by Michael Daly
Cooper & Bailey issued a public letter declaring that the continuing competition with Barnum would be “a ‘War of the Titans’ that shall stir up the whole land.” The newspapers carried a letter Barnum supposedly wrote to a friend after going incognito to see Cooper & Bailey’s show. Barnum described it as “a clean, moral, well conducted, stunning exhibition, by far the largest and the best that ever traveled except my own.”
Soon after, Barnum announced that he had signed an agreement combining his show with Cooper & Bailey. Barnum said that the idea had come to him as an epiphany while he watched his upstart competitor’s show.
“Having had the godsend of a baby elephant, the only one ever born in captivity, [Cooper & Bailey] are sweeping the country like a whirlwind,” Barnum said, either unaware of or discounting Hebe’s prior pregnancy. “This continent can’t support two such immensely expensive shows. We have been compelled, therefore, to form a grand alliance.”
Later, some historians would suggest that Barnum’s telegram offering the $100,000 had been a rare misstep on the public stage. They theorized that Cooper & Bailey had so successfully capitalized on the offer that Barnum decided if he could not beat them, he might as well join them.
Other historians believe the merger was planned and all but consummated prior to the supposed telegram. This theory called into question whether there ever was an actual telegram and suggested the letters to the public on both sides, along with Barnum’s supposed epiphany while watching his rival’s show, were all orchestrated by the Great Humbugger. His goal would have been to build up Cooper & Bailey while making Forepaugh seem not even worth mentioning.
Whatever the truth, Forepaugh was furious and issued a rant couched as an open letter to Barnum. Forepaugh declared that what Barnum had described in the newspaper interview as an epiphany was just an epic phony.
“I must exclaim with Shakespeare in The Tempest: ‘Your tale would cure deafness.’ In the falseness of its statements it out Gullivers Gulliver. . . . Perhaps, for the reason that you have so long been permitted to weave fairy tales for the press, you have become emboldened.”
Forepaugh raged on, disparaging his rival professionally and personally. Forepaugh must have been all the more exasperated to find himself up against not only the Barnum name and the Barnum wiles, but also a genuine American-born elephant. And Forepaugh’s mood could not have improved whenever he looked at the Asian-born elephant with which he had hoped to generate a sensation just like the sensation that had brought a windfall to Cooper & Bailey and precipitated the merger with Barnum.
Thanks to the genuine American-born baby, Forepaugh now faced what threatened to be in actual fact the greatest of shows. His Asian-born fake no longer qualified as a baby of any provenance but continued to be a reminder of the failed fraud and his accompanying failure of nerve when Barnum challenged him with the open letter and the original $100,000 offer.
On top of it all, the newspapers were reporting that Forepaugh’s rival had joined with the primary heir to the Vanderbilt fortune to form the Barnum Museum Company with the purpose of constructing a monumental five-story complex on the site of the onetime railroad depot on Madison Square. Barnum had closed his hippodrome there after two years and the premises had been leased by a promoter named Patrick Gilmore, who dubbed the facility Gilmore’s Garden and matched “professors” in “scientific sparring experiments,” as boxing was still officially outlawed. But Barnum continued to begin each circus season there, having struck up a fast friendship with the owner, Cornelius Vanderbilt. The tycoon had died in 1877, but his son William Vanderbilt honored the arrangement even after he took over the facility with an eye toward making it the premier venue for horse shows. The Vanderbilt scion rechristened it Madison Square Garden and arranged for a Brooklyn start-up called the Fuller Electrical Company—not Edison—to install four arc electric lights whose debut on Memorial Day of 1879 was described by the New York Times as “the first extremely favorable test of electricity for popular uses” even though this was a month after Brush had lit up the park in Cleveland.
Now, in June of 1880, even as the birth of the genuine American-born baby elephant was prompting Barnum to combine his show with Bailey’s, Barnum announced that he and young Vanderbilt would be building a new Madison Square Garden, this described by the New York Times as “a mammoth edifice, to be devoted to purposes of amusement.” It was to have eleven acres of floor space. The entire lower floor was to be a cavernous arena, with an opera house upstairs, as well as an aquarium, a skating rink, a zoo, a palatial restaurant, and a two-floor museum “intended to exceed anything of the kind ever before attempted.” The top floor was to be a “a vast tropical garden, with extensive walks, lawns, bowers, grottoes, arbors, waterfalls, palmeries, fountains, parterres, &c.,” where “grand concerts will be given on every afternoon and evening of the year, and innumerable refreshment-tables will be scattered about in the European style.” The building was to be fireproof and steam-heated and lit by many more than four Fuller fixtures. And the southwest corner was to feature a 250-foot observatory tower “furnished at its apex with a coronet of electric lights.”
“Mr. Barnum is to have management of the entire concern,” the Times reported.
By comparison, Forepaugh’s big top could not have seemed very big at all. His winter quarters in Philadelphia could only have seemed more barnlike. And, to make it all worse, he must have known that he was now feeling exactly what Barnum surely wanted him to feel. The revived $100,000 offer. The description of Bailey’s show as “moral” and “clean.” The talk of a War of the Titans without mentioning Forepaugh. The plans for a new and impossibly grand Madison Square Garden. All of this could only have further stoked Forepaugh’s rage. He was hardly going to fault himself and he was powerless to strike back at Barnum, but he did have a handy object on which to vent his fury.
Forepaugh beat Topsy with such abandon that he broke her tail. The elephant born of the crooked tale was henceforth known as Crooked-Tail Topsy.
TEN
The Continued
Magic of Kindness
and the First
Beauty Contest
Along with the genuine American-born baby, Cooper & Bailey brought to the merger with Barnum the troupe of Craven-trained elephants that was widely hailed as a true marvel, sometimes even without the instigation of a press agent. Forepaugh once more sought out Craven, privately offering to pay him what he had been paid by Cooper & Bailey if he matched what he had done for that show. Forepaugh further pledged a $1,000 bonus if Craven outdid himself.
Craven applied the magic of kindness to Forepaugh’s twenty elephants. Topsy was still growing toward her full 5,000 pounds, but now was of an age to perform. The first of the rudimentary tricks she learned was likely sitting down and rearing up on her hind legs. Craven’s usual method was to use block and tackle, with two ropes attached to the forelegs, a third looped under the trunk, and perhaps a fourth tied to a leather belt around the middle. The trainer would give the verbal command and then the assistant would pull on the ropes. The routine would be repeated until the elephant understood what was expected.
Craven had indeed outdone himself with all the elephants as the 1881 season approached. The results were undeniable unless you were the miserly Forepaugh. He declared that his herd was no better than the opposition’s and he flatly refused to pay the bonus.
“Forepaugh and Craven had some hot words and Craven went away without his thousand dollars,” animal trainer George Conklin would later write.
Craven retained a lawyer, who sent out observers as the season commenced and the Forepaugh show moved from city to city.
“They came back and reported that the showman was boasting to the public how much better his elephants were and how much more they could do than those of Cooper & Bailey,” Conklin would recall.
The lawyer himself attended a show, making
sure to have some witnesses in tow when he approached Forepaugh.
“Those are pretty fine elephants you’ve got, Mr. Forepaugh,” the lawyer said. “Their act was simply great.”
“Yes, you bet they are,” Forepaugh said. “They are ’nuff sight better than those things that Cooper & Bailey have got, an’ they ought to be, too, for I paid good money to have them trained and I paid a thousand dollars extra to be sure they were better.”
Forepaugh was subsequently confronted with his own words. The showman understood that he was sure to lose in court, where his only defense would be to publicly declare that his elephants were not better than Cooper & Bailey’s elephants. The resulting publicity would be beyond his control. The controversy might even call into question the ongoing fiction that his prodigy son was the genius behind the elephants’ tricks.
“It was not very long before Forepaugh was obliged to hand over the thousand dollars,” Conklin noted.
That did not stop Forepaugh from crediting his son at every opportunity with the unequaled performance of the elephants. Forepaugh’s press agent, Charles Day, subsequently penned a book titled Young Adam Forepaugh, Elephant Trainer that was sold at the show for twenty-five cents.
Day’s most notable contribution was to propose to Forepaugh what would become America’s first beauty contest, with a $10,000 prize supposedly going to “The Handsomest Woman in the World.”
Hopefuls by the thousands applied and five finalists were announced, but of course the contest was fixed from the start. A twenty-one-year-old variety artist named Louise Montague sought out Day with a letter of introduction from a minstrel of his acquaintance. Montague told him that she had come to speak to him about the $10,000 prize. Montague was worldly enough not to be surprised when Day informed her it was really “an advertising scheme.” Day said he could offer her a salary of $75 a week, which he figured was generous enough considering all she would be required to do was ride an elephant in the parade. She demanded $125 and Forepaugh made it $100.
“I’ll make up the difference in the sale of photographs,” Forepaugh said.
The big contest’s winner was announced that April, as the 1881 season was set to open in the nation’s capital.
“Miss Louise Montague, the queen of beauty who has been so fortunate as to secure Forepaugh’s $10,000 offered for the handsomest woman in the world will arrive in this city from Philadelphia early this morning,” the Washington Post reported.
Montague rode one of the larger elephants, with Topsy and the rest of the herd coming behind. Some unanticipated wagons materialized and took up the rear with signs reading “Wait for Barnum!”
Ads for the two competing shows appeared in the same issue of the Washington Post, Barnum reminding readers that his show would be just two weeks behind Forepaugh’s. Both sides also plastered the city with thousands of “rat bills,” posters disparaging the other show, Forepaugh’s charging among other things that Barnum had only fourteen elephants when he claimed to have twenty.
“Fraud! Falsehood! Downright Deceit!” Forepaugh’s rat bills said of the Barnum show.
On his part, Barnum denounced Forepaugh’s beauty contest as the fraud it in fact was.
“The elements angry! And the populace undeceived! Oh shame! Where is thy blush? 4-Paw’s Bad Day!” a Barnum rat bill said. “Who should cry aloud ‘My sins are greater than I can bear’? A fraud exposed. A Swindle Laid Bare.”
A blizzard of posters and bills blanketed a wide swath of the country as the shows exhibited in thirty-eight of the same cities, with Forepaugh appearing first in each instance.
“A continuous clash in all the large cities for nearly forty weeks,” a Forepaugh agent later wrote. “Nothing before or since has ever compared with it.”
Forepaugh proved the more thin-skinned, filing a lawsuit that charged the Barnum show with distributing “false, malicious and libelous” handbills and public advertisements aimed at persuading the populace “not to visit the exhibition of this deponent, and thereby cause him great loss and damage.”
The lawsuit went on, “The defendant’s further conspiring to injure the deponent caused millions of circulars to be printed and distributed in the cities of Washington and Baltimore while the deponent was exhibiting there, stating that the severe weather, together with the presence of a circus company, where hundreds have sat under a chilly canvas, has brought sickness into many households, that pneumonia has spread so rapidly for the past three days as to become almost an epidemic, and that nothing like it was ever known in Washington and that the fatality for the next forty-eight hours will be frightful.”
Forepaugh soon faced a lawsuit himself, filed by his $10,000 beauty, in which she complained she had been instructed to ride a substitute elephant and was twice thrown off the creature’s back “into the mud on her hands and face.”
“It was the duty of the defendant to provide an elephant that was perfectly tame and free from vicious habits, so that it would be perfectly safe for the plaintiff to ride on it,” the suit charged.
The litigation revealed to the public that the beauty contest had been rigged. What had been no secret from the start was Montague’s discomfort while riding atop an elephant. A reporter at the State Journal described the Forepaugh show’s parade through Madison, Wisconsin: “The chief expectancy was directed towards ‘the Handsomest Woman.’ When she came along bounced about on top of an elephant as though her back was being broken at every step, it rather took the romance out of the oriental Lalla Rookh, and made her look as though she was a safety valve for the elephant, and that he carried too much steam and was in momentary danger of blowing off.”
Her ride became even rougher two weeks later in Woodstock, Illinois, when her usual elephant fell ill and the howdah—a rail-ringed perch—was cinched atop the substitute. The subsequent court filings accorded some insight into who in the show possessed the actual expertise regarding elephants: “Ephraim Thompson said on that day that the basket ought not to go on that elephant, that it would kill the plaintiff,” the papers reported. “Addie Forepaugh, Jr., said that it must go on, that these were the governor’s (his father’s) orders.”
Thompson did as commanded, as did Montague.
“When she got upon it, [the elephant] commenced to shake itself as if to get rid of the howdah or basket and that it reared up, and the plaintiff was thrown to the ground and fainted.”
Much the same happened the next day in Waterloo, Illinois. Montague declared herself too badly injured to continue with the show. She subsequently filed the lawsuit and prevailed, though the jury awarded her only $500. Forepaugh’s attorney had successfully argued that any award should be reduced because however much the show might be at fault the first time she was bucked, she was guilty of “contributory negligence” the second, “in getting upon an elephant that she knew would throw her off.”
The Forepaugh show’s other main attraction was an elephant nobody save perhaps Eph Thompson could safely ride. Forepaugh had bought the behemoth Bolivar at the sale of a small show and billed the elephant as “the biggest and heaviest elephant in the world.” Bolivar was measured at more than eleven feet and seemed even bigger when he was angry. No doubt thanks to young Forepaugh’s cruelties, he was in a foul mood so often and so dramatically that he succeeded the notorious Romeo as America’s “ugliest elephant.”
Bolivar did turn curiously gentle and protective when it came to one particular elephant, the juvenile female with the crooked tail. He showed an attachment to little Topsy that was altogether unusual for a big male toward another elephant of whatever gender or age. Topsy may have been torn from her native herd before she was fully versed in its ways. She may not have learned to shun grown males. Or she may not have understood that a matriarch is necessarily female. Or her early traumas may have caused her to welcome and embrace elephants of any kind.
When it ca
me to humans, the only trainer who could control Bolivar was Thompson. The newspapers of course gave the credit to Forepaugh’s son. The New York Times said “the boyish looking young man” was “the most expert trainer of animals in the country, if not in the world.”
“He proposes to do what no one has yet succeeded in doing—train the big elephant Bolivar to perform in the ring with other elephants,” the Times reported.
Young Forepaugh subsequently said of Bolivar, “He is a treacherous, wicked brute, and he has to be continually watched.”
To further expand his menagerie, the elder Forepaugh sent his son on an animal-buying trip to Europe. The young man evidenced an extravagance that was in keeping with his appearance.
“Among his other peculiarities young Forepaugh affected the most striking dress and make up,” a Forepaugh agent later wrote. “He was always bedecked in large, flashy jewelry, never wearing a necktie and usually fastening his collar with a diamond-studded button of enormous size, while his watch and chain were of huge proportions, and an eight- or ten-carat diamond stud in his shirt front. In the winter time the richest sealskin overcoat hung to his feet.”
His expenditures quickly outpaced his funds and he cabled his father saying he had come upon two gigantic monkeys and needed $2,000 immediately to acquire them. The father sent the sum only to get a cable reading, “Money received; monkeys died last night. Addie.”
The son did purchase an Asian elephant nearly as big as Bolivar who had an actual royal provenance. Tip had belonged to King Vittorio Emanuele of Italy until the monarch’s death. The successor, King Humbert, had sold Tip to “Mad” King Ludwig of Bavaria. Ludwig soon after sold him to “Professor” Carl Hagenbeck, the German animal dealer who had been profiting so handsomely from the rivalry between Forepaugh and Barnum.
Like Craven, but independently from that American trainer, Hagenbeck had come to conclude that rewards were more effective than fear in training animals, going so far as to say beatings were counterproductive as well as cruel. Either he did not press his philosophy upon his customers or they simply declined to embrace it. That became clear shortly after Hagenbeck made his latest elephant sale, of Tip, to the younger Forepaugh.