Johnny Fox, a showman with a taste for the macabre and an appetite for swords, died on Sunday in Damascus, Md. He was 64.
The cause was liver cancer, said Marc Hartzman, who included Mr. Fox in his book “American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers,” published in 2005.
Though Mr. Fox’s array of talents included sleight of hand and hammering a spike into his nose, he was best known for sword swallowing, a skill he displayed all over the country.
His cancer was diagnosed early this year, but he was performing as recently as October at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, where he had been a regular for 37 years.
From 1999 to 2005, Mr. Fox also ran the Freakatorium, El Museo Loco, a small museum on New York’s Lower East Side that harbored artifacts including clothing worn by Tom Thumb, the P. T. Barnum performer; a mummified cat said to be from an Egyptian tomb; and a glass eye that supposedly belonged to Sammy Davis Jr.
Continue reading the main story“When you walk in, you’ll immediately notice the two-headed cow head and the two-headed snake,” Mr. Hartzman wrote in an article about the museum in Bizarre magazine. “Resting atop the cow heads is a cane made from a bull’s penis.”
The museum and Mr. Fox’s stage act were predicated on the same belief. As he used to tell audiences before swallowing a ridiculously long sword, “It’s gross, but you’ll watch.”
John Robert Fox was born on Nov. 13, 1953, in Minneapolis and grew up in Connecticut.
When he was a boy, his father, Joseph, took him to the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield, Mass., where he saw his first sword swallower. Not long after, his father gave him a book about Harry Houdini that described other swallowing tricks. At the dinner table one night, young Johnny swallowed a strand of spaghetti and then pulled it back up his throat.
“My dad said, ‘You’re excused; you can leave the table,’ ” he recalled in a 1999 interview with The New York Times.
Mr. Fox eventually created a magic and comedy act, which he performed at fairs and sidewalk shows. He added flashier stunts like fire-eating to attract crowds. Then, in 1978, he trained himself to swallow swords, spending eight months perfecting the art before showing it to audiences.
“I wanted it to look really natural in front of a crowd,” he told Mr. Hartzman for the encyclopedia.
He explained the technique to The Times.
“It’s about the ability to relax and dilate your throat, the pharynx and the epiglottis,” he said. He added, “What stops people from doing it is fear.”
In his act, Mr. Fox mixed sword swallowing with jokes, an assortment of tricks, and smooth, easy interplay with the audience. He made several television appearances, including in a commercial for Maalox, the antacid.
“Are you like me?” he says in the commercial as he smashes a light bulb with a hammer. “Do you occasionally eat things that don’t agree with you?”
He then proceeds to eat the shards of glass.
Mr. Fox performed at fairs and other events in Connecticut, Texas, Florida, Minnesota and elsewhere, including Coney Island.
Dick Zigun, the Coney Island impresario, said Mr. Fox had been more than just a performer.
“He was a pied piper and inspired a new generation, did the hard work to make events happen, earned and spent large sums of money to collect and preserve the historic objects of circus sideshow arts,” Mr. Zigun said by email. “And, oh, yeah, he was one of the great sword swallowers.”
Mr. Fox’s unofficial home was the Maryland Renaissance Festival.
Jules Smith, president and general manager of that festival, said Mr. Fox always preferred to perform outdoors in the daylight rather than in a theater so that he could see the members of the audience and enjoy their reactions.
When he became ill, friends and fellow performers started a fund-raising campaign to send him to Arizona for alternative cancer treatment, and for a time that treatment seemed to help.
“You can tell people I’ll be back,” he told The Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md., in August.
When he returned to the renaissance fair, the festival honored him by renaming one of its stages the Royal Fox Theater.
After his performances this summer and fall at the festival, despite his illness, “he would stay and sign autographs until the very last person got one and a photo with him as well, which usually took more than one and one half hours after his show,” Mr. Smith said by email.
The festival said Mr. Fox was married and divorced several times. His companion in recent years had been Barbara Calvert. He is survived by a son, Kelly.
Mr. Fox had a large collection of odd memorabilia, which he put on display in 1999 at the Freakatorium.
However, the $5 admission fee and the limited amount of traffic were not enough to keep the museum going in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
“People say: ‘Don’t close. We love you,’ ” Mr. Fox said in 2005 as he was preparing to close the museum. “It’s great to hear that, but do you want to pay the bills?”
Had he chosen to, Mr. Fox could certainly have paid those bills through pickpocketing. At the end of his shows, he would invite an audience member to come pull the grand-finale sword out of his mouth.
“I have a present for you for helping out,” he would tell the dragooned assistant after the sword was disgorged. “It’s a nice watch.”
It was the person’s own watch, which he had pilfered in the midst of the bit.
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. Fox was born. It was 1953, not 1954. As the obituary correctly notes, he was 64.