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Abstract
Steve Brodie's 1886 jump from the Brooklyn Bridge created a particularly modern fame that has much to tell us about the emergence of modern media celebrity and the kinds of spectacular stunt performances that could be mobilised to create it in the years just before the cinema. Bridge jumpers such as Brodie took the modern urban landscape as their backdrop, but also found a place on the melodramatic stage, collapsing distinctions between indoor and outdoor entertainment. Brodie's celebrity was articulated through newspaper coverage and a constellation of amusement forms, including the saloon, the dime museum and the popular stage, but it pointed towards a distinctly cinematic form of entertainment and stardom. Brodie's career thus sheds new light on the intertextuality of late nineteenth-century celebrity, and reveals a practice of public self-creation at that time beyond more familiar realms of fame. Brodie's embodiment of a working-class urban subculture of ‘Bowery Boys’ reveals the limitations of a model of celebrity that is based on a rigid distinction between ‘folk’ and ‘mass’ culture, and the discussion surrounding his multi-media presence provides a rich case study in the democratic potential of nineteenth-century celebrity.
Notes
1. On Foucault's notion of ‘technologies of the self’, see Dreyfus and Rabinow (Citation1982, pp. 238–239); on body technique, see Mauss (Citation1950, p. 105).
2. After his 1886 leap from the Brooklyn Bridge, Brodie indicated his debt to Patch with a number of direct references to the latter's career. Brodie visited Genesee Falls in Rochester, where Patch had died in November 1829 (Stephens Citation1894, p. 42). In May 1889, Brodie jumped into the basin below the Passaic Falls in Paterson where Patch had begun his public career.
3. On P.T. Barnum and nineteenth-century celebrity, see Gamson (Citation1994, pp. 20–22).
4. On the neo-classic hero, see Greene (Citation1970, pp. 37–47).
5. See ‘Bread and Coffee at Brodie's’ (New York Times 1895, p. 2). The Denver Evening Post reported that Brodie had seen ‘a number of working girls caught in a sudden shower’, and a few days later ‘it was known all over New York that any poor girl might borrow an umbrella at Steve Brodie's without leaving a deposit’ (Denver Evening Post 1896, p. 8).
6. Dennet (1997, p. 48) observes that high-end museums could feature tableaux of ‘Rulers of the world’ and ‘People talked about’, illustrating how discourses of celebrity were part of the dime museum display. Also note that Bunnell's museum in the Bowery had exhibits focused upon ‘topical issues’, such as wax display of ‘slayers of Jesse James’ (1997, p. 57).
7. Stephens (Citation1894, p. 31) claims that Brodie ‘went to the office of Edmund E. Price, the lawyer, and signed a contract to appear under the management of Messrs. Morris and Coleman, for ten weeks, at $250 per week’. Brodie was on the stage ‘in the museum conducted by Morris and Coleman at Coney Island’ for 4 weeks. ‘People swarmed to see him, and the other curiosities sat on their platforms neglected’ (Stephens Citation1894, p. 29). For more on the dime museum in America, see Dennett.
8. Bordman (Citation1994, p. 286) refers to MacKaye's production of this year as: ‘An Arrant Knave’.
9. Sensational melodrama found a receptive audience among Brodie's Bowery milieu. Sante (Citation1991, p. 76) writes that Bowery melodrama after the 1840s had become increasingly spectacular, featuring ‘giant set-pieces that depended far more on the deployment of stage machinery than on acting or writing’, and also took part in water tank effects: ‘tank dramas involved the use of a large pool of water, taking up most of the stage, on which were mobilized entire ships’.
10. Sante (Citation1991, p. 76) writes that ‘in 1849 the managers of the Bowery hit on a new gimmick, one that was just as crowd-pleasing as the spectacles without costing nearly as much to produce: they engaged the well-known saloonkeeper, gang leader, and boxer Tom Hyer to appear in a play’.
11. For the Trenton Evening Times, the production featured ‘uncommonly fine scenic equipment’ and wrote that the ‘the wonderful Brooklyn Bridge scene’ was ‘pictorial in the highest degree possible to a play of its kind’ (Trenton Evening Times 1896, p. 2).
12. In the same way that there was confusion over whether or not Brodie was ‘acting’ or simply exhibiting himself, early articles about cinema reveal a struggle to define the work of film performers as akin to ‘posing’ for a photograph or ‘acting’ on the stage (deCordova Citation2001, pp. 34–35).
13. Elliott Gorn (Citation1987, p. 408) characterises the type as ‘young single males, wage earners who earned their livings with their muscles, then sought rough and exuberant pleasures after hours… hard labor and limited chances taught them to admire muscular brawlers for their prowess, independence and bravado. Confined to tedious and sometimes dangerous jobs, they made high-spirited devotion to gangs, neighborhoods, and ethnic groups an avocation…theirs was a combative, physical way of life that offered the action, adventure, and autonomy denied in the workaday realm. After hours, free from masters and bosses, they gravitated toward places like the Bowery, where they took back a sense of control over their lives that the workplace denied.’
14. In Richard Dyer's terms, we might say that Brodie enacted an alienated alternative social type, whose popularity was inextricably bound up with class hierarchies (1998, p. 52).
15. Turner (Citation2006, p. 153) has questioned the extent to which the increasing visibility of the ‘ordinary person’ in media since the 1980s has represented a democratisation of the media. He notes that, while recent trends such as reality TV formats had ‘opened up media access to women, to people of colour and to a wider array of class positions’, any democratic functions of that fame were ‘occasional and accidental’, because the media industries still remained in control of ‘the symbolic economy’, and still attempted to ‘operate this economy in the service of their own interests’ (2006, p. 157).
16. For more on nineteenth-century celebrity and publicity hoaxes, see Gamson (Citation1994, pp. 20–22).