The end: Lights go dark on 'Greatest Show on Earth'
Among the kids who made a habit of showing up for a parting glimpse was Jeff LaHurd, who would grow up to become a county historian. It was inconceivable that he would live to see the obituary. “It was all so glamorous,” he recalls. “The big, colorful parades, the performers, and the elephants on Main Street.”
Even after the illusion began to fracture and “The Greatest Show On Earth” moved its winter headquarters to Venice more than half a century ago, the railroad — an enduring link to the Industrial Revolution that allowed Ringling and other circuses to abandon wagon trains and reach audiences of previously unimaginable proportions — remained its calling card.
“I remember how Charlie Smith, the trainmaster back in my day — him and (wife) Kitty — they would stop the train in Sarasota so the performers who lived here could hop off,” says Dolly Jacobs, the celebrated aerialist who spent 14 years on the road with Ringling, the last circus to travel by rail. “Then it would continue on to Venice.”
Following a May 7 farewell performance staged in Providence, Rhode Island, by one half of its team, Ellenton-based Ringling owner Feld Entertainment dispensed with any pretense of nostalgia. Without fanfare, without passengers, human or otherwise, its Red Unit train returned to Florida without even announcing a destination, thus ensuring that not even its most hardcore fans would be around to witness the end of an era.
Before dispersing for wherever they called home, some of the estimated 200 Red Unit performers and production staffers who had rolled out of Florida together when this ill-fated season kicked off in January called it “the ghost train.” Suddenly jobless 32-year-old aerialist Jessica Togni, a seven-year veteran with the Ringling circus, booked a flight to Sarasota to visit relatives before heading back to her home in Las Vegas. Closing the book on a 146-year chapter of American history was like a funeral without the ritual.
“They said no more train; they’re going to close it,” says Togni in the accent of her native Italy. “They said we cannot ride the train because they were going to turn off the power. People were sad, but there was nothing really to say anymore. We just tried to keep each other up.”
This evening at 7 p.m., the Blue Unit will finish it off at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum on Long Island. Fans can tune in remotely, via the 21st-century magic of cyberspace. With a couple of keyboard strokes and streaming assists from Facebook Live or Ringling.com, they can see the lions and tigers and the human cannonball and the pyrotechnics and, as he flies through the air with the greatest of ease, the daring young man on the flying trapeze.
Then, like its Red Unit counterpart, the nearly mile-long Blue Unit train will begin its empty and unceremonious trip back to somewhere in Florida.
Meaning, for the first time since 1871, there will be no version of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus performing in the United States.
Ninety years have passed since circus tycoon John Ringling decided to bring to Sarasota what was then the most irresistible force in entertainment. Never mind that, as Ringling historian Deborah Walk points out, a major reason was to “shore up their investments in real estate” following the Florida land bust of the Roaring Twenties.
Beginning in 1927, on a run that would last for 33 years, Ringling’s gamble would leave Sarasota with a permanent identity. But even then, perhaps without knowing it, the circus culture that dominated the 19th century was already being chased by a technology it could not outrun.
Describing the collapse without accounting for the ingenuity of its ascent, however, is to ignore how closely aligned the circus was with the growth of America.
"We really can't overestimate how important the circus was — and that circus in particular — to American entertainment," says Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson. "If you want to understand television, you need to understand radio. If you want to understand radio, that already happened with vaudeville, the variety acts. And if you want to understand vaudeville, hey, that already happened with the circus."
Janet Davis, associate professor of American studies at the University of Texas, says the phenomenon attained its full stature during the Gilded Age and echoed “all the big brushstrokes of the American greatness narrative.”
Maybe that story begins in 1793, when George Washington attended the new nation’s very first circus, a largely equestrian exhibition at a roofless arena in Philadelphia. Davis argues it found its soul during a spasm of religious fervor known as the Second Great Awakening. The catalyst was entrepreneur Joshua Purdy Brown.
Brown stayed afloat by managing an itinerant troupe of acrobats and entertainers, some of whom were women, a radical notion. In 1825, the Quaker power structure in Wilmington, Delaware, barred him from staging a show in the city limits.
“Some religious reformers didn’t like the fact that people were displaying their bodies for pay,” says Davis, author of “The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top.”
“They thought the theater was in some ways the devil’s workshop because it portrayed the world in a way that was dependent upon the imagination, and not portraying the world as it is. People who can fly in the air on horses’ backs or perform stunts or wear clown makeup and speak truth behind a mask — these things could be quite threatening.”
So Brown found a tent, designed a show to fit beneath it, and opened for business on the outskirts of Wilmington. The move was unprecedented. The money followed. Within two years, says Davis, the flexibility and mobility of tent circuses, no longer chained to fixed venues, became the rage. But Brown wasn’t done.
In 1828, as some rural Americans attempted to capitalize by showing off their menageries, mostly barnyard fare, one of Brown’s relatives touring South Carolina decided to add a second tent, for animal acts. Two tents, two admission fees — a visionary fusion. Davis says the animal shows gave patrons who might be otherwise offended by the “lascivious” display of contorting human bodies some plausible cover to investigate a more “edifying” companion attraction.
Syracuse's Thompson says circus history barely elicits yawns from his pop-culture students: “I think if I were to offer a free trip to the circus to my class of 150, I doubt very many would take me up on it.” Yet, if he were teaching marketing/public relations, “I would insist the first day that freshmen read P.T. Barnum. From a marketing standpoint, Barnum had figured out the most sophisticated stuff we do today, and we think it’s so modern.”
A Connecticut lawmaker famous for promoting freaks and museum hoaxes decades before assembling his first wagon train circus in 1871, P.T. Barnum’s ability to lure consumers into paying to see hogwash — even though they knew it was hogwash — has become an institutionalized component of so many contemporary American transactions, Thompson says.
Barnum’s 1881 merger with James Bailey, coupled with the advent of the Transcontinental Railroad, proclaimed itself “The Greatest Show On Earth.” And it established the American circus as a sensation that would dwarf its single-ring European roots by exporting not one, not two, but three rings' worth of frenetic spectacle to the world.
For agrarian societies scratching out a living with hard labor, swayback draft horses and mules, the circus was a revelation previously accessed only through books and the imagination. Suddenly, there were elephants and big cats and bearded ladies and fire-eaters and gravity-defying daredevils, coming to their towns in one big glittering storm of exotica. The circus even transformed common horses into surrealistic visions, with their exquisite grooming and prancing strides that danced to both music and command.
“The three-ring circus is so American in its bounty of excess that it reminds me of what would happen many, many years later with remote-control television,” says Thompson, founder of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “Three acts going on at the same time, you don’t like one, you watch the other one. The three-ring circus figured out how to appeal to a fragmented audience long before cable TV and the Internet would fragment it even further.”
But the circus was more than entertainment, cautions Deborah Walk, assistant director of Legacy and Circus at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota.
It was about navigating local politics, contract negotiation, cutthroat promotions and hyper-competitive worldwide talent hunts for the most extreme and bizarre. Most significantly, it was about the staggering engineering challenge of mobilizing, feeding, assembling and deconstructing the equivalent of a small city — a city populated with big animals — within a 24-hour cycle, then catching the rail into the nation's expanding frontiers.
Today, the only way to appreciate its audacity is to visit the sprawling, obsessively detailed, 1/16-scale replica on display at the Ringling Museum. Named for its creator, Howard Tibbals, the miniature Howard Bros. Circus counts more than 44,000 pieces and, at 3,800 square feet, dominates an entire wing of the museum.
“Circuses moved with military precision. Before World War I, the German army studied the Barnum and Bailey logistics to figure out the most efficient way to move large groups of people and equipment,” says Walk. “For the Ringling show, we’re talking about accommodating 1,300 people, day after day. Plus the animals.”
Ringling brothers Alf, Al, Charles, John and Otto saw the future in 1884 and put their own show on the road. By 1895, they were powerful enough to sign a no-compete truce with P.T. Barnum that carved the USA into two separate commercial spheres. A year after Bailey’s death in 1906, the Ringlings purchased his spread, roughly the equivalent of theirs, which counted 92 rail cars capable of ferrying more than 1,000 employees, 26 elephants, 16 camels and 336 horses, among other things, across the new American century.
Walk estimates more than 125 circuses were still slugging it out when John and Mable Ringling began sinking money into Sarasota (population 840) real estate in 1911. But competitors became asterisks eight years later, when the juggernaut “Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows” asserted itself as, once and for all, The Greatest Show On Earth.
John Ringling’s decision to plant residential stakes in Sarasota and move the circus’ winter operations here in 1927 became, as the Sarasota Herald crowed, “the most startling and important announcement made in the history of Sarasota.”
From the otherworldly Ubangi, and their famous distended lip plates jarring local restaurant patrons, to lion tamers walking chained carnivores down Main Street sidewalks, Sarasota was no doubt among the most curious and compelling societies in the Jazz Age universe.
But other modes of entertainment were closing in fast. At least half a dozen silent films about the circus — including one from budding Hollywood superstar Charlie Chaplin — began to visually demystify the three-ring drama. Portentously, 1927 was the year the first talkie — Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer” — upped the experiential ante.
Furthermore, despite his relentless promotion of Sarasota in circus programs, John Ringling’s projected real estate surge never took off. The last of the Ringling brothers died in 1936.
“The land bust was followed by the Depression, and then came World War II, so there wasn’t a lot of development,” says historian LaHurd. “1957 Sarasota looked the same as 1927 Sarasota.”
Even so, says author Davis, The Greatest Show On Earth retained its untouchable status during the war. “President Roosevelt could’ve said the circus has to stop because we need our railroads for the conveyance of armaments and material,” she says. “But he exempted the circus, saying it was a critically important institution for national morale.”
Nothing — not even the worst disaster in circus history — appeared capable of slowing it down. On a hot afternoon in July 1944, a tent fire in Hartford, Connecticut claimed the lives of 167 people.
By the 1950s, however, yet another technology — television — began chewing into Ringling’s box office. Although Thompson describes how myriad TV shows directed largely at children elevated the Ringling profile, it also proved you didn’t have to leave your own living room to get the point.
Assaults on multiple fronts continued, and Cecil B. DeMille’s Academy Award-winning 1951 film “The Greatest Show On Earth” — which featured countless local extras and a typically cacophonous Main Street parade — wasn’t enough to reverse the trend.
With labor issues simmering, John Ringling nephew John Ringling North, who had been running the show for 20 years, retired the tents for air-conditioned arenas in 1956. Three years later, North moved the circus’ off-season sanctuary to Venice. What remained behind — in the 150 or so acres east of present-day Beneva Road — was either burned, sold off or abandoned to junk. In 1967, North made a clean break and sold the enterprise to music producer Irvin Feld. By 1992, Feld Entertainment dispatched the operation to Tampa.
"A lot of people may have said 'Oh, that's really sad' when they heard the news," says Thompson, "but I'll bet most of them hadn't been to a circus in 40 years. The circus had become a lot like colonial Williamsburg, almost like it was set in amber. People were glad it still existed but they didn't necessarily want the inconvenience of having to actually go there."
What the Ringling circus did was survive long enough to allow Feld Entertainment to re-brand its image with more lucrative niches such as Disney On Ice, Monster Jam and Marvel Universe Live.
Still, the timing of Feld's decision throws light on a paradox. The Sailor Circus Academy, an unrivaled youth circus school when it opened in 1949, now has hundreds of imitators scattered across the U.S. The Academy’s parent, Sarasota’s Circus Arts Conservatory, is partnering with the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage for a summer extravaganza at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Conservatory co-founder Dolly Jacobs, honored two years ago as the first circus performer to receive a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, says her famous Ringling-clown father Lou Jacobs “would probably be very hurt if he were still alive.” But she thinks Ringling's demise was largely self-inflicted.
She live-streamed the Red Unit’s final show two weeks ago, and although she saluted its artistry, the format and structure left her cold: “It hasn’t been the greatest show on Earth for quite a few years.” But Jacobs has a hunch that Feld isn’t done with the circus because it refused to sell the name.
Between now and whatever comes next, there is no escaping the past in Sarasota. Some landmarks — The Ringling Museum, the Ringling Bridge, Ringling Boulevard, John Ringling's state-owned Ca’ d’Zan Mansion — are brazen. Others, like Bob’s Train restaurant, or the Showfolks clubhouse for aging circus veterans (who will gather to catch the Ringling finale), are often discovered by accident.
Still others, like the historic marker designating where the Winter Quarters used to be, require an active search. For the record, that one stands at the entrance to the Glen Oaks subdivision. There are reports of elephant bones being excavated as new suburbanites began installing swimming pools some 50 years ago.
But some things stay gone.
“It was so wonderful back then to be able to go to the circus with your parents and your children, your grandchildren, whatever,” says Jacobs. “It was a memory maker. And that’s what life is about. At the end of your life, all you’re left with is your memories, hopefully good memories. That's the circus.”
A century of circus history
1911: John and Mabel Ringling begin buying property in Sarasota
1919: The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows forms
1927: Ringling moves the circus winter quarters from Bridgeport, Conn., to Sarasota
1936: Nephew John Ringling North takes over following the death of his uncle
1944: 167 people die in tent fire in Hartford, Conn.
1952: Cecil B. DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth" wins Best Picture Oscar
1956: John Ringling North retires circus tents for indoor arenas
1959: North announces the circus winter quarters will move from Sarasota to Venice
1967: North sells the circus to Irvin Feld
1968: Clown College begins a 29-year run in Venice
1971: Feld family sells Ringling Circus to Mattel
1982: Feld family repurchases the circus
1992: Railroad closing forces circus winter quarters to vacate Venice for Tampa
2014: Feld Entertainment relocates circus winter quarters to Ellenton
2016: Feld retires elephant acts from its road show
2017: Feld ends "The Greatest Show on Earth"