Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  (1943)

  Lady Olga

  JANE BABNELL OCCASIONALLY considers herself an outcast and feels that there is something vaguely shameful about the way she makes a living. When she is in this mood, she takes no pride in the fact that she has had a longer career as a sideshow performer than any other American woman and wishes she had never left the drudgery of her grandmother’s cotton farm in North Carolina. Miss Barnell is a bearded lady. Her thick, curly beard measures thirteen and a half inches, which is the longest it has ever been. When she was young and more entranced by life under canvas, she wore it differently every year; in those days there was a variety of styles in beards – she remembers the Icicle, the Indian Fighter, the Whisk Broom, and the Billy Goat – and at the beginning of a season she would ask the circus barber to trim hers in the style most popular at the moment. Since it became gray, she has worn it in the untrimmed, House of David fashion.

  The business of exhibiting her beard has taken her into every state in the Union. In fact, she has undoubtedly travelled as widely in the United States as any other person, but she has always been too bored to take much notice of her surroundings and probably would not do well with a grammar-school geography quiz. ‘I been all over everywhere, up, down, and sideways,’ she says. ‘I’ve hit thousands of towns, but I don’t remember much about any of them. Half the time I didn’t even know what state I was in. Didn’t know or care.’ Miss Barnell is sixty-nine years old and was first put on exhibition shortly after her fourth birthday; she claims she has been bearded since infancy. As Princess Olga, Madame Olga, or Lady Olga, she has worked in the sideshows of at least twenty-five circuses and carnivals for wages ranging between twenty and a hundred dollars a week. She has forgotten the names of some of these outfits; one circus she remembers only as ‘that ten-car mess on the West Coast where I and my third husband had to knock the sideshow manager on the noggin with a tent stake to get my pay.’ She started out with a tramp circus, or ‘mud show,’ whose rickety, louse-infested wagons were pulled by oxen, and worked her way up to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey.

  She spent six years in the Ringling circus. She was with it last in 1938, when its season was cut short by a strike in Scranton, an occurrence which made her hysterical. Ringling’s sideshow, the Congress of Strange People, is as highly esteemed by freaks as the Palace used to be by vaudeville actors, but she would not sign a contract for the 1939 season. It pained her to make this decision; for six consecutive seasons she had occupied the same berth in Old Ninety-six, the Ringling sleeping car for sideshow people, and had grown attached to it. ‘Once I heard about a man in the penitentiary who broke down and cried when he finished his term and had to leave his cell for the last time,’ she says. ‘It had got to be a home to him. That’s how I felt about my berth.’ She turned down the 1939 contract because she had become obsessed with a notion that out on the road she would somehow be forced to join the circus union. Unions frighten her. Although she has never voted, she is a violently opinionated Republican. Also, she is a veteran reader of Hearst newspapers and believes everything she reads in them. She thinks the average union organizer carries a gun and will shoot to kill. When she sees pickets, she immediately crosses to the other side of the street. ‘Just as sure as I go back to Ringling’s, that union will get me,’ she told a circus official who tried for hours to reason with her, and added, ‘To tell you the truth, I think that old union is a corporation, like everything else these days.’ She also has a fear of corporations; to her, they are as sinister as unions. Since she left, Ringling’s has been without a bearded lady. Fred Smythe, manager of the Congress, offers her a contract every spring, but she always tells him that she will never again work for the Big Show. This never surprises Smythe. ‘Short of blasting,’ he says, ‘there’s no way of getting a fool notion out of the head of a freak. I’d sure like to get her back. She’s the only real, old-fashioned bearded lady left in the country. Most bearded ladies are men. Even when they’re women, they look like men. Lady Olga is a woman, and she looks like a woman.’ Smythe says that bearded ladies are not particularly sensational but they are traditional in sideshows, like clowns in the circus itself. ‘People don’t laugh at clowns any more but they want to see them around,’ he says. ‘Likewise, if there isn’t a bearded lady in a sideshow, people feel there’s something lacking.’

  Miss Barnell has not been on the road since leaving the Big Show but has stuck pretty close to New York City, which, as much as any other place, she considers home. In the winter she works intermittently in the basement sideshow of Hubert’s Museum on West Forty-second Street. She has shown her beard in practically every dime museum in the country and likes Hubert’s best of all; she has come to look upon it as her winter headquarters. Professor Le Roy Heckler, who operates the Flea Circus concession in Hubert’s, is an old friend of hers. They once lived in the same farming community in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and she worked in circuses long ago with his father, the late Professor William Heckler, who was a sideshow strong man before he developed a method of educating fleas and established the family business. She has great respect for Le Roy; she calls him ‘the young Professor’ and says she has known him since he was ‘diaper size.’ In the summer she divides her time between Hubert’s and Professor Sam Wagner’s World Circus Side Show, also a dime museum, in Coney Island. She likes Coney because she feels that salt air is good for her asthma; also, she has a high regard for the buttered roasting-ear corn that is sold in stands down there.

  On the dime museum circuit she does not work steadily; she works two or three weeks in a row and then lays off for a week. ‘I don’t want to go nuts,’ she says. In museums, her hours are from 11 A.M. to 11 P.M. There is an average of two shows an hour and during a show she is on the platform from five to ten minutes. Between appearances, she is free. At Hubert’s she kills most of this time dozing in a rocking chair in her dressing room. Sometimes she visits with other performers, usually with Albert-Alberta, the half-man-half-woman. Twice a week she goes into Professor Heckler’s booth and watches him feed his fleas. This spectacle always amazes her, although she has seen it scores of times. The Professor rolls up one sleeve, picks the fleas out of their mother-of-pearl boxes with tweezers, and drops them, one by one, on a forearm, where they browse for fifteen minutes. While the fleas are feeding, the Professor reads a newspaper and she smokes a cigarette. They seldom say anything to each other. Taciturn herself, Miss Barnell does not care for talkative people. At least once an afternoon she wraps a scarf around her beard and goes out for coffee or a mug of root beer. She usually goes to the lunchroom in the American Bus Depot, a few doors west of Hubert’s. She finds the atmosphere of a bus terminal soothing to her nerves. When showing in Coney Island, she takes brisk turns on the boardwalk between appearances.

  In the past, while filling engagements in and around the city, Miss Barnell always lived in small Broadway hotels. A year or so ago she gave up hotel life. One Saturday night, after working late in Hubert’s, she walked into a hotel off Times Square in which she had been living since the Ringling strike and a drunk in the lobby saw her and said, ‘By God, it’s the bearded lady!’ He followed her to the elevator, shouting, ‘Beaver! Beaver!’ Next day she moved out and took a furnished apartment in a theatrical rooming house on Eighth Avenue, not far from the Garden. The house was recommended by a colleague, a man who eats electric-light bulbs. Among the other tenants are a magician, an old burlesque comedian, a tattooed woman, and a retired circus cook. Surrounded by such people, she feels at ease; when she meets them on the stairs they simply take her for granted and do not look startled. ‘If an old baboon was to walk down the hall tooting on a cornet, nobody in my house would give him a second look,’ she says.

  Miss Barnell would like to spend the rest of her life in the city, but she knows that sooner or later she will become a stale attraction in the dime museums and will have to run an ‘At Liberty’ notice in Billboard and get a job with a circus or carnival again.
She wants to put this off as long as possible because she has grown to like apartment life; it has given her a chance, she says, really to get acquainted with Thomas O’Boyle, her fourth husband, and with Edelweiss, her cat. O’Boyle is a veteran Joey, or clown, but recently he has been employed as a talker – the sideshow term for barker – on the box at the gate at Hubert’s. He is nineteen years younger than Miss Barnell and, unlike her, is enthralled by sideshow life. He wears dark-blue shirts, lemon-yellow neckties, and Broadway suits. He believes Miss Barnell is one of the great women of all time and treats her accordingly. When she comes into a room he leaps to his feet, and when she takes out a cigarette he hurriedly strikes a match for her. They were married after working together during the season of 1931 in the Johnny J. Jones Exposition, a carnival. Both are short-wave-radio fans, and O’Boyle says that this mutual interest is what brought them together. ‘Since our marriage, I and Mr O’Boyle have travelled with the same outfits,’ Miss Barnell said recently, ‘but I never felt like I really knew him until we settled in an apartment. In a sleeping car you just don’t feel married. To get to know a husband, you have to cook and wash for him.’ Next to O’Boyle, Edelweiss is her chief concern. Edelweiss is a sullen, overfed, snow-white Persian, for which she paid twenty-five dollars when it was a kitten and which now weighs sixteen pounds. She has nicknamed it Edie, and when she speaks to it she uses baby talk. She owns a comfortable old canvas chair – it came out of a circus dressing tent – and she likes to loll in this chair, hold the cat in her lap, and sing to it. Interminably, one after the other, she sings ‘Eadie Was a Lady’ and ‘Root, Hog, or Die,’ an old circus song. Cats and dogs are not permitted in the sleeping cars of most circuses, so when she is on the road she usually has to board Edie in a pet store. ‘Sometimes out in the sticks,’ she says, ‘I get so lonesome for Edie I feel like I just can’t bear it.’ She thinks Hubert’s is much nicer than other museums because the manager there understands how she feels about the cat and lets her bring it with her to work. While she is on the platform, Edie sits beside her, purring. After cats, Miss Barnell likes horses best. She is one of those women who cannot pass a horse standing at a curb without trying to stroke its head; she keeps a handful of wrapped cube sugar in her bag for horses. Once a month, no matter how lean the season, she sends a contribution to the A.S.P.C.A. ‘To an animal, if you’re bearded, it don’t make no difference,’ she says.

  Miss Barnell has not only a beard but side whiskers and a droopy mustache. In a white, loose-fitting house dress, she looks like an Old Testament prophet. Her appearance is more worldly when she dresses for a party; on such occasion she uses lipstick and rouge. Monty Woolley saw her once when she was dressed for the evening and said she looked like Elsa Maxwell in a property beard. Someone repeated Woolley’s remark to her and she snorted with indignation. ‘Mr Woolley must not have good eyesight,’ she said. She is not as plump as Miss Maxwell. She is five feet five and weighs a hundred and eighty-three pounds. She does not look her age; she has few wrinkles and she walks with a firm step. Her face is round and gloomy. Her bobbed gray hair is brushed pompadour style, and on the platform she wears a Spanish comb and two side combs. Once a year she gets a permanent wave. Before going on the street, she always covers her face with a veil and wraps a Paisley scarf around her neck, hiding her beard. To keep it curly, she sleeps with her beard in a pigtail plait; on days off she does not unplait it. She wears a thick gold wedding ring. Her voice is low and feminine.

  Years of listening to barkers has had an effect on her speech; she makes long words longer. To her, a monstrosity is a ‘monsterosity.’ She uses some circus slang. The men who haunt the pinball machines on the first floor of Hubert’s and never spend a dime to visit the sideshow in the basement are ‘lot lice’ to her; in circuses, this term is applied to townspeople who do not buy tickets but stand around the lot, gaping at everything and getting in the way. She uses the word ‘old’ to express contempt. She once said, ‘If that old Mayor they have here can’t think up anything better than that old sales tax, he ought to lay down and quit.’ She consistently says ‘taken’ for ‘took.’ This is a sample of her conversation: ‘When I was a young’un I taken the name Princess Olga. After I first got married I changed to Madame, but when every confounded swami-woman and mitt-reader in the nation taken to calling herself Madame So-and-So, I decided Lady was more ree-fined.’ She has a dim but unmistakable Southern accent, and many of her habits of speech are North Carolinian. She heavily accents the first syllable in words like ‘hotel’ and ‘police.’ She uses ‘one’ as a contraction for ‘one or the other.’ She says, ‘I’m going to the movie pitchers this afternoon, or down to Coney Island, one.’ When she gets ready to do her kitchen shopping, she doesn’t say, ‘I’m going up the street’; she says, ‘I’m going up street,’ or, ‘I’m going down street.’ Another heritage from her years in rural North Carolina is a liking for snuff. She and O’Boyle own an automobile, and occasionally they get it out of storage and take a long trip. While riding along with the windows lowered, they both dip snuff. ‘Out in the country, snuff is better than cigarettes,’ she says. ‘Of course, I’d never think of using it indoors.’ She smokes a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. The use of tobacco is her only bad habit. As a rule, sideshow performers are fond of the bottle, but she is a teetotaler and a believer in prohibition.

  On a sideshow platform or stage, Miss Barnell is rather austere. To discourage people from getting familiar, she never smiles. She dresses conservatively, usually wearing a plain black evening gown. ‘I like nice clothes, but there’s no use wasting money,’ she says. ‘People don’t notice anything but my old beard.’ She despises pity and avoids looking into the eyes of the people in her audiences; like most freaks, she has cultivated a blank, unseeing stare. When people look as if they feel sorry for her, especially women, it makes her want to throw something. She does not sell photographs of herself as many sideshow performers do and does not welcome questions from spectators. She will answer specific questions about her beard as graciously as possible, but when someone becomes inquisitive about her private life – ‘You ever been married?’ is the most frequent query – she gives the questioner an icy look or says quietly, ‘None of your business.’ Audiences seem to think that this is admirable. Now and then, after she has told off a persistent or insulting questioner, people will applaud. Miss Barnell’s temper has been a blessing; it has kept her from succumbing to utter apathy, which is the occupational disease of freaks. ‘I don’t take no back talk from nobody,’ she says. She guards her dignity jealously. Once she slapped an apology out of a carnival owner who had suggested that she dye her beard so he could bill her as ‘Olga, the Lady Bluebeard.’ Wisecracking professors, or talkers, annoy her; she prefers to be introduced by one who is deadly serious and able to use long medical words. Except for midgets, the majority of freaks in American sideshows are natives, but talkers hate to admit this. Consequently, at one time or another, Miss Barnell has been introduced as having been born in Budapest, Paris, Moscow, Shanghai, and Potsdam. In one carnival she was ‘the daughter of a Hungarian general,’ and in another ‘the half sister of a French duke.’ She does not have a high opinion of foreigners and is sorely vexed by such introductions. She was grateful to the late Clyde Ingalls, who was once married to Lillian Leitzel and preceded Smythe as manager of Ringling’s Congress, because he never seemed to resent the fact that she was born in North Carolina. Ingalls would bow to her, turn to the audience, click his heels, and say, ‘It gives me the greatest pleasure at this time to introduce a little woman who comes to us from an aristocratic plantation in the Old South and who is recognized by our finest doctors, physicians, and medical men as the foremost, unquestioned, and authentic fee-male bearded lady in medical history. Ladies and gentlemen, Lay-dee Oolgah!’

  Among freaks it is axiomatic that Coney Island audiences are the most inhuman, but Miss Barnell has found that a Surf Avenue dime museum on a Saturday night is peaceful compared with a m
oving-picture studio at any time. She talks bitterly about her experiences in Hollywood, where she has been used in a number of horror and circus pictures. Her most important role was in ‘Freaks,’ a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer study of sideshow life filmed in 1932. It was probably the most frightening picture ever made. In it, among other things, a beautiful trapeze girl of a European circus permits a dwarf to fall in love with her in order to obtain some money he has inherited. At their wedding feast, with a fantastic group of sideshow people around the table, she gets drunk and lets slip the fact that she despises the dwarf. A few nights later, during a terrible storm when the troupe is on the road, the freaks climb into her private wagon and mutilate her, turning her into a freak. Miss Barnell thinks this picture was an insult to all freaks everywhere and is sorry she acted in it. When it was finished, she swore she would never again work in Hollywood.

  Her self-esteem suffers least of all when she is working in circuses, where sideshow class distinctions are rigidly observed. She herself divides freaks into three classes: born freaks, made freaks, and two-timers. Born freaks are the aristocrats of the sideshow world. She, of course, is a member of this class. So are Siamese twins, pinheads, fat girls, dwarfs, midgets, giants, living skeletons, and men with skulls on which rocks can be broken. Made freaks include tattooed people, sword-swallowers, snake charmers, and glass-eaters. Normal people who obtain sideshow engagements because of past glory or notoriety are two-timers to her. Examples are reformed criminals, old movie stars, and retired athletes like Jack Johnson, the old prizefighter, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, the old ballplayer, both of whom starred for a while on the dime museum circuit. Because Johnson wears a beret and because she has heard that he sips beer through a straw, she particularly dislikes him. ‘To the general public, old Jack Johnson may be a freak,’ she says, ‘but to a freak, he ain’t a freak.’ Paradoxically, she bears no animosity toward fake bearded ladies. They amuse her. She was greatly amused when Frances Murphy, the Gorilla Lady in the ‘Strange As It Seems’ sideshow at the New York World’s Fair in 1940, got into an altercation with a truck-driver and was exposed as a male. ‘If any man is fool enough to be a bearded lady,’ she says, ‘it’s all right with me.’