Carla Wallenda, who spent seven decades with her head and feet in the clouds (or close to them) as a member of the Flying Wallendas aerial act, died on Saturday in Sarasota, Florida. The last surviving son of the founder of the family troupe, she was 85 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son, Rick Wallenda. No cause was given.
Wallenda made her tightrope debut when she was just six weeks old – when “my dad rode a bike and my mom sat on his shoulders, holding me and introducing me to the public,” she recalled in a 2017 Sarasota television interview.
Fatal accidents took the lives of relatives, including her husband, but Wallenda continued to rise to new acrobatic levels. His signature was a heart-stopping head stop on an oscillating pole – a flexible steel rod – from a 30-meter position (later reduced to 20 meters as it grew).
Although weakened by diabetes and a chronic inflammatory lung disease (she stopped smoking in 2013), she continued to perform until the age of 82.
A career as a trapeze artist that could have been intended by the dynasty, she said, but was actually driven so much by her own desire.
“Accidents can happen anywhere,” she told The Sarasota Herald Tribune in 2014. “I have to make a living and this is the only way I know or want to. I’ve worked as a waitress and hated every minute of it. Why should I go and do a job I hate? “
Carla Wallenda was born on February 13, 1936, in Florida. His father, Karl Wallenda, founded his acrobatic troupe in Germany before moving to the United States in 1928. His mother, Helen (Kreis) Wallenda, who was known as Mati, was also a barbed wire acrobat.
As a child, Carla appeared on a 1939 newscast, showing that her parents taught her to walk the tightrope. She traveled with her family at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and started appearing at the family show with her brother Mario and sister Jenny in 1947.
She joined the troupe’s tightrope act only after demonstrating to her father that she could make a head stop at the top of the seven-person pyramid that is the family’s trademark – no hammock. The death-defying act featured four acrobats on a wire supporting two on the next layer, with the seventh sitting on the top of a chair.
Wallenda formed his own air group in 1961, then returned to the family troupe in 1965 after three of his relatives were killed in a performance and his brother Mario was paralyzed. Her aunt Rietta Grotefent fell to the death of a 30 meter high mast in 1963 when she was 43 years old. Wallenda’s husband, Richard Guzman, who was known as Chico, died in 1972 on a 60-foot dive after his mast hit an energized electrical wire.
Karl Wallenda fell to his death in 1978 while walking 30 meters high between the towers of a hotel in San Juan, PR
Although plagued by tragedies and sometimes divided by destructive disputes, the new generations of Wallendas continued the family tradition of breathtaking performances.
In addition to her son, Rick, who heads the family’s Wallenda Enterprises, Ms. Wallenda leaves two daughters, Rietta Wallenda Jordan and Valerie Wallenda; and 16 grandchildren. She has been married four times; in addition to Mr. Guzman, they were Iginio Bogino, Paul Jordan and Mike Morgan.
Asked once if she was related to Nik Wallenda, a nephew who became famous as a trapeze artist when crossing Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, she replied, “No, he is my relative – I was here first.”
And she was acting almost to the end. In 2017, Ms. Wallenda recorded a head support with a swinging pole for a television program and performed the same act the following April. It was introduced at the Circus Ring of Fame in Sarasota in 2019.
“My greatest love is to act,” she said. “When I’m out there, all my pain and everything that goes away, and I’m in a world of my own.”