The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [13]
The two men have divergent notions of pleasure. Rogers, noisy, pugnacious, and juvenile, likes to travel with sporting men. He will fly from a midway to an important prize fight a couple of thousand miles away and fly right back again when the fight is over. Dufour, despite his gauntness, is an epicure famous among carnival men. He has even invented two dishes—soft scrambled eggs with anchovies, and loose hamburger steak. He insists that his hamburger be made of a Delmonico steak cut into small pieces with a knife and that it be sauteed in a covered pan over a slow fire. Dufour's preoccupation with the finer things of life sometimes enrages Rogers. “I knew him when he had doughnut tumors,” he says bitterly, “and now he has to have scrambled eggs with anchovies.” Doughnut tumors are abdominal lumps which, carnies say, appear upon the bodies of show people who have subsisted for months at a time on nothing but coffee and doughnuts. “That Dr. Itch,” Joe sputters at other times—it is his familiar name for his partner—“when trouble comes he lams and leaves me with the grief.” But he values Dufour for his intellect. Both partners have been married for many years, and Mrs. Dufour and Mrs. Rogers hit it off well together.
The Dufour & Rogers reputation of always paying off stood them in particularly good stead when they bid for concessions at the New York Fair. Even an apparently flimsy building in the amusement area represented a big investment for the average outdoor showman. The buildings here had to be set on piles because of the low marshland; building specifications were strict; labor costs in New York were high. Wouldbe concessionaires had to furnish stiff guarantees of solvency. The “Nature's Mistakes” building, the least expensive of the Dufour & Rogers string, cost about $20,000. “Strange as It Seems,” their most elaborate offering, cost nearly $100,000. Altogether, Lew Dufour says, their attractions at the Fair grounds represented an investment of $600,000. The partners usually incorporate each attraction separately and finance it by selling bonds. The corporation also issues common stock, of which around fortynine per cent goes to the bondholders as a bonus, while the impresarios retain the rest. At the end of a fair, the corporation pays off the bondholders and the profits, if any, are divided among the holders of common stock. It is not a conservative form of investment, but the bankroll men get action for their money.
Concessionaires paid a percentage of the gross receipts to the Fair, making a separate deal for each show. For “Strange as It Seems,” for example, Dufour & Rogers agreed to pay around fifteen per cent on the first $500,000 of receipts. The show never reached that figure. The Fair administration provided either the tickettaker or the cashier for each show—the option rested with the concessionaire. If the cashier was a Fair employee, the Fair collected the gate receipts at the end of the day and banked them, paying the concessionaires their share by check. Dufour & Rogers, with their usual acumen, prefer to have a Fair cashier and a Dufour & Rogers tickettaker. “Then, if she takes any bad money, it is the Fair's hard luck and not ours,” Mr. Rogers says.
“Strange as It Seems” is an example of an ancient American form of folk art, the freak show. Phineas T. Barnum was primarily an exploiter of freaks. He became a circus man late in life, and never got to be a good one. But after Barnum the freak show became a stale and devitalized art form. Syndicated cartoonists like Bob Ripley, who draws “Believe It or Not,” and John Hix, Ripley's bustling young rival, who is author of the syndicated newspaper strip “Strange as It Seems,” were instrumental in the revival, but the genius of the risorgimento was the late C. C. Pyle, a showman who realized that the American public loves to suffer. Pyle put on a largescale freak show at the Century of Progress, calling it “Believe It or Not” and paying Ripley a royalty for the title. The selling point was that the highly peculiar principals in the show had been