Emmett Leo Kelly was an American circus clown. He performed with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, where he was a major attraction, from 1942 to 1956.
Background
Emmett Leo Kelly was born on December 9, 1898 in Sedan, Kansas, United States, the son of Thomas Kelly, a railroad section foreman, and Mollie Schimick. By the time Emmett began school his father had retired from the railroad and purchased a small farm near Cabool, Missouri.
Education
Kelly attended in Cabool, Missouri, one-room schoolhouse for eight years. A fair student with definite artistic abilities, he failed to graduate from the eighth grade because he was needed on the farm before the school year ended. Following the end of his formal education his mother enrolled him in a correspondence art course at the Landon School of Cartooning. Kelly quickly proved to be an able cartoonist. He completed his course in 1917.
Career
In 1917 Kelly embarked upon a career as a cartoonist and entertainer. Kelly's first job consisted of presenting chalk-talks in which he used his cartooning skills to convert words into illustrations. Throughout the remainder of his life Kelly continued to perfect this form of art and used it whenever he performed in nightclubs. In 1920, Kelly secured a position as a cartoonist with the Adagram Film Company of Kansas City, a firm that created animated advertisements for use in the local movie theaters. While working there Kelly created the cartoon character that eventually evolved into his alter ego, the clown Weary Willie. Throughout his life Kelly maintained that his first ambition as a boy, as a young man, and as an adult was to be an artist.
Along the way, however, he attended a circus, worked for a short time as the manager of the carnival sideshow "Spidora, " learned to work on the single trapeze, and fell in love with "trouping, " the term used by circus performers for living on the road and working under the canvas big top. Kelly received his first real circus contract from Howe's Great London Circus in 1921 when he signed on to perform principally as a trapeze aerialist and double as a clown. On opening day, however, his incorrectly rigged trapeze resulted in a poor performance and the cancellation of the aerialist portion of his contract. Kelly, who still considered himself a trapeze artist, spent his first season performing as a whitefaced clown while studying the various aerialist acts and honing his own skills. The following year he returned to the single trapeze with the John Robinson's Circus and remained there for three seasons.
During his early years as a clown, Kelly performed in whiteface, using a zinc oxide and lard makeup with black or red greasepaint outlining the eyes, nose, mouth, and eyebrows. In the back of his mind, the cartoon tramp he had created slowly began to take form and finally emerged as his true clown identity. Prior to the Great Depression, Kelly's ragged tramp clown was considered dirty-looking and unacceptable. By 1933, however, the American public was ready to embrace the forlorn, melancholy little hobo who, according to Kelly, "always got the short end of the stick and never had any good luck at all, but who never lost hope and just kept trying. " Dressed in a tattered and torn suit with numerous mismatched patches, oversized shoes, a green shirt, and a derby, Kelly's alter ego, Weary Willie, performed a number of routines that became his trademarks. The most famous of these relied on two props, a broom and a spotlight, and Willie's relentless determination to sweep up every last circle of light in the darkened arena before the show began. In 1942 he took this routine to Madison Square Garden, where he opened with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.
In 1954, Kelly published his autobiography, Clown. He left Ringling Brothers and circus life in the spring of 1956. His career as a clown extended far beyond the circus arena. At the end of his first circus season he began performing as a clown in night clubs and small theaters. In 1940 he debuted on Broadway in a production of Keep Off the Grass, receiving favorable reviews. A decade later he portrayed a murderous clown in the David O. Selznick film The Fat Man (1950) and then appeared as Weary Willie in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).
Following his retirement from Ringling Brothers, Kelly opened at the Roxy in an ice show, spent a season as the Brooklyn Dodgers' mascot, performed in Sarah Caldwell's production of the opera The Bartered Bride, appeared in European movies and on European and American television, and served as the technical director of a General Electric Hour television feature based on his life. For sixteen years he played long summer engagements at clubs in Lake Tahoe and Reno.
Kelly met a young aerialist named Eva Moore at John Robinson's Circus, and they were married between shows on July 21, 1923, over the objections of her father and the circus manager. The couple had two children. They became known as the Aerial Kellys and worked together on a double trapeze. In 1935 the Kellys divorced. During the 1944 season Mildred Ritchie, a young aerialist performer, joined the Ringling Brothers tour. She and Kelly married on April 27, 1944, while the show played in New York City. Before the circus moved on to its next engagement the couple had agreed to end the marriage.
In 1945 a young German acrobat named Elvira ("Evie") Gebhardt arrived at Ringling and soon caught Kelly's attention. They were married on April 21, 1955. The next year they moved to Sarasota, Florida, where they raised their two daughters.