A long time ago in a different America there was not a circus buff or small boy that didn’t know the name of Con Colleano. A tight rope walking acrobat who combined daring, style and more than a little dash of star quality with thrills, he was a Ringling Brothers circus star who in the depths of the Great Depression was paid a thousand dollars a week. Wearing flamboyant toreador like attire like any matador facing a raging bull, he faced death or serious injury.
Even seemingly all-powerful dictators presented him medals after seeing him jump backward on a tight rope. For a time in the 1930s and '40s, he called a family compound near Quakertown home. Among the many things interesting about Con Colleano (1899-1973) is there was nothing Spanish about him at all other than his flamboyant costumes.
That was a carefully created persona. In fact, he was an Australian of part Irish and Aboriginal and Afro Cuban background. His name at birth was Corneilius Sullivan.
His father was Con Sullivan. Said to have been a freed convict, he traveled the mining camps with his family appearing as a “take on all comers” boxer with a little gambling on the side. By 1910 they were old enough to have formed a small circus.
Young Corneilius seemed to have natural athletic ability, and the rest developed several other acts. It was during this time that they adopted the name the Collino, later Colleano. According to one source this was done to give an Italian cover because of the “sable” nature of their skin.
Race prejudice was high in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and laws discriminating against anyone of non-northern European ethnicity were common. Despite this, the Collinos were successful in Australia and by 1918 they were able to hire their own train. They would also often hire themselves out to other circuses.
Throughout this time Con practiced at least seven hours a day. He had no other wire walkers to learn from. And it was not just the basics he wanted to master.
He set his sights on the feet-to-feet forward somersault on the wire. “It was thought impossible at the time, because in turning, the performer loses sight of the wire..
. the performer’s feet have to find the wire without the aid of his eyes..
.in the backward somersault the performer’s eyes sight before alighting on it.” On a summer day in Sydney in 1919, after five years of trying Con had achieved the impossible and instinctive knowledge of where the wire was when in the air.
At roughly at the same time Con had met Constance Winifred Stanley, known as “Winnie,” a fellow circus performer known as a soubrette who would later become his wife. From her he learned some dancing steps that he would use on the wire in his performance, adding another “Spanish” touch to his performance. With that, after some touring in Australia where he performed before the Governor General in 1921, Con decided to head for the bigtime and in September of 1924 he appeared in the Hippodrome theater in New York with the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit.
Keith was Benjamin Franklin Keith, a Philadelphia impresario who brought acts in his Orpeaum theater chain to Allentown. It was later merged with a movie company as RKO. Fortunately, a talent scout and agent for John Ringling’s Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, Carl Hathaway, was also in the audience and engaged Con for the next season.
From then on into the late 1930s Con was the star performer at Ringling Brothers. He was paid $1,000 a week, a huge amount of money for the time and was given the ultimate circus perk in his own private compartment on the Ringling Brother’s train when the circus traveled. Silent film footage taken in 1928 shows Colleano walking about the circus grounds kidding with his fellow performers, a dashing debonair figure in a stylish suit, like one of the movie stars of the day.
To give his family and others involved a place to both relax and work on their acts between circus seasons, Colleano purchased a farm property in the Quakertown area. Recently an Australian film crew, hoping trying to find the farm’s location, contacted Robert McFadden and his wife, Kathrine Amy McFadden, of Orefield. Mrs.
McFadden’s father, James Maurice O’ Donnell, and his wife, Jeanette Howell O’Donnell, and siblings were part of the wire act as well as a juggling act the Juggling Colleanos who occasionally were at the farm. After much searching of the Bucks County land records, the couple were able to discover the location of Con’s farm property. It was in the late 30s while performing in Europe that Con appeared before both Hitler and Mussolini who each awarded him a medal and a complimentary passport.
One wonders how quick they would have been with their medals, especially considering their racist views, if they had known that Con was a bi-racial individual. In the summer of 1939, Con made his last appearance in Europe at Berlin’s Scala Variety theater. Throughout World War II Con performed frequently across America and was generally well received.
In 1952 he made his first known television appearance on Texaco Star Theater. In 1956 he and Winnie returned to Australia where they opened a hotel. But success was fleeting and after a few years they traveled to Hawaii.
Con made his last public appearance in Honolulu and retired to Miami where he died in 1973 after suffering a heart attack. Winne returned to Australia where she lived until her death in 1986..
