Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus

336 Pages·2013·4.08 MB·English

by  Dean N. Jensen

ALSO BY DEAN JENSEN
The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton

Copyright © 2013 by Dean N. Jensen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jensen, Dean.
Queen of the air: a true story of love and tragedy at the circus/Dean Jensen.
      p.   cm.
1. Leitzel, Lillian. 2. Aerialists—United States—Biography. 3. Woman circus performers—United States—
Biography. I. Title.
GV1811.L424J46 2012
791.3′4092—dc23
[B]        2012018066
eISBN: 978-0-307-98658-0
JACKET DESIGN BY BEN WISEMAN
JACKET PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF CIRCUS WORLD MUSEUM, BARABOO, WISCONSIN
v3.1
for my wife, rosemary, still and forever the center ring star in my life; my daughters, jennifer anne loew and
jessica jensen maxwell;
my son, dane marco antonio jensen; and
my grandchildren, lucas, kyle, and brendan.
and in memory of the late charles philip (chappie) fox, the circus’s greatest champion of the twentieth century,
and the man who opened my eyes and heart to what its excitement is all about.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Photo Insert
Part Two
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Three
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Four
Chapter 21
Photo Insert
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Selected Interviews
About the Author
PROLOGUE
A soaking rain had fallen much of the day, turning the circus lot into a
quagmire. By sundown, though, the downpour �nally had stopped, and now,
on this mid-June night in Boston in 1919, a canary-colored moon hung over
the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey tents like a blessing.
A show had been under way in the big top for more than an hour. It was a
little beyond eight o’clock when two women, one of them in a costume of
white and spangled chi�on, plodded to the great tent from the circus’s train,
idled on a railroad siding a quarter mile away.
From a little distance, the costumed woman looked like a child. She was
delicate of face and frame, and so tiny, just four foot nine. She walked with her
eyes cast to the ground, careful to avoid placing her kid slippers into the
puddles and the depressions left in the mud by the circus’s elephants and
horses. The woman at her side was her lady-in-waiting and constant
companion. She was over six feet tall and wore a charwoman’s bonnet and a
dowdy, ankle-length, cinder-colored dress. Her expression was unchanging in
its dolefulness, and she had teeth that leaned every which way like gravestones
in an unattended cemetery.
A hundred or more of the circus’s other attachés were already bunched up at
the big top’s back door by the time the costumed woman and her consort
arrived there. The gathering included wire walkers, clowns, the trainers of the
big cats, and even some of the sideshow’s freaks. Such back-door groupings
always formed when it was close to the time she was about to perform. It was
a way for the other troupers to pay regular homage to her. She was queen to
the circus’s thirteen hundred performers and laborers, and by far its greatest
star.
A brassy, Napoleonic-sounding composition started playing inside the big
top, the “Crimson Cradle March,” a work expressly written for the Queen of the
Air, as she was known. The music’s sounding was a cue for those gathered at
the door. A seam opened midway in the swarm, through which she and her
maid advanced.
A diagonal column of white light aimed from above located her the instant
she appeared in the tent, and the roaring that erupted from the crowd was
almost fearful. The big top shuddered as though it were housing a great
cataract like Niagara Falls. There were �fteen thousand people in attendance
this night, a full house.
Your great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents could have seen her
that night in Boston, or, if not there, maybe in Chicago, San Francisco, Biloxi,
or some other town. The Ringling circus, the most gigantic ever assembled,
traveled by train to about 125 towns each year, staying three, four, or more
days in some of them. The circus put on two shows daily, a matinee and
evening performance, and often played to two and a half million people in a
season. Its queen was almost certainly seen live by more people of her time
than any other single �gure in America, whether a prima ballerina, a sports
hero, or even the president.
With the crowd still cheering, she skipped to the center ring, throwing kisses
to every corner of the canvas cathedral. Her attendant was eight or ten feet
behind her, outside the spotlight, holding a train of white tulle that streamed
from her employer.
Inside the ring, after taking more bows, she moved to her web, a thick,
white, velvet-wrapped rope that served as her transit way to the big top’s
stratosphere. She started moving upward, hand over hand. Her ascent was
made easily, without strain, as if she had simply entered an elevator and
pushed a button to the �fth or sixth �oor.
Then she was in the big top’s heavens, and now even the spectators in the
highest seats had to tilt back their heads to see her. Her expression was one of
pure rapture, and she appeared to have instantly transformed into a state more
Icarus-like than human.
And then she was �ying.
Flying.
Sailing, soaring, swooping.
She weighed fewer than one hundred pounds on the ground, but up here,
she seemed to be incorporeal, as heftless as a butter�y. The air embraced her,
held her protectively, loved her.
She was now aboard a trapeze and moving ever higher in the ether—so high
that in her upward swings it appeared she might burst through the canvas
ceiling and keep rising until vanishing in the sky.
“Mother of god,” the people in the seats cried at the wonder of her.
She might have been inside a dream, one of those glorious reveries that
maybe everyone has, in which the dreamer discovers that by simply willing it,
she or he can lift and �y over church steeples, above mountains, above the
clouds.
She clung to the trapeze’s bar by just a single hand as it moved pendulously
in a great arc. She did hand and headstands on the widely sweeping bar. Then,
changing her position, she dangled from it upside down, with one of her legs
crooked at the knee over the bar. Finally she journeyed in space with her arms
and legs akimbo, secured to the conveyance by nothing more than the nape of
her neck.
“Mother of god.”
After minutes of such cavorting, she left the trapeze for another
appurtenance in her playground, a rope hanging down from above with a