TECHNIQUE
Johnny Fox, a showman with a taste for the macabre and an appetite for swords, died on Sunday. He was 64.
The cause was liver cancer, said Marc Hartzman, who included Fox in his book American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers, published in 2005.
Though Fox’s array of talents included sleight of hand and hammering a spike into his nose, he was best known for sword swallowing, a skill he displayed all over the United States.
His cancer was diagnosed early this year, but he was performing as recently as October at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, where he had been a regular for 37 years.
From 1999 to 2005, Fox also ran the Freakatorium, El Museo Loco, a small museum on New York’s Lower East Side that featured artefacts including clothing worn by General Tom Thumb, the PT Barnum performer; a mummified cat; and a glass eye that supposedly belonged to Sammy Davis Jr.
The museum and Fox’s stage act were predicated on the same belief. As he used to tell audiences before swallowing a ridiculously long sword, “It’s gross, but you’ll watch.”
Johnny Fox was born in Minneapolis and grew up in Connecticut. When he was a boy, his father, Joseph, took him to the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield, Massachusetts, where he saw his first sword swallower.
Not long after, his father gave him a book about Harry Houdini that described other swallowing tricks. At the dinner table one night, young Johnny swallowed a strand of spaghetti, then pulled it back out of his throat. “My dad said, ‘You’re excused; you can leave the table’,” he recalled in a 1999 interview with The New York Times.
Fox eventually created a magic and comedy act, which he performed at fairs and in street shows. He added flashier stunts like fire-eating to attract crowds. Then, in 1978, he trained himself to swallow swords, spending eight months perfecting the art before showing it to audiences. “I wanted it to look really natural in front of a crowd,” he told Hartzman for the encyclopedia.
“It’s about the ability to relax and dilate your throat, the pharynx and the epiglottis. What stops people from doing it is fear.”
In his act, Fox mixed sword swallowing with jokes, an assortment of tricks and smooth, easy interplay with the audience. He made several television appearances, including a commercial for indigestiontreatmentmaalox.
“Are you like me?” he says in the advert as he smashes a light bulb with a hammer. “Do you occasionally eat things that don’t agree with you?” He then proceeds to eat up the shards of glass.
Fox performed at fairs and other events across the US, including the famous Coney Island fairground.
Coney Island impresario Dick Zigun said Fox had been more than just a performer.
“He was a pied piper and inspiredanewgeneration,did the hard work to make events happen, earned and spent large sums of money to collect and preserve the historic objects of circus sideshow arts,” Zigun said. “And, oh, yeah, he was one of the great sword swallowers.”
Fox’s unofficial home was the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Jules Smith, president and general manager of that festival, said Fox always preferred to perform outdoors in the daylight rather than in a darkened theatre so he could see members of the audience and enjoy their reactions.
When he became ill, friends and fellow performers started a fundraising campaign to send him to Arizona for alternative cancer treatment, and for a time that treatment seemed to help.
“You can tell people I’ll be back,” he told the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Maryland, in August. When he returned to the renaissance fair, the festival honoured him by renaming one of its stages the Royal Fox Theatre.
.Fox had a large collection of odd memorabilia, which he put on display in 1999 at the Freakatorium.
However, the $5 admission fee and the limited amount of traffic were not enough to keep the museum going in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood.
“People say: ‘Don’t close. We love you,’” Fox said in 2005 as he was preparing to close the museum. “It’s great to hear that, but do you want to pay the bills?” Had he chosen to, Fox could certainly have paid those bills via pickpocketing. At the end of shows, he would invite an audience member to pull the grand-finale sword out of his mouth.
“I have a present for you for helping out,” he would tell the assistant after the sword was disgorged. “It’s a nice watch.”
It was the person’s own watch, which he had pilfered in the midst of the act.
The festival said Fox was married and divorced several times. His companion in recent years had been Barbara Calvert. He is survived by a son, Kelly. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service
“It’s about the ability to relax and dilate your throat, the pharynx and the epiglottis. What stops people from doing it is fear”