by Bruce Feiler
With this cue the band strikes up a peppy version of “Consider Yourself at Home,” the man they call Slow Motion slowly tugs open the back flap of the tent, and the opening spectacle, or “spec,” begins. The first person into the spotlight is Jerry, a four-foot-seven-inch dwarf in clown makeup, who just before the back door opens kisses one of the Royal Arabian horses and blesses himself with the sign of the cross before skipping out onto the hippodrome track that encircles the three rings. Jerry is wearing yellow-checked pants, a blue-striped shirt, and an impish red, white, and black face. The adults applaud. The children jump to their feet. As he parades around the track the overhead lights are kindled at each step until finally the entire floating ship of a tent is awash in a glow of light, color, and secret desire.
Indeed, from the moment the performers start streaming into the tent, some wearing headdresses, others waving capes, the circus begins to emerge as the living embodiment of illusion: dangerous, daring, tempting, taboo. A woman glides through in an impossibly tight bikini. A man marches past with impossibly plump biceps. Two clowns amble by, and most impossibly of all, they always seem to be smiling. Even the horses, tigers, and bears seem to be part of this world without constraint.
Approaching the moment of my first entrance, I, too, was caught up in this illusion, by the gloss of romance and the undercurrent of titillation. This feeling would never go away. Indeed, before I could walk out of the tent after our last finale—thirty-four weeks, ninety-nine cities, and five hundred and one shows later—I would be forced to confront two seemingly contradictory truths about the circus: one, the sins were more exotic than I would have expected, and two, the people were more wholesome than I could have anticipated. On the one hand, in the course of one nine-month season in the circus I encountered an array of sins so extensive I had to rethink whether I had ever truly known my own country. These sins, which I nicknamed the Seven Circus Sins, included: murder, rape, arson, bigamy, bestiality, group sex, and organized crime. If you find it in America, I found it in the circus.
On the other hand, even as I encountered this range of illicit activity, I was continually overwhelmed by an even stronger pattern of compassion as performers from thirteen different countries, speaking half a dozen languages and practicing almost twice as many religions, struggled to live together in one community with no means of privacy or escape. This was the family Johnny had told me about. In fact, when I stepped through the back door for the first time, dragging behind me the portable throne containing the king and queen, I became forever a part of this family. I wasn’t prepared for it to happen so quickly. Inside my costume I still felt like an outsider—looking up at the lights, looking down at the grass. But from the outside I already looked like an insider. On my feet I wore eighteen-inch floppy red-and-white clown shoes. On my body, to accent my tall, thin frame, I wore bright red pants that reached to my chest, a short white tailcoat that stopped at my waist, and an oversized shimmering gold lamé bow tie. And on my face, underneath a white skullcap and pointy hat, I wore a milky coat of white greasepaint, highlighted by arching black eyebrows on my forehead and bass clefs on my cheeks, a red bubble-gum smile around my lips, and in the middle of this cartoon face, a crisp red nose.
Once inside the tent, a childish thrill rose in my stomach. Cameras flashed in my eyes. Hundreds of nameless fingers waved enthusiastically from their seats. “Hey, Mr. Clown,” a girl called from the front row, and it took a moment to realize she was talking to me. “Keep waving,” I called out to the king and queen behind me. “Smile!” The energy seemed to grow as we rounded the track. Kids hurried down to the railing and reached out to touch us. My arms started getting tired from waving. The music was wailing and Jimmy was singing, “Be a clown, be a clown. All the world loves a clown…,” when suddenly I looked back and noticed that the little girl in the cart with the brightly striped cape—the queen of the opening circus parade—was crying. Was it the excitement? I wondered. Was it the din? Was it the natural reaction, the inevitable sadness, of having a dream come true?
As we reached the end of the parade, pausing slightly to let the train of ten elephants pass, I pulled the cart to a stop behind the tent and unloaded the king and queen to the ground. The girl was sniffing back her tears; her brother was peering into the tent. “Do we get to see the rest of the show?” he asked. “You sure do,” I said. “Let’s go.” I lifted their hands in my slightly stained white gloves and led them back to their waiting mother. “Goodbye,” I called as they scampered to their seats. “Enjoy the show!” The boy, anxious not to miss the tigers, ran directly back to his seat. The girl, still overcome by her circus debut, walked more slowly, and just before returning to the comforting hug of her mother, she stopped, turned around to face me again, and waved her fingers goodbye.
I smiled.
Turning, I hurried back to Clown Alley to change my costume for our first gag, now just minutes away. The stilt walkers sat down on ladders to remove their false legs. The acrobats rushed off to stretch their muscles. Jimmy James strode toward the circular cage that surrounded the center ring, blew his whistle with authority, and waited for the end of the “Born Free” fanfare before making his first call.
“In the tradition of America’s Clyde Beatty, we proudly present the Marcan Royal Bengal Tigers, in a rare, exotic breed of four colors. Exhibited under the command of Khris Aaaalllen…”
The lights came up in the iron cage, the cats let out a menacing growl, as Khris Allen stepped forward for his first time in the ring and raised his hand in the air.
2
Under a Canvas Sky
Before they erect the heavens, the men prepare the earth.
At 5:52 in the morning the headlights on the pole truck, No. 2, crease the black and empty field. A lone man dressed in blue jeans, a white sweatshirt, and a red knit cap walks to the end of the twin lines of light, picks up a sledgehammer, and begins pounding a wooden stake into the grass. A forklift appears from out of the dark, lowers its outstretched arms to the ground, and scoops up a sack of assorted ropes and cables, which it deposits next to the first of four red flags that mark where the center poles will rise. The sky is dark, but lightening. The town still sleeps. On Route 92 in DeLand, just up the road from Bud’s Highway Tavern and across the pond from the YMCA, the circus is coming to town.
Swooning, a second worker sings as he emerges from his bunk in No. 63 and begins to remove a stack of poles from the flatbed truck. A third man, much larger, lights up a cigarette as he shuffles toward the poles. Nobody looks at one another. Nobody speaks. By half past six there is a flurry of silent activity on the fairgrounds and nearly thirty men at work. Soon, the outer poles, seventy-six in all, are laid in a giant semicircle facing the center of the imaginary tent. The pattern of work mirrors the big top itself, with the most important work occurring down the spine, where huddles of men prepare the ground for the advent of the center poles. At a quarter to seven the four center poles themselves arrive, each one nearly a foot in diameter and over sixty feet long. Made of reinforced aluminum, the poles are escorted one by one into the arena by teams of straining men, like pallbearers.
“You see these babies?” cries the head of the crew, a man they call New York. “We call these the bone crushers. These are the ones that’ll make you find religion.”
Outside the tent, the shape of the circus is already beginning to emerge. The performers, most of whom pulled into DeLand the previous night, four days before opening, are still sleeping in their trailers along one side of the tent. At the front of the line of thirty or so trailers, a wagon holding ten portable toilets is already in place, along with the ticket wagon, the concession wagon, and the sleeper truck for the clowns. Later skirtlike banners will be laced around the wheels of these trucks, flags will be affixed to their tops, and fluorescent lights will be strung around their roof lines as these otherwise conventional tractor-trailers are transformed into the circus midway, one of the oldest enduring images of a traveling circus, a so
rt of open-armed “V” inviting you inside. At this early hour the only truck on the midway that doesn’t belong is No. 24, a regular cab with a short, stubbed rear end—inside of which are two giant spools, around which is furled the world’s largest big top.
“Come along, don’t be afraid. You won’t hurt it. After this you can say that along with the owner you were the first person to set foot on the new tent.”
Johnny Pugh put his arm around me just after 8 A.M. and led me onto the striped sea of blue-and-white canvas. In truth it wasn’t canvas at all, but vinyl—a dense twenty-two ounces per square yard, dielectrically heat-sealed by radio frequencies to avoid unnecessary sewing. Manufactured at a cost of $158,000 by Anchor Industries of Evansville, Indiana, the new tent was flame-water-, and wind-retardant up to sixty-five miles per hour. It was also, quite plainly, a sight to behold. Lying on the ground in two separate sections parallel to the center line, the tent looked like two enormous blueberry-and-whipped-cream-rolled pancakes, with splotches of strawberry red and an occasional triangle of butter yellow from fifty five-point stars.
“The spool is always the most dangerous part,” Johnny said of the hydraulic truck specially designed by a shrimp-boat manufacturer in New Bedford, Massachusetts. “When the tent is folded and wound onto the truck, the abrasion from the spools often damages it. Any pinholes, that’s where they’ll develop.”
Once the tent was stretched onto the ground, the workers gathered to unfurl it. Standing at a distance of one person every six feet, the fifty or so men all grabbed the tent and on command—“Ready, pull!”—unfolded the top layer of vinyl and dragged it away from the center poles. After easing their grip, they walked across the spread and hauled the next fold toward the center. The third pull was to the outside, the fourth toward the middle. Some of the workers used two hands, others one. Some faced forward, others backward. It was a curious rhythm in which each individual note was separate and discordant but together they made a striking chord. With the fifth pull the men reached the end of the vinyl, and with that Johnny ushered me onto the tent. It was 283 feet 4 inches long and, coupled with the other half, 146 feet 8 1/2 inches wide. It looked like an overgrown sail.
“When you designate the size of a big top,” he said, “it’s the width that matters. Other tents may be longer, but none is wider. That’s why we’re the largest tented circus in the world.”
Rubbing his hands together in childish delight, Johnny, who has been married to a former showgirl for over twenty years but never had children, led me to the line of center poles and proceeded to explain with paternal pride the modern-day physics of this age-old institution. The new tent, which he had personally designed over a period of four years, had a nylon webbing system imported from Germany to hold it together horizontally, an advanced steel cable infrastructure invented in Sweden to support it vertically, and—Johnny’s personal pride and joy—a system of state-of-the-art lightweight shackles made from a secret NASA alloy to hook the tent onto the four bail rings that carried it to the top of the center poles. Before the poles themselves were raised, however, one final touch was needed. At 8:21 in the morning Johnny personally slid a five-by-eight-foot flag onto the top of each pole: Old Glory on pole one, closest to the front door; CLYDE BEATTY on pole two; COLE BROS. on pole three; and CIRCUS on pole four.
“We are the only show that uses what we call House Flags,” he said as he stepped his way down the line. “A company called Betsy Ross in New Jersey makes them. It’s a nostalgia thing for us. They used to cost twenty-five dollars apiece, now they’re a hundred twenty-five dollars. At the end of the year we will pick out someone special and give them this season’s flags. Ironically, I’m the only one who doesn’t have a set. I want a new set, and I want to be buried with them.”
With the flags in place and the poles lifted into the air, the tent was ready to be raised. The outer poles were forced into place, creating a giant fishbowl, the outer lip high in the air and the middle hanging limply to the ground. Next the bail rings were slowly winched up the poles, carrying the center of the tent. With this penultimate stage under way, Johnny gave the word for the elephants to be brought in to push up the inner poles. No sooner had he given the order, however, than the first minor crisis of the year arose. Royce, the rookie manager, came rushing to Johnny’s side and informed him that all the outer ropes of the tent were two feet too short. Instantly, the childish thrill went out of Johnny’s eyes. His business demeanor returned in haste. He hiked up his trousers, ducked under the tent, and went to rescue his only child.
Feeling like a child myself, I savored the blush of this inaugural scene, delighted by the openness of the strangers around me and thrilled by the richness of this exotic world. This sense of excitement would often return. Indeed, one of the unexpected joys of joining the circus was the process—both formal, through books, and informal, through conversation—of learning about the central, almost unspoken role that the circus has played in the American imagination. In many ways, America and the circus were made for each other: both have European roots, eclectic ingredients, and the fulfillment of dreams at their central core. Most American writers—from Hawthorne to Hemingway to Emily Dickinson—have written about circuses, and probably the majority of Americans who ever lived have seen at least one in their lives. For sure, all Americans have felt their impact: words such as “jumbo” and “star,” expressions such as “hold your horses” and “get this show on the road,” and icons such as the white elephant and pink lemonade all began in the circus. Perhaps even more importantly, many of the great images in the collective memory of American children were painted in the circus—elephants, clowns, cotton candy, parades, and even if a child never saw one himself, tents.
Big tops have not always been part of the circus. The first American circus, organized by Scottish equestrian John Bill Ricketts, opened on April 3, 1793, at an outdoor amphitheater at Twelfth and Market Streets in Philadelphia. Within three weeks, the show, which presented acrobatics on horseback, clowning, and rope walking in a forty-two-foot circus ring, was seen by President Washington; four years later Washington actually sold the white charger he had ridden in the Revolutionary War to Ricketts. The circus had its first-ever sideshow attraction, not to mention a presidential seal of allure.
Building on Ricketts’s success, other promoters quickly realized the potential of taking their shows on the road. This need for mobility, along with the equally pressing need to cope with fluctuations in the weather, led Joshua Brown to erect the first American circus big top in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 22, 1825. The addition of canvas tents gave American circuses a flexibility their European indoor counterparts did not have, allowed them room to add traveling menageries and freak shows, and prompted them to invent the enduring line “rain or shine.” In no time, traveling circuses became the principal form of popular entertainment in America, with performers becoming more well known than presidents. In 1848, Dan Rice, the era’s most famed clown, persuaded his friend and Whig presidential nominee Zachary Taylor to ride with him in a ceremonial circus parade. When the townspeople saw the two together someone shouted, “Look, Dan Rice is on Zachary Taylor’s bandwagon,” and politics would be likened to a circus ever after.
The second great phase in American circuses began after the Civil War with P. T. Barnum, the Walt Disney of his time. Barnum, the prince of humbug—the art of careful exaggeration—had already wowed the country with a museum full of midgets, mammoths, and alleged African coneheads before opening his first circus in 1871 at age sixty. Ten years later he joined with his rival James Bailey to create the “Greatest Show on Earth.” Together Barnum and Bailey made two momentous changes: first, they stretched their circus to three rings to accommodate more seats; and second, they took their show off the wagon trail and put it on the railroad. The Gilded Age of the American Circus had begun. By the time the five Ringling Brothers bought out Barnum & Bailey in 1907, the new mega-show would span ninety railroad cars, employ 1,500 peo
ple, and seat 10,000 patrons. President Wilson visited the show near the end of his first term in 1916, took off his top hat, and tossed it into the center ring. Those in attendance took it as a sign that the as yet unannounced candidate would seek reelection: politicians now mimicked the circus in the business of show.
In 1956, John Ringling North, heir to the family business, heralded what he thought would be the third great phase in the American circus when he took his show out from under canvas and put it into buildings. The tented circus is a “thing of the past,” he declared publicly. BIG TOP BOWS OUT FOREVER, bemoaned Life magazine. THE BIG TOP FOLDS ITS TENTS FOR THE LAST TIME, echoed The New York Times. Mark Twain, who once wrote that he would rather have been a circus clown than a writer, would have loved the irony of this greatly exaggerated death. The circus big top not only wouldn’t die, but it would also live on thanks in large part to the work of people North himself had fired.
The year before closing down his big top because of constant delays in erecting the tent, John Ringling North fired his manager, Frank McClosky, for graft. Undaunted, McClosky and aide Walter Kernan took the money they had skimmed from Ringling and, along with racetrack owner Jerry Collins and attorney Jerome Calhoun, promptly purchased a tented circus from Clyde Beatty. Beatty, the most famous wild-animal trainer in history, had run away from Bainbridge, Ohio, in 1921 to become a cage boy on Howe’s Great London and Van Amburgh’s Trained Wild Animal Show. By the mid-1950s, he had headlined every major circus in America, performed with a record forty lions and tigers at one time, been on the cover of Time magazine, and achieved the status of a matinee film idol. McClosky and company merged Beatty’s show with the dormant title of Cole Bros., derived from the nineteenth century’s first circus millionaire, W. W. Cole, and took the show on the road in 1957 with thirty-five trucks and the reigning “world’s largest big top.”
