Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (5 page)

Big tops have not always been part of the circus. The first American circus, organized by Scottish equestrian John Bill Ricketts, opened on April 3, 1793, at an outdoor amphitheater at Twelfth and Market Streets in Philadelphia. Within three weeks, the show, which presented acrobatics on horseback, clowning, and rope walking in a forty-two-foot circus ring, was seen by President Washington; four years later Washington actually sold the white charger he had ridden in the Revolutionary War to Ricketts. The circus had its first-ever sideshow attraction, not to mention a presidential seal of allure.

Building on Ricketts’s success, other promoters quickly realized the potential of taking their shows on the road. This need for mobility, along with the equally pressing need to cope with fluctuations in the weather, led Joshua Brown to erect the first American circus big top in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 22, 1825. The addition of canvas tents gave American circuses a flexibility their European indoor counterparts did not have, allowed them room to add traveling menageries and freak shows, and prompted them to invent the enduring line “rain or shine.” In no time, traveling circuses became the principal form of popular entertainment in America, with performers becoming more well known than presidents. In 1848, Dan Rice, the era’s most famed clown, persuaded his friend and Whig presidential nominee Zachary Taylor to ride with him in a ceremonial circus parade. When the townspeople saw the two together someone shouted, “Look, Dan Rice is on Zachary Taylor’s bandwagon,” and politics would be likened to a circus ever after.

The second great phase in American circuses began after the Civil War with P. T. Barnum, the Walt Disney of his time. Barnum, the prince of humbug—the art of careful exaggeration—had already wowed the country with a museum full of midgets, mammoths, and alleged African coneheads before opening his first circus in 1871 at age sixty. Ten years later he joined with his rival James Bailey to create the “Greatest Show on Earth.” Together Barnum and Bailey made two momentous changes: first, they stretched their circus to three rings to accommodate more seats; and second, they took their show off the wagon trail and put it on the railroad. The Gilded Age of the American Circus had begun. By the time the five Ringling Brothers bought out Barnum & Bailey in 1907, the new mega-show would span ninety railroad cars, employ 1,500 people, and seat 10,000 patrons. President Wilson visited the show near the end of his first term in 1916, took off his top hat, and tossed it into the center ring. Those in attendance took it as a sign that the as yet unannounced candidate would seek reelection: politicians now mimicked the circus in the business of show.

In 1956, John Ringling North, heir to the family business, heralded what he thought would be the third great phase in the American circus when he took his show out from under canvas and put it into buildings. The tented circus is a “thing of the past,” he declared publicly.
BIG TOP BOWS OUT FOREVER
, bemoaned
Life
magazine.
THE BIG TOP FOLDS ITS TENTS FOR THE LAST TIME
, echoed
The New York Times
. Mark Twain, who once wrote that he would rather have been a circus clown than a writer, would have loved the irony of this greatly exaggerated death. The circus big top not only wouldn’t die, but it would also live on thanks in large part to the work of people North himself had fired.

The year before closing down his big top because of constant delays in erecting the tent, John Ringling North fired his manager, Frank McClosky, for graft. Undaunted, McClosky and aide Walter Kernan took the money they had skimmed from Ringling and, along with racetrack owner Jerry Collins and attorney Jerome Calhoun, promptly purchased a tented circus from Clyde Beatty. Beatty, the most famous wild-animal trainer in history, had run away from Bainbridge, Ohio, in 1921 to become a cage boy on Howe’s Great London and Van Amburgh’s Trained Wild Animal Show. By the mid-1950s, he had headlined every major circus in America, performed with a record forty lions and tigers at one time, been on the cover of
Time
magazine, and achieved the status of a matinee film idol. McClosky and company merged Beatty’s show with the dormant title of Cole Bros., derived from the nineteenth century’s first circus millionaire, W. W. Cole, and took the show on the road in 1957 with thirty-five trucks and the reigning “world’s largest big top.”

In 1981 the show was still on the road, though much deteriorated, and surviving owner Jerry Collins decided to “donate” the circus to Florida State University for a $2.5 million tax write-off. No sooner had he signed the transfer than the title to the circus was shuffled around a large conference table in Tallahassee and purchased by Pugh and Holwadel. Burdened by debts, the new owners raised $200,000 to take out the show in 1982, but managed only to break even their first year. That winter the show sold all nonessential equipment—scrap metal, spare parts, even palm trees—to raise enough money to “leave the barn” again. The following year the show made money and the rebirth had begun.

Ironically, the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus thrived in the 1980s and early 1990s by going against prevailing circus custom. For two hundred years circuses had made their reputations by being “modern”: they exhibited the “first evidence” of Darwin’s theory of evolution; they demonstrated the lightbulb before Edison had made it popular; they even presented motion pictures before theaters were widespread. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, when computers and video games held the monopoly on modern, the circus survived by presenting itself as the embodiment of old-fashioned. Come and see the real circus, where the performers are real, where the mud is thick, and where if you come at the crack of dawn you can still see the elephants raise the big top in the part of the circus that promoters proudly call the Greatest
Free
Show on Earth.

By half past nine the sound of laughter was everywhere. The smell of sweat and morning coffee permeated the air. A gentle breeze was blowing. A crowd of nearly four hundred people had gathered on the lot—a mother and her daughter, a man with his dog, a boy in a wheelchair with a video camera. Out back a family stopped to take pictures with the tigers. Out front a minor trauma was brewing.

After receiving the warning about the ropes, Johnny hurried to the front of the tent, where the big top would be secured to the stakes by a series of bright yellow ropes. Johnny’s plan called for the ropes to be twenty-two feet four inches long. The new ropes, however, measured twenty. Angry, but calm, Johnny ordered the manager to move the stakes inward until he could confer with the manufacturers and replace the stunted lines.

“You see, the weakest part of the tent is the stake line,” Johnny explained as we watched the big top slowly rise into the air. “If you don’t have a good stake line the tent is going to fall down. We have ridden sixty-five-mile-per-hour winds before, but I like winds under thirty. Even at that point I am not comfortable with people in the tent. If you’ve got people in there and the tent starts moving and rippling, they will panic. But the funny thing is, you can’t get people out from under the tent unless it actually starts to shake. If you say to them, ‘Will you please leave the tent in an orderly fashion, the National Weather Service has issued a warning,’ everyone says, ‘I’m not going out there…it’s raining.’”

Within minutes the center of the tent had been winched halfway up the poles and the first hint of daylight appeared underneath the span. Johnny took my arm and led me under the concave blue-and-white spread.

“Only once in thirty years have I seen the tent come down with people in it. That was in Auburn, New York, on July 9, 1968. We had had thunderstorms all evening right off the Finger Lakes. I said, ‘God, this is going to be a miserable tear-down,’ when all of a sudden this wind came up and the tent was gone in two or three seconds. I stood there and could see the whole thing lift into the air. The tent was brand-new, like this one. It fell on the people. Fortunately, we had very few injuries—I think maybe five people with a broken hand or foot. Unfortunately, the local fire department had little experience with tents, and they caused more damage to the tent itself by climbing all over it while the people were still trapped underneath.”

Just as the tent reached the top of the poles, the head of Anchor Industries arrived on the lot and Johnny went to discuss the problems with the ropes. After a brief consultation the company agreed to provide replacements, and Johnny began coping with a new problem: one of the fifty quarter poles that support the middle of the tent snapped as it was being pushed into place. Johnny marched over to the crew with the fury of an irate football coach. “I can do a better job than you guys with my privates!” he shouted in a show of force that brought to mind his reputation for swinging a stake or two in his day. “Now concentrate or you’re out of a job.” Once back in the huddle of businessmen, he brushed off the incident as perfectly normal for opening day with a new tent.

Finally at 10:15 the elephants arrived and the crowd began to cheer. There were three elephants in all—Helen, Conti, and Petunia, alias Pete—each wearing a giant harness around her shoulders and dragging a chain behind her on the ground. They were followed closely by a man pushing a red plastic wheelbarrow and carrying a shovel. “Look!” someone cried from the edge of the tent. “It’s the pooper scooper.” As each elephant reached her spot one of the workers would hook her chain to the bottom of a quarter pole. “Move up, move up!” Fred finally called, and the elephants moved forward with barely a strain and pulled the tent magically into place. As each pole dragged across the ground, it left a rut in the grass like a giant golf divot. The process was repeated with quiet efficiency, and in a breathtaking span of under fifteen minutes the tent emerged from its previous fishbowl shape into a glorious blue-and-white whale.

“If you ask me, a circus isn’t a circus unless it’s in a tent,” Johnny said. “In a building you have a very austere effect. The seats are so far away that the performers look like ants. Here, the worst seat isn’t the problem, the best seat is. The audience has to make sure it doesn’t end up part of the act.” For the first time all morning Johnny’s eyes misted up. When the circus left DeLand in five days’ time Johnny would have to stay behind for an operation for a back ailment brought on from his days as a trampoline performer. “When you buy a ticket for a circus in a tent,” he continued, “you buy a ticket for a fantasy. At some point everybody has wanted to be somebody in the circus—a ringmaster, the girl on the trapeze, a clown. Remember that, Bruce, when you become a performer: the only stars here are the ones who sit in the seats. If they don’t star in our show, then none of us gets paid.”

Johnny patted me on the back and walked away with his eyes toward the sky. I looked around at the massive space—solemn, sacred, almost cathedral. Give or take a yard or two, it could hold a football field, a commercial aircraft, even the White House in its entirety. But every night for the coming eight months it would hold a circus. At the moment, however, it held only promise. By eleven o’clock—four and a half hours after the first stake was struck, three hours after the vinyl was first unfurled—the heavens were now fully erect but the earth still needed work. First the bandstand, then the ring curbs, then the seats were wheeled in. Next, rows of lights were lifted into place. And finally, just before noon when a local priest arrived to bless the new big top and joked about sprinkling holy water on a waterproof tent, the performers began to appear.

A Rare Breed of Tiger

“As soon as I step into the ring I look around to make sure nothing’s on the ground.” Khris Allen is confident when he speaks. He is dominant and sure. But underneath his blond mustache and behind his clear blue eyes he is always a little afraid. “Sometimes I find pieces of metal or glass. Once I found the head of a baby doll: Fatima would have loved to eat that. Then, just as the last elephant passes the cage, we slide open the door and let the cats into the ring…”

The first act of the show is the “cats,” the deceivingly casual term that circus people apply to all wild felines. The act is first in the show because it is first in stature, and also because the twelve-foot-high iron cage that surrounds the center ring is heavy and difficult to maneuver easily during the show. Clyde Beatty’s original cage was so heavy, in fact, that his act closed the first show every afternoon and opened the second show that evening so the cage would not have to be handled more than once a day.

Despite this historical link to Beatty, the man who occupies the center ring with the cats is hardly impressive on first sight. He is short, around five feet six. His shoulder-length, beach-volleyball blond hair is thinning. But despite his boyish demeanor, twenty-five-year-old Khris Allen, from Atlanta, Georgia, had one of the firmest bodies and strongest wills of any member of the show. Though all year he would be considered a novice, in circus parlance a “First of May” (after the date that circuses used to start), once he stood in the ring with nine tigers on opening day dressed in riding boots, tight black pants, and a blue lamé shirt that he likened to Captain Kirk’s, Khris Allen was a victor, having triumphed in one of the quietest, but most intense love triangles and power struggles that the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus had ever seen.

“Once I’m out there, I try to sense the mood of the tent,” Khris said one afternoon when we discussed his act. “I want to know if there’s any electricity out there. Are people excited, or are they sitting on their thumbs?”

Not long after the season began, I realized that the circus and its performers have two parallel lives and that to grasp the full dynamics of the show I would have to understand both of these worlds and how they relate to each other. The first—the legendary traveling part—is the life that occurs outside the tent as the show moves across the land, from city streets to country roads, from mud to sleet, from one child’s deadly ear infection to one mother’s inexpressible pain when her son runs away from home. But to me that experience seems all the more extraordinary when contrasted with the other world, the life that occurs inside the tent as performers do the same show twice a day, seven days a week, every day from March to December without a single day off. To try to make sense of this side of the show, I decided to sit down with each performer in the course of the year and discuss his or her act. Their stories left me breathless with admiration. Khris Allen, like his act, was the first.