(Twenty-five years ago I fancied myself as a writer of novels and biographies. I wrote several long works, which I desktop published to immediate, yawning obscurity. They have long been out of print and unavailable, and until a few days ago I was sure even I myself didn’t possess a copy of any of my own prosy drek anymore. But recently, having moved into a Senior Apartment, I discovered in a moldy old suitcase some manuscript pages of the biography I had written long ago about the clown nonpareil, Otto Griebling. My biography was based on a conversation notebook I had kept in 1971, which allowed Otto to write down his part of the conversation he was having with me – since he had lost his voice to cancer a few years earlier. Here, then, is one particular story from his youth that he shared with me, and which I now happily share with you, from my original manuscript.)
Out of makeup, Otto Griebling looked like a dyspeptic janitor. In makeup, he became the glowering foil of an unsympathetic fate. Accoutered in hobo rags, his pudgy face lacked that treacly sentimental visage that both Charlie Chaplin and Emmett Kelly had parlayed into world-wide fame. Instead, his bindlestiff makeup displayed consistent crankiness, avarice, and suspicion.
Otto was the only buffoon allowed complete freedom to carpet clown during the entire show. This meant he could go into the audience and interact with the crowd no matter what was going on in center ring.
He would amble slowly and sullenly through rows of circus patrons, checking a greasy clipboard from time to time, making sure everyone was in their proper seat. Somewhere along the line he would discover a miscreant who was not on his list. Subtle shades of horror, disgust, and finally grim determination would flit across his face, indicating to the haplessly seated malefactor that his or her doom would be hard. But then, looking slyly about to make sure the coast was clear, Otto would give a conniving leer and hold out his hand for a bribe. His victim would offer him popcorn, a Coke, even a hotdog, with mounting merriment – since Otto would accept whatever goodies he was offered and then daintily tie a snow white napkin around his blackened neck before partaking. When the bribes ran out, the outraged Otto would mime the immediate expulsion of his victim, only to be met with more gales of laughter, to which his only reply was a furious glare and then a fatalistic shrug of his tattered shoulders as he moved on.
Or else he would industriously be wiping down the rails and backs of seats when he chanced upon a woman whom he immediately fell in love with. His body language perfectly mimicked the swooning swain as he lowered his ludicrous face closer and closer to his beloved, who would be convulsed with embarrassed laughter. Finally puckering his lips for the expected kiss, he was nonplussed at the guffaws that burst out all around him. Sadly realizing his mistake in giving his heart away to such a hussy, he would straighten up with vast dignity, squint at his former flame, and give her a light belt across the shoulders with his cleaning rag. Then stump away in high dudgeon.
Did Otto always have this mad and daring sense of humor? I used to wonder about it as we made up next to each other in clown alley. One day between shows he told me something of his youth in Wilhelmine Germany after I had asked him if he always wanted to be a clown.
Otto grew up in Koblenz, on the Rhine River, in west central Germany. In his early teens he was apprenticed to the keeper of a medieval clock tower in the courtyard of the Elector’s Palace. The elderly timepiece needed little attention, so Otto spent a great deal of time wandering among the gears and flywheels inside the tower. The day came when his master showed him how to control the strokes for the bronze bell that tolled the hours – and Otto became inspired with an impish plan.
Like many another town in the Rhineland-Palatinate prior to the First World War, the citizens of Koblenz had not traveled very far from their superstitious peasant roots. The forests still held sprites and goblins and the mountains were home to witches and other fell folk it was best to ignore or try to placate.
Thus it was on Hexennacht, May 1st, each year, the people of Koblenz mostly stayed indoors after dark, saying their prayers and sprinkling the lintels with holy water. (Hexennacht means Witch’s Night.)
After midnight, it was believed, the witches were diminished in their malignant powers and it was safe to go outside again. People would wait up until the twelve strokes of their clock towers had come and gone, and then go peacefully to their beds at last.
But that particular year when Hexennacht came around, Otto secreted himself in the clock tower during the evening and reset the bell mechanism so that when midnight came there would be 13 strikes to the bell – not twelve.
The ensuing panic and bedlam, Otto wrote in his conversation book to me, were well worth the whipping his father gave him the next day.
And when his father scolded him, calling him “eine dumme Betruger” (a foolish clown), Otto suddenly knew what his career was going to be . . .
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