Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (13 page)

Among freaks it is axiomatic that Coney Island audiences are the most inhuman, but Miss Barnell has found that a Surf Avenue dime museum on a Saturday night is peaceful compared with a moving-picture studio at any time. She talks bitterly about her experiences in Hollywood, where she has been used in a number of horror and circus pictures. Her most important role was in ‘Freaks,’ a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer study of sideshow life filmed in 1932. It was probably the most frightening picture ever made. In it, among other things, a beautiful trapeze girl of a European circus permits a dwarf to fall in love with her in order to obtain some money he has inherited. At their wedding feast, with a fantastic group of sideshow people around the table, she gets drunk and lets slip the fact that she despises the dwarf. A few nights later, during a terrible storm when the troupe is on the road, the freaks climb into her private wagon and mutilate her, turning
her
into a freak. Miss Barnell thinks this picture was an insult to all freaks everywhere and is sorry she acted in it. When it was finished, she swore she would never again work in Hollywood.

Her self-esteem suffers least of all when she is working in circuses, where sideshow class distinctions are rigidly observed. She herself divides freaks into three classes: born freaks, made freaks, and two-timers. Born freaks are the aristocrats of the sideshow world. She, of course, is a member of this class. So are Siamese twins, pinheads, fat girls, dwarfs, midgets, giants, living skeletons,
and
men with skulls on which rocks can be broken. Made freaks include tattooed people, sword-swallowers, snake charmers, and glass-eaters. Normal people who obtain sideshow engagements because of past glory or notoriety are two-timers to her. Examples are reformed criminals, old movie stars, and retired athletes like Jack Johnson, the old prizefighter, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, the old ballplayer, both of whom starred for a while on the dime museum circuit. Because Johnson wears a beret and because she has heard that he sips beer through a straw, she particularly dislikes him. ‘To the general public, old Jack Johnson may be a freak,’ she says, ‘but to a freak, he ain’t a freak.’ Paradoxically, she bears no animosity toward fake bearded ladies. They amuse her. She was greatly amused when Frances Murphy, the Gorilla Lady in the ‘Strange As It Seems’ sideshow at the New York World’s Fair in 1940, got into an altercation with a truck-driver and was exposed as a male. ‘If any man is fool enough to be a bearded lady,’ she says, ‘it’s all right with me.’

Some of Miss Barnell’s genuine but less gifted colleagues are inclined to think that she is haughty, but she feels that a woman with a beard more than a foot long has a right to be haughty. She undoubtedly does have the most flamboyant female beard in American sideshow history. The beard of Joséphine Boisdechêne, a native of Switzerland and one of P. T. Barnum’s most lucrative freaks, was only eight inches long, and she had no mustache. She did, however, have a bearded son – Albert, billed as ‘Esau, the Hairy Boy’ – who helped make up for this shortcoming. Grace Gilbert, who came from Kalkaska, Michigan, and spent most of her professional life in Barnum & Bailey’s Circus, had a lush beard, but it was only six inches long. Miss Gilbert used peroxide and was billed as ‘Princess Gracie, the Girl with the Golden Whiskers.’ Records of non-professional female beards are scarce. Margaret of Parma, Regent of the Netherlands from 1559 to 1567, had a ‘coarse, bushy beard.’ She was proud of it, believing it gave her a regal appearance, and she required court physicians to mix tonics for it. Charles XII of Sweden had a bearded female grenadier in his army, a reputedly beautiful amazon, who was captured by the Russians in the battle of Poltava in 1709 and subsequently taken to St Petersburg and
presented
to the Czar, at whose court she was popular for several years. There was a Spanish nun called St Paula the Bearded, who grew a miraculous beard, according to sacred history. She was being pursued one night by a man with evil intent when hair suddenly sprouted from her chin. She turned and confronted the man and he fled. No reliable statistics on the length of these beards have come down to us.

Most freaks are miserable in the company of non-freaks, but unless she is sunk in one of the morose spells she suffers from occasionally, Miss Barnell welcomes the opportunity to go out among ordinary people. One morning in the winter of 1940 Cole Porter went to her dressing room at Hubert’s and asked her to go with him to a cocktail party Monty Woolley was giving at the Ritz-Carlton. Porter told her that Woolley was a student of beards, that he was known as The Beard by his friends, and that he had always wanted to meet a bearded lady. ‘I’ll have to ask my old man,’ Miss Barnell said. O’Boyle told her to go ahead and enjoy herself. Porter offered to pay for the time she would lose at the museum. ‘Well, I tell you,’ she said, ‘I and you and Mr Woolley are all in show business, and if this party is for members of the profession, I won’t charge a cent.’ Porter said non-professionals would be present, so she set a fee of eight dollars. Late that afternoon he picked her up at her house. She had changed into a rhinestone-spangled gown. In the Ritz-Carlton elevator she took off the scarf she was wearing around her beard, astonishing the other passengers. There were more than a hundred stage and society people at the party, and Porter introduced her to most of them. Woolley, who got quite interested in her, asked her to have a drink. She hesitated and then accepted a glass of sherry, remarking that it was her first drink in nine years. ‘I like to see people enjoying theirselves,’ she said after finishing the sherry. ‘There’s too confounded much misery in this world.’ She was at the party an hour and a half and said she wished she could stay longer but she had to go home and cook a duck dinner for her husband. Next day, at Hubert’s, she told a colleague she had never had a nicer time. ‘Some of the better class of the Four Hundred were there,’ she said, ‘and when I was introduced around I recognized their names. I guess I was a
curiosity
to them. Some of them sure were a curiosity to me. I been around peculiar people most of my life, but I never saw no women like them before.’ She was able to recognize the names of the society people because she is a devoted reader of the Cholly Knickerbocker column in the
Journal & American
. She is, in fact, a student of society scandals. ‘The Four Hundred sure is one cutting-up set of people,’ she says.

Several endocrinologists have tried vainly to argue Miss Barnell into letting them examine her. She is afraid of physicians. When sick, she depends on patent medicines. ‘When they get their hands on a monsterosity the medical profession don’t know when to stop,’ she says. ‘There’s nobody so indecent and snoopy as an old doctor.’ Her hirsuteness is undoubtedly the result of distorted glandular activity. The abnormal functioning of one of the endocrine, or ductless, glands is most often responsible for excessive facial hair in females. Hypertrichosis and hirsutism are the medical terms for the condition. Miss Barnell once read a book called ‘The Human Body’ and is familiar with the glandular explanation, but does not take much stock in it. She says that her parentage was Jewish, Irish, and American Indian, and she believes vaguely that this mixture of bloods is in some way to blame, although she had three beardless sisters.

Miss Barnell has to be persuaded to talk about her early life. ‘What’s the use?’ she tells people. ‘You won’t believe me.’ She says that her father, George Barnell, an itinerant buggy- and wagon-maker, was a Russian Jew who had Anglicized his name. Around 1868, while wandering through the South, he visited a settlement of Catawba Indians on the Catawba River in York County, South Carolina, and fell in love with and was married to a girl who had a Catawba mother and an Irish father. They settled in Wilmington, the principal port of North Carolina, where Barnell established himself in the business of repairing drays on the docks. Miss Barnell was their second child; she was born in 1871 and named Jane, after her Indian grandmother. At birth her chin and cheeks were covered with down. Before she was two years old she had a beard. Her father was kind to her, but her mother, who was superstitious, believed she was bewitched and took her to a succession of Negro
granny-women
and conjure doctors. Around her fourth birthday, her father inherited some money from a relative and went up to Baltimore to see about starting a business there. While he was away a dismal little six-wagon circus came to Wilmington. It was called the Great Orient Family Circus and Menagerie, and was operated by a family of small, dark foreigners; Miss Barnell calls them ‘the Mohammedans.’ The family was composed of a mother, who was a snake charmer; two daughters, who danced; and three sons, who were jugglers and wire-walkers. The wagons were pulled by oxen, and the show stock consisted of three old lions, a few sluggish snakes, some monkeys, a cage of parrots, an educated goat, and a dancing bear. There were many tramp circuses of this type in the country at that time. On the last day of the Great Orient’s stay, Mrs Barnell sold or gave Jane to the Mohammedan mother. ‘I never been able to find out if Mamma got any money for me or just gave me away to get rid of me,’ Miss Barnell says bitterly. ‘She hated me, I know that. Daddy told me years later that he gave her a good beating when he got home from Baltimore and found out what had happened. He had been in Baltimore two months, and by the time he got home I and the Mohammedans were long gone. He and the sheriff of New Hanover County searched all over the better part of three states for us, but they didn’t find hide or hair.’

She does not remember much about her life with the Great Orient. ‘My entire childhood was a bad dream,’ she says. The Mohammedans exhibited her in a small tent separate from the circus, and people had to pay extra to see her. On the road she slept with the Mohammedan mother in the same wagon in which the snakes were kept. Her pallet on the floor was filthy. She was homesick and cried a lot. The Mohammedans were not intentionally cruel to her. ‘They did the best they could, I guess,’ she says. ‘They were half starved themselves. I didn’t understand their talk and their rations made me sick. They put curry in everything. After a while the old Mohammedan mother taken to feeding me on eggs and fruits.’ The circus wandered through the South for some months, eventually reaching a big city, which she thinks was New Orleans. There the Mohammedans sold their stock and wagons to
another
small circus and got passage on a boat to Europe, taking her along. In Europe, they joined a German circus. In Berlin, in the summer of 1876, after Jane had been exhibited by the German circus for four or five months, she got sick. She thinks she had typhoid fever. She was placed in a charity hospital. ‘I was nothing but skin and bones,’ she says. ‘The day they put me in the hospital was the last I ever saw of the Mohammedans. They thought I was due to die.’ She does not remember how long she was in the hospital. After she recovered she was transferred to an institution which she thinks was an orphanage. One morning her father appeared and took her away. ‘I disremember how Daddy located me,’ she says, ‘but I think he said the old Mohammedan mother went to the chief of police in Berlin and told who I was. I guess he somehow got in touch with the chief of police in Wilmington. That must have been the way it happened.’

Barnell brought Jane back to North Carolina but did not take her home; she did not want to see her mother. Instead, he put her in the care of her Indian grandmother, who, with other Catawbas, had moved up from the settlement in South Carolina to a farming community in Mecklenburg County, near Charlotte. Jane worked on her grandmother’s farm, chopping cotton, milking cows, and tending pigs. She never went to school but was taught to read and write by a Presbyterian woman who did missionary work among the Catawbas. Jane remembers stories this woman told her about Florence Nightingale; they made her long to become a nurse. In her teens she taught herself to shave with an old razor that had belonged to her grandfather. When she was around seventeen she went to Wilmington to visit her father, and a doctor he knew got her a place as a student nurse in the old City Hospital. She worked in the hospital for perhaps a year, and she still thinks of this as the happiest period of her life. Eventually, however, something unpleasant happened which caused her to leave; what it was, she will not tell. ‘I just figured I could never have a normal life,’ she says, ‘so I went back to Grandma’s and settled down to be a farmhand the rest of my days.’ Three or four years later she became acquainted with the senior Professor Heckler, who owned a farm near her grandmother’s; he worked in circuses in the summer and
lived
on the farm in the winter. Heckler convinced her she would be happier in a sideshow than on a farm and helped her get a job with the John Robinson Circus. As well as she can remember, she got this job in the spring of 1892, when she was twenty-one. ‘Since that time,’ she says, ‘my beard has been my meal ticket.’ Until the death of her grandmother, around 1899, Miss Barnell went back to North Carolina every winter. She had three sisters and two brothers in Wilmington, and she visited them occasionally. ‘They all thought I was a disgrace and seeing them never gave me much enjoyment,’ she says. ‘Every family of a freak I ever heard of was the same. I’ve known families that lived off a freak’s earnings but wouldn’t be seen with him. My parents passed on long ago, and I reckon my brothers and sisters are all dead by now. I haven’t seen any of them for twenty-two years. I had one sister I liked. I used to send her a present every Christmas, and sometimes she’d drop me a card. She was a nurse. She went to China twenty-some-odd years ago to work in a hospital for blind Chinese children, and that’s the last I ever heard of her. I guess she’s dead.’

Miss Barnell was with the Robinson Circus for fourteen years. While with it, she was married to a German musician in the circus band. By him she had two children, both of whom died in infancy. Soon after the death of her second child, her husband died. ‘After that,’ she says, ‘I never got any more pleasure out of circus life. I had to make a living, so I kept on. It’s been root, hog, or die. When I got sick of one outfit, I moved on to another. Circuses are all the same – dull as ditch water.’ She left Robinson’s to go with the Forepaugh-Sells Brothers’ Circus and Menagerie, leaving it to marry a balloon ascensionist. He was killed about a year after they were married; how, she will not say. ‘He was just killed,’ she says, shrugging her shoulders. Her third marriage also ended unhappily. ‘That one treated me shamefully,’ she says. ‘If he was in a bottle, I wouldn’t pull out the stopper to give him air. I taken out a divorce from him the year before I and Mr O’Boyle got married.’