How Not to Get Rich

by Alan Pell Crawford

  With characteristic good sense, Rogers consulted an expert of his own choosing to look into the business—someone who actually worked in the textile field and knew something about it. “I do not feel that it would be of any value to us in our mills, and the number of Jacquard looms in America is so limited that I am of the opinion that there is no field for a company to develop the invention here,” the expert reported. “A cursory examination of the pamphlet leads me to place no very high value upon the invention, from a practical standpoint.”

  At that, Twain dropped the idea, though doing so was difficult, for Szczepanik’s money man had other brilliant ideas. (One was a method for making blankets out of peat moss, when mixed with cotton, “or with wool if you want better goods.” They claimed that using this process they could make a suit of clothes—“soft, good, and durable”—for 36 cents.)

  IN MARCH 1900, Twain again decided that it “was about time for me to look around and buy something,” he told Rogers. “So I looked around and bought.” The company in Germany that produced Plasmon was forming a British affiliate to market it there, which presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Seizing it, Twain invested $12,500 (and at least that much later on) and was made the new company’s president, which prompted a move to London to oversee operations. By 1901, the British firm was shipping up to eight tons of Plasmon per month, and Twain was earning more than $1,500 in quarterly dividends. “It’s as good as railroading,” he told Rogers. He could easily “clear 20,000 [pounds sterling] a month.” Maybe so, but Rogers remained skeptical. “I’m afraid you think Plasmon is a speculative thing, but really it isn’t,” Twain insisted. “I’m not running any risk . . . You cannot lose a penny.”

  But so what if Rogers didn’t want to invest in Plasmon? Others surely would. Andrew Carnegie, maybe. Hoping to get Carnegie on board, Twain adopted the well-intentioned but questionable tactic of writing not to Carnegie himself, but to the tycoon’s daughter, Margaret, then three years old. He suggested that Margaret—or whoever read the letter—give her father “five or six fingers of Scotch,” and then talk to him about Plasmon. “This will mellow him up and enlarge his views, and before he solidifies again you will have him. That is to say, you will have his cheque for £500 drawn to order of ‘Plasmon Syndicate, Ltd.’ which you will send to me, and you and I will be personally responsible that the money is back in his hands in six months, and along with it 500 shares in the Plasmon Company, all paid up.” Even if charmed by this novel approach, Carnegie did not invest.

  This was no doubt wise. In 1900 Twain came back to the United States to form the American Plasmon Company, investing $25,000 of his own money to do so and acting as its president. The new company was incorporated in 1902, but within two years, Twain admitted to Rogers that it was “one of those investments of mine that I am ashamed of, and would like to forget.” For reasons he didn’t specify, he apparently had never been able to pay close enough attention to its operations, and the company suffered as a result—though not as much, maybe, as it would have had he paid close attention. He even considered making additional investments in it, though he suspected Rogers “would consider an additional purchase an additional insanity. That is what it would have been, I think.”

  In late 1907, with Twain as its president, the American Plasmon Company was sued by three former officers. Twain admitted that the company, with only $13.08 in its bank account, was unable to pay its bills and was now bankrupt. When the company’s receivers obtained a court order to get its account books, the New York Times reported, “Mark Twain is at present in Bermuda.” (He was vacationing, though the Times did not say so.)

  When reporters finally reached Twain, they asked if it was true, as rumored, that he felt he had been swindled.

  “It is,” he told them.

  “Out of how much?”

  “Oh, about $32,000. I held $25,000 worth of the stock, and one of the members of the company swindled me out of the $12,500 later. No, I won’t say I was swindled out of the $25,000. The company failed because of bad management. I ought not to say I was swindled out of all the money. Most of it was lost through bad business. I was always bad in business.”

  But maybe that was too harsh a judgment. “If I had kept out of American Plasmon,” he told Rogers, “I would now be a good business man, but as it is, I am only half a good business man.”

  In late 1909, just six months before Twain’s death, the Plasmon venture ended, taking Twain’s entire investment with it. But this failure did little to squash this irrepressible man’s high spirits: When Twain crowed next about an opportunity to invest $50,000 in a new railroad that Rogers hadn’t heard of and that didn’t seem to be included in standard railroad industry listings, Rogers told him, “Do be careful. It is much easier to keep out of trouble than it is to get out. You and I know that of old.”

  23

  |—

  —|

  “To Succeed in Business . . .”

  It was in 1897, when Twain was living in London, that rumors that he had suddenly died began to spread back in the United States. In early summer, the Cincinnati Inquirer reported that “broken down, mentally and physically, his once brilliant mind incapable of further effort and almost penniless, his life is drawing to a close.” Other papers picked up the doleful tone, which led to the publication of obituaries. The New York Herald tried to sum up Twain’s life, drawing some platitudinous lessons about why he had lost so much money. “Had he been less of a humorist,” the Herald speculated, “he might have been more of a business man.”

  On June 2, a cub reporter for the New York Journal showed up at the house Twain had rented in London. When Twain refused to get out of bed to meet him, the reporter sent up the telegram he had been given, which reminds us once again of the many ways a man can be worth more dead than alive. “If Mark Twain dying in poverty, in London, send 500 words,” the telegram read. “If Mark Twain has died in poverty, send 1000 words.”

  Twain sent back a handwritten note, explaining that he had a cousin in London who had been seriously ill a few weeks earlier but had since recovered. “The report of my illness grew out of his illness,” Twain wrote. “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” (Evidently, he never actually said reports of his death were “greatly exaggerated.”) “Of course I am dying,” he told the Journal’s London bureau chief, “but I’m not dying faster than anybody else.” The notion that he was impoverished, however, he found “harder to deal with” than reports that he had died. The Journal duly corrected the record, telling its readers that Twain was living comfortably in a splendid house in Chelsea.

  Twain, who was sixty-one in 1896, still had another fourteen years ahead of him. These were difficult years, marked—as are the last years of most people who live long lives—by failing health and the deaths of loved ones. After their world tour, Twain and Livy had moved around a good deal, usually in the vain hope that she would flourish in a different climate, under a different regimen or with more mineral baths, and would eventually regain strength. After their return to New York, they rented a house in Riverdale, on the Hudson River, in 1901 but left two years later for Italy. There on June 5, 1904, in a villa overlooking Florence, Livy died at the age of fifty-eight, having suffered for years from heart and thyroid problems.

  After her funeral and burial in Elmira, Twain lived at 21 Fifth Avenue in New York City. In 1908, he moved to a house he had built and named Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut, about sixty-five miles northeast of New York City. It was at Stormfield on Christmas Eve, 1909, that his daughter Jean Clemens, who was an epileptic, died of a heart attack suffered during a seizure. She was twenty-nine. (Twain’s only surviving daughter, Clara Clemens Samossoud, the only one to marry and produce a grandchild, lived to be eighty-eight years of age. She died in November 1962 in La Jolla, California.) Bedeviled by bronchitis and angina, brought low by grief, Twain died of heart failure at Stormfield on April 21, 1910. Seventy-five at the time of death, he was buried in Elmira, next to
Livy.

  There were times of great loneliness during Twain’s last years, but he never again had to worry about money—even if he was in the habit of doing so. Once Rogers got him out of financial trouble, Twain prospered, despite his best efforts to lose it all on the carpet-weaving business, on Plasmon, and on a succession of less noteworthy schemes. Rogers invested in blue-chip stocks for him, and having enabled Twain to hold on to the copyrights for his own books, Twain continued to profit from their sale in various editions. Stage productions of his books also brought in revenue. Twain’s world tour increased his popularity and book sales in other countries that already knew and loved his books. The American Publishing Company issued the first collected volume of all of his works in the late 1890s.

  BY THE TIME of Twain’s death, he was arguably the most famous American in the world and easily the most photographed. There’s film footage of him available online, supposedly taken by Thomas Edison. In it Twain can be seen walking outside Stormfield in 1909, using a slightly comical shambling gait, with white hair, white suit, cigar, and all. Twain’s was an instantly recognizable image in his own day. The pseudonym he had adopted in his newspaper days as well as his likeness were used to advertise and sell all sorts of products, and pretty much all without obtaining his permission and without paying him. There were Mark Twain brands of whiskey, cigars, tobacco, playing cards, ashtrays, fans, flour, board games, calendars, train cars, shaving soap, sewing machines, china, and—a little later—Oldsmobiles. There was, by one account, a jumping frog mechanical bank. The card game Authors included Twain (before his hair turned white) in 1873. Sheet music distributed in 1911 for “There Isn’t Anyone for Me to Play With Anymore” had his picture on the cover.

  There were Mark Twain shirts and trousers, shoes, socks and underwear, and, for the ladies, Mark Twain mink coats. Twain would have approved, provided, of course, he was properly compensated. He believed in wearing clothes. “Clothes make the man,” he is supposed to have said, though the quote might be apocryphal. “Naked people have very little influence in society.”

  OBSERVING ALL THIS, marketing geniuses today still draw supposedly profound lessons about their own profession from how the man we know as Mark Twain managed his extraordinary career and, as we would say today, his “personal brand.” Marketing consultants say Twain was a global brand, and that was no doubt true, as the success of his lectures in other countries amply demonstrated. We can learn a great deal about “content marketing” from Twain, Owen Matson tells us on MarketScale.com. In his book What Mark Twain Learned Me ’bout Public Speakin’, motivational speaker Conor Cunneen says we can make better presentations by studying how Twain prepped for his lectures. The site MDGAdvertising.com says Twain was “well ahead of his time in his ability to market his work while marketing himself as the definitive brand. He produced a steady stream of quality content and used laughter to drive loyalty. Though his heyday was more than 100 years ago, he still had the last word on modern marketing.” Tom Bentley, writing for MarketingProfs.com says Twain “had ‘platform’ a century before the concept had circulation.” (I don’t know what “had ‘platform’” means either.)

  Twain scholar Laura Skandera Trombley has written thoughtfully about Twain as his own brand manager. She has noted how in 1909 the Mark Twain Company was no doubt the only company he was ever closely associated with that actually made money. With Rogers’s help, Twain had already secured the copyrights to his own books. The purpose of the Mark Twain Company was to make it possible for him to generate income when other people wanted to use his likeness. Trombley writes:

  Once he copyrighted himself, he became an official commodity and possessed the right to control the usage of his likeness as well as the right to sue those who would use it without compensating him. An entire specialized area of business and copyright law has emerged from Mark Twain’s efforts and celebrities like J Lo, Jessica Simpson, and Victoria Beckham should give him a grateful nod for creating the outlet that allows them to earn royalties from their clothing lines.

  The estates of Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and other celebrities also owe Twain a debt of gratitude. Thanks to his pioneering efforts, heirs of celebrities today can generate huge revenues from the stars’ images after their deaths—more, in some cases, than when they were alive.

  WHEN TWAIN DIED in 1910, his estate was appraised at more than $470,000, or $11 million today. This included 50 shares in the Mark Twain Company worth $200,000, worth $4.93 million now, and 375 shares of Plasmon Milk Products, which were worthless. In 1964, two years after his only surviving daughter, Clara, had died, his estate was worth just under $980,000, or about $7.6 million today. Her father’s books continue to sell, of course. Some seem never to have been out of print. Huckleberry Finn makes his regular appearances in high school literature classes, though with equal regularity he is considered too disreputable for impressionable youth and expelled. He is always, of course, readmitted.

  That Twain remains an immortal would no doubt please him greatly. Year after year, he still makes news of one kind or another, and when he does, sales of his books spike. He planned it that way, making sure of that by setting conditions on when his autobiography would be released. He began writing it in 1870, put it aside, then resumed work on it in 1906, this time dictating his memoirs. He allowed some cleaned-up excerpts to appear in the North American Review in 1906 and 1907 but was determined that the unexpurgated versions would not be released until well after he and everyone else he talked about (and sometimes denounced) in the memoirs were dead. Paine edited excerpts of the autobiography that appeared in 1924, followed by more extensive editions in 1940 and 1959. In 2010, the first of three volumes of his uncensored dictations was issued; the final volume was released in 2015. With each release there is a flurry of publicity, and once again we all talk about his books, chuckle over his spontaneous aphorisms, and wonder how his humor remains so fresh generation after generation.

  So what lessons does this story of Twain’s financial misadventures offer? What is the takeaway? What can we learn? Well, not much, probably. If you read this book in the hope that you would discover some secrets of financial success, you will no doubt put it down with a sense of disappointment, if not disgust. But that is the wrong way to read biographies and histories, anyway. The value in looking at the life and career of someone who lived at another time is not in search of cherry-picked anecdotes that illustrate some banality (“A good CEO is a good listener”). The value in reading biography and history is to expand one’s imagination, to glimpse not how the challenges Twain faced were just like those of a business leader today (they weren’t) but to learn how utterly different they were, and in that way enrich one’s sense of life’s complexity and even how wildly amusing the human condition really is. If that makes you a better businessperson, it would be because it has made you a better person, period—wiser, more understanding, and with a deeper sense of life’s possibilities but also of its limitations.

  Of course, we should remember that, as an investor, Twain lived in a world that did not really know about the business principles that we, a century later, take for granted. Investors in the late nineteenth century didn’t have the same methods we have to conduct due diligence. They didn’t always consult with lawyers when they drew up contracts. All too often, they relied on their gut impulses. What’s puzzling, of course, is that a man who understood so much about human nature, as Twain did, could be misled so often by wishful thinking and a kind of manic enthusiasm.

  Twain himself didn’t believe there was much wisdom to be gained from a close examination of his business career. “I cannot say that I have turned out the great businessman that I thought I was when I began life,” he told Eastern Business College alumni in Poughkeepsie in 1901, when he was sixty-five. “But I am comparatively young yet, and may learn.” He then talked about Kaolotype (“I don’t know now what it was all about”), and the Paige Compositor (“a machine for doing something or other�
��), and about how he failed even at book publishing, and reflected on how well served he had been through the years by his own mad and endless determination to make a great fortune.

  Then, summing up his remarks to his business college audience, he offered one last thought for his listeners to hang on to.

  “My axiom is,” he said, after a long and impressive pause, “to succeed in business . . . avoid my example.”

  Afterword

  * * *

  And what about that Tennessee land that Twain’s father said would make the family rich? In case you’re wondering, John Marshall Clemens might have been right to tell his heirs to hang on to that property. The family had title to at least 30,000 acres, which John Clemens bought between 1826 and 1841, for $400—or about $9,260 in our time.

  Land records from Fentress County, where those land holdings were, show that in 2016, a parcel of 1,912 acres and the mineral rights under it sold for $2,453 per acre. That’s a total of $4,690,136. So if Twain’s family had kept those 30,000 acres to this day and sold them for $2,453 per acre, they’d have been worth at least $74 million. The family would have been “fabulously wealthy” after all.

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  I wish to thank Glen Hartley, my agent; Rick Wolff, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; and Rick’s superb publishing team, including Rosemary McGuinness, Alexandra Primiani, Dani Spencer, Katrina Kruse, Rachael DeShano, Lisa Sacks Warhol, Ayesha Mirza, and Martha Kennedy. They and their colleagues made the experience of writing this book a pleasure.