Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  The Leitzel Sisters’ New York vaudeville debut took place on the night of December 11, 1911, at the Columbia Theater, Forty-Seventh Street at Broadway. The Columbia, a theater that advertised itself as “The House That Brought Distinction to Burlesque,” was not a regular stop for New York’s smarter set. Now and then, the Columbia featured some of vaudeville’s bigger stars, but to hold its costs down, the theater padded its entertainment with “startling, beautiful, living pictures.”

  Most nights, the Columbia’s eighteen hundred seats were predominantly occupied by newly arrived immigrants and foreign students who were enrolled at Columbia University. These ticket holders viewed the Columbia as a place where they could improve their English by reading the movie subtitles and matching them with the action on the screen.

  In great part because of Hughes’s efforts, the Leitzel Sisters’ debut was well attended by a good number of vaudeville house managers, as well as the important critics. When the act was announced, the shy Jeanette stayed in the background, but Leitzel strode to the center of the stage.

  “O-o-o-h-h.” She shivered as she looked up and down at the crowd in the balconies and the ground-floor seats. She seemed genuinely surprised that so many people turned out.

  “O-o-o-h-h … o-o-o-h-h … o-o-o-h-h.…”

  Leitzel showed so much style just in making her stage entrance that the aerial rigging behind her almost seemed extraneous. But then the kettledrums in the pit began rumbling. Then the house lights went out and a single spotlight alighted on a white, velvet-wrapped rope, or web, that had been dropped from the stage’s ceiling.

  Leitzel untied her cape and, in a gesture that was almost imperious, tossed the shoulder wrap to Jeanette. Next, she slipped her feet from her size one and a half mules.

  She did not appear so much to climb her web as to float upward on it. She appeared incorporeal, lighter than air. Her ascent was punctuated by momentary stops during which she appeared to be reclining on air, with her body extended perpendicular to the rope. During these pauses, she dallied with the spectators, causing them to applaud, cheer, and whistle their adoration.

  She continued her journey. Up. Up. Finally, when she was thirty feet above the stage floor, she reached out for a pair of Roman rings suspended a few feet from the web. She slipped her feet through the rings and drew herself up into a sitting position. She seemed as tickled as a child who had just been presented with a new swing set for her birthday.

  Leitzel began swinging at the same time the pit orchestra started playing a waltz. Next, she began dishing out the little fillips of her act: handstands, forward and backward rollovers, upside-down hangs during which she dangled from the rings by her hocks. All aerialists performed the same stunts, but probably none with quite her style.

  She again drew herself up into a sitting position on the rings and, now swinging gently, looked out at the crowd and, with a buoyant expression, seemed to put a simple question to everyone: “How do you like me so far?”

  The crowd tittered, and then roared. There was piping from spectators blowing on empty Black Crows and Cracker Jack boxes. Leitzel blushed.

  Now she drew a tiny envelope from beneath a flounce at the neck-line of her bodice. She tore open the packet and dusted her palms with the powder she found inside.

  It was time.

  She reached out with her right hand for another rope a few feet away. Then, in an instant, she veered off her place on the rings and hung by a single hand from the looped end of the second rope. She writhed forward and then backward, forward and backward, and then, with a mighty effort, threw her body feet over head.

  One!

  Then she rocked her body up and over again.

  Two!

  Now another time.

  Three!

  The kettledrums began tolling off each of her revolutions and then the crowd started picking up the count: “Nine, ten … twenty-five … forty …”

  Her body was now moving in a wild, jerky motion, like a loose airplane propeller about to fly off its shaft. At the same time that she was spinning, her near waist-length yellow hair came loose from the top of her head and swished in the air. The sight was almost unsettling, but no one could turn their eyes from her.

  “Seventy … seventy-five … eighty-five …”

  “Ninety-eight … ninety-nine … ONE HUNDRED!”

  She descended to the stage via her web. With the audience now on its feet, applauding, cheering, she bowed and bowed and, still a little dizzy from her rigors, exited the stage on wobbly legs.

  Variety summed up the performance this way:

  The Leitzel Sisters closed the show at the Columbia … with a flying trapeze and ring act that attracted some little attention.… The smaller sister is the act. The girl has many things in her favor. The most important is a fetching style of working that means more than all the complicated tricks that could be devised. Also, she turns off several tricks on the rings that few male exponents in the line have shown. As a finish, she does a one-hand circle on the loose rope, turning over and over. It is a … capital finish for the act. The heavier girl fills in the time between the smaller girl’s tricks with familiar work on the trapeze. The Leitzel Sisters can easily hold down the opening position on big bills.… They are of the original Leamy Sisters turn.

  Behind Leitzel now were the slabs where the entertainers were expected to put in twelve- and fourteen-hour days. From now on, she would be contracted to appear in theaters where two performances a day were the rule. Gone, too, were the hick town boardinghouses with the scent of cow manure wafting through the windows. She would now be staying in modern hotels with maid service and clean sheets. In what may have been close to record time for a new vaudevillian, she had slogged her way from flyspeck towns to the Great White Way. Moreover, she proved that she belonged there.

  Gene Hughes had gotten the Leitzel Sisters a tour of theaters on the Keith-Albee vaudeville chain. The theaters were mostly in larger cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago, and were among the most lavishly appointed anywhere. Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee, ex–circus men, paid their entertainers more than other theater owners. As a result they were able to attract vaudeville’s biggest stars, among them Charlie Chaplin, Ed Wynn, W. C. Fields, and Fanny Brice. Leitzel was featured in the same variety shows as these luminaries, as well as with others who were just as esteemed by vaudeville audiences. She was starstruck in the presence of all of them. But she felt a different set of emotions for an entertainer of less eminence, one who had started appearing on the bills with her after she had been on tour for about a year.

  His name was Alexis Sousloff, and he was a tango dancer. He had slicked-back blond hair, prominent cheekbones, and piercing eyes the color of blue ice. When he appeared onstage, the women in the front rows commonly started fanning themselves with their programs. Some of them opened the upper buttons on their blouses.

  While most other members of the vaudeville enjoyed one another’s company, playing checkers and lunching together, Sousloff was never a part of the fellowship. An outsider, he spent much of his nonperforming time auditioning new partners and replaced his dancing halves about as regularly as the vaudeville company moved to different stops on the Keith-Albee circuit. His stage comrades, of course, had suspicions about his frequent changes of partners, since all his dancers moved well and all of them were beautiful.

  Sousloff, though, apparently was as smooth with words as he was on his feet. To the surprise of others, he and Leitzel were soon going out for late-night, postshow dinners. Next, hand in hand, they started spending free afternoons at movies and ballet performances.

  Other than the brief and barely grazing romance she had carried on with Alfredo three years earlier, Leitzel had never before been in a relationship with a man.

  Before a month passed, Sousloff proposed marriage.

  Oh, yes, she sighed. Oh, yes, yes.

  For a day or two after the proposal, Leitzel was giddy, happier than she had eve
r been.

  There was another matter that filled her with sweet anticipation. Edward Leamy had wired her from Syracuse, New York, where he had been living in an apartment building, the Florence. He told her of the pride he had at learning of the success she had been having in vaudeville. He also informed her that he would be taking a train to New York in a few days and would love to see her. Leitzel was overjoyed.

  On a Sunday morning in August of 1914, a week or so after receiving the wire, Leitzel stepped outside her hotel and strolled past a newsstand. Her heart stopped. All the newspapers had the story, most of them on the front page.

  Edward Leamy lay near death in Bellevue Hospital, badly beaten and unconscious.

  The “Silver King” or “Prominent Showman,” as he was identified in most of the headlines, had been found midway down the stairs of the subway station at Broadway and Times Square at two o’clock in the morning three days earlier. Police had determined that he had been at Shanley’s Restaurant, dining with several theater friends, including the superintendent of Hammerstein’s Theater. He excused himself from his friends sometime after midnight, saying he was going to the Astor Hotel, where he was staying.

  Leamy died of massive head injuries four days after he had been conveyed by ambulance to Bellevue. Ironically, his demise was likely brought about by the object he treasured above all his other material possessions, the diamond-studded cross that he always wore around his neck when he was in public. The cross, valued between $2,000 and $5,000 by the newspapers, had been stripped from him when he was found on the subway stairs.

  The meeting she and Leamy had planned was to have been their first time together since he had disbanded the Leamy Ladies two and a half years earlier. Leitzel was desolate.

  Less than two weeks later, on August 20, Leitzel and Sousloff were married in New York. The union took place hardly more than a month after he had proposed to her, but as short as the betrothal period was, the marriage, it would turn out, would be similarly fleeting.

  From the start of their engagement, Sousloff had promised Leitzel they would spend their honeymoon in the coziest of love nests. This started Leitzel speculating about which of the finer New York hotels they would be registered at. She was crushed when, following the pair’s marriage proceeding, carried out before a justice of peace, Sousloff took her to a boardinghouse where he kept a small, gray, airless room.

  George DeFeo, a theatrical producer who owned the boardinghouse, had doubts about whether the marriage was ever consummated. The two started fighting from the instant Sousloff led her into his room, he said, and the battle raged on night and day for weeks.

  DeFeo said he thought that after they married, Sousloff, still in his twenties, revealed to his bride that he was entering retirement. He viewed Leitzel as a meal ticket whose earnings would allow him to loaf during the day and carry on assignations with other women at night while Leitzel was working in the theaters.

  “She wanted him to go to work and he refused,” DeFeo said. “One word brought on another, and he told her to get out of the house, and, if she didn’t, he would put her out.”

  Within two or three weeks, the new bride did move out, taking a room at a New York hotel.

  “My wife and I visited her a number of times in hopes we could bring them back together, but he was obstinate and would not live with her,” DeFeo said.

  In a retreat that was uncharacteristic for her, Leitzel surrendered New York to Sousloff and decamped for Chicago, where she set up housekeeping in an apartment building in the heart of the entertainment district at 4700 Broadway. Within days, she was traveling the vaudeville circuit again and was garnering critical praise wherever she appeared.

  A line from Billboard’s review of the engagement at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre: “Miss Leitzel, on the vertical rope and Roman rings, was a sensation. The audience interrupted the act with continuous applause during the entire act.”

  A Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch critique of her performance at the city’s Keith Theatre: “[Miss Leitzel] possesses chic and alertness. A charmingly impertinent thing, she is with square shoulders and slender legs, a witching face and, heaven knows, she does whirl herself about on rings and ropes and things. This is a marvel because she does … a variety of things in such an insouciant manner.… Truly she is a headliner because what she does requires years of hard work [and] can’t be easily taught.”

  Reviewing her act at Chicago’s Majestic Theatre, the city’s most opulent house, Billboard weighed in a second time on the vaudevillian whose star just kept rising: “Miss Leitzel[’s] … act and personality should bring her the title of ‘Eva Tanguay of the Air.’ ”

  Leitzel was an aerialist, Tanguay was a singer, but the comparison Billboard drew between the two had a certain aptness. What was extraordinary about Leitzel was that she seemed to take sport in battling with the Grim Reaper each time she performed. When she was doing her one-arm planges, especially, she gave everyone an impression that she was on the verge of coming apart. Roland Butler, a press agent, may have put it best: “People got the idea she was flying apart at the seams, like an airplane under stress.” Danger of a different sort was also present in all of Tanguay’s performances. She seemed to be running a risk of being arrested and thrown in jail every time she stepped onstage. While other chanteuses of the day seemed to favor such sappy hits as “The Bells of St. Mary” and “M-O-T-H-E-R,” Tanguay’s repertoire was made up of selections like “Go As Far As You Like” and “I Want Somebody to Go Wild with Me.” Her vocals seemed less like songs than solicitations, and when she was moving across the boards, she presented an impression that she was plugged into a light socket. Her hips were shimmying and her breasts were waggling.

  One thing is clear: Leitzel’s manager, Gene Hughes, liked the Billboard observation that she had a lot in common with the “I Don’t Care Girl.” It was not long before Leitzel was being merchandised on the Keith-Albee vaudeville posters and in newspaper ads as “The Eva Tanguay of the Rings.”

  Standing before Leitzel, just outside the door of her dressing room at the Orpheum Theatre in South Bend, Indiana, were two men, one of them the manager of the theater, the other a stranger who started praising her for the stage performance she had just presented. He introduced himself as a representative for the Barnum & Bailey and Ringling Bros. circuses. Could he, the caller wanted to know, talk to her?

  It was a November night in 1914. Leitzel extended her hand to him and invited the pair into her room. There may have been a twinkling in her eyes, but if so, her tone was probably frosted with a hint of sarcasm “You’re late,” she told the circus man.

  She had been expecting and hoping to hear from an emissary of the Ringling organization for a long time, probably, in fact, since she had started attracting glowing reviews in the trade papers for her appearances in vaudeville.

  The agent was Fred Warrell, who, it turned out, had a home in South Bend.

  He opened a leather briefcase, drew out some printed forms, and got right to the point. He was acting on behalf of the Ringling brothers. More than anything, he said, they wanted her back in their organization.

  Warrell started reading from notes he apparently had made while taking directions from one or another of the Ringlings.

  The circus could offer her $250 a week to start. She would be given star billing. He assured her that when she was presenting her act, she alone would be the single artist appearing in the great tent.

  “You’re late,” Leitzel said again to Warrell. She was taking sport in playing hard to get.

  Warrell may have been worried that his continued employment depended on his success with Leitzel. He threw out more blandishments.

  Few of even the biggest vaudeville theaters had more than fifteen hundred seats, he noted. She could appear before ten times that number of people in just two performances a day in the Ringling brothers’ big top.

  There would hardly be a place anywhere in America where she was not recognized as the Ringling
s’ premier artist, Warrell went on. The circus would honor her with her own posters, giant bills three, four times larger than life that would be pasted on billboards and the sides of stores, factory buildings, and barns. In the entire history of American circuses, there had not been more than a dozen individual stars that had been accorded such a distinction. Finally, Warrell told Leitzel that if she wanted, she could return to vaudeville during the circus’s off-season.

  Leitzel’s mother had been born into the circus, and before her, Leitzel’s grandparents. Her father, Willy Dosta, wherever he was now, had also been a saltimbanque. As much as Leitzel had come to love the popular stage and its players, she had never stopped feeling a powerful urge to return to the circus. The call always came in spring, and it was perhaps inbred, like the urge, atavistic, irresistible, and eternal, that sends the swallows winging from Argentina to Capistrano each March.

  Leitzel did not gibe the Ringling representative again for the tardiness of his call on her. She asked for his pen and the contract.

  A caravan similar to the one that Willy Dosta would have driven, taking twelve-year-old Nellie Pelikan away from her family. (Author’s collection)

  Leitzel, age two, in Breslau. (Author’s collection)

  Lalo, Victoria, and Alfredo Codona when they were appearing in their first circus, a small one-ring family show organized by their father, Edward, that toured Mexico. Lalo is dressed as a clown. Victoria and Alfredo are dressed as aerialist or acrobatic performers. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)

  Leitzel and her brother, Alfred Pelikan, in Breslau circa 1898. (Author’s collection)

  Edward Leamy, manager of the Leamy Ladies and the Leamy Sisters. (Author’s collection)