The Final Confession of Mabel Stark
The fictionalized biography by Robert Hough is the basis of the upcoming movie being made by Tailor Made Films.

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ExRead.com Review

The Final Confession of Mabel Stark by Robert Hough

A Look at the Book

July Issue 2001 - By ExRead.com

The audience is transfixed by the vision of the tiny blonde woman in the cage with eight enormous Bengal tigers. How can one frail wisp of a girl possibly control such huge ferocious beasts? Yet somehow, with the crack of her whip, she does. At her command, they sit erect on their pedestals, or they arrange themselves in a pyramid, or, at her signal, all eight roll over
on the floor in unison. It¹s a fabulous, nervewracking performance. And now she turns to her audience to seek their approval. But is it really safe to turn her back on those snarling treacherous creatures? One of the tigers seems hostile. It makes angry pawing motions at her back. But she seems oblivious. The audience grows uneasy. My god, doesn¹t she realize! It's going to attack her! People in the audience get to their feet in alarm. They point, they shout warnings, but she seems unable to understand what the hubbub is about. Now the tiger is poised! For godssake woman — behind you! It springs, crushing her to the ground. Pandemonium in the big top! It's going for her throat now! But she fights back, wrestling with the beast. And miraculously, she triumphs. The tiny woman clad in a white leather pantsuit is on her feet, taking a bow. Then the audience understands. Sensational! Stupendous!! What an act!

The woman was Mabel Stark, and she was one of the greatest stars in the Ringling Brothers Circus in the 1910's and 1920's. This was the heyday of the circus. Movies and radio were still in their infancy, and, although the Ford Model-T now offered Americans a new mobility, roads remained mostly dirt tracks, and communities were still quite isolated. People hungered for entertainment to break the monotony of their daily lives. So vaudeville (the
live variety show) was still a big draw, and an Elmer Gantry-type hellfire revival meeting was always a good show. But nothing could compare with the arrival of the circus in town. That day, all business shut down, and everybody went to the circus, for they knew by next morning — like one great final magical act — it would already have disappeared down the railroad tracks.

Of all the circuses that toured America, the biggest and most wondrous, truly the greatest show on Earth, was the Ringling Brothers Circus. John and Charles Ringling spared no effort or expense to acquire the very best performers and the most exotic animals. Outside the big top which seated 12,000, there was a huge menagerie which, in an age when zoos were rare, provided people — the rubes — with their only opportunity to see actual bears and giraffes, hippopotamuses and orangutans, rhinos and kangaroos, llamas and sea lions. It took four trains to move this huge, self- contained world of wonders from town to town. It is easy to see why thousands of kids living in Drearyburg, Miss. or Ditchwater, Ark. dreamed of running away and joining the circus.

It is this alien world within our world that Robert Hough splendidly recreates as a backdrop forThe Final Confession of Mabel Stark. Using the known facts of Stark's extraordinary life, he paints an absorbing portrait of a woman obsessed by the fierce beauty of tigers. A pretty blonde (the novel includes four photographs of the real Mabel), she married five times. But the true love of her life was not a man, but Rajah, a 550 pound Bengal tiger — the one who "attacked" her in her act and who slept with her in her bed. We meet Mabel Stark in 1968 when she is nearly eighty and about to lose her job working with her beloved big cats. Faced with a future containing little more than reruns of Gilligan's Island — which she adores — she now looks back over her life. Escaping from an insane asylum where she was being sexually abused, young Mabel joins a travelling carnival as a cooch dancer. One of her duties there is to expose her breasts to rubes who have paid extra.

Eventually, however, she achieves her dream of working in the cage with the tigers (Lions hold no appeal for her). Her body becomes covered by a tracery of scars from the inevitable maulings that come with her strange trade, but these are less painful than the invisible psychological scars left by a succession of ineffectual husbands. There is no such thing as a perfect novel, and I could always quibble
about this detail or that. But The Final Confession is a richly textured, enthralling novel that will pull you into a world quite different from any other you have experienced, and will remind you that every one of us, like Mabel Stark, remains, as always, a world of infinite mystery.