Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  “Nothing on but a fig leaf and some paint,” he said in describing how he appeared for the shoots each day.

  Alfredo brought Papa Edward to Sherman Forest to help string the trapezes into the treetops. The family patriarch was still grieving over the loss of his wife of fifty years, but he enjoyed having a role in the moviemaking.

  “Dad and I have a nice tent and Vera lives in a very pretty cottage with all the comforts of modern life,” Alfredo recounted. “There are 150 people out here and we have a wonderful camp—showers running hot and cold water, and everything. There is a beautiful clubhouse where we eat and spend our evenings until 9:30 P.M., then to bed. Regular farmers.”

  The Flying Codonas’ work on the Tarzan film continued for eight weeks, and then, after a short break, Alfredo, Lalo, and Vera started work on Polly of the Circus.

  All the time that Alfredo was engaged in the movie work, he was also carrying out plans for a final tribute to Leitzel. The memorial services were to be held on December 10, ten months after her death. The Long Beach Press-Telegram predicted the occasion would be “the most elaborate affair Long Beach has witnessed.” And so it was.

  Hours before the services started, locals began massing outside Mottell’s Chapel and Mortuary; many were clutching autograph books in hopes of gathering signatures from the celebrities who were expected to appear. In an attempt to impose order, police organized the horde into a double file leading to the chapel door. Then the mourners started arriving and moved through the double rank of townspeople. As the Press-Telegram had forecast, the memorial services brought about the largest concentration of picturesque figures ever to appear in the city.

  Among the first to file into the chapel were Harold Lloyd, the film comedian and producer, and his wife, actress Mildred Davis. They had been ferried to the services from their forty-four-room mansion in Beverly Hills in a chauffeur-driven car. Also turning out were Janet Gaynor and Charles Morton, for whom Alfredo, Lalo, and Clara Curtain had doubled in the trapeze scenes in 4 Devils.

  Not surprisingly, numerous other big top stars were also present for the final tribute to the circus’s greatest female star ever, among them Mabel Stark, the renowned tiger and black panther trainer, and Minnie “The Human Top” Fisher, a retired aerialist who had been a sensation at the turn of the century when, with a rope gripped in her teeth, she whirled like a dervish high in the big top. Numerous Ringling executives were there, too, although not Mister John, who, as was usual for him during the winter months, was in Europe, scouring the Continent for new center ring attractions as well as more masterpieces for his John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota.

  Inside the chapel, Alfredo had reinstalled a shrine to Leitzel similar to the one he’d earlier created inside a bedroom of the Codona family’s Long Beach house on Cherry Street. The shrine’s centerpiece was a silver urn filled with Leitzel’s ashes, some of which were still in the simple copper container in which he had carried her remains back from Europe. Some of the mourners knelt before the urn and said prayers.

  After the services inside the chapel, presided over by the Reverend Perry G. M. Austin, a great rainbow-colored and waxed cortege of mostly Pierce-Arrows, Bentleys, Duesenbergs, and Stutz Bearcats motored to the Inglewood Park Cemetery.

  There Alfredo led the mourners to the knoll where, a short distance from the park’s Lake of Memories, the cemetery workers had sited the monument he commissioned for Leitzel. The stone memorial was still entirely enshrouded beneath a large tarpaulin when the mourners first arrived, and a great gasp rose from them when, a short time later, a couple of gray-suited cemetery employees removed the canvas to reveal Alfredo’s dream in white.

  The plinth below the towering and glowing statuary of the embracing, near nude Leitzel and angel-winged Alfredo bore a simple identification:

  IN EVERLASTING MEMORY OF

  MY BELOVED LEITZEL CODONA

  —ERECTED BY HER DEVOTED HUSBAND

  Works of art, especially creations that are intended to last forever, almost always are given titles, and the monument that Alfredo had commissioned for his beloved bore one that suggested he foresaw a day when the two of them would again lie together. He titled it Reunion.

  He was sobbing audibly, and his hands were shaking as he inserted a key into the small bronze door near the base of the monument, unlocked it, and then placed Leitzel’s silver urn inside.

  Afterward, one by one and two by two, the mourners approached Alfredo, shook his hand, and embraced him. No spouse could have presented a grander, more lasting, and more affecting tribute of love to a lost mate than he did, everyone told him. Reunion, they all said, was a masterpiece, the most beautiful work of art they had seen anywhere.

  CHAPTER 24

  After pleading with Vera day after day after day for months, Alfredo finally received the answer he wanted to hear.

  Vera’s answer came on a July night of 1932, a year and a half after Leitzel’s death and a little more than a half year after Alfredo had placed her ashes inside the bronze-doored vault of Reunion. It likely followed along this line:

  Well, okay, Alfredo. Okay, okay. If that’s what you want, if it will make you feel better, then, all right, fine. I’ll marry you.

  It likely was the most tepid and diffident response Alfredo had ever heard from any woman in his life, but he was deliriously happy.

  As though he felt the action might help bond her word, the first thing Alfredo did was contact the news wire services and such magazines as Time to announce that he and Vera had become engaged to marry. Next, he contacted the Gunther Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, to book its grand ballroom for the afternoon and night of September 18, 1932. The Ringling show would be playing in San Antonio on the day he had chosen for the wedding. Also in the city at the same time, holding their annual convention, would be the Circus Fans of America, an organization of hundreds of big top enthusiasts from throughout the country.

  Alfredo seemed to have been anticipating a wedding celebration that would approach the scale of a British coronation. He was crazy in love. He wanted everyone in his world to share in his joy.

  Whether she was strolling a sidewalk or going through the racks of dresses in a couturier, Vera probably never appeared anywhere in public without causing strangers to wonder if she was a movie star. She was that stunning. Her eyes, both light and dark in their gray chiaroscuro, were penetrating. Her skin was creamy and flawless, she had a slightly aquiline nose, and she was always fashionably coiffed and dressed. What may have been even more striking about her, though, was her air. She seemed almost sphinxlike in her mystery. She had always withheld from others any real sense of who she was. She was also guarded in revealing how she felt about anyone else.

  At twenty-seven, Vera was a dozen years younger than Alfredo. No one who knew her, though, not even her mother, believed that she said yes to Alfredo’s marriage proposal out of love. Annie Bruce remembered receiving a letter from her daughter during the time Alfredo was begging her to become his wife.

  “Mother, Alfredo wants to marry me,” Vera had written. “I don’t want to marry him, but he keeps pleading and pleading. He treats me beautifully, and gives me everything I want. But I don’t love him.”

  Bruce said that Alfredo always brushed aside her daughter’s words when she told him that while she admired him beyond anyone else as an artist and was honored to have a place in The Flying Codonas, she did not feel ardor for him. On these occasions, Bruce said, Alfredo took Vera’s hands in his and responded, “You’ll learn to love me. I’ll make you love me.”

  As large as the Gunther Hotel’s ballroom was, it was not so capacious that it could accommodate all the invited guests at one time. The circus had arrived in San Antonio with sixteen hundred people.

  All afternoon and all night, the well-wishers came to see the newly marrieds in shifts. Not only were all of the circus executives and Alfredo and Vera’s fellow performers invited to the blowout, but so were the canvasmen, the pony grooms, and
the camel attendants. For some of the roustabouts, the trip to the Gunther may have brought them into contact with flush toilets for the first time in months.

  The feasting and revelry continued until dawn, but sometime before midnight, the new Mr. and Mrs. Alfredo Codona said their good nights to the wedding guests and made their way to hotel’s bridal suite.

  Fourteen hundred miles away, beneath the lid of the silver urn locked inside the white marble shrine in Inglewood Park Cemetery, there may have been some stirring of Leitzel’s ashes.

  Alfredo had long been regarded as a first royal of the circus. Now, through marriage, Vera had become a princess, although few of her fellow troupers would have ceded her the honorific wholly on the basis of performing skills. She looked luminous on the trapeze platform, but there were at least a half dozen other women flyers touring with circuses who soared through the air with greater bravura. As adoring as Codona was of Vera otherwise, it bothered him that she seemed completely incapable of exuding any warmth to the people in the seats. “The more she practices, the worse she seems to get,” he once confided to Frank McCloskey.

  While Vera seemed not to grow any closer to Alfredo in the first months of their marriage, she did enjoy the new associations she gained by being Mrs. Codona. One of them was with the celebrated painter John Steuart Curry, who, along with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, was a leader of the American Regionalist movement. Like numerous great artists before him, among them Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, Léger, and Picasso, Curry viewed the circus’s saltimbanques as godlike, artists who consecrated their entire beings to their calling, and in some cases, even risked their lives for it.

  Through arrangements made by Alfredo, Curry had received approval to travel with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for a two-month period in 1932. It was during this time that the bald, moon-faced man from Kansas produced the working drawings for some of his most widely known paintings, including those of the horseback-riding Rieffenachs, the jungle cat trainer Clyde Beatty, and Irma Ponticio, an eight-hundred-pound fat lady who was better known to the public as “Baby Ruth” because of a prodigious appetite for candy bars of the same name that she ate by the twenty-four-count box.

  Curry dined with Alfredo and Vera each night, and, in the morning hours, often gave his new circus friends guided tours through the art museums in bigger cities like Washington, D.C., Boston, and Philadelphia. Curry revered the Codonas, especially Alfredo. He spent so much time on their trapeze perch, making sketches, that many in the audiences may have thought he was a fourth member of the troupe. He painted at least two major canvases of the Codonas. One was titled The Missed Leap and showed Vera falling through space to the net. Another of the paintings, this one called The Flying Codonas, provided a dramatic view of Alfredo cannonballing through the air while in transit to Lalo’s hands. The Flying Codonas, regarded by some critics as Curry’s most successful painting, was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York even before its oil was dried.

  Alfredo and Vera sailed for Europe soon after the Ringling circus finished its 1932 tour in October. The newlyweds spent their first weeks abroad visiting with friends, motoring through the countryside, and honeymooning. By November, they were joined by Lalo for the first of their winter engagements on the Continent, an extended return appearance in Berlin’s Wintergarten, where, as always, The Flying Codonas were the headliners.

  After spending six months in Germany, France, Spain, and England, Alfredo, Vera, and Lalo returned to the United States just in time for the start of the Ringling circus’s 1933 season in the Garden.

  Alfredo was nearing his fortieth birthday. There have been professional baseball pitchers, ballet dancers, and even a few prizefighters who remained close to their top form in their middle years, but, except for Alfredo, this was never true of flyers. Most of them reached their peaks around their twenty-fifth year, and then, like cheap watches, started losing their timing. Alfredo still performed The Triple, and also his blindingly rapid, three- and four-turn pirouettes.

  There was never any dispute among circus critics or even other trapeze artists about his place as the greatest flyer ever, but what surprised everyone was that he seemed to get ever better every year. So many thousands of times had Alfredo performed on the trapeze over the last twenty-five years that soaring into space and then getting safely back to his platform appeared to be as day to day for him as a spring robin’s morning departures from the nest to shop for night crawlers to take home to the hatchlings.

  It continued for him this way during the first two and a half weeks of the new season in the Garden in the spring of 1933, and then something changed one night. He moved through the first parts of his act as smoothly as ever. Then, it was time for him to throw The Triple and call it a night.

  He had rounded out a third somersault and was streaking to Lalo when he did something queer, something he had never done before. Instead of extending his hands to Lalo’s, he raised them up over his head, as though he was trying to clutch those of someone other than his brother. He soared right by Lalo, missing his connection with him altogether. In the next fraction of a second, he smashed headfirst into the uplifted apron of the safety net, and then, springing backward from the recoil, caromed into a guy wire stretched to the trapeze rigging. He moved grotesquely through the air for another second or two and then slammed onto the Garden floor.

  Alfredo lay unconscious for some time. When he came to, he had a sensation that knives were plunged everywhere in his upper back. He was carried from the arena on a stretcher.

  Alfredo’s upper torso was tightly bound with tape when, an hour or two later, Lalo was admitted into the room of the hospital where his brother had been conveyed. The ligaments in his back were torn everywhere.

  “You did something that was strange for me tonight,” Lalo said. “What was the matter?”

  Alfredo turned his gaze from his brother and, as though still trying to figure things out, stared blankly at a wall for seconds before replying.

  “I saw Leitzel’s hands reaching for me,” he finally answered. “I tried grasping them.”

  A new Ringling season had hardly started, but for Alfredo, it already was over.

  He began consulting with doctors. When he asked them how long it would be before he could rejoin the show, he always received the same crushing answer: he might never fly again.

  Alfredo went to see Paul Arley, a Saraosta chiropractor who earlier had been a circus perch pole artist. Arley had a reputation for ridding other big top athletes of cricked backs, pulled muscles, and other injuries of their trade. He assured Alfredo he could help him nurse his shoulder back into shape. He massaged Alfredo’s back daily. He fashioned an upper-body corset that was intended to keep Alfredo’s shoulder muscles stabilized. Within three or four weeks, Alfredo was pitching horseshoes and playing tennis.

  By November of 1933, six months after being grounded, Alfredo was ready to start a comeback. He rented an abandoned chemical factory in San Pedro near the Codona family home in Long Beach, and he, Lalo, and Papa Edward laced the barnlike building with his flying trapeze and net. His goal was to rejoin the Ringling circus the following spring when it opened its 1934 season in the Garden.

  Alfredo was surprised at how swiftly he was able to reclaim the more fundamental of his flying maneuvers. Even after his layoff of more than a half year, he was soon able to spring into the air from Lalo’s hands and then turn two or three pirouettes while moving through space to his trapeze bar. It was evident, though, even after several weeks of practicing, that it could be some time before he could recover his signature stunt.

  A circus expert had once calculated that when Alfredo came out of the third somersault of The Triple and caught the hands of his brother, the shock to his body was equivalent to that of someone grabbing a fence post from the open door of a car traveling at sixty miles an hour. Now, even when he threw a single somersault and was caught by Lalo, the pain that ripped through his back was so
great that he sometimes seemed close to passing out.

  Alfredo damned the gods for reclaiming The Triple from him, but he conceived another stunt that he was sure would be equally spectacular, one that no one had ever accomplished before, a Three and a Half. His idea was to turn three and a half somersaults in midair and have Lalo catch him not at his wrists, but at his ankles. The brothers worked on the trick hundreds of times. Now and then there were times when Lalo’s hands grazed Alfredo’s ankles, but he was never able to lock them in his hands.

  One day, though, after trying for weeks, Lalo managed to keep his clasp on Alfredo’s ankles. Elated, the brothers came down from their trapeze and hugged each other. Alfredo had spent ten years searching for The Triple before he could accomplish it. Because the brothers had succeeded once in executing a Three and a Half, they now knew that the laws of physics and gravity would allow the stunt. Their challenge now was to so precisely calibrate their timing to each other that they could carry out the feat with consistency.

  Over and over, they tried retrieving the Three and a Half. There were times when they seemed to get within a hairsbreadth of docking, but because one brother or the other was a quarter second too early or too late in being where he was supposed to be, they could never quite relocate the feat. In the end, Alfredo always tumbled to the net. Because of his own feelings of powerlessness, he often took out his frustrations on Lalo, cursing him and blaming him for the failures.

  After a series of botched attempts one day at calling back the feat, Alfredo climbed the rope ladder to try yet again. He was angry, not fully in possession of the sharp concentration and control he usually regained the instant he stepped onto his platform.

  He catapulted into space, whirled heels over head three and a half times, and then in the final stretch of his flight, shot beyond Lalo. He collided with the net’s upswept apron, sprang backward, and then started dropping to the net. After hitting the roped body catcher this time, he geysered upward ten or fifteen feet back into the air, and then, with his arms and legs flailing wildly, moved beyond the perimeter of the net below and crashed to the floor on his back.