Cheat and Charmer (9 page)

Kingman looks at Marlow and blinks impassively. There is no new thrill
here for them. She hasn’t named anyone new. Metzger and Klein have long since served their jail terms. One of them has moved to England; the other lives in Mexico. Nothing she says about them now can harm them, or so she wants to believe.

“Mr. Metzger and Mr. Klein are known to this committee,” Marlow says. “Is there anyone else you remember?”

“I’d just have to rack my brains, Mr. Marlow. I really do have such a t-t-t-terrible time with names.”

“Would you please tell us, Mrs. Lasker,” says Marlow, lighting a cigarette, “your reasons for joining the Communist Party.”

Unwin has coached her:
Be sincere, don’t be vague; make a speech if you have to
.

“The Depression was still going on,” she begins. “My family was hit quite hard. My father was already in his sixties and couldn’t find a job. No one could. B-B-B-Boys I had graduated with who were supposed to go to college couldn’t find jobs anywhere. We were young and we saw that there were”—the next word was impossible for her, so she sounded it out syllable by syllable—“e-c-c-c-co-nom-ic reasons for this, and we wanted to find out about them and do something about them, too. I couldn’t afford college. The Party was the only place where I could talk to people about books and ideas and what was going on in the world. People in the offices where I worked didn’t read much. It was so bewildering, really, to have everything we took for granted just sort of crash all of a sudden. It was awful to see the hardships. In the Party I learned why this had happened, and why it didn’t have to happen again.”

She pauses, and takes in Marlow’s face. It is expressionless; he has heard some variation of this speech a thousand times. But she has warmed to her topic and, much to her surprise, wants to keep talking. “And then more than anything else there was fascism—Franco and Hitler and Mussolini. The Communist Party seemed to be the only group that realized how dangerous they were or knew what to do about them. The Party seemed to care about people—ordinary people who had it tough. They raised money for floods and disasters. And they were the only people who wanted to help the Negroes and do something to end segregation. My G-G-G-God,” she bursts out, “nobody else was doing anything! I loved Roosevelt, but even his ideas seemed to us too little too late.”

She has never spoken like this before, never made statements, discussed her life, or shared her convictions with strangers, much less hostile
ones, never seen herself as a part of the times or of history. She speaks with a growing wonder that she has, indeed, lived through a distinct period, and she is surprised at the ease with which she talks about it. But she stops herself. She has said too much. What, she asks herself, am I even doing here?

“Tell us, Mrs. Lasker,” Marlow begins brightly. “Did you ever attend Communist Party meetings at the home of the actress Genevieve Milligan Ventura Albrecht?”

Startled, Dinah looks up at him. “My s-s-s-sister?”

“Then it is true, Mrs. Lasker, that you have a sister named Genevieve Milligan, an actress who was married to the late film director Stefan Ventura and who now resides in Paris with her present husband, the writer Michael Albrecht?”

“Yes. That is true,” she says dully. Oh God, she thinks, I should have known. The men questioning her and the woman with the red talons poised above the steno machine all go still. A stagnant orange haze hangs outside the window, and the smoke from her cigarette scrapes her lungs like glass dust.

“Did you go to meetings of the Communist Party at the home of your sister, Mrs. Lasker?” Marlow persists.

“It’s difficult to know exactly how to answer your question, Mr. Marlow,” she says finally. “I assume you are aware that my brother-in-law, Stefan Ventura, worked for the French Resistance. He was captured by the Nazis, tortured, mutilated, and murdered by them. My sister and Mr. Ventura left for France early in 1939. Later on, my sister and her child were hidden by friends in the French countryside, where they spent the rest of the war.” She speaks slowly, carefully, measuring every word, stuttering hardly at all. “I rarely went to my sister’s house when she and Mr. Ventura lived here, and when I did go there it was only for social events.”

Kingman breaks in, adjusting his gray-suited bulk in his chair and unclenching his hands. “Surely you are aware, Mrs. Lasker, that other cooperative witnesses have identified your sister and Stefan Ventura as members of the Communist Party? Here’s what one witness said: ‘They had the most distinguished Stalinist salon on the West Coast.’ ”

He pronounces it
sal
-lawn.

“Well, this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. I am busy morning till night raising a family, and I have no time to follow who’s been saying what about
whom. My sister has not lived in this country for many years, and she and I have always led s-s-s-separate lives.”

“Nevertheless, you would know your sister’s political sympathies,” Marlow says in his tight monotone.

“Not n-n-n-necessarily.”

“That certainly seems at odds with the facts, Mrs. Lasker,” says Marlow, pinching the skin on his neck. “According to our records, you resided at your sister’s home in the Malibu Colony from 1936 until 1938. Others have said you were well acquainted with the many European Communists and agitators who stayed at her home.”

“ ‘Communists and agitators’? Excuse me, Mr. Marlow, but your inf-f-f-formation is incorrect. I spent brief stretches of time at my sister’s and every once in a while I stayed overnight in one of the guest rooms, but I had my own apartment and that’s where I lived. You could hardly call the people who stayed at my sister’s or visited her home ‘agitators.’ Who was or wasn’t a Communist I just don’t know, and frankly I don’t care. If some of them
were
Communists, I’m sure they had their reasons. My God, don’t you remember those times? People were running for their lives. My sister’s guests were often famous and distinguished p-p-people, or so I was told, but when I met them they had usually just arrived, and they were in very rough shape. They had just been through hell, and they looked it, too. The Nazis had taken their money and property, and they were impoverished, and terrified, and had barely gotten out alive. I remember a woman, a famous singer from Berlin, who had seen her fiancé shot in the street before her eyes. There was another man whose mother died in Lisbon before they could get on the boat. Every single one of them was d-d-desperately worried about people who’d been left behind and whom they couldn’t get out and who were in fact killed later on in the gas chambers. You do remember the gas chambers, gentlemen, don’t you?”

“Was a Mrs. Dorshka Albrecht a frequent guest of your sister’s?” Marlow asks, ignoring her taunt.

“She wasn’t a guest. Mrs. Albrecht collaborated with Stefan Ventura on the screenplays for his movies, and she actually lived at the house. She had worked with him in the early twenties, in Berlin, and when he left for Paris in the early thirties, he arranged for her to go, too. She was a selfless, tireless friend to everyone who needed her. She sponsored one refugee after another. Many times she gave her last cent to get people out.”

“Was Mrs. Albrecht a member of the Communist Party?”

“I don’t know. I never saw her at any meetings.”

“Mrs. Albrecht has been identified to us as a well-known Communist,” says Kingman.

“Then why are you asking me?” she snaps. “Look, gentlemen, I lived a separate life from my sister’s. Even when I spent weekends at her house I lived a separate life. I was not yet in show business. Now, l-l-l-l-let me tell you something: people who are
in
show business take very little notice of people who are
not
in show business. Even the very nicest, kindest people in show business, people who worry about the poor and the hungry and the oppressed and the exploited, don’t really want to know you if you’re not in show business. To spend even an instant talking to someone outside the business is a big waste of their time. In fact, they’re c-c-c-completely uninterested in you and automatically bored to death with you if you’re not in it. I was not yet in it in the late thirties. What I was, gentlemen, was a genuine proletarian—a wage earner without prop-p-p-perty … sorry, I had an old Ford—a secretary in an oil company. I was invisible, as far as they were concerned. I spent my days taking dictation and typing letters for Mr. Winston Grundy at Claggett Oil in downtown L.A., and when the brilliant American screenwriters and movie stars and the famous European geniuses who came to my sister’s house met me their eyes gl-gl-gl-glazed over. But I didn’t care. I went there because I had just been divorced and I was lonely, and my sister’s guests were interesting, damn interesting, every last one of them. I had never known anyone like them, and so it was sort of my way of finding out what was going on in the world. And my sister needed me to help out—to shop for groceries, help with the cooking and cleaning up. On weekends she had at least twenty people for every meal, and she didn’t believe in having servants.”

“Isn’t that a Communist belief?” growls Kingman.

“You’d have to ask her,” she says. “All I can tell you is that I made more whipped cream with an eggbeater on any given Saturday than either of you will ever eat in a l-l-l-lifetime, and I served Mrs. Albrecht’s schnitzel and Sacher torte, and passed around the coffee and made sure the refugees had everything they needed. When I was around them, I felt terribly shy and uneducated. I would be told that this person or that was a famous writer or a famous composer, but I didn’t know who the hell they were. I hadn’t gone to college, I didn’t understand German, I’d never heard of the books they’d written or the music they’d composed. I didn’t know what their politics
were; hell, I didn’t know that politics was something you had. So when I visited my sister I just kept quiet and listened to all these people, and helped out when I was asked to, and who knew who was or wasn’t a Communist?”

“How is that possible?” Kingman snarls. “You are avoiding the question!”

“Mr. Kingman, I can’t say that I knew absolutely for sure who was or wasn’t a Communist.” She pauses, then adds, “You know, some people were what we used to call fellow travelers. I am sure, sir, that you remember the phrase.”

“So you say there were fellow travelers at your sister’s and this Ventura fellow’s?”

“I think, Mr. Kingman, that you ought to speak more respectfully of a man who gave his life f-f-f-fighting against Hitler.”

Before Kingman can answer, Marlow takes over. “Mrs. Lasker,” he says quietly. “What did people talk about at your sister’s?”

“The Spanish Civil War was the big thing at the time. And Hitler, of course, and the trials in Moscow, and, later on, the Pact.” She takes a deep breath. “You know, gentlemen, my sister didn’t have to join organizations. People flocked to her and Stefan.”

“What was Stefan Ventura’s background?” Kingman asks suspiciously. “Was he Spanish?”

“He was a Bulgarian Jew, from an old Italian-Jewish family that had come to that part of the world centuries ago, after some pope or other decided it was time to kick out the Jews. They got absorbed into the Bulgarian Sephardic world.”

She senses that neither Kingman nor Marlow has the slightest idea of what she’s talking about.

“Are you sure he wasn’t a Spanish Communist?” Kingman says, raising his eyebrows.

“I am quite sure he wasn’t, sir. He did study moviemaking in Moscow as a young man and then he went to Berlin, where he made a number of very good pictures.”

“When was he in Moscow, Mrs. Lasker?” asks Marlow with sudden interest.

“During the Revolution.” She lets this sink in.

“But even though others have unhesitatingly identified Ventura and your sister as Communists, you can’t say one way or another whether they were members of the Communist Party?”

“That’s correct, Mr. Marlow.”

“Is it true, Mrs. Lasker,” Marlow goes on, “that your husband, Jacob Lasker, known professionally as Jake Lasker, was not then or at any other time a member of the Communist Party?”

“That is true. He believed a person could be anti-fascist and anti-Nazi without being a Communist.”

“Well, that’s very interesting,” Kingman interrupts. “But, Mrs. Lasker, be that as it may, can you give us the names of some of the people you saw at Communist Party meetings?”

Here it is, she thinks. At least they’re off Veevi for now.

“Well, let’s see,” she says, and takes a deep breath. “I’ve already mentioned—you know, the men whose n-n-n-names I find so hard to say. Perhaps you could refresh my memory a little, since you already seem to know who it is you want me to name.”

“Mrs. Lasker!” Kingman booms. His face is flushed. Even his eyelids look inflamed. “You are trying the patience of this committee! Mr. Unwin led us to expect you were willing to give us your full cooperation. We can only know that you are sincere in your desire to help us get to the bottom of this terrible scourge of anti-Americanism if you willingly tell us the names of those people whom you saw at Communist Party meetings and at your sister and Mr. Ventura’s home, and at the homes of other known Communists as well.”

“Do not shout at me, sir. I said I would c-c-c-cooperate and I am trying to do so now.”

“Let me ask you again whom you remember from the time of your membership in the Communist Party,” Marlow says, plucking at his neck.

She sighs. “All right, gentlemen, I shall give you some names. Gilbert Moore—he was a screenwriter and a novelist. A Harvard graduate. He was a member of the Party around the time I joined. He was known as a kind of a th-th-th—this is an awfully hard word for me to say so please be patient—a th-th-th-th-theoretician. Later on he left the industry, and I have no idea what happened to him.”

“Did you know a woman named Renna Goldman, now Mrs. Joseph Schlossberg?” Marlow asks.

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you see her at meetings?”

“Sometimes.”

“She claims she recruited you into the Communist Party.”

So she’s the one, Dinah thinks.

“I believe I already told you that nobody recruited me. Renna told me about various meetings, but, as I told you, I went to my first meeting with some fellow I knew.”