Barnum
Page 7
This museum’s presentations—of things animal, vegetable, aquatic and mineral; of paintings and panoramic views and waxworks; of machines and automatons and chemical and electrical experiments; of primitive implements and mummies and mastodon bones; of magicians, ventriloquists, minstrels and dramatists—had worked as a steady leaven of enlightenment. While traditional educators hesitated, the American Museum carried on as a combined kindergarten, academy, and college for America’s culturally neglected Everyman.14
The museum went steadily downhill throughout the 1830s. Once valued at $25,000, it was now for sale for $15,000. But even this was far more money than Barnum had at his disposal, since “my recent enterprises had not indeed been productive, and my funds were decidedly low.” In one of the more famous passages from his autobiography, Barnum told a friend that he was hoping to buy the American Museum. When the incredulous friend asked what with, Barnum replied, “Brass, for silver and gold I have none.”15
It’s a memorable line, and it’s mostly true. In the convoluted series of events that led to Barnum’s control of the museum, his brass was augmented primarily by his wits and personality. He decided to seek out a complete stranger, a retired merchant named Francis L. Olmsted, who owned the building in which the museum was housed, with the quixotic goal of persuading him to buy the collection for him on credit, arguing that he would be a more reliable tenant than the struggling Scudder family. This, against all odds, Barnum was able to do, partly because of the impression he made on Olmsted, partly because friends of Barnum, including William Niblo and Moses Yale Beach, who owned the New York Sun, were willing to go in person to speak up for him. When Barnum visited Olmsted the day after his friends had, the older man gruffly said, “I don’t like your references, Mr. Barnum.” After Barnum replied that he was sorry to hear it, Olmsted continued, now laughing, “They all speak too well of you.”16
Olmsted said he was willing to make the deal with Barnum, but he wanted some collateral. Barnum owned only one mortgage-free piece of property, that five acres of utterly useless land on Ivy Island that his grandfather had given to him. He paused just a moment for moral qualms when offering the property to Olmsted as collateral, then absolved himself by remembering the land as he had imagined it as a boy, not as it was—and by assuring himself of what he could not yet know, that he was going to make a success of the museum and thereby not fail to pay Olmsted back.
Barnum then went to the Scudder family’s representative and talked him down to a price of $12,000 for the collection, but before the deal was signed the directors of a rival museum swooped in and offered the original price, putting up $1,000 in earnest money. Barnum was “thunderstruck” to have lost his purchase, but he was undeterred. He suspected that his rivals, who were bankers and not showmen, had created what they called the New-York Museum Company in order to join the remnants of another collection with Scudder’s, selling stock in the enterprise with no real ambition to make a go of it. Barnum went to his newspaper friends and offered to expose what he portrayed as a swindle, and he “wrote a large number of squibs, cautioning the public against buying the Museum stock.” Sure enough, soon “the stock was as ‘dead as a herring.’ ” Barnum went back to the Scudder’s administrator and elicited a secret deal that if the New-York Museum Company directors did not buy Scudder’s on the day they promised, he could have it for the negotiated price.
In the meantime, his rivals contacted Barnum with an offer to run their operation, presumably so he would stop undermining their stock scheme. Barnum saw an opportunity to lull them into thinking he was no longer an antagonist or even a competitor, and so accepted their offer. The day for payment arrived, and the directors, feeling no urgency to pay, didn’t act. Thus the museum slipped into Barnum’s hands. Just to rub salt in their wounds, he wrote to the directors the next day, offering them free passes to the museum that was now his.
* * *
OLMSTED’S BUILDING WAS LOCATED JUST across Broadway from St. Paul’s Church and the Astor House, which was the city’s, and indeed the country’s, premier hotel. When Barnum acquired the museum, Olmsted’s many-windowed marble building presented a bland façade to the street, matching the reputation of its overly familiar exhibits. Barnum quickly moved to liven up its look. He mounted a collection of foreign flags along the roof on the Broadway side to accompany a huge American flag. He installed a large Drummond light on the roof, employing a powerful beam of limelight with reflecting lenses to, for the very first time, turn the Broadway night into day. But even this did not satisfy Barnum’s need to attract attention to his new enterprise, so he had large, colorful, oval paintings of individual creatures—a Noah’s ark of animal portraits—placed between the eighty windows in the upper floors of the building. He waited to have them installed until all the oils were completed, creating the maximum dramatic effect by hanging them all on a single night. He attributed an immediate hundred-dollar increase in his daily draw to the paintings’ impact.17
The museum was auspiciously situated to suit Barnum’s ambitions. St. Paul’s, City Hall, and Astor House drew the city’s fashionable residents, who would promenade along Broadway and in City Hall Park to see and be seen. But too few members of the upper crust existed to support a museum on the scale Barnum foresaw. The growing success of the Bowery as an entertainment center for the thousands of workers and seamen who lived in boardinghouses in lower Manhattan proved that hoi polloi would spend their money on amusements fairly priced. Between the Bowery and the museum, just northeast of City Hall Park, began the infamous Five Points, a swampy area where Irish, free blacks, and various immigrant communities lived tightly packed in uneasy proximity. “All that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here,” Charles Dickens wrote about the Five Points after his 1842 visit to America. Its dens of gambling, drinking, and prostitution appealed not only to the working classes but also to better-off New York men and tens of thousands of visiting businessmen. But vice and virtue existed side by side throughout the teeming neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, and moral reform societies and temperance groups also had their energetic supporters in places like the Five Points. As the city began to climb its way out of the recession, about 30 percent of Manhattanites were middle class. Because of the fluidity of class status in a rapidly growing city vulnerable to booms and busts, achieving or maintaining respectability was a serious matter, demonstrated by one’s possessions, taste, and manners, or by whether one boarded, rented, or owned a house.18
Barnum wanted to attract this rising middle class and the aspiring members of the surrounding neighborhoods. They had more money to spend than those in the boardinghouses and were more likely to spend it on wholesome activities, and with their higher rates of literacy, they were more susceptible to newspaper advertising. As Barnum began to add to the museum’s collection, he continued the institution’s long tradition of emphasizing exhibits that would both entertain and make his customers think. So many newcomers to and tourists in New York, then as now, were drawn to the city by its promise not just of excitement but also of connection to a wider world than the one on view back home. Barnum had an unachievably ambitious plan for satisfying this hunger to learn: he aimed to acquire at least one example of every single thing in existence, living or dead. In the 1820s a Scudder Museum advertisement had claimed 150,000 items in its collection, and by the 1860s Barnum would advertise that his museum contained a “million wonders.”19
It was almost impossible to describe the breadth of what the museum held even before Barnum acquired it and began energetically adding to its exhibits. After he had been at it for a few years, the task became so hopeless as to be laughable. A humorist using the pen name Q. K. Philander Doesticks visited the museum in 1854 and wrote a piece that parodied the attempt, giving a good sense of how overwhelmed a visitor to the American Museum must have felt. What Doesticks claims to have seen included:
pictures, paddles, pumpkins, carriages, corals, lava, boats, breeches, boa constrictors, shells, oars
, snakes, toads, butterflies, lizards, bears, reptiles, reprobates, bugs, bulls, bells, bats, birds, petrifactions, putrefactions, model railroads, model churns, model gridirons, model artists, model babies, cockneys, cockades, cockroaches, cocktails, scalps, Thomashawks, Noah’s ark, Paganini’s fiddle, Old Grimes’s coat, autocrats, autobiographies, autographs, chickens, cheeses, codfish, Shanghais, mud-turtles, alligators, moose, mermaids, hay-scales, scale armor, monsters, curiosities from Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Beaverdam, Chow Sing, Tchinsing, Linsing, Lansing, Sing Sing, cubebs, cart wheels, mummies, heroes, poets, idiots, maniacs, benefactors, malefactors, pumps, porcupines and pill machines, all mingled, mixed, and conglomerated, like a Connecticut chowder.20
From the later vantage of the first edition of his autobiography, Barnum mused on the relative merits of entertainment and education in this chowder, and although there is no good reason to doubt him when he insisted that the entertainments existed to promote the educational elements, he undoubtedly worked at both sorts of exhibits with energetic glee.
If I have exhibited a questionable [humbug] in my Museum, it should not be overlooked that I have also exhibited cameleopards, a rhinoceros, grisly bears, orang-outangs, great serpents, etc., about which there could be no mistake because they were alive; and I should hope that a little “clap-trap” occasionally, in the way of transparencies, flags, exaggerated pictures, and puffing advertisements, might find “an offset” in a wilderness of wonderful, instructive, and amusing realities.21
He went so far as to suggest that in his experience the members of his public were not only not offended by the harmless laying on of claptrap but that they preferred their realities sweetened with some imaginatively presented foolery. His success in creating entertainment with a veneer of the worthwhile was soon apparent. Barnum reported that receipts for the museum in its last year with the Scudder family, 1841, were $10,862, a number that is specific enough to be credible, as is the number for the next year, his first of proprietorship, $27,912.62. With the frugal assistance of his beloved if often out-of-sight Charity, who helped him in the first year to keep expenses for the family below $600, he managed to absolve his $12,000 debt to Francis Olmsted in about a year and a half—“every cent having been paid out of the profits of the establishment.”22
But Barnum knew that however cluttered with wonders the rooms of his museum were, he would need to keep generating profits to keep the museum expanding (and to allow his family to live less frugally). This would depend on return business, and to achieve that would require a regular schedule of new amusements, augmented by well-publicized amazements. Even if profit had not been a motive, Barnum saw by now that his talent and his enthusiasm made him a showman first and a curator second. How could he resist scheduling the Lecture Room in his building with shows of the sort he had been taking on the road for years and creating an occasional excitement in the exhibit rooms with marvels that would test his customers’ credulity?
FOUR
* * *
* * *
THE MERMAID
Within months of his gaining control of the museum, the thirty-two-year-old owner of the Boston Museum, Moses Kimball, arrived at Barnum’s door with an unusual specimen. Nothing suggests that Kimball and Barnum, not quite thirty-two himself, were acquainted before this visit, but they were undoubtedly aware of each other. Kimball could not have missed the splash that Barnum had made in Boston with Joice Heth, and Kimball’s Boston Museum had now been in operation for more than a year. Within days of its opening, the New York Herald published an article calling it “all the rage . . . the most splendid establishment of its kind in the Union.” Barnum’s pulse must have quickened when he read that this new museum of Kimball’s had a theater capable of seating one thousand patrons, its confines described by the Herald ’s Boston correspondent as “airy, perfectly comfortable in every respect, and hung with paintings of a high order.” Even as Barnum had been scheming to acquire the Scudder family collection, in the autumn of 1841 such acts as “Winchell, the comic drollerist” were moving between the American Museum and the Boston Museum. With the entrepreneurial Barnum now in charge, Kimball must have seen the benefits of a more deliberate collaboration.1
What Kimball brought for Barnum’s inspection toward the middle of June 1842 was far more exciting in name than in reality. He called it a mermaid, from a distant part of the ocean, embalmed and miraculously preserved. It appeared in fact to be the upper body of a small female monkey of some sort, attached to the lower half of a large fish. Barnum could see the ruse immediately and later admitted that the “mermaid” was “an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen, about three feet long,” which displayed a permanent grimace, suggesting that it had “died in great agony.” He did, however, admire the craftsmanship with which the two halves were joined. Such specimens had become fairly commonplace, as Barnum himself pointed out, generally having been concocted in Asia. He chose not to dwell upon the difficulties, however, but instead envisioned a “Fejee Mermaid”—invoking the paradise of the South Pacific—and realized that this was an exhibit the public could be induced to pay good money to see.2
Still, Barnum made a show of feigning ignorance about the creature’s authenticity. He took it to his museum’s longtime naturalist, Emile Guillaudeu, for an opinion of the “genuineness” (Barnum’s italics) of this mash-up of fauna. The naturalist expressed surprise because he was unfamiliar with any monkey or fish that looked like those employed in the mermaid’s “manufacture.”
“Then why do you suppose it is manufactured?” Barnum asked.
“Because,” the naturalist replied, “I don’t believe in mermaids.”3
Barnum professed not to accept his expert’s opinion, but he knew as well as anyone that Guillaudeu had it right.
Kimball told Barnum how he came to possess the specimen. The story he had been told was that a sea captain from Boston, having made port in Calcutta in 1817, had been offered the mermaid for purchase, its seller attributing its provenance to Japanese sailors. The price was steep, a fact that undoubtedly contributed to a sort of delirium that developed in the captain, who leaped at the notion that this lump of matter could make his fortune. He was evidently a better ship’s captain than he was a man, because even after he stole $6,000 from the ship’s account to buy the mermaid and made off with his specimen to London, leaving the ship in Calcutta with its first mate, the owner did not prosecute him but eventually gave him another ship so he could work off his debt. At his death, the captain still had the object in his possession—his only son’s only inheritance. The son had sold it cheap to Kimball, who had as little notion of what to do with it as the captain had. Thus Kimball had brought it to Barnum.
Kimball’s story, or Barnum’s retelling of it, might accurately recount the one that the captain’s son had told, but the truth was somewhat different. In the early 1990s, a Swedish physician living in London named Jan Bondeson, whose pastime was researching medical curiosities, pieced together the real story through documents and periodicals at the British Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons, and elsewhere. The Boston ship captain, named Samuel Barrett Eades, was also a one-eighth owner of a merchant ship, the Pickering, whose principal owner was an Englishman named Stephen Ellery. While in port in Batavia, now Jakarta, in what was then the Dutch East Indies, Eades was shown the purported mermaid by Dutch merchants, who, in line with Kimball’s story, had purchased it from Japanese fishermen. So great became Eades’s need to own the mermaid that in January 1822, without consulting Ellery, he sold the Pickering and all its cargo and set off with his prize for London. When he reached Cape Town on the journey home, he exhibited his specimen to make some money. Among those who flocked to see it was a respected churchman, who was so persuaded by what he saw that he wrote back to London, “I have to day seen a Mermaid, now exhibiting in this town. I have always treated the existence of this creature as fabulous; but my skepticism is now removed.” The letter went on to describe the specimen in de
tail, in terms that match the object that Kimball would take to Barnum. The churchman’s letter was widely reprinted in London newspapers and magazines, stirring up interest in the public and, as it would turn out, in British customs officials.
When Captain Eades arrived in London in September 1822, the mermaid was immediately confiscated and held at the East India baggage warehouse for some days. After Eades was finally able to retrieve it from customs, he engaged the famous British illustrator George Cruikshank to draw it from the front and side and began to advertise his plan to exhibit it in a room at the Turf Coffeehouse in St. James Street in London. Cruikshank’s drawings closely match one that Barnum would commission two decades later of Kimball’s mermaid. As many as several hundred people a day paid a shilling to see it at the coffeehouse, and the matter of its authenticity was never seriously questioned. Finally in November, a naturalist named William Clift, who had been allowed to examine the specimen while it was being held by customs on the condition that he keep his findings in confidence, revealed in a newspaper article that it had been skillfully assembled from parts of an orangutan, a baboon, and a salmon. Her eyes were fake, her nails were made of horn or quill, and her pendulous breasts had been stuffed so that they hid the seam between ape and fish. Clift had been able to feel where the bones of the arms had been sawed to make the proportions closer to those of a human rather than an orangutan. The specimen was two feet, ten inches long. Clift’s article was not good for business, but Eades continued to show his exhibit to smaller and smaller audiences at the coffeehouse and elsewhere in London. It then toured the countryside and appeared at fairs for the next few years, until it eventually disappeared from view, although there were reported sightings of it in France and elsewhere in subsequent years.4