Some of the spectators may have bought the tickets with money raised by spending the year hunting for empty So-Da-Licious and Coca-Cola bottles and turning them in for the refunds. A few others might have pawned gold teeth removed from the mouths of grandfathers moments before their caskets were lowered into the ground. Surprisingly, as bleak as the times were, every one of the fifteen thousand seats in the New York Coliseum was occupied the night of March 27 when the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus opened its 1930 season.
The most sensational feature of the new circus was not a ring act but a sideshow attraction, seven women from a village of grass huts in equatorial Africa. The women were topless and wearing see-through raffia skirts when, along with two of their chieftains, they stepped down the gangplank of the boat that brought them into New York. Some in the harbor may have remarked that the septet appeared under-dressed for such a cool and breezy day, but it probably was not their brief costuming that many were studying. Each of the women had lips that, like the bills on ducks, cantilevered off their faces into space a full six or eight inches. The ladies—they were Ubangi tribeswomen—gained their prodigious-size lips during their growth years when, like their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers before them, they had series of progressively larger disks placed into their mouths, permanently stretching the flesh around them.
Posters of the Ubangi women were everywhere in the city. THE EDUCATIONAL FEATURE OF ALL-TIME! the bills all screeched. Such a claim was excessive, surely, but maybe a case could be made for the instructional value of the circus’s new sensation. The women seemed to add credence to the observation that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. It was said that the men in the Ubangi women’s village were affected by the sight of the lips in the same way that men in other parts of the world were moved by exposed female body parts north of the waist and south of the shoulders.
The 1930 show was among the strongest Ringling shows ever. The Great Wallendas were returned for a third year; Hugo Zacchini, the human cannonball, for a fourth; and Leitzel and The Flying Codonas were also back, and, as before, still holding positions as headliners.
Leitzel and Alfredo were ebullient at having been restored to The Greatest Show on Earth. They were back among friends. They again had paying work. And now when they were performing, they again were appearing in front of thousands, not the small handfuls before which they appeared when their star-crossed and short-lived Great Codona Circus rolled through Mexico.
For Leitzel, though, the rejoicing lasted for but the first two days of the new season. The third was among the bleakest she had ever known.
Hans Jahn had already essayed most of his routines atop his forty-foot wooden pole, balanced upright on the shoulders of his brother, Carl.
So far, everything had gone smoothly for him in the Coliseum in the Bronx on this night of April 29, 1930, the third of the new Ringling season.
Hans had but one more stunt to show the crowd, his act-finishing, no-arms headstand. Then he could shimmy down the pole, take his bows with Carl, and call it another night.
He slid a cushioned, disklike headrest at the top of the pole. Next, he gripped the pole with his powerful hands, placed his head into the cushion, and, with no apparent strain, lifted into the headstand. In another moment, he loosed his hands and was balancing on his head, his arms and legs akimbo.
No one knew what happened next. Hans seemed to have been suddenly possessed by a demon. He appeared to be suffering some torture. The flesh on his face became lopsided. His arms first and then his entire body started to shudder violently.
And then Hans was falling.
He slammed into Carl a little more than three-quarters of his way down, knocking his brother unconscious, and then crashed headfirst onto the stage.
Forty clowns spewed onto the hippodrome floor, trying to divert the crowd’s attention from the gruesome scene. Then the Jahn brothers were carried from the arena by attendants with stretchers.
Leitzel learned of the accident while in her dressing room. She raced to the room of the Jahn brothers. Hans’s wife, Gretchen, was already inside, and so was Dolly, the couple’s eight-year-old daughter. Both were looking down at Hans’s broken head and mangled body.
Gretchen was pleading with her husband to start breathing again, to open his eyes, to move a finger, anything.
Leitzel embraced Gretchen and then took eight-year-old Dolly into her arms.
Carl revived in a few minutes. He tried to leave his stretcher to see his brother, to try to talk to him. The attendants struggled to hold him down on his mattress. An ambulance was on its way for him.
But it would be a hearse that carried Hans from the Coliseum.
“What could have happened?” Gretchen sobbed. “He did that trick thousands of times before.”
Leitzel was shaking. Her face was the color of paraffin. She may have been wondering if Hans had been stalked this night by the same ghost that still sometimes appeared when she was on her rings, pleading remorsefully: “Why don’t you let go? You’re tired.… The audience won’t care. There is plenty more for them to look at.… Let go! Let go! Why go through all this effort when you can just drop to the ground and rest?”
There was no other family on the show to whom Leitzel felt closer than the Jahns. She wanted to do or say something to comfort Gretchen and Dolly, but felt helpless.
Maybe she thought she was only thinking the words, but they came out of her mouth all the same. Gretchen and Dolly heard them, and were startled at her pronouncement.
“I will be next,” Leitzel said. “I hear Hans calling me.”
It was a day or two after the funeral when Leitzel saw Dolly again.
She was the first of the circus children to enter Auntie Leitzel’s Free Elementary School.
Dolly was wearing a crepe, ash-colored mourning dress with black trim at the collar, wrists, and hemline. The dress was way too big on her. It was bought that way to allow for her growth over the year she would be wearing it.
Leitzel’s breath was taken away. She had to excuse herself from Dolly. She stepped outside the tent to cry.
Dolly continued to appear in the dress each day she came to school.
“Some mornings when I was in Auntie’s tent, I’d look up from a book and catch her staring at me,” Dolly remembered. “Her eyes were always brimming with tears. I was too young to understand why she appeared to be so sad, or maybe I knew but didn’t want to think about it too hard, or I would start crying, too.”
Gretchen wore a mourning dress, too, one identical in style to that of her daughter. She also wore a veil whenever she stepped out on the lot or entered the big top, although now she tried to avoid circulating among the ticket holders. The big top was supposed to be a church of gaiety. It would be wrong, she thought, if some of the circus-goers had their holiday mood broken because they saw all the sorrow that was on her face.
Dolly almost never missed Leitzel’s performances. She positioned herself in the darkness at the performers’ entranceway in her way-too-big gray dress, a small shadow inside a larger shadow, hardly seeable except for her light brown hair. She wanted to grow up to be just like her aunt, the brightest star of the big top. Leitzel tried hard to help make that happen. She continued to rehearse her daily on the small, low-slung single trapeze that was hung outside her private tent. Before the summer of 1930 was over, though, Dolly was sent away from the circus to attend a Catholic boarding school in Pennsylvania. Leitzel’s heart ached like that of a mother who loses a child. She wrote her letters every week and sent her books and dolls.
In part because Leitzel no longer saw Dolly in her school in her mourning dress each day, the fissure that had opened in her heart after Hans died began to close by the fall of 1930. Now, though, there was another gash in Leitzel’s heart, one that was deeper, wider. She did not think it would ever go away.
There was another woman in Alfredo’s life now, one younger and prettier than she was, and while certainly it had not
been Leitzel’s intention, she had put her there. Alfredo was now besotted with Vera Bruce, whom Leitzel herself, after engineering the ouster of Clara, had handpicked for The Flying Codonas.
When they were interviewed by newspaper and magazine writers, Leitzel and Alfredo, now married for more than two years, conveyed an impression that they were still all lovey-dovey. They held hands. They answered questions about how puppy love stirred in each of them when they first met on the circus as teenagers. They told journalists about their dreams of settling someday in Long Beach, California, where they would be close to his family and their friends in Hollywood. When Leitzel and Alfredo were alone together, though, in their apartment on the train or a room in a hotel, it was another matter.
Alfredo had become withholding, aloof. Leitzel had already gone through the coming-apart of two marriages. She fretted now that this one could be coming to an end, too.
Alfredo was thirty-seven, a dozen years older than Vera. If he initially felt dislike for her because Leitzel, not he, had chosen her for The Flying Codonas, his antipathy may have started dissolving soon after he began training her two years earlier. Alfredo found her to be an able pupil for the flying trapeze. She had no fear of heights and was strong and athletic.
Leitzel, along with The Flying Codonas, had performed in Paris, Berlin, and London in late 1928 and early 1929 during the Ringling off-season. Vera accompanied them on that trip abroad. By then she had already become rehearsed enough on the flying trapeze to appear in one of the flashiest and most dangerous of the Codonas’ maneuvers, the “passing leap.” In this stunt, she was tossed into the air from Lalo’s hands, and then, while Alfredo was cannonballing just inches above her while en route to his brother, she caught the flybar he had just vacated and returned to the perch.
Often The Flying Codonas and Leitzel appeared as separate acts with the same circuses during their European sojourns. But there were also times when the two attractions performed at different circus venues. It was during these partings that he began making his most aggressive moves on Vera, according to Annie Bruce, Vera’s mother.
Her daughter, the older Bruce insisted, never would have knowingly assumed a role where she would be interfering with Leitzel and Alfredo’s marriage. There was no one to whom Vera felt a greater indebtedness than Leitzel, she said. Leitzel had picked out her daughter from the ranks of the circus’s nameless performers and arranged her placement with one of the world’s greatest big top attractions. Her daughter, Mrs. Bruce said, always tried to be gentle in rebuffing Alfredo’s overtures for romance, but at the same time she was resentful that he continued his attempts at arranging trysts with her.
“Vera was always scrupulously honest, and possessed an innate fairness …” she declared.
While not discounting Alfredo’s reputation for skirt chasing, Alfred Pelikan, Leitzel’s brother, presented a different picture of Vera’s positioning in the triangle.
“My sister had taken in Vera as a protégée and had given her a place in The Flying Codonas,” he said. “Apparently that wasn’t enough. Vera was cold, and she could be calculating. Maybe she didn’t really have a serious romantic interest in Alfredo, but I think she plotted to take him away from Leitzel. She was angling to replace Leitzel as first lady of the circus. Always an opportunist, she thought she could do this by stealing her husband. Her betrayal of my sister was almost Shakespearean.”
The Ringling circus raised its tents for the last time of its 1930 season on October 10 in Birmingham, Alabama, and the next day the train started on its way for winter quarters in Sarasota. Mister John glumly told the troupers that it had been necessary to quit the tour four or five weeks earlier than originally planned because of the still-worsening economic conditions.
The collapse that began on Wall Street a year earlier spread across the ocean. As bleak as the conditions had become in the United States, with the shutting down of factories and the idling of a quarter of the country’s work force, they were even harsher in Europe.
As gloomy as the managers of Europe’s circus halls were about what the 1930–1931 winter show season might be like, they pleaded with Leitzel and The Flying Codonas to return to the Continent. The two American attractions had been powerful audience generators in their past appearances abroad.
Leitzel may have had reservations about sailing overseas again. She was nearing forty, old for continuing in employment that was so brutally punishing to her body. There was something else that was now weighing increasingly on her thoughts. After the deaths of Lewis Perez and Hans Jahn, she had become more preoccupied with thoughts of her own mortality.
She told George Brinton Beal, the Boston newspaperman, critic, and her friend, that now every time she ascended her web to present another performance, she worried more than ever that it might be her last.
“Someday,” she remarked, “something will happen … and there won’t be any more Lillian.”
Beal did not note whether Leitzel seemed unusually morose when she made the pronouncement. But after cavorting in the big top’s stratosphere from the time she was a child, she must have wondered how much longer she could continue taunting the fates. The thought of coming to her end before an audience in the manner of Perez and Jahn seemed hideous to her, like being a martyr led onto a platform for public execution.
Whatever uneasiness Leitzel might have felt about once again returning to Europe to perform during the winter months of 1930 and 1931, ultimately she did decide to go. She may have been holding out hope that the sojourn would provide a chance for her and Alfredo to start mending their marriage. Late in October, she and Alfredo, along with Lalo and Vera and her maid, Mabel, and rigger, Frank McCloskey, shipped for France. By November 14, they were settled for six weeks into Paris’s Cirque d’Hiver.
In the past, Leitzel and Alfredo had always looked forward to the late-year trips abroad. In comparison with their tours with the Ringling circus, when its cavalcade picked up and moved to a new town every one, two, or few days, the European engagements were almost restful. They were put up for a month or more at a time in the same venues, and stayed in the finest hotels. Because they gave but one performance a day instead of the two required in the Ringling circus, they were free to take in movies, museums, and the variety theaters almost daily. What they loved most about traveling in Europe, though, was the esteem they enjoyed with the public. Even more so than in America, they were ranked with the noblest artists of ballet, theater, and opera.
During Alfredo and Leitzel’s stay in Europe this time, though, he either turned down her requests to visit the theaters and museums, or invited Vera to accompany them on the outings.
Leitzel felt she was on the verge of a crack-up every day.
She and Alfredo, along with their entourage, had taken rooms at a hotel near the Cirque d’Hiver, and met as a group for breakfast and dinner each day. Leitzel saw Alfredo’s gaze soften each time he looked at Vera. She suspected at times that Alfredo was reaching under the table for Vera’s knee. Her cheeks were pinking. Sometimes Leitzel had to excuse herself from the table midmeal and return to her room. Her heart now always felt like her right wrist, rubbed raw, lacerated, softly bleeding.
The engagement in the Cirque d’Hiver of The Flying Codonas and Leitzel ended on Christmas Day 1930. The Codonas were scheduled to shift almost immediately to the Wintergarten in Berlin, but Leitzel was free of any bookings until February.
She had a lot of things to sort out but could not spend another day of carrying on a pretense that she and Alfredo were still a couple. She packed her bags, checked out of the Paris hotel, and had a porter place her luggage at the curb. She was alone when she stepped into a taxi and directed the driver to deliver her to the train station. Mabel, usually her constant companion, was unable to accompany her. She had come down with the flu and was too sick to even get out of her bed at the hotel. Leitzel may have felt it was just as well that she was unaccompanied this time.
In not many minutes, she was at the stati
on, and then was ushered into a private compartment on a train. There, she could cry the whole trip if she wanted. No one would see her tears.
The train started moving out of the station. Leitzel’s anxiousness may have risen. For a long time, she had felt a need to fall into the arms of someone whom she had not seen in years, someone now a day and a country away. Maybe she would find that this someone yearned to be with her just as much.
She hoped. She prayed.
Leitzel inside her private tent circa 1920. (Author’s collection)
Lillian Leitzel in her dressing tent, with her longtime maid, Mabel, who is attending to her hair. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)
Nellie and Leitzel in Paris in 1921. By this time Nellie had reinvented herself as “Zoe, the Aerial Venus,” a striptease aerialist, and had been appearing for several years in cabarets throughout Europe, as well as at Coney Island in New York. Leitzel, during the same period, was comfortably settled into being queen of the big top, the highest-paid, most coddled, and most beloved star in the history of the circus. (Author’s collection)
Clyde Ingalls, manager of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey sideshow, and Leitzel’s second husband, circa 1920. (Author’s collection)
Leitzel with two pupils in her traveling school, Auntie Leitzel’s Free Elementary School, circa early 1920s. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)
Papa Edward Codona, flanked by Lalo and Alfredo, mentored his sons for years before the two mastered The Triple, the big top’s most glorious trapeze maneuver in their time, and the most perilous. (Author’s collection.)
Aerial view of The Flying Codonas. Lalo Codona swings from the trapeze and reaches out to brother Alfredo Codona, who is in flight. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI)
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