Finally she did appear at the church. It was three hours later than the time when the announcement said the ceremony was to begin.
For the guests who had remained at the church, this may not have been the afternoon’s most surprising event. When Leitzel did enter the church, she was accompanied by Colonel Howard.
Leitzel offered apologies to the guests for her lateness but gave no explanation for her delay. Her coworkers were left divided on the reason for her tardiness. Maybe she suddenly had come down with a case of cold feet about marrying Alfredo and just needed some toe warming from the colonel. Or maybe the colonel spent the hours trying to dissuade her from going ahead with the marriage.
Colonel Howard took a seat in the pews with the other guests. There were no other delays. The Reverend Dozall appeared on the altar in his vestments and went ahead with the ceremony. Then, after saying their “I Do’s,” Leitzel and Alfredo kissed. Ella Bradna, the wife of ringmaster Fred Bradna, was at the bride’s side as matron of honor; Lalo was beside the groom as best man.
The postnuptial processional returning the bride and the groom to the circus lot lacked the pomp and ceremony befitting royals, but it attracted more than a little attention. The pair was ferried in what may have been the world’s most freakishly fabulous automobile, a black, open-top landaulet with a large JUST MARRIED sign on its rear bumper. The car coughed like a schoolboy smoking his first cigar as it puttered over the streets and, like a rodeo horse, periodically reared up, nearly tossing Leitzel and Alfredo to the macadam. At the wheel was a uniformed chauffeur with a chalky white face and a mouth lipsticked in black. It was Myron “Butch” Baker, a producing clown for the circus. Baker had created his wonder wagon in a good-natured attempt at taking some of the shine off the ostentatious vehicle his boss, John Ringling, drove, a silver Rolls-Royce convertible.
Upon returning to Grant Park, Butch took the bride and groom on several victory laps around the tent city to let everyone know the pair had been married. There was cheering and applause from everyone. Harry A. Atwell, a prominent Chicago studio photographer, was there, snapping away. No one could remember seeing Leitzel and Codona looking happier.
As usual, Colonel Howard kept to himself, separated from the circus troupers. As the owner of a string of racing Thoroughbreds, he had known other afternoons when he finished out of the money. If his heart was unusually heavy this day, though, he took his disappointment as he took the others at the Churchill Downs, Belmont, and Santa Anita tracks, as a true sportsman. After the evening performance, he picked up the tab for a dinner of pheasant and lobster to which all the performers and executives were invited. Vintage tonics were poured from pitchers. The blowout was attended not just by circus people but also by stars from the theater and vaudeville, and by several politicians, including the governor of Illinois, Lennington Small.
No one from the circus could remember another fete like it. The single attendee who did not have one of the great times of his life was Alfredo. He did not like the idea of somebody else throwing the bash, especially one of his wife’s former suitors. To make matters worse, he misplaced his bride in the early part of the reception, and then spent hours trying to find her. He looked in all the tents. He checked out the train cars.
Throughout his searches, Alfredo encountered merrymakers who lifted glasses to him and offered congratulations. The groom thanked them for the good wishes, but, looking miserable, then posed a question to them.
“You see anything of Mrs. Codona?” he asked. “I know she’s here. I saw her only a few hours ago at the altar.”
It was the wee hours of the morning before the last of the guests, many of them zigzagging, made their way back to their nests on the train. It was about the same time when Leitzel entered the newly-weds’ compartment and cheerily inquired of Alfredo whether he’d had a good time.
There were questions about whether the marriage was consummated that morning, or even anytime in the next few nights.
According to Fred Bradna, Alfredo exploded in a conniption of seismic proportions when he and his bride were finally reunited. Always thinking of the show first, this gave Bradna a lot of concern. Alfredo was left so unhinged by the humiliation Leitzel caused him, Bradna said, that for a while, he was not sure he would ever again be the same as a trapeze flyer.
“The resultant tantrum affected his timing aloft for several days,” the ringmaster observed.
The truth was that the marriage was troubled from the instant Alfredo and Leitzel looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged “I Do’s.”
CHAPTER 19
When Alfredo entered the big top, the effect he had on the women spectators was pretty uniformly the same. Most had a sensation that a hot wind had suddenly blown into the tent, a sirocco heated by Saharan sands that in seconds caused their temperatures to shoot up. Some fumbled in their purses for opera glasses to better study the maleness that was barely concealed beneath Alfredo’s white, silver-flecked tights.
Even when he was still in his teens and unmarried, Alfredo established records for conquering circus showgirls that were never broken, according to some of his fellow troupers. He likely could have had his way with at least half the single women traveling with the circus, and maybe also with some who had husbands.
As bitter as the truth must have been for him, though, he discovered that he could not have Leitzel even after taking her as a bride. Not all the time. Perhaps no man could have.
Like other women, Leitzel felt her temperature elevating at the mere sight of Alfredo. He brought on feelings of ardor in her that no man before him had ever stirred. She worshipped him. Her love for him, though, was complicated. She may have been pathologically incapable of limiting herself to one man. She may have found that by continuing relationships with other men, all of whom were admiring and were a generation older than she, she could at least partly fill a void that existed because she had never known a father and only distantly knew a mother.
The colonel appeared to be out of her life now. At least, none of Leitzel’s coworkers remembered seeing him on the lot after she and Alfredo married. Other men remained in her life, though, often judges, bankers, newspaper publishers, and manufacturers, men with reputations, money, and power over others.
In most instances, Leitzel’s dalliances appeared to be one-afternoon or one-night flings, and, as before she married, many of the dates were arranged by the circus’s front office with an expectation that some valuable quid pro quo would be gained by the show. There is no evidence that Leitzel entered into the relationships merely for sexual gratification. Clearly, though, the liaisons must have satisfied other needs that Alfredo was unable to fulfill. His interests were almost entirely confined within the precinct in which he lived and worked, the dusty and weedy lots of the circus. Early in his courtship of Leitzel, with her urging and mentoring, he tried to extend those boundaries, but apparently he never moved them far enough outward for his wife.
Leitzel’s friend Fanny McCloskey said there may have been another reason why Leitzel felt a need, even during the periods when she was married, to flutter between different men. Leitzel’s need, McCloskey said, apparently grew stronger as she grew older and watched more and more of her dewy loveliness slip away.
“Probably every woman who makes a living as a performer becomes more and more sensitive about her appearance as the years go by,” she observed. “This was probably especially true for Leitzel. Because of the great physical demands of her act, she sacrificed a lot of her femininity prematurely. By the time she and Alfredo married, she was nearing forty. By then, she had some of the appearance of a weight lifter. She had bulging arms and abnormally wide shoulders. She also had that ugly sore at her wrist that never healed. She was always trying to keep it hidden by covering it with ties of pretty silks.”
McCloskey remembered an afternoon when she and Leitzel sat on a sofa in the star’s stateroom and leafed through scrapbooks. “There were pictures from probably twenty years earlier—Leitz
el’s first years in the circus, vaudeville and Ziegfeld. She looked like a fairy, a tiny, delicate thing that a puff of wind could blow away like thistledown. Leitzel got teary-eyed looking at the pictures. ‘Where did she go?’ she asked of the pretty young thing in the pictures. Then she put away her scrapbooks.”
Whatever the reasons why Leitzel continued to carry on the serial relationships, they drove Alfredo close to near madness.
Said Merle Evans: “All of the show’s married couples had quarrels now and then. But the fights that took place in Leitzel and Alfredo’s car were different. They were thunder-clapping, fire-in-the-sky, the-world-is-coming-to-an-end storms. I think most of the blowups were caused by Leitzel’s refusal to stop seeing other men.”
The fights between Leitzel and Alfredo were also remembered by Fred Bradna. Not only did Alfredo have a furious “Latin temper,” the ringmaster said, but he also had fierce pride and suffered humiliation among his cotroupers because of his wife’s gallivanting.
In 1928, when brand-new Ford roadsters were selling for $385, four-door sedans for $485, Alfredo’s weekly salary was $500. It was a prodigious sum for the era, far higher than that of any other performer with the Ringling circus, but Leitzel. She was earning $1,200 a week.
Alfredo’s lifestyle became more cushy than ever after he and Leitzel married. There were breakfasts in Leitzel’s bed, served by Mabel, and Leitzel, because she had never known a love that was as exciting, observed the passing of each week of their marriage as an anniversary worthy of celebrating. Every Sunday, she gifted her husband with expensive sport coats, sweaters, silk pajamas, and jewelry. At first Alfredo felt flattered when fellow troupers remarked about his snappy dress. But as the gifts from Leitzel kept coming, he began to wonder whether she was only trying to remodel him further, to change him into someone with more refined tastes, someone like the colonel. His bride’s profligate ways may also have reminded Alfredo that, as high as he had ascended in his pay grade, she was the show’s only true royal, its wealthiest, most coddled star.
There was another matter that had been crumpling his ego. The Flying Codonas, as famous as they had become, still had to share the big top with other acts, usually flying troupes flanking them at either end of the hippodrome. It was different with Leitzel.
After George Denman exited the hippodrome with his herd of elephants, the house lights were extinguished for the longest time, and the people in the seats became absolutely hushed, as though they were anticipating some holy event like an apparition of the Lady of Fatima. Then, a single searchlight started playing everywhere in the house until it located Leitzel at the performers’ entryway. The tiny figure appeared to be emitting a heavenly light.
Cries of adoration swelled from the crowd, and then she would start moving to the center ring, throwing kisses to every corner. Ten steps behind her, just outside the pond of light that moved with her, was Mabel Clemings, as always, holding up Leitzel’s train of tulle. There were no distractions to shift the crowd’s focus from the circus’s biggest star for even an instant. Leitzel alone was the cynosure of all eyes. The big top was her palace entirely. In deference to the Queen of the Air, even the cotton candy and Coca-Cola peddlers stopped weaving through the stands. They moved to the aisles with their trays and, like everyone else in the house, gazed transfixedly at the slip of a woman, just ninety-five pounds. It was always that way.
Because he was now regularly referred to in the press as the “Adonis of the Altitudes,” Alfredo’s nose, pardonably, perhaps, was sometimes in a higher position than the top of his head. And while he was generally clubby with everyone on the circus, he did show a sharpness around a few other daredevils whom he viewed as possible challengers to his status as the show’s most sensational male performer.
Next to his brother Lalo, Alfredo’s closest confidant may have been Art Concello. A fellow trapeze flyer, Concello was known to others as “The Half-Invisible Boy.” That was because he was never fully seeable through the miasmas of cigar smoke in which he was almost always wreathed. From the time Concello was sixteen and starring with the Flying Wards trapeze troupe, he was singled out by circus experts as second only to Alfredo as a flyer. Such approbation was a matter of complete indifference to him. The boy wonder had already determined that his ambition in life was not to become a big top idol. As the son of a Portuguese railroad laborer who struggled to feed and clothe his family, Concello had another goal. He was determined to make money in the circus, real money. He aspired to be a circus boss.
“I don’t care how much the biggest stars earned, it was never more than a spit in the ocean compared with what guys in the front office raked in,” he declared. “Not only were they able to skim something from every ticket that was sold, but they also get a percentage on every bag of peanuts, every cup of lemonade, and every program that got into the customers’ hands. That all adds up.”
Ultimately Concello did work his way into the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’s front office, and then, in time, became general manager of the whole shebang. It was while serving as the circus’s majordomo that he brokered a deal with Cecil B. DeMille for the production of The Greatest Show on Earth. Charlton Heston’s role in the Oscar-winning film as big top boss was said to be closely modeled after Concello.
As hard-driving as Concello could be in business matters, there was one aspect of the circus that had always brought him to tears: the performances of Alfredo Codona.
“I got goose bumps every time I saw him on the trapeze,” Concello said. “Maybe you had to be a flyer yourself to realize just how great he was. It was always a religious experience for me. Maybe the feeling was like that another artist gets when he stands before a painting by Rembrandt. Codona was the absolute god.”
As reverently as he spoke of his close friend, Concello conceded that Alfredo probably suffered from paranoia. He summed him up this way:
“Alfredo was not only the greatest flyer who ever lived, he was probably the greatest male performer who ever appeared in the history of the circus. Women swooned at the sight of him. In comparison with the money earned by the other stars, he was paid a fortune. He was married to the most famous circus performer of all time. You’d think a guy like that would have the world by the tail. But he was beset with insecurities. He was always looking over his shoulder, worried someone might be approaching who was going to take everything away from him.”
No attraction caused Alfredo greater anguish than the Great Wallendas, high-wire walkers from Germany who became a part of the Ringling entourage in the spring of 1928.
The Wallendas’ profession was an ancient one. Egyptologists have unearthed papyrus drawings recording the feats of rope dancers, or funambulists, who may have entertained the pharaohs Kheperkan and Nechtneby as long ago as 3 BC. In the passing twenty-three or twenty-four centuries, though, it seems quite certain that none of the earlier rope walkers put on spectacles that were anything like those of the Great Wallendas.
Often blindfolded, the Wallendas skipped, danced, and cartwheeled while performing on their wire sixty feet in the air without a safety net beneath them. Other times, their bodies stacked on top of one another three high, they traveled over their cable on bicycles. They made a mockery of all the laws of gravity.
Alfredo may have had good reason to believe that the quartet could bring about a reassigning of the suites reserved in the pantheon for the circus’s greatest thrill acts. He might have worried that the Wallendas would eventually take over the pantheon’s penthouse, forcing The Flying Codonas and even Leitzel to take quarters on a floor beneath them.
Because The Flying Codonas made regular appearances in Europe during the circus’s winter off-seasons, it is likely that Alfredo had already seen the Great Wallendas perform. However it apparently was not until just days before the start of the new circus season, while the Wallendas were stringing up their rigging in Madison Square Garden, that he had direct contact with them. The first encounter was anything but pleasant, accor
ding to Karl Wallenda, the originator of the troupe.
Alfredo was on the floor, and he was livid.
“You heinie sons of bitches,” he screamed up to the Wallendas. “What in hell do you think you’re doing? Either you take your damned wires down immediately or I’ll be up there myself to shear them.”
Wallenda said that Alfredo complained that because of the way the troupe was installing its cables, their rigging would block the audience’s sight lines to his trapeze.
Wallenda, twenty-three at the time, apologized. He promised Alfredo that he and the other members of his troupe would reguy their cables so they would not obstruct the view to his trapeze. Alfredo was not willing to let the matter rest.
“Maybe you heinies think you were big-time in Europe,” he yelled as he angrily strode out of the arena. “But do you know what we do with acts like yours in America? We feed them to the pigs.”
The Wallendas were costumed in white satin sailor suits on the night of April 5 when they made their American debut. They started their turn with a series of quickly executed stunts that became progressively more mad-brained—walks, then runs, over the seventy-foot-long wire; rope skipping; headstands; frog leaps over one another. If Alfredo was watching the Great Wallendas, he may have been feeling smug. The applause for the four was polite, but nothing like the house-rocking commotions his Flying Codonas and Leitzel always detonated.
After some minutes, the air was sawed by a deep, resonant voice that perhaps bore the gravity of Moses addressing the Israelites on Mount Sinai. It was that of Ringling announcer John Stryker: “Ladies and gentlemen, the sensations of the entertainment world in all of Europe, the Gre-e-e-A-T-E Wallendas, will now attempt the most perilous feat ever presented by any circus. We beg for your absolute silence. The slightest lapse in concentration by any one of the artists could result in a terrible end for each of them.”
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