June 13, 2004

Please Don't Squash the Actors

IMES SQUARE was the focal point of my show "Ricky Jay: On the Stem," a personal homage to old Broadway in which I discoursed on hustlers and spivs, journalists and poets, showmen and charlatans as a background to my performance of sleight of hand, and one of our first shows was a fund-raiser that included a celebration at the newly opened Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum at 234 West 42nd Street.

If Tussaud's was new to Times Square, it was nonetheless a venerable institution whose combination of popular entertainment, fickle fame and the artisan's work in polychromatic wax seemed an inevitable part of the street. Madame Tussaud, born Marie Grosholtz, first plied her trade in Paris at the end of the 18th century, but waxworks were exhibited in New York as early as 1749.

Standing in Madame Tussaud's, I realized that I was on the exact site of Hubert's Museum, that much heralded and much maligned monument of Times Square. Hubert's, which opened its doors in 1925, was home to a fascinating assortment of characters, particularly those physical anomalies labeled "freaks."

This Times Square ten-in-one captured the attention of a disparate group of artists, the great New Yorker writers Joe Liebling and Joe Mitchell; the critics Robert Garland and George Jean Nathan; the photographer Diane Arbus. Lenny Bruce and Bob Dylan and numerous other worthies have shown us its lures and charms.

Hubert's major attraction, almost from its inception, was Heckler's Trained Flea Circus. Its proprietor was William Heckler, who had already achieved fame in his chosen profession and who had written some 10 years earlier his opuscule on the peregrinations of trained fleas, "Pulicology."

The heralded Heckler, however, was not the original impresario of fleas on Broadway. That honor belongs to Signor Bertolotto, whose "Industrious Fleas" made their debut to acclaim on Broadway in 1839. This event anticipated by a few years P. T. Barnum's presentation of a troupe of his own at the American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street, but it was long after the first recorded performance of the critters in the 16th century.

As a boy, I went to Hubert's to view Congo the Wild Man, Sealo the seal-finned boy and Harold Smith on musical glasses, but mostly to see Presto the magician, a gifted conjurer, and to witness Roy Heckler, William's son, put real live fleas through their paces.

Abraham Lincoln said that running the country was like shoveling fleas across a doorway. At Heckler's, the fleas did the shoveling, and a lot more. Roy Heckler presented almost the same show his father had many years earlier. Though Hubert's Museum closed in 1965, I still recall, almost verbatim, the bally of the outside talker:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, downstairs you'll meet Professor Roy Heckler's world-famous trained flea circus. Sixteen fleas, six principals and 10 understudies, and they will perform six different acts.

"As Act No. 1, a flea will juggle a ball while lying on its back. As Act No. 2, a flea will rotate a tiny miniature merry-go-round. As Act No. 3, three fleas will be placed on chariots, and the flea that hops the fastest will, of course, win the race.

"But the act, Ladies and Gentlemen, that most people talk about, the one they pay to see, three tiny fleas will be put in costumes and placed upon the ballroom floor and when the music is turned on those fleas will dance. I know that sounds hard to believe, but may I remind you that seeing is believing, and you'll see it all on the inside in Professor Roy Heckler's trained flea circus."

My own nascent offering as a flea circus impresario was thwarted, however, when, on opening night, my star performer ran off with a Bouvier des Flandres.