Partner James Oakes
Queer Places:
1346 N Broad St, Philadelphia, PA 19121
Fonthill Castle, 6301 Riverdale Ave, The Bronx, NY 10471
Old Saint Pauls Episcopal Church Cemetery
Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, USA
Forrest Theatre, 1114 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Edwin
Forrest (March 9, 1806 – December 12, 1872) was a prominent nineteenth-century
American Shakespearean actor. His feud with the British actor William
Macready was the cause of the deadly Astor Place Riot of 1849. John Banim's
Damon and Pythias was perhaps the most popular of Forrest's non-Shakespearian
roles outside the prize plays. The play focuses on the passionately loyal
relationship between two men. After his divorce, Forrest’s closest
relationship was with his lifelong friend,
James Oakes, a Boston merchant.
Forrest labeled the bedchamber across from his own in his Philadelphia mansion
“Oakes’ room,” and Oakes hosted Forrest whenever the actor played Boston.
Forrest’s official biographer, William R. Alger, relates that his Philadelphia
mansion displayed portraits of Oakes in four rooms. Oakes cared for Forrest as
his health worsened and was left an annuity of $2.500 a year in his will.
Forrest continually invited Oakes to join him on vacations and business trips,
and the two men refer occasionally to a common fantasy in which they move
together to Cuba, to “live and die there amid the warm breath of fragrant
fruits and flowers.” Oakes, for his part, often began his letters to Forrest
with “My noble Spartacus” and closed with even more effusive
affection,”Command my services to the fullest extent in anything and in
everything. For I am, from top to bottom, inside and out, an all through,
forever yours.” In a letter to the sculptor Thomas Ball, who had been
commissioned to make a statue of Forrest, Oakes explained that “For more than
forty years I have known this man with an intimacy not common among men.
Indeed, our friendship has been more like the devotion of a man to the woman
he loves than the relations usually subsisting between men.” In a letter
Forrest relates to Oakes that his leading lady, Lillie Swindlehurst, had asked
him “if we are married as you told her – which is the Woman.” In a subsequent
letter, Forrest declares that he will tell Lillie “that either of us is quite
likely to turn to a Woman, when it is desirable.” In 1872, while on what would
be his final stage tour, Forrest was stricken with pneumonia in Boston. Oakes
nursed him back to health and then spent much of the summer with him in
Philadelphia. Forrest embarked that autumn on a reading tour. He returned to
Philadelphia to gather his strength but died on December 12, 1872. Oakes
arrived immediately to supervise all preparations and dress Forrest’s body for
burial. As he contemplated the body of his dead friend, Oakes later wrote to
Alger that “it seemed to me that my body was as cold as his and my hearth as
still. The little while I stood at his side, speechless, almost lifeless,
seemed and age. No language can express the agony of that hour, and even now I
cannot bear to turn my mind back to it.”
Forrest was born in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, the son of Rebecca Lauman and William Forrest. His
father, a Scottish merchandise
peddler, moved from Dumfriesshire to Trenton,
New Jersey in 1791. His mother was a member of an affluent German-American family.
A business setback led William to relocate to Philadelphia, where he married
Rebecca and was able to secure a position with a local branch of the United
States Bank.[1][2] As
boys, Forrest and his brother William joined a local juvenile
thespian club and participated in theatrical performances staged in a
sparsely decorated woodshed. At the age of 11, Forrest made his first
appearance on the legitimate stage at Philadelphia's South Street Theatre,
playing the female role Rosalia de Borgia in the John D. Turnbull
melodrama Rudolph: or, The Robbers of Calabria. After Forrest's father died in
1819, he attempted to apprentice with a printer, a cooper, and finally a ship
chandler. When attending a lecture in early 1820, he volunteered to
participate in an experiment on the effects of nitrous
oxide. While under the influence of the gas, he broke into a soliloquy from Shakespeare's Richard
III that impressed eminent Philadelphia lawyer John Swift so much that
Swift arranged an audition at the Walnut
Street Theatre; this led to Forrest's formal stage debut on November 27,
1820, as Young Norval in John
Home's Douglas.[1][2][3]
The theatres of New York and Philadelphia were already crowded with trained
and successful actors. Forrest therefore set out at once for the south and
west. His tour through a rough country—with the inconveniences of long
distances, the necessity of presenting his plays in rude halls, insufficient
support, and poor scenery—was not altogether successful, but the discipline to
mind and body was felt in all his subsequent career.[4]
Forrest soon gained fame for portraying blackface caricatures
of African Americans.[5]
Constance Rourke wrote
that his impression was so believable he often mingled in the streets with
African Americans unnoticed. He allegedly fooled one old black woman into
taking him for a friend and then convinced her to join him in his stage
performance that night.[6]
In 1826, he had a great success at the Bowery
Theatre in New York City as Othello.
The management employed him at a salary far below his worth, and he was at
once offered increased payment at another theatre; but he refused to break his
word, and carried out the contract to his own detriment. This strict sense of
honor was characteristic of him throughout his career.[4]
His New York success was repeated in every city he visited. In 1829 he was
featured as Metamora in the play Metamora;
or, The Last of the Wampanoags by John
Augustus Stone. After a few years of profitable labor, during which he had
encouraged native talent by liberal offers for new American plays, he went to
Europe for rest and travel and larger observation, and was received with much
courtesy by actors and scholars.[4]
He returned to Philadelphia in 1831, and played there and in New York and
elsewhere with triumphant success until September, 1836, when he sailed for
England, this time professionally, and made his first appearance at Drury
Lane as Spartacus in The
Gladiator in 1836. The play was not a success, although his own role was
noted favorably. During a season of ten months he performed in that historic
theatre the parts of Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. His social triumphs were
as great as were his professional; he was entertained by William
Macready and Charles
Kemble, and at the end of the season was complimented by a dinner at the Garrick
Club, presided over by Thomas
Talfourd.[4]
During this engagement he married, in June 1837, Miss Catherine
Norton Sinclair, daughter of John Sinclair, a popular English singer. He
returned to Philadelphia in November of the same year and began an engagement.
His wife made a deep impression wherever she was presented, and it was argued
that domestic happiness would be the fitting crown of his public career. But
these predictions were disappointed.[4]
Edwin Forrest began a playwrighting contest from 1828 to 1847. The only
rule the plays had to follow was that the lead Character had to fit Forrest
and the plays typically followed American themes. The first play to win the
contest was Metamora by John Augustus Stone in 1828. The winner the following
year was The Gladiator by Robert Montgomery Bird. Other winning titles include
Richard Penn Smith's Caius Marcus; two other plays by Robert Montgomery
Bird: Oralloosa and The Broker of Bogota; and Robert T. Conrad's Jack Cade. Of
these Forrest kept The Gladiator, Metamora, and Jack Cade. Forrest is known
now as a great Shakespearean actor as well as a supporter of emerging
playwrights, as his contest helped get their plays produced.
Forrest visited London a second time in 1845, accompanied by his wife, who
was welcomed in the intellectual circles of English and Scottish society. He
acted at the Princess's
Theatre in London. He met with great success in Virginius and other parts,
but when he attempted to personate Macbeth,
a character unsuited to his physique and style of acting, the performance was
hissed by the audience. Forrest attributed the hissing to the professional
jealousy and machinations of Macready, although that artist had been kind and
helpful to him when he first came before London audiences. A few weeks later,
when Macready was playing Hamlet in Edinburgh,
Forrest stood up in a private box and hissed the English actor. This act
evoked reproaches from the British press and destroyed the respect in which he
had been held by the public. A letter by Forrest printed in The
Times aggravated the offence. The incident was fatal to his popularity in Britain.
His jealousy of Macready resulted in the Astor
Place riot in May 1849. The public feud had exacerbated rifts in New York
City social and political life. An estimated 10,000 people filled the streets
outside the theater where Macready was playing Macbeth,
fighting running battles with authorities and vainly trying to set fire to the
Astor Opera House. Dozens of rioters were killed, and around 250 civilians,
policemen and soldiers were injured.[4]
In 1850, Forrest and his wife sought divorce, after Forrest's affair with
actress Josephine
Clifton; he claimed that he had found a love
letter to his wife from fellow actor George
W. Jamieson.[7] Forrest
and Catherine separated in April 1849 and he moved to Philadelphia where he
filed for divorce in February 1850, though the Pennsylvania legislature denied
his divorce application.[8] Under
the advice of Parke
Godwin, Catherine hired Charles
O'Conor as her lawyer.[9] The
divorce became a Cause
célèbre and the well-known writer Nathaniel
Parker Willis was caught in the middle. Willis defended Catherine, who
maintained her innocence, in his magazine Home
Journal and suggested that Forrest was merely jealous of her intellectual
superiority.[10] On
June 17, 1850, shortly after Forrest had filed for divorce in the New York
Supreme Court,[11] Forrest
beat Willis with a gutta-percha whip in
New York's Washington
Square, shouting "this man is the seducer of my wife".[12] Willis,
who was recovering from a rheumatic
fever at the time, was unable to fight back.[13] Willis's
own wife soon received an anonymous letter suggesting that Willis was, in
fact, involved with Forrest's wife.[14] Willis
later sued Forrest for assault and, by March 1852, was awarded $2,500 plus
court costs.[13] In
the divorce case, Charles O'Conor was the counsel for Catherine, the
defendant, with John Van Buren representing Edwin. Throughout the Forrest
divorce case, which lasted six weeks, several witnesses made additional claims
that Catherine Forrest and Nathaniel Parker Willis were having an affair,
including a waiter who claimed he had seen the couple "lying on each other".[14] As
the press reported, "thousands and thousands of the anxious public" awaited
the court's verdict; ultimately, the court sided with Catherine Forrest and
Willis's name was cleared.[15] O'Conor
won a national reputation by winning the case, and secured a liberal alimony
for Catherine.[4] The
whole affair hurt Forrest's reputation and soured his temper.
In 1853, he played Macbeth, with a strong cast and fine scenery, at the Broadway
Theatre for four weeks—an unprecedented run at that date—and at the end of
this engagement he retired from the stage for several years. He became
interested in politics, being spoken of as a candidate for congress, and did
not return to professional life until 1860, when he appeared at Niblo's
Garden, New York, as Hamlet, and played the most successful engagement of
his life. Hereditary gout developed itself in a malignant form in 1865, during
an engagement at the Holliday
Street Theatre in Baltimore,
Maryland the sciatic
nerve was paralyzed, and he never regained the use of his hand or his
steady gait. His California tour in 1866 was a failure. He played his last New
York engagement in February, 1871, the plays being Richelieu and King
Lear. The weather was cold, and the houses empty. In October 1871, Forrest
commenced his last annual tour, starting at the Walnut Theater in his home
town of Philadelphia. He passed through Columbus, OH; Cincinnati, OH; New
Orleans, LA; Galveston, TX; Nashville, TN; Kansas City, MO; Leavenworth, KS;
St. Louis, MO; Pittsburgh, PA; Detroit, MI; Buffalo, NY; and by late February
the Opera House in Rochester, NY; February 27 through March 1. From Rochester
he traveled on to Boston, MA.[16]
On the night of March 25, 1872, he appeared in Boston,
Massachusetts at the Globe
Theatre, as Lear, played this part six times, and was announced for
Richelieu and Virginius, but on the intervening Sunday he caught cold. He
struggled through the role of Richelieu on Monday night, and rare bursts of
eloquence lighted the gloom, but he labored piteously against the disease
which was fast conquering him. Being offered stimulants, he signed them away,
with the words, "If I die, I will still be my royal self." This was his last
appearance as an actor. He eventually recovered from the severe attack of
pneumonia. The craving for public applause, which was his only happiness,
induced him to give readings from Shakespeare in several large cities. The
scheme failed, and was abandoned, to his deep mortification.[4]
A stroke of paralysis ended his life suddenly and without pain. His servant
found him dead, alone, and apparently asleep, in his home in Philadelphia
December 12, 1872. His body was interred in Old Saint Paul's Episcopal Church
Cemetery, Philadelphia.[17] The
large sums that he had earned on the stage were judiciously and fortunately
invested, and resulted in his amassing a large fortune. He had purchased,
about 1850, a site on the banks of the Hudson,
on which he erected a castellated structure. This estate, which he named Fonthill,
he afterward sold at a large advance for a convent, which later became the College
of Mount Saint Vincent. In 1855 he purchased his mansion in Philadelphia,
to which he retired after his temporary abandonment of the stage. There he
collected the largest dramatic library in the United States. By avoiding New
York and by legal evasions he succeeded in escaping the payment of alimony to
his wife, but left his estate heavily in her debt.[4]
His love of the theatre was unbounded, and he is one of the few whose
memory survives to this day, for he used his considerable accumulated wealth
to support his fellow actors. This began in 1865, the year of Lincoln's
assassination by the actor John
Wilkes Booth, a time when the public held those in the acting profession
in low regard, if not contempt. He sheltered actors at his Summer home near
Philadelphia and, in 1876, four years after his death at the age of 66, his
will instructed that there should be formed the Forrest Home for retired
actors in Philadelphia, which was to last for over one hundred years before
being folded into the much larger Actors
Fund facility in Englewood,
New Jersey. There his name lives on, in the Edwin Forrest Wing. In the
1920s, architect Herbert
J. Krapp was chosen to design two new theatres, one in New York City and
the other in Philadelphia. Both were initially named the Forrest Theatre in
honor of Forrest and his contributions to the theatre world. While the
Philadelphia location is still called the Forrest
Theatre, the building in New York has changed names over the years and is
currently known as the Eugene
O'Neill Theatre.[18][19]
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