Charly Baumann

Charly Baumann, Circus Trainer of Big Cats, Dies at 72 Charly Baumann, a German-born trainer of big cats, died on Jan. 24 in Sarasota, Fla., where he lived. He was 72. He was listed as HEINZ BAUMANN. Mr. Baumann made his reputation as a circus trainer of performing tigers in a spectacular Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus act that eventually included 16 tigers. He said he was the first trainer to teach five prostrate tigers to roll over simultaneously. His tigers also learned to stand on revolving glass globes, leap through blazing hoops and walk on their rear legs. A longtime trainer of lions, Mr. Baumann decided to switch to tigers in 1957 after watching a German circus act. It persuaded him that the tiger, with its ''soft, smooth, catlike'' movements was ''the most beautiful creature of all.'' He then acquired eight tigers and started teaching them tricks. The transition, he once wrote, ''was like going from drums to a violin.'' Comparing lions with tigers was akin to ''studying the difference between hard and soft,'' he wrote in his 1975 autobiography, ''Tiger, Tiger.'' ''Lions were heavy'' and teaching them tricks required ''sharp, deliberate movements,'' he wrote. But tigers were ''light'' and responded best to ''delicate, smooth'' gestures. Training tigers was slow and difficult because unlike lions, which live together in communities, tigers are solitary beasts, living alone in the wild and generally avoiding one another's company except in the mating season. In 1964 Mr. Baumann and his tigers moved to the United States from Germany, joining the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Mr. Baumann spent the next two decades with the circus, becoming its star animal trainer. ''I truly became the tiger trainer I had always dreamed of being,'' he wrote of that time. He gave his last performance in the ring in Cleveland in 1983. By then he had also moved into circus management, becoming performance director before his retirement in 1991. Heinz E. Baumann was born on Sept. 14, 1928, in Berlin, where his father was a movie stuntman and the owner of a riding stable. The Nazis sent his parents to concentration camps for helping a Jewish patron escape to Spain. His father died in the gas chambers of Bergen-Belsen; his mother survived Ravensbruck. After spending time in an orphanage, Mr. Baumann joined the German navy. He was captured by American forces but escaped when an unexploded bomb went off, blowing a hole in the prison camp fence. Back with his mother in Berlin, he scavenged for food until she got the first of many circus jobs, shoveling manure. He learned lion training from Willi Hagenbeck, the German trainer at Circus Bügler, who did not use physical force but taught his animals their tricks by rewarding them with morsels of meat. The animal acts Mr. Baumann presented were calm and elegant, stressing the empathy between trainer and beast. They contrasted starkly with the macho style of trainers like Wolfgang Holzair and Clyde Beatty, who sought to terrify the audience by staging mock confrontations with their animals. In his 1980 book ''Behind the Big Top,'' David Lewis Hammarstrom cited ''the gracious Charly Baumann'' as a fine example of ''civilized behavior between man and beast.'' In 1952 Mr. Baumann moved to Circus Roland, which he built up over the next decade into a major European attraction with the aid of one of its owners, Ada Auredan, who became his mistress and helped him develop a Tarzan-like physique with a high-protein diet. Sympathy for his lions and tigers was not to save Mr Baumann from accidents, however. He suffered many maulings, the worst in 1963 when a powerful tiger called Assur put him in the hospital for six weeks. In some ways Mr. Baumann's retirement and death represent a turning point in the development of the modern circus. Animal trainers are members of a fast-declining profession. ''Charly Baumann belonged to a dying breed,'' said Ernest Albrecht, editor of Spectacle, a circus magazine. ''There aren't many animal trainers left.'' The animal rights movement and popular distaste for caging wild animals is one factor, said Mr. Albrecht. Then there is the spectacular success of animal-free circuses like Cirque du Soleil. But Mr. Baumann belonged to the world of animals and adjusted his tactics. In Britain during the 1950's he was prohibited from taking a whip into the tiger cage, so he ostentatiously exchanged it for the orchestra conductor's baton before each performance and ''conducted'' his tigers instead. He is survived by his wife, the former Araceli Rodriguez, a Spanish-born showgirl.