Odd this day

3 min readJan 1, 2023

Ah, New Year’s Day! That can only mean one thing. YES, THAT’S RIGHT! The 147th anniversary of New York Herald proprietor James Gordon Bennett Jr being banished from polite society for pissing in his fiancée’s fireplace.

Photo of a man in the early to mid 1870s in a three-piece suit with watchchain. He has centre-parted, possibly brylcreemed hair, a Roman nose and luxuriant moustache, and looks sternly out of the right of the frame. The caption reads: In his prime just before a social disaster sent him into permanent exile

Nepo Baby JGB Jr had inherited the Herald from its founder, his father, in 1872, by which time the younger man already had a reputation for being ‘flamboyant’, ‘erratic’, and enjoyed ‘the good life’ — roughly translated, he was a roaring pisshead.

On midnight rides, careening down country roads, he would often strip off all his clothing. Stark-naked in the box, he would drive his four-in-hand along the turnpikes, cracking his whip and yelling his head off in delirious pleasure. Many an old farmer, peering out his bedroom window at this apparition, must have sworn off applejack the moment Bennett and his equipage bounded out of view

Still, it was Bennett Jr who financed Henry Morton Stanley’s 1869 expedition to Africa to find David Livingstone — and either Stanley or the Herald entirely fabricated the “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” line, so he knew the newspaper business.

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”, an illustration from Stanley’s 1872 book How I Found Livingstone — two white men, surrounded by people of colour, raise their hats to each other

He was also obsessed with owls. Apparently, this was because one woke him up when he was commanding a ship in the Civil War just in time for him to stop the vessel running aground. He does appear to have taken his gratitude to the creatures a little too far, however.

his superstitious, near-pagan worship of the owl. That bird was his talisman … so much an obsession with him that only a psychiatrist could come up with reasons for it. Live owls flitted around his estates, as privileged as any sacred monkeys around an Asiatic temple. Stuffed owls, owl statuettes, paintings of owls … plastered on his yacht, his carriages, masthead of his papers, his stationery and … “one of his girl friends had owls tattooed on both her knees.”

He even wanted to be buried in a 125-foot granite owl (on a 75ft plinth) which, he told the sculptor, had to glower “quite ferociously”, but when the artist was murdered Bennett decided it was an ill omen and cancelled the project.

Anyway, at the age of 35, he became engaged to Caroline May, and then, on New Year’s Day 1877, spent less than an hour at her parents’ party. By the sound of it, though, he had already been celebrating the season for quite some time.

Lurching slightly, he was ushered into the drawing room, which was thronged with May and Bennett friends.

…and, as you don’t need me to tell you, the thing about long hours of drinking is that they have consequences.

Jimmy Bennett… suddenly felt the urge to relieve himself. The bathroom was a long, lonely march away, down chill and drafty corridors. It was ridiculous to have to leave such jolly company simply because of what the Nice Nellies described as a “call of nature.” Since childhood, though “permissive” methods of child rearing had not yet been formulated, he had always done exactly what he pleased. Right now he had to pump out the bilge, and he wasn’t going to walk half a block for the purpose.

These extracts are all from 1962 biography, The Scandalous Mr Bennett, by Richard O’Connor — a man who says in his introduction that “he deserves a more serious biography … this isn’t it”. So, let’s be scholarly about this and turn to another source, David Rains Wallace’s The Bonehunters’ Revenge, to make sure this story’s true…

On New Year’s Day of 1877, he drunkenly urinated in the fireplace (or grand piano) of his fiancée’s parlor during a gala party. For this, he was horsewhipped by the fiancée’s brother and permanently banished from New York society.

Well.

As O’Connor points out, you’d have to be at least eight feet tall to piss in a piano, so the fireplace seems more likely. Even a powerful newspaperman might have been tackled if he’d undone his trousers and started scaling a large piece of musical furniture.

The aftermath saw Bennett scarpering to Europe to live in his 300ft yacht, and it’s his proximity to these shores that apparently led to the words ‘Gordon Bennett’ becoming a popular thing to bellow when shocked or appalled.

Perhaps the best bit of the story is another observation from Rains Wallace: Bennett, he reckons, wasn’t just

a fabulously rich alcoholic sociopath who could enact his desires on a grand scale…

As it happens, he was a controlled alcoholic sociopath who knew what he wanted and pursued his desires with the sociopath’s single-minded energy. He may have deliberately committed parlor urination to escape his engagement without incurring a costly breach-of-promise suit.

…which is enough to make one say ‘Gordon Bennett’ out loud in appalled admiration. Happy New Year, everyone.

Odd this day

Written by Coates