by Susan Orlean
HIGH-END BIRTHDAY PARTIES often have high-end birthday cakes. Silly Billy documents remarkable ones for his own amusement. This is why he carries a camera. He once photographed a cake that was a six-foot-long mocha-butter-cream scale model of an aircraft carrier. The theme of the party was the armed services. During the party, an actual helicopter landed on the front lawn. The birthday boy was five years old. Silly has also photographed cakes shaped like a freight train, a fire engine, a Barbie doll, and a panoramic countryside with spun-sugar streams, meadows, cottages, and a population of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Another popular cake is one decorated with a portrait of Silly Billy: Many children are so fond of him that they request him for dessert. Recently, a parent hired an artist to produce a marzipan portrait of Silly on a large sheet cake. Silly provided a snapshot of himself for the artist to work from. The snapshot had been taken late in the afternoon, and the artist was extremely faithful to it, so the birthday cake ended up decorated with an almond-paste Silly Billy wearing a five o’clock shadow.
Sometimes the birthday cake is just a grocery store variety and the party is in a housing project and there are no gingerbread place cards or Barney tablecloths or mountains of presents: There is just Silly Billy or one of his clowns. Once, Ziggy was telling me about the first shows he did after Silly Billy trained him. His debut was in front of thirteen six-year-old Hispanic girls in Spanish Harlem. His second party was held at a McDonald’s in the Bronx, but he was tossed out before he could perform, because McDonald’s didn’t allow clowns on the premises. In the middle of this story, he interrupted himself and said, “You know, people think only rich parents would have a live entertainer at their kid’s party, but we do lots and lots in humble surroundings. I think that for a lot of people having a clown at their kid’s birthday party is really important. It’s become part of the American dream, like owning a VCR.”
SILLY BILLY DOES NOT plan to become an old-man clown. He and Princess Pricilla, who specializes in fairy-tale performances, are brainstorming a Silly Billy–Princess Pricilla television collaboration; he has also started doing performances at parties for adults, under the name David Friedman. For adult parties, he does magic, and he has developed expertise in the field of off-color balloons. He has mastered a balloon man with a rising and falling erection, and believes he will soon have a breakthrough involving ejaculation. He told me this on the Long Island Rail Road while we were riding out to the country club party in Locust Valley. He had been explaining the advance in balloon technology that took place in the sixties-when the introduction of long, skinny balloons meant that animals could be made out of a single balloon, instead of being pieced together from several separate ones—and absentmindedly he began making a few balloon men, causing certain parts of them to inflate and deflate in very interesting ways. An elderly man sitting across the aisle fixed his eyes on us and, for the remainder of the forty-minute ride, did not once look away. By the time we got to Locust Valley, there was a pile of aroused figures on Silly’s seat. As we were getting ready to go, Silly started to gather up the balloons, then gave me a sly look and whispered, “I think we should leave them all on the train.”
THE WILCOX PARTY, at Park Avenue and Eighty-first: seventeen four-year-olds, some with mothers, some with nannies. Chloe, the birthday girl, dressed in an Empire-waisted midcalf red velvet jumper, has been described by her mother as “not shy”—that is, willing to be Silly Billy’s assistant in the participation tricks. Silly Billy is familiar with the apartment, which is big and bright, because he has done parties for all the Wilcox children. Before he sets up his props, he asks Bruce Wilcox if he can use the phone. Bruce Wilcox scowls, and says, “Well, don’t stay on long. I’m in the middle of a trade.” Silly makes a quick call and goes back to setting up his props on a coffee table in the living room. The children stare at him, transfixed. He starts with his warm-up—inflating a dozen balloons to be used later, during the play, and allowing every third or fourth one to escape and fly screeching and whistling across the room. He calls Chloe to come up. He tries putting a hat on her head; she balks. He asks her to hold his magic wand; she balks again. He says, “Okay, Chloe, why don’t you say, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’ ” Chloe stares down. Silly says, “Do you want to talk? You don’t want to talk? Okay, we’ll do the nontalking tricks.” Chloe, looking relieved, sits down. Silly gives her an inflatable birthday cake, which one of her guests, Nicholas, grabs, saying, “I already have one of those.” Silly rolls his eyes and says to the mothers, “Four years old and he’s already jaded.”
In the cab, leaving the party, Silly pulls out his Wilcox party notes. He always rates his own performance—the scale is “Great Perfect,” “Great,” “Very Good,” or “Good.” He also writes “All Knew” if all the kids knew him from earlier parties, or “All New” if they are first-timers. This was a “Most Knew. Great” party. “I know Chloe didn’t do the tricks with me, but she had fun,” he said. “She was there with me the whole time.”
At the home of the Japanese ambassador: twenty-three adult women, in fancy blouses and skirts; thirty children, the boys in blazers and the girls in velvet dresses; and one man, in rumpled pants and a cardigan, who sits alone on a big couch. The man on the couch is the ambassador. The house is grand and formal. Silly decides to do one of his favorite tricks, Card on Ceiling, in which he shuffles a deck of cards and the top one mysteriously shoots upward and sticks to the ceiling. Once it is on the ceiling, it is more or less a permanent part of the plaster. The effect is spectacular in houses with very high ceilings. Silly likes walking past houses where he has performed this trick and checking on the cards months after the party. At the ambassador’s house, the deck explodes and the card flies upward. For a moment, no one says anything or moves, and then the mothers start murmuring nervously, and glance at the ambassador, who is staring at the card. Finally, he applauds. Silly lets out a small sigh, and then says to the children, in Japanese, “I don’t know how to speak Japanese.” On his notes: “Great. ½ Knew.” From there we go on to Bronxville.
On Saturday, we go to Gym Time, on the Upper East Side, for what Silly Billy calls a fully loaded party. “First, they have you, then the bagels, then Snow White is coming,” the Gym Time aide says as she leads us to the party room. “Thank God, there’s no Barney. Although I’m sure if they were going to have a Barney they would have got the really good Barney. Anyway, after Snow White the kids are going to play Munchkin Tennis for a while. They’ve rented the gym for two and a half hours.” The birthday girl is turning three today. Her mother pulls Silly Billy aside and says, “Remember, Silly, if you do the Three Little Pigs, she wants the wolf to be nice.” The party room is large and low-ceilinged and has a cushiony rubber floor. A buffet with platters of smoked fish, trays of fruit, and baskets of bagels and pastries for the adults is set up against one wall, and in the middle of the room is the children’s table, set with Snow White tablecloths and plates, minibagels, People Pops, Gummi Bears, Junior Juice, and gift bags. On a separate table, there is an enormous cake in the shape of an English Tudor castle inhabited by the Seven Dwarfs. This is a cake that will go into Silly’s photo book. Two mothers are admiring the cake. One says, “My God, the baker really outdid himself on this one, didn’t he?”
“Incredible,” the other says. “I heard he screwed up on the cookies. Look at this cake, though. It’s too pretty to eat. Maybe it’s, you know, a little done.” She gestures toward the children, who have swarmed over Silly Billy. “Look at my kid. Look at him. He’s got a hangover. He’s been to five birthday parties this week. He’s beat.” The hungover party boy has started tackling one child after another. His mother says, “I’m telling you, he’s just exhausted. Look at him!” The boy grabs Silly Billy’s leg, and then spots a ball, which he begins kicking around the room. “Brian,” his mother calls out. “No soccer now, honey. No soccer!”
After the show, as we are on our way out through the lobby of the gym, we see a pale young woman in a long cape coming
in. Silly watches her for a moment and then says, “You know who that is? That’s Snow White.”
At the show in Locust Valley, which is at a country club called The Creek, there are seventy-five children of all ages. The clubhouse is mahogany-paneled and leather-upholstered. An infant wearing a navy blue double-breasted gold-buttoned blazer and no pants crawls across the carpet as Silly Billy begins the show. Looking down, Silly says, “Who is this person? Does anyone know this person?” The parents are milling around in the back of the room, holding cocktails and chatting; the blazered baby crawls away. Silly wants this to be a “Great” show or even a “Great Perfect” show, because he’s never been hired by the club before. It is the end of a week in which he has entertained at twenty parties, and he’s losing his voice, but he droops his flower and shoots his card to the ceiling as if it were the very first time. At the end of the show, he gets a standing ovation, a check saying “Pay to the order of Silly Billy,” and assurances that the club would like him back.
On the train home, he says, “Sometimes, when I think about it, I realize that thousands and thousands of kids in New York have grown up watching Silly Billy and saying ‘Googly-googly’ as their magic word. It really makes me think. That’s what goes on in a clown’s mind. The big issues are what it means to deal with so many kids, whether I will ever figure out how to make a recognizable Barney balloon, and what is the meaning of life.”
LA MATADORA REVISA SU MAQUILLAJE
(THE BULLFIGHTER CHECKS HER MAKEUP)
I WENT TO SPAIN NOT LONG AGO TO WATCH Cristina Sánchez fight bulls, but she had gotten tossed by one during a performance in the village of Ejea de los Caballeros and was convalescing when I arrived. Getting tossed sounds sort of merry, but I saw a matador tossed once, and he looked like a saggy bale of hay flung by a pitchfork, and when he landed on his back he looked busted and terrified. Cristina got tossed by accidentally hooking a horn with her elbow during a pass with the cape, and the joint was wrenched so hard that her doctor said it would need at least three or four days to heal. It probably hurt like hell, and the timing was terrible. She had fights scheduled each of the nights she was supposed to rest and every night until October—every night, with no breaks in between. It had been like this for her since May, when she was elevated from the status of a novice to a full matador de toros. The title is conferred in a formal ceremony called “taking the alternativa,” and it implies that you are experienced and talented and that other matadors have recognized you as a top-drawer bullfighter. You will now fight the biggest, toughest bulls and will probably be hired to fight often and in the most prestigious arenas. Bullfighting becomes your whole life, your everyday life—so routine that “sometimes after you’ve fought and killed the bull you feel as if you hadn’t done a thing all day,” as Cristina once told me. When Cristina Sánchez took her alternativa, it caused a sensation. Other women before her have fought bulls in Spain. Many have only fought little bulls, but some did advance to big animals and become accomplished and famous, and a few of the best have been declared full matadors de toros. Juanita Cruz became a matador in 1940, and Morenita de Quindio did in 1968, and Raquel Martinez and Maribel Atienzar did in the eighties, but they all took their alternativas in Mexico, where the standards are a little less exacting. Cristina is the first woman to have taken her alternativa in Europe and made her debut as a matador in Spain.
There was a fight program of three matadors—a corrida—scheduled for the Madrid bullring the day after I got to Spain, and I decided to go so I could see some other toreros while Cristina was laid up with her bad arm. One of the three scheduled to perform was the bastard son of El Cordobés. El Cordobés had been a matador superstar in the sixties and a breeder of several illegitimate children and a prideful man who was so possessive of his nickname that he had once sued this kid—the one I was going to see—because the kid wanted to fight bulls under the name El Cordobés, too. In the end, the judge let each and every El Cordobés continue to be known professionally as El Cordobés.
The kid El Cordobés is a scrubbed, cute blond with a crinkly smile. Outside the rings where he is fighting, vendors sell fan photos of him alongside postcards and little bags of sunflower seeds and stuffed bull souvenirs. In the photos, El Cordobés is dressed in a plaid camp shirt and acid-washed blue jeans and is hugging a good-looking white horse. In the ring, he does some flashy moves on his knees in front of the bull, including a frog hop that he times to make it look like he’s going to get skewered. These tricks, plus the renown of his name, have gotten him a lot of attention, but El Cordobés is just one of many cute young male matadors working these days. If his knees give out, he might have nothing.
On the other hand, there is just one Cristina, and everyone in Spain knows her and is following her rise. She has gotten attention far outside of Spain and on television and in newspapers and even in fashion magazines; other matadors, even very good ones, fuse in the collective mind as man-against-bull, but every time Cristina kills a bull she forms part of a singular and unforgettable tableau—that of an attractive, self-possessed young woman elegantly slaying a large animal in a somber and ancient masculine ritual—and regardless of gender she is a really good matador, and she is being painstakingly managed and promoted, so there is no saying where her celebrity will stop. This is only her first season as a full matador, but it has been a big event. Lately El Cordobés or his publicist or his accountant has been igniting and fanning the rumor that he and Cristina Sánchez are madly in love, with the hope that her fame will rub off on him. She will probably be more and more acclaimed in the four or so years she plans to fight, and she will probably be credited with many more putative love affairs before her career is through.
Before the fight in Madrid, I walked around to the back of the bullring and through the patio de caballos, the dirt-floored courtyard and stable where the picadors’ horses and the donkeys that drag away the dead bull after the fight relax in their stalls and get their hair combed and get fed and get saddled. I was on my way to the bullfighting museum—the Museo Taurino—which is in a gallery next to the stalls. It was a brilliant day with just a whiff of wind. In the courtyard, musclemen were tossing equipment back and forth and unloading a horse trailer. Another twenty or so men were idling in the courtyard in the few pockets of shade or near the locked door of the matadors’ chapel, which is opened before the fight so the matadors can stop in and pray. The idlers were older men with bellies that began at their chins and trousers hiked up to their nipples, and they were hanging around just so they could take a look at the bulls for tonight’s fight and see how they were going to be divvied up among the three matadors. Really, there isn’t a crumb of any piece of bullfighting that goes unexamined by aficionados like these men. I lingered for a minute and then went into the museum. I wandered past the oil portraits of Manolete and Joselito and of dozens of other revered bullfighters, and past six stuffed and mounted heads of bulls whose names were Paisano, Landejo, Mediaonza, Jocinero, Hermano, and Perdigón—they were chosen for the museum because they had been particularly mean or unusual-looking or because they had killed someone famous. Then I stopped at a glass display case that had in it a picture of the matador Juanita Cruz. The picture was an eight-by-ten and looked like it had been shot in a studio. Juanita Cruz’s ivory face and her wedge of a chin and her pitch-black hair with its tiny standing waves were blurred along the edges, movie-star style. She looked solemn, and her eyes were focused on middle space. In the case next to the picture were her pink matador kneesocks and her mouse-eared matador hat and one of her bullfighter suits. These are called traje de luces, “suit of lights,” and all toreros wear them and like to change them often; Cristina has half a dozen, and Juanita Cruz probably owned twenty or so in the course of her bullfighting career. This one was blush pink with beautiful gold piping and sparkly black sequins. It had the classic short, stiff, big-shouldered, box-shaped matador jacket but not the capri trousers that all matadors wear, because Juanita Cruz fought in a s
kirt. There is no such thing as a matador skirt anymore—Cristina, of course, wears trousers. I looked at the skirt for a while and decided that even though it looked unwieldy it might actually have been an advantage—in a skirt, you can bend and stretch and lunge with a sword unconstrained. On the other hand, a skirt would have exposed so much fabric to the bull that in a fight it would have gotten awfully splashed and smeared with blood. Every matador has an assistant who is assigned to clean his suit with soap and a toothbrush after every fight. Juanita Cruz was popular and well accepted even though she was an anomaly, but late at night, as her assistant was scrubbing her big bloody skirt, I bet he cursed the fact that she had been wearing so much fabric while sticking swords into bulls.
I WENT TO VISIT Cristina at home the morning before she was going to be fighting in a corrida in a town called Móstoles. It was now a week since her injury, and her elbow apparently had healed. Two days earlier, she had tested it in a fight in Cordobés and another the following day in Jáen, and a friend of mine who reads Madrid’s bullfight newspaper told me Cristina had gotten very good reviews. It turns out that I was lucky to catch her at home, because she is hardly there during the bullfighting season—usually she keeps a rock star schedule, leaving whatever town she’s in with her crew right after she fights, driving all night to the next place on her schedule, checking into a hotel, sleeping until noon, eating lunch, watching some television, suiting up, fighting, and then leaving again. She was going to be at home this particular morning because Móstoles is only a few miles from Parla, the town where she and her parents and sisters live. She had come home the night before, after the fight in Jáen, and was planning to spend the day in Parla doing errands. The corrida in Móstoles would start at six. The assistant who helps her dress—he is called the sword boy, because he also takes care of all her cutlery—was going to come to the apartment at five so she could get prepared and then just drive over to the bullring already dressed and ready to go in her suit of lights. Parla is an unglamorous place about forty minutes south of Madrid; it is a kernel of an old village that had been alone on the wide-open plains but is now picketed by incredibly ugly high-rise apartment buildings put up in the midsixties for workers overflowing the available housing in Madrid. The Sánchez apartment is in a slightly less ugly and somewhat shorter brick building on a busy street, on a block with a driving school, a bra shop, and a bank. There is no name on the doorbell, but Cristina’s father’s initials are barely scratched into a metal plate beside it. These days it is next to impossible to find Cristina. The nearly unmarked doorbell is the least of it. Cristina has a magician press agent who can make himself disappear and a very powerful and self-confident manager—a former French bullfighter named Simon Casas—who is credited with having gotten her into the biggest bullrings and the best corridas in the country but is also impossible to find and even if he were findable he would tell you that his answer to your request to speak to Cristina is no. He is especially watchful of her international exposure. Simon Casas didn’t know I was coming to see Cristina in Parla and he might have disapproved simply to be disapproving, and after I saw him later that afternoon in Móstoles, prowling the perimeter of the bullring like an irritable wild animal, I was that much gladder I’d stayed out of his way.