The Sunday Gentleman (19 page)

As to politics, it never taints his lectures. He insists neither he nor his audiences are interested. “When you discuss politics,” he says, “you are sure to offend.” Even after his third trip to Russia, he refused to discuss politics. “I am a traveler,” he explained at that time, “and not a student of political and economic questions. To me, Communism is merely one of the sights I went to see.”

However, friends know that Holmes has his pet panacea for the ills of the world. He is violent about the gold standard, insisting that it alone can make all the world prosperous. Occasionally, when the mood is on him, and against his better judgment, he will inject propaganda in favor of the gold standard into an otherwise timid travelogue.

When he is feeling mellow, Holmes will confess that once in the past he permitted politics to intrude upon his sterile chitchat. It was two decades ago, when he jousted with Prohibition. While not a dedicated drinking man, Holmes has been on a friendly basis with firewater since the age of sixteen. In the ensuing years, he has regularly, every dusk before dinner, mixed himself one or two highballs. Only once did he try more than two, and the results were disastrous. “Any man who drinks three will drink three hundred,” he now says righteously. Holmes felt that Prohibition was an insult to civilized living. As a consequence of this belief, his audiences during the days of the Eighteenth Amendment were often startled to hear Holmes extol the virtues of open drinking, in the middle of a placid discourse on Oberammergau or Lapland. “Sometimes an indignant female would return her tickets to the rest of my series,” he says, “but there were others, more intelligent, to take her place.”

This independent attitude in Holmes was solely the product of his personal success. Born in January, 1870, of a financially secure, completely cosmopolitan Chicago family, he was able to be independent from his earliest days. His father, an employee in the Third National Bank, distinguished himself largely by lending George Pullman enough cash to transform his old day coaches into the first Pullman Palace Sleeping Cars, and by refusing a half interest in the business in exchange for his help. Even to this day, it makes Burton Holmes dizzy to think of the money he might have saved in charges for Pullman berths.

Holmes’s interest in show business began at the age of nine when his grandmother, Ann W. Burton, took him to hear John L. Stoddard lecture on the Passion Play at Oberammergau. Young Holmes was never the same again. After brief visits to faraway Florida and California, he quit school and accompanied his grandmother on his first trip abroad. He was sixteen and wide-eyed. His grandmother, who had traveled with her wine-salesman husband to France and Egypt and down the Volga in the sixties, was the perfect guide. But this journey through Europe was eclipsed; four years later, by a more important pilgrimage with his grandmother to Germany. The first day at his hotel in Munich, Holmes saw John L. Stoddard pass through the lobby reading a Baedeker. He was petrified. It was as if he had seen his Maker. Even now, over a half century later, when Holmes speaks about Stoddard, his voice carries a tinge of awe. For eighteen years of the late nineteenth century, Stoddard, with black-and-white slides and magnificent oratory, dominated the travel-lecture field. To audiences, young and old, he was the most romantic figure in America. Later, at Oberammergau, Holmes sat next to Stoddard through the fifteen acts of the Passion Play and they became friends.

When Holmes returned to the States, some months after Nellie Bly had made her own triumphal return to Brooklyn, he showed rare Kodak negatives of his travels to fellow members of the Chicago Camera Club. The members were impressed, and one suggested that these be mounted as slides and shown to the general public. “To take the edge off the silence, to keep the show moving,” says Holmes, “I wrote an account of my journey and read it, as the stereopticon man changed slides.” The show, which grossed the club $350, was Holmes’s initial travelogue. However, he dates the beginning of his professional career from three years later, when he appeared under his own auspices with hand-colored slides.

After the Camera Club debut, Holmes did not go immediately into the travelogue field. He was not yet ready to appreciate its possibilities. Instead, he attempted to sell real estate, and failed. Then he worked for eight dollars a week as a photo supply clerk. In 1902, aching with wanderlust, he bullied his family into staking him to a five-month tour of Japan. On the boat, he was thrilled to find John L. Stoddard, also bound for Japan. They became closer friends, even though they saw Nippon through different eyes. “The older man found Japan queer, quaint, comfortless, and almost repellent,” Stoddard’s son wrote years later. “To the younger man it was a fairyland.” Stoddard invited Holmes to continue on around the world with him, but Holmes loved Japan and decided to remain.

When Holmes returned to Chicago, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was in full swing. He spent months at the Jackson Park grounds, under Edison’s new electric lights, listening to Lillian Russell sing, Susan B. Anthony speak, and watching Sandow perform feats of strength. With rising excitement, he observed Jim Brady eating, Anthony Comstock snorting at Little Egypt’s hootchy-kootchy, and Alexander Dowie announcing himself as the Prophet Elijah in.

In the midst of this excitement came the depression of that year. Holmes’s father suffered. “He hit the wheat pit at the wrong time, and I had to go out on my own,” says Holmes. “The photo supply house offered me fifteen dollars a week to return. But I didn’t want to work. The trip to Japan, the Oriental exhibits of the Exposition, were still on my mind. I thought of Stoddard. I thought of the slides I’d had hand-colored in Tokyo. That was it, and it wasn’t work. So I hired a hall and became a travel lecturer.”

Copying society addresses from his mother’s visiting list, and additional addresses from
The Blue Book
, Holmes mailed two thousand invitations in the form of Japanese poem-cards. Recipients were invited to two illustrated lectures, at $1.50 each, on “Japan—the Country and the Cities.” Both performances were sellouts. Holmes grossed $700.

For four years, Holmes continued his fight to win a steady following, but with only erratic success. Then, in 1897, when he stood at the brink of defeat, two events occurred to change his life. First, John L. Stoddard retired from the travel-lecture field and threw the platforms of the nation open to a successor. Second, Holmes supplemented colored slides with a new method of illustrating his talks. As his circular announced, “There will be presented for the first time in connection with a course of travel lectures a series of pictures to which a modern miracle has added the illusion of life itself—the reproduction of recorded motion.”

Armed with his jumpy movies—scenes of the Omaha fire department, a police parade in Chicago, Italians eating spaghetti, each reel running twenty-five seconds, with a four-minute wait between reels—Burton Holmes invaded the Stoddard strongholds in the East. Stoddard came to hear him and observe the newfangled movies. Like Marshal Foch, who regarded the airplane as “an impractical toy,” Stoddard saw no future in the motion picture. Nevertheless, he gave young Holmes a hand by insisting that Augustin Daly lease his Manhattan theater to the newcomer. This done, Stoddard retired to the Austrian Tyrol, and Holmes went on to absorb Stoddard’s audiences in Boston and Philadelphia and to win new followers of his own throughout the nation.

His success assured, Holmes began to gather material with a vigor that was to make him one of history’s most indefatigable travelers. In 1900, at the Paris Exposition, sitting in a restaurant built like a Russian train, drinking vodka while a colored panorama of Siberia rolled past his window, he succumbed to this unique advertising of the new Trans-Siberian railway and bought a ticket. The trip in 1901 was a nightmare. After ten days on the Trans-Siberian train, which banged along at eleven miles an hour, Holmes was dumped into a construction train for five days, and then spent twenty-seven days on steamers going down the Amur River. It took him forty-two and a half days to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok.

But during that tour, he had one great moment. He saw Count Leo Tolstoi at Yasnaya Polyana, the author’s country estate near Tula. At a dinner in Moscow, Holmes met Albert J. Beveridge, the handsome senator from Indiana. Beveridge had a letter of introduction to Tolstoi and invited Holmes and his enormous 60-mm movie camera to come along. Arriving in a four-horse landau, the Americans were surprised to find Tolstoi’s estate dilapidated. Then, they were kept waiting two hours. At last, the seventy-three-year-old, white-bearded Tolstoi, nine years away from his lonely death in a railway depot, appeared. He was attired in a muzhik costume. He invited his visitors to breakfast, then conversed in fluent English. “He had only a slight accent, and he spoke with the cadence of Sir Henry Irving,” Holmes recalls.

Of the entire morning’s conversation, Holmes remembers clearly only one remark. That was when Tolstoi harangued, “There should be no law. No man should have the right to judge or condemn another. Absolute freedom of the individual is the only thing that can redeem the world. Christ was a great teacher, nothing more!” As Tolstoi continued to speak, Holmes quietly set up his movie camera. Tolstoi had never seen one before. He posed stiffly, as for a daguerreotype. When he thought that it was over, and resumed his talking. Holmes began actual shooting. This priceless film never reached the screen. Senator Beveridge was then a presidential possibility. His managers feared that this film of Beveridge with a Russian radical might be used by his opponents. The film was taken from Holmes and destroyed. Later, when he was not even nominated for the presidency, Beveridge wrote an apology to Holmes, “for this destruction of so valuable a living record of the grand old Russian.”

In 1934, at a cost of ten dollars a day, Holmes spent twenty-one days in modern Soviet Russia. He loved the ballet, the omelets, the Russian rule against tipping, and the lack of holdups. He went twice to see the embalmed Lenin, fascinated by the sight of “his head resting on a red pillow like that of a tired man asleep.”

Although Holmes’s name had already appeared on eighteen travel volumes, this last Russian trip inspired him to write his first and only original book. The earlier eighteen volumes, all heavily illustrated, were offered as a set, of which over forty thousand were sold. However, they were not “written,” but were actually a collection of lectures delivered orally by Holmes. The one book that he wrote as a book.
The Traveler’s Russia
, published in 1934 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, was a failure. Holmes has bought the remainders and passes them out to guests with a variety of inscriptions. In a serious mood, he will inscribe, “To travel is to possess the world.” In a frivolous mood, he will write, “With love from Tovarich Burtonovich Holmeski.”

In the five decades past, Holmes has kept himself occupied with a wide variety of pleasures, such as attending Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in London, chatting with Admiral Dewey in Hong Kong, driving the first automobile seen in Denmark, and photographing a mighty eruption of Vesuvius.

In 1918, wearing a war correspondent’s uniform, he shot army scenes on the Western Front and his films surpassed those of the poorly organized newsreel cameramen. In 1923, flying for the first time, he had his most dangerous experience, when his plane almost crashed between Toulouse and Rabat. Later, in Berlin, he found his dollar worth ten million marks, and in Africa he interviewed Emperor Haile Selassie in French, and, closer to home, he flew 20,000 miles over Central and South America, Burton Holmes enjoys company on his trips. By coincidence, they are often celebrities. Holmes traveled through Austria with Maria Jeritza, through Greece with E. F. Benson, through the Philippines with Dr. Victor Heiser. He covered World War I with Harry Franck, wandered about Japan with Lafcadio Hearn’s son, crossed, Ethiopia with the Duke of Gloucester. He saw Hollywood with Mary Pickford, Red Square with Alma Gluck, and the Andes with John McCutcheon.

Of the hundreds of travelogues that Holmes has delivered, the most popular was “The Panama Canal.” He offered this in 1912, when the “big ditch” was under construction, and news-hungry citizens flocked to hear him. Among less timely subjects, his most popular was the standard masterpiece on Oberammergau, followed closely by his illustrated lectures on the “Frivolities of Paris,” the “Canals of Venice,” the “Countryside of England” and, more currently, “Adventures in Mexico.” Burton Holmes admits that his greatest failure was an elaborate travelogue on Siam, even though it seemed to have everything except Anna and the King thereof. Other failures included travelogues on India, Burma, Ethiopia, and—curiously—exotic Bali. The only two domestic subjects to fizzle were “Down in Dixie” in 1915 and “The Century of Progress Exposition” in 1932.

All in all, the success of Holmes’s subjects has been so consistently high that he has never suffered seriously from competition. One rival died, another retired eight years ago. “I’m the lone survivor of the magic-lantern boys,” says Holmes. Of the younger crowd. Holmes thought that Richard Halliburton might become his successor. “He deserved to carry the banner,” says Holmes. “He was good-looking, with a fine classical background, intelligent, interesting, and he really did those dam-fool stunts.” Halliburton, who had climbed the Matterhorn, swum the Hellespont, followed the Cortes trail through Mexico, lectured with slides. “I told him to throw away the slides,” says Holmes. “He was better without them, his speech was so colorful.” When Halliburton died attempting to sail a Chinese junk across the Pacific, Holmes decided to present an illustrated lecture on “The Romantic Adventures of Richard Halliburton.” He used his own movies but, in the accompanying talk, Halliburton’s written text. “It was a crashing failure,” sighs Holmes. “His millions of fans did not want to hear me, and my fans did not want to know about him.”

For a while, Hollywood appeared to be the travelogue’s greatest threat. Holmes defeated this menace by marriage with the studios. He signed a contract with Paramount, made fifty-two travel shorts each year, between 1915 and 1921. Then, with the advent of talking pictures. Holmes joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and made a series of travelogues, released in English, French, Italian, Spanish. In 1933, he made his debut in radio, and in 1944, made his first appearance on television.