AT the beginning, anyway, Lillie Mae put aside her earlier misgivings and acted like any other happy new mother, trying, in an almost comical way, to teach Truman to talk and recognize things around him even before he could lift his head off the pillow. Arch surprised her by making a great success of his new job, which was to book clubs and churches aboard the Streckfus Company’s fleet of Mississippi excursion boats. Fall and winter he worked out of New Orleans; spring and summer, out of St. Louis.
Rarely is anyone so well suited for a job as Arch was to his, and probably no one since Mark Twain has made a cruise on the Mississippi sound more exciting. Whatever the group, he had the pitch that would bring it aboard. “If you could be sold, Arch could sell you,” said his boss, Captain Verne Streckfus. “He was the best.” After years of searching, Arch had found his calling. Just as some men are natural athletes, or musicians, or leaders of troops in battle, he was a born salesman. In the time it would take a prospective customer to drink a cup of coffee, he could cast a spell that would turn the cream pitcher into Aladdin’s Lamp, the sugar bowl into a chest full of treasure.
Arch was not an ordinary charmer, however, and his ability to persuade did not rest on flattery, backslapping, or the telling of funny stories—though he could do all of those things with practiced ease. His charm had a firmer foundation: after a few minutes of conversation, he could divine a person’s secret dreams, much as a fortune-teller can reconstruct one’s past from a few clues unwittingly volunteered, and he could make those hidden dreams seem as close and attainable as tomorrow’s newspaper. He was mesmerizing; he was tantalizing; he was, in his own way, a magician, Svengali in a white linen suit. His magnetic appeal became so celebrated that The Circle, the company magazine, officially declared him “the Streckfus Line’s Prince Charming.”
His was a dazzling talent, too large to be confined to his job with the Streckfuses. During March and August, his two free months, and in whatever other spare time he had, he continued to hunt for that gold mine, as he called it, that was waiting just over the hill. During the years when Truman was a baby, he tried any number of schemes, each one of which he expected to be the mother lode. One year he managed a prizefighter who went by the name of Joe Littleton. Arch wanted to stage a match in Monroeville, right on the courthouse square, and, to get publicity, he sent the main attraction jogging around town in his boxing shorts. “All the ladies were scandalized,” remembered Lillie Mae’s sister Mary Ida Carter. “They had never seen a man’s legs before.” But the city council, alarmed by the uproar, passed an ordinance banning boxing within the town limits, and Joe Littleton put his trousers back on and returned home to New Orleans.
Another time, Arch spied that elusive gold mine in the Great Pasha, otherwise known as Sam Goldberg from the Bronx. Goldberg, who wore a turban and a robe, made his living putting on a kind of grotesque variety act. His best trick, the gimmick that excited Arch so much, was his ability to survive burial. With the help of what was advertised as a secret Egyptian drug, he could retard his heartbeat to such an abnormally slow rate that he hardly needed to breathe; he could remain alive in an airtight coffin for up to five hours. Calling him the “World’s Foremost Man of Mystery,” Arch staged his Pasha show—“Burial Alive, Blindfold Drive, Nailed to Cross, Torture Act and 100 others”—in half a dozen places. In Monroeville, people came to see it from a hundred miles around; even the banks closed for the day. Despite their success, Arch and the Pasha eventually quarreled and parted. For Arch it may have been just as well. Not long after their breakup, Goldberg’s Egyptian drug failed him, and one day when his coffin was dug up, the Great Pasha was as still as the Pharaohs.
Arch had other projects: a plan to syndicate shorthand lessons in newspapers, a magazine for sororities and fraternities, a series of popularity contests for high school girls. There was, in fact, no end to his schemes. His mind shot off ideas like a Fourth of July sparkler, and he thought of little else but new ways to make his fortune. “Money is the sixth sense, without which the other five are of no avail,” he liked to say, and he believed that it was his destiny to be rich. If he had had some extra quality—perhaps nothing more extraordinary than patience—he might have fulfilled that destiny and become as famous a promoter as Billy Rose, Mike Todd, or the man he resembled most of all, P. T. Barnum. But whatever that quality was, he did not possess it. His emotional barometer was subject to too many fluctuations—ebullience one day, depression the next—and he did not have the temperament to stick to any single thing for very long. He was, moreover, not always scrupulous about how he acquired his money. As he rushed toward fortune, he sometimes stooped very low to pick up a dollar and looked less and less like a visionary promoter and more and more like an ordinary con man. The image that remains from those years is that of the local sheriff automatically fingering the keys to the lockup every time Arch came to town. Even his mother, who was convinced that God meant for him to do something grand and important, complained that he did not know the difference between right and wrong.