The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  For the saltimbanques—that class of itinerant entertainers—the rise of the commercial venues marked a turning point in history, a shift at least as important as the rise of the fairgrounds two centuries before. By inviting the saltimbanques onto their stages during the interludes between longer comedies and melodramas, theater directors essentially sanctioned their profession for the first time. Granted, the theaters were ramshackle and crude compared with the royal venues, but they were theaters just the same, complete with advertisements, infrastructure, and a stable clientele. Instead of cadging donations in a muddy field, a performer could play to a paying crowd with a roof over his head. It was the first step on the road to cultural integration.

  Astley regularly frequented commercial venues and couldn’t help noticing their success. Soon he found himself ruminating on their model of dramas punctuated by entertaining interludes. He realized his own equestrian shows could profit from a similar system: his “feats of horsemanship” interspersed with “feats of activity,” old fairground acts he’d loved as a boy.

  Beginning in 1769, Astley branched out. Short on cash, he performed the first acts himself, comic routines and some horse-mounted sleight-of-hand, and later experimented with audience participation: he erected an obstacle course in the ring and invited spectators to race through it in burlap sacks. When these endeavors failed to take, Astley contracted out. According to one report, his first outside hire was a fourteen-year-old tumbler by the name of “Master Griffiths.” Later, he hired a “clown to the wire,” followed by the Ferzis, a family of Italian acrobats poached directly from the stage at Sadler’s Wells.

  Astley’s timing was impeccable. Less than a decade before, King George II had started closing the city’s fairgrounds, citing a lack of sanitation. Disinclined to return to the itinerant life, the fairground performers flocked to Astley for work. Under their influence his shows diversified even more. In 1773, a poster testifies to his addition of a “sagacious dog” capable of responding to a question such as “Does Beauty or Virtue in the Fair Sex more attract our Affections?” In 1776, he found a slack-rope walker who could spin on his line like a “roasted pig.”

  In time, the show became an amalgam of exoticism, spectacle, wonder, skill, and fascination. There were “Philosophical Fireworks” and “Men piled upon Men.” There was Signor Rossignol, the bird imitator, and a wire-walking monkey named General Jackoo. Throughout, however, horses remained the show’s focus. In the equestrian age, when horses were integral to human life, the public appreciated Astley’s routines and understood the difficulty of his moves. Watching the show, they experienced what Pascal refers to as a “mirror effect”: “A man would go to the circus and see Astley performing these amazing stunts. Then he would go home and see his own horse in the stable and think, Why not me?”

  Philip Astley created the circus as we know it. But he wasn’t an artist. He was a businessman, a master of promotion and pastiche, and as British chronicler George Speaight noted in A History of the Circus, the sergeant’s reputation rests “not so much on what he originated, as on how he developed the elements of entertainment that he had inherited.”† During his fifty-year career, he became a central figure in London society. He built four different circuses, including his Royal Amphitheatre, with purportedly the biggest stage in London. He also toured extensively. In 1774, he introduced the circus to Paris, where he first performed in a manège on the Rue des Vieilles Tuileries. In 1788, he pitched a “Royal Tent” in Liverpool, the first big top.

  All told, Astley constructed nineteen circus buildings across Europe, as far east as Belgrade, and in the process he defined the circus as we know it. He determined the circus’s colors (red and gold, from the British cavalry), its music (brass military marches), the size of the ring (forty-two meters), and even the smell (sawdust, which he used to cover the ground when he took the old mill on Westminster Bridge).

  Astley also inspired a wave of followers who carried the circus around the world. The first was Charles Hughes, one of Astley’s equestrians, who defected in 1772 to establish his own amphitheater near Blackfriars Bridge. After nearly two decades of acrimonious rivalry (at one point Hughes hired Astley’s own father as a ticket taker), Hughes absconded to Russia, where he became a favorite of Catherine the Great. Other equestrians followed, filling in the gaps of Europe. In 1780, Spaniard Juan Porte brought the circus to Vienna, where he installed his show in a grain-market plaza. By 1787, English equestrian James Price had sailed to Stockholm, where he constructed Sweden’s first circus, an open-air amphitheater. Because the circus was primarily a visual spectacle, unencumbered by linguistic barriers, there were few places where it was not welcome. John Bill Ricketts, America’s first circus mogul, managed to construct twelve circus buildings in America before he fell into the hands of French privateers during a trip to the West Indies in 1799.

  Philip Astley was the “father of the circus.” Without his insistence on growth and prosperity, historians claim, the art wouldn’t be what it is today. But there are also indications that Astley himself was just a sign of a trend sweeping the world, and that the circus was in fact a product of its time.

  Before the emergence of the circus, European society had been divided according to class lines for hundreds of years. A person’s class influenced every part of his life, from what he ate, to how he talked, to how he earned his living. In the eighteenth century, however, these walls were crumbling. As part of the great economic and social upheaval leading to the modern age, classes began to mix. Inevitably, this homogenizing spirit flowed into art. In 1760, not long before Astley’s premiere, French choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre staged the first ballet d’action, combining the movements of dancers with character and action. In 1770, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Horace Coignet staged the world’s first “melodrama,” Pygmalion, a mix of music and drama that would serve as a progenitor of the opera and later the Broadway musical.

  The circus emerged as part of this same trend, and no art epitomized it better. Early circus audiences included every class and creed. In America, John Bill Ricketts was a riding partner to George Washington. In France, Astley performed his stunts for Marie Antoinette. More symbolically, the show itself was a melting pot, a fusion of the highbrow equestrians and the lowbrow fairground performers. Less than a hundred years before, aristocrats had hunted performers like animals, boring their ears and branding their chests with Vs. Now the world was changing. As Pascal noted, “If the circus didn’t exist before, it was because the world wouldn’t allow it.”

  WHAT A LIFE Philip Astley led. When he wasn’t busy with his entertainment endeavors, he was publishing hand-illustrated maps of Central Europe and writing books on horsemanship, such as the bestselling The Modern Riding-Master. On holidays, he served as the unofficial chief of fireworks for King George III and the purveyor of some of London’s first hot-air balloon rides. In 1793, when England hurtled yet again into war with France, Astley gleefully took up the charge. Re-enlisting with his old regiment at the age of fifty-one, the now famous theatrical maven shipped off as the company’s “horse-master, celebrity morale-booster and war correspondent.”

  For all his swashbuckling success, however, there’s something tragic, perhaps even pitiful, about Astley’s story. He is almost totally forgotten outside the circus. Even at the National School his name usually elicited only vague nods.

  In a way, this is not surprising. The history of the circus has long suffered from neglect. Writing in the seventies, Edward Hoagland noted that the circus “remains a private passion for children and loyal fans; among sophisticates it occupies a niche similar to that of primitive art.” That is still true today. Circus museums are rare and starved for funding. The Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, for example, has closed multiple times; the International Circus Hall of Fame in Peru, Indiana, is open only from May to August. In academia, where professors dedicate whole books to the examination of an obscure painter, the circus is considered unworthy of ser
ious attention. Until the twentieth century, circus history was almost entirely ignored. (In the introduction to their 1890 study, Acrobats and Mountebanks, Hugues Le Roux and Jules Garnier claim to be the first to examine the disciplines closely.) In America, where nearly every major university has a theater department, only a handful of schools offer an accredited circus history course. (One is the University of Virginia, where LaVahn Hoh, a stagecraft professor and amateur circophile, advocated relentlessly for its creation.) Internationally, there is almost no such thing as a professional circus historian. At one point Pascal was teaching at four different schools and designing costumes on the side. Steve Gossard, the author of the only complete history of the trapeze, worked another job while he was writing, as a ticket salesman at the Amtrak train station in Bloomington, Illinois, where he also cleaned the bathrooms.

  The neglect might explain some of the circus’s power to fascinate and consume. “There’s a certain siege mentality that can set in,” one historian admitted to me. I experienced this firsthand while I was studying Astley. I had come to see Astley’s oblivion as a proxy for centuries of intellectual neglect.

  And so I decided to seek out Astley—as he exists today. Somewhere in Paris, I thought, there had to be some surviving Astley artifact or shred of tribute. This wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. A. H. Saxon, Barnum’s premier biographer, once confessed to slipping into the showman’s old suits. Pascal had visited Barnum’s grave twice. “You hope he’ll jump out and tell you something he’s never told anyone before,” he said. He called it “ghost-hunting.”

  And so I spent two weeks hunting every Astley ghost I could think of. I visited his house on Rue du Faubourg du Temple. I visited the site of his first Parisian performance, on the old Rue des Vieilles Tuileries (today roughly Rue du Cherche-Midi). I visited Versailles, where he once performed for Marie Antoinette. I called the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Musée Rodin. But I came up totally empty.

  The closest thing to a victory came at the site of his original Parisian circus building, 16–18 Rue du Faubourg du Temple. Founded in 1783, officially known as the Amphithéâtre Anglais des Sieurs Astley Père et Fils, the building once had been a marvel of circus architecture, with a roof, a stage, and thirty candelabras blazing with two thousand candles. Today it’s a mess. Entering through a pair of iron gates, off a street of kebab stands and discount-jewelry dealers, I found myself standing in what looked like a truncated alleyway. Industrial and commercial businesses lined both sides of the dirt lane. Loose garbage and dried leaves accumulated in piles. I walked around for a few minutes, trying to conjure up a sense of communion, before retreating to the sidewalk, where my eyes happened to fall on a sign. It was shaped like a shield on a post and embedded in the pavement like a parking meter. It began, “Philip Astley, former officer with the British cavalry, founded here in 1782 the first permanent circus in Paris.” I stared at the sign in despair, not elation. The thing was in rough shape. Dirt blotched the lettering. Across the top someone had scrawled an illegible but presumably unflattering word in silver paint pen.

  I decided to give up looking. Which is of course when I found him.

  At home one evening, reading the latest addition to my circus library, Earl Chapin May’s The Circus: From Rome to Ringling, I came across the following quote:

  “The first circus owner of modern times celebrated his seventy-third year of adventuring by recovering and remodeling his Paris property, only to die in his house in the Faubourg du Temple. Within a few months his son and successor also died, in the same house, the same room, and the same bed as his father, and was buried with him in Père La Chaise.”

  Père Lachaise! It was the biggest and most prestigious cemetery in Paris—and less than a mile from my apartment!

  I verified the facts online, then grabbed my coat and headed into the street. It was a gorgeous day. The sun blazed in a cloudless sky. The parks brimmed with children.

  Feeling chipper, I stopped into a flower shop. After Astley’s performance for Marie Antoinette in 1783, the queen, impressed and perhaps a little smitten with Astley’s son, John, had awarded the young cavalier a “rose of Paris,” a golden medallion inlaid with pearls. According to several sources online, when John Astley died in 1821, his wife buried him in Père Lachaise next to his father. For his epitaph, she chose: “Here lies the once Rose of Paris.”

  In the shop, I picked out the healthiest rose I could find. I thought it would make a fitting tribute.

  ENTERING PÈRE LACHAISE from the south, through a narrow stone stairwell, I found myself gazing over a rolling sea of graves. Trickles of camera-toting tourists, including a pack of Italian teenagers, drifted through the narrow lanes. I found a placard with the names of the cemetery’s famous graves and ran my eyes down the list: Apollinaire, Balzac, Bernhardt, Chopin, Colette, Delacroix, Duncan, Ernst, Montand, Ophüls, Piaf, Pissarro, Proust, Seurat, Wilde. But no Astley.

  The omission seemed odd, though not exactly shocking, given my experiences at the other sites. I flagged down a guard and asked him if there was a more complete record somewhere. He pointed me toward a little house in a wooded grove, which turned out to be the cemetery’s house of records, and where I found myself facing an ancient-looking woman in a conspicuously red dress.

  I explained my mission: Astley, the circus, the grave. The woman regarded me skeptically. Behind her another pair of elderly women shuffled between a half-dozen rows of enormous bookshelves. I was, I realized, still clutching my rose.

  “The inventor of the circus, eh?” the woman said, scratching the counter. “I’ve never heard that one before. When did he die?”

  “Eighteen fourteen,” I said.

  She recoiled. “Oooo la la. Do you have the date?”

  I didn’t, actually. I wasn’t expecting a scavenger hunt.

  I decided to take a guess. I told her it was sometime in July.

  The woman gave me another skeptical look, pivoted on her heel, and marched into the forest of bookcases. Scanning the top shelf, she rose onto her toes and hauled down what appeared to be a Gutenberg Bible, as big as a phone book and bound in leather. Cradling the tome in her arms, she spidered her fingers to the appropriate page, ran her eyes down the list, flipped to another page, nodded, then slammed the book shut.

  “Non,” she said, back at the counter.

  “Non?”

  She shook her head. “I even checked August as well. You’re sure he is buried here?”

  I didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t like circus historians to make such an egregious error.

  Trying to be diplomatic, I asked the woman if perhaps one of her colleagues might have some insight. Begrudgingly, the woman turned and called over her shoulder, “Martine.” The woman at the computer looked up. “Astley,” said the older woman. “Ça te dit quelque chose?”

  “No, pas vraiment.”

  The older woman looked at me. “How do you invent the circus anyway?”

  Outside, I noticed all the crows for the first time. They were dispersed across the tombs, dozens of them, obtrusive splashes of black. In the distance, a line of tourists had started herding toward the exit by guards. It was almost forty-thirty. The cemetery would be closing soon.

  I considered my options. Quitting seemed reasonable—I had grandparents whose graves I had never visited. But I wondered about the grave. The search had started to feel like a mission. Once I found it, I would write to the cemetery, alerting them of the oversight. I would demand that Astley’s name be added to their map.

  I raced home and looked up his death date online. January 27, 1814. I double-checked. Yes, January 27, 1814. I wrote the date on a piece of paper and hustled back to the cemetery, where I again found myself standing across from the woman in red. “Ah yes,” she said, wearily. “The circus man.”

  I slapped the date on the counter. The woman looked at it for a long moment, before peeling it up and shuffling again into the shelves. One of the other librarians, a younger woman, l
ooked up from her computer and held my gaze. I had the distinct sense that I had been talked about.

  I heard a book slam shut. The woman came waddling back.

  “Non.”

  I felt myself recoil. “What do you mean, non?”

  The woman shrugged. “He’s not here.”

  “Listen—”

  “Monsieur—”

  “No, please.” I was insistent. “There must be some kind of mistake.”

  A cloud rolled over her face. “It’s not a mistake, monsieur.”

  I didn’t know what to do. It seemed impossible that the historians would be wrong about the grave. Was there no electronic record? No comprehensive list? I looked pleadingly to the other librarians, but they were conveniently absorbed in their work. I pointed foolishly to the date on the paper. “I don’t understand. This is it. I mean, is there even a grave?”

  And at this, the woman sighed. She must have registered something sad or desperate in my tone. Her face softened, and she looked at me with sympathetic eyes.

  “You know, it’s a long shot, but there’s one other thing we can do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We can look in the book.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but the way she said it made it sound serious. “Okay, of course.”

  She nodded and walked solemnly to the end of the counter. Stooping, she retracted what looked like a dictionary from beneath the cash register. It was, she explained, a list of all the famous people buried in France. “If he’s buried in France, he’ll be in the book.”

  She opened the book and scaned the pages. “Archley.”

  “Astley,” I corrected.

  “Astley, right.”

  I watched her finger scan the page, then come to a slow stop. “No, I don’t see it.”

  I felt something die inside me.

  “But you know,” she mused, returning the book to the shelf, “it’s possible that he is buried here but that the grave was lost.”