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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
You can laugh, but the mummified clown at the California Institute of Abnormalarts appears to be serious business.
Mar 25, 2002 | If Federico Fellini and Salvador Dalí had ever collaborated on a funeral service, it might have resembled what the California Institute of Abnormalarts in the North Hollywood section of Los Angeles did a few weeks back. There on a chilly February evening, about 60 mourners, curiosity seekers and full-fledged freaks had gathered for coffee, cake and a clown corpse hermetically sealed in a glass box and displayed onstage in a moldy coffin. According to the Byzantine prayer cards handed out at the entrance, these were the earthly remains of one Achile Chatouilleu, an American circus performer who died in 1912, asking that his body be forever on display in the clown attire and makeup he wore in life.
Attendees of this memorial service for Chatouilleu (whose last name reportedly translates as "French tickler") gained entrance with a donation of five dollars and a gift for the dearly departed. Canned hams, skeleton dolls, bottles of booze and packages of condoms were but some of the presents proffered by clubgoers, most of whom had learned of the event by word-of-mouth. Often the mouth in question belonged to none other than the C.I.A.'s ingenious impresario Carl Crew, a former actor in his late 30s whose credits include the starring role in the low-budget 1993 flick "Jeffrey Dahmer: The Secret Life," wherein he quite literally makes meatloaf out of sedated victims.
"Yeah, I guess that's my calling card now," Crew told me on one of my trips to the C.I.A. "There were other films I was involved in I liked better, but that's the one people always mention."
Crew's been a friend of mine since I began going to the indie rock/performance art venue five years ago, when it was underground and served liquor without a license. The police eventually raided the C.I.A., closing the dimly lit nightspot for a few years. When Crew and co-owner Robert Ferguson reopened it in 2001 -- all operations above board -- the once-black interior was painted in garish reds and yellows and decorated with a circus sideshow motif. Crew, a freak show fanatic, put his vast collection of sideshow exhibits and paraphernalia on display. Vintage banners advertising Sweet Marie, a 643-pound femme fatale, share space with the severed arm of a French nobleman, a dead fairy, the skull of the world's smallest Freemason and the hirsute, severed head of Sasquatch.
Most of these are classic sideshow "gaffs," or fakes, like the two-headed baby nailed above the bar or the "merman" enshrined in glass nearby. But the clown, according to Crew, is quite real.
"This attorney friend of mine called me up one day on a speakerphone with all his lawyer pals around and goes, 'Carl, how would you like to lease a dead clown?' I said, 'Are you kidding? Of course!' All the other attorneys just roared with laughter. It took like four months to get the paperwork done, but now I have him for six months. I won't tell you how much it cost me, but it wasn't cheap," Crew said.
I was skeptical he would ever get this clown; once he got it, my incredulity was slow to fade. Sure, lying there under glass in red vestments, a Shriner's cap and long-faded greasepaint, the brownish body did look like a well-preserved cadaver. The fingernails showed sign of decay, and there was bushy, black hair in the nose -- details that would be difficult to fabricate, but not impossible. We were in Hollywood, after all.
I could find nothing online about Achile Chatouilleu, so I pushed Crew for some corroboration. It came in dribs and drabs. Nothing incontrovertible, of course, but enough to make me think that Crew had perhaps produced the genuine article. There were photos, said to be of Chatouilleu while he was still alive, and a ragged, blue turn-of-the-century poster for "The Great London Circus" at Madison Square Garden with Chatouilleu's name on the bill. Finally, Crew came through with the photocopy of a death certificate stating that Achile Chatouilleu, a "retired clown" born Feb. 3, 1866, died of "chronic nephritis" on Jan. 13, 1912.
Crew asked me not to reveal where Chatouilleu died or the names of his parents, listed as immigrants from Scotland on the death certificate. Chatouilleu was not the clown's birth name, and supposedly his descendants, who live on a ranch near Yosemite, wish to remain anonymous. But the death certificate and the rest of it could be forgeries. I remained unconvinced.
