Sunday Morning Looking Back: Reaching for the Unreachable, Even If They Agree to Talk, What Might They Say, if Anything?

Consider it a done deal, at least here, that the higher they fly under the big top, the harder they are to reach. For years, I tried reaching John Ringling North, once writing to Henry Kissinger, hoping he might set up a visit for me with the reigning Ringling ...

John’s faithful brother, Henry, was my ultimate ace in the hole ... The most memorable thing that JRN told me? He once tried talking abstract artist Salvator Dali into designing the costumes for his circus (can you imagine???). Dali was reachable, okay, but his fees were not. Ah, even big top tycoons experience unreachable let downs ...

Were I to reach Guy Laliberte (I am still trying to book space ship travel to his rumored porta parlor over planet earth), how revealing a subject might he be? You can’t bank on blockbusters from moguls. Like the intuitive Mr. North who answered my questions in a few words, I have a feeling that Laliberte operates in a similar fashion, having watched him pass terse judgements after reviewing new acts in rehearsal (the making of Varakei on Bravo). The lords of the rings rarely reveal what the peons in spangles will tell you ...

Paul Binder is one rare exception, a big top leader from ivy league college land. During the interview he granted me, he hit his stride linking the sawdust ring to its primal origins around primitive community circles ... Chris Lashua, of the younger generation, surprised me by linking Barnum and the Ringlings to Cirque du Soleil — they all searched the globe for the strange and the exotic, reminded Chris ...

The easiest of all for me to reach, ironically, were the once- mysteriously guarded Russians, back in 1979 before their iron curtain of secrecy fell. A consulate receptionist in San Francisco told me to write to the Minister of Culture in Moscow, name not given. And so I did. A few months later came a cablegram from head circus man Anatoly Kolevatov (later convicted for embezzlement) announcing that they were ready to receive me. What a great Bolshevik breakthrough!... And when I got there, Mr. K was “away,” and nobody in the Moscow office had a clue about my visit. Desperately I reached out to a young man at the ministry of culture. He received me with youthful sympathy, and the gates of socialist circusdom were finally within my reach ...

Reaching for the elusive: Emmett Kelly picked up a telephone when I dialed his Sarasota number and glumly declined to cooperate ... Lloyd Morgan (okay, I too have a “C” list) glumly said he expected to be paid, and I glumly withdrew. I’ve yet to pay an interviewee; what a corruptible result might ensue ...

Sarasota Central, working its contacts, handed me a phone number assumed to have belonged to quad prince Miguel Vazquez, allegedly given by the elusive prince to another once-fine flyer who had likely reached after Miguel. If so, a bum number he was handed, for every time I anxiously dialed it, the nasty sound of a busy signal on speed suggested a dead end for dreamers ... In the entire world of the circus, he is my number one choice for an interview.

Give or take half a century, and Mr. Guy Laliberte by then may be suddenly reachable at last — on his inevitable way down, or maybe in rehab seeking a visitor — or needing help out of a malfunctioning astro shuttle grounded on the wrong side of the Oakland hood ... By the way, does he by any chance have a brother — preferably one living within reach of the Twilight Zone?

from June 3, 2008