Barnum
Page 22
In early summer, almost before his family had had time to settle in with him in a London suburb, he was off again by steamship from Liverpool to New York. When he walked along the familiar blocks of Broadway he had the opposite experience of the one he had had when he first returned from London, when people who had formerly turned away from him cozied up because of his newfound wealth: “I saw old and prosperous friends coming, but before I came anywhere near them, if they espied me they would dodge into a store, or cross the street . . . or they would become very much interested in something that was going on.” He calls these people his “butterfly friends” and professes to have been delighted for “the opportunity to learn this sad but most needful lesson.” He stayed in America long enough to be rejoined by his wife and daughters for the marriage of his second daughter, Helen, in Bridgeport on October 7.18
After the wedding, having been advised that his staying around might make it easier for his agents to settle his remaining debts, he returned to New York. His financial outlook was now such that he took up lodging in the luxurious confines of the Astor House. One thing that had not been settled was Iranistan, which had not been lived in since the Barnums had decamped two years before. His Bridgeport assignee had not been overly eager to sell the place, perhaps sympathetic to Barnum’s wish to reclaim it if his finances improved enough to allow him to do so. But the attorney did hire workmen to keep the house in sufficiently good shape to sell if necessary. Barnum wrote that these carpenters and painters had been warned not to smoke in the house but had developed the habit of eating lunch in the large dome room and then smoking a pipe afterward, which Barnum suspected led to an errant ash.
For on December 18 his half brother Philo telegrammed Barnum in New York with jarring news: Iranistan had caught fire the night before and was now ashes. “My beautiful Iranistan was gone!” Barnum wrote. During his financial troubles he had failed to make all the payments on his insurance policies for the house, and those he held were valued at only $28,000. Eventually the grounds and outbuildings were sold for $50,000, and both of those sums went into retiring his debt, but it was a marked loss for Barnum. The sewing-machine inventor Elias Howe Jr. bought the grounds in the summer of 1859, intending to build his own impressive house there, but somehow he never did. For his part, Barnum had a narrow, mile-long, artificial lake in East Bridgeport dredged out in the fall of 1859, with the idea of rebuilding Iranistan there, but nothing came of that plan either.19
Barnum soon returned to England, leaving Charity and their youngest daughter, Pauline, living in Fairfield with Caroline and her husband, David. The showman joined Tom Thumb again to tour Scotland and Wales, once more taking in good profits. But after some months he realized that the general could generate plenty of cash without his personal oversight.
Hearing the “old clocks” ticking in his ear, Barnum now reinvented himself again, as a public lecturer. He took the advice of American friends in London to get up a talk called “The Art of Money-Getting.” The basis for the talk would be a list of ten rules for business success that Barnum had created in 1852 for a prolific Philadelphia author named Edwin T. Freedley, who published the list in his 1853 book, A Practical Treatise on Business, which also included a chapter by Horace Greeley titled “The True Man of Business.” Freedley told his readers that he delayed the book for three weeks while waiting for Barnum’s response, referring to the showman as “the ablest tactician, and one of the most successful business men of the age.” Barnum had published a slimmed-down version of the list in The Life of P. T. Barnum in 1855, and now he would greatly fatten it up with examples, anecdotes, funny stories, and a great dose of common sense masquerading as wisdom.20
Or perhaps it was wisdom. Commonsensical advice included the following: pick a business you are suited for; work hard and persevere; hire good people; and don’t count on others to do your job for you. Advice that came out of his own experience included “let your pledged word ever be sacred”; “be not too visionary”; “engage in one kind of business only”; “advertise”; and “live considerably within your income.” His wisdom, hard won, also included “Prosperity is a more severe ordeal than adversity, especially sudden prosperity.”21
Barnum seems to have spent a good deal of time preparing the lecture, joking to his friends that, given the clock catastrophe and his own bankruptcy, he should call the talk “The Art of Money-Losing.” But they spurred him on by reminding him that he could not have lost money without first having made it and that the public was well aware (thanks to Barnum himself) of how much wealth he had accumulated from the Jenny Lind tour and other ventures.
He gave his lecture for the first time on December 29, 1858, at St. James’s Hall in Piccadilly, a concert venue decorated in Moorish style that had opened earlier in the year with a choral performance led by his old friend Julius Benedict. Seated on the narrow, light-green horsehair benches in the hall were the Americans who had encouraged him, plus “all my theatrical and literary friends” and critics from the press.22
The next day’s Times gave his lecture high marks, pointing out that there was no odor of the charlatan about Barnum, but that he came across as a “thoroughly respectable man of business.” The paper’s critic praised his “fund of dry humor that convulses everybody with laughter, while he himself remains perfectly serious.” The text of the speech appears in the 1869 autobiography, refined and expanded after much use over the ensuing decade. It does not contain many opportunities for convulsive laughter, so Barnum must have ad-libbed freely, his deadpan delivery magnifying the humor. The critic made a point of praising his “sonorous” voice, which is of particular note because there has long existed the myth that his voice was squeaky.23
The Times was not alone in its high opinion of his performance. Barnum exulted, “My own lavish advertisements were as nothing to the notoriety which the London newspapers voluntarily and editorially gave to my new enterprise.” Here Barnum did not exaggerate. The victory must have been especially sweet since he had learned years before that the London papers could not be bought off with advertising money, unlike many of their American counterparts of the time. Barnum concluded, “The city thus prepared the provinces to give me a cordial reception.”24
He would deliver the speech nearly a hundred times in the first five months of 1859, both in the provinces and in the city of London. Advertised as the “Science of Money-Making,” not the art, and promising “an original definition of HUMBUG,” the presentation would also include “pictorial illustrations.” Having managed to procure from his friend Moses Kimball that desiccated thing the Fejee Mermaid, he exhibited it on his tour through the countryside. He seemed especially pleased with his performances in Oxford and Cambridge, where he had years before received the usual rough treatment from the undergraduates and was prepared to receive it again, “fully resolved to put up with whatever offered.” When a Cambridge student interrupted his lecture on February 21 by calling out a question about Joice Heth, Barnum pushed back by saying he would gladly give the student “all the information I possess concerning your deceased relative.” The quip feels ugly today, but Barnum believed it made the students less eager to tangle with him. A local newspaper had a different impression, calling the students “very disorderly” and subjecting Barnum to “many interruptions and shouts of derision.” The newspaperman dismissed Barnum’s talk as “nothing but a string of anecdotes” about how he had humbugged the public, and his wounding conclusion was that “Barnum appears to be a vain, elderly man, on the best possible terms with himself.”25
At Oxford on February 25, Barnum announced at the outset, “You have paid me liberally for the single hour of my time which is at your service,” and pointed out that they could spend that time listening to him or indulging in their own tomfoolery. When the audience tested this proposition by energetically singing “Yankee Doodle,” Barnum took a seat on the stage and contentedly waited them out. Several more such interruptions happened, but he kept both his good hum
or and an eye on his watch. When the hour was up, he stopped abruptly and the audience swelled forward, congratulating him on “a jolly good time.” Ticket sales for that single hour in Oxford amounted to £169, or about $850 in 1859 dollars.26
Barnum returned home in early June on the steamship Africa to be with Charity, whose health was failing. As he wrote to Moses Kimball, “My poor Charity continues very ill.” She and their unmarried daughter were now either boarding with Caroline and her husband or living cheaply in a small rented house. In his note to Kimball he added about his own health, “I am not quite well as the clock wheels are running in my head yet & make me dizzy sometimes.” He had left behind in England an eight-page pamphlet of his speech, selling for two shillings. If the advertising for the text was not quite as energetic as that for his public deliveries of it, still it kept his name before the British public. Although the provincial halls had not always been full and, especially in the smaller towns, the reception had not always been as enthusiastic as in London, all in all, his lecture tour was the “source of very considerable emolument to me.”27
He spent the rest of 1859 actively overcoming that clock-wheel dizziness, focused on the American Museum from behind the scenes, booking acts, finding new dramas and new exotic objects. In the fall he went into business with the singers Henri and Susanna Drayton to offer opera bouffe or parlor opera to New York and other cities, which the couple undertook with an ambitious series of appearances. Before 1860 had progressed very far, Barnum could write to a friend that the American Museum was bringing him $90,000 a year, although he told a much different story to those still making claims, legitimate and not, on his Jerome Clock paper. But even the Herald admitted in late 1859 that Barnum had in effect pulled himself out of debt and vowed to sin no more in a financial way. Combining the income from his various ventures, selling lots in East Bridgeport and other property, adding in Charity’s own income, and relying on her frugality if not always his own, he had over a period of five years paid off the bulk of what he owed and was now ready to tell the world, “Richard’s himself again.”28
Although advertisements in the New York papers had continued to tout “Barnum’s American Museum” throughout the years when Greenwood and Butler were nominally its proprietors and Barnum simply its agent, he was now ready to regain his status as the legal owner, showing everyone that he was in every way again in charge. He bought back the rights to the museum’s contents on March 17, 1860, and then took official possession of the museum a week later. That night, before he closed the building for a week of refurbishment, he spoke from the museum’s stage to a sympathetic full house, giving his side of the story of his financial recovery; offering thanks to those who had helped him through, starting with Charity and ending with John Greenwood (to whom “I owe much of my present position of self-congratulation”), who would stay on as his second in command at the museum; and pledging to rededicate himself to the museum “as a popular place of family resort.” Barnum wrote, “This off-hand speech was received with almost tumultuous applause,” but whatever the decibel level of its reception, the speech was clearly anything but off-hand and soon was being peddled as a pamphlet titled “Barnum on His Feet Again.”29
In a notice headed, with the standard editorial indifference to spelling, “Barnum’s Last Pronunciamiento,” the Herald was eager to poke fun, calling the speech a “refreshing piece of blarney” and referring to the showman as “Chevalier Barnum,” accusing him of “giving a great many words and very few facts, and meaning nothing in particular.” Comparing his career with that of William Niblo, the Herald suggested, “Something is wanting in the furniture of the Chevalier’s mental household”: namely, common sense. Barnum and Niblo were both “naturally clever men,” Bennett’s paper conceded, but Niblo kept to the show business he knew, while Barnum was “overrating his own powers” and involving himself in businesses he should have left alone. Niblo, it concluded, was now retiring as a millionaire, “while Barnum goes to work again a poor man, looking for another Joice Heth.”30
Leaving aside the now long-standing animus Bennett had exhibited toward Barnum, the paper can be forgiven for its skepticism about the sincerity of a speech that even Barnum saw as filled with self-congratulation. Given that the American Museum had continued to buy almost daily ads in the newspaper that Bennett owned, his enthusiasm for taking Barnum on was in admirable contrast to the prevailing journalistic ethics of the day.
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ONE SIGN THAT BARNUM WAS back on his feet was his breaking ground on a new house that would be next door to one he had constructed for his daughter Caroline after her 1852 marriage. He and Charity had been without a permanent place to live since leaving Iranistan, and now his wife’s health “was much impaired, and she especially needed a fixed residence which she could call ‘home.’ ” The site was about six hundred yards northwest of where Iranistan had been, also in the town of Fairfield. With the help of Caroline and his old friend the poet Bayard Taylor, he would name the Italianate-style house Lindencroft, not in honor of Jenny Lind but because a grove of linden trees adorned the grounds. “All that taste and money could do,” Barnum declared, “was fairly lavished on Lindencroft.” Saxon writes that the house was a hundred feet deep. Although substantial, it was not nearly as imposing from the front as Iranistan. Like the earlier house, the new one featured a large fountain out front, but otherwise “no attempt at ostentation” was made, Barnum said, hardly needing to add that Iranistan had been all ostentation. Lindencroft was not meant to be a symbol of his success or a calling card for his business, but was built purely for “convenience and comfort.” Charity, who had become an accomplished gardener, filled the grounds with “rare and beautiful flowers” to go with its walks, arbors, lawns, gardens, trees, and shrubs. For both of them, the house was “a labor of love,” and Barnum hoped to live out his days there.31
Barnum had undoubtedly been deeply rattled by his financial comeuppance, but when his natural disposition to look on “the bright side of things” began to pull him out of the doldrums, Charity did not escape them as easily as he did, and continued to feel downcast. He also had to contend with the unhappiness of his children, who “had been brought up in luxury; accustomed to call on servants to attend to every want.” Even if he was back on his feet, his family’s circumstances remained for a time diminished from what they had been at their height. It is not hard to imagine that one reason he had returned to England to tour with Tom Thumb was to escape their misery. Once he started to make money again, his life soon enough became all fried soles and shrimp sauce in the best hotels. Still, he had made a conscientious effort to pay off his debts, and he had publicly vowed to continue improving himself.
In his letter to his Connecticut neighbors soon after his bankruptcy and in his speech at the museum four years later, Barnum claimed to have learned that “there are, in this world, some things vastly better than the Almighty Dollar!” But in the same speech he acknowledged that “business activity is a necessity of my nature” and emphasized that, on the cusp of fifty years of age, he had no desire to retire. His natural inclination for business would never leave him, and given his genius for it, he would continue to accumulate dollars, almighty or not. But his faith led him to believe that his troubles had been God’s way of teaching him to be a better person, and in the three decades left to him, he managed, in this regard, to do what he saw as God’s will. The charitable way in which his true friends had treated him, offering him loans and often buying up his debt and allowing him to discharge it at less than its face value, had also made an impression on him. His quip about his being nothing without Charity seems to have been a lesson he now took to heart. He would become more generous in his dealings with others, and as his wealth accumulated again, he would give more and more of it away, not only in “profitable philanthropy” but in the sort that has no strings attached beyond proving to himself that he was not nothing.
FOURTEEN
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THE WAR AND A WEDDING
Even as Barnum was putting the pieces of his life back together, events in the nation were leading toward the great cataclysm of the Civil War. The month before Barnum reclaimed his museum, Abraham Lincoln had given his Cooper Union speech in New York, which led to his nomination for president in May and his victory in November. With the election, the fragile bonds between slave and free states began to break. Barnum was a Lincoln man and a passionate defender of the Union, although many of his neighbors in Connecticut and his customers in New York City were not. He did what he could for the Union cause, while getting back to his museum and returning to some of his usual humbuggery. He would also, during one of the bloodiest and most dispiriting periods of the war for the North, manage to create a welcome distraction for a weary Union, a celebrity wedding that was part enchantment, part absurdity, and all showmanship.
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ON MARCH 27, 1860, AN ad half a column deep appeared on the front page of the New-York Tribune, headed “BARNUM’S AMERICAN MUSEUM,” followed by his name as “Sole proprietor and Manager,” with John Greenwood described as assistant manager. Announcing the museum’s grand reopening, the ad used the word new some ten times, liberally augmented with now and renovated: “COMPLETELY RENOVATED AND REARRANGED, so as to meet, in all particulars, the views of the most exactingly critical.” The stage and Lecture Room were refurbished, the gaslights replaced throughout, the resident acting company shot through with new performers. On the day of the reopening, two different dramas and one farce played. Fireworks began at sundown. Among the familiar exhibits like the Happy Family that he had acquired years earlier in the English countryside (new family members replaced the old ones as they died off) were a grizzly bear named Samson, a sea lion, and a “learned seal.”1