The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [14]
When Ripley's backers failed to come to terms with the World of Tomorrow, Lew and Joe moved in, using John Hix as a front man. Hix got five per cent of the gross for the use of his name and dutifully drew pictures of the freaks for his daily newspaper strip. Ripley, apparently peeved by the affront to his prestige, opened his own museum of curiosities on Broadway. Dufour & Rogers had exclusive freakshow rights at the World of Tomorrow, besides an excellent grasp of the neoFrankenstein technique of breaking the audience down with horror. They had a man named Ellis Phillips in their show who drove a long nail into his nose, held up his socks with thumbtacks, sewed buttons onto his chest, and stuck hatpins through his cheeks. “It's a hell of an act,” Joe Rogers said admiringly, “and we also have a very nice fellow who eats razor blades.” The art of drawing up a bill for a modern freak show lies in alternating “strong” or “torture” acts in the layout, such as the tattooed girl, Betty Broadbent; the contortionist, Flexible Freddie, or the man who puts four golf balls in his mouth simultaneously. The customers move counterclockwise around three sides of the auditorium, and the strong acts are graduated in intensity, so that after passing the strongest of them the pleased patron will be within one bound of fresh air.
An ingenious gentleman named Nathan T. Eagle acted as manager. “The best ad for our show,” Mr. Eagle said engagingly, “is the number of people who collapse or imagine they have delirium tremens after seeing it.” The more important performers realize this and keep a painstaking record of how many people they cause to lose consciousness. Mr. Eagle's favorite performer was a Cuban Negro named Avelino Perez, who is always billed as the Cuban PopEye because he can make his eyeballs pop far out of his head, either singly or in unison. Perez was a keen runnerup to the hatpin man in provoking comas. A gentleman who pulls weights on hooks passed through his eyelids was another close competitor.
Perez was in especially good form one evening, and on performing his first, or lefteye, pop, caused a patron who had just dined at a midway restaurant to turn green. Perez popped his right eye, and the man went down cold. “A couple of our boys got hold of this fellow and started rubbing his wrists and pushing smelling salts under his nose,” Mr. Eagle says. “Just as he started to regain consciousness—he was lying there on the floor in front of the Cubano, you know—Perez looked down at him and popped both eyeballs. The fellow passed right out again. Great sense of humor, that Cubano.”
• Sparring Partner •
oe Louis' knockout of Max Schmeling in their second match was a triumph for the theory that fighters should have tough sparring partners. Each of his bouts since has been a triumph for the same theory. Louis trained for Schmeling with the best colored heavyweights his handlers could hire. They included a man named George Nicholson, who is considered the best sparring partner in the business. Writers covering Louis' camp frequently reported that the partners were outboxing the champion. Schmeling's camp was run on quite a different basis. His sparring partners were four virtually anonymous human punching bags, on whom he practiced his blows with impunity. They seldom hit back except by mistake, and when they did the German punished them. Louis paid twentyfive dollars a day apiece for his sparring partners; Schmeling paid ten. A Schmeling victory, therefore, would have meant economic catastrophe for the sparringpartner industry.
“It goes to show that you got to be in the best of condition no