CHEAT AND CHARMER •
By Elizabeth Frank. Random House. 543 pp. $25.95
In Hollywood, there are haves and have-nots. It's all about looks: You either have them, or you don't.
This is where Dinah Lasker drew the short straw. Not that she's unattractive, or even ugly. She's a nice, leggy shiksa who might be considered pretty in some environments, but not by the "impossible standards of the motion picture industry." Compared to a movie beauty, she's invisible, a nobody with nothing. She wants to know -- achingly -- why the world isn't more fair.
She comes of age in the 1930s and '40s, so Marx (Karl, not Groucho) provides some answers. But the dialectic can't begin to touch the deeper and more lasting questions of Dinah's life: How come her younger sister Veevi, a film star, is so much prettier? How come Dinah -- kind and loving, a better dancer, the one who really wanted to be in pictures -- didn't get a gold star on her stage door?
Veevi's beauty is shocking, suffocating and almost like a cosmic force. As Dinah herself describes it, when people see her sister for the first time, "it's as if they've been thrown from a horse. Knocks the breath right out of them."
The opening chapters of Elizabeth Frank's Cheat and Charmer glide and glitter with lines like this, and every page is loaded with totems of Tinseltown success: gold cigarette lighters, beaded bags, Art Deco desks and turquoise swimming pools. Frank likes details, description and spelling everything out -- things that would appeal to a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, which she is -- but in this, her first novel, an ambitious epic that was 25 years in the making, both external and internal worlds seem over-explained and over-described.
Sometimes when we're inside Dinah's head, the flow of subconscious blather is just maddening. In 1951, when she is handed a subpoena to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee -- which many in Hollywood refused to do, and for which they were blacklisted -- Dinah chooses to go along and name names. She feels just awful about testifying. But she tells herself she has no choice. It's the only way to protect her husband's job at Marathon Pictures, save her children from public school and keep her big house in West L.A. with its housekeeper and new swimming pool.
Dinah feels really, really bad about naming beautiful Veevi as a communist too. But what else was she supposed to do?
Appealingly, Dinah tries to make reparations. She contacts people she has named in her testimony -- and rather than make just a drippy apology, she offers to help, in whatever way, for the trouble she has caused. She sends a letter to Paris, where Veevi is living a carefree boho life with her super-masculine novelist husband, sort of a young Norman Mailer with a better body. But Dinah doesn't hear back.
Will Veevi speak to her again? Dinah frets about this -- and everything else under the sun. Although most of the book is set in Hollywood, and some real celebrities, such as Groucho (not Karl), wander in and out, Dinah's pathologies and repressions grab center stage as we watch her cushy life dissolve. You almost come to dislike this "paragon of Hollywood wifeliness," a Stepford creature who grew up poor and now devotes herself to figuring out all the social steps -- what to say, when to keep quiet. She instinctively knows she can't break all the rules as her beautiful sister does, and does, and does again.
After a while, we grow a little weary of Veevi. She's a Marie Antoinette communist who eats up people and asks for morning OJ served on a tray in her bedroom. She's mean, careless, sexually indiscriminate, and she ill-treats Dinah's kids, the true underclass of Cheat and Charmer. How many lives does Veevi have to ruin? Her beauty makes her so powerful that she doesn't even care about Hollywood anymore -- or being a movie star.
It's Dinah's husband, the Jewish comedy writer and director Jake Lasker, who's fully alive in ways his wife could only dream about. Jake is fat, bald and suffering from gout. But he knows himself thoroughly and grabs all he can out of life -- gals on the side, hot dogs from the corner vendor, cartons of ice cream. Jake is an actor in the world, and fabulously aware. He even knows why he loves Dinah so much and still cheats on her.
Does Dinah figure out why she betrayed her sister? It's not simply to keep the big West L.A. house. She does it to stay inside a cocoon of childhood myths she has told herself over and over -- and refuses to unravel. Dinah is in need of a big, bloody internal uprising. Her husband got some therapy. If only Dinah could too.
Eventually, the two sisters descend together to dark depths, intertwined like two swimmers, drowning in panic's embrace. By the time they bump bottom, the melodrama becomes almost laughable. If it weren't for the author's insights about social class, the whole book might sink with them. Frank's portraits of Eastern European intellectuals who escape Hitler and Mussolini only to find themselves dining with dim-witted beachgoers in Malibu Colony are hilarious and unforgettable. She sends up bohemian snobbery, communist hypocrisy, East Coast pretension, and deftly zeros in on how transplants to Hollywood manage to feel superior to the other transplants. The Okies hate the Jews, and the Jews look down on Dinah as "an uneducated shiksa, a nobody from nowhere whose great legs were an enviable but nevertheless suspicious sign of her lumpen origins."
Poor Dinah. It's all so unfair. •
Martha Sherrill is the author of "The Buddha From Brooklyn" and "My Last Movie Star."
