THE GREATEST SHOWMAN OR A COMPLETE HUCKSTER?
FORMER RTE AND BBC BROADCASTER AND AUTHOR, LIAM NOLAN, TELLS THE REAL-LIFE STORY OF P.T. BARNUM, WHO WAS PORTRAYED BY HUGH JACKMAN IN THE HOLLYWOOD FILM ‘THE GREATEST SHOWMAN’
HE was the man who memorably said, ‘ There’s a sucker born every minute.’ And also said, ‘You can fool most of the people most of the time.’ I wanted to make sure that my understanding of the word ‘ huckster’ was in line with what Americans understand the word to mean. So I went to the famous American Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
‘Huckster’, it said: ‘one who sells or advertises something in an aggressive, dishonest, or annoying way.’
It sums up the central character of the Hugh Jackman film musical ‘ The Greatest Showman’ — P. T. Barnum. Or, to give him his full name, Phineas Taylor Barnum.
Barnum has been called many things. For example, ‘ The 19th century impresario who found fame by exploiting circus ‘freaks’.’
He has also been called ‘Lord of the Hucksters’, ‘ The Master Humbug’, ‘A professional bullshitter with a penchant for loud rhetoric’, ‘King of the Conmen’ and, of course, ‘ The Greatest Showman’.
The Jackman film is fine entertainment, spectacular, and with a musical soundtrack that is enormously attractive. But there has been a wave of criticism about the movie’s inaccuracies, and about what it has glossed over; that it has airbrushed history. But Hollywood never lets facts get in the way of a good story.
The first film about the showman’s life, ‘ The Mighty Barnum’, was made back in 1934. A drawling-voiced beery-looking actor named, appropriately, Wallace Beery, played the lead. An Academy Award winner for Best Actor four years earlier, he was at the time the highest paid actor in the world.
The film came under the critical lash for being chronologically scrambled, and for depicting Barnum as a comic character.
‘ The true story got lost somewhere,’ one critic wrote. ‘It should just be enjoyed as entertainment, and not a life lesson,’ said another.
Is ‘ The Greatest Showman’ chronologically scrambled? Without a doubt.
It was Barnum’s grandfather Phineas Taylor who taught him the tricks of getting money without doing hard work. P. T. didn’t like physical work anyway.
He was known as Taylor Barnum when he was learning the lesson that he later lived by — that there is no such thing as bad publicity, if the publicity is spun correctly.
There was a dark side to Barnum’s activities from his very first venture into the world of show business.
By the time 1834 came around, he was married with four daughters. Aged 25, he moved to New York where he got a letter from an itinerant showman in Kentucky, R. W. Lindsay, who said that he had under his control a freed slave named Joice Heth. Heth, according to Lindsay, had been wet nurse to America’s first President, George Washington. She was, Lindsay said, 161 years old! He offered her to Barnum.
Barnum rented her, gave Lindsay $1,000 for control of her for a year. He brought Joice to New York. He then arranged an Eastern seaboard tour for the pathetic, blind, half paralysed creature, working her 10 hours a day. Barnum exhibited her as ‘unquestionably the most astonishing and interesting curiosity in the World!’
In a circular he sent out, he wrote: ‘She was the slave of Augustine Washington (the father of Gen. Washington) and was the first person to put clothes on the unconscious infant, who, in after days, led our heroic fathers on to glory, to victory, and freedom...’
Afterwards he was to say, ‘Without promotion, something terrible happens — nothing.’
Displaying toothless Joice Heth with her amazingly decrepit body (she was said to have weighed under 50 pounds) in town after town brought him in $1,500 a week.
He had embarked on the road to trafficking in human curiosities for an audience described as ‘interested in mass, and often crass, entertainment.’
He justified disregarding ethical considerations by asserting that no harm was done, no foul committed ‘so long as at the end of the day customers felt like they got their money’s worth.’
That’s when he said, ‘ There’s a sucker born every minute.’
By this stage he had worked as a lottery manager, shopkeeper, founder and editor of a newspaper.
A Texan author described Barnum as ‘someone who began his career in show business by going into debt to buy a superannuated female slave, who turned out to be a fraud.’
A New England newspaper, the Courier, didn’t put a tooth in it, saying, ‘ Those who imagine they can contemplate with delight a breathing skeleton, subject to the same sort of discipline that is sometimes exercised in a menagerie to induce the inferior animals to play unnatural pranks for the amusement of barren spectators, will find food to their taste by visiting Joice Heth.’
Barnum’s reaction? ‘I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.’
When Joice Heth died in 1836, Barnum didn’t even let her rest then. He organised a public live autopsy in a New York saloon, hired a respected doctor, Dr David L Rogers, and charged the public (1,500 of them) 50 cents each to go in and watch the body of an old black woman being dug into and cut up!
Doctor Rogers concluded that Joice Heth was no more than 79 when she died.
None of this stuff was featured in or was referred to in the two movies about Barnum.
‘ The story of his [Barnum’s] life we choose to tell is in part the story we choose to tell about American culture,’ said author Benjamin Reiss. ‘We can choose to erase things, or dance around touchy subjects and present a kind of feel good story...’
Take the way ‘The Greatest Showman’ treats the character Jenny Lind. Lind was a Swedish operatic soprano of outstanding talent, revered all over Europe for 14 years before Barnum ever even heard of her. Known as ‘The Swedish Nightingale’, Lind was no lipsticked beauty, had mousy brown hair which she pinned up in a plain non-glamorous style, and for her concert performances preferred simple white dresses.
She referred to herself as having ‘a potato nose’, and she was known for her kindness and charity. Her friends included the great European classical composers Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Like Barnum, she came from a humble background, but unlike Barnum, as an adult she lived in a rarefied social atmosphere. She had never been to America.
P. T. Barnum, feeling that most society people saw him as little more than an uncultured boor, had begun to attend operas. Inevitably he learnt about this ‘Swedish Nightingale’ and the enormous crowds that packed her concerts. ‘ Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd,’ he would say. ‘Every crowd has a silver lining.’
What if he could persuade Lind to come to America? He’d make money, she’d make money, and he’d be praised for importing a slice of true European culture. ‘If I shoot at the moon, I may hit a star.’
Barnum’s offer to Lind was: $1,000 per concert (for 150 concerts in a year), plus expenses. Before accepting, Lind insisted in having the world’s best musicians, plus the famous German pianist, conductor and composer Julius Benedict as her accompanist. He held out for, and got, $25,000 for the tour.
All of the money had to be paid up front and deposited with a London bank. It was. Lind signed the contract.
She left Liverpool for New
York on the four-masted sailand-steam-engined White Star liner ‘Atlantic’ (built by Harland and Wolf of Belfast), and landed in New York on 1 September 1850. She was welcomed by a crowd of between 30,000 and 40,000 well-wishers.
The Jackman film more than implies that Barnum and Lind began a romantic relationship. That was far from the truth. She had little personal regard for him. She performed 93 concerts for him, earned $350,000, and gave most of it away — some to charities, the remainder to her free schools in Sweden. The tour was a colossal success.
Barnum pocketed at least half a million dollars from the Jenny Lind tour, which was a cultural as well as a financial success. But a close look at his career reveals that he conned people over the course of his life, and he exploited marginalised groups, playing upon his audiences’ racist prejudices to draw crowds.
No blacks were allowed into his American Museum, and yet blackface minstrels were among the entertainers for the 4,000 white visitors a day who poured into the building, paying 25 cents each for the privilege. Blackface minstrels were themselves white but who blackened their faces.
One of the exhibits was a man described as ‘a creature found in the wilds of Africa, supposed to be a mixture of the wild native African and the orang otang, a kind of man monkey.’ In fact he was African-American William Henry Johnson.
There were many instances of Barnum exhibiting none-white people in degrading ways: ‘Zip the Pinhead’, William Henry Johnson, from a family of former slaves, mentally challenged and put into a cage as the missing link between apes and humans; from Guyana an armless and legless man who could do tricks; Chang Yu Sing the Chinese Giant, over eight feet tall, and Chang and Eng, the original Siamese Twins.
A hoax called ‘ The Feejee Mermaid’ was a preserved monkey’s head sewn onto the preserved tail of a fish.
Barnum had discovered not so much how easy it was to deceive the public, but how much the public enjoyed being deceived. He was indefatigable. It was said of him that no single person — including the big thinkers of the 19th century, people like Emerson, Lincoln, Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne — had an influence like Phineas T. Barnum of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
As The History Hour put it: ‘ The truth is that Barnum was a great man and a visionary who shaped the country he loved.’
It was the same visionary who said, ‘I am indebted to the press of the United States for almost every dollar I possess.’
This article first appeared in Ireland’s Own Magazine
A CLOSE LOOK AT HIS CAREER REVEALS THAT HE CONNED PEOPLE OVER THE COURSE OF HIS LIFE, AND HE EXPLOITED MARGINALISED GROUPS