For the sharpest minds in show business, there’s always another hustle.
Take Joe Exotic, whose 2020 conviction for a murder-for-hire plot and violations of the Endangered Species Act hasn’t kept the eccentric tiger trainer out of the headlines.
Since beginning his 21-year sentence, the “Tiger King” star has started a cannabis brand, hawked digital art and begun work on an album tentatively titled “Jungle Rhapsody: A Tiger King Experience.” His most recent gambit involves selling personal phone calls from his cell – “What better Valentines gift could you ever get your loved one,” he posted on Instagram in January 2026.
But before Joe Exotic, there was Mabel Stark. Often described as America’s most famous female tiger trainer, the Tiger Queen was renowned for her pluck and charisma.
While researching Caxton Printers, the publisher of Stark’s autobiography, I came across unpublished archival material about Stark’s long career training animals. Like Joe Exotic, Stark had a knack for the spotlight. But even more impressively, she did it under the scrutiny of being a woman in a male-dominated world, while caring for her animals with love rather than fear.
From nurse to tiger trainer
Born Mary Ann Haynie in 1888 or 1889 – the exact year has always been a mystery – Stark grew up in Princeton, Kentucky. When she was 8 years old, she attended her first circus, where she was awed by the performances of trained animals.
Two decades would pass before she got a chance to try her hand at animal training.
Taking a vacation in California from her job as a nurse, Stark met Al Sands, manager of the Al G. Barnes Circus. After learning of her interest in training animals, he hired her on the spot.
Stark started by riding horses and training goats. It would take several years before she started working with tigers. But once she did, her career took off.
Crowds gathered to watch the “Tiger Girl” wrestle with big cats and wow audiences by commanding a dozen tigers at a time to follow her lead. Her wrestling act with her favorite tiger, Rajah – in which the duo would roll three or four times on the ground – became one of the best-known cat acts in the U.S.
She leveraged that success to join the Ringling Circus – the largest circus in the U.S. – for twice the pay.
As her popularity grew, Stark collaborated with screenwriter Gertrude Orr to write her life’s story.
“Hold That Tiger” hit bookstores in 1938. Caxton Printers, a small publishing company in rural Idaho, issued the book and marketed it primarily to young readers. It proved popular, selling well enough to warrant multiple reprintings.
Known for giving a voice to first-time writers and authors from underrepresented groups, Caxton Printers found a niche market for circus-related titles. It also published books about Stark’s first employer, Al Barnes, as well as the Ringling Brothers and renowned lion trainer Louis Roth, who also happened to be one of Stark’s ex-husbands.
Female power in the ring
Stark was acutely aware of the path she was paving.
“I deliberately chose a field in which no other woman had specialized,” she wrote in her autobiography.
The conventional wisdom at the time, she added, was that “tigers were considered too dangerous for a woman to handle.”
Stark’s willingness to defy convention mattered. As circus historian Janet M. Davis noted, “circus women’s performances celebrated female power” and represented “a startling alternative to contemporary social norms.”
In early-20th-century American life, women might not have been able to vote or to serve on juries in most states, but in the ring, they commanded the audience’s attention riding bareback on horses, displaying strength and stamina, and performing gravity-defying acrobatic feats.
Stark’s schedule was relentless. She performed almost daily with traveling circuses, and she continually refined her act. In 1938, she worked with both tigers and lions at the same time, a first for a female trainer. She made history again working with 12 tigers in one cage.
Whether it was due to the demands of her schedule or her preference for her cats, Stark’s relationships with men rarely worked out.
Over the course of her life, Stark married four times, three of which ended in divorce.
“I love these big cats as a mother loves her children,” she admitted to a friend. But “with husbands I was never happy.”
‘An animal trainer can’t have nerves’
Stark, aware of other trainers’ abusive behavior toward their tigers, took a different route.
“Kindness and patience are the biggest factors in training. … Trainers who try to beat animals into submission always get into trouble,” she said.
Yet her trade was not without danger.
“An animal trainer can’t have nerves. I haven’t had any since I gave up nursing,” she said in a 1922 New York Times interview. “They may be planting violets on me tomorrow, but while I have my health and strength, I’d rather take care of 10 tigers than a sick person.”
Stark had several serious accidents. Perhaps the worst was in 1928: After a circus train arrived late, Stark started her act without realizing her tigers hadn’t been fed for 24 hours. Two famished tigers attacked Stark after she fell in mud.
“As I lay there, helpless,” she wrote, “I wondered into how many pieces I would be torn, and how long it would take for the other tigers, growling and snarling restlessly on their seats, to finish me.” She suffered multiple broken bones, nearly lost her leg and required 300 stitches.
Another incident took place in 1950, when a tiger mauled her as she reached for its cub. Doctors initially thought they would have to amputate her arm but managed to save it.
Despite these close calls with her tigers, Stark maintained that “I am not afraid. I like the challenge of their roaring defiance.”
The stark reality
Stark toured with circuses until the late 1940s, when she was hired by Jungleland, a zoo located outside of Los Angeles.
Save for the three-and-a-half years she lived in Japan touring with her wild cat act, she spent the last 20 years of her career at Jungleland.
Stark never stopped drawing crowds to her show, nor did she shy away from the spotlight. She even appeared on the game show “What’s My Line?” in 1961 as a contestant whose profession the panel had to guess.
“Each year has left scars on my body, but it has also brought a full measure of happiness,” she recalled.
Stark worked at Jungleland until she was fired in 1967 after the park’s insurance company stopped covering her. Being away from her tigers devastated her, and she died by suicide just months later on April 20, 1968, at her home in Thousand Oaks.
The concluding paragraph of Stark’s autobiography anticipates the end of her life:
“The chute door opens as I crack my whip and shout, ‘Let them come!’ Out slink the striped cats, snarling and roaring, leaping at each other or at me. It’s a matchless thrill, and life without it is not worth while to me.”
