Mabel Stark: The World's First Female Tiger Trainer
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For 57 years, a woman audiences knew as Mabel Stark walked into steel cages packed with tigers, wrestled her favourite among them to the ground in front of paying crowds, and survived at least 18 separate maulings along the way. She's usually remembered as the first woman to make a career out of training tigers, in an era when most circuses wouldn't let a woman near the cats at all. Her real name wasn't even Mabel Stark.
A Rough Start in Kentucky
She was born Mary Ann Haynie around 1888 or 1889 in Smith County, Tennessee, before her family moved to Cobb, near Princeton, Kentucky, where her mother's parents lived. She was one of seven children born to Lela and Hardy Haynie, and both parents died while she was still young. After a period living with an aunt, she made her way to Louisville and trained as a nurse at St Mary's Hospital, a job she came to dislike intensely. She later said the experience left her permanently unfazed by danger. As she put it in a 1922 interview, she hadn't had nerves since she gave up nursing, and given the choice, she'd rather look after ten tigers than one sick person.
The Tiger Called King
In 1911, restless and working odd jobs, she was out walking in Venice, California, when a sound drew her toward the winter quarters of the Al G. Barnes Circus. Inside, she came across a caged Bengal tiger named King, licking his paws. Something about the animal fixed itself in her mind, and she talked her way into a job with the circus soon after, initially far from the big cats, working with horses and goats under a new stage name. By her own account, she'd deliberately picked a field no other woman had claimed for herself, brushing off the conventional wisdom of the time that tigers were simply too dangerous for a woman to handle.
Learning From a Man She'd Marry
Stark's path to the cats ran through Louis Roth, one of Al G. Barnes' most respected big cat trainers, who took her on as a student and later became her husband, the first of at least four marriages over her lifetime. Roth trained using positive reinforcement rather than punishment, rewarding animals with meat rather than beating them into compliance, and Stark adopted the same philosophy for the rest of her career. She started out in a comparatively tame "balloon act," riding a lion on a raised platform and triggering a small fireworks display with a foot pedal. By 1916 she'd worked her way up to the circus's main tiger act.
Three Maulings in Three Years
The danger was real and constant. In 1914, while touring with the circus in Detroit, she was attacked by her own leopards during a parade. During the winter of 1915 she was mauled again in Venice. The worst of the early incidents came on February 18, 1916, while rehearsing for an exhibition in San Bernardino. A lion named Louie clamped down on her left arm and rolled her across the cage floor while Roth fired blank cartridges into the animal's face trying to drive it off, screaming spectators looking on the whole time. Roth had been mauled by a different lion earlier that same day. Stark was dragged out unconscious with a mangled, broken arm, her third serious mauling in as many years.
Rajah
Not long afterward, Stark took in a sickly, mangy tiger cub nobody else wanted and named him Rajah. She raised him herself, and the bond between them became the centrepiece of her act: a wrestling routine in which the two of them rolled across the ring floor together three or four times, a stunt no other performer of the era was doing with a full-grown tiger. It made her name. Billed as the "Tiger Girl," she used the act's popularity to move to the Ringling Bros circus, the largest in the country, for roughly double what she'd been earning.
An Embezzling Husband, and a Rival Trained by the Same Man
Stark's Ringling years brought her real fame, including a run in the circus's prestigious centre ring in the early 1920s, but they also brought a fresh set of problems. One of her husbands during this period worked as the circus's accountant and was eventually found to have been embezzling from the Ringling organisation. He was let go, and Stark's own position suffered by association. In 1925, Ringling's press office announced it was ending its cat acts altogether, officially citing safety concerns and the difficulty of setting up steel cages mid-show; Stark suspected she was actually being quietly punished for her husband's dishonesty. Ringling kept cat acts running at two of its stadium venues, but handed the job to a newcomer named Clyde Beatty, who'd trained under the same mentor Stark had once married, Louis Roth. Still under contract, Stark was shunted into a horse act instead, which she hated, before being traded the following year to the smaller John Robinson Circus, where she suffered one of the worst maulings of her career.
Amid all this, she found what she'd later call her one genuinely happy marriage, to Art Rooney, the circus's menagerie boss. It didn't last; Rooney died not long after the wedding. Of her other marriages, mostly to men connected to the animal-training world, Stark was blunter. She loved her tigers, she told a friend, the way a mother loves her children. With husbands, she said, she was never happy.
Hollywood and a Bestselling Memoir
Stark's fame eventually reached Hollywood. In 1933 she worked as a stunt double for Mae West in the film I'm No Angel, performing the tiger-handling scenes the studio wasn't about to ask its leading lady to do herself. Five years later, working with screenwriter Gertrude Orr, she published an autobiography, Hold That Tiger, through the small Idaho publisher Caxton Printers, which specialised in circus titles and sold Stark's book well enough to warrant several reprints. A heavily fictionalised novel based loosely on her life, Robert Hough's The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, appeared decades later in 2001, taking considerable creative licence with events; some of its more colourful claims, including an escape from a mental institution early in her life, belong to the novel rather than to any documented biography. That same era of daredevil women putting their own bodies on the line for a paying crowd also produced performers like Lillian La France, who rode a motorcycle around a vertical wall of death rather than wrestling tigers, but ran on the same basic nerve.
Jungleland, War Work, and a 57-Year Career
In 1938, the same year her memoir appeared, Stark took a full-time position at Jungleland, an animal park in Thousand Oaks, California, that predated Disneyland as the region's major tourist attraction. She stayed there for roughly three decades, working with as many as 18 tigers at once and, in 1938, becoming the first woman known to work tigers and lions together in the same act. When the Second World War broke out, she stepped away from the cats temporarily to take a job at Lockheed Aircraft, part of the wider wave of American women moving into industrial war work, a very different kind of daring from the one she was known for, in an era when women were also finding new physical freedoms elsewhere, much like Effie and Avis Hotchkiss, the mother and daughter who'd ridden a motorcycle clear across the country two decades earlier.
Fired Over an Insurance Decision, and the End
Jungleland was sold in late 1967, and its insurance company refused to keep covering Stark, by then 79 years old, for the risk of putting her back in a cage with tigers. She was fired as a direct result, though the animals she'd spent decades working with had to stay behind. Not long after her departure, one of the park's tigers, a female named Goldie, escaped its enclosure. Staff shot and killed the animal while trying to recapture it. Stark was reportedly furious and convinced that, had anyone called her, she could have led Goldie back safely herself. Being cut off from the cats altogether seems to have hit her hardest of all. Three months after losing her job, on April 20, 1968, her housekeeper found her dead of a barbiturate overdose. No suicide note was ever reported. The closing lines of her own thirty-year-old memoir read almost like the epitaph she never got to write herself, describing the thrill of the cats coming out snarling into the ring and calling life without that thrill not worth living.
Legacy
Stark worked with big cats for parts of six decades and survived at least 18 maulings along the way, most sources agree, though exact figures from the era vary. She's remembered today as one of the first women, and by many accounts the first, to build a lasting career specifically as a tiger trainer in a field that had almost entirely excluded women before her. She was inducted into the Circus Ring of Fame, and in 2018 filmmaker Leslie Zemeckis released a documentary, Mabel, Mabel, Tiger Trainer, revisiting her life on her own terms rather than through the lens of the earlier fictionalised novel. Sam Mendes reportedly optioned the novel's screenplay at one point with Kate Winslet attached to star, though no film has ever gone into production.
