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1. THE BLOOD-RED MENAGERIE

1.5   Freaks of Nature

But it was Phineas Taylor Barnum, later destined to become a household name, who introduced one of the most lucrative variations of the menagerie - the circus side show. The freaks of nature displayed here appealed to peoples' prejudice, their unquenchable curiosity for the outlandish and the unknown, and the paradoxical human attraction and repulsion for the diseased and deformed. For more than a hundred years, the side-show was to become an indispensable appendage of American circus culture. The first one of its kind systematically organised was contained in "P.T. Barnum's Great Travelling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome" and the countless imitations which followed in its wake habitually featured the same classic attractions, including the giant, the fat lady, the midget, the three-legged boy, the armless wonder and the thin man. For the freaks who never gained fame and fortune like General Tom Thumb, the 25 inches tall midget who brought Barnum riches beyond his wildest dreams, life was often a misery, more akin to slavery than employment.

In yet another circus rags-to-riches story, Barnum was born into a poor family in Connecticut in 1810. He was not a practical man by any means, yet exploited to the full his own dramatic personality, his genius in interpreting human psychology to meet his own ends, and his talent for hatching the most sensational and bizarre schemes. In her book Circus! Marian Murray notes that he was known to many as a "trickster, a perpetual liar and unscrupulous cheat who perpetrated a series of clever deceptions on a public he looked upon as fools." Yet his basic philosophy - "the bigger the better" - was all-American, and he is believed to be the author of the now traditional American motto, "There's a sucker born every minute." Barnum was also undisputed trail-blazer in the hyperbole and superlatives of circus language. "By the end of Barnum's life," notes Murray, "such adjectives as mammoth, monstrous, gigantic, colossal, elephantine, amplitudinous, stupendous, marvellous, magnificent, glorious and superb were to have lost virtually all meaning."

Barnum stumbled upon his true vocation when he heard about a crippled and helpless black woman, called Joice Heth, being displayed in a freak show in Philadelphia. She was reputed to be 161 years old and to have been George Washington's nurse. Upon seeing the old crone for himself, Barnum promptly bought her for $1000 and took her to New York to exhibit, where she earned him $1500 a week. When the old woman died within a year following a strenuous tour, an autopsy revealed that she was no more than 80. Although branded as a hoaxer and fraud, thick-skinned Barnum merely shrugged off such attacks, declaring that they served his purpose by "keeping my name before the public." Thereafter he was to acquire a taste for notoriety.

In 1841 Barnum invested everything he owned in a gamble which, during his thirty-year reign, was to bring him undreamt-of wealth, buying Scudder's American Museum on Broadway and renaming it Barnum's American Museum. By the end of the following year it had become the city's most popular place of entertainment. Huge garish panels on the outside of the building depicting strange exotic animals attracted customers in hoards. Baby shows, dog shows, poultry shows and flower shows, unknown species from distant impenetrable jungles, tamed red Indians who whooped their way obediently through war dances - these became the standard fare of the Museum. In 1864 Barnum even bribed an interpreter to let him display a group of imposing Indian chiefs who had expressly gone to Washington to conduct negotiations with President Lincoln over land rights and the white man's continuing injustice.

It was the Museum's policy to offer curiosities from all over the world, ranging from flying fish and mud iguanas to grizzly bears and the "first and only" hippopotamus in America, from human freaks such as the Bearded Lady, Siamese twins and Albino family, to "educated" dogs and seals. In yet another blatant fraud, Barnum even displayed a "Fejee Mermaid" - a shrivelled monster a metre long ingeniously constructed from a fish's body tacked to the head of a monkey. Displaying his unrivalled expertise in promotion, Barnum first set about wearing-down the scepticism of New Yorkers as to the existence of mermaids. In part, this was achieved by having one of his business associates pose before the press as an expert from the Lyceum of Natural History in London. By the time the mermaid arrived in New York, Barnum had succeeded in creating such avid curiosity among the public that his Museum was mobbed by the crowds, his revenue from ticket sales more than doubling. Increasingly desperate for other curiosities, Barnum himself travelled up the St. Lawrence to obtain two white whales, sent them 700 miles back to New York by train, and put them in a tank of fresh water. Needless to say, they died within the space of a few days. He then built a square 7m tank, piped sea water into it and brought in another pair of white whales but they promptly died as well. Not one to surrender to adversity, Barnum acquired yet another two replacements which this time lived long enough to be displayed to the public later, his marine collection was augmented with sharks and porpoises.

The Museum burned to the ground in 1865 and the only animals saved were the "educated" seal, one bear, and a few birds and monkeys. But the indomitable Barnum began again, establishing the New American Museum which he stocked with animals from all over the world. But this too was gutted by fire in 1868 with the same devastating loss of animal life. Although the ageing Barnum at last decided to retire, he was soon to become the father of "The Greatest Show on Earth," and America's pre-eminent circus dynasty.

In 1871 "P.T. Barnum's Travelling Exhibition and World's Fair on Wheels" took to the road - equipped with the largest number of caravans ever seen in a circus, and a tent that held 10,000 people. The side-show's star attraction was four "Fiji Cannibals" who, Barnum solemnly declared to his gullible public, had been educated and converted by missionaries. But the inimitable showman soon found himself entangled in a bitter feud with another circus chieftain of the time, Adam Forepaugh. At one point, the two rivals fell into vying with each other to be the first to procure the "Sacred White Elephant of the Orient." Forking out $75,000 for one of the rare mottled pink, albino-like animals in Burma, Barnum gleefully concluded that he had out-tricked Forepaugh only to discover that through some treachery his elephant arrived painted red and blue. A cunning Forepaugh used the incident to publicise his adversary's empty promises to the public and promptly presented to them a real, brilliant white elephant - one that had been given a liberal coat of whitewash.

In 1882 Barnum and his new and relatively unassuming partner James Anthony Bailey set in motion a plan to buy "the world's largest elephant" from London Zoo. Jumbo, as the 10 ft, 10 ins tall, 8 ton beast was known, was to become so famous that he would eventually bequeath his name to the English language as a simile for greatness. Despite protests over the transaction - which the matchless showman Barnum actively encouraged - the sale went through, with Jumbo netting London Zoo $10,000. But when Jumbo set his eyes upon the huge iron-bound cage that was to transport him to America, he began to trumpet in distress and lay down on the ground and refused to budge. A distraught agent then cabled Barnum for urgent instructions, and the impresario replied: "Let him lie there a week if he wants to. It is the best advertisement in the world." Less than three years later, the "greatest elephant the civilised world had ever seen" perished during a derailment of circus railway wagons in Ontario, Canada. As Jumbo appeared from his wagon, he was struck by an oncoming train. In a typical display of consummate bad taste, and to minimise his losses from the highly popular elephant, Barnum promptly bought Jumbo's "widow", Alice, from London zoo and exhibited her beside the skeleton and stuffed hide of Jumbo.

Frequent travel over long distances in cramped and filthy conditions made the circus animals' life a misery - as it still does today. In 1876, the then independent James Anthony Bailey, after playing to audiences in San Francisco and grossing as much as $6000 a day, chartered a steamer and took his menagerie across the Pacific to Australia, Tasmania and the Dutch East Indies. But as Murray records, after leaving Tasmania, the circus ran into a violent storm: "In the first moments of excitement, the rope around the bears' cage broke, and the cage with the lions slid down onto them. All the boxes overturned, and several washed overboard, occupants and all. Above the screams and roars of pain and terror from the animals, the shouts of the men, and the wild shrieking of the storm, a terrific splash was heard as the rhinoceros went in to the sea. Cage after cage followed. Nearly half the menagerie was lost, and the giraffe lay dead with a broken neck. When the ship reached Sydney, so the story goes, the giraffe was skinned and stuffed, and a mechanism inserted. In a darkened cage, the head on the neck nodded gently, and no one was permitted to go near enough to discover the truth."

By the end of the 19th century there were over 100 circuses criss-crossing America, spawning a sub-culture which gave rise to many a circus dynasty, the greatest family trees becoming a veritable puzzle of boughs and branches as circus families intermarried. Father would teach son and mother would instruct daughter in the vital skills necessary to achieve perfection in the discipline the child seemed most suited for. With a life on the road, an upbringing within a proud and insular culture, and education or schooling a rarity, often there were few opportunities for a child to choose a profession outside the circus world. Upon reaching a certain age, having honed his talents, the child would perhaps take to the arena, join a rival circus, be married-off into a different circus family, or simply start a poor ramshackle travelling show of his own. Competition and the search for pastures new prompted many circus families to leave their native countries, emigrating to Asia, South America, South Africa, and Australia. But while in Europe circus families tended to split-up, in the USA, there was a mania for mergers - though agreements were sealed and then broken with bewildering regularity. This trend culminated in 1907 when Ringling Bros. bought out Barnum & Bailey, creating the world's largest circus corporation. The two circuses combined in 1919, and according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, "the last competing syndicate, the American Circus Corporation, which comprised five circuses, was bought in 1929 to remove the last serious challenge to Ringling supremacy." Soon destined to become star of the Ringling conglomerate's menagerie was Gargantua, depicted as the largest and most ferocious gorilla the world had ever seen - an advertising ploy that revealed the crass cynicism of America's pre-eminent circus chieftains. The gorilla, which made its public debut in 1938, had actually been captured in Africa as a weak and vulnerable baby. But following an acid-attack by a disgruntled sailor during its transport to America, the disfigured Gargantua was to harbour a bitter grudge against every human being he ever encountered, even including his own trainer who rarely dared to approach the animal. Yet the ugly, deformed face of the beast and its unbridled fury were guaranteed money-spinners.

Resembling the culture of ancient Rome more than they would care to admit, Circus Americana was also characterised by its obsession for the grandiose. The big top of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus covered the equivalent of a hectare, was supported by centre poles 20m high and sheltered 12,000 people. Unlike the European circus which has traditionally focussed the audience's attention on just one ring, at Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey, crowds could watch as many as seven rings and stages at one time, the show's rough-and-tumble character stressing the rapid and dynamic pace, and the quantity of the performers and exhibits. By 1941, their famous "The Greatest Show on Earth" was transported around the country on four trains with a total of 107 twenty-one metre long carriages and freight wagons. Sometimes the show, with its glittering pageantry, displayed such overwhelming grandiosity that it simply back-fired. Writing in the American Encyclopaedia, F. Darius Benham and Arthur Perrow report that some pre-show parades, designed to give a tantalising preview of what would later be on full show under canvas "were so huge that when the Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth visited Germany, the watchers of the parade, after it had passed, returned to their homes thinking that was the whole show."

But the American hunger for the grandiose soon led to financial woes, and eventually the demise of the big top in the USA. In 1956, in what marked the end of an era, increased freight charges forced "The Greatest Show on Earth," to give up its itinerant way of life and appear only in exhibition halls and other metropolitan buildings. According to a statement by the owners, the circus had become the victim of television, bad weather, traffic congestion, labour troubles and mounting costs.

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