by Beth Macy
Sideshow performers were on call all day long, with intermittent shows given whenever Ingalls lured enough people off the midway and into his tent for a new show—or, in circus lingo, when he had turned the tip.
Which is partly why even Eko and Iko got up early, as the silent film had put it. The freaks were always the first to eat breakfast at the cookhouse, so they could arrive at their appointed tent well before the big-top performers were on call. The tent-canvas crew, or roughnecks (aka rousties, for roustabouts), would sit on one side of the cookhouse, the managers and performers on the other. The freaks sat on the performers’ side but at a table to themselves.
On a good day, Ingalls told a reporter, the sideshow could take in $1,200 or more.
Ingalls was so smooth-talking, so beguilingly good at what he did, that he managed to woo the diva Leitzel into marrying him in 1920—never mind that he was married to someone else when they had started cavorting a year earlier. Bandleader Evans had caught them rustling around in the predawn inside a pitch-black tent. “On the circus, everybody’s crowded together like candy in a gumball machine,” Evans said. “No secret can survive long.”
By the time the Muse brothers joined Ringling, Ingalls had moved on to a British-born widow who managed Ringling’s gorilla act. And Leitzel would eventually find love with Ringling’s number-two draw: Alfredo Codona, the Mexican trapeze artist known for his movie-star good looks and his mastery of the triple flip.
For George and Willie, the work was dirty, and it was grueling. You had to stand there most of the day, playing and saying the same things over and over, all day long, just about every day. But it was almost never boring.
You could read that on the faces of the lot lice who came to watch the rousties putting up the tents and taking them down. The big top was so breathtakingly scary and so alive, while the sideshow had the lure of the forbidden and perverse.
Maybe I’ll run off with the circus. You could see the moment the thought crossed their stunned, starstruck faces.
The mobile city moved at night. Back in the 1870s, James Anthony Bailey had designed his Cooper and Bailey Circus to travel that way, the only problem being that eventually the thing grew so much that it was too big to move easily. A protégé of P. T. Barnum’s, Bailey had grown up an orphan in a Pontiac, Michigan, livery stable. At the age of thirteen, he bolted from his abusive caretakers and ran away with a circus. “I told the [showman] I was an orphan, with no friends, and would like to go with the show,” he recalled in 1891. “He took me along, making me useful where he could. I have never done anything but circus work since, and I never want to.”
Bailey blamed his frenetic, obsessive work habits on having been beaten severely as a child. The abuse fueled him with a desire that was as motivating as it was destined to earn him a mint.
A self-taught circus engineer, Bailey mastered speedy techniques for loading and unloading trains. He designed tent-lot layouts that became the industry standard. He also figured out transatlantic travel in the 1880s, determining how to lift freight cars full of lions, tigers, and elephants—by crane—into the holds of ships. He transformed his circus from a single-ring enterprise to two rings and, later, three.
Bailey was so adept at logistics that a quartermaster general with the German military would shadow him in the late nineteenth century to learn the best ways to move men, animals, and equipment by rail.
The key was his scrupulous attention to detail: Bailey not only knew how many horseshoes he carried with him on any given day, his underlings claimed, he could tell you in exactly which bin they were located.
When the stress of managing thousands of employees and animals overwhelmed him, he gnawed on rubber bands. He saved his important decisions for Fridays, which he considered the most auspicious day of the week.
If Barnum had been the Walt Disney of his era, Bailey was the back-end brains behind Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth when the two joined forces in 1880. The polar opposite of Barnum, Bailey hated publicity. A tall but slender and wiry man—with energy emanating from his pores—Bailey had one-upped Barnum when they were competitors by refusing to sell him a baby elephant, the first born in captivity. Not only did he turn down Barnum’s bid of $10,000 for the young pachyderm, named Columbia, Bailey out-Barnumed the master by turning the refusal into an advertising promotion. He placed posters and handbills with copies of Barnum’s telegraphed offer under the caption WHAT BARNUM THINKS OF THE BABY ELEPHANT. Had he been born a century later, he would have been a master of Twitter.
Bailey became “an ideal ‘silent’ partner for the noisy Barnum, but a canny one as well. By the time Barnum died, in 1891, Bailey owned a controlling interest in the corporation,” wrote Fred Bradna, the Ringlings’ longtime equestrian director and stage manager.
Meanwhile, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, five brothers—the sons of a German harness maker—were busy putting on their first show. Premiering in 1882 with an admission price of 25¢, it was called the Ringling Brothers’ Carnival of Fun, and the brothers starred in and managed every aspect of it, from spinning plates and juggling (Al Ringling) to playing the cornet (Alf T.) to playing the violin and acting in skits (Charles) to portraying a Real Live Dude (John) and booking the shows (Otto). Al’s wife, Lou, did double duty as equestrian and snake charmer in the gang’s nascent wagon-show days. To give the impression the operation was larger than it was, Al had the idea to make the performers change costumes and reappear in another ring. Al himself had mastered a second trick of balancing a plow—on his nose.
Initially, they were “an awful exhibition of faltering nerve… and a demoralized lot,” Charles Ringling would later write. The brothers first traveled by farm wagon, wintering in the off-season in Baraboo, where they stowed their equipment and played occasional concerts.
And plotted their ascendency. In two years they saved $1,000 from ticket sales and garnered the stamp of support from the circus veteran Yankee Robinson.
A bona fide circus operation was born. The Ringling Brothers Circus went on the rails in 1890, giving it access to markets beyond the Midwest and, eventually and with support from Robinson, the ability to buy out some of its competitors. This naturally raised the ire of James Bailey, who worried some about the explosive growth of his young competitors. But, apparently, not enough: Bailey underestimated the Ringlings’ ambitions when he took his Greatest Show on Earth to Europe in 1898—and stayed five years. The Ringlings took full advantage of the openness of this newly competitive field and vastly expanded their routes south, west, and into Canada. By the time Bailey returned, “the Ringlings were by now so strongly entrenched in the favor of the American people as to be almost impregnable,” their nephew wrote.
But Bailey fell ill in 1906 at the age of fifty-eight, following an insect bite that infected him with erysipelas. (Bitten on a Thursday, he died the following Wednesday.) He’d been supervising the preparations for opening day at Madison Square Garden, and true to character, he insisted he could return to work, which he did—until, literally, he collapsed and died.
The following year, the brothers from Baraboo bought Barnum and Bailey for $450,000 from Bailey’s widow—an amount they earned back within a year. Operations for the two were kept separate until they merged into one colossal show in 1919.
John Ringling was the Bailey-like taskmaster of the combined operation, and he was considerably more flamboyant in his affairs than his brothers. He moved the headquarters to Sarasota, Florida, in 1927 and built a palace he anointed with a Venetian name: Ca’ d’ Zan, or House of John. He kept a long black cigar in his mouth and a pet monkey at his elbow, and he loved working late into the night, devouring two roast chickens and several pints of beer before going to bed at 4:00 a.m.
With his African-American chauffeur Taylor Gordon at the wheel, he rode in a Rolls-Royce and kept a firm hand on all aspects of the family dynasty, slinking around to covertly watch the RB&BB parade from a side street—to make sure no one was shirking.
“He dressed soberly, like a banker, but conducted his affairs like a Moorish potentate: ornately, glitteringly, incredibly,” recalled Bradna. At six feet one, he was swarthy, with drooping eyelids and a low, deep voice.
“The brothers who owned the show—Al, Otto, Alf T., Charles and John—were sort of Hydra, with five rather than nine heads, which could look everywhere at once,” Bradna wrote. “And the competitors who, like Hercules, tried to lop off these heads, soon discovered that when one was cut, two others immediately sprang up. By canny management, superlative showmanship, aggressiveness and doggedness, they succeeded ultimately in crushing virtually all their opposition. By 1929, they had ruined, absorbed, or bought every important rival in the land”—including the Al G. Barnes Circus.
And still John Ringling clutched the reins. When another elephant in the Barnes circus went amok, in 1929, crushing a woman to death, wrecking a car, and injuring two trainers, he personally wired: “Kill Diamond in some humane way.” The elephant was led to a clearing in the woods and chained to a tree while five marksmen pumped more than fifty bullets into him from six yards away.
To hype ticket sales and massage the media, the Big One employed Dexter Fellows, a Boston-born media darling who’d already worked with circuses across North America and in Europe. Fellows could quote literature from Balzac to Dickens and knew hundreds of reporters. He had a soft spot for animals, naming his Irish terrier after a character in a Balzac story and keeping sugar cubes in his pocket for the Ringling elephants.
Reporters from Seattle to Sarasota called him the Dean, and in New York especially they looked forward to the RB&BB’s annual spring opening stand at Madison Square Garden because they knew Fellows would spoon-feed them a new and crafty angle on the routine story.
As a Times reporter gushed of Fellows, “His keen sense of humor, his delightful ways and his broad culture gained him entrée into offices where more exalted personages had to wait in ante-rooms to be in turn ushered in.”
Fellows could place just about anything he wanted in any newspaper, from the gossipy pages of Billboard to the front page of the New York Times. “He could improvise the type of story that would ‘make the front page,’ and he invariably had the material to back it up; there was generally plenty of it in the shape of strange beasts, human freaks, clowns, equestrians, and all the rest that make up a circus,” a Times reporter marveled.
Fellows had a special place in his heart for freaks, marveling at audiences who paid to feel better about themselves, or sought to pity rather than to gloat.
“Sideshow people have a pride of calling,” he argued. “They have the hauteur of Shakespearean actors of the old school and the temperament of grand opera stars.… And a good many of them are in a position to buy and sell the majority of citizen paupers who come in to shed a tear over them.”
Most experts I interviewed agreed with Fellows’s laudatory assessment of sideshow performers. Al Stencell said the circus was the rare place in America where misfits of all stripes were welcomed. Most were “towners who were fleeing bad homes or aching to sow their wild oats. Gays were just glad to find somewhere that welcomed them,” he wrote, especially in the clown and sideshow departments.
Sociologist Robert Bogdan said he found show people in general to be more tolerant of human variation than the general population. “The other thing is, if you treat people badly, then they don’t cooperate. So there was a certain built-in incentive to keep the sideshow exhibits happy,” he told me.
A loyal camaraderie developed among the traveling performers, who cast the show-goers as provincial and naïve. A carny who played a show near his hometown was called, dismissively, a forty-miler.
The cool thing, the superior thing, was to be alive and on the road—unlike the people in the towns, who were thought to be sleeping through their lives. Those poor pitiful rubes.
Fellows had no trouble publicizing the fact that Ringling sideshow announcer Lew Graham had just made ONE OF FINDS OF HIS CAREER, or so blared Billboard’s main circus page in August 1922. While the Barnes circus had just been waylaid by a railroad strike along the East Coast that summer—and stuck in Zanesville, Ohio, of all boring places—the Ringling trains had moved on to Chicago and were now, thanks to Eko and Iko, “the center of a curious and interested audience.”
By moving the Muse brothers from Barnes’s show to Ringling’s, Shelton had done what people along the sawdust trail call blowing the show, or switching circuses.
“Mr. Graham is exhibiting Iko and Eko, two Ecuador [sic] white savages,” Billboard noted, as if writing about them for the first time. “They are pure Albinos, with skins as white as cream, and with all the facial characteristics of South African bushmen, aside from their color. The two strange creations are elaborately dressed in robes of royal purple, and their great masses of cream-white hair add to their striking appearance.”
The brothers’ hair grew so woolly and quickly, according to one newspaper, that it could make the equivalent of three new shirts a year. It was also said to grow from their scalps in knots, like some Jazz Age version of a chia pet.
In their earliest Ringling sideshow banners, Willie and George are portrayed as tall and elegant, with European-looking features. Their tuxedos are adorned with diagonal, vaguely militaristic sashes across their chests. And contrary to photographs, in which they appear extremely well fed by the mid-1920s, their early Ringling banners picture them as being almost as slender as Peter Robinson, the fifty-eight-pound Human Skeleton.
Fellows called a press conference to brief reporters on Ringling’s latest find, saying the brothers were around forty years old—at least a decade older than they actually were—and describing them as quiet, eccentric, and “childish” men, “the center of a curious and interested audience.” A paper in Syracuse, New York, said they spoke a language understood only by the two of them—their tribal dialect from Ecuador—but that they’d also absorbed “sufficient English to carry on a conversation.”
Sideshow manager Ingalls was said to have found them floating on “some peculiar wreckage near the coast of California,” Fellows stated in his typically alliterative prose.
Due to the strange language they spoke, the New York Sun reported, people at first thought they hailed from Hollywood.
Farce or not, the brothers from Truevine were now part of the top tier of the sideshow world. They worked hand in hand with Zip, now considered the dean of freaks; with the beloved Texas giant Jack Earle; and with Lionel the Mexican-born Dog-Faced Boy, who was then the highest-earning sideshow act, hauling down $250 a week, the equivalent of $3,400 today.
Candy Shelton had moved up to the big leagues with them, managing the brothers and working as a sideshow ticket taker. No longer would he have to “Chinese,” a racist bit of circus lingo that had morphed into an action verb for doing unpaid heavy labor around the show grounds. “Chinese is what you did in exchange for your sleeping quarters and cookhouse accommodations,” Stencell said of the slang, whose roots lie in the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant laborers who built the transcontinental railroad. “The candy butchers, especially, they pulled a lot of Chinese.”
In one of the few photos I found of Shelton from that era, he stands among the RB&BB circus staff with a host of other ticket takers and back-end workers. He’s paunchy, a shock of dark bangs dangling from his receding hairline. His sleeves are rolled up, his vest left open, and his trouser fly is cinched with a safety pin. He drapes his arm jocularly around a man named Charles Hummell, the only named guest in the picture.
By 1924, Shelton was pocketing $400 weekly for George and Willie’s work—a pretty penny, the equivalent of $5,400 today. And that didn’t count what he made from their photo-postcard sales, judging from a newspaper story about how well paid circus freaks were at the time. But that story may have been just another Fellows fiction, another alliteration-filled riff designed to engender admiration for Ringling—and more quarters for the sideshow tent.
What’s clear,
according to Billboard briefs that chronicled his whereabouts, was that Shelton was very well connected among managers of all the largest circuses and carnivals. He hobnobbed with diva Leitzel. He was friendly with Al G. Barnes and the managers of famed conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. He spent Christmas 1924 with the prominent carnival sideshow entrepreneur Pete Kortes and dined occasionally with Charles and John Ringling and John’s wife, Mable.
A Billboard writer even made up a Christmas poem featuring Shelton and the brothers one year—though he got one of their names wrong:
Candy Shelton, Harry Wilson
And Bob Crawford, too,
All line up in front
As the ticket-selling crew
Then there’s Eko and Mike [sic]
The Ambassadors from Mars
But we doubt if they ever
Have “mingled with the stars”
The wool on their heads
Is like that of the sheep
And they sit there as peaceful
As if in a sleep
In the fall of 1924, Billboard covered the backstage Halloween shenanigans of the Greatest Show on Earth, an annual party held as a masquerade ball in the big top, this time in Anniston, Alabama. The main stages of the big top were used as dance floors, and bandleader Evans furnished the music. Leitzel—by now she had both a private railcar and her own dressing tent—dressed up as a Boy Scout.
It’s not clear whether George and Willie were invited to the party—Alabama’s Jim Crow laws prohibited biracial fraternizing—or whether their presence was merely echoed, sneeringly, at the ball. The wife of a Ringling horse trainer dressed up as one of the Muses, while Shelton’s wife, Cora, played the role of the other brother in a mockery whose “impersonations were clever” and “had the show folk guessing.”
But which of the “rope-haired wonders,” as they called them backstage, was Eko? And which was Iko?