the grief, confusion and anger of the last two days, Colton Kemp had shrunk from the world’s many stimulations, had sought and failed to drown his sadness and release his tension, had doubted the existence of happiness elsewhere and in the future, had seen himself confronted with a greyer life untouched by beauty—and yet here he was, in a theatre crowded with almost everyone he knew, excited and overstimulated by this vision of a man, spinning and spinning like a celestial body.
The pedestal came to a stop. Sandow performed a backward somersault from standing, folded his arms and stood perfectly still, his face in profile. The crowd, who had been applauding and exclaiming for the duration of the brief exhibition, responded with a hero’s ovation.
‘Thank you,’ he said and stepped down from the pedestal. ‘Thank you. Please, that is quite enough applause.’ His voice was deep and guttural.
‘I wish to briefly talk to you about how I have attained my strength, the system I am sure many of you are familiar with, before I perform some demonstrations.’ He gestured to the props on the stage. ‘I was not a healthy child. My parents were not endowed with extraordinary strength. All the strength I possess I owe to my system.’
The boy, Jesse, who had been Father Time, returned to the stage stripped to the waist like Sandow, though he wore a thick leather belt and white tights rather than the master’s Herculean loincloth. With Jesse as his model, Sandow—part preacher of the gospel of physical culture, part salesman for his own wares—proceeded to demonstrate how to perform exercises with his Spring-Grip Dumbbell and his elastic ‘developer’. A lot of attention was paid to the development of the lungs and chest—though he pronounced it schest, in perhaps the clearest signal of his origins—and at one point demonstrated how he could expand his chest from an already impressive forty-seven inches to a full sixty-one.
He repeated often the fact that a person of any age or gender could undertake these exercises and obtain benefit from them. ‘As I travel about the colonies,’ Sandow said, resting a hand on Jesse’s shoulder, ‘I like to hold special talks with physicians and other interested parties of a town. These talks are discussions in the true sense and I much prefer this back and forth to a mere address. Unfortunately, as I will be leaving town early in the morning, I will not have the opportunity to hold such a congress here. However, I will take questions from the floor this evening.’ He held up his hand quickly. ‘But first, let me conclude the traditional portion of the show with a few feats of strength!’
With one hand he seized Jesse by the belt and lifted him over his head.
The theatre erupted in a pandemonium of applause.
The assistants in togas returned to the stage and the orchestra resumed. Sandow began by lifting a weight he stated was one hundred and thirty pounds, though it looked like a toy as he raised it above his head with one hand. He brought it down and handed it carefully to an assistant, who struggled to return it to its wooden rack. Sandow then lifted a barbell from the floor to an arm’s length above his head in a single jerk. ‘Two hundred and forty-two pounds,’ he said, while still supporting the weight. He then lifted a larger barbell to his shoulder, announced, ‘Three hundred pounds,’ and proceeded to fully extend his arm above his head.
The strongman began to stalk around the stage, lifting barrels and bursting chains, quickly and quietly. Even as the acts became more and more ludicrous, he maintained an air of grace.
He lay on his side and lifted one of his assistants by the ankle into the air.
Assistants brought forward two trestles. Sandow rested his neck on one, his heels on the other, and began lifting barbells with each hand while four of his assistants stood on his torso.
He lifted the makeshift barbell constructed from the two large baskets and the metal rod, then asked two assistants to stand inside the baskets and lifted the rig with similar ease.
He tore a pack of playing cards in half with his fingers. Then he tore two packs at once, then four, one on top of the other, ripping them as cleanly as if they had been cut with a knife. An assistant fastened the torn packets with ribbons and threw them into all parts of the theatre to be examined and retained as mementoes.
‘And now for a feat often referred to as “The Roman Column”,’ Sandow announced with no sign he was short of breath. He suspended himself upside down, his knees hooked over a horizontal bar protruding from an imitation marble column, then raised himself up in a sort of hanging sit-up. He repeated the feat with a barbell in each hand and again with assistants swinging on the end of the barbells.
Sandow righted himself and the column was removed from the stage. He announced, a little brusquely, ‘And now for “The Tomb of Hercules”,’ and reclined back until his hands were on the ground, his body arched upward, pelvis pointing at the vaulted ceiling. The six assistants carried out a large wooden platform and placed it on top of the strongman. It was so large that one end remained on the ground, forming a sort of ramp, though Sandow’s arms and legs did not appear fazed by the weight.
Jesse then led out the two ponies by their jewelled bridles and walked them carefully up the ramp of the platform until it lifted from the ground and the platform was horizontal. The six assistants then retrieved all the weights that had been used during the show and handed them to Jesse, who arranged them carefully, maintaining the equilibrium of the platform. Then, one by one, he clasped the hands of the men in togas and lifted them onto the platform.
Kemp almost forgot that beneath the seven men, two ponies, more than a thousand pounds of weights and the heavy platform itself, was Sandow, hands and feet planted on the stage as if embedded in the firmest of foundations.
As the people of Marumaru cheered, the assistants dismounted with care, removing the weights and lowering the platform so that the ponies could walk down. Once the men in togas had removed the platform, Sandow pushed himself upright with what strength remained in his arms and dusted himself off. He gave a cursory bow and left the stage.
Two minutes later he returned, dressed in a three-piece suit that Kemp would wager had come from Savile Row. He looked almost unremarkable and the audience greeted him with a trickle of polite applause.
‘Thank you very much,’ Sandow said. ‘We have a few minutes remaining if you wish to ask me any questions about my system, or the benefits of physical culture more generally.’
A scatter of hands rose into the hair. ‘Yes, madam?’ He pointed at Mrs Harry Wisdom in the second row.
‘Mr Sandow, what is your view on prohibition?’
‘It is my belief, madam, that if a healthy love of physical culture was spread among the young there would be no need of prohibition. Men who study physical culture take care of their bodies and when they have a drink or two have the willpower to say, “No, old man, I have had enough. This stuff does not do me any good if I take more.”’
Big Jim Raymond stood without invitation and asked in his booming, mayoral voice, ‘What about lunatics? Do you think they would benefit by physical training?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ Sandow replied. ‘They have adopted my system at Coney Island and no fewer than eighty persons have been sent out of the asylum thoroughly cured. It is the body that feeds the brain, the latter consuming twenty-five per cent of the blood in the system. Among businessmen and politicians very often it consumes as much as sixty per cent. It stands to reason, therefore, that if you do not keep the machinery for manufacturing food for the brain in good order something must burst. Many diseases can be cured by physical training of the body, for a healthy state of the mind will not allow the bacillus to live in the body.’
The
