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.
Read more about this topic: Pauline Markham
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“After years of vain familiarity, some distant gesture or unconscious behavior, which we remember, speaks to us with more emphasis than the wisest or kindest words. We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our Friends’ thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end that is aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)