THE RELEVANT QUEER: Vander Clyde Broadway Shines as Barbette, Cocteau’s Muse, Born December 19, 1898

“I wanted an act that would be a thing of beauty—of course, it would have to be a strange beauty.”

TRQ: Vander Clyde “Barbette”,  Born Dec. 19, 1898

Performer and trapeze artist Vander Clyde Broadway, known to most as Barbette for his aerial performances in full drag, was born on December 19, 1898. Barbette started in the circus but on his arrival in Europe and performing in the Moulin Rouge and Casino de Paris, he befriended and inspired Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Josephine Baker and Anton Dolin.

Broadway was born in Trickham, Texas, to parents Henry and Hattie. After Henry’s death, Hattie married Samuel C. Loving, and Broadway’s name changed to Vander Loving.

After his mother took him to Austin to see the circus, Broadway was obsessed. He started devoting hours upon hours to practice balancing and walking on his mother’s steel clothing line. He also went to the circus as often as possible, working in the cotton fields to afford ticket purchases.

Broadway graduated high school at age 14. After discovering an ad placed in Billboard, he auditioned in San Antonio to replace one of The Alfaretta Sisters aerialists who had died suddenly.

Broadway once explained, “The other sister had died, and this one—in private life she was the wife of a blackface comedian billed as ‘Happy Doc Holland, the Destroyer of Gloom’—needed a new partner for a trapeze and swinging-ring act.

Together Broadway and the surviving sister decided that he would perform the acrobatic act as a woman.

“She told me that women’s clothes always make a wire act more impressive—the plunging and gyrating are more dramatic in a woman—and she asked me if I’d mind dressing as a girl. I didn’t, and that’s how it began.”
— Vander Clyde Broadway

Next, Broadway joined Erford’s Whirling Sensation where performers hung by their teeth while wearing butterfly wings.

Before long, however, Broadway went solo and created his Barbette persona. He chose the name because to him, Barbette sounded French and exotic.

Dressed in a gown and ostrich-feather hat, he debuted at the Harlem Opera House in 1919. Barbette transitioned from the circus to the vaudeville stage, performing trapeze and high-wire acts in full drag. Halfway through the act, he would strip down to a leotard. He maintained the feminine illusion until at the end of the act, when he would remove his wig and reveal his muscled masculinity.

As the “versatile specialty,” Barbette toured the Keith Vaudeville Circuit across the United States and became increasingly popular. In 1923 the William Morris Agency sent him to London and Paris. Besides the Moulin Rouge, he opened at the Alhambra Theatre, and appeared at the Folies Bergère, the Médrano Circus and the Empire.

In Paris, the American cafe society and the French artistic and literary circles celebrated Barbette. Jean Cocteau described Barbette’s act as “an extraordinary lesson in theatrical professionalism,” in a now classic essay on art for the Nouvelle Review Française (1926).

Writing to his friend Paul Collaer, Cocteau praised Barbette again:
Next week in Brussels, you’ll see a music-hall act called ‘Barbette’ that has been keeping me enthralled for a fortnight. The young American who does this wire and trapeze act is a great actor, an angel, and he has become the friend to all of us. Go and see him … and tell everybody that he is no mere acrobat in women’s clothes, nor just a graceful daredevil, but one of the most beautiful things in the theatre. Stravinsky, Auric, poets, painters, and I myself have seen no comparable display of artistry on the stage since Nijinsky.

Elsewhere, Cocteau describes Barbette as “an angel, a flower, a bird.”

Cocteau commissioned Surrealist artist Man Ray for a series of photographs that captured Broadway’s transformation into Barbette. He also cast Babette in Le Sang d’un Poete (“The Blood of a Poet”) (1930) to replace the Vicomtesse de Noailles.

“I tried to imagine myself a descendant of the Marquis de Sade, of the Comtesse de Chevigné… and a long line of rich bankers–all of which the Vicomtesse was. For a boy from Round Rock, Texas, that demanded a lot of concentration–at least as much as working on the wire.”
— Vander Clyde Broadway

After joining the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to tour London, Brussels and Berlin, Barbette was caught having sex with another man at the London Palladium and banned from working in England again.

In 1930, Barbette inspired a character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! He had at least partially inspired the character in Viktor and Viktoria (1933) who removes her wig at the end of her act.

However, Barbette’s popularity peaked in the 1930s. He stopped performing entirely following an engagement at Lowe’s State theatre in New York, when he caught a crippling case of pneumonia that required nearly two years of rehabilitation to regain the ability to walk.

Even after he retired from performing, Broadway involved himself in various projects. He coached Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis for Some Like it Hot (1959). As artistic director, he staged productions for Ringling Brothers–Barnum and Bailey. He also contributed circus choreography and sequences for Disney on Parade and Orson Welles’s Around the World Broadway musical.

For the last few physically painful months of his life, Broadway lived in Austin with his sister. On August 5, 1973, he ended his life by overdosing on “somniferous” drugs. He was cremated in San Antonio, Texas.

About the Authors:

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and he is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore.

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Sources:

New Yorker

Dallas Observer

As It Ought To Be Magazine

Tsha Online

Impact News