THIS WAY TO THE BIG SHOW: THE LIFE OF DEXTER FELLOWS—Dexter W. Fellows and Andrew A. Freeman—Viking ($3.50).
Mother gorillas in equatorial Africa speak his name to hush their young. He has crossed Australia in the pouch of a kangaroo. He has followed the edge of the Gulf Stream in a rowboat to determine the exact date of spring. He has taught Ubangi women to play tiddlywinks on their platter lips. He owns an adjective factory in New Britain, Conn., whence he sallies forth each year, like a vernal Santa Claus, to scatter his sesquipedalian largess to thirstily gaping yokels. These and hundreds of such amiable Munchausenisms have been printed in the U. S. Press about Dexter William Fellows.
Newspaper editors are not as a rule fond of pressagents, but Dexter Fellows is a pressagent extraordinary, and he ballyhoos the most widely beloved of U. S. businesses. On the annual news that the circus is coming to town, even the dourest city editor is moved to let his newshawks soar far from earthy fact into the empyrean of their fancy—especially when the harbinger of this perennial Noah's Ark is such a downy dove as Dexter Fellows. In the 43 years Harbinger Fellows has been pressagenting for the circus, he has never failed to get favorable free publicity for "the Greatest Show on Earth"; his only problem has been how much he would get this time. The myth of his own personality has grown and flowered to such lush proportions that some have doubted his actual existence. But that he still is and has been very much alive was proved last week by his autobiography (ghosted by his good friend, a onetime newshawk, Andrew A. Freeman).
This Way to the Big Show is as far from the confessional type of memoirs as Tom Thumb from Jumbo the elephant. Fellows' life has been a three-ring circus, and he presents it in those terms. He ballyhoos himself as "a genie of journalistic paste jars, a fantastic flower nurtured in a pot of printer's ink, a product of the freedom of the press." True to his profession, he says he has done his best to tell the truth, adds: "Occasionally my tongue slipped into my cheek." No one who has ever been to the circus will mind that.
Born inappropriately in Boston, Dexter William Fellows was named after a race horse and a favorite uncle. Like every small boy he fell flat under the spell of his first circus; unlike others, he never recovered. When, barely grown up, he got a chance to join Pawnee Bill's "Historic Wild West" as pressagent, he jumped at it with both feet. Once in his niche, he was never tempted to seek a higher pinnacle. The late Ivy Lee, then a hard-working but undistinguished Manhattan newshawk, gave Fellows the benefit of his own ambitious advice about becoming a tycoon; Fellows let it lie, went on down his own primrose path.