Helen Gibson: Hazards of Helen, 1915-1917, Image via jgodsey
There’s no more stirring a spectacle than women performing hair-raising feats of daring, endeavour and endurance, while the audience looks on, awestruck. Meanwhile, from the performer’s point of view there can surely be little as empowering – a show of virtuoso prowess to leave the gapers agape.
Hazards of Helen #26: The Wild Engine, 1914, Image via jgodsey
From tightrope walkers and acrobats, to barnstormers and stuntwomen, the she-daredevils of yesteryear held a standing to which few today can aspire. Environmental Graffiti presents seven women who reached new heights of audacious, courageous enterprise – and did it in the sexiest of style.
7. Maria Spelterini
Image: George E. Curtis
The only woman in a legacy of daredevils to have crossed the Niagara River gorge on a tightrope, Maria Spelterini – sometimes spelt Spelterina – was a beautiful, buxom woman of Italian descent famous for wearing outrageous costumes. Born around 1853, the Signorina of Niagara’s tightrope walkers completed her famously dizzying feat in July 1876 using a two-and-a-quarter-inch wire.
Walking a tightrope: Maria Spelterini returning to the USA side of Niagara
Image: C. Bierstadt
After making her first crossing on July 8, just north of the lower suspension bridge, Maria repeated the feat on July 12, this time with her feet strapped in peach baskets, before crossing blindfolded five days later, and again with her ankles and wrists manacled three days after that. Prior to this series of stunts – performed as part of the US Centennial celebrations – the bella had toured Europe, performing in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Catalonia and elsewhere.
6. Zazel
Zazel the Human Projectile vintage poster, Image: Comtesse DeSpair
Launched by a spring-loaded cannon invented by The Great Farini, the 14-year old Zazel – aka Rossa Matilda Richter – became if not the first human cannonball, certainly the first woman cannonball. Zazel stunned audiences when she was shot through the air in 1877 at London’s Royal Aquarium, with coiled springs used to propel her, and a fake bang and puff of smoke courtesy of a well-timed firecracker. The explosive starlet later toured with the PT Barnum Circus, but her career came to a crashing halt when she missed the safety net and broke her back.
5. Bird Millman O’Day
Image via Blondin Memorial Trust
A star of the ‘Golden Age of the American Circus’, Bird Millman is the most fêted female high-wire performer of all time. Born in 1890, the Colorado native had entered big-time vaudeville by the age of 14, playing with her parents as part of the Millman Trio. After a virtuoso performance before the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin, her act returned to the US as Bird Millman & Co, where she added the New York Hippodrome and Palace Theatre Broadway to her list of credits.
World at her feet: Bird Millman wire walking high above New York
Image via Showbiz David
In 1913, Bird became a centre-ring performer with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, spending the off-seasons on Broadway, where she appeared in The Ziegfeld Follies among other shows. The angelic artist later performed a specialty number in a silent film. During several exhibitions she danced high above the streets of New York City, gaining widespread publicity – but Bird didn’t rely so much on novelty or hair-raising stunts, garnering acclaim rather for her extraordinary speed and effortless grace.
4. Lillian Leitzel
Image: Library of Congress
Widely considered the greatest circus star of all time, Lillian Leitzel was an acrobat and strongwoman as short of fuse as she was in stature. Born in Germany in 1892 to a Hungarian theatre performer and a Czech acrobat, Leitzel spurned a career as a concert pianist, instead joining her mother’s aerobatic circus group. Aged 18, she went to the US to perform, staying to try to break into the vaudeville circuit. She was later spotted and became a headline performer for the Ringling Circus.
High-flying: Lillian Leitzel – the world’s greatest lady aerialist
Image via Ectoplasmosis
Leitzel’s act included one-armed planges, where she momentarily dislocated her shoulder during each flip, repeating this hundreds of times in a feat of endurance, and urging the audience to count each one in unison. Best known for her flirting rapport with the crowd, the sassy artiste was also notorious for her fiery disposition, scolding roustabouts and firing her maid several times a day. On February 13, 1931, her graceful form plunged to the ground as she was performing in Copenhagen when the swivel that held her rope in place snapped. She died two days later.
3. Ethel Dare
Image: George Dettling Collection via Rob Osborne via Holcomb’s Aerodrome
The most famous female proponent of the dangerous, adrenalin-fuelled art of wing-walking, Ethel Dare – real name Margie Hobbs – was the first woman to switch planes in the air. Pretty and petite, the former Barnum and Bailey Circus flying trapeze performer was billed as the ‘1920 Aerial Sensation,’ the ‘Queen of the Air’, or less flatteringly ‘The Flying Witch.’
On a wing and a prayer: Ethel Dare executing a plane-to-plane transfer
Image: Danes Homes Antiques, Waupaca WI via Holcomb’s Aerodrome
Although information about her background is scarce, this surefooted showgirl of the sky delighted in standing on the edge of a wing and then suddenly falling backwards into space, with a length of rope used to abruptly halt her death plunge. Ethel’s speciality was the ‘Iron Jaw Spin’, where she would dangle from the end of a rope with a special mouthpiece clutched between her teeth, twirling dizzily in the plane’s propeller wash, before clambering up for a daring series of exercises as the plane circled the fairgrounds. Magically death-defying.
2. Bessie Coleman
Image: NASA
A civil aviator and barnstormer par excellence, Bessie Coleman was the first African American to become a licensed airplane pilot and the first American of any race or gender to hold an international pilot license. Born in Atlanta, Texas in 1892, she was the tenth of thirteen children to sharecropper parents, and despite being an excellent student at school, did not have the funds to complete her education.
Queen of the skies: Bessie Coleman proudly with her plane circa 1922
Image via Bobster 855
After moving to Chicago, aged 23, where she worked at a barber shop, Bessie heard tales from men who’d flown in WWI, and fantasised about being a pilot. However, her beauty and exuberance yet earned her the financial backing she needed, and in 1920 she travelled to France to learn to fly. On her return to the US, the savvy Bessie realised she would need to become a stunt flier to earn a living and so two years later sailed again for Europe to gain the training she needed.
Barnstormer extraordinaire: Legendary aviator ‘Queen Bess’, 1925
Image: New York Public Library via Bobster 855
‘Queen Bess’ returned to the US an air show sensation. She broke a leg and three ribs when her plane crashed in LA, but later displayed awesome daredevil manoeuvres – including figure eights, loops and near-ground dips – to a large crowd in Chicago. Despite her flamboyant style, she gained a reputation as a skilled and fearless pilot. Bessie died on 30 April 1926 when her plane refused to pull out of a nosedive. She never realised her dream of founding a school for young, black aviators but was the inspiration for generations of African Americans.
1. Helen Gibson
Image via jgodsey
The dame of all daredevils of the silver screen, Helen Gibson was a film actress, trick rider and rodeo performer, and is regarded as America’s first – and arguably best – professional stuntwoman. Born Rose August Wenger, the paternally-styled tomboy from Cleveland, Ohio was riding in rodeos by the age of 18 and went on to appear in numerous Hollywood pictures during a career that spanned 50 years, until her retirement in 1962 aged 69.
Stuntwoman second to none: Helen Gibson in The Hazards of Helen
Image via jgodsey
After appearing as a cowgirl extra in the 1912 movie, Ranch Girls on a Rampage, Helen met her first husband, Hoot Gibson, whom she worked with, the couple sweeping all before them in rodeos across the country. After returning to LA, she began stunt doubling in the hugely successful adventure film series The Hazards of Helen, which was responsible for her rechristened first name.
A Girl’s Grit: Helen doing what she called her most dangerous stunt
Image via jgodsey
Performing in The Hazards of Helen, the audacious entertainer pulled off probably her most dangerous stunt – a leap from the roof of a station onto the top of a moving train in A Girl’s Grit. Upon landing, the train’s motion forced Helen, ever fearless, into a roll headed for the end of the carriage, where she caught hold of an air vent and hung on, dangling over the edge to dramatic effect.
Not hanging around for nothing: Helen in A Race for Life
Image: jgodsey
Another of the riskier stunts Helen undertook – this one scripted by the sultry stuntwoman herself – involved her catching a runaway train by riding a team of horses ‘standing woman’, then grabbing a dangling rope, which she used to swing from her steed onto the train as it came steaming under a bridge.
Happy landing: Helen flawless as ever, again in A Race for Life
Image via jgodsey
A later, flawlessly executed stunt entailed travelling at full speed on a motorcycle chasing a runaway freight train, riding – and smashing – a wooden gate, and continuing on up a station platform and through the open doors of a boxcar, with her machine travelling through the air to land on a flatcar in a passing train. Helen Gibson: a legend, nothing less.
Image via jgodsey
