Cheat and Charmer (56 page)

“I hate you, Veevi,” said Lorna. “I hope you die. I hate you too, Mommy.” She turned away and walked toward the house, pulling the wet towel tightly around her. Dinah saw Lorna through Veevi’s eyes, saw her fat behind, and knew without a doubt that she had failed her child once
again—failed to protect her and stand up for her, failed to rebuke Veevi for the delicate cruelty of those words.

When Dinah finally glanced in Veevi’s direction, she still couldn’t see behind the dark glasses. But Veevi kept giving clothes to Claire, and telling her how marvelous she was going to look in them and what a good figure she had and how much the poor children of the blacklisted writers in Mexico were going to appreciate the rest. Since Claire didn’t ask what
blacklisted
meant, Dinah assumed that she knew, and that Veevi had told her why Jake was not blacklisted and why Veevi herself was.

Dinah brooded all afternoon about that incident. She went upstairs to Lorna’s room and found her sitting on the cork floor next to the dollhouse she had gotten for Christmas. Dinah had bought it for her because it looked so much like the Laskers’ house—a large Tudor mansion with an upstairs and a downstairs and a great many rooms. If Lorna made her bed, kept her room neat, and helped Gussie out after dinner, she was allowed to buy one piece of doll furniture and one piece of doll clothing a week; the house was becoming quite amply furnished with tiny sofas and tables, lamps and bathtubs and numerous beds and cribs for the Doll family’s many children.

In fact, the nursery already boasted four baby dolls. The Doll mommy liked having babies, and, according to Lorna, her goal was ten. When Dinah looked inside the house today, she found Mommy and Daddy Doll and the three larger Doll children at the dinner table. There was a Negro maid doll wearing a white uniform and an apron. She was standing in the dining room holding a tray with tiny bowls in which Lorna had placed minuscule carrots and cauliflower and steaks. Her name was Gussie. There was also a white-haired grandmother doll. Dinah asked Lorna what the Doll family were talking about at dinner and what kind of day they had all had, but Lorna didn’t answer. Usually Lorna had a long story to tell about the dolls, with elaborate details about the babies—who was walking, who was talking—and which older Doll kids had gone to a birthday party, nursed a sick baby through a cold, or tried to fly. But today she sat with her lips tight, not looking at her mother.

“Maybe tonight, when it’s bath time, you can tell me what happened
with the D-D-D-Dolls today,” Dinah said, standing up and lightly touching her daughter’s blond braids, but Lorna jerked her head away.

“Why can’t you talk right?” she spat out. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

Dinah paused, but the child refused to meet her eyes.

Next door, in the bathroom next to Jake’s office, Veevi was taking a shower. Dinah went in and sat on the unmade bed to wait. She was going to say something. Folding her arms, she leaned back against the wall and allowed her eyes to travel around the room. Veevi’s clothes were stacked haphazardly on the armchairs. She used the closet in Coco’s room for her dresses and slacks because there was really nowhere to hang anything in the office.

Lying next to the pillow was a book—the new John O’Hara,
Ten North Frederick
. She picked it up and opened it and a letter fell out. Carefully, she unfolded it. The shower stopped. Breathing fast, she skimmed the letter. Phrases leaped out at her: “heavily camouflaged trip … absolute circumspection … figure out a place to meet … never stopped loving you all these years. Cliff.” She folded the letter and put it back in the book just as the door opened and Veevi came out, looking scrubbed and fresh.

Cliff Boatwright and Veevi? Now, this was interesting. Was he married? Divorced? What was his situation? What did he mean by “heavily camouflaged”? All Dinah’s resolve to say something to Veevi about Lorna disappeared as she watched her sister remove her bathrobe and slip into one of her new pairs of Jax slacks and a light blue cotton shirt and fasten her hair back with a tortoiseshell barrette. There was no doubt about it: Veevi looked better. When had the letter come?

“Shall we?” Veevi said.

“Shall we what?”

“It’s five, Sister Ina,” Veevi said. “Time for a drink.”

She went to pick up her book.

“Any good?” Dinah said as they headed toward the stairs.

“Well, it’s not—”

“Ben Knight or Mike Albrecht. But would it make a picture?”

“For Jake? Haven’t read very far. But I don’t think so. Not his sort of thing. Here,” she said, taking the letter out of the book and handing it to Dinah as they reached the foot of the stairs. “You read it while I was in the shower, didn’t you?” She was smiling.

“Sk-Sk-Skimmed it, actually.”

They reached the den. The kids were watching television and didn’t look up. “Read it,” Veevi said, going into the bar. “Chivas on the rocks?” Dinah nodded and settled on the love seat, and this time she read Clifford Boatwright’s letter to Veevi with great care.

W
hile Jake was in the middle of his new project, Izzie Morocco and Mel Gordon called and begged him to take over their picture, whose director had dropped dead of a heart attack right on the set. It meant a lot of good fast money, a nice credit, and a chance to work again with Wynn Tooling and Maureen Tolliver. The minute Jake said yes, the household went on what he called “military alert.” Dinah took charge: everything and everyone had to follow a strict schedule, for nothing was allowed to disturb Jake or interfere with his requirements for food, rest, sleep, and order. No fugitive crayons were to be left in the den, waiting to bruise an unsuspecting adult’s tender barefoot instep. No wet bathing suits dripping on the stairs. The large house, with its great white-painted brick façade; Gussie at the vacuum cleaner; the gardener working in the flower beds; the pool man’s quiet strokes as he plied his net across the surface of the water, scooping up dead bugs and sodden leaves; the children eating early in the kitchen and sent to bed before their father came home—all were ruled by Jake’s one great purpose: to finish shooting the picture in five weeks, obtain first-rate performances from the actors, win undying love from cast and crew, and remain in or under budget.

So Veevi’s affair with Clifford Boatwright couldn’t have come at a better time. He was on the Coast for a month, talking secretly with Irv Engel, and working on a play for a new and very ambitious television project,
Electro’s American Scenes
. It was the brainchild of Ira Zeigler, who would be producing for NBC hour-and-a-half-long original plays once a month on Tuesday nights, sponsored by the Electro Corporation, a huge home appliances company. He wanted only top writing, acting, and directing talent, and he’d gone straight to Clifford for the first play.

“But Clifford’s blacklisted,” Dinah said to Veevi. “How’s he gonna do it? A fr-fr-fr-front?”

“Exactly. He’s out here writing the play, consulting with Zeigler, but when he’s done Ira will fly to New York and meet with him and the front—who’s—who’s a relative of Eve, Cliff’s wife”—Dinah locked eyes with Veevi at this information, but Veevi just continued—“and after Ira and Cliff coach him—the kid’s a graduate student in classics somewhere—Ira’s going to take him to meetings with the NBC execs. Oh, Jesus, they’re going to put one over on those guys.” She threw her head back and laughed as she headed out the door toward her new MG, a bag of books in her hand. Every day she drove to the Château Marmont and worked for Jake in Boatwright’s suite, he typing in the bedroom, she reading in the living room. More often than not, she stayed overnight and came home to the Laskers’ only to type up a report for Jake, shower, change, and see Coco and Claire in the afternoons.

She was transformed, Dinah thought, no doubt about it. Her skin was clear, her eyes shone, she walked and moved with the old majesty and assurance. She and Boatwright were crazy about each other, Dinah explained to Nelly Steiner one day as they ate lunch together under the awning of Nelly’s pool house. Boatwright had been insanely in love with Veevi forever—since he’d first come out to Hollywood. But they’d lost touch during the war. He’d written her once in Paris, after he’d read about her marriage to Mike, and she’d written him back. He’d written again, but she hadn’t answered. “But you know about his wife, don’t you?” Nelly said, pouring Dinah a cup of tea.

“Eve Leyburn? I know she’s a damn good actress. And that it’s her cousin who’s the front for Cliff.”

“Don’t you know about her and Clifford’s brother?”

“Wait a second,” Dinah said. “I think I heard something. They were engaged?”

“They were engaged, and he was sent to the Pacific. And killed on an aircraft carrier that was kamikaze’d. She was pregnant at the time. Had the baby. Cliff came back from the war—I think he flew bombing missions—and married her, and now they have five kids, plus the first one.”

“The brother’s?”

“Six altogether. Eve works, but the blacklist has made it tough for her, though it’s not as tough for people in the theater, in New York, as it is out
here. They live with his mother, according to my friend Shirley Dunlop, who’s an old friend of Eve’s from summer stock. The mother has money.”

“In other w-w-w-words, he’s never going to get a divorce,” said Dinah.

“Never. Does your sister know that?”

“I don’t see her anymore!” Dinah said. “She’s spending her time with Cliff, and it’s fine this way. Delicious, really. I’ve got my thoroughly exhausted husband to myself again at night.”

When Jake was directing, Dinah was more indispensable to him than ever, and she went about her days in a state of ascetic rapture. The short hours between his homecoming late at night and his headfirst dive into oblivious sleep were hers. And then, of course, there was the prestige, the glory of it all. There were mentions in the trades. The telephone rang; invitations poured in. Joyously, she turned down almost all of them: “Can’t do it—Jake’s shooting right now.” The pleasure of saying those words was immense. She didn’t have to entertain, or go out. When friends called to ask “How’s the picture going?” she gave them the vague “Oh, great, great.” As Jake had instructed, she admitted no problems or impediments, even if the night before he had come home cursing Irv, Izzie, and Mel, who had criticized the rushes and had pointed out to him that Maureen Tolliver was obviously stuffing her bra with Kleenex, since her boobs changed size from one scene to another.

Had Veevi been there, Dinah would have had to share him, and these times when he needed care and attention were too special for Dinah to want her sister there. Veevi, in turn, wasn’t about to bring Boatwright over to the house. Of course, he wouldn’t have come anyway; he had notoriously defied the Committee and spent a year in jail.

T
he picture was difficult. Mel and Izzy had written a sharp, gag-filled satire on the advertising business, and everything had to be fast—the one-liners, the physical comedy, the tempo of the scenes. Lothar Selz, the director who’d died—both Dinah and Veevi remembered him from the old days in Malibu, after Dorshka managed to get him out of Germany—and whom Jake greatly respected, had nevertheless his own rhythm, which was terrific for physical comedy but too fast for the jokes. Jake spent a lot of time in the cutting room at night going over the scenes that had already been shot and making sure his own tempo didn’t clash with Selz’s, while at the same time keeping the emphasis on the words. By the third week, he was irritable and anxious and couldn’t wait for the picture to be over. So, for Easter vacation the Laskers rented a house in Palm Springs, sight unseen, right on the edge of the desert. Veevi was back on Delfern Drive again. Boatwright had gone home to New York to finish his play, and there were no plans for him to return to L.A. for the time being.