I wasn’t prepared for Ernie Winn to stick an icepick up his nose.
It was the summer of 1993. I was a reporter for The Muncie Evening Press in Indiana, and I was covering the annual Delaware County Fair. My assignment that day was to write about Aladdin’s Palace, the sideshow on that year’s midway.
Anyone who’s watched the 1947 Tyrone Power noir thriller “Nightmare Alley” – or who might be looking forward to a new adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s book, coming out Dec. 17 with Bradley Cooper leading a great cast – knows what a carnival sideshow is all about.
For decades, the sideshow – often called a “freak show” – was a part of nearly every carnival, fair and traveling circus. No matter if it was called a sideshow or freak show or its attractions were called freaks or oddities or unusual performers, it was a uniquely American experience that didn’t originate in America, having been a harsh staple of entertainment since Medieval times: people with deformities and people with unusual talents were put on display for the enjoyment of a crowd.
It was a theater of cruelty, and it could not have existed without the willing, even if horrified and pitying, participation of the audience.
In the sideshow, the conjoined twins were alongside the sword swallowers were alongside the bearded ladies were alongside the men who walked on swords’ edges. And then there was the feral geek, whose mysterious and repugnant presence looms large over “Nightmare Alley.”
The carnival, and more specifically the sideshow, has been a recurring element in fiction over the decades. Appropriately, considering the mix of volatile personalities in squalid settings, the carnival sideshow lends itself to crime fiction.
King, other authors find dark material
Considering the rich cross-section of people, passions and lives that pass through the carnival sideshow – as attractions, anguished or jaded, and gawkers, horrified or sympathetic – a few books and movies share the setting.
Film fans certainly know many other aspects of a carnival midway, particularly the out-of-control merry-go-round and seedy “make-out island” in entertainment like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.” Maybe most authors consider the sideshow aspect too bizarre – or too on the nose for stories about seamy characters and goings on?
Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel “Water for Elephants” – made into a movie released in 2011 – used the circus as backdrop for a romance and employs some sideshow figures – notably a little person who befriends the male lead – but focuses mostly on the “glamorous” circus figures, including a woman who commands a stable of horses.
Stephen King’s 2013 novel “Joyland” is short on sideshow but long on carnies, and that’s a good thing. From a fortune teller early in the story to the operators of the Ferris wheel, King – not surprisingly at all – has a gift for bringing disreputable characters to life.
Two notable books do plunge into the world of the sideshow: Alice Hoffman’s 2014 “The Museum of Extraordinary Things” is a story of a young woman who plays a “mermaid” in her father’s Coney Island sideshow, while Katherine Dunn’s 1989 “Geek Love” has a stranger bent: carnival operators cause mutations in their children to populate their own freak show.
No novel of the sideshow has reached as many rapt readers as “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”
Whole lot of thumb-pricking goin’ on
When I read Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” for the first time, it was only about a decade old. In retrospect, that boggles my mind because Bradbury’s 1962 book reads like some lyrical but half-forgotten Depression-era tale.
Bradbury was a master of writing about small towns, of course, and in “Something Wicked” it is Green Town, Illinois, where Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, each 13 years old, hear from a traveling lightning rod salesman that a traveling carnival, Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, is coming to town.
The show – introduced as it arrives in town via a middle-of-the-night train – is exciting at first, with its promise of exotic people and thrilling acts. But the boys – and Will’s father – find that Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark – along with the Dust Witch, the Skeleton Man and the transformed lightning rod salesman – have sinister interests.
The story and its carnival trappings and aura of small-town dread of the inevitability of aging and death have inspired other authors, among them Stephen King, to explore some of the same fears. In my mind, the 1983 movie version, released by Disney, did a good job of translating the book, and Jonathan Pryce could not have been a better choice for Mr. Dark. And any opportunity to see the legendary Pam Grier, even in a smaller role like the Dust Witch, is great.
In my mind, the movie version remains the best depiction of the scary seediness of the carnival sideshow on film outside of “Nightmare Alley.”
‘Freaks,’ funhouses and small potatoes
Possibly the first on-screen depiction of a carnival sideshow and its attractions came in director Tod Browning’s 1932 film, “Freaks.” The film, which cast real people with unique physical features and talents, was perhaps the first blending of the sideshow and the crime story. The film’s story is sympathetic to the ostensible title characters, while the normal-appearing performers engage in betrayal, infidelity and murder. The movie was shocking for its time as well as now.
The carnival and its sideshow performers were spotlighted a few times over the decades, notably in “The Elephant Man,” the stage and screen version of real-life attraction Joseph (John) Merrick, “Water for Elephants” and “Carnivale,” a two-season HBO series about life in a macabre traveling carnival. One of the most unpleasant treatments of carnival and sideshow attractions came in “The Funhouse,” a 1981 slasher film made by Tobe Hooper, director of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” a far superior film.
And as bad and exploitative as “The Funhouse” was, it comes off like “Citizen Kane” compared to “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies,” a 1964 classic about a boardwalk fortune teller who mesmerizes men into becoming her followers, then turns them into freaks – not zombies – by disfiguring them.
A rare Hollywood exception for its whimsical treatment of the sideshow was “Small Potatoes,” a 1997 episode of “The X-Files.” Mulder and Scully investigate the births of a series of babies with tails in a small town. The offspring of a sideshow performer uses his unique ability to morph his appearance to take advantage of the women of the town, even making himself look like Luke Skywalker to one woman. Another episode, “Humbug,” from 1995, also portrayed carnival life.
Perhaps because of the subject matter and the possibility of a backlash like the one that greeted “Freaks” – the movie was banned in England for decades – Hollywood didn’t make many films about the seamier side of the carnival. There were plenty of films about the lion tamers and acrobats and clowns of the big top, but few that held up the sideshow tent and let us peer in. That’s what made the 1947 film of “Nightmare Alley” so daring.
The rise of the mentalist and fall of the geek
Stanton Carlisle was not your typical Hollywood leading man role, and that’s reportedly what prompted Tyrone Power to want to play the part.
Power, with gleaming dark eyes and hair, led films like “The Mark of Zorro.” Hollywood legend has it that there was some resistance to Power playing the part of a con artist and anti-hero at best. But his box-office power gave him the clout to claim the role in “Nightmare Alley.”
William Lindsay Gresham’s book, published in 1947, introduces us to Stanton Carlisle, who opens the story as a carnival hand and sideshow barker. He’s fascinated by the mysterious ways of players in the carnival life: the tarot reader, the strong man and the geek, a wretched creature, looked down upon by other carnies, who acts like – or is? – a madman and bites the heads of chickens in a shocking show.
Carlisle is drawn to the con-rich possibilities of the carnival, especially the mentalist act. He learns that two adept performers using a complex “code” of verbal cues can convince an audience that the mentalist can indeed “read” and decipher clues from a person or their possessions.
Carlisle eventually leaves the circus and transforms himself into “The Great Stanton” (in the movie version, at least) and becomes a hit playing his code-enabled mentalist act in nightclubs.
Carlisle’s life, built on a sham, begins to fall apart when he meets a female psychologist who is even more corrupt and amoral than he is.
Inevitably, Stanton Carlisle’s misfortune brings him back to carnival life and the lowliest, most repugnant and pitiful player in the sideshow.
Gresham’s book was adapted into the 20th Century Fox film starring Power the year after publication. Marketed as a noir film – and it is – the movie must have surprised some who expected Power as a hard-bitten but good-hearted protagonist. Instead, they got one of the most charismatic performances as a swindler ever. Carlisle can’t help but eventually be sympathetic and he’s redeemed somewhat by his performance, which emphasizes the character’s remorse.
The cast is dumbfoundingly good. Supporting Power are Joan Blondell as the sideshow mentalist Zeena, winsome Coleen Gray as good girl Molly, the stalwart Hollywood character actor Mike Mazurki – a familiar face for decades in movies and TV – as Bruno and Helen Walker as Lillith Ritter, the ruthless psychiatrist.
It’s possible the upcoming new version has an even more stellar cast, with Bradley Cooper as Stanton Carlisle, Toni Collette as the mentalist, Rooney Mara as Molly, Ron Perlman as the brutish Bruno and Cate Blanchette as Ritter. The rest of the cast is filled out with actors who are just gems, from Mary Steenburgen and David Strathairn to Tim Blake Nelson and Jim Beaver, the latter one of the stealth presences on “Deadwood” and “Justified.”
Director Guillermo del Toro can certainly deliver this type of twisted tale, so there’s every reason to be optimistic.
‘I was born this way’
The newsrooms at newspapers were, for decades, pretty damn insensitive places. So perhaps it’s not surprising that newspapers large and small dutifully wrote about carnival sideshows and threw out references to the freaks to be found there.
Less explicable are the blithely callous accounts of the role sideshow performers played.
In August 1960, The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, in a small feature tied to the Minnesota State Fair, asked sideshow attractions, “When did you decide to earn a living as a freak?”
One after another, the five performers they spoke with said that their fates were decided before they were born.
“I was born with alligator skin and when I was 15 years old I got a call from a carnival asking if I would join their freak show,” Esther Blackmon explained.
“I can stretch my skin 10 to 12 inches on any part of my body,” Jack Stretch said. “I’m the rubber skin man.”
“I became the world’s smallest mother as I gave birth to a three-pound, 12-ounce baby,” LaVonda Evans said. “I’m two feet tall and weigh 36 pounds.”
“I’m a dwarf four feet tall and I went into show business in 1915,” Alva Evans said.
“It was this year,” Hugh Bailey said. “I’m 26 years old and I’m called the Lobster Boy because, instead of legs, I have flippers and my arms are like lobster claws. I was born this way.”
In July 1963, in the Edmonton Journal, carnival boss Dick Best explained, “Without the curious in the crowd, these guys wouldn’t eat. Neither would I. We’d all be on welfare.”
Bailey made a reappearance to note, “Sure, I’m a freak. I got arms and legs with bones that look like horseshoes. I’m two feet tall. So what else is new? I ain’t a freak among the midway guys. I’m part of the show. They know me and don’t stare. We’re all in the same racket.”
“The freaks are there because they want to be,” a reporter for The Muncie Evening Press in Indiana wrote in July 1971 after she interviewed Bailey. The article went on to quote the sideshow manager as he dismissively spoke of “bureaucrats and do-gooders who think they (the freaks) should sit in their homes.”
The headline: “Fair Freaks Enjoy Their Jobs, Lives.”
The article notes that the Alligator Skin Girl organized a protest when South Carolina legislators wanted to ban “freaks” from performing in the state. The law was amended to forbid performers younger than 18.
The Alligator Skin Girl’s real name is not cited.
Enter another Lobster Boy
After Ernie Winn pulled the icepick back out of his nose – he was not only the owner of the sideshow but an attraction, as Screwy Louie, the Human Blockhead – he spoke, wistfully, about the heyday of the sideshow.
I also wasn’t expecting Winn to bemoan how advances in modern medicine had reduced the number of sideshow attractions over the years.
“There are so many miracles with medicine, you don’t see as many freaks,” Winn told me. He said sideshow performers found a greater sense of self-worth in carnival life than if they, ashamed, hid themselves away.
It was a line of reasoning that defied argument.
Winn talked about wintering in Gibsonton, Florida, a town that was the cold-weather home to other performers he alternately called “freaks” and “special people.”
“There’s the Half Lady, Mrs. Tremaine, she lives there,” Winn told me. “There’s Grady Stiles, the Lobster Boy. He had family problems. His wife had him shot last year.”
This was another Lobster Boy, apparently, than Hugh Bailey and in recapping his fate, Winn was mostly correct: Stiles, whose genetic condition, ectrodactyly, left his fingers and toes fused together so his hands and feet looked more like claws, was indeed killed in 1992. His history was one of cruelty on top of cruelty: He shot and killed his daughter’s fiancé just before her 1978 wedding and was convicted of murder. His story has been fictionalized in books, movies and TV as diverse as “Carnivale,” “American Horror Story: Freak Show” and the “Deadpool” comic.
In 2009, a decade and a half after I interviewed him, Winn told his own story, in a pair of short books about life in the carnivals, illustrated with his own paintings of sideshow life.
Modern-day sideshows tend to be built around performers such as human blockheads: People who have taught themselves mind-boggling skills. There are few “freaks” as once gawked at and victimized.
But there’s never been a time that our most base fascinations and worst tastes haven’t been fascinated by the sideshow. Like Jim Nightshade and Stanton Carlisle, we can’t look away, even when we might want to.
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Keith Roysdon has written around two dozen pieces for CrimeReads, including fond looks back at juvenile mystery novels, oddball 1970s TV movies, the spawn of James Bond and classic TV’s coolest and most unusual investigators. He never wanted to run away and join the carnival in part because he realized that sitting at a keyboard and writing would be the dullest sideshow attraction ever and he would never stick an icepick up his nose.
