Hubert's Freaks: the lost photos of Diane Arbus

Hubert's Museum was a Times Square dime museum open from the mid-1920s until 1965. This cabinet of curiosities was an icon of sideshow culture, featuring a flea circus, sword swallowers, contortionists, and other fabulous freaks. During its later years, the museum was frequented by my favorite photographer, Diane Arbus. Indeed, that's where she met the awesome giant Eddie Carmel who stooped for a famed family portrait with his normal-sized parents. Recently, a rare book dealer named Bob Langmuir came to possess the personal papers of Charlie Lucas, a sideshow performer himself who served as a manager at Hubert's Museum. Among the papers were two dozen of Arbus's original photographs, worth around $100 when she was alive and now valued in the high six figures at least. A new book by Gregory Gibson, titled "Hubert's Freaks," tells the story of the Museum, Lucas, and Lagmuir's efforts to make big bucks of his find. I ordered a copy before even finishing the review of the book in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. From the LA Times:

During the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, Charlie Lucas presided over the "Darkest Africa" exhibit as "African Chief of the Duckbill Women," a.k.a. "WooFoo, the Immune Man." He wore a bone through his nose and swallowed fire. (The fair that year celebrated, without irony, a "Century of Progress.") He and his wife, the beautiful Woogie, eventually settled in New York, and Lucas found work managing Hubert's Museum, where Woogie performed her snake-charming act alongside the aforementioned Sealo, Professor Heckler's Flea Circus, Mildred the Alligator Skin Girl, a Russian midget named Andy Potato Chips and Eddie Carmel, the Jewish Giant.

Not incidentally, Lucas was befriended there by photographer Diane Arbus, who talked her way into the homes of his colleagues and shot what would later become iconic photos of, among others, Andy Potato Chips with two other midgets in his Uptown living room and Eddie Carmel bent beneath the ceiling of his Bronx apartment, his parents looking like frightened Lilliputians beside him.

So when Bob Langmuir -- the protagonist of Gibson's tale, a rare-book dealer and collector of African Americana -- happened across a trove of Lucas' papers, he had reason to be excited.

Link to buy Hubert's Freaks, Link to HubertsFreaks.com (Thanks, Mark F.!)

• [numbone]

  Fascinating material. Human, very human. I found the film portrayal with Nicole Kidman very well done:
  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422295/

• [idontwant2liveinoprahsworld]

  Amazing. I just happened to purchase the Lenny Bruce box recently. Lenny did a routine (or “bit” as he called them)about being a kid in New York and talking his mother into taking him there because of his interest in (what he thought was) science.
  His bit ends up being a send up of the half-man half-woman at Huberts museum.
  I will be ordering this book ASAP.
  Pranksters everywhere should give Lenny a listen.

• [Seedouble]

  Check this out:
  http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/the_jewish_giant/

  “The Jewish Giant began with Jenny’s search to uncover a story that has remained a secret for 25 years. Eddie was normal sized until he became a teenager, when he began to grow uncontrollably (he suffered from acromegaly, a then-incurable condition resulting from a tumor that had developed on his pituitary gland). According to The Guiness Book of World Records, Eddie grew to be 8’9″. As an adult, the only work he could find involved exploiting his freakishness. He starred in B-grade monster movies (The Brain that Wouldn’t Die), made two 45 records (“The Happy Giant” and “The Good Monster”) and was billed in the Ringling Brothers Circus at Madison Square Garden as “The Tallest Man on Earth.” Eddie died in 1972 at the age of 36 in Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. His coffin was custom made.

  The Jewish Giant is a story of suffering, of not fitting in, of the body betraying itself, and of the bizarre life-twists that can subsume a family. It’s a story about what it’s like to be a regular person looking at the world from inside a not-so-regular body.”

• [Tenn]

  Thanks Seedouble! Haven’t read it yet but it sounds interesting. I’ll never complain about topping out at 5’0 again.

• [Seedouble]

  Be sure to listen to the interviews!

• [Robert Langmuir]

  Dear Friend:
  Thanks for your enthusiastic remarks about the book Hubert’s Freaks. Can you please correct the spelling of my last name in your first paragraph. Otherwise the geneological angels won’t get credit.
  I sincerely hope you enjoy the book.
  Much Obliged.
  Robert

• [David Pescovitz]

  SEEDOUBLE, awesome link. Thanks so much!!!