Adah Isaacs Menken was an American actress and poet.
Background
Adah Isaacs Menken was born probably in Milneburg, a suburb of New Orleans, Louisiana on June 15, 1835. Accounts of her birth and early life, most of which are based on her own statements, are conflicting. These declarations, naming her father variously as Josiah Campbell, James McCord, Richard Irving Spenser, and Ricardo Los Fiertes, are fabrications and were made for purposes of publicity. It is true, however, that she was born a Jewess, and that her given name was Adah Bertha. Her father, whose surname was probably Theodore, died when she was about two years old, and her mother married again. Of this union, two children were born. About 1853 the stepfather, probably named Josephs, died, leaving the family in straitened circumstances.
Education
Adah studied the classics, knew French, Hebrew, German, and Spanish, could ride, sing, and dance, and in later years became an amateur painter and sculptor.
Career
In 1856, Adah is said to have privately printed a volume of verse entitled Memories, under the pseudonym "Indigena. " In March 1857 she appeared at James Charles' theatre in Shreveport, Louisiana, as Pauline in The Lady of Lyons; on August 29 she made her début in New Orleans, at Crisp's Gaiety as Bianca in Fazio. On September 25 she published a poem in the Cincinnati Israelite, and subsequently contributed regularly to this paper until April 22, 1859. With her husband as her manager, she appeared in the principal Southern and Western cities during the next year, meeting with moderate success. On March 1, 1859, she made her New York début at Purdy's National Theatre as Widow Cheerly in The Soldier's Daughter. At Pfaff's, New York's Bohemian rendezvous, she met Ada Clare, Walt Whitman, Fitz-James O'Brien, and other American writers and critics. Her poems written in 1860, twelve of which were later included in Infelicia, reflect her depression of spirit. With the new year, however, she resumed her theatrical activities, meeting especial success in Milwaukee and Pittsburgh. On June 3, 1861, she made her first appearance as Mazeppa at the Green Street Theatre, Albany, before the largest audience in the history of that theatre. In November, an amazing success in Baltimore was accompanied by a gift of diamonds worth $1, 500. On July 13, 1863, she sailed for San Francisco with her husband, appearing at Tom Maguire's Opera House on August 24. To the literary group including Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, Joaquin Miller, and others that met in Joe Lawrence's Golden Era office, she was a strange, beautiful goddess. On April 23, 1864, she sailed for England. Newell, who accompanied her as far as the Isthmus, returned to New York. Opening in Mazeppa at Astley's, London, on October 3, she created a tremendous sensation. At her salon in the Westminster Palace Hotel such men as Dickens, Reade, Swinburne, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Purnell, and Charles Fechter were among her guests. On August 24, 1865, she arrived in New York, but her stay was short, and on October 9, she opened at Astley's in Child of the Sun by John Brougham. The play was withdrawn after six weeks and Mazeppa revived. In March 1866 she returned to New York, where on April 30, at Wood's Broadway Theatre, she played before a house jammed to suffocation.
Barkley later went to California, where he died in 1878. In Paris, "la Menken" went into retirement until the birth early in November of her son, who was christened, in honor of George Sand, his godmother, Louis Dudevant Victor Emanuel Barkley. On December 30, she opened in Les Pirates de la Savane at the Théatre de la Gaité to the greatest triumph that had ever been accorded an American actress. Her apartment at the Hótel de Suez was crowded with admirers, including Gautier and Dumas père. After a short engagement in Vienna, she returned to Paris. Astley's recalled her to London in the fall. At Sadler's Wells Theatre, on May 30, 1868, she gave her last performance. On July 9, in Paris, while rehearsing a new version of Les Pirates, she collapsed; on August 10, she died and was buried in the Jewish sector of Père Lachaise. Edwin James removed the body, April 21, 1869, to Montparnasse, where a marble monument bearing the inscription "Thou Knowest" had been erected. A collection of her poems, Infelicia, edited by John Thomson, Swinburne's secretary, and dedicated to Charles Dickens, was published in London, August 18, 1868. Twenty-five of these poems had appeared in the New York Sunday Mercury in 1860 and 1861, and one in the Israelite of September 3, 1858.
Achievements
Adah Isaacs Menken was the highest earning actress of her time. She was best known for her performance in the melodrama Mazeppa, with a climax that featured her apparently nude and riding a horse on stage.
Politics
Menken declared herself a secessionist and was promptly arrested and brought before Provost-Marshal Fish, who released her on parole.
Views
Quotations:
"Good women are rarely clever and clever women are rarely good. "
"There is no such thing as unfortunate genius; if a man or woman is fit for work, God appoints the field. "
"There is a graveyard in my poor heart - dark, heaped-up graves, from which no flowers spring. "
"Life is a lie, and Love a cheat. "
Personality
"The Royal Menken" was probably not a great dramatic figure, but her acting was as free from the platitude of the stage as her poetry was from its language. Volatile, fearless, and uninhibited, she scandalized the staid Victorians of her day by her unconventional conduct, and, after her death, biographers accepted as fact her rumored immoralities. She possessed a keen intellect that recognized the genius of Walt Whitman as early as 1860. Under his stimulus she developed her own technique in the "rolling rhythms" of her poems. Dante Gabriel Rossetti called them "really remarkable. " Driven by an insatiable ambition, and aided by her vivid personality and strange beauty, she climaxed a meteoric career with the fame she so ardently desired.
Quotes from others about the person
Swinburne, in his extravagant manner, wrote across a copy of Infelicia, "Lo, this is she that was the world's delight. "
Connections
In Livingston, Texas, on April 3, 1856, Adah married Alexander Isaac Menken, son of a Cincinnati dry-goods merchant. In July, she left Alexander Menken, and believing herself to have been divorcedby him, married John Carmel Heenan in New York on September 3. In January 1860 the news of her marriage to Heenan became public. Subsequently a scandal arose when Alexander Menken announced that he had never divorced his wife but that he would now proceed to do so. In the summer of that year, Adah Menken bore Heenan a son who died within a short time. Heenan, returning from England in July after his fight with Tom Sayers, repudiated his wife. To add to her unhappiness, she received word in September from her half-sister, Annie Campbell Josephs, telling of her mother's death in New Orleans. In April, 1861, she received her divorce from Heenan, and on September 24, married Robert Henry Newell. She had divorced Newell in 1865, and after a triumphal tour of the larger cities, she was married, on August 19, 1866, to James Barkley by Alderman John Brice at her home, 458 Seventh Avenue. Three days later she sailed alone for Europe.
