Show Business: Big Cat with Big Cats

Most stage directors know that controlling a cast of actors requires a combination of affection and whip cracking. To Animal Trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams, the gaudy star of the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the right mixture of toughness and tenderness means more than professional success; it means physical survival.

Gebel-Williams’ ability to communicate with animals has made him reputedly the highest-paid performer in the circus world and, to the circus management, their most valuable box office draw. His life is insured for $2,000,000, though few who see him urging tigers to leap aboard elephants would care to have money hanging on his longevity. For Gebel-Williams it is pure joy. “When I get together with my tigers, all my worries vanish,” he says.

Like many circusmen, Gebel-Williams grew up under the big top. Adopted by the owners of Germany’s Circus Williams, he became general manager and star of the company in 1951. He married his stepsister, Jeannette Williams, divorced her and remarried in 1967. His skill with tigers extends to his handling of women: both the ex and the current wife work in his act, one in the center ring, the other in a side one. “They’re both happy now,” he says. “But I have to walk very carefully between them.”

He selects his tigers just as carefully. He buys them young, prefers that they be jungle-born; those born in captivity, he says, usually undergo enough rough handling to sour their dispositions. His tigers are taught through food reward, praise and tone of voice: “It’s not important what you say to them. It’s the tone and the way it’s said. I call them by name, speak in a certain voice, and they know what I mean. They each have a different personality.”

The Real King. After the young animals have learned to trust him, Gebel-Williams teaches them to leap by dangling meat on the end of a stick. A fine leap earns a bravo, a poor one stern-voiced disapproval. (In performances, lazy tigers get a swift kick on their bottoms, good ones may be rewarded with an embrace and a kiss.) “The greatest danger,” says Gebel-Williams, “is that they will kill each other.” When a fight starts, he wades in and breaks it up with a blow to the snout.

Like all teachers, he has some problem students, but he blames himself for the collection of scars on his hands and arms. “Once I had a sick tiger,” he recalls, “and crawled into his cage to push him over so the doctor could give him a shot of penicillin. He wasn’t as sick as I thought. When I rolled him over, he bit my hand. I had to punch him in the nose to make him let go. I went to the hospital instead of him.”

The climax of Gebel-Williams’ act comes when his favorite Bengal tiger leaps onto the back of an elephant. The trainer follows, scrambling up the elephant, straddling the tiger and saluting the audience like a manic, peroxided Tarzan. It took two years for him to teach elephant and tiger to cooperate. He had them sleep close together. Later, he took them for walks. Even now, the elephant wears thick padding on his neck during the stunt: Gebel-Williams has been unable to squelch the tiger’s instinct to gnaw a hole into the neck of his “victim.”

Gebel-Williams puts more faith in tigers than elephants, which are, he says, more unpredictable..Lions? He sneers at them and does not use them. He says: “The lion is not the king of the jungle. He makes a big show but runs away. The tiger is the real king. When a tiger attacks, he means it.”