Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  When Alfredo regained consciousness, he felt the same pain in his back that he had suffered eight or nine months before, after the accident at the Garden. The ligaments had again snapped from his shoulder muscles. This time there were also broken bones. Alfredo must have known it even as he lay on the floor. This time it was over, his flying days were really over. Mercifully, Papa Edward was not a witness to the final disintegration of his creation. The Codona patriarch died a few months earlier, age eighty-one.

  And what about Vera? Were her days as a flyer with The Flying Codonas over now, too? And what about her assignments on movie sets, doubling for some of Hollywood’s brightest stars? Were they gone as well? The questions may have started troubling her from the moment she saw her husband on the ground in the practice barn, writhing and moaning in agony. As distant as her feelings for Alfredo may have been, she understood that the glamorous life she had been enjoying was a trapping of being married to the circus’s greatest male star.

  As they had been for decades, The Flying Codonas were back with a circus in the spring of 1935, but this time it was not with The Greatest Show on Earth, and this time it was not Alfredo that the crowds saw somersaulting in the big top’s empyrean. He was now being held together with tape and an upper body brace.

  Alfredo chose his own replacement for the act. Twenty-one-year-old Clayton Behee was a capable leaper, even a good one, but not one with Alfredo’s dovelike gift for flying.

  Mister John had relegated the reconstituted The Flying Codonas to the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, one of his smaller properties. Even there, the act was denied star billing. The new Codonas were given air space at a far end of the tent. Appearing over center ring were The Behrs, a group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who earlier had performed with a Boy Scout circus.

  Probably as much out of pity for the broken Alfredo as for any other reason, Mister John included Alfredo on his payroll. He hired him as the Hagenbeck-Wallace equestrian director, a top position, one giving him primary responsibility for the look and pacing of the tent productions. But Alfredo was miserable in the role. He was not a manager. He had been a performer since he was a child. His heart ached every time he looked to the big top’s ceiling and saw another flyer carrying out his work on the trapeze. His unhappiness must have been evident to the front office. When the Hagenbeck-Wallace season finished, his contract was not renewed.

  Alfredo was bitter. He had worked for the Ringling brothers since he had been in his teens and now Mister John could not find a place for him anywhere in his empire.

  He prevailed on a longtime friend, Tom Mix. The “King of the Cowboys,” then fifty-six, had gotten into the big top business in 1933, buying a $400,000 stake in an existing show, the Sam B. Dill Circus, which was renamed the Sam B. Dill Circus and Tom Mix Wild West Show. After a single season, Mix bought the enterprise kit and caboodle. The renamed Tom Mix Circus did not travel by train but in a large caravan of red, white, and blue trucks and buses. Because of Mix’s popularity with cinema audiences as America’s number one western star, the circus was greeted with turn-away crowds almost everywhere.

  Mix put Alfredo on the payroll as assistant equestrian director. His circus already had a strong flying act, though, The Flying Arbaughs, he reminded Alfredo. He said there just would not be a place in the show or its budget for the remade Flying Codonas. Alfredo’s expression turned saturnine at hearing Mix’s decision in the matter. He nodded that he understood why the circus could not use a second flying act but then pleaded with his new employer to give Vera work as an additional member of The Flying Arbaughs. Mix, probably again acting out of charity, agreed to Alfredo’s request. Vera’s placement in the Arbaughs troupe was largely ornamental.

  Because maintaining high morale among the performers was critical to the success of any circus, it was an important function of equestrian directors that they regularly assume priestly roles. Their duties might involve refereeing disputes between two feuding clowns one day and, on the next, getting the okay from the front office to advance train fare to a performer with a mother on a deathbed in Keokuk, Iowa. There were complaints from the troupers that Alfredo was ineffective in this part of his job. Because he was so consumed with self-pity over his own wrecked career as a performer, he found it difficult to be consolatory to others’ troubles. The Mix Circus presented its last performance of the season on November 5, 1936, in Anniston, Alabama. Mix wished Alfredo luck and shook his hand. He did not say “I want you back next spring when the show moves out again.”

  Alfredo had never known any world other than the circus. He had been born into it, traveling at first with the forever starved-out Gran Circo Codona with which his father and mother toured Mexico, and eventually rising to the highest place in its pantheon. Now, after giving more than forty years to the big top, after risking limb and life for it almost daily, there was no longer a place for him in it. All the glory and heart-in-the-stomach thrills that he had once been able to give to the audiences were used up. The circus, which is born anew every spring, retired him, cast him out, just as it did every year with once-radiant showgirls who, over time, gained just too many pounds or wrinkles.

  He and Vera hardly spoke after they left the Tom Mix Circus in Alabama and then started on the long train ride to Long Beach. He was being eaten inside by both anger and disgrace.

  Within a few weeks after resettling into the family home on Cherry Street, Alfredo, already starting to feel time long on his hands, took work in an auto garage in nearby Walteria. The garage, W. K. Adolph & Codona Co., was operated by Billy Adolph, a former professional race car driver and husband of his sister, Victoria, now long retired from the circus. Years earlier, in fact, Alfredo had put up the money to get Billy started in the garage, and thus the inclusion of Codona in the shop’s name. Now his brother-in-law would be signing his paychecks. The W. K. Adolph & Codona Co. specialized in servicing luxury cars and catered to many Hollywood stars, among them Al Jolson and Alfredo’s friend Harold Lloyd.

  Alfredo tried to convince Vera that the time had come to start a family. Long Beach was a good community. They could have a good life. Vera was thirty-three, not yet willing to trade the glamour and adventure of the circus for a life in a quiet neighborhood with crying babies and a crippled husband who was employed as a … a grease monkey.

  “Maybe in another year or two,” she said.

  Vera and Alfredo had only been back in Long Beach for a few months when she was offered an opportunity to return to circus life. Her brother, Clary, a trick rider, phoned her from the Ringling winter quarters in Sarasota, Florida, where he was putting together a new bareback riding act for the 1937 season. Vera had begun her circus career in Australia as a member of May Wirth’s famous riding act. There would be a place for her in the new act he was assembling, Clary assured her.

  Alfredo begged Vera not to leave. He would not be able to live without her, he said. She had to go, she answered. She could not disappoint Clary. He was her brother.

  As excited as Vera was at the prospect of rejoining the Ringling circus, there likely was a bigger reason why she felt she had to leave. Alfredo was sinking ever deeper into depression. There were days when he came home from the garage and never got out of his coveralls until bedtime. He smelled of axle grease. She found him weeping much of the time.

  Maybe even more disturbing to her was a shrine to Leitzel that Alfredo maintained in their bedroom. The copper urn, along with photographs of her, was on its linen-draped surface. Sometimes, when Vera was in another room, she heard Alfredo talking and even singing to the remains of Leitzel he kept.

  Alfredo begged and blubbered even as Vera packed her bags. When it was clear to him that her mind would not be changed, he drove her to the train station. She promised to write him every day, and phone at every opportunity. He kissed her. Then she was on the train, beginning the cross-country trip to Sarasota.

  After a few days, Alfredo received a first letter from Vera, and then, as she promised, her letters
and postcards started arriving every day. She talked about the Florida sunshine and inquired about the weather in Long Beach. She went on and on about how well Clary’s riding act was coming together, and how easily she had been able to regain her old skills at pirouetting and somersaulting on the backs of cantering horses. Always she told Alfredo she hoped he was doing fine but said nothing about missing him. She signed off all her letters the same way, not with “Love always, Vera,” but “Cheerio, Vera.”

  She phoned him, too. Alfredo cried throughout all the calls. He told her how miserable he was. He told her he was tormented with thoughts that she was going to fall in love with someone else. He would take his own life if that ever happened, he vowed.

  Then Vera’s letters and phone calls started to become spaced further apart, although his letters and attempts at phoning her continued uninterruptedly. Some days, she found three or four of them in her mailbox. Each was a plea for her to return to Long Beach.

  “Dear Wife Vera,” he wrote in one letter. “In front of your picture I have two beautiful roses, one white as snow which stands for your character, mind and beauty, and also your pure heart, the other, red, which stands for my love for you, and my fierce jealousy for all the things you are, and which are mine only.”

  In another letter, apparently penned moments after Alfredo had received a phone call from Vera, he wrote, “At seven twenty-five your sweet voice came across 3300 miles, and it made me so happy I almost cried.… After our little three minutes together, I lay down on the davenport, and, lonesome and blue, fell asleep thinking of you. Maybe something will happen over there to make you fed up with it, and you’ll come home to the one who loves you more with every breath he draws.”

  Despite Alfredo’s hopes, Vera did not become “fed up” with her ambition to resume her career as a big top performer. When the hundred-car Ringling train left the show’s Sarasota winter quarters late in March, on its way to New York to open the 1937 season, she was aboard, along with thirteen hundred other performers and workers.

  CHAPTER 25

  Alfredo’s foot was crunched to the floorboard for much of the three-thousand-mile trip. Even then, he worried that his brand-new, canary yellow, four-door Studebaker President sedan would not get him there fast enough. Maybe it was already too late for him to do anything about it, but he had to try. He drove for three or four days and nights, making stops long enough only for refueling, meals, and roadside catnaps. He kept pounding the Studebaker ahead, and over and over rehearsed in his head what he was going to do when he got there, what he was going to say. It was early in April 1937.

  At first, Alfredo was disbelieving. Before long, he was red-faced and screaming. He had just finished the cross-country trip from California to New York and was outside the performers’ door at Madison Square Garden. The security guards there had been given a photograph of Alfredo. They had been ordered not to admit anyone into the Garden who matched the man on their picture.

  Alfredo tried explaining. His wife was a performer with a bareback riding act in the Ringling circus. She was inside the building, along with other members of the circus, rehearsing for the show. It was important that he see her right then and there.

  Vera apparently had forewarned the circus’s management that her husband might try to get into the building and cause a disruption. Alfredo started yelling in anger at the security policemen, but they held him back. Their orders were orders, they explained.

  If the guards would not let him enter, could someone at least locate his wife on the Garden’s hippodrome floor and bring her to the door? The guards shook their heads again and this time closed the door on him. The circus’s biggest male star of just a few years earlier was now banned from even getting into the Garden. Alfredo was left to pace the sidewalk outside. His anger continued to rise.

  The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus of 1937 was a different enterprise from the one that Alfredo had been forced to retire from after his crippling fall four years earlier. The show’s general manager now was Samuel Gumpertz, the former operator of the Dreamland Circus and Side Show on Coney Island. John Ringling, the last of the great circus’s founding brothers, had died five months earlier. Although Mister John had managed to retain possession of his art collection and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, along with a palatial home there and another on Park Avenue in New York City, he had lost virtually everything else he owned in the Great Depression, including thousands of acres of undeveloped land throughout the United States, his short line railroads, and his once bulging portfolio of stocks and bonds. There was but $311 in his bank account at the time of his death at age seventy on the second day of December, 1936.

  Vera was with her brother, Clary, and other members of the bareback riding troupe when, some hours later, she exited the Garden. Alfredo rushed to her and began rebuking her for leaving him. Things had gone far enough, he told her. It was time to end all the games, he said. She was his wife and was traveling home with him.

  Vera had known for a long time that this day would have to come. She was grateful Clary was at her side when it did. Her eyes were filled with pity as she looked at Alfredo. He may have mistaken her expression as regret at having hurt him. He tried to embrace her. She shrank back.

  “Alfredo,” she said firmly, “I’m not happy with you. Honestly, I don’t even like you to put your hands on me. This can’t go on. The only thing to do is to get a divorce.”

  Alfredo’s threatening manner dissolved. He now looked contrite, as if he had just been punished.

  “I tried to make you love me,” he answered. It might take longer, but it could still happen, he said. He pleaded with her to give him more time.

  Vera started walking away from him, with Clary still at her side.

  “Good-bye, Alfredo,” she said.

  Alfredo resumed his letter writing to Vera even as he was returning on his long trip to Long Beach, posting his declarations of love for her from towns along the road. He continued to send her letters when he returned home. In one, he might accuse her of seeing other men and threaten to take her life and his own. In the next, sometimes posted the same day, he would beg Vera for her forgiveness, telling her he had threatened her only because he loved her so much and could not think clearly.

  Vera’s letters and phone calls to him had stopped altogether after the encounter outside Madison Square Garden.

  It was late in June before Alfredo heard anything more from Vera, and then the communication was carried out indirectly. He was served with papers from the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. Without his knowledge, Vera had taken a leave from the circus and returned to California to begin divorce proceedings.

  In her affidavit, Vera testified that “during the past year, the defendant has, without cause, become very jealous.… That on numerous occasions, the defendant has threatened to kill the plaintiff. That the defendant is possessed of a violent temper, and on many occasions has struck, slapped and abused plaintiff, and has subjected plaintiff to such a course of cruel and inhuman treatment, coupled with threats of violence, as to cause plaintiff to fear for her life and safety.” In petitioning the court to sever her bonds of matrimony with Alfredo, Vera requested that it order her husband to award her alimony of $200 a month, along with a lump sum payment of $3,500 to cover her attorney fees.

  The lawyer Alfredo hired to represent him in the lawsuit, Chris Wilson of Long Beach, warned him that his reputation could be forever sullied if Vera’s lawsuit proceeded to trial. Because he was still remembered everywhere in the world as one of the circus’s greatest artists ever, the attorney advised, the press would treat any courtroom proceeding in which he was involved as a cause célèbre. He told Alfredo further that if Vera testified in open court that there had been times when he had “struck, slapped and abused” her, and had threatened her life, he, the Great Codona, could be viewed by much of the public as a madman.

  Alfredo’s attorney, along with James E. Pawson, the lawyer that Vera retain
ed, arranged to meet before the first hearing that was scheduled in the case. During their meeting, the opposing attorneys codrafted a document that they planned to present in court and have Alfredo sign. It was spelled out in the document that Alfredo, of his own free will, was agreeing to all of the conditions, including the financial terms, that Vera requested in her petition for a divorce.

  The document was presented for review to the presiding judge, Joseph M. Maltby, in Los Angeles Superior Court on July 1, 1937. The judge approved the terms of the settlement, as they were detailed in the document drafted by the attorneys, but also ordered an addendum to the agreement: Alfredo was to be legally “restrained and enjoined from visiting, molesting, or in any manner whatsoever, disturbing the plaintiff.” Alfredo signed the amended document before Judge Maltby. The jurist then entered a decree for an interlocutory divorce, with the provision that neither Alfredo nor Vera could remarry before a year passed.

  Alfredo left the courthouse with the humiliated appearance of an aging but once world-class prizefighter who had just had much of his life pounded out of him by some palooka. How much more could he take? Now that he was crippled and used up as a performer, his wife was leaving him. Not only that: he was legally bound to continue supporting her.

  George Lait, an occasional screen actor, a publicist for United Artists films, and a correspondent for the International News Services, found Alfredo to be badly beaten down a couple of weeks later when the two met for lunch at a Hollywood restaurant. Because Lait was a man with connections, Alfredo asked if he could help him out.

  “He was a man living in the past,” Lait said. “He had … a leather folder containing notes, photographs, and newspaper clippings—in all, the story of his life and career. Could I advise him or assist him in arranging the publication of the story of his life? Surely everyone knew the Great Codona, the greatest aerialist who ever lived. Everyone would like to read his story. Or would they? Would they refuse his story because he was now a patchwork of broken bones?”