The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Read online

  The Electric Tower thrilled Mabel. It was, she wrote, “the highest and finest note of all.” The architect, New Yorker John G. Howard, would have been pleased. He had studded the small skyscraper with thousands of lights, and, inside the grillwork, placed an elevator that rose and fell like a moving jewel. At the very top of the building, he had planted a gilded sculpture, the Goddess of Light, symbolizing the triumphant harnessing of the natural world. Visitors like Mabel probably hoped the goddess was harnessed herself, for, made of zinc and iron and weighing more than one and a half tons, she would fracture more than herself in a tumble.

  Mabel was too proper a Victorian to notice, or too proper to say she noticed, the form of the tower. Other observers were not so shy. The tall, steel-ribbed structure that dominated the grounds, and the waterfall that gushed from it, were suggestive. As one fairgoer put it, “The shaft of the electric tower . . . makes a tender nuptial with the sky and seems to palpitate with beautiful life.” The tower’s designer referred to it as “the triumph of man’s achievement.”

  If Mabel entertained such notions about the fair’s magnificent erection, she never let on. She was nothing but circumspect, in fact, as she toured the grounds and marveled at the grand exhibit halls, with names familiar by now to the fairgoing public: Manufactures and Liberal Arts, Mines, Agriculture, and Electricity. She took notes on the big guns, bulky machines, and mighty engines. She weighed herself on a gigantic set of scales and “tipped the balance” at 119¼ pounds. She also toured state and country exhibits, and reveled in the fair’s oddities: a revolving globe made entirely of seeds, a big bear made out of raisins, an elephant constructed of nuts, and a California mission sporting lemon and orange walls. Sculptors had been hard at work, too, crafting a triumphal arch from soap, and the Minnesota capitol building out of 1,600 pounds of chilled butter. Louisiana exhibitors had restrained themselves—they left one of their star attractions, a 122-pound sweet potato, intact.

  Being of modest means, Mabel Barnes and Abby Hale brought box lunches and sat to eat on benches or grassy banks. Likely they turned their backs to the crowds—respectable women usually found it embarrassing to eat in public. At other times, the two women sampled the free offerings in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. They tasted “some mighty good doughnuts fried in ‘Cottolene’”—beef tallow and cottonseed oil—and tried a tablet of coffee.12

  It wasn’t until July that Mabel stayed late enough to see the biggest sensation of the fair—the Illumination. Just as the colors of the city began to fade, Mabel made her way to the Triumphal Bridge, at the southern entrance. Nearby, in the Esplanade, a band trumpeted a few patriotic airs and then stopped. What took place next, Mabel said, happened before she realized it. Pinpricks of red—filaments in thousands and thousands of tiny incandescent bulbs—began to outline the minarets and domes and arches. The Electric Tower itself began to glow, the teacher said, “like the first flush which a church spire catches from the dawn.” The light expanded until it outlined every edge with a daylight yellow.

  Electrical engineer Henry Rustin had produced this magic by reducing the unit of light to eight candlepower. Lights at previous expositions had been concentrated and “blinded the eye.” Thanks to the marvels of a gigantic rheostat, though, the Pan-American’s lighting seemed to echo the slow progress of the sun. Mabel didn’t acknowledge the cynics who said the Illumination was a technical necessity—a sudden flip of a switch and a surge of voltage, they declared, would burst the tiny bulbs. She was simply happy to revel in the way that modern science had beaten back the night.13

  The East Esplanade at night. A bandstand attracts crowds in the foreground; the Ethnology Building stands behind it.

  V

  WHAT MABEL MISSED

  Mabel Barnes was a dedicated teacher, and a committed student of the Pan-American Exposition. But she was also a young woman, closer to girlhood than middle age, which is likely why, out of all the sights that pleased her, none matched the Midway. She loved the disorder: the howls and shrieks, the cymbals and brass, the fun houses, the rides, the animals, the mix of people. The Midway offered the same commentary on race and civilization as the formal fair, but instead of glass cases and exhibit stands, it presented human acts. Advertised as silly, strange, and outrageous, the Midway featured Mexicans, Africans, Hawaiians, Japanese, and Filipinos. Indians took part in a government-sponsored Congress of forty-five tribes; African Americans, in an “Old Plantation,” performed the “good old days” before the Civil War.

  Chicago’s White City had sported America’s first midway. The Midway Plaisance, as it was called, received mixed reviews—it was too raucous, too lurid, with too much flesh. People were happily aghast. Fairgoers, it seems, wanted to gape and be titillated. Buffalo officials tried to say no to a midway like Chicago’s—they didn’t want a “naughty” concourse where women blushed and children grew curious.

  Ultimately, though, the dancing girls came: the hootchee-kootchees, the señoritas from Mexico, the hula-hula women of Hawaii, and the Maori “hip-wrigglers.”

  Buffalo’s Exposition Company sold a million dollars’ worth of concessions on the mile-long avenue of amusements. They didn’t provide an engineering trick like Chicago’s Ferris Wheel, but they did offer a Captive Balloon ride and an Aeriocycle, a giant seesaw that sent thrill-seekers 275 feet up in the air. Fair directors tried to distinguish themselves from Chicago with a new name for the concourse, considering “Queerway,” “Climax Way,” and “Fort Freak.” Ultimately, they kept things simple. Some people referred to the entertainment area as the Lane of Laughter, but most just called it “The Midway.”

  The North Midway. The Aeriocycle (still under construction) can be seen on the right.

  As big a fan as she was, Mabel Barnes didn’t like all of the acts on the Midway. She thought the Streets of Venice were “ramshackle,” and she was “startled” by some of the dancing women. But she couldn’t give it up. At the end of a fairgoing day, hot and nearly worn out with walking, the schoolteacher would enter the wide amusement lane and “fly the goose” once again. By nighttime, the concourse was littered with orange peels and popcorn, the air smelled like stale beer, and empty lunchboxes lay scattered everywhere, like small, foundered fleets. None of this bothered Mabel. She took it all in, and breathed deeply.14

  The Buffalo teacher missed a few things on the Midway, though. Once in a while she saw actors slip out of character, but she was unaware of other, bigger pretenders. She saw nothing odd about “Wenona the Sioux maiden,” the expert sharpshooter of the Indian Congress. Also known as an Indian princess, Wenona was a favorite guest of Buffalo’s society women. They didn’t realize that thirty-year-old Wenona had actually been born Lillian Frances Smith to a white couple from Massachusetts. Mabel Barnes was also captivated by the “little” Filipinos and loved riding their water buffalos. It was left to others to point out that two musicians in the village were undercover soldiers, planning ways to fight for their country against the United States.

  Mabel Barnes missed a lot of things at Bostock’s animal show, too, although she could hardly be faulted—almost no one knew. Mabel saw elephant, lion, and jaguar acts; watched a snake charmer; and saw a clown perform with trick dogs. She saw nothing that disturbed her there. It was a different fairgoer who noticed a lion’s blood-stained fur, and heard yelps of pain. And at the end of June, on her third visit to the fair, the teacher paid fifteen cents to enter Chiquita’s reception room, where she watched the sweet-faced, dark-eyed performer play a miniature piano. She then met the Cuban Doll in person, and shook her hand. Mabel was enchanted and took home the performer’s calling card. She had no clue that the Exposition star was actually Mexican. And she had no idea what Chiquita endured, behind the scenes and after hours, at the hands of Frank Bostock.15

  2.

  Summer in the City

  I

  THE MENAGERIST

  Just thirty-five years old in 1901, Frank Bostock looked the part of a ringmaster
. Often in uniform, he stood six feet tall. His eyes sat small and high in his white face and he wore his mustache in a wire-like swirl. In 1899, when he had applied in person to bring a wild-animal show to Rainbow City, Bostock touted his experience and made big promises. He boasted about his background, which included growing up in a family of animal trainers in England and marrying into the Wombwell family, owners of a world-famous zoo. He had successfully shown his trained animals in Europe, he said, and had staged several exhibits in the United States. Now, he told officials, he would bring a veritable jungle to the Pan-American Exposition. On a large plot of land, he would plant trees and bushes and bring up to 150 lions to “roam around it at their will.”

  As intrigued as they might have been, Buffalo directors told him to wait. Carl Hagenbeck of Germany, the world’s best-known animal trainer, also wanted a place on the Pan-American Midway, and they could offer only one contract. Some directors thought that the experienced German would do a better show.1

  Bostock needed the job—badly. He had had success with his animal zoos in the United States but hadn’t broken through to the big time. And it is not clear whether he could go back to Britain. His brother ran a major animal show in Scotland and would compete with him. Furthermore, he had left London under a shadow. In the early winter of 1893, British papers reported that Bostock’s wife, Susannah, had charged him with theft and cruelty. She alleged that he had sometimes left her and their children with no food, and that he had struck her. To top things off, she said, he had recently abandoned the family, departing for Europe with the eighteen-year-old daughter of a friend.

  Bostock answered the charges. He admitted he had left with the girl, and that he had taken some jewelry and silverplate belonging to his wife, but “afterwards he had sorted them out.” As for the hitting, he had indeed struck his wife, “because she was drunk, but he was extremely sorry and made it up with her.” When Susannah confessed to drinking, the charges against the menagerist were dropped.2

  Frank Charles Bostock.

  After reuniting with his wife and children, Bostock traveled to the United States and started business anew. Stories of his domestic problems did not travel with him; nor did the charges of animal cruelty that occasionally appeared in British police records. Instead, the showman disseminated press accounts that stressed his kindness. There wasn’t even much of a fuss when, in the spring of 1900, a reporter who went to see Bostock’s lion school in Baltimore discovered signs of rough treatment. He noted that it seemed “necessary to lash [the young lions] severely,” and that Bostock’s trainers used a long whip with “stings.” The reporter also saw that obstinate cubs went without food if they balked at posing for tableaux, and they were only willing to jump through a hoop of fire if they were first cornered, then frightened, by the sound of a gun.

  Even if they had read this account, members of the public might not have been bothered. Such training might have seemed more like discipline than cruelty. In Buffalo, the one person who might have been alarmed was Buffalo’s mayor, Conrad Diehl. Throughout his public life, the physician not only had championed the needs of sick and poor people but also called attention to the suffering of animals, particularly city dogs. Mayor Diehl, however, had little to do with the hiring of Midway acts.

  The choice of a wild-animal show for the Pan-American fair dragged on. Through the summer and fall of 1900, Director of Concessions Frederick Taylor held meetings about Hagenbeck and Bostock behind closed doors, and he refused to comment. Meanwhile, Bostock pumped up the charm. He reappeared in the Queen City twice in 1900, bringing with him enticements such as Chiquita and suggesting new performances. He proposed building a spectacular circular lion cage and acting out “Daniel in the Lion’s Den.” He himself would play Daniel. The Pan-American Exposition, he predicted, would be “the largest ever held in Europe or America.”3

  After he got the job, Bostock applied the same marketing skills to his show that he did to selling himself. His wild-animal arena was one of the first concessions to open in Buffalo in May, and his press agent announced it as the “star feature” of the Exposition. Mirroring the themes of human conquest that the fair trumpeted elsewhere on the grounds, the agent claimed that the Animal King ruled over a vast domain. He had conquered the natural world to assemble his collection, having invaded the “jungles of Africa, the forests of India and the deserts of Arabia and Egypt.” He had gone on to “ransack” ice floes and frozen seas. Not surprisingly, he not only had triumphed over other “animal subjugators,” but he also had overpowered indigenous peoples wherever he went: “The savage natives of the globe’s remotest corners and most inaccessible recesses know of the white man who rules the most ferocious beasts into absolute submission and obedience by some mystic power they cannot understand.”

  Bostock’s trained animals seemed the perfect match for the Exposition’s pronouncements about race. One of Bostock’s monkeys was linked to American foreign policy in Southeast Asia. Mike, a small orangutan from the Philippines, couldn’t comment on the war in the Philippines, noted a bystander, but “he is of peculiar interest because, in some respects, he resembles the creatures we are daily filling with Maxim bullets and shells. . . .” The showman’s celebrated chimpanzee, Esau, was alleged to be “the missing link” and a member of a group of ape-men recently discovered in Uganda.

  Press offices admitted that Bostock’s charming publicity agent, Captain Jack Maitland, had them cowed. Maitland’s releases, one reporter admitted, were often sent directly to the composing room. “It doesn’t make a bit of difference what the press agent writes about or how much truth there is in it,” he said, “so long as the matter is published and the name of his employer or his show appears.” When business becomes dull, he added, “it is positively wonderful to see how the captain’s imagination comes to the rescue. The next day the papers contain a startling story of a fight between lions or an animal getting loose with the narrow escape of the employees. An inquisitive public flocks to see the ferocious beasts and the victory of the captain is complete.”

  Bostock added to his mystique by staying behind the scenes. When he did make an appearance, it was rarely without an animal on his lap, and usually in the company of his bodyguard, a six-foot-tall former major in the Bombay infantry. Turbaned, and of a “mighty athletic build,” the guard had reportedly hunted and killed up to a hundred tigers.4

  As popular as his show proved to be in Rainbow City, the Animal King had his troubles. At the end of June, a Bostock trainer, Herman Weeden, suffered a nervous breakdown. Weeden had returned to work after a tiger attack—too soon, it turned out. He began hallucinating. One evening he imagined that he was Bostock himself, and, wielding an imaginary whip, flew around his quarters in a frenzy, trying to subdue phantom animals. “Look,” he shouted, “I am the animal king. I am the monarch of the brute world.” Bostock, endeavoring to placate Weeden until an ambulance arrived, played the part of a lion, crouching on all fours.

  Animals line up in front of Bostock’s arena. The large elephant in the center is likely Big Liz, who befriended Jumbo II.

  Although Frank Bostock could manage the temporary loss of one of his trainers, he wasn’t so sure whether he could get along without his Cuban Doll. Sometime in late June, one of his employees reported to him that Chiquita had a growing attachment to Tony Woeckener, a young cornet player in her show. Bostock was enraged. Chiquita, he felt, owed him unwavering loyalty. He had befriended her, supported her, managed her, taken her into his home. He had provided her with jewels, dresses, furs, tiny carriages with tiny horses, and even a car. He had made a lot of money with her, to be sure. But how dare she? The Animal King was nothing if not resourceful. It would take only a few small lies and, if that didn’t work, a lock and key.5

  II

  THE CUBAN ATOM

  The journey that had brought Chiquita to the Pan-American Exposition and placed her under the strong arm of Frank Bostock spanned at least three countries. Before she became the Doll Lady,
or the Cuban Doll, or even Chiquita, she was Espiridiona Cenda, born in Guadalajara, Mexico, around 1878. We do not know whether her birth was attended by any cries of surprise, but it was reported that when she entered the world, she was eight inches long, three inches wide, and, when doubled up, the size of “a large grape.” More impressive than her size, apparently, was her proportionality. “Nearly all midgets have some deformity,” the Buffalo press would explain, “something freakish in their appearance, but this little woman is one of the very rare exceptions.” As her managers would claim, she was “a perfect living, breathing doll.”

  Alice Cenda, as she was known offstage, attended school in Mexico and trained in singing and dancing. When she was about fifteen, her father hired a manager to exhibit her to the public, and she toured widely in the country, and later throughout Cuba. Sensing profits in using her as an emblem of the island, one of her managers reinvented her as Cuban and brought her to New York. Two brothers came with her.

  In New York, in 1895, Frank Bostock—who later would say he found her as a “Mexican peasant”—took over her contract. He paid her $80 per month for her performances (and held onto her money) and brought in, by one account, $1,000 per week. By 1900, she had become one of Bostock’s main attractions and toured in the United States and Europe. Like so many other Little People in show business at the time, she met heads of state and royalty.6