Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  “You’ve got plenty of time to see them all before the big top show starts. Tickets for the show inside here are just a quarter of the dollar for the ladies and gentlemen, a dime and a nickel for the little ones.”

  Somewhere in the same setting, probably inside the big top and stringing up his trapeze with his brother Lalo, was the circus’s newest sensation, Alfredo Codona. He was in the highest of spirits. He was back in America. He had been out of the country for most of the last half dozen years, traveling first with the Siegrist-Silbon trapeze troupe in Australia and New Zealand, and then, after 1915, touring Europe and South America with his own unit, The Flying Codonas. Over the last two years, Alfredo, along with Lalo, who was now his catcher, had been in Cuba and South America, as headliners with the Santos y Artigas Circus. Not only was Alfredo happy to be back on United States soil, and appearing with the Sells-Floto Circus, The Show Beautiful, but, probably even more cheering to him, he was reunited for the first time in years with his father, Edward, and sister, Victoria. Now twenty-eight, married, the mother of a three-year-old son, and still arrestingly beautiful, Victoria was regarded as the Sells-Floto Circus’s first lady. With Hortense in El Paso, Texas, looking after the home she and Edward had bought there, Edward was still touring with Victoria as her manager.

  Alfredo was married now, too. Five months earlier, while in Havana, Cuba, he married Clara Curtain, an aerialist who had begun her career in entertainment by appearing in the twenty-five-cent vaudeville houses in Chicago and her hometown of Cincinnati.

  Even though it was a Thursday afternoon, and most of the town’s men were at work in the oil fields, the circus’s opening show drew ten thousand people, a full house, a quarter of Wichita Falls’ population. The show opened with a spectacle titled “The Birth of a Rainbow.” As theater, the many-act production had no more coherence than a wino’s dream, but it did give the circus a chance to roll out just about everything it had brought to town. There were pom-pommed horses; twenty-five clowns; a small herd of elephants, each caparisoned in satin; a caged ape; and about sixty costumed showgirls. A dozen of them hung by their teeth from ropes, and another four dozen twirled awkwardly en pointe on the sawdust-covered ground. After twenty minutes or so, a pot of gold was drawn before the audience on a pony-drawn float. The pageant finally ended, and the circus began rolling out its acts.

  Three world-class bareback riding acts—The Lloyds, The Hobsons, and The Hodginis—performed simultaneously in the circus’s three rings. There were clown acts, acrobatic feats by a troupe called the Bonomoor Arabs, and then twenty or thirty elephants appeared in the arena, each of them carrying a showgirl.

  It was not until well into the program that Princess Victoria appeared. Like a swimmer determining the temperature of the water in a pool, she started by tentatively placing a toe on her wobbly slack wire. Alfredo and Papa Edward were on either side of the cable, to try to catch her if she should fall the sixteen feet to the ground. In another moment, Victoria was moving back and forth over the sagging wire, cakewalking at first and then doing her flamenco dance while clicking castanets. Then she began the crowning display of her act, and in seconds, the Wichita Falls crowd, like all the audiences that had ever witnessed it, became stupefied. Her wire started to move laterally higher and higher, faster and faster, until it was whipping back and forth like a telephone cable in a tornado. Somehow, impossibly it seemed, she was able to keep her gold-slippered feet on the wire as it flung her horizontal body right and left in the air almost to twelve o’clock. After finishing, she took her bows, and then left the big top, but the crowd, through its roars and cheers, called her back into the tent two or three times before it would finally let her go for good.

  There were more clown acts, more acrobats, and a dog in a woman’s dress and hat pushing a puppy-filled baby buggy. Then, after two hours, the time had come for the circus’s finale, what was likely the inaugural appearance in the United States of The Flying Codonas.

  A gasp rose from the audience at Clara Curtain’s first appearance on the trapeze perch. She was dazzling, with porcelain skin, an undulant figure, and curly, fire-colored hair, and the spotlight seemed to strip her of her brief coverings so she appeared nude.

  Clara and Alfredo each took turns presenting solo flights on the trapeze. Clara could perform all of the trapeze’s basic maneuvers, but as stunning as she was in her physical appearance, she was not a flyer of much expressiveness. When Alfredo was flying, on the other hand, he gave the impression of a bird that had just been freed from a cage. He soared through the air in ecstasy. He pirouetted. Sometimes, while in transit to the hands of Lalo, he left his trapeze and then seemed to move through the air with the loping leaps of Nijinsky. Other times, he seemed to hang in space motionlessly for what seemed like seconds. The audience cheered and cheered.

  And then it was time for Alfredo’s pièce de résistance, a feat he had presented in Cuba and South America, but never in the United States.

  He wormed himself into a gunnysack, and then, with only his arms free through the top of the bag, slipped a blindfold over his eyes. He pawed into the air to locate his flybar, and then, with fingers locked around the baton, shot out into the air. He made three or four forward swings, each higher than the one before it, and then released his grip. What appeared to be a sack of potatoes started ascending into the air and then made two full backward revolutions. Next, the sack was boring forward in space, with only Alfredo’s outstretched arms seeable outside its opening. In another blink of the eye, he was caught in a wristlock by Lalo.

  No one in the seats could have really believed what they had just witnessed, but Alfredo’s feat was still not quite finished. Lalo then flung him back into space, and still blindfolded, still stuffed in the burlap bag, he twirled like a top. Next he reached into the air for the flybar that Clara had just thrown and that was hurtling to him. He caught it and then neatly rode his conveyance back to the perch.

  The feat that Alfredo had just presented seemed utterly impossible. It may even have been beyond any rational person’s ability to imagine. Yet ten thousand of Wichita Falls’ townspeople had just seen it with their own eyes, and another ten thousand would also see it at the evening show.

  Ten years. Ten damn years.

  Still, Alfredo had not gotten it. What did the gods want from him?

  Had he not worked long and hard enough to gain The Triple?

  The Sells-Floto Circus presented the last show of its 1919 season on November 9 in Opelousas, Louisiana. After the single season of touring America with his Flying Codonas, Alfredo was already starting to receive mention from circus experts not just as the greatest trapeze flyer of his time but maybe even of all time.

  That was fine with him, all just fine. But still, after a decade of searching for it almost every day, he had yet to find the rarest, most wondrous, and most spellbinding big top feat of all: The Triple. It ate at his insides.

  The Flying Codonas had a contract to rejoin the Sells-Floto Circus for its 1920 season. Alfredo made up his mind that he was going to be ready to present The Triple when the show opened at the Coliseum in Chicago the following April, or die trying.

  Both Papa Edward and Lalo begged him to abandon his quest for the feat before it killed him or, worse, left him such a pathetic cripple that he would be belted into a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Alfredo could not be persuaded.

  By and large, circus people are superstitious. They believe that there are gods above them that rule their destinies. People in the ordinary world may be governed by fates, too, most circus people might concede, but the gods that govern the saltimbanques are different. They may be more extortive than any other gods. They may be more demanding in the payments they expect for their special favors.

  If Alfredo had a prayer, it was to accomplish The Triple before he became too broken from falls or too old for that to be possible. He was sure that there was no other daredevil who wanted anything half as badly as he wanted the stunt. It was the four-mi
nute mile of the big top world, the most elusive goal for every flyer aspiring to true greatness, to immortality.

  Alfredo revered Ernie Clarke, the Brit who, beginning in 1909, if not earlier, began presenting The Triple to circus audiences. At the same time, though, Alfredo may have been resentful of him. Why had the gods favored Clarke over him?

  Alfredo was twenty-seven. He had been carrying on his search for The Triple since 1909, almost from the first moment he saw Leitzel, performing in the Barnum & Bailey Circus in the heavens of Madison Square Garden. His madness had started out of his first love. If ever he was to be worthy of such a divine, he thought back then, he would have to gain the circus’s rarest feat.

  Did he still, even fleetingly, think of Leitzel with amorous longing anymore? And did he wonder, too, whether she ever thought of him in the same way?

  So much had happened in both of their lives since they had been secret lovers on the Barnum & Bailey Circus. For one, she had gone in and out of two marriages, and he had entered into one.

  Even if Alfredo had tried to push Leitzel out of his head and heart, that, as a practical matter, would have been impossible. By the mid-teens, she was already established as the first darling of the circus universe. The popular press, as well as the entertainment papers, detailed all her comings and goings.

  She had become one of America’s earliest poster girls and even a bona fide sex symbol. During the waning days of World War I, a vote was carried out by the thousands of American soldiers fighting in the trenches of France and Belgium to select “The most beautiful and attractive woman in all the world.” When the last of the ballots had been tallied, Mademoiselle Leitzel had finished well ahead of any of the other contenders, including Mary Pickford, Mae West, and Theda Bara. An emissary from the American Expeditionary Forces was dispatched to New York to hand deliver the proclamation to her. The document, prepared in Claumont, France, on stationery bearing the official seal of General John J. Pershing’s army, informed the circus star that she had been selected as “Queen of the Flock.” The proclamation went on to acknowledge to Leitzel that “you now stand No. 1, and in view of our absolute confidence, you need have no fear that your present position will ever be usurped by another, no matter how beautiful.” Thereafter, Leitzel posters and photographs started appearing on the inside locker doors of soldiers billeted in barracks throughout the United States and Europe.

  Alfredo’s search to find The Triple had taken on new urgency after he returned to America and, along with Lalo and Clara, joined the Sells-Floto Circus.

  Ernie Clarke, the first flyer to at least now and then successfully complete hands-to-hands triple somersaults on the flying trapeze, had by now eliminated the stunt from his performances. Even when the Brit was at the top of his form years earlier, he was never able to complete The Triple more than once or twice in every half dozen tries, and Clarke apparently came to the realization that he was engaging in a form of Russian roulette every time he attempted the feat.

  If Clarke had given back The Triple to the fates, Alfredo may have believed, they might now be more inclined to pass it on to him as the second mortal worthy of the most cherished of all big top treasures. But now there was a new matter tormenting Alfredo. He had been receiving reports that another flyer, Ernie Lane, the star leaper with the Flying Wards, was also seeking to gain the feat. Some who had seen Lane in his rehearsals said he appeared to be very close to taking possession of it. The former Iowa farm boy had started showing a devil-may-care daring in all his flying for the last two years. He had lost his wife when an empty troop carrier crashed into the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus’s train just outside of Hammond, Indiana, in the early morning hours of June 18, 1918. The railroad accident, the worst in circus history, took the lives of eighty-seven performers and workers.

  Alfredo found an ideal place to resume his pursuit of The Triple after the Sells-Floto Circus presented the last of its 1919 shows in Opelousas, Louisiana: the Coliseum on the fairgrounds in Shreveport just 190 miles to the south. The Coliseum, a dirt-floored exhibition hall, was largely vacant over the winter months.

  When Alfredo entered the Coliseum each morning along with his brother and father, it was in a spirit of humility, as though he were entering a church for the most solemn of occasions. He seemed willing to turn over his life to the gods to do with it whatever they thought was best.

  “I had adopted a fatalistic attitude,” he said. “If this was to be the end of my efforts, very well, then, it would be the end.”

  Each new day in the Coliseum, just as he had done thousands of times before over close to a dozen years, Alfredo ascended the rope ladder to the trapeze. Lalo, hanging upside down at the opposing end of the rigging with his legs entwined with the ropes of his trapeze, started swinging. Then, when he reached exactly the right speed and lift, Lalo sent out his familiar cry.

  “Listo.”

  Alfredo would then lunge into space and, gripping his flybar, swing higher and higher. Then he would let go of the baton and, with his body tucked into a sphere, start turning his backward somersaults while at the same time streaking forward in space like a comet. Always, though, when he started entering into the third of his spins, he would black out, momentarily losing consciousness. Alfredo had a term for these slivers of time during which he believed he ceased to exist.

  He experienced, he said, “the little death.”

  When he came to, another second would pass before he regained awareness of who he was, where he was, what he was trying to do. By then, it was too late. He was too far off course to make any corrections. Sometimes he slammed into Lalo, sometimes their hands brushed, but always the attempts ended with Alfredo tumbling into the net. His body was always bruised and abraded from net burns, and his mood ugly, when he left the Coliseum each day. He cursed himself. He also cursed Lalo and Papa, as though, preposterously, they shared any blame for his inability to find the trick. Mostly he blamed the damned gods. There was no one on earth who wanted The Triple more badly than he did. Probably there never was. Why did they not see that?

  Two or three two months went by, and then a morning came when Alfredo did not so much seem his customary humble, almost penitential self when he stepped inside the Coliseum. Rather, his spirit was one of excited anticipation.

  He clambered up his ladder to his perch and waited for Lalo’s call.

  “Listo.”

  Once again, Alfredo hurtled into space on his flybar, then released his hands from the baton and scrunched his body into a ball.

  He started somersaulting.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  And this time it happened.

  When he came out of the third turn, he leveled out, and this time, like a bullet from a sharpshooter’s rifle, traveled the remaining ten feet to Lalo, and this time, hallelujah, their hands interlocked around each other’s wrists.

  Had it all been a fluke?

  The brothers were almost afraid to try again, but after just moments, Alfredo was back on the rope ladder, climbing to his perch.

  “Listo.”

  Alfredo was again moving through space, his feet rolling over his head in three blurring revolutions, and then, hardly a second later, he was moored once again in Lalo’s powerful grip.

  Perfect.

  The brothers tried a third time, and once again, everything ended perfectly.

  Alfredo had it.

  He had The Triple.

  Had he made some irrevocable promise to the fates the night before in exchange for it?

  After a few seconds of hanging in his brother’s wristlock, Alfredo fell into the net, this time deliberately. A moment later, Lalo left his bar and also fell to the net.

  The brothers hugged each other on the ground, then collapsed to the earthen floor, and, like a couple of bear cubs, started playfully rolling together in the dirt. Then they pulled Papa Edward to the ground, and all three of them were rolling and squealing with laughter.

  “If any other
people had entered the Coliseum just then, they would have thought that all three of them were crazy, absolutely loco,” said Anita Codona, Lalo’s wife, who was a witness to it all.

  Ten years. Yes, ten damn years.

  CHAPTER 16

  Alfredo fell in love with Leitzel all over again.

  It happened in the same place it had occurred the first time, nearly a dozen and a half years earlier, on the floor of Madison Square Garden.

  This day, though, the Garden hardly seemed a likely setting for love to strike a second time. Several hundred Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus employees, performers, and workmen were in the arena, and more were streaming in by the minute. At the same time, roustabouts were rolling wheeled and iron-barred dens onto the floor with lions and tigers, a gorilla, and even a hippopotamus. Other circus employees were working near the ceiling, guying cables for the wire walkers and stringing up the riggings of the trapeze artists.

  Some of the tumblers, clowns, and bareback riders had found corners on the floor where they could begin practicing their acts, but most of the performers were still milling around, talking with one another, and waiting for some directions on where they might fit into the chaos.

  Weaving through the jumble, a cigar moving in and out of his lips, was Mister John. He was sixty-one now, and the last of the Ringling brothers. Charley had died four months earlier, at sixty-three. A question John could have had on his mind was how he and his lieutenants were going to be able to shape all the formlessness before him into another show. They would just have to do it. There was no other choice. Completely ready or not, The Greatest Show on Earth was scheduled to open its 1927 season on April 12. That was three or four days away.