Captain Don Paul Leslie

December 26, 1937 -- June 4, 2007

The stories about Don Paul Leslie begins in Boston with him running away from a home broken by alcoholism. Early on, Don had that dream that every American kid has had - run away and join the Circus. By the time he was 14, in 1952, he was working selling hot dogs for Ringling Brothers and then he ran the pony ride for King Brothers.
In Captain Don's words, he was, "taking the children off and on the ponies, tearing tickets, stuff like that. The sideshow was on the midway where they bring an act out now and then to entice a crowd. And a guy would come out there and swallow a sword, and I said, 'Wow!' For some reason or other, I knew, because I had heard all these stories about the sword being a fake and folding up. I didn’t touch the sword, and I was probably about 200 feet away, and I said, 'That’s for real.'

So on one of my breaks, instead of going to get a hot dog or soda, I went into the sideshow. I started going in there every day, on my breaks. The sideshow, you know, is continuous entertainment. Stay as, long as you like, and leave when you’re good and ready. And so I’d stay in that whole hour and I’d see him three times in that period. So one day he was wiping his sword up, and putting it back up, and the crowd had already dispersed and gone on to see the fat lady or whatever, and I was still standing there, and he said, 'I see you every day, boy. Are you with the circus?'
I said 'Yeah.' And I said, 'Boy, I sure would like to learn to swallow swords and eat fire.'
And he says, 'How old are you?'
I told him, and he said, 'Your folks know where you are?'
And I said, 'No.'
And he said, 'I’ll tell you what, I’ll make a deal with you. If you let me telegram your people, I promise not to tell them where you are. Let me telegram your people, and tell them that you’re alive and well, and I’ll teach you,' him thinking that I’d never take him up on it. He figures, the first time this kid gags or throws up or something, he's out of the contract. But I made him stick to it and teach me. And that was Alex Lang, the Guinness Book of Records world champion. He died in ’64. He swallowed four 27-inch blades simultaneously.
He never lived to see me break his record; I broke his record in 1981. I swallowed five 30-inch blades."

So Don knew the real money was in performing. Working all the while, whether with the ponies, following after the elephants with a shovel, whatever the Circus had for him, Don Paul Leslie was ready to start his act and bill himself as as a fire-eater. Don joined the Christiani Brothers Circus in 1954 and did just that. He met Carlos Leal, a fire-eater and sword swallower of some renown, who took young Don under his wing.
"Carlos taught him the wrong way to swallow swords," said Madame Chinchilla, a tattoo artist in Fort Bragg California. A friend of Captains for many years, she also wrote his biography. "He told him to cough and gag and make a big production of it to add drama."
Fortunately, Harry Doll -- of the world-famous Doll family of performing dwarves -- introduced him to Alex Linton. Meeting Linton probably saved his life because Carlos believed in building up the audiences anxiety and tension for dramatic effect which is considerably more dangerous to the performer. Doll also christened him "Captain" Don after telling the young sword swallower he needed a catchy stage name. But it was Linton who taught Captain to swallow swords smoothly, which is the artful and scientific approach to successful and safer sword swallowing. Linton held the world sword-swallowing record -- four -- until 1981, when Captain Don simultaneously swallowed five 30 inch long swords.

Tattooed attractions were pretty much gone in the early to mid ’50s. The only one that they would hire was the Tattooed Lady. And Betty Broadbent was one of the best known and she was well traveled in the performing circuits. Her first husband was a marionettist and a puppeteer and a ventriloquist. Betty is considered one of the first performing Tattooed Ladies. Her tattooes were done by the inveterate Professor Charlie Wagner. She and Artoria Gibbons were the last two tattooed ladies out there. Don was about 18 or 19 when he met Betty, they were in Christiani Brothers Circus together. That’s an Italian circus and the owners of the show were very strict and abusive, especially to young Don. Betty watched out for the boy and saved him from a beating more than a couple of times. She knew the young man came from an abusive alchoholic environment and was headed down that path himself. She cautioned him against drinking and often ran interference for him with the owners. According to Captain Don, "I stayed on her good side, boy. I’d have got my ass kicked several times if it wasn’t for her. Because the circus was like the military, they didn’t fool around. Carnivals, too. You just don’t walk out of the fairgrounds any time and go downtown anytime. You’ve gotta get permission to leave. When you get fired on a circus or a carnival, you just don’t get fired. They beat the shit out of you. They go to the office, get your pay, hand you your pay, knock the shit out of you, and take you off the lot and you’re on your way."

In later years, as a performer, Captain Don memorialized her and Charlie Wagner, in a song titled "Wagners Tattooed Lady", a swoozy blues tune that every Captain Don fan should look up on you tube.

He learned how to stick needles through his cheek and ice picks up his nose. He mastered the art of lying on nails, walking on glass and getting out of a straightjacket and the human pincushion.

Captain Don said of those days, "I was with a show, a 'Norman Brooks Strange People Show', and the pincushion was always a separate act. We called it an 'annex act'-you went around, you saw the whole show and then (Hawker) 'Now, ladies and gentlemeen, behind this curtain…' big spiel, you know, 'And for an extra half a buck go back and see this.' You’d come on all strong: 'This person could never walk down the street like you or I,' and all that jazz. It’s all just to get you in there.
But anyway, the pincushion keeps half of that money, and the show owner gets the other half. He has no salary, but shit, he’s making more in one day than any one act in there is making in a weekly salary.
And I saw that, and so one morning, we got up and the pincushion had left during the night. He was a drunk anyway, but he was a hell of a performer, even drunk
So Norman Brooks was all bummed out, 'Goddamnit, I lost my pincushion, my annex act…'
I said, 'I do annexes.'
He said, 'You do?' My sister was on the show with me and she looked at me, like 'oh, boy.'
And he says, 'I didn’t know that.'
I said, 'Yeah.'
He says 'Kid, you’re on!'
And then when he walked away my sister said, 'You ain’t no pincushion.'
I said, 'I am now!'
And so what happened was, I had watched him and a hundred other human pincushions before. I knew their whole routine: what they did, their whole spiel. So I borrowed a little from each one. The first show had about 150 people in the audience…. because, 150 faces looking at you, they had paid to see you, now it’s fucking time to do something: give them back their money, or shit or get off the pot. So I did it, and I’ve been doing it ever since."

He started getting tattooed in 1953. the first was from Carroll Nightingale, in Washington, D.C., he was 15 years old at the time, and traveling with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.

He recounted later, "...and I went into town to get a tattoo. Nightingale was a paranoid old guy. You couldn’t just walk into his shop. He had a locked metal grate on the front door. You had to push a buzzer, and then he would look at you, and if he thought you were okay, he would press a switch that unlocked the door. Then on the inside of the shop there was a partition up to just about where you could see into the tattoo station, and there was wire mesh the rest of the way to the top, so he tattooed in a cage which separated him from the customers who had just come in to look at the flash.
He let me into the shop and he said, 'How old are you, boy?'
I said, 'Eighteen, Sir.' He said, 'You’re a fucking liar. Sit down!'
He just wanted to let me know that I wasn’t bullshitting him, and everything was cool. We got along fine. He smoked one of those Sherlock Holmes pipes. He was puffing on it all the time. He wrote a book called 'The Tattoo Baron,' and also he patented a tattoo machine, too. I think it’s called The Magic Wand, or something like that."

The Captain hung up his swords when he was 18 and joined the Marines but when he got out, Don went straight back to the Circus and the Circus life on the road.

He traveled making a name for himself as a sword swallower and the 10 in one act: being the tattooed man, swordswallower, fire eater, human blockhead, human pin cushion, musician, grind man and talker etc. He worked in many different circuses in his life including King Bros, Ringling Bros, Barnum and Bailey Circus, Cristiani Bros Circus, Great American Circus, Circus Bruno, Hanneford Circus, Clyde Beatty and Cole Bros. Circus. He appeared live in nightclubs, dance halls and theatres in most major cities of the United States, Canada, Holland, Japan and Micronesian Islands.

Captain Don started getting tattooed seriously in 1955. As he described it "...the tattooist got so busy he couldn’t stay with it. One day he said, 'there’s a young fella that’s just breaking into the business. He works with Bert Grimm over on the Long Beach Pike and his name is Lyle Tuttle, and he’s a good lad, a nice young man, and I’m going to ask him to help. I said, 'that’s fine, and went up to see Lyle and he finished it. The other guy put the back piece on, and Lyle put everything else on."

Lyle Tuttle did the majority of Captains tattoos during 50s and early 60s. Lyle and Don became lifelong friends and they spent a lot of time together when Captain Don wasnt out performing. When the big top came down and the sideshow packed up, the Captain would spend the off-season working as a tattoo artist. He'd been tattooed by the masters, including 'Smokey' Nightingale, Leroy Minugh, Max Peltz, and Lyle Tuttle, and Don knew enough to make a living at it. He drew and painted flash and art and had the right equipment and he learned how to use it.

The Captain also would perform on the streets of Boston and was a regular on Fisherman's Wharf for most of the 1980s. It was at fishermans wharf that he met Henry Goldfield and they also became quite good friends. Henry would say that Captain "knew he was home, if he could smell elephants." He also appeared at the Exotic Erotic Ball a few times. He was slowing down by then and had quit drinking, but he'd still hit the road every spring. People loved to see him swallow five swords simultaneously.

It was the grand finale to his show that almost killed him in 1989. It was in Seattle, before a packed house at the release of Modern Primitives by Re-Search magazine in the city of Seattle, the Commission for the Performing Arts government building. In that performance, when Captain Don withdrew the five swords, the swords parted, nicking his esophagus. Don was seriously injured and he decided it was time to hang up the multiple swords.
"Sword swallowing…. that’s my main thing, you know, because fire-eaters are a dime a dozen. They’re tripping over each other. But sword swallowers are hard to find. There’s never been more than a couple dozen of them at any given time over the past 300 years."
He gave most of his swords to Lady Diane Falk, a sword swallower who worked with him for three years They met during a tour of the South Pacific and they worked together in Canada, where the Captain created a sideshow for Conklin Shows. "The Captain was old school," said Lady Diane, . "When you watched Captain Don, you knew you were watching history."

Captain Don Leslie is a legend among sword swallowers, and there are as many variations on his story as there are people to tell it. Performing was in his blood, and it wasn't easy to give it up. He started swallowing swords again a few years afterwards, at tattoo conventions, where he was something of a celebrity. Captain Don Leslie in the final decades of his life, found himself enveloped in the burgeoning tattoo community and he was fluid as water in it. Captain Don Leslie spent a lifetime with folks that he considered family, but were looked on by outsiders as "Freaks". He spent his early years in the shadow of Betty Broadbent, was friends with "Silo the Sealboy" worked with the "Pinheads" and lived the Sidewshow lifestyle. Its no wonder that he felt kindred with these new age freaks. Captain Don revelled in the young folks hanging around Lyle Tuttle in the 60s and seventies as he tattooed the new generation and new outlooks on people and their value. Captain had prepared for years to evolve and stretch his own limits while making people connections and as a performer taking us on those journeys with him.

Captain Don was a special friend to Mr G and Madame Chichilla of Triangle Tattoo & Museum in Ft Bragg CA since the early 1980s. The Tattoo Museum dedicates a good third of their space with items and artifacts of Captains. In 2010, Ms Chinchilla published a biography on Captain Don Leslie that she had co-written with Jan Hinson. Captain Don’s first sword he ever swallowed and his boots hang on display at the Triangle Tattoo and Museum. Madam Chinchilla described how Captain Don would join Mr. G. and her for each Fourth of July Parade in Fort Bragg. Madam C. and Mr. G would drive their pink Cadillac. Captain Don would walk in front, with sword in hand and breathing fire.

As time went by, the vibrant and show stopping tattoos that Captain Don wore had begun to fade. The years he had spent out in the hot sun, at those side shows and circus yards, had taken its toll on his tattoos. Even the solid elaborate work that Lyle had done was showing its age. Captain Don derived great pleasure in having Lyles daughter, Suzanne Tuttle, who was tattooing at that time, recolor some of the reds and greens that had been done by Lyle years before. When Captain was first getting tattooed from Lyle Tuttle, he would go to Lyles house to get his work done, after the shop had closed. While Lyles wife slept and Suzanne fussed in her cradle as a baby, Lyle would work on Don late into the night.

The Captain spent 42 years on the road. There isn't a circus worth mentioning or a place worth seeing where he didn't perform. He lived in a trailer, bathed from a bucket and stashed his money in a sock. Circus life was all he ever knew, or cared to know.

Captain Don Leslie died June 4 at home in Chico, six months after being diagnosed with throat cancer brought on by decades of eating fire. It was the carcinogenic gasoline that got in his lungs over the years. He was 69, and his peers and fans said his death closes the golden age of sideshow sword swallowing and circus performers. The tattoo community still looks to Captain Don Leslie to see the humananity of a man, set on a journey of his own and worth the fare to see, true to himself and a treeasure to know. Lyle Tuttle, his friend for over 45 years, was at his side when he passed away.

Captain Don Leslie has a long list of credits in mass media over his performing years. He was on the Art Baker Show, "You Asked For It" in 1957, The Dinah Shore Show, Evening Magazine, Hildegard's Party, Capt. Kangaroo, Mike Douglas Show, Jerry Springer Show, Discovery Channel Documentary. He was in the motion pictures "Problem Child" 1988 and in 1997 "Beloved". He is in numerous books and has been featured in countless magazines and newspapers. He was featured in The San Francisco Examiner Monday May 25,1981. He was a street performer in Boston, San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, New Orleans and Bourbon Street, and the Bicentennial in Boston 1976. He is from Florida, but has lived in Boston, Cambridge, Mass, (his place of birth), San Francisco, Chico.... In the "Smithsonian Photographic Historian" he is featured as "The Swordswallower of the 7th Decade of the 20th Century". Recording credits include: Fowl Records 'Capt. Don Leslie Presents Tattoo Songs' Album, cover by Henry Goldfield. Songs: A1 Wagner's Tattooed Lady 3:59, A2 Tattoo Boogie 1:55, B1 Tattoo Convention 3:16, B2 Polynesian Slaughter.