The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  They were an unlikely duo. Son of an equestrian, Footit had grown up as an equestrian in his father’s circus in England. After losing his horse in a card game, he turned to clowning, and then quickly rose through the ranks as a clown blanc, a descendant of the Grimaldi model, with white makeup and a white sack for a costume. Chocolat (Raphael Padilla) came from the other side of the world. Born in Cuba to parents of African descent, he arrived in Europe as the servant to a rich businessman, before escaping to Bilbao, where Tony Grice, a clown star at the Nouveau Cirque, discovered him performing feats of strength at a café and took him as his assistant. At the Nouveau Cirque, Chocolat adopted the character of the auguste, a down-and-out bourgeois striver.* Compared to Footit, his look was relatively realistic. He wore little makeup, a tattered, ill-fitting suit, polished shoes, and a red satin jacket. He made a nice contrast.

  In 1886, Grice fired Chocolat, and Footit, recognizing his potential, took him as a partner. Their comedy was brutal and contemptuous. Grimacing and stern, Footit was the authoritarian master of the games. Stomping, sulking, scowling, he converted the ring into what Cocteau called a “devil’s nursery,” through a “malice that children can recognize.” Chocolat was his punching bag. “You idiot! You fool!” Footit would rage, repeating his commands again and again, until Chocolat, ever staid, would finally turn to him and say with a smile, “I heard you the first time.” The violence could be extraordinarily direct. “Chocolat, I’m going to have to hit you now,” Footit might say, delivering a cuff to the temple. (In exchange for enduring this onslaught, it’s said that Footit paid Padilla an extra 40 sous every night.)

  The sketches sound horribly bigoted, of course, but circus historians contend that the act was less about race than about the shifting class standards of the period. “It was a typical master/servant relationship,” Pascal said. What made the act effective was the dramatic complexity the duo brought to the work. Footit, who wrote and directed the pieces, which were known as “entrées,” labored over the scripts and insisted on perfect execution. Star actors, including Sarah Bernhardt, came to see them perform and complimented them publicly.

  By the 1890s, the clowns were a Parisian sensation. Hêve, a popular soap, hired them for advertisements. They hobnobbed with the city’s elites and intellectuals. Footit was a drinking pal of Toulouse-Lautrec, who, years later, would paint a series of iconic images of the duo while a resident at the mental ward Folie-Saint-James. Largely because of this fame, their model would spread throughout Europe, and eventually the world. Before them, the white clown and the auguste had existed as separate entities. Now, every circus would have its duo: Ilès & Loyal, Dario & Bario, Antonet & Grock, Alex & Porto. One rule-maker, one rule-breaker. One clown, one auguste.

  At the site of the old Nouveau Cirque, I felt a pang of disappointment that the clowns had been priced out of the neighborhood. Curious about what would replace the old circus, I approached a pair of tall stewards manning the door to the Brooks Brothers across the street. With their matching blazers and perfect hair, they were an entrée unto themselves.

  “It’s going to be a hotel de luxe,” one of them said, barely looking at me.

  “A Mandarin,” the other corrected.

  “That’s right,” the first said. “A Mandarin.”

  “Is it going to be a Mandarine?” I asked.

  “That’s right, a Mandarine.”

  We stood and stared back up at the building. I wondered, briefly, how the Mandarin would feel about a plaque.

  BY THEN it was almost five. The sun was waning behind the Eiffel Tower. I had told Albrecht that I would meet the circophiles at seven, giving me just enough time to hit a second venue, the Cirque Medrano.

  “Medrano! Medrano! Medrano!” wrote the French circus historian Adrian. “Each time we pronounce these three syllables … it’s more than a circus show that’s evoked—it’s a swarm of memories.” More than any other circus, the Medrano epitomizes the unique relationship between Paris and the art. Located in Montmartre, Paris’s bohemian butte, it reigned for almost a hundred years as the city’s artistic circus, a gathering ground for poets, painters, and intellectuals. For clowns the venue was a pinnacle. “To play at the Medrano was … a definitive ordination,” wrote clown scholar Tristan Rémy.

  Like most troupes, the Medrano began modestly. Originally known as Cirque Fernando, the circus was founded by Belgian equestrian Ferdinand Beert in 1873. First, he put a tent on the lot, then a small stone building. At the time, Montmartre still had the feel of a village, with cobblestone streets and cows lounging in the alleys, and the building captured the provincial atmosphere. Intimate, almost familial, it had 2,080 seats and a bar where regulars could mingle with the performers. The star was a doctor-turned-clown named Boum-Boum (a.k.a. Geronimo Medrano), who hosted shows with children from the neighborhood. Fernando advertised by letting his monkey caper through the streets with a sign.

  This sense of authenticity was especially popular with the artists of the neighborhood. Lured by cheap rent, the ambitious aesthetic revolutionaries—Monet, Berlioz, van Gogh, Apollinaire, Toulouse-Lautrec—had installed their workshops in the quaint nearby streets of Montmartre, and they supported the circus by making it one of their main meeting points. At night, they would gather to watch a show before heading out for drinks at the Moulin Rouge or the Lapin Agile. During the day, Fernando’s wife allowed them to watch the rehearsals, sketchbooks in hand, leading to such famous artworks as Seurat’s Le Cirque (1891), and Edgar Degas’s Miss Lola. “[Picasso] would stay there all night,” said the artist’s longtime girlfriend Fernande Olivier, “Braque sometimes with him, talking to the clowns.”

  In 1897, Beert sold the lease to Boum-Boum, now a star at the Nouveau Cirque. The clown changed the venue’s name to Cirque Medrano, but he maintained the emphasis on his discipline, and, for a decade, the little circus was known across Europe as the venue for the clown, a temple of the craft. Rico and Alex packed the houses in 1910. In 1904, Brick and Grock made their appearance. In his memoirs, Grock described the time as the most joyful of his life.

  Unfortunately, beyond the idyllic confines of Montmartre, all was not well in the circus. Unbeknownst to Boum-Boum, his arrival in Montmartre coincided with the beginning of the art’s decline. In less than a decade, cars would flood the streets of Europe, displacing horses as the primary means of transportation, severing the circus’s relevance to people’s lives. Equally disabling were several new forms of entertainment. Music halls hired circus stars for more comfortable gigs with better pay. In America, the Chicago World’s Fair ignited an explosion in traveling carnivals, amusement shows featuring rides, shows, and games of chance.

  At the same time, motion pictures insinuated themselves into society with tremendous speed. In 1893, Thomas Edison introduced Americans to the first practical moving picture camera, the Kinetograph. In 1903, vaudeville managers had begun installing Vitascopes (early film projectors) in their theaters. Two years later, the first small movie houses, nickelodeons, appeared; two years after that, five thousand of them populated America alone. To the circus, the new media presented a mounting existential threat. Over the previous century, circuses had come to offer audiences a spectacle of fantasy and exoticism, presented with monumental visual appeal. Cinema could do the same, only more cheaply and efficiently. In 1898, the Cirque des Champs-Élysées bolted its doors. Cirque d’Hiver, Paris’s oldest hard circus, was converted into a cinema. A new era of entertainment had begun.

  Thanks to its loyal clientele, the Medrano was initially isolated from this competition. But debts soon began to mount. In 1912, Boum-Boum died, leaving the venue in the hands of his inexperienced widow and their five-year-old son, Jérôme. Two years later, France plunged into war. All horses and able-bodied men were summoned to the front. The Medrano closed. When it reopened the following year, the building was battered, the future bleak. Madame Medrano, not sure how to save her precious circus, turned to her marketing director, Rodolphe Bontem,
who in turn enacted one of the great coups of circus history.

  For some time, Bontem had been hearing reports of a trio of clowns drawing attention in the provinces. Born in Russia, sons of an Italian doctor-turned-equestrian, the Fratellini brothers—François, Albert, and Paul—had joined forces in 1909 at their mother’s insistence after their brother Louis succumbed to smallpox. At the time, duos (one clown high, one low) were the conventional mode, but the brothers found a natural unity in three. François played the white clown. Suave and elegant, he warmed up the audience until the arrival of Paul, the auguste, dressed like a struggling banker of the petite bourgeoisie, in a scuffed charcoal top hat and a weathered tuxedo. Together, the duo would improvise based on a loose script, like their commedia dell’arte ancestors.

  Then came Albert as a contre-pitre, or second auguste. The circus had never seen anything like him. As the writer and journalist Henri Béraud once observed, he looked like a “character from a cubist canvas, touched up by an alienated hairdresser with the help of a drunken stylist.” He wore large pants that billowed around his ankles. His makeup was grotesque, his eyes enveloped by pools of white, his nose lost under a big red ball. He was a monster, but a monster with the soul of a child. As novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley wrote, Albert was so “filled with a wistful enthusiasm in his fantastic undertakings” “that he seemed like a pathetic parody of the whole race of men.”

  In 1915, Bontem brought the brothers to the Medrano. To tout their arrival, Bontem hit Paris with a marketing blitz worthy of Barnum, plastering taxis, billboards, even urinals with the clowns’ faces. To attract the new crop of Montmartre artists—Dalí, Hemingway, Pound—Bontem kept the circus adult-oriented, even progressive. The evening shows didn’t start until ten o’clock. The Fratellinis didn’t go on until eleven-thirty. Many of their entrées were overtly surrealist. In one, François dressed up like an enormous butterfly. In another, Albert lumbered into the ring dragging a clanking mobile of metal tubes designed by the American sculptor Alexander Calder.

  According to most historians, the appearance of the Fratellinis at the Medrano marked the high point of clowning as a cultural form. Within months of their arrival, “Fratellinimania” had swept the city. There were Fratellini combs and caramels, Fratellini shoe polish and perfume. To the artists, the clowns represented a unique and avant-garde vision of the theater—improvisational, physical, visual, musical, and popular. Jean Cocteau cast them in his plays. The Comédie-Française recruited them to its stage. “Le clown,” wrote theater director Jacques Copeau, “voilà le vrai acteur.”

  Suddenly, Paris was awash in circus all over again. Inspired by the Medrano’s success, the Cirque d’Hiver reopened in 1923 and, the following year, poached the Fratellinis from the Medrano for a small fortune. Jérôme Medrano, Boum-Boum’s only son, now in control of the Medrano, countered by recruiting some of the biggest stars in circus history: Enrico Rastelli, the flying Codonas, and Con Colleano, the Australian “Nijinsky of the wire.” And, of course, nearly every great clown put in an appearance at the Medrano during this period, including several of the great clowns of cinema, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy.

  The renaissance carried on through the thirties—but not much longer.

  IN MONTMARTRE, I made my way through streets, which were packed with tourists. I knew the Medrano had been on the corner of Boulevard Rochechouart and Rue des Martyrs, but I didn’t know the exact address, and so I made my way over to a bookshop across the street. At my inquiry, the shopkeeper’s face lit up.

  “Oh yes, the circus was across the street,” she said, and she led me to the window. She was a brittle woman in her seventies who wore a pair of orange pants that crinkled like paper. She pointed to a tall gray apartment building across the street. “There’s a grocery store on the bottom floor. The ring used to be in the produce section, I’ve heard.”

  She seemed informed, and so we chatted for a few minutes about the Medrano and clowns. She indicated a shelf of circus books near where we were standing.

  “We try to keep it stocked,” she said. “It’s our little tribute.” She pulled a book down and began flipping through the pages. “There are some pictures of the Medrano in here somewhere. Ah, yes, here …” She fanned open the book and extended it to me. On the open page was a picture of a woman in an oversized black suit sitting on a pile of rubble. Below, the caption read, “Even Annie Fratellini couldn’t save the Medrano.”

  The shopkeeper examined the photo for a long moment and then looked up at me. “I suppose you know the story.…”

  In fact, I did.

  By the late thirties, the circus industry had again fallen on hard times. In America, the Depression brought a rash of closures. Survivors were forced to cut costs drastically. In 1931, for example, the Ringling-owned Sparks Circus fired their famous circus band and replaced them with a record player, a drummer, and a calliope. In Europe, World War II fell like an anvil. Around the Continent, circus buildings were destroyed, their carcasses scavenged for firewood. Armies bought animals for labor and even food. They appropriated trucks and performers for battle. (Midgets were recruited for airplane assembly lines, to crawl inside the wingtips to buck rivets.)

  With the armistice, circus owners hoped to rebound as they had after World War I. But the world had changed. The arrival of “personalized entertainment” in radio ate into the market share of more communal entertainments like fairs, festivals, and theatrical shows. Television would do the same. The rise of mass media also bolstered the prominence of professional sports. Athletes more easily challenged circus performers as celebrities. The proliferation of automobiles helped spawn suburbs, particularly in America. The new landscape rendered the traditional circus-marketing efforts (parades, posters, the tent) obsolete. “Last summer there were few circus parades,” noted The New Yorker in 1929. “This year there will be none.… You can’t have a circus parade of automobile trucks.”

  The circus industry entered a precipitous decline, what Pascal once described as a “guerrilla war” of survival. To cut costs, circus producers swapped their stars for inexpensive acts from abroad and abandoned their big tops to tour in sports arenas. (The last Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey performance under canvas occurred on July 16, 1956.) Children became the target market. They were less demanding, willing to overlook a mangy tiger or an acrobat’s frayed costume. Acts could be recycled ad infinitum, since children were always growing into and out of the circus.

  The changes had lasting artistic consequences. Already, big American shows had forced clowns to adopt exaggerated costumes and makeup, to sacrifice their crafted entrées for cacophonous “production gags” like the clown wedding, the clown fire brigade, and the infamous clown car. Now every joke had to appeal to a five-year-old. Idiotic sight gags became the rule: violins with strings that pop off, exploding hammers. Today, the shift makes circophiles irate. “What a pathetic misinterpretation of the circus!” wrote Antony Hippisley Coxe. But the shift was widespread and accounts for many of our present stereotypes about the craft. “Why do you want to do a movie about clowns?” circus historian Tristan Rémy asked Federico Fellini in his 1970 film The Clowns. “All the real clowns have disappeared.”

  To be fair, not all shows participated in this race to the bottom. As circus critic David Hammarstrom notes, Barbette (né Vander Clyde), who early in his career performed as a transvestite trapezist, directed a single-ring show that toured America to critical acclaim in the 1940s. Another innovator was Jérôme Medrano. At his little circus in Montmartre, he welcomed children while continuing to produce entertainment for adults. In 1950, he recruited Rhum (Enrico Sprocani), considered by many the best auguste in history, for whom he devised full pantomimes, including Rhum à Rome. In 1952, he assembled clowns and circus experts from around Europe to discuss the future of clowning and possible ways to rehabilitate its image.

  The preceding years had not been easy for Medrano. He had found himself embroiled in a crosstown riva
lry with a family of former animal trainers, the Bougliones. Born of the fairgrounds, with roots in the business dating back centuries, the family had purchased the Cirque d’Hiver and were staging increasingly elaborate shows based on the American model, full of animals and pomp. Medrano had fought the family tooth and nail, but during World War II, they managed to gain the upper hand: with Medrano abroad as a naval officer, the Bougliones purchased his circus from the family of tentmakers who owned the lease. (Circus historian Dominique Jando told me that the Bougliones arrived at the auction with a trunk full of gold.) Upon his return, Medrano filed suit. He was able to delay the sale for almost twenty years.

  Eventually, however, the courts ruled against him, and on January 10, 1964, after Medrano produced a final performance with clowns from around Europe, the Bougliones took control of the building. (Witnesses say the family stood in the hall during the show, waiting to seize the keys.) But, faced with running two circuses simultaneously and a no longer sympathetic audience, they closed the Medrano. For several years they rented the building out, first to theater companies and later to a barman who converted it into a beer hall. Then, shortly before Christmas of 1973, they had the building razed.

  It was a highly controversial decision. One historian refers to the event as an “assassination.” The Paris circus community received no warning of the destruction. The whole building was brought down intact—seats, railings, ring, and all—and just a week before the building’s hundredth anniversary, which would have qualified it for review as a historical monument. When news of what was happening leaked, Annie Fratellini, granddaughter of Paul Fratellini, rushed to the scene to stop the wrecking balls. But it was too late. Paris’s “temple of clowns” was gone.