Despite this historical link to Beatty, the man who occupies the center ring with the cats is hardly impressive on first sight. He is short, around five feet six. His shoulder-length, beach-volleyball blond hair is thinning. But despite his boyish demeanor, twenty-five-year-old Khris Allen, from Atlanta, Georgia, had one of the firmest bodies and strongest wills of any member of the show. Though all year he would be considered a novice, in circus parlance a “First of May” (after the date that circuses used to start), once he stood in the ring with nine tigers on opening day dressed in riding boots, tight black pants, and a blue lamé shirt that he likened to Captain Kirk’s, Khris Allen was a victor, having triumphed in one of the quietest, but most intense love triangles and power struggles that the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus had ever seen.
“Once I’m out there, I try to sense the mood of the tent,” Khris said one afternoon when we discussed his act. “I want to know if there’s any electricity out there. Are people excited, or are they sitting on their thumbs?”
Not long after the season began, I realized that the circus and its performers have two parallel lives and that to grasp the full dynamics of the show I would have to understand both of these worlds and how they relate to each other. The first—the legendary traveling part—is the life that occurs outside the tent as the show moves across the land, from city streets to country roads, from mud to sleet, from one child’s deadly ear infection to one mother’s inexpressible pain when her son runs away from home. But to me that experience seems all the more extraordinary when contrasted with the other world, the life that occurs inside the tent as performers do the same show twice a day, seven days a week, every day from March to December without a single day off. To try to make sense of this side of the show, I decided to sit down with each performer in the course of the year and discuss his or her act. Their stories left me breathless with admiration. Khris Allen, like his act, was the first.
“The thing that surprises me most about the cats is that they, too, can sense the audience,” he said. “If there’s energy out there, I know they’ll perform well. They’re like the elephants. They love the applause. But if the crowd is small and there’s not much energy, then I’ll let them play a little in the ring before I start the act.”
The first cat into the ring is Zeus, an immense, lumbering “liger”—the controversial offspring of a male lion and a female tiger bred by owner Josip Marcan. At two years old, Zeus is the youngest, at five hundred pounds the heaviest, and at most times the laziest of the cats. He is followed by Tito and Simba, the two slowest; then Barisal and Orissa, the liveliest; and finally Toshiba, Fatima, Taras, and Tobruk. As members of the Royal Bengal family, all of the cats have Indian names; yet each has a distinctive coloring. In addition to two ligers, which have faint tiger stripes and stark lion features, there are three standards—orange with black stripes; three tabbies—cinnamon with blond stripes; and one rare snow white striped in black.
“The snow white is the feistiest of them all,” Khris said, “and it’s because of her I stand to the side when they come into the ring. In the beginning of the year I stood in the middle, but one day she waited by the back of the ring to jump on another cat and almost knocked me down in the process. If she had wanted me, I’d be dead.”
The opening few seconds of the act, seemingly tame, are not. The previous year, in Reading, Pennsylvania, when Kathleen (the previous trainer) was doing the act, two of the tigers escaped at this stage during the 4:30 show. The two cats—Fatima, a one-and-a-half-year-old female tabby, and Tobruk, a two-year-old male standard—walked nonchalantly through the supposedly locked steel door of the cage and into the open tent. At first there was disbelief, then panic. A few people started screaming. Jimmy James sprang into action: “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain seated. Stay calm and keep your voices down…” With a prearranged wave of his arm, he gestured for the band to play in hushed tones in an effort to calm both the crowd and the animals. Ahmed, the prop boss, was standing in ring one when the cats first emerged. He froze. Two assistants were standing next to him. They ran: the worst thing to do in front of a tiger, as it frightens the animal and gives it a target. Fatima, however, didn’t jump. She walked very calmly up to Ahmed, who equally calmly kicked her in the shoulders. This startled the tiger long enough to let Kathleen grab her around the neck and lead her back to the cage. One cat captured. One still loose.
Tobruk, meanwhile, had made it out onto the track and was heading directly toward the seats, threatening hundreds of people. Several nearby performers leapt into action. Julián Estrada, a veteran Mexican tumbler, threw a bank of three chairs at the tiger. Tobruk jumped back, but continued. Julián’s brother Antonio grabbed the curtain used to keep people out of spec and blocked off the seats. One woman and her daughter, however, were left in front of the curtain, and Tobruk began to stalk them. Khris, then Kathleen’s assistant (and her boyfriend), came sprinting from the line of cages. But at this point the confrontation was already set and Tobruk could not be stopped.
At the crucial moment, one of those unexpected defining moments when a circus seems most like a dream, the woman, instead of panicking, slowly crouched over and sheltered her child with her body. Tobruk approached the woman, sniffed her from behind, and, for reasons no one ever quite figured out, suddenly jerked his face back in disgust—the same face the tigers are known to make when they smell another cat’s urine. That moment of pause gave Khris enough time to pounce. He grabbed the tiger around the neck and waited for Kathleen to slide on a leash. Tobruk was led back to the cage and the act resumed.
Once all the cats are in the ring, Khris sends them to their seats with the pidgin command “Platz, platz! Come on, everybody, platz,” a mix of German bossiness and English courtesy. For his first trick he has all nine cats sit up on their hind legs atop their pedestals. This trick, which the tigers performed every day for Khris, was the same trick that they had performed every day for Kathleen, that their parents had performed every day for Josip, and that their forebears had performed regularly in wild-feline acts for over one hundred and fifty years. The tricks that followed, however, were strikingly different.
Cat acts in America began in 1833, when Isaac Van Amburgh first stepped into a cage with a lion, a tiger, a leopard, and a panther. Dressed like a Roman gladiator in toga and sandals, Van Amburgh emphasized his domination of the animals: he beat them into compliance with a crowbar and thrust his arm into their mouths, daring them to attack. When he came under attack for spreading cruelty and moral ruin, Van Amburgh quoted the Bible: Didn’t God say in Genesis 1:26 that men should have dominion over every animal on the earth? To enhance his case, Van Amburgh actually acted out scenes in the Bible, forcing a lion to lie down with a lamb and even bringing a child from the audience to join them in the ring.
Van Amburgh’s vicious theatrics gave rise to the so-called American style of feline acts, a style that reached its apex a century later in the dashing glamour of Clyde Beatty. Beatty, who performed at one time or another with lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, hyenas, and polar bears, cultivated a safari image. Dressed in khaki jodhpurs, brandishing a dining-room chair, and firing a pistol into the air, Beatty would raise the ire of the animals to a fearsome roar until his survival seemed in doubt. In one famous routine, a full-grown male lion would knock Beatty’s chair from his hands and force the legend to flee from the cage in fright. Pausing to wipe his brow, Beatty would reenter the steel arena to thunderous applause and force the jungle beast to slink back in retreat using only a manly stare.