by Paul Martin
Peary was said to have regarded Cook as a potential rival as far back as their 1891 trip together.6 Eventually their differences came to a head. Shortly after the 1901 relief expedition led by Bridgman, Cook refused to serve under Peary ever again. He occupied himself with two expeditions to Alaska’s Mount McKinley (Denali), before the Arctic called once more. In 1907, Cook launched a two-year expedition to the North Pole, which he claimed to have reached on April 21, 1908. It took him over a year to make it back from the far north and publicize his exploit. In one of the great ironies of modern exploration, Cook wired the news that he had attained the pole just five days before Peary telegraphed his own similar announcement to Bridgman. Both explorers were feted for their achievements. Cook was honored by the Royal Geographical Society of Denmark, while Peary received recognition from America’s National Geographic Society.
Naturally, the issue of who had really been first to reach the North Pole became a whopping controversy. Peary had the weight of the National Geographic Society on his side, although the organization was clearly biased, since it was one of the sponsors of the adventurer’s final expedition. After a superficial look at the records of the trip, the society certified Peary’s claim, a move that helped persuade Congress to issue a gold medal in the explorer’s honor.7 Cook, however, had plenty of supporters himself, some of whom insisted on a congressional investigation into the matter. No such hearings ever took place. That left the issue in the court of public opinion.
Peary and his allies responded with a relentless smear campaign against Cook. To cast doubt on his rival’s claim of reaching the pole, Peary tried to show that Cook had lied about an earlier achievement. In 1906, Cook claimed to have become the first to reach the top of Mount McKinley. Peary funded an expedition to the Alaskan peak with the sole purpose of discrediting Cook. Peary ended up paying a member of Cook’s climbing team $5,000 to swear that the team had never reached the summit. The skullduggery paid off, and Cook’s claim of conquering North America’s highest mountain came under a cloud.8
Herbert Bridgman played a leading role in swaying the public through a barrage of pro-Peary articles, letters, and public lectures. Bridgman helped convince Americans that the walrus-mustachioed navy man was an iconic hero. Writing in Natural History magazine, Bridgman made Peary out to be a saint, an outsize human of the noblest demeanor: “Ambition urged him on, but science and patriotism fed its flame.”9 As for Frederick Cook, Bridgman and his fellow propagandists took every opportunity to disparage the man. The criticisms of Cook ranged from the serious, such as the accusation that he never left sight of land on his North Pole expedition, to the ridiculous, including the nonsensical charge that he’d stolen a missionary’s dictionary.10
Even Bridgman’s wife, writer Helen Bartlett Bridgman, got into the act. In her book Within My Horizon, she described Peary as a “man of irreproachable standing” and called Frederick Cook “a rank charlatan.”11 Such characterizations eventually took hold. For decades, generations of school kids read about the exploits of the famous admiral. Who knows how many youngsters dreamed about their own exotic adventures as they stared at photographs of the grim-faced explorer in his impressive fur parka. What none of them realized was that Peary’s major claim to fame may have been a soap bubble of wishful thinking.
Doubts existed from the first about Peary’s achievement. The records relating to his attainment of the North Pole were like Swiss cheese—so full of holes that they were mostly air. His navigational calculations to determine his position in relation to the pole were shoddy and incomplete and included the failure to factor in ice drift and detours around obstacles. His chronometer was ten minutes fast, which would have thrown him off course. On several days, he reported covering impossible distances.12
Peary’s records were turned over to the National Archives, where they were kept from the public for seventy-five years. After the records were released, a September 1988 article in National Geographic magazine sought to determine once and for all whether Peary had made it to the North Pole. Veteran British polar explorer Wally Herbert examined all of the evidence. His conclusion would have disappointed Herbert Bridgman: it’s possible that Peary may have missed the pole by as much as sixty miles.13 Though no one can say for sure, Frederick Cook could well have had a better claim to the pole than his more celebrated rival (although Cook’s proofs were no more conclusive than Peary’s; hard as it is to believe, Cook left most of the records of his polar trip in Greenland, where they were lost thanks to Peary’s interference).14
Peary and his supporters never wavered in their belief that he had attained the pole. After all the time he’d spent in the effort—twenty-three years—Peary seemed to feel that he alone had the right to the honor of reaching the imaginary landmark first. He told Helen Bartlett Bridgman of his consuming desire to add his name to the list of history’s immortals—giants such as Columbus, Washington, and Napoleon—and he unabashedly proclaimed this to his mother: “I want my fame now.”15 For over half of his naval career, Peary used political connections to help him avoid regular duty so he could pursue his personal quest for glory—acclaim he was reluctant to share with anyone. During a National Geographic dinner at which Alexander Graham Bell praised Frederick Cook as the first American to explore both the Arctic and Antarctic, Peary sat fuming like a jealous teenager.16
It’s curious why the public embraced Robert Peary and rejected Frederick Cook. Perhaps, as a military man, Peary fit the heroic image better than the Brooklyn physician. There’s no doubt that Peary was a demigod to Herbert Bridgman. When Bridgman died in September 1924, the New York Times commented on his intimate relationship with the explorer he’d promoted so unstintingly, observing that “as Secretary of the Peary Arctic Club [Bridgman] did more than any other one man to help as well as to encourage Peary.”17
Over the decades, however, the reputation of Bridgman’s paragon has shrunk like a melting iceberg. There’s no doubt that Peary endured great hardship and accomplished legitimate feats of exploration—he’s credited with the discovery of the northernmost point of land in the world, in Greenland—but there’s also something off-putting about him. He seems to have been a vainglorious, spiteful man of wobbly integrity and elastic morals (he took a fourteen-year-old Inuit girl as his Arctic “wife” while his real wife was back home, and he stooped to hiring thugs to disrupt his rival’s public lectures).18 The words he recorded on his supposed attainment of the North Pole reveal much about his character: “Mine at last,” he crowed, as if his longtime African-American assistant Matthew Henson and the Inuit members of the expedition did not exist.19 Frederick Cook, in contrast, included his two Inuit companions in his ruminations about reaching the pole. “We were the only pulsating creatures in a dead world of ice,” he wrote in his diary.20 As Bridgman’s idol, Peary certainly had feet of clay.
It’s clear that Bridgman did a disservice to Frederick Cook—and to history—by contributing to the blatant character assassination that undermined Cook’s claims. Bridgman’s biased media campaign on Peary’s behalf was more appropriate to politics than journalism. In the world of communications, the hard sell is the stock-in-trade of advertising and public relations. Journalism, on the other hand, is supposed to be impartial. At least that’s what they used to teach in journalism schools, although it sometimes seems like that lofty standard is becoming about as rare as a polar bear on Madison Avenue.
It’s a truism that the winners have always written history. In Bridgman’s case, a writer spun history to try to determine a winner. In the tangled chronicles of Arctic exploration, the proselytizing of Herbert Bridgman and other diehard Peary boosters shaped public opinion for the better part of a century. The truth of whether Peary reached the North Pole, or if he was indeed the first to do so, may never be known. Those arguments continue, with nearly as much unalloyed partisanship on behalf of Frederick Cook as Herbert Bridgman displayed for Robert Peary.
Peggy Hopkins Joyce
In the spring
of 1920, twenty-six-year-old Peggy Hopkins Joyce—a slender, seductive beauty who could reduce most men to gibbering idiots with a single glance—sat fretting in her suite in New York City’s luxurious St. Regis Hotel. The sometime theater and film actress and full-time socialite was about to depart for a Paris honeymoon with her new husband, millionaire Chicago lumberman Stanley Joyce. Lamentably, the new Mrs. Joyce felt totally unprepared for their European getaway.
“I will need a few things for the voyage,” she informed Mr. Joyce.
“Well charge them,” replied her distracted spouse, who was busy attending to some last-minute business affairs.
Taking her husband at his word, Mrs. Joyce went shopping. Her first stop was at Fifth Avenue jewelry store Black, Starr & Frost, where she bought a $200,000 diamond necklace. She followed that with the purchase of a $65,000 sable coat, a $30,000 chinchilla coat for knocking around in, and a new wardrobe of dresses. Oh, and there was also that attractive little $325,000 pearl necklace her husband had promised her.
Later, when her husband expressed his shock at her profligate spending, Mrs. Joyce rebuked him. “Well if a girl can’t buy herself a few things when she is going to Paris without being questioned by her husband who is a millionaire, what is the use of being married to a millionaire or going to Paris?”
Mrs. Joyce then burst into tears and accused her husband of not loving her, since all he seemed to think about was money and she wasn’t the least bit interested in money.
“No,” her husband replied, “I see you are not.”
This episode sounds like a drawing room scene from a Noel Coward comedy, but that was the way Peggy Hopkins Joyce described it in Men, Marriage, and Me, her frothy 1930 memoir.1 By the time that book came out, the acquisitive actress had already divorced Stanley Joyce—her third husband—and married and divorced another man as well. She would wed six times in all. Her most celebrated marriages were commercial ventures, calculated liaisons with men of wealth or position that vaulted this woman of humble birth into high society. Her fortuitous marriages, coupled with one particularly lucrative, highly publicized divorce, established her as one of the great gold diggers of all time. It was a role she admitted to without apology. “It is better to be mercenary than miserable,” she said. “I may be expensive, but I do deliver the goods.”2
If that unvarnished self-appraisal makes Peggy Hopkins Joyce seem predatory and self-centered, it’s because she was. She dedicated herself to gratifying her own hedonistic whims, and she wasn’t above marketing the one bankable asset she’d been born with to make that happen. It was a vocation she clearly enjoyed. Besides her string of hubbies, she toted up an impressive number of rich and influential lovers, including Charlie Chaplin, automaker Walter Chrysler, producers Irving Thalberg and Lee Shubert, and a lengthy list of European playboys.3 She was, in short, a courtesan, although one who sandwiched her sex-for-prosperity lifestyle around a middling theatrical career.
Despite her modest talent, Peggy Hopkins Joyce stayed in the public eye throughout the 1920s and early ’30s. She did it by dazzling people with her good looks and outrageous behavior. Tabloid newspapers, eager for gossip, turned her into one of the country’s first “famous for being famous” celebrities. During the height of her notoriety, reporters dogged Peggy Hopkins Joyce for the latest juicy tidbit about her private life, and she was always happy to oblige them, a willing partner in the creation of her own scandalous public image. She became the emblem of Jazz Age “gaiety,” the drunken, sexed-up, go-for-broke frenzy that flourished under Prohibition, when forbidden fruit was the sweetest.
In her youth, Peggy Hopkins Joyce vowed not to lead a “Dull and Dreary” existence, and she succeeded.4 It wasn’t an admirable life, but no one could ever say it was boring. Born in 1893 near Norfolk, Virginia, Marguerite “Peggy” Upton was the daughter of an itinerant barber—ironic, given that she spent her whole life clipping men herself. When Peggy was ten, her mother abandoned the family. As Peggy grew older, she dreamed of escaping her conventional circumstances, convinced that she would one day be a “Great Star.”5 In 1909, at the age of sixteen, she joined a small vaudeville troupe in Richmond, Virginia. She traveled to Denver with the troupe, making her professional show business debut somewhere along the way.
In Denver, a twenty-two-year-old salesman named Everett Archibald Jr. spied the nubile young Peggy Upton onstage and decided she was for him. A few months later, the two were married. It was not a tranquil union. Whenever her husband traveled on business, Peggy whiled away her lonely nights by working her way through Denver’s bachelor population. After Archibald walked in on her and a guest one evening, the blushing bride packed up and fled from Husband Number One. The profits from her initial foray into matrimony were small, just a few hundred bucks.6 She would do better the next time.
Peggy took to the road after her fling in the Rockies, ending up on the East Coast. In Washington, DC, she struck a deal with a local dressmaker to show off his creations by wearing them around town. Gorgeous and fashionably dressed, Peggy caught the eye of the city’s smart set. In addition to cloaking herself in someone else’s clothes, she wrapped herself in a mantle of lies, telling people she was the daughter of a rakish Southern gentleman, and that she’d attended Chevy Chase College, an exclusive finishing school.7 Swathed in this fantasy, she made the acquaintance of Sherburne P. Hopkins, the son of a powerful Washington attorney. “I have met a Millionaire!” Peggy wrote of their first encounter.8 She didn’t waste the opportunity. On September 1, 1913, at the age of twenty, Peggy Upton was a bride once more.
Firmly hitched to a fat bank account, Peggy dove into the luxurious life as if she were born to it, despite a frosty reception from her new in-laws. She squeezed her husband for an endless array of gifts—jewelry, clothes, an expensive new chauffeured limousine. She was the toast of Washington, a bright ornament on the arm of her husband at balls and receptions. In a remarkably short time, though, she began to find society in the capital confining. And Husband Number Two—no great wit—quickly bored her. In 1915, she escaped to New York City, armed with her new social standing and a taste for the high life. What she craved now was fame and excitement.
In Manhattan, Peggy met the owner of an exclusive dress salon, Madame Frances, who provided introductions to several influential New Yorkers. In short order, the young woman found herself in a vaudeville revue called the “Style Show,” which was exactly that—a presentation of the latest fashions, with models swishing around the Palace Theatre stage to music. This was precisely the type of show that fit Peggy’s “talent,” which consisted of looking pretty. Newspapers hailed her “performance,” noting that she “wears a gown the way some prima donnas sing a song.”9 Reporters seldom failed to mention that she’d left a millionaire husband and given up a life in Washington society to pursue her stage career, which enhanced Peggy’s reputation as a captivating free spirit.
A surprise hit, the “Style Show” traveled across the country, affording Peggy the chance to strut her stuff as far away as Los Angeles. The exposure probably helped her land a role in a silent film in 1916. In The Turmoil, she had a small part as a cheating wife, a portrayal for which she would have needed no coaching. That same year she played another minor character in Dimples, a film as forgettable as her first. When Peggy’s film career stalled, she returned to the New York stage in 1917, appearing in that season’s Ziegfeld Follies. Once again, she was little more than a mannequin, with reviewers noting how nice she looked.10
Peggy’s Follies performance and a second Ziegfeld production, Miss 1917, led to more movie offers. In 1918, she appeared in three films, none of which amounted to much, although they did enhance Peggy’s status as a sex symbol. She next tried acting in Broadway plays and was drubbed by critics, one saying, “She is about as convincing as a doll hanging from the limb of a Christmas tree.”11 Even so, society reporters loved the stylish adventuress, and her photos started to pop up in the leading fashion magazines.
In 1
919, Peggy went on the road with A Sleepless Night, a play in which her dramatic challenge was to loll about on a canopy bed in satin pajamas. During the play’s run in Chicago, thirty-two-year-old lumberman James Stanley Joyce was taken with the willowy beauty. The fabulously wealthy Joyce wooed the young actress, asking her to stay in Chicago. To help her make up her mind, Joyce bought her a large emerald. When she hesitated at his marriage proposal, he produced a very convincing diamond.
The courtship bounced from Chicago to New York to Palm Beach, with more ostentatious gifts appearing at each stop. At last, Peggy consented to the marriage, realizing that, even though she didn’t love Joyce, and despite the fact that he was a mousy little man of no great physical or intellectual attraction, he apparently couldn’t say no to her insatiable demand for baubles.12 Her divorce from Husband Number Two came through on January 20, 1920. Three days later, Peggy married Husband Number Three. This time she’d hit the jackpot.
For roughly a year, Peggy did everything she could to spend her way through Joyce’s fortune, acquiring a mansion in Miami and absurd amounts of clothes, furs, and jewelry. Her adoring husband could put up with all that, but he couldn’t abide Peggy’s other obsession: her ceaseless procession of lovers. During their extended European honeymoon—and even before—she fornicated like a nymphomaniac.13 Joyce finally became fed up. He left his bride in Europe, saying that he had to get back home to attend to business. Peggy soon received a cable from her lawyer stating that her husband had filed for divorce on the grounds of infidelity.