L.A. STORIES : She Could Tame Tigers--and Little Boys
The other day, I was eating lunch at my favorite restaurant, Philippe the Original, “Home of the French-Dipped Sandwich,” when I glanced up to find Mabel Stark staring back at me. Mabel Stark, the “world’s only woman tiger trainer,” who died 27 years ago this year.
Miss Stark was posing with a Bengal tiger in a photo hanging in the “Paul Eagles Circus Club” section of the Downtown restaurant--a zone where legendary circus folk hold periodic reunions. I froze in mid-bite.
The last time I saw Mabel Stark I was 11 years old and she was the headline act at Jungleland, an amusement park/zoo in Thousand Oaks made infamous in 1966 when a lion took a bite out of one of Jayne Mansfield’s children. My pals and I used to ride bikes to Jungleland long before Jayne Mansfield ever set foot in our hometown, and the highlight of our visits was watching the park’s star attraction, Mabel Stark and her tigers.
To our obnoxious boy-brains, Miss Stark was possibly the strangest creature we had ever encountered--a petite, elderly, unsmiling lady with a Harpo Marx hairdo and spangly circus outfit who commanded her striped charges to leap, growl, dance and roll over, punctuating each trick with a comical flourish of her right hand.
Judging by the flourish--to say nothing of the jumping into a ring full of giant-fanged felines for a living--my pals and I concluded that the lady must be drunk, and, as dopey boys will do, we giggled and imitated her gesture until we were apoplectic with laughter. Until, that is, Miss Stark cowed us into an abrupt silence with a glare so powerful and full of indignation that I have never forgotten it.
As I sat there in Philippe’s, another memory came back--that of reading the lady’s obituary one evening in 1968 in the Thousand Oaks News-Chronicle. Her favorite tiger had died, the obit said, and Miss Stark had retired her act after losing some mobility in her body. A few months later, she drafted a will and farewell note, closed her windows on the world, turned on the gas, and lay down on her kitchen table. She was either 74 or 80, depending on which records you believed.
It was with these strange, long-buried memories that I returned to Thousand Oaks the next day, to see what I might discover about this remarkable figure, and what led her to spend a life in the company of oversize killer kitties.
Jungleland, of course, was long gone--driven into bankruptcy in 1968 by the Mansfield incident and other problems. The fearsome, monolithic Thousand Oaks Performing Arts Center occupies the space where Miss Stark once put her tigers through their paces.
I stopped in at the News-Chronicle, recently renamed the Star, to pick up old clippings about the lady.
I learned from her obit that Miss Stark had been married for a few years to “menagerie superintendent” Eddie Trees, who had passed away in 1953. They had no children. There were references to her life touring the world with circuses, 18 maimings by tigers and a semi-retirement performing at Jungleland.
The obit also mentioned--to my great pleasure--that Miss Stark was “at home behind a typewriter” and had written an autobiography. Not surprisingly, it was titled “Hold That Tiger” (by Mabel Stark, as told to Gertrude Orr, published in 1938). I immediately headed for the Thousand Oaks Library, where I was granted limited and very carefully supervised access to their only copy of the book (autographed by Mabel), a prized part of the library’s local history collection.
The cover illustration looked like something out of Winnie the Pooh. There was a young, effervescent Stark standing behind a big, fluffy (and possibly smiling) tiger, her arms wrapped lovingly around its neck. The beast looked about as menacing as Garfield, Miss Stark as proud as a parent. The contents weren’t as cute.
*
For more than twenty-five years, I have been breaking, working, and training tigers . I have been clawed and slashed and chewed until there is hardly an inch of my body unscarred by tooth or nail. But I love these big cats as a mother loves her children, even when they are the most wayward. . . . They can be subdued but never conquered, except by love. And that is the secret of all successful animal training. I have learned it at the risk of my life. . . .
Mine may seem a strange profession for a woman, but it is not physical strength that counts in the big cage. . . . For me there is no greater thrill than stepping into a cageful of those glorious beasts and matching wits with them. . . . Nowadays, when I meet men and women who spend their lives shut up in houses or offices, whose faces are gray with the monotony of humdrum daily existence, I realize how fortunate I was in the choice of my lifework.
*
That choice, I learned, was made early. While other kids in her hometown of Princeton, Ky., were engaged in usual after-school social pursuits, young Mabel made a beeline for the zoo to watch the animals, hour after hour. A fledgling nursing career was cut short when she bought a ticket for the A.G. Barnes Circus while vacationing in California, and ran into Mr. Barnes himself. So apparent was her rapport with furry creatures that he invited her to join his organization on the spot. She did.
I leafed through the book’s spectacular photos of Miss Stark, invariably glamorous in ornate, militaristic circus attire, with blond hair in a kind of pageboy. One shot featured her posing with 16 tigers (!) arranged on pedestals in a kind of pyramid; another depicted the lady hugging a little child--along with tiger cubs on either side of the child--with the caption, “two kinds of children”; another had her posing with Mae West and a leopard (she “graduated” from lions and leopards to her orange-and-black loves).
It became clear that the great circus star was utterly dedicated to her incarcerated creatures--astonishingly so, when you consider that she was raised in less enlightened times when the imprisonment of animals for entertainment was not widely questioned. She sometimes took them home, sometimes for walks on the beach when the circus was wintering in Venice. She raised many of them from cubs, fed them punctually, fixed their teeth, scratched their heads to make them purr (yes, she said, tigers do purr), lanced their boils, and always staunchly defended those that bit and clawed her:
“I always blame myself--not the tiger,” she wrote, “if something goes wrong. Maybe it is an ulcerated tooth, a sore paw, just a grudge against the world for no good reason at all that has upset the cat. Then the fun starts.”
The “fun” was a series of maulings so horrific as to be scarcely believable. The worst was at a 1926 stop in Bangor, Me., while touring with the John Robinson Co., in an encounter with cats named Sheik and Zoo. Hold your breath for Miss Stark’s description:
Sheik was right behind me, and caught me in the left thigh, tearing a two-inch gash that cut through to the bone and almost severed my left leg just above the knee. . . . I could feel blood pouring into both my boots, but I was determined to go through with the act. . . . [Zoo] jumped from his pedestal and seized my right leg, jerking me to the ground. As I fell, Sheik struck out with one paw, catching the side of my head, almost scalping me. Zoo gave a deep growl and bit my leg again. He gave it a shake, and planting both forefeet with his claws deep in my flesh, started to chew. . . . I wondered into how many pieces I would be torn. Most of all I was concerned for the audience. I knew it would be a horrible sight if my body was torn apart before their eyes. And all my tigers would be branded as murderers and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in narrow cages instead of being allowed the freedom of the big arena and the pleasure of working. That thought gave me strength to fight.
Insisting that she be changed into a “street dress” for her trip to the hospital (she didn’t want to frighten people with her blood-soaked circus outfit!), Miss Stark was stitched, patched, and given up for dead by doctors, yet pulled through in a matter of weeks. She later discovered that on the night of the “fun,” Sheik and Zoo had somehow not been fed or watered in 24 hours. They were just hungry. “No wonder,” she wrote, shifting blame away from her big cats.
And so went the narrative of this strange, brave, somehow tender-hearted person, for whom each new disfiguring scar “also brought a full measure of happiness, for it taught me something new and interesting about my cats.” Those words gave me chills, as did the book’s final paragraph:
Out slink the striped cats, snarling and roaring, leaping at each other or at me. It’s a matchless thrill, and life without it is not worth while to me. I hope each new season until my number is up will find me shouting, “Let them come!”
No wonder, when the seasons were through and the tigers gone, she took it upon herself to decide that her number was up. The big cats were her Mt. Everest, and her family. Or maybe that’s too melodramatic. Maybe she was just a little golden-locked girl who never got over a love of going to the zoo.
Either way, here’s one more headline for Mabel Stark, bric-a-brac decor of Philippe’s walls, the greatest lady tiger tamer who ever lived. With apologies from a rude little kid who giggled at her long ago.