Barnum

by Robert Wilson

  Charles Rosenberg, who attended the concert while following Lind’s tour for a book he would write, put much of the blame for the mess on the Boston police, whose officers stood idly by when they might have brought order outside the hall. But the Boston newspapers were unanimous in condemning Barnum for selling far too many tickets in advance and then selling discounted tickets before the concert began. Barnum did stay in Boston long enough to deliver another temperance speech, in Roxbury on Sunday night, and to write a long defense of his actions for the Boston papers, but he let others who worked for him handle the unpleasant task of repaying the still-angry customers demanding refunds. Rosenberg writes that Lind “bore the annoyance with tolerable energy . . . but she was undoubtedly much terrified.” The next day, her fears were replaced by anger toward “those who had made the arrangements for the concert.” But her anger must not have lasted long, for only three days later she was strolling the grounds of Iranistan, arm in arm with its squire.16

  ELEVEN

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  BEFORE THE FALL

  Soon after she reached Boston, Jenny Lind wrote to her former guardian in Sweden, “Mr. Barnum has shown, and is still showing himself, extremely generous, and reasonable; and seems to have made it his first object to see me satisfied.” The statement to the press that Barnum released nearly two weeks later, the day after the Fitchburg Depot fiasco, was in part intended to dispute rumors of a falling out between “the great Northern Light” and “the small Drummond light,” as a writer in the Herald characterized the singer and her promoter. “In no instance,” Barnum wrote, “and at no time whatever, has the slightest difference taken place between the lady and myself. Invariably I have been treated by her with the greatest kindness, and the most perfect confidence in my exertions of her behalf.” For some, the fact of Barnum’s denial proved the accuracy of the rumor.1

  On Monday morning, October 14, 1850, Barnum took an early train from Boston to New Haven and then home to prepare for the arrival later that day of Lind’s party, which included Benedict and Belletti. The group spent the night at Iranistan, and the next morning Lind asked Barnum to walk her around the grounds. As she took in its gardens and fanciful outbuildings, she said, “I am astonished that you should have left such a beautiful place for the sake of travelling through the country with me.” That day, he remembered, she was in a “playful mood.” Perhaps as her way of assuring him that the rumors of their disagreements had not come from her, she told Barnum she had heard a quite contrary report: “that you and I are about to be married.” When she asked him how such an absurd rumor could have gotten started, he claimed to have responded, “Probably from the fact that we are ‘engaged,’ ” at which she “laughed heartily.” If Charity shared in the laughter, Barnum didn’t say so. But it is unlikely she was present: in her biography of Lind, Gladys Denny Schultz writes that Charity was “shy and retiring” around the singer and allowed her daughter Caroline to step forward as hostess during the visit. But Charity nonetheless secured an unwitting revenge for Lind’s intimate stroll in the gardens with her husband: a day or two later in Philadelphia, Lind developed a debilitating headache blamed on a reaction to Iranistan’s flowers.2

  Both Lind and Barnum found themselves under pressure in these first weeks of the tour. Barnum wrote that during the whole of their travels, “I did not know a waking moment that was entirely free from anxiety.” Not only was he dealing with unmanageably large crowds of people, but he was also exerting energetic and sometimes incautious efforts at generating those crowds. He was constantly feeding the newspapers new tidbits about Lind’s acts of generosity and at the same time often being lambasted in those same papers when things went wrong, and even when they went too right, meaning that Barnum was raking in profits. Lind herself had the stress of being constantly in the limelight, on stage and off, her every movement detailed and critiqued in the press. Her fans would repeatedly gather even on the supposition that she would be at a particular place at a particular time. Her generosity created an onslaught of crazily determined would-be recipients of her charity, and Barnum was criticized for pocketing his share of the profits while she gave hers away. She was also of course at the beginning of a long interlude in a strange land, mostly at the mercy of a man she hardly knew at all, one whose past could give her pause. Still, even three months into the tour, Lind wrote to a German friend, “Mr. Barnum behaves extremely well towards me: and I could not wish for anything better.”3

  However cordial their personal relationship remained, trouble was beginning to develop elsewhere. When Lind arrived in New York, she had, on the advice of Baring Brothers Bank in London, which held Barnum’s large deposit for her tour, retained attorneys in New York to represent her interests in the United States. One of the attorneys, Maunsell B. Field, had worked with her in her first days in America, as her contract was altered and altered again to give her a larger share of the profits from the tour and to give her the right to cancel it after either the sixtieth concert or the hundredth, if she no longer wished to work with Barnum. On his side, Barnum was able to retrieve the money he had deposited at Baring Brothers and gained the right to represent her outside the United States if she agreed.

  Relations between Barnum and Field were apparently amicable, and it initially seemed that these contractual rearrangements would generate little friction. In his memoirs, Field was highly complimentary about the showman and his behavior toward Lind. The three of them worked cordially on the first changes in her contract, Field wrote. He also reported admiringly that when the receipts for the first concert came up short, Barnum made up the difference from his own pocket. And then he added:

  Again and again Miss LIND desired changes made in the contract to her own advantage, and every time Mr. BARNUM yielded. Whatever his motive, he was most obliging and complaisant, and although I have never since met him, I have always esteemed him for the good-nature and liberality which he exhibited at this time in his business relations with Miss LIND. I believe that she received every farthing that belonged to her, and that he treated her with the most scrupulous honor.4

  Field represented Lind for the first month that she was in America, and then his cousin and partner John Jay, who had been off in Europe, returned and took over her representation. Jay was the grandson and namesake of the Founding Father and Supreme Court justice, and was himself an active abolitionist who would go on to help found the Republican Party. Soon after Jay took control, things went bad, presumably because Jay felt that even the revised contract was too favorable to Barnum. Midway through Lind’s tour, then, its future began to look doubtful.

  On October 23, when Barnum and Lind were back in New York after concerts in Philadelphia, Barnum wrote to Joshua Bates, a friend of his at Baring Brothers, which, having recommended Jay’s firm, presumably had some influence with him. His letter emphasized the warm relationship he had with Lind, but warned that their friendship was being traduced by people “moving in the first classes of society,” specifically by Jay, who “has been so blind to her interests as to aid in poisoning her mind against me by pouring into her ears the most silly twaddle.” Barnum attributed the ill will of Jay and unspecified others to envy, “and envy soon augments to malice.”5

  Barnum’s reference to “the first classes of society” hints that his enmity toward Jay was exacerbated by his sensitivity to questions of class as refined by his experiences in London, since Jay was the scion of one of New York’s most prominent families. Jay’s “silly twaddle” also seems to have itself been based on class. In Barnum’s letter to Joshua Bates, he wrote that Jay’s argument against him had much to do with his “regret that I was a ‘showman,’ exhibitor of Tom Thumb, etc., etc.” In any case, Barnum warned Bates in his letter that “continual backbitings” could harm a successful business relationship he had worked hard to achieve, and he added ominously, “I cannot allow ignorance or envy to rob me of the fruits of my enterprise.” Barnum asked Bates to advise Jay to back
off, but the eventual dissolution of Barnum’s partnership with Lind gives evidence that the main effect of Barnum’s letter was to allow the showman to blow off steam.

  The more Barnum promoted Lind for her generosity, the more he was criticized for maximizing his own profits. In truth, he often picked up the expenses for Lind’s benefit concerts and gave her all the credit for donating the proceeds. After all, the notion of Lind the angel was a central theme of his marketing strategy, so Barnum not only did not mind being her foil, but he actively encouraged the false impression of his role. A close friend and advisor in St. Louis, Sol Smith, an impresario, a lawyer, and, improbably, a comedian, dedicated a volume of his memoirs to Barnum, writing, “The following conundrum went the rounds of the American newspapers: ‘Why is it that Jenny Lind and Barnum will never fall out? Answer:—because he is always for-getting and she is always for-giving.’ ” Smith had long suspected that his dedicatee had himself come up with the joke, and Barnum, who quoted the full dedication in his 1869 autobiography, did not deny it. Barnum added that when he showed Lind a newspaper quoting the conundrum, she replied, “O! Mr. Barnum, this is not fair; you know that you really give more than I do from the proceeds of every one of these charity concerts.” Her private appreciation of his generosity apparently offset whatever she might have been demanding through Jay. During the tour, Barnum held his tongue and took his lumps from the press.6

  The New York Herald, with whom Barnum always had a strained relationship, covered Lind’s every concert and movement assiduously but did not hesitate to call Barnum “the veriest charlatan that ever exhibited his sleight of hand before the stupid gaze of the multitude” and to observe that, given “the antagonistic qualities of the two distinguished individuals,” the wonder was “that Barnum and Lind did not fly off from each other by the natural laws of repulsion.” Her own generosity expressed itself in more ways than in her charitable gifts. After Barnum was criticized in all four cities where Lind had appeared so far for the price of tickets, she pushed Barnum when they returned from Philadelphia to Tripler Hall in New York to lower prices and not sell tickets to speculators. The Herald, having lobbied for lower prices itself, saw fit to run a letter from Lind to Barnum and his letter in reply, in which she expressed these wishes and he agreed to accommodate them, pledging that, given the size of the hall, the cheapest tickets could go at $3. “This,” the Herald added complacently, “is as it should be.” Barnum undoubtedly wrote both letters.7

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  LIND PERFORMED FIFTEEN TIMES AT Tripler Hall—ten concerts and five oratorios—including an unfortunate performance of the Messiah marred by amateurish local singers and a poorly tuned organ. But she admired the acoustics in the hall and filled it every night she performed. On November 26 the troupe, including sixteen of the sixty musicians who had been accompanying her so far, departed with Barnum and his daughter Caroline on a twelve-thousand-mile southern tour, first returning to Philadelphia for four concerts, followed by four in Baltimore and then two in Washington.

  Because Washington had no theater large enough to accommodate a Jenny Lind concert, and because efforts to engage the House of Representatives chamber of the Capitol were undermined by pesky congressional rules, Barnum engaged an unfinished theater called the National Hall, which could seat three thousand people. Despite efforts to complete the building in time for the first concert on December 16, on opening night it still lacked ornamentation, smelled of fresh plaster, and required temporary seating, including armchairs for dignitaries and hard benches for everyone else. President Millard Fillmore and his wife attended, but his reception upon entering the hall was less robust than those that others received. When the Mexican war hero Gen. Winfield Scott made his way to the front, he got three cheers from the audience, and Kentucky’s senator Henry Clay, standing humbly at the back waiting for the prelude to end, also got rousing cheers when the crowd detected him. When the president arrived, the applause had been perfunctory, and to make matters worse, the seats reserved beside him in the front row for his cabinet and their wives remained empty through the first half of the concert, a bibulous reception at the Russian ambassador’s house being the bigger draw.

  Lind and her party had a full schedule the next day, receiving visits at Willard’s Hotel from the president, Secretary of State Daniel Webster—an admirer who had already seen Lind in Boston and New York—Clay, and other dignitaries. In the afternoon she rode on a steamer with Barnum, Caroline, and others in her party, accompanied by Col. John A. Washington to visit his home, formerly that of the first president, down the Potomac at Mount Vernon. There they stopped at George and Martha Washington’s graves, toured the mansion, and were served a “sumptuous and splendid collation.” Lind was deeply moved to be given two books from the president’s library, both containing his handwriting. That night her entourage was received at the White House.8

  The cast of Washington dignitaries, including the president, attended both of her concerts there, and the newspapers were largely laudatory. But one thing that happened mars the visit from today’s perspective. Rumors spread in the city that Lind had given $1,000 to an abolitionist group in the North, which at the time would have dimmed considerably her prospects and Barnum’s for her concerts in Richmond, Charleston, New Orleans, and elsewhere as her tour swung to the south and eventually up the Mississippi. The Washington Daily Union published a letter from its editor to Barnum inquiring about the truth of the rumor and also published his response, in which he hastily denied it, emphasizing that “there is not the slightest foundation for such a statement.” One of the Daily Union reporters asked Lind herself about the rumor, and she too denied it. Lind had indeed given smaller amounts of money to “colored” old folks and orphans groups, but in the weeks after the passage of the Compromise of 1850, including the controversial Fugitive Slave Act, her public support for abolition could have seemed like meddling in the nation’s politics. In response, Barnum practically tripped over himself rushing to deny the rumors of her abolitionism.9

  From Washington, the tour went to Richmond for one concert, followed by a train ride to Wilmington, North Carolina. The party then boarded a steamship for Charleston and suffered a frightening, storm-tossed passage that took nearly twenty hours longer than expected, so long that a report was telegraphed north that the ship had been lost. During the ten days they spent in Charleston waiting for a scheduled steamer to Havana, Lind gave two concerts and hosted parties for her retinue on both Christmas and New Year’s Eve. She had been planning the Christmas party for some time, having written home to her former guardian for traditional Swedish presents so that she could put on a Swedish Christmas. Barnum wrote that among the presents attached to the decorated tree, which included both serious and joke gifts for each person, was a small statue of Bacchus for him, to tweak him about his teetotaling. On New Year’s Eve she asked Barnum to join her in a dance, and when he said that he had never danced before, her response was “I am sure you can do it.” He good-naturedly gave it a try, and even more good-naturedly reported in his autobiography, “I never saw her laugh more heartily than she did at my awkwardness. She said she would give me the credit of being the poorest dancer she ever saw!”10

  The Havana newspapers had campaigned against the high cost of tickets for Lind’s concerts there, and on opening night the audience hissed her when she took the stage, something she had never experienced before. When she reached the footlights and saw the reaction of the crowd, according to a Tribune reporter who was present, “her countenance changed in an instant to a haughty self-possession, her eye flashed defiance, and, becoming immovable as a statue, she stood there, perfectly calm and beautiful.” There followed a performance that triumphantly won her doubters over, after which Barnum “could not restrain the tears of joy that rolled down [his] cheeks.” When he greeted her offstage, she draped herself around his neck: “She, too, was crying with joy, and never before did she look so beautiful in my eyes as on that evening.” Even though Lind wa
s called back for five encores, the papers did not let up in their criticism of Barnum, and her next two concerts in Havana were the worst attended of the entire tour. Barnum had announced a dozen concerts in the city, but after Lind gave a fourth performance as a benefit, he canceled the final eight, unwilling to accede to the call for lower prices.11

  The entourage would spend much of January 1851 in Cuba, where Barnum, Caroline, and others joined Lind in staying at a villa she had rented on the outskirts of the capital. There, Barnum recalled, she would “romp and run, sing and laugh, like a young schoolgirl.” During this period she was “merry as a cricket,” Barnum wrote, often asking him to play catch with her in the courtyard behind the house, stopping only when Barnum was tired out. “Then her rich, musical laugh would be heard ringing through the house, as she exclaimed, ‘You are too fat and too lazy; you cannot stand it to play ball with me.’ ” By this time, Lind was thirty years old, Barnum a decade older, and in a daguerreotype from later that year he still looks fit, vigorous, and brimming with self-confidence, his dark curly hair perhaps beginning to recede, his neck only hinting at the jowliness to come. She was teasing him, and he was enjoying the attention. Many men—including Belletti, who was helplessly in love with her—fell for Lind right and left, and at the least Barnum appreciated her charm. Lind herself had shown a tendency to be attracted to men who were safe—older, younger, established friends, as well as that one religious fanatic. But while both their accounts grew warmer in Cuba, it seems doubtful that there was anything more than friendship between Barnum and Lind, especially given the presence of his daughter Caroline at the villa.12