American Dreams
Authors: John Jakes
Tags: #Chicago (Ill.), #German Americans, #Family, #General, #Romance, #Sagas, #Historical, #Motion picture actors and actresses, #Fiction
At twenty-six, Fritzi knows that time is running out in her ambition to become a successful actress. Pressed by her father to settle into a life more suited to a young woman of her means, she heads for New York and one last shot at the big time. Fritzi is determined to support herself in her career, but she soon finds the streets of Broadway paved not with gold, but poverty, hunger and despair.
While she struggles to secure auditions, her younger brother Carl drifts from town to town, too proud to work at the Crown brewery since his expulsion from Princeton University. When his long-time fascination for automobiles finally sparks into a talent for racing and a job at Henry Ford's Detroit factory, it seems his future is assured. But just as Fritzi discovers her vocation in the decadent world of silent pictures, so Carl's thrill-seeking will take him in an unexpected new direction.
For young Americans with German roots, however, the advent of The Great War is a shattering experience. As his cousin Paul, a pioneering news cameraman, films the horrific events taking place on the Western Front, Carl faces the constant threat of death as a front-line pilot in the skies high above Europe...
Blending fact and fiction to remarkable effect, John Jakes charts the fortunes of the Crown family as they play their part in the decisive early events of the American century. Bringing
:o life, amongst others, Kaiser Wilhelm, Pancho Villa, Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin and the great director D.W. Griffith, AMERICAN DREAMS is the latest epic from the master of the listorical saga.
I
Also by John Jakes
HOMELAND
CALIFORNIA GOLD
Page 1
THE NORTH AND SOUTH TRILOGY
North and South V"
Love and War
Heaven and Hell
THE KENT FAMILY CHRONICLES
The Bastard
The Rebels v
The Seekers
The Furies
The Titans
The Warriors
The Lawless
The Americans
John Jakes
AMERICAN
DREAMS
Little, Brown and Company
.. 1
A Little, Brown Book
First published in Great Britain in 1998
by Little, Brown and Company
Copyright © John Jakes, 1998
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Page 2
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 316 64518 4
Typeset in Bauer Bodoni by M Rules
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
METROPOLITAN
BOROUGH OF WIGAN
DEPT. OF UlSURc
LIBRARIES
Ace. No.
108712
H/H
Date
Page 3
13 Hfo
u
Class No.
Little, orown ana l^ompany
Brettenham House
Lancaster Place
London WC2E 7EN
tm
The man who worked with me on California Gold was one of the great editors of recent tunes. I wanted to thank him publicly for his help but could not; he didn't like to have his name used in that way. He said a book, not its editor, should receive credit.
Though I was disappointed I honored his wish. You won't find his name in California Gold, which he improved vastly with his advice and editorial pencil.
Now, with sadness, but a sense of closure too, I can finish what was left undone in 1989. Gratefully, I dedicate this book to the memory of the late Joe Fox.
CONTENTS
1.
Actress «
2.
Drifter
3.
Paul and His Wife
Page 4
4.
lisas Worry
5.
A Dream of Speed
6.
Paul's Pictures
7.
The General and His Children
8.
Courage from Carl
9.
Obligatory Scene
10.
Eastbound
3
9
13
19
24
28
34
38
41
46
11.
Adrift in New York
12.
Fritzi and Oh-Oh
13.
Smashup
14.
Paul's Anchor
15.
Three Witches and Four Actresses
16.
Grosse Pointe Games
17.
Bad Omens
18.
Confessions
53
59
64
Page 5
70
74
83
90
97
viii
Contents
19.
Reunions
20.
Model T
21.
Jinxed?
22.
Tess
23.
Jesse and Carl
24.
Rehearsal for a Tragedy
25.
Tragedy
26.
Closed
27.
Paul and Harry
28.
Boom Times
29.
'Speed King of the World'
30.
A Desperate Call
31.
Savagery
32.
Separation
33.
Postcard from Indianapolis
100
110
115
121
124
129
132
136
139
Page 6
144
148
155
160
166
169
34. lisa to the Rescue
35.
Biograph
36.
Westward Ho
37. Blanket Company
38.
Our Heroine
39.
Onward, If Not Exactly Upward
40.
New York Music
41. Sammy
42.
Signs of Success
43.
Threats
44. Attack
45. B.B. Decides
46. A Toast to War
47. In the Subway
48.
Further Westward Ho
175
181
188
194
201
204
208
214
217
224
227
233
238
243
Page 7
247
Contents
ix
49.
Welcome to Los Angeles
50.
Wrong Turn
51.
Liberty Rising
52.
Fritzi and Carl
53.
Mickey Finn
54.
No Laughing Matter
55.
Inferno
56.
Carl Mows the Grass
57.
Decision
253 261
265
272
277
283
289
293
296
58.
Loyal
59.
Flying Circus
60.
Viva Villa!
61.
English Edgar
Page 8
62.
Inceville
63.
Mercenaries
64.
The Day Things Slipped
65.
Crash Landing
66.
Fritzi and Loy
67.
That Sundav
305
314
318
326 331
338
345
353
359 364
68.
In Belgium
69.
Troubled House
70.
Taking Sides
71.
'Truth or Nothing'
72.
Fritzi and Her Three Men
73.
Revelations
377
385 391 395 402
408
1
x
Contents
Page 9
74.
Detroit Again 412
75.
Million-Dollar Carpet
417
76.
End of the Party
423
77.
UBoat 430
78.
Winter of Discontent 433
79.
Air War
438
80.
Torpedoed
441
81.
Marching
447
82.
Troubled Nation
453
83.
Kelly Gives Orders 459
84.
Heat of the Moment 465
85.
Bombs470
86.
Casualties
475
87.
In the Trenches
479
88.
The Boy
483
89.
The Unfinished Song 484
Afterword
491
America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable.
Here they have tried to make dreams come true.
- Daniel Boorstin
'Eddie,' Papa said, 'you're a lucky boy to be born when you were.
There are a lot of new things in the making, and you ought to have a hand in them.' Those were the last words Papa said to me. . . . It was August, 1904.
- Edward V Rickenbacker
AMERICAN
DREAMS
I
DREAMERS
Page 10
Blow the Domestic Hearth! I should like to be going all over the kingdom
. . . and acting everywhere. There's nothing in the world equal to seeing the house rise at you, one sea of delighted faces, one hurrah of applause!
- Charles Dickens, on tour with his
company of amateur actors, 1848
Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street that I will soon be there.
- George M. Cohan, written for the
musical Little Johnny Jones, 1904
1 Actress
Fritzi Crown flung her bike on the grass and ran down to the water's edge. She skipped across wet boulders strewn along the shore until she stood where the waves broke and showered her with bracing spray. It was first light, the dawn of a chill morning in early December 1906. Along the horizon the sky was orange as the maw of a steel furnace, metal gray above.
Remembering a recurring dream that had held her in the moments before she woke - a dream in which she stood on a Broadway stage while thunderous applause rolled over her -- Fritzi threw her arms out, threw her head back like some pagan worshiper of the dawn. The wind streamed off Lake Michigan, out of the east, where lay the mysterious and alluring place that occupied her thoughts in most of her waking moments.
The waves crashed. The wind sang in her ears, a repeating litany that had grown more and more insistent in past weeks. Time to go. Time to go!
Red-faced, windblown.but exhilarated, she stepped down from the rocks and turned toward the bike lying on the grass shriveled and browned by the autumn frost. The bike was a beautiful Fleetwing with a carmine enamel frame, gleaming silver rims and spokes. It was a 'safety' - wheels of equal size - now the standard after years of highwheel models, the kind on which she'd learned.
Fritzi was a long-legged young woman with an oval face, a nose she considered too big, legs she considered too skinny, a bosom she considered flat. She was dressed for cold weather. On top of a suit of misses' long
Page 11
underwear she wore her bathing costume of heavy alpaca cloth - a separate skirt, a top with attached bloomers, both navy blue. Her cycling shoes were tan covert-cloth oxfords with corrugated rubber soles. For 4
Dreamers
added warmth she'd put on wool mittens and her younger brother's football sweater, a black cardigan with an orange letter P He had bequeathed it to her after he was thrown out of Princeton. A knitted tarn barely contained her long, unruly blond hair. Altogether it was the kind of costume that her father, General Joseph Crown, the millionaire brewer, disapproved of - vocally, and often.
'7b- ta, Papa, you must remember I'm a grown girl and can pick out my own clothes,' she would say in an effort to tease him out of it.
He disapproved of that, too.
The spectacular sunrise burst over the lake and burnished a row of trees near the footpath. Wind tore the last withered leaves off the branches and flung them into fanciful whirlwinds. The leaf clouds spiraled up and up, like her buoyant spirits. There were great risks in the decision she must make. They started right here in Chicago, in her own family.
Returning to her bike, Fritzi stopped abruptly. In thick evergreens planted behind the trees, a pair of eyes gleamed like a rodent's. But they didn't belong to a rodent, they belonged to a man -- a filthy, ragged tramp who'd been spying on her. He lurched out of the shrubbery, coming toward her. Fritzi was sharply aware of how early it was, how isolated she was here.