Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus

by Bruce Feiler

  The first person to link these characters with the circus, Elmo continued, was Joe Grimaldi, who in the 1760s put on a grotesque costume, chalked up his face, and performed in the English riding shows. It was this mix of styles that John Bill Ricketts copied in the first American circus and that continues to define the circus today: highly skilled performances by acrobats and animals juxtaposed with the humorous and bumbling antics of the clowns. The word “clown” itself, which derives from the Danish word klunis, or “clump of earth,” suggests this tension. Clowns were clods. They were the rustics or boobs, the ones who were laughed at when they came into the city or suddenly found themselves in the middle of the ring following an outstanding display of equestrian skill. They also stole the show. In addition to performing their standard routines the clowns often joked with the ringmaster or director. The ringmaster would be prim and formal in his red tie and tails, while the clown would be the foil in his mischievous costume and devilish white face. A century and a half later, it was this traditional type of whiteface style that I was trying to develop.

  With the white now covering my face I looked like a piece of unformed clay. I began to move my muscles into various expressions: happy, sad, surprised, goofy. As I did, Elmo looked at the grooves above my eyebrows, searching for their range of movement. After a moment he sprang up from the couch, picked up a Q-tip from the table, and put a dot on my forehead half an inch above my right eyebrow. “You see that dot?” he said. “That’s the point at which your eyebrow moves the highest. That will be the peak of your clown eyebrow.” A good clown face, he explained, is divided into separate regions: eyes, nose, mouth. My eyebrows would begin at that point, then slowly cascade downward, echoing the curve of my eye and focusing attention ever so subtly on my nose and mouth.

  We began to look at my cheeks. They were basically flat, though when I smiled a distinctive mound appeared at the height of my cheek-bones. Elmo put a dot just above that mound, then drew a line with a slight curve that ended at the base of my chin. He asked me to repeat it on the other side. I did, a bit wobbly, and he sat back to look. Again I logged through a range of faces. “Too narrow,” he declared. “Pat it out and start over.” I patted out the lines and drew two more that arched more strongly on their way to my chin like a pair of inverted bass clefs.

  “Better,” he said. “Now bring the tops in like the lines of a heart.”

  “I get it. That way they’ll point to my nose.”

  “The nose is going to be the highlight of your face.”

  I was starting to get warm. I could feel my skin itching underneath the makeup. I had developed a headache. Suddenly my whole body, my hands, my neck, even parts of my legs, seemed to be covered in white. Clowns, I realized, quickly become aware of the margins: white under the fingernails, white in the nostrils, white behind the ears and inside the lips. Clowning may literally be a white-collar job, but with all the grease in the nostrils it has a distinctly blue-collar smell. Moreover, just as a pizza lingers on the tongue for hours after it’s eaten, so a clown face lingers in the nose, the mouth, and especially the ears for days, even weeks on end. For months after I left the circus I could still feel the makeup lines on my face and feel my character living literally just beneath my skin.

  Back in the mirror, we moved to my mouth. With my right pinkie I made a fingerprint on the left hinge of my mouth; with my left pinkie I repeated the step on the right. Then I cleaned the white off my bottom lip.

  “Why only the bottom lip?” I asked.

  “It preserves the distance between the nose and the mouth,” Elmo said. “Sometime when you’re driving, watch for a picture of Ronald McDonald. It looks like someone threw a tomato at his face, there’s just this big red blob. Remember, simplicity is best. You can always tell a circus clown from a birthday-party clown. Party clowns have those big banana mouths with little hearts and flowers all over their face. It gets too cluttered. It doesn’t read.”

  When he talked about the purpose of a face, Elmo kept using words like “read,” as in “How will the face read from the back of the tent?”; “catch,” as in “How will that feature catch the attention of a child?”; and “sell,” as in “How will you sell an emotion during a gag?” A good clown face, he explained, has the ability to expand and contract, like Charlie Chaplin spreading his legs when he gets kicked from behind. Indeed, when we stopped to review the progress of my face it appeared to be quite flexible. The cheeks moved well. The negative space between my eyes and my eyebrows truly seemed to dance. But something was missing. We had two dominant elements that would be black—rounded eye-brows and curved cheeks-but nothing striking to bring the face together. I tried a star on my chin. “Too much like a party clown.” I tried an exclamation point between my eyebrows. “Too busy.” Finally I tried a triangle on my chin. Suddenly the face seemed to vibrate, to move the eye around more quickly, as if jolted by a bolt of electricity. The triangle, so unassuming, provided two elements: contrast to the loopy curves and opposition to the tapering lines. The triangle stayed. We were ready for color. Elmo went back to his story.

  While talking, whiteface clowns thrived in the one-ring circuses of the early nineteenth century; when the circus expanded to three rings, they could no longer be heard in all seats of the tent. A new type of clown—more physical, less talky—was needed. It was about that time that American Tom Belig, who was performing a riding routine in Germany, changed clowning forever. According to lore, one day when Belig was late for his act he threw on a baggy costume and wig, rubbed brick dust on his cheeks and soot over his eyes, and went out to do his routine. He was so frazzled he kept falling off the horse and jumping back on. The crowd roared with laughter, calling out the name of the popular comic-book character Der Dumme Auguste, Dumb Gus. This new persona quickly spread and eventually came to dominate clowning in America (nine of the clowns in our Alley were this type—with redder makeup and brightly colored wigs—while only two were whiteface). Forever after, whitefaces would endure as the new straight men, the foils, but their look would have to be sophisticated compared to their more frivolous and bumpkin cousins, the country-comes-to-town “Auguste.”

  After bathing my face in baby powder that was stored in a girl’s ankle sock and brushing off the excess with a badger-hair shaving brush, Elmo began to paint the black lines and red nose. Even without looking I could feel the lines changing the dimensions of my face. Unlike the white, which was sloppy and greasy, the black was sharp and crisp, sealing the pores on my face like a fixed expression under wax. The red was equally vibrant and sure, an exclamation point on my lips and nose in contrast to the black clefs on my cheeks.

  “So why is the mouth always red?” I asked.

  “Tradition,” he said. “Also, you don’t have to touch it up as often.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Well, try not to eat fried chicken.” I laughed. First it was Ronald McDonald, now Colonel Sanders. Was any American icon safe from the wrath of circus clowns? “No, I’m serious,” he said. “We used to have a guy on the Ringling show who loved Kentucky Fried Chicken. He called it K Fry. But you can’t have chicken between shows. Eat your chicken for lunch.”

  “What else can’t I eat?” I asked.

  “Spaghetti sauce, pizza. Anything with grease that will cut the makeup. Also anything eaten with a fork. You can always tell a clown by the way he slides food off a fork without letting the food or the fork touch his lips. Even when the makeup is off. It’s changed the way I eat forever.”

  After he finished painting the color on my face we marched to the bathroom for the final powdering. When I looked at myself in the mirror I was amazed by what I saw. My plain white face had been transformed. Now my cheeks were cradled in snappy black curves. My eyes were lifted with beaming brows. My mouth was as plump as a lobster claw. All together the simple strokes were like lines from a limerick that leapt happily off a blank white page. My immediate reaction was to tilt my head, lift my eyebrows, and stretch my li
ps into a smile.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I look like a clown.”

  Elmo smiled. “But you’re not a clown. You’re just a person in makeup. I’m afraid there’s a big difference. Only a child can decide who is a clown. The key is persona. A persona is what distinguishes a person in makeup from a clown.”

  Thus chastened, I closed my eyes and held my breath as Elmo blasted my new face with his powder sock. Even before I could work on my persona, the first step to being a clown, I realized, would be getting used to this onslaught of powder. The second step would be getting used to the onset of mud.

  As the end of the gag approaches, the clowns gather themselves together and move one last time to save the lady, who at this point is standing on top of the house wailing and flailing her arms and screaming for the firemen to save her baby. “Don’t worry!” Arpeggio calls. “We’re trained professionals.” “I hope you have insurance,” Rob adds. The audience cannot hear these lines, they are just for our own amusement. “Hurry up,” Henry says, “I have to fart.”

  “Firemen, firemen, save my baaaaby…,” Jimmy cries over the microphone.

  Our first task is to save the baby. Christopher, who is playing the old lady, holds the blond baby doll above his head and tosses her in one giant arching motion toward the top of the tent. As the audience gasps, the baby comes somersaulting toward the firemen’s net, where the clowns bounce it with a grunt and send it back into the air. Sometimes Henry would catch the baby at this point, at other times it would land on the ground. When this tragedy happened I would run to the side of the baby and give it one last chance at life with a desperate rendition of clown CPR.

  All eyes turn back toward the lady. She powders her cheeks, looks down at her house, and bends over in preparation for a final dive to safety. When she is just about to make her leap for life, a bright red fireball of nearly nuclear dimensions comes blasting up from inside the house and nearly consumes her exaggerated rear end. The audience shrieks in delight. Now greatly alarmed, the lady bends over one more time as another burst of flames, this time even brighter, fills the ring with terror and the clowns with fright. The audience cheers again.

  “It’s the danger,” Elmo explained. “Look at some of those old Charlie Chaplin movies. He’s walking on a high wire with a monkey on his shoulders that has its hands over his eyes and there’s a banana peel thrown on the wire. People love to watch others challenge death. The fire emphasizes that.”

  In truth, the fire itself was hardly dangerous. It came from a substance called lycopodium, a dried Mexican fern processed in New Jersey that American midwives used to put on umbilical cords to dry them after birth. In the container lycopodium is not flammable, but when it is blown into the air and comes into contact with a flame (in our case a lighter) it makes a dramatic fireball that looks real but doesn’t burn. Magicians discovered it, Elmo said, and it was used in The Wizard of Oz. In our gag it received the biggest laugh.

  “People don’t expect it,” Elmo said. “Also, it hits the lady on the behind. The tushy is very funny, especially for little kids. Where do they get punished? Where do they get spanked? A behind is a sacred thing for a kid. It’s never shown to others. It’s never touched. Therefore we want to make fun of it.”

  After two bursts of fire the lady is desperate. The audience is crying for her to jump. The clowns holding the net begin sprinting toward the house. The lady bends over one last time, when out of nowhere a deafening blast jars everyone in the tent, one last fireball spurts out of the roof, and the lady jumps for her life, hoping against hope to be caught in the net, but only to land miserably in the mud. Just as she lands, a clown appears from the house waving his hands in distress: his pants have caught on fire. This is the ultimate defeat. Not only could the clowns not put out the fire or catch the baby or save the lady but we also managed in our bungled confusion to set ourselves ablaze. Undaunted, we jump to our feet in unison and run out of the ring to the traditional romp “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

  4

  Outsiders Always Make Mistakes

  Kris Kristo had a certain way he went about preparing to go out. First he pulled on his skintight white jeans, his white T-shirt with the pack of Marlboros in the sleeve, his satin tiger-skin vest. Next he slicked back his hair, lightly spritzing it with Brut and gently tugging a few strands over his dark brown eyes and the small seductive scar across his left eyebrow. Finally, on special nights like this, he applied another layer of black spray paint on his well-worn biker shoes, giving them a five-cent patent-leather shine. Once primped, he would slowly make his way down the trailer line collecting his posse for the evening prowl: first Sean, in a neon-pink shirt and cowboy boots; then Danny in purple silk top and black Ferragamos; finally me in orange Gap button-down and shiny penny loafers. On the surface I looked as if I didn’t belong with this group, yet I had two things that Kris Kristo usually needed for a night out. First, transportation; and second, prophylaxis.

  “Hey, Bruce,” Kris said when he arrived at my RV, “mind if I borrow a condom?”

  My first week on the show I was overcome by the grind. With no day off and no break from the routine, all I could talk about was how tired I was, how much work there was, how hard this life was to lead. I got sick. I didn’t know when to sleep. I lost several pounds. My life was turned upside down. By the second week, when we moved from central Florida to the seaboard coast of Georgia, I noticed that when people asked how I was doing I no longer spoke only about the grind. I developed a routine. I ate breakfast in midmorning, my milk no longer frozen. I ate lunch in early afternoon, with my makeup to follow. I ate dinner after the 7:30 show. By the third week, when we jumped to North Carolina to play the Azalea Festival in Wilmington and Camp Lejeune around payday, I began to look forward to performing. I no longer missed my New York Times or MacNeil/Lehrer. I felt naked without my makeup. In short, I began to feel at home.

  The real reason was my neighbors. Any fears I had about not being accepted because I was a writer were quickly quelled. First, instead of trying to conceal their true identities, many people on the show flocked to my trailer in those opening weeks anxious to confess their deepest vices and gravest misdeeds (not to mention a few federal crimes). Their motivation, it turns out, was simple: they were worried that someone else would tell me first. In the span of several weeks, from mid-March to early April, I had intimate, almost confessional conversations with nearly every performer on the show and had already begun to develop a sense of the multilayered and sometimes dark personal fabric that ties members of the circus world so closely to one another.

  Second, instead of viewing me as an intruder, the people on the show reached out to embrace me once they realized I was prepared to do the show alongside them every day. Nellie and Kristo Ivanov, Bulgarian aerialists and parents of nineteen-year-old Kris and his younger brother, Georgi, lent me aspirin, fed me soup, and laughed along with me as I stumbled, eyes agog, from one shocking circus discovery to another. Pablo Rodríguez, fifth-generation acrobat and retired father of Danny and all his seven siblings and half siblings, put his arm around me every afternoon and told me how much I was worth that day: sometimes I was merely a twenty-five-cent clown, other days a million bucks. Dawnita Bale, Elvin’s twin and owner of the show’s largest collection of wigs, shared her daily complaints about the weather, the drive, or the general agony of deciding what shoes to wear in the ring.

  The closer I got to the people around me, the more I discovered the unspoken social order that dominated their lives. In the 1950s, Dawnita told me, married performers were kept away from single performers, single men were kept away from single women (“accidental meetings at the picture shows were not tolerated”), and all performers had to sign back in by 11 P.M. Performers were not allowed to socialize with “roustabouts” (the former name for workers), and roustabouts were not allowed even to speak to performers unless they were spoken to first. On our show, the rules were less rigid, but still firm. Performers were advised to
be friendly with the workingmen, but not to become friends with them. Animal people tended to socialize with animal people; performers with performers; clowns with clowns. Particularly crimped by these rules were the single male performers. Since there were few single women in the circus (and none in their late teens or twenties), since most of these guys easily tired of watching borrowed videos with their parents, and since all they seemed to want to do anyway was get out, get drunk, and get laid, the single men in the show banded together most evenings in one common pursuit: chasing townie girls. It was on one of these nights in Camp Lejeune that I ended up in an unlikely clash of wills with the Human Cannonball on the grounds of the Marine Corps base.

  As it happened, I didn’t want to drive my RV that night. The ground was muddy and I didn’t want to get stuck. The day had already been unlucky. Earlier, two hundred Marines had come to the lot to challenge two elephants to a tug-of-war in a mammoth publicity stunt and battle of the sexes (though referred to as bulls, all the elephants on the show were female). At the start of the face-off the two hundred Marines lay flat on the ground on either side of the rope just inches from Pete and Helen, the pride of Fred Logan’s herd. As soon as one of the clowns ordered the bout to begin, the leathernecks popped to their feet and started grunting, straining, and pulling the rope with admirable esprit de corps. Within seconds, just when the GIs seemed to be gaining the advantage, the rope suddenly split in the middle of the Marines and ricocheted up the line, sending the entire company to the ground, singeing the hands of nearly two dozen men, and burning off large chunks of the neck and face of eight unfortunate USMC warriors, who had to be sent to the emergency room. For their part, Pete and Helen hardly flinched but forwarded their regards.