Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (6 page)

“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.

Beatty’s theatrics were perfect for his age, but by the 1960s the American attitude toward animals had shifted and the public was ready for a new style of training. The new style came from Europe, and it was embodied by two men who arrived in the United States in 1968: Gunther Gebel-Williams and Josip Marcan. Gebel-Williams, a German, quickly became a superstar with Ringling Bros., demonstrating the so-called European style, which stressed the skill of the trainer in bringing out the natural, yet still obedient nature of the animals in a nonconfrontational way. Marcan, a Croatian, meanwhile, performed in various parks and circuses across North America. In 1986, he brought his European training style, his continental lifestyle, and his unique breeding style to the Beatty-Cole Circus. The show would never be the same.

“He put an ad in the Daytona
News-Journal
and I answered it,” remembered Kathleen, who was then a naïve, twenty-year-old part-time horticultural student from Morgantown, West Virginia. “The ad said:
WANTED FEMALE TO TRAVEL AND WORK WITH ANIMALS
. The next day I drove to winter quarters for an interview. We had lunch and he explained the logistics of the job: cooking, cleaning, raising tiger babies. Being, as he put it, ‘like my wife.’” Kathleen giggled as she recalled the encounter. The job description was certainly blunt, but was she ready to sleep with a man who had all but advertised for a temporary spouse in the want ads of a local newspaper?

“Originally I was a little bit intimidated,” she confessed. “He was pudgy and bald, and I didn’t understand a word he said. But the minute I looked through the fence and saw those tiger cubs, well, he could have not paid me and I would have stayed. It felt comfortable. It felt right. It was my destiny.”

Kathleen did stay that day, and after her first year she stayed for another. “When I first arrived on the show no one took me seriously. That was his third year, and I was his third girl. So when I stayed for a second year they were in shock. They probably thought I was a bimbo.”

During Kathleen’s third year Josip decided to return to Europe but agreed with the show to leave his act behind. For the first time since he began breeding cats, Josip needed someone to present his act. He selected Kathleen.

“I never dreamed of being a circus star,” Kathleen said, and her demeanor suggested why. Her brown hair hung uncombed around her shoulders; her pale face was devoid of makeup. She looked more like a tomboy than a showgirl. “I just wanted to spend more time with the cats.”

But suddenly she was a circus star. Her picture was in the newspaper, her story was on television. People came for miles to see her opening performance. Then, on Kathleen’s first day in the ring, the unthinkable happened. With documentary film cameras rolling and reporters filling the seats, she was knocked down by one of the cats, Simba. The next show it happened again, and the following day it also happened, Kathleen barely escaping injury with each time. The experiment seemed a failure. Everyone on the show expected her to quit.

“At that point it was a challenge,” Kathleen said. “None of the people on the show thought I could do it. None of them. Not one. Everybody is extremely cruel here. They all thought I would fail in a week and go crying home and Josip would have to replace me. Screw you guys, I said. I’m going to show you I can do this.”

Kathleen did show them she could do the act, though she never truly mastered the routine and never really liked it very much anyway. Incidents like the cat escaping in Reading only heightened her frustration. Other performers on the show blamed her for not locking the gate. She countered by blaming the crew. In any case, her isolation only deepened. To make matters worse, at times her five-minute act stretched to twenty or twenty-five minutes. It got so bad the members of the band actually kept a running tab of the number of times they had to play “Cat Mambo” waiting for her to perform one trick (the high was twenty-six, the low six). At that point, Kathleen decided to bring someone on the road with her to combat her loneliness. She invited an old high school boyfriend from Atlanta to visit her in winter quarters. He was a zoologist who had recently graduated from West Georgia College and had nothing much to do. He came for a month, he stayed for the season. The kept woman now had a kept man.

“When I first came I wanted to be with Kathleen,” Khris said. “She was my first love in high school and will always be the love of my life. But after about the first month I grew attached to the cats and I couldn’t see myself leaving. No matter what, I wanted to stay with them. No matter what, I wanted the act.”

A battle for the center ring arose.

After two seasons in the ring Kathleen had begun to tire of the pressure. She wanted to give up performing in the ring but still retain control of the tigers’ breeding and care. Khris, meanwhile, had begun to fantasize about performing, but he was reluctant to take the reins of the act without control of the tigers’ welfare as well. Inevitably a split occurred: Khris moved to the couch in Kathleen’s trailer; Kathleen started dating Khris’s brother; and Josip, who by this time had taken up with another woman in Germany, got trapped in the middle: his ex-girlfriend had de facto abdicated his cat act, all but handing it over to her ex-boyfriend, whom he, the owner, had never met.

The situation came to a dramatic head just hours after the new tent was raised, just three days before the opening performance of the season. Josip had signed a contract, his cats would be in the show, but Kathleen refused to perform, even though her picture was in the program and her portrait was on the front of the banner truck along the circus midway. Johnny and Doug were in a panic: the show that still bore Clyde Beatty’s name needed a cat act at all costs. Finally, on Wednesday, just minutes before the dress rehearsal, the owners announced the resolution: the act that was owned by the Legendary Josip Marcan, an act that had been trained in part by his former girlfriend, the Lovely Kathleen Umstead, would be presented for the upcoming season by her now estranged boyfriend, the Great Unknown, Khris Allen.

But one catch: Kathleen would still be with the show and she’d still be living in the same trailer as Khris.

After having the cats sit on their hind legs, Khris moves steadily through the heart of the program: a two-tiger rollover on the ground, a nine-cat walking carousel around the ring, and a hind-leg hop by Tobruk designed to show off the prowess of a full-grown tiger. In a further maturation of the European style, all the cats in Khris’s act perform natural tasks—walking, sitting, leaping, rolling—with no jumping through hoops, no prancing through fire, and no wrestling with the trainer in mock jungle fashion. To exemplify this point, Khris liked to tell reporters along the route that he was not a “lion tamer” at all, but a “cat choreographer.” He didn’t teach tricks, he said, he “enhanced natural behaviors.” In short, he was a diva of cat nouveau.

The cats, for their part, seem to love their new, ennobled status. With each behavior, they glide slowly, almost genteelly, through the routine as if they were walking through a Victorian parlor dance. Occasionally one will pause, slap a flirtatious paw at another cat, or growl menacingly at the trainer. When this happened, Khris would snap his eight-foot kangaroo-hide whip or flick his leather riding crop in the tiger’s direction. Nothing too hostile, only commanding. He knows he must stay in control.

“The cats are very sensitive to my moods,” he said. “If they know I’ve had a bad day, they’ll toy with me and do stuff just to piss me off. Sometimes it’s because there’s a big crowd, and they’ll think, ‘Oh, he won’t discipline me because of all the people.’ If it’s a small crowd, I can be a little bit more of a disciplinarian. It’s just like if you go into a supermarket with a kid and he’s pulling stuff off the shelf. If there are a lot of people around, you scold him. If there are not so many people around, you spank his butt. If he’s been doing it a lot, and there are a lot of people around, you smack him anyway.”

The act climaxes with a heart-stopping shoulder stand. Khris calls Fatima from her pedestal into the center of the ring. Standing slightly hunched over the full-sized tabby and holding a piece of raw horsemeat in each of his hands, Khris shouts, “Up, Fatima! Up!” and braces himself for the tiger’s four-hundred-twenty-five pounds as she plops her front paws on his narrow shoulders just inches from his face.