The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb - Melanie Benjamin [168]
After spending almost three years upon the Mississippi—her travels were interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War—Vinnie returned home to Middleborough. A year or so passed before, somehow, P. T. Barnum “heard” of her, and sent an agent to interview her. Her parents were skeptical; they did not wish to have their daughter caught up in any of Barnum’s infamous “humbugs.” But somehow, Vinnie and Barnum persuaded her parents to let her go, and it was only a matter of weeks before Vinnie was capturing the hearts of the New York press with her stately levees; she was heralded by all as the “Little Queen of Beauty.”
It made sense—not only to Barnum but probably to Vinnie herself—that the Little Queen of Beauty should marry a King, and the perfect candidate happened to be close at hand. Charles Stratton—Barnum’s great discovery and greater friend—made her acquaintance; Barnum wasted no time in fanning the flames of love and most important, the press, and in February of 1863, the two were married.
Their marriage was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana; every paper in the land covered it, relegating the Civil War, for a few days at least, to the back pages. From that point on, Vinnie and Charles, along with her sister Minnie and another little person, Commodore Nutt, performed as the most famous quartet in the world. They traveled the globe; they met Brigham Young, every president in the White House, Queen Victoria; they were among the first passengers on the new Union Pacific railroad linking the country and among the very first Americans of any size to travel to the new colony of Australia.
In 1878, Vinnie’s beloved sister Minnie died in childbirth. Commodore Nutt had already retired from their troupe, and suddenly the most famous quartet in the world stumbled upon hard times. Vinnie and Charles continued to perform, but tastes were changing; the country was more sophisticated, and their venues were becoming smaller. Hard-up financially—for they had believed they had to live the life their society friends could more easily afford—they even traveled with Barnum’s great circus for a season, performing as part of the sideshow.
In 1883, Vinnie and Charles were touring once more, staying at the Newhall House in Milwaukee when that hotel caught fire, resulting in one of the worst hotel tragedies in history; Charles apparently never recovered from the shock of that experience and died only six months later. Retreating to her childhood home, her finances in ruin, Lavinia was on the verge of retiring when Barnum encouraged her to keep going, to keep appearing before the public.
Of course, she did. In 1885 she remarried—to another little person, Count Primo Magri of Italy—and formed the Lilliputian Opera Company. She continued to tour, even appearing in vaudeville and early silent pictures; ever short of funds, the couple opened up a roadside stand near their home called “Primo’s Pastime,” where they entertained anyone who would stop and buy a souvenir. They also spent a sad couple of summers as part of the “Midget City, Dreamland” exhibit at Coney Island.
In researching Lavinia’s life, the challenge was always to separate the humbug from the truth. P. T. Barnum looms large over everything written about her. Many articles and even a book or two, written not only at the time but much later, appear to accept as fact everything that Barnum ever put forth, including the blatant falsehood that Vinnie and Charles were the parents of a daughter who died in infancy.
Even Lavinia’s own writings left much to the imagination. She had hopes of publishing an autobiography in her lifetime, but didn’t; several incomplete chapters were discovered after her death, however, and edited and published by A. H. Saxon in 1979. She also published a couple of essays in the New York Tribune Sunday Magazine in 1906 that purported to be part of her autobiography. But there is so much missing from all of these pages! She never mentions details of the death of her sister, for