by Bruce Feiler
In 1981 the show was still on the road, though much deteriorated, and surviving owner Jerry Collins decided to “donate” the circus to Florida State University for a $2.5 million tax write-off. No sooner had he signed the transfer than the title to the circus was shuffled around a large conference table in Tallahassee and purchased by Pugh and Holwadel. Burdened by debts, the new owners raised $200,000 to take out the show in 1982, but managed only to break even their first year. That winter the show sold all nonessential equipment—scrap metal, spare parts, even palm trees—to raise enough money to “leave the barn” again. The following year the show made money and the rebirth had begun.
Ironically, the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus thrived in the 1980s and early 1990s by going against prevailing circus custom. For two hundred years circuses had made their reputations by being “modern”: they exhibited the “first evidence” of Darwin’s theory of evolution; they demonstrated the lightbulb before Edison had made it popular; they even presented motion pictures before theaters were widespread. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, when computers and video games held the monopoly on modern, the circus survived by presenting itself as the embodiment of old-fashioned. Come and see the real circus, where the performers are real, where the mud is thick, and where if you come at the crack of dawn you can still see the elephants raise the big top in the part of the circus that promoters proudly call the Greatest Free Show on Earth.
By half past nine the sound of laughter was everywhere. The smell of sweat and morning coffee permeated the air. A gentle breeze was blowing. A crowd of nearly four hundred people had gathered on the lot—a mother and her daughter, a man with his dog, a boy in a wheelchair with a video camera. Out back a family stopped to take pictures with the tigers. Out front a minor trauma was brewing.
After receiving the warning about the ropes, Johnny hurried to the front of the tent, where the big top would be secured to the stakes by a series of bright yellow ropes. Johnny’s plan called for the ropes to be twenty-two feet four inches long. The new ropes, however, measured twenty. Angry, but calm, Johnny ordered the manager to move the stakes inward until he could confer with the manufacturers and replace the stunted lines.
“You see, the weakest part of the tent is the stake line,” Johnny explained as we watched the big top slowly rise into the air. “If you don’t have a good stake line the tent is going to fall down. We have ridden sixty-five-mile-per-hour winds before, but I like winds under thirty. Even at that point I am not comfortable with people in the tent. If you’ve got people in there and the tent starts moving and rippling, they will panic. But the funny thing is, you can’t get people out from under the tent unless it actually starts to shake. If you say to them, ‘Will you please leave the tent in an orderly fashion, the National Weather Service has issued a warning,’ everyone says, ‘I’m not going out there…it’s raining.’”
Within minutes the center of the tent had been winched halfway up the poles and the first hint of daylight appeared underneath the span. Johnny took my arm and led me under the concave blue-and-white spread.
“Only once in thirty years have I seen the tent come down with people in it. That was in Auburn, New York, on July 9, 1968. We had had thunderstorms all evening right off the Finger Lakes. I said, ‘God, this is going to be a miserable tear-down,’ when all of a sudden this wind came up and the tent was gone in two or three seconds. I stood there and could see the whole thing lift into the air. The tent was brand-new, like this one. It fell on the people. Fortunately, we had very few injuries—I think maybe five people with a broken hand or foot. Unfortunately, the local fire department had little experience with tents, and they caused more damage to the tent itself by climbing all over it while the people were still trapped underneath.”
Just as the tent reached the top of the poles, the head of Anchor Industries arrived on the lot and Johnny went to discuss the problems with the ropes. After a brief consultation the company agreed to provide replacements, and Johnny began coping with a new problem: one of the fifty quarter poles that support the middle of the tent snapped as it was being pushed into place. Johnny marched over to the crew with the fury of an irate football coach. “I can do a better job than you guys with my privates!” he shouted in a show of force that brought to mind his reputation for swinging a stake or two in his day. “Now concentrate or you’re out of a job.” Once back in the huddle of businessmen, he brushed off the incident as perfectly normal for opening day with a new tent.
Finally at 10:15 the elephants arrived and the crowd began to cheer. There were three elephants in all—Helen, Conti, and Petunia, alias Pete—each wearing a giant harness around her shoulders and dragging a chain behind her on the ground. They were followed closely by a man pushing a red plastic wheelbarrow and carrying a shovel. “Look!” someone cried from the edge of the tent. “It’s the pooper scooper.” As each elephant reached her spot one of the workers would hook her chain to the bottom of a quarter pole. “Move up, move up!” Fred finally called, and the elephants moved forward with barely a strain and pulled the tent magically into place. As each pole dragged across the ground, it left a rut in the grass like a giant golf divot. The process was repeated with quiet efficiency, and in a breathtaking span of under fifteen minutes the tent emerged from its previous fishbowl shape into a glorious blue-and-white whale.
“If you ask me, a circus isn’t a circus unless it’s in a tent,” Johnny said. “In a building you have a very austere effect. The seats are so far away that the performers look like ants. Here, the worst seat isn’t the problem, the best seat is. The audience has to make sure it doesn’t end up part of the act.” For the first time all morning Johnny’s eyes misted up. When the circus left DeLand in five days’ time Johnny would have to stay behind for an operation for a back ailment brought on from his days as a trampoline performer. “When you buy a ticket for a circus in a tent,” he continued, “you buy a ticket for a fantasy. At some point everybody has wanted to be somebody in the circus—a ringmaster, the girl on the trapeze, a clown. Remember that, Bruce, when you become a performer: the only stars here are the ones who sit in the seats. If they don’t star in our show, then none of us gets paid.”
Johnny patted me on the back and walked away with his eyes toward the sky. I looked around at the massive space—solemn, sacred, almost cathedral. Give or take a yard or two, it could hold a football field, a commercial aircraft, even the White House in its entirety. But every night for the coming eight months it would hold a circus. At the moment, however, it held only promise. By eleven o’clock—four and a half hours after the first stake was struck, three hours after the vinyl was first unfurled—the heavens were now fully erect but the earth still needed work. First the bandstand, then the ring curbs, then the seats were wheeled in. Next, rows of lights were lifted into place. And finally, just before noon when a local priest arrived to bless the new big top and joked about sprinkling holy water on a waterproof tent, the performers began to appear.
A Rare Breed of Tiger
“As soon as I step into the ring I look around to make sure nothing’s on the ground.” Khris Allen is confident when he speaks. He is dominant and sure. But underneath his blond mustache and behind his clear blue eyes he is always a little afraid. “Sometimes I find pieces of metal or glass. Once I found the head of a baby doll: Fatima would have loved to eat that. Then, just as the last elephant passes the cage, we slide open the door and let the cats into the ring…”
The first act of the show is the “cats,” the deceivingly casual term that circus people apply to all wild felines. The act is first in the show because it is first in stature, and also because the twelve-foot-high iron cage that surrounds the center ring is heavy and difficult to maneuver easily during the show. Clyde Beatty’s original cage was so heavy, in fact, that his act closed the first show every afternoon and opened the second show that evening so the cage would not have to be handled more than once a day.
Despite this historical link
to Beatty, the man who occupies the center ring with the cats is hardly impressive on first sight. He is short, around five feet six. His shoulder-length, beach-volleyball blond hair is thinning. But despite his boyish demeanor, twenty-five-year-old Khris Allen, from Atlanta, Georgia, had one of the firmest bodies and strongest wills of any member of the show. Though all year he would be considered a novice, in circus parlance a “First of May” (after the date that circuses used to start), once he stood in the ring with nine tigers on opening day dressed in riding boots, tight black pants, and a blue lamé shirt that he likened to Captain Kirk’s, Khris Allen was a victor, having triumphed in one of the quietest, but most intense love triangles and power struggles that the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus had ever seen.
“Once I’m out there, I try to sense the mood of the tent,” Khris said one afternoon when we discussed his act. “I want to know if there’s any electricity out there. Are people excited, or are they sitting on their thumbs?”
Not long after the season began, I realized that the circus and its performers have two parallel lives and that to grasp the full dynamics of the show I would have to understand both of these worlds and how they relate to each other. The first—the legendary traveling part—is the life that occurs outside the tent as the show moves across the land, from city streets to country roads, from mud to sleet, from one child’s deadly ear infection to one mother’s inexpressible pain when her son runs away from home. But to me that experience seems all the more extraordinary when contrasted with the other world, the life that occurs inside the tent as performers do the same show twice a day, seven days a week, every day from March to December without a single day off. To try to make sense of this side of the show, I decided to sit down with each performer in the course of the year and discuss his or her act. Their stories left me breathless with admiration. Khris Allen, like his act, was the first.
“The thing that surprises me most about the cats is that they, too, can sense the audience,” he said. “If there’s energy out there, I know they’ll perform well. They’re like the elephants. They love the applause. But if the crowd is small and there’s not much energy, then I’ll let them play a little in the ring before I start the act.”
The first cat into the ring is Zeus, an immense, lumbering “liger”—the controversial offspring of a male lion and a female tiger bred by owner Josip Marcan. At two years old, Zeus is the youngest, at five hundred pounds the heaviest, and at most times the laziest of the cats. He is followed by Tito and Simba, the two slowest; then Barisal and Orissa, the liveliest; and finally Toshiba, Fatima, Taras, and Tobruk. As members of the Royal Bengal family, all of the cats have Indian names; yet each has a distinctive coloring. In addition to two ligers, which have faint tiger stripes and stark lion features, there are three standards—orange with black stripes; three tabbies—cinnamon with blond stripes; and one rare snow white striped in black.
“The snow white is the feistiest of them all,” Khris said, “and it’s because of her I stand to the side when they come into the ring. In the beginning of the year I stood in the middle, but one day she waited by the back of the ring to jump on another cat and almost knocked me down in the process. If she had wanted me, I’d be dead.”
The opening few seconds of the act, seemingly tame, are not. The previous year, in Reading, Pennsylvania, when Kathleen (the previous trainer) was doing the act, two of the tigers escaped at this stage during the 4:30 show. The two cats—Fatima, a one-and-a-half-year-old female tabby, and Tobruk, a two-year-old male standard—walked nonchalantly through the supposedly locked steel door of the cage and into the open tent. At first there was disbelief, then panic. A few people started screaming. Jimmy James sprang into action: “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain seated. Stay calm and keep your voices down…” With a prearranged wave of his arm, he gestured for the band to play in hushed tones in an effort to calm both the crowd and the animals. Ahmed, the prop boss, was standing in ring one when the cats first emerged. He froze. Two assistants were standing next to him. They ran: the worst thing to do in front of a tiger, as it frightens the animal and gives it a target. Fatima, however, didn’t jump. She walked very calmly up to Ahmed, who equally calmly kicked her in the shoulders. This startled the tiger long enough to let Kathleen grab her around the neck and lead her back to the cage. One cat captured. One still loose.
Tobruk, meanwhile, had made it out onto the track and was heading directly toward the seats, threatening hundreds of people. Several nearby performers leapt into action. Julián Estrada, a veteran Mexican tumbler, threw a bank of three chairs at the tiger. Tobruk jumped back, but continued. Julián’s brother Antonio grabbed the curtain used to keep people out of spec and blocked off the seats. One woman and her daughter, however, were left in front of the curtain, and Tobruk began to stalk them. Khris, then Kathleen’s assistant (and her boyfriend), came sprinting from the line of cages. But at this point the confrontation was already set and Tobruk could not be stopped.
At the crucial moment, one of those unexpected defining moments when a circus seems most like a dream, the woman, instead of panicking, slowly crouched over and sheltered her child with her body. Tobruk approached the woman, sniffed her from behind, and, for reasons no one ever quite figured out, suddenly jerked his face back in disgust—the same face the tigers are known to make when they smell another cat’s urine. That moment of pause gave Khris enough time to pounce. He grabbed the tiger around the neck and waited for Kathleen to slide on a leash. Tobruk was led back to the cage and the act resumed.
Once all the cats are in the ring, Khris sends them to their seats with the pidgin command “Platz, platz! Come on, everybody, platz,” a mix of German bossiness and English courtesy. For his first trick he has all nine cats sit up on their hind legs atop their pedestals. This trick, which the tigers performed every day for Khris, was the same trick that they had performed every day for Kathleen, that their parents had performed every day for Josip, and that their forebears had performed regularly in wild-feline acts for over one hundred and fifty years. The tricks that followed, however, were strikingly different.
Cat acts in America began in 1833, when Isaac Van Amburgh first stepped into a cage with a lion, a tiger, a leopard, and a panther. Dressed like a Roman gladiator in toga and sandals, Van Amburgh emphasized his domination of the animals: he beat them into compliance with a crowbar and thrust his arm into their mouths, daring them to attack. When he came under attack for spreading cruelty and moral ruin, Van Amburgh quoted the Bible: Didn’t God say in Genesis 1:26 that men should have dominion over every animal on the earth? To enhance his case, Van Amburgh actually acted out scenes in the Bible, forcing a lion to lie down with a lamb and even bringing a child from the audience to join them in the ring.
Van Amburgh’s vicious theatrics gave rise to the so-called American style of feline acts, a style that reached its apex a century later in the dashing glamour of Clyde Beatty. Beatty, who performed at one time or another with lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, hyenas, and polar bears, cultivated a safari image. Dressed in khaki jodhpurs, brandishing a dining-room chair, and firing a pistol into the air, Beatty would raise the ire of the animals to a fearsome roar until his survival seemed in doubt. In one famous routine, a full-grown male lion would knock Beatty’s chair from his hands and force the legend to flee from the cage in fright. Pausing to wipe his brow, Beatty would reenter the steel arena to thunderous applause and force the jungle beast to slink back in retreat using only a manly stare.
Beatty’s theatrics were perfect for his age, but by the 1960s the American attitude toward animals had shifted and the public was ready for a new style of training. The new style came from Europe, and it was embodied by two men who arrived in the United States in 1968: Gunther Gebel-Williams and Josip Marcan. Gebel-Williams, a German, quickly became a superstar with Ringling Bros., demonstrating the so-called European style, which stressed the skill of the trainer in bringing out the natural, yet still obedient nature of the an
imals in a nonconfrontational way. Marcan, a Croatian, meanwhile, performed in various parks and circuses across North America. In 1986, he brought his European training style, his continental lifestyle, and his unique breeding style to the Beatty-Cole Circus. The show would never be the same.
“He put an ad in the Daytona News-Journal and I answered it,” remembered Kathleen, who was then a naïve, twenty-year-old part-time horticultural student from Morgantown, West Virginia. “The ad said: WANTED FEMALE TO TRAVEL AND WORK WITH ANIMALS. The next day I drove to winter quarters for an interview. We had lunch and he explained the logistics of the job: cooking, cleaning, raising tiger babies. Being, as he put it, ‘like my wife.’” Kathleen giggled as she recalled the encounter. The job description was certainly blunt, but was she ready to sleep with a man who had all but advertised for a temporary spouse in the want ads of a local newspaper?
“Originally I was a little bit intimidated,” she confessed. “He was pudgy and bald, and I didn’t understand a word he said. But the minute I looked through the fence and saw those tiger cubs, well, he could have not paid me and I would have stayed. It felt comfortable. It felt right. It was my destiny.”
Kathleen did stay that day, and after her first year she stayed for another. “When I first arrived on the show no one took me seriously. That was his third year, and I was his third girl. So when I stayed for a second year they were in shock. They probably thought I was a bimbo.”
During Kathleen’s third year Josip decided to return to Europe but agreed with the show to leave his act behind. For the first time since he began breeding cats, Josip needed someone to present his act. He selected Kathleen.
