The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  The first “freak” display in the United States occurred in 1771, when Emma Leach, a dwarf, was shown in Boston. Around 1840, full “freak shows” began to emerge, traveling with menageries or in the company of “handlers” who managed the promotion and exhibition of the stars, enhancing their natural deformities with a story or an exotic medical explanation. (As Tom Norman, Barnum’s English equivalent and the handler of the Elephant Man, wrote in his autobiography, “It was not the show, it was the tale that you told.”)

  Barnum was in this tradition, and he excelled at it. According to his biographer, A. H. Saxon, nearly every famous freak of the period spent a few weeks in the showman’s employ: R. O. Wickward, the skeleton man; Jane Campbell, “the largest Mountain of Human Flesh ever seen in the form of a woman”; S. K. G. Nellis, the armless wonder, who could shoot a bow and arrow with his toes. Many of the freaks appeared as stars in his museum, either as roving attractions, as part of special exhibitions, or as spectacles in the theater in back. Sometimes Barnum toured with them as well. General Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton) was a twenty-five-inch-tall four-year-old midget, who Barnum claimed was eleven. Barnum coached the boy to perform impersonations of various heads of state, including Queen Victoria, whom he visited on three separate occasions. In Paris, the duo played to Napoleon III and in a series of shows at the Salle Musard that sold out months in advance. “The French are exceedingly impressible,” Barnum wrote of the visit in his 1896 autobiography Struggles and Triumphs, “and what in London is only excitement in Paris becomes furor.”

  Given our modern mores and science, most people—circus historians included—lament these displays. At best they were grossly lowbrow, at worst debauched. Russian circus-historian Yuri Dimitriev once called them “a disgrace to human dignity.” “They were an insult to the very essence of the circus where the skill and beauty of the human body are celebrated,” he alleged, “playing on the basest instincts of the gawking crowd.” But it’s also important to consider the context. Though much of the interest in “freaks” indeed derived from inconsiderate or malicious instincts, the 1850s were an age before photographs, cultural museums, or widespread literacy. Audiences were curious about the world, and Barnum played to this curiosity in his exhibits. He advertised his museum as an “encyclopedic synopsis of everything worth seeing in this curious world.” He presented his artifacts, however strange, as part of the scientific revolution sweeping the globe. For example, he called his ape-man the “missing link” in Darwin’s theories of evolution. Barnum succeeded in this presentation because the museum’s atmosphere was consistently middlebrow. A lifelong teetotaler, he prohibited profanity, sexuality, and liquor. In letters he referred to himself as the “Director of Moral and Refined Exhibitions for the Amusement and Instruction of the Public.” “Barnum’s genius was in developing popular potential,” Bluford Adams, a Barnum scholar, told me. “He would take an idea, make it safe for the middle classes, and then commercialize it to the hilt.”

  Between 1842 and 1865, Barnum’s American Museum, his Boulevard du Temple in a building, was the single greatest attraction in America. Approximately thirty-eight million paying visitors passed through Barnum’s doors in that time span. This figure is particularly astounding given America’s population at the time: thirty-two million just before the Civil War.

  The American Museum made P. T. Barnum rich. In combination with his autobiographies, which sold over a million copies, the museum also made him an international celebrity. In America, his name was as well known as the president’s. Abroad, he came to symbolize America itself, and everything that was big, rash, and brash about the place. In 1871, Barnum brought this wealth and fame to the circus.

  Now sixty-one years old, he had settled into retirement in Bridgeport, Connecticut, following a fire at the museum. He was eager to dedicate his days to “serious reflections on the ends and aims of human existence”—but then he was approached by two men, William Cameron Coup and Dan Castello. Barnum knew them both to be capital showmen: Coup had worked in Barnum’s Asiatic Caravan as a teenager; Castello had starred as an acrobat and later run several successful shows himself. The men had an idea for a circus that required Barnum’s help.

  American proprietors had long been seeking an easier way than wagon travel to bring their acts west. In the beginning, many thought the future lay in waterways. In 1851, Gilbert Spaulding, a former pharmacist from New York, had partnered with English equestrian Charles Rogers to launch a two-hundred-foot “Floating Circus Palace,” a white-and-gold bargelike contraption rigged with a thousand-seat amphitheater on the main deck, two hundred gas jets for lighting, three enormous flags, and a steam-calliope whistle that could be heard for miles. But, more recently, hopes had turned to the railroads.

  Coup and Castello wanted to exploit this new technology on a grand scale. Even with a strong team of stock horses, they argued, the most you could move a show was fifteen, maybe twenty miles a night. On a train, a circus could travel ten times as far. Practically speaking, this meant a show could bypass small markets in favor of the large ones: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Saint Louis, Kansas City. And with a train there were no more worries about weight limits. Bigger tents, bigger crews, bigger menageries—the possibilities were enormous. For the first time, companies could play a big show to a big town, then push on after a single night—and it made both fiscal and logistical sense.

  But to create a truly monumental circus—the biggest the world had ever seen—Coup and Castello would need an equally impressive backer. They would need somebody who knew how to promote ambitiously, somebody with business acumen and a golden touch. Who better than the man responsible for the most eccentric, most eclectic, most popular, and best-known entertainment venue in the world? Though much of his museum had been destroyed in the fire, much also survived, and Barnum could bring to their circus a collection of oddities the likes of which the circus had never seen. It could be an American museum on wheels, the world’s first true colossal circus for the masses.

  Presented with Coup and Castello’s offer, Barnum hesitated, haunted by the itinerant experiences of his youth. Then, on October 8, 1870, he wrote to Coup: “I will join you in a show for next Spring.… We can make a stunning museum department.”

  The April after Barnum sent his letter to Coup, the men opened operations in Brooklyn. In honor of Barnum’s contribution (and in exploitation of his name), they called the show “P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus.” The ten thousand visitors who took the ferry from Manhattan that first week found the action divided into three tents: the big top, the animal tent, and the sideshow tent, a standard organization for years to come. During the subsequent tour of the Eastern Seaboard, hordes gathering outside the ticket booths became so massive and so raucous that Coup, who ran operations, decided to add a third daily show. A month later, they began running what amounted to a continuous spectacle, with attractions open from noon until night. The following season, Coup abandoned all precedent and added a second ring to the main tent. (The circus considered widening the ring, but the equestrians had trained their horses to the smaller size.)

  By now the profits were astronomical. The tour grossed over $1 million, the first show in history to do so. This, of course, inspired other circuses to adopt the model, taking to the rails and enlarging their shows. Rivalries quickly ensued. In 1882, Barnum, now associated with the nervous young circus genius James A. Bailey, added a third ring. Adam Forepaugh, an old horse dealer turned circus entrepreneur, followed suit. (“I have a boy and Mr. Barnum has none,” Forepaugh once claimed. “My show will outlast his.”)

  Meanwhile, on a warm afternoon in 1884, a group of brothers were standing on the banks of the Mississippi River in McGregor, Iowa, when the Great Pavilion Circus docked for a day of shows. Al, the eldest, turned to one of his brothers with a twinkle in his eye. “What would you say if we had a show like that?” he said, to which his sibling replied, “You know I was just thinking t
he same thing.” Thus was born the Ringling Brothers Circus. Like Barnum and Forepaugh, the five Ringling brothers—Al, Otto, Alf, Charles, and John—saw success in size. After learning the business from a man named Yankee Robinson, they struck out on their own, purchasing their first elephant in 1888. When Forepaugh retired in 1889, they bought his railroad cars to transport their stable of one hundred horses.

  Their growth continued through the turn of the century, eventually reaching heights that are hard to fathom today. The Ringling lot was fourteen acres across, double the size of Chicago’s Soldier Field, the biggest football stadium in the world. Their big top, which featured three rings and two stages, sat fourteen thousand people, over three times the number in a full house at the Metropolitan Opera.† The logistical demands alone were amazing. One thousand people occupied a ninety-two-car train. Their parade through New York lasted five hours. And yet the whole operation could be packed up in an afternoon.

  Today, American scholars often refer to this time, from Barnum’s arrival to the beginning of World War I, as the “golden age” of the circus. “Like the golden age of Hollywood,” writes historian John Culhane in the The American Circus, these years were “a brief, sunny period when there could never be too many circuses.” At the period’s high point in 1902, ninety-eight circuses and menageries operated throughout the country, more than ever before or since. The largest—Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey, Forepaugh—were household brands, as Disney is today. The performers were celebrities. When May Wirth, a famous Barnum & Bailey equestrian, fell off her horse, the news made the front page of The New York Times.

  In 1897, Bailey, the sole director of the Barnum & Bailey Circus after Barnum’s death in 1891, brought the American model to Europe, shipping his entire fourteen-thousand-ton operation across the Atlantic on a pair of steamships. The show spent five years abroad, inciting mayhem wherever it went—in London, the circus’s arrival nearly shut down the city. In its wake, certain European producers moved to adopt what the French call le gigantisme américain. In 1901, the clown Hans Stosch, son of a wealthy Prussian family, founded the Sarrasani circus in Dresden, Germany. By 1908, his circus was trouping with three rings, and eventually boasted upward of four hundred animals. At the same time, former fairground families, especially animal trainers, flocked to the circus game. Today many of the biggest names in European circus come from this migration: the Amars and Bougliones in France, the Chipperfields in England, the Kreisers and Busches in Germany, the Kludskys in what would become the Czech Republic.

  And yet, for all these inroads, the American model never quite caught on in Europe. The big menageries or sideshows remained largely elements of the fairground, unassociated with the circus. Historical forces played a role in this failure. With the approach of World War I, countries stiffened their borders, and touring a big circus became more difficult. But there were also cultural reasons. The European experience of the circus, dating back almost 150 years, gave both performers and audiences different expectations for the sort of pleasure it could provide. The performers, used to working in hard circuses in cities, found touring in the American fashion distasteful. The logistical demands of setting up, taking down, and traveling left almost no time for rehearsal, and much less time to create new work.

  European audiences settled down after their initial fascination with Barnum & Bailey, returning to the form of circus with which they were comfortable. In the hard circuses, there was a closeness that humanized the performers and created an almost physical intimacy. “There is something especially attractive in the coziness of these one-ring circuses of Paris,” Frank Berkeley Smith wrote in his 1903 guide to Paris, How Paris Amuses Itself. Audiences had a relationship with their performers. They watched their acts grow and appreciated new material. At close range, an audience could appreciate the subtlety and refinement of a strong performance.

  In the big American circuses, all this familiarity and precision was gone, sacrificed for other pleasures: spectacle, pageantry, sensory stimulation, what Barnum called in advertisements his “avalanche of attractions.” For American audiences, where the circus tradition was less entrenched and rougher, this trade was clearly worth it: why not take three rings for the price of one? Europeans felt the performers were too far away, the peripheral action too distracting. Writing in 1904, French historian Georges Strehly noted that in a Barnum show “the merit of a work, as perfect as it is, disappears, lost in the crowd of numbers presented simultaneously.” In the American willingness to play to the lowest common denominator, Europeans felt there was something pejorative and possibly selfish, a sacrifice of the art’s artistic sensibility for commercial gain. “[Barnum] piles on crowds on crowds, throws in a dozen of elephants here, a hundred ballet girls there,” observed a critic during the circus’s first appearance in London. “The audience does not matter, nor the stage, nor the expense.”

  Today this divide remains. Most Americans feel that both forms are valid. “It’s a matter of apples and oranges,” Dahlinger told me. What is clear from a historical perspective, however, is that the American-style shows were a devil’s bargain. In the short term, the expansion allowed the circus to become the single most profitable entertainment in the world; in exchange, the circus nearly sacrificed its own future.

  The shift had an effect on creativity. In a hard circus, performers, who often lived in the neighborhood, came to the circus during the day to rehearse or develop new material. Audiences expected ongoing improvement and innovation, since they attended the circus every month or even every week. But a performer in a traveling circus felt no pressure to improve. Hopping from town to town, he could perform the same routine for years. (As Pascal noted, “They found it easier to change the audience than change the acts.”) Over time, as more and more shows took up the grand tenting model, there was less innovation in the art as a whole.

  The American model also engendered a different commercial approach. Astley was closer to a businessman than an artist, but money did not define the circus. In England and later on the boulevard, circus owners had artistic reputations to maintain. The same applied for the performers. In the gigantic traveling circuses, by contrast, the circus became a business, plain and simple. Success was measured by profit, with performers there to serve the bottom line. But by diminishing the emphasis on individual acts, by promising “the Greatest Show on Earth,” circus owners walked themselves onto an existential tightrope. Every year, the circus would have to be bigger, more impressive, more extravagant than the year before—and not just bigger than other circuses, bigger than anything, a dangerous game at the dawn of twentieth century.

  “It’s as if,” Pascal once told me, “the form anticipated its own destruction.”

  * * *

  * According to one report, Pradier carved the statues in exchange for lifetime admission to the circus.

  † Each stage was roughly the same size as a ring. At any given moment, nine acts would be going on at the same time.

  (illustration credit 15.1)

  PARISIAN WINTER FEELS LIKE a wet blanket, spring like a relief. The scarves get put away. The skirts come out. Migratory species return: birds, tourists, clowns.

  My first sighting occurred in late March. Crossing the cobblestone plaza in front of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris’s modern-art museum, I stumbled on a crowd gathered around a man in a black porkpie hat and a soiled black suit, a taller, huskier Chaplin. He was improvising a scene you might find in a silent film, dragging audience members up to play characters (the scandalous wife, her dashing lover, the frumpy cuckold). They ran through the scene a few times: the doting husband arrives to find his wife with a lover, goes ballistic, pulls out a gun and shoots them both. But with every take something went wrong. The first time around, the husband forgot to knock on the imaginary door. The second time, the lover failed to kiss the woman with enough ardor. With each mistake, the clown, who played the film’s domineering director, launched into a mock frenzy, spiking his hat
to the ground, stomping around, collapsing to his knees, and pleading with his amateur charges to get the scene right, just this once.

  I knew next to nothing about clowns. The school offered no regular clown training and even subtly discouraged students from specializing in the discipline. (“There are more effective venues to learn how to be a clown,” Anny told me during my first week.) In shows, there were comedic characters, goofy everyman types, but actual clowns—or what I thought of as clowns—were a rarity.

  I didn’t get clowns, found them silly and trite. But the Pompidou clown seemed a breed apart. The bit was simple, but there was something raw, almost belligerent about him. Also, it was spring, and the sun was out, and I was feeling ebullient. And so, once the crowd had deposited their fistfuls of coins into his pillowcase, I approached him for a chat.

  He was kneeling on the cobblestones, stuffing props into a black leather suitcase. The back of his neck was glazed in sweat, the collar of his shirt stained yellow. I began asking him a few questions about his background, but he didn’t seem interested in sharing and mostly ignored me. Yet, when I asked him where he trained, he responded, “Training?,” as if the word tasted bad in his mouth. “What the hell do I need training for?” He stood and marched over to retrieve from the sidewalk a scuffed plastic pistol, which he chucked into the suitcase along with a pink scarf. “This is how you learn. You fucking do it.”