Jenny and Barnum

by Roderick Thorp

“I don’t know if I’d apply the same logic to Chang and Eng, however,” the little man said.

  There was more to Charlie’s response to the war than a quip. He worked to raise money for uniforms and guns, exhorted young men to enlist, and visited the wounded in their hospitals. At times Barnum thought Charlie was pushing his advantage over the limit, but Charlie was not to be denied his chance to help. By early 1862, a daguerrotype of Tom Thumb in Union blue, bearing a rifle with bayonet, was in nearly every store window north of Washington. The profits went to the amputees, the thousands who had lost arms and legs and had miraculously survived. Charlie thought he had outsmarted the rebels, but Barnum thought he was very brave. So did Lavinia—not that she wasn’t working just as hard as Charlie, rolling bandages in the church basement with the beautiful and ebullient Mrs. Farrell and the other ladies of the Altar Guild. Barnum’s midgets had become pillars of the community.

  In September of 1863 Confederate spies set fire to the American Museum and gutted the building. Fortunately, no one was hurt—but Anna Swan suffered the shock, and then the degradation, of her life.

  The fire swept up the central stairwell, making escape through the building impossible for those trapped on the upper floors. Barnum was in Bridgeport at the time, and got the full story later. Six engine companies responded to the call, and several of them had extension ladders capable of reaching the heights of the museum’s upper floors. While the fire fighters could not pump enough water to save much of the building’s interior, they made quick work of rescuing the people trapped at the windows above—that is, all except Anna.

  It was obvious that the ladders would break if she attempted to board them, even two of them lashed together. She was in a panic and would not have been able to keep her balance if she had tried it. The smoke was fierce. A dalmation, sensing Anna’s presence upstairs and apparently believing he could lead her to safety, dashed in. He was lost. Meanwhile, Anna kept whooping and hollering. The death of the dog upset some of the onlookers, who turned their fury on her—Anna, the huge woman filling the window on the top floor.

  “If you jump, you’ll crack the pavement!”

  “Don’t try to hit the net, you’ll go right through it!”

  The fire fighters had not even tried to set up the net. As she told Barnum later, she thought of jumping anyway.

  “I didn’t want to live. Not after what I’ve been going through.”

  Indeed. Her young man from Maine was still stalling her, and his motive was transparent: in spite of his own size, he wanted to believe he could win a “normal” girl.

  “He doesn’t want to admit that he’s a freak,” Anna told Barnum. “If he marries me, he’s admitting that he’s different, too.”

  Not that he was a bad fellow. In fact, he was torn—ravaged—by his own fate. Barnum had long since quit trying to tempt the boy with money to join the museum; it was too clear that he would make a lousy attraction. For all of that, the boy had come to feel a special affection for Anna, who had become as persistent as she was large. And as large as he was, he would not decide, seal his fate, invent his future; he was young, and it was too much for him.

  One of the engine companies had the solution, and was struggling to pull it to the scene with manpower: a crane, with a one-inch rope and a sturdy, oversized bucket at the end of it. It was a steam-powered thing, but could be manually overridden—or rather, hooked up to horses. There was no end to the problems of getting the thing through the streets and the crowd and into position so it could be cranked up to Anna’s window. A man rode up with the platform, a coil of rope over his shoulder to bind Anna to the main rope. The only weak link in the system was the power supply—ten men pulling on the rope, hoisting the platform. If they could not ease it back down slowly with Anna aboard, she would drop like a safe. The press had arrived, and was having a field day. Barnum knew the journalists were only getting the most out of the humorous element in the story and that nothing personal was intended—after all, editors fired reporters who showed too much human kindness, and rightly so. But the stories hurt Anna, particularly the parts telling how the platform wobbled for a moment like a flapping sheet, or that the rope had burned all ten men’s hands as it slipped through them and the platform hurtled ever faster to the street. Anna wound up with a pair of sprained ankles, and sure enough—as the newspapers duly reported—the sidewalk under the platform was cracked. Barnum thought of issuing a statement that the crack was an old crack that had been there and he had witnesses to swear … to hell with it, he thought finally; it was better all the way around to let the matter lie, so people would stop talking about it.

  The fire solved Anna’s problem as neatly as it had created it. The American Museum was closed for the duration, and Anna was out of a job. She went directly to Maine, and Barnum never heard another word from her—an interesting assessment of the value of their relationship on her part, he thought. No, Barnum heard instead from him, the Maine man, thanking Barnum profusely and then announcing his marriage to Anna. Fair enough. For the next several weeks Barnum amused himself by keeping an eye out for newspaper stories headlined: EARTHQUAKES IN MAINE. He needed to laugh. He really was out of business.

  He added up losses of seven hundred thousand dollars. The insurance companies coyly offered to settle for three. After paying off his earlier obligations, Barnum had less than one hundred thousand left from the Lind tour. There would be a recession after the war and labor would be cheap, but if it was cheap enough to let him rebuild his museum for less than four hundred thousand, then there wouldn’t be enough people working to pay their admissions to keep the museum open. If he was going to get back in business, he was going to have to go to the banks again, and take on a debt that would keep him picked clean for years.

  In the midst of this, word came from London that Jenny had given birth to her second child, this one a boy, whom they named Gustave. Gustave Goldschmidt. It was another needed laugh, for it seemed distinctly funny to Barnum that the woman with the most beautiful voice in the history of the world would give a child a name that sounded like a bishop’s fart: Gus.

  Trains made this war different. It took Barnum until January to clean up the last of his business in New York, and then he went up to Iranistan to study the battles and troop movements more carefully. A trainload of soldiers traveling at fifty miles an hour could deliver the military punch of all of Napoleon’s armies. But it wasn’t simply a trainload of soldiers, as the illustrations in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s made so clear. For every two Pullmans full of troops, there had to be a freight car containing tents, rifles, ammunition, and other necessaries. Food and kitchen gear were similarly organized. One effect was that the soldiers, freed of so many of the burdens of travel, could go into battle and die well rested. Another was that no army would hereafter organize itself so that it could not get all its belongings on railroad trains. A cannon that could not be hoisted on a flat car immediately lost more than half its value.

  Obviously, if you could move thousands of men and all their equipment from battle to battle by railroad, then you could do the same with a show, going from city to city to entertain, within months, whole nations. It would be the largest show ever seen, mostly because it would generate its own vastness in solving its problems: housing, food, medical care for performers, gaffers, and even animals, every element designed, scaled, and organized to fit on railroad trains. Those problems were endless. In the past elephants and other large beasts of burden were used to erect the tents in which the little traveling shows were held. What were the economics of a show going from one major city to the next? How big would the audiences have to be to guarantee a profit? How big a tent would be required for a crowd that size? If the tent was big enough, then a herd of elephants would be required to erect it—and that elephant herd would have to be a major part of the show, out of financial necessity.

  Barnum made notes and sketches, but the questions he raised only showed him how much information he lacked.
If he wrote to the War Department requesting data on troop movements, he would probably be suspected of being a spy. Barnum put the sketches and notes in a folder and filed it. The idea was so grandiose it was comical—as an idea. In reality, perfected and operating, it could be awesome, a City of Joy.

  In his early days Barnum had needed to discuss things—his dreams, ideas, plans. It had taken him years to see through his own enthusiasm to the effect some of his schemes had on Charity, as well as so many others. The easiest word to say was no. Frightened, disturbed, or just plain surprised by a new idea, most people would find some excuse to reject it. Charity was that way. She didn’t even know it. She had tried—but when she had tried her hardest, she had been capable only of saying no in a more modulated, seemingly rational way. So he didn’t mention this to her, and they went about their lives in their usual ways.

  Sometimes they took their meals together. When he wanted to keep working he had Maureen or Caesar bring him a tray in his study. Years ago Barnum had taught Caesar to read, and now he was having Caesar teach Maureen—using the manuscript of Barnum’s newly revised autobiography as a text, of course. He wanted their reaction to the new material on Jenny Lind. He was living on capital now, and after the war he was going to need something to tide him over while he put himself back in business. This was the easiest way. While Barnum ran from bank to bank, and then from contractor to contractor, the book, containing the True Story of the Conquest of America by Jenny Lind, and all that baloney, would be out making money for him.

  Another distance between Barnum and Charity that could not be crossed. She thought, perhaps rightly, that he would do anything for money. “You’d sell your own dirty underwear,” she’d said to him years ago, and he surprised even himself with his answer: “If I could get enough to cover my costs, I’d do it every day.” Presumably Jenny Lind was so delicate a subject that he was supposed to forget all about her. Barnum imagined there was some validity to the position—but since he was not telling the True Story of the Conquest, etc., anyway, what possible difference did it make?

  Barnum started to arrange for the financing of a new museum in the summer of 1864. By then it took no great intellect to see the way the tide was running; in fact, what made Barnum move so soon was his perception of himself. He was fifty now; by comparison, the forty-six-year-old who had pursued Jenny Lind seemed like an athletic young swain. Oh, the old humbug had vitality, all right; there was nothing wrong with his brain—he thought—because he had more and better ideas than ever. No, what was new was the need to measure the energy he had; now he thought it necessary to plan his moves well in advance. He was too old to waste even a single day. He wanted to get the museum going again, announce its reopening through the new edition of the book; and then, with the cash flowing again, get a set of traveling shows in motion, this time by rail, not on the road. At this point he knew he did not understand that problem as well as he needed to, but there, too, he was planning ahead, believing that the time he had allowed himself would be all he needed to relearn his own business, as he was trying to reinvent it.

  He had miscalculated. Labor was more expensive after the war, not less; of course Barnum had neglected to calculate the effects of an assassination on the state of the economy. In Barnum’s mind Abraham Lincoln was the closest America had come to a philosopher-king since Thomas Jefferson, and there was no one his equal anywhere in the world. Without Lincoln’s wisdom and guidance, the vermin of the country felt free to run amuck. The emotional climate turned sour, but still Barnum continued to commit money. Charlie was all but retired—he did not feel so young and frisky any more, either, most likely because he did not expect to outlive Barnum—but he agreed to appear at the museum’s reopening and to go on the road with the first of Barnum’s new shows. Barnum knew he was imposing on Charlie, but he was in desperate financial condition again—as it turned out, all he did right throughout the postwar period was to maintain adequate insurance coverage and make sure the premiums were paid. In the summer of 1867 the new American Museum burned to the ground, and in this fire a man was killed.

  And Barnum was there, or arrived before the fire fighters could wade into the charred embers and puddles of brackish water. Barnum was with them when they found the old watchman named Clancy still in his chair, covered with soot, his head back, his eyes closed. Half of Clancy was blistered and roasted, but it was clear that he hadn’t suffered, that he was unconscious before the flames reached him.

  “He must have been drunk,” Barnum said.

  “Oh, don’t blame yourself,” a fireman said. “When the smoke hits them, it puts them right to sleep.”

  That was the finish. Insurance or no, Barnum was out of business. His heart for it was gone. He had lost the last two years of the war, waiting to rebuild, then another year while the rebuilding was carried out, only to find that the passage of time had relegated the museum to the public’s own pile of memorabilia. At the end, it had been clear that his museum piece of a museum was not going to provide him with more than a living, a marginal one, at that. Now there weren’t enough souvenirs to fill a mule-drawn cart. He paid everybody off, got rid of his interest in the property, and went back to Connecticut.

  He was fifty-three years old, too young to retire, but too old, he thought, to start over at something fresh. The interest in his revised memoirs was not all that great, with the result that he had become a bit of a museum piece himself. He dabbled. Drifted. Without stirring very much, he made a little money buying and selling traveling shows and performers’ contracts. Charity’s health worsened, but Barnum had enough success with his investments to keep them comfortable. They were not unhappy, but not at all the husband and wife they had imagined in their youth. At the start of the war, after Jenny had gone back to Europe, Barnum had had Caesar build him a new master suite connected to his study. Barnum and Charity, without hostility, lived on different floors. They took their meals together when it suited them. His sons-in-law regarded Barnum with amusement until they got to know him better, when they found him an astute judge of character. With his advice they made money, too.

  From his European correspondents Barnum continued to receive news of Jenny and her family. She and Otto had homes in the city and the country now, and a villa on the Riviera. The children were sound and growing, and Jenny performed occasionally, although never in opera and almost always for charity. Her voice was not what it had been at the peak of her career, but she had never been a strong woman and expectations of a long life for her magical voice had always been guarded. For all of that, John Hall Wilton insisted, she was still the best singer in the world, but Barnum thought that Wilton was probably still eager to be carried away. The point was, the absolute greatness was gone, and only echoed in the voice that could be heard today. All artists were so cursed, Barnum knew, and it had to be terrible for them. His heart went out to her. Wilton wrote that her beauty had faded, too, that she was no longer girlishly trim; Barnum reacted badly to that, thinking it too cruel and beneath Wilton, who had probably grown bald and fat.

  By the end of the decade Barnum could no longer lie to himself about his retirement. He was a silent partner in a dozen shows and tours, organizing and advising. He crossed the country lecturing, discovering acts and performers, meeting real-life curiosities like Brigham Young, King of the Mormons. Young wanted so much to tour and capitalize on his fame that Barnum had to lay on the sweet-talk simply to get away from the man. Barnum felt that if the rubes found out what old Brigham was really up to with all those women, they would tear him limb from limb, and Barnum along with him.

  Barnum wanted a permanent showplace in New York and a show to put in it—not a museum; no, this would be different from the old museum in that the customers would sit in their seats and the show would be presented to them. It would be a true circus, like those he had admired in Europe before the war, but he would be able to bundle it up and put it on the road—in fact, the railroad.

  And now Barnum knew more abou
t the railroad, the idea, and the railroads, the businesses, and what they could and could not do for him. On the other hand, he also knew what he could and could not do for himself: he was closing in on sixty, and his fading capacity for detail made him wonder if his brains were not taking the same route as his eyes and his teeth. He formed a partnership with two experienced circus performers and producers, and the three men mounted a show that was a fair success. But no one was happy. Barnum’s partners were closer to each other than to him, another of his mistakes. His reputation was bigger than ever, but never did he deserve it so little, he thought. Now he was a real humbug, a superannuated, over-inflated fraud.

  Charity died. As bad as her health had been for so many years, she had somehow seemed indestructible. Not at all. Her condition suddenly turned grave on Friday, and on Monday afternoon she slipped into final unconsciousness and died relatively peacefully. Barnum was stunned beyond all imagining—it was such a sad end to so sad a story. He doubted that she had been prepared. It was as if life itself had dismissed her casually, waving her from the stage with a thoughtless gesture.

  While he was still feeling his grief, Barnum was bested in business by a mere boy of thirty-three, providing the sixty-year-old with his first hearty laugh in more time than he could remember.

  It had to do with a baby elephant, the first ever born in captivity, to a cow owned by one of Barnum’s competitors. By then the interest in exotic animals was acute, and so was the trade in them. Barnum had no doubt that a tiny elephant would draw well, and he made his offer by telegram. Ordinarily that would not have been very much of a mistake, but the man on the receiving end was about to establish that he was every bit Barnum’s equal. He was the thirty-three-year-old, named James A. Bailey.

  Newspapers reported that Bailey had had an artist render Barnum’s telegram on a billboard twelve feet across, and mounted the billboard outside the entrance to his tent, with the legend: THIS IS WHAT BARNUM THINKS OF OUR BABY ELEPHANT!