Ada Clare, Queen of Bohemia: Her Life and Times
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ADA CLARE, QUEEN OF BOHEMIA: HER LIFE AND TIMES GLORIA RUDMAN GOLDBLATT Copyright © 2015 Gloria Rudman Goldblatt All rights reserved. To my parents, Morris and Julia Rudman, and my husband, Samuel Goldblatt ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Over the 35 years I have worked on researching and writing this book, I have had support and encouragement from many. Otherwise I would have given up long ago. First of all I am thankful to have Professor Lisa Kahaleole Hall as current editor of this book. She has infinite patience and amazing skill plus being a wonderful person. Professor Lynn C. Bloom, teacher and friend of many years, critiqued my earliest work on Ada Clare. Professor Edward Whitley, co-director with Rob Weidman of The Vault at Pfaff’s, Lehigh University’s digital archive of America’s first Bohemia, is a friend who has always believed that this Ada Clare biography merited publication and has done everything to make it happen. I never could have imagined as I first typed this book on a typewriter (in the days of no personal computers or internet) that someday my book would be an e-book in a digital historical archive! Special thanks to Professor Scott Gordon, and everyone at the Lehigh University Press. The late Professor John G. Doyle shared research over many years and also critiqued my manuscript. Professor S. Frederick Starr and Professor Holly Blake also shared research, read early chapters of my book and gave me invaluable advice. Jan Seidler Ramirez welcomed my information about Ada Clare for the exhibition about Bohemians and Greenwich Village at the Museum of the City of New York, and made efforts to get the book published. Leonard Mogel read the first chapter and saw a potential book. My thanks to the late Joyce Tracy, whose advice and assistance set me on the right path when I began my research at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. Thanks to Luisa Cetti, author and scholar of Milan, Italy, for encouragement and sharing her writing about Ada Clare's novel Only a Woman's Heart. From South Carolina, Harlan Greene gave me a crash course on Charleston writers and encouraged my work on Ada Clare from the first time I walked into the South Carolina Historical Society. Alex Moore and Stephen Hoffius added patience and kindness to editing expertise. The late local historian John Boineau of Megget, South Carolina, took me to McElhenney Flats in the Low Country outside Charleston, the location of Ada Clare’s family plantation. My thanks to the late Dr. Fraser Wilson, Ada’s collateral relative, for family information and for the hospitality he and his wife shared with me in their beautiful Charleston home that held portraits of some of Ada’s family. Thanks also for the hospitality and encouragement of Newell and Fela Cox, and Professor Gerald and Arline Polinsky. The late Robert Young, Jr. of Sacramento was the great-grandson of Ada’s dearest friends William and Elizabeth Winter. He shared much valuable information with me about their relationships with Ada. My gratitude to the late Professor Daniel McKeithan, Professor Paul Gaston, the late Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Deborah Pollack, Professor Jerome Loving, Hugh Wilson, the late Robert Offergeld, Terry Miller, Jon Tandler, and Ray Reynolds. Last but not least, I am grateful for the late Albert Parry, author of the book Garrets and Pretenders that included the first extensive writing about Ada Clare. His friendship and encouragement over many years was a special gift. I am grateful for the assistance and courtesy of many librarians who aided my research and helped with other matters over many years. These include librarians at the American Antiquarian Society, the Bancroft Library, the South Carolina Historical Society, the Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, the Perkins Library at Duke University, the Library of Congress, Columbia University, the University of Texas, the Harvard Theater Library, Southern Illinois University, the Pennsylvania Historical Society, the University of Nebraska, the Missouri Historical Society, and Washington University in St. Louis. Finally I thank family members who have always been there: my late husband Sam Goldblatt, my son Lewis Steven Goldblatt, my brother Professor Stephen Rudman, my granddaughter Jennifer Molinoff and my cousins Erika Gottfried and Marjorie Berg. CONTENTS Introduction 1. Ada Agnes McElhenney: A Southern Lady Goes North to a New Life 1 2. North To A New Life-- Saratoga And The City 12 3. Ada Clare: The Apprenticeship Of An Actress And Writer 20 4. Enter Gottschalk - Exit a Fallen Woman 30 5. A N ot-So-Grand Tour of Europe by a Fashionable Lady 41 6. The Queen and the Kingdom of Bohemia 48 7. Bohemia at War 59 8. Go West, New Woman - To California 74 9. The Queen of Bohemia in the Courts of Hawai'i 84 10. Slowly Heading Home 91 11. The Last of the First Bohemia 95 12. Agnes Stanfield and Ada Agnes Noyes -Leading Lady llO 13. "Brightness Falls from the Air, Queens Have Died Young and Fair" 121 About the author 131 Further Reading 132 Endnotes 133 Illustrations 172 INTRODUCTION Ada Clare1 (1834-1874), American journalist, actress, and feminist Bohemian2 was born into a Southern elite family of slaveholding cotton planters and social arbiters. Though educated to become an upper-class lady, exemplary wife and respectable mother in Charleston, South Carolina, she dared to run away to New York City where she lived far outside the boundaries of those expectations. In mid-nineteenth century America other women like her may have questioned their limited range of life options, but few ventured out of their “woman’s sphere” to seek equality with men in careers and intimate relationships. Ada was a true forerunner of the “New Woman” who would follow her in large numbers decades later. Ada Clare faced many obstacles as she swam against the tide of her era’s conventional expectations for women but there were critically important circumstances in her favor that enabled Ada to establish a life of her own. She was raised in a home that allowed her a fine education, access to books, and the opportunity to develop her writing talent through publishing her first works in a local literary magazine. A combination of a family inheritance and her own determination made it possible for her to leave her aristocratic Southern family and community in Charleston, South Carolina, and sustain herself in New York City. And perhaps most importantly, as she worked to establish a career as a writer and actress, she found a support group of other writers and artists, also rebels, who had come to New York looking for the stimulation of new ideas, and a way of life and work suited to their free-wheeling personalities. These rebels called themselves Bohemians, and Pfaff’s beer cellar in New York’s Greenwich Village was their headquarters.. They were the first Americans to emulate the impoverished but lighthearted, talented French writers and artists who lived on the Left Bank in Paris written about by Henri Murger in his Scenes de la Vie de Boheme.3 And though their artistic movement was in full bloom for only a few short years, their influence still lives on.4 Through both her wit and skill at making connections, Ada rose to the heights of Bohemian Society, ruling over the lively group often gathered around a long table in the famous beer cellar alongside brilliant editor Henry Clapp, Jr. They acclaimed her as “The Queen of Bohemia” and together they drank beer, enjoyed Herr Pfaff’s delicious food, smoked, and enlivened themselves with songs, stories, verse contests, readings of their own work, and talk of the latest books and plays. Like Ada, some of them were forerunners of the future--in this case anticipating 1960s America by a hundred years -- living in an urban commune in a brownstone house they called “The Unitary Home,” practicing “Free Love,” and experimenting with drugs. This collection of witty and experimental personalities at Pfaff’s produced the avant-garde weekly literary paper Saturday Press, (First Series: 1858- 1860), for which Ada began to write a weekly column, “Thoughts and Things. ”5 Ada was lucky that the Press developed many new writers. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John Burroughs, Edmund C. Stedman, and William Dean Howells saw some of their first works published in the First Series of the Saturday Press, and subsequently became well-known. In the brief Second Series of the Press from 1865 to 1866, Bret Harte and Mark Twain, then known as Western writers, began to make their first significant appearance on the Eastern literary scene in advance of their fame. And from a present-day perspective, one of the best things the Pfaff’s Circle of Bohemians and the Press did was to give emotional and editorial support to Walt Whitman, their one genius. One of the most colorful Bohemians was their only war hero, Fitz-James O’Brien, who died fighting for the Union in the Civil War. He was heir to Edgar Allen Poe as a writer of fantastic tales, and those tales and O’Brien are receiving new attention today. In those days it was unusual for women to join the men in a beer cellar, but there were gutsy, interesting, and talented women among the Bohemians and Ada was at their center. Ada Clare, whose writing is only gradually being re-discovered and appreciated today, was a celebrity in her own day. Her physical beauty and witty writing were constantly reported on, though not always kindly, whatever she did and wherever she went. Most of the time, her colorful exciting life was centered in New York City but she also wrote about visits to Paris during the hectic Second Empire; the Far West’s cultural capital, San Francisco, and its frontier outpost Virginia City; as well as Hawaii, Havana, and Central America.