 Elizabeth Frank, author of Cheat and Charmer |
Frank is a patient woman. She has taught American Literature at Bard for 23 years, making the trek every week from her Greenwich Village apartment to the Annandale-on-Hudson campus. She spent over 11 years researching and writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Louise Bogan: A Portrait, and started work on her just-released novel, Cheat and Charmer, in 1978.
Cheat and Charmer opens in 1951 as a picture-perfect Hollywood couple, Jake and Dinah Lasker, dances "with tremendous rhythm and style" at a studio party to celebrate Jake's latest hit movie. But all is not golden. Inside Dinah's purse is a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Her decision to testify, saving her husband's career by naming her amoral, glamorous sister Veevi, of whom she's always been jealous, sets off a dazzlingly intricate web of betrayal, ambition, and unforeseen loyalties. It's a world in which ethics are muddied in every direction; as Barbara Stanwyck says in The Lady Eve, "The best girls aren't nearly as good as you think, and the bad girls aren't as bad."
It's no surprise that this subject would fascinate Frank. Her father, Melvin Frank, was a celebrated screenwriter/director/producer who worked with everyone from Bing Crosby and Cary Grant to George Segal and Gina Lollobrigida. Frank's family circle included her father's frequent partner, Norman Panama, with whom he wrote radio scripts for Bob Hope; Marx Brothers scribe Arthur Sheekman (Frank has a home movie of her mother dancing the Charleston with Groucho) and his actress wife Gloria Stuart; and writers of every stripe. Young Elizabeth and her two brothers, Andrew and Jim, trimmed Gene Kelly's Christmas tree.
But behind this extravagant social whirl, the infamous question "Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?" was cutting a swath through the Hollywood community, severing lifelong friendships and ending careers. Frank was too young to sense the undercurrents that roiled her parents' circle. When she was a teenager, attending schools in London and Geneva, she learned about the McCarthy hearings and met American expatriates who had refused to testify, moving to Europe to avoid jail sentences or unemployment due to blacklisting.
"I learned about wrecked lives, lost opportunities, and the lasting bitterness between former friends who were now betrayers and betrayed. What I began to understand is that nobody escaped: all of them had been hurt—all damned to one kind of hell or another—no matter what side they had taken," she writes in an essay entitled "On the Hollywood Blacklist."
It would be years before Frank wrote about this grim legacy. Meanwhile, she studied literature at Bennington and Berkeley, writing her doctoral dissertation on Emily Dickinson. While teaching at Williams, Frank learned that the papers of poet Louise Bogan had just been donated to nearby Amherst College. Frank loved Bogan's poems, but knew "next to nothing" about her life. Neither, it seemed, did anyone else. Bogan was a fiercely private woman, for whom the confessional urge was anathema.
Frank quickly became obsessed with her subject, traveling to archives and libraries all over the country. When she landed a contract with Knopf, Bogan's daughter consented to give Frank access to her mother's personal papers—"the proverbial cardboard cartons in the attic, full of mouse droppings"—which provided enough insight into the poet's tumultuous emotional life to turn a scholarly monograph into a masterly and compelling biography.
What happened next was a total surprise. "I came home from Bard on a cold, rainy night. My mother had died 17 days earlier, and I was very, very sad. I buzzed my then-husband to come help me with the wet bags of books I was carrying, and he came rushing downstairs, calling my name. My first thought was, 'Oh my God, who else has died?' And he yelled out, 'You won the Pulitzer Prize!' I was in absolute shock."
Frank reports that the Pulitzer gave her "about 24 hours" of pure satisfaction before life returned to normal. "I had the same experience with Cheat and Charmer when I got the galleys. I sat down and read it as if it was somebody else's novel, and had a great time. I thought, 'This is a damn good book.' And I went around for about a day and a half really pleased that I'd written the book I set out to write. So I worked 11 years for one day of deep satisfaction, and 25 years for a day and a half. But those were two of the very best days of my life. It was worth every minute."
There were times Frank thought she'd never finish her novel. She was hardly idle—along with the Bogan biography, she wrote books about painters Jackson Pollock and Esteban Vicente and numerous magazine articles, all the while teaching and raising a daughter. But "it didn't take that long just because I was busy with other things. It took as long as it took." Frank restarted many times, trying different tones and approaches, including a Mrs. Dalloway-inspired stream of consciousness. Finally, she sat down to write the plot, scene by scene, "like a rip-roaring drama."
Rip-roaring it is. But Frank's broad canvas has higher aspirations: it's a portrait of a doomed generation, unfolding across two continents (her portraits of European refugees in Hollywood and American expatriates in Paris are unforgettable.) It's also an insider's vision of a particular caste in Hollywood—not the glittering stars, but the people who crafted their movies, the "schmucks with Underwoods" who churned out script after script. Frank's blending of real and fictional celebrities is so seamless that someone unversed in the period might have trouble distinguishing one from the other. (For those in the know, it affords the same pleasure the Lasker kids take in recognizing studio sets when they watch TV westerns, yelling "Stock shot!" as stunt-riders gallop alongside a train.)
Frank bristles at many reviewers' assumption that, because of her Hollywood pedigree, Cheat and Charmer might not be entirely fictional. "It's not autobiography, or biography, or a roman a clef. It's a novel." As someone who loves the novelist's art—one of her courses at Bard is a semester-long study of Anna Karenina—Frank decries "the contemporary notion that fiction is transferred documentary, with the names changed. The act of inventing, of seeing things in the light and shadow of the imagination, is a source of truth that is unavailable to us in any other way."
The truths revealed in Cheat and Charmer seem uncannily apt in the Bush era. Frank's eyes glint when she's asked about parallels between HUAC and Homeland Security. Could there be a new blacklist? "It's not that it could happen again, it is happening again," she states bluntly. "It's bad and it's going to get worse. I'm a staunch opponent of this war, I loathe the Bush Administration and everything it's done. The Republic is dead. We now have an empire, attempting to dominate the world by endless war, and manipulate the public by endless lying. America is finished."
Frank sees herself and her peers as "stunned into silence, afraid to stand up for ourselves. When people are afraid to identify themselves as a liberal, because 'liberal' is a dirty word, the McCarthy spirit is reigning. There's a kind of inertia, an etiolation of the Progressive movement. One thing HUAC succeeded brilliantly in doing was splitting and splintering the Left. People who named names and people who were blacklisted refused to speak to each other or work with each other."
Frank spends two months every summer in Bulgaria with her significant other, a retired international telecommunications expert ("He was equipping the Sandinistas while we were invading them. We grew up on opposite sides of the Cold War.") Spending time in Eastern Europe gives her a unique perspective on the US. "This summer, Valentin and I were on a bus, and a drunken man heard us speaking English and started yelling, 'Dirty Amerikanka, get out of Bulgaria.' We have treated our friends and allies with such contempt that we're going to pay for it for years to come."
Frank is mulling a new novel set in Bulgaria, although she suspects it'll be a year or more until she starts writing. Meanwhile, "There are days when I crash into people because I don't see them on the street, because I've got a scene brewing in my head. It's a very pleasant altered state. Except when you're driving."
Frank smiles, recalling an anecdote from her childhood. "My mother once went to a dinner party with James Thurber at Nunnally Johnson's. At one point Johnson looked down the dinner table at the abstracted Thurber and said, 'Jim. Stop writing.'"
If we're lucky, Elizabeth Frank will not take his advice.