All the lights went out except for those illuminating the Wallendas’ silvery, strandlike highway near the rafters.
In a moment, one bicycle, and then another, slowly moved out onto the wire. Extending between the two cyclists, balanced on their shoulders, was a ten-foot-long pole, and standing atop the long, willowy shaft in slippered feet was Karl Wallenda. After the bicycles had traveled a quarter of the way over the cable, a seventeen-year-old girl, Helen Kreis, started walking gingerly out onto the wire. When she reached the other members of the troupe, Karl lifted her to the pole on which he was standing, and then to his shoulders, where she assumed a standing position. The Wallendas, now three bodies high, resumed the journey, moving slowly, ever so slowly.
Pandemonium exploded in the seats when the four finally came to a stop on a platform at the far end of the wire. There was shrieking, screaming, shrill whistling, the stomping of thousands of feet. There was also wailing by some spectators that verged on the hysterical. They must have been convinced that they had just witnessed a moment of spiritual transcendence, a miracle when some great power intervened and saved the four from death.
One after the other, the cyclists Joe Geiger and Herman Wallenda, Helen, and finally Karl descended their rope ladder to the floor. Over and over, they were pummeled by blows of noise that were more deafening and terrifying than any they had ever experienced at the conclusion of any of their performances.
The Great Wallendas bowed disconsolately. Then, with their heads down, they quickly exited the floor.
Karl slumped into a chair inside the troupe’s dressing room. The words Alfredo Codona screamed at him a few days earlier came back, and now they stung more than ever: Do you know what we do with acts like yours in America? We feed them to the pigs.
The din that the Wallendas had set off was continuing unabatedly. It rattled the locked door.
In Europe, such unrestrained outbursts were received by the performers as derision from the audience, the equivalent in the United States of boxers in a fixed fight being peppered with rotten fruit.
Karl was still looking fretful.
“Well, we really stunk up the place tonight, didn’t we?” he said to the other members of the troupe.
Minutes went by, and there was pounding at the door. It was Fred Bradna. The ringmaster’s face was ashen.
He ordered the four to return immediately to the floor. He explained that the audience was not going to permit the circus to continue unless they reappeared to resume their bowing. He escorted the four to the center ring, and at least another five minutes went by before the crowd ended its cheering. Tears of joy ran down the cheeks of each of the Wallendas.
“I shall never forget their debut,” Bradna said. “They made the biggest hit of any death-defying feat ever displayed.… In forty-two years [as ringmaster], I never heard another ovation of half the decibels.”
Billboard summed up the Wallendas’ inaugural American performance this way: “Easily the best act the circus ever had, and the most daring.”
Just as Alfredo had warned the Wallendas, a great feeding did take place following their first performance in Madison Square Garden. The feeding, though, did not involve any sows and hogs, but rather Alfredo himself. He found himself eating all those bilious words he had spat out to the Wallendas a few days earlier.
Leitzel’s love for Alfredo continued to intensify after their marriage.
“She never really seemed to have left the honeymoon stage even after she and Alfredo had been married for some time,” said Fanny McCloskey. “She was happier than I had ever seen her before. She said she would rather be in Alfredo’s arms than anywhere in the world.”
More and more, she declined the invitations that continued to come her way from partisans from the outside world who wanted to see her, but she seemed unable to wean herself entirely away from them. As infrequent as they had become, her after-show alliances remained a matter of soreness with Alfredo, especially since, during this same period, Leitzel was insisting that he rid himself of a woman who still remained in his life.
That woman was his ex-wife, Clara Curtain Codona. She had continued as a member of The Flying Codonas even after she and Alfredo had divorced the previous year. Alfredo had no interest in reestablishing a romantic relationship with Clara, but he still valued her as being almost indispensable to his flying troupe. Because she had been with the act for a dozen years, she could gauge the timing of each of the troupe’s stunts to split seconds.
Leitzel, though, not only persisted in her demand that Alfredo eliminate Clara from the troupe once and for all, but she also insisted on having final say in the selection of her successor. After considering the personalities and big top talents of all the young women touring with the show, Leitzel settled on an Australian-born showgirl, Vera Bruce, as Clara’s replacement.
Bruce, twenty, was tall and thin, but also statuesque. She wore her brown hair in a modish bob with finger waves. She would be striking on the trapeze perch, Leitzel assured Alfredo.
Bruce had been touring with the circus for three or four years. Her principal assignment with the circus was that of a bareback rider. She was lovely to look at, but she was never a performer who distinguished herself with the razzle-dazzle of many others in the equestrian displays, among them her brother, Clary Bruce. Vera also appeared as an extra in several of the circus’s other displays. She was one of a dozen or so women and men who struck different poses in the Living Statues, and also appeared in the aerial ballets, showy fillers in which the show’s shapeliest chorines performed on webs that were strung from the rafters.
It is unlikely Leitzel pushed for Vera as Clara’s replacement because she was unusually impressed with her performing talents. Rather, she may have felt some empathy for Vera because, like her, she was orphaned as a child. Immediately after her birth, her father, a circus bandmaster, and her mother, a trapeze artist, placed her in the care of Catholic nuns in an Australian convent. Vera remained there until she was sixteen. In the mid-1920s, she traveled to the United States with her mother, Annie, and Clary to join the Rieffenach family riding troupe.
Vera was unlike the show’s other single younger women. Most of the others had but one thing on their minds, and for many of them, that involved someone who wore the snuggest white tights to work every day. Vera was chaperoned everywhere by her mother, then widowed and retired from the big top. She was also serious in manner, a loner, and had few friends on the show.
Alfredo was resentful that Leitzel would even presume to suggest that he fire Clara and replace her with someone she, not he, had recruited. He was the originator of the troupe and believed he had always done just fine managing it.
Annie Bruce, along with Vera and Clary, shared quarters on the train near those of Leitzel and Alfredo. Annie said she often heard blowups between the two over Leitzel’s insistence that he hire her daughter. The disturbances did not involve only shouting, Annie said, but also the exploding of teacups and dishes hitting the walls. “Sometimes Leitzel’s temper got the better of her,” Annie explained. “Objects flew from her hands to Alfredo’s head.”
As was true of almost every battle the couple ever fought, though, Leitzel emerged triumphant in this one. Alfredo, beaten down, finally surrendered to her. Vera was on her way to becoming a member of the greatest flying trapeze act of all time. He agreed to take her in as an apprentice. Clara was on her way out.
The good feeling that Leitzel had over her victory would not last. In time she would come to view her sponsorship of the young, pretty Australian as the most ruinous move of her life. It would take somewhat longer for Alfredo, but ultimately he, too, would come to rue the day he had agreed to try transforming an unknown, barely noticed extra into a big top star, a Flying Codona.
CHAPTER 20
Patches of gray and rust-colored snow still littered the streets, but finally after a harsh winter, signs of spring were starting to appear in New York City. Central Park was greening and birds were featheri
ng nests in the trees lining the streets. The windowsills outside the tenements were crowded with clay pots from which scallions, daisies, and daffodils were beginning to push up.
It was 1929, early March. As was true every year at this time in New York, the sides of auto shops, stores, and fences blazed with luridly colored, newly broomed-up posters. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was returning.
The paper murals, some of them twenty, thirty feet wide, twelve, sixteen feet high, transformed the city into an outdoor museum. There were pictures everywhere with the most improbable sights—a human missile, Hugo Zacchini, shot from the smoking barrel of a giant cannon and soaring two hundred feet through space; a sea lion that the poster artists suggested was greater in size than Tyrannosaurus rex; the white faces of one hundred laughing, leering, weeping, and lusting clowns.
Of all pictorials, the most ubiquitous of them advertised the circus’s biggest star of the last fifteen years. THE DAINTY MISS LEITZEL, THE WORLD’S MOST MARVELOUS GYMNAST. She looked a bit coquettish on the posters. She wore an expression that could be read as come-hither. She was wearing high heels, the briefest of bloomers, and ankle socks.
The circus was due to play the New York Coliseum in the Bronx from March 21 through March 30, and then move to Madison Square Garden in Manhattan on April 1 for a three-week stay. But New Yorkers who were set on seeing Leitzel this year would have to settle for only her likeness on the posters.
The news had not been made public, but there was grave concern among John Ringling and the show’s other executives about whether Leitzel would ever appear in a circus ring again. There was even concern about whether she was going to live, and, if so, whether it would be with both her arms.
Leitzel was weak from double pneumonia, an ailment she contracted abroad while she and The Flying Codonas were performing in Paris and London late in 1928. But double pneumonia may not have been the worst of her troubles. After years of being gnawed at by her ropes, her right arm was now dangerously diseased. She had phlebitis, an infection of the vessels in her arm.
She had been hospitalized for a short time, but then released with orders that she suspend all physical activity and spend all her time in bed. Physicians warned her that if the blood clots inside the arm vessels broke away and traveled to her lungs, the effect would likely be fatal. Her days as a performer were over, they said. Mabel Clemings, Leitzel’s devoted maid, housekeeper, secretary, and confidante, now assumed an additional role, that of a nurse. She saw to it that Leitzel regularly took her prescribed medications. She applied compresses to Leitzel’s arm day and night.
It surprised the medical specialists, but after suspending performing for months and withdrawing the daily feedings she gave to her ropes, her cankered arm started to show improvement. Still, doctors advised her against resuming her performances or the infection would return.
Leitzel likely smiled wryly at the warnings. What she had not told the physicians was that she had already begun preparing for a comeback. Late each night in the Coliseum, and then in the Garden, after the audiences had gone home, she worked at slamming her muscles back into shape, “twisting, turning, bending nearly one hundred feet in the air on her rope.”
She could never give up performing. It was what she breathed for.
One doctor with whom she consulted during this time suggested that if she absolutely refused to retire from the spotlight, maybe she could alter her act in a way that would not return her right arm to a running sore. He asked if she could perform her planges with her left arm.
“Easily,” she said.
The doctor appeared relieved.
“Then it seems to me the matter is solved.”
Leitzel shook her head. She would perform her act with her right arm as always, she said.
“All right.” The doctor sighed. “The slightest increase in the infection will cause blood poisoning. You know what that means? Amputation.… Don’t you understand?”
Leitzel studied her left arm appraisingly, and then moved it closer to the doctor’s gaze.
“I understand,” she answered, “but you don’t. My right arm is scarred. I’ve become accustomed to seeing the burns on it. But my left arm is still pretty. After all, doctor, I am a woman.”
Because she had to recover not only from pneumonia but also from her infected arm, Leitzel was unable to appear at any of the six weeks of shows the circus presented in New York at the start of the 1929 season, but she was able to rejoin the show on April 25 for the first of its six days of performances in Boston.
Because he had always viewed the demands that she made on the circus to be extortionate, Mister John had never been one of her greatest fans. At the same time, though, he recognized that her name resonated with the public as widely as those of such other contemporary idols as Babe Ruth, Valentino, and Clara Bow. He was aware, too, that he could thank Leitzel, more than any other single attraction, for all the Cranach, Tiepolo, Rubens, and Gainsborough masterpieces he had in his art collection, along with one or two of the twenty-one galleries that had been constructed in his massive new John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art on his property in Sarasota, Florida. She generated far more money for the circus than any other performer in its history.
Leitzel was disbelieving at first. Then she started stewing.
How could Mister John do this to her? She made up her mind that somehow she was going to make him rue his decision. She would show him once and for all.
While the circus had been playing Boston, she had learned that he had reduced her weekly pay from $1,200 to $1,100.
Even with the cut, her pay was still well more than double that of any other single star with the show. It was also far more than the per capita income for working-class families at the time, which was $750 a year. Certainly the reduction would not necessitate any scrimping on her part, but, again and again, she kept asking herself how Mister John could have done this to her. Since joining the circus, there had never been a year when she had not gotten a sizable raise.
Did he now see her as a star whose light was beginning to fade? Did he not see how she was received in Boston? A standing ovation when she appeared before the audience the first night of her comeback. An even longer standing ovation after she completed her performance and took her bows.
John’s decision to cut Leitzel’s pay likely had nothing to do with a feeling that her star was losing some of its glimmer. He was beginning to worry. For the first time ever during the 1920s, the circus’s business had been down in New York, and there were other indicators that the nation was heading for an economic downturn. In almost every sector of the economy, manufacturers were reporting that their inventories were up and that consumer spending was decreasing. They were starting to lay off employees.
Leitzel was not the only one in the show having her salary pared. Everyone started getting smaller pay envelopes, including Alfredo Codona, whose weekly earnings dropped from $500 to $400.
Still, Leitzel took it all personally. She continued to brood over the cut. She saw it as a sign that Mister John was devaluing her importance as the show’s star attraction and leading ambassador with the press.
Lewis Perez and James Evans had just been welcomed into Leitzel and Alfredo’s apartment on the train. Both appeared to be bedazzled. Their gazes bounced off the furnishings in the long, narrow quarters—the grand piano, the Atwater Kent radio, the RCA Victrola phonograph, and the silver services and china cups that a uniformed maid had just placed on a table before them. The two might have been having the same thought: so this is how stars, really big circus stars, live and travel.
Lewis Perez and James Evans, both thirty-three, were performers. They were perch pole artists and jugglers, and had been a team for thirteen years. Mostly their appearances had always been made at small-time venues—county fairs, firemen picnics, and on high school football fields. But the two were now about to present the most important performance of their lives, and they would have an audience of just two—th
ree, if maid Mabel could be counted.
Perez and Evans sought out Alfredo and Leitzel because they had a proposition, a proposition that they were confident was wired and cinched, can’t-miss, and absolutely surefire. They wanted to partner with them in the creation of a new circus, a railroad circus.
They addressed Alfredo and Leitzel deferentially, but also with earnestness. They were frank in stating they themselves would not have a lot of money to invest in the venture. As entertainers who tramped the small-time, they had never been able to salt away much money. As small as their savings were, though, they were willing to bet everything they had on the show. They were also willing to assume whatever roles Alfredo and Leitzel might see for them in the circus. They had no doubt that the show would be a major success. How could it be otherwise? It would be headlined by Lillian Leitzel and The Flying Codonas, the two greatest big top attractions in the world.
Perez and Evans probably could have ended their pitch right then and there.
Alfredo’s expression had changed to one of rapture. He saw the picture the two men had painted. The circus would include a sleek train and big top. In gold letters so big they could be read a block away, both the train and the tent would be emblazoned with the title THE GREAT CODONA CIRCUS.
Like her husband, Leitzel, too, appeared to have been transported to another place. She had not stopped chafing since that day in Boston a couple months earlier when she learned Mister John had cut her pay. She had vowed then that she would get even with him somehow. The two guests in their train quarters were now showing her the way. She and Alfredo would operate their own circus. They would make all the decisions concerning its operations. Best of all, they would no longer have to content themselves with whatever Mister John chose to dribble out to them.
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