The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [11]
Lew and Joe joined forces for the first time before the Century of Progress in Chicago opened. Lew had his “Life” show, and Joe was able to finance a flashy building for it at the Fair. Showmen are incessantly forming oneor twoseason partnerships for a particular promotion, and neither Lew nor Joe realized at once the significance of their merger. The firm began its history just with “Life,” but within a week it opened a second exhibit—the twoheaded baby. The baby, one of those medical anomalies that never live for more than a few gasps, was in a large bottle of formaldehyde. For years it had been the chief ornament of a country doctor's study, and the partners had picked it up for a couple of hundred dollars from a Chicago dealer in medical curiosa. They built a fine front for this exhibit, with a wooden stork carrying a twoheaded baby prominently displayed over the entrance. They got a female talker for the show, a motherly woman who wore a trainednurse's uniform and made her ballyhoo through a microphone.
“Wouldn't you like to see a real twoheaded baby?” the nurse would ask sweetly. “He was born alive.”
“Get that,” Joe says. “We didn't say it was alive. We just said it was born alive.” The partners had arranged the entrance so that people on the midway could see past the door to a woman in nurse's uniform who bent over some object they could not discern. If the people inferred that the object was a baby and the nurse was trying to keep it alive, that was their own business. No deception could be imputed to Dufour & Rogers. And anyway, a look at a twoheaded baby, even in a bottle, is well worth fifteen cents.
“Did you ever see a real twoheaded baby?” Rogers sometimes murmurs euphorically, apropos of nothing except a cheerful mood. “It was born alive.” The partners grossed fifty thousand dollars with their pickled star. Thirtyfive thousand was clear profit.
“It wasn't a fake,” Dufour argues earnestly. “It was an illusion, like when Barnum advertised the 'cow with its head where its tail ought to be,' and when the people paid their money he just showed them a cow turned around in her stall. Just a new angle of presentation, you might say.”
The new angle of presentation is the essential element of success on a midway. There are virtually no novel or unique attractions. Even the most extraordinary freaks seldom remain long without rivals. Thus, shortly after the appearance of JoJo, the DogFaced Boy, the show world witnessed the debut of Lionel, the LionFaced Boy. The appearance of Frank Lentini, the ThreeLegged Man, was closely followed by that of Myrtle Corbin, the FourLegged Girl. Lalou, the DoubleBodied Man from Mexico, soon had a rival in Libera, the DoubleBodied Spaniard. This is because when one victim of a particular deformity begins to get publicity, other similar freaks see profit in making themselves known.
Dufour and Rogers have deep admiration for a young man named Jack Tavlin, who managed three midgets at the San Diego Fair and made money with them by calling them “leprahons.” “A midget is not worth feeding,” Mr. Tavlin, who was also working at the Flushing Fair, wisely observed. “Everybody knows what is a midget—a little man. But when I said, 'Come and see the leprahons,' the customers came. Afterward some of them would ask me, 'What is the difference between a leprahon and a midget?' I would say, 'Madam, it is a different species. A leprahon cannot reproduce theirself.' “ Mr. Tavlin's midgets were very small, because they were only six or seven years old, and a child midget is naturally rather smaller than an adult one. He dressed the midget boy in a high hat and a dress suit and the two girls in evening gowns. He didn't say