Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  “Leitzel never answered any of our questions about the colonel,” McCloskey said, “and he was always private around others on the show. Everyone suspected they were lovers, of course, but because they were so secretive, none of us knew for sure.”

  “Mostly,” McCloskey went on, “he and Leitzel spent all their time together behind the closed door of her train quarters or the flap at the front of her private tent. On those Sundays when the circus wasn’t able to play because of local blue laws, they’d often borrow one of the cars that Mister John and Charley carried on the train, and travel into town for dinner or a night at the movies.”

  Leitzel’s demands on management continued without abatement. As pleased as she was about having her own private tent and a stateroom on the train, she quickly discovered that such pieds-à-terre required constant spiffing up, especially because of the distinguished and discerning guests who were often stopping by. She called on Mister John and Charley again.

  What could she possibly want now? they wondered.

  She had to have her own full-time maid, she insisted. By this time, Leitzel had proved herself to be by far the circus’s biggest draw. The queen was also responsible for generating more favorable press coverage for the show than it had ever received. Charm oozed from her like juice from a ripe peach whenever she was interviewed by a journalist.

  As outrageous as some of Leitzel’s requests seemed to them, Mister John and Charley rarely objected to her petitions anymore.

  Leitzel got her maid, Mabel Clemings. She was the wife of Harry Clemings, one of the forty clowns touring with the circus. Mabel was as faithful to Leitzel as a Saint Bernard. Perhaps somewhat curiously for a woman who was married to a Pierrot, though, she always looked dour and seems never to have had even the slightest curl of a smile on her lips. She had fewer curves than a yardstick and favored ankle-length dresses, all of which were in shades of shadows.

  Some of Leitzel’s fellow travelers may have been resentful of the favored status that she alone enjoyed with the circus, but probably not many of them. Most of them took the position that what was good for the queen was also good for the show. She appeared to have been revered by all but a small few of the more than one thousand zebra grooms, tent stake drivers, living skeletons, bearded ladies, human cannonballs, and high-wire-dancing lunatics crisscrossing a nation with her. The open love her confreres had for her might be explained by the generosity she extended to everyone on the show.

  Not only did she allow her private tent to serve as a hospitality center for visiting dignitaries and celebrities, but she also turned it into a gathering place for her fellow troupers, among them the dozen or two children traveling with the circus. Five mornings each week, Monday through Friday, the tent served as what came to be known as Auntie Leitzel’s Free Elementary School, with Leitzel herself serving as its marm. There she read stories to the kids and gave them their first lessons in penmanship and arithmetic.

  Eventually a time would come when Leitzel’s tent would also bulge with young people in the early evenings. In an age when radios cost about the same as a Model T Ford, she bought one of the receivers, an Atwater Kent. Her new acquisition had the immediate effect of turning the circus’s children into evenly blithesome boys and girls who seemed unable to ever stop singing.

  At the time, The Man in the Moon, the first of radio’s children’s programs, was starting to be broadcast coast to coast. Bill McNeary, the show’s host and “The Man in the Moon,” read such stories as “The Adventures of the Gingerbread Man” over the airways and urged each of his young listeners to look up into the night sky and pick out a star as their very own. The Man in the Moon assured his earth children that their stars would always remain glowing as long as they cared for them properly.

  “It’s easy,” he promised. “The way to keep your star shining is to sing as much as you can and never pout.”

  Because Leitzel had the only radio on the circus, there were also times when her tent served as a prime social center for the circus’s performers and working men and women. On occasions of such historic broadcast events as presidential addresses or Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey fights, so many troupers streamed to her cottage that Leitzel had to limit the stays of each listener to three or four minutes.

  Charley Ringling was in his early fifties by the time Leitzel joined the circus, and though he was more than twice her age, he clearly was smitten with her.

  His wife, Edie, was regarded by everyone on the show as an extraordinarily indulgent woman, but there had been times in the past when she had learned of trysts her husband had arranged with ballet girls. She had threatened to leave him on those occasions, and made it clear to him that if they ever did enter a divorce courtroom, she would peel away as great a stake of his wealth as the judge would allow.

  Charley devised a stratagem for spending time with Leitzel without arousing the suspicions of either Edie or the newspaper gossip columnists. He founded what he called the “Once in a While Club” and installed himself as its president, treasurer, and entertainment director. The club had a membership that usually hovered around a dozen showgirls, and in an effort to convince his Edie that his conduct was always unimpeachable, he sometimes even brought her along as a guest for the picnics, swimming parties, and tables in fine restaurants.

  The club, he told Edie, was created with the sole purpose of providing wholesome and chaperoned activities for the show’s unattached and lonely female employees who were distantly separated from their families.

  “In reality, the Once in a While Club was started only because Charley believed it could give him some quality time with Leitzel,” said Fanny McCloskey, herself a member.

  Leitzel enjoyed Charley’s company in a way that a child might adore a generous and fun-loving uncle, but she was not willing to let their relationship move beyond that stage. After being rebuffed repeatedly by Leitzel in his efforts to get away with her in some private love nest, Charley eventually quit the pursuit. He did not disband the Once in a While Club, though.

  He found the mechanism useful in developing a romance with a second choice, Anna Stais. She was a member of “The Living Statues,” that group of Aphrodite-like women and Adonis-like men who appeared in the center ring covered in white greasepaint and mimicked the poses of the human subjects of famous art masterpieces that were familiar to the public through pictures in the Sunday rotogravures.

  Unlike Leitzel, Stais apparently was willing to let the relationship with her boss move further than just the toasting of hot dogs and marshmallows around a campfire encircled by a dozen or more other young women.

  The trapeze flyer Butch Brann had just started dating a pretty, black-eyed showgirl who would eventually become his wife.

  “Because of the show’s rules for keeping the sexes apart, Delores and I had to go through all kinds of sneaky stuff to be alone with each other,” he said. “Once, we arranged to meet at a movie house in town. I got there first, bought a ticket, and waited inside. In a while, Delores came in, and then entered the darkened theater. I watched as she walked down the aisle and then slipped into a row with a couple empty seats. I waited five minutes to make sure no show detectives were around and then slipped into the seat beside her. Then I saw who was in the row just ahead of us. It was Charley and Anna Stais. He had his arm around her and his head was resting on her shoulder. Delores and I hightailed it out of that row. We found new seats in the balcony.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The voice coming through the closed door was deep and resonant, songful.

  “Come in, please. Come in. Come in.”

  Surely Leitzel had heard the voice before, if not in a music hall or on a vaudeville stage, then on the Victor and Columbia records. The voice may have been more widely recognizable to Americans at the time than that of President Woodrow Wilson.

  Leitzel was making the rounds of the dressing rooms inside Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s Aerial Gardens on the rooftop of the New Amsterdam Theatre building on Forty-Secon
d Street near the corner of Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. Leading her on the tour was a young woman in a floor-length evening gown with carrot-colored hair and a light sprinkling of freckles on her nose. She was so pretty that maybe she should have had a tiara on her head and a magic wand in her hand. She put a gloved hand on the brass knob and turned it. Leitzel’s excitement rose.

  The occupant on the other side of the door materialized before the two women through a white-blue cloud. He looked like a divine, like the mythic being everybody up and down Broadway regarded him to be. There was, as always, a smoking cigarette in the V of his fingers. Two or three others were burning in ashtrays. The air in the room seemed almost sliceable.

  Leitzel would recall her reaction this way: “My arms turned to gooseflesh at the sight of him. My heart was drumming.”

  The man, thick around the middle, grinning widely, and wearing a black tuxedo with swallowtails, took Leitzel’s companion into his arms and held her in a long embrace.

  “Like a god and a goddess hugging,” Leitzel would remember.

  The man was Bert Williams, song-and-dance man and comedian. He was the highest-paid entertainer on Broadway and, along with Al Jolson and Nora Bayes, one of the three biggest-selling recording artists in the world. He was likely also the most widely beloved black performer in America. Booker T. Washington said of him: “He has done more for our race than I have. He smiled his way into people’s hearts. I have been obliged to fight my way in.”

  In Williams’s arms was Billie Burke, an esteemed stage and film actress, but even better known the last four years as Mrs. Ziegfeld, wife of the impresario widely regarded as “The Man Who Invented Broadway.”

  In time Billie, in fact, would acquire both a magic wand and a crown, and then be forever identified with them. She would also become known eternally to almost every child born, and to be born, in the Western world. But the royal accoutrements and her everlasting fame would not begin until years later, when she portrayed Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in The Wizard of Oz.

  That was not to be until 1939.

  This night was December 9, 1918, and it was late.

  When Billie introduced Williams to Leitzel, he took her hands in his, a cigarette still popping up through his fingers. He told her of seeing her perform in the Ringling circus a year or two earlier. “I’ll never forget it,” he said. “When you finished and returned to the floor, I whispered a thank-you to the Lord for making my life such an easy one.”

  Leitzel could not believe it. She could not believe any of it. She was high above the sidewalks of Times Square, as close to heaven as any Otis elevator could lift her. She was inside the most sumptuous entertainment temple in all of New York. And she was in the company of Bert Williams and Billie Burke, the Bert Williams and the Billie Burke.

  She was also frightened, more terrified than at any time in her life. The clock was nearing midnight. Opening in a little more than an hour would be the fourth annual production of the show New York’s smart set anticipated with greater excitement than any other—Flo Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic.

  And Leitzel was to be a part of it—she and Bert Williams, and such other luminaries as Fanny Brice, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, and Lillian Lorraine, advertised as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.”

  A month earlier, Leitzel had concluded another tour with the Ringling Bros. Circus, her fourth. She was now free to accept whatever stage engagements were offered to her, and the invitation to appear in a Ziegfeld Frolic was by far the most prestigious theater assignment ever to come her way.

  Billie Burke continued in her role as tour guide for Leitzel. After introducing her to Williams, she led her to the dressing rooms of the 1918 Frolic’s other entertainers.

  “I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming all this,” Leitzel told her brother, Alfred. “I don’t know when there were a greater number of so many truly distinguished entertainers in one place at one time. What was I doing in such company? I was a circus performer.

  “They were all so gracious, though. Everybody told me I was now one of them. I thanked them for trying to make me feel welcome, but I wasn’t so sure I really belonged in this place with them. Here I was, among the great aristocracy of the entertainment world, and surely I had big doubts about whether I really belonged.”

  As jubilant as she was at meeting most of her costars, she may have become standoffish when Billie presented her to Bird Millman, a slack-wire performer who had been a sensation with the Barnum & Bailey Circus the last few years. Audiences recognized in the first minute of Bird’s performances that they were seeing someone unlike any other circus artist. A petite figure of radiant beauty, Bird discharged pirouettes and entrechats with about as much grace as Isadora Duncan performed the feats, but with a difference. Instead of performing her twirls and liftoffs on a wide and deep wooden stage, Bird presented them on a cable, three-quarters of an inch thick and thirty-six feet long. To make things even more interesting, all the time she pranced on her wire, she sang with the sweetness of a nightingale. Her lilting soprano carried to the most distant seats. Audiences adored her.

  Bird had a reputation as the sweetest-tempered woman appearing with any circus. As unassuming as she was, she seemed not to have any other ambition but to always put on a good show for the folks, and have fun doing it. Leitzel, though, viewed her as a bit of a nemesis. Because Bird was so lovely and so broadly cherished, Leitzel believed, she was her greatest challenger to the throne she had assumed as queen of the circus world.

  Certainly Leitzel recognized Bird’s exceptional artistry. It irritated her, though, that the circus gift wrapped the wire dancer’s appearances in such pomp and ceremony. No other star, Leitzel stewed, not even her, had enjoyed such favoritism. More than once, she had complained to one or another of the Ringling brothers that the circus was going way over the top by providing Bird with an eight-member choir to accompany her as she warbled songs like “Would You Like to Spoon with Me?” and “Tiptoe through the Tulips” while mincing over her wire. As upsetting as the choir was to Leitzel, what galled her even more was the ostentatious manner in which Bird’s consorts were costumed. According to one magazine writer, the accompanists were gowned in “vestments not dissimilar to those of the Vatican choir.”

  Variety observed that Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic “drew the classiest after-theater patronage ever known.” In an age when the pay for skilled workers averaged four dollars a day, there was a five-dollar cover charge for admission to the Frolic shows, by far the highest anywhere in Manhattan. Ziegfeld did not intend for the rooftop productions to attract just anybody. The plebs, he said, could take in his long-running, dollar-a-head Ziegfeld Follies, which were presented in a sixteen-hundred-seat theater on the ground floor of the New Amsterdam building. The Frolic, though, had been confected expressly for New York’s most beautiful people.

  Begun in 1915, the Frolics had many of the same ingredients as the enormously successful Follies, including A-list comics, singers, and, of course, dozens of chorines, each handpicked by Flo with a critical eye for exceptional beauty, long legs, and pleasing topographies of flesh. There was a difference, though. Because the Frolic was presented in a far smaller playhouse and limited to about five hundred guests, the clubbers had such intimate contact with the performers that they could sniff the Sen-Sens on their breaths.

  The Frolics also tended to be more risqué than the Follies. Many of the Frolic comedians salted their monologues with stories that were too racy to present to the wider public, and among the two or three dozen showgirls who were featured in the productions, there were always a few who had little compunction about removing just about all of their coverings but their nail polish. The Frolics’ management not only tolerated a certain restrained revelry by the guests but also encouraged it. In all of the productions, there was always a number when Ziegfeld’s Broadway belles circled the floor in costumes made mostly of inflated balloons. The rowdier of the male patrons
took sport in approaching the dancers and, with lighted cigars, popping the balloons.

  No circus performers were featured in any Midnight Frolic of the first two years. It was Billie who persuaded her husband to open the programs to the day’s big top novas. As much as she adored the great entertainers of the stage, Billie considered the circus’s wanderers to be the noblest of all performing artists. She had spent much of her girlhood in the presence of equestriennes, lion tamers, and fire eaters, as well as such storied professional human oddities as Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Man, and George, the Turtle Boy. Her father, Billy Burke, briefly operated a small circus in the 1870s, and later became a popular singing clown who made center ring appearances with such major enterprises as the Barnum & Great London Circus.

  By the time Leitzel headed to her room to change into her costume, the first of the clubbers had already started appearing in Ziegfeld’s aerie. They turned over their fox and raccoon coats to the coat check girls and made their way to the floor, where small, round, glass tables were set with wooden hammers and interhouse phones that allowed the patrons to ring up not only the waiters but also other diners across the room.

  No other club in New York had the opulence of the Aerial Gardens. Ziegfeld commissioned the great Joseph Urban, a Vienna-schooled architect and a top stage designer, to create the jewel box. The playhouse’s walls were decorated with woodland scenes, painted à la Georges Seurat’s softly shimmering, pointillist A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. All around the space there were inner-lighted crystal columns with bouquets of gold foil flowers at their tops. The theater’s movable stage was made of glass, as were the staircases on either side of the floor that led to box seating.

  At the stroke of midnight an orchestra dramatically started playing and two or three dozen showgirls surged onto the floor and took their places on the stage and the staircases. A few of the bolder men in the audience left their wives and girlfriends at the tables and took positions beneath the transparent staircases for worm’s eye perspectives on Ziegfeld’s Broadway belles.