Queen of the Air

Dean, Jensen. Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love & Tragedy at the Circus. New York: Crown. 2013. Print

First Sentences:

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.

Description:

To me, the circus presents a conflicting experience. On one hand, it is a magical world visually and sensually of animals, colors, smells, and lights, a world populated by fantastic beings with unusual talents and masterful presence. 

On the other hand, the behind-the-scenes workings of the circus can be disquieting, almost shameful. The circus brings together the exotic, the peculiar, the poverty-stricken outcasts and caged animals to perform before audiences eager to gape at them. It is a demanding environment, as performers and animals struggle to perfect unnatural, dangerous skills. But it also seems demeaning for elephants to dance on balls, obese sideshow figures to sit on stages waving, and trained dogs to run up ladders wearing dresses.

But oh, then there are the trapeze artists. Their grace, strength, and breath-taking daring make the circus an other-worldly experience. These men and women are "godlike, artists who consecrated their entire beings to their calling, and in some cases, even risked their lives for it," according to the painter John Steuart Curry, who travelled with and painted circuses in the 1930s.

Dean Jensen, former art critic for the Milwaukee Sentinel, has written three books on the circus. In Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love & Tragedy at the Circus, he is at his best as a storyteller and researcher, bringing to life what really made up a circus and its inhabitants during the early 1900s.

Jensen focuses on the true stories of Lillian Leitzel and Alfredo Codona, the biggest stars ever to hit the circus world. Leitzel was a trapeze artist from Czechoslovakia in the early 1900s, a wisp of a girl/woman who perfected a unique move: a one-armed swing as she hung from a single rope, jerking her body 50 - 100 times in head-over-feet revolutions, all performed 70' in the air without a net. 

Leitzel's mother, only 13 when Leitzel was born, was herself an international trapeze star. Nellie performed throughout Europe with the Leamy Ladies on the "Trapezone Rotaire," a circular arrangements of trapezes that revolved overhead, which was a stupendous sensation for audiences in the 1890s. Leitzel was left alone for years with her grandparents while her mother travelled. 

Leitzel started aerial performing at age three on a small pair of Roman rings and a trapeze bar. By age 11, she teamed up with her mother as a Leamy Lady on the Trapezone Rotaire. Their act was seen by John Ringling at a performance in Berlin's Wintergarden, and they were immediately booked to join the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth in America.

Leitzel became the most popular attraction in circus history, drawing huge crowds everywhere as the star. She eventually commanded her own train car, tent, and a salary of $1,200 per week from the Ringling Brothers, an unheard of amount in the 1920s when a good car cost $400. She continued to return to the European stages in the circus off season and even appeared on Vaudeville stages in America, performing her demanding routine many times a day year after year.

Alfredo Codona, the other star of the book, was also a trapeze artist, working with his brother as "The Flying Codonas" in small circuses in Mexico before tiny audiences. He became obsessed with perfecting the feat no other flyer had ever completed: the triple somersault. 

Once he actually achieved the triple and could perform it before audiences, his skill was noticed by the Ringling Brothers who signed him to their circus that featured Leitzel. The two stars, these magnetic personalities, now were thrown into the same star-crossed orbit. What happened to them next was both beautiful and shocking. 

Queen of the Air is a wonderful book. Jensen weaves a clear story with a descriptive narration that let readers intimately understand the world of the circus and their performers. We lucky readers can breathe the big top air, watch the performances, feel the tension, and cheer the successes. We get to know and understand the motivations of these unique performers as well as the managers of the circus and the audiences who worship the stars. 

It is a gripping, fantastical tale of two people and the circus world they dominated as god-like stars. In Jensen's words:

"The story of Leitzel and Alfredo was the greatest one the big top has ever had to tell. They presided over an ever-relocating sawdust-and-rainbows-made Camelot where, one after another, wonderments kept occurring. Their love story was epic. Had it played out in the ancient world instead of the first third of the twentieth century, it might have been presented on the stage by Sophocles. Their story moved in the arc of a Greek tragedy, and, I believe, was complete with mischievous fates and vengeful gods." 

Who can resist a story as big and as personal as this? Certainly not me, and I hope not you either. It is wonderful.

Happy reading. 


Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Jensen, Dean. The Biggest, the Smallest, the Longest, the Shortest: A Chronicle of the American Circus from Its Heartland

True look at the world of circuses, performers, and animals.

Helfer, Ralph. Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived 

True account of a relationship between an elephant and his friend/trainer over seven decades, from surviving a shipwreck together to performing in circuses worldwide.

Gruen, Sara. Water for Elephants 

Recollections of a 90-year-old man about his wildly varied experiences with the circus. Wonderfully written and a great fictional story.