Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison

by Michael Daly

  “THE CIRCUS IS THE THING AFTER ALL,” the 1894 route book declared.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Wizard’s

  Latest Marvel And

  So Many Elephants

  That same spring, the first kinetoscope parlor was ready to open in a former shoe store on Broadway in Manhattan, within walking distance of where Tip had met his end. The Edison Manufacturing Company provided the ten machines and the film loops while the actual operation of the parlor was handled by an independent syndicate that included Alfred Tate and his brother. A plaster bust of Edison painted to look like bronze was set in the front window. A crowd formed outside even though the opening of this first kinetoscope parlor was not scheduled until the following day.

  “Look here, why shouldn’t we make that crowd out there pay for our dinner tonight?” Tate would recall telling his brother.

  Tate sold tickets while his brother watched over the machines.

  “I wish now that I had recorded the name of the person to whom I sold the first ticket,” Tate later wrote. “I cannot recall even a face. I was kept too busy passing out tickets and taking in money. It was good joke all right, but the joke was on us. If we had wanted to close the place at six o’clock it would have taken a squad of policemen. We got no dinner.”

  The film loops at the premiere included footage of a kilted pair performing a “highland dance” and an organ grinder cranking away. A third loop, titled Trained Bears, had been the most demanding to make.

  “The bears were divided between surly discontent and a comfortable desire to follow the bent of their own inclinations,” W. K. L. Dickson, then Edison’s chief filmmaker, recalled. “It was only after much persuasion that they could be induced to subserve the interests of science.”

  Dickson here may have been making ever so slight fun of Edison, who continued to insist that the ultimate purpose of motion pictures would be educational. The initial marvel was indeed technological—this being the machine itself, the very fact that these moving images could be recorded and replayed. But the novelty soon wore off and Edison’s company sought to keep the public interested with an ever-growing variety of film loops. These were shot in the world’s first movie studio, a tarpaper-covered shack erected outside the lab on tracks that enabled it to be moved during the day so the subjects inside remained in direct sunlight. The Edison name drew many illustrious figures of stage and sport to what was dubbed the Black Maria because its shape and hue were reminiscent of the police wagons known by this name. Among them were the celebrated dancer Carmencita, the contortionist Ena Bertoldi, and Eugen Sandow, the self-proclaimed strongest man in the world and pioneering proselytizer of bodybuilding. There were also purely comic scenes such as Boxing Cats, featuring two felines wearing miniature boxing gloves, and The Wrestling Dog, filmed adjacent to the site of the ghastly experiments during the War of Currents.

  Annie Oakley was still with the Wild West Show and she came by the Black Maria to be filmed demonstrating her marksmanship. The filmstrip ends with her shooting glass balls tossed into the air one after another.

  By then, the kinetoscope parlor was so much more a place of entertainment rather than of edification that Edison asked Tate to remove the bust from the parlor’s window.

  “He thought its display undignified,” Tate later wrote.

  Even so, Edison had an ever-growing need for silver dollars. He faced a continuing financial drain from the ore-crushing enterprise that he hoped would vanquish the memory of things electric and become the first innovation people thought of upon seeing his likeness.

  “Not even so resourceful and versatile an inventor as he could at will discover something to represent the foundation of an industry so vast as that which he created when he perfected the electric incandescent lamp,” Tate later wrote. “And it was these dimensions that he strove to duplicate or to surpass. Spurred by his resentment at the loss and alienation of this great industry, he poured his energies and his wealth into his iron ore milling enterprise in the belief that this would expand to the dimensions encompassed by his mind.”

  Edison felt sure he could top Edison because he was Edison.

  “But there the Fates opposed him and forced him to develop an ephemeral though profitable industry into which his heart never entered,” Tate went on. “It is a remarkable circumstance that the field which he always viewed with such pronounced aversion, which he so earnestly tried to avoid, the amusement or entertainment field, was the one in which through two of his inventions, the Phonograph and the Kinetoscope, he recouped his fortunes and accumulated the greater part of the wealth which he left behind him.”

  The Barnum & Bailey circus happened to come through West Orange in May of 1895 and several performers were filmed in the Black Maria, including Princess Ali, who performed a belly dance that was quite provocative for its time, among the first stirrings of sex in the movies. The first stirrings of violence were staged in other films that year such as The Indian Scalping and The Lynching and most dramatically in The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which employed stop action. The male actor who played the ill-fated royal was substituted for a dummy whose head was lopped off.

  “EXECUTION Representing the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots,” read the Edison film catalogue. “A realistic reproduction of an historic scene.”

  Even with gyrating hips and the tumbling head, the kinetoscope soon lost its novelty. Revenue was already dwindling when word came of a movie projector invented by two upstarts from Washington, D.C., Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins. Rather than squint through a peephole one at a time, people would be able to watch en masse images as big or even bigger than life on a screen.

  The kinetoscope syndicate faced ruin and sought to position itself as a middleman, proposing an arrangement between Edison and the actual inventors of the projector whereby the Wizard would lend his name to the new device. The syndicate insisted it was not suggesting out-and-out humbug. It simply figured on allowing people to reach their own conclusions.

  “We should of course not misrepresent the facts to any inquirer, but we think we can use Mr. Edison’s name in such a manner as to keep within the actual truth, and yet get the benefit of his prestige,” the syndicate said in its proposal.

  The Edison name continued to have such commercial power that Armat and Jenkins agreed. Edison might have been expected to dismiss it out of hand. He had shown during the War of Currents that he was willing to engage in falsehoods, but he had always insisted on marketing only his own inventions, only the fruits of his own inspirations, even at the cost of losing control of the electric company he founded.

  But he remained so desperate to obliterate the hurt of that loss that he now proved willing to compromise the same stubborn precept that had precipitated it. He essentially agreed to sell his name, if not some of his soul, to get the money he needed for the ore-crushing project that others were calling “Edison’s folly.” He remained certain it would be an all-eclipsing success.

  In April of 1896, the press was invited to Edison’s laboratory to see “Edison’s vitascope.”

  “Edison’s Latest Triumph,” the New York Times headline announced.

  The public got its first look later that month at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in Herald Square in New York. A clip of two dancers was followed by one of waves breaking onto a beach, and the very air was said to be charged with energy akin to that for which Edison was famous for utilizing.

  “The spectator’s imagination filled the atmosphere with electricity,” the New York Times reported.

  One of the two actual inventors, Armat, was present, but he went unheralded, hunched over the projector and out of view. Edison sat in an upper balcony but did not respond to cries from the audience.

  “Edison! Edison!”

  The big hit was screened during the second week. The May Irwin Kiss featured fifteen
seconds of the actress kissing her leading man from the musical comedy The Widow Jones. The two became the first movie stars, traveling the country giving kissing demonstrations, even lessons.

  In the meantime, the Edison company came up with an innovation for which it could rightly claim credit, a portable “taking machine,” or movie camera that enabled filmmakers to venture into the world beyond the Black Maria and make “actuality” movies. The first such effort was Herald Square, which enabled the audience in the theater to see the street directly outside. The camera crew subsequently traveled north to the scene of Westinghouse’s latest triumph, an electricity-generating project so big that the building housing the dynamos was called the Cathedral of Power. The crew stuck to filming Niagara Falls itself from numerous angles. The most popular clip was Niagara Falls, Gorge, shot from the back of a train that ran along the edge of the roaring river at the base, the white water churning with the power that Edison himself had envisioned harnessing along with the sea and the wind.

  Back closer to Edison’s home base, his traveling film crew shot Bathing Scene at Coney Island on the beach at Brooklyn’s edge. There, the crew also filmed Shooting the Chutes, a popular ride at America’s first enclosed amusement park, Captain Boyton’s Sea Lion Park, operated by the same Fearless Frogman who had been such a sensation with the Barnum show.

  Boyton had appeared in the Barnum show for that single season, billed below the Hairy Family as his publicity value dimmed. He had then resumed his rubber suit adventures, adding the Ohio to his list of rivers, all the while keeping an eye out for new opportunities to convert fame into fortune.

  When he visited the Chicago exposition of 1893, he did not fail to note the popularity of the various amusements of the midway. The following year he opened Shoot the Chutes, a water slide toboggan ride not far from where the fair had been. He did an adequate local business but the big crowds had ended along with the exposition. He decided to relocate to Coney Island, an ocean resort so popular that it drew midway-size multitudes every summer.

  On July 4, 1885, the nation’s 109th birthday, Boyton opened his park, featuring performing sea lions as well as daily demonstrations of his world-famous rubber suit. The Edison crew chose to film one of the wood toboggans shooting down a huge, steep ramp and then skipping across a lagoon. The result was Shooting the Chutes.

  Across the street from Boyton’s sixteen-acre park was a big new seaside hotel built in the shape of an elephant by a Philadelphia entrepreneur named James Lafferty, who had funded the project by distributing thousands of handbills offering what were essentially time-shares in various parts of pachyderm anatomy. Not to be confused with the slightly smaller elephant-shaped hotel Lafferty built in Atlantic City, the seven-story-high Elephant Colossus in Coney Island was constructed of pine sheathed with tin. The thirty-two rooms, including the stomach room, the trunk room, and the twin eye rooms, were accessed through stairways in the rear legs, the right one up, the left down. More than fifteen thousand people had paid a dime a head to tour it when it first opened, but as the novelty wore off it became a towering white elephant. It struggled and failed first as a hotel, then as a restaurant, then as a dance hall. It remained the most iconic Coney Island landmark and the sight that first welcomed those arriving by ship into New York Harbor, but the filmmakers may have decided not to memorialize it because it had finally become a brothel, adding a wink to “seeing the elephant.”

  The Edison crew did film actual elephants at the Barnum & Bailey show, going to the circus in New York instead of having some of the performers come to the studio. Movies that could not have been made at the Black Maria included Trick Elephants No. 1, which featured a pachyderm headstand as well as a procession by a full dozen of the show’s herd around the center ring, followed by a pyramid. The film was popular enough, but it offered no particular filmic magic, being shot from the perspective of a spectator and offering a sight many had seen firsthand. It was not a hit like The Black Diamond Express, which used perspective to give the audience the sense that a speeding train was coming right out of the screen at them only to veer at the last moment.

  Live performances proved to far outdraw screened images when the Ringling Brothers Circus—a show begun by five Midwestern brothers of that name—acquired an Edison vitascope for one hundred dollars during the 1897 season and began showing movies in a “black top” adjacent to the big top. The offerings included “life-size living” images of the prizefighter James “Gentleman Jim” Corbett in action, which had an added allure because boxing was still illegal in many states, but showing moving pictures of it was not. There were also films “provided more for the entertainment of the ladies.”

  The Bailey-owned Forepaugh Show—which had now merged with the Sells show and reinstated the three rings—responded with its own “black tent” across from the sideshow in 1898.

  “EDISON’S WONDER. THE WIZARD’S LATEST,” read the banner over the main entrance.

  The show also had the Corbett film, as well as a clip shot in Havana Harbor after the battleship Maine exploded and sank, triggering the Spanish-American War. Patriotic fervor helped pack the new tent, which the show people contemptuously nicknamed “the chamber of gloom.”

  Often, film programs ended with Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory, shot in the Black Maria and projected with the machine the public believed was his invention. The Wizard could be seen in a white coat, experimenting with the ingredients of some future marvel. There was no hint of the passions at work in his solitary psyche, which were so at odds with his popular persona. And nobody could have foreseen the circumstances under which this new wonder, the motion picture, would someday feature the very elephant who now led the quadrille in the main ring of the Forepaugh & Sells Brothers combined show.

  In the meantime, the movies remained essentially an adjunct of the Forepaugh sideshow, to be seen before and after the performances in the big top. The show had dispensed with the money-saving example of kindness in animal education. And the hyperbole was back, as the show’s promotional courier attested concerning Topsy and her now doubled herd:

  We own and everywhere exhibit in performance parade all the Adam Forepaugh elephants, all the Sells Brothers elephants, including the best performing elephants on earth . . .

  Mastodonic merit in disparate droves

  The world’s wonderful exhibition of animal sagacity, proficiency, and humor

  Head stands

  Hind legs

  Elephants from Asia, Africa, Ceylon, Sumatra, and Borneo

  Elephants from everywhere and knowing almost everything

  Nearly a hundred tons of living pyramids

  Animated dancing of mountains

  Martial, musical, clown, boxing, athletic, quadrille, polite, bicycling, equilibristic, aldermanic, mimicking, juggling, posing, mirthful elephants

  So many elephants.

  As reported by the 1898 route book for the Forepaugh & Sells Brothers show, the only attraction that repeatedly outdrew both the black tent and the big top came when the circus took an ostensible day of rest in Des Moines, Iowa.

  Sunday, July 3

  It was announced that the elephants would bathe in the river during the afternoon and in anticipation thereof a tremendous crowd of at least 35,000 gathered on the riverbank and bridges, on top of buildings and in windows for several blocks to witness the elephantine frolic.

  Other huge crowds watched the elephants hit the water at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on July 10 and Wichita, Kansas, on July 24. The day after the Wichita splash, the show was in Harper, Kansas, and the diligent Topsy was assigned to her usual post-parade duties outside the ring.

  “Elephant Topsy created a little excitement while placing cages in the menagerie after the parade,” the route book reported. “She was frightened by the appearance of a chicken under the sidewall and came near a rampage. Our Sunday dinner had a
narrow escape.”

  Yet Topsy as well as the other elephants remained serene when an apocalyptic thunderstorm suddenly struck the show during a performance in Sioux City, Iowa. The equestrian act had just finished, with the acrobats and the elephants scheduled next.

  “Instead of the usual applause there broke from the audience a smothered cry of terror and dismay as the canvas on the northwestern side of the tent was lifted and riddled by the storm, and the exterior poles were pulled from the ground and their lashings snapped with reports like guns, and support poles were whisked to and fro among the horrified audience,” the route book recounted.

  The entire big top was lifted up over the reserve seats and fell upon the far side of the arena, “pummeling men, women and children with swaying tent poles, and tangling them in a labyrinth of ropes and cables, while the elements shrieked.”

  Hundreds ran off into the storm, halted only by the river or a row of barbed-wire fences.

  “And upon it all and into it all there was deluged a torrent of rain which fell in sheets, driven edgewise by the hurricane, their surfaces illumined by monster lightning flashes.”

  Here was electricity at its most spectacularly elemental, not the harnessed power of modernity and the White City but untamed, wild, primal, dangerous.

  “Sight was blinded by the glitter and glare and the tempestuous waters, and to the din of the elements was added the shouts of men and the hysterical lamentations of women and children. Hither and yon distracted hordes moved, blindly colliding in the tempest, many of them with all ideas of locality or direction paralyzed.”

  The mightiest patriarch would have been helpless before these forces of nature.

  “Instantaneous havoc seemed to be loosed and puny humanity was at the mercy of powers too mighty for its insignificant resistance. Pandemonium yawned and a helpless multitude felt itself caught in the jaws of wreck and horror.”