Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  Wanting now a simpler, quieter life, in 1924 she sold her house in Washington and moved to another, set on twenty-five acres of woods just outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Called Greenway Rise, the property had been long neglected, and with an energy that surprised her, Bisland oversaw a major renovation. The house that emerged was large and square, with a blue-tiled roof and gray stucco walls covered with rose vines that she had planted; she installed a Japanese pergola in the back and created an apple tree walk that reminded her of the house she had built with her husband in Oyster Bay. Greenway Rise was not far from the University of Virginia, the school founded by Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson, like Queen Elizabeth I, was one of her personal heroes), and Bisland enjoyed, at a certain remove, the life of the university. She attended lectures, spoke occasionally to classes. The New Orleans Times-Democrat, the newspaper that had published that first Christmas poem when she was twenty, described Elizabeth Bisland in those later years as “a distinguished white-haired lady in regally old-fashioned black velvet and lace.”

  Living in Virginia, Elizabeth Bisland began to write again in earnest, and in 1927 she published her final essay collection, entitled The Truth About Men and Other Matters. In it she considered country living, travels in Japan, and relations between the sexes. (In the title essay she observed, “The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them—or wished to see them.… No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life.”) Much of the book, though, was about growing gracefully old. In an essay called “Toward Sunset,” Bisland observed “That old age may be agreeable to others and tolerable to itself no other equipment is so necessary as a vigorous sense of humour.” But old age itself, she was quick to point out, “is not an amusing episode”:

  Firstly, because one suffers from being forced to dwell in a house steadily falling to decay; a trial to the housekeeper, arousing a sense of some innate incompetence that the beams of the building should sag, doors open difficultly, windows dim with the dust of time, the outer complexion of the house grow streaked and grey with the weathering of many seasons. There is a certain desperation in the realization that no repairs are possible.… one braces one’s self to accept courageously the wrongs of time; to wear the lichens and mosses with silent gallantry.

  As she grew older she had increasingly turned away from the stern religiosity of her parents; now, reading history and philosophy, she discovered that the pre-Christian Stoic point of view most appealed to her. She wrote, “I never can understand why any one should think, because of absence of future rewards or punishments, one should misbehave. I have not the slightest belief in either, and behave myself simply because I find it a thousand times more agreeable than the other thing. Vice always looks to me so atrociously stupid and dull, and there are so many delicious things in the world that I could not imagine myself doing wicked things when the innocent ones are so far more agreeable.” She had always found sustenance in nature, and in the autumn she often spent mornings walking the hills around her house, admiring the peaceful countryside in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The fields were streaked with goldenrod, ironweed, joe-pye weed, and wild asters; the dark crimson stains of Virginia creeper reminded her of the blood that ran from Casca’s dagger: imperial summer lying dead. “The earth is a ripened fruit,” she wrote of that season, “lying enfolded in dreams, brooding tenderly, rich with many blossoms aureate, purple, white.” The air seemed haunted by delicate unknown perfumes, “the soul of summer passing invisibly in a fragrance.” In the mornings, now, the mists hung like smoke in the still air. The frost hardened and crisped the ears of corn ripening in the fields, waiting to be pulled from their stalks and hauled away to nearby cribs and barns. At night the hunter’s moon rose large and orange, as in one of her earliest memories, her family’s flight from Louisiana during the War. She thought often of New Orleans, that shabby and picturesque place of her youthful dreams; from the distance of years the city seemed to her bathed in golden light and the smell of roses. The year was turning to a close, the days drawing in. Boughs are daily rifled by the gusty thieves / And the book of Nature getteth short of leaves. They were lines by Thomas Hood, which she had first read so long ago in a book of British poetry; they had remained with her all this time, even now, in her own winter. “Winter,” she wrote in one of her last essays, “like age, robs of the dear illusion of soft outlines; shows all the veins and articulations of the poor skeleton once clothed about with a garment of fair flesh and of tender foliage.” The winter skies over Virginia were a hard icy blue; the trees, she thought, looked gaunt and weary, gently lifting their boughs as if to test the brittleness of the frost. At the beginning of the new year, surprising everyone who knew her, Elizabeth Bisland suddenly came down with pneumonia, and on January 6, 1929, she died. She was sixty-seven years old. The funeral services were held in New York, and she was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, beside her husband. The epitaph on her gravestone is a line from Robert Browning, written in the voice of a Greek poet: Wishing thee wholly where Zeus lives the most, within the essential element of calm.

  Elizabeth Bisland’s obituary in The New York Times, five paragraphs long, noted the plans for her burial; her birth on the Fairfax Plantation in Louisiana; her marriage to Charles Wetmore; her editorial positions on the New Orleans Times-Democrat and The Cosmopolitan; and the several books she had written. It did not mention her race around the world.

  IN HER LATER YEARS the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson composed a cautionary poem on the perils of celebrity. “Fame is a bee,” she wrote,

  It has a song—

  It has a sting—

  Ah, too, it has a wing.

  By the beginning of the 1890s Nellie Bly had experienced all of fame’s attributes—the song, the sting, and the wing. Having left her contract with The New York Family Story Paper unfulfilled, she disappeared from sight. For more than a year she published absolutely nothing. Her absence was so striking that in August 1892, Allan Forman of The Journalist asked his readers, “Where is Nellie Bly? I don’t mean the song, but the girl,” and two months later repeated the query: “What is Nellie Bly doing now?”

  Her seventy-two-day race around the world was a success from which Nellie Bly had not yet been able to recover. In the meantime, newspapers all over the country were hiring women to pursue the type of undercover participatory journalism, some of it serious, some frivolous, that Bly herself had once undertaken for The World. That variety of reporter now even had a name: “stunt girl.” Stunt girls begged in the streets, sought illegal abortions, visited opium dens. In 1890 Annie Laurie of the San Francisco Examiner—whose very first article for the paper had been an interview with Elizabeth Bisland—set out to investigate the treatment received by poor women in the city’s public hospitals. She had a doctor friend put belladonna drops in her eyes to dilate her pupils and then pretended to faint in the street; carried to a public hospital in a wagon used to transport dead bodies, she was forced to drink an emetic of mustard and hot water and was then briskly discharged. The influence of Nellie Bly’s earlier insane asylum exposé for The World could hardly have been lost on anyone. At The World, a stunt girl named Meg Merrilies similarly got herself picked up by an ambulance in City Hall Park, so that she could be taken to the Chambers Street Hospital to find out how poor patients were treated; what she found there, in The World’s description, was “abuse, neglect, profanity and filth.” Meg Merrilies put on a diving suit and helmet and explored the ocean fifty feet deep off Staten Island; she passed a night surrounded by almost a billion dollars of gold and silver in a local depository of the U.S. Treasury, only to find that the money, in antiquated safes, was not adequately safeguarded; she assisted a circus trainer with his performing lions. Once, astonishingly, she allowed a million volts of electricity to pass through her body, the most powerful current any human had ever taken; later she performed the most hair-rais
ing stunt of all—getting shot in the chest by a .45 caliber Winchester rifle while wearing a bulletproof vest (or, as it was called, “the much-discussed bullet-proof cloth”). In fact, there was no “Meg Merrilies”; The World employed a number of stunt girls, all of whom wrote under the same pen name. Clearly the paper’s management had realized that anonymous, assembly-line stunt girls would never be able to attain the stature of a Nellie Bly and would thus have little leverage to demand more money or better assignments, as Bly herself once had.

  By this time The World had moved in to its grand new tower on Park Row, but Joseph Pulitzer himself was still away from the office, continuing his travels through Europe to recuperate and consult with medical experts. He could no longer oversee the day-to-day administration of the newspaper; as was his tendency, he had appointed two men, George W. Turner and John Cockerill, to run the paper together in his absence, and as there was already a good deal of friction between them, he appointed a third man as a kind of referee to mediate disputes. This was Col. William L. Davis, a mining engineer by trade, who had no newspaper experience but at least had the advantage of being Pulitzer’s brother-in-law. Pulitzer grandly termed the new managerial structure a “regency,” but not surprisingly it proved unworkable, producing conflict and deadlock and a 16 percent decline in circulation; and as Joseph Pulitzer was disinclined to trust his editors anyway (“Every reporter is a hope,” he once said, “and every editor is a disappointment”), he fired Turner and shipped Cockerill back to his old job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. For the next two years the editorial merry-go-round at The World continued apace; in September 1893 Pulitzer reassigned the paper’s city editor, Merrill Goddard, to be editor of the Sunday World. Goddard was an enterprising twenty-seven-year-old Dartmouth graduate; he had made his reputation when, as a young reporter covering President Grant’s funeral, he donned a black suit and posed as the undertaker’s assistant, enabling him to sit next to the grieving widow in the front carriage of the funeral procession. Goddard had a brilliant sense of what would sell newspapers—the following year he would begin publishing The Yellow Kid, the first of the color Sunday comic strips—and in one of his first acts as Sunday editor he offered Bly her old job back. With no source of regular income other than the small stipend her mother continued to receive, Bly gratefully accepted.

  Her very first piece for The World was a jailhouse interview with the anarchist Emma Goldman, who was awaiting trial on trumped-up charges of incitement to riot. Later she would interview several politicians from Tammany Hall, the youthful millionaire John Jacob Astor, and the “moral reformer” the Reverend Charles Parkhurst; there was also another jailhouse interview, this one with the labor leader Eugene V. Debs, who, like Goldman, was serving time for his political activities.

  As the months went along, Bly’s work for The World settled into an uncomfortable mix of big-name interviews and, increasingly, follies. She traveled up to White Plains to take the “Keeley cure”—normally meant for women addicted to liquor or morphine—by being injected with a solution said to be bichlorate of gold. She spent a night in a haunted house in New Jersey, supposedly armed with two pistols, waiting for a ghost that never arrived. She visited a gambling house in the city, but her investigation came to an end when she was recognized by one of the players. She spent a day with the wealthy inmates of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in upper Manhattan; the article that resulted was decidedly sedate, and suffered in comparison with the danger and outrage that had so animated her earlier asylum exposé—a contrast brought into sharp relief when one of the patients noticeably perked up upon discovering that she was Nellie Bly, who had gone undercover at Blackwell’s Island. Indeed, much of Bly’s current work seemed like a rehash of her earlier World columns, with little of the derring-do so evident in the adventures of her present-day rival “Meg Merrilies.” Bly was still only twenty-seven years old, but she seemed to have been doing this kind of work for a long time. An item in The Journalist observed that Nellie Bly had left The World upon “receiving a better offer from some publishing house” but was now “back again, her copy mutilated, her feelings hurt, herself put in the background, or assigned to do work repulsive or revolting.”

  In July 1894, Bly traveled to Chicago to report on a strike among the train workers in the company town of Pullman, Illinois. The workers were protesting wage cuts and rent hikes in the “model town”; though she had been initially unsympathetic to their demands, she wrote, “before I had been half a day in Pullman I was the most bitter striker in town.” Bly marched with the strikers and was persuaded to deliver a speech at a large rally, but even this excitement—and the cheers of the workers—seemed not to lift her spirits. “How I would like to see you!” she wrote to Erasmus Wilson on her return to New York. “What a long time it is and how little I am doing. And I used to have such hopes!”

  Her life, though, was about to undergo a dramatic change. On a train headed to Chicago, Bly met a man named Robert Seamon, and within the week the two had eloped. The marriage took all who knew her by surprise, not only because of its suddenness but also because Seamon was an old man: seventy years old, in fact, forty years older than Bly. He was the owner of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company of Brooklyn, and he was said to be worth $5 million. Some journalists branded Bly a gold digger, which was unkind, but certainly Seamon represented long-term financial security for Bly, as well as the possibility of giving up increasingly unsatisfying and exhausting newspaper work, and perhaps, too, he served as a kind of replacement for the father she had lost as a girl. In his memoir, Bly’s old friend Walt McDougall suggested that Bly was upset that a man to whom she was “deeply attached”—this may have been a reference to James Stetson Metcalfe—had married someone else. In any event, Bly had married a millionaire, and thus fulfilled the fourth of her youthful vows; whether she had fulfilled the third—to fall in love—seemed much less clear. Almost from the beginning there were signs of trouble in the marriage. On numerous occasions Seamon hired private detectives to follow his wife, and at least once to investigate James Metcalfe.

  Nellie Bly, though, seemed to take to life as a wealthy woman. She moved in to Seamon’s elegant four-story brownstone on West Thirty-seventh Street near Fifth Avenue, which she substantially redecorated, and oversaw the large household staff. She dressed in expensive clothing and became friends with local aristocrats including Hetty Green, widely considered the richest woman in the United States, and Edwin Gould, the brother of Jay. For four years Bly and Seamon traveled in Europe, visiting Paris, London, Rome, Vienna; upon their return, in 1899, Bly became increasingly involved in the operations of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, which centered on an immense factory complex in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. When Robert Seamon died at the age of eighty, in 1904, Bly assumed control of the business.

  The Iron Clad company turned sheet metal into milk cans, coal scuttles, fire shovels, wash tubs, water buckets, ice-cream freezers, ash cans, oil cans, garbage cans, and almost every other imaginable metal object, up to and including kitchen sinks. By 1905 the company was doing more than a million dollars a year in sales. Bly was, she liked to say, “the only woman in the world personally managing industries of such a magnitude.” The remarkable drive, perseverance, and creativity that had once propelled her to success in journalism she now applied to metal manufacture. She worked twelve-hour days at the factory, devising more efficient work processes and installing more modern machinery. It turned out that she had a talent for industrial design; at one time there were twenty-five patents with her name on them, including one for the first steel barrel made in the United States.

  However, Bly was not at all interested in finances (“financial details bored me terribly,” she later admitted), and she made the critical mistake of allowing her husband’s accountants complete control of the company’s books. Some of the employees took advantage of her, embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars by forging her name on company checks, including $15,000 in political c
ontributions and $25,000 for a yacht. Eventually she was forced to declare bankruptcy; several creditors sued her for breach of contract, and years of expensive, wearying suits and countersuits followed. In 1914, when the court demanded that she open the company’s books, Bly refused the order; it was, she claimed, “being put only for the purpose of obtaining information to be used in further depriving me of my rights.” As a result, charges were filed against her for obstruction of justice and nonpayment of legal fees. Bly pleaded not guilty to all the charges. She transferred her stock in the company to her mother, asking Mary Jane to transfer them in turn to a wealthy Viennese friend of hers named Oscar Bondy (who would not be subject to her creditors’ claims); four days later, she fled the country.

  On August 1, 1914, Bly left New York for Austria, sailing on the White Star steamship Oceanic, the successor to the ship on which she had crossed the Pacific twenty-four years earlier. War in Europe was imminent; Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia only three days earlier. Overseas, Bly lived with Bondy in Vienna and also traveled through Central Europe filing occasional dispatches for William Randolph Hearst’s Evening Journal. As the war went on, though, she gave up journalism to participate in charitable efforts for Austrian widows and orphans. Her sympathy for the Austro-Hungarian cause was provoked in large part by her longtime enmity for Great Britain; in one story for the Journal, Bly wrote that “the English chill one’s blood with repulsion,” and later Bly told an American official that she had gone to Austria because she hated the English and would do anything against them.

  For five years Nellie Bly lived in exile; then, when the war was over, she returned to the United States to face the charges against her. The slender young brunette of popular memory was now gray-haired and stout; dark half-moons had appeared under her eyes, giving her a perpetually sleepless look. The iconic bangs were gone; she wore her hair pulled back in a matronly chignon. A reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described her return: “Charmingly garbed in silks and furs, still as vivacious as the indefatigable investigator of years ago, Nellie Bly still overpowers one with her striking personality.”