She fears for a clown.
“They’ll mob him,” says Megan McCord. “They’ll run down the hill and the kids will be all over him. We just can’t allow that to happen to Bozo.”
McCord is the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Auxiliary Board Coordinator and, as such, is in charge of making sure that Bozo–popular television personality and Chicago icon–remains intact so that he can lead the parade that will, in a few minutes, kick off the 10th annual Spooky Zoo festivities.
Inside the Crown Field Center, in a surreal encounter that would have put a smile on the face of filmmaker Federico Fellini, Bozo is chatting amiably with Ronald McDonald, a unicyclist and a stilt walker.
Informed that he is wanted outside to pose for some photos, Bozo says, in that preternaturally cheerful way of his, “Hey. Great idea. Let’s take some pictures,” and heads out into the damp day.
He is immediately surrounded by children and their parents. Joyful chaos ensues, as the clown is hugged and kid-handled. From a pathway above, child after Halloween-costumed child–and their parents–shout, “Hey, it’s Bozo!”
It is Bozo. And being Bozo means never being able to say “Sorry. No time to say hello,” or “Sorry. I’m sick and tired of screaming kids.”
“Hey, kids,” says Bozo, waving. “Are we having fun?”
Another thing being Bozo means is rarely being able to say you are Joey D’Auria.
“I have never minded that,” says D’Auria, the man who is Bozo. “Look at this. People love Bozo.”
This is D’Auria’s 11th year as Chicago’s Bozo. His is the most anonymously famous face in a city that zealously celebrates its famous folk.
During the parade, as he slowly travels through the zoo sitting on top of the back seat of a convertible, Bozo is greeted with squeals, shouts, hoots and hollers. People rush up to the car for a brush of the clown’s white-gloved hands. From small hills and through chain-link fences, the faithful voice their affection.
“Working with Bozo is one of the fun parts of my job,” says the zoo’s president, Kevin Bell, who has taped some zoo-related features with Bozo for the show. “It goes back to (previous zoo presidents) Marlin (Perkins) and Les (Fisher). It’s great to be part of that tradition.”
There were once as many as 180 Bozo shows across the TV land and on a couple of dozen foreign sets. But our Bozo has always had the best and most popular one.
This is no mere civic chauvinism. It’s fact. Just ask the next person you meet on the street.
“Bozo?” says a man named Henry Waller, walking down Michigan Avenue one recent afternoon. “He’s part of Chicago’s cultural fabric.”
Bozo was born as a voice, created by Capitol Records vice president Alan Livingston in 1946 for a series of albums and read-along books with titles such as “Bozo Under the Sea.” The albums were so successful that in 1949 Capitol decided Bozo should take human, or at least clown, form.
A character actor named Larry Harmon was hired to play the part at promotional events and in commercials. He designed and constructed the costume and the clown, engineering the famous wig with yak hair from Tibet.
Harmon, knowing a good thing when he invented one, eventually bought the rights to Bozo (he still owns them) and began selling franchises to television stations.
In most places these were shoestring affairs–little more than excuses for showing cartoons–with cardboard sets and clowns played by any station employee shameless enough to don the red nose and huge shoes.
In Chicago, it started quietly as a simple 30-minute show in 1959. But in 1961, it was reborn as “Bozo’s Circus,” with more elaborate sets, an orchestra and an audience. Its cagey mix of slapstick, circus acts, participatory games and cartoons has remained relatively unchanged over the decades as the show moved from daily staple to, earlier this year, a once-a-week spot (“Bozo’s Super Sunday Circus” at 8 a.m. Sundays on WGN-Ch. 9).
The first Chicago Bozo was Bob Bell, a gifted comic actor, a gentle man. When Bell retired in 1984, a national search for a replacement resulted in D’Auria’s first trip to Chicago.
Plucked from a comedy club
He was then a 32-year-old graduate of New York City’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts, scratching out a living as an actor and standup comic in L.A.
“I was, I believe,” he says, laughing, “on the brink of getting a role as the wacky next-door neighbor on some sitcom.”
Perhaps, but he was spending most of his time at a place called the Variety Arts Center, a club-restaurant that catered to and featured performances by old vaudevillians and burlesque acts.
“I was just soaking up the work of all these great old performers,” D’Auria says, sitting in his modestly appointed dressing room at the WGN studios on the Northwest Side.
Michael Feinstein, later to become a piano-playing recording star, was tickling the keys in the club’s lounge. Victoria Jackson, later to appear on “Saturday Night Live,” worked as a cocktail waitress. D’Auria was the maitre d’ and an occasional performer.
One of his creations–Dr. Flamo, who sang as he held his hands over burning candles of varying size–was a consistent “Gong Show” winner. D’Auria’s career hit its pre-Bozo high point when Dr. Flamo appeared on a New Year’s Eve broadcast of “The Tonight Show”; “right before Tina Turner,” D’Auria remembers.
D’Auria seems to remember almost everything, recalling, for instance, that the fellow applying the makeup for his first Bozo audition “was smoking a cigarette and the longest ash was hanging, precariously, just above my face.”
That audition went well.
“I chewed up the scenery in a way that would have made Jim Carrey blush,” D’Auria says.
He got the job and, increasingly aware of the stature of Bozo in Chicago, advised his then 9-year-old son, Brendan, not to say anything to his new classmates about his father’s new job.
“You’re an actor,” said the boy. “It’s just another job.”
But being Bozo is not just another job. It is a mission, a calling. It is more than a job to be the object of constant adulation.
“I might be jaded if it was my face out there,” he says. “But I still get so excited by the people’s reaction to Bozo.”
In the early years of his Chicago clown tenure, the show’s production demands precluded any outside work.
“In those first seasons, the station never objected to my doing other work. They did have some conditions: I couldn’t do anything by (occasionally street-talking playwright David) Mamet; I could not do `A Streetcar Named Desire’ dressed in the Bozo costume,” he says. “But there wasn’t time for a lot of outside work.”
He filled his non-Bozo professional hours with some voice-over gigs and a few industrial videos. Last year he was approached to appear in the Briar Street Theatre production of the Neil Simon comedy “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” He joined the cast for eight months, playing the character Max Prince, a Sid Caesar-like 1950s TV comic.
Reviewing D’Auria’s performance, Tribune critic Richard Christiansen wrote that “(D’Auria) does not have the sheer heft of Caesar’s size to make some of the show’s physical jokes work. He’s more like a toy terrier compared with Caesar’s bull mastiff. But . . . he can shpritz with the best of them, and, as required, he has the awesome energy to keep the bang-bang pace of the comedy zinging right along.”
“Not bad for a first review, eh?” says D’Auria. “That was the first time I ever did a play and it was great. It was grueling. But it was a pleasure to perform without a yak wig.”
Uniquely Chicago
D’Auria is, in and out of costume, a pleasant man, eager to amuse. This day he is dressed in an outfit that would fit nicely onstage in a Noel Coward play: brown pants, shoes, sport coat and pattern tie, accented by a brown suede vest, a pocket square and a watch fob. He lives with his wife, Virginia, in Wilmette; their son is now a musician.
D’Auria says that he has no burning desire to try another acting arena. He proudly announces that he has started writing more sketches for the TV show. He remains, comfortably, an actor in clown’s clothing.
“The show, of course, is not what it once was,” he says. “We are fighting for every viewer we get. Over the years we have gotten all sorts of competition–Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles. But the station is committed to the show, very committed. And so am I.”
There remains the legendarily long wait for tickets to the tapings–now up to three years–and there continues the struggle, on the part of pundits and critics, to explain Bozo’s appeal.
Many years ago, Michael Arlen, the usually incisive television critic for the New Yorker, tripped over his patrician intellectualism when he criticized Bozo’s show for its “carnival cheapness and its almost primitive exploitation of children and parents.”
Chicago’s Bozo, as brought to the public by D’Auria and before him by Bob Bell, is a gloriously inane innocent. He has become, for a couple of generations, an enduring symbol of simpler times. He is still, for kids, silly and subversive enough to please.
“Bob Bell wasn’t, and neither am I, a clown. We are actors in clown suits, exploring the artistic side of low comedy,” D’Auria says. “That’s one of the keys to his popularity. Another is that Chicagoans tend to lionize things they deem uniquely Chicago. And that’s Bozo.”
Al Hall, the man who directed the show for its first six years and has been its producer since 1973, has been asked through the years to explain Bozo’s appeal. He tries: “I really think that people who send in for tickets don’t really care if they have kids or not. When adults get here, they revert to childhood.”
Simply explaining Bozo’s appeal is one member of the mob that waits at the Farm-in-the-Zoo, the final stop on Bozo’s Spooky Zoo trip.
A six-year-old boy named Todd Whaley shouts, “I love you, Bozo!” as soon as he sees the car and the clown come into view.
“Why do you love Bozo?” asks his mother, Grace.
“Bozo is Bozo,” he says.
