19–22 March 1872 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: NN, UCCL 11847)
Born in Elmira, N. Y., at 4.25 A.M., March 19, 1872,1explanatory note to the wife of Samℓ. L. Clemens, of Hartford, Conn., a daughter. Mother & child doing superbly.
Clemens apparently sent out birth announcements over a period of days, from 19 March (as evidenced by the postmark on the announcement sent to Orion) to about 22 March: Joseph T. Goodman replied from New York on 24 March to an announcement probably sent on 21 or 22 March (CU-MARK), and Abraham Reeves Jackson of Chicago, the “Doctor” in The Innocents Abroad, acknowledged receipt of an announcement dated 21 March (Jackson to SLC, 27 Mar 72, CU-MARK; L2 , 65–66).
Actor Frank Maguire Mayo was one of a group of Clemens’s western cronies who met in New York City on 26 March and toasted the birth of the “charming, rosy, wee-bit of a baby girl” (Farington). (The group included Joseph T. Goodman; Frank Farington, local reporter on the Gold Hill Nev. News and the Virginia City Union in the mid-1860s, now correspondent of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, who was en route to Europe and Japan; and Clement T. Rice, a New York insurance agent who, as “the Unreliable,” had been Clemens’s journalistic rival in Virginia City in the 1860s.) Mayo (1839–96) was born in Boston, but emigrated to California at the age of fourteen. By 1856 he had begun his acting career, and over the next several years appeared in San Francisco and Sacramento and toured the mining camps. From 1863 to June 1865 he was a leading actor at Maguire’s Opera House in San Francisco, and he probably met Clemens during that period—perhaps through Goodman, a close mutual friend. Returning to the East in the summer of 1865, he became a leading actor on the Boston and New York stages, with a repertoire of classical roles and contemporary character parts. (He appeared in Hartford, for example, on 28 February 1872 in Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife.) In the summer of 1872 Mayo became the manager of the Rochester, New York, Opera House, where, in September, he opened in Davy Crockett, a role he would perform over two thousand times. In September 1894 Clemens gave Mayo the dramatization rights to Pudd’nhead Wilson. The play opened in April 1895, with Mayo in the title role. He died the following year while taking it on a western tour (Doten, 2:812, 905, 994; “Among the Saints,” Gold Hill Nev. News, 12 Mar 72, 3; “Passengers Sailed,” New York Tribune, 28 Mar 72, 3; “Farington,” Virginia City Virginia Evening Chronicle, 31 May 72, 3; RI 1993 , 651–52; Joseph T. Goodman to Frank Mayo, 15 June 65, Alice Fischer Papers, NN; Hartford Courant: “Amusements,” 28 Feb 72, 3; “Man and Wife,” 29 Feb 72, 2; “Personal,” Hartford Evening Post, 17 July 72, 2; HHR , 139 n. 2, 219–20).
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was in the Alice Fischer (Frank Mayo) Papers, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN), but has been missing since 1979.
L5 , 61–62.
The papers of the actress Alice Fischer (1869–1947) at NN include the letters, diaries, and other papers of actor Frank Mayo (1839–96).