What I Didn't See Read Online Free PDF Page B

a bar to drink his way through his fury. A quart of brandy in, another drinker told him he'd never be the actor his father was.
    "I'll be the most famous man in America,” John Wilkes answered.
    * * * *
    On the night of April 14, 1865, Edwin Booth was in Boston, playing the villain in a melodrama called The Iron Chest to a sold-out house. The Civil War had just ended; the city was celebrating. Edwin Booth was thirty-one years old and engaged to be married again.
    Some of his audience, on the way home from the theater, heard that the president had been shot, and some of those dismissed this as idle rumor. Edwin knew nothing until the newspaper arrived the next morning. When he saw his brother's name in print, Edwin wrote later to a friend, he felt he'd been struck on the head with a hammer. Soon a message arrived from the manager of the Boston Theater. Although he prayed, the note said, that what everyone was saying about Wilkes would yet prove untrue, he thought it best and right to cancel all further performances.
    Edwin's daughter, Edwina, was visiting her aunt Asia in Philadelphia. Asia read the news in the paper and collapsed. While her husband was trying to calm her, a U.S. marshal arrived, forbid them to leave the house, and put a guard at every door.
    Junius Jr. was on tour in Cincinnati. When he entered his hotel lobby for breakfast, the clerk immediately sent him back upstairs. Moments later, a mob of some five hundred people arrived. They had stripped the lampposts of Junius’ playbills and come to hang him. His life was saved by the hotel clerk, who convinced the mob that Junius had gone in the night, and the staff, who hid him in an attic room until the danger passed.
    Mrs. Booth and Rosalie were at home in New York. A letter from John arrived that afternoon, written the day before. “I only drop you these few lines to let you know I am well.” It was signed, “I am your affectionate son.” His mother wrote to Edwin that her dearest hope now was that John would shoot himself. “Please don't let him live to be hanged,” she wrote.
    Junius Jr. was arrested, charged with conspiracy, taken to Washington and imprisoned there. A letter had been found from him to John that referenced the “oil business,” the phrase so oblique it was obviously code. Asia's husband, John Sleeper Clarke, was also imprisoned. There was an irony in this: Clarke was a comic actor of great ambition. John Wilkes had warned Asia before she married him that Clarke didn't love her. All he'd wanted was the magic of the Booth name, John had said.
    In Clarke's case there wasn't even a vague, incriminating phrase, only the partiality of his wife to her little brother. Asia would surely have been imprisoned herself, if she hadn't been pregnant. Instead she was put under house arrest.
    It's not clear how Edwin escaped the conspiracy charges. He'd once saved Lincoln's son from a train accident. He was known as a Union man. He had powerful friends who exerted themselves. He'd been born with a caul. Somehow he stayed out of jail. Still, he couldn't leave his house; the streets were too dangerous. His daughter returned from her aunt's under police escort. His fianc?e broke off their engagement by letter.
    More letters arrived, hundreds of them, to all members of the Booth family. They came for months; they came for years. “I am carrying a bullet for you.” “Your life is forfeit.” “We hate the very name Booth.” “Your next performance will be a tragedy."
    John Wilkes was exposed as a debaucher as well as a murderer. Junius Sr.'s bigamy was suddenly remembered; the whole Booth clan was bastard-born. Plus there was Jewish blood. What a Shylock Junius Brutus Booth had once played! Asia's husband was furious to be in jail while Edwin was out. They were a nest of vipers, he told the press, a family of Iagos. His honor demanded he divorce his pregnant wife as soon as he regained his