Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  The party, a fete, really, was intended to pay high honor to F. W. Murnau, the German-born film director. It was hosted by ringmaster Fred Bradna and his wife, Ella, inside and outside their Pullman coach. Their car, along with all the others on the Ringling train, was idled on a railroad track siding alongside the circus lot in Lynchburg, Virginia.

  The Murnau reception was an invitation-only occasion, limited to the circus’s top executives and the most elite of its performers, among them Leitzel, of course, The Flying Codonas, bareback rider May Wirth, wire walker Berta Beeson, and bandmaster Merle Evans. The party was received by the circus’s crème de la crème as the social event of the 1927 season. It may have been the social event of several seasons.

  Rarely did more than a few days pass on the circus without an appearance by at least one genuine grandee from the outside world, a matinee idol, an opera diva, maybe a Supreme Court justice. Management treated such visitors as royals. Their names and stations were announced to the crowd as they were escorted to boxes beside John and Mable Ringling.

  Because of the frequency with which golden people turned up at the circus, the performers and workhands, while unfailingly welcoming and cordial, were rarely unduly impressed. Their reception for Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was different. Everyone fawned over him.

  Murnau was widely acknowledged to be the first true genius of moviemaking. Like Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Beethoven, he was one of those far-seers who, after being drawn to an art medium, reinvented it and established new standards for elevating it to a pinnacle never before reached.

  The motion picture industry was still in its infancy, barely two decades old. But more than any figure before him, Murnau showed film’s malleability for revealing human drama with the complexity and emotional pitch of the greatest theater and opera. With Nosferatu, the first vampire movie, and others of his early movies, he developed a stylistic vocabulary that would be appropriated by almost every important filmmaker who would succeed him. Among the more revolutionary approaches he brought to the cinematic art was a subjective point of view through which the psychological makeup and inner thoughts of the characters were revealed by using the camera’s lens to peer out at the world as though seeing through the characters’ eyes.

  Murnau was lured from Germany to Hollywood in 1926 by William Fox, head of Fox Studios. He wasted no time in starting on a new picture, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. The film, released in 1927, received the first-ever award from the newly created Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Picture (Unique and Artistic Production). The movie’s star, Janet Gaynor, took home the Academy Award for Best Actress.

  Murnau was tall, thin, and, at thirty-nine, still boyish-looking. He may not have been totally at ease at the party the Bradnas had thrown for him. He was shy and not comfortably fluent in English. For much of the day and night, though, performers and show executives were gathered before him two and three deep. They were not truckling entirely because of his vaunted reputation. They knew the director was far along in developing the script for a second Fox movie, one to be set against the backdrop of a circus. Knowing this, many of the admirers that day viewed Murnau as a one-man job fair.

  Merle Evans explained: “Everyone was having secret thoughts of worming their way into his movie. That goes for Fred and Ella Bradna, and even John Ringling. And, I’ll admit it, even me. Even I thought about how grand it would be to work for the greatest film director in the world. What could be more glamorous than going to Hollywood during the off-season, getting a part in a movie, and getting paid for it?”

  Murnau had linked up with the Ringling cavalcade to carry out research for his new movie. He was intent on absorbing everything he could about the circus and the lives and work of its nomads. He expressed amazement at how, within an hour and a half after the circus train and its thousand travelers had arrived in a new town, an entire tented burgh would rise up on a dusty lot, with the calliopes piping ragged tunes for the first comers and the vendors out in force, selling peanuts, cotton candy, and tiny green lizards in lapel harnesses.

  “The circus,” Murnau observed, “is a complete community, each member of which knows where he has to be at a certain minute and what he has to do. And he does his work quietly, speedily, and efficiently.”

  Murnau got up with the show’s earliest risers, and did not slip back into his bunk until after everyone else was asleep. He climbed the rope ladder to the dizzying height of the Codonas’ trapeze rigging. There, sitting on the perch, he made sketches of Alfredo rapidly rolling head over heels through space, and the vertiginous view down to the safety net fifty feet below. He spent much of his days strolling the lots, interviewing not just the muscled acrobats and primped and talcumed equestriennes, but also the fetid men who drove the tent stakes and slept in the train’s stock cars with the camels and elephants.

  So deeply did Murnau fall under the circus’s spell that he might have been close to staying with it forever.

  “If I had remained another day,” he told a reporter, “I believe that I would have joined the parade.… When the bugle blows for the start of a new performance, everyone says, ‘There she goes,’ and they join the opening parade around the arena with the same enthusiasm as if it were the first day of the circus.”

  After a week or ten days, though, Murnau did leave to return to Hollywood, his briefcase filled with drawings, notes from interviews, and rolls of exposed film.

  For all the hopes Mister John and the circus’s center ring stars had of finding places in Murnau’s movie, the director did not turn out to be a grand employer. F. W. offered work to just three Ringling employees, The Flying Codonas. He may have viewed Lalo and Clara as stunt players who were mostly coming along for the ride, but he absolutely needed Alfredo’s services. Alfredo was the single trapeze flyer in the world who could execute the Salto Mortale, The Triple, the feat for which the movie’s antihero was celebrated.

  Murnau’s planned film was to be an adaptation of Four Devils, a novella by Herman Bang, an experimental Danish writer and a friend of Henrik Ibsen. Bang’s book related the misadventures of an acclaimed but ultimately tragic trapeze flyer identified in the story as Fritz Cecchi. The slim book—it was titled De Fire Djaevle in Danish—had been published to wide popular and critical attention in 1890.

  That was three years before Alfredo was born. But he so startlingly resembled the book’s protagonist inside and outside the circus world that he might have been Fritz’s doppelgänger.

  Like Fritz, Alfredo was born into the circus and began performing when he was little more than a tot. And also like Fritz, Alfredo momentarily stopped the hearts of almost every woman who turned her gaze his way. And just as was true for Bang’s fictional character, Alfredo flirted with death in every performance. While he was famed for the perilous Triple, Bang’s Fritz was hailed for the identical feat, described in his novella as “The Leap of Death.”

  Murnau had already cast the movie’s two principals. Charles Morton, twenty years old and a new contract player with Fox, was given the part of the Fates-tempting Fritz Cecchi. He selected Janet Gaynor to portray Marion, a co-flyer in Fritz’s trapeze troupe who had the name Aimee in the original Bang story. Fritz and Marion had been in love from the time both were newly orphaned children traveling with a one-wagon gypsy circus.

  Morton had wavy dark hair, dashing good looks, and a physique that suggested he could have been valedictorian of a graduating class at Bernarr Macfadden’s American College of Physical Education. His frame was that of a Y, moving in a straight line from his feet to his rib cage and then flaring widely right and left. As hunky as Morton was, though, he was an acrophobe. He became palsied and his teeth began chattering whenever he was directed to climb to the trapeze’s perch and merely stand there and pose for the cameras. Even with Murnau’s genius at using cameras to present an appearance of verisimilitude to any improbable situations, he would have been hard-pressed to trick up things enough to convincingly show Morton execut
ing a Leap of Death from the trapeze, the maneuver key to the story. That was where Murnau wanted Alfredo to come in, to double for the leading man. Alfredo, of course, had done movie stunting before, carrying out the stunning flying for Emil Jannings’s character in Varieté, E. A. Dupont’s masterpiece.

  Alfredo was a changed man after being handpicked by Murnau. He could always fly through the air. Now he gave his fellow troupers an impression that he could also walk on it.

  “Alfredo was given to dark moods a lot of the time, but he was as excited as could be about going to Hollywood,” Merle Evans said. “He was as bright as a new penny, a good-time Charlie, outgoing, joking, and friendly to everybody.”

  Well, not everybody. Not Clara.

  The final straw for her came November 2, 1927, the eve of the circus’s final performance of its tour season. She discovered her husband in bed with another woman. It was not the first time she saw Alfredo engaged in flagrante delicto, she stated, just the last time.

  Clara did not identify Alfredo’s fille de joie by name. Nor did she specify exactly where she witnessed the pair lying together. It seems likely, though, that the other woman was Leitzel, and since Clara claimed to have witnessed “numerous” other incidents of her husband’s extramarital couplings, the last pairing she saw likely occurred inside Clara and Alfredo’s train quarters.

  If Alfredo and Leitzel had been less than cautious in choosing a trysting place, it may have been because their libidos had completely taken control over them. They may have seen the afternoon or night of November 2 as a last chance at lovemaking for what would be a long time.

  The Ringling tents were then spread in Tampa, Florida. After traveling to 119 cities in 34 states and four Canadian provinces, the circus was to present its last show of the season there the following day. Alfredo and Leitzel were then due to go their separate ways, she back to New York to resume her usual rounds of winter engagements in vaudeville, and he to Hollywood to begin the shooting for Murnau’s movie, whose title he modified from Bang’s Four Devils to 4 Devils.

  Alfredo was sick with grief at the thought of separating from Leitzel even for a short time. He was sure that once she was back in her Central Park apartment, she would be resuming her dalliances with Colonel H. Maxwell Howard. The realization was almost more than he could bear. What besides the colonel’s massive wealth could Leitzel see in such an old coot? he wondered.

  Clara continued to confront Alfredo about his infidelity. He refused to discuss the subject. He told her that nothing he did anymore should be a concern to her. When Clara continued to press him on the matter, Alfredo became so angry that he struck her, and, in her words, caused her “great physical pain and mental anguish.”

  Following the circus’s season-closer in Tampa, the train traveled just thirty-five miles farther south to the circus’s newly established winter quarters in Sarasota. From there, Alfredo and Lalo and Lalo’s wife, Anita, boarded another train to return to Long Beach. For the first time since they had married, Clara did not accompany her husband on the trip to the Codona family home. She was on another train, this one heading for her hometown of Cincinnati.

  On December 22, nine days after the tenth anniversary of his marriage to Clara, a process server delivered the court papers to Alfredo at the Long Beach home of Edward and Hortense. He did not contest any of the claims made in the document, including one charging him with “extreme cruelty” to Clara and another alleging that on “sundry occasions,” he had been guilty of adultery.

  Clara was granted the divorce on December 27, 1927, without a challenge.

  From the outside, the sprawling, wooden structure looked no more imposing than a barn, a drab, windowless cowhouse. Inside, it was another matter. Still smelling of new paint and plaster, and just-installed but yet-unused upholstered seats, its interior glimmered with the soft glow of the opulent circus theaters found in European capitals. The hall’s steeply banked seats, sectioned in three tiers, surrounded an oval hippodrome. There was a great, velvet curtain at one end of the building, the entranceway for the performers, horses, and elephants.

  It was January 3, 1928, the first day of production on 4 Devils at Fox Studios off Sunset and Western Avenues in Hollywood.

  The scene inside the newly slapped-up circus theater was one of outrageous chaos. In the center of the hippodrome, welders and riveters were cobbling together a massive puzzlement of steel beams that had all the actors speculating on just what it could be. Elsewhere on the earthen floor, inside a white painted wooden ring, a trainer was rehearsing a trio of elephants through headstands and two-legged pirouettes. Grips were rolling in carts, most of them piled high with lamps and coils of cable. And near the ceiling, Alfredo and Lalo, along with Edward, now sixty-nine, were jabbering in Spanish while installing the rigging for the flying trapeze.

  The three, along with Anita, had motored that morning from the Codona family home, twenty-five miles away in Long Beach. They were still getting over their surprise at what they discovered on the movie lot.

  “We expected to see a big top like we had on the Ringling show,” Anita said. “Instead, we discovered a special circus building made just for his picture. It … must have cost a fortune.”

  Because the narrative for the movie mostly unfolds in Paris, Friedrich Murnau wanted to stage the trapeze performances in a setting bearing a resemblance to the Cirque d’Hiver, a four-thousand-seat circus amphitheater at 110 rue Amelot. Opened in 1852, the Cirque d’Hiver was famous not only for presenting the world’s greatest circus artists but also as a haunt for such painters as Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and Picasso.

  For the actors, cinematographers, and lighting technicians, the first days on the set were mostly spent listening to Murnau talk about his vision for the movie, according to Anita Codona. She said a week might have gone by before any actual filming got under way.

  Murnau had a reputation for being even tempered. When he was on the set, though, he refused ever to listen to any actor or technician who tried to tell him that a direction he gave could not be carried out. More than theater, opera, or dance, Murnau believed, film was an art form that had a capability of making anything that was imaginable seeable.

  Among the most stunning sequences in the movie was one appearing early in the film. It introduced the quartet of trapeze artists to a Parisian audience. The Four Devils exploded through a curtain onto the hippodrome track. Each was astride a pair of galloping white horses, standing Roman-style on the backs of their mounts. Each of the Four Devils was identically costumed, wearing fleshlings, dark capes, and head caps with devil-like horns. Like gladiators who might have been entertaining a full house in Julius Caesar’s Circus Maximus, they tore around the hippodrome on their tandem steeds, each with fistfuls of reins in their hands.

  A Variety critic described the passage this way: “Murnau has given [them] a ring entrance that will set every acrobat in the world on fire when seeing it.… Their trapezes are lowered. As each of the trapeze flyers rides under it, they’re taken aloft, their wraps falling off on the way up to the aerial pedestals.”

  The reviewer provided the description in 1928, but if his appraisal can still be trusted, the spectacular and richly imagined opening might draw raves even from today’s film critics. Indeed, so brilliant was Murnau at conveying the pandemonium of a circus that the best scenes in such big top films as Cecil B. DeMille’s Oscar-winning The Greatest Show on Earth of 1952 might appear pedestrian by comparison.

  Murnau partly achieved his stupefying effects through a creation of his own invention, a bewildering, twenty-two-ton colossus of welded and bolted-together girders. His motor-driven invention—it was affectionately dubbed the “Go Devil” by the technical crew—was equipped with a telescoping steel strut that jutted well out into space from its center. At the far end of the strut was a large man bucket for the cameramen. Because the strut not only revolved around and around but also moved up and down like an appendage on a fairground Octopus, the cameramen could record
every detail of the circus in the round.

  Murnau said he had conceived the camera boom so it could “gallop after the equestrienne … pick out the painted tears of the clown, and jump from him to a high box to show the face of the rich lady thinking about the clown.” The Go Devil did all that, and even more. Because the strut’s positioning could be changed from a horizontal orientation to one that was vertical, its man bucket could be extended high into the theater’s dome like the head of the long-necked Loch Ness monster. This allowed the cameramen to record the movie’s heart-arresting trapeze feats, including Alfredo’s Leap of Death. Not only did Alfredo carry out all of Morton’s flying, but, by putting on a wig and slipping some cups under his fleshlings, he also essayed Gaynor’s trapeze work.

  Murnau consulted with Alfredo continually during the shooting. He wanted every detail of the film’s circus to appear authentic.

  Gaynor recalled one of the pair’s discussions. Murnau wanted to present a scene in which Fritz would leap from the trapeze, bullet through the air, and then be caught by his legs by Marion, who was to be hanging upside down from another swinging trapeze.

  “This is impossible, Mr. Murnau,” Alfredo protested. “No woman can hold her weight and a man’s weight with her hands.… This is impossible. I can’t do it. No one can do it.”

  Murnau, though, had not asked Alfredo whether the stunt he described was possible. Of course it was possible. Everything was possible in the movies.

  “This is the way we will do it,” the director said curtly, and then walked away. Alfredo seemed properly chastened.

  The scene, planned by Murnau for the movie’s end, involved what in Herman Bang’s story was a widely advertised event. Fritz Cecchi was again going to attempt the feat for which he was already famed everywhere in Europe, his Leap of Death, but now he was going to try to present it in a new way. He would not use a safety net. If he were to miss the trick now, his death would be certain.