Show Business: King of the Beasts

FORTY MAGNIFICENT, MONSTROUS, MENACING MAN-EATERS MIRACULOUSLY MINGLED, the signs used to say. That was in the ’30s, when “circus” was a word with magic, when kids impatiently waited through the year until the big tent went up again. And what they waited for most was the instant when a trim, 5-ft. 6-in. man, dressed in spotless white shirt and breeches with soft leather belt, bounded into the spotlight of the center ring and doffed his pith helmet. Then, whip in his right hand, a steel-reinforced chair plus blank-loaded pistol in his left, he would summon the first ferocious cat into the cage.

That was Clyde Raymond Beatty, king of the beasts, the greatest animal trainer in the world (TIME cover, March 29, 1937). “I want people to see me close—close enough to smell the cats,” he would explain. “When I’m in there, I don’t know if there are a hundred or a thousand in the audience. It doesn’t matter. I’ll give them anything; I’ll give them everything.” And twice a day, ten months a year for more than four decades, he did, with a mixture that was as much danger as hokum, but real enough to land him mauled, scratched and chewed in the hospital more than 60 times.

“Nero Over Me.” Born in 1903 near Chillicothe, Ohio, Beatty raised rabbits, guinea pigs and skunks as a boy, at 15 responded to the lure of the circus by signing up as a $3-a-week helper. His goal was to be an acrobat, until he twisted an ankle, got a chance to fill in on a polar bear act (“a bear will bite you ten times to a big cat’s one”), and began his career as an animal trainer.

It was the time when Jungleers Martin and Osa Johnson drew crowds to see the movies of wild animals they took in Africa and Hunter Frank Buck drew cheers for bringing them back alive. But Beatty never sentimentalized over his beasts. “You can never be certain that a lion or a tiger won’t hook you if it has the opportunity,” he explained. “Big cats are wild by nature, even if they’re born in captivity. They never develop any affection for their trainer, no matter how gentle he may be with them.”

Beatty believed in pushing his luck to the limit. When his act began to pall, he mixed lions, tigers, leopards, pumas and hyenas. Then he became the first man ever to mix lions and tigers of both sexes, eventually performing with more than 40 in the cage at the same time. It was a threatening, unstable mixture, and often it exploded. To hear Beatty tell about it was spine-tingling. “Nero [a black-maned lion] stood over me, ready to sink his teeth in my face. Desperate, I planted the palm of my right hand against his nose and shoved with all my might. Suddenly I felt my hand slip into his mouth up to the wrist. I yanked frantically and got my hand free, but left shreds of flesh on Nero’s teeth. Then he sank his teeth into my right leg until they actually penetrated to the bone and he started to drag me to one side of the arena. Just then he noticed the lioness, and went to her. I was unconscious the better part of twelve days, and they just about gave up on me.”

Never a Tamer. Near misses kept audience adrenalin pumping too. Several times when the circus lights failed, Beatty had to grope his way to safety from a cage full of roaring animals. Once in Cleveland, three of his “kitties” broke loose, terrified the crowd for long, anxious minutes before Beatty finally maneuvered them back into cages. The tensions of such a life forced him to get a nightly ten hours of sleep, sweated a pound off him at every 18-minute performance, and earned him wildly varying sums of money. The Ringling Brothers Circus was paying him only $250 a week when in 1935 he formed the Cole Brothers-Clyde Beatty Circus. At the height of his fame, a year later, he was earning $3,500 a week. But soon the time of magic would end. “Suckers may still be born every minute,” mourned a circusman, “but TV gets them first.”

Circus was faltering, but it was still the first love of Clyde Beatty. “I’ll never quit,” he vowed, and he didn’t, performing just last May, at 61, in Long Island. “Oh, I know they’ll get me some day,” he used to say of his animals. They never did, though. Instead, last week in Ventura, Calif., at about the time the matinee would have started, cancer finally clawed to earth the man who could never abide being called an animal tamer. “If they are tamed,” he always said, “there is no act.”