Hamlet in a Greatcoat

PRINCE OF PLAYERS: EDWIN BOOTH (401 pp.)--Eleanor Ruggles--Norton ($4.50).

Everyone agreed that the Booths were eccentric--sometimes majestically. Take old Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), first of his line in the U.S., one of the most admired Shakespearean actors of his day. On tour, the family had to lock him in his hotel room to keep him sober enough to go onstage. Old Junius Brutus found a way of getting around that: with the help of a thoughtful waiter, he sucked mint juleps from a tray in the corridor by pushing a straw through the keyhole.

Old Booth had seven sons--Richard, John, Junius, Henry, Frederick, Joseph and Edwin--but Edwin was the one on whom father Booth depended. It was teen-aged Edwin who turned the key in the lock night after night, and defied his raging father to break out. It was Edwin who followed the old man into bars and honky-tonks, or kept him out of them by stalking along at his heels until old Booth was driven to his bed by sheer exhaustion. Edwin's reward was bit parts in his father's plays; his penalty was that, by the time old Booth died, Edwin was a nervous wreck. Overnight, the steady, trustworthy boy changed into a wild, hard-drinking copy of his father.

Death -- & a Derringer. Years later, when Edwin Booth looked back on his early days, he felt he had lived his life backward; childhood was like "old age to me." In 1860, when he was 26, Edwin married Actress Mary Devlin, and Mary transformed his life. "My youth began with my marriage only," he once wrote.

So far as acting was concerned, Edwin was still a chip off the old block. Old Junius Booth had been raised in the grand tradition of Kean and Garrick. His periods rolled like thunder, his gestures were hurricanes. The younger Booths (three of them became actors) inherited the tradition. They played it before audiences which whooped and shrieked with delight when a famous line came booming over the footlights like a royal salute. The cheers were thin indeed for the actor who failed to grind each word between his teeth before he hurled it into the gallery. Sometimes it was even advisable to have a sponge full of beet juice in the cheek: the really terrific lines from Lear or Macbeth were most effective when spouted from lips flecked with pink froth.

But tragedy, which had entered Edwin Booth's life early, was getting ready to mold him into the maker of an entirely new stage tradition. Wife Mary had barely set him on his feet when she took ill and died. Booth went half out of his mind. He was still dazed with shock when he was struck by a blow from which neither he nor the rest of the Booths ever recovered. It came out of the blue, brandishing a derringer, in the person of brother John Wilkes Booth, who, with the theatrical cry of "Sic semper tyrannis!" shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theater.

Double Mourning. The Booths were Marylanders; the Civil War had divided their allegiances but not their affection for one another. Now they served as scapegoats, North & South. When Edwin Booth, faced by increasing family debts, bravely announced that he would act in the fol--lowing season, the New York Herald sneered: "Will Booth appear as the assassin of Caesar? That would be, perhaps, the most suitable character."

John Wilkes Booth had been the darling of the family. On Edwin fell the double burden of detesting the assassin while mourning the brother. In the one role, Edwin reimbursed the Virginia farmer whose barn had been burned down around brother John. In the other, he pleaded with the authorities to allow the Booths to give John's body Christian burial. He wrote to Secretary of War Stanton, who did not deign to reply. He wrote to General Grant, who ignored him too. It was President Andrew Johnson who at last handed over John's remains, the raven-black hair grown long, the body mutilated by official autopsies.

One consolation existed for Edwin Booth. In a railway station one day, he saw a young man, jostled by the crowd, fall between the platform and the wheels of a moving train. Booth sprang forward, pulled him up, and saved his life. The young man was Abraham Lincoln's son Robert.

More often, one incident after another seemed to have been sent by fate to deepen the old wound. Booth got a letter from a sergeant named Corbett, asking for free tickets to a performance. "I am sure you will not refuse," wrote Corbett, "when I tell you that I am the . . . soldier that shot and killed your brother." Booth sent the tickets.

Everything But Guts? He married again, another Mary. Before long, her mind began to go to pieces. Booth became used to running to & fro between stage and dressing room, Hamlet or Lear at one moment, nurse to a hysterical woman the next. Then the second Mary died, and Booth was alone except for his daughter Edwina.

He had noticed after his first wife died that his grief gave him "new insight" into Shakespeare. Every play revealed meanings he had not suspected--and Booth, no matter how deep his private misery, was never deaf to dramatic demands. Even in his drunken days, it was said, he managed to suit his intoxication to his part: he was "melancholy-drunk for Hamlet, sentimentally drunk for Othello, and savagely drunk for Richard III." Personal tragedy began to shape all his parts--and in such a way as to suggest that he was rooting out forever the elements that had brought misery to the Booths.

Gone was the fanatical exuberance, the frothing and the mouthing. In their place was a profound intensity, expressed with rigorous restraint and the most economical of gestures. Oldtimers were appalled: it seemed to them that Edwin Booth had forgotten what "drama" was. Stage managers and critics begged him not to "refine his art too much," urged him to revert to the "awful burst of passion" of his younger days. "Edwin had everything but guts," complained Walt Whitman bitterly.

"I Rarely Know . . ." Few of his contemporaries could appreciate the calculated "quietness" which was to be Booth's greatest contribution to the American stage. Moreover, illness and exhaustion sometimes caused Booth to collapse on the stage. The public was showered with "inside" stories of Booth's drunkenness (in fact, after his first wife's death he rarely drank). But by now he had made himself almost oblivious of the outside world ("I rarely know who's President," he said). One who saw him trudging through the snow "like Hamlet in a greatcoat" said: "I have never yet beheld a sadder [face]."

A moment before his death (in 1893), the electric lights in the house and street went out. When his daughter cried out, "Don't let father die in the dark!", all the lights flashed on again. And in that instant, Booth died. As his coffin was being carried from the church in New York, a "splintering roar" was heard in Washington. By a macabre coincidence, the interior supports of Ford's Theater had collapsed, killing 21 people. He left a new tradition, but the old one pursued him to the end.

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