Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [912]
For all this, there was nothing like a whiff of forbidden sensuality to sell tickets, and the boundary between Broadway and the Tenderloin proved a porous one. A series of ravishing overseas visitors such as Lily Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt took to the boards, and the arrival of glamorous Lillian Russell turned out to be a classic case of downtown infiltrating uptown.
Russell was born Helen Louise Leonard in Clinton, Iowa, in 1861. At age two she was taken to Chicago by her father, a newspaperman, and her mother, Cynthia Leonard, a strong-willed feminist and crusader for women’s rights, and placed in the Convent of Sacred Heart for eight years; she first studied music in church choirs. In 1877 Helen’s mother, eager to work with the suffrage and socialist movements, took her seventeenyear-old daughter with her to New York. Intending Helen for an opera career, Leonard placed her with famed teacher Leopold Damrosch and then plunged into feminist work: in 1888 she would become the first woman to run for mayor of New York City. Helen, equally strong willed, abandoned her lessons and joined a chorus, where she caught the eye and ear of Tony Pastor. The variety entrepreneur assigned her a new name and launched her career with a major role in The Pie-rats of Penyan, a vaudeville burlesque of uptown operettas.
Russell soon shifted from satire to the real thing, landing a role in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. In short order the silvery-voiced singer had become the Casino’s resident light opera prima donna and was pulling down a salary on a par with those of steel executives and Wall Street brokers. Sexually magnetic—her 165 pounds corseted into the requisite hourglass figure—Russell became one of the most lusted after women in America, with tycoons pleading to drink champagne from her slippers, yet all the while she maintained a reasonably respectable cachet.
The genteel theater, for all its reservations about actors, public sensuality, and the commercialization of sex, itself dabbled in the “leg-itimate” business (as one downtown burlesque show chortled). Its marketing of personalities, moreover, was directly tied in with the marketing of commodities. The daily doings of famous actresses were chronicled in the women’s magazines, and their choice of clothes, jewelry, and millinery began to set national trends. Women adopted their coiffures and tried to imitate their figures (for a time Bernhardt’s “spiral silhouette” banished the bustle). Makeup moved out of theatrical dressing rooms into respectable parlors, beauty shops became almost as common as barbershops, and photographs of Lily Langtry’s flawless complexion soon graced ads for Pear’s soap.
PULITZER’S WORLD
Manhattan and Coney islands were incubating a new mass commercial culture, but their assorted entertainment zones were strung out over such distances that it was hard for even the most diligent pedestrian to grasp the new phenomenon as a whole. There was one source, however, that even armchair investigators could easily consult and master: Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, which was itself a prize example of the new order.
After the Gvil War Pulitzer had moved to St. Louis, worked as a reporter for a German-language paper, got into politics, practiced law, formed the Post and Dispatch, and become a successful publisher. By 1883 he was ready to tackle New York again, but the city’s field of metropolitan dailies was a crowded one, filled with such potent competitors as Dana’s Sun, Bennett Junior’s Herald, George Jones’s New York Times, and Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune—just among the morning papers.
There was also the World, once the organ of Swallowtail Democrats, now Jay Gould’s plaything. Deep in the red, it nevertheless had an Associated Press franchise and a Democratic lineage in a Democratic town, so Pulitzer bought it from the hardbargaining financier for an outrageous $346,000, payable in installments. Pulitzer had his foothold in Manhattan,