FEW True Stories films have been as unlikely as Cat Dancers. A tragic tale stranger than most fiction, it began with a 70-year-old man displaying his bodybuilding equipment and donning an extraordinary wig. This was Ron Holiday, the sole survivor of
a showbiz troupe who performed with panthers, leopards and tigers, rearing them like children.
Ron was married to Joy, whom he'd known since she was an awkward Catholic schoolgirl who dreamed of becoming a nun. Instead, she teamed up with the extravagantly camp Ron as ballet-dancing stars of the Radio City Music Hall.
When her mother insisted they get married, he designed the wedding dress and still boasts about her beauty. "Her skin was like velvet," he tells his bemused students, "and she had no surgery apart from her boobs, because (they] were gone by 40."
When they became too old for ballet, the movie star William Holden gave them a leopard from his wildlife sanctuary and they built up a new act – she in her Nancy Sinatra showgirl outfit, he as a muscleman in a gladiator costume, the fearsome cats willing to jump into their arms. They were a success in a time when, perhaps, audiences didn't want too look too far behind the illusion.
But this was not a film about the rights and wrongs of keeping wild animals in captivity – in old footage, the cats snarled through the bars of concrete cages on their Florida ranch, but the Holidays insisted they were happy and well-treated.
Rather, it was a film about love: Ron and Joy's love for each other, their love for the cats and their love for Chuck. Chuck was a young man who'd run away to join the circus; when the Holidays met him it was love at first sight: "He was damn cute … and he was all man." Unusually, but in some ways inevitably, he joined the troupe as their assistant, their student, their surrogate son and their lover.
Ron's description of their threesome relationship was gushy and dreamy. But what happened after 14 years of what he describes as making him the "happiest man in the world" was not. Prompted by Siegfried and Roy's Las Vegas success – which was also to end badly – they got a white tiger, Jupiter. And, as was also inevitable really, one day in 1998 Jupiter bit through Chuck's neck and he died in Ron's arms.
Then five weeks later, incredibly, Ron tried to rouse a grieving Joy who was practically starving herself to death by taking her to visit the cats – and Jupiter, again, ripped out her throat. Crying as he recounted the tragedy, Ron, oddly, exclaimed: "At that moment I knew – Jupiter, you're inbred. You're INBRED!"
There were, clearly, many, many questions which could have been asked here. But this was a one-sided account of a life and an act, with director Harris Fishman choosing to let Ron tell the story in his emotional, trembling way. He resisted suicide, he said, to look after the cats: though "inbred" Jupiter was shot, the others were moved to a sanctuary where he helped train animal handlers.
When that closed, he chose to have his two remaining animals put down; now all he lives for is the hope of moving to what sounded like an idyllic, possibly not quite real monastery in Thailand where monks and tigers live in harmony.
