The adventures of the bridge jumper

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.

Keywords:

• celebrity
• early cinema
• New York City
• performance
• publicity
• subculture

Introduction

On 22 July 1886, a figure could be seen falling from near the centre of the Brooklyn Bridge. The body was in the air for about three seconds as it traversed the 135 feet from the bridge to the water, and after striking the East River it disappeared from sight for nearly half a minute. A man was soon pulled from the water into a tugboat and brought to shore, where he was promptly arrested for attempted suicide. When the jumper, named Steve Brodie, emerged after a brief stint in a police court cell, he had become an instant celebrity. Brodie was shown newspaper accounts of his jump and signed a contract to appear in dime museums across the country. Tourists would soon be crowding into Brodie's New York saloon in order to catch a glimpse of him, and within a decade he was a travelling performer on the stage, enacting his famous leap from the bridge.

Brodie's was 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 such as the theatre, organised sports or politics. Furthermore, 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. The discussion surrounding his multi-media presence thus provides a rich case study in the democratic potential of nineteenth-century celebrity and cultural discourses of fame, class and cultural taste. Historical research of this kind is particularly relevant to a cultural and academic context that places much emphasis on the apparently ‘new’ democratisation of fame embodied by so-called ‘ordinary’ people. Before turning to Brodie's performances as a Bowery social type on the stage, however, it is useful to begin by examining his first, and most career-defining, site of performance: the Brooklyn Bridge.

A bridge to the temple of Fame

Construction began in 1870 on a bridge spanning the East River from Brooklyn to New York. Designed by John Augustus Roebling and his son Washington, the bridge was a stunning feat of America's emerging engineering and entrepreneurial prowess. The building of the bridge was a public spectacle, and huge crowds gathered to watch the first steel wire being hung in 1876 (Cadbury 2003, p. 102). The grand opening of the bridge, at the time the longest suspension bridge in the world, took place on 24 May 1883. The Brooklyn Bridge, like the Erie Canal, was a work of technological and entrepreneurial vision made manifest by industrialists through engineering and rationalised labour. According to historian Paul E. Johnson, works such as these represented one way in which the term ‘art’ was understood in the nineteenth century. Johnson (2003, pp. 54–56) contrasts that definition of ‘art’ with ‘the whole range of combined mental and manual performances’ by means of which working men ‘provided for the wants and needs of their communities’. Where the former was an industrial technology, the latter was what Michel Foucault calls a ‘technology of the self’, or what Marcel Mauss conceptualises as a ‘body technique’. ¹ Johnson made his observations in an analysis of a mill spinner named Sam Patch, who made a series of spectacular jumps at New England waterfalls during the late 1820s, culminating in a well-publicised leap at Niagara Falls in 1829. The geography of industrial labour provided the setting for Patch's jumps, and it also charged them with particular class tensions. Johnson reminds us that the waterfalls where Patch jumped were an integral part of the emerging American industrial economy: the falls were the engines that drove the factory mills where Patch was a spinner. Steve Brodie's 1886 jump updated this tradition of working-class stunt-jumping but on an even larger scale, pitting body technique against an iconic and imposing instance of industrial art. ²

Brodie grew up in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of seven boys raised by his mother. He never knew his father, who was killed in a gang-related street fight three weeks before his birth (Notoriety that pays 1889, p. 5). According to one account, his father died in a battle between iconic New York gangs the ‘Bowery Boys’ and the ‘Dead Rabbits’ (Stephens 1894, p. 5). Brodie was not the first person to jump from the bridge: a professional swimmer from Washington named Robert Odlum died from injuries he sustained upon hitting the water during an attempt on 20 May 1885 (Odlum's leap 1885, p. 6, Fatal leap from the East River Bridge 1885, p. 344). One year after Odlum's death, Brodie's successful leap was front-page news for the New York Times, which described how Brodie had hidden himself in a lumber wagon in order to sneak past the New York tollgate. Leaving the wagon, he quickly removed his coat and hat, under which he wore an ‘electric belt’, a layer of protective bandages and trousers that had been tied around the ankles with strong twine so that they would not flap in the wind during his descent (A leap from the bridge 1886, p. 1). Brodie promptly headed for the railing of the bridge, and onlookers assumed that he intended to commit suicide. As a crowd stood powerless to stop him, he climbed down to the lower girders and from there dropped into the water below. The doctor who examined Brodie at the police station after the jump reported that he had ‘shrieked as if suffering agony’, although it was unclear as to whether his discomfort was real or simulated, and might have had something to do with the fact that Brodie was reportedly ‘more than half drunk’ (Off the Brooklyn Bridge 1886, p. 1).

We might describe Brodie's jump in terms of Erving Goffman's notion of ‘action’: tasks in which the consequences of one's decisions are felt immediately; in which ‘chance-taking and resolution’ are brought ‘into the same heated moment of experience’ (1969, p. 199). The industrial ‘art’ of the modern steel suspension bridge was the result of a long period of planning, the labour of many workers and a considerable passage of time between the undertaking of the project and its completion. The risks and consequences of Brodie's dangerous jump, on the other hand, were made manifest in the ‘same heated moment of experience’. To put it another way, a single working-class person could not design, fund and build the bridge, but he or she could jump from its span, and in that moment appropriate some of its cultural power. In fact, Goffman (1969, p. 179) notes that social manoeuvering takes place during moments of accelerated consequence, making action a powerful mode for the performance of self. In other words, action constructs character. Brodie's jump re-created the self in a dramatic way, making him a pioneer of a new kind of nineteenth-century ‘DIY’ celebrity; one forged by an individual operator rather than an established ‘showman–publicist’ such as P.T. Barnum. ³

Writers in the popular press struggled to understand Brodie – and the steady stream of ‘bridge jumpers’ who were soon attempting to emulate his success – in relation to a classical model of fame. For one thing, Brodie seemed to have gained his renown too easily. ‘The temple of Fame was formerly believed to top a most austere, stony peak’, Peterson Magazine wrote in 1895. Brodie was ‘a latter-day Marco Polo’ who had discovered a new ‘air line’ route to the summit: ‘Previous seekers after fame have trusted to Genius. Mr. Brodie gave himself into the hands of Gravity. He pushed himself; it did the rest’ (O'Noklast 1895, p. 857). Not only did Brodie rely upon gravity instead of genius to make his leap to fame, but his jump had not demonstrated a socially recognised skill:

There is no more skill required to jump from the middle of… the Brooklyn Bridge into the river than to jump from a pier ten feet or less above the surface of the water… It is the risk alone that constitutes the attraction. (Bridge jumping 1895, p. 4)

To those used to the notion of fame as the accident of effort, and not its end, Brodie's leap to notoriety seemed too calculated. Brodie was, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it in 1887, a ‘newsboy’ who had ‘thirsted for celebrity’: ‘The artist, the inventor, the poet, the statesman are not concerning themselves with what the world will think or say of their actions; they see an opportunity to do the world a service and they do it; fame is the concomitant of their deed’ (Spoiled by celebrity 1887, p. 2). ⁴ Finally, unlike the inventor, poet or statesman, Brodie had achieved a notoriety that seemed to some pundits to render no public service: ‘If the achievements of Brodie and his imitators were a source of benefit to the human race the extravagance of their performances might be overlooked’, wrote one critic in 1889; ‘there is, however, absolutely no excuse for their existence’ (Brodie's unfortunate escape 1889, p. 4).

One way we can understand the concerns of Brodie's critics is through Thomas Baker's observation of a general nineteenth-century ‘fear of ill-deserved and capricious popularity’: ‘That the “people” were sovereign was certainly a nineteenth-century republican commonplace, but they also frequently fell prey to puffery and manufactured sensation… hence the era's abiding concern to sort out enduring fame from mere fleeting celebrity’ (Baker 1999, p. 8). The attitude towards Brodie's fame found in articles such as these also shares much in common with Daniel J. Boorstin's well-known discussion of celebrity in his 1961 book, The image. Boorstin bemoaned the passing of a time when ‘famous men and great men [sic] were pretty nearly the same group’ (1961, p. 72). Like Brodie's critics, Boorstin contrasted an earlier, more ‘authentic’ hero to the celebrity, whom he defined as a person known for their ‘well-knownness’ (1961, p. 79). Boorstin connected this sea change in public notoriety to the modern media, referring to a ‘Graphic Revolution’ made possible by the ability ‘to make, preserve, transmit, and disseminate precise images’ (1961, p. 13). Boorstin begins by identifying printing and photography as the key media in this ‘revolution’, but quickly tosses the telephone, radio, motion pictures and television into the mix, thus arguably losing any sense of the social, cultural or technological specificity of any of these media. This criticism aside, the key effect wrought by the ‘Graphic Revolution’, according to Boorstin, was that it changed the temporality of fame: the hero had been ‘born of time’ through the circulation of ‘folklore, sacred texts, and history books’, but the celebrity was ‘the creature of gossip, of public opinion, of magazines, of newspapers, and the ephemeral images of movie and television screen’. ‘The celebrity is born in the daily papers’, Boorstin wrote, ‘and never loses the mark of his fleeting origin’ (1961, p. 63). In addition to vague claims about media influence, Boorstin's argument relied on Romantic notions of ‘folk’ culture as opposed to mass culture: he wrote that the ‘usually illiterate’ and ‘unself-conscious’ folk was ‘creative’, while the mass was inherently passive, ‘the target and not the arrow… the ear and not the voice’. ‘While the folk created heroes’, Boorstin concluded, ‘the mass can only look and listen for them’ (1961, p. 56). Like Brodie's critics, Boorstin dismissed modern media celebrity as an inauthentic, fleeting and degraded version of a previous heroism that arose ‘organically’ from and served the needs of society.

If we adopt Boorstin's perspective on media celebrity we are left a limited, and in the end elitist, perspective on public figures such as Brodie. More recent scholars of media notoriety have made more focused claims about the role of the modern media and have stressed its democratic potential. Graeme Turner (2004, p. 5) warns that Boorstin's work resembles typical ‘elite critiques’ of popular culture, in which ‘each new shift in fashion is offered as the end of civilization as we know it, with the real motivation being an elitist distaste for the demotic or populist dimension of mass cultural practices’. Chris Rojek (2001, p. 9) writes that the modern notion of celebrity derives from ‘the rise of democratic governments and secular societies’, and that ‘the increasing importance of the public face in everyday life’ is a consequence of the rise of a public society that ‘cultivates personal style as the antidote to formal democratic equality’. Furthermore, P. David Marshall (1997, pp. 5–6) argues that celebrity invokes ‘the message of possibility of a democratic age’, suggesting that ‘the restrictions of a former hierarchy are no longer valid in the new order that is determined by merit and/or the acquisition of wealth’ (see also Ponce de Leon 2001, p. 48).

Steve Brodie tested the ‘message of possibility of a democratic age’ through performances that created and projected the character of an ‘ordinary person’ through national media, thus upsetting established social hierarchies that ratified only certain kinds of fame. Brodie's celebrity was certainly ‘born in the daily papers’, but it also found expression through working-class entertainments such as the saloon, dime museum and popular melodrama. Attention to the intertextual nature of his stardom complicates the dismissive claims of his critics, and Boorstin's rigid distinctions between folk and mass culture. In the process we can gauge the democratic potential of nineteenth-century celebrity and explore a mode of celebrity that prefigures the film star.

This ain't art: it's on the Bowery

For proof that Brodie was lacking in the ‘moral force’ required of apparently ‘authentic’ fame, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle pointed to the ‘unsavory reputation’ that he had acquired since his entrance onto the public stage: ‘His jumping eccentricities may serve to attract attention to his grog shop, but they excite no sympathy from lovers of manly sports and provoke nothing but contempt in the minds of thoughtful people’ (Brodie's unfortunate escape 1889, p. 4). The ‘grog shop’ mentioned here was a saloon that was owned and operated by Brodie at 114 Bowery Street, and that became a key component of his public image. Saloons such as Brodie's had a central place in nineteenth-century urban working-class culture. Kathy Peiss (1986, p. 17) writes that most tenement neighbourhoods were dominated by saloons, and estimates that there were more than 10,000 in operation in greater New York City circa 1900. Saloons were ‘at the heart of working-class life’, according to Elliott Gorn (1986, p. 133), and created ‘informal but stable brotherhoods’ for working men in which the tavern keeper was ‘the caretaker of a cultural style that emphasized camaraderie and reciprocity among peers’. Drinking occupied an important portion of working men's leisure hours in the mid- to late-1800s, with the saloon standing as a leisure place separated both from work and home (Rosenzweig 1983, pp. 40–44).

Of all the 10,000 saloons in New York, Brodie's Bowery grog shop took on iconic status in the decades around the turn of the century. One newspaper wrote in 1908 that Brodie's saloon, with its ‘marvelous gallery of prize fighters’ portraits' had been one of the leading attractions of the Bowery for more than a quarter of a century (Bowery landmark to go 1908, p. 7). No visit to the Bowery was complete, claimed one 1901 article, without seeing the ‘distinctly tough’ clientele at Brodie's, as well as its collection of ‘photographs of the celebrated pugilists of the past and present’ and mementoes of ‘famous fistic encounters’ (Steve Brodie 1901, p. 2). With its iconography of roughneck male entertainments, Brodie's bar was situated firmly in urban working-man's culture, and even served as the site of well-publicised donations of free bread, coffee and umbrellas to needy locals. ⁵ We might return here to claims by Brodie's critics that his fame served no social service. Such claims beg the question: service to what part of society? Brodie's notoriety allowed him to situate himself as a ‘caretaker’ of a working-man's cultural style, and he used his saloon as a kind of community centre. Boorstin saw in modern celebrity a sign of the erosion of community but Brodie's fame, particularly as manifested in the saloon, articulated a connection to, and expression of, an urban working man's culture. As such, Brodie illustrates Marshall's claim that, compared with the neo-classic model of fame, modern celebrity was ‘touchable by the multitude’; that ‘the greatness of the celebrity is something that can be shared and, in essence, celebrated loudly and with a touch of vulgar pride’ (Marshall 1997, p. 6). Brodie's saloon anchored his notoriety to a place and a social milieu; keeping his fame ‘touchable’.

In addition to working-class patrons, Brodie's saloon attracted wide-eyed tourists and titillated middle-class visitors keen on ‘slumming’ in the Bowery, a fact of which Brodie was keenly aware. During an interview in his saloon, Brodie told a reporter:

Look at these people in here. What do they come in for? To get something to drink? Not much. They're mostly strangers and curiosity hunters; fellows that patronize the dime museums. They come in to look at me. And I'm just smart enough… to be here when they come in, so that they can take a good look at me and shake hands. (Notoriety that pays 1889, p. 5)

Brodie's reference to the dime museum audience is telling. His Bowery saloon provides a vivid illustration of Barbara Kirshetblatt-Gimblett's notion of the ‘museum effect’, whereby ‘the museum experience itself becomes a model for experiencing life outside its walls’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991, p. 410). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points to a common mid-nineteenth-century trope of ‘the city as dark continent’ and the journalist and social reformer as an ‘ethnographer’. When experiencing the city in this manner, ‘an ethnographic bell jar drops over the terrain’ such that ‘a neighborhood, village, or region becomes for all intents and purposes a living museum in situ’ (1991, p. 413). The Bowery became this kind of ‘extended ethnographic theme park’ for tourists and middle-class visitors and Steve Brodie's saloon, with its mementos of past ‘fistic encounters’, was referred to explicitly as a ‘curiosity shop’, with the famous bridge jumper as its perennial main attraction.

Visitors flocked to his saloon on the Bowery but Brodie also took his urban ethnographic show on the road, appearing in dime museums from the first days after his 1886 jump. The American dime museum had ‘reached its apex’ during the 1880s and 1890s and New York, and in particular the Bowery, became America's ‘dime museum capitol’ (Dennett 1997, p. 45). ⁶ Luc Sante (1991, p. 123) characterises Bowery museums as ‘the true underworld of entertainment’, as they featured ‘anything too shoddy, too risqué, too vile, too sad, too marginal, too disgusting, too pointless to be displayed elsewhere’. The New York Daily Tribune reported that Brodie had accepted an offer from the proprietor of an East Side Museum at No. 105 Bowery, and that the news had created a ‘sensation’ among the other museum ‘curiosities’: ‘it is to be feared that “Steve” will have to keep his eyes open if he wants to escape the jealousy of the fat woman, who is said to be specially vindictive’ (Hero of the fourth ward 1886, p. 1). The bridge jumper appeared well beyond the confines of the Bowery in this capacity, however, and in the year after his leap he appeared at dime museums in Providence, Boston, Cincinnati, Chicago, St Paul and Milwaukee (Notoriety that pays 1889, p. 5, Stephens 1894, p. 31). ⁷ Evidence suggests that these engagements could sometimes feature a performance of his jumping ability. In February 1887, he was arrested in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania for attempting to jump from the top of a dime museum into a net in order to publicise his appearance in the establishment (Not allowed to jump 1887, p. 4).

Brodie's stint as a dime museum curiosity was soon followed by other kinds of stage work, including non-speaking roles as a stunt performer on the melodramatic stage. In 1886 and 1887 Brodie appeared in a play called ‘Blackmail’ in which he made a leap from ‘a high tower into the sea’, achieved by jumping through a trap door in the stage (Stephens 1894, p. 32). He made a similar jump from a bridge in Steele MacKaye's 1890 play ‘Money Mad’ at the New York Standard Theatre (Stephens 1894, p. 50). This association with MacKaye is significant, as it indicates points of convergence between Brodie's outdoor stunt performances and developments on the melodramatic stage. MacKaye was an influential late-nineteenth-century playwright, director and actor who had studied the Delsartean approach to ‘naturalistic’ acting (Bordman 1994, p. 43). Along with Henry Irving and David Belasco, MacKaye is credited with a turn to proto-cinematic spectacular realism or ‘pictorial illusionism’ on the late nineteenth-century melodramatic stage (Sokalski 2007, pp. 178–179; see also Vardac 1949, p. 89). Ben Singer (2001, pp. 149–151) describes how stage melodrama of this period often featured a display of realistic scenic effects made possible by new technologies of ‘mechanical-electrical stagecraft’. MacKaye was a key figure in the development of such stage technologies, but it is important to remember that the display of these technologies was accompanied typically by perilous stunt-work that heightened popular melodrama's visceral affect: ‘characters swung by ropes from ledge to ledge, tightrope-walked across telegraph wires, dove off cliffs into the ocean, moved inches away from real buzz saws or pile drivers, and so on’ (Singer 2001, p. 158). The vogue for such stunt-work enabled Brodie to transfer his skill at outdoor bridge jumping to the indoor world of the stage.

Singer (2001, p. 157) finds at the heart of popular melodrama of this era an effort to portray ‘situations and environments that challenged the physical and spatiotemporal boundaries of the indoor stage’. Modern suspension bridges and bridge jumping became a key part of that project. Steele MacKaye's ‘Money Mad’, which featured a jump by Brodie, had a drawbridge as its most striking stage set. The bridge opened over the orchestra to let a steamboat pass, a moment that one reviewer claimed ‘brought forth the mightiest cheers and applause of the evening’ (Bordman 1994, p. 294). A Chicago Tribune review of MacKaye's 1888 play, ‘A Noble Rogue’, described the production's ‘wonderful bridge’: ‘it swings towards the audience and lets a big steamer through. Smoke rises from the vessel's funnel. Whistles blow. Bells ring. Stars glitter in the midnight sky. The cry of the tender is heard. The machinery of the bridge creaks. And the black hull passes. Realism could no further go’ (With the diving drama 1888, p. 27). ⁸ The modern suspension bridge made a dynamic set-piece for realistic melodrama, and the bridge jump was a logical piece of action custom-made for that environment. ⁹

Bridge jumping and representations of suspension bridges were key selling-points in Thomas H. Davis's 1893 stage production ‘On The Bowery’. The play's plot involved ‘a betrayed young woman’ who hunted down her betrayer in the hopes of revenge. The villain hires two thugs to kill her by throwing her from the Brooklyn Bridge, but a ‘heroic young saloon keeper’ saves her just in time (Bordman 1994, p. 367; see also On the Bowery a sensational play 1894, p. 5). The name of that heroic young saloon keeper was, of course, Steve Brodie, and the part was played by none other than Brodie himself: an early example of an actor employed ‘as a consequence of non-theatrical celebrity’ (see Sante 1991, p. 76). ¹⁰ As had been the case with MacKaye's ‘Money Mad’, the ‘On the Bowery’ bridge set was singled out frequently by critics for its stunning realism: ‘the scenery is the most artistic feature of the performance’, wrote one reviewer; ‘The perspective view of Brooklyn Bridge is the most striking optical delusion [sic] ever seen on the stage and is so perfect as to give the impression of looking off in the distance’ (Amusements 1896, p. 5). ¹¹ Reprising his earlier stunt-work, Brodie enacted his famous jump from the Bridge by leaping through a trapdoor in the stage as stagehands ‘threw handfuls of rock salt into the air to simulate the splash’ (Sante 1991, p. 125). Like Steele MacKaye's spectacular melodramas, ‘On the Bowery’ illustrates the utility of the bridge as setting and the bridge jumper as thrill-maker for dramatic entertainments of this time, but the show also exploited Brodie's iconic status as a Bowery type.

The second act of the play was set in a detailed representation of Brodie's Bowery saloon, where the bridge jumper sang a song entitled ‘The Bowery Girl’ in what was described as ‘a round, but slightly husky, tone’ that came out of one corner of his mouth (On the Bowery a sensational play 1894, p. 5). Just as Brodie's bridge jumping lacked a clear display of ‘skill’, so his performance on the stage seemed to some to be little more than a glorified dime museum exhibition. A critic in the Decatur Bulletin-Sentinel wrote that Brodie ‘freely admits that he is no actor and does not try to be. He is there merely to be seen, and as the public is willing to pay for it, that suits Brodie’ (Untitled 1895, p. 8). The ‘Steve Brodie’ of the play was ‘exactly the Steve Brodie of real life’, wrote his biographer, who quoted him as saying, ‘When I'm on the stage in the saloon scene… I feel just as if I was in my place on the Bowery’ (Stephens 1894, p. 55). ‘I don't want people to think they are coming to see Booth or Barrett when they come to see me tonight’, he told a Portland reporter in 1896, ‘I want them to come and see the first man on the American stage who ever appeared representing himself, as he is, in everyday life in his business, see?’ (Steve Brodie as he is 1896, p. 5). One of Brodie's lines in the play seemed to slyly assert his seeming lack of artifice: ‘This ain't art’, Brodie said, ‘It's on the Bowery’ (Bordman 1994, p. 367). We should note that enacting one's offstage public persona in this manner, although perhaps notable on the turn of the century stage, became the modus operandi of film players.

Richard deCordova (2001, pp. 87–88) argues that, during the early 1910s, the existence of the ‘picture personality’ outside of film narratives emerged ‘as an extension of an existence already laid out within films. The illusion that was operative was that the player's real personality… preceded and caused the representation of personality on the screen.’ Later, during the Hollywood studio era, Joshua Gamson (1994, p. 26) claims that ‘the merging of screen roles and offscreen personality was central to studio star making’, and that studio publicity departments worked to ‘match the star's personal life with the traits of the screen character’. Many film stars thus came to specialise in what Barry King calls ‘personification’, when the actor is ‘limited to parts consonant with his or her personality’ (King 1985, p. 30). ¹² With its realistic sets, spectacular stunt-work and Brodie's style of non-acting, ‘On the Bowery’ begins to look like a dry run for film acting.

Ironically, Brodie could ‘be himself’ on the stage in part because he was seen to powerfully represent a social type. In a review of ‘On the Bowery’, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that ‘Brodie may be an ideal bridge jumper and he certainly tends bar with neatness and dispatch, but he can neither act, sing nor make speeches. But what difference does that make? One can see a play any night, but a genuine Bowery lad: nit’ (Steve Brodie and his Bowery play 1896, p. 9). Another review claimed that Brodie did not try to ‘act anything but himself’, and instead was presented as ‘a typical Bowery boy, which he is in many respects’ (Entertainments 1896, p. 6). The Bowery Boy was one of a number of social types prevalent on the late-nineteenth-century American popular stage. Unlike the stage ‘Dutch’, ‘Hebrew’, ‘Italian’ or ‘Minstrel’ types, however, the Bowery Boy was not based on descent from a particular ethnic group. Instead, Bowery Boys were an updated version of ‘the youthful working-class dandy’ (Wilentz 1984, p. 300). ¹³ The social identity of the Bowery Boy depended upon his presence in commercial culture: Christine Stansell (1987, p. 91) writes that the Bowery Boy:

[D]id not spin out his associations with his fellows on the basis of common membership in a trade union or an ethnic group or even an organized gang; rather, he defined himself through his use of his leisure time. In an after-hours world, he created commonalities through dressing, speaking, and acting in certain ways.

The Bowery Boy was ‘a member of youth culture, a milieu characterized by a symbiotic relationship to its own symbolic elaboration’. In fact, working men had long defined their perceptions of how to be a Bowery Boy through watching ‘delightfully recognizable characterizations acted out on the stage’ (Stansell 1987).

Such characterisations began with popular plays in the 1840s that featured the actor Francis S. Chanfrau in the role of Bowery fireman Mose. For folklorist Richard Dorson (1973, p. 107), the Mose plays ‘sounded a popular, realistic note in the American theater that did not appeal to certain custodians of the drama’. Dorson quotes a drama critic of the period who decried both the ‘vulgarity and illiteracy’ of Mose plays and the working-class audiences that they drew to the theatre: ‘the boxes no longer shone with the elite of the city; the character of the audiences was entirely changed’, and instead of simply appearing on the stage, Mose ‘was in the pit, the boxes, and the gallery’ (1973, p. 107). A similar complaint was echoed 50 years later in a New York Times review of ‘On the Bowery’ that described how Brodie's ‘own kind’ had ‘flocked to see him’: ‘There was a house full of underdeveloped Brodies in the gallery’ who ‘applauded everything that Brodie, the actor, did, but it was easy to do that; it was because it was Brodie, the bridge jumper’ (On the Bowery a sensational play 1894, p. 5). At the Boston Theatre in 1894, Brodie appeared before ‘two galleries full of street arabs, who yelled, whistled, stamped and commented with courageous and seldom erroneous discrimination’ (On the Bowery draws a big audience to the Boston 1894, p. 5). A Denver, Colorado newspaper treated its 325 newsboys to tickets to see ‘On the Bowery’. After parading through town and giving Brodie an ovation in front of his hotel, the newsboys are said to have gone ‘wild’ at the performance, ‘cheering and applauding the athletic barkeeper’ (Very happy crowd 1896, p. 10). Brodie thus embodied and individuated the Bowery Boy social type, and continued a vibrant tradition of nineteenth-century popular drama with a powerful connection to young, working-class audiences. ¹⁴

If spectators from around the country came to Brodie's saloon on the Bowery as an ethnographic ‘curiosity shop’, the stage saloon in ‘On the Bowery’ brought that ethnographic display to paying audiences around the country. The desire for an ‘authentic’ experience in a working man's saloon could pose certain dangers, however, even in the form of a theatrical re-enactment. One of these dangers had to do with the fact that Brodie's stage saloon served actual alcoholic drinks. The San Francisco Chronicle called ‘On the Bowery’ the ‘wettest play ever put on the San Francisco boards’: ‘rounds of drinks were served every few seconds and if there had been any more than one act of it the players couldn't have wobbled to the culmination’ (Steve Brodie and his Bowery play 1896, p. 9). A Portland newspaper wrote that the amount of beer that the players drank ‘raised the question how much more they could stand and maintain their equilibriums’ (Steve Brodie makes a hit 1896, p. 5). Not only could audiences witness authentic inebriation; some of the cast were genuinely ‘tough’ characters prone to violence and, by some accounts, crime. At a Boston performance of the play in February 1896, some local college students were hired to play non-speaking roles as patrons in the saloon scene. Trouble began when the students drank Brodie's beer ‘with a gusto’, ordering it faster than the bridge jumper could serve it. Tensions increased when Brodie launched into his song. As Brodie ‘struggled through the first verse’, the rowdy extras ‘banged the beer glasses down on the tables until they were smashed’. At this point, Brodie attacked the ‘apparent leader’ of the students and soon other members of the cast, made up largely of Brodie's ‘sporting’ friends, lent the bridge jumper a hand in giving ‘the would-be “toughs” the worst drubbing they had ever received in their lives, and… ejecting them bodily from the stage’. ‘That's the way I always serve guys who can't behave in my saloon’, Brodie told the appreciative crowd (Can fight as well as jump 1896, p. 18). In Idaho, two members of Brodie's company who had played the role of ‘safe crackers’ in the show, gave ‘a genuine exhibition of their Bowery proclivities’ by picking the locks of a door at the theatre during a dispute with the management (Bowery in real life 1896, p. 4). Brodie's travelling ethnographic display thus held some of the same dangers and appeals as the experience of slumming on the Bowery: ‘real’ drunken bar-room violence and the encounter of ‘authentic’ Bowery characters.

The cultural life of ‘On the Bowery’ and Brodie's embodiment of the Bowery Boy social type reveals the limited utility of Boorstin's model of celebrity, which was based on a rigid distinction between an authentic, creative ‘folk’ culture and a passive, inauthentic ‘mass’ culture. The Bowery Boy's ‘symbiotic relationship with its own symbolic elaboration’ was a process that encompassed both an urban ‘folk’ culture and an incipient mass culture, and illustrates that the latter could be ‘creative’ of its own heroes; could be the arrow as well as the target; the voice as well as the ear. To the extent that Brodie's celebrity opened up popular media access to a distinctive working-class subcultural style, we might say that it demonstrated the democratic potential of media celebrity. ¹⁵ Brodie fused a variety of nineteenth-century stage traditions, combining museum attraction, stunt-work and acting to create a mongrel ‘art’ that anticipates modes of twentieth-century media celebrity, in particular film stardom and cinematic stunt performance. Although Brodie found a niche inside the theatre, his fame was still based ostensibly upon his leaping ability outside of it. However, the closer we look at the distinctions between his technique in the theatre and out of it, the more those distinctions begin to collapse in a manner that, like his stage performances, points to the cinema.

The prize faker of the western hemisphere

‘When I see that trade is getting dull and customers ain't standing two deep in front of my bar’, Brodie told an interviewer, ‘I go off somewhere and make a jump’ (Notoriety that pays 1889, p. 5). Business must have been slow in the autumn of 1889, when Brodie left his saloon and headed for Niagara Falls. Beginning with Sam Patch's 1829 jump, Niagara had drawn daredevils like a magnet. After Patch, the most famous of these was Chevalier Blondin (Jean Francois Gravelet), the ropewalker who crossed the Falls in August 1859. Like the stunt performers who preceded him, Brodie was drawn to Niagara's guarantee of large crowds and promise of glory on a truly massive scale. The New York Times reported that on an afternoon in early September, Brodie had donned a rubber suit and paddled himself out into the river about 600 feet above Niagara Falls with the intention of going over. He was soon in police custody charged with attempted suicide, but despite Brodie's claims the police magistrate did not believe that he had navigated the Falls at all. Brodie was told that if he would admit to a hoax, he would be discharged. ‘Well, then’, Brodie replied, ‘I did not go over, and I am off’. The Times reporter noted that Brodie ‘seemed very nervous and frightened throughout the proceedings’ (Over Niagara Falls 1889, p. 3).

The Niagara controversy prompts us to reconsider earlier episodes in Brodie's career, such as the strange occurrence a year before when word had spread that he would be making a jump from the Poughkeepsie Bridge. The figure of a man was indeed seen falling from the top of the bridge, but it turned out to be a human effigy whose trouser legs were filled with stones (It was not Brodie after all 1888, p. 16). Perhaps eager to quell any suggestions of trickery and maintain his public status, Brodie did in fact jump from the bridge a few months later, but on this occasion he did not emerge unscathed as he had done so often before, instead sustaining severe internal injuries and breaking three ribs (Steve Brodie badly hurt 1888, col. D). Niagara and Poughkeepsie took a toll on Brodie's profile in the press, and soon thereafter the possibility that even the Brooklyn Bridge leap of 1886 had been a hoax was being discussed openly. According to one informant, a tugboat captain had been paid $200 to participate in Brodie's ‘rescue’ from the East River and then confirm every detail of his story (Bowery landmark to go 1908, p. 7). ‘Reliable newspaper men in New York’, wrote the Washington Post in 1901, claimed that a weighted dummy and not Brodie had hit the water; that the dummy sank to the bottom of the river while Brodie climbed into the boat and ‘panted realistically for a while’, before answering the questions of reporters as he had been rehearsed by a New York press agent (Brodie fond of publicity 1901, p. 17). If such accounts are true, Brodie's real ‘art’ had much in common with the field of public relations, and he emerges as a working-class trickster and master media manipulator.

In fact, Brodie pulled off a media hoax almost as stunning as the phony bridge jump: he faked his own death. Several prominent newspapers carried stories on 31 March 1898 which reported that Brodie had died on a Chicago train (Brodie on a train 1898, p. 6). It was soon discovered that Brodie was quite alive, and had only been taken ill on the train, passing out after an injection of morphine. When Brodie arrived back home in New York at Grand Central Station, he was greeted by a crowd of supporters and a hearse. He told the crowd, ‘I'm not dead, though it's no fault of yours’ (Is again a bride 1898, p. 6). Besides bolstering his image as a mass culture confidence man, this stunt, like the open question of the authenticity of his jumps, made Brodie resemble a film star all the more. The birth of modern film stardom has been traced frequently to producer Carl Laemmle's well-known 1909 publicity coup claiming falsely that his newly signed actor Florence Lawrence had been killed by a street car. Seen in the context of Brodie's faked death a decade earlier, Laemmle's stunt looks like a page taken from the bridge jumper's playbook. Furthermore, Richard deCordova (2001, p. 140) claims that a crucial distinguishing characteristic of the movie star was the enigma of the star's ‘true’ self, thought to reside behind their various film roles and studio publicity. deCordova has argued that, during the growth of cinema, ‘all discourse about those who appeared in films emerged in a secretive context. The fascination over the players' identities was a fascination with a concealed truth, one that resided behind or beyond the surface of the film.’ deCordova finds this discourse of secrecy at each stage in the early development of the film star: during what he calls the ‘discourse on acting’, when the film player became the site of discourse about the mystery of labour in the cinema; in the early 1910s, around the revelation of the names and personalities of the players; and later in the decade, with the increased circulation of information about the private lives of film stars (2001, p. 140).

Like the film player, Brodie's celebrity rested on a compelling secret: did he jump or not? The possibility of a hoax behind Brodie's public image points to publicity practices that became common in the film industry, as does his alleged technique of using a dummy as a body double. ¹⁶ Indeed, two early landmarks of narrative film made prominent use of a dummy to create the illusion of a thrilling stunt. Edwin S. Porter's Great Train Robbery (1903) features a fight during which a man is thrown from the roof of a moving train; an illusion achieved by a match on action edit that substitutes a dummy for the body of an actor. In Walter Haggar's Life of Charles Peace (1905), What Noel Burch (1990, p. 99) calls ‘one of the true masterpieces of primitive cinema’, the celebrated English criminal attempts to escape from the police by leaping from a moving train, and the actor is again replaced by a dummy. Both films combine location shooting with studio sets and rely on stunt-work, editing and the use of a dummy to create seemingly impossible or dangerous stunts. These cinematic thrills can be seen as a continuation of trends on MacKaye's melodramatic stage or, just as easily, as a professionalisation of promotional techniques explored by Brodie.

Brodie's celebrity encompassed a variety of nineteenth-century entertainment traditions to create a nineteenth-century ‘art’ that combined the techniques of public relations, media manipulation, the spectacle of the modern landscape and a montage of real and prosthetic bodies: an art, we should note, that looks a great deal like the cinema. Porter and Haggar's landmark films were made just a few years after Brodie died – for real this time. Just before his death, Brodie moved to the drier climate of San Antonio, Texas in an attempt to slow the tuberculosis that eventually killed him in 1900 at the age of only 38. It seems strangely incongruous that Brodie, the iconic embodiment of the Bowery, should die in Texas, and yet it is fitting that he moved West just before the film industry, which relocated from New York to Hollywood in the 1910s. In the decade after the bridge jumper's death, Bowery entertainments such as the working man's saloon, dime museums and spectacular melodrama were largely eclipsed by cinema. Stunt performers such as Brodie figured in that process in that they, to paraphrase Tom Gunning (1997, p. 32), carved out a popular receptivity to certain types of celebrity and thrilling performance ‘into which the film experience crept like a hermit crab’. It is hard to miss the significance, then, of the fact that before Steve Brodie moved to Texas, he lived for a short time in Buffalo, where he purchased a saloon at 475 Main Street, and outfitted it in a manner similar to his grog shop on the Bowery. After his death, 475 Main Street was taken over by Mitchell and Moe Mark, who converted Brodie's saloon first to an Edisonia Penny Arcade and then, in 1908, to the Theatre Comique: a ten-cent movie theatre.

Notes

1. On Foucault's notion of ‘technologies of the self’, see Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, pp. 238–239); on body technique, see Mauss (1950, 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 1894, 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 (1994, pp. 20–22).

4. On the neo-classic hero, see Greene (1970, 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 (1894, 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 1894, p. 29). For more on the dime museum in America, see Dennett.

8. Bordman (1994, 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 (1991, 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 (1991, 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 2001, pp. 34–35).

13. Elliott Gorn (1987, 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 (2006, 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 (1994, pp. 20–22).