Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  Leamy returned to the Pelikan apartment for Nellie a few weeks later. He was taking her to England. There she would help in selecting and training two other young women for the revolving trapeze.

  Nellie was again tearful at leaving behind Leitzel, three at the time, and now also Alfred, an infant, two or three months old. She did not, though, feel any of the dread that gnawed at her when she was touring with Dosta. Mr. Leamy appeared to worship her, and Nellie, in fact, was brimming with excitement at what might lie ahead with him. She knew of the Vaidis Sisters. They had been famous throughout Europe. Now she was under the management of the courtly, silver-haired impresario who guided the pair to fame.

  In her wanderings with Willy Dosta, Nellie had often been away from home for months at a time. Nellie probably did not know it when she kissed Leitzel and Alfred good-bye and, for the first time, left the Pelikan home with her new manager. But now, traveling with Leamy, there would be times when she would be separated from her children for years.

  “I was only months old when my mother left with Edward Leamy,” Alfred said. “My grandmother had a few photographs of my mother, but except for those pictures, I had no idea of what she looked like for the first several years of my life. I also had no real idea what my father looked like, although my grandmother was also able to show me a picture of him. The photograph showed a big, muscular man with a bushy head of hair and a mustache that covered much of his lower face. On the back of the photo, in my mother’s hand, was writing that simply said, ‘Willy Dosta, the man who took me away from my family.’ ”

  Soon after Professor Leamy left Breslau with Nellie and settled with her in London in the spring of 1893, he selected two other young women for places in his planned new revolving trapeze act. One was a hefty twenty-four-year-old named Lizzie, and the other was Emma, who, like Nellie, was fifteen.

  Leamy’s course of training for his three new apprentices was the same one he followed in schooling all of his aerialists, and was carried out in a large, high-roofed storage building. Each morning, and several times during the day, he put Nellie, Lizzie, and Emma to work lifting dumbbells and light clubs.

  “Big clubs only develop a few big muscles,” he explained, “but light ones bring them all into play, and make the body supple.”

  Leamy refused to allow his trainees to skip any parts of his classes. At first, he only permitted his charges to rehearse their poses and stunts on a trapeze that barely cleared the floor, but every few days, he drew the trapeze higher. Above all else, he wanted to ensure that his aerialists were thoroughly practiced before they ascended to the highest region of the storage building to try executing their feats below the revolving trapezone rotaire.

  “The worst accident that ever happened to an artist under my control was when a girl tore her shoe,” he lectured his pupils.

  He had been engaged in training aerialists for twenty-five years.

  Nellie, Lizzie, and Emma’s schooling with Leamy continued almost every day for nine or ten months, and then their professor was sure they were ready to be seen by the world. He could not have been prouder of them.

  In Europe, as well as in the United States, circuses were the most popular public entertainments in the late nineteenth century. Most of the biggest American circuses presented their three-ring spectacles under great tents, called big tops, and traveled from one city to another in long trains. It was different on the Continent. With few exceptions, the circuses were presented in permanent buildings, and almost every European city boasted at least one such amphitheater, and some cities, including London and Paris, had two or three or more.

  There does not seem to be a reliable record of just where the Leamy Sisters presented their premiere performance in the spring of 1894. By all accounts, though, Edward Leamy was among the most attentive and careful of entertainment producers. Because the troupe and the new trapezone rotaire had yet to be tested before a large and discerning public, it seems probable he would have scheduled the first appearances either in one of the less distinguished houses in London or perhaps in a venue somewhere in the provinces.

  Wherever it was that the aerialists made their debut, though, their showing must have been auspicious. It was not long before Leamy received an invitation to present his troupe in a summer appearance in the most opulent new amphitheater anywhere in Europe, the Blackpool Tower and Circus in the seaside resort of Blackpool in Lancashire in northern England.

  The Blackpool Tower and Circus, which opened to the public on May 14, 1894, after being under construction for three years, was the pride and joy of everyone living in Blackpool. It had been a brainchild of John Bickerstaffe, a hotelier and the town’s mayor. He and his family had traveled to Paris in 1889 to see the Great Paris Exhibition. Bickerstaffe was so astounded by the sight of the Eiffel Tower that when he returned to Blackpool, he began rounding up local investors to erect a similar landmark in town. It would draw free-spending tourists from throughout the United Kingdom, he assured. To get things rolling, he anted up two thousand of the nearly three hundred thousand pounds the tower would ultimately cost.

  Built on a stretch of beach called the Golden Mile, the Blackpool Tower turned out to be, almost girder for girder and rivet for rivet, a close clone of Gustave Eiffel’s landmark, albeit one that at 519 feet was less than half the 1,063-foot elevation of La Tour Eiffel. Still, there was no need for Bickerstaffe or the other investors to suffer any embarrassment over the somewhat stunted elevation of their creation. The Blackpool Tower had something at its base that the Eiffel Tower lacked: an imposing, multistory brick entertainment complex that included a ballroom and a large performing hall for circuses and aquatic shows. The Blackpool Tower also had something else that set it apart from any other man-made work of architecture—it had an apartment near the topmost part of its spire, at the time the highest residence in the world. The space was occupied by a company of dwarfs, the Blackpool Tower Midgets.

  All the lights inside the Blackpool amphitheater had been extinguished, plunging the soaring, open hall into blackness, and there was much rustling in the three tiers of seating. Nellie, Lizzie, and Emma were in total darkness as, one after the other, they ascended a rope ladder to the towering ceiling of the great, open hall.

  A minute or two passed, and then there was the sound of a slight, metallic, cranking noise far up above. In another instant, as the trapezone rotaire began turning, a soft breeze started fanning the faces of the three thousand spectators in the seats, and soon the ceiling, walls, and floor of the entire theater were awash in moving, twinkling light of every color.

  Lizzie was seated on a bicycle fixed on top of the trapezone rotaire. With what one reviewer described as “less exertion than she would make strolling up the boulevard,” she drove the bike’s pedals with her tree-trunk-thick legs, keeping the steel contraption circling smoothly like a giant, midair lazy Susan.

  Nellie and Emma dangled from the underside of the trapezone rotaire on trapezes and, for a time, performed a series of identical maneuvers. Then Emma, working alone, presented a flashy turn in which she hung by her teeth from a single rope and twirled like a dervish in the air at the same time that the trapezone rotaire continued to rotate. Her performance set off gales of applause.

  By and large, though, Emma and Lizzie mostly served as window dressing for La Belle Nellie. She was the real star. She presented a series of feats on her swinging trapeze that had everyone in the house continually at the edge of their seats—no-arms, no-legs headstands; upside-down suspensions in which she was connected to her swing bar only by the backs of her ankles; a turn in which she hung from the trapeze only “by the back part of the neck whilst the trapeze [wheel] revolve [d].”

  Finally, as the climax to her performance, La Belle Nellie took an eighty-foot swan dive from the trapezone rotaire to a net stretched eight feet above the tanbark, the bed of bark and wood shavings covering the floor. The crowd went mad, shaking the house with such loud roars of approval that its new plaster may ha
ve been close to vibrating off the walls. Everyone in the house that night must have felt exceptionally special. The spectators had been witnesses to one of the most sensational attractions seen in any circus.

  Following the Blackpool engagement, the Leamy Sisters traveled to other major performing halls, including the Empire in London, Hengler’s Circus in Dublin, the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, and the Wintergarten in Berlin. As exciting as these engagements must have been for them, along with their manager, none could have stirred more exaltation among Leamy and his “sisters” than an opportunity that presented itself while the troupe was in Berlin.

  An agent representing Oscar Hammerstein—one of ten such representatives working in Europe for the great American theater impresario—engaged the Leamy Sisters to present their act at the gala opening of what at the time was to be the world’s biggest entertainment center, Hammerstein’s Olympia in New York. The complex, which was in its final stages of construction, was to house three separate large performing halls. It would occupy an entire city block east of Broadway between Forty-Fourth and Forty-Fifth Streets.

  Opening night at the Olympia, on November 25, 1895, turned out to be one of New York’s biggest social occasions in years. It appeared to some observers that nearly everyone on the famed Four Hundred register turned out for the occasion, along with another ten thousand ticket buyers.

  In all, twenty-seven different attractions made opening night appearances in the Olympia’s three great halls, among them opera divas, prima ballerinas, and world-famous violin prodigies. It seemed from the press accounts, though, that the most incandescent stars of the evening were those three aerial sprites on the trapezone rotaire.

  The New York World, for example, in a pronouncement that was closely echoed by the city’s other newspapers, weighed in on the appearances of La Belle Nellie, Lizzie, and Emma this way: “Quite the best feature of the evening was the revolving trapeze with the three girls who compose the Leamy Troupe. Dazzling, graceful, skillful, their act was remarkable.”

  Certainly Oscar Hammerstein did not have any quarrel with the World’s appraisal. He immediately extended the Leamy Sisters’ contract to twelve weeks, far longer than that of any of the other opening-night attractions. There were no published reports of how much the Leamy Sisters were paid, but the sum was likely fabulous, especially if it was even close to the amount Hammerstein awarded to Yvette Guilbert, the French singer-reciter from the Moulin Rouge whose appearances in the Olympia started a few weeks after the massive entertainment complex opened. Guilbert received a reported four thousand dollars a week.

  Edward Leamy had a reputation in every corner as an honorable man. It can be assumed he was paying a fair portion of the act’s earnings to Nellie, as well as to the other young performers. However much La Belle Nellie netted as the act’s prima donna assoluta, though, much of her pay was used to support the family back in Breslau, including her mother and father, assorted siblings, and, of course, Leitzel and Alfred.

  “Our family’s standard of living improved significantly once my mother started working for Professor Leamy,” Alfred said. “We started enjoying chicken in the pot more often. And always my mother was sending home gifts from Spain, France, America, from everywhere in Germany—wooden trains and boats and beautiful picture books for me; Dresden dolls and expensive clothes and hair ribbons for Leitzel; pretty dresses and hats for my grandmother Julia, and suits, shirts, blouses, and dresses for my uncles and aunts.” Nellie also sent home money to Julia to ensure that her children received the best tutoring that was available to them. By the time Leitzel was four, Julia was accompanying her to studios to study piano and dance. When she was five, she was also enrolled in a private elementary school that was primarily intended for the children of professors at the world-class Breslau University.

  “She was in the same classrooms as children who were the sons and daughters of scientists and philosophers,” said Alfred, who in a few years would also be enrolled in the same school. “She studied Latin and the classics in literature. The school was modeled after the European gymnasiums, schools intended as high schools for children who would go on to universities where they would pursue studies in medicine, science, or other subjects that would gain them professorships.” To some extent, Nellie’s showers of gifts on Leitzel and Alfred may have been attempts to expiate her guilt at not being a better mother. After leaving home to begin her association with the Leamy Sisters troupe, five years went by before she was reunited even briefly with Leitzel and Alfred. On that occasion, she had returned to Breslau because the Leamy Sisters had an engagement in the city’s Zirkus Renz. Because she had been away since Alfred had been a babe in arms, it was the first time he ever really saw her.

  “I remember how people stared at her when she walked down the street. She was dressed in the finest of clothes. She looked like someone regal. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  Everyone in the Pelikan family received gifts from Nellie upon her return visit home to Breslau. The most surprising of the presents was the one she gave Leitzel. It was a pair of silver-plated Roman rings, identical to those on which La Belle Nellie soared in circus amphitheaters everywhere, but smaller, child size. The rings were attached by their ropes to the ceiling in the Pelikans’ apartment. From the time Leitzel took her first flight with the rings, she never wanted to let go of them. They were magic. They transported her somewhere she had never been before.

  By the time Leitzel was five or six, she was also distinguishing herself as something of a wunderkind amid the other children in her piano classes. Not long after her aerial rings were installed in the Pelikan household, La Belle Nellie arranged to have a child’s piano delivered to the home.

  Leitzel and Alfred, along with Grandmother Julia and some of their aunts and uncles, were in a box at the Zirkus Renz every night during that Leamy Sisters engagement. And each day during Nellie’s return home, the entire Pelikan clan visited the city zoo or went on family picnics that were organized by Edward Leamy.

  “He was so good and generous with everybody, especially my sister and me,” Alfred said. “For all intents and purposes, he was the only father we ever had.”

  After a week or two, though, the Leamy Sisters’ engagement in Breslau was over.

  “It was quite a scene at the train station when my mother and the rest of the party were about to depart,” Alfred recalled. “Leitzel begged my mother not to leave us again, and then she begged her to take us with her. Leitzel cried so loudly that her shrieks echoed everywhere in the terminal. Her arms were locked around my mother’s leg. My grandmother finally had to tear her away so my mother could catch the train.”

  Nellie continued to remember Leitzel and Alfred with gifts at Christmastimes, Easters, birthdays, and sometimes just out of the blue. But always she was far away somewhere, unable to be with them. Always she concluded her letters and cards to them with a promise. “Someday it will be different,” she assured.

  After the one return that Nellie made to Breslau to perform with the Leamy Sisters at the Zirkus Renz, Alfred said, there were a few other occasions when he and Leitzel again got to see their mother, if only fleetingly. These were times when the Leamy Sisters were playing in such cities as Berlin, Hamburg, or Copenhagen. Grandmother Julia traveled with them by train to reunite with their mother at the engagements.

  “These get-togethers never lasted more than a day or two, and we always had to share our mother with her fans and the press,” Alfred said. “Everyone cried when they were over, and Leitzel and Grandmother Julia and I had to get back on the train and go back to Breslau. The reunions were filled with more heartache than happiness.”

  Nellie never came home to stay.

  CHAPTER 5

  All the time that Leitzel and Alfred were growing up in Breslau, year after year, one day dawned regularly in their dreams. It was a day that loomed larger and more gloriously in their mind’s eyes than all their birthdays and Christmases bunched toge
ther as one. They dreamed of a day when they would finally be reunited with their mother.

  Mostly the dream visited the sister and brother at night, when they were tucked in their beds. It was then, while they were drifting close to sleep, that Grandmother Julia would reprime their imaginations with stories of La Belle Nellie.

  “She has long, silky, brown-black hair, porcelain skin, and is fair and beautiful,” Julia would often begin. “People come from everywhere just to see her. Even kings, even queens. She is known everywhere as La Belle Nellie.

  “Oh, everyone adores her. Just everyone everywhere. She’s hardly bigger than a lightning bug and she’s just as glowing. She dances in the air …”

  Grandmother Julia would go on and on with her night stories.

  “Oh, and did I tell you this before?” she would ask. “Your mother is a princess. Yes, yes, La Belle Nellie is a princess, a genuine princess, and more beautiful than all the flowers in Holland.”

  And, of course, she had told them this before—dozens of times, maybe hundreds.

  Always the woman with iron-colored hair ended her bedtime stories the same way, and by then, tears were teetering in her eyes.

  “There’s no two people on Earth that she would rather be with than her daughter and son. Every night when she is in her bed, she thinks only about you, and how much she misses you every minute of every day. But she is a princess, and princesses really belong to everyone, and so she must keep traveling the world.”

  Throughout the childhoods of Leitzel and Alfred, Nellie inhabited their imaginations less as a mother than as some fabled storybook character like Snow White or Cinderella. Leitzel wanted to be like her in every way. She wanted to be prettier than all the flowers in Holland, too. She hated it that her own hair was frizzy and carrot colored. How she wished it was long, silky, and brown-black, just like La Belle Nellie’s.