Secrets of the sideshows
by John-Ivan Palmer
[ bookreviews ]
If you can’t resist morbid amusement, wait until someone in your home is about to wake up in the morning. Hold open Joe Nickell’s Secrets of the Sideshows to the photo on page 161 of Bill ‘Two-Faced Man’) Durkes, so it’s the first thing they see upon opening their eyes. Watch them recoil in horror at the sight of a man born with such an extreme cleft palate that it separated his face into halves, making him look “like he had been hit in the face with an axe.”
Before they pull the covers over their head, flip to page 173 and let them have a gander at “Popeye” Perry, a prepossessing black man in a ruffled tux - popping his eyeballs out of their sockets. Women are especially prone to Mr Perry’s unique charms, as I can attest, having seen his act many times. According to Nickell, Perry once popped out an eyeball, making a woman faint. He waited until she recovered, bent over, then popped out both eyes simultaneously, making her faint again. At this point one of two things are likely. You’ll either be looking at your last day in the house, or the book will get borrowed and never returned.
Critic Leslie Fiedler wrote that looking at freaks can confuse your sense of location, not only in physical space, but in life itself. If you’ve managed to induce this wincing aporia in your awakening victim, you are probably one of those people who don’t know when to quit anyway. So you might as well read aloud the basic description of Alexander Montarg, the human skeleton whose arms were as big around as the average thumb, or the fully grown John Battersby, the 40 pound wonder who married 700 pound Hannah Perkins. Talk about not taking your eyes off someone. Without consulting Fiedler’s Freaks, Myths & Images of the Secret Self (1978) in Nickell’s bibliography, you and your listener might needlessly ponder whether the superior missionary position for Hannah would result in last rites for John. Fiedler (not Nickell) reveals the secret that most fat-thin marriages were publicity stunts.
Like the sideshows themselves, Secrets of the Sideshows promises more than it delivers, while, ironically, delivering more than it promises, mostly by raising questions it doesn’t answer. Reading between the lines you’ll see that show business in general fulfils not only a public need for fascination, but a private safety net for those who will never be a part of the public, for reasons physical, mental, or both. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sideshow of human anomalies, the ultimate equal opportunity employer. If you have a face like a mule or don’t exist from the ribs down, the color of your skin is irrelevant. In this universal congress of men and women you’ll find the full spectrum of human phenotypes, Africans, Mexicans, Jews, East Indians, Asians and, according to Nickell’s secondary source, at least one “Sunni,” although I think he means the mystical “Sufi,” and not the puritanical other one. Anyway, this Muslim gentleman currently performs in night clubs, and is known for jabbing a skewer under his tongue and pushing it out through the skin of his throat.
For street creds Nickell himself worked as a magic pitchman in the Canadian National Exhibition carnival in 1969, and did a stint on the school assembly circuit as Mister Twister the Magic Clown. The photo on the dust jacket shows him with his head thrown back, ready to eat the flaming end of a torch. Here Nickell lets you in on secrets from sources more direct. For example, when eating fire, do not breathe in the gas fumes or there’ll be an explosion in your lungs like inside the cylinder of a car, making your last show a hard act to follow.
Sideshows makes up in breadth for what it lacks in depth. If you are worthy of Joe Nickell’s book, it won’t matter that you are lured by secrets that morph into a cavalcade, like the promoter of a “live” two-headed baby that died suddenly on tour and had to be substituted for a two-headed fetus pickled in a jar. “Live” means “live at one time.” There’s secrets and then there’s secrets.
Any one chapter, nay, any one page, goes beyond the length of a typical sideshow, so where you put your bookmark depends on your personal capacity for overload. If you’re a glutton for troubled sleep you may want to dwell on Eli Bowen, one of the so-called “half-people.” In a photo he is shown resembling a nobly mustachioed Frederich Nietzsche, posing on a pedestal with his hand thrust between the buttons of his frock coat. From the hip area, through special trousers, protrude two “legs” resembling the hooves of a goat. But for the deep hook you have to consult Fiedler who, not as a performer but as a literary critic, is more adroit at realizing the discrepancy between the freaks’ “pitiful actuality and their horrendous legend... Apathy, if not outright hostility, becomes their occupational disease.”
Nickell himself appears in several photos where one sees that very discrepancy. Compare his good-natured grin of letting you in on the “secret,” to the look of apathetic jadedness on his Human Lobsters, midgets, and world’s fattest people. It’s the discrepancy you see in snapshots of happy sex tourists posing with somewhat less than happy prostitutes.
Nowhere is this simmering hostility more apparent than in Nickell’s account of Grady (“Lobster Man”) Stiles, the scion of six generations of pincer people. The Lobster Man seems to have preferred that his daughter marry a nice Lobster Boy (or Penguin Person or Human Alligator), but she did a shameful and disgusting thing. She became pregnant by her boyfriend - who was normal. Stiles was so deeply offended he shot the boyfriend dead. A sympathetic judge let him off with probation, but Stiles was one of those crustaceans who drank too much, snapped his claws at the audience, and beat up other lobsters in the family. Finally his stepson, a Human Blockhead who pounded nails into his face, hired an assassin to put an end to all the biting and snapping. The dynasty lived on, but Lobster Man did not.
Consulting Nickell’s bibliography, especially the Fiedler volume, as well as Drs Gould and Pyle’s Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1896), and Dr John Money’s Sex Errors of the Body (1968, cited by Fiedler, but not Nickell), you will be inevitably drawn to the unsettling essence of the freak secret, the very one Nickell is unable to reveal, perhaps for good reason.
If you think you have your sexual insecurities, imagine what the Siamese Hilton sisters had to live with, exhibited as freaks since the age of three. Each had a failed marriage. Beyond the copulatory mounting logistics arising from their caudal conjoinment, is the deeper dilemma of how a husband could say to one or the other, “It’s none of your business.”
The original Siamese twins (actually from Siam) were the famous Chang & Eng Bunker, who each shared a single wife. The obvious secret goes beyond the unspoken. Shared a single wife? Was this polyandry or a glorified threesome? Was it the best of both worlds for the woman? How did the conjoined freaks ever meet these solitary wives, and what was their secret history? Would a meeting such as this in a singles bar be self-contradictory? Was it a human situation beyond the laws of bigamy and inheritance, beyond papal pronouncement, beyond Scripture itself? There’s no way Nickell or anyone else could know. What he does say is telling enough... when one of the twins died, the other held him close and patiently waited for his own inevitable death two hours later.
When twins do not fully develop, Siamese or otherwise, you get what is known in sideshow slang as a “one-and-a-half,” where a partially developed body without an upper torso sticks out of the chest or stomach. An East Indian, known simply as Laloo, dressed the half-twin sticking out of his breastbone as a female, even though it possessed a rudimentary penis reportedly capable of erections. If pondering Laloo’s sex life isn’t preoccupying enough, think about Myrtle Corbin, who had two small legs hanging between her own and two vaginas, which bore three children from one, and two from the other. Was the comely Myrtle seen by her children’s father as strange forbidden fruit, or merely a woman with something to live down? Barring the discovery of a lost journal intime, or a cache of voluminous, soul baring correspondence, these are all secrets we will never know.
But you do get your Nickell’s worth in the “love story of the century” between Percilla the Monkey Girl and Emmitt (“Alligator Man”) Bejano. Percilla went out in public with her face covered like a woman in hijab, but posed for many photos without. She appears as a surprisingly alluring, hirsute Neanderthal beauty next to her husband, a striking matinee idol encased in the skin of a large reptile. After she retired she shaved every couple of days, but we don’t know if that was her idea or his. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary at a large party in Gibsonton, Florida, a sideshow retirement community and quasi Haight-Ashbury for literal freaks.
The secrets of Nickell’s Sideshows are revealing if not penetrating. The magicians and sword swallowers and six-legged cows and tattooed people are fine, but we all know it’s the freaks that rule. Not only in the eyes of the audience, but in the carnival hierarchy. But getting inside their protective shell is elusive at best. Fiedler wrote, “Not even freaks have left reliable records of what it feels like to be what they are, avoiding publication as if words were an inappropriate medium for what their bodies so eloquently express...official ‘autobiographies’...[are] a part of the act rather than a way of seeing beyond it.” What kind of memoir could a freak possibly write, if a typical sideshow might travel over 16,000 miles in 20 plus states in an 8 month season, like my Uncle Arthur’s pit show of Rat Regurgitators and Human Pinchushions? The show must go on and props and wardrobe always take priority, something I discovered first hand, growing up in traveling shows and trying to collect rocks. It was no less exasperating to my prop encumbered father when I switched to books. Alexander Pope, deformed king of the couplet, or Thomas Aquinas, the world’s fattest theologian, notwithstanding, the freak world, alas, is a silent one. An interesting exception might be Jack (“World’s Tallest Man”) Earle, author of The Long Shadows (1952). So rare is this collection of poems that if Nickell didn’t list it in his bibliography I might question its mythical existence. But no one, including Nickell, ever seems to quote from it. We are told the poems are “melancholy,” but is that melancholy as in secret agonies, or melancholy as in doggerel?
Today, with few exceptions, like Jim Rose’s traveling geek-o-rama, or Todd Browning’s Coney Island 10-in-1, the sideshow is dead. Not because of political correctness, Nickell reveals, but because of old fashioned economics, sometimes called greed. There’s more money in a big ride gobbling up space on the midway, than in a geek in a tent gobbling down mice. Rides are the carnival form of urban sprawl, a shallow mechanical thrill for a generation that finds little fascination beyond what glows on a screen. One could say we’ve become our own freaks in our own tent - without an audience.
Chapters in Secrets of the Sideshows are based on external qualities - giants, midgets, animal people, blockheads, etc. It’s interesting and useful to compare this structure to Fiedler’s Freaks, which is divided into conceptual categories - image, dream, terror, theology, etc. Each volume makes an effective bookend. But we know what happens when you remove a bookend - things fall to one side. Magicians like Nickell or James Randi, one of his sources (both contributors to the Skeptical Enquirer, the dubunkers’ organ), are useful human centipedes breaking down the hard fiber of human gullibility, like America’s well-known weakness for religious lunacy, creationism, and junk science. But the process of blowing the cover of external deception yields little insight into the secrets under the gaff. For that you need the other bookend.
But for secrets closer to the surface you will be more than satisfied to learn from Nickell that Francois Battalia, who ate stones like popcorn, every few weeks “voided a great quantity of sand.” Or, before you swallow and regurgitate a live mouse, you must first blow smoke in its face as a tranquilizer so it won’t gnaw into your stomach lining. Similar wonderment awaits you from torture acts, bearded women, hermaphrodites, knife throwers and others. Beyond that, the deeper secrets of the sideshow are forever written in sand. Nickell’s devotedly assembled cavalcade on paper, nonetheless, is a worthwhile attraction in the bibliographic grind show of freak lit.
But whatever you do, don’t look at page 163.
