SUNDAY BACKWARD: Creepy Clowns Grip the Nation! ... Letizel and Codona Movie in Works at Warner ... Cirque’s Paramour Gets Scripting Overhaul, Biz Remains Stagnant ... Vinyl is Back ... Farewell, Jack Ryan and Pat Cashin ... and More on the Inside!

Do Creepy Clown lives matter?  That’s what I heard this morning on a radio talk show having fun with the issue.
 

This latest media storm is becoming fodder for late night  TV comedians.   It’s also no laughing matter for our struggling big tops, unless some really smart circus can spoof its own jesters into a new kind of merry mayhem.  Ringling, you’ve tried outer space. What say, a trip to the asylum for retired clowns on parole?   Bring on the Scariest Show on Earth!

Creepy clown sightings are spreading like a visiting virus    Another gift of social media, the demented darlings are rattling news wires, stalking schoolyards, scaring kids half to death.  But what a nice diversion from that political circus going on all around us.  Maybe Lady Hillary or Lord Donald will show up at the next debate in gory greasepaint, or is that what they are already wearing?  (shhh! Think Hillary's laugh, kids ...)

Pity the well-intended circus clown: If this creepy movement isn’t reason enough for all circuses to ban traditional jester makeup in favor of the harmless red nose, (okay, to be extra safe, a pink one)  I don’t know what is.  More and more adults are outing their own fear of funny faces.   No longer something to hide from.  Simon Cowell on America’s Got Talent, for one.   Just another nail in the coffin of our sadly beleaguered big tops.

P.T. Barnum once said that "clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung."  Well, these days, they may be hanging it — literally

Onto great promising news  Have we, at last, a high-drama quality film for adults about a genuinely tragic American circus story?  New flick about aerial thrillers Lillian Leitzel and Alfred Codona in the works at Warner Bros, and how I hope the Weinsteins have their hands in this one.  Heavy weights already signed on include producer Andrew Lazaar, who handled Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, and Aussie actress Margot Robbie, right (The Wolf of Wall Street, Suicide Squad), to play Leitzel.  I’m thinking this could be The One I’ve been waiting for through too many mediocre big top flicks  Think of the background alone --- Ringling in the ‘20s!.  The rivalry between Leitzel and her scheming nemesis, conniving Vera Bruce ... Of the tragic ends that would befall both icons.  

To be based upon Dean N. Jensen’s 2013 book Queen of the Air, and I can’t wait.  Yes, I might have said that before another film, Water for Elephants, came out, but I’d not yet read the wretchedly brutal book from which the latter was faithfully adapted. 

Can Queen of the Air achieve what all other circus flicks have failed to do: Mine cinematic gold from genuine big top history? Film Makers and documentarians  have long shunned compelling subject matter staring them in the face: I’m thinking the towering figure of reckless circus king John Ringling, who lived a colorful and ultimately tragic life, and I’ve thought of Leitzel and Codona, and of course of the catastrophic Hartford fire, not to mention its genesis in a fractious war among Ringling heirs for control of the circus.

What do we usually get from Hollywood?  Of late, Water. I mean, tell me, please, was there ever a circus as thoroughly sadistic as that one?   As improbably untrue to any semblance of tent show history, then, before or now?

Another Cirque du Fizzle?  The company’s ill-reviewed New York stage show, Paramour, closed down quietly for a few days in late Auguest to reivse script in reponse to public feedback, some fans wanting “more acrobatics earlier in the show during the exposition,” others hungering for more meat on the bones of an empty-headed plot.  Post revamping, the altered Paramour is enduring ticket sales still ranging from pretty good to ominously stagnant, hovering too often in the 65% range.  I still think they have a chance.

Will the eggheads on the lot ever learn?  When I came across a New York Times review of two new stage shows, headlined “Identify Crisis: Theatre Productions That Refuse to be Theater,” I thought of how well it applies to circuses refusing to be circuses.

END RINGERS: Sadly, the passing of  Pat Cashin, clown and blogger, and only 48-years-old.  When I started up this blog, he was an early supporter.  That support faded away over the years, down to zero. I never exactly knew why, but likely something I said ... Also departing us, on August 25, another early supporter of my blog and the person who coined "May all your days be circus days," Ringling PR man Jack Ryan, at 77 ... Yet another circus school is rising, this one over Philly, site of the first circus to play America .... Warning to freak show imitators:  If you try dining on blades, be sure to order them Dull.  An Indian man suffering acute stomach pains, discovered by doctors to be harboring 40 various blades and knives in his guts.  About the unnamed patient, you’re thinking. extreme side show trickster?  No, think 42-year-old policeman – and maybe, on the side, a petty thief with a built in fencing flow  ... Retro trendy vinyl record lovers not going away.  It’s no passing fade.  Some new CDs coming out on old wax, too.  Down the street, just opened a vinyl-only shop.  Exciting!  Many of my old LPs from the fifties are still cracking-free good, I’ll have you know ... Sinatra never sounded better ... Oh, you gotta love the kids who don’t dismiss everything that came before them ...

Chase a creepy clown into a panic.  Pray for a great circus flick from the great Warner Bros.  And buy a vinyl record on me!  

first published in 2016

A True Trapeze Queen Shamefully Ignored By History

 

 Update, 5/28

Our winner had checked in!  He posted under The Magic Guys, but somehow, his full message did not come through.  His answers was:

Latvian aerialist Lena Jourdan, of the Flying Jordans

Congrats, Magic Guys!

End of update. 

Still ignored by writers and historians who should know better: Lena Jordan, not Ernest Clarke, was the first flyer to turn a triple somersault on the trapeze.  Most sources place the feat on Jordan Bros. Circus in Australia, 1897. But according to the Guinness Book of Records, Jordan actually turned the first triple in New York city with the Flying Jordans, an American troupe, in 1896, at Koster & Bial's Theatre 

Not so fast, says Wikipedia, claiming that the New York record has not been officially recognized. Rather,  In May 1897, Jordan, aged 16, "became the first recorded person to perform a triple somersault during a routine in Sydney, Australia."

The Circus Ring of Fame in Sarasota propounded the myth by ignoring  Jordan altogether, in order to give  Antoinette Concello credit for first female to turn the triple. 

How does the Circus Historical Society check in on this?  I once followed a thread on their history message board, all the way to a contributor who confirmed that, indeed, the honor goes to Jordan. 

Chance Circus Reflections... from Olympian Flops to the Glory of Colleano ...

 

     RANDOM RANTING AND RUING, in no particular disorder.  May I begin by officially bashing the Bumblers-in-Chief behind this Olympian disaster (aka, farce). From the top, NBC, which shoves under or overwhelming personalities at us, from the dull man in the control booth to Iceland’s precious guess-who-I-really am gender bender, Johnny Weird.  Gosh, world, do you really need him to inform us that a number of male figure skaters are gay?  Duh?

     NOT TO SLIGHT the elegantly corrupt IOC.  Give them a gold for Site and Scheduling Stupidity. ... Founder of the games, a Frenchman, declared it was not the act of winning but that of entering the race itself that merited respect for all.  Today, some of the young contenders are berated by their coaches for falling short of the gold. Silver for Shame.  Bronze for Boooo!                           

     SIMON COWELL’S Extreme Desperation?  I bumped into his latest, a strained effort chasing the extreme sports market, which lingered too long between its Big Moments (one, truly close to death), and padded the slightest evidence of danger ahead with overwrought judges faking near-hysterical dread.  And then, running the action in slow motion!   Since when did I want to watch the cannon man in slow motion?  Since when was speed not a thrill?

     SOME OF THESE TRICKS are old circus and carny stunts.  Pardon my insensitivity in recalling one of the biggest let downs of them all, this from the “Nerveless Nocks,” whom I could not wait to see on Ringling-Barnum – lured by the image (in my mind only) of the performers jumping from the tip of one spar to another and passing each other in breathless  “mid-air exchanges.”Actually, those maneuvers were grasping and clumsy, as the Nocks clung to each other’s bodies while exchanging poles. A stunt, period, redeemed, however, when each of the Nocks came sliding down their respective spars, head first, for a terrific finish.

     WHEN DID THE END begin?  Here is the cover before me of a White Tops, featuring a photo that shows a sign “PLEASE HELP SAVE THE CIRCUS” You see some young people signing petitions spread out on a table during intermission at Circus Vargas, and you marvel at the date of the magazine: July-August 1975. May I repeat: 1975.   That early?   Yes .... It was a long time in coming, with PETA up and running, Cirque du Soleil yet to attack ...

     CRITICALLY GONE: Writer and critic Ernest Albrecht, from whose possibly last review I quote, this from his March 2020 Spectacle on line, which went dark thereafter.  Albrecht was reviewing Circus Sarasota, just before Corona came to call. He was was high on two acts, and left to pick over the rest with notes.  Samples of discontent:  “A juggling act called Get the Shoe never really got very interesting ... comes off as nothing more than sloppy juggling mixed with martial arts.”  About a labored cradle routine from Hannah Griffth,  “It might help if she could do something to break up the monotony and engage the audience, perhaps with some flirting.”  Like, say, a little Lilian Leitzel? ...  A thoughtful voice was  he who supported and favored the best in all forums, including what he called “the new American Circus,” which, sadly, was maybe still new but hardly thriving by the time of his passing.  A serious voice worth missing

     BIG APPLE ANONYMOUS:  Was there ever a more thoroughly under reviewed show that came to New York city than Nik Wallenda’s version of the still-beleaguered Big Apple Circus, this having marked its third incarnation out of a shaky bankruptcy.  What went wrong?   Early in his rocky trial date with Lincoln Center,  Nik threw a three-ring snit when ordered by his landlords  to remove posters on construction walls.  And this he turned into an ugly campaign that did nothing to enamor this particular Wallenda of the city that never sleeps, or forgets.   

     BIGGEST MYSTERY OF ALL is how many seats he filled.  If he attracted healthy crowds, Nik gets double-high marks for playing Gotham in the dark when  media attention totaled ZERO.  Not a single notice in any of the dailies. So I offer you a rare review, this one posted here as a comment, which I subsequently posted  as a real review -- by the ever-sharing Anonymous.  See if this does not strike you as smartly observing stuff. Samples:   

   "THERE ARE SOME STELLAR solo and duo acts, [but] the show is ONLY solo and duo acts apart from the wire act, which is made extremely cringe-worthy by Nik's several interruptions to show video and speak on mic to the audience ... It's all made worse by the suspicion that he is doing nothing but alienating his neighbors in Lincoln Center by his Page Six video, hollering about discrimination and unfairness." **
   
     IN YOU TUBE WE TRUST, when all else fails, with or without posters, Monte Carlo acts or “character arcs.”  You Tubing is the ultimate road to circuses then and nearly now. I stumbled into an eight minute stream of Cirque du Soleil’s 2014 Volta, and found two standout displays  – the shimmering acrobatics of a woman from her web; and the very circus-like action of some bike riders up and down ramps. Exciting! The rest?  Home made action to my eyes, even the props, or the way they were worked, looked humdrum. If this is a typical Cirque entry, I can’t see them packing the tent.  

     AUSSIE AWESOME: You Tube streamed me to the image of low wire god Con Colleano, and I linked, Yes!  And  was swept away into glorious black and white, a stream of old film first showing the Big Show trains unloading in the yards, the tents going up, and then the Great One dancing upon and somersaulting over his wire on fire.   How lucky was I once upon a superior season when Clyde Beatty Circus came to Santa Rosa, and with it, Colleano.  Such passion and thunder! I knew I was watching a true wizard of the big top.  I never got to see another Great One —  Colleano’s wife, Winnie, who arguably took the single trapeze turn to its highest summit ever.   

    THEY WERE STARS in those days!  Names known!   Hollywood wanted Con Colleano, to fill in for Rudolph Valentine following his passing.  Con was not turned on to the offer, remembers an Aussie interviewed on the feature, but stuck to his first love, The Circus. And doesn’t that give you a rare good feeling in these especially precarious times? 

     GOODBYE, SWEET KIEV: Misty memory of a cool Autumn evening in 1979,  on foot in my favorite Soviet city (such sparkling grandeur) to take in the circus.  Along the way, a handsome young fellow, earnestly inclined, discretely joined my company, striding alongside.  Why, soon it became clear.  He told  me how hard it was to buy the jacket I was wearing in his world, and then commenced a soft campaign, hoping I would understand and allow him to purchase the prize off  my back.  Politely I declined.  Gently, he continued, from other angles.   And then I reached the circus, and he reluctantly stood aside as we parted company.  I felt a genuine sadness. I can imagine him, maybe 20 years later, finding a jacket like mine in then-liberated  Kiev.  Tomorrow?  I am not so sure.

**to read the full review link  to "circus reviews" found on the right sidebar and scroll down a ways.

U.S. Circuses in the Age of Virtual Reality: The Struggle to Placate Ambivalent Americans

The late Henry Edgar once posted a comment on this blog to the effect, What if you were to offer the customers what most of us would agree is the best circus possible and yet they still failed to fill up your seats ?  A very good question given shrinking crowd sizes over the last thirty years.  Maybe it's time to review not the show but the audience itself.  To continue Henry's thread, I have a question:

What is the circus owner to offer a jaded public turning fickle on big top staples?  

The Very Real Circus:  Not Virtual Enough?

Perhaps the force of circus being a live show no longer holds the same drawing power, as more people turn to virtual realities, albeit it everything from texting to eDating, video games to porno.  

I have long argued the compelling reality of circus.  More and more, I am starting to doubt the argument’s relevance in this new and rather frightening era of electronic interaction where, one day — people as smart as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have ventured — “computers are going to take over from humans, no question.”  Wozniak can see ourselves becoming the pets of our robots.   

Item: A group of friends sharing restaurant table space, but not each others company, preferring interaction with their smart phones over the people actually sitting next to them.

Item:  Check out the movie Her, in which a man forms a relationship with an advanced operating system named Samantha.  Frightening.  And very believable.

Enter the Ambivalent American Audience

Yes, Mr. Producer, I feel your frustration, even if you don’t.  You no longer enjoy the total attention of a crowd.  You now must complete with smart phones and tablets and other tweety distractions, ad nauseum.

You now must also compete for the respect of a crowd that arrives with issues about the contents of your show.  Oh, those weird looking clowns.  Don’t .. Come ... Near ... Me ... Look at that draggy tiger, think it's been mistreated?   Which reminds me, I've got to get some suppression pills for my pit bull. No, he can't attack anybody in the nose muzzle when we go out walking. ... Oh, no, look -- she's not wearing a safety wire, is she?   Sometimes they don't?  What if, oh God!  [Another day, another show]: Oh, look, she’s strapped to a wire!  Must be a beginner.  I could do that.

Even granting that a live show can still draw big crowds, then what next to question under the big top?  There's plenty according to the critics.  On parade, here come the most politically incorrect offenders.

Circus Staples Under Siege

DAREDEVILS
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This key element of circus  may be losing its luster to more spectacular acts of risk-taking on TV reality shows or aerial stunts in the great outdoors captured on film.  Compared to which, the sight of a mere human scaling a wire only thirty or forty feet above the ground may somehow seem, reverse affect here, old school.  Another trend that is emasculating the show are the solo and duo fabric aerialists who throw more focus onto slower balletic moves. I think this sort of action, some of it, to be sure, quite exciting, has nonetheless eroded the public’s taste for the more perilous tricks we associate with the single trapeze.   Would Pinito Del Oro, above, have settled for a silken web? For a static trapeze?

The protected aerialist: The presence of lifelines (mechanics) has done more than anything else to produce today’s ambivalent audience.  Courage or cowardice, which will it be today, Circus? With some performers flying under protection, others not, the vacillating impression does nothing to sustain a committed identity.  And the primal power of circus suffers.   

CLOWNING

This old-time jester might today consider either less greasepaint or horror flicks

The heavily painted funny faces are not so welcome anymore.  Reports and images of creepy characters in grotesque clown makeup terrorizing citizens on city streets and in public places have produced a growing number of adults who fear taking their kids to a circus for this among the other reasons.  In Europe, there seems to be a trend towards less makeup, down to a red nose maybe and a few whimsical marks, sufficient to paint a face in mirth, but not one of implicit mayhem.  This is a viable route for today’s jesters.  After all, a clown is a character far more than a painted face.

ANIMALS

The elephants may be on the way out. So, too, the big cage cats.  But there are still plenty of dogs, horses, camels and other critters — well, if  Jenny Vidbel can find and train them. I think that John Ringling North II made about as shrewd and sensitive a move as a circus man can make these days by featuring just one small elephant, Louise, on his Kelly Miller show last season.  The dancing of Louise, nothing like I have ever seen, was pure magic.

Encore for Elephants?  If the public’s skittishness over performing pachyderms is ever to be reversed, it may take one elephant at a time.  And it may take a far simpler approach like the one advocated by UK author and critic Douglas McPherson in his book, Circus Mania: 

“The elephants don’t need to be oversold with gimmicks.  Just walking into the ring and marching, stopping and turning to command would be enough.” 

Indeed, a day may come when an audience new to such a spectacle as elephants on parade will thrill to that alone.  Certainly the children will.

Bring back the one-act show:  Circuses may help their cause by removing the intermission and running a shorter show straight through, as once they did.  Promise patrons less time away from their gadgets.  On their way out, happier, they may still be more inclined, maybe more so, to patronize the rides and concessions — the vain lure of selfies.

 Remember When Circus Day was Guilt Free?

Unlike their forebears, today's patrons enter the tent loaded with electronics and with overwrought minds buzzing with issues over whether to patronize a circus is even a good idea in the first place.
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That long-gone circus day that enjoyed the total attention of an undistracted crowd not fraught with issues, that long ago world in which we once thrilled to a circus show feeling not a qualm, reveling in the honest and simple joy of it all --- that wondrous world, I am sadly afraid, no longer exits.

The Big Show in Council Bluffs, Iowa, August 23, 1953

Next: Can Kenneth Feld Rebuild The Greatest Show on Earth?

Photos above: On horseback, the Cristiians

On the high wire:  The Wallendas

On the single trap:   Pinito Del Oro

Clown Buzzy Potts.
Barnum & Bailey on parade, 1908
Under the big top At Gil Gray Circus (from the Circus Blog)
Ringling elephants on Parade, 1978, with Ana May in the lead, the Woodcocks in charge

First posted January 18, 2016

SUNDAY OUT OF THE PAST: Blundering “Biography” of Leitzel & Codona, a Book You Can't Put Down --

Peaked at 13,284 page views  

 This revised review is drawn from additional research following the posting of my earlier review of the book. More about this at the end.

Book Review, Revised
Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus
Dean Jansen, Crown Publishers

Here is a book for the ages, or so I originally thought and wrote.  The subjects tackled by author Dean Jensen — Leitzel and Codona, and Ringling in all its glory — are of course immensely compelling.

In her fiery heyday thrilling spectators with high-energy gymnastics under the big top, Lillian Leitzel was arguably the greatest solo star ever to grace the rings of Ringling. So transcendent a figure had she become, that American soldiers during World War I voted her “the most beautiful and attractive woman in all the world.” (5.26.25 -- confirmed by AI!*)  And that included Hollywood. Men of note, Henry Ford among them, are said in these precarious pages to have lined up to play suitor to the charismatic performer.  Did they or didn’t they?  I have my doubts.  Even with Alfredo, I have my doubts.

More likely, everything was carefully choreographed to build up an epic image bigger than life, bigger even than the circus itself.  A mythical image now made even more mythical (and at times heartlessly cruel) by an expedient author of dubious ethics. Make no mistake:  There is plenty here to enthrall and entertain readers with little interest in big top history.  Plenty here that may be genuinely rich and even revelatory. But for my money,  too much of it bears the mark of either incredibly careless research or slyly calculated distortion to inflate story-telling dynamics. Shame on Crown Publishers for daring to describe this a biography.          

Conceived in rape,  Leitzel grew up to be her own best agent, and once installed on the Ringling caravan — granted an entire car on the train, a private tent on the lot, and a maid, Mabel Cummings — she reigned like a self-appointed queen.  Nobody dared question the coming and goings of  their blazing headliner, whose first two ill-fated marriages come off looking more comical than sincere.  

She doted on giving circus children morning lessons in her tent.  And under the big top later in the day, her spectacular entrance pitted the diminutive dynamo — all of 4' 9", against the lumbering 6' 4" Willie Mosher, uninformed like a hotel doorman, who escorted her into the ring. (Believe it or not, there is no mention of Mosher in the book that I recall, nor does his name appear in the index.)  Lillian threw kisses to the crowds as she whirled furiously above them, teasing her way up to the big trick — her famous one arm rollovers numbering sometimes over a hundred. Those spinning revolutions composed, in Jensen’s own beguiling two-word description,  a “white blur.” I have never come across a white a blur in the scarce film footage of her act that I have seen.

A JOYFUL EXUBERANCE

How good was the act, really?  If I have a problem with Leitzel’s art and this sensationalizing treatment of her life, it is this: Of the footage I have seen from the  late 1920s,  I want — oh how I want — to feel a thrill I can’t quite feel. In photos out there, her leg extensions can be awkward, the transitions from one trick to the next, labored. Of the rollover plange, equestrian director Fred Bradna wrote in his book,The Big Top, “It was not a beautiful sight; it was not supposed to be.  It was a test of stamina.”  But there is something maybe more at work. By shunning  – or failing -- the polish of ballet that others such as Con Colleano incorporated, Leitzel may have intensified the passionate exuberance she projected, a rough tumbling spirit as lively as the three ring circus on the move.

ENTER HER GREAT LOVE          

Trapeze god Alfredo Codona comes through as a bit more humble, though in the end he turns stark raving mad. He and Leitzel in love – or playing to each other’s need for constant attention and rumorizing —  tangled ruthlessly in romance, tormenting the hell out of each other by flaunting side affairs.  Roll the drums!  Silence all vendors!  Leitzel wins the prize for Greatest Act of Cruelty on Wedding Day.  That is, if you wish to buy Jensen’s blundering tale of how Leitzel kept Alfredo and guests waiting for over three hours at the alter. Yes, three hours.  In fact, calm down, kids — they were married on time between shows in Chicago.   It was at a wedding reception following the night show that Leitzel lost herself for a couple of hours, driving Codona into a panic.             

TWO UNFORGETTABLE ENDINGS

When Leitzel’s rigging fails in Copenhagen, sending her to her death in 1931, I wept. So did I weep being pulled though the last punishing days of Codona’s tragic end, trapeze god felled by a fall, down to failed ringmaster, and then onto car garage mechanic in Long Beach, CA.        

With Leitzel gone, Alfredo, right, defaulted to his flying partner Vera Bruce,center, begging her over and over again to marry him. Really?  According to Jensen’s end notes, he drew this stormy account from a story, “The Mad Love of Alfredo Codona,” allegedly penned by Annie Bruce for True Story Magazine in 1938,  a tabloid-leaning periodical known for taking rewrite liberties with submissions, and also publishing the work of fiction writers   Why did Jensen not defer to more credible accounts at hand, one by Fred Bradna in The Big Top;  the other by author Robert Lewis Taylor in Center Ring?  In fact, Bruce had been trying all along to steal Codona away from Leitzel.  

RINGLING AS NEVER BEFORE REVEALED         

Beyond Leitzel & Codona, the circus of Ringling, as narrated by the masterfully fact-altering Jensen, rides high and wide on revelations so startling as to leave me dumbfounded.  How did it take so long for some of these things to surface?  As long, maybe,  as it took Jensen to concoct them.  He mentions dozens of taped interviews, and I hope these will end up in a legit space.  They could turn out to be a gold mine.

                  

For example, there is the sighting of married man Charles Ringling --- seen here with Leitzel and his son, Robert ---  spotted in a darkened movie house with his head resting on the shoulder of showgirl Anna Stais, his arm around her. The spotting of it was done in only a few nervous seconds by flyer Butch Brann, having just slipped into seats with “Dolores.”  In his own words, as quoted: “Then I saw who was in the row just ahead of us.  It was Charlie and Anna Stais ... Dolores and I hightailed it out of that row.” To the balcony they fled.  I have a question for those into movie house intrigue:  How could Butch have known for sure from the back of a figure sitting directly in front of him in a darkened theatre that it was his own boss. – one of the brothers who banned “accidental meetings” between the sexes on the show?  

 MISSING IN ACTION

Away from gossip and dirt in the shadows, how about something as important as who first threw the first triple?  Ernest Clarke was not the first flyer to nail it.  That honor goes to Russian-born  Lena Jordan, and if you don’t believe me, check out Wikipedia.   Still  don’t?  Okay, how about Guinness Book of World Records?  In fact, the record was impressively explored and certified on the Circus Historical Society history message board, July 1, 1965.

What makes these blunders more inexplicable is that Jensen drew from the likes of Fred Dahlinger (“how many times did I call on him while producing this book?”), Greg Parkinson, Fred Pfening III.  I have to wonder if any of these three were asked to read the manuscript or proofs.  

A LEGACY BARELY A BLUR

Curiously, the legacy of Lillian Leitzel does not hold up well in lists out there of all time circus greats, although these lists are so wildly different as to make each seem meaningless.Her name is totally missing in several I have examined. On others, she is never at the top. The History Channel places her at the bottom of a list of 8, below May Wirth.  She fails a list of 15, the most phenomenal female performers.  John Ringing North who saw her perform in her hey day, described her, "twirling like a human pinwheel high in the top of tent [who] may never find its equal as long as there is a circus anywhere."  

Sadly, we may never be able to see the Lilian Leitzel that North and others saw in her best years.   What I enjoy the most in film footage is the spectacle of her crossing the lot, with her maid trailing her, on her way to the big tent where the crowds are waiting to be thrilled.  I love the warm waving looks Lillian Leitzel gives to bystanders on the way. Her true love.

To me, Queen of the Air feels like contaminated goods, and I no longer have the faith in it to buy my own copy.  How would I know what to believe? Perhaps the experts of what qualifies as “biography” will find me off base. So be it.  I am not of the school that dismisses objectivity as out of date.   Some standards of conduct should forever be worth fighting for.  

TWO STARS, kindly awarded.

For more about the book, I discuss Queen for the Air with Timothy Tegge in an earlier post on the subject.  In fact, had Tim not answered my second e-mail asking for his input, this revised review would likely never have been.

 first posted 5.25.21, Park Your Memory at the Marquee.

SPECIAL BONUS FROM GEORGE BRINTON BEAL 

By sheer serendipity,  I came upon rare candor from author George Binton Beal, this found in his little magazine, The Call of the Calliope, from December 1955: “In public she managed to appear beautiful in a dainty, doll-like way that is difficult to describe.  Actually she was an ugly misshapen little woman  doing an ugly awkward act which by means of her great genius she made beautiful to behold.”

On her death” “Many show folk do not believe that her rigging broke and hint at fowl play ...I remember so clearly one  night when Leitzel and I were chatting ...She looked down at her taped and bandaged wrist, then up at her rigging ... Then, turning to me she said, ‘Some night, Mr. Beal, I’ll just let go and there won’t be any Lillian any more.'"

* Beware: I am learning that AI can be as wrong as right, and can't seem to self reconcile contradictory information it puts out in separate answers to essentially the same question,  differently worded. See my post a ways down, AI Goes to the Circus. re: the first triple somersault.

5.25.21   

41,620 3.10.26

Staggering Achievement in Circus History Captures Tragic Lives of Leitzel and Codona, Reveals Ringling as Never Before

UPDATE, 4/17, 1:32 PST: Re: the book's troubling assertions, I am in communication with a well-placed source on the subject of Leizel and Codona which may result in significant revisions to parts of this review, or a separate post. Disregard the headline above.

Book review
Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus
Dean Jansen
Crown, 2013

Here is a book for the ages, and why did it take me so long to get to it?

In her fiery heyday thrilling spectators with her high-energy gymnastics under the big top, Lillian Leitzel was arguably the greatest solo star ever to grace the rings of Ringling. So transcendent a figure had she become, that American soldiers during World War I voted her “the most beautiful and attractive woman in all the world,” Hollywood included. Men of note, Henry Ford among them, lined up to play suitor to the charismatic dynamo, who stood all of four foot nine.   Did they or didn’t they?  I have my doubts.  Even with Alfredo, I have my doubts.

More likely, everything was carefully choreographed to build up an epic image bigger than life, bigger even than the circus itself.  John and Charles Ringling caved to the diva’s demands for a private car on the train, her own dressing tent on the lot, both concessions unheard of at the time.  The brothers also helped fuel her flame by encouraging her various affairs, believing the notoriety would bring more glamor and attention to the circus.

Conceived in rape,  Leitzel grew up to be her own best agent, and once installed on the Ringling lot, she reigned supreme, like a self-appointed queen.   Nobody dared question the coming and goings of  their blazing headliner, whose first two ill-fated marriages come off looking more comical than sincere.  

Perhaps more sincerely, Leitzel doted on giving circus children morning lessons in her tent, and over the center ring later in the day, throwing kisses to the crowds as she whirled furiously above them, teasing her way up to the big trick — her famous one arm rollovers numbering sometimes over a hundred. Those spinning revolutions composed, so it was written, a “white blur.”  Once back on the ground and back to theatrics, Leitzel cursed out her maid and fired her. Then rehired her. Happened every day. Which sounds a bit scripted to me. And why not? Every day on the circus, she had a whole new audience to play to.

A Joyful Exuberance

How good was the act, really?  If I have a problem with Leitzel’s art and this extraordinary book, it is this: Of the scarce film footage of it from the late 1920s that have studied,  I want to feel a thrill I can’t quite feel. That “white blur” does not come through.  Notwithstanding the photo, her leg extensions can be awkward, the transitions from one trick to the next, labored.  But there is something maybe more at work here. By shunning  – or failing -- the polish of ballet that others such as Con Coleano incorporated, Leitzel may have intensified the passionate exuberance she projected, a rough tumbling spirit as lively as the three ring circus.

Enter Her Great Love

Trapeze god Alfredo Codona (not, by the way,  Mexican, but of Scottish and French blood) comes through as a bit more humble, though in the end he turns stark raving mad. He and Leitzel in love – or playing to each other’s need for constant attention and rumorizing —  tangled ruthlessly in romance, tormenting the hell out of each other by flaunting side affairs.  But Leitzel gets the prize for Greatest Act of Cruelty on Wedding Day.  She kept Alfredo and guests waiting for over three hours. Yes, three hours. The groom might have walked away. The groom was being taught how to be a more pitiful person.
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Two Unforgettable Endings

When Leitzel’s rigging fails in Copenhagen, sending her to her death in 1931, I wept. So did I weep being pulled though the last punishing days of Codona’s tragic end, trapeze god felled by a fall, down to failed ringmaster, and then onto car garage mechanic in Long Beach, CA. With Leitzel gone, he defaulted to his flying partner Vera Bruce, begging her over and over again to marry him.  She did not love the man, but finally she gave in, and likely did not give out. The doomed marriage ended the lives of both in the office of a divorce lawyer, where Codona, armed for the occasion, first took down Vera, and then himself.

Ringling Revealed As Never Before

Beyond Leitzel & Codona, the circus of Ringling, as magnificently narrated by the masterful Jensen, rides high and wide on fresh revelations, some quite startling, all of which makes for an enormously enthralling read. Some nuggets among many:

John Ringling, in the painting above, admired by his nephew, John Ringling North, comes through perhaps more vividly here than in any other book I have read. 

And then there is the lowdown on Charles Ringling and wife Edith (Edie) the latter described as “extraordinarily indulgent.” Perhaps this trait drove Charlie into the charms of other women.   He tried but failed to snare touchy-feely time in the private tent of his highest paid performer.  He did better in darkened bijous with at least one show girl. And her name was not Edith Ringling,  Her name was Anna Stais. As observed by another figure in the movie house essentially up to the same thing, Charlie “had his arm around her and his head was resting on her shoulder.”   Astonishing, considering how the brothers explicitly banned all “accidental meetings”between the sexes in various public places.  

The Wallendas Enter the Tent

Nowhere have I read a better account of the Wallendas first night at Madison Square Garden to a prolonged standing ovation, declared by The Billboard “easily the best act the circus ever had, and the most daring.” I can believe this, oh can I. For, many years later when the troupe performed their legendary 7-high pyramid at the Santa Rosa fairgrounds pavilion, to the eyes of an 11-year-old, it felt as if circus gods from on high had briefly descended to give him a revelation of true wonder.  That day sealed my fate.

Troubling Assertions

Nothing is perfect, and small errors are to be expected.  Bigger ones?  Red flags must be raised here.  First and foremost, hard to understand why Jensen did not go deeper to learn, easy to learn at the time he was nearing publication, that British born Ernest Clarke was not the first flyer to nail the triple.  That honor goes to Russian-born  Lena Jordan, and if you still don’t believe me, check out Wikipedia.   Still  don’t?  Okay, how about Guinness Book of World Records?  In fact, the record was talked about  on the Circus Historical Society history message board, July 1, 1965.

Nor was Jensen without expert guidance in his research, drawing from from the likes of Fred Dahlinger, Greg Parkinson, Fred Pfening III.  I have to wonder if any of these three were asked to read the manuscript or proofs. Why oh why such an inexplicable blunder?  

Leitzel did not always get the entire performance area to herself, as Jensen fanfares.  I’ve seen her listed in old Ringling programs as appearing in seven-act displays.  Once, solo.  Here if the 1925 program:

A Legacy Barely a Blur

Curiously, the legacy of Lillian Leitzel does not hold up well in lists out there of all time circus greats. Although these lists are so wildly different as to make each seem meaningless..Her name is totally missing in several I have looked at. On others, she is never at the top. The History Channel places her at the bottom of a list of 8, below May Wirth.  She fails a list of 15, the most phenomenal female performers.

Sadly, we may never be able to see the Lilian Leitzel that others saw in her best years. What I miss the most is the white blur.  What I enjoy the most is the spectacle of her crossing the lot, with her tall maid trailing her, on her way to the tent where the crowds are waiting to be thrilled.  I love the warm waving looks she gives to bystanders on the way. Her true love.

The childless Leitzel with Dolly Jahn, 1926, celebrating the girl's birthday.

This book must rank as one of the greatest big top tomes of all time.  Need I say any more, America?  

FIVE STARS

 

Wallenda NY High Wire Walk a Washout ... While Nik Stays Safely Strapped to Safety Wires, Viewership Takes a Plunge ...

* UPDATES, 6/24: Fake daring-do just won't cut it anymore.  Turns out that Nik and sister Lijana were strapped to safety wires, looking more like injured patients re-learning how to walk.

* 5 million watched the stunt on ABC, down from the 10 million who followed Nik Wallenda's 2012 walk, also protected. (He has taken similar outdoor walks elsewhere in past years without mechanics.)

* About the safety harness, Wallenda told a reporter he was "totally cool" with it, giving as a reason his concern for his sister.  High wire walkers who work with mechanics are not true high wire walkers at all, and that is putting it politely.  What they should do is come down to earth and walk the low wire, and preserve the aura of integrity.

* I caught a clip of Nik strapped to an elaborate high-tech harness.  Pitiful.  A further smear on the vanishing mystique of great American circus , which comes off looking even more impotent compared to some TV reality shows. Karl Wallenda must be grieving in his grave.

"TWO PEOPLE, 25 STORIES ABOVE TIMES SQUARE!"  Great come-on.

Actually, I am putting this out the night before, having just discovered an ABC special I knew nothing about -- Nick Wallenda and sister about to take a  wire walk over Times Square.

Got to give it to these two: They make perfect personalities for this kind of stunt, somehow managing  to come off above and beyond the vulgarity sometimes attached to these old-fashioned exploits. She is a discrete looker, drawing a fashionable sympathy talking about not being totally secure with an ailing ankle.

He, cool guy still, says he cares more about his sister than his own balance aloft.

And I am already nervous, or should I say concerned?  But I will have no idea whether or not they make the crossing, for I will be sleeping through most of it.

Have a good night.

MIDWAY FLASH: Cirque du Soleil Aerialst Falls to Death in Tampa

Yann Arnaud, above, lost his grip with an aerial strap and fell  a dozen  feet to the "stage" at 10 p.m. last night in Tampa.

Tampa Bay Times, reporting the incident, said Arnaud was rushed to a local hospital, where he later died from injuries.

The 38-year-old Arnaud was performing in Cirque's new show Volta.

“The entire Cirque du Soleil family is in shock and devastated by this tragedy,” said long-time company president Daniel Lamarre in a statement published in the Canadian Press. “Yann had been with us for over 15 years and was loved by all who had the chance to know him.”

Trapeze in Our Time: Beyond Elusive Quads -- Novel Riggings and Expanding Flight Patterns Deliver Fresh Thrills

Upon reading about  the Espana family being inducted into the Ring of Fame in Sarasota, I instantly thought –  Ramon Espana.   One of very few flyers whose names remain burnished in my brain.  He flew for Circus Vargas in the mid - eighties, and he flew with the greatest of pizazz.  I can picture him him up there on the pedestal, reaching out to grab the fly bar, as if to be be shouting — Give it to me!  I can’t wait any longer!  Gotta fly!

On, what a showman.  I think he even out-showaned  Tito Tito. Although I don’t recall his having as full a repertoire of tricks as did the Great Gaona, seen here, Ramon's zesty demeanor was infectious. He and the family reached the pedestal on high like attack flyers on a mission, burning to conquer the crowds below — their body language screaming, Okay, we’re here!  Now the real show begins!  When they were on, they were ON.  Ramon and his brother Noeh both turned triples, as did the Rodogels over the center ring.  The tent exploded with joy.

No doubt they were one of many reasons why I saw that wonderful edition of  Circus Vargas five times in three SoCal locations in 1985.  This was, for my eyes and ears,  Mr. V’s best ever. 

Once upon a season, circus-loving Americans banked on the biggest moment in the show --- when the nets went up, the fliers hit the rings with flaring capes and scampered up skinny rope ladders to daring-do and bravado at the top.   Once upon a season, whatever they did up there — remarkable or not  — spectators loved it.

I thrilled to  the Ward Bell Flyers on Polack Bros in its 1950s heyday, when three troupes of them worked side by side, their big climax being a simultaneous passing leap. Maybe they were ahead of their time.  Among the troupe’s  members were Harold and Eddie Ward, Jr., the later seen here, right, with Art and Antoinette Concello. The brothers  had grown up in Bloomington, Illinois — a veritable training ground through the first half of the twentieth century for many if not most of the best aerialists who flew over rings around the world.  America was once a major player.

Around that time, when the triple was still an elusive wonder, came an outstanding film on the subject  -- Trapeze.  In it, the character of  John Ringling North visits the famed Cirque d’Hiver in Paris,  to chart  the progress of a young flyer named Tino, struggling to master the triple.  Tino’s dream is to fly high at Madison Square Garden for The Greatest Show on Earth.

Once upon a time seems so long ago.

Ramon Espana surly realized his own dream through  the 1980s, in my view the last great American circus decade.  Another flyer with an advanced vision and more muscle yet, was the majestic Miguel Vazquez, who caught his first quadruple somersault  before a Tucson, Arizona audience while flying for Ringling-Barnum in 1982.  As the seasons flew by,  Miguel, seen below, had scarce competition, save for the Caballeros, whose quad career, from what I vaguely understand, was short lived.  In circus history, the lone figure of Miguel’s dazzling triumph still looms alone -- almost -- in its greatness.

Almost.  In 1991, the Russians included a quiet quad, executed by Vilen Golovko and  Pyotr Serdukov, in their celebrated aerial epic, The Flying Cranes, a tribute to fallen soldiers in WWII.  But ballyhoo the trick, they did not, fearing that the feat alone would detract from the sensitive story line. Which begs the question, with what frequency did Golovko and Serudkov succeed?

The Russians were already redesigning human flight patterns in circus space and time,  adding multiple riggings into novel configurations, to turn the standard daring-young-man appearance into a constellation of daring souls in motion at the same time.  I first beheld their thrilling vision at the Old Circus in Moscow, in 1979.  A stunning revelation of how and why the greatest  ring stars push to break new boundaries. 

After the 1980s, things began to slacken off in this country.  One shocking year at  Ringling in the 1990s, there was not a single trapeze act on the bill!.  I could hardly believe it.  Kenneth Feld, his own innovator, believed it. And the show went on.  Other countries were following the Soviet lead.  From Shanghai to America came the Shanghai Swingers, a sensational hyper ballet of complex aerial patterns, which I caught at UniverSoul Circus.  Other similarly inclined troupes landed prime time on Ringling. One always wanted more, and so more is what we got.

Today still, a number of ambitious young flyers take their turns at the elusive quad.  So far, they invariably fail to reach the golden altitudes with any degree of consistency.  Might this not possibly make the standard trapeze act, where a triple is no longer a notable exception, feel a tad, passe?

Ringling’s last show offered the crowd an exhilarating twist on a trapeze staple, thank you, Feld Family in fearless retreat, when two of the Tuniziani flyers, a fabulous troupe from Venezuela, turned triples simultaneously from separate riggings, flying in opposite directions past each. Spellbinding.  At least in the air, Ringling-Barnum went out in a blaze of glory.

Trumping the quad, something even more miraculous has come to flight: At Monte Carlo three festivals ago, one of the flyers in a troupe of eleven turned the quintuple  — yes, five somersaults.  The house was  ecstatic, on its feet, encoring.  Three or four minutes on its feet.   How I would love to have been there.  The judges sighed, GOLD.

From whence that monumental achievement? From Pyongyang, North Korea.

Some fans quibbled about the flyer, Ching Leong Chang*,  seen above, being given an unfair advantage, his takeoff catapulted from a small Russian swing type rig attached to the pedestal, with another flyer behind him helping to propel it.   The critics might be technically correct, but of greater import is what occurs as a result: The flyer is able to produce a more spectacular upward-reaching liftoff, and to trace a much wider arc on the ascent, as if to be literally flying through space  before falling into the hands of the catcher.  And thus, the trick is not only easier to watch, but it produces a longer lasting thrill.  Anything wrong in that?   You can see it here:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVIXV2FoWIY

Back on earth, the standard trapeze turn may no longer dominate the bill as once it did.    And the fine young flyers failing to achieve the quad may not be  helping the cause any.  Latest is Ammed Tuniziani, claimed by Big Apple Circus to be "the ninth person in history to catch the quadruple somersault."  In her enthusiastic review of Big Apple for the Atlantic-Journal Constitution,,  Becca J. G. Godwin wrote:

 “Another seldom-attempted trick came from Ammed Tuniziani, who tried to complete a quadruple somersault on the trapeze. The effort failed when his hands didn’t connect with his partner’s after the midair tumbles, causing him to fall to the net. The crowd hollered anyway, perhaps feeling oddly reassured by the mistake.”

Were they — are we, too ? — “oddly reassured” over what might be considered a symbol of what is happening to the American circus  as, one by one, its core elements are seen as no longer working?   We are living through some kind of a very strange and uncertain time, the outcome for which is too hard and painful to predict.

One thing is certain, with kudos to some young North Koreans:  These rare mortals in lands far and near who hurl their spinning bodies through space like invincible birds of steel — they will  not go away.  They will not be denied.  Were John Ringling North alive today, I can’t imagine him not trying to get the Korean flyers over here.  Refusing to be denied.

Pray for North Korea to take a more civil road.  And, by the time that should happen, for there to be a circus owner still around with the drive and resources to book the Koreans for the First Time in America.

Jeff Bezos, are you available?

****************************************************************************

 *  Ching Leong Chang is what I hear the ringmaster announcing.   I have seen another video of what appears to be another Korean flyer turning the quin, whose name seems to be Han Ho Song,  but his takeoff is produced in a different manner, by his being capitulated from his feet by another flyer sharing the same swing.

Read about legendary flyer Miguel Vazquez and his phenomenal Gold Clown performance at the Monte Carlo Circus Festival, in Showbiz David's critically acclaimed new book, Big Top Typewriter: My Inside Adventures through The World of Circus.   Buy it now on Amazon at specially reduced Presidents Day prices.