I share things I’ve enjoyed on Sundays, and I publish an essay, story, or book review (no spoilers) on Wednesdays. This is a story based on the very real Ringling Brothers.
Antoine Toussaint immigrated himself and his wife and his surname from France to Florida near the end of the nineteenth century. A ship deposited them in modern-day Sarasota, a small beach town on the state’s western shore, where the couple became the Tintins. They immediately set to work.
The first order of business was to produce a series of seven brothers. Within a span of fourteen years, Camille Tintin—a square durable tractor of a woman—birthed one after the other with the support of her husband’s virility. Understanding that disposition is, to a large extent, immalleable, the parents sighed seven breaths of relief upon realizing that, in each of the children, there was enough of the heroic spirit that made soldiers like Napoleon, enough of the sensibility that made artists like Monet. The boys were born with the requisite receptors. Antoine and Time could beat in whatever lacked.
From an early age the progeny, with their father’s encouragement, opted for enterprise over erudition and skipped school in favor of commercial experiments. They did so out of a necessity for creation and food. The boys built bicycle shacks, carpentry shops, and everything in-between; over the course of two decades, the children became men. From the American soil they learned to pass their perseverance off like a baton; when gloom drowned a few of the lot, optimism burned more brightly in the rest. The brothers relayed around the track of an American Dream made of silver, not steel.
After a series of minor successes and failures, they finally struck gold with a traveling circus named eponymously. The Tintin Brothers Circus, italicized by the spotlight, moved about the country with a rare and bizarre pack of creatures that included, according to their documents, one set of conjoined twins; nine contortionists; fifteen buffoons; nineteen fire-eaters; twenty-two sword-swallowers; twenty-five midgets; forty-eight camels; sixty-two tigers; seventy-nine showgirls; one hundred and twelve elephants; four hundred and eighteen horses; and, roughly, another one thousand people they did not bother to categorize. This group traveled together on ninety-two double-length railroad cars in a moving menagerie.
The competition itself was robust and invigorating, but they never forgot the show’s artistic element. They believed that it “provided a more accurate portrayal of the country’s spirit than the papers did,” a sentiment that echoed across a few articles I read during my research for this story. The Tintin Brothers Circus was a reflection of the madness of the times.
In 1917, after touring the country for twenty years (including a brief stint overseas), the brothers—with the exception of the youngest, Clement, who continued to run the circus—returned to their beginnings in Sarasota with aging fame and fortune. To celebrate their success, the family created structures that ranged from ostentatious museums to nondescript schools; they hung their names from buildings the way lesser households plaster portraits across hallways. But of all these monuments, only one was ever recognized for its design.
The Tintin Opera House began with ten light-gray steps that led to a plaza of the same stone; at its center, was a Parisian fountain, circular with intricate sculptures in the middle. If one were to look up from there, he would see a confident, reticent building curving over them in the shape of a crescent moon. For the first fifty feet, the exterior was built of glass that let sunlight in during the day and splashed the lobby’s warm yellow light out during the night. Where the glass ended, white stucco walls continued with windows spaced at even intervals up to the apex one hundred feet in the sky.
Inside, red felt covered the lobby floor and bare white walls extended beyond the second-floor mezzanine to the ceiling ten stories up. From this room the audience, dressed in their most elegant and opulent outfits, would spill into a baroque French theater that hushed and cooled their buzz into a murmur. They ran their eyes over the curved golden balconies and the sparse gilded statues and the dome’s intricate mural that told tales of heroism and romance lost. In the midst of the performances, both on windy and pleasant nights, pairs of tightly held hands would escape behind the building to find and forget the few others who had also gathered in nearby shadows, fifteen feet above sea level, to trace their futures along the black Gulf of Mexico which ended in a necklace of city lights.
No one in Sarasota had seen anything of the like before. In the wake of its inception, families made neighborly pilgrimages to their town’s crowning achievement, content with the idea that, even though their lot was to live with inconspicuous humility, the opera house before them would carry, in its walls, perennially, a small but essential component of their souls.
The building, however, was not for them nor the family; it was for opera itself. The Tintin brothers were believers leaving lavish gifts at the feet of gods made definite. They spent sums that logic could not justify. The building came out of the womb magnificent to the impartial and blinding to the family.
After the town’s swelling pride waned, the venue began to struggle financially. Three years and hundreds of operas later, the market concluded that there was no demand for the art form in Sarasota. The convergence of its commercial failing and chatter regarding a looming recession, which would not come for a while yet, prompted the brothers to hand over the management of the building to an enterprising New Yorker: Dick Dawson.
Of everyone that they could have given the opportunity to, Dawson was the least likely. He grew up poor. He did not have the luxury of exploring romance. He, like the Tintins, worked from a young age, but, unlike them, was more adept at manipulation than creation. Despite his circumstances, his pugnaciousness, his dullness, his want of creativity, his proclivity to quarrel, all who knew him well knew that he would triumph for opportunity had the same effect on him as raw meat has on tigers.
As a teenager, he made a living exploiting the pretension of dilettantes right up to the day that those very same forces hurled him off of Broadway. In his early twenties, he scurried from unsuccessful scheme to unsuccessful scheme until, on his twenty-fourth birthday, Dawson came across a struggling venue in Brooklyn that ignited a tremendous growl. From there, he created a reputation for himself as a mercenary for pioneers. His name was spoken throughout the country, and, at the age of thirty, the Tintins decided to give him a title shot. “Strategy should be reserved for the textbooks,” Dawson told them during their first meeting, “what you need is experimentation. Give me fifteen months and I will make your opera house sing.”
Though Dawson sold his experiments to the public with the passion of a pastor, he viewed each of them as dispassionately as a doctor working through a series of treatments. For the first two months, he flooded the city with Florida’s Greatest Jazz Shows; then he created The Seaside Home of Blues before developing The Greatest Show on Earth. Nothing worked, but Dawson fed on turbulence. With only a few months left on his contract, he intuited that the population was most comfortable not ahead of popularity nor in its wake but right in its liver.
He created a show that changed every month by taking the three most popular songs of the moment and turning each of them into a burlesque that the brothers privately described as pornographic and publicly coughed as innovative. The audience loved it. They swarmed the plaza night after night. Their cackles cracked through the walls, pounced on the paint, reverberated through the theater. In one fantastic globular cluster they exited together to the back of the building where hundreds of cocktails added hilarity to the sea. Dawson had turned the failing venue into an establishment.
Simultaneously, unbeknownst to the brothers, the circus was spiraling toward its nadir while the opera house was nearing its economic peak. Clement Tintin, its operator, was without every sort of intelligence that is useful for business. For a stretch of two years, he threw elaborate shows that flew over budget and underperformed. It was his artistry that successfully withheld this fact from the family until a performance brought it to light.
In 1924, eight thousand people in Hartford, Connecticut—most of whom were women and children—sat under the The Tintin Brothers Circus’ tent, also known as the big top, two hundred feet wide, four hundred feet long, forty-eight feet high at its peak. They waterproofed the canvas with paraffin wax dissolved in six thousand gallons of gasoline whilst circus performers created fire spectacles beneath. One hour in, flames soared to the tune of The Stars and Stripes Forever, the song that circuses used to use signal distress to the personnel.
The fire devoured everything around it, nibbling on beasts and beings alike like a wild Pacman machine, ceasing only after one hundred and sixty-seven people died and more than seven hundred were injured. In a makeshift morgue atop all forms of ashes, the photo of a young blonde girl in a white dress, known only as Little Miss 1565—the number assigned to her in the above ground cemetery—clipped itself onto the front page of the nation’s biggest newspapers.
The Hartford circus fire was one of the most deadly in American history. Clement was put in jail for negligence; the brothers realized through the company books that their life’s work was teetering on collapse. I do not know whether it was their leonine or sensitive side—if the two could even be separated—but of the two options fate made available to them they took the latter, the one that exists after the conjunction, or, followed by an ellipsis. Short of money, the brothers sold off of all their assets, except the opera house, and began again.
Now, it was more difficult. Two years on, they were still staggering back toward trust. Finally, their financial insecurity and Dawson’s wealth reached a perverse equilibrium; the brothers sold the opera house to him. It is rumored that in this arrangement was an informal agreement to retain its original structure; but for posterity it does not matter if this was indeed the case: two weeks after signatures were laid across contracts, it was announced that the building did not make economic sense. They decimated the moon and built a rectangle that offered more space; they replaced the felt seats with modern, comfortable recliners; they tore down a lilac and built a shotgun in its place.
Dawson’s building still stands today; all that remains of the opera house is a small black-and-white photograph. I have chosen not to include it here.
Thanks for reading. In addition to my Sunday posts, I’ll publish a review of Bright Lights, Big City (9/20).
Transported!