Potter’s Debuts
Sensational Journalism, Society Columns, and Mrs James Brown Potter’s Theatrical Debuts
By Eileen Curley
Eileen Curley, Author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eileen Curley is Chair and Associate Professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she teaches a wide range of theatre and drama courses. She is also the Editor in Chief of USITT’s Theatre Design and Technology and has worked as a props master and scenic designer. Her research on nineteenth century amateur theatre has appeared in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Popular Entertainment Studies, Theatre Symposium, Performing Arts Resources, and edited collections. She holds an MA and Ph.D. in Theatre History, Theory, and Literature from Indiana University and a BA in Theatre from Grinnell College.
In 1887, amateur theatrical performer Cora Urquhart Brown Potter turned professional amid a maelstrom of international newspaper coverage. Newspapers picked up the story of her career, feeding a desire for salacious gossip at the expense of the elite celebrity cast as a fallen woman. Yet, Potter and the press developed a symbiotic relationship, as her non-traditional path to the stage required that she transform her personal celebrity into a professional one in order to attract audiences and bookings. The papers obliged and, as the story developed and her celebrity transformed, they shifted their coverage of Potter’s journey from society columns, to theatrical columns, to sensational front-page spreads. Potter’s early career paralleled and capitalised on such new developments in the newspaper industry and its messaging. While the press continued to sell her scandal, Potter used the papers to profit from her society past while forging her future as a theatre professional.
A series of overlapping developments in the late nineteenth-century newspaper industry allowed scandal-ridden stage actors and socialites to use and be used by the press. New newspapers, such as Joseph Pulitzer’s World, entered the market, often employing sensationalist journalism to sell copies. Early gossip news, which had been located throughout the paper, evolved into multiple focused sections, with articles devoted to increasingly elaborate pieces about public figures.1 Simultaneously, as publishers sought to capture female readership, society columns and other human-interest stories increased in popularity. Although reporting on this cult of celebrity intruded into private lives, many elites and public figures would also use the press to establish or solidify their reputations. Into this newsprint cauldron strode Cora Urquhart Brown Potter, a New York socialite and amateur theatrical performer who gave up her husband, her daughter, and her social status to pursue a professional stage career. She perpetually reinvented her public image to maintain her celebrity, and thus her income, exploiting changing social views of gender at the turn of the twentieth century. The first years of her career sit firmly amid this multiplicity of forces driving the new journalism of the 1880s and the changing societal views of actresses and theatre. As a socialite, she first made a name for herself in the society columns, and yet her professional choices launched her into an international celebrity plagued by scandal, albeit sometimes of her own construction. During the lead up to and coverage of her 1887 professional debuts in London and New York, Potter’s public image was scattered amid multiple sections of the paper; as she battled for acceptance as a theatre professional, newspaper publishers seemed unsure whether to view her as a socialite, an actor, or a good scandal. That uncertainty, however, did not stop them from using her story to reach multiple newspaper audiences or her from exploiting the papers to solidify her reputation and transfer her amateur celebrity into the foundation of a long professional career.
A New Orleans socialite, Cora Urquhart married James Brown Potter, a banker and nephew of Bishop Henry C. Potter, in December of 1877. The pair settled in New York, quickly claiming their place as a notable part of the highest society, fraternising with royalty when abroad and with the so-called 400 in New York. In the early 1880s, Mrs Brown Potter acted in and organised numerous amateur charity theatricals, often garnering praise for her beauty, her dresses, her ability to draw large crowds and large donations, and occasionally her acting skills. Thus, Potter established a reputation for herself in the society news columns, first simply as a member of the upper class, and then in the early 1880s as an amateur theatrical performer who raised money for numerous charities. She then went to London in 1886, preparing for her eventual professional debuts in London (March 1887) and in New York (October 1887).
Cora Urquhart Potter. An undated photograph on a decorative mounting.
As with many amateur performers who turned professional at the end of the nineteenth century, Cora Urquhart Brown Potter was regularly described in the press as a socialite who turned pro, rather than as a professional actor who, like respected mid-century actresses Charlotte Cushman or Anna Cora Mowatt, participated in theatricals when young. Certainly, some of these socialite-turned-performers (and their managers) consistently sought to link themselves with their respectable upbringings for marketing purposes, particularly in theatres such as Daly’s where respectability was part of the brand. In Potter’s case, her professional identity was inextricably linked to her past social standing as well as the scandal caused by the manner of her professional debut. Even in the first lines of her obituary in 1936, Potter was haunted by her past indiscretion: ‘Fifty years ago New York society sat up and raised eyebrows when Mrs. Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter, wife of a reputed millionaire, forsook wealth and social distinction for a stage career.” The critique in this death notice reflects the constant intertwining of her social status and her professional choices. This blending of society column matters with theatrical news pervades all types of articles about Potter, reflecting her marketing strategies as well as the media’s attempts to position her story somewhere between society columns, theatrical news, and salacious gossip, all of which would sell papers.
While the size of Potter’s archive is perhaps not unusual for a professional performer with a lengthy and varied career, her dedication to creating a legacy of celebrity in the press and the timing of her career has left behind significantly more material than scholars of amateur historians normally locate. This study focuses on newspapers from across the United States and in England, as her story gained such prominence that she became syndicated news from the years covered in this paper through to her death. Her social network and fame means that she is mentioned in numerous other archives and memoirs, and her professional career is recorded in scattered ephemera. Potter also published books and articles
and granted interviews throughout her career, including two well-timed elocution pieces to help build her reputation in advance of her debut: an early 1886 article in Lippincott’s Magazine and her late 1886 book My Recitations. By 1887, the year she turned professional, the book was so popular that it was on its fourth edition. In 1908, she published The Secrets of Beauty and Mysteries of Health, replete with plates of her in costume from the earlier part of her career. Each of these texts is easily read as a calculated attempt to create and maintain a public presence at a critical time in her career, and each presents a different persona. In the 1886 publications, she claims innocence and is notably not calling herself an actor; instead, she is only responding to the editor’s request ‘for my experience as an amateur elocutionist’ and to the public’s ‘requests for copies of my recitations’.8 By 1908, Potter has dispensed with the pretence of her youthful strategies, claimed her full agency, and offers her marketable beauty advice with a call to feminism: ‘We women are no longer puppets on the stage of life, placed here or there for show or effect by mere men.
“He argues that the central paradox of the star is that it is seen as both a person and an institution. Viewed as a person the star tends to elicit a positive response of sympathy. Viewed as the product of an institution or system, however, the star elicits a negative response (that Barthes says stems from distaste we attach to any mechanization of the world)”
Potter’s strategic use of the press in advance of and during her 1887 debut drew upon society’s still conflicted relationship with the propriety of theatre as a career for a woman of her social standing, and yet her status is also what enabled her to have the necessary agency to manipulate the press and public opinion. As Richard deCordova notes, a star’s ‘undeniable specificity’ is vital because ‘it is this specificity that makes the division between the individual star and the star system meaningful’. The narrative she spun in advance of her debut served to create such an ‘undeniable specificity’ in the minds of her future audiences. Yet, what makes Potter’s approach even more intriguing is how she complicates deCordova’s discussion of Barthes:
Potter spent her entire career establishing herself as an individual, replete with years of participation in expected actor-marketing trends like sponsoring beauty products and producing a significant number of picture postcards; yet, her choices – from 1886 and 1887 to later exploiting contemporary social fads such as mysticism and rhetoric such as the New Woman – were always tinged with scandal tied to her relationships with various institutions. She was, throughout, trying to establish herself as a person who was willing to combat institutional proscriptions such as marriage, societal expectations, and gender roles, as well as the existing institutional structures for theatrical stars. She was neither fully of society nor of the theatre, as she was an amateur turned professional, in actuality and in a lifetime of newsprint rhetoric. Thus, she was simultaneously rebelling from and benefitting from her relationship with institutions. Knowing full well, we have to assume, that leaving her family and newborn would cause a scandal, Potter took the risk that a hit to her personal celebrity would bolster her professional celebrity through the increased fame and newspaper coverage that it would produce. This calculated measure enabled her to capitalise upon the negative responses of those who thought she should not be leaving her family as well as from those who believed she was from the wrong theatrical institution (amateur theatre). She gained some sympathy in the press, but the negative scandalous responses from representatives of all of the institutions she sought to leave and join made for much better news – to the benefit of the newspapers and her celebrity.
As a socialite celebrity, she was watchable yet still respectable; this duality was central to her debut and manipulated by her and the press right through to her death. As a socialite turned commercial performer, she could continue to draw upon that more acceptable celebrity while working in the commercial sector, and yet she remained distanced from it due to her continued positioning as an amateur turned professional. For the commercial theatre, the ability to distance Potter is, perhaps, useful, as her woeful performances could be dismissed as the result of an overreaching amateur rather than any fault of the institution. It also potentially benefitted Potter by casting a degree of respectability over her career; she was only an amateur, after all. Later, even her disastrous year managing the Savoy in 1904–05 could, accordingly, be disregarded as the expected outcome of a dilettante manager.
Charles Ponce de Leon traces the public interest in reportage about people and scandals in part to growing class divisions and the gradual acceptance during the early nineteenth century that public personas are performed. By reporting about the elite and celebrities, presses could exploit the public’s ‘doubt and suspicions that had always been aroused by self-promotion and publicity, [which] gave rise to a growing conviction that the personas of public figures, reiterated by sympathetic biographers or reporters, were contrived to make them appear virtuous’. For decades papers could and did use Potter’s story because it appealed to the public’s scepticism about elites, celebrities, and self-promoters; this already newsworthy mixture was then packaged as a fallen socialite, a wayward mother, an amateur reaching too far for celebrity, and an actor of questionable talent who was rumoured to be a royal plaything. Thus, Potter hit the scandal jackpot, rather spectacularly. While young girls who ran away to join the stage were common in gossipy and usually short-lived news-bits, Potter’s story appeared in the pages of newspapers worldwide for nearly half a century.
Society news columns addressing the New York elite expanded over the same period when celebrity journalism proliferated, two intertwined developments that allowed Potter to lay the groundwork for her fame in the 1880s. As Eric Homberger notes,
the New York press paid little attention to the emerging social ‘season’ [….] ‘Society news’ remained ‘small town stuff’ in the opinion of metropolitan editors. Yet, by the end of the decade [1880s], every newspaper in the city was devoting increasing space to covering high society.
This drive for social news paralleled an increasingly complex relationship between the press, contemporary notions of privacy and performance, and the lives of public figures. Ponce de Leon argues that ‘celebrities emerged when public figures—people visible in the public sphere—were subjected to this new mode of presentation’ wherein details of private lives were shared with readers so as to humanise the subjects. In a period when ‘the freedom to fashion one’s own identity and pursue the new economic and social opportunities made possible by modernization aroused a profound suspicion of appearances’, the release of private information allowed the public to gain access to a public figure’s ‘real self [which otherwise] could only be viewed in private’.17 The reading public thereby gained more intimate access to these public figures turned celebrities. Yet despite the success of both celebrity journalism and the society news columns covering the elite in New York society, Potter’s choice to exploit these developments for her professional gain remained fraught, both due to her career choice and use of the press to engage in public negotiations of her rights and role as a woman in society and on stage.
Amateur theatricals provided Potter with her first forays into a more earned fame. At first, her society news coverage began like the ‘hundreds of figures who appeared in Town Topics [and other papers] who had no other claim to fame— other than their position in society’. Amateur productions received wide coverage in society columns, affording more press coverage and a professional identity as an ‘amateur theatrical performer’. The press later responded to the growth of the amateur dramatics by covering productions outside of society columns and by creating separate columns for amateur theatre, including in the theatrical newspaper The New York Dramatic Mirror.
In 1889, she played the role of Cleopatra and launched a mania for Egyptian styles
At the same time that their coverage of amateur theatre expanded and became formalised, newspapers continued to reinforce a concern for propriety in numerous articles referencing the dangers of amateur theatricals and women working in commercial theatre. The fad for theatricals and the reluctance of society performers to turn professional during the latter years of the nineteenth century suggest a world where tacit acceptance of the supposed social dangers led to amateurs largely remaining as such. Yet, elite amateurs were also targeted and marketed by newly developed training schools and producers such as Augustin Daly who used the women’s social standing as a means of gaining respectability, and thus wealthy audiences, for their companies. The interplay here speaks to an ongoing social proscription against theatrical careers alongside the simultaneous profitability of providing access to the elite woman’s body on stage; news coverage compounded the matrix by allowing readers into the lives of the performers as they transitioned from one social zone to another. This gradual and complicated shift in public perception, as least as reported through the press and as visible through professional and amateur production practices, parallels the early years of Potter’s career. Unlike a female performer who is being marketed by a male manager, Potter chooses to market herself outside of institutional structures and thus manipulates this seemingly contradictory social move towards acting’s respectability amid presumed, and perhaps performed, concerns for gendered propriety.
While women such as Potter were accruing more earned fame through their theatricals, the concurrent growing acceptance of commercial theatre as a pastime suitable for middle- and upper-class audiences did not, however, lead to widespread social acceptance of the theatre as a suitable career path for women from the upper echelons of society. The long process of revamping theatres in the mid-nineteenth century to attract middle-class audiences included removing prostitutes from the third tier, the development of museum theatre which sold learning and spectacle, adding matinees, and marketing performers as more respectable. Newspapers also changed their strategies, as ‘the gentrification of popular culture led the press to tone down its criticism’ of commercial theatre. Over the course of the 1880s, New York society warmed to events with professional actors that included socialisation with a performer; a column detailing one tea and performance with Sarah Bernhardt in 1891 included quips from attendees who remarked about how society members refused to attend a similar function with the actress during her previous tour to the US a mere ten years earlier. Thus, while Craig Clinton argues that Potter ‘could be viewed as a bellweather in the increasing gentrification of the stage at the end of the nineteenth century’, he concurs that ‘the widely held, deeply hostile views of earlier eras persisted’; she was not immune from backlash. A tea with Bernhardt became acceptable, but a career alongside her was still scandalous for women such as Potter, even if some audience members’ shock might have been merely a performance of propriety.
Access to commercial celebrities was not meant to encourage higher-class women to embark upon the profession, not least because it invited a celebrity that was inappropriate. As Homberger notes, when discussing the problems faced by Potter and society journalists,
the dangers of unwanted intrusions into private life, and distaste for anyone who would turn a position in society into a money-making career opportunity, reinforced a strong but ambivalent inhibition about professionalism. That particular line was not to be crossed.
The vulgarity of such a choice compromised the amateur celebrity’s standing in society because it suggested a cultivation of celebrity as well as an inappropriate career path.
Because of such social proscriptions, and despite some notorious exceptions of elite women like Potter who did turn professional, press coverage of upper-class New York society generally assumed that the occasional amateur with sufficient dramatic skills to turn professional would never actually do so, as indicated in a review of Potter’s December 1885 amateur production of A Russian Honeymoon. Clinton remarks, however, that this particular review ‘might well have turned the head of an amateur inclined toward professionalism’. The veiled commentary refers directly to Potter, who, despite her talents on the amateur stage, was not expected to eschew her lifestyle:
There is no room for doubt that this lady possesses talent for the stage and all the needful intelligence to develop it under a practical course of study and training. That is to say, if she wished to become an actress she could reach a foremost place in a profession in which lasting success is rare. Of course, it is out of the question that she ever will become an actress.
Within months of this article, however, rumours of just that choice began to appear, in large part due to Potter’s machinations. Yet, she also turned professional without going through ‘a practical course of study and training’. Rather, she chose to transfer her society column amateur celebrity directly into a commercial celebrity, calculating accurately that such a scandalous invitation of intrusion into her private life, such a blatant disregard for social mores, would result in marketable celebrity to bolster her career.
From C.M. Bell’s Studio, 1873
The archival record makes it difficult to assess the number of society women who turned professional in the United States in the last three decades of the 1800s, but digitised newspapers make certain trends visible and allow us to contextualise the relationship between Potter and the press. First, the uptick in coverage of young women running away to join the stage is notable; the newspapers coined them ‘stage-struck girls’ and covered the woes of their heartbroken parents and the girls’ scrapes with private investigators. Brief stories also appear about women such as Sarah Jewett, who turned professional to public scorn initially but ‘when, some time later, financial reverses led her to reflect seriously on concentrating her gifts for some remunerative achievement, … destiny and desire met and determined her choice for the stage.’ Once theatres started recruiting society women intentionally, then limited coverage is predictably dedicated to those new stars. Daly and other managers certainly marketed their society performers, but the women themselves do not appear to have engaged in the same marketing of self as Potter; given the producers’ concerns with exploiting the women’s propriety, this trend is perhaps unsurprising. A decade after Potter’s debut, the New York Times spoke to what were then the apparent standards of introducing a society performer:
Had Sara Chalmers made her début in almost any other theatre in the country she would have been announced in advance as a ‘leading society lady,’ who had decided to embrace the stage as a profession, and columns of advertising would have been secured through the medium of stories of her life and sketches of her personality. Mr. Daly uses no such methods of introducing his new people.
Keyword searches on women introduced in this manner rarely result in ongoing press coverage unless the producer specifically turned the performer into a star, such as can be seen with David Belasco and Mrs Leslie Carter, who notably turned professional decades after Potter.
Indeed, one of Daly’s Debutantes, Phoebe Russell, is indicative of the trends visible in the digitised newspaper archive, of societal resistance to the profession, and of how Potter’s agency and creation of celebrity was unusual for these women. Both performers debuted in New York in the fall of 1887; Potter in a show she arranged for herself and Russell as part of Daly’s company. Russell is pointedly compared to Potter midway through a long piece about the production:
In society circles in the Northwest this young lady occupies as prominent a position as Mrs. James Brown Potter does in New York, but, unlike Mrs. Potter, she intended to begin at the bottom of the ladder, with a firm determination to work her way up to the top.
The piece continues to describe her family and theatrical aspirations briefly, noting that ‘her wishes were opposed by her parents, whose objections were finally overcome on condition that she should appear only under Mr. Daly’s management.’ The relative quiet of her debut stands in stark contrast to Potter. After this, she appears as part of the company listing for shows occasionally, but there is none of the fanfare that Potter produced. Little other mention of Russell can be found, until an 1889 paragraph amid the New York Times’ regularly appearing ‘Theatrical Gossip’ column. Here, readers learn that Russell’s upcoming marriage to Norman Dodge ‘is now given as fully explaining her sudden desertion of the stage. It is said that Mr. Dodge never saw Miss Russell on the stage, and that he always had a strong objection to her adopting the profession.’ Sara Chalmers, another of Daly’s debutante performers, follows the same trend, including generally disappearing from already limited newspaper coverage a year after her debut while remaining an active part of the company at least through spring 1890.
Potter, by choosing to go professional outside of the burgeoning late-nineteenth-century training frameworks available to aspiring actors, needed recognition as an individual star. Her choice to go to London for a debut is telling; she could have simply joined an acting school or taken an entry-level position in an existing company in New York. Her family, however, would have balked at this decision, too, and they might have had more success pulling her back from the brink because she would have been residing with them. Potter’s choice might have been taken to ensure that her infamy would carry her through any potential disinheritance process. Her methods speak not just to her desire to skip the professional apprenticeship period (where perhaps her talents might have developed – or perhaps they would have prevented stardom), but also her willingness to transfer her societal celebrity into a commercial one that would ensure notoriety and thus, hopefully, success.
To do so, she needed to fashion a public identity as a performer and not just a socialite, though the latter became a clear component of her published narrative despite its constant inherent reference to her choice to leave her family and society. Given that at least some of the newspaper coverage came from the organisers and considering the sheer volume of coverage that exists from 1885 onwards, it is obvious that she intended to create a name for herself as an amateur performer. The breadth and depth of reporting in hundreds of articles across all of New York’s major newspapers makes it clear that she is not just another amateur doing charitable dramatic fundraisers solely for fun. Her initial choices are small and subtle; the 1885 headline ‘Noted Amateurs Playing: “The Russian Honeymoon” Produced by Mrs. Potter and Others’ is but one example of coverage that is out of alignment with amateur practices that would sometimes credit the playwright but rarely performers. The vast majority of amateur productions in the 1880s were staged by established dramatic societies or unnamed amateur groups; Mrs Brown Potter, however, appears as the publicised organiser and star of theatricals with regularity. Usual billings such as ‘theatricals by the Amateur Comedy Club’ or ‘theatricals by amateurs’ were far more common approaches to advertising, and the puffing of individuals usually occurred as part of a cast list. Through this rhetorical focus on the self, Potter is aligned with recognisable power brokers whose public activities are described the same way: organisers of balls and commercial theatre managers, rather than an average socialite or amateur practitioner. By the time she had left for Europe in 1887, the press had begun snidely remarking about her positioning: Town Topics mused about how ‘her company’ would fare without her and the World reminisced that their shows had had ‘Mrs. James Brown Potter as the leading lady, and have been what may be called “star” performances, comparatively little attention having been paid to the company.”
By 1886, Potter had begun to lay the groundwork for her professional career by making certain that news of her amateur acting appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide, presumably relying in part upon the press’s tendency to use ‘a kid-glove treatment’ of society members to cover calculated scandals, such as the day when she performed racy material in front of Washington politicos.33 On 19 February 1886, Potter performed ‘’Ostler Joe’, George Sims’s poem about a stage-struck woman who leaves her husband and goes to London, at Mrs William Whitney’s house in Washington D.C., causing much scandalous talk up and down the east coast: ‘Her proceedings […] have been the nine days’ wonder and gossip.’34 Although a fair amount of coverage was directed at the hypocrisy shown in the public reaction to the piece, Potter was roundly criticised and her behaviour ‘raised universal condemnation about the town and distressed and deeply embarrassed every man and woman in the chosen audience that had to listen to those indecent verses’.35The Washington Post, while quick to note that its city’s society was more decorous and moral than New York’s, still felt a need to echo other newspapers and defend Potter’s reputation while noting that the poem was perhaps not the wisest selection to perform:
A lady of irreproachable character and unquestioned position rises in her private capacity as a clever amateur and delivers a recitation in the house of her friend, of which the worst that could be said is on the score of taste.
Potter, by associating with the highest levels of society, had constructed a protective wall of reputation that shielded her while she remained an amateur and yet simultaneously enabled her to obtain wider public recognition. The New York Times argued that ‘the sensational incident gave great activity to the sales of tickets’ for her amateur production of A Russian Honeymoon in D.C.37 Clearly, her stratagem had worked.
With the benefit of hindsight, in 1890 Alan Dale suspected ulterior motives in Potter’s choice of poem and location, believing that she was building a public name:
Then came the grand coup-d-état in ‘Os’ler Joe,’ which so shocked sweet ingenuous Washington society. It brought Mrs. Potter more prominently before the public than anything she had previously done. It was Bismarckian. It was consummate. A cleverer stroke could never have been made. Nobody but a keen student of American foibles could have done so much.38
The performance seems to have been a calculated choice made by a woman who, as a guest of a Cabinet Secretary’s wife, had access to the top layer of Washington society, including President and Mrs Cleveland. This event also conveniently preceded her Washington amateur stage debut by a week, and ‘the sensational incident gave great activity to the sales of the tickets’.39 In less than a month, papers across the country published reports of her behaviour and rumours that she might turn professional against her family’s wishes.
Herein, Potter began to build the groundwork for celebrity, by expanding the public’s access to her private life through sharing her experiences and opinions about gender and performance. Using her proven ability to fashion an image, she followed up the ‘’Ostler Joe’ incident and a busy season of charity theatricals with a May 1886 publication of ‘My Experiences as an Amateur Elocutionist’ in Lippincott’s Magazine. She notes that she is ‘that hybrid creature an amateur who appears in public’, and she discusses the differences between amateur and professional audiences in an almost defensive tone. She asks whether anyone should be surprised ‘that our audiences are of a dyspeptic turn by the time we face them’, as if explaining the reaction of her ‘’Ostler Joe’ audience. After discussing her childhood failures, Potter returns to the fact that ‘[e]very audience must be won over’. While repeatedly stating that she is ‘only a beginner’, she gives thanks to ‘theatrical managers and professionals’, including David Belasco, who assisted her along the way. This continual revelation of her closeness to the professional stage and her positioning as an innocent amateur culminates in an acknowledgement that ‘much misconception and much that is annoying’ has almost convinced her at times to quit the amateur stage, but that her desires to perform overwhelms her, and ‘these things in our natures are perhaps a little stronger than we are.’ This proclamation of the strength of her desires is followed by a pointed comment that ‘it is impossible for [an amateur] to acquire the stage-ease that the habit of appearing in front of the footlights gives a professional’. The constant back-and-forth and veiled commentary are, in retrospect, revealing of her desire to turn professional and her understanding that she cannot possibly do more than hint at such a choice just yet. The need to maintain propriety while building her reputation was key to her eventual transfer of her celebrity to her professional career.
Yet, her willing participation in the press already rendered her character suspect and warranted notice in publications as far removed from New York society as the Galveston Daily News:
There is an actress who, notwithstanding she is an amateur, is not in the least outraged by free discussion in print. Mrs. James Brown Potter enjoys the breeze which her breath blew up when she recited ’Ostler Joe in Washington quite as thoroughly as the Potter family deprecate the publicity. Mark this prophesy: She will be on the professional stage within a year. She has the symptoms too acutely for cure.
While the anonymous author did diagnose the condition correctly, Potter continued to deny the rumours.
By July 1886, her family and society friends seemed most upset about her choice to allow her image to be reproduced and sold, after she had already departed for London, leaving behind her husband and child. Clearly, this overt image marketing had crossed a line. In her memoir, Rita Lawrence, a friend and devotee of Potter, quotes an uncited news clipping in Potter’s scrapbook that reveals tension between Mr Brown Potter and his wife about her marketing her beauty:
By Saturday night it was the talk that Mrs. Potter would not act any more at all in public, in fulfillment of her husband’s expressed wish. It was also said that Mr. Potter’s interdiction was caused by Mrs. Potter’s portrait in lithograph form, having been largely circulated on Friday after the manner of advertising professional actresses.
Potter clearly knew that getting her image out in public would help her to achieve enough national and international fame to draw an audience; yet publicly, she remained appropriately indignant about the innocence of her actions. While the sale of actors’ photographs had become common, the New York Times clearly made it seem like Potter was one of the first American women, other than a handful married to British aristocrats, who had made her likeness available for sale in the US. She was following ‘the example set by Mrs. [Grover] Cleveland in allowing her photographs to be publicly sold’, though it appears Potter’s went on sale merely a week after the former first lady’s. Again, she seems to have carefully made movements towards establishing her own celebrity while still able to claim that she was merely participating in a new fad, and one sanctioned by Mrs Cleveland.
Later the same month, the rumours about her potential professional career started to be shared publicly by those other than musing journalists. In response, she wrote a letter to a friend in New York, requesting assistance maintaining her reputation.
If Mrs. Paran Stevens [with whom Potter had been staying in London] abuses me defend me. She is so coarse & used such fearful language that no one could stand her. I think she is mad it is the most charitable construction to put on her conduct. She says she is not going to leave me a particle of reputation in 2 hemispheres. She says I am going on the stage. Please say every where I have no such intentions.
The story of their argument appeared in the New York Times on 15 August, and her name appeared to be protected by her reputation as it had during the initial ‘’Ostler Joe’ incident. Blame for the conflict was laid upon two warring chaperones, but the dispute became a reference point for society gossips for the next months, punctuated by continual rumours about her turning professional.
October 1886 finds Potter granting a wide-ranging interview with the World, wherein she is doing pointed advanced publicity while the interviewer asks after the most recent scandals and rumours. Her answers seem strategic in retrospect: a brief discussion of her health, international travels, and connections to heads of state ground her status. She then slides from being busy with travel to being busy pulling together a book of recitations that soon will be published. Next comes the first of a handful of overt references to how she needs to please: ‘An audience grows restless if you do not talk to them of people, of human life, of something besides landscapes and metaphysics. An audience demands from a reciter a story of every-day existence…’ The interviewer brings up the ‘’Ostler Joe’ scandal, and she acknowledges that the piece will be in the book and deftly moves on to the other selections, including discussions of English wherein she offers an out of place aside that she thinks it ‘surprising’ that the English respond better to her elocution than ‘do my own countrymen’. She later mentions having ‘a very elastic temperament’ and claims to have no plans for the coming season. Asked about the rumours that she is ‘going on the stage’, she replies that ‘I am in receipt continually of large offers from managers, but, as I said before, I have no plans for the future aside from my few months’ study in Paris.’ Read with hindsight, it is not difficult to see that these comments, offered amid meandering answers full of name-dropping, were placed intentionally. She is purportedly selling an anthology, and yet she is pedalling a vision of herself as worldly, connected, and desired by managers.
Potter’s next strategic move came with the November 1886 publication of a book entitled My Recitations, which promoted the idea of Potter as elocutionist and reader and pointedly not as an actress, perhaps as an attempt to hedge against possible failure. During this time she seems to have been quietly pursuing her professional goals in London by cultivating relationships and performing in charity theatricals. Society women were publishing similar anthologies at this time, and so even though the book contained the contentious ‘Ostler Joe’ poem, the book’s publication appears to have been deemed appropriate, if not simply unworthy of criticism. The society columns discussed it in passing, but there were no outcries like that in the 28 November report that she had ‘given society another shock by appending her name to an advertisement of complexion balm’. These manoeuvres all served to establish Potter in the public mind and, as can be seen with the balm, to push boundaries, all to better enable her to attract audiences and support her future career. By claiming that she was following the leads of other unimpeachable society women, Potter would build sympathy in advance of the inevitable day when she was thoroughly attacked for actually turning professional.
Her debut tour also speaks to the complexity of the relationship between theatre and audience at the end of the nineteenth century. What this era provides, and what Potter and the press both capitalise upon, are the intersections between those varied reasons for attending theatre (schadenfreude, community, finding a date, etc.), syndicated news, improved transportation infrastructure, and the accordant rise of the star-based touring company in the United States. Instead of reaching only New York audiences who were familiar with her name through the society columns, Potter ensured, through her ‘Ostler Joe’ performance, columns, images, book, and debut in London, that her name would appear in multiple sections of the paper and her story would be picked up internationally. Her fame preceded her tour, and while this was certainly not unusual in the age of touring companies, she needed her storied past and scandalous stage debut in order to establish her name as a performer who could pull audiences nationwide. The press was vital for her quest to introduce herself to the country and enter the production frameworks that would support her career.
Further, without a stage apprenticeship, she would be reliant upon theatre placements by managers who could provide access; but without press confirmation that she was a viable commercial investment, the managers would not have been interested. And indeed, in the months between her argument with Paran Stevens and her professional debut, the papers reported and recanted stories that Potter had signed with Henry Irving, Augustin Daly, Henry Abbey, Charles Chizzola, and other unnamed managers for varying sums of money. As yet, the archival evidence does not tell us whether those managers were actually interested in signing her, had jumped on the bandwagon for their own publicity, or if their supposed interest was created by the press or by Potter to keep the story alive. Eventually, she signed with Henry Clay Miner and teamed up with Kyrle Bellew, a well-known British actor, for her New York debut.
Accordingly, while she spent months in London without her husband and baby daughter, her name and theatrical leanings continued to appear in the New York papers with as much regularity as it had when she had been living there. For Miner, who would be her manager for the New York debut, the press was instrumental not simply in selling tickets, but in selling them for a substantial fee through a gimmicky auction to a wealthy audience of Potter’s former social acquaintances. Press coverage in this period reflected the interests of the various constituencies that were benefitting from her celebrity and addressed her private dispute with Paran Stevens, her contractual agreements as a professional, her scandalous private choice to leave her husband and child, her impending debut, and her ongoing regular social behaviours such as ball attendance.
Throughout, the press remarked upon the propriety of her choices, including in a spate of articles in the winter of 1886 and 1887 that reveal familial battles for her future and reputation and contain much speculation about the propriety of a stage career for a millionaire’s wife. Reports made much of a failed visit to London by her father and husband before her March 1887 professional debut at the Haymarket; they had hopes of dissuading Potter, but they and the rest of her family, friends, and society acquaintances were unsuccessful in deterring her. Readers could follow the family’s attempts to bring Mrs James Brown Potter back from London, relishing in learning that she was ‘estranged from her husband’s family and that her failure as an actress in London is rather pleasing than otherwise to them. Their silence is perfect, but they will not deny that such is the case.’ Potter, meanwhile, continued to talk to the press to increase her celebrity appeal, in defiance of propriety and in stark contrast to her husband, her father, and the extended family. She noted in April 1887 that
I am heartbroken at the way things have gone. I have been the victim of the [cruelest], most unjust, and most unfounded gossip. But I am not going to turn back. … as soon as I can get one I am going to have a play of my own; and I’m going to America and let my own countrymen see me and judge for themselves.
It is difficult to know if her hurt and defiance here were real or calculated. Was she playing on sympathies to encourage audiences to see her as a woman wounded by institutions of family and society? Or was the difficulty of breaking into the profession and the ensuing estrangement from her family causing sufficient pain that she chose to speak about it publicly? Regardless, the press continued to feed just as she continued to manipulate her image; both worked to ensure that ‘[a]s the time draws near for the first [professional] appearance of the New York amateur any personal lack of sympathy is gradually verging into local and national interest, and it is generally hoped that she will make a success.’
While the press was offering substantial commentary on the scandal, James Brown Potter’s family, well-respected and well-entrenched in the Northeast, kept largely quiet and offered few direct quotes to the papers. Whether it was communicating to Cora Potter through the press indirectly or whether the press was manipulating the situation remains unclear. For instance, a cable from London to the New York World after her London debut claimed to be unable to offer a direct quote from the husband, but noted:
He is very silent as to his wife’s debut, and is by no means anxious for her to be on the stage. […] He fears that the critics are opposed to society ladies usurping the places of actresses of experience, and Mrs. Potter shares his impression on the subject. He would be rather pleased in his heart of hearts if the press advised her to continue to grace the salon rather than the stage.
Regardless of its authenticity, such familial communication through the press continued throughout the next few years, although their hopes that ‘her failure will cure her’ did not come to fruition. Indeed, as early as the summer of 1887, ‘it was reported that she was being paid £100 a week and, as a consequence of her London debut, no longer relied upon her husband for support.’ While her first few years in the profession were a financial roller coaster, by 1889 the press assessed her marriage in hopeless terms: ‘she no longer needs him to stand by her. She has money of her own and can do without him, and all possibility of her abandoning her career and returning to him is at an end.’ Still, the desire for class-appropriate decorum kept the Potter family from revealing too much in the papers; cables that were sent between Cora and James during her time in London were not released to the press until he sued for divorce, claiming ‘willful desertion’ in 1900. Thirteen years after her debut, the details of the divorce proceedings that revealed these contentious letters from 1887 were front-page news.
Thus, Potter’s entry into the profession was marked by scandal, albeit scandal that she had spent more than a year fostering. Her first professional performance was in Man and Wife at the Haymarket in London in March 1887. The choice to debut abroad, while feted by the Prince of Wales and away from her husband and child, enabled her months-long out-of-country tryout to remain regularly in the press on both sides of the Atlantic while simultaneously out of reach of her husband’s family and society’s potential opprobrium. The distance also enabled her to control her professional presentation of self, to an extent, and to ensure anticipation for her eventual debut and tour in the US. Dale argued that even though Potter claimed that she made her debut in England for practice, she ‘knew that Anglomania raged in her own country. Her appearance at the Haymarket Theatre was calculated to give additional prestige to her New York debut.’
The London debut did not go well. But, while she did not succeed on the stage, her questionable talent fed the news cycles. The overwhelming tenor of the press soon shifted from ‘should she act’ and ‘can her husband bring her home’ to ‘can she act’, although critiques of her personal life continued. The US press coverage of her London debut and British tour contained pre-emptive strikes against her reportedly poor acting and miserable role selection. Syndicated articles appeared across the US with titles such as ‘Mrs. Potter’s Acting Improved’ and comments such as ‘Mrs. James Brown Potter is rapidly converting the critics in her favor, and her ability becoming recognized, she is now admitted to be rising to the status of a great artist.’ These newspapers picked up the story of her career, presumably feeding a desire for salacious gossip at the expense of the elite, the celebrity, and the fallen woman.
In part, Potter was chastised for expecting that her amateur talents would carry her on the professional stage and for interviews where she appeared to be a patronising wealthy woman who was merely dabbling in theatre for fun; the critiques harboured an implicit condemnation of her attempt to fashion a professional celebrity out of her amateur status, as well. A Herald interview that revealed her supposed desire to ‘elevate’ the stage by her mere presence led the New York Mirror to query: ‘Does Mrs. Potter suppose that the accession to the stage of a very pretty and superbly advertised society amateur will in any measure “elevate” either the artistic or social plane of the stage?’ Indeed, the Mirror argued, her choice to engage in such a blizzard of calculated self-promotion rendered her ‘unfitted to add one jot or tittle [to] the dignity of the calling she proposes to embrace’. Perhaps reflecting the depth of her social connections and a greater British acceptance of her choice, a volley of articles countering these themes appeared following her debut, containing quips from famous theatrical professionals who assessed her likelihood of success and wherein the Prince of Wales also offered his predictions of her future successes.
The New York Times, however, generally offered more balance, as seen in its edition of 14 August 1887. Potter’s London struggles and impending US tour are discussed in three separate places. As a professional, her exploits were financially relevant to her competition and of interest to theatre followers, and thus a short blurb about her latest production appears amid the ‘Notes of the Week’ column. As with most news stories in 1887, it addresses her acting difficulties, remarking that ‘Mrs. Potter’s part was an unusually trying one, but it was more suited to her and showed her to greater advantage than any of her previous roles.’ This piece was picked up and reprinted across the country. Potter was, now, a professional actor whose coverage had made it into the syndicated theatrical news.
Gallery of Players from the Illustrated American, 1894
More peculiar is the interplay on page 12 between the ‘Society Topics’ column and the ‘Drop-Curtain Monographs’ article. Nearly half of the latter is devoted to her story. It contains a six-paragraph discussion of her future plans, expected New York debut date, contract and theatre rental negotiations, which is a confusing read; it seems that another paper reported that John Stetson, manager of the Fifth Avenue Theater where Potter was to debut in New York, saw Potter in England, and then refused to lease her the theatre. The New York Times writer, however, reports having seen proof of the negotiation and that all is well with the lease. The article appears to protect Potter’s reputation. Amid the business details, there sits a lengthy warning against pre-judging her, comparing her early failures to those of the now-beloved and respected Lily Langtry, and exhorting readers to remember their national pride while continuing the now international discussion of her acting talents, or lack thereof:
It is too early in the year to say that Mrs. Potter is an actress. It is too early, also, for almost any one on this side of the Atlantic to say whether or not she will ever become one. But it will always be timely to remark that she is an American. As such, she deserves respectful consideration at the hands of Americans until they have had an opportunity to determine whether as an actress she is to their liking or not.
Ironically, the Times is taking a page from the World’s playbook and appealing to nationalist sentiment to sell papers, all the while implying its supremacy over the sensationalist press.
The newspaper’s assumed role as scandal-squasher and perhaps inadvertent reputation protector is continued in the ‘Society Topics of the Week’ column. It gives a short, detailed discussion of Potter’s personal and professional life, beginning with yet another fact-based contradiction of false scandalous reporting by ‘an obscure weekly publication’ claiming that Mr and Mrs James Brown Potter were separating. The column goes on to address her acting, reflecting the endless blending of personal and public life choices that pervaded these newly intrusive society columns and haunted Potter throughout her entire career. Rather than singing her praises, however, it contains frank concerns about her talent:
She has ceased to be a card in London in any way, but this is due, say New-Yorkers who have lately returned from London, to the fact that public curiosity there regarding her has died out, and her poor success at first did not hold the public attention for her as an actress. She has improved greatly, say these same friends, but is still far from perfection.
Here, the Times seems less concerned with protecting Potter’s reputation and more interested in using her story and the associated international scandal to solidify its role as a credible newspaper. Yet, the same acting difficulties that were driving away London audiences were allowing her to build anticipation for her New York debut, thereby keeping her in the papers.
The World, by contrast, seemingly had no issue going after Potter’s choices in whatever way might sell papers. Homberger notes that Pulitzer’s ‘passion for social justice and scorn for the irresponsible rich gave the World an abiding interest in covering the activities of the city’s social elite’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the paper’s coverage of Potter’s debut seemed designed to sell the scandal. Compared to the largely factual reporting of the Times, the World gleefully comments upon any peculiarity that Potter offered, from her refusal to engage in star-appropriate behaviour upon arrival home to Miner’s ticket auction scheme, which it predicted would ‘doubtless be some interesting bidding’. Two days before her debut, the paper advertised an upcoming Sunday discussion of Potter on the same page that they reported Dockstader’s would be running a minstrel burlesque piece about Potter entitled ‘Mlle. de Brass Ear’, a play on her second London production and upcoming New York debut production of Alfred Delpit’s Mademoiselle de Bressier. On 1 November 1887, the Dockstader’s ad appeared directly below Potter’s, with Mrs Potter and Mrs Blotter vying for attention in the column. A full piece later in the month is devoted to whether or not Potter would kiss her on-stage paramours; she had been refusing to do so, an illogical acting choice which audiences noticed: ‘Comment on that point buzzed all over the house.’ The piece can be read as a critique of Potter’s attempts to have a professional career and maintain some semblance of societal propriety.
The 31 October 1887 New York City debut proved a gala affair with a sold-out house where ‘over $12,000 had been paid for seats’, and the press coverage enabled numerous New York performers, critics, and society members to weigh in on the performance. An enormous spread in the New York Times confirmed Potter’s celebrity value as front-page news. The piece largely continued the paper’s couched defence of Potter while continuing to frame her as a society member and performer: ‘She stepped upon the stage at the Fifth-Avenue Theatre last night a full-fledged actress before a mighty assemblage representing that fashionable society of which she has been a leader.’ The verb tense is telling, for while the piece goes on to discuss her need to continue to practice her art and contains a detailed assessment of her acting, it pointedly tells the world that as a professional actress Potter can no longer retain her position in society.
Potter’s New York debut garnered more positive reviews than her London performance and was a financial success due in part to society-wide schadenfreude, but the debut was damning to her social life and reputation. Mrs Astor, that arbiter of social acceptance in New York, attended the debut performance, but no longer admitted Potter in her circle of friends. Thereafter Potter would tour infrequently in the States and resided largely in Europe until her death, in part because society would not take her back. Even her husband, who left London before her debut there, apparently ‘left his sick room at the Breevort House to attend his wife’s [New York] debut […] accompanied by his physician’. With intrusive detail, the World’s gossip column attributed his illness to ‘an internal abscess, caused by excessive exercise at tennis’.
The mixed nature of the New York theatrical reviews was repeated as she toured through the country. The papers fed on her story, constantly referring to her upbringing and past social standing. Typically, in Boston she drew an audience ‘composed of society people quite largely, who were in sympathy with Mrs. Potter socially, at least, and she found herself a congenial element … Her acting, however … was of little depth and indicated amateur crudeness.’ Even a piece about the costumes for the American tour pointedly refers to her parlour skills and poise. Her New Orleans stop was reported nationwide as ‘a brilliant social success in New Orleans, the home of her girlhood, but professionally her reception was sort of a cold wave’. Indeed, her hometown’s The Daily Picayune elaborated on the major issues facing Potter and offered an explanation for the crowds attending her productions:
A society wife cannot go on the stage and retain her place in society. The moral atmosphere of the stage is not necessarily any worse than that of society, but the traditional chasm between the two has not yet been quite filled up or bridged over. […] When she comes back to her native land, it will be as a sensation. All classes, including her late associates, will throng to see her. Whether she acts well or ill, she is certain of financial success. Human nature will give her that.
Thus the questions of ‘should she act’, ‘can her husband bring her back into the fold’, and ‘can she act’ were joined by ‘will a theatre-going public support her or are her houses simply full of people who just want to see what all the fuss is about?’ Given that the longevity of her career appears to have been based more on reinvention and novelty than on talent, it perhaps makes sense that she and the press developed a symbiotic relationship.
Potter continued to make calculated choices to keep herself present in these theatre columns, perhaps knowing that her past secured her a place in the society news. As a theatrical professional, she granted interviews, printed postcards, and a hundred thousand photographs to sell Recamier Cream and Balm, and engaged in a debate with other public figures about these products. One wonders if her string of poorly chosen roles was part of this calculation to remain in the headlines. As a new professional actor and novelty act, she made certain that she was seen to be participating in the usual professional charitable activities, such as spending $100 to attend Lily Langtry’s benefit for the Actor’s Fund days before her debut. Even as the newspapers continued to sell her scandal, Potter was using the press to capitalise on her society past while forging her future as a theatre professional.
In the end, Potter’s gamble to turn her amateur celebrity into a professional reputation born of scandalous blurring of societal lines worked. By 1906, divorced from her husband, still working professionally if reinventing her career again after the failure at the Savoy, she was approached by the new Mrs James Brown Potter, who wanted her predecessor to stop performing under her married name. The family argued, as they had in 1887, that Cora was bringing shame upon the family. Her lawyer responded that ‘her name … brings her in an income upon which she lives; and why, without a well-arranged business proposition, should she relinquish her name in order to enhance the social position of the lady who is now the second wife of her former husband?’ Social and professional celebrity collided again, with Potter arguing that the name that served to link her to career and to her past as a member of New York’s elite society was now worth $250,000.
Cora Urquhart Potter was able to transition from the amateur to the professional stage at this time because of concurrent changes in the theatre industry and the press. The expansion of the sensational press gave her a venue in which to sell her story and her celebrity, as an amateur and later as a professional. Her agency was built on her generation’s pointed manipulation of gendered social roles that enabled them to start performing publicly as charitable fundraisers. The press provided coverage of those amateur theatricals, and the rising interest in celebrity assured a reading audience wherein Potter could build familiarity and acceptance. While she faced significant familial outrage and the social proscription against women of her standing working in the commercial theatre, she clearly drew an enormous audience, perhaps due to the sensationalism of the scandal as well as her social status. Potter’s career coincided with the sensationalist press’s need to sell stories and papers. Symbiotically, the two exploited each other for decades, starting with her decision to shun societal expectations, turn professional, and thereby create the profitable narrative that would follow her on newspaper pages right through to her obituary.
