King of Frauds

THE FABULOUS SHOWMAN (317 pp.)--Irving Wallace--Knopf ($5).

It might be fitting if, at the time of their greatest embarrassment, the high-salaried humbuggers of TV were to observe a moment of noise in honor of Phineas Taylor Barnum. They might take comfort from the information that the old Bridgeport fraudmonger left an estate of $4,100,000 after a lifetime of ballyhooing fakes (and fakes of fakes; he once counterfeited the counterfeit fossilized Cardiff giant). Network presidents might reflect that Barnum would not have had fits of contrition; he would have locked his found-out quislings in a cage, tacked up a sign saying "This Way to Regress" and charged admission at 25-c- (plus inflation) a head.

Unfortunately the first Barnum biography (for adults) in several decades is as spotty as the conscience of its subject. Author Wallace owes something of his prose style to the titles of Valentino films ("Unashamedly, Barnum wept. But then came the dawn"). Not enough of Barnum's private life emerges because, in his portrait of the "Fabulous Showman," the author presents little but the show. Still, the highlights of that show are there as Phineas, son of a Connecticut farmer-storekeeper, moves from attraction to attraction--the white whale, Soprano Jenny Lind, General Tom Thumb, Commodore Nutt, the Negro who claimed he could turn black skin into white, and all the others.

The man William Lyon Phelps was to call "the Shakespeare of advertising" discovered that he could get as much free publicity by confessing himself a fraud as he could by trumpeting that a hoked-up mermaid was real. New Yorkers crowded into his museum to be outraged when the news spread that a bugled model of Niagara Falls was only 18 inches tall; they crowded more after a spectator, probably with Barnum's connivance, filed a lawsuit to test the femininity of the bearded lady (she was shown to be soundly female).

Behind the promoter's checked vest was an enigmatic man who preferred good music, or said he did, to carnival clatter, who drank hard until middle life and then, in a town's quick change, became a steam-driven temperance lecturer. Biographer Wallace mentions briefly Barnum's political career--he served in the Connecticut legislature and for a year was a reform mayor of Bridgeport, possibly his greatest fraud of all. Readers may be disappointed to learn that nowhere is there any record that Barnum made his legendary crack, "There's a sucker born every minute." The phrase must have been invented by some obscure fraud who palmed it off on Barnum, in a gesture of poetic justice.

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