Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (41 page)

cheerleaders used to wear in the 1950s. He seems much smaller off-

stage, his hair thinner, and his fair skin dappled with age spots. Yet

he radiates the energy of a child and shuffles about like a spritely aged

leprechaun. His flat lips rarely change shape as he talks, fairly well dis-

guising that he’s missing some front teeth.

He says his partner, Chris, is inside on the phone and suggests we

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talk here. It’s obvious that he just wants to docent his museum.

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“Now let’s start down here,” he says, leading me to one of the dis-

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plays at the end of the room. He reminds me of my spry ninety-year-

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old grandmother, who had to proudly point out every flower, fruit tree,

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and vegetable on her farm before letting any visitor inside her house.

Ward’s props reinforce his unofficial title as King of the American

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Sideshow. He’s more P. T. Barnum than P. T. Barnum. He points out a

playbill for
Phineas
, which he wrote about the infamous eighteenth-

century showman’s life. Ward and Poobah performed all the roles at

the 1995 Circus Fans Association of America convention in Bridgeport,

Connecticut, P. T. Barnum’s hometown. As if there were any doubt,

Ward adds that he played the leading role, P. T.

“Now this is Louise Capps. She was born without arms,” he says,

pointing to a black-and-white photo of a shapely armless woman in a

strapless bodysuit. “She could do anything that anyone else could do

but with only her feet. She came to our show at the Texas State Fair in

1979. She married a boy, Bruce Hill, who was a knife thrower on our

show. They bought a farm in Oklahoma, and she operates the farm

machinery, milks the cows, and she does it all with her feet.”

Moving along to a photo of a Harold Huge in his full blubbery glory,

Ward gives a windy account of how Bruce Snowdon came to be his side-

show fat man. He goes over Bruce’s college degrees, how he was taking

a break from an archaeological dig in the early 1970s when he discov-

ered a photo of a fat man at a local library. Sideshow life sure sounded

easier. Specifics flow from Ward as if the fat man had walked into his

life only this morning, rather than twenty-six years ago. Sure, Ward’s

given this tour before and has written about his life. But this man is

eighty-one and has the memory of an elephant.

proof

He tells me near the end of Bruce’s fat-man career that they billed

him as weighing 712 pounds, even though they weren’t really sure. “The

man literally ate himself to death,” he says of Bruce. “He kept gaining

more and more weight until he was bedridden and died a year ago.” He

was fifty-eight.

So, how much did he weigh initially? Ward goes back and studies

the photo up close. “I’d say he was about half that size. His goal was

he wanted to be that fattest man in the world and so he would get 5

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pounds of sugar and put it in a gallon of water and dissolve it and sip

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on that sugar water all day just to gain more weight.”

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It’s almost inconceivable that someone would purposefully deform

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themselves to such a fatal extent just to be a sideshow freak; it even

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suggests a need for some intense psychotherapy. But there’s a roman-

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tic allure to life on the road, pitching tents in one dusty town after an-

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other, no time cards or stress over annual reviews, and never having to

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worry about fashion faux pas like wearing white after Labor Day. The

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freedom from conventional life can become addictive.

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Take the tattooed lady. Lorett Fulkerson started as a dancer in a

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hootchie coochie show. She fell so in love with the life that she ensured

she would always have a sideshow job by making herself a freak. She at-

tempted to have her entire body inked, but her tattoo artist died after

covering 90 percent of her, including the inside of her lower lip. Lorett

and her husband, who worked the ticket booth, were with Ward and

Chris’s show for thirty-two years.

Ward points to a photo of a giant dressed like Aladdin, noting that

the costume was one of his creations. He says he likes flamboyant cos-

tumes and is quite proud that he made many for his performers, sew-

ing each by hand.

Now comes an homage to Pete Terhurne, a.k.a. Little Pete, a.k.a.

Poobah, perhaps the most iconic American circus and sideshow dwarf.

His clown face has been on circus posters across the nation. He’s had

bits parts in multiple movies and made the late-show circuit appear-

ing on Jay Leno’s
Tonight
Show
and others. He worked and shared a

roof with Ward his entire career, some fifty-five years. He juggled while

standing on his head, wrestled a python, played a pygmy, played mur-

der victims in a couple of Ward’s musicals, and, as previously witnessed,

ate fire. Little Pete had never held a job and lived reclusively with his

mother when he approached Ward for work on the midway in 1954.

Ward became his mentor, coworker, friend, and somewhat caretaker.

proof

I had caught what turned out to be Poobah’s final tour at the Florida

State Fair. Ward says he’s since retired and lives in an assisted-living

home in Brandon. “He loves it,” Ward says. A brief hint of sadness in

his eyes tells he misses his longtime little buddy, but he’s in show mode

with no time for sentimentality.

Next is Dickie Brisban, whose ankles grew from his hips. “We called

him the Penguin Boy because when he walked he waddled like a pen-

guin.” Ward says he was playing Jamestown, North Dakota, in 1960

when Dickie showed up looking for work. He was on welfare. He retired

twenty-six years later with a nice home in California and a small ranch

in Nevada. “I’d say he did pretty good,” Ward says with a grin.

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That’s another thing about freak shows that typically comes up

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when disability groups cry of their exploitation and cruelty. Sitting in

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a tent and letting people pay to stare at you was one of the few, if not

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only, ways for those born without legs, with lobster hands, or covered

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in thick hair to earn a living before the age of modern surgery. Side-

shows offered financial independence. It was also liberating to be with

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people equally freakish, who saw each other as who they were on the

inside instead of judging them for being so profoundly different on the

outside. On the road and wintering in Gibtown, they were a family, the

only one that some had ever had.

For the hairy woman and scaly man in Ward’s next photo, side-

show life was all they ever knew. Percilla, the Monkey Girl, was born

in Puerto Rico with a rare genetic abnormality that covered her entire

body in thick, black hair. She was way more than a bearded lady. Her fa-

ther was exhibiting her by the time she was three. After he died she was

adopted by a sideshow operator who, Ward says, treated her as his own

child and gave her a pet chimpanzee. Yes, the Monkey Girl had her own

monkey and even sometimes performed with it. Ward says she fell in

love with the Alligator Man, Bennett Bejano, of Punta Gorda, Florida,

after he joined her father’s show. Bennett had no sweat glands, which

gave him scaly skin like a reptile. His early life was amazingly similar to

Percilla’s. He was put in a sideshow at six and adopted by the sideshow

owner after his father died. Monkey Girl and Alligator Man eventually

eloped and were billed as the “The World’s Most Unusual Couple,” not

to be confused with “The World’s Strangest Married Couple,” the Giant

and Half-Girl who ran the diner.

Although I’d read some of these tales in Ward’s writings, part of his

storytelling gift is that he can make you feel that he has never shared

proof

the story with anyone else. I’m savoring his craft, but the sunroom’s a

steam bath and I’m being bled by mosquitoes. I shoo one off his fore-

head, then wave one away from mine. Ward doesn’t seem to notice.

He’s on full-tilt.

He points out publicity photos from Hollywood movies that he and

Chris were involved with—films such as
“Carnie”
starring Gary Busy

and Jodie Foster and
“Daredevil”
with George Montgomery and Terry

Moore. His detailed accounts indicate they were intricately involved

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with the films and friends with the actors. He throws in a story about

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Terry Moore’s marriage to Howard Hughes. Ward is an encyclopedia

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of showbiz. As for acting, his most noted cinematic role has always

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been as himself, a legendary sideshow promoter. He’s been in
Gibtown

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(2001); the BBC’s
Last
American
Freak
Show
(1994);
Showman:
The
Life
s’n

and
Times
of
Ward
Hall
(2006);
Sideshow:
Alive
on
the
Inside
(1999); and Wot

several others (all confirmed).

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Ward admits he’s narcissistic. He confesses this as we look at play-

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bills from his musicals. He says he’s written four that were performed

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at small venues, never making it to Broadway. “I thought because I

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wrote them they were all going to be big hits. They were all artistically

successful and financial flops. I violated the number-one rule in the

theater, which is to never invest your own money in the show. I did this

because I was so egotistical that these were going to be big hits that

why should I share it with anyone. Each time I went broke.”

Group photos of wildly costumed performers, snapshots of air-

brushed semi-trailer wax museums, film publicity shots, award letters,

and newspaper clippings prove just how manic Ward and Chris were

in the 1970s and 1980s. Nothing is in chronological order, and Ward

jumps from one endeavor to the next with so many tangential details

it takes a little on-the-spot calculation and later research to grasp the

big picture. In short, they had about fifteen shows going at once across

North America: They operated traditional 10-in-1s with only live acts

featuring “freaks” from Turtle Man to Artoria the Tattooed Lady, who

was inked with works of Raphael and Michelangelo; they owned per-

manent oddity museums along the Jersey shore; they ran grind shows,

which are single-act exhibits featuring marvels such as a giant snake or

illusions such as a headless woman; they operated mobile wax muse-

ums that featured everyone from Sonny Bono to Jesus and his Apostles

at the Last Supper.

Nothing was too grotesque or taboo. Their freak baby grind show

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featured two-headed fetuses floating in jars. Showmen call them pick-

led punks. Police eventually confiscated Ward and Chris’s freak fetuses,

most of which turned out to be rubber dolls.

As with his plays, Ward’s blind ambition eventually got the better of

him in the sideshow realm. In 1982, he and Chris built the massive pro-

duction show
Wondercade
with more than forty performers, an orches-

tra, elephants, chimps, dogs, and birds. It took almost twenty semis to

haul it to Las Vegas. The tent seated 2,700. After three weeks, the aver-

age daily attendance was 175. “We ran out of money, and I couldn’t pay

the acts if we had gone on, so I closed the show,” Ward says. They blew

$1.5 million, most of it borrowed, and were forced to file bankruptcy.

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He says they worked five years to pay everyone back.

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Ever the promoter, Ward’s not one to dwell on negatives, and he

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brings up one of the highlights of his career—the
World
of
Wonders
ex-

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hibition at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s and

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early 1980s. He proudly points out a formal letter from the hallowed

institute and adds the exhibit was written up in the
New
York
Times
.

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He quotes the newspaper’s characterizations of him: “When Ward Hall

talks, people listen even when they don’t want to.” We both laugh.

I’m eager to learn more about Ward, not just his accomplishments.

Here’s a man who made his living by selling others’ bizarre deformities

and refers to them as “freaks” with impunity when speaking of them

professionally. Yet, he clearly respects them and considers many his

dear friends. What exactly made Ward Hall, Ward Hall?

Although I think he prefers that we stay in his museum, he notices

I’ve begun to look like I just climbed out of his pool. The sound of a TV

news commentator carries through the wall. Chris clearly is no longer

on the phone.

The mobile home is fairly new with a slight vault to the ceiling, thick

carpet, and faux wood paneling. The living room décor is modest with

heavy 1980s furniture—cushiony couches and easy chair, a cluttered