Cheat and Charmer (5 page)

“There was nothing left for him here, Irv.”

“You know, in this business if you’re patient enough something always turns up.”

Not true, Jake said again to himself. It’s what everybody out here is terrified of: if you’re finished, you’re finished for good.

“So,” Jake said, “if Dinah refuses to testify and I’m blacklisted, there’s nothing to worry about? I’ll just sell shoes till I get a phone call from you?”

“Okay, okay,” said Engel, rearranging paperweights and pens. “Let’s get serious. Let’s talk about you and Dinah. She was in the Party and you weren’t, and they’ve got her number now and you want to know what to do. Is that the situation?”

“That’s the situation. Now,” said Jake, slapping his thighs with both hands, “you’ve got to understand my wife. She’s—she’s
frighteningly
loyal. She’d do anything for me. If I ask her to testify, she’ll testify. She’s willing to do it. If she could have done it last night at your party she would have. But I don’t want her to go through it if she doesn’t absolutely have to.”

“Well, what about you, Jake? Can you live with Dinah’s testifying for you?”

Jake bit his lip, hesitating. “I don’t know, Irv. That’s a tough one.”

They both knew it meant he could but wasn’t going to say so.

“So what are you asking, dear boy? You want I should be the heavy?” Engel said, in imitation of his immigrant father.

“Tell me the truth. What’ll happen if she refuses.”

“What’ll happen to
her
or to
you
?”

“Me.”

Engel looked at his watch. “Tell you what. I have to get tough with a certain director, a friend of yours and mine, though I can’t tell you his name, but I know you know who I mean. I’m supposed to be on his set in five minutes to yell at him about going over-budget—something I rarely have to worry about with you, which is another reason you’re a very valuable
commodity.” He picked up the phone. “Carlotta, set up a call for me with the legal department at exactly one-thirty. And at exactly two o’clock get me Van Zandvoort Aldrich. On his private phone.”

“
The
V. Z. Aldrich?” Jake asked. “Of the Hudson-Hyde Trust?”

“The one and only. I’m expecting him out here at the end of the week. He comes to inspect the premises about twice a year,” added Engel, putting the phone back. “Most often when his wife’s in Paris for the spring collections.”

V. Z. Aldrich was the head of the New York bank behind Marathon. “We met him at your house, Irv, remember? He tried to get me to arrange a date for him with Fiona Henley. I told him she’d gone back to England when we finished shooting. What else could I say? That she’s a dyke and is serviced by her maid?”

“Very diplomatic of you.”

“He told me how much he loved
Cousin Jonnycake
,” Jake continued. “ ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘it took real chutzpah to make that picture.’ ” Jake pronounced the word with the
ch
sound in
cheese
, or
chump
.

“And he also asked you, if I’m not mistaken, whether you’d signed the loyalty oath, and you fudged and said you were planning to, and by God the next day after that dinner in you trotted, and out came your pen, and to a chorus of angels you signed that goddamn loyalty oath and God did not smite you with leprosy. You woke up the next morning and you were still the same talented, successful guy you were the day before. Look, I understand what you’re feeling—you love your wife, you’re edgy, you don’t want to put her through this. Take the day off, play golf, have fun, then meet me back here at five o’clock. I’ll have some answers for you.”

Jake sighed, slapped his thighs again, and got up to leave. “Five,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

Back in his own office, Jake had his secretary, Gladys, put a call through to Dinah and described to her in detail the meeting with Irv and the plan to see him again later that day. “I’ll call you the minute it’s over.”

“Gee,” she said, “it’s gonna be a
long
afternoon for you.”

“Yeah, and my legs are restless as hell. I’m torn between trying to work on the script and just going over to Finlandia to sweat out the tension. Maybe I’ll drop in and see my mother.”

“So
go
,” she said.
“Go.”

He summoned Gladys and gave her the scenes he had been working on that morning, with instructions to insert them in the light blue third-draft binder.

“Oh, this’ll be fun,” she said, taking the yellow legal pages, which were covered in Jake’s spider-web-thin scrawl.

“You still like it?”

Gladys was a small, dark young woman who smoked Kools and chewed Juicy Fruit gum while she typed, and her Brooklyn-accented voice was always raspy and precise, with whistle-sharp sibilants. “So far I love it, I swear,” she said. “Would I lie to you?”

“Maybe you’re a bit too close to it.”

“Naw. I read it out loud to my brother and sister-in-law last Sunday, when I finished typing those pages I took home, and they howled. Really howled. That sequence where the guy is hiding under the table listening to the spies talking about the bomb plans, scratching one guy’s knee and tapping the other guy’s, trying to keep it all in sync.” She looked up at him and, seeing him search for something in the top drawer of his desk, reached into her blouse pocket and threw him a stick of gum, which he caught with one hand, unwrapped immediately, and popped into his mouth. He liked their little wordless understandings and always felt comfortable around her.

“You like that part?” he asked her, chewing noisily as he went to the closet for his jacket and his baseball cap.

“It’s terrific.” Her small, eager face, resplendent with loyalty, followed his every movement. “Has George seen it yet?”

“I was going to show it to him this week, but I think I’ll wait a little till we have more pages.”

“He’s committed before on a lot less than this.”

“Yeah, but you know, I just wanna wait awhile. Between you and me, maybe he’s not the only guy who could do it. How many George Joy pictures have I made, after all?”

“Five,” said Gladys, counting them on her fingers while she silently reviewed the titles. “Five pictures since 1944. I know, ’cause I’ve typed the scripts for every last one of them.”

And, he thought, what the hell are you going to do if Dinah refuses to testify and you’re out of a job? He couldn’t imagine working without Gladys. And what about Gussie? What would happen to Gussie?

“Well, maybe there’s …” His voice trailed off.

She looked at him, understanding that there was something he wasn’t saying but that she couldn’t ask him about. Yet, not wanting to appear to have secrets from her, he felt he had to confide to her at least something she could be trusted with. “I’d like to see just once what would happen if I worked with somebody else. Do you think I could shoot this picture with Wynn Tooling?”

“The English comedian? That is one sensational idea, Jake. I mean, sensational.”

“You think so?”

“I think so.”

He wanted so much to tell her about the subpoena.

“Jake,” she said, “if you shoot it in England, could you take me with you? I’ve never been to Europe.”

“Semper fi, kiddo. If the Brits’ll let me, that is. They’ve got complicated labor laws. But I’d pull every string I could.” And he meant it, too.

“You know,” she said matter-of-factly, putting a new page into the typewriter. “I’d like to see the world one day.”

“I know you would, Gladys.”

He looked at her and felt how much he liked her, and wished, somehow, that he could do more for her. Then, as he started toward the door, he paused and asked her to call his mother and tell her he would be stopping by sometime in the afternoon.

H
e drove along Santa Monica, not Sunset. He wasn’t going to Finlandia, and hadn’t intended to go there in the first place. Stopping in a parking lot in West Hollywood, he entered a phone booth, where he took a blue address book from his jacket pocket and dialed, slouching against the glass windows. A minute or two later, he got back into the sea-green 1950 Cadillac and pulled into Santa Monica again, then made a right on Harper, which rose steeply toward Sunset. He parked just above Fountain, to be safe; his mother rarely walked to that end of the block.

It never failed to amuse him that the girl happened to live in the same building as his mother. It was just the sort of farcical circumstance he adored, and he wished he could use it in a picture someday. Will the time ever come, he often wondered, when American movies can show this sort of thing? Luckily, the two women lived on different floors—his mother on the fourth, the girl on the seventh—and, again luckily, in different parts of the building, which was a very large white stucco Spanish Colonial. Bonnie’s place fronted west, on Harper, while his mother’s looked out to the east and the north, toward the San Bernardino Mountains, over layers of scalloped terra-cotta roofs.

It winded Jake a little to climb the stairs, but he knew that his mother, with her arthritic knee, never used them, relying solely on the elevator. Nor was he likely, this way, to run into the elderly couple who lived across the hall from her and whose son was a well-known television director.

There really was very little danger, he reminded himself. Still, he always got the jitters when he came to see Bonnie. In a way, he knew, it was part of the fun. He had met her at Joe Brogan’s, the bar across the street from
the wrought-iron gate at the entrance to Marathon. Cutting
Cousin Jonnycake
, planning to stay late into the night, he had taken a late-afternoon break for a beer and pretzels and the baseball scores. As soon as he walked in, he saw Johnny O’Rourke and Sammy Hart, the songwriting team, both of them real swingers, talking to a couple of Marathon starlets, a blonde and a brunette. The fellows called him over, and at one point, when the brunette had gone to the ladies’ room, he asked Johnny what she was like. “Oh nice, nice,” said the affable lyricist. “A sweet, easygoing kid. Here, I’ll give you her number.”

Always well provided for himself, O’Rourke was generous with his friends, often passing along current or ex-girlfriends. In these arrangements, everyone understood everyone else: the men wanted discretion and no fuss, and the girls—every single one of them—a break.

When the brunette, whose name was Bonita—“My friends call me Bonnie”—returned to the table, Jake talked with her for a while and then, after calling his cutter, drove her home. That’s when he discovered that she lived in the Ensenada House, the same building as his mother. At the door, she invited him in for a drink. Minutes later he and Bonnie were in bed and having a very nice time. When he called her again, it was a weekend, the middle of a Saturday afternoon, and he was banking on his mother’s having gone to his sister’s in the Valley. With Dinah, he had used his most reliable alibi—that he had to go to Finlandia for a steambath and a massage—anything to relieve his tension over the final cut.

He’d been having girls on the side for some time now, but there hadn’t been anyone he’d seen more than once or twice. At first he’d used the three-bedroom apartment in the Hollywood Hills that George Joy rented for meetings with his writers. They all had keys, and there was a tacit understanding that you were supposed to call five or ten minutes ahead to make sure the coast was clear. But Jake found this arrangement distasteful. It lacked class, and he disliked the feeling that at any moment George himself or one of the boys, most of whom were married, might unexpectedly show up with a broad, despite the rule about phoning ahead. So he’d been limiting himself to girls who lived alone in their own apartments. But there hadn’t been many of these, either—two or three at most, which wasn’t anything compared to some of the other guys. And then, as he had repeatedly explained to his analyst, Sandy Litvak, he didn’t know what to do about the guilt, the lousy feeling that would creep up on him from time to time—mostly when, in the throes of screenplay insomnia, he would wake Dinah
up and ask her to rub his back. She was a deep sleeper, but she never refused him, and then he would feel pretty low. Of course, a lot of the time he felt no guilt at all, and thought often of a line he’d heard from an old vaudevillian he’d worked for years before: “How do I know I love my wife? ’Cause I’m so comfortable cheating on her.” He simply put Dinah and family in one compartment and girls in another—the same with his work, his golf game, his kids, his mother, Las Vegas, donations to Israel, and so on. And for some time now Bonnie had been tucked away right there in the drawer marked Convenient, for her place was on the way to and from the studio, and she had thus become, over the past eighteen months, a fixture in his life.