Show Goes On for Wallenda Aerialist Dying of Cancer

Doctors at City of Hope in Duarte this week informed aerialist Angel Wallenda that her lung cancer is too advanced for surgery, but the high-wire artist said Friday she will refuse chemotherapy and continue performing “as long as I can.”

Wallenda, accompanied by her husband, eighth-generation aerialist Steven Wallenda, and their 3-year-old son, Steven II, traveled to Duarte this week from their Pennsylvania home, hoping that surgery at City of Hope National Medical Center would halt the deadly spread of her cancer, which already has claimed her right leg and portions of both lungs.

On Tuesday, she celebrated her 22nd birthday in their modest motel room, with roses and a cake from the motel manager.

But doctors on Thursday afternoon told her there is little hope.

“It has progressed too far,” Steven Wallenda said quietly Friday morning. “They can’t do anything.”

For the last year, Angel Wallenda, who routinely traversed 24-foot-high wires on foot or bicycle even after she was fitted with a leg prosthesis, has been a spokeswoman for the American Cancer Society and has raised funds for the City of Hope.

“Surgery would not serve any purpose,” said Dr. Jose Terz, chairman of the hospital’s surgery division. He said chemotherapy would have a 30% to 40% chance of shrinking the tumors in her lungs, but he would not comment on how long the treatment might be expected to prolong her life.

Wallenda said she plans to reject the chemotherapy option because of the side effects of the drugs.

On March 4, informed of the alarming growth of the tumors, Angel Wallenda gave a “farewell performance” with her family in Pennsylvania, marking what she intended to be her last walk on the wires. Now, however, she vows she will perform again if she has the opportunity.

Wallenda and her family are the last of the Great Wallendas, aerialists from Germany who debuted without a net as part of Barnum & Bailey’s 1928 circus season in New York. Later, they continued to awe the world with spectacular high-wire stunts such as the seven-person pyramid.

Steven Wallenda, 34, trained from age 3 under his grand-uncle Karl Wallenda, the family patriarch who plunged 150 feet to his death during a 1978 wire act. Steven Wallenda has walked the cable on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and developed a “race of death” stunt in which he walks a wire between two cars moving at nearly 60 m.p.h.

Angel Wallenda, born in Tarrytown, N.Y., was trained as a gymnast, but changed her routine when she married into the Wallenda family in 1985.

Two years later, she was diagnosed as suffering from spindle cell lyomayo sarcoma, a rare form of cancer which affected first the muscles in her leg, then her lungs.

She went to City of Hope, which she selected because of its national reputation in cancer treatment and research. In August, 1987, her right leg was amputated below the knee.

Learning to walk again was a challenge. Then, in January, 1988, she was ready to mount the wires again. But the day after she began training, her left lung collapsed and she underwent emergency surgery. Portions of her right lung were removed in April, 1988. The family moved to a small ranch in Mansfield, Pa., after the operation, and six months later she was back on the wires.

“Everyone said there was no way I could do it,” she said, grinning. “It just shows how much more I worked.”

Doctors who fitted her with the prosthesis advised her not to keep it on longer than eight hours at a stretch. But “she was up from sunup to sundown,” Steven Wallenda said. “She’d go on until she had blisters and (began) bleeding.”

Angel Wallenda, a tall blonde, was more subdued than usual Friday, but seemed indomitable.

She doesn’t know how long she has to live; “I’m not going to ask,” she said. But she doesn’t intend to put her life on hold.

“If a performance comes up, we’ll plan for it,” she said. “I’ll do it as long as I can.”

She boasts about her precocious Steven II, who already can walk a wire unassisted, and sits on his father’s shoulders as they cross a tightrope. “His attention span isn’t too great,” she said with a laugh. “If he sees a bird or something, it breaks his concentration.”

From now on, Steven Wallenda said, the family will probably be spending a lot of time together at their two-acre “ranchette” in Pennsylvania. “Quality of time is better than quantity,” he said.

For the last five months, Angel Wallenda has been working on her autobiography, “High Wire Angel,” to be published later this year. “I want to get my philosophy out there,” she explained. “Sometimes you have to readjust certain goals, but basically you can do whatever you want to.”

In this case, however, she admits that she is powerless.

“With the wire, people think you’re living life on the edge, but you have control. With cancer, you don’t.”