Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  Murnau had storyboarded the fictional Cecchi’s Leap of Death as the movie’s penultimate scene. In order to enact this scene for the cameras, Alfredo was called upon to execute what may have been the most daring, dazzling, and neck-risking flying maneuver of his life. Murnau wanted him to do not just The Triple but also, a split second before the turning of his somersaults, to pass through a hoop of flames.

  The Go Devil was in place, with its strut high in the air, and camera and lighting men in its man bucket. After getting signals from his crew that all was ready, Murnau then cried out an order to begin the shooting.

  Alfredo swung back and forth on his trapeze two or three times before reaching the right altitude in the air. Then he let go of his flybar.

  He shot through the circle of fire, and, in the next hundredth of a second, with his body balled into a tight tuck, he started rising in the first of his heels-over-head, backward somersaults. Perfect. Then he turned the second of them, and then the final one. They were perfect, too. In a bat of an eyelid, he had leveled out horizontally and was streaking to Lalo at the far end of the trapeze rigging.

  Afterward Murnau thanked Alfredo and told him that the spectacle he had just presented had been absolutely brilliant, everything he had wanted. Alfredo’s assignment on 4 Devils was now over, but he remained on the set to watch Murnau at work on the closing scene, one in which the photoplay fades and fades to utter blackness.

  The bodies of the fictional Marion and the Great Cecchi lay on the set’s earthen floor, haphazardly positioned and absolutely motionless. Murnau was in his man bucket, high in the air and looking down at the scene with a cameraman. Through a megaphone, he kept directing the actors Gaynor and Morton to move their arms or legs just a few inches this way or that in their portrayals of the lifeless Marion and Cecchi on the ground of the make-believe Hollywood circus amphitheater.

  Alfredo was on the perch of the trapeze in the building. He took in every detail of the scene below him with what may have been grim fascination.

  The circus demands of its daredevils that they devote themselves entirely and irrevocably to their callings. Could Alfredo have imagined that another night might come to the circus when he met the same end as the Great Cecchi? Or, what may have been even more terrifying to him, could he have imagined a night in the big top when his beloved Leitzel could come to the same end as Marion?

  CHAPTER 18

  Most mornings, Monday through Friday, Leitzel was ready for them at nine and stepped outside her tent. She would then start shaking a handbell and, like a Salvation Army worker outside Macy’s at Christmastime, sprinkle the air with jingling. In an instant, the circus’s children spilled from their family quarters on the Ringling train. Whooping, they raced in a beeline from the railroad siding to the bell ringer. Auntie Leitzel’s Free Elementary School was about to begin another day.

  Her school was open to all the sons and daughters of the show’s performers and executives. Leitzel tried not to show favoritism, but if she had a pet, it was Dolly Jahn. She regarded the child as her protégée. She rigged up a miniature trapeze outside her tent and tutored Dolly in aerial work. She gave her private piano lessons in her train apartment.

  Leitzel’s attentiveness to Dolly sprang from the feelings she had for the child’s father. She heroicized Hans Jahn. And she pitied him. It hurt her that so daring an artist received so little appreciation from his audiences.

  Jahn was a small man, not weighing more than 140 pounds, but his arms, loins, and even his neck were ropey with muscle. His workplace was atop a forty- or fifty-foot pole held upright in delicate balance on the shoulders of his brother, Carl. There, Hans presented all manner of tricks, including, at the finish, a no-hands headstand. Hans was a perch artist, probably the best ever to appear in a sawdust ring. His was one of the most perilous acts presented in the circus, but when he completed his turns and slid down his pole, he was seldom rewarded with any more than patterings of applause.

  Leitzel was always trying to shore up Jahn’s spirits. She often visited his dressing room in the minutes before he was due to appear for the crowds. Sometimes she found him pacing the floor, his head down, with a rosary in his hands. Leitzel apologized at her intrusions and turned quickly to exit. Before leaving, though, a kind of handshake of their eyes took place between the two. Like fellow members in a secret coven, they seemed to recognize that they were both haunted, maybe controlled by some dark angel over which they were powerless.

  The towners seeing the circus’s players from the seats tended to imagine them as fugitives from Scheherazade’s thousand and one tales, wanderers in a rich adventure that just kept continuing on and on eternally. The wire walkers, acrobats, and clowns, though, led lives that in some ways had the metronomic regularity of the day workers who picked beans or sorted nuts, bolts, and washers on the assembly lines. They punched in for their jobs in the big top at precisely the same hours each afternoon and night. Three times a day, they filed into the cookhouse, where they took seats across the tables from the same coworkers who were there the meal before. Always they were on the move, decamping from one place every one, two, or three days to travel on to another, but almost always their peregrinations were carried on in the blankness of late night when they were asleep on the trains. When they awoke, they discovered themselves to be in a place not much different from the one they left eight or twelve hours before, almost always an overgrown field alongside a railroad siding on the outskirts of a town whose name was of no matter to them.

  Because of the sameness of their days, the nomads welcomed even the most quotidian of changes in their colony—the flowering of a romance between a professional fat lady and the human skeleton in Clyde Ingalls’s sideshow; the birth of lion cubs in the menagerie; the occasional death by bottle of another of those faceless animal attendants who answered to such names as Old Joe or Camel Scoop. Such changes provided them something new to talk about in the cookhouse.

  One such change began evolving early in the touring season of 1928, and, because it involved the circus’s queen and king, it was a doozy. Everyone on the show had cause to wonder: Just what was going on between those two now?

  Alfredo started turning up at Leitzel’s tent immediately following the matinee performances each day, and, at the very instant he entered her cottage, maid Mabel stepped out. She then flopped into a chaise lounge chair and, like a sentry, blocked anyone who might try to get beyond her.

  Everyone on the show, of course, had known for some time that something must have been going on between the two. Just as was true the previous year, when Alfredo was still married to Clara, he was present for all her performances, always pacing the center ring far below her, and ready to try to catch her if she should ever fall. And also as was the case the season before, at least when the colonel was not traveling with the circus, Alfredo’s fellow troupers often spotted him entering Leitzel’s train quarters late at night.

  But now, something different appeared to be happening in the relationship of Alfredo and Leitzel. When he called at her tent each late afternoon, he was carrying a rucksack that appeared to be heavily weighted.

  “Because Leitzel and Alfredo were the show’s biggest stars, none of the other performers were brazen enough to ask them what was going on in their late-afternoon rendezvous,” said the clown, bareback rider, and trapeze flyer Freddie Freeman. “Some of us tried bribing Mabel to dish on the two, but she kept her lips zipped shut. The most popular idea was that Leitzel and Alfredo were getting together for rolls in the hay. But why was he always lugging that canvas bag?”

  Weeks went by, and no one had the answer.

  Practically speaking, Fred Bradna was the circus’s field marshal. He had two jobs. He was ringmaster. He was also the show’s “equestrian director,” a title dating to the eighteenth century, when the circus’s ring presentations were primarily displays of trick bareback riding. He was responsible for keeping all of the acts meshing perfectly together in the air, inside the circus’s
three rings and atop its two stages. At every point of the two-and-a-half-hour shows, he knew to about the quarter minute just where every performer should be in her or his act.

  A onetime cavalry officer in the German army, he was as lean and tall as a Kansas cornstalk, but his most memorable physical feature was just three inches wide and was right under his nose. It was a pencil-thin mustache that bore the outline of a peaked circus tent. It looked like it could have been crayoned in black there by James Thurber.

  Inside and outside the big top, Bradna was all circus business. It is unlikely he had even a casual interest in any goings-on between Leitzel and Alfredo inside her canvas sanctum sanctorum. It was Bradna, though, who finally learned the reason for Alfredo’s private, between-shows calls on Leitzel, and his enlightenment came purely through happenstance.

  Bradna was forever dreaming up ways in which the performers could dress up their acts. Almost instantly whenever he had such an inspiration, he sought out the performer to discuss his idea. Whether it centered on Leitzel or Alfredo is unclear, but Bradna was visited by one of his brainstorms one afternoon and, excited, immediately struck out for Leitzel’s tent. As usual, Mabel was posted at its door, serving as a human DO NOT DISTURB sign. Bradna pulled rank on her. He made an end run around her chaise lounge chair and entered the tent.

  Alfredo was visibly embarrassed at having been found out, but not because his boss caught him engaged in lovemaking. Bradna found him seated at a wicker table spread with children’s books on social studies and ancient history. Alfredo, Bradna learned then, had been reporting to Leitzel’s tent each afternoon for the same reason the circus’s kids turned up there each morning. At age thirty-five, and for the first time in his life, Alfredo had started going to school.

  On the trapeze, Alfredo had no peers. It was another matter when he was earthbound. When he was around others of any worldliness, he was so self-conscious about his artlessness that he sought out shadows in which to hide. He worried that his attempts at speaking would betray his lowly origins. He was, as Bradna said, “conversationally limited.”

  Leitzel tutored Alfredo in drama, music, and art, the areas outside the circus that mattered most to her, as well as those in the circles in which she moved outside the big top. “Her dressing tent,” said Bradna, “was an ideal setting for the afternoon tête-à-tête between the two most celebrated personalities of the circus. Here Codona literally sat at Leitzel’s feet … and caressed Lillian’s two Boston terriers, Jerry and Boots, as he listened.… He became a virtual mooncalf in his adoration of her.”

  After class, Alfredo and Professora Leitzel would walk hand in hand to the cookhouse, still discussing Plato, Mozart, or the pre-Raphaelites.

  Bandmaster Merle Evans remembered a distinct change that came over Alfredo:

  “We’d be drinking coffee, discussing the weather maybe, and then, just like that, Alfredo would dig into his school bag and pull out a book he borrowed from Leitzel on Greek theater or whatever. He’d be as excited as could be. He’d start telling me something he just had learned about the great Greek thinkers. He’d start talking about Homer. I’d asked myself, ‘Homer? Who the hell is Homer?’ I thought at first it must be one of the roustabouts who hand-fed fish to the trained seals.”

  Could Alfredo, with ongoing tutoring from her, begin to gain new social and conversational skills? Leitzel seemed to believe so. She seemed to start valuing Alfredo as something more than the circus’s prettiest male. While their joinings in the past had been carried out furtively—and, for Leitzel, perhaps, arranged mostly to satisfy certain urges—now they were open about their relationship. Just as Alfredo had always been present for all of Leitzel’s performances, she was now always in the big top every time he was flying. Leitzel confided to Fanny McCloskey that she had fallen more deeply in love with Alfredo than with anyone she had ever known.

  No one in the Ringling organization was more gleeful than the press agents at the signs that things had heated up between Alfredo and Leitzel. They were always looking for stories to keep the names of the circus’s big stars before the public. Now they had a lollapalooza—a romance between the show’s two biggest stars, its Mark Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet and Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. The agents were not going to let this one pass. They started leaking information to favored correspondents. Speculation about where the romance would lead began appearing in newspaper columns and Sunday supplements.

  One Chicago writer, carried utterly away, went to her typewriter and made this announcement to her world: “The marriage of these two comets in the galaxy of circus stardom would brighten Heaven. And it will—it must—take place. It is preordained.”

  But what about that other man in Leitzel’s life in recent years? While Colonel Howard’s visits to the show had been regular occurrences in earlier years, none of the troupers could remember seeing him on the circus lot in the first months of the 1928 season. Did Leitzel finally call things off? Or did Howard himself conclude that things could never work out, that his wife would never agree to being replaced in the Howards’ Dayton, Ohio, castle?

  Four months into the 1928 season, in the early morning hours of July 16, the Ringling cavalcade rolled into what many of the troupers regarded as the Promised Land. The circus raised its great tents for a nine-day stay in Chicago’s Grant Park on the shore of Lake Michigan. The Chicago stays were always the longest for the circus anywhere outside New York’s Madison Square Garden and, for many of the performers and workers, also the best. A lot of them spent their mornings and late nights dunking in Lake Michigan and picnicking on the shoreline. And because they were settled in one place for more than two or three days, some of them with nagging ailments or dental problems took advantage of the time to see physicians, chiropractors, and dentists. Always, too, when the circus was in Chicago, there were ballet girls and other performers who slipped from the lot after the evening shows to see doctors who were known to perform midnight abortions.

  The morning of July 21, a Saturday, dawned like those of the circus’s first four days in Chicago: burnished and bright, golden and blue, sweet and good. A select group of performers that included most of the center ring stars woke up that day knowing it was going to be special.

  Appearing in the big top as usual that afternoon were Leitzel and The Flying Codonas, as well as all the other performers. Instantly as the players finished their turns and took their bows, they scurried to their dressing tents. Finally, Hugo Zacchini, new to the circus that season and a big sensation, was blasted out of a cannon and soared the full length of the tent into a net. The matinee was over.

  A rank of taxis was parked near the doors of the dressing tents. As the performers exited the tents, the women in their best dresses, the men in Sunday suits, they galloped to the cabs and were sped from the lot. The destination of everyone was the same, a Presbyterian church minutes from the lot.

  A few people were already in the church when the first troupers arrived, among them the minister, the Reverend Harold Dozall. Also there was Leitzel’s brother, Alfred Pelikan, along with his wife, Melba. After graduating from King’s College in London and then receiving an advanced degree in art education at Columbia University in New York, Pelikan had settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1925, where he held positions of distinction as both the director of the Milwaukee Art Institute and superintendent of art education for the city’s public school system.

  Alfred’s eyes started tearing at the sight of one of the troupers who entered the church. He left his pew to embrace the man. It was Bluch Landolf, a famous clown best known for walking around the arena with a long wooden plank on his head with baskets of tomatoes balanced on both ends. Every fifty feet or so, with the plank never changing position, Bluch would do an abrupt about-face and start walking in the opposite direction.

  Bluch, christened Adolph Pelikan and about fifty, was in his first season with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, although, for decades earlier, he had been a popu
lar auguste and trick bicycle rider in European circuses and on the vaudeville stages in America.

  “I hadn’t seen Uncle Adolph since I was nine or ten, and living with my mother and Edward Leamy in London,” Pelikan said. “I blubbered like a baby, and my uncle did, too. How the world had changed in those twenty-five years since I had seen him last.”

  Everyone drifting into the church was there to attend a wedding, the wedding of Leitzel and Alfredo.

  Alfredo was already in the church, but when the hour for the ceremony arrived, the bride had not yet appeared.

  As was her custom whenever the circus was playing in the bigger cities, Leitzel, to get a change of scenery, had taken a room in a hotel, the Embassy in downtown Chicago. Alfredo, sensing the restlessness of the wedding guests and nervous himself, made a phone call to her hotel room. There was no answer. Had she concluded it had been a mistake for her to accept his proposal?

  Another hour went by. The bride’s whereabouts were still unknown.

  Alfredo was now on the phone to Leitzel’s room every few minutes, and still she was not answering. Some of the guests, other performers, started leaving the church, apologizing to Alfredo and explaining to him that they had to get ready for the evening show.

  In 1918, at the famous Merriman’s Gymnasium in Philadelphia before an audience, Leitzel did twenty-seven chin-ups with her right arm and then seventeen with her left. Some years later, before a full house at Madison Square Garden, she executed 249 of her torturous one-arm planges. Both feats were entered in the books as records for a woman.

  The Guinness Book of World Records seems not to be of any help in the matter, but it may be that Leitzel chose her wedding day to establish yet another mark—this one for the longest time a bride kept a groom waiting at the altar.