by Jill Jonnes
They dragged her to bed, where she spent the night in a delirium, begging again and again to be let in. “They did not bring me a thing to eat or drink until I could crawl downstairs.” The “She-Wolf” left Oakley alone for two weeks, but then it was back to grueling amounts of work and chores. “I constantly begged her to send me back to my mother,” but they refused. Now eleven, Oakley was effectively their slave. She was not allowed to go home, and when she displeased them, they beat and abused her. For two more years Oakley endured this virtual serfdom.
“One fine spring day the family was gone. I was ironing a large basket of clothes. Suddenly I thought—why not run away?” She was now thirteen years old and no doubt a sad-looking waif. And so she fled.
Very luckily she encountered a kind man at the train station who took her under his wing. She had all of forty-eight cents. He purchased her ticket, made sure she changed trains in the right place, fed her dinner, and then put her on the train that would stop that afternoon near her mother’s house. Before debarking, he enlisted another adult to accompany young Oakley, and to make sure she got off at her proper station.
Oakley arrived at the family home only to find that her stepfather had died and her mother had moved back to their old village. The woman who now owned the house insisted that Oakley stay the night, and the next morning after breakfast, Oakley walked ten miles to reach the home of family friends, eluding a frightening tramp on the road. From there, it was another five miles to her mother and safety. Oakley offered no description of her reunion with a mother who had not bothered to find her as year after year passed. But she did describe her return to school: “I was happy for the first time since I left Auntie’s.”
Six months later, there was a loud banging on the school door, and the “He-Wolf” stormed in. “He took me by the arm, twisting it until I almost fainted with pain, and dragged me through the door.” He pulled her up on his wagon and took off, the teacher in hot pursuit.
“I knew he must pass Edington’s and I kept figuring out how to escape. I planned to turn a back somersault and leap just as he reached the gate.” But Mr. Edington, who knew the “He-Wolf” well, stood in the middle of the road, stopped the horses and acted as if Oakley’s captor would naturally be staying for dinner. Her aunt reassured her they would not let the “He-Wolf” take her, and at that, “I had Auntie unbutton my little dress and look at the scars on my back where the ‘Wolves’ had struck me.
“ ‘My God, child,’ said Auntie, ‘six months ago, and your back and poor little shoulders are still green. How did you live through it?’
“ ‘I do not know,’ I told her.”
After dinner, the “He-Wolf” said he was taking Oakley home with him, but the men of the household told him to leave, warning him, “You are a lucky man to escape.”
For the first time in almost four years, fourteen-year-old Oakley felt safe.
As an adult, Annie Oakley was famously tight with money, a characteristic that was especially notable in the company of the ever-generous, wildly profligate Bill Cody. Oakley knew her reputation, but she preferred to give her money to the young and needy.
By July 16, the sunny summer days had been blown away by heavy winds, followed by day after day of cold, rainy weather. This suited the mood of Minister Antonin Proust, who by now knew there was no hope he would be able to buy The Angelus for France. The conservatives in the Chamber of Deputies had permanently tabled a bill to finance the purchase because poor François Millet was too close to republican hearts. Nor in this season, when the Panama Canal collapse had struck so hard, was there any rich, gallant savior to step forward to offer to preserve this French patrimony. After that frenzied moment of triumph in the Sedelmeyer Gallery, Monsieur Proust accordingly had to officially relinquish his prize and watch Mr. Sutton sally off with a picture that should have been enshrined in the Louvre. The situation was not made any less bitter when Monsieur Proust learned that his American nemesis proposed to display The Angelus in Paris for two months before shipping it home. The culture minister’s only consolation was knowing that the U.S. tariff on fine art would cost the American a painfully large sum.
On Tuesday, July 16, despite the steady drizzle outside, jubilation reigned at 27 avenue de la Bourdonnais, American Exhibition headquarters. An exultant Gen. Rush Hawkins had received good news, which he immediately shared with the Paris Herald: The 255 American artists exhibiting at the World’s Fair had won an impressive 108 medals. This was a huge relief, after nasty rumors that the juries had seen little to reward on the crowded walls of the second-floor American galleries. “Our countrymen will doubtless be surprised . . . [and] rejoice in the success,” opined Hawkins proudly, especially as “this is the first time we have entered the lists to contend with the artists of the world.” Three Americans had won the highest award, the coveted medal of honor: painters John Singer Sargent and J. Gari Melchers and sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett, while another seven artists had won gold medals. Had James McNeill Whistler not defected to the British exhibit, his gold medal for his portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell would have upped the gold medal total to eight.
In London Whistler was especially pleased about his gold medal, for Lady Campbell was an old friend of his and daughter-in-law of the Duke of Argyll. Whistler graciously accepted the many felicitations from French friends Montesquiou and Mallarmé, even though he viewed the honor as inevitable. Of course, his multitude of enemies, carefully cultivated over the years, declared it “a horror” that Whistler had won over more-deserving English artists. Some American critics swooned with admiration, hailing Whistler as “the only and original painter. He has narrative, natural aptitude for the presentation of form, repartee, and originality.” At the same time, Whistler was embroiled in a legal fight with London brewer Sir Henry Meux over a portrait of his young wife, Valerie, which Whistler had destroyed after she dared to complain about too many sittings and the portrait’s taking too long. Whistler had long since perfected using the modern art of scandal amplified by the newspapers to keep his name on everyone’s lips. The notoriety was more than useful in drawing crowds to see his art and in selling it.
Alfred O. Tate, Edison’s young private secretary, had remained in London, and after almost two months there had concluded nothing would ever light a fire under the ever-amiable Col. George Gouraud. On July 23, Tate wrote to Samuel Insull, Edison’s private secretary, that Gouraud’s recent “order” for a thousand phonographs was a ploy. “He might just as well have made the order for 10,000.” In truth, Gouraud was actually asking for only “50 phonographs and supplies—and you can rest assured that he will not ask for a further shipment for several months, if he ever does. . . . The commercial success of the phonograph will never be seriously considered and worked out energetically until it leaves Gouraud’s hands.”
Insull, who had been Gouraud’s secretary for two years before immigrating to the United States in 1881 to work for Edison, was not surprised. “I have always insisted that Mr. Gouraud would never be able to float anything successfully . . . and I want no better justification of my opposition” than Tate’s reports. Unfortunately, Gouraud had a contract.
General Hawkins, who had survived many rounds of combat in his Civil War years, felt pleased and grateful to emerge from his own Paris art wars bruised but victorious. First, he had put up with a great deal of complaining from his own artists, followed by considerable carping from American critics. The Tribune complained that the U.S. painters failed to convey “a national story, a national landscape and a moral elevation.” The French concurred, with one critic writing, “What is wanting in this American Exhibition is native painting on native subjects.” Back in 1887, Henry James had summarized the situation neatly: “It sounds like a paradox, but it is a very simple truth, that when today we look for ‘American art’ we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it.” While the Americans had held their own at the exhibition, the fact was that the French had simply re
warded their acolytes for sensibly studying and practicing art in Paris.
The irascible General Hawkins took the occasion of the penning of his official Exposition report to skewer such troublesome sorts as Whistler, describing the prize-winning portrait of Lady Campbell as “truly Whistlerian, and in no respect satisfactory. The subject is neither walking nor standing. A rudimentary foot is shown, but it seems to be suspended from something and incapable of bearing weight; it is not an English foot, nor does it even appear to rest on anything. It is only an incorrect suggestion of a foot.” To be fair, he did have kinder things to say about another Whistler painting, The Balcony, which featured a Japanese-like scene.
Amid all the pleasures and exhilarations of the World’s Fair, Eiffel was disturbed by one great disappointment: the final and total collapse of Ferdinand de Lesseps’s Panama Canal Company. When the receiver appointed in February 1889 had advised in mid-May that no further work would be reimbursed, Gustave Eiffel had reluctantly instructed his men in Panama to stop work on the locks. Even as the World’s Fair persuaded the Western nations not to underestimate the French industrial spirit—“the French capacity for work has not been idle for a single moment”—the canal venture was in its death throes. Throughout France families were financially devastated. In July Eiffel signed a document returning $600,000 and giving over all the equipment and the locks that had been built to the receiver, thus retiring his own contract. He had expected the Panama Canal to be his final great work, another colossal engineering project for the greater glory of France, and one of far greater significance than his Tour en Fer. Alas, that was not to be.
Fairgoers near the fountain on the Champ de Mars, with the Central Dome in the background
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Monarchs of the World Ascend the Republican Tower
At 8:00 a.m. on Friday, August 2, all those who worked at the Eiffel Tower were in a state of intense anticipation: When would Nasir al-Din, His Majesty the Shah of Persia, the King of Kings, arrive to ascend the tower? The Figaro reporters, the ladies selling trinkets and cigars, the waiters, the elevator men—all attired in their Sunday best and bedecked with nosegays and medals—crowded the platform railings to watch the Pont d’Iéna for a glimpse of the imperial landau and its honor guard of dragoons. After a fortnight of wintry rain, a few days earlier the sun had mercifully come out, and it was the clearest of summer mornings.
By eleven o’clock the men of Le Figaro, facing their deadline, called the tower’s office, asking plaintively, “Is he coming?” Down below at the fairgrounds, they spied only the usual crowds and a bobbing sea of women’s colored parasols unfurled to protect fair skins. By noon a pall of disappointment had settled over the tower: His Majesty the Shah, despite official advance notice, was not coming.
Two days previous, in midafternoon, the sixty-year-old Shah, whose royal line descended from Darius the Great, had made his first informal visit to the Exposition. Though short of stature, he was a striking personage with his dark mustachios, tall astrakhan fez, and colorful uniform resplendent with very large precious stones. “His Majesty,” reported the Paris Herald, “went immediately to the Eiffel Tower, but after mounting a few of the steps leading to the lifts, renounced any intention he might have had of ascending.”
The Shah quickly recovered his sangfroid and pressed on to the fair’s other seductions. On two earlier state visits, the Shah’s Oriental extravagance had become legend, and now as he strolled through the fair, he more than gladdened the hearts of the vendors. He gravitated toward an Antwerp diamond-cutting exhibit, where he added to his collection of royal jewels by purchasing a large black diamond for 32,000 francs ($6,400). Then “all along his passage the Shah made numerous purchases at different stalls he passed, greatly to the satisfaction of the stall keepers.”
His first visit to the fair concluded, the Shah’s cavalcade of carriages, led by galloping dragoons, crossed the Seine on the Pont d’Alma, heading to 43 rue Copernic, a palatial mansion in a large walled park. Owned by the French republic, the mansion had been freshly painted, gilded, and opulently furnished with antiques from the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. The Shah occupied the entire second floor, and from the private Italian balcony off his bedroom he could see the very Eiffel Tower he had thus far declined to ascend.
At this most democratic and republican of World’s Fairs, the French government relished the visit of every single royal, as did Gustave Eiffel. Certainly, high above Paris on his tower, Eiffel found no set of ascensionnistes so politically gratifying as the foreign nobility. First had come the Prince and Princess of Wales, flouting Queen Victoria’s express wish that her government boycott the fair. In ensuing weeks he had had the pleasure of welcoming to his republican tower the former queen Isabella II of Spain, whose misrule had caused her to be exiled in 1868, followed shortly by her abdication. Now a longtime resident of Paris, she was a notorious libertine. In the course of the summer, other royals also ascended: the Duke of Edinburgh, an admiral in the British navy; the Russian czar-to-be Nicholas II; and Tewfik Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt. On July 22, Prince Kitiyahara, heir apparent to the throne of Siam, and his younger brothers, Pravita Chira and Rabi, had been up, squired by members of the Siamese Legation. The very next day King George of Greece had visited, ignoring the heavy rainsquall impeding the view. As his queen had been a czarist princess, he elected to dine at the Russian restaurant.
Eiffel’s most exotic royal visitor had been the Muslim king of Senegal, Dinah Salifou, who attended with his entourage and a four-man orchestra providing background music with stringed instruments and xylophone. On the last day in July, Eiffel scored a patriotic coup, for with him atop the tower was none other than the German ambassador, whose government and private enterprises had been ostentatiously boycotting the fair.
On the very day that the Shah bolted, King Salifou ascended the tower with his queen and their entourage for their second visit. On that occasion, the king and queen brought along eight young princes—all speaking good French, noted Le Figaro de la Tour—who had been entrusted to the Senegalese king for the journey to France. His own son, Prince Ibrahim, would soon travel to Algiers to attend lycée there. Once again the king’s musicians played their instruments up at the tower’s summit as Le Figaro went to press.
In the wake of so many bruited royal visits, the Persian Shah’s failure to ascend had been duly noted and ridiculed. It seemed the King of Kings had been brooding over his embarrassing departure from the Eiffel Tower and subsequent nonappearance. For on Saturday, August 3, around midday, a New York Times reporter strolling the tower’s first platform stopped in his circuit, unable to believe his eyes—could this be the Persian king ascending the staircase, dressed in a blue Turkish-style tunic with gold braid epaulettes and sky blue trousers? “To my astonishment,” he wrote, “and the utter stupefaction of the bewildered authorities, up climbed the Shah. He had been trying to screw up his courage ever since his arrival, but had never gotten above the third step, and there he was, all by himself, far in advance of his frightened suite and looking like a very brilliant, anxious fish, suddenly landed from deep water on high ground. Such a funny scene of confusion I never saw.”
The Figaro reporter was directly behind His Majesty on the stairs. A tower official had called excitedly up to the tiny newsroom to say that the Shah’s imperial landau had halted unexpectedly at the foot of the tower and that the Shah had emerged and announced his intention to ascend. Figaro’s Monsieur St.-Jacques rushed down on the Otis elevator, and indeed, there was Nasir al-Din, walking up the western staircase with two fair officials in his wake. “The king climbed slowly, stopping a few minutes at each landing, admiring the view that is always so fine. After walking around the first platform’s exterior gallery . . . the Shah of Persia leaned on the balcony and spent a long time admiring the structure’s proportions, conversing animatedly with Monsieurs Berger and Ansaloni. A large crowd surrounded him. Servants from the Russian Restaurant offered flowers
to the monarch.”
The Paris that the Shah gazed out over, on this, his third visit to the city, was noticeably more prosperous and democratic than during his earlier stays. The self-made man had come to the fore, and new industrial fortunes such as Gustave Eiffel’s had upended the established class-based nobility and social order. Paris, with all its opportunities, culture, and freedom had become a great magnet for the ambitious, much to the outrage of the old guard. The aged Edmond de Goncourt lamented, “The truth is that Paris is no longer Paris; it is a kind of free city in which all the thieves of the earth who have made their fortunes in business come to eat badly and sleep with the flesh of someone who calls herself a Parisienne.” Of course, the republicans saw the changes very differently.
The Times man soon learned that the Shah was supposed to be at an official function across the Seine at the Trocadéro, where “everyone was waiting for him in state and expectation.” The French republican government, determined to show that democrats were as capable as royalists of proper ceremony, had heaped all possible formal pomp, protocol, and receptions upon the Persian Shah, their first official royal state visitor to the fair. But now here he was wandering about like any tourist. Utterly unprepared for Nasir al-Din, the flustered Eiffel Tower officials politely tried to shoo the hoi polloi off the first platform.
“But,” noted the Times man, “they could not be thrown over the railing and it takes time to get down the stairs, so a good many staid [sic].” As for the Shah, “He looked exactly like a schoolboy caught in mischief, and expecting a parental earthquake to swallow him up.” A royal luncheon was quickly organized at Café Brébant. Monsieur St.-Jacques of the tower Figaro had no choice but to return to his office on the platform above and compose a quick story, for his paper was already behind deadline. But the Times man happily lingered, waiting to see the next installment in this spur-of-the-moment royal appearance.
