by Duncan Wall
Less than six months later, he was on his way to the Cirque des Champs-Élysées in Paris. His father, an old gymnast himself, had encouraged his son to work up an act with the trapeze, which he premiered in his hometown, Toulouse, soaring over mattresses stuffed with straw. Immediately word spread of the daring young man. The crowds flocked. The critics fawned.
Louis Dejean, the circus mogul of the boulevard, dispatched a scout to confirm the rumors, and then raced down himself. While auditioning Léotard, Dejean told him that “the race of the trapezes,” as Léotard called it, was unquestionably magnificent. But was it safe? How did he know the boy wonder wouldn’t make headlines for the wrong reasons, by breaking his neck within a week? To prove the act’s safety, Léotard released into the mattresses mid-flight, producing only a puff of dust. Dejean signed Léotard on the spot.
Yet, as Léotard describes in his memoirs, his own doubts festered. Now, on the train to Paris, he wondered what his on-purpose fall had proved. What if he suffered an unplanned fall? What if sweat slicked his fingers and his grip slipped? What if he lost his bearings in the air and landed upside down? These and similar questions clouded Léotard’s thoughts as his train hissed to a stop. Out the window, he spotted Dejean waiting for him on the platform. Léotard wondered if he wasn’t being escorted to his death.
His arrival in Paris corresponded with a turning point in circus history. In the beginning, there had been Astley and his equestrian stunts. Then came the “theatrical period” of acrobats and dramatic fusion, epitomized by Madame Saqui. Now the circus was entering the age of romance. In Paris, circuses had begun to rise in stature, to become refined entertainments on the order of the ballet or the opera. In America, shows had begun to morph into the lavish, magical pageants that we know today. It was also an age of death.
In the early days of the circus, during Astley’s reign and later on the boulevard, the circus’s emphasis had been straightforward. In early posters, Astley billed his shows as “displays” or “exercises.” He aimed to impress people with his skill and savoir-faire. Danger was present, but it wasn’t central to the work. Injuries, when they occurred, were minimal. Death at the circus required an almost freakish confluence of events—such as when the dainty Parisian equestrienne Émilie Loisset fell beneath her horse during rehearsal and punctured her lung on the horn of the saddle. Audiences didn’t attend shows hoping to experience what Pascal once called “that pit-of-your-stomach feeling.”
But in the years leading up to Léotard’s emergence, circumstances had started to change. Around mid-century, circuses witnessed an uptick in the number of dangerous acts and a corresponding increase in bloodshed. In the wake of Henri Martin’s shiver-inducing big-cat triumph at the Cirque Olympique, circuses around the world rushed to include wild-animal trainers in their programs. At the Bowery Theatre in New York, a toga-wearing Isaac Van Amburgh† starred in The Lion Lord, a stage play written for him, two tigers, two leopards, and a pack of hyenas. At Astley’s in London, another American, John Carter, wrestled a live jaguar inside a steel cage. The acts were extraordinary, but they were also hellaciously dangerous. Van Amburgh was the first man to put his head in a lion’s mouth. Almost every trainer suffered some kind of terrible injury. Van Amburgh broke his back twice. Others had their arms and scalps ripped off.
Also during this time, acrobats started experimenting with technologies allowing for more dangerous flight. They created the batoude, a downward-sloping runway that terminated in a stiff hickory springboard. Not long after, a pair of German acrobats, Walpert and Paulan, created the first teeterboard, a flexible teeter-totter used for vaulting.
These devices had a tremendous impact. Using a batoude, Jean-Baptiste Auriol, star of the Cirque Olympique, could clear twenty-four soldiers standing upright with their bayonets drawn. Among acrobats, the possibility of landing the triple flip sparked a public competition that was also a bloodbath. Johnny Aymar shattered the bridge of his nose. William J. Hobbes snapped his neck. In 1869, during a performance with George W. DeHaven’s Circus, a railroad-and-steamboat show, Warren Hoyt overrotated his second somersault on a vault over twelve horses and smashed into the clay ring with his chest. Although he managed to drag himself out of the ring, complications from the blow killed him shortly thereafter. At Hoyt’s funeral, his brother Joe threw a backward somersault over his grave.
As a burgeoning acrobat and the son of a gymnast, Léotard had of course heard such stories, and as he roamed the bustling streets of Paris, he struggled to strike them from his thoughts. “The thought of my debut haunted me constantly,” he writes in his memoirs. Stopping by the circus one afternoon, he found the technicians installing his rigging. “I had the sense of watching them erect my catafalque.” After a few weeks, the stress had made him ill, and his inaugural flight—the official world premiere of the flying trapeze—had to be postponed until the autumn.
Finally, on November 12, 1859, he appeared at Dejean’s Cirque d’Hiver (called Cirque Napoléon at the time). By modern standards his routine was surprisingly simple. In leather boots and a black singlet, to a popular waltz played by an orchestra, Léotard flew horizontally between trapezes, always rushing in the same direction, like Tarzan on his vines. His flight covered a span of roughly ten feet, and his most complicated trick was a flip. For the Parisian crowd, however, the performance was a revelation. Critics hailed him as a god. Wrote a critic from Toulouse, “The Marvelous Gymnastics executed by Monsieur Léotard have proved that a rationally and gradually exercised human body might manage to evade our ancient gravity.” Within weeks, stores were stocking Léotard canes and pastries, Léotard bowler hats and neckties. Women literally fought for a glimpse of his body in action. “They stopped his car,” wrote Signor Saltarino (a.k.a. Waldemar Otto), “beautiful women dropping to their knees in front of him in the street, duchesses and working-class girls.” (Léotard’s memoirs, published when he was just twenty-two, are largely a collection of love letters from female admirers. “I should have called this book My Temptations,” he writes at the beginning.)
For the next ten years, Léotard swooped across Europe, playing to princes and tsars at the world’s most prestigious venues. Then, in 1870, at the age of twenty-eight, he died from smallpox. Although Léotard managed to avoid an accident, the dozens of flyers who rushed to imitate him would legitimize his concerns. Like Léotard, most early flyers used minimal safety equipment: mattresses, canvas stretched by stagehands, or nothing at all. Under such perilous circumstances, a single mistake meant injury or death, and statistics from the period are gruesome. According to one study, at least sixty-five trapezists died in Europe alone between 1860 and 1970. At the Hippodrome on the Rue de l’Alma, one of the Silbons missed his catch and crashed into the crowd. At the Academy of Music in New York, William Hanlon fell sixty-five feet and glanced off the side of the net. According to a witness, “His head had struck against the iron back of a chair, tearing the scalp away between the eyebrows and the back of the crown.” The list goes on: Emma Rafaelli, 1908; Fefe Gavazza, 1910; Eva Metzler, 1954. Writing in the forties, Pierre Guillon noted the surprise that struck him every time he completed a successful turn. He called it the “On est encore là!” (“I’m still here!”) feeling.
In spite of such carnage (and perhaps because of it), the circus officially entered its next phase. Managers constructed buildings with higher ceilings to accommodate bigger riggings and more spectacular acts. They pressured their animal trainers to introduce sensationalist touches—cracking whips, loaded pistols—and in their advertising emphasized their stars’ risks. Acts were no longer billed as “skillful” or “graceful.” They were “dreadful” or “stomach churning.”
This macabre tone crept into the work itself, a shift epitomized by another act that gained popularity in the period: the “dare-devils,” or what the French call “casse-cous,” the broken-necks. Guillermo Antonio Farini (a.k.a. William Leonard Hunt) built an early version of the human cannon in 1877. The spring-load
ed catapult propelled a fourteen-year-old named Zazel across the Royal London Aquarium. Similarly risky acts followed: women jumping off of platforms on horses, bicyclists looping-the-loop.
A performer’s skill sometimes mattered less than his mettle. Appeal resided in seeing another human being risk his life. Many acts assumed appropriately gruesome nicknames. The Salagurs called themselves the Amants de la Mort, the Lovers of Death. Aloys Peters, a popular performer from the 1930s, billed himself as “The Man with the Iron Neck.” From an elevated platform, he dived, headfirst, with a noose around his neck. As Roland Auguet notes in his excellent Histoire et légende du cirque, “Circus isn’t a show about death, but death is its permanent guest.”
There are multiple theories about what provoked this shift. Steve Gossard, the trapeze historian, suggested it was a consequence of “the age of daring.” “There was an obsession with courage at the time,” he told me. “People going up in hot air balloons, people traveling to the farthest parts of the world.” In an intriguing 1905 essay entitled “The Limits of Human Daring,” stuntwoman Octavie Latour offers a related theory. As the world evolved, Latour writes, men were deprived of the opportunity to prove themselves with “wars, jousts, and crusades.” To compensate, they invented new outlets for what Latour calls “their craving for courage.” “They drive racing autos. They launch forth in airships.” And they came to the circus, where they could “satisfy their natural inclinations with the admiration of another’s thrilling feat.”
Pascal had a simpler answer: “It was the Industrial Revolution,” he said. With the rise of liberalism and capitalism, the audience changed. Until then, in refined cities like Paris, the art remained an aristocratic affair. Now working-class viewers arrived. True popular culture—based on emotional and visceral appeal—emerged for the first time. The new audiences worked for a living, and they saw risk differently. “A capitalist appreciates achievement,” Pascal noted. “To be the best, to be the most profitable. He understands risk—in his actions, in his investments.” The new audience also lived in a different world—faster, harder, and more violent. “The lion-tamer in the cage, the trapezist, the funambule on his wire: they bring that violence to the circus.”
I told him his words reminded me of Rome, of the Colosseum and the bloodthirsty hordes.
“Yes, it really was that,” he replied, “a return to the ferocious energy of the past. In the opera, there is a metaphorical violence. You die among the décor. In the circus, you die and it’s for real.”
OUTSIDE LAURENCE’S TRAILER, the sun was tucking itself into the woods to the west, bronzing the horizon. At the bottom of the iron steps I paused to let my eyes adjust to the dusk. According to Laurence, more than a hundred friends had been invited to that night’s show, and I noticed a row of cars starting to form in the company lot. Opening curtain was still four hours away.
Laurence had suggested I could find some of the trapezists in the company dining trailer, also known as the “cookhouse.” In the old tenting circuses, the cookhouse was the troupe’s hub, the first tent to go up in the morning and the last to come down at night. To judge by the cookhouse of Les Arts Sauts, not much had changed. As I slipped into the trailer, I felt as though I had wandered into a Greek wedding. Dozens of people sat at long, cafeteria-style tables, chatting loudly over paper plates of rich-smelling food—lasagna, French bread, salad. Wool sweaters and work pants abounded, but the diversity was otherwise impressive: acrobats talked with the elderly, hippies spoke with children. At the rear of the room, an enormous sheet of butcher paper covered the wall. Words were scribbled all over it. At the top, in big letters, it read, “IDEAS.”
Flagging down a cook in a saucy apron, I asked if he could direct me to a trapezist. He used a ladle smeared in tomato sauce to indicate an enormous man hunched in the back of the trailer.
“Him?” I said skeptically. It was hard to imagine a man of his size on high.
The cook smiled, understanding the implication. “His name’s Frank. He’s a catcher.”
Ah yes, the catchers. In a trapeze act, there are two species: flyers and catchers. Flyers are what we imagine trapezists to be: nimble and slight, they fly through the air and grab the spotlight. Catchers are twice as big but half as prominent. Dangling by their legs instead of their arms, catchers are the unseen heroes of the discipline, like offensive linemen in football—always in the play, but almost never touching the ball.
The distinction didn’t always exist. Léotard never had a catcher, and neither did his slew of imitators, all of whom flew between two bars—releasing, throwing a trick, then grabbing. But the routine was repetitive, and audiences soon lost interest. Flying this way was also difficult, not to mention dangerous. Grabbing the bar at high speeds put tremendous pressure on a flyer’s shoulders. A miss of even a few inches could ruin the trick and possibly the performer’s teeth; getting cracked in the face during a trapeze move is like getting hit with a crowbar. It looked for a while as though the act might disappear.
Fortunately, catchers appeared. Technically, catching began with an act called the “leap for life.” Hurling himself from his trapeze, a flyer would land in the arms of a partner hanging by his knees. But the act was jarringly brief. After being caught, the flyer would grab a rope and shimmy to the ground.
In England in 1873, Azella and her partner, Gonza, came up with a better system. The gist of the act was the same: one flyer, one catcher. Only instead of hanging static, as in the leap for life, Gonza swung in rhythm with Azella’s flight, allowing him to catch her while maintaining her motion. Meanwhile, an assistant on Azella’s board caught her bar and delayed it long enough for her to come swinging back.
The duo called this the “flying return act,” and it revolutionized the trapeze. With a partner to account for minor errors, flyers could attempt bigger tricks—triple somersaults and double layouts. What had been brave now became dramatic, as one man reached into the open air to haul his comrade to safety. In effect, the innovation marked the beginning of the act as we know it today, a display of rhythm and flow and majestic sweeps. The trapeze never again lacked for popularity.
For obvious reasons, catchers tend to be husky, with bulky torsos and powerful arms. Frank was no exception. He had mailbox shoulders and a fire-hydrant neck. His forearms were like lamb shanks. One lay on the table while the other shoveled heaps of lasagna under his handlebar mustache with a comically small fork. A single word was printed on his T-shirt: “Acrobat.” At first I took it for an ironic statement about his craft. Later, Frank informed me that it was the name of an Australian company. “They do pure acrobatics,” he said. “They’re fucking raw, man. Raw.”
We talked about catching. I had no sense of the practicalities involved. To maximize the chances for a successful “pass,” Frank explained, a catcher has to optimize his “catch point”—the point where his swing brings him closest to the flyer. But this is complex. Different tricks have different catch points, and it’s the catcher’s responsibility to adjust to variations in his partner’s flight, which is difficult because flyers and catchers hang on trapezes of different lengths (eight feet and eleven feet, respectively), which means they swing at different rates (longer pendumlums have slower swings). Also, a flyer’s weight changes the velocity of the swing. Also, a catcher is hanging upside down, which is disorienting. And since human beings are unpredictable, even if you manage to organize all these variables in your head and arrive in the right place at the right time, you might find that your flyer has botched the trick entirely, and is hurtling toward your face.
Needless to say, the pressure is tremendous. Any catcher will tell you he bears the ultimate responsibility for his partner’s safety. Collisions can be catastrophic. An approaching flyer is like a buzz saw of knees and elbows. Broken cheekbones are common, as are broken necks, even cracked skulls. There is ultimately very, very little margin for error. Alfredo Codona, the great Mexican flyer, once alluded to this in an essay for The Saturday Evening
Post. He described a collision between himself and his brother, Lalo. Alfredo was attempting a triple somersault, a move he had completed hundreds of times. Only this time his takeoff was wonky, and a collision ensued that put Alfredo in the hospital with five cracked ribs. As Codona writes, “The accident resulted from the fact that I had misgauged my time in leaving the bar by less than a hundredth of a second.”
As we were finishing dinner, I asked Frank if he ever dreamed about being on the other side. Given the difficulties of being a catcher, and the obscurity in which he worked, did he ever wish he were the one soaring through the air?
He let out a deep chuckle. “Rich man, poor man, fat man, thin man—everybody wants to fly. I think that’s true. And I don’t think catchers are any different.” He was sopping at the remnants of his lasagna with a crust of bread. “You know, they say flying is the universal dream.”
IN THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY CIRCUS, performers had a special term for the lot where they ate, slept, and trained: “the backyard.” In circus lore, the backyard looms almost as large as the performance itself. This was especially true in the circuses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when massive shows traveled by railroad, and big tenting circuses were the rule. To stroll across the lot then was to peek behind the curtain, to glimpse the incomprehensible lives of the performers and crew. Witnessing the arrival of a show was observing the creation of an entire village, a dreamscape erected in an empty field.
