ANIMALS: Bride of the Lion

Plenty of pretty girls in the fewest possible clothes was the formula which made Fort Worth, Tex.'s Frontier Centennial Exposition a bang-up success last summer. As a final fillip, Producer-Manager Billy Rose, the Broadway Barnum, worked up an act called "Beauty & the Beast." In this, shapely Lawrene Nevell, clad in breechcloth, brassiere and flowing cape,' did a dance in a lions' cage, flapping her cape in the faces of five large lions owned by a Dallas veterinarian named Nobel Hamiter (see cut). The lethargy of its bestial stooges made "Beauty & the Beast" less titillating than Billy Rose had expected, and it was soon replaced by a "Ziegfeld Milk Bath." Dr. Hamiter took his lions off to Chicago to become part of a vaudeville troupe called Circus de Paris. A 22-year-old chorus girl named Gladys Cote volunteered to replace Dancer Nevell. The act was renamed "Bride of the Lion."

One afternoon last week the Circus de Paris was playing in Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre. "Bride of the Lion" went off as scheduled and the curtain fell. Suddenly from the stage came screams, roars, shots. A juggler rushed out, distracted the audience by beginning his act in front of the curtain. Behind it, Dr. Hamiter was tugging a lion named George off prostrate Gladys Cote. Her lacerations were not fatal, but bacteria under the lion's claws were. Gangrene developed and in three days Bride Cote was dead.

The Circus de Paris moved on to Philadelphia, where a city ordinance forbids such animal turns as "Bride of the Lion." But Dr. Hamiter testified at an inquest that Dancer Cote, vexed by newspaper criticism of the lions' lethargy, had sewed a large bolt in the hem of her veil, presumably thumped George's snout with it. The troupe's manager. Eddie Pierce, announced that blameless George would continue to perform in the act, that three girls had already applied to replace Gladys Cote as his bride.