Cheat and Charmer (23 page)

Everett was the first man Dinah slept with, and because of that she married him—after a number of pregnancy scares, and muscles made stiff and sore from vehicular fornication on Rabbit Hill. Sitting now in her station wagon on New Year’s Day, 1953, she recalled Everett’s hot breath, his urgent hands sliding past her garters, his helpless, in-the-way, boiling-over erections, her long open legs colliding at peculiar angles with the steering wheel and dashboard, the way he would put his arm around her afterward, when they were sitting up again, knowing they would have to leave soon. The very first time they did it—and it
had
hurt—he had apologized. He told her he loved her, and every time after that he told her he loved her, and she liked hearing him say it. Her parents told her he was a fine boy and a good catch. After they were married at the Christian Science church in
Hollywood—Dinah in a white dress and veil Mom had made for her—she and Everett moved into their own apartment in West Hollywood, established a routine in bed, and planned the life they would have if the Depression ever ended. For their wedding present, his father had given him a job in the family restaurant, but Everett wanted a business of his own.

But I knew then, she said to herself now, lighting a new cigarette, checking her watch but desperate to stay with her memories, feeling like a thief who has broken into a home and come upon a treasure just as the owners are pulling into the driveway, I knew then that I’d married him just to get away from home—from Pop sitting every day in a rocking chair on the porch, his old slippers on his feet and his neck in a brace, snapping at Mom, who snapped right back at him. Her mother had married her father in 1911, when she was eighteen and he was thirty-eight, and on the second day of their honeymoon, in Norfolk, Virginia, he’d told her to stay in the hotel while he went to see a man who owed him money. At about four in the morning, he’d come back drunk and stumbling, his money belt stolen—he didn’t believe in banks, which he said were controlled by the Jews—and his two front teeth knocked out. Dinah was born nine months later.

Shortly after Dinah married Everett, Veevi started dancing in pictures, at Marathon. Things happened fast once Talcott Engel set eyes on her. The elder son of Marathon’s founder, Lionel Engel, Tal started bringing Veevi to his parents’ beach house and Veevi invited Dinah. Once—only once—Everett had come with her, but he brooded all afternoon, because he’d left his parents to take care of the restaurant, and he was worried that something would go wrong. He had nothing to say to anyone he met. Dinah felt guilty. She’d felt sorry for him as he drove home stiffly upright to keep his sunburned back from rubbing up against the car upholstery, that is, until he said, “You better watch it—they’re all Roosevelt lovers. They’ll sell the country out to the reds and the other Jewish elements. Did you see all those Jews jabbering at each other today? They sure do stick together. Just you wait and see. Father Coughlin has a lot to say about them, yes sirree, and if you spent Sunday afternoons with me instead of with that chichi crowd you’d figure it out for yourself, like I have.”

“Everett,” she said. “Your thinking about J-J-J-Jews is icky. Keep it to yourself, okay?” They drove the rest of the way home in silence, and she smoked and looked out the window and thought, I’ve got to live with him for the rest of my life.

Soon enough, Dinah stopped listening to Everett. She was much more interested in thinking about the things people talked about at the Engels’. She would situate herself on the margins of the lively group of men and women—writers and actors—who gathered around Veevi. Stretched out on a pool chaise with her shining brown hair done up in braids and a straw hat shading her face, her only makeup bright red lipstick and mascara, she reigned as an icon of perfection. Her every gesture was graceful; Veevi was incapable of an awkward or a clumsy movement. No one questioned her right to sovereignty—least of all herself. Veevi’s self-assurance, Dinah marveled, was absolute. Wherever she was, there was laughter, her own a gay chortling gasp, often laced with mockery.

For a while, Dinah didn’t understand the new words she was hearing at the Engels’. She didn’t know what people meant when they referred to the “Comintern” and the “popular front” and “workers’ committees” and “five-year plans.” But she caught on fairly quickly. People talked, it seemed to her, both seriously and ironically at the same moment. “Hey, all you toilers on the Marathon lot,” said Clifford Boatwright, Jr., one afternoon. “Just a reminder: tomorrow night, my house, come one come all. Mrs. Parker and Mr. Stewart are coming to talk to us about forming an anti-Nazi league.” Boatwright was from the East Coast, the only son of a journalist famous for his squibs and jibes at American provincialism, and he’d grown up knowing all the famous writers of the teens and twenties. He wasn’t handsome—at least, according to Veevi—but he had taut skin drawn over a face with a high forehead and high cheekbones, and his expression was simultaneously vigilant and mischievous. Dinah thought something was going on between him and Veevi. “I can’t help it if he’s crazy about me,” Veevi said with a shrug when Dinah asked her about it. Boatwright wasn’t Jewish, but he was the one who explained to Veevi, who then explained to Dinah, that they were “shiksas.” He also translated
schmuck
,
schlemiel
,
meshuga
, and other Yiddish terms for them, and did so with such pleasure, such appreciation of nuances, that it was as if he were introducing them to fine wines.

By this time Veevi had become a movie star. The fan magazines said simply that she’d been “discovered on the Marathon lot,” but the real story was different. Dinah had taught her all the dance steps she would need to get a job, and she became a dancer in the chorus of an ice-skating movie at Marathon. One afternoon, Tal Engel spotted her taking a break in the midday sun with the other dancers outside the freezing soundstage. She knew who he was and complained about working conditions—the
long hours, the treacherous condition of the ice rink. She was beautiful and fearless, and he was smitten. He did nothing about her complaints, but had her tested instead and put under contract. While Dinah spent her days typing and her evenings doing the laundry, Veevi starred in “costume dramas,” in which she played one ingenue after another, usually a princess or a countess endangered by medieval upstarts or French assassins. Audiences loved her, but she complained to Dinah that she felt silly when she acted and hated being on display. Money and fame came easily, however, as well as a house of her own in Beverly Hills. Sometimes during the week, in the evenings, Dinah dropped in to borrow books from the “library,” as it was called. On her lunch hour, over a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a Coke in a nearby coffee shop, or on a bench in Echo Park, Dinah would manage to read a few pages. When she started in on
The Communist Manifesto
, she hid it inside a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel—Everett would have had a fit. She used the same novel to hide
The ABC of Communism
. When she started reading
Capital
, she put it inside the dust jacket for
The Grapes of Wrath. Capital
was very slow going, and she had no one to talk to about it. She certainly couldn’t ask Tal Engel to explain it. He was obsessed with Veevi, eager to lift her out of her background, hungry to have her all to himself; obviously he wasn’t interested in talking to Dinah, and he already resented the time she spent with Veevi, who, Dinah could see, wasn’t in love with him. At the Engels’, people were nice enough to her—she was asked to join volleyball games and to dance when music was piped out to the pool deck—but a couple of years went by and nobody paid any real attention to her.

Dinah took a deep breath and closed her eyes. The Santa Anas were still blowing hard, slanting the blades of fresh grass on the hill. She would be late to her own open house, late to greet her guests, late to get them drinks, to laugh and joke, and find them a place by the fireplace in the den. She remembered now just how shy and insignificant she had felt during those early years. The way those people talked! She was sure they had all been to college. They were so quick, and they always had so much to say! Whatever they talked about, they looked at from a thousand different angles: fascism and Spain and Roosevelt and strikes and Stalin and Clifford Odets and the
New Deal and the Group Theatre and Hitler and
The New Yorker
and a million other interesting things that were new to Dinah.

Sometimes she found herself stretched out on a towel among the crowd gathered around Norma Levine. Small-boned, with elegantly coiffed strawberry-blond hair, she never went into the pool but wore expensive bathing suits and used a cigarette holder. She had written stories for
The New Yorker
before she gave in to the lure of a two-thousand-dollar-a-week salary in Hollywood. Dinah loved listening to her, because she often caught Dinah’s eye when she spoke, as if she were seeking confirmation from her, and because she was always telling stories or anecdotes or remembering bits and pieces of things—as if the world consisted of nothing but stories.

Dinah suddenly remembered how startled she had been upon hearing Norma say, “All I know is the girl walking in front of me turned to the other girl and said, ‘And what did I get out of it? Nothing but pleasure!’ ” It was the way people laughed when they heard lines like that that Dinah had wondered about. How did they know
when
to laugh, and
what
was funny? For every utterance, there always seemed to be a web of unspoken mutual understandings. Dinah also noticed Veevi watching Norma, watching and listening, as if Veevi were deciding how best to handle this rival, who was seductive not because she was beautiful—which she wasn’t—but because she was interesting and intelligent and fun. And so Dinah studied Norma, too: the ease with which she told stories, the way she nodded her head sagely while listening to others, the impression she gave that sitting around and talking was the most interesting and absorbing thing in the world. Once Norma told a story about an actor from the Group Theatre—Art Squires, whom Dinah would later get to know but who, in the summer of 1935, had only just come to L.A. under contract to Warner Brothers. “So get this,” Norma said, squinting against the sun, so that her entire face now seemed centered by her full red mouth, “Phoebe, his wife, goes out and buys
a hundred and thirty-six
pairs of shoes.” She enunciates the syllables very slowly and pauses before adding, “And when he calls his mother-in-law to tell her they’ve just bought a forty-room mansion with an oak-paneled living room and a screening room for fifty and a wine cellar for hundreds of bottles of vintage-this and vintage-that, her first comment is, ‘Is there swimming on the premises?’ ” which Levine—at some point Dinah began thinking of her by her last name—delivered in a perfect Yiddish accent. Dinah saw Veevi taking in Levine’s success, and saw how, the following
Sunday, as Levine emerged from the dressing room and started walking toward them in the sun, Veevi said sotto voce, “Oh, here comes Twinkle-Tits.” Someone laughed, then somebody else, and then, when Levine arrived, Veevi said to her, “Great bathing suit, Norma. Looks terrific on you. Where’d you get it?”

But Dinah also realized that it didn’t make all that much difference whether or not Veevi spoke. She was so lovely to look at that all she had to do was exist. Nothing else was required of her. Clifford Boatwright stood up in front of her one day and said, in front of everyone, “If eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being,” and bowed, with one hand on his belly and the other behind his back, like a cowlicked boy of ten who has just finished reciting at a school assembly.

No one got more pleasure out of the sheer fact of Veevi’s existing than Lionel J. Engel, who talked incessantly of the day when he would give her and Tal an “extravanganza-type” wedding by the ocean, with all Hollywood present, although so far the young couple hadn’t set a date. L.J. liked having Veevi by his side when eminent drop-ins dropped in on Sundays. Since she, however, much preferred the company of the young writers from New York, she always managed to get from one side of the pool to the other—from the shady side with the red-and-white-striped umbrellas, where L.J. and his producer pals sat and went for “dips” in the pool, to the dazzling sunny side, where the younger set slathered themselves in suntan lotion, and, when they reached the broiling point, threw the Spanish Loyalists to the wind and hurled themselves into the water in an ecstasy of aquatic self-immolation. L.J. was always sending a maid or a butler over to summon her while she was in the midst of the political discussions. Later on, she would ask Dinah to fill her in on who had said what—which, naturally, helped Dinah in her poolside education.

Among the Sunday drop-ins were the sons and daughters of other Hollywood pioneers—they’d gone to the same birthday parties and Ivy League colleges as the Engel boys. Some of them were younger men who were fond of L.J.; they appreciated him—he wasn’t quite the cliché they accused their own fathers of being.