User:Jnestorius/Eddie Carmel

Eddie Carmel, born Oded Ha-Carmeili (Hebrew: עודד הכרמלי) (March 16, 1936 – August 14, 1972) was an Israeli-born American entertainer with gigantism and subsequent acromegaly resulting from a pituitary adenoma. He was popularly known as "The Jewish Giant", "The Happy Giant," and "The World's Biggest Cowboy." Carmel was billed at heights of up to 9 ft, though he may have more realistically been around 7 ft. He was variously a mutual funds salesman, carnival sideshow act, screen actor, singer, and stand-up comedian. He was made famous by a 1970 Diane Arbus photograph which appeared in Time, Newsweek, and Life magazines.

Agenda
Unused references listed here to show up in reflist.

Agenda is
 * 1) classify reliability of references: do they mention only in passing, do they repeat blarney, do they cite Wikipedia
 * 2) fill in incomplete references (page numbers, date, accessible URLs); remove unusable Google-books links
 * 3) from reliable sources, reference as much as possible and note any remaining unreferenced assertions
 * 4) see if remaining references might fill in the gaps; then judge whether to delete assertion, find a better source, or add "some sources say" hedge
 * 5) what to do where statement is sourced to unavailable online?
 * 6) reread reliable sources for any extra information worth adding
 * 7) * Gay Talese and Arbus in 1961
 * 8) * The mutant [in THE HEAD THAT WOULDN'T DIE] was played by 7'8" Eddie Carmel, who had been "Eleazer Carmel, the wrestling champion of Israel" and "The Happy Giant Clown" on TV(!)
 * 9) copyedit for flow
 * 10) expunge any unused sources
 * 11) copy to article space, uncommenting infobox photo and transcluding Categories

Additions:
 * Provenance of various museum prints, and destination of noted auctioned prints.
 * Comments from Arbus on Carmel's personality, and her earlier acquaintance with him, and the context of her attachment to "freaks".
 * More films etc -- jumpoff from IMDB but only cite better refs
 * cite for comedian career
 * his 1971 impromptu poem on Arbus -- how does that TV appearance square with his retirement/incapacity?

Childhood and education
Oded Ha-Carmeili was born in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine (now Israel), the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Itzhak Ha-Oded Ha-Carmeili from Poland and Miriam (née Pines) from the United States. When he was two years old, the family relocated to the Bronx in New York City so his mother could care for an ailing relative. His father worked as an insurance salesman and his mother as a secretary at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In America his father became Isaac Carmeli and young Oded began to go by "Eddie"; "Carmel" came later as a stage name.

Carmel was of normal size until adolescence; his his parents were 5 ft and 5 ft. At 15 years of age he was diagnosed with gigantism and acromegaly; he had radiotherapy to treat a pituitary tumor over the next two years, but continued to grow until a final treatment in 1964 when he was 28. His later self-mythology included a birth weight of 16 lbs, a height aged seven of 6 ft, and ancestry including Goliath of Gath and a Polish maternal great-grandfather in Warsaw was the world's tallest rabbi at 7 ft. Carmel was billed at the exaggerated heights of up to 9 ft. A 1965 edition of the Guinness Book of Records claimed he was the world's tallest man at 8 feet; the 1988 edition estimated his height from photographs at 7 ft. He had a shoe size of 24, sometimes exaggerated to 35.

Carmel graduated from Taft High School in 1954, and for the next two years attended Baruch School of Business, which was then part of City College of New York, where he was elected vice president of his class and joined the Dramatic Club. He dropped out to pursue an entertainment career exploiting his size.

Career
In 1958, Carmel was selling mutual funds at an office near Times Square in Manhattan. He tried to break into stand-up comedy, attending clubs and forming a double act with friend Irwin Sherman, with public stunts such as protesting the small size of the Volkswagen Beetle. Due to his condition, Carmel's primary work was in carnival sideshows. At Hubert's Dime Museum and Flea Circus on West 42nd Street in Times Square, he was "Texas Ed Carmel, the World's Tallest Cowboy". He toured with the sideshow attached to the World of Mirth carnival, while Milt Levine was barker, and later toured with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which billed his size as 9 feet $1/4$ inch (2.76 meters) and 500 lbs. When not on tour he lived with his parents on Elgar Place in Co-op City in the Bronx.

Carmel had bit parts playing monsters on television and in a few films, including The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) and 50,000 B.C. (Before Clothing) (1963). His deep basso profondo secured some dubbing work, and he studied French, German, and Spanish to increase his range. He formed a band, Frankenstein and the Brain Surgeons, and recorded novelty songs "The Happy Giant", "The Good Monster," and "The Happy Monster's Song". When his mobility declined he restricted his circus work to Madison Square Garden, and stopped altogether in 1969 when arthritis made it difficult to mount the stage; he used two canes and later a wheelchair. Promoters of some later public appearances, such as supermarket openings, refused to pay him because he was unable to stand, and his seated height was less impressive.

Carmel, who always wanted to "play Carnegie Hall", was among the "random collection" of guest stars there on 5 January 1972 in A Marvel-ous Evening with Stan Lee, in which he recited a poem about "my kid brother the Hulk".

Arbus photograph
Carmel was made famous by Diane Arbus' photograph Jewish Giant, taken at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y. It was taken on 10 April 1970, ten years after Arbus first met and photographed Carmel at Hubert's. In the famous image, Carmel's back is arched against the low ceiling of the apartment as he looks away from the camera at his parents gazing up at him. The other shots in the same reel are more conventional family portraits with Carmel behind and between his parents as they all look at the lens. Carmel quipped to Arbus, "Isn't it awful to have midget parents?" Arbus later wrote, "You know how every mother has nightmares when she’s pregnant that her baby will be born a monster? … I think I got that in the mother's face". Susan Sontag commented, "the parents look like midgets, as wrong-sized as the enormous son".

The picture was first published in Artforum in May 1971, and was seen more widely in the 31 May 1971 issue of New York magazine. Arbus included the photograph in A Box of Ten Photographs, her only portfolio, of which she had printed eight copies and sold four of a planned limited edition of 50 by the time of her July 1971 suicide. The four unsold sets were posthumously redesignated artist's proofs, and the edition was completed in 1973 with 46 sets printed by Neil Selkirk. Some sets of A Box of Ten Photographs have been split, with individual prints sold separately. Christies sold the print of Jewish Giant from Selkirk set number 34 for $56,250 in 2013.

Original prints of the photograph sold for $340,000 in 2004, $220,000 in 2005, $421,000 at Christie's on 18 October 2007, and $583,500 at Christie's on 17 May 2017 (inscribed to Nancy Grossman and Anita Siegel). A print from the estate of Arbus' manager Marvin Israel sold for "only $4,950" in November 1984, the subject matter being "too doom and gloom" for the market's mood.

Original prints outside the Box of Ten edition exist. Nancy Grossman's was of the same dimensions as the box set; Philip Leider's copy was 14.875 x; another by Arbus of 14.25 x sold at Christie's in 1991; another 15.375 x sold in 1993 and 2005; another 13.625 x in 2007. One by Selkirk of 9.75 x sold at Christie's 5 October 2015

Individual prints:
 * 9/50 auctioned at Sotheby's in 2021, gifted to the seller in late 1970s
 * 33/50 auctioned at Sotheby's in 2018 from the estate of Leland Hirsch, who bought it at Christie's in 2006
 * Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University gift of Gideon Panter 2017
 * Metropolitan Museum of Art #6882-1-13(S)-1620 printed by Arbus bought "directly from her estate" by Danielle and David Ganek and donated in 2004.
 * Jewish Museum, Manhattan purchased 1999
 * Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2018 purchase from Howard Greenberg Gallery

Jewish Giant was also included in Twelve Photographs, 1961–1971, an edition of 1000 published for Venezia 79 la fotografia with profits to UNESCO.

The picture has been reproduced in many photography books, beginning in 1973 with Anne Wilkes Tucker's The Woman's Eye and Volker Kahmen's Art History of Photography.

Los Angeles 2001 essay by Bernard Cooper.

Death and legacy
On August 14, 1972, Carmel died of a heart attack at age 36, in Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, New York. At the time of his death, he had shrunk several inches, due to kyphoscoliosis (curvature of the spine, a mixture of scoliosis and kyphosis). His parents sold his clothes to a sideshow collector and soon moved back to Israel.

Jenny Carchman, upon learning that her father was a first cousin of the "giant" in Arbus' photograph, made an audio documentary about Carmel, which premiered in 1999 at Manhattan's Jewish Museum, was later broadcast on All Things Considered, and reported by Laurie Dhue for Special Edition on MSNBC. In 2014 the Jewish Museum mounted an "intimate 'essay' exhibition" centered on its print of Arbus' photograph and augmented with Carmel's belongings and memorabilia.

In the 2006 Arbus biopic Fur, the giant based on Carmel was played by former Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball player Eric Gingold. Jerome Charyn's 2015 short story "Dee" is based on Arbus' photographing of Carmel.