The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

by Dawn Raffel

  Topsy refused to cooperate. She wouldn’t set foot on the killing platform. Unable to get the elephant to budge, Thompson summoned her old trainer. Ault provided a piece of his mind: He wouldn’t coax Topsy to her death. Not for the twenty-five dollars they offered him. The executioners prevailed, moving the platform to where the elephant stood. Into her moist mouth went the poisoned carrots. Next, the electric current ripped through her body. Topsy’s wild heart stopped its beating almost instantly, although she was strangled just to make sure. A doctor pronounced her dead.

  * * *

  —

  Samuel Schenkein was back from the brink of extinction. After months of judicial hair-splitting over the nature of Schenkein and Coney’s contract with McConnell, the latter saw some cash, but there is no remaining record of how much. Regardless, the cloud of “involuntary bankruptcy” was lifted.

  Sam, presumably feeling lucky, bought a ticket. But not for himself. On April 27, who should arrive aboard La Gascogne but Mlle. Louise Recht, dark-haired to Maye’s golden, now calling herself a more mature “Madame.” For the record, she was Amelie Louise, but she, like Annabelle Maye, favored her middle name.

  Not three weeks after Louise’s arrival, on May 16, Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy officially lit up Luna Park, with its half million electric lights and A Trip to the Moon as its signature ride. Roughly a block from the spot where Topsy collapsed, Dr. Martin Couney opened his infant incubator station.

  “Come this way, ladies and gentlemen!” the barker hollered. “See the tiniest bits of humanity! Maybe the future president is inside!”

  * * *

  —

  Fifteen years had passed since Michael Cohn beheld the Elephant Hotel from aboard the Gellert. A bad idea from the start, the beast became a brothel, until even the hookers checked out. In 1896, it burned to the ground.

  Where Coney Island was once a restless nest of vice, now it was a drunk-on-adrenaline fantasyland. Stars and swains arrived in fine, high style. The middle class unbuttoned. Immigrants who suffocated through the week in tenements and sweatshops looked forward to the weekend, when they could cram into airless trains and trolleys, to frolic in the crowded sea. They sunned on the anything-goes beach, surrendering their hard-earned coins at George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park. They screamed. They spun on rides that flung them into one another’s arms. Lovers slid through dark canals in boats, stealing kisses. Fires raged and wars were won in full-scale reenactments, someone else’s hell.

  Coney Island from the air.

  Tilyou’s only competition came from the floundering Sea Lion Park across the way. Regardless, he had to keep his theme park peppy. In 1901, ever alert for the next best thing, he went on a shopping expedition to the Buffalo World’s Fair. He needed A Trip to the Moon. And if, in order to get it, he had to hire Thompson and Dundy, so be it. He brought in the partners to manage their hit concession, along with all of Steeplechase Park for the summer of ’02. By the end of the season, Sea Lion Park was belly-up.

  Tilyou didn’t like that. He believed that two parks, like two heads, were better than one. If the neighboring space became a decrepit ruin it would hurt him in the pocket. But he had an idea (he always did). He drew up a cunning second-year contract for Thompson and Dundy that drastically slashed their pay. As he predicted, they stepped right into his setup, huffing that rather than sign this demeaning agreement, they would buy Sea Lion Park instead. So there.

  Poor doomed Topsy was forced to haul the mammoth Trip to the Moon to its new location during her final months on earth. The spot where they killed her was less than a five-minute walk from the decomposing ashes of the Elephant Hotel.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Coney” had to go. That name would not do. Not in Luna-tic Park, with its lions and tigers and midgets and freaks and blazing lights and strolling bands intended to rouse people up off the benches and onto their swelling feet. A whole Venetian city arose, complete with gondolas; already there was talk of chariots and prancing horses. How was a doctor to run a serious operation in this carnival atmosphere? Certainly not as Coney Island’s Dr. Coney. That distinguishing u was back for a return engagement—Couney, minus the nuisance accent aigu atop the e.

  “Strangest Place on Earth for Human Tots to Be Fed, Nursed and Cared For,” The Brooklyn Eagle reported, struggling to contain a paradox in the space of a newspaper column. The idea of “haranguing the passing throng in an effort to divert its shekels for a spectacle so serious, not to say sacred, strikes one as questionable, almost repellent.” But then the reporter’s assessment took a U-turn, praising the superior equipment, the skillful feeding with the tapered spoon invented by Dr. Martin Couney, and the immaculate conditions, right down to that fact that instead of feather bedding, which absorbed saliva and sour milk, the babies’ pillows were filled with a tarred sanitizing substance that was regularly discarded. Indeed, the reporter concluded, this was a “sober, scientific exhibit.”

  Martin and Maye and Louise might well have assumed it wouldn’t be long before every physician and hospital adopted this new system. For now, they could enjoy their good fortune: making money, saving lives, inhaling the ocean breeze.

  * * *

  —

  Alfons Coney would’ve enjoyed this endearing turn of events. Doubtless he’d have visited, if he hadn’t been three thousand miles away, after leaving the Gravesend racetrack for the opposite coast. While Baby Brother saved the babies, Alfons was making a name for himself in certain muscular circles. The following summer, perhaps a bit pickled, he dared a fellow member of the San Francisco Olympic Club to race him up Mount Tamalpais and back to the Dipsea Inn for additional liquid refreshment. Alfons finished second out of two. Nevertheless, he was credited with starting a long-distance-running tradition. The annual Dipsea Race would still be run long after he and his brother were dead and the twentieth century ended.

  * * *

  —

  Martin had lost the coveted chance to exhibit at the upcoming St. Louis World’s Fair, but he had gained a home. And now he was going to have a wife. On September 26, 1903, he and Annabelle Maye signed their marriage license, with her widowed mother, Mary Isabella, as their witness. “Belle,” as she often called herself, would live with the newlyweds, as would Louise. A family of women. For his marriage license, the city clerk required him to state his profession. He might have hesitated a moment before saying “medical instruments.”

  He gave his legal name as Martin A. Couney. And this was the truth, or would be in a moment. On October 1, his change of name was finalized by the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Michael Cohn, Martin Cohn, and Martin Coney had gone the way of the Elephant Hotel.

  KISS THE BABY

  In the photo I found, he looks tired. His hair is mostly gone. His cheeks have fallen into jowls. His eyes, behind black glasses, contain a quiet sorrow. He faces straight into the camera, holding a child so small that his liver-spotted hand covers her torso. The child was named Beth Bernstein and she was born in 1941, the summer before the United States entered World War II.

  At birth, Beth Bernstein weighed one pound, ten ounces.

  * * *

  —

  At seventy-three, Beth Allen was petite, almost gamine, with short, straight gray hair and a lively gait. What I saw in her eyes was delight. Martin Couney was clearly among her favorite topics of conversation.

  As we sat at her table, with its sweeping view of playing fields and the city beyond, Beth began by telling me about her twin, who lived two days. “I never knew there was another baby until I was about eleven years old and I overheard something at a family gathering,” she said. “When I asked my father he said, ‘Yes, but don’t talk to your mother about it, it’s too painful for her.’”

  Beth had no other siblings. “I was overprotected all through my childhood,” she said. “When I was ready to come home from t
he incubator, my mother was terrified. She wanted a baby nurse, but Martin Couney told her, ‘No, you’ve had a long vacation. Now you take care of your child.’ She was so afraid that my father gave me my first bath.”

  If Beth’s mother didn’t want to discuss her lost twin, she didn’t want to talk about Coney Island, either. As strange as that sounded to me, parents not talking about it would come up repeatedly as I started finding Martin Couney’s few surviving patients. Before I read too much into that, I had to remind myself that theirs was a generation far less fond of “sharing” than ours. Nobody would have spoken openly about a miscarriage, either. Nobody talked about illness—certainly not cancer, and nothing connected to intimate parts of the body or the psyche. So much of that past has vanished due to silence. How much of our own past, I wondered, will be lost amid too much noise?

  * * *

  —

  Ten years ago, maybe more, someone named Dr. Lawrence Gartner had wanted to interview Beth’s mother. She finally agreed, but the meeting was canceled when his travel plans changed. Instead, he sent Beth a list of questions to ask on his behalf.

  “Here’s the little piece of paper that I used when I interviewed my mother,” Beth said. She had cut the questions short when they became too painful, but now she referred to her few existing notes. “My mother was at her mother’s house with one of her sisters when she went into labor,” she read. “They called the doctor, who said it must have been something she ate. And her sister said, ‘No, no, no, you come over right away.’”

  Ah, how often did I hear about doctors thinking labor pains were simple indigestion? But this doctor, persuaded, came over and drove Beth’s mother to the hospital. Israel Zion (now Maimonides Medical Center) had a few incubators, but no one there was trained in treating a baby under two pounds. And the hospital didn’t have enough machines to keep a single baby for long, when other babies were waiting.

  “The doctors wanted to send me to Dr. Couney, and my mother rejected that totally. She said, ‘My baby is not a freak. I don’t want her in a sideshow.’” Convinced that her daughter had no chance regardless, she was persuaded only when the elderly Martin Couney came in person to plead his case.

  Having said yes, she couldn’t bear to visit. But Beth’s cousins, eleven and eight years old, were full of questions. “The eight-year-old remembered her mother trying to describe how small I was,” Beth said. “She took out a pound and a half of chop meat and said, ‘This is your new cousin.’ The eleven-year-old went to Coney Island every day.”

  This latter cousin, Terry Silverman, had died by the time I met Beth, but years earlier, she had made a recording for the Coney Island Oral History Project. In a raspy, nostalgia-soaked voice, she spoke about going to see the incubators free of charge, about Martin Couney patting her on the head and about befriending the midgets next door. She also recalled people criticizing Beth’s mother: “A lot of people expressed horror . . . ‘How could you do that? Put your child on display like a freak?’ She said, ‘No, my child is being saved by a genius of a man with incubators.’” For all that Beth’s mother was embarrassed at Coney Island, she was clearly grateful.

  Beth’s cousin Terry observes the incubator.

  Toward the end of the season, when Beth’s weight topped five pounds, she was moved to a beribboned bassinette. “She was the star of the show,” Terry Silverman said adoringly, “and Dr. Couney himself placed her in my arms. I felt faint, I was so excited.”

  Martin Couney encouraged hugging and kissing. His give-them-love approach was the opposite of the masked and gloved, sterile, no touch protocol that hospitals would later adopt—and then reject.

  * * *

  —

  More than any of the other “babies” I would eventually meet, Beth had immersed herself in research. She knew that her birth weight remains on the cusp of viability. “When you think of the state of care all those years ago . . . I didn’t get the blindness, or the lung problems, or the breathing problems,” she said. “Now I can’t even lose a pound and a half.”

  For Father’s Day, her parents would take her to Martin Couney’s house by the ocean, visits she barely remembers. “I was a little girl and he was an old man, and I probably didn’t want to go,” she said. Her parents attended his funeral, but she didn’t have any details. “You know, it’s just so sad that I never got more information before everyone who lived through it left.”

  As I was getting ready to leave, Beth mentioned Dr. Gartner one more time. For some reason, the name didn’t register with me. Still, I made a note to myself to find this Dr. Gartner—eventually. First, I wanted to do some more digging of my own.

  “THE CRIME OF THE DECADE”

  St. Louis, 1904

  John Philip Sousa’s marching band kicked off the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, colloquially known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. Innovation like percussion. The ice cream cone, a portable sphere of pleasure you could lick to the final crunch. Mustardy hot dogs and hamburgers. Fizzy Dr Pepper. The midway, called the Pike, looked as if it had sprung from a tipsy pixie’s head. Fun and games and rides and freaks and sugar and spice. Visitors could view indigenous peoples—this time a tribe of Igorrotes from the Philippines—and lighten their wallets in all the ways people had come to expect. Left unsaid, hushed up as much as possible in the interest of profit and image: the babies turning blue and dying in the incubator sideshow.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Martin Couney wasn’t there. He and Sam had expanded to Atlantic City, with the assistance of local doctors. Coney Island boasted twin attractions: one in Luna Park and the other in the newly opened Dreamland. Owned by a Tammany Hall–connected businessman named William H. Reynolds, Dreamland was intended as the lifted-pinkie answer to Luna Park and Steeplechase. Pearl-white buildings, classy pizzazz. But Reynolds had no showbiz in his veins. In it only for the money, he copied from Thompson and Tilyou, betting on more being more: If Luna Park had five hundred thousand electric bulbs, he would have one million. If Luna Park’s Fire and Flames featured a thousand men dousing a conflagration, his neighboring inferno would engage two thousand. A ballroom jutting into the ocean! Three hundred midgets! Preemies!

  Martin obliged him. On August 1, he ripped a page from Alexandre Lion’s playbook and threw his first reunion. Oh, how he delighted in these squeezable tots! The triplets from Buffalo, happy and fat. Three sets of Brooklyn twins, and singles as young as three months old, almost all assured of surviving, thanks to his system.

  Later that month, one-pound, eight-ounce Baby Lillian was delivered to the premises. Martin put on an optimistic face and dialed the press. Under the headline “New York Excited over the Smallest Living Body,” a reporter remarked that Lillian’s fingers were the size of matchsticks.

  “The case of Lillian is, of course, the most wonderful in medical science,” Martin said, “as no child born weighing less than twenty-four ounces ever has been known to live. I think, however, that she will get along finely now and that we will be able to point with pride to her as a fully grown young woman in a few years.”

  If only he could speak a kinder truth into power. No further word about Baby Lillian was published, which seems to bespeak her death. For years after, he kept trying to break the two-pound barrier. But Martin’s reputation was growing, with plans for concessions in two amusement parks in Chicago, another in Minneapolis (for which he would “train” the personnel), and the Lewis and Clark Exposition to be held in Portland, Oregon, in ’05. The future looked as peachy as a healthy child’s cheek.

  But by the end of the season, the smell of the news oozing out of St. Louis would make Martin Couney sick.

  * * *

  —

  Martin saw it coming. He had warned them, had he not? Never would something like this have happened on his watch. Sam had been invited to make their pitch for the concession in St. Louis all the way back in ’01, before
their Buffalo troubles. By 1902, the concessions committee was sold on the idea of an incubator show. But rather than award the contract to people who knew how to run it, they were shopping around. For all Martin knew, they intended to give it to Edward Bayliss from the beginning. The master of disaster: the Battle of Manila, the Great Fire at Dawson City. Bayliss was local to St. Louis, well connected.

  Still, in the down-and-out December of ’02, Martin, as Dr. Coney, was invited to state his case in person. Round and round they went, these men of the committee. The topic was money. Apparently, they were unaware of the lawsuit with McConnell. Sam had offered a flat fee of $8,000 for the concession, while the committee insisted on a percentage of the gate. They refused to relent.

  In their meeting with Martin, he declined to reveal financials, either through ignorance or through willful obfuscation. The conversation bordered on contentious, like a bad Mad Hatter party.

  “I don’t see why it is that you have any objection to stating what your receipts were in Buffalo . . . and I think you take an arbitrary stand.”

  “Oh, no. It isn’t,” Martin said. “We have been to a good many Expositions with our affair. We were in Omaha, Buffalo, and Berlin in 1896.”

  “You were not in Paris?”