Jenny and Barnum (50 page)

He had miscalculated. Labor was more expensive after the war, not less; of course Barnum had neglected to calculate the effects of an assassination on the state of the economy. In Barnum's mind Abraham Lincoln was the closest America had come to a philosopher-king since Thomas Jefferson, and there was no one his equal anywhere in the world. Without Lincoln's wisdom and guidance, the vermin of the country felt free to run amuck. The emotional climate turned sour, but still Barnum continued to commit money. Charlie was all but retired—he did not feel so young and frisky any more, either, most likely because he did not expect to outlive Barnum—but he agreed to appear at the museum's reopening and to go on the road with the first of Barnum's new shows. Barnum knew he was imposing on Charlie, but he was in desperate financial condition again—as it turned out, all he did right throughout the postwar period was to maintain adequate insurance coverage and make sure the premiums were paid. In the summer of 1867 the new American Museum burned to the ground, and in this fire a man was killed.

And Barnum was there, or arrived before the fire fighters could wade into the charred embers and puddles of brackish water. Barnum was with them when they found the old watchman named Clancy still in his chair, covered with soot, his head back, his eyes closed. Half of Clancy was blistered and roasted, but it was clear that he hadn't suffered, that he was unconscious before the flames reached him.

“He must have been drunk,” Barnum said.

“Oh, don't blame yourself,” a fireman said. “When the smoke hits them, it puts them right to sleep.”

That was the finish. Insurance or no, Barnum was out of business. His heart for it was gone. He had lost the last two years of the war, waiting to rebuild, then another year while the rebuilding was carried out, only to find that the passage of time had relegated the museum to the public's own pile of memorabilia. At the end, it had been clear that his museum piece of a museum was not going to provide him with more than a living, a marginal one, at that. Now there weren't enough souvenirs to fill a mule-drawn cart. He paid everybody off, got rid of his interest in the property, and went back to Connecticut.

He was fifty-three years old, too young to retire, but too old, he thought, to start over at something fresh. The interest in his revised memoirs was not all that great, with the result that he had become a bit of a museum piece himself. He dabbled. Drifted. Without stirring very much, he made a little money buying and selling traveling shows and performers' contracts. Charity's health worsened, but Barnum had enough success with his investments to keep them comfortable. They were not unhappy, but not at all the husband and wife they had imagined in their youth. At the start of the war, after Jenny had gone back to Europe, Barnum had had Caesar build him a new master suite connected to his study. Barnum and Charity, without hostility, lived on different floors. They took their meals together when it suited them. His sons-in-law regarded Barnum with amusement until they got to know him better, when they found him an astute judge of character. With his advice they made money, too.

From his European correspondents Barnum continued to receive news of Jenny and her family. She and Otto had homes in the city and the country now, and a villa on the Riviera. The children were sound and growing, and Jenny performed occasionally, although never in opera and almost always for charity. Her voice was not what it had been at the peak of her career, but she had never been a strong woman and expectations of a long life for her magical voice had always been guarded. For all of that, John Hall Wilton insisted, she was still the best singer in the world, but Barnum thought that Wilton was probably still eager to be carried away. The point was, the absolute greatness was gone, and only echoed in the voice that could be heard today. All artists were so cursed, Barnum knew, and it had to be terrible for them. His heart went out to her. Wilton wrote that her beauty had faded, too, that she was no longer girlishly trim; Barnum reacted badly to that, thinking it too cruel and beneath Wilton, who had probably grown bald and fat.

By the end of the decade Barnum could no longer lie to himself about his retirement. He was a silent partner in a dozen shows and tours, organizing and advising. He crossed the country lecturing, discovering acts and performers, meeting real-life curiosities like Brigham Young, King of the Mormons. Young wanted so much to tour and capitalize on his fame that Barnum had to lay on the sweet-talk simply to get away from the man. Barnum felt that if the rubes found out what old Brigham was really up to with all those women, they would tear him limb from limb, and Barnum along with him.

Barnum wanted a permanent showplace in New York and a show to put in it—not a museum; no, this would be different from the old museum in that the customers would sit in their seats and the show would be presented to them. It would be a true circus, like those he had admired in Europe before the war, but he would be able to bundle it up and put it on the road—in fact, the
rail
road.

And now Barnum knew more about the railroad, the idea, and the railroads, the businesses, and what they could and could not do for him. On the other hand, he also knew what he could and could not do for himself: he was closing in on sixty, and his fading capacity for detail made him wonder if his brains were not taking the same route as his eyes and his teeth. He formed a partnership with two experienced circus performers and producers, and the three men mounted a show that was a fair success. But no one was happy. Barnum's partners were closer to each other than to him, another of his mistakes. His reputation was bigger than ever, but never did he deserve it so little, he thought. Now he was a real humbug, a superannuated, over-inflated fraud.

Charity died. As bad as her health had been for so many years, she had somehow seemed indestructible. Not at all. Her condition suddenly turned grave on Friday, and on Monday afternoon she slipped into final unconsciousness and died relatively peacefully. Barnum was stunned beyond all imagining—it was such a sad end to so sad a story. He doubted that she had been prepared. It was as if life itself had dismissed her casually, waving her from the stage with a thoughtless gesture.

While he was still feeling his grief, Barnum was bested in business by a mere boy of thirty-three, providing the sixty-year-old with his first hearty laugh in more time than he could remember.

It had to do with a baby elephant, the first ever born in captivity, to a cow owned by one of Barnum's competitors. By then the interest in exotic animals was acute, and so was the trade in them. Barnum had no doubt that a tiny elephant would draw well, and he made his offer by telegram. Ordinarily that would not have been very much of a mistake, but the man on the receiving end was about to establish that he was every bit Barnum's equal. He was the thirty-three-year-old, named James A. Bailey.

Newspapers reported that Bailey had had an artist render Barnum's telegram on a billboard twelve feet across, and mounted the billboard outside the entrance to his tent, with the legend: THIS IS WHAT BARNUM THINKS OF OUR BABY ELEPHANT!

Barnum thought it a wonderful stunt. Bailey had four partners as lackluster as Barnum's own pair. If Bailey wanted to do a deal with Barnum, the two shows could be put together, and then it would just be a matter of time—and careful maneuvering—to get rid of the other partners and build the finest circus the world had ever known.

In 1885, Barnum and Bailey's Combined Shows, known as The Greatest Show on Earth, conquered Europe. Thirteen hundred performers and roustabouts, more than five hundred animals, including eighty elephants—many, many more than had been with Hannibal crossing the Alps—and enough equipment, paraphernalia, and costumes to fill fifty railroad cars: acrobats, jugglers, clowns, and pretty girls; lions, tigers, gorillas, and polar bears; midgets, giants, human skeletons, and fat and bearded ladies, an entire army from a make-believe land of wonder and joy, the white-haired Phineas Taylor Barnum, the living legend himself, in the lead, in an open white carriage drawn by four spirited white horses. The Greatest Show on Earth had filled an entire iron-plated steamship, easily the most all-inclusive collection of the world's creatures to sail upon open water since Noah and the Ark.

Bailey had solved the problem of feeding so many large carnivores at sea by freezing meat in blocks of ice, then thawing them as required. Bailey was really a taciturn and self-effacing man; it was Barnum who overruled Bailey and printed both of their pictures on their broadsides and billboards. But Bailey was the great riddle-unraveler, able to muster imaginative flair in answering such questions as how to pack a tent in a railroad car (after the giant cats had been stowed, on the rolling carts that had carried their cages, hauled aboard, of course, by the elephants) to what to do with tons of elephant dung (claim it possesses amazing fertilizing qualities, and sell it). Bailey ran the show, made it work the way a chef operates a good hotel's kitchen, with efficiency and dispatch, and an eye on his own professional pride.

Barnum, on the other hand, the Mighty Monarch of Merriment himself, wrote the advertising copy, hired acts, beguiled the press, and counted the money. It was a perfect business relationship, without a lot of God-awful personal and social complications, and both men were truly rich—high-on-the-hog rich, as Bailey liked to put it.

The Greatest Show on Earth was not on tour merely to offer Europe the opportunity of seeing it, but, as Barnum had promised America, to bring back the Greatest Creature on Earth-Jumbo, the largest elephant in captivity!

No mean feat, considering that all of Victoria's Empire was aligned against Barnum. Jumbo was presently quartered at the London Zoological Garden, where he was a favorite of royalty and commoner alike, because he was loved by English children. They traveled from all over the country to ride on his back around a special track at the Zoological Garden, which was owned by a man who, like Braithewaite years ago, had fallen on bad times. Barnum was going to pay him enough to keep him fat and sassy well into the twentieth century, if necessary. The deal was done, but unannounced. Rumors about Jumbo had been floating for months, and the response on both sides of the Atlantic was as could have been predicted. Now that Barnum could not make off with Jumbo in the dead of night, as it were, he had to put as good a face on the situations as he could. Whole orphanages of English children got to see the world's first three-ring circus, all its exhibits, pageants, and tableaux, generating waves of favorable publicity for Barnum and Bailey. When Barnum returned to London from Leeds, where the show was on tour, he found a letter written in a script he had not seen in almost twenty years.

My dear fat old man,

Perhaps you can take time from winning the hearts of English schoolchildren to pass an afternoon with one of your earlier conquests. I realize that you are as frightfully busy as ever, and that you are no longer the sprightly, high-stepping youth I once knew, but if it is possible for you to take the train out to Castle Combe, where I have spent the last seventeen summers, I shall be pleased to brew you a cup of tea
.

Yours faithfully,

Jenny L
.

He scribbled a note straightaway and got it in the noon post, assuring its delivery by the next morning. In the absence of a reply, he would see her on Friday afternoon—whatever else he felt, the thought made his heart leap like a boy's.

He had known he was heading into one of the prettiest parts of the world, but he had forgotten just how
very
pretty the Cotswold Hills really were. It was easy to see why so many emigrants from these parts had fallen in love with the soft, rolling hills of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Here were wonderful stone villages set in the folds of the earth like miniatures under a Christmas tree, fields marked with ancient stone walls, cathedral steeples poking over the distant hills. It had been raining when he had left London, but here the sky was mostly blue, a silent sea for a school of brilliant orderly clouds. The green of the fields and woods was so intense that it hurt Barnum's eyes. This was the country of King Arthur and Will Shakespeare, ancient country filled, it seemed, with children and the young, boys driving sheep and cattle down the lanes, girls tilling kitchen gardens beside their mothers. As much as it reminded Barnum of the simple countryside in which he had spent his boyhood, he could see, too, that it was entirely different, most particularly in the length and stature of its history. Life here had almost always been lived as he was seeing it, and so it seemed timeless. There was a joy in the newness of the New World, but there was a very deep pleasure in contemplating what the land had contemplated in the innumerable cycles of humanity that had come before. Barnum had almost lived this life, he knew, and although he was a happy man, he could not help feeling a sense of loss for not having done it.

Jenny's directions accompanying her note indicated that he could easily walk from the railroad station to her cottage, which was on the edge of town. The main street was an unpaved stretch of rutty hardpan, not different from Bethel. Once the train had pulled away, the loudest sounds were those made by the goats and chickens. People came out of their stone cottages and the public house on the corner to see the erect, potbellied septuagenarian in city clothes striding smartly toward the northern edge of the settlement, where a view of the broad, cultivated valley was revealed. Jenny's cottage, she said, was just around the bend. Barnum was too deaf now to hear the murmurings of the locals, but their behavior confirmed his suspicions and Jenny's directions. Barnum felt just like a boy, in a bliss of anticipation. He did not know what he was going to hear, or even if she had anything to tell him at all.

The cottage was set down the hill from the road, twenty feet behind a wooden fence and a vividly blooming, slightly overgrown garden. The path was a set of flagstones curving down to the door. He was raising his hand to knock when the door opened, and there she was.