Cheat and Charmer (7 page)

When Jake showed up again at Irv Engel’s office just before five, Carlotta Moran, his secretary, resigned herself to being at the office for at least another half hour. Mr. Engel had told her to hold all calls. There was going to be a social at her church tonight, and she wanted to go home and fix herself up for it. She had every intention of finding another husband, this time one with money, and there was a widower with nice manners she had her eye on.

After she led Mr. Lasker into Mr. Engel’s office, she strained to listen to the conversation on the other side of the door but could catch only indecipherable murmurs and, from time to time, shouting, by two different voices: Mr. Engel’s shrill and shrieking, and Mr. Lasker’s deep, gravelly, and explosive.

At five-forty, Mr. Lasker came out, murmured good night, and, with a
preoccupied look on his face and his lips tightly pressed together, quickly left. After a moment, she heard a buzz: “Get me V.Z.A. again, honey. The Greenwich number. After that you can go on home.”

“Yes, Mr. Engel,” she said. “Sure you don’t need me to stay?” She took care to sound just as bright and cooperative as she had been all day, as she was every day. She had worked for Mr. Engel’s father and was close to sixty. One tiny expression of weariness or resentment and she would be gone, she knew. The secretarial pool at Marathon swelled every day with younger, prettier women who would do
anything
to work for a top executive in the business.

“Jake, I don’t have to tell you,” Engel began. “I believe in you, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do at this studio or in this town for you.”

Just say it, Jake thought. Just get it over with.

“I also know I don’t have to tell you how much I abhor the investigations and the terrible things they’ve done to this industry.” Engel shook his head. “It’s Salem all over again, each side vilifying and reviling the other, each bringing out the worst instincts in the other—cowardice, sneakiness, knavery—”

Where would he be without the thesaurus? thought Jake.

“And you know where I stand, my boy. You know I was one of the first, the very first, to speak out in public against the Committee. You know I was on that plane to Washington with you and all those other good people. You saw my statement in the
New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
, and the ones I put in the trades, too. You know how hard I have fought to keep certain people we both admire from losing their jobs.”

“Yes, Irv,” Jake said. “Believe me, I do know and everyone in the industry knows you’ve done all you can, but the fact remains that those guys are out on their asses. So tell me, right now, Irv. I’ve got to know right now, because I’m right in mid-screenplay and I’ve got two kids to send to college, in addition to a monthly nut the size of a football: what’s gonna happen if Dinah refuses to testify?”

“You’ll never work in Hollywood again.”

Jake sat perfectly still, his hands clasped together in his lap. He had known that this was what Irv was going to say. But hearing it, as opposed to expecting to hear it, was an altogether different thing.

“That long, huh?” he said finally.

“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.”

“What about the three-picture deal I just signed? What about ‘Jake Lasker knows how to make America laugh’ and all the other sweet nothings you said last night?”

“That was last night. Today’s today,” Engel said without expression. “This is what I called V.Z.A. and the legal department about. The contract is out. Without Dinah’s testimony, you’ll become a known subversive.”

“
Me?
A ‘known subversive’? How do you figure that?”

“Being married to a known subversive makes you a known subversive.”

“Guilt by association?”

“Exactly. You’d be in violation of the loyalty oath, so there’d be no obligation on our side.”

“But I
signed
that fucking loyalty oath!” Jake shouted. “That goddamn idiotic unconstitutional loyalty oath that I never wanted to sign in the first place.”

“That was before they subpoenaed your wife. Who knew they’d go after her?” Engel shrugged.

“Is that what those loyalty oaths are for? Fucking escape clauses for you guys? It’s obscene, Irv,” Jake shouted again.

“Don’t you shout at me, Jake Lasker,” said Engel, his own voice rising. “I’m as much a victim of this as you are. I
writhe
with shame thinking about what I’ve had to do. But my job is to keep this studio running and the bankers in New York happy, a contradiction in the best of times, so that when this madness is over we’ll still have a Marathon studio where guys like you can keep on making pictures like
Cousin Jonnycake
. If I’m out, God knows who they’ll stick in here to run the place.”

“I hear you’ve worked out deals for people.”

Engel pounded on his desk. “Like who? Name me one single person! There are no deals with the Committee.” His voice had become an impassioned falsetto. “You don’t know the hours I’ve spent on the phone, at this desk, screaming at the top of my lungs at the boys in New York. All they ever say is ‘Protect our investment.’ ”

“What about protecting me? Aren’t I an investment? You need dough from New York, but you need talent from here!”

“Look, Jake. You know we’re the only studio in Hollywood history that’s
ever given a damn about writers. My father believed in writers and I believe in writers, and we treat ’em just as good as movie stars here. But do you think V. Z. Aldrich and the blue-blooded board of the Hudson-Hyde Trust give a good goddamn about writers? As far as these genteel gentiles are concerned, writers are what Harry Cohn called them: ‘schmucks with typewriters.’ In the same class with nannies and broads—almost as useful and much more expendable. I have to fight these guys every time I pay a writer what he’s worth. They’re schmucks with airplanes—big private airplanes—who come out here when their wives are planning charity balls and tell me which broads to send up to the hotel. Before I get paid, they get laid. And that, on top of our profits, is how we finance great American popular art like yours. Believe me, Jake, V.Z.A.’s got friends in Washington and he wants to keep ’em. What a
macher
he is with the Republican Party I don’t have to tell you. I’ve begged him to let me keep one writer after another. Frank Ford, Eric Riswold, Burt Allen, Archie Collier, Dan Salander, Joel Kanin—top guys, the best in the business. He axed every single one. Not to mention actors, actresses, producers, directors. My orders are very strict: ‘Get rid of the stink of pink or we get rid of you.’ Deals? Forget it.”

But Engel, as Jake well knew, was lying. He’d been allowed to keep Lance Drake, a huge Marathon star whose last two pictures had grossed more than ten million dollars worldwide. Nobody had had to work very hard to convince Van Zandvoort Aldrich about the importance of keeping Marathon’s cash cow. Aldrich had called Dick Nixon in Washington and promised a big contribution to the young man’s next campaign if he could persuade his colleagues on the Committee to let the Drake matter drop; then he’d called Engel and dictated a letter in which Drake would say how sorry he was to have been duped in his young and innocent days into giving money to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. In exchange for the letter, Engel and Drake got no publicity and a dropped subpoena.

But Lance Drake was a major movie star, not a screenwriter.

“You do realize what kind of position this puts Dinah in, don’t you? She hates the idea of informing, but she doesn’t want me to lose my job. Can’t you say something to Aldrich? What kind of a threat could she be? She’s just a
housewife
, for Christ’s sake.”

Engel slumped back in his chair. “No can do, my boy.”

“Jesus Christ, Irv, how can I let my wife go to jail for a year? We’ve got two little kids at home. Have you thought of that?”

“Did I say anything about Dinah’s going to jail? Listen, Jake—” he said,
leaning forward. “If I thought Dinah should take the First or the Fifth, by God I’d tell you. Believe it or not, I’ve advised some of my own people to do it—even though I knew I’d have to fire them, and told them so.
I have never demanded that someone who works for me double-cross his own conscience—
”

Where had he heard
that
line before? Jake wondered. Later on he remembered reading it in Engel’s open letter in the trades, during the hearings on the Ten.

“Jake,” Engel continued, “you’ve got to look at it this way. Dinah’s not the one with the
talent
in this case.
You
are. For Christ’s sake, why should
we
be deprived of
you
—a very hot creative talent, right in your prime—just because you happen to be married to a woman—a
wonderful
woman, Dinah is one of my
favorite
people in the whole world, an absolute
paragon
of what a Hollywood wife should be, an attractive, no-bullshit dame utterly devoted to you and your two beautiful children
—but
, let’s say it now, out loud, a woman who was, if we have to face it, at one time, like a lot of other very young people of goodwill who didn’t know any better, a member of the Communist Party?”

He pulled on an earlobe and cocked his head before adding: “Unless, um, she’s still got some kind of attachment to it?”

“Hell no. She left years ago.”

“How many years ago is ‘years ago’?”

“During the war—before we were married. I kinda told her she’d have to get out if we were ever to have any kind of a future together.”

“Well, then, what’s the
problem
? Get her to testify, Jake. Tell her it’s for you. For us. For the Marathon family.”

“What about naming people?”

“What about it?”

“Can’t she just name herself?”

Engel sighed deeply and, clasping his hands together, looked at Jake as if he were a teacher who had kept a slow pupil after school to explain a simple math problem. “That, Jake, is where the Committee has the world by the balls. You can’t just show up and talk about yourself. That’s the whole point. You’re there to name names. If you don’t, you’re through. But”—he shrugged—“names, schnames.
They’ve already got all the names they want
. They’ve had ’em from the beginning. They don’t care about names. What they want is humiliation, degradation, and demoralization. They want to crush the Left and the New Deal and the Democratic Party, or what’s left of it,” he said. “And they know the best way to do that is to
turn people against each other, so the martyrs hate the stool pigeons and the stool pigeons hate the martyrs. There’s no Left left in a situation like that.”

“I don’t know, Irv. I can’t force her to do it.”

“Sure you can,” said Engel, fixing his eyes on Jake. “If I know one thing about Dinah, it’s that she loves you. She loves you more than you’ve got any right to be loved. She loves you more than she should.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jake said.

“I know it because that’s how Anya feels about me. She hates it out here. Every day is torture for her. She wants to live in New York, she wants to live in Paris, she wants art galleries and museums. I say, ‘What can I do, baby? I gotta stay here and mind the store.’ And she sticks it out because she’s crazy about me, the way Dinah’s crazy about you. I can feel it, I can see it. She looks at you the way Anya looks at me. She’ll do anything you ask. Actually, you don’t even have to ask her. She’ll do it anyway. Let’s not forget I know something about your wife.”

“You do?” said Jake. “And what’s that?”

“I knew her before you did, before you ever came out here.”

“What’re you saying, Irv?”

“Oh, it’s not that. I never had anything going with her. I was one of those perfect idiots in love with Veevi. But I saw what life was like for her when nobody knew she was alive. She was waiting for something; you could see it in her eyes. You’re not only the best thing that ever happened to her, Jake, you’re the
only
thing that ever happened to her.”