American Dreams (43 page)

Fritzi said, 'That's all very fine, but I don't understand the name change.'

'For his capital Hayman gets some leverage,' Kelly told her. 'Hayman says a horse bit him when he was nine. The pony had to go.'

'We already have a swell new symbol picked out,' B.B. said.

'Let me guess. The Statue of Liberty?'

'Give the girl a prize,' Kelly said. 'Sign the contract today, Fritzi.' He bent his head over a ledger, as if she and B.B. didn't exist.

Pleased as a father with a new infant, B.B. took her out through the dusty kitchen to a barn that would store scenery and house the company's property and paint shops. 'Dressing rooms over here.' Fritzi was dismayed.

He was pointing at horse stalls that smelled of manure. 'Don't worry, don't worry, we'll hang up blankets.'

The center of activity seemed to be the rear of the lot, specifically a primitive construction B.B. proudly referred to as their stage. She saw carpenters on ladders, and two familiar faces -- Eddie and Jock Ferguson, who was tinkering with an unfamiliar camera. Was this the new one B.B.

had referred to?

'Right, it's a Bianchi,' he said. 'Named after the Eyetalian who used to work for Edison. Jock says it's lousy. Breaks down all the time. The image shakes and shimmies like Little Egypt. But it don't violate any patents.

We'll shoot with old faithful but keep this one for display. If detectives show up, it should keep them scratching their heads, huh?'

He chuckled, but the beautiful sunshine had a touch of chill suddenly.

She saw Pearly again, the moment he fell under the train at City Hall station.

She often had nightmares about it.

Jock kissed her cheek to welcome her. Eddie escorted her onto the 268

California

Page 286

stage, a large rectangular platform with a bare wooden floor. 'We can shoot at least two interiors at the same time,' he said. 'Three if we crowd them together. B.B. and Kelly want to step up production to three reels a week -- one comedy, one drama, one western or Indian picture. That's the standard for successful independents.'

B.B. planted himself in front of Fritzi, cheerful as a cherub. 'Well, my gel, what's your opinion now?'

Somewhat bewildered, she smiled. 'There's certainly a lot happening.'

'And you're part of it. A big part.'

Eddie put his arm around her. 'The new Indian scenario's ready if you want to read it.'

She said, 'Of course.'

Fritzi's bewilderment became amazement The winds of change were certainly blowing. A new partner was already putting his mark on the company, which had a new name. A new camera was operating on a new site called a lot. In this strange new business both the product and the people were 'movies.'

She'd never admit it to Hobart, or any of her Broadway chums, but she was suddenly eager to go to work.

Ham Hayman made his first appearance in late January, having moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to work more directly in production. He was a small, fastidious man with pale hands, curly hair, and foxy eyes.

Eddie said Hayman not only provided much needed production capital, but paid a ten percent premium into the partnership for every finished and delivered negative. For this he had exclusive distribution rights to all Liberty pictures within the territory covered by his exchanges.

Hayman showed up regularly on the lot, bringing with him strong opinions which he shared with actors, crew - anyone within earshot. One of them led to a certain person being hired.

'How can we speed up production without more scripts? We need a regular story department,' Hayman complained within Fritzi's hearing.

She didn't forget the remark. At an opportune moment she politely asked B.B. to talk to a young woman of her acquaintance who had sold one or two scenarios. Fritzi slipped a reference to Hayman into the conversation.

B.B. cheerfully agreed.

That night Lily dithered with excitement while Fritzi counseled her
Page 287

about the meeting two days hence. 'Fake the stories you've sold, and any Liberty Rising 269

thing you're working on. You want to impress him that you're literary.'

'Hell, that's the last thing I am, literary,' Lily said, with a lift of one shoulder that pushed her breast forward inside her blouse, which was thin and quite revealing. The moment seemed to speak eloquently of what lily was and was not.

'Haven't you read any nevels or poetry?'

'I like Poe, his scary stuff. And Dickens, I've read a few of his. Big words but interesting characters.'

'Can you quote anything from either one?'

'Come on, Fritzi. I could hardly wait to get out the school door when I was legal age to leave.'

Fritzi sat beside her on the bed in the larger bedroom, pondering. 'Then we need to work up something that might charm Mr. Pelzer. Something worthy but not too obscure.' She thought of a dozen poems she'd committed to memory in school. 'Tennyson. He's just right. Listen to this.'

On her feet, she put her palm on her bosom and declaimed:

'Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, a sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.'

Lily lifted her flounced skirt and scratched her thigh. "I don't get it.'

'That isn't important so long as you sound like you do. It can mean whatever you want - the thoughts that arise can be all the stories spilling out of your head so fast you can hardly write them down.'

Dubious, Lily stared at her. 'If you say so.'

Riding the red cars on the appointed morning, Fritzi was as nervous as her friend. She'd begged Lily to put only a faint dab of rouge on each cheek, not overdoing it as she did when she went out at night. Lily wore
Page 288

her most demure dress. Outside the main house, Fritzi squeezed Lily's hand. 'Don't let him scare you. He's a very nice man. Good luck.'

She could barely concentrate on her work with Eddie for the next hour.

About half past nine, she finished a take, paused to dab her perspiring forehead with a hanky, and saw Lily dashing past the barn toward the stage, waving. Fritzi ran to meet her.

'What happened?'

'I'm hired. I'm the story department - a whole twenty dollars a week until you go back to New York.'

270

California

'Lily, that's wonderful.' They danced each other around in an improvised polka that amused Jock Ferguson and Eddie.

'There's more. Mr. Pelzer said that if I work out, I can have the job when the company comes back next winter. I owe it all to you. He loves Tennyson.'

Another one of Hayman's great ideas led to someone being fired.

While Fritzi changed clothes in a smelly horse stall, she overheard the partners arguing outside the barn.

Hayman: 'Kalem's putting out a list of the actors with every release.'

B.B.: 'I dunno, Ham, it's the brand name sells the picture. In the World one exhibitor said he advertises "Anew Biograph every day.'"

Hayman: 'Phooey. You get letters asking about the actors, don't you?'

B.B.: 'A few for Owen, lots more for Fritzi. But-- '

Hayman: 'Tell the names. Sell the names. They did it with Florence Lawrence pictures.'

Kelly: ''After she left Biograph. Biograph doesn't pump up anybody else.'

Hayman: 'They're nuts. They got the most valuable actors in America.

Mary Pickford's getting a big build-up since she and her hubby left them for Laemmle's IMP outfit.'

Kelly: 'I'm warning you. Publicize personalities, they'll want more money.'

Page 289

Hayman: 'So what? If we have stars people know and want to see, we'll make more money. Change, Al -- change! It's like the ocean. It's always there, you can't fight it, but it'll carry you to fabulous new places if you let it.'

B.B.: 'I like this man's thinking.'

Fritzi listened to a heavy tread she presumed to be Al Kelly stomping away from the discussion, outvoted.

For her next picture, The Lone Indian's Escape, they returned to the rugged and isolated area of North Highland known as Daisy Dell. About noon on the first day, B.B. arrived in a taxi and hiked down a rough trail to the spot where the company had set up Owen's tepee. Excited, he showed a picture postal card bearing a photograph of a stout hook-nosed man in cowboy clothes.

'Found this yesterday, selling for a nickel at a theater. Ain't it a swell idea?' Fritzi studied the legend with the photo.

Liberty Rising 271

ESSANAV LEADING MAN

'BRONCHO BILLY' ANDERSON

'like it, Owen? Like to have your name and your mug on one of these?'

'Anything you say, B.B.' Owen folded his grease-painted arms and gave Fritzi a smug look. B.B. rushed around the crude camp table where cast and crew had been consuming sandwiches and tepid tea.

'How about you, Fritzi?'

Surprised, she could only point at herself. Before she could add, The?'

Owen jumped up with all the feathers of his great war bonnet quivering.

'Wait a minute, who's the star of these pictures, may I ask?'

B.B.'s brow wrinkled in a studious way. 'Why, Owen, based on the numbers of letters she gets and you get, I'd have to tell you' -- he laid his arm over the sun-dappled shoulders of Fritzi's pioneer dress -- 'it's this little gel.'

Owen turned a distinctly darker shade of reddish-brown. 'Oh, yes?

Well, Mr. Pelzer, I'm not happy to hear that. I'm not happy at all. Her parts get bigger while mine stay the same. I tell you I don't like it.'

Page 290

To show how much he didn't like it, he tore off his war bonnet and threw it down and kicked it.

'We're having a talk about this, Mr. Pelzer.'

'Sure, sure, drop in tomorrow and--'

'Right now.'

B.B. sighed. 'Okay.' He and Owen hiked back up the trail. Owen's little talk lasted forty-five minutes, putting them behind schedule and seriously irking Eddie. The talk resumed in the studio office when the company returned at sunset. It was never clear whether Pelzer, the'gentlest of men, fired Owen, or he simply quit. Fritzi didn't learn the news until she reported next morning.

'I want to know how we finish the damn picture,' Kelly said.

'We find another Big Chief Hot Air,' B.B. said. 'I finally had to tell Owen nobody's really watching him.' He captured Fritzi's hand. 'This is the one we got to take care of, Al. This little gel is the star'

The star? No one had ever used the word in reference to Fritzi. She knew she should be thrilled. In a certain way she was. Mostly she was terrified.

She imagined herself on a raft being pulled irretrievably into a dark whirlpool, the movies, while distantly on the shore, Broadway lights twinkled and Ellen Terry waved a sad but resigned farewell.

272

California

52 Fritzi and Carl

(, Oit down, woman.'

O 'But that driver in the yellow car is my brother.'

'D'you hear me? Sit.' The man in the row behind gave her sleeve a rude yank. Fritzi turned and hit him with her handbag, a light glancing blow.

'Stand up if you can't see, you bully.'

The scruffy man saw the fire in her eyes and stood on his seat rather than argue.

The three cars, Barney Oldfield's white one, a green one, and Carl's yellow racer took the starting flag and roared off for the second heat.

Fritzi jumped up and down along with hundreds of others packed into the wooden amphitheater. 'Come on, Carl. Beat him, beat him.'

Page 291

Fritzi had never seen a racetrack like this one at Playa del Rey, within sight and sound of the Pacific. Basically a saucer surrounded by a high grandstand, the racing surface was Oregon fir overlaid with crushed shells for traction. The board track was banked all the way around, and from the top of the grandstand there was a fine view eastward to the mountains, west to the sunlit ocean.

This Sunday, the last day of April, Fritzi had no illusions about Carl beating Oldfield. He'd written to explain the rigged exhibition races. Even so, natural excitement and sisterly affection drove her to cheer wildly when Carl won the second heat by a length.

Gas and oil fumes mingled in the exhaust smoke rising off the track. In the final heat, two laps from the finish, Oldfield suddenly cut in front of Carl, clipping his left front fender as he passed. The impact sent Carl toward the grandstand wall, then into a spin when he corrected. Oldfield shot ahead. The third driver veered to the inner rail and scraped along it, narrowly avoiding Carl, who spun to a stop and killed his engine. Fritzi kept her knuckles pressed against her teeth until Carl restarted his motor and chugged out of the way of Oldfield, who was coming around again without slowing.

Carl finished a bad last, leaving the track while Oldfield took a victory lap. She couldn't help feeling let down and angry. Oldfield had been reckless, almost involving her brother in an accident.

She fought her way down the stairs through the crowd afterward. The Fritzi and Carl

273

track garage was packed with hangers-on, heavy with smoke, everyone joking and shouting. Fritzi spied Carl off by himself, climbing out of an oil stained coverall. She caught her breath when she saw a nasty purplish bruise on his left cheek, just above a smear of grease.

'Carl?' She waved and pushed toward him. He turned, and she got another shock. His right eye was barely visible in the slit between swollen and discolored eyelids.

'Sis, my Lord, how are you?' He flung his arms around her, bending over with an enthusiastic hug. She drew back in his arms, gently touched his bruised and grimy face. 'What on earth is all this?'

'The eye? A little fracas last night. On the way to town we stopped for a few beers at a roadhouse in Ventura and -- never mind, it isn't serious.'

'Could you see to drive?'

'Just enough. I'm through for the day. Want to meet the great man
Page 292

before we go?''

'Of course,' she said hesitantly, puzzled by the curious note of reluctance when he asked.

Carl turned his shoulder and thrust through the crowd like a Princeton lineman. She said, 'How long will you be in town?'