How Not to Get Rich

by Alan Pell Crawford

  Going back on the lecture circuit was something Twain dreaded. He had declared before that he would never again mount the platform and play the fool for the amusement of strangers. He hated pretending to enjoy the dinners he was obliged to attend when he spoke around the country—the nineteenth-century’s rubber-chicken circuit—and he found traveling from town to town in drafty railcars and staying in small-town hotels increasingly wearisome. “I guess I am out of the field permanently,” he had declared shortly after he had gotten married. “Have got a lovely wife; a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished; a lovely carriage and a coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-inspiring—nothing less—and I am making more money than necessary—by considerable, and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform?”

  But that seemed a long time ago. Twain no longer had the energy that he was blessed with as a younger man, and now felt no need to advertise himself as he had done when he was nobody. Now he was so famous it seemed his every embarrassment made the papers. Still, he saw no alternative, since he was good at lecturing, there was always a demand for his appearances, and there was ready money in it. His agent had recommended a lecture tour as soon as he had learned of Twain’s bankruptcy. “I hope your business troubles will not break you down,” the agent wrote. “It comes hard at this stage of the game but with your vigor of mind and body I cannot imagine a better equipped veteran for a hard fight.” And a hard fight it would be. He had done plenty of lecturing in America. “This time,” as Resa Willis writes in Mark and Livy, “the world would be his stage.”

  THEY LEFT ELMIRA by rail on July 14, 1895. Twain made an appearance in Cleveland, then “lectured and robbed and raided” his way to Vancouver, British Columbia, playing twenty-two cities in thirty-eight days. Twain told his admirers he was confident that if he lived through the ordeal he could pay off the debt, “after which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and unincumbered [sic] start in life.”

  They covered 2,500 miles in railcars—and did fifteen appearances—before sailing to Australia on August 23. By mid-September Twain was doing two weeks of lecturing in Australia, and from there to New Zealand before returning to Australia a week or so before Christmas.

  He was a huge hit among the Aussies. For every appearance, at least a thousand people showed up. It was “constant unceasing adulation of Papa,” Clara recalled. Shortly after New Year’s they were off to Ceylon, where the demand was so great that he had to give three lectures a day. Next came India, from January 20 to April 1, followed by almost two months of much-needed rest and relaxation in Mauritius. But Twain was painfully aware of the need to press on. Whenever he was ill and couldn’t speak, Livy figured they lost $500 a day. So Twain soldiered on, despite colds and carbuncles. “I am sure if his life & health are spared to him that it will not be long until he is out of debt,” Livy wrote to her sister. “Won’t that be one joyful day.”

  Things really were looking up. Twain wrote travel pieces for the Century magazine, much as he had done for newspapers in his Innocents Abroad days decades earlier. He would turn those articles into a book, Following the Equator, for the American Publishing Company. The $10,000 advance—$270,000 today—went directly to Rogers for safekeeping. So did profits from the lectures. There were also earnings from The Tragedy of Puddin’head Wilson, serialized in the Century magazine and then released in hardcover in late 1894, with unanticipated profits from a stage version that opened in March 1895. The same year Puddin’head Wilson was published, Tom Sawyer Abroad hit the bookstores, followed by Tom Sawyer, Detective two years later. Joan of Arc was also published in 1896. Following the Equator came out the next year.

  “What had started for him as a desperate lunge for money,” Zacks writes in Chasing the Last Laugh, “was starting to seem magically transformed into a victory lap for the ‘humorist of the century.’” The thousands of people who had read about Twain’s financial difficulties in the newspapers were also now following his heroic efforts to claw his way back. Upon receipt of payment, creditors were writing thank-you notes that Rogers saved and passed along to Twain and Livy. “I appreciate [Twain’s] manliness no less than his incomparable humor,” wrote one sales agent who had finally gotten the $3.27 coming to him. “For the first time in my life,” Twain told Rogers, “I am getting more pleasure out of paying money out than pulling it in.” To William Dean Howells he wrote, “I hope you will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled onto me three years ago. And yet, there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that I reckon maybe it is worth while [sic] to get into that kind of hobble.”

  WITH THE TOUR finally completed, the family sailed in July 1896 for Southampton, England. There they lived while Twain worked on Following the Equator and rested. But in August, family tragedy struck. While visiting Hartford, their twenty-four-year-old daughter Susy, who had chosen not to accompany Clara and their parents on the world tour, was diagnosed with spinal meningitis. While Livy and Clara sailed home to nurse her, a telegram informed Twain, back in England, that Susy had died.

  For several months, Susy’s grief-stricken father became something of a recluse. Despite the upturn in the family’s finances, Twain’s uncharacteristic absence from social events gave rise to heartless rumors. People said he had been abandoned by his family and was penniless. In response to these rumors, the New York Herald began a charity drive to bail him out and put in $1,000 of seed money. Andrew Carnegie pledged another $1,000, and the paper asked for donations. Contributions of as little as 5 cents were welcome.

  When Livy found out about the charity drive, she was mortified. Rogers, troubled too, wired Twain, urging him to “retire gracefully.” Adding to the overall embarrassed discombobulation, Twain admitted that he was aware of the newspaper’s efforts on his behalf and, in fact, had approved the scheme back when “everything was looking black and hopeless.” There is even some evidence that he initiated the idea, although he claimed to have forgotten the details. Had he ever broached the subject with Livy, he said, “she would have forbidden me to touch it—and for that reason I didn’t mention it to her.” What concerned him most, he told Rogers, was that the charity drive “may end in a humiliating failure and show me that I am not very popular.”

  His rationale, in what appears to have been a letter intended for the Herald, makes a kind of loopy sense:

  This way out (of debt) would not have occurred to me, and a year or two ago my self-love would have rebelled; but I have grown so tired of being in debt that often I think I would part with my skin and my teeth to get out. I know that the custom is to wait till a man is dead and then gather up money for the monument for him when he can’t enjoy it; but if friends want to collect advance money for a monument now, my creditors will think that the wiser more rational course, and so shall I. If I can get on my feet again I will be the monument myself, and shan’t even need another one.

  The effort did in fact prove to be the “humiliating failure” that Twain feared. Hoping to jump-start the fund drive, Twain suggested a scheme that, as might be expected, involved Rogers and his deep pockets. “I wish you would collect $40,000 privately for me from yourself,” he wrote, “then pay it back to yourself, and have somebody tell the press it was collected but by [Livy’s] desire (and mine) I asked that it be returned to the givers and that it was done . . . Now if your conscience will let you do that, it will reverse things and give me a handsome boom, and nobody will ever be the wiser. I like the idea. I don’t see any harm in it.” But Livy, who disapproved of every aspect of the scheme, did see harm in it. Twain told the Herald to cease the drive and return the money, which it did, putting a finis to the entire fiasco.

  THE FAMILY MOVED around Europe before returning home to America. They spent two years in Vienna. There Twain’s popularity was such that their apartment became what Resa Willis calls “a second American embassy,” with Twain, as he put it, functioning as “self-appointed ambassador-at-large of the United States of America—without
salary.” Livy got “millions of delight” during these years, methodically tracking the reduction in their debts, which she figured could be zero by January 1898. And she was right. At the end of the month, Rogers informed them that they were in the clear, and with $12,000 to $13,000 left over. Using some of these funds and more that came in later, Rogers began making savvy investments for Twain, more than doubling their nest egg.

  Virtually all biographers who have written about Twain’s financial problems report that he paid his debts in full. But this really wasn’t the case, as Zacks points out in Chasing the Last Laugh. The biographers also routinely claim that Twain had been legally obligated to pay only 50 cents on the dollar but, as a man of honor, had voluntarily paid back every penny. Here too Zacks sets the record straight. This conventional account, he notes, omits inconvenient realities. In fact, three major creditors, including the Mount Morris Bank, had sued and won judgments against him, totaling more than $30,000. It was not Twain but Livy who insisted they pay in full even when creditors agreed in separate negotiations to accept less than 100 percent. Moreover, Zacks writes, Twain never did pay the Mount Morris Bank. Biographers have also failed to examine the shift of assets from Twain to Livy just prior to the bankruptcy, which Zacks calls fraudulent.

  Twain, while not a good businessman, was a superb manager of his own image—an image he created, publicized, and, when damaged, contrived to rehabilitate. He put his own spin on his money problems so successfully that the public, which had looked askance at his excesses and extravagances, just as quickly celebrated him as a selfless soul who had struggled against financial setbacks and triumphed as few could. When, on October 15, 1900, the Minnehaha brought Twain, Livy, and Clara back to New York City, reporters were waiting on the dock, eager to welcome the returning hero.

  Two days before the ship came into port, the New York Times set the tone for his reception. Having “long lived down the invidious reputation of a mere maker of jokes,” the Times said, Twain on both sides of the Atlantic has established himself “as one of the first of living writers of the English language.” But it is not mainly as a man of letters that Twain’s countrymen have reason to be proud of him.

  It is as an American who has shown that the American standard of honor goes far beyond the standard set by the law. Many acts of commercial honor have been done by Americans which showed as high and scrupulous a sense of what was due from man to man as the assumption by [Twain] of debts for which he was not legally liable. But the conspicuousness of the position of a popular author makes his example in such a matter more useful for edification of his own countrymen, and far more valuable to them as a vindication of the National character abroad. No foreigner will be apt to repeat without shame the old sneers at “Yankee sharp practice” who remembers this signal exhibition of “that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which feels a stain like a wound.”

  22

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  “You Cannot Lose a Penny”

  When William Dean Howells first laid eyes on Twain and Livy, he said they looked ten years younger than they had before they left on their world tour. He was sixty-four and she was fifty-four, but they seemed to radiate a “renewed youth.” Livy saw it, too, in her husband. He now behaved like a “fighting cock,” she said.

  None of this surprised Twain. Their good health was attributable, he said, to a diet, the basis of which was a powdered food supplement derived from waste products fed to pigs. He had discovered it when they lived in Vienna two years ago. It was known as Plasmon and had developed a following on the Continent. The German manufacturers said three pounds of Plasmon was nutritionally equivalent to 100 pints of milk. The family had come to rely on Plasmon, he told Rogers. “Among us we can eat about a quarter of a pound of it per day,” which Twain claimed supplied the same nourishment as four pounds of steak. A pound of Plasmon “contains the nutriment of 16 lbs. of beef, and will do the same nourishing that the 16 lbs. would do, besides being no trouble to digest.” It is “pure albumin,” with “neither taste nor smell.” It dissolves readily, and, Twain added with scientific precision, “99.4 percent of it digests.”

  Twain had tried it and then encouraged Livy to try it, too, since her health, which was never good, continued to decline. Nothing else had seemed to help. She was barely able to keep solid food down when they lived in Austria. She had tried to eat an egg once, washed down with a half teaspoonful of malted milk, but the combination “acted like poisons—numbed her arms and distributed pains over a large nerve-surface.” She detested Plasmon, Twain admitted, “yet she has to live on it, as far as keeping up her strength goes.” Twain had three doctors attending to his wife, and he “implored them all to feed the madam solely on Plasmon for three days,” but after trying the regimen, “they got scared and went to guessing again and raised some more hell.”

  At last, “having tried everything else and failed,” one of the physicians consented to a twenty-four-hour trial, and the results were “so good that the madam is herself almost convinced, and is willing to chance another 24. The only strength she had got [is] from the Plasmon that was mixed with the failures—as the doctor has to admit.” Livy, however, was less enthusiastic. When she learned he was urging Rogers to adopt the regimen, she was “greatly troubled about that Plasmon cure,” Twain admitted. She instructed him to tell Rogers “to boil it before using it.” Evi­dently, it did not go down as smoothly as Twain said. Whether Plasmon helped or harmed Livy is impossible to know at this late date. But it is clear that she hated the stuff—and evidently did not want Rogers to suffer as she had.

  Twain tried to get Howells to make Plasmon part of his routine, too. “Yes—take it as medicine—there is nothing better, nothing surer of desired results,” Twain said. “If you wish to be elaborate—which isn’t necessary—put a couple of heaping teaspoonfuls of the powder in an inch of milk & stir it until it is a paste; put it in some more milk and stir the paste to a thin gruel; then fill up the glass and drink. Or, stir it into your soup. Or, into your oatmeal. Or, use it any method you like, so’s you get it down—that is the only essential.”

  It never failed to astonish Twain that otherwise sensible people—especially medical doctors—could be so irrationally resistant to such wonderful breakthroughs in modern medicine. “The scientific testimonials,” he told Rogers, “are strong enough to float Gibraltar.” It seemed obvious to Twain that Plasmon, in Resa Willis’s paraphrase, could “feed the world’s hungry and cure the world’s sick.” It also seemed obvious to Twain—and this could not have come as too great a surprise to Rogers—that Plasmon would be a sure-fire investment, making untold millions for anyone who got in on the ground floor.

  Twain had been itching to invest again almost as soon as he was back on his feet. It didn’t take long for him to find his next sure thing—and Plasmon was not the first item that captured his interest. In mid-March 1898, he learned of a young Austrian, Jan Szczepanik, who claimed to have invented a machine to revolutionize the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards to make complex patterns on the carpets it wove. Szczepanik’s invention, as Twain described it, “automatically punches the holes in the Jacquard cards, and does it with mathematical accuracy”—and at a third of the cost of methods already in use.

  Dazzled by the possibilities, Twain turned himself into an instant expert on carpet weaving by poring over the best carpeting statistics he could find at the U.S. embassy in Vienna. These statistics were eighteen years old and, he realized, of limited value. Even so, he met the next day with Szczepanik and his banker, who were “merely expecting to find a humorist, not a commercial cyclopedia.” Twain peppered them both with questions, and the money man said Twain “could get my living as a financier if authorship should fail me.” Twain wanted in, and negotiations ensued. “I’ve landed a big fish to-day,” he told Rogers. For an unspecified sum, he agreed to take an option to buy the North American rights for $1.5 million. Of course, he needed additional investors, wh
ich is where Rogers came in. They could corner the carpet-weaving market and establish a monopoly, which other plutocrats were busily trying to establish in their respective industries. In fact, Standard Oil should consider buying it all, “and take the fish off my hands, and give me one-tenth of that Company’s stock, fully paid up, for my share.” Standard Oil could make 200 percent a year from its investment.

  Competition would be at an end in the Jacquard business, on this planet. Price-cutting would end. Fluctuations in values would cease. The business would be the safest and surest in the world; commercial panics could not seriously affect it; its stock would be as choice an investment as Government bonds. When the patents died the Company would be so powerful that it could still keep the whole business in its hands and strangle competition. Would you like to grant me the privilege of placing the whole Jacquard business of the world in the grip of a single Company? And don’t you think the business would grow—grow like a weed?

  Twain was convinced that this investment was sound; this time around would be different. As evidence, Twain passed along a pamphlet on this new process to Rogers so he could see for himself. Carpets could spill out of the looms almost immediately, Twain told Rogers. This time the company “will not have to wait, and wait, and wait, and chew its bowels, and moan about hope deferred, and all that. (Because it isn’t a typesetter.)”