“Mr. Semmel isn’t in there, he’s out.”
Paul wanted to pick up a chair and smash the door down. He rubbed away ash on his vest and barked at the young woman instead. “Sure. Give him my regards.”
She handed him a folded yellow sheet. “This came for you.”
Another wire from Marguerite. It informed him that Chicago and Milwaukee had canceled in the wake of plunging ticket sales and complaints from managers where he’d already appeared. Marguerite ended her message by invoking the clause in the original agreement he’d signed with APA which said that either party could cancel at any time. The bureau no longer represented him. Marguerite would expect a commission on any remaining engagements he fulfilled, but he would fulfill them without her help.
He stormed down the stairs. That’s what comes of turning down an eager woman. The cheap and bitter joke didn’t lift his spirits one iota.
Fritzi rushed home from Liberty after working all day on Big Top Nell (“Until now I’ve never played a scene with a hundred-and-ten-pound chimpanzee in a clown suit, and I don’t intend to repeat the experience, thank you very much”).
“What will you do after the tour?” she asked at supper in her little Mediterranean house, which Paul found charming. He, Fritzi, and Hobart sat on a small terrace, cool now that the sun was hiding behind the hills. Hobart refilled their wine glasses with an excellent Sonoma County red. It was half past eight, a fine summer evening.
After reflecting a moment, he said, “Why, I’ll go home to Julie and the kids, then go back to the war zone, shoot more film, and try to find someone to buy it. That’s all I know how to do.”
“I’m sorry you’ve had hostile crowds,” Fritzi said.
“They just don’t understand. I’m hanged if I know why.”
Hobart puffed his cigarette and watched a flight of birds in the amber sky. “The war still isn’t real to most Americans. The furor over Lusitania seems to be dying down. The war is enriching America. Your countrymen want to profit from it, without any painful involvement.”
After dark, in the small, cozy living room warmed by exposed wooden beams and bright Navaho rugs, Paul set up Fritzi’s projector and ran his film. When the six Belgian men and women died in the field, Fritzi wept; Hobart cursed.
Paul switched off the machine, switched on the electric lights. Fritzi wiped her reddened eyes, sniffed, and tucked the hanky in her pocket.
“There’s one person who must see the pictures, Pauli. Papa.”
“Chicago’s canceled. I’m not stopping there.”
“Please reconsider. For me.”
“You want me to set up a projector and force him to look at pictures that damn his beloved fatherland? You’ve already told me how he feels about the war.”
“Yes, but you might change his mind. You can tell him you were reluctant but I insisted. I’ll take all the blame. He can’t despise me more than he does already.”
Paul didn’t reply. He sat low in a deep leather chair with his feet stuck out and his untied shoelaces dangling. The second button of his vest was fastened in the first buttonhole. His tie was loosened, his hair messy. He was very reluctant to compound the General’s anger at Fritzi. Hobart sat sleepy-eyed, watching the interplay between the cousins.
“Are you just asking me because I took the pictures and I’m handy?”
“Oh, no, far from it. Papa doesn’t respect me any longer, but he respects you. And you’re family.” She folded her hands in her lap. “So it’s your duty. Papa’s gone down the wrong road, Mama says so in every letter. You have to do it, Pauli—unless you no longer have a conscience or any kind of moral compass, which I know isn’t true.”
He winced at Hobart. “How do you like that? She lays a skillful trap, doesn’t she?”
“There are expert instructors within our profession,” Hobart murmured.
“Pauli, don’t joke. This is a serious matter,” Fritzi said.
“God, I know. Give me some more of that wine while I think about it. I could wind up with the General despising both of us forever.”
83. Kelly Gives Orders
Fritzi took her head out of Roger’s mouth. It was a monumental relief; Roger had terrible breath, possibly from all the steaks, chops, and ribs fed to him so he wouldn’t be tempted to snack on the actors. Unlike Buster, the one hundred and ten-pound chimpanzee, however, Roger was not inclined to tear her clothes off to satisfy his curiosity about the human form.
Roger was, in fact, a magnificent, if rather elderly, king of beasts. He weighed six hundred pounds and stood four feet high; his head was on a level with Fritzi’s bosom. Roger badly needed to diet, though. His belly sagged.
Roger liked eye contact. He blinked his tawny eyes at Fritzi, nuzzled her chest, then opened his enormous jaws to yawn. Following this he lay down to snooze.
Eddie ran into the cage built on the original outdoor stage. Half the bars were rubber. Fritzi dropped her lion tamer’s whip and wiped her perspiring face and neck with the hem of her striped tunic. “Lord, this getup’s hot.” She wore the tunic with pantaloons, oversized shoes, a fright wig, and clown makeup: huge lips, a red ball on the tip of her nose, a single teardrop outlined in black under her left eye.
“I know,” Eddie sympathized. “The take looked swell, though. Could I have one more for insurance?”
“Oh, Eddie.” Being professional, that was the extent of her complaint. “Will Roger cooperate?”
“His owner says the dope won’t wear off for another hour.”
“Let’s pray he’s right.”
Roger flicked his tawny tail and made an unfriendly noise somewhere in his chest. Fritzi followed Eddie out of the cage and off the set. Behind the camera positioned to shoot through the bars, Jock chatted with Roger’s owner. Farther back, Al Kelly was observing with his usual dyspeptic frown.
She plopped in a chair in the shade of a beach umbrella, and a makeup girl handed her a glass of lemonade. “Thanks, Mona.” Stripped to his undershirt, Jock Ferguson said to Roger’s owner, “How do you get him to open wide like that?”
“Lions are smart. They train well. Roger knows that when we’re finished he’ll go home to mama. African lions don’t step around. They take one mate for life. If I told you any more, you’d be making thirty-five simoleons a day instead of me.” Jock laughed.
In the cage Roger lurched to his feet. He made a lovelorn gargling sound and began to pace. A grip hastily padlocked a chain on the cage door—not much help if Roger discovered the rubber bars. Roger’s owner reached through the bars and ruffled his mane. He spoke quietly to the lion. Roger tossed his head once, bared his few remaining teeth, flopped, and rolled over. Fritzi thought he looked cross, though. Performing for hours in the hot sun was no fun for any actor, two- or four-legged.
A man’s shadow fell in front of her. Al Kelly stepped under the umbrella.
“Like to see you in my office, Fritzi.”
Eddie overheard. “Boss, we need to get this shot before Roger gets testy.”
“Last take looked fine to me. Don’t waste money.”
Kelly tilted his head to indicate that Fritzi should follow. It was hard to walk because her shoes measured twenty-five inches from heel to toe. In Eddie’s improbable script, Knockabout Nell took over for the star circus clown, who’d eloped with an aerialist. She tamed a lion mistreated by a roustabout, foiled a firebug, prevented bank foreclosure on the circus, and, despite characteristic mishaps with buckets, hoses, trampolines, and tent ropes, once again saved everything and everybody while getting nothing for herself. Nell’s secret love was the circus strongman. He preferred the cashier, who happened to be the owner’s daughter. Nell was left at the fade-out sitting with her arm around Roger.
In his office Kelly wasted no time. “Fritzi, we pay you to perform at the studio. I hear you did an act downtown while I was up at Yosemite.”
“I marched in the preparedness parade, if that’s what you mean.”
“Made a big speech. It went
all over the country on the press wires in case you don’t know it. I saw the Times write-up when I came back. I didn’t like what I read.”
She dabbed her melting makeup with a hanky. “I’m sorry. I think we disagree about the war. I spoke my mind.”
“Take my advice. Don’t get involved in causes. It steals your energy.” He smiled with all the sincerity of a con man defrauding a widow. Being avuncular just wasn’t in him.
Irked, she said, “There are more important things than being a picture star and signing autographs.”
“Not in my cash book, sister. Everybody says Hollywood people are the new royalty, the only royalty this country’s ever had. You’re part of that. Look at all the press you get. The crowds you attract when you so much as break wind.”
“Al, please.”
He pressed on, a hard edge in his voice. “Take the wrong stand on a public issue like the war, your audience is liable to desert you. You can’t afford that.”
“I’ll chance it.”
“All right, Liberty can’t afford it. I won’t put up with it.”
“Why, because you hate red ink?”
They sounded like a couple of children spatting, but there was nothing childish or funny about Kelly’s snarl. “Stay out of those parades. Don’t make any more speeches. That’s it, that’s the order. I run this studio.”
“You don’t run me, Al. Not outside the gates.”
“Then you’re making your last picture as Nell.”
“What?”
“That lawyer you shoved down our throats—a real genius. He overlooked one thing. You signed a contract binding you to work for Liberty for three years. But you don’t get any say in the kind of work—what pictures you’re in. We have to pay you, but we don’t have to use you.”
“Have you lost your mind? The Nell comedies make money.”
“Sure, but watch them go the other way if you keep opening your bazoo about the war. Half the people in this country want no part of it. Half, maybe more. Get this straight, Fritzi. Liberty created the Nell pictures, and Liberty owns the character. We can hire any actress for the part. We can send you back to playing Princess Laughing Rainwater in cowboy pictures. Do you get what I’m telling you? We can put you in blackface and make you play darky maids. Or the rear end of a horse.”
“This is a bluff.”
“Sure, all right. Play the hand out and see. Take a vacation, Fritzi. A good long one. After this Nell wraps up, go make as many goddamn speeches for England as you want. Oh, one more thing. Don’t bother crawling to Hayman this time. Ham’s with me all the way on this. He hates what the limey press says about studio owners. That a lot of ’em are German Jews and love the Kaiser.”
He swiveled around in his chair and showed her his back. Fritzi reeled out of the office. Her funny shoes flapped and slapped. She felt like a novice drinker who’d gulped a quart of gin on an empty stomach.
A cool wind from the mountains dropped the nighttime temperature. She built a fire and put a new disc on the Victrola. Caruso singing “Vesti la giubba” filled the house. A song about a sad clown seemed appropriate.
She lay on the Navaho rug in front of the fire, toasting her bare feet. Her eyes misted as the music soared, and she thought of Loy. The mournful air ended; the needle scraped as the disk went round and round. She rewound the machine and started the record again.
The twists and turns and confusions of the world baffled and frustrated her as never before. All your life you dreamed of one man to love, and he turned out to be wrong. You started along one road where you thought success lay, but it didn’t, so out of a combination of desperation and accident you took another road, less desirable, and lo and behold, there you found the rewards, the dreams fulfilled in a totally unexpected way—and then someone threatened what you’d achieved simply because you did what you believed right.
Were dreams always so thwarted, distorted, changed in ways you never anticipated? Was this what people meant by the riddle of life? If so, its solution was beyond her, though its pain and hurt were present and real.
What did it all mean? How could you understand? What could you do, beyond getting up next morning and going on? She fell asleep in front of the dying fire with the questions unanswered and the Victrola needle scraping in the center grooves of the record.
She hit on a scheme to take her out of Los Angeles for a while. She bought Schatze a pearl-studded collar, loaded her into a wicker traveling box, and boarded a train for Texas.
She rode the Pecos & Northern Texas Line, which ran from Lubbock to Farwell Junction on the New Mexico border. Yet she saw little of the countryside because of dust storms, yellow monsters that roared over the land, carrying off topsoil of the cotton fields.
At Muleshoe only two passengers left the train, Fritzi and an anvil salesman lugging a small sample. He disappeared in the dust, coughing. Fritzi looked around. A colored porter approached.
“Is there a hotel?”
“Yes’m. ’Cross the street.”
“Thank you.”
The clerk stared at her while she signed the ledger. Fritzi now understood that people stared at her the way they stared at Little Mary, or Charlie, but she still had moments when she stood away, remote from herself, a mystified observer who wondered how this could be. Dust blew past the grimy lobby windows as she asked, “Is there a local police department?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Sheriff, then?”
“Yes’m, this is the county seat.” He gave directions. People were extra helpful if they recognized you; that was one of the few advantages.
The sandstone courthouse matched the hue of the dust clouds. The building smelled of spittoons and aging deed books. Sheriff Rob Roy Trigg’s office was on the first floor. The sheriff was a big old buffalo of a man with a home haircut, handlebar mustaches, and neat citified clothes. She found him sorting through wanted flyers. Many more hung three and four deep on his bulletin board. She wondered if a flyer with Loy’s likeness and description was among them.
Trigg nearly tangled his feet racing around the desk to hold the guest chair. “It’s an honor, ma’am. My wife and myself, we enjoy you so much at the picture show.”
“Thank you, Sheriff.” No matter how often she had to listen to it, each person who said it fancied they were the first, so you couldn’t be rude.
“I’ve come about a man I was acquainted with in Los Angeles. A resident of this town at one time. Loyal Hardin.”
“Why, sure, I knew Loy.” The words revealed nothing of his feelings. A fly walked across the sheriff’s ink-stained blotter. He waved it off.
“Do you know his whereabouts?”
“No, ma’am, afraid I don’t. No one’s seen Loy in years. He killed a Texas Ranger, Captain Mercer Page, did you know that?”
“I had some hint of it. Loy and I worked in several pictures together. He handled horses, sometimes took small parts.”
“Do tell. Didn’t know.” He brought a corncob out of his desk. “Will this bother you?” She shook her head. He packed the pipe. “Loy’s sister, Clara, she’s over in Lubbock in a home for the feeble-minded.” Trigg’s hand hovered over the old pipe with a lit match. He almost burned himself before he blew it out. “What happened about Merce Page was a real shame. Loy Hardin shot and killed him, then disappeared to hell and gone ’fore the whole story came out.”
“What do you mean, the whole story?”
Trigg leaned back with both hands cupped around his pipe. “It got out that Loy shot Merce because he, ah, molested Loy’s sister. After Loy ran off, women started coming forward. A young woman up in Lariat, that’s in Parmer County. Another from Castro County, preacher’s widow. Woman of sixty, can you imagine? Lord knows how many more kept silent. The man was an animal. Not fit to wear a Ranger’s badge. Upshot was, the murder charge was sort of put aside. Only Loy never knew it.”
The irony of it. When B.B. wanted him for a good role, Loy feared he might be recognized back home and
be locked up, unable to care for Clara. Poor sweet man, if he’d said yes, he might be a picture star by now. Wherever he was, Loy was free. Probably he’d never know.
84. Heat of the Moment
In the midst of the fiercely hot summer, a season of mounting war passions, Joe Crown felt himself a man besieged.
The climate in which German-Americans found themselves steadily grew more stormy and hostile. Editorial cartoons portrayed all Germans as “cruel beasts” and “lying Huns.” Newspapers ran wild scare stories about spy rings secretly financed by “hyphenates.” It became sorrowfully evident to Joe that to be an American citizen of German origin was to be a pariah.
Though he didn’t tell Ilsa, he worried endlessly about Carl, off there in France in a fragile aeroplane, risking his life. Carl never wrote letters, so he and Ilsa were left wondering about him, which only enhanced the anxiety.
He was beset by physical ailments. His eyesight continued to fail. A fall on the ice late in the winter had exacerbated arthritic pain in his hips. He tended to stoop, couldn’t brace his shoulders back as he had for so many years, to reflect his pride at being a Union officer and then General of Volunteers in ’98. He was no longer erect and military but old and bent.
Since his seventy-third birthday, observed on March 31, it seemed to him that things had slid downhill more rapidly. He and Ilsa had celebrated the birthday by themselves in the dining room of the Union League Club. Joe was aware of whispers, and some ugly looks, as they dined that night. Well, what else could be expected? His own friend Roosevelt was denouncing “hyphenates” in speeches.
Now, in the blaze of July, here was his nephew Paul fresh off the transcontinental train and eager to show him pictures.
“Why should I waste my time?” the General said after Ilsa had retired. He and his nephew sat with beer and cigars in the stuffy office on the first floor of the mansion. Wind shook doors and windows ahead of a storm blowing in from the prairies. Paul’s train had come through downpours and a hailstorm.