Lords Of The Rings

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The odds are that Irvin will like the act. "I'd say we agree on 95% of everything you see in the circus," says Kenneth. "Once in a while you hire an act that looks great when you see it in Poland. Then you get it here and it doesn't work out. And I'll sit through performances with my father and he'll say 'I never would have bought that act.' I get a kick out of it. It's an amazing relationship. I know a lot of people who are in business with their fathers, and it's not as calm and peaceful as our give-and-take. My father made it that way. From the very beginning he always backed up decisions I made. If it wasn't a great decision I would catch hell in his office but never in front of anybody. His philosophy was that 'you're going to make right decisions and you're going to make wrong ones, but the key thing is to make decisions. Through the bad decisions you'll learn the right way.' "

The Felds spend most of their time worrying about what the show will look like; Bob MacDougall spends all of his making sure that their creation runs like a finetuned engine. Today he and the Blue Unit are in Denver. The 47-year-old MacDougall, a bear of a man, wears a conservative bluesuit. He joined the Felds in 1975, after an 18-year stint as a mechanical engineer with Borg-Warner Corp. His wife, Pauline, a former secretary with Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., signed on as the unit's wardrobe mistress. As the Blue Unit's general manager, MacDougall is in charge of "the whole ball of wax," tearing the show down, putting it on the train, moving it, and setting it up. Now he leaves his office, wagon February, 1983 16, for a final look around.

This morning at 8 he saw rows of empty seats and a bare floor. Now, at 4 p.m., the rigging, made up of miles and miles of steel cable, is suspended from its massive steel frame. The heavy green mats, which prevent animals and humans from slipping, are in place. The sound system is set up, and three workers are touching up the outside of the ring curbs with red, white, and blue paint. Everything is nearly ready for opening night, when Charly Baumann, the performance director, will take over, making sure the show functions exactly as it did when the Felds approved it months ago in Florida.

Six days and 13 shows later, it will be move-out day; right after the last performance, everthing will be torn down. The rigging, the sound system, $2 million worth of sequined and feathered costumes, bejeweled elephant blankets and props such as Captain Christopher's giant rocket and the smallest man in the world's stagecoach will be loaded into wagons and pulled by tractors to the train, which in this town is only a few blocks away. In all, 70 pieces of equipment will be loaded onto 11 flatcars. The whole procedure, says MacDougall, rarely takes more than an hour and a half.

Then, nearly 150 performers, 125 laborers, 60 to 70 vendors, and 21 elephants, 20 tigers, 18 camels, two llamas, 35 horses, one goat, and an assortment of dogs will board the train, which is both freight carrier and traveling hotel. By 3 a.m. three hours after the last show, the train will take off for Rosemont, Ill., the next city on the tour. There the entire procedure will be reversed.

"We have a plan of attack for each building," says MacDougall. Every piece of equipment has an assigned place, each person an assigned task. There is an exact order for both loading and unlonding the wagons, so laborers can get to critical items immediately. If things weren't so precisely organized, he says, "you'd have a snafu here you'd never straighten out."

MacDougall's crew is organized into seven departments. There is the animal department, which is subdivided into elephant and everything else (the ring stock); the inside wardrobe, which takes eare of production costumes; outside wardrobe, which takes care of props; and the prop department, which handles not props, but rigging. There are crews to maintain the train on the road and a staff to oversee the Pie Car, the unit's traveling restaurant. There is also the labor department, "basically, five guys who shovel the manure," MacDougall explains. It is a highly specialized environment. Each of the three rings, for instance, is headed by a prop boss who oversees the placement of equipment in and above that ring.

For the 125 workmen each unit carries, says Irvin Feld, "it's an education process. For a month we instruct them until they get it down, and we rehearse without the performers doing the acts, just the erection of the rigging time and time again, as many as half a dozen times a day. Tear the whole thing down. Put the whole thing up. If I were to try to save money and go in with a skeleton crew of 10 people and pick up 115 locals, first of all I would be taking chances with my performers' lives. Second of all, it would take me two to five times as long to rig the show, if I could ever get it rigged with those kind of people. So it costs you extra money to carry these people, but it is worthwhile. With the circus what it is, no expense should be spared. They might fall off the high wire, but the wire is rigged right."

"If I ever slipped up on what I was offering the public," says Irvin, "I'd bail out. It's really more than what the bottom line is. It's crazy, crazy serious pride. It's almost a religion with me. I would never compromise with quality. If I want to do something with the show and it cost $400,000 extra, I'll take that cost and amortize it and say what do I need in extra people in the course of a year to get me out of that $400,000. I don't have to become a multimillionaire. Yes, I like to keep my head above water, to make a profit, but it does me a lot more good to look around and see 17-or-18,000 smiling faces and feel like I've done something for humanity."

What is most important, agrees Kenneth, is the show. "It has to function right. And it can't stop for any reason. It hasn't for 113 years."

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