an asset, and she accepted that harsh assessment in reflecting on her stage career. Her works contain such self-deprecating statements as “I, who was not beautiful” and “I was not blond or beautiful,” comments that photographs belie. According to the prevailing tastes of her era, however, she was not the preferred female type and had to rely on the emotional impact of her performances rather than on physical allure. A journalist marveled in 1910, “Wherein her power lay I do not know. She was plain and small, yet she took the part of lovely, betrayed women and ravished her audiences.”11

5

Introduction

In a country obsessed with celebrity and success, what happens to someone who fails as publicly as Morris did? To her credit, when her stage career ended, she reinvented herself as a writer and was lauded as a “Woman Kipling.” Her fiction and nonfiction reproduce familiar tropes, providing moving tales and moral lessons created for her largely female readership. Yet her writing also is a bravura performance in which she draws on the explosive material of her childhood to inform her work. The memoirs shape her story as she wanted others to view it and present her as a multiple outsider: on account of gender, class, even geography. Her determination to conceal the painful complexities of her adult life produces three autobiographical volumes, each of which is a highly fictionalized account. Her didactic short stories and novels, on the other hand, not only allow insight into her unsettled early years but also suggest the gulf between her optimistic public persona and the torment she reveals in her diary. However self-absorbed she may be—and a diary always provides a forum for the self—Morris includes accounts of local, national, even international events. Although she has not written a comprehensive chronicle of her era, her observations are illuminating, especially as they deal with such occurrences as the massacre of General George Armstrong Custer (a man she admired and whose loss she mourned), the San Francisco earthquake, or the end of World War I. Ultimately, however, hers is the most compelling story. Even after years of adversity and illness, she remained surprisingly resilient. Her life is as much a tribute to the power of the human spirit as it is an effective means of exploring American theater and society in the Gilded Age and the first quarter of the twentieth century.

6

1 That

F

air Peak of Triumph

FOR A THEATER-MAD DECADE, it was another glittering opening. Under the glare of gas lamps, carriages snarled in a traffic jam outside Augustin Daly’s handsome Fifth Avenue Theatre on West Twenty-fourth Street, adjacent to the fashionable Fifth Avenue Hotel. The young manager was presenting the eighth production in his third successful season, designed as always to impress New York’s discerning playgoers with the combined talents of his large troupe. Determined to break with the star system, he worked hard to create a genuine ensemble in which every actor played major and minor roles. Yet, keenly aware of box office revenues, he never let his desire for equitable casting obscure the individual strengths of his company members. The current production, Article 47, was a sensational drama in five acts, which Daly himself had adapted from a French original by Adolphe Belot.1 It had a cast of twenty-three, but only one person had captivated the top-hatted men and bejeweled women who streamed out to waiting cabs on the evening of 2 April 1872. In the role of Cora, the vengeful Creole, Clara Morris had scored another triumph. In her second season then with Daly, Morris had surprised New York audiences the previous year with her dazzling appearance as Anne Sylvester in Man and Wife, a Daly adaptation based on the Wilkie Collins novel. Morris, a recent transplant from Ohio, replaced the female lead, Agnes Ethel, who left the production early in the rehearsal period. Daly had his doubts about Morris, whom he found physically unprepossessing, but he thought she had the potential to carry the part. As it turned out, she carried the play as well. In true storybook fashion, the unknown “young actress from the West” made her debut on the New York stage and, according to the New York Herald, “achieved a success of the most unqualified kind.”2 Instantly popular and regarded as a major new talent, Morris experienced a meteoric rise from obscurity to acclaim under Daly’s management. Although they often clashed, she understood the importance of refining her artistry as a member of his company. Much as she craved recognition, she played roles 7

That Fair Peak of Triumph

of varying size as he insisted. Cora, however, was the part that established her reputation as one of the leading actresses of her generation. “When the curtain fell,” Daly’s brother, Joseph, recalled, “she was the mistress of the American stage.”3 A lurid melodrama with an improbable plot, Article 47 centers on racism and domestic violence. Before the action begins, Georges Duhamel has tried to murder his lover, Cora, an “octoroon.” She survives the shooting, disfigured. At the opening of act 1, Duhamel is on trial for his crime. After hearing the testimony against him, including an eloquent statement from Cora, the court sentences him to five years in the galleys and banishes him from Paris under article 47 of the penal code, which bars former convicts from living in the city. Eight years pass. Duhamel resides in Paris illegally with his young wife, Marcelle. Cora, now known as Madame Delafield, runs a fashionable gambling salon where she recognizes him one evening. She threatens to expose him to the authorities unless he makes nightly visits to her establishment. When he spurns her advances, she vows to destroy him. After sending an incriminating letter to the police, however, she plunges into madness and dies “a raving maniac.” Georges is free to enjoy the purity of his love for Marcelle, having finally escaped the “fatal passion” of a “colored woman.” In the twisted values of this emotionally charged play-world, Cora is the dark demon who provoked him to act violently. Even though he maimed her, she is seen as the guilty party, condemned by nineteenth-century mores to madness and death. Morris said little about Article 47 in her diary but discussed in Life on the Stage her intense and careful preparation for the role of Cora. Almost thirty years after the eventful premiere, she remembered how apprehensive she had been when Daly told her the production’s success or failure depended on her performance. She was particularly worried about fashioning the scar she considered essential. Although the actress who played Cora in Paris had left her face unblemished, simply draping a scarf beneath her chin to suggest the damage that Duhamel had inflicted, that was an option Morris rejected. She intuitively understood that Cora’s fatal vengefulness would make little sense without a ghastly injury but did not know how to create it. Riding home one night after rehearsal, she found the solution. On the other side of the horse-drawn streetcar was a “large and handsome mulatto woman” whose throat had been cut “almost from ear to ear.” “Faint and frightened,” Morris forced herself to study the scar, noting the white “cordlike welt” with “puckering edges” and “threatening” red flesh on either side. Leaving the car at its next stop, she raced to a druggist’s shop for supplies with which to reproduce “that riven throat.” Using “slender rolls of cotton, covered and held with gold-beaters’ skin,” she duplicated what she had seen, with “angry red spaces”

8


painted between “dull white welts.” To complete the dramatic effect, she distorted the shape of her eye by attaching “strong sticking-plaster” to the lid. Morris had a “rare scar” indeed but much to Daly’s dismay had no coherent concept for the character. Even visits to the local “madhouse at Blackwell’s Island” had not inspired her. She was so expressionless in rehearsal he feared she would ruin the play. The crucial mad scene was particularly lifeless. “I simply stood still and spoke the broken, disjointed words,” she recalled, as her frantic manager ordered her to act. “But what are you going to do at night?” he cried. When she did not reply, he refused to watch her rehearse the scene any longer and left the room in disgust. The night before the opening performance, Morris saw a production of Il Trovatore, which inspired her. In the privacy of her room after the opera, she “had it out with Cora, from A to Z.” In a welcome burst of creative energy, she worked until dawn, clarifying her concept of the character and choreographing her movements. Even the staccato style of this passage in her memoirs suggests the intensity with which she thrashed out the details of her interpretation: Tried this walk and that crouch; read this way and that. Found the exact moment when her mind began to cloud, to waver, to recover, to break finally and irretrievably. Determined positively just where I should be at certain times; allowed a margin for the impulse or inspiration of the moment, and at last, with the character crystal-clear before me, I ended my work and my vigil.4 It was only when she saw the sun rising that she realized she had been up all night. She had lost all sense of time. Confident and calm, she was ready for Article 47’s premiere that evening. With its white marble façade, graceful proscenium arch, and thickly fringed curtain, the Fifth Avenue Theatre was one of New York’s most attractive houses. Its handsomely appointed interior made it an ideal venue for Daly’s productions. Article 47 was no exception, and many reviews praised its “scenes,” “furniture,” and “dresses.” The New York Times admired the “finish and elegance” of the costumes and noted that the “setting” was more expensive than anything Daly had previously constructed. The problem was the play itself, which the Times called “morbid” and described as “a nightmare of a piece.”5 After two tedious acts, the situation improved with Morris’s entrance as a Cora hellbent on revenge. The crouch she had refined the night before served her well. A reviewer for the Spirit of the Times made particular mention of her effective “tigerlike postures,” praising them as both “admirably conceived” and “strongly executed.”6 The appreciative audience burst into thunderous applause, rewarding her with numerous curtain calls before the play could proceed.

9


Morris returned to the stage for the dreaded mad scene. “The low, eerie music caught my attention and awakened my imagination,” she recalled, and “in another second I was mad as a March hare,” with a low, gibbering laugh” that “swelled into the wild, long-sustained shrieking ha! ha!” Much as it loathed the play, the Times praised the “dramatic power” and “passionate intensity” of Morris’s performance. Although noting that she was “not yet a highly refined and cultivated artist,” the reviewer recognized her as “a woman who can feel very deeply, an actress who can make others feel” and predicted a promising future.7 Morris neither elaborated on the specific choices she made for Cora nor discussed the emotional and psychological reservoirs on which she drew. Other comments, however, evoke the electricity of that opening night. Written years after the theatrical event when nostalgia may have clouded critical objectivity, they capture the striking physicality of her interpretation. Scholar and playwright Brander Matthews spoke of her hypnotic effect on the audience. He remembered the “absorbed stillness during the final act . . . when suddenly we became aware . . . that the silent woman rocking her body to and fro was going mad before our eyes.” Theater historian George C. D. Odell claimed, “Anyone who saw Clara Morris in her prime in this part” would never forget that scene: “the rocking figure, the staring eyes, the muttered ravings, increasing in intensity until, as Cora tore the covering from her ghastly-scarred cheek, that last frightful maniacal shriek ran through the house and simply chilled to the marrow all who heard.” Playwright Clinton Stuart called it “acting that made the blood run cold”: “She paced on the floor like a caged animal, then sat and chattered half-incoherent sentences. The approach of delirious madness was indicated with exceeding subtlety, and the scream and final fall electrified the house.” He even described drama within the drama when Daly rushed from the wings to lift Morris from the stage floor and found her “half-insensible.” Having thrown herself to the ground so violently that her bracelets “had cut into her,” she took her curtain calls with both wrists bleeding.8 In appealing to popular taste, the play had it all: sex, violence, madness, the whiff of scandal, the threat of miscegenation. But it was Morris’s riveting performance that made the dramatic event memorable. Her diary captures the exhilaration of the moment: My benefit night—Packed house, every box taken—three calls—four baskets of flowers—one lovely bouquet of stemmed flowers—47th performance of 47. Season closed tonight with a good house. . . . —I came off with flying colors—received two receptions—a call at the end of third act and two calls

10


for the mad scene. There was also a call at the end and a superb basket of flowers bearing in the center the figures “47,” red figures on white ground. I am so thankful my resting spell has come at last. . . . I have played Cora 77 times.9

Cabinet photograph of Morris as Cora in Article 47, 1872, a lovely image that neither conveys the terrifying passion and “tigerish” power of her interpretation nor reveals the disfiguring scar she worked so hard to create. This picture is typical of her publicity photographs, which fail to capture the emotional intensity and graphic portrayal of acute physical pain for which she was known. There are no photographs of Morris in performance. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

11


A well-deserved holiday took her by steamship to England, where she enjoyed shopping, sightseeing, and attending theater: Medea with Kate Bateman, Dion Boucicault and Agnes (Robertson) Boucicault in his Arrah-na-pogue, and Don Giovanni at Covent Garden. She also made her first trip to France, returning to New York at the end of August to prepare for the upcoming season with Daly’s company. It began on 3 September with Diamonds, an unexceptional comedy by Bronson Howard, in which she and Fanny Davenport had small parts. In the acerbic words of one reviewer, “they impersonated two schoolgirls as well as could be expected, as nothing like either character was ever seen in life.”10 Morris appeared in three of the next ten productions and won favorable notices for all. Her performance as Magdalen Atherleigh in New Year’s Eve, or False Shame, a three-act comedy by Frank Marshall, was especially well received. The play itself would have been forgettable, had it not figured in a catastrophe. Shortly after the matinee on New Year’s Day, Daly’s theater burned to the ground. In an era of gas illumination, when open jets often ignited flammable scenery, theatrical fires were all too common. (By Odell’s tally, it was the twelfth in the city since 1865.) Having had a premonition of disaster earlier in the day, Morris brought her jewelry box home. She was shocked nonetheless when her landlord burst into her room and told her the Fifth Avenue Theatre was ablaze: With a piercing cry, I caught up my cloak, and throwing off somebody’s restraining hands I dashed down-stairs and into the street, racing like mad, giving sobbing cries, and utterly unconscious for over two blocks’ space that my waist was unclosed and my naked throat and chest were bare to the wintry wind. Disregarding her own welfare, she broke through the crowd and the police barrier in front of the theater. In a moment of madness worthy of Cora, she hurtled toward the burning building. Just as she was about to run inside, a hand restrained her. It belonged to Augustin Daly, who led her across the street to watch the fire. “All was seething flame,” she recalled, in Life on the Stage, “like some magnificent spectacular production—some Satanic pantomime and ballet.” She and Daly stood in silence until the roof suddenly collapsed. He shivered and turned away as a column of sparks flew into the air, thanked her for staying with him, and sent her back to her apartment. She fell, exhausted, into a chair, and wailed, “It’s gone! the only theatre in New York whose door was not barred against me . . . and dropping my face upon my hands, I wept long over the destruction of my first dramatic home in New York.”11 The laconic version of the same event in her diary raises questions about the veracity of her memoirs: “5th Avenue Theatre burned after the matinee. I

12


ran all the way from home to the theatre at the fire alarm—remained until the walls fell and the fire was nearly out. Mr. Daly took it very coolly—Nothing saved! How glad I am I brought my jewelry home.”12 She would soon need it onstage. Although uninsured and facing an incalculable loss in terms of sets, costumes, props, manuscripts, and records, Daly was undaunted. By the time his friends gathered to express their condolences on the night of the fire, he had already secured a space. He had signed a two-year lease for the New York Theatre, the house in which his own play Under the Gaslight had premiered in 1867. The building was dilapidated, but it was the only vacant theater in the city. Eager to be back in business, Daly began gutting its cavernous interior the next morning, reshaping it from back wall to front door in sixteen working days.13 The new Fifth Avenue Theatre opened on Tuesday night, 21 January 1873. As Joseph Daly remembered it, the “eager crowd that poured into 728-730 Broadway . . . found themselves on velvet carpets in an interior of crimson and gold and in the very atmosphere of the uptown ‘jewel box.’” The New York Times reported that people were in a celebratory mood and broke into spontaneous applause as the members of the orchestra took their seats. After a spirited overture, the red curtains parted rather than dropped—a novel feature that impressed the Times—and revealed the assembled company, elegantly attired in evening dress, standing in a semicircle at the front of the stage.14 All took part in a comic address, written by actor-playwright John Brougham. Not quite doggerel but hardly polished verse, Brougham’s poem made light of the fire and expressed high hopes for the future of the company. Clamorous calls for Daly brought the manager to the stage. After quipping, “The casket is gone, but the jewels are safe,” he signaled for the production to begin. It was Alixe, which he had adapted from a French original centering on a guilty secret and its tragic consequences. Yet another cautionary tale about an errant woman, this time it is the woman’s innocent child who must pay for her mother’s sins. Gentle Alixe has grown up in the country with her mother, Madame Valory, who has concealed a troubled past. Years earlier, as the Countess of Somerive, she abandoned her husband and infant daughter to flee with her lover, who died shortly after fathering Alixe. Now sixteen, Alixe has spent two months vacationing at a chateau and looks forward to a reunion with her mother. Complex circumstances and stormy weather drive others to take shelter there as well. They include Henry, with whom Alixe falls into virtuous love; his fiancée Lucienne, the child abandoned so long ago; and Lucienne’s father, the spurned Count Somerive. Silver bracelets confirm identities. Intercepted letters reveal past mistakes. Emotional scenes of recognition propel the play to its painful finale. Incompre-

13


hensibly, Alixe holds herself responsible for the actions of the mother she adores. She decides to drown herself, hoping that Henry and Lucienne will be free to marry, and the count will pardon his estranged wife. Standing over her daughter’s lifeless body, the weeping countess reads her poignant suicide note. It ends, predictably, with a plea for mercy, lest her death be in vain. With the assembled mourners nodding in tearful approval, Somerive forgives his repentant wife. Although Daly had strengthened the title role, neither he nor Morris anticipated the sensation Alixe would cause. She thought she would be miscast as the teenage heroine and urged him to choose another actress. Claiming he needed the drawing power of her name on opening night, he promised to replace her after the first week. She reluctantly agreed and began preparing for the part by focusing on her costumes. In order to heighten Alixe’s virginal appearance, she chose a blonde wig (“flaxen hair parted simply and waved back from the temples to fall loosely on the shoulders”), white dress (“a thin, white nun’s veiling gown, high-necked and long-sleeved, over a low-cut white silk lining”), pale blue sash, and “heelless slippers.”15 Her most challenging decision concerned the play’s last act in which she had to look convincingly dead as she lay onstage. She had seen the production in Paris and found the visible breathing of the French Alixe distracting. She tried removing her corset but realized that those in the audience using opera glasses would still detect the rise and fall of her chest. After experimenting with other possibilities, she designed a dress identical to the one she had been wearing, except looser at the waist. A cloak of the same fabric completed the costume and created the illusion she wanted. It was a brilliant solution. People marveled at the eerie stillness of Morris’s body, the most memorable effect in the show. As rehearsals progressed, she was drawn to the character she had at first disliked but did not yet know how to interpret. Alixe’s “perfect innocence,” so unlike Cora’s “tigerish” power, demanded a different approach. The choices she had made for Article 47 would not work in this play, and she feared that she would not be able to portray Alixe believably. After considering such possible models as Ophelia, she had an epiphany: “Innocence is alike the world over, I thought; it only differs in degrees. I sprang to my feet! I cried joyously: ‘ . . . I won’t act at all! I’ll just speak the lines sincerely and simply and leave the effect to Providence.’”16 At first glance, these words are puzzling. Because everything Morris did on stage was, by definition, acting, what could the decision not to act possibly mean? They are understandable in nineteenth-century terms, however, when acting was extremely physical, and there was great emphasis on making strong stage pictures. Bold gestures and decisive movements were not simply effective in creating a character; they were central to the theatrical experience audiences expected to enjoy. The simplicity for which Morris strove was a departure from 14


the accepted approach. By proceeding from an understanding of Alixe’s inner life, she was shaping a believable characterization. In deciding not to act, as she put it, she was building a powerful yet subtle performance, striking in its modernity. Daly was unimpressed, convinced that people would find it boring. How wrong he was! As Morris recalls that memorable night—her cloying words typical of the way she describes her younger self—the impact of her interpretation was immediate and profound: The audience accepted the joyous little maid almost from the first girlish, love-betraying words she spoke, and yet . . . they thrilled with a nameless dread of coming evil. . . . Before the first act ended, we discovered that the tragedy was shifting from the sinful mother and was settling down with crushing weight upon the shoulders of the stainless child. At the end of the fourth act, “a whirlwind broke loose in that little theatre” as “the curtain shot up and down, up and down,” and the applause was deafening. The suffering of poor, wronged Alixe had produced the desired emotional response. “The whole audience,” an eyewitness asserted, “was in tears and raptures.”17 Her diary captures the joy of that triumphant evening. On 21 January 1873, an ebullient Morris wrote, “Greatest success of my life—6 calls. Mr. Daly led me out after the last act. House packed. My reception an ovation. How delighted I am.” The following day she noted proudly, “Every paper has something nice about Alixe. I have recieived [sic] some delightful letters of congratulations.”18 Critics considered it her best work to date. As a chaste, virtuous, self-sacrificing victim, she embodied one of the period’s favorite stereotypes, and reviewers were lavish in their praise. The New York Times admired Morris’s “depth of feeling,” “delicacy,” and “subtlety of perception.” The Spirit of the Times, which had repeatedly criticized her for lack of discipline and artistic control, declared that she expressed “the varying and strong emotions which the heroine feels” with “great facility and power.” The New York Tribune found her portrayal “fresh in its beauty, intense in its emotion, . . . an adequate and superb revelation of a woman’s passionate love.” The New York Herald predicted with confidence that her “fame” would soon spread beyond “the narrow limits of this island” as her gifts became known throughout the country.19 In three seasons, Morris had reached what she later called “that fair peak of Triumph” where “there is no knowledge of sin or suffering, of death or hate; there is only sunshine, the sunshine of success! love for all those creatures who turn smiling faces on you, who hold their hands to you with joyous cries.”20 Success, however, would be evanescent. In roughly the same amount of time it had taken to establish her reputation, she would topple into the arid wasteland of artistic failure. No longer under Daly’s management, she would stumble badly in a series of ventures that revealed her limitations as an actress. By 1876, 15


less than three years after Alixe made her a star, the Union Square Theatre’s Albert M. Palmer declared, “She was in great need of rehabilitation,” having been “a failure everywhere.” Against his better judgment, he decided to give her a chance to redeem herself, although he doubted that she would be able to resurrect her flagging career.21 What could have caused such a precipitous decline in Morris’s theatrical fortunes? The answers lie somewhere in the traumatic events of 1874–75, a crucial period that forever altered the course of her life and artistic development. Other clues can be found in her troubled childhood, when years of poverty and deprivation shaped an ambitious but physically and emotionally scarred adult.

Cabinet photograph of Morris as innocent, sixteenyear-old Alixe, 1873. If Cora’s maniacal ravings inspired fear, Alixe produced its cathartic partner, pity, as audiences wept. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

16

2 The

M

aking of an Emotional Actress

IN LIFE ON THE STAGE, Morris provides a selective account of her early years, a childhood as melodramatic as the plays in which she appeared. Vague about specifics, she tells a story that rivals the Brothers Grimm in its clear division between good and evil, love and hatred, hope and fear. She says she was born on 17 March in Toronto, Ontario, and makes much of her birthday’s being on Saint Patrick’s Day. She describes the weather at length but fails to note the year—a significant omission that caused confusion about her age for the rest of her life. Such sources as the Dictionary of American Biography establish it as 1848, while others, including Who’s Who in the Theatre, cite 1846. Many of Morris’s diary entries, however, confirm 1847 as her birth year. On 17 March 1900, for example, she wrote, “1847 to 1900 is a good many birthdays to thank people for remembering. God is merciful to me—I thank him humbly for many gifts—Life first!”1 That is not the only deliberate omission in Life on the Stage. In the chapter “I Am Born,” Morris writes cryptically, “I came to a house where trouble and poverty had preceded me, and, worse than both these put together—treachery.” She does not elaborate on its specific nature, identify her parents, or describe the circumstances of her birth. She moves instead to her mother’s discovery of her husband’s duplicity, then to her flight from Toronto with her six-monthold daughter, Clara. Morris does not reveal where they settled but notes it was the first of many such swift escapes from “the big, smiling French-Canadian father” who became their “dread.” Although her mother assumed her mother’s maiden name (Morrison) “as a disguise,” mother and child lived in constant terror of discovery. Morris describes fear of her father and intense love for her mother as the defining antipodes of her peripatetic childhood. Her father was a menacing stranger who threatened to disrupt whatever security she had and to destroy the only meaningful relationship she enjoyed. To avoid detection, she wore a veil over her face whenever she went outside during the day and spent her first 17

The Making of an Emotional Actress

four years mainly “in growing and learning to keep out of people’s way.” The next four years were even more difficult. Isolated from other children, she attended school intermittently and “never played with any living creature save a remarkable cat.” While her mother worked at menial jobs (seamstress, housekeeper, laundress, cook, maid, nurse) in a series of boardinghouses and private residences, Morris spent months sitting quietly on hard chairs “for hours and hours at a time,” with the result that she was often unable to stand, her “limbs being numbed to absolute helplessness.” She understood that such sacrifices were necessary in order to remain with her mother; she, in turn, would do anything to keep her daughter, as long as it was “honest work.” Morris responded with ardent devotion, writing of “that love for my mother which was to become the passion of my life.” “To me as a child,” she explained, “she was the one woman of [sic] the world.”2 Interestingly, the themes of mother-love and self-sacrifice pervade Morris’s fiction and the plays in which she would star. “Still flying from [her] seemingly ubiquitous father,” the nine-year-old Morris and her mother moved to the southwestern part of Illinois. She describes their long railroad trip and how they smelled of vinegar because the pickles her mother had packed in her large carpetbag had spilled, soaking all their clothes. She recalls their thirty-mile carriage ride over the open prairie and the sight of a beautiful orchard at sunset, which cheered her. Even the “rough farm-house” that was to be their home did not dampen her enthusiasm. In the “two precious years” she would spend there, “the charm of that backwood [sic] life never palled.” She does not say where she and her mother actually were or with whom they lived but details the special joys of “this new, strange life.” She learns to plant grain and corn. She gathers fruit and nuts. She tends farm animals. She knits her own stockings. Best of all, she finally meets other children who become her friends. The idyllic interlude ends when Morris’s mother learns her husband has died, and she decides to return to urban life. She chooses Cleveland, the first city Morris identifies other than Toronto. She can find work more easily there, and her daughter, now ten, can go to public school.3 Although Life on the Stage contains a more detailed account of Morris’s early years than Stage Confidences and The Life of a Star, there is much it does not disclose. As George T. MacAdam wrote in his notes for the book he planned, “Paternity! real name! the autobiography leaves them both shrouded in mystery.”4 Fascinated by the woman he considered a “unique genius,” he had the opportunity to purchase “ten or twelve bushels of biographic material in the raw” after her death. A member of the film company that acquired her Riverdale estate in 1913 had given him “a diary kept by Clara Morris in 1869,” which “had been fished out of a heap of litter in an attic room.” Intrigued, MacAdam negoti-

18


ated to buy the remaining memorabilia and obtained “many other diaries,” as well as “letters, photographs, clippings and business papers.” In reviewing the material, he realized that “all her life Clara Morris guarded with jealous care three secrets—her family name, her father’s name, the circumstances of her birth.” He wondered if he could “lay bare those old secrets” and “reach back, across more than three-quarters of a century and exhume facts that would illumine that vague, strange story of her childhood.” He eagerly assumed the role of biographer as sleuth and made important discoveries about the past Morris worked so hard to conceal. Although occasionally too eager to embellish facts with melodramatic scenarios of his own invention, his research has led to a better understanding of Morris’s early years and an appreciation of the highly autobiographical nature of her fiction. MacAdam began his detective work by “digging slowly” through the old papers. It was “dull, profitless reading” until he found a newspaper bill for the publication of Sarah Jane Proctor Morris’s death notice: “Proctor!—here was my first encounter with this name in connection with Mrs. Morris, or, as she was known in the earlier days, Mrs. Morrison.” He immediately wondered if Clara Morris had “put on her mother’s coffin-plate her maiden name [Proctor], the only name she was legally entitled to bear, together with the assumed one [Morrison] that she had borne the greater part of her very long life.”5 Another discovery brought him closer to the answers he sought: “a large, flat package wrapped in brown paper, labelled ‘The Brat.’” It turned out to be the manuscript for the novel Morris published in 1904 under the title Left in Charge. On its first page, MacAdam was astonished to see a “Note to Compositor,” containing the following directive: “Whenever Proctor appears change to Parsell throughout the story.” “Again the name Proctor!” he exclaimed. “Also evidence of a decision to camouflage it!”6 Hoping Morris’s diary would help, he turned to the 1903 volume because the manuscript indicated it as the year in which she began the novel. The revelation proved elusive until 9 May. On that date Morris wrote, “Another reminder from England of pedigree hunters—funny in my case—whose pedigree should they search for—Morris, Morrison, Lamontagne, Proctor? I am my family.”7 Lamontagne was “a new name,” and MacAdam suspected it belonged to Morris’s father but lacked conclusive evidence. What he did have was a scrawl at the back of the 1891 diary: “Miss Nevada S. Proctor, 633 Vine Street, Quincy, Ill.” Convinced that she was related to Morris, he did not know if he would find her alive, because more than thirty-five years had passed since Morris had recorded her name and address. He sent her a list of questions nevertheless and hoped she could help him reconstruct Morris’s history. While awaiting her reply, he “built a family tree of the Proctors as they would appear in the novel.” When he

19


received her response two months later, he was delighted to find it confirmed his suspicions that “the Proctor family tree of fact and fiction were identical” and that “Miss Nevada S. Proctor was a cousin of Clara Morris.” A subsequent discovery would prove even more illuminating: Morris’s mother’s account of her desperate childhood in Canada. MacAdam called it “The Mother’s Story” and said he found it “among some old papers in the attic of Ornith Cottage,” Morris’s last home. Although it was “an almost undecipherable manuscript, bad handwriting, bad spelling, bad grammar, no punctuation,” it provided invaluable information about the woman who would be her daughter’s lifelong companion and soul mate, whom Morris describes at one point in her

Undated cabinet photograph of Morris’s mother, Sarah Jane Proctor Morrison, probably in the early 1870s. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

20


diary as “my mother, my sister, my best friend—my Sarah Jane.”8 The lives of mother and daughter were so intertwined that it is impossible to understand Morris without considering her mother’s experience. All three sources—the Proctor genealogy, Sarah Jane’s story, and the novel—reveal far more about Morris’s family background and early years than the sanitized version she presents in her memoirs. According to MacAdam, as reconstructed from the material Nevada Proctor provided, Morris’s great-grandfather, William Proctor, emigrated from England to America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was most likely a farmer and settled somewhere in Pennsylvania, where he married a woman named Sarah. They had a son, whom they probably called William. This William would also marry a Sarah, Pennsylvania-born Sarah Morrison. That couple (Morris’s grandparents) had five children: William, Elizabeth, Sarah Jane, John, and Catherine. Sarah Jane, their second daughter, was Morris’s mother, born in Harrisburg on 17 April 1823;9 John, the younger son, was Nevada Proctor’s father. In the late 1820s, the extended family—the elder William and Sarah Proctor, along with their son William, daughter-in-law Sarah, and grandchildren—moved to Canada. Like many other Americans at the time, they hoped Canada would provide an escape from economic depression in their own country.10 In MacAdam’s words, “they chose as their new home a frontier settlement not far from Toronto,” then “a raw young city on the edge of a great wilderness that stretched from Lake Ontario to the Arctic.” Actually, the city had been called York since 1793 and would not return to its original name, Toronto, until its incorporation in 1834. York, then the capital of upper Canada, and its frontier outposts saw a groundswell of immigration in the late 1820s. According to Sarah Jane’s account, written in her peculiar orthography, they lived “in a place caled dundaS in canaday,” along with “plenty oF indianS the chipawayS,” who “came oFten to are houSe.”11 The Proctor family went to Canada in search of new opportunities but encountered great hardship instead. Sarah Jane’s father soon died in the harsh surroundings, leaving her mother, Sarah Proctor Morrison, a widow with five children. They moved in with William and Sarah Proctor, who told their daughter-in-law “there was . . . not room for all.” The solution was to keep their oldest granddaughter, Elizabeth, to run their household and to send their oldest grandson, William, to learn a trade. Sarah Proctor Morrison went to work elsewhere as a housekeeper, taking her two youngest children, John and Catherine, with her. Four-year-old Sarah Jane, however, was left to fend for herself. In her haunting words, “i waS turned out to root or die and i rooted but i wiShet hundreds oF times that i could die.”12

21


For several years, she worked as a servant in households where she was poorly fed and routinely tormented. She finally found a better situation in the home of a “kind faSet woman,” Mrs. Stephenson, who kept her for more than two years and was the only person Sarah Jane remembers as having been good to her. When her employer no longer needed her, she went to work for one of her neighbors “at the big house.” Her description of life there suggests either that civilization had come to the backwoods or that her frequent moves to new places of domestic employment had brought her closer to Toronto. Accused of stealing, Sarah Jane left that position after three years and drifted from household to household. At that point, her narrative stops. Morris drew substantially from these recollections when she created Left in Charge’s Selina Parsell Marsh, her mother’s fictional counterpart down to the monogram. As the novel begins, Selina and her young daughter, May, have left Cleveland by train and have come to Quincy, Illinois, in search of relatives. Their destination is a farmhouse on the Warsaw Road, “some place between the villages of Marceline and Lima.”13 On the carriage ride from the train station to the farmhouse, Selina grows introspective. May chats with the driver while Selina sits motionless, “with closed eyes and tight-clasped hands,” picturing herself as a “mother-hungry little girl” in a Canadian forest. Her employer having permitted a brief visit home, she “came running from the woods” only to discover the house deserted, her family gone. The distraught child Selina learns her family has joined a group of proselytizing Mormons and has set out by covered wagon for the “Zion that’s to be Missouri” or Illinois. When her mother balked at leaving her daughter behind, the Mormon elders promised they would stop for Selina, although they had no intention of doing so. Knowing that her mother did not willingly abandon her brings some comfort, but Selina feels as though “her heart had broken in her breast.” Her only recourse is to remain a servant. She returns to her position with Mrs. Humphries—the name of Sara Jane’s first employer—and stays for several years. Overworked and underpaid, she is spared the brutal treatment Morris’s mother received. “She grew tall and pretty and was advanced to a responsible position in the household”; still she longs for “one touch of her mother’s hand on her hair, for one kiss from the lips that had been so velvet-soft on her cheek.” No word ever came.14 Sarah Jane’s memoir does not deal with this traumatic episode, but Nevada Proctor’s letter confirms it. Disenchanted with their hardscrabble life, the Proctors returned to the United States in the early 1830s and settled in Adams County near Lima, Illinois. Two of Sarah Jane’s siblings, Elizabeth and William, remained in Canada, but she had no contact with the rest of her family for more than twenty years. As Morris transforms her mother’s story into fiction,

22


she omits many of the more disturbing incidents so that the focus shifts from the cruelty Sarah Jane endured to the resilience and courage Selina develops. When she is fifteen and Mrs. Humphries returns to England, she is alone again. She faults her employer for failing to teach her to write—she can read printed letters but not handwritten script—and understands that her quasi-illiteracy will bar her from such desirable positions as “nursery governess.” Resigned to domestic service in Toronto, she resents that she is “always being driven from pillar to post, from one situation to another . . . —often without sufficient food, never quite comfortably clothed, sometimes in desperate need.”15 The city in which she found herself, however, was flourishing. When Charles Dickens visited Toronto in 1842, he was impressed with its vitality, its “life and motion, bustle, business, and improvement.”16Toronto was a city of merchants, tradesmen, and artists, with hundreds of stores. In Morris’s novel, Selina’s employer sends her to one of them, “the principal draper’s shop on Toronto’s main business street,” to buy fabric. Absorbed in her search for flowered chintz, she is startled to see a rabid dog lurching in her direction. As it dashes toward her, someone strangles it. The hero is a “big smiling man,” Charles Paul Lavalle, who assures her that she is safe. Actually, the danger is far greater than she could have imagined. En route to Illinois years later, Selina bitterly recalls her “headlong love for the well-spoken, well-to-do, well-looking French Canadian who had filled her heart with pride and gratitude.” She regrets their “swift courtship” and “reckless marriage,” an “almost unwitnessed” service in “the most obscure church findable.” Within months of their wedding, Selina discovers that her husband is having an affair. She decides to ignore his infidelity and to focus on his positive qualities, not the least of which is that he treats her more kindly than anyone else has for most of her life. After a year and a half of marriage, they have a daughter and are reasonably happy. Then, on one “awful day,” Selina learns the shocking truth and understands why their wedding ceremony took place surreptitiously: her husband is a bigamist as well as a philanderer. Morris constructs a scene worthy of the most vivid stage melodrama. Selina is at home with her baby when “a woman half mad with passion” bursts into the room. She identifies herself as Lucie Laballe [sic], Charles’s wife and the mother of their three grown sons. Cursing her rival, she draws a dagger from her dress and lunges, nicking the baby’s arm. The sight of her child’s blood enrages Selina. After shaking Lucie so violently she drops the dagger, Selina pushes her away and returns the weapon with a contemptuous kick. She flaunts her marriage certificate, throws a daguerreotype of Charles to the floor, and ejects Lucie. “After that,” the novel continues, “Selina’s life had been—purgatory! The man followed her, cajoled, pleaded, threatened—at last promised the tormented

23


woman peace if she would give to him his ‘May-flower,’ his ‘blue-eyed, milkwhite child.’” Selina’s response is that she would rather strangle her daughter than release her to him. Morris describes their travail in cadences that are almost biblical: “And so she changed her name often and fled from one city to another, to escape his persecutions. And the child feared him beyond death and the devil, and was taught one lie: ‘That she had no father!’ If pressed, she was to say: ‘He was dead.’” Mother and daughter eventually settle in Cleveland, where Selina finds employment in a boardinghouse. One day she hears a woman mention the Parsells and learns that “people of that name, who had left the Mormons, were settlers in Illinois, near Quincy.” She shares her story with the woman, who contacts the postmaster of the area on her behalf. He confirms what she hoped might be true: “the old mother was alive, was living with baby sister Kate, who was now Mrs. Jason Gallaway.” “With the mother-craving stronger than ever,” Selina travels to Illinois to find her mother and to save her child from Charles Paul Lavalle.17 MacAdam understandably wondered, “How much of this is truth? how much fiction?” It would be tempting to assume that Left in Charge is wholly autobiographical and to see it as an accurate version of the story to which Morris vaguely alludes in her memoirs. The “treachery” preceding her birth could have been the sham marriage and her consequent illegitimacy. MacAdam believed her father’s real name was Charles Lamontagne, the name she mentioned in her May 1903 diary and disguised as Charles Lavalle in the novel: “Charles Lavalle! La valle, the valley; la montagne, the mountain.”18 It is impossible, however, to date Sarah Jane Proctor’s arrival in Toronto or to find her name in a city directory. The 1846–47 volume includes a Charles Lamontaigne (not Lamontagne), whom it identifies as a “cabman.” Toronto’s first “cab,” a red and yellow horse-drawn carriage that held four passengers, appeared in 1837. By the 1840s, cabdriving had become a profitable business. Many people left other positions to become “cabmen,” and Charles Lamontaigne, whom the 1837 City Directory lists as a blacksmith, may have been one of them.19 Because the city’s first cabstand was in the center of the shopping district, Lamontaigne could have met Proctor there. Eager to verify Lamontagne’s relationship to Morris, MacAdam contacted Mollie Revel, one of her dearest friends. He had a letter she sent Morris, which included her return address. When he visited her in the Bronx, the conversation soon turned to Morris’s childhood: I mentioned the name of Charles Lamontagne. Miss Revel knew the name and what it stood for in Clara Morris’s life.

24


“Then you know that Clara had a brother and a sister?” the old lady queried. Here was unexpected, disrupting information. In the intimacy of a dressing-room chat, Miss Morris had told Miss Revel that she had a brother Clarence and a sister Eliza; that she believed Eliza had perished in the Brooklyn Theatre fire. . . . That was all! Yes, Miss Revel had been curious, wished that Miss Morris would tell more; but she felt that it would be indelicate to ask questions, and Miss Morris never again referred to either Clarence or Eliza. 20 MacAdam had no reason to doubt Revel’s account but found it baffling because Morris does not mention siblings in Life on the Stage: This was not a mere omission—a brother and sister would be a contradiction of facts, for if Sarah Jane Morrison, shortly after the birth of Clara, her first-born, had fled from Charles Lamontagne, if the father had become a hated bogey, how could there have been two other children? A subsequent marriage was a possibility. What then had become of the second husband and of his name?21 MacAdam returned to Morris’s papers where he found an anonymous letter she received shortly after her November 1874 marriage to Frederick Harriott. It contained tantalizing information: I understand your father left you in the “long ago” and the feelings you have entertained, were, and may still be, that he did not care for you. As I understand the case . . . it was impossible for him to help any of his children, or then to help himself. He went to South America twenty-two (22) years ago, and remained there until a month or two ago, when he returned to this country, as I have it, “old, childish, a cripple and poor.” He may be found by addressing Charles Lamontagne, Esq., care Dr. Minor, Buffalo, N.Y.22 “Three things” struck MacAdam as particularly significant: “First—the name, Charles Lamontagne. Second—contrary to the story told in Chapter II of the novel,” as well as in her memoir, “it was the man who fled from woman and child. Third—the year of his disappearance was 1852,” when Morris would have been have been five, not the infant she claims she was in Life on the Stage and Left in Charge. Although the letter’s reference to children could

25


have included those from his legitimate marriage, it would have been possible for Lamontagne and Proctor to have produced another daughter and a son between 1847 and 1852. It is unclear when Charles and Sarah Jane left Toronto or if they had other children there. There is no Charles Lamontagne or Lamontaigne in the 1850–51 city directory (the next volume after 1846–47), although there is a listing for a “Mrs. Lamontaigne” living on “King St. East.” Neither Lamontagne nor Lamontaigne appears in subsequent editions of the directory for the next several years. As MacAdam learned in 1926, moreover, the office of what was then called the Ontario Registrar General did not begin civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths until July 1869. At that time, religious leaders and civic officials were asked to forward copies of their old records, but few actually responded. Consequently, there is no record of the marriage of Charles Lamontagne and Sarah Jane Proctor, nor is there a birth certificate for their daughter, Clara (or for any other children). Much to his surprise, MacAdam found that James Harris, a Presbyterian minister, had submitted a certificate for the marriage of “Charles Lamontagne to Bridget Doyle,” which he had “solemnized” on 8 April 1834.23 Encouraged by this information, MacAdam continued to mine for biographical gold. Notwithstanding Nevada Proctor’s insistence that she had never heard of any Morris siblings, MacAdam returned to the diary. The 1891 volume contained a striking entry, written when Morris was performing in Buffalo, New York. On 17 October, she noted she was on her way to the theater when “old Mary Shields” told her something she had never expected to hear: “She says LaMontagne [sic] is not dead—Can he be living still?” She did not comment further but wrote instead about financial matters: “A gentleman from [Erie] Savings Bank called for information about Eliza Burt, I could give none—Her account will expire unclaimed shortly by limitation of the law and I—or mother—am the natural heir. . . . I am to hear further about it.”24 Because Mollie Revel had said that Morris’s sister’s name was Eliza, MacAdam went to Buffalo to inquire about Eliza Burt. He met with the president of the Erie Savings Bank, who produced documents confirming that Eliza P. Burt, “now Mrs. George A. Burtis,” had opened an account in 1867. When he heard that she was living “in the middle West Side of New York,” MacAdam returned to Manhattan and a search of its city directories. Although he found a George A. Burtis, clerk, listed in the 1880s and early 1890s, his name disappears after 1894.25 Leafing through the diary once again, MacAdam discovered that Morris had written on 28 December 1898, “A George Burtis is dead—I wonder if it is Elizas [sic] husband.”

26


Hoping he had found the married name of Morris’s sister, MacAdam continued his investigation. From Burtis’s obituary, MacAdam obtained the date and place of his burial. On a trip to the cemetery, he located the Burtis family plot, as well as family records that enabled him to contact Burtis’s niece, Helen Delongy. When he visited her in Connecticut, she showed him a Burtis family Bible in which he read, “July 26, 1882: George A. Burtis married to Eliza Proctor Burt of Buffalo.” The appearance of the name Proctor convinced him that Eliza Burtis was Morris’s sister. The Burtis relatives, however, had lost contact with her and did not know if she was still alive. Because Burtis had been a Civil War veteran, MacAdam traveled to Washington to find his widow’s name on the “pension rolls.” He learned that a pension had indeed been granted in 1908 and that the last check had been sent to 62 Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. The intrepid biographer rushed back to New York by train and went to the address he had just obtained, only to see that there had been a fire, and the house had been demolished. Turning to the police for help, MacAdam was sent to “the old janitress” who had worked in the building. She not only remembered Eliza Burtis but also was able to tell him where to find her: living in squalor in a tenement on West Fifty-sixth Street “in the old Hell’s Kitchen district off Ninth Avenue.”26 Seventy-eight, crippled by rheumatism, and almost blind, the “little cameo-featured woman” whom MacAdam finally met had long suspected she and Clara Morris were sisters but had never communicated with her.27 Thanks to MacAdam’s persistence and ingenuity, however, Surrogate George A. Slater of Westchester County declared Burtis “the sister and only heir at law” of “the late Clara Morris,” who, as the New York Times reminded its readers, had been “America’s most famous actress.”28 In a hearing at Burtis’s apartment that resulted in Slater’s ruling, MacAdam related what he believed was the true story of their early years. Based on the evidence he accumulated, Sarah Proctor Lamontagne had not fled from her husband when she discovered his bigamy. Instead, she and Charles left Toronto—possibly together, probably separately—with their daughter, Clara. Seeking to escape from his wife Bridget, Charles and Sarah traveled across Lake Ontario to Buffalo, where Eliza was born, most likely in 1849. In 1852, the year in which Charles allegedly deserted his second family and departed for South America, MacAdam speculates that Bridget arrived in Buffalo, having finally located her errant husband. By that time, Sarah Jane was pregnant again. Unable to cope with the demands of two small children, perhaps hoping that her younger daughter would have a better life than she could provide, she gave Eliza to Henry and Henrietta Burt, who adopted her.

27


Then, in an attempt to evade Bridget, Sarah left Buffalo for Cleveland, Ohio, taking only Clara with her. When MacAdam asked Eliza Burtis why she had never contacted her mother, she replied, “I couldn’t understand how any woman could leave her own child.” Even though she “wanted somehow to get in touch with [her] sister,” she “thought better of it.”29 In Cleveland, MacAdam contended, Sarah Proctor Lamontagne was known as Mrs. Morrison, a widow. She began working as a nurse and housekeeper for Philetius Swiss Bosworth and his wife, Frances. The childless couple did not object to Clara’s presence in their home, unlike many of Morrison’s other employers. When she gave birth to a son, whom she may have named Charles after his father, the Bosworths adopted him.30 The two children spent a great deal of time together. After Bosworth became “undersheriff ” of Cleveland, brother and sister often played in the corridors of the city jail. According to MacAdam, the real threat to the security of Morris’s childhood was not her father but rather his vengeful wife, Bridget Lamontagne, who had followed them to Cleveland.31 MacAdam’s account is compelling, but directory listings confirm little of it. The Buffalo City Directory for 1849–50 includes a Charles Lamontagne, although the entry does not reveal much. It says simply, “Lamontagne, Charles, hotel, cor. Prime and Dayton,” meaning either that Lamontagne was living in a hotel at the corner of Prime and Dayton or working in one. The directory does not mention family members and contains no listings for Proctor or Morrison. The 1848–49 edition includes a Henry B. Burt, butcher; by the following year he has become a justice of the peace and presumably was a solid citizen who could have given Eliza a comfortable home.32 A Philetus (not Philetius) S. Bosworth appears fairly consistently in Cleveland listings, although not as an undersheriff. Over the years, his occupations are given as paver, grader, foreman, and contractor. There is no Bridget Lamontagne, Sarah Jane Proctor, or Sarah Jane Morrison. Morris herself does not surface in the Cleveland Leader City Directory until 1866–67. As MacAdam envisions their marginal existence, Morrison and her daughter moved from household to household, from job to job. They occasionally stayed with kind people; more commonly, Morrison’s employers treated her harshly and refused to allow her daughter to live in their home. At these difficult times, Morris returned to the Bosworths or to a boardinghouse where her mother had worked and did her best to disappear into the shadows until they could be reunited. According to MacAdam, it was not simply others who acted cruelly. Morrison, too, was capable of abusive behavior. Prone to savage rages, she disciplined her daughter harshly, boxing her ears and whipping her, often without provocation. He held her responsible for the crippling back injury that plagued Morris for the rest of her life:

28


There was that time—tragic in its consequences—when the mother hurled the child across the room. Little [Clara] was ill after that and a doctor had to be summoned but he could not diagnose the trouble. Recurring illnesses: finally the diagnosis—spinal trouble.33 It is unfortunate that MacAdam produces no evidence with which to substantiate this serious allegation. Morris’s unwavering devotion to her mother, who lived with her until her death at ninety-four, undermines its credibility. Although it is tempting to speculate about the complicated nature of their relationship, there is nothing in Morris’s fifty-four-volume diary to support the charge of child abuse. Yet, in Morris’s memoir, her mother emerges as a disciplinarian with an explosive temper. She boxes young Clara’s ears—“a custom now considered criminal in these better days,” the adult Morris notes with some satisfaction—for spelling the word mouse incorrectly and for chewing gum noisily. In her fiction, too, several characters bear Morrison’s indelible emotional stamp. Left in Charge’s Selina, for example, threatens to whip her daughter for “impertinence” and often lashes out at her, both verbally and physically. When asked why she is “so exacting” and “so severe” with “such a gentle child,” she responds with words Morris must have internalized: Why? because she has to live in other people’s houses—because I have to work for my living, and a strange child, always unwelcome, may only be tolerated in the house as a very paragon of silent obedience! That is why the rod is always so close to my hand! It’s not exactly a joyous life that is led by the mother of the unwelcome child.34 At the same time, she is her daughter’s fiercest champion, capable of expressing intense love as well as caustic disapproval. In writing about her younger self, Morris opts for innocence and vulnerability. She calls Life on the Stage a “story of a little maid’s clamber upward toward the air and sunshine that God meant for us all,” and that typifies the way she describes herself throughout the book. She invariably is a little “girl,” “child,” or “maid.” She is virtuous, kind, thoughtful, loyal, trusting, spirited, brave, industrious, honest, pious, and pure. Resourceful and clever, she can be as hot-tempered as the mother she adores. A perpetual outcast, she is the poor one, the tearful little girl, the young woman “unsheltered and alone,” for whom “poverty would be a cruel stumbling-block” and whose “crushed childhood” would affect the course of her adult life.35 MacAdam found a corroborating source for Morris’s depiction of herself as an unhappy outsider in a letter written to her in 1901 by John N. Stewart, a

29


Cleveland schoolmate. MacAdam traveled to Ohio to interview him. The “grayhaired old gentleman” described Morris’s mother, then a boardinghouse cook, as someone who “swore like a trooper when she got mad.” Stewart remembered Morris as having been ostracized by her classmates, “snubbed” by girls and boys alike. “She had no pals, belonged to no clique,” he told MacAdam. “During recess hours, the other children got together in groups; Clara was left to herself, a lonely, isolated body in the midst of the exuberant hubbub of a schoolyard. I say she was left to herself, but that isn’t even quite accurate: sometimes the children taunted her.” She never responded, he explained, because they “had made her feel that the daughter of a cook didn’t rank with them.”36 Morris drew freely on her childhood memories in the short stories she began to publish in the 1890s and collected in two volumes in 1899: A Silent Singer and Little “Jim Crow” and Other Stories of Children. The latter contains many obviously autobiographical pieces that focus on a needy little girl dependent on the kindness of strangers. Loss, want, and deprivation figure in all of them. Some, like “My Pirate,” are fairly innocuous. Its adult narrator tells of a young railroad engineer she knew as a child when they lived in the same Cleveland boardinghouse. He befriends her but leaves her forever when he moves to the “far West” after being blinded in an accident aboard his train. 37 Others are darker and convey a sense of the frightening instability of her early years. “My Mr. Edward” and “A Pretty Plan,” for example, replicate the frequent moves from household to household, the understanding that she is unwanted, and the emotional and physical distance from a harried, overworked mother.38 The cumulative effect of these stories is unsettling. Those in A Silent Singer are even more disturbing. Morris creates a desolate fictional world in which people are thoughtless, cruel, and selfish. The title story, its illustrative point unclear, is a dismal piece about frustration and failure. Its narrator is a spirited girl named Carrie who appears in several stories, often as the narrator, sometimes as the adult narrator’s younger self, but always meant to represent Morris as a child without a childhood with many obstacles to overcome. As MacAdam describes her, she has brown hair woven into long braids, “big, wide-open eyes . . . usually a soft gray-blue,” and a “face preternaturally solemn—so very solemn that many grown-ups laughed at the bare sight of her.”39 The most macabre is “The Gentleman Who Was Going to Die” in which the adult narrator recalls her friendship with little “golden-haired” Charley. Son of the local sheriff, Charley lives at the jail where he and Carrie play. One inmate, a convicted murderer, horrifies and fascinates them. He tells them stories and strokes Carrie’s braids through the bars of his cell. Having attempted suicide by slashing his throat, he requests a final visit with the children before his execution. Although the sight of his “ghastly face” frightens them, they approach his

30


bed. Charley jumps up and kisses him, but Carrie cannot. Instead, she brushes his lips lightly with her fingers and lets him kiss them. It is their last encounter with him. They are sent to the country so as not to see his hanging. His cell is empty when they return.40 It is difficult to know how truthful this story is or what lessons Morris hoped it would impart. MacAdam believed that “Charley” was Morris’s brother, Charley Bosworth, with Carrie meant to represent the young Clara. If the behavior depicted actually took place, an impressionable young girl could have found it disturbing. Every aspect of this episode—playing in the jailhouse, being fondled by an inmate, seeing his bloody wound—could have left the adult Morris with psychic scars. It certainly would have provided her with ample source material for the tormented stage characters on which she built her reputation. Morris and her mother left Cleveland for rural Illinois some time in 1856 or 1857. As Nevada Proctor assured MacAdam, the sojourn her cousin describes in Life on the Stage and Left in Charge was based on fact. Selina Parsell Marsh, like Sarah Proctor Morrison, hopes to find members of her family after a twenty-year separation. Overjoyed when she is reunited with her mother, who knows her instantly, Selina soon sees she has made a terrible mistake. It is not simply the ramshackle farmhouse in which she and her daughter are unwelcome guests, the indigence of her relatives, or the lack of opportunities in this impoverished area. It is the realization that the sister she remembered as “baby Kate” is a shrew who tyrannizes the household. Morrison’s sister, Catherine Proctor Gallemore, becomes the novel’s Catherine Parsell Gallaway. According to Walter B. Jackson, son of the hired man, ’Lonzo, who appears as a character in the book, the real Kate was much worse than her fictional counterpart.41 In the novel, Selina endures almost two years of Kate’s jealousy and vindictiveness, escaping whenever she can to work as a cook or housekeeper elsewhere. She establishes a relationship with her brother John, who lives nearby and provides a modicum of moral support. Nevertheless, the discovery that Kate has stolen her inheritance by secretly altering their grandfather’s will drives Selina away. She announces that she can no longer remain under “the same roof with that cold-hearted, cruel woman” and is going “back East” with her mother and daughter.42 According to Nevada Proctor, Sarah Proctor Morrison returned to Cleveland with her daughter but without her mother for different reasons. 43 She stated that Morrison began working for William L. King, her sister-in-law’s uncle. King owned several tenant farms and ran a distillery on the property where Morrison came to live, about six miles from the Gallemores. Evidently she became pregnant by him. Two letters from Nevada Proctor to MacAdam

31


confirm that she gave birth to another daughter at the home of her brother John (Nevada’s father) and that the baby “was admitted to be the child of my mother’s uncle, William King.”44 She believed that the infant died in “an institution” a short time later. If this account is true, it would have been the third time that Sarah Proctor Morrison had abandoned a child. One wonders about the long-term impact of her actions, however subliminal, on her observant, imaginative daughter, Clara.45 In Cleveland, once again, Morrison was a boardinghouse cook, living with her daughter in claustrophobic servant’s quarters. In MacAdam’s words, “the old restless, shifting life had begun over again. One place of employment followed another. Sometimes Clara accompanied her mother; sometimes she was left with old Mrs. Miller or with the Bosworths who now occupied a house at the corner of Scoville Avenue and Church Street.”46 In December 1861, however, they set out for Portage County, Ohio, a village thirty miles from Cleveland. Based on one of Morris’s diaries that is no longer extant, MacAdam believed they went to visit Grandfather Proctor, the same grandfather who had treated Sarah Jane so cruelly in the Canadian wilderness.47 She had learned that he was still alive and had settled in rural Ohio after breaking with the Mormons. It is hard to imagine what, other than sheer desperation, could have motivated her to contact a man who had farmed her out as a household drudge when she was little more than a toddler and had shown no subsequent interest in her. Her daughter’s diary provides no answers but serves as a record of their threemonth stay with him. The cover bears the following inscription: Clara Morrison’s Diary Pond, Portage County, O. (A New Year’s Gift). I, myself, Clara Morrison, wish I was in Cleveland at school.48 Any hope she and her mother had for a permanent home with him quickly evaporated. Entries show that she missed Cleveland and found her great-grandfather irritable and unpleasant. They juxtapose her precocious ability with the hardships of their daily life: Here it is another year—and I sit down to write a little. . . . We came out . . . from Cleveland last Monday—I am real lonesome. It was wash day and I helped mother some—this evening I did a little drawing.

32


Mother ironed—Mary Henry came over—She is the first female that has been here yet—I am going to writing school—this evening had an introduction to a lot of girls Went to school—Got there a long time before the doors were open—I was perfectly disgusted with it Got up early this morning and while I was dressing Grandpa looked at me awfully . . . and I looked defiance at him Got up late and read Jane Eyre most of the day I could not go to school because I had no shoes It snowed and rained today—I put a piece of leather in my calfskin shoe so I could wear it and went to school—Ma had a quarrel with grandpa Got excused a little after noon and went out to skate but it was so rough and the wind blew so much that I could not skate much—Ma stayed in the kitchen all day and I never spoke out loud the whole evening Ma swept all over the house—Grandpa was as cross as a bear with a sore head This was the last day of school—Did not go—Oh joy!49 The remaining entries provide a similar chronicle of domestic duties and outdoor activities, interspersed with comments about the weather. She notes her great-grandfather’s black moods—“Grandpa looked sullen enough” (16 March), “the old man raised a muss again” (26 April)—and senses escalating tension between him and her mother, “Ma had a fuss with grandpa big enough to fill two bushel baskets” (18 March). The final entry on 28 April suggests that their parting was abrupt and acrimonious: “It rained some—we had our orders to leave—I have been packing up—Ma washed all our clothes, then she had to bring them in to dry—The old man has gone to Blairs all night.” That last line makes it sound as though Grandpa Proctor cannot even tolerate the sight of them and has left the house. Morris and her mother returned to Cleveland. It was the spring of 1862 and their lives were about to change. Within several weeks, fifteen-year-old Clara would join a theater company. Like so many others, she would turn to show business to fulfill the American dream.

33

Photograph of a young Clara Morris in Cleveland in the early to mid-1860s, probably shortly after joining John Ellsler’s company at the Academy of Music. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

3 Theatrical

A

pprenticeship in Cleveland

ON 17 MAY 1893, Clara Morris joined actresses Georgia Cayvan, Julia Marlowe, and Helena Modjeska in Chicago at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, a weeklong colloquium designed to showcase the advancement of women in various fields and “departments of intellectual activity.” Convened during the World’s Columbian Exposition, the congress drew almost two hundred thousand to its seventy-six sessions and featured more than six hundred speakers. The topic the four actresses discussed was “Woman and Her Relations to the Drama.” Several thousand packed the Hall of Columbus and the Hall of Washington for their presentation, with an overflow crowd spilling into anterooms and corridors.1 Cayvan, Marlowe, and Modjeska approached the subject historically, acknowledging female pioneers and voicing hope that women’s growing power and influence would shape a new theatrical era. Morris spoke more personally. Focusing on her own experience, she expressed gratitude to a profession that had given her “every good thing” and praised the theater as a splendid teacher, particularly for someone whose schooling had been haphazard. She explained the transformational impact of a stage career: “It takes you by the hand and leads you by paths of romance and dramatic incident from land to land, from age to age, and, best of all, from poet to poet, till you reach the knees of Shakespeare’s self. There our greatest and mightiest have stood with the humility of little children to learn the A B C of that great art we call acting.”2 Morris’s “education” began in Cleveland in 1862. After the Portage County fiasco, she and her mother were back at Mrs. Miller’s boardinghouse. It was spring, and as she writes in Life on the Stage, she was “a great girl of thirteen.” (Actually, she was fifteen, having just celebrated her birthday in March.) Upset because her mother was being “cruelly overworked,” she did not know what to do. Another young boarder, Blanche Bradshaw, suggested that she try acting. Morris thought she was joking until Bradshaw told her about an opportunity in the theater company to which she belonged. John A. Ellsler, actor-manager 35

Theatrical Apprenticeship in Cleveland

of the Academy of Music, needed ballet girls for an upcoming production. Although Morris was skeptical, Bradshaw encouraged her to meet him. The two girls set off for the theater the next morning, Morris with her “heart beating almost to suffocation.”3 Having recently assumed the management of the Academy of Music, Ellsler was anxious to establish it as Cleveland’s most prestigious theatrical venue and to ensure the stability of its resident troupe. He understood the challenges such a venture entailed, because Cleveland had been surprisingly slow to embrace the idea of a permanent theater company. Notwithstanding the theatrical boom that much of the country had enjoyed in the 1850s, the “Forest City” lagged behind Midwestern neighbors Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati in making a demonstrable commitment to theater. “Can Cleveland support a theatre?” the Cleveland Leader wondered in an article about the most recent attempt to solve this “old problem” in 1861. The paper answered its own question three days later, when it reported that the Academy of Music’s resident company “had disbanded because of private difficulties.”4 The career of its new actor-manager was as checkered as Cleveland’s theater history.5 After years of frustration and failure, he and his wife, Effie (Euphemia Emma Myers), hoped to build a successful theater there. The model they chose, the resident stock company, still dominated the nation’s theatrical activity. Based on a British model and established well before the Civil War, it remained the leading organizational system in American theater throughout the 1860s, although its end was closer than the Ellslers realized. Headed by an actor-manager and hired by him (or, rarely, her) for a season that usually ran from fall through spring, the stock company performed a variety of works in repertory rotation, either in a permanent house or on tour. Counting fulllength plays and shorter afterpieces, the repertoire could include well over one hundred attractions.6 In addition to featuring their own actors throughout the season, stock companies showcased the work of traveling stars. The expansion of the nation’s railroad lines made it possible for guest artists to visit major cities, as well as smaller towns, in the central part of the United States. Firmly entrenched in the American theater by midcentury, the “star system” was an excellent way for managers to boost box-office revenues by presenting visiting celebrities supported by local favorites, although theater historians would later recognize it as having contributed to the stock company’s decline. In 1862, however, engaging star attractions was still regarded as mutually beneficial, enabling the featured luminary to attract a national following and a resourceful manager to fill the theater. Ellsler was keenly aware of the need to do brisk business. Even in conservative Cleveland, there was competition. Audiences could enjoy varied fare at

36


other venues, including Brainard’s Hall and the Weddell House, where individual performers and traveling companies appeared fairly regularly. The 1862 Cleveland Leader lists numerous entertainment offerings in the city, among them, performances by “illusionist, pianist, and seer” Robert Heller, General Tom Thumb, “East India Magi” Professor Hambujer, rope-walker W. H. Donaldson, and “little fairy” Dollie Dutton. Sanford’s Opera Troupe and several minstrel companies (Christy, Morris, Frank River’s, Hooley and Campbell’s, and Johnny Booker’s) also had Cleveland engagements that year. In addition to lectures and readings, such attractions as the Zion Musical Society, the Hutchinson Family, and soprano Adelina Patti gave public concerts. Clearly, there was a great deal at stake for the man whom Clara Morris had reluctantly agreed to see. One of the reasons for Morris’s hesitation, undoubtedly, was the theater’s questionable status in American society. Although no longer considered as disreputable as it had been earlier in the century, American theater still had its

Undated photograph of John A. Ellsler, actor-manager of the Academy of Music in Cleveland. Morris’s first mentor, he had a profound influence on her personally and professionally. Courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.

37


vocal detractors. Some saw it simply as frivolous and irrelevant, while others viewed it more darkly as dangerous, immoral, and unchristian. The stigma against the stage in general and actresses in particular remained strong, even as people seeking diversion flocked to theaters in increasing numbers. Public and private debates continued to rage about the viability of theater as an institution and the propriety of dramatic performances.7 While the “woman question” was attracting national attention—especially in the years following the first women’s rights convention in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York—the pace of historical change had not yet begun to accelerate. The theater, which gave women visibility and voice, was particularly threatening to those who subscribed to that mythic construct, the “cult of true womanhood,” and believed that a woman’s place was with her family in the home her husband, father, brother, or son owned. A woman speaking publicly on the stage could not play the idealized role of quiet, subservient “fireside angel” dedicated to her domestic duties as wife, mother, daughter, or sister. Choosing a professional career in the theater precluded the selfless commitment to home and family that society sanctioned, considered culturally correct, and expected of a woman. According to theater historian Claudia D. Johnson, the life of the successful nineteenth-century actress was “a constant repudiation of the inevitability of female limitation preached in America.”8 Not surprisingly, many Americans saw actresses as morally suspect, even sexually deviant. Notions of “woman’s proper sphere” began to change by midcentury. Such exemplary performers as Fanny Kemble, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Olive Logan had shown the nation that actresses could be respectable. Nevertheless, doubts remained about the legitimacy of the theater as a profession and the character of the people it attracted. The struggle for social acceptance would define the evolution of the nineteenth-century actor, male as well as female. It certainly would become a driving force in Morris’s life and a recurrent theme in her work. It was the theater’s ambiguous social status that made it accessible to someone like her. Given her working-class background and, more important, her illegitimacy, employment opportunities would have been limited. She could have followed her mother into domestic service or worked in a Cleveland factory. With training, she might have succeeded as a seamstress or a shopgirl. The irregularity of her upbringing and education precluded teaching or working as a governess, but theater was less restricted by class concerns. Open to women of talent and ambition regardless of social status, it offered the possibility of financial reward, professional achievement, and some measure of equality with men. Yet it was a difficult career path, as author Louisa May Alcott discovered after briefly considering acting as a vocation in Boston in the mid-1850s. In a letter to her family, she wrote that theater manager Thomas Barry had convinced

38


her to abandon her plans when he said that “he would never advise anyone to choose that profession it was such a hard life & few succeeded.”9 Perhaps Barry believed that Alcott was too genteel for the stage. That was not an issue for Ellsler in hiring Morris. Her size, however, was. He does not discuss their first meeting in his memoirs, but she describes it from his perspective in hers: I was much put out by a business matter and was hastily crossing the corridor when Blanche called me, and I saw she had another girl in tow; a girl whose appearance in a theatre was so droll I must have laughed, had I not been more than a little cross. Her dress was quite short—she wore a paleblue apron buttoned up the back, long braids tied at the end with a ribbon, and a brown straw hat, while she clutched desperately at the handle of the biggest umbrella I ever saw. Her eyes were distinctly blue and were big with fright. Blanche gave her name and said she wanted to go on in the ballet, and I instantly answered she would not do, she was too small—I wanted women, not children, and started to return to my office.10 Blanche protested but Morris, who sounds very much like the solemn child in so many of her short stories, remained silent. Ellsler noticed her trembling hands and realized she was crying. Moved, he changed his mind. Although he said he might have something for her “in a day or two,” he had decided to hire her. In thinking about it afterward, he realized she “won an engagement . . . with a pair of tear-filled eyes.” Returning to the theater three days later, Morris learned she would be a ballet girl in The Seven Sisters and receive “three dollars a week, or fifty cents a night” for the two-week run. According to MacAdam, she wrote in her diary that evening, “I went to see Mr. Ellsler. He said I would do. Oh, what emotion passed through my heart!”11 American audiences had first seen classical ballet in 1827 when Madame Hutin shocked audiences with her knee-length tutus. By 1834, when Madame Celeste performed in the United States, people seemed more comfortable with the idea of a woman in a revealing costume moving freely about the stage. The arrival of Austrian dancer Fanny Elssler in 1840 and the success of her twoyear American tour confirmed ballet as a respectable popular art form. Theater managers quickly saw the advantages of incorporating some of its distinctive features, most notably its scantily clad dancers, in their own productions. By 1860, every first-rate theater company had a corps de ballet. It soon found its way into lesser theaters across the country as well. “Ballet girls” had voyeuristic popular appeal and gave young women like Morris a chance to enter what she calls “that dim, dusty, chaotic place known as ‘behind the scenes’—a strange place, where nothing is and everything may be.”12

39


Laura Keene’s Seven Sisters was unlike anything Ellsler had staged, and he must have hoped its novelty would draw large audiences. Keene had created the musical mélange shortly after Lincoln’s election in 1860 for production at her New York theater, which was known for its lavishly mounted comedies. Business had declined on account of the secession crisis, however, and she knew she needed more than a drama to stimulate ticket sales. Her solution was The Seven Sisters, which she promised audiences was not a play but “merely a vehicle for the conveyance of music, scenery, dresses, properties, appointments, fun, laughter.” Advertised as “A Grand Operatic, Spectacular, Diabolical, Musical, Terpsichorean, Farcical Burletta, in Three Acts,” the show involved a visit to New York by the seven daughters of Pluto, king of the underworld. When one of them falls in love with an aspiring playwright, they all agree to help him produce his new work and to perform in it.13 Keene’s metatheatrical approach provided a flexible framework for the production. It enabled her to combine a variety of musical numbers with satirical sketches, as in the popular minstrel show, and to add spectacular tableaux that made the plot almost irrelevant. It also allowed her to capitalize on the drawing power of the corps de ballet. Thanks in large part to the “short-petticoated ladies” who appeared in several production numbers and left the general impression of “a hundred miscellaneous legs in flesh-colored tights,” The Seven Sisters enjoyed a remarkable run of more than two hundred performances and kept Keene’s theater open until August 1861.14 Ellsler would have welcomed similar success in Cleveland. In the weeks since the Academy of Music opened under his management, he had found it difficult to fill his house. In spite of encouraging reviews from the Cleveland Leader, which recognized the new company as “a very superior one,” attendance was inconsistent.15 Melodramas usually did well, especially if they featured a visiting artist like Sallie St. Clair in The White Terror or Frank Chanfrau in The Mysteries and Miseries of New York. Tragedies were not as popular, as Ellsler discovered when Neafie, “an actor of sterling merit,” played Hamlet. Dramas could draw if they featured a star of sufficient magnitude. Large audiences came to the Academy of Music to see Charles Walter Couldock in The Chimney Corner, as well as in Richelieu, The Advocate, Louis XI, and Still Waters Run Deep. Yet, business declined after his departure, inspiring a Cleveland Leader editorial: “We were sorry to see so small an audience at the theatre last evening. Ellsler, the manager, has spared neither pain nor expenses to establish a good theatre, and the public ought to see that he is liberally supported.”16 The next day, the paper went even further, chastising its readers for failing to support the new venture: We have in this city one of the finest theatres in the western country, and at the present time one of the best companies that ever graced its boards. 40


Last night two fine pieces were produced, . . . but the audience was small. It is a strange idea that most people have; they seem to think that actors can live upon air.17 Whether it was the effect of the admonition or the merits of the production, the Academy of Music’s next offering, a melodrama called The Sea of Ice, or the Mother’s Prayer, played to a crowded house when it opened three days later and was well attended throughout its run. As the Cleveland Leader reported, the “fine scenic drama” concluded “an unusually successful season of twelve nights to a large and fashionable audience.”18 Ellsler’s next production was The Seven Sisters. The Cleveland Leader acknowledged that the musical extravaganza had “very little plot” but assured its readers that they would still find it “very entertaining.” Over the course of the two-week engagement, the paper carried five notices about the production, clearly aimed at stimulating ticket sales. On 1 July, it reported, “The Seven Sisters is properly a burlesque in which all classes are introduced from Pluto,” played by Ellsler, “to the ‘irrepressible darky.’” Visually spectacular, it even replicated a local skating rink as the setting for several scenes. Midway through the run, the paper praised Ellsler for enhancing the production with “Uncle Sam’s Magic Lantern.” A spoof on “the political hacks of the North and South,” the new act was designed to increase the show’s topicality during wartime and, no doubt, to attract repeat customers.19 Morris recalled that the ballet girls appeared in three numbers: a “Zouave—or military—drill” and “a couple of dances.” They were dressed as fairies for one of them, with “flesh-colored” slippers, tights, bodices, and “seven white tarlatan [sic] skirts, as full as they could be gathered—long enough to come a little below the knee.” They wore wreaths of white roses and waved garlands of them as they danced. They also had wings that Morris remembers as being “nasty, scratchy things” and shed for their next appearance in colorful dancing skirts. For the drill, they carried rifles and wore the distinctive red uniforms of the Fire Zouaves, a military unit.20 The routine required a precision the young troupe had trouble mastering. As Morris noted in her diary, “It is pretty hard work to handle the musckets [sic]. . . . I went to a rehearsal. Also a night rehearsal: dressed up in a zouave suit. . . . We are bad in the drill.” By the opening performance the following evening, they had learned the intricate maneuvers: “We had the drill perfect, and it was applauded very much.”21 Mastering the Zouave drill was not the only memorable aspect of the production. As Morris tells it, something happened on opening night that changed her life. It occurred during a scene played as if it were taking place backstage, with “scene-shifters and the gas-men . . . standing about” and “everything . . . going wrong.” One of the ballet girls was supposed to arrive so late that she missed her cue, at which point the irate manager would grab her and throw her 41


out onto the “imaginary” stage. Overcome with real stage fright, however, she balked. She refused to make the planned entrance, as did all the other ballet girls except Morris. While the others shrank from the manager—probably Ellsler, the real manager, who also may have played that part in the scene—Morris nodded to him that she would do it and dashed across the stage. Reflecting on her courage that night, she says she interpreted it as a sign she should pursue a stage career and calls it the “first step upon the path” she would follow “steadily and faithfully” for more than four decades.22 At the end of the two-week run, she left the theater with her six dollars in salary and a new name, one that she would permanently adopt.23 At the first rehearsal, the stage manager had recorded her surname incorrectly when, distracted by the tumult backstage, she did not hear him ask for it. He wrote Morris instead of Morrison, and the error stood. Given the peculiarities of her family background, however, Morris was no less valid a choice. Neither was her real name, and Morris distanced her even further from her parents’ pasts. She also left with an offer for the 1862–63 season. Impressed with her spirit and her skill, Ellsler intended to keep her in the corps de ballet. Later that day, with her mother’s permission, she accepted it and experienced a pleasant “new feeling” she could not identify at the time. Describing it in her memoirs years later, she says it “was the self-respect that comes to everyone who is a breadwinner.”24 She could not have realized it at fifteen, but she would play that role, accompanied by more-complicated feelings, for the rest of her life. After two more productions in which Morris was probably not involved, The Angel of Midnight and The Gypsy Girl, or the Flowers of the Forest, the Academy of Music closed for the rest of the summer. The 22 July Cleveland Leader reported that “there was a crowded house” for “the last performance” of the season, and the actors “were called before the curtain and warmly cheered.” The 3 September edition noted that the theater was being “handsomely painted inside” in preparation for the fall opening just five days later. Red plush curtains now draped its large, raked stage. Gas footlights provided stage lighting, while a chandelier containing hundreds of china candles illuminated the auditorium. For the first two attractions, Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and Comediette’s Loan of a Lover, ticket prices would range from seventy-five cents for box seats to fifteen cents for the gallery.25 Morris received a speaking role within weeks. A diary entry captures her excitement: “Oh, we had such fun today playing. I spoke for the first time tonight on the stage—two lines as a nurse.” In another she wrote, “I had a part to learn, Tom Bruce in ‘Nick o’ the Woods.’ I spoke it very well Mr. Ellsler said.” She noted she performed in Ambition, Camille—which she found “very affecting”—and Romeo and Juliet, in which she had a part she did not identify. She

42


also appeared in the farces Little Pickle and Roll of Drum and in the company’s holiday offering, Bluebeard.26 In Life on the Stage, Morris remembers that she played one of the witches in Macbeth, but the Cleveland Leader did not recognize her in its review of the production on 22 June. However Morris may have distinguished herself, the newspaper did not mention her by name until May 1866 (coincidentally, the year in which she first appeared in the Cleveland City Directory), when it praised her performance as Joseph, “a boy of good heart and religious tendencies,” in Never Too Late to Mend.27 The lack of substantive source material—specifically, the absence of diaries, scripts, and reviews focusing on Morris, as well as the dearth of Academy of Music programs and other memorabilia—makes it difficult to chronicle her activities during this formative period without depending almost exclusively on the readable but unreliable Life on the Stage. Yet that volume, in combination with the Cleveland Leader’s coverage of Ellsler’s theater, provides some insight into her development as an actress and her determination to establish a distinct identity within the company. Ellsler continued to feature a varied repertoire at his theater in 1862–63, with double bills the customary offering. Comedies or melodramas followed by farces were most popular, but tragedies or dramas ending with musical selections also appealed to his audiences. Occasionally, with a particularly compelling play or a star of sufficient magnitude, only one piece was performed on a given evening. That was the case in December with the musical extravaganza Bluebeard. According to the Cleveland Leader, the company (which included John and Effie Ellsler in the leading roles, Ibrahim and Fatima) exhibited splendid acting, and the enthusiastic audience shouted its approval night after night. The paper did not mention Morris. Notwithstanding the quality of his attractions, Ellsler still had trouble filling his theater. Although the Cleveland Leader continued to praise the company as a source of “first-class amusement,” it noted several evenings that only had a “fair house” and others when the audience’s behavior was unacceptable. On 22 October, it chided theatergoers for “rising in groups and making for the door” before the final curtain. On 26 November, it criticized “some rowdies in the family circle who behaved scandalously” during Romeo and Juliet and “marred” some of the best scenes. Earlier that month, however, the paper suggested that Ellsler had gone too far in attempting to elevate the standards of conduct expected from audiences. He had angered people when he announced that “babes in arms” would no longer be welcome at his theater. The 13 November Cleveland Leader reported that he had received a petition “drawn up by a deputation of mothers” and signed by more than four hundred asking “in the name of justice . . . that the rule be stricken out.”28

43


On 21 January 1863, the newspaper announced that Ellsler had taken his company to Columbus, Ohio, where he was doing “good theatrical business.” The troupe did not appear in Cleveland until 13 April when it returned to the Academy in Money, or Duplicity Exposed and Jenny Lind, or the Swedish Nightingale. One of the most successful spring productions was a revival of The Seven Sisters. Among the highlights the Cleveland Leader praised were the “female Zouaves, comprising the ‘Lightning Brigade’ and commanded by ‘Captain Tom Highboy’ (Mrs. Dickson)” and “the ballet dance by twelve young misses.” The company concluded its season on 11 July with a benefit performance for one of its leading actors: a triple bill consisting of “The Dream at Sea, the farce The Man Without a Head, and the comic drama Toodles.”29 Ellsler continued this performance pattern for several years. The company would play in Cleveland from September through December, move to Columbus where the state legislature was in session (and new audiences were available) from January to the beginning of April, then return to the Academy of Music until June or July.30 Often, there would be summer tours to Akron, Canton, Warren, and other towns in rural Ohio. Morris wrote that she was unhappy when she first learned of Ellsler’s intention to leave Cleveland, because it meant a separation from her mother, yet she admitted she felt a “thrill of importance” at the thought of being more independent. She also was pleased to see her salary raised to five dollars, along with that of the other ballet girls, to cover the additional expense of living away from home.31 She knew she was receiving valuable professional training. Ellsler was a versatile actor from whom she learned a great deal, even though “the only word of instruction” he supposedly ever gave her was “speak loud—speak distinctly.” She admired his talent for playing “crying old men or broad-farce-comedy men” like Polonius or Dutchy (Mose’s sidekick in A Glance at New York) and said he helped her understand the need to create a compelling character on stage no matter how small the part. His performance as the old switchman in Under the Gaslight taught her that “the value of a character cannot always be measured by the length and number of its speeches.” Other company members offered advice about makeup and costumes and showed her how to analyze a script. She remembers that they “were never weary of discussing readings, expressions, emphasis, and action” or comparing interpretations of a particular role. Although she sometimes found this “weighing of words” and “placing of commas” tedious, she recognized its importance. 32 It was the visiting artists, however, who were most instructive. In writing about this important period in her own development, she portrays it as a golden era in the American theater in which exemplary actors inspired her to achieve comparable success. She is curiously silent about some of the more renowned

44


players with whom she appeared such as Lotta Crabtree and Adelaide Ristori but writes at length about others including Edwin Booth and his notorious brother John Wilkes, whom she recalls with particular fondness. Although a few of them ignored her, most were solicitous as she emerged from the ballet and began to play small parts in company productions. In her seven full seasons under Ellsler’s management, Morris claims she neither rose officially beyond the rank of ballet girl nor earned more than five dollars a week. Nevertheless, because she learned so quickly, he often put her in as “utility man” (as a servant, for example, or the leader of an angry mob). She rapidly moved to other roles. She remembers stealing a scene from comedian Dan Setchell, who starred in a series of raucous farces at the theater during the week of 5 October 1863. She was delighted to appear as the Player Queen to John Wilkes Booth’s Hamlet, probably during his weeklong summer engagement. When he returned in the fall, she joined two other ballet girls in white robes, wigs, tights, and makeup to form a trio of Grecian statues in the first act of The Marble Heart, a “romantic drama” in which he played Raphael, a self-sacrificing artist. Booth himself arranged their poses and the folds of their garments to create a striking visual effect against the black velvet backdrop.33 During the 1864–65 season, her third with the company, Ellsler asked her to play King Charles in James Robinson’s Planché’s Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady. When the actor who had been cast in the role suddenly became ill, Morris had to perform the part “in borrowed clothes and without any rehearsal whatsoever.” Ellsler was impressed with how quickly she memorized her lines and praised her professionalism. As she recounts the experience, however, she sees it more negatively as the beginning of her disenchantment with the company: “From that day on, I became a sort of dramatic scape-goat, to play the parts of the sick, the halt, the cross, the tricky, for whenever an actor or actress turns up with a remarkable study—the ability to learn almost any part in a given time—he or she is bound to be ‘put upon.’” Although flattered by the attention and grateful for the opportunity to act, she fretted about not receiving an appropriate salary increase and feared she looked ridiculous on stage because she lacked appropriate costumes, especially for women’s roles. She recognized the inherent inequity in the stock-company system: “Here, as everywhere, the man is the favored party, and the theatre wardrobe contains only masculine garments; the women must provide everything for themselves.”34 It is unclear whether it was the teenaged Morris who felt the “injustice” or, more probably, the adult Morris who reflected on it almost four decades later. As she recalled, “I suffered the most when I had to play some lady of quality, for what in heaven’s name had I to dress a lady in? Five dollars a week to live on, to dress myself on, and to provide a stage wardrobe!” The visiting artists, surprised

45


to see her “standing in the crowd of peasants” again after having played “an important part” the previous night, urged her to “rebel.” They advised her to leave the ballet and to seek compensation for her additional responsibilities. Unable to assert herself, however, on account of “those long years of childish thraldom,” she allowed herself to be exploited. Morris had come to understand the disadvantages of a stock company. Ellsler’s theater, like many others at the time, was a family affair, with him as its actor-manager, Effie its leading lady, and their daughter, “little Effie,” ready to inherit her mother’s parts as soon as she was willing to relinquish them.35 Given the company’s hierarchical organization and the rigidity of its operative “lines,” the only way Morris could play a leading role was with Effie Ellsler’s permission. No matter how well suited she may have been for a particular part, she could not perform it unless Ellsler gave it to her—permanently or simply for one performance. Morris writes with some humor about bizarre combinations resulting from such a proprietary approach to casting. In two productions of Hamlet, for example, one with Edwin Booth and the other with Daniel Bandmann, she was supposed to play Gertrude to Effie Ellsler’s Ophelia. Both actors were astonished by the incongruity of the role assignments. Whereas Booth rehearsed the scene and “spoke no unkind word,” the incredulous Bandmann barked at John Ellsler, “What kind of witches’ broth are you serving me, with an old woman for my Ophelia and an apple-cheeked girl for my mother! She can’t speak those lines.”36 She could, however, and did, because Ellsler refused to reassign the parts, and Bandmann, unwilling to lose a night’s earnings (and a future engagement), proceeded with the performance. Periodically, Effie Ellsler would opt out of her roles. If she did not like the leading man, the part would go to Morris until she chose to reclaim it. Ellsler would not perform if she found the conditions too primitive, which was often the case in rural Ohio where there might not even be a theater. Interestingly, she also objected to playing opposite women in male leading roles. Popularized by Charlotte Cushman (whose Romeo, Hamlet, and Cardinal Wolsey intrigued audiences in England and America), cross-dressing was still sufficiently novel to have drawing power.37 Although “breeches roles” had been in vogue since the Restoration, they usually involved actresses in disguise as men or appearing in comic male roles, such as Peg Woffington playing Sir Harry Wildair in Farquhar’s Constant Couple. Having women impersonate men on stage in serious or tragic parts, however, was more a nineteenth-century phenomenon—one that did not meet with universal approval. As the Cleveland Leader observed in September 1866, following Lucille Western’s appearance as Don Caesar de Bazan at the Academy of Music, Western “acted well, but we are never fully

46


satisfied with seeing a female in male character. There is an unnaturalness about it that no amount of good acting can ever cure.”38 Effie Ellsler made her own disapproval clear by refusing to take part in any production that featured a woman as leading man. The advantages of belonging to Ellsler’s troupe must have outweighed the systemic inequities because Morris remained for four more seasons. She continued to play a variety of parts and to benefit from her contact with visiting artists. Some encouraged her and predicted she would become a great actress. Others helped her more directly by advising her on technique. E. L. Davenport, for example, took time during rehearsal to teach her the importance of stage business: those carefully planned, well-choreographed actions with which actors enhanced and enlivened their performances. Impressed with her dedication, he suggested “business” he thought she could use in a particular scene. He urged her to take one of her lines more slowly and to find behavior that would strengthen its delivery. Under his tutelage, she discovered how powerful silence on stage could be: Cornered, check-mated, I slowly signed the paper, wiped the pen, closed the inkstand, and set it aside. He stood like a statue. The silence reached the house. I stretched out my arms and rested my crossed hands lightly on the table. I met his glance a moment, then with a curling lip, let my eyes sweep slowly down length of body to boot-tip and back again, rose slowly, made a little “pouf” with my lips and wave of hand, and contemptuously drawled: “My friend, you are a fool!” while, swift and sharp, came the applause Mr. Davenport at least had anticipated.39 When she thanked him for his help, he reminded her that “it was the business” that captivated the audience and urged her to make strong physical choices in creating her roles. It was a lesson she internalized, with both positive and negative consequences, for her entire professional career. Although stage business animated a performance, it also could push it toward mannerism when what began as a fresh approach to a character became mechanical and hardened into caricature after years of repetition. As acting styles changed in the late nineteenth century, such stylized physicality came to be seen as so much distracting, artificial “claptrap,” cluttering a performance, weakening its emotional impact, and making the actor seem a relic from a distant era. Physicality, however, was never meant to obscure the primacy of emotion in shaping a performance. Moving the audience was paramount, and that was something Morris also learned in Cleveland. In addition to observing actresses whose turbulent emotionality defined them, she discovered her own gift for expressing strong emotion. The comment she attributes to Ellsler, that he hired

47


her on account of her “tear-filled eyes,” was prescient. Adept at crying on cue, Morris became known for the graphic realism of her stage suffering and the response she invariably elicited from audiences affected by watching her. According to Life on the Stage, she discovered her ability to cry on stage during the 1863–64 season in Columbus. Guest artist Sallie St. Clair was appearing with Ellsler’s company in The Little House on the Bridge, a melodrama based on a French original. Because St. Clair had two male roles in the production, Effie Ellsler refused to play opposite her. No one else wanted the female lead because there was so little time to learn the lines. Worried that she did not have the right costume and, more important, that she would be unable to handle the emotional demands of “a crying part,” Morris reluctantly agreed to take it. Even with a borrowed dress from St. Clair and the assurance that she only had to pretend to cry during one scene, she dreaded the performance. Yet, transformed by the “glamour of the stage” that night, she forgot her fear and became “the Spanish girl whose long-mourned lover had returned.” Distressed by his strange, even “alien” demeanor, she began to cry real tears. When the curtain fell at the end of the scene, St. Clair exclaimed, “You would move a heart of stone.” Her husband, Charles M. Barras, called Morris “a marvel in embryo” and declared, “You have a fortune somewhere between your throat and your eyes, my girl—you have indeed.”40 The reviews, from which Morris quotes liberally, were splendid. One Columbus newspaper noted the “real tears—tears that left streaks on the girl’s cheeks!” Another asked, “Who is she—have you seen her—the wonderful Columbus ballet–girl, who wins tears [from the audience] with tears, real ones, too?” A third praised her as a “rough diamond” and called particular attention to the way she acted her scenes: speaking earnestly in character to St. Clair rather than delivering her lines to the audience as many of the other actors did.41 Although Morris does not say so explicitly, it was her ability to become the character that seemed remarkable at the time. Instead of declaiming her speeches to the audience, she addressed St. Clair directly and was fully engaged in their interaction. The emotions she expressed appeared genuine, and that is what made the scene work so well. In the coming years, the strong connection she felt to her stage creations would enable her to embody them with startling effectiveness, shaping performances of passion and power. Audiences would find the suffering of the characters she played both gripping and believable. Morris’s triumph in Columbus did not change her position in the company. She did not assume Effie Ellsler’s starring roles on a regular basis but returned to the relative obscurity of the ballet and the small parts she usually played. It took two more years for her to attract the attention of the Cleveland Leader, which finally referred to her by name in a handful of notices between May 1866

48


and May 1867. Most are perfunctory, acknowledging her fine work without discussing what she actually did on stage. In October, the paper admired her Helen, opposite an abysmal Mrs. J. F. Rodgers as Julia, in Sheridan Knowles’s Hunchback and called it “a very thorough and satisfactory performance—really faultless.” In November, when Lawrence Barrett appeared in The Marble Heart as Raphael—the role John Wilkes Booth had played several seasons earlier—she was “very successful as Marie, telling her sad story with an unaffected simplicity that was touchingly effective.” In January as Mademoiselle Quinault to Daniel Bandmann’s eponymous tragic hero in Narcisse, she won “warm applause” and took several curtain calls during the course of the play. (The same critic was less impressed with Effie Ellsler’s Pompadour and did not consider it a “great impersonation.”) In April and May, Morris received “especial commendation” for her roles in three melodramas: Ellen in The Hero of Switzerland, Catherine in The Venetian Spy, and Lucy Fairweather in Boucicault’s Streets of New York.42 The only review that provides a more detailed description of Morris appeared on 16 December 1866 and applauded her Lady Versala in Matilde, a “sensational and very Frenchy drama” starring Kate Reignolds. It was the type of role in which she would soon specialize: the repentant sinner who expresses her remorse in one highly charged scene after another. The Leader found her particularly affecting in the final act where “confronted by the woman she wronged and the husband she dishonored, [she] portrayed the grief-stricken, penitent and mercy-seeking suppliant with a power and pathos well calculated to induce one to turn away from a scene so terribly natural.” The emphasis once again is on the compelling realism of the performance, so much so that Morris “seemed herself overcome by the emotions she portrayed” and doubtless “shed real tears before she reached the close of the ordeal.”43 The Leader also made favorable mention of her Bianca in the tragedy The Italian Wife and her Bertha in Dot, a “touching drama,” on 17 May. The evening was a benefit performance for Morris, her first as a member of Ellsler’s troupe.44 That in itself suggests she had achieved new stature within the company, although she insists in Life on the Stage that her salary was not commensurate with it. She was still earning ballet-girl wages, regardless of the number and size of her roles. In her next two years with Ellsler, she did not advance within the company’s ranks. The Cleveland Leader does not cite her by name in any of its reviews of the 1867–68 and 1868–69 seasons, and there is no evidence that she regularly played leading roles. Her retrospective comments in Life on the Stage convey her disenchantment: “I was the easy old dramatic slipper, which it was pleasant to slip on so easily, but doubly pleasant to be able to shake off without effort. . . . Any part belonging to me by right could be claimed by that lady [Effie Ellsler], if she fancied it, and if she wearied of it, came back to me.”45

49

Broadside playbill for The Lancashire Lass with Morris as Kate Garston, probably the earliest extant image of her in performance, Academy of Music, mid- to late 1860s. She is the young woman standing to the right of the window. Effie Ellsler, kneeling, is title character, Ruth Kirby. Courtesy of the Laurence Senelick Collection.


Yet she did not leave the troupe until September 1869, and her diary, which exists for part of this period, indicates that she was reasonably happy. There are several entries for July and August 1868, written during one of the company’s summer sojourns in rural Ohio. Morris often mentions primitive playing conditions, like those at the “beastly hall” in Ravenna where they presented Othello. She does not always say where she is but usually records what she performs: mostly popular melodramas like The Octoroon, Under the Gaslight, or The Ticket-of-Leave Man. The only other Shakespearean work in the repertoire that summer was Macbeth, and because Morris notes she was studying Lady Macbeth, it seems reasonable to assume she played it. She was Dora in The Octoroon to Effie Ellsler’s Zoe and starred as Laura in Under the Gaslight but only because Effie had returned to Cleveland where her daughter was ill.46 Morris usually notes the size of the audience, which ranged from “bad . . . dede [dead]” to “fair,” “good,” “better than expected,” all the way to “splendid house—turned people away.” She never reflects on why attendance might have varied so from place to place and rarely discusses the productions, although she does comment on herself. On 18 July, she appeared in The Hidden Hand and wrote, “Mr. E. says I played the part well.” When the company presented Macbeth on 24 July, she noted, “Mr. E says he was pleased with my share of the performance.” After The Stranger on 3 August, she was gratified: “They treated me first rate . . . lots of people crying—Mr. E says the last scene was beautiful.”47 Diary entries provide glimpses of her daily life. When she is not rehearsing, performing, or traveling, she keeps busy. She writes to her mother, washes and mends her stockings, complains about her laundry service, embroiders and crochets, buys black lace for a costume, enjoys novels (such as Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone) and magazines (usually Harper’s). She reads newspapers but never comments on current events. She makes no mention of the racial unrest gripping the nation after the Civil War or of the contentious battle over constitutional amendments in the Reconstruction era.48 Her focus is myopic but engaging. She loves eating “cream” (ice cream) and oysters. She enjoys physical exercise of all kinds, especially riding, walking, and swimming. One afternoon she is proud of herself for hiking ten miles each way to “bathe in the river”; on another, happy to join Ellsler and a few company members for a carriage ride and a picnic lunch in a beautiful lakeside spot. On 28 July, she enjoys a “baseball match” where she “saw two innings.” Other entries suggest that life was not idyllic. Several mention illnesses that disrupt her daily routine. She misses meals, rehearsals, even performances when she is “sick” or feeling “bad.” On 25 July, for example, she wrote, “I did not go to rehersal [sic] was very sick all day. had [sic] to go home before the performance was over tonight.” There is scant improvement the next day: “I

51


have been more than half sick all day, could eat no breakfast. had a little dinner but it made me so sick.” She is displeased with an August performance because of a “fearful” cough. There are a few cryptic references to someone she calls “B,” who often brings her books. She enjoys his company but does not reveal his identity, suggesting that the twenty-one-year-old Morris may have been involved in a relationship she knew she had to conceal. The 1868 diary concludes abruptly on 26 August. The 1869 volume with “Clara Morris, Academy of Music” neatly lettered on its title page, begins on 1 January, with entries appearing fairly regularly until the end of July. The life it chronicles sounds remarkably similar to that of the previous summer. Although she often says she misses her mother, who is living elsewhere as a housekeeper, she is in good spirits. She has friends whose company she enjoys and is busy with the demands of her career. Performing virtually every night, she is a dedicated actress who plays a number of roles—more sometimes than she feels is fair. As she writes on 16 January, “Cried tonight about parts—I have to play all Hats parts, my own—and all Mrs. Ellslers bad ones too—I feel bad.” When she objects to her assignments the next day, she is told—presumably by John Ellsler—that she is “to play any and every thing and never to feel bad about it.” To her credit, except for balking at two roles later in the season because she does not think they suit her, she accepts Ellsler’s casting decisions without complaint for the rest of the year.49 Morris does not discuss the roles she played or explain how she created them. From those she mentions, she seems to have taken several of Effie Ellsler’s, including Cora in Pizarro and Helen in Foul Play. She also appeared as Coraxa, “a Gipsy boy,” in The Gypsy King and Florena, “a Roman maiden doomed to death,” in The Roman Slave, or the Warrior Captive.50 She “played kind of a comedy part” in Blow for Blow in April and “did very well.” In a piece she does not identify, she notes that she “got a good reception” but does not say why.51 She does not use her entries for introspective self-analysis or reflection and is equally reserved about the productions themselves. The few comments she does make suggest that the company was struggling. She notes only one “splendid house,” with many more that are “fair,” “not good,” “poor,” or “empty” (as was the case with Rosedale on 3 June). According to her 1 May entry, Ellsler was “very much troubled about buisness [sic].” Ticket sales were disappointing for the next two months, as her 28 July entry indicates: “The house was just about as good as last night—I hope the Buisness [sic] will improve soon or I am afraid we will all have to retire and live on hope.” It is not surprising that Ellsler would have had financial concerns. Economic recovery had come slowly to post–Civil War America, and prosperity seemed chimerical. American paper currency regained some of its strength

52


and was closer once again to gold in value, but the market was unstable. Brokers on Wall Street speculated in currency as well as in stocks. On 24 September 1869, the gold market collapsed, a debacle precipitated largely by the machinations of financiers Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, probably with the complicity of the Ulysses S. Grant White House. The impact of “Black Friday,” which bankrupted investment houses and caused twenty-five suicides in New York City alone, 52 extended across the nation. For Ellsler, whose career had always been a struggle, it was yet another challenge to overcome. He hoped to attract audiences with fresh offerings. Although the repertoire still included the familiar mix of melodrama, comedy, and the occasional tragedy, with visiting stars like Lotta Crabtree in Little Nell, Ellsler was doing his best to stay current. In May 1869, his company presented Ixion, which had done blockbuster business in New York the previous fall with Lydia Thompson and her troupe of “British Blondes” in revealing, thigh-high costumes. Ixion; or, the Man at the Wheel was a burlesque: a satirical musical comedy spoofing contemporary politics and society. Full of literary and classical allusions, jokes, and puns, its songs set humorous lyrics to familiar tunes and its spirited dancing combined a variety of popular forms (high-kicking, jigging, and cake-walking). As theater historian Faye Dudden notes, Ixion forever changed the meaning of the word burlesque and is considered the first of the modern burlesque shows in which “satire became associated with (and later eclipsed by) display of the female body.”53 Ellsler must have staged a pirated version of Ixion about which, regrettably, Morris says nothing. Neither did the Cleveland Leader, whose coverage of theater in general had declined since 1867. It is possible that the absence of a review reflects the paper’s disapproval of the production, which might have shocked a city that was still fairly conservative. In a blistering editorial, the newspaper that had once advocated on Ellsler’s behalf condemned “the decadence of drama in this city.” Although it did not mention him by name, its target could not have been more obvious. Even as it acknowledged that nudity, novelty, sensation, and stars were undermining theater nationwide, it blamed Ellsler by implication for the “deterioration” and “general decadence” of local offerings. Criticizing the Academy of Music itself as “a caricature upon the city,” the paper stated the urgent need for “a good opera house, and an enterpsiring [sic], go-ahead manager who knows how to get a good stock company and maintain a good theatrical season.” It also exhorted Cleveland “capitalists” to invest in such a worthy enterprise.54 Ironically, it would be Ellsler, object of the paper’s derision, who would rise to the challenge. He would build the grand Euclid Avenue Opera House, but the project would bankrupt him. As he wrote years later, “Into this structure, I invested the entire fortune I had accumulated in many years of work, only to

53


lose every dollar invested.” It was not simply that he had been reckless. Construction costs had skyrocketed, and the Panic of 1873, caused by the failure of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and the collapse of Philadelphia’s Jay Cooke & Co., a leading investment bank, plunged the city and the nation into economic depression. “Promised aid was witheld [sic],” Ellsler explained, “and the theatre, in which it seemed reasonable we should add to our fortune, proved our ruin.”55 In 1869, however, when he had not yet made that calamitous decision, he had other concerns. One of them may have been how to conceal his affair with Clara Morris from his wife and the other members of his company. What is most striking about Morris’s 1869 diary is the reemergence of “B” as a dominant presence in it. From brief cameo appearances in the 1868 volume, he occupies almost every page of this one. He is her mentor, advisor, and, eventually, lover. Although she is careful never to identify him, the man she calls by pet names “Brownie” and “Meetsy” (short for “Old Sweetmeets”) could not have been anyone but Ellsler. It is not simply that his birthday falls on 26 September, the same as Ellsler’s, or that both men are in their forties.56 It is that B has almost total control of her, both on and off stage. More than just a fellow actor, he is someone who determines the parts she plays and decides whether she can take music lessons. He brings her scripts and money for her board, as well as newspapers, slippers, flowers, Easter eggs, books, pears, and oysters. He is involved in all aspects of her life from brushing her hair and tying her ribbons, to choosing her costumes and negotiating her next contract, which, interestingly, will not be in Cleveland. She looks forward to the time they spend together and misses him when they are apart. She worries about his health and washes his stockings. Many of the activities she chronicles are innocent enough: reading, strolling, taking carriage rides, picking lilacs, playing word games, eating ice cream, and drinking soda water. As she writes on 7 April, “Brownie came brought cold cream for my face—we said Peter Piper—what fun we did have. Brownie can say it right & I cant [sic].” Several entries, however, suggest a relationship that was far from platonic. After a January performance, she notes she “had a dreadful time tonight no sleep at all hardly.” She continues, “I kept B awake all the time, I guess,” which indicates they were spending the night together. Several months later, “Meetsy came and hid in the closet” while she was at dinner. “He left some peaches—such beauties, I said ‘Oh dear!’ & then he tapped on the [closet] door & I hauled him out.” After that, she states, “I paid him well,” the emphasis on “paid” implying that she reimbursed him with sexual favors.57 Whether or not Morris’s mother knew of the relationship is unclear. On a “memoranda” page at the end of the 1869 diary, there is a revealing entry dated “Jan the 1st 1869”:

54


I have tried to be good today. I treated her better than I thought I could—I have said damn once—and got out of patience once—but there is no merit in being good when you have no temptation to be otherwise. Last night I was tempted and I—yealded [sic]—naturally. Ah! me! I am very bad—full of sin origanal [sic] and cultivated envy & ambition—I am an unhappy woman because an ambitious one. In addition to acknowledging what sounds like a sexual experience, Morris provides more insight into her complicated feelings than she does anywhere else in this volume. The “her” to whom she contemptuously refers is Effie Ellsler, who appears in two other entries. In one, Morris is annoyed that she cannot go to a party with B because “she is here.” The other shows the escalating tension between the women and within the company. When they are on tour in Akron and staying at the same hotel, tempers flare at dinner: “Mrs. Ellsler . . . left the table and wasent [sic] there a row this afternoon—poor Brownie (curs [sic] that woman) I shall leave the house tomorrow. . . . My boy is so miserable—& I don’t wonder at it—dear heart.”58 The New Year’s Day 1869 entry is equally significant for what it says about Morris herself and the personal toll she feels her “ambition” takes. At this point in her life, involved in an adulterous affair with her theater manager, determined to achieve success in a field many Americans still regarded with suspicion, she has made unconventional choices. She claims she has already spurned one marriage proposal and refers jokingly to other suitors, such as a man from Detroit who sends her his picture and a corpulent admirer who stops her on her way to the theater and compliments her on her acting. She yearns to play leading roles and understands she will never have that opportunity in Cleveland, yet is reluctant to part from her lover. Although she is flattered a Chicago manager has offered to engage her for “leading buisness [sic] for next season,” she is distressed when B tells her “it would be best” for her to go. “My Meets,” she writes, “I couldent [sic] leave him—I cried ever so long I felt so bad.”59 By April, however, she has changed her mind and is willing to consider other offers. B, who could simplify his own life greatly by removing Morris from it, helps her negotiate a contract. On the first of April, she writes with palpable excitement, “Brownie went to S. Louis tonight for an engagement for me, Maccauley [sic] offers me $25 a week for Leading buisness [sic] in Cincinnatie [sic], I hope he may get me.” Ellsler must have returned with a written offer, which she answers, “asking $36 a week or $30 and two benefits.” She is still considering Chicago and is corresponding with a Mr. Hess, whom she does not identify, when she contacts Barney Macauley again to say that she “will not come to him short of $35 per week.”60 She finally receives a contract from him on 4 August for “leading business” at Wood’s Theatre in Cincinnati

55


but expresses ambivalence in her diary: “Tonight Brownie gave me a great big envelope—& when I opened it there I found the articals [sic] of engagement for next season, with Mr. Macauly [sic]—and a letter from him—asking for a list of favorite pieces—we open . . . on the 13th of September—my heart is as heavy as lead—and so is Brownie’s.” According to the diary, she is supposed to go to Cincinnati on 8 September but wants to delay her departure. Brownie is sick, and she refuses to leave without seeing him. They have sent two telegraphs to Macauley requesting a later arrival but have not received a response. “Brownie says to stay any way. I shall,” she writes defiantly.61 By 21 September, the date of her next entry, she is in Cincinnati and does not say when she arrived. In Life on the Stage, she describes her emotional farewell to Cleveland. Ellsler is ill in that account, too, but rises from his sickbed to say good-bye. Given the nature of the relationship the diary depicts and the way he has exploited her, the paternal words she puts in his mouth are disturbing: “You were placed under my care once by your mother. You were a child then, and though you . . . consider yourself a woman now, I could not bear to think of your leaving the city . . . to begin a lonely journey, without some old friend being by for a parting Godspeed.” He takes a small box from his pocket and, in a halting speech that rings with unintentional irony, explains that he wants to give her “a keepsake” as a daily reminder “of—of—er the years” she has spent in his theater. It is a “good watch” for a “good girl and a good actress.” Overwhelmed, she cannot speak, but her “pride and pleasure” make him laugh. The horse-drawn carriage arrives to take her to the train station. In her words, “As I opened the door of the dusty old hack, . . . the hoarse voice said, ‘God bless you!’ and I had left my first manager. . . . Thus grateful for a kindly send-off, made happy by a gift, I turned my back upon the old, safe life and brightly, hopefully faced the new.”62 From all Morris has written in her diary, the old life was far from “safe” and left its imprint on her both personally and professionally. Although she avoided scandal in Cleveland, allegations of sexual impropriety would swirl around her in Cincinnati. As an artist, the lessons she learned at the Academy of Music irrevocably shaped her career. She would continue to impress audiences with the stunning emotional power of her performances. Yet, long after the stock company system was dead, she would define herself by its standards. She would be a traveling star like the ones she knew in her youth and would gravitate to the roles she saw them interpret so convincingly on Ellsler’s stage.

56

4 Leading

B

usiness in Cincinnati

IN MID-SEPTEMBER, Morris arrived in Cincinnati, a hilly city tucked into a bend in the Ohio River. Settled in 1788 and incorporated in 1819, the Queen City of the West had seen its population increase from 750 in 1800 to 230,000 in 1869, due largely to an influx of German immigrants.1 Cincinnati’s strategic western location and dominance of river commerce made it a prosperous center of trade and industry before the Civil War, but its situation was precarious in the Reconstruction era. The war’s catastrophic impact, the decline in steamboat traffic as railroads reached across America to remote towns and villages, and the emergence of Chicago and St. Louis as regional urban leaders precipitated a financial crisis. To help revitalize Cincinnati’s economy, civic leaders turned to the promotion of culture.2 Thanks to traditions transplanted by German immigrants, music had long permeated the life of the city and was central to the public-school curriculum. Cincinnati would soon see the establishment of two art schools, the Ohio Mechanics Institute and the McMicken School of Design, as well as several art galleries. They would join the theaters, already part of the cultural landscape. In 1869, the year Morris became leading lady at Wood’s Theatre, there were two others in operation: the National Theatre, which had a resident company, and Pike’s Music Hall, which did not. Wood’s was the most stable of the three. Actor Barney Macauley had assumed its management in November 1868 after feuding minstrel troupes had relinquished their claims to the building.3 Macauley, who would remain at Wood’s for nine years, renovated it in 1869 just prior to Morris’s arrival and increased its seating capacity from 1,240 to 1,720. Both the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer and the Cincinnati Daily Times praised his efforts as having greatly improved the space. Morris does not record her impressions of the theater in her diary, which contains only seven entries, most of them written during her first weeks in Cincinnati, for the nine months she spent there. She mentions the titles of just four plays (Our American Cousin, Belle of the Season, Captain Charlotte, and 57

Leading Business in Cincinnati

The Heir at Law) but says nothing about the productions themselves. Other than noting she is going to rehearsal, studying a script, or walking home from the theater, her sole comment about the season is that there was a “splendid house” one evening. She says a great deal about Brownie and how much she misses him. She is happy when he sends her letters, disappointed he does not come to see her. She complains about her ailments: a bad cold, “neuralgia of the hand,” indigestion. Pleased to have several admirers, she records the names of men who have come to call. The entries end abruptly on 2 October without a hint of the controversy that would shortly engulf her.4 Life on the Stage’s account of the Cincinnati season fits the familiar pattern, stressing her virtue, industry, piety, and filial devotion. Devoid of specific detail, it provides an instructive model for readers, who see Morris avoiding temptation while pursuing admirable goals. She remembers only two unpleasant incidents, the first while she was still in Cleveland. Having agreed to perform “leading business” in Cincinnati, she received a letter from Macauley asking her to relinquish certain roles—among them, Lady Macbeth—to his wife, Rachael Johnson. Morris angrily refused and issued an ultimatum: she would be “the leading woman or nothing.” To her surprise, he capitulated, sending her the contract she expected and expressing his respect for her “firmness” in demanding her “rights.” The second has nothing to do with theater. Having rented a room in what she thought was a boardinghouse but learned was a gambling den, she immediately left for other lodgings, her virtue intact. She has shared this story because she wants people to see how perilous “the pathway of honest girlhood” can be and to understand that “utter ignorance of evil is itself a danger.”5 The scene of her narrative shifts to the theater. It is the first rehearsal of the season and her introduction to the Wood’s company. Gratified by the warmth of their welcome, she happily accepts the role Macauley has assigned her: “that of a country girl (Cicely), in some old comedy, whose name” she has since forgotten. (Based on the Daily Enquirer’s review of the opening performance on 4 October, the play was George Colman the Younger’s 1797 comedy, The Heir at Law).6 The other actresses are sorry she has to make her Cincinnati debut in such a “poorly dressed part” because “rustic” Cicely has only one costume. Morris, however, is more concerned about a risqué monologue she has to deliver, laced with double entendres. One woman recommends that she mumble the words and hope no one will hear her. Another tells her to hang her head to indicate that she, Morris the actress, is ashamed of what Cicely the character has to say. Morris rejects both suggestions. She realizes the lines will work only if she delivers them as a naïf who is oblivious to the meaning of the words she utters. Bringing “scandalized Miss Morris” on stage “with a hanging head and a shamefaced manner” might signal her disapproval but would spoil the scene’s

58


comic effect. On opening night, therefore, she stays in character and speaks her lines “clearly and plainly, looking squarely and honestly into the eyes of the person . . . addressed.”7 According to a review the next morning, the audience understood “the double-entendre,” appreciated the “perfect honesty” and “wide-eyed innocence” with which she played it, and burst into applause. “It was the most dramatic moment of the evening,” the critic observed, “for that outburst was not merely approbation for the actress, it was homage to the woman.” When the curtain fell, it “fell upon a favorite.” With her first appearance on the Wood’s stage, she had triumphed. In her words, she had won “the kindly hearts of the Cincinnatians” and kept them for the season. She received nightly gifts from her admirers: flowers, jewelry, and candy in “dainty boxes.”8 Morris makes only two other comments about her season at Wood’s, both of which emphasize the demands of “leading business.” She “worked hard at all times, and five nights out of seven . . . had to study till far on toward morning.” Having to do a “double performance” on Saturday was especially taxing and “left” her “a wreck.”9 Instead, she describes her life of “honest poverty.” She and her mother, who had joined her, lived frugally in two “wee” rooms. Thankful to be together, they shared such simple pleasures as reading newspapers and novels, telling jokes and stories, drinking tea with canned oysters and crackers. Too poor to afford more than one shabby dress, she was embarrassed to attend church on Sunday and read the Bible at home. Her only extravagance was taking piano lessons from the orchestra conductor at Wood’s, who admired her “most perfect ear” and “steadiness.” She also enjoyed the company of John Cockerill, whom she identifies as the city editor of the Daily Enquirer. Both were “young, poor, energetic, ambitious” and exchanged “confidences, plans, hopes, and dreams.” Within a few months, they became engaged. Although she ended their relationship soon after leaving Cincinnati, they remained “devoted friends” for years.10 However truthful this account may be, it simplifies a more complicated experience by presenting Morris as the embodiment of virtue and respectability. There is no suggestion of impropriety, no hint of scandal or controversy, no admission that might tarnish her reputation or jeopardize the social position she wants readers to believe she has attained. Her morally resolute autobiographical world leaves no room for ambiguity. Newspapers, on the other hand, provide glimpses of a different Morris in a more tumultuous Cincinnati season: one that involved accusations, innuendo, an abrupt dismissal from Macauley’s company, and the threat of litigation. The press was kind to her, as she claims. She attracted favorable critical attention almost immediately. The 8 October Daily Enquirer called her “a leading

59


lady of rare talent.” Three days later, the same newspaper devoted most of its review of Married Life and Forty Winks to praising her. Although it did not say what roles she played, it described her as “a young lady of handsome form and feature” with “a sweet, sympathetic voice, capable of a variety of expression,” particularly convincing in “all her emotional parts.” Congratulating Macauley for engaging a young woman of such talent, it predicted a long, successful career in Cincinnati.11

Photograph of Morris in Cleveland shortly before joining Barney Macauley’s company in Cincinnati, ca. 1869. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

60


Other laudatory Daily Enquirer notices view her through the cultural gaze of the era. Not surprisingly, her stage appeal rests largely on her physical attractiveness and such desirable feminine attributes as “grace” and “charm.” The reviews also acknowledge her exceptional “dramatic powers,” her ability to move an audience with something other than her “beauty.” She is a “universal favorite,” the most “meritorious leading lady” to “trod the boards of Wood’s,” an actress who “never fails to attain the highest standards of excellence in all her parts.”12 The Daily Times was more restrained but consistently positive in its assessment. Although it provided few details, it reviewed Morris’s performances favorably, noting that the audience would break into “hearty applause” after a scene in which she was particularly effective. Neither paper covered every production at Wood’s, where the bill, with few exceptions, changed nightly, and so each Morris appearance is not documented. In October, for example, Macauley’s company presented thirty-two plays but the Daily Enquirer and the Daily Times only mentioned her in eleven. She won particular praise for the roles she performed with British tragedian Neil Warner, including Ophelia, Emilia, and Queen Elizabeth to his Richard III. “By her faultless elocution and admirable grace” in this last role, the Daily Enquirer reported, she “imparted rare interest to the performance.”13 The paper found her most compelling as Lady Macbeth: Her sweet, gentle face lacked the stray lines which have rendered Miss Cushman so terribly grand in this character, but she threw into it at times the most tragical of expressions, and her reading and enunciation were at all times faultless. “Infirm of purpose—give me the daggers! The sleeping and the dead are but pictures” was rendered with rare fidelity, as was also the somnambulistic performance of the wretched Queen.14 The comparison with Charlotte Cushman was hardly a random association. Lady Macbeth was one of her signature roles, and people considered hers the definitive interpretation. The words this critic chose to describe Morris’s performance—her “faultless” reading and enunciation, the “rare fidelity” with which she “rendered” her lines—suggest a standard against which she was being measured and with which she compared favorably. It was the standard Cushman had set. Notwithstanding their physical differences, the petite Morris was doing a convincing imitation of Cushman’s Amazonian Lady Macbeth. Within a few years, however, Morris would break with American tradition and would create the role according to her sense of the character. Instead of the acclaim she sought, she would find herself almost universally censured. The critical outcry her performance provoked would change the course of her career.

61


In November, she appeared as Celia opposite Kate Reignolds’s Rosalind in As You Like It. According to the Daily Enquirer, “the charming Miss Morris fairly outshone the reigning star.” The Daily Times agreed, noting, “The beauty, grace, and charm which this actress brings to her aid, have made her exceedingly popular with the patrons of the house.”15 In her next appearance, however, Morris drew her first negative notices. Critics for both newspapers disliked her performance as Grace Harkaway in Boucicault’s London Assurance. Neither found fault with her acting, but each objected to her behavior on stage. The Daily Enquirer observed: Certainly Miss Morris never looked more charming, nor played her part with more artlessness and naiveté than in the role of “Grace,” but we fear that the little favorite is falling into some stage habits of which, in the spirit of friendliness, we would essay to remind her. Miss Morris is very pretty, and undoubtedly a good actress, but we would suggest that the stage is not the place for a display of vanity.16 The Daily Times warned her not to succumb to flattery, “for it has proved the alluring reef of shipwreck to many a bright and promising student of the drama.”17 It is hard to know exactly what the two critics meant because “vanity” is so nonspecific. One possibility is that Morris had begun to seem affected, strutting about the stage in imitation of the stars she watched for years in Cleveland, with an inflated sense of her importance as the company’s newest talent. Another is that the actress, who had been concerned about breaking character as Cicely, now acknowledged admirers in the audience with coy winks, smiles, nods, and curtseys. Waving or blowing kisses from the stage as Clara Morris the actress could have distracted critics, who came to review her as dramatic character Grace Harkaway. The Daily Enquirer did not mention Morris again until 26 November when it faulted her behavior once more. She may have been “pleased to greet her old audiences” but should not have made them “part of the stage performance.” Bestowing “individual recognition” was “undoubtedly bad taste.”18 This time she heeded the criticism. In its review of A Day after the Wedding, the paper praised “Miss Clara” as the comedy’s “leading spirit” and applauded her for taking “a brave step in the right direction” with regard to her conduct on stage. “While looking very prettily,” she “did not favor the audience with any special attention save the usual nod in response to the warm greeting which she received.” Her “superb” performance was “not only artistically faithful, but . . . free from the least semblance of affectation.”19 A Day after the Wedding ran in a double bill with Lucretia Borgia, M.D., a burlesque starring “elfin” Elsie Holt. Macauley had to compete with the National

62


Theatre, which had been staging burlesques for several weeks. Beginning with the highly publicized appearance of the British Blondes in Ixion and Sinbad the Sailor in early November, the National had featured guest artists in popular productions that attracted sizable audiences and favorable critical attention. The Daily Times fretted the “merry” musical productions with their “troops of dancing and singing girls” would “usurp the entire stage” but acknowledged “the increasing taste for burlesque” as “one of the manifestations of the irreverent spirit of our time.” It also was a way for managers “to realize a richer harvest . . . than in the legitimate.”20 Eager to offer more-profitable amusements, Macauley countered in early December with Lucretia Borgia, M.D. and Ivanhoe, starring “sprightly little Holt.” Morris had a prominent part in Ivanhoe, her first Cincinnati burlesque. She cross-dressed as the title character and appeared opposite an actor costumed as Rebecca. The Daily Times thought she “looked lovely as the only son of Cedric, Ivanhoe.” The Daily Enquirer, which had expressed concerns about the misuse of her talent, approved of her performance as “a girlish lad.” Both critics noted her appealing womanly qualities and praised her for wearing “the scanty attire of the modern burlesquer” without compromising her “high standing as an actress and a lady” or her “grace and modesty.”21 Ivanhoe drew capacity houses each night, after which Macauley returned to more-standard fare with Boucicault’s Streets of New York. According to the Daily Enquirer, Morris played steely Alida Bloodgood, daughter of the villainous Gideon, and “gave a well-studied rendition of it, dressing and looking the cold-blooded and heartless society belle.” The Daily Times called her performance “admirable” and predicted she would soon become one of the nation’s most distinguished actresses because of the “many points of excellence” she consistently “displays.”22 Morris won similar accolades throughout December. The words “admirable,” “faultless,” “superb,” and “genius” appear frequently in reviews of her performances. The new year began just as auspiciously. On 4 January, the Daily Enquirer reported that Morris, “the lovely and gifted leading lady,” would appear that evening in her first benefit at Wood’s as Rosa Leigh in Rosedale. Calling her interpretation “the best we have ever seen,” the paper urged “every lover of an exquisite play, every admirer of dramatic genius embodied in a young and fair woman” to attend. Following a forgettable double bill (Priuli, or the Husband’s Vengeance and A Glance at New York), she provided strong support for guest artist Mrs. D. P. Bowers during her two weeks at Wood’s. The perennially popular Bowers, with whom Morris had appeared in Cleveland, was presenting familiar material: Camille, Lady Audley’s Secret, Lucretia Borgia, Leah, the Forsaken, and The Hunchback, the opening attraction. Although the

63


Daily Enquirer and the Daily Times recognized her as a capable actress, neither liked her Julia and intimated that she was too old to play the role. Morris as Helen, on the other hand, was “sprightly and vivacious and gave the character the spice of humor that makes it so agreeable.”23 After that performance, Morris dropped from sight. Her name did not appear in the newspapers until the Daily Enquirer mentioned, more than a week later, that she had been sick. Even more surprising, she did not perform in Cincinnati for two months. When she did, it was not at Wood’s, and she was no longer under Macauley’s management. He seems to have fired her in January, although the reasons for her dismissal remain unclear. The Daily Times did not mention it, and the Daily Enquirer made only two oblique references to “unusual occurrences” at the theater. Morris herself never discussed it. She granted no interviews to Cincinnati reporters and provided no explanation in either her diary or her memoirs. In the latter, she did not refer to a rift with Macauley or a contract with a rival company and claimed she enjoyed the adulation of Cincinnati audiences until the end of the season. The first clue that all was not right at Wood’s came in the 19 January Daily Enquirer. A negative review of Mrs. Bowers’s Mary Stuart ended as follows: “The company and theatre is [sic] evidently under a cloud this week and people are beginning to miss a certain completeness which once drew all lovers of a wellrendered play to Wood’s. We trust that the very heavy cold, which has deprived us temporarily of Miss Morris, may soon improve (though we regret to say that she is at present worse), and that we may soon welcome back the charming and gifted leading lady and a whole company.”24 Morris may have been ill, but the reference to the company’s being “under a cloud” suggests that there was more to the story than a cold. No further explanation was forthcoming as Mrs. Bowers completed her engagement, and Maggie Mitchell began hers. In critiquing her opening performance in Fanchon, the Cricket, one of her specialities, the Daily Enquirer mentioned that the cast included Charlotte Crampton, making her first appearance at Wood’s. The review noted cryptically that she had “recently been added in order to improve the moral tone of the company,”25 implying a connection among Morris’s absence, Crampton’s arrival, and concerns about unspecified but inappropriate behavior behind the scenes. There was no mention of Morris until the end of February when both newspapers made a surprising announcement: she had joined a new company at the National Theatre under Robert E. J. Miles’s management. The Daily Times had recently criticized him for the “unfortunate” company he had previously assembled and called on him to seize the opportunity to rebuild his theater. Evidently, Miles rose to the challenge and recruited Morris, who would star in a series of inaugural performances with Cincinnati favorite Joseph Jefferson

64


III. The Daily Enquirer approved, noting, “During the present season, Miss Morris’s early promise has ripened into the fruit of artistic success, and among her friends and admirers she numbers every play-goer of Cincinnati.”26 Given the positive reviews Morris received, the abrupt termination of her contract seems unusual. Neither paper speculated about what happened at Wood’s, nor would any future article disclose the reasons for her dismissal. One possible explanation is that she bridled at supporting visiting female stars because she was getting better notices than they, and she insisted on playing leading roles. If she challenged Macauley, he might have opted to fire her rather than keep a recalcitrant actress under his management. George MacAdam offers another explanation: Rachael Johnson’s determination to replace Morris as leading lady in her husband’s company. As he imagines the scenario, “the advancing season added fuel—a particularly combustible fuel—and jealousy leaped into a wicked flame that scorched the hated rival and drove her from Cincinnati.”27 The “fuel” was the attention wealthy John Worthington, who had recently returned from New York, lavished on Morris night after night. Smitten with her, he began sending her expensive gifts. Soon there were “whisperings of scandal! whisperings that became audible on the streets, in newspaper offices! Scandal had linked the names of Clara Morris and John Worthington.” In MacAdam’s melodramatic words, “Oh what power hath an irate woman! Husband-manager terminated the contract with his leading lady—because of alleged misconduct in her private life!” The hot-tempered Morris angrily “refused to be cast off.” She and Macauley engaged lawyers; “the matter was to be thrashed out in court.”28 Morris herself recalls Worthington in Life on the Stage, but there is nothing improper about the relationship she depicts. He is simply a friend. He admires her work, appreciates her talent, and is the first to suggest that she belongs in New York. She does not mention a lawsuit or contacting John Ellsler, as MacAdam claims she did. According to him, Ellsler cautioned her against taking legal action. “What do you think they [the lawyers] would make of it, in their gibes and cross-examinations? What expressions, suggestions, hints, etc. would not the lawyers indulge in?” Morris heeded his advice and settled with Macauley out of court for one hundred dollars to avoid the notoriety of litigation.29 Because the documents from which MacAdam quotes are not extant, it is impossible to verify his account or to know where fact ends and fiction begins. An October Cleveland Leader editorial, however, provides a partial explanation. Although it leaves many questions unanswered and avoids mentioning specific names, it clarifies the reason for the rift with Macauley: Last winter it came to the ears of manager Macauley that Miss Morris was falling into evil ways. Her popularity among gentlemen seemed likely . . .

65


to seriously compromise her good name. The manager remonstrated with her, but all to no purpose; and to put his theatre right on the record, Miss Clara was dismissed. Many thought the dismissal undeserved, and said so with great plainness.30 How justified were Macauley’s actions? What exactly were the “evil ways” into which Morris was “falling”? She seems to have had a number of admirers, as the stage conduct for which critics reproached her earlier in the season would indicate. The truncated diary leaves the impression that she enjoyed having several men pay court to her. The seven entries, however, do not reveal anything that approximates sexual impropriety. At most, she seems guilty of flirtatiousness and self-absorption. It would be difficult to build a case for promiscuity, even by nineteenth-century standards, on such flimsy evidence. John Cockerill became Morris’s champion. According to the Cleveland Leader, “he carried his guardianship of injured innocence so far as to threaten that, unless she were reinstated, the Daily Enquirer would do its utmost to break down the popularity of the theatre.” Macauley was not intimidated. Although he allowed “the rejected actress to wend her way to other fields,” he barred Cockerill from his theater. That would have been problematic for a journalist who was the Daily Enquirer’s drama critic, not its city editor as Morris had claimed. (Because he and she became engaged at some point during the year, one wonders about his objectivity in reviewing her performances.) At the time of the Cleveland Leader editorial, Macauley and he were embroiled in a lawsuit of “gigantic proportions.” He had recently tried to attend a performance at Wood’s but had been denied entrance twice. As the editorial observed, their “very pretty quarrel” was causing a “sensation” in Cincinnati.31 That was not the case with Macauley and Morris. As public a figure as each may have been, their disagreement remained private. There was no further mention of it in the press. If people thought Macauley had been unjust, they did not boycott his theater. If they believed Morris had behaved scandalously, that did not keep them from the National and may have even drawn them to it. She does not figure prominently in Cincinnati papers in the spring, but the articles that do mention her are positive. The Daily Enquirer’s review of the new company’s first performance on 29 February, presumably by Cockerill, focuses on her. The play was Watts Phillips’s melodrama Not Guilty, although the irony of the title was probably unintentional. Morris doubled as “‘Margaret Armitage’ and the daughter ‘Alice,’ and . . . infused a womanly spirit into the characters which made them attractive.” The Daily Times acknowledged the warmth of the audience. The “earnest, heartfelt, and continued” applause that greeted her first appearance “told her how truly she was endeared to the playgoing of this city.” Initially inaudible, she “recover[ed] her self-possession” after a few minutes and

66


“entered into the spirit of her part and played throughout in a most admirable, graceful and pleasing manner.”32 Their reviews for the next two months were consistently positive, with both critics not only praising her attractiveness but also acknowledging the emotional power of her acting. After Not Guilty, the National hosted Hungarian actor Maurice Neville in Othello and Ruy Blas, a weeklong engagement that had manager Miles scrambling to fill his house. Neville was unknown in Cincinnati, and his accent was so heavy that both papers found him almost unintelligible. Morris, however, was superb, despite the “perplexing mixture of tongues.” The Daily Times called her Emilia “splendid and spirited,” while the Daily Enquirer considered it “a grand piece of acting, full of study, power and feeling.” Her Marianne in Ruy Blas was even more impressive. Beyond the “rare beauty and taste” of her “dress,” her acting in the final scene was “as grand as it is possible for a woman to be.” This last observation, with its intrinsic sexism, did not preclude recognition of her strengths as a performer. Her melodious voice, clear enunciation, and “natural” interpretation of her lines all contributed to an interpretation that was “effective, impressive and emotional in the extreme.”33 After Neville’s lackluster engagement, Miles turned to spectacle. He chose Undine, another musical extravaganza in which, as Mark Twain quipped, “the scenery and the legs are everything.”34 Featuring the Moriacchi Ballet Troupe in the obligatory “Amazon March” and lively dances like the can-can, it provided a visual feast for Cincinnati audiences. The Daily Enquirer noted the “gorgeous costumes, well-wrought scenes and brilliant appointments.” The Daily Times exhorted all “those who love the splendors of enchanted land, the grace and beauty of dancing girls, music that turns the air to ravishment and all that can be realized in the spectacular” to run to the National Theatre.35 Neither paper said much about Morris, who played the title character and was not part of the musical numbers. “The charming Miss Morris speaks the lines set down for the river goddess,” the Daily Enquirer explained, but it was “the dancing,” not the dialogue, that drew capacity crowds to the theater every night for Undine’s two-week run. After Undine, the National returned to less-spectacular offerings. Morris appeared in The Ticket-of-Leave Man opposite “Little Nell, the California Diamond,” whose name suggests the young actress hoped to be mistaken for popular sister Californian “Little Lotta” Crabtree. “Loudly applauded” as Katherine in an abridged version of The Taming of the Shrew, Morris was especially convincing in The Mendicant as a destitute woman who is “stricken blind” just as she is about to be reunited with her long-lost child. The Daily Enquirer found her portrayal of the mother’s agony “too real to be pleasant” but acknowledged it was deeply moving:

67


Miss Morris rendered the leading role with fidelity, feeling and power. From first to last she held the interest of the audience, and, at the fall of the curtain on the affecting final scene [in which the mother staggered forth in search of her beloved child], there were few dry eyes in the house; no woman who was not weeping. Artistically, it was a triumph of which many a “star” actress that has visited us this year might well be proud, and which few of them could win.36 The review is significant because it captures the qualities that would soon distinguish Morris as an actress and become hallmarks of her art: the graphic realism with which she interpreted her roles, the emotional intensity of her performances, and the powerful impact she had on her audiences—particularly women. Tears would flow when Morris suffered on stage, and the catharsis she enabled people to experience was one of the principal reasons to see her. Between her appearances in Lost at Sea on 22 April and The Colleen Bawn on the twenty-ninth, Morris traveled to New York. When she returned to Cincinnati, it was with a contract for the upcoming season at Augustin Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. The Daily Enquirer assured its readers that she would fulfill her obligations at the National but did not elaborate on her decision to relocate. According to her account in Life on the Stage, John Worthington was the person who urged her to “face” New York. She demurred because she did not think she was “pretty” enough. He disagreed, insisting that she had her “eyes and voice and expression.” When she protested that she was too unsophisticated, he assured her that she could easily acquire “polish of manner,” and no other actress could duplicate her unique “fire and strength and pathos.”37 Coy rejoinders and self-deprecating remarks aside, Morris’s diary has shown that her ambition was “awakened” well before this conversation with Worthington. Determined to become a “queen of the stage,” as she later puts it, she must have known that the stardom she sought was impossible to achieve outside New York. The contretemps with Macauley, moreover, may have convinced her that the Midwest was too provincial, conservative, and confining for someone with her personal and professional appetites. In the years following the Civil War when America’s social mobility was unrivaled, New York offered the freedom of anonymity and the dream of self-invention. For Morris it would be an opportunity to escape her past and to become a new person in a place with “plenty of room,” so that “she need clash with no one, need hurt no one.”38 These are words she has Worthington speak, but they undoubtedly reflect her own fierce ambition. Having asked John Ellsler for a letter of introduction, she is disappointed when he refuses to contact any New York managers on her behalf and advises her to stay in Ohio. She has already decided to forge ahead on her own when

68


he writes that he has changed his mind and has told four managers about her. As she subsequently discovers, he has sent them all the same perfunctory note: “He simply asked: ‘If they had an opening for a young woman, named Clara Morris, for leading or leading-juvenile business.’ That was all; not a word of recommendation for ability or mention of years of thorough experience.” She feared no one would respond to this “duty letter,” but three replied. Two cannot use her. Edwin Booth, who remembered her, regretted that he had already signed a contract with another actress for the same “line.” Henry Jarrett was committed to “spectacular (‘Black Crook’) for the year to come” and had “no earthly use for an actress above a soubrette or a walking lady.” It was only Augustin Daly who expressed interest. He mailed Ellsler a two-line squib: “‘if you send the young woman to me I will willingly consider proposal. Will engage no actress without seeing her. A. Daly.’”39 Ellsler doubted she would pursue it but had underestimated her. She knew she must meet with Daly and asked another actress to replace her in the two performances she would miss while away. On the eve of her departure, she received a letter from Thomas Maguire, a San Francisco manager who had already tried to hire her. With a promise of “leading business” at a weekly salary of one hundred dollars in gold and a benefit performance whose proceeds would go entirely to her, he enticed her with the guarantee of a second. Tempted to accept his offer, she was too committed to the idea of a New York engagement to cancel her trip to what she calls “the great city of my dreams, all circled round and guarded by living waters.”40 The romanticized language with which she describes New York contrasts sharply with the account she provides of her first meeting with Daly. Full of jests, barbs, and comical misunderstandings, the scene she recreates portrays an adversarial relationship from the first. Daly, all curtness and restrained formality, was perplexed by the irreverent Morris, who wisecracked her way through the interview. He “was as a god in his wee theatre, and was always taken seriously.” She, on the other hand, “knew not gods and took nothing seriously.” She repeatedly offended him, especially when he thought she disparaged his theater. He displeased her with the observation that she was “a comedy woman, root and branch.” When she asserted that “sentiment” was her specialty, he bluntly replied, “I never made a mistake in my life. You couldn’t speak a line of sentiment to save your soul. . . . —your forte is comedy, pure and simple.”41 Daly offered her a contract for the coming season but refused to engage her for a specific line of business and said she would have to trust him to cast her correctly. Although she took it as a personal rebuff, it was his policy. At a time when the combination system—the formation of a temporary company to take a successful production on tour—was challenging the stock system through-

69


out the country, he remained committed to a resident troupe. He wanted his actors to be members of an ensemble willing to play parts of varying size and importance throughout the season, not individual stars. However authoritarian his managerial methods, his meticulous attention to detail, imposition of strict standards for rehearsal and performance, and refusal to compromise his singular vision enabled him to create works of almost unprecedented artistic unity.42 His presentation of often-controversial material, much of it adapted by him from European originals, and his emphasis on naturalness in dialogue and action gave his productions a striking modernity. Daly promised her thirty-five dollars a week, substantially less than she could make in San Francisco, and assured her he would double it if she made a “favorable impression.”43 She thought it was a “poor offer—a risky undertaking” but accepted it. Achieving renown on the New York stage was a goal of the utmost importance and she had decided the time had come to realize it. “If I fail now in New York,” she reasoned, “I can go West or South, not much harmed. If I wait till I am older, and fail, it will ruin my life.”44 These words create a sense of the shifting double vision with which the adult Morris views her resolute younger self. Strong and ambitious, the woman portrayed in the memoirs takes the risk, confident she will cope with failure, should it happen. Of course, in her narrative, she will succeed gloriously. As she tracks her personal and professional life, there will be challenges, but she will emerge triumphant. Failure will be something that happens to others, something she observes with compassion but does not personally experience. It will never touch her directly or enter her theatrical world. In reality, however, Morris would fail. She would fail sooner than she could have imagined or would subsequently admit. Although she never applied the word failure to herself, she would feel the pain of it all too vividly in the coming years. She agreed to Daly’s offer but could not resist one last jocular exchange. She refused to use his “stub” of a pen and declared, “I can’t sign with that thing—I’d be ashamed to own my signature in court, when we come to the fight we’re very likely to have before we are through with each other.” Again, it is the older Morris, knowing how acrimoniously their relationship will end, who prepares her readers for the possibility of escalating tension between the two. She attributes her remarks to “levity,” but they reflect the bitterness she felt decades later. In Life on the Stage, Daly simply “groaned” and gave her a different pen. She wrote her name twice, shook hands, and “went out and back to my home—a Western actress with an engagement in a New York theater for the coming season.”45 Morris finished the season at the National in early June. Worried that she would not be able to afford her move to New York, she accepted a summer en-

70


gagement in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Touring companies from Boston and New York had been performing at the Theatre Royal since the late 1850s.46 In an era without air conditioning, costumed actors preferred the cooler Canadian climate to the stifling heat of most American cities. In June 1856, for example, a troupe from Wallack’s Theatre in New York began a season that ran for nearly two months and included Hamlet, Othello, The Lady of Lyons, and The Corsican Brothers. The following May, E. A. Sothern arrived from Boston and renovated the Theatre Royal, which reopened in June as Sothern’s Lyceum for a summer run. Although a financially disastrous engagement later that year almost stranded his company in Nova Scotia for the winter, Sothern recouped his losses and repeated his success in the summers of 1858 and 1859.47 American actors did not travel to Halifax during the Civil War but returned to the Theatre Royal after the cessation of hostilities. By 1867, a second theater, Temperance Hall, also welcomed American companies. Almost twenty years after its opening, the building’s owners lifted the ban they had imposed on dramatic performances48 and leased the space to T. Charles Howard’s Olympic Theatre Company, which promised to bring the “best talent in the United States” to Halifax. A large audience greeted the troupe at the first performance on the evening of 28 May. Theatergoers enjoyed The Streets of New York and the farcical afterpiece, The Cork Leg. The British Colonist described the actors as “clever” and the performances “pleasing.”49 Howard returned to Temperance Hall in the summer of 1869 and again in 1870. The 7 June 1870 Daily Acadian Register listed the company members scheduled to arrive the next day. One of them was Clara Morris. In Life on the Stage, she portrays herself as an intrepid solitary voyager venturing northward to “Halifax, the picturesque.”50 In reality, she was part of a large troupe of thirty-two actors, among them Boston comedian Dan Maginnis and leading man John W. Norton. Characteristically, Morris provides few details of her arrangement with Howard. She does not say how she obtained the contract or what its specific terms were, nor does she discuss her trip (most likely by train and steamship) from Cincinnati to Halifax. Upon arrival, she was surprised by “the astonishing number of people in mourning” and subsequently learned of the tragic loss of the City of Boston. The transatlantic liner had sailed from Halifax on 28 January 1870 with 121 passengers, 51 of them from Halifax, bound for Liverpool. The large steamer, pride of the Inman line, never reached its destination. It became one of twenty-four ships to vanish between 1840 and 1890 on the Atlantic Ocean without leaving a clue to explain its disappearance.51 Although it had been missing for almost five months, its loss had just become official. Halifax, in Morris’s words, “was a very sad city that summer.”52

71


The Olympic Theatre Company promised to provide some much-needed entertainment but offered a disappointing opening bill on 13 June: a dramatic reading of Dickens’s Dot!, Or, The Cricket on the Hearth, followed by Brian O’Linn, a farce. The first was probably a last-minute substitution, because an announcement of the acclaimed author’s death had appeared in Canadian newspapers that morning. Nevertheless, the Daily Acadian Recorder called the selections “unfortunate” and expressed concern that the company had not been able to “do justice to their individual merits.” Even though Howard returned to more traditional fare the next night with Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn and a new farce by Dan Maginnis called The Spitfire, the same paper reported that attendance was “very slim” for most of the Olympic’s first week. The blame did not lie entirely with the company. There had been a smallpox outbreak in the city, which undoubtedly kept people away from the theater. In addition, the weather had been unusually hot and “insufficient ventilation” was “another source of annoyance” for the audience. 53 The 18 June Daily Acadian Recorder assured its readers that the ventilation problem had been addressed and urged them to patronize the troupe. In particular, it encouraged them to see Clara Morris, “the first star of the season,” in her Canadian debut on 20 June. “She is said to be young, handsome, and accomplished,” the paper observed, noting a “report speaks of her talent in the highest terms.” Although the stale offerings in which she appeared (The Lady of Lyons, followed by a farce, Object of Interest) failed to do her justice, the paper praised her in Ingomar later in the week. The production was overlong, but she won the audience with her affecting interpretation: “The tones of this lady’s voice are surpassingly sweet—there is no affectation whatever, and gentleness, womanly grace, and the absorbing power of love, which conquereth strong men, were all vividly represented in and by Miss Morris last evening.”54 She had leading roles in the parade of melodramas Howard’s company presented over the next two weeks. They included Zoe in The Octoroon, Julia in The Hunchback (which the Daily Acadian Recorder considered “one of her best impersonations”), and Laura in Under the Gaslight. She also played Lady Gay Spanker in Boucicault’s London Assurance and appeared in his Jessie Brown, or the Relief of Lucknow, a production she discusses in her memoirs. The newspaper gave it a perfunctory review that did not mention her by name and said simply it was done in “fine style” to a “full house,” with “each of the characters filling their respective parts admirably.”55 Morris does not indicate which one she played, remembering it only because of the melee that ensued during a battle scene. As she tells it, Howard had recruited real soldiers to act as extras, and some actually began clubbing their fellow actors with muskets. Others dressed in kilts shocked audience members when their clothing caught on cleats as

72


they scaled a wall on stage and revealed they wore nothing underneath. Much to her amusement, “the curtain had to come whirling down before the proper time to save the lives of the men being pounded to death and the feelings of the women who were being shamed to death.”56 Whether Morris embellished the episode or the critic chose to ignore it, these events did not appear in the pages of the Daily Acadian Recorder. The only other experience she relates is having played Juliet to a “womanRomeo.” It was not the first time she performed opposite a woman in a male role, having done so several times for Ellsler, but it would be the last. The newspaper identifies the actress as Dollie Bidwell, who had been “secured for a short season of five nights.” Morris describes her as being “a so plump Romeo, who seemed all French heels, tights, and wig, with Romeo marked ‘absent.’”57 She says nothing more about the production, nor does the Daily Acadian Recorder, which did not review it, perhaps because the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War on 15 July dominated the headlines. Morris had already appeared in three Shakespearean roles opposite “eminent English tragedian” Frederick Robinson, who had a weeklong engagement earlier in the month. Both received favorable notices for their work in Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Taming a Shrew (yet another adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy), as well as in Still Waters Run Deep, King of the Commons, She Stoops to Conquer, and Dreams of Delusion. Morris does not reflect on her summer in Halifax, except to say she found “the people”—fellow actors? journalists? audiences? community members?—“so pleasant.” She makes one statement in Life on the Stage, however, that startles because it is patently untrue. Recalling Romeo and Juliet, she writes, “I little dreamed I was bidding a personal farewell to Shakespeare and the old classic drama, as I really was doing.” Although she would embrace new material in the coming years, winning recognition as a Shakespearean actress remained a cherished personal goal, one that she would not easily relinquish. She would strive to equal, if not surpass, Charlotte Cushman in critical and popular esteem. She would search for a classical role that would solidify her reputation as a gifted artist but would find the quest far more difficult than she anticipated. Her immediate task, however, was to begin “the new life in the great strange city” New York.58 Her triumph there would be real, immediate, and surprising—to everyone, perhaps, but herself. Within weeks, she would begin to fulfill her twin dreams of stardom and self-invention.

73

5 A

W

estern Actress in New York

NOTHING SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE FOR a confident and growing New York in 1870. The city where Clara Morris and her mother settled in August was America’s largest, as it had been since the mid-1850s, with a population of almost one million. The nation’s leader in trade, banking, and commerce, New York was financially secure and thriving. Critics might complain about its rampant crime and “ill-regulated, badly paved, filthy streets crowded with vehicles.” They could object to political corruption in the era of William M. “Boss” Tweed, when bribery, graft, larceny, and fraud infiltrated municipal operations at every level. They could criticize the inadequacies of the urban transportation system, lack of bridges connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn, and ever-widening gulf between the flamboyantly wealthy and the desperately poor,1 but they had to acknowledge the city’s importance as the nation’s theatrical epicenter. Between 1850 and 1870, theater had found its permanent home on Broadway, a major urban thoroughfare. Paved and lighted, it was served early and well by public transportation. Although theaters clustered on Lower Broadway earlier in the century, Union Square had emerged as the center of New York’s theatrical district by 1870. Other theaters were beginning to open beyond its borders: Broadway (on the west), Fourth Avenue (east), Seventeenth Street (north), and Fourteenth Street (south).2 Booth’s Theatre had stood on the southeast corner of Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue since 1869, the year after financier James Fisk Jr. bought the Fifth Avenue Theatre on the south side of West Twenty-fourth Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. After renovating the interior, he installed John Brougham as its manager. When Brougham’s theater failed, Fisk leased the building for the then astronomical sum of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.3 The new tenant was Augustin Daly. Daly, who had recently opted for a full-time career as a manager, had been involved in the theater for more than a decade as a journalist and playwright. In December 1859, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the staff of the Sunday

74

A Western Actress in New York

Courier, New York City’s first Sunday newspaper. Within a few weeks, he advanced to the position of drama critic and produced a series of articles under the pseudonym Le Pelerin (the Pilgrim),4 a name that reflected the almost religious devotion he would show towards the theater in the coming years. In 1864, he succeeded James Otis as drama critic of the Evening Express and in 1866 began contributing criticism to the New York Sun. Appointed drama critic of the New York Times and the New York Citizen in 1867, he continued to write for all five newspapers for a short time.5

Engraving of Augustin Daly by S. Hollyer after a cabinet photograph by Napoleon Sarony. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

75


In that same year, he achieved his greatest success as a playwright with his spectacular melodrama Under the Gaslight. First presented on 12 August at the New York Theatre, it enjoyed more than one hundred performances in its first season in New York (as well as four weeks in Boston and seven in Philadelphia). Daly had begun to write plays in 1856 but did not attract critical attention until 1862 when he created Leah the Forsaken, based on Austrian playwright Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal’s Deborah, for Kate Bateman. Other adaptations of French and German originals followed, including Taming a Butterfly for Mrs. John Wood and Come Here! for Fanny Janauschek. Griffith Gaunt won praise in 1866, but Under the Gaslight, whose courageous heroine defied gender stereotypes in rescuing a man from the path of an oncoming train, made him famous. Encouraged by the accolades Under the Gaslight received, Daly resigned as drama critic from every paper but the New York Times to concentrate on playwriting and management. In 1869, shortly after his marriage to Mary Duff, daughter of theater manager John Duff, he resolved to focus exclusively on the latter. Although he used neither term to describe himself, Daly assumed the roles of artistic director and producer for his company, devoting himself to theater with a singleness of purpose from which he never deviated. Honored by the New York Shakespeare Society in 1896, three years before his death in Paris, Daly expounded upon the significance of his achievement. In a speech his brother Joseph had prepared, he described his life’s work in elevated terms: If to write the songs of a nation is to exert more influence upon it than to make its laws, then the men who control the amusements of the people have a responsibility . . . as great, if not greater, than the men who fill its pulpits. It is with a sense of such responsibility that I have done what I have done for the modern stage.6 As those last three words suggest, Daly saw himself as a theatrical innovator. His mission had been to reform American theater by providing it with fresh material of contemporary relevance and insisting on realistic acting by a unified ensemble. His ideal company was one without stars or lines of business, in which strict discipline enforced high standards, and he had absolute control. At the refurbished Fifth Avenue Theatre, the first playbill made his intentions clear: “This theatre is opened for the production of whatever is novel, original, entertaining and unobjectionable, and the revival of whatever is rare and worthy in legitimate drama.” As he would do throughout his career, he assembled an outstanding group of actors, staffed his theater with skilled designers, and provided an excellent orchestra.7 The season began on 16 August

76


1869 with T. W. Robertson’s Play. Over the next six months, he staged twentyone productions but struggled to fill his nine-hundred-seat house.8 His first success came in February 1870 with Frou-Frou, his adaptation of a French sentimental drama by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. The production made a star of Agnes Ethel in the role of Gilberte, known affectionately as Frou-Frou, an impetuous child-wife who commits adultery with her former suitor. After the husband she abandoned slays her lover in a duel, she atones by nursing the poor and contracts a disease from one of her patients. Reunited with her family before her imminent death, she begs their forgiveness and, as the curtain falls, asks to be buried in a white gown covered with roses. Although the Tribune’s William Winter condemned the play as “pernicious to morality,” weeping audiences kept Frou-Frou on stage for 103 consecutive performances, the longest run of the season. With Frou-Frou, Daly had found the formula that established his theater and his reputation. Interspersed among traditional fare (such as Shakespeare and eighteenth-century English comedies) and “modern” pieces by Robertson and other authors of the day were more-controversial offerings. Adaptations of contemporary European dramas, often his own versions of French works recently the rage in Paris, they presented sensational topics of current interest. In Daly’s view, a lurid play could be palatable if it taught a moral lesson. Although his productions provoked critical censure, they also attracted audiences with the promise of titillating material and polished performances by the resident company. Their convoluted plots typically focused on the trials of a beleaguered “fallen woman”—innocent victim, errant sinner, or a more complex character of greater ambiguity—and frequently featured the latest Daly discovery in the leading female role. Morris would soon be one of them. When the Fifth Avenue Theatre closed for the summer on 9 July, Daly had presented 337 performances of twenty-five plays. The second season, Morris’s first under his management, would proceed with similar intensity.9 From her perspective, as described in Life on the Stage, it did not begin auspiciously. Worried about meeting the members of the company, she saw her worst fears realized when everyone ignored her. Daly, whom she characterizes as “tall and thin and dour,” neglected to introduce her to her fellow actors, whose “titters” at her shabby clothes and scornful “appraising glances” kept her “in agony.” She remembers the theater itself as being tiny and unpleasant. The claustrophobic green room in the basement was especially oppressive, more like a dungeon than a place where people could relax or socialize: Atmosphere was there stagnant, heavy, dead, with not even an electric fan to stir it up occasionally, and the whole place was filled with the musty, mouldy odor that always arises from carpets spread in sunless, airless 77


rooms. Gas, too, burned in every tiny room, in every narrow slip of passageway, and though it was all immaculately clean, it was still wonderful how human beings endured so many hours imprisonment there.10 She recalls her surprise at the way the company cowered before Daly, puzzled by their slavish attention to his every word. When he distributed parts for his adaptation of Man and Wife, based on the novel by Wilkie Collins, she was displeased with hers. He had cast her as Blanche, “a comedy part.” The role she hoped for, that of the wronged Anne Sylvester, had gone to Agnes Ethel, fresh from her triumph as Frou-Frou. Before the first rehearsal the following morning, Daly summoned Morris to his private office where he told her that Ethel had rejected the part, for reasons he did not disclose. Although company member Fanny Davenport had asked to play Anne, he doubted she could. His choice was Morris, who quickly agreed but still felt she was “not one of them.” The men seemed indifferent to her, the women cruel. They mocked her clothes and treated her with condescension. She did not help the situation by rehearsing listlessly, reading her lines “with intelligence” but without conviction. As the days passed, she became increasingly upset. She found the rehearsals “exhausting in the extreme,” the heat “unnatural,” and the long walk from the theater to her apartment enervating. She did not have enough to eat and thought she was on the verge of “a breakdown,” so weak she had “to be carried up the stairs to the stage.” Morris had so little money, she worried she would be unable to buy the costumes Daly expected her to provide. Having learned that Agnes Ethel objected to Anne Sylvester’s alleged “immorality,” she was baffled, given the roles Ethel played the previous season, and wondered if she had become a pawn in a company cabal. Even worse, on the night before her New York debut, “suffering bodily as well as mentally,” she had “an alarming attack of pleurisy.” Her description of the ordeal is sheer melodrama but does suggest the deficiencies of nineteenth-century medical practice. Her anxious mother called a doctor to treat her. He arrived but was drunk, “obstinate, almost abusive.” He blistered her so “shockingly” that Morrison summoned another doctor to dress her daughter’s “hideous” wounds. Morris’s “agony” paled in comparison to “the nervous terror, the icy chill, the burning fever, the deadly nausea” she felt on opening night. She was unable to eat, but her mother stood over her “with tear-filled eyes” until Morris finished a raw egg and a cup of broth. Because her lips were “so cold and stiff with fright that they would not move,” she and Morrison embraced instead. Her little dog covered her “troubled, veiled face with frantic kisses” as she was about to leave for the theater, which comforted her. After she “crept painfully down the steps,” she glanced back at her mother who waved and called, “Good luck! God bless

78


you!” Morris’s mood changed instantly. “The pendulum was swinging to the other extreme,” she explains, and she found herself “in high spirits.”11 The pendulum swung again when she arrived at the theater. In her tiny dressing room, she was overwhelmed by a “sense of utter loneliness.” No one wished her well or offered advice about makeup, even though everyone knew she was unfamiliar with the intensity of the theater’s gaslight. As soon as she made her first entrance and saw the proximity of the audience to the stage, she realized she had applied it too heavily. Their “closeness” horrified her, and her reaction is shocking in its ferocity: “I felt I should step upon their upturned faces; I wanted to put out my hands and push the people back, and their use of opera-glasses filled my eyes with angry tears.” She knew she could not compete with the other women in the cast, whose “exquisite lacy dresses, their jewelloaded fingers” distressed her and made her feel “sick and cold.” Predictably, when she heard her cue and tried to speak, she could not. She opened her mouth but made no sound. Although her first line was a “hoarse croak,” she delivered the next with such spirit that the audience greeted her with “a round of applause of lightning quickness.” Taken aback by the warmth of their response, “the first bit of genuine hearty kindness” she had received in New York, she smiled and won more applause. Her attitude changed instantly. The people whose faces she wanted to trample moments earlier were no longer her adversaries. There was an immediate bond between them: “At last! I was starting fair, we had shaken hands, my audience and I; my nerves were steady, my heart strong, the part good. I would try hard, I would do my best.”12 Applause punctuated the performance and increased in volume and intensity. Much to her embarrassment, the audience demanded a bow in the middle of a scene. At the end of the third act, with Daly’s approval, she stood alone on stage and received a standing ovation. Through her “happy tears,” she watched the audience rise “as one individual.” She held her hands out to them “in a very passion of love,” and they waved white handkerchiefs in ecstatic communion. The curtain fell, and as it rose for the last time, she had a mystical experience. She saw a vision of herself as “a little crying child carrying a single potato in her hand,” passing between her adult self and “those applauding people.” It served as a powerful reminder of how far she had come and how much she had achieved in a decade.13 As if scripted by Daly, virtue was rewarded, and the unknown actress became a star overnight. Morris triumphed as Anne. During the fourth act, even the orchestra broke into applause for her. Finally, “late, far too late,” the performance ended “in a blaze of glory.” Eager to share the happy news with her mother, she scrambled into her street clothes and dashed from the theater.

79


As she did, Morris chose a curious image with which to conclude her account of this memorable evening: As I came up from that place of mouldy smell and burnt-out air, and lifted my face to the stupendous beauty of the heavens, sniffing delightedly at the cool, pure night air, suddenly I thought how delicious must have been the first long breath young Lazarus drew when, obeying the Divine command, he “came forth” from the tomb.14 It is the second time she has referred to the theater in such macabre terms, suggesting the profound ambivalence she would later feel about her acting career. The older Morris, chastened by failures she never discusses, understands that success is fleeting, audiences fickle, applause evanescent. Although she presents her story as a rags-to-riches saga, she knows it is more like a medieval cautionary tale about the transience of fame and the turning of Fortune’s wheel. She gives her readers only the wheel on the upswing, but the constant awareness of the precipitous drop that can and will happen without warning pulses beneath her uplifting text. When it surfaces in references to the theater as a tomblike place of fetid air or a “melancholy and desolate place of shabby deceptions,” it is jarring, revealing pain the sunny public persona cannot mask or contain.15 Morris concludes her account with a beatific portrait of herself sitting beneath a gas jet, between her mother and her dog, eating a simple dinner of bread and cheese. Acknowledging the powerful connection she felt with her audience, as well as the universality of her appeal, she says she had discovered that “hearts are just the same whether they beat against Western ribs or Eastern ribs.” She went to sleep thankful that through “God’s mercy” and her “own hard work” she was “the first Western actress” who had “ever been accepted by a New York audience.”16 She had obviously chosen to ignore Lotta Crabtree, whom New Yorkers first applauded in 1864 and never tired of seeing until her retirement in 1891. However exaggerated Morris’s claim to “first” might be, she did not overstate the importance of audience approval. Given the hardship of her early years, ensuring freedom from want, achieving social respectability, and winning acceptance on the stage were driving forces in her life and career. Pleasing theatergoers was paramount, so she eschewed roles that people might find objectionable. Many of them, in turn, were deeply affected by her performances and responded to her with passionate devotion. Emotion flowed in both directions between artist and audience in an exchange that infused both with new energy. Sadly, as the nature of that relationship changed over the years, she would come to dread the public and would find acting an ordeal. In her writing, instead of portraying the audience as her ally, it would metamorphose

80


into an adversary and, finally, into something not even human: a hydra-headed monster she loathed and feared. Despite Morris’s fondness for hyperbole, many critics verified her account of the opening performance. Observing that the “young actress from the West . . . achieved a success of the most unqualified kind,” the New York Herald praised her for having interpreted “the character with rare delicacy, tenderness, dignity and all the varied qualities it demanded.” The New York Times, favorably impressed with her “remarkably mobile” face and “full and melodious voice,” applauded the “delicacy” and power of her performance, declaring them qualities that are “rarely united”: Where such refinement is, there is apt, also, to be weakness, and where strength, coarseness. Miss Morris is in this respect singularly fortunate. She is charmingly spontaneous, appreciative, even to subtlety, of the play of womanly feeling and its nice balance of act and motive, and yet she is physically strong enough to give effect even to the most stormy and exacting situations.17 The New York Sun’s Nym Crinkle was more restrained. In an era when the prime requisite for an actress was beauty, he found Morris lacking “a magnificent stage appearance.” Nevertheless, he admired her convincing interpretation and acknowledged the strong emotional connection she established with her audience: “She feels a passion and expresses it so that we all feel it likewise.” He urged her to “take success in her own hands” by refining her craft and remembering that most American actresses “have erred by too great a reliance on their nature when they should have learned to lean upon their art.”18 It is easy to see why Morris would have found Anne Sylvester congenial. In addition to being the leading female role, she is a virtuous and wholly sympathetic character. She serves as governess-companion to Blanche Lundie, to whom she is devoted. She loves Geoffrey Delamayn, a nobleman’s son, who has pledged to marry her. She does not realize he has no intention of making her his wife because his father has threatened to disinherit him unless he chooses an heiress. Unlike the novel, in which Anne is pregnant, Daly leaves the exact nature of their relationship unclear, suggesting only that she and Geoffrey have been romantically involved. Her refusal to play croquet because she feels ill in the opening scene results from emotional, not physical, distress. Geoffrey’s machinations propel the complicated plot, which depends for its resolution on an interpretation of Scottish marriage laws by Blanche’s uncle, Sir Patrick Lundie. An arcane regulation forces Geoffrey to wed Anne, who soon comes to hate and fear him. As the action spirals through conspiracies, blackmail, and attempted murder, he moves from treachery to madness. Unable to divorce

81


Anne, his plan to strangle her thwarted by a servant, the enraged Geoffrey collapses and dies cursing the wife he loathes in the play’s startling conclusion.19 Anne would have resonated with Morris, who could have drawn on her own experience to portray this multifaceted character. For Anne, the social inferior and outcast, Morris could recall her unhappy years in Cleveland and ostracism by Daly’s company. For Anne, falsely accused, she could remember her recent altercation with Macauley in Cincinnati. For Anne, victimized by a predatory male, there was John Ellsler, who certainly exploited his relationship with a young woman more like a daughter than an appropriate sexual partner. Virtuous, self-sacrificing Anne would have appealed to Morris’s sense of self in any number of situations over the years. At the same time, she would have seen Anne’s strength as matching her own and the social acceptance she wins at the end of the play as fulfilling some of her most precious aspirations. A description of her nuanced performance published decades later captures the emotional impact it had on the first-night audience: Nobody in the audience seemed to know the pale little creature who remained in the background during most of the first act, until the climax [when] she startled everyone with a Vesuvian outburst of passion. They were watching her when the curtain rose again; and during the second act she developed such intensity of power, sincerity of purpose—fury expressed in choking passion, and tenderness interpreted through streaming tears,—that half the audience wept with her. After that all were under the spell of the little pale woman, and Clara Morris was famous.20 That “spell” continued for the run of the play. Although there is no diary for this important period in her life, the 1869 volume contains eight entries for 1870, two of which concern Man and Wife. In one, Morris notes she played Anne and was “treated gorgeously by the audience.” In the other, she “received [a] splendid call” after both afternoon and evening performances. 21 With Man and Wife, in theater historian George C. D. Odell’s words, “Miss Morris became at once a new sensation.” An outsider no longer, she was welcomed into what she calls the “family circle” of the company. Her major challenge was keeping her performance fresh night after night. She was used to stock productions, which ran for two weeks at most, and now faced several weeks of playing the same role. She was particularly concerned about being able to cry on cue, because she realized her performance depended on it. As she explained in Life on the Stage, “I had made my hit with the public by moving the people’s feelings to the point of tears; but to do that I had first to move my own heart, for, try as I would, no amount of careful acting had the desired effect. I had to shed tears or they would not.”22

82


The longer the play ran, the less the role affected her and the more difficult it became to produce tears on stage because “they are not mechanical, they will not come at will.” Her solution was to recall an “outside incident” that moved her: the memory of a Cleveland actress crushed by the realization that audiences disliked her. Visualizing her “quivering face” and “stricken eyes” produced the “sudden tears” Morris needed. It was a technique she claims to have used for the rest of her career, without which she could not have cried “seven times a week, for nine or ten months a year.” It did not matter if the incident came from real life or a book as long as remembering it brought “tears to weary eyes.”23 Morris makes her discovery sound radical, but it is a technique many actors use to trigger an appropriate emotional response. For her to consider it unusual suggests that in 1870, it was. Although there were signs that acting styles were changing, 24 Morris—by nineteenth-century standards—was breathtaking in her realism. She was especially effective, too, because the contrast between her unremarkable appearance (a “little pale woman”) and the volcanic passions she expressed was so startling, so different from the hegemonic feminine ideal of the day. She allowed the audience to become emotionally invested in the character she played and, by extension, in her as an actress unafraid to lose herself completely in the emotional demands of the role. That cathartic exchange was a gift she gave her audience each night. In any era, it is the first requirement for stardom. Man and Wife closed on 19 November after a ten-week run. One month later, Morris opened in Saratoga, a new comedy by Bronson Howard. In keeping with his no-stars policy, Daly had cast her as Lucy Carter, a small role she considered beneath her. She was furious but knew she could not alter the terms of her contract. As she explains in Life on the Stage, “for one hundred nights I was thus made to do penance for having made a success in ‘Man and Wife.’ Truly I had got a good ‘crack’ for bobbing up.” Although Joseph Daly wrote that Morris “shone in a comedy part as conspicuously as in the deadly serious one of Anne Sylvester,” the New York Herald dismissed her performance as merely decorative.25 Rewarded for her patience, Morris won the title role in Boucicault’s Jezebel, which opened on 28 March 1871 and closed after only two weeks. A ludicrously complicated story of adultery, assumed identity, and bigamy—which Daly had excised from Man and Wife but could not remove from this play—Jezebel must have baffled theatergoers with the improbable twists of its convoluted plot. Nevertheless, the New York Times praised Morris’s performance as the remorseless Madame d’Artigues, whom she described as a “wicked, even murderous adventuress,” and admired the emotional power she brought to the role. She had “an intensity and a variety of physiognomical expression rarely seen.” The

83


“voluptuousness and implacable passion, the indolence and snaky concentration” with which she endowed her character made for a “striking dramatic illustration” and showed that Morris gave “promise of becoming a remarkably fine actress.” She already was “an unusually good one.”26 Daly ignored his own policy regarding visiting stars when he engaged veteran actor Charles Mathews for nearly two months, beginning on 10 April. Odell wrote that Morris “made a great hit” opposite him in “The Spanish Armada,” the play-within-the-play in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s satire The Critic. Following Mathews’s departure on 3 June, Daly presented four more plays: his own adaptation of Victorien Sardou’s Le Papillon called Delmonico’s, or Larks up the Hudson, Wilkie Collins’s dramatization of his novel No Name, and a forgettable double bill consisting of The Savage and the Maiden and An Angel. Morris appeared in three of them, but none won critical or popular acclaim. The failure of No Name was most disappointing. Although Daly had hoped to duplicate the success of Man and Wife, the new production ran for just thirteen nights. Odell found Morris “fine” in the leading role of Magdalen Vanstone but criticized the work itself as a “skeleton play” lacking the novel’s convincing character development.27 Morris’s major complaint during that first season was Daly’s refusal to honor his promise to double her thirty-five-dollar salary if she made “a favorable impression” on New York audiences, although she had certainly done so as Anne Sylvester.28 He pressed her to sign a five-year contract, pledging an annual salary increase if she did. Convinced it would mean “absolute bondage,” she insisted on a renewable contract each year instead. His policy, however, was to engage actors for several years at a time, and he was unwilling to make an exception for her. Angry she had challenged his authority, he was ready to dismiss her from the company. According to Life on the Stage, the prospect of losing her to a competitor made him change his mind. Having noticed a letter addressed to Morris with “Wallack’s” on the envelope, Daly instructed the doorman to send her to his office as soon as she arrived at the theater. When she appeared before him, he offered a contract for one season as she had requested and because he had departed from company procedure, swore her to secrecy. He proposed an immediate raise of five dollars, with a salary increase to fifty-five dollars assured for 1871–72. He also promised to provide three costumes whenever she needed five for any production. “Tormented” for money, Morris signed “instantly,” then found a better offer from Lester Wallack in her mailbox. 29 Morris flourished under Daly’s management for the next two seasons. Each recognized and respected the other’s strengths. He valued her honesty as well as her talent and knew he could trust her with confidential information. She characterized him as “a man of fine and delicate tastes, with a passionate love

84


of beauty—in form, color, sound . . . —a man of many tastes, but of one single purpose—every power and acquirement were brought to the service of the stage.” As a director, “he had the entire play before his ‘mind’s eye.’” He always gave her a reason for her actions on stage, “and that made it easy to work under him.” His attention to detail “amazed” her. When they took a bow together after her brilliant opening performance as Alixe, she kissed his hand in gratitude for having enabled her to achieve one of her greatest triumphs.30 However idyllic these recollections may be, Morris’s memoirs also depict a rapidly deteriorating relationship. Complicated from the first, it became increasingly adversarial. She grew disenchanted with him, frustrated by his refusal to pay her an appropriate salary. He tried to placate her with gifts: an inlaid writing desk after Alixe, a puppy following her success in Madelein Morel, the last play in the 1872–73 season. She resisted his attempts to monitor her performances, delimit her artistic development, and censor her conduct. He resented her defiant, even subversive independence. Morris’s comments about Daly are laced with irony, her descriptions often critical and unflattering. In Life on the Stage, she portrays his need for absolute control as sinister. From his office, like a diabolical giant spider, “he dreamed dreams and spun webs, watching over the incomings, the outgoings, the sayings and doings of every soul in the company. He would have regulated their thoughts if he could.” “A man of unbounded ambition,” as driven as she, he rigidly enforced his authority within the world he governed and insisted that company members call him “Governor.” He expected them to obey what Morris calls “an astounding list of rules printed in fine type all over the backs of his contracts.” As she writes in Stage Confidences, there were penalties for a seemingly endless list of infractions: “‘For being late,’ ‘For a stage wait,’ ‘For lack of courtesy,’ ‘For gossiping,’ ‘For wounding a companion’s feelings’—each had its separate forfeiture.” Most of them “ended with, ‘Or discharge at the option of the manager.’”31 Nothing was to compromise the theater’s public image he had so carefully constructed. Typically in his office by 7:30 a.m., Daly would often stay beyond midnight, sometimes spending the night at the theater. According to Otis Skinner, a member of his company in the 1880s, “his capacity for work was limitless”: He ran the entire establishment from ticket office to stage door. He was ubiquitous. At one moment he was on the paint frame, criticizing the work of the scenic artist, then in the property-room issuing orders for furniture, draperies, and bric-a-brac, and his trail could be followed into the costume workshop, the carpenter shop, to the business office whose windows overlooked Broadway, and then plunging back again into his own private den in the rear to labors of play-writing, work with his translator,

85


and the thousand and one things that were crammed into each of his twenty-four hours.32 He did not hesitate to drive his actors to achieve the perfection he expected. William Winter, who reviewed Daly’s productions negatively for years, thought his direction tended to “efface individuality in an actor and convert him into a machine.” Skinner claims, “No martinet was ever more strict in discipline and cast-iron rule.” Odell calls him “one of the greatest despots in the theatre.” Others compared him to a Napoleonic dictator, Roman emperor, or military commander. “He was relentless when disobeyed,” reported the New York World on 9 June 1899. “No captain on a quarterdeck exercised greater authority than the manager did on the stage of Daly’s Theatre.”33 Daly saw himself in authoritarian terms and cultivated the sense of an imperial self. Theater historian Kim Marra cites compelling examples of his autocratic self-references. In a January 1865 letter to his brother Joseph, he asserted, “I have the will and disposition to ride over every puny obstacle.” “When I am on stage,” he informed an employee, “I permit no one to interfere with me.” As he explained to actor Richard Mansfield, skeptical about his methods, “I cannot afford to be less than Commander in Chief of all my forces from the highest officer under me to the humblest. Only in this way can I lead you on to victory—the victory which we both would desire.”34 Like titans in other fields, Daly was determined to rise to the top of his as he rewrote its rules. Gender dynamics also played a significant role in the Daly enterprise. As a Victorian male manager, it was his privilege and prerogative to control and “tame” his actresses. When they questioned his authority as Morris did, they threatened his masculinity, professional identity, and sense of self. Based on comments by company members, Marra believes Daly “subjected actresses to more rigorous scrutiny and to more extreme humiliation than actors in rehearsals, and he used his authority to take sexual liberties with the women that he apparently did not with the men.”35 His most enduring relationship was with Ada Rehan, who joined his company in 1879 and remained with him as leading lady and lover until his death. Yet, even she, a woman to whom he was allegedly devoted, did not escape his cruelty during rehearsals when his insults often reduced her to tears. Their commitment to one another did not keep him from pursuing other actresses, any more than his marriage had prevented a twenty-year liaison with her. As critical as Morris is, she never suggests that Daly pressured her into a sexual relationship. Although they disagreed publicly and privately over many issues, sex does not seem to have been one of them. In her novel A Pasteboard Crown, a strangely bitter “story of the New York stage,” she implies that she did not appeal to him. One of the main characters is the genial actress Claire Morrell, 86


who resembles Morris down to the initials. She is Mrs. Barton “in private life” and lives in Riverdale at “The Beeches”; Morris was Mrs. Harriott, residing in Riverdale at “The Pines.” They share the same grim childhood. The description Morris provides of her fictional counterpart reads like a self-portrait. She is “a fair-complexioned, wholesome-looking woman, with lots of brown hair that had glittering threads through and through it.” Morrell’s ordinary appearance may have protected her from sexual exploitation. “Her straight nose was a little too short, her cheek-bones a little too high, her mouth a little too wide; in fact, she had escaped being a beauty so easily that one could not help feeling she had never been in danger.”36 That had not been Morris’s experience as a young actress, nor is it the case with lovely Sybil Lawton, who will fall victim to the emblematically named Stewart Thrall. Based unmistakably on Daly, Thrall is the ruthless manager who runs New York’s Globe Theatre in New York. He is a clone of her former manager: “a tall man of excellent figure,” with black “closely cropped hair” and luminous “Irish blue eyes.” Handsome and debonair,” he is “shrewd and clever and determined.” Just as Daly bribed newspaper editors and bought critics, Thrall “made everything serve him. If he had a friend in a high place he never forgot it or allowed anyone else to forget it either.” Like Daly, he often retires to private quarters or places in the theater from which he can watch his company members unseen. Like Daly, they refer to him as the Governor.37 It is as a sexual predator, however, that Thrall most closely resembles Daly. The unsuspecting Sybil Lawton will be the last of his many conquests. The devoted daughter of loving but ineffectual parents, she hopes to become an actress in order to support her family. She knows her neighbor Claire Morrell can help, and her “desire to go upon the stage” quickly becomes a “passion.” As Morris cautions her readers, “it is the almost sterile soul of poverty that oftenest produces the cactus-like plant of Ambition, whose splendid and dazzling flowers are, alas, so often without perfume.”38 If that were not sufficient warning that Sybil is doomed, Morris provides others. There is Claire Morrell’s swift, cynical reply when the young woman asks her if it is difficult to have a theatrical career: A flash came from the blue eyes of the actress, and her lip curled contemptuously as she answered: “Oh, no! If a woman has been party to a particularly offensive scandal, or to a shooting, or has come straight from the divorce court, then she turns quite naturally to the stage-door, which seems to open readily to her touch—such is the baneful power of notoriety. But your respectable, clean-minded girl, who wishes to enter a theatre of high standing, will find it easier to break through the wall, removing brick by brick, than to open unaided the door closed against her.39 87


There is the haunting description of the empty Globe Theatre during the day, which reflects Morris’s disillusionment with the stage’s “shabby deceptions.” It conveys “an impression of loss.” “It is like looking on the face of a dead pleasure.” “It is though an admired, brilliant and successful liar stood there who had been found out and suddenly reduced to telling the bare, bald truth.”40 Thrall’s own words reinforce the idea of theater as fraudulent and illusory. When Sybil admires an engraving of renowned British actress Sarah Siddons wearing a crown, she says she hopes she will be “crowned queen” of the stage some day. Thrall laughs derisively, calling it “a pasteboard crown, . . . so thinly covered with gold-leaf you dare not try to burnish it! . . . A cheap and gaudy thing, the outside blazing with rare jewels made of glass! Inside, paper, glue. . . . A thing worthless, meaningless!” Sybil disagrees, asserting that even as pasteboard, it would still be “a sign, a symbol of artistic triumph, of true excellence, of the world’s approval!”41 Reality, however, soon shatters Sybil’s fantasy. Awed by her beauty, Thrall agrees to manage her. He becomes obsessed, revitalized by the passion he feels for “this little girl” and admits he loves her “blindly, stupidly, senselessly.” They consummate their relationship in the theater one stormy night, ironically after a rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet.42 Illicit sex would have been damning enough, but there is an additional complication. Stewart Thrall, like Augustin Daly, is married. Although he lives apart from Lettice, his wife of twelve years, and has long been unfaithful, she refuses to divorce him. Sybil, who faints during a performance when she learns of Lettice’s existence, is distraught. Betrayed by the man she trusted and admired, she now feels “base,” “unworthy,” “polluted,” and “defiled forever.” Eager to make a point about moral weakness and victimization, Morris takes her novel far beyond the facts of her or Daly’s life. The fates of Stewart Thrall and Sybil Lawton are very different from those of Augustin Daly and Ada Rehan—or, for that matter, from John Ellsler’s and her own. Nevertheless, her portrait of Thrall serves as an indictment of exploitative managerial power and the double standard of sexual morality with which she seems to be charging Daly. Although she may not have been the target of his sexual advances, she implies that many actresses in his company were, vulnerable to his sense of entitlement as well as to his voracious appetite. At the same time, based on her harsh treatment of Sybil Lawton, Morris strongly suggests that women have a responsibility to act honorably even if men do not. Men may be weak, coarse, even brutal, but women should know and do better.43 Whatever her personal animus toward Daly, Morris could not question his professional judgment during the next two seasons she spent under his management. In September 1871, New Yorkers were preoccupied with the fall

88


of the Tweed Ring but flocked to the theater nonetheless. Revivals were the predominant attractions. Lotta Crabtree had launched the 1871–72 season on 14 August with a six-week engagement in Little Nell and the Marchioness at Booth’s. Niblo’s, which had burned to the ground in May, reopened on the twenty-first with a new production of Fritz, Our Cousin German. Comedian G. L. Fox drew audiences to the Olympic Theatre on 31 August with his popular musical pantomime, Humpty Dumpty. The Grand Opera House followed on 2 September with a revival of Narcisse, starring Daniel Bandmann. Two days later, Lucille Western began her engagement at Wood’s Museum with the perennial favorite East Lynne.44 When the Fifth Avenue Theatre opened its doors on Tuesday, 5 September, Daly did not follow suit. Committed to staging plays of contemporary interest, he presented Divorce, his adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. With a cast of twenty-three, the production showcased the talents of the company and featured Morris as Fanny TenEyck, a role she described as “a long, hard-working part, that was without any marked characteristic or salient feature to make a hit with.” In its review of the opening-night performance, the New York Herald called the play “remarkably realistic and absorbing” and praised Morris for the power she brought to her role. The Tribune’s William Winter questioned “whether art ought to invite public attention to minute vivisection of matrimonial infelicities”—implying it should not—and declared “other and better plays” had treated the subject “with less prolixity.” Yet, he also acknowledged the artistry with which Daly had mounted the production (particularly the splendid scenery) and the strength of the company.45 Whether it was the topicality of the play or its intrinsic merits, Divorce was an unqualified success. According to Odell, it “achieved the longest run known up to that time for a comedy in New York; it was acted continuously to its two hundredth performance on March 18th when the run ceased.” As of 27 January, the New York Herald reported that 130,000 people had seen Divorce “at an average nightly receipt of $1000.” During one week, it was staged simultaneously in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and St. Louis. On 22 February, undoubtedly as a publicity stunt, Daly had his company present a matinee in Philadelphia and return by train for the evening performance in New York. According to Odell, “Divorce was one of the biggest features of its time in the American theater. The public by this and other Daly productions were learning that a great theater could be run without absolute dependence on old comedy and Shakespeare.”46 Daly presented two weeks of revivals in March, including Elizabeth Inchbald’s Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are, which only ran for one night and featured Morris as Lady Priory. She did not appear in the other

89


five productions because she was busy preparing for her next leading role.47 It would be another Daly adaptation of a French original and, in Odell’s estimation, would be “the most sensational triumph of the little theatre” to date. On 2 April, Morris would stun theatergoers with her appearance as Cora the vengeful Creole in Article 47.48 One of the great roles of Morris’s career and a staple of her repertoire ever after, Cora gave her the opportunity for uninhibited histrionic display. Notwithstanding a final scene of Daly’s invention that allowed Cora to end her wretched life with an expression of repentance, it was her descent into raving madness that thrilled and horrified audiences. In her riveting interpretation, Morris jettisoned the usual arsenal of female attributes and created an unforgettable character. The scar that marred her features made her hideous, not beautiful. Charm disappeared in incoherent mutterings and maniacal shrieks; grace, in rocking and gibbering. For Victorian audiences used to a narrow definition of femininity, Morris’s performance must have been startling in its ferocity, its violent emotionalism and physicality both disturbing and titillating. According to theater historian Kerry Powell, Victorian men, “including the male coterie of drama critics,” responded “with anxiety as well as admiration” to such an exhibition of “female control on stage”: Captivated by the power of an exceptional actress, they experienced under her influence a sense of danger to themselves and an apprehension . . . that social codes of gender were being challenged before their eyes. Could women so commanding be women at all? . . . In exceeding the limits of what was thought proper to women’s nature, could actresses be considered healthy specimens of their gender in either a physical or mental sense? From such misgivings the Victorians constructed a rhetoric of the actress which functioned to monitor and control her excesses even as it allowed a space for her intimidating performances.49 Sometimes, the actress was seen as monstrous and unnatural. A British critic, for example, found Charlotte Cushman “inhuman, incredible, and horribly fascinating” as Lady Macbeth. Other actresses were likened to splendid, but dangerous, animals. G. H. Lewes called French tragedienne Rachel “the panther of the stage.” Arthur Symonds, fascinated by Sarah Bernhardt, wrote that she “tears the words with her teeth, and spits them out of her mouth, like a wild beast ravening upon prey.”50 American observers resorted to comparable imagery to capture the power and the danger of Morris’s Cora. The Spirit of the Times praised her “tigerlike postures.” Clinton Stuart likened her to “a caged animal.” Joseph Daly referred to her “panther-like spring.” Such wild beasts required taming, and that was a

90


role Daly willingly assumed. According to Marra, it became an important part of his managerial persona. Permitting “transgressive displays of primordial passion” worked to his advantage because it allowed him to impress people with his ability to control, contain, and dominate such spirited, threatening female performers.51 Conversely, it is also possible to view Morris’s Cora as the embodiment of weakness rather than savage strength. In assessing her performance and the shockwaves it generated for years, the operative word was “emotional.” According to Stuart, “her Cora was the sensation of the day, and she was acknowledged a great actress of the school termed emotional.” Odell, opting for the superlative, declared, “From the night of that production Clara Morris took her position as the greatest emotional actress of her time.”52 Both men were impressed by the gripping physicality of her interpretation, yet chose the word emotional to describe it. Typically applied to women, this adjective often appeared in combination with hysterical, so that Morris and such actresses as Lucille Western, Matilda Heron, Rose Eytinge, and Kate Claxton were said to belong to the “emotional” or “hysterical emotional” school of acting—a school that was exclusively female. When men acted as Morris did in her prime, they were never described in these charged terms. For Morris, the rubric would always be emotional, no matter how graphic the physical expression, because nineteenth-century notions of gender left women little latitude with regard to conduct on and off stage. The technical virtuosity of her performance allowed her to illustrate aberrant female behavior: specifically, the hysteria to which the “weaker sex” was all too susceptible. To nineteenth-century eyes, Cora was the embodiment of a familiar personality type: the romantic, emotional, erotic, hysterical woman. The extraordinary circumstances of her unhappy life, coupled with her obsessive desire for vengeance, had unhinged her mind as they had unleashed her passions. For her, as for so many other hysterics, the inevitable end was madness and death. Hysteria, as cultural historian Elaine Showalter explains, was initially viewed as a disease of the body that affects the mind but later came to be seen as “‘an affliction of the mind that was expressed through a disturbance of the body,’ which converted unconscious desires into pathological changes and physical symptoms through an obscure neural process.”53 Throughout its long history, whether its site was thought to be the uterus or the nervous system, its cause possession by the devil or bewitchment, it has been associated with women, usually in extremely negative ways. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doctors wrote about hysteria more than any other medical disorder. Some implicated the female reproductive system, while others believed it was a morbid condition of the brain. In the 1840s, the discovery of the process of ovulation inspired a

91


new ovarian theory of hysterical disorders popular among gynecologists until the end of the century. Showalter quotes French physician Auguste Fabré, who wrote in 1883, “As a general rule, all women are hysterical and . . . every woman carries with her the seeds of hysteria. Hysteria, before being an illness, is a temperament, and what constitutes the temperament of a woman is rudimentary hysteria.” According to historian Mark S. Micale, the “hysterical constitution” was defined less by clinical symptoms than by a set of negative character traits that were seen as female. These included “eccentricity, impulsiveness, emotionality, coquettishness, deceitfulness, and hypersexuality.”54 France figures prominently in the literary history of hysteria. During the middle decades of the century, such writers as Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and Gustave Flaubert embraced a kind of “neurological Romanticism” and explored a variety of mental maladies in their works.55 Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was germinal. According to Showalter, Flaubert based his portrait of neurasthenic Emma Bovary on medical literature, and his novel not only influenced subsequent fictional depictions of hysteria but also shaped medical diagnosis and patient behavior. She quotes theater critic Francisque Sarcey, who observed, “One finds hysteria everywhere today. . . . These languors of the woman of thirty who is bored and who daydreams: hysteria. These tumultuous longings of the woman of forty who flings herself into the future while looking backwards: hysteria. Our doctors have peopled the world with hysterics.”56 Article 47, first produced in October 1871 at the Théâtre Ambigu-Comique in Paris, was one of many plays that capitalized on popular interest in hysteria and its sensational manifestations. Reflecting the racism and sexism of the day, audiences would have understood that as a person of mixed blood, Cora was particularly susceptible to the disease. She would have fulfilled their expectations both as a fallen woman—melodrama’s favorite female character—and as a hysterical woman. As Showalter notes, the two female types were virtually indistinguishable. According to theater historian Elin Diamond, each displayed “eye rolling, facial grimaces, gnashing teeth, heavy sighs, fainting, shrieking, choking; ‘hysterical laughter’ was a frequent stage direction as well as a common occurrence in medical asylums.”57 It is significant that Morris visited an asylum (“the mad-house at Blackwell’s Island”) in order to research her role.58 She denies basing her interpretation on any one inmate but undoubtedly observed hysterics in “that awful aggregation of human woe” and could have used aspects of their behavior for Cora. According to her account, the key to the mad scene lay in Verdi’s Il Trovatore, and it is possible that she modeled Cora on the gypsy Azucena. Daughter of a woman unjustly burned at the stake, mother of the heroic Manrico, beheaded by a villainous count, Azucena is consumed by her desire for vengeance and tormented

92


by visions of her mother’s agonizing death as well as her own impending doom. Although the opera lacks a classic “mad scene” (as in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor), there are striking similarities between Cora and Azucena that Morris must have recognized. Both female characters are racially impure. They are social outcasts, intent on revenge. Each has suffered grievously at the hands of others, yet she harbors her own guilty secret that has tortured her for years. In the power of Azucena’s arias, as well as in her obsessive behavior, Morris may well have found the inspiration for Cora’s affecting descent into madness. 59 She certainly had found the first of her signature roles, one she would play effectively for years. Daly had banned lines of business but unerringly guided Morris to hers. She would specialize in characters like Cora, hysterical women, haunted by the past, with whom she may have identified. Although it would be impossible to diagnose Morris retrospectively as hysterical—now an obsolete medical term—her descriptions of herself in Life on the Stage suggest strong affinities between many of the characters she played and her own personality. The mood swings, breakdowns, paralyzing fear, “deadly nausea,” and “nervous terrors” she often mentions make her sound very much like Cora and the gallery of women with whom she made her reputation. Morris the writer may simply be using the accepted language of the day to capture the drama of each life experience she relates, but she may also be reflecting something more fundamental to her own nature and endemic to the culture. By the late nineteenth century, “metaphors of the histrionic” had begun to influence clinical discussions of hysteria, just as the concept of hysteria was coloring people’s perception of actresses. Showalter quotes physician Jules Falret, who regarded hysterical women as “veritable actresses” who “know no greater pleasure than to deceive.” Conversely, “theatre critics like Hélène Zimmern described some of the most famous [European] actresses as hysterical women who had found an appropriate outlet for their histrionic personalities.” Eleanora Duse was “the fin-de-siécle woman par excellence, with her hysterical maladies”; Aimée Desclée’s performances were “worldly hysteria”; Réjane was “the muse of hystero-epilepsy.”60 Whether she adopted the nervous mannerisms and emotional characteristics of hysterical women or legitimately embodied them, Morris would not have been unusual for her era. She would have been yet another convincing example of a recognized medical type: the hysterical woman as actress. As an “emotional actress,” moreover, she would have fascinated audiences in Victorian America, in which public displays of feeling were still not the norm. She permitted emotional release, allowing theatergoers to experience a range of cathartic feelings as they watched her. Even if audiences found the characters she played disturbing, they had to respond in some way to the spectacle of their suffering

93


on stage, as well as to the technical virtuosity of the woman who interpreted them so convincingly. Morris, however, resented attempts to link her with her stage creations and feared being known as a “one-part actress.” She was upset by a critic’s reference to her “strange, intuitive comprehension” of such “creatures of mixed blood” as Cora and Jezebel. Another alarmed her when he described her performance in Article 47 as “flecked with those tigerish gleams that seem to be part of her method” and predicted she would “probably find difficulty in equaling in any other line her success as Cora.”61 She knew that “just one more ‘tigerish part’ at that time would have meant artistic ruin” because people would have dismissed her as limited. With her appearance as virginal Alixe, Cora’s polar opposite, she demonstrated her versatility and solidified her reputation as a major talent. Defying Daly’s expectations as well as her own, she created a memorable character and, in Odell’s words, “grew more and more in sympathy with the poor neglected creature, hungry for love, and forced to sacrifice all for the happiness of others.” The illusion of innocence she established was as carefully choreographed as Cora’s explosive rage, both designed for maximal audience impact. Many years later, Edward A. Dithmar declared that Morris’s Alixe had not only “thrilled and touched” countless playgoers but also had “placed her, for all time, beyond the front rank of actors, among the leaders of dramatic art.” “From the first night,” Odell explained, her interpretation resonated with audiences who “took the little girl to their hearts.”62 If Cora had inspired fear, Alixe produced its cathartic partner, pity, and Morris reaped the benefits. In Odell’s words, her “Alixe became the talk of the town, and made her, virtually a star.” It was not simply her effective simulation of death, as the rigid body of the drowned martyr lay on stage at the end of the play, but rather the emotional power of the entire performance. The New York Herald marveled, “Real tears came into her eyes as readily as genuine smiles upon her lips. Love, joy, jealousy, grief and despair are portrayed by her with a force beyond that of any actress on the American stage.”63 Almost three weeks later, the same newspaper expressed optimism about Morris’s seemingly limitless promise but warned that “her artistic life” was “in its transition state” and failure was also possible: If she is true to herself and her art, her fame will ripen into a russet roundness and glory for which no other actress on the American stage can obtain; but if she takes her past as the measure of her future her career is already ended. . . . Seeing the great power of this young girl exhibited in a way which cannot fail to bring many flattering words to her ears, and remembering the fate of others who stood where she now stands, we cannot help regarding her future with both hope and fear.64

94


If she had a response to these prescient concerns, Morris did not record it in her diary. On 9 February when the Herald article appeared, she said only, “Sick in bed—cold settled in my lungs.” On Saturday, 15 February, she wrote, “Not able to act this afternoon or evening—[Sara] Jewett plays my part. . . . gave up playing until Monday next.” On the seventeenth, she received an offer from the rival Union Square Theatre but declined it, noting on the twenty-second that she “signed a contract [with Daly] for season of 73–74. $200 per month for 8 months, 3 months being reserved for me for starring.”65 Alixe ran uninterruptedly until Tuesday, 18 March, when Daly revived New Year’s Eve, or, False Shame, and the two productions played in rotating repertory on alternate nights for three weeks. Morris appeared next in a revival of Divorce on 15 April, noting in her diary that she had been at “rehearsal from 10 to 5” and had not gone home after the performance until “1 in the morning.” On 5 May, she attended the reading of Madelein Morel, a new play that went into rehearsal the following day. It opened two weeks later on Tuesday, 20 May, the night after Divorce concluded its run. Daly hoped to bring his season to a profitable close with his adaptation of Madelein Morel, another melodrama by von Mosenthal. Morris was its eponymous heroine with the obligatory troubled past. Transformed by her love for Julian, an honorable young nobleman who plans to marry her, she renounces her sinful life. Upon reflection, however, she fears she will disgrace him if she becomes his wife. She tries to drown herself but is rescued by a priest who brings her to a cloister. After a year spent mourning his lost love, Julian weds another. As he and his bride leave the altar, they encounter a procession of nuns. Among them is Madelein, who has just taken her final vows. Julian angrily accuses her of having betrayed him. Protesting that she has always loved him, she rips the veil from her head, renounces her vows, and begs him to claim her as his wife. The sudden realization that he is already married, however, is too much to endure. As Julian watches in horror, she falls to the ground, dead, in a shocking finale of Daly’s invention. Mosenthal’s play concluded happily with the couple’s reconciliation: Julian has not yet married, and Madelein has been in hiding but has not become a nun. Daly clearly had another agenda in choosing blasphemy and death over marital bliss. Although many people objected to Madelein’s actions as sacrilegious, Daly knew that controversy was good for business. As he hoped they would, audiences rushed to the theater and kept the production running until the last week in June. In changing the ending, however, he may have had more in mind than stimulating ticket sales. Nym Crinkle believed he wanted to call attention to the plight of the “fallen woman” and the unfair treatment society has accorded her: “Madelein Morel brings with her questions of justice and

95


mercy . . . as to whether society shall have two forms of moral law, one for man and one for woman.” He found some scenes “unwholesome” but defended Daly’s sympathetic treatment of Madelein, crediting him with providing “glimpses of that most infamous lie which society in its cowardice and cruelty puts between itself and sexual vice . . . that a woman who once errs has passed beyond the reach of repentance and commiseration.”66

Cabinet photograph of Morris in Madelein Morel, 1873. Once again, the tranquil image does not suggest the frenzied passion of the play’s last scene. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

96


Given the double standard with which Daly operated his theater and the sexual harassment to which he subjected many of his actresses, it is ironic that his play would have been seen either as an indictment of the double standard or as a sensitive depiction of the plight of the fallen woman. Notwithstanding Nym Crinkle’s eloquent defense, it is more likely that Daly explored these issues because they were timely but did not seek to repudiate conventional morality. In his adaptation, Madelein and Julian will not be reunited as in the German original. There will be no ultimate redemption for her. The double standard remains intact. For errant Madelein as for Cora, the tragic mulatto, there are only misery, madness, and death. Madelein is another erotic, hysterical woman well suited to Morris’s talents. Nym Crinkle believed Daly had adapted the play specifically for her, an actress “who expresses misery with a singular facility.” The critic found her anguish in Madelein Morel so moving that he saw it as emblematic of generic female suffering, with compelling moments “when her wail seems to be that of her sex, and to express the misery and wrong of centuries.” As effective as it was, however, Morris’s interpretation also struck him as lacking sublimity. Although “forceful and magnetic” in certain scenes, she “never quite rises to tragedy” and “falls short of the possibilities of the last act.” She may have been limited by the mawkish script, as the New York Herald suggested, noting that the “vivid truth and depth of feeling” Morris demonstrated in playing her role “would have been conceded to be genius . . . in a higher class of dramatic art.”67 The Tribune’s William Winter praised her powerful, nuanced interpretation: She is physically handsome in the part; she carries through it a subtle sense of blight upon her beauty; she expresses . . . the capacity of wild, idolatrous passion; she is noble in bursts of grief and scorn; . . . she is entirely adequate to those moments of frenzy in which the frenzy is conscious of itself; she passes, with good art, from mood to mood, according to the requirements of situation and language; and she certainly succeeds in winning for her creation interest, pity, sorrow, and respect. To do this is to do much.68 Nevertheless, he condemned the play in the strongest possible terms as “unclean,” “a gross offense against religion and decency,” and “an injury to the public morals” as well as “to the stage.” He decried Daly as “a theatrical huckster, with no more heart than a grindstone, and no sense of a higher responsibility in his vocation than that which appertains to a man of business”—a charge Daly would refute two decades later in his speech to the New York Shakespeare Society. For the conservative Winter, Madelein Morel was yet another in a series of “pestiferous plays” with which the manager had desecrated the stage.

97


The works that incensed Winter dealt with sexual misconduct and celebrated “the adulteress, the courtesan, the blackguard, and the prurient fool, the phenomena of spoony vice, and the woes and struggles of mature licentiousness.” He deplored their relentless focus on adultery and recurrent depiction of “fallen angels” like Madelein, “dramatic heroines who have nothing to commend them but tears and trouble, resultant from the lack of chastity.” Such subjects were dangerous because they sensitized people to vice and reduced their appreciation of virtue. That Daly abdicated his moral responsibility to pursue a “shockingly evil” managerial course was reprehensible. Differing with critics who blamed actresses for the scandalous behavior of their characters, Winter defended the women who had to appear in these objectionable roles and censured Daly for what he considered “a libel on the upright and worthy members of the dramatic profession,” even “a calumny of the profession itself.”69 Morris worried that the play would damage her reputation. In Life on the Stage, she recalls being particularly concerned about the climactic church scene: “I had to drag from my head the veil . . . —had to tear from my breast the cross, and, trampling it under foot, stretch my arms to Heaven and, with upraised face, cry: ‘I call down upon my guilty soul the thunders of a curse, that none may hear and live!’ and then fall headlong, as though my challenge had been accepted.” Fearful her actions would be considered blasphemy, she contemplated withdrawing from the production. Daly assured her that people would understand she was playing “a woman mad with grief and trouble” and would know her lines lacked “the value or consequence of words spoken by a sane person.” Unconvinced, she became increasingly anxious about opening night. Her impressionistic description of that performance is one of her most vivid recollections: As I fell into line with the Church procession of sisters, of novices, of priests and acolytes, I felt myself a morsel in a kaleidoscopic picture of bright colors, the churchly purple and its red and white, the brilliant gowns of the women of fashion, the golden organ-pipes, the candles burning star-like upon the altar, the massed flowers, and over all, giving a touch of floating unreality to everything, the clouds of incense. Then suddenly, out of the bluish haze, there gleamed the white, set face, for love of which I was to sacrifice my very soul! The scene was on, swift, passionate, and furious, and almost before I could realize it, the dreadful words had been spoken—and with my foot upon the cross, I stood in silence the like of which I had never known before! I had not fallen—stricken absolutely motionless with terror I stood—waiting. In that crowded building, even breathing seemed suspended. There reigned a silence, like to death itself! It was awful! Then without changing my attitude 98


by the movement of a finger, I pitched forward, falling heavily at the feet of the dismayed lover and the indignant priest. And suddenly as sharply as by a volley of musketry, the silence was broken by applause. Yes, actually by applause, and beneath its noise I heard a voice behind me gasp: “Well, I’ll be blest!”70 The voice, of course, belonged to Daly, watching from one of his stations backstage. Morris’s diary reflects none of this anxiety. She comments sparingly on Madelein Morel, noting simply that she attended rehearsals on 6–8 May. On Sunday the eleventh, she wrote, “Rehearsal of two acts of Madeleine [sic] Morel perfect”; on the thirteenth, “whole piece called perfect.” Tensions must have been high, however, because her Friday entry records an altercation with Daly: “Rehearsal up to 3½ Daly tore vail [sic] out of my hands very rudely—I looked at him in a manner that drew an apology from him. After rehearsal we had a quarrel—at least I quarreled he only apologized.” By Tuesday the twentieth, the day of the opening, they were on better terms and had a “chat.” The rest of the entry, written after the performance, shows the pleasure she took in the audience’s response: “Tonight made a great hit in ‘Madelein’ such calls and such applause.” She receives flowers and “a basket with metal cage containing a lovely red bird.” Best of all, she could see her mother “in front,” enjoying her daughter’s success. “Everyone,” she notes happily, “was congratulating Ma.” 71 Daly rewards her with books and a picture of Restoration actress Nell Gwyn rather than a salary increase. She does not complain and is delighted with her benefit on 9 June: “Splendid success—$845 in the house—five monster baskets of flowers, any number of calls, and the greatest possible enthusiasm in the audience—cries of brava, and raising of handkerchives [sic] I was perfectly bewildered by the reception I recieved [sic] I’m very happy tonight.” She collects $281.67, her share of the proceeds, and seems content. Yet, there are hints that her relationship with Daly is about to change. On 19 June, she mentions she has “received letter from Mr. Pope about star engagement.” On Tuesday the twenty-fourth, she writes, “I went to see Daly. Have promised to go to Cincinnati but not to Philadelphia.”72 Morris is talking about the 1873–74 season, which will begin with the company on tour while Daly refurbishes another theater. Both the possibility of a “star engagement” elsewhere and her refusal to perform in Philadelphia suggest that the power balance may have shifted irrevocably. Her fall diary will reveal how wide the rift between them has become and how insurmountable their differences are. Much as she may have owed to Daly’s guidance, discipline, and inspiration, she will declare her independence from his managerial control and will take responsibility for her own professional advancement. 99

6 The

D

ramatic Meteor

MORRIS HAD LAST SEEN Daly on 30 June, two days after the 1872–73 season ended, when she went to the theater “for salary.” “Met fully word” was her code-like diary entry (suggesting that he honored whatever promises he had made), after which “goodbyes and good wishes exchanged.” “Sent little note to Mr. Daly,” she wrote on 19 August. On the twenty-first, she shopped for dresses for the Fifth Avenue Company’s upcoming tour and from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-ninth, was busy rehearsing. She and the rest of the troupe traveled by train to Cincinnati, where they arrived “on time” at 6 a.m. on Sunday, 31 August. Seeking relief from the heat, they all went out for pretzels and beer later in the day. “Such a lark!” she observed, “and Mr. Daly the jolliest of the crowd.” Divorce opened the following night, and although the “house was not very big,” she was pleased with the “fine reception” she received. On Wednesday, confident his company was ready to tour, Daly returned to New York.1 Morris was working hard, but diary entries show she was ill. Her throat was “very bad” on 7 September when she summoned a doctor who thought she was “consumptive.” “I have been quite sick,” she wrote on Saturday the thirteenth, yet she completed two performances of Fernande, a revival of a Daly triumph in which Agnes Ethel had originally starred.2 Still “sick with headache all day and evening” on Monday, she did not appear in False Shame, although she was well enough for Divorce two nights later. The following evening, having played Alixe to a “crowded house,” she received “5 calls” and a “superb basket of flowers,” a success she considered “worthy of New York.”3 After another glorious performance as Alixe on Saturday, Morris and the rest of the company set off on a twenty-six-hour train trip to Buffalo, New York, their next destination. Entries throughout September show increasing rancor between Morris and Daly. “I wrote a fearful letter to Daly.” “Received letter from Daly—I have sent a very severe answer and have again refused to play Taming [of the Shrew] in Buffalo.” They exchanged angry telegrams on the thirteenth, with Morris unyielding. Subsequent entries reveal a rapidly deteriorating relationship. “No

100

The Dramatic Meteor

news from Daly.” “Have not seen Daly at all. Miss Rogers plays ‘Fanny Ten Eyke’ [sic] Mr D seems to be paying violent court to Rogers—everyone wondering what is in the wind now.” “Went to theatre for rehearsal of first act of Fernand [sic]. Met Daly in hall—shook hands coldly.” Not surprisingly, the discord affected her acting. She was unhappy with her performance that evening. “Played Clotilde [sic] tonight and cried my eyes nearly out because I thought I had played badly. Oh heaven how I long for home!!!”4 Morris arrived in New York six days later and “sent Daly [a] dispatch—no answer.” The following evening, she went to see internationally renowned Tomasso Salvini in one of his signature non-Shakespearean roles: Corrado in Paolo Giacometti’s La Morte Civile (Civil Death). “Company bad, house awful bad,” she wrote after the performance, but “he is a great actor.”5 Hoping to speak with Daly, she stopped by the “Opera House” the next morning, but left after two hours when he “did not come.” Nevertheless, she had the satisfaction of knowing that there were “two managers” vying for her, having heard that she had severed her relationship with Daly.6 She received a note from him on 3 October and on a rainy Monday three days later, drove off in a buggy to find him. “He was at the Broadway,” she noted that evening. “I asked to be released from my engagement, since he had broken faith with me about pieces. He defers any answer until Saturday.”7 Morris confronted him on Friday at the Opera House: “Told him his violation of any verbal contract released me from any written one—He refuses to let me leave and thinks he can hold me.” In need of legal counsel, she turned to Judge William Fullerton, who said he thought Daly could “get an injunction to prevent [her] acting in any other theatre” and agreed to review her contract. She was disappointed when he explained that Daly was “keeping carefully within the limits of the law.” “Sick with headache” on the seventeenth, she fielded inquiries from two reporters (for the Times and the Era) before receiving a letter from Daly holding her to her contract “in every particular.” By the twentieth, however, the situation had changed: “I went down to theatre for my salary up to the 10th of October—I left the rest of it in the office. I told Appleton I had left the company. Now the news will fly.”8 Exactly what caused the rift remains unclear. She provides no explanation in her diary but discusses it in Life on the Stage. According to that account, published two years after Daly’s death, it began with a salary dispute. Although another manager had offered her a starring tour, she agreed to stay with Daly if he paid her appropriately. He demurred, preferring to supplement her wages with “stage costumes and occasional gifts,” an arrangement she considered unacceptable. They finally reached an accord: she would work for him for three months each season, after which she would be free to tour as a star.9

101

The Dramatic Meteor

Daly had given her permission to use his versions of Article 47 and Alixe (although he expected a nightly royalty for each one) and promised not to produce them before her scheduled appearance in any of the cities on her tour. She soon discovered that he had not kept his word in Philadelphia: I had been announced as the coming attraction when I received startling telegrams and threats from the local manager that “Mr. Daly’s Fifth Avenue Company” was announced to appear the week before me in “Alixe,” in an opposition house. Thus Mr. Daly had most cruelly broken faith with me. She reproached him, but he dismissed her concerns and offered her a leading role in a new production. She refused it, warning that she would never work for him again if he produced Alixe in Philadelphia. When he threatened to sue her for breach of contract, she said she would take legal action against him and met with Judge Fullerton the next morning. He counseled her to leave the company, assuring her Daly would not press charges because he would be loath to alienate “public opinion.” “In attacking you,” Fullerton asserted, “he will attack every young, self-supporting woman in New York. . . . The New York man will sympathize with you.”10 A lawsuit never materialized. On tour that winter, Morris told a different version of the story. Then in St. Louis as “the reigning dramatic star at the Olympic,” the “meteor-like young actress” spoke with a reporter for the Spirit of the Times. (She had agreed to the interview, her first in any newspaper, because she appreciated the favorable coverage that publication had consistently given her.) Asked why she broke with Daly, she replied, “It was simply a business disagreement between actress and manager.” Daly had reneged on his verbal agreement “to reserve ‘Madeline Morell’ [sic], ‘Alixe’ and ‘Article 47’ for her exclusive use on tour and to have his company perform ‘Divorce,’ ‘Man and Wife,’ and other society plays.” By staging “Madeline Morel [sic] and Alixe in Philadelphia himself,” he caused her “an immense amount of trouble.” “I believed in Mr. Daly,” she explained, “and never for a moment thought that he would act to me in so shameful and dishonorable a manner.” When he indicated he was amenable to her rejoining his company, she “declined to return on any terms” to “one of the firmest and most obstinate managers in the country.” She did not mention an altercation in his office, threats of legal action, or the intervention of Judge Fullerton.11 From the diary entries, it seems that the account in Life on the Stage is closer to the truth. Despite Morris’s penchant for self-dramatization, the entries reveal Daly’s refusal to release her from her contract when she confronted him in his office. He must have threatened legal action, which led her to seek Judge Fullerton’s advice. It may be that in her 1874 interview, Morris omitted details that would make her seem overly aggressive. As a young actress well on her

102

The Dramatic Meteor

way to obtaining the coveted “histrionic diadem,” it was better to appear soft, sweet, and ladylike, which is how the reporter portrayed her. Elegantly dressed, coifed, and bejeweled, with “a voice so low and musical” it mimicked an “Aeolian harp,” she epitomizes lovely, if professional, femininity. She is earning “lots” of money on her starring tour but is careful to express gratitude for her success. Although she predicts she will soon play a wider variety of roles than the ones for which she is currently known, she is not boastful. She is appropriately modest, mindful of the public image she is crafting. She may be hardworking, but she never seems hard.12

Cabinet photograph of Morris as “dramatic meteor,” a stylish young actress on the rise, ca. 1874. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

103

The Dramatic Meteor

“And thus it happened that I was not legally quite off with the old manager when I was on with the new—in the person of Mr. A. M. Palmer,” Morris recounts in Life on the Stage. In the diary, she is more explicit about her negotiations with Albert M. Palmer, a young lawyer and librarian, who had assumed the management of Sheridan Shook’s Union Square Theatre in June 1872.13 As her relationship with Daly deteriorated, she wrote of Palmer, who avidly pursued her: Saw Mr. Palmer—he is willing to take all risks and engage me. Mr. Palmer called and got my contract [with Daly] to show to his lawyer. Mr. Palmer came in the evening—I think I shall take the risk and close with him—if I can get salary enough. Mr. Palmer will give me $300 per week—so I shall sign now whenever he wishes. Sunday, and such glorious weather—. . . . I was announced in the papers to appear at the Union Square.14 In defecting to Palmer, Morris had made a shrewd strategic move when Daly was vulnerable. It had been a catastrophic autumn. Railroad speculation, the epidemic fever of the age, had led to economic disaster.15 The collapse of Jay Cooke’s banking firm on 18 September, following the bankruptcy of the Northern Pacific Railroad in which Daly had heavily invested, precipitated a financial panic on Wall Street that quickly spread throughout the country. During the resulting economic depression, unemployment skyrocketed into the hundreds of thousands, thousands of businesses failed, and the total investment lost was $775 million.16 In Joseph Daly’s words, “theatrical business”—volatile in the best of circumstances—“felt the effect of the financial disaster immediately.” His brother was in a precarious position, “caught with two theatres open, a third building, and three companies to provide for.”17 That may have been why Daly did not take legal action against Morris: he had too many other pressing concerns to become embroiled in a lawsuit. Unlike many other theater managers, however, he would survive the Panic of 1873. He and his two main competitors, Palmer and Lester Wallack, would dominate the New York theatrical scene for the next two decades. Until his retirement in 1887, Wallack presented an excellent company in the outstanding comedies of the day: “old,” new, and primarily British. He often staged Shakespeare but avoided the sensational “emotional” plays that

104

The Dramatic Meteor

were central to Daly’s repertoire. Palmer, on the other hand, did not. Under his management, the Union Square Theatre would specialize in what he called “plays of contemporary life,” melodramas like those Daly produced. From the first, he wanted to establish “a stock company to rival in merit the players controlled by Wallack and Daly.”18 Palmer would be a formidable competitor for Daly’s actors and audience, although his approach to running a theater company was less autocratic. If, as British critic Clement Scott observed, Daly “made each play a monologue with himself as principal performer,”19 Palmer worked more collaboratively.

Cabinet photograph of Albert M. Palmer. Courtesy of the Laurence Senelick Collection.

105

The Dramatic Meteor

He relied on trusted associates in all areas of theatrical production, beginning with business partner Sheridan Shook. Although Palmer may have lacked Daly’s obsession with total artistic control, he was equally committed to excellence. Located in the Union Place Hotel on Fourteenth Street, between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, the Union Square Theatre had opened on 11 September 1871 as a venue for burlesque and vaudeville. Its new manager intended to “sweep the variety and all its belongings out the door.”20 Determined to attract morerefined audiences by making his theater a home for “legitimate” drama, he was willing to pay well for the talent he recruited. His salaries were consistently higher than those of other New York managers. 21 Compared with what she had been getting from Daly, Morris’s initial agreement with Palmer must have exceeded her wildest expectations. Palmer closed the Union Square for renovations in August 1872, shortly after assuming its management. When the elegantly refurbished theater reopened in September, it was the epitome of tasteful refinement. Freshly carpeted and frescoed, with “comfortable chairs” replacing the “old straight back, anxious benches” of the dress circle, it was a medley of white, pink, and gold, designed to please the most discerning theatergoer. Its similarity to Daly’s theater was not lost on reporters. The Herald called it “a worthy rival of the Fifth Avenue in the richness and elegance of its appointments.”22 Palmer’s rivalry with Daly, however, went beyond décor. He also raided his company, beginning with comedian Dan H. Harkins, whom he hired as stage manager. 23 Having learned from him that Daly had let Agnes Ethel’s contract expire, Palmer signed her as his “leading woman” for Agnes (which he claimed Victorien Sardou had written expressly for her), the first production of the 1872–73 season. It opened on Tuesday, 17 September, with Ethel supported by a strong cast, many of whom were recruits from Daly’s and Wallack’s companies. A popular success, the play ran until 21 December, when its star fulfilled her one-hundred-night contract. Vying for Wallack’s audiences in the holiday week following that profitable engagement, Palmer staged three “old comedies”: Boucicault’s London Assurance, Sheridan’s School for Scandal, and Bulwer-Lytton’s Money. All were financial failures. None of the remaining productions did well, and the season ended with a net loss of about seventyfive thousand dollars.24 Palmer blamed himself for being too tentative and for relying excessively on the “counsel” of others, especially Harkins who seemed to think he was the company manager. “He finally ventured to suggest that I retire in his behalf,” Palmer quipped. “I saw that I had to readjust my cabinet.” He dismissed Harkins, who promptly returned to Daly. 25 The 1873–74 season began with George Fawcett Rowe’s four-act drama The Geneva Cross, which Palmer had commissioned. “From the inception of the

106

The Dramatic Meteor

dramatic idea and its development up to its establishment on the stage [it] was a home product,” he proudly recalled, noting that he had suggested the title. The play opened on 1 October and filled the theater for seven weeks, “even through the terrible period of depression brought about by the ‘Black Friday’ [the day Cooke’s bank failed] on Wall Street.”26 During the play’s successful run, Palmer raided Daly’s ranks again and hired Morris, who accepted a limited seasonal arrangement rather than a long-term contract and would be earning almost ten times more per week than she had as a member of the Fifth Avenue Company.27 He agreed to let her take a short starring tour of her own, provided she return to the Union Square in the spring. She would make her debut under his management as Selene, the fairy queen, in William Schwenk Gilbert’s Wicked World: an Entirely Original Fairy Comedy in Three Acts and One Scene, first produced in London at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, on 4 January 1873. A misanthropic work about the destructive power of love, The Wicked World takes place in Fairy-land. The “blameless” realm lies atop a cloud through which its inhabitants observe people on the earth below. Bored with their serene lives, they bring humans into their world with disastrous consequences. Jealousy swiftly transforms the fairies into scheming termagants, one of whom becomes Selene’s rival for the mortal Ethais’s love. They slander each other while he betrays them both. Their sister fairies squabble and gossip; treachery and malice abound. Instead of impressing men with their purity, the fairies are corrupted by them. By the end of the second act, Selene has lost her crown and her true self. The tempestuous third act concludes with the restoration of tranquility as the mortals depart, the toxic human influence abates, and the fairies realize that love is “a deadly snare,” fit for “mankind” but not for them.28 Palmer described The Wicked World as “the most delicious thing its brilliant author has ever created,” with Morris having “appeared to great advantage in it.” As the complicated Selene, at once “an angelic prude and a passionate woman,” she effectively “conveyed the sentiment of agonized love.” She, too, had fond memories of her Union Square debut in a “well cast, beautifully produced, . . . deliciously poetic” piece. “Success . . . perched upon our banners, and we were all filled with pride and joy,” she rhapsodized in Life on the Stage, recalling many “young men who came early and strove diligently to get seats within reaching distance of the foot-lights” on opening night.29 Diary entries capture the joy she felt at the first performance on Monday, 17 November. Despite a “terrible storm—wind rain & snow,” she was delighted to find the “house packed—reception something to remember for years.” She was “called out again and again” and received several “splendid” baskets of flowers including one “bearing the name ‘Selene’ in scarlet flowers upon a white ground and the whole topped by a superb crown.” “Everyone congratulated”

107

The Dramatic Meteor

her afterward, and the reviews the next day were favorable. “World notice is the best this morning,” she wrote on Tuesday, “Times next—and Herald last. Evening papers splendid.” The second performance brought another “packed house,” as well as compliments from an admirer who told her she was “much better than Miss Robertson,” who had played Selene in London.30 In her diary, Morris writes about ordering her costume (“a dress and sandals”) and attending eight rehearsals but says nothing about her preparation for the role. It is possible, however, to get some sense of her interpretation from the critics’ comments about it, both favorable and unfavorable. The most negative review appeared in the New York Tribune. Written by the influential William Winter, who had been hostile to Morris since her debut under Daly’s management, it not only found her wanting as an artist but also suggested she was morally unfit for the part. Winter catalogued the “mannerisms” he disliked: “a bitter contortion of the countenance, a convulsive quivering of the lower jaw, a strained pursing of the mouth and sucking in of the cheeks, a tawny gleam of yellowish eyes, a carriage of person which is either a gliding rush or a listless lounge, a variety of abrupt and awkward gestures, and a great volubility of utterance.” While acknowledging her “vigor of execution,” he criticized her for “the lack of purity of ideal” and implied that this “very knowing young woman” was too worldly to play a chaste fairy, even a fairy in love. Lacking true innocence, she had to rely on “affected demureness,” which he found objectionable. In his derisive words, “You cannot make a lily-leaf out of a piece of parchment, nor a rose out of a dandelion.”31 “Fearful attack made upon me by William Winter today—have cried myself Sick,” Morris wrote in her diary on 19 November. Three days later, the Spirit of the Times offered a tepid rebuttal, defending her ability “to personate a passionateless [sic] fairy.” Although not without “faults,” both vocal and physical, this reviewer found her Selene believable. Her “wonderful sweetness of voice” helped her win “the sympathy and admiration of the audience.”32 In the New York World the following day, Nym Crinkle expressed another opinion. He hated the play and did not see Selene as a character for whom Morris was temperamentally well-suited: “An actress who must feel or she cannot act; who is as richly tuned with the voices of emotion as any woman who has spoken to us from the boards for years,” she is “of all others at hand least fitted to embody the airy nothings of amorous satire or to picture the trivialities of phantasy.” Yet, instead of disparaging her interpretation, he praised it. Even in scenes where Selene’s passion for Ethais seems “grotesque, unnatural, and absurd,” Morris makes her compelling and sympathetic. She “gives the needed heart-beat to the performance” and to the play itself. She “saves Mr. Gilbert’s ‘Wicked World’ . . . by transfusing it with some of her own blood.”33

108

The Dramatic Meteor

In creating Selene, as with all her memorable roles thus far, Morris drew on her ability to convey strong feelings convincingly to an audience. As Nym Crinkle explained, she “suffered all the imaginary pangs of the personage she represented as if” the character’s “causes were real, and in so doing made everybody else feel their poignancy.” Compared with “all the simulacra of the stage,” she has been “vital and real and universal.” The “magnetic power” of her performance drew people to the theater “to enjoy the strange luxury of being touched.” He denigrates her detractors (whom he calls “the anatomists and the rhetoricians”) for ignoring her strengths and magnifying her defects. Instead of expressing gratitude to her for having “killed dullness on the stage,” they have mocked “her articulation,” “inflections,” “sibelants [sic],” “her manner of taking breaths,” even “the color of her eyes.” Threatened by her idiosyncratic talent, they have derided her for being different. His perceptive analysis of Morris’s “pathetic power” captures the emotional intensity that distinguished her in 1873. Her ability to express the “deep, harrowing anguish of the soul” and to seem “completely . . . swayed by the passion or sorrow she simulates” moved even the most jaded theatergoer to tears. “Independent of all formula,” the suffering she depicted was extraordinarily convincing: Those who have seen her with tears streaming down her face, her lips white and quivering, and her face drawn by an imaginary woe into the speechless agony of pain, need not be told that the woman who thus passes into the very heart of the playwright’s misery and becomes part of it, who feels, and who, giving to every phase of her artistic experience some fibre of herself, exercises the procreative power of genius in her profession. 34 She was not simply infusing the character with her own personality, a conflation critics often attributed to actresses. Rather, as Nym Crinkle suggested, she was creating the illusion that the audience was seeing into her soul. She was using the theater as a site of female self-expression and self-invention.35 To apply cultural historian Susan A. Glenn’s comments about Sarah Bernhardt to Morris, “it was not just violent female emotionalism” that marked her style as unusual. Consciously or unconsciously, Morris “took what was then the revolutionary step of encouraging audiences to believe that what they saw on stage was not an actress playing a character, but a woman using that character to reveal herself to the spectators.” That is a significant difference, striking in its modernity. Although such assertive self-display will become more common in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Morris was in “the protofeminist vanguard”36 as one of the first women on the American stage to offer herself as theatrical spectacle. That may have been partly why Winter carped at her lack of “purity of ideal.” He did not understand that she could not possibly

109

The Dramatic Meteor

portray an abstract ideal because she dared to embody the reality of her own strong emotions. Palmer, on the other hand, knew that “intensity of emotion” (which he defined as “a kind of concentration of will added to natural impulse”) was “the secret of her power.” “She relies in small measure on elocution,” he wrote, “but utters her words in a measured, very often slow impetuosity, but always with an aim that carries their meaning unerringly to the understanding and the heart.” Although he did not call her unconventional, he recognized her as unique: “The town was still under the spell of amazement at the revelation of her powers so new and original.”37 Like Nym Crinkle, Palmer spoke of her “power” rather than using the terms “method” and “technique.” Whereas the latter two suggest a studied, disciplined approach to acting, power seems mysterious and intuitive, particularly in combination with the word spell, making her sound like the fairy she impersonated. It acknowledges her impact on spectators but not her work as an artist developing and refining her craft. The cultural imaginary of the period, with its myopic view of female behavior, left little room for such radical concepts as that. Morris herself provides few insights into the creative process, preferring to chronicle her daily activities instead. “Splendid article in ‘World’ from Mr. Wheeler,” she jotted on 23 November about his laudatory piece. “I am so pleased.” “Bought pair of rubber boots,” she wrote the next day, “& waded down to theatre” in a rainstorm to meet Palmer. They “went downtown,” perhaps to reason with Daly, but failed to secure the play she wanted for her upcoming Philadelphia engagement. As guest artist, she would be supported by the resident company but was expected to provide her own starring vehicle. “Guess can’t get Alixe,” she noted, sounding philosophical. Her diary entry on the twenty-fifth, however conveys her disappointment: “Been sick all day long. . . . Oh if I only had Alixe.”38 Morris’s two-week run in The Wicked World ended on Saturday, 29 November, with a “fine house—good calls and two lovely baskets of flowers.”39 Palmer was reluctant to release her but honored the commitments she had made to other managers. She “left home” on Sunday by train for Philadelphia, the first stop on her starring tour. After only one rehearsal, unimaginable today but common in the nineteenth century, she opened on Monday night at the Walnut Street Theatre in The Geneva Cross, a piece in which she had not previously appeared. Palmer, who controlled the rights, had given her permission to use it when it was clear that she needed a play.40 As Morris recalls in Life on the Stage, she “joyously” accepted it and began learning her lines while her mother assembled her costumes: “I was studying my part at night, my mother was ripping, picking out and pressing at skirts and things. Congratulating myself upon my good

110

The Dramatic Meteor

fortune in having once seen the play in New York, I went to Philadelphia.”41 She was starring as Gabrielle, the role Rose Eytinge had created at the Union Square Theatre in October. A suspenseful four-act drama centering on espionage and intrigue during the Franco-Prussian War, The Geneva Cross gave Morris the opportunity to display a range of emotions as the French wife of a former Prussian spy, Riel du Bourg, now committed to neutrality. He and Gabrielle wear the Geneva cross, a sign they are caring for the sick and wounded but cannot escape the conflict. French army officer Matthieu Moineau, motivated less by a sense of patriotic duty than by his unrequited love for Gabrielle, exposes her husband as a spy, sentencing her to death after she helps him escape. Moineau offers to let her live if she will become his. She spurns him and is reconciled to being shot. Moments before her execution, du Bourg comes to the rescue. Husband and wife are happily reunited, amid a cascade of Prussian bombshells as the curtain falls. A Philadelphia critic marveled at how convincingly Morris’s Gabrielle matured through her suffering as the action progressed. She went from “a beautiful, bright picture of innocent girlhood” in the first act to a self-sacrificing missionary with a “sweet white face” in the third. By the fourth, she seemed almost wraithlike, her face “absolutely pallid,” her once-tearful eyes now “utterly tearless,” “fixed on scenes that were no more of the earth.” After scornfully rejecting Moineau, she was chilling as her anger dissipated, and she plaintively whispered, “Am I already dead?” From the “youthful and hopeful” Gabrielle of the opening scenes, she became a Gabrielle “no longer of this world.” It was a transformation Morris, whom he considered a “great actress,” made “appallingly real.”42 During her two weeks in Philadelphia, Morris also performed Martha Lafitte Johnson’s version of Article 47, which differed substantially from Daly’s and which, evidently, he could not keep her from using.43 She appeared in it on 12 December when, according to her diary, there was such demand for seats that the members of the orchestra relinquished theirs and played “behind scenes.” Ticket sales that Friday were substantial ($1,156.75, as compared with opening night’s $419.75), but she disliked her performance. “I am very sick—acted horribly bad. Fell and hurt my head—all black & blue.” Her spirits improved the next day. Article 47 was the offering at the Saturday matinee, and although she does not say what the play was that night, she noted there was a “Big house.” Following the evening performance, she left by train for Washington, D.C., where she arrived at 6:30 the next morning.44 Morris’s weeklong engagement began with a rehearsal on Monday, as it had in Philadelphia, only this time the play was Alixe. Daly may have relented or,

111

The Dramatic Meteor

more probably, the ban may have applied only to Philadelphia where the Fifth Avenue Company had performed it. In either case, Alixe would be part of her repertoire for the remainder of the tour, along with Article 47 and The Geneva Cross. She appeared in Alixe that night, and although ticket sales brought in just $407.50, she was delighted to have received “3 calls!” “splendid notices in papers,” and “two baskets of flowers, one bearing the name ‘Alixe’ in violets on white ground.” She called a rehearsal of Article 47 the next day but dismissed the cast “as everyone was late.” “What a crowd of Duffers they all are,” she wrote on the seventeenth, after two more rehearsals. They must have improved by the end of the week, because she concluded her run with that play on Saturday night, having performed Alixe at the matinee.45 From Washington, Morris traveled to Buffalo, New York, where she spent Christmas week at the Academy of Music. Diary entries capture her fatigue but do not reveal much about her work. She notes she performed twice on Christmas Day as well as on Saturday but neither identifies the productions nor comments on the caliber of the supporting cast. She also does not indicate whether she was pleased with her earnings for the week ($395.83), saying only that she “played at night and took train at 10:30 for New York,” where she was “very late getting in.”46 Morris was back on a train, this time bound for Providence, Rhode Island, on Sunday night. She arrived the next morning, seven hours behind schedule, and went directly to rehearsal.47 Once again, she says little about the weeklong engagement in her diary, but it is possible to get some sense of her in performance from glowing notices that local newspapers carried. The Providence Daily Journal called her “the greatest actress on the American stage” and quoted a Buffalo review of her affecting Gabrielle the previous week. In language redolent with sentimentality, it portrayed Morris as an “artiste” who mesmerized her audience: Through all the scenes in which Miss Morris figured . . . she . . . interpreted the feeling of the character with such exquisite delicacy, such charming tact, such indescribable tenderness, that she fairly held her audience spellbound. . . . She swayed hearts at her own will, and touched the tenderest chords of the soul till they responded with a sweet music that is not often called forth. Indeed her influence was magical.48 In its own critique of The Geneva Cross, the Daily Journal praised the musicality of her voice, the strength of her acting, and the “spell” she cast on the opening night audience. The Providence Morning Star, too, noted, “She has that power of keeping the attention of the auditors fixed upon every movement of hers, and of smiling when she smiles, crying when she appears to cry,” exerting it

112

The Dramatic Meteor

“so effectually that she was three times called before the curtain with vigorous enthusiasm.”49 After Providence, Morris returned home for less than twelve hours before continuing her tour. In the next two months, she would appear in such cities as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago, and St. Louis, performing indefatigably onstage and off. In interviews like the one she granted the Spirit of the Times, she is careful to present herself as an energetic, young professional, appreciative of the success she is enjoying. That reporter called her “the Dramatic Meteor,” and the image is apt. This is Morris on the rise, winning critical and popular acclaim, making more money than she ever had in her life. If the diary reveals fatigue or boredom, if it provides few specifics about where she is or what she is performing, it also conveys a sense of the intensity and exhilaration of her first starring tour: A busy day—two performances and then rush for the train Name came up for benefit—Crowded house—Superb basket of flowers, bird & cage—Made little speech Jammed house for matinee (half-price) turned people away— Fine house tonight. My share of weeks reciepts [sic] $1600 Stormy night—packed house—Such a reception Snow storm. . . . Played matinee 1800 people in and crowds turned away. . . . Big house tonight Mr. Wallack wants me for the stock next season Ahem! Rehearsal of “Alixe”—Heavy snow storm. . . . Bad house tonight, Big call at every act.50 She “rejoiced over the [Chicago] Tribune article on ‘47,’” but “another mean notice” in the Columbus Dispatch displeased her. Several entries suggest that all was not idyllic, especially in Cleveland, where she clashed with her former manager: Woke up too late for church. . . . Quarelled [sic] all day with Mr. E[llsler]. Rehearsal of ‘Geneva Cross’—Home late—row with Mr. E Been sick and lonely Lying down all day

113

The Dramatic Meteor

Terribly cold—slept last night wrapped up in flannells [sic]—a fire in room and yet was cold. Am not well Rain all day. . . . Sent to doctor for medicine for throat 51 For the most part, however, even the rigors of touring could not diminish her enthusiasm. As she told the Spirit of the Times, her engagement in Pittsburgh had been lucrative, but playing at Ellsler’s Academy of Music in Cleveland, where she “had friends by the thousands,” was more gratifying. It had been “standing room only” throughout the run, beginning with opening night. “House packed—people standing up—Grand reception—Made speech after 3d act,” she wrote after the 19 January performance. The next morning, the Cleveland Herald confirmed that her return had been triumphant. Recognizing that “few have gone forth so modestly, and fewer still have come back so honored and with such a cordial welcome,” the paper praised her “intelligence and genius” as well as the originality of her Cora: “The force and power of its working, the delicate shadings of its pathos, and the tender emotions of its sentiments all belong to her.”52 Morris delivered a gracious entr’acte speech, which the Herald printed in its entirety. She thanked the audience for making her return “home” so memorable and recalled her early years in Cleveland. “This theatre is where I made my first appearance, as a fairy, and an awkward ‘fairy’ it was,” she reminded the rapt listeners. “It was here that I received the first round of applause, and”—in a nod, perhaps, to the newspaper that was about to cover her so favorably—“it was here that the first word of praise greeted me when the Cleveland Herald said: ‘Miss Clara Morris played the small part allotted to her well.’ I have the copy now; it is old and yellow, but these words will ever be cherished.” She and Ellsler must have made peace with one another because she credited him with discovering “the possible actress” in her, nurturing her talent, and sharing “very much” of her success.53 After another splendid performance of Article 47, an ebullient Morris wrote in her diary, “Packed house tonight—every seat sold days ago—Recieved [sic] two baskets of flowers, and a gold chain, cross, and earrings—am so pleased.” According to the Herald, one of the arrangements was nearly three feet high and was “the most elaborate floral display ever seen on the stage of the Academy.” The cross had “the monogram, ‘C. M.’ and the superscription: ‘Cleveland, January 23, 1874.’” The entire evening was “one of the most elegant and beautiful testimonials to the accomplishments and grand success of a daughter of the city.” The Spirit of the Times reported that Morris was nearly overcome with emotion, yet managed to speak, promising that she would be worthy of “the praise, plaudits, and presents” her friends and admirers had bestowed. “I am

114

The Dramatic Meteor

more than ever convinced,” she told the attentive audience, “that there is nothing like study, hard work, and patience in the profession, and if you will only give me time, I hope to return to you with a reputation you may feel proud of.”54 Morris used almost exactly the same language in her St. Louis interview the following month. Reiterating the importance of “study, hard work, and patience in the profession,” she said her “ambition to be a great actress” had steeled her determination as she rose through “the ranks” in Cleveland. Having overcome “difficulties,” she believed she finally had “achieved something.” Although she dismissed censorious critics who questioned the “morality” of her signature roles, she was ready for new challenges: “I do not join in the belief that my abilities are confined to the ‘Madelein Morel,’ ‘Alixe,’ and “Frou-Frou’ drama, and before long I shall convince you that I am right. . . . There will be many plays written to develop my powers. I am now studying several new roles to demonstrate this.” She informed the journalist that she would be opening shortly at the Union Square in “a beautiful part in [Adolphe] d’Ennery’s latest Parisian success, ‘Les Deux Orphelines,’ a drama which strikes upon the linked chords of humanity with a master hand.”55 Morris would perform in The Two Orphans but not until 1904, forty years after this revealing interview took place, and not at the Union Square, which was destroyed by fire on 28 February 1888. Her next appearance under Palmer’s management would be in one of the iconic female roles of the century: Camille. Popular in America for more than fifty years, Camille was based on La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, who had adapted his novel of the same title for the French stage. Allegedly inspired by his own short-lived relationship with Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis, Dumas presents courtesan Marguerite Gautier as the charismatic tragic heroine of his play. Convinced that such women do not deserve the societal opprobrium they routinely incur, he creates a complex character and treats her sympathetically. In the course of his five-act drama, Marguerite is transformed by the power of true love—hers for Armand Duval, and his for her—and redeemed through the purity of genuine suffering. Staged in Paris in 1852 with Eugénie Doche as its doomed tubercular heroine, La Dame aux Camélias had its first American production the following year. It starred Jean M. Davenport, a British actress who had seen Doche’s performance and provided her own sanitized adaptation of Dumas’s controversial work: Camille, or the Fate of a Coquette, a Play with Music in Five Acts. In addition to changing the name of the heroine from Marguerite to Camille, which most American actresses subsequently adopted, Davenport pandered to midcentury tastes by excising anything remotely scandalous. Her Camille was a coquette, not a courtesan, who died more from the effects of too many late nights than from a bohemian lifestyle. 56 Equally, but differently, bowdlerized,

115

The Dramatic Meteor

Laura Keene’s Camille, or, a Moral of Life entertained New York audiences for three weeks in 1856. Her version avoided charges of impropriety by turning Dumas’s drama, literally, into a nightmare.57 The first memorable American Camille was Matilda Heron, who introduced her adaptation to a New York audience at Wallack’s Lyceum Theatre on 22 January 1857, having toured the country with it for more than a year. Heron allegedly decided to translate the play after having seen a revival of La Dame aux Camélias in Paris in 1855. Although she also called her heroine Camille rather than Marguerite, she claimed her version was faithful to the French original. 58 Unlike Davenport and Keene, she was no apologist for Camille. There is no doubt about the nature of the life she leads, and the essential features of the story remain the same. A beautiful courtesan when the play opens, she loves and leaves Armand, sacrifices her own happiness for his, and dies serenely after their poignant fifth-act reunion, her transgressions forgiven. Heron’s assertions notwithstanding, there are many differences between the two versions of the play. Her Camille, a Play, in Five Acts is very much an adaptation, not a faithful transcription, of Dumas’s script. She has transformed the drama—albeit one with sensational elements—into pure melodrama. Dumas’s relatively complex heroine has become a one-dimensional character victimized by society, Armand’s father, and her own sorry past. She has tried to change her life but to no avail. Dumas’s condemnation of societal hypocrisy becomes, in Heron’s version, yet another cautionary tale about the fate of a fallen woman, forever tainted by her transgressions. His affirmation of the transformative power of love becomes instead a vision of redemption through suffering, of happiness attained only after death. Heron softens and sentimentalizes Camille, emphasizing her refinement as well as her fragility. More charming hostess than calculating courtesan, her heroine seems far more innocent at the beginning of the play than Dumas’s enigmatic, intriguing Marguerite. Unlike Marguerite, who changes considerably over the course of five acts, Camille remains consistent as a character. Her transformation has taken place before the play begins. She may be a courtesan leading a “feverish” life, but she has a “pure” heart, an unmistakable sign in Camille as in all sentimental drama that she is a good woman. The “long-suffering” she has already experienced has cleansed her. She will embrace self-sacrifice, endure emotional turmoil, and succumb to illness, but she will not be a fundamentally different person at the end of the fifth act than she is when the curtain rises on the first. A walking oxymoron, Heron’s Camille is a courtesan in name only, a good “bad” woman. Her relationship with Armand is striking in its purity. The elevated language they use with one another suggests that the mutual passion they feel is anything but carnal. Camille refers to him as her “only friend, protector,

116

The Dramatic Meteor

brother,” and although they live together in the country, her words make them sound more like siblings than two people in love. They enjoy long walks and take turns reading aloud. She sits next to him and sews; he speaks to her of the future and transports her to another world. If that was not enough to convince the audience of the innocence of their relationship, Heron’s Camille looks and acts like a little girl: “In this simple dress, with my great straw hat, I skip along the fields, or sail on the water by his side. I feel I am a child again!”59 These lines are Heron’s additions and typify the florid, sentimentalized language of her adaptation. Designed to emphasize Camille’s virtue and the sanctity of her love for Armand, they are as melodramatic as the tableaux with which each act ends and differ significantly from the style and tone of the Dumas script. On the page, after the banter of the opening scene, her Camille has an almost angelic purity. She is like the camellias she loves: exquisite, fragile, and doomed. As she explains to Armand after giving him a flower in the first act, “Cherish it, and its beauty will excel the loveliest flower that grows; but wound it with a single touch, you never can recall its bloom, or wipe away the stain.”60 Wounded by ignorance and intolerance, forever stained because she is unchaste, she will find the “peaceful home” she seeks in death. On stage, however, Heron’s actions subverted the innocence her script established. The lusty physicality of her performance made Camille seem common, even vulgar. According to the New York Tribune, she often walked brazenly with her hands on her hips and lifted the skirts of her ball gowns “as if she were entering a coach.” One critic complained that she had turned Camille into an Irish washerwoman,61 while others objected to the coarseness of her interpretation. Most, however, admired her passionate intensity, even if they objected to the play itself. Winter, who loathed Camille, praised Heron for her “wild vigor of imagination, depth of tragic emotion, soul-felt knowledge of sin and misery” and “capacity to depict the struggles of a . . . nature torn by the contending forces of good and evil.”62 It is hard to know why Camille shocked and fascinated American audiences for so long. Dudden suggests that the story resonated with changing conceptions of women’s place in domestic and public spheres, reasoning that it would have had “vague but palpable connections to troubling cultural issues in a society where the links between sexuality on the one hand and marriage and procreation on the other no longer seemed indissoluble.”63 Certainly, in the second half of the nineteenth century, its subject matter could have seemed both titillating and threatening, with the glimpse it promised of a forbidden world unknown to the majority of American theatergoers. That promise, however, was false; that glimpse, illusory. The demimonde the play depicted was not terribly different from the world of many drawing-

117

The Dramatic Meteor

room comedies with their glittering salons and soirées, schemes and intrigues. Camille may be a courtesan, but her aspirations are decidedly middle class, consistent with the domestic ideal of the era. She yearns for a loving husband and a happy home, neither of which will be attainable. If, as Dudden posits, the play “acknowledged the disparity in power between men and women, . . . sometimes edged close to a critique of the double standard, [and] questioned the definition of women as sexual property,”64 the contrived plot and sentimentalized language of the American version undermine the realism for which it was originally known and make it seem far more dated than La Traviata, the Verdi opera it inspired. Yet, one feature of the play is indisputable: it provides a splendid role for an actress, particularly an actress known for her emotional power. It is not surprising that Palmer would have asked Morris to perform it at a benefit in the spring of 1874. She “had long wished to play ‘Camille,’” Palmer recalled, and he “had great faith” in her ability to do so. She remembers it differently, claiming in Life on the Stage that she “hated! hated! hated! the play!” and feared comparison with the other actresses who had appeared in it. She wanted to do Love’s Sacrifice but was unable to use it because Rose Eytinge, then starring in Led Astray at the Union Square, considered it hers.65 Unwilling to pressure Eytinge, Palmer suggested Camille instead. When one of his associates offered to coach Morris, because he had seen Heron and “knew all the business,” she was indignant. “I would leave a theatre before I would do as much,” she replied and argued for the validity of her own interpretation. Although she respected Heron as “the greatest Camille America had had,” she thought she had been too “coarse and vulgar.” Another actress, in contrast, had been “chill and nun-like.”66 She, on the other hand, appreciated the complexity of the character: “Camille was not brutal. . . . Her very disease made her exquisitely sensitive to music, to beauty, to sentiment. If she repelled, it was with cynicism, sarcasm, her evident knowledge of the world.” As Morris explained, providing an interesting clue to the Camille she would create on the Union Square’s stage, “She allured men by the very refinement of her vice.”67 Morris’s memoir conveys the intensity of her preparation. With her appearance less than two weeks away, she chose her costumes and concentrated on learning her lines. She remembers two “simply purgatorial” rehearsals, “two acts on one stage on one day,” three acts on another stage the next,” and a “house packed to the danger-point” for the benefit on 26 March. The performance itself was frenetic. The first act “went with a sort of dash and go that was the result of pure recklessness,” the second with “a rush and sweep of hot passion between Armand and Camille.” “The third act went beautifully,” she reported. “Many women sobbed.” In the fourth, Frank Mayo, the actor playing Armand, was so

118

The Dramatic Meteor

rough he frightened her: “He batted me and hurled me and sometimes I had a wild fear that he would kick me. Finally, he struck my head so hard that a large gold hairpin was driven through my scalp.”68 The fifth act, which Morris says she cut because she thought it was too long, produced the desired effect on the audience: tears followed by tumultuous applause. Conscious of having made people respond exactly as she intended, she sounds almost sadistic: It’s good to be alive sometimes! to feel your fingers upon human hearts, to know a little pressure hurts, that a little tighter pressure will set tears flowing. It was good, too, when that madly-rushed performance was at last over, to lie back comfortably dead, and hear the sweet music that is made by small gloved hands, violently spatted together.69 Palmer’s “experiment” had been a success. “Within twenty-four hours,” Morris recalled, she had “been engaged to play Camille at the Union Square [in May], as one of a cast to be ever proud of, in a handsome production with sufficient rehearsals and correct gowns and plenty of extra ladies and gentlemen to ‘enter all!’ at the fourth act.”70 “Played ‘Camille’ tonight,” Morris noted in her diary on 14 May. Although she was “very sick,” the Union Square opening was a triumph: “House crowded tonight—I recieved [sic] a glorious reception—calls at every act, and three calls at the fourth act. I had some lovely flowers. . . . [including] a tall tree bearing 50 Japonicas in full bloom.” Unfortunately, she provides more information about this plant than she does about the part she played. There are tantalizingly few clues to the character Morris created and to what made it, in Palmer’s words, “a surprisingly effective piece of work.” 71 She does not reflect upon it in her diary. There is no annotated script in her hand, no extant promptbook for the production. From the little information that does exist, however, it is possible to glean a sense of the role as she interpreted it and to appreciate the innovative features of her performance. The Union Square’s opening-night playbill for Camille declared, “The unappreciated womanly sacrifice of ‘Camille’ to a higher duty than self-preservation is a lesson worthy to be taught at all times, and the revival of this beautiful and touching play needs no apology.” It also stated that Heron had authorized the use of her version.72 Given the nature of that adaptation, it is not surprising that Morris created a Camille that capitalized on her strengths and differed from Heron’s portrayal of the “agonized outcast.” 73 As she had convincingly demonstrated with Alixe, she excelled at depicting suffering innocence. While Camille could never be mistaken for that play’s virginal heroine, her goodness and purity—particularly as scripted by Heron—were undeniable. The sentimentalized

119

The Dramatic Meteor

language, acts of kindness to others, and noble self-sacrifice all supported an interpretation of Camille as “a winning gentle girl, more pure than worldly.”74 If that was not enough to move an audience, moreover, her illness certainly could. With the same attention to clinical detail she demonstrated in designing Cora’s scar, Morris devised Camille’s tubercular cough. As related by drama critic Alan Dale many years later, she created it after conferring with her physician: I learned . . . that there are two coughs peculiar to lingering consumption. One of them is a little hacking cough that interferes with the speech, and injures the throat; the other is a paroxysm brought on by extra exertion. I chose the paroxysm, and introduced it in the first scene, after I have been dancing. Camille says at one time that all pain is gone. My doctor told me that this was on account of entire loss of the lungs. He cautioned me against saying much after that, and told me that the tubes of the throat could be used for a few words. I studied Camille in this manner.75 Publicity photographs show Morris as a lovely Camille. In one of them she wears a white gown (her first-act costume), with a billowing train curving gently at her feet. The short, puffed sleeves emphasize the slimness of her arms, which lie gracefully against her skirt. Her crossed hands hold a book. A painting rests on an easel behind her, but she does not glance at it. Instead, with eyes downcast, she looks pensive, even melancholy. Other portraits of Morris in the same dress have her standing sideways, kneeling, or sitting, eyes averted from the camera, lost in thought. Soft bangs frame her forehead while the rest of her hair, drawn back above her ears, cascades softly over her shoulders and touches the mantle of camellias adorning her gown. It is only her long earrings—two concentric hoops suspended on a sliver of metal—that seem daring. There is no other hint of impropriety in the photographs, nothing to suggest that the demure woman pictured is a courtesan. Both are consistent with the Camille Morris presented to New York audiences in May 1874, a Camille noteworthy for her virtue and vulnerability, a Camille markedly different from Heron’s. In its generally favorable review of Camille’s opening night, the Spirit of the Times contrasted the two women’s interpretations. The galvanic power of Heron’s performance had been striking. Working against the sentimentalized language of her own adaptation, she had stripped Camille of all “fictitious glamour” and “romantic ideality.” “In her electric bursts of grief, storm, and struggle,” she “was like the blinding, dazzling rays which shoot meteor-like from the uncut diamond.” Morris, on the other hand, played a character consistent with the one Heron had scripted, one who seemed “guileless,” “ingenuous,” even “unworldly,” “an Ophelia who had lost her virtue because she could not resist the impetuosity of her lover,” with “none of the wanton’s tricks” and “none of her sins.” 76

120

Cabinet photograph of Morris in Camille, 1874. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

The Dramatic Meteor

Morris, however, had taken Camille’s purity and refinement to such an extreme that it lacked believability: The effort to present Camille as a perfectly unsullied and respectable female is strained too far and we see a comely young woman struggling with a passion that is not entirely animal, making a noble and heroic sacrifice to preserve the man who is the god of her idolatry. She feels all the pangs of a blighting remorse and finally dies haunted by the memory of her ill spent life, and with a glowing apostrophe to virtue on her lips.77 Although the Spirit of the Times admired her “infinite lightning-like variety of expression” and found her particularly affecting in two scenes (the third-act confrontation with Armand’s father and her “inexpressibly tender and touching” death in the fifth), she was too one-dimensional. There should have been a stronger contrast between the first act’s frivolous, worldly Camille “surrounded by her sisters in sin” and Camille after she has been transformed by the “purifying innocence” of Armand’s love. For the play itself, however, the paper expressed “the most unmeasured condemnation,” dismissing it as “immoral” and “unworthy” of a place in the American dramatic canon. Grace Greenwood, pseudonym of Sara Jane Clarke, one of the first woman journalists in the United States, also detested the play but for different reasons. In “Five Camilles,” an article in which she discussed five actresses who interpreted the role, she called the play “morbid in feeling” and “revolting” in its “exhibition of injustice, cruelty, falsehood, vice, and brutal selfishness.” 78 It is not that Camille presents unsavory characters engaged in illicit activities, the reason the Spirit of the Times objected to it. Rather, it is the degradation to which it subjects its heroine that troubles Greenwood. Although she does not use the word victimization, that is what she means. She writes of the distress she feels “as a woman who loves her fellow-woman” at the “picture full of darkness and horror,” “the exhibition of injustice, cruelty, falsehood, vice, and brutal selfishness” the play presents. Yet, she also recognizes that Camille has become as important a role for women as Hamlet has long been for men and understands why actresses would be drawn to it. “With all its faults,” Camille is “a sort of test-play for emotional power,” for which women are known, “as ‘Hamlet’ is for intellectual power,” the province of men. Morris, an actress in whom Greenwood is “deeply interested,” is her first Camille since Heron’s, and the contrast is striking. Although the journalist admires the “naturalness” and “magnetic power” of her interpretation, it is “too plaintive, ingenuous, and innocent,” too similar in concept to Alixe. “There are before me now two of Sarony’s exquisite photographs of Miss Morris,” she writes, “one as Alixe, . . . the other as Camille, and it is difficult to tell

122

The Dramatic Meteor

which has the most pure and maidenly air and expression.” Too pensive early in the play, she was most effective in her scenes of pathos, “especially the one following her interview with that dreadful Duval père, and the death scene.” Whereas Heron “tore the heart,” Morris produced a more subdued effect, one that left Greenwood “tearful, silent,” and “lost in a profound feeling of sadness, even solemnity.”79 William Winter found Camille distasteful, because “the moral drift is mixed,” and it sends confusing messages to audiences. “Read one way,” he explains, “it is a warning against harlotry. . . . Read another . . . it is the assertion that a courtesan may be one of the noblest of women; and that when such a woman reforms she is entitled to a place in virtuous society, on a level with all good women, as wife and mother.” Such an interpretation is “muddled, fallacious, and abominably deceptive” because it is not up to society either to “forgive sin or reinstate sinners.” Because “the stain is on the soul,” total rehabilitation for the errant is unthinkable. In his view, Camille should have “disappeared when Miss Heron withdrew from the stage.” Morris is no match for his memory of Heron in her prime. She had portrayed Camille believably as a “ruined woman.” Morris, in contrast, is just “a comely girl playing at ruin.” She is “singularly handsome and winning.” She focuses attention throughout on her “golden youth and passionate enthusiasm.” In her third-act “parting scene,” she is “as pretty a type as ever was seen of pathetic desolation trying to be merry.” Yet, much as he trivializes her interpretation, he also suggests its effectiveness, noting “the delicate intuitions of meaning that tremble through her tones and the wildness of sudden emotion that flashes from her eyes.” His arch dismissal of people who find Camille moving cannot disguise the impact that Morris had on the opening night audience, many of whom were weeping audibly: They appeared to enjoy their woe very much last night, and the watery waste of unlimited pocket-handkerchief ought surely to be noted among the incidents of the evening. Many an immaculate cambrio was despoiled; many a lace was made to languish; many a frigid linen grew limp with lamentation; and therefore, though little else of great moment was accomplished by this lachrymose effort, the victory over starch may be set down as signal and complete.80 Winter concludes surprisingly by praising Morris. Although she was not a believable Camille, the character she created was “something a great deal better”: “a lovely type of affection and self-sacrifice,” who “loved as virtue loves” and “suffered as virtue suffers.” Instead of emphasizing “repulsive traits and dark passions,” she has chosen to embody “a most lovable ideal of womanlike

123

The Dramatic Meteor

gentleness,” an ideal he obviously cherishes. Lovely and loving, “strong in simplicity and goodness,” weak in “bitterness” and “scorn,” she has finally met his exacting standards for female behavior on stage. While he did not consider her performance “a great piece of acting,” he predicted that it would “add in a material degree to the permanence of her fame.” His comments were prescient. Morris would never drop Camille from her repertoire. and until it hardened into something altogether different, audiences would find her interpretation deeply affecting. Although the role as she played it was not a significant departure from characters like Alixe and Gabrielle, it enhanced her reputation. If, as Greenwood contended, Camille was a test of an actress’s “emotional power,” it was a test that Morris convincingly passed. Based on her success, Palmer would offer her a contract for the coming fall at a weekly salary of one thousand dollars, more than three times what he was paying her in the spring (and almost thirty times the amount she had received from Daly).81 Morris had shown, moreover, that she was not afraid to assert her individuality. No matter who had played a role before her or how definitive another actress’s interpretation, she would not hesitate to draw on her own strengths in creating a character. She had to begin with a concept that made sense to her. The Heron script certainly supported the sentimentalized interpretation she devised. It provided her with many actable moments of anguish, thanks to lines that suggested (and stage directions that specified) trembling, shrinking, staggering, dropping to the ground, and, above all, weeping. Camille’s tears begin to fall in the second act, following a misunderstanding with Armand and flow freely until the end of the play. These are not the tears of the anguished female hysteric discharging her sexual urges or signifying her “erotic volatility.” They are the “sacred tears” prized by Victorian sentimentalists because they symbolized “deep femininity.” As Glenn explains, “when the redeemed courtesans of nineteenth-century French drama wept, the tears signified a ritual cleansing that led to the rediscovery of their true womanliness.”82 A sign of her redemption, Camille’s tears are the tangible proof of her noble self-sacrifice and the measure of her suffering. As she sobbed, empathetic audience members wept along with her. Unlike Sarah Bernhardt who would soon seduce American theatergoers with the bold sexuality of her Camille, Morris won them with the sanctity of hers. If they could not enjoy an erotically charged event, they could luxuriate in the cathartic grief they felt at the spectacle of lovely Camille, remorseful from the first, enduring misfortune after misfortune before expiring in Armand’s arms. 83 Palmer found her “sad farewell to the home where she had been so happy with her lover” particularly moving: “In that one scene of suffering and despair, nobody has ever affected

124

The Dramatic Meteor

me and I have never seen anyone affect one American audience” as she did.84 In emphasizing Camille’s anguish, moreover, Morris had found an approach that would define her. The spectacle of suffering, accompanied by copious tears on stage and in the house, would become the hallmark of her art. This production of Camille figured in three more diary entries. “The papers are splendid,” she noted on 15 May. “The World notice is charming & even Mr. Winter notices me kindly.” “Was feeling badly all night,” she recorded on the 25th, “fainted in 3d act—Mr P[almer] sent me boquet [sic].” She wrote about the closing performance on Thursday, 11 June: “Last night of Camille—Jammed house—Building magnificently decorated with flowers. Played ‘Wicked World’ in Brooklyn (matinee) for Mr. Smith’s benefit Am so tired I can scarcely walk tonight—my last night I’m so glad.” The following day, at another benefit, she performed “one act of Camille 4th—Was crowned with laurel—crown sent by Miss Heron, her letter read before the curtain—I replied.”85 Morris often uses the image of being crowned with laurel in her memoirs to symbolize stage success. In this case, she actually was. At the conclusion of the performance, according to the 13 June New York Herald and 20 June Spirit of the Times, an enthusiastic audience called her before the curtain and showered her with flowers. Among the bouquets was a laurel wreath tied with red, white, and blue ribbons from Matilda Heron. It came with a letter praising Morris for the “grace and beauty” of her interpretation while reminding her of Heron’s proprietary interest in the play. One of the actors read it aloud and, as the audience burst into applause, placed the wreath on her head.86 “Now I am through acting for this season,” Morris wrote in her diary later that day. A year that began in turmoil had ended in triumph. “Camille,” according to Odell, “had entirely restored Clara Morris to her artistic pedestal.”87 She looked forward to new challenges but first was off to Europe to enjoy a working vacation in England and France. While in Paris, she was to scout for fresh material for Palmer, who was eager to have her open the Union Square’s third season under his management. She would indeed return with a play, but it was one that would produce results neither of them could have anticipated when she left New York on the Celtic, White Star Line, on 15 June 1874.

125

7 Marriage and

M

acbeth

A 23 JUNE 1874 diary entry records Morris’s arrival in Liverpool after a smooth crossing. “All well,” she wrote, indicating that she and her traveling companions were fine. They included her mother (“Ma”), Union Square actress Roberta Norwood (“Norwood”), and Frederick C. Harriott (“Fred”), her fiancé of more than a year. Scion of two established New York families, the Harriotts and the Havemeyers, nephew of William Havemeyer, then in his third term as mayor of New York, “Fred” had entered Morris’s life shortly after her arrival in the city.1 According to the Spirit of the Times, Harriott was a wealthy flour merchant who also taught elocution and “dramatic art.” The two met when Morris came to study with him, and “it was not long before rumor had the teacher and pupil engaged.”2 He had appeared in her diary on 8 September 1872 when she wrote, “Mr. Harriott and Mr. Halliday called.” They visited again on the 15th, and on the 19th, Morris “went for drive with Mr. Harriot [sic].” She mentions “Fred” frequently after that, noting his gifts of floral arrangements, caged birds, and bottles of perfume, as well as his kindness to her mother and attentiveness to her business affairs. He supported her legal battle with Daly, helped negotiate her contract with Palmer, and would soon assume the management of her career. The couple had been engaged since 5 November 1873. A relieved Morris wrote in her diary, “Fred has told his father, and he is not angry, but has allowed Fred to send me his picture (Mr. Warren Harriot’s [sic] picture I mean) Oh what a load is off my heart!”3 Such alliances were not uncommon. Although a stigma against the stage still existed, especially if a young woman married an actor, socially prominent men encountered few objections when they wed actresses. In his History of the Union Square Theatre, Palmer mentions several actresses who succeeded in “stepping from public to private life honorably and happily” and makes such a leap sound like a worthy career goal. He cites Agnes Ethel, who “won her triumph” professionally and “retired to a life of ease, social distinction and great wealth.”4 That, undoubtedly, was what Morris anticipated with her upcoming marriage to Harriott, who had avidly pursued her.

126

Marriage and Macbeth

Morris was in London when she received a letter from Palmer sending her on a theatrical mission. He had bought the rights to Octave Feuillet’s Sphinx, then the rage in Paris, and planned to star her in an Americanized version at the Union Square in the fall.5 He wanted her to see the French production, paying particular attention to Sophie Alexandrine Croisette as scheming adulteress Blanche de Chelles, the role Morris would have in New York. Although she does not mention the French Sphinx in her diary, she discussed it at length in a New York Telegraph article (“When ‘The Sphinx’ Shocked New York”) written almost thirty years later. She “hurried” to Paris” but found that intense heat in the city had forced the production to close prematurely. She was thus unable to study Croisette’s performance or to judge the effectiveness of the death scene in which Blanche, having ingested poison, reportedly turned green before expiring in agony.6 Eager to play the part for Palmer, Morris returned to England. She and her party left Liverpool on the steamship Republic, which docked in New York on 30 August after an uneventful ten-day voyage.7 Translated and adapted by George Fawcett Rowe, The Sphinx was in rehearsal by the first week in September, with a reading on the third. Morris wrote in her diary on the ninth, “I don’t like the piece.” It was her only entry about the play, which opened at the Union Square on Monday, 21 September. She did not discuss it in her memoirs either, although there is a photograph of her as a pensive Blanche in a black riding habit, complete with helmet and crop, in Stage Confidences. Specific information about her interpretation comes from other sources, mainly the aforementioned article, Palmer’s recollections, and reviews of the New York production. Morris had signed a contract with Shook and Palmer on 18 May in which she agreed to a nine-week fall engagement at the Union Square, as well as a shorter one the following spring at an unspecified New York theater, for a weekly salary of one thousand dollars.8 Having accepted Blanche de Chelles without having seen or read The Sphinx, Morris found herself with the most challenging role of her career: a completely unsympathetic heroine. Longtime drama critic John Ranken Towse described her as an “abominable” character: Psychologically the young woman was a bundle of the grossest inconsistencies, an early example, possibly of divided and warring personalities. Dominated entirely by her passions, she plots to poison her dearest friend in order to run away with her husband. Then to prove her innocence she agrees to marry another man whom she detests and, as a climax, swallows the poison which she had prepared for her rival.9 Unlike her other memorable roles, beautiful, pampered Blanche was evil and unrepentant. She took pleasure only in the forbidden, showed no remorse

127


for her actions, and escaped from worldly punishment through suicide. As Morris recalled, “I had hard work to keep from foolish crying because I had blindly engaged to play the part of Blanche, who, from malice and vanity run mad, sinned so grossly; who, wealthy, protected, and loved, wrecked homes and lives simply to gratify her own morbid, momentary fancy!” She feared that without “a piteous past” or “a heart-breaking childhood” to win some sympathy, such an amoral character would alienate audiences.10 Nevertheless, Morris began preparing for the role. A French journal had published a caricature on which she said she based her interpretation: “Croisette as Blanche was pictured with sharp little ears, a catty face, a stealthy crouch, and always with stripes introduced roundwise in her costumes to suggest the tiger cat.”11 Her Blanche, too, would be feline and dangerous. She would even wear the same fitted riding habit. Yet, Morris was not content to ape Croisette. She understood that the fourth-act death scene was an important way to make the character hers and to distinguish her performance from the French original. Just as she discussed Camille’s tubercular cough with her doctor, she sought medical advice about Blanche’s suicide. Although it was death by poison, it had to be the right poison: He read the last act carefully, for he had first thought of prussic acid as the probable cause of death, but Blanche had to speak several lines after the fatal draught; then she asked for the veil to cover her face, which indicated a conscious distortion of her features; and he concluded that symptoms of strychnia poisoning best suited the scene.12 Strychnia (strychnine) is as lethal as prussic acid (cyanide) but works more slowly, producing symptoms that typically begin fifteen to thirty minutes after ingestion. As Morris learned from the “gruesome lecture” her doctor provided, there are “early spasms and muscular twitchings leading up to the awful tetanic convulsions and final suffocation.” Strychnine poisoning may also cause the body to arch convexly, with legs and arms extended, fists clenched, jaw clamped, the face fixed in a grin, the eyes bulging.13 The effects of strychnine, in other words, were much more actable. The challenge, as she explained, was “to decide what to reject as too shocking or what to try to represent.” Years later, she provided a vivid description of the choices she made: When Blanche swallowed the poison she stood in a sort of stupor of horror a moment. . . . Then the muscles began to stiffen, a slight froth gathered about the lips. Next, with a wild cry of anguish, she tore open the chokingly high, close riding habit and fell backward into the chair, bounding upward with arched back as one in a convulsion, gasped her pleas for the veil to hide her convulsed face from the sight of her lover—and so died horribly.14

128


Critics found the death scene repellant. According to one, “anything more ghastly, terrible, and realistic . . . has not for a long time been seen upon the stage. . . . A visible shudder went through the audience, and horror was depicted on nearly every face. Mingled with this was a sensation of disgust.” The Spirit of the Times thought the “intense suffering” she portrayed was unbelievable, especially for a female character: “No human system could stand up under such terrific and protracted torture. Unconsciousness or death would intervene before those painful and unreal convulsions could manifest themselves. No woman’s nervous system could endure them an instant.” For the New York Times, “the spectacle Miss Morris offers with eyes upturned, pallid face, foaming mouth, and hands clutching at her bosom—the waist of her dress being torn open in the agony of the moment” was “simply disgusting, and not impressive.”15 Towse branded the play “nasty rubbish” but praised Morris for making Blanche “plausible if not credible.” He found her acting “full of fascination, venom, and passion, and, at the last, of a stony-eyed despair which carried the house by storm.” One reviewer admired her performance for its absence of “conventionality” and “truth to nature,” even though the “unexpected transitions” and idiosyncratic “methods of expressing emotion” were occasionally startling. Another likened her to “a human volcano” that “lit up the stage with blazes of emotional lightning.” Nevertheless, he loathed the play, calling it “a psychological study of depraved womanhood, . . . depending for its existence on the morbid fascination that rivets the gaze of the living on the writhing figure of the epileptic, on the wild-glaring inmates of the asylum, or on the stone cold corpses of the morgues.”16 The clinical effectiveness of the death scene, combined with a morally bankrupt character at the play’s center, was too much for this critic and for others who found The Sphinx and the spectacle revolting. Given her anxiety over Madelein Morel the previous year, it is not surprising that Morris buckled when, in Palmer’s words, The Sphinx “met with the disapprobation of the newspapers and a portion of the public.” She was so upset by the censure that she “would cry over it in the green-room every night, tell me what cruel things her friends said about her and was, in fact, in no fit state of mind toward it to play the part.” After five weeks, she insisted he close it. Because of her “moanings,” he reluctantly agreed, even though it was still attracting audiences.17 An impassioned article about The Sphinx’s withdrawal appeared in the New York Daily Graphic on 24 October, chastising “maudlin” journalists who condemned the play as immoral and Morris for appearing in it. It expressed the enlightened view that no actress should be held “responsible for the moral of the author” or have her own character “as an artist and as a woman” conflated with that of the dramatic character she played. Unfortunately, Morris had been

129


the target of such “a virulent and continuous . . . stream of personal abuse” that she succumbed to the pressure and refused to continue in the role. “Purists” who assail “modern” works for exploring the “social relation of the sexes” are misguided, it argued, because they are “the only plays to-day which have performed the double duty successfully of reflecting contemporaneous life and interesting the public.” Far from being immoral, they are more “truthful” than traditional fare. Artists who create and perform them should not be subject to censorship. Rather, “art should be a law to itself. The only converging point for morality and art is that of absolute truth.”18 The unsigned article concluded by praising Morris as an “emotional actress” who portrayed the agony of a “woman’s misfortune” with an affecting power unlike any other on the American stage and “not a formulated mimicry of suffering.” She gave theater a “new impulse” and should have won recognition for “doing a new thing worthily.” Instead she has “been bullied into the belief that the adulterous drama is . . . immoral” and has capitulated to the “thoughtless outcries of canting critics.” This “capable and intelligent” actress will undoubtedly abandon the works to which she is so well suited in favor of “legitimate drama” for which her “impulsive talents” are less appropriate. As the Daily Graphic had predicted, Morris opened at the Union Square Theatre two days later in what Palmer described as “a familiar English comedy,” James Sheridan Knowles’s The Hunchback. She starred as Julia, the role Fanny Kemble had created to critical acclaim at Covent Garden in 1832, which had become a favorite of British and American actresses. Although Palmer says she was playing it for the first time, she actually had appeared as Julia during her summer in Nova Scotia (and as Julia’s confidante, Helen, in Cleveland and Cincinnati).19 Audiences had not tired of the ludicrous plot featuring inherited titles lost and won, honorable paternity revealed, and romantic relationships righted after five tumultuous acts. They still delighted in Julia’s transformation from country innocent to frivolous fiancée to repentant woman reunited with the man who adores her and whose love she finally reciprocates. In Winter’s words, Julia—the “pure, wholesome, virtuous, proud, and thoroughly noble and lovely English girl”—represented “the best type that the stage possesses of maiden ingenuousness, the waywardness of innocent youth, the rebellion of a pure heart against injustice in love, and the very common experience of self-conflict and sorrow at the stern effects of folly.” For him, the transition from “carnal” French Blanche was “startling and delicious.” It felt like a breath of fresh air: “To pass from The Sphinx to The Hunchback is to emerge from the stench of sickness into the fragrance of the pines; to leave the ooze and slime of the quagmire, and tread the firm, white, shining sands of the sea-beaten shore.”20

130


Morris does not discuss the role in her memoirs and gives it only cursory mention in her diary. On 26 October, she wrote, “Played Julia in The Hunchback—Did not play very well—was frightened nearly to death—had four calls—no five,” a number Winter’s review confirmed the next day. Displeased with her performance on the twenty-seventh, she expressed relief that critics were not harsh: “Papers generally kind Mail Times & World the worst—Republic Tribune Graphic & Express & Post the best—Played badly tonight.” “Big house, and I acted better far than last night,” she noted on the twenty-eighth. 21 In Palmer’s bizarrely phrased opinion, “she mounted the climaxes with a fine vault but she lacked only the equable of playful temperament for the domestic and comedy scenes.” The Spirit of the Times admired the “appealing sincerity” with which she performed and forgave her “minor artistic delinquencies,” such as “the lack of essential elegance in manner and diction necessary in such a part.”22 The New York Times did not think the role suited her but appreciated the “sympathetic quality of her art” and the “touches of nature, spontaneous and forceful” that “compelled hearty applause” in certain scenes.23 Winter acknowledged strengths and weaknesses, commending Morris for “the grace and purity of her work” but faulting her lack of “animation” in the “rural portion” of the play and “glitter” in the “purely comedy portion.” He found her “entirely sincere” in the “scenes of strong emotion,” due in large part “to her sweetness and tender warmth.” Given his preference for virtuous femininity on stage, it is not surprising that he considered Julia’s “rapt expression of moral and spiritual exultation” in the final act the “highest point” of Morris’s performance. Although he thought the “impersonation” could have been more vibrant, he praised it as “eminently fresh, simple, and womanlike” and commended her for having “copied none of the stereotyped points” of the part. The Hunchback closed on 14 November after a successful three-week run. Palmer opened Jane Eyre two days later starring Charlotte Thompson while Morris, in his words, “left for ‘the provinces’”—Brooklyn, where she had a weeklong engagement at Mrs. Conway’s Theatre.24 (Because the Brooklyn Bridge was under construction, Morris crossed the East River by ferry, the only means possible at that time to reach the burgeoning city.) Her repertoire for the week of 16 November included Alixe, Camille, and The Hunchback, which played to customary acclaim. Then, for four performances only, she surprised audiences with a new offering: Lady Macbeth. This bold choice was not entirely unexpected. During the run of The Sphinx, the Spirit of the Times announced that Shook and Palmer would soon present Morris in a strong “legitimate” part, a well-known heroine from classical drama. The paper later reported that she and E. L. Davenport would star in Shakespearean and classical plays at Booth’s in April. 25 A strategic move on Morris’s part,

131


acting Shakespeare was a way to solidify her reputation as a brilliant young actress capable of performing traditional as well as contemporary repertoire. Beyond that, selecting this role represented a direct challenge to Charlotte Cushman, then nearing the end of her career as America’s preeminent tragedienne. In attempting it, Morris signaled her intention to define Lady Macbeth for the next generation of theatergoers and to inherit the “tragic mantle” she imagined passing from Cushman’s broad shoulders to her own. The strong, masculine Lady Macbeth for which Cushman was known was not the character Morris intended to play. As she recalled in The Life of a Star, “the lady was the first consideration”: I could not accept the traditional, martial-stalking drum-major of a woman, who spoke in sepulchral stomach tones, and splashed about in blood, as though she were quite used to it; who spoke of dashing out the brains of her suckling babe with a fiendish satisfaction in her own nerve. That made her final remorseful breaking-down of brain and heart a contradiction, almost an impossibility. 26 Yet she questioned her temerity in rejecting her predecessors’ interpretations: You find all the greatness of the mighty [Hannah] Pritchard, [Sarah] Siddons, Cushman, and the rest looming up between you and the part you are studying; they and their business, their reading of certain lines: Siddons—“We fail?”—Cushman—“Give me the daggers!” go whirling through your brain. You feel smaller and smaller, and worst of all, those great traditions are frightening you away from Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. You forget that you have the same material to build with that they had—Shakespeare’s own words. That you have the right to construe those words according to the best effort of your God-given intelligence; and very often custom is too strong and one more Lady Macbeth is too monumental, declamatory, gory-minded and domineering. 27 Determined to present a feminine Lady Macbeth, she proceeded with what Towse called a “bold experiment” in which “she, a modern of the moderns, challenged comparison with Charlotte Cushman and other less noted oldschool impersonators of the part.”28 Morris had already played Lady Macbeth. In addition to appearing several times in the role in Ohio, she had weeklong engagements in Macbeth the previous spring in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C., just before she opened in Camille. A 27 March Brooklyn Eagle review had been favorable, praising Morris’s departure from Cushman’s “old muscular, viragoish idea of Lady Macbeth.” Although it criticized the production for being underrehearsed—Morris had

132


only two “insufficient” rehearsals with a “shaky company”—certain moments were unforgettable. The sleepwalking scene was “awing in its still perfection,” the end of the banquet scene particularly moving: Macbeth is all fear, all remorse, trembling . . . under the weight of the hell within him. Beside him she comes. She has now seen the consequences of the crime to him. She knows the consequences to herself. The haggard face, the tremor at the idea of retiring to the solitude of their chamber, the vague lassitude of grief that freighted her every tone to him, seemed an apocalypse of the woe within which she turned on the audience after he had left her to herself. . . . Those nearest the stage felt heartsore in looking at it; and as a low moan issued from her motionless lips it thrilled through the audience that sat in silence spellbound.29 Based on “the extraordinary power and beauty” of Morris’s interpretation, the paper predicted it would soon become the standard against which others would be measured. Morris’s success in Camille, coupled with the brouhaha over The Sphinx, generated great interest in her upcoming stage appearances. Just as they had in April, critics ferried to Brooklyn to see her in November. The response to her Lady Macbeth was mixed. Three reviews (the New York Daily Graphic, Herald, and World) were negative; two, including the influential Post, were positive.30 All recognized that they were seeing a very different portrayal, the “exact opposite” of Cushman’s. The older actress was “essentially masculine,” Morris distinctly feminine, presenting what the Herald called “the fair haired pink and white type as her idea of the Lady Macbeth.” Towse, writing in his new role as the Post’s drama critic, found her first appearance “rather startling. . . . A slight, lithe figure, richly but plainly dressed; a girlish, almost innocent face, surmounted by a coronet and a mass of golden hair—a woman, at first glance, to love rather than fear.” Where Cushman was terrifying and imperious, Morris was “unobtrusive” and tender. Her interpretation struck the Daily Graphic as “never a grand passion, always an individual experience. . . . It was life-like, exquisitely sentient, full of human weakness, often pathetic, but never sublime, scarcely majestic, and never poetic.”31 Although the Herald missed Cushman’s rugged strength, it appreciated Morris’s sleepwalking scene where “fierce energy has given way to remorse.” Ultimately, however, that paper, along with the World and the Daily Graphic, found the new approach unconvincing. It was not up to Cushman’s heroic standard and, according to the World, “did not offer in its inadequacy any originality of conception or of reading to atone for the want of tragic force.” The Post’s Towse, on the other hand, appreciated Morris’s originality. While acknowledging “weak

133


points” in her performance, he expressed hope that “adverse criticism” would not discourage her, confident that “perseverance will enable her to overcome the defects which her own good taste will aid her to discover.”32 Morris does not mention the play in her diary, so it is impossible to know her thoughts about Lady Macbeth. Her next entry concerns a more private matter, her marriage to thirty-five-year-old Frederick C. Harriott on Monday, 30 November: Fred and I were married this morning by Dr. Crosby in the church parlor John Norton & Mother and Addie [her maid] were present and Freds [sic] mother father sisters & brother Ed—his dear old grandmother & his uncle Haveymer [sic] My Fred like a goose gave me an opal & more made me wear it—It is in the center of a diamond locket the rings are beautiful solitaires—All my presents were lovely but Freddys [sic] is the finest of all. . . . After dinner Fred Addie & I took the cars for Pittsburgh where I play on Tuesday night.33 It is striking that in writing about her simple wedding and in myriad diary entries over the years, Morris never uses the word love in referring to her husband. According to George MacAdam, who interviewed members of her extended family after her death, she told a cousin that she had “married for social position” and “was fearfully disappointed that marriage brought her no children.” MacAdam himself characterized Harriott, a member of “a family prominent both socially and financially,” as “an 18-carat snob.”34 Vera Liebert, who toured as a child with Morris, remembered him as a “good-natured, slightly pompous, and exceedingly ineffectual man.”35 There is surprisingly little information about Morris’s husband of almost forty years—no extant photographs, diaries, or articles chronicling his achievements.36 Even the spelling of his name is inconsistent, appearing both as “Harriot” and “Harriott” throughout his life.37 Whatever facts are known about him come from his wedding and death announcements. His father, Warren Harriott, was a banker; his mother, Catherine, a Havemeyer, a family that made its fortune in the sugar industry. Born in Manhattan, Fred must have been an indifferent student because there is no evidence that he attended college even though his parents could have afforded to send him. Instead, he worked in the wholesale flour and grain business with his brother. His reputed wealth, as well as his family’s standing in the community, undoubtedly convinced Morris that he would be an ideal husband, her passport to a life of ease and respectability. For him, on the other hand, the lure was the stage. Described by one paper as an “accomplished elocutionist,” he had been an amateur performer in the early 1870s, giving platform readings on Long Island and in upstate New York.38 If

134


Morris looked to him for financial security and social position, he undoubtedly saw in her the promise of a more exciting life than he could have as a businessman. If he could not enjoy a professional stage career of his own, he could shape hers. The role of “husband-impresario” was one he willingly assumed. Perhaps the death of Harriott’s uncle William, mayor of New York, on the day of the wedding—at the “very moment” she and Fred “had stood before the minister”39—should have been an ominous portent. Perhaps her associating their marriage with Macbeth, a reputedly unlucky play, should have been another. As she recalled in The Life of a Star, “I simply can’t think of my wedding without hearing a swirl of the ‘Around, around, around, around—/About, about, about, about . . . ’ music of the witches’ cave scene. Dear me—dear me! how those two memories do braid themselves together.”40 She jocularly dismisses these inauspicious signs, assuring her readers that all is well thirty years later: “The husband, superstition to the contrary notwithstanding, big and ruddy and as English looking as if he had just left the Shires, is sitting not far off, and not the sign of a divorce decree to be found in this house.”41 In actuality, keeping her troubled marriage intact would be a driving force in Morris’s life and a running theme in her diary for decades. John Ellsler had written to express his disapproval of the marriage. Personal reasons aside, he thought it would hurt Morris’s popularity with playgoers who liked to think of their favorite actresses as innocent and virginal. Determined to prove him wrong, as well as to allay fears she was retiring from the stage, she embarked on a starring tour that would take her across the country to California and back to New York by spring. Newspapers reported that the Harriotts left immediately after their wedding for Pittsburgh, as Morris noted in her diary, where she was to begin a two-week engagement at the Opera House the following night. A laudatory article about Morris appeared in the Pittsburgh Leader on Monday, 6 December. It began by quoting Donn Piatt, one of Morris’s Ohio friends, who called her the “Rachel of the English-speaking stage,” a title the Leader thought she deserved. Like Rachel at the Comédie Française, “she has achieved a revolution in the drama, and has created a new school of acting.” Praising her for having rejected the “muscular, ranting, stagey style that distinguished the old school, the school of which Miss Cushman and Madame Janauschek are the principal exponents,” it cited her meteoric rise from obscurity to the pinnacle of her profession in New York. Without mentioning Daly’s name, it claimed the Fifth Avenue Theatre had steadily declined since her departure and was now nearing bankruptcy.42 Supported by the resident company, Morris divided her first week between Camille and Article 47. The Leader considered both plays “unpleasant” and

135


“disreputable” but praised the young actress on three counts. First, she was brilliant in each and enjoyed a “complete” success. Second, she expressed her own distaste for “the French style of dramas” and explained that she had only agreed to present Article 47 because the Opera House’s manager convinced her it would draw well. Third, she planned yet another “new departure” and intended to “identify herself with the legitimate drama as far as possible.” In her second week at the theater, therefore, she would play Julia and Lady Macbeth, with a brief appearance as Alixe in between. Sensitive to adverse criticism and hungry for respectability, Morris may well have wanted to distance herself from the works on which she had built her reputation. Whatever she really thought of them, she was ready to prove herself as an actress of the first rank, eager to bring her revolutionary approach to the interpretation of “legitimate” roles. Without an illuminating diary entry, it is impossible to have Morris’s perspective on the Pittsburgh engagement, but the Spirit of the Times reported it was an “immense” success. Lady Macbeth played to “overflowing houses,” with critics “lavish in their praises.” At the final matinee on Saturday, 12 December, “hundreds were turned away, the box office being compelled to refuse money offered even for standing room.”43 Morris, however, does not discuss the tour in her diary at all. She does not write about the roles she played, the companies with which she performed, or her critical and popular reception. There is just one entry dated 25 December, which concludes the 1874 volume. She is in Cleveland, staying at the Hammond House. It is Christmas Day, and she appreciates the gifts she has received: “a box of presents” (from Ma), “a cunning little watch and chain” (Fred), a wallet and “card case of shell” (Ellsler), and “a French traveling clock that strikes the hours in the sweetest tones” (Piatt) but makes no mention of her stage appearances. Unlike the tour of the previous season when she delighted in recording her curtain calls, “splendid” reviews, and gifts of jewelry and elaborate floral arrangements—many of them sent by Harriott—this year’s is striking for the absence of commentary or reflection. She says only that she spent most of the day packing and would start for Chicago that night.44 Reviews in the Cleveland Leader confirm that “Cleveland’s child” returned to the site of her earliest successes and spent two weeks at the Academy of Music. Billed as “The Celebrated Emotional Actress,”45 she offered the same repertoire as in Pittsburgh: Camille, Article 47, The Hunchback, Alixe, and Macbeth. As Cora, although the supporting company was inferior, she was “simply beyond criticism.” She was convincing in The Hunchback, “an actress young enough to look ‘Julia’ as well as act it—a union ever scarce upon the stage.” As Camille, however, she was astonishing: “Acting?” It is not acting. When sinews are strung to their utmost with intensity of feeling; when the body writhes with anguish that is unmistak136


ably real; when the hands spasmodically clutching at bosom and throat betray actual physical pain; when a genuine paroxysm of emotion shakes the whole frame like an aspen, delineation passes beyond the pale of acting and becomes—the acme of genius.46 Such a description captures the powerful physicality and violent emotionalism of Morris’s performance, which impressed even the most jaded viewer: “One is so bewildered that criticism is forgotten, the cool languor with which one learns to look upon a play is dispelled by tense nerves and excited brain, and the lachrymal glands of the hardest cynic soften and melt into rain like the summer cloud.” Lady Macbeth, however, remained the real test, one that Morris had not yet passed. In its preview of the 18 December performance, the Leader called her upcoming appearance “the most interesting dramatic event of the season” and alluded to the controversy she had already provoked. It was not simply that she was moving from “light melodrama to the heaviest tragedy” but that she wanted to make the role her own. That was what “the vinegar-penned dramatic editors of the metropolitan press” found objectionable and why they had already begun to carp about her interpretation. That they insisted on comparing her to Cushman was unfair. She had been performing Lady Macbeth for decades; Morris, for only a few months. Hers was a work-in-progress, and she was entitled to refine her interpretation over time. “Miss Morris has a genius that must not be pent up within the narrow confines of such melodramatic trash as ‘Camille’ and ‘Article 47,’” the Leader reasoned, predicting that within a few seasons she would become “the greatest tragic actress of the age.”47 A subsequent review acknowledged that her Cleveland debut in the role had been disappointing but applauded Morris’s determination “to take a long, uncertain, advance step in the pursuit of perfection in an art where it is more dangerous to reach too far than to remain contentedly within the bounds of more humble ambition.” She had invested Lady Macbeth with a “womanly character” and the contrast with Cushman’s—“that masculine hag, that ugly excrescence upon womanhood”—was striking. With a flair for hyperbole that Morris must have appreciated, the paper praised her interpretation as one that would finally allow “the woman of Shakespeare” to “be born”: The reform could only be accomplished through an independent thinker who was also an independent actor. The little ballet girl of a few years ago was selected—by the spirit of the Bard of Avon himself, perhaps—and the Clara Morris of to-day is teaching the actresses of all ages since the advent of Shakespeare that they have been miserable interpreters—that “Lady Macbeth,” ambitious, murderous though she was undoubtedly, was also a woman, and not a fiend without conscience or mercy.48 137


The Spirit of the Times wrote that the engagement was a great success, with Morris playing to packed houses and positive reviews. “On the last evening of her appearance,” the paper reported, “seats were sold in the upper gallery at full prices to gratify the demands of Miss Morris’s admirers.”49 Then she was off to Chicago where, again, interest centered on Lady Macbeth. The Inter Ocean’s critic found “weaknesses and imperfections” in her performance on Friday, 8 January, but attributed them to the short time she had been playing the challenging role. He considered her conception of the character “intelligent” and admired her for having “had the courage to give it to the world.” He was particularly impressed with the sleepwalking scene in which Morris had been so “dreadfully realistic,” he was convinced she had studied “somnambulism from living subjects”: She glides in, all noiseless, with the taper in her hand, her form shrouded in white robes like a corpse in a winding sheet. Her eyes have a glassy stare, her face is of a deathly pallor. . . . In her hands the sleep-walker becomes a dread specter, a being who might have been conjured up from tombs by the weird imagination of Edgar Poe. More than any one we have ever seen she succeeds in inspiring awe. Charlotte Cushman is as impressive as it is possible to conceive. Miss Morris is that and something more. . . . The audience were spellbound. . . . They heard that terrible sigh, they saw her wringing her hands and not until she glided from the scene did it seem as if a breath could be drawn.50 She was ill, which made it all the more remarkable. According to the Inter Ocean, “her indomitable pluck and determination carried her bravely through a most trying ordeal,” but it was obvious that she was “seriously indisposed.” The Spirit of the Times reported that only the aid of “restoratives” had enabled her to finish the performance. The following day, although there were matinee and evening shows scheduled, she was unable to appear at all. “Acting on the command of her physician,” the Inter Ocean stated, “she remained in her room.”51 A handwritten receipt for “services rendered” confirms that Morris sought medical attention on 29 December, shortly after arriving in Chicago. Although the problem and treatment remain unspecified, it shows that T. D. Williams, MD, received payment of five dollars from Morris’s husband. Another receipt for “second week Miss Morris engagement” (4–9 January) confirms that she did not play on Saturday.52 Beyond that, it is difficult to monitor Morris’s health or to track her appearances until late January, when she was in San Francisco for four profitable weeks at the California Theatre. According to the Spirit of the Times, “acute rheumatism” almost scuttled those plans. After taking therapeutic hot mud baths in Santa Barbara, however, she was able to complete her San

138


Francisco engagement, which reportedly generated seven thousand dollars in ticket sales per week. Audiences had never seen an actress who could present “suffering humanity” so convincingly and flocked to the theater. 53 Although the same newspaper also announced that illness forced her to cancel the rest of her tour (which included St. Louis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Buffalo, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia), two newspaper clippings confirm her subsequent appearances in Buffalo and Philadelphia and show either that the report was erroneous or that Morris had recovered sufficiently to fulfill some of her engagements. 54 The Buffalo Commercial Advertiser praised her Julia as a “genuine dramatic triumph” all the more remarkable because she achieved it “in spite of severe indisposition.” The Philadelphia Evening Herald applauded her performance at the Walnut Street Theatre in Barton Hill’s Marguerite, a melodrama involving illicit love at a spa, which she may have introduced in California.55 Morris was back in New York by May, ready to honor her commitment to Palmer for a spring engagement and eager to prove that she was ready for new challenges. Acclaimed in the “emotional French school,” Odell explained, “she now turned to the classics.” As the Spirit of the Times had reported earlier in the year, she would appear at Booth’s Theatre so that “metropolitan audiences” would have the opportunity to see her Lady Macbeth. 56 She would also play the title roles in Richard Sheil’s Evadne and Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore. All three were meant to establish her reputation as one of America’s leading actresses, a versatile performer who excelled in classical and modern works and whose deliberately unconventional approach would mark her as a star of the first magnitude. Buoyed by the reception she had received on her profitable tour, she must have expected a triumphant return to the New York stage and accolades from even the most censorious critics. It is hard to know why Morris chose such a curious repertoire. Macbeth, of course, was a Cushman staple, but Evadne; or, the Statue, a Tragedy (1819) and The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) were little known to American audiences and infrequently performed. Perhaps in some way, their obscurity made them appealing. They were “legitimate” plays but not ones with which the majority of theatergoers would have been familiar. There were no “Evadnes” or “Jane Shores” in recent memory with which Morris could be compared, favorably or unfavorably, and that may have been liberating. Another explanation is that Palmer proposed them. In a letter dated 30 November 1874—the day of her wedding—he outlined the terms of her spring engagement. She would play from “the 10th of May to the 10th of June 1875,” “supported by a combination of the very strongest talent which can be obtained.” “The plays intended to be produced,” he wrote, “will include Macbeth, Fazio, The Wife, Evadne and Jane

139


Shore, subject of course to your approval and to such other suggestions as you may please to make.” In addition to supervising every detail of the productions himself, he promised she would be “the feature of the engagement,” with her name “starred and no pains . . . spared to make a brilliant artistic success.”57 The elimination of Fazio and The Wife left Morris with Macbeth, Jane Shore, and Evadne, all dramas of political intrigue, rife with conspiracies and questions of succession, spanning three centuries. The three roles she played are distinct enough from one another to allow her great emotional range and to showcase her talents. In interpreting them, she used the naturalistic acting style for which she was known. She dispensed with the tragic grandeur and declamatory “utterances”—the powerful, virtuosic delivery of verse—nineteenth-century audiences expected. The roles might be traditional, but the unconventional approach would be startling in its modernity. Morris opened on Wednesday, 10 May, in Evadne. “The best thing about the venture,” Odell breezily observed, “was the series of lovely photographs Sarony made of Miss Morris in the character.”58 Other critics were kinder, although it was clear the play itself (which Richard Lalor Sheil based on James Shirley’s 1631 tragedy, The Traytor) was second-rate. Set in Naples at an unspecified time, it pits two courtiers, the honorable Colonna and the Machiavellian Lodovico, against one another. Lodovico covets the crown and lusts after Colonna’s sister, Evadne. The libertine king does, too, even though she is betrothed to upright Vicenzio, and is obsessed with making her his mistress. Featuring deceptions, duels, and discoveries, the convoluted plot lurches forward through angry exchanges and emotional confrontations. As Towse explained in his opening-night review in the New York Post, “the piece is called a tragedy, . . . but is in reality a melodrama. It is not devoid of literary excellence, . . . but the characters are strained and unnatural and the story is not well suited to the taste of the present day.” At its center is selfless Evadne, “model of loveliness, purity and virtue,” who is sorely tested by the trials to which the play subjects her. Surprisingly, because Sheil called it a tragedy, her reversal of fortune proves temporary: “At the moment when . . . she appears to be completely in the power of her enemies, her lover recovers of his wound, her royal persecutor repents of his wicked designs, the villain is unmasked, and everything ends happily.”59 Neither innocent victim nor fallen woman guilty of a past transgression for which she will be held accountable, Evadne differs from many characters Morris played. Rather than waiting passively for others to rescue her, she defends her family’s honor, takes an active role in the resolution of the conflict, and effectively comes to her own defense. As courageous as she is virtuous, she will live happily, vindicated, honored, and triumphant, with her beloved Vicenzio.

140


Towse admired Morris’s interpretation, which he considered “on the whole powerful, harmonious, and sympathetic.” He appreciated her progression from “simple and winning girlhood” in the first act, to “wonderment and perplexity,” “indignation and grief,” and finally “quiet dignity and repose.” “Always skillful in depicting the tender emotions of women,” she was particularly effective in this play: “The struggle between love, pride and anger was very cleverly expressed. Her swimming eyes and choking voice belied the bravery of her words, and the sympathies of her hearers were fairly excited by her distress.” “Occasional blemishes,” however, marred her performance, including certain “mannerisms . . . contracted during her novitiate in the French drama” and the “colloquial form of address” into which she “fell too soon.”60 Others also noted Morris’s idiosyncratic delivery. The New York Herald, struck less by the play she selected than by the manner in which she interpreted it, believed it was intentional, arguing that she deliberately substituted conversational speech for declamation. Because she preferred the naturalistic acting style she had perfected to the elevation traditionally associated with tragedy, “her aim seems to be to depart as much as possible from the tragic school, abandoning the traditions of the stage and replacing them by the realism of the emotional school . . . , introducing the innovation of speaking her lines as she would do in an ordinary emotional drama.” Although the paper thought Evadne’s effectiveness had been somewhat compromised, it acknowledged the power of her performance, concluding, “As pictures of human passion, . . . the realistic modern school can paint them, perhaps, more acceptably than the stilted methods of high tragedy.”61 The Tribune’s Winter disagreed, arguing that her approach did not serve the play. As he explained, “It is characteristic of Miss Morris that she is real and of the passing hour. She is like a girl of this day in all that she does. . . . It is not to be natural, when interpreting poetry, to be as people are in real life.”62 In the context of this particular play-world, her insistent realism was unrealistic, her naturalism unnatural. By virtue of its genre and the blank verse in which it was written, Evadne demanded the kind of heightened oratory she was unwilling (or unable) to adopt. He saw an incongruity between the material and the style in which she had decided to perform it. Like Winter, the reviewer for the New York Times found Morris’s delivery too pedestrian. He appreciated her “magnetism and fire” in certain scenes but thought she would have done better with “a little more regard for rule and precedent, and a little less respect for strangeness and contrast.” The Spirit of the Times, conversely, considered the performance among the best of her career, “the defects . . . far outweighed by the beauties.” Her rapid transitions from one strong emotion to another, combined with the “strength,” “intensity,” and

141


“appealing naturalness” of her acting, were impressive, and there were many moments when she “attained the height of genius.” (In contrast, the “staginess” and “stilted declamation” of George Morton in his New York debut as the king were “almost painful.”)63 However attentive people were to Evadne, it was not what they were most eager to see. Critics and audiences alike were waiting for Lady Macbeth, mindful that Charlotte Cushman had performed the role on the same stage just six months earlier in her final New York appearance. The Herald reported that a large and enthusiastic audience, consisting of many members of the theatrical profession and the press, assembled at Booth’s Theatre on Monday evening, 17 May, to witness Morris’s attempt “to succeed to the commanding position made vacant by the retirement of Miss Cushman from the stage.”64 According to the Spirit of the Times, “this was justly esteemed an event of great importance in dramatic art, and the theatre was crowded with an audience of evident intelligence and culture.” That audience paid “close and discriminating attention” to the “representation” and burst into loud applause several times during the performance. “The seal of public approval was thus placed upon Miss Morris’s venture, and it was certainly, so far as the verdict of the audience went, a success.”65 The Herald read the audience’s response quite differently, calling “last night’s exhibition . . . the worst performance of ‘Macbeth’ seen for many a day.” It acknowledged Morris as “a clever and worthy actress” but refused “to gloss the failure which attended her efforts last night, or to fail in noting the general disappointment of the public.” Disparaging Morris as mediocre and George Rignold’s Macbeth as without “redeeming excellence,” the New York Times observed, “The two players essayed the play and inflicted upon a patient audience a performance which neither of them was in any way fitted to render interesting or impressive.” Stalwart in its support, the Spirit of the Times defended Morris’s acting as “consistent,” even “moving” in certain scenes, and not only found her conception of the character “plausible” but also thought she developed it “with perfect success.” At the same time, it wondered “whether it is a conception that the mass of theatre-goers are likely to accept as the true one, and whether Miss Morris, having proved the potency of her means of execution, will find it advisable to continue the attempt to make them so accept it.”66 It is indeed unfortunate that no diary entries illuminate Morris’s approach. There is no 1875 volume at all—a puzzling lacuna, given the regularity with which she had been writing and the significance of the events she experienced that year. Whether Morris was too preoccupied with personal and professional matters to keep a diary or subsequently destroyed it because of revelations she was unwilling to share, its absence means that clues to her interpretation must be found elsewhere in the account she provided years later in The Life of a Star. In

142


the two chapters that deal with Macbeth, she says her portrayal was controversial because she insisted on a feminine Lady Macbeth rather than the “masculine woman” with which nineteenth-century audiences were familiar. Like any memorable dramatic character, Lady Macbeth has a complexity—or what Shakespearean scholar Marvin Rosenberg calls a “polyphony”— that defies easy categorization and should preclude definitive interpretation.67 Given the canonical centrality of the text and the vitality of theatrical tradition, however, there was an archetypal image of the character with which people were familiar and certain actresses associated with the role. In England, it was illustrious tragedienne Sarah Kemble Siddons, who brought her Lady Macbeth to London in 1785 (having already performed what would become her most famous part in the provinces). As Charles Lamb explained, “We speak of Lady Macbeth, while in reality we are thinking of Mrs. S.”68 In 1785, according to theater historian Michael R. Booth, Siddons was thirty, and in her physical prime: “she was then remarkably beautiful, on the tall side, imposing in appearance, dignified . . . in bearing and movement, with an expressive and wellproportioned face, the characteristic Roman nose of the Kembles, and a pair of piercing black eyes. She was also acclaimed and lionized, the unchallenged

Engraving of Sarah Kemble Siddons (1784) and undated photograph of Charlotte Cushman, both as Lady Macbeth. Courtesy of the Laurence Senelick Collection.

143


Queen of Tragedy.” Throughout her career, critics and spectators spoke of her monumentality and elevation, choosing adjectives like “grand,” “majestic,” “regal,” “awful,” “sublime,” and “superhuman” to describe her acting.69 For American audiences, the definitive Lady Macbeth belonged to Charlotte Cushman, who had lived and worked in England. A performer in the Siddons tradition, she brought “to the image of the Terrible Woman a forbidding physical massiveness.”70 As Lisa Merrill explains, Cushman’s “choice to portray a forceful rather than feminine Lady Macbeth was guided by her body as much as by her temperament. . . . At five feet six inches—quite tall by nineteenthcentury standards—Charlotte was actually taller than many of the men who played opposite her.” Although some people (including several of the actors she intimidated) found her too virile, most admired the vigor and ferocity of her interpretation, at once imposing and expressive. For Towse, her “Lady Macbeth was a splendid virago, more than masculine in ambition, courage and will, more bloody, bold and resolute than she wished her husband to be. . . . She was inhuman, terrible, incredible, and horribly fascinating.”71 Just as Cushman’s powerful body and deep voice helped define her performance, Morris wanted to play a Lady Macbeth that suited her. More petite than Cushman, Morris also lacked Siddons’s regal beauty. Scrutinizing her own “modern-looking features” on opening night, she allegedly exclaimed, “Oh, for a Greek, coin-like profile!”—clearly a reference to the English actress.72 From a physical standpoint alone, it would have been ludicrous for her to have imitated either woman. She had to capitalize on her own strengths and shape a character that allowed her to use her face and body effectively. If she could not be convincingly majestic or masculine, she certainly could be distinctly, even defiantly, feminine. Morris justified her interpretation in part by invoking Siddons and Cushman. She claimed that both believed in the validity of a feminine Lady Macbeth but had chosen not to play the character that way—Siddons because she feared upsetting the public,73 Cushman because she knew “the coaxing, purring, velvet-footed, supple hypocrite” was inappropriate for her. She even reconstructed a conversation that supposedly took place in Philadelphia between Cushman and a Morris detractor, in which Cushman applauded the younger actress’s “pluck” in challenging tradition and defended the courageous decisions she had made, including her “wearing red hair” instead of the expected Siddons black. “Her words of generous encouragement were like a strong staff to lean upon,” Morris recalled, “until the public could decide whether or no it would support my uncertain footsteps.”74 A 1 November 1874 letter to Frederick Harriott from a Chicago friend suggests another possible explanation for Morris’s interpretation: the coaching of

144


her husband. The writer thanks Harriott for sending him articles about the stage. He says he particularly enjoyed one about Charlotte Cushman, adding, “I do not like her Lady Macbeth. It is not human, and I guess never was.” Although he knows nothing of Morris’s “conception,” he thinks “she would make her greatest hits not on the worn out Shakespearean climaxes when everything and everybody looks for them, but by mystery.” He suggests that Morris break with tradition and portray the character seductively: She will fascinate by beauty. She will be the long, green, glittering and gorgeous snake, marvelously, deliriously beautiful—her attitudes and actions and words will be soft and intoxicating. Macbeth will be charmed like Caesar, or Anthony. When she makes her advances in the direction of success, her movement will be almost imperceptible. Then utterances of the harsh words in the places where Miss Cushman rants and storms as “I have given suck” will be simple contrast with them [sic]. They will be the old unfathomable mystery of sex. It will be Eve giving the apple to Adam. Eve was no Miss Cushman. Eve was no man-woman.75 Harriott could have shared this letter with the woman he was about to marry or have passed the ideas along as his own. Whether he simply encouraged Morris or actively directed her, he would have shaped the formation of a character antithetical to Cushman’s. Daring and different, a womanly Lady Macbeth had the potential to make Morris the tragic “queen” of her generation and catapult her into the realm of “the legitimate” for good. There is no conclusive evidence that Morris based her interpretation on this letter or on her husband’s advice, but similarities between the letter’s language and Morris’s description of Lady Macbeth make such an assumption plausible. She imagines her as “soft,” “fair-faced,” a “pet and darling” of her “rough” husband’s love, while he is “a fine soldier, big and bluff and physically brave” who loves his wife, his “dearest chuck.” To provide effective contrast, Lady Macbeth must be “fair, soft, tender in seeming . . . , [a woman] whose soft body housed a soul of fire; whose brain seethed with plans to gratify her devouring ambition.” (Morris could be describing herself, but the self-portrait does not seem to be intentional.) She is “graceful, suave and gracious” to Duncan. She “flatters and cajoles” Macbeth. “Crafty and subtle,” she is not inherently evil. Rather, “she only becomes terrible through her absolute reliance on the supernatural power of the witches”: There is something appalling in her ready faith and eager summoning of the spirits of evil to her aid; and right in that invocation I find my proof that Lady Macbeth was naturally womanly, pitiful, capable of repentance for wrong done, and had sufficient belief in God, to at least fear Him. For

145


in that moment of exaltation, when the promise of the crown was tightening every thrilling nerve to a mad determination, her first demand of the “murdering ministers” is that they shall unsex her.76 Although emboldened by the witches, she cannot survive the awful realization that they have used their power against her or the knowledge that she and her husband have been instruments in their own downfall. Morris explains the epiphany’s tragic consequences: “And when at last it is borne in upon her that they have played her husband false; that all stained with crime they two are left to face an outraged God, how quickly the delicate woman becomes a physical wreck.”77 Morris never likens Lady Macbeth to a snake as the letter writer had. Interesting, however, Towse did—not in a review at the time but in his thoughtful assessment forty years later. Remembering her performance then, he wrote, “The keynote to her conception” was the line “‘Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.’” Morris, playing the serpent, appeared as “a seductive and dangerous siren, full of lure and guile, amatory, callous, ambitious, and immoral.” Unlike Cushman, “she did not dominate her husband, but humored, tempted and spurred him.” Her “personification . . . lacked the regal, imperious, imaginative, and masculine qualities of Shakespeare’s heroine—it was all woman—but it had brains and consistency, excited admiration and reflection, and, considering the limitations of the actress, it was a memorable achievement.”78 Considering the limitations of the actress is a striking phrase, one that is crucial to an understanding of Morris’s failure in Macbeth at Booth’s. She attributes it to her “feminine” interpretation of the role, and that is one possible explanation for the critical resistance she encountered. Although her Lady Macbeth was hardly the safely domesticated “angel in the house” that appealed to Victorian imagination, Morris reinforced traditional gender boundaries whereas Siddons and Cushman had transcended them. Critics may have rejected a womanly Lady Macbeth because the ideology of heterosexual virtue saw women as moral and nonviolent; in nineteenth-century terms, only deranged or hysterical women committed murder. Lady Macbeth eventually goes mad, but she is not obviously insane at the beginning of the play. Without masculine qualities to empower her—the assistance of the witches notwithstanding—she should have been incapable of the violence she perpetrates.79 Such gendered assumptions may have provided a subtext but do not surface in the negative reviews Morris received. The critical uproar over her interpretation centered more on genre than on gender. Tragedy, especially Shakespearean tragedy, demanded a kind of grandeur in performance that melodrama did not. The latter could have the thrilling intensity and powerful theatricality of tragedy. It could convey turbulent passions in bodily attitude,

146


gesture, and facial expression. It could stir strong emotions and even impart moral lessons. Typically, however, melodrama was written in prose, not verse, and that made a significant difference. By virtue of the elevation it automatically possessed as poetry, Macbeth demanded a more idealized approach than a play like Camille. Morris’s depiction, in contrast, was seen as reductive and pedestrian. Winter faulted her because “the personation was of the earth and common life. It was not ideal.” (In his Shakespeare on the Stage years later, he would dismiss her as “a charming modern person assisting at a murder in a mediaeval castle.”80) The Herald believed she had erred in trying to present a historically accurate Lady Macbeth, instead of conveying Shakespeare’s thought and imagination. The New York Times found her “too feeble intellectually and physically for the personage” and said her interpretation was as distant from Lady Macbeth as Hamlet was from Hercules. Only the Spirit of the Times, which saw her performance as “a consistent and carefully elaborated embodiment of her avowed conception,” concluded, “She realized the purely feminine ideal of Lady Macbeth.”81 According to Shakespearean scholar Russ McDonald, “Lady Macbeth was one of the most thoroughly codified of dramatic parts, its points specifically prescribed. Everyone knew what should be done; when a new actress arrived, the question was how well she did it.”82 In Morris’s case, the assessment was harsh. “She had not the art, the dignity, the nobility required” was Odell’s disparaging summary of the critical consensus.83 The body and the voice that had served her so well in “the emotional French school” were inadequate for Shakespearean tragedy. It was not simply that she lacked the imposing grandeur and majesty of Siddons or the heroic strength and stature of Cushman. She lacked the vocal technique verse required, which was more damning. The Herald called the performance “exceedingly bad,” her “elocution . . . very defective,” and concluded, “Physical defects of voice not to be overcome by any amount of dramatic genius must place Lady Macbeth forever beyond Miss Morris’s reach.” Complaining that she had turned the verse into prose, the Tribune criticized her voice as nasal and weak. Odell, who did not see the performance, speculated, “Her western burr-r-r and flat intonation must have been excruciating in the verse.” Towse remembered her “elocution” as “sadly defective.”84 Was Morris’s “instrument” defective, or did her aesthetic—her insistent realism—preclude declamation? Was she incapable of delivering blank verse with the power and virtuosity these critics expected, or did she intentionally reject a more elevated style of delivery as being too stagy and stilted? Was her use of colloquial speech a conscious artistic choice or a physical necessity? Although it is impossible to answer these questions definitively, it certainly is true that Morris’s voice had attracted favorable notice prior to this run at Booth’s

147


and for years afterward. Described as musical, melodious, and “cello-like,” it was also likened to running water and tinkling bells—all pleasant sounds and associations. The extremely negative comments about her Lady Macbeth suggest that the problem was less the voice itself than her failure to produce the kind of tragic sound to which critics were accustomed. Before the advent of recording devices, exactly what any actor sounded like in performance cannot be known. Only written descriptions—and, to a much lesser extent, images—can spark the imagination. Clearly, however, just as stage speech was distinct from conversational speech, there were differences among dramatic forms. Tragedy, especially verse tragedy, demanded a more elevated oratorical style than comedy with its witty ripostes. The resonant sound actors projected was as significant as the words they spoke, the voice equally important in the expression of tragic passions. Siddons was famous for her vocal pyrotechnics on stage. Jacques Henri Meister, who visited London theaters in 1789 and 1792, described her voice as “at once melodious, clear, articulate, and thrilling.” G. J. Bell, law professor at the University of Edinburgh, recorded his impressions of a performance he attended circa 1807 in which her “full deep voice of fixed resolve” ranged from an “exalted prophetic tone” to something “quite supernatural, as in a horrid dream.”85 Cushman, too, held audiences “spellbound” with her “wonderful, deep-toned voice.” The sound of that voice, moreover, was British. As Merrill explains: Charlotte, an excellent mimic and quick study, had “fallen into” British “habits of articulation and enunciation” from her very first performance as Lady Macbeth in 1836. When British actor James Barton had coached [her] in New Orleans for that performance, he modeled the speech patterns that would do her great stead in the years to come. Later, performing opposite Macready in the United States had reinforced Charlotte’s notions of effective stage delivery.86 When she appeared in England, critics complimented her for the clarity of her “utterances” and the absence of an American accent. To critics and audiences in the United States, it was not so much that she sounded noticeably British as that she sounded appropriately theatrical. American stage speech, particularly in “higher” forms of drama, was probably fairly close to standard British elocution. Trying to reproduce it too exactly could make actors seem affected, guilty of “stilted declamation” and “staginess.” Failing to approximate it sufficiently, however, could be equally damaging because actors would appear untrained and unsophisticated, devoid of the grandeur and elevation their roles demanded. Odell’s comment about Morris’s “western burr-r-r and flat intonation” is revealing because what he really is criticizing is her American accent. Beyond that,

148


the implication is that she lacks sufficient class—or what Merrill calls “classinflected qualities”87—to give her performance a patina of legitimacy. It is impossible to know what Morris sounded like as Lady Macbeth or to judge whether the problem was vocal inadequacy or critical myopia. She seems to have approached the role the way a “method actor” might in a century more appreciative of idiosyncratic talent. For Towse to have called her “a modern of the moderns” suggests that her deliberate break with tradition threatened the critics who denigrated her. It was too new, too radical, too unconventional. It is also possible that they saw the attempt of a “mere emotional actress” to move into the realm of the legitimate as presumptuous and inappropriate. That is Odell’s insinuation in writing, “The ambitious Clara Morris, freed from the trammels of the stock company, came to star in a very high-intentioned selection of standard tragedies.” The word ambitious, fraught as it was for women in this era, presages the inevitable result his next sentence discloses: “Miss Morris, perhaps weary of the emotional French school, in which she was pre-eminent, now turned to the classics—and failed.” For someone born illegitimate as Morris was, the verdict that she had failed in “legitimate” drama must have been as devastating psychologically as it was professionally. The negative criticism did not end with the opening performance. Although it had initially reviewed her favorably, the June 12 Spirit of the Times contained a “retrospective” about the season, with much of it devoted to Morris’s Lady Macbeth. It reminded its readers that this “woman of decided genius” had tried “to emancipate herself from the objectionable school of French plays with which her name is associated.” The attempt, however, had “confounded her.” Choosing “legitimate characters utterly beyond her sphere” had been a mistake. Lady Macbeth had “some few excellent qualities” but not enough to outweigh the deficiencies. Dismissing the sleepwalking scene as “simply an hysterical exhibition”—one, moreover, that “was never more wretchedly acted”—the article detailed “a series of egregious blunders” Morris had made in the banquet scene in a misguided quest for originality. From her inappropriate costume (“a white brocaded silk, an interminably long scarlet velvet trained edged with ermine, a low-necked gown and white kid gloves with double buttons”) to a “silly fit of whimpering” as she left the stage (“well enough suited to the consumptive Camille, but utterly beneath the dignity of Lady Macbeth”), she had failed to capture the essence of the character.88 In his own retrospective account, Towse defended Morris’s concept: Her audacity was largely in excess of her equipment, but she made no ridiculous failure. Neither in physique nor in declamatory power was she fitted for parts of tragic dignity and passion. . . . Conservative critics rated her soundly, but her idea was not entirely without authoritative support.

149


The great Sarah Siddons herself is said to have found warrant for it, but rejected it as unsuited to her majestic style. . . . Miss Morris’s assumption had at least the merits of originality, cleverness, and sustained interest. She was never conventional and she made many interesting points. 89 Towse found her particularly convincing in the sleepwalking scene. Whereas the Spirit of the Times had likened it to “operatic ravings,” he saw it as “wholly novel and modern” and “intensely pathetic in its denotement of spiritual anguish.”90

Cabinet photograph of Morris as Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene, 1875. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

150


Morris did not discuss that scene in The Life of a Star, saying only that she considered it “the great test,” “agonised [sic] in silent dread” of it, and then happily took seven curtain calls for it on opening night.91 She wrote at length about the banquet scene, however, in order to show the care with which she created a believable performance. Palmer may have recruited the cast and funded the production but did not hire a director. “I had become a star,” she explained, “and . . . I had to direct everything myself.” Fortunately, she was “so familiar with the time-honoured music of Locke, with every bit of business for the apparitions, soldiers, supers, et al., that not even the oldest witch . . . could find a chance to sneer at my ignorance of the old tragedy—modern as I was.” It was only “the business” for her own part that concerned her.92 Whatever she devised, she replaced on opening night when the heavy crown she wore cut into her forehead. She describes the “impromptu action” she substituted: Lady Macbeth’s last line had been spoken, Macbeth had turned and walked with somber mien to the R. I. entrance, repeating his exit speech. As he reached the line: . . . My strange and self abuse Is the initiate fear, that wants hard use: the Queen unable to longer endure her suffering, raised both hands and lifted the crown up from her head and in the same instant, the King turning, noted the action with such a surprised frown, that quick as a flash the Queen dropped it to its place again and bravely smiled into his face; while both were startled by the swift-following applause of sympathetic comprehension. He added his suggestive: We are yet both young in deed. and so made his exit, and Lady Macbeth kept her forced smile till he was quite gone. Then it faded. Slowly she removed the crown and stood looking at it, calculating all its cost, until tears trickled down her wan cheeks, when hearing a sound outside she hastily resumed it, and with listless, hanging arms and drooping shoulders, feebly dragged her royal trappings, her misery and herself out of sight as the curtain fell.93 Morris implies that it fell to tumultuous applause, concluding her disjointed account with an anecdote about an audience member who was so moved by the production that he leapt onto the stage and “triumphantly cut a piece” from the set “to keep as a souvenir.” If that actually happened—and it is always hard to separate fact from fiction in Morris’s memoirs—it must have been the only triumph that night. The following day, she received a letter of support from an unlikely source: Augustin

151


Daly. Written on his personal stationery, it exhorted her not to be discouraged by the negative reviews: My dear Miss Morris, I am sure that the courageous little woman who conquered nearly as William New Yorkers five years ago does not despair this morning of reconquering the half dozen critics who differ with her. I am certain that the brave artiste who has during her brief yet brilliant career revealed so many new truths will yet impress her last upon the hearts that she seeks. I need not say to you—persevere!—you who have studied with me know that my motto and my advice is never let go! Very sincerely, Augustin Daly 94 He had been wooing Morris for the 1875–76 season, as a 1 March missive suggests. Scrawled in black ink on a Fifth Avenue Theatre letterhead, it expressed his frustration that she had not yet replied to his “last letter—explaining [his] propositions for next season.” He would write to “dear Miss Morris” on 31 May, again on business stationery, but this time marked “Confidential.” It is clear they had already met. Eager to speak with her that evening, he has an offer he hopes she will accept: I can open with you on November 15th which will just give my opening piece a fair run, and I will play you for eight or nine weeks. If you will (as we talked) open in a new play by me and then follow with your own: & give one week to your Alixe; Cora; & Madelein Morel: It is now for you to consider terms: I am willing to be very liberal in meeting you and trust that you will consider. Yours very truly, A. Daly He adds a postscript asking that she “keep the matter entirely entre-nous whether we settle or not—for the present.”95 That request is not surprising because Morris was still under contract to Palmer and had to finish her engagement at Booth’s. She had opened in an abridged version of Rowe’s lugubrious Jane Shore on Monday, 24 May. Whatever its pedigree, this “she-tragedy” was yet another cautionary tale about a fallen woman. Although a fifth-act revelation discloses that it was the king, “the tyrant ravisher,” who took poor Jane against her will and “by force possess’d her person,”96 she must pay the dramatic price for adultery. A pathetic victim from the first, she is sadistically abused throughout the play until she appears in the final scene a pitiable figure, Christ-like in her suffering. 152


The Spirit of the Times hated the “gloomy and disagreeable” play but praised Morris for having “acted magnificently throughout, the death scene being one of the most remarkable ever seen on the stage in this country.” Well suited to her particular talents, it allowed her to present “an intensely realistic piece of acting” that conveyed “the full force of the piteous sufferings of the wretched heroine.” Towse remembered her as having “made a wonderful but somewhat unprofitable emotional display” in Jane Shore, suggesting that although she had been effective in the play, it did not help her establish a reputation as anything but an “emotional” actress.97 She had hoped to triumph at Booth’s, but the recommendation rising from the pages of the metropolitan newspapers in May 1875 was to return to “the emotional drama,” a genre in which she excelled. The Spirit of the Times explained, “It is, we fancy, better to be the foremost exponent of a school—even the French school—than to take a lower place in the portraiture of the Shakespearean drama.” Morris heeded that advice for the last week of her engagement. As her fourth and final offering, she “reverted to her specialty, Camille,” the play in which she had succeeded so gloriously the previous spring.98 “This engagement must have been a disappointment to Miss Morris,” Odell dryly observed.99 More accurately, it must have been devastating. She had imagined herself Cushman’s successor, the next “queen of the stage,” acclaimed for the definitive Lady Macbeth of her generation. Instead, she found herself branded as a limited artist, her reputation diminished, her interpretation rejected by the critics whose approval she sought. Her failure is puzzling because she had received positive comments in Brooklyn and on tour, with notices that were equivocal at worst. Was it simply that these New York City critics were tougher, more conservative, and less tolerant of change? Were they elitist Eastern anglophiles, resistant to incursions by Westerners, especially Westerners of questionable background and training? Did they resent Morris for trying to displace Cushman when the older actress was terminally ill? If she had waited longer to reinterpret one of Cushman’s signature roles or if she had chosen a different dramatic character, would the response have been the same? Conversely, had something happened to Morris? Were her health problems more serious than she disclosed? Did the performance at Booth’s differ from earlier ones, altered in ways that made it unacceptable if not unrecognizable? Morris herself is silent, although the next few months would begin to provide some answers to these perplexing questions. In June, meanwhile, it is clear that she has broken with Palmer. Perhaps she held him responsible for the debacle, blaming him for suggesting the plays, assembling an inferior company, and providing no direction. Perhaps she believed that returning to Daly, as contentious as their relationship had been, would be artistically advantageous. She may have welcomed the opportunity to work with him again, flattered by 153


his renewed interest in her. Whatever the motive, Morris signed a contract on 10 June to appear at the Fifth Avenue Theatre from 15 November 1875 to 5 February 1876 for eight hundred dollars per week.100 That was less than Palmer had paid her but considerably more than the thirty-five-dollar weekly salary she had previously earned under his management. In addition, Daly, agreed to give Morris “one half the royalty of $25 a night for a play she intended to write on the subject of Marie [sic] Stuart for every night of its performance, matinees being excluded, each week to include seven performances and such rehearsals” as he ordered. She would not receive “any extra payment” for the rehearsals but would have “precedence in all bills and advertisements.” Finally, Morris would “debut in a new play” by Daly, while he, in turn, would allow her to perform it first “in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Baltimore and Washington,” as long as she paid him a royalty “of ten per cent of whatever and all sums which she shall receive whenever she plays the said piece.”101 Her plans for the coming year reasonably secure, Morris made a brief appearance at the Brooklyn Theatre beginning on 21 June. She chose Article 47 for her three-night engagement, with the fourth act of Camille added for the final performance.102 No doubt relieved to have finished acting for the season, she sailed once again for Europe, this time without her husband of seven months or her mother. In The Life of a Star, she wrote that she left them “on the other side of that great ocean that widens so terribly between hearts at need.” It was, she claimed, “the first, the last, the only journey” she would make without Harriott.103 Sentimentalized language aside, her going without him suggests that she needed some space and some time in which to process all she had experienced. She may well have resented him for encouraging her to create a Lady Macbeth she now regretted and for which she held him at least partly responsible. Wherever the blame ultimately lay, Morris’s failure must have been deeply humiliating. Although she later justified her interpretation in her memoirs, she did not publicly challenge her critics or question their judgment. With just two exceptions, she never attempted Shakespeare again. The concern Towse expressed in November proved prescient. He hoped “she would not allow herself to be too suddenly frightened by adverse criticism” of her Lady Macbeth, but that was exactly what happened. Although there are no passages in her memoirs, diary entries, statements to the press, or documents of any kind to prove it, Morris seems to have accepted the verdict that Shakespeare and the “classics” were beyond her and to have made a conscious choice to focus on “modern” drama instead. In June 1875, she could not have known how profoundly that decision would affect her life or how irrevocably it would alter the course of her career.

154

8 Morphined in

M

iss Multon

IN A LETTER FROM CALIFORNIA that ran in the Cleveland Leader on 1 March 1875, Morris looked forward to the mud baths in Santa Barbara and a respite from performing. “Next week I do not act,” she wrote with palpable relief. “Only think of it—no dresses, no wigs, no rouge, no rehearsals, no fear of critics (!), no fear of failure through utter prostration.”1 She must have been equally thankful to have escaped New York in late June, although the city was preoccupied with a greater cause célèbre than the panning of her Lady Macbeth. Even after months of intense publicity, the Beecher-Tilton trial dominated the front pages of the metropolitan dailies, and Theodore Tilton’s accusation that Henry Ward Beecher had committed adultery with his wife Elizabeth still shocked the nation.2 When the case ended without a verdict on 2 July because the jury was deadlocked after eight days of deliberation and fifty-two ballots, Morris was about to dock in Europe. On this trip, she would visit Ireland and Scotland, sightseeing as she researched Mary Stuart. With characteristic industry, inspired perhaps by the success of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, she wrote a series of “travel letters” for the New York Graphic. 3 She may have tried to emulate Twain’s satirical style, which spoofed travel literature as a genre and mocked fellow travelers on the steamship Quaker City. Whereas his pieces were amusing, however, hers seemed meanspirited. One “ridiculous letter” baffled the Spirit of the Times, which doubted its authorship and speculated that some “knave of a humorist” might be playing a joke at Morris’s expense because the “adventures” chronicled were so inane. If indeed she produced “all the rubbish” the letter contained, then the paper implored her to “lay her pen forever back in the inkstand” and “stick to acting.” A squib in the same newspaper the following month reported that Morris declared herself “the authoress of her own letters” and “emphatically denie[d] all aid in their composition.”4 A long letter in her hand confirms that claim. Its eighteen pages contain many of the unkind comments on which the paper 155

Morphined in Miss Multon

had remarked. She dislikes “the rude gaze of the common herd” as she steps into an uncomfortable carriage, “a gridiron on wheels,” at a train station. She hates the rainy weather in Ireland and mocks the checked clothing everyone wears. Killarney has “the honor of being the dirtiest town.” “The gap of Dun is simply appalling.” In Scotland, she almost freezes “to death on a July day on Loch Lommond [sic]” and detests “a fellow voyager,” a “coffee-colored old witch” who she hopes will “fall from her seat on top of the coach & roll in a cloud of dust to the bottom of the mountain.”5 Edinburgh is altogether different. “Amazed and delighted,” she declares the city “architecturally superb,” with a “‘new town’” that is “massively picturesque” and an “‘old town’” she finds “deliciously odd.” The reason for her “pilgrimage” is Mary Stuart, who obsesses her. Morris seems to feel her presence everywhere but is particularly moved by her visit to the Palace of Holyrood House, Mary’s residence for several years. She studies “every portrait of the fair Stuart” she finds and marvels at “the face men have maddened for.” One leads her to reflect on Mary’s execution—her “perfect head paying the penalty of a passionate heart”—and to wonder how she might react if the doomed queen were to come back to life. The fantasy is bizarre but understandable in view of her contract with Augustin Daly. In addition to playing the role of Mary Stuart, Morris was supposed to be writing a play about her. She was gathering the material she would need (real and imagined) for both creative efforts. Admitting that she has become yet another “person Mary Stuart mad,” she also reveals that she has been ill: “I have been very sick of late. The hand that writes these lines is shadow thin, and very weak but nevertheless it signs me right truely [sic]. Yours Sincerely, Clara Morris.” Morris’s deteriorating health was the subject of a letter published in the Cleveland Leader on 9 September. Its author was her friend Donn Piatt, who had steamed across the Atlantic on the same ship and wrote from London. Under the provocative title, “Clara Morris’s Tortures,” he provided a frightening account of a medical procedure she had recently undergone in Paris. He began with “the growing evidence of ill-health” he and others had observed “toward the close of her winter’s work” (on tour after the California hiatus? during her run at Booth’s?), suggesting a medical explanation for her failure as Lady Macbeth: “In spite of all that art could do the eyes seemed to enlarge as the face became thinner, . . . the movements were languid and evidently the result of painful effort. This was what could be seen from the front.” The scene backstage was even more alarming: “The curtain was scarcely down before loving arms were stretched out to catch her sinking form, and carry her exhausted to the dressing room, where bathing, rubbing, and strong coffee were brought into requisition to give her strength for a continuation of her work.”6

156


According to Piatt, Morris sailed for Europe on the advice of her physicians, who believed she needed “rest and change of scene,” but her health worsened on the voyage, and she suffered from acute spinal pain. When the ship docked in Ireland at Queenstown (known as Cobh since 1922), Piatt watched anxiously as she set off on her travels. His “many misgivings” were soon confirmed. She arrived in Paris “a confirmed invalid, in a continuous state of pain that robbed days of rest and nights of sleep.” After a particularly debilitating paroxysm, “Doctor Belvin was called in. This admirable physician, after a hasty diagnosis, pronounced the case a very grave one” and summoned his colleague Professor Ball for consultation. Upon examining Morris, the two concluded, “The disease of the spine would, if not arrested, terminate fatally within two years.” Its seriousness required “nothing but the severest treatment.” The one they recommended, Piatt explained, “is known as moxa, and consists of burning the flesh along the sides of the spine with irons heated to a white heat.” Such a procedure was not without risk, particularly “to a delicate and sensitive organization worn down by disease and overwork.” Having heard the grim prognosis, however, Morris agreed to it at once. Because Piatt was in London, he had to rely on a “private letter, written by a friend who . . . witnessed the terrible trial” in Paris. Dated 12 August 1875, it portrayed Morris as brave and resolute. The operation, which she elected to have without chloroform, required her to “sit in a low chair with her back bared” and submit to unimaginable torment: Doctor Belvin lit his furnace and the roaring of the flame that was to heat the iron to a white heat in a few seconds was dreadful to hear, and while this was going on, Professor Ball marked with a pencil the line the iron was to follow on either side of the spine. Every touch of the pencil sent a thrill through the delicate frame of the poor victim; but the professor had scarcely ended making the penciled marks when, with a flash, the iron was applied. It was dreadful. The white point seemed to sink an inch into the quivering form, with that sickening sound of burning flesh; but beyond a writhing of the body, accompanied by deep, heavy breathing, there was no response—not a shriek, not a sigh or groan. The doctor had nearly completed his dreadful task when Clara, suddenly starting up, cried out in a voice that even moved Professor Ball: “My God, I can not, can not bear it.”7 Much to the anonymous friend’s amazement, however, Morris “helped replace her clothes after the wounds were dressed, and walked calmly down to the carriage.” Even the two doctors were impressed with the “wonderful exhibit of nerve.” Although she was “quite prostrated” the following day and “suffer[ed] from a violent pain in her head,” they predicted a full recovery. The

157


letter from Paris ended with the encouraging news that American physician Fordyce Barker, in Paris for a medical meeting, had agreed to monitor Morris’s care upon her return to New York. Piatt concluded his account with a tribute to Dr. Barker, expressing hope that Morris, “this greatest of living artists of the stage,” would “soon be restored to health and the triumphs that in health only can be enjoyed.” Piatt had no way of knowing then the profound impact that Fordyce Barker would have upon her. Rather than improving her health, he was probably responsible for creating a lifelong affliction more serious than either Piatt or Morris could have imagined. In “The Moxa,” a gripping chapter in The Life of a Star, Morris recalls the ordeal. Thirty years later, she ruefully acknowledges that she “had apparently suffered in vain” because the procedure did not produce the desired results.8 As she tells it, the experience becomes a pitched battle between the forces of good—Piatt and Barker—and the forces of evil—Belvin and Ball—over her body. Much as she tries to inject levity into her account, she wants readers to appreciate her heroic suffering and stoic endurance. She describes Ball as a “scientific hawk,” whose gaze was “menacing” and whose “plucking” and “scratching” reminded her “of the hungry dismembering of prey.” During a “night of terror,” she submitted to the “revolting treatment by burning.” The French doctors insisted on repeating the procedure at her hotel the next day, but Piatt—whom she places in Paris rather than London where he actually was—came to her rescue. He brought Dr. Barker, who examined “his sorely broken countrywoman,” his surprise at her pitiful state quickly turning to “amazement and amazement indignation.” After “gently” laying her “thin waxy hand down upon [her] knee,” the American physician forbade a second operation. When the French team arrived with “all the demnition paraphernalia of the modern Inquisition,” tempers flared, and the four men almost came to blows. Morris watched with excitement as a furious Ball ordered Belvin to light the furnace, and a livid Barker threatened to throw them both over the balcony. To her great relief, Barker prevailed; the other doctors “retired, their properties with them,” and she “saw them no more.” Thanks to the efforts of Piatt and Barker, she was well enough to leave Paris the following month. Indeed, the name “Miss Clara Morris” appears on the list of saloon passengers on the steamship Celtic, White Star Line, which sailed from Liverpool to New York on Thursday, 9 September 1875.9 In “The Moxa,” Morris exaggerated her plight as the “poor”—an adjective she uses frequently in her narrative—victim of a modern “inquisition,” a term that also appears repeatedly. Interestingly, however, the “operation” she portrays as barbaric was relatively innocuous, analogous to acupuncture and often used in conjunction with it. Like acupuncture, “moxa treatment” (or “moxibustion”)

158


had originated in China, spread to Japan and other Asian countries, and eventually reached Europe (probably in the seventeenth century). The early 1800s saw a renewal of interest in each practice as an accepted remedy for chronic pain, especially in France and England. Moxibustion was thought to be particularly effective in the treatment of rheumatism, which is what Piatt said Morris had. To have sought relief through alternative therapies would not have been unusual. If indeed she experienced the horrors she described, then Drs. Ball and Belvin were either inept or unfamiliar with the technique they had adopted. It is far more likely, however, that Morris embellished the story to stir the emotions of sympathetic readers. “Rescuers” Barker and Piatt could not have objected to the mingling of fact and fiction, because both men were long dead when The Life of a Star appeared in 1906.10 By mid-September, Morris was busy writing. In addition to the play about Mary Stuart, she contributed a short story “The Little Ballet Girl” to the Graphic. The Spirit of the Times called it “decidedly the best literary specimen she has yet favored the world with” and “a vast improvement on her letters.”11 She was also communicating with Daly, whose season began with a weeklong revival of Saratoga on 13 September and continued with a British comedy, H. J. Byron’s Our Boys. In a 13 October letter, Daly asked Morris “to observe the very closest silence about the new play” he was writing, explaining that he never worked well “if the public know in advance what I am doing, or if it is gossiped about in the papers.”12 A 2 November letter apologized for not having responded to two she had sent him, explaining that he had been out of town. He referred to some “danger” from which she had luckily escaped, before moving to the real issue at hand: “Mr. Booth” and his extended engagement at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. His early October appearance delayed by injuries sustained in a carriage accident, Booth opened in Hamlet on 25 October and proved so popular that Daly extended his run into November. Although Morris’s contract had her starting on 15 November, Booth was starring that week instead, which upset her. As Daly explained to Morris: You know I excused him from three weeks of his time with me at the beginning of his engag’t & in return he offered me one week he had set aside for rest. This was the week beginning Nov 15th and I accepted it with the full intention of paying you for the month all the same—although you will play on the 22d. I trust this does not offend you, for as you see I shall be the only loser.13 The letter ended cordially with the line, “I shall be very glad—soon as you are better—to have you run in and have a gossip,” which suggests that she had been ill (presumably the “danger” to which he had alluded earlier) and was recover-

159


ing. He also promised to send her “Leah to look over—and if you like study.” Once again, he requested that she “keep it very very very dark.” The “Leah” to which Daly referred was The New Leah, a revamped Leah the Forsaken, which he had adapted in 1862 from Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal’s Deborah (originally produced in Vienna in 1849). Instead of starring Morris in a new play as he had promised, he was about to give her a tired melodrama with little changed but the heroine’s name. The “new Leah” was named Esther, and she would not be a success. As Odell bluntly stated, “This was one of the most ghastly failures in the career of Miss Morris and that of Daly.”14 When the production opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre on Monday, 22 November 1875, notwithstanding the death of Vice President Henry Wilson that day, it was uniformly skewered.15 With the exception of William Winter, who usually disliked her performances but admired the passion of her Esther, the critics were scathing. Although the New York Times faulted Daly for having chosen the play, it chastised Morris for stagnating as an artist: For the third or fourth time it was conclusively shown that Miss Morris has not advanced one step in her art since she raised the high hopes of play-goers by her personations of Cora and Alixe, and for the third or fourth time, too, she was unfortunate enough to essay the portrayal of a character for the delineation of which she has not a single requisite. . . . Miss Morris by means of study and observation might in due course have won a prominent place in her profession. This, unluckily, was not meant to be, and in the singular combination of force and weakness, charm and repulsiveness, finish and crudity, the actress is quite unchanged.16 The Herald was surprised by her lack of energy, which the Spirit of the Times also noted, observing, “It was evident, from first to last, that she had not the power to go through with the part with the strength it required.” In comments that echoed the criticism of her Lady Macbeth, that paper declared, “No repose, no grandeur, no dignity could we discover in anything she did. All was modern, French-society-playish from beginning to end. . . . She never once showed the possession of the least trace of poetic feeling or imagination. She is naturally too realistic to be grand or noble.”17 Nevertheless, the review ended on a positive note, urging Morris not to be discouraged by her failure in this play because there were many others that suited her talents, and reminding readers that “she is, emphatically, after all, the first actress on the New York stage, and one of the most remarkable in the world.” The New Leah closed after one dismal week, with Morris pleading illness. The 4 December Spirit of the Times reported that she and Daly had quarreled

160


violently, each blaming the other for the debacle. She was so upset by the angry confrontation that she fainted and had to be carried home, where she was said to be seriously indisposed. A medical certificate signed by Dr. Fordyce Barker and posted on the door of the Fifth Avenue Theatre stated that Morris could not possibly perform without endangering her health.18 Meanwhile Daly, who had planned to have Morris repeat her starring role as Anne Sylvester in Man and Wife the following week, hastily substituted Our Boys, the comedy that pleased audiences earlier in the season. Correspondence between Daly and the Harriotts provides insight into the rift. It shows that Morris insisted Daly withdraw The New Leah and present her either in his new play or her Marie Stuart as he had promised. An undated, unsigned letter in Frederick Harriott’s hand, probably a draft of one he sent Daly, acknowledges his wife had been ill but “this morning” is “better and sufficiently so to undertake a rehearsal . . . of your new play whenever you give her notice.” He informs Daly that she “intends to perform her part of the agreement with you and must insist upon your performing yours,” reminding him, “By appearing in Leah she did not waive her right to go into your new piece immediately afterward.” He concludes by declaring, “I therefore give you notice on her behalf that she will hold you responsible not only for her salary but also for such damages as she may sustain by reason of the non production of your new play and of her Marie Stuart.”19 Based on Daly’s response, Morris must have refused to perform in a Thanksgiving matinee on 25 November: “I expected fully that you would play—and I expected fully to pay you for so doing. I trust you are not going to put an obstacle in the way of the new piece which I am busy at now and which I must stop if I have to worry about the matinee.”20 Signed “Very truly, A. Daly” and dated 24 November 1875, it prompted an immediate reply from Harriott that shows tension escalating: “You seem to think that it was my duty to inform you on last Monday that my wife would not play this Thanksgiving matinee. I don’t feel at all responsible . . . as according to the contract—‘Twas none of my business.’ . . . You say that you expected to pay for the extra work. Why the confession shows that you were knowing of the contract yet too poor in compliment to bespeak the services.” Harriott ends by making their terms clear: his wife will not extend her run in The New Leah unless Daly completes his new play, casts her in the starring role, and schedules the first rehearsal for Monday, 29 November. “If the original play is not ready,” he added, “she will be obliged if you cast her version of Marie Stuart.”21 Daly, however, had advertised Man and Wife for the week of 29 November and had no intention of substituting another production. Morris then issued an ultimatum: she would appear only in the new play he had promised her or

161


Marie Stuart.22 That prompted an angry four-page response from Daly. Transcribed by the Fifth Avenue Theatre’s business manager Stephen Ryder Fiske on Saturday, 27 November, Daly’s letter referred to the Harriotts’ correspondence, as well as to a conversation between Morris and Fiske on Friday: “As there was no obligation upon my part to have an original play ready for rehearsal on Monday next, and as you expressly refuse to play The New Leah longer than this week, I immediately announced Man and Wife for next week, with you in your original, familiar and successful part, ‘Ann [sic] Sylvester.’” He was displeased that Morris not only declined to play the role but also was adamant about not appearing in “any other old play” until he had “tried” his new play and Marie Stuart. Daly then issued his own ultimatum: You have, therefore, in both of your letters, announced your determination to violate your contract with me, and if I do not hear from you in writing, by six o’clock this evening, that you are ready and willing to play your part in Man and Wife on Monday next and throughout the week, and to attend such rehearsal of other plays as I may designate and in which, according to your contract, you are assigned by me the leading parts, I shall consider your contract at an end and hold you liable for damages for your deliberate breaches of it.23 He argued that The New Leah was a new work. In accepting it, Morris had “waived any right . . . to debut in any other new play,” no matter how much she believed she was entitled to it, and was wrong to demand that he give her one. According her contract, she had agreed “to act during the season all such leading parts and characters” as he directed, and “it was under this clause” that he “assigned” her Anne Sylvester. Reiterating that she still had time to reconsider, he concluded the letter with a lengthy reminder of all he had done for her and an appeal to her sense of duty: Permit me to add that, in view of our former relations as actress and manager, I have treated you with exceptional consideration during this engagement. I have paid you a week’s salary, to which you were not entitled under your contract, from Nov. 15th to Nov. 22nd, before you commenced to act. I prepared for you The New Leah in which to debut. I have never reproached you for what you call your “brilliant failure” in this piece. I have been subjected to heavy pecuniary loss by your refusal to play at the Thanksgiving matinee, although you were to be paid extra for the performance and well knew that it is the custom at this theatre to give a matinee on that day. I have advertised and treated you as a “star,” although not bound to do so by your contract. I have submitted to be placed in a false position before the public by your refusals to appear after my advertisements and bills 162


were published. And even now I give you until six o’clock this evening for your reply to this letter and fix that time because it is indispensable that my announcement for next week shall be prepared for publication in tomorrow’s papers.24 Morris obviously disagreed with him, believing that he had not upheld the terms of the contract she had signed. The New Leah was hardly the new play he had promised, and it was not unreasonable for her to have expected him to produce her Marie Stuart. On the other hand, Daly was a businessman with a theater to run. He may have found her Esther so dreadful that he decided to cut his losses and renege on his pledge, knowing it would provoke an angry response but believing he could justify it. Although he may have originally intended to star her in a different play, he may have doubted her ability to perform it based on what he had just seen her do in The New Leah and knowing of the persistent health problems from which she suffered. He may have decided that Morris—particularly with her husband acting as legal counsel—had become unacceptably demanding and inflexible. With regard to the play about Mary Stuart, the absence of an extant script makes it impossible to evaluate Morris’s work. It is safe to say, however, that she was not a playwright. Even with her summer’s research, it is unlikely that she could have produced a piece that would have met Daly’s standards. He could not have mounted a production of a play he did not consider stage-worthy. Whatever the motives and expectations on both sides, their professional relationship ended abruptly once again. Morris, no doubt advised by her husband to reject Daly’s terms, refused to appear in Man and Wife. Daly immediately fired her for breach of contract and substituted Our Boys, which opened on Monday 29 November and ran until Saturday 11 December. After a dark Monday, the theater opened on Tuesday 14 December with what Odell called “one of the great successes” of Daly’s career: a “‘play of today’—the comedy-drama of Pique.”25 Unlike The New Leah, Pique really was a new work, one that Daly had been writing for several months. Based on Florence Marryatt’s novel, Her Lord and Master, Pique capitalized on public interest in the Charley Ross case. Victim of the first kidnapping for ransom in America to receive widespread media attention, four-year-old Charley had disappeared from the front yard of his family’s home in suburban Philadelphia on 1 July 1874. In spite of poignant newspaper advertisements seeking his return, posters with his picture blanketing the northeast, and a popular song—“Bring Back Our Darling”—on music stands across the nation, the crime remained unsolved. As parents watched their children warily, people still hoped for news of little Charley. Ever the entrepreneur, Daly was quick to seize a dramatic opportunity. In Pique, he presented audiences with the story of an estranged couple reunited by the kidnapping of 163


their young son. Unlike Charley, who was never found, Little Arthur made a happy reappearance in Pique’s final scene. The part of Mabel Renfrew, whom Odell describes as “the proud beauty who marries for pique”—hence the title—“only to find her will curbed by the iron will of her father-in-law,” went to Fanny Davenport, who had been a member of Daly’s company since 1869. Whether or not it was ever intended for Morris, Mabel Renfrew was Davenport’s first starring role and was one she played superbly. Although the opening-night performance ended after midnight, the combination of stirring action, strong cast, and positive reviews ensured Pique’s success. According to Odell, the demand for tickets was so great that “after two months or so,” Daly introduced Wednesday matinees “at one o’clock, for the benefit of ‘suburban ladies.’”26 By spring, given Pique’s popularity, Daly had created a second company to take it to other cities. Jeffreys Lewis, not Morris, played Mabel in that touring production, and on the afternoon of 23 June, as part of a special celebration of Pique’s two hundredth performance, Lewis appeared in a revival of Divorce as Fanny Ten Eyck, a role Morris had originated. Pique finally closed on 29 July 1876, after thirty-eight additional performances, a run Odell considered “remarkable . . . for that day of a smaller play-going public and of sore financial straits.”27 While Daly enjoyed enviable success, Morris’s fortunes were considerably less sanguine. On Christmas Day (1875), she appeared at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music in Camille. She was in Washington, D.C., on 7 February as a visiting star in that play, as well as in Marguerite, which she still hoped to bring to New York. On the ninth, she wrote in her diary, “very sick—went to rehearsal . . . lots of callers in afternoon—taken sick too—big house—acted very well.” In Baltimore on the fourteenth, she was “unable to play—sore throat and bronchitis” but managed to perform the next day. On the nineteenth, she “played Margurite [sic] to crowded houses at matinee—after the performance the street was completely blocked by people waiting to see me come out.” Rather than pleasing her, however, the crowd disturbed her. “I felt as though I was a criminal—left for New York at 10-30” and was “sick in bed” the next day. “Very little better” on 22 February, she summoned her physician, Dr. Seguin, who forbade her “acting in Brooklyn or anywhere in March.”28 The 26 February New York Clipper informed its readers that “owing to ill health,” Morris would “have to cancel engagements until April.” Actually, she was not able to work again until the fall. According to press reports, she had suffered an alarming physical collapse. The 1876 diary shows that Morris was often sick, suffering from numerous, usually unspecified ailments. It also reveals that she had begun taking morphine by hypodermic injection. She notes on 14 January that she had become ill in the evening and had called Dr. Seguin. He returned the next morning

164


and “injected morphine into my arm.”29 Like thousands of doctors throughout the country, he had given his patient the best remedy for pain then available. Morphine, the major alkaloid of opium, was one of the first substances injected beneath the skin (although intravenous injections were uncommon until well into the twentieth century). It became popular after it was packaged in bottles and ampules for hypodermic use. By the 1860s, doctors relied on it to relieve all sorts of pain and distress. Despite some warnings about addiction, there were few regulations anywhere against its sale as its reputation grew. According to historian Martin Booth, “Morphine injections were used to treat everything from inflammation of the eyes, menstrual pains and rheumatism to delirium tremens.” As David T. Courtwright explains, “Morphine injected hypodermically avoided the unpleasant gastric side effects of opiates administered orally; it also produced stronger feelings of relief and euphoria, and it produced them much more quickly.”30 Morphine’s popularity was directly related to the easy availability of the hypodermic kit. In the late 1850s, few practitioners had heard of it. By the 1870s, when Morris’s physicians relied on it to treat her, the “hypo” had become a standard article in a doctor’s bag, and its sale was unrestricted. Like bottles of morphine, needles and syringes were easily obtainable by mail as well as at the corner drugstore. In many American homes, especially when the temperance movement was at its frenzied peak, the hypodermic kit was preferable to the hip flask or the decanter. Syringes became a fad and, in some circles, women reportedly wore them cleverly disguised as jewelry.31 In historian Barbara Hodgson’s words, “Reliable statistics are difficult to come by, but numerous references imply that morphine syringes among the theatre crowd were as common as cigarettes.”32 Morphine injection had become a “virtual panacea,” as physicians believed they finally had a nonaddictive, near-instantaneous remedy for a wide range of diseases. Doctors and patients alike were tempted to overuse. As the decade progressed, however, concerns about addiction began to rise; in the 1880s, articles about morphine’s real dangers proliferated. By that time, however, hundreds of thousands of people had become dependent on the drug. Although morphine crossed class lines and touched all social and economic groups, women were particularly vulnerable.33 More women than men seemed to be affected, and the typical addict was a middle-aged white woman of the middle or upper class, whose long-term use began, as Morris’s did, with physician-administered injections. As Courtwright explains, “Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, exemplified the characteristics of this generation of addicts: female, outwardly respectable, long-suffering—and thoroughly addicted to morphine.”34

165


It is impossible to know exactly when Morris first took morphine because there are so many gaps in her diary (including the entire 1875 volume). The perfunctory style of the 15 January 1876 entry suggests that she had already used the drug, because she generally comments when she tries medicine for the first time (as she does later on with cocaine and aspirin). She mentioned opium by name on 20 March 1874: “I woke Ma up in night to get me some opium—my leg was so bad,” but it probably was a medication she took orally. 35 She noted three weeks later, “Ma is quite sick. . . . Dr. was here and vaccinated her,” the word vaccinated strongly suggesting that the physician had given her mother a dose of morphine by hypodermic injection. 36 Morris’s own use of injected morphine most likely began or accelerated when she met Dr. Fordyce Barker in Paris in August 1875. Professor of Clinical Midwifery and Diseases of Woman at Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York, Barker served as the first president of the American Gynecological Society, which he helped found in June 1876. A champion of the use of anesthesia in childbirth, he also gave the first hypodermic injections of morphine in America in 1856 with a syringe he probably obtained in Edinburgh.37 By the time he saw Morris in Paris, he had been injecting morphine for almost twenty years. There is every reason to believe that he would have recommended it to her as an effective, reliable treatment for chronic pain. It is tempting to ascribe Morris’s artistic failures to the effects of morphine and to attribute deficiencies in her performances as well as changes in her personality to the drug. No evidence exists, however, with which to support such assumptions or to know exactly when her use of injected morphine began. Nevertheless, it is clear that 1876 marked the beginning of a serious lifelong dependency, as references to morphine appear with increasing frequency in the diary. Numerous entries show that it was doctor administered, for Morris still relied on her physicians to relieve the pain from which she suffered and had not yet begun to dose herself: “sick” “sick” today—Dr. Seguin out of town. One of his partners called twice— once in afternoon, once in evening, both times using morphine. “sick” Dr Seguin gave me morphine Sick all day—Doctor twice—gave morphine in the evening Doctor here about noon am pretty well over the effects of morphine but am in great pain in the spine38

166


On the “25th of June,” she noted sorrowfully that “Gen Custer and all his men [were] killed by the Sioux Indians” but focused on her health again the next day, “Went to Dr. Thomas—he says I am suffering from flexion of the womb.” On 27 June, she wrote, “Dr. Seguin took me to Dr. Thomas to commence treatment.” The treatment for her uterine “flexion” probably involved morphine, too, because the drug was routinely prescribed for gynecological problems. From cancer to convulsions, diabetes to dysentery, headache to hysteria, there were few ailments for which morphine was not the medicine of choice. Without an understanding of addiction and withdrawal, Morris’s doctors did not realize that many of the symptoms plaguing their patient were probably caused by the morphine they injected into her body. On 1 July, she used the chilling term morphined for the first time, a word that makes her sound like the medical addict she had become. “Very sick—morphined,” she wrote on that date, and again on the 20th, “‘sick’— . . . morphined twice.”39 Ill throughout the month of July, Morris continued on morphine into August and September. The diary skips from 21 July to 19 August, with frequent medical bulletins thereafter: Very sick—morphine Attack in the head Sick—Getting over morphine . . . Sick all day—went to Dr Jones at 8.30. a.m. . . . Lying down all day Wretched night—at Dr. Jones [sic] at 8.30. Better this morning . . . Spinal attack in afternoon—Dr Seguin Gave morphine “Sick” Morphine last night40 Her tone changed by the twenty-eighth when she wrote with palpable relief, “Dr Thomas says I am almost well!!” Two days later she noted, “Rehearsed ‘Conscience’ at Union Square.”41 In spite of daunting health problems, she had agreed to appear under Shook and Palmer’s management in Conscience, a melodramatic mystery-thriller about a sleepwalking forger and murderer, which had premiered unsuccessfully at the Union Square Theatre with Kate Claxton the previous spring. Illness then had kept Morris from playing the leading role of Constance Harwood, which

167


playwrights A. E. Lancaster and Julian Magnus had written for her. William Winter had dismissed the work as one that “does not rise above the level of elegant mediocrity,”42 but Palmer attributed the production’s failure in large part to her absence from the cast. Although he wished to stage it again for financial reasons, he also hoped it would be an opportunity for her to resurrect a flagging career.43 Morris noted she had a “rehearsal of Conscience” on 9 October in the morning and then was “sick all afternoon.” That evening, nevertheless, she was able to enjoy the “fine house—splendid reception—flowers—‘most welcome’ worked in white on green vines—four enthusiastic calls before the curtain—congratulations from actors and manager—altogether a great success.”44 She was “sick” again three weeks later and wrote, “Dr. Seguin here twice,” presumably to inject her with morphine. On Halloween, however, she was well enough to attend a “rehearsal of Miss Multon,” Shook and Palmer’s next venture.45 Miss Multon was an American adaptation of a French play by Eugène Nus and Adolphe Belot, which was based on an English dramatization of Ellen Wood’s popular novel East Lynne. Reflecting on the production in his History, Palmer wrote, “No other performance at the Union Square Theatre struck deeper into the realities of human experience. There was no romance in the story. It was the simple recital of the wreck of a life. . . . A woman’s faithlessness ended in misery and death.”46 He remembered Morris as having been eager to play the role of Sarah Multon, the errant wife who traded her family for a lover years before and, now both remorseful and conveniently unrecognizable, returns to her former home to serve as a governess for the very children she abandoned. According to the contract Morris signed in August, she would appear under Shook and Palmer’s management for twelve weeks, beginning on 1 November. She would receive a weekly salary of four hundred dollars, significantly less than the thousand they had paid her two years before and indicative of her declining drawing power as a star.47 The French play had failed twice in Paris. Palmer, worried about its reception in New York, had his chief writer, Augustus R. Cazauran, embellish the script. “Driven by a singular reverence for the genius of Miss Morris,”48 Cazauran provided “bookends” designed to maximize the play’s potential for pathos. The new first act featured a children’s Christmas party, which sparks Multon’s desire to see her own daughter and son. Cazauran added a poignant fifth-act death scene so that the repentant protagonist, having sinned and suffered, could expire in the arms of her sobbing children. The improbable plot, which one critic called “a tissue of absurdities,” did not bother Morris, who believed that “the tremendous passion of maternity” would “touch the public heart.”49 She worried more about making Multon’s death believable. Having

168


rejected such options as stabbing, poison, and fever, she returned to the script and its stipulation that Multon collapse twice at moments of “extreme emotion.” Morris decided that heart disease—specifically “extreme emotion acting upon a weak heart”—should be the real reason for her character’s demise. 50 Although the novelty of “heart trouble” appealed to Palmer, Cazauran was “piqued” and grudgingly added one line in the first act to establish this underlying condition. After “a violent exclamation from the lady,” her doctor’s response would be, “‘Oh, I thought it was your heart again.’” “On eight words of foundation,” Morris explained, “I was expected to raise a superstructure of symptoms true enough to nature to be readily recognized as indicating heart disease.”51 Just as she had sought professional advice for other roles, she turned to two of her physicians—Drs. Seguin, father and son—for help with Multon’s heart. She wrote on 3 November, “Rehearsal—one dress fitted. . . . Dr. Seguin Jr. came with my notes for heart disease which I wish to study up for Miss Multon.” Evidently, she had a great deal to learn. As she recalled years later, “Why, when I went to the Doctors Seguin to be coached, I could not even locate my heart correctly by half a foot. Both . . . did all they could to teach me the full horror of angina pectoris, which I would, of course, tone down for artistic reasons.”52 The younger Seguin explained the structure of the heart, showed her “some ugly pictures” that resembled “sections of ripe tomatoes with blue radishes growing through them,” and detailed the “awful torture” of an angina attack, even inducing one in an unsuspecting female patient so that Morris could observe it. With surprising cruelty, he took the arm of the unfortunate woman and rushed her up a long flight of stairs. Morris watched in horror as “she stood swaying, clinging to the door frame” but also took careful note of physical symptoms to replicate on stage: “her ghastly, waxen pallor; the strained, scared look in her eyes; the dilating nostrils; above all, the movement in the muscles about the mouth, which contracted the upper lip at every hurtling, gasping breath.”53 The sadistic demonstration achieved the desired result. Morris was so convincing on opening night that she alarmed Fordyce Barker, who was in the audience and feared she was suffering from a “new affliction” he had failed to detect. Palmer believed that the “performance of ‘Miss Multon’ came nearer to absolute perfection than had any other play he had ever produced,” thanks to the outstanding cast he assembled. It included James O’Neill as injured husband, Maurice de la Tour, Sara Jewett as his second wife, Mathilde, with Bijou Heron and Mabel Leonard as their children, Jane and Paul. As effective as the others were, it was Morris as errant runaway Sarah Multon who ensured the production’s success. In Palmer’s view, she “never played a part in her life for which she was so closely fitted, in genius, appearance, and manner.”54

169


Many critics disliked the maudlin play but admired her powerful performance and acknowledged the emotional impact she had on audiences. From the second act on, “it was cry, cry, cry” wrote Monsieur X. in the New York Sun. “Of no one else . . . can it be said so truly that she has tears in her voice,” the New York World asserted: “‘For God’s sake, Maurice, let my little girl know me as her mother!’ is the most piteous, pathetic and passionate plea that any theatre-goer

Cabinet photograph of Morris (at left in black dress) as Sarah Multon with Bijou Heron as Jane and Mabel Leonard as Paul in Miss Multon, 1876. Jane and Paul are the children Sarah foolishly abandoned years earlier and to whom she has returned, repentant, as a governess, her identity unknown to them. Courtesy of the Laurence Senelick Collection.

170


ever listened to; we suspect that some night, someone will throw something at Mr. O’Neil [sic] for not granting it.” “No actress in the country can rival her” in “the expression of purely human passions” or the realistic portrayal of “acute physical pain,” declared the New York Times. “Her mobile face and her tearful voice and eyes are as potent as ever.” Marveling at “the mingled force and tenderness” in “her almost tragic presentation of a mother’s suffering and troubles,” the New York Herald observed, “She sweeps the whole gamut of human feeling, and every chord finds an echo in the hearts of her audience.”55 The Spirit of the Times, always friendly to Morris, considered Sarah Multon her finest work ever, “a rare manifestation of genius”: “Her great intensity was astonishingly effective, and throughout she held her audience, so to speak, in the palm of her hand.” Even William Winter praised her performance: “She depicted the alternations of forlorn submission to doom and frenzied strife against it, with a depth of passion and a truth of drawing that could not fail to hurt the heart. . . . The house was, at times, deeply moved by the spectacle of quivering agony thus laid bare.” Her power lay “in the capacity to depict a shattered emotional nature, in wild conflict with itself and its circumstances.” Watching her in Miss Multon, he perceptively explained, “is to see a vivisection of the nervous system. The effect is strong, but terribly painful.”56 On 21 November, the day after the opening, Morris wrote happily, “Critics all in my favor—Oh! but I am glad.”57 The uniformly positive response had dispelled her anxiety of the previous day when she had slept fitfully, fretted about the weather, and spent the day in agitated activity: “went to rehearsal of two acts of play—came home and finished getting things ready—Hope it may clear up before night—but now at 2.-30, the storm is really frightful—The storm held up by 7—I went early to the theatre—occupied my new dressing room—it is very comfortable.” Taking that, perhaps, as an auspicious sign, she made her triumphant debut as Sarah Multon: House packed—reception something to remember for a life time. The piece went beautifully from first to last. Recieved [sic] call after call–handkerchives [sic] waved—flowers in profusion—Mrs Norwood and Louise Sylvester (of the company) both sent me flowers and I esteem that a great compliment—Mr Steadman [sic] sent a charming little poem with a basket of violets—My Fred gave me a superb boquet [sic] of tea roses & violets—other baskets—I have not yet looked at the cards58 Poet, critic, and journalist Edmund Clarence Stedman had attached this paean to his floral tribute: Touched by the fervor of her art, No flaws tonight discover! 171


Her judge shall be the people’s heart, This western world her lover. The secret given to her alone No frigid schoolman taught her: Once more returning, dearer grown, We greet thee, Passion’s Daughter.59 “Morphine’s Daughter” would have been equally apt, for the diary reveals a curious situation: while the Drs. Seguin coached Morris on the symptoms of heart disease, they also dosed her with morphine throughout the run of the play. Although she did not always note which physician was in attendance, she usually recorded the treatment she received. On 19 November, “nervous sick about ‘Miss Multon’” and troubled by “the old pain in the neck and rheumatism all day,” she summoned “Dr. Seguin,” who gave her “a three drop injection after he had applied the electricity to [her] throat.” At home following that glorious first night, she called “Dr. Seguin” because she was “in great pain in head and neck.” “Sick” on Saturday, 25 November, she “played at matinee” but “was in great pain—throat bad too.” Pleased with the “splendid house” and even more with the knowledge that the “Dramatic papers bond in [my] praise,” she was relieved she did not have to perform in the evening.60 “Sick in bed all day” on the twenty-sixth, she noted that “Dr Seguin called at 6.30.” “Went to Dr Marcy for powders for throat,” she wrote on Monday, when she was “sick all day” and “worse at night” at the theater: “Fine house—but I suffered very much—Dr Seguin gave me morphine.” Her “throat very bad” on 2 December, she had a “frightful headache” on the fourth. Once again, the treatment was morphine: “Dr Seguin gave me injection of morphine at 3 o’clock—I suffered frightfully all evening from sickness of the stomach.”61 Morris was not so preoccupied with her health that she was oblivious to the world around her. On 6 December she wrote she was “shocked to hear that Brooklyn Theatre burned last night” during a performance of The Two Orphans starring Kate Claxton. Morris had gone to photographer Napoleon Sarony’s studio to have pictures taken with members of the Miss Multon cast and had learned then of the catastrophic fire. She was particularly upset that two actors, “Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Burroughs,” were missing. Later in the day, she noted sadly, “Both of the poor boys have been found—160 bodies have been taken from the ruins—its [sic] awful no performance Tonight I am sick with horror Poor Harry Murdoch—poor Burroughs. They come first in my thoughts, of course, because I knew them.”62 “Had injection last night,” she reported on 7 December, when she went to see “Dr Thomas [but] missed him.” She did meet Palmer, who was “awfully upset” about the fire and had decided to close the Union Square Theatre for

172


the remainder of the week. “Am trying to run away from this dreadful calamity,” she explained on the eighth, and went to Washington, D.C., in spite of the “fearful” cold to visit the Piatts. They returned to New York with her on the eleventh for Miss Multon, which reopened that night. Like every other theater in the city, the Union Square was affected by the Brooklyn tragedy. “The house was full downstairs but light upstairs,” Morris noted, which is not surprising because most of the fire victims had been seated in the upper gallery. Whether it was Shook and Palmer’s decision or a citywide edict, moreover, there were additional exits in case of emergency: “New doors have been cut through to the street—and there are a number of fire men in the theatre.”63 Miss Multon ran until the end of December when it was forced to close on account of Morris’s fragile health. As Palmer remembered it: On Tuesday, Dec 26th, Miss Morris was taken sick. She sent for me the next day. She was lying in bed very weak. She broke out crying and in a very tragic way and full of emotion seized my hand as I sat by her bedside and said: “Don’t, please don’t let anybody play my part, don’t! don’t! don’t!” There was real pathos in it all. I was very much moved by this bit of acting in which there appeared to be so much sincerity.64 He may have begun to question Morris’s motives but agreed to stage Led Astray instead of having someone replace her in Miss Multon. “Miss Morris,” he explained, “probably knew that some time previous to this, anticipating possible interruption from her illness, I had some talk with Miss Charlotte Thompson concerning the part, and that she was in fact in readiness as understudy.” Even though “for the sake of sentiment” he “could not let business continue to suffer,” he promised Morris that he would wait until she was well enough to return to the cast. “The imminent danger of Miss Thompson’s seizure of the part,” he wryly recalled, “brought Miss Morris to her feet on January 1st.”65 Morris was back in the cast, but her medical woes continued. She wrote on Wednesday, 3 January, “Played tonight—very sick—fainted after 4th act—Dr. Seguin waiting for me at home”; on Thursday, “Little better—played again.” “Worse” on Friday, there has also been a significant change. The entry for that date shows she had begun to use morphine during the performance, as well as before and after it: “had morphine at end of second act—got through very well.” “Much better” on Saturday, she “played at matinee but was sick at night” and then was “sick all day” on Sunday.66 On Monday, according to Palmer, “Miss Morris was in bed again,” which her entry confirms: “Dr Thomas here—I rode to his office at 2.30 am ‘sick’—Doctor don’t [sic] want me to play—sent note to Mr. Palmer—Miss Rogers will play my part tonight.” As he explained, “During three intervals of absence, Miss Katherine Rogers,” not Charlotte Thompson,

173


played Sarah Multon “and also on Saturday nights, the play then replacing Led Astray for that evening in the week.”67 “‘Sick’ in bed all day” with “neuralgia (internal)” on Tuesday, she returned to the stage the next evening. Once again, however, Dr Seguin gave her an “injection at end of second act.” Ever attentive, he also was at the theater on the fifteenth when she reported a “poor house,” probably on account of the weather: a “terrible night—sleet & rain—people walk [sic] in the middle of the street.” She was “very sick” with “chill—vomiting and fainting—old headache” on Friday, 19 January, and stayed in bed “all day.” Although she was “very lame from rheumatism” on Saturday, she managed to appear in the matinee.68 Miss Multon ran for two more weeks until Saturday, 3 February, with Morris giving her last performance that afternoon. According to Palmer, “it was about the largest matinee the theatre ever held.” She said nothing about the size of the audience in her diary but expressed concern that other actresses were trying to claim a role she considered hers. She was unhappy that Rose Eytinge had already played Sarah Multon in Philadelphia, and Charlotte Thompson planned to bring the play to Pittsburgh. Relieved that Palmer was willing to pay her for “3 nights in Brooklyn,” she hoped “to make enough” to finance another trip to California.69 Morris’s fragile health, obvious to audiences and critics alike, was initially part of her appeal. People admired her determination to perform whatever the physical cost and understood her need to take “restoratives” for sustenance. The New York Post, for example, said she “plainly” showed “the traces of recent pain and suffering” but still managed to act convincingly. The Spirit of the Times called her a “remarkable little woman” for courageously completing the engagement in spite of “her wretched health.” “She used to faint sometimes on stage,” the paper explained, “and we have seen her obliged to apologize to the audience in order to go and drink water and bathe her throbbing temples behind the scenes.”70 From the diary, however, it is clear that she was actually going backstage for injections of morphine, something the public did not yet know, and Morris denied for years. Even though the diary contains a record of her morphine use (incomplete as it is on account of the irregularity of the entries during this critical period), it was not a place where she reflected on the physical and emotional distress her dependency undoubtedly caused or even acknowledged that it was problematic. The starkly delineated catalogue of injections becomes especially chilling with her escalating use and physical decline so apparent. The 7 February entry reads, “Started at 8.30 p.m. San Francisco—Piatt saw us off.” It is innocuous enough, except that it is not in Morris’s hand and is the first time someone else has written in her diary. The handwriting belongs to

174


her husband, who makes all the entries until 5 May, suggesting that Morris was incapacitated or at the very least had become dependent on him. The morphine injections appear with increasing frequency on the pages of the 1877 diary, as does the notation, “injection Fred,” which could mean that he was the person administering the opiate or, possibly, receiving it. Although the trip started auspiciously enough with “Clara pretty well today—out for 3 meals regularly,” the situation deteriorated rapidly as the Harriotts sped across the country by train. Bulletins about the precarious state of his wife’s health fill the diary’s pages in February: Rushed to the Sherman House Chicago—very chill, glad to escape—Clara rheumatic Omaha—Clara not as well—caught dreadful cold & result congestion of head. Soon after entering Wyoming—Clara’s head commenced aching—no use Telegraphed for doctor to be on hand at Cheyenne—injection Clara little better—arrived at Ogden Injection Fred San Francisco—tired out Injection Fred 1st phaeton drive. . . . Dr. Shaw’s 1st visit 2nd phaeton drive Dr Shaw xx injection + ½ [word indecipherable] Clara very sick all day Dr. Shaw Shaw & Bates Injection Fred71 The Spirit of the Times reported that Morris’s health was in “such a shattered condition as to preclude all possibility of her appearing” at the California

175


Theatre in San Francisco.72 The diary confirms this gloomy assessment, as Harriott records “Shaw office double injection” on 27 February. The disturbing litany continues into March: “Shaw twice injection,” “Shaw three times Fred Injection,” “Shaw 3 times Injection,” “Shaw 3 times 3 Injections,” “menstral [sic] 2 Injections Shaw,” “Shaw 2 [times] 2 Injections,” “Dr Bates,” “Bates injection,” and so on throughout the month with injection after injection: single, double, triple.73 In several entries, the words “Clara sick,” “Clara in bed,” or simply “bed” slant down the right side of the page in wayward handwriting; it is difficult to tell whether it is Morris’s or Harriott’s.74 On Sunday, 25 March, someone has scrawled a formula for injection: “6 [two abbreviations indecipherable] 1 Strych[nia] 1 Atrop[ia] @ 8 o’clock 11 o’clock.” At the end of the 1877 volume, moreover, Morris has inscribed, “Injection for Entre-act if absolutely required The required amount of morphia 1/30 grain strychnia 1/120 atropia,” confirming both her dependence on the drug and her use of it during performances.75 There are no April entries. In May, when Morris was well enough to return to work, she still was dependent on morphine but at least was keeping her own diary. She had agreed to perform Camille and Miss Multon for one week each in Boston, supported by the resident company at the Boston Theatre, and was apprehensive about the engagement.76 She wrote on Saturday, 5 May, “very very sick Leave tonight for Boston—How can I face that audience while I am so weak & unfit for work? I tremble with terror,” and then noted the next day, “Traveled on morphine am very ill. . . . Rehearsal 7.p.m. on morphine.” “Very weak—very frightened” on Monday, she appeared in Camille, which was a “great success—Thank God!”77 After the performance, however, she experienced “severe fainting fits—cause—excessive weakness.” On Tuesday, her entry reads, “I have three doctors—one for throat Dr. Knight—one for internal trouble & one for theatre for morphine” [italics mine].78 After rehearsing Miss Multon until midnight on Sunday, 13 May, Morris wrote that she was “worried and troubled” because none of the cast members seemed “perfect.” Although the production opened on schedule the following evening, it did not proceed as planned. She actually stopped the performance after two acts when it was obvious that the Boston actors had not mastered their parts.79 She expressed outrage in her diary that night: “‘Miss Multon’ no one knew one speech perfectly—The play was ruined—damned—I could not bear it—it was shamefull—I dismissed the audience at end of 2d act.”80 The Boston papers paid little attention to this breach of theatrical etiquette and were much more interested in the precarious state of Morris’s health. The Boston Evening Transcript praised the “extraordinary power” of her acting but questioned the wisdom of performing when she was so obviously unwell:

176


Much speculation has been rife as to the cause and nature of the illness from which every one who has visited the Boston since Miss Morris appeared must have seen that she was suffering. Nothing short of positive genius for her profession, backed by a will and energy so indomitable that no physical infirmity can utterly subdue it, could have worked out the undoubted success which Miss Morris has achieved in this city; for her Camille was, of course, a very weak performance compared with that which she gives when stronger. She is never really strong—has never been well. . . . But so great was the strain on her system that there was scarcely an entr-acte during the whole of last week’s performances when she did not sink in a fainting fit before or after reaching her dressing room.81 According to the Evening Transcript, offering a stock explanation for virtually any female malady in the nineteenth century, the problem was “nerve trouble.” Morris was “one of those cases where a very highly-strung mental and nervous organization is contained within a frame which has but little physical strength to uphold and sustain it.” No matter how hazardous acting might be, “the plucky little actress” insisted on honoring her commitment to Boston because she had been forced to cancel two previous engagements on account of ill health. “When she does not perform,” her husband explained, she “sinks into such a state of utter depression, both physically and mentally, that she cries nearly constantly, and ends up being even worse off than when kept up by the excitement of that mimic life of the stage.” Other newspapers picked up the story. A response from Morris, which ran under the title “A Curious Letter from Clara Morris,” appeared the following week in the New York Sun, where she had seen it. She acknowledged the “great pain” her husband’s words had caused but questioned the accuracy of the reporting. Insisting that “Mr. Harriot [sic] positively denies ever making such a statement,” she implored people to respect her privacy: God has seen fit to give me a brain as strong as my body is weak. It is true I have often acted when wholly unfit for work, but even mine enemy will not accuse me of being actuated by vanity. That I do not give my reason for so overworking myself, is not because I can not, but because I do not wish to do so at present. . . . I do not like appearing in print; but I like still less to be considered an imbecile. Hence these lines. 82 While the Sun seemed willing to honor that request, other newspapers pursued the story more aggressively. In August, with the resolution of the summer’s Great Railroad Strike and the resumption of train service nationwide, Morris brought Miss Multon to Chicago. So ill she had to be carried to the cars in New York on Thursday the ninth, she was met by one physician when she arrived in

177

Diary entries for 5–8 May 1877 show Morris traveling, rehearsing, and performing on morphine. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.


Chicago on Saturday and had another in attendance at her hotel. Her engagement at Hooley’s Theatre was an ordeal. On opening night, according to her 13 August entry, there had been a “Big house—long and loud reception—had to motion them with my hand to stop—‘Miss Multon’ great hit,” but she was “horribly sick” and could “hardly stand up.” On Tuesday, although she really was “too sick to act” and had “no voice,” she did not cancel the performance: “Went before curtain with [stage manager] Parsell [sic] to convince audience I was not seriously ill.” Subsequent diary entries confirm the success of her engagement: “15 Wednesday: house packed,” “16 Thursday: Every seat in house sold at 12.40 Ladies in top gallery [sic] Hundreds turned away,” “17 Friday: More turned away than were in the house—,” “18 Saturday: House packed and jammed before the overture began Donn Piatt came today to take me home with him—he can’t get inside of the door even.”83 Notwithstanding her popularity with Chicago theatergoers, she could not disguise her abysmal physical condition, as the Chicago correspondent for the New York Dramatic News attested. Writing with a fury he could barely contain, he described the spectacle of Morris on stage as “disgusting and harrowing—an ineffable disgrace to humanity.” Rejecting euphemistic descriptions of her illness, he actually mentioned morphine: Saturated with morphia, sick with her morbid baffled hunger for personal display, the frail physique of the pitiable creature was deepened in its pathos by contrast with the burly frame and hale vigor of John Parselle, the stage manager, who apologized for a fiat of God and called a passing cold what for three years all have known to be a prostrating and most painful disease.84 He compared Morris’s “morbid hunger for artistic triumph” to a drunkard’s appetite for whiskey but lashed out with particular vehemence at the “cupidity and cruelty” of the men who were willing to exploit her for “blood money” and who “stood there like so many Shylocks exacting their pound of flesh.” He described her career since leaving Daly’s management as “one continuous reproach to American humanity,” with “every phase of her sickness” used as “a source of vulgar advertising, designed to keep her name before the public—during the absence of her suffering body.” Recalling her engagement at the Union Square the previous November—with her “frequent prostrations,” “vacillating steps,” and “taking medicine in lozenges before the very eyes of her audience”—he asked questions that reverberated in Chicago as well as in New York: “Has this pitiable woman no relations, no friends capable of supporting her? Is there no man who has the charity, coupled with the right, to prevent the exhibition and infliction of this ordeal?”85 The reporter did not mention Harriott by name, but he could not have identified him more clearly if he had illuminated him

180


in limelight. The unmistakable implication was that Harriott should be held accountable for the distressing spectacle of his wife’s prostration for profit. Morris herself had little to say about the state of her health, although she devoted three diary entries to the loss of her beloved horse, Theo. (In a futile attempt to treat the animal’s broken leg, she even dosed him with morphine. 86) On Sunday, 19 August, she noted that she was “worn out” after having had “callers in droves” in Chicago. On Monday, she was “very much exhausted” and in “great pain.” She was well enough on Sunday the twenty-sixth to go to Urbana by carriage with friends and spent a “lovely evening” there. She left by train for New York the next day, enduring a “terrible journey—Heat, dust, pain—hunger Lunch basket lost” before reaching her destination the following morning.87 There are no entries for the month of September, during which she appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Miss Multon. From the Spirit of the Times’s review, however, it is clear that her physical condition had not improved. According to that account, there were long waits between the acts, “owing to the fact that it is absolutely necessary for Miss Morris to take a rest.” She fainted in the third act and “during the last took medicine on stage to soothe her pain.” Unlike his colleague in Chicago, this journalist did not reveal what the medicine actually was. Nevertheless, as a concerned admirer of a gifted performer, he urged her to retire from the stage: She has won renown, the highest society is at her feet, why, therefore, should she drag before us her shattered form, stricken by disease? If she were poor and alone, we could understand her conduct in persisting to act, but sick and feeble as she is, she ought not to venture forth upon the stage. We admire her genius, respect her in private life, wish to the nine muses she could recover to adorn an art that can ill spare her, but honor bright, it seems unmanly, inhuman, to applaud the spectacle of suffering which she intrudes upon the public. We can readily understand her ambition, but is that not already satisfied? America has crowned her its greatest actress. . . . Fame can do nor more for her, and if she died tomorrow, her name is registered among those of the illustrious women of her country. 88 Moreover, as he reminded his readers, “Miss Morris (Mrs. Harriott) has married a man well able to support her off the stage.” She had married a man she thought could support her. In reality, she earned the money on which her small family depended and had already begun to pay the debts her husband incurred. On 13 January, for example, she wrote, “I have got to pay $1500 for Fred,” and noted the following week that she “gave Fred a check for $1500.”89 If she had expected a life of ease as Mrs. Harriott, working only when she chose to, she must have come to the painful realization that she

181


would not have that luxury. Through a combination of extravagance, unwise investments, and failed business ventures, her husband lost whatever money he had made as a merchant and dissipated Morris’s considerable earnings. He may have even figured in her morphine addiction. As early as 1873, the year before her marriage, she wrote of him, “Fred went down to theatre with me and he brought me some medicine—that man is filling my house up with bottles.”90 In later years, entries suggest that he often withheld medication from her to make her work, rewarding her with it when she finished; on other occasions, he would give her the drug she craved so that she could work. By October, however, Morris’s situation had improved. The 6 October Commercial Advertiser reported that she was “quite restored to health, and enters upon her arduous duties for the season in a condition as favorable to a brilliant and uninterrupted campaign as her well-wishers could possibly desire.” Although her “case was one that baffled the most skilled physicians for a long time,” it “has at last yielded to treatment.” The New York Evening Post carried an equally encouraging story two days later: “Current reports concerning the ill health of Miss Clara Morris are much exaggerated if not altogether unfounded. As a matter of fact, Miss Morris is in better health than she has enjoyed for years, and believes herself to be strong enough to fill her present engagements without fear of any interruption by sickness.” 91 The Commercial Advertiser noted she would have weeklong engagements in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., bookings the diary confirms. Morris wrote that John Thomson Ford had offered to star her in Miss Multon for two weeks: “I to recieve [sic] 50. per cent of the gross—and he (Mr. Ford) to pay traveling expenses and board of two children [in the cast] if I take them with me—I am to open in Baltimore 22d Oct for one week and to go to Washington 29th Oct same play.” Alluding to the negative press coverage she had recently received in New York, she sounds relieved that “Mr Ford promises the papers shall not treat me there as some have been treating me here.”92 She must have been delighted with a 28 October review describing the week she had just spent in Baltimore as “the most successful of the present season.” According to that glowing notice, “Not only was the house filled with large audiences at every performance, but the rendition of Miss Multon was fully up to public expectation. . . . Everybody went to see Clara Morris.” She did not disappoint. “All used their handkerchiefs, and tears, real tears, were shed. Miss Morris was superb in her rendition of Miss Multon.” The reviewer acknowledged that it was “hard to say, sitting down among the audience, how much effect her illness and suffering have had.” Nevertheless, “her acting . . . is still superb, and instead of a diminution there appears to be an increase of her ability to awaken enthusiasm among theater-goers and sympathy from her audience.”93

182


Morris herself says nothing about her two weeks in Miss Multon until 3 November, when she concluded her Washington engagement with a Saturday matinee. She sounds pleased with the ovation she received: “Audience remained standing some three or four minutes at end of play—& when with cast I went before curtain—handkerchieves and hats were waved—and through the applause and cries of ‘bravo’ I heard quite distinctly from several places the word ‘goodbye.’” Her tone changes as she recounts her experience after the performance. She sees the crush of people waiting to glimpse her outside and acknowledges the futility of such “celebrity” worship: I was very late getting dressed for home . . . yet when I did get out there was such a jam of people—men. women. children. white black—old. young—poor and rich—such a crowd again waiting from me, as required the persuasion of four policemen to make way for me to reach the carriage—Poor crowd—to wait so long to see–what?—a long fur cloak. a blue vail [sic] and a gray gloved hand.94 She arrived in New York on Sunday “two or three hours late—caught train at 42d St and went directly home.” Although “quite sick all day,” she was well enough on Monday morning to go “down town early” to prepare for her first appearance as Jane Eyre: Dress-maker first—Wig maker next—Store next. . . . Went to rehearsal (borrowed stage from Mr Abby of the Park Theatre) from rehearsal to hotel—cup of tea and then to dressmaker for “trying on”—Terrible storm— back to hotel at 10. dinner off [sic] one chop and a cup of coffee—and then study till 2:3095 “Very sick” on Tuesday, 6 November, she still attended rehearsal. The next day, she was unhappy to find co-star McKee Rankin unprepared, “reading though he has played the part over & over again.” She wrote on Thursday that she had spent a “bad night” and was “very sick this morning—neuralgia—bad throat—and nervous—oh God!” She had her “throat sprayed” and managed to leave “early” for the theater, where she “dressed.” When a “spinal headache came on just before [the] curtain went up,” she “had four drops of morphia,” then went ahead with the benefit performance of Jane Eyre. It was not only her debut in the title role but also was her first foray into managing. The Harriotts had hired the actors, engaged the theater, and planned to donate all proceeds to the Custer Monument Fund. The reception exceeded her expectations: House packed & jammed—& hundreds unable to get even standing room Great success thank God—Eight recalls before curtain—Play went very

183


well all things considered—The first performance I ever managed—and this is it—“Jane Eyre” (first time) played by Clara Morris for the benefit of the Custer Monument Fund $1794.50—came into the box office—and $1794.50 I sent to the Herald office—paying all expenses out of my own pocket and I wish it were five times as much—and if it were five one thousand times as much it could not express my love my admiration my devotion for and to the memory of our dead Hero!96 “Too sick to rise” the next morning, she was pleased nonetheless to receive a “charming letter from Mrs Custer” and to find that “all papers speak most favorably of yesterdays [sic] performance—oh! all except The Times.”97 She participated in another benefit the following week, this one for the Society of Elks, in which she performed the fourth act of Camille with “Mr. O’Neil doing ‘Armand’ for the first time.” She wrote that she met Mary Anderson, a lovely young actress, who played the “chamber scene from Romeo and Juliet” and had made her first New York appearance at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in The Lady of Lyons three days earlier. Odell remembered her as “the most beautiful woman I ever saw on the stage, or, for that matter off the stage. . . . There was something noble about everything she did.”98 Morris, too, was impressed with Anderson’s physical beauty, although she thought her Juliet lacked emotional depth. Nevertheless, she reminded herself, “no one can measure an actress from one scene and I wont [sic] try—I know she is fresh and frank and fair and I like her and thats [sic] enough for today—in the tomorrow she will be great.99 Interestingly, she does not mention another actress who also made her New York debut at the Fifth Avenue that season, perhaps because the woman Odell called “one of the most finished, one of the greatest artists known to the stage” posed a greater threat. Helena Modjeska, who opened on 22 December in Eugène Scribe’s Adrienne Lecouvreur, startled audiences on 14 January with her Camille, a role Morris undoubtedly considered hers. She could not have been oblivious to the acclaim the Polish actress won or to the ways in which critics invariably contrasted them. The Spirit of the Times, for example, likened the two to musical instruments, suggesting that Modjeska was superior to Morris in “the harmony of art” but inferior to her in depth of feeling.100 In Odell’s view, Morris and Matilda Heron were “fiery geniuses” who lacked “the refinement and charm of Modjeska’s.”101 Such invidious comparisons must have seemed more dangerous than Mary Anderson’s beauty. The few remaining 1877 diary entries are devoted mainly to social activities. Morris attended dinners, lectures and receptions, including one on 18 November “(in new french [sic] dress, garnett [sic] silk & silvery brocade combination—very beautiful but oh so tight—and I’m slim enough to wear my dresses comfortable I think)”102 that tired her. The only other item of theatrical interest appears on 184


30 December, her final entry for the year. In bed since Christmas night, she has been “suffering very much.” With her mother visiting friends in Cleveland, “Fred and I have passed day quite alone.” She adds that she has “not yet signed for California or for New Broadway [Theatre], though Mr J. Duff waits impatiently for my modicum of mind to be made up.”103 Morris would make another trip to California in 1878, a year in which allegations of morphine use would continue to plague her. Bursts of productivity would alternate with periods of ill health, as her physical deterioration became increasingly apparent. Opinion would remain divided as to the advisability of her remaining on stage, with admirers applauding her courage, detractors decrying her exhibitionism. Although many praised the suffering of the characters she unerringly delineated, some found the “intense reality of her impersonations”104 excessive, as the line between the character and the woman portraying her became indistinguishable. In the coming years, as Morris tried and failed to find new roles that suited her, the “spectacle of suffering”—as the Spirit of the Times had put it—would be what people expected of and remembered from her performances. It would be the suffering of the sick woman on stage, however, and not that of her memorable dramatic creations. As she struggled to stay current, voyeurism would change the dynamic between Morris and her audiences and would help to explain the nature of her continuing, though diminishing appeal. Audiences would watch her on stage as much to satisfy their morbid curiosity as to admire her technical virtuosity, until, of course, they even tired of the former. When they discovered that much of the suffering they paid to see was drug induced and that Morris, although she continued to deny it, was an addict “‘fly specked all over’ with morphine punctures,”105 the outrage would be explosive, the backlash savage.

185

9 Queen of

S

pasms

IN 1903, CRITIC LEWIS C. STRANG asked, “What, then, was Clara Morris? Was she actress or phenomenon, artist or exotic? That she had power cannot be disputed. That she afterward lost this power is also a fact.” Fifty-two years later, theater historian Garff B. Wilson offered the inane, sexist explanation that Morris, like many other members of the “emotional” school of American acting, was “left with few resources” when her “personal charm and emotional output” evaporated, thus leading to “her failure in life.”1 Others have assumed that a lack of training and discipline made her incapable of sustaining an acting career after breaking with managers Augustin Daly and Albert Palmer. In actuality, the unfortunate combination of a disastrous marriage, a humiliating public failure as Lady Macbeth, and, most significant, an addiction to morphine led inevitably to her artistic decline. It is well documented that Morris turned to morphine to relieve chronic pain; what she was medicating herself for, however, remains unclear. George MacAdam, as previously mentioned, believed it was spinal pain, stemming from a childhood injury inflicted by her mother. It could have been neurological damage caused by the hours Morris claims she spent sitting so still as a child she could barely walk when finally permitted to stand up. It is also possible that the “rheumatism” she mentioned frequently as she aged was rheumatoid arthritis or a disease now known as ankylosing spondylitis, which causes arthritis of the spine and sacroiliac joints, as well as inflammation of the eyes, lungs, and heart valves. Whether episodic or chronic, it is associated with debilitating back pain, stiffness, and loss of motion. In the late nineteenth century, the recommended treatment for all types of rheumatism included morphine; for sciatica, about which she frequently complained, morphine “hypodermically” was considered “most useful.”2 Another possibility is that Morris suffered from venereal disease, which was endemic in the theater world. Many, if not all, of her recurrent ailments are consistent with the manifestations of untreated syphilis and gonorrhea in

186

Queen of Spasms

the pre-penicillin era: infertility, debilitating headaches, sore throats, severe aches and pains of all kinds, “rheumatic attacks,” neuralgia, stiffness of gait, loss of appetite, nausea, insomnia, gastrointestinal distress, eye inflammation and blurred vision, weakness, exhaustion, numbness in the hands and feet, even heart disease. The excruciating pain she experienced is consistent with the misery of progressing syphilis, a disease Carl Jung called “the poison of the darkness.” Even “grinders,” a word that appears in the diary, was a term nineteenth-century physicians applied to the “grinding” stomach pain characteristic of secondary and tertiary syphilis. It may be that the health problems for which Morris sought relief over the years were actually manifestations of syphilis, often called “the great imitator,” never adequately treated or documented. 3 Many of them also can be attributed to the chronic use of injected morphine, the physical deterioration addiction produces, and the agony of withdrawal. Nineteenth-century observers compiled a long list of the drug’s physical and “mental” side effects ranging from “repressed appetite” and “predilection for sweets” to abscesses, ulcers, and “contraction of the intestines” to “nymphomania,” “erotomania,” depression, and insanity.4 While some of them now seem ludicrous, the physical decline concomitant with addiction is irrefutable. Symptoms include inflammation of the mouth and throat, gastric illnesses, circulatory disorders, constipation, impotence, amenorrhea, and sterility. Skin infections, swelling and collapsing of veins too frequently used for injections, respiratory diseases, and advanced tooth decay are all possible medical complications.5 Morris’s diary shows that she suffered from many of them and turned to morphine for relief. Without an understanding of opiate addiction, she could not have known that her remedy of choice was compounding her myriad problems. Withdrawal produced its own constellation of maladies, the severity dependent on the daily dose of the addict, with most people experiencing something comparable to a bad case of the flu. As described by German physician Edward Levinstein in Die Morphiumsucht, the first major contribution to the study of morphine (published in England in 1878 as Morbid Craving for Morphia), “abstinence” brought intense physical suffering: agitation, yawning, chills, headache, abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, insomnia, a change in pulse or respiration, and delirium tremens.6 Year after year, Morris treated her many ailments with morphine, which she or her husband injected when doctors could not, and became trapped in a cycle of addiction and withdrawal from which she never escaped. The diary chronicles her physical deterioration but provides little insight into the cause. She repeatedly mentions “morphia,” “medicine,” “powders,” “pills,” “drugs,” “doses,” and “needles.” She is “sick,” “miserable,” and “wretched” but

187

Queen of Spasms

never calls herself an addict, “morphinist,” or “morphinomaniac.” She may chide herself for an inherent “weakness” or write of her “shame” but does not reveal what has provoked these negative thoughts and feelings. Certainly, such subjects are absent from her memoirs. All three volumes relate her triumphs and tribulations but do not discuss anything as sordid as syringes and “hypers.” One can only wonder about morphine’s impact on Morris in performance, as accustomed as she was to its use. Sarah Bernhardt, soon to be a competing Camille in New York, described what she experienced after ingesting opium in liquid form before a stage appearance: The opium that I had taken in my potion made my head rather heavy. I arrived on the stage in a semiconscious state, delighted with the applause I received. I walked along as though I were in a dream. . . . My feet glided along on the carpet without any effort, and my voice sounded to me far away. . . . I was in that delicious stupor that one experiences after chloroform, morphine, opium, or hasheesh.7 It is inconceivable that Morris’s reliance on injected morphine would not have profoundly affected her acting. An unacknowledged subtext in her life and work, drug addiction undoubtedly was the most significant factor in her artistic decline.8 Considering the gravity of the problems that plagued her, it is remarkable that Morris remained active for as long as she did. Clearly, the downward trajectory of her career must be viewed against this backdrop of chronic pain, illness, and substance abuse. To her great credit, she tried to keep her “harness bright by action,”9 but that harness grew oppressive as her energies dwindled. Diary entries record her reluctance to perform as physical demands became overwhelming, audiences unresponsive, and her efforts unremunerative. Desperate about finances, determined to preserve the façade of respectability she had constructed, she drove herself relentlessly with diminishing success. Her New York appearances dwindled as her repertoire calcified. In February 1878, Morris opened at the new Broadway Theatre in The Governess, an adaptation of Jane Eyre written for her. In many ways, the production would set the pattern for her performances for the next decade: a dramatically inferior work with a weak supporting cast—most of them hired by the Harriotts for the season, others provided by the “host” theater—designed to showcase the talents of its unpredictable star. The New York Clipper called it a “one-part drama” because “all of the characters” were “subservient to that of Jane Eyre, and, with the sole exception of Lord Rochester,” insufficiently developed. The Herald dismissed the cast as inadequate and the play as poorly constructed but applauded Morris’s “careful, well conceived, and intelligent . . . acting through-

188

Queen of Spasms

out.” Although the work lacked “literary merit,” the role gave her “ample scope for the display of emotional acting and the vivid depiction of mental suffering for which she has gained considerable celebrity.” She was a neurasthenic but moving Jane Eyre, especially effective in the third act. Her wedding to Rochester interrupted by maniacal screams, Jane “the stern self-torturer” became Jane “the sensitive martyr, pale and stricken in her bridal robes.”10 The real problem was the absurd length of the performance. The 11 February opening ran well past midnight on account of entr’acte delays. They continued throughout the two-week run, slowing the production to an extent that alarmed the audience. The Clipper noted, “On Thursday night, . . . the intervals between the acts were so long that the audience gave audible expression to their uneasiness.” Because the set was not elaborate, it was obvious to everyone that the interminable waits had to “be attributed to the feebleness of Miss Morris’s health.”11 In actuality, they were caused by the morphine injections she received backstage, on which she would depend for the rest of her acting career. Such tedious delays would become a Morris hallmark. The engagement closed with a matinee because fragile health precluded her acting twice in one day. The Spirit of the Times reported, “Every seat was sold and ladies were standing up in the aisles.” That had not been the case earlier in the run when the Clipper observed houses that were “little more than halffull.”12 Whether lackluster attendance was a factor in her decision to perform elsewhere, Morris would not appear in a New York production for more than a year. On 17 March, she was “sick in bed and suffering greatly,” but her distress was not theater related. Upset because neither her husband nor her mother had remembered her thirty-first birthday, she bewailed their thoughtlessness: “I have given my whole life, my poor little scraps of strength—my earnings, everything to my mother and my husband. . . . I dont [sic] care for a gift—but my heart is almost broken—its [sic] the sadest [sic] birthday I ever scored. . . . I dont [sic] merit such neglect!!”13 Considering how hard she worked to support them, her disappointment is understandable. She rehearsed Miss Multon at the Park Theatre the next day, in preparation for a weeklong tour. Although “terribly ill,” she performed in Newark on Tuesday, 19 March; “very sick” in Bridgeport on Wednesday; in New Haven on Thursday, “very sick, worse Doctor—no sleep—no food growing very weak”; in Hartford on Friday, “severe fainting during performance.” In Worcester for the next two days, she says more about her health than the play in which she appeared: “Am looking shockingly bad. Weak. Worn out—Terrible spinal headache at 7 p.m.” She does not indicate with whom she was performing or in which theaters, and she cannot wait to get home. “Providence. Thank God this is the last town on the list. . . . we are rushing things to try to get off by tonights

189

Queen of Spasms

[sic] train.” She arrived in New York at 6:30 a.m. on the twenty-seventh, her relief tempered by the awareness of “how sick” she was. Barely able to walk, she was injured on stage earlier in the week when she “fell against chair” and sustained a “severe blow in right side close to groin.” Still, she went out in the afternoon, bought two large “Japanese roses—big as myself,” and managed a trip to the circus, which “bored” her.14 In a benefit performance at New York’s Steinway Hall on 13 April, Morris read poems by Bayard Taylor and Elizabeth Barrett Browning so effectively she moved many in the audience to tears.15 By the end of the month, she was in St. Louis. Although “very very sick,” she began a weeklong engagement in Miss Multon on Monday, 29 April. Sizeable audiences packed the opera house and were pleased with the star attraction. “Long waits and other circumstances made it evident that Miss Morris was not in good health,” the New York Clipper reported, but her Sarah Multon “left nothing to be desired.” Her 3 May diary entry focused on her illness, not the production: “‘Sickness’ added—How can I endure it and act? Throat doctor and body doctor (dont [sic] know what else to call him) have made a day of it. . . . My suffering something terrible.” Yet, she noted it was a “big house,” and she received “lovely flowers.”16 After the “jammed and crammed” matinee the following day, she drove directly to the depot. There “Dr Needlet gave [me] a ‘hyper’ and jumped off the cars.” The name sounds like a joke yet is sobering because it shows the utter depersonalization of the treatment and the urgency of the need.17 “Unutterably worn” and “very sick,” she was relieved the engagement was over. “With the rent in my pocket,” she wrote, “I can return home gladly.” Two days later, she was in New York, thankful to “find all well.” For the next two months, she considered offers for the upcoming season. She was in demand, with several theater managers vying for her. On 17 June, she was pleased to have signed a contract for a lucrative two-week engagement in California, “with privilege of two more—6 regular performances per week and some little farce or comedy for the matinee—I am not strong enough to act twice in one day, but they give me such good terms I feel I must do all I can—Therefore I play some one act piece that my name may help fill the house. Terms $2000 per week.”18 On Monday, 15 July, she began a two-week engagement at Hooley’s Theatre in Chicago with Conscience. She had paid three thousand dollars for permission to include it in her repertoire. She brought six company members from New York, although she says nothing in her diary about hiring them. The response to the first performance was favorable: “House good—play went smoothly and seemed to please—The calls after the 3d and 4th acts most enthusiastic.” The weather, however, was oppressive. The New York Clipper’s Chicago correspondent reported that it was the hottest week of the season, with record-setting

190

Queen of Spasms

temperatures “above the hundreds” keeping people away from the theaters. Conscience would draw “only fair houses.”19 “Heat terrible,” Morris noted, but her husband was a more serious problem on opening night: Freddy has been cross to me, and made me cry my heart nearly out. I am not or was not fit to act. Had to rehearse this morning too when I was already so weak and sick—the extreem [sic] heat is hard on Fred and that may make him feel cross—but it comes very hard on me to conceal my suffering bodily and mental and act so as not to lose what reputation I have already earned. It is the first night I have played the part for more than a year and my Nervousness is great—that being added to my pain, my fatigue and my sorrow and tears—Who envies Clara Morris?20 That poignant question would reverberate in the coming months when Harriott’s erratic behavior became more public. As temperatures cooled, the situation in Chicago improved, and Morris’s Miss Multon did “a fair week’s business at Hooley’s.”21 At home once again, she learned there was no hope of recovering the money John Ellsler still owed her.22 Spurred perhaps by the sobering news, she took Miss Multon to Cincinnati (week of 23 September) and Philadelphia (week of 30 September). According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “the light of the American stage” brought part of her company from New York, with the rest joining her from St. Louis “by special train.” The Clipper’s correspondent praised her “superb rendition of the title-role” and reported she did “splendid business” at the Grand Opera House, with “‘Standing-room Only’ being announced each evening after the first.”23 “Matinee closed engagement,” she noted on 28 September, “which has proved really a furore [sic], many turned away last three nights. Papers very kind—lots of flowers ect [sic].” She left that night by train for Philadelphia and opened at the Arch Street Theatre on Monday, 30 September. She wrote telegraphically: “Same company—scenes good—Heat very severe—Throat in terrible state—am quite weak—House fair.” Nevertheless, her acting impressed the Clipper’s Philadelphia correspondent “as full of the original touches of excellence that have rendered her famous as an exponent of this peculiar type of characters [sic].”24 “Home at last!” on Sunday, 6 October, and happily reunited with her mother, she was relieved to “find all safe and well.” According to the Spirit of the Times, she would appear shortly in New York, but that report proved erroneous. Noting that “Morris no longer enables us to predict anything,” the newspaper

191

Queen of Spasms

retracted it on 19 October.25 That same day Morris wrote, “We expect to start at 5 p.m. for California.” She would open on 4 November in San Francisco at Baldwin’s Theatre, one of three grand new venues in the city, 26 and would appear to great acclaim there until the end of the year. She would give thirty performances in plays Californians clamored to see: Miss Multon, Conscience, Article 47, Camille, and The Governess. The reviews would be positive, with reports of houses “crowded to overflowing,” electrifying acting, and standing ovations. Minor problems such as a spat over a supporting actress with whom Morris refused to work or “a sudden and severe affection [sic] of the heart” that caused the cancellation of a performance were short lived. 27 One San Francisco paper called her a “great expositor of emotional sensations,” “an artist in the fullest sense of the term,” and noted her unfailing ability to “produce a phenomenal cheek-moistening and eye-blinding effect” in “ladies [who] take a strange but characteristic delight in the poignant distress inflicted upon them by Miss Multon’s trials” and “bearded men . . . who were never before known to lose their obduracy.” Another praised her as “the highest exponent of the natural school,” an actress who “speaks and moves as Miss Multon or Jane Eyre would speak and move,” and whose “intense sympathetic accord” with the parts she played produced “a similar state of mind” in each audience member.28 While Morris enjoyed success in San Francisco, troubling stories surfaced on the East Coast. The 26 October New York Clipper reported that Morris had “separated from her husband, Mr. Harriott,” although “no legal steps” had yet been taken. On 2 November, the New York Dramatic News published an interview in which Morris denied seeking a divorce but disclosed “her marital troubles.” Admitting she never loved her husband, she portrayed him as her polar opposite: “cold, phlegmatic, indifferent,” “forbidding” and “selfish,” while she is “warm-hearted and impulsive.” He forces her to perform because they depend on her earnings. “I am nothing but his chattel, his property,” she complained. “Whether I am a sick woman or a healthy woman, it matters not. I am good for . . . so much money, but I doubt if ever a thought crossed his mind of how I feel about it, or that I feel at all, for that matter.” She criticized former manager Palmer, accusing him of “using her as long as he wanted her, and, when she broke down, of villifying [sic] her by giving false reports to the press about her; saying that she could never act again; that she was pretending sickness, etc.” She had “braved actual death” in Shook and Palmer’s service, and in return, they slandered her: They noised abroad that I lived on morphine, that I was an opium-eater, and all sorts of absurd things to prejudice the public against me. This morphine story has gained such ground that I find everybody believing it. Now, a

192

Queen of Spasms

grain of morphine makes me deathly sick. To take it for one week would, I believe, kill me. It is the very worst thing I could do.29 Because Morris’s use of morphine is well documented, her fervent denial questions the veracity of the entire interview. For the next month, accusations flew between Harriott, angry at having been portrayed as “a cold-blooded parasite” clinging to his wife’s fortunes, and the editors of the New York Dramatic News. He threatened a libel suit; they defended the accuracy of the article, swore they had witnesses to corroborate Morris’s statements, and promised a costly counter-suit against both Harriotts for defamation of character.30 A detailed account of the escalating “Morris-Harriott scandal” ran in the tabloid’s 7 December edition, providing titillating new information courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle. One of its reporters quoted Harriott as saying his wife had been “on her knees before” him, denying her statements “in accents of anguish.” The Dramatic News’s response was to liken her to Nancy “clasping in her last agonized embrace the feet of Bill Sykes, who butchered her because she betrayed him to the police!” Mocking Harriott as a mere “flour-dealer,” the article went on to characterize him as “bloodthirsty” and volatile, someone who claimed to have murdered a man for attempted robbery just three weeks earlier and now threatened to shoot the editors of the Dramatic News. Although Harriott intended to keep the press away from his wife, he was outwitted by the intrepid reporter who hid in the “flies” of the theater and described what he saw below: While the plaudits of the audience still rang in appreciation of her efforts, poor Clara Morris heeded not the shout, but like the dying gladiator, lay prostrate and unconscious, while a physician leaned over her and administered restoratives. . . . Mr. Harriott, when the curtain drops and his wife faints under the swift collapse from the exaltation of Sarah Multon’s sorrow to the dead and dreary reality of Mrs. Harriott’s sorrow, doses her from a tin teapot with a stimulant the secret of whose decoction he jealously guards.31 Much to the consternation of the Dramatic News, when another reporter managed to gain access to the room in which Morris was “imprisoned” at the Palace Hotel, she denied the statements that had appeared in the original article and refused to incriminate her husband in any way. The paper stood by its story, asserting it had exposed Harriott as a tyrant and had shown the American people “how much agony” Morris’s “bondage costs her.”32 The threatened lawsuits on both sides apparently fizzled, and there are no diary entries to corroborate any part of this bizarre episode. Whether it was a publicity stunt or a legitimate cry for help is impossible to determine.

193

Queen of Spasms

Morris spent the month of January vacationing in San Gabriel, returning for two more weeks at Baldwin’s Theatre in February.33 The bill changed nightly and presented mostly familiar fare: Article 47, Miss Multon, The Governess, Camille, and Conscience, with Raymonde, a new offering, for the last three performances. Her revision of Monsieur Alphonse, a play Daly had adapted in 1874 from the original by Dumas fils (1873), was “a big hit,” with “splendid recalls after 2d act,” floral tributes, and even standing room sold out for the Friday evening performance.34 The Clipper confirmed that she not only “renewed her former triumphs” but also “surpassed herself” as the title character. The “fire and magnetism” of her acting inspired James O’Neill, the Baldwin’s handsome leading man, as her “fond, noble-hearted husband,” Commander Montaiglin. With that compelling performance, she “fittingly concluded probably the most successful engagement ever played in this city.”35 She was quickly engaged for the following year. The 2 March San Francisco Chronicle reported she had signed a contract for ten weeks beginning in February 1880, traveling expenses included, at five hundred dollars per performance. According to the Clipper, “This sum of $30,000 for sixty performances is the largest ever guaranteed in this city to a single star.”36 On her return trip to New York, Morris had weeklong bookings in Louisville (Opera House, week of 14 April), Chicago (Haverly’s, 21 April), and Cincinnati (Grand Opera House, 28 April), supported by Joseph F. Wheelock and the Olympic Theatre Company of St. Louis. The plays in all three cities were identical—Article 47, Miss Multon, and Camille—but reviews were not uniformly positive. Although the Clipper reported that Morris’s “intensely emotional acting” had “created the most profound sensation” in Louisville, the New York Mirror’s Chicago correspondent complained that the cast, with the exception of Wheelock, was “lamentably bad”; whereas the Louisville engagement was “highly remunerative,” Cincinnati’s had been “a disastrous one, financially,” with Morris performing “in the most agony and misery” after injuring her hip in a fall on stage. Offstage, just prior to these engagements, there had been an unpleasant altercation on a Nebraska train platform when Harriott hit a man, apparently without provocation.37 Other than a biographical sketch in the 17 May New York Clipper in which her husband’s name appeared incorrectly as P. C. Harriott, and a squib in the 28 June New York Mirror predicting she would play no more than ten weeks in the upcoming season, there is little information about Morris after returning to New York. Sporadic diary entries show she spent a relaxing summer at home in Riverdale with her mother but still suffered from a variety of ailments. Her first fall engagement came on 9 October when she opened at Haverly’s Brooklyn Theatre in The Royal Favorite, an adaptation of Jane Shore by Donn

194

Queen of Spasms

Piatt. The Mirror panned the performance, reminding its readers that Morris had failed in that role at Booth’s. Jane Shore was still “uncongenial.” Moreover, ill health had begun to compromise her acting, which “is now brilliant in flashes, but is often monotonous. . . . The power of sustained portraiture is in great measure gone.”38 The Spirit of the Times was much more critical in its assessment of the poorly written play, the interminable production—which it said Morris had directed—and its purported star. Calling it a dramatic “hodgepodge” that Piatt “ought not to have concocted, and which Clara Morris certainly cannot act,” the reviewer reported that the opening performance did not begin until after nine o’clock. When the curtain finally fell at one a.m., thanks to scenic delays and Morris’s customary entr’acte breaks, over half the audience had left the theater. Morris received a “gloomy” telegram from Piatt urging her to withdraw the play. “Hot,” “used up,” and “so sorry to have caused so much pain and trouble,” she appeared in the disappointing production through Saturday, substituting Conscience and Camille for the second week of her engagement.39 Except for two benefits in December, Morris did not perform for the rest of the year. Her health and her husband’s behavior continued to plague her.40 She did not mention morphine, but a diary entry such as the one for 26 November (“Needle broke had to send Mama to city for me”) conveys her urgency. Several entries indicate she was working on an adaptation of Man and Wife, which Daly had just revived, and was considering a new play called The Soul of an Actress. “Some people will not believe actresses have such things,” she quipped.41 Health permitting, she enjoyed socializing. She attended a reception on 14 November for W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, whose HMS Pinafore had been the rage since its New York premiere at the Standard Theatre in January. Morris’s hostess was “Mrs. Fortescue” [sic], wife of George K. Fortesque, “Buttercup” in a rival Pinafore at the Lyceum. Morris did not say whether she saw either production but commented on the guests of honor: the reticent Gilbert (“Mr G. tall—very English—light—small sidewhiskers—had no conversation to speak of”) and the jocular, swarthy Sullivan (“Mr S. short and very dark—inclined to ‘chaff people you know’”).42 On New Year’s Eve when Pinafore’s popular successor, The Pirates of Penzance, premiered at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, Morris was in Wyoming en route to Baldwin’s Theatre. There are no diary entries for her two months in San Francisco, but press coverage shows that this engagement was not the unqualified success of the previous winter. Although she received positive notices, there were negative ones as well beginning with Man and Wife, the production with which she opened on 19 January. The Clipper’s correspondent called it “a poor adaptation of the novel,” full of “glaring faults and incongruities.” Morris acted

195

Queen of Spasms

with characteristic passion and pathos but did not appear “to her best advantage as Anne Sylvester,” an ironic comment because she first won acclaim in New York with that role.43 Her only new offering was A. C. Gunter’s The Soul of an Actress, an elaborate costume drama about the Comédie-Française’s Hippolyte Clairon.44 That she never performed it again suggests it was a failure. With her standard repertoire—Camille, Alixe, Miss Multon, and Raymonde—she drew sizeable audiences. Nevertheless, the Clipper noted a significant change and implied that her erratic behavior was partly to blame: “There is no disguising the fact that the popularity of Miss Morris [has] greatly declined in this city, and, conceding the permeating pathos and genius of the lady’s impersonations, our public are not disposed to submit to many more of the disappointments occasioned by her frequent non-appearance.”45 This time, Morris left California without a contract for the coming year. The 14 February New York Mirror reported she would play whenever her health allowed “but will make no positive or lengthy engagements at present.” The same newspaper said she was vacationing “in the wilds of Arizona” in April.46 By June, she was back in Riverdale enjoying a quiet summer in preparation for a busy fall. She spent the week of 13 September at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre, appearing as Cora in Article 47 and Alixe in The Countess de Somerive, most likely her own adaptation of the play Daly still owned. She was pleased with the performances but worried about paying her rent.47 A two-week engagement at Abbey’s Park Theatre in Boston must have relieved her anxiety. Billed as “the greatest American artiste,” she received four thousand dollars for twelve performances, beginning on 20 September.48 Returning to its sister house in New York, she made her first professional appearance in the city since the previous fall. “I played ‘Alixe’ to a solid house,” she wrote after the 26 October opening. “Ah What a superb reception.”49 Two days later, she was apprehensive because Sarah Bernhardt, who was about to embark on her first American tour, was in the audience. “The Great One” made her entrance after the first scene and “was quickly recognized while she was unfastening her cloak”: She faced the audience as placid as possible When she was free from the sealskin cloak she adjusted her large white hat . . . and then she bowed and smiled and smiled and bowed untill [sic] the reception gave out. We were all peeping trying to catch a glimpse of her—I got a pretty good look for a moment She looked very pretty—“made up” pretty—but nevertheless pretty Rather stylish than elegant—Then when I went on in 2d act—Good Heaven the house broke loose It went mad seemingly People climbed on chairs at wings to see—They had been very jealous for me it seemed.50

196

Queen of Spasms

Worried that the ovation would seem like “rudeness to the stranger,” Morris “strove to catch her eye” and “motioned to her.” When Bernhardt did not respond, she offered a gesture of recognition and welcome: “I held out my left hand put my right into it shook it—then swept my arm across front and kissed my hands to her—She sprang to her feet—and bowed & kissed hands and the house rose.” The Spirit of the Times reported that Bernhardt left the performance exclaiming “Charmante! Magnifique!” Privately, however, she stated that Alixe was not a role for which Morris was suited. She also famously observed, “That is not acting, it is suffering,” which many interpreted positively as an acknowledgment of Morris’s emotional power, but others saw negatively as a blunt appraisal of her aesthetic limitations.51 In the book she published about the American tour the following year, Marie Colombier, a member of Bernhardt’s company, denigrated the thirty-three-year-old Morris as a woman without youth or beauty: Her mouth is a black hole. Her teeth look like holes stuck in sealing-wax. And people pretend that America is the country of dentists! Shriveled up, mummified, she wears a cherubim wig. At the dramatic moments she sobs with her head in her hands, and you can see her long fingers adjusting the locks to her hempen-blonde hair.52 In all fairness to Morris, Colombier was jealous of Bernhardt’s success and wrote a nasty account of the entire trip. Nevertheless, the Spirit of the Times used her unflattering description to justify its own increasingly harsh assessment of the American actress. The newspaper that had reviewed Morris so favorably during the 1870s became her most hostile critic, decrying her behavior, appearance, and artistic decline.53 Its racist characterization of her Alixe was cruel: Her entire reading of the part is that of Topsy, not of an Alixe. She is Topsy with a Western twang. Her “mommer dear,” her brusque movements, her pouts, her passions, her gaucheries, her smiles, and her quick transitions from playfulness to pettishness are all Topsy. Black her face and she would be almost as good a Topsy as Mrs. G. C. Howard without an alteration of her Alixe. But the Alixe of the play is not at all like Topsy. Ergo, Miss Morris does not act Alixe artistically. In what her friends claim as the greatest proof of her art—her playing dead in the last Act—she is passed by the opossum.54 The critical response, however, was not uniformly negative. The New York Herald believed she had never had a “more emphatic” success. Notwithstanding the

197

Queen of Spasms

“provincial pronunciation” that mars her speech and the visible effects of “the wearing illness that has afflicted her for so many years,” she still “moves her audience grandly by the sheer force of her almost unaided natural powers.”55 For her second week at the Park, Morris chose Article 47, “newly adapted and omitting the court-room scene.”56 Pleased with the 1 November opening, she wrote, “to my great and delighted surprise accepted by a crowded crowded house as a magnificent success.”57 Three days later, however, she was too ill to complete the performance. Worried the audience would think her drunk because she had “staggered” during the first act, she “plunged off the stage.” While Dr. Seguin tended to her behind the scenes, the audience was “dismissed.” She recovered by Monday night, 8 November, when she enjoyed Sarah Bernhardt’s first appearance as Adrienne Lecouvreur at Booth’s. On the eleventh, too weak to commit to weeklong runs, she began a series of Tuesday and Thursday matinees at the Park that continued through 2 December. Once again, the vehicle was Article 47, with Alixe for the last two performances. Odell, who attended an Article 47 matinee, described the mad scene as “one of the most extraordinary exhibitions of dramatic power” he had ever witnessed. “I still see Miss Morris in that sweeping red dress,” he wrote years later, “clutching at the veil that conceals her disfigured face, until, pulling it away, she fell a-heap with the shriek of maniacal laughter. It was terrible.”58 Palmer had been in the audience on 22 November and, impressed with the sold-out house and ovations Morris received, brought her to the Union Square for a series of matinees. Miss Multon ran in January, Camille in February and the first two weeks in March, with Conscience concluding the engagement at the end of the month.59 According to Odell, “New York almost rediscovered Clara Morris in those interesting days.” The city certainly buzzed over the dueling Camilles of Morris and Bernhardt on 23 April, with Bernhardt in a matinee performance at Booth’s and Morris appearing in the evening at the Union Square. Morris’s Camille was still deeply affecting, but her interpretation had changed. Not surprisingly, given the state of her own health, she now took what the Spirit of the Times called “the consumptive view of Camille,” emphasizing the character’s illness and decline. She was in agony from the first, suffering physically and spiritually. Winter found her convincing, although he thought she carried the realism of the death scene so far it “smelled of the drug store and the sick room.” Nevertheless, he admired this Camille, so different from the sensual woman Bernhardt played, and appreciated Morris’s affinity for the character she played: “Deep beneath this performance it was perfectly easy to see the flow of a great heart, alike wonderfully sensitive and long and deeply tortured among the thorns and mysteries of human life.”60

198

Queen of Spasms

Maddeningly, Morris does not discuss her interpretation or compare it with Bernhardt’s.61 There are no diary entries devoted to it or to Raymonde—another piece about a “lady with a past and an illegitimate child”62—which she performed in the evening at the Union Square during the week of 25 April. She must have persuaded Palmer to stage it, because he characterized it as “an experiment that [she] desired to make.” Unfortunately, the play that worked so well in California failed in New York. “I have seen Miss Morris give some very, very unsatisfactory performances,” he wryly recalled, “and her work in Raymonde was among them.”63 Yet, certain of her drawing power, he revived Camille for a week in November. After what must have been a long opening night Morris wrote, “Nov. 28th 1881: 2 a.m.—Just walked up from Union Square Theatre. Been playing Camille to a beautiful house—double recall at 2nd & 4th acts—the house fairly roared at the latter.” She rose from her sickbed the following evening and was “greatly pleased” with another “big house” and “four calls.” The performance on the thirtieth was even better, although she was surprised to see so many men in the audience “in full dress with out ladies,” evidently a practice more common in Europe than America. Home from the theater at 3:30 a.m.—the hour suggesting the length of the entr’acte breaks—she noted it had been “such a splendid house—the finest audience in the city . . . —calls 2, 3, 4th acts—shouts and Bravas.”64 Another series of Tuesday and Thursday matinees at the Union Square followed in January and February. It began with The New Magdalen, adapted from a novel by Wilkie Collins, whose material Morris had always found congenial. She starred as Mercy Merrick, a role British actress Ada Cavendish had created. Mercy, a reformed prostitute, has assumed the identity of Grace Roseberry (a colonel’s daughter whom she believes is dead) and has married a gentleman. Her future seems secure until Grace Roseberry, who is very much alive, returns. After treating the real Grace abominably, the remorseful Mercy acknowledges her duplicity and wins forgiveness. The Spirit of the Times reported that Morris had introduced a long speech in the last act in which Mercy blamed her errant ways on having been drugged by a seducer. The reviewer found it too absurd to have been crafted by a legitimate playwright, “but an amateur reciter might; consequently we suspect the husband of Clara Morris.” Actually, Morris herself had written it, drawing on her knowledge of drug-induced behavior. As she noted on 2 January, “Worked hard getting out confession for Mercy.”65 The winter weather was vile and her health poor, but the reviews of the improbable play were positive with the houses mainly full. The most interesting comment about Morris’s performance was one from an unlikely source: Oscar Wilde, who was in America at the request of producer Richard D’Oyly Carte.

199

Queen of Spasms

Hoping to duplicate the success of H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance, Carte had brought Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience to New York in September 1881, six months after its successful London opening. A witty satire on the aesthetic movement, it presented dueling poets Reginald Bunthorne and Archibald Grosvenor, both allegedly modeled on Wilde. American audiences, however, knew little about aestheticism and did not find it amusing. Carte, who also managed lecture tours, invited Wilde to give a series of readings across the country, shrewdly scheduling him to appear in each city just before Patience opened.66 In addition to his contract with Carte, Wilde had personal reasons for coming to New York. He had written his first play, Vera; or, the Nihilists, and wanted Morris to star in it. Set in Moscow at the turn of the century, the political melodrama centers on two assassination plots, one successful, the other thwarted by the eponymous heroine. Scheduled for production at London’s Adelphi Theatre in December 1881 under Dion Boucicault’s direction, Vera did not open as planned. Two assassinations had recently shocked the world—those of Czar Alexander II on 13 March and President James Garfield, who died on 19 September, eleven weeks after having been shot—which made Vera both timely and controversial. Just as rehearsals were about to begin at the end of November, they were abruptly canceled.67 Disappointed, Wilde was determined to find a New York actress to stage his play. He had been told the most likely prospects were Mary Anderson and Clara Morris.68 Two days after docking in New York Harbor, Wilde saw Anderson in Romeo and Juliet. He found her beautiful but cold and turned his attention to Morris. Both were guests at a reception for Louisa May Alcott on Sunday, 8 January, and at a luncheon on Wednesday where he persuaded her to read his play. He attended a performance of The New Magdalen the next afternoon and was fulsome in his praise. The following day, the New York Herald printed his paean under the heading, “Is It Aesthetic Taffy?” Miss Morris is the greatest actress I ever saw, if it be fair to form an opinion of her from her rendition of this one role. . . . We have no such powerfully intense actress in England. She is a great artist, in my sense of the word, because all she does, all she says, in the manner of the doing and the saying constantly evokes the imagination to supplement it. That is what is meant by art. She would be a wonderful success in London. I don’t think, however, that a play as worn as “The New Magdalen” would be the proper work in which to present her. She is a veritable genius. We have no one like her.69 The Herald questioned the sincerity of Wilde’s tribute. The Spirit of the Times was certain it was a publicity stunt, “a bogus, advertising interview, written as a guy [a joke].”70 Although Wilde may have been impressed with Morris’s acting,

200

Queen of Spasms

his flattering words were undoubtedly meant to convince her to commit to Vera, an exciting new play very different from the tired vehicle in which she was currently appearing. Morris decided against doing Vera in early February, probably because she was loath to play an assassin, even one who turns the gun on herself rather than on her intended victim. Her 2 July 1881 diary entry shows that the attack on President Garfield, whom she had met as a child in Ohio, had greatly upset her. For several weeks, like the rest of the nation, the patriotic Morris prayed for his recovery. The absence of an entry following his death on 19 September suggests that she was too distraught to write. That was not the case on 25 January, when she expressed relief that Garfield’s assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, had been found guilty: “What other verdict could they give? . . . God rest the great soul of the victim—God be merciful to the crime stained soul of the murderer.”71 Uncomfortable with the idea of appearing in a play in which assassination figured so prominently, she declined Wilde’s offer. He pursued her nonetheless. “I am . . . quite aware of how difficile she is,” he wrote to D’Oyly Carte on 16 March and urged the producer to intercede. Morris, however, refused to reconsider.72 From 23 February through the end of March, she appeared in what Odell called “a slightly altered version” of Article 47 with Alessandro Salvini, son of the celebrated Italian actor. According to Palmer, he was making his Union Square debut as Georges Duhamel and “acquitted himself very well.” Other than noting she “rehearsed Salvini in 3 acts of ‘47’” on 6 February, she says nothing about working with him. She does mention having been struck by a heavy curtain while she stood on stage the following month: “When it fell it fell full on my upturned face and naked arm–the right of course—eye cut and bruised—arm cut underneath about 4 inches and very severely bruised both beneath and above elbow the face.”73 On 17 April, she opened in a new play, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. She had suggested it to Palmer because she was intrigued by the rebellious Bathsheba. Once he had approved the production, she selected Augustus R. Cazauran to dramatize the novel. Palmer reminisced regretfully about the dreadful script (“chiefly done with the scissors”) and Morris’s inappropriateness for the role. Expert at playing “the victims of social usage,” she “had not correctly estimated the part” and made a terrible Bathsheba. Instead of a “beautiful, wayward girl,” she looked like “a person suffering under cumulative agony.” Uniformly unfavorable reviews led to its closing after two weeks. It would be Morris’s last performance for Palmer until 1904.74 There are sporadic entries for the remainder of the year. On 3 June, performing The New Magdalen at Boston’s Park Theatre, she notes how pleased

201

Queen of Spasms

she is with the “immense house—Ladies in top gallery” and her two thousand dollars in earnings. She has concerns about her husband’s business investments, which she fears will fail, and chronic health problems, exacerbated by her morphine addiction. On 18 June, for example, she has been sick with “several hours of grinders” and “no instrument”: “FC went to Yonkers for one—but oh what a needle—ugh! FC would not look on while it was tried. He called it ‘too cruel.’”75 On 11 September, she opened a week’s engagement in Miss Multon at New York’s Grand Opera House. “Again a star” but “still an invalid,” in Odell’s words, she “could not play eight times a week.”76 On a happier note, she had taken up painting and was enjoying it. In January 1883, she received three thousand dollars for six performances of The New Magdalen at the Grand Opera House (week of 8 January) and Miss Multon (week of 19 January) at the Windsor Theatre. Her next New York engagement would be in April, when she appeared at Booth’s Theatre for two weeks with Tommaso Salvini—the father, not the son—then on a yearlong American tour.77 The play was one of Salvini’s signature pieces: La Morte Civile, advertised in New York as The Outlaw. He would perform Conrad, the title role, in Italian while Morris would act Rosalie, the outlaw’s long-suffering wife, in English. Newspapers tried to make it into a dramatic contest between two fabled “emotional” actors, even portraying them as forces of nature. Salvini, “the great dome of the Alps,” and Morris, “the chief mountain of New England,” would now be “side by side” on the stage and how they would look was “not easy to say.”78 According to the Herald, people worried that Morris would suffer by comparison. The verdict of the Spirit of the Times was that she did. In contrast to Salvini’s “broad, natural, refined art,” she seemed crude, “clumsy and ineffective”: “She stood with her arms folded below her breast and talked to Conrad in wiry, nasal tones, as if she were a Yankee housekeeper discussing who had broken the China teapot or killed the canary, instead of an Italian wife sacrificing her love, her reputation, her life for her child.” It dismissed the “suppressed emotion,” “the gasps and gulps and intertwined fingers upon which she relies” as mere “stage tricks.” Other critics, however, were kinder. George Edgar Montgomery of the New York Times actually preferred her performance. Whereas Salvini was obviously acting, Morris was believable, “human,” and as “genuine as life.” “The pathos” of her Rosalie “moved the audience deeply.”79 In her diary, Morris admits to being “frightened” about the opening performance on 16 April, her first at Booth’s since 1875, but her fears proved groundless. Even though the “house [was] bad,” and Salvini had a cold, she received a “magnificent basket of flowers . . . much applause & calls.” She sounds exasperated by the reviews the next day, particularly those that noted her vocal shortcomings: “Papers all praise and blame—praise acting—blame

202

Queen of Spasms

pronouncing—one would think I had not learned my letters yet.” A 24 April entry indicates that attendance had not improved and that her costar was not acting with customary energy: “Poor house but better than last night. Salvini decidedly not up to the mark—stuck twice and was generally flat.” Perhaps his lackluster performance affected the audience because even “the house seemed rain soaked.”80 Although Morris was to have played Emilia to his Othello, she did not appear in that role in New York. She returned to Shakespeare for the first time in eight years in Cincinnati where she participated in a weeklong dramatic festival that began on 30 April and featured Mary Anderson, John McCullough, Lawrence Barrett, James E. Murdoch, Nat C. Goodwin, and John Ellsler. Even the Spirit of the Times wrote that “as Emilia,” Morris “did herself justice.” 81 Reporter John C. Freund preferred the “impulsive and emotional” Morris to the “statuesquely cold beauty, Mary Anderson” but expressed some ambivalence about the former: “From all our actresses who possess representative power and intense sympathy as well, let me single out Clara Morris, that strange weird woman, so much belauded and so little understood, especially by that amiable nincompoop of a husband of hers, yclept ‘Freddy.’” He described her as “a woman who loses herself so thoroughly in her part that she carries you and herself so completely away that sometimes, in very excess, an anti-climax is produced.”82 This last statement is particularly interesting because it suggests how fine the line was between an emotionally riveting performance and one that became bathetic or grotesque. In the coming years as Morris’s acting hardened into something less appealing, she would find it difficult to convey heightened emotion believably. Increasingly, the “very excess” was what audiences would come to see. Morris closed the 1882–83 season with six performances of Article 47 at the Grand Opera House at the end of May. She began the next on 17 September with a week in Camille at Rankin’s Third Avenue Theatre. The Spirit of the Times noted “the theatre was overcrowded” and disapproved of her onstage behavior: “Clara Morris distinguished herself, as usual, during the performance . . . by ordering the lights to be turned up and saying ‘Thank you!’ to the prompter, during one of her serious scenes, and by audibly remarking, during another scene, ‘It is not a bit better!’”83 Such “peculiarities” had become as characteristic of a Morris performance as the long entr’acte breaks and, for a time, enhanced her idiosyncratic appeal. Even more significant is the choice of repertoire. Although she could not have known it in 1883, Morris would appear in just five other plays for the remainder of her stage career: Denise (1885), Renée de Moray (1887), Hélène (1889), Odette (1891), and Claire (1894).84 Only one would win favorable reviews; the

203

Queen of Spasms

rest would be humiliating failures as she sought, with increasing frustration, to find material that suited her and appealed to audiences. With the exception of these five—unfashionable before they even reached the stage—her offerings for the next two decades would be her past successes: Miss Multon, Article 47, Camille, Alixe, and The New Magdalen. As her appropriateness for them diminished and tastes changed, tolerance of her increasingly bizarre behavior would also decline among critics and theatergoers. Throughout the late 1880s and into the 1890s, Morris would be a traveling star of rapidly dwindling luster. As stock companies disappeared from the theatrical landscape, she could no longer appear as a guest artist supported by strong resident troupes. Like virtually every other actor performing in America, she had to rely on the “combination” touring system, the term used for star-led companies that hired supporting players as needed along the way. 85 Hers varied from season to season, reflecting the state of her fortune and reputation. As both declined, it became more difficult to recruit talented actors for the Clara Morris Company, formed in the early 1880s, or to find a competent manager for it. 86 Four men played that role at least some of the time for roughly a decade: Frank L. Goodwin, P. E. Wheeler, Edwin H. Price, and Jean H. Williams. 87 At other times, the Harriotts jointly managed—or mismanaged—Morris’s company. She was its artistic director, although that was not a title she used; her husband served as business manager. Aside from anecdotal evidence about her eccentricities (such as Vivia Ogden’s “Childish Recollections of Clara Morris”88), there is little information about where she found actors for her troupe, how much she paid them, or what the specific details of their service actually were. One exception is a group of contracts for “the traveling season of 1888–89” between Harriott and the people who would join his wife from 1 October 1888 for “a period of not more than 32 weeks”: Walter C. Kelley ($60 per week), Julius Kahn ($50), Frederic de Belleville “as leading support to Clara Morris and advertised as such on all printed material” ($200), M. W. Rawley as stage manager and actor ($50), Mattie Earle ($75), Octavia Allen ($55).89 De Belleville and Allen were still with her in 1890. Touring throughout the 1880s, she wrote sporadically in her diary. She often does not indicate where she is performing as one town blurs with another, one engagement with the next. In 1883, she chronicles her season selectively. On 3 November, she appeared in a matinee of The New Magdalen at an old haunt, Cleveland’s Academy of Music. She was happy that it was a beautiful day and that she was still a draw: “ladies waiting three hours before door opening time—House packed from top to bottom. . . . Many people after autographs Beautiful flowers—Play went well very well—would doubtless go for a full week.” On 15 November, it was Article 47 somewhere in Ohio: “House full full—all the

204

Queen of Spasms

people of note were present—many coming from other towns—the foot lights very bad—All seemed pleased to see me.” “Papers splendid—House was jammed & packed last night—Thank God,” she wrote on 16 November, already en route to St. Louis, her next destination. She does not say what she was performing that night. In December, conversely, she recorded the name of the plays but not where she was: “‘47’” (11), “‘Camille’” (12, 13), “‘Magdalen’” (14). Very “sick” on the Camille days, so ill she “nearly broke down,” she briefly considered having another actress replace her. “I believe she will never forgive me for not failing,” she muses.90 When 1884 begins, she is on a train somewhere between Galveston and Kansas City. It is her first time in Texas, indicative that she has to travel farther to find new and receptive audiences. For the entire year, there are only thirtytwo diary entries and some miscellaneous jottings, none of them particularly informative. She is performing the same plays but mentions only “47” and “Magdalen” by name. She notes appearances in Peoria, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Springfield (Ohio), and Louisville. Often sick, in “torturing pain” from “grinders” and other ailments, she is still dependent on morphine.91 Her husband continues to upset her: “F. so cross that I cry myself sick,” she writes on 6 January; on 14 March, “F. C. cross enough to make me cry”; on 27 April, “F. C. had row with train conductor.” For the most part, however, she is pleased with the reception she receives. Concerned that the “top gal[lery]” was “not full” for “47” in Peoria, she still got “close attention—considerable applaus [sic].” In Cleveland, “47” drew a “fine house—rather cold—but closely attentive many cards notes ect [sic].” She records gratefully in Cincinnati, “House packed—‘47’ greatest enthusiasm . . . —calls. flowers. cheers. Thank God for it all.” “Over $1500 worth of seats [were] sold in advance” for an April performance in Indianapolis; in May, an enthusiastic audience gave her Magdalen a standing ovation in Springfield.92 As always, she was relieved to see the season end and to return to the Pines, the home the Harriotts were in the process of purchasing, and her mother, Sarah Jane Morrison.93 Although she does not write often about Morrison, it is clear that she was a welcome presence in her life and the most important member of the small family Morris worked indefatigably to support. Morrison ran the household in her daughter’s absence and when she was incapacitated at home. She brought her flowers and coffee, read to her while she painted, and did errands for her in town as long as her own health permitted. She supervised the servants, with whom she argued frequently, and quarreled with Harriott if she found his behavior objectionable. Mother and daughter enjoyed taking carriage rides together and caring for the myriad pets—small dogs and caged birds—to which the childless Morris was deeply attached. As devoted as mother and

205

Queen of Spasms

daughter were to one another, there were occasional signs of friction, evidence that the volatile Morrison could be querulous and demanding. On one sunny Sunday in July, for example, Morris was upset when having given up her own horseback ride to go out with her mother, she found Morrison “very unkind in her speech as well as manner—tears tears; she makes me shed many but I love her God knows & I try my best.”94 On the other hand, considering the many afflictions from which Morris suffered and about which she complained on the pages of her diary for years, she undoubtedly tried her mother’s patience and endurance. However fraught their relationship (particularly if MacAdam’s charge of child abuse was accurate), however complicit Morrison may have been in Harriott’s exploitation of her daughter, Morris’s love for her mother was palpable, unwavering, and profoundly moving. After a restorative summer at the Pines, she was “shocked that September is here so soon” but understands the financial pressures that make touring essential. Thankful she “can work—that people offer” her work, she brought Miss Multon to the Third Avenue Theatre for a week at the end of the month.95 In October, it was Article 47 and Miss Multon in Boston and Brooklyn; on 6 December, the second act of Miss Multon in a benefit performance at the Olympic Theatre for John W. Norton, manager of the Grand Opera House, which fire had destroyed two weeks earlier. On 21 January, she was in Texas again, in “‘47’ of course” in Fort Worth. The following week in Memphis (“a nice wide awake city”), she found the “theatre very pretty in front” and was pleased to see the “house packed downstairs and in top gallery.”96 The New York Times reported on Thursday, 26 February, that her company’s season ended the previous Saturday in Des Moines, although Morris herself started for New York one week earlier. Her next diary entry (18 March) offers no explanation for the early departure but mentions that her dentist had “the new anesthetic cocaine,” which, ever the medical pioneer, she “tried with some slight success.” Morris actually had a compelling reason to reach New York: she and Daly were haggling over a play. This time it was Denise, his version of yet another Dumas fils work, adapted at her request. It would be a most unhappy collaboration, beginning with her objections to the script. On 30 March, she wrote, “F. C. sent Daly the very words I refused out & out to allow,” but at a meeting the next evening, she found the “play very little altered—will call it Denise—the original title.” They must have reached an accord, because rehearsals proceeded as planned, even though Morris was ill. When the production opened on 21 April, the critical consensus was that Denise was a disaster. The New York Herald declared, “No failure could be more complete.” The tedious play was partly to blame. A dated story of love, betrayal, and sacrifice, it featured unmemorable characters engaged in uneventful pursuits

206

Queen of Spasms

for the first two acts. Only midway through the third does interest quicken when the title character reveals she had an illegitimate child, who has since died—the doomed product of a sham marriage. In order to save her beloved’s younger sister from a similar fate, Denise shares her terrible secret. As she urges her betrothed to find someone more suitable, he exclaims, “I cannot! Denise! . . . (He holds out his arms.—She runs to him with a cry.) You only can make me happy.”97 For once, the errant-but-virtuous woman will not have to pay for her sins with death, madness. or a life of repentance. In a break with the societal double standard, she, too, will be allowed a happy future. The ending may have been a concession to modernity—after all, Nora’s door slam had begun its worldwide reverberation—but it did not assure the play’s success. Denise still was a creaky melodrama, complete with music swelling under important speeches and picturesque tableaux at the end of each act, with little to engage an audience. As the Herald observed, “There is not a line worth remembering, not a joke worth repeating, not a scene worth narrating, not a character worth analyzing. A deep gloom settled upon the audience at an early part of the evening, and it was not lifted at the end.” Daly was responsible for these dramaturgical defects, but Morris contributed to the play’s poor reception. At thirty-eight, she lacked the “beauty, distinction and personal charm” to play the twenty-three-year-old heroine convincingly. In the Herald’s damning words: All players must grow old. . . . In Clara Morris, one can detect the ruins of her former skill. Strange gleams of forgotten tenderness shoot from her eyes. Transports of passion still feebly shake her frame. But to the generations of play goers which has sprung up since she was last at Daly’s Theatre the spectacle is not wholly agreeable. The American stage has learned the grace of bearing and elegance of language since Miss Morris, with her uncouth ways and provincial burr, came out of the West.98 Odell agreed that her accent was “distressing” but found this assessment unduly harsh. Even the Spirit of the Times acknowledged her still-powerful impact on audiences, particularly on women: “Every other night we hear some woman has gone into hysterics at the confession scene, or has had to be carried out in a dead faint. Nobody but Clara Morris can produce these effects, and the people go to see how she affects her audiences.” Negative reviews notwithstanding, diary entries note sizeable and responsive audiences, which pleased her.99 When the production closed after three weeks, however, she and Daly were feuding, each no doubt blaming the other for its failure. She faulted him for not rewriting the fourth act as she had requested and refused to pay him the three thousand dollars he demanded for the right to take Denise on tour.

207

Queen of Spasms

Angrily denying that she had asked him for revisions, he refused to permit her to perform the play anywhere and threatened her with legal action if she ignored him. She did not, but this public squabble marked the end of their tumultuous professional relationship. They never worked together again.100 Morris was about to enter another difficult period in her personal and professional life. Touring in 1885 and 1886, she wrote infrequently. The few diary entries there are convey a strong sense of artistic decline. “Performance frightful,” she noted on 8 September 1885 but provides no details about where she was or what role she played. On 1 October, she was in Cincinnati in Multon; on 4 and 5 November, it was Alixe and Multon again—somewhere. On 27 November, she was in Wilmington in Magdalen. The house was “good,” but the theater was a “big barn—marble front—rot behind—such dirt, such scenes,” its decrepit state indicative of the inferior venues in which she appeared with increasing frequency. Her 1885 diary concludes on 19 December with a somber reminder that poor health and marital difficulties still plagued her: “very lame & side bad. . . . F. C & I colided [sic] about his secrecy about my business affairs—He to bed—I tears & prayers.” Her problems continue in 1886. “Fred makes my life hell,” she wrote in May. In August, up all night and in great pain, she took a “heavy dose” of morphine, slept into the late afternoon, and then was “so ashamed. . . . I feel robbed of a whole day.”101 At least she was working. After a week performing Miss Multon, Camille, and Alixe to large out-of-town houses, she brought them to New York on 8 February. She was the first attraction at the newly renovated Windsor Theatre in the Bowery and, in Odell’s view, was “still a luminary, though of somewhat diminished brilliance.”102 “America’s Greatest Actress” next went to Baltimore with the same plays (although she canceled a performance of Miss Multon due to illness). Back in New York in March at Niblo’s Garden and Brooklyn’s Criterion Theatre, she added Article 47 and The New Magdalen to the rotation. Although the diary shows her seeking new material during her long summer break, she began the 1886–87 season at Boston’s Hollis Street Theatre in September with familiar fare: Article 47 (Monday, Thursday), Miss Multon (Tuesday, Friday), The New Magdalen (Wednesday), and Camille (Saturday matinee). The only variations were the omission of Alixe and the presentation of Engaged by Goodwin’s Dramatic Company on Saturday evening because “the Distinguished Emotional Actress” preferred to play only once a day.103 After engagements in Elizabeth (New Jersey), Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., and Erie and Scranton (Pennsylvania), she returned to New York’s Union Square and Windsor theaters in October with the same four plays. Odell, who could not conceal his disappointment, declared that she was not as “all compelling” as she once was: “Clara Morris, acclaimed in the 70s and earliest 80s as the

208

Queen of Spasms

greatest American actress had latterly become a traveling start with an almost unbreakable repertoire with her mannerisms hardened into something less appealing than of yore. But,” he was quick to add, “her tears still flowed copiously in her moments of extreme emotion,” and she drew audiences. Even the Spirit of the Times grudgingly admitted, “Some people like the acting of Miss Morris, and cry over it and declare that it shows genius.”104 According to her diary, she was playing to large and responsive houses everywhere. Ill health, however, continued to plague her. In Chicago in November, she performed three acts of Camille and then had another actress replace her for the last two, “& this without notice of any sort to public.” This volume of her diary ended on 6 December with a peculiar entry, probably attributable to morphine and exhaustion: “Surprised Freds telling me the day shows I’ve lost lost a day. Yes really! Od thing to loose [sic].”105 During 1886, Clara Morris was “ill, but acting; now she is ill and not acting,” the Spirit of the Times reported on New Year’s Day.106 By February 1887, however, she was touring once again. “Weak and unfit for work,” she performed Camille and Miss Multon to “packed” houses and was pleased the Saturday matinee was standing room only, with “people sitting on the floor between acts.” Yet, the same entry also provides unintentionally ironic contrast between the lovely weather and her abysmal health: “Fine day. Limbs swollen so—Abscesses [from needles] all in full play, am very sick, feverish, no sleep.” On 13 March, she arrived in Los Angeles but said more about the attempted robbery of her jewels than Camille. On Thursday, 24 March, it was Article 47 in Salt Lake City, where for the first time she noted “the house not very good.” Miss Multon drew a “big house” the next night, but only a “hyper in the neck” enabled her to perform. Her husband exacerbated her distress. “FC has won something not very far from hate by his conduct Now he is a bit kinder,” she wrote on Saturday.107 In London (Ontario) and Toronto (“my birthplace”) in April, New York again in May, her repertoire did not vary. Her diary records only the titles of the same four plays, suggesting how monotonous she found their repetition. She did not act again until October 1887 when she appeared in Renée de Moray, which she had performed in California in March. It would remain in her repertoire for the rest of her stage career. An adaptation of Adolphe d’Ennery’s Le Martyre by Boston journalist Clinton Stuart, it was a welcome success. It offered the kind of role she knew audiences expected her to play: one in which she shed copious tears and allowed them to weep along with her. As she explains in The Life of a Star, Le Martyre looked “promisingly teary,” with its story of “a daughter’s self-sacrifice to save a beloved mother, whose youthful sin is about to find her out.” Notwithstanding “the improbability of the play,” which demands that its heroine leave her husband, child, and home to save her

209

Queen of Spasms

mother’s already tarnished reputation, Morris decided to “risk it all” on Renée de Moray, a title her manager had suggested. (She had no alternative, because she had been threatened with legal action if she called it The Martyr.108) The themes of “mother-love” and self-sacrifice certainly would have resonated with her. Reviews of the production, which opened at the Grand Opera House on 20 October, were mainly positive with critics recognizing the synchronicity of actress and role. The Herald wrote that Morris had “found another character well-suited to her art and great emotional talents.” After noting that the performance “was marked by all the actress’s peculiarities of style and temperament,” the Times acknowledged that she made many in the “packed” house weep and received calls “to the front after each of the acts in which Renée was visible.” She was especially pleased with “the big one” at the end of the fourth act.109 Critics may have found the play absurd, but audiences enjoyed it and appreciated the happy ending. Unlike the doomed heroines whose suffering Morris delineated so graphically, Renée’s reward for heroic, if improbable, self-sacrifice was forgiveness and reconciliation. On tour in the northeast in November and December, there are only occasional notes in her diary about where (Boston, Brooklyn, Reading, Allentown) or what (47, Renée, Alixe) she performs. Three entries are somewhat less perfunctory. In Brooklyn on 5 November, she was pleased with the “splendid house” for “Magdalen.” In Reading on 30 November, however, Alixe played to a “bad bad house utterly stupid—noise,” and the next night in Allentown the “filthy dirty” theater caused her to fear for her costumes. “Oh the poor pretty new dresses,” she wails.110 After a holiday respite at home, she was back on tour in January. Billed hyperbolically as “America’s greatest actress,” she brought Renée to Boston on Monday, 9 January, for a weeklong engagement at the Globe Theatre. Relieved that rain, snow, and sleet did not keep people away on Thursday and Friday, she was ill on Saturday but managed to give two performances: to an “immense house” at the matinee and to one that was “almost as big” at night. She was delighted to receive a “beautiful basket of roses and orchids” from an “unknown friend.”111 Renée dominated this tour. Except for two performances each of Article 47 and Alixe, there is no indication in the diary that she appeared in anything else. From Bay City (Michigan) on 17 January to Indianapolis on 19 March—with East Saginaw, Grand Rapids, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cleveland, and three visits to Chicago in between—it is Renée. For the most part, houses are large and audiences receptive. In St. Louis on Valentine’s Day, she noted that the morning papers are “very kind.” En route to Indianapolis on 18 March, however, her mood has darkened: “Very sick and sorely troubled—I fear some approaching worry about business I don’t know why—but it would be only courtsy [sic] for Fred to let me have a little knowledge of my own affairs.”112 210

Queen of Spasms

Morris returned to New York with Renée for four weeks: opening at the Fifth Avenue on 2 April for two of them, then at the Grand Opera House (23 April) and Niblo’s Garden (7 May). There was a decided change in the critical response to these appearances, as even Morris enthusiasts noted her deterioration. Odell could not conceal his dismay: “Clara Morris, once a devouring flame of emotional acting, was in 1888 but a mannered shell of what she had been. . . . I once admired Clara Morris intensely, but, in 1888, her mannerisms made me sad.”113 A theatergoer who saw her first performances in Article 47, Alixe, The Sphinx, and Miss Multon recalled having rushed to see her Renée de Moray “in feverish anticipation.” When she “came upon the stage,” she was not the person he had remembered so vividly. “My Clara Morris became dead to me,” he wrote, although he was quick to add, “But she is still great.” Critic C. T. Copeland found her wildly inconsistent. Deeply affecting in the first half of the play, she “lost her hold of the part” in the second, with “exaggeration and even rant” dominating many of her scenes. Nevertheless, she still had the ability to illuminate “some meaningless waste of words . . . with a flash of insight or comprehension that leaves the spectator dazzled with its brilliance.”114 Predictably, the Spirit of the Times was most damning. After years of innuendo, it finally mentioned morphine. However veiled the reference, its meaning was clear: Nothing new is to be said of Clara Morris, in Renée, at the Fifth Avenue, except that her engagement, this time, is for a fortnight, and that those who neglected to see her as the Martyr for fifty cents may now pay a dollar and a half for the privilege. She cries and makes her audiences cry; she has long waits between the Acts and she makes her audiences wait; she is the same Clara Morris and attracts the same admirers of stage hysteria and disease. It is as impossible to improve her by criticism as it is to reform the morphia habit by sensible advice. We can only wonder and pity and pass on.115 The downward spiral continued, with Harriott’s infidelity compounding Morris’s distress.116 On tour in the fall after an illness-plagued summer, she still has drawing power, but her skills seem greatly diminished. At the Grand Opera House in October, Renée de Moray is the offering once again, but Odell finds it “hollow and artificial”: “Emotion burnt up, and art not quite perfect, what result could be expected?” It is “a sad commentary on an actress who had once been so moving and thrilling.” For the rest of the year and on into 1889, towns and engagements blurred as one “dirty” theater was indistinguishable from another, houses fluctuated between “good” and “poor,” and work was drudgery. She mentioned Harlem, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Titusville, Oil City, Warren, Beaver Falls, Youngstown, Chillicothe, Dayton, Richmond, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Macon, Augusta, Charleston, Mobile, Brunswick, Columbia, Montgomery, New Orleans, Houston, Williamsburg, and Newark—the obscurity of 211

Queen of Spasms

some of the names suggesting how far she had to go to find audiences for her stale offerings. It is always what Odell calls “her limited repertoire of emotional heroines”: Renée, Magdalen, Multon, and Camille.117 Finally, there was a new play. On 29 October, Morris opened at the Union Square in Martha Morton’s Hélène, which had previously failed at the Fifth Avenue Theatre.118 Other than noting she was “studying” the first two acts on 20 October, she said nothing about it in her diary until 23 November when she wrote tellingly, “Hell. . . . Helene twice.”119 The two-week engagement was a disaster, savaged by the New York critics. In “Convulsions and Clara Morris—Both Appear in ‘Helene’ at the Union Square Theatre,” the New York Herald mocked her histrionics as “stage horrors,” “agonizings” that would be alarming if they were not so ludicrous. Dismissing the play as “preposterous rubbish,” the Times described Morris’s “curious theatrical method” in a way that made her sound drugged:

Drawing of Morris and her husband, Frederick C. Harriott, in an article by “Margery Daw,” unidentified newspaper, 30 August 1891. The only extant image of Harriott, the serenity of the pose belies their extremely complicated, deeply troubled relationship. Clipping Files, Clara Morris, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

212

Queen of Spasms

She speaks many lines of inflated sentiment in the strange tones of a person talking in a dream. Her face assumes a great variety of startling expressions. Her body and limbs frequently tremble as if she were in danger of spasms. She indulges in frantic outbursts of emotion, and often paces the stage in a strange, wild, restless way that suggest the movements of an untamed animal in captivity. . . . In such passages as the absurd lottery scene . . . she is dreadfully in earnest. Her delineation of the frantic agony of the woman at the close of that episode might have been studied in a hospital or madhouse.120 She has moved from idiosyncratic to freakish, yet, as “exaggerated” and “overdone” as the Times found her, it also acknowledged her “hold upon audiences of ordinary intelligence” who remained “deeply impressed by her performance.” The Spirit of the Times, however, had nothing positive to say about Morris who made “an absurdly improbable play” into an “absurdly impossible” one. Instead of the “young and lovely woman” the author intended, “on walks a stout matron, badly dressed, who talks through her nose with a Yankee twang and looks uglier than Bernhardt says she was!” Arguing that “aged horses” are not allowed to run in races indefinitely, the paper urged her to retire.121 The “Empress of Emotional Acting”122 did not take that advice but forged on in the same plays. Article 47, Camille, Miss Multon, The New Magdalen, and Renée de Moray run mantra-like through her diary for 1890–91, years in which she traveled extensively throughout the country. She made another trip to the west (Montana, Washington, Oregon, California, and Utah), went as far south as Memphis and Nashville, and returned to some of her usual stops (Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis). Physical pain, morphine injections, financial concerns, and the emotional distress Harriott causes were recurrent themes. She was upset by the deteriorating quality of the actors she could afford to recruit, angry that one quit over a salary dispute, ashamed that another appeared drunk on stage, forgot his lines, and wandered off.123 That she was playing in inferior venues is clear from entries in which she railed about “filth” or calls the theater a “hole.” Sometimes, houses were “immense,” “packed” with “superb” and enthusiastic audiences, such as the one that enjoyed Camille in San Francisco on 10 November 1890 and rewarded her with “big” calls and a standing ovation. Others, however, were “poor,” “cold,” and unresponsive. In Los Angeles on 24 November, for example, the “light house” disappointed her. In Salt Lake City on Christmas Day, she was in excruciating pain but completed the performance. She worried about it afterward: “Went to theatre screeming [sic] with agony How I got through I dont know. am now desperate with fear of having done bad work.”124 It was Sardou’s Odette, hardly a radical departure. As Odell observed,

213

Queen of Spasms

“She had played many women with shady pasts, and Odette was but another of that genre.” Although it failed to impress critics when she brought it to New York, it remained in her repertoire for the next three years.125 The litany continued in 1891 with one significant difference. Morris rejoiced in April when the season was “safely over,” her “debts paid.” She enjoyed her mother’s company at home in Riverdale during the summer. In August, she felt “very blue as the going away time draws near.”126 Yet, her life was about to change once again with the publication of her first article, “Reflections of an Actress,” in the September North American Review.127 She would continue to perform into the next century, but the eight-page piece would signal her reinvention as a writer and the beginning of a second robust career.

214

10 Diary of a

W

orking Actress

MORRIS’S LIFE FOR THE next fourteen years was a study in paradox. Although comparatively few actresses remained in the theater beyond age thirtyfive,1 she worked harder than ever and was still touring in her fifties, even as her health declined. Her acting career continued its downward spiral, yet she emerged as an illustrious representative of the profession, writing and speaking with cultural authority. A champion of domesticity in the many articles she produced touting the compatibility of marriage with an acting career,2 her diary reveals the ongoing challenges of her own strained relationship. The subject of numerous illustrated features about her offstage life emphasizing a love of the outdoors, she actually spent much of her time encapsulated in a private train car whizzing about the country or at home alternating between her sickbed and the desk from which she pursued her new career as an author. Morris’s first article is typical of much of the work she would publish in newspapers and such magazines as Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, McClure’s, Scribner’s, Current Literature, and The Theatre. “Reflections of an Actress” draws on personal experience to comment on the acting profession in general and, more obliquely, on the public it fascinates. It begins with a homely image, likening an actor at morning rehearsal to a caterpillar, at rest in the afternoon to a chrysalis, and in the evening to a “many-tinted, broadwinged” butterfly (although she sees herself as “a big, blundering good-natured moth, strong of wing and square of head”). She reminds her readers that actors are ordinary people but understands the curiosity they arouse.3 She mentions her own inventive work in Article 47 and Miss Multon, explaining that she based Cora’s madness on women she observed in an asylum and Sarah Multon’s heart disease on the patient Dr. Seguin forced up a flight of stairs. She discusses her engagement in a performance’s climactic moments, the validation she finds in audience response, and the ultimate mystery of the creative process, stating in transcendent language, “I forget myself and pass into another form of being.”4 That tantalizing image brings the article to a close. 215

Diary of a Working Actress

Morris does not say what led her to submit this article for publication. Presumably, however, she realized that the popularization of magazine journalism and the proliferation of periodicals had created a vast new audience among the American public, a readership hungry for information about actors’ personal and professional lives.5 America’s obsession with celebrity had begun, and Morris was eager to capitalize on it. At the same time, she was not ready to leave the stage. The 1892 diary records her most extensive tour to date. From January through April, she traveled in the Northeast and Midwest, the variety of the venues a striking contrast with the consistency of the repertoire. It was the same three plays—Odette, Camille, and Renée—in constant rotation, with an occasional performance of Article 47. “What fun acting is,” she cracked after appearing in Camille in Indianapolis on 23 January. “Sorry the play should be Renée—I do hate it so,” she confessed a month later in Madison, Wisconsin. Monotony was not the only issue. Transportation was often grueling, particularly in the increasingly remote areas in which she now had to perform. En route from Baraboo, Wisconsin, to Dubuque, Iowa, for example, snow caused a four-hour delay. The car was hot, and the “motion almost unbearable.” Myriad ailments plagued her: a sprained thumb, fever, chills, “grinders,” searing pain, a spinal attack, rheumatism. She was so sick in Duluth, Minnesota, she coughed her way through a performance of Odette, with a doctor who “gave medicine every 10 minutes” waiting backstage. The tour’s nadir occurred in March during a performance of Camille in Louisville: A not soon to be forgotten night—I was in a state of semi unconsciousness for two whole acts Some times could not speak for quite a while Dr Yandell got there at end of 2d act. I could not stand up then—He could hardly find a pulse Gave medicine brought me up a little—more onstage—still I felt as if I were dying—at end of 3rd act gave hypodermic of morphia—acted like a charm—4th and 5th acts all right, But oh what will the people think of me—no wonder I cry with shame and grief.6 Fortunately, she was “much better” the next day, relieved that Odette “seemed to please,” although the house was “light.” The primitive condition of several theaters upset her. In a Minnesota venue she did not identify, she complained, “Cold of stage beyond belief, men shiver and swear Heavy curtains wave—papers are blown from the table. . . . I feel this theatre has done me a serious hurt.” She called Peoria, Illinois, “a horror of a place” with a theater to match. Despite the “good house,” the “theatre [was] awful—filthy dirty—stage badly lighted, immense great torn place in floor cloth right at foot lights.” In Massillon, Ohio, she had “never seen such a dangerous

216


place for human beings to gather in. . . . 59 steps in all . . . steep, narrow, narrow steps as well as staircases turning again and again And then the filth—oh.”7 The performance of Renée in Geneva, Pennsylvania, on 24 March was noteworthy for a different reason: it was her husband’s acting debut with the company. Having learned late in the afternoon that one of the actors was ill (“morphia etc”), Harriott, long a fixture on her tours, asked if he could replace him. Morris agreed to it, writing afterward, “He really was quite surprisingly perfect in the lines, and had he spoken a bit louder he would have made a real good character of it. . . . It was a big job and he did well.”8 Encouraged by his first success, Harriott began to perform more frequently, especially as it became difficult to recruit and retain capable actors for the troupe. The tour ended on 2 April with “‘Renée’ twice” in Troy, New York. It was a “dreadful night—Heat, noise—worry,” but Morris was relieved that most of her company would “come back next season” and that “this is the last of it for at least a while.” At home in Riverdale the next day, she was thankful her mother was there to welcome her. She spent a quiet summer planting flowers, gathering guinea-hen eggs and strawberries, embroidering, entertaining visitors, enjoying her horses, dogs, and birds. A few signs reveal all was not idyllic. On 13 May, she wrote that she “had to speak [to Fred] about checkbook—Its [sic] cruel to force me to beg for a little of my own hard earnings.” She was concerned when he did not come home one night in July, dismayed in August that he was “very cross, very unkind,” treated her “cruelly,” and made her cry.9 She suffered from “grinders,” rheumatism, and other illnesses. She was upset when her coachman suffered a fatal fall. Always searching for new material, she sought Palmer’s permission to perform Rose Michel, J. Steele Mackaye’s adaptation of a popular French melodrama, which ran successfully at the Union Square Theatre during the 1875–76 season with Rose Eytinge in the title role.10 She expressed interest in Eva (1889), a German play by Richard Voss, which her manager, Edwin Price, brought to the Pines. She thought it was a “gem” but hated the translation and decided to revise it. “Hard job to arrange it I can tell you,” she wrote on 5 June but said more in her diary about “Gentleman Jim” Corbett’s defeat of John L. Sullivan for the heavyweight boxing title than she did about her adaptation.11 Although she dreaded the start of another season, she was touring again by October. This time she began in Colorado and worked her way back across the country, ending in New York. She added Claire, her version of Eva, to the familiar rotation and was encouraged by the audience response: “Fine house—and much enthusiasm,” she wrote on 15 November. “Thank the good God People speak wonderfully of ‘Claire.’ . . . I wonder if I may hope for it a future! I suppose only Frisco can really tell—But we are to do it rest of week instead of ‘Rennie’ [sic].”

217


Health problems occurred with predictable regularity. At the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colorado, a picturesque mining town in the Rockies at an elevation of 10,430 feet, the altitude so affected her breathing that she had to unfasten her dress “from top to waist right on stage in order to finish [my] 2nd act speech,” and the theater manager complimented her on her “nerve & endurance.”12 “Wretchedly ill,” her “throat frightful,” she still performed in Salt Lake City. En route to Los Angeles on 13 December, she was injured in a railway accident, the result of a brakeman’s error. Her car “became uncoupled & rushed madly down a mountain road” into a freight train.13 Yet she appeared in Odette that night and Claire the next, even though she had a “heavy cold” and could “hardly speak.” In San Diego, where she admired the handsome, comfortable, “beautifully lighted” theater, she was so ill she took “medicine every 10 minutes”: “Dr gave me a hyperdermic too—between my shoulders—spine, head, lungs, throat Oh what a mess.” On the eighteenth—a Sunday and thus not a performance day—it was “torture—medicine every 15 minutes”; on Monday, she went to the theater “with cries and groans of intolerable agony,” “lay on floor & screamed aloud,” and “was led about stage with eyes closed, water streaming from them.” Harriott reluctantly cancelled the Tuesday performance in Oakland, California, when it was clear that even the doctor’s injection brought no relief. Morris acted on Wednesday, motivated perhaps by the irate theater manager, who threatened “to arrest every one Prevent leaving state etc if ‘I was sick tonight.’” She did not indicate the role she played but noted she got “calls & 3 receptions,” as well as a “big hyperdermic after the performance.”14 “How weary I am of this airless box,” she wrote on New Year’s Day en route to Portland, Oregon, where she performed Article 47, Odette, Camille, Renée, Claire, and Rose Michel to large, receptive audiences.15 She spent a good deal of time in that box over the next three months as she zigzagged home. January brought stops in Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, many of them one-night stands. In Chicago, she was pleased by the response to Claire (“double calls over & over again”) but troubled by sciatica and intestinal issues. “My suffering is dreadful My looks enough to frighten any one,” she noted on 30 January. Two days later, distressed about finances, she wrote, “Tears & trouble—opened letter by mistake—more debts of Freds. Oh my dear pitiful God What am I to do[?] I am actually penniless. . . . I played to over 6000 dollars last week & not one cent has he given me—I am wild—This is eating me up. . . . The money loss is awful but the cruel cruel deception—the lies—I don’t know what to do.”16 From Indiana in February to Ohio, West Virginia, and upstate New York in March, the litany continued. There was another train accident, less serious than the first. Theaters were dirty, even dangerous, including one in Akron,

218


Ohio, where she had performed “as a girl” and which, to her surprise, had not changed at all. Syracuse, New York, brought a “dirty and old and dark” theater and a “rather light house” for Claire; in Auburn, New York, the audience for Renée was larger but unresponsive: “the hardest . . . to play to I ever saw No call & a good house which added to the infamy. When there was a faint bit of applause it was laughably long after the action which caused it.” If Morris wondered whether her stale material was to blame, she did not express that thought in her diary. “Very little applause,” she noted in Binghamton, New York, but at least she got “calls & people said they were pleased,” with the Clipper commenting, “She played to good business.”17 After stops in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., Morris concluded the season in late April with a weeklong engagement at Brooklyn’s Grand Opera House, appearing in Article 47, Renée, Camille, Odette, and Claire. She was relieved the critics were kind (“Papers beautiful . . . New York papers too”)18 and looked forward to another restorative summer in Riverdale. First, however, she had to prepare her speech for the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago. Her selection—along with Georgia Cayvan, Julia Marlowe, and Helena Modjeska—reflected the stature she still had in the field. Characteristically, she did not indicate who gave her the honor or how she felt about receiving it but simply wrote, “In agony of anxiety all day—Read over my speech” on Wednesday, 17 May. The next day, she was “so happy to be free” yet displeased a newspaper had printed her remarks with “many mistakes of course.” She did not describe the wonders of the Chicago World’s Fair, other than to say the “White City” was “very beautiful and impressive now.” By Sunday, she was at home.19 The diary reveals her effort to find fresh material. “I read ‘The Chain of Vice’ again,” she wrote on 1 May. “It has a play in it, I think.” It also shows her enjoying painting, gardening, churchgoing, and her mother’s company, but fretting about her health, the purchase of a piano, the weather, her household staff, and Harriott’s erratic behavior.20 Occasionally, events of national significance appear on its pages. The 7 June entry notes the death of Edwin Booth. “Thus ends a sad and weary life,” Morris reflected. “Great actor—unhappy man! Poor sad somber Booth.” Two days later, she was struck by the irony that Ford’s Theater had collapsed on the day of his funeral, “killing 23 & maiming many. Strange how that man seemed to be bound to that horrible event of 1865,” she mused. “Even on the last day—its shadow falls across his coffin.”21 She was back at work by mid-September. Although she did not say how or when manager Price recruited her troupe, she wrote that they rehearsed “‘Renée’ & one act—last—of ‘Camille’” on the twenty-fifth and that she “Gave them sandwhiches [sic] & bottled beer—pickles crackers—fruit etc for a lunch.”22 On

219


1 October, after a day of “Packing—and misery in general,” she began a grueling tour that would take her to Bangor, Maine, through parts of the Midwest, then south as far as New Orleans and up to Cincinnati, before returning to Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Baltimore in April.23 During the tour, Morris would play in sixty-six cities and towns in all, with a break at home over Christmas and New Year’s. Her diary notes most of them, with entries appearing on a regular basis. Her writing style, while never lyrical, had become more fluent and readable. She described her daily experience in greater detail so that she not only recorded where she was and what she performed but also remarked on the state of the theaters (often primitive), audiences (unpredictable), company members (inconsistent), and train travel (exhausting). Moreover, although she did not address it directly, her comments reflect the devastating impact the Panic of 1893—the century’s fifth economic disaster—had already had on the nation. The New York Stock Market had crashed on 27 June, and by fall, the situation was dismal. Thousands of business failures and bank closures, widespread unemployment, violent labor strikes, antitrust debates, currency wars over the gold and silver standards, and farmers’ revolts would all be part of the four-year depression that affected the entire country and hit the West particularly hard.24 “Business here has been something awful they say,” she wrote in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 2 October. The next day in Haverhill, a city north of Boston whose major industry was shoe manufacturing, she noted, “Shoe shops shut since June—want & suffering great.” Her focus, however, remained more myopic. She bruised her elbow at each exit from the “bad [dressing] room” in Worcester. There was a “good house” for Odette, but her leading man disappointed: “Mr Glendening [sic] stuck dead in 3d act . . . —awful slow very stiff.” Even worse, although she had directed him to look at her in important scenes, he faced the audience instead, and she actually “had to take hold of him & to walk him to his positions.” In Haverhill, he “bruised [her] black and blue.” She hurt herself in the train car “trying to show Fred how to catch [her] in ‘Camille’—Bad too.”25 The Clipper reported that Morris “played to good business” in Camille at the Opera House in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on Monday, 9 October. Nevertheless, she found the audience “dull,” was harassed by an “autograph fiend,” and was “wild with shame” because her maid “broke string in neck of low dress—also left skirt unhooked.” In Chelsea, Massachusetts, on Tuesday, Mrs. Gaylord was “awful” and the house “light,” but the audience was “pleased pleased at ‘Claire.’” In Taunton the next day, the unscripted drama threatened to upstage Odette. She had little patience with actors who failed to deliver the performance she expected. As their director in all but title, she coached them on their speech

220


and movement, blocked scenes as she had for years, and insisted that they meet her playing standards. If they did not, she could be harsh: Mrs Hampton was a scandal & shame in last act—Ruined it, made me almost forget words—I pulled her to knees for the kiss—When I spoke at fall—she warned me not to pinch her Told her was accident[,] asked when she proposed to learn the act. [She] said “When I knew my business,” snapped fingers in my face, shrieked yelled that [I] should get someone else, etc. I shall.26 “The youling [sic] little cat” failed to make amends for this breach of decorum, so Morris told her manager it was “an apology or go.” When one was not forthcoming by Saturday, Price gave the offending Mrs. Hampton and her husband their notice. “Poor little man,” Morris wrote, “I am sorry for him.”27 The Clipper reported that Morris had “excellent houses 12, 13, 14” at the Providence Opera House for Camille, Odette, Claire, and Renée.28 According to the diary, that was true of opening night but not the others. The recession was taking its toll. “House not so good,” she noted, “7000 men out on strike & oh two banks failed yesterday awful awful.” In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, sandwiched inconveniently between Bangor and Portland, Maine29 (where she was furious she had to play in City Hall with stock painted backdrops rather than a real set), she got a “Bad bad report from Boston—Business awful there.” The dire predictions proved wrong, however, and she enjoyed her week at the Grand Opera House in Camille, Renée, Claire, and Article 47. The large audiences were receptive, the critics laudatory. Even Claire received “splendid notices in all papers. . . . I am amazed,” she wrote on 2 November, although she did not think the audience “really liked it.”30 From Boston, it was on to Chicago’s Empire Theatre for a week with the same repertoire. Her knee hurt and she had a bad cold, but she was happy with the large houses, enthusiastic receptions, and the knowledge that voters had just defeated Democrats virtually everywhere in the nation, giving Republicans control of Congress. During a performance of “47” on 9 November, she experienced technical difficulties when the newfangled electric lights “went out entirely during mad scene while [I] wrote & read letter & a lot more.” Fortunately, two jets of gas were lighted until the electricity “came back,” and she “never lost one word.” The Clipper reported that Morris had “the best advance sale of the year, at advanced prices” at Foster’s Opera House in Des Moines on 16 November. After stops in Sioux City (19), Council Bluffs (20), and Hastings, Iowa (21), she was in Lincoln, Nebraska, in Camille on 22 November. The house was “packed,” the “Gov and full staff present—in uniform Ladies in full dress,” she wrote afterward but “Feet so bad could barely hobble about, I am so shamed.”

221


The performance was reviewed by a University of Nebraska student, who freelanced as a drama critic for the Nebraska State Journal and the Lincoln Courier and would eventually become the state’s most noted novelist. Nineteen-year-old Willa Cather, already known for her trenchant coverage of touring companies, praised Morris’s “great genius” in an illuminating review of surprising complexity: Better work has never been done by any actress in any country. . . . Clara Morris acts by feeling alone. One can see her gestures and poses have never been practiced before a mirror. Sometimes they are almost grotesque in their violence, and her body writhes as though it were being literally torn asunder to let out the great soul within her. “Camille” is an awful play. Clara Morris plays only awful plays. Her realism is terrible and relentless. It is her art and mission to see all that is terrible and painful and unexplained in life. It is a dark and gloomy work that has been laid upon more geniuses than one. But after all is said there is so little said where so much is felt, so much reverenced. . . . Art and science may make a creation perfect in symmetry and form, but it is only the genius which forever evades analysis that can breathe into it a living soul and make it great.31 Although the acting was hardly as unpracticed and intuitive as she assumed, Cather’s critique shows that Morris had not yet lost the ability to move a spectator, particularly a first-time spectator, with the physical and emotional power of her performance. Her diary entry the following day mentions a “good house,” a “dull as dishwater audience,” and a “great notice about Camille.” It may well have been Cather’s. The next three weeks would be difficult. In Topeka, Kansas, a man named Crawford, angry about a broken engagement four years earlier, sent a sheriff to stop her car and keep her from playing in St. Joseph, Missouri, on Saturday. She managed to get to “St. Joe” on schedule, but the stress of touring was taking its toll. “I dare not think of more than one day at a time or I should give up—I can’t describe it!” she wrote in Pittsburgh on 3 December, where she was appearing for a week in the usual fare—Camille, Article 47, Renée, and Claire. Cleveland was the exception. Although sick (“could barely stand—can only walk two or three steps at one time, Morphia!”), she was delighted with the ovations and multiple “calls before curtain” she received throughout the week and called the engagement “great.” Nevertheless, her desire to return home was paramount. When she did, at nearly 2:00 a.m. on 18 December, her relief

222


was palpable: “I am here—Thank the good God for it Here safe in my own bed and can rest a bit.”32 According to the Clipper’s bulletins from the road, business everywhere was suffering on account of the nation’s economic collapse. It is a tribute to the drawing power Morris still had that she was able to fill most of the theaters in which she played. The Clipper wrote that she “appeared to excellent business” in Article 47 and Camille in Indianapolis in January, and had “good houses” during her week in St. Louis at the end of February. Her diary confirms those reports, although it also reveals that she was so sick in Indianapolis (“5 chills— vomiting—high fever—and spinal attack”), she needed “3 injections morphia” administered by a doctor to complete the first performance and “a hyper for 4th act” to finish the second. Between these engagements was a swing through the south—including Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi—where audiences found her repertoire less appealing, and the theaters were a challenge. “Meanest theatre in the world,” she complained in Charleston. “Had to buy the nails used to fix scene They would not pay 3 cents for lamp shade for play.” Jackson, Mississippi, was even worse: “theatre a horror of filth—a dangerous pig sty—Had a red hot stove in my [dressing] room—and bitter cold on stage.” In Greenville, Mississippi, she was surprised to find a “clean theatre” until she learned that a man from Cleveland, a “northern manager,” not an incompetent southerner, ran it.33 Problems with company members continued, particularly with the recalcitrant Glendenning. After a performance of Camille in Indianapolis, he was “making more demands. . . . —‘Wishes to make some experiments’—he had better speak his own lines—he has blundered shamefully in 5th.” In New Orleans, she “had to rehearse” him for Odette and was annoyed by his mistakes during the first act of Article 47: “He was furious because I asked him to take my hand—old old business—Said behind my back to women—I was an ‘unfair actress’ Well—he is the first man or woman who has made that discovery.” Relations did not improve in Mobile, Alabama, where she objected to his performance in Odette: “Mr G must be spiteful I hate to think it, but he is not sick He is ‘explosive’ still in 2d act, but simply crawls through 3d act—It is an outrage—such an exhibition.” There were other offenders, too: “Miss Ford must be spoken to—just walked through part [in Renée]—Mr Hutchinson made many errors this his second night.” “Vining awful—the people laugh at him.”34 Southern audiences were less responsive in general than northern, and Morris often expressed contempt for them. During Camille in New Orleans, she remarked on their “dull bovine faces.” They were “noisey” in Natchez, Mississippi, and interrupted the play “by ill advised applause.” In Memphis, the

223


house was “poor,” the audience “awful,” and the “calls like pulling teeth.” The house was “fair” in Nashville, but the audience “cold as stones—calls so mean” she “did not wish to take them.”35 Back in more congenial St. Louis at the end of February, she “shook like a leaf” during Article 47 because “Glendenning [was] drunk” on stage,” always anathema to her. “1st scene was awful—Hutchingson [sic] almost as bad—the beasts.” For the most part, however, performances went smoothly with “fine,” “good,” even “surprisingly good” houses and “delighted” audiences. In Cincinnati, according to the Clipper, she played to “splendid business” for the week of 12–17 March. Two days later, she was in New York to deal with legal matters and prepare for her weeklong engagements at Brooklyn’s Grand Opera House and the Fourteenth Street Theatre.36 She performed the same repertoire in both theaters—Camille, Article 47, Claire, and Renée–with The New Magdalen added to the familiar rotation. According to a playbill, it was “an original dramatization” by Morris.37 In his coverage of those engagements, Odell referred to her disparagingly as “a fading luminary. . . . It was more than twenty years since Clara Morris had swept New York in her first whirlwind success.” Morris did not say much about either one, although she was pleased with the “good house” for Camille and The New Magdalen in Brooklyn. More expansive about her New York City opening in Camille, she described it as a “Great success! Magnificent reception—superb flowers—baskets of them 7 recalls waving handkerchives [sic].” Odell, in contrast, called it “a faded or even artificial version of her former glory.” Even so, he reported that people “packed the house” the next night for Article 47, corroborating her account that the theater was “jammed from top to bottom.” The following day was a Wednesday, with matinee and evening performances of Claire, which she had not previously presented in Manhattan.38 Morris sensed it would be critically panned: “I said this play would catch it in the papers—but they [the cast] did it—Now tomorrow we will see.”39 She was right, unfortunately, and the critics faulted her performance more than the play itself. In its review of the production, the Herald reported that Morris’s adaptation was better than her acting, which was “much too lachrymose.” It was excessively maudlin and, for the first time—or at least the first time a critic has mentioned it—laughable: Miss Morris played the part in her accustomed Multonian fashion, fairly drowning the stage with tears the moment she appeared, and indulging herself throughout the evening in such extravagant exhibitions of grief that only half the audience would consent to weep, the other half insisting on giving vent to signs of the utmost hilarity. . . . In the acting, Voss’s plays—

224


morbid and melodramatic enough in themselves, Heaven knows!—should be toned down, not exaggerated.40 Morris had never, ever said that audiences laughed at her, and such a response must have been deeply troubling. There is no diary entry for 5 or 6 April, which suggests she may have been too upset to write. She completed the engagement nonetheless, presenting The New Magdalen, Camille, and Renée. In her entry for Saturday the seventh, she noted happily, “Splendid house at matinee Orchestra had to play on stage Their places were sold.” In the evening, “Renée had not only a good house but a surprisingly pleased audience.” Morris ended the season with a successful week in Baltimore, playing to houses she described as “splendid,” “packed,” “immense.” It was standingroom-only for Article 47, and even Claire drew “fine” audiences.41 After Renée on Saturday, she noted that Price would no longer be her manager because “he and Mr Harriott can get on no longer,” a situation she did not explain further. She expressed her thankfulness for a “good season, during the blackest year the profession has ever known.”42 She did not reflect on Claire’s failure in New York and may have viewed it as an aberration. Although she would never perform it again, she did not seem to understand that it marked yet another critical point in her acting career. In that play, she had moved from the “terrible realism” Cather admired into the realm of the ridiculous, a line she would begin to cross in other roles. She would increasingly be seen as a relic of the past, out of fashion and out of touch with changing tastes and “modern” acting. Although she dropped Claire from her repertoire, she could not control her artistic atrophy. “Home Thank God!” is the entry for Sunday, 15 April. Morris would not act again for a year, missing the entire 1894–95 season to concentrate on writing. Her summer diary entries focus mainly on domestic matters, the oppressive heat, the riding she enjoys, and the rheumatism that periodically flares up. There is an occasional mention of the outside world (such as the assassination of French President Carnot on 25 June) and several references to her mother’s health. When “Mamsey” was very ill in July, Morris gave her an injection of morphine and was relieved that she tolerated it well.43 In the fall, she noted that one of her dogs ate “cocain [sic] got crazy,” suggesting that morphine was not the only drug in her household medicine cabinet.44 She was christened “Clara Patrice” on 14 October and was moved by the solemnity of the moment. On 1 November, she recorded the death of Czar Alexander III and hoped “his loss does not mean war.”45 She mentions the title of a composition for the first time in her 24 November entry: “wrote some on ‘Jim Crow,’” a short story about a black boy the adult narrator befriended years earlier when white children taunted him.46 On 23 December,

225


she is happy her “rainy Christmas scrap” has appeared in the New York Herald “in the place of honor” above the fold but certain “Fred will be vexed” because in printing her name “they have cut off ‘Harriott.’” Although she is annoyed he refuses to let her go “sleighing” on the twentieth-eighth, she is delighted when he “telephones” later that day to tell her “‘Jim Crow’ is a success”—meaning that he had sold it to a newspaper or a magazine for publication. Like many of the other volumes, the 1895 diary is a New Year’s gift to Morris “from her Mamsey Sarah Jane.” Numerous pages chronicle “Fred’s” noxious behavior—the nights away, the “tantrums” upon return—which worsens as time passes. In entry after entry, year after year, she rails about his cruelty, explosive rage, reckless spending, and mounting debts. He pawns her jewelry to pay expenses, forces her to perform in pain and to write when she is barely able to lift her pen. “I can scarcely tolerate the presence of FCH though I am trying hard.” “Started on new book . . . just to please Fred.” “I rehearsed the play with Fred—I am so afraid of him.” “Fred so cross he frightens me.” “Fred was savage.” “Fred a terror.” “I am heart and spirit broken.”47 It is difficult to understand why Morris did not leave him, although the fear of scandal and the determination to avoid the stigma of divorce were two compelling reasons to keep her marriage intact, particularly for a woman who had been born illegitimate. Moreover, while she earned the money on which they depended, he played a role in her professional affairs beyond simply acting with her company. Confined as she was to her sickbed much of the time, she needed Harriott to be her agent, selling her manuscripts and making business arrangements she could not handle on her own—even by telephone. She may have been the primary wage earner—which, in itself, was not atypical during these grim economic times48—but there was not a total role reversal within their marriage. Perhaps without his pushing, prodding, and bullying, she would not have accomplished as much as she did. The true nature of their codependency is unknowable, although her emotional distress is unmistakable, as the following poignant entry reveals: Worked against will . . . to please Fred—well I got usual return 21 years I have been at this lesson and have not learned it yet Why why in Heavens name do I try to please him, who is unpleasable? I am rightly served & yet I cry & cry, as if it was my first disappointment.49 Sick throughout much of the winter, spring, and into the summer of 1895, Morris kept writing. She completed another story (“Poor Sementha”) and sent it to the Herald. She considered expanding “Jim Crow” into a book. She began a piece about her late coachman called “Old John Hickey.” As well received as her work had been, however, it was not sufficiently remunerative. The only

226


recourse was to return to the stage, much as she dreaded it. By June, she and Harriott were interviewing prospective actors for an upcoming tour. In July, she was preparing a new adaptation of Raymonde, which she had not performed since 1881. In August, she assembled new costumes, including a “rose pink brocade—pale blue & silver brocade [for] ‘Camille’ ‘All over’ Persian silk for ‘Raymond.’ . . . Blue and white grayish cloth for ‘Multon.’” By Labor Day, she was still trying to complete her company and had few viable candidates. Her description of one hapless recruit is comical: Had a Mr. Sacket up [to Riverdale] for the “doctors” two scenes—Fred has boasted so long & loudly of this remarkable man, I really expected some thing—Well!—He is a frozen terror—false teeth—false hair—clammy hands—These of course he cant help—but—since Faikirs [sic] were invented, he is the worst. He has every monstrous fault known to old actors a-a-a-h!—t-h-e-e-e-e-h-h before he speaks a line I worked 2¾ hours for 2 scenes. He is a hopeless horror—his brains are batter. 50 She hired him nonetheless, although she soon discharged him. “I look like an old ghost tonight—so worn and white,” Morris wrote on Thursday, 12 September, after a taxing rehearsal. “All of us frightened,” she noted on Sunday. “Finished [packing] my trunk, had cup of tea, & started down to begin long season.” In her hotel room that evening, she admitted she was “very blue—very nervous about tomorrow.” Yet, she and her “Specially Selected Company,”51 now under the management of Jean H. Williams, opened as scheduled at New York’s Fourteenth Street Theatre on Monday. The two-week engagement marked the start of her last full-season tour, which, once again, offered audiences nothing new—just Camille, Raymonde, and Miss Multon, with an occasional performance of Article 47 to break the monotony. Even the order in which she presented the plays did not change along the route, although the cities she visited had seen them all before. Reports from the road were mixed. According to the Clipper’s correspondents who wired from various cities, Morris “closed a good engagement” in Pittsburgh, had “a very fine engagement” in Boston, “was well attended” in Indianapolis, “won merited praise and success” in New Orleans, and drew a “large audience” in Nashville for her one performance of Camille. Other appearances were less popular. Business was “fair” in Mansfield (Ohio), Chicago, and Atlanta and only “average fair” in Detroit. In Milwaukee, she “drew light houses” for Camille, Raymonde, and Miss Multon; the same was true in Chattanooga, where Raymonde “did a light business.” The most negative assessment came from Washington, D.C., where she spent the first week in December: “Clara Morris appeared at Allen’s Grand Opera House in a repertory, but the

227


once great actress seems to have lost her power to act and consequently to draw. The audiences were light.”52 A Chicago drama critic observed that Morris’s unchanging repertoire was unusual. Whereas “most actresses of the last twenty years” had moved on to new material, she only appeared in the plays that had made her famous. He found her affecting nonetheless as “a wonderful impersonator of the tear-touched heroine, be the latter saint or sinner.”53 A Boston critic reached more-damning conclusions after seeing her at the Tremont Theatre in late December. Describing her as “a relic of the past . . . intruded upon the present,” he made her sound like an insect trapped in amber. Unlike “the dramatic world,” which had progressed, Morris—whom Towse once called “a modern of the moderns”—“has stood still”: “there is absolutely no change of method, of expression, or of technique.” It was not simply that her outdated material was inferior to “modern” playwriting. It was that her old-fashioned acting with its “heights and abysses” seemed hopelessly crude in comparison with the technique of younger actresses and baffled contemporary audiences. He admitted that “the Miss Morris of today is not the Miss Morris of twenty years ago” yet argued that “flashes of genius” rather than consistency always characterized her performances. On the one hand, such “flashes” amid the “mawkishness of sentiment and manner” saved her from being totally ridiculous. “We are on the verge of laughter,” he explained, “when we are suddenly swept away from ourselves by a burst of genius which causes us to realize the secret of her once wonderful power.” On the other, such inconsistency struck him as vulgar and made the “brilliant moments” comparable to “finding a diamond necklace in a dump heap”—a remarkably unflattering image.54 If Morris felt like a “relic,” she did not say so in her diary and did not agonize on paper about finding new material. She did try out a new play called One Love in Detroit, which she and the company rehearsed after the show on 25 November and performed the next night. She called it “a puzzle to [sic] good to abandon—too somber for a big go” and then added that she was “too broken down tonight to care.” Although the review the next day was “kind,” she must have decided that it did not suit her, because she did not present it again. Frustration with her dated repertoire surfaces only occasionally. After a performance of Camille at New York’s Grand Opera House before a “stupid” audience, she actually called it an “awful play” and exclaimed, “Oh how can I drag my weary body through [it] twice more this week—no one ever has any mercy on me!”55 Such moments, however, are rare. Her entries typically contain more-familiar complaints: about Harriott, her company and manager, the theaters and audiences, the relentless schedule, and her ill health. “What folly for any one to work like this in such misery too,” she noted in New York. “Neuralgia of stomach,” she

228


wrote before a performance of Miss Multon in Pittsburgh. “If I am not born to suffering who is?” When she and Harriott quarreled over an actress he wanted to dismiss from the company, she reiterated his familiar accusation, one she had heard often over the years: “Fred is furious[.] One of his stories—He was ‘a great lecturer & gave up a career for me’—Lord forgive him.”56 There are fascinating glimpses of the theater world that occasionally flash across the diary’s pages, such as her disbelief that “they went on with the performance” at the Bijou Theatre when a poor property man was “blown to pieces” by an exploding battery backstage. 57 Nevertheless, a heightened sense of urgency, even desperation, permeates her writing as the tour continued. She frequently expressed her dismay at the size of the audience (“poor,” “light,” “cold,” “cruel,” “bad”), and her drug use escalated. She was “morphining” Caroline, her maid, but she was being morphined, too. On 5 November, for example, she wrote, “‘Raymond’ bad house[.] Heavy storm just at 7 o’clock—How have I got through it—I don’t know—Morphia I suppose—Four visits from doctor.” Still “Sick with a capital ‘S’” two days later, she resorted to morphine again: “Oh me, oh me—my poor back—4 hyperdermics [sic]. . . . Doctor gave the injections—I have suffered cruelly.” For someone traveling with other people (including her husband), she felt surprisingly isolated, and the reduced circumstances several entries depict suggest that the tour was far from profitable. On Thanksgiving in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, she lay on a bed without a mattress, “dirty rugs from floor” underneath her head, and had “no food but one roll & a bottle of cream.” “What a Christmas,” she wrote from Boston, “no church—no greens—no fun—no home. . . . Swallowed a slice of bread & a glass of cold milk.”58 Morris’s finances were precarious, and she was not alone. The nation was still in economic freefall, and all businesses were affected. On 8 January she wrote, “Eight companies reported broken down—strapped, on Monday—Mrs Julia Marlowe Tabor is 7 weeks behind in salaries—Oh its [sic] awful awful!” (She also noted Sarah Bernhardt’s return to America on 12 January, but that would be her only mention of it.) After a short respite at home, she was back to the rigors of touring by 25 January. Traveling through the South was especially challenging, where long distances between stops (such as the four-hundredmile “jump” from Louisville to Memphis) and ramshackle facilities were the norm. The water was putrid in Memphis, “a bat was flying all over the theatre” in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the hotel in New Orleans had no kitchen or dining room, and the stench from the “mouldy” Academy of Music was “awful—like a grave.”59 There were some lighter moments. During Raymonde in New Orleans on 8 February, she wrote that she “broke Mr. Walker up entirely by crossing my eyes at him on stage.” For the most part, though, she sounds stressed and

229


enervated, her health as problematic as ever, exacerbated by squabbles with Harriott and tension among company members. Only a doctor-administered “hypodermic” enabled her to appear in Montgomery, Alabama. A physician in Nashville told her she was “completely broken down.” “I have groaned through the performance some way,” she wrote in St. Louis. “My suffering is almost more than I can bear—I don’t know half the time what words I am saying.” Although her weeklong engagement there proved so popular that “crowds and crowds” had to be “turned away” from the Wednesday matinee, she expressed her frustration that “people complain I am not on enough [in Raymonde] & that they only have ‘one good cry’—Oh how tired I am.”60 Ecstatic to see her season end “at last” with a benefit performance on Sunday, 1 March, she was relieved to be back in Riverdale on Tuesday. Morris provides so little information about her business arrangements that it is impossible to know why she ended her tour in February and failed to honor the contract Williams had signed in November with Friedlander, Gottlob, and Company, managers of the Columbia Theatre in San Francisco. According to its terms, she had agreed to play twelve weeks beginning on 3 February 1896 in Omaha and concluding on 25 April in San Francisco, with appearances they booked for her in cities en route.61 Whether it was sheer exhaustion or concerns about poor business in San Francisco, Morris did not go west as promised, which explains the “nasty letter” a “California manager” sent her in March demanding money.62 She closed the season in New York with “a week of hard & cruel work” at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in April. The familiar offerings were Camille, Article 47, Raymonde, and Miss Multon. Once again, she says more about her health than the performances. She summoned a doctor before she went on in Camille on 9 April and complained about the treatment she received: “Doctor with useless syringe 4 punctures for one injection—Some of my people thought me dying Had chill on stage in 3d act.” The next night prior to Article 47, “Doctor came gave me a hyper and people say I played splendidly Audience seemed pleased—But what I have suffered no one knows.” She concluded the run with Camille (“fine house matinee”) and Raymonde (“at night—very light”) on 11 April, returning home as soon as the applause subsided.63 From the diary, it is clear that Morris planned to tour again in the fall. She was looking for new material and was writing a play. She made several trips into the city, including one on 9 May to Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, newly refurbished and finally respectable, which had become one of New York’s leading venues for variety entertainment. Although she does not use the word, she went to see a vaudeville show and enjoyed it, except for the opening number, “cats & rats—horrid.” She admired “Mr. [Albert] Chevalier,” a talking-singer

230


she found “very clever, a good actor—good make-up, an artist” (as opposed to a vulgar popular entertainer), but disapproved of a Loie Fuller impersonator who had “stolen every thing even to name Fuller—what a shame.” Most exciting, she saw a splendid new invention, “‘Vintoscope’ a marvel, a wonder—a beautiful success [Thomas] Edison must be proud & grateful.”64 Actually, the machine was the Vitascope, an early motion-picture projector advertised as an Edison invention, which had its first theatrical exhibition at Koster and Bial’s on 23 April, just two weeks before Morris’s visit. The Vitascope and other projectors would soon bring motion pictures to vaudeville houses across the country. Morris, too, would shortly make her debut in the nation’s most rapidly growing entertainment form but would prove a less-enduring attraction. Such pleasant excursions would be the exception that summer, which Morris spent mostly at home, often sick and heavily medicated. The diary chronicles her illnesses with graphic references to her drug use as in this 12 May entry: I’m down flat. Such a chill—vomiting—fever—Oh how am I to bear it if this is to get firm hold of me—Why don’t [sic] [Fred] send for [Dr.] Wetmore now? No. Sherman it is—Well let us hope & wallow in drugs—9—nine doses a day—It would “chill” any one The next day, not surprisingly, she spent the day “in bed raving in delirium.” The following week, she questioned Dr. Sherman about “all these drugs—5 doses of one—3 of other,” but he insisted she take them. By the end of the month, under Dr. Wetmore’s care, she said she was “miserable” and worried about being “held prisoner for weeks again.” In mid-June, she was in such pain she “actually screamed aloud with agony—Fred had Sherman up on wire for advice.”65 On 27 June, nonetheless, Morris wrote that her husband “started for Chicago” to sign her contract for the new season, noting that it was “The first time he ever left me for longer than one night—I went to Europe once without him—but never again was I allowed to go alone.” She says nothing more about her upcoming engagements, although the 1 August New York Clipper reported that they would be “nearly all one night stands.” Two months later, the same paper, along with all the city dailies, carried the shocking news that Morris had been badly injured in a carriage accident on 7 October.66 Thankful to have survived the ordeal, she canceled the tour and focused on writing. She sold several stories in the next few months and was pleased to receive payment for them but did not produce enough income to support her household. As Harriott continued to plunder their savings, she realized she “must work some other way.”67 It would take the form of a vaudeville act. On 9 April, she noted she had received an offer for “20 or 30 weeks work 2 performances a day, though short”

231


and said a Herald reporter, whom she refused to see, had come to the Pines to inquire about the rumored “vaudville [sic] engagement.” On 25 April, she hired “Mr. Kenneth Lee—actor and writer” to create the material she needed. He returned four days later with “Justice,” a one-act play. When she opened on 10 May at Gilmore’s Auditorium in Philadelphia, it had become “Blind Justice,” with Morris as yet another long-suffering wife, supported by Harriott. They had joined the growing number of “legitimate” actors whom enterprising managers lured to the vaudeville stage, in part to bring more “class” to the popular entertainment form, in part to provide an endless array of attractions. “Highbrow” or freakish, one-legged tap dancer or banjo-playing Shakespeare monologist, all that mattered was filling the house. Morris’s billing as “America’s most eminent Emotional Actress” was designed to do just that.68 For the eighteen months during which she played fairly regularly in vaudeville, Morris attracted audiences. Pleasing them, however, was more difficult, and the response to her act was decidedly mixed. Her debut in Philadelphia went well, even though Harriott stepped on her dress and “tore it all out at the back” so that she “had to leave the stage for repairs.” The matinee audience on 11 May rewarded her with “two recalls” and “plenty of applause”; the critics, with “fine newspaper notices—very very good.” In Baltimore the following week, the “house was jammed,” and “people cried, but there was little applause,” and Morris worried that “they dont [sic] know what to think of a serious play.” In Boston at Keith’s (“the theatre first class in every way—the people the best in the city”), she was delighted to find the “House fine—Loud applause at sight of my name Big reception Piece made hit I believe . . . calls etc,” relieved that the papers the next day were “very very good—very.” She must have missed the one in which a Boston critic dismissed “Blind Justice” as “a meagre sketch” and her “delivery” as “sadly artificial, the effect being deplorable and pitiable in the extreme.” Worst of all, he said that people found the piece amusing, not tragic, and could barely keep themselves “from breaking out into one huge guffaw of laughter,” especially at “the most pathetic points” of the act.69 When she made her New York vaudeville debut on 30 August at the Union Square, now a Keith’s vaudeville house, the Clipper reported, “The house was packed to repletion afternoon and night” and credited Morris with “the tremendous rush for admissions.” She was thrilled with the “magnificent reception” at both performances, with “calls & calls & calls again. . . . Houses packed to suffocation, and such affection shown to me as simply stunns [sic] me.” So ill she needed doctor-administered “hypers” to help her through the two-week run, she was grateful that audiences responded favorably and the theater’s manager was pleased.70 She was satisfied with her fall engagements in Worcester and Buffalo; in Brooklyn in mid-October, she was “astonished” once again by the “immense reception . . . so long kept up so hearty.” 232


As the weeks passed, however, her ebullience and energy faded, her health worsened, and the rigors of touring—even in New York—took their toll. At the Madison Avenue Hotel on 14 November, she was disgusted to find her room full of “Ants!—Red Ants! Thousands tens of thousands! Bed all night In drawers—under shirt—nightgown ruffles Every where.” The next day’s entry, in contrast, is devoid of descriptive detail. It contains only two sentence fragments—“Began an engagement at P——— P——— Tears and tears and then Tears”—around which Morris has drawn a black border so that the page looks like a death notice. She might have meant the Pleasure Palace, flagship of the F. F. Proctor organization, which had opened in 1895 with a bill that included Joe Weber and Lew Fields, comedian Sam Bernard, minstrel Lew Dockstader, and a troupe of comedy elephants.71 Whatever the venue, the cryptic scrawl suggests that she was distressed by what had happened that night. Perhaps the audience had laughed at her or had reacted in some other way she found humiliating. Two weeks later, in a locale she did not identify, she was so ill she was unable to “rise for either performance,” even with “3 hypers [sic] and medicine.” Despite her increasing reluctance to perform, she needed the money her appearances brought. In one entry, she wrote that she was darning her only pair of socks. In another, she complained that Fred had taken thirty-five dollars of her salary for coal. In a third, she said that she had just bought her first pair of new shoes in four years.72 Her stories were selling, and she was winning acclaim as an author, but her husband would not allow her to abandon the stage. Throughout 1898 she would pursue both careers, alternating stints in “Blind Justice” with bursts of writing. Vaudeville took her throughout the northeast in January (Albany, Newark, Fall River, Providence), March (Washington, D.C., Philadelphia), and April (Brockton, New York City). “So shamed onstage” she wrote after one of the New York performances in a theater she did not identify. In late May and early June, she was in Ohio (Cleveland and Toledo).73 In November, there were New York engagements in Albany and in Harlem at Klaw and Erlanger’s Columbus Theatre. A critic who saw her there found her as ludicrous as the Boston Transcript had and archly observed: Of course Harlem needs to be educated in vaudeville, for there were those the other night who seemed to think that Clara Morris was doing a comedy sketch entitled “Blind Justice,” and her hysterical laughter, supposed to be thrilling, only brought forth a responsive goatlike chortle on the part of some of the young women. Such breaks as these indicate a lack of culture quite appalling, and a line should be run on the bill stating that the sketch is supposed to be taken seriously. He was unimpressed with her husband, “Mr. Marriott [sic],” noting only that he “still supports her placidly, and without any very great attempt at acting.” As for 233


Morris herself, she “was cordially applauded at the close of her performance” but “aroused little enthusiasm during the progress of the sketch.”74 Dwindling audience interest more than declining health effectively ended her vaudeville career. At Harriott’s insistence, she would appear in it just a few more times—four of them in 1900—reluctant to endure further “shame and humiliation” in a “vulgar place.” In Brooklyn in March, they tried a lighter piece called “Woman’s Whim,” which failed in its first performance. Morris was particularly displeased with her husband’s inept acting: Fred simply sat still and let me f lounder on till he came to his lines again—What would become of him with any one else? At times I can not hear one word he says—even in the entrance—and he has such a big voice Let there be a poor house & you can hear him—He drops his affectations then—I have coaxed—I have praised—entreated—argued—no he is positive he knows—Oh its [sic] dreadful They completed the run with “Blind Justice” and brought it to Keith’s in Boston for a week in August. “What heat—Big house no applause hardly very wearisome Oh how I wish it was safely over,” she wrote on the twenty-second. A week in Providence followed in November; in December, one in Pittsburgh. Evidently, Harriott’s acting had not improved. “All went well save Fred who just knocked my scene to pieces—Oh dear he is hopeless,” she exclaimed in frustration after the 17 December opening.75 Her last vaudeville engagement came five years later. Morris was furious her husband was making her return to something she loathed: Shame—Shame and tears—All week I have fretted—I knew something secret was going on—hence bad—Well my loving lord is vaudeville mad again He can’t expect silence again for that—To drag me back when I am just safely clean of the old horror Treating me like a bale of goods without will or sense “Go” or “Stay”—Shame to him76 Because “vaudeville is his craze again and money must be had,” she did as he ordered, appearing for a week at New York’s Colonial Theatre in a solo act. She presented “Reminiscences of the Stage,” a twenty-minute talk culled from her published work, which she had performed under different titles on previous lecture tours. She shared three recollections: one about substituting a celery top for the camellia that should have been in her bodice during a performance of Camille; the second about an actress who chewed gum as the Player Queen in Hamlet; the last about a child who bravely played her sprightly comic role after learning her twin sister was dying. One critic said she “made a decided hit” and was “warmly applauded.” Another found the anecdotes improbable but engaging and described the audi234


ence as “interested and entertained” by Morris as raconteur. Sometimes seated at a table, sometimes standing or “sauntering to and fro,” she impersonated characters in the stories convincingly and “infuse[ed] them with her own engrossing individuality.” The same reviewer, however, described her as “a pitiful sight”: “Nervous pains have wrenched her these many years, and she is feeble. Her voice is unsteady and her hands tremble. But the old-time pathos is in her speech, and eloquent expressions come into her face.” He also mentioned her “non-productive husband” as the reason for her return to the “concert hall” at a salary of six hundred dollars per week.77 Morris called the week a “success” but refused the manager’s request that she play another. Ill health had made performing an ordeal, and she was eager to return to her writing. It had been her primary focus since 1899, with some exceptions. In addition to the vaudeville appearances, there was a brief “hyper”fueled run in Miss Multon in December 1898 and January 1899. According to a newspaper squib, Morris was to present Miss Multon for a week in New York before taking it to major cities as far west as Chicago. Then she would “appear in an emotional drama written by herself” and “a literary man” she declined to identify.78 In actuality, she played two weeks in New York (at the Columbia and Star theaters), gave two performances in New London, and then spent a week each in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. She did not act in Chicago or in the play she had promised. Instead, she concentrated on building her reputation as a respected author of fiction and nonfiction. Her stories and articles were being published more frequently in such magazines as Ladies’ Home Journal and The Criterion, as well as in newspapers like the New York Journal and Evening World, although they did not meet with universal acclaim. One wag quipped, “When Clara Morris withdrew, perhaps temporarily, from the regular stage, her departure was deeply regretted. Now that she has begun to write stories for the Evening World, her retirement from the stage is even more deeply regretted.”79 On 12 April 1899, she signed a contract with Brentano’s for her first book, A Silent Singer, a collection of eleven short stories, many of them previously published. One reviewer found the writing as melodramatic as her stage performances, with “all the qualities—fervor and strength, crude forces of pathos and passion—that made her acting notably popular, . . . told as only an actress could tell them, with pretty theatrical pauses and sad, shivery music from the orchestra.”80 Some of them rang false, like the maudlin title piece about a young woman who dies of consumption after her tyrannical father breaks her engagement; “An Old Hulk” with its pseudo-biblical overtones, images, and references; or the depressing “Old Myra’s Waiting” about “a poor, half mad woman” who yearns to join her long-dead children. Like several others in the slim volume, “Old Myra” can be read as an allegory of Morris’s life, the sorrows of the once 235


wealthy and powerful Myra Worden evocative of her own story of loss and endurance, Myra’s references to the “many-headed public” who “growl” and “tear” rooted in Morris’s recent experiences on the stage. Chronically ill and heavily medicated, she was astonishingly prolific. As she produced stories, her husband transcribed them—at first by hand and then on the typewriter (probably the new “visible” typewriter introduced in 1895)—took them to prospective editors, and read them aloud to interested listeners. On 19 September, she signed a contract for her second book, this time with “the ‘Century’ people” for Little “Jim Crow” and Other Stories of Children. Yet financial pressures remained acute. “Fred came for money for $87,” she wrote on 1 October. “Oh, I work Why cant [sic] I earn enough.” The answer came the following week when she learned that instead of depositing money in her bank as she had requested, he took it “to his bank & has used it all! . . . he has done that too often but not to tell—It might have ruined me.” Making their mortgage payments remained an ongoing concern because her earnings as a writer were not that sizeable. An article called “Eugenie,” for example, was accepted for publication, but she received only fifty dollars for it, just “one cent a word—that’s all.” In November, thankful to have gotten a “check for $200, from Century Co. for ‘A Warning Word,’” she wrote, “I am glad for Fred came for the last dollar in account for wages.” In December, she complained, “Fred has drawn $100 in advance of my first books earnings—to pay on a note—Its [sic] too bad!”81 Morris received a copy of her new book on 27 November. She found it “rather small for the price, but very pretty Two boy heads one black at top—‘Little Jim Crow’ title grey cloth—gilded top leaves.” She was pleased with the positive reviews it garnered, mentioning a “lovely notice” in the Sun and a “good short one in Mail, too.”82 Like The Silent Singer, most of the stories in Little “Jim Crow” had already appeared in print. Many of them seem autobiographical, based on painful memories of childhood events. It is impossible to know how truthful they are, but they reinforce the story Morris would tell in Life on the Stage where she continued to mine her early years for marketable material. The diary shows her working hard throughout 1900 despite daunting health problems. Occasionally, she expressed frustration with her role as family provider. “Oh if I could earn faster or if he could earn a dollar or two to help,” she wrote on 11 January. Whatever the motivation—fear of Fred, failure, or penury–she persevered, churning out articles (such as “Pet Superstitions of Stage People” and “The Actor People at Home”), correcting proofs, writing a play, and starting her autobiography. She was delighted when the World referred to her as a “Woman Kipling” on 30 March, disappointed when Theatrical Syndicate founders Marc Klaw and A. L. Erlanger declined to produce her unnamed play,

236


dismayed when Harriott demanded her pearl necklace in June and her sapphire and diamond ring in August. She worked furiously on her book throughout the fall, measuring her progress by the number of words she wrote each day. On 8 December 1900, Morris went downtown for what she said was her first photographic sitting in twenty-four years. She does not explain why she stopped having portraits made, although hers had never captured the frenetic emotionalism of her stage performances or the graphically realistic suffering for which she was known. Perhaps, as she aged, she feared the camera, preferring to have people remember her as she looked in her prime, before illness and drug addiction took their toll. Perhaps, too, as her reputation declined, she no longer received invitations from such celebrity photographers as Sarony for complimentary portrait sessions and chose to avoid the expense of paying for them herself. Even when her career was at its height, moreover, inadequate lighting precluded the taking of pictures in the theater. Full-stage photographs did not begin until the late 1880s, which is why there are no images of Morris in performance. With the exception of a few posed group shots for Miss Multon, all of hers show her alone in the photographer’s studio—eyes invariably averted from the camera—with appropriate accessories against a suitable backdrop.83 One of the pictures from this December 1900 session became the frontispiece in Life on the Stage. She wears a coat (red cloth, according to the diary) with an upturned collar, a high-necked shirred blouse, and a large hat that resembles a bird’s nest on the softly curled hair framing her face. Her expression is solemn and strangely blank, eyes gazing off to the side, lips drawn together as if she were about to smile or speak. Her left hand rests on the back of an ornately carved wooden chair; her right hand, the arm bent at the elbow and pressed against her torso, holds a monocle. She looks affluent, matronly, respectable, and stolid, without a trace of the anguish the diary vividly chronicles. In early January, Morris was understandably upset when several newspapers carried reports of her death. Puzzled that the rumor could have found its way into print, she quickly corrected it and assured all who telephoned that she was very much alive. Although she continued to agonize over her husband’s behavior (including his claiming authorship of some of her stories), her isolation at home, her physical distress, and her financial situation, she would have a productive year. She completed Life on the Stage and a steady stream of articles, began The Pasteboard Crown, and embarked on a lecture tour. She had signed a contract in January with McClure, Phillips, & Company for her autobiography, which was serialized in McClure’s magazine and many daily newspapers prior to its October publication. Furious that a reporter called on her at home and saw a resemblance to the tormented characters she portrayed on stage, she was pleased when a reader likened her to English diarist Samuel

237


Pepys, and her handsome new book (“all dressed up in red and gold”) received favorable reviews.84 Morris began her lecture tour under the management of Thomas Broadhurst in November, billed as a distinguished actress and writer. Eager to capitalize on the success of her book, her subject was “The Stage and the Actor.” The first stop was Indianapolis, where even though she was “sick with terror” beforehand, she was a “big success.” She was elated that audiences responded just as positively to her in Columbus and Pittsburgh (“people delighted—papers splendid”). In Cincinnati, the audience was “light but clever,” and the “lecture went beautifully.”85 Then it was on to Louisville and home, where she spent the month of December working on The Pasteboard Crown. She resumed her tour in January, with engagements in Rochester (“success good house & people delighted Recall!), Minneapolis (“good house went surprisingly well”), Appleton, Wisconsin (“big audience—Delighted—cried—laughed . . . went splendid”), and Milwaukee (“Fine house—theatre—Full dress—big success”).86 After that, she traveled to Chicago (“Lecture went splendidly Lovely!

Frontispiece, Life on the Stage, 1901, a photograph Morris claimed was her first in twenty-four years. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

238


. . . Papers splendid”) and Des Moines, Iowa, even though people advised her against it because of a smallpox outbreak. She and Harriott had vaccinations as a precaution and went anyway. The lecture was a success (“the house good. . . . Had big reception afterward Governor of state and speaker of house there, too”), but “that scoundrel” Broadhurst took their earnings and disappeared, leaving them “without a cent.” Thanks to “telegraphed money,” they made it to Omaha as planned (“Big house, People delighted Reception afterwards”), followed by Lincoln, where Morris became embroiled in a contract dispute. Nevertheless, she was pleased that William Jennings Bryan, whom she found “better looking than his pictures,” had introduced her. She concluded the tour with another appearance in Chicago and reached home on 10 February.87 Morris drew on her professional experience to speak knowledgeably on such topics as “The Drama and Stage Life,” “Stage Morals,” and “Behind the Scenes.” In all of them, she defended the theater as a worthy profession for women, fraught with no more peril than other fields, provided that aspiring actresses guard against temptation and unscrupulous men. Although she spoke with a Victorian voice, it was a feminist voice. Unlike Mary Anderson who advised young women to stay off the stage, Morris was a strong advocate for their presence on it, arguing that the term virtuous actress was not an oxymoron and that a theatrical career, while difficult, was not incompatible with domesticity. She had already explored similar themes in her memoir and in articles like “Religion and the Stage: Clara Morris Protests against the Idea That the Life of an Actress Is Necessarily without Religious Faith” and “The Stage as an Occupation: Clara Morris Holds That for Women It Has Distinct Advantages over All Others.” The lecture platform gave her the opportunity to amplify views she had already expressed. By using herself as an instructive example, she could warn young “stage-struck” girls about pitfalls she had avoided and could prepare them for the challenges they would face in pursuing a stage career. She impressed reviewers with her dynamism and naturalness as a speaker. According to one Chicago critic, “she did not lecture to the people who gathered to hear her. She talked to them.” Another praised her ability to “carry her audience from tearfully sad scenes to delightfully humorous situations.” Both found her manner forthright yet warm, her delivery “animated by the art of the actress shining faintly through the gestures and expression.”88 They could not have appreciated what a bravura performance it was, because they had no idea that the cautionary tales she related were shards of personal experience. Just as the “dethroning” she describes in Life on the Stage must have been hers, so her advice that the aspiring actress “know her own limitations” and avoid “trying to do something for which” she is unsuited stemmed from her professional disappointments.

239


Vitriolic Alan Dale was one critic who was immune to her appeal on the lecture circuit. He was in the audience at Wallack’s on 20 April when Morris presented her talk, now called “Behind the Scenes.” She was delighted her Riverdale neighbor Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) had come to her dressing room, “& he offered his very self to introduce me.” “Such a welcome,” she wrote that night. “Great big big success—Laughter—tears—applause.”89 She presented the same combination of sage advice and entertaining anecdotes (including the one about the celery top in Camille) as she had on her winter tour, making the audience believe she was taking them into her confidence, sharing stage secrets with refreshing candor and common sense. While other critics appreciated her jocularity, Dale disliked it, claiming that it destroyed whatever illusions people still had about the theater. However tongue-in-cheek that statement was meant to be, his animus toward Morris was unmistakable, his portrayal of her unflattering: Miss Morris was led on, in speckled white satin, and a wide smile, by Mark Twain. . . . The actress was very nervous at first, and reconnoitred uneasily. She knew that revelations were expected and . . . she was going to fool them. She hem’nd and she ha’d. Then, in her peculiar, deliberate, massive, heavily leaded tones, she approached her subject. Everybody found her hard, crude, dry, absurd, impossible. His assault continued in an article that appeared the following Sunday. “Why the Ex-Tragedienne Should Be Muzzled” was particularly vicious because it not only denigrated her performance at Wallack’s but also mocked her reputation as a “great” actress: For years, I am told, Miss Morris won fame and fortune by the wetness of her tears. . . . Personally, I cannot testify to Miss Clara Morris’s tragic, comic or elocutionary merit. I never saw her in the hey-day of her career. It was in her hey-night that I had an opportunity of observing her. And I must confess that I was unable to accept her on hearsay evidence. I not only found no symptoms of greatness, but though I tried hard, persistently, strenuously, I could not discover any one single peg upon which to hang the barren possibility of one solitary great moment.90 Dale viewed Morris’s entire career from a skewed perspective, and his damaging assessment would reverberate for decades. Although she did not respond publicly to the attack, she acknowledged it in her diary: “Mr Alen [sic] Dale has hammered me well today—Oh I am abused—Gracious I get it.” Given the leitmotifs that run through the diary—Harriott’s cruelty and profligacy, her sickness and pain, their financial distress—Morris’s accom-

240


plishments for the rest of the year were impressive. While Life on the Stage won plaudits from the American and British press, she completed two more books: The Pasteboard Crown, which Scribner’s had won the right to publish, and the second volume of her memoirs, Stage Confidences: Talks about Players and Play Acting, which went to Lothrop, a Boston firm, because it agreed to pay her an advance. “This search of Diaries is weary work so many ghosts rise up from their pages,” she wrote in May. “Well I’ve done it! I’ve put on my yoke again and gone to work on 1st chapter of 2d Vol of Stage Life—Oh my!”91 She also kept writing articles, received an offer of a London engagement from producer Daniel Frohman, began dramatizing The Pasteboard Crown, and considered adapting it for film, traveled to upstate New York to lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in August and to Brooklyn in December to read “Frank Sen: A Circus Episode,” an older story she had recycled in Stage Confidences. A curious hodgepodge, Stage Confidences is more superficial than Life on the Stage—which presents a coherent, if sanitized, story of Morris’s rise to fame and fortune—and reveals very little substantive information about her life. Dedicated to Mary Anderson, “The fair, The chaste, The unexpressive She,” it reads like a printed version of Morris’s lectures. It is intended to be a guide for aspiring actresses, “those dear girls who honour [me] with their liking and their confidences.” Because she cannot respond to all of them, she has created “a lovely composite girl, Miss Hope Legion,” to whom she will relay her “word of warning, of advice, of remonstrance” and offer sound counsel and practical advice “founded upon personal experience and observation.”92 Unlike Life on the Stage, which has only the picture of Morris as she appeared at the time of the book’s publication, Stage Confidence has sixteen illustrations, ten of them of her. Interestingly, they are all photographs of a much younger Morris, captured years earlier. The frontispiece shows her in profile, wearing a broad-brimmed hat with flowers and streamers. She is dressed in a filmy white dress with a scalloped collar and a cluster of lilies-of-the-valley at her breast, long hair cascading down her back. Allegedly taken in 1883 when she would have been thirty-six, she appears innocent, virginal, girlish, and half that age.93 In the last, which shows her “before coming to Daly’s Theatre in 1870,” she looks bored, as if she were impatient to get to New York. The rest are photographs of her in plays she frequently performed (Article 47, Alixe, Miss Multon, Odette, and Camille), with three exceptions. Surprisingly, she has included Jane Eyre, which was not a success; The Sphinx, which she loathed; and Evadne, which failed. Their selection seems random, because none of them matches the text of the chapters that contain them. It is as if Morris decided to use these images simply because she liked the way she looked in them. She had no intention of providing the “real story” behind them any more than she wanted to include

241


pictures of herself in the present. That narrative would have been incompatible with her authorial persona. It would have ruined her “act.” As much as Morris purports to share her knowledge and experience, it is a highly selective sharing, one that reveals others’ pain, mistakes, and falls from grace but not her own. She has worked hard, has known disappointment and self-sacrifice, has even been ill on occasion (throat trouble in Odette in the West, a lung inflammation in Alixe at Daly’s) but has had the fortitude to withstand danger and temptation. Thanks to mother love, faith in God, and unwavering moral values, she has won stardom and happy domesticity. Hers is a fine example to emulate.

Cabinet photograph of Morris, allegedly in 1883 when she would have been thirty-six, that became the frontispiece in Stage Confidences, 1902. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

242


Yet she cannot conceal the bitterness that surfaces from time to time, notwithstanding her genial tone. Her mask occasionally slips. She still is the perpetual outsider, resentful of the “petted, beloved daughters of the rich” who have power over others but have no idea what real work entails. She is especially savage in her description of men who prey on unsuspecting young girls, “mashers” and “johnnies” who “like poisonous toadstools, spring up at street corners to the torment of women, [and] should be taken in hand by the police.”94 Her references to theater are especially revealing, similar to those she makes in The Pasteboard Crown. Phrases such as its “dim and dingy half-light,” “the burnt-out air with its indescribable odour, seemingly composed of several parts of cellar mould, a great many parts of dry rot or unsunned dust, the whole veined through and through with small streaks of escaped illuminating gas” make it sound pestilential. The most interesting part of the book for a contemporary reader is chapter 12, “The Stage as an Occupation for Women.” Although Morris cannot resist embellishing it with a ludicrous anecdote about having been mistaken for a maid in Paris because she was styling a friend’s hair, the points she makes have a modern resonance. Implicit in her argument are two fundamental feminist tenets: a woman’s right to professional employment and to parity in the workplace. With these principles unspoken but understood, she gives three reasons why theater has an advantage over other fields. First, it allows women a greater degree of independence, because an actress “is her own mistress”; “She goes and comes at her own will; she has time for self-improvement.” Next, as a salaried employee, an actress can be self-supporting from the first. Finally, unlike other professions in which talented women have to wait for recognition that may never come, the response can be immediate in the theater: “swift as lightning, sweet as nectar, while you are young enough to enjoy and to make still greater efforts to improve and advance.”95 In spite of her considerable efforts and the favorable press Stage Confidences and A Pasteboard Crown received, 1902 ended with a flurry of publicity of a very different sort. Many newspapers carried the alarming news that Morris was desperately ill and in danger of losing her home. The Harriotts had failed to make the two-thousand-dollar mortgage payment they owed on the Pines and were about to be evicted from it.96 She was so upset about her finances that she succumbed to “an attack of nervous prostration,” unable to leave her bed. Reports in January 1903 were even bleaker: Morris was dying. One paper’s headline screamed, “Clara Morris at Point of Death. Overcome in Her Last Brave Struggle to Save Home She Loved. May Not Live Many Hours.” Another stated that her physicians despaired of saving her, while her husband, “constantly at her bedside, is nearly overcome with grief and anxiety.”97 The diary,

243


however, shows that these accounts were exaggerated. Although the danger of foreclosure was real and Morris was sick, she was far from incapacitated. She was upset by the “alarming” reports but understood newspapers “wont be mild they want a sensation.” Had they been privy to it, this revealing entry would have provided one: What a brutal outburst from Mr H[arriott]—I may never never forget. Not the lowest navvy could have done worse to the commonest hag. Oh Father in Heaven how I have been dragged through the mire by this creature and have borne all because “For better for worse” Dear Lord it has been for—worse—worst But the man feels no shame no pain—He begs without a blush98 In February, well enough to consider performing again, she was disappointed her husband insisted she decline an invitation to “play Nurse”—presumably in Romeo and Juliet—“in all-star company.” She remained hopeful that someone would want to stage her “Crown play,” which she had finished and Harriott was reading to potential producers.99 No one did, although there had been great interest in the project. The London engagement with producer Daniel Frohman did not materialize either. Instead, relief came in the form of a benefit performance, organized by friends and fellow professionals eager to help. It was held at the Broadway Theatre on 14 April during a torrential rainstorm, which led some of the scheduled attractions—including Weber and Fields—to cancel at the last minute. The afternoon program featured a variety of dramatic material (such as Bronson Howard’s one-act comedy Old Love Letters and the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice), “The Belle of Avenue A” and “In the Good Old Summer Time” sung by Adele Ritchie, and a “Celtic” version of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene starring Edward Harrigan and Annie Yeamans. Sarah Bernhardt sent a cable expressing her admiration and affection, which was read to the audience, along with a long letter of appreciation from Morris herself. Unable to attend the testimonial, she was profoundly grateful for the outpouring of generosity and concern. The benefit raised six thousand dollars, allowing the Harriotts to pay their debts and keep their home.100 Understandably relieved, Morris resumed a more active schedule. She began work on another book, Hulda’s Brat (which became Left in Charge, published in January 1904), writing up to three thousand words a day. Many articles and stories—including “The Dressing-Room Reception,” “When ‘The Sphinx’ Shocked New York,” “Has the Drama Degenerated?”—appeared in print. She embarked on a month-long summer lecture tour that took her through the Midwest to Colorado and drew large audiences, “nearly 6,000 people” in Owensboro, Kentucky, “nearly 7,000” in Winona Lake, Indiana. “Great success,” she noted frequently in her diary. Fall brought a book contract 244


“for ‘Brat’” and a five-hundred-dollar advance. As always, complaints about her health (“sick,” “wretched,” and “weak”) and her husband (his “awful temper,” “never ending fault-finding,” “savage looks,” and “furious tones”) fill her entries. He withholds the money she earns from her speaking engagements and forces her to write until her fingers are blistered, sometime up to twelve hours a day. “Oh! If I could get rid of that awful man,” she exclaimed on 28 November. Eager to vary her claustrophobic routine, she considered returning to the stage. In March 1904, she was in rehearsal for a revival of The Two Orphans, which Palmer was directing for producer Charles Frohman (Daniel’s younger brother). Her former manager, ill with heart disease and heavily in debt, had been given the opportunity to stage one of his most memorable productions for Frohman, who had befriended him.101 Palmer had asked Morris to play Sister Genevieve, a character who is onstage for just one scene in the third act. Insulted by the size of the role, Morris almost refused it. She wrote on 23 January, “Mr Palmer offers me the ‘Nun’ in revival of ‘Two Orphans’—Nay nay Mr. Palmer (one act to herself—how kind). ‘[La] Frochard’ is in this play I think—yes I do think so.” La Frochard was a larger role that she wanted but did not get. On 1 February, Harriott delivered his wife’s ultimatum to Palmer: she would play Sister Genevieve for “$300, or nothing.”102 After consulting with “Erlanger et al,” he accepted her terms. “Well I’m glad its [sic] settled and am grateful for the chance to earn something in so dull a time,” Morris noted. By the end of the month, she was committed to the project: “Received my part tonight of ‘Sister Genevieve’ It should be good indeed as precious things come in small parcells [sic]—30 lines of short three or five word lines All right = Its [sic] Clara for her best for Sister ‘Vive.’” She had her lines memorized by 11 March “& rehearsed perfect.”103 The Two Orphans opened on 28 March at the New Amsterdam Theatre with an “all-star” cast that included James’s O’Neill as Pierre Frochard, crippled brother of the outlawed Jacques, played by Charles Warner. Its success exceeded everyone’s expectations. As Palmer wrote to stage manager William Seymour, it was “certainly one of the most distinguished triumphs that I ever saw in a theatre.”104 Perhaps audiences in the new century were nostalgic for the old, receptive to an antiquated melodrama that still made them weep. The New York Times noted the flurries of applause that began shortly after the curtain rose, greeted each of the principals, and rewarded Palmer “for fully ten minutes” during the third act. When Morris appeared shortly after that, she received an ovation: Then occurred a scene such as is seldom witnessed in any theatre. In vain the actress raised her hand to still the tumult, in vain she clasped both her hands together as an indication of reciprocal feeling. It was only when her lips quivered, her eyes filled with tears, and her body trembled, that the people in front seemed instinctively to realize that even enthusiasm can be carried too far.105 245


According to the Herald, she retreated to the rear of the stage where it took her several moments to regain her composure. At the end of the act, the applause began again, “and she was forced to come to the front of the stage, where she bowed low and kissed her hands gratefully to the shouting and cheering throng. It was . . . most remarkable.” After the last curtain, the audience refused to leave until Morris came out from the wings to acknowledge them.106 As she described it: Never to be forgotten welcome home again to New York Stage. Thank the good God!!—Such cheers & crys [sic]—such—oh such Paradise of enthusiasm, and after my 20 lines—calls and calls and yet calls—cheers & more cheers & when I was going home they came yelling—Miss Morris the house is waiting for you—and on I ran in street dress—Flowers flowers—telegrams notes. . . . Company wildly delighted old & new—tears hugs all Managers shook hands etc—Oh a blessed night107 Morris does not discuss the role in her diary or her memoirs, providing no insight into the specific choices she made in creating the character. Her sole comment about Sister Genevieve is that she hated the costume (a nun’s habit). Photographs show a quiet serenity, so different from the frenetic emotionalism of her signature roles, suggestive of a more subdued performance style that may have resonated with early twentieth-century audiences. It is also possible that people responded, however subliminally, to the melodrama within the melodrama. Because they believed Morris had been near death just one year ago, they applauded her courage and endurance as well as that of the character she played. Much of the favorable press coverage about her reinforced the sense of Morris as a survivor, emphasizing her longevity as a performer. An article in the American Standard magazine, for example, called her “The Woman Whose Popularity Has Never Been Surpassed” and showed her in “Some of the Greatest Parts That She Has Ever Played” (from Alixe to Sister Genevieve). When The Two Orphans ended its New York run after fifty-six performances, one newspaper called it “the most remarkable revival in the history of the American stage.” From the four weeks originally planned, the engagement had extended to seven, with an average weekly business of fifteen thousand dollars. The ovation that greeted Morris in her closing performance on 14 May was as tumultuous as opening night’s, and she was touched to have received a “gift of love—art neuvau [sic] bowl vase on legs of lily stalks—filled [with] sweet peas” from the younger women in the cast.108 Buoyed by her success, she agreed to recreate the role on tour the following season. It is clear from her diary entries, however, that her health and her financial situation had again begun to deteriorate.

246


The tour began in Boston on 5 September with a “great great welcome” and traveled through the eastern half of the country. Morris’s diary shows that The Two Orphans played mainly in large urban areas through December, including Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Detroit. Although the production was not the triumph it had been in New York, Morris was pleased with the audience response to her along the route. Many of her entries note receptions that ranged from “big” to “magnificent” with “calls and calls,” “much enthusiasm,” and “lovely” reviews. She caused a frenzy in St. Louis, which delighted her: “House packed to the roof. . . . Had that great roar that I love roared at me tonight at my own calls I am grateful . . . calls for every act over & over—Mine simply wild. . . . Such a shout as they gave as I came out. It is wonderful.”109 Beginning in January, as the company moved from upstate New York to Richmond, Charlotte, Savannah, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Birmingham, Mobile,

Cabinet photograph of Morris as Sister Genevieve in The Two Orphans, 1904, the role that helped restore her artistic reputation. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

247


and New Orleans, Morris said less about the audience and more about the alarming state of her health. She was troubled by sciatica, and there was something terribly wrong with her feet. So swollen and painful she could barely walk, she almost fell on stage on 17 February. The next day, she was “unable to rise without help—foot worse—can’t stand at al [sic] now.” Although Harriott wanted her to travel to Texas with the company, she refused and wrote, “I know—I shall not be able to stand for many a day—Its waste of money to drag me about in torture for nothing.” By the twenty-first, she was “home once more!! In agony untellable—but home.” Interestingly, the tour’s managers never announced that she was no longer a member of the troupe. She was still so popular throughout the country they feared a substantial loss of revenue if people knew she had left the cast. Audiences thought they were watching her and gave the “Clara Morris” ovation to her replacement, Aphie James, who had faithfully copied her performance.110 Except for the week in “refined vaudeville” at the Colonial Theatre—billed as “The Celebrated Emotional Actress, late of The All-Star Cast of the ‘Two Orphans’”—she would not perform again in 1905. Increasingly anxious about money, she returned to writing and published articles on a variety of topics, among them “Is Stage Emotion Real or Simulated?” “The Most Critical Point in My Career,” “Why Men Don’t Go to Church,” “Othello, Shakespeare’s Most Inconsistent Character,” “A Damp Christmas,” and “A Convert to the Play.”111 In December, she went into the city to read the script of a new play she did not identify. When the illness of its leading man, Edward Morgan, delayed rehearsals, the ever-industrious Morris covered a murder trial for the New York Journal and agreed to write a column several times a week for the New York American. Morgan subsequently succumbed to “an overdose of morphia” in March. “Found dead in bed—dreadful thing,” Morris wrote with understandable concern in her diary. Nevertheless, J. Hartley Manners’s Indiscretion of the Truth opened as scheduled on 30 April in Washington, D.C.112 Ironically, it was an adaptation of Man and Wife—the play in which Morris won acclaim as Anne Sylvester almost forty years earlier. Too old to play Truth Coleridge, this production’s version of Anne, she was mute housekeeper Judith Grange. Morris said nothing about the role, noting only that the play was overlong and in need of drastic cutting. She was pleased she got a “Big big reception Many calls,” and the “papers [were] very kind” the following day. One of them praised her for having developed her small part “with wonderful finesse and depth,” giving “a wonderful portrayal without uttering a word for most of the play.”113 She returned home to mounting debts and looming deadlines. Although she did not formally announce her retirement from the stage, she devoted

248


her energies entirely to writing. In addition to the many articles and stories she produced in 1906—including “Voices from the Tombs,” “Ex-Empress Eugenie Ignored,” “A Plea for the Orphans,” “The Emotional Language,” “The Abuse of Mourning,” “Prisoner in for Life,” “Fat,” “Mothers Are Mothers the World Over,” “Nightmares,” “The Haunting of a Word,” and “A Plea for Thanksgiving”—she completed the final volume of her memoirs, which appeared in June. More substantive than Stage Confidences, The Life of a Star is a pastiche of personal reminiscences and celebrity portraits, many of which had already appeared in print. As in Life on the Stage, Morris creates the illusion of honesty and intimacy yet has no intention of sharing her dark secrets with the “kindly patient readers” she seems to welcome so openly. Once again, it is the classic rags-to-riches fable. Once again, it ends with Morris at the apex of her career, the illustrative tales of failure and disappointment never hers. She digresses so frequently that the narrative seems almost stream-of-consciousness, the stories of inner strength and resilience meant to be instructive but never personally revealing. Although she honors her promise to discuss her marriage, about which critics thought she had previously shown “a curious reserve,” she does so in a bizarre manner. She links her “taking of a husband” to “the production of ‘Macbeth,’” certainly one of her most humiliating professional experiences, and never speaks of Harriott in affectionate terms. He emerges as a combination of protector, maid, and companion, not as someone she loves or who loves her in return. There are no photographs of him or of them. Unlike the two earlier volumes, there are no images in this book at all. One of the most interesting passages comes in the first chapter when Morris describes the unexpected success she experienced as a “loyal and woolly little Westerner” in New York: I had suddenly been lifted high into popularity by the whim of the first city in the land—powerful, brilliant, changeable. Ah, there was the rub— changeable! I had sprung up in a single night. What had happened once might easily happen again. I knew no more of security. From that moment I began to peer into the future, watching for the woman there just out of sight who waited for my shoes; and I straightway resolved never to be dragged down from the high place that had been given me, but at the first sign of frown or weariness to descend at once, without tear or remonstrance, showing only gratitude for what had been.114 The irony of her words was probably lost on the majority of readers, unaware of how protracted her artistic decline had been. Morris herself, moreover, could not have imagined the extent to which insecurity would define the rest

249


of her life, years in which she experienced complete physical and financial collapse. As hardworking as she was, she could not keep pace with her husband’s profligacy any more than she could conceal the secret trauma of her personal life. She would shortly be known as “the woman of sorrow,” and the epithet would be apt.

250

Conclusion:

A

Story of Woman Courage

LEFT IN CHARGE WAS not Morris’s only book in 1904. In October, there was another novel, The Trouble Woman, an expanded version of a short story published in newspapers the previous December. Like much of her fiction, it is a tale of fortitude and endurance. The title character is Widow Breene, a crone who tends the sick and helps the needy. She shares her sobering story with a frightened child she has rescued from a fierce storm. Breene has lost everyone dear to her: her three-year-old daughter to a rattlesnake bite, her husband to drowning, her son, hanged for shooting the gambler who cheated him.1 She has persevered nonetheless, bringing comfort wherever she can. Her faith in God remains unwavering. The child, now the adult narrator, reveres her memory. “The Trouble Woman” is a title Morris could have chosen for her own life story. She could not have invented anything more harrowing than what she actually experienced: financial reverses, blindness, invalidism, loss of home, livelihood, and family. Her pain was as acute as that of the characters she had portrayed on stage, her last years as much a “spectacle of suffering” as her theatrical performances had been. Her life became a sentimental narrative that people followed with interest, and she commanded their respect as well as their compassion. Determined to live with dignity under almost unimaginable circumstances, she showed admirable courage in dealing with adversity. “The most important thing in a woman’s life is to keep her self-respect,” she once told a reporter.2 Her optimism and endurance were remarkable, the Chekhovian solace she found in work inspiring. In one of her last diary entries, she prayed, “Help me to a way to earn a little more. . . . Help me to help myself.”3 That fervent desire defined the last two decades of her life. From 1907 to 1909, there is a sameness to her diary entries. Chronically ill, she was particularly concerned about her eyes. Worried about making her mortgage payments, she continued to produce stories and articles on a wide range of subjects, some drawn from personal experience, others keen comments on the contemporary scene. She covered the Harry K. Thaw murder trial in 1908 and, 251

Conclusion

according to the New York Dramatic Mirror, wrote a play called Conscience based on it.4 She published her fourth novel—and ninth book—that year, The New “East Lynne,” an “entirely original” version of the familiar story. In her diary, she recorded events of note: the suicide of actress Clara Bloodgood, the nomination of William Howard Taft, the deaths of Bronson Howard, Lydia Thompson, Helena Modjeska, and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. She portrayed her husband as a “cruel driver,” perpetually “vexed,” “savage,” and “cross.” Despite her literary efforts, the Harriotts’ financial situation worsened, and in 1909, “the Pines” was again in danger of foreclosure. Although she was ashamed to “be made a public beggar,”5 Morris allowed her sister “stars”—members of the Twelfth Night Club—to organize a benefit for her. More than fifty actors took part in an afternoon tribute on 16 April at the New York Theatre. The New York Telegraph noted the “profoundly sympathetic and reverential attitude” of the participants, all of whom “had given something of their hearts as well as of their energies to the honoring of a famous actress and a brilliant woman.”6 The varied fare included the second act from Lady Windermere’s Fan, songs, recitations, “Imitations,” and a “Pianologue.” The highlight of the five-hour testimonial, however, was a performance by Morris herself as Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene. Ironically, the role that was supposed to have secured her reputation as the preeminent American actress in 1875 now brought her stage career to a close. The benefit netted $3,200 for Morris and staved off disaster for a time. On 29 December, she ended her 1909 diary with the statement, “Wasted whole day—sick.” There is no 1910 volume. In 1911, there are only four entries, then silence again until 1914. Under such maudlin titles as “Darkness Comes on Noted Player” and “As the Curtain Is Falling,” newspapers carried reports that she had been “stricken with blindness,” had suffered a nervous breakdown, and was “at death’s door.” Some said the “brave little actress” was dying but still dictated stories from her sickbed to her husband, who transcribed them in “that castle of pain, ‘The Pines.’” One magazine article described her as “a pathetically picturesque martyr to the stage” and claimed the falls she took as Alixe so injured her spine that “permanent ill health followed, snuffing out a dramatic power that has never been surpassed and seldom approached.” Another equated her name with suffering and called her life “one continuous tragedy”: “If she has portrayed misery of mind and heart, the mimic misery never equaled the real misery of her body.”7 While it is impossible to know exactly what happened, it is clear that she became completely or partially blind in 1910 and never fully recovered her sight.8 She would be confined to her home—often to her bed—for the rest of her life. At the end of 1911, according to the New York Dramatic Mirror, “Miss Morris now sees no visitors, and her blindness is nearly total.”9 Earlier that year, in a 252

Conclusion

diary entry on her sixty-fourth birthday, Morris wrote, “I bless the dear Gods [sic] name—I see not perfectly but thank God for what I have . . . my mother, husband and the shelter of this old home—friends’ remembrances—and I am grateful for all and oh I hope my birthday scribble may lead to work—blessed work—have some ideas.”10Aside from three brief entries concerning a July heat wave, she would not keep a diary again until 1914. Journalists chronicling her saga changed their focus. Although alarming bulletins about her health continued, articles began to emphasize her optimism and determination. One portrayed her as a “survivor” who had outlived managers Daly and Palmer and had not allowed illness to defeat her. Instead, she had become “as much a heroine in real life as ever she was in the play” and had “conquered suffering by insisting that life in pain still is life big and desirable.” Another reported that she was “working heroically to complete her latest literary efforts.” While the two books it promised never materialized, newspaper and magazine articles did.11 Their publication in 1912 and 1913, two years for which there is no diary, shows that Morris’s invalidism was not completely incapacitating. She did her best to be productive and support her small household. Far from reclusive, she was very much connected to the world beyond her home. That home was still in jeopardy. Fred’s brother, Samuel W. Harriott, had kept “the Pines” from foreclosure in 1910 when he assumed the mortgage but sold it to a motion-picture company in July 1913. Morris, her husband, and her mother moved to “the old Harriott homestead” on Long Island.12 The 1914 diary contains the following inscription: “After 37 years, its [sic] hard to write a new address instead of the dear old Pines—but needs must so—Clara Morris Harriott, Fair Lawn, Whitestone NYC.” It begins on Thursday, 1 January, with the mention of two health-related events from the previous year and with a simple expression of gratitude to God: “August stroke of paralysis came on Fred poor boy—December peneumonia [sic] came to Mama at 90—God is very merciful to me.” Even though her eyes were “cruel bad,” she kept writing. “Why Actresses Marry So Often,” for example, appeared in the Cleveland Leader on 14 March, and her popular column for women, “Clara Morris Says,” ran in newspapers across the country. Several diary entries detailed her husband’s escalating morphine use. By April, he was repeatedly overdosing and required constant supervision. “Freddy taken bad again this afternoon—an—” Morris wrote on 28 May 1914, the sentence breaking off. “Oh my God! My God! Oh Boy—Boy” is the next day’s distressing entry. Harriott was dead at seventy-four, following a massive stroke.13 From this point on, the change in tone with regard to her husband is striking. The ogre who stalked its pages for years metamorphoses into a loving, devoted partner whose loss she mourns each day. The 31 July entry is typical: “Poor dear boy I miss you so—You were always so interested in my work—I miss your dear 253

Souvenir Program, New York Theatre, 16 April 1909, Benefit for Clara Morris, organized by the Twelfth Night Club. Ironically, her last stage appearance was as Lady Macbeth. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

Conclusion

help so. Poor boy!” and so on through the years. She even began referring to herself as “Pinky,” his pet name for her. She found solace in the company of her ninety-one-year-old mother, whom one reporter described as “a bent little figure, with sleek gray hair and seamed face,” and in work. The articles she produced in 1914 and 1915 led one newspaper to refer to her as a “social philosopher,” a term she found amusing (“Well, well—I’m a joy forever”),14 but she needed the income more than the acclaim. Diary entries show that she was concerned about money and considered selling the manuscripts of plays in which she had starred. She was distressed to find that they were either missing or unusable: “Nurse searched for mss. of plays—an awful condition—bills—letters—papers—a few parts—an act or two, all pitched together—all molding—Oh.” “The mss plays Alixe—Multon etc. are gone—were sold at auction when Boy abandoned them—Oh foolish foolish—How I need them now.”15 With her health as abysmal as ever, she often worked in pain. Still dependent on morphine, she was worried for the first time about obtaining it. The passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914—the culmination of a five-year effort to restrict legal access to opiates—required doctors, pharmacists, and other approved dealers to register with the Treasury Department, pay a nominal tax, and keep records of drug transactions. Although it permitted physicians to prescribe narcotics to their patients, they were more closely monitored, and any doctor suspected of maintaining an addict’s habit was subject to prosecution.16 The new regulations kept people like Morris from buying morphine through the mail or simply requesting it at a local pharmacy. Many entries reflect her mounting anxiety: Great trouble about morphia. . . . What can one do? Dr. R is away on his vacation—we have no one to help us. Terrible attack of eye trouble—am terrified . . . Dr. Belcher . . . sent morphia 100¼ grains—well thanks boy—thanks Needle last one gave out before breakfast—had an order—sent Emily flying for needles—such an experience. One needle in the world now Dr Jagger came and brought me needles—thank heaven Mrs A went down could get nothing even with Dr Stevens prescription—Left old tube to be mended, after begging praying for them to do it. What am I to do?17

256

Conclusion

At least some financial relief came in October 1915 with Fred’s brother Samuel’s death and a $50,000 bequest.18 It enabled Morris and her mother to live comfortably but did not free them entirely from want. In 1916, just before her sixty-ninth birthday, she learned they would have to leave Fair Lawn. “Dear Lord help me,” she wrote on 13 March. “How can I do it—Helpless as I am and my poor dear too.” By 2 July, however, she was reconciled to the move: “Last night in this Hoodoo of a house—what sorrow, what loss—what illusions wiped out—Trouble—oh what trouble have I not known here—God be merciful to us in our going—Mama and I all alone.” Writing from Ornith Cottage, Tuckahoe, New York, two days later, she declared her new home “pretty and very complete.” Morris remained of interest to readers moved by the pathos of her situation, which journalists freely exaggerated. One called her life “a story of woman courage . . . and endurance.” Though “blind, an invalid,” she refused “to give up. Lying on her back unable to leave her room or bed, she . . . is a beautiful evidence that courage does not consist alone in overlooking danger, but in seeing it and conquering it.”19 The diary, however, shows that her situation was not that dire. In one 1917 entry, for example, she wrote that she “got sick and had to give up work and lie down,” which suggests that she did not spend the entire day supine in bed. Another reporter described her as “almost wholly blind for several years,” determined to write “by dictation for magazines and newspapers on matters pertaining to the stage and sociology.” Yet, several entries (such as one in which she complained, “I do hate to copy. Had to rewrite one leafe [sic]”) indicate that she did not dictate every piece she sent off for publication but transcribed some herself.20 She was remarkably productive. Her articles—such as “The Kiss That Killed His Love,” “Why Stage Love So Often Turns into Real Love,” and “The Story of a Stage Child”—appeared regularly. She followed national and world events, commenting on Sarah Bernhardt’s amputation (“The awful operation is over—Madame B’s leg is off—oh how terrible”), the sinking of the Lusitania (“awful report about Loosatania [sic]—awful—say she is torpedoed”), the defeat of a women’s suffrage bill in January 1915 (“Women failed of vote I believe”), her dislike of Woodrow Wilson (“He has always danced to German music”), and the United States’ entry into World War I (“Great headlines—War is proclaimed on Germany”).21 On 1 July 1917, she remarked on the death of William Winter, expressing her compassion and forgiveness: “Poor man . . . he was sorry for the past with regard to me—I bear no rancor.” On Thursday, 30 August, she recorded another loss of far greater personal significance: “Oh my God my God at 4:55 am or by other clock 4:58 my darling my mother ceased to be. How am I to bear it. My small world is shattered. Oh mother, mother The most terrible

257

Conclusion

day of my life—Oh my Sarah Jane, my dear—my dear.” The funeral and burial of the woman she called the “dear companion of my whole life” took place on Saturday, and then it was a “lonely lonely coming home.” In a letter to the New York Sun the following month, Morris wrote that she was still “stupidly numb” and had not acknowledged the many expressions of sympathy she had received. She said that she chose nearby Kensico Cemetery in Westchester as the final “resting place” for her mother and herself, rather than “the old Havemeyer-Harriott vault” at Green-Wood. Both women had a “horror of vaults,” she explained, and wished to “rest out under the sun and stars.”22 Ironically, the divorce she had worked so hard to avoid in life would come in death. She would be buried with her mother, the real love of her life. “Yet,” she continued in the letter, “I must begin to work now. Death is a mad extravagance these days. I must pick up the pieces of my shattered world.” To her credit, she did. She took in tenants and demonstrated admirable resilience as she looked forward to 1918: The family Andrus are kind and gay and pleasant and very considerate of me and my ways. So I am well off in personal comfort and accept the new part I am cast for in the play of “Life.” That of the old person upstairs—who owns the house—and knits and plays the guitar to herself at unholy hours of the night and is sympathetic to all other peoples [sic] sorrows even to their joys. Well I have always played my best, good part or bad part. So I must do my best now even though I do make a wry face now and then. So farewell 1917—You brought me much and took more—God’s will be done.23 When the Andruses left abruptly in January 1919, Morris hired Ada Murphy as her nurse. Mrs. Murphy would stay with her for the rest of her life—a life that varied little in its rhythms and routines. In the seven remaining years for which there are diaries, Morris yearned for her “dear ones.” Although the pain of her mother’s loss remained acute, she had difficulty remembering her husband. On one of the pages at the end of the 1918 volume she wrote, “Oh—I miss my mother so. . . . Fred seems to be settling into the period of early married years—I don’t recall him as old—without an effort—Poor boy—so big and so—weak.” That was one of her more honest assessments of Harriott, who continued to recede from her memory. In February 1919, she contrasted her mother “who seems so near” with “Freddy who begins to seem so far.” As the years passed, thoughts of Sarah Jane—“Poor hardly tried brave woman”—became even more vivid. On the second anniversary of her death, Morris wrote, “I hear her step and wait actually wait for her early early morning coming into my room to tuck me up or bring me a sip of her coffee or bring a flower for me”; on her own seventy-

258

Conclusion

third birthday, “If I only had mother” is the wistful entry. The following July, she revealed how intertwined their lives had been: Dear Sarah Jane, you who suffered so in cruel heat—Oh those days when I could not help yet—and saw you suffer and overwork at Mrs Millers—what I suffered and prayed in that stinking tiny rat hole we were in: “God oh please let me help her—Oh please—some way” Dear He answered—I love you so Mother24 She remained active within the confines of Ornith Cottage. An avid reader of newspapers, magazines, and library books, she also knit, studied Spanish, played the guitar, and enjoyed visits from friends and the occasional journalist. She talked on the telephone, listened to her Victrola, and bought a radio, although it never worked properly. She worried about money and kept writing. The diary indicates that she published twenty-three articles in 1923 and was still producing them in 1924. The last one she mentioned was “Woman Unchangeable,” which she feared was “poor” and mailed on 2 September. She wore Japanese kimonos and ate candy regularly—molasses, not ginger which she detested. She loved flowers, birds, her Pekinese, Chilo, and the color pink. In a 1921 interview, she said she disliked “reds, except in roses, . . . purples and most shades of green.” The same article quoted her perceptive comments about old age, which she did not romanticize: “It has dignity. It has wisdom. But it has no beauty. It is futile to talk of the beauty of old age. . . . Old age is decay. There is no beauty in decay.”25 On the pages of her diary, she often commented on significant events in the world beyond her yellow house. In 1918, she was upset to learn of Vernon Castle’s funeral, Anna Held’s terminal illness, the execution of “Alixe [sic], deposed Empress of Russia and all four lovely helpless fatherless daughters,” and the outbreak of history’s most lethal influenza virus. “What an awful thing this epidemic is,” she wrote on 23 October. “Can’t find men to dig graves, 300 burials in single day at Kensico God help us all Oh the orphans.” She rejoiced in the end of the First World War, although she still disapproved of Woodrow Wilson and was thrilled to see his two-term presidency end in March 1921: “The inefficient reckless administration of eight terrifying years is over. Mr Wilson is out—God strengthen and guide the man who follows him. Welcome Warren Harding.”26 Both men were dead within three years, as she noted in February 1924. Morris recorded losses to the theater world as well: “Jimmy O’Neill” in 1920 and Eleanora Duse, Marie Corneille, and Lotta Crabtree in 1924. She delighted in Jack Dempsey’s defeat of European champion George Carpentier for the heavyweight boxing title in July 1921—the first important sports event broadcast by radio. In contrast, the previous summer, she had said nothing

259

Pages from Morris’s 1917 diary. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Conclusion

about the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which finally gave American women the right to vote. She marked suffrage with a laconic entry on Election Day: “First time for women—I hope they will be earnest and dignified.”27 A newspaper article in March 1920 credited her with “the bubbling spirits of a girl and the intellectual vigor of a woman of forty.” Two 1924 letters capture that vitality, irrepressible in spite of her physical limitations. The first, written on 1 June to a lawyer who had sent her a gift, conveys the optimism she still felt: In seven years I have breathed outdoor air five times. Even then, one of those times was the following of my beloved mother to her place of rest. I am alone and I am confined to my room absolutely now, can’t walk. I have one woman in my house—sort of combination nurse and housekeeper. I work when I can, my editor even accepts pencil copy. I have my guitar for pleasure, my Spanish to keep my mind from mother hunger. . . . I find the world lovely. The second went to the manager of the Fifth Avenue Theatre, who hoped to present a “Clara Morris Night” in November. Claiming that she was now just “a fable, a legend of 1875,” she declined the invitation: “I could be shouldered like a bag of oats or rolled in on a roller chair, but . . . pride forbids. . . . It is a delightful thing to be remembered when you know it is common decency you should be forgotten.”28 Clearly, she had not lost her sense of humor. Six clippings tucked into the pocket of the 1924 diary suggest her wideranging interests: an ad requesting contributions to the Immediate Relief of Italy Fund, an article about former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, a letter to the editor of the Sun from the president of the New York Parks and Playgrounds Association urging that High Bridge—a “beautiful old monument of the past”—be preserved, directions for making fabric stars as Betsy Ross did, and handwritten notes for a story she would not live to write (“The 2 of her—1 wrestled with mentality—2 wrestled with emotions—conflict mental and physical—Between reason and instinct”). The last is a poem about dying, which she must have found especially meaningful. 29 Three January 1925 entries fill the last pages of the 1924 diary. On an “exquisite” New Year’s Day, she ate chocolate fudge, admired a bouquet of cyclamen in her room, dressed for a visit from her lawyer, noted her radio was still “not in good form,” and expressed relief that her dog, Chilo, had recovered from a recent illness. Monday, 5 January, was a “lovely day although no snow—rabbit tracks about the house.” She knit, played the guitar, and read library books. A new radio arrived on Thursday, but Mrs. Murphy “made an awful mistake . . . and turned off the lights, so cant [sic] get it to light at all.” Pleased “Chilo fairly well,” she ordered more library books.

262

Conclusion

Morris’s fifty-four-volume chronicle concludes with that mundane entry. Although she intended to continue, there is no 1925 diary. It is impossible to know why or to say with any certainty how she spent her final months. In March, according to newspaper reports, she celebrated her birthday at home, received greetings from all over the world, and told a journalist by telephone, “I am not sad. I’m running a three-ring circus.”30 In September, she moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, to spend the winter with the Herolds, Mrs. Murphy’s son and daughter-in-law. Had Morris’s health deteriorated? Had Ada Murphy herself become too frail to care for her seventy-eight-year-old patient? Many obituaries quoted Morris’s friends who said her mind was alert to the end and included a remark she had allegedly made: “I am the famous actress who only had one husband and never knew any family trouble.” She was still unwilling to lift the veil she had drawn over her personal secrets. Morris succumbed to heart disease at the Herolds’ home on Friday afternoon, 20 November 1925. Although several newspapers reported the cause of death as a heart attack, the death certificate stated it was endocarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart chambers and valves, which could have been related to her underlying rheumatic condition or to her drug use. The obituaries that ran in major dailies on Saturday provided fulsome, if inaccurate, accounts of her life and career. The New York Times called her “one of the most beloved actresses in the history of the American theatre.” The New York World characterized her as “the greatest actress of her day.” The New York Telegram identified her as the “leading portrayer of feminine emotions on the American stage,” the Boston Transcript as once “the greatest emotional actress of the English-speaking stage.”31 They also reminded readers that she was the “woman of sorrow” whose “later years” had been marked by adversity. On Sunday afternoon, Morris’s body lay in state in the mortuary chapel of the Church of the Transfiguration, “The Little Church around the Corner” on East Twenty-ninth Street—a chapel that had held the bodies of Edwin Booth, Richard Mansfield, Joseph Jefferson, and Maurice Barrymore. The New York Times reported that nearly six hundred people, many of them “old stage associates,” filed past her bier on Sunday, with more “from all walks of life” flocking to the chapel before and after the funeral the next day. The Morris they saw through the candlelight looked “startlingly young”: Only her silver hair betrayed the tell-tale mark of her 79 [sic] years. There was not a wrinkle in her placid face. Draped about her shoulders was a pink scarf, and her robe was pink silk embroidered with butterflies. As one oldtime actress who had known Miss Morris since girlhood expressed it, the beauty of her youth had seemed to come back to her in death.32

263

Conclusion

The funeral itself took place on Monday afternoon and was even more crowded. The church could not accommodate the twelve hundred mourners who had come to pay their final respects to the actress they “knew and loved.” They included representatives of several theatrical organizations, distinguished actors and actresses—such as George Arliss, Gertrude Elliott, Robert Mantell, Nellie Revell, and Gloria Swanson—and “many humbler folk who had seen her only once or twice from gallery seats.” It was standing room only, and the theatrical parallel was not lost on observers. According to the New York Morning World, “Once more, and for the last time, crowds stood in line for Clara Morris yesterday. Long before 4 o’clock, the hour set for the actress’s funeral, every seat . . . was taken. People stood against the walls, a double row lined the path outside, and cars choked the usually quiet street.”33 As the choir sang “Abide with Me,” Morris’s funeral procession made its way into the church. Preceded by eleven honorary pallbearers—among them John Drew, Otis Skinner, and David Warfield—the mahogany coffin, “carried high and mantled with pink chrysanthemums and autumn leaves, was borne to the chancel.” Morris had made no funeral arrangements, so the simple service was arranged under the auspices of the Episcopal Actors’ Guild of America. Led by the Reverend Doctor Randolph Ray of the “Little Church,” assisted by the Reverend Frederick A. Wright, rector of Morris’s church in Tuckahoe, it featured two more musical selections (“I Heard a Voice” and the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria”), with “Hark My Soul” as the recessional. Outside the church afterward, Wright addressed the mourners. He read a statement Morris’s fellow communicants had drafted assuring the public that “she was not only a great actress but also a devout Christian believer and a good and worthy follower of Jesus Christ.” He then told a story she had often related about how, as an eight-year-old, she had promised God to be “a good girl and go to church all her life if only she could help her mother, who took in washing.” The following day, “an itinerant troupe of players came to the little town in which she lived.” They needed a child for one of their productions, so she joined them for four dollars a week. She had “kept her covenant all these years on the stage and at her little home in Riverdale.”34 Wright’s remarks reinforced the defining tropes of Morris’s life, which, even in death, shaped her autobiographical narrative: love of her mother, trust in God, and the determination to achieve respectability. The “good girl” grew into a hardworking, self-sacrificing Christian woman untarnished by her years on the stage, unvanquished by illness, unwavering in her faith. Interestingly, that was the case. Although she never stopped filtering the stories she shared with the public, the last few volumes of the diary reveal that Morris had indeed become the inspiring individual she had hoped to be, someone capable of writing,

264

Conclusion

“Thank you God for the beauty of the world. For friendship. For Life that is yet so good a thing.”35 The person and the persona had finally melded. The outpouring of affection her death provoked showed how many lives she had touched as an actress, a “social philosopher,” and a courageous human being. Morris was buried alongside her mother at Kensico on Tuesday. She left no will,36 and the grave remains unmarked, both of which are eerily symbolic. Although it would be an overstatement to say that she has disappeared from the historical record, her achievements have not won the recognition they deserve, nor has she been acknowledged as the feminist she was—for her era—both on and off the stage. Her reputation has diminished once again. Such words as “limited” and “undisciplined” have been allowed to define her accomplishments and such derisive epithets as “Queen of Spasms” to reverberate through the decades. During her long period of decline in the 1880s and 1890s, she was dismissed as a relic, even a grotesque, incapable of adapting to changing tastes and styles, bound to a dated repertoire and a hopelessly mannered style of acting. Her admirers were saddened by what she had become and her detractors—some of whom, like Alan Dale, had never seen her in her heyday—took gleeful pleasure in skewering her. Andrew C. Wheeler (Nym Crinkle), who spurned the theater after a religious conversion, had a farm outside Monsey, New York, where he reportedly kept a sow named “Clara Morris.”37 If true, it suggests how precipitous Morris’s fall had been in the estimation of those who once admired her. Wheeler died in 1903, a year before Morris appeared in The Two Orphans, the production that marked the beginning of her artistic rehabilitation. Sister Genevieve was strikingly different from the roles for which she was known, but Morris’s acclaimed performance made her popular once again, beloved by audiences who rewarded her—and her replacement—with ovations each night. Her writing was even more important in restoring and elevating her reputation. Another kind of bravura performance, it not only kept her in public view but also gave her the legitimacy she had always craved. Widely respected as an author, she spoke with cultural authority on a variety of subjects. As she noted with pleasure in her 1907 diary, a newspaper had placed her in a line of “‘four great writers’ my my!” that began with Nathaniel Hawthorne.38 It was the story of her personal struggles, however, that truly transformed her in the public mind. It contributed to a kind of Morris hagiography that erased the anger people had felt in the 1880s when her morphine use became known, and she repeatedly denied it. Then she had seemed like just another American “humbug” who duped trusting audiences into believing the entr’acte injections she needed were simply restorative medicinal drinks. It is possible that increasing awareness of the nature of addiction at the turn of the century

265

Conclusion

made people more sympathetic to Morris’s plight. It is more likely, however, that the ongoing saga of the “woman of sorrow” subsumed all else. Her many afflictions and the courage with which she accepted them forged an emotional bond of compassion and identification between her and the people who admired her. That sympathetic connection had probably figured in her Two Orphans’s success as well, because it followed the year in which reports of her illness, death, and imminent eviction had first surfaced and the benefit she was too sick to attend had taken place. More than her longevity as a stage performer and success as a writer, it was her personal strength in dealing with adversity that transformed Morris into the beloved figure her obituaries recalled and helped to elevate her artistic reputation immediately after her death. Recalling that she had recently characterized her stage career as now merely a “legend,” the Sun observed, “it may have become that, but it was the sort of a legend founded on the rock of genuine admiration and deep respect, both well-deserved.”39 In a 1918 interview, Morris revealed that she never liked Camille but had come to appreciate its “vitality.” Although she still found it “artificial,” she considered it the first play “that ever laid bare the soul of a woman.”40 That kind of emotional vivisection was her specialty, as William Winter said of her Sarah Multon, and Willa Cather sensed when she wrote that Morris infused her characters with a “living soul.” Critic Amy Leslie used similar terms in 1899, stating, “She does not play parts, she materializes souls.” Another described her as having “a razor in her emotions,” which suggests that she flayed her audiences along with her characters. A third asked in 1910, “What other actress has made us see a breaking heart? Made us utterly forget the player and remember only the woman portrayed?”41 In the eyes of many spectators, however, she was not only playing a character but also was using that character to reveal herself, creating the illusion that they were seeing into her soul as well. Whether it was Morris herself as theatrical spectacle, the suffering of the characters she interpreted so convincingly, or both, the effect was profoundly moving. The Tribune explained, “It was the power to compel tears which made [her] one of the most popular actresses of her time. She lived and acted in a day when the chief effort of the playwright was to ‘make ’em cry.’ Now he is trying to ‘make ’em think,’ which is a more difficult business.” As the Tribune noted, Morris generated “heart-interest.” At the height of her career in the 1870s, audiences felt an electric connection to her on stage. They found her moving because she was believable, the pain and passion she depicted so realistic. She brought a nuanced complexity to the roles she interpreted, using personal experience (including her own dark memories) to reinvent them. According to the Sun, “she played for sympathy parts which

266

Conclusion

had theretofor [sic] been considered only as the subject of hisses and moral indignation—she played with such terrific intensity and feeling that all small conventions were swept away.”42 Beyond that, as historian Drew Gilpin Faust has shown in her penetrating book This Republic of Suffering, America in the 1870s was still reeling from the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. With hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, death touched virtually every household, North and South.43 Morris’s graphic delineation of suffering on stage may well have resonated with a traumatized nation and allowed audiences welcome emotional release. When the country was ready to move on, however, she could not. No one questioned Morris’s ability to arouse pathos and sympathy as she portrayed “the tender suffering of a woman’s heart.” Most critics even used the word genius in describing her talent. For many, however, she was an inconsistent genius. As Towse described her, she was “a remarkable personality” and “a great actress” but lacked the requisite polish, “the executive perfection” of the “great artist.” Watching her perform evoked memories of Edmund Kean, whose acting Coleridge had famously compared to reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. Compounding the problem for Morris was that it was not reading Shakespeare but Daly’s version of Dumas fils. When the plays on which she built her reputation were no longer fashionable, the career itself seemed evanescent, the achievement inconsequential. The New York Dramatic Mirror observed in 1910, “Her fame would perhaps have been more permanent had it rested on a foundation of classic and standard roles instead of parts in plays of . . . fugitive interest. She scored her greatest triumphs in dramas that allowed her to display the full force of her realistic genius for roles of sensational coloring.”44 While that is undoubtedly true, the material she interpreted also helped shape her distinctive performance style. Like the sensation novels in which many of the plays originated—a genre known for its “violent yoking of romance and realism, traditionally the two contradictory modes of literary perception”45—it was Morris’s unconventional “yoking” of the realistic with the aberrant that audiences found particularly compelling (and probably was what Cather meant when she called her realism “terrible and relentless”). “A great expositor of emotional sensation,” as a San Francisco critic described her in 1878, Morris operated at the point of intersection between the possible and the improbable. She was the embodiment of sensational realism—the personification of the novelistic “sensation paradox”—and that made her best performances unusual, unsettling, and unforgettable for nineteenth-century audiences. For subsequent critics and scholars, however, Morris’s inability to eschew melodrama and embrace “modern” or classical material led to her dismissal as merely an “emotional actress”—itself a dated and sexist term—lacking

267

Conclusion

the range, depth, flexibility and subtlety of greater talents. It is tempting, but ultimately pointless, to wonder how different her reputation might have been had ill health and morphine addiction not hobbled her. Consigned to obscurity for decades, Morris deserves recognition for her many creative accomplishments. One of them certainly is her diary. Cracked and crumbling, the fragile volumes disintegrate beneath even a careful reader’s fingers. A few have cloth covers, but most of them are bound in leather of varying colors: brown, purple, black, maroon, and red. The majority are “pocket” size, roughly 3½ by 6 inches. Several have “Excelsior Diary”—her preferred brand—embossed in flowery gold script on their covers. Some snap shut with scratched metal tabs, while others fasten with frayed ties. Most contain lined pages edged in red or gold, with handwriting that varies considerably from volume to volume, undoubtedly affected by age, stress, illness, and medication. The entries themselves are in pencil (black or blue) or ink (black or violet). All capture the voice of a determined, resilient woman. “Work and put the best of yourself into it. Put pleasure and leisure and luxury behind you,” the industrious Morris told an interviewer in 1907.46 Thousands of entries reveal how completely that principle informed her life and inspired her two remarkable careers. Her capacity for dramatic reinvention remains as compelling today as her stage creations of passion and power were for the audiences they haunted.

268

Notes Index

Notes Abbreviations Frequently cited collections are indicated by the following abbreviations. BRTC Diaries HTC LSC RLC

Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center Clara Morris Harriott’s diaries, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library Laurence Senelick Collection Robinson Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center

Preface: A Tale of Two Cemeteries 1. The grave contains the remains of Clara Morris Harriott and her mother, Sarah Jane Proctor Morrison. Introduction: A Strange Human Cryptogram 1. Variety, 15 November 1925. 2. New York Times, 21 November 1925. 3. New York World (no date), Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. Nym Crinkle is one of the pseudonyms of Andrew Carpenter Wheeler (1835–1903), who also wrote as J. P. Mowbray, J. P. M., and Trinculo. Albert E. Johnson and W. H. Crain Jr., “A Dictionary of American Drama Critics, 1850–1910,” Theatre Annual 13 (1955): 87. 4. Linda Wagner-Martin, Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 5. 5. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 82. 6. George T. MacAdam, a New York Times reporter for ten years, purchased Morris’s diaries and assorted papers after her death. His own came four years later on 28 November 1929 at age fifty-three. His widow, Virginia Root MacAdam, donated the diaries to Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library in October 1969. In 1997, my colleague, Professor Laurence Senelick, acquired MacAdam’s research notes and some of the Morris material, all now part of the Laurence Senelick Collection (LSC).

271

Notes to Pages 3–17 7. Mildred Langford Howard, “The Acting of Clara Morris” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1956). 8. Diaries, vol. 3 (1867–68). Volumes 1 and 2 include Spanish phrases, instructions for various card games, recipes, and lists of plays and books but no daily entries. 9. Albert M. Palmer, “Far from the Madding Crowd,” History of the Union Square Theatre, MSThr173 (no publisher, no date), HTC, 105. 10. Clara Morris, The Life of a Star (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1906), 329–42. 11. Mary O’Connor Newell, “The Clara Morris of Yesterday,” unidentified Chicago newspaper, 5 June 1910, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 1. That Fair Peak of Triumph 1. In Life on the Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1901), Morris refers to the play as L’Article 47. Most reviewers, however, drop the article and call it either Article 47 or Article Forty-seven. 2. New York Herald, 14 September 1870, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 53. 3. Joseph F. Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 110. 4. Morris, Life on the Stage, 334–40. 5. New York Times, 4 April 1872. 6. Spirit of the Times, 13 April 1872, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 63. 7. Morris, Life on the Stage, 342–43; New York Times, 4 April 1872. 8. Brander Matthews, Rip Van Winkle Goes to the Play (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 186–87; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 15 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–49), 9:152; Clinton Stuart, quoted in Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton, eds., Edwin Booth and His Contemporaries (Boston: Page, 1900), 217–18. 9. Diaries, vol. 5 (1872), 15 May, 15 June 1872. 10. Odell, Annals, 9:261. 11. Morris, Life on the Stage, 349–51. 12. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 1 January 1873. 13. Edward A. Dithmar, Memories of Daly’s Theatres (New York: privately printed for Augustin Daly, 1897), 69. 14. J. F. Daly, Life of Augustin Daly, 117; New York Times, 22 January 1873. 15. Morris, Life on the Stage, 357. 16. Ibid., 358. 17. Ibid., 363; Stuart, quoted in Matthews and Hutton, Edwin Booth, 219. 18. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 21, 22 January 1873. 19. New York Times, 22 January 1873; New York Tribune, quoted in Matthews and Hutton, Edwin Booth, 227–28; Spirit of the Times, 25 January 1873 and New York Herald, 22 January 1873, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 67. 20. Morris, Life on the Stage, 344. 21. Palmer, History, 47 (see intro., n, 9). 2. The Making of an Emotional Actress 1. Diaries, vol. 32 (1900), 17 March 1900. Even obituaries give conflicting accounts. Some cite 1846, others 1847 or 1848 as her birth year. Morris compounded the confusion. On her 20 November 1874 marriage license, she gave her age at her next birthday as

272

Notes to Pages 17–27 “26,” which would have meant an 1849 birth year. The year 1847 appears on her death certificate in the Connecticut State Department of Health. 2. Morris, Life on the Stage, 2–15 (see chap. 1, n. 1). 3. Ibid., 9–14. 4. George T. MacAdam, “A Biographer in the Role of ‘Old Sleuth,’” 2, George MacAdam Papers, LSC. 5. Ibid., 3–4. She died in 1917 at ninety-three. 6. Ibid., 7. 7. Diaries, vol. 35 (1903), 9 May 1903. 8. MacAdam, “Biographer,” 8; “Chapter 2,” 7, George MacAdam Papers, LSC. 9. In her diary entry for 17 April 1915, Morris confirms that date and birthplace. 10. Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (New York: HarperCollins, 2004/paperback edition 2005), 38. 11. MacAdam, “The Mother’s Story,” 1, 5, George MacAdam Papers, LSC; Peter G. Goheen, Victorian Toronto: 1850–1900: Pattern and Process of Growth (University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper No. 127, 1970), 48. 12. MacAdam, “Mother’s Story,” 6. 13. Clara Morris, Left in Charge (New York: Dillingham, 1904), 10. According to MacAdam, “examination of a map of Illinois showed that the Warsaw Road and the villages of Marceline and Lima are actualities.” “Biographer,” 5. 14. Morris, Left in Charge, 22–25. 15. Ibid., 27. 16. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy, quoted in Goheen, Victorian Toronto, 50. 17. Morris, Left in Charge, 28–34. Bigamist Charles Paul Lavalle got what he deserved. He was shot and killed by the fiancé of a woman he assaulted. 18. MacAdam, untitled draft, 22, “Biographer,” 7. 19. George Brown, Brown’s Toronto City and Home District 1846–47 (Toronto: Brown, 1846), 40; Edwin C. Guillet, Toronto from Trading Post to Great City (Toronto: Ontario, 1934), 118–20; City of Toronto and the Home District Commercial Directory and Register, 1937 (Walton, 1837), 26. 20. MacAdam, “Biographer,” 8. On 5 December 1876, more than three hundred people (including several actors) died in a catastrophic fire that began during the last act of the popular melodrama The Two Orphans starring Kate Claxton. 21. Ibid., 9. 22. Ibid., 10. There is no evidence that Morris tried to contact him. 23. MacAdam, untitled draft, 26, George MacAdam Papers, LSC. 24. Diaries, vol. 22 (1891), 17 October 1891. 25. “Clara Morris’s Sister Is Found amid Squalor,” New York Tribune, 28 October 1927. 26. “Find Needy Sister of Clara Morris,” New York Times, 28 October 1927. 27. Ibid. 28. New York Times, 28 October 1927. The ruling made Eliza Burtis her sister’s sole beneficiary, the recipient of Morris’s estate of fifteen thousand dollars. The value of the award was subsequently reduced to six thousand dollars, on account of deductions to cover expenses Morris had incurred. Sadly, Burtis died on 23 November, less than one month after inheriting it. The money probably went to Helen Campbell, a young woman who had befriended her, although four Proctor cousins also claimed it.

273

Notes to Pages 28–36 29. New York World, 28 October 1927. 30. Although Mollie Revel remembered Morris saying she had a brother Clarence, MacAdam believed the baby’s name was Charles. Unfortunately, there is no evidence (such as a birth or adoption certificate) with which to support the existence of this child, let alone to conclusively determine his name. 31. MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 1.11–14, George MacAdam Papers, LSC. 32. Buffalo City Directory, 1848–49, 118; 1849–50, 227, 126. 33. MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 1.14–15. 34. Morris, Life on the Stage, 6, 14; Morris, Left in Charge, 113. 35. Morris, Life on the Stage, 399, 306, 180. 36. MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 1.16–17. 37. F. Marion Brandon, a script editor, considered making a film based on “The Pirate”: “It is very interesting to know that you were the child,” confirming the autobiographical nature of this story. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 38. Morris, Little “Jim Crow” and Other Stories of Children (New York: Century, 1899), 71–102, 125–42. 39. MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 1.15. 40. Morris, “The Gentleman Who Was Going to Die,” A Silent Singer (New York: Brentano’s, 1899), 71–90. 41. MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 1.46. 42. Morris, Left in Charge, 263–64, 348. 43. The fate of Morrison’s mother is unclear. She may have died before her daughter’s visit to Illinois or during her stay there. She did not accompany her to Cleveland. 44. Nevada Proctor to George MacAdam, 9 September 1926, 17 January 1927, George MacAdam Papers, LSC. 45. MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 1.49–50. 46. Ibid., 17. 47. In Left in Charge, Grandfather Parsell has died long before Selina and May arrive at the Gallaways, but sadistic Grandfather Toler could have been based on Morris’s memories of her own great-grandfather Proctor. 48. MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 2.18. 49. Ibid., 1, 2, 3, 7, 18, 26–30 January, 27 February, 1 March 1862. 3. Theatrical Apprenticeship in Cleveland 1. May Wright Sewall, ed., The World’s Congress of Representative Women: A Historical Resumé for Popular Circulation, vol. 1 (Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1894), v, 161–63. 2. Ibid., 177–78. 3. Morris, Life on the Stage, 18 (see chap. 1, n. 1). 4. Cleveland Leader, 22, 25 February 1861. Built by Joseph C. Foster on the top floor of a three-storey brick building on the east side of Bank Street, the theater opened on 16 April 1853. Known as National Hall (1853–54), then as Foster’s Varieties (1854–55), it became the Academy of Music in 1859. See William Ganson Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland, OH: World, 1950). 5. See John A. Ellsler, The Stage Memories of John A. Ellsler, ed. Effie Ellsler Weston (Cleveland, OH: Rowfant Club, 1950). The Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland,

274

Notes to Pages 36–42 Ohio (www.wrhs.org) has an unpublished version of Ellsler’s memoir in its manuscript collection: MS 2875, John A. Ellsler Papers, 1852–77, container 1, folder 2. 6. Don B. Wilmeth, introduction, Plays by Augustin Daly (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 5. 7. Walter J. Meserve, “Malice, Ignorance, and Good Intentions: The Struggle for Stability in the American Theatre during the 1850s,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 11 (Spring 1999): 2. 8. Claudia D. Johnson, American Actress: Perspective on the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984), 35. 9. Ibid., 46; Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy with Madeleine B. Stern, eds., The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 23. 10. Morris, Life on the Stage, 19. 11. Ibid., 20; MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 2.4 (see chapter 2, note 31). MacAdam gives the date as Monday, 23 June 1862, and claims she was still in school. Morris remembers it as a Tuesday after the academic term ended. An unidentified newspaper article by Philip Playlore quotes from the same diary and could have been MacAdam’s source. Entitled “The Diary of Clara Morris/Poverty and Privations in the Youth of America’s Great Emotional Actress,” it appears in an extra-illustrated volume at the HTC (TS 931.2F): Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton, eds., Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States, vol. 5, no. 12, 13 (New York: Cassell, 1886). Because the diary from which MacAdam quoted is no longer extant, it is impossible to verify either the date of Morris’s first meeting with Ellsler or the authenticity of the diary quotation. 12. Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790– 1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 150, 143; Morris, Life on the Stage, 20. 13. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 142. 14. Ibid., 143. The Black Crook (1866) is considered the first American “leg” or “girlie” show. Keene’s production should claim the title because it appeared six years earlier. 15. Cleveland Leader, 23 April 1862. 16. Ibid., 12 June 1862. 17. Ibid., 13 June 1862. 18. Ibid., 30 June 1862. 19. Ibid., 1, 2, 8 July 1862. 20. Morris, Life on the Stage, 21–23. Zouaves were elite volunteer regiments in the Union Army, named after the Berber tribesmen of Algeria who fought with the French in the Crimean War. Early in the Civil War, American Zouaves wore red uniforms adopted from their North African counterparts. By the end of 1861, however, most Zouave units used the standard blue uniform of the Union Army because red had made them easy targets. 21. MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 2.4; Philip Playlore, “Diary of Clara Morris.” 22. Morris, Life on the Stage, 26–27. 23. Six dollars then had the purchasing power of $128 in 2007. Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, “Purchasing Power of Money in the United States from 1774 to 2007,” Measuring Worth, 2008. In the following notes, all values of dollars are computed using Officer and Williamson’s method. 24. Morris, Life on the Stage, 30.

275

Notes to Pages 42–49 25. Cleveland Leader, 22 July, 3 September 1862; Rose, Cleveland, 260. The candles were lighted from the balcony with a long rod. The theatre was 200 feet long, 80 feet wide, and 27 feet high, with a stage measuring 80 by 60 feet. It had excellent acoustics and seated more than two thousand. 26. Philip Playlore, in Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses. According to Playlore, the diary ends abruptly with the 24 December entry: “It was warm. I went to rehearsal. Mrs. Dickson is worse. I went up the street. Ma got me a new cloak and I got a new corset. Purcell and Tom gave me 10 cents.” 27. Cleveland Leader, 1 May 1866. It is possible that the Cleveland Herald and the Plain Dealer cited Morris by name before 1866, but one would have to read them issue by issue. The Cleveland Leader is more accessible because it was part of a WPA project, Annals of Cleveland, 1818–1935, which contains a newspaper digest. That digest provides a yearly index by subject of articles from the Cleveland Leader, the only Cleveland newspaper included. Her first directory listing (1866–67) reads, “Morris, Clara, Academy of Music, b American,” which means she worked at the Academy of Music and boarded at the American House. In the next edition (1867–68), the last in which her name appears, it is “Morris, Clara, actress, b American.” There is no entry for her mother. 28. Cleveland Leader, 13, 17, 22, 27 October; 11, 13, 16 November; 2 December 1862. 29. Ibid., 15 May, 11 July 1863. 30. The company appeared at Ellsler’s Atheneum in Columbus, which suggests that he bought or, more probably, leased another theater. 31. Morris, Life on the Stage, 43–44. 32. Ibid., 193, 34. 33. According to the Cleveland Leader, Booth appeared at the theater from 29 June to 3 July 1863. His fall engagement began on 26 November and included The Lady of Lyons and Richard III. 34. Morris, Life on the Stage, 119–20. 35. “Little Effie” Ellsler (1854–1942) made her debut with the company that season (1863–64) in William H. Smith’s popular temperance melodrama, The Drunkard. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says it was in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Little Eva, but John Ellsler’s memoir cites The Drunkard. “Little Effie” was the oldest of four, her siblings being William G., John J., and Annie. 36. Morris, Life on the Stage, 156. E. L. Davenport reacted with similar disbelief when he learned that Effie Ellsler would play Desdemona and Morris would be Emilia to his Othello. 37. See Lisa Merrill’s When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 38. Cleveland Leader, 28 September 1866. 39. Morris, Life on the Stage, 189. 40. Ibid., 141–44. Also an actor, Charles M. Barras (1826–73) is remembered primarily as the author of the four-act musical extravaganza The Black Crook with music by various composers, which opened at Niblo’s Garden on 12 September 1866 and became a spectacular success. 41. Ibid., 147. 42. Cleveland Leader, 1 May, 17 October, 16 November, 1866; 17 January, 18, 27 April, 7 May 7, 1867. According to a 4 December 1866 Academy of Music playbill, Morris played Paulina in the “Great Drama” The Wizard Skiff, or the Ship of Fire and Mary Woodward

276

Notes to Pages 49–57 in The Maniac Lover, or the Fayre Lass of Litchfield. On 6 December, she appeared as Jane Wilton in the “Melo-Drama” entitled The Dumb Boy of Manchester. The following night in The Angel of Midnight! or, the Footsteps of Death! she played Marguerite. Playbills, Clara Morris, HTC. 43. Cleveland Leader, 16 December 1866. 44. Ibid., 18 May 1867. 45. Morris, Life on the Stage, 192. 46. Diaries, vol. 3 (1867–68), various entries. 47. Ibid., entries as noted. 48. The Fourteenth Amendment (ratified on 9 July 1868) guaranteeing citizenship to former slaves and the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified on 3 February 1870) granting voting rights regardless of race but not regardless of gender pitted advocates of women’s suffrage against those who supported the rights of freedmen to vote. 49. Diaries, vol. 4 (1869), 3 June 1869. She identifies the plays (Victor and Lady and Devil) but does not explain why she refused the roles. 50. Academy of Music playbill, 22 January 1869, Playbills, Clara Morris, HTC. The same playbill shows that seats for the performance ranged from 25 cents for a gallery seat to $8.00 for a private box and that the theatre opened its doors at “7¼ o’clock,” with the curtain scheduled to rise at 8. The program also indicates that the Academy of Music’s seating areas were strictly segregated. The orchestra, family circle, dress circle, parquette, and private boxes were for whites only. “Colored Persons” were permitted in the theater but were only allowed to sit upstairs in the gallery. 51. Diaries, vol. 4 (1869), 19 April, 11 May 1869. 52. Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 187, 190. 53. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 164. 54. Cleveland Leader, “Theatrical Needs of Cleveland,” 30 July 1869. 55. John A. Ellsler, Stage Memories of John A. Ellsler, unpublished manuscript (see note 5). 56. On 26 September 1869, Morris, who was then in Cincinnati, wrote, “This is my Brownie’s birthday. God bless him, how I wish I was with him. . . . You are 42 tonight.” Diaries, vol. 4 (1869). Born in 1821, Ellsler would have been forty-eight in 1869. He may have told the twenty-two-year-old Morris he was younger than he actually was to minimize their age difference. 57. Diaries, vol. 4 (1869), 27 January, 8 August 1869. 58. Ibid., 15 January, 26 July 1869. 59. Ibid., 22, 24 January 1869. 60. Ibid., 1, 14, 19 April 1869. The amounts of $35 and $36 then were worth $549 and $565, respectively in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 61. Ibid., 8 September 1869. 62. Morris, Life on the Stage, 235–37. 4. Leading Business in Cincinnati 1. George E. Stevens, The City of Cincinnati: A Summary of Its Attractions, Advantages, Institutions and Internal Improvements, with a Statement of Its Public Charities (Cincinnati, OH: Blanchard, 1869), 72–76.

277

Notes to Pages 57–68 2. Robert C. Vitz, The Queen and the Arts: Cultural Life in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989), 158. 3. Russell J. Grandstaff, “A History of the Professional Theatre in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1861–1886” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1963), 22–23. 4. The diary does not resume until 11 October 1870. 5. Morris, Life on the Stage, 230–40 (see chap. 1, n. 1). 6. Ibid., 241; Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 5 October 1869. 7. Morris, Life on the Stage, 242. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 246. 10. Ibid., 245–59. In her 12 and 13 April 1896 diary entries, she notes with sadness Cockerill’s death in Egypt. 11. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 8, 11 October 1869. 12. Ibid., 20, 21, 28 October 1869. 13. Ibid., 31 October 1869. 14. Ibid., 29 October 1869. 15. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer and Cincinnati Daily Times, 9 November 1869. 16. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 12 November 1869. 17. Cincinnati Daily Times, 12 November 1869. 18. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 26 November 1869. 19. Ibid., 30 November, 2 December 1869. 20. Cincinnati Daily Times, 30 November 1869. 21. Ibid., 4 December 1869; Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 4, 5 December 1869. 22. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 8 December 1869; Cincinnati Daily Times, 7 December 1869. 23. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 4, 5, January 1870; Cincinnati Daily Times, 11 January 1870. 24. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 19 January 1870. 25. Ibid., 25 January 1870. 26. Cincinnati Daily Times, 27 January 1870; Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 23 February 1870. 27. MacAdam, “Making of an Emotional Actress,” 3:17. Rachael Johnson played leading roles at Wood’s for three weeks in the spring (18 April–7 May) after Morris’s dismissal. Grandstaff, “History of the Professional Theatre in Cincinnati,” 194. 28. Ibid., 3:18. 29. Ibid., 3:19. 30. Cleveland Leader, 24 October 1870. 31. It is unclear how or when the two men resolved their differences. 32. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 3 March 1870; Cincinnati Daily Times, 2 March 1870. 33. Cincinnati Daily Times, Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 8, 9, 10 March 1870. 34. Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, from a travel piece written for the Alta California in 1867, quoted in Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 154 (see chap. 3, n. 12). 35. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 15 March 1870; Cincinnati Daily Times, 14 March 1870. 36. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 16 April 1870.

278

Notes to Pages 68–74 37. Morris, Life on the Stage, 251. 38. Ibid., 250. 39. Ibid., 252–53. 40. Ibid., 254–55. In addition to the offer from Maguire, she says she received one from a Washington manager but does not indicate whether it is the western state or the nation’s capital. 41. Ibid., 257. 42. Kim Marra, “Taming America as Actress: Augustin Daly, Ada Rehan, and the Discourse of Imperial Frontier Conquest,” Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance), ed. Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 52. 43. The weekly salary Maguire offered had the purchasing power of $1,639 in 2007, compared with Daly’s $574. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 44. Morris, Life on the Stage, 258. 45. Ibid. 46. The Theatre Royal, also known as the Spring Garden Theatre and the Garrison Theatre, opened in 1846 in a building that had been a hay barn. According to Janet A. Maybee’s “Theatre in Halifax, 1850–1880” (master’s thesis, Dalhousie University, 1965), forty-one professional touring companies performed in Halifax between 1850 and 1880. lxiii–lxix. 47. J. Linden Best, “Theatre in Halifax Had an Earlier Golden Age,” Mail-Star, 17 October 1972. 48. When the building opened in December 1849, the Sons of Temperance forbade theatrical productions but permitted public meetings and variety performances. 49. British Colonist, 28, 30 May 1868. 50. Morris, Life on the Stage, 261. 51. William Coates Borrett, “Another Unsolved Sea Mystery: The S.S. ‘City of Boston,’” Tales Retold under the Old Town Clock (Toronto: Ryerson, 1957), 150–54. 52. Morris, Life on the Stage, 263. 53. Daily Acadian Recorder, 13, 15, 18 June 1870. 54. Ibid., 18, 25 June 1870. 55. Ibid., 1 July 1870. 56. Morris, Life on the Stage, 264–65. 57. Daily Acadian Recorder, 12 July 1870; Morris, Life on the Stage, 264. 58. Ibid., 265, 264, 267. 5. A Western Actress in New York 1. George J. Lankevich, American Metropolis: A History of New York City (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 116–18; Laurence Senelick, The Age and Stage of George L. Fox, 1825–1877 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 137; Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre: New York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square (Clifton, NJ: Whiste, 1976), 100, 127. Brooklyn was accessible by ferry. Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, often called the greatest engineering project since the Erie Canal, began in January 1870 and was not completed until May 1883. Lankevich, American Metropolis, 119. 2. Henderson, City and the Theatre, 88, 112–13.

279

Notes to Pages 74–84 3. Wilmeth, Plays by Augustin Daly, 9 (see chap. 3, n. 6). That $25,000 had the purchasing power of $392,396 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power” (see chap. 3, n. 23). 4. Marvin Felheim, The Theater of Augustin Daly (1956, Harvard University Press; repr., New York: Greenwood, 1969), 6–7. 5. Wilmeth, Plays by Augustin Daly, 7. 6. Felheim, Theater of Augustin Daly, 46. 7. Dithmar, Memories of Daly’s Theatres, 32 (see chap. 1, n. 13); J. F. Daly, Life of Augustin Daly, 89 (see chap. 1, n. 3); Felheim, Theater of Augustin Daly, 11. 8. The season started slowly. An article in the Cincinnati Daily Times listing the gross receipts of “the places of amusement in New York City for the month of September” shows the Fifth Avenue Theatre’s $11,931 well behind Booth’s ($49,144), Niblo’s Garden ($35, 595), and Wallack’s ($24,810), among others, but ahead of Wood’s Museum ($11,117), Bowery Theatre ($8,747), Stadt Theatre ($7,373), Bryant’s Minstrels ($3,722), and Academy of Music ($3,491). 9. Wilmeth, Plays by Augustin Daly, 9, 11. According to Joseph F. Daly, there were 315 performances in the 1870–71 season (Life of Augustin Daly, 106). 10. Morris, Life on the Stage, 279–80, 276 (see chap. 1, n. 1). 11. Ibid., 291–93. 12. Ibid., 294–95. 13. Ibid., 296. 14. Ibid., 298. 15. Clara Morris, A Pasteboard Crown: A Story of the New York Stage (1902; repr., New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 133. 16. Morris, Life on the Stage, 299. 17. New York Herald, 14 September 1870, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 53 (see introduction, note 7); New York Times, 15 September 1870. 18. Undated review of Man and Wife, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 19. “Man and Wife,” Man and Wife and Other Plays by Augustin Daly, ed. Catherine Sturtevant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942). Sturtevant based her edition of the play on one that Daly printed privately in 1885. 20. Charles Wingate and F. E. McKay, eds., Famous American Actors of Today (New York: Crowell, 1896), 93. 21. Diaries, vol. 4 (1869), 29, 30 October 1870. 22. Odell, Annals, 9:12 (see chap. 1, n. 8); Morris, Life on the Stage, 315. 23. Morris, Life on the Stage, 316–17. 24. According to British critic George Henry Lewes, for example, Charles Kean had changed from “the stamping, sputtering, ranting, tricky actor” of his early career to one remarkable for his “naturalness and forcible quietness.” Quoted in Tice L. Miller, Bohemians and Critics: American Theatre Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1981), 32. Kean’s tour took him to Cleveland where he performed with Ellsler’s company and Morris worked with him. 25. Morris, Life on the Stage, 320; New York Herald, 22 December 1870, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 56. 26. Morris, Life on the Stage, 324; New York Times, 30 March 1871. 27. Odell, Annals, 9:18. Morris did not appear in The Savage and the Maiden. 28. Morris, Life on the Stage, 330. According to Joseph Daly, her salary was $40, not $35. That was low compared with the wages other company members received: among 280

Notes to Pages 84–90 them, Agnes Ethel ($125), Fanny Davenport ($75), Mrs. Gilbert ($65), James Lewis ($100), Fanny Morant ($110), Kate Newton ($60), Linda Dietz ($20), and Roberta Norwood ($15). Odell, Annals, 9:20. 29. Morris, Life on the Stage, 332. 30. Ibid., 323–34, 365. 31. Ibid., 283; Clara Morris, Stage Confidences: Talks about Players and Play Acting (Boston: Lothrop, 1902), 270–71. 32. Otis Skinner, Footlights and Spotlights (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924), 135. 33. William Winter, quoted in Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre & Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 207; Odell, Annals, 9:149; Marra, “Taming America as Actress,” 53 (see chap. 4, n. 42); Wilmeth, Plays by Augustin Daly, 19 (see chap 3, n. 6). 34. Marra, “Taming America as Actress,” 53; Marra, “A Troubled ‘Republic’: Daly and His Leading Ladies” (chapter in unpublished manuscript), 7 (quoting J. F. Daly’s Life of Augustin Daly, 92) and 3 (quoting J. Daly, Life of Augustin Daly, 548). I am grateful to Professor Marra for generously sharing her unpublished work. It has since appeared as Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865–1914 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007). 35. Marra, “Taming America as Actress,” 59–60. 36. Morris, Pasteboard Crown, 50. 37. Ibid., 100–101, 261. 38. Ibid., 26. 39. Ibid., 68. 40. Ibid., 133. 41. Ibid., 142. 42. Ibid., 263–64. 43. Sybil may have been the innocent victim of Thrall’s lust, but Morris does not absolve her of guilt. Although she had intended to leave him, she does not. Three years later, their adulterous affair still continues, and she has become “Queen of the Stage.” One morning, she rushes to Thrall’s office, crying because she has just learned of her mother’s death. A stagehand mistakenly thinks Thrall has upset her and shoots him. Mortally wounded, Thrall asks Sybil’s forgiveness. She kisses him, replying, “I love you for time and for eternity.” She opens a jeweled locket after his death the next morning, as he instructed, and finds the inscription, “Wife.” She responds by pledging her devotion to him. As the novel ends, she is en route to London, wracked with the “very agony of grief.” She says, “I repent of my sin, yet I still love and long for him.” The implication is that she has renounced her stage career and plans to spend the rest of her life seeking forgiveness. Morris, Pasteboard Crown, 349–70. 44. Gerald Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Senelick, Age and Stage of George L. Fox, 176. 45. Morris, Life on the Stage, 367; New York Herald, 6 September 1871, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 58; Winter, quoted in Bordman, American Theatre, 39. 46. Odell, Annals, 9:148. 47. The other plays were Old Heads and Young Hearts, Fernande, The Provoked Husband, London Assurance, and Frou-Frou. Odell, Annals, 9:149. 48. Ibid., 9:150. 49. Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13. 281

Notes to Pages 90–99 50. Ibid., 13–16. 51. Spirit of the Times, 13 April 1872, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 63; Stuart, quoted in Matthews and Hutton, Edwin Booth, 217–18 (see chap. 1, n. 8); Augustin and Joseph Daly correspondence, 4 September 1873, quoted in Marra, “Troubled ‘Republic,’” 9. 52. Odell, Annals, 9:150. 53. Phillip R. Slavney, Perspectives on “Hysteria” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 1–2, quoted in Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 14.. 54. A. Fabré, L’hysterie viscerale—nouveaux fragmentsde clinique médicale (Paris: Delahayé & Lecrosnier, 1883), 3, quoted in Elaine Showalter, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender,” Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. Sander Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Showalter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 287; Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 24. 55. Micale, Approaching Hysteria, 183, 188. 56. Showalter, Hystories, 82. 57. Ibid., 82, 101; Felheim, Theater of Augustin Daly, 197; Elin Diamond, “Realism and Hysteria: Toward a Feminist Mimesis,” Discourse 13 (Fall–Winter 1990–91): 63, quoted in Showalter, 101. 58. Morris, Life on the Stage, 334. 59. Predictably, Joseph Daly attributes the effectiveness of the mad scene to his brother’s direction: “This triumph had not been effected without extreme preparation. Long rehearsals with her ambitious and painstaking manager had shaped every movement and guided every inflection. Their joy was mutual.” Life of Augustin Daly, 110. 60. Jules Falret, Etudes cliniques sur les maladies mentales et nerveuse (Paris: Librairie Ballière et Fils, 1890), 502, quoted in Showalter, Hystories, 101–2, Hélène Zimmern, “Eleanora Duse,” Fortnightly Review (1900): 983, quoted by John Stokes, “The Legend of Duse,” Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Arnold, 1979), 162, and Michael Robinson, “Acting Women: The Performing Self and the Late Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Criticism 14 (1992): 3–24. 61. Morris, Life on the Stage, 355. 62. Odell, Annals, 9:266; Dithmar, Memories of Daly’s Theatres, 69. 63. Odell, Annals, 9:266; New York Herald, 22 January 1873, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 68. 64. New York Herald, 9 February 1873, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 68. 65. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 9, 15, 17, 22 February 1873. A monthly salary of $200 then was worth $3,575 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. In Life on the Stage, Morris reduces the amount of time she says she committed to Daly: “We agreed that I should give him three months of the season every year as long as he might want my services, and the rest of the season I should be free to make as much money as I could, starring” 376. 66. New York World, undated clipping, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 67. New York Herald, 21 May 1873, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 70. 68. New York Tribune, 30 May 1873, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 69. Ibid. Although the 21 May 1873 New York Times was more restrained, its critic also considered the play “unwholesome” and “unfit to be acted.” 70. Morris, Life on the Stage, 372–73. 282

Notes to Pages 99–104 71. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 20 May 1873. 72. Ibid., 9, 16, 19, 24 June 1873. 6. The Dramatic Meteor 1. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 30 June, 19, 21, 24–26, 28, 29, 31 August, 1 September 1873. 2. Odell, Annals, 9:14 (see chap. 1, n. 8). Ethel had the title role, a well-educated young woman from a good family who becomes a prostitute after having been orphaned, then seduced, and abandoned by her guardian. Morris played Clothilde, the innocent young wife of Fernande’s lover, Maurice de Barthelme. 3. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 7, 13, 15, 17, 18 September 1873. 4. Ibid., 7, 11, 15, 22, 23 September 1873. On 25 September, she “went out to look for Mr. Burt” but “could not find him,” suggesting that she was searching for relatives, perhaps her sister, Eliza. 5. Ibid., 29, 30 September 1873. Tomasso Salvini (1829–1915) was famous for his Othello, which he customarily performed on tour in Italian, supported by a company speaking the language of the country in which he was appearing. This seems to have been the case with his Corrado. 6. Ibid., 1 October 1873. Daly also managed the Grand Opera House, on the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. 7. Ibid., 6 October 1873. In addition, Daly managed the Broadway Theatre at 728 Broadway (formerly the location of the Fifth Avenue Theatre) and the New Fifth Avenue Theatre (northwest corner of Broadway and Twenty-eighth Street). A cartoon in the 11 November 1873 Graphic “showed him bending beneath the burden of his theaters with the caption, ‘An Atlas of Theatres.’” Felheim, Theater of Augustin Daly, 13 (see chap. 5, n. 4). 8. Ibid., 11, 17, 20 October 1873. Appleton may have been the publisher of Appleton’s Journal, a weekly magazine of fiction and current affairs. 9. Morris, Life on the Stage, 375–76 (see chap. 1, n. 1). 10. Ibid., 376–78. 11. “Clara Morris Interviewed: The Dramatic Meteor Tells Her Story,” Spirit of the Times, 14 March 1874 (dated 20 February, St. Louis), vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 12. Joseph Daly attributed the rupture, ironically, to Divorce, the production with which Daly’s company opened in every city. Miffed that the “comedy scenes elicited more applause than the serious and emotional parts”—namely, hers—she refused “to appear again in Divorce” and “before her first three months were up . . . retired from the company.” Moreover, although Morris’s seven-month contract forbade her to perform anywhere else in New York without Augustin Daly’s consent, she breached it when she signed with a rival manager and “engaged to play at the Union Square Theatre.” Life of Daly 153–54 (see chap 1., n. 3). 13. New York Dramatic Mirror, 18 March 1905, quoted in Pat M. Ryan Jr., “A. M. Palmer, Producer: A Study of Management, Dramaturgy, and Stagecraft in the American Theatre, 1872–1896” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1959), 10. Palmer (1838–1905) was a member of the second class to graduate from the newly reopened Law School of New York University, obtaining his LLB in 1860. Dissatisfied with the practice of law, he worked on Abraham Lincoln’s election campaign and was rewarded for his loyalty with a series of political appointments in the 1860s. An administrator of the New York Mercantile Library, then the fourth-largest library in the country, he became its librarian in 1869. Ibid., 2–9. 283

Notes to Pages 104–7 14. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 18, 19, 21, 22, 25 October 1873. Three hundred dollars was the equivalent of $5,362 in 2007, a sizeable weekly salary. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 15. Milton Rugoff, America’s Gilded Age: Intimate Portraits from an Era of Extravagance and Change, 1850–1890 (New York: Holt, 1989), 46. 16. Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 29. The 2007 equivalent of $775 million was $13,852,590,517. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 17. J. F. Daly, Life of Augustin Daly, 142. 18. Palmer, History, 4 (see intro., n, 9). 19. Clement Scott, Drama of Yesterday and Today, 2:416, quoted in Ryan, “A. M. Palmer, Producer,” 305. 20. Palmer, History, 4. 21. “Two hundred dollars a week is a fair price for the best leading man,” Palmer declared in 1883, “and it is as much as any manager can afford to pay who means to keep faith with his actors and the public.” New York Herald, 20 December 1883. Daly’s salaries, however, still “started as low as $7 a week and averaged about $35.” Felheim, Theater of Augustin Daly, 33; Ryan, “A. M. Palmer, Producer,” 333–34. 22. New York Standard and New York Herald, 18 September 1872, quoted in Ryan, “A. M. Palmer, Producer,” 11. 23. Stage manager in Palmer’s day referred to a senior actor in the company who helped conduct rehearsals. 24. Palmer, History, 5–6; Ryan, “A. M. Palmer, Producer,” 15–19. In 2007, the equivalent of $75,000 was $1,340,573. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 25. Palmer, History, 8, 16. He replaced him with John Parselle, an actor known in London and Philadelphia, then making his New York debut. 26. Ibid., 19. 27. The Library of the Players, New York, contains a transcript in Palmer’s hand of Morris’s letter of acceptance, which is reproduced in Ryan, “A. M. Palmer, Producer,” 333. New York November 14, 1873 Mr. A. M. Palmer Manager, Union Square Theatre Dear Sir:— I accept the time offered to me in your note of this date, viz.:—I agree to play under your management for two weeks from the 17th day of November (my salary to commence on the 10th day of November) 1873, and from the first day of March 1874 until the end of the season—which shall not be later than June 15, 1874—for the sum of three hundred dollars per week, subject to the rules and regulations of the Union Square Theatre as printed, as such as may be posted in the Green Room. Clara Morris

284

Notes to Pages 107–12 28. W. S. Gilbert, The Wicked World, acting ed. 364, French’s Standard Drama (New York: French, 187?), 42. 29. Palmer, History, 20; Morris, Life on the Stage, 380. According to an openingnight playbill, the performance would begin each evening “until further notice” with Conjugal Tactics, “a Comedietta [sic]” in which Morris did not appear. The 3 December 1873 playbill shows another “charming Comedietta,” A Regular Fix. Assorted playbills, Box 172: Union Square Theatre, 1871–77, HTC. 30. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 17, 18 November 1873. 31. Winter cited in Spirit of the Times, 22 November 1873, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 81–82 (see introduction, note 7). Winter’s wife, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Campbell Winter, had been a member of Daly’s troupe in 1870–71, Morris’s first season with the company, so it is possible that the critic’s disapproval stemmed from personal animus based on information (gossip?) his wife had shared. See Miller, Bohemians and Critics, 76–77 (see chap. 5, n. 24). 32. Spirit of the Times, 22 November 1873, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 82. 33. New York World, 23 November 1873, in Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses (see chap. 3, n. 11). 34. Ibid. 35. Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 23. 36. Ibid., 23, 6. 37. Palmer, History, 20. 38. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 23–25 November 1873. 39. Ibid., 29 November 1873. 40. A list of expenses, dated 27 December 1873, shows that Palmer charged Morris $100 for using the play. It is unclear whether that was a one-time fee or a royalty he expected every time she appeared in it (Clara Morris Papers, LSC). According to her 6 December diary entry, he would not let her have The Wicked World on this tour. 41. Morris, Life on the Stage, 381. 42. Unidentified Philadelphia newspaper clipping, 2 December 1873, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 43. As Morris explained in her Spirit of the Times interview, “the first and last acts are entirely new. It also dispenses with the rather prosy court-scene which you find in Mr. Daly’s version.” 44. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 12–14 December 1873. Offstage drama in Philadelphia included a “row” with her agent, Mr. Campbell, who promptly quit. When he did, she telegraphed Palmer and John Ellsler for help. Palmer was the first to respond, arriving two days later with a new agent, John P. Smith. 9–11 December 1873. 45. Ibid., 15–18, 20 December 1873. 46. Ibid., 27 December 1873. An itemized list of expenses and assets dated 27 December 1873 shows that ticket sales for Morris’s week in Buffalo amounted to $2,046.25. The nightly totals were as follows: Tuesday, $287.75; Wednesday, $175; Thursday matinee, $100; Thursday evening, $602; Friday, $400.75; Saturday, matinee, $232; Saturday, evening, $248.75. After Morris deducted her expenses and the local theatre manager took his share, her income for the Buffalo engagement was $395.83, which was worth $7,075 in 2007. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23.

285

Notes to Pages 112–19 47. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 29 December 1873. 48. Providence Daily Journal, 30 December 1873, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 49. Ibid. and Providence Morning Star, 31 December 1873, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 50. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 3, 9, 10, 22, 24, 28, 30 January 1874. The 22 November 1873 Spirit of the Times reported that Morris had received offers from several London managers for the 1874–75 season, but she says nothing about them in her diary. 51. Ibid., 11–13, 15, 16, 19 January, 1 February 1874. Because the Euclid Avenue Opera House was under construction, Morris performed at the Academy of Music. Ellsler’s grand new theater opened on 6 September 1875. 52. Ibid., 19 January 1874; Cleveland Herald, 20 January 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 53. She would show her gratitude more tangibly later in the year. An undated note in handwriting that is not hers reads: “Clara put $25,000 in 1874 in Ellsler’s Cleveland Opera House,” whose management he assumed (Clara Morris Papers, LSC). A sizeable investment (worth $469,524 in 2007; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23), it was money she probably never recovered because Ellsler’s new venture eventually failed, bankrupting him. 54. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 23 January 1874; Cleveland Herald, 24 January 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC; Spirit of the Times (quoting the Cleveland Herald), 31 January 1874, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 55. “Clara Morris Interviewed.” (See chap. 6, n. 11). 56. Bonnie Jean Eckard, “Camille in America” (PhD diss., University of Denver, 1982), 39–43. 57. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 133 (see chap. 3, n. 12). 58. “No one knows for sure if Heron made her own adaptation directly from the French of Dumas fils or if she plagiarized what Davenport had already adapted or if she worked from another literal translation.” Gwen U. Preston, “Matilda Heron: An Americanization of Camille” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2003), 4. 59. Camille, a Play, in Five Acts, translated and adapted from the French by Matilda Heron, French’s American Drama, acting ed. 129 (New York: French, 18??), 23. 60. Ibid., 12. 61. New York Tribune, 23 January 1857, quoted in Eckard, “Camille in America,” 69; unidentified newspaper clipping, quoted in Eckard, “Camille in America,” 60. 62. New York Tribune, 15 May 1874, “The Drama. Union Square Theater. Camille— Miss Clara Morris,” Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 63. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 134. 64. Ibid., 134. 65. Morris, Life on the Stage, 382–83. It probably was George W. Lovell’s Love’s Sacrifice, or, The Rival Merchants, a Play in Five Acts, first produced at Covent Garden Theatre in 1842 and well known in America by the 1850s. 66. Ibid., 383. It is unclear whether or not Morris actually saw Heron in Camille. The other actress she mentions could have been Davenport or Keene, although she would have been too young to have seen either one. 67. Ibid., 383. 68. Ibid., 386. 69. Ibid., 386–87.

286

Notes to Pages 119–26 70. Ibid., 387. Palmer characterized his casting of Morris as an “experiment.” Although he believed she would be effective, one of his associates disagreed and stated bluntly, “She cannot play Camille.” History, 23. 71. Palmer, History, 24. 72. Union Square Theatre Playbills, 14 May 1874, HTC. The playbill reads, “This and every evening until further notice will be presented (by kind permission of Miss Matilda Heron) Dumas’s great play.” The acknowledgment casts doubt on a story told by A. C. Wheeler (Nym Crinkle), related by Howard, of an ill, unstable Heron desperate to keep Morris from claiming the role she considered hers. Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 85–86. 73. New York Tribune, 15 May 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 74. Spirit of the Times, 23 May 1874, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 75. Alan Dale, Familiar Chats with Queens of the Stage (New York: Dillingham, 1890), 365–66. “Alan Dale” was the pseudonym for Alfred J. Cohen (1861–1928). Drama critic for the New York Evening World (1887–95), Journal (1895–1913), and American (1913–21), he also wrote articles on theater for Cosmopolitan and Ainsley’s. Johnson and Crain, “Dictionary of American Drama Critics,” 72 (see introduction, note 3). 76. Spirit of the Times, 23 May 1874, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 77. Ibid. 78. Grace Greenwood, “Five Camilles,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. In addition to Morris, they were Doche, Davenport, Heron, and “the beautiful Mrs. Mousby”—probably British actress Clara Mousby (1848–79), celebrated more for her appearance than her acting ability. 79. Ibid. 80. New York Tribune, 15 May 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 81. Articles of Agreement between Albert M. Palmer, for Sheridan Shook, and Clara Morris, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. A thousand dollars then was the equivalent of $18,780 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 82. Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France, trans. Teresa Bridgeman (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 20, 21 quoted in Glenn, Female Spectacle, 20, 21. 83. Ibid., 19; Greenwood, “Five Camilles.” 84. Palmer, History, 24. 85. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 15, 25, 26 May 1874. 86. Alberta L. Humble, “Matilda Heron, American Actress” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1951), 295. Humble says it was “Rankin, the Armand of the play,” who read Heron’s letter. According to the playbill for Camille, however, McKee Rankin played Count de Varville, while Charles R. Thorne Jr., was Armand. Union Square Theatre Playbills, HTC. 87. Odell, Annals, 9:402. 7. Marriage and Macbeth 1. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 23 June 1874. William Frederick Havemeyer (1804–74) served as New York City’s mayor in 1845–46, 1848–49, and 1873–74. 2. Spirit of the Times, 5 December 1874, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 1, RLC, vol. 351, BRTC. 3. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 5 November 1873.

287

Notes to Pages 126–31 4. Palmer, History, 7 (see intro., n, 9). 5. Palmer reportedly paid Feuillet $1,000 for the rights to The Sphinx, even though the play was already published in Paris and had thus passed into the public domain under existing copyright laws. Ryan, “A. M. Palmer, Producer,” 121 (see chap. 6, n. 13). 6. Clara Morris, “When ‘The Sphinx’ Shocked New York,” New York Telegraph, 20 December 1903, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 7. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 20, 23, 30 August 1874. 8. Articles of Agreement between Clara Morris and Albert M. Palmer for Shook and Palmer, 18 May 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. According to the terms of that contract, she would appear at the Union Square from 14 September through 14 November 1874 and at an unspecified New York theater from 10 May 10 through 15 June 1875. 9. John Ranken Towse, Sixty Years of the Theater: An Old Critic’s Memories (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1916), 152. An English journalist who joined the New York Evening Post as a reporter in 1869, Towse (1845–1927) became its drama critic in 1874 and held that position for the next fifty-four years. He also contributed articles to Century, Nation, and The Dramatic Year, 1887–1888. Johnson and Crain, “Dictionary of American Drama Critics,” 86 (see introduction, note 3). 10. Morris, “When ‘The Sphinx’ Shocked New York,” 98. 11. Ibid., 99. 12. Ibid. 13. “Strychnine,” http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/strychnine/basics/facts.asp. Morris writes, “In deciding on strychnia [a white or yellow powder], we were flatly contradicted by Blanche’s description of the poison she carries in her Sphinx ring which she declares to be a brown powder. She drops it into a little cold water, in which it is supposed to dissolve, while the strychnia is, I believe, not soluble without great heat; but then, much is allowed to stage license.” Morris ordered a “Sphinx ring” from Tiffany’s: “a beautiful intaglio, encircled with diamonds, and it was so made that it swung back on a hinge, revealing the receptacle for the brown powder (finely pulverized coffee) which I had each night to swallow.” “When ‘The Sphinx’ Shocked New York,” 99. 14. “When ‘The Sphinx’ Shocked New York,” 100. How Morris achieved the effect of frothing at the mouth remained a mystery throughout the run. She finally revealed that she used chalk to produce it, having first hidden it beneath one of her fingernails, then under a tea tray on stage. 15. Unidentified clipping, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC; Spirit of the Times, 26 September 1874, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 92 (see introduction, note 7); New York Times, 22 September 1874, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 92. 16. Towse, Sixty Years of the Theater, 152; Arcadian, “The Sphinx,” n.d., Clara Morris Papers, LSC; unidentified clipping, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 17. Palmer, History, 26. The production ran from 21 September through 24 October 1874. 18. “The Retreat of Clara Morris, the Cant of Current Theatrical Criticism and What It Has Done to Rob the Stage of a Great Emotional Exponent,” New York Graphic, 24 October 1874, quoted in Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses (see chap. 3, n. 11). 19. Palmer, History, 27. 20. New York Tribune, quoted in Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses. 21. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 26–28 October 1874.

288

Notes to Pages 131–35 22. Palmer, History, 27; Spirit of the Times, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 93; Odell, Annals, 9:544 (see chap. 1, n. 8). 23. New York Times, 27 October 1874, quoted in Odell, Annals, 9:544. 24. Palmer, History, 27. The theater, which had opened under the management of Mr. and Mrs. F. B. Conway on 2 October 1871, would be destroyed by fire on 5 December 1876, little more than two years after Morris’s engagement. 25. Spirit of the Times, 3 October 1874, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 93. 26. Morris, Life of a Star, 30. 27. Ibid., 31–32. 28. Towse, Sixty Years of the Theater, 153. 29. Brooklyn Eagle, “Music and the Drama: Clara Morris as Lady Macbeth,” 27 March 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 30. The five reviews are in Matthews and Hutton’s Actors and Actresses. Only the Daily Graphic’s is dated (27 November 1874), but all clearly refer to this Brooklyn engagement. 31. An unidentified newspaper clipping in Matthews and Hutton’s Actors and Actresses contrasts Morris favorably with Cushman, which it caricatures as “a species of she-Forrest with a portentous aspect, a corrugated brow, a huge headachy Massachusetts forehead, and a cavernous mouth, which, when the ledge is lifted, emits a deep and dreadful sound, [and which] although sanctioned by tradition, has no affinity in nature.” 32. New York World and New York Post, n.d., quoted in Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses. 33. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 30 November 1874. 34. George MacAdam Papers, miscellaneous notes, LSC. Their marriage license (dated 20 November 1874) which MacAdam obtained, contains the following information: “Frederick Christian Harriot [sic], Merchant; residence: Whitestone, Long Island; age next birthday: 36; b. New York City to Warren Harriot and Catherine E. Havemeyer Harriot; Clara Morris; residence: 139 W. 32d St.; age next birthday: 26; place of birth: Toronto, Canada; Father’s name: Charles Morris; Mother’s maiden name: Sarah Jane Proctor.” In addition to changing her father’s name, Morris made herself two years younger than she actually was. 35. Vera Liebert, “Clara Morris or the Weeping Muse,” MWEZ + n.c., 18,266, 10, BRTC. 36. Schlesinger Library has two tiny datebooks, both with very few entries, which belonged to him. There is additional material in the Senelick Collection, none of it particularly revealing. 37. It is “Harriot” on the marriage license, as noted above, but “Harriott” in his obituaries. Morris herself seems to have spelled her name with one t at first and then added the second. When she mentions her husband in The Life of a Star, it is “Harriott.” 38. See Odell, Annals, 9:89, 132. Several extant reviews of Harriott’s appearances are favorable, including one from Albany: “His voice is of great compass, ranging with masterly effect from the deep, clanging bass of ‘The Bells’ to the sharp, thin treble of ‘Sara Gamp.’ . . . We hope Albany will ere long have the pleasure of another visit from Mr. Harriott.” Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 39. Morris, Life of a Star, 54. (See introduction, note 10.)

289

Notes to Pages 135–40 40. Ibid., 29. She makes it sound as though Fred proposed to her while she was in rehearsal for Macbeth in November 1874, when she had accepted his proposal the previous November. 41. Ibid., 54. 42. Pittsburgh Leader, “Amusements: Pittsburgh Opera-House,” 6 December 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 43. Spirit of the Times, 25 January 1875, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 44. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 25 December 1874. 45. Academy of Music Playbill, 21 December 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. The same playbill identifies Mrs. Effie Ellsler as the theater’s manager, restricts “Colored People . . . to the Family Circle only,” states “Positively no Improper Characters Admitted,” and announces that John Ellsler will join Morris for two performances of Alixe as the Count de Somerive “wedded and wretched.” 46. Cleveland Leader, “Amusements: Academy of Music,” 15, 18 December 1874. 47. Ibid., 18 December 1874. 48. Ibid., 24 December 1874. 49. Spirit of the Times, 25 January 1875, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 50. “Amusements: The Event of the Week—Miss Clara Morris in the Role of Lady Macbeth,” 10 January 1875, Inter Ocean, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. Given her interest in clinical accuracy, Morris could have consulted with her physician about somnambulism or observed “living subjects.” If she did, however, she never discussed it. 51. Ibid.; Spirit of the Times, 16 January 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 94. 52. Ticket sales that week brought in $1341.50, of which Morris’s share was $170.75. Her expenses (for printing and Dr. Williams) came to $60.60, thus leaving her $110.15 ($2,146 in 2007 dollars; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23) in weekly earnings. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 53. Spirit of the Times, 20, 27 February 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 94. That was equal to $136,409 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. The 5 December 1874 issue reported that she made $4,400 ($85,743 in 2007; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23) in her two weeks in Brooklyn. 54. The 1 March 1875 Cleveland Leader carried a fascinating letter in which Morris wrote she “had a physician four or five times a day” in San Francisco and had to be “carried to and from the theater.” She described the “two earthquakes and a fire” she experienced and her visit to “the Chinese quarters,” including “their eating house, their Joss house [temple], and their opium dens.” She said she “was received with high honor at their theatre, and taken behind the scenes.” Surprised there were no actresses, with “the men taking female parts,” she was startled when the actors undressed in her presence. 55. Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 26 March 1875; Philadelphia Evening Herald, 20 April 1875, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 56. Odell, Annals, 9:532; Spirit of the Times, 25 January 1875, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 57. A. M. Palmer to Clara Morris, 30 November 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC.

290

Notes to Pages 140–47 58. Odell, Annals, 9:532. 59. New York Post, 11 May 1875, quoted in Matthew and Hutton, Actors and Actresses. 60. Ibid. 61. New York Herald, 11 May 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 95–96. 62. Ibid., 96. 63. Ibid.; Spirit of the Times, 15 May 1875, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 64. New York Herald, 18 May 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 99. Ill with cancer, the fifty-eight-year-old Cushman still planned to give professional readings. See Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 239–41 (see chap. 3, n. 37). 65. Spirit of the Times, 23 May 1875, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 66. New York Herald, 18 May 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 99; New York Times, 18 May 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 100; Spirit of the Times, 23 May 1875, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 67. Rosenberg identifies more than 275 “descriptives” attached to her from “acquiescent, admirable, affectionate, agitated” to “witch-like . . . worn, wracked,” and “youthful.” See Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 159–60. 68. Charles Lamb quoted in Russ McDonald, Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 38. 69. Michael R. Booth, “Sarah Siddons,” Three Tragic Actresses: Siddons, Rachel, Ristori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996) 36, 61. 70. Rosenberg, Masks of Macbeth, 168. 71. Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 93; Towse, Sixty Years of the Theater, quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 97. 72. Morris, Life of a Star, 46. 73. According to her undated “Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth” which she gave to her biographer, Thomas Campbell, Siddons originally saw the character as “fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile, . . . captivating in feminine loveliness.” Campbell, quoted in Rosenberg, 161. 74. Morris, Life of a Star, 31, 39–40. There is no evidence that such a conversation actually occurred or that Morris and Cushman ever met or communicated about Lady Macbeth. 75. ? (signature indecipherable) to Frederick Harriott, 1 November 1874, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. In a 4 October 1874 letter to Harriott, he disparages The Sphinx’s Blanche as “a moral coward” and wonders why Morris does not play Cleopatra. 76. Morris, Life of a Star, 32–33. 77. Ibid., 34. 78. Towse, Sixty Years of the Theater, 153, 155–56. 79. At roughly the same time as Morris’s conspicuous failure, a Massachusetts jury found Lizzie Borden innocent of first-degree murder. Although evidence strongly supported conviction, the notion that this quiet, well-bred young woman could have murdered her parents with an ax seemed more irrational than the crime itself. 80. Winter, quoted in Odell, Annals, 9:533.

291

Notes to Pages 147–54 81. All quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 100–101. 82. McDonald, Look to the Lady, 40. 83. Odell, Annals, 9:532. 84. New York Herald, 18 May 1875, quoted in Odell, Annals, 9:532; New York Tribune, 18 May 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 101; Towse, Sixty Years of the Theater, 154. 85. M. R. Booth, “Sarah Siddons,” 53, 44. 86. Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 94. 87. Ibid. 88. Spirit of the Times, “Retrospective,” 12 June 1875, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. Criticizing Morris for not wearing a historically accurate costume was unfair, because many actors chose not to appear in period garments. Siddons herself, the paper reported, wore “black velvet and diamonds,” which may be why it objected to Morris’s white and scarlet. 89. Towse, Sixty Years of the Theater, 153. 90. Ibid., 155. 91. Morris, Life of a Star, 51–52. 92. It is unclear which version of the play Morris was using. A program for one of her engagements at Mrs. Conway’s Brooklyn Theatre shows that the production featured “original Macbeth music, solos, choruses, by Matthew Locke.” Vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. Matthew Locke (ca. 1630–77) wrote music for William Davenant’s version of Macbeth (1663), which shifted the emphasis to spectacle and had a chorus of singing, dancing, and flying witches. In the Brooklyn production, Hecate and the three witches were played by men. The four “singing witches,” however, were female, as were the second and third “apparitions.” Significantly, the part of Lady Macduff has been omitted. Morris probably used the same version at Booth’s. 93. Morris, Life of a Star, 51. 94. Augustin Daly to Clara Morris, 18 May 1875, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 95. Augustin Daly to Clara Morris, 31 May 1875, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 96. Nicholas Rowe, The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714), in Eighteenth-Century Plays, ed. Ricardo Quintana (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 98. 97. Spirit of the Times, 29 May, 12 June 1875, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC; Towse, Sixty Years of the Theater, 156. To relieve the “gloom,” the play was followed each night by Douglas Jerrold’s popular melodrama, Black-eyed Susan; or, All in the Downs (1829), in which Morris did not appear. 98. Spirit of the Times, 22 May 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 104; Odell, Annals, 9:533. Morris must have decided against appearing in Marguerite, as the Spirit of the Times had announced, and in Ingomar as Parthenia, a part she had once played in Cleveland with Charles Kean. Spirit of the Times, 29 May 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 104–5. 99. Odell, Annals, 9:533. 100. That amount of $800 was worth $15,965 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 101. Contract between Augustin Daly and Clara Morris (Harriot) [sic], 10 June 1875, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 102. Odell, Annals, 9:625. 103. Morris, Life of a Star, 59.

292

Notes to Pages 155–62 8. Morphined in Miss Multon 1. Cleveland Leader, 1 March 1875. 2. Laura Hanft Karobkin, Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and NineteenthCentury Legal Stories of Adultery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 57–58. For the Beecher-Tilton affair and ensuing trial, see Karobkin and also Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers (see chap. 3, n. 52). 3. A popular success, The Innocents Abroad (1869), which began as a series of humorous travel letters written for a San Francisco newspaper, sold more than seventy thousand copies in its first year and remained Twain’s best-selling book throughout his lifetime. 4. Spirit of the Times, 7, 15 September 1875, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 5. Undated letter in Morris’s hand to an unidentified person, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 6. “Clara Morris’s Tortures,” Cleveland Leader, 9 September 1875. 7. Ibid. 8. Morris, Life of a Star, 55–68. 9. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. Clearly, she was unable to attend the opening performance at Ellsler’s Euclid Avenue Opera House on 6 September. 10. Barker (b. 1818) died in 1891; Piatt (b. 1819) died in 1881, although some accounts say 1891. 11. Spirit of the Times, 30 October 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 106 (see introduction, note 7). 12. Augustin Daly to Clara Morris, 13 October 1875, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 13. Augustin Daly to Clara Morris, 2 November 1875, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 14. Odell, Annals, 10:15 (see chap. 1, n. 8). 15. It was the second Fifth Avenue Theatre in which Morris had never performed. 16. New York Times, 23 November 1875, quoted in Odell, Annals, 10:16. The reviewer added that if Morris had spent more of her time in Paris studying the artistry of Aimée Desclée and Sophie Alexandrine Croisette, and the public had read less about her in the newspapers, it would have been mutually beneficial. 17. Spirit of the Times, 27 November 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 107. 18. Spirit of the Times, 4 December 1875, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 108. 19. Frederick Harriott to Augustin Daly (draft, n.d.), Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. An undated, unsigned draft of that letter in Morris’s hand reads curtly: Dear Sir, I see by the papers that you have advertised me to appear next week in Man and Wife. This is a departure from our contract. By that as you know I was to make my debut in your new play and have waived my rights now for two weeks and cannot do it any longer. I shall not appear in Man and Wife or any other old play until your new play and Marie Stuart have been tried. Clara Morris Papers, LSC.

293

Notes to Pages 162–68 23. Augustin Daly per Stephen Fiske to Mrs. Clara Morris Harriot [sic], 27 November 1875, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 24. Ibid. 25. Odell, Annals, 10:16. 26. Ibid., 10:17. 27. Ibid., 10:17–20. 28. Diaries, vol. 8 (1876), 9, 14, 19, 22 February 1876. 29. Ibid., 15 January 1876. 30. Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 72; David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 46. 31. H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800–1980 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 12–38. 32. Barbara Hodgson, In the Arms of Morpheus: The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine, and Patent Medicines (Buffalo, NY: Firefly, 2001), 93. 33. The statistics are convincing. According to Courtwright, “The outstanding feature of nineteenth-century opium and morphine addiction is that the majority of addicts were women. Orville Marshall’s 1878 Michigan survey, Charles Earle’s 1880 Chicago survey, and Justin Hull’s 1885 Iowa survey indicated that 61.2, 71.9, and 63.4 percent of their respective samples were female. Marshall further differentiated between opium addicts, of whom 56.3 percent were female, and morphine addicts, of whom 65.6 were female.” Dark Paradise, 36. 34. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 1. 35. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 20 March 1874. Morris may have taken laudanum, or tincture of opium, a potent mixture of wine, opium, saffron and cinnamon. There also were many other opium-based remedies for pain relief that she could have used at home, including Dover’s Powder, Dr. J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, Atkinson’s Black Drop, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, and Godfrey’s Cordial. Hodgson, 45. 36. Diaries, vol. 7 (1874), 10 April 1874. 37. Claude Edwin Heaton, “The History of Anesthesia and Analgesia in Obstetrics,” Journal of the History of Medicine (October 1946): 570; Martin Booth, Opium, 72. 38. Diaries, vol. 8 (1876), 4 March, 30 April, 28 May, 16, 17 June 1876. It is tempting to assume that when Morris puts quotation marks around the word “sick” (or underlines it), it is a coded reference to having received a morphine injection or to experiencing what she had begun to recognize as the effects of morphine. It is impossible, however, to prove it. Similarly, someone (George MacAdam? Virginia MacAdam?) has noted that when the sign “+” appears on a diary page, it means a morphine injection. That is an erroneous assumption because many entries in which Morris writes of taking morphine are on pages without that sign. 39. Ibid., 25–27 June, 1, 20 July 1876. 40. Ibid., 26–29 August, 3, 7, 17 September 1876. Interestingly, in her 27 August entry, she indicated an awareness of the effects of morphine when she used the words “getting over morphine.” 41. Ibid., 28 August, 20 September 1876. 42. Tribune, 16 May 1876, quoted in Ryan, “A. M. Palmer, Producer,” 38 (see chap. 6, n. 13). 43. Palmer, History, 41 (see intro., n, 9).

294

Notes to Pages 168–73 44. Diaries, vol. 8 (1876), 9 October 1876. 45. Ibid., 29, 31 October 1876. 46. Palmer, History, 47. 47. Agreement between Shook and Palmer and Clara Morris (Harriot) [sic], 16 August 1876, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. Four hundred dollars a week then still was a sizeable salary, comparable to $7,982 per week in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 48. Palmer, History, 47. 49. Review of Miss Multon, unidentified Boston newspaper, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC; Morris, Life on the Stage, 390 (see chap. 1, n. 1). 50. Morris, Life on the Stage, 393–94. 51. Ibid., 394. 52. Diaries, vol.8 (1876), 3 November 1876; Morris, Life on the Stage, 394–95. 53. Clara Morris, “Reflections of an Actress,” North American Review 153, no. 418 (1891): 334. Life on the Stage’s account is almost identical, except that Morris embellishes it with an act of “remorseful generosity”: “I made her a little gift, and as she was slipping the bill inside her well-mended glove, her eye caught the number on its corner, and, she must have been very poor, her tormented and tormenting heart gave a plunge and sent a rush of blood into her face that made her very eyeballs pinken; and then again the clutching fingers, the flaring nostrils, the gasping for air, the pleading look, the frightened eyes! Oh, it is unforgettable! poor soul! poor soul!” Morris, Life on the Stage, 395. 54. Palmer, History, 47; Odell: Annals, 10:196. Palmer crossed out another sentence, but the words are legible: “There was no waste of emotion here.” 55. New York Sun, 26 November 1876; New York World, 23 November 1876; New York Times, 21 November 1876; New York Herald, 21 November 1876, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 56. Spirit of the Times, 25 November 1876, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 113; New York Tribune, 21 November 1876, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. Years later in The Wallet of Time: Containing Personal, Biographical, and Critical Reminiscences of the American Theatre (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1913), Winter changed the wording slightly to “a vivisection of the human heart” (571). 57. Diaries, vol. 8 (1876), 21 November 1876. She underlined “all” twice for emphasis. 58. Ibid., 20 November 1876. 59. Matthews and Hutton, Edwin Booth, 212 (see chap. 1, n. 8). 60. Palmer writes that Led Astray was “the Saturday night bill during her engagement” because “she had begun this early to rest, on that night, as a rule” (History, 48). According to her 25 November 1876 diary entry, however, it was “‘[The] Two Orphans.’” 61. Diaries, vol. 8 (1876), 26, 27 November, 2, 4 December 1876. 62. Ibid., 6 December 1876. 63. Ibid., 7, 8, 11 December 1876. 64. Palmer, History, 48. 65. Ibid. It is clear from his account that he resented the way Morris subsequently represented this episode: “Some years after, Miss Morris, talking with a newspaper reporter in San Francisco on her favorite theme, the cruelty of managers, urged the falsehood that she had dragged herself out of her bed to play Miss Multon at the Union Square Theatre in order to satisfy the greed of her manager; the truth being, that I yielding to the sentiment of pity, appealed to from a sick bed, in order to gratify this woman’s

295

Notes to Pages 173–82 querulous demand, lost many hundred dollars by putting up Led Astray. Moreover I thus magnified her importance with the public, by making open confession that I could not do without her in the play.” 66. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 3–7 January 1877. 67. Ibid., 8 January 1877; Palmer, History, 48. 68. Diaries, 10, 15, 19, 20 January 1877. 69. Ibid., 14, 15 January 1877; Palmer, History, 48. On 11 January, she noted the death of Lucille Western that evening in Brooklyn: “poor woman—hers has been a ruined life.” On the thirteenth, she was sorry to hear John Ellsler had been forced to sell the Cleveland Opera House: “Poor man he has to commence all over again, & his [sic] is old.” 70. New York Post, 17 January 1877, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC; Spirit of the Times, 24 February 1877, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 115. 71. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 8–14, 18–25 February 1877. 72. Spirit of the Times, 14 April 1877, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 116. 73. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 1–6, 8–10 March 1877. 74. Ibid. See for example 4–6, 15–21 March 1877. If the writing is Frederick Harriott’s, then its deterioration suggests that he, too, was under the influence of the drug. 75. Ibid., 25 March 1877, and undated entry. 76. According to the terms of the contract Morris had signed with Shook and Palmer on 16 August 1876, she could perform Miss Multon “in all other theatres than those of New York and Brooklyn.” In exchange, she had to pay them “a royalty of twenty dollars for each evening and ten dollars for each matinee performance.” Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 77. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 5–7 May 1877. She has underlined the first two words twice, the “Thank God!” three times for emphasis. 78. Ibid., 8 May 1877. 79. The Spirit of the Times incorrectly reported that the cause of the abrupt termination of the performance was Morris’s “serious and sudden indisposition.” 19 May 1877, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 116. 80. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 13, 14 May 1877. Morris discusses this incident at length in The Life of a Star, recalling her anger and mortification over the Boston cast’s incompetence (154–56). 81. Boston Evening Transcript, 16 May 1877, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 82. “A Curious Letter from Clara Morris,” New York Sun, n.d., Clara Morris Papers, LSC. The letter itself is dated 23 May. 83. Diaries, vol. 9, 9, 11, 13–18 August 1877. 84. “Clara Morris: Cupidity and Brutality—The Coming End,” 15 August 1877 letter from Chicago, New York Dramatic News, 25 August 1877, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 85. Ibid. 86. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 17, 24, 25 July 1877. 87. Ibid., 19, 20, 26, 27, 28 August 1877. 88. Spirit of the Times, 29 September 1877, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 117–18. 89. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 13, 20 January 1877. 90. Diaries, vol. 6 (1873), 29 August 1873.

296

Notes to Pages 182–88 91. (New York?) Commercial Advertiser, 6 October 1877, New York Evening Post, 8 October 1877, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 92. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 8 October 1877. 93. Unidentified newspaper clipping, 28 October 1877, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 94. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 3 November 1877. 95. Ibid., 5 November 1877. 96. Ibid., 8 November 1877. That amount had the purchasing power of $36,658 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power” (see chap. 3, n. 23). 97. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 9 November 1877. 98. Odell, Annals, 10:372–73. The Fifth Avenue was now under the management of Stephen Fiske, Daly’s former business associate. According to Odell, Daly was near bankruptcy, “unable to meet the demands for the rent due in September. Threatened with ejection from the theatre he had built up, he immediately, in moral indignation, surrendered the place. . . . Daly carried his company through the country until the close of the season of 1877–78” and then sailed to Europe for “an extended visit” in August. Annals, 10:370–72. 99. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 15 November 1877. 100. Spirit of the Times, 19 January 1878, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 119–20. 101. Odell, Annals, 10:376. 102. Diaries, vol. 9 (1877), 18 November 1877. 103. Ibid., 30 December 1877. 104. “Miss Morris as ‘Miss Multon,’” New York World, 23 November 1877, quoted in Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses (see chap. 3, n. 11). 105. “Clara Morris as a ‘Cut Up,’” unidentified clipping, 28 January 1906, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. That comment was made by Louis James, an actor who performed with Morris in “the Daly company in New York when they were both young and playful” and more recently “as the true veterans of the all-star cast that presented ‘The Two Orphans’” [in 1906]. 9. Queen of Spasms 1. Lewis C. Strang, Players and Plays of the Last Quarter Century, Volume II: The Theatre of Today (Boston: Page, 1903), 234; Garff B. Wilson, “Queen of Spasms: The Acting of Clara Morris,” Speech Monographs 22, no. 5 (November 1955): 240. 2. Merck’s 1899 Manual of the Materia Medica: A Ready-Reference Pocket Book for the Practicing Physician (New York: Merck, 1899), 163–66. 3. Deborah Hayden, Pox, Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis (New York: Basic, 2004), 43–50, xiv, xvii, 36, 55. In a period when venereal disease was “life’s dark secret,” it is not surprising that Morris would not have mentioned it, even in her diary. 4. Ibid., 42–43. 5. Martin Booth, Opium, 89 (see chap. 8, n. 30). 6. Edward Levinstein, Morbid Craving for Morphia, translation of Die Morphiumsucht (London: Smith, Elder, 1878; New York: Arno, 1981), 115; William A. McKim, Drugs and Behavior: An Introduction to Behavioral Pharmacology, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 239. 7. Sarah Bernhardt, Memoirs of My Life (1908; repr., New York: Blom, 1968), quoted in Hodgson, 51.

297

Notes to Pages 188–92 8. A letter written by Dr. Thomas Latimer in 1878 shows how dependent on morphine Morris had become and how complicit her husband was in her addiction. Latimer, who treated her in Baltimore and filed a lawsuit because he had not been paid, claims he saw “Mrs. Hariott [sic] every time she left the stage front; each time administering morphia hypodermically, except once when Mr. Harriott himself administered it.” The doctor said he advised her “to use morphia much less frequently.” In his judgment as a physician, “she could not much longer endure the large quantities she was being habituated to.” Dr. Thomas Latimer, Baltimore, to Mr. Edward Savage, New York, 7 January 1878, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 9. Morris, Life on the Stage, 204 (see chap. 1, n. 1). 10. New York Herald, 12 February 1878, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 120 (see introduction, note 7); New York Clipper, 23 February 1878; Spirit of the Times, 16 February 1878, “The Governess—Clara Morris,” vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 11. New York Clipper, 23 February 1878. 12. Spirit of the Times, 2 March 1878, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 121; New York Clipper, 23 February 1878. 13. Diaries, vol. 54 (miscellaneous entries from 1875, 1877–79, 1881, 1882, 1888), 17 March 1878. 14. Ibid., 18–27 March 1878. 15. Spirit of the Times, 13 April 1878, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 121. She was performing for the Victor Emmanuel II memorial fund. 16. Diaries, vol. 54 (miscellaneous entries from 1875, 1877–79, 1881, 1882, 1888), 29 April 1878; New York Clipper, 11 May 1878; Diaries, vol. 54 (miscellaneous entries from 1875, 1877–79, 1881, 1882, 1888), 3 May 1878. 17. Harriott’s tiny datebook for 1889 contains the name of a Dr. Nidelet, so it is possible that “Needlet” was Morris’s misspelled version of the physician’s name. She also could have been punning, conflating his name with his function as a physician wielding a hypodermic needle. Diaries, vol. 56, Frederick C. Harriott, 1889 date book. 18. Diaries, vol. 54 (miscellaneous entries from 1875, 1877–79, 1881, 1882, 1888), 4, 6, May, 17 June 1878. That is worth $42,884 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 19. Spirit of the Times, 13 April 1878, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 122; Diaries, vol. 54 (miscellaneous entries from 1875, 1877–79, 1881, 1882, 1888), 15 July 1878; New York Clipper, 27 July 1878. 20. Diaries, vol. 54 (miscellaneous entries from 1875, 1877–79, 1881, 1882, 1888), 15 July 1878. 21. New York Clipper, 3 August 1878. 22. Notification to Mrs. F. C. Harriott, creditor of John A. Ellsler, Bankrupt, from United States Marshal’s Office, Northern District of Ohio, Cleveland, September 5, 1878, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 23. New York Clipper, 5 October 1878. 24. Diaries, vol. 54 (miscellaneous entries from 1875, 1877–79, 1881, 1882, 1888), 30 September 1878; New York Clipper, 12 October 1878. 25. Spirit of the Times, 19 October 1878, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 121. 26. The other two were the California Theatre, built in 1869, and Wade’s Opera House, which opened in 1876 along with Baldwin’s. See Misha Berson, The San Francisco 298

Notes to Pages 192–95 Stage: From Golden Spike to the Great Earthquake, 1869–1906 (San Francisco Performing Arts Library Museum Series, no. 4, February 1992). 27. New York Clipper, California news, 16 November (dated San Francisco, 2 November), 23 November (9 November), 30 November (16 November), 7 December (24 November), and 15 December (1 December) 1878. 28. Unidentified San Francisco newspaper, 9 November 1878; San Francisco Post, 7 December 1878, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 29. New York Dramatic News, 2 November 1878, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. The interview took place on Wednesday, 9 October 1878. 30. Ibid., 9, 23 November 1878. 31. Ibid., 7 December 1878. In an undated letter to Morris, Dr. T. F. Bacon of Temescal, California, offered to cure her of her reliance on morphine. There is no evidence that she sought his help or replied to the letter. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 32. Ibid. 33. Diaries, vol. 10 (1879–80), 3 February 1879. 34. Diaries, vol. 10 (1879–80) and vol. 54 (miscellaneous entries from 1875, 1877–79, 1881, 1882, 1888), 3, 10, 13 February 1879. 35. New York Clipper, 1 March 1879 (February 15). She acted once again on 22 February, as a last-minute replacement for Rose Eytinge—ironically, as Nancy in Oliver Twist. According to her diary, “I had a rehearsal of some of the scenes this morning. I borrowed dress from Miss Prescott. The house was simply packed and when Bill Sykes said ‘here she comes now’ there was a great burst of applause and when I went on—gracious! What a reception they gave me. I had some splendid ‘calls’—but all the same, I hate the part and play—it is sickening.” 36. New York Clipper, 15 March 1879. That is worth $643,253 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 37. New York Mirror, 3 May (Chicago, 27 April), 10 May (Cincinnati, 4 May) 1879; Spirit of the Times, n.d., vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. That newspaper’s Omaha correspondent forwarded a report from the Omaha Herald. Urged by his wife to strike a man she saw from her train car, Harriott walked outside and hit him twice in the chest and once in the face. He claimed the man was connected with the Dramatic News and had insulted Morris in San Francisco. The assaulted man denied both charges and asserted he was the victim of mistaken identity, which others at the train depot confirmed. 38. New York Mirror, 11 October 1879. 39. Spirit of the Times, 11 October 1879, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC; Diaries, vol. 10 (1879–80), 9 October 1879. 40. On 20 October, for example, she writes that she is “utterly prostrated,” upset by his “harsh,” “cruel,” and “bitter” treatment, by the “scenes” they continue to have about money: “Money! Money! I give all I have—could I only have enough for all the bills, and wants, could I free him wholly from his debts and have some left over—I am sure he would be kind but—Oh me—Oh me. I do all I can.” A 16 December letter to Harriott from T. C. Corwell, owner of the Pines, shows that the Harriotts were interested in buying it. In response to Harriott’s inquiry about the price, Corwell wrote that it was not on the market but would cost $40,000 ($857,671 in 2007; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23.) furnished if it were. He also added a postscript regarding their rent: “If you spend the winter in California, please arrange for the rent regularly on the 5th of each month. Last winter I believe it was 3 months behind.” 41. Diaries, vol. 10 (1879–80), 4, 14, 20, 21, 26 November 1879. 299

Notes to Pages 195–99 42. Ibid., 14 November 1879. 43. New York Clipper, 7 February 1880 (San Francisco, 24 January). Morris does not discuss the changes she made, and the script is not extant. 44. The 13 March New York Mirror said Morris appeared as Josephine Claison, but that was an error. A Baldwin’s Theatre program identifies Clairon [Claire-Josèphe-Hippolyte-Léris de la Tude (1723–1803)] as “the most celebrated actress of her day—the first exponent of the natural school of acting on the French stage . . . at the time of the play (a.d. 1749) . . . the idol of the court and people.” Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 45. New York Clipper, 21 February 1880 (San Francisco, 7 February). 46. New York Mirror, 10 April 1880. 47. “Troubled about rent,” she wrote on 17 September. “F. C. H. promises so much & does so little.” 48. That was worth $83,690 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power” (see chap. 3, n. 23). A letter dated 18 June 1880 confirms that Henry E. Abbey, manager of Booth’s Theatre in New York and Abbey’s Park Theatre in New York and Boston, hired her for two weeks at a salary of $2,000 and the promise of six performances per week. A clipping from an unidentified Boston newspaper indicates that her husband was nearly arrested for nonpayment of a two-year-old tailor’s bill. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 49. Diaries, vol. 11 (1880–81), 26 October 1880. 50. Ibid., 28 October 1880. 51. Spirit of the Times, 6 November 1880, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 126; A. C. Wheeler, “When the Lights Are Out,” Criterion (September 1899), quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 126. 52. Spirit of the Times, 26 November 1881, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 126. Advanced tooth decay is one of the medical complications of morphine addiction. 53. The tone of its reviews changed markedly in the 1880s, perhaps concomitant with Stephen Ryder Fiske’s becoming drama editor. Fiske, Daly’s business manager at the time Morris broke with him, may have had personal reasons for disliking her that precluded objectivity. Because reviews were still unsigned, however, it cannot be said with certainty who wrote them. 54. Spirit of the Times, 20 October 1880, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 125. 55. New York Herald, 27 October 1880, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 124. 56. Odell, Annals, 11:259 (see chap. 1, n. 8). 57. Howard says it was a new version that omitted the courtroom scene, although Morris does not mention it. 58. Odell, Annals, 11:259. 59. Palmer, History, 91 (see intro., n, 9). 60. New York Tribune, 3 February 1881, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 131. 61. The critics themselves were divided. Some praised Bernhardt’s naturalness, ease, and polish, while others preferred Morris’s magnetic emotional power. The 11 December 1880 Hartford (Connecticut) Times compared Bernhardt with her predecessors (including Doche, Keene, Heron, Davenport, Morris, and Modjeska) and found her superior to all of them. See Patricia Marks, Sarah Bernhardt’s First American Theatrical Tour, 1880–1881 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003). 62. Odell, Annals, 11:230. 300

Notes to Pages 199–203 63. Palmer, History, 101. 64. Diaries, vol. 12 (1881), 30 November 1881. 65. Spirit of the Times, 14 January 1882, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 135; Diaries, vol. 13 (1882), 2 January 1882. 66. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 151, 269. 67. According to Ellmann, Vera had come to the attention of the Russian government. In addition, the Prince of Wales was married to the sister of the new czarina and could have found the play objectionable. Oscar Wilde, 153. 68. Although Morris had not performed in London, her name was well-known there. According to Clinton Stuart, who had lived in England for several months, everyone familiar with theatrical affairs had heard of her. She was more famous than either Lawrence Barrett or Edwin Booth, and he hoped she would soon act in London. “Clara Morris,” Theatre 3 (1 March 1881), 145, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 137. 69. New York Herald, 13 January 1882, quoted in Odell, Annals, 11:439–40. 70. Spirit of the Times, 25 February 1882, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 137. 71. Diaries, vol. 12 (1881), 2 July 1881, vol. 13 (1882), 25 January 1882. 72. Vera finally had a New York production the following year. Starring Marie Prescott, it opened at the Union Square on 20 August 1883, in sweltering heat after a week of rehearsals. Wilde crossed the Atlantic again to see it and was displeased with the response to his work. The reviews were unfavorable, with negative comments about actress and playwright. It was withdrawn on 28 August, although Prescott toured briefly with it. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 163, 242–43. 73. Diaries, vol. 13 (1882), 14 March 1882. She devotes a chapter to Alessandro Salvini in The Life of a Star, describing how he forgot his lines during the mad scene and almost ruined the performance. Morris saved it but says she was so convincing he thought she really had gone mad. 74. Palmer, History, 105. Convinced that the fashionable theater district was moving uptown, he sold his interest in the Union Square to Sheridan Shook and J. W. Collier in May 1883. It declined under their management and was destroyed by fire on 28 February 1888. On 1 September 1884, Palmer became one of the managers of the Madison Square Theatre. In March 1885, he assumed complete control of the theater, which flourished for several seasons under his leadership. 75. Diaries, vol. 13 (1882), 18 June 1882. At the back of the volume is a note about a book she must have wanted to read: “Dr. H. H. Kane on Opium Smoking, G. P. Putnams [sic] sons pub.” 76. Odell, Annals, 12:50. She also brought Miss Multon to Boston for a week at the Park Theatre in October. 77. Unidentified clipping, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. That would be the equivalent of $64,060 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.” 78. New York Herald, 17 April 1883, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 139. 79. Spirit of the Times, 21 April 1883, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 141–42; New York Times, April 17, 1883, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 141. Montgomery (ca. 1858–98) served as its drama critic from 1877–84. 80. Diaries, vol. 14 (1883), 16, 17, 24 April 1883. She also wrote that they had a “long talk about art” and that he “raved” about Ristori and Rachel. In the chapter on Salvini in Stage Confidences, she remembers this engagement fondly, recalls his majestic Othello, and describes his discipline as an artist. While supporting actors smoked by the stage 301

Notes to Pages 203–5 door, he would be dressed for the performance and pacing backstage. He told her he was “‘walking into the character,’” which she found remarkable. 227–51. 81. Spirit of the Times, 12 May 1883, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 142. Mary Anderson played Desdemona; John McCullough, Othello; Lawrence Barrett, Iago. Souvenir Programme, Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 82. John C. Freund, Music and Drama, 20 May 1883, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 83. Odell, Annals, 12:263; Spirit of the Times, September ? (date illegible), vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 84. There would be a small role in The Indiscretion of the Truth in 1906, but as it was an adaptation of Man and Wife, it was not technically a new play. 85. Berson, San Francisco Stage, 43. 86. It is impossible to know when Morris first assembled a company because she does not discuss it, and few extant documents deal with this aspect of her career. A Fourth-anniversary Souvenir Programme for Boston’s Park Theatre shows the “Stars and Combinations” that played there from April 1882 to April 1883. They include the Clara Morris Company for two weeks (29 May and 30 October 1882), which indicates that the company was in existence by this time. Sometimes it is called the Clara Morris Combination. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 87. Playbills indicate that Morris appeared under Goodwin’s management from 1884 to 1886. By September 1886, they stated that she was being supported by Frank L. Goodwin’s Dramatic Company. In 1887, it is Wheeler. Goodwin served as manager again in 1890, but once again, it is the Clara Morris Company. Price is her manager in 1891, Williams in 1895. 88. A. Vivia Ogden, “Childish Recollections of Clara Morris,” Theatre 2 (June 1902): 16–19. Ogden and her sister Clara, members of Morris’s company in spring 1886, played the roles of the children, Paul and Jane, in Miss Multon. The daughter of two of Morris’s Academy of Music associates, Vivia wrote candidly about Morris’s fondness for “guying” [joking], often to the consternation of her fellow actors, and the liberties she took with her audiences. “The waits between the acts were something awful, lasting sometimes forty-five and fifty minutes, and this often for no other reason than simply that Miss Morris would not hurry. . . . Many times she was ill, but often she just dawdled.” Quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 159. 89. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. Comparable salaries ranged from $1,124 to $4,498 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.” 90. Diaries, vol. 14 (1883), 3, 15, 16, 17 November, 11, 12, 13, 14 December 1883. She does not record her reaction to a flattering portrait in the 29 December New York Clipper, the first in its series on “Noted Performers of Our Times.” She has obviously provided inaccurate information, stating that she “was born about 1848,” “her mother was a worker,” and her father “about 1860 was run over and killed.” The same article also profiles Sarah Bernhardt. 91. Diaries, vol. 15 (1884), 10 January, 14, 24 April, 9, 10 May, 24, 26, 28 June, 4, 5 July, 17, 18 August, 7, 12 September 1884. “No hy [hypodermic needle]—I was sending of Mat for it at 6:15 a,m [sic],” she notes on 7 September. 92. Ibid., vol. 15 (1884), 6, 11 January, 14 March, 14, 25, 27, 28 April, 10 May, 1884. The amount of $1,500 then was worth $32,704 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.”

302

Notes to Pages 205–11 93. A 4 August 1884 letter to “My dear Mrs. Harriott” from Jane E. Cornell shows that she has accepted the Harriotts’ offer to buy the Pines, the property they had been renting, and to assume the $10,000 mortgage on it. They are to pay her $2,500 in August as partial “purchase money” and will remain her tenants until 1 February, when the rest of the payment will be due (Clara Morris Papers, LSC). Described as “a handsome graystone mansion at Riverdale on the Hudson,” the Pines was on a portion of the estate formerly owned by celebrated American actor Edwin Forrest (1806–72). New York Dramatic News, 3 March 1888, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 94. Diaries, vol. 14 (1883), 15 July 1883. 95. Diaries, vol. 15 (1884), 1 September 1884; Odell, Annals, 12:466. 96. Diaries, 21 January 1885. 97. Denise. A Play of Humanity as It Is. From the French of Alexandre Dumas, adapted and augmented by Augustin Daly. Microopaque of handwritten manuscript in the Amherst College Library, Microfiche W2652, Microforms, Lamont Library, Harvard University. 98. New York Herald, 22 April 1885, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 157. 99. Odell, Annals, 12:425; Spirit of the Times, 2 May 1885, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 157; Diaries, 30 April, 1, 2, 9 May 1885. 100. New York Times, 14 May 1885. The amount of $3,000 then was the equivalent of $66,741 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.”. She did not mention him until 7 June 1899, when she wrote in her diary, “Mr Daly is dead in Paris—I am so sorry.” Diaries, vol. 31 (1899). 101. Diaries, vol. 17 (1886), 1 May, 9 August 1886. 102. Odell, Annals, 13:47. 103. Hollis Street Theatre Playbill, 13 September 1886, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 104. Odell, Annals, 13:234; Spirit of the Times, 9 October 1886, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 161. 105. Diaries, vol. 17 (1886), 27 November, 6 December 1886. 106. Spirit of the Times, 1 January 1887, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 158. 107. Ibid., 26 March 1887. 108. Morris, Life of a Star, 253–55. Two theater programs in the LSC indicate that Morris saw M. Doyle’s production of The Martyr at Boston’s Bijou Opera House in December 1886 and must have decided to adapt it. She received a letter from Doyle dated 24 February 1887 giving her “legal notification that the title of ‘The Martyr’ was and is legally copyrighted and protected by law” and that no one else “has any right to the title whatsoever.” Interestingly, Palmer produced yet another version of the play at the Madison Square Theatre on 10 November and defiantly called it The Martyr. Adapted by Cazauran and starring Agnes Booth, it failed, closing on 4 December. 109. New York Herald, 21 October 1887, New York Times, 21 October 1887, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 162–63. Diaries, vol. 18 (1887), 20 October 1887. 110. Diaries, vol. 18 (1887), 5, 30 November, 1 December 1887. 111. Ibid., vol. 19 (1888), 12–14 January 1888. 112. Ibid., 18 March 1888. 113. Odell, Annals, 13:442, 461.

303

Notes to Pages 211–17 114. “A Glimpse Backward over Dramatic Affairs Twenty-two Years Ago,” New York Mirror, 26 February 1910; C. T. Copeland, “Miss Morris in Renée de Moray,” The Dramatic Year 1887–88, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 165. 115. Spirit of the Times, 7 April 1888, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 116. For example, “My husband—who had been—God pity us—at a funeral all the day—yes all the day yet at 3.50 p.m. he was speeding to New York with Miss Jones—Oh liar liar!! . . . F. C. H. was at the ‘dirty Joneses’ from 8.10 p.m. till Eleven (11).” Diaries, vol. 19, 26 July 1888. 117. Odell, Annals, 14:59, 62. 118. A contract for this engagement, signed on 2 April 1889 by J. M. Hill (the Union Square’s manager) and Harriott, stipulated that in exchange for Morris’s $2,500 salary ($58,112 in 2007; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power”), Harriott must furnish “the professional services of Miss Clara Morris and a first-class Company, all necessary costumes, scores and band parts pertaining to plays . . . to be produced; . . . calcium lights and perishable properties, . . . newspaper advertising, printing, posting and distributing, and shall and will play and defray all royalties, fees and remunerations due to authors and secure the authorization and consent of the authors for the performance and production of such plays when required.” Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 119. Diaries, vol. 20 (1889), 20 October, 23 November 1889. 120. New York Times, 30 October 1889, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 168–69. 121. Spirit of the Times, 2 November 1889, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 167–68. 122. Odell, Annals, 14:300. This epithet appears on many Morris playbills from the period. 123. Diaries, vol. 21 (1890), 8, 9, 20 February 1890. 124. Ibid., 25 December 1890. 125. Odell, Annals, 15:47. New York audiences had already seen Ada Rehan in Daly’s adaptation of Odette in February 1882, Modjeska in January 1883 and 1886. 126. Diaries, vol. 22 (1891), 18 April, 6 September 1891. 127. Morris, “Reflections of an Actress,” 329–36 (see chap. 8, n. 53). 10. Diary of a Working Actress 1. Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 29. According to the 1900 census, most actresses had ended their careers by their mid- or late thirties. 2. Ibid., 67. 3. Morris, “Reflections of an Actress,” 329–30 (see chap. 8, n. 53). 4. Ibid., 330–36. 5. McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 143. 6. Diaries, vol. 23 (1892), 15, 28 February, 14 March 1892. 7. Ibid., 11, 13 February, 4, 22 March 1892. 8. Ibid., 24 March 1892. 9. Ibid., 2 April, 20 July, 13, 19 August 1892. 10. The production, which opened on 23 November 1875, closed after its 121st performance on 18 March 1876. Odell, Annals, 10:21–22 (see chap. 1, n. 8). 11. Diaries, vol. 23 (1892), 21, 23, 24, 28–30 May, 5 June, 8, 27, 28 September 1892.

304

Notes to Pages 218–21 12. Ibid., 9 November 1892. Leadville, North America’s highest incorporated city, was built in 1879 by Horace Tabor, who made his fortune in silver mining. The Tabor Opera House still stands. 13. Ibid., 13 December 1892. 14. Ibid., 17–21 December 1892. 15. The 5 January 1893 entry is the only one that mentions Rose Michel, although Morris implies that she has performed it elsewhere: “Funny—they applaud in places never noticed before.” 16. Diaries, vol. 24 (1893), 30 January, 1 February 1893. 17. Ibid., 7, 20–22 March 1893; New York Clipper, 1 April 1893. 18. Diaries, vol. 24 (1893), 24–26 April 1893. 19. Ibid., 17–21 April 1893. An 10 April letter shows that Chairman May Wright Sewall had issued the invitation, which Morris accepted by telegram. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 20. The diary is full of petty complaints about her maids. On 17 September, for example, she wrote, “Mary—the new horror—had not washed the breakfast dishes at 1.30 p.m.” 21. Ibid., 9 June 1893. 22. The diary notes rehearsals on 21, 22, 25, 27, and 28 September. Morris does not mention the actors by name but lists them (and for several, their lines of business) on a “memoranda” page at the back of the 1893 volume. Her husband is among them: “Mr Glendenning Leading Man, Mr Harriott, Mr Walter Kelly Second, M Hampton Low Comedy, M Spencer Low Comedy, M Hutchings Heavy, Jack Elliot Props, Joe—Mr Prices nephew Utillity [sic], Miss Harriet Ford Leading, Mrs Hampton Ingenues, Mrs. Gaylord—Old women, Miss La Mar, Mrs Rust servants.” At the end came “Caroline Maid Black.” 23. The 30 September 1893 New York Clipper’s “On the Road/Dramatic” report shows how extensive Morris’s 1893–94 tour was. It notes the following engagements, many of them one-night stands: Worcester, Massachusetts, 2 October; Lowell, 5; Lawrence, 9; Taunton, 11; Providence, Rhode Island, 12–14; Bangor, Maine, 18; Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 19; Portland, Maine, 20; Concord, New Hampshire, 21; Barre, Vermont, 23; Burlington, 24; Bellows Falls, 25; Keene, New Hampshire, 26; Salem, Massachusetts, 27; Boston, 30–4 November; Chicago, 6–11; Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 15; Des Moines, 16; Council Bluffs, 20; Lincoln, Nebraska, 22; Topeka, Kansas, 24; St. Joseph, Missouri, 25; Keokuk, Iowa, 30; Decatur, Illinois, 1 December; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 4–9; Mansfield, Ohio, 15; Columbus, 8–10 January; Indianapolis, 12, 13; Atlanta, Georgia, 22–23; Augusta, 25; Charleston, South Carolina, 26–27; New Orleans, 4–10 February; Memphis, Tennessee, 19–21; Nashville, 22–24; St. Louis, 26–3 March; Louisville, 5–10; Cincinnati, 12–17; Brooklyn, 26–31; New York City, 2–7 April; Baltimore, 9–14. The diary shows that Morris played in additional locations not noted by the Clipper. 24. Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 228. 25. Diaries, vol. 24 (1893), 2, 3 October 1893. 26. New York Clipper, 21 October 1893; Diaries, vol. 24 (1893), 9–11 October 1893. 27. Diaries, vol. 24 (1893), 12, 14 October 1893. According to the diary, the Hamptons did not leave the company until 13 November. A list on a “Cash Account” page shows that Mr. Hampton had been replaced by “Mr. Spencer,” Mrs. Hampton by “Miss Agnes Lane.”

305

Notes to Pages 221–25 28. New York Clipper, 21 October 1893. Several entries reveal that she is concerned about actor Walter Kelly’s wife, who seems strangely infatuated with her and has even begun to impersonate her. 29. In booking them, her manager probably confused Portland with Portsmouth. It would have been better for Morris to have played Bangor first, then Portland, followed by Portsmouth. 30. She also wrote, “William Winter sent me his book The Shadows of the Stage I am proud.” Winter did not devote a chapter to Morris, although he mentioned her favorably. 31. Nebraska State Journal, 23 November 1893; “Amusements,” Willa Cather Archive/ Cather’s Writings, http://cather.unl.edu. Cather clearly had Morris in mind when she wrote My Antonia (1918) more than twenty years later and described an “old-fashioned, though historic actress” who brought Camille to Lincoln. The only difference is that it is April, not November, but the woman depicted sounds very much like the Clara Morris whom Cather would have seen in 1893, even to the “hobbling” about the stage, and shows how memorable she must have found the performance. 32. Diaries, vol. 24 (1893), 11–13, 17, 18 December 1893. 33. New York Clipper, 20 January, 10 March 1894; Diaries, vol. 25 (1894), 12, 13, 20, 22, 26 January, 3, 14, 16 February 1894. 34. Diaries, vol. 25 (1894), 13 January 4, 9, 12, 15, 21 February 1894. 35. Ibid., 5, 15, 19, 21 February 1894. 36. Ibid., 27 February, 13, 16, 17 March 1894; New York Clipper, 24 March 1894. Frederic de Bellville, a former actor with her company, must have filed a lawsuit against her. She wrote on 21 March, “Lawyers up to take deposition in de Bellville case—very disagreeable,” but provided no other details. 37. Fourteenth Street Theatre playbill, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. It also shows that there had been considerable turnover in Morris’s company. 38. Odell, Annals, 15:785, 604; Diaries, vol. 25 (1894), 2, 3 April 1894. 39. Diaries, vol. 25 (1894), 4 April 1894. 40. New York Herald, 5 April 1894, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 41. Diaries, vol. 25 (1894), 9, 10, 12, 13 April 1894. 42. Ibid., 14 April 1894. 43. Ibid., 4, 5 July 1894. Morris writes that she “hunted over her old needles, she had saved from old times” to find one she could use. “Cleaned opened—polished one & gave her scant 5mm of morphia (magendies) in left arm”—which suggests her mother was not a habitual user at this time. 44. Ibid., 24 October 1894. Morris’s use of cocaine is difficult to document. Although doctors were treating morphine addiction with it as early as 1879, it is unclear exactly when she was introduced to it or what its form actually was. It surfaces periodically in her diary. On 27 August 1895, for example, she is worried about her maid’s infected cheek and writes, “I cocained her tonight for her pain.” 45. Diaries, vol. 25 (1894), 14 October, 1 November 1894. Morris does not identify the church at which her christening took place, although she says that she and Fred went by horse and carriage to “St. John’s Rectory” and then into the church “after the people were gone.” Currently, there are two Episcopal churches in the area with the name St. John: St. John’s Episcopal Church in Tuckahoe and St. John’s in Larchmont. 46. Presumably meant to show how enlightened Morris is, the narrative is laced

306

Notes to Pages 226–30 with racist observations and generalizations, with black dialect for little William Jones that could have come straight from the minstrel stage. 47. Diaries, 12 December 1896; 16, 29 October 1898; 6 May 1899; 5 March 1900; 2 November 1902. 48. Sandage, Born Losers, 236–52. 49. Diaries, vol. 26 (1895), 25 March 1895. Harriott was not the only person to disappoint her. In early April, she registered her disapproval of Oscar Wilde, whose trial had concluded: “Oh! Oscar Wild [sic] lost his case! All England, America—the world rings with his infamy. . . . His name is stricken from the play bills. . . . Poor old Lady Wilde—Oh the mother wife & little sons—They are to be pitied. Oh it is too dreadful—He is arrested now.” Diaries, vol. 26 (1895), 5, 6 April 1895. 50. Ibid., 26 August, 2 September 1895. 51. Programme, Tremont Theatre (Boston), week of 23 December 1895, Playbills, Clara Morris, HTC. Morris dismissed the incompetent Sackett after the concluding performance of Miss Multon on Saturday night and had a “wild row” with Williams about it (28 September 1895). A financial statement in Williams’s hand for the week of 9 December lists the actors and their weekly salaries, worth from $509 to $3,821 in 2007 (Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23): Mr. Colville ($150), Mr. Harriott ($60), Mr. Walker ($50), Mr. Coveney ($50), Mr. Gordon ($50), Mr. Young ($40), Mr. Pauncefort ($35), Mr. Arnold ($25), Mr. Williams ($60), Mrs. Gaylor ($45), Miss Shannon ($75), Miss Ballou ($35), Miss Weston ($25), Miss Clay ($20), and Margery Valentine ($25). Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 52. New York Clipper, 19, 26 October, 2, 9, 23 November, 7, 14 December 1895, 4 January, 15, 22, 29 February 1896. 53. Unidentified newspaper review, 12 November 1895, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 54. A. Brownell, “Clara Morris in Repertoire,” Bostonian 3 (February 1896): 470–71, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 173–75 (see introduction, note 7). 55. Diaries, vol. 26 (1895), 12 December 1895. A financial statement for the week at the Grand Opera House (9–14 December 1895), written by manager Jean H. Williams, shows the company operating at a loss. Although its share of the gross receipts was $2,150, total expenditures came to $2,677.35, which meant that the loss carried forward was $657.35 ($16,744 in 2007; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power”). That was a better figure than the one for the previous week, when the loss brought forward was $1,337.10 ($34,059 in 2007; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.” Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 56. Ibid., 28 September, 8 October, 3 November 1895. 57. Ibid., 30 October 1895. 58. Ibid., 21, 25, 26 October, 28 November, 25 December 1895. 59. Ibid., vol. 27 (1896), 8, 13, 29, 30 January, 1, 2, 7 February 1896. 60. Ibid., February 12, 22, 23, 24, 26, 1896. 61. 19 November 1895 contract between Jean H. Williams and Friedlander, Gottlob & Co.; 19 November, 13, 15, December 1895 letters from Friedlander, Gottlob & Co. to Jean H. Williams (Clara Morris Papers, LSC). Interestingly, there is a handwritten note in the contract’s left margin stipulating that Williams “shall not be held liable for any damages, resulting from illness of Clara Morris, or from any special acts over which he has no control.”

307

Notes to Pages 230–38 62. Diaries, vol. 27 (1896), 16 March 1896. 63. Ibid., 6–11 April 1896. On 12 April, she was saddened to learn of the death of Cincinnatian John A. Cockerill, whom she calls “my poor boy John, my sometime lover, always my friend Dead! Dead away off in Egypt—on the way home.” 64. Ibid., 9 May 1896. 65. Ibid., 12, 18, 27 May, 17 June 1896. 66. “World of Players,” New York Clipper, 1 August, 17 October 1896. 67. Diaries, vol. 28 (1897), January 13, 1897. 68. Gilmore’s Auditorium program, Playbills, Clara Morris, HTC. 69. Diaries, vol. 28 (1897), 10, 11, 17, 24, 25 May 1897; “Keith’s Theatre: Clara Morris and Vaudeville,” Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 70. New York Clipper, 4 September 1897; Diaries, vol. 28 (1897), 30, 31 August, 2–10 September, 1897. 71. Ibid., 18 October, 14, 15 November 1897. Trav S. D., No Applause—Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006), 99. 72. Ibid., 30 November, 4 December 1897, 7, 21 February 1898. 73. Contracts signed by Harriott show that “Clara Morris and F. C. Harriott” received $685.77 ($17,685 in 2007; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power”) for their eight days at Cleveland’s Euclid Beach Park, $600 ($15,473 in 2007; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power”) for their seven at Toledo’s Casino, “less 10%” for Wilson and Smith of Managers Vaudeville Exchange, which had booked the engagements. The Harriotts also received a guarantee of “Rail road (first class) fares, including sleepers, from N.Y. to Toledo, Ohio and return” and carriages to take them to and from the theater. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 74. Unidentified clipping, 17 December 1898, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 75. Diaries, vol. 32 (1900), 10, 22 March, 17 December 1900. She mentioned that A. M. Palmer “came to call” after the performance on 21 December. “Had a pleasant chat.—Ah he is old—At his throat & jaw particularly & very white now.” 76. Ibid., vol. 37 (1905), 9 April 1905. 77. “Clara Morris in Vaudeville,” 2 May 1905, and untitled 14 May 1905 clipping, vol. 2, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 352, RLC. Her salary of $600 was worth $14,584 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.” 78. Untitled newspaper clipping, 21 December 1898, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 79. The All-Nighter, “Town Topics,” unidentified clipping, 28 (?) June 1899, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 80. “Confessions of an Actress,” unidentified clipping, 12 August 1899, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 81. Diaries, vol. 31 (1899), 19 September, 1, 10, 25 October, 25 November, 27 December 1899. Her check for $50 in 1899 had the same purchasing power as $1,289 in 2007, the one of $200 was comparable to $5,158, and the $100 advance amounted to $2,579. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.” 82. Ibid., 27 November, 11 December 1899. 83. Conversation with Laurence Senelick, 18 January 2008. 84. Diaries, vol. 31 (1899), vol. 33 (1901), 11 January, 3 September, 7, 10, 12 October 1901.

308

Notes to Pages 238–45 85. Diaries, vol. 33 (1901), 17–21, 25–27 November 1901. 86. Ibid., vol. 34 (1902), 9, 18, 27, 28 January 1902. Newspapers reported that Morris’s scheduled lecture in Milwaukee before the College Endowment Association had been cancelled when a local clergyman objected to it. A group of actresses, including Mrs. Leslie Carter, Annie Russell, and Margaret Anglin, expressed their support for Morris and criticized Milwaukee’s provincialism. “Clara Morris Gets Rebuff,” 31 December 1901, and “Actresses Rush to the Defense of Clara Morris,” 2 January 1902, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 87. Diaries, vol. 34 (1902), 30, 31 January, 3–10 February 1902. When Morris met him in 1902, Bryan (1860–1925), a lawyer and former U.S. Representative from Nebraska, was a popular speaker on the Chautauqua circuit. He had run unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate for president in 1896 and 1900. He would try and fail again in 1908. 88. “Says Actress Can Be Domesticated” and “Clara Morris on Stage Morals,” 31 January 1902, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 89. Diaries, vol. 34 (1902), 20 April 1902. 90. Alan Dale, “Clara Morris Gives Her Views of Temptations of the Stage,” 21 April 1902, and “Why the Ex-Tragedienne Should Be Muzzled,” 27 April 1902, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. 91. Diaries, vol. 34 (1902), 18, 26 May 1902. 92. Morris, Stage Confidences, 3, 4, 5. 93. In the book’s list of illustrations, the frontispiece is identified as “Clara Morris (1883).” However, that date contradicts Morris’s 8 December 1900 diary entry, which states that the portrait for Life on the Stage was her first in twenty-four years. If that is true, then she had not been photographed since 1876, which would mean that this image could not have been taken in 1883. Whatever its actual date, it is clear that the fifty-five-year-old Morris wanted readers to remember her as she looked in her twenties. Significantly, in The Life of a Star (the third volume of her memoirs), there are no pictures at all, not even a frontispiece. 94. Morris, Stage Confidences, 177. 95. Ibid., 131–45. 96. The amount of $2,000 then was the equivalent of $49,722 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.” 97. “Clara Morris May Lose Family Home,” New York Herald, 28 December 1902, and unidentified clipping 22 January 1903, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC; Record-Herald, 22 January 1903, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 98. Diaries, vol. 35 (1903), 22, 27 January 1903. 99. Ibid., 21, 22, 25 February 1903. 100. “Rain Spoils the Benefit,” Morning Telegram, n.d., and “Clara Morris Free of All Her Debts,” 6 June 1903, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, RLC. The amount of $6,000 then was the equivalent of $145,844 in 2007. The New York Supreme Court issued an order on 5 June discontinuing the foreclosure suit against Morris. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.” 101. Because Palmer had sold the American rights to the play to Kate Claxton, who toured successfully in it until the turn of the century, he had to obtain her permission to stage it. The program reads, “The Original Union Square Theatre Version was made by Hart Jackson, Esq., for A. M. Palmer, and is played by arrangement with Kate Claxton, its present owner.” Playbills, Clara Morris, HTC.

309

Notes to Pages 245–52 102. The salary of $300 then would be worth $7,208 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power.” 103. Diaries, vol. 36 (1904), 27 February, 11 March 1904. 104. A. H. Palmer to William Seymour, 1904, William Seymour Correspondence, Manuscript Room, Princeton University Library, quoted in Ryan, “A. M. Palmer, Producer,” 110 (see chap. 6, n. 13). 105. New York Times, 29 March 1904, quoted in Howard, “Acting of Clara Morris,” 177. 106. Ibid., 178. 107. Diaries, vol. 36 (1904), 28 March 1904. 108. “The Woman Whose Popularity Has Never Been Surpassed,” American Standard, n.d., “Ovations Close ‘Two Orphans,’” and “Touching Tribute to Clara Morris,” 15 May 1904, vol. 1, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 351, Robinson Locke Collection, BRTC; Diaries, vol. 36 (1904), 14 May 1904. The average weekly take of $15,000 was comparable to $360,386 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. Sadly, Palmer declared bankruptcy during the New York run and died less than a year later on 7 March 1905, following a stroke. Producer Charles Frohmer died in 1915 when a passenger on the Lusitania, which was torpedoed by the Germans and sank. 109. Diaries, vol. 36 (1904), 21, 23, 25 November 1904. 110. Ibid., vol. 37 (1905), 17, 18, 21 February 1905; “How Clara Morris’s Non-Appearances Were Received with Great Ovations Down South,” 11 May 1906 clipping from unidentified New York newspaper, vol. 2, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 352, RLC. 111. Vol. 2, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 352, RLC. 112. Presented by Guy Standing and his players, it may have been an amateur production. 113. “Washington Rises to Clara Morris,” special dispatch, Morning Telegraph (Washington, DC), 30 April 1906, vol. 2, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 352, RLC. 114. Morris, Life of a Star, 4–5. Conclusion: A Story of Woman Courage 1. Morris had not lost her interest in clinical accuracy. In an undated letter, Dr. John McEntee Wetmore responded to her queries about rattlesnake bites, probably in relation to this story. Clara Morris Papers, LSC. 2. Ada Patterson, “Clara Morris on Life,” Woman (March 1907), vol. 2, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 352, RLC. 3. Diaries, vol. 53 (1924), 3 December 1924. 4. New York Dramatic Mirror, 14 March 1908. The play was never produced. 5. Diaries, vol. 41 (1909), 19 March 1909. 6. New York Telegraph, 17 April 1909, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 7. Toledo News, 20 May 1910, Kansas City Post, 21 June 1910, New York Telegraph, 17 April 1909, “Martyrs of the Stage,” Theatre, December 1909, and Whiting Allen, “Stories You Have Heard of Clara Morris,” 1910 clipping, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. The Theatre article portrayed Charlotte Cushman as another martyr, because the repeated breast-beating she did as Meg Merrilies supposedly caused a bruise “from which ensued [the] cancer” that consumed her. 8. It is possible that Morris suffered ocular complications from rheumatoid arthritis, in which patches of inflammation occur under the conjunctiva in the scleral 310

Notes to Pages 252–62 and episcleral tissues. Ankylosing spondylitis, too, can produce inflammation of the eyes (anterior uveitis, also known as iritis), which causes pain and sensitivity to light. Unlike syphilis, in which eye damage is irreversible, the blindness associated with these rheumatic diseases is usually not permanent, although recurrences are common. “Eye Diseases and Visual Disorders,” New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15thEdition, Macropedia 7 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1975), 123. 9. New York Dramatic Mirror, 27 December 1911. 10. Diaries, vol. 42 (1911), 17 March 1911. 11. Success, November 1911, “Clara Morris Keeps Up Literary Work,” New York Telegraph, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. Titles include “Plain Talk to the Stage-Struck Girl” (Pictorial Review, May 1912), “Rachel” (McClure’s, October 1912), “Why No Woman Can Love a Rival” (n.d.), and “The Eight Ages of the Prima Donna—From Poverty Back to Poverty” (Sportsman’s Review, Spokane, Washington, 23 November 1913). 12. New York Star, 4 April 1914, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. Whitestone is now considered part of Queens. 13. Diaries, vol. 43 (1914), 28, 29 May 1914; “F. C. Harriott’s Death Mourned by Many,” New York Telegraph, 31 May 1914, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. Harriott was buried in his family’s vault in the Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn (the final resting place of Henry Ward Beecher, Kate Claxton, Laura Keene, Lola Montez, Napoleon Sarony, “Boss” Tweed, Lester Wallack and, more recently, Frank Morgan and Leonard Bernstein). 14. Diaries, vol. 44 (1915), 29 May 1915. 15. Ibid., 3, 29 August 1915. 16. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 1–2. 17. Diaries, vol. 43 (1914), 7, 15 August 1914; vol. 44 (1915), 30 May, 27 October 1915; vol. 45 (1916), 2 September 1916; vol. 47 (1918), 9 September, October 1918. 18. The bequest of $50,000 then was the equivalent of $1,064,384 in 2007. Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23. 19. “Clara Morris’s Life Is a Story of Woman Courage,” Kansas City Times, 30 March 1916, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 20. “Clara Morris Moves to Tuckahoe Estate,” 30 July 1916, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC; Diaries, vol. 46 (1917), 20 February 1917; vol. 47 (1918), 31 October 1918. 21. Diaries, vol. 44 (1915), 23 February, 8 May, 3 November 1915; vol. 46 (1917), 3 February, 3 April 1917. 22. New York Sun, 3 October 1917, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 23. Diaries, vol. 46 (1917), n.d., written on a page marked “Notes for 1918.” At the top of that page, Morris asks, “How can one have notes for 1918 when God has not sent it yet?” 24. Ibid., vol. 50 (1921), 11 February, 8 July 1921. 25. “Ada Patterson Discusses the Meeting of Clara Morris and Frances Starr,” New York Star, 15 June 1921, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 26. Diaries, vol. 47 (1918), 19 February, 18 April, 10 September, 23 October 1918; vol. 50 (1921), 4 March 1921. 27. Ibid., vol. 50 (1921), 3 July 1921; vol. 49 (1920), 2 November 1920. 28. Clara Morris to Henry Wollman, quoted in New York Evening World, 26 November 1925 and Clara Morris to William Quaid, quoted in New York Tribune, 21 November 1925, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 311

Notes to Pages 262–68 29. Roselle Mercier Montgomery, “Sometimes They Say ‘No Flowers,’” New York Sun and Globe, n.d. 30. “Clara Morris Dies of Heart Disease,” New York World, 21 November 1925, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 31. All four obituaries dated 21 November 1925, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 32. New York Times, 24 November 1925, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 33. Ibid., 23 November 1925, New York Morning World, 24 November 1925, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 34. New York Times, 24 November 1925, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 35. Diaries, vol. 53 (1924), 31 December 1924. 36. Had George MacAdam not discovered Eliza Burtis, Morris’s $15,000 in assets (comparable to $179,052 in 2007; Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power,” see chap. 3, n. 23) would have reverted to the State of New York. Beyond the evidence he found confirming Burtis’s identity as Morris’s younger sister, her medical profile could have. Like Morris, she was nearly blind, suffered from rheumatism and heart ailments, and died at seventy-eight. 37. Miller, Bohemians and Critics, 156 (see chap. 5, n. 24) 38. Diaries, vol. 39 (1907), 27 January 1907. The others were Alfred Henry Lewis and Winifred Black. 39. New York Sun, 23 November 1925, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 40. New York Star, 14 August 1918, vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 41. Amy Leslie, “Morris,” Some Players: Personal Sketches (Chicago: Stone, 1899), 418; “When the Lights are Out,” and Newell, “The Clara Morris of Yesterday,” vol. 3, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 353, RLC. 42. New York Tribune, 22 November 1925, New York Sun, 21 November 1925, Clipping Files, Clara Morris, HTC. 43. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), xi–xiii. 44. “Return of Eleonora Duse to the American Theatre,” New York Post, 27 October 1923, MWEZ + n.c.18, 266; New York Dramatic Mirror, 28 May 1910, Clara Morris Scrapbooks, vol. 3, RLC, vol. 353, BRTC. 45. Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 16. 46. Patterson, “Clara Morris on Life.”

312

Index Note: The initials CM are used to refer to Clara Morris. Fictional characters in works by Clara Morris are designated (fict.). Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations. Academy of Music, Cleveland: 1863 spring productions, 44; 1869 season, 53; CM as guest artist, 114, 136–37; John Ellsler and, 36, 40; hierarchical organization of, 46; opening of, 274n. 4; playbills of, 276–77n. 42, 277n. 50, 290n. 45; roles played by CM at, 45, 52 acting: approach to, in late 19th century, 14–15, 47; emotional school of, 91; realism in, 83, 185; tragedy vs. melodrama, in Macbeth performance, 146–47; tragic school vs. emotional school, 141 actors in CM’s company, 220–21, 223–24, 305n. 27 actresses: CM on, 239; and concept of hysteria, 93; emotional, 91, 93–94, 109, 130; and marriage, 126; perceived respectability of, 38; response of Victorian men to, 90 Agnes (Sardou), 106 Alcott, Louisa May, 38–39, 200 Alexander II, assassination of, 200 Alixe (adapt. Daly): at Academy of Music, 136; CM and Daly rift over, 102; CM’s performance in, 14–15, 85–86, 94; in CM’s standard repertoire, 196, 208–9; plot of, 13–14; run of, 95; on tour, 100; in Washington, D.C., 111–12 Anderson, Mary, 184, 200, 203, 241 angina attack, induced, 169 Article 47 (adapt. Daly): in 1879 engagements, 194; at Chestnut Street Theatre, 196; in CM’s standard repertoire, 206, 208–9, 213, 216; critical response to, 9–11, 90, 135–36; at Fifth Avenue Theatre, 7; at Grand Opera House, 203; mad scene in, 10, 92, 282n. 59, 301n. 73; in Ohio, 204–5; at Park Theatre, 198; plot of,

8; on tour, 218–19, 221–25, 227, 230; at Union Square Theatre, 201 Article 47 (adapt. Johnson), 111, 114–15 assassinations, 200 audiences: American, fascination with Camille, 117–18; approval of, as driving force in CM’s life, 80; dwindling, for CM’s performances, 234; impact of CM on, 10, 82, 170, 207; morbid curiosity of, 185; response to “Blind Justice,” 232; response to CM, 79, 94, 123, 142, 246; southern vs. northern, 223–24; unresponsive, 219; Victorian, 90 autobiography of CM, 237 Baldwin’s Theatre, San Francisco, 192, 194 ballet girls, 39, 41–42 Bandmann, Daniel, 46, 49, 89 Barker, Fordyce, 157, 161, 166, 169 Barras, Charles M., 48, 276n. 40 Barry, Thomas, 38–39 Beecher, Henry Ward, 155 Beecher-Tilton trial, 155 benefit performances: of Camille, 118–19; for CM, 10, 49, 99, 254–55; for CM, at Broadway Theatre, 244; for Custer Monument Fund, 183–84; for John W. Norton, 206; for Mr. Smith, 125; for Society of Elks, 184; at Steinway Hall, New York, 190 Bernhardt, Sarah: at Abbey’s Park Theatre, 196–97; amputation of leg, 257; at benefit performance for CM, 244; at Booth’s, 198; as Camille, 124; Susan Glenn on, 109; on opium effects, 188; response of Victorian men to, 90; return to America, 229

313

index Black Crook, The (Barras), 276n. 40 Black Friday, 53, 107 “Blind Justice” (Lee), 232, 234 Bluebeard (musical extravaganza), 43 Booth, Edwin, 45–46, 69, 219 Booth, John Wilkes, 45 Booth’s Theatre, New York, 74, 89, 142, 153, 202 Boston Evening Transcript (newspaper), 176–77 Bosworth, Charles/Clarence (brother), 25, 28, 31, 274n. 30 Bosworth, Frances, 28, 32 Bosworth, Philetius Swiss, 28, 32 Boucicault, Dionn, 62–63, 72, 83–84 Bowers, Mrs. D. P., 63–64 Bradshaw, Blanche, 35–36 breeches roles, 46 Broadhurst, Thomas, 238–39 Broadway, 74 Broadway Theatre, New York, 188–89, 283n. 7 Brooklyn Eagle (newspaper), 132–33 Brooklyn Theatre, 154, 172 Brougham, John, 13, 74 “Brownie,” 54–56, 58. See also Ellsler, John A. Bryan, William Jennings, 239 burlesque, 53 Burt, Henrietta, 27–28 Burt, Henry B., 27–28 Burtis, Eliza P. (Burt) (sister), 26–27, 273n. 28, 312n. 36 Burtis, George A., 26–27

Cincinnati, Ohio, 57–60 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (newspaper), 59–63, 66–68 Cincinnati Daily Times (newspaper), 61–62, 66–67, 280n. 8 City of Boston (transatlantic liner), 71 Civil War, 71 Claire (play), 203, 217–22, 224–25 Clara Morris Company, 204, 227, 302n. 86, 305n. 22 classical ballet, 39 Claxton, Kate, 167, 309n. 101 Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain), 67, 240, 293n. 3 Cleveland, Ohio, 36–37 Cleveland Leader (newspaper), 40–41, 48–49, 65–66, 135–37, 290n. 54 cocaine, 206, 225, 306n. 44 Cockerill, John A., 59, 66, 308n. 63 Columbus Theatre, Harlem, 233–34 combination system, 69–70, 204 Conscience (Lancaster and Magnus), 167–68, 190–91 corps de ballet, 39–40 Crabtree, Lotta, 45, 80, 89, 259 Crinkle, Nym (Andrew Carpenter Wheeler), 2, 81, 95–97, 108–9, 265 Croisette, Sophie Alexandrine, 127–28 Cushman, Charlotte: CM compared to, 137, 289n. 31; as great performer, 2; as Lady Macbeth, 61, 132, 142, 143, 144; in male roles, 46; as martyr of the stage, 310n. 7; response of Victorian men to, 90; stage voice of, 148 Custer, George Armstrong, 6, 167, 183

California Theatre, San Francisco, 138–39 Camille (adapt. Davenport), 115 Camille (adapt. Heron): at Academy of Music, Brooklyn, 164; American fascination with, 117–18; as benefit performance, 118–19; at Booth’s Theatre, 153; at Boston Theatre, 176; Willa Cather on, 222; in CM’s standard repertoire, 196, 203–5, 208–9, 213, 216; comparison of, to Dumas’s script, 116–17; critical response to, 120–25, 135–36, 196, 220; on tour, 194, 219–20; uncertain origins of, 286n. 58; at Union Square Theatre, 119, 199 Camille (adapt. Keene), 116 Carrie (fict.), 30–31 Carte, Richard D’Oyly, 199–200 Cather, Willa, 222, 225, 266–67, 306n. 30 Cazauran, Augustus R., 168, 201 Charley (fict.), 30–31 Chevalier, Albert, 230–31 Chicago World’s Fair, 219 Christmas, 136, 229

Dale, Alan, 120, 240, 265 Daly, Augustin: adaptations by, 51, 76–77, 84, 95–99, 160–61, 194 (see also Alixe; Article 47; specific titles; specific titles below); CM’s contract negotiations with, 68–70, 84, 95, 100, 152–54, 206–7; CM’s relationship with, 7–8, 69, 84–85, 99–103, 161–63; Denise, 203, 206–8; Divorce, 89, 95, 100–101, 164; as drama critic, 74–75; economic depression and, 104; and extended run of Hamlet, 159–60; and Fifth Avenue Theatre, 7, 12–13, 74; gender dynamics in interactions with, 86; and Grand Opera House, 283n. 6; managerial persona of, 91; Man and Wife, 7, 78–82, 195–96; as model for Stewart Thrall character, 87–88; photograph by Napoleon Sarony, 75; Pique, 163–64; as playwright,

314

index 76; response to CM’s performances, 10, 99; theaters managed by, 283n. 7; as theatrical innovator, 76 Daly, Joseph: on CM, 8; on CM’s Cora in Article 47, 90; on CM in Saratoga, 83; on effects of economic depression, 104; on new Fifth Avenue Theatre, 13; on rift between Augustin Daly and CM, 283n. 12 Dame aux Camélias, La (Dumas), 115–16 Davenport, E. L., 47, 131, 276n. 36 Davenport, Fanny, 78, 164 death scenes played by CM, 14, 128–29, 153, 168–69 Denise (adapt. Daly), 203, 206–8 diary entries: overview, 3–5; for 1860s, 32–34, 51–52, 54–56; for 1870s, 8–13, 15, 178–79, 180–81, 184; for 1890s, 216–36, 306nn. 44, 45; for 1900s, 236–52; for 1910s, 252, 258–59, 260–61; for 1920s, 259–63; Harriott’s entries in, 174–75; recurrent themes in, 187–88, 213; volumes 1 and 2, 272n. 8 (intro.) Dickens, Charles, 23, 72 Divorce (adapt. Daly), 89, 95, 100–101, 164 Dot! (Dickens), 72 double bills, 43 double-entendres, 58–59 Duff, Mary, 76 Dumas, Alexandre, 115–16

of, by fire, 12–13; and economic depression, 135; Agnes Ethel at, 78; The New Leah at, 160–61; opening of new, 13; Pique at, 163–64; renovation of, by John Fisk Jr., 74; revivals at, 89–90; salaries at, 84; touring company of, 100–101 Fire Zouaves, 41, 275n. 20 Ford, John Thomson, 182 Ford’s Theater, collapse of, 219 Frohman, Daniel, 241, 244 Fuller, Loie, 231 Fullerton, William, 101–2 Gallaway, Catherine Parsell (fict.), 31 Gallemore, Catherine (Proctor), 31 Garfield, James, assassination of, 200 Garston, Kate, 50 Geneva Cross, The (Rowe), 106–7, 110–11 German immigrants, in Cincinnati, 57 Gilbert, William Schwenk, 107, 195 Glendenning, Mr., 220, 223–24 gold market collapse, 53 Governess, The (play), 188–89 Grand Opera House, New York, 89, 202–3, 206, 209–11, 228, 283n. 6 Grand Opera House, Washington, D.C., 227– 28 Greenwood, Grace (Sara Jane Clarke), 122–23 grinders, 187

economic depression, 104, 223 Ellsler, Euphemia Emma (Myers) “Effie,” 36, 43, 46–47, 50, 55, 276n. 36 Ellsler, John A., 37; in Alixe, 290n. 45; in Bluebeard, 43; CM’s first meeting with, 39; and CM’s guest appearance, 114; on CM’s marriage to Harriott, 135; as CM’s mentor, 35– 38, 37, 44, 65, 68–69; CM’s relationship with, 54–56, 113, 277n. 56; and Euclid Avenue Opera House, 53–54; financial concerns of, 52–53; as manager of Academy of Music, 35–38, 43–44, 52; sale of Cleveland Opera House, 296n. 69; unpublished memoir of, 274–75n. 5 Ellsler, “Little Effie,” 276n. 35 emotional school of acting, 91 entr’acte breaks, 203, 302n. 88 Ethel, Agnes, 77–78, 100, 106, 126, 283n. 2 Evadne (Sheil), 139–42, 241 Eytinge, Rose, 118, 174, 217

Harriott, Frederick C. “Fred”: and acting company, 227; as actor, 217, 232–34, 289n. 38; in altercation, 194; burial of, 311n. 13; as business manager of Clara Morris Company, 204; with CM, 212; CM’s engagement to, 126; and CM’s health, 177, 182; CM’s marriage to, 134–35, 181–82, 191, 205, 211, 231, 244, 252; CM’s mourning for, 253–56; CM’s quarrels with, 229; CM’s separation from, 192–93; contract negotiations with Daly, 160–62; ill health and death of, 253; letter to, suggesting interpretation of Lady Macbeth, 145; and Mr. Price, 225; spending of, 236; tantrums of, 226 Harriott, Samuel W., 253, 257 Harrison Narcotic Act (1914), 256 health problems of CM: in 1868, 51–52; in 1870s, 100–101, 111, 113–14, 138–39, 164; in 1890s, 218, 222–23, 228–31; in 1900s, 243–44, 247– 48; blindness, 252–53, 310–11n. 8; in Boston, 176–77; cold in lungs, 95; and compromised acting, 195, 198; disease of the spine, 157;

Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York: in 1872, 7; Daly’s first season at, 76–77; destruction

315

index health problems of CM (continued) Donn Piatt on, 156–58; flexion of the womb, 167; injuries, 28–29, 201, 218, 231; morphine addiction and, 202 (see also morphine use and addiction, CM and); in New York, 189–90; New York Evening Post on, 182; pleurisy, 78; during run of Miss Multon, 172–74; in San Francisco, 290n. 54; teeth, decayed, 197; in vaudeville, 232–33, 235; while writing, 235–36 Heir at Law, The (play), 58–59 Hélène (Morton), 203, 212 Heron, Bijou, 170 Heron, Matilda, 116–17, 125, 286n. 58, 287n. 72 holidays, 12, 125, 154–55 Holt, Elsie, 62–63 Hunchback, The (Knowles), 49, 64, 130, 136 hysteria, 10, 91–93 hysterical emotional school of acting, 91

formance in Madelein Morel, 98–99; Fifth Avenue Theatre fire in, 12; frontispiece of, 237, 238; similarities of CM to Cora, in Article 47, 93 MacAdam, George T.: on CM’s chronic pain, 186; on CM’s dismissal from Wood’s Theatre, 65; on CM’s marriage to Fred Harriott, 134; death of, 271n. 6; research of, 3, 18–19, 24–27; and story of CM’s early years, 27–33 Macauley, Barney, 55–58, 62–66 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 51, 61, 130–36, 139–40, 142, 292n. 92 Madelein Morel (adapt. Daly), 95–99 Man and Wife (adapt. Daly), 7, 78–82, 195–96 Marguerite (Hill), 139, 164 Marsh, Selina Parsell (fict.), 22–24, 29, 31 McClure’s magazine, 237 melodramas, 3–4, 40–41, 49, 51, 72, 146–47 Miller, Mrs. (boardinghouse owner), 32, 35 Miss Multon (play): at Boston Theatre, 176; closing of, due to CM’s illness, 173–74; CM’s contract with Shook and Palmer, 296n. 76; in CM’s standard repertoire, 196, 202, 206, 208–9, 213; players in, 302n. 88; on tour, 177–83, 189–91, 194, 227; at Union Square Theatre, 168–72 Modjeska, Helena, 35, 184 morphine use and addiction, CM and: in 1896, 230; and artistic decline, 186–88; beginnings of, 2; and chronic health problems, 202; cure offered to, 299n. 31; and denial, 192–93; diary notations for injections, 294n. 38; Harriott and, 182; and Harrison Narcotic Act, 218, 256; injections during performances, 173–74, 176, 189; injections during run of Miss Multon, 172; Thomas Latimer on, 298n. 8; media response to, 211; in New York Dramatic News, 180–81; in summer of 1896, 231; on tour, 174–75, 229; in vaudeville, 232–33; while writing, 235–36; and withdrawal, 187 morphine use and addiction, in 19th century, 4–5, 164–67, 186, 294n. 33, 300n. 52, 306n. 44 Morrell, Claire (fict.), 86–88 Morris, Clara (CM), 212, 238, 242, 247; ambitions of, 55, 60, 68; as beloved figure, 266; biographers of, 3; birth year of, 272n. 1 (chap. 2); burial of, 265; on celebrity worship, 183; christening of, 225, 306n. 45; in Cleveland, 34, 60; crying on cue, 48, 82–83, 125; daily

interviews, 114–15 Jane Eyre (play), 183–84, 241 Jefferson, Joseph, 64–65 Jessie Brown, or the Relief of Lucknow (play), 72–73 Jezebel (Boucicault), 83–84 Johnson, Rachael, 58, 65, 278n. 27 Keene, Laura, 40, 116 King, William L., 31–32 Lamontagne, Bridget. See Burtis, Eliza P. (Burt) (sister) Lamontagne, Charles (father), 24–26 Lamontagne, Clarence/Charles (brother), 25, 28, 274n. 30 Lamontagne, Eliza (sister), 25. See also Burtis, Eliza P. (Burt) (sister) Lamontagne, Sarah Proctor (mother), 27–29. See also Morrison, Sarah Jane Proctor (mother) Lancashire Lass playbill, 50 Lavalle, Charles Paul (fict.), 23–24, 273n. 17 Lavalle, Lucie (fict.), 23 Lawton, Sybil (fict.), 87–88, 281n. 43 leading business, demands of, 59 lectures of CM, 237–41, 244 letters written by CM, 155–56, 262, 290n. 54 Life on the Stage (Morris): Cincinnati season in, 58; critical success of, 241; Augustin Daly in, 85, 101–2; early life in, 17–18, 29, 236; Ellsler company in, 49; fears for per-

316

index life of, 51; death, premature reports of, 237; death of, 1, 263–64, 273n. 1; declines in career of, 16; diaries of, 2, 268, 271n. 6, 272n. 8 (intro.) (see also diary entries); as dramatic meteor, 103, 113; early life of, 1–2, 17, 27–33; education of, 33, 35; as emotional actress, 91, 93–94, 109, 130; employment opportunities, 38; father of, 17–18; financial relief, 257; financial problems of, 181–82, 217–18, 229, 233, 236, 243–44, 252, 256; forgotten birthday of, 189; grave site of, 265, 271n. 1 (preface); and great-grandfather, 32–33; internal conf licts of, 3; as journalist, 248, 251–52; in The Lancashire Lass, 50; in Liverpool, 126; marriage license, 272n. 1 (chap. 2), 289n. 34; marriage of (see Harriott, Frederick C. “Fred”); mother of (see Morrison, Sarah Jane Proctor (mother); moves in later life, 253, 257, 263; mystical experience, 79; New York stage debut, 7; obituaries, 1, 263, 272n. 1 (chap. 2); ostracism of, by New York actors, 78; personal struggles of, 265–66; physical appearance of, 5; piano lessons, 59; and poverty, 59, 78; productivity of, as writer, 257–58, 260; professional training of, 44; as quick study, 45; resilience of, 6; secrets of, 2, 19; surname change, 42; writing career of, 2, 159, 214, 225–27, 233, 235, 241, 244, 265 Morris, Clara, works: articles, 248–49, 253; “Behind the Scenes,” 239; “Clara Morris Says” (newspaper column), 253; Conscience, 252; “The Drama and Stage Life,” 239; “The Gentleman Who Was Going to Die,” 30–31; Hulda’s Brat, 244–45; “Jim Crow,” 225–26; Left in Charge, 19, 22–24, 244–45; The Life of a Star, 5, 142–46, 249–50, 301n. 74; “The Little Ballet Girl,” 159; Little “Jim Crow” and Other Stories of Children, 30, 236; memoirs, 6; “My Mr. Edward,” 30; “My Pirate,” 30, 274n. 37; The New “East Lynne,” 252; novels, 6; “An Old Hulk,” 235; “Old John Hickey,” 226; “Old Myra’s Waiting,” 235–36; A Pasteboard Crown, 86–88, 237–38, 241, 243, 281n. 43; “A Pretty Plan,” 30; “Reflections of an Actress,” 214–15; “Religion and the Stage,” 239; “Reminiscences of the Stage,” 234–35; short stories, 6, 30, 226, 235–36; A Silent Singer, 30, 235–36; “The Stage as an Occupation for Women,” 239, 243; Stage Confidences, 85, 241, 242, 301n. 80; “Stage Morals,” 239; The Trouble Woman, 251; “A Warning Word,” 236; “When ‘The Sphinx’

Shocked New York,” 288n. 13, 14. See also Life on the Stage (Morris) Morris, Sarah Jane Proctor, 19. See also Morrison, Sarah Jane Proctor (mother) Morris-Harriott scandal, 193 Morrison, Clara, 32–33. See also Morris, Clara (CM) Morrison, Sarah Jane Proctor (mother), 20; birth of daughter by William King, 32; childhood of, 20–22; in CM’s early years, 17–18, 25–26; CM’s mourning for, 259; death of, 257–58; as disciplinarian, 29; gifts to CM, 226; in Liverpool, 126; moves to rural Illinois and back to Cleveland, 31; move to Fair Lawn with CM, 253–56; at the Pines with CM, 205–6 moxa treatment (moxibustion), 157–59 National Theatre, Cincinnati, 63–68, 70 New Magdalen, The (adapt.), 199–202, 204–5, 208–9, 213, 224–25 New York City, 68–69, 74 New York Clipper (newspaper): on advance sales in Des Moines, 221; on CM as Sarah Multon, 191; on CM in Camille, 220; on CM in Monsieur Alphonse, 194; on CM’s drawing power, 223; on CM’s erratic behavior, 196; on CM’s New York vaudeville debut, 232; on CM’s tour (1895), 227; on The Governess, 188; on houses in Providence, 221; on length of intervals between acts, 189; on Man and Wife, 195–96 New York Daily Graphic (newspaper), 129–30, 133 New York Herald (newspaper): on CM as Evadne, 141; on CM as Hélène, 212; on CM as Jane Eyre, 188–89; on CM as Lady Macbeth, 133, 147; on CM as Renée, 210; on CM as Sarah Multon, 170–71; on CM in Alixe, 15, 94, 197; on CM in Claire, 224–25; on CM in Denise, 206–7; on CM in Macbeth, 142; on CM in Man and Wife, 81; on CM in The Two Orphans, 246; on He Knew He Was Right, 89; as publisher of CM’s short stories, 226 New York Stock Market crash, 220 New York Sun (newspaper), 177, 266–67 New York Theatre, 13, 254–55 New York Times: on CM as Alixe, 15; on CM as Hélène, 212–13; on CM as Julia, 130; on CM as Lady Macbeth, 147; on CM as Renée, 210; on CM in Jezebel, 83–84; on CM in The Two Orphans, 245; on CM’s opening

317

index New York Times (continued) performance in Man and Wife, 81; on CM’s stagnation as artist, 160; on death scene in The Sphinx, 129; on Macbeth, 142; obituary of Clara Morris, 1; review of Article 47, 9; review of CM’s Cora, 10 New York Tribune (newspaper), 15, 147, 266. See also Winter, William New York World (newspaper), 133, 170–71, 236, 264. See also Crinkle, Nym (Andrew Carpenter Wheeler) Niblo’s Garden, 89, 276n. 40

absurd, 213; intervals between acts, 189; in late 1880s and 1890s, 203–4; limited to matinees, 198; in Man and Wife, 79–80; as mirror of private life, 4; physicality in, 47; power of, on the stage, 109–10; preparation for, 8–10, 92, 120, 128; primacy of emotion in, 47–48; and reluctance to perform, 188; sleepwalking scene, in Macbeth, 133, 138, 150; as spectacle of suffering, 125; style of, 267; vanity, perceived by critics, 62. See also benefit performances; individual plays; roles played by CM photographs: of CM, 212, 238, 247; full-stage, 237; by Napoleon Sarony, 75; publicity, 120, 241–42; sitting for, 237 Piatt, Donn, 135–36, 156–58, 173 Pines, the, 205–6, 243–44, 252–53, 299n. 40, 303n. 93 Pique (Daly), 163–64 Price, Mr. (CM’s manager), 219, 221, 225, 302n. 87 Pritchard, Hannah, 132 Proctor, Catherine (aunt), 21 Proctor, Elizabeth (aunt), 21 Proctor, John (uncle), 21, 32 Proctor, Nevada S. (cousin), 19–20, 31–32 Proctor, Sarah (great-grandmother), 21 Proctor, Sarah Jane (mother), 21–22. See also Morrison, Sarah Jane Proctor (mother) Proctor, Sarah Morrison (grandmother), 21 Proctor, William (grandfather), 21 Proctor, William (great-grandfather), 21, 32–33 Proctor, William (uncle), 21

Odell, George C. D.: on CM as Alixe, 86; on CM as fading luminary, 224; on CM as Lady Macbeth, 147; on CM as Renée, 211; on CM in Camille, 125; on CM in decline, 208–9, 211; on CM in Man and Wife, 82; on CM in The Critic and No Name, 84; on CM’s mad scene in Article 47, 10; on Augustin Daly, 86; on failure of The New Leah, 160; on He Knew He Was Right, 89; on Helena Modjeska, 184 Odette (Sardou), 203, 213–14, 216, 218–21, 223 Olympic Theatre Company, Halifax, 71–72, 89 O’Neill, Eugene, 165 O’Neill, James “Jimmy,” 5, 194, 245, 259 opium, 166, 188, 294nn. 33, 35 Palmer, Albert M.: on actresses and marriage, 126; background of, 283n. 13; and Camille, 118; on CM, 16, 110, 124, 131, 201; CM’s break with, 153; CM’s contracts with, 124, 127, 288n. 8, 296n. 76; CM’s criticism of, 192–93, 201, 295–96n. 65; CM’s defection to, 104, 110, 118–19, 124–27, 129–31, 139; CM under management of, 167–68; engagement of CM for matinees, 198; on Far from the Madding Crowd, 201; on fire at Brooklyn Theatre, 172–73; hiring of CM, 107; and Madison Square Theatre, 301n. 74; and The Martyr, 303n. 108; plays proposed for spring 1875, 139–40; rivalry with Augustin Daly, 105–6; and Sphinx, 127; and The Two Orphans, 245; and Union Square Theatre, 104–6, 301n.74 Panic of 1873, 54, 104 Park Theatre, Boston, 196–98 performances by CM: artistic decline in, 186, 188–89, 208–9, 215; colloquial speech in, 147; dwindling audiences for, 234; early roles at Academy of Music, 42–43; as embodiment of sensational realism, 267–68; emotional intensity of, 68; freakish and

racism, 92, 197 railroads, and touring, 5 Raymonde (play), 194, 196, 199, 227, 229–30 realism, in acting, 4, 49, 83 Reconstruction era, 57 Reignolds, Kate, 49, 62 Renée de Moray (adapt. Stuart), 203, 209–13, 216–19, 221–25 resident troupe, 69–70 Revel, Mollie, 24–26, 274n. 30 revivals, 89–90 roles played by CM: Alida Bloodgood, in Streets of New York, 63; Alixe, 14–15, 16, 85–86, 94, 100, 197; Alixe, in The Countess de Somerive, 196; Anne Sylvester, in Man and Wife, 7, 78, 81–82; ballet girl, in The Seven Sisters, 41–42; Bertha, in Dot, 49; Bianca, in The Italian Wife, 49; Blanche de Chelles, in The Sphinx, 127; Camille, 118–25, 121, 136–37,

318

index 176, 198, 266; Celia, in As You Like It, 62; Cicely, in The Heir at Law, 58–59; Clothilde, in Fernande, 101, 283n. 2; Cora/Madame Delafield, in Article 47, 8–10, 11, 90–93, 135– 36; Dora, in The Octoroon, 51; early, at Academy of Music, 42–43; Emilia, in Othello, 67, 203; Esther, in The New Leah, 160; Evadne, 140–42; Fanny Ten Eyck, in He Knew He Was Right, 89; Gabrielle, in The Geneva Cross, 110–11; Gertrude, in Hamlet, 46; Grace Harkaway, in London Assurance, 62; Helen, in The Hunchback, 49, 64; Ingomar, 72; Ivanhoe, 63; Jane Eyre, in The Governess, 188–89; Judith Grange, in Indiscretion of the Truth, 248; Julia, in The Hunchback, 130; Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet, 73; Katherine, in Taming of the Shrew, 67; King Charles, in Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady, 45; Lady Macbeth, in Macbeth, 4, 130–34, 137–38, 142–53, 252; Lady Priory, in Wives as They Were, 89–90; Lady Versala, in Matilde, 49; Laura, in Under the Gaslight, 51; Lucy Carter, in Saratoga, 83; Madame d’Artigues, in Jezebel, 83–84; Madelein Morel, 95–99, 96, 98–99; Mademoiselle Quinault, in Narcisse, 49; Magdalen Atherleigh, in New Year’s Eve, 12; Margaret Armitage and Alice, in Not Guilty, 66; Marianne, in Ruy Blas, 67; Marie, in The Marble Heart, 49; in melodramas with Olympic Theatre Company, 72; Mercy Merrick, in The New Magdalen, 199; Nancy, in Oliver Twist, 299n. 35; Odette, 213–14; Queen Elizabeth, in Richard III, 61; Renée, in Renée de Mornay, 210; Rosa Leigh, in Rosedale, 63; Rosalie, in The Outlaw, 202–3; Sarah Multon, in Miss Multon, 168–72, 170, 176, 182–83; Selene, in Wicked World, 107–9; Shakespearean, 67, 73, 154 (see also Macbeth [Shakespeare]); Sister Genevieve, in The Two Orphans, 245–46, 247, 265; women, victimized, 4, 67–68; at Wood’s Theatre, 61–63. See also performances by CM Rose Michel (adapt. Mackaye), 217–18, 305n. 15 Ross, Charley, 163–64 Rowe, George Fawcett, 106–7, 127 Royal Favorite, The (adapt. Piatt), 194–95

Schlesinger Library, 271n. 6, 289n. 36 secession crisis, 40 Seguin, Dr., 164–65, 167–69 Seven Sisters, The (Keene), 39–42, 44 sexism, and hysteria, 92 Shook, Sheridan, 104, 127, 167–68, 296n. 76, 301n. 74 Siddons, Sarah Kemble, 132, 143, 148, 291n. 73 Sphinx, The (adapt. Rowe), 127–30, 241 Sphinx ring, 288n. 13 Spirit of the Times (newspaper): on CM and morphine addiction, 211; on CM as Alixe, 15, 197; on CM as Camille, 120–22, 198; on CM as Cora, 9; on CM as Evadne, 141–42; on CM as guest artist at Academy of Music, 138; on CM as Julia, 130; on CM as Lady Macbeth, 147, 149; on CM as Rosalie, 202; on CM as Sarah Multon, 171; on CM in Macbeth, 142; on CM in Tragedy of Jane Shore, 153; on CM in Wicked World, 108; on CM’s Cora in Article 47, 90; on CM’s effect on audiences, 207; CM’s interview with, 102–3; on CM’s onstage behavior, 203; on death scene in The Sphinx, 129; on The New Magdalen, 199; on rift between Daly and CM, 160; on The Royal Favorite and CM’s performance, 195; urges CM’s retirement from stage, 181, 213 Spitfire, The (Maginnis), 72 stage business, 47 stage managers, 106, 284n. 23 stage speech, 148–49 star system, 36, 99 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 171–72 Stewart, John N., 29–30 stigma against the stage, 4, 37–38 stock company system, 5, 36, 45–46, 56, 69–70, 204 strychnine poisoning, 128–29 Stuart, Mary, 155–56 syphillis, 187 tears, sacred, 124 tears on stage, 48, 82–83, 125 Thanksgiving, 229 Thaw, Harry K.: murder trial of, 251–52 theater: CM’s disenchantment with, 49; CM’s impressions of, in A Pasteboard Crown, 88; combination system, 69–70; death in, 229; leading business in, 59; references to, in Stage Confidence, 243; status in American society, 4, 37–38

salaries, 45, 49, 84, 168, 279n. 43, 284n. 21 Salvini, Alessandro, 201, 301nn. 73, 80 Salvini, Tomasso, 101, 202, 283n. 5 San Francisco, 138–39, 174–76, 192, 194, 290n. 54 scandals, 65

319

index theater fires, 12–13, 172–73, 206, 273n. 20 theaters, on tour: dirty and dangerous, 218–19; inferior, 208–10, 213; primitive, 51, 216–17; in southern states, 223, 229 theaters, segregation of, 277n. 50 theater wardrobe, gender inequities in, 45 Theatre Royal (Lyceum), Halifax, Nova Scotia, 71, 279n. 46 Thompson, Charlotte, 131, 173–74 Thrall, Stewart (fict.), 87–88, 281n. 43 ticket prices and sales, 42, 111–12, 285n. 46 Toronto, Canada, 21, 23 touring: in 1880s, 204–5, 208–9, 211–12; in 1890s, 213, 216, 223, 227–31, 235, 305n. 23; in 1900s, 247–48; Article 47, 218–19; Camille, 194, 219– 20; Claire, 217–18; with Fifth Avenue Theatre company, 100–101; as guest artist, 110–15, 131, 135–39; in late 19th century, 5; Miss Multon, 189–90; and morphine use, 174–75; Renée de Moray, 218–19. See also theaters, on tour Towse, John Ranken: background of, 288n. 9; on CM, 267; on CM as Evadne, 141; on CM as Lady Macbeth, 133–34, 146, 149–50; on CM in Tragedy of Jane Shore, 153; on Cushman as Lady Macbeth, 144; on Evadne, 140; on The Sphinx, 127, 129 tragedies, as genre, 40, 148 Tragedy of Jane Shore, The (Rowe), 139–40, 152–53 Trovatore, Il (Verdi), 92–93 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 67, 240, 293n. 3 Tweed, William M. “Boss,” 74, 88–89 Two Orphans, The (play), 245–47, 265–66 Under the Gaslight (Daly), 51, 76 Union Square Theatre, New York: CM in Article 47 at, 201; CM in Camille at, 119, 199; CM in Conscience at, 167–68; CM in Evadne at, 139–41; CM in Hélène at, 212; CM in Macbeth at, 130–34; CM in matinee performances at, 198; CM in Miss Multon at, 168–72; CM in Raymonde at, 199; CM in The Hunchback at, 130; CM’s debut, 107–9; CM’s offer from, 95; comedies staged in 1872–73 season, 106; Harriott’s contract with, 304n. 118; Albert Palmer as manager of, 104–6; Palmer’s sale of, to Shook and Collier, 301n. 74; renovation of, 106

vaudeville, 231–35 venereal disease, 186–87, 297n. 3 Vera (Wilde), 200–201, 301nn. 67, 72 visiting artists, 44–47, 84 Vitascope, 231 Wallack, Lester, 84, 104–5, 113 Wallack’s Theatre, New York, 71, 240 Wall Street Panic, 53–54 Western, Lucille, 46, 89, 296n. 69 Wheeler, Andrew Carpenter (Nym Crinkle), 2, 81, 95–97, 108–9, 265 Wicked World (Gilbert), 107–10, 125 Wilde, Oscar, 199–201, 307n. 49 Williams, Jean H., 227, 230, 302n. 87, 307n. 55 Winter, William: on Augustin Daly, 86, 97–98; on CM as Camille, 123–24, 198; on CM as Evadne, 141; on CM as Julia, 130–31; on CM as Lady Macbeth, 147; on CM as Sarah Multon, 171; on CM in Madelein Morel, 97; on CM in Wicked World, 108–10; death of, 257; on Frou-Frou, 77; on He Knew He Was Right, 89; on Matilda Heron as Camille, 117; on power of CM, 266; wife of, in Daly troupe, 285n. 31 Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are (play), 89–90 womanhood, true, 38 women: characterizations of, in melodramas, 4; fallen, in adaptations of European dramas, 77, 92, 95–96, 116; in male leading roles, 46–47, 73; and morphine addiction, 165, 294n. 33; and nerve troubles, 177; and opium addiction, 294n. 33; in A Pasteboard Crown, 87–88; stereotypes of, in late 19th century, 4–5; and the theater, 5, 38; Victorian, and murder, 146 women’s rights convention, 38 Wood’s Theatre, Cincinnati, 55–58, 64, 89 World’s Congress of Representative Women, 35, 219 Worthington, John, 65, 68 Wright, Frederick A., 264–65 writing career of CM, 2, 159, 214, 225–27, 233, 235, 241, 244, 265. See also Morris, Clara, works Zouaves, 41, 275n. 20

320

Barbara Wallace Grossman, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts University, is a theater historian and director. She is the author of Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice. A presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts (1994–99) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council (2000–5), she currently serves as vice-chair of the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is a member and former chair of the American Repertory Theatre’s advisory board and a board member of MassEquality, a grassroots organization working to achieve full equality for the LGBT community in Massachusetts and supporting other New England states in winning equal marriage rights for same-sex couples.

theater in the americas The goal of the series is to publish a wide range of scholarship on theater and performance, defining theater in its broadest terms and including subjects that encompass all of the Americas. The series focuses on the performance and production of theater and theater artists and practitioners but welcomes studies of dramatic literature as well. Meant to be inclusive, the series invites studies of traditional, experimental, and ethnic forms of theater; celebrations, festivals, and rituals that perform culture; and acts of civil disobedience that are performative in nature. We publish studies of theater and performance activities of all cultural groups within the Americas, including biographies of individuals, histories of theater companies, studies of cultural traditions, and collections of plays.

theater / biography “A Spectacle of Suffering is a unique contribution to theatre scholarship. Barbara Wallace Grossman has done an excellent job of piecing together Clara Morris’s history. Her text is effortless to read—as smooth as a novel—and the documentation is impeccable.” —Rosemarie K. Bank, author of Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 Once called “America’s greatest actress,” renowned for the passion and power of her performances, Clara Morris (1847–1925) has been largely forgotten. A Spectacle of Suffering is the first full-length study of the actress’s importance as a feminist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Detailing her daunting health problems and the changing tastes in entertainment that led to her retirement from the stage, Barbara Wallace Grossman explores Morris’s dramatic reinvention as an author. During a second robust career, she published hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and nine books—six works of fiction and three memoirs. A Spectacle of Suffering recovers an important figure in American theatre and ensures that Morris will be remembered not simply as an actress but as a respected writer and beloved public figure, admired for her courage in dealing with adversity. This book—which is enhanced by twenty-four illustrations—is the only published biography of Clara Morris, and is as much a tribute to the power of the human spirit as it is a means of exploring American theatre and society in the Gilded Age. barbara wallace grossman is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts University. She is the author of Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice.

southern illinois university press 1915 university press drive mail code 6806 carbondale, il 62901 www.siu.edu/~siupress Cover illustration: Cabinet photograph of Clara Morris as Camille, 1874, which appeared in many of her obituaries in November 1925. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library. Printed in the United States of America

isbn 0-8093-2882-8 isbn 978-0-8093-2882-6

A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage

Wright Morris (Pamphlets on American Writers)

On Stage!

Clara

The Mystery on Stage

Society of the Spectacle

Suffering Souls on Pilgrimage

The Spectacle of Intimacy

Spectacle

Clara

Clara

The Spectatorship of Suffering

The Society of the Spectacle

A Stage of Memory

The Society of the Spectacle

A Spectacle of Corruption: A Novel

The World's A Stage

The World's A Stage

The Suffering of the Immigrant

The Legend of Morris Cerullo

Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen

Suffering

Ballet Shoes: A Story of Three Children on the Stage

Clara Howard In A Series Of Letters

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Latin American Macroeconomic Reforms: The Second Stage

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

This Republic of Suffering - Death and the American Civil War

Stage Fright on a Summer Night

Clara Moreland

Stage Fright on A Summer Night

A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage

Wright Morris (Pamphlets on American Writers)

On Stage!

Clara

The Mystery on Stage

Society of the Spectacle

Suffering Souls on Pilgrimage

The Spectacle of Intimacy

Spectacle

Clara

Clara

The Spectatorship of Suffering

The Society of the Spectacle

A Stage of Memory

The Society of the Spectacle

A Spectacle of Corruption: A Novel

The World's A Stage

The World's A Stage

The Suffering of the Immigrant

The Legend of Morris Cerullo

Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen

Suffering

Ballet Shoes: A Story of Three Children on the Stage

Clara Howard In A Series Of Letters

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Latin American Macroeconomic Reforms: The Second Stage

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

This Republic of Suffering - Death and the American Civil War

Stage Fright on a Summer Night

Clara Moreland

Stage Fright on A Summer Night

Recommend Documents