The Merry-Go-Round

Crump's Colossal Combined Carnival Show barely survives financially by hiring thieves and pickpockets to rob customers. One day, the circus is bought by clubman Jack Hamilton when his car breaks down en route to meet a deadline to avoid bankruptcy, and he needs the circus tractor to get his auto out of a ditch. Hamilton leads the circus to financial success and falls in love with Gypsy, the ticket-taker. To convince Jack to marry Gypsy, her supposed mother, the fortune-teller Carlotta, says that she was kidnapped as a baby and shows Jack a photo in which he recognizes Gypsy's mother as the wife of Andrew Pomeroy, the financier who ruined him. Gypsy's subsequent life with her real parents is miserable since they find her lack of manners offensive and try to get her to marry a cousin, but Jack rescues her and the minute she turns eighteen, marries her, with the Pomeroys' belated consent.