Carnivals, which combined rides (the new Ferris wheel, for instance, still in the category of a thrill ride) with games of chance and the peculiar tradition of sideshows, were less glamorous. They had a reputation for being “cheap and sleazy” in comparison with the “splendor and prominence” of some of the other branches of the amusement industry, as the sociologist Robert Bogdan writes. Circuses, too, traveled with sideshows displaying human oddities, but carnivals had more hootchy-kootchy performers along with the freaks and geeks. Grift—the various means of parting customers from their money that included rigged games of chance, shortchanging customers, and sometimes out-and-out stealing from their pockets—ran rampant in carnivals. Still, since few towns could afford to maintain a year-round amusement park, the popularity of traveling carnivals steadily grew in the early twentieth century. In 1902, there were seventeen carnivals touring the country, while by 1915, there were forty-six, and by 1937, three hundred.
Mary Talbot may finally have been reconciled to Lyle’s having a relationship with his father. She harbored a grudging respect for Anna, she could see that Lyle was delighted to have a father in his life, and in her own fierce way she loved Lyle. But to allow him to join a traveling carnival with the Hendersons, even just for the summers? That took some energetic talking on Lyle’s part. What helped was that Walter Savidge boasted of running a cleaner carnival than others. He hired mostly married couples, figuring they’d be a stabilizing influence and less likely to fool around with the townsfolk, told his performers to refrain from smoking or drinking on pain of fines or dismissal, and most of all, cracked down on grift.
Other carnies sneeringly called it “the Sunday School carnival,” but Savidge embraced the term. “Pure entertainment and clean amusement is our motto,” one flyer promised. “Roughs and toughs will not be tolerated.” Every once in a while there’d be reports of carnivals and even whole circuses run out of town by angry citizens, and Savidge didn’t want to be in that sheepish club. The upstanding rep was good for business. As a headline in the Bonesteel, South Dakota, Enterprise put it, “Walter Savidge Amusement Company, Clean and Worthy, Drawing Large Crowds.” Omaha’s World-Herald noted that “the crew is not made up of crude fellows who flop in strange places. No, indeed. Savidge and his co. are welcomed with open arms each year in towns that he has played before.” Maybe it was this kind of publicity that persuaded the occasional parent to entrust her children to him, as this mother did in a painstaking letter to Savidge: “At my Son request to writh to you and give my consent for him to go with your show wich Mr and Mrs Fred Hugart as our Friends wanted him and said it would be all right for him to go. I am willing if you think that he is not to young (as he is 15 years) and it would be all right if not he can Come home from Wayne be for you leave. I hope it will be all right. Alex is well thought of here and will be missed by many. From Alex Mother, Mrs Julius Quintal.”
Savidge was the sort of impresario who thrived in the era before radio, movies, and television nationalized entertainment. He and his company were known really only in Nebraska, but there they were well known, for they traveled to innumerable small towns, and their arrival each year was an event. The company was, in its way, remarkably successful. It lasted from 1915 to 1941, and at its height employed 125 performers. It had a Ferris wheel “brilliantly lighted” by the company’s “own electric light plant” and it had its own brass band. It had a snake charmer, a trick horse, a family of midgets, a man who ate with his feet, and an act billed as “Darwin’s Original Monkey Man,” perhaps someone with a condition like hypertrichosis, which causes excessive hair growth all over the body, but quite possibly just a black man who was willing to act like an ape, which, distressingly, was a way to make a living in early-twentieth-century America. (“Missing link” acts were also, for many Americans, their first exposure to the language and concepts, however freely interpreted, of Darwinian evolution.) There’s a story that Bert Chipman, the circus manager, tells about an African-American man who did a Beast of Borneo routine to the thrill and repulsion of white audiences, until one day while he was shaking the supposedly impregnable steel bars of his cage, they popped out, and the men and women who’d been watching and jeering a moment before ran screaming. Maybe for somebody like that, roaring at his audience was a way to show the contempt he must have felt for people all too willing to believe him a beast, even when he wasn’t wearing the matted wig and shackles of his disguise.
The Savidge show went for a touch of class, sort of, with Baby May, of whom the ballyhoo bragged both that she weighed 480 pounds and that she spoke seven languages. What was the fascination of that, exactly? Maybe it was the idea that a superior intelligence could be housed in a body regarded as grotesque, a brand of irony or poignancy that sideshows often engaged in. You could see it at work, for instance, when they presented families of midgets as European royalty, or “missing links” as gifted painters or soulful poets—people whose talents and distinctions were belied by the physical packages they walked around in. Perhaps here the sideshow offered us a distorted mirror image of ourselves, for many people have the sense at one time or another of being trapped in a body that does not do justice to their scintillating inner selves.
Lyle (third from left) with some of his pals from the Walter Savidge Amusement Co., in front of posters for the sideshows. I’m not sure what the Whole Damm Family did.
But if that mode of presenting a performer like Baby May helped forge an empathetic connection with the audience, it’s hard to imagine how the other aspects of her act could. Its central conceit—fat people appearing, for humorous effect, as though they were babies or children—was a mode of entertainment that, like the whole sideshow enterprise itself, strikes most people today as weird and cruel. It was certainly popular in its time, though, a time that lasted at least into the 1920s. (What probably killed it was the sexual scandal that forced the silent-era comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle off the public stage.) Dainty Dolly, Baby May—what a riot to call obese performers by such diminutives and to compel them to dress up in rompers and knee socks. Gluttony, I suppose, seems to us a childish sin, and it suited some people to think of fat adults as children who’d never grown up. Poor May. I hope she really did speak seven languages and could mutter curses in Dutch or Portuguese or mentally transport herself to distant lands when all the carnival-goers, scrawny people mostly, filed in to gawk at her.
The Savidge sideshow also traveled with “Koo-Koo, the Bird Boy,” a billing that makes me shudder even now, imagining a child who made birdlike squawks—an autistic child, perhaps—and “Clara-Leroy,” the sister and brother Siamese twins. It had, in short, “thrilling and unbelievably strange people. An amazing congress of human paradoxes.” At the same time it had no less astonishing wonders of natural science and new technology—an octopus, for instance, and an “electric bulb burning.” It had a waterproof tent that seated one thousand people. And the Savidge company performers traveled on their own twenty-car train painted red and yellow on the outside and equipped on the inside with mahogany seats, beveled glass mirrors surrounding the berths, and sinks with hot and cold running water.
Savidge himself had been one of those restless boys who could not resist the lure of the circus. He was born in Deloit, Nebraska, in 1886, into an Irish coal mining family that, like my father’s, had moved from Ireland to Pennsylvania, then westward to Nebraska, where they homesteaded. As a kid he had seen a couple of acrobatic acts he never forgot. Most boys were content to watch and whistle under their breath and go home for a hot supper, but Walter had to try some of that wild stuff himself. He hung a rope between the shed and the barn of his father’s farm, and with the phlegmatic cows and somewhat more excitable chickens for an audience, taught himself to inch across it. He climbed to the top of the windmill and jumped, using an umbrella as a parachute, which actually sort of worked if you didn’t mind a lot of bruises. Pretty soon, local fair organizers started hearing about the tricks
Walter had taught himself to do and were inviting him to perform.
In Wayne, Nebraska, he particularly impressed a young woman in the audience named Mabel Griffith, whose father, the president of the county fair, had hired Walter for $5 that day. Years later, after Walter had started a theatrical company with his brother, and Mabel was teaching piano and living on her own, Walter went to visit her in Wayne, found her clever and levelheaded, and persuaded her to marry him.
In the winter, when the Savidge carnival was headquartered in Wayne, many of the performers fanned out to find work with theater companies in little towns throughout the Midwest. Sometimes the Savidges would go with them. To Mabel’s chagrin, most of the hotels they stayed in were cold and shabby, with heat only in the hallways. After the shows, Mabel would stay late to play the piano for dances that brought in extra money for the company. In the spring, they’d start touring on the train, which was more comfortable. A reporter from the Wayne newspaper who caught up with her when she was an old woman, long after Walter had died, summed up Mabel’s attitude toward life on the road this way: “It was hectic and they were always on the go, and it was really her husband’s life. She didn’t despise it, but would never do it again.”
The trouper’s life could be hazardous, no doubt about it, and the hazards began with what nature meted out. The region of the country known as Tornado Alley would not seem the best place to put a lot of big tents out in open fields every summer and then pack them with men, women, and children. But Tornado Alley was favored territory for many tent shows, because in the Midwest they had the best setup for reeling in sizable audiences. Nebraska and the surrounding states had plenty of farmers who lived in small, isolated, dull-as-dust settlements, but who were affluent enough to own automobiles, which they could drive into the nearest good-sized town to see some entertainment—a visiting troupe of actors, a circus, or even an itinerant moving picture show. The Midwest had the highest rate of automobile ownership of any region in the country in the 1910s, and according to a 1919 report from Paramount Pictures, Iowa was the state with the highest percentage of cinema patrons who got to the movies by car. Women drove, too, and farm women in the Midwest were more likely to make frequent trips to town by car than their counterparts in the South. Compared with the West, which had fewer small towns than anywhere else in the country (the population tended to cluster in big cities on the Pacific coast or else to scatter, like dropped beads, on far-flung ranches), the Midwest held a robust network of small towns, connected by railroad lines, which made it feasible for entertainers to work a regular circuit.
Walter Savidge (seated) and some of the roustabouts after a tornado at Neligh, Nebraska, July 1920.
But it wasn’t just a matter of geography or patterns of settlement. Attitudes were different, too. In New England, blue laws restricting entertainment on Sundays still cast a puritanical pall on entertainment in general. In the South, evangelical disapproval did much the same, and segregation compounded the effect, reducing the potential audience by more than half in some places. The Midwest, by contrast, was home to many Central and Northern European immigrants, people like the Czechs my father grew up with, who did not, with some exceptions, harbor a religious antipathy to music, dance, and other such worldly pleasures. All that was the good part of touring the Midwest. The bad part was the tornados.
• • •
THE TROUPERS AND THE CARNY PEOPLE called them “blow-downs.” An audience could be sitting there waiting for the show to start and a cyclone could come along and blast the tent clean away. There the people would be left, befuddled, bareheaded, in the sallow light and whirling wind, their scared and delighted kids screaming, their hats cartwheeling away amid brightly colored programs that whirled around them like confetti. Or, more gravely, a tent could collapse on top of the people inside, as happened once in Perham, Minnesota, where a fire then broke out and badly burned many of the trapped spectators. In my father’s first scrapbook, a series of photographs shows the aftermath of a twister in Neligh, Nebraska. In one, the Savidge company’s Ferris wheel lies on the ground like a crushed Tinkertoy. That storm came in the morning of July 19, 1920, so fortunately there were no carnival-goers present when the tent blew down and the Ferris wheel collapsed, but under one photo Lyle wrote, “A $10,000 loss was estimated.” Fires were a menace, too, because show tents were coated with a highly flammable waterproofing compound made of gasoline and paraffin wax. (That practice came to an end only after a horrific fire in 1944 at an afternoon performance by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut, killed 167 people, mostly women and children, and injured hundreds of others.) But it was winds that often started the fires, by knocking over lights.
Lyle lasted only two seasons at the carnival. It wasn’t that he disliked that brand of entertainment. He loved circuses all his life, thought clowns were genuinely funny and poignant (long after a lot of people started thinking they were a little creepy), and maintained a childlike delight in the antics of clever pigs, hardworking showbiz dogs, dancing horses, and all other trained animals. Working at Savidge’s carnival, he developed an abiding fondness for salted peanuts in the shell, ice cream cones, and cotton candy (which had just been developed by, among others, a dentist in New Orleans; a dastardly plot to drum up business, perhaps?).
I don’t think my father objected to sideshows, either. Not many people in those days did. Hundreds of freak shows crisscrossed America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and from the point of view of most contemporaries, they were actually more acceptable than other theatrical entertainments, since they offered an edifying experience: a chance to study the human curiosities that cropped up with some regularity in God’s great plan. This marked a turn from the eighteenth century, when people with various abnormalities were shunned as evil omens, living manifestations of the sins or witchcraft of their parents. The forces that had just begun, in the 1910s and 1920s, to make sideshows seem uncivilized, were not always so benign themselves. The eugenics movement, for example, which upheld the notion that disabilities should be stamped out by encouraging procreation only among the genetically “fit,” implicitly suggested that anomalous human beings should be hurried off the public stage. Genetic discoveries and the medicalization of difference meant that such people were now to be considered, in Robert Bogdan’s words, “‘humble and unfortunate’ pathological rarities, a far cry from the interesting curiosities or ‘lusus naturae’ they had been in the past.” The freak’s new role was to be not a public exhibit but “a patient of physicians, to be viewed on hospital rounds and in private offices, by appointment only.” This was a mixed blessing. There’s mercy in being far away from jeering crowds, but the asylums where disabled people often ended up were no sanctuaries. (And in a way, we have our own version of human-aberrance-as-entertainment today: reality TV shows where people violate their own privacy for fun and profit.) “They weren’t fakes,” said Mabel Savidge of the sideshow freaks; they “were pleasant people, and weren’t bothered by being on display as they felt it was their living and they made good money.”
What must have been difficult for Lyle was the chronic outsider status of the carny people and the way they cultivated it. Some of the means by which they marked their separateness were fun for him—the lingo, for instance, because he liked words. There were the vivid bits of carny argot that would make it into general usage—shill, hokum, mumbo jumbo. And there were the more arcane terms that stayed on the inside: an “aginner” was somebody who disapproved of entertainments, “heavy sugar” was a lot of money, a “bender” was a contortionist, a “monkey” was an easy mark, an “apple knocker” was a rural dweller.
But carny people, even the cleaner ones like the Savidge employees, also tended to feel a solidarity that was compounded in part by their hostility toward the regular folk—the rubes, the yokels—who came to see them. And the hostility was often returned—by disapproving churchmen, by
local defense committees set up during World War I to promote the idea that all stray men should be drafted and sent overseas immediately, and sometimes by bored local boys who wanted an excuse to clock somebody and found one in the chicanery of showmen. “It was no infrequent occurrence to be set upon by a party of roughs, who were determined to show their prowess and skill as marksmen with fists and clubs if required,” the circus impresario W. C. Coup wrote in 1901. “As a consequence, showmen went armed, prepared to hold their own against any odds. Not once a month, or even once a week, but almost daily, would these fights occur, and so desperately were they entered into that they resembled pitched battles more than anything else.” A lot of carny people took pride in their slipperiness, their ability to put one over on the proper, stay-at-home folk.
The Savidge Amusement Co. may have been a Sunday-school carnival, but it probably wasn’t free of grift altogether. Lyle wasn’t a hoodwinking type, though, and didn’t hold the locals in contempt or get a cynical kick out of their disapproval. Part orphan that he was, he warmed to a sense of belonging and hungered for a little more class, for the shiny armor of acknowledged glamour. What would, in later years, give him the mojo he needed to perform was the belief that people needed him and respected his talents; if they did, then he would step up, and by Jiminy, he’d entertain them. It was his job, and he took it seriously. But the idea of scraping up business by faintly unsavory means, or cheating the people like those he’d grown up with in Brainard, made him shrink inside when he wanted to be elegant and expansive.
The Entertainer Page 6
