Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  In New York, Bly surrendered to federal marshals and was set free on $1,000 bail. While she was in Europe, her mother—prompted by her brother Albert—had sued for the return of Mary Jane’s shares in the Iron Clad company, claiming that the transfer of stock to Oscar Bondy had been fraudulent. (That suit would be decided in favor of Bly, but by then the company was essentially worthless.) Not long after her return, the court cleared Bly of all the earlier charges. Now almost penniless, she looked to work again as a newspaperwoman in New York, the city where once she had been the toast of the town. Journalism, though, had changed dramatically in the intervening years, and Bly was little remembered, even by the current generation of female reporters. They prided themselves on objective, factual reporting; they were not interested in emotional appeals or undercover work, and they frankly regarded its greatest practitioner as an anachronism, even something of an embarrassment. An old friend of Bly’s from The World, Arthur Brisbane, who had become editor of the Evening Journal, offered Bly a regular column; the pay was $100 a week, less than half of what Norman L. Munro had signed her for thirty years earlier.

  No longer welcome at the Brooklyn home of her mother and brother, Bly took a small two-room suite at the Hotel McAlpin, the largest hotel in the world; it was located on Thirty-fourth Street at Broadway, not more than a block from where she had lived with her mother at the time she went around the world. Unexpectedly, Bly flourished at the Evening Journal, where she rediscovered her avocation for helping the weak and less fortunate. Sometimes she used her column to dispense marital or career advice, or to advance a favorite cause (she campaigned for the hiring of American seamen and against capital punishment), but her work at the Journal was primarily charitable in nature; most often she wrote columns about people in need and solicited help from her readers. One of her subjects, for instance, was an eleven-year-old girl named Maizie, who had been stricken with infantile paralysis and now moved only with great difficulty; Maizie’s father had died, and she lived with her two younger siblings and her grandparents, all of whom depended on Maizie’s mother, who did factory work for twelve dollars a week, supplemented by another two dollars she made from cleaning offices after hours. “On this $14 these six human creatures live,” Bly wrote, suggesting that someone reading her words might be able to hire the grandparents for suitable work, or provide a better-paying job for the beleaguered young mother. “Can anyone resist the unselfishness of little Maizie, the crippled child? I am confident, from all the goodness that poured in upon me in answer to pleas for help before Christmas, that there will be plenty to come forward to aid this poor American family. Immediate aid in the way of clothing for the little hard-working mother and Maizie and her brother of nine and the baby of four, and clothing for the grandmother, who is an enormous woman, and for the grandfather, who is five feet eleven, and takes a number 40 coat.”

  Thanks to Bly’s Evening Journal columns, orphaned children received Christmas gifts; a boy with consumption received two suits and three overcoats; a woman with seven children, whose husband was out of work, received money, food, and clothing. Week after week the donations came in to Bly at the Hotel McAlpin and then went back out again, distributed to the poor, the ill, the suffering, the helpless. Bly employed several unmarried women to open, sort, file, and answer her mail and arrange her interviews. One of her secretaries was a woman who supported her five children and widowed mother—and who, in turn, having been touched by one of the letters sent in to Nellie Bly, bought a railway ticket for a poor young man to return to the home he had left many years before, and arranged for friends to give him a new set of clothes and twelve dollars in pocket money besides. Bly wrote a column to raise money for St. Mark’s Hospital at Eleventh Street and Second Avenue, a hospital financed by private donations, that treated its patients at no charge and to which she had directed hundreds of people who came to her in need of medical care but without the means to pay for it: the “hospital with a heart,” she called it.

  Nellie Bly circa 1921, at the age of fifty-seven (Illustration Credit epl.2)

  Many of her Evening Journal columns were devoted to finding homes for abandoned babies, whom she often cared for herself in the hotel until she could locate suitable foster parents. (“I get in debt each month trying to support them,” she once wrote.) Young mothers whose troubled circumstances prevented them from caring for their children brought them to Nellie Bly, and she wrote columns extolling the virtues of little Faith, Gloria, Ralph, Yolanda, all of whom needed only “a chance to be beautiful and clever and great.” She asked readers who wanted to adopt a child to write to her, in full confidentiality, giving their reasons and qualifications. “I know there are plenty of people waiting to make their homes happy with a baby,” she wrote in one column, “and I want to spread joy in the world and at the same time secure for these blessed little ones comfortable homes and love and devotion and a chance in the world.”

  Bly collected old clothes from the other residents of the Hotel McAlpin and distributed them to those in need. Over time the hotel’s managers grew annoyed by the shabbily dressed individuals who seemed always to be sitting in the plush chairs of the hotel’s huge marble lobby; everyone understood that they were waiting to be taken up to see Nellie Bly. Bly’s friends often warned her that people were taking advantage of her generosity, but her answer was always the same: “Relieve immediately; investigate afterwards.” There was, though, one striking exception to her openheartedness: even years later, those who had known Nellie Bly could still recall how cold and distant she became whenever she met someone from England. Her secretaries knew better than to send up to her any young woman who had even the hint of an English accent.

  In those days Bly always wore a large hat with a veil and cultivated the air of mystery that had surrounded her when she was at The World. Though she had a private office at the Evening Journal, she dictated her columns to a secretary in her hotel room. She hated the telephone, and used it only when her column was given a secondary position on the editorial page; then, with her fingers clenched and her mouth pursed in an angry line, she would call the office and berate everyone from Arthur Brisbane on down.

  “The truest happiness and the only forgetfulness come from making others happy,” Bly wrote in one of her Evening Journal columns. She seemed to have regained at last the enthusiasm of her youth, the satisfaction that came from using her influence to right wrongs and provide help to those who needed it. By now, though, the hard condition of her later years was taking its toll. She had put on a lot of weight, and much of the time she was tired and ill. Still, she persisted in her work; she was constantly rushing in cabs from place to place, sleeping little, eating poorly, going out in all kinds of weather. She refused to take medicine, as though to do so would be to admit personal weakness. In January 1922, Bly caught pneumonia and was taken to St. Mark’s Hospital, the very hospital she had once extolled in her column. The doctors were confident of her recovery, but in the second week she suffered a downturn, and on the morning of January 27, Nellie Bly died in her hospital room. She was only fifty-seven.

  Nellie Bly, too, was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, no more than a quarter mile from the grave site of Elizabeth Bisland. Curiously, it was just one of many things the women had in common. Both had married wealthy men, were childless, performed relief work in Europe during the First World War; both were widowed, both died of pneumonia, and both had been writers right up to the very end. Of the two, though, only Nellie Bly had race horses and show dogs and an express train named for her, and a board game with her picture on it, and songs sung of her famous deeds. Of the two, only Nellie Bly would be remembered long after death, and almost always it was for her record-breaking trip around the world.

  In 1936, a young Brooklyn-born reporter for the Evening Journal named Dorothy Kilgallen embarked on an around-the-world race against two male reporters, Leo Kieran of the Times and H. R. Ekins of the World-Telegram. At the beginning of her trip Kilgallen wrote, “Nell Bly,
watch over me. You may be astonished at what you see—but watch, anyway.” Kilgallen crossed the Atlantic not on a steamship but on a zeppelin—the Hindenburg—and was the first woman to fly across the Pacific Ocean. But Dorothy Kilgallen, unlike Nellie Bly, finished second.

  In 1946 a new musical, Nellie Bly, about the race around the world, opened at the Adelphi Theatre on Broadway. Savaged by the critics (the Journal American noted that the trip was supposed to take seventy-five days, but in the Adelphi Theatre “it seems a whole lot longer”), the play closed after only sixteen performances. The plot, such as it was, bore only the vaguest resemblance to actual history: scenes took place in an Arabian harem, a Moscow public square, and the Paris Exposition, where Nellie Bly somehow ended up doing a striptease with cancan dancers in a cabaret. And the rival journalist against whom Bly was racing turned out to be a man from the Herald—who was, of course, secretly in love with the plucky young reporter from The World. Elizabeth Bisland had been removed from the theatrical version of the race, as would surely have pleased her.

  Though Nellie Bly lived for another thirty-two years, her life seemed always defined by those seventy-two days of her youth; to the end, her name seemed to resonate with the cheers of distant crowds. Bly’s final column for the Evening Journal was headlined NELLIE BLY ON PRANKS OF DESTINY. It concerned two imaginary young women who started out on similar career paths but whose lives took them in very different directions. “Is it possible for us to struggle and overcome fate,” Bly asked in that column—the very last words she would ever publish—“or are we merely being swept along a course which all our efforts fail to alter or change?”

  For Vivian,

  who has traveled widely

  in Brooklyn

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN BROOKLYN, WHERE I LIVE, MANY OLDER RESIDENTS REMEMBER THE late, lamented Nellie Bly Amusement Park (in Bath Beach, right off the Belt Parkway) but little about Bly herself, and even less about the race around the world that made her, for a while, among the most famous women in America. I, too, only vaguely knew who Nellie Bly was when I happened upon a reference to her celebrated race; and I knew nothing at all about her rival Elizabeth Bisland, other than the fact that on that November day in 1889 she had set off around the world as well. Four years ago, I decided to write a book about these two young travelers. It has been, for me, a fascinating and enjoyable journey, and I am deeply grateful to the many people who helped me to complete the trip.

  First thanks go to my agent, Henry Dunow, who was the first person after my wife to whom I mentioned the idea for a book about the Bly-Bisland race. From the beginning Henry believed in and enthusiastically supported this book, and near the end, in a moment of crisis, came up with its title; along the way, as always, he has been both an exceptional literary agent and a gantzer mensch.

  It has been my great good fortune to have had Susanna Porter as an editor. Over and again Susanna carefully read the manuscript, offering countless thoughtful suggestions that improved it enormously; I feel privileged to have been the beneficiary of her intelligence, her wisdom, and her always welcome sense of calm. Also at Ballantine Books, Priyanka Krishnan handled myriad technical details with remarkable grace and good humor. Emily DeHuff’s copyediting, so careful and precise, was the sort that any writer would treasure. I’ve been delighted, as well, to have been able to work with an exceptionally talented and good-spirited production team, among them Loren Noveck, the book’s production editor; Barbara Bachman, who oversaw the book’s design; Liz Shapiro, who created the lovely cover; and David Lindroth, who drew all of the wonderful maps. To these people, and to all the others at Random House who have been so good to this book and helped to make its production such a pleasure, I offer my heartfelt thanks.

  I did the research for this book in many libraries and archives, but primarily at the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Butler Library of Columbia University, and the Library of Congress, and many librarians there and elsewhere gave me invaluable assistance. I owe a special debt, though, to several in particular. Arlene Balkansky sent me copies of numerous articles about Bly and Bisland in the collection of the Library of Congress. Frances S. Garrison of Mansfield University in Pennsylvania sent me copies of newspaper articles written by Nellie Bly during her time in Pittsburgh. At the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library of Tulane University, Sean Benjamin provided photos and historical information about New Orleans’s old Newspaper Row, and guided me through a collection of letters written by Elizabeth Bisland during the last twenty years of her life.

  Piers Brendon, author of Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism, offered historical information about Thomas Cook and Son, as did Paul Smith, the Thomas Cook company archivist. I thank them for their help, and of course any errors here regarding the agency are mine alone.

  Among Elizabeth Bisland’s descendants are several with genealogical expertise, the products of which they freely shared with an outsider who wanted to learn all he could about their illustrious ancestor. Many thanks to Thomas A. H. Scarborough, author of the scholarly essay “The Bislands of Natchez,” and Betty Shields McGehee, who sent me her breathtakingly researched unpublished family history, “A Record of the Descendants of John Bisland and Susannah Rucker.” I am especially indebted to Elizabeth Bisland’s great-grandniece Sara Bartholomew, who was patient and unfailingly generous in answering my many queries, and who provided me a wealth of materials including newspaper clippings, family photographs, surveys of Fairfax and Applegarth, and a trove of never-before-seen letters written by Elizabeth Bisland on a subsequent trip around the world. This would have been a far poorer book without her assistance.

  Lenny Benardo, Jennifer Weiss, Deborah Schupack, and Joan Dempsey read the manuscript in various stages and offered many helpful comments and much-needed encouragement; I’m honored by their friendship and their goodwill, and I hope someday to be able to repay them adequately for it.

  Finally, I offer this book with love to my children, Ezra and Vivian (with whom I have passed happy hours playing Round the World with Nellie Bly, and who joined me for the last piece of research for this book, a trip to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where they solemnly laid flowers on the grave sites of both Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland—roses for Bly, daffodils for Bisland), and especially to my wife, Cassie Schwerner, who was from the very beginning this book’s most dedicated supporter, its sharpest reader, and its most patient listener, and who has long been my best companion in travels of all kinds.

  NOTES

  THIS IS A WORK of nonfiction. All of the dialogue in this book, and anything else between quotation marks, has been taken from a written source such as a memoir, letter, or newspaper article. None of the events presented here was imagined, and no thoughts have been ascribed to a character that he or she did not personally claim. In writing this book I have drawn from newspaper and magazine articles, guidebooks, travelers’ accounts, letters, histories, and biographies; in the travel sections I drew most heavily on the writing of Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland themselves, especially the books each wrote about the race, respectively Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890) and A Flying Trip Around the World (1891). All direct quotations from these books are cited in the endnotes; in certain other places I have paraphrased the travelers’ descriptions as a way of maintaining their distinctive voices and points of view. Bly had a sharp, peppery style and Bisland was erudite and lyrical, and their own books about the “lightning trip” are each wonderful and well worth reading.

  PROLOGUE

  1 the North River, as it was still called then: Dutch colonists called the Delaware the South River, and the Hudson the North River. King (1892), 68.

  2 Augusta Victoria: The ship was actually christened after the German empress Auguste Victoria, but the name was misspelled; oddly enough, it would be many years before the correction was made. Bowen, 198.

  3 a gigantic hearse with windows: Fox, 95.

  4 a pleasing note of sophisticat
ion: Kroeger, 25.

  5 “Don’t worry”: Bly (1890), 14. The citations for Bly’s book of her trip are taken from the paperback reprint Around the World in Seventy-two Days (Indialog Publications, 2003).

  6 Their apartment was on West Thirty-fifth Street: Trow’s New York City Directory, Vol. CIII, for the Year Ending May 1, 1890 (New York: Trow City Directory Company, 1889), 347. The entry is listed under the name of her mother, Mary J. Cochrane.

  7 Bly paid her nickel: Sun, 328.

  8 a one-way ticket, three cents: Kobbé, 32.

  9 an unusual rising inflection: McDougall, 186.

  10 at the age of twenty she had moved to New Orleans: Lafcadio Hearn incorrectly remembered Bisland as having moved to New Orleans when she was sixteen, a mistake that subsequently found its way into several histories. In fact, as Susan Millar Williams notes, Hearn, who first met Bisland when he was working for the New Orleans Times-Democrat, did not begin working for the paper until 1881, when Bisland was twenty. Williams, 685.

  11 the little apartment she shared with her sister on Fourth Avenue: Trow’s New York City Directory, Vol. CIV, for the Year Ending May 1, 1891 (New York: Trow City Directory Company, 1890), 111.

  12 “a sort of goddess”: Williams, 686.

  13 “a beautiful dangerous leopard”: Ibid.

  14 (“After the period of sex-attraction has passed”): Bisland (1906), 125.

  15 working for eighteen hours at a stretch: Stevenson, 190.