Flying Funny: My Life without a Net

by Dudley Riggs

  We got great notices, and the producer splurged with a huge bonus when we closed. The tour was a big success.

  A year later I heard that there had been another act billed as The Great Alberty. I found out he’d canceled the year before, leaving a great supply of posters. The producer, happy to use up the old posters, had dubbed me “The Great Alberty.” So much for pride.

  1948. I was nearly seventeen, flying well, and getting stronger with every engagement. I was in love with the feeling of vitality, the feel-good exhilaration, the joy of flying. We were booked to do aerial bars and a flying return act. Doc hired a new catcher.

  When we played the Boston Garden, I got a profound education in humility, humanity, and the danger of hubris in show business. The building was one of those tall, high-balcony jobs, made for sports, with big accessible girders easy to tie off to and hang the rigging. The floor plates were, however, all too far out, making for net guy wires that were much too loose. We knew we would have to find a fix before showtime. That had to wait because Denny, my new catcher, wanted to get in some of what he called “beer time.”

  I never got invited along when Denny and P. J. went out drinking because I was still underage. We had hit the city on an odd date, with the setup on a Thursday because of some sports playoff that had, to my dismay, higher priority than the circus. We were to play a split week, making the hall available halfway through the run. The hiring committee—some charity or Shrine club that took the hall on a “days available contract”—had created a lot of extra work for us. On Friday we did an early kiddies’ matinee and the regular two shows, tied off all the guy lines, and liberated the space for the basketball game. After all the doubled-up work, we got to take Saturday off. I listened to the basketball game in the dressing room, because the ushers wouldn’t let me in without a ticket.

  At that time Boston had some kind of Sunday blue laws regarding the sale of alcohol, so Denny’s Sunday search for his “morning bump” had been futile. He was in a bad mood, but then he was never in a good mood, so I didn’t give it much thought. Denny, half Irish and half Sioux, was a big man and heavier than most catchers. His 250 pounds looked good in the air but had a lot of belly on the ground. He was tough enough and strong enough to bounce me off his chest and make me look graceful. I was a pretty good bar performer; my long legs gave my giant swings the advantage of a longer pendulum, but I was constantly reminded that I had grown too tall to ever become a really great flyer.

  Never inclined to pay attention to logic, The Riggs Brothers had gone right ahead and offered the flying trapeze act along with the aerial bar act, the juggling act, and the clown numbers, so as to have something to sell. We were actually offering the only non-Hispanic flying act anyone had seen for a long time, with a couple of principal flyers who were too old, a comic leaper who was too tall, and a catcher with a drinking problem.

  The band played the “Dream Lover’s Waltz,” and Doc did the first two fly-outs, out and back, warming up, testing the swing. Then Denny dropped down, swung his legs around the outside of his lines, and wrapped his legs in a Dutch Lock. I heard him groan slightly on the top of his backswing. Doc gave me a quizzical look, as if to say, “What’s up with Denny?” I didn’t pick up any meaning from the look, so I left the board when Denny topped the front end of his swing, went down the hill, did some comedic bicycle kicks on the backswing for the audience, and passed Denny at the top of the swing. Doc called to me in a singsong voice, “He’s-not-high-enough.” I could have gone back to the board and started all over, but I was pumped, ready to fly. Pride shaded my judgment.

  Freddy Valentine had always insisted, “It’s not speed you want, it’s height. You have to have height to do the trick and meet the catcher. Height gives you more time before you meet.”

  In rehearsal, Denny was always forcefully energetic. Now he was moving like mud. I put a lot of kick in my swing, as if more energy from me would make up for Denny’s flaccid arc. I came down the “hill,” popped as high as I could, reached for his wrists . . . and found only air. My rotation continued, and my feet came up and connected with Denny’s head, making a very soft thud sound. My rotation stopped. I fell, eyes to the sky, flat as a board, out of control, into the net below. Denny, nearly unconscious, swung his legs together, fell out of his lock, and dropped like a slab of cement.

  My first bounce into the net had lifted the crow’s foot off its pin, and it sagged in toward the center pole. At the bottom of my second bounce, Denny landed on top of me, and the whole center of the net collapsed into the sawdust. I heard the band switch to clown music, with people yelling, and the sound of the whistle. I couldn’t move. I thought Denny must be dead. Then he cursed and rolled off me and slowly went from hands and knees to both feet and staggered out of my sight. I don’t remember anything after that.

  I woke up the next day in a Boston hospital, in a body cast, and feeling a lot of pain. I had a broken collarbone and left arm, and my ribs had been pulled away from the sternum. My right side had been spared, except for a broken pinky finger. The doctor said I had been in shock, but that my head was okay, and that my big body cast would be replaced after a few days. I knew “from tradition” that the show would go on without me.

  I was told that when we came crashing down the ringmaster called for “Clowns!,” then “Bulls!,” and reordered the lineup, bringing the elephants in on the hippodrome track for the always popular long mount. This refocused the crowd, blocked their view of the ring, and allowed for a graceful finale to the show. He closed the performance announcing happily that everyone was alive, safe and sound, and imploring, “May all your days be circus days!”

  The announcer had kept the audience happy and had kept the lid on the story so as not to spook future attendees. “Circus accidents make for very bad press and knock the hell out of the box office,” said the boss. The story made the local newspapers, a single column three inches long. I was nearly killed and couldn’t even make the front page.

  The engagement ended, and the show moved on to Chicago along with my father, who was under contract—leaving me stranded in the hospital in my hot, itchy body cast. I was angry and childishly looking for someone to blame. Denny was at the top of the list, as was my own lack of judgment. Denny worked the rest of the engagements. The show must go on.

  When a flyer falls, you go to the hospital, but the show goes on.

  1 Arthur Riggs was a prisoner of the Germans for fourteen months in a prisoner-of-war camp that just so happened to be called Stalag 17.

  7

  Flying Funny

  “Absolutely awesome acrobatics, amazingly achieved at an astonishing altitude by an accomplished agile aerial artist, the king of the air!”

  How was I supposed to hear that twice a day and not let it go to my head?

  I had never had a five-year plan, always needing to keep things open in order to be available for work, but I knew it was time to grow up and do a little life planning. I had always been in the family act, always on a team, always saying “we” instead of “I.” It was time for me to get out on my own. Doc was now putting everything into producing clown numbers, and he wasn’t very interested in my idea for a circus act with original music and a fantasy story to tell.

  “The Riggs tradition is what counts,” he said. “They don’t want to hire us to do some kind of ‘avant-garde’ aerial act. Save your money; they don’t want new music.” It was time for me to do new things.

  Dubb Harden, my onetime rigger, had a short season that ended in New Jersey, so he hopped on the train and came to see me. He had a lead on a sway pole rigging that he said I could pick up for five bills, but when I saw some pictures of it, I felt chills. It was sleek and well painted but poorly engineered.

  “Why is this rig for sale?” I asked. There had been a number of aerial accidents recently, and I had for some weird reason been keeping track. Some circus people had been coming crashing down because of faulty equipment, almost always because of some kind of riggin
g failure.

  “I think it’s part of an estate sale,” said Dubb, who didn’t know much.

  “Oh, damn, do you think?”

  “Pipe broke,” he said.

  “Pipe? Do you mean a pipe, like as in gas pipe, with a seam?”

  “I think he tried to make do with two-inch electrical conduit.”

  I told Dubb to keep looking.

  After I was discharged from the hospital I caught up with the show on closing day in Atlanta and started working my body back into shape. Everything had healed, and I was beginning to get a full range of motion, but I was weak from bed rest and could hardly lift my own weight. With The Riggs Flyers no longer available for bookings, I was out of a job. I started working out long days, eating big steaks, and pushing myself back into a flying condition.

  “How would you like to be a catcher in an unnamed famous flying trapeze act?” I asked Dubb. Six weeks later we were doing simple picture tricks, simple “pose and then connect” moves like “skin the cat,” and I was getting over being sore all the time. By spring we had one-half of an act. I had managed to remount long enough to know that the fall had not robbed me of anything but time. The feel of flying was still there. I could still have fun in the air. But first I had to finish high school.

  Most of the old vaudeville and circus acts were set—polishedbut never changed or added to. The Riggs family kept adding more acts to the roster. Everyone seemed to agree that the most beautiful aerial act was the flying return act, but it was not the most difficult. John Ringling once said, “The two hardest acts in the circus are the horizontal bars and Roman Rings,” so naturally Doc insisted on doing both. I came late, so I missed out on doing the Roman Rings, but the horizontal bar act was as hard as anything I had ever tried. “Why do we keep selecting the hardest job?” I asked. “Oh, it’s just a family tradition,” said Doc with a smile.

  To connect with the audience, we would always “sell” to a specific spot in the house, a corner in the audience—looking for a friendly face. On the first bow, we’d find someone in the audience to make eye contact with and then work to that someone. In the flying act on the back turn, we would stomp lightly on the landing and “style” to the young lady over there, sell it to another group over here, try to see how they’re taking it. You hope you have their undivided attention. The worst thing that can happen is that you make the extra effort to sell to a certain person, then realize that she is looking somewhere else—watching the balloon salesman go by. (In Europe, the circus in those days never compromised the art by selling merchandise in the big top.)

  It was harder to make audience contact in the big halls, where we were farther away from the audience. The big three-ring circus system was, of course, built on greed, as a bigger tent would accommodate a larger audience. It became artistically frustrating when we were working in the number one ring and couldn’t see what was going on down in ring number three. Some shows would actually move an act from one ring and play it later in the show in another ring. That was the reason I liked the flying act, because it was usually the only act working at one time. You were high up, and you had all of the audience’s attention.

  When Doc and I did the ground version of the horizontal bar act (a difficult comedy act, punctuated by straight tricks or dangerous moves), we would work in the program against acts in both end rings, a three-ring display of acts working at the same time. Here we got a humbling lesson. Once when we thought we were doing something wonderful, we styled for the audience. But the audience wasn’t watching us. They gave no applause, because they were watching the guy over there in ring number two.

  That’s when we realized that we had not interested that audience that night, despite the difficulty of what we were doing.

  “Everything in show business is either interesting or it’s not interesting,” Doc said. It was an irony that I did not understand until much later.

  In the horizontal bar act I left the bar at the bottom of a giant swing, did a half twist and a half somersault, and landed in a handstand on top of the other bar ten feet away from there. I then continued the circle. When we got really good at this, Doc and I would do what we called “chasing flyovers,” passing each other in the center making continual circles of giant swings. It was a risky proposition; a collision could wreck us both. If I underturned the trick, I would cross over and, instead of catching with my hands, I’d slam into the bar with my sternum and most likely tear my ribs. The act was designed to be both a straight and a comedy act, ideal for circus or for nightclubs; it kept me on guard—and with my ribs taped up all year.

  We built a low apparatus that had two horizontal bars eight feet high and ten feet apart, a tall mechanism that rolled in and out like a big rollaway bed. We could set up on a little nightclub dance floor, put down weights to stabilize it, and then do the act. For comedic purposes, we’d prepare the safety pads underneath the bars for a surprise gag. I’d sprinkle some talcum powder around the edge of the pad and put another pad on top of that.

  The act started with me seated casually in a chair with my feet against the rigging. The audience would see me reading a book titled in big letters: How to Be an Acrobat. Doc would enter and complete a demanding routine of giant swings, ending with a somersault, all while I would be sitting there reading the book. Finally, inspired by Doc’s example, I would decide to try my luck. I would start to follow the instructions in pantomime, come back, look at the bar, reread the lesson, and finally get brave, jump up, and do a half swing. Just when I reached horizontal, I would let go and fall flat on my back and hit the pad, which would raise a cloud of talcum dust. I then lay there motionless, appearing to be knocked out. The audience would wonder if I were dead. I’d wait a count of ten, then get up like Lazarus in a surprise recovery, go get the book, and tear out the offending page and crumple it up and throw it away.

  This ninety-second gag took a fair amount of rehearsal. The comedy came from what the philosophers called “failure exposed and amplified.” Every time I would try to do something, I would fail, and then Doc would successfully do something even more spectacular that would challenge me, and then, like Sisyphus, I would try to do the same trick and fail again. Of course, at the end, I’d master the moves—for the big finish. Success at last!

  One of the next new things I considered was buying a cannon, a story for another day. It ultimately fell apart, and Mother said, “Go back to school.”

  I was nearly twenty years old when I finally enrolled in what was then called the Normal School, a teachers’ college in the middle of rural Minnesota. I had just returned from a very successful circus tour of Hong Kong, Manila, Hawaii, and Japan. That was after a not unsuccessful European circus tour. I had a little money and was feeling rather full of myself. My age, parlance, Italian clothes, and foreign car made it difficult to blend in. With no local family, no social connections, no record of athletic or scholastic achievement, it was not surprising that someone would ask, “Why did you choose this school?”

  I enrolled at Mankato State Teachers College (MSTC) because I had no bookings.

  I had transported a very bright young lady friend two hundred miles to her dormitory and was about to leave when she said, “As long as you’re here, why don’t see if they’ll let you register? You always said you wanted to go to college someday, so why not here? Why not now?”

  I knew it was customary for bright students to start planning for college in junior high school. I missed the planning when I missed junior high. Amazingly, I was accepted. This should not be held against MSTC, which was and still is a fine institution (now Minnesota State University, Mankato).

  Joining the other first-year students, I stood out. I soon learned that standing out goes against a well-established Minnesota custom.

  My roommate, a business major as well as an accomplished jazz pianist, began the process of orienting me to college life. Chuck McKinsey was a year ahead, so he knew and taught me the ropes. He also introduced me to modern jazz. After year
s of flying to Strauss waltzes and circus marches, modern jazz was a revelation. Jazz has covertly inspired most of my theatrical work ever since.

  We all read the book How to Think Up (McGraw-Hill, 1942) in which Alex F. Osborn, a founder of the advertising agency BBDO, introduced the term “brainstorming” to the world. We spent hours discussing existentialism, German theater, T. S. Eliot, and especially the Freudian idea of free association. Trying to impress my tiny group of friends, I said in a delusion of grandeur that I thought that a group of intelligent, talented people, placed in a state of free speech, where all voices and ideas were welcomed, could use free association to create stage entertainment without the benefit of a written script. No one agreed. But everyone had a free-association story. And told it. My idea about applying the technique to theater got lost. The discussion went on and on. Beer was illegally consumed. Friends turned hostile and challenged my un-American idea.

  I wanted approval about my theory from peers, but I went about it in the most stupid of ways, speaking with too much assumed authority. I was a new nobody who hadn’t taken time to make friends. So I stopped talking about it.

  I counseled myself: When you are ready and truly off the road, you can do a degree program. But for now, take the courses that interest you, but be sure to do the work.

  I did the class work, but then “real work,” offering real money, resurfaced.