Book Review: Fortune's Fool

Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Boothby Terry AlfordOxford University Press, 2015“Oddly enough,” Terry Alford comments at the beginning of his fantastic new book Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, “Fortune's Fool is the first full-length biography of John Wilkes Booth ever written,” and the comment will strike some of Alford's readers as quite familiar, since every one of Booth's earlier biographers has made it in almost exactly those same words. The incomprehensibility at the heart of Booth's story seems to cause a kind of recurring amnesia; he's perpetually right there to be explained all over again.Fortune's Fool is a better, more comprehensive, and more consistently fascinating attempt at explaining John Wilkes Booth than any yet written, although it's unlikely to be any more convincing, ultimately, than any of its predecessors. Alford recounts Booth's upbringing in Maryland as the ninth of the ten children of British Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth and Mary Ann Holmes, his decision to follow in the acting footsteps of both his father and his brothers Edwin and Junius Jr., his rise to wealth and stardom as the most dynamic actor of his day, and his increasingly vocal support for the Confederacy. And throughout all this, Alford strives to concentrate as closely as possible on contemporary accounts and contemporary impressions, rather than succumb to what he views as a later accumulation of dark legends unsupported by the facts. This necessarily involves conveying all of the rosy estimates of Booth's own day:

His impetuous personality had a spark of genius that shone onstage and, added to his superb good looks, wonderful voice, and exciting acting style, brought him stardom within a matter of months. Some critics complained that he was hurried, inarticulate, and crude at times. Others saw him as uniquely gifted. The public embraced him without reserve, and he played successfully throughout the North, being particularly popular in Boston and Chicago …

It's a remarkably well-rounded portrait of the man, but it's headed for the same brick wall all the earlier portraits of the man struck head-on: that fateful night at Ford's Theatre in 1865. Here Alford's extensive familiarity with the contemporary sources helps to counter-balance the traditional view that Booth was an unhinged alcoholic with delusions of grandeur. Alford's research underscores the fact that, unlike the case of so many other presidential assassins and would-be assassins, Booth was a well-adjusted, caring, funny, charismatic success in his own life. Toward the book's climax, the sheer mystery of the murder of Lincoln temporarily supplants the horror of it – a displacement Booth's friends would have recognized:

Booth's friends were nearly speechless with astonishment at this turn of events. The comedian William Warren, on a train traveling to Boston, heard that Booth had shot the president from a conductor rushing down the aisle. That's a lie, thought Warren, and, leaping to his feet, he contradicted the man. Booth was a generous and affable person. He could not be a murderer. “Alas,” wrote the comedian in his diary, “it proved too true.”

“J. B. McCormick,”Alford tells us, “whose hands were scarred by injuries inflicted by Booth in stage combat, recalled in 1901, 'Before he shot Lincoln, I never heard anyone say he was crazy. Even now I don't think he was.'”And that's exactly where Fortune's Fool leaves us: this handsome young man wasn't insane, and he wasn't drunk, and he wasn't acting on impulse – rather, he was carrying out a carefully-laid plan to do the unthinkable out of sincere conviction. It's exactly as if Tom Cruise, fresh from the success of Top Gun, had been invited to a White House gala in 1986 and shot Ronald Reagan because he disagreed with the President's decision to bomb Libya: there's layer upon layer of cogent thinking, wrapped around a core of complete insanity. Alford has given us a three-dimensional John Wilkes Booth, who laughs with his friends, exasperates his brothers, dotes on his mother, and goes into genuine mourning when a favorite pet dies, and then he's sat back with his readers and watched that John Wilkes Booth shoot President Lincoln in the head.Very likely it'll never be possible to reconcile those two worlds, but that won't stop the next first-ever biography of Booth from trying all over again.