Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  Several of Ingalls’s charges filled the pews on his side of the aisle, among them Eddy Masher, a “living skeleton,” advertised as weighing just thirty-three pounds; Jim Tarver, a giant, at eight foot three; and Alistair MacWilkie, a Scot with a twelve-foot-long red beard. It was Lionette, though, who attracted the greatest attention on the groom’s side. Not only did the seventeen-year-old “lion girl” have flaxen hair that fell silkily from the sides of her head, but much of her face was covered with it, too.

  The newspapers hailed the wedding as a major event in show business history. The New York Mail, for one, observed that, like Fifth Avenue, the sawdust ring could make claim to at least a few nobles, and called the joining together of Clyde and Leitzel as “a marriage of circus high life.” The New York Sun, referring to Ingalls as “the prince of side showmen” and Leitzel as the “queen of the flying rings,” pronounced the union to be a “marriage of circus aristocracy.”

  And Ingalls undoubtedly did feel like a freshly minted aristocrat soon after the ceremony. He started experiencing the cushiest lifestyle he had ever known. Not only did his bride have a well-appointed Manhattan apartment with around-the-clock doormen, but she also had her own car, a big, new, gleaming black phaeton, along with a chauffeur. She also had Mabel Clemings, who was always there to serve not only as her maid but also as secretary, bookkeeper, confidante, and worshipper.

  On average, Leitzel fired Mabel four times a day—usually before and after each of her matinee and evening shows. After finishing her turns on the Roman rings and harvesting the audience’s applause, Leitzel would head toward the tent’s exit and, with Mabel trailing behind her, launch into a critique on how badly she thought her employee had carried out her job in the big top.

  “Where were you, Mabel? I turned to you to put the wrap on my shoulders and you were six feet away. Six feet! Think of it! And where were my clogs? Where were they? I ask you. Oh, well, you’ll never learn. Don’t come near me! Don’t touch me! I never want to see you again, Mabel. And you say you love me, that you think of me constantly when I’m up there in the air. Don’t try to answer me. I’ve heard it all before. Why don’t you say something? Are you stricken so dumb that you can’t even answer me?”

  As lashing as they were, Leitzel’s tempests rarely lasted longer than it took for her and Mabel to walk to the star’s private tent or train quarters. Leitzel would slump into a chair, blame her rage on the strains of her employment, and beg Mabel for forgiveness, promising she would try harder never to fly out of control again.

  “There, there, ducky,” Mabel would coo. “I understand. Now let me fix you tea.”

  The roustabouts, with all their worldly possessions carried inside bedrolls, along with clowns, daredevils, and bareback riders, started appearing in Madison Square Garden the second and third weeks of March 1920. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was scheduled to launch another new season on the night of March 26, and then, following the New York stay, begin another cross-country tour.

  Because only a small number of Leitzel and Ingalls’s fellow troupers had been able to attend their church wedding, the newlyweds were swarmed in the Garden by well-wishers. All their fellow travelers were trying to kiss the bride and shake the groom’s hand, and some of them were bearing gifts. According to May Wirth, though, it was evident that the marriage, just a month and a half old, was already in trouble.

  “Leitzel and Clyde appeared cold toward one another. A few of us girls got together with Leitzel privately and asked if we could organize a little party to celebrate the marriage. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want anything like that.’ ”

  Because Ingalls rarely ever accumulated enough money to buy his next pair of alligator skin shoes, he was as anxious as anyone to get back to work, to again start getting paid. But that was not the only reason why he was anxious for a new circus season to start. Now, maybe, he would be able to see his bride with some regularity. This had not been the case with the newlyweds up to now.

  Because she had been engaged for a second season in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic during the circus’s off-season, she had disappeared from the couple’s apartment most nights and did not return until a few hours before dawn.

  The few nights when she was not performing in the New Amsterdam Theatre were mostly taken up by appearances at soirees, many of them thrown by people who were connected to the worlds of the circus and theater. She permitted Ingalls to tag along on some of these nights out, but some of the invitations she received, she told him, had been extended only to her.

  As she was leaving their apartment alone for these nights out, she would often call back explanations to her new husband that might sound something like this, according to Fanny McCloskey.

  “Flo and Billie want me to meet one of their dear friends, the owner of a chain of department stores or something like that,” she might say. “Oh, it’s going to be such a boring night. Probably a lot of talk about luggage and white sales. No need to wait up. I’ll be late getting back.”

  At least some of the merriments in which she participated were organized as just two-person affairs, Leitzel and the host, who more times than not, was a gentleman. Flo Ziegfeld and Charley and John Ringling not only encouraged her participation in such outings but sometimes also helped arranged them. They valued her as a potent emissary for their enterprises and believed her liaisons with manufacturers, bankers, newspaper editors, theater managers, and politicians could be useful to them.

  Leitzel seemed not to deny that the expectations she had in a marriage partner could be beyond reason to an extreme, even allowing for her to carry on dalliances with other men. Still, she believed that as a queen, she was entitled to make all the rules in relationship matters and, on at least one occasion, openly discussed her ideal of the perfect man, whether a husband or lover.

  “He must be ever there, waiting for my commands,” she said, “my wishes must be his law. I am high-strung and nervous as a result of my strenuous work, and he must remember this and make allowances for my fits of temper and unreasonableness.”

  She went on to say that she would always react sharply to any man who might try to control her in any way, even if he regarded some of her ways as being capricious.

  “He must be comforting, but he must not be forever under my feet. He must remember that ego is the curse of the professional woman, and he must cater to it.”

  The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus opened its 1920 season with a five-week run at the Garden that ended in May, and then, once again, started rolling elsewhere across America. The apartment that Leitzel and Ingalls shared on the train immediately gained a reputation among the other troupers as an arena for some of the great fights of the century.

  It is likely that at least some of Ingalls’s differences with his bride had to do with Colonel H. Maxwell Howard, her multimillionaire suitor. She was still seeing him at least now and then.

  Harry and Gracie Doll, brother and sister midgets from Germany who sang, danced, and rode horses in the big top, shared a train compartment adjoining Leitzel and Ingalls’s quarters. A lot of mornings, the Dolls’ eyes were rimmed with dark circles when they entered the cookhouse for breakfast.

  “Oh, they were at it again last night,” Harry would explain. “Like cat and dog they were snarling at one another all night. We got no sleep at all.”

  During one especially pitched battle, Leitzel lopped off one of Ingalls’s fingers with a kitchen knife, according to Henry Ringling North, a nephew of the Ringling brothers who was traveling with the circus at the time. After that, whenever Clyde recognized that the tensions were escalating to a dangerous level, he surrendered. Perhaps fearful that he might be risking the loss of a body part even more dear to him than a finger, he gathered a blanket and in the black and blue of night, skulked to the sideshow tent.

  Leitzel and Ingalls had been married a little more than a year when they received a cablegram from Captain Bertram W. Mills, the biggest of Britain’s circus
impresarios. He was lining up acts for his second annual Bertram W. Mills International Circus and Christmas Fair. He wanted to sign Leitzel as his headliner and Clyde as head of the sideshow, as well as the announcer for the arena shows. Leitzel and Ingalls’s marriage was already badly deteriorated, but the offer was hardly one they could pass. Mills’s Circus and Christmas Fair, held each year in Olympia Hall in West Kensington, London, brought together many of the world’s greatest circus all-stars.

  Mills chose two other features for his production from the Ringling-Barnum circus, the nine-member Siegrist-Silbon trapeze troupe and bandmaster Merle Evans. The Americans boarded the Adriatic for the nine-day voyage on November 30.

  “Leitzel and I got so seasick we were sure they’d be burying us at sea,” Evans remembered. “As sick as Leitzel was, though, she put up her rigging in the ship’s hold and practiced every day. She worried that if she laid off too long, she wouldn’t be in shape to perform in Mills’s show.”

  The change in continents had little effect in moderating Leitzel’s instinct for constant socialization. She had hardly stepped off the Adriatic’s gangplank when she became swept up in a whirlwind of endless lunches, dinners, parties, and nights at the theater. As always, Clyde was excluded from most of her rounds. As hurtful as this must have been to him, there was another matter that left him humiliated. Within days after he and Leitzel arrived in London, many of the city’s newspapers began publishing pictures showing Leitzel in the seminude. The photographs, many of them produced by Alfred Cheney Johnston, were too risqué for American newspapers, but such pictorial cheesecake was de rigueur in the British papers, especially the tabloids.

  Mills’s International Circus opened under the patronage of Queen Alexandra to a full house in the five-thousand-seat Olympia the afternoon of December 16. The queen mother, eighty-eight years old and in fragile health, was not present, but the premiere did not lack for glitter in the royal boxes. Princesses Beatrice and Victoria were there, along with the Lord Mayor, Edward C. Moses, and Queen Maud of Norway. Also present were hundreds of wounded World War I soldiers and children from orphanages and institutions for the blind.

  Mills’s production was roundly praised in the press as the most spectacular circus seen in London in years. The circus continued for four weeks, and when it was over, Leitzel and Ingalls made a side trip to Berlin, Germany, to visit for a few days with Nellie, who, at forty-two, was still making regular appearances as a striptease aerialist. Leitzel and Ingalls then sailed back to New York.

  The couple was home for little more than a week when Leitzel began skipping out on Ingalls again, disappearing to fit in some vaudeville engagements before the start of a new circus season.

  In its publicity in the early 1920s, the circus made the claim that Leitzel was earning $6,000 a week. Clearly the claim was absurd. It may have overstated her pay by as much as the third zero.

  Whatever the amount of Leitzel’s pay, it was surely the richest sum awarded to any single big top performer. But few of the troupers begrudged her earnings. She functioned as kind of a one-woman benevolent society whose principal beneficiaries were her fellow travelers. Gretchen Jahn was often a witness to her acts of generosity.

  “There’d be times when the two of us would be walking around the lot and Leitzel would spot some old workingman with raggedy clothes, and shoes that were bound together with twine,” Jahn said. “She’d hand me a twenty-dollar bill and tell me, ‘First chance you have, get this to that man and tell him to shop for a new outfit.’ Other times, she’d learn of someone on the show who didn’t have train fare to visit a sick mother or father somewhere. She’d get train money and extra cash to the worker or performer, and get word to him or her not to worry about ever paying her back.”

  Merle Evans, too, had memories of Leitzel’s largesse.

  “She considered my drummers to be the most important players in the orchestra because they tolled off the count for the crowds as she did her one-arm swing-overs—fifty … fifty-one … fifty-two, and so on,” he said. “She’d come around once a week and slip each of them ten spots. She also gave weekly ten-dollar allowances to the boys who put up and took down her private tent. She handed out ten spots like they were sticks of gum.” Of all the people who came to Leitzel with their hands extended, none called more frequently than Ingalls. Because of the support payments he was making to his earlier wives, and the tabs he had running with several haberdashers, he was broke most of the time.

  Evans was paid twenty-five dollars a week as conductor of the circus’s big orchestra, and he speculated Ingalls was probably drawing similar pay as manager of the sideshow. If that were so, Clyde’s salary was probably but a twentieth of his wife’s salary. He regularly asked Leitzel for handouts.

  “I loathe money,” Leitzel would scream at him. “I never touch it. Talk to Mabel.”

  Ingalls would move on to the maid.

  “How much do you need?” Mabel would inquire.

  Ingalls seemed ever hopeful that one day he would find that Mabel, like Ebenezer Scrooge, had experienced some dramatic transformation that would fill her with the spirit of Christmas.

  “Oh, three or four hundred should see me through,” he would reply.

  “Here’s a tenner,” she would reply. “See that you don’t fritter it away foolishly.”

  Leitzel was never sure where her stipends to Clyde were going. Still, she seems never to have directed Mabel to cut off the allowances. Maybe she considered the payouts a form of penance for not just once, but now twice, failing to vet her prospective mates more closely.

  The two continued to operate in separate spheres, Leitzel the social butterfly, Clyde the stay-at-home husband.

  By the third year of their marriage, if not earlier, Ingalls finally concluded that coexistence with the world’s greatest circus star would never be possible. He started shopping for a new mate. Ultimately he found one in a neighboring tent on the lot. She was Kathleen Baines, a Brit, thirty-three and widowed, and the exhibitor of a gorilla, John Daniel II.

  Leitzel was awarded a divorce from Ingalls on a finding of “irreconcilable differences” on October 15, 1924, in Shreveport, Louisiana. Six months later to the day, the minimal waiting period for divorcees to remarry, Ingalls and Kathleen Baines became husband and wife in New York City.

  The third time—or was it the fourth?—was charmed for Clyde. He and Kathleen had two children, a boy and a girl, and remained together until his death in Sarasota, Florida, on March 17, 1940, at age sixty-four.

  ALFREDO CODONA AND LEITZEL, FOLLOWING THEIR MARRIAGE CEREMONY ON JULY 20, 1928, ON CHICAGO’S LAKEFRONT WHERE THE RINGLING BROS. AND BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS WAS PERFORMING. THE OPEN TOP LANDAULET IN WHICH THE NEWLYWEDS TRAVELED HAD BEEN MODIFIED BY CLOWN MYRON “BUTCH” BAKER SO IT COULD REAR UP ON ITS BACK WHEELS LIKE A RODEO HORSE. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  CHAPTER 15

  For the residents of Wichita Falls, Texas, who left their houses the morning of April 17, 1919, it all must have looked like something that had slipped off a star, something magical and sparkly that dropped from the sky and landed on, of all places, their town. On a dusty scrap of land near the railroad tracks that the day before was a patch of barrenness with only some rusted cans, tumbleweeds, and prairie dogs, tents were rising. Scattered here and there around the canvas stables, sideshow, and big top were a couple dozen gilded and rainbow-splashed parade wagons and floats that took the morning light and flung it back at the sun.

  Sometime after midnight, when all of Wichita Falls was sleeping, the Sells-Floto Circus train had stolen into town. It arrived in style, on a forty-car train, all white with blue lettering, “the prettiest thing that ever moved over the rails,” Billboard declared.

  The town’s forty thousand citizens should have felt well favored. The Sells-Floto Circus’s Wichita Falls matinee and evening performances would be the first of its planned 165-town 1919 tour. Immediately upon their arrival, the roustabouts, working by torchlight, started unloadi
ng the train of its caged wild animals, elephants, horses, tents, parade wagons, and other cargo. By the time the first light of the new day appeared, the show’s here-today, gone-tomorrow encampment was largely established.

  The invading gypsies must have struck the townspeople as members of some lost and ancient tribe. They were black and white, and red skinned, coffee colored, and faintly yellow. They appeared to have come from everywhere, and quite possibly they did.

  Strolling the circus grounds were five or six dozen showgirls, many of them appearing bored at having been deposited in a place of such dusty forlornness. Even in their everyday housedresses, even with curlers in their hair, they were striking, all of them gorgeous enough to be contestants in a beauty contest.

  Greatest in number in the circus tribe were the whiskered, gray-faced, and sweat-soaked men who threw slabs of meat to the lions and tigers, pitched hay at the horses and zebras, and rhythmically swung sledgehammers at the tent stakes.

  There was another distinctive subculture with the traveling show that was not yet seeable to the Wichita Falls townsfolk making early morning explorations of the new show ground. Its members included Carlos Traveno, “The Two-Headed Mexican”; the “Honduras Siamese Twins”; and Kyko and Sulu, a brother and sister from Zanzibar whose heads looked like they had been shaped by a giant pencil sharpener. These “Marvelous Human Prodigies,” along with a dozen and a half others just as remarkable, were hidden behind the canvas flaps of Professor W. F. Palmer’s sideshow annex. Their tent would not be open to the public until closer to the time of the big top’s matinee. By then, Professor Palmer would stand on his bally platform outside the freaks’ showplace, trying to lasso customers from the midway with his rodomontade:

  “You’ll see them all, ladies and gentlemen. You’ll see ‘The Living Venus de Milo,’ a young woman more beautiful than dawn who was born without arms. You’ll see the fattest lady in the world. She weighs more than a piano and is just as wide. There’s a man inside our commodious emporium who twists his arms and legs into pretzels.