Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus

by Bruce Feiler

  “Where there’s smoke,” Jimmy James intones, “there’s fire!”

  From the back of the tent a siren wails. All eyes turn toward the screaming uproar as a bright red fire cart with sunburst wheels speeds onto the hippodrome track. Pulling the handle in front, riding the ladder in back, even running desperately behind the cart are those well-dressed, well-trained public servants of the pyromaniacal: the Clown Town Volunteer Fire Department. At the sight of this band of Keystone Firemen, the children in the seats start clapping their hands. The band perks up with the sprightly “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Speeding the long way around the track, the clowns arrive in the center ring just as the smoke reaches the top of the tent and an old-lady clown sticks her head out of the roof. The firemen come to a sudden stop, the driver does a somersault over the handle of the cart, while the rider in the rear flops off the ladder and lands facedown in the grass. The drummer crashes his cymbals. The old lady spreads her arms in dismay. Putting out this fire will not be easy, for despite all those pairs of oversized shoes none of the clowns can stay on his feet. Still they rise and approach the house.

  Though most of the performers on our show would rather burn to death than admit it, the clowns were probably, as a group, the hardest-working members of the show. A few of the other performers were in half a dozen or more acts. The animal people had round-the-clock responsibilities. But once the middle of every afternoon rolled around, the clowns were required to be in makeup, be in position, and be ready to go on at a moment’s notice in case of emergency in the ring. This meant they had little time off every day between 2 and 10 P.M., little time out of greasepaint every week for nine months, and little time to be anywhere during the entire year other than their private canvas dungeon known affectionately as Clown Alley.

  Clown Alley is an anthropologist’s dream. Part tribal ring, part locker room, part fraternity, part day-care center, it was a tent the size of a generous closet that held nine steamer trunks, eight wobbly chairs, twenty-seven juggling clubs, seventeen pairs of clown shoes, hundreds of half-empty containers of makeup, and one recyclable piss jug—an empty baby-powder carton that was loudly and publicly filled every day with the exaggerated hand gestures and juvenile penile thrustings of nine grown-up teenagers turned childlike clowns. In the past, clowns were mostly drawn from the ranks of aging performers who could no longer do their acts or homosexual men who were running from convention and needed a mask behind which to hide. These days, gay men apparently no longer need clowning, and as for older performers, with the long hours, low pay (starting at $180 a week), and lack of respect from the other show members, most would rather tote their children’s rigging or stay home and work at Wal-Mart. That leaves clowning to kids.

  When I arrived on the show, the one unifying feature of all the clowns in the Alley was that they were young, ranging in age from nineteen to twenty-four. (Buck, although a clown, stayed mostly in his van and was not considered part of the Alley.) All had graduated from high school and most had wandered from one part-time job to another, from a few months in school to living at home, before finally ending up in Ringling Brothers Clown College. For them, clowning was a hobby, not an art. And when they didn’t receive an offer to join Ringling and came instead to Beatty-Cole, the circus was an adventure, not a career. Their stories, ranging from the bizarre to the macabre, would have made Margaret Mead ecstatic.

  There was Joe, the oddest and funniest of the bunch, who wore flip-flops on his feet and a ponytail on his head, who ate his vegetarian meals with chopsticks, drank his generic sodas out of a plastic martini glass, and hoped to translate his wacky character, Arpeggio, into a Las Vegas nightclub act. There was Marty, a.k.a. the Village Idiot, who had the most energy, the loudest mouth, and the largest number of radio-station and iron-man bumper stickers on his costume trunk (the most prominent: YOU GOTTA BE TOUGH IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE STUPID) and who hoped to save enough extra money doing cherry pie to join the cast of Up with People. Finally there was Jerry, alias Ace, a four-foot-seven-inch dwarf whose father had been on the Ringling show and who in the midst of all the oddities, anxieties, and kinky obsessions of his mainstream dropout colleagues was the cleanest, preppiest, and probably the most likely to be able to find and keep a real “townie” job. In a world where close shaving is a job requirement, Arpeggio usually had shaving soap in his ears and a missed tuft or two on his throat; Marty, the Village Idiot, often just plain forgot; but it was Jerry who always had an electric razor and who earned the indelible nickname the Neck Shaving Dwarf by personally taking the responsibility of making sure everyone in the Alley went to work each week with no unsightly stubble on the back of his neck.

  Not surprisingly, when I plopped down uninvited in the middle of this group I was the one who was considered odd. Not only had I not been to Clown College (Buck and Jerry hadn’t either), but I had been to regular college, and to graduate school as well. Also, I was a little older, I hung out with the performers (most of the clowns were kept away), and I didn’t pepper every other comment with “Fuck you,” “Suck me,” or “How about a dick in the ass?” As a result, most of the clowns wanted me out. To prove it, they went out of their way to make me feel like an outcast.

  First it was my ideas. In the first days of the season we had a series of rehearsals to design the gags. In the beginning I decided that in these rehearsals, as in most situations around the lot, I would keep quiet as a way of fitting in. After lying low for a while, however, I decided that my silence seemed awkward and that I should wade into these brainstorming sessions. How about having the clowns do such and such? I shyly suggested. Never tried. How about having a clown do so and so? Ignored. In one session Marty and Rob, the two Young Turks, were practicing different versions of sliding down a ladder. When they asked for comments I stepped off the ring curb and said, “I hate to say this but it does look better if you do it closer to the house.” The response was an appalled silence. “Fuck you,” Marty blurted. “Go away.”

  I slunk back to being silent.

  Next it was my makeup. During intermission on opening day, while the clowns were in the center ring signing autographs, Jerry came over and tapped me on the shoulder. I excused myself from the child I was greeting and stepped to the edge of the ring. It must be important, I thought, or he wouldn’t be interrupting our time with the audience. “Don’t you know anything?” he said when we were just out of earshot. “Whiteface clowns are supposed to wear gloves. Also, your makeup is uneven on the back of your neck. You’re a disgrace to the Alley.”

  The final insult came when their hazings entered the ring. As clowns we had various responsibilities in the show. We had to pull various carts in spec, do the firehouse gag in the first half, the stomach-pump gag in the second act, and appear in the finale along with the entire cast when Sean got fired out of the cannon. Also, in the first half we had to do what was known as a walk-around, in which the clowns walk around the track performing short gags for several sections while the prop crew readies the next act. In Wilmington, North Carolina, these walk-arounds spawned a change in my attitude. All day the boys had been abnormally quiet, almost conspiratorially so. Then the whispers started. Rob went to Marty, then to Jerry. Jerry went to Brian, who then went back to Marty. A plan was being hatched.

  The show started as usual. The early gags went as planned, but I sucked up some baby powder during the firehouse gag and went back to my trailer to get something to drink. Minutes before the walk-around I returned to the Alley to pick up my prop. It wasn’t there. I went to the side of the tent where the performers wait to enter. It wasn’t there either. By that time the walk-around had begun. Nellie Ivanov was just returning from her cradle act. She looked at me sympathetically. I felt a tinge of guilt. Earlier she had told me that no matter how many acts she had or how injured she felt she never missed a performance. Here I was missing something as simple as a walk-around.

  I headed back to the Alley. As soon as the whistle blew Marty a
ppeared from the tent and raised his hands as if to say, “Where were you?” This struck me as a little odd. During a walk-around there is usually no time to see what the other clowns are doing, much less whether they are even there. Back in the Alley the hounding started. Brian asked me where I left the prop. Marty asked me when I last saw it. Jerry thrust his finger in my face and said I would have to pay him twenty dollars if it didn’t turn up. “It will turn up,” I assured them. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Marty said they had found my gag inside the tent and had hid it to teach me a lesson. I wasn’t exactly sure what the lesson was, since many props were left in the tent. But the lesson, I suspected, had less to do with the prop and more to do with letting me know who was in charge.

  “The Alley has a certain way of doing things,” Marty said. “If you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, if you let us down, you’re going to be made aware of it. We have to be able to count on one another. We have to work together.”

  It was after I received this little speech that I knew the only way to be accepted into this group was to start speaking up for myself. All pantomime aside, it was time to become a talking clown.

  Once the firemen are in the ring the clowns set about trying to put out the blaze. Inside the firehouse, I rapidly strip off my old-man pajama top, slip on black trousers, a red jacket, and a metal fire hat and run out to join the chaos. The first stunt involves a hose. Once in the open I retrieve a coiled-up section of hose from Buck, spin it in the air like a lasso, and toss it toward Arpeggio, who takes the end that slaps him in the face and tries to hook it up to a five-foot-high fire hydrant. Just as he approaches the giant hydrant, however, it moves. Arpeggio takes two steps to the left; the fire hydrant takes two steps to the right. Finally, as an exasperated Arpeggio storms toward the fixture, the hydrant spits out a stream of water, rises up on the shoulders of the dwarf inside, and sprints out of the ring. At this point the clowns have had two run-ins so far—one with the cart, one with the hydrant—and the inanimate objects have won both. The audience could not be more pleased.

  “People have a negative image of clowns these days,” Elmo said to me at the beginning of the year. A fifteen-year veteran of the circus, Elmo, a short blond idiot savant of a clown, designed the gags, built the props, then left the performing to us as he traveled one week ahead of the show doing advance publicity. Like the other clowns on the show, he was temperamental and moody; unlike the others, however, he had a clear philosophy of clowning. “Krusty the Klown on The Simpsons, Homey the Clown on In Living Color, even Stephen King’s It are all maniacal and just plain odd. They never do anything funny. If we can do something funny, then we are doing our jobs. Remember, most people come to the circus to see clowns and elephants. If that’s the case, the elephants better be big and the clowns better be funny.”

  For clowns, being funny means being silly. The firehouse gag is one of a dozen or so traditional gags that have been around the American circus since early in the twentieth century. (The most famous clown routine of all, the overstuffed clown car, was actually first performed on the Cole Bros. Circus with a specially constructed Studebaker in the 1950s.) The key to the firehouse gag, Elmo explained, is the incompetence of the clowns, who can’t even perform simple tasks that every child in the audience can do. If the clowns can’t ride in their cart, if they can’t even hook up a hose, woe is the woman who stands on the house screaming for the clowns to save her baby.

  With the fire hydrant out of the ring and the hose lying on the ground, the clowns decide to use it for some fun. Marty and Rob grab the ends of the hose and the three of us watching from the side come skipping to the center and perform an elaborate jump rope—one, two, three, four—until we get tripped up in midair and go tumbling to the ground like living dominoes. Left holding the rope, the two clowns on the end then go racing in opposite directions until the hose between them recoils like a rubber band and flings them to the ground. With each fall the audience laughs louder. The act is building to its blowoff.

  “The firehouse is a slapstick gag,” Elmo explained. “A ‘slapstick’ is something you hit someone on the rear with and it makes a loud noise. During the Renaissance, the commedia dell’arte troupes used a pig bladder on a stick to make that sound. Today slapstick is just another form of that—a kick in the behind, a slap to the face, a bucket over the head.”

  Indeed, once the clowns pick themselves off the ground and start to assault the house the gag moves inexorably toward the one action that always got a laugh: the bucket of water on the head of a clown. Before that, however, most of the clowns end up on the ground at least several more times. Four of us run toward the house and get knocked off our feet by an opening door. One person tries to climb the ladder only to be punched by the lady. And in the most dramatic incident of the act, Arpeggio enters the ring waving a four-foot ax, trips, swings around, and accidentally decapitates a seemingly helpful fireman. After a moment the audience realizes the head is fake and the fireman is only a dummy on top of the dwarf. Still the horror thrills.

  “It’s violence,” Elmo explained. “Violence is funny to people if it happens to somebody else. They are not laughing with you, they are laughing at you. Let’s say you hate your boss or your teacher, and we have a gag where an authority figure is picked on. People love it. The audience lives vicariously through you. They can step out of their own parameters of good behavior. Why do you think Road Runner is so popular? Or Tom and Jerry? It’s because we like to watch other people getting hit. Clowns are like that. We are living cartoons.”

  It was this transition from person to cartoon that was the most interesting and challenging for me. As a teenage actor, I was taught to be realistic; as a mime, I tried to be reflective; but as a clown, I had to learn to be exaggerated, in a sense unreal, beyond gender, beyond human, beyond constraint. Running around the ring in the firehouse gag day after day, week after week, I slowly began to make this transition, but to do it properly I had to get beyond the confines of my own body. The shoes helped in this matter; they were caricaturish and surreal. The costume helped; it was wider and taller than what any conventional person would wear. But the key to feeling less like a human and more like a clown, indeed the key to looking less like a person and more like a cartoon, was the same. In the end, it all came down to the face.

  “Take a dab of white with your fingers. More than that, cover the tip until it’s dripping off. Good. Now take another finger. And a third.”

  It was a little over two weeks before the season would begin when Elmo came to my apartment in Washington, D.C., to help me design my face. Dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, I sat before a mirror on the ottoman in my living room. Elmo lent me a woman’s knee-high stocking to pull over my head and hold my hair in place.

  “So there it is,” I said when my hair had disappeared. “My face unadorned. How would you describe it?”

  “It’s a plain face,” he said. “Not many lines. No outstanding features. You would make a great spy.”

  I began to apply the clown white, a mix of petroleum jelly, titanium oxide, zinc oxide, and paraffin, which Elmo brought for the day. “Put a dab on your left cheek, then your right,” he said. He was dressed preppy in a white button-down shirt with his natural blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He looked like a cross between a high school biology teacher and a surfer. “Then move to your forehead, your chin, your nose. Don’t be afraid to put it on thick.” The makeup felt milky and cold against my skin, sort of like a dab of Crisco shortening, or worse, curdled milk. I resisted rubbing it into my pores. “Rub it around quickly,” he said. “Don’t waste any time. There will come a time when you’re late for a show and you don’t want to be too slow. My makeup takes me thirty-five minutes and I hate it. We’re going to design you a twenty-minute face.”

  After a while the clown white covered my skin. It made me feel excitedly messy, like spreading finger paint where it didn’t belong, but also slightly constrained, like dunking my head i
n a vat of Vaseline. Unlike my oval mime face a generation earlier, this face had the white right up to my hairline and underneath my chin. “In the show you’ll have to do your ears, your neck, the insides of your nostrils as well.”

  “What about my eyelashes?” I said as I started to work the white into the crevices beneath my eyes.

  “You’ll find out,” he said, and indeed I already had.

  “Once it’s evenly smeared, take your open hand, the whole hand, and begin to pat out the rough spots. That way you’ll eliminate the streaks. It’s like putting your hand on a soft pat of butter and pulling up a thousand stalagmites. Later, those stalagmites will grab the baby powder and keep your face dry.”

  As I proceeded to smear white around my face, Elmo began sketching some of the history of clowning that I would have to know. The first known instance of using humans as comic diversion, he said, was in the Dilemma festival of ancient Crete, in which slaves were offered freedom if they jumped over charging bulls (thus giving rise to the term “on the horns of a dilemma”). Later the ancient Greeks needed performers to get people in the mood for their outdoor festivals. They came up with the phalla phoria, men who strapped on giant phalluses and red noses and acted as if they were drunk. Phalla phoria were captured and turned into one of a dozen or so stock characters, characters that reappeared centuries later in the commedia dell’arte of the Renaissance. These traveling theatrical troupes, with the comic Harlequina, the young couple in love, and the villainous rival, soon spread throughout Europe. In France, they liked the characters but not the language and moved in the direction of pantomime. In England, they liked the characters but not the scripts and created their own story lines with enduring personalities such as Punch and Judy or Jumping Jack, the modern day Jack-in-the-Box.