Show Business: The Greatest Showman on Earth

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The Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus is:

1) Just a three-ring circus

2) Owned by a brother named Ringling or North or Barnum or Bailey

3) Dying

4) All of these

5) None of these

THE right answer is No. 5. In this, the 100th year of the road show originated by Phineas T. Barnum, the Ringling Brothers extravaganza is so healthy that it is actually a six-ring circus—two separate, full-scale circuses traveling two different itineraries. Last week the "Blue company" was playing Madison Square Garden while the "Red company" was packing them in in Birmingham. Each, naturally, was billed as "The Greatest Show on Earth."

The double superlative may not be as illogical as it sounds. The Blue company features Mexico's "Flying Gaonas, the first family of the air"; Tito Gaona, who performs the triple somersault, is regarded as the greatest "flyer" in circus history. "Death-Defying Jose Guzman" rides a motorcycle up a wire to the roof of the auditorium, carrying with him a trapeze on which his wife Monique does acrobatic maneuvers. For a finale, Ringling's "human missiles," the Zacchinis, are fired from a cannon almost simultaneously. In the South, the Red company's program includes Sweden's "Unbelievable Lindstroms," who ride the high wire, all three of them balancing from a single unicycle; Bulgaria's Silagis, generally acknowledged as the world's most dazzling teeterboard act; and Gunther Gebel-Williams, a wild-animal tamer so impressive that Irvin Feld spent $2,000,000 to buy out an entire circus (belonging to Gunther's then mother-in-law) just to land him.

Folded Tent. Irvin Feld? The man behind that little-known name is the reason that the circus has lived to 100.

Feld got into the act in 1956, when John Ringling North, nephew of the founding brothers, was so beset by debt and besieged by TV that he announced the folding of his tents. The next morning Feld was on the phone, telling North, "Your methods are antiquated, and I have the solution." The solution was to get out of the big top and into the new arenas that were being built and that Feld, as a jazz and rock-'n'-roll promoter, knew how to book.

That idea alone saved the circus the salaries of 1,000 roustabouts. Feld, hired as a consultant, soon reduced the payroll even further, from 1,542 to 300.

"We cut out the freaks and the sideshow," he says, "because it was making fun of people and sickening to me."

He started a clown college to train replacements for Ringling's creaky old comic crew (average age: 66). And he changed what he calls "the Las Vegas look" of the circus—a polite way of saying that he hired showgirls who did not look quite so shopworn.