Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

  Notably absent from Paris and the European tour was Annie Oakley, now fifty-five. Injured when a Wild West train derailed in 1901, she had not returned to Cody’s show, which more and more entailed long stretches of grueling one-night stands. She opted instead for a more leisurely life, performing only occasionally, competing in shooting meets, and visiting family and friends. Then, on August 11, 1903, she opened the Chicago Hearst newspaper to see the headline “ANNIE OAKLEY ASKS COURT FOR MERCY Famous Woman Crack Shot . . . Steals to Secure Cocaine.” The article was picked up throughout the country, and while the offending newspapers ran journalistic mea culpas and apologies once the story was refuted, Oakley was not assuaged. She became embroiled in libel suits against fifty-five newspapers, testifying at one trial after another over the next five years until all had paid up.

  In the spring of 1906, Gustave Eiffel rejoiced to learn that his beloved tower would receive a reprieve from the City of Paris, which extended his contract to 1915. The city’s committee expressed no great enthusiasm, however, stating, “If [the Eiffel Tower] did not exist, one would probably not contemplate building it there, or even perhaps anywhere else; but it does exist.” The attitude was very much a resigned “Since it is there, let it stay”—at least for an additional five years.

  Energized by this victory, Eiffel expanded his investigations into the nature of wind and aviation. Seeking more control and precision, he built a large wind tunnel at the foot of the tower. There, he used the tower’s generators to operate a fan system that blew a steady, powerful wind of up to forty miles an hour. He conducted thousands of experiments that helped in the redesign of the wings and propellers of airplanes. His book The Resistance of the Air and Aviation earned him the Smithsonian Institution’s prestigious Langley Gold Medal in 1913.

  By then, Eiffel no longer worried about the future of his tower. In early 1908 the French War Department had finally come around to his point of view. “The Government has begun the installation of an elaborate apparatus for wireless telegraphy in the Eiffel Tower,” reported The New York Times, further describing “splendid results attained . . . messages were sent here direct from Morocco, a distance of about 2,000 kilometers. . . . [A]n instrument in [the] Eiffel Tower would prove most useful as a part of the national defense in time of war.”

  In August of 1911 Thomas Edison returned to Paris for the first time in twenty-two years. He, Mina, and their children, Madeleine and Charles, were embarked on that rare Edison activity: a family vacation. “I have just finished something new,” he told the inevitable horde of reporters, “my talking pictures are complete; two hundred sets of them have been made and they are wonderful.” Among the many subjects the usually loquacious Edison did not address was the Eiffel Tower and why America had not yet built something taller and better.

  At one chic Paris restaurant, a fashionable woman asked, “Who is that shabby little man with the crowd around him?” When told it was Le Grand Edison, she said, “His clothes look as though they had cost about fifty francs, but he has a brain great enough to make him Emperor of France.” The Edisons spent two busy months motoring through France, Switzerland, and Germany, and the great inventor had plenty to say about his experiences. As for Paris, it “impresses me favorably as the city of beautiful prospects, but not as a city of lights. New York is far more impressive at night.” Edison reckoned he had covered almost two thousand miles during his travels, and thus felt well qualified to proclaim: “In France, the roads are the finest in the world. The fact is, France is one great park. The farms are splendid, and the people get twice as much out of an acre as we do in America.” More ominously, when asked if he saw any signs of war, he confirmed what many feared, answering, “Yes, at every little mountain pass there was a fort with wire entanglements. The military was in evidence everywhere, in cities, villages, the countryside, and all.”

  Edison would never return to Paris, and spent his remaining two decades lionized in America as a national hero whose genius had bequeathed to the world the incandescent light, the delights of the phonograph, and, to a lesser degree, the marvels of the moving pictures.

  In early August 1914 war came, as feared, to Europe. James Gordon Bennett’s many automobiles, horses, and carriages (and the Jersey dairy cow from his Versailles estate) were requisitioned for the Gallic war effort, as were those of every French resident. Bennett, seventy-three, had no intention of abandoning Paris, and he could be seen walking daily to the offices of the Paris Herald, which he turned into a lifeline of information for the thousands of Americans initially stranded by the chaos of war. The reading room at 49 avenue de l’Opéra became the center for “Americans in Paris [to find] salient news of the war and the European situation.”

  Gustave Eiffel had long argued the strategic value of his thousand-foot tower, and during the early weeks of war he was vindicated. “In August 1914,” recounts Eiffel Tower historian Joseph Harriss, “the tower’s receiver captured a radio message from [German] General von der Marwitz,” whose cavalry division was bearing down on Paris, except that he “had run out of feed for his horses and was unable to advance—intelligence that helped convince the French General Staff that the time had come for a decisive counterattack on the Marne.”

  In The Herald’s newsroom, “an editor kept track of the armies by sticking pins in a map, but when they came too close to Paris the editor fled.” Not the pugnacious Bennett, however, for with almost all his staff gone by September, he simply took over as managing editor, while also working as a reporter. A great student of military strategy, he did not believe the Germans would take Paris, but he told his London correspondents that “he would keep on printing his paper . . . and if the Germans ever did get into Paris he would keep on printing it if they would let him. His example had a fine effect on the courage of the people.” As the war dragged on and many Paris papers ceased publication altogether, Bennett began printing two front pages for The Herald—one in French and one in English. Back in America, he put the full might of The New York Herald into urging the United States to enter the war against Germany.

  In these early years of the war, the Paris Herald was losing ever-greater sums, and though few were aware of it, Bennett could no longer easily absorb such losses. The sad truth was that by 1914 the glory days of The New York Herald were behind it. During the 1890s, when Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal-American had been battling it out in downtown Park Row, Bennett’s Herald, largely hors de combat, flourished. In 1893, he had moved the paper north to West Thirty-fifth Street, to a two-story Veronese palace designed by Stanford White. The Herald, with its uptown location and high-toned readership, captured much of the splashy advertising of the new nearby Macy’s and Gimbel’s department stores.

  In 1906, however, Bennett decreed that The New York Herald would oppose rival publisher William Randolph Hearst’s Democratic candidacy for governor of New York. When Hearst lost, he sought to punish Bennett. For years, The Herald’s personals columns had been known along Park Row as “the Whores’ Daily Guide and Compendium.” Bennett’s editors had often warned their boss that “some day the personals would get him in trouble with the postal laws, that they were a constant affront to decent people. . . . The Commodore swept aside their warning memos. Those little ads kept him in yachts, champagne, and country estates, as well as helping to pay for the Herald’s costly foreign correspondence.” Now avenging Hearst lieutenant S. S. Carvalho persuaded a federal grand jury to investigate.

  The grand jurors had little trouble deciphering the intent of such typical Herald personals as: “A woman finds paddling her own canoe dreary task, seeks manly pilot,” “Young lady, good figure, wants to pose for artists,” or the dollar-a-line come-ons such as “chic Parisian ladies with cozy suites,” “masseuses with highly magnetic manners,” and “witty, affectionate ladies possessing beautiful figures, hair, teeth” seek “jolly sports” in search of “pleasant possibilities.” On April 10, 1907, James Gordon Bennett and his
newspaper were convicted and fined $25,000. The “indecent” personals were ordered halted, causing a great drop-off in revenue and circulation. Bennett’s Gilded Age had come to an end.

  The Herald was still profitable but was no longer the cash cow that had sustained Bennett’s many extravagances. In 1915, a Herald reporter who had recently returned from wartime Paris was asked how Bennett was. “The old, drunken, money-spending Jim Bennett is dead. In his place had come a Scotch miser.” Equally surprising had been Bennett’s marriage on September 10, 1914, to Maud, the American widow of Baron de Reuter, a European news magnate.

  Bennett was no longer young, and his stalwart publishing of the Paris Herald during the war years took its toll. However, not even World War I could persuade him to give up one of his more peculiar editorial whims—the daily appearance in the Paris Herald since December 24, 1899, of the exact same letter from “Old Philadelphia Lady”: “I am anxious to find out the way to figure the temperature from Centigrade to Fahrenheit and vice-versa. In other words, I want to know, whenever I see the temperature designated on Centrigrade’s thermometer, how to find out what it would be on Fahrenheit’s thermometer.”

  James Gordon Bennett did, however, give up a number of his other indulgences. In 1916, he sold his luxurious yacht Lysistrata to the Russian Red Cross. Perhaps he could no longer afford to maintain the one-hundred-man crew, or perhaps on a continent mired in trench warfare and slaughter, pleasure cruising was considered bad form. In the fall of 1917, Bennett went to visit the war wounded in a hospital in Paris and caught the flu. He and his wife retreated to the Villa Namouna on the Côte d’Azur in Beaulieu, where he could convalesce among the rose gardens, the lawn cluttered with ceramic and iron animal sculptures, and his beloved herd of tiny dogs. Bennett recovered, only to be stricken with pneumonia. He would remain at his villa, bedridden, until his death on May 14, 1918, at five thirty in the morning. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., died at the age of seventy-six with the great story of his final years—World War I—still unfinished.

  The French newspapers genuinely mourned the loss of this noted American Francophile: “All Paris knew his tall, slim figure,” declared an editorial in Excelsior, but what “stood out most prominently, especially at this time of universal upheaval, was his fervent friendship for France, which never failed and which strengthened in our hours of trial.” “Gordon Bennett!” exclaimed L’Heure. “What an original figure and what memories! Never again shall we see the Napoleonic director of the New York Herald, the inventor of the ‘grand reportage,’ the man who sent Stanley in search of Livingstone. . . . It is a great pity, in all sincerity. And what a friend of France! What sound judgment! His Paris edition of the Herald was always a little chef-d’oeuvre of elegance.”

  While year after year, Cody’s Rough Rider and Wild West show earned decent and sometimes even immense profits, Cody himself teetered, as ever, on the brink of fiscal calamity. When he failed to repay a $20,000 six-month loan from a ruthless scalawag named Henry Tammen, owner of the Denver Post, Buffalo Bill found himself in a kind of indentured servitude, working for Tammen’s Sells-Floto Circus. On October 22, 1915, he reported to his sister Julia from Bryan, Texas: “This has been another long season 183 days given 366 performances traveled 16,878 miles. And with God’s help I haven’t missed a performance.”

  By the spring of 1916, Cody was his own boss once again, out in the hustings with “The Military Pageant Preparedness, ‘Buffalo Bill’ (himself) Combined with the 101 Ranch Shows.” Some days, Johnny Baker worried that Cody, who wore a hairpiece to hide his baldness, would not manage to mount his horse, McKinley. But Cody was the quintessential trouper. “For four weeks we have had the hottest sweltering mucky sticky heat I ever experienced,” he wrote Julia on August 1, 1916, from Amsterdam, New York. “And the epidemic among the children just paralised business. But I am still alive.”

  When the tour wrapped up on November 11 in Portsmouth, Virginia, Cody gratefully caught the train to Denver to visit his sister May, then continued on to Wyoming to pass Christmas at his beloved TE Ranch, before returning to Denver to seek new financing for his show. Although he was not well, he could not resist granting an interview to reporter Chauncey Thomas, who wrote, “The old scout was in pajamas and slippers, and over them was drawn a house coat. . . . Just the man himself standing there, waxen pale, his silver hair flowing down over his straight, square shoulders, his hand out in a last farewell. . . . It was the last time. I knew it; he knew it; we all knew it. But on the surface not a sign.” On January 10, a few minutes after the noon hour, at the age of seventy, Buffalo Bill Cody died at his sister May’s house, surrounded by his family. His passing was big news, and the occasion for national mourning. Twenty-five thousand people, including cowboys, Indians, and grizzled old scouts, paid their respects as he lay in state in the Colorado State Capitol.

  Even in death, Buffalo Bill’s fate was shaped by debt. He had reportedly wanted to be buried in the hills near Cody, Wyoming, but when Henry Tammen offered free burial and a grand monument atop Lookout Mountain, twenty miles from Denver, Mrs. Cody and Johnny Baker quickly agreed. That June the Cody family and friends reconvened in Denver to make the trek out to Lookout Mountain, where Cody would be interred in a vault blasted from solid rock. “For hours before the ceremony at the grave there was a steady procession of automobiles winding up the mountainside toward the summit. Several thousand persons, who came by trolley to Golden, at the foot of the mountain, climbed steep foot trails or trudged along the automobile road to Wildcat Point, where the burial was held. . . . At the conclusion of the service, a bugler sounded taps.” The view, indeed, was magnificent, and from the peak one could see the plains of Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, and Wyoming. But Tammen, true to form, never delivered on his promise of a monument.

  As Cody’s most recent and thorough biographer, Louis S. Warren, sums up his career: “In a time when America represented the future of the modern world in its exploding cities and its industrial power, Buffalo Bill brought together the wild, primitive parts of the American frontier—buffalo, elk, staged prairie fires, real Indians—and the astonishing promise of a technological future, in his show’s modern gunplay, its glowing electric lights and brilliantly colored publicity. He represented the coming together of the old and new, nature and culture, the past and the future. He straddled the yawning chasms between worlds, and in doing so, rose to greater heights of fame than any American could have dreamed.”

  Annie Oakley was not in attendance for Buffalo Bill’s final appearance, but she wrote the following appreciation: “William F. Cody was the kindest hearted, simplest, most loyal man I ever knew. He was the staunchest friend. . . . I traveled with him for seventeen years. . . . It may seem strange that after the wonderful success attained that he should have died a poor man. But it wasn’t a matter of any wonder to those that knew and worked with him . . . he never seemed to lose his trust in the nature of all men, and until his dying day was the easiest mark above ground for every kind of sneak and gold brick vender.” Perhaps Cody was more of an average American than she thought—a decent man whose pie-in-the-sky dreams, optimism, and gullibility left him broke.

  Annie Oakley and Frank Butler, financially comfortable from their glory days, had now settled into a good life working at two fashionable resorts—the Lakeview Hotel in Leesburg, Florida, and the Carolina Hotel in Pinehurst, North Carolina. “Annie enjoyed getting up at four in the morning and heading down to the stables for a fox hunt,” writes biographer Shirl Kasper of these years. “She wore a tweed jacket, high boots, and a black, broad-brimmed hat. . . . The weekly hunts, Annie said, kept her ‘vital.’ She raced at the Pinehurst jockey club, entered a setter named Roy in a dog show (and took first place in the pointer class), and, of course, went after the quail.” She taught many women guests how to shoot, engaged in shooting matches from time to time, and enjoyed the convivial atmosphere of these busy holiday places. In the spring of 1926, she and Frank went home to Ohio and family, whe
re Oakley died peacefully at age sixty-six in Greenville on November 3.

  When armistice finally came to a war-weary Europe, Gustave Eiffel, eighty-six, watched with satisfaction as the public once again flocked to his famous tower, which had been closed for military use through 1918. Now half a million visitors ascended its heights each year, more than double the prewar number. Above all, the great engineer relished the fact that despite so many boasts, no individual or nation had managed to construct a structure that came close to topping his beloved tower in height. Nor could it be asserted any longer that the tower was impractical or useless.

  “The tower,” he wrote in his memoir, “is the principal work of M. Eiffel and appears as a symbol of force and difficulties overcome. [The tower’s] construction itself was a marvel of precision, all the more important since its height surpassed by a great deal that of all the edifices built till this time. . . . This monument, constructed on the Champ de Mars on the occasion of the Exposition Universelle of 1889, was the main attraction of that fair, as it was again for the fair of 1900. Millions of people from all the countries visited it, and reproductions of every kind are spread all over the world.” Eiffel finished this memoir in September of 1923, and presented a typed copy to each of his five grown children. Three months later, two days after Christmas, he succumbed to a series of strokes at the age of ninety-one.

  “I ought to be jealous of the tower,” he once protested half seriously. “It is much more famous than I am. People seem to think it is my only work, whereas I have done other things after all.”

  Before we bid adieu to the dramatis personae of the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, let us examine how time has dealt with some of them.