‘A strange beauty’ discomfits GOP lawmakers (Essay)

When he was 8, his mother took him to the circus in Austin, and what he saw that day determined the course of his life. The clowns, the elephants, the lion tamer daring to enter the cage of growling killers enthralled the little boy, but it was the trapeze artists who captured his imagination. On the way home, young Clyde told his mother he was going to pull a Toby Tyler; he would run away from home and join the circus as a wire-walker. She counseled him to at least wait until he graduated from high school. He did just that, as the 14-year-old valedictorian.

When he wasn’t picking cotton in the summer to finance his three-ring dream, he was teaching himself how to walk a tightrope. He got so good, he could set out across his mother’s swaying backyard clothesline and make it from one end to the other. (Did he walk barefoot? I wonder. Maybe wear a pair of Keds?) His nephew, Charles Loving of Austin, told me for my 2015 column that he occasionally walked across the big, iron bridge spanning Brushy Creek near his house — walked atop the bridge, that is, not on the roadway.

Scanning Billboard magazine not long after finishing high school early, the teenager noticed a help-wanted ad for an aerialist. The Alfaretta Sisters, a noted circus act from Italy, needed a tightrope walker, since one of the sisters had died unexpectedly. The surviving sister would be holding auditions in San Antonio of all places. I’m assuming the young Texan saw fate beckoning. He must have caught a southbound bus or train immediately, his impossible dream suddenly within reach. 

He auditioned. He got the job. As he was about to head home to Round Rock, his new trapeze partner had a question for him: Would you mind dressing as a girl?

“I didn’t, and that’s how it began,” he told a reporter years later. 

Taking the name “Barbette” because it sounded French, the Texan made his solo debut at the Harlem Opera House in 1919. Aweing the crowd with daredevil trapeze and wire stunts he must have perfected on his mother’s Round Rock clothesline, he soared above the packed house in a lavish ball gown, silvery-gold wig and a hat festooned with ostrich plumes and feathers. 

“I’d always read a lot of Shakespeare,” he told Francis Steegmuller in a 1969 profile in the New Yorker, “and thinking that those marvelous heroines of his were played by men and boys made me feel that I could turn my specialty into something unique. I wanted an act that would be a thing of beauty — of course, it would have to be a strange beauty.”

Barbette made his European debut in 1923, when the William Morris Agency sent him to London. Reviewing his high-wire performance at the Hippodrome, the Guardian raved, “It is scarcely enough to say in praising Barbette that Barbette is incomparable.”

In Paris, he performed at the Casino de Paris, the Moulin Rouge, the Empire, the Médrano Circus, the Alhambra Theater and the Folies Bergère. His admirers included Pablo Picasso, art critic Serge Diaghilev and the photographer Man Ray. He also toured both Europe and America with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He told Steegmuller he traveled “with 28 trunks, a maid, and a maid to help the maid.”

Jean Cocteau, the French poet, novelist and dramatist, fell in love with him. “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,” he wrote to an acquaintance. “Go and see him, be nice to him, as he deserves, 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.”

In 1926, Cocteau wrote an essay about the nature of art, observing that Barbette “transforms effortlessly back and forth between man and woman.” In one translation of Cocteau’s words, “the young performer’s femaleness is like a cloud of dust he throws into the eyes of the audience to blind it to the masculinity he needs to perform his acrobatics.”

It’s hard to know exactly how his career ended, but one version takes place in a Paris music hall. A Russian sailor stared upward. He was enthralled. He couldn’t take his eyes off the young woman on the wire, until someone informed him — perhaps they tapped him on the shoulder and whispered — that the beautiful Barbette was actually a man. His fantasy crushed, the sailor drew a pistol and shot himself. 

Barbette a few nights later, still distraught by the incident, fell. His injuries, combined with a bout of pneumonia, ended his career on the wire.

He came back to Texas, lived with a sister in Round Rock and Austin, and for more than 30 years worked as a choreographic consultant on Broadway shows and Hollywood movies, including “Some Like It Hot” and “The Big Circus.” He lived with chronic pain from illness and the long-ago injury. 

“He asked me for the poison, an overdose of Quaaludes,” his nephew told me. “I thought about it, but then I thought, ‘I know what he’s going to do! ‘”

Barbette was undeterred. He died of a drug overdose in 1973. His ashes are buried in Round Rock Cemetery on Sam Bass Road.

Loving, the nephew, told me that one reason I’d never heard of his uncle is because Round Rock’s city fathers in the early 1990s rejected a proposed statue of their accomplished native son. “Nobody gay ever came from Round Rock!” is how Loving remembers their response. 

With their bills harassing “drag queens” instead of tending to the state’s vital business, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, and state Rep. Nate Shatzline, R-Fort Worth, reflect the same pinched spirit. They’re the people’s representatives, with important obligations and responsibilities. In the spirit of Barbette, who died 50 years ago this summer, these guys should be flying so much higher. 

Joe Holley was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2022, as part of the Houston Chronicle editorial team that produced a series of editorials on Donald Trump’s “Big Lie,” and a Pulitzer finalist in 2017. He has been the “Native Texan” columnist for the Houston Chronicle since 2013.