Queen of the Air Read online

  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 finally 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 chiffon, 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 fifteen 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 figure 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 fifth or sixth floor.

  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 flying.

  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 butterfly. 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 fly 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 silver hand ring at its bottom. She pushed her right hand through the ring and then gripped the rope. She was now hanging loosely fifty
or sixty feet in the air, without a net anywhere between her and the earthen hippodrome floor.

  Her back-and-forth movements were slight, almost imperceptible, at first. In not many seconds, though, her body started describing half circles in the air. She continued to rise, her feet moving higher than her head in her forward and backward swings. In seconds more, she started turning full heels-over-head circles in the big top’s sky. With each of the turnovers, her arm dislocated from her shoulder, and then clicked back in place.

  Some in the crowd started tolling off the numbers of each of her revolutions: “One … Five … Fifteen … Twenty …” But then, her throw-overs started coming so fast that she changed into a white blur, and it became harder for most of the spectators to continue their counts.

  The tresses atop her head that her lady-in-waiting had earlier bobby-pinned in place started to become undone and fall. They banged softly at her beaming face in golden corkscrews.

  “Oh, mother of god,” the crowd gasped.

  Typically, the little queen essayed about a hundred of the revolutions in her performances. But the pain in her shoulder may have bothered her more this night than most others. She ended her turns somewhere short of her usual number and descended her web to harvest her applause.

  The rushing sound of a mighty cataract returned to the tent. Almost everybody in the tent was standing, and applauding, and cheering.

  “Leitzel … Leitzel … Leitzel …”

  She bowed and bowed, and flung kisses in every direction. Then, with her maid following, she made her way to the tent’s back door. The crowd was not willing to yield her to the night so easily, though. Leitzel was called back a second time to say good night, and then a third and a fourth.

  Many of the circus queen’s subjects were still outside the back door when she left the tent a final time. Among them were three midgets.

  “How splendid you were tonight, Mademoiselle,” one of them said to her. “It was seventy-nine, wasn’t it?”

  One of the other dwarves was carrying a flashlight. He laid down a carpet of light before her.

  “Look out for the mud,” he cautioned.

  Leitzel, her maid, and the three little men then started poking over the puddled and miry ground to the siding where the train gleamed in the moonlight. There, they came upon two teenage boys who were leaning against the queen’s wheeled apartment, smoking cigarettes. They were members of a Japanese acrobatic troupe. One of the young men lifted the queen to the foot ledge just outside the door to her quarters. Next, he offered her a wish just before she closed the door behind her.

  “Beautiful dreams for honorable little lady,” he said.

  NELLIE PELIKAN, AGE FOURTEEN, MOTHER OF LEITZEL (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  CHAPTER 1

  Firelight was entering the circus wagon through a narrow open door when Nellie woke. The orange light was jumpy, flickering. It played over the walls of the roofed wagon and its collection of costumes, trunks, hoops, juggling balls, and other props. The air in the wheeled cabin was scented with woodsmoke and meadow grass.

  She lay on a straw-filled ticking spread on the plank flooring. At her side, sharing the thin mattress with her, were an eight-year-old boy and nine-year-old girl, a brother and sister. Nellie was unable to communicate with them. They were Czech. She understood only German and a little Polish.

  Always, though, Nellie and the children held hands as they lay together as the wagon rolled through the nights, with the brother and sister whimpering, “Matka … Matka …” over and over before falling asleep, and Nellie crying, “Mutter … Mutter …”

  It was the spring of 1890, April or May.

  Nellie Pelikan was twelve, and doll-like. She was small for her age, maybe four foot four or five. Her head bore a large corona of soft curls that were exactly the chestnut brown of her sad eyes.

  She along with the brother and sister were wards of Willy Dosta, the operator of a one-wagon, one-horse circus. The show was one of hundreds of such gypsy affairs that toured Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mostly the Willy Dosta Circus rolled over the rutty roads veining the dark, thickly forested wilderness of the Carpathian Mountains along the boundary between Poland and Czechoslovakia. The circus depended on free-will offerings and seldom played to audiences of more than a dozen or so.

  This night, as every night, Nellie and her companions had fallen asleep while Dosta was at the reins, searching for another hamlet where he could put down the show. At the time Nellie awoke, though, the wagon was off the road and stopped in a clearing. It was dark outside except for the flaring of a fire. It might have been in the dead of night or an hour or two before dawn.

  She had awakened with an urge to empty her bladder. She squirmed this way and that on the mattress, hoping that she could hold off leaving the wagon until daylight.

  Her discomfort grew and finally she rose from the bedding. The floor creaked beneath her bare feet. She tried to step more lightly. She did not want to disturb the sleep of the brother and sister.

  She froze when she had padded to the open door, startled at the sight before her. Thirty or forty steps outside was Reiter, the Percheron horse that not only towed the wagon from place to place but also appeared in the ring of the Willy Dosta Circus. Reiter was a gentle horse, but freakishly massive, twenty hands, almost seven feet, and with the inky air blanking all details of the landscape around him, he appeared to Nellie to have grown to an even greater size. Not only that, but Reiter was glowing. His white-gray coat was fluorescing with crimson light. The great horse was tethered near a campfire, munching grass.

  Closer to the fire, lying on a scrap of canvas, was Willy Dosta. His boots were on one side of him and his rifle on the other, and he appeared to be sleeping. Dosta, a Scotsman, was a man in his late thirties, with a broad chest, muscular arms, and the neck of a bull. His red mustache was so bushy it masked the entire lower third of his face like a bandanna covering the mouth of a stagecoach bandit.

  Nellie shivered. She cowered at every sight of him. Even in sleep, his expression was one of sullenness. It had been that way since that spring night a month or two earlier when, as she cried and screamed and begged to be released, he penned her inside the circus wagon, latched the door with a lock, and then, with a shake of Reiter’s reins, took her from her family in Breslau, Silesia.

  Nellie leaped the three feet from the wagon floor to the ground and struck out in a direction opposite from where Dosta lay, wading through a field of hip-high grass. When she had moved a hundred steps or so, she stopped, drew the hem of her nightshirt to her waist, and squatted to pee.

  Her head had vanished beneath the top of the grasses when she heard a swishing in the field. Her heart started drumming. She remained crouched, trying to make herself smaller. Brown bears, lynxes, and wolves were everywhere in the Carpathians, but in an instant, she would see an even more frightful animal.

  Dosta was at her side, towering over her. He had found her easily by following in the wake she had cut through the grasses.

  With a single hand clenching her shoulder, he drew her up and then led her deeper into the grasses. Next, he pushed her to the ground, then dropped down himself and threw one of his heavy muscular legs over hers. He clamped his furry mouth over her lips. She could not scream. She could barely breathe. He slipped a hand under her nightshirt and moved it to her chest. He discovered only small, boyish buds there, and moved his hand down beneath her underwear. His fingers were scratchy and hard with calluses from gripping Reiter’s reins for hours each day. With his free hand, he slipped the suspenders from his shoulders and pushed down his trousers so the pants legs gathered around his boots.

  He was gone when she awoke. She lay in the grass for a moment, looking up at the moon and stars, and then got onto her feet. From afar, as she was approaching the wagon, she saw that Willy was again sprawled out on his patch of canvas near the campfire. She reentered the wagon, and, waiting for daybreak, took her place on the mattress between the
sleeping boy and girl.

  She must have thought about escaping. But how? Every day the wagon penetrated deeper and higher into the wilds of the Carpathians. Was she a hundred miles from the family home in Breslau or a thousand? She could not have had any idea. She was never even sure of the country she was in. During their meanderings, Dosta and his charges continually wove in and out of regions in Poland, Slovakia, the Ukraine, and Romania.

  Dosta had rarely spoken to Nellie before, except to issue commands. His relationship toward her became even more remote after the assault. He showed no signs of remorse and seemed to view the molestation as another demonstration that she was fully his chattel.

  Nellie ached with homesickness for her mother and four brothers and sisters. But she sank into even deeper despair after the attack. She became preoccupied with one thought: she was going to burn eternally in hell.

  Almost from the time Nellie Pelikan started walking, she had lived the life of a nomad. She had been an equestrienne and acrobat in Eduard Pelikan’s Family Circus, a show operated by her father. Because she was on the move seven or eight months a year, her schooling was irregular. But winters, when the Pelikans were back in Breslau, she was enrolled in a school operated by Polish nuns. Because her native language was not Polish but German, she had trouble absorbing the lessons of arithmetic and history. Often the nun placed the dunce cap on her head and ordered her to sit on a stool in front of the class.

  If Nellie had trouble concentrating on the secular subjects, though, she was attentive when the sister cleared the classroom of the boys and preached to the girls about the evils of fornication. A girl could commit no greater sin than to allow herself to be touched by another in her private areas, the nun would lecture. The sister would then open an oversize copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy and, standing before the classroom desks, turn the pages to the illustrations showing wailing sinners in the fiery pits of hell. Some of the children in the pictures seemed to Nellie to be no older than she was.

  “This will be your forever if you disobey God’s commandment to remain chaste,” the nun would warn. “The sinners you see here are still in hell today, and they will be there tomorrow and when all of you are old and gray. Once you enter hell, there is no escape. These sinners are there for the eternities.”