The Amazing Mabel Stark - Tiger Trainer & Big Cat Tamer

A brilliant new documentary film entitled Mabel, Mabel, Tiger Trainer directed by Leslie Zemeckis premiered in 2017. We added the film trailer to our website in 2018 (on right sidebar) so we could help spread the word about this amazing woman. Lesley Zemeckis has done a sterling job in bringing Mabel’s incredible life story to the big screen. 

Mabel Stark, whose real name was Mary Haynie was a renowned tiger trainer of the 1920s and was one of the world's first women to take up this thrilling but very dangerous occupation, which she did from 1911 right through to 1968. 

"Mabel Stark" entered the world on December 10, 1889 in Kentucky. She was one of seven children born to Lela and Hardy Haynie. Her parents were farmers and they died within two years of each other, so that by the age of 17, Stark and her siblings were orphaned. 

She spent a short period of time living with her aunt in Princeton. She then travelled to Louisville and became a nurse at St. Mary's Hospital. Soon after that, she left Louisville and her history becomes difficult to trace. 

Her Circus friends contend that she worked in carnivals as a "dancer". Like many circus performers, Stark did not hesitate to enrich the truth to create an interesting story. She even once told an interviewer that she was born to a wealthy Canadian.

In 1911 she was working with the Al G. Barnes Circus based in Culver City, California, where she met animal trainer Al Sands. She worked for a brief time there as a "high school" horseback rider, but her dream job was to work with the big cats. She began work with Louis Roth, a famous "cat man" who she would later marry. Roth advocated training big cats by rewarding them with meat, as opposed to beating them as earlier trainers did. Roth used the carrot instead of the stick. Stark's first big cat performance was with two lions and two tigers. 

Soon, she became a tiger trainer in the ring. At first, they had her work a "balloon act" which had her "riding" a lion on a platform and then pressing a pedal to release fireworks at some point in the act. But by 1916, she was presenting the show's major tiger act.

On 18 February 1916, Stark was severely mauled by a lion named Louie while rehearsing for the Pacific Electric exhibit of the National Orange Show in San Bernardino, California. Stark's husband, Louis Roth, fired blank cartridges from a revolver into the face of the lion amid the screams of his wife and spectators who had gathered to watch the rehearsal.

 The lion seized Stark's left arm into its mouth and rolled over a number of times. Roth had also been mauled earlier that same day by a lion. He suffered deep injuries to his arm before firing blanks into the animal's open jaws. Mabel was dragged unconscious from the cage and rushed to a hospital where she was treated for a mauled and broken arm. This was Stark's third mauling in as many years. In 1914, while in Detroit, Michigan, she was attacked by her leopards during a parade, and during the winter of 1915 she was again attacked in Venice, California.

She adopted a sickly tiger cub named Rajah and raised him to perform a famous wrestling act with her. She accomplished this by romping and playing with the cub at the beach and actually keeping him as a pet in her apartment. According to Stark's autobiography:

 "Rajah would run straight toward me. Up he went on his hind legs, his forefeet around my neck. We turned around once or twice, I threw him to the ground, and we rolled three or four times. I opened his mouth and put my face inside, then jumped to my feet".

Rajah became instrumental in making Stark a star. She admitted years later that Rajah was actually relieving himself sexually during this wrestling act, which looks very much like a vicious attack to anyone not familiar with tiger behaviour. Stark started wearing a white uniform at this time so that the audience would not see tiger semen. The white costume became her signature, which she used for the rest of her career.   

She was approached by, and joined, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1922, where she performed in Madison Square Garden with snarling tigers and a black panther. By the end of that season, of the six wild animal acts featured with the circus, Mabel Stark's was clearly the greatest success. In 1923, she starred in the Ringling centre ring, but two years later the circus banned all wild animal acts. 

By then Stark had divorced Roth and was a star act. She married the circus's accountant Albert Ewing, who was embezzling funds from Ringling. They divorced when the crime was uncovered, but Stark believed she was being punished for her husband's sins when the circus cut all big cat acts in 1925. 

Ringling chiefs claimed that the cage took too long to assemble and tear down during a performance. Stark was still under contract, though, and was assigned to a horse act. Her tigers were kept on in the circus's menagerie, which was supervised by Art Rooney. Mabel later claimed that she married her first husbands for practical reasons, but she fell in love with Rooney. They soon married, which surprised other circus employees because Rooney wore makeup and nail polish, and they assumed he was not the marrying kind. Rooney died soon after under circumstances that were not recorded.

After a sojourn to Europe where she performed in a circus, she came back to the U.S. in 1928 and began work with the John Robinson Show. The circus train was late getting to the venue in Bangor, Maine, the tigers were getting wet in the rain, and there was no time to feed them before the show. Normally, a cat act would be delayed or cancelled for this reason. But Stark let the show go on. Two hungry tigers named Sheik and Zoo mauled her during the show. Stark's own description of the incident was:

    "Sheik was right behind me, and caught me in the left thigh, tearing a two-inch gash that cut through to the bone and almost severed my left leg just above the knee. . .I could feel blood pouring into both my boots, but I was determined to go through with the act. . .(Zoo) jumped from his pedestal and seized my right leg, jerking me to the ground. As I fell, Sheik struck out with one paw, catching the side of my head, almost scalping me. . .Zoo gave a deep growl and bit my leg again. He gave it a shake, and planting both forefeet with his claws deep in my flesh, started to chew. . .I wondered into how many pieces I would be torn. . .Most of all I was concerned for the audience. . .I knew it would be a horrible sight if my body was torn apart before their eyes. And all my tigers would be branded as murderers and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in narrow cages instead of being allowed the freedom of the big arena and the pleasure of working. That thought gave me strength to fight."

She would suffer a wound that almost severed her leg, along with face lacerations, a hole in her shoulder, a torn deltoid muscle and a host of other injuries. Stark managed to leave the cage with the help of another trainer, Terrell Jacobs, and insisted on changing out of her blood-soaked stage clothing before going to the hospital. Doctors sewed muscles and skin back together with 378 stitches, but they did not expect her to survive. She was back to work within a few weeks, swathed in bandages and walking with a cane, although the injuries troubled her and she was in and out of hospitals several times over the next two years for further muscle repair. When she was mauled, she blamed herself, or other factors, but never the tigers. She loved them and respected them, but also said there was no such thing as a "tame tiger." 

 Stark announced her retirement a couple of times, but always returned to performing.

She performed with the Sells-Floto Circus in 1929 and then rejoined Barnes, after it had been sold to Ringling, in 1930 and stayed there until it was absorbed into Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey during the season of 1938. 

Mabel with Mae West in 1933

In 1932 she and her tiger act was filmed for the Paramount Pictures motion picture King of the Jungle (1933). In the film Stark is seen putting her tigers through their paces when fire erupts in the big top. 

 She also worked as a stunt double in the lion-taming scenes for Mae West in the 1933 film I'm No Angel, which West wrote, possibly inspired by Stark's career. 

Hollywood work introduced Stark to Louis Goebel's Jungleland, in Thousand Oaks, California, a facility that housed trained animals for movies. She returned to California and finished her career at the Jungleland Compound.

She toured with some small circuses and lived in Japan where she performed her circus act in the 1950s. Stark also appeared on television in the 1960’s - she did a stint as one of the guests with an unusual occupation on What's My Line?, the popular Sunday Night CBS-TV program.

In 1968 Jungleland was sold to a new owner who disliked Stark and fired her. Soon after she left, one of her tigers escaped and was shot. Stark was angry and hurt about the animal's destruction and felt that she could have safely secured the tiger if the owners had asked for her assistance. Three months later, she killed herself by an overdose of barbiturates.

 In the last pages of her autobiography, Hold That Tiger, Stark writes:

 "The chute door opens as I crack my whip and shout, 'Let them come,' Out slink the striped cats, snarling and roaring, leaping at each other or at me. It's a matchless thrill, and life without it is not worthwhile to me."

She died on April 20, 1968 and was found dead by her housekeeper. According to her 1938 autobiography Hold That Tiger, Stark would have preferred to “die at the hands of a tiger than by any other means.”

In 2001 a fictionalized biography of Stark's life by author Robert Hough, entitled The Final Confession of Mabel Stark was published. The story is based in 1968, the same year that Stark committed suicide. The screenplay was optioned by director Sam Mendes with the hopes of making a film starring his wife Kate Winslet, however no production schedule has yet been announced. Apparently Winslet, has been interested in playing the role of Mabel Stark since 2003.

In the meantime if you want to find out more about the real Mabel Stark read her autobiography and watch the fantastic new documentary Mabel Mabel Tiger Trainer. 

 http://mabeltigermovie.com