Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  “Twenty-en …! Twenty-to …!”

  “Twenty-fin …! Twenty-seks …!”

  Momentum alone swept her upward halfway through another revolution. Her feet were now at twelve o’clock in her revolution.

  Then, when her toes were pointing to two o’clock and then three o’clock, something happened, something terrible.

  She was falling away from her rigging with the silver ring still in her hand.

  In the instant when she realized what was happening, she made a desperate attempt to grab the bar of her nearby trapeze. She batted it, sent the rod swaying, but was unable to grasp it.

  The Roman ring remained in her hand for a split second more during the fall, but then dropped away.

  Coming down, Leitzel looked like a mallard that had been blasted out of the sky while flying over a hunter’s blind. Just feet from the bottom, she managed to position herself horizontally with her back to the floor.

  Her shoulders hit first, and then her head snapped back, pounding the thin rubber mat covering the flooring.

  Mabel and McCloskey rushed to her.

  She was still conscious.

  She rasped, “It’s what I told you I was worried about. Thirteen.”

  Her act been listed on the Valencia Hall’s program as No. 13. The night of her premiere appearance in the Valencia Music Hall was February 13, Friday the thirteenth.

  Two attendants shot through the performers’ curtained entranceway, carrying a stretcher. When they got to her side, she tried waving them away with a slow, fanning movement of her hand, signaling she did not need them.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “I can go on.”

  Her first thought was with the audience. McCloskey and Mabel laced their arms with hers and managed to get her to her feet. She started moving wobbily back to the entranceway. She got only halfway. She traveled the rest of the way on the stretcher. Within ten or fifteen minutes, she was lifted into an ambulance. With its bells clanging, the conveyance rushed her to the Copenhagen Municipal Hospital.

  Mabel sent a wire to Nellie and Alfredo, who received the news in Berlin where, after completing their run at the Cirque d’Hiver, The Flying Codonas had started an engagement in the Wintergarten. They traveled together by plane and appeared at the hospital the next morning at about six o’clock. There, along with Mabel and McCloskey, they were ushered into an office where they received a report from the attending physicians.

  Leitzel’s skull had been cracked everywhere, like the shell of a dropped egg. Her vertebrae were shifted every which way.

  Nellie ran from the room into a hall and then sank to the floor. She had never felt as complete as she had when Leitzel came to stay with her in Berlin. Now, after having felt largely estranged from Leitzel all her life but the last month and a half, she felt she might be losing her again. She sobbed hard and gasped for air.

  A doctor injected Nellie with a sedative to help calm her. Even so, she could not have been prepared for what she saw upon being admitted to her daughter’s room. The flesh on Leitzel’s face was yellow and blue. Her hair was shorn to the scalp.

  “Poor Leitzel hardly recognized me,” Nellie said later. “Her poor head. She was in terrible pain. How I suffered at not being able to help her.”

  Alfredo moved to kiss Leitzel on her lips. When he was within inches of her and saw just how badly swollen and bruised every inch of her face was, he withdrew, concerned that even his slightest touch would cause her more pain. He took her right hand and kissed it for a long time.

  “My doll.” He wept. “Mi muñequita. Oh, mi muñequita pobre.”

  The pupils of Leitzel’s eyes seemed hardly larger than pinpricks. She gave Nellie, Alfredo, and Mabel signs that she knew who they were, but she was unable to speak. She was heavily sedated with morphine. Her wakefulness was brief. She sank back into a deep sleep.

  Once or twice more in the morning hours when Nellie, Alfredo, and Mabel were in her room, she woke for a minute or two, and again seemed to show some signs of having a connection to the three.

  By the afternoon, things had changed. Now and then, her eyes fluttered open like those of a mechanical doll, but they did not appear to be seeing anything. Nellie, Alfredo, and Mabel were left terrified by these awakenings. She was delirious during each of them. She shrieked in pain and fright. The figure with the broken head had changed into someone who was no longer a daughter, wife, and dearest friend.

  The physicians told Nellie, Alfredo, and Mabel that Leitzel could lie in a coma for days or even weeks, or possibly she could go anytime. All the three could do was to pray and wait.

  Alfredo was tormented with self-reproach.

  “Why hadn’t I been with her when she fell?” he asked. “She could have fallen into my arms. I would have caught her.… Leitzel never knew how to fall. I never taught her. She never fell in her life.”

  Nellie, Mabel, and Alfredo had been at Leitzel’s bedside sixteen or eighteen hours. The best thing any of them could do, they were told by the nurses, was to get some rest—that, and pray and wait. If there was any change in their loved one’s condition, the three were assured, they would be notified immediately. Nellie, Mabel, and Alfredo left the hospital.

  Alfredo was mindful that The Flying Codonas were still under contract with the Wintergarten for a long engagement, and that the theater would suffer great losses the longer he was gone. He caught the last train of the day for Berlin.

  Nellie and Mabel returned to their room at the Grand Hotel. Nellie could not stop crying. She stayed up for a couple more hours, and finally, after having gone without sleep for more than twenty-four hours, slipped into bed.

  The hospital rang up Nellie and Mabel’s room at two o’clock on the morning of February 15. Alfredo received the news after getting off the train in Berlin.

  She was gone. Leitzel was gone.

  Before the day was out, the news of the death of the circus’s queen was on the front pages of newspapers everywhere in the world. The circus had lost the most glamorous, most widely beloved royal in its history.

  But was Leitzel really gone, or had she somehow just entered into another realm?

  Such was the claim made by some of the dancers and other entertainers with whom she had appeared in the Valencia Music Hall that night on a Friday the thirteenth, forty-eight hours earlier. Some of them insisted Leitzel had returned to the music hall in time for the start of the evening show of February 15, eighteen or twenty hours after it had been reported she had died. She was there the next night, too, and the next and the next. They saw her, as clear as could be, with their own eyes, the performers said. They would swear on stacks of Bibles.

  She was wearing the same crème de menthe–colored tutu she had on the night of her debut in the Valencia. When they saw her, the entertainers claimed, she said nothing, but smiled at them. Her eyes had a sadness now that was not there before, but her smile was warm, like spring sunshine on the face.

  The first of the public tributes was held two nights later in New York’s Madison Square Garden, the place where she had made her American debut as an aerialist and a place where at the beginning of the new Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus season each spring, she was the cause of massive adoration.

  Before the start of a hockey game between the New York Rangers and the Ottawa Senators, as thousands stood with their heads bared, the great arena was darkened. A single spotlight played on a white rope that was slowly lowered from the ceiling. Then, when the rope stopped moving, another spotlight disclosed Joe Humphreys, a well-known announcer at the Garden. He was standing at the center of the ice rink.

  “To the memory of Lillian Leitzel,” Humphries said. “God rest her soul.”

  As the rope was slowly drawn upward, a drum corps sounded the roll that always marked the finale of her Garden appearances. Next, an orchestra started playing “Nearer My God to Thee.” When the hymn ended, the Garden lights went on and the rival teams swarmed out on the ice.

  Colonel H. Ma
xwell Howard was in Havana, Cuba, wintering at the Sevilla Biltmore Hotel, when he learned of Leitzel’s death. As a gentleman who was always elegant in his manners, he may have felt that, as a paramour of Leitzel’s, it would be indecorous to express his condolences to Alfredo. He did send a wire to her brother.

  ALFRED PELIKAN =

  CIVIC ART DIRECTOR, MILWAUKEE (WIS) =

  I AM BARREN OF WORDS.… LEITZEL GAVE HER LIFE TO THOSE SHE LOVED. THE UNPARALLELED HAPPINESS SHE DISTRIBUTED TO THE WORLD WILL NEVER BE MATCHED BY ANY WOMAN. STUNNED AT SAD NEWS. LOVE TO MELBA AND CHILDREN =

  COLONEL.

  Alfredo remained in Berlin, fulfilling the terms of the long engagement The Flying Codonas had at the Wintergarten. Then, in March, he, along with Lalo and Vera, boarded the SS Mauretania in Southampton, England, and started on their return voyage to the United States. Alfredo was carrying a copper urn with Leitzel’s ashes

  As the ship steamed into New York Harbor late in the morning of April 3, the same day the circus was opening its 1931 season at the Garden, four wreaths were dropped onto its deck by planes flying overhead. One of the wreaths was from John Ringling. There were others from the Circus Saints and Sinners Club of America, a fraternal organization of theater and circus people, and Tina Burroughs (née Pelikan), an aunt to Leitzel and a coperformer with her in the Leamy Ladies. The biggest of the wreaths, though, and the most elaborate, laced with long-stemmed white and red roses, bore the simplest of cards, a small, white square that was simply signed “Colonel.”

  In her lifetime, one well before television, Leitzel had appeared live before more people than any other entertainer in any medium, or even any United States president. She had been cheered by untold tens of millions, most of them spectators inside the tents of the Barnum & Bailey and then Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circuses with which she toured for twenty years. For these adorers, her story, as sad as its ending was, was over.

  This was not so for great dozens of the dancers and other entertainers who would perform in the near and far time ahead in Copenhagen’s Valencia Music Hall, where the circus’s royal queen had fallen—or so they would claim.

  The reports of Leitzel sightings by the dancers, magicians, acrobats, and jugglers in Valencia Hall would continue for years. None of the entertainers ever claimed to see her directly, but rather, they said, they glimpsed her in the large, ornamentally framed mirrors that were everywhere in the Valencia, either on the walls of its ballroom, or in the looking glasses at their makeup tables in their dressing rooms. Always she was costumed in the same mint green tutu she was wearing on the night of her fall, these witnesses said, and always she was smiling.

  Heinz Saxburger, a Danish magician and illusionist of wide fame in Europe, was among the Valencia entertainers who told of having such a sighting.

  “It was a night sometime around 1960 or 1961, and I was making my very first appearance in the Valencia,” he said. “I was in a dressing room, putting on my makeup, when, appearing in the dresser mirror before me, was a beautiful woman with golden hair. The door of my dressing room was open, and she was leaning against its frame. She was wearing a performer’s tricot of light green, and she was smiling. I only saw her for a few seconds in the mirror before I turned from my chair to look to the door. There was no one there. The door was still closed.”

  Saxburger said his first thought was that one of the Valencia’s dancers had entered the room, and then, discovering her mistake, instantly vanished. Later he carefully looked over all the dancers appearing in the evening’s program. None of them bore any resemblance to the beautiful, smiling woman in green.

  Saxburger said he was still puzzling over the incident the next day when he met a representative of the talent agency that booked his appearance at the Valencia. The agent then told him the story of an internationally famous circus performer, an American, who had taken a fatal fall in the music hall on a night three decades earlier.

  “You saw her, Heinz, you saw her,” the booker said. “You’re a lucky, lucky man. You will be blessed as all others who have seen her have been blessed. You will have great success as an entertainer. You will have a long and happy life.”

  Saxburger was eighty and still working as a professional magician when he recounted the story of his encounter with the ghost of Leitzel.

  The Valencia Music Hall was razed in 1980. There apparently have been no reports of Leitzel sightings since.

  CHAPTER 23

  Alfredo saw it in a dream the first time. It was towering, all in white, and emitted the glow of a winter moon. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen, or could even ever imagine. The dream of white came to him just days after Leitzel died. When he awoke from it, he could not get it out of his head.

  He talked about his vision with Lalo and with some of the other performers at the Wintergarten in Berlin. Someone told him of Professor Escoli, and on a day off from the circus, Alfredo boarded a train for Italy.

  The leather-aproned man who answered Alfredo’s pounding at the wooden door looked like a ghost. He was silted head to toe in white dust and invited Alfredo in. His studio was a place of daily sandstorms. There was not a tabletop or a tool that was not, like Professor Escoli, frosted in white. He was a stonecutter, a sculptor.

  The two sat at a table, and Alfredo told the professor of his dream in white. He showed him some crude pencil sketches, his attempts at recalling what he saw in the dream, then handed him a small collection of photographs, some of them showing himself, others showing Leitzel.

  Escoli looked at the photographs, and then at Alfredo’s sketches. With a sure hand, he started refining Alfredo’s drawings.

  “Sì? Sì?” the professor asked as his pencil and eraser moved swiftly over Alfredo’s rude conceptions.

  “Yes, yes,” Alfredo answered. “Oh, yes, yes. Exactly so.”

  Before Alfredo left to return to Berlin, Escoli brought out a large caliper. He took careful measurements of his caller’s head, neck, chest, waist, and thighs. He carefully recorded all of the dimensions in a ledger.

  When Alfredo saw his dream in white a second time, it was ten months later.

  The dream was seventeen feet high, chiseled from vein-less, Carrara marble, and weighed several tons. It bore a $38,000 price tag. Alfredo had commissioned the work by Professor Escoli with funds from Leitzel’s estate.

  The wood-crated monument was unloaded from the SS President Pierce in Los Angeles harbor on December 3, 1931, and then moved on a flatbed truck to a place atop a grassy knoll in the Inglewood Park Cemetery.

  The cemetery, southwest of downtown Los Angeles, already had an impressive collection of grandiose creations in granite and marble that marked the last earthly addresses of Hollywood directors, screen stars, and world-class boxers. Even so, Codona’s dream out-rococoed all the other stone follies in the 340-acre park.

  The monument’s most conspicuous features were its full-length, life-size likenesses of Leitzel and Alfredo. The two royals were embracing, and they were nude except for some skeins of carved drapery that Escoli had discreetly situated over their private parts. This was not all that was astonishing about the Italian sculptor’s conception. While huge, seraphlike wings sprouted from Codona’s back, not even a trace of feathery fluff appeared on Leitzel’s shoulders. Had Codona directed the professor to represent him as a divine, and his beloved wife as a mere mortal?

  The figures were posed in a manner suggesting that Alfredo was trying to cling to Leitzel, trying to keep her earthbound. What was surprising in Professor Escoli’s representation of the lovers, though, even startling in a way, was that some force seemed to be drawing Leitzel upward. She appeared to slipping from Alfredo’s hands, levitating, perhaps on her way to heaven to receive wings, too.

  Carved in relief beneath Leitzel’s feet were two Roman rings, a symbol of her act. Each was attached to a rope, but the rope on one of them was severed. Escoli had gotten this detail wrong. Clearly he intended for the snapped rope to represent the cause
of Leitzel’s fatal plunge, but, in fact, her fall had resulted not from a severed rope but from the shattering of a metal swivel that was attached to her ring.

  The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus presented the final performances of its 1931 season in Atlanta on September 14.

  By the time Alfredo, Lalo, and Vera wound up business with the show and returned to Long Beach for the off-season, it was eight or nine days later. That was not quite soon enough for the Codona brothers to see their mother alive a last time. Hortense died on her sixty-second birthday, a day or two before the pair arrived back home.

  The nation was in the third year of the Great Depression, still felled on the mat, groggy and hardly moving. The 1931 Ringling tour had been the shortest of any in its history. The abbreviated season meant that all its performers and laborers had to give up a month and a half or two of pay. Most of them were paralyzed with fears about not only how they could ever survive the winter but also whether there would still be a circus to report to in the spring.

  This, though, was not an immediate concern for Alfredo, Lalo, and Vera. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had signed The Flying Codonas to do the stunting for two major pictures, Tarzan, the Ape Man, the first of six Tarzan movies in which Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan were to be paired, and Polly of the Circus, costarring Clark Gable and Marion Davies. Both pictures were scheduled for release in 1932.

  The filming for Tarzan, the Ape Man got under way in mid-October in Sherman Forest, a densely wooded area of mountains and a lake twenty miles from downtown Los Angeles.

  Alfredo and Vera did the vine swinging for Weissmuller and O’Sullivan, and Lalo doubled for Cheeta, a chimpanzee appearing as Tarzan’s confidant in many of the scenes. Unlike Lalo, who had to suit up each day in a hot, itchy, and heavy ape suit, Alfredo’s costuming requirements were minimal.