Mark Twain and Bambino: the black cat who escaped from 21 Fifth Avenue

On April 2, 1905, readers of the New York Herald found a peculiar ad in the lost-and-found section. A white-haired gentleman living at 21 Fifth Avenue offered a five-dollar reward for the return of his cat. The animal was described this way: "Large and intensely black; thick, velvety fur; a faint streak of white hair across the chest; not easy to find in ordinary light." The owner's name was Samuel L. Clemens, which meant nothing to almost anyone. His professional pen name, Mark Twain, did. The cat was named Bambino. And what happened over the next seventy-two hours in that New York house earned two consecutive stories in the Times.

How Bambino came to live with Twain

The cat was a gift from Clara Clemens, the writer's daughter, during a stay of her own at a sanatorium. Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's personal biographer and author of Mark Twain: A Biography (Harper and Brothers, 1912), dates the cat's arrival at the family home to late 1904. Olivia Langdon, the writer's wife, had died only months earlier in Florence, in June 1904. Twain's return to New York in early 1905, installed in a rented house at 21 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of Ninth Street), was one of the darkest stretches of his adult life. Bambino arrived as company for a grieving man of 69.

The cat had first lived with Clara at the Riverdale sanatorium. When the doctors banned pets from patients' rooms, Clara gave him to her father. Bambino settled into the Fifth Avenue house with the usual privileges Twain's cats enjoyed throughout his life.

The writer's catalog of cats

Mark Twain kept cats all his adult life, and he named them with deliberately absurd names. The list documented in Mark Twain: A Biography and in the diaries of his secretary Isabel Lyon includes, among others: Apollinaris, Beelzebub, Blatherskite, Buffalo Bill, Satan, Sin, Sour Mash (after the Tennessee whiskey), Tammany, Zoroaster, Soapy Sal, Pestilence, Famine. The naming policy was simple: the longer and more grandiloquent, the better, because it forced the household children to pronounce difficult words, and that, by Twain's own account, was a public service to their education.

Bambino, by contrast, got an Italian diminutive ("little child") at Clara's suggestion. He was also Twain's only cat during this period. Olivia and Susy (the eldest daughter, who died in 1896 at 24) had been great cat lovers during the Hartford years, and the family home had taken in dozens over time. The New York chapter was the first in a long while with a single cat.

The April Fool's Day escape

On Saturday, April 1, 1905, Bambino slipped out a first-floor window of the Fifth Avenue house. Isabel Lyon, Twain's secretary since 1902, recorded it in her manuscript diary: the cat had been asking to go out for several days, she wrote, because since Olivia's death the animal had developed more erratic habits. The parlor window had been left open a few minutes during a cleaning. Bambino took the chance.

Twain ordered an ad drafted for the paper offering a five-dollar reward. Then he had second thoughts, asked for it to be pulled, and declared he did not want to turn the cat into a media event. The cancellation came too late. The New York Herald ran the ad on Sunday, April 2. The description ("large, intensely black, an almost imperceptible white streak on the chest") circulated through Manhattan.

The parade of cats

What happened next is the most comic part of the story and is well documented in the New York Times account of April 4 ("Mark Twain Loses Bambino"). Dozens of New Yorkers showed up at the door of 21 Fifth Avenue with black cats under their arms. Most looked nothing like Bambino. A few did. Twain, who was sleeping badly and working worse in those weeks, found himself obliged to receive each neighbor, examine the cat presented, and politely turn it down. One woman brought four different black cats over the course of three days.

Albert Bigelow Paine, who was present, later recounted in the biography that many of those visitors brought no cat at all, just a book to sign. The feline excuse worked as a key to meet the writer in person. Twain signed books for a full week.

Bambino, meanwhile, had already spent a couple of days shut in the garden of the house next door, 25 Fifth Avenue, without the neighbors knowing. Isabel Lyon located him on the afternoon of April 3, chasing him through the yard between two rows of flowerpots. She had to cross Ninth Street twice. She finally caught the cat by the scruff under a hedge.

What breed was Bambino?

The best-known photograph of Twain with Bambino (attributed to Underwood and Underwood, around 1905-1906) shows the writer seated in a wicker armchair with the cat on his thigh. The animal is plainly a domestic shorthair (mixed, no defined breed), with a sturdy body, an entirely black coat, and the white chest patch the ad mentioned.

There is no record of a cattery adoption or a specific breed. In early-twentieth-century New York, fully black cats were overwhelmingly common house cats; modern all-black breeds like the Bombay did not yet exist (the Bombay was developed between 1953 and 1958 in Kentucky, crossing the Burmese with the American black domestic). Bambino was, therefore, a common black New York cat, what today would be labeled a domestic shorthair with a solid black coat, or simply a mixed-breed cat with no recognized pedigree.

Twain and black cats

Twain himself joked about the Western superstition surrounding black cats. In a well-known fragment of his Notebooks he wrote: "If a black cat crosses your path, it signifies that the animal is going somewhere." He had a soft spot for dark cats from a young age; in an 1898 photograph taken in Sanna, Sweden, he appears with a black cat on top of the piano. The preference, according to Paine, was more aesthetic than mystical: Twain held that black cats "show up" better in any room because they stand out against any light background.

What the science says about black cats

Solid black cats carry a few documented quirks that are not folklore. The recessive agouti gene in its homozygous form produces the uniform coat, and this same genetic profile has been associated, in feline-genetics research, with a lower relative incidence of some viral diseases, specific variants of the feline leukemia virus in particular. The hypothesis (still debated) is that the allele responsible for the black coat confers some selective immune advantage. It is not conclusive, but it is the first time in a long while that black-cat mythology has found any biological footing.

Culturally, black cats still face a lower adoption rate in shelters across the United States and elsewhere. Shelters call it black cat syndrome and report consistent figures: black cats take longer to find a home than cats of any other color, even with no health or behavior problems. Bambino dodged the syndrome because he happened to live in a house where the only operating superstition was the one about getting literary work done every day.

The verifiable facts in one line

Fact	Confirmation
Name and type	Bambino, common domestic shorthair, entirely black with a white chest streak
Origin	Gift from Clara Clemens to her father, late 1904
Residence	21 Fifth Avenue, New York (rented house 1904-1908)
Escape	April 1, 1905; recovered April 3 in the garden of number 25
Herald ad	April 2, 1905, five-dollar reward
Times story	"Mark Twain Loses Bambino," April 4, 1905

Why the story matters

Twain's biographers agree on one thing: cats were the only stable element of his adult life. He went through financial crises, lost a daughter (Susy, 1896) and a wife (Olivia, 1904), buried Jean (1909), and was left alone with Clara, married and living away. Bambino, in that house at 21 Fifth Avenue, was the animal that stood by him during the worst emotional period of his life. Twain died five years later, on April 21, 1910, at his Stormfield home in Connecticut. Bambino had died earlier, with no recorded date, around 1907.

The scene of the black-cat parade arriving at 21 Fifth Avenue also carries a curious cultural value. For the first time the press documented the effect of a reward published in a mass-market newspaper for a companion animal: seventy-two hours of chaos for one family. The informal protocol that eventually took hold (a higher reward, a far more detailed description, a mandatory photograph) still bears traces of that April Saturday in Manhattan.

What kind of owner Twain was

If you have pictured a grumpy old man with a cigar and a white suit, add the complementary image: the same gentleman scooping up a black cat from among the flowerpots, in the neighbor's garden, with his necktie crooked and two people watching from the sidewalk. Twain was, before he was a professional writer, an obsessive cat owner. The count varies among biographers, but over his lifetime he kept between 15 and 19 cats identifiable by name, not counting passing litters. Bambino was the last on the list. And, by circumstance, the most photographed.

If this story tempts you to adopt a black cat, the number to remember is the one behind black cat syndrome: black cats wait in shelters up to twice as long as cats of other colors. Almost any urban shelter has black cats on its permanent adoption list. The white streak across the chest is optional.