Bad actors in the Oval Office
Before Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, there was Ulysses Grant
Donald Trump has played bit parts in movies and television since 1985. Trump made his first cameo appearance on The Jeffersons. Fast forward to 1989, when Trump hammed it up opposite Bo Derek in Ghosts Can’t Do It. Trump got a razzie for worst supporting actor at the 11th Golden Raspberry Awards. The first time in history critics panned an actor playing himself.
Ronald Reagan made several forgettable films. He was terrible in The Killers (1964).
Bad actors, both of them. But if contemporary accounts can be trusted, Reagan and Trump were nowhere near as bad as our 18th President. Because Ronald Reagan wasn’t the first actor to be elected President of the United States. That distinction goes to Ulysses S. Grant.
President Grant was so unsuitable for his starring role that his acting career nearly ended when it began. This was in 1846 when he was a young army officer in the Mexican War.
Captain Grant (Sam to his friends) was so bad that West Point classmates mentioned his farcical theatrical performances in their memoirs.
Sam Grant played a woman in his acting debut. He was with the 4th Infantry in Texas at the time. This was at Camp Marcy on the outskirts of Corpus Christi.
Like the regulars of the 3rd, 5th and 8th Infantry and the 2nd United States Dragoons, the men of the 4th were cooling their heels. They were waiting for orders from President Polk to add 500,000 square miles to the landmass of the continental United States.
The soldiers on the Texas-Mexican border didn’t expect the coming war to last long. After all, Sam Houston had whipped General Antonio López de Santa Anna without breaking a sweat in 1836. Fought to avenge the Alamo, the battle of San Jacinto had lasted all of eighteen minutes.
Still, formalities must be observed, even in war. Zachary Taylor had to wait until James Knox Polk ordered him to splash across the Nueces into Mexico.
General Taylor’s troops were getting restless, so the officers formed an amateur dramatic company. John Bankhead Magruder of the 1st Artillery supervised construction of an 800-seat theater to stage their productions, and ordered costumes from New Orleans.
As Grant’s biographer W.E. Woodward notes, Grant played “a part in Shakespeare’s Othello — not as the dusky Moor or Iago or a Venetian Gentleman, but in the sweetly feminine role of Desdemona. He wore one of the great bell-like skirts of ancient Venice and carried a fan, very likely, as the role calls for such a costume. I know it sounds incredible, this appearance of Ulysses as the lisping daughter of Brabantio, but it is a fact.”¹
Surviving accounts indicate that Grant was an embarrassing Desdemona. James Longstreet, originally cast in the role, was dropped after rehearsals. The officers thought the dour Longstreet “too tall, especially in crinolines; some shorter, slender officer was needed. They decided Grant looked all right in the costume.”
Lieutenant Theodoric Porter disagreed. Porter, who played Othello, complained bitterly about Grant’s unsuitability for the part of the Venetian beauty.²
According to Longstreet, Porter “protested that male heroines could not support the character nor give sentiment to the hero, so we sent over to New Orleans and secured Mrs. Hart, who was popular with the garrisons in Florida. Then all went well, and life through the winter was gay.”
Adds Lloyd Lewis in Captain Sam Grant, “Grant and Longstreet had their innings later when the repertoire turned back to comedy.”³
Lieutenant George Gordon Meade, destined to win fame at Gettysburg, had a jaundiced view of the proceedings. Meade wrote home, noting with some asperity that his fellow officers had turned “farce into buffoonery.”⁴
Grant’s acting career is recorded in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare: “In addition to its roles within British society, non-professional Shakespeare has also been a recurrent pursuit of military personnel (in situations which have sometimes preserved the single-sex traditions of the Renaissance stage: Ulysses S. Grant, for instance, played Desdemona while a young lieutenant in the 1840s) and among expatriates.”⁵
¹W.E. Woodward, Meet General Grant (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), p. 78
²Lloyd Lewis, Captain Sam Grant (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950), pp. 129
³Woodward, p. 79, Lewis, p. 129
⁴Lewis, p. 130
⁵Michael Dobson, Stanley Wells, Will Sharpe and Erin Sullivan (eds), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 8
