Bly had resolved to act completely sane once she was inside the asylum, but the more she tried to assure the doctors of her sanity, the more they doubted her. She urged the doctors to try every test on her, to ask any question they wished; she insisted that she was sane and had always been so, that they had no right to keep sane people there, and that many other women there were also sane. “Why can’t they be free?” she would ask the doctors.
“They are insane and suffering from delusions,” was the inevitable reply.
To her growing horror, it was becoming clear that without the intercession of The World she would indeed never leave Blackwell’s Island. What if they were not able to procure her release? Colonel Cockerill had suggested that a week inside the asylum would be sufficient, but after seven days there was still no word from the outside world. Finally, on the tenth day, the newspaper managed to get an attorney inside the asylum, who assured the authorities that Nellie Brown would be cared for by friends in the city; she eagerly gave her consent, and then awaited her release.
It came during the morning promenade, as she was helping a patient who had fainted while being compelled by the nurses to walk. She had so desperately looked forward to leaving, and yet now that she could she felt a deep sadness about the women who still remained; it seemed, as she later wrote, “intensely selfish to accept freedom while they were in bondage.” For a moment she had the quixotic impulse to refuse her release—but only for a moment. She stepped outside, shutting the door behind her; soon she was crossing the river back to the city.
Afterward, Nellie Bly would call her time on Blackwell’s Island “the ten longest days of my life.” Even a year later, she was still haunted by thoughts of the companions she had left behind, still tormented by memories of the place that she variously termed a den of horror, a human rat trap, and hell on earth.
ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, less than a week after her release, The World unveiled the first part of Nellie Bly’s exposé of the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum, entitled “Behind Asylum Bars,” followed the next Sunday by “Inside the Madhouse.” It was, trumpeted The World, a “remarkable story of the successful impersonation of insanity” undertaken by “a courageous and clever young woman … whose pluck and alert intellectual facilities peculiarly fitted her for the work.” The story was reprinted in newspapers around the country (shortly afterward it would be issued in book form under the title Ten Days in a Mad-House), creating, as The World was happy to report, “an immense sensation everywhere.” In New York, the district attorney’s office convened a grand jury to investigate the asylum, and Bly herself was invited to testify. After giving her testimony she led the jurors on a tour of Blackwell’s Island, where she was surprised to discover that, virtually overnight, long-standing abuses had been miraculously corrected: the halls were clean, the bathrooms had shiny new basins, and the bread, previously hard and blackened, was now “beautifully white”; best of all, several of the wrongly committed immigrant women, seemingly doomed to a life behind bars, had been either transferred from the asylum or discharged.
There was no doubt, given the acclaim that had greeted her first production for The World, that Nellie Bly would be hired as a full-time staff reporter. Joseph Pulitzer himself, interviewed by an enterprising reporter for the Dispatch while waiting for a train in Pittsburgh, praised his new reporter as “very bright” and—the adjective that would forever after be associated with her—“very plucky.” Said Pulitzer, “She is well-educated and thoroughly understands the profession which she has chosen. She has a great future before her.” (He did not fail to mention that he had rewarded her excellent work with “a handsome check.”) Just two weeks after the publication of the second installment of her Blackwell’s Island exposé, Nellie Bly was already writing regularly for The World—not fashion or society pieces, for which John Cockerill had earlier pronounced women reporters most fit, but investigative journalism, often going undercover again to experience firsthand the subjects about which she wrote. “I had some faith in my own ability as an actress,” she had written of her daring imposture as Nellie Brown, and the success of her Blackwell’s Island exposé emboldened her for further impersonations.
Answering a “suggestive advertisement” in The World, she assumed the role of a new mother and applied to an agency that would, for a small fee, sell her unwanted baby for her. (“A girl?” said the man at the agency. “Too bad. They are very hard to get rid of. Now, if it was only a boy you would have had more chance.”) She got herself hired in a paper-box factory, where young women worked all day for low pay in an unventilated room reeking of glue. Once she received a tip from a reader about a man who drove a carriage around Central Park each day to prey on unaccompanied young women, whom he ordered into his carriage under threat of arrest; he had bought the complicity of the local policemen with regular gifts of beer. Dressing herself as a “country girl,” Bly stationed herself on a park bench and allowed herself to be picked up by the man, who drove her to an uptown roadhouse where he attempted to ply her with spiked lemonade; with the help of a World reporter and photographer, she was able to identify the man by name, and then published in the newspaper his home address and place of employment. In one of her most ambitious exposés, she posed as the wife of a seller of patent medicines, who hoped to kill a bill coming up for consideration by an Assembly committee. She visited the hotel room offices of Edward R. Phelps, the “Lobby King” of Albany, who grandly assured her that for as little as one thousand dollars he could purchase the votes of a majority of the committee members, going so far as to place a pencil mark by the names of the members he promised he could buy. After The World published Bly’s article about her meeting with Phelps (complete with a facsimile of his annotated list), public condemnation of the Lobby King’s corrupt influence was so sharp and immediate that within the week Phelps fled Albany: the King, crowed The World, had been “driven from his throne.” Before long, Nellie Bly had become so renowned for her undercover work that the humor magazine Puck was advising its readers, “When a charming young lady comes into your office and smilingly announces that she wants to ask you a few questions regarding the possibility of improving New York’s moral tone, don’t stop to parley. Just say: ‘Excuse me, Nellie Bly,’ and shin down the fire-escape.”
Just a few years before, Pink Cochrane had been tramping the streets of Pittsburgh looking for work; now Nellie Bly was a popular reporter for New York’s most widely read newspaper. Thanks to Bly’s new financial security, her mother was able to join her in New York; with her growing success the two women moved ever farther downtown, in 1888 to West Seventy-fourth Street and the following year to West Thirty-fifth Street, between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, in the heart of the theater district known as “the Rialto.” Now, in the evenings, Mary Jane and her daughter could join the well-dressed crowds hurrying by on their way to a show, or just stroll the avenue at a more leisurely pace, past the gleaming black carriages and the restaurant windows shining with golden light, and contemplate how far they had come from the grist mills and tallow candles of Apollo.
In 1889, Nellie Bly was twenty-five years old. She had changed her hairstyle from her Pittsburgh days and was now wearing it pinned up in the back, with rounded bangs that gave her a more girlish appearance. Her figure was slender, made shapely by a narrow waist corseted punishingly tight. She liked to dress stylishly, in high-collared blouses with brooches at the throat, or floor-length satin gowns that she selected in the parlors of the most fashionable dressmakers. Bly took great care with her personal appearance, both because she enjoyed the attentions of men and because she believed that a woman should use pretty clothing as a means of advancing herself. “Dress is a great weapon in the hands of a woman if rightly applied,” she would write. “It is a weapon men lack, so women should make the most of it.” She was greatly disturbed, covering the National Woman Suffrage Convention for The World, that the female delegates seemed to be “neither men nor women.” When she met Susan B. Antho
ny, president of the convention, she did not hesitate to tell her that “if women wanted to succeed they had to go out as women. They had to make themselves as pretty and attractive as possible.”
An item in The Epoch, New York’s weekly cultural magazine, about “the enterprising and remarkable member of the World staff” noted that Bly “eschews all the literary ‘sets’ of society, and is to be found neither in the parlors of Bohemia nor in the drawing-rooms of the wealthy and lion-hunting.” Still, given her personal attractiveness and her rising visibility in the city, it is not surprising that her name was romantically linked with at least two prominent men, including Dr. Frank G. Ingram, the young assistant superintendent of the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum, who was the only sympathetic official that Bly had found during her confinement there. A more serious suitor was James Metcalfe, the drama critic for the satirical magazine Life, whom she had met when he helped her up after she slipped on an icy sidewalk during the great blizzard of 1888. Metcalfe, a Harvard graduate, was famously handsome—few accounts of the time failed to mention his violet eyes—successful enough as a journalist not to be intimidated by her success, and amusing in a sardonic sort of way; Bly, who tried not to take herself too seriously, must have enjoyed how free he felt to poke fun at her more high-minded exploits. Metcalfe himself was sufficiently taken with Nellie Bly that he published a poem in Life inspired by their first meeting, an awkward bit of verse that ran in part:
When first you dropped upon the pave and I came walking by
I picked you up and looked at you with far from eager eye.
But this soon changed to interest and then to something more
Until at last, I now must own, a woman I adore!
Often, of an evening, James Metcalfe could be found escorting Nellie Bly around town, perhaps to a play at the nearby Madison Square Theatre, famous for its “double stage” that was raised and lowered by hydraulic pressure and was at least as much of an attraction as the show itself; or, if they were in the mood for lighter fare, to a performance at Dockstader’s Minstrel Hall on Broadway. On warm afternoons they shared picnics in the English gardens of Riverside Park and stately trips by horse-drawn stagecoach up Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
All this time Bly maintained a grueling work pace, often turning out a new adventure every week. Early in her career at The World an editor had counseled that the public liked her in part because she was young and pretty and lively; if she wrote only critical, moralistic stories, he said, people would eventually forget about those other qualities and grow bored with her. Bly considered this for a while and decided that he was right—and so, in addition to her investigative pieces, she brought her readers along as she happily partook of all the variety the city had to offer. She played cornet in a marching band and made friends with the women of a Wild West show. She learned to ice skate and to fence, to ride a bicycle and to dance ballet. She watched, aghast, as “iron-nerved young women” performed human dissections at a women’s medical college; she visited Vassar College to ask why men were not allowed to enroll there. She attended the races at Saratoga and spent a day strolling the grounds of a fancy resort in Newport. (“If you are rich and have a place in polite society, by all means go to Newport.… If you are poor, go anywhere else on earth instead.”)
Bly became so popular that her name appeared not only in the bylines of her stories—in itself an achievement for the time—but in the headlines as well: NELLIE BLY ON THE WING, NELLIE BLY AS A MESMERIST, NELLIE BLY A PRISONER. She received as many as two hundred letters a week; some contained threats, others marriage proposals. When she reported that she suffered from regular headaches, she received bagfuls of letters offering surefire cures, from a cold sponge bath each morning to a raw onion each night. (“I have 700 physicians who diagnose my case and prescribe without charge,” she noted gratefully.) In a perverse tribute to Bly’s popularity, in October 1889 it was revealed that several young women around the country were impersonating her, running up large tabs with hotels and dressmakers and asking the bills to be sent to The World in New York. “I have no way to protect myself or the public against such people,” Bly wrote. “I would only say to too confiding business people that I never run up bills, that I never under any circumstances use the name of ‘Nellie Bly’ outside of print. I live quietly and am only known to the few I have come in contact with in business as ‘Nellie Bly.’ ” That state of affairs, though—her quiet, anonymous life—was about to end.
When Joseph Pulitzer purchased The World from the Wall Street financier Jay Gould in 1883, its circulation had stood at about fifteen thousand; by the fall of 1889 the circulation was more than ten times that. In its first five years The World’s growth had been nothing short of spectacular, but in recent months, as the paper became a more familiar feature of the New York landscape, there had been first a leveling off, and then a slight dip in total circulation. It was not a situation that Joseph Pulitzer or the men who worked for him took lightly. Each evening the editors of The World gathered to discuss possible story ideas. They were looking for something sensational—a story that would rivet the public’s attention, and not just for a day or two, but for months on end. One idea after another was discarded, until finally they had found what they wanted. It was the story that Nellie Bly herself had suggested a year before; now, at long last, they were prepared to do it. On the damp, chilly evening of Monday, November 11, 1889, the editors sent Bly a message:
They wanted her to go around the world.
THREE BLOCKS EAST AND THREE BLOCKS SOUTH OF THE APARTMENT that Nellie Bly shared with her mother, Elizabeth Bisland had recently moved in to an apartment with her sister. Those few blocks, though—no more than ten minutes’ walk—bridged two very different worlds. On West Thirty-fifth Street by Broadway, Nellie Bly was living at the northwest edge of the notoriously louche neighborhood that a New York police captain, in honor of the plentiful opportunities for graft to be found there, had dubbed the Tenderloin (“I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force,” he gloated upon his transfer, “and now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin”). An out-of-town theatergoer making a wrong turn away from the Rialto would find that just to the east, on Sixth Avenue, the lights emanating from the storefronts had become at once dimmer and more lurid, the crowds jamming the sidewalks less expensively dressed and a good deal livelier, the avenue itself lined on both sides with raucous dance halls, gambling parlors, and saloons with names like Paddy the Pig’s and the Burnt Rag (each of them, courteously, had a separate Ladies’ Entrance), as well as numerous whorehouses more politely termed “houses of assignation.” Some of the houses catered to more upscale customers; their front parlors were scented with patchouli and brightened with sprays of fresh-cut flowers, and at midnight the evening’s patrons were served an oyster supper.
Across Fifth Avenue, the dividing line between the East and West Sides, Elizabeth Bisland’s apartment was at Thirty-second Street in genteel Murray Hill, long the site of the city’s most exclusive clubs and elegant stores. In her walks around the neighborhood, Bisland would have stopped to browse in the showrooms of the European art importers clustered between Thirty-first and Thirty-third Streets and paused to gaze at the fine millinery, furs, and jewels displayed in the nearby shop windows. Though her own apartment was modest and located above a candy store, an early-morning stroll might allow her to cross paths with Astors, Vanderbilts, or Rockefellers, and just three blocks away was the home of the dry goods tycoon A. T. Stewart, the most expensive ever built on the North American continent, for which the stucco work alone had reportedly cost over a quarter of a million dollars. Fourth Avenue, where she lived, sloped gently down to the manicured lawns and geometric flower beds of Madison Square Park, which a contemporary observer noted was “filled with a better class” than was normally found in a public park, the pervasive atmosphere of wealth making it “unfavorable to the gathering together of the tramps and shiftless idlers who may be seen
airing their tattered garments so often in the other parks.”
In the warmer months of 1889, Elizabeth Bisland would often have walked along Madison Square Park, admiring the pleasant scene it presented on a sun-filled day, for catercorner to the park, on Twenty-fifth Street, The Cosmopolitan had its offices. To accommodate his magazine’s rapid growth, publisher John Brisben Walker had leased the entire third floor of the Madison Square Bank building, between Fifth Avenue and Broadway; it was, remarked The Journalist, “probably the best location for a magazine that can be found in the whole city of New York.” Walker had recently arrived in the city from Denver, where he had made a fortune in alfalfa, having already made and lost one in iron. He was a millionaire with a social conscience, a former newspaper editor who now had enough money to buy a magazine of his own, and in January 1889 he purchased a foundering monthly called The Cosmopolitan from a Christian publishing company that had bought it the year before from a manufacturer of office equipment. He imagined a magazine that would combine aesthetic cultivation and social uplift, intended for the sort of people he had known out west, the families of the rising middle class in towns and small cities, who were ambitious enough to want to improve themselves but not yet too busy to read advertisements. Early issues of The Cosmopolitan brought readers articles about the application of electricity in household appliances, the fighting forces of Germany, and the development of men’s trousers over the centuries. Responding to the American public’s ever-growing interest in travel stories, the magazine emphasized first-person accounts of every manner of foreign adventure—an African elephant hunt, a pilgrimage to Meshed, a train journey across the Russian steppes, an ice whaling expedition among the Eskimos. At least one poem or short story appeared in every issue of The Cosmopolitan, as well as an omnibus review of several recently published books called “In the Library.”
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