Cheat and Charmer (8 page)

“My wife,” said Jake with dignity, “had and still has more class than any woman I’ve ever known, including her sister. Don’t ever talk to me that way about her again.”

He stood up to go.

“Jake, listen,” said Engel. “I’m sorry. I spoke out of line. Don’t blow it, Jakie. Don’t fuck things up. I want you here, at this studio. You know what I’m saying?”

He stood up, smiled a broad, warm, utterly seductive smile, and went over to Jake and put his arm around him.

“I don’t know, Irv. You got any relatives in the shoe business? I used to sell shoes in college. Shoes, meat, bicycles. Maybe I could be a bicycle salesman.”

“It’s not gonna come to that,” Engel said quietly. “Listen to me. Be
extra-special nice to her. Be, you know, romantic. Lay off the broads for a while—”

“What do you mean?” said Jake, surprised.

“Come on,” said Engel. “You don’t have to pretend with me. That Bonnie Alvarez is a nice girl. Needs a different last name, though. Maybe we’ll change it to Austen and see if she gets somewhere.”

Jake laughed. “Don’t tell me you’ve got plans for her yourself?”

“Who, me? Nah. I’ll tell you something, my boy,” said Engel, squeezing Jake’s shoulder. “I know this is going to sound very square, but I don’t play around. I’m faithful to Anya. I mean, I
make a point
of it. Maybe I didn’t so much when I was younger, but”—he shook his head sagely—“I don’t think I’m missing anything. Luckily for me, she never found out. You know, one false step and there’s your whole family. And then, oh my God,
alimony
. Christ, forget it, it ain’t worth it.”

Jake nodded automatically but offered nothing in reply. Engel added, “Let me say it again, Jake. Dinah loves you. She’s gonna do it and never look back. She’s gonna do it for
you
. So don’t be careless, ’cause you’re gonna owe her.”

“Got it.”

“Good boy.”

There was one last pure Engelism, as Jake later reported it to Dinah. Just as they reached the office door, he said, Engel gave his shoulder an especially tight squeeze. “Just promise me one thing, Jake,” he said. “When this all blows over, and the country wakes up and realizes what it’s done to itself, I’m gonna write a script with you and you’re gonna direct it, and together we’re gonna tell the
truth
about this period—and we’ll do it with
humor
.”

“Let’s do that, Irv,” Jake said, disengaging himself from Engel’s embrace. “Let’s definitely do that.”

S
he stops and checks her watch: 2
P.M.
exactly. A thousand years ago she had won silver cups in dance contests in the ballroom on the same floor, the mezzanine of the Hollywood-Griffith Hotel. Once a château-esque blue extravagance, it is now faded to gray, deep in the smoggy bowels of an already decrepit and tatterdemalion Hollywood Boulevard. She pauses in front of the conference room and by design she’s alone, without counsel, and not in Washington, as she had feared. A deal has been worked out. Jake found a lawyer who has arranged a closed “executive” session right here at home in L.A., and fixed it so that she would show up alone and thus demonstrate greater good faith and cooperation on her part than if she had come with a lawyer at her side. Nevertheless, she breathes fast, and her intestines rumble; she trembles and sweats. Calm down, she orders herself. The lawyer, who has had lots of experience representing “friendly witnesses,” has told her it’s going to be easy and fast.

She knocks at a door. Ever the director, Jake had gone through her closet the night before, taking a dress from the rack and saying, “This’ll do very nicely. I want you to look very Pasadena Garden Club.” It’s a cream silk printed with a pattern of small horseshoes and jockeys astride horses. She is wearing smart brown-and-white open-toed heels and cream-colored gloves, and she stands straight and tall. She is pulled together: a little powder, red lipstick, and mascara, hair and nails perfect, the gold barrette locked into its usual place.

The door opens and she faces a thin man with limp hair. The way he holds his head back at a stiff angle and doesn’t quite look her in the eye reminds her of a heron. “Mrs. Lasker?” he asks in a surprisingly quiet voice.

“Yes.”

“I’m Horace Marlow. Please come in.” He gestures toward a large table piled high with manila folders. At the far end of the table she sees a fat man with puffy jowls and a crew cut. Marlow introduces her to him, but she recognizes him from the newspapers and loathes him on sight: the Honorable Curtis P. Kingman, Republican congressman from Orange County. In a corner of the room, by the open windows and the maroon velvet drapes, a stenographer with glasses and bright red lips sits at a card table with a steno machine.

“Are you ready to be sworn in, Mrs. Lasker?” Marlow inquires.

“I am.”

“Please raise your hand.”

As he recites the oath, she tries to identify his accent. It sounds midwestern to her ears; there’s a slight twang. An Okie? she wonders. Why would an Okie be on
their
side? Hasn’t he read
The Grapes of Wrath
?

The swearing-in completed, Marlow motions for her to sit down. Then he moves to the opposite side of the table and begins to look through a file. Clearing his throat twice, three times, he makes another strange birdlike movement with his head, jutting it forward and then back again, where it stays, slightly tilted, so that when he looks at her she gets only a sidelong view of his face. He asks her to recite her full name and address and then to confirm that she is appearing under subpoena. She obliges, and he continues.

“Where were you born, Mrs. Lasker?”

“In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”

“Could you elaborate, please?”

“I was born at the Homeopathic Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My family lived in Beaver Falls and my father was a steel salesman. We moved to California in January 1922, when I was nine.”

“Would you give us a brief résumé of your educational background?”

“Public schools in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, then Selma Avenue School in Hollywood, then Hollywood High School, from which I graduated”—she stutters on this one—“in June 1930. I was supposed to begin UCLA in the fall of 1930, but the Depression had hit and I went to work.”

His face registers nothing when she stutters, although Burt Unwin, her lawyer, has cited it in his negotiations as the major reason for the executive session. If you put her on the stand in Washington, in full public view, he’d warned Marlow and Kingman, she’ll be tongue-tied and the hearing will
take a very long time. Maybe Mrs. Lasker would be unable to speak at all.

She glances coldly at Kingman, noting his lumpish face.

“Were you a dancer in motion pictures under the name of Dinah Milligan?”

“Yes, briefly. But it wasn’t ‘under’ that name. It
is
my name, or was, before I married.” She catches herself too late. Unwin has instructed her: Don’t tell them more than they ask for.

“Can you give us some background concerning your career?”

“I became a dancer in pictures while I was still in high school in order to help support my family. May I smoke?”

“By all means.” She lights a cigarette, and Marlow reaches over and pushes an ashtray toward her. It’s full of cigarette butts, and she wonders how many people they’ve already seen that day.

“Please continue.”

“Dancing wasn’t steady enough, so after graduation I got a job as a secretary at the Sprague P-P-P-Paper Company. I was there for five years and then I got another job, at Claggett Oil, where I was executive secretary.”

“Continue, please.”

“Actually, between those jobs I worked for L. J. Saber for one week. He was the founder of Marathon Pictures, and he fired me when he heard me stuttering on the phone. Later, after Claggett Oil, I became a secretary for Mr. Reginald Pertwee at American Artists Corporation,” she continues. “It was and still is a well-known entertainment agency in Beverly Hills. Eventually I became a writer on the NBC radio show
Hey There, Patsy Kimball!
”

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” The voice isn’t Marlow’s but Kingman’s, and it’s gruff and phlegmy. He’s bored and wants to get the session over with. She hates the way he pronounces the word
—Comm
-unn-ist.

“Yes, sir. That is, I am not now a member of the Communist Party, but I was at one time.”

“Can you tell us when you joined the Communist Party?” asks Marlow.

“I joined sometime late in 1937 or ’38.”

“Do you recall who recruited you to the Communist Party?”

“No one ‘recruited’ me. As I remember it, I went to a party somewhere. Some of the other guests were raising money for ambulances in Spain or refugees fleeing from Hitler, I don’t remember which. Maybe it was both.
There was some interesting conversation, and I was invited to another one, and eventually I just started going to more gatherings. One day I joined.”

“Do you remember who invited you to this party?”

It had been Renna Schlossberg—Renna Goldman back then. They were getting bored with going ice-skating in Westwood every weekend. Renna knew about this meeting and they’d gone together. Dinah replies, “Just some fellow I had a date with. I don’t remember his name—I never went out with him again.”

“You are certain you don’t remember his name?” Kingman barks from his end of the table.

Unwin had said:
Unless you knew for a fact that someone really was a member, don’t name them
.

“Oh yes, I’m certain. I have a t-t-terrible memory for names.”

She looks squarely at Kingman as she speaks. She fears him, and despises him, gross feature by gross feature. For some reason she doesn’t despise Marlow; he intrigues her. He looks as if he could have been one of those unsmiling Party guys or union organizers from the aircraft industry or dock workers in San Pedro: envoys from the world of real “toilers” (the word everyone used to make fun of from the badly translated Soviet pamphlets they used to have to do “reports” on), men who from time to time showed up at meetings, and had romantic, iron faces and hard eyes and were absolutely sure of themselves. Except that, with his oddly angled body, Marlow doesn’t look that tough. He seems tense.

“Where was this meeting held?” Marlow asks.

“Honestly, I don’t mean to be so vague, but I just don’t remember.”

She is about to light another cigarette but interrupts herself. It’s time to give them something. “Somewhere in West Los Angeles, maybe, near UCLA, near Veteran. I’m not sure.”

“But you did go back there and you subsequently joined the Communist Party?” Marlow asks.

“Yes, I did.”

“Were you assigned to any particular unit?”

“I was asked to do clerical work. Typing, mostly. Stuffing envelopes. I think all of it had to do with Sp-Sp-Spain—meetings for Spain and fund-raisers for Spain.”

“Where did you do this typing?”

“It would depend. Sometimes one person’s house, sometimes another’s.
On Saturday mornings. I can’t say I showed up very reliably. I worked hard during the week and was often very tired on weekends.”

“Did you attend specific meetings for any regular period of time?”

“Not regularly. I’d say I went on and off.”

“Do you recall where these meetings were held?”

“Well, that’s difficult for me to answer. It was a long t-t-t-time ago.”

“Mrs. Lasker,” Marlow says, his voice a degree louder. “Do you recall where
some
of those meetings were held?”

“I remember driving somewhere in Westwood, between Olympic and P-P-P-Pico. A house—someone’s house; I don’t remember whose. I did some secretarial work there, I remember.”

“Do you recall who was present at these meetings?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You can’t remember the name of a
single person
who was present at these meetings?”

“They were not people I was familiar with. I was still a secretary. I wasn’t in radio yet—I didn’t begin working for AAC until 1941. I was shy and didn’t mingle easily. I felt uneducated. I tried to l-l-l-listen to what was being said, but I didn’t start conversations. With my speech, you understand, I was not very f-f-f-forthcoming.”

“Surely, Mrs. Lasker,” growls the Honorable Curtis P. Kingman, “you can remember the names of some of the people at these meetings. Mr. Marlow and I have all afternoon to help you refresh your memory.”

She does not sigh, she does not glare, she does not take on the stony, intransigent expression of a person who has decided to become difficult. Indeed, she sits back in her chair and lights a cigarette and tries to give the impression that she is a lady whose current life has no connection whatsoever to the life about which she is being interrogated and that searching her memory is a far greater ordeal than she had anticipated. “Well,” she says finally, “I went to meetings at the homes of the screenwriters Norman M-M-M—You have to bear with me, gentlemen, because I could never say this fellow’s name. Norman—” She shuts her eyes to concentrate, takes a deep breath, and exhales “Metzger. Norman Metzger. And Anatole K-K-Klein. They were the ones who gave me secretarial work.” Her stutter is genuine; these names have always been impossible for her to say, although she has had them ready for several days and has practiced saying them.