![]() I had heard something about his career’s having ended with an accident, and assumed I was seeing the result. But when he moved he seemed older his gestures and his gait, which at first struck me as mincing, I saw were not quite that but curiously careful-stiff and a bit jerky. He looked like a very trim older-man fashion model, less than his age, which I knew to be a bit over sixty. He was spare and very erect, with thin, almost pinched features. When he took his hat off, his sandy hair was impeccably brushed. Almost everyone else within sight was dressed with the utmost casualness-there was scarcely a necktie to be seen-but Barbette was wearing a dark, well-cut suit, a white shirt, a striped tie, and a narrow-brimmed brown straw hat. He was standing beside Vivante at the Austin airport when I arrived, one spring evening (I learned later that he had been nervous while waiting, and had remarked to Vivante, “I feel this is the arrival of the literary F.B.I.”), and I was at once struck by his careful grooming. He found him there-“a very nice, delicate man,” he wrote me, “rather reticent, and wondering whether or not to encourage you to come down”-and a few days later came a note from Barbette himself consenting to see me. Her father was the man who stood on one finger-therefore ‘Unus.’ ”) But when I wrote to Barbette in Austin (my friends’ informant said that he used the name Barbette as a last name, and that his first name was Vander), he didn’t answer, and, fearing he might not be there, I asked Vivante to drive over from the university and inquire. I forget her show name-something very fancy like La Gloriosa instead of her own wonderful name of Vicky Unus. “The high school in Sarasota offers, as one of its forms of extracurricular athletics, circus training of almost every kind, including high trapeze, etc., and one of its graduates is now the current Lillian Leitzel with the big show. ![]() ![]() “The circus tradition lingers here in a delightful way,” one of my friends wrote me. (The retired performers aren’t the only traces of the circus remaining in Sarasota, it seems. Someone had told me that Barbette was now associated with a circus, and although Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows moved its winter quarters some time ago from Sarasota to Venice, I knew that quite a few retired circus people continue to live in Sarasota, and my friends learned about Austin from one of them. I had obtained Barbette’s address through friends of mine who spend the winter in Florida, near Sarasota. It was in connection with Cocteau, whose biography I was writing, that I wanted to see Barbette, and the person who finally found him for me was a professor in Austin named Paolo Vivante-a Hellenist and Latinist I had once known in Tuscany-who had never heard of him before. It is true, however, that although some of those admirers knew that Barbette was Texas-born, it was generally unknown that he had returned to the state and was living in Austin. And Since Barbette is the hero of one of the best essays on the nature of art written by Jean Cocteau, the French poet, novelist, dramatist, draftsman, and cineaste-an essay not unknown in university circles-his name enjoys, thanks to that connection, academic prestige at Austin as well as elsewhere. In Texas, there are quite a few vaudeville buffs, I have discovered, who are respectfully knowledgeable about the career of Barbette (as the gentleman I had come to see was known professionally). I suspected at the time that my informant was not entirely correct, and my suspicion has since been confirmed. I had been told that most people flying from New York to Austin, Texas, are apt to be en route to conferences with either legislators or professors (Austin being both the state capital and the seat of the state university), and that my mission-to talk with a gentleman who had rocked the international vaudeville world in the nineteen-twenties and thirties with a trapeze act he did disguised as a girl, to the music of Wagner and Rimski-Korsakov-would not, even though he was Texas-born, be considered by Texans a sufficiently serious reason for visiting their state.
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