by Dudley Riggs
People who have no blood ties anywhere, or rather have no blood ties that they can tie to a location, often have trouble explaining: “Where are you from?” “Where are your people from?” You have to overcome the fear that you’re going to be judged in order to perform. When you’re onstage, everyone applauds. When you’re offstage, you’re just another kid, except you’re show people. I carried that judgment for a long time, and it still hurts to remember.
5
School on the Road
“Why is this child not in school?”
In 1941 we settled for a while in Oklahoma and set up a “winter quarters” as a place to repaint and repair the circus—and put me in school. Starting school at the end of the circus season in October always required a mixture of white lies, short con, and sometimes serious negotiation. My mother’s task was to convince the school authorities that her young son had “just transferred into the school district, unexpectedly, quite suddenly,” and that she was therefore unable to provide any records from the previous school, which was always, it seemed, hundreds of miles away. I had had several tutors over the years, but alas, there were no previous school records. Our sudden arrival at a school around Halloween was explained by some vague reference to “an unfortunate family emergency” and accompanied by promises of hard work and good deportment. Nothing was mentioned about the fact that I would not complete the school year. I was comforted by that fact. I knew that soon I could leave it all behind and move on to fun things again, such as working in the circus. By June, when the school session would end and my (nonexistent) school records had still not arrived in the mail, I would already be miles away, in the fifth week of the new circus season, playing thirteen shows a week and—sad now to say—not thinking about tests or passing to the next grade.
On the road, of course, I had a tutor, sometimes a qualified teacher, but usually just someone already on the payroll who could double in brass. She would be my teacher, or at least someone with the show who could be referred to as my teacher if a local truant officer were to show up backstage and ask, “Why is this child not in school?”
One season, when I was seven, I was without a tutor for a while. My mother had hired a clown named Bubbles Lake to be my teacher, but my dad fired him when he caught Mr. Lake offering me a swig from his gin bottle. I was never sure of Lake’s intentions, but Doc was direct: “I know he’s a college graduate, and I know he used to teach school, but Bubbles doesn’t get to teach my son . . . anything!” Doc had just that moment tossed Bubbles off the second-floor balcony of our hotel. Bubbles bounced off of the lobby sofa and wasn’t hurt too badly—just a broken arm and collarbone. Dad tore up his contract, gave him a Greyhound ticket, and that was the last I heard of Bubbles Lake.
Because we were always moving from town to town, my education stayed a hit-and-miss affair. But there was a plan, and there was a Riggs family rule: whenever possible, I was to be in school—that is, when it did not conflict with our bookings.
My mother, of course, valued education. She had finished college before she met my father and got swept away in show business. She said she loved show business, and she loved my father, but she knew that if the Riggs family tradition did not continue into the fifth generation, the world would not come to an end.
My father and my mother remained at odds about education. Doc finished high school but never went to college. Lil came out of college into marriage and was always a little irritated that my education was so often put on the back burner. My mother wanted me to have an education, and Doc wanted me to have a career. For her, school was “preparation for life.” For Doc, show business was life.
The first time I enrolled for an extended period in an actual school, I was nearly ten. My mother and I went to arrange my placement, but her meeting with the school authorities did not go well.
“Without proper papers, Strang School cannot allow some stranger, some unknown kid, whose parents are in ‘the show business,’ to enroll in the Strang school system,” the principal said. He pronounced the words the show business as if those words were an insult and a threat to his civilized community.
Lil gave it another try. She and I dressed conservatively for our meeting with the school superintendent. Mother dropped the name of the Baptist minister and the mayor and even quoted the work of that great educator John Dewey. All in vain.
School had started in September, and it was now November. “You were not here. It’s too bad, but maybe next year. If you are still around,” we were told. “We are not required by law to provide schooling to migrant workers, Indians, or show people. It’s all we can do to school our own and the . . . colored! You are nonresidents. You haven’t paid taxes here, so why would anyone expect the county to provide schooling for children of show-business transients?” He spat that last word out with distaste.
As we drove back to our newly rented quarters, Mother kept mimicking the man in his dumb cracker voice. “The county is not required, blah, blah, blah . . .” We were laughing. I thought, I’m not going to school this year, either. Was I disappointed or relieved?
Then Mother had a thought.
“Wait a minute, the county is not required, but what about the state and federal government?”
So Lil visited the Five Civilized Tribes Indian School in Strang, Oklahoma, and had a talk with Chief Keys, a wonderfully wise and oil-wealthy Cherokee who was head of the tribal board. He had a secret school he called the “lab school.” He decided that the Strang Public School policy was unfair to all minorities—including show people—and that the Five Tribes should set an example of fairness by enrolling any child that had been unfairly denied a chance to attend school. I was the only candidate. So I became a Five Tribes fifth grader.
I didn’t know what to expect. Up until then, the closest thing to a classroom that I had seen in a long time was watching a burlesque sketch titled “Teacher’s Pet,” a short number that featured a seminude teacher and three of her “students,” who were baggy pants comics shouting, “Oh, teacher!”
At Five Tribes I was allowed to make up all my missing class grades, all five of them, and was accepted by the other kids even though I could not prove any native lineage. My mother had implied that there was some sort of blood connection to the Creek tribe, but it didn’t matter. The kids knew the truth: I was “that show-business kid” and was told to stay home on Indian agent inspection day.
Like most white children, I identified Indians with cowboys. Everything I knew about them had come from the movies. I was soon ashamed of this. Chief Keys had saved a lot of kids from being taken away from their families and being sent to an Indian-assimilation boarding school. Keys was a man of peace who said, “I have stayed angry in my head but not in my heart.”
At Five Tribes Indian School, I was accepted by the kids after running a single gauntlet. I was fast enough to make it through the line without any loss of blood. When I came back, they dropped their sticks and let out a big yell. No one made fun of my looks, my stupid answers, or my pale face. I learned more than the three Rs. I learned when to look people in the eye, and especially when not to look people in the eye. I learned how to be with other kids, but I still thought of myself as an adult.
“School’s not so bad,” I thought. “I like being around other people, even if they are my own age.”
6
The Circus at War
When a flyer falls.
1940 had been a very good year. The Depression seemed over and people once again had jobs and money and hope. The United States was at peace. The future looked bright, the circus business was booming.
“It’s getting bigger and better every day,” said my mother. “Americans look happy again.”
Then came the war.
Soon everything had to be rationed as America mobilized for war.
And I could see a second war, a war about tradition, education, and values festering between my parents. The Second World War would cost Doc his marriage, his circus, his health
, and, most tragically, his pride.
“If the Riggs Brothers Circus can’t get enough gasoline during the war, we should make the show smaller,” Lil said. “The public will understand. The audience will still come to the show.”
The war brought a shortage of tires, sugar, and, above all, labor. Everyone was either joining the army or being drafted. The circus had to find ways to reduce the number of workingmen and still be able to move the show and get the big top up and down. Like the early railroad, the circus had always required the use of cheap labor—men were hired for their muscle and not much else. Most of the canvas and stake crew were down at the bottom of the pecking order. They fit into the hierarchical caste system below the rest of the workingmen—even below the sometimes hired runaways, winos, and ex-cons. As part of the “top-tier” performing artists, I hardly ever saw any of the workingmen. It’s not that I tried not to see; it’s just that I didn’t.
There was a lot of uncertainty about our future. Everything Doc acquired from the World’s Fair needed to be repainted and overhauled if the show was to hit the road again in the spring. The principal painter, a newly unemployed scenic artist by the name of Mr. McAdoo, said that he needed six men for four months—“if the circus is to look like a real circus and be ready to open.” Mr. McAdoo was a wonderful old man who suffered from a shaking palsy. Even with this affliction, he was able to paint intricate gold leaflines on the wagons, saying as he painted, “Watch me shake some art off of this paintbrush.”
Despite the gasoline rationing, the Riggs Brothers Circus was on the road until Doc closed the show and joined the navy. With the show closing, the animals had to go somewhere. Some went to other circuses, some went to zoos. But more than the whole Noah’s Ark of animals, the menagerie of our circus, had to be disposed of before the show could be put to bed. Seats, lights, canvas, and props went into a barn. Seeing Doc’s dream circus being taken apart in 1943 made me very sad. We thought that after the war the Riggs Brothers Circus would be resurrected and reopened, but it never opened again.
“I’m going to win the war!” Doc wrote to Lil. “Then I’ll be able to buy gas and rubber for the show and continue our scheduled circus tour.”
When he had tried to enlist in 1942, the army wouldn’t take him, saying he was too old, but in 1943 with the war going badly, the navy made him a petty officer.
1943 was a very bad year. People were frightened and sad. Everyone thought we were losing the war. We got a telegram: Uncle Art was declared missing, shot down over Germany; Father was in the Pacific; my grandmother died, and no one told me. (This still hurts.)
With the strain of these terrible times, my parents divorced. The Riggs Brothers Circus folded the big top forever. I did my part, too, by getting sick, spending nearly a year at the Mayo Clinic fighting nephritis. I got well, obviously, but by that time America was winning the war, my uncle was liberated from Stalag 17,1 my mother had remarried, and I started school again.
After VE Day, my father’s navy ship had sat on the equator for eight weeks while they were waiting for the troops to arrive from Europe. All the men on his ship were sure of their death in the upcoming invasion of Japan, and having by then survived eleven initial landings and losing many of their buddies, they were feeling fatalistic. At that point, men on the ship started tattooing one another, singing some old navy song: “without a sigh, for tomorrow we die.”
My father was a navy beach lander. His job was to get marines from the troop ships into the landing boats and then onto the enemy beach. Once a ship’s ramp was dropped, the marines went ashore. Doc had only to run fifty paces from the landing craft, dig in, guard the craft, and await a return trip with the casualties. Those first fifty steps often took the heaviest enemy fire. Of the 350 beach landers who trained with my dad back in Oakland, only twelve came back alive.
When he came back from the war, his body was covered with tattoos. “I’m a moving picture show,” he said. His charming cheerfulness was replaced with a hair-trigger anger. “They say I’m Asiatic now,” he said, using a slang termfor the “battle fatigue” that came between World War I’s “shell shock” and post-traumatic stress disorder in more recent wars.
Before the war, we had standards: every Riggs act was rehearsed, polished, and re-rehearsed “to be the very best.” The war had changed Father. He was no longer eager to rehearse. Now he was willing to settle for second best. Tears welled up in his eyes when he explained: “We are a variety act, we are only one part of a variety show, we are not headliners anymore. Our act fills out the evening’s performances between the star acts. There is no onus on the Riggs reputation because we will be very good at being good enough.” That was a tragic change.
In 1947, when I was fifteen, we started getting a lot of engagement offers from overseas. We took our act out of the country, thinking we were hot stuff. In London we were the “imported act, direct from the USA,” deserving of better billing because we were new to the British.
I learned a new lesson about tolerance. The homegrown English acts were gracious and revealed none of the resentment that American acts often felt about jobs being filled by those “hooligan” foreign acts. There was much less jealousy in the British circus, or maybe they were just better at concealing it behind English reserve. At any rate, we were treated to good conditions; we were respected and paid very well, and I tried to live up to my billing without becoming impossibly temperamental. I tried.
I was billed as “The Great Alberty.” It was a big surprise. I thought I was pretty good, but I had never thought that I was great.
Our contract clearly had us booked as The Flying Riggs Brothers; my pole act was just an extra act we offered along with the clowning back when we were exchanging telegrams. Now we were in England ready to perform two acts in the show, and management expected three.
When we arrived for the first rehearsal, I was surprised to find that someone named Clive had given me a brand-new stage name and a separate identity on the program. The circus producer in London just decided that The Great Alberty would be the best name to give the American kid who had been hired for the holiday production. I was told the programs and posters had been printed, it was too late to make changes, and I was expected to become The Great Alberty. I had never wanted to be anyone other than a Riggs, so I was a ticked-off teenager.
“You will do the act as you always do,” said the director. “The only change will be the announcement.” He smiled and gave me a little salute, saying, “Mister Alberty.”
I went through some ego swallowing, but by dinnertime I had talked myself into liking the name. I carried on a debate in my head. I thought, “Alberty could conceivably be construed as honoring my uncle Al, and at least they didn’t give me some name that’s hard to say like Ugo Dematsiatsy. And Alberty is first alphabetically. It should be easy for the fans to remember, and it is the center ring.”
I must have said center ring out loud because Doc spoke up: “There is only the center ring here; in England, every act is center ring.” Doc went on to explain the publicity snafu. It turned out to be a vagary of deadlines. “Clive said he couldn’t reach us while we were on the ship, so he went with the first name he could think of to make his printing deadline. You always said you’d like to have a job that didn’t depend on the Riggs family name. Well, Son, you got it!”
He was putting me in my place and complimenting me at the same time. At least that’s what I thought. “‘Great’ is a word for the towners; ‘great’ is to sell tickets. I’m not sure it will mean much to the British. They have never been an easy sell. Just don’t go getting temperamental on us,” I was told.
The poster was only a “two-sheet,” small by bill-posting standards, but it had my new aerial stage name in big block letters. (The war was over, but paper was still being rationed, as was damn near everything.) It read, “Spectacular Sway Pole Sensation: The Great Alberty.” I started swaggering a little, feeling much more important than I could ever be. Doc caught me as I was b
ulling my way across the ring. “Don’t get too cocky,” he said. “We’re getting the same salary as before.”
In the holiday presentation of the Blackpool Tower Circus, my third-from-closing spot on the program was introduced with a trumpet fanfare and this announcement:
“Absolutely awesome acrobatics, amazingly achieved at an astonishing altitude by an accomplished agile aerial artist, the king of the air!”
The announcer would pause, as the drum roll grew louder, and end with: “The Great Al-Bert-Tee!” How was I supposed to hear that twice a day and not let it go to my head?
This grandiose, alliterative, redundant style was also used for our bar act earlier in the show. “Hair-raising, heart-stopping heroics by the death-defying daredevil duo: The Flying Riggs Brothers!”
This kind of puffery gave the newspaper critics an easy angle for their columns. If they wanted to potshot any of the acts, the excesses of our intro gave them a license. I felt like we had been set up to draw fire away from the rest of the show. All of the British acts were given straightforward announcements. Maybe management just wanted to prop up the Americans’ announcement to an audience that was not totally sold on all things American. It could have been what they thought we wanted. Always skeptical, I believed that it was some kind of private joke by the management.
The billing had some other effect on me, however. I had carried a secret, silent hurt around for several years. Mr. Davenport, the circus boss, had once said, “You got hired by Dailey Brothers Circus only because of the Riggs name and reputation. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been interested. Without your dad’s name, you are just another nobody.” That bothered me a lot, but after a season of work as The Great Alberty, I knew I could make it on what I had to offer. Partly, it was father–son pride, and I had won, even though there had never been a fight. It was all in my head. There was no scene, no “today you are a man” moment. I had done well, and my dad said, “Good job, Son.” Having proven to myself and Doc that I didn’t need the Riggs name, I went comfortably back to being one of The Riggs Brothers.