by Beth Macy
Deemed “useless” by the Nazis, she had been triply cursed: half Jewish, physically different, and forever connected to a despised American capitalist—who lived to the ripe old age of seventy-five.
13
Practically Imbeciles
Harriett wasn’t sure what to do. It was 1936, and the Great Depression had only just begun to plateau, with nearly ten million Americans still out of work. Jobs were still almost impossible to find, and drought was gripping the Southeast again. In her native Franklin County, money was so scarce that a farmer’s choices were to make whiskey, steal, or starve. Many made whiskey, judging from the ongoing conspiracy case that had swept up fifty-five of the county’s moonshiners and haulers, plus dozens of sheriff’s deputies, Prohibition agents, and even the commonwealth’s attorney—who were all thought to be on the take.
Though Prohibition ended in 1933, the multi-tentacled case extended back to 1928 and drew national attention. Between 1930 and 1935, local still operators and their business partners had sold a volume of whiskey that would have generated $5.5 million in excise taxes. Juries were tampered with, bribes offered, and a deputy who happened to be a key government witness was gunned down in his car on a country road, along with a prisoner he was carting to jail on unrelated business—all to keep the deputy from testifying.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had pushed to end Prohibition for good. It hadn’t kept people from drinking anyway, judging from all the swinging nip joints in Jordan’s Alley alone. But money trumped morals when politicians finally conceded that the new liquor taxes were helping fund federal jobs projects. (One such program, the Federal Writers’ Project, employed writers to collect oral histories from across the country—including, for instance, some stories of the Franklin County ex-slaves drawn on earlier in this book.)
Roosevelt himself came to the Roanoke Valley, visiting nearby Salem to dedicate a huge new Veterans Administration hospital complex in 1935. But Harriett Muse, now in her early sixties, had no way of getting to a VA cleaning job even if she’d been lucky enough to land one.
She missed the country. She missed her sons.
And she was dead broke, now dependent on her daughter and son-in-law—who had mouths of their own to feed.
The checks sent home by Ringling Brothers had stopped coming in the early 1930s, according to court records. Though Ringling did swing through Roanoke in the fall of 1935—the local newspaper described it as a “clean show”—there was no mention of Eko and Iko, which we now know was because they were no longer part of the lineup.
Harriett had no idea where or how Willie and George were, and no real way of finding out. In a repeat of what happened to them in their early careers, Candy Shelton had switched the brothers to another show, abruptly cutting off their paychecks—and all contact with their mother.
Having abandoned the contract Warren Messick had negotiated as part of the 1928 settlement package, he was also avoiding the ire of Ringling’s lawyers by finding them all a new employer who played looser with contractual details than Ringling did.
In circus lingo, he had blown the show.
But Shelton had forgotten what a worthy adversary Harriett Muse was. Even her descendants had no idea how consistently fierce she’d had to be, the stories of her heroic actions in 1927 eclipsing any reports of her subsequent battles.
Though the voluminous documents don’t relay her precise motivations, they do reveal that every time the money stopped coming home, Harriett took forceful legal action. While we’ll never know where Willie and George preferred to be as they aged, or how much oversight they had over their earnings—including their mother’s cut—it’s clear from the records that their family connection remained strong.
She had risked her life in 1927, standing up for her sons against lawyers, circus showmen, and the police. That was all true. But her bravery then was simply a prelude to what she would spend the remainder of her life doing: holding the showmen legally accountable. The next case became so convoluted and so protracted that it would persist longer, even, than the moonshine-conspiracy trial.
Harriett hadn’t seen George and Willie for “three to five years,” according to court documents filed in the fall of 1936. The brothers were performing in a carnival called Beckmann and Gerety Shows now, working for a sideshow operated by the Greek-born Canadian Pete Kortes, whose name was pronounced, maybe ironically, “courts.”
If Shelton had dominated the first half of the Muse brothers’ careers, Kortes would dominate the last. And so would the courts.
About a third the size of Ringling, the B&G carnival still was not a small operation. Described as a “Stupendous Spectacle of Inconceivable Magnificence,” promising “Fun and Thrills for the Entire Family,” the traveling show had enough performers, rides, and animals to fill thirty train cars. Major acts included the Singers Midget Band, John Ruhl’s Flea Circus, and Marjorie Kemp, a curvaceous brunette daredevil who rode the pitched walls of the motordrome in a tiny race car—with a lion seated next to her.
Run by Fred Beckmann, a longtime showman with deep jowls, the show was visited by twenty-five million people annually. It traversed eighteen thousand miles a year, mostly in the midwestern, central, and southwestern states, where its stops lasted five or six days. Among the larger traveling carnivals, B&G was sizable enough that it issued its own “brass,” or scrip—tokens performers used as part of their pay to buy food and other items on the show lot.
Kortes ran the sideshow, paying rent to Beckmann for his exhibit space, which he grandly titled the Kortes World’s Fair Museum. Along with myriad showmen of that era, Kortes routinely ripped off the World’s Fair moniker, hoping to profit from the association with wildly popular and much grander events and harking back, most notably, to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a six-month exposition that drew twenty-seven million visitors and heralded America’s emerging prowess in science, technology, and anthropology.
But whereas the nineteenth-century presentation of exhibits was rooted in the flawed, xenophobic science popular at the time—people actually believed Zip might have been a member of a brand-new species combining elements of human and ape—Americans were increasingly familiar with medicine and more knowledgeable about people living on the other side of the world. Accordingly, the sideshow began to reflect a more comic, almost tongue-in-cheek view of human differentness.
Kortes’s 1935 version of a world’s fair featured Barney Nelson, the Colored Armless Wonder and the Most Amazing Man You Ever Saw, and the sixty-pound Shadow Harrow, the Thinnest Man in the World, placed alongside Tiny, the World’s Largest Girl. It was fronted by Miss Gibbons, whose back featured a giant tattoo of The Last Supper.
The once-heralded space travelers were absent, though, having been replaced by Eko and Iko, the Sheep-Headed Men from Ecuador. Why, for ten years, bragged a newspaper in Rockford, Illinois, they had even been “one of the ace attractions” of Ringling!
Working alongside his brother, George Kourtis (who refused to Americanize his surname), Pete Kortes had started out in the business as a fire-eater during World War I. George had been the manager for Schlitzie, the microcephalic performer (or pinhead, in offensive showman parlance) featured in the film Freaks, and he later managed Athelia, another microcephalic, believed to be Schlitzie’s sibling. Unlike Harry Lewiston, who admitted to binding the limbs of two microcephalics—so they couldn’t masturbate—George treated them relatively well, providing a nurse to supervise them and manage their hygiene. They were incontinent, which is why microcephalic males were typically presented as females. When they wore dresses, it was easier to change their diapers.
For a time, Pete Kortes also managed Schlitzie. “But he didn’t need both of them, and as he became older, Schlitzie was a little rangy and hard to get along with,” said Ward Hall, who eventually bought Kortes’s show.
While the Muse brothers abhorred Shelton, Nancy Saunders recalled, they were quite fond of Kortes and his wife, Marie, who cooked meals and planne
d off-hour outings for the performers. Kortes was a fun-loving, friendly sort, Willie told her, a heavy drinker but not abusive when drunk. His trips were more relaxed, and it was he who would make possible one of their favorite experiences: swimming with dolphins.
In a picture of the Kortes gang taken in Honolulu, the Muses pose happily for a group sideshow portrait, the clenched fists and nervous glances of their earlier photos long gone. George has his arm draped over Athelia’s shoulder. The group is at a restaurant, with Pete at the head of the table, wearing thick black-framed glasses and holding a cigarette. He’s seated next to the “fat man” Jack Connor, who required the extra space at the table’s edge. As the Muses entered middle age, their hairlines seem to retreat in direct proportion to their expanding waistlines.
As one writer of that era described them: “Their hobby is music, and they play it on their platform, softly practicing on saxophone and guitar, hour after hour, when not called upon by the inside talker to stand up and be seen.”
It was the life they were used to.
But the happy-go-lucky sheen of the photographs and news clippings belies the seamier side of the business arrangement with Shelton and, likable or not, with Pete and Marie Kortes.
According to dozens of court documents filed on the Muse family’s behalf in the mid-to late 1930s, Shelton was back to his old tricks and had been for several years: he was stealing the brothers’ pay again and keeping them as far away from Roanoke as possible.
Harriett had no idea where they were. Again. But period documents show they were all over the place with Kortes, after Shelton joined forces with the sideshow carnival showman in 1931. Two years later, Shelton switched back to Ringling, and it was business as usual with the Big One again, though he and the Muses still traveled annually with Kortes in the off-season: with the tacit approval of both Ringling and Kortes, Shelton continued stealing their earnings. No money was sent home, nor was any news about the brothers, including their whereabouts.
Harriett would strike back legally in 1936. But by that time, Ringling wasn’t as invested as it had been in 1927 in holding on to its sideshow stars. The Big One was preoccupied with turbulence of a much bigger sort throughout the 1930s, extending from its biggest big-top performers to the men putting up the tents.
The opening salvo hit in March 1931, when Leitzel, the most beloved circus performer of all time, fell to her death in Copenhagen. The brass swivel on her performing rope had snapped, and she shot from her trapeze, landing on a floor protected only by a thin rubber mat. Just moments before, a crowd of hundreds had been applauding so wildly for her that the crystals on the performance hall chandelier shook.
The news devastated the circus community, especially John Ringling, who considered Leitzel and her husband, Alfredo Codona, dear friends. He used to chew his cigar to bits during their most dangerous routines.
A few years later, Codona was still mourning Leitzel and in the midst of the breakup of his second marriage, to Vera Bruce, a circus bareback rider who’d frowned on the shrine he maintained to Leitzel—in their bedroom. “I am going back to Leitzel, the only woman who ever loved me,” he wrote in a suicide note. Then he shot and killed Bruce before turning the gun on himself.
Leitzel and Codona had been the glimmering showstoppers adorning the cake, but the foundational layers, too, were beginning to cave. A power grab orchestrated by lawyer John Kelley against John Ringling had wrested the circus out of the potentate’s hands, crippling his finances, which in turn—aided by decades of late-night meals and myriad poor lifestyle choices—crippled his health.
The takeover was payback for a poor business decision Ringling had made in 1929, when he took out a $1.7 million loan to buy the Peru, Indiana–based American Circus Corporation. Ringling purchased the company purely out of spite after Madison Square Garden changed the terms of his opening-day contract, eliminating Friday shows for the circus, which the Garden now wanted to devote to the more lucrative spectacle of prizefighting.
According to his nephew Henry Ringling North, John Ringling initially responded by telling “them with anatomical exactitude precisely where they could put their contract, and announced that the circus would open at the 22nd Regiment Armory.”
When the Garden promptly contracted with Ringling’s only serious rival, ACC, “John Ringling was thunderstruck,” his nephew recalled. Some form of the family circus had been opening at Madison Square Garden for more than fifty years. “His rage consumed him. And destroyed his business judgment.”
Ringling tried to trump the deal the only way he knew how. He bought the American Circus Corporation for $2 million.
But putting his circus into so much debt proved to be unduly risky in 1929.
With only a little cash down, he’d taken out the note for $1.7 million from the Prudence Bond and Mortgage Company, which financed the deal. His plan was to incorporate a new company and sell its shares to the stock-frenzied public, thus paying off the note, according to his nephew.
But before he could sell an issue of circus stock, the market crashed.
The ACC purchase had been childish, and it was, ultimately, Ringling’s undoing. By 1936, his competitors had filed an antitrust lawsuit, and his real estate holdings were so entangled that almost every lawyer in Sarasota was engaged in a suit either for or against him. (There were at least one hundred lawsuits pending against him.)
After his own family members and many longtime associates—including lawyer Kelley—had taken control back to save the debt-plagued circus, John Ringling was now simply a figurehead, forbidden from making any commitments in the name of the circus. His personal life was equally fraught. After his beloved wife, Mable, died in 1929, Ringling had married a sophisticated (and very spoiled) socialite. So tone-deaf was Emily Ringling to the needs of Depression-starved folks that she went to a Sarasota country-club party themed “How to Have Fun Though Broke” costumed as she imagined the poor might dress—wearing a native Cuban outfit with a string of new potatoes around her neck.
In the months leading up to his death, in 1936, Ringling wasn’t even allowed to mingle with the crew at the circus. Employees were forbidden to speak to him, and he was mostly alone in his rapidly deteriorating Florida mansion with only his private nurse, who stayed on to work for him—though she hadn’t been paid since 1933—and his yacht captain from happier days, who now “did his best to keep the grounds and gardens from going back to the jungle,” according to Henry North. North (whom Ringling dubbed Buddy) also filled in gratis as his uncle’s business agent, chauffeur, handyman, cook, and butler. To keep Ringling’s art collection from deteriorating in the sea-damp climate, he borrowed library books and Harvard University technical papers and gave himself a DIY course in art restoration.
In 1938, Henry and his brother, John Ringling North, took over management of the Big One, determined to restore its reputation as the greatest show on earth. But labor disputes were raging across the country, and that June, in one twenty-four-hour period in Erie, Pennsylvania, sixty-seven crewmen walked off the job. John Ringling North had announced that everyone, executives included, would be taking a 25 percent pay cut. Aggrieved employees responded by sabotaging the brakes on twelve train cars. Delayed train departures created delayed performances, in turn creating mayhem under the tents. Pinkerton detectives were called in to guard the trains.
A falling tent pole shattered a spectator’s shoulder. Then the North brothers’ latest menagerie star, a gorilla named Gargantua they’d bought from an eccentric woman in Brooklyn (and managed to get featured on the cover of Life magazine), turned on his keeper, attacking him in front of the crowd.
Circus managers, who had historically responded to roustabout wage demands by simply replacing the men, could no longer ignore workers’ pleas. The rousties had recently organized for the first time ever as an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, so when John Ringling North decided to cut wages, a full-on strike was called.
The show went on. In Ja
nesville, Wisconsin, managers broke picket lines with elephants. In New York City, John Ringling North himself helped clowns and midgets hoist ropes and rig performers’ nets. At another stop, the cage serving as the panther’s arena was moved and reassembled by Clyde Ingalls and Jack Earle while Harry Doll assisted by securing the trapdoor ropes—and the audience assumed it was all just part of the show.
During a late June stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the Norths could no longer finagle a work-around. As Henry North described it, “We were in considerable danger” from labor activists, some of whom were pelting performers with rocks. “For five days we were besieged in the Casey Hotel, with the circus stalled on the lot. We could not move it out, and the left-wing mayor of Scranton was disinclined to help us or offer protection.”
This time the North brothers couldn’t round up enough strikebreakers to move the circus out, not even with the elephants on standby. At the end of the standoff, Henry paid $12,000 in “strike costs” to the union before taking the circus back to winter quarters midseason.
To save the show, John Ringling North, thirty-four at the time, had the moxie to talk the best performers into moving west and switching to the Ringling subsidiary, Al G. Barnes-Sells Floto Combined Shows, whose employees were not unionized. Its workers had already agreed to accept the 25 percent pay cut.
Even Gargantua the Great, the World’s Most Terrifying Living Creature, joined the twenty-one railcars leaving Sarasota for South Dakota. Adding the Ringling performers doubled the size of the Barnes-Sells Floto show, which pushed the media superlatives into overdrive as the circus publicity machine tried to overshadow news mentions of labor struggles. The gorilla performed alongside Mabel Stark, the World’s Only Lion and Tiger Trainer, and along with aerialist Janet May, who could pull off one-arm flips from her rope but “lacked the polish of the celebrated artist” she was trying to evoke—Leitzel. Or maybe it was still too soon after Leitzel’s death for critics to fully embrace May’s efforts.