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BOOKS: Everybody Paid a Price
Sam Apple
Not many people could have had Elizabeth Frank on their shortlist to write a big Jewish novel
That Frank had literary talent was well established. In 1986 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of the poet Louise Bogan. But until this year Frank, an English professor at Bard College, had never published a work of fiction, not even a short story.
That doesn�t mean she wasn�t writing fiction. For the past 25 years, as her acclaim grew in nonfiction circles -- she has also written books on Abstract Expressionist painters Jackson Pollock and Esteban Vicente -- Frank was quietly working on a novel. The product of all that toiling is the recently released "Cheat and Charmer," a sweeping 543-page tale of Hollywood and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that is being compared (at least by the blurbs on the book jacket) to "The Sun Also Rises" and "The Last Tycoon."
It�s a stretch to put Frank in the same league as Fitzgerald. "Cheat and Charmer" sometimes reads like staged melodrama and Frank�s prose is merely functional. But she has produced an engaging, if dark, story of a family in the throes of the Hollywood blacklist, and, in the process, she has captured an important moment in American Jewish history.
Although HUAC attempted to weed out Communists in a number of different industries, the Committee took a special interest in Hollywood, presumably because the interrogation of movie stars and moguls guaranteed plenty of media attention. In the late 1940s and 50s, HUAC�s investigations succeeded in ruining the careers of hundreds of writers, filmmakers and musicians, a great many of them Jewish. The Hollywood hearings started in 1947 and by the time a second round began, in 1951, most of Hollywood�s former Communists had already been named. America was now experiencing a full-fledged Red scare and the HUAC investigations became little more than what the Encyclopedia of the American Left refers to as a "a kind of ideological exorcism."
It is amidst this "exorcism" that "Cheat and Charmer" begins. The year is 1951, and Dinah Lasker, a housewife and former member of the Communist Party, has just received the dreaded subpoena informing her she must testify. If Dinah doesn�t comply, her husband Jake, a successful writer-producer-director, will never work in Hollywood again. If she does name names, she may have to finger her own sister Veevi, the stunningly beautiful chorus dancer turned Marxist glamour gal who had been at the center of Hollywood�s most elite Communist circles in the 30s.
Under pressure from Jake, who in turn is under pressure from the boss at his movie studio, Dinah testifies and names Veevi, among others. Much of the rest of the novel is the grueling account of how this decision weighs on Dinah�s conscience and sets in motion a series of events that wreak havoc on the lives of Dinah, Jake and Veevi.
"What I began to understand," Frank writes in the publicity materials that accompanied the book, "is that nobody escaped [HUAC]. All of them had been hurt. All damned to one kind of hell or another -- no matter what side they had taken. The legacy of the blacklist was inescapable. It affected everyone concerned."
Indeed, one of the most intriguing things about "Cheat and Charmer" is that the author herself, who spoke with The Report at her publisher�s offices in New York, can be counted among those affected by the committee�s machinations. Frank, who has short brown hair and dark eyes, and who will say about her age only that she is "old enough to remember when Eisenhower defeated Stevenson" -- something that happened in both 1952 and 1956 -- is the daughter of the late, Jewish screenwriter-director-producer Melvin Frank, who together with his partner Norman Panama made a number of famous films, including "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" and "Court Jester." Frank counts Candice Bergen and Liza Minnelli among her childhood acquaintances and recalls spending a lot of time in her youth with Groucho Marx and his daughter. ("He really was grouchy," Frank says.)
Although Frank, who considers herself Jewish even though her mother was not, says that "Cheat and Charmer" is not a roman � clef, it is clear that her late aunt, Virginia "Jigee" Ray, is the thinly veiled model for Veevi. When pressed, she will say only, "I do not acknowledge or deny that these people were the inspiration for the characters in my story." Like Veevi, Jigee was the star figure in a glamorous Hollywood Communist circle full of highly acclaimed writers, Jewish �migr�s and beautiful women. Among the circle�s many well-known personalities were screenwriters and novelists Peter Viertel, Budd Schulberg (both former husbands of Jigee), Ring Lardner Jr., and Maurice Rapf. Interviewed some 50 years later by Nancy Lynn Schwartz, in "The Hollywood Writers� Wars," 17 writers from the circle acknowledged having once been in love with Jigee. A number of them even portrayed her in their work, including Arthur Laurents, who based Barbra Streisand�s character on her in the 1973 film "The Way We Were."
"All the Jewish Communists were attracted to her because she was this gorgeous gentile princess who was accessible because she was a Communist," the late Melvin Frank is quoted as saying in Kevin Starr�s book about the period, "Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950." And it wasn�t only the Jewish writers who fell for Elizabeth Frank�s aunt. Ernest Hemingway was also said to be a great admirer of Jigee.
Frank�s mother, Ann (Jigee�s sister), would appear to be the inspiration for Dinah Lasker. Like Dinah, Ann Frank was once a member of the Party, and, like Dinah, Ann Frank testified before the committee in order to save her husband�s Hollywood career.
Whether Ann Frank named her sister remains a point of dispute. Elizabeth Frank would not comment, but Peter Viertel, who was Jigee�s husband at the time of Ann�s testimony, wrote in his 1992 memoir, "Dangerous Friends," that Ann had indeed fingered Jigee. "That she had named her sister was not particularly astonishing either," Viertel notes. "Many in the same circumstances had named their close friends, in some cases the people they proselytized and converted."
Although Frank did not want to discuss the matter in relation to her novel, she has publicly talked about her mother�s nightmare dilemma before. In "The Real Nick and Nora," by David L. Goodrich, Frank denied her mother named her sister but acknowledged that she testified. "[M]y mother did testify, to clear my father�s name -- otherwise it would have been guilt-by-association.... I don�t think my mother named anybody who hadn�t already been named. I think she made a moral decision. I think it�s just as moral to protect those you love as to protect those in your community. It was a very painful choice."
ACALAMITY ON THE SCALE OF the Hollywood blacklist almost necessarily takes more than one generation to heal, and in light of Frank�s very personal connection to the story, it�s possible to read "Cheat and Charmer" as itself a legacy of HUAC, the work of a daughter wrestling with what her mother did.
To her credit, the novel never reads as a blind defense of the decision to name names. Frank is acutely aware of the complicated moral terrain of the blacklist and she doesn�t shy away from the destructive effect the "friendly witnesses" had on the lives of the people they named. But Dinah does emerge as the most sympathetic figure in the novel, and her reason for testifying -- to protect her husband and children -- is hashed over again and again. "I have never for one moment told myself that going down there and t-t-talking to those two cr-cr-creeps was anything other than degr-gr-gr-grading and humiliating," the stuttering Dinah tells Jake. "But I did it for you, and for us, and I would do it again for you and for us."
Only Frank knows just how much her novel emerged from her feelings about her mother�s testimony. Asked why it took her 25 years to write, Frank said that she was busy with other things, but then added that she "really fought with this book for a long time" and that it "wouldn�t let her go" until it "blessed" her.
Judy Chaikin, who made the Emmy- nominated 1987 documentary "Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist," about the families of the blacklisted, told The Report that, at least in the families she filmed, the children were almost always damaged by what happened to their parents. "It becomes your family history," Chaikin said of the experience of being blacklisted. "It was something the family lived with every day of their lives."
Chaikin filmed only the families of those who were blacklisted, but the same might be said for the families of the "friendly witnesses" who named names. "For ordinary folks -- and not the children of [name-namer Elia] Kazan, etc. -- the difference between the children of blacklistees and of friendly witnesses has blurred considerably, along the lines of �we were all victims,�" says Paul Buhle, a senior lecturer in American civilization at Brown University and the author of several books on the blacklist. "They look back at their parents� -- basically fathers� -- lives as tragic, but as lives of left-wing people, more or less."
Frank says that she learned about HUAC only as a teenager, after her family moved to Europe, for nonpolitical reasons. "Gradually I began to form a picture of what had happened in the movie industry in the late 40s and early 50s. I learned about wrecked lives, lost opportunities and the lasting bitterness between former friends who were now betrayers and betrayed," Frank writes in the book�s publicity materials -- never mentioning her own family episode with the committee. "I also got to know people who had named names and I began to see that despite their reasons and excuses and justifications they slept uneasily at night."
Perhaps the best clue as to Frank�s own reckoning with her family�s past comes in the last pages of "Cheat and Charmer." Just as Frank�s family moved to Europe when she was a teenager, so the Laskers are now living in London. Dinah is driving her teenage son Peter to the home of a friend when she discovers that the friend is the son of a couple she had named before HUAC. Worried they will throw Peter out of their house, Dinah decides to tell her son about her testimony.
"I can�t believe it! My mom a fink!" Peter says. But minutes later the news sinks in and Peter changes his tone. "Look, Mom," he tells Dinah, "I wish you hadn�t done it. But I don�t care what his parents think. That�s their tough luck. This time, I�m protecting you."
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Sam Apple�s book "Schlepping through the Alps" will be published by Ballantine in March.
Cheat and Charmer / by Elizabeth Frank. Publisher: Random House 543pp.: $25.99
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