American Dreams (50 page)

Tired of a one-note career, Fritzi went to B.B. and voiced her frustration.

He responded with one of his soulful sighs.

'Listen, I understand perfectly, but I got to tell you, Fritzi, Hayman and Al are in bed on this, you'll excuse me for being crude. You're a money maker. Money, money, money - the word comes out of them like they were a pair of Victrolas. Is the talent happy? Who cares? 1 fight them tooth and nail. Sure, I can order Al to do what I say, but whenever I do, the whole operation goes to hell until he decides to stop sulking. Al's a genius with the books, I need him. It's frustrating. Sometimes I get as mad as you and want to go back to the optical shop. I'll find you something better, I promise.'

True to his word, he loaned her to a new company, Adolph Zukor's Famous Players. In Zukor's Stick 'Em Up Fritzi played a brave female bank teller who foiled a robbery. Not exactly A Doll's House, but at least she kissed a leading man, the bank president's son, instead of a horse. She also saw a good deal of Mary Pickford for a week. She and Little Mary lunched in Mary's dressing room with the door latched. This permitted
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Mary to puff away on cigarettes; on the screen she didn't dare.

"They still have me playing twelve and fourteen because I can get away with it,' Mary complained. Though only in her twenties, she was rumored to be making five hundred dollars a week. The studio called her America's Sweetheart. There was an open conspiracy to keep secret from the public Loyal 313

her marriage to Owen Moore, a handsome leading man from Biograph who had the misfortune to be a drunk.

'The sweet little virgin, that's me.' Mary rolled her eyes. 'Get a load of this.' She opened a smart leather case trimmed in brass. The case held rows of artificial yellow curls nesting in velvet. 'A makeup whiz named George Westmore made it. I can sprout a whole head of curls in five minutes.'

In

turn, Fritzi told Mary about her frustration over her roles. Mary was incensed. 'They'll chain you up forever if you let them. The moment I think I can press my bosses to the wall, I'll demand control, with my own production company. You should do the same.'

'Oh, I'll never have the power. I'll never be a big star like you.'

'Yes, you will, darling.' Mary patted her hand. 'Till then, keep a little sign in your head that says "My Own Company."'

At that moment America's Sweetheart had the steely eyes of a robber baron.

Fritzi dreamed often of the man from Texas. On a free day she drove to the Waterhole, parked, and waited. No sign of him. A fortnight later she went back and this time found bowlegged Windy White, half sober and hobbling on a crutch.

'Mr. White, do you remember me?'

' 'Course I do. Miss Crown, ain't it?'

'That's right. I'm sorry to see you had an accident.'

'Wai, wasn't as if I didn't know ahead of time the shot was chancy. I jumped off a locomotive on a trestle and fell in a crick. The crick'was a mite shallow. I'll mend in a week or so.'

Fritzi shuddered thinking of it. 'Do you do this kind of thing often?'

'Often as they want to pay me, yes'm. Windy White'll take a dive from
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an auto, a trolley, a balloon, a cayuse, a runaway wagon - anything that's movin' fast.'

'That's dangerous work.' She wondered how he dared risk it if he were constantly befogged by whiskey. 'By the way, have you seen Mr. I Iardin, or heard from him?'

'Loy? Nary a word since he left. Loy ain't the sort to write letters, though. Any special reason you're asking?'

'Urn, the studio wants him for a small part.'

'That so?' He sliced a wad of tobacco off a plug and slipped it into his 314

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mouth. He didn't embarrass her over the transparent question: what studio would send an actress searching for a bit player?

Wish I could help you. I sure-God don't know what's happened to him. I hope some grizzly didn't catch holt of him. Anything on two legs Loy can handle.'

He tipped his stained sugarloaf hat and hobbled off to join some cowboys playing euchre on the trolley bench. Fritzi crossed Hollywood Boulevard, in front of a wagon loaded with five-gallon bottles of mineral water, fighting back tears of frustration.

59 Flying Circus

Carl rode the boxcars to El Paso, and asked for Rene LeMaye at the gents' bar of the Sheldon Hotel. He was told that LeMaye's aerial exhibition team was making an eight-week circuit of Arkansas and Oklahoma. Carl washed dishes in a restaurant for two months. At the end of that time, as predicted, LeMaye returned to his base. He interviewed Carl in the bar of the Sheldon.

Rene LeMaye was a small, squinty man of forty, prematurely bald, and almost never without a cigarette. He'd learned to fly in France, at the school run by the Farmans, Maurice and Henry. In 1910 he'd come to the U.S. as a mechanic for the celebrated French flyer Louis Paulhan, and stayed when Paulhan's exhibition tour ended. Rene's remarks to Carl in fractured English were candid, not to say blunt:

'I will try you out tomorrow on our oldest plane. If you don't crash it to
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pieces, I'll hire you. Our troupe is different from many touring your country.

We are not demonstrating machines in order to sell them. We have nothing to sell but frisson. The fluttering heart. The leaping stomach.

Death-defying aerial stunts by daredevils who -- always the faint unspoken hope, eh? - might fail to defy it this time. For the flyers too it is exciting -- like drinking fine brandy, or having a new woman. Can you deal with all that, man amiV

"I can, and I'd like it,' Carl said, with more hope than certainty.

After a successful tryout, Rene hired him. In the weeks that followed, Carl discovered that the little man had spoken truthfully. The yells and Flying Circus 315

cheers rising from a packed grandstand after a dangerous stunt were heady wine. Once, he thought he should spend his life with racecars.

Traveling from fairground to fairground with Rene's troupe, he realized he'd been wrong. He really belonged aloft, with the wind and clouds and air currents, challenged by a fragile machine that could carry him to spectacular heights, or fail and kill him in an instant.

After Rene, the most important man in the troupe was Tom Long, their mechanic. Tom was a huge, tall, full-blooded Cherokee with black braids, fierce dark eyes, and a passionate loyalty to the school that had prepared him for the world, the Carlisle Indian Academy in Pennsylvania. Jim Thorpe's school.

The third pilot, Chauncey Crampton, was a big, bluff Englishman with a perpetually red face and peculiar green eyes. He'd been hired in a San Antonio saloon as a desperation replacement for a likable young man named Alfie Burns. One day when the aerial circus was flying to another engagement, Alfie wandered off course, ran into a cloud of grasshoppers five miles wide, and crashed. He had the misfortune to be piloting the troupe's Curtiss biplane. Its pusher engine tore loose on impact, hurtled forward, and broke his spinal cord. He lived less than twenty-four hours.

Carl learned that Alfie Burns's replacement carried the nickname Harvard because his titled father had sent him to that school.

Temperamentally a bully, Crampton had fared badly at the university. In his sophomore year he had knocked another student out the second-floor window of a dormitory during a drunken fight. The student hit the ground at a bad angle, crushed his skull, and died. Harvard was not only expelled; his, father punished him for his scandalous behavior by banishing him from England. Like many another'remittance man, Harvard lived on a stipend too small to satisfy large appetites for food, drink, and women. He never hid any of this -- seemed to revel in telling it, rather.

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Carl disliked Harvard from their first meeting, and it was returned. The Englishman provoked petty disputes. Who had the only chair in the shade.

Who took the wrench the other wanted. Harvard packed a gigantic Colt revolver in a holster decorated with silver ornaments. He seemed eager to use it to settle their petty differences. Carl refused to take the bait.

Carl and Harvard had their first serious trouble in the summer. The troupe was back in El Paso for a week, readying their machines for a series 316

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of exhibitions in New Mexico. On their last night in town Carl entertained himself in a whorehouse Rene recommended.

The madam, Senora Guzman, had decorated the place with religious plaques and statues, and scores of altar candles burning little cups of red or green glass. The Senora apparently saw no conflict between her deeply held faith and a lusty appreciation of the flesh.

Carl relaxed in a side parlor off the main hall, in his undershirt, his galluses down and his sidearm still strapped to his hip. He'd bought the gun, a Model 1911 Colt .45, on Rene's advice. The Southwest still had many of the rough aspects of the frontier; the aviators had been involved in a couple of scraps with small-town hooligans in West Texas and Arizona, and Rene deemed a pistol for each man to be a wise deterrent. So far Carl had never fired the Colt in anger or self-defense, but if he had to, it would deliver a wallop. The merchant who sold it said it could knock a man over even if the bullet hit him in the arm.

Though Carl was just thirty-two, he was developing the stomach of a man somewhat older. Harvard liked to rag people about such things.

'Hey, mucker,' he would say, poking Carl in the middle. 'Carrying a little bun in the oven, are we? Won't be able to fit in your dress.' Wearing an ankle-length dress, a gray wig, and wire glasses, Carl did a stunt in which he stole a plane warming up in front of the grandstand, then made zooming passes over the thrilled crowd with a second plane in pursuit. At the end of the stunt he landed in the infield, ripped off the wig, and took a bow.

On a low table next to Carl's chair was a brown bottle of sotol, the wickedest liquor he'd ever tasted. On his lap sat a plump girl in her twenties, full-skirted but naked from the waist up. Her breasts, big brown melons, were barely covered by a fringed purple rebozo. She teased Carl's nose, his eyebrows, his forehead, with a languorous hand. There was no hurry; he had engaged her for the night.

The girl gently licked his upper lip and whispered that she could feel his control stick beneath her, did all aviators have such big ones? Before he could answer he heard heavy boots. Harvard appeared with his long Colt
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strapped to his leg. Anxiously, Senora Guzman hovered behind him.

'I tell you, sir, Yolande's busy with this gentleman,' she said in Spanish.

Like the rest of the troupe, Carl had learned enough of it to make life tolerable.

It

was a hot night; Harvard's face looked as if it had been cooked in a lobster pot. He grabbed the madam's arm, shoved her to one side, Flying Circus 317

leaving finger marks on her flesh. 'But I decided I want Yolande again tonight, granny,' he said in English.

Carl waved. 'Forget it, Harvard. No reserving the ladies in this house.

Pick one of the others, they're all pretty'

Harvard clenched his teeth, the nearest thing to a smile he could manage. 'She's with me, you-mucker' He loved that word, used it often to incite someone to fight, or to humiliate them if they wouldn't.

Carl wouldn't. 'No,' he said.

Harvard growled, 'Yes. Come on, we'll settle it.'

Carl sighed. 'Jesus, you're determined to ruin the evening, aren't you?'

He eased Yolande off his lap, wet his lips with a sip of the fiery liquor, slipped his galluses up over his shoulder. He unbuckled his holster and laid it on the chair. He had no intention of exchanging shots with the bullying Britisher.

'There's a yard in back where we can discuss this. We don't want to break any of Sefiora Guzman's furniture.'

Harvard took off his holster and shoved it into the hand of the madam without looking at her. Carl flipped a casual finger at Harvard's soiled khaki shirt.

'The hideout gun too, if you don't mind.'

It didn't seem possible that Harvard could turn redder, but he did.

From under his shirt he produced a .32 knuckle duster charmingly christened

'My Friend' by the manufacturer. It was an ugly little weapon, with no barrels; it fired directly from the revolving chamber.

Carl watched Harvard's eyes, wondering if the man was so angry that he might shoot without thinking. Yolande stood behind him, arms locked around his waist to drag him away from what would be, at Best, an exchange of brutal punches lasting until one man dropped.

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.It didn't go that far. Rene strolled in, whistling 'Alexander's Ragtime Band.'

With one look he sensed the standoff, the animosity. He was a head shorter than Harvard but stepped in front of him and pushed his chest with both hands.

'We are all on the same side, gentlemen. We do not fight one another, whatever the pretext.'

'Get your ruddy hands off me, Frenchie.' Harvard showed a fist. An eight-inch knife seemed to leap into Rene's hand from nowhere. He touched the point to Harvard's throat without drawing blood.

"I want grown men working for me, not quarrelsome children. If that's r

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too hard for you, mon ami, pack your kit. Go live on the pittance you get from dear papa.'

Harvard's eyes bulged as he strained to see the shiny blade under his chin. He backed up slowly. Raised his hands.

Rene said, 'Very good, that's intelligent.'

He withdrew the knife, snapped it shut. Harvard grabbed his gun belt from Senora Guzman. As the Englishman stepped into the hall, he looked at Carl with those odd green eyes.

'Another time, mucker.'

'Any time,' Carl said.

The Englishman stomped out of sight. Rene sighed. 'I am not always a perfect judge of character. I hired the wrong man. Go on upstairs with your lady. He's my worry.' He rolled a cigarette and attached it to his lip with spit.

Carl slipped an arm around Yolande's waist. 'No,' he said, 'we've all got to worry about that one.'

60 Viva Villa!