Flying and Smoking
15
performer who is a socially and, no doubt, a physically attractive companion.
The idealised male is drawn wearing a suit, bow tie, and hat, in the convention
of the 1950s while a fictionalised Fox wears her two-piece performance
costume. The male is given a pretext for being there by the detail of a camera
propped up in the foreground. The illustration continues a spectatorial fantasy of
sharing intimate space that might arise out of the performance and be imagined
to carry over into the private offstage dressing room.
The Camel advertisements exemplify what Tinkler discerns is the “sexual
promise” carried by images of women smoking (2006: 105-31), one that
enhances their sexual appeal, which is also part of the appeal of circus. The final
photograph of smoking and the highlighted T-zone of the mouth become
implicitly fetishistic links whereby the oral eroticism of smoking becomes
associated with the mouth apparatus used in solo trapeze performance.
The 1948 advertisement featuring Rose Gould (also spelt Gold) shows her
working in a trio with two unnamed male performers.10 “Experience is the Best
Teacher! In aerial acrobatics—in cigarettes too” (RBBBC program and
magazine 1948 no pagination). Perhaps the reader ponders what else experience
teaches. “She dives into space” in a trick designed to give the impression that
Gould is in a dangerous free-fall (ibid). The caption bubbles have the spectator
below explain how she works 75 feet in the air without a net, hanging from the
trapeze by her feet, before diving into space in a breakaway trick. This trick was
pioneered by Jennie and Eddie Ward, a brother and sister partnership, and Eddie
founded the Ward-trained group of aerialists that included Concello and
dominated trapeze and aerial work in the USA in the first half of the 20th century
(Gossard 1986: 5-6). Gould’s main trick involved working with the two males
catching her. The trick would have involved Gould appearing to simply fall
from the perch and being pulled up by cords on her ankles just short of the
ground. Gould also did a heel catch (1949: 104).11 A spectator comments that
Gould had fallen when a cable broke and she is appearing for the first time at
RBBBC after this fall in a feat that has risks because of its reliance on
equipment and this enhances her bravery in the act—a claim of first is standard
procedure in circus promotion.
The scene with the cigarette after the act has two males offering her a
Camel explaining how thrilling they find her act; there are two clowns in the
background. Here is a depiction of the “sociality” associated with cigarette
smoking (Dennis 2006: 50 [Borthwick]). There is a direct social reference to
remind readers of recent events as Gould explains that the cigarette shortage
during the war meant she smoked any available brand and therefore could gauge
if Camel was a good one. The physical risks for the act collapse into the risks of
the recent war.
The cartoon drawing style used between 1948 and 1951—when Camel
featured Gould, Concello, and Fox—is distinctive and particularly well
developed for its depiction of unfolding physical action enhanced by F