Leitzel, too, had only recently arrived in Chicago. She, along with the women in her family, had been playing engagements in Europe for most of the past year, and they had returned to America for a second appearance with the Barnum show.
Leitzel was already well on her way to becoming world renowned. She was eighteen and already a darling with circus audiences everywhere abroad, as well as with the quarter million people who had seen her the year before in the Barnum circus’s opening stand in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Alfredo, on the other hand, was unknown to all but the audiences before which he had appeared with the Gran Circo Codona in the tank towns and deserts of Mexico. The position he had been given in the Barnum & Bailey Circus was that of an extra, one of those nameless performers whom the audiences saw only peripherally, if at all, while focusing on the genuine stars in and above the center ring. Alfredo, in fact, would not have had a place in the Barnum circus at all had it not been for his sister.
An agent for the big show, Ernie Thompson, saw Victoria performing with the family circus in Veracruz, Mexico. He was besotted not just with her dazzling feats on the slack wire but also by her surpassing beauty. He immediately wired his Ringling bosses at their circus winter quarters, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, assuring them that she would be a major sensation in the show.
“Give her the moon if you have to,” Thompson urged. “No expense should be spared.”
Otto Ringling followed the agent’s advice but maybe not to a tee. He flashed a wire to Papa Edward, declaring that the Barnum circus was prepared to give Victoria a place in the show:
FEB 13, 1909
CAN OFFER YOU $125 PER WEEK AND BOARD AND TRANSPORTATION. THIS IS THE BEST WE CAN DO. CAN PLACE ACT IN CENTER RING. TELEGRAPH ANSWER, BARABOO, WIS.
OTTO RINGLING
Even as long ago as 1909, $125 a week might have been considered laughably low for a center ring attraction of Victoria’s caliber. But Papa Codona not only accepted Otto’s proposition, he also offered to throw in his services, along with those of Alfredo. He regarded $125 a week as a king’s ransom next to the receipts he typically took in with his circus, some of which were in denominations of chicken eggs and grilled goat meat.
When Edward, Victoria, and Alfredo reported to the show just days before its Chicago opening, the circus, looking for a place where Alfredo might fit in, added him to the Siegrist-Silbon Flyers, a trapeze troupe that already had fourteen or fifteen artists. Trapeze flyers were always ranked with the most elite of circus artists. But on the Barnum show of 1909, they seemed to be only slightly less common than the flies in the horse stables. In addition to the big Siegrist-Silbon troupe, the spectacle also featured two other flying acts.
If Alfredo was little noticed by the people occupying the seats, it was a different matter for the single young women who traveled with the show, working as seamstresses in the wardrobe tent, washing pans in the cookhouse, or appearing as window dressing in the lavish biblical and historical productions of a hundred or more anonymous, camel- and burro-leading players that the circus spilled out on the hippodrome floor. He had lustrous and dreamy eyes that were about the color of beer bottle glass and softly waving brown hair. Like most trapeze flyers, he was smallish, just five foot eight, but every square centimeter of his arms and chest seemed to have been carved and polished by a Renaissance master. Even his muscles appeared to have muscles. Probably the most apt physical description for the boy leaper came from a stage actress who apparently had some knowledge of herpetology.
“When he moved”—she sighed—“the muscles on his back moved like copulating snakes.”
A good number of the showgirls drifted to sleep at night with publicity photographs of Alfredo in their hands. The pictures, taken when he was still traveling with the family’s Gran Circo Codona, showed him shirtless and wearing leggings that appeared to have been whitewashed on his lower body.
He likely would have discovered many of these fellow travelers to be easy conquests. Even at sixteen, though, it was not in Alfredo’s nature to pursue much in life that was his for the mere taking. He was up for a greater challenge. He wanted only Leitzel.
Many of the circus’s single women, and likely some married ones, too, were desolate when it became widely known that Alfredo was love drunk on Leitzel.
“You would have thought the show had suddenly been hit by some epidemic—one that only struck the girls on the show,” said Charlotte Shives, one of the showgirls. “When it became known that Alfredo was putting out his cat for Leitzel, almost every girl on the show seemed to stop believing life was worth living. There was a lot of moping, a lot of crying, a lot of talk by the girls of leaving the circus to enter the convent.”
Shives appeared in the hippodrome spectacles riding atop a float as Betsy Ross and sewing stars on an American flag. She was also a member of the Living Statues, a small group of exceptionally attractive young women and men who covered their near-nude bodies in white greasepaint and appeared in the center ring where they assumed the poses of the figures in such famous artworks as Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware.
While she shared the view of the other showgirls that Alfredo was the most beautiful male specimen in the circus, she herself was never smitten with him, Shives insisted.
“For one thing,” she said, “I don’t think Alfredo knew more than a hundred words of English at the time, and the only word of Spanish I knew was sí, which could have resulted in a dangerous relationship. For another thing, I thought my chances of ever being singled out by Alfredo were about the same as my chances of winning the Irish Sweepstakes. Whether they were sixteen or forty, almost every other single girl on the show wanted him.”
Now and again romances did blossom on the Barnum & Bailey Circus, but hyphenations of performers or workers who met each other on the show were extremely rare, maybe falling into that broad category identified as eternal mysteries of nature. This was because the circus’s front office was always quick to run in with icy water if it saw signs that sparks were beginning to arc between a male and female on its payroll.
Charley Ringling, who was in charge of the show’s personnel, even hired a detective, an Officer Black, to regularly peer into the circus baggage wagons and the shadowy areas of the animal tents to look for coupling employees. A camel groom or clown who was caught trying to woo a showgirl would discover on payday that he had been docked $10. This was not an insignificant amount when the average workman earned $25 a month, a minor performer $37.50.
The Ringling brothers’ reason for discouraging the development of intracircus romances may not have been motivated entirely out of overdeveloped senses of rectitude. Love could lead couples to the altar or justices of the peace. This complicated matters—for the circus and for the newlyweds. For one thing, the show’s sleeping accommodations fell short of those at the Waldorf Astoria. The five Ringlings, a few of the show’s other executives, and one or two center ring stars had staterooms on the train. But most of the performers and all the animal men, canvas men, and showgirls, whether married or not, were housed in “sixty-four cars,” so-called because each was shared by sixty-four men and women. Fred Bradna, ringmaster for the circus, compared the arrangements to those of the Yagua, an Amazon River tribe that lived in grass communal huts, with each couple sharing a hammock against a wall.
“Nothing is quite so frustrating to the newlyweds as the married people’s car,” Bradna lamented. “The company is excellent, even sympathetic. But space is crammed and privacy is limited.… Privacy is obtained by turning one’s face to the wall. A man … in such a position is, by common consent, not present. No one looks in the direction.”
Whatever the sanctions management imposed to keep the men and women segregated, though, none worked perfectly. It was one thing for the circus to expect an animal trainer to stick his head into the oral cavities of his lions for two performances a day. It was quite another for Charley and his brothers to insist that males in their teens and twenties ignore the showgi
rls of ripened figures that abounded on the show.
Necessity being the mother of invention, though, the circus’s attachés found ways to foil Officer Black, according to Francis “Butch” Brann, one of Alfredo’s coflyers in the Siegrist-Silbon troupe.
“Every town had a post office,” he noted. “If you picked up a signal that one of the ballet girls might be interested in you, you’d get word to her to meet you on the post office steps after the last show. If you had a night off and knew what movie houses were in a town, you could ask the girl to wait for you in the theater’s balcony.” Brann may have sounded knowledgeable about ways to skirt the circus’s measures for keeping the sexes apart, but his own skills in such maneuverings might be called into question. By his own admission, his pay was docked so many times for his attempts at amorous connections that at the close of most circus seasons, he often had to borrow money to get back to his home in Canton, Ohio.
The circus’s patrons have always tended to view its spectacles as dream-splashed, rainbow-colored phantasmagoria that are populated by demigods who, in their strength, fearlessness, and ability to relax the usual rules of gravity, have taken on the traits of beasts and birds. The men and women responsible for putting on the spectacles, though—the ringmaster, the performers, even the faceless men with shovels who clean up after the elephants and camels—tended to have a different view. Most of them became blasé about their workplace after relatively short stays on the job. They rarely regarded the sideshow’s bearded lady or the human cannonballs and high-wire daredevils with any more fascination than people who were in the workaday world viewed their mailman or corner butcher.
Even so, when Leitzel was performing, great numbers of her fellow circus travelers stopped what they were doing to take in her act. Many of the interlopers were young males who were single, recently detached, or detaching. Leitzel was easily the most widely desired of all the pretty young women traveling with the circus. She also may have been just about as unreachable and unobtainable to her love-stricken as Selene, goddess of the moon.
Of all the bareback riders, daredevils, tumblers, clowns, cookhouse dishwashers, and stablemen who interrupted their routines to take in her performances, Alfredo likely was the only one with a perfect attendance record. He was present for each of her afternoon and evening appearances.
In addition to the hindrances that the circus threw up to frustrate the flowering of amour between its single employees, there was an even more formidable obstacle that Alfredo would have to surmount to carry on any attempts at wooing Leitzel. Edward Leamy remained as vigilant as ever in keeping Leitzel as well as the other Leamy Ladies stonewalled from any would-be suitors, whether they were part of the circus or paying customers.
Brann made this observation: “If the old man had any suspicion that some young buck was lusting after his Leitzel, or, for that matter, any of the Leamy Ladies, he probably would have put out his eyes with his umbrella.”
Victoria said that certainly Alfredo knew he was engaging in risky behavior by pursuing Leitzel, but he could not stop himself.
“Over and over, Papa warned him about getting on the wrong side of Mr. Leamy,” she remembered. “Papa said that if the Leamy Ladies’ manager found out that Alfredo was trying to romance Leitzel, he would have marched right up to Mister John and seen to it that he was thrown off the show. Maybe I’d have lost my job, too. Alfredo was so crazy in love, though, that he would have walked through fire for her. He wouldn’t listen to Papa.”
Within a few days after the circus’s new season began, though, Leitzel secretly started providing Alfredo with intimations that maybe she was a little bit interested in him, according to Charlotte Shives, who had become close to the star.
“I think this was all a game for her, at least at first,” she said. “Even then, she was a big star, and Alfredo was a nobody. It wasn’t until Leitzel found out that the show’s other girls were gaga over Alfredo that she paid any attention to him. I loved Leitzel, but she was fiercely competitive, whether playing Chinese checkers or trying to show up the other performers. As a star, she seemed to believe she was entitled to anything that made her heart flutter. When she heard that the other girls were turned into mush by Alfredo, she decided to put her name on him. If that meant taking him out of circulation from the other girls, well, so be it.”
Leitzel and Alfredo eventually found a way to start snatching private, if brief, moments together. Their liaisons required help not just from Alfredo’s friends but also from La Belle Nellie, Tina, and Toni.
Each night after the show, Leamy shepherded his foursome to a rooming house some blocks from the Coliseum. He always kept a few steps ahead of them, ready to wrap his umbrella around the heads of any mashers. Always on these late-night strolls, Leamy stopped at a pool hall along the way to pick up cigars for the next day. The hall was a popular late-night hangout with circus performers, among them Butch Brann, Toto Siegrist, also a trapeze flyer, and Orrin Davenport, a trick horse rider. Because women were prohibited from entering pool halls, the Leamy Ladies waited outside while their manager took care of his business inside.
“What Leamy didn’t know,” said Brann, “was that Alfredo was always hiding in the shadows at the side of the pool hall. The instant the old man entered the hall, Leitzel separated from her mother and her aunts, and got together with Alfredo. Me and Toto and Orrin were always at a billiards table. When we saw Leamy, we’d tie him up in conversation, talking about the weather, the circus, this and that. This gave Alfredo and Leitzel some time for smooching. When Leitzel’s mother and aunts saw through the window that their boss was at the cash register, settling up for his cigars, they signaled the lovebirds to break from their clinch. Leitzel quickly rejoined her mother and aunts. Leamy never found out about these little trysts.”
Alfredo could be moody much of the time, even melancholic, Brann said, but after he and Leitzel started seeing each other, he brightened.
“He even talked to me and Toto and some of the other guys in the Siegrist-Silbon Flyers about borrowing money to help him buy an engagement ring,” said Brann. “He thought that if Leitzel agreed to marry him, old man Leamy would have to let them carry out their romance in the open. I never saw anybody fall harder for a gal than he did. He seemed to be getting crazier every day.”
To Papa Edward, the most alarming change that came over his son at this time involved a new obsession, a madness. Alfredo had become preoccupied with the thought of accomplishing the most dazzling of feats ever to be presented under a big top. He wanted to execute The Triple, three somersaults in midair while streaking at speeds up to seventy miles per hour from one flying trapeze to another.
The flying trapeze act—the spectacle of a performer being catapulted from a flybar and then shooting through space to another athlete, a catcher—started becoming a feature of the bigger circuses by the 1870s. Very soon some of the more daring flyers added a somersault to their flights to make their displays appear even more eye-popping to their audiences. As spectacular as these exhibitions were, though, they still did not have enough razzle-dazzle for the most brazen of flyers. By the 1890s, some of them had started turning two somersaults while shooting the air.
But three somersaults from a flying trapeze to the hands of a catcher, a Triple?
Such a feat was thought to be absolutely impossible, as inconceivable at the time as the idea of any man ever being able to run a mile in fewer than four minutes, as preposterous as the notion that a day would ever come when a man could walk on the moon. Maybe there were gods somewhere who could execute a Triple, but a mortal? The idea was absurd, not even imaginable.
And then, not many years into the twentieth century, a Triple was executed. It was accomplished by Ernie Clarke, a British-born circus daredevil.
There were accounts, some of them published, that Clarke, at least now and then, may have begun throwing his first Triples as early as 1902 or 1903 when he and his brother, Charles, his catcher, were performing in Australia and
New Zealand. Not all experts on the early twentieth-century circus believe these claims, but there appears to be little doubt that by the time Ernie was appearing with the Publiones Circus in Cuba in 1909, he was regularly presenting The Triple.
Word of Clarke’s feat spread quickly through the big top world. Alfredo was immediately determined to follow his lead.
“If he could perform The Triple, it would make him famous the world over,” Victoria said. “He also believed that if he could ever perform the feat, it would make him more worthy of Leitzel.”
Papa Edward had started training his son on the flying trapeze when Alfredo was as young as four or five. When a dozen years later Alfredo approached his father and begged help from him to add The Triple to his repertoire, the senior Codona’s response was immediate and adamant.
“No,” he said. “Not on your life and not on mine.”
Edward was fifty in 1909. He must have thought he had already sacrificed enough for the circus, all those babies who were stillborn or died soon after they were born while he and Hortense were traveling with their Gran Circo Codona in Mexico. He did not want now to also lose his sixteen-year-old son.
Triple midair somersaults had started taking the lives of circus daredevils years before the first flying trapeze acts started appearing in the big circuses late in the nineteenth century. Emerging in the circuses in the 1830s and 1840s was a species of intermittently insane supermen who ran down long, steeply inclined wooden ramps to gain speed, and then, at the bottom of the ramps, jumped onto springboards that shot them sixty or seventy feet through the air before they alighted on straw-filled mats. These athletes were called “leapers,” a name that would later be passed on to somersaulting trapeze flyers. Almost all of the first leapers could throw at least one somersault while moving in their parabolic arcs in the air, and a few could turn doubles. Almost all of the madmen who tried to execute triples, though, killed themselves, if not in their first tries at the stunt, then in their second or tenth.
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