Barnum
Page 16
By the time Lind arrived in America in September, just over six months from the time Barnum learned she had been signed, his campaign to prepare the public for her had become something to behold. On February 20, 1850, the very day he quizzed the train conductor, he wrote a letter to the papers in New York, which would be picked up far and wide, describing Lind as “a lady whose vocal powers have never been approached by any other human being, and whose character is charity, simplicity, and goodness personified.” In this first attempt at marketing her, Barnum reversed his usual strategy of emphasizing the great expense to which he had gone to procure an act. Although he did say he would pay her “enormous” sums, he emphasized that she had turned down better offers and that money was not “the greatest inducement that can be laid before her.” He didn’t explicitly say what greater inducements could be offered but implied that her eagerness to visit America (which she could have done anyway by accepting one of those better offers) and her freedom to give charity concerts (which she might well have negotiated with the others) made the difference. But the strongest implication was that the real inducement was working with Barnum himself. In this opening salvo, Barnum also began to use the tour to improve his own reputation, and indeed his letter to readers of the New York papers promised them that even his own motivation for bringing Lind to America was not primarily financial: “I assure you that if I knew I should not make a farthing profit, I would ratify the engagement.” That was undoubtedly read with a disbelieving smile by many of those readers.15
Within just a few days, however, Barnum was up to his usual tricks. He leaked to the papers the figure of $300,000 as the amount he would pay her to tour, but within a couple of weeks he amended that to the real $1,000 per night payment. As part of his initial feeding of the press, he also released a letter from Lind thanking Barnum “for the anxiety you and your agent evince to render my intended tour replete with comfort.” In the following weeks and months, he continued to release small items to the press, which were reprinted around the country, including his booking of Lind and her party at the luxurious new Irving House hotel in New York and later at the Revere House in Boston. He disseminated news that his huge payment in advance of Lind’s tour had been shipped by steamer on May 1 to London for safekeeping at the Baring Brothers Bank there, as well as announcements of his intention to rebuild a hall on Broadway and to refurbish one in Philadelphia in anticipation of Lind’s appearances. He also released reports of her triumphs years earlier in Europe and her present activities there, along with a list of cities she would visit in America and the number of concerts planned for each. He spurred speculation about ticket prices and let it be known that he planned to auction off tickets for the most desirable seats.16
One of his largest promotions involved extracting a letter from Julius Benedict, a composer who would be Lind’s music director on the tour, promising that he would write the music for a song, “Welcome to America,” to be sung by Lind at her first concert in New York, “if I can obtain the poetry of one of your first rate literary men.” The letter (likely composed by Barnum) promised that “Mlle. Lind is very anxious” to perform such a “national Song.” Barnum added a letter of his own to Benedict’s, offering $100 to anyone who would produce the words to such a ditty. The showman soon elicited another round of stories nationally by upping his payment to $200, and a third round by naming a committee composed of well-known journal editors and book publishers to judge the submissions, eventually totaling more than 750. Barnum later admitted that the entries, which came from around the country and Canada, “were the merest doggerel trash, with perhaps a dozen exceptions.”17
During the months when Barnum was preparing America for her tour, Lind sang in Hamburg with Robert and Clara Schumann and returned to Sweden for what was referred to scoffingly as “hymn singing” by a public that still saw her as an opera diva. She did sing (but not operatically) for the royal wedding there and for the Queen Dowager. When she left Sweden in late June for the last time before sailing to the United States, a large crowd gathered at the dock to send her off. She performed in benefits in Germany and then went to London, where she said goodbye to Queen Victoria. Before her party departed from Liverpool, she gave two more benefit concerts there with Julius Benedict and the baritone Giovanni Belletti, who would travel with her to America. Barnum hired a critic from London to cover the first concert and an agent to get the critic’s glowing review in the Liverpool Chronicle for the next day and send copies by steamer to New York that very morning. When the papers arrived, Barnum wrote, they “had the desired effect.” The New York Herald republished the review on its front page on the very day that Lind herself reached New York. The second Liverpool concert was the more memorable, however. She sang for the first time what would become one of her standard oratorio works, Handel’s Messiah. Even without Barnum’s encouragement, the critics were impressed. “It was a leave-taking,” the London Times wrote, “such as even Jenny Lind has rarely experienced.”18
On the Sunday before her departure, Lind and her party went to have lunch with Capt. James West aboard the S.S. Atlantic, the two-masted paddlewheel steamer on which they would travel. She mentioned the ship in a letter she wrote to her parents the night before her departure:
Nothing grander of its kind, I should think, could be found in any country. The vessel is 300 feet by 80, and is decorated so magnificently that one can fancy oneself in a rich private house.
I look forward to the sea—the ocean!19
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AS THE ATLANTIC STEAMED NEARER, Barnum’s preparations became more frenzied. The Canal Street pier on the Hudson, where the ship would arrive, had been decorated with the flags of the United States, Sweden, and other nations and with evergreen and floral arches reading, “Welcome to Jenny Lind” and “Jenny Lind, Welcome to America.” The crowd of tens of thousands who would show up to greet her was seeded with “a large number” of Barnum employees, elegantly dressed in black and bearing bouquets, and Barnum’s private carriage, drawn by two handsome bay horses, would be parked at the foot of the gangplank. In his autobiography, he allowed himself a bit of false modesty about this elaborate scene, writing, “These decorations were probably not produced by magic, and I do not know that I can reasonably find fault with some persons who suspected I had a hand in their erection.”20
Barnum himself would meet the steamer off Staten Island and accompany the singer as the ship passed through the harbor, into the Hudson, and up to the pier. Among Barnum’s many friends was Dr. A. Sidney Doane, the health officer for the Port of New York, stationed at the Quarantine Ground on Staten Island, who agreed to let Barnum accompany him on the official quarantine inspection as the Atlantic idled in the bay. Because it was impossible to predict exactly when the ship would arrive, Barnum went to the Quarantine Ground the day before it was expected and spent the night with his doctor friend. The next morning, the first of September, was misty, and there was no sign of the ship. A reporter from the Tribune met them in the late morning, and then at about 1 p.m. two guns sounded from the southeast, the direction of Sandy Hook, the first bit of American soil the steamer would pass. “In a few minutes,” the Tribune reporter wrote, “the Atlantic hove in sight, her giant bulk looming through the light mist which still lay on the outer bay.” Dr. Doane had a German flag raised at the Quarantine since he didn’t have a Swedish one, and another salute roared as the ship threaded its way through the Narrows, after which the coal-fired paddles of the ship were stopped and it floated slowly in on the tide.
Barnum had prepared for this auspicious first meeting with Jenny Lind. He wore a white vest under his suit and bore a large offering of red roses. Soon he and the reporter were accompanying Doane in the quarantine boat, “over the fresh, dancing swell, as fast as four pairs of strong arms could urge us.” When their boat came alongside, the ship loomed over them “like a mountain,” the reporter wrote, “and it was something of an undertaking to climb the rope hand-ladder to her deck.” To
do so, Barnum, still spry at age forty, tucked the bouquet into his vest, and then labored up the ladder and onto the deck. Captain West met him there and escorted him to the front of the vessel, where Lind and her companions Benedict and Belletti were seated, enjoying the welcome sight of land.
Looking “as fresh and rosy as if the sea had spared her its usual discomforts,” Lind wore a black cashmere coat over a silvery silk dress, a light blue silk hat, and a black veil. A small Pekingese dog, also silky, lay at her feet—a present from her friend Queen Victoria. Barnum was a man who could be counted on to make the grand gesture, and when Captain West introduced him to Jenny he offered her his bouquet with a flourish. But for once he had been out-gestured. The owner of the steamship line, shipping magnate Edward Knight Collins, had boarded the Atlantic before him, off Sandy Hook, and had presented Lind with her first bunch of New World flowers. Collins’s bouquet was not only first; it was three times bigger than Barnum’s. But Lind didn’t seem to notice, turning her round face up to the showman, all expectation at the success the two of them were about to share.21
Barnum wrote that he took her hand, and after a moment of pleasantries she asked him where he had seen her perform. When he said he had never done so, she responded, “How is it possible that you dared risk so much money on a person whom you never heard sing?”
“I risked it on your reputation,” Barnum told her, explaining that he trusted that more than his own musical judgment.22
Also stopped at the Quarantine was a Swedish ship, the Maria, flying her nation’s flag. Seeing her countrymen on the vessel, Lind grew emotional. She waved her handkerchief at the sailors, who would be in quarantine, Doane told her, for a total of thirty-five days.23
No such delay would detain the Atlantic, which soon got under way toward lower Manhattan. Lind told Barnum that the sight before her was the most magnificent she had ever seen, to which Barnum suggested, “Except the Bay of Naples.” “Not excepting even that,” she replied. As they approached the pier, thousands of people could be seen gathered on both sides of the river, people filling the wharves and piers, people leaning out of windows or standing on the rooftops of nearby buildings, and people on the decks of other docked vessels, some of whom had shimmied up their masts and were thick in their riggings. The bad weather early in Lind’s voyage had slowed her ship’s arrival by a day, and the size of the crowd had only swelled. It was a Sunday and people were off work, promenading on nearby Broadway and wearing their Sunday best. “Have you no poor people in your country?” the Tribune reporter heard Lind ask Barnum. “Every one here appears to be well dressed.”
But not everyone was well behaved. As the ship went upriver past the pier and then floated slowly into its berth, the crowd pushed in, held back by a gate at the entrance to the pier. Once Lind disembarked down a carpeted gangplank, the pushing grew frenzied, the gate gave way, and dozens of people “lay crushed by the inexorable crowd, stretching out their hands and crying for help.” The police were able to urge the crowd back and save those who were trampled. At least one man fell from a sloop into the river and had to be fished out.
Once Lind and her party made their way to his carriage, Barnum climbed up in front to sit beside the driver, knowing that he was now so familiar to the public that his presence there would tell those along the route, cheering from the sidewalks and windows, that this was the carriage carrying the Swedish Nightingale. The crowd was densely packed around the carriage, with people climbing up on the horses and on the top of the vehicle. Even when the coachman whipped the horses he could not induce them to pull. When he then began to whip members of the crowd to move them back, Lind stuck her head out the window and asked him to stop. “I will not allow you to strike the people,” a Herald reporter heard her say; “they are all my friends, and have come to see me.” In this fairy-tale-like telling, a cheer then went up and the sea of people parted. The carriage glided through the streets, Lind continually bowing to those she passed, as they “literally heap[ed] the carriage with flowers,” managing to get more than two hundred bouquets into the compartment where she sat.
Once they arrived at the Irving House, at the corner of Broadway and Chambers, across from A. T. Stewart’s latest emporium, the hotel staff quickly raised the Swedish flag in greeting and Lind went straight up to her rooms on the second floor to rest. Many of the more than five hundred guests in the hotel wanted a glimpse of her, as did the crowd of thousands that gathered on Broadway in front of her hotel, whose members spilled onto the corner of City Hall Park and climbed the walls of an addition that was being built for Stewart’s. Cheers rose regularly as women who might be the divine Jenny peered out the windows of her apartment, and at several points Lind herself stood at the window and repeatedly bowed to the assemblage.
At midnight a group of two hundred musicians, members of the New York Musical Fund Society, made their way up Broadway to Chambers Street accompanied by twenty companies of New York firemen—three hundred men in all, wearing red shirts and carrying torches. They had intended to lead a torch-lit procession from the pier to the hotel the night before, when the Atlantic had been expected, but now they cleared a space for the band in the still-crowded street. Barnum estimated the crowd was ten thousand strong; the papers went as high as thirty thousand. Hotel guests threw open their windows or gathered on their balconies for the concert. After Lind, her head and shoulders covered with a crimson shawl against the chill, received the sustained cheers of the crowd, “Hail Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle” rang through the night, and then the band played them again at Lind’s request. They continued their serenade with several more songs and concluded with “God Save the Queen.”
Lind must have been cross-eyed with exhaustion at this point, but she endured a visit to her apartment by a committee of the music society, and naturally a long speech ensued. Lind, who had been studiously looking at her feet as the speech droned on, then offered a response, “her voice choked with emotion,” and graciously thanked the visitors for their welcome. With that, the delegation mercifully withdrew, and “the Nightingale retired to her downy nest.” For Barnum, the day could hardly have gone any better. He and Lind had each made an effort to put the other at ease, and both had succeeded. The reception to the New World that Barnum had gotten up for her seemed to have filled her with elation. She told Belletti before retiring that the day had “been like Liverpool” and danced him around the room. We cannot know what Barnum’s last thoughts were as his head hit the pillow in his own nest that night, but it is safe to say that they were of the future, and that they induced a sound night’s sleep.24
TEN
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TEMPLES OF ENTERTAINMENT
In the months when Barnum was preparing America for the arrival of Jenny Lind, he was anything but idle in other aspects of his business. He closed the American Museum in April 1850 for extensive renovations that would incorporate the Chemical Bank Building next door into “one grand structure, finished in the most tasty style, at a cost of Fifty Thousand Dollars!” The words are unmistakably Barnum’s, taken from an advertisement in the New York Herald that ran to nearly two thousand words, appearing the day before the museum reopened to the public on June 17. The most prominent feature of his rebuilt “temple of moral entertainment” was its Lecture Room, which Barnum claimed could seat five thousand patrons. A reporter for the Herald, having attended the press opening the day before and spoken with the renovation architect, wrote in the same issue as Barnum’s ad that the theater could seat only two thousand, but never mind. The reporter was otherwise impressed, writing that the renovations “succeeded beyond the most sanguine expectations.” The Lecture Room was decorated in red velvet seats and wallpaper, columns and trellises and other trim of “dazzling” white and gold, and fifty feet up, above two tiers of box seats, was a broad dome. Patriotic images of all the presidents appeared beneath the dome, and the sixty-foot-wide stage featured a drop curtain painted with a scene of the U.S. Ca
pitol and its grounds.1
Just as he was promoting the Swedish Nightingale for her moral virtue as much as for her singing ability, Barnum’s pitch for the reopening of his museum and its impressive new theater centered on their suitability for the whole family. From his first days of owning the museum Barnum had believed it should be a place where families could comfortably go, and he would increasingly emphasize the wholesome nature of the enterprises with which he was involved. Given his commitment to the temperance cause, it is no surprise that his newspaper advertisements announced, “There is no bar, or intoxicating drinks, allowed on the premises,” and in an illustrated guide to the museum he promised instead the availability of “refreshing and healthful drinks of the season.” His patrons were not permitted to leave for a snort in a nearby saloon without paying the full price for readmittance, which, Barnum claimed, “reconciled them to the ‘ice-water’ which was always profuse and free on each floor of the Museum.” He emphasized in his pamphlet how well lit and well ventilated his rooms were, including the Lecture Room, giving further assurance of their suitability for families.2