Menken starred in a pair of sensational, gender-bending melodramas in which she impersonated men—Thomas Haines’s The French Spy and Henry M. Milner’s Mazeppa, loosely adapted from a verse romance by Lord Byron. In the former she played the title character, “a frisky Frenchman” who is “as dumb as an oyster,” as Sam wrote in his review for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. The Menken’s signature role, however, was as the Ukrainian hero of the latter play, an erotic tour de force. In the first act, Sam described her as rushing onstage and “cavorting around” as though simulating sex acts: “she bends herself back like a bow; she pitches headforemost at the atmosphere like a battering ram; she works her arms, and her legs, and her whole body like a dancing-jack.” In the climax of the play, attired only in a flesh-colored body stocking and a loincloth, she is strapped to the back of a horse—a “fiery untamed steed” according to the script, an “old circus horse” according to Sam—that canters up a flight of stairs and across the set as Menken digs “her heels into his hams . . . to make him go faster” as the curtain falls. The sexual symbolism could not have been more obvious. Except for the “superfluous rag,” Sam added, “the Menken dresses like the Greek Slave,” an allusion to Hiram Powers’s famous nude sculpture. Her performances packed the house every night for two months, with a total attendance of about thirty thousand, and she was reportedly paid five hundred dollars a night. In a review of her performances in San Francisco that oozed sarcasm, the Virginia Evening Bulletin remarked that Mazeppa had been “written expressly to display the extraordinary talents of Miss Menken.” The correspondent added that her “abundant charms . . . need no encomiums from my pen” as “she makes no effort to conceal them.”4
Sam detested puns (“that last and saddest evidence of intellectual poverty,” he said, they were “like mediocre music, neither wit nor humor”) and his dislike for them may well have originated in the badinage about Menken’s stage appearances in San Francisco. Charles H. Webb, who was reporting for the San Francisco Bulletin, was notorious for this strain of snickering schoolboy humor: “her play rested on a stable basis,” “her horse isn’t a clothes horse,” she was “a thing of beauty and a boy forever,” “she is unrivaled in her line, but it isn’t a clothesline.” Or others: Menken could not have appeared under more favorable “horse-pieces.” “Those who have attended the performances of Adah admire her very much—what they have seen of her.” But, for the record, Sam added his mite to this chorus of puns: “the whole constellation of the Great Menken came flaming out of the heavens. . . . I have used the term ‘Great Menken’ because I regard it as a more modest expression than the Great Bear.”5
Sam’s comments on Menken’s performance in Mazeppa are also the earliest evidence of his fascination with transsexuality and transvestism. To be sure, he may have seen “wench acts” or female impersonators on the minstrel stage even earlier, though if so he failed to record his impressions of them. He was intrigued by women with facial hair during his European tour in 1867, to judge from his comments about them in The Innocents Abroad (1869).6 He first deployed transvestism as a literary device in his sketch “An Awful —— Terrible Medieval Romance” (1870) and last in “A Horse’s Tale” (1906). During the intervening years, he portrayed cross-dressing characters in “1002nd Arabian Night” (written in 1883), The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), the story of the military surgeon James Barry in the final chapter of Following the Equator (1897), “Wapping Alice” and the play Is He Dead? (both written in 1898), and most famously in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Occasionally, these sexually ambiguous characters subvert gender norms. The transgendered Maid of Orleans only dresses in male attire, for example, one of the “crimes” for which she is martyred. More often, the characters are dressed in drag for comic purpose, as in Huck Finn and Is He Dead?
After his return to Virginia City in late October he moved with Dan De Quille into an apartment in a brick building at 25 North B Street owned by the journalist and politician Rollin Daggett and the mining broker W. F. Myers. Sam and De Quille were compatible from the start. C. C. Goodwin thought Dan “the most winsome of men; no man was ever more honest or conscientious; he was gifted in a hundred ways; he was one of the most efficient and valuable men that ever wore out his life in a newspaper office. . . . He was above both bribes and bluffs; no man could ever corrupt him; no man could scare him.” The Gold Hill News remarked a month later on the “pleasant and comfortable quarters” where they lodged. For a modest rent of thirty dollars a month, Sam and Dan shared a sitting room and a bedroom. They “had a huge double bed, piles of bedding, splendid carpets and the fine fittings of all kinds” in sharp contrast to “the bunks in which we roosted in an old tumble-down shed when I first began work on the Enterprise,” De Quille remembered. They were convivial roommates and enjoyed their toddies every night. Both of them “wanted to read and smoke about the same length of time after getting into bed, and if one got hungry and got up to go downtown for oysters the other also became hungry and turned out.” They became such boon companions that the Gold Hill News noted satirically that they were “to be married shortly,” though Dan also jested that if he “had known that [Sam’s] shirts were all without collars, I would never have gone into partnership with him in rooms.” A “very agreeable and jolly lot of people” lived in the same building, Dan remembered, including Tom Fitch and his second wife, the aspiring novelist and playwright Anna Mariska Fitch, across the hall. Often when the “locals” for the Enterprise came home at night, “we found laid out for us in our rooms a fine spread of pie, cake, milk and the like. Mrs. Fitch’s mince pies were perfection. Envious reporters of other papers did not scruple to assert that we stole all these good things out of the Fitch pantry. We denied the charge, but it was labor lost.” Dan joked at the time, too, that he and Sam filched all their firewood from Fitch, and Sam sometimes berated Dan—in his absence—for the theft in a voice loud enough that all the other residents of the rooming house could hear him.7
From the first, Sam’s beat reporting for the Enterprise extended even to sporting events. He wrote up the horse races at the first fair of the Washoe Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Society in Carson City in the fall of 1863, and he covered the (illegal) fourteen-round prizefight between adversaries Tom Daly and Billy McGrath at the Washoe racetrack for the Enterprise on September 23, which ended in a shooting melee and a death. He also covered what he called the “severest fight that has ever taken place in the Territory” between Pat Bradley and Jack Bradley on October 4 near the site of Goodman and Fitch’s aborted duel in Six-Mile Cañon two months earlier. The same week, in “The Great Prize Fight,” one of the pieces he contributed to the Golden Era and one of the best known of his early humor writings, Sam burlesqued the political rivalry of Governor Leland Stanford and Governor-Elect F. F. Low of California, imagining it as a boxing match. After training for six weeks, the fighters meet in the ring, represented in their corners by the lawyers William Stewart and Stephen J. Field. The sketch not only satirizes the brutality of California state politics but also parodies the style of contemporary sportswriting. In the early rounds Low “gave Stanford a plaster in the eye” and “busted him in the snoot,” while Stanford “replied with an earthquake on Low’s bread-basket” and “mashed him in the ear.” The principals are gradually dismantled and the ring strewn with body parts until they look “like shapeless, mutilated, red-shirted firemen.” The fight apparently ends in a draw. Then Sam confesses in a postscript that the fight had never occurred, that he had been duped by a candidate for Congress.8
In another famous hoax, “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson,” published in the Enterprise for October 28, 1863, Sam concocted a bloodcurdling tale about a deranged father who murders most of his family and then commits suicide. The gothic devices were designed not only to horrify but to point a moral. “In my self-complacent simplicity,” Sam explained, “I felt that the time had arrived for me to
rise up and be a reformer.” The San Francisco Bulletin had reported on September 8 that the Daney Gold and Silver Mining Company, headquartered in the Bay City with operations in Washoe, had declared a fraudulent dividend of fourteen dollars a share two months earlier. Half of the disbursement, totaling twenty-eight thousand dollars, was paid with borrowed money “to keep up appearances.” The scheme, whether “folly or mismanagement,” worked “beautifully.” At a meeting a week later, the board of trustees levied on the stockholders a ten-dollar-per-foot assessment, payable only in gold, prompting a panic in the sale and a wholesale depreciation in the value of the stock. The Spring Valley Water Company of San Francisco had recently declared a two-dollar-per-share dividend that was similarly “cooked.” By mid-October the company had run out of water, “leaving the southern portion of the city defenseless against fire,” but no local newspaper covered this scandal. Charles A. V. Putnam of the Territorial Enterprise staff was approached by the San Francisco civic leader C. F. Low to complain about the hypocrisy of the Bay Area newspapers that exposed the bogus dividends paid by the mining company yet ignored the assessments charged by the same outfit and the false dividends paid by the water company. In both cases, the books had been falsified to attract investors at artificially inflated prices and allow the officers to “sell out at a comfortable figure.” Putnam adjured Sam to think of a way to trick the San Francisco newspapers into mentioning the financial irregularities. Sam’s solution was to “manufacture a diabolical murder” with a backstory about how the killer was distraught because he had been bankrupted by his bad investments in Spring Valley Water.9
In the guise of a straight news report of a bloodbath, Sam remembered, “I stole upon the public unawares with my scathing satire upon the dividend cooking system.” He “made the horrible details so carefully and conscientiously interesting,” he allowed, “that the public simply devoured them greedily.” A man named “P. Hopkins or Philip Hopkins,” who lived with his family “just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s,” had murdered his wife and seven of their nine children, then scalped and mutilated their bodies. Two of his daughters survived, though Hopkins had “knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on them”—with a knife still embedded in the eldest girl when she was found. Hopkins had slit his own throat from ear to ear and galloped his horse four miles into Carson City, “bearing in his hand [the] reeking scalp [of his wife] from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia Saloon,” a roadhouse locally notorious for its “forty-rod” whiskey. After luring readers with his bait, Sam expected to hook them in the final paragraph. Hopkins
had been a heavy owner in the best mines of Virginia and Gold Hill, but when the San Francisco papers exposed the game of cooking dividends in order to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested to an immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company of San Francisco. He was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the dividend-cooking system as applied to the Daney Mining Company recently. Hopkins had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the Comstock lead, however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired property, their water totally dried up, and Spring Valley stock went down to nothing. It is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family. The newspapers of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on borrowing money and cooking dividends.
Unfortunately, as Sam conceded, the readers “never got down” to the social commentary. Instead they “found the thrilling particulars sufficient. To drop in with a poor little moral at the fag-end of such a gorgeous massacre was to follow the expiring sun with a candle and hope to attract the world’s attention to it.”10 It was a rare reader who recognized the spoof. Instead, it was read as if it was a companion piece to the report of the Cornell murders in Austin, Nevada. Sam miscalculated, moreover, by claiming that his informant was the well-respected Abe Curry and by taking an entirely gratuitous swipe at Pete Hopkins, the owner of the Magnolia Saloon in Carson City.
The story struck a nerve across the region. “In all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that little satire created,” Sam admitted. “It was the talk of the town, it was the talk of the Territory.” However ludicrous it was, many of its readers took the tale at face value. As in the case of his petrified-man hoax, Sam did not expect it to be believed, or so he claimed. “The idea that anybody could ever take my massacre for a genuine occurrence never once suggested itself to me, hedged about as it was by all those tell-tale absurdities and impossibilities,” he insisted. The murderer, Pete Hopkins, “was perfectly well known to every creature in the land as a bachelor, and consequently he could not murder his wife and nine children”; Empire City and Dutch Nick’s “were one and the same place”; “there wasn’t a solitary tree within fifteen miles” of it, much less a pine forest at the site; and anyone who sliced his neck from ear to ear would have dropped dead on the spot, not ridden a horse several miles.11
Yet many papers swallowed the bait whole. The Gold Hill News summarized the story in its afternoon edition the same day it appeared in the Enterprise. “The most sickening tale of horror that we have read for years is told in the Enterprise of this morning,” wrote Philip Lynch, “and were it not for the respectable source from which our cotemporary received it, we should refuse it any credence.” The Sacramento Bee and Sacramento Union both copied the story in good faith. The editors of the Virginia Evening Bulletin were not amused: “The whole story is baseless as the fabric of a dream” and “of the most extravagantly sensational order.” The “horrid story will come back to us in a hundred different papers,” they warned. “But much as it will annoy us, it will torture its author a thousand fold more—at least we hope it will.” Sam was obliged to print a retraction. “The story published in the Enterprise reciting the slaughter of a family near Empire was all a fiction,” he admitted. “But it was necessary to publish the story” in the form in which it appeared “in order to get the fact into the San Francisco papers that the Spring Valley Water company was ‘cooking’ dividends by borrowing money to declare them on for its stockholders. The only way you can get a fact into a San Francisco journal is to smuggle it in through some great tragedy.”12
The confession ignited a firestorm of outrage across the West. Dan De Quille remembered that “there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego.” As soon as Lynch learned he had been “sold,” he complained that Sam’s hoax nevertheless “will be believed” in some quarters “and the already bloody reputation of our Territory will receive another smear.” The Grass Valley, California, National scorned “the ass who originated the story” and the Reese River Reveille severely rebuked him: “We would not be surprised at anything done by that silly idiot.” The Sacramento Union (“it may be considered by the Enterprise very pleasant and harmless amusement to trifle with the sympathies of its readers, but many will not see it”) echoed the point. The San Francisco Bulletin, completely misunderstanding that it was a target of Sam’s satire, reprinted it with the retraction under the title “The Latest Sensation.” The Virginia Evening Bulletin lambasted the fool “who hashes up the locals for the Enterprise” for his ill-advised hoax. The “man who could pen such a story, with all its horrors depicted in such infernal detail . . . can have but a very indefinite idea of the elements of a joke.” His “heart must be as callous to all the nobler feelings of our nature as the threat of a whisky guzzler is to the sense of burning.” The editors predicted that “this miserable scribe . . . will himself be forgotten.” They could not have been more wrong, of course. Some papers announced they would no longer credit any news that appeared in the columns of the Enterprise (e.g., the Sacramento Bee: “we shall know how to treat that journal hereafter”). Others demanded Sam’s dismissal, including A. C. Benham of the San Franci
sco Evening Journal (“as long as they keep the author of that hoax in their employ we shall not trouble their columns for news matter”). Meanwhile, Sam defended his “pleasant financial satire” and insisted in the Enterprise on October 30 that he tolerated “the storm . . . without a pang of remorse.” Instead, he indicted the “picayune papers” that reproved him, in particular a “little parson” and “oyster-brained idiot” on the staff of the Virginia Evening Bulletin.13
His public response to the scandal was more bluster than contrition. In fact, by all accounts he was privately embarrassed by the imbroglio. The Evening Bulletin dismissed him as nothing more than a “distinguished itemiser” the day the hoax appeared and reported three days later that he “appears to be in a terrible agony at the castigation which he is receiving for the sin he committed in publishing that rascally hoax. Out of pity for the poor wretch’s misery, we will not retort upon him, and as a mark of the profundity of our pity for his sufferings, we advise him to depart in peace and sin no more.” The Gold Hill News added two days later that Sam was “morose and melancholy,” suffering from “the mulligrubs” and “drinking mean whisky to drown his misery.” He had not published “a good square joke” in “four or five days.” According to his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, Sam offered to resign from the Enterprise but Goodman refused to accept the offer. His roommate Dan De Quille recalled that Sam was worried “as I had never before seen him worried. Said he: ‘I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains.’” One night, “when the persecution was hottest, he was so distressed that he could not sleep. He tossed, tumbled, and groaned aloud. So I set to work to comfort him.” Dan assured him that the scandal “will soon blow itself out. This item of yours will be remembered and talked about when all your other work is forgotten. The murder at Dutch Nick’s will be quoted years from now as the big sell of these times.” He was right: the hoax became part of Virginia City folklore. In 1893 Dan reflected that “not one man in a hundred in Nevada can remember anything” Sam had written for the Enterprise “except this one item.”14
The Life of Mark Twain Page 33
