American Dreams

  THE CROWNS

  Fritzi—A woman whose beauty is equaled only by her fierce independence—her passion and ambition will carry her from the bright lights of Broadway to the boomtown of Hollywood….

  Carl—Thrown out of Princeton, searching for his destiny—his quest for adventure will drive him from the breakneck speedways of Detroit into the skies as a daredevil pilot….

  Paul—A thoughtful idealist—his empathy for humanity will move him to capture both the glory of existence, and the heartbreaking despair that accompanies the modern age of industry….

  From the ballrooms and bedrooms of fortress America to the battlefields of Europe in the throes of World War I, American Dreams is a bold, bighearted novel that evokes the grand passions, dizzying progress, and vanishing innocence of an extraordinary age—a time we will never know again. It is historical fiction at its very finest, as only John Jakes can tell it.

  Praise for American Dreams

  The second generation of the Crown family…

  “Jakes successfully weaves the dreams of three young family members into a historical work of fiction…. His knowledge of American history shines.”

  —Sunday Oklahoman

  “Jakes has a grand old time spinning his yarns…. He mixes his fictional offspring with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, making us feel as if we too have brushed our shoulders with celebrity.”

  —Toledo Blade

  “Realistic detail and period color galore keep this swift-moving story grounded…as the automobile and WWI arrive to shake the republic out of its golden idyll.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Historical fiction at its finest, as only John Jakes can tell it.”

  —Wheaton Gazette

  “A worthy successor to Homeland.”

  —Columbia State (SC.)

  Also by John Jakes

  Homeland

  California Gold

  THENORTH AND SOUTH TRILOGY

  North and South

  Love and War

  Heaven and Hell

  THE KENT FAMILY CHRONICLES

  The Bastard

  The Rebels

  The Seekers

  The Furies

  The Titans

  The Warriors

  The Lawless

  The Americans

  JOHN JAKES

  AMERICAN DREAMS

  A SIGNET BOOK

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Previously published in a Dutton edition.

  ISBN: 9781101209189

  Copyright © John Jakes, 1998

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_4

  The man who worked with me on California Gold was one of the great editors of recent times. 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

  PART ONE

  DREAMERS

  1. Actress

  2. Drifter

  3. Paul and His Wife

  4. Ilsa’s 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

  PART TWO

  STRIVING

  11. Adrift in New York

  12. Fritzi and Oh-Oh

  13. Smash-up

  14. Paul’s Anchor

  15. Three Witches and Four Actresses

  16. Grosse Pointe Games

  17. Bad Omens

  18. Confessions

  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

  PART THREE

  PICTURES

  34. Ilsa 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

  PART FOUR

  CALIFORNIA

  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

  PART FIVE

  NIGHTMARE

  58. Loyal

  59. Flying Circus

  60. Viva Villa!

  61. English Edgar

  62. Inceville

  63. Mercenaries

  64. The Day Things Slipped

  65. Crash Landing

  66. Fritzi and Loy

  67. That Sunday

  PART SIX

  BATTLEFIELDS

  68. In Belgium

  69. Troubled House

  70. Taking Sides

  71. “Truth or Nothing”

  72. Fritzi and Her Three Men

  73. Revelations

  74. Detroit Again

  75. Million-Dollar Carpet

  76. End of the Party

  77. U-Boat

  78. Winter of Discontent

  79. Air War

  80. Torpedoed

  81. Marching

  82. Troubled Nation

  83. Kelly Gives Orders

  84. Heat of the Moment

  85. Bombs

  86. Casualties
>
  87. In the Trenches

  88. The Boy

  89. The Unfinished Song

  Afterword

  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

  PART ONE

  DREAMERS

  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 high-wheel 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 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 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 tam 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.

  “Ta-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.

  The tramp planted his feet a yard in front of her. The sleeves of his coat shone like a greasy skillet. “Hello, girlie.” Fritzi swallowed, thinking desperately. Even upwind of the man she caught his stupefying stench—mostly liquor and dirt. He was burly, obviously much stronger.

  He winked at her.

  “Girls out wanderin’ by theyselves this time of morning, they’re either runaways or little Levee whores.” His baritone voice was thickened by hoarseness and phlegm. He stuck out his arms, wiggled his fingers with an oafish leer. His nails were broken and black with dirt.

  “Come give us a kiss.” He dropped his left hand to his pants. “Anywhere you please.”

  For want of her usual weapon of defense, a long hat pin, Fritzi called on her primary talent. She replied in a loud and almost perfect imitation of his wheezy baritone: “Don’t let this long hair fool you, bub. You’ve got the wrong fellow.”

  The tramp’s eyes bugged. He was confounded by the male bellow issuing from Fritzi’s chapped lips. She’d always been a keen mimic, sometimes getting into a pickle because of her rash choice of subject, especially schoolteachers. The tramp’s confusion gave her the extra seconds she needed. She sprang to her bike, wheeled it onto the path, ran and threw a long leg over the saddle. She took off in a flying start, pedaling madly.

  Flashing a look back, she saw the tramp thumb his nose, heard him shout something nasty. She sped around a curve, snatched her tam off and let her curly blond hair stream out. She laughed with relief, pumping harder.

  At least her talent proved to be worth something this morning. It could be worth a lot more in New York City.

  Time to go…

  Of that she was certain. And never mind the trouble it was likely to cause.

  As Fritzi pedaled away from the lake shore, she reflected on all the things that had driven her to the emotional epiphany this morning.

  Shapeless things, like the growing malaise of living day after day under the roof where she’d been raised but definitely no longer belonged.

  Silly things, like a little easel card noticed on a cosmetic counter at The Fair Store.

  OVER TWENTY-FIVE?

  LUXOR CREME PREVENTS AGEING!

  Ironic things, the most recent being a well-meant remark by her father only last night. The family had been seated at Abendbrot—literally, evening bread, the light supper traditional in German households. Ilsa, Fritzi’s mother, remarked that she was still receiving compliments on the lavish anniversary party which the Crowns gave annually for close friends, Joe Crown’s business associates, and others they knew from their years in German-American society in Chicago. The party in early October had celebrated thirty-seven years of marriage.

  The General agreed that it was indeed a fine party, the best ever. He then turned to his daughter with a thoughtful expression:

  “Fritzi, my dear, your birthday will be on us in another month. We must plan. What do you want most?”

  Fritzi sat to her father’s right, on the long side of the dining table. Her older brother Joey—Joe Crown, Junior—sat opposite, sunk in his chair and his customary, vaguely sullen silence. Poor Joey was a permanent boarder. In 1901 he’d dragged himself home from the West Coast, crippled for life in a labor union brawl. Under a tense truce with his father, Joey worked at Brauerei Crown, doing the most menial jobs. He and his father traveled to and from work separately, the General in his expensive Cadillac motor car—he had become an avid automobilist—and Joey on the trolleys.

  Fritzi thought about asking for motoring lessons, then reconsidered. The General believed women had no place at the wheel of an auto. She said, “I haven’t an idea, Papa. I’ll try to think of something.”

  “Please do. How old will you be?” It was a sincere question. Her elegant silver-haired father was in his sixty-fourth year, occasionally forgetful. He had never lost the accent he’d brought with him as the immigrant boy Josef Kroner from Aalen, a little town in Württemberg that had been the
home of the Kroner family for generations.

  “Twenty-six.” Somehow it sounded like a sentence from a judge.

  With this latest realization of her age thrust on her, Fritzi spent a restless night in her old room on the second floor—the room she’d occupied since she had returned to Chicago almost a year ago.

  In 1905, during a late summer heat wave, the General had suffered a fainting spell only later diagnosed as a mild heart attack. He collapsed on a platform from which he was quietly and reasonably defending the brewers of beer, attempting to separate them in the collective mind of his audience from distillers of hard spirits. The audience wanted none of it, because he was presenting his message to a temperance society.