Life & Death in the Theater: More 19th Century Stories

© Podcast text copyright - Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Adventures in Theater History. I know I signed off Episode Twenty-seven by saying we were all done with the 19th Century. But then, you know, I had also promised back in Episode One to tell you ALL the stories, and I realized that I left a few important figures from the city’s 19th Century theater history out of the narrative. Now often, of course, I had in fact profiled these people over on our Facebook Page or on Twitter or on our Patreon page - online feeds associated with the podcast which I urge you to check out and follow, if you can. But I hadn’t recorded these stories for the podcast, which is, after all, supposed to be the central resource I am assembling for posterity here. So I’ve decided to record them for you, and give us all a few more glimpses of Philadelphia theater in the 19th Century (and by using that term I mean ‘The LONG 19th Century,” as historians sometimes call it, stretching from 1790 to 1914). Some of these stories are pleasant and a lot of them intertwine, as historical characters make appearances in each other's lives, but some of the stories, I must warn you, are not pleasant at all. Now all of them seem to end with death and burial, for some reason - but I guess that’s the way lives work. As usual they’re all also about legacy, and what remains of the ephemeral art of theater after its practitioners shuffle off this mortal coil. And I promise there will be lots of great music throughout the show. Though in the very last story, be ready, because as I also said a while back, some bodies around this city just won’t stay buried. Are you ready? Well good, because Here We Go.

Alexander Reinagle

I mentioned Alexander Reinagle many times during the early episodes of the podcast, when discussing Philadelphia’s New Theatre company on Chestnut Street in the late 18th and very early 19th Centuries, though I never really centered any story on just him. But he deserves a chapter all of his own.

Reinagle, though he had a German name, was British. He was the son of Austrian trumpeter Joseph Reinagle, who moved to England in the mid-18th century, like many other Middle European musicians of the time, who were following the market created by the pronounced tastes of the new Hanoverian kings of England, George I and George II, for German-style classical music. Joseph Reinagle met and married a Scottish woman (It’s not clear what her name was, but who may have been named Annie Laurie, though that seems a bit too on the nose), and soon enough the two had kids. Alexander arrived while his parents were living in Portsmouth, but then they moved to Scotland, perhaps to be closer to his mother's family. He seems to have spent his childhood mostly in Edinburgh, and trained there as a musician (mastering both the cello and the harpsichord) with his father and with a man named Raynor Taylor as his teachers. I have also seen several assertions that the Reinagle family was in London for periods in 1763 and 1764, and that young Alexander was a childhood friend, therefore, of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, when Wolfgang, along with his sister, came to London in that period.

There was a lot of work for musicians in theaters of that day. Indeed as we know every theater was expected to have a band of live musicians playing in the orchestra pit in front of the stage - it was standard practice. As early as the age of 14, Alexander was playing harpsichord in the pit of the Edinburgh Royal Theatre. And as a young man he was living and teaching in Glasgow, where he composed and published several exercise books for keyboard students, as well as a collection of Scots tunes. (If you’re a piano student at all, you may be familiar with these.) It seems that for a while he tried to make a career in the merchant trade, which involved making several Trans-Atlantic trips to the American colonies, but this evidently didn’t really pan out for him, and he soon returned to music.

In 1784 he and his brother Hugh went traveling together through the European continent, making a particular visit to Hamburg, to meet and study with Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (the son of J.S. Bach) who was Reinagle's idol. While in Portugal the two Reinagle brothers played for the royal family there, but unfortunately Hugh Reinagle, who was chronically ill, succumbed in Lisbon to his tuberculosis, so Alexander returned to Great Britain alone. 

Alexander Reinagle soon decided to emigrate to America, and landed in New York City in 1786. Not finding post-Revolutionary New York a very amenable place, he moved on to Philadelphia. There he found that Philadelphia society had enough people with leisure and spare time that they would then use it to do things other than just work - things like learning music, learning to dance, and attending public performances. Along with other professional musicians, Reinagle began giving a popular series of subscription concerts for the next seven years. Reinagle made good contacts in most of the best Philadelphia families, and was soon teaching many young students - including President George Washington's step-granddaughter, Nellie Custis. He also helped supply music for plays that were again being staged at the Old South Street Theatre in the early 1790s.

In 1793 Reinagle was recruited by Thomas Wignell to be the house composer and conductor for the New Theatre on Chestnut Street, a position he was to hold for the next ten years. Wignell had gone back to Britain and recruited a large number of actors, stagehands and property men, costumers - as well as collecting many scripts and even musical scores. Reinagle was in charge of hiring local musicians, as well as arranging these musical scores and composing new music. These were in fact some of the most musically productive of his life, as he needed to pour out the scores, the songs, the operas and the other incidental music needed for the shows at the New Theatre, as well the shows the company produced when they traveled to Baltimore, Annapolis, and Alexandria, Virginia. (He was joined in Philadelphia by his former teacher Raynor Taylor, who also became part of the growing number of talented professional musicians resident in the city.)

In the first six seasons the company produced more than seventy-five musical works. Reinagle composed, arranged, or orchestrated music for all of these productions, and composed two ballad operas himself in 1795, entitled The Volunteers and Sicilian Romance. He was also the first to use the piano in an American stage orchestra, and the first to use a pipe organ, too.

There is a long list of theatrical music scores that Reinagle composed, adapted, or worked on, perhaps fifty in all. Here are the titles of just some of them - although you’ll notice recurring themes - Lots of sailors (or ‘tars”), lots of harlequins, lots of patriotism, and lot of adventures:

• Robin Hood, or Sherwood Forest (1794) 
• Harlequin Shipwreck'd, or The Grateful Lion (1795 )
• The Witches of the Rocks, or Harlequin Everywhere (1796)
• Columbus, or The Discovery of America (1797)
• The Arabs of the Desert, or Harlequin's Flight from Egypt (1799)
• A Wreath for American Tars, or Huzza for the Constitution (1800)
• The Wife of Two Husbands (1805 )
• Mary, Queen of Scots (1806)
  
  

Sadly, all but a very few of the musical scores written by Reinagle for the New Theatre's productions were lost in the fire that destroyed the building in the spring of 1820. Among the few works that we still have are a series of solo songs written to be performed by our old friend Ann Brunton Merry, the leading lady of the company. These include "Edwy and Elgiva" (sung by Mrs. Merry in the tragedy of that name), also "I Have a Silent Sorrow Here " (for the opera entitled The Stranger) which we’re listening to in the background right now.  The scores of these works are in the Keffer Collection of Sheet Music at the University of Pennsylvania Library.

Alexander Reinagle passed away on September 21, 1809 and although is buried in Baltimore, where he spent his very last years, to scholars of America theater history, he is, like other famous Philadelphians of his day, rightly termed a Founding Father - not of America’s political institutions perhaps, but he could be called the Founding Father of American Musical Theater.

Joseph Jefferson III

We talked about Joseph Jefferson often in our two episodes about Louisa Lane Drew, but never really went into depth about him. I always felt I really should talk about him here at some point, and I’m glad to do so.

We actually mentioned the name Joseph Jefferson quite often in our early episodes, but that was his grandfather. The first Joseph Jefferson was a comedian - an emigrant from England, who came to Philadelphia in the very early 1800s. He soon became one of the most prominent and beloved members of the New Theatre company on Chestnut Street. A large number of his numerous children also went into the theater business, including his son, Joseph Jefferson Jr., who became an actor and scenic artist.

Joseph Jefferson III was born to Joseph Jefferson Jr. in 1829, in the family home at the corner of Sixth and Spruce Streets - amazingly, this lovely house still stands today, it has been nicely restored, has been landmaked, and it bears a small plaque commemorating his birth. (I’ll put some photos on the website.)

Young Joe, like Louisa Lane Drew, was brought onstage very early as a child, though I'm afraid his debut was less appealing than hers - Joseph Jefferson was brought out as a small blackface juvenile version of the "Jim Crow" character created by  the performer Thomas D. Rice. So, unwittingly perhaps, young Joe Jefferson took part in the invention of the minstrel show.

In 1838, when Joe was just 8 or 9, his parents moved with him and his siblings to the young city of Chicago. The Jefferson family were instrumental in building the early theaters of that city, which is why the theatrical awards in the Windy City are still called the Jefferson Awards, or, more briefly, "The Jeffs." 

Nonetheless, once he left home and tried starting an independent career as a comic actor, he eventually found himself back in the Quaker City. As he was scrounging for work, a manager of a circus on Chestnut Street told him he didn't have the right kind of face to be a comedian. "You have a serious, melancholy expression. You look more like an undertaker." The young Jefferson did his best to put on a 'jovial, quizzical expression', and was finally hired to be the circus' 'low comedian' - at a salary of 20 dollars a week. But he didn’t stay long in Philadelphia, or Chicago, or anywhere else either. Like other young American actors of his day, Joe Jefferson went touring, traveling the world and even went as far as Australia in the early 1860s. But he never found much luck in his show biz career until he transformed some old plays and material into a show about Rip Van Winkle, the famous story by Washington Irving about a man who falls into enchanted sleep in the colonial-era Hudson River Valley and then wakes up decades later, surprised to find himself in some land called “The United States of America.” After the show received a professional rewrite from the great Irish playwright Dion Boucicault in 1865, it then became a monster hit for Jefferson. He was to play the role of Rip Van Winkle regularly for the next 40 years. It was to make him a very wealthy man, and he seems to have enjoyed the role even more as the years went on. Maybe it was because of the way the play slipped back and forth in time. When he was a young actor, he could pretend to be old, and then pop back again to youth. By the time he was an old actor, and still doing Rip Van Winkle, he didn’t have to put on as much makeup to do the part where the guy got old, but he got to go back and visit his youth, too - at least onstage. He came through the city of Philadelphia dozens of times over the course of his career, playing at almost all of its theaters, and he was always happy to trot out Rip Van Winkle again and again. It was a great earner for him, a real money-spinner. 

Now, Joseph Jefferson did have other plays in his repertoire, of course: He did The Heir at Law in which he played Dr. Pangloss, The Cricket on the Hearth (doing the toymaker Caleb Plummer), and as we discussed in Episode 19, he toured with Louisa Lane Drew in Sheridan's The Rivals (in which he played Bob Acres) until eventually she passed away. Undeterred, every spring and fall, Jefferson would hire a company and go out on the road again. And every year, audiences would line up to see his shows. He was a bit of curiosity by that point, but a reliable theatrical product. Philadelphians would take their grandchildren to see Jefferson do Rip Van Winkle as they had themselves first seen him do when they were kids themselves. His last tour came through the city of his birth in the spring of 1904, but by the autumn of that year it was reported Joe Jefferson wasn’t feeling up for any more shows, and was finally staying at home to rest.

Joseph Jefferson III passed away in 1905 in Palm Beach, Florida. He is buried in Massachusetts, however. Having traveled all his life it seems like, at the end, he wasn’t much attached to his birthplace of Philadelphia. In fact, in his later years he used his enormous theatrical earnings to buy land in Louisiana, near the Gulf of Mexico, and build a huge country estate there. The Joseph Jefferson Mansion there is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Oh and by the way, he had a son - inevitably named Joseph Jefferson the Fourth, who took over his father’s role as Rip Van Winkle, and even made a silent film of it in the 1920s. Like everything else these days, it’s on YouTube. Old Rip just keeps on living, into the digital future.

Like the character Rip Van Winkle, Joseph Jefferson was born in one era and before he died found himself in another - but unlike Rip, he wasn’t phased by it, and he lived into the age of movies and recorded sound, and in 1896 actually made some early short films of scenes from the play called “The Awakening of Rip Van Winkle”. It’s on YouTube as well, so you can see him act! I can’t show you that, here on the podcast, of course, but in 1903 he also made two two-minute long Columbia records of his lines from the play. They’re just Rip’s side of the conversation, you can’t hear any other actors speak. But I imagine that after nearly 50 years of performing the part Joe hardly needed to hear his cues anymore. As we end this section, let’s listen to the very end of the second recording, where old Rip is talking to a woman who had been a little girl back in the time before he went to sleep. He’s trying his best to make sense of the new reality he finds himself in: [RECORDING NOT TRANSCRIBED]

James Murdoch

We spent three entire episodes telling the story of the most famous 19th Century tragedian ever to come from Philadelphia, the great Edwin Forrest. But there were other Philadelphians who became great classical actors in that era, enormously popular in their day.

James Edward Murdoch was born in 1811, and was just five years younger than Forrest. His father, Thomas Murdoch, was a bookbinder, a sometime soldier, and an enthusiastic member of the Vigilant Volunteer Fire Company.  James was the eldest of four Murdoch boys, who all apprenticed with their father to learn his trade. However James was not satisfied with staying in the family business. Like Forrest, he became enamored of attending Philadelphia’s theaters, and also joined local amateur 'spouting' societies, where young men practiced doing speeches from great plays for each other. 

At eighteen years of age, Murdoch had his first professional success at the brand new Arch Street Theatre, playing Frederick in Kotzebue's melodrama Lovers' Vows. The experience confirmed young Murdoch’s desire to make the stage his life's calling.

 And indeed he went on to have a major stage career - although unlike Forrest he played comic as well as tragic roles. James Murdoch didn’t have nearly the same financial success as Forrest, although he was considered one of the best actors of his generation, performing at both the Park Theatre in New York, and then the Haymarket Theatre in London. With a handsome and well-chiseled face and body, he was renowned for his Hamlet and his Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew, and he also was well-known for acting in plays such as Dion Boucicault's London Assurance, and in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal.

But I don’t want to give you Murdoch’s entire life story today, what I would like to emphasize here is that he was an early practitioner of something that would characterize America’s relationship with dramatic literature for much of the 19th Century - Murdoch was a famous elocutionist - that is, he studied and taught what was considered proper formal diction and public speaking. In the 19th Century this was a very big deal indeed. In an era when the rising educated middle class wanted to lose the casual locutions and regionalisms of American speech to match their new-found status, and in a time when almost every field of human endeavor was considered a proper field for scientific study, becoming an elocutionist was a very highly-regarded artistic and scholarly discipline. Professional elocutionists would go on tour, reciting poetry and plays at lecture halls and theaters. And by the end of the century there were entire institutions of elocution in all big American cities, including Philadelphia.

James Murdoch was one of the first American actors to make a really serious study of elocution - first with Lemuel White who had also taught Edwin Forrest, and then with another well-known Philadelphian who had also left his father’s trade behind - Dr. James Rush. James Rush was the dutiful son of the famous Philadelphia physician and Founding Father Dr. Benjamin Rush, following him into the field of medicine. But after his father’s death, James Rush had abandoned his own medical practice to do what he really wanted to do: write one of the earliest and most influential texts of elocution, The Philosophy of the Human Voice, in 1827. This was a groundbreaking work that for the first time really tied the production of people’s speech to both the actual physiology of the human body, as well as acknowledging the psychological aspect of speech and vocal production. And Rush devised a phonetic system of notation that indicated the pitch, duration and vocal placement of every possible human sound. James Murdoch, after studying with Rush, was the person who really took Rush’s system and brought it into the theater world. Murdoch’s 1847 book, Orthophony, or the Cultivation of the Voice, made the actor almost as well known for his scholarship as for his stage performances, and he taught Rush's system all over the country.

In the 1850s and 60s he was perhaps the best known elocutionist in the nation. And throughout the Civil War, Murdoch gave readings and performances to support the Union Cause. During the final years of his life James Murdoch largely stayed on his farm outside of Cincinnati, which he had bought after falling in love with the countryside of the Ohio River valley. Occasionally he returned to Philadelphia to give lectures on elocution, acting and oratory.  During one of these visits, by the way, he even spent some time training a young actor named Henry R. Strange, the African American whose story we told in our episodes about “The Black Booth”. 

In May of 1889, James E. Murdoch made his final appearance on a Philadelphia stage, in a testimonial benefit at the Academy of Music. Murdoch was now 77, and it was nearly 60 years since he had first appeared at the Arch Street Theatre. By this point, however, styles had changed, and he seemed a relic of a bygone age, his careful and precise method of speaking now just charmingly old-fashioned.  “Mr Murdoch is about the last representative of the fine old elocutionary school of acting,” wrote the Philadelphia Times, “and it will be interesting to see him again . .  especially” (the writer added, ominously) “as this will probably be the last opportunity of seeing him at all.”

This last warning was all too true, and after this final appearance in the city Murdoch returned to his home in Southwestern Ohio, where he died in 1893. He is now mostly forgotten in Philadelphia, though there is a small collection of his papers at Princeton University nearby.


Matilda Heron

Born into a poor family in County Derry, Ireland, Matilda Heron had come to Philadelphia at the age of twelve along with the rest of the Heron clan. Once here, her father quickly found success in the lumber business, but after his death her older brother Alexander took over leadership of the family. 

Alexander got into the steamship trade and succeeded. He was soon running the Heron Line of trans-Atlantic schooners. His sister Matilda, with whom he was very close, therefore did not have to work, and she was sent to a young ladies school on the Southeast corner of Ninth and Walnut, where she became rather fluent in French. Her younger sisters, Fanny and Agnes, were also sent to school, but Alexander was often so busy that all three girls were difficult to keep home.

"Tilly", as her family called her, was particularly headstrong, became particularly 

fascinated with leading the theatrical life that she could see going on directly across the street from her school. The Walnut Street Theatre was on the northeast corner of 9th and Walnut. Much to the disappointment of her brother, she began taking acting lessons from Peter Richings, who worked at the Walnut. Maybe she was getting a little extra romantic attention for the first time in her life too, from Mr. Richings, one suspects. Anyway, despite the reluctance of her family to be associated with the socially disreputable world of the theater, Tilly 'went upon the stage.'  

In February of 1851: Matilda Heron made her debut at the Walnut Street Theatre in the role of Bianca in Fazio by Henry Hart Milman. It was one of the roles that had made Fanny Kemball such a success in the city, just a generation earlier, of course. For her part, young Tilly also made such a sensation with the Walnut Street audience that she was immediately asked back to do the role over again, a few nights later. She continued acting, first in the Walnut's company, and then in Washington DC, and then New York. And by 1853 she traveled to San Francisco and made a smash hit in the theaters of Gold Rush Era California. (She also made a sudden rash marriage with a San Francisco lawyer, which however soon failed - a sad occurrence which was inexplicable to many, after all who could fail to love the wonderful Tilly Heron?)

But it was Heron who, after all, who had initiated the break. Estranged from both her husband and her family, she went abroad, and traveled to Paris in 1854, looking for new roles. She was at the theater to view the highly popular new drama La Dame aux Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The story goes that one night, while watching the show, she suddenly felt a tap upon her shoulder, and turned to find her brother Alexander smiling down at her. Alex, looking meaningfully at the stage, said: "Tilly, that's a play that would make your fortune, if you would translate it for America."

Matilda Heron did so, and making use of her school French lessons, soon was performing her own translation of it, usually known in America by the title she gave to it, Camille, to great acclaim. In October of 1855 Heron brought the play back home to Philadelphia, where she played the tragic courtesan Marguerite Gautier to her hometown - at the Walnut Street Theatre, where she had first sought success in acting.

Due to a lack of international copyright in that era, there were already several versions of Dumas' play being performed, but Heron's script was regarded as superior and her performance compellingly definitive. A New York critic wrote of her: "She exuded the electricity of genius." Another man gushed that every time he returned to the play, he "came away more infatuated than ever. There was no acting - it was all nature; and my heart ached looking at the woman, as I thought all those thousand little evidences of love, those outbursts of passion,that could never have been learned, or acted, save by a heart which had gone through a similar fiery ordeal .  . 'the Heron' must have magnetized, spiritualized or bedeviled me in some way, for I am no longer a free man."

Though Matilda Heron would adapt other French plays for her repertoire, she was always associated with Camille from thereon, and it is estimated that she earned over one hundred thousand dollars playing the role, all over America. "Other parts she acted, that part she lived", wrote the critic William Winter. Indeed the 'realism' that Heron may have injected into the role seems to have been drawn not only from her own tempestuous love life, but those of one of her sisters, who had actually "fallen" in life and become a courtesan.

Matilda Heron's subsequent career and personal life were alternately successful and rocky. She married again, but when her new husband found out about her previous one, as well as her sister's profession, that marriage failed, too. To escape it had to settle most of her money on her second husband and go back upon the stage and start earning again. She performed for the last time in Philadelphia, again on the Walnut's stage, on October 14th, 1863. "Houses crowded! Hundreds turned away!" said all the newspaper ads.

The performances must have been quite stressful for Tilly Heron, because only a month before she had given birth to a daughter, Helene, whom she always called "Bijou". (Later Bijou Heron would also go onto the stage, first as a child star and later as a mature actress, and have a long career of her own.)  

But her mother, Matilda, was not blessed with a long career, or even a long life, and she did not return again to Philadelphia in her remaining years. In fact, Matilda Heron was in increasingly poor health, and by the age of 47 she had turned quite gray and haggard, by all reports. 

What we can see now, though it wasn’t openly talked about at the time, is that it was likely that Heron suffered from syphilis. One might speculate that she had contracted the disease from her first husband, which would explain her immediate haste to extract herself from the marriage. After lying dormant for many years, the disease may have emerged again, taking a terrible toll. Her obituary in the New York Times hinted at what was wrong, noting that during her final years: "Now and then . . she herself took part in dramatic representation, but eccentric demonstrations and speeches invariably mar[red] the effect of acting [that was] sometimes crude and uneven." Her confusing reported last words were "Tilly never did harm to anyone - poor Tilly is so happy." She died in New York City in 1877.

Despite her ardent Catholicism, the Catholic church seemingly refused to bury her. Like many other New York actors of her day, funeral services for Matilda Heron were held at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, or the "Little Church around the Corner", and she was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn.

John McCullough

November 8, 1885: The well-known actor John McCullough also died much too young at 53, at his family home, 219 E. Thompson Street in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. In the paper the next day the cause of his death was listed as "blood poisoning." His wife, his sister, and his attending physician were by his side as he passed.

John McCullough had a long history in Philadelphia, like Matilda Heron, having arrived here from Ireland when quite young. He had been employed in a gas works in Northern Liberties, where he used to entertain his fellow employees by spouting long sections of classical verse. He first went upon the stage at the Arch Street Theatre, and later acted in the company of the Walnut Street Theatre, and like Murdoch he was discovered by Edwin Forrest, who made him part of the regular acting company. The two men, Forrest and McCullough, formed a close bond and often acted together in many classical plays, and in his will the great tragedian even left John McCullough all his annotated prompt books - a very valuable resource in its time. McCullough, in fact, took over performing much of Forrest's famous regular repertory of roles from then on, including Metamora and Virginius. He was a major leading man of the American stage, commanding the large salary and huge reputation of other great classical actors of his day, such as Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett.

But in the early 1880s, John McCullough began to . . well, falter. The actor's friends and colleagues, who had previously prized him for his perfect memory and genial and outgoing personality, found that he was increasingly forgetful, both on and offstage, and that he often would begin to weep uncontrollably for no reason. His walk became uneven, and his performances became increasingly erratic, too. Frequently he would begin to interpolate the texts of other plays into his lines, which made other actors increasingly wary of performing with him. In 1884 while playing Forrest’s famous former role of Virginius on the stage of McVicker's Theatre in Chicago, McCullough began ranting and raving incoherently at the other actors. The audience, thinking he was drunk, began booing and hissing until the curtain mercifully came down. He never acted again.

Two weeks before his death, McCullough had been brought back to Philadelphia from Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane in New York City, where he had been confined for over a year. Though the public was kept in the dark, and most newspaper accounts about him just published vague Victoriansms such as ‘ill health’, but many journalists and theater people knew quite well what the matter was, and that McCullough was neither a drunkard nor insane. Like Matilda Heron, he suffered from paresis, a neurological failure caused by tertiary syphilis.

It was a disorder quite common in the day, widespread in an era when many American males patronized houses of prostitution on a regular basis, and as we’ve seen from the case of Tilly Heron, if they married they might pass on that infection on to their wives. Actors, who spent so much of their careers traveling around the country in those days, were especially at risk because theaters of the era were often immediately adjacent to districts where prostitution was common. Before the discovery of antibiotics there was no cure for syphilis, and there was no treatment, other than particular mercury compounds. So transmission of the disease was considered a danger for anyone dealing with actors, and was often quietly spoken of as a reason for not getting involved with them personally. In fact, John McCullough’s own marriage had broken down years before, perhaps over this very issue, and the house and family in Philadelphia that he was brought ‘home’ to at the end of his life was not one that he had ever really shared with his wife and children. He even had a long-standing relationship with a woman from California, which had actually produced a young daughter. But his Philadelphia family was determined to make their claim on him at the end, and his estate - and to snuff out any hint of public scandal.

Nevertheless, a few weeks after his passing, a rather nasty item appeared in the Philadelphia Times, telling the true story of the actor's passing. "John McCullough's physician was just about to cure him when, with characteristic obstinacy, he died.  . . The autopsy shows those changes in the arteries of the brain characteristic of recognized constitutional disease. . . and concludes: 'the morbid conditions, as found, fully explain the symptoms evinced during life.' " Though no newspaper of the day was actually going to publish the word syphilis, this sort of insinuation was pretty clear to the readers  of the day. The revelation, of course, was not a surprise to many in the theater world, who had long seen the evidence of it.

McCullough could at least depend upon his many friends to look after his reputation, after his death. The eminent critic, William Winter, published a book in his memory, and his long membership in the Benevolent Order of the Elks did something to preserve his reputation in some respectability. A large number of the Elks brotherhood solemnly accompanied his body to its final resting place. Winter and other friends took up a collection to raise a tall granite monument over his grave in West Philadelphia's Mt. Moriah Cemetery. It was placed therein 1888, and can still be seen there, a tall Victorian sculpture in delicately etched pale gray granite, with four columns rising from a base, supporting an elaborate multi-level pagoda roof. It’s rather like a scaled-down Philadelphia version of the Albert Memorial in London, actually. 

But this stern monument did nothing, in the end, to the mockery that had surrounded the actors’s sad demise. Indeed for many years afterwards McCullough’s name remained a byword for any famous person - especially an actor - was rumored to be suffering from syphilis, like the comedian Tony Hart or the producer and playwright Charles Hoyt.  It was a bit of a party-trick in that time for some actors to rant and rave in a comical fashion, in parody of McCullough's final years. In 1897, the eminent New York theater critic Laurence Hutton, who had been a close friend of McCullough’s, was startled to find a streetside booth with a large lithograph of the actor and a sign next to it that read “The Ravings of John McCullough.” For a nickel Hutton was treated to a phonograph recording of a comedian named Harry Spencer doing his version of the actor’s raving in his final years. It was a distressingly good imitation, Hutton thought, actually. This recording still exists as well, and it is also easily located on YouTube. It’s quite amazing. Because he died in 1885, we have no record of his actual performance, all that remains is this parody. The first minute of it is right here: 
[RECORDING NOT TRANSCRIBED]

Pop Reed and Charlie Hoffner

Our final story is not about musicians or actors, but about another aspect of theater history that we’ve spent very little time covering, I’m afraid: the people who work backstage. In the 19th Century, as today, the stagehands and the stage crew, that is to say, the carpenters, scene shifters, doorkeepers, fly crew, property men, costumers and so forth, tended to have a culture all of their own. Some of stagehands actually, you know, lived in the theaters - it was a side benefit of some of the positions, which after all often did not pay very well, that the stagehand could sleep in an odd corner of the scene shop or the property room, if need be. They were literally fixtures about the place. Still, their work didn’t often get recorded or noted in newspapers or the history books, but in some cases, they had such vivid personalities that they did. Here’s a couple of them:

John Roland Reed was a native Philadelphian, born in 1808 - the same year that Pepin and Breschard first put up the circus building at the corner of 9th and Walnut that would one day become the Walnut Street Theatre. Reed’s first job in the theater, beginning at the age of 16, was not as an actor but as a lamplighter, the guy who gently applied a live flame to the gas jets that had just been installed in the Walnut Street Theatre in 1824 and were now lighting up the stage. Reed would keep his job and his expertise with stage lights, and rise to become “the gasman”, the person in charge of setting all the levels of the stage lights and maintaining the safe operation of the gas system that ran throughout the theater. A very important job. On the strength of his prospects at the age of 21 he was able to marry his neighborhood sweetheart, the 19 year-old Mary Jane Lewis, and the two of them set up housekeeping together in a suite of small rooms at the very top of the theater, above the fly-rail. From these cozy quarters, literally right about the shop, ladies and gentlemen, the couple raised thirteen children, and whenever a play needed a baby or a small child in its cast, one of the Reed kids would be pressed into duty. Indeed eventually John Reed would also be chief of all the supernumeraries at the Walnut, and would enthusiastically take on any small non-speaking roles himself. Three of his children, Roland, Julian and Clara eventually became professional actors themselves, though by then the family were not living in the theater anymore, they had finally gotten a small house of their own nearby. And by that time Reed, too, was a local institution, quite well known to all theatrical folk. And, like many veteran doorkeepers and stagehands in the city of Philadelphia, he was known to one and all as “Pop”- now this is perhaps a local custom, because even today in the streets of Philadelphia, as I can personally testify, any older gentleman whose name is not otherwise known will be addressed by a working class Philadlephian as either “Pop” or “Pop-pop”

In 1858, when Pop Reed had been working at the Walnut for 32 years at that point, another young Philadelphian found a position at the theater as a stagehand. The new guy’s name was Charlie Hoffner, and he was clever with tools and carpentry and metal-work, so he was installed in the property room, where all the swords, the chairs, the canes, the magic wands, goblets - anything an actor might handle or carry about the stage - these were made, stored, and distributed from the prop room. Eventually there were TWO separate property rooms at the Walnut, but Hoffner was installed in the oldest one, the same one that had been used by the circus men Pepin and Breschard. Like Pop Reed, Hoffner loved everything about the theater, and he made a lifelong commitment. It would become his home for the next fifty years, and he worked with every company that came through town. He made walking sticks for Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merrilees, a he made a chair for Edwin Forrest to sit and ponder as Hamlet, and he made a spinning wheel for a production of Faust. Then he would store his creations on the dusty shelves of the old prop room, bringing them out again if ever they were required. And as the years went on he acquired a great collection of stories, too, about all those famous stars who had passed through his experience. In an interview that was published in 1910 in the New York Tribune, Charlie Hoffner recalled Edwin Forrest - forty years before, roaring loudly at him for coming on stage at the wrong time, during a rehearsal of The Gladiator, to fit Forrest with a new pair of shackles that needed to be broken off during the action of the play. Forrest only forgave him when Hoffner calmly explained to the actor that the lock mechanism of these shackles was new, and he didn’t want the great actor literally to be chained to the scenery, after all.

Another tale of Hoffner told the Tribune involved the actor and playwright Dion Boucicault, who in 1875, according to Hoffner, came right into the Walnut’s wings, dripping sweat on a warm May night, still in his costume and makeup, following a performance of his Irish-themed melodrama The Shaughraun. Boucicault had a sudden idea, he said to Hoffner, and wanted to make some immediate notes. He demanded a pen and some paper and a place to write, and a full pot of coffee. Hoffner obligingly set him up in the Walnut prop room, where he felt the genius wouldn’t be disturbed, and left him alone. When Hoffner returned at 9:30 the next morning, he found Boucicault awake, looking exhausted but very pleased, a pile of scribbled pages at his feet and an empty coffee pot at his elbow. “Have you stayed here all night?” asked Hoffner. “Yes,” replied the playwright. “But I’ve almost finished the play. Won’t you send out for some warm coffee?”

Hoffner was still on duty in the year 1880, when his fellow worker Pop Reed was finally prevailed upon to retire from the Walnut Street Theatre at the age of 72, after working there for 56 years. Reed’s son Roland, now himself a famous comedian working in New York, and elsewhere, offered to support both his aged parents, but Pop Reed evidently still couldn’t quit the stage, and after leaving the Walnut went to work for five more years at the National Theatre up the street. He announced his retirement again in 1885, and a big benefit performance was organized for him - at the Chestnut Street Theatre. Hoffner and other stagehand friends from the Walnut sat in a special box that night and watched the show. Tributes poured in and were read aloud from hundreds of actors who had worked with Reed at the Walnut over the years. Our friend Joseph Jeffrerson III couldn’t be present, but sent a message and a check for fifty dollars. Reed’s son Roland closed the evening with a number from his hit new show called Humbug.  

But Pop Reed still wasn’t actually done with show biz. Just like a hammy actor, he kept coming back out for more. He shifted to the Temple Theatre over on Chestnut, until it burned down in 1887. By then most of the Philadelphia theater managers didn’t need gasmen any more, they were all installing wiring, and those new-fangled electric lights. So Pop Reed ended his theatrical career in 1890 at the rather less prestigious Lyceum Theatre on Vine and 8th, working as the doorman - at 83 years old perhaps the oldest working stagehand in the country at that point. Except for Alexander Reinagle, he’d worked with every other person we’ve talked about today, and with many many others. His last reported words in the summer of 1891, as he lay on his deathbed, was an inquiry to his son Roland about the prospects for success of the comedian’s new play. “Oh, I’ll make a lot of money out of it,” Roland said. “Ah, that’s good,” said Pop, and died.

But as he left this earthly sphere, Pop Reed knew that he was, in some other sense, going back again on the stage. Part of him, anyway. In the last will and testament that he had drawn up before his death, he carefully instructed that  “My head be separated from my body immediately after death, the latter to be buried in a grave; the former duly macerated and prepared to be brought to the theater where I served all my life, and to be employed to represent the skull of Yorick [in Hamlet]. And to this end I bequeath my head.” It was an alarmingly macabre sort of immortality, but that’s what he wanted. 

Pop Reed’s heirs dutifully followed his final instructions, and his head was not among the human remains buried in the family plot at Mt. Vernon Cemetery in North Philadelphia, where Reed’s torso and limbs eventually rested alongside the complete bodies, one presumes, of his wife Mary Jane Reed, and eight of his thirteen children. After proper treatment, ahem, the gasman’s bony cranium went back to work, and was handed over to his old colleague at the Walnut, Charlie Hoffner, who dutifully and gravely placed it on the shelves with all the other props down in the Old Prop Room. 

So then, what? Was the skull of Pop Reed ever used as Yorick? I am sorry to say that, no. Not at the Walnut, anyway, which as far as I can tell did not host a production of that particular play for the next thirty years. I’m not really sure what the old stagehand was thinking, really. He should have known the Walnut Street theater was mostly the home to light musicals and melodramas in that era, after all. It didn’t do much Shakespeare any more. When Charlie Hoffner, the custodian of the prop Pop Reed finally retired in 1910 after over 50 years of service it likely was still sitting there on the shelf, and I have to report that when Charlie Hoffner’s son took over his job at the Walnut, but the skull did not stay there long. The dusty Old Prop Room that had lasted 110 years was dismantled and its contents were scattered when the Walnut Street Theatre underwent a heavy interior renovation - removing all its Victorian interior - and it was reconstructed in the year 1920. Most of the old props: Booth’s chair, Cushman’s walking stick, all the old masks and spinning wheels and swords - were just thrown out. In 1920 people wanted to be done with the Victorian Era, frankly.

But, you know, evidently Pop Reed’s skull survived that winnowing, and it traveled around for a while. Eventually it ended up being passed - through the network of the brotherhood of theatrical propmen - into the collection of the Academy of Music. According to a recent book entitled Strange Philadelphia, by author Lou Harry, the skull of Pop Reed was tracked down by an actress in the 1940s and taken from the Academy of Music and once again returned to the Walnut, where the prop man of that day, named George William Thorpe, remarked as he accepted it: “You know, stage people took their work much more seriously then, than they do now.” And the truth of that assertion can be regarded as having been immediately proved true, because according to the book, the skull again disappeared shortly thereafter and has yet to be found to this day. It’s probably grinning away on somebody’s curio shelf, somewhere, right now.

But because this is Philadelphia, there were still other skulls of Yorick wandering around the city. There was George Frederick Cooke’s, for example. And there was another skull belonging to another famous Philadelphian we’ve previously covered, the Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness. Furness, as a standing family in-joke, used to send along a skull he’d acquired along with each of his sons and grandsons when they went as undergraduates to Harvard. He even wrote a quote from Hamlet across the top: “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.” A rather mordant dad joke, if you ask me, but not a bad one. I wish I thought of it, actually.

Yet another human skull eventually came into Horace Howard Furness’s possession, and this particular skull is often confused in modern journalism (so be careful) with the Pop Reed skull. This other Yorick - just the upper half of the cranium, no lower jaw, quite chapfallen - was given to Horace Howard Furness by the eminent Philadelphia neurologist and writer Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who said, as he gifted it to his friend, that it was supposedly the standard prop skull used throughout the 19th century at the Walnut Street Theatre for all the productions of Hamlet. Mitchell had inherited it from HIS father, also a physician, who in turn had picked it up from a friend of his, a druggist named Carpenter, who back in the 1840s and 50s used to loan it out to famous actors whenever they came through town and needed an authentic prop skull for their production of Hamlet. You can see this skull on - a nice wooden base with “Alas, poor Yorick!” inscribed on it - at the University of Pennsylvania even today. It has the last names of the actors who used it inscribed across the cranium, including those of Charles Kean, E. L. Davenport, Edwin Booth and Edwin Forrest. There is a story that the actors themselves all signed the skull before they gave it back to Mr. Carpenter, but the writing looks to be mostly all in the same hand, so I don’t think that’s true. And this particular skull can’t have, of course, been that of Pop Reed. Because Pop Reed had long outlived all these actors, and they would have had to have their names inscribed on his head while he was still alive - which doesn’t seem very likely, now, does it? 

Anyway, it’s all a very Philadelphia story - full of half-remembered and frequently garbled facts, lots of grisly and rather disturbing details, and frustratingly unclear in its resolution. And there are even more stories lurking underneath, of course. There usually are, in this city. We’ll get to them in the second season of the podcast, I hope.

Anyway, that’s our show for today. Thanks for listening as we looped back and tidied up a lot of loose ends I had left lying around. I’m glad we got a chance to work all these stories in. The show’s theme music and sound engineering are by the wonderful, the talented, the Barrymore Award-Winning Philadelphia theater artist Christopher Mark Collucci! If you want to see images and read even more about the topics we’ve discussed today, please check out the blog post on our website, AITHpodcast.com. The link is in the show notes. And please leave a review of the show there! (Please leave a review of the show there!) It helps so much with getting other people to notice our work, and to get it more widely shared. If you’d like to give some feedback, right through the website, or you can email us at aithpodcast@gmail.com. We always love hearing from our listeners and our fans, and I promise that we always respond right away. I appreciate all of you, so much, and your support and your continued attention more than I can say. Thanks for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[CLOSING THEME]