The face of a professional clown in repose, sans all the gaudy colors, grows inconceivably sad over time. His features settle into a weary, wary, haunted expression, because the jokes and japes he throws out to the audience seem to rebound onto his own head, and into his own personal life -- and that just doesn’t seem cricket.
The melancholy visages of old clowns that I knew, such as Otto Griebling, Swede Johnson, and Lou Jacobs, suggested hearts not only broken but missing whole pieces. And never was there a more forceful example than Emmett Kelly, Ringling’s celebrated ‘Weary Willie.’ He spent a few days at my 1971 Clown College at the invitation of Bill Ballantine, our ‘Dean.’ By then Kelly had retired, spending his days fishing, granting interviews, and whittling napkin rings out of pieces of cypress knees he picked up at the Sarasota Flea Market.
He did not deign to instruct us in anything technical, but would come over in the evenings to reminisce, in his flat Midwestern voice, about the great days under canvas when the Ringling name was at the height of its intoxicating magic. Squatting on the makeshift ring curb, he remembered blowdowns, hoof and mouth disease among the livestock, the Hartford Fire, his vain attempts to woo ill-fated circus star Lillian Leitzel, and a host of other depressing circus subjects that left me feeling orphaned in a sinister universe. He just was not a happy camper. He would take questions from us, but inevitably his answers involved train wrecks and other disasters. One night I asked him who he thought the greatest clown ever was. He looked off into the distance for a good long while before answering.
“Slivers Oakley” he finally replied. “He came along before Chaplin, worked with Ringling, and finally blew his brains out when he couldn’t make it in Vaudeville.”
Kelly paused to brush cypress shavings off his lap; he inevitably whittled while he talked with us.
“Buster Keaton stole several routines from him in his movies -- never even gave him credit. Like his one-man baseball routine. Best damn pantomime bit I ever saw -- always brought the circus crowds to their feet, stomping and cheering. Maybe he killed himself over a woman -- I don’t recollect exactly anymore.”
He was not gentle and understanding with us tender young students, either. When one of the girl students asked him, apropos of nothing, what his favorite food was, he snapped back: “Chocolate covered rutabagas.”
The one thing that reanimated his deadpan face was to talk about fishing. Then his eyes would light up like those in a jack-o-lantern, glowing with the true faith of a fanatic. Nobody but me seemed to pick up on this -- perhaps because none of my fellow students had the good fortune to grow up in Minnesota, the Land of Ten Thousand Fishing Stories.
So one night, summoning up my courage, I waited until our depressing Q&A was over and accosted Kelly as he was leaving.
“Mister Kelly” I asked, “you ever caught a channel cat?”
He displayed an angelic smile and said “We caught some monsters when I was a kid in Missouri!”
“We lived just three blocks from the Mississippi up in Minneapolis. I had one break my cane pole.”
“Do tell! You ever go fishin’ on Lake Minnetonka? That used to be swell for bass.”
“Naw” I said, my chest expanding like an inflated balloon. “Minnetonka is strictly for crappies nowadays. No limit. I can reel in a dozen in about two hours.”
He gave me a shrewd look, realized I was lying through my teeth, but that I WAS a dyed-in-the-wool fisherman, and sat down on a bleacher seat, motioning me to sit down next to him.
For the next ten minutes we ranged over a host of aquatic hotspots, from Lake of the Woods to Lake Okeechobee. I told him quite frankly that the only effective stinkbait for any kind of catfish was a piece of Velveeta cheese with a kernel of canned corn molded into the middle of it. He told me that whenever the show played Minnesota he and Lou Jacobs would pull out a huge two-man papier mache giraffe smoking a cigar and use that in their last appearance during the Finale so they could get out of their makeup unobserved and save some time -- then run out the back door to the nearest fishing hole.
When he got up to leave he gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder.
“Nice talkin’ to ya, kid. Good luck with the show.”
This was heady stuff for a 17 year old greenhorn like me. A private chat with the greatest living circus clown! And, like a typical greenhorn, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I was soon boasting to everyone at Clown College that Emmett had invited me to go fishing with him next Sunday, probably so I could give him a few pointers. I strutted about with this whopper for a few days until Bill Ballantine called my bluff in front of the whole student body during a training session with the lean-to shoes. These are a pair of sturdy Army boots which are soled with T-bars; when a clown slides the T-bar into a metal slot installed on a thick plank of lumber, he can actually lean his entire body at an impossible angle as long as he keeps his legs locked straight. The wooden board keeps the clown from falling over, giving him the appearance of defying gravity.
As I was practicing this stunt under Ballantine’s watchful gaze, he casually asked me:
“So, I hear you and Emmett are going out fishing this Sunday?”
“Yeah” I replied nonchalantly. “Probably just off the public pier for a coupla hours.”
“Well, that’s strange -- since he told me he’s going to Chicago tomorrow for three weeks.”
My face a crimson fireball, I inadvertently unlocked the boots from the board and fell into a crumpled heap. The derisive laughter that greeted my fall from grace sounded harsh and cruel to me. Not the kind of belly laugh I was hoping to create when my clown career started.
I think that’s when my profile began its long slide down to the homely glower that now greets me each morning in the bathroom mirror.
