Questions regarding Tod Browning's "Freaks"

Factual Questions
1

Somewhat recently, I rented Tod Browning’s “Freaks.” It was a pretty fascinating look at America’s sideshow tradition. I know that a lot of these deformities came from a lack of education in terms of pre-natal health, and the fact that the medical community wasn’t as advanced.

Not sure if I’d get more answers in GQ or in Cafe Society. Mods, feel free to move, as per usual. Basically, I want to know how these people come to be. Is it always something so simple as not enough folic acid or drinking too much during pregnancy? There were a lot of people in the film who had missing limbs. The torso man and Johnny Ecks come to mind. Is there anything exact that causes someone to be born without arms or legs, or does it just happen?

As for the conjoined twins, is that also a deformity that can be cured by taking the proper pre-natal precautions? I feel the answer to that is no, as there are conjoined twins born, albeit rarely. Is there something that causes it, or is it just “one of those things”? And also, I read that the twins in question, Daisy and Violet Hilton, were able to use self-hypnosis in order to get a little “me time.” Is that true?

I was very intrigued by Josephine/Joseph, the half man-half woman. Was s/he just a person of normal gender who used make-up/hair/clothing to look as though s/he was multi-gendered? I really couldn’t tell. S/he looked very androgynous, which I suppose was the desired effect. Or was Josephine/Joseph an actual, honest to god hermaphrodite? I suppose it doesn’t make a difference what you really are if no one can tell, but it’s started a whole “It’s Pat!” thing inside my head.

Finally, one question that relates more to the film than anything else. The sound was quite bad, at least on the version that I got, and the heavy accents often obscured what the actors were saying. Did people actually care and complain about this back then, or did the movie’s subject take over?

Thanks all, I’ll be glad to read any and all responses.

2

Wow, no answers at all? I’m bumping this baby…

3

Durn-near-required-reading-on-the-subject: “Very Special People” by Frederick J. Drimmer. The book contains photos and bios for quite a few people in that movie, and is the source of nearly all the information I’m tossing out here.

…and I can only answer your questions extremely generally, since it’s pretty open ended. I interpret it as “how do some folks get this way?”

There are a whole galaxy of reasons human beings (or other critters) are born looking a bit off kilter. Prenatal care often has a lot to do with it. So does alcohol consumption, smoking, and suchlike. Thalidomide caused quite a few birth defects, generally in the armless-legless-flippered area, but it wasn’t around in the 1930s, when the movie was made. Unfortunately, if we are going to discuss the specific folks in the movie, I can’t give you much in the way of specific answers… because medical science is just now beginning to be able to explain a lot of that stuff. We’re not quite sure why Johnny Eck, for example, was born without legs. Didn’t seem to bother him much, though – in Drimmer’s book, he is quoted as saying, “Asking me if I’m sorry I have no legs is like asking an Eskimo if he’s sorry he’s never tasted an artichoke.”

The “pinheads” in the film, notably the famous Schlitzie, were microcephalic persons… a birth defect in which the head does not grow properly, and can take on a kind of pointed or cone-shaped look. Microcephalics tend to be pretty petite; the condition results in mental retardation. Many of the ones in the movie weren’t girls, despite the way they were dressed – the carnies dressed them that way because it made their toilet needs easier to take care of. Microcephalism CAN be caused by crummy prenatal care, bad nutrition on Mom’s part, and drug abuse, but I have no idea what Schlitzie’s parents were up to.

The Hilton sisters: another enigma. Their mom was a British hooker; they were literally sold to a hubbins-and-wife showman team who toured with them and kept their money (until they finally got a lawyer; read Drimmer’s book for details). Yes, they claimed to be able to use self-hypnosis to get rid of each other; apparently Harry Houdini taught them a trick or two.

Josephine/Joseph and Koo-Koo The Bird Girl were both “grifts.” JJ was a guy who grew his hair long on one side and injected something into one of his pecs to “grow a breast”. True hermaphrodites do exist, but they are NEVER split right down the middle, any more than “siamese twins” can be non-identical. In Koo-Koo’s case, she was just an ordinary woman with a remarkable knack for making herself ugly; she was one of the few carny “freaks” who could wash her face, change clothes, and go shopping without even being noticed.

Prince Randian, the black guy in the caterpillar outfit, was quite real, and used to amaze people with the cigarette rolling trick you see him do in the movie. A man with no arms or legs at ALL who rolls and lights his own smokes, shaves himself, and so on could make a mighty easy living, even during the Depression…

Yes, the sound is bad. The sound is bad on nearly every copy of the film I’ve ever seen.

4

Here’s some links. 1st has some pics
http://freaks.cinephiles.net/

As to whether folks complained about the sound – I doubt it. Freaks came out in '32, a year before King Kong. Sound "talkies"were only 5 years old.
I doubt people knew the difference.

I don’t know how the folks came to be. It is a memorable film.

5

Actually, I think Koo-Koo was supposed to be blind.

6

Another couple of recommended books on the subject:

Freak Show, by Robert Bogdan
P. T. Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman, by assorted Kunhardts. (this is technically a biography, but with lots of pictures and information about Barnum’s life as the king of the freak-shows).

And for a while there was work being done on a movie based on the life of Johnny Eck (starring DiCaprio, if you can believe that), who did a magic show with his identical (except for the legs) twin brother which featured the most effective saw-the-man-in-half trick around. Not sure if it’s still being made or not.

As to why you don’t see as many of these kind of deformities any more, I think it’s a combination of better pre-natal care and advances in plastic surgery. Of course, even in a freak-show, ‘real’ freaks were mixed in with total fakes, actors, and such commonplace oddities as people with mental retardation.

It’s actually a fairly interesting study.

7

Some prints of the movie may have a better sound track than others; I’ve rented the movie at least once, and have seen it screened twice that I recall. I don’t remember much trouble understanding the dialogue, although it did have that sort of “tinny” sound one associates with movies of the era, early Our Gang shorts, etc.

An excellent book on the subject is Leslie Fiedler’s Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, which includes a discussion of the movie. Fiedler says that the Hilton Sisters said that they learned self-hypnosis from Harry Houdini, and used it to “tune out” whenever the other was having sex.

The sisters also appeared in another film, a cheesy little B-movie from the early 50’s called Chained for Life. That film was told in flashback as the sisters stand trial. The judge has a considerable dilemma; one of them killed a man, and the law requires him to sentence her (and, inevitably, her innocent sister as well) to death if she is found guilty. In their later years they worked at a grocery. Fiedler speculated that one was a cashier while the other bagged groceries.

It is interesting how little the movie Freaks resembles its source material; the story Spurs concerns a beautiful woman who marries a dwarf for his money. At first they seem ust like the couple in the movie, but the woman soon learns her husband is a domineering sadist and he soon has her completely whipped. The title refers to his habit of wearing spurs when they go out; he forces her to carry him on her shoulders and prods her if he doesn’t like her pace.

I would be interested in a cite for the information about Koo-Koo. This may well be true, but in The Big Book of Freaks, edited by Ricky Jay, it says merely that there is speculation that this is the case.

Fiedler discusses performers such as Joseph/Josephine in his book. I don’t recall if he mentions this case specifically. He says that many such attractions were true hermaphrodites, but then underwent selective body building, surgery and the like. It was common for such performers to strip, sometimes in shows which were restricted to all men or all women. Flannery O’Connor discussed this in a short story.

Johnny Eck was clearly the model for a character in William Lindsey Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley. It appears that he was actually a prince of a fellow.

No one has asked about Kaiser Wilhelm yet. He is cited in the opening to the film, and people ask about it in theaters. The Kaiser would have been excluded from his own army; his one arm was severely stunted.

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Another thought: micropcephalic persons developed their condition relatively late in gestation, when their brains stop growing prematurely. I recall hearing in a documentary once that there were a disproportionately high number of such births in and around Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few months after the atomic bombs were dropped.

9

The info about Koo-Koo, I got from “Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others,” by Daniel Mannix (Feral House publishing). Mannix and some of his carny buddies get to talking about Koo-Koo, and that’s basically what they had to say – that she was a little on the homely side, but far from ugly. She simply had a knack for exaggerating her worst features to the point of freakishness.

If she was blind, I sure never heard about it.

10

I believe Freaks is coming out on DVD this fall. I’d imagine the sound will be better.

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Another note about microcephalism: I believe that it can also be caused by the mother contracting German measles during pregnancy.

About Johnny Eck: it seems to me that there’s far more to his deformity than not having legs; his torso seems to be abnormally shortened. Being the biologist/thrill seeker I am, I spent some time trying to find information about his anatomy. I found proof that he was thoroughly examined, but if a report was ever made public, it isn’t online.

About conjoined twins: they’re total flukes. No way to prevent them.

12

Thanks for all the comments thus far. Wang-Ka, slipster and FisherQueen, I’ll definitely try to check out some of those books. They all seem up my alley.

Sattua–I noticed that, too. It did seem like he was cut off from the waist up, instead just having legs cut off. So one of the questions running through my mind pertained to his genitalia. It just didn’t look like there was room for them. Looking back, I figured I was just remembering wrong, and that I was a bit creepy for even thinking of him like that. He seemed like such a nice guy, too, from the film. Really personable. I feel like if you knew him, the fact that he didn’t have legs just wouldn’t be an issue.

Re: the sound…I only ask because I’ve seen a couple of pre-30s films (“Blackmail” and “Anna Christie”) and their sound seemed, if not perfect, a lot better than that of “Freaks.” The storyline is simple enough, though.

As for Josephine/Joseph, I figured that the split down the middle thing must have been a put on. But I thought maybe he was a hermaphrodite and just decided to make it more obvious externally. It never really occurred to me that “normal” people would voluntarily become freaks. Were they accepted by the honest-to-god, already born sideshow attractions, or were they just part of the gang?

Also, about the pinheads, maybe I’m a little slow, but how would dressing them as girls make their toilet needs easier to take care of?

13

As one who has worked with a variety of disabled individuals in a variety of capacities, chum, I could tell you, but I suspect it would be a matter of TMI.

Put it this way: From a caretaker standpoint, “accidents” are somewhat easier to prevent, and considerably quicker to clean up if one’s charge is wearing a dress, as opposed to trousers of any sort… and microcephalic individuals, as I mentioned, tend towards profound mental retardation.

They often have trouble with toilet training well past the age where you and I ceased to have “accidents.”

As to “normal” people becoming freaks – there are any number of cases where people have done just that. Particularly during that time frame – guys like Schlitzie were making truly insane money during a period of history where a great many “normal” people with saleable skills were going hungry. Most “tattooed men” (and women, for that matter) were perfectly ordinary folks who, for the sake of a new career, got coated in cartoons. Nowadays, it’s likely most folks wouldn’t pay a buck to see a “tattooed man,” simply because you stand a decent chance of running into one at the food co-op or the Herbal Tea stand, but in the 1930s, such things were rare. And so was the opportunity to see someone running around nearly nude, hence the popularity of “snake ladies” and tattooed women.

Another “normal” chap, the Great Mortado, had holes drilled in his hands and feet, and wore cork wedges in them to keep them from growing back together. He had a special chair built that had little feeder tubes that fit in these holes… and billed himself as “Mortado, the Human Fountain.” He had a great little spiel about how he was the only human ever to survive being crucified by the Savage Natives of the Ookabollakonga tribe, or whatever, and…

…you get the drill. Aside from the holes, he was as normal a guy as you can find, from what I’m told.

I’ve also heard of “siamese twins” who are actually just two guys or two women strapped together. The dead giveaway here is that siamese twins are always identical twins; grifts, on the other hand, usually can’t find actual twins, so the fake twins won’t resemble each other. I seem to remember hearing about one set of siamese twins who were supposedly brother and sister, in fact…

The success of some of the odder conjoined twins – one whole human and one partial human, sticking out of them – led to a whole string of grifts in that department, as well. Frank Lentini became a rich man simply due to having an extra leg (and an extra penis, as well, but I understand he didn’t normally show that off. Not for money, anyway…) At any rate, lots of people supposedly manufactured fake arms, legs, body parts, heads, whatever, and glued or strapped them on to show. Hell, how many jobs simply require you to sit there and get stared at for really good money?

Sources:
“Very Special People” Frederick J. Drimmer
“Confessions Of A Sword Swallower” Daniel Mannix
“Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others” Daniel Mannix

14

Anyone on here read Geek Love by Katherine Dunn? Parents that set out to purposefully create their own sideshow…

15

Oh. Thanks, Wang-Ka.

settlement–Yeah, I finished it only a couple of weeks ago. The Binewski family and their successful experiment was on my mind as I asked the question. I was thinking of starting a thread on it, but I figured I should wait a while after this one to avoid the one-trick pony rep. In Geek Love, the thing that really caught my attention was all the kids that didn’t survive, actually…

16

Yet another book of interest is Jay’s Journal of Anomalies by Ricky Jay. During the 1990s Jay published a quarterly newsletter about sideshow attractions and the like, and the entire run was eventually published as a book. In each issue he focused on a different attraction, such as people who fasted (or claimed to) to extreme degrees as a public attraction, or flea circuses.

There was an entire issue about Mortado and other individuals who made a career of being nailed up. One performer in the 1890’s would sing “After the Ball is Over” while suspended from a cross. He also gave some attention to freaks of nature, such as sideshow fat people and a highly unusual dwarf who billed himself for a time as “The Human Fly”.

Fiedler referred to people having faked being conjoined twins but does not, as I recall, cite examples.