COVER STORY
15
DIRECTION CHANGE
During one of her trips north, Zora and her mother
stopped in Jacksonville to see the Wilbur Opera Co., a traveling
musical group. Zora apparently auditioned and won a
spot, staying with it until 1902.
In her memoir, though, she writes that she ran away to
join the circus at age 19. “The truth is that I ran away, coldly,
deliberately, burning my bridges behind me, with a clear
knowledge of what I was doing,” she says.
She says she abandoned the opera company in New Orleans,
joining a small circus with the hopes that she would
be able to work with the animals — an ambition she says she
always had — but ended up in “generally useful” roles like
dancing and horseback riding.
BAD TIMES
The circus went broke. Zora wrote that she ended up penniless
and friendless in a strange city “frying flapjacks in the window
of a second-rate restaurant.” She immediately began looking for
another circus job without a thought of returning home.
“Years that were comparatively uneventful followed,”
she writes.
They were not as uneventful as she said, however.
There were several newspaper accounts in October 1900
of a shooting involving Zora. The New York World reported
that Joseph Pazen, the proprietor of the Pazen Theatre in
Chicago, was shot and “probably fatally wounded” by “Zora
Card,” described as a “burlesque actress.” The newspaper
went on to describe her as “a tall, handsome blonde, a daughter
of Milton Card, an orange grower at Ankona, Florida.”
The account said she was married to William Hilliard, a leading
man in a Chicago theater company.
The newspaper account was melodramatic, even for its
time.“When arrested, she asked, ‘Is he dead?’ On being informed
that he was still alive, she declared as she waved her
hand dramatically in the air, ‘I wish I had killed him.’ ”
A report by the St. Louis, Mo., Republic has Zora Card accusing
Pazen and another man, William Phelon, of conspiring
to get her out of Chicago so “that she could not press a suit
against Phelon for sending obscene literature through the
mails.” She accused Pazen of conspiring to get rid of her and
then called him a liar and an ex-convict. “Pazen told her to
take it back, but she declined to do so, whereupon he caught
her by the neck, choked her and bumped her head against the
>>
An early Sells-Floto Circus poster advertises animal acts and a female
animal trainer.