Showman who built a fortune on freaks and fraud
But why does a new Hollywood film about P.T. Barnum gloss over his outrageous cruelty and racism?
LEGENDARY showman P.T. Barnum earned many sobriquets during his 80 years. He was, variously, the man who ‘invented showbusiness’, the ‘Shakespeare of advertising’, the ‘Prince of Humbug’ and the ‘world’s greatest fraudster’.
He once exhibited the skeleton of a ‘mermaid’ (a monkey sewn on to a fish carcass), claimed to have President George Washington’s 160-year-old nanny in his ensemble, and routinely exploited black people, the mentally and physically disabled, and deformed — including conjoined twins and a child with dwarfism — in the name of profit.
Towards the end of his life and aware his health was failing, Barnum decided he wanted to read his own obituary in print before he died. The New York Sun obliged, running its front page ‘Great and Only Barnum’ tribute weeks before he passed away in 1891, following a stroke on stage (where else?). He had done it all, laying the foundations for the
business of showbusiness and how promoters and publicists would operate in the 20th century.
He invented the big top circus entertainment extravaganzas and launched the first superstar tour, with singer Jenny Lind, the ‘Swedish nightingale’.
Then, once Barnum had his fill of all the razzmatazz, he neatly reinvented himself as a campaigning politician, philanthropist and leader of the Temperance movement, promoting sobriety.
It’s quite a story, so no wonder Australian actor, Hugh Jackman, has been clamouring for years to make — and star in — an epic rags-to-riches romantic musical movie celebrating Barnum’s extraordinary life, The Greatest Showman, at cinemas now.
‘It is not exaggerating to say he ushered in modernday America,’ Jackman has said, ‘especially the idea that your talent, imagination and ability to work hard should be the only things that determine your success . . . So many things that I aspire to in my life are embodied in this one character.’
What a shame, then, that in his haste to pay homage to the man who ‘celebrated all humanity’, Jackman’s film has left so much out.
No mention of Barnum’s endless failed business ventures, his obscenely hasty second marriage, after his first wife’s death, to a girl 40 years his junior, and his horrific mistreatment of his animal exhibits?
What about his cynical and relentlessly commercial manipulation of hundreds of America’s vulnerable, abused misfits as money-making opportunities in his ‘freak’ shows? In The Greatest Showman, the emphasis is firmly on Barnum’s so-called empowering of these individuals, rather than exploitation.
One of Barnum’s star turns was Tom Thumb (real name, Charles Sherwood Stratton), who suffered from dwarfism and stood just 25in high. Barnum dressed him in military uniform and billed him as the ‘world’s smallest general’.
In the film, he is portrayed as a 22 year-old-man and not the five-year-old boy he really was when he was put to work and began drinking alcohol as part of his act, and barely seven when he started puffing on cigars.
And what of Joice Heth, the 80-year-old black slave whom Barnum bought — yes, bought — for £1,000 in 1835, who was rebranded as ‘George Washington’s 160-yearold nanny’, and became a travelling exhibit? She has been airbrushed out completely.
‘The most astonishing and interesting curiosity in the world’, trumpeted Barnum’s sensationalist publicity fliers about her at the time. ‘The first person who put clothes on the unconscious infant who was destined in after days to lead our heroic fathers to glory.’
Poor Joice was blind and partially paralysed, with just enough movement in her right arm to allow her to smoke a corn-cob pipe. She was also toothless. Barnum even boasted about how he’d plied her with drink and then pulled out her remaining teeth to make her look closer to 160.
Not surprisingly, she didn’t last long — barely a year, but long enough to recoup Barnum’s investment many times over.
He made still more money out of her death, charging the public 50 cents each to attend her public autopsy. The profits from ‘Washington’s Amazing 160-yearold Nanny’ allowed him to set up his infamous Barnum’s American Museum which became the cornerstone of his business empire.
THERE is also no mention in the film of black conjoined twins MillieChristine, or black brothers, Eko and Iko, all of whom had been kidnapped from their parents as children for their ‘freak show’ value, and later acquired by Barnum. Or the dreadlocked black males who were displayed in cages as ‘wild men’.
Which is a shame, because they all helped turn him into a multimillionaire and the ‘most widelyknown American that ever lived’.
Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Bethel, Connecticut — 70 miles from New York — in 1810. His father was a struggling tailor and shopkeeper who worked hard for little return.
From the start, young Phineas wanted to make a lot of money — fast. Over the years, he tried and failed with endless schemes — grocery stores, a lottery, a weekly newspaper, a fire extinguisher that could not put out a fire and a cargo ship that never took on a cargo.
Then in 1835, after moving to New York with his wife Charity, he came across Joice Heth.
It was a Eureka moment when he recognised the appeal to the American public of the unusual, the unexplained, the grotesque, the maimed, the disabled, the deformed and the downright fake.
‘Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public,’ he once said, famously.
He had found his calling and proved to be a genius at coming up with unbelievable cons and outrageous tricks. He instinctively knew better than anyone how to give audiences the mix of glitz, craziness and ghoulishness they craved. Some of his scams were fun and harmless — like that ‘genuine mermaid skeleton’, ostensibly caught by sailors near Fiji. Others caused gasps of disbelief and accusations of abuse and racism, even back then. There was a lavishly hirsute lady called Annie Jones with plaits to her waist and a lustrous curly beard that grew down to her breast bone; Jo-Jo, the ‘dog-faced boy’ who had to bark for his living, and Isaac W. Sprague, the ‘living skeleton’, who suffered from a form of muscular atrophy, standing 5ft 6in tall, and weighing only 44lb.
Perhaps, most upsetting was an African-American boy, William Henry Johnson, who suffered from microcephaly, which meant he had a tiny, sloping head.
His ‘act’ involved sitting in a cage, dressed in a furry suit, shrieking and rattling the bars and pretending to be the Wildman of Africa or a ‘man monkey’. At other times he was exhibited as Zip the Pinhead.
To be fair to Barnum, some acts — including conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, billed as The Siamese Double Boys — were thrilled to work with him and take his money.
Joined together by a band of flesh above their hips, Chang and Eng fought constantly — mostly over Chang’s rumbustious drinking — but were amazing acrobats, fantastic chess players and astonishingly strong.
They performed for four hours a day, six days a week for years, made a small fortune from their notoriety, married two sisters and