Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  Leitzel was seated in her dressing room, waiting for her turn onstage, when she was disturbed by the noise the first time. It was a loud, rushing clattering that rattled not only her room but also her nerves. After a few moments, the annoying commotion filled her room again, though now filtered by the sounds of the orchestra or the laughter Fields or Brice were drawing from the crowd.

  Then, in a little time, the clattering returned, went on for thirty seconds or a minute, and then again quieted, but never for long.

  Leitzel was becoming more and more disturbed by each of the noisy disruptions. As it was, she had already been experiencing opening-night jitters. As she would comment later, “In all my years in the circus and vaudeville, never had I been as nervous about appearing before the public as I was in Mr. Ziegfeld’s club.”

  There was a knock at Leitzel’s door, and then it opened a crack. The stage manager called in that her act would begin in minutes.

  She left her room, moved through a hall, and stopped at a curtained entranceway that opened onto the floor. Then her name was announced by the emcee, and the frightful clattering started again, only this time, because she was outside her dressing room, the disturbance was louder than ever. Now she understood its source. The clubbers were pounding at their glass tables with wooden mallets. Ziegfeld had provided the hammers for what he said was the protection of the guests. He knew he had the most spectacular show in town. By showing their approbation for the entertainers by pounding the mallets, the guests could spare their hands from turning into bloody pulps.

  Bobby Cronkleton, Leitzel’s rigger and property boy, was already on the stage when she took her first steps onto the floor. At first sight of her, he may have thought she was nude. She was wearing a flesh-colored, loose-fitting, barely-there tutu. Under the arms of her bodice were two large openings through which Cronkleton likely got his first look at his employer’s bare bosom. Cronkleton, nineteen or twenty, had been with Leitzel two or three years, carrying out the rigging for all her circus and vaudeville performances. He had never before seen her in such a revealing costume.

  If Leitzel initially had any qualms about appearing before the public in such revealing dress, she likely disburdened herself of them after seeing the examples of the Frolic showgirls. She had observed that Ziegfeld’s girls, though half naked, commingled with the crowds with hardly any more self-consciousness than the veil-faced matrons filing into St. Patrick’s Cathedral Sunday mornings.

  But it may have been a man, rather than any of Ziegfeld’s enchantresses, who gave Leitzel her greatest lessons in merchandising her sexuality to the audience. Alfred Cheney Johnston listed his occupation as a portrait photographer, but such a characterization was hardly any more descriptive than calling Van Gogh a “colorer.” Johnston, who maintained a studio in the Hotel des Artistes with neighbors such as Noël Coward, Isadora Duncan, and the painter Howard Chandler Christy, served as a kind of Professor Henry Higgins to all of Ziegfeld’s new hires. He was a brilliant photographer, but his greater importance was in mentoring waitresses and shop clerks who aspired to places in the impresario’s chorus line. He directed them on how to color their faces with rouge and lipstick and kohl. He coached them on how to move, how to pose, how to bat their eyelashes. He showed them how, with one-dollar swatches of satin, silk, and tulle not much bigger than handkerchiefs, they could create costumes whose effect on the male animal could be as incendiary as any getup Cleopatra ever wore inside her boudoir.

  Leitzel had spent part of two or three weeks in Johnston’s studio before turning up for her first performance in the Midnight Frolic. Johnston must have found her to be a malleable subject. He produced at least a dozen eleven-by-fourteen-inch, hand-colored photographs of her, depicting her variously as an innocent with her virginity still available, as a gypsy peasant, and as a seductress.

  The clattering of the wooden mallets was rushing at Leitzel as she curtsied before the audience.

  Her preshow jitters vanished. There was no place in the world where she was more at ease than on her trapeze bar and Roman rings.

  In an instant, she was again frolicking in air, soaring on her trapeze, cartwheeling while gripping a hand ring. Her perpetual motion was reflected in flashing blurs on the glass stage and staircases.

  The audience applauded appreciatively, and a few patrons pushed themselves up from their chairs to give her a standing ovation, but the reaction from the clubbers was nothing like the din that resounded whenever she finished her act in the big top or on the vaudeville stages. Maybe the subdued response she received was simply because the Frolic audience was far smaller than those before which she usually performed, she concluded. Or maybe it was that the people of the high life had unusual reserve. Or maybe it was because the patrons believed that as a circus performer, she was completely miscast in the company of the belles and beaux of Broadway, and that was the thought that was most in her head as she left the floor.

  It was three or four o’clock in the morning. Leitzel had changed into her street clothes, but she was almost too tired to leave for home. The crowd had thinned, but some revelers were still in the Aerial Gardens, drinking, dining, and dancing to an orchestra.

  Bird Millman was the first to drop by her dressing room. She embraced Leitzel, congratulated her, and told her she was the greatest circus performer she had ever seen.

  In time, Bert Williams, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, and all of her other coheadliners dropped in. She had been a sensation in her Frolic debut, each said, and told her they felt honored to be able to appear on the same stage with her. Each then wished her a good night, or what little was left of it, and disappeared.

  Finally appearing were Billie and Flo. Billie covered Leitzel’s cheeks with kisses. She told her how proud she and her husband were to have her in the revue. Ziegfeld was more reserved, but he shook her hand. He was carrying a first edition of the morning New York World and opened it to the theater page. He drew her attention to a column headlined “New Ziegfeld Frolic Loveliest of All,” and then pointed to an observation a critic had made about her performance.

  “Lillian Leitzel, ‘Aerial Frolic,’ deserves—and will get—a paragraph by itself. She is the most amazing performer on the flying rings and the dangling ropes that this metropolis has ever seen.”

  Billie and Flo were in their coats. Their car was parked on Forty-Second Street right outside the New Amsterdam, with their chauffeur at the wheel, the motor running. It would be no trouble at all to drop her at her apartment on their way home, Billie assured Leitzel.

  “What a grand, grand night it had been,” Leitzel would later report to her brother, Alfred.

  As she rolled through the dark and now quiet and nearly empty streets with her deliverers, Leitzel was still thinking about her newly acquired friends, all of them nobles. She revered them all—even Bird Millman. Maybe especially Bird Millman, for a long time her nemesis and now, after this night, a dear and lovely friend.

  CHAPTER 14

  It was a question debated by the stable hands shoveling manure in the horse tents, the chalk-faced clowns, and, most animatedly, by the midgets, bearded lady, living skeleton, and Frank Lentini, the three-legged man, in the sideshow annex.

  How could it have happened?

  Leitzel changed suitors with about the same frequency that she changed earrings. In every town where the circus appeared, trails were beaten in the grass to her train quarters and private tent. Many of her callers were young men with high posts in finance, manufacturing, or show business. With such a wide field of admirers, how could it happen she would tumble for, of all people, Clyde William Ingalls, manager of the sideshow?

  “The pairing of Clyde and Leitzel seemed no less astonishing than the creation of the first centaur,” observed Merle Evans, the circus’s bandmaster. “Who would have predicted that there would be an attraction between two beings that were so distinct from one another? The romance that flowered between them may be the best example since time began that love is blin
d.”

  Ingalls had a prognathic jaw that some thought gave him the profile of a Neanderthal man. He towered over Leitzel by almost a foot and a half, weighed about two and a half times her ninety-five pounds, and, at forty-six, he was nearly twenty years older than she. The contrasts of the pair did not end with their eye-jarring physical distinctions. Leitzel was by far the most fabulously compensated contract employee with the circus; Ingalls, in the words of Merle Evans, “didn’t have a pot to pee in.” Ingalls also had what a lot of single women might have regarded as another drawback to the budding of a serious romance. He already had a wife, a shy girl from Iowa named Neil. She was at least the second Mrs. Ingalls, maybe the third.

  The romance between Leitzel and Ingalls started in 1919.

  This was a momentous year in the history of both the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circuses. The year before, at the end of the tours of the two circuses, John, Charley, and Alf T. Ringling arrived at a decision that shook the ground of the show world. The two giant circuses would no longer exist as separate entities. The following spring, the two circuses were to be merged into a single megashow, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, or what the press was quick to characterize as “The Colossus of All Amusements.”

  The consolidation was dictated, in large part, because the brothers saw a need to achieve greater economies in their operational costs. By joining the two formerly competing shows as one, they could make vast cuts in their transportation costs by moving with just one train instead of two. Even more significantly, they could slash their labor costs. Hundreds of workmen had been needed on each of the shows to load and unload the trains, and put up and take down the tents. Not only had the circus been paying these workers each week, but it had also been providing them with meals and bunks. Through the merging of the Ringling and Barnum & Bailey shows, the labor costs could be halved.

  But there was yet another reason why the time had come to join the two amusement behemoths. During the thirty-four years the Ringlings had been touring as showmen, there had been times when there were as many as seven brothers to handle the top management posts. By 1918, the brothers’ ranks had been significantly thinned by deaths. John, Charley, and Alf T. were the only brothers still active in the circus operations, and Alf, director of press relations, was in failing health.

  In their crafting of the new supercircus, the Ringlings drew up a list of their most valuable and loyal employees, including performers. The remainder of their attachés, likely a thousand or more men and women, were let go.

  As the most famous circus performer in the world, Leitzel, of course, topped the list of contracted employees whose jobs were secure. Ingalls, formerly manager of the Barnum & Bailey Circus sideshow, was also retained. A condition of his employment was that he bring along his most celebrated freaks. With his switch to what would be a brand-new circus, Ingalls apparently believed the time was also right to make another change in wives. He wasted little time in going after Leitzel.

  Different theories evolved among the circus’s travelers about how Leitzel could have fallen under Ingalls’s spell. Some, including Evans, thought she may have viewed him as a stand-in for the father she never had. But it seemed more widely conjectured that Leitzel was drawn to Clyde because of his undeniable gifts of persuasion.

  Like the anteater-nosed Cyrano de Bergerac, Ingalls may have had some physical features that a lot of young women might have found off-putting in their first meetings with him. But, also in common with the rapier-wielding Cyrano, Clyde was a master wordsmith. He could string them together in sentences that gleamed like strands of pearls against black velvet. Ingalls cultivated his skills at declamation through years of lecturing midway crowds on the virtues of the tattooed lady, the ossified man, and the two-and-a-half-foot-tall midget mother with a six-foot-two son.

  “They’re all real, they’re all alive, and they’re all anxious to meet you, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys,” he would tempt the towners from an elevated platform outside his one-hundred-by-three-hundred-foot-long tent. “You can talk to them, they will talk to you. The cost for entering our capacious, clean, and comfortable pavilion is a mere twenty-five cents for the gentlemen and gentle ladies, a thin dime for the young ones. A great bargain, if you ask me, for making new friends you’ll have for life. You can stay inside for as long as you wish. You’ll thank me on the way out for presenting you with the time of your lives.”

  If all human beings were equipped with lungs like Ingalls’s, the loudspeaker would have been an unnecessary invention.

  “His voice was so booming you could hear him a quarter mile away,” said Freddie Freeman, a clown, bareback rider, and trapeze flyer. “It also had mellifluence. When he was lecturing, his voice reminded you of those scenes in those biblical movies by Cecil B. DeMille where the clouds part, the sky opens, and, in a tone that’s like roaring wind, God says something like, ‘Hey, Noah, I want you to build an ark.’ ”

  The effect was always the same once Ingalls gathered a crowd, or what circus people called a “tip.” He would start his lecture, and instantly, the sideshow tent, as though it had been turned into a powerful vacuum cleaner, would begin sucking the towners off the midway and through its canvas flaps.

  Some believed W. C. Fields studied Ingalls’s manner before developing his portrayal of J. Eustace McGargle for the movie Sally of the Sawdust. Ingalls wore loud checkered suits, boutonnieres, alligator skin shoes, and Panama hats with brims that seemed large enough to provide shade for two.

  Because he was still married, he and Leitzel, at least early in their relationship, tried carrying on their romance in secret. Merle Evans recalled an occasion when he unintentionally surprised the pair. It happened in an early morning after Evans woke in his bed inside the parked train and heard a galop playing inside his head. The bandmaster was quite commonly treated to such predawn musical interludes. Evans was the originator of much of the circus’s music, whether the marches for the grand entries or the lilting waltzes to which the trapeze artists flew. Most of the compositions that Evans heard playing in his head in the predawn hours were, in his view, just so-so, even derivative. He was able to turn them off and go back to sleep. Now and then, though, he heard melodies that struck him as being quite good, although none was ever perfect in its playing.

  “I looked at these tunes as fixer-uppers,” Evans said. “With a little tinkering, maybe beefing up the brass section here, putting in some crashing cymbals there, I could often turn them into music that was a little more, oh, Sousa-like.”

  When Evans awoke to hear a new composition coming on, he would quietly slip out of bed, careful not to disturb Neva, his sleeping wife. He would put on a robe, gather some blank music paper and the instrument on which he did all his composing, his cornet. He then went out into the darkness, trying different things with his muted horn to bring refinement to the tune in his head.

  “One early morning while I wandered the circus lot, playing with different passages, I happened on one of the most heavily billed freaks of Clyde’s freaks, ‘Zip, The What Is It?’ Zip, who was advertised as ‘The Last Living Link between Ape and Man,’ was an ancient, stooped-over man with a head no bigger than a Jonathan apple. He was also an imbecile—didn’t even have the intelligence of a four-year-old—but he was harmless.

  “Zip was lying in some weeds and bawling like a baby,” Evans went on. “He was wearing the same outfit he always wore on Clyde’s stage, kind of a caveman’s getup made of leopard skin, with one strap over a shoulder. Zip had no idea where he was. Maybe he had gotten into a bottle of hooch. I felt sorry for him. I took his hand and led him back to the sideshow. The tent was pitch-black inside, but I heard rustling near the stage. I lit a match and moved toward the noise. That’s when I saw Leitzel and Clyde. Both were straightening their clothes. ‘What are you doing here at this hour?’ they asked me. And I replied, ‘No, the question is, what are you are doing here? It’s three in the morning.’ ”

 
; Evans could not remember paying any future calls at the sideshow during the dead of night. More than once, though, he said, when it was lights-out everywhere on the lot, he spotted Ingalls entering Leitzel’s stateroom.

  “On the circus, everybody’s crowded together like candy in a gum-ball machine,” he noted. “No secret can survive long. I think everybody on the show soon knew of the hanky-panky between Clyde and Leitzel.”

  Certainly Neil Ingalls learned of her husband’s dalliances. The newly combined Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had been on the road for only a month or two in 1919 when, with her heart broken, Neil left for her hometown of Burlington, Iowa. She promptly began legal proceedings. Within a year, the couple was divorced.

  Leitzel and Ingalls wed on the afternoon of January 29, 1920, in a Baptist church in West New York, New Jersey. Because it was off-season for the circus, most of their fellow troupers were scattered everywhere in the country and unable to attend. Still there were well-wishers on hand, and it is likely the church pastor, the Reverend John Lehment, had never before seen his house of worship filled with a stranger mix of high and low congregants.

  On the bride’s side of the aisle were some friends from Broadway like Billie Burke, Fanny Brice, and Ed Wynn. Among the attendees from the circus was May Wirth, the loveliest and most dazzling of the circus’s equestriennes, and Bird Millman, with whom Leitzel had become especially close since their working together in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic. Wirth, as always, made her appearance at the church in exceptional style. She was dressed entirely in white and had been ferried to the church in a white limousine driven by a chauffeur who was also liveried in white.