TIMEPIECE This month in history
On the afternoon of 16 November 1906, a middle-aged woman was standing in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo, New York, when suddenly she ‘felt the knuckles of a hand rub against me’. Turning, she saw a ‘foreign-looking man’ loitering behind her. The woman (‘Mrs Hannah Graham’, the newspapers reported) screamed, fearing ‘there was no mistaking the insult intended’ – the foreigner was, in the language of the period, a ‘masher’, a sexual predator who ‘annoyed’ women by making unwanted advances on them in public places.
Events quickly escalated in a startling fashion. A plain-clothes policeman, James Caine, stepped forward to intervene in the encounter. Caine was no ordinary bystander, but in fact had 13 years’ experience on the Park Zoo beat, ‘watching for men who annoy women,’ as the New York Times put it. Caine was good at his job, apparently ‘arresting on an average five men every Sunday in the animal houses’.
This time, though, he had truly hit the jackpot – the man whom he arrested that Friday was none other than the famous Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, in town for his first appearance of the season at the Metropolitan Opera. Escorted to a neighbourhood police station, the 33-year-old Caruso indignantly tried intimidating the desk sergeant with his celebrity status. ‘I am Enrico Caruso, tenor of the Metropolitan Opera House,’ he said. ‘I don’t care who you are,’ the hard-nosed sergeant retorted, before proceeding to charge the hapless singer, who was dragged weeping to a holding cell.
When Heinrich Conried, director of the Met, eventually bailed Caruso, he too was quick to play the celebrity card in his star tenor’s defence. ‘A man like Caruso, of the highest honour and dignity, could not have done such a thing,’ Conried argued, before adding – rather ill-advisedly – that Caruso, ‘if he desired it, could have had the acquaintance of many fine women in this country’.
The New York Police Department was not impressed by Conried’s argument. Six days later, Caruso appeared in court to answer what had now become a l
