Fiction mixes with fuzzy facts

“Cheat and Charmer” by Elizabeth Frank is a novel set in Hollywood, the blacklist its backbone. It’s high time for a fiction examining the chasm that the House Un-American Activities Committee cleaved through Hollywood, between those who talked and those who refused, those who went into political and professional exile and those who stayed, continuing to work in a place dominated by betrayal. One hopes for a work as passionate as Brooke Hayward’s knowing memoir, “Haywire.”

Alas, this novel unfolds a domestic narrative of adulteries, fibroids, snubs, cigarettes and alcoholism against a background of 1930s communism and the compromises of the ‘50s, written in a dutiful style that tells the stories but misses the jokes, as if to retain virtue at the expense of pleasure. This is a first try at fiction for Frank, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for a biography of poet Louise Bogan. Frank’s heroine, Dinah Lasker, is a secretary with a stutter who becomes a Communist along with her beautiful sister Veevi, both under the influence of glamorous writers and exiles in the ‘30s.

It’s a brave choice to tell a story from the point of view of stable, cautious, bourgeois Hollywood, where lima beans are the dinner vegetable. Although the sisters come from a modest background -- their father, a steel salesman from Arkansas, is an anti-Semitic drunk who moved to Los Angeles in 1922 -- their lives take different paths: Dinah marries comedy writer-director-producer Jake Lasker, gets a big house and two children; Veevi rises to the greater glamour of an improbable European destiny. She becomes a movie star, the wife of a genius Bulgarian director, moves to France, where she hides in a chateau during the war and, without speaking any French, manages to work for the resistance.

When Dinah is subpoenaed in 1951, Jake pressures her to speak to HUAC. Dinah -- who has been a resentful outsider at the court of her sister and her husband and his former lover, emigre writer-actress Dorshka Albrecht -- names Veevi.

Then Jake goes to Paris and London, hitting the holy spots of the Hollywood expatriates: Fouquet’s, St. Jean de Luz, Biarritz. There’s a sense of awed pilgrimage here as he meets characters who are versions of Irwin Shaw, John Huston and Robert Capa, whose European experiences set the standard for high living. Jake sees Veevi, who doesn’t seem to mind having been named as a Communist. And when she returns to California and moves in with Dinah and Jake, her fancy foreign ways and the empty gin bottles under her bed upset the balance of the household. Dinah tries to make peace with what she has done, but her dazzled envy endures: “[S]he throbbed with the sudden desire for evenings in cafes and bistros ... to dance with handsome strangers who had had ‘good’ wars ... and said ... sexy things in French.”

A naive or stubborn misunderstanding of movies and movie people trips up the story again and again, so much so that the reader is impelled to turn to biography and autobiography to try to verify that there was indeed a golden age of monsters and magic. And they might find them in Salka Viertel’s indispensable memoir, “The Kindness of Strangers,” or her son Peter Viertel’s “Dangerous Friends: At Large With Hemingway and Huston in the Fifties,” those places, those times and those people are described and brought to life. “Cheat and Charmer” is fiction, not fact, and it most successfully calls up the sour feeling of exclusion that such glamorous lives elicit in those short of the spotlight.

Most writings about Hollywood work best as memoir or gossip, because careers and lives unfold in endless hyphenations, as do marriages. When real names are replaced in a roman a clef, the narrative clumps up with fictitious biographies of people making films with fictitious titles, and creates a mirror world of superfluous information. In Hollywood, who did what to whom is more important than what they did.

Joan Juliet Buck, the former editor in chief of Paris Vogue, is the author of the novels “The Only Place to Be” and “Daughter of the Swan.”