I took the train to Philadelphia from New York to see the museum, especially the specimens of Booth and Guiteau, and to talk to the museum’s director, Gretchen Worden. Dressed in a smart black suit, she’s more glamorous than I expected. She reminds me of Ava Gardner, if Ava Gardner happened to keep a book on her desk about the history of diabetes as illustrated in international postage stamps.
We had scheduled our meeting on the only day in October both of us were free. It wasn’t until I had boarded the train and opened the newspaper that I fully comprehended the date, October 31. I was going to a musty old house of skulls and things floating in jars on Halloween. So I asked Worden if every day is Halloween at the museum.
“No, no day is Halloween here. I always say it’s really about All Saint’s Day. It’s really about tomorrow, about when we give thanks to those people who have died before and for everything that they have done for us. And in this case, it’s people whose bodies or body parts are here in the museum who have made possible the education of physicians, whether it’s a willing or unwitting contribution. That I think is a way we ought to look at the collections and not just think of it as all spooky and weird. It has nothing to do with spooky and weird. It really does make people think we’re macabre, and I keep saying, ‘We’re not about death, we’re about life.’ We’re about what was necessary to teach a physician how to keep someone alive.”
“Maybe for you then every day is Memorial Day?”
“Yes.”
I ask how the museum came into possession of its Booth specimen.
“All we know is the information we have on the label,” Worden answers. “It says, ‘Sent by a messenger of the Surgeon General.’ The surgeon general at the time was Joseph K. Barnes. The only information on it was this old label that said, ‘Piece of the thorax of John Wilkes Booth.’ And for years we had no reason to question it because we never did any research into it. And it was only when I was finally trying to figure out what piece that was that I realized they didn’t do but a routine autopsy on him. So there’s no way it could come from the thorax.”
She continues, “For years, because of the political associations with Booth, his specimens were hidden away in a tin in a drawer until the curator found it.”
“When was it found?”
“Maybe in the thirties or forties. By then, the feelings had changed. There was not that sense of immediate revulsion against John Wilkes Booth that there had been in 1865. So they put out an exhibit. And I have it right now up in my presidential assassination part of the presidential health exhibit. We used to have it downstairs where the mega colon is. I had Chief Justice Marshall’s bladder stones in one half of a case and I had John Wilkes in the other. It was simply as a historical specimen of interest because of the association. I didn’t tie it in to the whole story as we do up there now. The reason why? One, it’s really an interesting thing just to look at something and think, ‘Oh, there’s a piece of John Wilkes.’ And the other is that potentially all of this material is valuable whether it’s an anonymous ovarian cyst or a piece of John Wilkes, for the information we might be able to get from it should we choose to go and do DNA testing.”
This is especially true for the Garfield assassin Guiteau’s brain. “It was suggested at one point that he might be suffering from neurosyphilis,” she says. “At the time they really didn’t have good ways of examining tissue, or proving it. We now do. Having the tissue allows you to go back in and ask new questions of old specimens.”
I mention that I was disappointed that the Mütter’s Booth and Guiteau specimens don’t show up on FindAGrave.com. Worden has never heard of my favorite Web site. A database listing the names, brief biographies, and burial locations of more than twenty thousand historical figures, one of its curious features is that, usually, if a dead person’s body parts are buried in more than one location, all known locations are given. For example, Abraham Lincoln’s page of course cites his Springfield tomb, but it also points the reader to Lincoln’s skull fragments on display at Washington’s National Museum of Health and Medicine.
While I was telling her all that, Worden has wheeled over to her computer and called up the site. Seeing the space to type in a subject’s first and last name she types in “John Brown,” explaining that she had just returned from Harper’s Ferry.
“Me too,” I say, launching into my theory about John Wilkes Booth crouching in the pine thicket after the Lincoln assassination, mortified that the papers are calling him an evil lunatic, when he thought he was going to be praised and worshiped like the abolitionists’ favorite murderer, John Brown.
She sighs, murmuring, “I really feel sorry for John Wilkes.”
“You do?”
“After reading his account of being hunted by dogs, of being so surprised by the reaction to what he had done. Plus, he’s so cute.”
“Really cute,” I agree.
“He was a sorry figure. He just didn’t get the big picture. God knows he was not the only one that would have shot Lincoln.”
That’s true.
“See,” she continues. “We’ve made a myth out of Lincoln. So people are very surprised to find out that anyone could hate this saint, and you look back at the time and John was just one of many. Though the fact is, he just made some really, really bad decisions.”
“Yeah,” I laugh.
Booth’s, she says, “was not a happy death. It was certainly a slower one. At least he was awake while he was dying.”
I gingerly pose a personal question, informing her she doesn’t have to answer it if she doesn’t want to, but I’m curious about how working here — and she has worked at the Mütter Museum for nearly thirty years — has affected the way she thinks about her own death and what will happen to her body after she dies.
“I’m still debating,” she says, delighted to be asked, “how I want my body to be preserved in the museum.”
Stupidly, I think I had meant did she want to be buried or cremated. “In the museum?” I repeat.
“Oh, absolutely. That’s traditional. A lot of the curators end up as part of their collections. You know Jeremy Bentham?”
Can’t say I do.
“Eighteenth-century Englishman. He was associated with the University of London. He had his body mummified with the stipulation in his will that he shall attend all of the annual meetings. So they keep his body in the closet and then they have to wheel him out.”
“Still?”
“Yes, they do it. I mean now his face is missing; it’s modeled in wax, but it’s still this skeleton with clothes on it. It’s very cool. There are others. Loren Eiseley, the great scientist, donated himself to the University of Pennsylvania, but he didn’t want to be the ‘skeleton of Loren Eiseley.’ He wanted to be just one in the anatomical collections that the students would use routinely for studying — very modest man. But now there are so many more possibilities: freeze-drying, which makes you pretty light” — pretty crunchy too I think, remembering the freeze-dried strawberries I had sprinkled on my breakfast yogurt — “or plastination; more flexibility. It’s always fun joking about it, but basically the coolest thing would be to have some sort of ironclad will where I have to attend every senior staff meeting to eternity and where I have a permanent display just to make myself as big a pain in the neck to every future curator. If I apply the same criteria to myself that I apply to other people who want to donate their bodies or parts, I really have to come up with something that’s going to be educational, whether it’s pathology or an interest in anatomy, and I don’t know that I can justify my obsession.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You might get some really rare disease.”
“I’m working on it. It would be nice to be part of this place. It’s already gotten my blood, tears, and sweat.”
“Might as well get the rest of you?”
“Yeah.”
I mention that I used to go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and that the museum’s collection includ
es John the Baptist’s tooth. The tooth is housed in a reliquary. And though that reliquary was prettier and more elaborate than the simple, scientific glass jars housing the chips off Messrs. Booth and Guiteau, the effect of looking at the objects was the same. What, I ask, is the difference between a relic and a specimen?
“It depends on the specimen,” she says. “We do have some pieces of famous people, but the other specimens are simply important because they are demonstrating a particular pathology or anatomy that we want to show. So it varies. But the importance of the relic, the importance of the little sacred icon, is a sense of connection to the past. To look on a tooth, look at George Washington’s teeth, to look at instruments that were actually handled by Joseph Lister, there’s power in there.
“I still have some of my mother’s clothes, you know, for no other reason than I can’t bear to part with them. Because it’s her favorite sweater, stuff like that. Because of the fact that it was an immediate contact with somebody it just brings up memories. It’s also interesting. If you want to know that Joseph Lister used this particular instrument and we have a set, that provides you more information about his practice of medicine, etc. But often it’s simply the almost sentimental association of the fact that this is a piece of a great man. It’s the same thing as a piece of the true cross.”
The way she lumps in Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic surgery, with her mother makes me wonder if she thinks of the specimens in the museum as her friends.
“No,” she grins. “They’re like my bosses.”
Back home in New York, I’m always bumping into John Wilkes Booth’s big brother, Edwin. I see Edwin’s statue almost every day. He’s so familiar and homey I would almost consider him my mascot but for the fact that he’s fenced off in Gramercy Park and I am one of the 7,999,900 New Yorkers who do not have a key. It’s the only private park in New York, and to get in, you either have to live in one of the lovely brick and brownstone buildings on the park’s perimeter or you have to play bass guitar in one of the bands that are always staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel.
The neighborhood of Gramercy Park, where Edwin used to live, was built to look like London, which is to say that its considerable beauty is skin deep while its heart beats with the ugliness of monarchy. And at its very center, inside the gates keeping out the riffraff that is all New York, stands the statue of the sad and fancy Edwin Booth, dressed as Hamlet, his signature role.
I like Edwin. I’m fond of Shakespeare too, but mostly because of the way I grew up watching his plays — sitting in the Montana dirt. In my home state, there was Shakespeare every summer put on by a heroic organization called Shakespeare in the Parks — parks, by the way, with no fences around them, parks a citizen can walk in and out of any damn time she wants.
I live six blocks down Twenty-first Street from Gramercy Park and even though I walk by it every other day, I have been inside it precisely once, when my friend Nick, a Londoner, came to town and stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel. How fitting that I cannot enter a park on my street without the escort of a subject of the British crown.
Nick gets the hotel’s bellman to unlock the gate for us. Then the bellman asks how long we would like to stay. Why does he care? Because he has to know when to come back and un lock the gate. Unbelievable.
Nick seems to like the park, but then he likes anyplace in America where he can smoke. We mosey toward Edwin’s behind. A life-size bronze in Elizabethan garb, his head’s bowed, as if he’s about to ask Hamlet’s that-is-the-question question. Like the Prince of Denmark, Edwin could have come up with at least three reasons not to be. For starters, little brother going down in history as the president’s killer was a cringing, galling shame. Before that, as a boy on the road with his drunken actor father, Junius Brutus Booth, when Edwin finally chose his own stage career over being Junius’s babysitter, the elder Booth only lasted a few days without him, drinking rancid river water and dying, sick, on the Mississippi. Though it’s hard to blame a kid for wanting more out of life than holding back his father’s hair every night as he vomited up his Shakespearean pay, Edwin felt responsible for Junius’s demise. Not that this guilt kept Edwin off the bottle. When Mary, his first and favorite wife, was lying on her deathbed in Boston, Edwin was in New York, too smashed to make the last train north. She was dead when he got there. He kicked himself for the rest of his life.
“So who was he?” Nick asks, pointing at Edwin’s statue.
“Only the greatest Shakespearean actor of the nineteenth century.”
Says the English accent, “You mean, in America?”
Whatever. I let that slide. I’ve been dying to get inside this park for years, but eventually, I’m going to need Nick and his bellman to get me out.
I tell him how Edwin was known as the Hamlet of his day; how his father, Junius Brutus was the greatest Shakespearean actor in England, until 1821, when he emigrated to Maryland, at which point he became the greatest Shakespearean actor in America; how three of Junius’s children became actors themselves — Edwin, John Wilkes, and Junius Brutus Jr.; how the three brothers appeared onstage together only once, in Julius Caesar here in New York in 1864 as a benefit performance for the Shakespeare statue in Central Park; how their performance was interrupted because that was the night that Confederate terrorists set fires in hotels up and down Broadway and Edwin, who was playing Brutus, interrupted the play to reassure the audience; how the next morning Edwin informed John at breakfast that he had voted for Lincoln’s reelection and they got into one of the arguments they were always having about North versus South; how Edwin retired from acting out of shame when he heard his brother was the president’s assassin, but that nine months later, broke, he returned to the stage here in New York, as Hamlet, to a standing ovation; how he bought the house on Gramercy Park South and turned it into the Players Club, a social club for his fellow thespians and others, including Mark Twain and General Sherman; how he built his own theater, the Booth, on Twenty-third and Sixth, where Sarah Bernhardt made her American debut; and how, in the middle of the Civil War, on a train platform in Jersey City, he rescued a young man who had fallen onto the tracks and that man was Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son, so he’s the Booth who saved a Lincoln’s life.
It is remarkable that Edwin earned back the public’s affection after his brother had committed such a crime. It says something about his talent and his poise that he could pull this off. I have a recording of Edwin, performing Othello, from an 1890 wax cylinder. It sounds like a voice from the grave, so thick with static the only phrase I can understand is “little shall I.” Though I cannot make out most of the words, something of Edwin’s gentleness comes across, a kind of wispy melancholy I can imagine inspiring more sympathy than scorn.
Perhaps this is the approach Dr. Mudd’s grandson Richard should have taken. Instead of spending his very long life pestering state legislatures to pass resolutions recognizing his grandfather’s innocence, if he really wanted to get the country behind his family name, he should have recorded a hit song or come up with a dance craze or something.
In Bel Air, the Booths’ hometown in Maryland, Edwin is a local hero. The Edwin Booth Memorial Fountain stands in front of the courthouse, next to a sign announcing that Edwin made his theatrical debut in the building. A WPA mural in the post office depicts the scene: a gangly teenager in tails leans pompously toward the assembled audience, half of whom have their heads in their hands they look so bored. A roadside historical marker at Tudor Hall reads, “The home of the noted actor Junius Brutus Booth, the Elder. Birthplace of his children. His son Edwin Booth was born here November 13, 1833.” That’s the whole sign. No mention of John Wilkes unless you count that cryptic reference to “his children.”
Edwin’s Players Club still exists in Gramercy Park. It remains the club Edwin envisioned, a fancy place for actors and their friends to get together. Edwin, the illegitimate son of a drunk, the heartbroken brother of an assassin, longed for propriety and elegance.
He was an actor back when theater was one of the trashier professions. His actor brother offing the president in a theater didn’t improve his profession’s profile. Thus did Edwin establish the Players. It’s a beautiful house. I’ve been inside a few times, mostly for literary events. The last time I went, after wandering around and admiring the Edwin memorabilia on display — the John Singer Sargent portrait of Edwin hanging over the fireplace, the helmet he wore as Brutus in Julius Caesar — I listened to a novelist confess that his childhood sexual awakening occurred while watching a Porky Pig cartoon in which Porky dressed up in high heels.
Edwin would have loved his statue in Gramercy Park — the first statue of an actor in the city. He warranted a stained-glass window too — a multicolored Shakespearean portrait in the Church of the Transfiguration on Twenty-ninth. Known as the Little Church Around the Corner, it became an actors’ church in the nineteenth century because it was the one church in town where actors would be granted a proper funeral.
The church hosted Edwin’s funeral on June 9, 1893. Just as his pallbearers were carrying his coffin out the door in New York, in Washington, three floors of Ford’s Theatre collapsed. The building had been turned into a government office building after the Lincoln assassination. Twenty-two federal employees died.
“In this room, the last of Abraham Lincoln’s fourteen funerals took place,” says the tour guide upstairs at the Old State Capitol building. “At eight o’clock on May third, 1865, after making eleven stops, Lincoln’s funeral train arrived here in Springfield. An honor guard escorted his casket to this room.”
The guide, who has a white beard and wears glasses on a chain around his neck, has shown us — and by us I mean uniformed seventh graders on a field trip from their all-girls school in Chicago and me — into the semicircular former chamber of the Illinois House of Representatives, which was, he claims, “the biggest room in the state of Illinois in 1839.”