Freaks: The Crooked Timber of Humanity

When I get the chance, I like to take them out into the sunlight and let them play like children. That’s what most of them are, children. —Madame Tetrallini, guardian of the Pinheads

In the late 1950s, in Painesville, Ohio, one of the annual highlights was the visit of the Mills Brothers three-ring circus at the spectacular Fairport County Fair in nearby Fairport Harbor. The fair was spread out along Lake Erie beach with a large Ferris wheel, scary rides, where they measured your height against a marked post to see if you were big enough to ride, a spooky funhouse and bump-em cars that permitted little kids to drive unaccompanied. There were games where you could shoot pellet guns at little moving metal figures and booths where you could knock stacked fake milk bottles over with softballs to win huge teddy bears, if you were skilled or lucky. At night, the entire beach was lit up with brightly strung lights. It was a magical world for me and my friends to wander around, eating cotton candy and hot dogs. My parents gave us some money and they let my brother and me go without supervision.

I particularly remember the carnival freak shows, usually in small tents, with a barker at a booth in front, telling us to “come on in and see the Lobster Woman” for only five cents. The Lobster Woman was a young deformed girl, in a sexy tutu, who sat on a chair inside a four-sided barrier constructed from a rectangle of canvas. You had to peer over the side to see her. She had connected fingers and toes which formed “claws”—a rare medical condition known as ectrodactyly or “Lobster Claw Syndrome”. Born with the middle fingers missing, the fingers and toes on either side of the hand and foot were fused together at birth.

She had a hypnotic ballerina-like grace. I wrote a poem about her, which I called “Sideshow Deity Crush 1957”:

Walking the night beach surf,

toward bright fairground lights,

Ferris wheel like a Saturn ring,

the magic village appears on sand once a year,

with candied-apple barker booths,

a child’s eye doesn’t see

hard alcoholics raising tent poles,

cheap trailer homes concealed,

money dealings gravely done,

behind thin aluminium doors,

but only outlines of wonder,

in faded cartoons peeking

out beneath the rolled shirt cuffs.

Sideshow tent says Lobster Woman.

Born with shrunken arms,

two pincer toes on each foot,

she sits in red one-piece bathers,

on a little platform. As we gather around

in a circle, she extracts a cigarette,

with one foot, from a Lucky Strike pack,

lifts it askew to her mouth,

lights it with a wooden match,

held & struck with her hand-claw.

My friends laugh.

I think she’s divine.

I rewatched Tod Browning’s 1931 MGM film Freaks recently, and was transported back to those childhood fairground days. Peter Bradshaw, writing in the Guardian, has said of Freaks: “This macabre masterpiece of pre-Hays Code Hollywood is a staggering provocation … and a very potent reminder of cinema’s origin in the fairground tent.”

Browning had just had a massive success with the original Dracula film, leading Hollywood into a new wave of horror pictures. But because of its controversial content, and its cast of real sideshow performers, Freaks was a commercial failure, and was banned in England for three decades.

In the film, a carnival sideshow dwarf named Hans is engaged to Freida, another dwarf. But Hans is infatuated with a normal-sized woman, Cleopatra, a trapeze artist who is romantically involved with Hercules, the circus strongman.

Cleopatra has no time for Hans but when he inherits a sizable estate from his uncle, she connives with Hercules to seduce him into marriage and gain control of his money. At their wedding, she begins to add poison to his wine. But she gets drunk, and shamelessly flirts with Hercules in front of Hans and makes vicious fun of him. She lifts Hans onto her shoulders and parades around with him as if he is a pet. Hans now sees that she is only after his inheritance, but the poison has begun to affect him and he falls ill. Once he realises that she has been spiking his wine, he only pretends to drink it, meanwhile plotting with the other sideshow performers to exact revenge. During a storm, the circus wagons are overturned and both Cleopatra and Hercules are chased into the rain and dark wood by angry sideshow members wielding knives. Hercules is injured. Cleopatra is mutilated.

Later, a new act is added to the sideshow—the “Squawking Duck Woman”: Cleopatra with one eye poked out and tongue removed, her legs cut off, hands melted to resemble duck’s feet, and tarred and feathered.

Freaks was based on the short story “Spurs” by Tod Robbins, published in 1926 as part of a collection titled Who Wants a Green Bottle? The book is now a rare collector’s item. The core of the story is essentially the same as the movie, but the characters and the ending are different.

The dwarf protagonist is named Jacques Courbé who performs in the Copo Circus Big Top, riding on a large wolf-like dog named St Eustache. This dog is also his fierce protector. Courbé falls in love with a bareback rider named Jeanne Marie. Her acrobatic partner is Simon Lafleur, “the Romeo of the circus tent—a swarthy, herculean [sic] young man with bold black eyes and hair that glistened with grease, like the back of Solon, the trained seal”.

Courbé has recently inherited an estate from his departed uncle and, with the confidence of his new wealth, proposes marriage to Jeanne Marie. Although she loves Lafleur, she realises the financial benefits of being married to the rich dwarf, as “these pygmies were a puny lot. They died young.” They marry at a ceremony in town attended by the other members of the circus, Papa Copo, the owner, Griffo, the giraffe boy, M. Hercule Hippo, the giant, Mlle Lupa, who has extraordinary long white teeth and growls when she speaks, M. Jegongle, with his compulsive juggling fetish, including the silverware and dishes on the banquet table, and Mme Samson, with her trained boa constrictors, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, coiled about her neck.

At the wedding reception, Jeanne Marie, quite drunk, humiliates Courbé in front of the entire troupe. She lifts him onto her shoulders and carries him off into the night, drunkenly singing at the top of her voice.

A year passes. Courbé and Jeanne Marie are no longer with the circus and Lafleur has all but forgotten her. One day, there is an unexpected knock on his door. It is a gaunt bag-of-bones woman dressed in peasant clothing—a worn and tired Jeanne Marie. Lafleur barely recognises her. She tells him that her midget husband has turned her into a “beast of burden” out of revenge for the way she humiliated him at the wedding. She has been forced to obey his every wish and carry him everywhere. The first time she tried to resist, his dog St Eustache practically tore her throat out. She asks Lafleur if he can help her and get her job back with the circus.

Suddenly, an angry Courbé bursts through the door, riding on his dog’s back and brandishing a tiny sword. The dog attacks Lafleur, crushing his arm in its jaws, and Courbé stabs him to death. Jeanne Marie, realising that she has lost her only protector, finally submits, lifts Courbé onto her shoulders and departs, St Eustache following behind.

Tod Browning was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1880. He ran away from home at the age of sixteen, when carnival shows were at their peak, and joined a circus. Later he became a clown for Ringling Brothers. Americans were drawn to travelling sideshows, encouraged by the charisma of the master showman P.T. Barnum. Everyone wanted to see “freaks of nature”.

Browning worked as an extra in D.W. Griffith’s epic film Intolerance, and got a taste for film, appearing in fifty low-budget films. He became a director on another eleven films. When he met the silent film star Lon Chaney, they formed a deep friendship and went into business together, making ten films, all of them profitable. Chaney was a master of horrific makeup and Browning was interested in actors who were outside the mainstream of conventional society.

Dracula had been a successful stage play and Universal Studios offered the job of directing the silent film version to Browning, with Chaney in the lead role as the vampire. However, when Chaney died, Universal decided to finish the film as a talking picture, with Bela Lugosi as the lead.

Browning was a heavy drinker and the loss of his working partner, Chaney, caused him to lose interest in the decision-making production details of the film. He also had no experience with “talkies” and felt out of his league. Fortunately, he had a gifted cameraman, Karl Freund, who had worked on Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis in Germany. Freund was a specialist in expressionistic lighting and his brilliant cinematography gave Dracula its distinctive gothic look. Dracula became a tremendous hit in 1931, and made a talking-picture star out of Lugosi.

With Freaks, MGM felt they might have another Dracula on their hands, but studio employees found the presence of the actual sideshow performers on the lot too grotesque. The head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, wanted to shut the film down once he saw the kind of actors Tod Browning had hired.

Matthew Jackson has written, on the website Mental Floss:

Browning’s insistence on casting real sideshow performers in Freaks paid off visually, resulting in an unforgettable film experience that also managed to humanize the various real people behind the story. When those casting decisions were applied to the practical process of shooting a film, though, things were sometimes less rewarding. Though many of them were seasoned performers, the “freaks” were not necessarily trained actors, and some of them required special care and patience due to impairments. The stress of working with them took a toll on Browning.

The film editor, Basil Wrangell, wished he hadn’t agreed to work on the film. He said that the mere sight of the actors “made you crawl up the walls”. To make matters worse, many of them who had been featured stars in the sideshows began acting like prima donnas on set. They wore sunglasses and acted like movie stars. According to Browning, “the professional jealousy was amazing”.

The most severely handicapped actors were forced to stay in their own custom-built tent and not allowed to roam the studio lot or visit the MGM commissary. The head of production, Irving Thalberg, said, “Well, I asked for something horrible and I guess I got it.” 

Harry and Daisy Earles, born in 1902 and 1907 respectively, who played Hans and Freida, were real-life siblings. They were part of a family known as the “Doll Family”, with sisters Gracie and Tiny. The Doll Family appeared as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz (1939). In that film, Harry was also part of the Lollypop Guild. Daisy became known on the travelling carnival circuits as “the midget Mae West”. Harry was the one who recommended “Spurs” to Browning as a vehicle for him and his sister.

The conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton were born in 1908, joined by their hips and buttocks. They shared blood circulation but shared no major organs. According to legend, a drunken F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was writing for MGM, came into the commissary for lunch one day and saw the Hilton sisters. He was so shocked that he went outside and vomited. The Hiltons toured the American burlesque and vaudeville circuits and performed on shows with Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin. But they soon were reduced to poverty. In 1968, Daisy died of the flu. Violet, trapped beside her, died three days later. Their bodies went undiscovered for almost a week.

Olga Baclanova, who played Cleopatra, was born in Moscow in 1893, and was known as the “Russian Temptress”. She was a member of the Moscow Art Theatre and a featured lead in plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, Turgenev, Shakespeare and Dickens. She was also a trained singer, recording an album in 1947. She originally was shocked by the disabled actors’ appearances and struggled to even look at them, much less act with then, but eventually was one of the few cast members who treated them with dignity. Irving Thalberg had originally wanted Myrna Loy to play the part of Cleopatra but Loy was “absolutely horrified” by the script and pleaded with Thalberg not to cast her in the role.

Schlitzie, the film’s endearing “pinhead”, was born Simon Metz in New York. Not much is known about him. Some records show his legal name as Schlitzie Surtees. He was four feet tall and often billed as “The Last of the Aztecs” or “The Monkey Girl”. Born with an abnormally small head, which made him severely retarded, he could only speak in monosyllabic words. Although male, he was presented as a female, wearing a dress throughout the film. It was said this was to hide his incontinence. He continued to travel with sideshows until he died aged seventy.

“Pre-Code” Hollywood refers to the time between 1927 and 1934, when sound films began replacing silent films. In 1915, the Supreme Court had ruled unanimously that free speech did not extend to movies. The Motion Picture Production Censorship Code, known as the Hays Code, was adopted in 1930 and pretty much ignored. But it began to be rigorously enforced in 1934.

William Hays had been a Presbyterian elder and chairman of the Republican National Committee. He managed the winning presidential campaign of Warren Harding in 1920. His “recommendations” to the film industry became known as “the Formula”.

During the Depression, audiences turned out in droves for films with violent and sexy content. Due to empty promises from politicians during those difficult times, many people were looking for coarser types of entertainment. But now, the sort of films made before the Hays Code that depicted sex between races, drug use, abortion, homosexuality, heavy violence and infidelity were discouraged and blocked. Earlier popular movies that glorified gangsters, such as Public Enemy and Little Caesar, in which criminals were almost heroic and where they appeared to financially profit from their activities, were no longer allowed. All criminal action in movies now had to be punished, and could not elicit sympathy from the audience.

The British censors banned Freaks from the UK for thirty-one years, the longest film ban in the country’s history. Many US states also made it technically illegal to watch the movie.

MGM gave up on the film and sold the rights to Dwain Esper, known as the “father of modern exploitation”. Esper was born in 1894 and had served in the First World War. He released the film under several new titles including Forbidden Love, Nature’s Mistakes and The Monster Show. Some of his more provocative posters promoting the film asked “Do Siamese Twins Make Love?”, “What Sex is the Half-Man, Half-Woman?” and “Can a Full-Grown Woman Truly Love a Midget?” He toured an adults-only road show for five years, projecting the film onto canvas banners that were set up in a tent.

In 1934, Esper made Maniac (also known as Sex Maniac) adapted from the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”. Some film critics believe this to be the worst film ever made. The film review site Rotten Tomatoes placed it on its list of movies “So Bad They’re Unmissable”.

In 2015 Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian gave Freaks five stars and called it “a work of genius” and “a disturbing curio of old Hollywood that has lost none of its power to unsettle”. Joe Morgenstern wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the film “[boasts] some of the most terrifying scenes ever consigned to film”. Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader said, “If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror that in this film by Tod Browning.” Tom Huddleston of Time Out also gave the movie five stars and wrote:

Cinema’s boldest statement on the dichotomy between outer appearance and inner life: no wonder the beauty-obsessed Hollywood studio system had no idea what to do with it. It’s one of the most powerful films ever made about the need for humanity and solidarity in the face of cruelty and oppression.

The original film of Freaks was an hour and a half long but after audience members walked out of initial previews in droves (one woman said the film was so repulsive it induced her miscarriage, and threatened to sue the production company), Thalberg cut the film down to an hour without consulting the director. The full original version no longer exists.

Freaks was unsuccessful in its time, only being shown in the most obscure cinemas, and on private circuits, but after a screening at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, it began to be heralded as a lost classic. In 1993, sixty-two years after its first release, Freaks was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in recognition of its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance.

Dracula had made Tod Browning one of the most successful directors in Hollywood, but after the commercial failure of Freaks, his career never recovered.