Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (18 page)

“When you live in a Communist system,” Venko explained, “any way out is a miracle. Kenneth Feld was our miracle maker.”

Venko Lilov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. Because of his prodigious size, he was selected as a child for special athletic training schools, eventually rising to become three-time heavyweight wrestling champion of the country. Championships, however, did not guarantee him freedom, and one day at the height of his career a friend suggested he try out as a catcher for a famed teeterboard troupe that was leaving for the West. “I went to the practice like it was a joke,” he remembered. “Two weeks later I was in America.” Overnight he knew that’s where he wanted to be. Returning home two years later, Venko married Inna, a Russian wirewalker born in Tbilisi, and the two of them set out to develop an act. Starting with two Russian bears her father had presented to them as a gift, they went to work. In no time they had a family, an act, and a way out. They also had an enemy. “It was a nightmare,” Venko said in his beefy Slavic accent. “The director was fucked up. For some reason he hated us. I had an offer to go to Italy. He said, ‘No, you go to Czechoslovakia.’ I had a contract to go to France. He said, ‘No, you go to Russia.’ He didn’t want us to get out. This lasted nine years.”

Until one day Kenneth Feld appeared. “He came to the office and said, ‘I want that act.’ He was the producer of Ringling Brothers. He saw our pictures and wanted us on his show. It was that simple. We got hired by photographs. The director didn’t dare turn him down.”

“So why did he pick you?”

“Because we were different. Our act was based on sports—rings, hurdles, parallel bars. No bears in dresses. No waltzing in the ring. One month later we flew from Sofia to Paris, from Paris to New York, and from New York to Sarasota. The bears went to sleep in Bulgaria and woke up the next morning in Florida. They never knew the difference. I did.”

In America the Lilovs once again began to build a new life, though at the time they were making little money. Kenneth Feld paid the Bulgarian government, and the government in turn paid them—$105 a week. Undaunted, they began to breed their bears and cultivate a stable of well-trained animals. Within six years they had developed enough of a reputation and saved enough money to break away. They left Ringling Brothers and moved to Mexico. This proved to be a near-fatal mistake. Once they left the United States, the bottom fell out of their dream—their banks recalled their notes, their working visas ended, and they were stranded with five bears, two loans, and no resources. It was at this point that Douglas Holwadel stepped into their lives. Having promised them a contract, he guaranteed their notes and arranged for working papers. The next year Venko Lilov’s Performing Bears would find a home on the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus.

After the first trick, in which Jackie, a two-hundred-pound toddler, jumps over track-and-field hurdles, Venko leads his bears through several displays of gymnastic skill—turning somersaults, jumping rope, balancing on the parallel bars. This series climaxes when Venko unhooks his prized patriarch, Dobush, an eight-hundred-pound, sixteen-year-old behemoth of a bear, and leads him to a set of gymnastic rings suspended from a bar. Dobush lumbers slowly to the front of the apparatus, places his paws tentatively on the rings, and with a gentle kick with his legs leaps up onto his forearms and performs a towering handstand two feet above the ground. The trick elicits gasps of approval.

“A good trick has to be close to the people. Something they can relate to,” Venko told me. Unlike the Rodríguezes or the Bales, Venko had originally been unfriendly toward me. He was hostile toward outsiders, and, even though I mostly stayed clear of him at first, he actively sought me out around the lot to deliver a series of dire admonitions. “I’m warning you, man,” he liked to say, “these people will kill you once your book is published.” About two months into the season he finally confronted me directly one night on my way back to my trailer. How could I write a book about the circus business, he wanted to know, when I was only traveling with one show? I’m not writing about the business in general, I told him, but about this show in particular. Well then, how could I write about this show at all when I didn’t know anything about animals? That’s why I’m interviewing performers, I told him, because I didn’t know anything about the acts. Interviewing? he said. I didn’t know you were doing that. And with that he offered me a beer.

“For the last few years I’ve been working on a new comedy car,” he went on to explain in that first of many late-night drinking sessions. “In the act the car breaks down and the bear and I try to fix it. When the bear sticks his head under the hood and pulls out the radiator, the people will go crazy. Why? Because everybody in that audience—at least the adults—has a driver’s license. They’ve been dicked around by service people. They will think it’s funny.”

“And does the bear think it’s funny?”

“Are you crazy? She doesn’t know it’s funny, She does it for the cookie. She wants the reward. Now she likes it, of course. You can’t make a bear do something it doesn’t want to do. But all these animal rights people who say we force the bears to do the tricks, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They say that we teach the bears to jump rope by using a heat pad. That’s crazy, my friend.”

“So how did you teach them to jump rope?”

“The bears, they were young. I had some bread one day and I was waiting to feed them. Jackie jumped up to get the bread. I ran and got another piece of bread and she jumped up again. The next day I got a rope. She jumped up to get the bread, I gave her the bread and pulled the rope underneath her. And that’s it. Once I have the trick I don’t practice it anymore. I wait a couple of days, maybe a week or two, and let her remember what she did. Then I go back and do it again and she’s learned the trick. I don’t teach them the tricks, you see, they teach me.”

“And they do all of this for a cookie?” I asked.

“All for a cookie. Just like the ones you buy in the store. Gingersnaps, sugar cookies. We can’t use raisins or chocolate chips because they get stuck in their teeth.”

“So why don’t they ask for more?” I said. “When I was a child and got rewards for doing something I would ask for more the next time. Will they do the same trick for the rest of their lives all for the same reward?”

“Bruce,” Venko said. “You sure are a dumb fuck, aren’t you? Use your head. You have to think about what you’re doing in order to get a higher reward. You have to think, ‘Today I get five dollars; tomorrow I’ll ask for ten.’ The bear doesn’t think that way. For him it’s all a reflex.”

“If that’s the case, then why are so many people upset about having trained animals in the circus?”

“Because we have them on leashes. Because they wear muzzles. Of course, the people don’t realize that the bears can walk without the leashes, they can work without muzzles. It’s all for safety.”

“So why don’t you just explain what you’re doing?”

“You can’t rationalize with the public. People are fucking stupid, my friend. You just don’t understand. They come up to me every day and say things like ‘Wow, man. Where did you get those monkeys?’ Just this morning I was opening the cages to feed the bears and a woman behind me called, ‘Excuse me. Excuse me, sir!’ I ignored her but she kept on calling, ‘Sir, sir. Can I ask you a few questions?’ She wouldn’t shut up, so finally I turned to her and said, ‘Lady, don’t you have a fucking brain in your head? What are you thinking? I have an eight-hundred-pound bear in my hands and if I turn around and talk to you he just might decide to eat me.’ She pressed her lips together and shot me a bird.”

“Does this only happen in America?” I wondered. “Or all over?”

“It’s worse in America,” he said. “Also, it’s worse now than it’s ever been. You just watch, it’s bound to explode.”

“
CLOWNS, YES! ELEPHANTS, NO! CIRCUS ANIMALS HAVE TO GO!
”

The chant was faint yet clear as it wafted up from the parking lot of the Apple Blossom Mall in Winchester, Virginia, a little after three o’clock in the afternoon. The show had arrived the night before in the pedigree-perfect pink-and-green town just across the West Virginia border from famed Harpers Ferry, and for the first time all year a small group of protesters showed up on the lot to picket against the show’s alleged violation of animal rights. One of the women wore a polyester tiger costume. Another carried a cardboard sign that said: “
MAKE THIS YOUR LAST CIRCUS
.” A man was dressed in a saggy pom-pom clown costume with runny makeup on his cheeks that already raised my territorial ire: Don’t you know how to powder? I thought.

The first person to notice them was Sheri from concessions. She came climbing over the hot-dog counter and screamed at the protesters to get off the property. The second to arrive was Dave Hoover, the former tiger trainer turned “chief safety officer.” He waved his soggy cigar in their faces and threatened to have them arrested. Doug was much calmer when he appeared. “You are welcome to picket,” he said. “But this is private property and you are not allowed here.” They quietly moved toward the parking entrance.

“This isn’t private property,” I said to Doug after they had left. “Do you have the right to ask them to leave?”

“No,” he said. “I just bullshit a little.”

Several minutes later I walked toward the parking area to speak with the protesters. When I arrived they were discussing the best place to stand. Jimmy told me that in one town the picketers stood at the stoplight and directed people to circus parking “just up the way,” which actually led them out of town. This group was less destructive, but equally adamant. They were from PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and had driven in fifty miles from Washington, D.C. A reporter had told me earlier that they had sent a press release to the local newspaper announcing their picket. As they were setting into a location, several children stopped in front of the man in the clown costume with his polyester orange wig and said, “Look, a clown!” The man frowned. I grimaced. The children walked away. In the meantime his partner handed me a pamphlet.
CRUELTY IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT
, it said over a photograph of an elephant in shackles. “Although some children dream of running away to join the circus, it is likely that most animals forced to perform in circuses dream of escaping them.”

After glancing at the pamphlet, I asked the woman whether she had seen the show. She said she had not. Had she spoken with any of the animal trainers on the show to see how they care for the animals? I said. Again, she said no. Did she picket all circuses, I wondered, or only this one? She said they picketed all places where animals are cruelly treated. As we were speaking, Doug appeared at the edge of the lot and looked at me with harsh, disciplinary eyes. He gestured for me to follow him. “I’m only speaking with them,” I said when we met at the top of the stairs. “There’s no harm in that, is there?”

“Just don’t pay any attention to them,” he said. His voice wasn’t angry, only firm. “The people on the lot get all excited. The best thing to do is ignore them. They’re all vegetarians and don’t respond to reason.”

We nodded goodbye and I returned to my camper.

Back at home I continued reading the pamphlet.
NO FUN FOR THE ANIMALS
, it said across the top. “Colorful pageantry disguises the fact that animals used in circuses are mere captives forced to perform unnatural and often painful acts. Circuses would quickly lose their appeal if the details of the animals’ treatment, confinement and training became widely known.” To support this claim the pamphlet listed five alleged abuses.

1. Animals are forced to travel thousands of miles with the show for 48-50 weeks every year
. Although the length of our season was only thirty-four weeks, the fact of the travel was accurate.
2. Tigers live and are transported in cages only 4? × 5? × 6?—barely enough room to turn around in
. This statement was also essentially true (even though the cages were slightly larger), but it failed to mention that the size met USDA regulations.
3. Animals perform unnatural acts like balancing on one foot and jumping through flaming hoops only under threat of punishment
. While the animals on our show did perform some unnatural acts, most of what they did were natural behaviors, and in any case they didn’t do them under the threat of punishment, but in the promise of a reward.
4. Elephants are chained in filthy railroad cars which are often left in the sun in 90 to 100 degree weather
. Our show did not have railroad cars, and the animals were never left in the truck on hot days but kept under canopies.
5. Elephants are beaten across the eyes, on their trunks and on the backs of their legs with “bull books” and whips
. Elephants on our show were not beaten across the eyes, and in my experience were not beaten at all, although they were prodded and slapped frequently in the other places mentioned.

All in all, I was left with the feeling that the pamphlet was overstating its case and was ultimately not very convincing. This came as no surprise. After several months on the show I had gleaned enough about the animal rights movement to realize there were two camps: first, a moderate camp that doesn’t mind animals in circuses as long as they are well treated; and second, a more radical camp that doesn’t approve of animals in entertainment at all. The picketers from PETA belonged to the latter group. After observing them in Winchester, as well as two dozen locations around New England, I was left with the distinct impression that they were more interested in stirring up controversy than in engaging in a dialogue with the circus to address their concerns. While their lobbying in Washington has at times been extremely effective, their grass-roots efforts around the show were ineffective at best and often laughable. In Ithaca, a group of PETA protesters appeared on a nearby bridge during a heat wave to claim that it was too hot for the elephants (who are from Southeast Asia, after all) to work. After twenty minutes the protesters themselves got so hot they gave up and went home.