Jenny and Barnum (49 page)

Otto, his back to the door, looked nonplused. Barnum slapped him soundly on the shoulder, stepped past, and closed the door on the happiest moments he had ever known. No mention of his wedding gift—there hadn't been time. That thought was just sinking in when the smart-alec reporter piped up.

“What do you think of that suit, Barnum? It didn't take him long to find the purse strings.”

“That suit's a gift, I should judge. In any event, it's a good idea. The husband of Miss Jenny Lind should look the part.” Barnum chucked him under the chin. “You're just jealous.”

19.

Rumors that Goldschmidt was going through her money drifted back to America, but they were only rumors, with no truth to them. Early on, Barnum heard from John Hall Wilton and other English sources that the Goldschmidts had set up housekeeping in Jenny's London home and were looking for a modest cottage in the Cotswolds. At the end of the summer, the story came over that she was going to have a baby, so if there was something wrong with the Goldschmidts' marriage, it wasn't that serious. Goldschmidt was working in London—with Jenny idle, his own career did not seem all that modest, for he was much in demand as an accompanist and conductor.

The passage of time made Barnum appreciate how rare Jenny's talent actually was. By comparison, other singers struggled through their songs, and Barnum could hear every mistake and false note. Wilton reported that there were no plans for a new Jenny Lind tour in Europe. Her voice was still splendid, Wilton was able to say, because she was singing for charity and at private occasions. After the birth of her first child, a girl, Jenny made a few professional appearances in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, but for all practical purposes, however temporarily, Jenny Lind was retired.

Barnum had less and less time to think of her anyway. With the outbreak of hostilities authorities warned him that the Confederacy would send spies and saboteurs into the North to spread terror among the civilian population. The American Museum was a likely target for arson or bombing, and Barnum might want to think about hiring bodyguards for some of his performers. Barnum hired more security patrolmen for the museum, but he thought the second suggestion laughable. If the Confederacy wanted to win the world's sympathy—and it did, although Barnum could not imagine why—it was not going to do it by assassinating Tom Thumb. Charlie agreed.

“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.