PROFILE OF P.T. BARNUM THE GREATEST SHOWMAN OR A COMPLETE HUCKSTER?
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.