Aubrey MaloneFortune’s Wheel (G)
On a quiet Sunday in November 1951 a lioness escaped from the waste ground behind the Fairview cinema in Dublin while she was being fed by her owner, Bill Stephens.
She then went on a ramble through downtown Fairview and the surrounding streets, mauling a young petrol pump attendant in the process and then taking Stephens himself in her mouth and biting into him before casting him aside. The animal was eventually shot by armed police. The story went all around the world.
Some months later, another lion being trained by Stephens escaped from his pen in Finglas and killed three pigs. By now he was being sued by the petrol pump attendant for his injuries. In 1953, Stephens’ luck ran out for keeps when he was killed by a lion he was trying to coax out of a cage. (He had hoped to demonstrate his taming skills to a visitor from an American circus.)
All of this may make you conclude Bill Stephens was reckless. If he was, it was caused by his ambitiousness – the American to whom he was showing the fatal lion was, he hoped, his ticket to fame. She was a ‘talent scout’ to use an expression of Bill Whelan, the co-producer of this documentary and the man who originally developed the concept of making it.
Bill Whelan has always been fascinated by the story of the escaped lioness. He was only three years of age when she rampaged through Fairview but the event had a huge impact on him, as he makes clear when he’s interviewed in the film. He also conducts many interviews in it himself. During the course of one of them he comments on the fact that on the day the lioness escaped, the local Fairview cinema was showing a film called Jungle Stampede. Was there ever a more ironic coincidence?
Fortune’s Wheel is a captivating evocation of a time and place. It has moments of humour as well as pathos and also documents the tension between the siblings of Bill Stephens and his wife Mai, whom he married as a teenager.
Mai grew up in East Wall. Before Bill met her his main interest was playing the drums in a band. Mai was an intrepid soul who did things like wrapping snakes around her neck. Bill eventually started a circus double act with her called ‘Jungle Capers’. It featured dogs and lions in dangerous scenarios. Bill’s appetite for danger seems to have been spurred on by the worldwide publicity surrounding the November 1951 incident.
After it, he sought an aggressive lion with which he could practice his stunts. It was such an animal, Pasha, that eventually killed him. Was Mai responsible for him becoming more and more daring in his behaviour? If so, did Bill’s siblings indirectly blame her for his untimely death?
These considerations are left open to question in the film. Bill certainly can’t answer them because he’s no longer with us. Mai suffered a stroke a few years ago so she can’t either. She’s now in a nursing home. She appears in the film towards the end but is clearly too ill to speak.
I heartily recommend Fortune’s Wheel to anyone who may remember the events it chronicles, and indeed anyone who’s interested in a rattling good yarn about a man brave enough to put meat in his mouth and then put that mouth into a lion’s one to feed him. Insanity?
Bill Stephens paid the ultimate price for his nature but along the way the curly-headed daredevil gave many people great thrills. His story should have been told years ago. Now that it’s here, it’s to be doubly welcomed.