Confessions of a Cat Woman

This is the gripping and shocking story of a tiny woman that ran away with the circus at the turn of the 20th Century, before everyone had electicity, indoor plumbing, or an automobile. The Wright Brothers were experimenting with flight.

The scarcely 5-foot tall lady became the only living female tiger trainer in her era, one or two having been mauled to death before her. She was mauled several times, but kept coming back to circus after circus, until she left the Big Top in 1938.

This biographical fiction is gripping, because it features danger and is controversial. The controversy surrounds the question of how accurate the fiction might be, especially written by a Canadian author about American culture. It is controversial also in its explanations of animal training that society decries today. it is controverial thirdly in its conent of unorthodox means used by an indepenedent woman to survive in a time before women were little accepted in the US workplace, were not permitted to vote, and were largely immobile. How did Mabel Stark survive The Great Depression? How did she survive lions and tigers, carnies, and cut-throat competition among circuses until WWII and their deline?

The story is as shocking as the film Iron Jawed Angels of the same era -- Some women were beaten and spat upon for wanting to vote, while others were ripped to bloody shreds in a lion cage, which was a step up from stripping in the sideshow.

The story is shocking for the inhumane lack of care with which some circuses ruined animals.

It is shocking for the lack of recognition of professionally and historically important women like this one.

The Final Confession of Mabel Stark

Robert Hough

Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003

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Born in 1889, one of the most famous animal trainers in US history fled the mental health system of the early 1900s, married 6 times, suffered repeated catastropic injuries, and ended up working with the big cats in California's JungleLand until she was 79 years old in 1968. She never retired, never collected Social Security, never benefitted from Medicare; and finally committed suicide after the death of her favorite tiger - as far as can be determined from archived records.

The wonders of Ms. Stark's life were more difficult than the abusive treatment suffered by her contemporary sisters seeking The Vote in America. Both lived in cages of a sort - one full of tigers and one filled with discrimination.

The extent of this cat woman's injuries was worse in her first mauling than those depicted for Jesus by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. The film was nothing compared to the front row scene of a tiger knocking her down, ripping her open lengthwise and eating raw muscle.

Stark loss massive amonts of skin and blood as well, but recovered to return to the big cats she loved. Like many people on Valentines Day questionnaires, she'd choose an animal over a human mate.

During Stark's first massive injury, men and women jumped up and ran out of the tent, just as they ran from the theater during The Passion, appalled and sickened by the CGI scourging of Christ. However, Mabel's was real and blood flowed everywhere. Some male spectators came forward to the cage thinking to help, but it was too late. Amazingly, ripped to shreds, she recovered - and that was just the first major scathing. She lived for her work; and there was no Workers Compensation or disability insurance in those days.

Mabel Stark worked with a series of menageries and circuses, beginning possibly as a sideshow stripper or "cooch", but documented as a horse rider in the circus show. When she ruled  Center Ring with Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus in the 1920s with 21 tigers, the circus was the top entertainment anywhere in the USA. 

Animal training was crude. Wearing either a black or a white leather jumpsuit, Stark wrestled with 500-pound Bengal tigers and other cats and none were neutered nor declawed. Today, they are neutered, declawed, and defanged and do not live as long with the circus as they would in the jungle.

Author Robert Hough visited every city that had a circus museum, especially Circus World in Barraboo, Minnesota (see the link to the right). Journals, letters, and circus posters provide an outline for his book, but fiction fills in major gaps, as he explains in his afterward to the book.

According to reporter May Okon in the New York Daily News on 2/26/1950, Mabel Stark suffered massive mauling injuries on three separate occasions at Center Ring, along with a dozen lesser attacks, but always came back. In 1968, Mabel died and JungleLand declared bankruptcy and passed away as well. The only remembrance of it today is a restaurant on the former site, named the New Jungleland Cafe, where photos of Mabel Stark may be seen inside. She is a landmark just as much as is the cafe.

New Perspectives and Key Testimonies

Virginia Barnes Stonehouse writes on Amazon,.com with her own memories of her dad, Al G. Barnes. She takes issue with two parts of the novel and stands up for her mom, who was also denigrated in the story.

Circus History Message & Discussion Board contains some interesting personal hoistories of indivisulds that have seen or have known the Marvelous Mabel Stark. A visitor signing as Giovanni Iuliania tells is that Louis Roth was a well known animal training, but also a respected trainer's trainer of his era. He was the trainer and nmentor to Clyde Beatty and Mabel Stark, among others. He takes issue with author Robert Hough's contention that circuses picked up temporary labor from local drunk wards and insane asylums --

The assertion may or may not be true, but I personally know that my grandfather (from 1878 - 1920s, at least), father, their nephews and others joined other farming families each autumn after the major harvest to set up the annual installation of the Circus when it pulled into the rail station. The great speculative fiction author Ray Bradbury wrote about this same sequence of events in the 1930s to World War II in novels and short stories from personal experience. In fact, his favorite topics include October and the circus come-to-town.

If drunks and lunatics were hired by the circuses, it was not in farming communities in the autumn of the year. That may have occurred in larger cities where schools were not closed for the week of the circus shows.

Roger Smith on the same bulletin board that he was trained and coached by Mabel Stark at JungleLand for the last 3.5 years of her life, which would be approximately late 1962 - April 20, 1968. She'd been at the entertainment complex/theme park for 30 years, since 1938. Mr. Smith lived across the street from her and remembered that her housekeeper found her dead in bed that morning.

Other stories of Mabel's end are circulating in Hough's book, by rumor, and on the Interenet. One legend is that she stuck her head in her oven, turned on the gas, and died by suicide. Another is that she drank poison, stumbled out to her car in the garage, and sat inside it with the engine running until she died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Rumors are that her favorite tiger, one that had mauled people to the extent that he was ordered destroyed, had been spirited away to a safe haven and Mabel learned that he had died on the day of her own death.

A teacher posted a message around Thanksgiving 2009 that she found a copy of Mabel's 1938 memoir Hold That Tiger and read from it in class every year until she leant it to someone. It was named after a popular big band song of the era. The Internet Movie Data Base sows that Mabel appeard in a few films, but uncredited.

Roger Smith has posted on at least one circus blog, with a photo of Mabel posed with her friend Mae West, whom Stark doubled for in the movies. He has been reportedly writing his own biography of Mabel Stark, to replace fiction with facts as he received them from Mabel 42 years ago at this writing in 2010.

Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes purchased movie rights to Hough's book, but a screen play is not yet in hand. Ms. Winslet has planned to play Mabel Stark.

Mabel Stark did not receive credit enough for her life of accomplishments, even though animal traiing was cruel in itself in many ways – whips, guns, shouting, and many atrocities. In addition, she never worked under Social Security, had no retirement fund,  and had to work to the day she died at age 79. 

In 2010, the age of retirement with full benefits is gradually rising to 75, so she could take some justice from that; but she had no retirement income except from continued work at the mismanaged end-time JungleLand.

Her happiest times may have been wwhen she doubled for Mae West, when both stated that each would be just as happy to be the other woman. That was a short amount of happiness.