58. Encore Episode: George Frederick Cooke Heads to Philadelphia

Hello everyone, Peter here. This is an encore presentation of an episode we first released in May of 2021, which tells the story of the early 19th Century British actor George Frederick Cooke and what happened when he came to the city of Philadelphia.

Now, you may not know this, but my podcast host provides me with very detailed records about how many downloads each episode of the show gets, and even from what cities in the world our audience is listening.

It’s nice to see each new episode spread across the country and the world, and it’s even nicer when I see that old episodes are being downloaded, too. In fact, one of the most heartening things for me about the work I’ve been doing here over the past two years or so is that the long list shows we’ve released are becoming an online archive of Philadelphia theater history. People will go and seek them out, even years after their initial publication. This is exactly what I always wanted to happen, and I find it very gratifying to see it coming true.

This episode, however, tends to get a bit overlooked. Now I’m fond of all my subjects I’ve researched and shared here with you folks, but really this was one of my all-time favorites. So, since the podcast is on a bit of a summer hiatus right now, I thought I’d bring George Frederick Cooke out for one more curtain call. I know that many people have only started listening to Adventures in Theater History over the last year or so, and perhaps not many of them have found time to go back and listen to our earliest episodes. And even if you did listen to this one, two years ago, by this point you may be getting a bit fuzzy on the exact details of the story - especially that twist at the end, you know? Have I mentioned that too much? Did I give away the fun? I hope not.

So here it is, once again - Originally released as our episode number 10, "George Frederick Cooke Heads to Philadelphia"! Here we go!

[INTRO MUSIC]

By 9 pm, it was thought best that someone go and summon the actor George Frederick Cooke from his dressing room at London’s Covent Garden Theatre. It was June 1, 1810 - a benefit night for another actor in the company. Cooke was scheduled to perform Sir Archy McSarcasm, one of his famous Scotch accent roles, in the Charles Macklin comedy Love a la Mode. It was the second play on the bill that evening, but since that morning’s rehearsal no one had seen Mr. Cooke in the Green Room. Knowing looks went round everyone’s faces, and the prompter dispatched his young assistant, who now tapped on the great man’s door, and receiving no answer, opened it and looked inside. 

When the boy returned with the news of what he had found, the prompter sighed and wrote in his daily account book, as he had many times before: “Cooke was discovered indisposed.” The prompter then sent an understudy on to perform in Cooke’s place, and an announcement was made to the audience. It was a familiar ritual, to all, by that point, and it occasioned the usual response from the crowd: “What, is he drunk again?”

George Frederick Cooke had risen from obscure beginnings to have a long and somewhat checkered career in the British theatre world. After a long apprenticeship in Britain’s provincial theaters he earned a growing reputation as a formidable leading man with a prodigious memory and considerable charisma onstage. Although well into his forties, in the year 1800 at last he made his triumphant London debut. The reception among both critics and the general public was rapturous. 

It wasn’t that he was especially handsome or tall or commanding, not at all. He was of middling height, with a bladelike nose and oddly short arms. But his acting was astounding to all, ‘electrifying’, they said (which was a new word at the time) with a technique that was both intellectually rigorous and full of emotional truth. He did not rant or intone or declaim - he acted from his own feelings, and always stayed, as we would say nowadays, In the Moment, even when other characters were speaking. Wrote one reviewer: “In his soliloquies . . he appears to be delivering the natural workings of his mind, and not to be speaking an address to the audience.” Another said: “Mr. Cooke not only thinks originally, he looks, speaks, and walks unlike any other man we ever saw. He is himself alone.” 

Along with Sarah Siddons, Cooke was perhaps one of the first truly great English actors of the Romantic Era. The young Edmund Kean, whose reputation we now perhaps know even better, studied him and modeled his approach very closely after Cooke. When the ever-restless actor Thomas Cooper returned to England from America in 1802 to play Othello on the Drury Lane stage, he was fortunate in being able to get leave from Covent Garden to have Cooke perform Iago alongside him, a combination that was by all accounts an astounding success.

Cooke was especially known for playing charming villains and wily schemers in both comedies and tragedies. Richard III, Iago, and Shylock, were his forte in Shakespearean roles.  Admittedly, such roles suited him so well because of his own vicious wit, his mercurial personality, and his one overriding, almost demonic obsession: he was an incontinent and unstoppable binge drinker. All his colleagues and friends knew that Cooke had to be kept away from alcohol, or else he would go on rampaging and degrading benders that so often meant missed performances - or worse. There were times when he would be lost for weeks, perhaps burrowed away at a low dive, or locked in jail. Once he was so inebriated he even enlisted in the British Army and was shipping off the West Indies before his managers could extricate him from the situation.

By his mid-fifties his career was in decline. His vindictive rages and erratic performances began to wear on everyone’s patience. Already his once-mellifluous voice had been coarsened by years of alcoholic excess. A London critic now wrote: “Were we to judge the fondness of the public, this man would appear to be the best actor we have . . And yet no man treated his audience with such insolence and contempt as this very person. His frequent inebrity, his impertinent speeches, his non-acknowledgment of applause, his unpopular cast of character,  . . . . all these circumstances would naturally lead one to suppose that Cooke must be much disliked.” 

Cooke’s general behavior, always extremely sensitive to such slights and insults, had begun to worsen. Sometimes he showed up at the theater, but was so intoxicated he could not be understood. Cooke’s scathing sarcastic wit, famously entertaining to his drinking companions when he was in his cups, was increasingly turned on any audience he considered sufficiently unappreciative. Once he excoriated a theater full of people in the city of Liverpool. “What? Do you hiss me? Hiss George Frederick Cooke? You contemptible money-getters . . Farewell, I banish you!” Marching to the wings he turned one last time and snarled: “There is not a brick in your dirty town but what is cemented by the blood of negroes!” And then he stalked off the stage. (That this remark was completely true - Liverpool’s commercial fortunes had been built largely as a result of the Trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans - made it sting all the more. Deeply aware of his own flaws, he was expert at spotting the moral weaknesses of others.)  But Cooke was also famous for the elegant apologetic speeches he would make after committing such otherwise unforgivable acts. These speeches invariably got the audience back on his side again. Like many high-functioning alcoholics, he knew how to be charming and how to crawl back into people’s good graces, when he really needed to.

Yet by the end of the decade where we pick up his story in the year 1810, Cooke’s time at Covent Garden was at an end. On June 5th, he was supposed to perform Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV for another actor’s benefit night. He never arrived at the theater at all. The following night he showed up, but refused to perform in the comedy Man of the World. On June 22nd he was sober enough to work again, and played Shylock - but for a meager house. It was the last time he would ever perform on a London stage.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia: The season of 1809-1810 had been a good year, financially and artistically, for the New Theatre on Chestnut Street. The young American actor John Howard Payne had been recruited to play youthful roles such as Romeo and Hamlet, to much acclaim. The pantomime Mother Goose had pleased the family crowd. Later in the season, the Irish actor John Dwyer had shone in a dozen comedic roles, and the always popular tragedian Thomas Cooper had performed Shakespeare to good houses. Despite the competition of Pepin and Breshcard’s New Circus on Walnut Street a few blocks away, the Philadelphia audiences remained loyal and the New Theatre’s series of actors’ benefits that Spring had given the company members enough to live upon quite agreeably the summer through. 

For the next season, the rights to a new melodrama entitled The Foundling of the Forest was obtained to showcase the skills of the regular stock company, and a series of more prominent outside talents, such as the actor James Fennell, were also engaged to give the Philadelphia audience a taste of novelty. Although Thomas Cooper was now lost to them since he had taken over shared management of the Park Theatre in New York, as the Philadelphia managers Warren and Wood completed contracts and schedules over the summer, they had every reason to expect that the next season was only going to be better, surely. 

For his part, in late summer of 1810, Cooke was in Liverpool again on a summer engagement when he ran into his old stage partner, that same Thomas Cooper. Cooper had just arrived in England to recruit actors for the Park Theatre. Like his Philadelphia counterparts, he was also looking for some novel and notable talents to attract theatergoers, but he had the additional challenge of invigorating what was then a rather moribund Manhattan theater scene. 

Cooper immediately had a blazingly brilliant idea: Bring the great George Frederick Cooke to America, where he was sure he could make a fortune both for himself and for the aging star. He managed to persuade Cooke to leave his difficulties with English audiences behind and to agree to cross the Atlantic with him. (Probably this was primarily accomplished by keeping Cooke’s well supplied with drinks, and by taking sly advantage of the actor’s well-known vain and impulsive nature.) Cooper proposed that Cooke make what we would now call a barnstorming tour of American cities - stopping in each for a few weeks and doing his most famous roles, utilizing for his supporting cast the stock companies of each city: New York, Boston, Baltimore . . . and Philadelphia. Cooke tipsily agreed, and once the necessary documents were signed, Cooper pounced. Without even stopping to collect the actor’s costumes and books, he bundled him into a packet boat in Liverpool harbor. Forty-five days later - enough time for the sodden actor to sober up - they were in New York City.

Cooper’s intuition that American audiences were hungry to see a true English star, had been correct - if anything he underestimated the frenzy that was about to occur. News of the great Cooke’s arrival in New York in November of 1810 created a huge sensation among the public. They crammed the box offices and swarmed the doors at his initial appearance at the Park Theatre. American playwright and author William Dunlap, who had been hired by Cooper and Price to mind Cooke throughout his journey and keep him out of trouble, wrote: “It appeared as impossible to many, that the great London actor should be removed to America, as that St. Paul’s Cathedral should be transported across the Atlantic.” Reviews in newspapers were rapturous, despite Dunlap’s repeated failure to keep Cooke away from drink, and the actor’s frequent mood swings between truculent insolence, abject stage fright, and intoxicated sentimentality.

Dunlap thereupon engaged Sam Claus, an African-American grocer who evidently had much experience being a trusted personal valet to wealthy, privileged and difficult white men. Claus would attend Cooke when in January 1811 he sailed to Boston, playing an engagement of 14 nights. “Honest Sam”, as Dunlap constantly refers to him in his memoir about Cooke, must have had his professional patience constantly tested, since Cooke left behind ample displays in Boston of both his overwhelming talent onstage and his inevitable habit of drowning himself in drink offstage.  Returning to do another New York run in February, Cooke found that his public reputation had soured somewhat, and he often played to half-empty houses. After this, Cooke vowed to Dunlap that he would never play New York again, and that he looked forward to going to Philadelphia - where there were surely people with taste and discrimination about the theater!

In fact, knowing of his imminent approach, Warren and Wood, the actor-managers of the New Theatre on Chestnut Street, had rearranged their entire season to accommodate the English star. The regular company’s benefit nights - the lucrative one-night performances by which every individual actor collected a majority of their annual compensation - were moved forward into February and March so that they would not be diminished by the arrival of the exotic and exciting star performer.

Cooke, accompanied by his nervous minders William Dunlap and Sam Claus, set out on the journey to Pennsylvania. On Wednesday, March 20th 1811 the party found themselves marveling at the crush of commercial traffic as they traveled on the busy roads leading to the city of Philadelphia. Dunlap reported that he saw some all-too-familiar danger signs:

“The equanimity of self-possession which had been Mr. Cooke’s companion since our leaving New-York, seemed to forsake him after we entered the city of Philadelphia. He appeared agitated -- he was peevish in his mode of speaking to the driver -- and I doubt not but he felt a great anxiety as to the reception he should meet on this new field of action . . “

Though Warren and Wood had already announced that Cooke would perform that same week, the actor adamantly refused to be rushed, and the managers hurried to make more changes in the scheduled shows, and they even brought Cooke along with them to see a performance at the Chestnut Street Theatre.  When they arrived, the word quickly buzzed through the audience that Cooke was in the house, and the attention of the audience was drawn from the actors on the stage, to the actor in the box. The adjoining boxes were soon crowded with curious people, gawking away. After the show Cooke visited backstage, and renewed his acquaintance with members of the acting company, many of whom he knew from the days of their youth, while they struggled in the obscurity of provincial British theaters.

The next day Cooke returned to Chestnut Street, for a rehearsal of the play he was scheduled to perform the following week on Monday, in his signature role of Richard III. Now in those days ‘rehearsals’ for a  play did not involve weeks of careful preparation and mutual exploration on the part of an entire cast, as we are accustomed to today. Instead, back then, it was expected that every actor carried their performance with them - they would learn their lines on their own and then show up at the theater for a single run-through before a play was performed. At a ‘rehearsal’ typically a leading actor like Cooke would walk around the stage in his own personal accustomed blocking for the role, instructing all the other actors in any necessary stage business that he required, which the official house prompter (what we would now call a stage manager) would carefully note down. Lines would not be spoken in full voice, but be muttered in low tones, as it was considered best to save the true performance for the audience. At one point during this rehearsal, however, Cooke suddenly startled the American company by ‘throwing out his voice’ - speaking at full performance level, in order, as he termed it, to ‘try the house’, testing it for acoustic properties. Said Dunlap: “The power he displayed caused looks of surprise among those around. Which produced a pleasure [to Cooke] more than adequate to the cause. He occasionally directed, commanded, and reproved some of the younger members of the company, with peevishness and undue asperity.” 

That asperity was even more evident in the evening, when Dunlap and Cooke dined at the manager William Wood’s home. Cooke began drinking heavily at his host’s table, and Wood unwisely joined him, evidently trying to keep liquor out of his guest’s system by consuming as much as he could of the bottle himself. Wood attempted to keep the conversation cordial, but Cooke kept stopping all rival discourse by banging the table and shouting “Hear me, Sar! Hear me, Sar! Didn’t I throw out my voice this morning -- ah, ha! Haw! Ah ha ha! I astonished the yankee actors! I gave it them - I’ll show these fellows what acting is!” Things got worse from there, and Wood and Cooke almost got into a fight over some small matter before Dunlap and Sam managed to separate them and steer the raving actor back to his room and his bed at the Mansion House Hotel on Third and Spruce Streets.

There was one more night of difficulty with Cooke, according to Dunlap’s account, before his charge began to reform his behavior over the weekend, evidently aware that he needed to be in somewhat good condition for Monday night’s opening performance. They spent the time together touring Philadelphia, while Cooke told Dunlap story after story from his long career. It’s a little like the ‘buddy relationship’ in that movie My Favorite Year, about another barnstorming British actor and his American ‘minder’, except that the main character is not the highly charming fictional one played by Peter O’Toole, it’s the highly alarming real one that was George Frederick Cooke. And though the movie ends on a rather hopeful note, you just know our particular story, the one I’m telling you today, is not going to end well. Dunlap notes repeatedly that Cooke’s hand kept stealing to the part of his ribcage just above his liver, and complaining of the pain coming from an organ that Dunlap knew was likely destroyed by years of being pickled in alcohol. In fact Dunlap, who keeps referring to Cooke’s manically compulsive behavior as a type of ‘insanity’  or ‘mental intoxication’ probably gets close to an even deeper truth about George Frederick Cooke. Though it’s a bit presumptuous for me, a non-medical professional, to make a diagnosis from this great distance of time - to me the actor shows many classic signs of what we now refer to as Bipolar Disorder. And in an era long before the treatments we use today for manic depression, the incessant drinking may have been an attempt to self-medicate the storms raging in his head. 

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Monday arrived, the day of Cooke’s much-anticipated first performance in Philadelphia as Richard III.  In the city which at its founding had banned theater entirely as the work of the devil, now there was a hellish frenzy about the performance of a single actor which would have singed William Penn’s eyebrows, if he had ever seen it. Crowds had been mobbing the box office all day, and men had been hired to sleep on the pavement in front of the theater overnight in order to be first in line. When the ticket sales began, reported historian Charles Durang, “coats were torn from the backs of those who tried to get near the box office; hats were lost; black eyes and bloody noses were to be seen by the hundreds. The struggle to gain [tickets’] . . . resembled a tumultuous riot. A certain Dr. B. hit upon the expedient of throwing Scotch snuff into the faces of the crowd. On the first occasion he carried his point by this brutal ruse, [but] . . on the second trial he was most severely handled for the atrocious act. The crowd blocked up Chesnut and Sixth street corners even to the court house.”

At 5 pm, Cooke and Dunlap walked together from the hotel, up Chestnut Street to the theater. They were perhaps not surprised to see that the street in front of the building was completely thronged with people - that had been the case in New York and Boston, too, but when they attempted to go around the back to the stage door that was mobbed as well. Since the narrow front doors of the theater were jammed, impatient ticket holders were trying to get in at every possible entrance, ignoring the posted signs that read: “Nobody on any account to be admitted behind the scenes.” 

“Why this beats Sarah!” exclaimed Cooke, not entirely displeased at the evidence of his star power. It was impossible for them to enter at all, until eventually the crowd consented to clear a lane for the actor to access his dressing room. “Aye, aye,” Cooke chuckled to Dunlap, “they understand their interest now, for as the man said when going to the gallows, there will be no sport without me!” Dunlap, for his part, made his way to the overflowing audience area where he along with many others was forced to sit with the orchestra, much to the evident irritation of the musicians.

But  .  but . . . it was all worth it. That evening in Philadelphia everyone in the crowded theater’s orchestra, boxes, pit and gallery was treated to the full measure of Cooke’s genius in the part of Shakespeare’s Richard III. The curtain rose on the solitary figure of the Duke of Gloster, gazing into the distance, pensively. Cooke, by the way, never used cheap costuming tricks to show the character’s deformity. There was no ‘mountain on his back’, no pronounced limp, no claw-like left hand. The actor’s steel-gray hair was covered by a light brown wig - and a helmet with three black plumes rising from it. He wore the classic red velvet cape, sword, white leggings and knee boots that most actors of the era used when portraying Richard, but when he began to speak, it was his simplicity, his lack of bombast that struck everyone in the house. Without moving, his hands hanging at his sides, he said the opening lines:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by the sun of York;

And all the clouds that lower’d upon our house -

In the deep bosom

(and here he lifted his right hand slightly with a gentle sweeping motion, and then turning his palm downwards, he continued . .)

 . . . of the ocean . . . 

(he made a short pause and sinking his hand towards the earth, he finished the sentence . )

 . . . buried.

And so the play continued, through his scene where Richard woos the angry and mourning Lady Anne, through his seizure of the crown on his brother Edward’s death, through the manipulation of Buckingham and the murder of his nephews. Throughout it all, the Philadelphia audience was glued to their seats, the ladies in the boxes alternately horrified and intrigued, the men in the pit too amazed to even light their usual cigars, the crowd up in the galleries rapt in awe of what they were witnessing. As the play came to the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard finally met the character of the Duke of Richmond and received his justly bloody end. No one who saw it ever forgot it. Charles Durang, years later, could still describe Cooke in the death scene: 

“As he lifted up his left arm over his forehead, and he gave the last withering look at Richmond, the expression of his eyes - as they for a moment vividly rolled, then became fixedly glazed, and then all vision seemed gone. . . you felt everything he did. . .  The words that followed riveted your attention and absorbed all attention else. Your mind dwelt on nought beside. You did not see Cooke; you only saw the character. He never lost the feeling of his part. The coloring of the passion was preserved in graphic tints to the end.”

[SFX] The applause for Cooke at the curtain was tumultuous, and overwhelming. “The triumph was complete”, wrote Dunlap. “Expectation, which had been raised to its highest pitch by the delayed gratification of curiosity, was completely satisfied.”[SFX out]

George Frederick Cooke continued performing in Philadelphia until the end of April 1811. He played Richard several more times, and on other nights brought out all his other famous roles: Shylock, Lear, Falstaff, Macbeth, Glenalvon in the play Douglas, Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Kitely in Ben Johson’s Every Man in His Humor - and his greatest success besides Richard, the Scotch aristocrat Sir Pertinax MacSycophonat in Chales Macklin’s Man of the World. All of the plays brought in full and enthusiastic houses - with the exception of King Lear, oddly, since the folly and degradation of the title character so closely matched his own. By the end he had brought in over $15,000 in ticket sales and a garnered a benefit night of a thousand dollars more in addition to his 100 dollar weekly salary - a pittance when we realize that half the total receipts under the arrangement he had so rashly signed went off to Cooper and Price, his New York managers, and the balance when to Waren and Wood in Philadelphia. 

At the end of the run, in fact, Thomas Cooper arrived from New York and  joined him onstage once again, pairing with him in Venice Preserved and The Gamester, and then the two repeated their Drury Lane triumph from ten years before as Othello and Iago. This performance was such a consummate theatrical success that  Charles Durang, who saw it, declared that it was impossible to portray in adequate language.  . . . though he tried anyway. . . “Where Othello proposes the death of Cassio, Cooke used to start as if he appeared horrified at the deed, appeared to hesitate, and then, with a sudden impulse, drew his hand across his face, looked at the Moor , which look told plainly, ‘I do this for the love of thee,’ and then, in a voice almost choked -- ‘my friend is dead’. The effect was irresistible.”

A new monthly publication, edited by the Philadelphia journalist Stephen Cullen Carpenter, called The Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor, devoted the bulk of its April, May, June and August issues that year almost entirely to discussing and praising Cooke’s performances. Such commendation was especially gratifying to the aging actor, but he resented any praise directed at his co-star Thomas Cooper, the man who had inveigled him to come to America in the first place. Offstage Cooke railed against Cooper and declared he would never act with him, but when he did act with him anyway, he had the self-possession and artifice to channel his deep resentment back into the role. Durang again describes it for us: “Cooke’s Iago was a continual reaction of quiet, yet vigorous points  . . there was no effort; there seemed no acting.  . . It looked like nature - but it was nature directed by the most skillful playing. It was the philosophy of acting.” When Cooper would spout off one of Othello’s fine speeches, prompting a burst of applause from the house, Cooke as Iago would step forward and receive it proudly as if it was meant for him instead, astonishing and seducing the audience with his devilish audacity.

But what of all his famous offstage antics and debauches, of which I’ve already spoken so often? Well, those continued to occur, and sometimes poor Sam Claus would be forced to stay up the entire night tending to Cooke’s needs, trying to keep the effects of his drinking bouts under control. But on the whole Cooke was on a rather steady path during his weeks in Philadelphia. There were more good nights than bad ones. We can attribute this, perhaps, to two things. First was the assiduous efforts of Dunlap to make it generally known in the city that if people wanted to enjoy Cooke’s acting they had to give up the pleasure of his company at the bar. After a while, to the credit of Philadelphians, everyone mostly cooperated with that unspoken arrangement.

The other thing, what really might have saved Cooke from himself more than anything else, was that almost every morning the actor walked to the studio of the painter Thomas Sully. There he posed for three separate portraits, which had been commissioned by wealthy benefactors in the city. These quiet mornings, reported Dunlap, Cooke was charming and peaceful, engaging in respectful conversations with ladies and children who stopped by to see the great man as Sully sketched and painted away. Cooke valued intelligent attention above all, and always remembered to be on time for Mr. Sully, and just as he tried to abstain from drinking when he knew an important show was coming the next day, he preserved himself for these sittings, as if he knew his immortality was somehow at stake.

You can still see these great portraits of Cooke that Sully completed during this period. One of them is in the collection of the Players Club, in Manhattan, and copies of them can also be viewed, along with other paintings and prints of Cooke in his great roles, at the episode blog post on the website AITHpodcast.com (the link, as alway, in the show notes). 

Another Sully portrait of Cooke is the artwork that I’ve attached to this podcast episode, in his costume as Richard. I’ve posted a full length version in the blog post. But better yet, you should really go to the Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia to see it in person. It is extraordinary. Set as if the actor was standing in the interior of Westminster Cathedral, the warm reds and golds of Sully’s palette remain vivid. Cooke’s Richard the Third stares out at the viewer, a slight smile playing on his lips, as he cannily appraises exactly how much he can gain from us, and calculates how best to flatter and deceive us. In the left foreground the bottom of a pillar of the gothic cathedral anchors the composition with a smooth and solid weight. Behind Richard, to the left, a statue of St. Helena stands in an alcove, with a calm and mournful expression. Yet she also seems strangely vulnerable to the wolfish villain in front of her, perhaps a foreshadowing of the way he will soon seduce the virtuous Lady Anne over the very body of her murdered husband. It is an astonishing work, one of the jewels of the Academy’s collection, and has been a favorite of  local art patrons and admirers of Thomas Sully’s work for many years. Long after anyone who had actually seen Cooke perform was left alive in Philadelphia, that portrait has remained as evidence of the great man’s presence here, so many years ago.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

In May 1811, George Frederick Cooke moved on from Philadelphia, to Baltimore - where once again he missed a show due to an extended night of drinking in the company of supposed admirers. During that party he boasted he secretly scorned America and would refuse to play in front of her pathetic rebel of a President James Madison. Then, despite having completed his contract with his American managers, he returned to New York. His debauches continued, and in the midst of one he actually married a daughter of the owner of a local coffee house, Violet Behn. (It was perhaps his fourth such marriage in his lifetime, though none of these lasted for long). 

In the Fall of 1811 he returned again to Philadelphia for a brief engagement at the Chestnut Street Theater. This engagement was more to his economic advantage than the previous one, as he received half of all the profits from each performance. It was there that our old friends, the French circus riders Pepin and Breschard, finally caught up with him. 

I have not forgotten about them, although you may have thought by this point that I was neglecting to follow up on the suspenseful ending I left you all with at the end of Episode 9. But in fairness, throughout all the events I’ve been describing so far, Pepin and Breschard’s circus had been out of town, touring other American cities while their own theater underwent a renovation, adding a proscenium stage to their grand riding ring.

As you no doubt remember, the two men had decided that what they needed to inaugurate the new stage was a performance from the great Cooke. They approached him one day at his hotel, offering a huge compensation in return for his services for just a few nights. Cooke listened to them gravely, and thanked them for the honor. But unfortunately, he said to the equestrians, he had never been taught to ride. The Frenchmen looked at each other in confusion.

“No no no sir”, explained Pepin, “My dear Mr. Cooke! You are not expected to ride, but to appear in your incomparable delineation of Shakespeare!” Cooke reared himself up in his most dignified manner and again repeated: “Sar! I can’t ride.” To all Pepin’s subsequent explanations and his further proposals, Cooke just kept repeating “I can't ride.” “But Monsieur!”  “I can’t ride!”

Finally his visitors gave up their quest, and departed, dejectedly. After they left, Cooke related the story to his companions: What nonsense to think he would consent to appearing with Frenchmen! He, the great George Frederick Cooke, who had played before King Geoge III at Covent Garden and had scorned to play  before the President of the United States! “What would his majesty say on hearing that Geoge Frederick Cooke had profaned Shakespeare, and dishonored himself by exhibiting the Richard among the saw-dust of a beggarly French Circus!”

So, there was to be no George Frederick Cooke for the new Olympic Theatre to boast of, and soon there was to be no George Frederick Cooke at all. Although he continued to perform for several more months in America, the end was predictably near. In 1812, gravely ill and having spent or lost almost all of the money he had earned on his final tour, he died in New York City.

A quick post-mortem autopsy by his physician revealed that Cooke’s liver was hard and solid as a stone, and in fact had stopped functioning completely, causing his death. In respect for his great reputation, the body of the actor was given a grand funeral procession attended by both the Governor and the Mayor, but because of his penury, his body was placed in the Strangers Crypt in St. Paul’s Church in lower Manhattan.

Eight years later, for instance, the great British star Edmund Keane was touring the United States, and like Cooke had done before him was hauling in huge box office returns from adoring American fans. When he reached New York, Keane made a point of paying his respects to his fallen countryman and his artistic idol, the great George Frederick Cooke. Keane had his bones removed from the Stranger’s Crypt at St. Pauls and reburied at great expense, under a tall stone memorial in the middle of the churchyard. It’s still there. Like the great portrait of Cooke in Philadelphia you can go see it. In fact many actors over the years have come to that cemetery to pay their respects to the great George Frederick Cooke.

[TRANSITION MUSIC  . . record scratch]

But wait . .  that’s not the end of the story! Though his grave is in New York, George Frederick Cooke is still with us here in Philadelphia. And I don’t just mean his spirit, or his memory, or even his portrait. Buckle up, because here’s where things start to get a bit weird. 

You know how people can be a little crazy about collecting memorabilia of celebrities, stars and historical figures? Locks of hair, used handkerchiefs, photos, autographs.That phenomenon really gets underway in the 19th Century, all part of the growing Romantic spirit of the age, and the star system, and the obsession with Genius and History.

In 1820 when the actor Edmund Keane had the bones of George Frederick Cooke reinterred, apparently even he couldn’t resist. Somehow a finger or toe bone of Cooke’s got into his possession, and supposedly he had it mounted and placed upon his mantelpiece, insisting to his wife that it was “worth Ten Thousand Pounds”. Mrs Keane, so the story goes, was horrified and had the family maid quietly drop it into the river one day, much to her husband’s displeasure. But, you know, that’s not the only piece of George Frederick Cooke that went wandering - one of his teeth ended up being made into a tie pin and given to the American actor Edwin Booth. It’s not clear that Booth ever actually wore such a grisly souvenir, he gave it to the Players Club in his old house, but now the pin and tooth are in the collection of the City Museum of New York.

Here’s the part where you really have to sit and probably put down any food you are currently eating. It seems that one of Cooke’s doctors who treated the actor in his final days, and who conducted the immediate post-mortem autopsy on his body, removed his head and kept the skull for his own private collection. Yes, Cooke’s body is in New York City, but his head was not buried with it.

This fact became first known amongst his closest friends when Dr. Francis, who was known for his own extensive collection of human skulls, supposedly loaned Cooke’s cranium to a theater company that was performing Hamlet and needed a good prop version of the skull of Yorick. The good doctor attended the play himself and watched the scene keenly, no doubt thinking that he was seeing George Frederick Cooke onstage for his true final performance. He bragged about it to his friends afterwards. When William Francis died he passed his skull collection on to his son Valentine, who was also a doctor. In 1888 the younger Dr. Francis slipped and fell while sailing on a yacht off Newport, Rhode Island. He was treated for his head wound by Dr. George McClellan - a nephew of the famous general of the same name and the grandson of the founder of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, whose house had been right on the next block from the Walnut Street Theatre. In fact, young Dr. McClellan was also now on the faculty at Jefferson Medical College. Dr. Francis, in gratitude for treatment of his own skull, passed on the skull (just the upper part, its lower jaw having gone missing) of George Frederick Cooke to Dr. McClellan.

McClellan then took the item back with him to Philadelphia, very pleased with his acquisition. He wrote an academic paper about it. He took the skull out and used it in a public lecture in 1904! Someone, learning about it, evidently tried to steal it from him at one point, but it was kept safe, and after McClellan’s death in 1913 it passed to his widow, who in turn gave it to Dr. Ross Patterson, the sub-dean at Jefferson Medical College. He kept it in his home at 2126 Spruce Street. After his death in 1938 his maid found the skull hidden under his bed. There was a small flicker of interest about the story in the press. The New York Times even wrote it up. But the skull was legally a thing, it was an artifact, and a medical and historical curiosity. Dr. Patterson had never married and so along with the rest of his estate, the skull of George Frederick Cooke went into the collection of the Library of Jefferson Medical College, now known as Thomas Jefferson University.

And there it still sits, carefully preserved by the library staff, to this day. Some people have talked about getting it back to his grave in New York, but apparently that’s difficult, for all sorts of reasons. Unlike Cooke’s portrait at the Academy of the Fine Arts, you can’t go and see the skull, it’s not on display. We’ve begun to be a bit more reticent about showing off human remains these days - though to my mind, not enough.

So an important piece of George Frederick Cooke remains in Philadelphia, just a few blocks away from where he once performed so magnificently on Chestnut Street, and just a few hundred yards from where he scorned to play among the sawdust of a beggarly French circus But, the Walnut Street Theatre? He’s not going there. Not then, not now, and not ever.

I’m Peter Schmitz, and the sound and music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. Thanks for coming along with us on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

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