Truevine

by Beth Macy

  In response, the women crafted a miniature effigy of him, which they tortured continuously.

  In response, Bergonier carried a revolver.

  In response, the Ubangis announced a work stoppage, refusing to board the train from Chicago to Milwaukee unless Bergonier left the show.

  Just as the show must go on, the train must pull out of the station on time. Every train, every station, every time. It was the American railroad, after all, that had driven the creation of standardized time in the United States in the 1880s—to prevent train wrecks. Back in Roanoke, railroad men synchronized their Hamilton pocket watches daily, and they manned the steam-powered factory whistle (nicknamed Old Gabriel), which blew to announce the beginning and end of work shifts, then and now. (Before, towns across the nation set their own times by observing the placement of the sun, so instead of Eastern Standard Time, there was Philadelphia Standard Time, for instance—until rail companies persuaded each region to abandon the chaos of local times.)

  So the train schedule won out, as it was wont to do. And the circus train soon departed, leaving Bergonier to take another train, bound for Sarasota instead. Shortly after arriving in Florida, he was bitten by a tropical insect (though the medical examiner listed the cause of death as “septic pneumonia”). He died just as the circus was rolling into its Florida winter quarters.

  When the Ubangis heard the news, they cheered, bragging that their hexes had caused his demise (“No die, we make ’em die”). The chief of the tribe demanded to see Bergonier’s body at the funeral home, where he and four of the women spread powders and made gestures to repel his “evil spirit” before they approached the casket.

  Then, according to Bradna, they stared at his remains with “a fierce hatred.”

  Setting profits aside, John Ringling finally agreed to let the Ubangis return to the Congo, at his expense, at the end of their second season. “At home… they bought a big ranch, stocked it with splendid cattle, and now live in high style among their grandchildren,” Bradna wrote.

  Of course a new, slightly more Westernized crop of Ubangis was imported the following year to take their place. They spoke not only their tribal language but also French, wore blue sweaters that they did not randomly take off, and generally mixed with their coworkers better than the first Ubangi crew.

  Still, according to Mills, the British deemed both the Ubangis and the Muse brothers flops. “We made it clear that whereas a giant like Jake Earle would always be welcome, we did not want objects of pity of any kind,” Cyril Mills recalled. “In my opinion, Eko and Iko were severely handicapped mentally, and if I am right it was stretching the law to the limits to exhibit them in public.”

  I flinched, again, when I read that portrayal. Having interviewed not just family members but also lawyers who deposed Willie Muse in later life, as well as caregivers who treated him, I’m convinced the brothers were not mentally incapacitated.

  Uneducated, yes. Socially uncomfortable around white authority figures, yes.

  As a young man in the late 1920s, A. L. Holland noticed they sometimes seemed to have trouble putting sentences together. But later in life and far away from the circus—settled snugly within the confines of their loved ones’ homes—they conversed just fine.

  I believe that Ingalls encouraged the Muse brothers to play dumb, just as P. T. Barnum and Zip’s later manager, O. K. White, manipulated Zip. In an unpublished memoir on file at the Circus World Museum, a ballet dancer described Zip as just “a normal colored man” whose contract stipulated he remain silent onstage.

  Tiny Kline wrote: “Should any folks have dropped into the side-show during the ‘off’ hours, between five and seven p.m., they would have found [Zip] down on his knees in the circle with the other men, before a blanket spread out on the ground, shooting ‘crap,’ and with typical Southern accent, repeating the magic words used in the game: Come on, seven! ’leven! Baby needs new shoes!”

  Teasing out the Muse brothers’ behind-the-scenes character is somewhat harder, not just because of the universally racist press accounts but also because few, if any, insiders bothered to record and report their point of view.

  By the early 1930s, they were beginning to become slightly humanized by the media: two 1930 press accounts describe them being engaged in chess, but in a typically jokey tone. A New York Post article riffed for two long columns about what Eko and Iko thought of the fact that Herbert Hoover’s widowed vice president, Charles Curtis, had his half sister living with him in Washington, serving as his hostess for social gatherings.

  “Ambassador Eko reported that everywhere he is finding a growing interest in Mars and its exports, and a feeling of international amity,” wrote the reporter. He then noted that Eko was from “Western Mars,” whereas Iko hailed from the “rich tenderloin of East Mars.” The premise of the article—the joke—was that the reporter interviewed them (or pretended to) as if they were indeed politicians representing the interplanetary state of Mars.

  “What did get recorded is so one-sided and so full of holes,” said Jane Nicholas, the historian. “You’re like, I know there are real people in there somewhere and not just shells.”

  The sideshow might have given the Muses a place where they belonged, and they might indeed have been treated with more humanity than their family was in segregated Roanoke. But, without question, that place was also exploitative, Nicholas argued.

  From London to Lansing, Michigan, George and Willie Muse were among the most widely celebrated people of their time, endlessly photographed and written about—yet never were they given a chance to tell their own story.

  Accounts of managers who spoke of their midcareer period made the Muse brothers sound not like naïve Boy Scouts, as today’s cultural anthropologists view them, but like wild savages who had to be looked after at all times. Sideshow bally Charlie Roark told Al Stencell he often had to escort the brothers from the sideshow tent to the cookhouse. He said they took turns announcing the various circus features they were passing along the way:

  The menagerie tent was the monkey house.

  The front end, where the bosses worked, was City Hall.

  “I got the sense they needed supervision, from what Charlie said,” Stencell recalled. “Every now and then, one would pick up a ladder [leading up to the sideshow platform], then run around swinging it in the air,” as Roark remembered it. “People were ducking, and they’d be yelling out, ‘Ham and bone! Ham and bone!’ They’d have to run out and get Candy Shelton to come out and calm ’em down and put the ladder back up to the platform.”

  Whether they were wild savages or musical geniuses depended on who was telling the tale. Many of the show people were “racist Southern crackers. Not one of ’em was politically correct!” Stencell said.

  The ham-and-bone bit? A good chance it was probably one more bit of theater trumped up by managers to entice another quarter from the rubes.

  Whether the British liked them or not, the Muses were a mainstay for American circus-goers throughout the Depression. In fact, the brothers from Truevine would fare better—and longer—than many of their more respected (and better-paid) coworkers.

  The kindly giant Jack Earle (real name Jacob Erlich) might have been ogled and admired by the royals, but he also suffered from disabling depression for much of his life, in addition to a pituitary fluke called acromegaly. Seven feet tall by the sixth grade, he was the target of schoolyard bullies and withdrew into himself, taking solace in books, painting, and sculpture. (His work, much of it circus-themed, has been the subject of museum shows. A bust he sculpted of Taibosh posing as Clicko and six paintings featured in a 1936 Fifth Avenue gallery show were found to be “promising,” according to a critic quoted in the New York Times.)

  On a mid-1910s childhood fishing trip to California designed by his parents to cheer him up, Earle had been “discovered” by silent-film scouts and ended up acting in forty-nine early movies—some with pioneering child star Baby Peggy. (They starred together in Jack a
nd the Beanstalk and other films in which Earle typically played… the giant.) After a stunt accident temporarily blinded him, Earle was recuperating with his family in El Paso, Texas, when a group of friends took him to see the Big One as it passed through their hometown.

  Clyde Ingalls spotted him on the midway. He could tell that Erlich was several inches taller than Ringling’s longtime giant, Jim Tarver, according to Erlich’s nephew. Andy Erlich is a psychologist who writes and gives motivational speeches about his uncle, whom he refers to by his nickname, Jake.

  Ingalls offered him a job on the spot.

  “But I don’t want to be a freak,” Jake told his father during a family meeting to discuss whether he would join the circus.

  “And my grandfather told him, ‘Being a freak is a state of mind,’” Erlich said.

  “He couldn’t make a living in El Paso; he didn’t have a skill. And everybody was worried if he stayed home he’d get depressed again,” Erlich told me. So he went.

  Ingalls outfitted Jake in outlandish clothes: red satin garments with gold buttons and epaulets, capped off by platform shoes that were twelve inches high. “I was so damn high in the air, I had to keep moving my toes to make sure it was really my feet down there,” he once told an interviewer.

  The locals peppered him with tedious clichés—“How is the weather up there?”—along with questions about his sex life and occasionally anti-Semitic remarks (Jake was the son of German-Jewish immigrants). He was so nervous during his first show that his knees were knocking—until a thin voice from below said to him, “Take it easy, Jake. And don’t worry: there’s more freaks out there in the crowd than there are up here.”

  It was the voice of Harry Doll (real name: Kurt Fritz Schneider), the dwarf who went on to be featured in Freaks and The Wizard of Oz, in which he played a member of the Lollipop Guild.

  So began a long friendship between Jake and the Doll family and the other little people on the show. During one stop in Chattanooga, a patron tried to grab Harry as they walked along the midway, and Jake busted the man’s jaw. “Ringling had to settle the guy’s claims, and Jake never engaged in fisticuffs again,” his nephew said.

  For a long time, Andy Erlich felt conflicted about his uncle’s story and didn’t want to write about it. “I guess I felt his depression, and it kind of made me not want to go there. But when I looked at his art and his paintings and saw him expressing himself, I started to embrace it.”

  It reminded me of Nancy’s response to our 2001 newspaper series. For the first time in her life, people came up to her—in her restaurant and when they bumped into her in stores. Rather than taunt her about George and Willie or make light of them, as happened often when she was younger, they congratulated her for preserving their legacy. A few even apologized for having complained about her intermittent restaurant hours—not understanding that when she’d been late opening the Goody Shop it was because she’d been home, tending Uncle Willie.

  “Some of the things you’re dealing with growing up, they just make you tougher. They make it so you learn to handle things,” she said.

  The often-brandished rock on the cash register; the prickly, defensive posture; her pride in her great-grandmother despite Harriett’s possible role in George’s and Willie’s joining the circus—all of it was coming into focus now. I was also beginning to understand what Nancy meant when she told me, knowingly, at the start of my research for this book: “No matter what you find out… you have to remember: in the end, they came out on top.”

  Still, she remained defensive during our interactions. During a photo shoot I arranged for this book, a photographer friend casually asked if we could shoot her portrait at Uncle Willie’s house, where she grew up and where she cared for him in retirement. She wheeled around and snapped at me, “Are you senile or something?” She’d said no to that request a few months earlier. Didn’t I know better than to ask again?

  When I complained that the brothers’ interior existence was hard to report on, she told one of her younger relatives, “If she thinks it’s hard for her to write this story, just think how hard it was for Uncle Willie and Uncle Georgie to live it! She better pick her ass up!”

  But on the day of the photo shoot, on the way out of her house, Nancy also handed me an inspirational quote she’d saved from the newspaper. It was a line by Voltaire that resonated with the story of her uncles:

  “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.”

  Unlike Nancy, Andy Erlich had not experienced any bullying related to his uncle. He knew nothing of the perils of growing up black in one of the most segregated cities in the South, or of the legacy of slavery and sharecropping on a gap-riddled family tree. Unlike Nancy, he can not only pinpoint the identity of all his great-grandparents; he can also place, with certainty, where they are buried.

  While the Muse brothers’ circus artifacts rest mainly in collectors’ hands, the legacy of Jake could fill an Erlich family museum. Andy’s father, Jake’s brother, was extremely proud of the giant in the family, maintaining a trove of his artwork, press clippings, and a welter of books Jake himself had collected.

  Andy’s first memory was of being thrown into the air by his uncle and of his grandmother screaming, “Watch out, he’s gonna hit his head on the ceiling!” Shortly before Jake died, in 1952, Andy’s parents took him to see his uncle, who asked the boy to give him a kiss. “I can’t reach you,” Andy said.

  Jake died at the age of forty-six, from complications related to acromegaly. He left behind his paintings and sculptures, a book of poetry, and a collection of souvenir rings that originally had sold for a quarter, inscribed with the words Jack Earle, Circus Giant, Eight Foot Six. The actress Diana Serra Cary—aka child star Baby Peggy—gave Andy hers as a gift.

  During performances, Jake would take off one of his rings so that lecturer Charlie Roark could pass a fifty-cent piece through it—to demonstrate the massive size of his finger. “There is enough good metal in that ring that even the meanest junkman will get you a quarter for it,” Roark would say, and the quarters clinked as sales added up. “Earle made a ton of money,” Roark recalled. (And the lecturer, too, who typically pocketed 10 percent of souvenir sales.)

  Tom Waits immortalized the winsome Texas giant in a song. At the suggestion of muralist Diego Rivera, a gallery in New York mounted a one-man show of his work. His nephew penned a book based on his life, closing it with what is perhaps the saddest sideshow ending of all: the fate of the German brunette Lya Graf.

  “The World’s Littlest Woman” was one of Jake’s closest friends on the sideshow. Just as he’d done with Jake and Harry Doll, Ingalls often posed the two of them together for promotional photographs that exaggerated the difference in their size.

  If you were charting Graf’s height using Jake’s body, the crown of her head would be even with his knees.

  In 1933, a Ringling press agent—a Fellows minion and never one to miss a photo op—had the idea to boost circus attendance by staging a photograph: Graf would sit on the lap of Wall Street titan J. P. Morgan Jr.

  The juxtaposition would be rich: Graf was adorable. Morgan was a bankster.

  It turned into a twofer promotion: The photo would also make Morgan appear grandfatherly, the company bankers hoped, more “of the people”—despite his $2.5 million yacht, Corsair, and his four homes, not counting the Scottish estate he rented annually so he could shoot grouse with King George VI.

  In 1933, snagged in the crosshairs of congressional hearings about the 1929 stock market crash, the world’s most powerful banker was being hammered in the press about income taxes. He stood accused of selling stocks at below-market prices to favored, politically connected clients.

  In the middle of the monthlong hearings, Senator Carter Glass casually told reporters that the proceedings needed only pink lemonade and peanuts to turn them into a three-ring circus. That was all the juice Fellows and the Ringling publicity machine required to turn the spectacle into one
of the country’s first media circuses. (Glass is the same Lynchburg senator who had shouted out “Discrimination! Why, that is exactly what we propose” during debate about the 1902 Virginia Constitution.)

  Morgan had always been private and press-shy, but now, even he admitted, he needed a media boost.

  He smiled stiffly as handlers placed a beaming Graf onto his lap. She wore a blue satin dress, a red straw hat, and Mary Jane pumps, her ankles daintily crossed.

  The twofer backfired. Published worldwide, the photo went on to become an emblem of Wall Street’s fallen state.

  But Graf was more than a circus joke, more than a footnote to the stodgy Wall Street titan. Like Jake, she was sensitive, and she grew weary of being ridiculed about the famous picture. She found off-color jokes about her relationship with Morgan unbearable, she told Jake and other sideshow friends.

  To escape the media’s glare, she quit the sideshow in 1935 and retreated to her native Germany, where she’d been born Lia Schwarz.

  By the late 1930s, Jake was working as a sales rep for Roma Wine. The shtick: here was the largest man hawking product for the largest wine company. It was so good you would have thought Dexter Fellows had personally dreamed it up.

  The Muse brothers were still traveling the country, still reliant on the imperfect legal system that was supposed to govern their settlement agreement—and protect them from the whims of Candy Shelton, the former captor who was still managing them. And their money.

  But they were faring a lot better than their brother Tom, who’d quit the circus after two years and returned to Roanoke. In December 1930, he was arrested for felony assault after shooting “Johnny Clark, colored,” in the stomach, as the newspaper put it, and was sentenced to three years in prison.

  “He was a rough man, very rowdy,” said Mary Davis, whose aunt was married to him, briefly, in the 1920s.

  Lya Graf’s life after the circus had a much sadder ending. The Nazis rounded her up in 1941 and arrested her. They eventually sent her to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers. She was twenty-eight years old.