A Place to Be a Clown, Be a Clown, Be a Clown

There’s a patch of elderly San Diego that seems to be waiting for 1943 to arrive.

Kettner at Fir. It’s downtown and east of the railroad tracks, a cluster of California deco warehouses with enamel bowl lights over their signs. Also a street of venerable clapboard, gingerbread two-story homes wearing widow’s walks because sea captains built them.

Then there’s the little house that contains a culture.

Clowns live there, real clowns, full-time jesters, a tiny family of journeyman jugglers, magicians, tumblers, mimics and mimers. Flutterby, Jingles and Polka Dottie. Tinkerbell the cocker spaniel. Two rabbits and a white dove. There’s room for anyone with wet feet.

Haven for Sadness

And so goes and grows Flutterby’s Funhouse, a place of love and a haven from sadness because these clowns share the first and finest tradition of their medieval craft--a perfect devotion to the dreams and laughter of children.

“Sometimes I’ll lick the tear right off a child’s face and tell them it tastes like peppermint. Or get down with them and be sad with them and be funny about it and let them know that even in sadness you can find fun. ‘Hey there, this isn’t a broken balloon. Look, pull it out and it’s a worm. . . .’ ”

That’s Flutterby. She’s Pamela Whilner, 25, and she’s from Toledo, Ohio. Pamela clowns, in part, because she has known hurt and loneliness as an unsettled child who ran away to live at the YWCA at the age of 15. If clowning were everywhere, she says, no other child would ever feel such emptiness.

“As soon as I got here it was different than anything before. I don’t really know how to describe it. Try? It’s like trying to describe a warm bath. . . .”

That’s Jingles. He’s Don Shoults, 37, of Rochester, N.Y., and he’s been a sailor, softball umpire, nuclear power inspector, bus driver, quality assurance supervisor and cop. He clowns as an antidote. It allows him the freedom and spontaneity, he believes, that he once sacrificed to an adult life of suburban regimen and social conformity.

“What I like best about clowning is that I make new friends who don’t really get into it with big clowns but come into a corner with me. Of course, when I’m in the corner with them I’m still the clown and they’re still the kids. . . .”

That’s Polka Dottie. She’s Leslie Shoults, 9, who has been on a cross-country Paper Moon odyssey with Dad since her parents’ marriage broke up three years ago. Worries? Not when there’s Tinkerbell to hug and Pam to teach you all about clown makeup and a dad who makes 12-foot teddy bears and can find quarters in your nose.

For Don Shoults and his daughter, becoming clowns was simply an opportunity realized. Shoults was in San Diego working for a ship repair company, a bachelor father restless for some new permanence. Along came a friend’s party and a meeting with Pam and a joining of lives that will be confirmed by marriage this year.

For Flutterby’s Funhouse at 1907 Kettner, a $700-a-month rental, all blue and yellow, sprouting balloons and with a monster teddy bear on the veranda, the new occupancy represents a definite upgrading of status. Built in 1912 as home for a tuna boat skipper, this house was once the dispatch office for an outcall modeling agency.

For Whilner, well . . . she regards this fun for hire, her calls to children’s hospitals, the telethons and the parties she plays, as a calling that likely has been her shadow since childhood. Flutterby from Whilner, she says, certainly was cast by very serious studies in child development and psychology combined with her major as an actress, singer, musician and dancer. Then there were her fantasies, bubbling imagination, natural sense of improvisation . . . and the single quality that drove Emmett Kelly, Otto Griebling, Popoff and Lou Jacobs to circus greatness--the talent to remain a child in the mind so as to always reach a child.

“In Toledo, when I was about 7, we used to sing for our supper,” Whilner said. “Literally.” The interview is in the front office of Flutterby’s Funhouse that used to be a fisherman’s front parlor. Shoults is climbing into black rubber boots for an afternoon appearance. Leslie is in the backyard struggling to build a ribbon of balloons against their natural predators, wind and rain. “While supper was getting ready, all us kids would put on a play, little skits, everything from ‘Snow White’ to ‘My Fair Lady.’

“We built a backyard theater as a day-care center that at one time had 50 kids at 10 cents a day. We’d do ‘Bambi,’ create circuses and zoos and midways and teach ‘em how to grease the plates so that the pennies would slide off. . . .”

One grandmother in Toledo was an actress in amateur theatricals. Mother was a church singer. Even Granddad was a musician. He played the four-stringed pitchfork. “From this family background, I learned a lot about controlling my emotions and feelings; that in turn allowed me to adopt the feelings of others.

“I developed an imagination. I would close my door at night and just put on ‘Hello, Dolly!’ for myself, doing all the characters, talking to myself.”

Real, she believes, is boring. Waiting tables, typing letters and teaching aerobics might be acceptable to others. “But to be a clown,” she explained, “to be me and to allow other people the freedom to be, to live, to laugh, to give back. Then to have a kid come up and hug you and say: ‘I love you, clown.’ You get teary-eyed and you know no money can buy that, no other job can give you that.”

Clowns were a constant of her early life. The Shrine Circus in Toledo each year and front-row seats because grandad was a Shriner. The route when visiting an aunt always passing a house with its sign that announced: “Clown for Hire.”

One day Whilner went inside and met Quackie and they became friends and he told her of the old days and they went through his books, especially a biography of Emmett Kelly.

“I think,” added Whilner, “that it was Quackie who impressed me to grow up and be a kid.”

As her own kid, however, Whilner did not find complete happiness. Being the third child of the family, she said, produced dissipated attention and affection, and that left her as Cinderella. So she left home . . . to graduate from high school alone, to study theater at Toledo University alone, and to move to California alone.

Here there was drama, child development and psychology studies at UC San Diego and Miramar College. A job as governess to children of the stunt man who doubled for the late Steve McQueen. Some television commercials.

“But in 1977 I’d reached the point where I couldn’t go through any more cattle (casting) calls, no more auditions . . . that was about the time I was driving down 5th Avenue in San Diego and saw a sign that said: ‘California Clowns.’ I stopped the car, went in and said: ‘I want to be a clown.’ ”

She was hired as Whilner. The development of Flutterby took several more seconds. First, a rainbow wig brighter than a Red Admiral brushing a Purple Hairstreak. Then wings around eyes and antenna between brows and butterfly makeup. A friend saw the result. Hey, she said, a flutterby.

At an early show, a radio station promotion before a Padres baseball game, a child waved. As children do, the hand was backwards and the little fingers flapped inward. “I thought: ‘Oh, that’s great,’ ” remembered Whilner. “A flutterby. That’s going to be my wave. That’s going to be me.”

A Vote for a Voice

She voted for a voice: “It would be low, rasping, like Susan St. James or Lauren Bacall. That wasn’t difficult. I’ve always been a screamer and that left me with nodes and I don’t ever want ‘em removed.”

Gestures: “A lot of movement, arms always above the head to create more energy, more room and to make you look bigger than life.”

And a philosophy for clowning: “Freedom. The freedom of being myself and letting children be themselves. Not trying to amuse because the moment you do that the moment is forced, contrived. Not making a conscious effort to be funny but just letting go, letting the soul out and allowing the heart to direct you.”

This dedication to the unstaged, to the giving and receiving of natural responses, is a facet of entertainment that has kept Whilner from the big rings. Thrice she has auditioned for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s clown college in Venice, Fla., and has been accepted. Thrice she has changed her mind in favor of individuality and being her own clown.

“Being a circus clown means working at distance, doing somebody else’s shtick without variations and within established time frames. That’s not for me . . . nor is elephant cleanup.”

So it has been her presence and her personality that Whilner has added to five Jerry Lewis telethons, a half-dozen March of Dimes presentations, numerous hospital appearances, weddings and, yes, a bar mitzvah at the Hotel del Coronado.

Outside, Whilner is the easy, polished, pratfalling professional.

Inside, there is raging hyperactivity, concentration focused to a laser point, gears always shifting in search of audience mood changes. Watch out for the wrecker trying to destroy the act. Careful of the sad kid, find out why he’s sad. Spread group participation right out to the fringes. Assume control, keep control. That’s being a clown.

Yet in those beginning years Whilner always knew that something was missing. A home. She needed a clown house, a nest to comfort others, a place where all the rooms were playrooms. As a matter of fact, she lived in such a place in her dreams.

“Then one day I happened to be walking down Kettner and I saw this place,” she said. “The colors, the architecture, the period, the lattice were perfect. It was right out of my dream.”

Whilner waited out several tenants until business and her reputation had matured. At $150,000 she couldn’t afford to buy the property. But she could sure rent it.

Eighteen months ago, Flutterby’s Funhouse drew its first smile. Eight months ago, Flutterby hugged a man and his daughter and became a family. And in this fairy tale, they believe, there will be nothing but happy endings.

“This,” breathed Flutterby, “will be a home filled with the arts. Mime instruction, a little theater troupe, maybe a clown school, definitely ballet in the backyard. A cultural arts center for children. Where they can come and play. And be listened to.”