A brilliant, eclectic showman, circus king John Ringling North achieved international fame as a talent scout, booking the likes of Gargantua the Great and Unus, the man who stood on his forefinger. He once engaged George Balanchine to choreograph a ballet for elephants, with Igor Stravinsky composing the music.
Big Top Boss explores the remarkable career of North, who ran Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for thirty years. Using as a backdrop North's flamboyant lifestyle and the lavish spectacles he brought to the big top, David Lewis Hammarstrom details in lively and dramatic fashion how North guided the circus through adversities ranging from depressions and wars to crippling labor strikes and rapidly changing trends in American entertainment. This first balanced picture of North's controversial life reveals how his popular image as an impresario was shattered in the wake of his bitterly opposed 1956 decision to strike the tents for good and move the circus indoors. It also shows that North's circus was not artistically run down and losing money when he sold it in 1967 but in fact had been reestablished as a profitable enterprise that earned first-rate critical notices and was attracting larger crowds each year.
Hammarstrom has interviewed a host of key circus figures including North himself; his brother, Henry; his famous general manager, Arthur M. Concello; and many performers, directors, and department heads who were involved with the circus when North owned and operated it. Big Top Boss also sheds new light on North's personal life, giving proper significance to his long-term relationship with Countess Ida von Zedlitz-Trutzschler, the onetime ballerina with whom he lived for nearly thirty years.
Excoriated by the press in 1956 for closing the Big Top--that is, circus acts in tents--North (1903-1985) has never received proper credit for his many contributions to the greatest show on earth. So argues Hammarstrom, author of Behind the Big Top and Those Ringlings , who here makes a strong case in favor of the man who moved the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus into the 20th century by commissioning work from the likes of Stravinsky and Balanchine, then hiring Norman Bel Geddes and John Murray Anderson, the reigning stage-design talents of their time. Besides adding ballet and Ziegfeld-style extravaganzas, North signed the best conventional acts, such as ``Bring 'em Back Alive'' Frank Buck and the Wallenda family of high-wire performers; he also hyped the disfigured gorilla Gargantua into a super-attraction. Beginning as a candy butcher in 1915, he worked for the family business until 1967, when he sold it after conquering litigious relatives and the challenge of TV, but not the unions and the collapse of the railroads. A very thorough biography. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
