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NEW ORLEANS—All my friends are so pleased these days that the state of California is out-circusing Louisiana. “Louisiana politics ain’t so bad,” they say. “Look at Arnold.” That’s when I remind them of just what a sideshow our traditional political circus can be. Or a veritable zoo, even. 

I should know. Arnold Schwarzenegger may look and sometimes act like a gorilla, but it’s my father, Rodney Fertel, “The Gorilla Man,” who ran for mayor of New Orleans in 1969 on the platform that the Audubon Zoo needed a gorilla. 

My father’s family made most of its money in real estate, so he was in a position to play when he wanted to. And for the people of New Orleans, his sense of fun was his primary political asset. To them, a man who campaigned in a safari outfit, even sometimes in a complete gorilla suit, was sending up the clowns who ran the Third World banana republic that was their home. 

His campaign manager was named Black Cat Lacombe, a local racetrack promoter straight out of a Damon Runyon story. Allen LaCombe was called the Black Cat, he was happy to tell you, because he lost at everything. Legend has it that during a stint as a newspaper handicapper he selected nine winners one day in his column, then bet against each one of them. 

When he wasn’t promoting horseflesh, the Black Cat was promoting himself, always in it for laughs, a perennial candidate for whatever office was up for grabs. When he ran for governor in 1959, the Black Cat was invited to a dinner honoring Robert F. Kennedy, who was stumping for his brother JFK. Sitting at the head table with Kennedy and the other bigwigs, the Black Cat sported on his rented tuxedo a campaign button the size of a saucer that read, “Use Your Dome, Vote LaCombe.” 

It was because of this campaign against incumbent Gov. Earl Long in 1959 that A.J. Liebling came to immortalize the Black Cat in his masterpiece about Louisiana politics, “The Earl of Louisiana.” Leibling records the following exchange, overheard at a local bookie joint conducted in what we call here an Irish Channel brogue that sounds pretty much like Brooklynese: 

“A customer came over from the bar and said to the Black Cat, ‘I’m going to vote for you, governor; you’re better than them other sonsabitches, anyway.’ 

“‘What precinct you vote in?’ the candidate asked and, after the man told him, said, ‘Well I’m going to look at the returns Sunday, and if I don’t have one vote in that precinct I’ll know you’re a lying sonofabitch.’” 

The Black Cat didn’t make it to the governor’s office. Uncle Earl won the campaign, but then lost the war. Soon after returning to the governor’s mansion, his wife had him put in the state insane asylum. She tired of his publicly gallivanting with Bourbon Street stripper Blaze Starr. Of course in California, Blaze might be running for governor herself. 

In the next election, the Black Cat lowered his aim and ran for New Orleans mayor. This time he claimed he was qualified to serve the Crescent City because he “nearly went to high school.” He got 129 votes, which makes my father’s 308 votes a decade later look like a landslide. 

A perennial loser like the Black Cat is probably the last man you’d choose to run your campaign—unless your goal, like my father’s, was political surrealism rather than the mayor’s office. 

The culinary center ring of this political big-top was run by my father’s long-divorced wife and my mother, Ruth Fertel. Her New Orleans restaurant, the original Ruth’s Chris Steak House, has for decades been the place of choice for red-meat politics. The day before votes are cast, it’s a hotbed of deal-making and handicapping. The day after, it’s payback time, with winners eating steak and losers, red beans and rice, cooked for many years by my mother’s hand and sold for the price of a steak. 

Polling 308 votes, Dad was one of the red-beans guys. But he won a mock election at the University of New Orleans. Kids know a good joke on their elders when they see one. It was the 1960s, and maybe this was some more of that street theater they’d seen on the six o’clock news. Maybe the Gorilla Man was related to Abbie Hoffman, that other latter-day surrealist. You know: “Steal This Campaign.” 

Gorilla Man the thing Dad was proudest of is that after his landslide he went out and found not one, but two baby lowland gorillas for sale. He brought them back to the zoo, where they were a popular attraction for years. 

Dad named them Red Beans and Rice. And then he announced that he was the only candidate in history who had kept all his campaign promises even though he’d lost. 

So far, California’s gubernatorial hopefuls, however entertaining they may be, have shown little indication of proving so generous. 

PNS contributor Randy Fertel teaches English Literature at Tulane University. He is working on a memoir about his parents and New Orleans.