The Man Behind the Makeup : Clown Gets Top Billing Under the Big Top, Which Comes to Anaheim on Tuesday

He wears bulbous shoes with a nose to match, frumps around in a bad suit, has makeup lines you have to see to believe--and gets love letters from smitten circus-goers.

David Larible, from a seven-generation circus family in Italy and now the first clown to headline the venerable Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, raises his painted eyebrows and shakes his head.

“They don’t go in love with you. They go in love with David the Clown,” he says.

David the Person, whom audiences don’t see, is the man who speaks five languages, including Italian-flavored English; the man who studied ballet; the man who studied at a music conservatory in his hometown of Verona, Italy, and plays half a dozen musical instruments; the man who spritzes Versace cologne around his muscular, stocky body as a last-minute ritual.

As the only clown to achieve top billing since the first Ringling Brothers circus in Iowa in 1870, he follows acts tinged with exotica or danger like lion tamers, Zulu tribal dancers or trapeze artists. Clowns have been a staple, but never the main act.

“He is not really a clown,” said Allen Bloom, executive vice president of marketing for the circus, explaining the decision to put Larible at the top. “I think he’s a rare combination of Marcel Marceau, Red Skelton and a circus clown all wrapped in together.”

Larible brings his varied training into his act, trying to show that clowning is more than just a big wig (the naturally curly hair is real) and a big nose (the nose is not).

“The problem is for me that people say, ‘A clown? Headlining the show?’ ” says Larible (pronounced la-REE-blay). “The people in America think the clown is kitsch, is that how you say? The clown is not kitsch; the clown is an artist.”

So his act is part slapstick, part mime and part good-humored conspiracy with his audience against unsuspecting “volunteers” dragged from their seats. He is agile enough to bumble. He juggles, he plays trumpet, he throws knives (badly).

Larible, the son of an aerialist and a high-wire performer, said he took his first steps as a toddler in the ring of a circus somewhere in Europe and announced by age 8 that he wanted to be a clown. He used to trail another clown as a child, watching his makeup ritual and admiring his performance. (Today, the little boy of a concession worker follows Larible the same way.)

He wanted to make people laugh. His father insisted he learn other skills first such as music, acrobatics and dance. He learned in the ring, not in a clown college, to perform on the trapeze and with horses, and he made his professional debut at 16 in Italy’s Circus Medrano. In 1988, he received a high honor in the circus world, the Silver Clown, at the International Circus Festival in Monte Carlo.

Larible, 33, originally resisted offers by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey because he feared performing in arenas so large. European circus arenas are much more intimate, he says, with one ring rather than three and seating perhaps 2,000 people, not three to four times that many at Anaheim Convention Center, where the circus arrives Tuesday.

Gestures have to be much bigger--he says his Italian mannerisms help him there--to interact with the audience and to compensate for the lack of eye contact.

“All your body you have to work much, much more like your face,” he says.

He joined Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey for this season, which began in Florida in December. This is the first time he has performed in the United States. “I consider myself a very lucky person because I’m doing something I love and I’m living my dream,” he says.

Circus managers believe Larible will become more popular as his show reaches more audiences and hope to keep him as a headline act for years, according to Bloom. Larible headlines one of the two traveling circuses; an animal trainer headlines the other.

He keeps his makeup to a minimum--some pancake foundation, Clinique lip liner and Estee Lauder mascara--because he likes it when children can recognize him out of costume. He also tries to keep his time in costume to a minimum to keep the energy level charged.

“A clown is born and dies every day,” he says. The birth begins while he pats the foundation on and fluffs some powder around his chin. During it, he thinks of things other than the upcoming performance, other than the adrenaline-fueled moment when the ringmaster in the sequined red tux booms his name with exaggerated consonants and cadence: “LAY-deez and-a GEN-tlemen . . . DA-vid La-RI-BLE!”

“I try always to keep these two people far apart,” he says. “The big risk is that I play the clown all day, and that’s no fun.”

In his non-clown persona, Larible has been married to America, a trapeze artist from Mexico, for 10 years. They have a 2-year-old daughter, Shirley, his circus family’s eighth generation.

He revels in the freedom of being a clown, and he thinks that appeals to audiences as well. “A clown is a little bit of an anarchist,” he says. “A clown can do anything. When I do something, people accept it and laugh. When I do the same thing with my tie and jacket, people don’t accept.”

The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus opens Tuesday and continues through Aug. 13 at the Anaheim Convention Center, 800 W. Katella Ave., Anaheim. Tickets: $8.50 to $22.50. Information: (714) 999-8900.