Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  Leitzel poses for the camera on a circus back lot, standing on the hood of a Packard automobile. Several circus tents can be seen in the background. (Author’s collection)

  Alfredo Codona sitting on a trapeze. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)

  Leitzel performing in an open-air arena, swinging one-armed from a rope. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)

  The Flying Codonas, mistakenly renamed “The 3 Codonas” in this poster from the early 1930s, often traveled to Europe at the conclusion of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’s annual summer touring seasons. There, they appeared in such major venues as the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, the Wintergarten in Berlin, and the Circus Schumann in Denmark and Germany, which toured widely on the Continent. (Courtesy of the Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)

  Alfredo Codona and Vera Bruce stand on a suspended platform, ready for a performance under the big top. (Author’s collection)

  Alfredo Codona and J. A. Westmoreland of the Circus Fans of America stand before the flower-adorned monument Reunion, in Inglewood Cemetery, Inglewood, California. Alfredo commissioned an Italian sculptor to create the stone memorial after Leitzel plunged to her death while performing in Copenhagen in 1931. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)

  CHAPTER 22

  The apartment was just one room, small, almost claustrophobic. For Leitzel, who had just come in from the cold of Berlin’s streets and climbed the flights of stairs to the sanctum, it must have seemed almost airless. And, like most everyone else who stepped into the dimly lit space for the first time, she may have been momentarily startled.

  There were small, handmade dolls everywhere, dozens of them. They were arrayed side by side atop a dresser, ten or fifteen of them. Others of the tiny figures were crowded together in sitting positions on the room’s two or three chairs. They were spread everywhere on the bed that dominated the space, and overhead, suspended on strings from the ceiling and dangling by their arms from tiny trapezes and ropes, there were more. All the little people were female, and all of them were in costume, leotards, and short skirts of white and apple-blossom pink.

  Leitzel had a similar collection of dolls, although not one nearly so large. They had kept arriving at her New York apartment for years. Always they were delivered in cardboard boxes plastered with orange and purple and green and blue postage stamps from France and Germany and Belgium and Spain. And, almost always, they were brought to her door a few days before her birthday, Christmas, or Valentine’s Day.

  The room’s walls were also covered with framed photographs. Many were pictures of the apartment’s sole occupant, overprinted with the lettering MADAME ZOE, THE AERIAL VENUS. They showed her just feet below the high domes of circus halls. She was posed on crescent moons of wood, or hanging by her teeth from the grip of a parasol. There were other photographs, pictures of Leitzel, also in costume, and dangling from a single trapeze or pinwheeling on her rings.

  Nellie Pelikan, still unmarried and alone, was now retired to her memories and scrapbooks thickly pasted with brittle newspaper clippings celebrating her years as the star of the Leamy Ladies and later as Zoe. She was at a stage of life when some referred to her as die alte Jungfer, “the old maid.” At fifty-two, though, she was still a woman to whom men tipped their hats when they passed her on the street. Her waistline still appeared to be only about half the circumference of her shoulders, and gray had not yet crept into the tower of chestnut-colored hair atop her head.

  Now and then, in some of her earlier trips to perform in Europe, Leitzel had had brief reunions with Nellie, and on these occasions, she presented her with gifts such as hats and colognes, bought from the finest milliners and perfumeries. This time, Leitzel brought her only her pain.

  Leitzel had always revered Nellie as a creature out of a fable, so eternally childlike, so lovely, so empowered with so much magic that a handsome prince might have picked her as his bride from a crowd of thousands. From the time Leitzel was a girl, she had tried imitating her. Her feelings for her were never those of a child for a mother. Those were reserved for Grandma Julia, who not only suckled her, but also cared for her throughout her infancy and childhood when Nellie was almost always countries away, traveling with circuses.

  From the moment Leitzel entered the apartment that day, Nellie must have sensed she was weighted with sorrow. She led her to the bed, made her sit, and wrapped her in her arms. It was a moment of intimacy between the two that neither had ever known. Leitzel started shuddering, and then began quaking so hard that Nellie could barely hold her.

  “I never before had a chance to have her so much to myself,” Nellie said.

  Through her sobs, Leitzel told her that Alfredo had fallen in love with Vera Bruce, a woman far younger than her, far prettier. She hardly knew how she could go on another day.

  Nellie tried drawing her even closer.

  There, there, Nellie said. There, there.

  There was nothing Nellie could do to make Leitzel’s pain go away. She could only hold her, cry with her, assure her that from then on, she would always be there for her, telling her she wanted all bygones to be bygone, and asking if they could be mother and daughter.

  “She loved Alfredo perhaps too much.…” Nellie would later say in remembering their embrace.

  Throughout Leitzel’s stay, mother and daughter slept in the same bed, waking up mornings to the sight of the tiny circus figures floating above them like wingless angels. Nellie did not want their time together ever to end. She remembered these days as the most precious of her life. She felt almost happy that Mabel Clemings, Leitzel’s maid and constant companion, had taken sick and had not been able to accompany her.

  “It was a bad wish,” she said, “but I wished Mabel would stay away longer so I could stay with my dear Leitzel [alone]. She told me so many things—all her troubles.”

  The two often left the apartment on strolls and visits to cafés and theaters. Nellie loved showing off Leitzel.

  “Do you know who this woman is?” she would ask neighbors, waiters, and shopkeepers. “This is Lillian Leitzel, the center ring star of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey in America, the biggest circus in the world, The Greatest Show on Earth. She’s my daughter.”

  After being together four or five weeks, a day came when Nellie and Leitzel had to part again. Mabel Clemings turned up at the door of Nellie’s apartment a week or so into February 1931. It was time for Leitzel to go. She had been engaged to appear in Copenhagen, at the Valencia Music Hall. Frank McCloskey, Leitzel’s property manager, would be joining the two there in a few days, Mabel said.

  Nellie and Leitzel embraced for a long time before separating, and each was crying. The bygones, all of them, were bygone now, and they were closer than they had ever been. They were mother and daughter.

  It was not until Mabel and Leitzel were on the train, traveling to Denmark, that Mabel presented her with a letter that Alfredo had asked her to deliver.

  Leitzel whimpered as she read the letter. She had to keep blotting her tears with a handkerchief as she read it over and over.

  He said he had been miserable since the day she left him in Paris to see Nellie. He said he never again wanted to be away from her for so long. He begged for her forgiveness. He said he knew he had been cruel to her. He loved only her, he assured. She was the only woman he ever loved. Vera meant nothing at all to him. She never really did. He told Leitzel that he sometimes flirted with Vera because he wanted her to feel jealous but now knew this was wrong. He could not wait until they were together again. He would try to make up for everything.

  Did Alfredo really mean that she was the only woman he had ever loved? Leitzel may have wondered. Or had Vera finally made it clear to Alfredo that there could never be anything more between the two than a working partnership in the flying act? Of course Alfredo was speaking from his heart in his letter to her, Leitzel concluded. He meant every word of it. In all of time, there were never two other lovers who were m
ore destined to be together forever. They were the circus’s queen and king.

  After receiving the letter, Leitzel’s spirits soared like a stringless kite. Her mood was still bright when she and Mabel checked into a suite at the Grand Hotel Copenhagen that provided a view of the city, including the famous Tivoli Gardens. It was in that suite a few days after arriving in Copenhagen that she sat down for an interview with Erna Milde, editor of the women’s pages for the daily Ekstra-Bladet.

  Leitzel told Milde she had been overcome with nostalgia from the moment she arrived in the city. She had been there once before, perhaps twenty-five years earlier, when, along with her mother and her aunts, Tina and Toni, she performed there with the Leamy Ladies.

  “I still remember the Tivoli Gardens and the beautiful tulips, and I have a vague memory of a marvelous ride along the coast,” she said. “I am just waiting for a similar sunshiny day to repeat the trip. A repeated trip will most likely wake up a lot of memories almost forgotten.”

  Milde joked with Leitzel about her reputation for expensive “hobby horses.” The reporter asked if she still had such indulgences.

  “Well, for a while it was diamonds,” Leitzel said. “I was obsessed … and searched everywhere for large, precious stones and simply had to own them.… Now I couldn’t be bothered to even look at a diamond. Then came my manias for fur coats and cars. The last craze reached its climax when I had a specially built, black and platinum Packard which I brought to Paris two years ago.… You can hardly think of something more difficult than to get this car and a driver into France. The … government is still holding five thousand of my dollars for this joke.… It’s doubtful I’ll ever get the money back.”

  “What are you interested in at the moment?”

  Leitzel beamed at the question.

  “Only my husband.… To see his act is the most exciting and wonderful thing in the whole world.”

  “Are you ever nervous?”

  “I can wake up in the middle of the night scared to death.… But during the act, it comes naturally. I’ll continue my act two or three years, then stop.…”

  “And then what?”

  “A wonderful house in California.… My husband has his family there, and both of us have good friends [there]. Harold Lloyd happens to be one of [our] best Hollywood friends. He’s the nicest fellow.… In Hollywood, a lot of people are getting megalomania, but Harold … has always kept his balance, although he’s one of the wealthiest men in Movie City.”

  The Valencia was located in Copenhagen’s Vesterbrogade section near the gateway to Tivoli Gardens. The music hall regularly featured world-famous entertainers, but it was almost equally renowned for the high-class prostitutes that trolled its bars and the tables surrounding its first-floor ballroom.

  The hall’s interior had the appearance of having been decorated by the same designer who conceived the look of Marie Antoinette’s apartment in the Palace at Versailles. The walls were covered with Gobelin tapestries with gold and silver threads that glinted in the sconce lighting, and hanging over the center of the ballroom was a massive chandelier with hundreds of pieces of crystal.

  What was most remarkable of all, though, were the Valencia’s gilt-framed mirrors. They seemed to be everywhere on the ballroom’s walls, so if a dandy placed a hand on his escort’s thigh, his action could be seeable to almost everyone in the house, reflected in the looking glasses. Not since the years in the 1910s when Leitzel appeared in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic in the rooftop garden theater atop New York’s Amsterdam Theatre had she been booked into a hall quite so glossy.

  Leitzel was always jittery before performing in halls in which she did not have a lot of familiarity, but her engagement at the Valencia made her even more jumpy than usual. She wanted the audiences to see her at the top of her form. She worried that the weeks-long layoff from performing while staying with her mother could have taken some of the sharpness from her act.

  There was something else that troubled her. She did not discuss it with the Valencia’s management, but over and over she talked about it with Frank and Mabel. She was a bit anguished by where in the Valencia’s lineup of entertainment her act was listed. She was also feeling some uneasiness about the date and day of the week for her premiere in the Valencia. Finally, she decided she was only being silly in her concerns over these matters, and, besides, her premiere appearance had already been advertised in all the Copenhagen papers

  Leitzel stood behind a curtain at the entranceway to the hall’s floor, peering out through a slit at the crowd in evening dress. The braided scents of Cuban cigar smoke and expensive perfume were so thick that the air inside the Valencia seemed almost chewable.

  On the floor, The Stroganoffs, Russian dancers, were in the final moments of their performance. Up until now, all the entertainers in the night’s show had been dancers—tangoists, fox trotters, adagioists, even one or two strippers. The audience seemed to be growing a little restive, perhaps bored by the sameness of the fare. The applause was tepid when The Stroganoffs took their bows.

  Speaking in Danish, the konferencier, Julius Reger, announced the next act, the evening’s headliner. Leitzel picked out only some of the words:

  “America … Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey … Mademoiselle Lillian Leitzel.…”

  When she parted the curtains and appeared on the floor, the applause swelled to a storm. Almost always Leitzel appeared in white or pink for her performances, but this night was different. Days earlier, while shopping in Copenhagen, she fell in love with a tutu of crème de menthe green. She was wearing it when she appeared before the crowd, with Mabel, as always, eight or ten feet behind her and holding up her train of tulle.

  Near the center of the floor, Leitzel curtsied to all sections of the house and slipped from her mules. Next, with McCloskey tugging at her web to keep it taut, she began her ascent. Because she needed to get well beyond the hall’s chandelier so the great lamp would not block the audience’s sight lines, her upward journey was about twice the distance she usually ascended in American theaters.

  She was now a month and a half beyond her fortieth birthday, but she was still as graceful as she had been twenty-five years earlier. She ascended her web weightlessly, almost floated upward, with her body and legs remaining perpendicular to the cord. As impossible as her manner of levitation may have appeared to the audience, the exercise seemed to take nothing from her. Finally she was almost four stories in the air and then transferred from the web, reaching off for her trapeze bar.

  Without a moment’s pause, she started her routine, standing on the bar, and, with her legs pumping it, driving it out into space. In seconds, she was flying in an ever-higher arc. Two hundred degrees. Two hundred and twenty degrees. Two hundred and fifty degrees …

  She sank into a crouch on the furiously swinging bar. In another instant, she was hanging upside down, her legs folded over the bar at her knees. Her golden hair started to become unbound, flying every which way. Her flight was reflected in the hall’s great mirrors and could be seen in almost whatever direction the spectators turned, as if it were being projected on a dozen movie screens.

  She pulled herself up and momentarily assumed a sitting position on the bar. Next, with the trapeze still moving in a great arc, she lay on the trapeze at the small of her back. Her arms and legs were turned outward, spread beyond the ropes.

  There was more.

  As the trapeze began to slow in its back-and-forth tracings of a half circle, Leitzel once again assumed an upside-down position, this time dangling from the bar with only the upper parts of her feet. She appeared to be as much at peace as a sleeping bat. There was a faint screaking in the air as the trapeze moved forward and backward, but otherwise the hall was without a sound.

  When she finished her performance on the trapeze, everyone in the balconies and at the tables on the ballroom floor was standing, applauding, and crying out bravas. The tumult was so great that the crystals on the chandelier tinkled reverberantly.r />
  Leitzel, now seated on the trapeze, pushed the hair from her face and buried it in her hands. She was chuckling to herself. She had never been able to quite believe that she, that anyone, could do the things she did in the air.

  Her time for basking in the crowd’s adoration was brief. She was only halfway through. She reached out for one of the silver hand rings at the ends of two white ropes tethered to the ceiling and transferred from her trapeze bar.

  How many of her wild, sensational, propellerlike full-body revolutions would she turn this night? Fifty? Eighty? Would she break one hundred? The matter always drew speculation among the crowds that turned out to see her. Some in the audiences even made wagers on the number she would achieve.

  Now, almost forty feet above the floor, she was hanging from the rope with her right hand alone. Few could watch the first moments of her exertions without grimacing. Over and over, she threw her short legs forward and then backward, building the momentum that would enable her to start her revolutions. She writhed. She resembled a great, hooked game fish, putting on the fight of its life, trying everything to avoid being boated and added to a stringer. Finally, with an audible groan, she threw her ninety-five-pound body over her arm.

  A snare drum in the orchestra was rolling in a paradiddle and snapped sharply at the first of her full revolutions. At the same time, a cry rose from the crowd.

  “En …!”

  Then, the drum resumed its roll.

  Coming a little easier this time, Leitzel completed a second revolution. The drum barked again, as it did for each of her full-circle turns, and spectators continued their count.

  “To …!”

  “Tre …!”

  Soon her turns were coming quickly and with less strain. A swivel attached to the hand ring clicked with each of the revolutions.