The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  Shortly after that hegira, Dufour decided that while the show owners got the glory, it was the concessionaires traveling with the shows who got the money. So he became the proprietor of a “jam joint.” A jam joint is a traveling auction store in which, as the climax of the “regularly scheduled sale,” the auctioneer says, “Now, my friends, who will bid one dollar for this empty, worthless box?” A man in the audience says, “I will,” and passes up a dollar. The auctioneer is touched. He says, “This gentleman has sufficient confidence in me that he offers one dollar for an empty box. I will not abuse his confidence. Here, mister, is the box. Open it in front of everybody” The box, it turns out, contains “a seventeenjewel Elgin watch.” “I don't want your dollar, mister,” the auctioneer says. “Take this beautiful fortyfivedollar watch as a present.” Then he asks how many people will give him five dollars for an empty box. A few fivedollar bills are passed up hopefully He asks the people if they are perfectly satisfied to give him five dollars for an empty box. Sensing that it is a game, they shout “Yes!” He hands back their money and presents each of them with a “handsome and valuable gift,” usually a wallet or vanity case worth about a dime, as a reward for their confidence in him. Next he calls for tendollar bids on an empty box. By this time the contagion of something for nothing has spread, and the countrymen eagerly pass up their bills. He asks them if they would have any kick if he kept their money and gave them nothing but an empty box. Remembering the previous routine, they shout “No!” “Nobody will have any complaint if I keep the money?” the jam guy asks. Nobody. The auditors expect him to return the money, with a present as a reward for their faith. The auctioneer assures them that he will not give them an empty box for their money. He will give to each and every one of them a special platinumrolled alarm clock “worth ten dollars in itself.” He makes a speech about the alarm clock. That is not all. He will give to each a beautiful Persian rug, worth twentyfive dollars, specially imported from Egypt. He makes a speech about the rug. That is not all. He adds a couple of patent picture frames “worth six dollars apiece.” In short, he loads each of his confiding acquaintances with an assortment of bulky junk and then declares the sale at an end, retaining all the tendollar bills.

  Jamming paid well and yielded a certain artistic satisfaction, but it did not content Dufour. He felt that it was not creative and that it had only an oblique educational value. It was at the Louisiana State Fair at Shreveport, in 1927, that Lew found his real vocation. He recognized it instantly; Keats felt the same way when he opened Chapman's Homer. There was a medicine pitchman at the Fair who carried with him a few bottles of formaldehyde containing human embryos. The pitchman used the embryos only as a decoy to collect a “tip,” which is what a pitchman calls an audience, but Dufour, who was at the Fair with his auction store, dropped in on the medicine show one evening and at once sensed there was money in the facts of life. He must have had an intimation of that vast, latent public interest in medicine which has since been capitalized upon by Dr. Heiser, Dr. Cronin, Dr. Hertzler, Dr. Menninger, and all the other authors of medical best sellers. “A scientist may know a lot about embryology and biology,” Lew has since said, “but it don't mean anything at the ticket window because it's not presented right. I felt the strength of the thing right away.” From the day when he decided to present biology effectively, Lew began to collect suitable exhibits.

  The important thing in assembling a cast for a biology show is to get a graduated set of human embryos which may be used to illustrate the development of an unborn baby from the first month to the eighth. The series parallels, as the lecturers point out, the evolution of man through the fish, animal, and primate stages. As an extra bit of flash, a good show includes some life groups of prehistoric men and women huddled around a campfire. Sometimes it takes months to put together a complete set of specimens. While it is true, as Lew sometimes roguishly observes, that you cannot buy unborn babies in Macy's or Gimbel's, there are subrosa clearing houses for them in most large cities. It is now a small industry, though seldom mentioned by chambers of commerce. The embryo business even has its tycoon, to borrow a word from graver publications, a man in Chicago who used to be chief laboratory technician at a medical school. The specimens are smuggled out of hospitals by technicians or impecunious internes. Hospitals have a rule that such specimens should be destroyed, but it is seldom rigidly enforced; no crime is involved in selling one. Dufour can afford to keep companies standing by. The actors need no rehearsal and draw no salary. Early in his biological career, Lew thought of a terrific title for his show— “Life.” He did not pay fifty thousand dollars for this title, as Henry R. Luce did when he had the same inspiration. He did pretty well with his “Life” exhibits, playing state and county fairs and amusement parks, but he didn't get to the big time until he teamed up with Joe Rogers.

  During Dufour's years of orientation, Rogers had been acquiring a comfortable bank roll by merchandising unbreakable dolls and cotton blankets in western Canada. His merchandising apparatus consisted of a wheel with fifty numbers on it. The customers paid ten cents a chance, and after every whirl one customer or another collected a doll or a blanket. In order to keep their midways free of swindlers, the Canadian fairs make contracts awarding all the concessions at each fair to one firm of concessionaires. Rogers' wheels were honest but allowed a nice margin of profit, and he usually got the concessions. Joe had established his headquarters in Chicago, and he used to travel through Canada west of Toronto in the winter, signing contracts with fairs. He was always a heavy bettor on sporting events, and on his journeys acquired an expert knowledge of professional hockey, which, in those days, existed only in Canada. When bigleague hockey was introduced to the United States, Rogers was the only betting man in Chicago who really knew what the odds on the teams should be. He won consistently for several seasons before his friends began to catch on. In addition to all this, he ran the Link cigar store and restaurant on Michigan Boulevard, a rendezvous for sporting men and politicians.

  Lew and Joe joined forces for the first time before the Century of Progress in Chicago opened. Lew had his “Life” show, and Joe was able to finance a flashy building for it at the Fair. Showmen are incessantly forming oneor twoseason partnerships for a particular promotion, and neither Lew nor Joe realized at once the significance of their merger. The firm began its history just with “Life,” but within a week it opened a second exhibit—the twoheaded baby. The baby, one of those medical anomalies that never live for more than a few gasps, was in a large bottle of formaldehyde. For years it had been the chief ornament of a country doctor's study, and the partners had picked it up for a couple of hundred dollars from a Chicago dealer in medical curiosa. They built a fine front for this exhibit, with a wooden stork carrying a twoheaded baby prominently displayed over the entrance. They got a female talker for the show, a motherly woman who wore a trainednurse's uniform and made her ballyhoo through a microphone.

  “Wouldn't you like to see a real twoheaded baby?” the nurse would ask sweetly. “He was born alive.”

  “Get that,” Joe says. “We didn't say it was alive. We just said it was born alive.” The partners had arranged the entrance so that people on the midway could see past the door to a woman in nurse's uniform who bent over some object they could not discern. If the people inferred that the object was a baby and the nurse was trying to keep it alive, that was their own business. No deception could be imputed to Dufour & Rogers. And anyway, a look at a twoheaded baby, even in a bottle, is well worth fifteen cents.

  “Did you ever see a real twoheaded baby?” Rogers sometimes murmurs euphorically, apropos of nothing except a cheerful mood. “It was born alive.” The partners grossed fifty thousand dollars with their pickled star. Thirtyfive thousand was clear profit.

  “It wasn't a fake,” Dufour argues earnestly. “It was an illusion, like when Barnum advertised the 'cow with its head where its tail ought to be,' and when the people paid their money he just showed them a cow turne
d around in her stall. Just a new angle of presentation, you might say.”

  The new angle of presentation is the essential element of success on a midway. There are virtually no novel or unique attractions. Even the most extraordinary freaks seldom remain long without rivals. Thus, shortly after the appearance of JoJo, the DogFaced Boy, the show world witnessed the debut of Lionel, the LionFaced Boy. The appearance of Frank Lentini, the ThreeLegged Man, was closely followed by that of Myrtle Corbin, the FourLegged Girl. Lalou, the DoubleBodied Man from Mexico, soon had a rival in Libera, the DoubleBodied Spaniard. This is because when one victim of a particular deformity begins to get publicity, other similar freaks see profit in making themselves known.

  Dufour and Rogers have deep admiration for a young man named Jack Tavlin, who managed three midgets at the San Diego Fair and made money with them by calling them “leprahons.” “A midget is not worth feeding,” Mr. Tavlin, who was also working at the Flushing Fair, wisely observed. “Everybody knows what is a midget—a little man. But when I said, 'Come and see the leprahons,' the customers came. Afterward some of them would ask me, 'What is the difference between a leprahon and a midget?' I would say, 'Madam, it is a different species. A leprahon cannot reproduce theirself.' “ Mr. Tavlin's midgets were very small, because they were only six or seven years old, and a child midget is naturally rather smaller than an adult one. He dressed the midget boy in a high hat and a dress suit and the two girls in evening gowns. He didn't say they were fullgrown. The customers assumed they were. In time the juvenile midgets got into the hands of a less conscientious impresario, and the picture of the boy appeared in the magazine Life as a “lifesize portrait of the world's smallest man—age 18 years, height 19 inches, weight 12 pounds.” The boy was only nine years old then, but, as Mr. Tavlin says, “There is always some unscrupulous person that will take advantage of a reporter.”

  For the two summers of the Century of Progress, Lew and Joe prospered. “Life,” the TwoHeaded Baby, and Darkest Africa, the Ethiop village that they opened the first season, all made plenty of “paper money.” The Hawaiian Village, their most ambitious promotion, earned no profit, but the partners broke even on it. A vista of paper money and excitement opened before Dufour & Rogers in the fall of 1934. The only requisite to continued success was a steady supply of world's fairs. Brussels and San Diego had announced expositions for 1935. The firm divided its forces. Rogers went to Brussels with “La Vie,” a variation of “Life”; “Les Monstres Geants,” a snake show featuring rattlesnakes, or serpents a sonnettes, a novelty in Belgium; and, as a feature attraction, a show like “Gang Busters,” called for the Belgian trade “Le Crime Ne Paie Pas.” Dufour took the same line of shows to San Diego, and in addition had the firm's mascot, the twoheaded baby. “Le Crime Ne Paie Pas” had a collection of tommy guns and sawedoff shotguns reputedly taken from les gangsters americains, a rogues' gallery of photographs featuring postmortem views of Dillinger and an old PierceArrow sedan billed as “L'Auto Blinde des Bandits.” The old Pierce has especially thick plateglass windows, and the doors and tonneau are indubitably lined with sheet metal. Its history is uncertain, but it must have belonged to somebody who was at least apprehensive of accidents. The car was like a box at the opera. In Brussels it passed on alternate Wednesdays as Dillinger's, on odd Fridays as Al Capone's, and at other times as Jack “Legs” Diamond's. Jack “Legs” Diamond was the most popular gangster in Belgium, Rogers says, because once he had tried to land at Antwerp from a freighter and had been turned back by the Belgian police. The Belgians felt they had had a personal contact with him. During the weeks before the Flushing Fair opened, Joe drove the armored car around the streets of New York, usually between the Fair grounds and the West Side Ruby Foo's, where he likes to eat.

  The star of “Le Crime Ne Paie Pas” was a man named Floyd Woolsey, who sat in an electric chair and impersonated a murderer being executed. He had to give special performances for delegations of curious European police chiefs. Belgian journalists reported that “Le Crime Ne Paie Pas” gave them a fresh insight into American life. Dave Hennen Morris, at the time United States Ambassador to Belgium, found the show a fine antidote to nostalgia, but a few stodgy American residents of Brussels protested against giving Continentals such strange ideas of our culture. Therefore, acting on the Ambassador's suggestion, Rogers rechristened the show “Les Gangsters Internationaux.” The inclusion of a few German gangsters in the rogues' gallery made everybody happy, and, as Joe says, “the heat was off.” He thinks well of Europe except for the climate. “It is the wrong setup for snakes,” he says. “Cold and rainy all the time.” But the weather had no deterrent effect upon the crowds. The Belgians, Joe concluded, had given up hoping for fair weather.

  During 1936 and 1937, Dufour & Rogers operated clusters of shows in the expositions at Dallas, Fort Worth, and Cleveland, but these were mere workouts: they had already begun to plan their layout for the World of Tomorrow. Throughout the Texas and Cleveland fairs, none of which was an unqualified success, Lew and Joe maintained a record of profitmaking most unusual among concessionaires. Each time they emerged unscathed from another fair their prestige in the trade and the amount of paper money which they apparently had at their disposition increased.

  The two men have divergent notions of pleasure. Rogers, noisy, pugnacious, and juvenile, likes to travel with sporting men. He will fly from a midway to an important prize fight a couple of thousand miles away and fly right back again when the fight is over. Dufour, despite his gauntness, is an epicure famous among carnival men. He has even invented two dishes—soft scrambled eggs with anchovies, and loose hamburger steak. He insists that his hamburger be made of a Delmonico steak cut into small pieces with a knife and that it be sauteed in a covered pan over a slow fire. Dufour's preoccupation with the finer things of life sometimes enrages Rogers. “I knew him when he had doughnut tumors,” he says bitterly, “and now he has to have scrambled eggs with anchovies.” Doughnut tumors are abdominal lumps which, carnies say, appear upon the bodies of show people who have subsisted for months at a time on nothing but coffee and doughnuts. “That Dr. Itch,” Joe sputters at other times—it is his familiar name for his partner—“when trouble comes he lams and leaves me with the grief.” But he values Dufour for his intellect. Both partners have been married for many years, and Mrs. Dufour and Mrs. Rogers hit it off well together.

  The Dufour & Rogers reputation of always paying off stood them in particularly good stead when they bid for concessions at the New York Fair. Even an apparently flimsy building in the amusement area represented a big investment for the average outdoor showman. The buildings here had to be set on piles because of the low marshland; building specifications were strict; labor costs in New York were high. Wouldbe concessionaires had to furnish stiff guarantees of solvency. The “Nature's Mistakes” building, the least expensive of the Dufour & Rogers string, cost about $20,000. “Strange as It Seems,” their most elaborate offering, cost nearly $100,000. Altogether, Lew Dufour says, their attractions at the Fair grounds represented an investment of $600,000. The partners usually incorporate each attraction separately and finance it by selling bonds. The corporation also issues common stock, of which around fortynine per cent goes to the bondholders as a bonus, while the impresarios retain the rest. At the end of a fair, the corporation pays off the bondholders and the profits, if any, are divided among the holders of common stock. It is not a conservative form of investment, but the bankroll men get action for their money.

  Concessionaires paid a percentage of the gross receipts to the Fair, making a separate deal for each show. For “Strange as It Seems,” for example, Dufour & Rogers agreed to pay around fifteen per cent on the first $500,000 of receipts. The show never reached that figure. The Fair administration provided either the tickettaker or the cashier for each show—the option rested with the concessionaire. If the cashier was a Fair employee, the Fair collected the gate receipts at the end of the day and banked them, paying the concessiona
ires their share by check. Dufour & Rogers, with their usual acumen, prefer to have a Fair cashier and a Dufour & Rogers tickettaker. “Then, if she takes any bad money, it is the Fair's hard luck and not ours,” Mr. Rogers says.

  “Strange as It Seems” is an example of an ancient American form of folk art, the freak show. Phineas T. Barnum was primarily an exploiter of freaks. He became a circus man late in life, and never got to be a good one. But after Barnum the freak show became a stale and devitalized art form. Syndicated cartoonists like Bob Ripley, who draws “Believe It or Not,” and John Hix, Ripley's bustling young rival, who is author of the syndicated newspaper strip “Strange as It Seems,” were instrumental in the revival, but the genius of the risorgimento was the late C. C. Pyle, a showman who realized that the American public loves to suffer. Pyle put on a largescale freak show at the Century of Progress, calling it “Believe It or Not” and paying Ripley a royalty for the title. The selling point was that the highly peculiar principals in the show had been immortalized in the Ripley cartoons. The title had drawing power, but the unabashed appeal to the crowds' cruelty really put the show over. Women emerging from the exhibit advised friends not to go in. “You'll faint,” they said. No stronger inducement to attendance could be offered—the friends went right in. Sally Rand topped the midway at Chicago during both summers of the Century of Progress, but the freak show finished a good second.