Cheat and Charmer
By Elizabeth Frank
Random House, 543 pages, $25.95
In “Shut Up He Explained,” Kate Lardner’s recent memoir of being “a blacklisted kid,” she retells a famous story about her stepfather, Ring Lardner Jr. When he was asked to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating communist influence in Hollywood, Lardner replied, “I could answer the question exactly the way you want, Mr. Chairman,” but “I’d hate myself in the morning.”
Lardner was pulled from the witness chair and cited for contempt, joining nine others who did jail time and came to be known as the Hollywood Ten. When he died in 2000, he was the last surviving member of the group.
It’s hardly time for the end credits, though, despite the passing of that generation. Blacklist wounds still ooze in Hollywood–a furor erupted when the motion picture academy gave Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar five years ago, recall. Kazan was one who had named names in the postwar HUAC proceedings, earning him the enmity of Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman and others who resisted. Those blacklisted included a pantheon of America’s creative elite, among them Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Zero Mostel, Orson Welles, Richard Wright. And now, using a crowd of fictional stand-ins for the original players, we have an attempt to re-create that time of fission in Tinseltown, Elizabeth Frank’s new novel, “Cheat and Charmer.”
“The terrible thing about the whole business, really,” Kate Lardner’s mother told her, “was what it did to people.” And that is what Frank sets out to show, using cameos and close-ups rather than panoramic shots; she has movie people running for cover in Europe or Mexico, as many real-life figures did, or turning on each other to save their own careers by naming Communist Party members and fellow travelers, or balking at HUAC and being denied a chance to work within the studio system or the TV networks.
Guilt and deception are the bywords of “Cheat and Charmer,” in which the blacklist as it develops is but one opportunity, and a kind of overarching metaphor, for betrayal. Marital infidelity, sibling rivalry and parental disavowals–lovelessness, really–are other ways Frank’s characters undo each other.
Frank is a biographer who has won a Pulitzer Prize for her work, and her observations can be keen at times. She has a real story to tell, too, about faith in one’s convictions and acceding to dark political pressures. Unfortunately, in the shift to fiction, Frank has peopled this novel with rather standard cutouts, figures from a book of paper dolls, and that is one of its disappointments. Their blood, when it runs, is movie blood. They attest to emotions, they vent and cry and vacillate, as we all do, but too often it’s curiously aseptic when it happens.
The soap-operatic quality that creeps in at the very beginning of “Cheat and Charmer” never does a fade-out, either. As others clear the floor, we see a lone couple dancing, Jake and Dinah Lasker, moving “with tremendous rhythm and style.” He is “[t]all and broad-shouldered,” her legs are “long and well proportioned, with slender, graceful ankles.” But of course. It’s 1951, and by the end of the first chapter, Dinah has been served with a subpoena to testify before representatives of HUAC; we’ve met studio head Irv Engel and his wife, Anya, plus the Laskers’ black housekeeper and the two Lasker children; heard conversation about Dinah’s overweeningly beautiful sister, Veevi, ensconced in Europe; and sensed that Dinah will probably testify despite misgivings, and that Jake, while weakly implying he is against that, seems bent on subtly manipulating her to do so. Lastly, we see that the Laskers sleep in separate beds. Jake, a producer-writer-director, will in fact sleep in a number of beds before we’re through, being the very embodiment of a cheat and a charmer.
Those are most of the major characters, and as a reader, much will depend on what you expect from a book when you take up Frank’s novel. As pop fiction, it’s a smooth, undemanding read that is occasionally moving and chronicles an interesting social set and a troubling time, historically. The dialogue, which can be unengaging, will also be recognized as accurate for the sorts of situations in which it occurs, whether terse exchanges or romantic blandishments. Frank nowhere traffics in the implausible when plotting the book, which is a plus in any realist fiction.
It’s when considered as literature that “Cheat and Charmer” comes up shy: It doesn’t have the imaginative compass that it should, given the subject matter, and the level of artistic surprise, sentence by sentence or scene by scene, is rather low. And yet the author has an obvious seriousness of purpose and labors to elevate the novel above being an entertainment or a straight political tract.
The incident that determines the main plot trajectory of “Cheat and Charmer” is Dinah’s potential, and then actual, testimony before representatives of HUAC. She names names, and when that is reported in the press it implodes portions of the Laskers’ social circle and for a time severs relations with sister Veevi, who ends up, as an indirect result, financially dependent on Jake and Dinah. Dinah spends most of the novel justifying what she did, but she’s holding self-flagellation in abeyance too.
The consequences of Dinah’s decision were well understood beforehand, of course, and this lends a sense of inevitability to much of the novel. ” ‘[W]hat’s gonna happen if Dinah refuses to testify?’ ” Jake inquires of his boss, studio mogul Engel, early on. ” ‘You’ll never work in Hollywood again,’ ” is the reply. ” ‘Not here at Marathon, not at Metro, not at Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, Columbia, RKO–forget it. You won’t be able to get through the front gate. Not even as an extra.’ “
And so throughout the novel we encounter social faceoffs between the “have tolds” and the “have-not tolds,” those who maintained their professional status and those who were stripped of it. And we even see the ramifications among the expat arts community in Europe. Frank does a good job evoking club-hopping Americans in Paris, a loose cluster of writers, photographers, producer-directors and actresses, including Veevi, among whom passport questions loom large, given the Red scare in America.
Jake, although never a member of the Communist Party, had signed the loyalty oath enforced by the studio system and would have been guilty of associating with a subversive because of Dinah’s brief flirtation with the party. While Dinah’s testimony saves his career, he breaks the loyalty oath of marriage with impunity, a clever parallel and one of the major leitmotifs of the book. Jake is consistently self-justifying about his string of women, even when struck by the occasional impulse to reform, joking with male colleagues in what, in “Cheat and Charmer,” appears to be the standard genetic fallout of the Y chromosome. When Dinah is apprised of his affairs and calls him a particular piece of male anatomy, he thinks:
“She’ll get over it in time. They always do. . . . [S]ome sweet talk, trips to Paris, jewelry. For every broad, she gets a brooch.”
Dinah, for her part, has roles as a mother and sister as well as a wife, and the multiple tensions on her serve to complicate her more than any other character in the book. She speaks with a stammer, a holdover from childhood, and had been the daughter disfavored by her bitter father, who showered his affections on Veevi. Veevi is a figure of “commanding loveliness” who has been preferred by everyone over Dinah, lifelong. Even as an adult, Dinah worries that “She will come here and eat me alive.” Frank does reach beyond this stereotypic setup, though, by having a kind of reversal take place late in “Cheat and Charmer,” in which the sisterly bond complicates itself movingly. Veevi is healing from an accident that led to her partial immolation, and Dinah agrees to contribute to the grafting process. Veevi “was going to start a new life. ‘In your skin,’ she said to Dinah.”
The question of whose skin we are really in is at the heart of “Cheat and Charmer,” too, where fidelity and principle are so tested. Recalling the time when her stuttering began, in childhood, Dinah thinks that “every waking hour became a struggle against the dark foot in her throat that crushed her words as they fought their way up toward the open air.”
It’s how the blacklisted must have felt too.
