Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's an Angel! It's Barbette!

Vander Clyde (c.1899-1973) aka Barbette

Photo by Man Ray (1925) / Poster by Charles Gesmar (1926)

Where there is loveliness of appearance, then there is no fraudulence ...

  

I.

 

Once upon a time, a young boy in Texas, named Vander, made a fateful visit to the circus and instantly decided that he wanted the life of a performer. Thinking he might make a good high-wire walker, Vander spent many hours practicing at home on his mother's steel clothes line. 

 

After graduating high school, aged 14, Vander began his circus career as one-half of a famous aerialist team called The Alfaretta Sisters. The fact that he was male wasn't deemed a problem, as he was happy to dress as a girl, agreeing with his new female partner that audiences preferred to watch women in colourful and elaborate costumes perform dangerous acrobatic stunts, rather than men in plain leotards [1].    

 

After he had devised a solo act, however, Vander decided to go it alone and exchange the world of circus for vaudeville, working under the mononym Barbette, which he thought had a mysterious French ring and certain neutrality to it. 

 

 

II. 

 

Barbette made her debut at the Harlem Opera House in 1919. After performing in full drag and maintaining the illusion of femininity until the end of the act, Vander would then pull off his wig and strike exaggerated masculine poses (as if only playing the part of a man) to the (shocked) amusement of the crowd [2]. 

 

After several years on the vaudeville circuit, Barbette made her European debut in 1923. Initially performing in London, it was Paris where, like many American artists belonging to the so-called lost generation [3], Barbette was truly to find herself, appearing at venues including the Casino de Paris, the Moulin Rouge, and the Folies Bergère. She was soon the talk of the town.   

Unfortunately, on a return visit to London, Vander was caught in flagrante delicto with another man. This resulted in the Palladium cancelling his contract and in Barbette being unable to work in England ever again. However, her adoring fans and famous admirers across the Channel simply shrugged in a typically Gallic manner when hearing of the incident.   

 

 

III. 

 

One of these admirers was the avant garde artist Jean Cocteau, who, by his own admission, was completely captivated by Barbette, whom he described as a queer combination of actor, angel, and bird: No mere acrobat, but one of the most beautiful theatrical performers alive today, whose artistry is comparable with that of Nijinsky. 

 

In fact, so impressed was Cocteau with Barbette's astonishing ability to slide back and forth between man and woman - thereby revealing the fluid and performative aspect of gender - that he wrote a seminal essay on her in 1926, in which he beseeched his fellow artists to learn from Barbette if they wished to understand the true nature of artifice [4].

 

To illustrate the essay, Cocteau commissioned a series of photographs by Man Ray - another American in Paris - which captured not only aspects of Barbette's performance, but also the pre-show process of gender transformation. Cocteau also cast Barbette in his experimental first film Le sang d'un poète (1930), where she appears dressed in Chanel. [5]

 

 

IV.

 

Sadly, all glittering careers must come to an end and a combination of age, injury, and illness obliged Barbette to bring down the curtain on her life as a performer at the close of the 1930s. 

 

Happily, however, a new life opened up as an artistic director at various circuses and Vander also worked as a consultant on a number of Hollywood films, including Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), where he coached Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon on the art of drag [6]. 

 

In his final months, Vander ended up living back in Texas, with his sister. Having been in often severe pain for many years, he committed suicide (by overdose) in 1973. In an interview with Francis Steegmuller four years prior to his death, Vander explained his thinking behind the character of Barbette:

 

"I’d always read a lot of Shakespeare […] 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." [7]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Although Barbette entered the circus ring or, later the theatre stage, dressed like a showgirl, she would obviously remove her headdress, cape and gown, before taking to the high wire and trapeze. 

 

[2] As Chase Dimock notes:

      

"Barbette does not simply reveal his male identity and return to his true self, instead, he pantomimes and performs the masculinity supposedly revealed by removing his wig. His male sexed body and its expected postures and actions are revealed to be as much a product of artifice and performance as the female persona he adopts on stage."

 

The thing that is most interesting is that even after the big reveal and Barbette rebecomes Vander, s/he still retains their allure as an object of desire. Dimock interprets this in Kantian terms:

 

"While Barbette initially lures the desire of those drawn in by his pleasing make up and costuming, he is still able to retain the beauty of femininity after removing these items. Therefore, the attraction of Barbette is deeper than the pleasing veneer of femininity that he wears; it comes from an attraction to the pure form of beauty that he realizes through his acrobatic stunts and graceful movements. If Barbette could sustain his feminine form after all of the socially constructed signifiers of femininity had been stripped from his body, then it stands that Barbette had discovered some universally attractive structure of beauty that kindles desire irrespective of gender constructs." 

 

See Dimock's excellent essay; 'The Surreal Sex of Beauty: Jean Cocteau and Man Ray’s "Le Numéro Barbette"' (2 June 2011), in the As It Ought to Be archive: click here.   

 

[3] Gertrude Stein is usually credited with coining the term Lost Generation to refer to a group of American expatriate writers and artists drifting round the capitals of Europe during the 1920s. It was popularised by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. 

 

[4] Jean Cocteau's 1926 essay on the nature and artifice of the theatre was originally published in Nouvelle Revue Française. It can be found alongside Man Ray's photographs and a New Yorker profile of Barbette written by Francis Steegmuller (see note 6 below), in the book Le Numéro Barbette, (Jacques Damase, 1989).

 

[5] Barbette also inspired the characterization of "Death" in Cocteau's later film Orphée (1950). Clearly, Cocteau was in love with Barbette, though whether they consummated their brief affair I don't know.   

    

[6] For a recent post on Some Like It Hot - in which I compare the drag performance of Curtis and Lemmon with that of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey in Carry on Constable (1960), click here.

 

[7] Vander Barbette, quoted by Francis Steegmuller in 'An Angel, A Flower, A Bird', The New Yorker (20 Sept 1969): click here to read online.