Payne's Sweet Song

John Howard Payne was a theater critic at age 14, a playwright soon after and then a child star. He was a friend of Washington Irving and Charles Dickens, a staunch defender of the Cherokee Indians as they were forced from their homes in Georgia to Oklahoma on the ``Trail of Tears'' and a diplomat who died at his post as American consul general in Tunis.

But what brought him the greatest fame were the words he wrote in London for a little song in the operetta ``Clari, or the Maid of Milan.''

It was called ``Home, Sweet Home.''

The melody wasn't Payne's -- the music was by British composer Henry Rowley Bishop, who may have borrowed it from a tune he heard in Sicily -- but the combination of notes and lyrics was a show-stopper. It turned into the first blockbuster hit ever written -- not that Payne or Bishop ever got any royalties.

And what was the ``lowly thatched cottage'' that beckoned the lonely wanderer in the song? Was it the house at 33 Pearl St., Manhattan, where Payne's father ran a school for a few years? Or was it the cedar-shingled saltbox on the East Hampton village green owned by the writer's grandfather, Aaron Isaacs?

Payne himself claimed to have been born in New York. That's what he wrote in his memoirs -- published in London in 1815, when the great man was all of 24 years old. But the partisans of East Hampton dismiss that as self-serving: New York was a much better address in those days.

East Hampton is where the Home Sweet Home Museum is, right next to St. Luke's Episcopal Church. The house was built around 1670, probably by a man named Robert Dayton. By 1740 or so, it was owned by Aaron Isaacs, a Jewish peddler who found his way from New York to what was then called Maidstone, who grew prosperous, married Mary Hedges, member of a founding family, and converted to Presbyterianism -- ``What was he supposed to do? He was surrounded by Puritans,'' exclaimed museum director Averill Geus.

Nevertheless, Isaacs kept his business records in Hebrew, and among his grandson's treasured possessions was a seal ring with a Hebrew inscription.

The Isaacs had 13 children, of whom the fifth, Sarah, took a business trip with her father to New London, Conn. There she met a widower named William Payne, whom Isaacs brought to East Hampton to teach in the newly founded Clinton Academy, the first secondary school in New York State.

The question of John Howard Payne's birthplace is a murky one. In 1791 the family moved to New York to set up a school, and their fifth child, John Howard, was born that June 9. ``He could have been born in a rowboat going to Shelter Island,'' Geus said. ``Nobody knows.''

Wherever the blessed event took place, there's little doubt that Payne spent significant parts of his early life at his grandfather's house, being frightened by the geese on the green and roaming among the thatched houses.

It was in New York that the 14-year-old Payne -- a clerk by day and a theatergoer by night -- published the first issue of The Thespian Mirror, a weekly journal of theater criticism. Not content with working 12 hours a day and writing a weekly magazine, Payne wrote and produced his first play, ``Julia; or The Wanderer, a comedy in five acts,'' at the Park Theater on Feb. 7, 1806.

The play caused an uproar -- it's full of double entendres about the heroine, a 16-year-old orphan besieged by rakes, one of whom says ``Damme'' several times. ``Julia'' got only one performance, and Payne earned virtually nothing.

Wealthy patrons gave him a scholarship to Union College in upstate Schenectady. But he yearned for the stage, and on Feb. 24, 1809, at age 18, made his debut at the Park Theater as Young Norval, the hero of John Home's ``The Tragedy of Douglas; or The Noble Shepherd.''

Payne was an immediate success -- he appeared in five other plays that season, and earned the immense sum of $1,400 in a performance of ``Romeo and Juliet.''

The succeeding years were a roller coaster of fame and failure. He toured the United States, attended one of Dolly Madison's White House parties, and in 1813, during the War of 1812, sailed to England -- where he was immediately arrested and jailed for two weeks until his passport was cleared.

Payne stayed in Europe for the next 20 years, acting, writing, producing, visiting Paris and becoming an important member of the English literary world. It was in his play ``Brutus'' that the tragedian Edmund Kean became a tremendous star in 1818.

Payne himself was thrown into debtors' prison after a bad season running the Sadler's Wells theater. There he wrote another play whose profits got him out of jail.

In Paris during 1822, Payne saw a ballet entitled ``Clari; or the Promise of Marriage'' and quickly wrote some dialogue. Composer Bishop saw the ballet, too, and suggested they turn it into an operetta. Payne was living at the time in the very elegant Palais Royal, but he was writing letters to his siblings in New York about ``my yearnings toward Home.''

And so, on May 8, 1823, ``Clari; or the Maid of Milan'' premiered at London's Covent Garden theater. It was a hit, and publisher John Miller issued sheet music for ``Home, Sweet Home'' separately. It sold as many as 100,000 copies in the first year; Payne was paid about 100 British pounds for ``Clari,'' and got nothing for the song.

As playwright, producer and literary figure, Payne continued high in the public's eye for the rest of his life. At one point he carried a discreet torch for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of ``Frankenstein.'' He loved her but she loved Washington Irving, who was not interested.

Payne returned to America in 1832, toured the country in triumph, traveled with John James Audubon, lobbied Congress to keep the Cherokees from being forced from their ancestral home (the Georgia Guard, a sort of pre-Civil War Ku Klux Klan, held him prisoner for a few weeks in 1835 -- one of his captors whistling ``Home, Sweet Home'' at the time), and eventually was appointed consul general in Tunis, a post he occupied twice in the period from 1843 until his death in that city on April 9, 1852.

The song itself lived on -- during the Civil War the armies of both sides, encamped on the battlefield, would sing it together at night. Jenny Lind sang it during her tour of America; Adelina Patti sang it for President Abraham Lincoln in the White House.

In 1883, financier William Wilson Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Gallery, got Payne's body exhumed and brought to the United States. It arrived first in New York, for one procession, and then, in a massive ceremony attended by President Chester A. Arthur and Gen. William T. Sherman, was interred in Washington's Oak Hill Cemetery.

And that had never been his home.