| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Betty Broadbent |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Early Modern |
| Location | 11 Chatham Square · Bowery, NYC |
| Date | 1927 CE |
| Style / Technique | American traditional tattooed-lady bodysuit, circus and sideshow display in the Charlie Wagner Chatham Square idiom |
| Connected to | Charlie Wagner, Mildred "Millie" Hull, Maud Wagner |
Archive Note
Betty Broadbent was born Sue Lillian Brown on November 1, 1909, in Zellwood, Florida, to parents from North Carolina. The family moved to Philadelphia while she was a child. At about fourteen she was working as a nanny in Atlantic City when she met Jack Redcloud on the boardwalk, a heavily tattooed man whose work caught her eye. Redcloud sent her to his tattooer in New York, Charlie Wagner.
Beginning in 1926, when she was sixteen or seventeen, Broadbent had a full bodysuit applied at Wagner's shop at 11 Chatham Square on the Bowery. The work ran across two winters. The principal tattooers were Charlie Wagner and Joe "Sailor Joe" Van Hart, with additional work reported from Tony Rhineagear and Red Gibbons. A photograph from around 1927 showing Wagner and Van Hart tattooing her at 11 Chatham Square survives in auction-catalog and museum collections, one of the most reliably attributed records of her early career.
Her best-known designs included a Madonna and Child across her back, a portrait of the aviator Charles Lindbergh on her right leg, and a portrait of Pancho Villa on her left leg. A Charlie Chaplin portrait is also often reported. The total tattoo count is given variously between 365 and 565 across the sources, with a 1938 Australian press source quoting 465 at that point. The exact figure is disputed and should be read as approximate.
Broadbent debuted as a tattooed attraction in 1927, at seventeen, with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, then the largest circus operation in the United States. She stayed a fixture of the American sideshow and circus circuit for forty years. Her act followed the tattooed-lady convention of display and narration, but she carried a more domestic and respectable stage persona than the captivity-pitch tradition of the Hildebrandt-era acts that came before her.
In 1937 she crossed the Pacific to tour independent circuses in New Zealand and Australia. She appeared on the cover of the Australian magazine PIX dated April 23, 1938, and performed at the Sydney Royal Easter Show before returning to the United States that year. In 1939 she was a featured attraction in the John Hix "Strange as it Seems" sideshow at the New York World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, where she also entered a beauty contest. Sources record stops in Montreal and San Francisco where she worked as a tattooer herself, a second career that ran quietly alongside the exhibition work.
She kept touring with major circuses through the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s. Her final season was with the Clyde Beatty Cole Bros. Circus in 1967, after which she retired at fifty-eight and moved to central Florida. In August 1981 she became the first person ever inducted into the National Tattoo Association's Hall of Fame, a recognition the trade read as honoring both her own run and the tattooed-lady tradition at large. Broadbent died in her sleep on March 28, 1983, in Florida, at seventy-three. Forty years on the midway and the most thoroughly documented photographic archive of any tattooed woman of her century make her the late, mature face of the American tattooed-lady tradition.