The "Bearded Lady," the "Four-Legged Woman," the "Albino Sisters," and "Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy," made a surprise appearance at the ANTIQUES ROADSHOW Tampa event in the summer of 2005. Once promoted as "freaks" at dime museums and circus sideshows they all showed up in a collection of more than a hundred late 19th-century photographs. We were curious: Who were the people who posed for these photos, and were their oddities staged, or were they real?
For an answer, we consulted Robert Bogdan, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University and the author of Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Bogdan said that if there was only one thing true about every person who appeared in a sideshow, it's that they were packaged and puffed up to sell to the gawkers.
"The whole thing is hype," Bogdan says. "It's not like these people didn't have some physical abnormalities. Many did. But there was always a story to go with it. This was show business."
Usually, the hooksters began with a dash of reality and then doctored the soup with a combination of exaggerations, bold-face lies, and pseudoscience to entice the paying rubes. The first human "oddity" that the showman P.T. Barnum ever exhibited, Joice Heath, was 80-years old in 1835, but Barnum promoted her as the 161-year-old nurse of President George Washington (who died in 1799). The man with poorly formed arms became "Seal Man"; the man with poorly formed legs, "Frog Man." The man whose entire face was covered with hair was Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy.
Sometimes the scam consists of elevating someone's status to epic proportions. Charles Sherwood Stratton, a tiny boy with a pituitary problem born into a Connecticut family of modest means, became rich when his promoters changed his age, changed his birthplace to London, and re-titled him General Tom Thumb. Sometimes the ordinary was billed as the exotic. An African-American dressed in a grass skirt and given a spear was sold as a Zulu tribesman. Attractive women had their hair soaked with beer and then teased to create Afros — part of the shtick used to create "Circassian Beauties," who had reputedly escaped from Turkish harems. Most were neighborhood girls in need of cash.
Other times, the acts were outright fakes, known in the business as "gaffed freaks." This was especially true during the heyday of sideshows, from the 1880s to the 1920s, when there was hot competition among promoters for real Siamese twins and other human oddities coaxed with lucrative contracts to join exhibits. The four-legged lady was often two ladies — one, in full view, with her two legs, and another who was hidden from view, supplying the other two. The ape-like "Madamoiselle Fanny," dressed in Sunday clothes and a parasol, was not some strange half-breed offspring of human and ape, as she was billed. From her calledoused knuckles to her prominent jaw, she was every inch an actual ape.
P.T. Barnum was savvy enough - some have called him the Shakespeare of advertising - to use the suspicions of the paying public to his own advantage. To promote Madam Clofulia, the bearded lady whom he recruited from Switzerland, Barnum planted a person in the audience who was charged that she was a fraud, a man dressed in women's clothing, and took his charges to court. Three doctors confirmed that the Madam actually was a Madam, as did two men who should know best - her father and her husband. The judge, knowing a con when he saw one, dismissed the case, but not before press accounts of the lawsuit drew thousands of curious customers to Barnum's museum.