Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  It was somewhere in Ohio and sometime in June when Alfredo and Leitzel had their first meeting with Perez and Evans. Within a month or a month and a half, the quartet had advanced so far with the plans that they were ready to reveal the first details to the entertainment press.

  The Great Codona Circus would be a one-ring, European-style show, presented inside a round big top 160 feet in diameter. The new circus was already booked to present its premiere performance in the border town of Laredo, Texas. From there, it would travel south, moving through Mexico and then through Central and South America. In all, the Great Codona Circus would feature twenty-one different acts, including The Flying Codonas and Leitzel and, of course, the perch pole artists and jugglers Lewis Perez and James Evans.

  When the telegram from James Evans reached Alfredo and Leitzel on the Ringling lot in Alexandria, Minnesota, on August 9, 1929, Alfredo and Leitzel were overtaken with shock, and then with dread that left them sick.

  Lewis Perez was dead. He had broken his neck when, along with the perch pole that had been balanced on Evans’s shoulders, he crashed twenty-five feet to a stage inside the grandstand at the Tri-State Fair at Burlington, Iowa.

  There had been no way of preventing the accident. Just as Perez had done in hundreds, maybe thousands, of performances before, he had put his feet into the stirrups at the top of the pole and then, like a flag atop a staff, extended his body out horizontally. In the next instant, a great gust of wind appeared and swiped at him. Evans tried to keep the pole upright. He moved this way and that way on the stage, but then the pole started its downward lean and there was no way for him to stop Perez’s crash.

  Everyone had tried to assure Evans that he was blameless, but he remained knifed with guilt. If only he had had the strength to overcome the force of the wind.

  The dream of having roles in the management of a circus was one Evans and Perez shared from the time they had become a team more than a dozen years earlier. Evans told Alfredo and Leitzel that he no longer thought he could continue in the plan to create the Great Codona Circus.

  “ ‘Laugh, clown, laugh,’ ” he said bitterly. “That’s all right for the movies. But just try it.”

  Perez was dead, and now it sounded like Evans was abandoning the venture. Were these omens? Was the Great Codona Circus now dead, too? Leitzel and Alfredo had already made a sizable investment in the enterprise. Their purchases included a small train, a big top, seating, and a power generator. They had also entered into contracts with most of the circus’s performers. Alfredo and Leitzel were queasy but decided they would go ahead with the plan anyway.

  Within a week after the 1929 Ringling tour ended in October, Alfredo and Leitzel were in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, just across the Texas border, and carrying out dress rehearsals with the other performers.

  Leitzel apparently was confident that she would never be returning to her old employer. She had been given headline billing in all the ads that started appearing daily in the Laredo Morning Times and the Spanish-language Tiempo de Laredo, and was described this way:

  When flying on the trapeze, Alfredo’s sense of timing was as exquisitely precise as the orbital moves of the planets, but it utterly failed him choosing the date for the grand opening of the Great Codona Circus. He scheduled the premiere for November 16, 1929, a Saturday night. That day Nuevo Laredo was slammed by a blizzard, an event not likely to happen there at that time of year more than once in a century or two.

  “It was a disaster,” remembered Edna Antes, who was trying to sell tickets the night of the opening. “Icicles were hanging from the big top. We went ahead with the show, but it was pretty much a dry run. Hardly anybody ventured out. Mexicans won’t go anywhere when it’s freezing and snowing.”

  In addition to Leitzel’s aerial act and The Flying Codonas, the show featured about twenty attractions, many of them poached from the Ringling circus, including The Arleys, another perch pole act; Bluch Landolf, Leitzel’s uncle and producer of the clown acts; the Sabots, a bareback riding troupe; Charlotte Shives, who performed on a single trapeze; and Vera Bruce, who appeared as an equestrienne as well as the third member of Alfredo and Lalo’s flying trapeze act. After initially telling Alfredo and Leitzel that he was too brokenhearted after the death of his partner, Perez, to ever perform again, Evans had a change of mind and decided to become a part of the new circus, after all. As a small investor in the show’s creation, he took on some of its management tasks, and also appeared in the ring as a juggler.

  A Billboard correspondent, on hand for the premiere of the Great Codona Circus, described its attractions as “extensively entertaining,” but enthused even more about the classy impression its canvas theater made. The show, he wrote, was a creation of “unusual splendor, attractiveness and comfort [with] no expense or trouble … spared by management to provide the show with the most modern equipment.” Among the features that attracted the writer’s eye were the circus’s “large, spacious boxes” and its “specially built electrical plant [that] brilliantly lighted the 160 feet [in diameter] top.” The circus was scheduled to remain in Nuevo Laredo for “only a few days,” according to the newspaper ads, and then start on the southward tour that would eventually take it to South America. The attendance picked up in Nuevo Laredo after the snow melted, but only slightly.

  “We had four or five clowns with the show and one of them was George Harmon, a midget who went by the professional name of Yo-Yo,” said Edna Antes. “Families with eight or ten kids came to the lot, trying to steal a free glimpse of Yo-Yo and drink in the band music drifting through the tent walls to the outside. Then, without leaving behind so much as a peso with the show, the families returned to their homes.”

  Not only had Alfredo opened his circus on a night of hateful weather, but, more broadly, he launched the show during the worst economic period in twentieth-century history. On October 29, barely two weeks before his circus opened for business, the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 occurred, ushering in the deepest and darkest depression of the twentieth century. Almost overnight, the unemployment rate in the United States soared to nearly 25 percent. In cities across America, colonies started to sprout up with shacks made from scavenged box wood, sign tin, straw, and cardboard.

  From the beginning of the planning, Perez and Evans and even Leitzel tried disabusing Alfredo of his belief that it would be a good idea to travel through Latin America with the circus. The three suggested that because of the prominence of the Codona name with American circus audiences, and also those of Leitzel and other Ringling performers traveling with the show, the enterprise figured to have its greatest success in the States. Alfredo, though, remained insistent in wanting to carry out the tour south of the Rio Grande. Three and a half decades earlier Edward Codona, the family patriarch, had traveled through Mexico with his small family circus, the Gran Circo Codona, and it was there in 1893, while the family was in Hermosilla, Sonora, that Alfredo was born. Alfredo’s urge to return to Mexico may have been impelled by the same impulse that sends millions of hummingbirds migrating from North America to Mexico each fall.

  “Alfredo was my brother-in-law, and I loved him dearly,” said Anita Codona, “but he could be as stubborn as an old mule. He was still convinced he could make a go of the circus in Mexico even though our experience in Nuevo Laredo was awful and the world was in a depression.”

  The caravan set out on the first leg of its journey south of the border, a trip of 325 miles to Victoria.

  “The train was nothing like the one we had become used to while traveling with Ringling,” Anita recalled. “There were three or four baggage cars for the big top, the seating, the electrical plant, and the Sadots’ horses. There was just one passenger car. There were no beds. It was miserable, especially for married couples. All of us had slept on wicker seats. To make matters worse, there was a family traveling with us that presented a trained dog act in the show, the Millers. They were always yipping and running everywhere in the car, and scrapping with a dog Bl
uch had brought along.”

  In the plans for the new circus that were outlined in the first stories in the trade papers, it was reported that the show would be making appearances of one or two weeks in most cities and, in Mexico City, likely have a stay of a month or two. But because the Great Codona Circus tent was nearly empty for the performances in Victoria, the show pulled up stakes after a day or two and traveled farther south to the port city of Tampico.

  “All the time we moved through Mexico, we were hearing about how terrible the Depression was in the United States—the soup lines, the Hoovervilles, the millionaires jumping from skyscrapers because they lost everything,” said Anita. “As bad as things were in the States, though, they couldn’t have been nearly as awful as they were in Mexico. Most people there always worked for low wages, and now there was no work for them. About the only people we saw in our tent were town officials—mayors and police chiefs and the like, and they were given free tickets for themselves and their families.”

  The entire troupe was on the brink of mutiny by the time the circus got to Tampico.

  “We were afraid we were going to be left stranded in Mexico with no way to get back to the States,” said Paul Arley, who with his wife, Loula, and Fanny McCloskey presented the perch pole act. “The show was hardly even taking in enough money to feed us. Bluch was our cook. He’d go to the markets and try to trade tickets for groceries. Mostly he came back to the lot with nothing but some bags of rice and beans. Sometimes, though, he was lucky enough to get some live chickens and fresh vegetables. He’d throw everything into a pot on a campfire. These were the only times we enjoyed decent meals.”

  The show had been scheduled to head from Tampico to Mexico City, where, according to the original plan, Alfredo had expected it to settle in for a month or longer. Alfredo, though, instructed the train’s engineer to reverse the show’s course and travel north to Monterrey. There, Alfredo, Leitzel, and James Evans handed everyone letters typed on stationery printed with the title “Great Codona Circus—Touring Mexico and South America.”

  Monterrey, N. L., Dec. 2nd, 1929

  Dear Sir:

  As per contract and owing to the general conditions of the country, we regret very much to advise you that we are compelled to close our season at this time and hereby serve you with two weeks’ notice.

  We will ship the outfit back to the States at the end of the engagement here, and if you care to ride back with the show on the train and have your baggage go as far as Laredo, we will be very glad to take it.

  Sincerely yours,

  Great Codona Circus

  His store of hope almost gone, Alfredo joined with the show’s men in raising the tent in Monterrey, Mexico’s third largest city and an important business and industrial center.

  As was true of all their stops elsewhere, the performers and musicians found themselves putting on shows where they outnumbered the spectators in the seats.

  After a day or two, the circus train was on the move again. Everyone was beaten up, beaten down, bedraggled. Because the show had never been in one place long enough for them to take care of personal matters, like laundry, everyone was smelling as rankly as their co-tenants inside the stuffy passenger car, the Millers’ dogs. All the travelers ached for a night of uninterrupted sleep, something impossible in a car with hard, upright seats, yipping dogs, and crowded with two dozen other travelers. More troubling to everyone, though, was their uncertainty about what was ahead. They had signed on with the circus with an expectation of having work for a year or more. What were they going to do now? The world had become a different place. They were funnymen, head standers, bareback riders, rope swingers, drum pounders, and horn tootlers with talents that no longer seemed merchandisable.

  As despairing as the troupers were, a day did come in the second week of December when, at least for a little while, the attachés of the Great Codona Circus rejoiced. The cavalcade of the Great Codona Circus had just crossed the Mexico border and had rolled to a stop in Laredo, Texas.

  “We were home again, back in America,” said Fanny McCloskey. “We felt like prisoners of war who had just been airlifted to the United States after having been in a strange and hostile country. We all kissed the ground.”

  A few of the troupers immediately bought train tickets to start on trips back to their homes in Minnesota, Kansas, and Arkansas, but most of them stayed behind in Laredo.

  The Great Codona Circus had a final stand to make, its only one on American soil. A first matter of business for Alfredo was to go to the Laredo Morning Times to arrange for advertising. Meanwhile others in the show fanned around the town of forty thousand to hang posters in the stores, barbershops, and bars.

  The Great Codona Circus, “The Show Beautiful,” as it was subtitled in the advertising, opened in Laredo at nine forty-five the night of December 31, 1929.

  Leitzel, “The Queen of the Air … Former Star of Ringling Bros.,” as she was billed, and likely the most prominent entertainer ever to appear in the town, presented a show that was as dazzling as any she had ever given in Madison Square Garden or Ziegfeld’s New Amsterdam Theatre. Alfredo, Lalo, and Vera were flawless on the flying trapeze. Anita Codona, all in red and clicking castanets, did a flamenco dance in a reprisal of those she did in vaudeville when she and Lalo first met. Bluch, his face smudgy with burned cork and wearing a hobo’s outfit, absurdly walked around the ring with his eight-foot plank on his head, bushels of tomatoes balanced at its ends.

  The show ended just minutes before midnight. At the stroke of twelve o’clock, the bells of Laredo’s churches began pealing everywhere in town, signaling the beginning of a New Year.

  Its seats had only been about half filled, but the Great Codona Circus had just performed to the biggest audience of its forty-five days of life. The performers, all of them still in costume, gathered as one inside the sawdust ring and then the band resumed its playing. Leitzel and Codona, along with the troupers that had remained with the troupe, started singing, many of them with tears streaming down their cheeks. The audience, immediately recognizing the song, joined in. The band was playing “Auld Lang Syne.”

  ACOMBINATION IMAGE SHOWING MEMBERS OF THE FLYING CODONAS PERFORMING ON THE TRAPEZE (ABOVE) AND LYING ON THE SAFETY NET. ALFREDO CODONA IS ON THE LEFT, VERA BRUCE IS IN THE CENTER, AND LALO CODONA IS ON THE RIGHT. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  CHAPTER 21

  Before the end of January 1930, Leitzel and Alfredo were resituated in her lustrous, richly furnished New York apartment. Both may have been wondering how long they could remain there.

  Without providing specific figures, the newspapers reported that Leitzel and Alfredo had suffered huge financial losses in their attempt at starting their own circus. Leitzel’s brother, Alfred, believed the pair might have been on the verge of bankruptcy at this time.

  “My sister never told me how much they lost,” he said. “It could have been $100,000, the equivalent of millions today. And while she made a lot of money in the circus and vaudeville, she really never saved that much. She always lived the high style—fancy apartments, diamonds, furs, big cars, chauffeurs, maids. She was also very free about handing out money, whether it was for family members, friends or down-and-outs on the circus. Alfredo, too, made more than a comfortable living, but nothing close to my sister’s pay. Whatever money he invested in the circus, it was likely just a fraction of Leitzel’s investment.”

  The egos of both Leitzel and Alfredo were so outsize that there had never been a lot of room left in their psyches for humility. They were out of work now, though, and maybe also almost out of money. They had to try to get their old jobs back with the Ringling show.

  Initially they approached Pat Valdo, the show’s personnel director, although they were aware that ultimately it would be John Ringling who would make any decisions about whether there was a place for them in the circus. Valdo, though, was clear on one matter: if there was any chance that they could regain employment with the circus, they would have to
agree to sharp cuts in their pay from their earlier years. Because of the Depression, there had been a great downturn in the circus’s gates in the last months of the 1929 tour, and Mister John was on pins and needles about what the season ahead would be like.

  He, along with his sister-in-law, Edie Ringling, Charley’s widow, now owned every railroad circus of significance in America. Months earlier, just before the crash on Wall Street, Mister John had signed a note for nearly two million dollars to buy the American Circus Corporation, a conglomerate with five other shows—the Al G. Barnes, Hagenbeck-Wallace, John Robinson, and Sells-Floto Circuses, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. With these added properties, Mister John’s circus empire had now grown to forty-five hundred employees, and another two hundred railroad cars.

  Pat Valdo was an affable man, and one who particularly admired Codona and Leitzel. The circus’s personnel manager went back and forth with Mister John on behalf of the pair, pleading with him to reinstate them.

  John may not have been even casually interested in hearing about the reverses Leitzel and Alfredo suffered. The tens of thousands of acres of undeveloped land he owned in Florida, Montana, and elsewhere were now worth but a small fraction of his original investment in them. Likewise, the fat portfolio of stocks and bonds that he had amassed over the years was now bleeding like a slaughtered pig. He was probably wondering at the time how he was going to write a check for his next Titian or Rubens, but, at Valdo’s urgings, he agreed to take back both Leitzel and The Flying Codonas, the biggest attractions in the six decades of The Greatest Show on Earth.

  New York’s circus fans were no less rabid than its Yankees crazies. For a segment of the city’s population, opening day of a new Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey season was always regarded as a holy day, a second Christmas or Easter. They would not miss the observance of such an occasion for anything, not even, apparently, for a Great Depression.