Sesquipedalian

THIS WAY TO THE BIG SHOW: THE LIFE OF DEXTER FELLOWS--Dexter W. Fellows and Andrew A. Freeman--Viking ($3.50).

Mother gorillas in equatorial Africa speak his name to hush their young. He has crossed Australia in the pouch of a kangaroo. He has followed the edge of the Gulf Stream in a rowboat to determine the exact date of spring. He has taught Ubangi women to play tiddlywinks on their platter lips. He owns an adjective factory in New Britain, Conn., whence he sallies forth each year, like a vernal Santa Claus, to scatter his sesquipedalian largess to thirstily gaping yokels. These and hundreds of such amiable Munchausenisms have been printed in the U. S. Press about Dexter William Fellows.

Newspaper editors are not as a rule fond of pressagents, but Dexter Fellows is a pressagent extraordinary, and he ballyhoos the most widely beloved of U. S. businesses. On the annual news that the circus is coming to town, even the dourest city editor is moved to let his newshawks soar far from earthy fact into the empyrean of their fancy--especially when the harbinger of this perennial Noah's Ark is such a downy dove as Dexter Fellows. In the 43 years Harbinger Fellows has been pressagenting for the circus, he has never failed to get favorable free publicity for "the Greatest Show on Earth"; his only problem has been how much he would get this time. The myth of his own personality has grown and flowered to such lush proportions that some have doubted his actual existence. But that he still is and has been very much alive was proved last week by his autobiography (ghosted by his good friend, a onetime newshawk, Andrew A. Freeman).

This Way to the Big Show is as far from the confessional type of memoirs as Tom Thumb from Jumbo the elephant. Fellows' life has been a three-ring circus, and he presents it in those terms. He ballyhoos himself as "a genie of journalistic paste jars, a fantastic flower nurtured in a pot of printer's ink, a product of the freedom of the press." True to his profession, he says he has done his best to tell the truth, adds: "Occasionally my tongue slipped into my cheek." No one who has ever been to the circus will mind that.

Born inappropriately in Boston, Dexter William Fellows was named after a race horse and a favorite uncle. Like every small boy he fell flat under the spell of his first circus; unlike others, he never recovered. When, barely grown up, he got a chance to join Pawnee Bill's "Historic Wild West" as pressagent, he jumped at it with both feet. Once in his niche, he was never tempted to seek a higher pinnacle. The late Ivy Lee, then a hard-working but undistinguished Manhattan newshawk, gave Fellows the benefit of his own ambitious advice about becoming a tycoon; Fellows let it lie, went on down his own primrose path.

His book abounds in tall tales, wreaths of reminiscence, diverting digressions. Of Annie Oakley, famed deadshot of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, he records that she was extremely stingy, never took so much as a beer unless someone else paid for it; that the bullets she used in her act were explosive, scattered the shot so that misses were rare. Death Valley Scotty, broncobuster, was such a glutton for chocolate creams that he ate them while his mount was cutting capers. Buffalo Bill stuck religiously to his temperance pledge except in his native State of Nebraska: there all bets were off, and the show, taking its cue from him, went really wild. Cody and his equally temperamental manager, "Arizona John" Burke, sometimes had differences. Cody once wired him: IF YOU WANT TO REMAIN WITH THIS SHOW YOU MUST OBEY MY ORDERS. To which Burke replied collect: WHO THE HELL EVER TOLD YOU I WANTED TO REMAIN WITH YOUR SHOW BRING OUT THE BAND LET IT PLAY HAIL TO THE CHIEF ITS A MATTER OF RECORD THAT COLUMBUS WAS PUT IN CHAINS AFTER DISCOVERING AMERICA AND THAT THE JEWS CRUCIFIED AN AWFULLY GOOD MAN.

The days of the circus' death-defying stunts, as the days of its parades down Main Street, are over. Both are now an unnecessary complication of an already complicated routine. Since Ringling's and Barnum & Bailey's have combined, such competitive stunts are no longer demanded. Fellows admits that accidents still happen under the big top, but on no such scale as in the dangerous days of looping automobiles and diving bicycles. Such ' hair-raising numbers as Clyde Beatty's animal-training act are not popular with all members of the audience, and present knotty transportation difficulties. But the elephants, the trapezists, the trick riding, the clowns are hardy perennials. Of the professional clowns Fellows remembers, one filled in the winters at osteopathy, one was a patent lawyer. Everywhere the circus goes, says Fellows, local bankers, merchants, doctors want to act as a clown for one show. "To accommodate them we keep several extra costumes on hand."

Some publicity stunts that Pressagent Fellows tells about: sending an elephant to lay a wreath on a dead elephant's monument; staging the real wedding of a clown in Madison Square Garden; putting up a gorilla at Manhattan's McAlpin Hotel. One stunt he denies any connection with was plumping the midget (Lia Graf) on J. P. Morgan's knee. Of circus freaks in general Fellows writes with friendly sympathy. He recalls one Jonathan R. Bass, an ossified man: "He seemed well informed, was fond of conversation, and was an atheist." Once a certain fire-eating man fell in love with the bearded lady, whose place was next his on the sideshow platform. When she spurned him, his love turned to hate. At the next show he suddenly shot his flaming breath at her, singed her precious beard.

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