Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Some of Miss Barnell’s genuine but less gifted colleagues are inclined to think that she is haughty, but she feels that a woman with a beard more than a foot long has a right to be haughty. She undoubtedly does have the most flamboyant female beard in American sideshow history. The beard of Joséphine Boisdechêne, a native of Switzerland and one of P. T. Barnum’s most lucrative freaks, was only eight inches long, and she had no mustache. She did, however, have a bearded son – Albert, billed as ‘Esau, the Hairy Boy’ – who helped make up for this shortcoming. Grace Gilbert, who came from Kalkaska, Michigan, and spent most of her professional life in Barnum & Bailey’s Circus, had a lush beard, but it was only six inches long. Miss Gilbert used peroxide and was billed as ‘Princess Gracie, the Girl with the Golden Whiskers.’ Records of non-professional female beards are scarce. Margaret of Parma, Regent of the Netherlands from 1559 to 1567, had a ‘coarse, bushy beard.’ She was proud of it, believing it gave her a regal appearance, and she required court physicians to mix tonics for it. Charles XII of Sweden had a bearded female grenadier in his army, a reputedly beautiful amazon, who was captured by the Russians in the battle of Poltava in 1709 and subsequently taken to St Petersburg and presented to the Czar, at whose court she was popular for several years. There was a Spanish nun called St Paula the Bearded, who grew a miraculous beard, according to sacred history. She was being pursued one night by a man with evil intent when hair suddenly sprouted from her chin. She turned and confronted the man and he fled. No reliable statistics on the length of these beards have come down to us.

  Most freaks are miserable in the company of non-freaks, but unless she is sunk in one of the morose spells she suffers from occasionally, Miss Barnell welcomes the opportunity to go out among ordinary people. One morning in the winter of 1940 Cole Porter went to her dressing room at Hubert’s and asked her to go with him to a cocktail party Monty Woolley was giving at the Ritz-Carlton. Porter told her that Woolley was a student of beards, that he was known as The Beard by his friends, and that he had always wanted to meet a bearded lady. ‘I’ll have to ask my old man,’ Miss Barnell said. O’Boyle told her to go ahead and enjoy herself. Porter offered to pay for the time she would lose at the museum. ‘Well, I tell you,’ she said, ‘I and you and Mr Woolley are all in show business, and if this party is for members of the profession, I won’t charge a cent.’ Porter said non-professionals would be present, so she set a fee of eight dollars. Late that afternoon he picked her up at her house. She had changed into a rhinestone-spangled gown. In the Ritz-Carlton elevator she took off the scarf she was wearing around her beard, astonishing the other passengers. There were more than a hundred stage and society people at the party, and Porter introduced her to most of them. Woolley, who got quite interested in her, asked her to have a drink. She hesitated and then accepted a glass of sherry, remarking that it was her first drink in nine years. ‘I like to see people enjoying theirselves,’ she said after finishing the sherry. ‘There’s too confounded much misery in this world.’ She was at the party an hour and a half and said she wished she could stay longer but she had to go home and cook a duck dinner for her husband. Next day, at Hubert’s, she told a colleague she had never had a nicer time. ‘Some of the better class of the Four Hundred were there,’ she said, ‘and when I was introduced around I recognized their names. I guess I was a curiosity to them. Some of them sure were a curiosity to me. I been around peculiar people most of my life, but I never saw no women like them before.’ She was able to recognize the names of the society people because she is a devoted reader of the Cholly Knickerbocker column in the Journal & American. She is, in fact, a student of society scandals. ‘The Four Hundred sure is one cutting-up set of people,’ she says.

  Several endocrinologists have tried vainly to argue Miss Barnell into letting them examine her. She is afraid of physicians. When sick, she depends on patent medicines. ‘When they get their hands on a monsterosity the medical profession don’t know when to stop,’ she says. ‘There’s nobody so indecent and snoopy as an old doctor.’ Her hirsuteness is undoubtedly the result of distorted glandular activity. The abnormal functioning of one of the endocrine, or ductless, glands is most often responsible for excessive facial hair in females. Hypertrichosis and hirsutism are the medical terms for the condition. Miss Barnell once read a book called ‘The Human Body’ and is familiar with the glandular explanation, but does not take much stock in it. She says that her parentage was Jewish, Irish, and American Indian, and she believes vaguely that this mixture of bloods is in some way to blame, although she had three beardless sisters.

  Miss Barnell has to be persuaded to talk about her early life. ‘What’s the use?’ she tells people. ‘You won’t believe me.’ She says that her father, George Barnell, an itinerant buggy- and wagon-maker, was a Russian Jew who had Anglicized his name. Around 1868, while wandering through the South, he visited a settlement of Catawba Indians on the Catawba River in York County, South Carolina, and fell in love with and was married to a girl who had a Catawba mother and an Irish father. They settled in Wilmington, the principal port of North Carolina, where Barnell established himself in the business of repairing drays on the docks. Miss Barnell was their second child; she was born in 1871 and named Jane, after her Indian grandmother. At birth her chin and cheeks were covered with down. Before she was two years old she had a beard. Her father was kind to her, but her mother, who was superstitious, believed she was bewitched and took her to a succession of Negro granny-women and conjure doctors. Around her fourth birthday, her father inherited some money from a relative and went up to Baltimore to see about starting a business there. While he was away a dismal little six-wagon circus came to Wilmington. It was called the Great Orient Family Circus and Menagerie, and was operated by a family of small, dark foreigners; Miss Barnell calls them ‘the Mohammedans.’ The family was composed of a mother, who was a snake charmer; two daughters, who danced; and three sons, who were jugglers and wire-walkers. The wagons were pulled by oxen, and the show stock consisted of three old lions, a few sluggish snakes, some monkeys, a cage of parrots, an educated goat, and a dancing bear. There were many tramp circuses of this type in the country at that time. On the last day of the Great Orient’s stay, Mrs Barnell sold or gave Jane to the Mohammedan mother. ‘I never been able to find out if Mamma got any money for me or just gave me away to get rid of me,’ Miss Barnell says bitterly. ‘She hated me, I know that. Daddy told me years later that he gave her a good beating when he got home from Baltimore and found out what had happened. He had been in Baltimore two months, and by the time he got home I and the Mohammedans were long gone. He and the sheriff of New Hanover County searched all over the better part of three states for us, but they didn’t find hide or hair.’

  She does not remember much about her life with the Great Orient. ‘My entire childhood was a bad dream,’ she says. The Mohammedans exhibited her in a small tent separate from the circus, and people had to pay extra to see her. On the road she slept with the Mohammedan mother in the same wagon in which the snakes were kept. Her pallet on the floor was filthy. She was homesick and cried a lot. The Mohammedans were not intentionally cruel to her. ‘They did the best they could, I guess,’ she says. ‘They were half starved themselves. I didn’t understand their talk and their rations made me sick. They put curry in everything. After a while the old Mohammedan mother taken to feeding me on eggs and fruits.’ The circus wandered through the South for some months, eventually reaching a big city, which she thinks was New Orleans. There the Mohammedans sold their stock and wagons to another small circus and got passage on a boat to Europe, taking her along. In Europe, they joined a German circus. In Berlin, in the summer of 1876, after Jane had been exhibited by the German circus for four or five months, she got sick. She thinks she had typhoid fever. She was placed in a charity hospital. ‘I was nothing but skin and bones,’ she says. ‘The day they put me in the hospital was the last I ever saw of the Mohammedans. They thought I was due to die.’ She does not rem
ember how long she was in the hospital. After she recovered she was transferred to an institution which she thinks was an orphanage. One morning her father appeared and took her away. ‘I disremember how Daddy located me,’ she says, ‘but I think he said the old Mohammedan mother went to the chief of police in Berlin and told who I was. I guess he somehow got in touch with the chief of police in Wilmington. That must have been the way it happened.’

  Barnell brought Jane back to North Carolina but did not take her home; she did not want to see her mother. Instead, he put her in the care of her Indian grandmother, who, with other Catawbas, had moved up from the settlement in South Carolina to a farming community in Mecklenburg County, near Charlotte. Jane worked on her grandmother’s farm, chopping cotton, milking cows, and tending pigs. She never went to school but was taught to read and write by a Presbyterian woman who did missionary work among the Catawbas. Jane remembers stories this woman told her about Florence Nightingale; they made her long to become a nurse. In her teens she taught herself to shave with an old razor that had belonged to her grandfather. When she was around seventeen she went to Wilmington to visit her father, and a doctor he knew got her a place as a student nurse in the old City Hospital. She worked in the hospital for perhaps a year, and she still thinks of this as the happiest period of her life. Eventually, however, something unpleasant happened which caused her to leave; what it was, she will not tell. ‘I just figured I could never have a normal life,’ she says, ‘so I went back to Grandma’s and settled down to be a farmhand the rest of my days.’ Three or four years later she became acquainted with the senior Professor Heckler, who owned a farm near her grandmother’s; he worked in circuses in the summer and lived on the farm in the winter. Heckler convinced her she would be happier in a sideshow than on a farm and helped her get a job with the John Robinson Circus. As well as she can remember, she got this job in the spring of 1892, when she was twenty-one. ‘Since that time,’ she says, ‘my beard has been my meal ticket.’ Until the death of her grandmother, around 1899, Miss Barnell went back to North Carolina every winter. She had three sisters and two brothers in Wilmington, and she visited them occasionally. ‘They all thought I was a disgrace and seeing them never gave me much enjoyment,’ she says. ‘Every family of a freak I ever heard of was the same. I’ve known families that lived off a freak’s earnings but wouldn’t be seen with him. My parents passed on long ago, and I reckon my brothers and sisters are all dead by now. I haven’t seen any of them for twenty-two years. I had one sister I liked. I used to send her a present every Christmas, and sometimes she’d drop me a card. She was a nurse. She went to China twenty-some-odd years ago to work in a hospital for blind Chinese children, and that’s the last I ever heard of her. I guess she’s dead.’

  Miss Barnell was with the Robinson Circus for fourteen years. While with it, she was married to a German musician in the circus band. By him she had two children, both of whom died in infancy. Soon after the death of her second child, her husband died. ‘After that,’ she says, ‘I never got any more pleasure out of circus life. I had to make a living, so I kept on. It’s been root, hog, or die. When I got sick of one outfit, I moved on to another. Circuses are all the same – dull as ditch water.’ She left Robinson’s to go with the Forepaugh-Sells Brothers’ Circus and Menagerie, leaving it to marry a balloon ascensionist. He was killed about a year after they were married; how, she will not say. ‘He was just killed,’ she says, shrugging her shoulders. Her third marriage also ended unhappily. ‘That one treated me shamefully,’ she says. ‘If he was in a bottle, I wouldn’t pull out the stopper to give him air. I taken out a divorce from him the year before I and Mr O’Boyle got married.’

  Miss Barnell is disposed to blame circuses for much of the unhappiness in her life. Consequently she does not share her present husband’s enthusiasm for them. O’Boyle was an orphan who ran away to work with a circus, and has never become disenchanted. Every week he reads Billboard from cover to cover, and he keeps a great stack of back copies of the magazine in their apartment; she rarely reads it. Like most old circus men, he is garrulous about the past. He often tries to get his wife to talk about her circus experiences, but she gives him little satisfaction. O’Boyle is proud of her career. Once he begged her to give him a list of the circuses and carnivals she has worked for; he wanted to send the list to the letters-to-the-editor department of Billboard. She mentioned Ringling, Barnum & Bailey, Forepaugh-Sells, Hagenbeck-Wallace, the World of Mirth Carnival, the Royal American Shows, the Rubin & Cherry Exposition, and the Beckmann & Gerety Shows, and then yawned and said, ‘Mr O’Boyle, please go turn on the radio.’ He has never been able to get the full list.

  In the last year or so Miss Barnell has become a passionate housekeeper and begrudges every moment spent away from her apartment. About once a week she rearranges the furniture in her two small rooms. On a window sill she keeps two geranium plants in little red pots. On sunny afternoons during her days off she places a pillow on the sill, rests her elbows on it, and stares for hours into Eighth Avenue. People who see her in the window undoubtedly think she is a gray-bearded old man. She spends a lot of time in the kitchen, trying out recipes clipped from newspapers. O’Boyle has gained eleven pounds since they moved into the apartment. Before starting work in the kitchen, she turns on four electric fans in various corners of the apartment and opens all the windows; she does not trust gas and believes that stirring up the air is good for her asthma. While the fans are on, she keeps Edie, the cat, who is susceptible to colds, shut up in a closet. She has developed a phobia about New York City tap water; she is sure there is a strange, lethal acid in it, and boils drinking water for fifteen minutes. She even boils the water in which she gives Edie a bath. In her opinion, the consumption of unboiled water is responsible for most of the sickness in the city. On her bureau she keeps two radios, one of them a short-wave set. On her days off she turns on the short-wave radio right after she gets up and leaves it on until she goes to bed. While in the kitchen, she listens to police calls. The whirring of the fans and the clamor of the radio do not bother her in the least. The walls are thin, however, and once the burlesque comedian who lives in the next apartment rapped on the door and said, ‘Pardon me, Madam, but it sounds like you’re murdering a mule in there, or bringing in an oil well.’

  Miss Barnell’s attitude toward her work is by no means consistent. In an expansive mood, she will brag that she has the longest female beard in history and will give the impression that she feels superior to less spectacular women. Every so often, however, hurt by a snicker or a brutal remark made by someone in an audience, she undergoes a period of depression which may last a few hours or a week. ‘When I get the blues, I feel like an outcast from society,’ she once said. ‘I used to think when I got old my feelings wouldn’t get hurt, but I was wrong. I got a tougher hide than I once had, but it ain’t tough enough.’ On the road she has to keep on working, no matter how miserable she gets, but in a museum she simply knocks off and goes home. Until she feels better, she does not go out of her apartment, but passes the time listening to the police calls, playing with Edie, reading the Journal & American, and studying an old International Correspondence Schools course in stenography which she bought in a secondhand-bookstore in Chicago years ago. Practicing shorthand takes her mind off herself. She is aware that such a thing is hardly possible, but she daydreams about becoming a stenographer the way some women daydream about Hollywood. She says that long ago she learned there is no place in the world outside of a sideshow for a bearded lady. When she was younger she often thought of joining the Catholic Church and going into a nunnery; she had heard of sideshow women who became nuns, although she had never actually known one. A lack of religious conviction deterred her. Religion has been of little solace to her. ‘I used to belong to the Presbyterians, but I never did feel at home in church,’ she says. ‘Everybody eyed me, including the preacher. I rather get my sermons over the radio.’

  Most of Miss Barnell’s colleagues
are touchy about the word ‘freak,’ preferring to be called artistes or performers. Years ago, because of this, Ringling had to change the name of its sideshow from the Congress of Freaks to the Congress of Strange People. Miss Barnell would like to be considered hardboiled and claims she does not care what she is called. ‘No matter how nice a name was put on me,’ she says, ‘I would still have a beard.’ Also, she has a certain professional pride. Sometimes, sitting around with other performers in a dressing room, she will say, with a slight air of defiance, that a freak is just as good as any actor, from the Barrymores on down. ‘If the truth was known, we’re all freaks together,’ she says.