No Giasticutos, No Hyfandodge

Exhaling cigaret smoke through his nose, a slight man, tough as raffia, brown as leather, leaned over a collapsible campstool tugging at the laces of his chamois slippers. Into the concrete cave of his dressing-room crept the sound of remote applause. A distant rain of handclapping drifted in, and many smells--a realistic mixture of axle-graphite, new timber, horse sweat, ropes, giraffe dung. His laces pulled and fastened, the wiry little man stood up and flexed his fingers, appraised their steely strength. A buzzer sounded from behind a dented locker, a girl's voice called out with cheerful British preciseness.

Alfredo Codona, aerialist supreme in the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Combined Circus, slipped into a bathrobe, hoped he would find his brother's hands waiting to catch him when he spun dizzily out of his triple somersault from the sweeping end of a flying trapeze 60 ft. above the centre ring in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden. He usually manages to find them, misses every two or three months. The Codona Brothers* have been holding hands for over 20 years, have been grabbing at each other after Alfredo's triple somersault several times a week since their first public exhibition of the spin in Chicago's Coliseum in 1920.

To circus buffs the Flying Codonas really, artistically wind up the show, though Human Projectile Hugo Zacchini still hurtles clear across the Garden from the mouth of an inclined cannon to make the official finale. Zacchini is good, and this year his cannon is mounted on a silver truck. But he is a find, not an artist, not a circus tradition. His trajectories will not be charted after he is gone.

If John Ringling's tall-talking publicist, Dexter Fellows, knows this, it disturbs him little. Outfitted in loud, self-advertising mufti, he strides through the dressing-rooms of his troupers, confident that, one & all, they are the finest performers ever assembled, worthy of every conceivable hyperbole. He is, of course, quite right. Undiscouraged by salary cuts, suspensions and failures of other circuses. Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey's is still the world's greatest show. And for each of its 24 displays Dexter Fellows has a resounding, polysyllabic jawbreaker of commendation. With his famed adherence to literal truth, he makes some concessions: "I admit we have no gorilla. I will go further and say we have no giasticutos, no hyfandodge, no auk. But we have things just as protolithic, and more macrobiosian."

Macrobiosian indeed is the "Delhi Durbar" which opens this year's circus. For large-scale panoply purposes the celebration which took place in Old Delhi, India, after crafty Prime Minister Disraeli secured for Queen Victoria the additional title of Empress of India, was reproduced in the Garden with such historic fidelitv that the lead elephant's name was Technocracy. Another one, Lily the Golden, was a massive bulk of gilt bearing a gilded girl. A mighty blaring of brasses followed the pachyderms, from bandsmen geared out in topis like London bobby's caps. Missing were the mahouts, the ankuses, the jasmine garlands, the gas flares--but not missing was the public's immediate acclaim. Though ''Mister John" Ringling was too sick to come up from Florida, the opening of his circus on this 50th Anniversary of his and his six dead brothers' entrance into show business was a polychromatic paragon of perfection.

Performance is even more important to a circus than novelty and this year John Ringling has banked more heavily on it than ever. There are no new major performers. But Con Colleano, the only man on earth who can turn a front somersault and land upright on a tight wire without cutting himself in two, is as exciting as ever, though he did miss it four times and have to give up at the first matinee. In the hush that falls before his act, the crackle of a peanut shell shakes the air like a splintered plank. Asked what he thinks about during his twice-daily moment of congealed concentration, he says: "I think what a hell of a responsibility it is!"

The Balancing Wallendas still bring sweat from the most jaded pores, are themselves visibly relieved at the conclusion of each performance. Year and a half ago their impossible, top-heavy, quivering pyramid on the high wire brought a scream of horror from 3,000 spectators in Europe when everything toppled. Balancing poles and a chair crashed down into the arena. Two Wallenda brothers caught the foundation wire neatly. Another Brother Wallenda caught it with one hand, caught his sister Dorothy, who was falling clear of any possible support, with his legs, squeezed her in a scissors till the ground crew brought a net to catch her in. Then he dropped her to safety, not realizing that he had strangled her unconscious. She revived and is still top poser on her brothers' rickety framework.

Clyde Beatty, who spends 15 minutes in the same cage with 16 lions and five tigers, definitely expects, sooner or later, to be publicly eviscerated. Last year he was hospitalized for three weeks after a cat got behind him. But most of the casualties in his cage are internecine, the lions ganging together to maul a lone tiger. Beatty has lost 16 tigers this way, one lion. Except during the filming of The Big Cage when Lloyd's covered both him and his animals, Beatty has never paid a cent for life insurance. With a whip, a kitchen chair, a revolver loaded with blanks, he persuades his refractory felines to sit on pedestals, cower, roll over. With fangy reluctance they obey him.

Another headliner from last year is beauteous, gauze-clad Dorothy Herbert, riding side saddle and without reins, smiling sweetly as she puts her horse over a flaming hurdle.

With uncustomary vagueness, grandiloquent Dexter Fellows last week announced that on April 14 there would arrive from Havre a mystery exhibit, "Humans that remind you of a New England shore dinner."

*The troupe now includes Mrs. Alfredo Codona, third wife of Alfredo. She is English, pretty, 4 ft. 11 1/2 in. 103 lb., onetime equestrienne, sister of famed Bareback Rider Clarence Bruce. Alfredo's second wife, strong-armed little Lillian Leitzel "greatest woman aerialist of all time," killed in Copenhagen in 1931 when a nng broke, was a soloist. Alfredo's first wife, Clara, was his partner.

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