Truevine

by Beth Macy

  Bespectacled and with an ever-present cigar in his hand, Kelley was a Baraboo native who’d grown up with the Ringling brothers and represented them and the company from 1905 to 1937. Among his favorite stories was his response to a lawsuit sparked by a 1917 circus parade in Omaha. A runaway horse had destroyed property and injured several bystanders, resulting in a $25,000 claim. An especially damning eyewitness account from a socialite, the wife of an Omaha newspaper editor, had Kelley’s case circling the drain. But Kelley had thrown the witness off-guard with a simple question—“How old are you, ma’am?”—that played on the socialite’s vanity.

  The woman responded exactly as Kelley had hoped.

  She fidgeted, swayed, and “blushed in the throes of evident dread.”

  Kelley used her stammering to discount her entire testimony and won the case.

  In the late 1910s and early ’20s, Kelley had helped turn John Ringling into a tycoon. He had rushed to the scene of an Oklahoma oil strike, fortuitously located near one of John’s newly acquired rail lines. Kelley quickly secured eight thousand acres of oil leases that would bring millions in profits and lead to the creation of Ringling, Oklahoma, a company town named for and laid out by John himself. Kelley had elevated the self-titled circus king to oil baron.

  Though eventually their partnership soured, Kelley always exhibited a deep love for Ringling history, founding the Circus World Museum in 1959, long after he retired. He revered Baraboo, unlike John, who had looked down his nose at the hometown folk and called them Baraboobians.

  Stepping into an intrafamily money squabble in the wake of Charles Ringling’s death, in 1926, Kelley had accused the grand pooh-bah, John—then the remaining original partner and heir—of being lazy, distracted, and moneygrubbing. Six years later, he helped the remaining heirs incorporate the business and orchestrated a power shift from John to Samuel Gumpertz.

  With offices in Chicago and, later, Manhattan, Kelley was no one to trifle with, and he was used to frying fish much larger than the ones Warren Messick caught along the river at Gray Rocks. He was a master at combing legal documents, down to the prenuptial agreements he’d insisted John nail down before his second marriage, after Mable died.

  Still, Kelley prided himself on knowing the minutest goings-on of the Big One, including its sideshow contracts. A coworker recalled watching him unfold his long, gangly frame from his car, stomp into the circus office, and announce, “Boys, I have a great idea for next year. We will feature a sight denied past generations—a man… from the wilds of Borneo. Adam Forepaugh did it in 1864, and we will do it,” too.

  “The Ringlings paid their people ten percent less [than other circuses] because they had taken control of the market,” said former Circus World Museum archivist Fred Dahlinger, who currently writes and does circus research for the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. Though Dahlinger knew nothing about the 1927 Muse case, he had strong doubts about the charges Messick brought against Ringling and found it hard to believe that George and Willie Muse had ever worked without pay.

  “In terms of business practices, they were not fly-by-night; they were very honorable,” Dahlinger said of the company. “And they would have known if they had talent that was not being paid” or otherwise held in peonage by their manager, he insisted. “They were rough people, but they did not welch on financial obligations.”

  He did not at all buy the argument that Ringling might have been just as culpable in exploiting the brothers’ labor as Shelton, which is why Messick named them in the suit.

  But Dahlinger was so insistent about the fairness of Ringling business dealings that, since I was unable to find a contract between the Muses and the circus or Shelton and the circus, he suggested I look toward the contractual obligations written for Clicko, the Wild Dancing Bushman, the Muse brothers’ sideshow coworker for many years. Franz Taibosh, who actually did hail from South Africa, suffered at the hands of a brutal early manager but was rescued by Ringling legal agent, or fixer, Frank Cook, who found him near starvation and ill clothed in an unheated Bridgeport, Connecticut, apartment. Taibosh had been performing in the Barnum and Bailey sideshow, unpaid and under the care of his harsh manager, Paddy Hepston. He took his temper out on Taibosh in frequent alcoholic rages and compensated him only in food, booze, and cigars.

  Cook not only rescued Taibosh; he made him welcome to such an extent that he lived with Cook’s family, quite happily, for the remainder of his career, as related in Neil Parsons’s 2010 biography, Clicko. And not only that, he even adopted Taibosh, “and by what political machinations I’ll never know—since Taibosh could not read—got him made an American citizen,” recalled circus heir Henry Ringling North, in a candid memoir.

  Cook had wheel-greased Taibosh’s emancipation, Parsons wrote, describing a relationship that was certainly parallel to dealings between the Muse brothers and Candy Shelton—but only to a point. Shelton did not have the clout of Cook, and therefore the brothers never enjoyed the “pet” status that Clicko had among many Ringling managers.

  North fondly recalled playing with Taibosh as a kid: “He’d let me pull his kinky hair, which would stretch out a foot or more and, when I let go, snap back like a rubber band. He called my brother ‘Johnny’ and me ‘Bonny’ to save the bother of adding an entire new word to his limited vocabulary.” When Taibosh learned of his impending American citizenship, he bounded up to young North and shouted, “Bonny, me American citizen now, no more nigger son of a bitch.”

  The Muses did not enjoy the insider status accorded Taibosh, who was treated like something between a fraternity brother and an eccentric, dementia-addled uncle. “Cook ensured Taibosh had all creature comforts, including those of the flesh; they partied and ate and drank” together, Parsons reported. “As Taibosh’s manager, Cook dealt with all money matters. In essence the arrangement was that, in return for Taibosh’s summer pay minus pocket money, Cook would provide Taibosh with a winter home.” During the circus season, Taibosh slept in the same dormitory Pullman car as the other sideshow performers while Cook traveled separately, in a management car.

  Not surprisingly, Parsons wrote, Taibosh’s command of English greatly improved after he became liberated from Hepston, and his lilting South African accent charmed the crowds in the sideshow and in the circus backyard. (His first language was Afrikaans, but Hepston had spent years hiding him away from potential paying audiences and instructing him to grunt and yell when onstage.)

  Taibosh was not a fan of George and Willie Muse—“he was rather snooty about them,” Parsons told me in an e-mail. But the brothers were well liked both in the press, which considered them good copy, and among the rousties, who recalled them pleasantly strumming guitars and “laughing and singing until the train started to roll” on humid summer nights.

  As The New Yorker put it in the magazine’s lawsuit coverage, the Muses were widely considered “good examples of contented freaks.” They loved monkeys and kangaroos, the magazine reported. It also mentioned their appearance at the hairdressers’ convention, where their dreadlocks were unveiled in a publicity stunt involving permanent waves. “If the waving machines on exhibition at the convention could wave Ecko’s [sic] ropy locks, they could wave anything, even a telephone switchboard. But it never happened. The freak remained happily in a corner with a plate of ice cream.”

  Lawyer Kelley won the first volley in his battle against Messick, who could not squeak past the shortcut he’d taken in hastily writing his initial legal pleading. Like the press, Richmond judge Beverly T. Crump issued no comment at all about the brothers’ claims of enslavement. But he agreed with Kelley that Messick had mistakenly labeled the circus a “corporation” when in fact no such entity existed. Despite becoming captains of industry, the Ringlings technically still operated the business as an informal family partnership, just as they had back in the old wagon days of Baraboo. (The circus incorporated several years later, in 1932. Its Baraboo winter quarters had moved to Bridgeport in 1919, and a decade l
ater John Ringling bade the Baraboobians a final good-bye by shifting the operation closer to his mansion in Sarasota.)

  There being no corporation to sue, Crump deemed the case quashed.

  But Messick left the door open for another suit by persuading the judge to keep the matter under advisement while he took one more stab at it. Meanwhile, he angled quietly for a settlement, presenting it as a way to keep the kidnapping story out of the press and to preserve Ringling’s “Sunday School” image.

  Not that anyone in the press viewed the charges seriously. In fact, reporters took even greater liberties to embellish Clyde Ingalls’s ballyhoo about the brothers by turning the brouhaha into yet another joke.

  In Wisconsin, an editorial writer opined that sideshow customers, not the Muses, had suffered the most harm: it was a hard blow to patrons who had paid out their good coin to see authentic citizens from another planet. They felt they had been wickedly imposed on by those slick fellows of the circus.

  In Norfolk, Virginia, an editorial writer reframed the story, comparing it to ghostwritten celebrity gossip: as long as the newspaper world can stomach this sort of faking in its own household without nausea, it is in no position to steam up over Ambassadors from Mars.

  Nary a reporter wrote a word about how the Muses felt.

  Meanwhile, a Kansas journalist reported—correctly—that life in Roanoke amid the drugstore crowds was not exactly brimming with excitement for the famous duo: now they sat around the fireside of the old home “shack” and seemed lonesome for the crowds who used to visit them each day.

  In February 1928, Messick pulled out another squeaker—he got the Big One to settle with the Muses. Details of the settlement he brokered with Ringling were not reported in the media, though the Roanoke newspapers insisted it was “a highly satisfactory adjustment of their claim.”

  Evidence of the case no longer seems to exist in city or state holdings in Roanoke and Richmond beyond Messick’s initial brief, Kelley’s response, and myriad newspaper accounts. I have personally looked for them, hired a legal researcher to look for them, begged lawyer friends to cajole law librarians and clerks into looking one more time on my behalf, and combed accounts by sideshow historians, who have likewise come up dry.

  “Efforts to bring an appropriate case against the circus were frustrated,” the Canadian historian Jane Nicholas summed up, vaguely, in a 2014 article. She shared my exasperation about the difficulty of trying to envision lives that were seemingly well documented—only never from the subjects’ point of view. “There are so many stories missing, especially of [sideshow performers who began as] child performers,” she told me. “Young performers weren’t seen as children, only as people who brought an economic benefit. They weren’t hidden away from the public. They were there for the public. So even though the sideshow did provide them with work and a place to be, it was still exploitative.”

  Missing documents notwithstanding, Nicholas encouraged me to keep digging. If we only wrote the histories of the people who left detailed records, she said, “we would only get to know about the really privileged people. You have to piece together your evidence with empathy and conjecture,” using the materials at hand.

  At the stately Library of Virginia, where researchers are restricted to laptops and pencils for note taking and where I was asked to lock my belongings away (a routine part of theft prevention), a clerk who spoke in brief, hushed tones hauled out museum-quality storage boxes containing the court case on a large wheeled rack.

  There wasn’t much to see.

  Folded into thirds and wrapped in neat bundles tied in orange lace bows, the trace legal leavings bore no hint of the reality of George and Willie Muse. The boxes contained fewer than ten pages, mostly just the original filing by Messick and Kelley’s response.

  Messick declined to disclose the amount Ringling ponied up as the brothers’ unofficial back pay, nor did he offer his own lawyerly reflection. He hinted that a federal peonage suit might be in the works. We also know he gave a short press conference, with George and Willie on hand, “their long sheep-like hair waving like banners in the breezes that waft through the Federal Building. They talked, and not without a touch of longing, of the old trouping days,” the Roanoke Times wrote. “The drab narrowness and cramped horizons of Ten-and-a-Half Street fail to touch the spark of their esthetic emotion as the Ringling ballyhoo of the big top once did.”

  Messick also implied that he and Kelley had come to a new agreement over the Muses’ employment. He hinted that the brothers might be willing to return to the circus—but only if they were paid adequately and allowed to visit their family during breaks.

  If their salaries were sent home, maybe their mother could get away from the neighborhood’s noisy nip joints, its cinder-filled air, the screeching and clanking of all those rail-yard brakes. Maybe, instead of doing other people’s laundry, she could just do her own, out of earshot from the loud racist parrots up the street.

  Maybe she’d have a space for gardening, which she missed. Maybe she’d buy a respectable piece of property in Pinkard Court, the black suburban enclave on the outskirts of town.

  Maybe, George and Willie hoped, Harriett would figure out a way to leave Cabell, who wanted, more than anything, not to buy his wife a home but to score the ultimate status symbol in 1928: a new car. Outside of the black doctors and lawyers in town, he’d be among the first African Americans in the city to own his own set of wheels.

  Ringling dispatched Shelton back to Roanoke to further sweeten the deal: if George and Willie returned to the sideshow, he promised, the circus would find roustabout work for their younger brother Tom. He could tour the country now, too, helping erect the big top alongside scores of other, mostly black laborers. Shelton even hoped to land them all a wintertime gig in London with a British-owned circus called Bertram Mills. They could play before King George V!

  The Roanoke Times pondered their predicament:

  “The curtain of the drama has only commenced to rise” on the brothers’ next act. “Eko and Iko sit snugly by a fat stove in their Ten-and-a-Half Street abode while the indulgent daddy supplies the fuel.”

  Given Cabell’s behavior in the nip joints and at the back-alley craps matches, the family was surprised he hadn’t already absconded with that chauffeur car he drove for work. And though they couldn’t stand Candy Shelton, George and Willie had come to realize that the indulgent daddy was maybe even greedier.

  That winter, the brothers found themselves engaged in much less glamorous work—playing music in the storefront window of a downtown Roanoke drugstore. Their frowns were even deeper set. A. L. Holland remembers watching them there when he was just ten years old. They were sitting on stools, playing a mandolin and guitar. They spoke very little but played beautifully, Holland said.

  Before and after school, Holland worked as a blind man’s assistant, leading him around town, helping him sell brooms for seventy-five cents apiece. “Every time he sold a broom, I got a nickel,” Holland recalled.

  “It had been a very happy time; everybody was glad to see the Muse brothers. The whole town was talking about it.” But after a few weeks of it, “they looked real sad to me,” he said. He had never before seen hair like theirs, and “as a kid, I was a little bit scared of them.”

  Holland was not the only one.

  “We were afraid to get close to them,” another Roanoke native told me in 2001. He recalled George and Willie standing inside the family’s front door and waving shyly to passersby.

  It was George and Willie’s decision to heed Candy Shelton’s plea and rejoin the circus in the spring of 1928, with Tom in tow, according to family members. They wanted to help support their mother, especially in light of the way Cabell was burning through the settlement money. They probably also missed the relative freedom of the circus backyard, a familiar place where a person happening upon them was not apt to walk the other way—or call the police about wild savages on the loose.

  Maybe they believ
ed their dark-skinned brother, with his normal vision and streetwise ways, could help them navigate a more independent life. Shelton would continue to manage their act, but they would not be so constantly under his thumb. Census records from 1930 show the three brothers living in the multiracial, immigrant-rich Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan during the off-season, in an apartment building that also housed actors, theater ushers, and factory workers.

  Were their fellow sideshow workers glad to see them back under the tent? Unclear. Did managers treat them better now? We’ll never know.

  Opening-day circus coverage in the New York Times noted only that George and Willie hadn’t missed a beat during their Roanoke hiatus. The reporter only briefly noted the reunion drama and didn’t even mention the lawsuit. In a Fellows-fed story subtitled EKO AND IKO ARE HAPPY, the brothers had been “found by their parents last Winter after they had been missing from home for some ten years,” the paper explained.

  The story was pure Fellows fodder, a page-three gimmick that mainly focused on Habu, the man with the iron tongue, who supposedly had just suffered two nervous breakdowns because he could not hoist an elephant, or even a baby zebra, with his tongue. He lifted items—a heavy-looking bucket, for instance—via a hook that was placed in his pierced tongue. (“This is actually a gaff,” Al Stencell said of Habu’s gimmicky hoax. “A U-shaped piece fits around the tongue” and is covered up with a cloth in front of the mouth while the hook is pretend-inserted.)

  “Yah,” the brothers were quoted as saying of Habu, as if in unison. “He’s gloomy,” they supposedly chorused.

  Nothing was written about the conditions of their employment, past or present, by either the Times or the New York Evening Post, which noted only that the Muse “twins” had returned to Ringling “dressed to kill in their crimson flannel dress clothes.”