American Dreams (46 page)

Emigrating from Vienna, he'd worked in a few pictures in New York. His first name was Erich, his last Stroheim, and he had a large mouthful of names in between. B.B. called Fritzi to his office to introduce her.

'We got no parts right now, but I hired him to teach you to drive.'

The man clicked his heels, bowed. His shoes were coming apart, Fritzi noticed.

'I am informed you are German.' Erich's accent was heavy as a barrel of sauerkraut. Wunderschon, we shall speak it together. Call me Von, if you please.'

Fritzi managed to say, 'Charmed.' He snatched her hand and kissed it.

286

California

Only his politeness and his smile redeemed him from an appearance of utter and heartless evil.

Von turned out to be a capable instructor and, in contradiction of his looks, a likeable and good-humored companion. He forgave her initial clumsy mistakes at the wheel. Within two weeks she was driving competently.

During

Page 306

one of their afternoon sessions, they were approaching the corner of Figueroa and Eighth, downtown, when she suddenly yanked the wheel and slewed the Packard to the curb. She braked so hard she almost banged her forehead on the glass. Her instructor in the passenger seat paled. 'Gott! Gib acht.' Be careful.

She stood up in the open car, a hand over her brow to block the sun.

'Say, what's going on?' Von stood up too. In the center of the intersection, policemen in tall hats and frock coats ran every which way, chasing civilians and bashing them with billy clubs while dodging a parked wagon and an auto going round and round in a circle, apparently out of control. A black police sedan had run up over the sidewalk, inches from a store window; steam spouted from its hood. In all four arms of the intersection, wagon and auto traffic was backed up. Irate motorists shouted and sounded their horns and klaxons.

'The police are rioting,' Fritzi exclaimed.

Weth, nein,1 he said with a nonchalant wave. LLichtspiel. Film.1

'A movie?'

'Ja. Biograph, I think. See there? Herr Direktor.1

Fritzi spotted him on a far corner; in the confusion she hadn't noticed him, or the camera. The moment the director called cut, she said, 'I know him.'

All action stopped, though one actor threw a last brick. It sailed high, arcing down toward the Packard. Fritzi cried, 'Duck.'

'Nah. Filz.1 The felt brick bounced harmlessly off the hood.

Fritzi stepped out, crossed the intersection. Men from the film crew stood with hands raised, blocking the traffic. The air was blue with oaths and threats, the blare of horns. Someone had lost a billy club, which Fritzi picked up. Stuffed cotton.

The director, a burly young Irishman she remembered from Fourteenth Street, shouted at his crew. 'It looked okay except for the skid. Dump another barrel of liquid soap and we'll shoot it again. I lurry it up or we'll be in the hoosegow.'

'Mr. Sinnott?' «.

No Laughing Matter 287

'Hi.' Then, swift recognition: 'Miss Crown. Hello. Wait till we finish this.'

Page 307

Fritzi stepped behind the camera as five cops piled into the black sedan.

The driver reversed, bounced off the curb, and headed west on Figueroa.

One of the men charged with stopping traffic was wrestling with a matronly motorist who belabored his head with her furled parasol.

A prop man ran into the intersection with a wooden cask. Before he could uncork it and dump the soap, everyone heard the rising wail of a siren on South Eighth. 'Hell, we can't do another take.' Mike Sinnott waved frantically. 'Everybody clear out.'

Like robbers caught in a bank with the alarm ringing, crew and actors scattered. Men threw props and the camera into an open touring car with amazing speed. The car took off northward. As Fritzi watched the real police car coming fast, Sinnott grabbed her arm. 'This way.'

They dashed into a tea shop, to the rearmost table. The police sedan screamed by in pursuit of the camera car.

'How are you, Miss Crown?' Sinnott said, unperturbed by the chaos he'd caused. 'I didn't know you were in Los Angeles.'

'Working for Liberty Pictures.'

'I saw ,4 Merry Mix-up. You're a riot.'

Which was hardly what she wanted to hear, but she smiled politely. 'And you're directing.'

'I groused long enough, and Biograph finally let me make a couple of cop comedies.'

'Did you get a permit to shoot in the street?'

He grinned. 'Permit? What's that?'

She laughed. 'You could get arrested.'

'Not if we run faster'

Yon marched in, searching for them. When Fritzi introduced him, Sinnott raised an eyebrow. 'Your driving teacher?'

Von clicked his heels and popped his monocle out of his eye. 'That is correct. Actually, I am a performer and director, but I am not yet established.

Teaching Fraulein Fritzi the fine points of motoring is more pleasant than delivering furniture or selling flypaper in Woolworth's.'

'Sit down, join us.'

'Danke:

Page 308

After they ordered, Fritzi said, 'Mr. Griffith's here, isn't he?'

'Busy as a tick, but he's no happier than I am. He wanted to make longer pictures, like the ones coming from Italy. The studio won't let 288

California

him, even though four- and five-reel shows are getting to be the rule instead of the exception. Other companies are wooing him with promises of artistic control. He's got a bug about some Civil War opus he wants to shoot.'

They chatted over their tea until Sinnott checked his watch and said he should catch up with his crew. 'First place I check is the city jail.' He put money on the table. 'I'll look you up when 1 need a funny leading lady.'

You may look, but you won't find me, she thought as he sauntered out the door.

Hindsight made Sinnott's last remark seem like a dire omen. With a combination of avuncular wheedling and parental firmness, B.B. got Fritzi into Pearl's Piano, a new slapstick farce.

Her character, a young and naive music teacher, desperately needed a piano. A crooked salesman played by Pete Porter, another refugee from the New York stage, had conveniently salvaged one from a train wreck (Eddie cut in some dramatic footage of a derailment originally filmed for a crime melodrama). The salesman patched up the piano, then offered gullible Pearl a stunningly low price if she'd buy it sight unseen.

Needing students to pay for her mother's hospitalization, Pearl announced a recital for some boys and girls and their snooty mothers who would pay for lessons. When she sat down to play the gleaming new instrument, pedals and keys began to fall off. The top of the case sprang open. Felt hammers and twisted wires shot out, followed by two white rabbits (no explanation of how they got there).

A mean little boy pulled a girl's pigtail; there was an immediate juvenile brawl that quickly involved the mothers. Draperies were torn down, picture frames smashed over heads, furniture broke, goldfish bowls full of water and goldfish sailed through the air - the chaos was stopped only by the appearance of a young deputy sheriff, with the salesman in handcuffs.

Of course, the deputy had a sister with a fine piano she would dispose of cheaply if Pearl accompanied the deputy to a dance. Pearl batted her eyes coyly and sat down on the only article of furniture still intact, the
Page 309

piano stool. Which naturally collapsed. Fadeout.

Fritzi was heavy-hearted about the picture. Fortunately, the calendar called a halt to what she saw as a dangerous trend in her career. At the end Inferno

289

of May, B.B. and Kelly declared the Liberty lot closed until next winter.

Fritzi packed up to leave Los Angeles with the rest of the company.

Lily begged her to come back. 'Promise me.7 Fritzi said she couldn't promise. Both of them cried and hugged at the Glendale station. Lily stayed on the platform, waving and gamely trying not to sob as the eastbound train pulled out.

55 Inferno

Back in New York, Fritzi rented a parlor and bedroom at the refurbished Bleeker House. Oh-Oh Merkle was gone, a bad memory, though some of the old staff remained. New owners had brought a new respectability; no longer were the beds turned on an hourly basis.

A young Russian immigrant, a dishwasher in the hotel restaurant, gushed over Fritzi's adventures with the Lone Indian. She'd learned to take such compliments with good humor, even a degree of pleasure, damping down her true feelings of frustration about a theater career.

In her first week in the city she enjoyed a reunion with Hobart at the cafe near the Hudson River piers, where he seemed to know many visiting sailors, for reasons she now understood. Hobart was about to launch a half-year stock-company tour of the Pacific Northwest and Canada, doing Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a cross-gartered and decidedly overage Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and, for ladies' matinees, Nora's repugnant husband in A Doll's House.

'Can you imagine performing Ibsen and the Bard in some place called Medicine Hat?' he complained. ^Aes'tuat ingens imo in cordepudor.'

'You'll have to help me, 1 hated Latin.' Fritzi reached for a raw oyster on the plate between them.

'It's Virgil's Aeneid. "Deep in his heart boils overwhelming shame."'

'Sometimes I think I'd rather be doing plays in the provinces than these silly little pictures.'

Page 310

'I thought you enjoyed the work.'

'I enjoy the people. Anyway, I'm getting out soon.'

Easier to say than do; Eddie kept her working steadily. The company motored off to Cuddebackville, New York, in the Orange Mountains, for ten 290

California

days of outdoor shooting in beautiful wilderness country. The replacement for Owen had come East for a few weeks, so they shot two Lone Indian dramas in the gorges and woodlands of the Delaware Water Gap, retiring at night to a rustic hostelry called the Caudebac Inn; there the men played cards and the ladies worked picture puzzles and read fashion magazines.

Fritzi wrote letters: To her mother. To Julie and Eustacia in England. To Lily, saying, with honesty, that she already missed California, especially the bracing air, so different from the sopping humidity of an Eastern summer.

When the company returned to the city, Fritzi took up her old routine of visiting producers and casting agencies, listing her availability as next January 1, when her one-year contract with Liberty expired. Ira Mehlman was the only agent to offer even slight encouragement. After remarking that he'd watched a number of her pictures and recognized her even when unbilled, he said, 'Not bad. There's a winter revival of Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines on the books. 1 could recommend you for Madame Trentoni.'

'Here in New York?' Fritzi said, thrilled. The role of the Clyde Fitch play had made a star of Ethel Barrymore in 1901. Mehlman shook his head.

'Then what city?'

'Cities. Tank towns. Does Wheeling, West Virginia, appeal to you?'

'Very little.'

'Oil City, Pennsylvania?'

'Mr. Mehlman, I've toured places like that. Is there nothing better coming up, sooner?'

'Do I have a crystal ball? A lot of producers decide on a show and mount it in three weeks. I'll be frank, Fritzi. Recommending you for anything will be touchy. If I've seen you in flickers, so have others. Breaking through in this town's as hard as ever. Where you've been the past year or so makes it harder. Didn't anyone warn you?'

'Many times.'

Page 311

'But you went ahead.'

Or let myself be dragged, willynilly.

'I don't mean to sound negative, Mr. Mehlman. I want to return to the stage very badly. I'll be eager to hear about anything, including the Captain Jinks tour. I'll be grateful.'

'Sure, Fritzi. We'll be in touch.'

The old refrain. Harry Poland should write a song, she thought as she left, trailing clouds of disappointment.

*

291

On a sweltering night in late July, Eddie took Fritzi into the second-floor projection room at the Liberty offices on Fourteenth Street. An editor, Daphne Roosa, joined them. Daphne was a stout young woman with plump but delicate hands and an almost fanatic obsession with the details of pasting a picture together.

The tiny space was hot, windowless. It smelled of chemicals and yesterday's cigars. Fritzi slumped in a hard chair, waving a damp handkerchief in front of her nose to stir the air.

Eddie said, 'I want you to see this before we show it to Kelly. Something bothers me, but I can't quite peg what it is.'

'I had a similar reaction,' Daphne Roosa said. The one-reel picture had been no trouble to film, but those who'd trekked out to Greenwich, Connecticut, didn't seem to have much fun doing it.

Ostensibly a comedy, Mixed Nuts came from a scenario Al Kelly had bought from a friend and forced into production. The antics of three escaped lunatics, one of them Fritzi, made her uncomfortable, the same way she'd felt during production. When Eddie turned on the lights, she said, 'I think 1 know what's wrong. The jokes are funny, but they're at the expense of people who are feeble-minded. Making the sick or crippled into objects of fun isn't my idea of humor. It's unkind.'

Miss Roosa agreed. Eddie said, 'Well, it's Al's idea of humor.' He reflected a moment. 'But maybe you've got it. Something about the picture smells.'

Miss Roosa wrinkled her nose. 'Something around here smells too.'

Fritzi had been marginally aware of it for a minute or so. With unexpected
Page 312

haste Eddie shoved a chair out of the way, ran into the hall.

'Smoke!'

He disappeared toward the rear of the building. Fritzi smelled it strongly now. She and Miss Roosa exchanged alarmed looks and raced each other to the hall. Down at the end Eddie was opening the door of a storeroom holding archive prints of Pal and Liberty pictures. Smoke poured out, coiling up to the ceiling. Eddie threw an arm across his face and jumped back from the glare.

I Ie ran back to them, pushed them toward the front of the building.

Flames from the storeroom licked out to the wall opposite; the wall began to smolder. The light in the corridor brightened like some hellish daybreak.