The Scarlet Sisters (23 page)

On a sleeting day in Manhattan, Tennie shocked a male visitor as she entered the
Weekly
office, throwing off her sodden outer garments. “ ‘Isn’t this weather terrible? Just look at this!’ Up went her skirts to a point midway between her knee and waist.” The revelation of drenched stockings and underwear that came to just above the knees—and revealed nothing of Tennie—nevertheless unnerved the visitor.

From the moment the sisters stepped onto Wall Street, Tennie captivated reporters. She possessed “the impulsive gaiety of a gypsy,” wrote a
Sun
reporter. “She is all verve, and vivacity, full of imagination and excitability, very free in her modes of expression.” Gossips were appalled at her habit of sitting close to men when she engaged them in conversation. One story made the rounds that when a wife admonished her husband for being so taken with Tennessee, he replied that what on earth could he do when a woman so charming leaned that close to him? When she stood on platforms to speak, young men in the audience warbled, “Oh that Tenn, Tenn, Tennessee.”

Tennie enjoyed entertaining reporters at the sisters’ Thirty-Eighth Street mansion, plying them with champagne and amusing conversation. They eagerly came to interview her following the 1871 publication of
Constitutional Equality of the Sexes
, a scholarly treatise under her name, widely thought to be the work of Stephen Pearl Andrews. Authenticity mattered little to the reporters greeted by Tennie: “She is all animation, talking not only with her tongue, but with her eyes, face, hands, and all over. One would think her whole physical structure was inlaid with a thousand
sensitive spiral springs.” Having “mingled largely and freely with men of the world, she will say and do the most outré things, but with an air of the most childlike and unsophisticated innocence.”

Tennie treated them to her premise on the sexual double standard: “Take, for instance, Hester Prynne—she darted a quick look at Col. Blood—‘it is Hester Prynne, isn’t it?’ If she is forced to wear a scarlet letter A, then so should her reverend seducer.” Asked what “Reverend Seducer” she had in mind, Tennie winked and said, “Draw your own conclusions.”

While Victoria scandalized with her radical views, she also maintained a controlled and regal image, seldom displaying the carefree abandon of her sister. Even in private she showed decorum, while Tennie let fly with her thoughts. Once, when Tennie referred contemptuously to a man as “that old cock,” Victoria darted a warning look, recalled Benjamin Tucker. Tennie said, “Oh Bennie knows very well that I was not referring to his private parts.”

Tennie was great fodder for cheap “sporting news” papers such as the
Days’ Doings
, read in saloons, barbershops, and sporting men’s clubs. The public drew on tabloid celebrity coverage to form their opinions about the famous, swearing with knowing looks that the stories were true, as surely as if they were happening to next-door neighbors, simply because they had read them in the scandal sheets. Lurid headlines and drawings in gossip rags added to the criticism heaped on the sisters in the mainstream press. The
Days’ Doings
made Tennie a cover girl, with drawings that depicted her in low-cut dresses, although she seldom wore them. The New York
Evening Telegram
wrote that Joan of Arc was never as well known as Tennie, and quipped, “Joan of Arc never had her name in the newspapers once, while Tennie Claflin’s name is in the newspapers all the time.”

Taking their cue from such coverage, the Beecher sisters Catharine and Harriet exploited Tennie in their determination to destroy Woodhull. Catharine referred to them as the “two prostitutes.” As the Beecher sisters tried to investigate the scarlet sisters’ past, Tennie’s actions added to the low-class portrayal they loved to depict, as in Stowe’s roman à clef,
My Wife and I
.

On occasion, Harriet and Catharine had ammunition. When the sisters opened the brokerage firm, Tennie was lavishly lauded in the press for her ability to spot the purveyor of a fraudulent check, expertise no doubt gained from her long experience with Buck Claflin. But her publicity drew the attention of some Chicago merchants who swore that a woman who owed them money looked a lot like Tennie, thus exposing a small crack in the prim and proper tale the sisters had told Wall Street reporters. The debt was $125.70, for medicines bought in her spiritual healing days. Tennie denied having been in Chicago, and when a lawyer read a description that fitted her exactly, she said, “with a smile which would have rivaled Cleopatra’s,” that she had often been mistaken for a lady who looked like her and had been obliged to pay her debts. Shortly after they opened the brokerage firm in 1870, Tennie had gone to court to answer charges on the unpaid bill, wearing a black silk-and-velvet dress, a chignon, and a fashionable hat. She smiled engagingly at the judge, but when he demanded she pay the bill, Tennie flounced out of the courtroom with a slight sway of her upholstered derriere.

Tennie had borne the brunt of their father’s larceny from childhood throughout her teenage years; when she was a young woman, skipping out on a debt and lying about it was a normal way of life. Still, this public notoriety was enough for Vanderbilt to begin distancing himself from the sisters. The New York
Sun
reported that Vanderbilt “denies all knowledge of her and her partner.” This was disingenuous, because the Commodore certainly had known them and helped them for two years.

The truth about Tennie scarcely mattered, because sporting newspapers used “almost any excuse to lampoon the sisters, whose images had wide commercial appeal.” Tennie’s political ambitions were mocked in illustrations with vicious stereotypes of the kind of people who would follow her. In one, Tennie stands aloft in a low-necked gown, a glass of champagne in hand, while the men ogling her include a thick-lipped African American, a Chinaman with a long braid and an opium pipe, and a large-nosed bearded man who fit caricatures of Jews in that era. Splashed on the cover of one
Days’ Doings
was an improbable scene: Tennie is depicted as an unbridled harpy, pummeling a male drama teacher with her fists as he
begs for mercy on the floor. This silly illustration was printed without reason or relevance; what mattered to the editors is that the sisters sold well.

Both sisters were savvy enough to know that as a team they enhanced their power, adding a special allure. Dressing alike was their showman’s trick, giving the intriguing impression of a twinlike personality. Tennie recognized that they were not of the norm, once saying defensively, “We have queer theories, queer opinions, queer manners and queer dresses, but we are pure-minded women, trying to do business just like men.”

There is no indication that Woodhull, with her proper manners and high ambitions, ever tried to restrain her lively sister. A friend who saw them constantly for nearly two years said that they always seemed fond of each other. The two were inseparable. In private, Tennie assumed a protective, almost motherly role when her older sister let down her guard and collapsed in fatigue. Victoria sorely needed Tennie’s unwavering support, for public scorn and upper-class condemnation weighed heavier on Victoria than her fiery rebuttals indicated. Victoria appeared impervious while striking back in print or at the lectern; only later would her private letters and musings reveal how deeply she was wounded.

At times, however, Tennie pushed for separate recognition. In the summer of 1871, when Theodore Tilton was Woodhull’s devoted camp follower, Tennie felt left out and unsatisfied. “I will tell you confidentially,” she wrote in a decidedly not confidential
Weekly
article, “that since Mr. Andrews is chief of the pantarchy and Victoria is chief of the Cosmopolitical Party, I have taken it into my head to be ‘chief of something.’ ” She might enlist the help of “my friend the Commodore, Rothschild, or whoever else has a few hundred thousand to spare” to bankroll an enterprise to show “what my own genius can design and realize.” She would leave the mansion, she said, and have her own “grand city home” and salon filled with “men and women of letters and genius, great artists and the like… leaders of reform.” She would call it the Republican Court. This never happened, but Tennie did indeed make a solo splash the following year.

Still, Tennie always remained eternally supportive of her sister. After Woodhull’s “I Am a Free Lover” speech in November 1871, Victoria was
much in demand as a lecturer, setting off on a wearying journey in towns throughout Michigan, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia. This time Tennie stayed home to defend her sister and carry on the fight to lambast sexual hypocrisy. She published a letter from a madam named Mary Bowles, complimenting Victoria for a speech that “touched the hearts of thousands of degraded women with a thrill of joy and hope… your lecture has awakened a soul in me which I thought was dead. If your views could prevail, virtue and happiness could be again mine. God bless you for your honest effort for women even though it should fail.” About to retire from her lucrative business, Mrs. Bowles offered to expose her clientele: “I will give you access to my two big books,” which would reveal the names of “all classes—from doctors of divinity to counter jumpers and runners for mercantile houses. Make what use of them as you please.”

Tennie published a disingenuous reply in the
Weekly
: “My sister and myself have scrupulously adopted the policy of avoiding personalities when possible.” Then she added, “But the time may come when that policy will have to be abandoned, for our enemies do not scruple to resort to them in the most scandalous manner.” As always, Tennie, more than Victoria, spoke of and to prostitutes from a deep well of sympathy. “I shall be happy to receive you at my home at any time,” either alone or “with others of your class. It is enough for me that you are human beings, and such as Christ loved and associated with.”

The trick in all this was that there was no “Mrs. Bowles.” She was Tennie’s invented madam. All the correspondence was fake. Posing as “Mrs. Bowles,” Tennie seethed with rage at the way men treated prostitutes and poorer women, and she declared (as Mrs. Bowles) her “intense indignation, amounting almost to hatred, for society which had condemned and excluded me, and for men especially in their mean and hateful treatment of women of our class—intimate with and caressing us in private and coolly passing us by without recognition before the world.” If Tennie was referring to herself, this is a deeply revelatory passage, and the most telling of all her comments. Nowhere else had she expressed such vehement private feelings: “almost hatred for society” that had “condemned her”; the “mean and hateful treatment” of
men “caressing us in private” and shunning them “before the world.” More than anything said about the sisters, her venom gives the impression that Tennie may have been a young prostituted victim of the Claflin tribe, ignored by day by men who had sought her at night. If so, it would go a long way toward explaining her unrelenting crusade regarding the sexual double standard.

While viewed by some as a shadow sister in the Woodhull machine, Tennie was stalwart in her fight for women’s independence. She was the one who procured Vanderbilt’s crucial support and start-up money for the brokerage firm, the one who hounded businessmen for
Weekly
ads. Tennie was the better salesperson, cutting deals through her bold pursuit and unwavering confidence. She was thus criticized for possessing persuasive powers that were considered attributes in men. She was also the sister who first scouted Capitol Hill for their suffrage fight. She managed to wangle a meeting with President Grant, parlaying a chance encounter in her youth with Grant’s hardworking tanner father, Jesse Grant, into a White House invitation. Jesse lived in Covington, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati, when the Claflins were plying their clairvoyant medicine trade in the 1860s. Old Jesse sought out Woodhull to spiritually heal his aches and pains and near deafness. He spent an afternoon with the sisters and became so entranced with Victoria, sister Utica, and Tennie that he composed a poem citing their peculiar names: “Three sisters fair, of worth and weight / a queen, a city and a state.” The visit must have been jolly; his poem ended, “Each bewitching gypsy / got that day a little tipsy.”

Tennie was a solid partner as advance woman and warm-up act, and when her sister suddenly became ill or too exhausted to perform, Tennie substituted for her. One time, Tennie stood alone, a pretty young woman, but with none of her sister’s commanding presence or name recognition, facing an overflow crowd at the Academy of Music. The murmurs of disappointment changed when Tennie charmed them with her “inimitable freshness and vivacity.” She could bellow with such tremendous volume that she had sometimes frightened the audience. One critic, who had heard Tennie speak earlier, said, “Her voice is something astounding to hear when at its full capacity”; she could
go from high C soprano to “melodious contralto” and down to “tremendous thunderings” of a “basso profundo.” But this time, Tennie kept her voice in check and won over the packed house. She was no shadow.

Despite Tennie’s reputation and the rumors surrounding her, there is little evidence of a freewheeling sexual life in Manhattan. Outside of Vanderbilt, and of Tennie’s easily discarded first husband, and of a suggestive letter to the influential Whitelaw Reid, little is known. Even the gossip papers never located lovers. One dashing young man was known as a steady companion and “Tennie’s sweetheart,” the city editor of the New York
Sun
, Johnny Green. He was “a tall, handsome, smooth-faced chap of about 30, with an olive complexion that made him look like a Portuguese,” one acquaintance noted. Green was “ ‘all gone’ on Tennie” and showed up often at the offices of the
Weekly
. When Tennie or the family wanted to broadcast anything, Tennie fed it to Green.

The only suggestion that Vicky and Tennie had an unusually charitable relationship concerning shared beaus came from the gossip-for-sale Tucker. “One afternoon, when I was walking uptown with Victoria, from the office, she [Victoria] said to me suddenly: ‘Tennie is going to love you this afternoon.’ I looked at her wonderingly. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I don’t care to have her.’ ‘Oh! Don’t say that,’ she answered, ‘Nobody can love me who doesn’t love Tennie.’ ” Tucker relates that he ducked “numerous hints and opportunities” from Tennie.