Flying Funny: My Life without a Net

by Dudley Riggs

  8

  Clown Diplomacy

  My handshake nearly destroyed the circus.

  I was just getting acclimated to life in a college dorm in Minnesota when I got a telegram from E. K. Fernandez that changed everything. I could finish the term, but I had to be in San Francisco two days before the start of spring quarter.

  The U.S. government had decided that something so American as the circus would help sell the new democratic way of life to the Japanese and build goodwill. It would help heal the wounds of a formerly proud, now defeated people.

  E. K. Fernandez was the greatest producer I ever knew. He opened up the entire Pacific Rim to American show business. Fernandez liked “firsts.” He was the first to produce the Ice Capades in Tahiti, where they had never even seen ice or thought of people skating on it. He moved an entire coral reef to the World’s Fair, where it was presented as the “Singing Sands of Maui.” Now he was the first to bring an American circus to Japan after we destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

  “I need clowns, funny clowns,” Fernandez wrote. “The Japanese people need to laugh. I’ll buy your bar act, but what I have to have is a producing clown who can deliver. Wire me your availability.”

  As producing clowns, it was our job to devise short sketches and walk-around gags that could live up to E. K.’s challenge. First we would hire a few “wild and crazy guys” who would arrive, hopefully, with an established clown character of their own creation. Ideally, they’d have their own makeup and wardrobe and be able to “think funny.” It’s amazing how many would-be clowns think that the clothes make the man and that all they have to do is look funny. Funny is as funny does. Some clowns just look funny; real clowns do funny. It’s like the difference between saying a funny line and saying a line funny.

  For any clown gag to work, it has to be simple and accessible. People need to understand the context and have some empathy for the pain of others. Slapstick comedy can get pretty rough.

  If it’s funny, someone is feeling pain. When we see someone fall down, our instinct is to laugh. If the person who falls on the ice doesn’t get up, then it’s tragedy. Slapstick comedy works everywhere in the world; the characters change, but a sight gag always gets a laugh. Admittedly, the younger the audience, the easier the laugh.

  The only opportunity we really had to spend time up close with the audience was during the “come in” when it was possible to improvise with ticket holders as they came in to take their seats. As Alfonso the Honking Pedestrian, I made a point of never speaking words. I greeted newly arrived folks and showed them to their seats, making conversation with them through the use of the several horns and bells I had hidden in my bearskin coat. This allowed me to express some variable emotions, simply with the different sounds. The audience could observe the moment and fill in the blanks with their own thoughts—the “recognition light bulb” would go off and cause them to laugh. All of this preshow entertainment served as a warm-up to the start of the Grand Opening Parade and the show itself.

  A lot of our vaudeville acts could cross over to the circus ring by making the movements and the props bigger. When we played as The Crazy Carpenters in vaudeville, the opening would find us at a construction site, hammering and sawing, moving long pieces of lumber and tall ladders about the stage, creating a big Rube Goldberg–kind of puzzle. The audience could see that something was being built despite the many accidental tumbles and pratfalls, and they could anticipate the catastrophe that just had to occur. This was what was called a crazy house comedy acrobatic act with lots of tumbling in and out of windows, leaps through revolving doors, and near-miss collisions. In the end, the whole house came crashing down onstage. We would perform the same acrobatic moves in the circus, but there we became The Crazy House Painters, which allowed for splashing a lot of water-based paint on each other anda small amount of clean water on some audience members.

  I suppose what’s really funny is that the circus paid us to do all this nonsense. And now we were going to be paid to go to Japan to entertain people who had just lost World War II.

  There seemed to be no reason not to take the job, so Doc and I joined the Fernandez company in San Francisco and flew Pan Am to Japan with a couple of refueling stops along the way.

  “I can’t tell you how important this tour is,” E. K. kept saying. “The occupation will end soon, and we must be a credit to the American way of life. They can’t just like us; I want them to love us. If this engagement goes well, we might be able to take the show on to Manila and Hong Kong and just keep going west around the world for a couple of years, until we play England and come back to the States a big success and play New York.”

  This wonderful old man had a dream, and I was ready to hop on for the ride. It was the patriotic thing to do. And it looked like two years of steady work.

  Walter Mahatta was the bilingual company manager. A Japanese-American, no-nonsense road boss who always seemed mad about something, he got off on the wrong foot with Doc by making a crack at Doc’s expense.

  “Doc Riggs only looks like Clark Gable at night; in the morning he’s just a hobo clown,” Mahatta said. Lucky for him, Doc let it pass.

  “He doesn’t know anything about me, so I’ll wait awhile,” Doc said. “Maybe I won’t have to educate him.”

  In the circus, there was always a lot of “hurry up and wait.” The show’s equipment came by ship, and even though it had a three-week head start, it did not arrive until the night before opening. We had to do an all-nighter getting the show hung, so everyone was dead tired the morning we opened. With no time to rehearse, the first matinee (9 a.m.) was a tragedy of errors. There were only two accidents at the opening, but because show people believe that “accidents run in threes,” we were all edgy—fearful that the third (other shoe) might drop at any time.

  Right off the bat, the second number in the show, Frank Phillips’s arena cat act, had flash bulbs popping as Japanese cameramen, hired for opening publicity, triggered an event that gave them a news photo. The American mountain lions freaked from the flashes and started slashing Frank’s shirt and chest to shreds. Pumas or mountain lions tend to gang up when there is trouble. African lions will do a sideways slap at the trainer, but pumas do quick, vertical slashes. Blood was flying through the air, the photo guys kept shooting, and the flashes made things worse. Cage boys distracted the other cats and opened the gate, allowing them an exit to the comfort of their cages. Frank managed to beat the lead cat aside, and the whole gang of cats opted for the safety of the chute, and things calmed down. The band had not missed a beat while Frank was fighting for his life. The ringmaster whistled, the band played a D’A’ (a circus band two-note trumpet used to punch up a concluding act), and I entered the number two ring to “Galloping Comedians” played heavily on trumpet as Frank limped toward the back door, bleeding from multiple slashes on his face and arms. The steel arena was removed from the circus ring to clear the stage for the next act while The Riggs Brothers frolicked on the horizontal bars. Now the audience was laughing, having forgotten the bloodshed (while Frank was being treated by medics). Funny clowns were there to entertain and distract the audience from the reality they had just experienced.

  In Japan, we set up in what had been a wrestling arena, a very tall building with forty-five thousand places on the floor to sit. The people in the audience watched the show sitting on their knees on mats. There were a few dozen chairs available to U.S. servicemen and diplomats in a small, closed-in area in front of the center ring, which I, not too wisely, decided to refer to as the royal box. The show had a full brass band, three elephants, a tiger act, and an American mountain lion act. There were jugglers, acrobats, Fred Valentine’s Flying Trapeze Act, and us—The Riggs Brothers and our “jolly collection of frolicking fools.” We had the usual collection of clown wannabes and a couple of workingmen who had been recruited from the props department, well-meaning but short on professional experience. The one truly brilliant clown was a young hobo character named Pun
ch Jacobs.

  After just a one-hour rehearsal, the crew learned the acts, including a clown baseball game that we were certain would be a hit, because baseball was so popular in Japan.

  The baseball act involved keeping your eye on the ball—but there was no ball. The ball appeared only as suggestion. The pitcher went through all of his motions—windup, a stretch, and an exaggerated throw. There was a moment’s pause, and the catcher slapped his glove, raising a puff of dust. The umpire called out “Strike one!” and the game went on. The audience, knowing the rhythm of the game and how the movements were normally paced, soon accepted the fact that there was no ball. In the United States, this pantomime baseball game had always been a big hit with the audience; in Japan, much to our surprise, it died.

  “What happened?” stormed Mahatta. “How did you guys make that the most unfunny clown gag in the history of the circus?”

  He paused, trying to catch his breath, then walked right up to me and shook his finger in my face. He was standing on tiptoe on the front edge of my clown shoes, looking up, trying to get something else out, but all that came was a gibberish of words, a frustrated mix of Japanese and English. Then he walked away muttering in very loud English something about needing new clowns. Everyone was exhausted, and we had two more shows to perform before we could rest.

  The next performance was also a disaster. Nothing happened the way it was planned. The music was off, the pickup musicians hadn’t learned the music, the local prop boys wouldn’t move until the orders were given a second time in Japanese. They stood and posed in their new uniforms, forgetting what they were there to do. Having just been trounced by the unexpected audience apathy, I asked myself, “Just what is it that I am supposed to be doing here, so far from America? What is my job? Do I still have a job?”

  I was sure that Mahatta was making a list of people to fire. If this performance got bad press, someone would have to be blamed.

  We ended with a spirited, patriotic flag finish. The audience for the second show was lining up at the gate, the third-show audience could be seen in a widening line, six abreast, appearing to go out to infinity. The show was going to be a big success, but we had to fix our act.

  It was clear that the supposedly foolproof baseball sketch had not connected with the audience. It had offended some portion of the crowd and caused them to turn off for the rest of the show. I approached Mahatta and said, “Mahatta-san! You are the expert; you must know your people. Please tell me why do you think the audience went away so fast?”

  He stopped walking, looked around to see who else might overhear, then said, “You know American baseball, you do not know Japanese baseball. To you baseball is a pastime, in Japan baseball is more important.” He stormed off.

  I saw a couple of American servicemen standing in line to get into the second show. I felt like a goof, but I approached them. “Hi there. As you can see I’m a clown with the circus, could I ask you guys for some help?” They had attended a Japanese baseball game, something I had foolishly neglected to do, and kindly explained the differences between American and Japanese pregame rituals and players’ responses to hits, runs, and errors.

  I called an emergency rehearsal. With less than an hour before the next show, we added some ritual moves to our interpretation of baseball and, just to be safe, inserted a bit of a popular native folk dance we had learned the first night we arrived. The Japanese found it funny, though I was not sure why. No matter, now we were a hit!

  Business was soon booming for the All-American Circus. After our rough opening, we got into a groove, doing three shows a day for about forty-five thousand delighted ticket buyers and getting outstandingly good publicity. The Mainichi newspaper was one of our sponsors—E. K. Fernandez saw to that. The Daiei Motion Picture Company—the producers of Rashomon—decided to shoot a Japanese version of Romeo and Juliet, set in modern Japan, using the All-American Circus as one of the locations.

  Doc had been featured in a lot of the advertising for the show. His good-natured Tramp character—“I’m penniless but oh so happy, not a care in the world, I’m free because I’m broke”—seemed to resonate with the audience and became an easy symbol for the word circus. Doc and I were beginning to enjoy a growing fan club of mostly female admirers when the movie opened. Six weeks after the last day of principal photography, our fan club grew to several thousand, mostly young, and mostly female.

  Doc’s attitude toward the Japanese had gone from war crazy to saying, “These really are nice folks, once you get to know them.” Michiko Ute should get the credit for turning Doc’s head and heart around. She was liaison between the U.S. Army Intelligence and the Daiei brass and spent most days at the circus. After a while. she was spending her nights there as well.

  If there had been no Pearl Harbor, if there had been no war, the 1942 Olympic Games would have been held in the elegant stadium in Nishinomiya, Japan, where the All-American Circus was presented nearly a decade later. The influence of the other Axis powers was very much visible and intentional, a mix of classic marble and Mussolini modern. The location, centered between Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto, guaranteed even larger audiences than Tokyo. The producers, the U.S government, and E. K. were all looking forward to the move to the south of Japan and to continued success. But then I made a well-meaning but foolish mistake that nearly destroyed the circus.

  The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) brass did not bother to let all of the performers in on the fact that the Japanese royal household had reserved special seats for the Tokyo matinee, only a few weeks before the official lifting of the U.S. occupation. All was not tranquil. There had been May Day riots and a few burning cars, but no one expected things to worsen once the occupation was officially over and American soldiers started going home.

  We were presenting the circus in a structure that had been built for sumo wrestling and was designed to accommodate the masses. These huge audiences were a challenge to play to; it was hard to get close when the layout put so many people high up in the stands. Most of the audience was kimono clad and sat on their knees for more than two hours. A few people in Western dress would be seated in actual chairs along the front side of the track.

  The bandleader, Ramón, blew the trumpet announcing the half hour, so Punch and I started working the front rail. The house was about two-thirds full as we worked our way along the special red seats. I was honking my greetings, shaking a few hands, getting a few laughs, and having a good time. Just in front of the center ring I stopped, tipped my hat, made a lean-in bow, reached out, and shook the hand of a polite, short, very well-dressed young man about my age. I honked my horns in time to the up and down of our handshake and ended as usual with the bell. He was smiling a shy smile and gave a little giggle. The young woman next to him covered her mouth in that charming way Japanese women stifle open laughter. Flashbulbs popped, and the audience that had been laughing went absolutely silent for a moment.

  Then about ten thousand people gave an alarmed gasp and began an embarrassed murmuring. Two very tall men who must have been from Hokkaido stepped forward, glaring at me. I continued to move along the rail. The young man laughed a little louder, the tall guys sat back down, and the crowd let out a sigh. That sigh so surprised everyone that they began laughing at their own surprise. Still not knowing what had happened, I worked my way around to the performers’ entrance, the show began, and I headed for the dressing room.

  “What was that?” Doc asked. “The crowd just went dead; I could hear them just freeze up from here.”

  Before I could answer, Walter Mahatta and a security guy stormed in, spewing orders in Japanese, swearing every profanity that he knew in English and inventing new words to fit the occasion.

  “You! You touched the Crown Prince! No one! No one touches any member of the royal family!” He rattled off something in Japanese, trying to justify himself with the head of security. “Thousands of years—no one is allowed to touch the royal family!”

  E. K. arrived and said, “
No one is supposed to go anywhere near, much less touch, any member of the royal household. You just touched Akihito, the Crown Prince, the son of Emperor Hirohito.”

  “The son of the Son of the Sun God!” Mahatta piped in.

  Men in suits were all over the backyard. Uniformed Japanese cops and U.S. Army brass were all trying to get control of the situation without knowing which situation. I looked at Doc, he nodded, and silently spoke snafu: “situation normal, all fouled up.”

  Mahatta came up to me real close, looked around, and said very quietly, “I think I’ll be able to get you out of the country. Not sure yet, but you need to know that I’ll try to do everything I can to keep you safe. Trust me.”

  E. K. walked in with a grim look on his almost always cheerful face. “Son, you can’t go back to the Ga Joa Inn tonight. The anti-Royalists and the Communists, everybody is just going nuts. The Jap secret-service guys are trying to arrest each other, so the army liaison people are sending some of their security.”

  “Thank God we still have control,” said some army major. “If the occupation was lifted, who knows what would have happened? If this had happened in prewar Japan, all twelve of those secret-service guys protecting the prince would have been ordered to commit hara-kiri. It’s only because we still have some control and can take some of the blame and because of the new constitution that these guys will be allowed to live. Except some of them might do themselves in just out of pride and force of habit.”

  “You!” Mahatta addressed me. “You are out of the show. Take off your makeup.”

  Two army officers took me to their office.

  “You can bunk down on the major’s couch,” one of them said. “There are MPs here all the time, so relax until we decide what to do with you.”

  The next morning, Mahatta came in and told me that because Freddy and his flying troupe had accidentally walked on the red carpet that they had been fired and were already at Pan Am waiting for their flight home. E. K. brought the morning newspapers. The picture showing Akihito shaking my hand was great, but the editorials were all nasty: