On the Scene: Boldface Names in New York
Diamond Jim Brady (1856–1917)
A man-about-town and “good fellow” among politicos, chorus girls, and “hostesses,” James Buchanan Brady was incandescent in the electric lights along Broadway and in the popular restaurants, such as the Café de Paris, where he devoured double portions of every dish, from oysters to chocolates. His shirt front was blazoned with diamonds, and his shirt cuffs and fingers sparkled with rubies, sapphires, and amethysts. Diamond Jim cut a bulky figure on the dance floor while carefully wooing the customers who were crucial to his occupation as a salesman of brass fittings. “Bring your wife,” he insisted to the potential purchaser of a big order of fittings whom he invited to a gourmand’s feast. Wining and dining the couple (and perhaps leading the missus in the new turkey trot on the dance-floor), he relied on his gemstones to mesmerize the wife, to whom he presented a diamond or a sapphire. The sale was a certainty, and his commission amply covered the cost of the stone.
Nellie Bly (1864–1922)
Pioneering undercover journalism in 1886 made Elizabeth Jane Cochran—a.k.a. Nellie Bly—a sensation when she posed as a mental patient in a New York insane asylum and exposed its horrors in “Ten Days in a Madhouse” in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Two years later, she persuaded the World publisher to sponsor a true-life version of Jules Verne’s fictional Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly promised telegraphic dispatches chronicling her progress, and she set off from Hoboken on November 14, 1889, for a journey of nearly twenty-five thousand miles by steamship and rail. Starting eastward through Europe, she proceeded to the Middle East and North Africa, onward through Central and East Asia, across the Pacific, and home—all in seventy-eight days.
Bly’s exploits boosted sales of the World, whose newly appointed “Excursion Editor” maximized publicity. (Proclaimed one headline, “The Young Lady’s Undertaking, a Constant Subject of Comment.”) The famed French author Jules Verne met Nellie Bly in France and wrote in London’s Pall Mall Gazette, “the complete modesty of the young person . . . took the hearts of both myself and Mrs. Verne.” In the Gazette, he called Nellie “the prettiest young girl imaginable” but rued in private that she was “thin as a match.” Following the journey, Bly lectured and authored a book: Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days. The first edition of ten thousand copies sold out in the first month.
Jack London (1876–1916)
The New York cop who cracked a penniless teen on the head in 1895 never guessed that the target of his billy club was the future celebrity author whose adoring fans flocked to his Grand Central Exhibition Hall appearance in January 1906 to savor his message and swoon at his “bohemian” appearance. Best-selling writer, adventurer, sailor, reporter, lecturer, photographer, and California farmer, Jack London compared himself to a blazing comet. He shot to fame with the 1903 publication of The Call of the Wild, which launched his twenty-year, fifty-book career as the most popular author in America and the first US writer to earn $1 million (nearly $24 million today).
Readers thrilled to the story of a dog’s fight to survive in the subzero gold-rush North country where he suffers abuse by whip-handed masters and deadly rivalry by his fellow sled dogs but ultimately soars to freedom. Sales of the book justified London’s harrowing winter in the Klondike in the gold rush of 1896–97, the venture his last-ditch effort to strike it rich to avoid a future of deadening manual labor and starvation wages. Gleaning precious little gold that winter, London mined and milled the “gold” tales he heard in the mining camp cabins. His self-apprenticeship in creative writing in the late 1890s to early 1900s (including a thick stack of rejected manuscripts) led to published stories and, finally, acclaim and fame.
The public knew the celebrity author as a model of fitness, a world-traveling adventurer, a twice-married father of two daughters, and an outspoken critic of Gilded Age politics and economics. In print and at the speaker’s lectern, London expressed the political convictions formed in his youth, when he helped his impoverished family by earning pittances as a school janitor, a laundryman, a textile mill hand, and a cannery worker—each work stint convincing him that the industrial economic system was rigged against workers and that socialism was the only rational and humane political system.
Throughout his career, London counted on the powerful New York publishing industry to market his hundreds of short stories and best-selling novels, including White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, and The Star-Rover.
Lillian Russell (1860–1922)
Known fondly as “Airy Fairy Lillian,” Lillian Russell (née Helen Louise Leonard of Clinton, Iowa) took New York by storm as a musical theater songstress of superb talent and unparalleled beauty, “a radiant, full-bosomed girl with corn-colored hair” and a complexion denoting “that shade of pink which only the great masters are able to achieve on canvas.” (The term “peaches and cream complexion” began with her, and her stage name sprang from an effort to hide her first New York stage appearances from her mother.)
Helen’s mother was ambitious for her teenage daughter’s operatic career and so had beelined to Gotham in the hope that the orchestral conductor Leopold Damrosch might accept Helen as his protégé. Maestro Damrosch was interested, but fate intervened when Tony Pastor, a leading impresario of family-friendly “clean variety” vaudeville, happened to hear the young woman’s voice while visiting someone in a boarding house where mother and daughter were lodging. He introduced himself, invited the talented ingénue for a visit to his theater, and enlisted her to sing on his program—though without Mama’s knowledge. For weeks, the young singer sneaked off to the theater after her mother was asleep. To hide her identity, she plucked a first and a last name of actors on a theater bill, and voilà: Lillian Russell.
Soon the secret was out, and Russell was on her way to stardom in comic opera and musical theater. She excelled in demanding roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, including H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance, and for five years she starred onstage at Fields’ Music Hall. The “Airy Fairy” toured the Continent and excelled in French light opera. Recalled Albert Stevens Crockett, “People went to her operatic performances less to hear her sing than to look at her,” for her “hour-glass figure . . . was considered by connoisseurs of the female form . . . as divine.”
Suitors clamored for her favor. (“One admirer sent her an emerald a week for almost a year.”) Her first marriage, to the orchestra leader Harry Braham, produced a son, and three marriages followed. Russell’s most ardent admirer was Diamond Jim Brady. He was seen promenading with the “Airy Fairy” along the Waldorf’s “Peacock Alley,” and he presented her with a bicycle bejeweled by Tiffany. She was sometimes seen cycling in Central Park.
Buffalo Bill (1846–1917)
He was William Frederick Cody as a Pony Express rider at fourteen, a Union soldier in the Civil War, and an army scout in the Indian Wars, but he became Buffalo Bill when a cheap dime novel furnished the name that made him a legend.
Intrigued about the play adapted from the novel, Cody ventured to New York City to see Buffalo Bill: “I was curious to see how I would look when represented by some one else, and of course I was present on the opening night.” Months later, the novel’s author, Ned Buntline, persuaded Cody to take the title role of Buffalo Bill onstage. The 1870s saw theatergoers avid for plays about the American frontier, and for months, Buffalo Bill was staged in the Northeast and Midwest; all the while Cody honed his skills before live audiences. He soon formed a company called the Buffalo Bill Combination and saw his popularity and profits soar—to $50,000 in 1882 ($250,000 today).
The stage was set for a quantum leap to the outdoor spectacle known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It featured “guns, knives, whips, hats, boots, and ropes,” as one newspaper quipped, “the paraphernalia of frontier life.” Buffalo Bill’s signature costume included buckskin suits trimmed in silver and velvet and a broad-brimmed hat. The show included a popular theatrical scalping of an Indian named Yellow Hair, casting Buffalo Bill as the symbolic avenger of the late Colonel George Custer, who was killed in “Custer’s Last Stand” at the infamous Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. (The symbolic scalping included a real scalp.)
A huge attraction of the show was the sharpshooting of Annie Oakley. At four feet, eleven inches in height, Miss Oakley (née Phoebe Ann Moses) proved her extraordinary marksmanship in 1884 when she aimed her .22-caliber rifle, fired at 1,000 airborne glass balls, and shattered 943 of them. Wild West Show audiences soon thrilled to the sight of glass balls popping in the air as the petite Annie Oakley showed her firepower. By 1886, Cody’s Show was complete, including the famous Lakota Indian chief Sitting Bull and a cadre of warrior braves. Audiences saw horseback reenactments of frontier battles between Indians and whites—the major message being the settlement of the West through defeat and domestication of the natives.
It is unclear whether twelve-year-old Clarence Day Jr. absorbed that message when his father, a Wall Street railroad financier, treated him to lunch at Delmonico’s and an afternoon at the show. “The Wild West spread out before us,” he recalled, “dust, horses, and all.” The live-animal cattle drives thrilled him, as did the lariats, the brass band, the stagecoach attacked by Indians, and “the wonderful marksmanship of riders who hit glass balls . . . tossed into the air and shot at with careless ease as the horsemen dashed by.” Young Clarence was inspired to become a cowboy, only to hear his father retort that cowboys were nothing but tramps. “Put your cap on straight,” he ordered. “I am trying to bring you up to be a civilized man.”
Front-Page Girls
In 1901, Ladies’ Home Journal posed the question, “Is the Newspaper Office the place for a Girl?” The query was moot because “front-page girls” had made their mark in journalism for over a quarter century. Between 1870 and 1899, the number of US daily newspapers quadrupled, and although the “women’s pages” devoted to home and hearth continued to be a female staple, a significant number of newspaperwomen were gathering and reporting the news. “Nothing must escape,” advised one seasoned newspaperwoman. “Every class in the community must be looked after, from the merchant prince to the rag-picker.” (In 1888, the Journalist, a trade periodical, estimated that two hundred women wrote or edited newspaper copy in New York City alone, and by 1905, the textbook Practical Journalism included a chapter on “women in newspaper work.”)
Henry James caricatured the modern woman journalist in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), his disapproval flaring in every line about the brash, blustering reporter Henrietta Stackpole, who barges into complicated lives whose nuances escape her. (“Do appoint a meeting as quickly as you can,” the frenetic Henrietta writes to a friend. “You know everything interests me and I wish to see as much as possible of the inner life.”) Countering James was Frances Willard, the nationally known, authoritative Women’s Christian Temperance Society leader whose 1899 compendium, Occupations for Women, beckoned women of “aliveness” to the journalist’s job site: “The girls we are talking about are those who go into the newspaper office and have regular desks there, ‘take assignments,’ and go out and attend to them.” They work “side by side” with their male counterparts.
The “genuine” reporter, Willard emphasized, is “an honest worker” without “make believe” or an inflated ego. The income, she admitted, is modest, the hours long and irregular, and the work “never done,” for the newspaper “is printed every day, and sometimes several times a day.” To qualify, the aspirant must “write well” with “clearness and conciseness.” She must be well read, knowledgeable about current events, and alert for “something fresh and new” to chronicle “in white heat.” Her tears must not flow nor her chin tremble when her editor strikes his blue pencil through her most eloquent prose. For those who qualify, newspaper reporting “catches and holds the enthusiasm of the workers as nothing else does.”
If few of the Gilded Age newspaperwomen’s names stand out in the slurry of history, their careers merit notice. Nellie Bly’s madcap world tour made her famous; all the while her journalist sisterhood covered politics, the military, factory conditions, and environmental issues, among other topics. Their “beats” ranged from San Francisco to Chicago to New Orleans, Buffalo, and New York City. The pioneers’ honor roll includes Sallie Joy White, Adeline E. Knapp, Mary Kraut, Grace Sheldon, Eliza Heaton Putnam, Winifred Black, Nixola Greeley-Smith, Ada Patterson, and many others.
One name prevails among the “front-page girls”: Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), who worked tirelessly to alert the public to an epidemic of unpunished murders, specifically, the lynching of black American citizens by white American citizens. The Mississippi-born, African American Wells (Wells-Barnett upon marriage) left school teaching for journalism in Memphis in the post–Civil War years; in Memphis, her exposé of lynching was published in the Free Speech and Headlight, a black newspaper in which she was a partner. Her article on the root cause of lynching (whites’ resentment of blacks’ economic success) so inflamed white Memphis that her newspaper office was trashed and Wells’s life threatened. She fled to New York City and continued lifelong to investigate, gather data, and publish her findings on lynching nationwide. Wells reported for T. Thomas Fortune’s New York Age and the Chicago Conservator, both robust black newspapers. Her work was widely syndicated, and she is credited as a major figure in US civil rights history. Her writings include Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record (1895), and Lynch Law in America (1900).