The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  The rain started again. During the break, we went into the players’ lounge, a big white tent set up behind the courts. Tennis racquets and racquet cases were piled up near the door. Raymond sat down next to Lindsay Davenport, whose match had also been suspended. Helena Sukova, a Czech player, who started on the tour the same year as Manuela, stood in a corner, dripping from the rainstorm, and flexed her legs. Maggie sat across the room, stretching to keep from cramping, and chatting with the tournament’s massage therapist about Jennifer Capriati, who had recently been arrested on a drug charge. “I didn’t know her too well, but I thought she was cool,” Maggie said. “She was a cool person. I faxed her a letter the other day to tell her I thought she was cool.” Manuela and Youlia were at the other end of the tent, faxing a note to Katerina, in Bulgaria, and glancing every few moments at Maggie. A few other players and their coaches were milling around, talking about their travel plans for Paris. Everyone who had lost her match was leaving Lucerne immediately, because the French Open was starting in three days. The losers seemed cheerful. It occurred to me that the best players on the tour are always the last ones to leave, because everyone who loses has either gone home or gone on to the next tournament. No one sticks around just to watch someone else win. Players would rather be early at the next tournament site. Linda Harvey-Wild, a Chicagoan, was one of the people in the tent. I asked her how long she was going to be in Lucerne, and she said, “Hey, not much longer! I lost! I’m done! I’m out of here! If I can get a flight, I’m leaving for Paris today!”

  After an hour or so, the rain let up, and, once the courts had been mopped, the matches resumed. Maggie would hit several strong shots and then a string of reckless ones, and as she got frustrated her body seemed to get disorganized. Youlia was now leaning over the railing of the grandstand. The boy with the frankfurters was gone, so I edged closer to Youlia. The second set went to 3–0, in Raymond’s favor, and then it began to drizzle again. We headed back to the lounge. Youlia walked beside Maggie and said something to her in Bulgarian, and then added, in a low voice, “She’s playing out of her mind.”

  “Mom,” Maggie said, grimacing.

  Manuela walked next to them, saying nothing. The rain stopped after a few minutes, and the courts were sponged dry again. The two players went back onto the court. Raymond had tightened her ponytail, and it seemed to be pulling back the corners of her eyes. She looked fierce. One of her shots nicked the line and was called in; Maggie bounced her racquet on its head and then walked over to the umpire, saying, “What? Are you craaazy?” Her accent made the word crazy sound lulling and poetic. She did not get the call, did not win the game, and did not win the match. The final score was 7–5, 6–4, Raymond. As soon as the match was over, Youlia stood up, walked quickly to the lounge, and headed for the phone, to call about flights to Paris. Maggie slung her racquet cases over her shoulder and trudged toward the locker room. Manuela followed her in and didn’t emerge for several minutes. In the car back to the hotel, Maggie cried a little and then stared out at a cottony fog that had wrapped around the Alps. After a moment, she rubbed her nose and said, “I wish I had won. It’s kind of a bummer.”

  THE RICHEST, most famous sisters in Bulgaria did not have the best time of their lives at the Grand Slams this summer. At Wimbledon, Katerina drew the second seed, Aranxta Sánchez Vicario, in the first round and lost; Maggie beat Shaun Stafford in the first but was upset by an unknown Indonesian player in the second. In the French Open, Maggie had been seeded thirteenth, but she lost in her first-round match against Ruxandra Dragomir. They had played each other many times before in Bulgaria, starting when Ruxandra was fourteen and Maggie was twelve, and Maggie had usually won. Ruxandra admitted to me afterward that she hadn’t been too happy when she saw she was facing Maggie in the first round. “I was like, Oh my God,” she said. “It was like, I wish I wasn’t playing her. But today I was really confident, and she wasn’t expecting me to play so well, so she got scared.” For the next day or two, I hardly saw Maggie around at all. I asked Manuela how Maggie was. She said, “She had two days that were not very good. That’s how it is. She’ll be okay.” When I finally saw Maggie again, she was wearing her burgundy outfit and did seem okay, although she looked slightly peaked. Unlike other first-round losers, she wasn’t packing for home or for Wimbledon, because her whole family, except for her father, was for the moment residing in Paris at the hotel. Also, she had decided at the last minute to play the doubles competition with Katerina.

  The evening after Maggie lost to Ruxandra, I’d seen Youlia in the lounge. She was wearing thick-soled sneakers and a T-shirt from last year’s Wimbledon. She said that Dragomir had gotten lucky. “Do you remember that one incredible shot she hit? One of her strings was broken, and she hit such a risky shot, a backhand down the line. That gave her such a boost.” She sighed deeply, and then said, “This is when it can kill you to be a mother and a coach. This is when it can kill you to have tennis in your family.”

  Katerina played Linda Harvey-Wild in her first round. During the match, her fiancé, Georgi, sat beside Youlia, but Maggie and Manuela, as usual, sat several rows apart and some distance from their mother. Katerina played an orderly and unyielding game, while Harvey-Wild was batting most of her passing shots into the net, double-faulting, and missing easy overheads. When the match was over, all the Maleevas looked exhausted and relieved. Two days later, in the second round, Katerina played a beefy German named Marketa Kochta. During the match, Kochta’s coach sat at one end of the grandstand, and the Maleevas broke with family tradition and sat together at the other end. Katerina won the first set, 6–0, but then lost the next two, 3–6 and 2–6. As the match went on, she looked more and more solemn; in the stands her mother and her sisters sat more and more upright, their faces pulled into frowns. Kochta looked more and more surprised, and when she finally won she looked as if she might faint.

  SERIOUSLY SILLY

  FOR A WHILE, SILLY BILLY WAS OF THE MIND that all clowns were fungible. This was in 1989, when his business as a children’s entertainer in New York began growing by leaps and bounds; he couldn’t personally satisfy all the requests he was getting to appear at birthday parties, so he decided to add personnel. The first was a social worker he saw doing an impromptu routine at a children’s Christmas party. Silly Billy was so impressed that he offered to make the social worker his supplementary clown. He named him Silly Willy and taught him the Silly Billy act, which is a mixture of clowning, magic, balloon sculpture, and wisecracks. If clients called when his own calendar was filled, Silly Billy would offer Silly Willy in his stead. For a year or so, the addition of Silly Willy was sufficient, but the children’s party market kept expanding, and Silly Billy eventually had to hire Silly Milly and Silly Dilly. Before they were sent out as Silly Billy affiliates, he taught them the fundamental balloon animals (several breeds of dogs, a duck, a mouse, and a bird) and at least ten good tricks, like Hippety-Hop Rabbits, Farmyard Frolics, Vanishing Ketchup Bottle, Milk Pitcher on Head, and Mixed-Up Santa. For consistency, all the clowns were dressed like Silly Billy—floppy felt hat, red T-shirt, miniature necktie, patchwork pants, rainbow suspenders, mismatched sneakers, no makeup, and lensless plastic eyeglass frames approximately three times normal size—and they all used Silly Billy’s magic word, “Googly-googly.” This is how Silly Billy came to dominate the clown industry in New York. Not only was he able to supply quality clowns in the Silly Billy mold but he could also diversify price points. If you call his company, The Funniest Clowns in the Whole Wide World, you can request a $100 clown, which would be one of the associate Sillies, or a $150 clown, which would be Silly Willy, or you can go for the top, which means engaging the services of Silly Billy himself, who charges from $250 to $400 and is the preeminent clown in town.

  SILLY BILLY TRAVELS HEAVY. On the job, he carries a fiberboard case that is four feet high and two feet wide and weighs about eighty-five pounds. On a busy day—that is, a day when he is booked at five or six birthday par
ties around the city—he might have to hoist the case into and out of half a dozen different taxis. Cabdrivers often decline the opportunity to assist him. Sometimes they look at his case, then look at his patchwork pants and his tiny necktie and his rainbow suspenders and his mismatched sneakers, with their Mickey & Pals Bow Biters, and then look back at the case and crack “Hey, whaddya got in there, pal, a dead body?” and Silly will slap his forehead, then clutch his chest and say “My God, yes!”

  Actually, the case contains his hat, his glasses, a bullhorn, a camera, a ninety-nine-cent plastic poncho, a Kit Kat, cough drops, a Magic Marker, some Sudafed, and an issue of Magic; about twenty magic tricks, including Bongo Hat, Drooping Flower, Chinese Sticks, Silk to Egg, Card on Ceiling, Dove Pan, and Soft Soap; a box of little time-killer props (a deck of stuck-together cards, a troll, a fake hand, a whistle, a squeaker); four different magic wands and a movie clapper; two gross of long, skinny balloons; a few inflatable birthday cakes, 144 heart-shaped balloons, and several hundred somersaulting Silly Billy balloons; several hundred cardboard feet for the Silly Billy balloons; concealer makeup to cover his beard late in the afternoon; a Mak Magic French Arm Chopper; and a cellular telephone. His pants have ten pockets. One is filled with notes about his day’s schedule. Beside the name and address he jots down whether the mother sounds nice, whether there is a cute baby-sitter he might ask out on a date, whether the birthday kid is shy, and also whether the kid has seen him before. Because Silly has performed for so many thousands of parties since his first, in 1985, this last notation is sometimes a double-digit number rather than a simple yes or no. Recently, Silly did a birthday party for a first grader on the Upper West Side; most of the children at the party had seen him at four other birthday parties that month. One group of five-year-olds who are classmates at the Lycée Français de New York, a private school on the Upper East Side, saw him seven times this fall. There are other prominent children’s entertainers in New York—Princess Pricilla, Magic Al, Professor Putter, Pinkie the Clown, and Arnie Kolodner, to name a few—but if you are between three and five years old and have any kind of social life at all, you are probably intimately familiar with Silly Billy’s work.

  ONE DAY LAST MONTH, Silly was eyeing his case with some despair, because he had a tight schedule, involving multiple taxi rides—the kind of day that makes him complain that suburban clowns have it easy, since they can just drive themselves around. “On the other hand,” he was saying, “I have clown friends out on Long Island who sit around all week with nothing to do, because everyone out there only gives parties on weekends.” Silly’s schedule that day, a Friday, included a party for six hundred children of the employees of Davis Polk & Wardwell, a midtown law firm; a birthday party for a four-year-old girl on Park Avenue; a holiday party that the Japanese Ambassador to the United States was giving for the children of his staff; and a birthday party for a three-year-old boy in Bronxville. On Saturday, he would be doing a party for a three-year-old girl at an Upper East Side children’s gym and a children’s holiday party at a Locust Valley country club.

  We stood on the corner waiting for a cab that wouldn’t be scared off by the enormous case or by Silly Billy’s costume. At the moment, most of his costume was concealed: He never puts on his hat and glasses until he arrives at a party, and today he was wearing a down-filled parka that covered him to the top of his patchwork knees. From the neck up, Silly is actually a very regular-looking guy. He has silky black hair, a refined mouth, and the sort of huge, dark, satiny eyes that are standard in clown portraits on black velvet. Out of necessity, he has learned to clean-jerk eighty-five pounds, but his build is smallish and wiry. His hands are fine-boned, square-nailed, fluid, and impressively pale. His clown voice and his normal voice are pretty much the same—light, nasal, and slightly sarcastic. He is rather sly. He has the manner of an older brother who first tortures and teases you, then pulls a quarter out of your nose, levitates the kitchen table, and finally cracks you up.

  One day, he said to me, “I just realized that before I became Silly Billy there was no Silly Billy.” Before he was Silly Billy, he briefly considered being Uncle Funny and, even more briefly, Mr. Funny, and, quite protractedly, was David Friedman. He is now thirty-three years old. His résumé, in reverse chronology, goes: children’s performer, 1985 to present; street performer specializing in balloon animals, 1984 to 1986; marketing associate at Doubleday books, March 1984 to December 1984; student at Northwestern University, 1978 to 1982; teenager/owner/chief executive officer of Tip-Top Novelties, a magic-trick and novelty business (whoopee cushions, itching powder, Snappy Gum, and so forth), 1974 to 1978.

  Arriving in the lobby at Davis Polk, we were met by a slender woman in a navy blue suit. “Silly?” she said, hesitantly. “Bonnie?” he responded. They shook hands. Bonnie had organized Davis Polk’s holiday party. Silly had rated her “Nice!!” on his schedule note. She had booked him for the party in early fall, and they had spoken on the phone several times since. One of Silly Billy’s business philosophies is that a client should speak directly to his or her specific clown as soon as the date is booked. Bonnie’s only special requests were for Silly to do at least one Hanukkah trick and to bring Crazy String. Because this was a big corporate party rather than a private birthday, Silly would be doing a special version of his show: lots of jokes and magic tricks, but not his big finale, in which he makes balloon costumes for all the kids and has them act out a play like Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast. Bonnie led us to an elevator and then down a hallway lined with attorneys’ offices and conference rooms, where popcorn, hot dog, ice cream, and candy vendors were now set up for the party. A juggler friend of Silly’s walked by and waved at us. In a big conference room, where Silly was going to perform, several waiters in tuxedos were setting up chairs. Silly started unpacking his case. A patrician-looking man in a chalk-striped gray suit stuck his head in the room and called out, “Silly Billy? Is that you? Are you happy? That is, do you have everything you need?” Silly nodded. A moment later, the man came back, leading a little boy about two feet tall, who was wearing a matching chalk-striped gray suit. They sat in the first row of chairs.

  One of the waiters looked over at us and said, “My God—Silly!”

  Silly looked up and said, “Ziggy. Small world.” He turned to me and said, “Allow me to introduce Ziggy the Clown, the former Silly Willy.” To Ziggy he said, “So how was your show?”

  “Killer,” the waiter said. “I performed for two dozen Yiddish-speaking Orthodox kids, and they loved it.”

  Silly rummaged around in the case and pulled out a bag of balloons and a prop for the Drooping Flower gag. “Good,” he said to Ziggy. “By the way, I’m doing the Underwear trick downtown. For some reason, it works with the kids there and not uptown. It must be a cultural thing. Also, the Multiplying Bananas. Hey, how are your lungs? Blow up a snowman for me.”

  “What’s the Multiplying Bananas?”

  Silly stopped unpacking, gave Ziggy a look, and said, “Please don’t tell me you work for me and you don’t know Multiplying Bananas.” He made a dramatic show of exasperation. Then he explained to him how to multiply bananas. Then he began to explain to me how you turn Silly Willy into Ziggy the Clown: “In the beginning, I thought it was a good idea to make all the clowns interchangeable. Then I started thinking that it was confusing to children to see several Silly Billy–like people, and that as an artist I was diluting the value of the name Silly Billy, because there were so many other Silly-whatevers. I needed to keep my identity more unique.” He gave the other clowns new costumes and he renamed them. He went through a Loony phase—there is a Loony Lenny, Loony Louie, Loony Loony, Loony Goony, and Loony Lucy—and then he got more free-form. On his staff now, there are Melody the Clown, for instance, and someone named just plain Clarence.

  Silly also decided to reserve exclusive use of “Googly-googly” for himself, so he held an interoffice contest for a new, underclown magic word. The winning submission, “Iggy-la-piggy-
wiggy,” came from Silly Willy, who happened to be the only clown who refused to change his name; he fought Silly Billy for a year over it. Ziggy told me that even though he was tired of being confused with Silly Billy, he had been Silly Willy for three years and had a considerable following of his own, including people who actually preferred his gentleness to Silly Billy’s smart-alecky, edgy style. Nonetheless, Silly Billy insisted. Silly Willy, who in real life performed as a social worker under the name Micah Goldstein, finally gave in to his boss and settled on the name Ziggy the Clown. Now the two of them just fight about tricks and gags and whether Silly is generous enough with his praise. “Basically, we fight all the time, but I’m very loyal to him,” Ziggy says of Silly Billy. “After all, he found me. I never planned on being a clown, and then Silly Billy came along. Now I feel like wherever I go I will clown. If I move to—oh, Dallas or something, I will clown. Right now, I still have to do a little catering on the side to make a living, but I would love to do what Silly Billy does—to be a clown full time and have the kind of stature he has. I’m not sure there’s room at the top in this city for more clowns at his level. I’m the $150 clown, the upper-middle-class clown. There are millions of cheap clowns out there, and dozens of upper-middle-class clowns, but only one or two at the high end with Silly Billy. He’s the crème-de-la-crème clown.”