“There are more old drunkards than old doctors” Buzzy the clown, a notable toper in his own right, liked to say when tasked with his overweening thirst and consequent hangovers. He claimed to have the perfect morning after remedy -- a glass of ice cold tomato juice with a dash of cayenne pepper sauce and a splash of Worcestershire sauce, plus a raw egg slightly beaten in. I don’t know if such a concoction every really worked for him -- but I’m sure it took his mind off his other physical maladies while he was sprinting to the Men’s Room. Most of the funny folk in the Ringling clown alley had various nostrums and cures for everything from hangovers to white lung disease (a common ailment among clowns, from inhaling all that talcum over the years while setting their makeup.)
Prince Paul claimed that a sovereign balm for what ailed you was Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic. It was manufactured in New York, and unavailable in the hinterlands once the show left the East Coast -- so Prince always squirreled away a couple wooden cases of the stuff in his suite on the train. Such was his standing with the candy butchers that he had but to ask for a cup of ice to cool Dr. Brown’s panacea and they would fall all over themselves to bring it to him -- I, on the other hand, had to pay a buck-fifty for a cup of ice from those ravening gypsters.
Swede Johnson was a chain-smoker from the age of fourteen, yet he never got sick. Never a sniffle or a hack. When I asked him once why he was never ill he just scowled at me and said “Pinhead, I’m too damn mean for any germ to last long inside of me!”
Dougie Ashton rubbed his temples each day with eucalyptus oil, claiming it kept colds away and was the secret behind the tremendous old age of his forebears. And, indeed, Dougie is still a hale and hearty specimen today back in Australia -- fifty years after I first met him. In fact, his posts and photos on Facebook show him to have a health and energy level better than mine, his junior by at least twenty years!
LeVoi Hipps swallowed a tablespoon of unsulphured molasses mixed with cod liver oil each morning -- and made his wife and kids take it each day as well. I never knew him to be sick. But his breath -- uff dah!
Whenever Tim Holst was feeling under the weather he searched for an IHOP and ordered Swedish pancakes smothered in lingonberry syrup, with a cup of rosehip tea.
“My mother always made this for me when I was sick” he told me. “I’m gonna teach my wife the recipe.” But neither one of his wives ever bothered to fix it for him, as far as I know.
It was no laughing matter for a clown to get sick. Depending on the mood of Performance Director Charlie Baumann, he would let a sick clown take a few days off with full pay -- or dock him for each day missed, with additional penalty and interest. You never knew which way he was going to go. It always griped me that the show carried a full-time veterinarian for the animals, but not even a nurse or a bottle of aspirin for the performers. Luckily, many of the larger arenas, like Madison Square Garden, had a nurse on-call during performances. She was always glad to check out a clown for the flu or a pulled muscle and then write out a prescription.
I think poor old Otto Griebling was in a lot of pain that final season in 1972. He changed the dressing on his tracheotomy several times a day, and I noticed that sometimes there was bloody pus on it. But he never missed a show, until that final week when he checked into the hospital and never checked out again. In fact, I think a lot of those veteran clowns were sick and in pain to some extent -- but they just lived with it. The alternative -- quitting the show and losing their livelihood and the dignity of steady employment -- was unthinkable. Ringling was their life -- without it they would fade into debilitated shadows.
Mark Anthony was the most proactive jester in clown alley when it came to self-medication. He had once been a champion carouser, he claimed, drinking and smoking and laying with strange women and getting their strange diseases -- but all that was behind him now. Now he only ate organically grown fruits and vegetables (which were a lot harder to locate back in 1972 than they are now.) He was as chaste as a monk. He asked pointed questions about his meat in restaurants: Was it caged or glutted with hormones or did it die in pain? He took every vitamin there was and constantly snacked on raisins for their iron content. Whenever he got the ‘creeping crud,’ as he called it, he would swallow a glass of warm water with Epsom salts mixed in, and then go find a Turkish Bath or a sauna to ‘sweat it out.’ He dropped a crowbar on his foot one day, and his big toe first turned blue, then green, then black, and his toenail fell out. He hobbled around for a few weeks in obvious pain, but pooh-poohed the idea of seeing a doctor. He finally decided that what his gangrenous foot needed was a long soak in a tub of diluted cider vinegar. Apparently it worked; he was walking around without the least sign of a limp in a few days, and his big toe returned to its normal hue and shape. But when his toenail grew back in it curled up like a Persian slipper.
Like all the other First of Mays that season I was as healthy as a horse. Except for an occasional bout of diarrhea. I’d never had it as a child at home, so when it struck I had no idea what to do. In fact, I panicked -- begging Chico to take me to the ER before I died.
“You don’t need a hospital, Nut-Nut” he said. “Just take some Brioschi and you’ll be up and running in no time.” He gave me several glasses of the fizzing concoction, which settled my stomach but did nothing about my runs. So I guess I was up and running, like he said. It was only when Steve Smith dosed me with Kaopectate that my troubles subsided. And ever since then, whenever that distant internal rumbling begins after a heavy and spicy meal, I smugly have Kaopectate for dessert instead of apple pie -- and peace and harmony return to my gastrointestinal regions.
