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What's it's like to work for Circus Vargus
Under the big top
Eight o’clock, Friday morning. For roustabouts, last night was the first night’s sleep since Yuma.
A lone man paces back and forth in front of a covey of lighted motor homes and house trailers assembled in College Grove Center’s parking lot. He is clutching his jacket tightly around his neck with one hand, while in the other he holds a mug of steaming coffee and a lighted cigarette.
"What are you going to do? Let the elephants starve?”
It’s 1:00 a.m- on a Thursday morning, and Mike Gorman, the hyperkinetic twenty-four-hour man — or “advance logistics rep’’ — for Circus Vargas, crosses and recrosses the lot’s west end, stopping only long enough to grind out one more smoked-down-to-the-butt cigarette. Gorman has had little sleep since the night before, when he left Circus Vargas in Yuma, Arizona, and his sharp, narrow chin needs shaving. His eyes, swollen with weariness, keep turning toward the rise, two blocks away, where fog fuzzes the sign marking Highway 94’s Massachusetts and College Avenue exits.
The low-paid roustabouts are responsible for “putting it all up and taking it all down.”
Gorman is worried — his circus hasn’t arrived yet. Each circus performance ends with the Grand Parade, with the entire roster of circus acts making its farewell loop around the interior of the football-field-size tent. Caparisoned elephants ferry the high-kicking Vargettes. Sir William Baker’s blondmaned Liberty horses fancy-step, whitefaced clowns blow kisses, aerialists and jugglers and fire-eaters and magicians all wave good-by to the cheering audience.
Caparisoned elephants ferry the high-kicking Vargettes.
Then, dripping sweat, stripping off spangle-encrusted fancy dress as they go, performers head straight out of the tent into their vehicles, which are hooked up, all ready to go.
An Oxford graduate in sciences and economic history, Terry left his wife, children, his job in an English ad agency, home in the English countryside.
And that’s how it went last night in Yuma. By ten o’clock the performers were on the road to San Diego. After performers left, the Yuma circus ground was deconstructed: bleachers that seat 5000 were taken down, aerialists’ riggings unhooked, the 90,000 square feet of royal blue and bright red plasticized fabric rolled and packed into ten canvas-wrapped bags, the four center poles and hundreds of support poles and stakes let down and pulled out, the 24,478 feet of cable and rope wound back onto coils.
“You go by all these trailers and smell all the wonderful aromas of foods from various nations.”
If all went as usual, then from nine-thirty or ten Wednesday night until five or six Thursday morning, one by one, the caravan of trailers and midsize trucks, cars and pickups and campers, and last, the diesel flatbeds loaded with the seventeen tons of tent and tent appurtenances would leave Yuma bound for College Grove Center. It is a process that will be repeated two to three times each week, from now until December, for 600 performances in ninety-five cities across the nation.
"The tent will all be laid out, then raised, then the guys will go up top and sew it up. School kids will crowd in to watch."
The Asmonty Sisters, four jugglers from Holland, driving a small sedan and pulling a thirty-five-foot house trailer, rolled into the center just after midnight. Immediately they started walking their poodles and heating up a meaty ragout that had simmered all afternoon. In the past forty-five minutes, however, the only others to arrive have been Manuel Gonzales, who does the Rollabolla act, the Ithonos Italian acrobatic troupe, and the magician, Dale Longmire. Gorman, who notes that he is “always cognizant that the time the circus travels is also the time when all the drunks are out,” checks his watch beneath the glow of Super Bagels’ yellow logo. “They are coming in too slowly,” he groans.
“Hard, hard, hardcore circus fans, guys get out before dawn to see the tent go up.”
This deepening fog concerns Gorman. “But about thirty miles up there, that thirteen miles of six-percent downgrade,” Gorman shakes his head, “that’s got me really worried.”
Grisel Saez, Mike Gorman. Even on Super Bowl Sunday, which had Saez worried, the 5000-seat tent had been at eighty percent capacity.
Gorman, Circus Vargas’s advance logistics representative for five years, left Yuma Tuesday evening, heading for San Diego. “Every few miles, all along the route, I put up what we call confidence arrows, sheets of paper with black arrows printed on them,” says Gorman. “These arrows literally lead the circus from one town to the next. One arrow [pointing] down means slow down. One to the right means get ready to make a right turn, and so on. I jump out with my staple gun, pop up the arrows, then get back in and keep on going.”
“Your average citizen still perceives the performers as carnies living in the worst Peyton Place you can imagine. Life here is not like that at all.”
At nine Wednesday morning, Gorman started pacing out the center for the sixteen-year-old circus, one of the few remaining traveling tented circuses in the United States. Most circuses now perform in stadiums, coliseums, and sports arenas, not under tents outdoors. “Sixty to seventy percent of our grounds now are malls,” he says, adding, “the rest are fairgrounds.” By seven in the evening he had a plan on paper and chalk marks on the lot to show where each stake, truck, and house trailer goes.
Spotting the asphalt with his flashlight, Gorman leads the way around the empty parking lot. “I have a pretty sharp eye, right off, about the best way to lay it all out. My problem is. I’m 365 feet long and over 200 feet wide [tent dimensions], so it leaves my options very limited. Where you see that white cross etched, that’s where the center pole goes.” Patting the bark on a scrawny tree planted in a parking divider, Gorman says, “I had to get us up over these two trees. They will be in the tent,” he grins. “Landscaping.”
Farther east on the lot, Gorman walks through what will be the midway, the “Main Street” for the public. “From that pole on,” says Gorman, aiming his flashlight at one of the light poles and then beaming his light back down onto the chalk-marked asphalt, “we have elephants, camels, llamas, then the candy wagons, or concessions area, with petting zoo, pony ride — and this year,” Gorman shudders, “a snake show.” Pointing to the south edge of the lot rising above Highway 94, Gorman says, “I’ve put the cookhouse there. From the cookhouse west, the performers’ homes will form a double line with an avenue between. We are really going to have to jam and cram to get them all in.” Gorman describes himself as “one of those people who fell in love with the circus as a kid.” He placated his parents by acquiring a business administration and theater degree from UCLA, supporting himself working summers for Ringling Brothers. After graduation Gorman worked five years for Ringling as an assistant performance director, then came to Circus Vargas as ringmaster and performance director for another five years. In addition to his work with Vargas, Gorman is executive act producer for television’s Circus of the Stars, filmed at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
He has lost none of the ringmaster’s resonance, euphony, or dramatic sense. He stretches forth one khaki-jacketed arm and proclaims roundly across the unlit parking lot: “What you see now, this bare desolate parking lot, will soon be completely transformed into a glittering circus fairyland.”
At 2:00 a.m. the temperature is forty-five degrees, the fog is more dense, and thirty-five trailers are still missing. “I know I keep looking up the road,” he says apologetically as one of the Asmonty Sisters, blonde and long-legged, humming, clicks by on three-inch heels, her small dog on its leash pulling her ahead across the dark parking lot. “But I’m starting to get real concerned. These people are my friends, my family.”
Thirty minutes later, Gorman is a new man. “They are starting to smash in now,” he calls out exultantly as he races across the lot, arms waving.
“Slow, slow, slow,” he shrieks while the Ford diesel truck, scintillating with gold clearance lights, backs its trailer into position. “Very nice, very, very nice,” Gorman yells out toward the driver, who has neatly set his trailer in place.
“The flying act from South Africa, the Radlies, are here. Lucy and Lacy, the show accountants — sweet, sweet people, Hungarian, married forty years — they’re here, in that Airstream pulled by the GMC Suburban. Sir William Baker from England, who has the Liberty horses, he’s coming in. We’re filling up now, we are going to be smashed in.”
By three o’clock, the moon has slipped down the horizon. Poodles, miniature schnauzers, Pekingese, small terriers, and crosses among and between them, have hopped out of pickup cabs or motor homes. Tails wagging, they sniff one another, then run in circles. Bright light from trailer windows scatters on the ground.
An ebullient Gorman rhapsodizes about the growing village. “This is their home. They are regular households, and this is their evening.” Inhaling the bouquet of complex cooking smells that has begun to overtake odors of gasoline and hot metal, Gorman says, “You go by all these trailers and smell all the wonderful aromas of foods from various nations.”
By four o’clock, forty-four people have been scratched off Gorman’s list. “What happened is that the hills have slowed them down. Ten miles of straight-up hill. A real toughy,” he sighs, lighting another cigarette, exhaling generous smoke rings into the lightening sky.
“I should see the last truck in at seven this morning. That will be the tent truck. At eight our tentmaster will hire locals. I will go to bed and get four hours of real quick sleep and be up at noon when the inspectors come: health, fire, safety. I go around with them.
“While I’m asleep, the working guys will literally get out of their vehicles and onto the lot and go right to work. The tent will all be laid out, then raised, then the guys will go up top and sew it up. School kids will crowd in to watch. A veritable beehive of delivery trucks will come, bringing hay, popcorn, concessionaires’ supplies. By noon, the acts will be getting their props cleaned up and dusted off. It will be organized chaos!”
By four-thirty, almost everyone has gone to bed. Windows are black. Crickets chirp. Traffic going west on 94 picks up. Clouds cover the falling moon. The ticket sales trailer stands smack-dab on the spot Gorman marked for it. In less than four hours, ticket sales will begin.
Seven a.m., Thursday. In the last two and a half hours, more motor homes, camper trucks, semis loaded with elephants, bleachers, and a petting zoo have arrived. The circus residential area has covered the asphalt as prodigally as morning mushrooms. But Gorman, frantic and pale in the cold, already-bright morning light, is still minus two semis, one of which carries half of the elephants.
Men Gorman calls “hard, hard, hardcore circus fans, guys out before dawn to see the tent go up,” have already shaken hands with one another and begun to exchange stories about circuses they were taken to, as long ago as seventy years, by their parents.
“The circus? Why has it remained popular?”
“It’s the mystery,” observes one gray-haired fan. “A circus shows up in the night while everyone sleeps, gives a few performances, and then, a day later, the lot is as strangely empty as it was before.”
Tom Larson, the tentmaster — sinewy, tall, tanned, one neatly braided pigtail brushing his belt — has his crew laying the 136 support poles on the points chalked by Gorman. They go about the oval arrangement almost as if hypnotized. The two Clark 825 Bobcat forklifts are off the truck. The stakepounding machine stands on the asphalt, ready to start knocking in the 485 four-foot-long stakes, made from machined-down car axles, that secure poles to ropes and inner-tent paraphernalia. The fifty-six-foot center poles lie, ready to raise, across the lot.
Larson has not started hiring locals. Carrying new canvas gloves, several of the locals approach Larson, impatiently asking when he will hire. “Ten o’clock,” mild-mannered Larson tells them.
Nine o’clock, Thursday morning. Two local TV anchormen, hair blown smooth, trousers freshly creased, stride across the lot, stepping over cable and unrolled tent sections. Video camera bearers follow.
Raven-haired, extravagantly pretty Grisel Saez, Vargas advance promoter, favors tailored suits. This morning, her beige linen is brightened by a silk scarf. Saez introduces herself to teachers and parents shepherding kindergarten classes down the midway past dozing tigers and trumpeting elephants. Saez says that she is sorry for having had to substitute Pepsi for the milk promised in circus promotional handouts. “But the cookies are here,” she assures the youngsters in her mellifluous voice. The children, already cozened into treble giggles by Mickey “the Circus Ambassador,” an orange-haired clown garbed in ragtag diplomatic mufti and shod in oversize boots, largely ignore Saez.
Leaving the children to Mickey, Saez leads the way down the “residential” avenue. At the wide picture window of one trailer, a woman waters African violets. A fat white Pekin duck, penned at the back of the camper, pecks corn, oblivious to the llama trotting past. A window box of geraniums has been ^attached to a “mini Winnie,” a small Winnebago. Clothesline hung between two trailers has been draped with dripping polo shirts. Phil Donahue’s voice, sounding combative, and the new soul hit, “Do Me, Baby,” drift out of several doors, mixing with Larson’s shouted orders, the growl of engines, and the pinging of fifteen-pound sledgehammers driving in stakes.
Strolling through the ten-hour-old neighborhood, Saez observes, “Your average J.Q. Citizen still perceives a circus as a carnival and the performers as carnies living in the worst Peyton Place you can imagine. In actuality,” she says emphatically, “life here is not like that at all.”
A man in grimy clothes, identified by Saez as a roustabout, passes by. “Roustabouts get no glory and most of the grief,” she says, adding that not only are the low-paid roustabouts responsible for “putting it all up and taking it all down ” but that they are also the individuals who tend to be identified by townspeople as “carnies.... They are the ones,” she says, “everyone fears is going to come into their mall and booze it up. But they aren’t like that.”
A circus act stays several seasons, then moves on. Apologizing for not being able to introduce many of the performers, out now on the back lot — chatting, carrying sacks of groceries, bouncing on a mini-trampoline — Saez explains that this year’s acts are almost all new, that she has been in San Diego since late October, and that she has yet to see the first performance. “The programs are not even printed yet!” Children following Mickey, ogling circus animals, and slurping Pepsi are a result of the promoters’ school campaign. Saez and her husband, Tim Traynor, also a Vargas promoter, arrived in San Diego, moved into an Ocean Beach apartment, and immediately set to work on San Diego County’s four-site, twenty-nine-performance run. College Grove Center is to be the first stop Circus Vargas will make in the county. After College Grove, it will move on to Clairemont Square, then to the Del Mar Fairgrounds, and finally to Chula Vista. Saez contacted schools throughout the county. “We ask how many children each school has. Say that St. Mary’s School over on Executive Drive has 280 children,” explains Saez. “Then we will send St. Mary’s 280 coupons good for free admission for children to sit in the general admission section, which is $3.50.” The hope is that the children’s parents will accompany them, buying adult admissions. “We offer a clown for assemblies, let them know that on opening day they are welcome to come out to see the tent erected.”
Ordering the ton and a half of hay circus animals eat and trample each day, the sawdust, the tigers’ 1000 pounds of chicken necks, beef kidneys, and beef thighbones, hot dogs and popcorn for concessions is also part of Saez’s job. “People don’t realize it,” she says, pausing to ask a group of children to keep more distance from the tigers, “but when a circus comes to town, we have to order dumpsters, septic service for the portable toilets, find the local horseshoer, vet, nearest hospitals, names of the paramedics. If one of the fliers falls, for instance, paramedics have to be there in seconds to take them away.
“How often is it you have to buy ten tons of hay in one week? But we get here,” continues Saez, “and they [merchants] want to charge us high prices because they know we have to have it. But what are you going to do? Let the elephants starve?”
This is twenty-eight-year-old Saez’s third season with Vargas. She was working at a Los Angeles jazz station, feeling restless, and answered an ad. “It’s the easiest way to join the circus,” she laughs. “Look in the newspaper when the circus is in your town!”
Vargas promoters receive salary plus “gravy” based on ticket sales. How much gravy a promoter gets will depend on how aggressively he or she promotes the show as well as upon contingencies of local events, holidays, weather. Saez indicates today’s bright cloudless blue. She grins, “Right now you can’t ask for anything better” Saez has been at work since seven this morning and does not expect she will be back in her apartment until ten or eleven tonight. “Any promoter — Disney, Ringling — it takes a certain kind of person,” she says. “If you are going to miss your boyfriend, forget it. If you can’t take pressure, forget it.” Saez, married last year, met her husband at an annual meeting of the twenty-five to thirty Vargas promoters. “After that, he was working northern Indiana and I was working southern, we got together. Then, last year, I was working Pomona and he was in San Bernardino, we got together again.” Before her marriage, Saez moved from town to town, working one month here, three weeks there. But she never felt lonely. “When we got married I asked Tim if he ever got lonesome on the road, and he said, ‘You know, I never was. Were you?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘but there were times I just wanted to take a bottle of JB and go sit down.”
Thursday, seven in the evening. Circus Vargas’s lights beam I down from College Grove Center onto cars passing up and down 94. Forking lots around the tent are filling. Along the midway, a barker, trilling an alliterative verbal lure, inveigles strollers in to view “Alive! Deadly rattlers!” Balloons bobble. Children’s faces are entirely hidden behind cotton candy.
In the performers’ village, TV screens radiate from windows. An Asmonty Sister, in high heels, opera hose, and tutu, tosses her poodle back into the trailer. The tiger trainer, pectorals bulging on his bare oiled chest, kneels down on asphalt, checking the chute through which his tigers enter the tent. One of the eight Vargettes — who combine dancing and aerial acrobatics executes legato warm-up exercises, then standing straight, shaking out her sleek arms and legs, slips back into satin high heels, and with the tip of her little finger smoothes a strip of false eyelash across her emerald eyelid.
Saez, as fresh and crisp as at nine this morning, stands at the tent entry greeting various “honorables” to whom free tickets were given for opening night. Inside the darkened tent, the three rings are played with colored lights. Mike Gorman, wearing an impeccably tailored pinstriped navy blue suit dotted with a white boutonniere and looking thinner than on the night previous, paler than this morning, and — is it possible? — more exultant than at 3:00 a.m. when he welcomed arrivals, glances skyward to the aerialists’ rigging and says, “Enjoy the finished product.”
Eight o’clock, Friday morning. For roustabouts, last night was the first night’s sleep since Yuma. An effortful snore rasps out from the shadows of one of the roustabouts’ two dormitory trucks. Seated on a cardboard carton near the truck’s open door, a dark-haired young man leans over and pulls on rumpled socks that once were white. He yawns.
In all but two or three trailers, shades are pulled down. From within the trailers dogs bark as a young towheaded roustabout, hired the day before, walks, on unsteady stiffened legs, to the cookhouse, from which the odor of coffee wafts out and stains the air. He asks where he can wash up and is directed — humorlessly — to a hose behind the cookhouse trailer.
At the cookhouse, where roustabouts have a ten-dollar-a-day allowance, the chalkboard menu offers navy bean soup, eggs and bacon, hamburgers.
Outside the cookhouse, at the edge of the ridge above 94, are six folding chairs and a picnic table, the latter set with ketchup and mustard.
The dozen Bengal and Siberian tigers, each in his or her own barred cage, sleep, purring, on their backs. The huge paws spread out over the bars and knead against the iron.
The hem of his grubby T-shirt riding above his belly button, a heavy set man moves down the row of seven elephants, four Asians and three Africans, offering each of them water from the hose unfurling behind him. The elephant proffered the hose grabs it with his trunk, then turns the hose end into its mouth and drinks. Hardly a drop spills.
The ticket office has raised up two windows. A Vargette, face an unmade-up oval, sells tickets to a mother whose three children sneak out from under her forbidding glance and run to the pen beneath a red-and-blue striped canopy, where ducks, geese, red-combed black-and-white speckled hens, Nubian goats, a miniature Shetland, and lambs trample the dirty straw.
Circus society is strictly stratified. The head man, Vargas, always spoken of as “Mr. Vargas”; the executive staff, the ringmaster (comparable to an orchestra’s concertmaster), promoters, Gorman; performers; upper-echelon staff such as the wardrobe mistress and Tom Larson, the tentmaster; roustabouts; and lowest of all, the fifteen to twenty “temps,” or “townies,” hired at each stop — each of these has his or her place.
Unlike performers and staff, roustabouts have no contracts. “They could fire me today, or I could leave today. There are no firm strings,” says Terry, a roustabout with Vargas for the last two years. Deeply tanned, as are most roustabouts who have been with the circus since they winter-quartered through December in El Centro, Terry stands, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, near the performers’ entrance to the Big Top. Most roustabouts, he says, are “young guys, itinerants, wanderers. You don’t get many, anymore, of the typical kid, run-away-to-join-the-circus types. Oh, you get one or two. They want the glamour of associating with circus people. They will practice juggling with them in the Big Top, but they have no firm ambitions to be performers.”
In his fifties, an Oxford graduate in sciences and economic history, Terry left his wife, children, his job in an English ad agency, home in the English countryside, and came to the United States. “I came to America on business. I had not liked Americans in Europe. But I came here to California and adored it. And I liked you better on your ground. You were no longer such arrogant people, with your almighty dollars. My second marriage, at that time, was break or make, so I went back to England and said, ‘Let us move to new ground, new hope.’ But I did not want to bring the children. English education is pompous, but it is true. So we decided I would come to America. They would stay there.
“I was here one week, I had a job, a driver’s license, a social security number. I was a real person.” Terry read a newspaper ad that offered “adventure and travel.” He answered the ad, placed by Circus Vargas, and was hired.
“Today,” says Terry, “I intend to do very little. Wednesday in Yuma I started work at nine in the morning, took an hour break for lunch, went to a driver’s meeting at two, as soon as the meeting was finished went to work taking tickets. Finished that, with no breaks, with back-to-back performances. The last show ended at 9:30. We then started taking it down and packing it up. That took until 3:15 in the morning. Immediately, then, I got in the truck and started driving, with a lame dog — our maintenance vehicle — so I was shepherding him. Got in here seven hours later, at ten o’clock in the morning, Thursday, and started putting this up. So there was no break whatsoever until after last night’s show.”
Terry bathed under the hose this morning. “Expediency,” he grins, showing uneven teeth. “We have shower, toilets, freezer, stove, refrigerator, all the facilities. But we don’t always have time to hook them up. Yesterday we didn’t. So my shower constituted me standing here, under the hose, with a bar of soap.”
The generator will not come on until 11:30. “Another one and one-half hours,” says Terry, examining his watch. Which is why it is fortuitous to have propane and/or oil units, which some do.”
Terry shares, with four roustabouts, the back end of the truck trailer that carries, at the front, the circus sound studio. “The circus makes use of every space,” says Terry, “just as if it were a sailing ship.” He hypothesizes that his life is not all that different from that of an itinerant Englishman who carted his trained bear through market and cathedral towns during the Middle Ages. Pointing to the crowded truck in whose trailer he sleeps, he asks, “Is it any different?”
After the last performance Sunday night at College Grove, the circus packed up, tore down, and moved to Clairemont Square. The location, as Gorman had feared, was a tight fit. But he had paced it out, three days earlier, and got them in. By dawn Monday morning, before dew was even dry on the grass in the circus’s new neighborhood, the stake driver was biting into Clairemont Square’s parking lot. By eight, fifteen townies were hired to help lay out and erect the tent. Aromas of coffee and bacon rolled out of the cookhouse. Elephants were being watered, horses chomping sweet feed. Business as usual. Then, by ten o’clock, when mall stores began to open, all hell broke loose. One of the Clairemont Square merchants, apparently irate over animal odors, noise, dumpsters, and the loss of parking space, filed formal complaints against the circus with the health and fire departments.
But twenty-four hours later, on Tuesday morning, what had made Saez an hour late to the coffee shop in Clairemont Square, what had happened that had her voice vibrating with anger, was a telephone call. “It was a man we had done a promotion with. We had given him tickets for our opening here last night. He called demanding tickets for tonight. I said, ‘We gave you twelve tickets for opening night for your store managers.’ And he said, ‘Well, I want twelve more for tonight.’ Those tickets he got were worth $11.50 each! Times twelve, you’re talking a lot of money!
“Radio stations, TV stations, are notorious. You get this call, ‘I’m Mr. Anchorman. I have a wife, five kids, a grandma, and a grandpa. I need ten tickets.’ If we give the house away, we can’t do it.’’
The caller didn’t get his tickets. And the irate merchant? “Merchants get a letter from their mall director saying, ‘A circus is going to be here.’ At that point they have an opportunity to say yea or nay or I don’t care. But this merchant didn’t say anything until two days before the show was in. By then it’s a little late to find a new location!
“He said it was unsanitary out there. There was a dumpster he wanted moved. He said it smelled. He wanted the tiger chutes moved. He wanted the wardrobe truck moved. He said, point blank, ‘Circuses do not belong here.’ “The health department came and said, ‘There’s no problem. You’re sanitary.’ So now, there is no problem.’’ The storm of outrage passed almost through, Saez sips tea and explains, in a rapidly calming tone, circus policy on free tickets. “Opening night we give away whatever we have to, to fill the house. Because it helps us. Word of mouth. That’s how we make our money. But after opening night, we can’t give away tickets, because we lose money.’’
Actually, things were going pretty well, according to Saez. At College Grove, the figures were still coming in on Ticketron. But even on Super Bowl Sunday, which had Saez worried, the 5000-seat tent had been at eighty percent capacity.
It takes a little over $100,000 per week — after salaries, permits, gas, food, animal supplies, mall rentals, telephone, advertising, printing, truck breakdowns — to keep the show going. Insurance policies are for anywhere from one to ten million dollars, and the premiums are costly. The circus was insured for one million at Clairemont Square. They carried five million for the “Celebrity Elephant Race” at Baker Chevrolet, an event at which DJs and TV anchormen raced elephants.
The first day in a new town, a promoter goes to city hall to find out what permits and licenses are required. “When you are coming into town, everyone wants money! In Chula Vista we were really screwed. There were things they came up with at the council meeting that some council members did not even know existed, as far as fees and schedules are concerned,” says Saez.
Some cities require extra fire and police watch. Some want a tent permit. Everyone demands purchase of a business license, the cost of which, says Saez, “ranges from fifteen dollars for a little town in Indiana to $700 a day in some places in Los Angeles.” The City of San Diego charged $1000 for licenses to use the Clairemont and College Grove sites.
Because San Diego County “is a huge area, not like Kokomo, Indiana,” observes Saez, “it was necessary for two people to be here all the time.” While her husband Traynor got to work hunting down a North County site — the circus wanted to play Escondido, San Marcos, and Vista but could not find a large enough site, so they chose Del Mar — Saez contacted mall directors. She lifts an imaginary telephone receiver, “Hi, Donna. We’re back in town, let’s get together. What are you going to do for promotions? Let’s get your mall merchants involved, get posters up in their stores.
“Then,” continues Saez, setting down the “receiver,” “you do your media. There are twenty-five or thirty stations in this area. So, who do you buy? You can’t buy everybody. We usually buy a country station, two adult contemporary stations, a middle of the road station, and of course, a Spanish station. With TV, we find out who has kids’ programming, young mothers’ programming. We want those mothers, ” laughs Saez, her eyes sparkling.
Again lifting an imaginary receiver, Saez illustrates. “Hi, we are going to be in town, we are going to be spending some money with you. We’d like to know if you trade.”
Circus Vargas trades dollar for dollar, tickets for services, says Saez, adding, “Mr. Vargas has a policy. He thinks he has something good to offer. And he really does. People have to see that and be educated. So he says he wants to do a tradeoff, as well as spend X amount of money.”
Advance promoters encourage radio and TV stations to do promotions. Later that afternoon, K.KOS was sponsoring a “Lunch with the Elephant” in North County, during which, it was rumored, KKOS DJs would feed pasta to the elephants.
By last Thanksgiving, Saez had acquired the necessary licenses, visited mall directors, contacted the media, arranged promotions, and seen that the generic taped Circus Vargas commercials were recorded for local distribution. During the first two weeks in December, promotional agreements with Valueland. Safeway, 7-Eleven, and Bob Baker Chevrolet were tied up.
Right after New Year’s Day, Saez, Traynor, and a third person brought in to help with Del Mar began to order supplies. At the same time they kept tabs on mall directors and began to mail out coupons to schools.
Promoters never know where they will be sent next. Saez had no idea where she and her husband would go when the Del Mar run ended. Not knowing does not bother Saez. “You really don’t want to know. Let’s say, God forbid, the circus isn’t doing well here. If you knew you were going, say, to Pomona, you might think, ‘Well, who cares about San Diego, I’m gonna go to Pomona next week, and Pbmona will really do good.’ If you are doing good, you’ll keep doing good. Or, say you knew you were going someplace you didn’t like, you might be thinking, ‘What will I do there for two weeks?’ ”
Some towns are rewards. Owner Vargas gives those to whoever is doing a particularly good job. “Also,” suggests Saez, “he knows if a town has been unusually tough and may send you somewhere easier next. He has been a promoter and is still active in promotions. His family was in circus, and he’s been a ringmaster, laid out lots, put up the tent. He knows what the work is like.”
Asked to name a “plum” assignment, Saez hesitates before saying, “L.A. L.A. is wonderful. We will do 131 performances there, and not one will not do well. They love us there. They know we aren't a carnival.” San Diego? “It’s our fifteenth year here, and we are still not where we want to be.”
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What's it's like to work for Circus Vargus
Under the big top
What's it's like to work for Circus Vargus
Under the big top
Eight o’clock, Friday morning. For roustabouts, last night was the first night’s sleep since Yuma.
A lone man paces back and forth in front of a covey of lighted motor homes and house trailers assembled in College Grove Center’s parking lot. He is clutching his jacket tightly around his neck with one hand, while in the other he holds a mug of steaming coffee and a lighted cigarette.
"What are you going to do? Let the elephants starve?”
It’s 1:00 a.m- on a Thursday morning, and Mike Gorman, the hyperkinetic twenty-four-hour man — or “advance logistics rep’’ — for Circus Vargas, crosses and recrosses the lot’s west end, stopping only long enough to grind out one more smoked-down-to-the-butt cigarette. Gorman has had little sleep since the night before, when he left Circus Vargas in Yuma, Arizona, and his sharp, narrow chin needs shaving. His eyes, swollen with weariness, keep turning toward the rise, two blocks away, where fog fuzzes the sign marking Highway 94’s Massachusetts and College Avenue exits.
The low-paid roustabouts are responsible for “putting it all up and taking it all down.”
Gorman is worried — his circus hasn’t arrived yet. Each circus performance ends with the Grand Parade, with the entire roster of circus acts making its farewell loop around the interior of the football-field-size tent. Caparisoned elephants ferry the high-kicking Vargettes. Sir William Baker’s blondmaned Liberty horses fancy-step, whitefaced clowns blow kisses, aerialists and jugglers and fire-eaters and magicians all wave good-by to the cheering audience.
Caparisoned elephants ferry the high-kicking Vargettes.
Then, dripping sweat, stripping off spangle-encrusted fancy dress as they go, performers head straight out of the tent into their vehicles, which are hooked up, all ready to go.
An Oxford graduate in sciences and economic history, Terry left his wife, children, his job in an English ad agency, home in the English countryside.
And that’s how it went last night in Yuma. By ten o’clock the performers were on the road to San Diego. After performers left, the Yuma circus ground was deconstructed: bleachers that seat 5000 were taken down, aerialists’ riggings unhooked, the 90,000 square feet of royal blue and bright red plasticized fabric rolled and packed into ten canvas-wrapped bags, the four center poles and hundreds of support poles and stakes let down and pulled out, the 24,478 feet of cable and rope wound back onto coils.
“You go by all these trailers and smell all the wonderful aromas of foods from various nations.”
If all went as usual, then from nine-thirty or ten Wednesday night until five or six Thursday morning, one by one, the caravan of trailers and midsize trucks, cars and pickups and campers, and last, the diesel flatbeds loaded with the seventeen tons of tent and tent appurtenances would leave Yuma bound for College Grove Center. It is a process that will be repeated two to three times each week, from now until December, for 600 performances in ninety-five cities across the nation.
"The tent will all be laid out, then raised, then the guys will go up top and sew it up. School kids will crowd in to watch."
The Asmonty Sisters, four jugglers from Holland, driving a small sedan and pulling a thirty-five-foot house trailer, rolled into the center just after midnight. Immediately they started walking their poodles and heating up a meaty ragout that had simmered all afternoon. In the past forty-five minutes, however, the only others to arrive have been Manuel Gonzales, who does the Rollabolla act, the Ithonos Italian acrobatic troupe, and the magician, Dale Longmire. Gorman, who notes that he is “always cognizant that the time the circus travels is also the time when all the drunks are out,” checks his watch beneath the glow of Super Bagels’ yellow logo. “They are coming in too slowly,” he groans.
“Hard, hard, hardcore circus fans, guys get out before dawn to see the tent go up.”
This deepening fog concerns Gorman. “But about thirty miles up there, that thirteen miles of six-percent downgrade,” Gorman shakes his head, “that’s got me really worried.”
Grisel Saez, Mike Gorman. Even on Super Bowl Sunday, which had Saez worried, the 5000-seat tent had been at eighty percent capacity.
Gorman, Circus Vargas’s advance logistics representative for five years, left Yuma Tuesday evening, heading for San Diego. “Every few miles, all along the route, I put up what we call confidence arrows, sheets of paper with black arrows printed on them,” says Gorman. “These arrows literally lead the circus from one town to the next. One arrow [pointing] down means slow down. One to the right means get ready to make a right turn, and so on. I jump out with my staple gun, pop up the arrows, then get back in and keep on going.”
“Your average citizen still perceives the performers as carnies living in the worst Peyton Place you can imagine. Life here is not like that at all.”
At nine Wednesday morning, Gorman started pacing out the center for the sixteen-year-old circus, one of the few remaining traveling tented circuses in the United States. Most circuses now perform in stadiums, coliseums, and sports arenas, not under tents outdoors. “Sixty to seventy percent of our grounds now are malls,” he says, adding, “the rest are fairgrounds.” By seven in the evening he had a plan on paper and chalk marks on the lot to show where each stake, truck, and house trailer goes.
Spotting the asphalt with his flashlight, Gorman leads the way around the empty parking lot. “I have a pretty sharp eye, right off, about the best way to lay it all out. My problem is. I’m 365 feet long and over 200 feet wide [tent dimensions], so it leaves my options very limited. Where you see that white cross etched, that’s where the center pole goes.” Patting the bark on a scrawny tree planted in a parking divider, Gorman says, “I had to get us up over these two trees. They will be in the tent,” he grins. “Landscaping.”
Farther east on the lot, Gorman walks through what will be the midway, the “Main Street” for the public. “From that pole on,” says Gorman, aiming his flashlight at one of the light poles and then beaming his light back down onto the chalk-marked asphalt, “we have elephants, camels, llamas, then the candy wagons, or concessions area, with petting zoo, pony ride — and this year,” Gorman shudders, “a snake show.” Pointing to the south edge of the lot rising above Highway 94, Gorman says, “I’ve put the cookhouse there. From the cookhouse west, the performers’ homes will form a double line with an avenue between. We are really going to have to jam and cram to get them all in.” Gorman describes himself as “one of those people who fell in love with the circus as a kid.” He placated his parents by acquiring a business administration and theater degree from UCLA, supporting himself working summers for Ringling Brothers. After graduation Gorman worked five years for Ringling as an assistant performance director, then came to Circus Vargas as ringmaster and performance director for another five years. In addition to his work with Vargas, Gorman is executive act producer for television’s Circus of the Stars, filmed at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
He has lost none of the ringmaster’s resonance, euphony, or dramatic sense. He stretches forth one khaki-jacketed arm and proclaims roundly across the unlit parking lot: “What you see now, this bare desolate parking lot, will soon be completely transformed into a glittering circus fairyland.”
At 2:00 a.m. the temperature is forty-five degrees, the fog is more dense, and thirty-five trailers are still missing. “I know I keep looking up the road,” he says apologetically as one of the Asmonty Sisters, blonde and long-legged, humming, clicks by on three-inch heels, her small dog on its leash pulling her ahead across the dark parking lot. “But I’m starting to get real concerned. These people are my friends, my family.”
Thirty minutes later, Gorman is a new man. “They are starting to smash in now,” he calls out exultantly as he races across the lot, arms waving.
“Slow, slow, slow,” he shrieks while the Ford diesel truck, scintillating with gold clearance lights, backs its trailer into position. “Very nice, very, very nice,” Gorman yells out toward the driver, who has neatly set his trailer in place.
“The flying act from South Africa, the Radlies, are here. Lucy and Lacy, the show accountants — sweet, sweet people, Hungarian, married forty years — they’re here, in that Airstream pulled by the GMC Suburban. Sir William Baker from England, who has the Liberty horses, he’s coming in. We’re filling up now, we are going to be smashed in.”
By three o’clock, the moon has slipped down the horizon. Poodles, miniature schnauzers, Pekingese, small terriers, and crosses among and between them, have hopped out of pickup cabs or motor homes. Tails wagging, they sniff one another, then run in circles. Bright light from trailer windows scatters on the ground.
An ebullient Gorman rhapsodizes about the growing village. “This is their home. They are regular households, and this is their evening.” Inhaling the bouquet of complex cooking smells that has begun to overtake odors of gasoline and hot metal, Gorman says, “You go by all these trailers and smell all the wonderful aromas of foods from various nations.”
By four o’clock, forty-four people have been scratched off Gorman’s list. “What happened is that the hills have slowed them down. Ten miles of straight-up hill. A real toughy,” he sighs, lighting another cigarette, exhaling generous smoke rings into the lightening sky.
“I should see the last truck in at seven this morning. That will be the tent truck. At eight our tentmaster will hire locals. I will go to bed and get four hours of real quick sleep and be up at noon when the inspectors come: health, fire, safety. I go around with them.
“While I’m asleep, the working guys will literally get out of their vehicles and onto the lot and go right to work. The tent will all be laid out, then raised, then the guys will go up top and sew it up. School kids will crowd in to watch. A veritable beehive of delivery trucks will come, bringing hay, popcorn, concessionaires’ supplies. By noon, the acts will be getting their props cleaned up and dusted off. It will be organized chaos!”
By four-thirty, almost everyone has gone to bed. Windows are black. Crickets chirp. Traffic going west on 94 picks up. Clouds cover the falling moon. The ticket sales trailer stands smack-dab on the spot Gorman marked for it. In less than four hours, ticket sales will begin.
Seven a.m., Thursday. In the last two and a half hours, more motor homes, camper trucks, semis loaded with elephants, bleachers, and a petting zoo have arrived. The circus residential area has covered the asphalt as prodigally as morning mushrooms. But Gorman, frantic and pale in the cold, already-bright morning light, is still minus two semis, one of which carries half of the elephants.
Men Gorman calls “hard, hard, hardcore circus fans, guys out before dawn to see the tent go up,” have already shaken hands with one another and begun to exchange stories about circuses they were taken to, as long ago as seventy years, by their parents.
“The circus? Why has it remained popular?”
“It’s the mystery,” observes one gray-haired fan. “A circus shows up in the night while everyone sleeps, gives a few performances, and then, a day later, the lot is as strangely empty as it was before.”
Tom Larson, the tentmaster — sinewy, tall, tanned, one neatly braided pigtail brushing his belt — has his crew laying the 136 support poles on the points chalked by Gorman. They go about the oval arrangement almost as if hypnotized. The two Clark 825 Bobcat forklifts are off the truck. The stakepounding machine stands on the asphalt, ready to start knocking in the 485 four-foot-long stakes, made from machined-down car axles, that secure poles to ropes and inner-tent paraphernalia. The fifty-six-foot center poles lie, ready to raise, across the lot.
Larson has not started hiring locals. Carrying new canvas gloves, several of the locals approach Larson, impatiently asking when he will hire. “Ten o’clock,” mild-mannered Larson tells them.
Nine o’clock, Thursday morning. Two local TV anchormen, hair blown smooth, trousers freshly creased, stride across the lot, stepping over cable and unrolled tent sections. Video camera bearers follow.
Raven-haired, extravagantly pretty Grisel Saez, Vargas advance promoter, favors tailored suits. This morning, her beige linen is brightened by a silk scarf. Saez introduces herself to teachers and parents shepherding kindergarten classes down the midway past dozing tigers and trumpeting elephants. Saez says that she is sorry for having had to substitute Pepsi for the milk promised in circus promotional handouts. “But the cookies are here,” she assures the youngsters in her mellifluous voice. The children, already cozened into treble giggles by Mickey “the Circus Ambassador,” an orange-haired clown garbed in ragtag diplomatic mufti and shod in oversize boots, largely ignore Saez.
Leaving the children to Mickey, Saez leads the way down the “residential” avenue. At the wide picture window of one trailer, a woman waters African violets. A fat white Pekin duck, penned at the back of the camper, pecks corn, oblivious to the llama trotting past. A window box of geraniums has been ^attached to a “mini Winnie,” a small Winnebago. Clothesline hung between two trailers has been draped with dripping polo shirts. Phil Donahue’s voice, sounding combative, and the new soul hit, “Do Me, Baby,” drift out of several doors, mixing with Larson’s shouted orders, the growl of engines, and the pinging of fifteen-pound sledgehammers driving in stakes.
Strolling through the ten-hour-old neighborhood, Saez observes, “Your average J.Q. Citizen still perceives a circus as a carnival and the performers as carnies living in the worst Peyton Place you can imagine. In actuality,” she says emphatically, “life here is not like that at all.”
A man in grimy clothes, identified by Saez as a roustabout, passes by. “Roustabouts get no glory and most of the grief,” she says, adding that not only are the low-paid roustabouts responsible for “putting it all up and taking it all down ” but that they are also the individuals who tend to be identified by townspeople as “carnies.... They are the ones,” she says, “everyone fears is going to come into their mall and booze it up. But they aren’t like that.”
A circus act stays several seasons, then moves on. Apologizing for not being able to introduce many of the performers, out now on the back lot — chatting, carrying sacks of groceries, bouncing on a mini-trampoline — Saez explains that this year’s acts are almost all new, that she has been in San Diego since late October, and that she has yet to see the first performance. “The programs are not even printed yet!” Children following Mickey, ogling circus animals, and slurping Pepsi are a result of the promoters’ school campaign. Saez and her husband, Tim Traynor, also a Vargas promoter, arrived in San Diego, moved into an Ocean Beach apartment, and immediately set to work on San Diego County’s four-site, twenty-nine-performance run. College Grove Center is to be the first stop Circus Vargas will make in the county. After College Grove, it will move on to Clairemont Square, then to the Del Mar Fairgrounds, and finally to Chula Vista. Saez contacted schools throughout the county. “We ask how many children each school has. Say that St. Mary’s School over on Executive Drive has 280 children,” explains Saez. “Then we will send St. Mary’s 280 coupons good for free admission for children to sit in the general admission section, which is $3.50.” The hope is that the children’s parents will accompany them, buying adult admissions. “We offer a clown for assemblies, let them know that on opening day they are welcome to come out to see the tent erected.”
Ordering the ton and a half of hay circus animals eat and trample each day, the sawdust, the tigers’ 1000 pounds of chicken necks, beef kidneys, and beef thighbones, hot dogs and popcorn for concessions is also part of Saez’s job. “People don’t realize it,” she says, pausing to ask a group of children to keep more distance from the tigers, “but when a circus comes to town, we have to order dumpsters, septic service for the portable toilets, find the local horseshoer, vet, nearest hospitals, names of the paramedics. If one of the fliers falls, for instance, paramedics have to be there in seconds to take them away.
“How often is it you have to buy ten tons of hay in one week? But we get here,” continues Saez, “and they [merchants] want to charge us high prices because they know we have to have it. But what are you going to do? Let the elephants starve?”
This is twenty-eight-year-old Saez’s third season with Vargas. She was working at a Los Angeles jazz station, feeling restless, and answered an ad. “It’s the easiest way to join the circus,” she laughs. “Look in the newspaper when the circus is in your town!”
Vargas promoters receive salary plus “gravy” based on ticket sales. How much gravy a promoter gets will depend on how aggressively he or she promotes the show as well as upon contingencies of local events, holidays, weather. Saez indicates today’s bright cloudless blue. She grins, “Right now you can’t ask for anything better” Saez has been at work since seven this morning and does not expect she will be back in her apartment until ten or eleven tonight. “Any promoter — Disney, Ringling — it takes a certain kind of person,” she says. “If you are going to miss your boyfriend, forget it. If you can’t take pressure, forget it.” Saez, married last year, met her husband at an annual meeting of the twenty-five to thirty Vargas promoters. “After that, he was working northern Indiana and I was working southern, we got together. Then, last year, I was working Pomona and he was in San Bernardino, we got together again.” Before her marriage, Saez moved from town to town, working one month here, three weeks there. But she never felt lonely. “When we got married I asked Tim if he ever got lonesome on the road, and he said, ‘You know, I never was. Were you?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘but there were times I just wanted to take a bottle of JB and go sit down.”
Thursday, seven in the evening. Circus Vargas’s lights beam I down from College Grove Center onto cars passing up and down 94. Forking lots around the tent are filling. Along the midway, a barker, trilling an alliterative verbal lure, inveigles strollers in to view “Alive! Deadly rattlers!” Balloons bobble. Children’s faces are entirely hidden behind cotton candy.
In the performers’ village, TV screens radiate from windows. An Asmonty Sister, in high heels, opera hose, and tutu, tosses her poodle back into the trailer. The tiger trainer, pectorals bulging on his bare oiled chest, kneels down on asphalt, checking the chute through which his tigers enter the tent. One of the eight Vargettes — who combine dancing and aerial acrobatics executes legato warm-up exercises, then standing straight, shaking out her sleek arms and legs, slips back into satin high heels, and with the tip of her little finger smoothes a strip of false eyelash across her emerald eyelid.
Saez, as fresh and crisp as at nine this morning, stands at the tent entry greeting various “honorables” to whom free tickets were given for opening night. Inside the darkened tent, the three rings are played with colored lights. Mike Gorman, wearing an impeccably tailored pinstriped navy blue suit dotted with a white boutonniere and looking thinner than on the night previous, paler than this morning, and — is it possible? — more exultant than at 3:00 a.m. when he welcomed arrivals, glances skyward to the aerialists’ rigging and says, “Enjoy the finished product.”
Eight o’clock, Friday morning. For roustabouts, last night was the first night’s sleep since Yuma. An effortful snore rasps out from the shadows of one of the roustabouts’ two dormitory trucks. Seated on a cardboard carton near the truck’s open door, a dark-haired young man leans over and pulls on rumpled socks that once were white. He yawns.
In all but two or three trailers, shades are pulled down. From within the trailers dogs bark as a young towheaded roustabout, hired the day before, walks, on unsteady stiffened legs, to the cookhouse, from which the odor of coffee wafts out and stains the air. He asks where he can wash up and is directed — humorlessly — to a hose behind the cookhouse trailer.
At the cookhouse, where roustabouts have a ten-dollar-a-day allowance, the chalkboard menu offers navy bean soup, eggs and bacon, hamburgers.
Outside the cookhouse, at the edge of the ridge above 94, are six folding chairs and a picnic table, the latter set with ketchup and mustard.
The dozen Bengal and Siberian tigers, each in his or her own barred cage, sleep, purring, on their backs. The huge paws spread out over the bars and knead against the iron.
The hem of his grubby T-shirt riding above his belly button, a heavy set man moves down the row of seven elephants, four Asians and three Africans, offering each of them water from the hose unfurling behind him. The elephant proffered the hose grabs it with his trunk, then turns the hose end into its mouth and drinks. Hardly a drop spills.
The ticket office has raised up two windows. A Vargette, face an unmade-up oval, sells tickets to a mother whose three children sneak out from under her forbidding glance and run to the pen beneath a red-and-blue striped canopy, where ducks, geese, red-combed black-and-white speckled hens, Nubian goats, a miniature Shetland, and lambs trample the dirty straw.
Circus society is strictly stratified. The head man, Vargas, always spoken of as “Mr. Vargas”; the executive staff, the ringmaster (comparable to an orchestra’s concertmaster), promoters, Gorman; performers; upper-echelon staff such as the wardrobe mistress and Tom Larson, the tentmaster; roustabouts; and lowest of all, the fifteen to twenty “temps,” or “townies,” hired at each stop — each of these has his or her place.
Unlike performers and staff, roustabouts have no contracts. “They could fire me today, or I could leave today. There are no firm strings,” says Terry, a roustabout with Vargas for the last two years. Deeply tanned, as are most roustabouts who have been with the circus since they winter-quartered through December in El Centro, Terry stands, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, near the performers’ entrance to the Big Top. Most roustabouts, he says, are “young guys, itinerants, wanderers. You don’t get many, anymore, of the typical kid, run-away-to-join-the-circus types. Oh, you get one or two. They want the glamour of associating with circus people. They will practice juggling with them in the Big Top, but they have no firm ambitions to be performers.”
In his fifties, an Oxford graduate in sciences and economic history, Terry left his wife, children, his job in an English ad agency, home in the English countryside, and came to the United States. “I came to America on business. I had not liked Americans in Europe. But I came here to California and adored it. And I liked you better on your ground. You were no longer such arrogant people, with your almighty dollars. My second marriage, at that time, was break or make, so I went back to England and said, ‘Let us move to new ground, new hope.’ But I did not want to bring the children. English education is pompous, but it is true. So we decided I would come to America. They would stay there.
“I was here one week, I had a job, a driver’s license, a social security number. I was a real person.” Terry read a newspaper ad that offered “adventure and travel.” He answered the ad, placed by Circus Vargas, and was hired.
“Today,” says Terry, “I intend to do very little. Wednesday in Yuma I started work at nine in the morning, took an hour break for lunch, went to a driver’s meeting at two, as soon as the meeting was finished went to work taking tickets. Finished that, with no breaks, with back-to-back performances. The last show ended at 9:30. We then started taking it down and packing it up. That took until 3:15 in the morning. Immediately, then, I got in the truck and started driving, with a lame dog — our maintenance vehicle — so I was shepherding him. Got in here seven hours later, at ten o’clock in the morning, Thursday, and started putting this up. So there was no break whatsoever until after last night’s show.”
Terry bathed under the hose this morning. “Expediency,” he grins, showing uneven teeth. “We have shower, toilets, freezer, stove, refrigerator, all the facilities. But we don’t always have time to hook them up. Yesterday we didn’t. So my shower constituted me standing here, under the hose, with a bar of soap.”
The generator will not come on until 11:30. “Another one and one-half hours,” says Terry, examining his watch. Which is why it is fortuitous to have propane and/or oil units, which some do.”
Terry shares, with four roustabouts, the back end of the truck trailer that carries, at the front, the circus sound studio. “The circus makes use of every space,” says Terry, “just as if it were a sailing ship.” He hypothesizes that his life is not all that different from that of an itinerant Englishman who carted his trained bear through market and cathedral towns during the Middle Ages. Pointing to the crowded truck in whose trailer he sleeps, he asks, “Is it any different?”
After the last performance Sunday night at College Grove, the circus packed up, tore down, and moved to Clairemont Square. The location, as Gorman had feared, was a tight fit. But he had paced it out, three days earlier, and got them in. By dawn Monday morning, before dew was even dry on the grass in the circus’s new neighborhood, the stake driver was biting into Clairemont Square’s parking lot. By eight, fifteen townies were hired to help lay out and erect the tent. Aromas of coffee and bacon rolled out of the cookhouse. Elephants were being watered, horses chomping sweet feed. Business as usual. Then, by ten o’clock, when mall stores began to open, all hell broke loose. One of the Clairemont Square merchants, apparently irate over animal odors, noise, dumpsters, and the loss of parking space, filed formal complaints against the circus with the health and fire departments.
But twenty-four hours later, on Tuesday morning, what had made Saez an hour late to the coffee shop in Clairemont Square, what had happened that had her voice vibrating with anger, was a telephone call. “It was a man we had done a promotion with. We had given him tickets for our opening here last night. He called demanding tickets for tonight. I said, ‘We gave you twelve tickets for opening night for your store managers.’ And he said, ‘Well, I want twelve more for tonight.’ Those tickets he got were worth $11.50 each! Times twelve, you’re talking a lot of money!
“Radio stations, TV stations, are notorious. You get this call, ‘I’m Mr. Anchorman. I have a wife, five kids, a grandma, and a grandpa. I need ten tickets.’ If we give the house away, we can’t do it.’’
The caller didn’t get his tickets. And the irate merchant? “Merchants get a letter from their mall director saying, ‘A circus is going to be here.’ At that point they have an opportunity to say yea or nay or I don’t care. But this merchant didn’t say anything until two days before the show was in. By then it’s a little late to find a new location!
“He said it was unsanitary out there. There was a dumpster he wanted moved. He said it smelled. He wanted the tiger chutes moved. He wanted the wardrobe truck moved. He said, point blank, ‘Circuses do not belong here.’ “The health department came and said, ‘There’s no problem. You’re sanitary.’ So now, there is no problem.’’ The storm of outrage passed almost through, Saez sips tea and explains, in a rapidly calming tone, circus policy on free tickets. “Opening night we give away whatever we have to, to fill the house. Because it helps us. Word of mouth. That’s how we make our money. But after opening night, we can’t give away tickets, because we lose money.’’
Actually, things were going pretty well, according to Saez. At College Grove, the figures were still coming in on Ticketron. But even on Super Bowl Sunday, which had Saez worried, the 5000-seat tent had been at eighty percent capacity.
It takes a little over $100,000 per week — after salaries, permits, gas, food, animal supplies, mall rentals, telephone, advertising, printing, truck breakdowns — to keep the show going. Insurance policies are for anywhere from one to ten million dollars, and the premiums are costly. The circus was insured for one million at Clairemont Square. They carried five million for the “Celebrity Elephant Race” at Baker Chevrolet, an event at which DJs and TV anchormen raced elephants.
The first day in a new town, a promoter goes to city hall to find out what permits and licenses are required. “When you are coming into town, everyone wants money! In Chula Vista we were really screwed. There were things they came up with at the council meeting that some council members did not even know existed, as far as fees and schedules are concerned,” says Saez.
Some cities require extra fire and police watch. Some want a tent permit. Everyone demands purchase of a business license, the cost of which, says Saez, “ranges from fifteen dollars for a little town in Indiana to $700 a day in some places in Los Angeles.” The City of San Diego charged $1000 for licenses to use the Clairemont and College Grove sites.
Because San Diego County “is a huge area, not like Kokomo, Indiana,” observes Saez, “it was necessary for two people to be here all the time.” While her husband Traynor got to work hunting down a North County site — the circus wanted to play Escondido, San Marcos, and Vista but could not find a large enough site, so they chose Del Mar — Saez contacted mall directors. She lifts an imaginary telephone receiver, “Hi, Donna. We’re back in town, let’s get together. What are you going to do for promotions? Let’s get your mall merchants involved, get posters up in their stores.
“Then,” continues Saez, setting down the “receiver,” “you do your media. There are twenty-five or thirty stations in this area. So, who do you buy? You can’t buy everybody. We usually buy a country station, two adult contemporary stations, a middle of the road station, and of course, a Spanish station. With TV, we find out who has kids’ programming, young mothers’ programming. We want those mothers, ” laughs Saez, her eyes sparkling.
Again lifting an imaginary receiver, Saez illustrates. “Hi, we are going to be in town, we are going to be spending some money with you. We’d like to know if you trade.”
Circus Vargas trades dollar for dollar, tickets for services, says Saez, adding, “Mr. Vargas has a policy. He thinks he has something good to offer. And he really does. People have to see that and be educated. So he says he wants to do a tradeoff, as well as spend X amount of money.”
Advance promoters encourage radio and TV stations to do promotions. Later that afternoon, K.KOS was sponsoring a “Lunch with the Elephant” in North County, during which, it was rumored, KKOS DJs would feed pasta to the elephants.
By last Thanksgiving, Saez had acquired the necessary licenses, visited mall directors, contacted the media, arranged promotions, and seen that the generic taped Circus Vargas commercials were recorded for local distribution. During the first two weeks in December, promotional agreements with Valueland. Safeway, 7-Eleven, and Bob Baker Chevrolet were tied up.
Right after New Year’s Day, Saez, Traynor, and a third person brought in to help with Del Mar began to order supplies. At the same time they kept tabs on mall directors and began to mail out coupons to schools.
Promoters never know where they will be sent next. Saez had no idea where she and her husband would go when the Del Mar run ended. Not knowing does not bother Saez. “You really don’t want to know. Let’s say, God forbid, the circus isn’t doing well here. If you knew you were going, say, to Pomona, you might think, ‘Well, who cares about San Diego, I’m gonna go to Pomona next week, and Pbmona will really do good.’ If you are doing good, you’ll keep doing good. Or, say you knew you were going someplace you didn’t like, you might be thinking, ‘What will I do there for two weeks?’ ”
Some towns are rewards. Owner Vargas gives those to whoever is doing a particularly good job. “Also,” suggests Saez, “he knows if a town has been unusually tough and may send you somewhere easier next. He has been a promoter and is still active in promotions. His family was in circus, and he’s been a ringmaster, laid out lots, put up the tent. He knows what the work is like.”
Asked to name a “plum” assignment, Saez hesitates before saying, “L.A. L.A. is wonderful. We will do 131 performances there, and not one will not do well. They love us there. They know we aren't a carnival.” San Diego? “It’s our fifteenth year here, and we are still not where we want to be.”
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