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• Montana Wojczuk

  A Very Dangerous Young Man

  Tags:

  acting,

  Central Park,

  New York,

  newspapers,

  women

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  The man in the dented top hat kept fussing with the rope. The band could barely be heard over the screaming children who seemed to multiply like weeds and, like weeds, seemed bent on ruining the new flowerbeds that rose on either side of the terrace. Central Park drew all kinds. A semi-circle of chairs was set up around Bethesda terrace for patrons, while the public spread out picnic blankets to enjoy the unseasonably warm May air. Their tatty sheets created a patchwork effect against the new green sod, as though the park were aproning herself for spring cleaning.

  In 1873 Emma Stebbins had become the first woman to receive a New York public works commission. Her Angel of the Healing Waters was named for the new aqueduct which ran under that very spot, but to Stebbins the statue also had a personal significance: the body was modeled after her lover, the American actress Charlotte Cushman.

  Cushman had retired from the stage a decade ago, but when Emma was introduced to Charlotte in Rome she had been as smitten as the first time she’d seen her play Hamlet on stage. Charlotte wouldn’t be coming today—the powerful body that had embodied the greatest characters of the theater, the body Emma had begun to sketch all those years ago, was wasting away.

  The man in the top hat gained the rowdy crowd’s attention. The day lightened as the last of the gold cumulus clouds burned off in the bright blue sky and a cool breeze lofted a few early dogwood blooms. The white flowers dipped over couples rowing brightly colored swan boats across the lake then sailed into the audience. The man pulled and the canvas fell away revealing the statue of an angel in flowing robes, holding in one hand a lily as a symbol of healing. A century and a half later, the Bethesda Fountain would come to be called “Central Park’s beating heart.” Hordes of tourists would flock here to have their pictures taken: day laborers eating lunch at the water’s edge, college girls arriving with an apple and a novel, watching the young men reading under the angel’s outstretched wings.

  On that day, however, the sculptor had no inkling of her statue’s future glory, or that the attempt to memorialize her Charlotte had succeeded. In fact, using Cushman’s once-powerful body as her model backfired. Critics found the sculpture ugly, its bare legs grotesquely plump and proud chest almost manly. The New York Times critic found it at once coarse and disturbingly erotic:

  From a rear view the figure resembles a servant girl executing the polka pas seul in the privacy of the back kitchen…the head is distinctly a male head, of a classical-commonplace, meaningless beauty, the breasts are feminine, the rest of the body is in part male and in part female.

  Charlotte Cushman was one of America’s first superstar actresses. Walt Whitman had written rapturously of her roles as a young theater critic for the Brooklyn Eagle. In 1846 he proclaimed “the towering grandeur of her genius” writing, “Miss Cushman assuredly bears away the palm from them all, men and women.” In the golden age of American theater this was no mean feat, but Charlotte Cushman was no ordinary actress. She became famous for playing “breeches parts,” men’s roles like Hamlet and Romeo, for which she competed with the most famous actors of the day.

  Cushman’s Romeo, with her sister as Juliet, had unprecedented success in England and her Hamlet and Macbeth drew both men and women to the stage door, arms laden with flowers. One woman declared that Cushman was “a very dangerous young man.” As an artist who was also an “intellectual” performer, a woman who played the man, and a single woman whose life reads like an adventure novel Cushman deeply influenced American culture in the time of great upheaval around the Civil War. Louisa May Alcott once wrote that she had a “stage-struck fit” after seeing Cushman perform, and would later base the character of Miss Cameron from Jo’s Boys on her.

  Still, by the end of her life Cushman’s roles had become highly controversial among critics. Some like Whitman continued to believe she was the greatest hope for American culture—a culture still struggling to define itself against Europe. Others criticized her for the very gender-bending roles that had made her famous.

  By the time of her death in February of 1876, Cushman was among the most famous women in the world. Yet as 25,000 people holding flickering candles crowded the streets of New York in mourning, a counter-movement of social conservatives had begun a campaign to eventually write Charlotte Cushman out of history. Her obituary, published the next day in the New York Times, said that Cushman may have been talented enough, but the newspaper was “relieved” that American culture had evolved enough that no woman would again debase herself playing men onstage. The tens of thousands of Cushman’s fans shuffled their feet and cupped hands around their candles that day they felt the knife-edge of a cold-snap that would develop into a chilly year.

  Photo: Jason Walton via Flickr

  February 9, 2011
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