Finally, as her trapeze slowed in its momentum and then became motionless, Leitzel resumed a sitting position on the bar. Everyone rose from their seats. The house rattled with applause, cheering, whistling, and stomping feet. The crowd’s outburst might have been less a commendation for the amazing display than a collective hallelujah to the divine who spared the child from death.
Still seated comfortably on her bar, Leitzel wore an expression that seemed to tell the audience, “I appreciate your concern. I really do. But, honestly, there was no need to worry. I was just having fun.”
She reached into a slipper and fished out a wad of chewing gum that was about the size of a golf ball. She popped it into her mouth and started chewing. The crowd roared even louder. From her swing perch twenty feet away, La Belle Nellie fixed her daughter with an icy stare. She was likely the single censurer in the house. Minutes passed before the applause and cheering subsided.
Nellie was still in high dudgeon when, after taking her bows, she stormed from the hippodrome to the Leamy Ladies’ dressing room. She was immediately intent on giving Leitzel a dressing-down. She had not progressed far backstage when she found her daughter surrounded by a knot of Blackpool Circus officials, all of them praising her to the heavens and telling La Belle Nellie that she may have given the circus world its greatest child star ever.
Edward Leamy was beaming at the attention his protégée was receiving. He determined there and then that the turn Leitzel had presented in her public debut, right down to the end, when she stuffed her mouth with a choking wad of chewing gum, would be a fixture in all future performances of the Leamy Ladies.
CHAPTER 7
The truth about her mother did not come to Leitzel all at once. It fell on her like rain, a day after day, cold and stinging rain. It soaked into her being every day of the first weeks, and then months, that they lived and performed together.
La Belle Nellie was not more devoted to her children than anything else, as Grandmother Julia had always said. She was not selfless. Her mother, as Leitzel came to know her, was insecure and often petty, a woman-child who had been piteously manipulated by others all her life. Maybe because the only real love she had known was from the audiences that cheered her night after night, she resented anyone, even her own flesh and blood, challenging her primacy in the great halls and tents.
The Leamy Ladies played for weeks at the Blackpool Circus, and late at night, when Leitzel and Alfred were in their beds in the hotel room they shared, they sometimes heard Nellie sobbing to Professor Leamy in an adjoining room.
“Did you see her again tonight?” she cried. “Always the show-off. The big star. Always trying to take over the audience as though it were there for her alone.”
Her protests to Leamy were always desultory, regularly broken apart by blubbering.
“She makes me feel so bad. She wants to take away everything that is mine. My own daughter, and I put her in the act. She would like it just as well if I wasn’t even there. Maybe you would, too. You always seem to side with her. You have to talk to her. You have to put her in her place. You have to stop her from trying to take over the whole show.”
Leamy had dealt with prima donnas many times before. He had been managing women trapeze acts for more than a quarter century. He tried assuring Nellie that the audiences still saw her as the star of the Leamy Ladies and would always do so.
“You’re La Belle Nellie,” he would answer. “The people come to the show to see you.”
Leamy was always calm. He tried to show Nellie that he understood her concern, but he gave her no assurances that he would tell Leitzel to tone down her skylarking on the trapezone rotaire.
In her first weeks on the road as a member of the Leamy Ladies, Leitzel held out hope that there would eventually be a lifting of the fog of estrangement that prevented her and La Belle Nellie from seeing eye to eye. Nellie, after all, had been but twelve when she gave birth to her, and then, almost immediately, she was out of her life for most of the next dozen years. How could she be expected to feel, just like that, the same closeness to Leitzel that most mothers who raise their children from birth know?
As more time passed, though, Leitzel seemed to know she and Nellie would never fully bond as daughter and mother.
And Nellie likely knew it, too.
Just as Nellie no longer came close to matching Leitzel’s long-held, but now vanished, belief that she was a princess-mother who always had to be separated from her children because she belonged to everybody, Leitzel no longer conformed to Nellie’s old idea that her daughter was a child who had been irreparably broken by her abandonment of her. Leitzel had grown into a young woman with a strong will who was independent and self-sufficient. It hurt Nellie that Leitzel did not need her more. She seemed to have done well without her. She had learned to survive without her.
In the stratosphere of the Blackpool Tower, inhabiting the same air, Nellie and Leitzel may have felt that they were birds of the same feather, albeit creatures that competed for the crowds’ greatest servings of adulation. But on the ground, down from the trapezone rotaire, each felt completely severed from the other, as distanced from each other as always. Daughter and mother would forever be strangers.
Courtney Ryley Cooper, a circus press agent and noted author, made this observation about the impossibility of Leitzel and La Belle Nellie ever fully bridging the gulf between them: “The yearning that ever existed in the pair … lingered. There was mother love and there was child love … beating against a barrier of years of separation and a feeling of strangeness which their separation naturally engendered. Surmounting even this was discipline. [Nellie] was an acrobat in a ‘sister’ act, [Leitzel] herself a child apprentice.… In the ring, mother and daughter must be … subservient to the commands of the act.”
Following the engagement with the Blackpool Circus, the Leamy Ladies started on a tour of European cities that was to continue almost without interruption for years.
Leitzel never tired of traveling to one strange capital and then, after a few weeks or months, moving on to another. Each of her days was rich with adventure, and now, for the first time, she had a sense of belonging. Tina and Toni and La Belle Nellie seemed less like blood relatives to her than the dramatis personae of a fable, sorceresses from a missing chapter of A Thousand and One Nights. The four captivated entire cities with their magic and beauty.
Wherever the Leamy Ladies appeared in public—in train stations, in cafés, in marketplaces—thickets of curiosity seekers wound around them. Few of the oglers could have known who the three women and the child were, but clearly they recognized the four as somebodies.
Edward Leamy, in fact, always made sure his Leamy Ladies stirred hubbubs when they were out in public. He always inspected the four before allowing them to step outside their hotel room. They were to be dressed in haute couture. They were to have their lips painted, their cheeks rouged, their eyelashes mascaraed, and their eyes rimmed in kohl.
“He had a strict rule,” said Alfred. “Whether my mother, sister, and aunts were appearing before circus audiences or strolling through a park in Paris or Berlin, they were to maintain the appearance of royals. He insisted on it.”
Leamy himself accompanied the quartet everywhere, always appearing a few steps ahead of them, like a baton major at the head of a parade. With his silvery white hair, tailor-cut three-piece suits, and the large, ever-present, flashing diamond-studded cross just below his neck, he himself was always a figure of wide notice.
Even though Leitzel daubed her cheeks with red and blackened the flesh around her eyes in imitation of the other troupe members, she always appeared to be the odd femme out in the company of the Leamy Ladies. She was tiny, still barely over four feet, and although she was twelve when she became a member of the troupe, she still appeared to be in prepubescence. She could hardly pass for a lady. There was something else that set her conspicuously apart from the others in the quartet. In contrast to her mother and aunts, all of whom were
well-coiffed brunettes, her hair was wildly curly and was the color of peach marmalade.
Leitzel was adored everywhere, and just as La Belle Nellie had started to fear, her star began losing some of its gleam once her daughter became a member of the troupe. One indication of this came while the Leamy Ladies were performing in Paris.
The manager of the theater where the company was appearing had arranged for a top newspaper correspondent to interview Edward Leamy and his aerialists. The news that an important journalist would be calling stirred great excitement, especially with Nellie, Tina, and Toni. Not daring to leave anything to chance, the three doused themselves in toilet water. Next, after fastening themselves into iron maiden corsets, which heaved their breasts upward and outward and shrank their waists, they wriggled and stuffed themselves into their most revealing leotards, mauve in color with sprinkles of silvery spangles at the crotch and over their breasts. Leamy sent out for expensive champagne.
The time for the correspondent’s afternoon appointment arrived and then passed, and there had been no rapping at the Leamy Ladies’ dressing room door. Then another hour ticked by, and then another. The ice melted and the uncorked champagne lost its fizz. After three hours in their stuffy backstage room, Nellie, Tina, and Toni started to look molted.
Leamy, in a rare pique, finally phoned the newspaper’s offices, where he sought out the editor. He demanded to know why the paper’s star scribbler had stood up his aerialistes.
“Oh, he was there,” the editor replied. “He got a formidable interview from an enfant standing outside your dressing room. Quelle personality.”
Because the new Leamy Ladies could boast of not only La Belle Nellie, a circus star everywhere on the Continent, but now also a wunderkind whom the press was calling Madame’s protégée, the troupe was a greater sensation than ever. Whether in France, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, England, or Italy, the theaters and circus halls that could advertise the attraction were virtually assured of turn-away crowds.
Hundreds of thousands would marvel at the quartet in the years ahead. Among their admirers, especially on first-night performances, were kings, queens, marquises, princes, princesses, chancellors, and mayors. Of all the European nobles that took in the act, though, none would be as important to the Leamy Ladies as an American commoner, the son of a harness maker from the dozing farm center of Baraboo, Wisconsin.
A towering figure with an upper body the circumference of a rain barrel, and a head as round as the moon, he showed up in Berlin’s Wintergarten Theater on a night late in December 1907.
Alfred Pelikan was on hand the night the American appeared in the Wintergarten. Fourteen at the time, he was on a Christmas season break from Lawn Park High School in London, where he was enrolled in a course of Oxford preliminaries.
“The Wintergarten’s show was late in getting started that night,” Alfred said. “An announcer kept coming out on the floor, apologizing for the delay. He said the show was being held up because management was awaiting the arrival of some very important guest. One would have thought the Pope was due to arrive, or at least the chancellor of Germany.”
The crowd was restless by the time the American finally made his appearance in the hall. He was flanked by a couple aides-de-camp, and following just a few steps behind him was a small retinue of Wintergarten officials. He wore a derby and walked with his right hand wrapped around a gold-balled cane.
Everyone in the house with opera glasses kept them trained on the late-arriving dignitary as he was shepherded to a red plush box normally reserved for Germany’s highest officials. The American, likely a stranger to all but a few of the three thousand spectators filling the Wintergarten, comported himself with the hauteur of a man who was aware that whether he was at a circus or throwing back drinks and devouring a couple chickens at a time at Shanley’s in New York, he was almost certainly the richest and most powerful figure in the house.
Alfred remembered the circus’s tardy dignitary only as being “one of the Ringling boys.” In fact, it was John Ringling, or “Mister John,” as he was commonly addressed by anyone of lower rank than a viscount. There probably was not a wire walker, clown, or proprietor of a trained flea act anywhere who did not revere Mister John. A big top performer of almost any sort could be pretty well assured of being listed in the final, unabridged annals of circus greats if he or she received notice from Mister John. He was regarded around the world as the absolute potentate of the circus universe.
John Ringling, fifty-one at the time, was well on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest men in the United States. By turns, he was amassing a fortune that included not only stakes in the two largest circuses in America but also eighty thousand acres of land in Montana and another thirty thousand in Florida. He also owned several short-line railroads, oil wells, and a palatial home on the Sarasota Bay in Florida that was modeled after the Doge’s Palace in Venice. The possessions he prized among all others, though, were canvases he owned by such masters as Titian, Tiepolo, Rubens, Hals, and Gainsborough. His art collection would ultimately become so sprawling that he would have to build a vast museum on the grounds of his Florida estate to house it.
This was all surprising, since at their start as circus showmen only a little more than two decades earlier, John and his brothers traveled in a tiny, ragtag enterprise with a small secondhand, patched-up tent and a few horse-drawn farm wagons that rolled over rutty roads in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. In its first years, most of the Ringlings’ ring entertainment was provided by the five brothers themselves, along with the wives of those who were married. Probably the rolling show’s biggest attraction its first year was a caged, flea-bitten hyena that the young showmen advertised as “The Midnight Marauding Monster That Robs Graves Under the Cover of Darkness.”
After each summer tour, John and his brothers Al, Otto, Alf T., and Charles reinvested their profits in additional attractions and amenities. Within five years, their World’s Greatest Shows had grown to such proportions that they were able to retire their farm wagon and buy their own train. This enabled them to start presenting their circus in bigger towns, bypassing the lumbering and farming centers of a hundred or three hundred inhabitants that they visited in their earliest tours.
Traveling circuses and carnivals did not enjoy the highest levels of respectability in the nineteenth century. Most ministers used their pulpits to fulminate against them, telling their parishioners that these here-today, gone-tomorrow shows were vulgar entertainments whose ranks carried bunco men, pickpockets, and chicken thieves. Their condemnation of traveling circuses was hardly surprising. Most of the churchmen noticed precipitous dips in their collection plate offerings at about the same time the first garishly colored posters started blooming on nearby barns and store sides, announcing the coming of the shows.
From the start, though, the Ringling brothers insisted on presenting clean entertainment and policing their circus of grifters. Competing showmen disparaged the boys from Baraboo as goody-two-shoes showmen, the operators of the “Ding-a-Ling Brothers Circus,” but the public and press quickly came to regard the new circus as a Sunday school show, fit for families.
Among the boosters of the Ringling Bros. World’s Greatest Shows was George Ade, an enormously popular Hoosier humorist, playwright, and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist of the day.
“They found the business in the hands of vagabonds and put it in the hands of gentlemen,” Ade wrote in one of his columns. “[They] became the circus kings of the world by following the simple rule that it is better to be straight than crooked.”
Each of the Ringlings developed strengths in different areas, including booking, advertising, and personnel management. John, the youngest, was likely the most driven. Early on, he showed a gift for discovering ring performers and attractions that, with proper packaging, would come to be viewed as world-class. After the turn of the twentieth century, he started to make annual trips to Europe, scouring both the great circus amphitheate
rs and the small tents for attractions to bring to America.
When Mister John made his appearance at the Wintergarten that night in 1907, he was shopping for acts not just for the Ringling Bros. World’s Greatest Shows, but also for an even more renowned circus, Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth. The brothers had acquired the circus lock, stock, and elephant tubs after the death the previous year of James A. Bailey, who had outlived his partner, Phineas Taylor Barnum, by fifteen years.
Mister John’s fleshy eyelids always appeared to be at half-mast, but his gaze missed nothing. The Wintergarten was by far the largest and most distinguished of the dozens of performance halls in Berlin. In the moments before the circus finally started, after he and his aides were seated, he threw back his head and stared at the ceiling, taking in a constellation of thousands of softly twinkling electric stars. Next he turned his attention to the Wintergarten’s thickly plastered, custardlike walls. They were hung with large portraits of some of the performers who had made appearances in the opulent hall over the years, among them Harry Houdini, the American escapologist; Saharet, the high-kicking, Australian-born burlesque dancer; Grock, the most beloved clown in the world; and Yvette Guilbert, the café singer, a sensation at Montmartre’s Moulin Rouge and the subject of paintings by such famous French artists as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chéret, and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen.
Mister John may have felt his European scouting trip had been successful even before he turned up at the Wintergarten. Earlier, in France, he had bagged the Sisters La Rague for importation to the United States. The two women, who may or may not have been related, were daredevil stunt drivers whose spectacular act might have been an inspiration to Evel Knievel decades later. One sister piloted a blue car that hurtled down a steeply inclined, ninety-foot ramp and then collided with an obstruction at the ramp’s bottom that sent the driver and her roadster somersaulting high into space. Only a split second passed before the second car followed down the ramp and then shot straight out into the air just feet below the somersaulting roadster. In just a second more, one after another, both cars alighted on an elevated bridge fifty or sixty feet away.
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