Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

Members of the Pelikan clan circa 1897. Seated at the far left in the dark dress is Julia, matriarch of the family. In the foreground is Alfred Pelikan, and to his right, Leitzel and Nellie. Others in the photo likely include Leitzel’s aunts and uncles, Tina, Toni, Adolph, and Horace. Nellie was the star of the world-famous Leamy Ladies at this time, and the family portrait was created during a visit home to the family in Breslau. (Author’s collection)

  Leitzel and Nellie, both members of the Leamy Ladies aerial troupe, around 1904. Mother and daughter were separated by just twelve years. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)

  The Leamy Ladies around 1905, when they were a major circus attraction throughout Europe. From left to right: Leitzel, fourteen; her aunts, Tina and Toni Pelikan; and her mother, Nellie Pelikan, along with Lily Simpson, not a part of the family, who toured with the troupe for a brief period. (Author’s collection)

  The Leamy Ladies made their first appearance with an American circus in 1908, when they were headliners with the Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth, along with the Sisters La Rague, daredevil automobile stunt drivers, and Wotan, a “balloonist” horse. An inset that is part of this poster, from that same year, shows the Leamy Ladies performing on their “trapezone rotaire,” a massive revolving contrivance that was invented by their manager, Edward Leamy. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)

  Barnum & Bailey Circus, 1909—La Belle Victoria’s first year in America and her first season with The Greatest Show on Earth. Victoria’s father, Edward, and Alfredo look up at her on the slack wire. (Courtesy of Greg Parkinson, Baraboo, WI)

  Studio portrait photograph of Lillian Leitzel and her brother, Alfred Pelikan. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)

  Nellie as “Zoe, the Aerial Venus” circa 1918. (Author’s collection)

  Leitzel circa 1918, likely taken during the time she was performing in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic. (Author’s collection)

  IN A HANDWRITTEN INSCRIPTION FROM 1918, TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD LEITZEL OBSERVED “THERE IS A LITTLE BIT OF BAD IN EVERY GOOD GIRL.” (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  CHAPTER 12

  Leitzel gazed through the window of the taxi as it traveled the streets from Baltimore’s train station. She rarely rolled more than a block or two without seeing the woman looking back at her. She felt excitement every time she saw her.

  She was way larger than life, ten feet at least, maybe twelve. She was also so sultry in appearance that she may have caused Leitzel’s cheeks to redden. Her pale skin was bare from her shoulders to the point where her breasts began their swell. She was posed on an ornately carved love seat with a white angora coverlet, and was wearing a spaghetti-strapped, gold camisole that was patterned with twining black flora, along with a tutu of apple-blossom pink and white ballet slippers. Her eyes were greenish blue.

  Leitzel would have recognized the woman anywhere. She saw her every time she looked in the mirror, although never in such Amazon-like proportions. The woman was her. Her outsize likeness seemed to be everywhere in the city, appearing on gigantic, richly colored posters blazing from billboards, fence hoardings, and the exterior walls of department stores, car dealerships, and butcher shops. Each of the posters bore the same legend in orange block lettering:

  Never before had Leitzel received such extravagant billing. She also must have wondered whether she really looked quite that sexy when she was costumed for the circus ring.

  Ten or twelve hours earlier, before it was light, she had boarded a train in Chicago and had traveled all day. She was exhausted but in high spirits as the taxi carried her the last miles of her trip in Baltimore to the tents of the Ringling circus. She had been with the show when it opened its 1915 season in Chicago a few weeks earlier, but then had to stay behind in the city for a short time to appear for the divorce proceedings in the Cook County courthouse in Chicago that she had started against Alexis Sousloff. As it turned out, Sousloff failed to show up in court to contest any of the claims Leitzel made against him. Her petition for the marriage’s dissolution was granted.

  Leitzel was excited at having a chance to appear before the Ringling crowds again, but there was another reason why she was eager to rejoin the circus. She was twenty-three now and believed that the time was right for her to execute a plan, one she had been plotting for a long time.

  She could scarcely believe her eyes when the cab came to a stop at the circus grounds. Although she had appeared with the World’s Greatest Shows only a few weeks earlier when it was playing in the Coliseum in Chicago, she had never before seen the Ringling circus set up on a show lot. She was astonished at its immensity.

  It looked like a municipality, a community made almost entirely out of canvas. The circus’s fifteen-thousand-seat big top dominated the setting, but there were twenty-two other tents, among them a hotel-size cookhouse large enough to seat several hundred workers and performers at one time, stables for the more than seven hundred horses, and a zoo for the show’s thirteen hundred wild animals, including jungle cats, zebras, gorillas, emus, and hippopotami.

  Charley Ringling greeted Leitzel as she stepped from the taxi and immediately started leading her through the high grass on a tour of the lot. The two strolled past tents that had the form of the pyramids of Giza, and seemed almost as large. Next, they passed before the sideshow annex on the midway. Hanging from cables outside the annex and flapping in the breezes like laundry on a clothesline were garishly painted, ten-foot-high banners advertising such human wonders as an Indian rubber man who could tie his arms and legs into Boy Scout knots; a fat lady about a quarter the size of a boxcar; and Princess Wee Wee, a midget claimed to be “Just Twenty-One Inches High—The Smallest Woman in the World.”

  Women sat outside the wardrobe tent, making needle-and-thread repairs to richly ornamented camel and elephant robes and polishing navel stones for the showgirls who would appear with a cast of hundreds in the circus’s opening spectacle, “Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.”

  It all seemed like Camelot to Leitzel. She was almost too excited to speak.

  Finally Charley led her into the big top. Its seats were empty, but equestrians and equestriennes, clowns, wire walkers, trapeze flyers, and acrobats were everywhere, rehearsing their routines. She followed her guide into the center ring, where the Three Jahns were practicing their perch pole act on a twenty-five-foot-long wooden shaft that Carl balanced on his shoulders while his brother, Hans, and Hans’s wife, Gretchen, performed at its top. May Wirth, the circus’s premier equestrienne, was also rehearsing in one of the rings.

  Charley directed Leitzel’s attention to the big top’s ceiling. There, fifty or sixty feet in the air, were her trapeze and Roman rings. She could not wait to return to them, but not this day. What she needed most at the moment was a good night’s sleep.

  She was stifling yawns as Charley kept talking, and then she put a question to him that she had been wondering about all day.

  “Do you know the living arrangements that have been made for me on the show?”

  Charley looked at her with solicitude.

  “Oh, forgive me, my dear,” he said. “Of course you must be bone tired. You’ve been on a train all day. We’ll see to it that a porter fixes a bed for you. You’ll be in a sixty-four car, one for the single girls.”

  Leitzel’s expression of wonderment dissolved in an instant. She was incredulous. She could not believe what she had just heard from Charley Ringling. A bunk, maybe a shared bunk, in a sleeper with sixty-three other performers? This for a star advertised on the posters as the “World’s Most Marvelous Lady Gymnast”?

  She folded her arms in front of her, stewed for a bit, and then launched into a tirade.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Ringling, you can go straight to hell if you think you’re going to put me up in a car with sixty other girls like so many piglets going to market,” she hissed. “I know I’m a star and you know I’m a star. I expect to be treated accordingly. Consider me to be on strike until you can provide me
with my own private quarters.”

  Invectives continued to spew from her like fiery magma exploding out of Vesuvius.

  Charley unbuttoned his suit jacket from his paunchy middle, and then rebuttoned it. Then he unbuttoned it again and, once more, rebuttoned it. His normally pinkish face turned ashen. He looked as if he might have lunched on some tainted pork stew in the cookhouse and was now suffering severe stomach cramps.

  By now, the Three Jahns had interrupted their practice but remained in the center ring. “Our jaws had dropped,” May Wirth said. “Here was this little bitty thing dressing down our big boss.”

  Charley’s attempts at placating Leitzel went nowhere. The pair exited the big top and rapped at the door of Mister John’s office wagon.

  “The three met there for at least an hour,” Wirth said. “Leitzel was all sweetness when she stepped outside again. Mister John appeared to be in good spirits, too, although Charley was still looking a bit wan.”

  The solution that had been worked out in the first of what would be numerous summit meetings between the three was designed to take care of the immediate crisis, as well as ensure that Leitzel would be comfortably and peacefully cosseted in the long term.

  She was to spend the first of her nights with the circus in the rail car that Charley shared with his wife, Edie. After that, she would be moved into quarters on the train that were entirely her own. This second step would necessitate the shifting of one of the show’s top executives from the private and quiet lodging he had been enjoying to a bunk in one of the sixty-four cars.

  From its beginnings a century and a half ago as a multiple-ring, railroad-traveling enterprise with Notre Dame Cathedral–size big tops, the modern American circus has had its kings. Before the Ringling brothers, there were Phineas Taylor Barnum and James A. Bailey, and before them, a few other monarchs whose reigns did not last long enough for their names to get permanently written on the public imagination. Never in its history, though, did the circus empire have a genuine queen.

  Although born illegitimately and without a pedigree of royal lineage, Leitzel decided at an early stage that she alone was destined to fill the vacancy. She had carried that plan with her the day she traveled to Baltimore. Without filling out an employment application or submitting to a job interview, and certainly without the pomp and circumstance of a coronation, she simply assumed the position. She was sure the circus public wanted it this way. Where was there another star in pink tights who was washed over with the kind of love and adulation that she received when she appeared before audiences?

  Leitzel, of course, never openly declared to the Ringling brothers that she was the circus’s first, only, and last queen. But they knew very quickly that something momentous had changed in the royal court, and that somebody new was calling a lot of the shots.

  Leitzel made another change about the same time she assumed occupancy of a throne that had remained empty since the very beginning of the circus. She changed her first name from Leopoldina to Lillian, apparently believing that her christened name was just too Old World–sounding and that the time was now right to assume an identity that was more American. In presenting her to crowds, the ringmasters starting intoning her name as “Le-e-E-E-tol-l-l Lillian Leitzel” and, in not much time at all, her name began appearing as “Lillian Leitzel” on her posters and in the circus’s press materials.

  Within a week after setting up housekeeping in her new apartment on the train, Leitzel had a creature comfort delivered into the space, a shiny, new spinet piano. Late at night and sometimes at one or two o’clock in the morning, to the pleasure of some but not all her neighbors on the train, she played Mozart, Chopin, and the rags of Scott Joplin as the circus flyer rolled through the coal towns of Virginia and the cornfields of Kansas.

  Then, soon after gaining her own private train quarters, Leitzel knocked at the door of Mister John’s office wagon again. She was swarmed by worshippers wherever she appeared on the lot, she explained. She loved the attention, but now and then she needed moments to herself, yet more privacy. She needed her own tent where she could take sanctuary.

  No other circus performer had ever had such a perquisite. John balked but acceded when Leitzel showed him a collection of telegrams she had received from theater agents pleading with her to return to vaudeville.

  Her tent was always staked near the rear of the big top, close to the performers’ entranceway. Fit for a sultana, it was appointed with satin drapes, Oriental rugs, and rattan furniture.

  As resistant to Leitzel’s cottage as Mister John was at first, he came to view it as an important capital improvement, a place where visitors of rank could feel they were being received with special hospitality.

  Leitzel held tea parties in her tent for President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge whenever the circus was playing in Washington, D.C. The Coolidges returned her hospitality. On at least one occasion, they invited her for a sleepover at the White House. Leitzel accepted the invitation, but not wanting to appear overly anxious, she turned up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW late enough to look fashionable.

  Henry Ford was another regular caller at Leitzel’s blue-and-white-striped tent and train apartment. The industrialist was among the most ardent of her admirers, and on all his visits, he presented her with bouquets of flowers. Dropping in day and night at Leitzel’s canvas residence, too, were senators, governors, mayors, newspaper publishers, and bank presidents, as well as such major stars of the stage and screen as Will Rogers, Fanny Brice, the Marx Brothers, and Charlie Chaplin.

  Most of the guests receiving entrée into Leitzel’s private sanctum were there only because they were eager to spend a social hour or two with the circus’s most glamorous artist. But Leitzel apparently was also welcoming to at least a few visitors, some of them midnight callers, who came to her door with other intentions.

  Mister John was not at all amused when he received a report from the show’s detective that Leitzel was regularly entertaining gentlemen in her stateroom late at night. Management promptly delivered a carefully worded letter to her, spelling out the circus’s policy on such matters. The missive, in part, read: “We have always had a rule that persons not connected with the show are not to be admitted to sleeping cars or dressing rooms. This has never been considered a privation by anyone, and should not be so considered by you as there is nothing personal to you in its application.” Leitzel ignored the directive. As queen of the big top, she was above taking orders from Parliament.

  Of all the potentates who streamed to Leitzel’s train quarters and tent, none was more warmly welcomed by Leitzel than Colonel H. Maxwell Howard of Dayton, Ohio.

  Colonel Howard was the founder and president of one of the country’s largest paper manufacturing operations, the Howard Allied Paper Mills, which had four plants in Ohio. He lived in perhaps the showiest residence in the Dayton area, a three-story Norman castle perched on a high hill on the city’s outskirts, and also maintained a stable of racing horses. Several of his ponies were to gain immortality in racing’s annals, including Stagehand, who pounded past Seabiscuit at the finish line in a Santa Ana Handicap that many horse racing historians still regard as the most thrilling Thoroughbred run ever.

  Colonel Howard and Mister John, perhaps because both were fabulously wealthy, appeared to be the closest of friends. The two often strolled the circus lot together, or sat with each other in a box inside the big top. It seemed likely to many on the show that Mister John introduced the colonel to Leitzel.

  Because the colonel raced ponies, lived in a castle, and considered circuses to be his favorite form of entertainment, it seemed surprising to others that there was nothing at all flashy about his outward appearance. He could have passed as a mortician. He wore rimless glasses, was bald except for a fringe of white hair that half circled his head, and wore expensively tailored three-piece suits that were either mouse gray or brown.

  Howard was twenty-five years older than Leitzel. He also had a wife back home. Some of Leitzel�
�s fellow travelers on the show wondered why she was attracted to him. The colonel was not just a millionaire but a multimillionaire, and this was in an era when there were fewer than two hundred people in America whose net worth reached a million dollars. It seems unlikely, though, that Leitzel was unduly impressed with the Daytonian’s riches. She was well short of qualifying for millionaire status herself, but she was by far the most richly compensated artist with any circus.

  Soon after the two became chummy, Howard set Leitzel up in an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York, a place he visited often to carry out business for his papermaking operations. On each of his reunions with his inamorata, whether on the circus lot or at her apartment, he also presented her with furs and jewelry, although she tended to respond more warmly to such lagniappe as chocolates and flowers. On one occasion, he simply placed an envelope in her hand. Her face crinkled in an expression of distain when she opened the envelope and removed its papers.

  Leitzel might have hoped that the envelope contained a letter in which Howard poured out his love for her, or perhaps described a future in which the two lived together as husband and wife.

  “Now I just took the liberty of bringing along these shares of General Motors preferred,” the colonel said by way of explaining his offering.

  “Money, money,” she snapped upon seeing the stock certificates. “What do I care for money? Get them out of my sight.”

  Always unaccompanied, Howard turned up on the circus lot in different towns a half dozen times or so each touring season, and when he did, he typically stayed three or four days before disappearing, according to Fanny McCloskey, a perch pole artist, elephant rider, ballet girl, and close friend of Leitzel’s. Neither she nor any of her fellow performers fully understood the nature of Leitzel’s relationship with him, but all of them had suspicions.