Up in the Air

You have to be of a certain age and still have a section of your long-term memory intact to remember the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights on CBS at 8:00 p.m. It was part vaudeville, part variety, part circus, and part Borscht Belt that pretty much had something for everyone in its hour long broadcast. The Beatles famously made their American debut on the show.

One of the "circus" acts that I remember seeing a few times on the show was the guy who set up tall, slender flexible poles, balanced a ceramic dinner plat on each pole, and kept perhaps a dozen of the plates spinning on the tops of the poles at the same time.

His trick was to get the first plate going fast enough, long enough, so that at he could successively add another plate, and another, and so on...and keep them all spinning before the first plate stopped spinning and hit the stage and broke.

He usually succeeded. Sometimes a plate spun poorly and hit the deck with a crash. Undaunted, the tuxedo-clad performer would just get another plate going and not stop until he had a plate spinning on each of the poles he had set up.

Then he would take them off the poles, one-by-one, restack them until he had them all off the poles before the last plate stopped spinning. Perhaps it was hokey after you had seen the trick a few times, but this was the Ed Sullivan show and it was hugely popular.

I couldn't help thinking of the guy with the plates when I read the obituary for Thereza de Orléans e Bragança, 93 a paragon of Rio Glamour, by Michael Astor in yesterday's New York Times. The obiturist deftly keeps so many names in the air, complete with their diacritical markings, that to me, it is a journalistic gem. Getting that many names right in Ms. Orleans e Bragança life is like getting all the names correct in a two-car pileup that saw four people in each vehicle suffer either fatal, or near-fatal injuries; which ones had a sheet pulled over them, and which ones were taken to an area hospital.

Ms. Orléans e Bragança was certainly a long-legged Bazilian beauty, as evidenced by the above Life Magazine photo taken in the mid-1950s. Consider all the people in her life after she was born Thereza de Jesus Cezar Leite in 1929 to José da Silva Leite and Branca Queiroz Cezar dos Santos in Ubá, Brazil.

She first married Carlos Eduardo Souza Campos, a polo-playing banker. It was with this husband that she held attention as a fashion and lifestyle doyenne, a society swan, living in a 20-room mansion in Rio's tony Copacabana section, hosting one event for 70 in honor of Prince Aly Khan, an international polo-playing playboy once married to the American actress Rita Hayworth (Gene Markey of Calumet farm named her champion thoroughbred Alydar after Aly Khan. (Aly Darling).

At 61, Mr. Orléans e Bragança married Dom João Maria de Orléans e Bragança, a direct descendant of Portugal's King João VI and lived a somewhat less hectic social life.  Dom João Maria's great-grandfather was Pedro I who had declared Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822

Dom João Maria was Pedro II's grandson. He had one son, Dom João Henrique with his first wife, the Egyptian princess Fatima Scherifa Chiriene. That stepson, Dom João Henrique Orléans e Bragança survives Ms. Orléans e Bragança, who had a son by her first  marriage to Carlos Eduardo Souza Campos, Carlos Eduardo Jr., who died in August 2019.

Ms. Orléans e Bragança is also survived by a sister, Magda Leite Memória. A niece of Ms. Orléans e Bragança, Ms. Souza Campos, said the death of Carlos Eduardo Jr. in August 2019 affected her aunt quite hard, leaving her to spend her last months in bed, not answering the phone.

My guess is that when Michael Astor completed this obituary, he went somewhere for a stiff drink.

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