American Experience (1988) s09e09 Episode Script

1
Major funding for American Experience
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American Experience
is also made possible
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( clock ticking )
( clock chiming )
Narrator:
November 1889 -- A young reporter
prepared to embark on one of the most
publicized journeys of all time.
Her mission: To break the record
set by the legendary fictional
character Phileas T. Fogg.
For the next two
and a half months
the whole world would follow
the adventures of Nellie Bly.
( Steamship whistle blows )
Stephens: This was new and this was
different and this was exciting
and when Nellie Bly
actually decided to go
all around the world
I mean, that was like going up
in the space shuttle.
( Train whistle blows )
Narrator: Nellie Bly became one
of the most famous women in the world
by doing things a woman
wasn't supposed to do.
She posed as an unwed mother to
expose the baby-buying trade
A thief to experience
a night in jail
An insane woman to report
on life inside a madhouse
and everything she did
sold newspapers.
Corrigan: There was something
about her voice
Something about the bravado
that her pieces exuded
that I think really captured
readers' imagination
and really made her the premiere
female reporter of her time.
She seemed to know
how to pick the assignment
that would put her
on center stage.
I think it was
her most remarkable gift.
Nussbaum: "I wonder when they'll
send a girl to travel 'round the sky
read the answer in the stars,
they wait for Nellie Bly."
Narrator: A few years before
her death, Nellie Bly wrote:
"If one would become great,
"two things are
absolutely necessary.
"The first is to know yourself.
The second is not to let
the world know you."
The world never knew
what lay at the heart
of her remarkable ambition.
She never spoke of the darkest
days of her childhood.
Her given name was
Elizabeth Jane Cochran
but everyone called her "Pink."
She was born in the last year
of the Civil War, May 5, 1864
in Cochrans Mills, Pennsylvania.
The town was named
for her father,
Judge Michael Cochran.
He had ten children
with his first wife.
After she died,
he married again.
Pink was his 13th
and most rebellious child.
Great confidence.
Dressed in pink, everyone else
is dressed in brown and black.
Her mother has taught her
to gather attention
and revel in it
and these are lessons
that were never, never lost.
Narrator:
When Pink was six years old
her life changed suddenly
and forever.
Her father died,
leaving no will
to protect the interests
of his young second family.
The elegant mansion they had
lived in for only a year
was auctioned off.
With 15 heirs,
there was little to go around
and Pink's mother felt she had
no choice but to marry again.
She and her mother were thrown
on very hard times
when her father died
and then her mother made
a disastrous marriage
after her father's death
to a man who abused her and
who she finally had to divorce
so I think Nellie saw
a lot of tough times
and a lot of the dark side
of life.
Narrator: When Pink Cochran
was 14 years old,
she testified at her mother's
divorce trial.
The future reporter painted
a devastating portrait
of a marriage.
"My stepfather has been
generally drunk
"since he married my mother.
"When drunk he is very cross,
and cross when sober.
"I have heard him scold
my mother and call her names:
"A whore and a bitch.
I've seen her cry."
Kroeger:
Watching these events unfold
and you're someone
with Nellie's spirit,
what do you say to yourself?
This is not a sure thing.
Love, marriage may be nice
but it is not going to secure
my future or my family's future.
Narrator: Pink Cochran
would depend on no one.
In a Victorian world, she would
be an independent woman.
At age 15, she enrolled
at the Indiana Normal School
in western Pennsylvania
determined to enter one of
the few careers open to women.
She would become a teacher.
But after only one term,
her money ran out.
She would have to seek
her fortune
without the advantage
of a formal education.
"Looking down on the city
of Pittsburgh,"
said a writer for
the Atlantic Monthly
"is like looking into Hell
with the lid off."
Pittsburgh would be
Pink Cochran's home
for the next seven years
and the place where
luck and ambition
would finally come together.
Kroeger:
Pittsburgh was industrializing.
Great fortunes were being made.
It was a place
of opportunity and growth.
Her brothers had preceded her
to the town.
Her mother came
to make a home for them.
They found their way,
they took in boarders.
They made it work.
Narrator: In the lives of
the young working women she met,
Pink saw the dark side
of industrial America.
Girls as young as nine or ten
worked in canneries, foundries,
glass factories.
Their only way out -- marriage.
But Pink Cochran yearned
for more than factory work
or a husband.
She wanted the same
opportunities as her brothers
who landed white collar
jobs quickly
in spite of their
meager education.
Kroeger:
Why can't she be a clerk?
Of course at this time
only young men can be clerks,
not women.
Why can't she be a conductor
on a Pullman palace car?
Why can't she do the same thing?
Simply because she's a woman?
Narrator:
For five years she struggled
helping her mother
run the boarding house
seeking work
as a nanny or a tutor.
Pink was 20 years old
and going nowhere
when she read a column
in the Pittsburgh Dispatch
by Erasmus Wilson, known as
Q.O., "The Quiet Observer."
Q.O. Was a Civil War veteran
with a courtly manner
who looked on the past
with nostalgia.
He said that girls were useless
outside the sphere of marriage.
They should learn
to spin, sew, cook
and raise obedient children.
A woman who tried to make
a living outside that sphere
he wrote, was nothing less
than a monstrosity.
Kroeger:
Nellie reads this column
and just goes into a rage
because, of course, he has not
addressed the question
of the young women who have
really no choice
but to make their way.
They don't have families
taking care of them.
So she writes a letter
that is really imbued
with all this passion.
The editor himself reads
the letter.
He says, "This writer
who has signed herself
'Lonely Orphan Girl'" --
so he probably has an idea
that it's a woman --
"has no style, no punctuation,
no grammar,
"but I see a spirit here.
I see a spirit here."
He runs an ad --
a little snippet on the
editorial page that says
"Lonely Orphan Girl,
will you please come forward?"
And she does.
Narrator: As she later told
the story, Pink Cochran so impressed
the managing editor
of the Dispatch
that he hired her on the spot.
The odds are astronomical
against such a thing occurring.
At the same time,
it was an unsettled age
and amazing things did happen
and her very life
is the evidence of that.
Woman: Nelly Bly, Nelly
Bly, bring the broom along ♪
we'll sweep the kitchen clean,
my dear ♪
and have a little song.
Narrator: Pink Cochran took her
byline from a Stephen Foster song.
She wasn't the first woman
to work for a newspaper.
There was Margaret Fuller
who wrote for Horace Greeley's
respected Tribune
Amelia Bloomer who started
her own newspaper, the Lily
filled with editorials
about women's rights
And Jenny June, who pioneered
the women's page.
But Nellie Bly wanted to write
about what she saw
all around her--
poverty, child labor, divorce.
In one story,
Bly interviewed factory girls
not about their jobs, but about
their lives after work.
Some came home to emptiness
and boredom.
Others went to bars
and got drunk with strangers.
Bly asked one young woman
"Why do you risk your reputation
in such a way?"
Kroeger: The girl says, "I have
no money, I have no books
"I have nowhere to go.
"I work all day
in a miserable place.
What do you want from me?"
And I think that
is a much more powerful
way of telling the story
of the drudgery of their lives
than simply chronicling
what they do hour by hour.
Narrator: But over time,
Bly's editor assigned her stories
about flower shows, fashion
and rubber raincoats.
Trapped on "the ladies page,"
she rebelled
and invented herself
all over again.
Kroeger: She gets the
idea to go to Mexico
become a foreign reporter --
as she put it herself
"to do something no girl
has ever done before."
She writes fantastic letters
back from Mexico
about the food, about the
character of the people.
There's no detail
that escapes her.
When she goes to a bullfight
she describes how
they keep their breeches up --
I mean, things that you might
not even have the sense
to think to ask
she's answered
that question for you.
Narrator:
Bly's reports from Mexico
appeared regularly
in the Dispatch.
Her strategy had worked so well
that now her byline was
part of the headline.
But when she returned
to her old job
and colleagues like Q.O.,
she found herself back on
"the ladies page"
writing stories about theater
and the arts.
Finally, she'd had enough.
She decided to leave Pittsburgh
for good.
Kroeger: She suddenly doesn't
show up for work one day.
This is pure Nellie Bly.
They look around,
they find a note.
It says, "Dear Q.O.,
I'm off for New York.
Look out for me, Bly."
Narrator:
"Who owns the city of New York?
The Devil."
So said a 19th-century preacher.
But for an aspiring
young reporter
this was the place to be.
Bly arrived in New York City,
population: a million and a half,
a year after
the Statue of Liberty
took her place in the harbor.
She had come to America's
publishing capital
where magazines
like Harper's Weekly
displayed the fine art
of engraving.
Tabloids like the Police Gazette
turned vice into entertainment.
And photographer Jacob Riis
exposed the shadowy places
where the other half lived.
On street corners
immigrant boys sold
the great New York dailies
for a penny or two apiece.
If you wanted to be
a journalist in New York
you knew the street to visit.
It was Park Row
right near City Hall
and you could see the Tribune
office was one place
and the Times office
was another
and there was the World
and there was the Herald.
This was an almost exclusively
male crowd.
This was not a particularly
educated group of people.
It was really more like
the Wild West journalistically.
Narrator:
Looking down on Park Row
a brilliant new crop
of publishers and editors
hatched schemes
to sell more newspapers.
The most aggressive and
successful of them all --
Joseph Pulitzer,
publisher of the New York World.
Pulitzer designed his paper
for the immigrants
pouring into New York City.
He entertained them
with sensational stories
about riots, murders
and disasters
educated them
with crusading editorials
and taught them to be American.
The World was Nellie Bly's
kind of paper.
But she would have jumped at the
chance to work for any of them.
For nearly six months
she knocked on every door
on Park Row.
Stephens: I think they must
have greeted Nellie Bly
with her spunk and her desire
to be a reporter
with a rather
condescending amusement --
"Isn't this interesting?
"Isn't this cute
that this woman thinks she can
do these sorts of things?"
But she showed them, didn't she?
She came up
with a wonderful ruse
to actually meet
some of these people.
She decided that she would write
a freelance story
for the Pittsburgh paper
about what it would be like
for a woman journalist trying
to get a job in New York.
Narrator: Using her Dispatch
credentials, Bly made appointments
with every major editor
in the city.
She asked each of them
the same question:
"What chance does a woman have
in journalism?"
Kroeger:
They basically say no chance.
The things a woman
is suited for --
society reporting, for example--
she usually does not
want to do.
No editor in his right mind
is going to send a woman
to police court
or to cover a murder
or a fire
because it puts her life
at peril.
And so basically, why hire
a woman when you can hire a man?
Narrator: One editor told Bly
that women had a problem with accuracy
but her meticulous reporting
impressed some of
America's top journalists.
They called her
"talented, readable
bright as a new pin."
It gave her the confidence
to fast-talk her way
into the office
of John Cockerill
managing editor
of Pulitzer's New York World
and into a bold new kind
of journalism.
I think there were many times
in her life
where she managed to be at the
right place at the right time
and she was the right person
for the moment
and so when she met
with Pulitzer's managing editor
and almost insisted
on getting a job as a reporter
for the New York World
he had this idea
in the back of his mind
which was something of a dare.
"If you really want to be
a reporter
let's see what you've got."
Narrator:
The challenge was terrifying.
Bly would create a new identity,
pretend to be insane
and get herself committed
to the most notorious madhouse
in New York City.
She would experience
all the horrors of the asylum
from an inmate's point of view.
Once released,
she would write an exposé
for the New York World.
If it worked,
she would have a job.
This is actually
a brilliant strategy
because it allows the reporter
to say "I was there.
"I saw it with my own eyes.
"This isn't a collection
of statistics.
"This isn't an interview
with an asylum keeper.
"This isn't even a commentary
by some poor benighted inmate
"that has now been let loose
"who we could
never believe anyway
"because why were they there
in the first place?
You can believe me."
Narrator: The women's asylum
on Blackwell's Island
had long fascinated writers
and reporters.
On his American tour
Charles Dickens visited
the madhouse.
He was enchanted by the spacious
and elegant staircase
but oppressed
by the hopeless atmosphere.
He left in a hurry.
Some years later,
a reporter for Harper's Weekly
wrote a feature story
about the women's asylum.
After his supervised tour,
he concluded
that the asylum was a clean
and comfortable place
where inmates were treated
fairly, even tenderly.
Now, for the first time
a reporter would explore
the asylum
through the eyes
of a patient.
This was her chance.
She was not going to say no
and show any sort of cowardice.
She was not going to do that.
This was her moment
to get hired.
Narrator: Bly herself created the
scenario for her madhouse assignment.
As she later wrote,
she practiced all night
looking dazed and confused
in a mirror.
The next morning
she checked into a boarding
house for young ladies
claiming to be an immigrant
from Cuba named Nellie Brown.
Soon after her arrival
she began ranting incoherently,
terrifying the landlady
who called the police.
They took her
to police court
where she appeared
before a judge.
Kroeger: The judge looked
on her very kindly
and thought that she was
somebody's darling
who'd gone astray,
decided to call in the reporters
from all the newspapers
to see if running a story
about this girl
would help bring forward
her family.
Narrator: The Sun wondered,
"Who is this insane girl?"
The Times wrote
of "the mysterious waif
with the wild, hunted look
in her eyes."
The New York World, of course,
said nothing at all.
At Bellevue Hospital,
three medical experts concurred
that Nellie Bly suffered
from dementia
with delusions of persecution.
They took her by ferry
to the women's asylum
in the East River off Manhattan.
Obviously, it's one of
the first investigative
journalist's escapades
of deliberately putting yourself
in harm's way
to discover terrible truths
about public institutions.
And Blackwell's Island was
a very frightening place.
Narrator: When the doors
of the asylum shut behind her
Bly saw the same staircase
Dickens described
but she didn't have the choice
to leave.
Carr:
It's a very grim place.
The buildings were actually,
probably when they built them,
quite attractive,
but that doesn't change
the air of grimness about it.
Like many other
mental institutions
that have been closed down
that I've seen
there's a real sense of the
suffering that went on there.
Narrator: As a patient,
Bly saw the madhouse as a place
where insanity was
not so much cured as created.
"Take a perfectly sane
and healthy woman," she wrote,
"shut her up and make her
sit up straight
"from 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M.
"Do not allow her to talk
or move during these hours.
"Give her nothing to read.
"Let her know nothing
of the world or its doings
and see how long it will take
to make her insane."
Mealtimes punctuated the boredom
with a special kind of terror.
The inmates choked down
stale bread and rancid butter.
Some refused to swallow the food
and were threatened
with punishment.
For Nellie Bly
the most frightful experience
was being given a bath.
( door slams )
Kroeger: To be taken naked
by very unkindly attendants
to a big tin tub
filled with freezing-cold water
to stand there stark naked
have this water poured
over your head
in some approximation
of a washing --
that's the image
that stays with me the most.
Narrator:
"My teeth chattered
"and my limbs were goosefleshed
and blue with cold.
"Suddenly, I got three buckets
of water over my head --
"ice-cold water, too --
into my eyes, my ears,
my nose and my mouth."
"I think I experienced the
sensation of a drowning person
"as they dragged me
gasping, shivering and quaking,
from the tub."
"For once, I did look insane."
Bly wrote of listening to the
screams of a young woman
as the attendants bathed
and then beat her.
The next morning,
the woman was dead.
The doctors blamed her death
on convulsions.
Bly believed that some of the
inmates weren't crazy at all.
They were simply
destitute immigrants
unable to defend themselves
because they couldn't
speak English.
Carr: Anybody who can't
be made to fit neatly
is going to be put away.
I mean, they're going to find
a way to get rid of that person.
That's what's so ground-breaking
about the work
that Nellie Bly did
is that it reinforces
this notion
that, well, wait a minute,
asylums may not be hospitals.
They may be just clearinghouses
for people that
society finds troublesome
and that's hugely scandalous.
Narrator: In a few days,
Bly quit her theatrics
and begged to be re-examined.
But the more she tried to
assure her doctors of her sanity
the more they doubted it.
On the tenth day, Pulitzer sent
an attorney to rescue her.
"There was a certain pain
in leaving," she remembered.
"For ten days
I had been one of them.
It seemed intensely selfish to
leave them to their suffering."
This is, this is one
of the most amazing aspects
of the Nellie Bly story.
I mean, what a difficult test
the editor of the New York World
devised for her.
I think of all the escapades
she went on
this is probably the one
that must have taken
the most courage.
Narrator:
Just days after her release
Bly's madhouse exposé,
complete with illustrations,
appeared in the New York World.
Papers across America
printed the explosive series.
Doctors at the asylum denied
Bly's charges of cruelty,
but couldn't explain how she
had fooled them all so easily.
Kroeger: Joseph Pulitzer,
of course, loved this
and was asked by an old reporter
friend of Nellie's
what he thought of her feat
and he said,
"Obviously this girl
"is very suited
for this profession
and I have given her
a very large bonus."
Narrator: That year, New York City
voted a substantial increase in funds
to improve conditions
at the asylum
and Bly published a book
based on her newspaper story.
As for the reporters
who'd been duped by
the mysterious Nellie Brown
they had no choice
but to recognize
the new talent in their midst.
Bly was only 23
when she pioneered
a new kind of undercover,
investigative journalism.
They called it "stunt reporting."
It was aimed
at boosting circulation
but at the same time it was
very much aimed at investigation
and doing good
and changing society.
It involved, you know, Nellie
posing as a domestic employee
to see how
the employment agencies
were treating women who came
with little education
and little possibility
to find work.
It would have her
posing as an unwed mother
trying to sell a baby
to expose the baby-buying trade
in New York.
We use a million avenues
like this
that really
were about social reform
which, of course,
was such an important part
of what was happening
in the 1880s and 1890s.
Narrator:
Stunt reporting sold newspapers
and Pulitzer pushed for more.
Week after week, Bly filled
the pages of the New York World
with clever, accurate,
fearless reporting.
One of her stunts forced a
crooked lobbyist to leave town.
He never dreamed
she was a reporter.
And she really played up
this aura
of innocence and naïveté
to trap the people
who would have never thought
that she was what she was.
I don't know, they
People thought that reporters
were hard-boiled men
who drank a lot and swore a lot
and smoked a lot of cigars
and Nellie Bly just didn't fit
that stereotype.
Narrator: By the new year of 1888,
Bly was performing a stunt a week.
At times she played the role
of the town reformer
at others, the town flirt.
She posed as
a chorus girl for a day
and told of dressing
in a crowded room,
tights that didn't fit,
and making a fool of herself
on stage.
While interviewing
the boxer John L. Sullivan,
she felt his muscles, asking:
"Do you take cold bath showers?
How are you rubbed down?"
( series of hard punches )
( fight bell ringing )
Afterwards, according to Bly,
Sullivan told her
"I have given you
more than I ever gave
any reporter in my life."
Always the main character
in any Nellie Bly story
is Nellie Bly herself
and she was very much
a character.
She wasn't modest
about anything.
I mean, this was very much
part of the Bly persona
and part of, I think
what made her reading
so compelling
because you were
just astonished
at what she was willing
to say about herself
including, you know,
her "sparkling eyes"
and her "fantastic smile" and
her "tiny little wasp waist."
We hear about these things
over and over and over again.
Corrigan: I mean,
reporters use what they have
and the fact
that she was a woman
was really a strike against her
so if she could turn that around
and somehow make
the fact of her being a female
interviewer an asset in a story,
I say more power to her.
Narrator:
In a Victorian world
Nellie Bly was a hint
of things to come.
As a new century approached
American women
were breaking the rules.
They rode bicycles,
wore bloomers
smoked cigarettes,
entered politics.
Decades before women
had the right to vote,
Bly interviewed
attorney Belva Lockwood,
the first woman allowed to plead
a case before the Supreme Court
and the second to run for
President of the United States.
Lockwood said her supporters
were neither working slaves
nor society dolls--
"thinking women,"
she called them.
When Bly
interviewed Susan B. Anthony
she wanted to know
if the feminist leader
had ever been in love.
"Yes," was the answer,
"but I never felt I could
give up my life of freedom
to become a man's housekeeper."
Corrigan: And what she seems
to do is involve her reader
in the daringness
of asking these questions.
So there was
a way she had, I feel
of hooking the reader into
the adventure of the interview
that she was conducting.
Narrator: By the fall of 1889,
Bly was working harder than ever
because now she wasn't the
only stunt girl in the business.
Kroeger: Joseph Pulitzer
had a very specific tactic
of always pitting talent
against talent.
He did this among his managers
and he did this
among his best reporters.
He would always
lay on competition.
The World
made copies of Nellie Bly--
picked women, other women
journalists, said:
"Do exactly this,
do exactly what she does.
Write exactly like she does."
We had young women
posing as flower vendors
outside the Union Club
to see who would
come and solicit them
among New York's social elite.
We would have Viola Roseborough
posing as a raggedy beggar
to see what it's like
to be a beggar for the day.
I'm not sure what
the social value of that was
but it certainly made
for good reading.
One of my favorites is --
"Meg Merrilies feels
what it's like to be shot!"
And there's a picture of her
standing against a wall,
very bravely
with an early
bulletproof vest on.
And she was actually shot
and they show a picture
of the bullet before and after.
And completely dangerous,
ridiculous stunts
that really proved nothing
and yet because
they grabbed your attention
these women did them
and it was a way for them
to enter journalism.
What I think stunt journalism
achieved for women
because it was effective
as a circulation booster
for almost a decade--
which is a pretty long time for
a gimmick to stay operative--
was the fact that it
gave women an opportunity
to display that they had the
skills of any good reporter
because you needed all
those skills to do this work.
Nellie Bly, two and a half years
into her tenure on the World
was a goddess.
She certainly did this better,
more sensationally
and to greater effect
than anyone else.
Narrator: In the fall of 1889,
the New York World
laid a cornerstone
for a brand-new building.
It would have a gold dome
and at 26 stories
would be the tallest
office building in the world.
To celebrate his new image
Pulitzer was searching
for a great new stunt.
Bly came up with
a brilliant idea
but she had to convince
Pulitzer's editor
to let her do what no one--
man or woman--
had ever done before.
Nussbaum:
Finally, he comes to her
and he says, "can you leave
for around the world
"the day after tomorrow?
"The steamship Augusta Victoria
"is leaving
for Southampton, England.
Can you be ready?"
And she says, "Yes, I can."
Narrator: It was the right time
in history for a record-breaking stunt.
Jules Verne's
Around the World in Eighty Days
had appeared in English
15 years before.
A spectacular drama
based on the novel
played to sold-out
crowds in New York City
and the fictional Phileas Fogg
was now an American hero.
But no one had even tried
to break Fogg's record.
Most Americans saw the world
through a popular device
called a stereoscope.
The brave few
who ventured around the world
were lucky to make it
in less than a year.
( clock chiming )
To do it in less than 80 days,
Bly would need every break
she could get.
Above all,
she would have to travel light.
She took
200 British pounds silver
and a small amount
of American money
as an experiment to see if
other countries would accept it.
She brought along
a 24-hour watch
and though she had
no room to spare
a bulky jar of cold cream.
She carried most of what
she took in a tiny gripsack.
Dressed in what would become
her signature coat
she was about to embark on
the longest journey
known to mankind
in the shortest possible time.
( foghorn blares )
November 14, 1889 --
Nellie Bly sailed
from New Jersey
on the steamship
Augusta Victoria
Prepared to travel by ship,
train, carriage, donkey
rickshaw, sampan and catamaran.
She left with ominous thoughts
of killer storms and shipwrecks,
wondering if she'd
make it home alive.
Her editor
entertained no such fears --
"She'll add another
to her list of triumphs,"
said the headlines.
Nellie Bly, "a veritable
feminine Phileas Fogg."
If the goal
was selling newspapers
this was the perfect stunt.
The Augusta Victoria
crossed the Atlantic
in 6 days, 21 hours.
A correspondent
for the New York World
met Bly in England
with an irresistible proposal.
If she were willing to risk
falling behind schedule
she could meet Jules Verne.
A frantic train ride, carriage
ride and channel crossing later,
Bly was sharing wine
and biscuits with Jules Verne
at his home in Amiens, France.
And then he took her out
into the hall
where he had a map
with Phileas Fogg's route
and then on the same map
he lined up her route.
So she was very excited
about that.
( stopwatch ticking )
Narrator:
France to Italy.
Now she had to make
every connection on time
stopping to cable her newspaper
whenever she had the chance.
Day 11, November 25 --
Bly arrived by mail train
in Brindisi, Italy,
and went on a frenzied search
for the nearest
telegraph office.
"It was in a building
down a dark street," she wrote.
"It had one small window like
a shop window in a post office.
but it appeared to be closed."
Bly's arrival woke up the agent.
Before he sent her cable,
he had a question.
"In what country exactly
is this place called New York?"
Bly's cable went from Brindisi
to the main terminal in Rome
then through giant cables
strung for 2,500 miles along
the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,
reaching New York City
in just a few hours.
But her detailed hand-written
report would travel by ship
and take two weeks.
In the meantime, her editor had
to make a lot out of a little.
Kroeger:
So the World vamped.
They had to keep interest up
so they were
running geography lessons
on the places
she was going to visit.
They were running reports
from other newspapers
about what people were saying
about fantastic Nellie
on the fly.
Robe: Well, it involved
all of the characteristics
of a great thing to watch.
It had unusual places,
unusual people
unusual modes of transportation.
She talked about eating
strange things
all sorts of things that people
who lived in New York
would never have
a chance to see.
It's got to be big,
it's got to be flashy
and Nellie Bly's trip around
the world certainly was.
Narrator: Her newspaper invented
gimmicks to keep the readers hooked.
"Around the World
with Nellie Bly"
became a popular board game.
The Nellie Bly guessing match
offered a free trip to Europe
to the person who came closest
to guessing her arrival time.
Kroeger:
The guessing blanks came in
by the hundreds
of thousands.
Senators were guessing,
judges were guessing
everybody got into the act,
and of course
this also served to keep
interest up in the trip
and to give them
some copy to write about.
Narrator:
Brindisi, Port Said, Aden --
two weeks of heat,
but no crisis.
December 10, Day 26 --
the steamship Victoria
anchored in the bay of Colombo.
Bly rushed ashore
to cable the New York World
that she was
two days ahead of schedule.
She celebrated too soon.
The stopover stretched
into a five-day delay
waiting for the arrival
of the steamship Nepaul.
"It's only fair to state,"
said the World,
"that the elements
are against her."
Delays like this
only made the race more exciting
boosting circulation
and launching the New York World
into a year of record profits.
Day 33 --
11,000 miles to go.
In Singapore, Bly bought
a monkey and named it McGinty.
Singapore to Hong Kong --
a monsoon engulfed the ship.
Bly wrote of her "fear of burial
beneath the angry sea."
Day 40 -- she arrived safely
in Hong Kong
to be greeted by
an unsettling piece of news.
Nussbaum: When she went to
the ticket office in Hong Kong
to buy her ticket to Japan
that's when she learned
about Elizabeth Bisland
who had been sent
by Cosmopolitan Magazine
to see if she
could beat Nellie Bly.
And the man
behind the ticket office says
"Miss Bly, I'm afraid
you are going to be beaten
in your trip
around the world."
So she thinks it over
and she says,
"No, I'm not racing with anyone.
"If somebody else thinks she
can do it faster than I can,
"that's her business.
"I only know what I have to do.
"I promised my editor
that I was going to go
"around the world
in 79 days or less.
May I please have
my ticket to Japan?"
Narrator:
Day 41 -- Christmas.
Nellie was halfway
around the world
spending the morning at
a leper colony in Canton, China
and having lunch
at the temple of the dead.
New Years Day 1890.
On board the Oceanic
sailing for Japan
Bly endured another
brutal storm.
She couldn't
afford to lose even a day.
Kroeger: At the point
at which it appeared
that she might not make it,
her first response is
"I would rather go back
to New York dead
than not a winner."
That's how important
it was to her.
Narrator:
Day 55 -- 8,000 miles to go.
The Oceanic set sail
across the pacific.
Two weeks of dark skies,
wind and water
inspire nothing but worry.
Where is her competitor,
Elizabeth Bisland?
( foghorn blares )
Day 68 -- the Oceanic
docked in San Francisco.
Hearing a rumor about a smallpox
quarantine on board ship
Bly jumped into a tugboat
with her monkey
and headed for land.
20,000 miles behind her --
3,000 to go.
( train whistle )
Nussbaum: Her trip home
was an absolute triumph
from the minute she
arrived in San Francisco.
As she says, "There were crowds,
flowers, cheering.
"The World had chartered
a special train
"to take me as far as Chicago.
"It consisted of one sleeping
coach and one engine
"and that trip
from San Francisco to Chicago
was the fastest on record --
67 hours."
Narrator:
In Chicago, in the wheat pit,
stockbrokers voted Nellie Bly
one of the boys
to the sound of three cheers
and a tiger.
Hallen and Hart
sang a new tune
"Globe Trotting Nellie Bly."
Elizabeth Bisland
had fallen hopelessly behind.
In Pittsburgh, pandemonium --
half the people in the cheering
crowd were women.
Pittsburgh to Jersey city --
300 miles to go.
The only question now --
what will her final time be?
( ticking clock )
( cheering crowd )
Narrator:
January 25, 1890 --
Nellie Bly arrived
in Jersey City
where her trip had begun.
Cannons boomed, timekeepers
stopped their watches:
72 days, 6 hours,
11 minutes, and 14 seconds.
She's beaten
Phileas Fogg by nearly a week.
"The stagecoach days
are ended,"
crowed the New York World.
"The new age
of lightning travel begun."
Around the world, a slender
young woman in a checkered coat
became a symbol
of American pride and power.
Robe:
She was a celebrity
at a time when
the whole notion of celebrity
was beginning
to be invented.
She was an advertiser's dream
because everyone
recognized her name
and everyone assumed that
if her name, Nellie Bly,
was connected with something,
it would sell
which showed
that she was big business.
Narrator: They named a hotel after
her, and a race horse and a train.
At age 25, Nellie Bly was
the most famous woman on earth.
Her moment didn't last long.
The age of lightning travel
ushered in the age of motion
pictures, horseless carriages
and yellow journalism.
In such a world
the stunt girl came to seem
more quaint than daring.
Some of Bly's best reporting
lay ahead.
In 1893, she interviewed
one of the most controversial
political figures in the country,
anarchist Emma Goldman.
When social unrest seemed to be
tearing the nation apart,
Bly went to Chicago to cover
the Pullman railroad strike.
Federal troops
had fired on workers
and she was the only
reporter to tell the story
from the strikers'
point of view.
Nellie Bly didn't want to be
a reporter
for the rest of her life
but she never found anything
else she could do as well.
She wrote a novel
which failed to sell.
At age 30, she married
a 70-year-old industrialist
named Robert Seaman
and for a while, enjoyed life
as a wealthy New York matron.
After ten years of marriage,
her husband died.
She took over
his Iron Clad Factory,
advertising herself as
"the only woman in the world
personally managing industries
of such a magnitude."
When the business went bankrupt
Bly returned to reporting,
using her forum as a columnist
to find homes
for abandoned children.
Kroeger:
I think she was quite prominent,
but I also think she was seen
as more relic than icon.
Young reporters no longer
saw her as a model.
They saw her more
as a curiosity,
as someone who was kind of
left over from another age.
Narrator: Nellie Bly died
of pneumonia in 1922.
She was 58 years old.
"Energy rightly applied
can accomplish anything,"
had always been her motto.
The girl from Cochrans Mills
who could hardly spell
was proclaimed, in the end,
"The best reporter in America."
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