[custom_adv] On September 1, 1850, 30,000 onlookers packed the waterfront around Canal Street in New York City, clamoring to catch a glimpse of the Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind as she disembarked from the steamship Atlantic to begin an American tour. [custom_adv] Lind’s American promoter, the visionary entertainer and entrepreneur P.T. Barnum, greeted the singer with a bouquet and waved her into a private carriage as police pushed the teeming crowds apart, Hard Day’s Night-style. [custom_adv] The Jenny Lind tour was a barnstormer, taking in the modern equivalent of $21 million over a nine-month engagement and spawning an American mania for all things Lind: concert tickets, women’s hats, opera glasses, paper dolls, sheet music, even Lind-branded chewing tobacco. (The craze persists in today's children’s furnture stores, where you can still purchase a spindled “Jenny Lind crib.”) [custom_adv] But more than Lind’s fame or Barnum’s marketing success, the story that has persisted most through the decades is the did-they-or-didn’t-they frisson of a suspected romance between the entertainer and his star attraction. [custom_adv] Nor is this the first such suggestion: fictionalized versions of Barnum’s life, including the eponymous 1980 Broadway musical, have often relied on the tension of a man torn between his steady, Puritan wife and an exotic European songstress. The love triangle is, however attractive, a fiction. [custom_adv] Certainly the new Hugh Jackman film The Greatest Showman, a highly fictionalized musical biopic starring Rebecca Ferguson as Lind, subscribes to the idea of an infatuation between the showman and the singer. [custom_adv] From unassuming origins, Jenny Lind became the darling of European opera. Born out of wedlock and into a dismal childhood, she was admitted to the Royal Theatre in Stockholm as a voice student at the age of nine, and by her tween years was a renowned professional singer.
