Word: circusing
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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...
...stardom that led Warhol to create the legendary, shifting entourage of drag queens, raucous juvenile models and human parrot fish who, entering a room in a cloud of sequins and patchouli, take the strain of flamboyancy off the Master's back. Warhol's id vanishes behind his circus as his ego does behind his paintings...
...Washington march for peace has become a highly ritualized affair -something that an anthropologist might call a "cultic in-gathering," an annual coming together that is part circus, part festival, part political mass meeting. Last week its time came round again, and in balmy spring weather a crowd estimated by police at 200,000 -one of Washington's largest ever -streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue to assemble before the west front of the U.S. Capitol. On the same day, in San Francisco, 125,000 demonstrators formed a six-mile parade down Geary Boulevard into Golden Gate Park; they were...