Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (25 page)

In between the two siblings is their older sister, Gloria, who instead of a single high school horse controls eight Arabian Thoroughbreds, ranging in color from liver chestnut to bay and looking in their excited primped-up appearance like a restless collegiate marching band. As if to emphasize this theme, Gloria, like her sisters, is dressed in majorette-like wear that actually descends from the Spanish Riding School: ballroom shoes with knee-high spats; white-breasted leotard with a matching dinner jacket; and a nifty little folding hat such as nurses and female naval officers wear. Dawnita’s and Bonnie’s outfits are vermilion; Gloria’s, like her eyes, is royal blue.

“A lot of people switch to animal acts when they grow older,” said Gloria, herself clinging to her last days of middle age, her voice still carrying a hint of English propriety. “Their bodies need the break. As for me, I grew up loving them. As a girl, I loved ballet. I loved dance. I even loved to work in the air. But horses were my dream. I first did a liberty act when I was fourteen; I’ve been doing one ever since.”

In contrast to high school, where a single horse performs a standard set of steps, a liberty act involves a group of horses performing a wide variety of tricks. The act is termed “liberty” because the horses are free to roam untethered. With no reins and no longes, the presenter must communicate with the herd through voice signals and hand gestures. The biggest liberty act in history, trained by Edouard Wulff in the nineteenth century, had one hundred and twenty horses. Gloria’s, like many today, has eight.

“When I first arrive in the ring I’m a little nervous,” she told me. “I have so much to worry about. In hot weather they run a little slower. In mud they might get stuck. They especially have trouble in sand because they have to work harder to get their feet out. Also I have to think about their mood. I try to keep them calm by giving them carrots, but noises bother them—popping balloons, squeaky pulleys, clanking poles. The biggest problem is the butchers who spin their empty Coke trays as they take them out of the tent. A horse’s natural defense is to bite and kick. If that happens, I’m the one in the way.”

Once the horses arrive in the ring Gloria sends them off to their first trick with the simple command “Partez!” She uses French because her father used it to train the act and because, as in ballet, the movements that horses do, from “croupade” and “ballotade” to “piaffe” and “pirouette,” all have French names. With “Partez!” the horses sprint from their spot and begin prancing around the ring in a single-file line to the musical whimsy of “Radetsky,” a Johann Strauss two-beat march. Within seconds the sleepy ring is transformed into a frolicking carousel with the horses bobbing and bouncing in a never-ending cycle of heads and tails. At one moment they seem to be burrowing into the ground like the tigers who turned to butter in the children’s story; at the next they all but rise into the air like the heirs of Pegasus. This ring, so shimmering, is the sacred icon of the circus. These horses, so animated, are the source for that ring.

“Horses, you know, started the circus,” she said. The Romans used to have chariot races with horses, she explained, while in Europe, much later, showmen organized enormous riding expeditions for recreation. It was Philip Astley who invented the first circus in England in 1768 when he combined bareback riding with equestrian clowning. Astley found it easier to ride in a ring and have people sitting in a circle around it to watch the show. The term “circus,” from the Latin word for “circle,” comes from those early rings.

As long as there have been horses in circuses, Gloria went on to say, there have been Arabians. First bred by bedouins who went to extraordinary lengths to keep the line pure—including killing foals that were not considered worthy—Arabians were eventually imported into Europe, then America. George Washington’s white horse, the same one he sold to American circus founder John Bill Ricketts (himself a disciple of Astley), was believed to be an Arabian. Today, Arabians are still considered to be the purest breed of all horses, with shorter, stronger bones, wider chests, and one fewer rib and vertebra than other horses. As a result, they command prices ranging from $1,200 to $3,000 apiece—expensive for horses, but still a bargain when compared with $75,000 for an elephant or twice that for a rare white tiger.

After Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. bought eight of these Arabians from a horse farm near Ocala, Doug and Johnny named them after their families (Doug and his daughters; Johnny, his wife, his father, and—the ultimate honor of all—his wife’s prized poodle, Schatzye). Once christened, the two-year-old Thoroughbreds were handed over to Trevor Bale to be trained. Father of the Bale sisters and Elvin, Trevor has been a renowned animal trainer for almost sixty years since he first stepped into a ring with lions and tigers at age twelve. Since that time he has trained, or “broken,” as circus people say, elephants, horses, bears, lions, tigers, hippos, zebras, camels, llamas, dogs, donkeys, pigeons, giraffes, and geese. Along the way, he was the first to put lions on swings, one of the best at putting tigers on horses, and the only person ever to work black bears and polar bears in the same ring.

“My dad has some kind of attachment to animals,” Gloria remembered. “For some reason they love him. He could come here today after three years of being away and they would just go nuts for him. He has that strong a connection. He’s like Dr. Doolittle.”

Unfortunately, he wasn’t a magician, and from the beginning he encountered problems with these horses. First, there was the problem of time. In order to break eight horses properly he needed a year. The show had only six months. Second, there was the problem of gender: an ideal liberty act should have only one gender, Gloria said; this act had two. That created various difficulties. In the act, after the horses run around the ring in single file, Gloria issues a new call, “En deux!,” and the horses double up along the ring curb and continue to trot in tandem. After several minutes she announces, “En quatre!,” and they double up again. Here the sexual politics begin.

“They’re like oil and water,” Gloria complained. “I have four geldings and four mares. I’ve got four guys who are big, tall, and have more energy. They work in fast-forward. Meanwhile I’ve got four girls in first gear. They think differently.” She rolled her eyes. “I feel like a therapist. Sometimes they simply drive me crazy. At other times they’re almost perfect.”

Gloria was not the only one who shared this sentiment. Despite their occasional fussiness, when the horses finally do reach their stride the beauty of their hallowed blood ripples through every muscle and tendon in their well-toned legs. Children are mesmerized by their beauty. Even performers get carried away. “I’m not much for animals,” Arpeggio once told me, “but those horses sure are cute.” Perhaps it was inevitable that one worker would find this beauty too much to resist.

When I decided to join a circus, I viewed it as a life on the road, as a way to discover the backyard of America from the back lot of a traveling neighborhood. After almost four months on the show I had begun to revise my view. While each stop along our nine-month route reflected the area around it, I found that I was encountering the true variety of American life not in the various communities that lived near the tent but in the one community that lived underneath it—the circus itself. With its two hundred employees from all corners of the globe, holding all manner of religious and political beliefs, the circus represented a true melting pot. There were no educational requirements to keep you out of this company, no skyrocketing property values to keep you out of this neighborhood. In addition, there were no random drug tests to weed out misfits and no reviews of credit history to exclude miscreants.

This notion of the circus as a microcosm of America helped me answer one nagging question I had about the show: how is it that circus people, who by all accounts live on the fringes of American life, manage to perform every day to acclaim from an audience of thousands of “mainstream” Americans? The answer, I came to believe, is that the people in the circus and those in the audience ultimately want the same things—security, success, a new car, a way out. The people who come to see the show have a host of worries—they fight with their spouses, they argue with their children, they struggle with their bills—but when they step into the big top they agree to leave their problems behind. The people who put on the show have the same wealth of worries, but when they step into the big top they also agree to leave their problems behind. This is the magic of the circus: the shared illusion of escape.

But ultimately the circus is just that: an illusion, a fantasy, a myth brought to life. The horses that trot around Gloria in the center ring don’t actually float, they just seem to. The bears that bounce on the trampoline aren’t really docile, they just appear to be. Catastrophe most often occurs when nonperformers try to continue the fantasy long past the time it has ended for the show people. Sometimes, as in Fishkill, these outsiders are townies. Other times they are workers from the show itself. With so many men coming and going, the show could not always control the behavior of everyone on its payroll. “What are the minimum qualifications for being hired as a worker?” I once asked Doug. “Minimum qualifications?” he mocked. “Breathe.” It was one of these men whom Dawnita discovered one chilly night in June.

“I got this sudden urge to get up in the middle of the night,” she remembered. “It doesn’t happen to me often, so I knew something was wrong.” She threw on her clothes and went running toward the horse truck. Since the night was abnormally cold, the horses were sleeping inside to keep warm. As usual, the mares were on one end and the geldings on the other. The black and white stallions were closest to the door. “As soon as I approached the truck I saw clothes on the ground. I thought something had fallen from the roof. I got closer, waving my flashlight all around, and then I saw the man on the ground. His head was directly underneath the crotch of our largest stallion. He was naked except for a bandanna around his neck. He was a hippy. He was a drunk. If nothing else he was a pervert.”

But how did she know this for sure? I wondered. Maybe he was just sleeping through the night. Perhaps he was trying to stay out of the cold.

“I hate to say this,” Dawnita said, “but a horse’s penis is dirty. When it’s clean we know something has happened. Either they’ve been mating with the mares or they’ve been played with. We know they haven’t been mating with the mares.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“As soon as I realized what had happened I dragged him out of there as fast as I could and beat the shit out of him with a rubber whip. I would have beat him to death if someone hadn’t pulled me away. Luckily the guy was gone by the next morning. I told him I would kill him if he ever stepped foot on the lot again. And do you know why? Because if he would do that to an animal, he would do that to a child…”

Circus people will tolerate a lot in private—drinking, drugs, even profligate sex were all part of the daily life of the show—but if somebody either inside or outside the community threatens to spoil the public face of the show—the basic elements of the dream—reaction is swift and lethal. The circus, at its core, is a fantasy: you can look but you cannot touch.

As the act nears its end, Gloria calls all the horses to the center of the ring with the simple command “Chez!” With a giant sweeping gesture of her arms she signals for all eight of her horses to stand on their hind legs. The first attempt is valiant, but short. The second lasts a little longer. It is not until the third try at the trick that her full platoon of Thoroughbreds rears back on its sixteen hind legs, punches the air with its line of hooves, and holds its pose for an impossible span that seems to defy not only gravity but time.

“The truth is, not all of the horses like to do that trick. It’s hard, and they’re getting old. These animals are around seven. If they’re taken care of they can work for another few years. But then they’ll get tired; they’ll lose weight. They’re like old people. Sometimes they just don’t want to go out and perform anymore.”

Sitting behind her trailer between shows, with the wind skipping up from the early-evening sky and the lights first appearing on the top of the tent, Gloria realized the irony of what she was saying. All good acts must come to an end. All performers have their time. In his book
Wild Tigers and Tame Fleas
, famed clown Bill Ballantine writes about living on the Ringling train in the 1950s next door to the newly arrived Trevor Bale and his family. In the book Gloria (age eleven) and Elvin and Dawnita (age eight) are seen giggling around the circus lot until they are beckoned back by the commanding call of their father: “EL-VIN! DAWN-NITA! GLOO-O-O-RIA!” “Try to imagine an ocean liner whistle at six feet,” Ballantine writes, “a diesel locomotive at a crossing, and you approximate father Bale’s call of the wild.” Almost forty years later these names were still being bellowed around circus tents and their glory was just as strong. Still, hints of retirement were just beginning to be heard. Bonnie, who was a newborn at that time, had already retired once. Dawnita maintained that the Beatty show would be the last place she performed. Gloria, meanwhile, who since her days as a child on Ringling had performed in over eight different acts on at least ten different shows, insisted she wasn’t quite ready to quit.

“Sure, I’ve done what I wanted to do: I’ve worked with horses, I’ve done the trapeze, I’ve traveled all over the world. But it’s in my blood. I’ll do it until I feel like I don’t look good enough and I don’t feel as if I can perform well. Then I won’t do it anymore. Then I’ll know it’s time to leave.”

Tired, the horses are ready for their exit dance. Gloria sends them back into their original single-file trot around the ring, this time to the timely gallop “Homestretch.” When the last horse in the line gets to the front of the ring, the horse turns a complete 360-degree revolution and obediently steps out of the ring into the outstretched grasp of a handler. The process is repeated—eight, seven, six, five, four, three, and two—until horse number one, Blair, appears to sprint unexpectedly past the gate. “You forgot to turn,” Gloria calls in a public rebuke reminiscent of her father. Blair slowly backs up as if he were going to turn, then steps abruptly into the ring and, with Gloria at his side, bows his head to the audience. The simple gesture brings “aaaah”s from the house. The trick has worked to perfection. The horses have worked their charm.