The newly-revealed first victim of the Son of Sam’s murderous rampage in NYC 48 years ago credits her survival in the nearly fatal attack to her time growing up in Europe as a trapeze artist.
“Being a trapeze artist and contortionist, I was very strong,” Wendy Savino said of allegedly being shot five times by notorious .44-caliber killer David Berkowitz as she sat in her car in the Bronx on April 9, 1976.
“They said it was my beautiful big lungs that saved me,” the now 87-year-old said a week after The Post revealed that NYPD detectives recently determined she was actually the first victim in the spree that targeted women and left six people dead. “I really thought I was dying.”
She is now considered one of the eight victims who were shot but lived.
Savino, whose real first name was Brenda, began performing acrobatics and dance at a theater when she was just a child in Dartford, England, about 20 miles from London, because she was “always hanging upside down.”
She was a fixture in theaters by the time she was a preteen.
“I appeared in many shows as a young child and at 12 I became a professional,” Savino, who lives in Rockland County, said. “I took an audition and was immediately employed.”
She began working with a group of 12 girls on the Isle of Man — between England and Ireland — “doing mostly dancing and acrobatics.”
By the time she was 15, she was touring England with a partner.
Sometimes, after finishing a Saturday night show the group would travel to its next gig by train.
Savino was so small she would sleep on top of the luggage rack.
“I adored it up there,” she said.
She would eventually perform with singer Petula Clark and English comedians Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, among others.
When she was 19, she auditioned for the Windmill Theatre in London, where her first name was changed because the company already had a Brenda.
“‘Well she looks like Peter Pan,’” one of the adults said of the girl with a blonde, pixie haircut. “‘That’s it. She’s Wendy.’”
While there, she did a contortionist act with her friend, Sadie, where Savino would coax her body into backbends and splits.
But that grew old after a time so they both learned a trapeze act.
The expert who taught them told the teens to stick their feet out when they dove down to the trapeze instead of pointing their toes.
“Then, when you fall forward your feet catch the ropes on either side and you’re hanging by your feet,” she recalled the acrobat saying. “I threw myself forward and he just puts his arms up, grabs my shoulders, tips me over and I land on my feet.”
The teens learned the act and the theatre began sending them to entertain the troops in promotional appearances.
“We were rehearsing and practicing all over, anywhere,” she recalled.
She eventually bought a Vespa to get around from show to show, she said, and that led her to entering a race on the Isle of Man.
Her reflexes were great from all the dancing, she said, but her fearlessness helped her the most.
“I won the race,” she said, explaining that she was crowned Scooter Queen of 1959.
At one point, she took a ship to Casablanca in Morocco to perform in the casinos there.
The ship fare was free as long as she and her contortionist pal Lizzie performed on board.
“Our payment was to appear on a boat that is rocking and you are on a table on top of another girl,” she recalled. “As I did the back summersault, the boat came up and broke my toe. I had to keep performing.”
Along the way, she also worked in the famous Moulin Rouge in Belgium, where she often danced the high-kicking, leg revealing can-can that was popular in French cabarets.
She also met the husband who would eventually sweep her off to America.
“The owner came and said there’s an American out front who’d like to meet you,” she said, recalling that she put her foot down, “I’m here to entertain on stage.”
When the “the loud, noisy American” persisted, she finally agreed to meet him.
The man was Joseph Savino and she moved to an apartment on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx to be with him in 1963 and waited four years to marry him.
Savino later became the boss of the Bronx GOP.
Among her first NYC observations: nobody said “please or thank you,” she recalled.
But the city grew on her and she settled in to have two sons in Pelham Manor, where she was known as the cool mom who walked on her hands around the pool and told the kids to get up and try again when they fell off the monkey bars.
She never performed on stage again but had a trapeze in the backyard of her Westchester County home.
She has no doubt her experience as a gymnist helped her survive being shot in her face, back, arm, chest and right eye, which she lost.
“I was very strong,” she said of playing dead in the front seat of her 1976 Jaguar’s bucket seat until she could escape Berkowitz that day. “I knew if I could just hold on I’d be O.K.”
