Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus Read online

  Under the Big Top

  A Season with the Circus

  Bruce Feiler

  For my brother,

  my other eye

  The circus is a jealous wench. Indeed, that is an understatement. She is a ravening bag who sucks your vitality as a vampire drinks blood—who kills the brightest stars in her crown and who will allow no private life to those who serve her; wrecking their homes, ruining their bodies, and destroying the happiness of their loved ones by her insatiable demands. She is all of these things, and yet, I love her as I love nothing else on earth.

  HENRY RINGLING NORTH

  Program of Arenic Displays

  Epigraph

  Winter Quarters

  1 A Toe in the Ring

  First Half

  The Circus on Parade

  2 Under a Canvas Sky

  A Rare Breed of Tiger

  3 First of May

  Facing the Fire

  4 Outsiders Always Make Mistakes

  Swings of Fate

  5 This Is When They Become Real

  Give the Bear a Dog

  6 Death of a Naïf

  The Amazing Art of Hair Suspension

  7 Please Don’t Pet the Elephants

  Nights with White Stallions

  8 A Streak of Blood

  Intermission

  The Color of Popcorn

  Second Half

  9 The Star of the Show

  Triple Whammy

  10 Without Saying Goodbye

  Where Are the Clowns?

  11 Reborn

  Love on the Wire

  12 At Heaven’s Door

  An American Dream

  Home

  Behind the Painted Smiles

  Read All About It

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Bruce Feiler

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Winter Quarters

  1

  A Toe in the Ring

  “Before we start I want you all to know there’s always a chance we might end up with a dead elephant…”

  Dr. Darryl Heard’s voice was stern and deep, softened only by a faint Australian brogue that gave his already blunt warning an eerie, other-worldly air.

  “Whenever you take an animal this large, this old,” he continued, “and put her under general anesthesia, there’s a forty percent chance that she won’t wake up again. We may have to roll her out of here.”

  “You can’t use local anesthesia?” E. Douglas Holwadel stepped forward into the doctor’s face, removed a rapidly disappearing cigarette from his lips, and ran his empty hand across his receding gray hairline. As co-owner of Sue, a forty-two-year-old, 5,500-pound, “petite” Asian elephant valued at around $75,000, he alone was allowed to smoke in the operating barn. Though it was not yet 8:30 in the morning, he was already nearing the end of his first pack.

  “Not with an operation of this magnitude,” Dr. Heard replied. “She might go berserk and crush us all. We have to put her to sleep entirely.”

  “And you’ve done this before?”

  “A dozen times. Just last weekend I went up to Albany, Georgia, to remove a tusk from an African male. We had him up twenty minutes after the operation was done. I just want you to be aware of the dangers. We can always stop the operation if you’re not comfortable—”

  “No,” said Doug. “We’re here. Let’s do it.”

  “In that case,” said the doctor, “I need your signature.”

  Doug dropped his cigarette onto the floor and retrieved a fountain pen from the well-starched pocket of one of his two dozen Brooks Brothers shirts. A little over four hours earlier, Doug and I had left circus winter quarters in a dark, driving rainstorm not uncommon for late January in central Florida. The previous day, after our introductory meeting, Doug had invited me to accompany him during this emergency operation to remove an ingrown toenail from Sue’s right front leg. Never having seen an elephant under anesthesia, I agreed.

  It was well before dawn when we set out. The outside thermometer in his maroon Cadillac with EDH plates said 39 degrees. We followed behind newly painted “Truck No. 60, Elephant Department,” kitchen white with stylized red letters that read: “Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus—World’s Largest Under the Big Top.” Leaving DeLand, home of the circus and undisputed fern capital of the world, we passed through DeLeon Springs (“They don’t have a decent bar,” Doug mentioned, “so everyone drives to Barberville”), across the St. Johns River, which runs from Orlando to Jacksonville (“Do you know why the St. Johns is the only river in Florida to run upstream?” he asked. “Because Georgia sucks.” He laughed especially hard, knowing Georgia was my home state), until we arrived at the crack of dawn at the William N. Inman and Clara Strickland Inman Food Animal Hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

  “Could you stop that drilling and sawing,” Doug called out to some nearby construction workers after he had signed the papers. “It’ll spook the hell out of Sue.”

  Finally, at a little past 8:30, with the arrangements for the operation complete, Captain Fred Logan waddled alongside the high-tech operating barn and began escorting Sue up the walkway with a bull hook, a short cane with a stubby hook on the end. He paused slightly to let a Vietnamese potbellied pig wobble across the path. A seventy-year-old Canadian who had literally run away to join the circus when he was a boy, Fred had been the chief elephant trainer with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus for over two decades, but in all that time he had never had to put an elephant under total anesthesia.

  Once inside, Fred led Sue to the center of a hay bed about the size of an average mall parking space.

  “Be sure she lies down on her left side,” called Dr. Heard. “It’s the only way we’ll be able to get to her right front leg and have total access to her toenail.”

  “Don’t worry,” Fred said gruffly. “That’s the only way she’ll go.” Circus elephants, he explained later, are trained to lie only on their left side. It’s one of only eight or so commands the average elephant can comprehend.

  Once Sue was standing in her place; Fred tied a thick yellow rope to each of her left feet and tossed them under her body. As soon as she felt the ropes Sue started to squirm.

  “Back, Sue. Back!” Fred barked.

  Sue stepped backward and began to grumble.

  “Front, Sue. Front.”

  She stepped forward and started to shake.

  “Steady, steady…. Thata girl.”

  With the patient temporarily calm, Dr. Heard snapped into action. He tossed the ends of the two ropes over Sue’s back and ordered four of his white-coated assistants to stand behind the protective railing and prepare to pull her over if necessary. When everyone arrived in position, he gave the signal to advance.

  “Down, Sue. Down!” commanded Fred, but Sue did not obey.

  “Sue, down!” he shouted.

  Sue slowly leaned down on her back legs, disobeying his command to lie down on her side. Fred ordered her to stand up again, which she did with an unfriendly growl.

  “Back, Sue. Back!” he continued. “Front, Sue. Front! Down.”

  The process was repeated several times, but each time Sue kneeled down instead of lying on her side. “Let’s try a little psychology,” Fred said. He asked one of the assistants to retrieve a kitchen broom, which he used to brush Sue’s back in an effort to bribe her down. It didn’t work. Dr. Heard then changed the plan, announcing that he would inject the patient with a dosage of morphine 80,000 times the potency normally given to humans. He rested one hand on Sue’s forehead, pulled back her rub
bery flipperlike ear, and gave her an injection with a syringe.

  The elephant shook angrily even before the injection was completed. She began to swing her head in disgust.

  “Down, Sue. Down!” Fred pleaded, but she ignored him and grumbled loudly.

  “Hold on to the ropes!” Dr. Heard shouted. “Don’t let her fall to her right or we’ll have to abandon the operation.”

  Four men pulled the ropes taut. Doug turned his eyes away. Fred shouted more frequently.

  “Down, Sue. Down. Steady!” His voice took on an imploring tone, but at that point it no longer mattered. Sue could no longer hear him. She knelt down on her back feet as she had done twice before, but instead of leaning down on her front knees, this time her entire body went suddenly limp like a deflating hot-air balloon.

  “Now, now!” called Dr. Heard. “Pull her toward the left.” The four assistants slowly tugged the 5,500-pound Sue until she collapsed droopily on her left side. The ropes had worked perfectly. Sue’s inflamed foot was exposed. The operation could proceed.

  With the patient now in place a swarm of thirty veterinarians dressed in blue jeans and white jackets emerged from behind the protective railing and gathered around the body. One team focused on Sue’s right foot—sliding it out from its bent position, resting it atop a hay bale, and brushing off the mud and debris that had collected around her potatosized nails. Another group rolled out a $10,000 assortment of gadgets, monitors, and computerized gizmos that would monitor Sue’s vital functions. A third group climbed atop her back to attach some nodes to the frayed edges of her ears.

  Resting on the ground, Sue’s head seemed remarkably inert. Her ears, while smaller than those of an African elephant, were still large and fragile, beginning thick and rubbery close to her head but deteriorating like a giant aging leaf into a tattered, lacy fringe. Her one exposed eye, the size of a billiard ball with a rich amber hue, was closed, but a steady stream of tears seeped out from beneath the lid into the grooves of her skin, dry and corrugated like a baked riverbed. Her mouth was puckered, the inside a startling baby pink in contrast to the somber millstone gray of her skin.

  Sue’s mouth quickly became the center of attention as Dr. Heard led a group of doctors in trying to insert a respirator into her lungs. At this point the team encountered its first problem of the day, as Sue had instinctively clenched her jaws together when she collapsed under the influence of the morphine. In an attempt to open a passageway for the respirator, one group of doctors tied a rope around her lower jaw and another held her trunk. On the count of three, the two groups pulled and Dr. Heard slid his fingers between Sue’s teeth and tried to pry open a narrow space.

  He failed, and with the teams still clinging to the ropes, Dr. Heard peeled off his medical coat, rolled up his sleeves, and stuck his arm deep into Sue’s throat in another attempt to find a passageway large enough to slide the tusk-sized respirator tube into her lungs. “We should have brought a baseball bat,” he cursed, his face straining under the pressure of her throat muscles. After several minutes he withdrew his arm. It was dripping with saliva and nicked from Sue’s teeth. “It’s going to be difficult. Hand me the tube.”

  As he poked into her throat again, though this time with the tube in tow, Dr. Heard found it even harder to penetrate past Sue’s mouth. Finally he withdrew the tube and dropped his head onto the back of his hand in frustration. Several tense seconds passed, until Dr. Heard snapped to attention with renewed vigor and shouted something to one of his students in mangled veterinary code. The student dropped her notebook, darted around the corner past a series of signs that said: RE-PRODUCTION BOVINE OBSTETRICS, MEMBER FLORIDA CATTLEMAN’S ASSOCIATION, and WE WISH YOU A SUCCESSFUL DAIRY YEAR, and returned momentarily with that tried-and-true solution to pachyderm penetration: a tube of K-Y jelly. Dr. Heard smeared the jelly over the stiff plastic tube and, moving slowly, pushing hard, and constantly peering at his watch, eventually pushed the tube past Sue’s mouth and inserted it into her lungs. With the tube in place he withdrew his arm and rapidly attached the tube to the respirator. At 9:10 the compressor was turned on, the doctors stood back, and Sue’s stomach heaved greatly at first and then settled into a steady breathing rate, her belly expanding noticeably with each gasp from the machine.

  As soon as the respirator was functioning properly, Dr. Heard turned to another problem. When Sue was pulled to the ground with the ropes, her head had accidentally landed against a concrete barrier. The doctors were worried that the weight of her head might burst her eyeball. They decided they needed to lift her head to relieve the pressure. If the patient had been a dog, or even a horse, the veterinary team could have accomplished this task with relative ease. But Sue was an elephant and her head alone weighed around 800 pounds. The solution to this unique gravitational problem: a forklift. One of the doctors went scurrying out of the barn and soon returned driving a bright yellow Caterpillar forklift directly into the operating room. Several ropes were tied around the tines of the forklift and then wrapped around Sue’s head. As several people steadied the head, and several more held the ropes, the mechanical fork was slowly lifted into the air and several gymnasium mats were slid underneath Sue’s head. With her head now swaddled in a bed of tumbling mats, the students in the gallery started to applaud, the prep team resumed its scrubbing, and Dr. Heard finally turned his attention to Sue’s ingrown toenail.

  With Sue now completely out of their hands, the circus team could not bear to watch. Fred, feeling helpless, had retreated to the corner. Doug, overcome, had handed me his camera and driven off to Hardee’s to buy a cup of coffee. I, meanwhile, was mesmerized: transfixed by the allure of this elephant and, in truth, still slightly dumbfounded by the unlikely series of events that had brought me to her side.

  I first caught the dream when I was twelve. I was attending summer camp in the mountains of Maine when my counselor took me outside with a handful of oranges and taught me how to juggle. For hours that morning I chased decomposing oranges down a hill; for years afterward I stoked fantasies of tightropes and teeterboards; and a decade and a half later I could still feel those oranges as I set out in pursuit of one whimsical fragment of the American dream by running away and joining a circus.

  The dream had developed slowly. After years of practicing juggling as a teenager, I dipped gradually into the world of street performing and harlequinism. First I learned pantomime and whiteface makeup from a teacher in my hometown. Next I developed a short routine combining pantomime, juggling, and corn-pone humor, which I enthusiastically performed at birthday parties, street festivals, and any gathering in my parents’ living room—despite the irrevocable damage done to more than one prized family heirloom. In short, I was a teenage pantomime prodigy, all the more easy since I was the only teenage pantomime most people in South Georgia had ever seen.

  Eventually, perhaps inevitably, this infatuation with performing led me to the brink of clowning. Like many teenagers fascinated by the circus, I even considered applying to “Clown College,” Ringling Brothers’ ten-week training course that was founded in 1968 in an attempt to stanch the decline in clowning but was brilliantly marketed as an academic exercise rivaling that of the Greeks. When the time came, however, I chose a more conventional academic stage. At Yale, I taught drama in local schools, directed the children’s theater, and even helped start a campus mime troupe, but the dream of joining a circus seemed to be fading away. When I graduated and moved to Japan to teach English, the dream was completely out of my mind.

  Yet somehow the clown in me never died. In Japan, where I lived for three years, I would often mime, clown, or occasionally even juggle my way out of a cross-cultural impasse. In England, where I attended graduate school, my sense of humor, my voice, indeed my whole way of communicating were louder and more theatrical than that of my European friends. Was this my personality speaking, my nationality, or both? Spurred by these questions, I decided to come home after five years abroad and spend some time exploring my own cul
ture. It was then that I returned to my adolescent roots: what better way to discover America, I thought, than from the back lot of a circus. I could join a show, possibly even perform as a clown or a juggler, and write a book about life inside this most American of institutions. Circuses, after all, have been around since the founding of America. They crisscross the country year after year, visiting towns both large and small and always managing to reinvent themselves on the verge of their own extinction. They are, I believed, the embodiment of our dreams: a metaphor for ourselves. And, I hoped, a way home. So it came to pass, fifteen years after learning to juggle, five years after leaving the country, that my childhood aspiration coincided with my adult wanderlust to lead me back into clowning.

  Having decided to join a circus, it didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t know anything about circuses, much less how to join one. My first step was to visit every show I could find—glitzy and seedy; air-conditioned and muggy. Like many adults without children, I hadn’t actually seen a circus in almost twenty years. My immediate reactions were twofold. First, I was thrilled to discover that the circus was almost exactly as I had remembered it, with colorful costumes, daring acts, and exotic animals. Second, I was surprised to find that the circus, though quite traditional, was shrouded in a cloud of controversy of a distinctly modern variety. Many of the shows I visited, for example, were surrounded by picketers protesting the infringement of animal rights. Inside, the circuses themselves adopted a surprisingly defensive air, not only about their treatment of animals but also about their desperate efforts to prevent the circus from withering away. The circus was certainly alive and well, but its future seemed in doubt.