Simon Pettibone (1865-1930)
Pettibone was born in Murphysville, Indiana in March of 1865. The exact month is important, because nine months before, in July of 1864, Jefferson Pettibone, his supposed father, had been one of the Indiana volunteers killed in the final day at Gettysburg. In later years, Pettibone would claim that his mother Edith had told him he was the illegitimate son of General Thomas Morgan, the Confederate cavalry officer who had conducted raids through Indiana and Ohio Records are unclear where Gen. Morgan was in July, 1864, so this claim can not be substantiated.
What can be substantiated from his writings is that Jefferson Pettibone was a stone racist, and after his death, Edith Pettibone did her utmost to instill the same hatred in her son. While the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana did not reach the height of its influence until the 1920s, Edith Pettibone was certainly involved in the beginnings of the Indiana KKK during the Reconstruction era.
However, when he reached the age of 15, Pettibone ran away from his mother's house, and never returned until her later funeral. In his memoirs, Pettibone claims this was because she was abusive, and whipped him regularly. Newspaper reports reveal that it was because Pettibone had impregnated the daughter of the president of the local bank, and he fled rather then be forced into marriage.
Pettibone surfaced in New York two years later. According to his memoir, he had spent the intervening time working various job on the railroad, but contemporary reports of his facility with locks indicate a different story.
In any case, it was in New York that Pettibone first started in the theater. Pettibone claimed that he had sweet-talked his way into a job as a member of the chorus, but the truth is more suspicious. In fact, he had been working as a janitor at the Regal Theater, when an unlikely accident happened to one of the chorus members. The singer had been injured by a fall into the orchestra pit. Desperate for someone who could fit into three different costumes (soldier, congressman, and a "Hindoo"), Pettibone volunteered, though in his memoir, he claimed to have been dragooned by Alice McManus, the owner of the performance group, the Phillipson Repertory Company.
Regardless of the circumstances, Pettibone proved to have a distinguished singing voice, which soon led to Alice McManus showcasing him as a performer. After two years touring with McManus, Pettibone struck out on his own. This led to complete failure, and within six months, he went looking for his old job. Still angry, Alice McManus refused to even meet with Pettibone.
This was the point at which Pettibone took up blackface. During his tours with the theater through the South, Pettibone had become acquainted with many Irish minstrel show performers, and he contacted one such man, James "Jimmy One Foot" O'Neill. (Jimmy One Foot gained his moniker after losing his left leg on the immigrant ship he took to New York.)
O'Neill and Pettibone started a blackface routine that became extremely popular, especially in the border states of Maryland, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Their partnership ended after ten years, when O'Neill finally convinced Pettibone to perform in Indiana. The 1894 performance was a disaster, as Edith Pettibone was in the audience, and attempted to shoot her son. Her reasons were never made entirely clear, but years of festering resentment is probably reason enough. Her letters also made it clear that she considered her son a traitor to his race, because he performed while dressed as a stereotype.
O'Neill was fatally wounded by Edith Pettibone before the guards in the theater shot her dead. Pettibone stayed in Indiana long enough to see his mother buried and to deal with her estate, before he left, never to return again. As O'Neill had no family, Pettibone also took care of O'Neill's funeral.
By the turn of the century, Pettibone had branched out into managing other acts. One of the curiosities of blackface performing is that many African-Americans also participated. Pettibone became one of the key managers who financed African-American blackface performers. He claims this was because of his great guilt over his other's racism, but it seems more likely that it was he felt no compunction about paying African-American performers much less than their majority counterparts. Pettibone parlayed this management into a minor fortune, and ended up investing much of the money into works by fledgling filmmakers. Pettibone claims t have been a major source of funds for D.W. Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION, though there is no evidence to support this.
The scandal that caused Pettibone to leave the East Coast was unsurprisingly tied up in his the complicated race relations he had dealt with for much of his life. In 1910, Pettibone was arrested in Maryland for shooting one of his performers, Thomas Philip Jefferson. During the subsequent trial, Pettibone was discovered to have impregnated Jefferson's sister, Sally. When Jefferson confronted Pettibone, it resulted in Jefferson's death. Desperate for his life, Pettibone presented racism as his defense. He portrayed Thomas Jefferson as a subhuman brute, and Sally Jefferson as a liar. The all-white jury, though clearly convinced that Pettibone was, in the words of the foreman, "guiltier than the serpent in the Garden of Eden", refused to convict him. Pettibone fled to Southern California.
He spent his waning years
performing for tiny audiences, and trying to get involved in the movie
business. Finally, in 1930, the last of his money having vanished as a
result of the 1929 stock market crash and the resultant run on the banks,
Pettibone died of pneumonia in a pauper's hospital on Sunset Boulevard.
He left no acknowledged heirs, but Sally Jefferson's son Philip would
later write a biography of Pettibone that would be praised for its balanced
portrayal of the mostly amoral man responsible for the death of his uncle
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