How quickly fortunes reversed.
At 9:30 p.m. on the cool evening of September 9, 1913, John Duval Gluck Jr., dressed in his best suit and bowler, his mustache carefully groomed, basked in the excitement of a stadium full of his fellow New Yorkers. A light breeze carried the scent of salt water and stale food over the hundreds of onlookers packed into their seats. They whooped at what they saw before them: In the flesh, ambling around the arena, was something they had only heard about in stories and seen in picture books.
But just moments after this marvelous spectacle appeared, delighting and thrilling the audience, it all came crashing down. By 10:30 p.m., Gluck sat handcuffed and humiliated in the Coney Island Police Station.
It was New York City’s first bullfight and the headline event of Coney Island Mardi Gras week. George Tilyou, creator of the beloved Steeplechase Park, took a chance and hired the untested Gluck to publicize it. Though a novice publicity man, the thirty-five-year-old Gluck proved adept at sparking interest. By taking out newspaper ads alongside those for Broadway shows, promising “three ferocious bulls each performance,” and talking up the showdown to his press contacts, Gluck elevated the bullfight into one of the most talked-about draws of the festival. Running two times each day, almost all of the tickets had been sold by the time the bacchanal began. Although it remained true to the spirit of the more familiar Louisiana festival, Coney Island’s Mardi Gras was held not before Lent but after Labor Day, marking the end of summer days spent lying on the beach and eating hot dogs on Surf Avenue.
Gluck hoped this new gig might give him a fresh start. He’d followed his father into the family business at age twenty-four and dedicated himself to customs work, as vice president and then president of the customs brokerage firm John D. Gluck & Son. But a decade on, he yearned for escape. He’d spent his entire adult life immersed in the nuances of importing and exporting, excise tax and tariffs. Now he wanted his hours to go to something more meaningful. At such an exhilarating time, it seemed a shame to just watch the thrills of New York City from the outside, like the poor children he often saw on the sidewalk, faces pressed against the windows of Gotham’s proliferating shops, lobster palaces, and hotel lobbies. Gluck wanted inside.
He possessed a natural gift for storytelling and had accumulated plenty of business associates from his brokerage work, so he decided to try his hand at publicity. His well-connected friend, the restaurateur Paul Henkel, connected Gluck with the Mardi Gras opportunity. Henkel sold tickets to the event from his newly opened steakhouse, helping bring in business as he supported his friend’s efforts to move into a new line of work.
But now the day had finally arrived. Gluck joined the delighted crowd as New York’s eleventh annual Mardi Gras launched in the large ballroom of Luna Park with the crowning of the festival’s king and queen—tubby silent-film star John Bunny and actress Lillian Walker. They led a great parade atop their royal float, covered in garlands and incandescent bulbs, marching from Ocean Parkway and Neptune Avenue all the way to West Twenty-Second Street. Behind them traveled floats representing farflung countries while costumed mummers and brass bands rounded out the procession. Bringing in the rear was the Coney Island float—a giant electric-lighted lobster ridden by a bevy of young beauties. Gluck could barely make out the floats through the blizzard of confetti and paper streamers.
For Gluck and the other spectators, the dancing crowds and colors seemed like a kaleidoscopic dream. Among the audience that evening, Italian-born painter Joseph Stella described the “hectic mood the surging crowd and the revolving machines generating for the first time, not anguish and pain, but violent, dangerous pleasures.” The swirling lights and colossal rides he saw that night inspired his first masterpiece—the hallucinogenic oil painting Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras. Coney was a place where New Yorkers could forget everyday obligations and social codes—cuddling in the Barrel of Love and laughing as clowns zapped men with electric stingers and hidden air jets blew up girls’ skirts in the Blowhole Theater. One of the most popular attractions was a booth with fake china dishes that customers paid to destroy. “If you can’t break up your own home, break up ours!” read the sign. And at Mardi Gras, Coney Island got wilder than usual.
The crowd was especially lively thanks to acting mayor Adolph Kline’s decision to provide twenty-five all-night licenses to local cafes and hotels, supplying drinks to all who wanted them, as late, or early, as they liked. It fueled the horde, which made its way past Steeplechase’s Ferris wheel and mechanical racecourse toward the large makeshift arena Tilyou had installed for the headline event. The shop girls, newsboys, and other revelers, who had each paid fifty cents to as much as five dollars per ticket, filled the seats overlooking an emptied swim tank, its water replaced by a foot of sand. Gluck had arrived early to ensure all the performers were ready and to provide a few interviews to reporters. Was there any truth to the rumors the bullfight might be cancelled? What about the safety of the bull? they asked. Absolutely no truth to it, Gluck assured them. And there is no reason to worry about the safety of the bull—or the matador, for that matter. As he had explained many times already, this would be a “bloodless bullfight”—a demonstration, not a violent confrontation. He could barely hide his annoyance and urged the reporters to stop speaking with the meddling Humane Society folks, who had been ginning up protests about the event the past week. Just watch the show for yourself, he urged. As the crowd of seven hundred settled, Gluck found a place on the sideline with a view of the action. He lit a cigarette to dissipate some of his nervous excitement as his watch struck 9:30. He would show these skeptics.
A thick, muscular man strolled into the arena, wearing colorful traje de luces, complete with wide-brimmed hat, short jacket, and snug tights. The clothing, aided by the lightness of his smooth movements, gave him a deceptively slender appearance. The crowd knew this man: famed Spanish matador Enrique Robles, whom Gluck had trumpeted as a daredevil, brindled with scars, who had nearly lost an eye during a recent scrap with a bull. Spectators whispered to one another the story of how Robles had defeated his first bull at age fifteen—how he’d sat in the audience just as they did today, but at a crucial moment jumped over the barrier, pulled from his pocket several sharp banderillas, and planted them deep in the beast’s back. The bull threw him seventeen feet, and kicked off the teenager’s death-defying career. Now Robles had brought his first show in the United States to Brooklyn, and these spectators were there to witness history.
Several picadors on horseback galloped onto the sand following the matador, each dressed in a short velvet jacket, silk shirt, and velvet stockings with a pica lance used to test the bull’s strength and to signal Robles which side the creature favored. Over the loudspeaker, announcer Eugene Talrone described each step of the dance in excited tones, while assuring the onlookers this was only an exhibition. Robles and his retinue would not taunt, injure, or kill the bull but merely demonstrate what such a performance looked like in Spain. Gluck glanced at the reporters to ensure they jotted that last point. A pair of cowboys, ready to perform between Robles’s demonstrations, waited nearby.
The introductions over, a side gate opened and the real star of the evening appeared: a hulking Andalusian bull, brought from Spain on the same ship as Robles. It trudged around the ring, ignoring the riotous crowd that called to it. Few in the audience had ever seen such a creature in action, and their cheers validated Gluck’s promises that this would be an event New York would not soon forget.
Gluck drummed up a packed house, partly because bullfighting remained a divisive sport. The last high-profile show had taken place almost a decade earlier, at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. When the authorities had tried to halt the event, a mob of almost seven thousand stormed the arena, destroyed the furnishings, and burned it to the ground. A 1911 letter to the editor of the New York Times urged that the international community condemn bullfighting or “in some way lift the Spanish people to a more enlightened form of amusement.”
At least five men in the audience shared this distaste for the sport. They bought seats not for their own entertainment but because they distrusted Gluck’s assurances that this fight would be nonviolent. Three were New York veterinarians: Edward Leary, Thomas Childs, and Philip Finn. Next to them sat Thomas Archer, a representative of the Humane Society, and Thomas Freel, superintendent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).
They watched hawk-eyed as Robles delicately approached the bull. The creature moved slowly and seemed hardly the furious animal the crowd expected. The matador placed a tissue streamer between the animal’s horns. No reaction. The announcer attempted to add excitement to the proceedings, describing how fierce and dangerous the creature could get, but the somnambulant bull took little notice of the strutting matador. Sensing the dissipating energy, with a showman’s desire to give the people what they paid for, and flouting all of Gluck’s assurances and New York City law, Robles smacked the bull on the nose. Gluck’s throat tightened. The bull’s gloominess vanished. Snapping to furious attention, the animal charged. It ran at Robles, who dodged the beast. And then it kept running—straight at the crowd.
Without slowing down, the bull slammed headlong into the wooden barricade separating it from the audience. Members of the crowd shrieked and dove from their seats, frightened he would charge again or crash through the barricade altogether.
While many ran for their lives, the veterinarians jumped from their seats and sprinted toward the bull, which now lay on its side. Upon striking the arena wall, the creature had knocked itself unconscious. The crowd and the doctors had little to fear from the beast now. The reporters on the sidelines began gunning questions at Gluck, but he could only stare silently as Leary, Childs, and Finn examined the bull from hoof to horns and found its nose badly cut. An animal lover himself, Gluck pitied the poor bull—but more distressful at that moment was that the gore pouring from the creature’s face made Gluck’s “bloodless” claim a lie. That was not only embarrassing, it was illegal. The doctors signaled to the men from the SPCA and the Humane Society. In the past, the two organizations had traded barbs about each other’s effectiveness but set aside their differences for such a high-profile gathering. Freel and Archer worked together in arranging for the veterinarians to be on hand and—as Gluck was about to learn—in securing the involvement of several cops.
As if in slow motion, Gluck watched as uniformed police officers consulted with the animal-rights men and then moved on Robles’s six picadors and the two cowboys, corralling and cuffing the costumed figures. Next they went after announcer Talrone and, amidst his protests and in view of the reporters he had tried so hard to impress, handcuffed Gluck himself. The papers the next day would gleefully recount the event’s meltdown and arrest of its press agent, much to Gluck’s ire. Fleet-footed Robles managed to escape. Though reports differed whether the collision with the fence or the strike from the matador caused the bull’s bloody nose, the fracas provided the police with enough to charge the event’s organizers with breaking sections 181 and 185 of the New York City penal code—baiting animals and animal cruelty, respectively. The officers frog-marched the motley band of men to the Coney Island Police Station.
It was the last bullfight Coney Island hosted, bloodless or otherwise, and the organizers took a loss on the rest of the week’s shows. The police eventually charged Gluck and the others with fines and released them. But while seated in the jail cell, his carefully pressed suit now disheveled, the wild party continuing outside without him, Gluck faced the failure of his first serious attempt to break out of his life’s mundane routine.
He could have reasonably accepted defeat and returned to the tedious world of taxes and tariffs he understood. But the brief taste of the excited crowd, of having brought something to New York that it had never seen before, left Gluck intoxicated. And as it happened, he knew of another way to enchant New Yorkers and bring joy to his own humdrum life. He had been toying with an idea for a couple of years after reading about a change in Post Office Department policy and a need that it produced for a creative individual to step forward. It began as a frivolous thought, but as the months passed, Gluck grew convinced that he alone qualified for the assignment. It required a playful imagination but also an instinct for efficiency, a knack for attracting attention but for causes worthier than base entertainment, plenty of business connections and the ambition to make new ones. On all counts, Gluck felt certain he fit the bill.
That’s it, Gluck decided. This Christmas, he would bring Santa Claus to New York City.