Menagerie in Blue

Grown men started last week when the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus opened in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden. The Circus had changed to look as fabulously beautiful as they had imagined it had looked when they were children. The Brothers John and Henry Ringling North, their imaginations inspired by Designer Norman Bel Geddes, had enchanted the traditional "Spec," the great opening parade.

No longer was there the usual procession of chipped wagons and shabby cavalry.

Instead the arena was transformed into a nursery lotus land. Even the tanbark had changed color, to a bright blue. Over it, one after another, rolled glorious floats and glittering equipages of white and gold, bearing hundreds of characters from Mother Goose. Wheeling and cavorting came Old King Cole, in canopied splendor suspended between four elephants; ranks of pretty maids with cockleshells; a cow that literally leaped over the moon.

It was like the lovely dream circus in Billy Rose's Jumbo, only five times larger.

On adults the effect was powerful; on the less mature it was staggering. Said one young spectator for publication: "It was all good. I can't remember." Lest the Big Show be beautified out of its hallowed form, in other acts Trainer Alfred Court presides over snarling panthers and lions who pose, with noble indifference, among dogs and bears, including the bruin who apparently gets ecstatically drunk on a bottle of beer. Elly Ardelty, netless, stands on her pretty blonde head on a trapeze at the very top of the circus heavens. Massimilliano Truzzi juggles knives, flaming torches and the spectators' nerves. Half a hundred elephants galumph around the ring and take a bow in unison. Hubert Castle staggers like a drunken clubman on his tightwire. And in his air-conditioned, chrome steel cage in the menagerie, Gargantua, the 550-lb. gorilla who at eleven years is probably not yet old enough to mate with M'Toto, his presumed gorillass (TIME, March 3), makes the angriest faces in the world and then wearily turns on his audience the silver-grey, pointed-fox smoothness of his huge back and buttocks.

In the adjoining cage M'Toto manages to look a lot like him and still be labeled "cute." Last week M'Toto's former owner, swank, socialite Mrs. E. Kenneth Hoyt, traveled from her Havana estate to see M'Toto and supervise a light lunch of eggs, salad, cup custard and a pound of filet mignon. Backing out of M'Toto's presence, Mrs. Hoyt brushed against the one side of Gargantua's cage that is not glass-enclosed. Gargantua thrust a huge hand between the bars and, with a single twitch of a clawed finger, tore Mrs. Hoyt's smart costume off her back.

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