Cheat and Charmer (28 page)

But there was another man who interested her, a great modern songwriter, apparently: Frank—real name Ferenc—Herzog. He wore round steel-rimmed glasses and had a head of thick light brown curly hair flecked with gray, and what Norma Levine referred to as “a large corporation.” He came often on Sundays, and he always showed up with his dog, Boris, a German shepherd, whom she overheard him describe as a “dedicated Bolshevik and crotch-sniffer.” Dinah and Frank Herzog shared a silent laugh once when Boris went into a state of olfactory ecstasy as he attempted to burrow into the nether regions of a certain statuesque and overdressed Viennese lady, famous for having married a rather long roster of celebrated men—the last an architect with whom she had migrated across the seas to Beverly Hills, a necessity she was said to have bitterly and loudly blamed on his being Jewish. Herzog asked Dinah to take a walk on the beach with him. The dog had no interest in molesting her, particularly since she kept throwing her sandal into the swirls of foamy water, from which he delighted to retrieve it for her. She was, furthermore, extremely wary of taking long walks on the beach with interesting European men just off the boat, and kept a wide space between the songwriter and herself. He asked her who she was and what she did, and where he could buy ink, composition paper, and phonograph records. When they got back, Veevi was still holding court on the patio and Dinah observed her sister looking at her with curiosity, but when Veevi asked her if she wanted to come upstairs and talk while they changed into slacks and shirts for dinner, Dinah said she had promised to help Dorshka in the kitchen. She knew now to avoid Veevi’s comments on men whose attention she had won.

That night Frank Herzog sat at the piano and sang some of his songs—in German, of course—but he kept seeking out Dinah’s eyes, and before the evening was over he invited her to dinner the following Wednesday. He apologized for asking her to drive all the way out to his little house in Santa Monica, and explained that he did not yet know Los Angeles, or even how to drive well enough to come for her himself—and in any case, he wanted to show her what he was working on.

The night of their date, feeling sophisticated and shrewd, determined not to repeat what had happened with Ventura, Dinah headed out to Santa Monica, wearing her one glamorous dress (a black silk studio hand-me-down from Veevi). She had spent extra money on gas and was worried about exceeding her weekly budget, but she soon pushed that to the back of her mind. Herzog took a great interest in her, asking all about her work.
“It’s not v-v-v-very interesting,” she said. “I type all day, take dictation, and hate my supervisor.” Herzog had cooked a goulash with red cabbage and buttered noodles, and she expressed admiration and almost, but not quite, cleaned her plate, remembering her father’s admonition to “walk away from the table a little bit hungry.” After dinner—she surprised herself by not offering to clear the dishes—he played songs from the score he was working on. The story was from some old American novel nobody had ever heard of, about a man who practices mesmerism and casts spells on beautiful young women. It’s got horror in it, and fantasy, he explained excitedly, and he was having such fun writing the songs. They had motifs from American folk music, which he had been studying and had fallen in love with. Would she like him to play some for her? Could she recognize the American songs? He played, and she sang along softly with the tunes, indeed recognizing all of them, and then she offered to sing two songs her father used to sing to her and her sister when they were little and that she’d never heard anywhere else.

“Yes, please do,” he said. “I would like very much to hear these songs.”

“ ‘I went way out to Kansas,’ ” she began simply, and unself-consciously, “ ‘where they told me I would find / Money growin’ round like apples on a tree / But it was just like Dinah told me / There was nothin’ of the kind / And the weather was so cold / I like to froze.’ ”

Herzog’s eyes lit up. Dinah didn’t have a strong voice, but she was a natural alto and could carry a tune. As she moved into the refrain, Herzog accompanied her, sight-reading, as it were, from her face and the tune:

Then she sang another, which was fast and funny. When she finished, he was looking at her with joy in his face.

“Will you write down these songs? Such wonderful songs!”

“Sure,” she said, and he ran into his study and came back with paper and pencils.

As she wrote down the words, he asked if she had been named for the Dinah in the song.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a sad song, though, isn’t it? I got the name from the sad song, and my sister, Genevieve, got the fancy French name from God knows where. I l-l-l-like my name, though,” she added, printing the lyrics in small capitals so that he could read them clearly. “That song’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I, too, love this song. I steal it from you completely!” he added, and they shared a laugh. He was, like Stefan, older than she, well into his forties. She liked him, liked his cozy house, with the piano that took up nearly the entire living room and the big German shepherd snoozing and sighing on the rug.

Later, he brought in coffee and they sat at either end of the sofa, talking. He told her about the Nazis’ forbidding performances of his music, shutting down the theater where he’d had many successes, calling his work decadent, Communist, Jewish. At ten o’clock, though she wanted to keep on talking—or, rather, listening—she glanced at her watch. The drive back was long, she told him, and she had better go. At this he reached across the sofa for one of her hands, which he took in both of his and kissed. She had secretly laughed at all the hand-kissing that went on at the Venturas’, thinking it a silly custom, and was surprised by the tenderness in the gesture and the sexual way it stirred her. Then he spoke: “I must be here for three months. I am alone, and I do not like all this Hollywood”—he waved his hand—“nonsense. Ventura is an old friend of mine and I am very fond of the fellow, but, forgive me for saying so, he is a bit of a fool. Your sister has beauty and charm, but she does not truly care for him—anyone can see that, and Dorshka fusses around him like a grandmother, and nobody sees that they will eat him alive here. You are different. I see something in you right away. You are not part of the movies, and I like that very much. Excuse me, I mean to say, I like
you
very much. I would like for you to come and live with me here, in this house. You could give away—”

“Give up?”

“Give up your job. You say you would like to read more—why not come and live with me and read all day? There is one circumstance and I will not hide it from you. I am married. My wife is an actress and a singer, a great one, and she is in New York now, working in a show I have written just for her. It is doing very well. When I leave here, I will go back to her and we will work together on another show for her. Then I will come back here, as
long as I have luck getting work in this crazy place. My wife and I, we have what you call an understanding, because so much time we are separated. Certain questions we don’t ask each other. No doubt, of passing the time when we are not together, she has her own ways. I will never leave her and she will never leave me. Making troubles she will not do for me, and I also don’t make troubles. And I would take good care of you and I would not hurt your pride.”

Herzog let go of her hand. Dinah looked at him with her candid brown eyes and wondered why she had the rottenest luck with men of anyone she knew. She turned and leaned over her knees and clasped her arms together, and looked sideways at him. “Your arrangement sounds very nice. I’d love to quit my job and live with you. It sounds like a wonderful life. But after a while you’ll go back to New York, to your wife, and then I’ll be stuck in this house with nothing to do. I want to fall in love with someone, Mr. Herzog, and get m-m-m-married. I want to have kids. I don’t want to be a mistress, even of a very nice and interesting guy like you. So I’m going to go home now.”

But he leaned forward and took her hand and began to pull her toward him. If she kissed him, she would never go home, and with a force of will that surprised her, she pulled away.

“Dinah darling, you have nothing to fear. I think you are a fine girl, a splendid girl. I would take care of you. And you wouldn’t be lonely when I’m not here. I know good, interesting people here. They would make sure you weren’t too much alone. And always, I would come back.”

“Thank you, Frank,” she said, pointedly using his first name now. “You’re being awfully nice about this. But I’m not all that s-s-s-sophisticated about some things, and I don’t sleep with married men. I want kids.”

He leaned forward, took her face in his hands, and kissed her. “You are a good American girl.”

Stefan had said the same thing to her. Who did they think she was, she wondered, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, for Christ’s sake?

“For you, something is either wrong or right,
ja
? But you know you refuse yourself—and me—something good for us both. You are—what do they call it?—a puritan!”

Dinah wanted badly to stay. He had warm eyes, and she loved it that he had seen something in her that interested him. “Well, I dunno. Maybe I am,” she said, standing up. “But I don’t think it’s that. I just want the usual
things—you know, a nice guy and some kids. Thanks for dinner and for playing your songs. And for inviting me to l-l-l-live with you.”

She put on her little black hat, also a hand-me-down from Veevi and the Marathon wardrobe department, and pulled her car keys out of her purse as he walked her out to her car. The night air was cool and sweet, and she imagined what it would have been like to live in that house and fall asleep with him every night to the sound of the ocean. But then, she reminded herself, he would go back to New York and she’d be all by herself. The ocean can sound angry and restless if you’re alone in a dark house.

“Will you at least come and have dinner with me again?” he asked her, opening the door of her old Ford.

She turned and threw her arms around him, kissing him on the mouth, holding him to her, and then quickly broke away, and got into the car.

“Oh, Frank,” she said, smiling, feeling as if she were in a movie. “We’d just end up like we are right now, with you inviting me to dinner again and me waiting for the engine to t-t-t-turn over.”

Then in the spring of 1938, after a Party meeting, Dinah got to talking with Owen Darrow, a screenwriter who was considered by the members of the Potemkin Club, as the unit was called, the most brilliant explainer of Marxist theory among them. He besieged her with phone calls, insisting that she have dinner with him every night, and she capitulated easily, fascinated by the clear and ready speech with which he answered questions. Fluency—articulate, unobstructed utterance—hypnotized her. She was spellbound at the meeting when he said that Litvinov, Radek, Rykov, Yagoda, and Bukharin were all Trotskyist wreckers and saboteurs who were actively aiding fascism and Hitler. “Look at the evidence,” he said. “Is anybody here really going to stand up and say that hundreds of pages of testimony and innumerable eyewitness reports are all fabricated, all lies? Make no mistake about it: people who defame the Moscow trials are dedicated enemies of American progressivism. They ought to be damn grateful to the Soviet government and its great leader, Stalin, for exposing these traitors before they can do more harm than they already have.”

Owen Darrow had a grim, humorless poise and everyone listened to him with what seemed to Dinah a mixture of reverence and gratitude for
having figured out all the positions in advance. When they spoke at meetings, Norman Metzger, Guy Bergman, and Anatole Klein always turned to him for confirmation. It was as if he knew just what they were going to ask him and had the answers at his fingertips, and she marveled at the sheer coherence of their exchanges. Dinah had never experienced anything like that, and she wondered if it was like what went on in college.

Darrow was a hefty guy, with transparent green eyes and closely cropped sandy-brown hair. He was handsome, but he wasn’t a good athlete and didn’t like volleyball or bodysurfing out at Veevi’s. He lived in town, not far from Laurel Canyon, picked Dinah up for meetings, and took her out on dates. He said right away that he was in love with her and was sure she was the one. “Let’s give it some time, and then it’s home to meet Mother and plan the wedding,” he said.

When they visited her sister’s, and were visibly a couple, Veevi beamed at Dinah and said, “Well, you’ve got an interesting fish on the line.” He was patient with Dinah, in the beginning. She admired his ready opinions, and when he told her what to think she accepted it—after all, he was much smarter than she was. Of all the Communists they knew, he seemed to her the most genuine. When they went out for seafood and beer in Long Beach with union guys he knew, longshoremen in the Party, he loosened up and was right at home with them, so much that when it came time to go back to Los Angeles she had to do the driving.