On Monday night, February 8, David Wark Griffith premiered The Clansman downtown at Clune’s Auditorium. The picture had already been shown at surprise previews in remote locales such as Riverside, but Fritzi had heard little about it, except that a subtitle, The Birth of a Nation, had been added, and Negro groups had vainly attempted to block showings by going to court.
Tickets for the Los Angeles premiere cost two dollars. Despite the high price all twenty-five hundred seats sold out, and scalpers got as much as twenty dollars on the weekend before the showing. The gala event at “the Theater Beautiful” was somewhat disrupted by the presence of a dozen black people picketing under the Fifth Street marquee. Since the picture hadn’t been shown locally, Fritzi assumed they were protesting on the assumption that it followed the racist story line of the Dixon novel. Placards identified the pickets as members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organization less than ten years old.
Fritzi’s escort for the evening was Hobart, who still managed to be a presence even though he was no taller than her shoulder. Edging toward seventy, Hobart refused to discuss age or birthdays. His heart trouble hadn’t recurred, though Fritzi from time to time cautioned him against overexertion.
Polo had friends in the tailoring trade, so Hobart’s formal suit fit him well, minimizing to the extent possible his bow legs and his stomach, which of late resembled the front end of a Zeppelin. The old actor had long ago trimmed his shoulder-length Oscar Wilde hair, but time had removed it on the top of his head, and he insisted on covering his baldness with a ridiculous shiny chestnut wig that always seemed to sit a bit crookedly, one day listing to port, the next to starboard; in a brisk breeze it had a tendency to slip astern.
On the way into the theater, Fritzi nearly collided with Loretta Gash. The reporter’s red satin cloak and turban shimmered under the electric lights. The look she gave Fritzi was hostile, the abruptness with which she turned away a calculated affront—if Fritzi had bothered to be offended.
A full symphony orchestra in the pit played the score for Griffith’s film. From the first notes of the overture, a thrill of excitement swept the crowd. The tale of a Southern family before and after the Civil War enthralled the audience. Fritzi admired Mr. Griffith’s ambition, and the genius displayed in composition and editing. The battle scenes, including the one whose filming she’d watched, were spectacular. Her heartbeat quickened when the Little Colonel, dapper Henry Walthall, charged the Union guns with a Confederate banner he spiked into the mouth of a cannon. After intermission, the Klan galloping to the rescue of the beleaguered family had undeniable power and excitement, intensified by the “Ride of the Valkyrie” thundering out of the pit. One of those hooded riders was Loy, she recalled sadly.
But stirred as Fritzi was by the technique of the film, she was at the same time repelled by the story. She remained a child of General Joe Crown, who had fought to make black people free and equal citizens, not buffoons of the kind Griffith depicted—ignoramuses in loud suits who gnawed chicken legs and tossed the bones on the floor of South Carolina’s Reconstruction legislature. Griffith’s Kentucky boyhood, his father’s service as a Rebel officer, explained his sympathies, but she didn’t see that it justified glamorizing night riders while turning blacks into satyrs and clowns. She was among the few who didn’t stand during the final ovation. In the lobby she avoided the line of well-wishers waiting to congratulate the director.
Lily sauntered into the tent with a folded tabloid-size paper under her arm. The tent was white canvas, with a solid floor, set up behind the sun-bleached building that contained Liberty’s regular, cramped dressing rooms. A small wooden sign hanging outside the tent said MISS CROWN.
“Say, Fritz, where the hell did this come from?”
Fritzi swung around on the stool in front of the makeup table. “The tent? It was here when I arrived this morning.” Her studied shrug tried to minimize the significance, but Lily whistled anyway.
“A dressing tent of your own. You’re coming up in the world.”
She handed Fritzi the copy of Screen Play. “Go on, take a look. Page four.”
One side of Lily’s shirtwaist hung out, stained by something bright yellow, perhaps mustard. Index and middle fingers of her right hand were a darker yellow-brown. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the center pole while Fritzi turned pages. Lily had already missed two days of work this week. She was gaunt, with a gray pallor.
…Also seen at the premiere of Griffith’s epic: Liberty’s comedy star Fritzi Crown, on the arm of tragedian Hobart Manchester (NOT her usual escort, Screen Play can reveal for the first time). Miss C may be one of the new royalty of this town, but in private she’s strictly declassé, playing “bunk-house” with a cowboy bit player with dirt under his nails and who-knows-what in his past. A lot of these Cactus Charlies who hang out at the Waterhole looking for day wages are reputed to be one step ahead of the law back home on the range. Careful, Fritzi!
“Oh, good God.” She threw the paper down.
Lily exhaled cigarette smoke. “What’d you do to her?”
“Nothing. I saw her at a party in December. I wouldn’t answer her cheap questions about Loy.”
“He’s gone.”
“Obviously she doesn’t know that.”
Lily clucked and shook her head. “Lots of people read that bitch. Lots of them believe every word she writes.”
“Oh, come on, trash like that can’t hurt me.”
Lily ground the wooden match under the toe of her red leather pump. “I sure hope not. Kelly’s secretary said he saw it and didn’t like it. Said it reflects badly on the studio. What a fucking hypocrite.”
She got to meet Kelly face to face later that afternoon, in B.B.’s office.
“I called this meeting to discuss how we can speed up production of pictures starring this little gel,” B.B. said. In front of him lay large sheets of pale green columnar paper inked with figures. Fritzi and Eddie sat in front of B.B’s desk. Al Kelly hunched in a chair in the corner, regarding Fritzi with a bilious eye.
Eddie spoke first: “Do we want to do that? We might glut the market.”
Kelly snorted. “We could finish a two-reel Nellie every third day and not glut the market. The exchanges are screaming for them.”
“Even in England, where they got the war to think about,” B.B. agreed. “Scandinavians and Dutchmen are standing in line. Froggies too. I’m heading over there in a few weeks to check the situation personally. Negotiate some better percentages. If they want Liberty product, they got to pay for it.”
Fritzi said, “Is a trip like that a good idea with all those German submarines prowling? I read that they sank an American cargo ship, the William Frye, and it was just carrying wheat, not munitions.”
“You’re a sweet gel to worry, but we got an investment to protect, and I smell a rat in the woodpile. Some of those frogs and eyeties may be cooking the books and stealing us blind. Besides, there’s a hundred ships crossing the Atlantic all the time, and only a few of those Hun subs. I got no worries. We’re taking that fabulous Cunard boat, Lusitania.”
The following Saturday, she worked a half day. In the afternoon Hobart and Polo arrived at the house with a noisy, lively present. A female dachshund puppy from a pet shop.
“You look so sad lately, dollink,” the director said. “We thought a nice German weenie dog might make you feel better.”
“You’re sweet, both of you.” Holding the wiggling puppy against her bosom, she kissed the men in turn. The wiener dog licked her chin.
After they watched the pup frolic for a while, Hobart said, “What will you christen her?”
That took only a moment’s thought. “Schatze. It means treasure, or sweetheart.” She picked up Schatze, who yipped and wriggled in the crook of her arm. Excited, the dog wet.
Fritzi held the pup at arm’s length. “Girl, you need training. I know just the right paper to use. Hobart, be a dear and hand me that copy of S
creen Play in the pantry.”
Later, during the night Schatze barked and cried in the best style of a puppy thrust into a new, strange environment, namely the pantry where Fritzi had shut her up with a dish of ground-round steak rushed from the butcher shop at half past six. She’d also spread pages from Loretta Gash’s publication over the pantry linoleum.
After an hour of listening to the poor dog’s misery, Fritzi relented. Barefoot, she went to the pantry, opened the door.
“All right, Schatze, you win.”
Excited again, the wiener dog leaped into the air and dampened the hem of Fritzi’s cotton nightdress. She laughed, changed her gown, and sat with Schatze on her lap in the kitchen. Together they ate two bowls of warmed-up chili and twenty crackers. Fritzi, however, drank all the beer. At Lily’s suggestion she’d checked her weight on a penny scale earlier in the week. Since Loy left she’d gained seven pounds. She’d never been able to eat and gain weight in times past. Was this another toll taken by age?
She went to bed with Schatze snuggled against her stomach as if she’d belonged there always. In a nightmare, she chased Loy across an endless dark void. As the pursuit grew more desperate, her failure more certain, terror gripped her—she’d never catch him. She woke shouting and thrashing, with the little wiener dog licking her sweaty face.
79. Air War
The new plane was fine, light and maneuverable. Nicknamed the Bébé, it was a smaller version of Nieuport’s two-seat reconnaissance ship. Today was the second time he’d taken one up since three of them had been delivered to the N65 squadron operating in the skies over Nancy.
During his first months in the French flying corps, Carl had piloted a slow Farman, spending most of his hours aloft buzzing back and forth with field glasses, observing German entrenchments. Because he had a good deal of experience as a pilot, he was soon reassigned from the observation squadron to the N65, a true pursuit squadron devoted not to scouting but to chasing and downing enemy planes that menaced French-held territory. He’d left his friend Rene behind to shoot at German observation balloons, clumsy gas bags that could explode with deadly force. Pilots who ventured too near could be blown up along with the enemy balloonists.
Carl had rolled out of the French-style hangar of canvas and girders an hour ago. Though it was a warm day, he’d donned a fleece-lined coat bought in a Paris specialty shop that outfitted airmen. The flying corps had no uniforms. In the earliest days, his messmates told him, pilots wore nothing heavier than a driving duster, and consequently froze their asses in the slipstream at higher altitudes.
Tess’s scarf was knotted around his throat and tucked safely inside the coat. The rest of his flight gear consisted of goggles and oil-stained motoring gauntlets. He wore no parachute. They were available, but far too bulky for a big man squeezed in a small cockpit.
New, hornlike streaks of white hair above Carl’s ears testified to the strain of aerial duty. There were men in the squadron who had literally turned white in one night, usually after a harrowing air combat. Carl had been flying three and a half months and hadn’t yet engaged an enemy plane, though he’d chased quite a few.
A casual observer would have said Carl looked rather seedy, but he fancied he looked rather romantic. That was an attitude common to aviators in this war. They felt they were stronger, smarter, braver than men fighting in the mud and filth of the trenches down below. Luckier too—they’d escaped the sordid horror of the ground war. Death was certainly no different in the air, but everything else was.
The Bébé clipped along at six thousand feet. The eighty-horsepower rotary motor droned smoothly. Three other pilots were aloft with Carl. German artillery below the horizon was hammering again, blanketing the land for miles with dust clouds in which shells burst like holiday sparklers. French artillery replied from positions behind him.
He bent to adjust the air and gas mix levers, and when he looked up again, he panicked. His three wing mates had vanished into a towering cloud. Suddenly, two thousand feet below, an Aviatik two-seater with black wing crosses popped from under the same tall cloud, going the opposite way. An artillery spotter.
Quickly he planned his strategy: attack from underneath the Aviatik. A second German manning the rear-seat swivel gun made diving from above foolhardy.
A Fokker pursuit monoplane burst out of the cloud. The observer’s escort. At once he changed his plan. Fokkers were deadly because their guns fired through the synchronized propeller. The race to develop a superior synchronizing mechanism was one of the great technical battles of the war. He must knock out the Fokker first.
At least he had more experience than many of the young Frenchmen sent to the front. Some had as little as five hours at flight school, and had never flown before that. Sending anyone out with training that meager was, in Carl’s mind, tantamount to committing murder.
As he went higher, he turned. He thrust the nose over into a dive and felt a heavy vibration in the wings transferred to the fuselage. He streaked downward in spite of it, and in seconds he was on the Fokker, pressing the button to fire the big Lewis gun mounted above him on the upper wing.
His rounds missed. He dove past the Fokker, banked away underneath. The Fokker came after him.
Carl headed into the sun. The Fokker’s fuselage-mounted machine guns chattered, and several rounds punched holes in the Bébé, a foot behind the cockpit. He yanked the stick back, and the plane climbed steeply in a retournment.
At the apex of the climb, he put the nose over and descended steeply again; again he felt the wings shaking horribly. But he’d gotten the Fokker off his tail.
Carl finished the evasive maneuver by flying in his original direction. He passed the German observation plane. The rear gunner tried to swivel to shoot but was too slow. When Carl was well in front of the Aviatik, the Fokker appeared behind it suddenly, dived beneath it, then zoomed up, closing fast on Carl’s Nieuport.
He executed a renversement. He came out of it flying straight at the Fokker, his Lewis gun blazing. The Fokker returned fire. One round nicked Carl’s propeller; a chip bloodied his face.
They were on a collision course, firing steadily. He could clearly see the enemy pilot’s youthful face, blond hair, clenched teeth. Only Carl’s hands and will controlled his plane; the rest of his body was running wild with fright. His bladder let go.
One of his incendiary rounds ignited the German’s fuel tank. The explosion shook his plane, and the red fireball scorched his face as it rolled toward him, obliterating the sky. He dove like a madman, just clearing the lethal smoke and flame. The Nieuport vibrated hellishly. Small pieces of wing covering tore and blew off. Carl was hurtling nose first to a crash. He fought to bring the Nieuport out of the dive, thinking, First and last kill in one day.
A thousand feet above the earth, the plane responded. He flew with his eyes shut for a few seconds, feeling the wing vibration dampen and then disappear altogether. A glance overhead showed the Aviatik darting into clouds to hide.
His breeches dried before he landed, thank God. He turned the Nieuport 11 over to his flight mechanic and jogged toward an open staff car that would deliver him to the château where the squadron was billeted. Aviators rode and slept in style—dined that way too. In the evening mess, with a good whitefish and a fine bottle of Graves, Carl listened to his commanding officer, Major Despardieu:
“Fine work today. Your colleague Rossay was above you during the dogfight. He verified the kill.”
The mess in the château’s great hall was crowded and smoky. Of the sixteen pilots who flew regularly, twelve were present, playing the piano, laughing, tossing darts at postal cards tacked to a bulletin board. The cards, from a German company called Sanke, bore sepia photographs of German heroes of the air war, the most recognizable being Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann.
The major took the monocle out of his eye. “You do appreciate that the Bébé’s wings tend to crumple and shear off if the machine is pushed too hard?”
“Yes,
sir, I got that idea today. I didn’t think about it long, I was pretty busy.”
“Of course.” Despardieu clinked his brandy snifter against Carl’s. “Still, mon ami, you needn’t worsen your chances.”
No other words were needed; Carl understood perfectly. The men in the squadron talked a lot about the fact that the average life expectancy of a front-line aviator operating against the enemy was three weeks.
In an abstract way he was proud of his success today, but he felt none of the heady exhilaration familiar from his days of race driving and stunt flying. Maybe it was because the brief duel at six thousand feet had ended with another man’s death. Probably a decent chap—some mother’s boy just following orders.
He reached for the brandy decanter to calm a bad case of nerves. Next morning when he looked into his shaving mirror, the horn-like streaks of white hair were thicker.
80. Torpedoed
On the last night out, Captain Turner addressed hundreds of passengers in the grand lounge. Not all of them could crowd in; the ship affectionately nicknamed Lucy carried more than twelve hundred on this crossing.
William Turner was a veteran of the Cunard line, a solid, broadly built seaman who didn’t mingle comfortably with his clientele. Which probably meant Bowler Bill was a damn fine sailor, B.B. decided. Bowler Bill’s nickname came from his favorite off-duty hat.
Like all of the great ship’s public rooms, the lounge was opulent. The period was late Georgian. Heavy furniture complemented rich tapestries on polished mahogany walls. The fine attire of the ladies and gentlemen was a perfect match for the surroundings.
Captain Turner took a wide-legged stance, hands behind his back. “Ladies and gentlemen. While I do not wish to alarm you unduly, it is my duty and responsibility as master of this vessel to inform you that we today received an Admiralty signal advising us of submarine activity in the area of Fastnet Rock.”