Ever Wonder What Emperor Norton Thought of the Many Comic Theatrical Depictions of Him in San Francisco During His Lifetime? Here’s a Clue.

Including a Brief History of the Building Where One Such Offense Took Place

Starting at least as early as September 1861 — with Norton the First, or, An Emperor for a Day, a musical revue that played over the course of a couple of weeks at the Academy of Music a.k.a. Tucker’s Hall, on Montgomery Street between Pine and California — theaters in San Francisco staged many revues, burlesques and other “extravaganzas” during the twenty years of Emperor Norton’s reign that featured depictions of the Emperor that were designed to get laughs.

During this same period, Emperor Norton was a stock character at local masquerade balls, parties and benefits, where prizes of money and jewelry often were awarded for the most convincing portrayals. Newspapers often reported that the Emperor Norton at this or that event — sometimes there was more than one — walked away with top honors or at least an honorable mention.

In the first week of June 1867, the Olympic Theater staged ten performances of a new play entitled The Naked Truth, or The Emperor’s Dream. Here’s the ad for the play that appeared on the front page of a new-ish paper called the Daily Dramatic Chronicle, which shortly would change its name to the San Francisco Chronicle. The role of Emperor was played by Frank Prescott, a comic actor who was making a name for himself in San Francisco at the time.

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EMPEROR NORTON was not happy about the play, and he made this known publicly. But, before we come to that, an extended sidebar on the “pre-history” of the Olympic Theater building…

In early June 1867, when The Naked Truth was playing at the Olympic, Emperor Norton was about 4½ years into his residency at the Eureka Lodgings, on Commercial Street mid-block between Montgomery and Kearny.

Clay Street runs parallel, and one block to the north, of Commercial.

The intersection of Kearny and Commercial was at the western end of the Emperor’s block. So, the Olympic Theater, at the northeast corner of Kearny and Clay, was just around the corner.

The Olympic Theater occupied the second floor of building that opened as the California Exchange in 1850. Here’s how the California Exchange looked in a photograph by George R. Fardon dated May 1855.

**California Exchange building, northeast corner of Kearny and Clay Streets, San Francisco, May 1855.** Photograph: George R. Fardon. Originally published in Fardon’s *San Francisco Album* of 1856. This print in *Views of San Francisco*, c.1859–60 (image 57 here). Collection of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Source: Yale

In 1856, during the 3-month conflict engaged by San Francisco’s Second Committee of Vigilance, both the Vigilance Committee and the Committee’s opponents, known as the “Law and Order Party,” vied for control of the California Exchange as an armory and a site for drill practice.

Ultimately, the Committee took control of the building. And, in June 1856, the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin reported on a project to “re-construct” the top floor, so as to make it strong enough for practice drill and armory uses.

*Fireman’s Journal* item on “re-constructing the upper portion of the…’California Exchange.’” Reprinted in the San Francisco *Daily Evening Bulletin*, 23 June 1856, p.1. Source: GenealogyBank.

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IN DECEMBER 1856 — four months after he Second Vigilance Committee disbanded in August and the California Exchange building no longer was being used for military purposes — the following notice (and others like it) began to appear in local newspapers.

**“California Menagerie Removed to the California Exchange,”** ad for John “Grizzly” Adams exhibition, San Francisco *Daily Herald*, 12 December 1856, p.2. Source: GenealogyBank

For a few months, a hunter and trapper named John Adams had been exhibiting his collection of trained bears and other animals in a basement location elsewhere on Clay Street, billing the exhibit as the “Mountaineer Museum.”

Initially, Adams — later celebrated as Grizzly Adams — had “removed to” the larger, better situated California Exchange as a brief stepping-stone in advance of taking his “menagerie” on tour on the East Coast. But, he wound up staying for three years, styling his new location the “Pacific Museum.”

By 1859, Adams’s San Francisco enterprise had started to go sideways. Adams’s health was failing. There was a dispute over the ownership of the animals. And, the Museum was losing money.

In early August 1859, Adams moved his animals from the California Exchange building to temporary quarters in the Mechanics’ Pavilion, on Montgomery between Post and Sutter.

Later that month, perhaps out of financial desperation, Adams made two of his animals — a buffalo and one of his bears — available for gruesome buffalo-and-bull and bear-and-dog fights near Mission Dolores — an episode that cuts hard against the grain of the myth of Grizzly Adams as a gentle animal lover. (See the Daily Evening Bulletin’s 18 August 1859 write-up here.)

In January 1860, Adams put his animals on a ship and accompanied them to New York, in the hope of joining forces with P.T. Barnum once there. This Adams did — in the process, selling his animals to Barnum.

Adams died in October 1860.

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IN THE FEW MONTHS after John Adams vacated the California Exchange, the building was “entirely remodeled and fitted up in fine style,” according to the following profile of the building that appeared in the Daily Evening Bulletin on 10 November 1859:

A couple of weeks later, the second floor had a new tenant:

**Ad for Gilbert’s Melodeon**, San Francisco *Daily Herald*, 5 December 1859, p.2. Source: GenealogyBank

Notice, on the bill, “LA PETITE LOTTA.” That’s Lotta Crabtree, who had just turned 12 the month before.

Originally from France, the proprietor Ferdinand Gilbert most recently had lived north of San Francisco, in Marysville and Oroville. Here’s how the California Exchange building, with Gilbert’s Melodeon, looked in 1860:

**Gilbert’s Melodeon, northeast corner of Kearny and Clay Streets, San Francisco, c.1860.** Collection of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Source: Calisphere

The most obvious explanation for the changes to the building since Fardon’s photograph of May 1855 — different storefronts and second-floor windows; the addition of cornices and other mouldings — would seem to be the “re-construction “ of 1856, the remodel of 1859, or both.

Three years after the melodeon’s December 1859 debut, the Stockton Independent newspaper of 15 November 1862 reported that Gilbert had sold his interest in the business. Gilbert announced that he would be returning to Europe for a time, and, as part of his send-off, was fêted with a benefit concert and given an elaborate gold watch.

The melodeon continued under new management and, as late as October 1863, still was being marketed as Gilbert’s Melodeon.

**Ad for Gilbert’s Melodeon**, San Francisco *Sunday Mercury*, 18 October 1863, p.3. Source: GenealogyBank

By mid 1863, Ferdinand Gilbert had returned to San Francisco. In October of that year, he and two other partners leased out the Union Theater at 727 Commercial Street (south side) between Kearny and Dupont (current-day Grant) and launched a new melodeon there that initially was called Gilbert’s New Idea.

During this same period, it appears that Gilbert was leasing and running some, maybe even all, of The Willows, a popular resort just outside the city, located in an area that now is in the Mission District, around 18th Street between Valencia and Mission. In fact, Gilbert and his family were living in the second floor of a house on the grounds, which burned down on 12 January 1864.

The timing of the fire couldn’t have been worse for Ferdinand Gilbert, who had just launched his latest project two weeks earlier. A 29 December 1863 item in the Marysville Daily Appeal noted that “Gilbert’s Museum and Menagerie, San Francisco, has been thrown open to the public, and a vast assemblage has visited it.” Gilbert’s Museum was a venture in the Adams trade: wild beasts and human oddities. (Yes, John Adams checked that second box, too.) See the 8 May 1864 Daily Alta ad for “Gilbert’s Museum,” at Second and Market, here and a photograph of the “museum” — a second-floor space, much as Adams had at Kearny and Clay — here.

When the Daily Dramatic Chronicle debuted eight months later, on 16 January 1865, a front-page ad carried the news that Gilbert’s old place at Kearny and Clay now had a new name and a new owner.

William “Billy” Worrell (1823–1897) was a celebrated circus clown who developed a stage act with his three young daughters, the aptly named Worrell Sisters. The already popular sisters went on to fame of their own, moving to New York, where they leased a theater and — in a review that appeared in the New-York Tribune of 18 May 1867 — were dubbed “the Three Graces of Burlesque.”

The elder Worrell’s association with the theater that was “formerly Gilbert’s” didn’t last long. In fact, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle of 8 May 1865 noted that Gilbert had bought out Worrell’s interest.

By the end of May 1865, Gilbert — who seems always to have had his finger in at least a couple of entertainment-business pies at the same time — was ready to re-open The Willows. He pulled the plug on his Gilbert’s Museum, at Second and Market Streets, and moved the animals there out to the resort.

Worrell’s Olympic was re-branded as the Olympic, and Gilbert’s name remained on the banner of ads for the theater as late as 9 September 1865.

**Banner of ad for the Olympic Theater**, *Daily Dramatic Chronicle*, 9 September 1865, p.1. Source: GenealogyBank

But, two days later, the banner reflected a different arrangement:

**Banner of ad for the Olympic Theater**, *Daily Dramatic Chronicle*, 11 September 1865, p.1. Source: GenealogyBank

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IT APPEARS that Ferdinand Gilbert might have retained a minority interest in the Olympic Theater for a while longer. But, by the time The Naked Truth opened on 1 June 1867, Gilbert was mostly or entirely out of the picture — although, interesting to note, the proprietor of the Olympic in 1867 was E.G. Bert, who in 1863 had been one of Gilbert’s partners in the New Idea melodeon and soon thereafter became the New Idea’s proprietor.

On June 8th, a week into The Naked Truth’s 10-day run, Emperor Norton took to the Daily Dramatic Chronicle — which still was running the ad for the play on the front page — to voice his displeasure:

**Proclamation of Norton I, *Daily Dramatic Chronicle*, 8 June 1867**, p.3. Source: GenealogyBank

A mention of The Naked Truth in the Daily Dramatic Chronicle of June 6th described the play as a “local piece,” which gives some sense that the Emperor being depicted — or lampooned, as the case may be — was ours.

Perhaps one of the papers that Emperor Norton read every morning in the reading room of the Empire House, a couple of doors up from his lodging house, reviewed the play. Or maybe someone familiar with the play briefed the Emperor on the details.

The truth is, the Olympic Theater was located directly across Kearny Street from Portsmouth Square, where the Emperor spent time virtually every day. So, he was walking near the Olympic as a matter of routine. It’s easy to a imagine that someone who knew him — a friend, a shopkeeper — stopped him in the street to engage him on the subject.

It’s worth remembering that, in early June 1867, Emperor Norton still was less than five months past what may have stood as the most hurtful public indignity of the Emperor’s 20-year imperial career: his bogus arrest, in late January 1867, on trumped-up charges of vagrancy and lunacy.

In light of this, the Emperor may have been feeling more tender and prickly than usual — and this may explain why he responded as he did to this particular play. Certainly, it wasn’t the first — or the last — time that he was made the butt of jokes on the San Francisco stage.

Had Emperor Norton issued a Proclamation on this particular subject before June 1867?

If not, then this was the moment when playwrights, theater composers, theater proprietors and managers, and actors were placed on notice.

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The Emperor Norton Trust

The Emperor Was Not Amused

Ever Wonder What Emperor Norton Thought of the Many Comic Theatrical Depictions of Him in San Francisco During His Lifetime? Here’s a Clue.

Including a Brief History of the Building Where One Such Offense Took Place