Ward was an even bigger deal. He was proving to be one of the few entertainers capable of outshining Menken. Not only was he the darling of critics, playing sold-out houses everywhere he went, but he even had a best seller to promote, Artemus Ward, His Book.
Carleton, a New York publishing house, had rushed the title into production to capitalize on the success of The Babes in the Wood. Of course, Ward’s stand-up routine didn’t really translate onto the page. It was highly dependent on facial expressions and perfectly wrought pauses. The publisher’s solution was to collect a series of reprinted columns from the Plain Dealer. In other words, the book featured the newspaper “Artemus Ward” rather than the stage creation, a distinctly different personality, and a source of possible confusion for buyers.
No one seemed to notice or care. Ward’s routine was hilarious, and so were his old newspaper columns. Artemus Ward, His Book sold an incredible forty thousand copies in the six months following its May 1862 release date. The only title that outpaced it was the English translation of Victor Hugo’s latest epic, Les misérables.
Ward even found an admirer of his humor in the president of the United States. On September 22, 1862, five days after the battle of Antietam, Lincoln summoned his cabinet to the White House. All seven members were present, including War Secretary Edwin Stanton, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, and Secretary of State William Seward. None of them knew the reason they had been called together, only that it must concern some vital matter.
To open the meeting, Lincoln picked up a copy of Artemus Ward, His Book and began reading aloud. The cabinet members were puzzled. “With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do,” Lincoln explained. He made halting progress through a brief chapter entitled “High-Handed Outrage at Utica,” stopping frequently to let out hearty guffaws.
Lincoln then put down the book and retrieved a single sheet of paper. It had been lying on a nearby table, pinned beneath his stovepipe hat. Once again, the president read aloud to his cabinet, but now his tone was considerably more sober. This was Lincoln’s first presentation of a hallowed document, the Emancipation Proclamation. The New York Herald was wonderstruck: “Upon somewhat the same principle that Alexander the Great read the Iliad before beginning a battle, the President now reads a chapter of Artemas [sic] Ward’s book to his Cabinet before beginning business.”
Artemus and Adah: While their brief fling in Boston was now a distant memory, they remained a pair of sorts. Ward turned twenty-nine in 1863; Menken was twenty-eight—or so she claimed. At the height of the Civil War, these fellow Pfaffians had emerged as two of the most popular acts in the Union states. Success built on success, and soon they attracted the attention of Tom Maguire, a powerful and accomplished western theater impresario. Maguire had gone to California in the gold rush year of 1849, escaping New York City, where he’d spent a shiftless youth as a stage driver, saloon keep, and low-level Tammany thug. Ready for a fresh start, he arrived West already in possession of a critical insight: chasing gold was not the way to go. He didn’t even bother staking a claim. The real riches lay in serving the needs of the miners by selling them pickaxes and tent cloth and one-dollar eggs.
Maguire became a purveyor of entertainment to the miners—that was his particular racket—and he made a fast fortune. By 1863, he owned roughly a dozen theaters in western locales such as San Francisco, Sacramento, and Virginia City, Nevada. His entertainment empire was bringing in millions of dollars per year.
A tall man, well over six feet, Maguire had a full head of prematurely white hair—prematurely because he was believed to be in his midforties (his birth date is unknown). He favored silk top hats and finely tailored suits. His fingernails were always buffed, his hair neatly slicked with pomade, his mustache waxed to a perfect taper. He rounded out his impeccable look with diamonds—a lot of them. A diamond stickpin held his scarf in place; his fingers sparkled with big, gaudy diamond rings.
That he’d achieved such wealth is doubly impressive when one considers another fact about Maguire: he was illiterate. When he staged a production, he couldn’t read a word of the script. But he had keen instincts for the kind of theatrical talent that would fill his houses. It was necessary to pick the right acts. Simply getting one to travel out West was expensive and logistically complicated. Maguire even brought in some performers from as far away as England.
A winning formula, he’d found, was to offer sensationalistic fare with a measure of sophistication. So many different types of people had moved out West, and audience tastes ranged from opera high to burlesque low. At his San Francisco theaters, increasingly, Maguire was finding that he needed to cater to cultivated urbanites, the kind of audience one might find back East in New York or Philadelphia. But he also owned theaters in the kind of frontier outposts that San Francisco had been a decade earlier. The inhabitants of such places dreamed big dreams of quick-strike riches—and in their leisure hours, they craved similarly outsize entertainment.
Maguire, certain that Menken and Ward were perfect, began pursuing both entertainers. He didn’t want them to perform together or even on the same bill. Rather, savvy Maguire wanted each to travel his theatrical circuit independently. News had carried way out West of the man who made Lincoln laugh and the woman who did the notorious horseback act. Even out here, many people were familiar with these daring and original artists; some even knew the name for their ilk: Bohemians. Maguire smelled opportunity and recognized that Menken and Ward were the kind of acts that could cut across his diverse audience. One notable East Coast Bohemian artist would drum up interest in the other, and the diamonds would come raining down.
“They seem crazy to have me out there,” wrote Menken to one of her handlers, a reference to ongoing negotiations with Maguire. Ultimately, she received extraordinarily generous terms. For a western tour, Maguire agreed to pay Menken a reported $500 per week, plus one-third of the nightly gross receipts and half the take from Friday nights and matinees.
Around the same time, Ward received a telegram from Maguire, inquiring about his availability. (Because Maguire was illiterate, an associate wrote it on his behalf.) While passing through New York City, Ward dropped by Pfaff’s and showed the telegram to Clapp. “What will you take for forty nights in California?” it read. “Brandy and soda” was Clapp’s suggestion for a humorous response.
What’s truly funny: Ward sent a return telegram bearing that message.
It proved a fantastic opener for a business negotiation. Brandy and soda: Ward came across as so confident and relaxed. No doubt, it made Maguire that much more resolute about landing the comedian. The terms of Ward’s deal are not known, but one can bet that they were also extremely generous.
Ward and Menken were getting everything they had ever desired. Like all Bohemians—the vanguard French and otherwise—the two had always hungered for glory. Why bother with a burdensome artist’s life unless that’s the goal? It’s what they had wanted and had struggled for. But now, Menken and Ward would find it increasingly difficult to accommodate.
Just as the first days of the Civil War felt giddy, not as anyone would have expected, fame—once achieved—didn’t feel as one might have imagined. Ward, a funny man with a cold current of melancholy, would increasingly lose himself in drink. Menken, underneath it all, simply remained a mess. She once described herself as “dumb and cold when I should be all grace and gratitude.” She regularly signed her letters “Infelix,” Latin for “the unhappy.”
Menken departed for the West first, sailing out of New York Harbor aboard the Northern Light on July 13, 1863. She brought eight trunks of clothing along with her fourth husband, Robert Newell. (Despite her resolve to avoid the altar, she had made yet another trip.)
Newell was a writer who had lately found success under the pseudonym “Orpheus C. Kerr.” It was a play on “office seeker.” His humorous pieces
skewered the corrupt political patronage system that was rapidly taking over in wartime. Newell was a delicate man with a trim little mustache, a surprising follow-up to prizefighter Heenan. With her latest mate, Menken seems to have been trying to pivot from brawn to brains. But the contrast left Newell insecure. Only four days into the marriage, he had locked his wife in the bedroom of their Jersey City flat to keep her from venturing out into the world—source of a potentially limitless supply of Menken suitors. She climbed out the window. It was not an auspicious start. Now, nearly a year into her latest troubled marriage, Menken sailed through the Golden Gate.
Mazeppa debuted at Maguire’s Opera House in San Francisco on August 24, 1863. For the new production, everything had been pushed up to an even greater level of sensationalism. Maguire was full of ideas. When Menken was stripped down, it was no longer to sheer pink tights. Instead, at Maguire’s suggestion, she donned a wrap, a kind of mini toga, which exposed ample bare leg. When she was strapped to a horse, it was no Belle Beauty (the horse from those first performances in Albany). It was a scraping, snorting California mustang. Before the production began, Menken had to devote a couple weeks to rehearsing with this beast.
Tickets were fifty cents for general admission. Paying twice that amount entitled one to the luxury of a reserved seat, then an unusual arrangement. Plenty proved willing to hand over a dollar to see Menken, though. The smart set could talk of nothing besides the “Frenzy of Frisco.” Menken’s run made such an impression that a parody Mazeppa later ran at the Bella Union, a seedy melodeon house. It featured a performer called Big Bertha, who was stripped down and strapped to the back of a donkey.
Menken played about a month’s worth of sold-out shows in San Francisco. She demanded only a single break, for Yom Kippur, the traditional Jewish Day of Atonement. Maguire’s Opera House was darkened on that date. And then it was time for Menken to move on to other Maguire theaters in other towns—most colorfully, Virginia City.
As her stagecoach wound through the Sierra Nevada range into Virginia City, Menken was greeted by a remarkable sight. Even on its outskirts, playbills for Mazeppa were plastered on the rocks and trees, and in the city proper they were everywhere: on walls, in windows, stuck to fences and street lanterns and pieces of mining equipment. Maguire had arranged for twelve hundred playbills to be posted. He’d also distributed a number of cartes de visite photos of a scantily clad Menken. Maguire knew his audience. In Virginia City, the ratio was seventeen men to every woman. It didn’t take much to stir this population. “Feminine laundry, hanging on a line, filled them with mad longing,” according to an old account of the town.
Menken had wowed the sophisticates in San Francisco, but this promised to be an altogether different experience. Virginia City was only a few years old, founded during the silver rush that broke in 1859, exactly a decade after the gold rush. At the outset, a handful of prospectors had gathered here, living in tents, working claims with colorful names like “Gouge-Eye” and “Wake-Up-Jake.” They’d chosen their spot well, smack on the Comstock Lode, site of the richest silver strike in US history. Now an entire city (population twelve thousand) had sprouted, halfway up the side of Sun Mountain. It had grown so quickly and haphazardly that it consisted of just four long streets, running in parallel across the face of the mountain. They were named simply, and in descending order: A, B, C, and D Streets. No one had even bothered to create connecting streets. To get from B to A, say, one had to climb a steep path.
Virginia City wasn’t merely situated on Sun Mountain; the mountain was also the repository of those rich silver deposits. Beneath the city, there existed a parallel one, a vast honeycomb of mining shafts and tunnels and dimly lit galleries. The commotion was incredible. According to another old account, this one in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, “Steam-engines are puffing off their steam; smoke-stacks are blackening the air with their thick volumes of smoke; quartz-batteries are battering; hammers are hammering; subterranean blasts are bursting . . . picks and crow-bars are picking and crashing.” The mining companies worked Sun Mountain so hard, they’d created such gaping underground hollows, it seemed, that residents frequently wondered if Virginia City would simply collapse back into the earth from whence it came.
The miners worked around the clock in shifts. These were hard-luck characters, men who had traveled out West hoping to get rich, some of them deserters from the Union army, some from the Confederate army. When their own schemes failed, they were forced to take jobs in the mines. They toiled so that others—the wealthy mine supervisors and claim holders up on A Street—could realize their dreams. Climbing from D to C to B to A Streets may have been physically grueling. Even more difficult was attaining the wealth necessary to move up the mountain to a better, higher, address. Few made it. In their off hours—whether it be 5:00 p.m. or a.m.—the miners frequented saloons such as the Sawdust Corner. They pounded back forty-rod, a type of strong, cheap whiskey that took its name from the distance a person could supposedly walk, after drinking a shot, before keeling over.
During his recent trip across the continent, Ludlow had passed through Virginia City. Despite his colossal vocabulary, he found that the place beggared description. The best he could manage was “feverish.” Virginia City—feverish western boomtown—was situated in a feverish western boom territory. Only a few years before, this entire region had been part of the vast Utah Territory. After the Comstock discovery, however, a large chunk of Utah was split away, separating silver country from the troublesome Mormon lands to the east. This breakaway piece became the Nevada Territory.
Menken’s visit occurred during the very brief window before—in record time—Nevada made the transition from territory to statehood. Millions of dollars’ worth of silver were being extracted annually. Absorbing Nevada into the United States promised to secure a source of funding for the Union war effort. Lincoln—bypassing the usual constitutional requirements—would simply proclaim Nevada a state.
Everything was new and raw and wild and exaggerated. Even Maguire’s Opera House in Virginia City had been open for only a few months. Fittingly, on its very first night, two miners in the audience got into a heated dispute. One pulled a gun and started firing. Audience members scattered, crouching behind seats and lying on the floor.
The theater featured a massive stage, far larger than its San Francisco counterpart. There was a double tier of box seats, done up in scarlet brocade and fronted by velvet-lined railings. The curtain, embroidered with a scene of Lake Tahoe from a Sierra summit, was the work of an Italian artist. Off from the main auditorium were all kinds of side attractions—a long mahogany bar, a billiards parlor, gambling tables—representing further moneymaking opportunities for Maguire.
Opening night for Mazeppa—March 7, 1864—didn’t feature any gunplay. But there was plenty of excitement. Throughout Menken’s performance, the stage periodically shook and the footlights flickered, the result of subterranean mining detonations.
Two of the city’s most notable residents were on hand. In the best box in the house sat Julia Bulette, wealthy owner of the most popular brothel in town. In the press pew sat Mark Twain, audacious cub reporter for Virginia City’s Daily Territorial Enterprise. The paper was considered among the finest west of the Chicago Tribune. Its stories were frequently picked up by other publications, sometimes from as far away as London. The Nevada silver rush was a major current event, producing a steady stream of important news. The paper employed a talented team of reporters who covered mining innovations, labor unrest, and impossibly convoluted claim disputes with vast sums at stake. Thrown into the editorial mix were humorous pieces and hoaxes, a specialty of western papers of this era. Very often, these were the work of young Twain.
Twain was no fan of Menken. His recent stay in San Francisco had coincided with her run of Mazeppa, and he’d caught a performance. In a review for the Territorial Enterprise, Twain had taken Menken to task for being graceless and fren
etic: “She pitches headforemost at the atmosphere like a battering-ram; she works her arms, and her legs, and her whole body like a dancing-jack.” Even the much-ballyhooed strip-down scene failed to move him. It left Menken wearing a “superfluous rag” that reminded him of an item “indispensable to infants of tender age.” To Twain’s unsparing eye, Menken’s new mini toga looked like a diaper.
Now, as he watched Mazeppa again, Twain was busy crafting fresh barbs. He planned to really tear into the actress. Before he got the chance, however, Joseph Goodman, editor of the Territorial Enterprise, stepped in and wrote a positive review. A second savaging by the same reporter for the same paper would have been overkill.
While Menken played Virginia City, Ada Clare arrived in San Francisco, her young son, Aubrey, in tow. The Queen of Bohemia had flown Pfaff’s at last. King Clapp was left to his solitary reign.
Clare had decided to move to San Francisco after securing a promise of steady writing assignments from Joe Lawrence, the pipe-smoking Golden Era editor with the aggressive recruiting style: “We purchased their pens and pencils before they had been here an hour.” Lawrence was thrilled. This was an opportunity to offer an established and sophisticated female writer to his readership. In an editor’s note, Lawrence crowed that he’d signed up “Ada Clare, the beautiful, accomplished, talented, and brilliant young feuilletoniste.” Clare jumped at the chance to have the kind of freedom she had once enjoyed with the Saturday Press.
For the Era, Clare would write columns contrasting women’s clothing fashions in New York versus San Francisco and praising a local outfit called Robinson’s Gym Classes for offering instruction to women as well as men. In one column, “The Man’s Sphere of Influence,” Clare humorously inverted nineteenth-century gender roles, imagining a world where it was men who stayed home. For this particular piece, Clare wrote in the guise of a cranky social conservative, lamenting that times were changing and not for the better: “I noticed one thing that grieved and annoyed me. That is, seeing so many gentlemen out without any body to take care of them, expressing their opinions without asking any lady’s leave, and enjoying the music without begging any lady’s pardon.”
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