How Not to Get Rich Read online

  The answer came to Twain in one of those famous “a-ha!” moments that brain scientists these days study and innovation-­mad business leaders profess to want more of. But of course, as we now know, these moments usually occur only after an individual has devoted years of research and investigation to a specific problem. All high achievers devote at least 10,000 hours to whatever it is they are trying to accomplish, according to Malcolm Gladwell. But that wasn’t the case with Twain. Meaning no disrespect, Twain was not a professional fashion designer, and by all evidence, he had invested maybe one or two hours, tops.

  To appreciate the full magnitude of Twain’s contribution to a field in which he had no training whatsoever, it is important to know something more about life as it was experienced during this time by the pants-wearing men of the world. Belts, though in existence since the Bronze Age, were largely decorative. And pants worn by men in Twain’s day were so high-waisted that belts were nearly useless. Suspenders as we know them were not in use until 1820, and Twain, like many men, found them uncomfortable. (It was only in World War I that men became comfortable with uniform belts and then with belts in civilian life.)

  And so, with all this buzzing about in Twain’s mind, he would apparently lie awake at night, worrying about Horace Greeley’s pants. Then one morning, unable to get back to sleep, Twain suddenly thought of an elastic strap. It just snapped into his mind, as elastic tends to do. Like Archimedes leaping naked from his bath, Twain jumped out of bed.

  “While I dressed, it occurred to me that in order to be efficient, the strap must be adjustable & detachable, when the wearer did not wish it to be permanent,” he recalled. “So I devised the plan of having two or three button-holes in each end of the strap, & buttoning it to the garment—whereby it could be shortened or removed at pleasure.” He began to sketch diagrams of his idea. As he told the Patent Office: “While washing (these details seem a little trivial, I grant, but they are history & therefore in some degree respect-worthy,)” he drew other diagrams. He then showed the sketches to Orion and, in the course of their conversation, “it occurred to me that this invention would apply to ladies’ stays.” This led to yet another diagram. Then—mirabile dictu!—Twain realized the device might be used on shirts and underwear, too. The possibilities were endless.

  SWELLED UP WITH CONFIDENCE, Twain went to Washington in October 1871 and, in December, secured U.S. Patent 121,992. There was a dispute from another applicant, but Twain prevailed after agreeing to allow the other man a share in the profits once the device was manufactured and marketed. But as it turned out, Twain never manufactured it, and in 1877, the other man sued Twain, seeking $10,000 for breach of contract. Finding for the plaintiff, the court awarded him only $300. More than a century later, Twain’s elastic strap was praised in an unlikely source. In 2011, Rebecca Greenfield wrote in the venerable Atlantic:

  While the literature claims [Twain’s invention] is most useful for “vests, pantaloons or other garments requiring straps,” how many pantaloons do you see with elastic straps held together by clasps these days? This clever invention only caught on with one snug garment: the bra. For those with little brassiere experience, not a button, not a strap, but a clasp is all that secures that elastic band, which holds up women’s breasts. So not-so-dexterous ladies and gents, you can thank Mark Twain for that.

  Greenfield, moreover, imagined additional uses for the device. “We should refocus and bring this invention back to where Twain intended it to be: ‘vests, pantaloons or other garments requiring straps.’ Just think: Stretchy pants with clasps.”

  OF COURSE THE FIRST MONTHS of Twain’s married life were not all adjustable elastic straps. There were adjustments of other kinds, too. Twain soon grew bored with newspaper office routine. Fred Kaplan in his Twain biography puts it nicely: “Taking full advantage of his ownership prerogatives, he began to stay away from the Express office.”

  Livy, meanwhile, never really felt at home in Buffalo and missed her family. Her homesickness intensified in the spring, when her father fell seriously ill. On August 6, 1870, just eight months after his daughter’s wedding, Jervis Langdon died. While sad and unsettling—Twain had come to love his father-in-law—Langdon’s death also opened up new opportunities for the newlyweds. Langdon left his fortune to be divided among his widow and their two children, Livy and her brother, Charley. An adopted daughter, Susan Crane, was given a country house called Quarry Farm, overlooking Elmira. Twain and his bride inherited $250,000—in our time, about $4,400,000.

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  “To Live in This Style . . .”

  By the spring of 1871, little more than a year after arriving in Buffalo, Twain and Livy decided to leave. They sold the house they had been given as a wedding present, at a loss. They also sold their share in the newspaper, also at a loss. Then they moved to Hartford, Connecticut.

  Twain had first visited Hartford in 1868. These days, we think of the city as a center of the American insurance business, which it has been ever since J. P. Morgan’s grandfather established the Aetna Fire Insurance Company there in 1817. But Hartford was headquarters as well of Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company and the Colt Armory, which manufactured firearms. It was also home to the Pratt & Whitney Company, which produced machine tools. The city was prosperous, and Twain was understandably impressed. “Hartford dollars have a place in half the great moneyed enterprises of the union,” he reported in the Alta California.

  Twain also found Hartford attractive because it was a hub of the subscription book business. His own publisher, Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company, was still headquartered in the city, which also counted among its residents a number of financially comfortable and socially progressive intellectuals. Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Dudley Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other advanced thinkers made their homes in Nook Farm, a close-knit woodsy enclave that appealed to Twain’s social as well as financial ambitions. The houses were “not shingle-shaped affairs, stood on end and packed together like a ‘deck’ of cards, but massive private hotels,” with spacious yards. “To live in this style,” Twain said, “one must have his bank account, of course.”

  A skeptic in religious matters, Twain even felt comfortable among the city’s educated, broad-minded, and very worldly churchgoers. He called the community’s Congregational house of worship “the Church of the Holy Speculators.” Its pastor, ­Joseph Twichell, became one of his closest friends. Twichell was “one of the best of men,” Twain said, “although a clergyman.” Kenneth Andrews in Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle says Twichell could have “castigated [his congregants for] their devotion to prosperity, and led them from the dominant commercialism” of their age. But this never occurred to Twichell, because he was a man of his time and place, “entirely normal and nothing neurotic.”

  The same could not be said of their neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe. A crusader on behalf of noble causes, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin became increasingly eccentric with age. When Twain knew her, she would wander into somebody else’s house, slip up behind an unsuspecting neighbor who might be lost in thought or reading a book, and “fetch a whoop that would jump that person out of his skin.”

  TWAIN AND LIVY decided to build a house in Hartford and “build it right even if it does cost 25 percent more.” Twenty-five percent more than what, Twain didn’t say, but whatever sum he had in mind, the house ended up costing a great deal more than that. Construction seemed to take forever, and the family moved in before the house was finished. “The carpenters are here for time & eternity,” Twain said. “I kill them when I get opportunities, but the builder goes & gets more.” He was determined to get all the workers off the property as soon as possible, “even if we have to import an epidemic to do it.”

  Twain was nonetheless delighted with the results of their work, which he called “the loveliest home that ever was.” Even today, the twenty-five-room, thirteen-fireplace, seven-bath mansion is a showstopper,
though it has never been without its detractors. The Hartford Times said it was “one of the oddest-looking buildings . . . ever designed for dwelling.” The Elmira Advertiser called it a “brick-kiln gone crazy, the outside ginger-breaded with woodwork, as a baker sugar-ornaments the top and side of a fruit loaf.”

  With furnishings from all over the world, the interior was no less eye-popping. A carved chimney piece was from a castle in Scotland. Pierced brass plates around the fireplace in the marble-floored entrance hall were from India. There was a window over one of the fireplaces so the family could enjoy a cozy fire while watching snow fall. Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the New York jeweler, had a hand in the front-hall decoration. In Venice, Livy found the master bedroom’s walnut bed frame with carved cherubs. “This Italy does tempt money out of one’s pocket,” Livy told her mother. After another European shopping spree, the family returned with twenty-two freight boxes of furnishings for the house. They accumulated so much stuff that much of it had to go immediately into storage.

  Over the years, Twain gave a number of estimates of the cost of the house, a new barn, and a carriage house. The lowest was $110,000, and the highest was $167,000 in the dollars of the day. In 1877, soon after the family moved in, the city assigned the property’s value at $66,650, equivalent to $1,420,000 today. Three years later, they began renovations, enlarging the kitchen and front hall. Once that was done, Twain said, they “still had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber not knowing it.” But give the plumber his due: The house had running water, a shower, and indoor toilets. When William Dean Howells brought his son to visit, the boy was duly impressed. Finding red soap in one of the bathrooms, he cried out, “Why, they’ve even got their soap painted!”

  In 1902, long after Twain and his family had moved away and the house stood uninhabited for several years, it was purchased by a Hartford insurance executive for $28,800. In 1920, he sold the house to a real estate investor (with two undertakers as partners) for $55,000. When these investors announced plans to demolish the house and replace it with apartments, civic-minded Hartford residents were incensed. The developer’s response was to offer it to any literary types for $300,000. If they didn’t buy the property at that price, he would “take off that ugly roof” and stack three more stories on the house. In 1925, the developer sold it for $82,000, and the house was acquired in 1929 for use as a museum, visitor center, and library for $150,000. The Mark Twain House & Museum opened in 2003.

  AFLESH-AND-BLOOD SOCIAL NETWORKING MACHINE, Twain made the most of the intellectual and commercial opportunities that Hartford presented. He and Livy opened their house to authors, publishers, bankers, merchants, politicians, and other civic leaders, sparing no expense in making their events memorable. Daughter Clara Clemens remembered her parents “constantly preparing for lunch parties and dinner parties.” Howells recalled them as “whole-souled hosts, with inextinguishable money, and a palace of a house.”

  They spent as much as $100 a week on food and drink and their accoutrements, or about $100,000 a year at today’s values. A maid remembered the dinner parties as elaborate affairs, where all sorts of delicacies were served. There was ice cream, for example, and “never plain ordinary ice cream—we always had our ice cream put up in some wonderful shapes—like flowers or cherubs, little angels—all different kinds and different shapes and colors—oh, everything lovely!”

  HAPPY IN HARTFORD, Twain was energetic and productive. He worked on some of the books that made him a literary lion in the third-floor combination billiard room and study, where, during most of the year, he did his writing. In the summer, he turned out hundreds of pages from an outdoor study built especially for him at Quarry Farm by Livy’s sister by adoption, ­Susan Crane, and her husband. “It is octagonal, with a peaked roof, each octagon filled with a spacious window,” Twain wrote, “and it sits perched in complete isolation on top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.”

  It was during the Hartford years that Twain wrote Roughing It and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It was also during this period that Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner collaborated on The Gilded Age. Published in 1873, The Gilded Age was never one of Twain’s most popular novels, but it has the distinction of giving the era of the great robber barons its name. Sales of these three Twain books were not as brisk as those of The Innocents Abroad, though they still sold well. Tom Sawyer would have been more of a commercial success had not “Canadian pirates,” as Twain called them, flooded the U.S. market with bootleg copies. He made nothing from the sales of these unauthorized editions and was appropriately aggrieved, leading to a longtime interest in and advocacy of copyright protection for authors.

  But The Gilded Age made money for the author in a way no one anticipated. In the early 1870s, Twain learned of an unauthorized version of The Gilded Age being performed on the stage. Understandably indignant that someone else was profiting from his work, Twain considered suing the scoundrel who wrote and produced the bootleg production but instead simply bought the rights to the play outright, declaring “he shan’t run any play on MY brains.” Twain revised the play and renamed it Colonel Sellers, after the big-talking promoter who dominates the story. The play toured for a decade, earning more money for Twain than the novel ever did.

  THE BOOK THAT was most profitable during the Hartford years was one Twain didn’t write but invented. The book, according to Albert Bigelow Paine, “did not contain a single word that critics could praise or condemn.” This was Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrap Book. The idea first occurred to him in the summer of 1872 and represented a response to a market demand, even if consumers were not yet aware that any such demand existed.

  An avid collector of newspaper clippings about himself, Twain evidently seethed with annoyance whenever the clippings were torn or smudged or otherwise defaced—especially when he tried to affix them to scrapbook pages. On the reasonable assumption that others had been subjected to similar frustrations, he envisioned a scrapbook whose pages were coated with what Ron Powers calls a “gum-stickum, to ward off the heartache of brittle, ink-sucking mucilage.” As Twain explained to his brother Orion, “you need not wet any more of the gum than your scrap or scraps will cover,” and—voilà!—“you may shut up the book and the leaves won’t stick together.”

  Eager to make sure his patent application was not challenged by another inventor, Twain instructed Orion to preserve the envelope from the letter in which he laid out the plan, because the postmark “ought to be good evidence of the date of this great humanizing and civilizing invention.” There was no challenge, and in June 1873, the scrapbook was awarded U.S. Patent 140,245.

  Orion showed little interest in the scrapbook. This was unusual, Powers writes, because Orion was ordinarily as “malleable as a spaniel.” But a friend from the Quaker City excursion was very much interested. This was Dan Slote of Slote, Woodman and Company, a New York City stationery-supply company. Among the pious pilgrims on the Quaker City, Twain and Slote forged an instantaneous bond. Slote, who packed 3,000 cigars for the voyage, became Twain’s “splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless room-mate” on the trip. Together, they formed the core of “the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through Palestine,” horrifying their sanctimonious shipmates with their irreverence. Back in the United States, Twain would stay at Slote’s house during visits to Manhattan, where they dedicated every Saturday “as a solemn fast-day,” Twain told his mother and sister. On such occasions, “we will entertain no light matters or frivolous conversations, but only get drunk.”

  WHEN TWAIN BROUGHT Slote the idea for the scrapbook, Slote’s company agreed to produce and distribute the finished product. The scrapbook sold 25,000 copies that first year, earning Twain $12,000, or $231,000 in our day. In time, there were more than fifty varieties to choose from. Some estimates have Twain pocketing $50,000 from the scrapbook, or about $1,100,000 today. But for some unknown reason, still h
e persuaded himself that Slote was swindling him. This suspicion was strengthened in July 1878, when Slote asked Twain to lend the company $5,000 at 7 percent interest. Twain recalled the negotiation this way:

  As security he offered the firm’s note. I asked for an endorser. He was much surprised and said that if endorsers were handy and easy to get at he wouldn’t have come to me for the money, he could get it anywhere. That seemed reasonable, and so I gave him the five thousand dollars.

  Three days after Twain made the loan, Slote, Woodman and Company went out of business.

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  “How the Ignorant and Inexperienced Succeed”

  Twain, being Twain, did not confine his business activities to the scrapbook alone. As a prominent citizen of Hartford, he of course invested in an insurance company. Here’s how Harper’s Weekly, in its July 4, 1874, issue, reported this latest venture:

  Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, sometime [sic] known as “Mark Twain,” has at last found his true mission. From idling away his time as a writer he has determined to become an underwriter—one of those practical money-absorbing men for whom Hartford is a sort of hive, so to speak. The cash citizens of Hartford have resolved to get a new accident insurance company, of which it is surmised that Mr. Clemens who will be a stockholder is to be made “Old Prex.” He has met with a great many accidents in his [day] and now proposes to go into it as a matter of statistics and income.