It predates television and photography, movies and pop music. But it was scooped by its rival, the New York Journal, which triumphantly ran a full-ear portrait, sketched from life.Ĭelebrity, with all of its ridiculous excesses, is not a recent phenomenon. One local tabloid, the World, reported breathlessly that its correspondent, having “pleaded with her for a glimpse of her ear”, had been granted a brief flash of “a bit of rose-tinted flesh”. By the autumn of 1897, when Mérode arrived in New York to begin an American tour, ear-mania had crossed the Atlantic. Maybe they were huge, or tiny, or completely missing? Newspapers across Europe theorised feverishly on the subject, while purveyors of prints and postcards rushed out imagined images of the fateful lobes.
For months, this bizarre question became an international obsession.
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