Flying Funny: My Life without a Net

by Dudley Riggs

  American Arrogance

  U. S. Violates . . .

  Not Amused by Yank Joke

  This was an international crisis. Nationalists and anti-Royalists both used the situation to air their anti-American rants. I had “offended Japan,” and now I was in big trouble. Everyone with an ax to grind found the situation a handy peg on which to hang their anti-American rants. I was feeling pretty bad, thinking about packing up. Then I felt worse when I realized that if I got deported, Doc would lose his job too, because we were in on a single-family passport. So much for trying to save a few bucks.

  For three days I thought of myself as an unpatriotic American who had disgraced the Riggs family name, wrecked the tour, and bankrupted the All-American Circus. Then the Mainichi newspaper printed an editorial that quoted a bulletin from the Royal Palace that defused the situation:

  “The photo does not insult the royal family. To the contrary, the photo reflects the New Japan. A Japan that reaches out to the West, a Japan that reaches out the hand of friendship to the World.” Perhaps our handshake signaled a change.

  “We are going to keep all of this very quiet,” Mahatta said. “You are very lucky, but don’t get too cocky. I still have your Pan Am ticket in my pocket.”

  9

  Fliffus It Is!

  The happiest time I could remember; I was smitten.

  When the E. K. Fernandez All-American Circus tour ended in Manila, I boarded the Scandinavian motor ship Fernland and for twenty-eight days, nothing was required of me. Oddly, that stimulated a great deal of creative energy and discussion about theater, art, and music, especially jazz. The Fernland was a copra cargo vessel and allowed a complement of no more than twelve passengers because there was no doctor on board. The passenger roster listed eight other Fernandez Circus performers, including my dad and Paul Bornjorno and Marylyn Rice, as well as our Japanese PR man, and an American musician named Bernie Sailor.

  Bernie was returning to San Francisco, rejoining his jazz life, which included selling arrangements to the Ellington big band. “I’m taking the slow boat back so that I can work on some new arrangements,” he said. When we first met at the ship’s breakfast cold table (lots of cheese, fish, and pickled things offered several times a day by two very attractive Swedish stewardesses), I heard that he had attended our circus and knew many of the performers. Marylyn Rice knew Bernie from some earlier shared tour, and they seemed like they would be good people to be friends with. I could see that they would be easy friends. The Fernland’s Captain Neilson seated Bernie, Marylyn, and me at his table the first night (an honor I assumed he would rotate with other passengers throughout the voyage). This arrangement generated a most productive month of conversation, debate, and civilized discussion centered on “rational ways to solve all the world’s problems,” and it forged some lasting friendships that led to Fliffus.

  Normally, I kept pretty close counsel, not burdening others with anything personal. I caught myself ruminating about all the choices I had to make. I had too many “shouldas”: I should have stayed in school. I should get back to the Riggs & Riggs career. I should not be taking these bookings because that slows down college and keeps me from getting where I want to be.

  Marylyn interrupted my wailing. “Just where is that?” she asked. This was actually a serious question, put directly to me. “Where is that ‘place’ you want to be?”

  Her candor put me off balance. “I don’t know.”

  Bernie leaned over and said, “That is not a good answer!”

  I explained the problem of my being caught between my mother’s constant reminder to “stay in school and be prepared for life” and my father’s belief that “show business is life!” I told them that it seemed natural that I would follow my father into the family business.

  These two new friends were good listeners and could have just said, “There, there” or something neutral and avoided getting involved in the problems of who? After all, I had just met Bernie.

  Bernie took a while and then said, “Yes, but . . .” He moved to sit next to Marylyn. They were both looking me in the eye. Bernie said, “You do have free will.”

  Marylyn said, “After all, you aren’t chained to the Riggs family business.”

  Thus began the most honest talks that I had ever had. These were show people, but they were grown-up show people, confident of their talent, and not needing the froth of small talk.

  Marylyn like to talk about “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” She was always questioning. She said she loved debating. “Not arguing, just formal discussion and debate. I like to exercise my mind,” she said.

  “What is truth?” I asked.

  “Truth is fragile, it comes apart easily and fragmentary pieces of truth fall off exposing a greater—no, a lesser truth? Now I’m not sure. We must explore. Pieces of truth that cling and pieces that fall off. Sometimes you have to pick up all the little pieces that were lost.”

  “How can we have more than one truth?” asked Bernie.

  “We all see the same thing at the same time, but the truth we each see is remembered as different truths. Is that right?”

  This was all new to me. They always put an idea forward as a question. Avoid the absolutes. This was exciting, productive talk.

  “And memory of truth is not infallible?” I asked.

  “It’s human nature,” said Bernie. “I have a theory. I think that every time you pull something out of past memory, you revise it a little. So an oft-repeated story is constantly revised. Does that make it richer truth?”

  I was still a sophomore and out of my depth, but happy to be included.

  Marylyn picked up on Bernie’s theme. “We must think our revisions make for a richer story. If that’s true, is it a truer truth?”

  “I’m not sure that it makes for a better truth. I’m always skeptical when I hear someone claim to know some absolute truth and know all of the facts. Always swearing up and down that they are only speaking the truth.”

  She looked at Bernie and smiled. Then she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Now if we’re talking about romantic love, I take back everything I just said.”

  Marylyn was a one-of-a-kind woman. I had never met anyone even remotely like her. She was not a woman willing to play dumb for the benefit of male egos. She never played that towner girl trick of asking a feigned serious question about something when anyone could see that she already knew the answer.

  Both Bernie and Marylyn seemed so curious and open to new ideas that I chattered away, trotting out more and more fanciful “what if” ideas, half expecting Bernie to interrupt with “Enough of your crazy ideas.” But he did not interrupt! He smiled and continued to listen quietly for a while before he said, “I like to understand what you are saying before I take the floor. If I have nothing new to add, why stir the confusion? Please continue.”

  That was an unexpected and new experience for me. I grew up with show people, a group that was inclined to speak in the contradictory shorthand style that kept conversations short and sometimes intentionally free of meaning.

  With Bernie, I found that not being interrupted was a bit unnerving. I watched my pauses expectantly, staying only half committed to my point until it dawned on me: This is a real friend. I don’t need to be on guard because he’s not on guard. We are not trying to one-up each other with man-to-man challenge games. We can actually have a polite, friendly conversation, respecting each other, even when we disagree about the subject.

  They provided corrections to flawed logic and gently pushed me to examine my positions, always in a positive, open, and friendly way. And they listened to me. Most people can’t listen because they are so busy interrupting. Bernie Sailor taught me a new way to understand the public and how to disarm an audience by the simple act of listening to them. Learning to listen, really listen, later became the key to all successful audience participation work.

  As I got more confident about holding my own with these older, obviously passi
onate, smart people, I began sprouting some less-thought-through ideas. “Maybe it would be possible to blend classical ballet with circus aerial: Tchaikovsky’s ballet score and a love story high in the air. A circus act with a plot.”

  Bernie was very kind: he would listen to what I had to say, then softly echo the words back to me, sometimes with a slightly quizzical look. Marylyn was welcoming and friendly but direct: “Don’t you think Tchaikovsky would be difficult for the circus band since they have so few violins?”

  At first I felt obliged to not bore her or reveal my lack of maturity, but after a few hours the sense of age difference had faded, and I realized I was smitten with this (only slightly) older woman.

  We began discussing good jazz, bad opera, and my idea of using the new Freudian concept of “free association” to create stage dialogue. I brought up The Humanettes and how my folks often fielded audience suggestions and ran with them to buy time. We talked about how it might be possible to riff ideas off the top of our heads, to build a dialogue the way jazz players riff and repeat musical phrases.

  Marylyn said, “You mean ad-lib the whole bit? Without a script or a prompter? Why would you do that?”

  Bernie said, “Why not?” He paused for a moment and then said, “Why the hell not?”

  The subject had never gotten very far in school discussions before it became an easy tool for a put-down. I thought Marylyn and Bernie would think it through and not rush to quick judgment or the oh-so-easy joke.

  “Free association makes me think of hypnosis and psychotherapy and too much unresolved stuff,” Marylyn said.

  Bernie smiled, with eyes wide. “I think of crazy laughter, Dalí, and Ingrid Bergman.”

  “You think it has too much baggage?” I asked.

  “Maybe you should find some safe, neutral way to describe ‘Your Thing.’” He was dismissive as he paused for a long beat. “Or just drop the subject.”

  That stung. I said my goodnights and retired. I spent the long night ranting to myself, trying to understand what caused the chill from my friends and trying to think of meaningless words to replace what Bernie called “Your Thing.” Searching for a neutral word or phrase, I finally decided the word would be “Fliffus.”

  Usually known only to aerialists, the term “Fliffus” describes a difficult, complicated, but beautiful flying act feat. Shamefully, I had never successfully completed the flying Fliffus. Maybe that’s why it came to mind when I was looking for a word to describe a new kind of theater that I began to envision. I needed a neutral phrase because every time I used the term “free association,” which carried the connotation of Freud and psychoanalysis, people went nuts. I suppose they thought I wanted to expose their secret thoughts. And the term “improvisation,” the musicians insisted, belonged rightly to jazz. So I came up with my own word for it and Fliffus it was.

  In this way, serendipity led to the eventual development of the first incarnation of what later became my brand of improvisational theater.

  “Why not?” I thought. “Why not” might just be pretty good words to live by.

  I was so impressed by these people. Marylyn: so warm and friendly, always lighting up the room with her smile. Bernie: smart, open-minded, and fearless when it came to trying new things.

  From my earliest memories as a child on the road, travel-ing from city to city, my family made a pastime of playing what my grandmother called Roundelay, a verbal word game. To help the driver stay awake on long hauls, we would each take our turn, adding personal feelings to the ongoing fantasy story. “Now, remember, listen, think, and speak clearly. All these little tales joined together can become a single grand fantasy, created by many authors,” said my grandmother. “Not unlike the Scriptures.”

  And not unlike improvisational theater.

  Reciting aloud, we each added our part, inspired by what we knew of the story so far. And when we ran out of breath or ideas, we took a pause, by inserting “who . . .” The next person would use “who” as the first word to continue the tale. This sometimes went on for hours as we traveled the three or four hundred miles to get to the next engagement.

  When Bernie first heard me talking about Roundelay, he came alive with excitement and took on Grandmother Riggs’ word game with almost patriotic zeal. We talked late into the night when the only other sound was the steady hum of the Fernland’s engines and the hourly time bells. Bernie talked about Greek theater and South American music. Marylyn brought up acting and acting teachers, Lee Strasberg, and The Method. “It’s the new thing in New York.”

  Speaking to what we each thought qualified as “new and original,” we laughed and argued into the predawn. Often not about things new, just things new to me.

  What a revelation. That one month on the Fernland with Marylyn and Bernie was the happiest block of time I could remember. Doc saw it differently: “The Riggs Brothers lost a month of work when you decided to turn in our Pan Am tickets.” He kept forgetting that our rigging had to go surface, by water, and the month would be lost either way.

  When we docked in San Francisco, I said good-bye to my new friends and promised to keep in touch.

  10

  Word Jazz

  “It just might become something wonderful.”

  When we returned to the United States after our 1952 Asian tour, we were at the top of our game, feeling flush and expecting some big-time offers, but something had changed. The American circus was in decline. Television had put vaudeville in a coma, and fairs were down, but the nightclub business was picking up, hiring variety acts for supper-club revue productions.

  Doc had a short booking on the Gil Gray Circus, but I was at liberty, so I went back to college in Mankato, Minnesota, for a while, assuming that show business would soon recover.

  Chuck McKinsey, my roommate in the dorm, endlessly quizzed me about why the trip had so transformed my thinking and fired my sudden enthusiasm for modern jazz.

  “When you left, you loved Dixieland jazz. What happened to you?”

  I probably repeated every word of every conversation I’d had with Marylyn and Bernie. Chuck proved that he too was a good listener, but he was always diligent in reminding me that there was a reason we were attending classes.

  My college friends often challenged my thinking about where I was putting my creative energy because they didn’t know or care about show business. In my mind, I was caught between the exciting world of show business and immediate job offers and years of college with just the possibility of a teaching career. I had made this callow calculation: if I work really hard, I should be able to get my college education without interrupting the Riggs family performance schedule. I had been so busy performing that I had not taken the time to think things through.

  In March, I heard that Marylyn and Bernie had landed a job in Minneapolis, playing and singing modern jazz in the lounge at the Radisson Hotel. So I started doing a weekly commute up to the Twin Cities to hear my friends perform. The second week they graciously invited me to sit in during their set.

  They performed a forty-minute musical set, singing sly little calypso songs and playing modern jazz. I was impressed by Bernie’s loose, four-line nonsense phrase pieces with percussion backing and Marylyn’s absolutely clear singing voice. They suggested that “as a change of pace,” I should do my act billed as “Five minutes of juggling and comedy patter,” memorized one-line gags punctuated by drum and cymbal crashes. To my surprise, I got a good reception from the nicely dressed dinner crowd. The audience seemed pleased to be there even when we tried ideas that didn’t work (as when I tried to recite poetry to Bernie’s jazz in time with my juggling moves).

  Mostly I enjoyed being reunited with my friends from the Fernland. Marylyn and Bernie were supportive and generous. They treated me like I was some kind of crazy guest star who dropped by bringing fun and surprises—a guest who needed an audience, some stage time, and some protective shelter. “You can do whatever you are big enough to do,” Marylyn said. “Just don’t get u
s arrested.”

  Whenever I came up with a new gag, Bernie said, “Why not?” That was such a gift of creative freedom. That openness and the challenge to try out ideas soon began to produce some actual comedy. I was being kept awake by a constant flow of “what if” queries. Each new audience taught me something fresh.

  Then one night in the third week, when the audience was especially warm and receptive, Bernie surprised me when he said, “It’s ‘showtime,’ D. R.! Time for us to do a bit together. This is a good audience to test that top-of-the-head, ad-lib bit of yours.”

  Marylyn was protective and concerned. “You guys can’t just walk on stage naked without script or props!” she said.

  “Why not? I play jazz without sides. The notes come to me as I play,” Bernie said.

  That first night, with Marylyn on piano, Bernie and I tried making up a story, one word at a time, batting words back and forth like ping-pong. It was not much of a start. To the confused audience it came off a little awkward and unfriendly. We were trying way too hard to look cool and clever and to top each other’s lines.

  Later Marylyn spoke kindly. “You guys were interesting . . . but this was not what one could call entertainment.”

  I thought: “Interesting. Why not just say ‘You flopped!’”

  “You boys just need to take the time to hear each other and think before you speak. And you should try being nice to each other!”

  Two weeks later, this short ad-lib interval between musical sets was judged to be less of an irritating interruption for the audience. Some said they “enjoyed the change of pace.”

  Marylyn, who was having fun making the intro and building up the audience, said, “Let’s call it Word Play or Word Dance. It needs a cute, catchy name if it’s going to catch on.”