Marceline

Sold to the circus in Spain when he was a child, the clown Marceline Orbes went on to become the star of the New York Hippodrome. He was lauded by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, but when silent movies emerged as a popular art form, his career took a nosedive. He went from being the star to just one of many clowns running around the ring of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Chaplin offered to help his idol but he was too proud to accept it. Penniless and alone, he shot himself in a Manhattan hotel in 1927, surrounded by keepsakes from the height of his career. Little did he know, his death would land him once again on the cover of newspapers.

“Marceline: Death and Life of a Clown” is also a quest: he left few remnants of his life, as he had no family. My search for the clues to his life took me through the streets of Amsterdam and London, and to his unmarked grave in upstate New York. Looking into Marceline’s life is also a look into the dramatic changes of popular culture at the turn of the 20th century, when the rise of cinema left behind many vaudeville and circus performers. The book is an homage to Marceline and his forgotten legacy and to a generation of clowns that were not memorialized on the big screen.

As the reader soon discovers, my life as a foreigner in New York, parallels that of Marceline who was born close to my hometown in Spain. When I was nine years old, I spent a summer touring with a troupe of puppeteers and that experience marked my life. My research also made me discover a surprising New York. I participated in a spiritual séance in the Upper West Side to celebrate the anniversary of Houdini’s death, and spent long hours browsing through the archives hidden in the attic of a Broadway theater.

The book was published in Spanish in November 2017 in Spain by Pregunta Ediciones. While he became famous in the US and the UK, no biography has been written of him in English. Now I look forward to bringing his story to an English-speaking audience.