Ringling Forever: Revisiting the Last Great Big Top Through the Pen of a Master

 

 

John Ringling North

How bitter-sweet it is, reading Center Ring, the richly endowed book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert  Lewis Taylor, published in 1956 — the year of Ringling’s last big top.  Between its covers are a compilation of pieces Taylor turned out over the prior seven seasons for the New Yorker magazine.  These were based on his talking to the show’s leading stars and support staff on the ground.  If you have never read Center Ring, you have deprived yourself.  This one goes near the top of my list.

Bitter-sweet especially because of what we are living through — by far the worst season in American circus history. In fact, no season at all.  Among Corona’s long-term blows to American life, the circus may come out high on the list.  Pray it won’t.  As you know, it was already on life support.

Taylor’s literary treasure trove captures the golden years of John Ringling North.  Never, it might be argued, was the American circus more lavishly costumed, more profusely talented or daringly inventive.  That was the time of Cecil DeMille’s award winning movie, The Greatest Show on Earth.  The time when Europe's top acts counted a ring in the show – any ring – as a summit in their careers.

Is Taylor’s narrative all true? I can’t say it is. There are errors I have spotted. For example, I was surprised to learn that North was “usually accompanied by his brother Henry” on his talent scouting abroad. I thought that a female supplied companionship.  Nor did North discover Pinito del Oro in a “gypsy Cave.” 

Perhaps the show's vocally captivating publicist, Roland Butler, put some tale tales over on Taylor, who described him, “unquestionably the world’s  most skilled composer of embroidered news,"and rewarded him with the longest page count of all his profiles. 

As for the input of all the others quoted, their words ring true to me  And I fact checked a few of Taylor’s accounts to find them valid.

The author’s witty and clever prose makes for not only a damn good read, but a very instructive one.  There is so much here to learn from and be well entertained by. Among the depth of research, I was impressed by the information revealed on animal trainers and their insights.   And by, best of all ---  credit Art Concello, the ways of trapeze flyers.

Some excerpts:

Merle Evans on making song selections and how he arranged segments of them in an order “to sound like one natural composition.”

English circus owner Bertram Mills, in a desperate wire to John Ringling “I want that band leader of yours, and I want him bad.”

A “hardened circus hand” on the music for Wedding of the Winds:  “the minute I hear those first three notes of that god-damned waltz, I want to sit down and bawl.”

John Ringling in reply to Roland Butler about a piece fraught with lies, cooked up on Tom Mix by a young Ringling publicist: “Heat it up! Heat it up!  What do we care where it came from.”

 “For Pat Valdo, variety is the essence of circus” Amen.

Pat Valdo; “Most circus people perform for each other — the real critics – rather than for the crowds.”  I  believe this.

24-year-old Flyer Fay Alexander to Art Concello, at the start of spring training in Sarasota: “Art, I won’t put on another Mother Hubbard [for spec] ...  It’s professional suicide.”  Nonetheless, the sulking Fay could not get out of spec, but put on  something.  They hated it then as much as they do — did — up to the present time.

This is a remarkable achievement in circus literature, a great enduring read about the ways of circus people. how they do their work and how they feel about each other.  And now it offers us a radiant reminder of what we once had on these shores.  

By    the    way:  Where are all these hordes of people crowing around my midway coming from?   Have none of you the courage to make a non-anonymous peep -- in the heroically self-sacrificial act of daring to put your own name to it?  In fact, have you a name? You're not all robots, are you?  Pardon me for  just wondering.