The Freakish Connection Between the Spurs, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Barnum & Bailey

May 3rd, 2015

So the Spurs lost this morning. Unfortunately the game ended around 10:30 a.m. here in Indonesia, so I had the rest of the day to be depressed. The loss hit me especially hard because one of the announcers said as Tim Duncan walked into the locker room, “That could be the last time we see Tim Duncan in a Spurs uniform.” While I fully expect Duncan to return next season, I still burst into tears.

I’ve never been very good at just sitting with my feelings, but I’ve also learned to allow myself to have them. Sometimes it’s okay to stay in bed all day and order McDonald’s delivery (that’s right, folks- McDonald’s delivers in Indonesia). I ended up going down an Internet rabbit hole.

After listening to Elliott Smith’s Figure Eight, an album largely about heroin use that I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to all the way through for about six years, followed by Pink Floyd’s The Wall, one of my least favorite of their albums but quite fitting when you're feeling dead inside, I finally tried to work on my novel but ended up killing off one of my favorite characters and having a cat eat her face. I decided I needed to find something to get me out of this funk. Long story short, I discovered this short film, The Butterfly Circus. It’s very strange and quite cheesy at parts and when I finished watching it, I wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to be ironic or not.  It's about a limbless man who joins a depression-era circus after discovering he can swim.  This is a quotation taken from the film, and very apt after this nail-destroying, heart-breaking series of basketball we've just endured:

While watching it, I thought the principal character’s limbs had been removed using CGI. Turns out, the star actually has no limbs.   He’s an Australian man by the name of Nick Vujicic, a motivational speaker and Evangelist. You can watch his Ted Talk here.

So that got me reading about Tetra-Amelia syndrome, an extremely rare condition in which sufferers are born without limbs. Most infants born with it do not survive, but there have been isolated cases of people who have lived full lives with Tetra-Amelia syndrome. Wikipedia had a list of sufferers, which included Prince Randian. Intrigued at his name, I clicked. Not true royalty, Prince Randian was a Guyanese American circus performer brought to the United States by P.T. Barnum himself of Barnum & Bailey’s. He was most famous for rolling cigarettes with his mouth and for his role in a 1932 horror movie called Freaks.

This is where it got really interesting. Freaks is a controversial film produced by Tod Browning and distributed by MGM. Browning is most famous for directing Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931). Freaks, however, would destroy his career because people were so horrified by it.  A New York Times review published on July 9, 1932 said that "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer definitely has on its hands a picture that is out of the ordinary. The difficulty is in telling whether it should be shown at the Rialto—where it opened yesterday—or in, say, the Medical Centre."

The story of a circus, the film centers around a trapeze swinger named Cleopatra who schemes to marry a little person, murder him and steal his fortune. When the "freaks" discover her plan, they chase her through a rainy night and turn her into "one of them" by attacking her and turning her into a human duck. A scene in the film shows their wedding feast, and the other circus performers chant, “One of us, one of us, we accept her, one of us, goobla-gobble, goobla-gobble,” while passing around a huge goblet of wine. The stars of the film were actual sideshow performers, including Prince Randian, Schiltzie Surtees, born with a disorder that caused him to have an unsually small head; Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, who were household names at the time; Johnny Eck, who had a normal torso, normal proportions, but no legs; and Frances O’Connor, a beautiful, armless woman often billed as a living Venus de Milo.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was working on a screenplay with MGM at the same time that Freaks was filming, and found himself seated with Violet and Daisy Hilton. According to Dean Jensen’s book, The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins, it was “the day after a soiree at the Malibu beach home of Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer. Fitzgerald had been falling-down drunk at the party and was still badly hung-over when he entered the commissary” (208). The Siamese twins sat down in one seat and Scott was apparently so horrified by their idle chatter to each other that he had to run out of the room to throw up. He alluded to the incident in his short story, Crazy Sunday.

I am not the first person to be intrigued by the movie Freaks. The Ramones song “Pinhead”, which begins with the chant, “Gabba-Gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us”, was inspired by the movie, and their infamous Pinhead mascot is modeled after Schiltzie. The song was a staple of their live performances and often featured a performer dressed as “Pinhead”. Notable Pinheads to appear in Ramones shows were Debbie Harry, Madonna, and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam.  The song ends with "Gabba Gabba Hey", a catchphrase associated with the band which is also the name of the 1991 Ramones tribute album.

Diane Arbus was also inspired by the film, and her infamous photography has often inspired me. She said,

“There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”

Three of my favorite photographs by Diane Arbus

I’ve always adored that quotation because it rang so true, especially in my own life. People do go through life dreading trauma, including myself, and once you go through that first life-altering one, there’s a certain freedom in it. You gain self-reliance from it, and recognize it as a gift. I have often had the thought that, despite some of the more difficult experiences I’ve had to go through, the younger they happen to you, the luckier you are. Then you can live the rest of your life with that much less delusion, and that much more appreciation.

The film was even alluded to in Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street :

Freaks is itself an adaptation of a short story. I burst out laughing when I saw that it was based on a short story called Spurs by Tod Robbins, who adapted it into a screenplay for Freaks. And that’s the story of my day spent in bed because the Spurs lost, and how I was obviously meant to learn something extremely weird from it.  I don't mean to be so melodramatic about a basketball game, or compare the adversity of losing in round 1 of the playoffs to being born without limbs.  

Still, I don't really believe in coincidence.  In mathematics, coincidence is said to occur when two expressions show a near-equality which has no theoretical explanation.  So I won't try to theorize on why I ended up with a short-story called "Spurs", or why the things I discovered were exactly what I needed to hear to overcome today's particular sadness.  All I can say is that I'm quite tickled by how things connect, and by my happy privilege to use F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Spurs, The Ramones, and Barnum & Bailey in one sentence.