“Cat Dancers,” an extraordinary HBO documentary, tells a tale so touching, heartbreaking and complex that it took eight years to tell.
Ron and Joy Holiday were childhood friends in Maine who bonded through ballet, and later, as a married couple, went on to showbiz success with an exotic tiger act that began when actor William Holden gave them a black leopard cub from his African animal preserve.
The couple operated out of the Cat Dancers ranch in Florida where they hired a young man named Chuck Lizza to work with their animals.
Lizza joined the act and eventually became a lover to the middle-aged Holidays.
In 1998, Lizza was killed in a freak accident by Jupiter, a rare white Bengal tiger who was introduced to the act despite Joy Holiday’s objections. After Lizza’s death, though, she took to her bed, stopped eating, and lost over 20 pounds in five weeks fell. She was pining for death. Five weeks later, she got her wish.
Ron Holiday narrates “Cat Dancers.” As he tells the Post, he stills remembers the two horrible incidents that changed his life – for the most part.
“When it happened with Chuck, it looked like an accident. Chuck tripped on chain-link fencing and fell onto the cat’s back. The cat was startled, grabbed him by the neck and killed him immediately,” he says.
“I remember that like I can see my hand in front of me. But with Joy, it was an out-and-out attack. I only remember the cat lunging up at her, and I don’t remember anything else.”
After Jupiter killed Joy, the authorities shot the cat dead.
First-time filmmaker Harris Fishman, whose brother studied tiger-training with Holiday, learned of the story several months after the tragedies, and immediately sensed it would make a fascinating film.
Holiday agreed to it, but for very different reasons.
“When we first met, I was borderline insane,” he says. “I was in the process of grieving, and I had no idea where I was going or what life had in store for me. Anyone who would have asked me anything at that time, I would have said fine. I had no idea what I was getting into.”
For the first several years of interviews, the two men didn’t discuss the tragedies.”There were trust issues around what was gonna be my take on the story,” says Fishman, “so we just talked about his life with Joy prior to Chuck, and then slowly talked about Chuck. It took a long time.”
The first half of “Cat Dancers” features footage from Ron and Joy’s early show business life. The lead nude dancer in Paris’ Follies Bergere, Ron was vigorously pursued by Siegfried from Siegfried & Roy. Although he sent many a bouquet to Ron, the dancer ultimately rejected him because he was “not my type – too femme.” The film does not delve too deeply into the menage a trois shared by the Holidays with Lizza.
“We were extremely private – no one knew what was going on,” says Holiday, now 72. “As a rule, people thought that I was gay, and that Chuck was Joy’s lover. But this was a bond between the three of us. It was nobody’s business. We knew how the average public would look at it, and we did not want to be involved in any discussion.”Indicative of the story’s complexity, there is one subject that Fishman and Holiday disagree on- whether the careless way she interacted with Jupiter, turning her back on him as she left his cage, might have actually been a suicide.
“Joy was not the kind of girl that would ever commit suicide,” says Holiday. “When we were kids, she wanted to be a nun. She believed in Catholicism, and she did not believe in suicide.”But when Fishman is asked if he believes Joy killed herself, his immediate response is, “Yup.”
“I do. I wanted to be light-handed on it, but my point of view was, if a Catholic person were to commit suicide, it would be like that. You’d do it, but don’t tell yourself you’re going to do it,” says Fishman. In the end, Holiday is grateful to Fishman for the work he did, as “Cat Dancers” helped him get past one of the most tragic periods anyone could possibly experience.
“I can look at my life now and see what happened, and it’s over with and I’m moving on. I’m finally enjoying my life,” says Holiday. “It was complete closure, which I feel I never would have gotten [otherwise]. I do believe that this documentary saved my sanity.”
CAT DANCERS
Monday, 10 p.m., HBO2
Tuesday, Midnight, HBO