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The man behind the nose

By Michael Kane

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August 8, 2010 | 4:24am

Confronted by 60 cannibal tribesmen carrying spears, Larry Harmon recalled what the grizzled Aussie bush pilot had said upon dropping him off at the airstrip. “You ain’t coming out of them jungles, mate. Your head’ll be on a stick before nightfall.”

Harmon could have run. But not very fast. He was wearing clown shoes.

Larry Harmon was Bozo the Clown. And it was this total Bozo’s big idea to risk his life in the most impenetrable place on earth — the 1960s wilds of New Guinea — to test his theory that “joy and laughter” were universal, that goodwill, affability and, well, funny-looking red hair crossed all borders and cultures. “Bozo could protect me. Bozo could be my guide,” Harmon said.

So the clown, in full makeup and costume, stood face to face with a village elder, each eyeing the true oddity of the other. One had a red nose, the other a bone in his nose. One had paint on his face, and . . . so did the other, actually. Bozo cracked a big clownish smile and let out a “Yuh-yuh-yuh!” chuckle — and, tough crowd or not, the tribesmen all grinned and laughed as well. Bozo would live to clown another day.

Such are the bizarre tales in “The Man Behind the Nose,” Harmon’s new memoir, that sets out to show that not all clowns are sad on the inside.

Part chronicle of derring-do, the posthumous tell-all (Harmon died in 2008 of heart failure) is also a chronicle of the entertainer’s vision in building an entertainment empire around face paint and funny shoes.

It’s a well-kept secret: Bozo the Clown wasn’t a syndicated TV show. It was franchised, like a fast-food chain. That Bozo you watched on TV as a kid was one of a hundred. Actually double that.

Harmon trained 203 men to become Bozo, one for just about every US market and as far away as Australia. “In every city that has Bozo, those citizens think he’s the only one,” Harmon said, while, of course, he profited from each one.

Raised in Cleveland in the ’30s, Harmon grew up sitting beside the family radio, letting his imagination run wild and often adding in his own percussion by banging spoons on mom’s pots and pans.

During WWII, he was a drum major with an Army band that performed for politicians and visiting dignitaries. Afterward, its famous marching band drew Harmon to the University of Southern California, where following college he found musical and voice work for radio and early TV broadcasts.

In 1952, Harmon won an audition to portray the character Bozo the Capitol Clown for children’s records and live performances. When Capitol Records figured the clown bit had run its course, the forward-thinking Harmon purchased the rights to the character.

He added a new costume, a new chuckle and finally a new wig of yak hair curved upward and coated in Krylon. (The original Capitol Bozo had hair like a mop).

Then he set out to gain fortune by pitching the show across the country to local networks — not through syndication but by training actors to play the role. The script went something like: “Howdy! This is your old pal Bozo and we’ve got the most rootin’ tootinest, ding-dong dandy show in the whole ding-dong dandy world. Yuh-yuh-yuh!”

For the Washington, DC, market, he picked a local announcer by the name of Willard Scott (now best-known for his old-timers segments on the “Today” show). Years later, a local McDonald’s franchise asked Willard to come up with some commercial spots and he created Ronald McDonald. Coincidence?

The show was a hit across the US, even airing as far as Thailand, Greece and Brazil. And thanks to his universal celebrity, the brains-behind-Bozo the Clown took every advantage of the thrill ride.

Fully dressed as Bozo in a flak jacket, he received astronaut training in the late ’60s on the “vomit comet” — a weightlessness-simulation that had Bozo floating around in low oxygen until his painted-red lips turned purple underneath.

He trained with the New York Fire Department, threw out the first pitch at a Cleveland Indians game and somehow got that swooshing up-do hair into a fishbowl helmet to go diving with the US Navy at the site of a sunken WWII gunboat.

In 1984, at the height of the Cold War, Bozo staged a joke run for president with a platform of world peace through laughs. And in a weird twist of irony, he was himself the target of an assassination attempt in Dallas.

“Sooner or later, clown,” said a voice on the phone in his hotel suite, “you gotta leave your room. And when you do, I’m waiting. I’m gonna kill you.”

Dallas police arrested a woman at the payphones in the hotel lobby with baggies covering her hands and feet and a gun in her purse. She thought that Bozo was a threat to the American people.

Harmon died at age 83 of congestive heart failure. But his dream of creating a character that would live on was realized. He’s even eponymous. Ever call someone a Bozo?

“I had made my dreams come true,” Harmon said, late in his unusual and eventful life. “I had fashioned this character into an icon that would survive whether I was here or not.”

The Man Behind the Nose

Assassins, Astronauts, Cannibals, and Other Stupendous Tales

by Larry “Bozo” Harmon with Thomas Scott McKenzie

Igniter

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