Battle for the Big Top

TWO

BEFORE THE BIG TOP

THE CIRCUS WOULD IN FACT SURVIVE THE AWFUL TRAGEDY, AND THE RINGLING show would not cease the use of the “big top” tent for another dozen years. But the Hartford disaster was a significant punctuation point in a process of reorganization and downsizing of the once-formidable circus industry, which had been ongoing since 1929, when John Ringling himself had struggled to keep his “greatest show on earth” afloat amid the economic wreckage brought by Black Tuesday of October 29.

Those struggles for Ringling, who was by the 1920s a highly diversified and successful businessman with far-flung holdings in railroading, banking, planned community development, and oil, might have seemed impossible scant years before the Depression, when the American circus reigned as far and away the most compelling form of popular entertainment in the nation, and indeed the world. At the turn of the century, when the big top was raised and the pachyderms paraded from the rail station to the circus grounds, an entire community turned its attention to the event that was about to unfold.

Nor were the financial implications of the industry insignificant. In the months leading up to the stock market crash, Ringling cleared about $1 million from $2.5 million in receipts. To gain some appreciation of those sums in terms of contemporary dollars, we could use the Bureau of Labor’s somewhat conservative formula to adjust for inflation and peg Ringling’s 1929 profits at about $15 million in today’s money. But economists Michael Keppler and Robert Gunther, who compare the relative value of wealth against the gross national product of a given year, would suggest Ringling’s 1929 circus generated the equivalent of at least $250 million in revenue, with profits equating to $100 million or more. That the circus once commanded such social and economic significance may be difficult to fathom today, when Super Bowls that draw less than a hundred million viewers are belittled, when television audiences can access four hundred or more channels, and when movie executives measure true success as film releases that gross in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

But, indeed, the circus did command the world of American entertainment during the greatest part of the nation’s rise to world prominence and, in time, it became an inextricable part of the national identity. Just as the American frontier had been tamed by political leaders and adventurers, so had the most fearsome wild creatures been brought into détente with their human trainers. For a can-do nation that prided itself on the ability to overcome any technological obstacle to progress, what better metaphor might there be than a troupe of acrobats or gymnasts defying gravity? And if an audience member’s attention might wander back to some cold reality outside the tent for a moment, the Joe-ordinary, never-catch-a-break clowns were there to remind them: we are all in this mess together.

Despite all the twentieth-century technological advancements in entertainment—movies, television, computers, and gaming consoles among them—it would be nearly a hundred years from when John Ringling had first grappled with a brave new world to the final performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, testimony of how deeply ingrained in the American consciousness the institution of the circus had become.

As the final show in 2017 approached, Kenneth Feld, whose family had purchased the show from Ringling heirs in 1967, pointed out that the business model for the circus was in fact 146 years old, a form of mass entertainment that attempted to incorporate a bit of everything for audiences of all types and tastes. In this modern era, when technology allows for ever-narrowing “entertainment channels,” the circus had suffered in the same way that big department stores and print newspapers have. Given the high costs of mounting such a diverse, labor-intensive show, the Felds’ circus had long been an enterprise on life support, and with the 2015 decision to retire the pachyderms came the final blow, proof of P. T. Barnum’s hoary observation: “When attempting to entertain the American public, it is best to have an elephant.”

Yet even if the end had been in sight for some time, many in the crowd on May 17, 2017, were distraught. Shawn Goberdhan, a thirty-one-year-old pharmacy manager who had brought his two-year-old son to see the show, held out hope that the circus would somehow find a way to return, retrofitted in some way for a twenty-first-century audience. “If it doesn’t,” Goberdhan said, “I can’t even think about it.”

Part of the reason for Goberdhan’s inability to comprehend the end of the circus likely has to do with the fact that the roots of the American circus date to colonial days, more than a hundred years before the arrival of Barnum and Bailey and the Ringlings and the Greatest Show on Earth. And actually, the roots of the circus itself go back two thousand years, to the Roman circus, a fixture of public entertainment dating from the fifth century BCE. During the hundred-day opening of the Colosseum in Rome, some nine thousand animals were killed, and it was commonplace for the Romans to sacrifice captured soldiers and army deserters to be trampled by elephants or brought down by lions and tigers in the arena. The emperor Commodus prided himself on having stalked and killed a hundred bears in a single day inside an artificial forest created in the Colosseum. Earlier even than the Roman circus was a Greek version called a hippodrome, primarily consisting of horse and chariot racing, which had been included in the Olympic Games as early as the seventh century BCE.

Though very little of what audiences viewed in those ancient venues, including gladiatorial contests and the slaughter of wild beasts, survived antiquity, it would be nearly thirteen hundred years after the collapse of the Roman Empire until a single dictionary or encyclopedia wavered from the common definition of the term:

To appreciate the evolution of the American circus, then, and its emergence as “one of the most important achievements of mankind,” as one commentator has put it, requires a bit of backstory. And while Barnum and Bailey and Ringling might not have created “the greatest show” out of whole cloth, their accomplishments may seem even more remarkable given their ability to transcend what had been a staple of the world’s entertainment for upward of two millennia. One measure of creativity, poet and scholar Brewster Ghiselin asserts, is “the combining of familiar elements into a form never before apprehended.” Indeed, that was the watchword for many who experienced the full flowering of circus productions during the institution’s golden age: “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Here is how it happened.

THREE

THE PERIODIC TABLE OF CIRCUS ELEMENTS

SLAUGHTER, NAVAL BATTLES, AND CAESAR’S THRONE THANKFULLY DISAPPEARED from the circus with the passing of the Roman Empire, but when the world reemerged from the Dark Ages, what are generally regarded as the three essential elements of the modern circus were stirring: acts that can be presented in a ring, including riding, tumbling, juggling, and balancing; clowns; and the ring itself. Over time, three other elements added color and vitality: the menagerie, the sideshow, and the parade.

Historian Isaac J. Greenwood writes of a troupe of latter-day Eastern desultores, or horsemen, who caused a stir in the thirteenth century when they arrived by ship at Constantinople. “They stretched their ropes for dancing from one ship’s mast to another, and in riding stood erect upon their horses, mounting, dismounting, and turning somersaults at full gallop. In sixteenth-century England, even Shakespeare made reference to the fabled silver-shod Marocco, a trained horse who could count coins and walk about on its hind legs: ‘How easy it is… the dancing horse will tell you.’”

By 1652, one William Stokes was to publish his illustrated Art of Vaulting, which showed how he might mount one horse via a mighty leap over other stationary horses, sometimes choosing to land neatly in the saddle or at other times atop his chosen steed. And Greenwood shares an account of John Evelyn, dated 1682, describing the regular visits of the Moroccan ambassador and his retinue to Hyde Park, where crowds gathered “to watch their extraordinary activity in horsemanship, and in flinging and catching their lances; they rid [sic] very short, and could stand upright, managing their spears with incredible agility, and the ambassador himself charging his gun all at full speed.”

More tightrope walking had been reported throughout the Middle Ages, including one account of a man who, in 1385, climbed from the top of a bridge in Paris to a church tower while holding a pair of lighted candles.

And at Saint Bartholomew’s fair in London was introduced the curiosity or “monster,” an attraction that would one day find its way to the circus sideshow. Among the earliest on display there was a “Miracula Natura,” elsewhere billed as “O’Brien the Irish Giant the Tallest Man in the Known World Being Near Nine Feet Hight,” who soon had company, including “a man with one head but two bodies, a hermaphrodite, a woman with three breasts, and a child with three legs, as well as a man without hands or legs who nonetheless managed to play the oboe and paint pictures that were offered for sale.”

A number of royals and wealthy nobles of the Middle Ages were fond of keeping exotic beasts, including elephants, lions, tigers, leopards, bears, and giraffes, in private collections. By the fourteenth century, French rulers had established a public menagerie at the Louvre featuring lions, and soon the practice spread about Europe.

As to the antecedents of that most essential element of the circus, the clown—the figure who bridges the gap between the superhuman performer and the ordinary gawkers in the audience—it was in Italy during the Renaissance that the clown as a distinguishable modern performing figure began to take shape, in a genre known as the commedia dell’arte, loosely structured plays that tended to be bawdy and highly improvised and that were often dominated by a chief actor who could tell jokes, dance, sing, juggle, mime, and do acrobatics, all to keep a show from flagging. The most well-known clown, prior to American Emmett Kelly, was an early-nineteenth-century London performer: Joey Grimaldi. He never appeared in a circus ring, instead earning his reputation in vaudeville-styled performances at Sadler’s Wells and other theaters, but his work set the bar for all the clowns to come. According to one commentator, all Grimaldi had to do to send his audiences into screaming laughter was don his outlandish makeup—his face described as a startling mask, his mouth “a blood-red wound, a mile-wide smear of jam”—then walk onstage and ask, “Well, how are you?”

Grimaldi was also a gifted singer, using musical performances to humanize his comedy. He would take his place, seated at the footlights, flanked on one side by a huge codfish’s head and on the other by a giant oyster that opened and closed its mouth along with the music. Grimaldi sang “An Oyster Crossed in Love,” which sent the adults in the audience into paroxysms. At the same time, he projected such pathos for the oyster’s unrequited efforts that all the children were in tears.

So great was Grimaldi’s impact upon the genre that the slang industry term for clown to this day is “Joey.” He may never have set foot in a circus, but his outlandish makeup, his kaleidoscopic costumes, his wild array of wigs—Mohawks, purple plumes, thatches of orange and green thistle—and his shoes and gloves that left not an inch of skin showing created the archetypal look for all clowns.

Thus, with all the disparate elements of the modern circus alive in the popular imagination, there remained only the need for some individual to pull things together. In seventeenth-century England, public exhibitions of skilled horsemanship had become popular, with a man named Thomas Johnson among the first performers. As an October 1758 issue of Grand Magazine rhapsodized: “This Artist has, for some weeks past, entertained the town with his singular method of Riding. He first gallops round the field, standing upon one horse; he next mounts a pair, one foot on each horse, gallops then full speed round the course; and afterwards does the same with three horses.… He has even rode the single horse standing on his head.”

The good Dr. Samuel Johnson himself was drawn to witness this equestrian at work and came away impressed: “Such a man, Sir, should be encouraged; for his performances show the extent of human powers in one instance, and thus tend to raise our opinion of the faculties of man… so that every man may hope, by giving as much application, although, perhaps, he may never ride three horses at a time, or dance upon a wire.”

Thomas Johnson may have been adroit enough to capture the attention of Samuel Johnson, but the individual often recognized as the father of the modern circus was Londoner Philip Astley, a former cavalry rider and veteran of the Seven Years’ War who set up a permanent performance arena in a field near Westminster Bridge. Astley staked out an open ring on his rented property and performed a series of stunts on his horses in full view of passersby. There were no viewing stands, but to help attract attention Astley erected a small platform in the middle of the rope-encircled ring where one or two pipers played, accompanied by Mrs. Patty Astley on bass drum. Handbills were posted about and thrust upon bewildered commuters, who must have wondered what on earth was causing the commotion in the middle of what had been so recently just a vacant, marshy lot.

As pipers piped and the drummer drummed, Astley mounted his horses and began to ride… and in such a fashion as most had never seen before. Standing on one foot, and then on two—though one per horse—standing on his head, standing on his hands, leaping from mount to mount, all the while at a gallop around the circular track. Astley soon had crowds stumbling down the pathway to stand transfixed about his crude ring, and just before the moment when he would dismount with a flourish, and while the cheers and the applause still sounded, wife Patty would leave off her drumming and slip smilingly through the crowd to collect, in the words of one commentator, “such gratuity as the crowd might be pleased to bestow.”

Some say that the extraordinary skill that Astley exhibited resulted from a simple discovery that he had made: riding horses about a circular ring created a centrifugal force that aided him in keeping his balance. The harder the horses went, in fact, the easier it was for Astley to stand upright. Although some dispute the notion that Astley was the first trick rider to discover the benefits of ring riding, and others quibble about whether he or a colleague hit upon the ideal ring size of forty-two feet in diameter (still the standard size for today’s circuses), it is indisputable that he was the equestrian to stamp the practice as a sine qua non for the trick rider and eventually for the grand institution of the circus that long outlived him.

Astley’s modest endeavors at Halfpenny Hatch proved an enduring success, and by 1770, he moved his enterprise a few hundred yards away to a new site beside the southern end of Westminster Bridge (just south of today’s London Eye and the Tate Modern), where he built a set of covered grandstands and charged a shilling for entry. Overhead galleries were set aside for the gentry, and stables for the horses, and the sides of the buildings that faced the roadways were painted into brightly colored billboards that advertised the attractions. Not only would audiences witness amazing feats of horsemanship, the posters promised, but many other delights as well.

One of Astley’s most famed attractions was a pony named Billy that he had acquired for a nominal price at the Smithfield Market. Astley applied his fabled skills to the animal, and soon enough, Billy was featured on the program under the sobriquet “The Little Military Learned Horse.” Among Billy’s many feats were his abilities to jump through hoops, play dead, play hide-and-seek, add and subtract, set a table for tea, and pour the boiling water into the cups. His master was fond of introducing the act by coming upon the tiny animal lying motionless in the ring. Feigning dismay, Astley would turn to his audience and proclaim: “My horse lies dead apparent in your sight / But I’m the man to set the thing aright.” Soon enough, Billy would be miraculously resuscitated, able to dance, paw out sums, and cavort beyond all logic, with Astley providing explanatory doggerel through their routine.

Eventually, Astley combined the features of the ring with those of the theater, building a stage at one end of a new amphitheater of his design. Equestrian acts were performed in the ring, while ropewalking, skits, and freak shows (also known as monstrosities), which had become quite popular, took place onstage. Some of the “monsters” might seem somewhat tame by later standards: one of the first to be featured in Astley’s show is described in rather poetic terms by an early historian: “We are told of a certain fair one, from the south of France, who walked around the ring, gravely attended to by Mr. Astley bearing lighted candles, the better to display the wealth of golden tresses which trailed several feet upon the ground.”