Things moved quickly. Attendants wrapped ropes around the big elephant, positioned the electrodes, and tied his legs to stakes. They moved the little ones out of the way. Bostock spoke to the crowd and told them Jumbo was tearful. Jumbo flapped his ears. Someone reported that “streetcars on several lines had been stopped” to supply the voltage. The trainer raised his arms and the electrician threw the switch.
What the audience expected, it seems, was a spark, or smoke, or at the very least the hissing of steam. They counted on seeing Jumbo react, perhaps rear up, and then, certainly, they expected to see him sink in a thunderous heap onto the ground. But they saw nothing. The electrician opened the next switch. Jumbo apparently needed higher voltage.
The elephant flapped his ears, picked up a loose plank on the platform, and tossed it.
The electrician threw open both switches.
Jumbo swung his trunk.
In a split second, the mood of the crowd shifted. Spectators who had been eager to see a dead elephant suddenly began to cheer the live one. They laughed at the electricians and made jokes.
Jumbo remained standing.
After several minutes, it was clear the show was over. Bostock’s attendants brought back the smaller elephants, reattached them to Jumbo, and walked the group down the concourse to the Bostock concession. Close behind them, the crowd followed, jeering.
Some witnesses declared it a sham. Not only had the switchboard never lit up, but the wires looked dead. There were no marks on the animal. Others thought it was an experiment that failed—the elephant’s skin had been a nonconductor.
When reporters caught up with Frank Bostock, they found the Animal King willing to talk. Maybe he would try to destroy the elephant again, he said. Or perhaps he would see whether Jumbo could become peaceable. “He only gets wild in spasms,” the Animal King admitted. “I will shut him up in a box and ship him in that fashion.”
And he did. Led into a special car, and encumbered with chain, Jumbo II managed some “frolicsome antics” while in transit to Bostock’s zoo in Boston. Once he rejoined his companions, Big Liz and Little Doc, though, he quieted and allowed himself to be paraded past five thousand spectators to the Cyclorama Building on Tremont Street. There he stayed through the winter, calm and steady.11
III
MRS. BADGER’S MISTAKE
If Frank Bostock suffered a public-relations disaster with his failure to do away with Jumbo II (assuming he did not stage the entire affair), he was winning in his battle with the world’s littlest woman. He had hidden her. In mid-November 1901, a reporter in Erie, Pennsylvania—likely the same newsman who had been serenaded by the Woeckener girls—wrote a story about Tony Woeckener’s missing wife. The headline asked, WHERE IS CHIQUITA? and the reporter issued a plea to the public to send Tony any information on her location. He also posted a sketch of Tony, looking wistful.
Tony did find Chiquita—not at the Charleston Exposition, where he thought Bostock would take her, but in Boston, being advertised for a show. Within days, he and his father were in New England, where Tony was allowed to see his wife only in short, heavily guarded visits. Meanwhile, having sued the menagerist again, the Woeckeners waited for a decision from the courts. On January 6, 1902, Tony’s father sent a terse message back to Erie: “Hard fight on.”
An associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court listened to Tony make his case against Bostock, and listened to Chiquita. Alice told him that she did not like to break her contract with the Animal King but wanted to be with her husband. The judge made a decision. The marriage between Tony and Chiquita, he said, “should not have taken place under any circumstances.” The arrangement was not “the offspring of love or affection.” There was “some ulterior motive.” As for the little person herself? “The wife,” he declared, “is not an ordinary person nor of ordinary capacity and intelligence for a woman of her years.” He did insist, though, that she was perfectly capable of understanding—and fulfilling—her detailed employment contract. In sum, she belonged to Bostock.
Under oath later on, Chiquita recounted that, after Bostock had locked her in a Boston apartment, he had produced a new contract. If she did not sign it, she was told, “she would never be permitted to see her husband again.” Faced with Bostock, his lawyers, and his employees, along with their “threats, intimidations, and curses,” she signed the paper. The word that came to her mind when she recalled that moment was “terror.”12
In the contract, Chiquita agreed to work for the Animal King for eighty dollars per month, through the close of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. She could work for no one else. She had to accompany Bostock or his “agent” from “place to place, and work and exhibit herself as a midget.” She had to “continue to live as one of [Bostock’s] family” and to “obey all the rules and orders.” Unlike other contracts that her father had helped negotiate, and that had been written in both English and Spanish, this one was produced in English only. She was not given an opportunity to look it over.
Bostock did agree to offer Tony a job with his zoo. But Tony couldn’t bring himself to take it. “I thought he wouldn’t hesitate to send me on some duty connected with his animals,” the musician said, “which would incense them and they would tear me in pieces.” He was serious. His father had seen enough of the Animal King to believe the same thing: “We knew too much to be drawn into such an agreement. Bostock would have killed Tony in six months.”
Tony left Boston to go back to his family in Erie, and, not long afterward, Madame Morelli sent word that she and Alice were boarding a ship in New York Harbor. They were bound for Glasgow, where Mr. Bostock’s brother ran a zoo. Indeed, in Scotland, the newspapers were already drumming up attendance, telling readers that Chiquita, “the sensation of Buffalo,” was on her way.
It took less than two weeks for Tony to give in. Saying he was desperate to see his wife, he wrote to Bostock to apologize and said he was ready to join the show. “Apparently you have realized how foolish you have been,” Bostock wrote back. He told Tony to report to his representative in Boston, where he would have tickets available for travel to Scotland.
On March 3, Tony said good-bye to his family and shook the hands of the reporter who had so faithfully reported his story. It would be a long good-bye, he said. “I go to join my Alice!”13
But there were no tickets to Scotland for Tony, and all he could do, once more, was wait. The couple did not reunite until mid-June, after Chiquita had performed throughout Europe and sailed back across the Atlantic. It was seven months after their marriage.
Bostock, meanwhile, bought $250,000 worth of life insurance for Chiquita. It was an expensive policy, but he drew on her salary for half of it. The showman then hired two attendants, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Badger, to oversee the couple as they toured with one of his shows.
Alice Cenda had endured harsh treatment from Bostock over the previous year, but nothing beat the soul-breaking rule of the Badgers. As the show moved through the South and the Midwest in the summer of 1902, the Badgers made sure the Animal King got his money’s worth out of his Doll Lady. They withheld her eighty dollars a month. They refused to buy her street clothes, forcing her to wear the same calico dress for weeks at a time. They demanded she hold fifty to sixty receptions every day, from morning until midnight. They gave her almost no time to eat. Soon enough, she was worn out and losing weight.
On trains between towns, Tony tried to comfort her and brought her food. Another performer watched him give her “friendly attentions such as were customary from a husband to a wife.” The Badgers didn’t like it. Nothing if not conscientious, they eyed them closely. They locked the couple in hotel rooms. When Tony and Chiquita were allowed on the street, the Badgers stayed close. To make matters worse, Mr. Badger drank, and when he did, he swore at Chiquita and was “abusive.” At times, Chiquita said, “it was almost unendurable.”
But then came Elgin.
On Sunday, August 24, 1902, the Badge
rs and all the Bostock performers arrived in the Illinois town of Elgin, northwest of Chicago, for a one-week show. As they did at all the places they planned to stay, the Badgers surveyed their living quarters. Mrs. Badger made it clear to Mrs. Page, the proprietor of the boardinghouse, that she needed a room close to Tony and Chiquita. “These freaks are strange people,” she said, “and we have to watch them so they will not run away.”
The group settled in, and while Chiquita held receptions in a show tent, Mrs. Badger and Mrs. Page sat in the parlor, chatting. Taking the landlady into her confidence, Mrs. Badger explained how important it was to keep Chiquita afraid of her. In fact, she admitted, “she often had to whip [her].” She had also taken pains to keep the couple isolated. Sometimes Alice had been invited to people’s houses during their tour, but “it was Bostock’s orders that she be allowed to visit no one.” She also confessed that they wanted to eliminate Tony. Thus far, they “had tried every way to get rid of him.”
Maybe Mrs. Badger irritated the boardinghouse owner. Or perhaps Mrs. Page, seeing a small, beaten-down wife and her fretful husband, felt sorry for the couple. However it happened, the landlady told Tony and Alice that their overseers were concocting a plan to separate them, “even if they had to do away with [Tony].”14
August 26 had been a busy day in Chiquita’s tent, so in the rooming house, the performer retired upstairs with her husband. Mrs. Page went to bed. The Badgers, their surveillance done for the day, headed to their rooms, too. Time passed. The town stilled. After midnight, Tony looked out the window, waiting for a sign. He had telegraphed Erie friends, praying that they would drop what they were doing and travel across three states to help him out.
He spotted them. Down on the street, the men waited with a carriage. Tony opened the upper-story window. He wrapped a long rope around Alice—how he got the rope, nobody knows—and carefully, soundlessly, lowered her to the ground. He followed, then hurried to the carriage. Neither he nor Chiquita took anything with them, not even his prized cornet. Chiquita was in her nightdress.
The friends whipped the horses, galloped out of Elgin, and pulled up at the Geneva railroad station, twelve miles south. Carrying Chiquita like a tired child, they took an early morning train to Chicago, arrived in the city at 9 a.m., and slipped out of the station. Worried that the Badgers or Bostock might have alerted the Chicago police, they didn’t dare take a cab across town to the depot for the Lake Shore line. Instead, they hailed a drayman on the street and climbed into his wagon. They rode openly, “trying hard to look innocent and like farmers.”
In Erie, the reporter at the Erie Morning Dispatch got a message that the couple he had dogged so faithfully was free. Hustling to the Woeckener house, he found Alice still in her nightgown—and ready to talk. Chiquita told him about the Badgers, and then one of Tony’s friends took over the tale, describing their escape. “No one in all the crowds paid any attention to us,” he explained. “They took [Chiquita] for a little baby I was carrying.” As she listened to him tell the story, Chiquita, probably for the first time in months, laughed.
The newsman was beside himself. He imagined how Bostock must have looked when he found out that Tony and Chiquita had escaped—how he probably “tore his hair and filled the air with blue blazes.” He couldn’t believe that the man had been outsmarted. “Have they really escaped from the mighty Bostock at last?” he asked. “Is it possible that the man who in all his long show career has never before been ‘done,’ has at last been outwitted?”
Not quite.
Bostock’s men assured the public that Chiquita would soon be found. She might miss some shows in Elgin, they said, but she would appear in South Bend, Indiana, her next scheduled show. “Oh, we’ll find her all right,” commented one. They told the press that she was a thief, too—that she had stolen all of Bostock’s jewels.
The Animal King put detectives on the case. Years later, Tony’s brother Eddie remembered that “they hid behind the trees out front of [the house] trying to catch them.” But this time, Tony’s whole family turned out to guard them. Even his grandfather, in his seventies, came from upstate New York to pitch in for three weeks.
Bostock threw more troops into the battle. Learning that Tony and Chiquita were making plans to stage a show of their own, he sued the performer to prevent her from breaking her “iron-clad” contract. He was likely furious to see the publicity they created, too. Their advertisement for the Edinboro State Fair in Pennsylvania described Chiquita as “the smallest woman on earth, stolen by Bostock and kept in captivity for the past year.”
Through the fall of 1902, the court fight in Pittsburgh moved forward, with Bostock calling in witnesses like Jack Bonavita, the lion trainer, and Chiquita and Tony drawing on the testimony of Mrs. Page, the Elgin boardinghouse owner. Even the Buffalo justice of the peace who married the couple was asked to provide testimony.
Bostock lost. The case wasn’t formally settled for three more years—the details have disappeared—but in fact Bostock gave up. Chiquita was finally free. In January 1903, when she performed again, she did so with her husband. She held a “dainty reception” on State Street in Erie, where children could meet her for a dime. The notice of her show described her as “a lily with a heart of fire, the fairest flower in all the world.”
Tony probably wrote it himself.15
11.
The Timekeepers
I
THE ELEPHANT IN THE CASTLE
While Tony and Chiquita sweated out the decision of the courts and hid away from Bostock in Erie, one hundred miles to the west, in Cleveland, Ohio, the Animal King played another hand, in his other game.
After exhibiting Jumbo II to New England crowds through the winter of 1902, Bostock shipped the elephant off to Baltimore. There, Jumbo broke out of his pen and tried to find his way out of the grounds. He was recaptured. The showman then hauled him to Cleveland and tried to sell him. Having billed the pachyderm as the “most savage elephant in the world,” he couldn’t have been surprised when his offer to the Wade Park Zoo was turned down.
His sales efforts having failed, Bostock positioned his big elephant as a curiosity at his Cleveland show. Forty horses carried him in a wooden cage to Manhattan Beach, at the edge of Lake Erie, and there, throughout the summer of 1902, in the company of his usual mates and alongside Madame Morelli, Captain Bonavita, and the formerly mad Professor Weeden, he held court in a “castle.” His biography was modified to match his new quarters. Not only had Jumbo caused the death of “hundreds” during his life, but in India he had been “used as a public executioner and has crushed the lives out of hundreds of criminals beneath his massive feet.” Most recently, at the Pan-American Exposition, he had marked his arrival “by killing a man.” He was “the worst elephant in the world,” and all it cost to see him was twenty-five cents.
Through the summer on the waterfront, Jumbo stood in his castle, as Big Liz and Little Doc gave rides. It had rained heavily in June, and Ohioans, released from indoors, poured into the menagerie. Crowds particularly liked feeding time with the elephants. With the exception of one incident when Jumbo roughed up a new employee who had entered his stall and teased him, he was most “reasonable.”
In September, after the children went back to school and the crowds thinned, the show on the beach closed. Stage sets were struck, cages were dismantled, and Bostock’s animals were loaded onto trucks and wagons and taken to the train station to move to winter quarters. Big Liz, Little Doc, all the other trainers and animals—everybody left Manhattan Beach.
Everybody but Jumbo II.
A man in Baltimore, claiming Frank Bostock owed him a lot of money, launched a lawsuit. Jumbo was attached to the suit, and a helpful Cleveland sheriff ordered Jumbo held until Bostock paid up.
Bostock left town and disappeared and the sheriff rued his decision. The elephant, he discovered, cost money. His oatmeal, peanuts, and bales of hay were expensive. A hired elephant keeper cost more than thirty dollars a week.“Som
ething must be done about this pretty soon,” said the sheriff in early October.
In the middle of the month, the sheriff again complained that Jumbo’s daily needs—two bales of hay, barrels of water—were too much for the county budget. Bostock had been tracked to New York City, but he had not replied to inquiries.
Finally, and probably under pressure, Bostock settled the suit. Jumbo II was his again. And within days, the showman made an announcement. A bullfight manager in Mexico City wanted to buy the elephant to fight a bull in his show ring. Even better, he would pay Bostock $5,000 for his big pachyderm. The Animal King, who had been plotting for months for ways to get rid of Jumbo, now made it clear that he had every reason in the world to keep him alive.
Which is why it was an unfortunate coincidence when suddenly, and for real this time, the big elephant died.
Some said that Jumbo II had been poisoned. Others said that the elephant, left by himself in the cold amusement park in Manhattan Beach, had died of loneliness. He had been sick for days, they claimed, and was “longing to join his companions of the show.” What is certain is that someone who knew exactly when and where the elephant would die, and who knew exactly what sort of equipment to bring, quickly sawed off the elephant’s tusks. The “thief” was never apprehended.1
Jumbo II never stood a chance against the Animal King. But at least his menagerie mate Big Liz carried with her some news that softened—if only slightly—the fact of his untimely end. After Cleveland, Liz was moved on to shows in New York City. And on June 24, 1903, between 4 and 4:30 p.m., at the Sea Beach Palace in Coney Island, she gave birth to twins, weighing approximately 150 pounds each. To those who did not know the recent history of the elephant mother, the New York Times offered some help. “The father of the babies is Jumbo II,” the paper explained, “whom Liz met at the Pan-American Exposition twenty-two months ago.”
The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Page 21