The Barbary Coast
The Barbary Coast
Besides the establishments which were quite frankly dives, wherein the sole purpose of every employee and hanger-on was to separate the unwary visitor from his money with the greatest possible dispatch, other resorts abounded during the early days of the Barbary Coast which were a trifle more respectable. They were also called melodeans and sometimes concert saloons, but were in reality low variety and music halls. Among them were the Bella Union, the Olympic, the Pacific, Bert’s New Idea Melodeon, the Adelphi, and Gilbert’s Melodeon. They catered to stag audiences only, and occasionally offered very ambitious programs, but their performances, while coarse and vulgar and presented with what the Gilbert’s advertisements called “freedom from constrained etiquette,” were not particularly obscene. In these places there was no dancing. They charged admission, ranging from a bit, or twelve and one-half cents, to fifty cents, and their revenue was derived solely from this source and from the sale of liquor. They employed no pretty waiter girls, and discouraged drugging and robbery upon their premises. As elsewhere on the Coast, however, the female performers were required to sell drinks between their appearances on the stage, and in the curtained boxes which were a feature of each house they were permitted to do whatever in their judgment might persuade a reluctant customer to buy.
It was seldom that a prostitute appeared in any of the resorts of this type, for with the additional income from admission fees they were able to engage entertainers of some slight professional standing. Many, indeed, who trod the boards at the Bella Union and other Barbary Coast melodeons became in later years outstanding dramatic, vaudeville, and musical comedy stars of the American stage. Such well-known players as Ned Harrigan, Lotta Crabtree, James A. Hearne, J. H. O’Neill, Maggie Brewer, Eddie Foy, Junie McCree, Pauline Markham, Jefferson de Angelis, and Flora Walsh received at least a part of their early training there. Harrigan was a ship-calker at Vallejo when he became ambitious for a career behind the footlights and obtained a job singing at Gilbert’s Melodeon. He was discharged after his third performance, and it was not for several weeks that he was able to get another chance, at the Bella Union. There he was an immediate success, and within a year he was receiving fifty dollars a week, a large salary for a variety actor in those days. When he played in the East a few years later, he and Tony Hart formed a song-and-dance team which soon became the most celebrated vaudeville act in the United States.
The Bella Union, at Washington and Kearny streets, was probably the most popular resort ever operated on the Barbary Coast. It was the favorite haunt of the young bloods of the town whenever they wanted to see a bit of life in the raw, or at least what they regarded as raw, and no sailor considered his shore liberty in San Francisco complete unless it included a visit to the Bella Union. Originally the place was opened as a gambling house about the middle of 1849. It was destroyed several times by the great fires which devastated San Francisco during the reign of the Sydney Ducks. In 1868 the building which had been erected after the conflagration of June 1851 was demolished and a new one constructed which stood until the earthquake and fire of 1906. Despite these vicissitudes and many changes in name and management, the Bella Union maintained a continuous existence for almost sixty years. During most of this period it was a variety house playing to men only, but there were also times when it was a family theater presenting melodrama at fifty cents top. In its later years it was called successively the Haymarket Theatre and the Imperial Concert Hall and finally ended its days as the Eden Musee, housing a penny arcade and a waxworks exhibit.
An occasional theatrical performance was staged in the Bella Union during gold-rush days, but gambling remained the principal business of the resort until 1856. (6a) It was closed after the Vigilante uprising of that year, but was soon reopened as a melodeon by Samuel Tetlow, who operated the house successfully until 1880, when he shot and killed his partner, Billy Skeantlebury. Tetlow was acquitted on a plea of self-defense. A few months later he sold the Bella Union and retired to private life, but his wife died, and he became enamored of a chorus girl, who soon reduced him to poverty. He died a pauper. Under Tetlow’s management the Bella Union was advertised mainly by dodgers thrown about the streets. The beauty and shapeliness of the female performers were not mentioned, nor was the fact that the performance might be highly objectionable to the sensitive indicated in any way. A typical Tetlow dodger, issued in 1862, thus described the Bella Union’s theatrical fare:
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NIGHTLY A CONSTANTLY VARIED ENTERTAINMENT
In Which
DRAMATIC, TERPSICHOREAN AND MUSICAL
Emphatically the MELODEON OF THE PEOPLE Unapproachable and Beyond Competition. |
“Who has not heard of the Bella Union? Go to the farthest end of our sage brush in the mountain country, and you will meet some antique miner of the primeval days who will tell, with glistening eye, of the many queer sights he enjoyed at the ancient Bella Union. . . . We enter, and passing through a large bar room find ourselves seated in a very pretty little theater, surrounded by a circle of curtained boxes, that resemble so many pigeon holes. After giving the audience time to admire a drop curtain execrably painted, it is drawn up and exposed to view is a semi-circle of male and female performers seated on the stage; the latter generally quite pretty and in no way diffident in displaying their charms to the audience. Songs and dances of licentious and profane character while away the hours of the evening, and all that can pander to that morbid desire of the rabble for obscenity is served in superior style. If you have remained long enough below we will intrust ourselves to a pigeon hole above. No sooner are you seated than the curtain drops on some broad farce and the orchestra prepares for the interlude. But what is this? Don’t be alarmed, my friend; this is simply the pretty little danseuse who performed the evolutions in the hornpipe in the last act come to solicit the wherewithal to purchase a bottle of champagne. The request is a modest one, partaking of the character of the fair petitioner. ‘Only $5, now don’t be stingy.’ But you are stingy, and the request drops to a bottle of claret. ‘No?’ Under the depressing influence of your meanness it continues to drop until it at last reaches the humble solicitation of ‘at least, a whiskey straight.’ In the next box are seated three or four young men of respectable family connections, said respectable connections dozing away in their residences on Rincon Hill and elsewhere, under the hallucination that their worthy scions are attending a levee of the Young Men’s Christian Association. How shocked they would be could they but see them as they sit there now, ‘playing particular smash,’ as they are pleased to term it, with the feminine attaches of the Bella Union. Well, night gives license to many strange things; but we won’t moralize, although that pretty girl with the intellectual forehead that sits near one of the centers on the stage might tell you some very queer stories about some very worthy people, but she won't."
The popularity of the Bella Union declined when Samuel Tetlow left the resort, but its ancient glories were revived for a few years by Ned Foster, an able showman who always drove a team of black Shetland ponies harnessed to a gaudy dog-cart and was invariably attended by his Negro bodyguard, called Deacon Jones. Foster assumed control of the house in July 1887 and operated it profitably until 1892, when the City Council enacted a law prohibiting the sale of liquor in theaters. Unlike most statutes directed at the Barbary Coast, it was enforced. It was a lethal blow to the Bella Union and other places of its type, and they gradually passed into oblivion, although the Bella Union survived much longer than any of the others. The shows that Foster presented were no bawdier than those offered by Tetlow had been, but he made them seem so by his advertising, which had a smirking, small-boy-writing-on-the-barn quality curiously like that of the modern motion-picture ballyhoo. All of his street dodgers, in design if not in actual wording, were similar to this one of 1890:
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Are Invited to Visit the BELLA UNION If you Want to "Make a Night of It.”
BELLA UNION You will Find
REALLY GIRLY GIRLS! No Back Numbers, but as Sweet and Charming
BELLA UNION And Such Fun!
As For the Program, it is Enough to Make
We could Tell You More About It, but It
BELLA UNION THEATER. |
One night early in 1890 a lumberjack who had come to San Francisco from the redwood forests to spend half a year’s wages became enamored of a Midway dancer. He not only bought half a dozen bottles of champagne, on each of which she received her proper commission, but stuffed several bank-notes into her stocking, a privilege which gentlemen in those days considered quite a treat. Naturally, they became very much engrossed in each other; so much so, in fact, that the dancer failed to appear on the stage when the time came for her turn. Presently one of the resort’s assistant managers rushed into the booth, threatened to discharge her for neglecting her art, and forthwith snatched her from the lumberjack’s lap. Thereupon the hardy woodsman drew a revolver, fired a shot into the ceiling, and cried: “Put that back!“ The frightened assistant manager quickly restored the lady to her perch, and the performance was delayed until she and the lumberjack had finished their conversation.
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Perhaps the most fantastic of the many queer characters who delighted audiences at the Bella Union and other Barbary Coast melodeons were Big Bertha, a sprightly lass of two hundred and eighty pounds who sang sentimental ballads in a squeaky soprano; and Oofty Goofty, a stringy little man who, for a while at least, fancied himself as a dramatic actor. So far as journalistic or public knowledge went, Oofty Goofty had no other name than this singular appellation, which he acquired during his first appearance before his San Francisco public, as a wild man in a Market Street freakshow. From crown to heel he was covered with road tar, into which were stuck great quantities of horsehair, lending him a savage and ferocious appearance. He was then installed in a heavy cage, and when a sufficiently large number of people had paid their dimes to gaze upon the wild man recently captured in the jungles of Borneo and brought to San Francisco at enormous expense, large chunks of raw meat were poked between the bars by an attendant. This provender the wild man gobbled ravenously, occasionally growling, shaking the bars, and yelping these fearsome words: “Oofty goofty! Oofty goofty!" (6b)
He was, naturally, immediately christened Oofty Goofty, and as such was identified to the day of his death. For a week or so he was a veritable histrionic sensation, the wildest wild man ever exhibited on the Pacific Coast. Then, since he could not perspire through his thick covering of tar and hair, he became ill and was sent to the Receiving Hospital. There physicians vainly tried for several days to remove Oofty Goofty’s costume without removing his natural epidermis as well. He was at length liberally doused with a tar solvent and laid out upon the roof of the hospital, where the sun finally did the work.
Thereafter Oofty Goofty eschewed character parts and decided to scale the heights of theatrical fame as a singer and dancer. He obtained a place on the bill at Bottle Koenig’s, a Barbary Coast beer hall which also offered a low variety entertainment. There he danced once and sang one song. He was then, with great ceremony, thrown into the street. In reality this was a very fortunate experience, as it indicated his future career, or, as he termed it, his “work.” Oofty Goofty was kicked with considerable force, and landed heavily upon a stone sidewalk, but to his intense surprise he discovered that he was, apparently, insensible to pain. This great gift he immediately proceeded to capitalize, and for some fifteen years, except for occasional appearances at the Bella Union as a super, and a short engagement as co-star with Big Bertha, he eked out a precarious existence simply by letting himself be kicked and pummeled for a price. Upon payment of ten cents a man might kick Oofty Goofty as hard as he pleased, and for a quarter he could hit the erstwhile wild man with a walking-stick. For fifty cents Oofty Goofty would become the willing, and even prideful, recipient of a blow with a baseball bat, which he always carried with him. He became a familiar figure in San Francisco, not only on the Barbary Coast, but in other parts of the city as well. It was his custom to approach groups of men, in the streets and in bar-rooms, and diffidently inquire: “Hit me with a bat for four bits, gents? Only four bits to hit me with this bat, gents.”
Oofty Goofty was knocked off his feet more times than he could remember, but he continued to follow his peculiar vocation until John L. Sullivan hit him with a billiard cue and injured his back. Not long afterwards Sullivan’s pugilistic standing was impaired by James J. Corbett, the pride of San Francisco, and Oofty Goofty always felt that Corbett had acted as his agent in the matter. Oofty Goofty never entirely recovered from his encounter with Sullivan. He walked with a limp thereafter, and the slightest blow made him whimper with pain. With his one claim to distinction gone, he soon became a nonentity. He died within a few years, but medical authorities said that Sullivan’s blow had not been a contributing cause.
Big Bertha arrived in San Francisco in the middle eighteen-eighties, posing as a wealthy Jewish widow searching for a good man to take care of her money, which she described as being far more than she could count. Gentlemen by the score volunteered for this arduous service, and many strove to meet the test with which she proposed to determine their worth and financial standing. She required each suitor to transfer to her a sum of money, to be added to an equal sum of her own, the whole to be risked on an investment of which she alone knew the nature. In this extraordinary manner she collected several thousand dollars from a score of lovelorn males, not a penny of which was ever seen again by its rightful owner. She was at length arrested, but none of her victims felt inclined to brave the torrent of publicity that would result from prosecution, and she was released on nominal bail, and the case against her dropped. She then decided to ornament the stage and sought an engagement from Ned Foster of the Bella Union, and Jack Hallinan, manager of the Midway Plaisance, then the Cremorne. These far-sighted impresarios promptly took her under their joint management, rented an empty store on Market Street, and exhibited her as Big Bertha, the Queen of the Confidence Women, admission ten cents. At stated intervals during her hours of exhibition Big Bertha rose from the specially constructed chair in which she reclined, and recited the story of her career of crime in San Francisco and other cities, embellishing her account with many vivid details.
Having thus established herself as a villainess of the deepest dye, she lifted her voice in song, rendering the only two songs she ever knew: A Flower from My Angel Mother’s Grave and The Cabin Where the Old Folks Died.
When the furor over Big Bertha as Queen of the Confidence Women had subsided, she played a brief engagement at Bottle Koenig’s and then went to the Bella Union, where she achieved considerable renown as a singer who couldn’t sing, a dancer who couldn’t dance, and an actress who couldn’t act. Her work in the drama, indeed, was so remarkably bad that she attracted audiences from all over San Francisco and brought to the Bella Union and the Barbary Coast hundreds of citizens who had never visited the quarter before and never did again. Her greatest triumph was achieved in Romeo and Juliet, in which she co-starred with Oofty Goofty. They played the balcony scene with Romeo in the balcony, and Big Bertha herself, as Juliet, standing firmly upon the stage. This was probably the most popular production that Ned Foster ever staged, but within a week he was compelled to take it off the boards, for Big Bertha complained that as a lover Oofty Goofty was entirely too rough. She flatly refused to act with him any longer. Soon thereafter Foster presented her in a condensed version of Mazeppa, in which she made her entrance strapped to the back of a donkey. This was also greeted with great acclaim, until one night the donkey fell over the footlights, carrying Big Bertha with him, and well-nigh exterminated the orchestra. During the excitement Big Bertha, scratched and angry, crawled from beneath the braying donkey and, in language which she had doubtless learned during her career as an adventuress, indicated that she would never again play the role of Mazeppa. Thereafter she confined her stage work to singing, with an occasional dance, and appeared at various melodeons until 1895, when she obtained control of the Bella Union. Unable to sell liquor because of the law of 1892, she couldn’t make the resort pay. After a few months she quit in disgust and so passed from the Barbary Coast picture.
