One of the best accounts of the perils of The Triple may have been provided by George Brinton Beal, an author, Boston theater critic, and one of the most alert observers of the circus’s arts.
“Nothing in the entire list of acts … is more heavily laden with possibilities of disaster than the triple somersault,” he wrote. “The great risk involved … is … after the second turn is accomplished, and the third turn is attempted. The performer ‘loses his catch,’ or, translated from show language, loses control of his body and is governed by gravity. Because his head is heavier than his feet, he is most likely to land on his head and break his neck.”
When Alfredo told Papa Edward that he was going to try to find The Triple, even if he could not count on his help in his search, Edward wept. He pleaded with his son to give up the idea. It was only after he became fully convinced that his son’s mind could not be changed that he agreed to work with him.
The Barnum & Bailey Circus had settled into the Coliseum in Chicago for a month at the start of its 1909 season. Hours before the show’s matinee each day, while the great arena was empty of spectators, Alfredo ascended the rope ladder to his trapeze pedestal, and with Edward opposite, hanging upside down from another trapeze, son and father started their search for The Triple.
“Estoy listo!” Alfredo would cry out, and then, ready to go, would grab his flybar. Next, he would swing as high as possible, and then let go of the bar, starting the first of his heels-over-head backward somersaults while at the same time shooting forward en route to the hands of his father, hanging upside down on another trapeze at the opposite end of the rigging.
One …
Two …
Thr-r-r-r …
Butch Brann, along with other members of the Siegrist-Silbon Flyers with whom Alfredo performed in the circus, was often present to watch the sessions.
“Alfredo could always throw a double somersault, sometimes even something close to a two and a half,” Brann said. “But The Triple? No. Never. He’d spin wildly out of control just as he was entering the third turn, and then end up crashing into the net. He’d cuss in Spanish, totally frustrated. But then he’d climb back to his pedestal. ‘Estoy listo!’ he would again cry out to his father.”
There were times when Alfredo believed he was getting closer to executing The Triple. Other times, he felt he was no closer to success than the first day he and Papa began the pursuit. He was cross with himself at the end of each practice session and feeling aches everywhere on his body from his spills into the net.
As angry at the fates as Alfredo would become because they did not permit him to execute The Triple, there was another matter that troubled him even more. He and Leitzel continued to steal a few moments together outside the pool hall each night, but she made it increasingly clear to him that she was not interested in seeing the relationship advance beyond a puppy love stage.
“I think she saw her clutches with him as mere rehearsals for a day when there would be someone else in her life,” said Charlotte Shives. “Each day, men from outside the circus, young men with elegant manners, were sending her flowers, candies, and letters, and begging for a chance to see her. Because of Mr. Leamy, of course, none ever got anywhere with her.”
Brann said Alfredo became worn down by Leitzel’s refusal to commit to him.
“He would get teary and say, ‘Who am I to think that she would ever promise herself to me?’ Leitzel, of course, was already a major star, someone management counted on to draw people to the ticket booths. Alfredo was just another ‘kinker,’ a no-name performer like me whose job was to provide filler between the premier acts like the Leamy Ladies and Victoria Codona, who were getting all the promotion.”
Brann probably was at least partly correct in suggesting that Leitzel was reluctant to become serious about Alfredo because the two were so distanced from each other on the circus’s social scale. But there was another reason why the time was not right for Leitzel to make a commitment to Alfredo, or to anyone.
Their romance, she told Alfredo over and over, necessarily had to be a “summer love,” or, more accurately, a “spring love”—one that could only have the duration of the four or six weeks that the Barnum & Bailey Circus was playing in its season-openers in the Garden in New York or the Coliseum in Chicago.
After that, Alfredo, along with most of the circus’s other performers and workers, would board the show’s train and, for the next seven months, start crosshatching the country. Neither Leitzel nor any of the other Leamy Ladies would ever be on the train, though. Leamy still had not been able to find a way to safely hang his ponderous trapezone rotaire in the circus’s big top, and once the show left the permanent halls in New York and Chicago to go on the road, the Leamy Ladies were scrubbed from the program. They, along with their manager, would then return to Europe to resume their peregrinations there.
Leitzel and Alfredo were again in the shadows outside the Chicago pool hall late in the night of April 26, 1909, but this would be the last of their minutes-long embraces there. The circus would be presenting its final show in the Coliseum the next day.
As circus artists, they were committed to the life of vagabonds, stateless souls who, like migratory birds, move here one day, and there the next. Maybe sometime, somewhere, their paths would cross again, Leitzel told Alfredo. Maybe things could be different then, she said. But maybe, too, that might never be.
Professor Leamy exited the pool hall moments later with a new supply of cigars to get through the next day and, joined by Leitzel, Nellie, Tina, and Toni, then resumed the walk to the group’s hotel. Alfredo remained in the shadows for a while, watching the five disappear down the street, and then rejoined his fellow Siegrist-Silbon Flyers at the billiard tables, but, according to Brann, he was unable to stop crying.
CHAPTER 11
It all happened so fast. Leitzel was left stunned, uncertain now about everything.
Days earlier, she was a darling of Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth, America’s biggest circus, adored by hundreds of thousands. Now she was out of work, and without prospects for immediate employment. Even more wrenching, just like that, she had lost her attachment to her mother, her aunts, Edward Leamy, everyone with whom she had been closest.
She was even without a country.
What upended everything, finally, was a final blowup between La Belle Nellie and Professor Leamy.
From the time Leitzel had begun touring with the Leamy Ladies, she had often heard her mother and Professor Leamy arguing in low voices. Most of the time, their quarrels took place late at night as she lay in hotel beds while her mother and Leamy were in an outer room.
Their whispers went back and forth, moving like sweeping brooms at opposite ends of a room.
Shiss … shiss.… Shiss … shiss.… Shiss … shiss.…
Occasionally Leamy’s murmurings rose to the sound of wind:
SHISS … SHISS … SHISS … SHISS … SHISS.…
Leitzel strained to listen to the fusses. Their words were too indistinct to make out. Often, though, after the bickering quieted, she heard La Belle Nellie sobbing. When she saw her in the morning, her eyes were puffy and red.
While Leitzel never knew exactly what Leamy and her mother quarreled over, she was sure their difference had to do with his control. He chose the clothes she wore, as well as those of Leitzel and Nellie’s sisters. He subjected the four to dress inspections before he allowed them to go out in public. He paid for the clothes, train tickets, hotels, and meals for all the Leamy Ladies and also provided them with allowances. But there was a feeling among Nellie and her sisters that maybe they were not getting honest shares of the money the act earned.
Maybe what was most upsetting to La Belle Nellie was that he refused to allow her to accept dinner and theater invitations from admiring men. And although he himself seemed never to have a romantic interest in her, or in any woman, he refused to ever let her out of his sight.
The Leamy Ladies’ separation from thei
r manager took place soon after April 22, 1911, when the Barnum & Bailey Circus ended a six-week appearance in New York. It had been the fourth consecutive year that the circus had brought the troupe to America for its season opener.
“My mother always felt indebted to Professor Leamy,” said Alfred Pelikan. “She respected him. He rescued her from Willy Dosta. He turned her into a world-class circus star. But was he controlling? Oh, yes, I’d say he could be despotic. He insisted on running every detail of her life, as well as mine and my aunts’. I was a young boy at the time. I didn’t know all that went on when the Leamy Ladies were touring. Leitzel, though, told me about the tension that always existed between my mother and Professor Leamy. Finally, after being together for years, the two of them decided they just couldn’t go on together anymore. They went their separate ways, and that was that.”
Nellie sailed to Berlin, and Tina and Toni returned to London to be reunited with other members of the Pelikan family, including patriarch Eduard, who had found work producing finely crafted display cabinets for the British Museum.
Leitzel was desolated by Leamy’s departure from the Leamy Ladies. She had never felt any bitterness toward him. He was kind and good, and she had always loved him like a father. Now she was unsure if she would ever see him again.
Leitzel, now twenty, decided to remain in New York to search for opportunities as a solo performer.
If La Belle Nellie felt new freedom after the falling-out with Professor Leamy, she must have also felt some fear. She was thirty-two, and from the time she was fourteen, there had never been a day or night when he was not there to chart all of her moves.
It was not long after Nellie settled in Berlin, though, that the entertainment world started taking greater notice of her than ever. She received offers to make appearances in theaters throughout the Continent, and caused tongues to wag wherever she traveled.
She had reinvented herself as “Zoe, the Aerial Venus.” The handbills printed for her act carried a tagline in big type that described her act this way: “A Beautiful Woman Completely Disrobes While Clinging by Her Teeth to the Handle of a Lace Parasol.”
It was the Belle Epoque, a rash and brash era ushered into Europe with the tango. Even so, it seems improbable that there were halls where Nellie was permitted to “completely” disrobe before audiences. She did not put on her shows in dives but in opulent performing halls and circus theaters whose gilt-filigreed boxes were occupied nightly not just by dukes, archdukes, counts, and viscounts but also by mayors and police magistrates. As liberated as the “Beautiful Age” was, especially in contrast to the Victorian era, any public exhibitions of nudity likely would have brought out police raids.
Jack Leontini may have seen her “disrobing” as often as anybody—and for free. In 1911 he was working as a bareback rider and errand boy for the Adolfi Circus in Göteborg, Sweden, where Nellie had an extended engagement.
Leontini was interviewed in his seventy-fifth year and said the impression Nellie’s stratospheric striptease left on him was still “indelible.” Probably this was not surprising. He was a schoolboy, just ten or eleven, when he saw her performances. Leontini, who years later would become manager of the Great Wallendas, the famous high-wire daredevils, had this memory:
She was elegantly attired when she appeared in the ring, twirling a parasol and flirting with the men. After a while, she hooked the top of her parasol to a cable that was rigged to a pulley. A couple of strong men pulled at the cable and, while she was hanging by her teeth on the parasol’s handle, she was hoisted almost to the ceiling. The spotlights changed from white to red. Then, while swaying back and forth in the air, she started stripping. Her buttoned shoes dropped to the ring first, then her garters, then her stockings and petticoats. She was covered in a lot of frills which she took off one by one, very slowly, and let them flutter to the floor. I was sure at the time that Madame Zoe was stripping completely. I became a hero among all my friends because I told them I had seen a naked woman. Because I was so young then, though, I really didn’t even know what nude ladies looked like. Maybe I only thought I was looking at a completely nude lady night after night because this is what I wanted to believe. I was told years later that Madame Zoe only stripped down to flesh-colored tights. Maybe so, maybe not.
Then, as today, European circuses shaped their productions for adults. The circuses of America, on the other hand, were crafted for families. Enterprises like Barnum & Bailey and the Ringling Bros. would have considered Madame Zoe’s skyborne disrobings far too risqué for their audiences. Nellie would, though, return to the United States the following year, where she found bookings in New York and Washington, D.C., theaters, as well as an extended engagement at Luna Park on Coney Island, where, for several months, she shed her raiment not as “Zoe, the Aerial Venus,” but “Zoe, the Famous Parisian Novelty.”
“In Europe, at least, there was no bigger sensation at the time than Madame Zoe,” Leontini said. “She appeared with just about every major circus. In the equivalent of American money at the time, she was probably earning $400 or $500 a week, a staggering amount, likely more than any other single circus performer of the time was commanding.”
All of Leitzel’s days started the same way in the first weeks she was alone in New York. Each morning, she entered one or another of the office buildings on Forty-Sixth Street near Broadway that were dovecotes of talent promoters and booking agents. She would ride an elevator or sometimes climb the stairs to the sixth or eighth floor. Next, she would start entering the offices, one after another, some hardly bigger than phone booths, and almost all of them with air thickly smeared in cigar smoke.
She spread her newspaper clippings on the desks of the agents, showing them how she had always been singled out for her performances with the Leamy Ladies. She could easily recraft her act into a solo feature that would play well in the vaudeville houses, she assured them. Inevitably, her importuning brought a response along these lines: “You know how many ‘dumb acts’ I already have on file, sister? Got hundreds of ’em. Maybe a thousand. What theater managers are looking for today are real entertainers—Eva Tanguay, the Marx Brothers, Fanny Brice. Big stars. Dumb acts? You can hardly give ’em away anymore.”
The expression “dumb act” was not a pejorative, but rather defined vaudeville acts like juggling, trick roller-skating, and acrobatics where the performers did not communicate vocally with their audience. Dumb acts were usually slated as the first and last features of the vaudeville lineups, when the patrons were either noisily entering the theaters or leaving them.
Although she had endeared herself to uncountable numbers of New Yorkers who had seen her in her appearances in the Garden with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, the bookers for the vaudeville houses apparently had doubts about whether her trapeze act would translate well inside theaters. After being turned away at a talent agency, Leitzel would move on to the next, and then the next. Hours later, by the time she finally descended to the ground floor, her spirits would be beaten down. She would walk out into the sunlight, wondering how much longer she could survive without employment.
After weeks of searching, Leitzel finally did find work—on vaudeville’s so-called silo circuit. She had been given marching orders to make appearances at a series of what the bookers referred to as “slabs,” vaudeville houses in small, sleepy towns and farming centers well outside New York. Because of the remoteness of the cow towns to which she was dispatched, she often found herself traveling not in passenger trains but on milk trains.
The dives at which she appeared, often with fewer than a dozen people in the audience, were open from late morning until late at night. Because the theater managers were usually too stinting to hire more than three or four features, she put on her grueling act on her aerial rings eight or ten times day, and when she was not onstage, she often assumed assignments like operating the popcorn stand. She knew better than to complain. The silo circuit was a purgatory in which nearly all new vaudevillians served terms.
Troupers who groused about their assignments were often left marooned a few hundred feet from nowhere, with their future booking erased, and without funds from their agents to return to New York.
While gazing out the windows of the trains as they delivered her to one Podunk one week and then another the next, she often saw barns blazing with luridly colored posters advertising the Barnum & Bailey and Ringling Bros. and other circuses, and then became wistful. She loved the circus life more than any other. She wondered if she would ever return to it.
There are no reliable accounts of all the travails Leitzel might have endured while traveling the boonies, but the time she spent playing the slabs of vaudeville was relatively short. By December 1911, just eight months after she started her peregrinations through the wilds, she made her Broadway debut. By then she had been taken under the wing of Gene Hughes, longtime president of the Showmen’s League and one of the best connected agents in New York. A roly-poly man with a tomato-colored face, he had a talent for sifting through the armies of aspiring entertainers and identifying the few who had genuine star potential.
Hughes teamed Leitzel with another aerialist, a Jeanette Diaz, who, coincidentally, had been a former member of the Siegrist-Silbon trapeze troupe and, thus, like Leitzel, was a Barnum & Bailey alumna. In contrast to the small, fair-skinned, and comely Leitzel, Diaz was thickset, dusky in color, and had the protruding brow and long, over-large nose of an Easter Island monolith. In their appearances, the two women could hardly have been more mismatched. Hughes, though, retailed the new duo as the Leitzel Sisters. His pairing may have been carefully calculated. Leitzel’s Dresden doll smallness and delicateness was only accentuated by Diaz’s coarser appearance.
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