Barnum

by Robert Wilson

  Tom Thumb would spend three years touring the British Isles, France, and Belgium and on the brief visit to Spain. In all, five million people had seen the general, Barnum estimated. The crowned heads of Europe had doted on him, and as Philip Hone, the former mayor of New York City, wrote in his famous and oft-quoted diary, Tom had “been kissed by a million pairs of the sweetest lips in Europe, from Queen Victoria down.” Both Barnum and the Strattons had grown wealthy, one British newspaper reporting that the latter had made in the neighborhood of $350,000—more than $10 million in today’s dollars. Since the equal partnership lasted for only two of the three years abroad, Barnum made considerably more than that amount. He wrote only that “the General’s father had acquired a handsome fortune,” some of which Stratton gave immediately to his son and much of which he invested. The father would use $30,000 of the profits to buy land just outside Bridgeport and build a fine house on North Avenue, where he and his wife would live until his death on the last day of 1855. Cynthia would stay on there for another ten years or so before moving to West Haven to be with members of her family.20

  Barnum’s relationship with Tom’s parents was often tense, an unsurprising situation given the amounts of money involved in their joint enterprise and the question of who ultimately controlled the source of that money, his parents or the man who had discovered and developed him. In letters home from abroad, including his letters published in the Sun, and later in both versions of his autobiography, Barnum spent a considerable amount of his time making tedious fun of the elder Strattons’ penny-pinching and provincial ways. But he never wrote ill of Tom and often went out of his way to praise the boy’s good nature, his talent, and his uncomplaining willingness to be almost always onstage. “The dear little General is cuter than ever,” he wrote to Kimball in one of his last private letters from the European tour, “he is in fact a little brick and astonishes us all more and more everyday.”21

  EIGHT

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  AT HOME

  Barnum felt a lifelong tension between the comforts of domesticity and the excitement of the exotic, the satisfactions and responsibilities of family life and the challenges of business, and even the patriotic love of his homeland and the attraction of foreign lands and cultures. This tension was drawn tightest in his three heady but sometimes lonely years away and in the period immediately afterward. Barnum then spent his first half dozen years back in America struggling with the same predicament.

  As early as August 1845, midway through the European interlude and feeling homesick, he had written to Charity in detail about buying land in Fairfield for a house he wanted to build. He urged her to get the project going if that was something she felt ready to do, only asking her to let him know the cost of any land she bought before finalizing the purchase. A native of Fairfield, Charity apparently approved of settling there. Barnum’s half brother, Philo, had recently been named deputy postmaster of bordering Bridgeport, and Charity and the children had also at times rusticated there while Barnum was in Europe. In April 1846, he returned for a visit to New York, where he met his new daughter, Pauline, who had been born on March 1. By then, Charity had scouted out the land for the house, and now he bought it, seventeen acres just yards from what was then the border between Fairfield and Bridgeport.1

  While he was home on this visit, he expressed his weariness with some of the very things in Europe he had eagerly described in his Atlas letters. In late May, Walt Whitman, who had recently become the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, left his second-floor office overlooking the Fulton ferry and rode it across the East River to interview Barnum in Manhattan, where they talked about the showman’s time in Europe and “his intercourse with the kings, queens and the big bugs,” as Whitman put it.

  We asked him if anything he saw there made him love Yankeedom less. His gray eyes flashed: “My God!” said he, “no! not a bit of it! Why, sir, you can’t imagine the difference—There every thing is frozen—kings and things—formal, but absolutely frozen: here it is life. Here it is freedom and here are men.” A whole book might be written on that little speech of Barnum’s.2

  Barnum’s enthusiasm for the land he had spent so much time away from suggests he was tiring of Old World pomp, however enamored of it he had been for a time. But even if the attraction of the far side of the Atlantic had grown weak and his appreciation for the vigorous ways of his native land strong, life at home on that short return trip had apparently become difficult, even rancorous enough to send him back to England earlier than he had planned.

  Barnum wrote to Tom Thumb on May 14 that Charity was “in very bad health—she does not go out of the house except for a short ride in a carriage two or three times a week.” Not only was she dealing with a newborn baby, having had to bury on her own her most recent child only two years before, but here was Barnum, bursting with success and self-regard, having spent most of the previous year squashing grapes, attending bullfights with a Spanish queen, and rhapsodizing about French landscapes in his Atlas letters. Charity had made it clear that even England was too risqué for her, so imagine her reaction when she read in one of his Atlas letters about the rapturous beauty of Spanish women, and then read his unpersuasive coda: “Suffice it to say this is a dangerous country to any except those who, like myself, have lived long enough to resist all temptations!” Does any wife, separated by an ocean from her husband, want to hear his loud protestations that he resists all temptation? To make matters worse, Barnum had continued to use Charity as an object of amusement in his letters, which, however forbearing she might have been, cannot have amused her.3

  After his return to England in the summer, he wrote a letter to Kimball in Boston from Brighton on August 18, 1846, that is one of the most obliquely revealing letters of the many he wrote to his friend. In it, he apologizes for departing from the United States abruptly, apparently having left Kimball and others in the lurch in some financial way. He had intended to leave for England on July 16, he explained, but “in a fit of very desperation I resolved to leave the 25th June by G. Western.” If he had waited for the later steamer, he would never have returned to England because he would have found himself in an “insane retreat.” If that claim left any doubt, he added, “I never before experienced so much trouble, nay misery, in the same space of time as I was forced to endure during my stay in the States.” Now that he was in England seeking some peace of mind, he was “hard at work and not very happy.”4

  Barnum never explicitly named the cause of all this misery, but if, as seems evident, the source was his relationship with Charity, this would explain his hesitation to say so to Kimball or anyone else. The purchase of the acreage in Fairfield and the idea of building a house there was well-timed as an attempt to mollify an irate Charity. But Barnum’s determination to return to England for another year would have opened up another channel for her rightful disgruntlement. Although he protested to Kimball from England, “I have less troubles than when I was home,” his continued unhappiness and his expressed determination to make things better next year, but not sooner, also suggest that his difficulties were domestic in nature. The final clue that Barnum was feeling the unremitting heat of Charity’s indignation is that the letters to the Atlas, several of which had been written aboard the Great Western on his trip home to New York in April, now stopped and would not resume upon his return to England. His concession of ending the epistolary career that had given him so much satisfaction must have been penance for his long abandonment of his family and for his having enjoyed himself so much without them.5

  Barnum might well have laid on the misery a little thick in the Kimball letter, given that its main purpose was to mollify its recipient, who was clearly miffed at him for something. Barnum referred to his early departure as “a shabby trick” and pled guilty to “selfishness, selfishness, selfishness.” He also tossed Kimball a little pro forma flattery: “I hope you are succeeding in your stupenduous enterprise and that you will have a success exc
eeding your own most sanguine expectations, & I believe you will.” After his repetition of the word selfishness, he signed off with the equivocal confession, “I plead guilty to this general crime & can only give as my poor excuse that it is a part of human nature.”

  The letter apparently did not succeed, for Barnum wrote Kimball again in October, alluding to his supposed friend’s having written of “not wishing to continue friendship or advice where it is not wanted.” But on January 4, 1847, Barnum wrote, “I am glad to see that you are willing to pull at your end of the yoke, and not let our correspondence flag,” and he promised that when the steamer carrying him and Tom Thumb home to America stopped in Boston in late February, he would certainly see “my dear Moses” there in person.6

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  THE PLAN HAD BEEN TO stay on in England well into the spring of 1847, but the wife of Fordyce Hitchcock, manager of the American Museum in Barnum’s absence, died early in the year. The man’s depression was so deep that Barnum feared he was “unable to manage business with his usual energy.” So Barnum booked passage on the steamship Cambria out of Liverpool on February 4. The Strattons were ready to return home with him, and a parade with marching band accompanied Tom Thumb to the ship, where the crowd gave him three cheers and a hearty round of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” A rough crossing took them first to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then to Boston, where Barnum presumably had his promised meeting with Moses Kimball, and then on to New York, where Tom Thumb began to appear at the American Museum before unprecedented crowds.7

  Soon after Tom’s four-week run began at the American Museum on February 26, Philip Hone, who, like Tom, was the son of a carpenter, took his wife to see the general. In his diary entry for March 12, he wrote that the young general “performs four or five times each day to a thousand or twelve hundred persons; dances, sings, appears in a variety of characters with appropriate costumes, is cheerful, gay, and lively, and does not appear to be fatigued or displeased by his incessant labors.”8

  Admission to the American Museum was still only a quarter, but Barnum was now making more each day than he had formerly made in a week, since the building was “thronged at all hours, from early morning to closing time at night.” Apparently he was able to reinvigorate Parson Hitchcock, who would not retire as manager of the museum for two more years.9

  Once the triumphant run at the museum was up and the Strattons had returned to Bridgeport for a month of well-earned rest, Barnum induced the general to appear for two days in benefits for the Bridgeport Charitable Society, with which Charity was now associated. It was the first time the townspeople of Bridgeport were exposed to their most famous son since he had conquered Europe, when they could see that “a diffident, uncultivated little boy” had returned to them as “an educated, accomplished little man.” In short, at least in Barnum’s telling, he had in their eyes been “Barnumized.”10

  Barnum’s own prosperity was such that the plans for his house had evolved into something more grand. He was now envisioning a stately pleasure-dome worthy of Kublai Khan, a fantasy of a mansion inspired by the minareted, multidomed Royal Pavilion of George IV at Brighton, which Barnum had visited and admired while in England. He had a London architect make preliminary studies inspired by John Nash’s elaborate Oriental plan for the king’s seaside palace. Back home, the Vienna-born architect Leopold Eidlitz designed Barnum’s house, which would rest on a small rise in a treeless field overlooking Long Island Sound not quite a mile west of the heart of Bridgeport. The ferry to New York now took only three and a half hours, and two railroads met the ferry, so beyond his own ties to the area, and Charity’s and Tom Thumb’s, Fairfield was convenient to the American Museum, and the adjacent Bridgeport was, in Barnum’s mind, a city “destined to become the first in the State in size and opulence.” Even as the “concurrence of my wife” about where to live had reassured him, the businessman in him could not help but weigh the possible financial advantages of settling in Fairfield.11

  Although Barnum wrote that his sole concern was for the new house to be convenient and comfortable, unpersuasively suggesting, “I cared little for style, and my wife cared still less,” he admitted that his “eye to business” did influence the dramatic design he picked. If the house was distinctive enough, he realized, it “might indirectly serve as an advertisement of my various enterprises.” For the actual construction, Barnum employed what he called a “competent architect and builder” and bid him to spare “neither time nor expense” in completing the project. The builder, Thomas P. Dixon from down the coast in Stamford, must have been someone in whom Barnum initially had real confidence, since ground was broken even before Barnum returned from England, and then the showman went off touring with Tom Thumb for much of the time the house was rising.

  The Tom Thumb tour began with a visit to the White House, where, on April 13, 1847, the general and the showman went to meet President James K. Polk, his family, and his cabinet, including future president James Buchanan. After that, they traveled for months throughout the United States and to Cuba. The little general appeared in Kimball’s grand new Boston Museum on Tremont Row in June, where the take exceeded $6,000. Barnum made occasional trips home during this tour, but by May 1848 he agreed with the Strattons that his time traveling with them was now at an end. He pledged, not for the first time, to “henceforth spend my days in the bosom of my family.”12

  The exotic house on the edge of Bridgeport was completed in the late summer of 1848 and given the equally exotic name Iranistan, which Barnum translated as “ ‘Eastern Country Place,’ or, more poetically, ‘Oriental Villa.’ ” An advertising pamphlet produced in 1849 referred to the house as a combination of “the Byzantine, Moorish, and Turkish styles of architecture,” and here and there Chinese elements were tossed into the mix. At the end of August a piece headlined “Iranistan” appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle urging readers to hop on a ferry and go in person to Bridgeport to visit the mansion and its grounds, calling it “one of the most unique and magnificent structures in the country.”13

  Made of reddish sandstone, the villa measured 124 feet across, with a terraced, three-story central structure flanked by two-story wings, each of which featured a glassed, multisided conservatory. Deep loggias with Arabic arches and elaborate scrollwork fronted every floor, stretching the width of the house. Iranistan’s most eye-catching aspect by far was its huge onion-shaped central dome, the top of which reached ninety feet above the ground, surrounded by four smaller domes and an endless series of diminutive minarets. In front of the main house was a large fountain in the center of a circular driveway, and in back was a pond with swans and ducks. The whole acreage was landscaped into a park with hundreds of mature fruit trees and what Barnum called “forest” trees, which because of their size had been transplanted at great expense. Outbuildings, including glass greenhouses to shelter tropical fruits, an elaborate gardener’s house, barns, stables, pavilions, and so on, were also built in Oriental styles amid walks, statues, and formal flower gardens.

  Inside, on the first floor, a frescoed drawing room stretched the entire depth of the house; also on that floor were a library with a Chinese theme, bedrooms, bathrooms with running hot water, parlors, and a baronial dining room with walls of oak painted with representations of Music, Poetry, and Painting. Objects in porcelain, a tea set in gold, and a silver service, all from Paris, were on display in the dining room, which could seat forty. The wide main hallway and grand walnut staircase were populated with marble statues, and on the second floor were more bedrooms and bathrooms and Barnum’s princely study, dominated by a rosewood bookcase, its walls and ceiling lined with orange silk damask, and “window hangings, carpets, and everything else to match,” as a visitor reported in the Daily Eagle. “Elegant and appropriate furniture was made expressly for every room in the house,” Barnum wrote. The third floor featured a billiards room that could double as a ballroom, and above that, up a circular staircase, was the inside of the great dome, whose
diamond-shaped windows, each a different color of stained glass, created a kaleidoscope effect for those sitting on a tow-stuffed circular seat that could accommodate forty-five posteriors.14

  His interlocutor from the Eagle asked Barnum if he worried about burglars, given that the grounds were open to the public. Barnum responded that they would have to get past several ferocious bulldogs before breaking in, and warned that, only a few nights before, the dogs had “attacked one of [my] ponies, tore him in pieces, and by morning had eaten him half up.” Barnum, the master at attracting crowds through clever use of the press, here shows a facility for discouraging clientele of an unwanted sort, and one can hope that the half-eaten pony was only a useful fiction. But just in case the bloodthirsty bulldogs were not enough, Barnum had also installed a newfangled alarm system.

  The writer in the Eagle, who signed his report only with the letter T, concluded his visit to Iranistan by praising Barnum as “one of those off-hand, whole-souled, generous men who take your good will by storm. And his excellent lady, though more quiet in her manners, very soon makes you feel at your ease.” As with anything published about Barnum, the suspicion always arises about whether he might have written the piece himself—was the T for “Taylor”?—or in some way dictated its contents. If he did not do so in this case, he at least displayed his ability to charm a visitor into writing an advantageous story.