Pauline Markham - Later Years

Later Years

Over the first ten years of her career Markham was thought to have earned $250,000 and received some $100,000 in gifts. Her later career would still achieve some highs, but also a number of lows with more than one of her shows collapsing in mid tour and an incident involving a tour manager who disappeared with the troupe’s funds. After her second marriage she eventually slipped into poverty with newspaper accounts of her working as a scrub woman and sometimes taking bit parts under an assumed name. If these accounts are true her poverty, at least in part, resulted from the broken leg she suffered around 1892 after falling through an open cellar door along a stretch of sidewalk in Louisville, Kentucky. Five years later she was awarded through a negligence lawsuit $5,000 from city of Louisville. In 1897 Markham attempted a comeback in vaudeville that appears to have ended the following year at Tony Pastor’s in dramatic skits with Catherine Dann.