Barbette-- born Vander Clyde-- left home as a teenager to become a circus acrobat. He formed a partnership with a woman trapeze artist, assuming the role of her twin sister after the sister died. As a solo trapeze artist and wire-walker, he continued to dress as a woman, and in the mid-1920's he went to perform in Europe. He achieved substantial, if brief, acclaim in Paris, and was celebrated in a famous essay by his friend Jean Cocteau. In this era he also posed for a series of photographs by Man Ray and appeared in the Cocteau-Luis Buñuel film "Le Sang dún Poète." In the 1930s he returned to the United States, where he suffered a fall while walking the high-wire, suffering injuries that would force him to retire from performing in 1938.