Carny King’s Sideshow Must Go On

Like many other retirees, Bobby Reynolds still likes to keep a hand in the business.

In his case, that means changing the formaldehyde for Ronnie and Donnie the Two-Headed Baby and firing off one-liners like the one about his date with the half-man, half-woman.

“Guy asked me did I have a good time,” he says. “I told him, yes and no.”

At 67, Reynolds is one of the last remaining grand old men of American sideshows. He lives on a scrubby nine-acre spread in Fillmore. His living room is painted black and rigged up with an overhead rack of stage lights. Pictures of the immortals--P.T. Barnum, Tom Thumb, Kokomo the Mule-Faced Boy--line the walls. On a long table sits a fluid-filled bell jar holding a mustached object that Reynolds halfheartedly insists is the head of Pancho Villa.

“It was in a museum in Mexico and there was an earthquake,” he says. “Bada-bing, bada-boom.”

The times have not been kind to free-spirited entrepreneurs like Reynolds. When he was young, as many as 200 sideshows crisscrossed the country, displaying their freight of contortionists, five-legged sheep, scantily clad girls, and “human blockheads” who shoved screwdrivers up their noses and spikes in their tongues.

But carnival and fair operators came to reap a lot more profit from big, expensive rides. And the public’s appetite for what used to be called “human oddities” dwindled.

“Now it’s not OK to put on a fat lady and charge to see her,” said John Strates, the third-generation operator of a carnival train that chugs up and down the East Coast. “A two-headed baby is not politically correct. You get e-mails about sideshows right and left.”

Reynolds isn’t out on the road much these days. This fall, he and his Reynolds’ Believe It You’re Nuts show will be the centerpiece at a collegiate art festival in Maryland. Afterward, he might swing down to the Carolinas. He says he could get more work, but he ruefully acknowledges that the golden era of sideshows is long past.

“They’re trying to make Disneyland out of fairs,” he says, “and it ain’t working.”

At home, Reynolds helps out his 11th wife, Ruth, who had a stroke a couple of years ago. Her previous husband was a circus man named Big John Strong. Her grown kids and a couple of his from assorted marriages drift in and out. One recent afternoon, Reynolds was visited by a Mormon missionary--Reynolds became a Mormon last spring--and a 7-foot, 2-inch sword swallower from Bakersfield named George McArthur.

“Meet George the Giant, the Goliath of the 21st century!” Reynolds orates by way of introduction.

McArthur, 32, has been on the road with Reynolds, who taught him the fine points of swallowing swords. And fire. And lightbulbs.

“They were calling me a freak when I was 10 years old and 6-foot-7,” McArthur says. “Now at least I’m paid for it.”

From time to time, some of Reynolds’ fellow performers have lived in trailers on his ranch. Dave Twomey, known professionally as Happy the Clown, was there recently after treatments for cancer. Jimmy Webb--a.k.a. the Ugliest Man in the World--was a longtime guest, as was a hirsute woman who eventually grew disenchanted with life as a freak.

“When your bearded lady starts to shave, you know she really wants out of show business,” Reynolds observes.

For him, that is inconceivable. Reynolds is on all the time. In the space of two hours, he dons a pith helmet, a fez and a top hat. He does coin tricks, spews carny patter, bursts into a medley from “Fiddler on the Roof” and hauls a dummy out of his closet for a quick display of ventriloquism. In between, he relaxes with an endless chain of ancient one-liners.

“I’ve been married so many times I got rice marks,” he says. “I got three rings: Engagement ring, wedding ring and suffering.... “

Growing up in Jersey City, N.J., he started his professional life at 13 as a pitchman for a Coney Island attraction called Professor Heckler’s Trained Flea Circus. By night he slept in a cardboard box under the boardwalk. By day he reveled in his spiel, which he will still rattle off at the drop of a pith helmet:

“Fleas that juggle, jump through hoops, play football, operate a miniature merry-go-round, tiny little fleas hitched to a chariot and they actually run a race.... It is without a doubt the most fascinating sight the human eye has ever witnessed!”

At one time, Reynolds had 14 shows plying the midways of America. His “museum show” featured items that were purportedly pickled, like Van Gogh’s ear. Another had strange animals, some with extra limbs. Like other showmen of the day, he displayed actual fetuses, like the two-headed baby, ostensibly to illustrate the evils of drugs and alcohol.

Today’s handful of sideshow equivalents are more extreme. The Jim Rose Circus, for instance, features Mr. Lifto, a man who lifts weights dangling from his pierced nipples and other body parts.

“I don’t put Jim Rose down,” Reynolds says. “If I wanted to earn real money now, I’d have to resort to things like that too.”

Over the years, Reynolds has performed himself. Among other things, he did an act with a tap-dancing chicken--a chicken trying to shake off the pieces of tape Reynolds had stuck to its feet.

“We were supposed to be on the [Ed] Sullivan Show but I got drunk and missed the rehearsal,” says Reynolds, a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 21 years. “Who knows what would have happened?”

Now and then, Reynolds, like other sideshow operators, ran into legal difficulties.

In 1985, his “giant rat” was confiscated at the Ventura County Fair. Police deduced that the 100-pound beast was not a killer from the sewers of Paris, as advertised, but a South American rodent called a capybara.

Reynolds says the case was dismissed when he showed the judge a magazine caption calling a capybara “the swamp rat of Brazil.”

That isn’t how the arresting officer remembers it, however.

“He’s just so full of smoke,” said Steve Bowman, a private investigator now retired from Ventura’s Police Department. “He pleaded guilty and paid a $500 fine.”

For all that, Reynolds ran his shows with “a convoluted sense of honesty,” according to Dick Horne, one of just a few sideshow scholars.

Horne and his partner, James Taylor, operate Baltimore’s American Dime Museum, an exhibit hall crammed with sideshow memorabilia. One of the featured attractions was acquired from Reynolds: The Horrifying Giant Kentucky Redwood Bat--12 feet long and 600 pounds, fairgoers were told, “big enough to kill a horse!”

The monster is an oversized baseball bat.

“But it really does weigh 600 pounds,” Horne said. “Bobby could just as easily have gotten one made of Styrofoam but instead he had this huge thing carved.”

Horne helped set up an upcoming appearance by Reynolds at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

For 10 days, Reynolds will be on hand with his musical frogs (stuffed and holding tiny instruments), his two-headed goose, his sword swallowers, his fire-eaters, and such smoke-and-mirrors illusions as No-Middle Myrtle, the stomachless girl from the isle of Ahamamamagoola. Three trucks will haul his “circus museum”--a display 120 feet long and 70 feet wide--to the urban campus.

Fred Lazarus, the institute’s president, said the show will be a learning experience on many levels, from the graphics of hand-painted circus banners to the aesthetics of the bizarre.

“There’s also this whole issue of freaks and stereotypes,” Lazarus said. “It will be useful in opening us to thinking differently about people who are different.”

For his part, Reynolds, who modestly calls himself “the world’s greatest showman,” admits that throngs of adoring young people will get his blood pumping.

“Kind of like Tony Bennett,” he says.