American Dreams

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

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.