By half past nine the sound of laughter was everywhere. The smell of sweat and morning coffee permeated the air. A gentle breeze was blowing. A crowd of nearly four hundred people had gathered on the lot—a mother and her daughter, a man with his dog, a boy in a wheelchair with a video camera. Out back a family stopped to take pictures with the tigers. Out front a minor trauma was brewing.
After receiving the warning about the ropes, Johnny hurried to the front of the tent, where the big top would be secured to the stakes by a series of bright yellow ropes. Johnny’s plan called for the ropes to be twenty-two feet four inches long. The new ropes, however, measured twenty. Angry, but calm, Johnny ordered the manager to move the stakes inward until he could confer with the manufacturers and replace the stunted lines.
“You see, the weakest part of the tent is the stake line,” Johnny explained as we watched the big top slowly rise into the air. “If you don’t have a good stake line the tent is going to fall down. We have ridden sixty-five-mile-per-hour winds before, but I like winds under thirty. Even at that point I am not comfortable with people in the tent. If you’ve got people in there and the tent starts moving and rippling, they will panic. But the funny thing is, you can’t get people out from under the tent unless it actually starts to shake. If you say to them, ‘Will you please leave the tent in an orderly fashion, the National Weather Service has issued a warning,’ everyone says, ‘I’m not going out there…it’s raining.’”
Within minutes the center of the tent had been winched halfway up the poles and the first hint of daylight appeared underneath the span. Johnny took my arm and led me under the concave blue-and-white spread.
“Only once in thirty years have I seen the tent come down with people in it. That was in Auburn, New York, on July 9, 1968. We had had thunderstorms all evening right off the Finger Lakes. I said, ‘God, this is going to be a miserable tear-down,’ when all of a sudden this wind came up and the tent was gone in two or three seconds. I stood there and could see the whole thing lift into the air. The tent was brand-new, like this one. It fell on the people. Fortunately, we had very few injuries—I think maybe five people with a broken hand or foot. Unfortunately, the local fire department had little experience with tents, and they caused more damage to the tent itself by climbing all over it while the people were still trapped underneath.”
Just as the tent reached the top of the poles, the head of Anchor Industries arrived on the lot and Johnny went to discuss the problems with the ropes. After a brief consultation the company agreed to provide replacements, and Johnny began coping with a new problem: one of the fifty quarter poles that support the middle of the tent snapped as it was being pushed into place. Johnny marched over to the crew with the fury of an irate football coach. “I can do a better job than you guys with my privates!” he shouted in a show of force that brought to mind his reputation for swinging a stake or two in his day. “Now concentrate or you’re out of a job.” Once back in the huddle of businessmen, he brushed off the incident as perfectly normal for opening day with a new tent.
Finally at 10:15 the elephants arrived and the crowd began to cheer. There were three elephants in all—Helen, Conti, and Petunia, alias Pete—each wearing a giant harness around her shoulders and dragging a chain behind her on the ground. They were followed closely by a man pushing a red plastic wheelbarrow and carrying a shovel. “Look!” someone cried from the edge of the tent. “It’s the pooper scooper.” As each elephant reached her spot one of the workers would hook her chain to the bottom of a quarter pole. “Move up, move up!” Fred finally called, and the elephants moved forward with barely a strain and pulled the tent magically into place. As each pole dragged across the ground, it left a rut in the grass like a giant golf divot. The process was repeated with quiet efficiency, and in a breathtaking span of under fifteen minutes the tent emerged from its previous fishbowl shape into a glorious blue-and-white whale.
“If you ask me, a circus isn’t a circus unless it’s in a tent,” Johnny said. “In a building you have a very austere effect. The seats are so far away that the performers look like ants. Here, the worst seat isn’t the problem, the best seat is. The audience has to make sure it doesn’t end up part of the act.” For the first time all morning Johnny’s eyes misted up. When the circus left DeLand in five days’ time Johnny would have to stay behind for an operation for a back ailment brought on from his days as a trampoline performer. “When you buy a ticket for a circus in a tent,” he continued, “you buy a ticket for a fantasy. At some point everybody has wanted to be somebody in the circus—a ringmaster, the girl on the trapeze, a clown. Remember that, Bruce, when you become a performer: the only stars here are the ones who sit in the seats. If they don’t star in our show, then none of us gets paid.”
Johnny patted me on the back and walked away with his eyes toward the sky. I looked around at the massive space—solemn, sacred, almost cathedral. Give or take a yard or two, it could hold a football field, a commercial aircraft, even the White House in its entirety. But every night for the coming eight months it would hold a circus. At the moment, however, it held only promise. By eleven o’clock—four and a half hours after the first stake was struck, three hours after the vinyl was first unfurled—the heavens were now fully erect but the earth still needed work. First the bandstand, then the ring curbs, then the seats were wheeled in. Next, rows of lights were lifted into place. And finally, just before noon when a local priest arrived to bless the new big top and joked about sprinkling holy water on a waterproof tent, the performers began to appear.
A Rare Breed of Tiger
“As soon as I step into the ring I look around to make sure nothing’s on the ground.” Khris Allen is confident when he speaks. He is dominant and sure. But underneath his blond mustache and behind his clear blue eyes he is always a little afraid. “Sometimes I find pieces of metal or glass. Once I found the head of a baby doll: Fatima would have loved to eat that. Then, just as the last elephant passes the cage, we slide open the door and let the cats into the ring…”
The first act of the show is the “cats,” the deceivingly casual term that circus people apply to all wild felines. The act is first in the show because it is first in stature, and also because the twelve-foot-high iron cage that surrounds the center ring is heavy and difficult to maneuver easily during the show. Clyde Beatty’s original cage was so heavy, in fact, that his act closed the first show every afternoon and opened the second show that evening so the cage would not have to be handled more than once a day.