American Dreams (78 page)

'Who knows? My legs feel like toothpicks. You keep me standing here, they'll be broken toothpicks.' B.B.'s smart chalk-stripe suit hung on him like a gunny sack. His round belly, and the rest of him, had shrunk drastically.

Fritzi

helped him into the living room, settled him in the easy chair. 'I'll wait in the cab,' the attendant said, leaving.

t>.B. blinked at the knickknacks and scrapbooks, the packing boxes, the 486

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rolled-up Navaho rugs. 'Eddie came to me. He told me. He said nobody could stop you but me. You ain't going to do this, are you?'

'Yes. Kelly's holding me to the contract, but he won't put me in a picture.

He hates my speeches.'

'Eddie told me.' All at once B.B. bristled with energy. 'That Irish bastard's
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out. He's out. I still got majority control. From here I'm driving straight to the studio to take care of it. Now, let's talk about you. You belong in pictures. Liberty Pictures exclusively. You don't want to work on Broadway again, all those drafty theaters, cold-water dressing rooms, cockroaches - pfui. Eddie has just the picture for you. He told me. Say, you got anything to drink? Some hot tea? I like English Breakfast.'

Dr. Gerstmeyer had said B.B. could leave his mental dungeon if he wanted, but only when he wanted. She was touched that her situation had been the lever Eddie used to pry him out of self-imposed exile.

'I'm afraid all I have is Earl Grey.'

'That's British, that'll do.'

She heated a kettle and fixed a tray while Schatze sniffed B.B.'s cuffs.

With a fearful look he patted her. 'Nice doggy.' Schatze growled and slunk off.

Fritzi brought the tea tray into the darkening parlor and served B.B. on a small lap tray.

'Ah, that's good.' B.B. smacked his lips. 'What I got to propose came from Izzy Stemmel, he runs our Nashville exchange. You remember him.'

'Oh, I do. He had two chorus girls with him each time he visited.'

"That's Mr. Iz. A low-down cheater on his wonderful wife, but it don't seem to affect his brain power. He sent Eddie a bang-up idea. Iz loved you in the Lone Indian pictures. Never forgot you. So here it is, two in one.

Eddie's writing it now, he's nuts for it.' B.B. held his breath. You could hear trumpets.

''Two Gun Nell. Knocking them out in the Wild West! I know you had a terrible time, Fritzi. That cowboy vamoosing the way he did. Eddie told me. Work's good medicine, though. You want to work, we've got work.'

Fritzi's eyes welled with tears. 'Oh, B.B., I don't know if I can anymore.'

'Sure, you can. You're a strong gel. You're professional, for heaven's sake. So what if you got a cold or the vapors? You do it anyway. That's acting. What do you say?'

Ellen Terry helped her out.

LYou say yes.' *>.

The Unfinished Song 487

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The first thing Fritzi noticed on Monday morning was Al Kelly's office, padlocked.

Her old friends welcomed her like a lost Queen of Sheba. Jock Ferguson hugged and kissed her lustily. Windy White, fittingly cast as a town drunk, offered her a snort from a flask, which she refused. No, he hadn't heard a word from Loy - probably never would.

Fritzi walked out of her makeup tent wobbling on high-heeled boots.

Floppy sheepskin chaps over dungarees dragged in the dust. A blue and white gingham shirt fitted her new, plumper bustline nicely. She carried the huge sugarloaf sombrero they'd given her because as soon as she put it on, it slipped down over her ears to the tip of her nose.

On the glass stage, flats created a frontier saloon. Five extras from the Waterhole stood about. B.B. sat to one side of the camera in a canvas backed chair.

Eddie approached with his little megaphone. His riding boots shone, his jodhpurs were spotless, his tan cap was tilted over his forehead. Eddie tended to strut these days, she'd noticed. Well, success entitled everyone to a little excess, didn't it?

'How do you feel, Fritzi?'

'I feel like an idiot in this getup.' The truth was, she felt low. Little had changed; the same bleak questions persisted. Where was the laughter?

There wasn't any. Just another performance. Oh, well. It was what she did, all she knew. Maybe she'd love it again someday.

Eddie said, 'May we have a rehearsal? Time is money.'

'We got another Kelly on our hands,' B.B. said so everyone could hear.

'Fritzi?'

'I'm ready,' she said in a weary voice.

'Jock, stand by. Fritzi, you know the moves. You dash forward, but you dpn't see the cuspidor. You trip, you fall on the poker table, the legs break away, the three card players tumble over backward in their chairs. Do you want padding in your shirt in case you land hard?'

Impatiently, she said, 'No. Let's get on.'

Eddie called, 'Camera.' Jock's assistant started cranking. Standing by the flimsy batwing doors mounted in a cutout, Fritzi poised herself for the take. Sunlight falling on the greenhouse stage dazzled her a moment. She saw a tall, broad-shouldered man hurrying toward the stage with a secretary pointing the way. Something about the man's build, his confident stride, remirfded her of--

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No, she was wrong. It wasn't Loy. It was Harry Poland.

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'Action/'

Identifying him as she started her run threw her timing off. She missed the cuspidor, banged into an empty table, lost her balance, and reeled into a canvas flat head first. The canvas tore, and her head poked through.

Eddie yelled to Jock to stop cranking. Six feet in front of her, on the other side of the glass -- yes, it was Harry, waving yellow roses wrapped in green tissue paper.

'What in the name of hell's fire is going on here?' Eddie demanded.

Fritzi pulled her head out of the flat, unhurt except for embarrassment.

Harry stepped in through the hinged glass door and tipped his hat. Fritzi said:

'It's an old friend, Eddie. I saw him and it startled me.'

'Harry Poland, ladies and gentlemen,' he said. 'I remember some of you from my previous visit. I traveled a great distance to see Miss Crown -- I sincerely apologize if my presence disrupted your work.'

Rosetta, the girl who kept track of the scenario for Eddie, clasped her notebook to her bosom. 'Harry Poland the music maestro? "The Elephant Rag" and all those? Oh, my God, Eddie, he's famous.'

'Yes, and I have a picture to make,' Eddie said, folding his arms to show how cranky he felt. 'All right, Fritzi, speak to your friend.' Eddie waved his megaphone at the others. 'Take a half hour. But I'm warning everyone, we'll have to work late to catch up.'

Fritzi dropped the oversized sombrero on a table and tried to rake tangles out of her frizzy blond hair. She felt a perfect fool in her cowboy regalia, especially with Harry looking so smart, as always. His gold watch with a matching wristband gleamed almost as brightly as the tips of his shoes, where she saw reflections of herself. He tipped his hat a second time, presented the roses.

'Why, thank you, they're beautiful.' She looked around, as though for a vase, but of course there were no vases in a frontier saloon. Rosetta rushed forward to take the flowers, promising to put them in water right away.

Harry cleared his throat, reached into his coat. She saw folded papers in an inner pocket, but he left them there, turning to meet the inquisitive stares of the extras, the director, the cameramen, the carpenters and stage hands. He said in a stage whisper, 'I wonder if we might go somewhere to talk?'

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Fritzi pointed at the rear of the lot, still undeveloped and weedy.

'There?'

'Fine, lead on.'

The Unfinished Song 489

They stepped outside. Harry spied an abandoned rusting wheelbarrow, sat down on one side of the broken wheel while Fritzi sat on the other.

i'm so happy to see you, Harry. Do you have business in Los Angeles, or is this another vacation?'

'Neither.' He looked at her intently. 'A year has gone by.'

'So.it has.' She hadn't forgotten.

'A bit more than a year, actually. I've been in London, rehearsing my new show. I brought a song for you. Not perfect, not yet finished, it came to me in a rush, on the crossing. Do you know that John Philips Sousa wrote "The Stars and Stripes Forever" in similar fashion?'

'No, is that right?'

'He was coming home to America, severely depressed by the death of a friend, and the march wrote itself in a matter of minutes. I was not severely depressed - by no means! But I had the start of the lyric in a flash.'

Out came the folded music paper glimpsed earlier. He cleared his throat and began to sing softly, in a pleasant if untrained baritone.

'I keep insisting,

You keep resisting,

Saying you can't love

As I love you.

Dearest, until

The day that you do,

I have

Love enough

For two--'

Harry raised his head slowly, still flushed. 'You see why it's imperfect, don't you? "Love enough" - that's bad, difficult to articulate. Trouble is--' His Adam's apple bobbed wildly, and his blue eyes fixed on hers in a way that made the nape of her neck tingle.

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'--trouble is, the words express the thought precisely.'

'Harry, what are you trying to say?' She almost feared the answer.

'I'm saying I love you, and I'm doing a damn bad job of it.'

She was stunned by his fervor, and flattered. She noticed blurred faces pressed to the glass of the stage. She turned her back on them, clasped her hands between her knees to steady herself.

'Now, Harry--'

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'Please, Fritzi' - he spoke in a rush - 'let me say what I came thousands of miles to say. I dreamed of this country long before I saw it. I dreamed of all the possibilities in America, and when I got here I discovered the freedom a man needs to make dreams come true. I discovered new dreams as well. The very air of this land induces visions of what can be. All my dreams have come true but one, and it's the most important. You, Fritzi.

Having you as my own. Being with you as long as I live. I've dreamed of it from the day we met in Central Park. I fell in love with you that day, but I couldn't do a thing about it. Except write a song. "A Girl in Central Park." Now I'm free. I want to know, I must know, if there's the slightest chance for me.'

A bee buzzed near her face. She waved it off.

'Harry, I don't want to hurt you. You're a fine, decent man, a dear man.

You deserve honesty. I like you very much. I admire you enormously. But I don't love you the way you want.'

Instead of disappointment he showed enthusiasm. 'It isn't necessary!

You will in time, I'll make certain of it. Don't you see?' He held out the paper. 'I wrote the song to say that.'

Fritzi rocked back on the wheelbarrow, laughing in spite of herself.

'I must say, you're terribly confident.'

'Yes, I am. In this country dreams come true.'

She shook her head. 'I don't understand it. I mean, your fascination with--'

He tossed the music paper in the weeds, held her hand in both of his.

'You're beautiful.'

'Oh, Harry, that's not true.'

'Beautiful - to me, from the very first.'

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Fritzi's blond hair tossed in the sunshine. 'No one's ever said that to me.'

'Then you are long overdue to hear it.'

Looking at him with a new, wondering tenderness, she laughed again, deep in her throat. 'You almost make me believe I might be, in another life, another century, perhaps.'

'This life. This century.' He drew her up from the rusted wheelbarrow.

'Now.'

'Harry, they're all watching--'

'I don't give a hang. I love you. You're beautiful. Believe it. I have love enough for two. Help me finish the song, Fritzi. Help me, and I'll make sure you never have a single regret,' he said as he bent to kiss her.

AFTERWORD

1am-happy to deliver at last the further adventures of the Crown family of Chicago. To the steady stream of mail from readers who liked Homeland there has been added e-mail, an average of a message every day or so (yesterday's came from a reader in Australia), asking about 'the next book.' That kind of inquiry is always heartening, but at the same time it creates a guilty conscience over delays.

I enjoyed writing American Dreams as much or more than I've enjoyed anything I've done, for two reasons. First, the period immediately preceding World War I is fascinating. An old order was dying, but few realized it. Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower used the word sunset to describe the process, and the moment. In little more than ten years, America, and the world, went from idyllic golden summers of peace to the bleak and bloody winter of war - war so apocalyptic, so destructive, it could hardly be imagined by most of those living at the time.

Second, with this book I happily engaged in writing a valentine to a group of people for whom I have boundless affection: all the men and women who pit themselves against the perils of the acting trade. Having started out with ambitions to be an actor, I shared Fritzi's struggle every step of the way. I also found her great company.

As always, the story's background and events are grounded in the historical record. In a few instances 1 have done a time shift with some real people, moving certain film actors and directors backward or forward by as much as year for purposes of the story. In no case did I falsify what these people did or
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didn't do, unless it's a case of an actor playing in an obviously fictional picture.

Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the movie industry's first 'Wild West' location.

Patents Company detectives did pursue and harass independent film makers, sometimes known as blanket companies, for the reason described. This 492

Afterword

continued until about 1915, when government action destroyed the trust forever.

D. W Griffith's Birth of a Nation is rightly considered a masterpiece and, at the same time, virulently racist. When the great director adapted Thomas Dixon's novel, our country was only a half century removed from the war that tore us apart, redefined personal liberty, and set us on a new and better course. Passions still ran high among the defeated, one of whom was Griffith's father. Attitudes reflected in his epic film regrettably persist and trouble our land to this day.