What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  “And it isn’t just conspicuous consumption,” she said. “His idea of how to spend one hell of an evening is to lock himself in his library alone. He built a special house for his books at the back of his estate.”

  The more she told me the more curious I was that a man like Sidney Fineman should want to work with Sammy.

  “Fineman isn’t the man he was fifteen years ago,” she said. “He had just as much taste as Thalberg and more guts. Hollywood was his girl. He loved her all the time. He had ideas for making something out of her …”

  I could see Sammy out of the corner of my eye. He had finally worked his way down to our aisle. He was leaning over two or three people to shake hands with Junior Laemmele.

  “But that’s all gone,” Kit was saying. “The Depression killed something in him. Not only losing his own dough, but the big bank boys like Chase and Atlas moving in on his company. He began to get an obsession about the Wall Street bunch working behind his back. He started playing safe. Now he’s just one of the top dozen around town, making his old hits over and over again because he’s scared to death that the minute he starts losing money they’ll take his name off the door. He’s convinced Sammy is a money writer. And I have a sneaking suspicion who convinced him.”

  Sammy ducked into the seat beside me as the credit titles came on. I watched his face as his name filled the screen:

  ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

  by

  SAMUEL GLICK

  There is no word in English to describe it. You could say gloat, smile, leer, grin, smirk, but it was all of those and something more, a look of deep sensual pleasure. The expression held me fascinated because I felt it was something I should not be allowed to see, like the face of the boy who roomed across the hall from me in prep school when I had made the sordid mistake of entering without knocking.

  Then Sammy leaned over and whispered something in my ear that will always seem more perverse than anything in Krafft-Ebing.

  “Just for a gag,” he said, “clap for me.”

  The most perverse part of the story is that I did. There were my hands clapping foolishly like seal flippers. The applause was taken up and spread through the house, not what you would call a thunderous ovation, just enough of a sprinkle to make my hands feel like blushing. It wasn’t bad enough that I had become Sammy’s drinking companion. I had to be his one-man claque. My applause couldn’t have been more automatic if Sammy had previously hypnotized me and led me into the theater.

  As I stared at that credit title I had a feeling that something was missing. But it wasn’t until the screen was telling us who designed the wardrobe and assisted the director that I remembered what it was. Julian. Julian Blumberg, the kid who made the little snowball that Sammy was rolling down the Alps. Granting that Sammy had written, God knows how, the screenplay alone, the worst it should have been was original story by Samuel Glick and Julian Blumberg preceding the screenplay credit. But there it was, all Sammy Glick, no Julian Blumberg.

  On impulse, but a better one than before, I leaned over and asked Sammy whether he noticed anything funny about that screen credit and when he didn’t, I enlightened him. It was like lighting a candle in Mammoth Cave.

  “That first story we did all went in the ashcan, Al,” he said in a thick whisper. “I had to start from scratch. I know it’s a tough break for the kid, but that’s Hollywood.”

  “The hell it is,” I said. “That’s Sammy Glick.”

  Kit said a sharp shhhhh.

  As the picture was opening I was wondering whether I would have agreed with Sammy about Hollywood before I met her.

  The picture wasn’t anything that would come back to you as you were climbing into bed, or even remember as you were reaching under the seat for your hat; it was a good example of the comedy-romance formula that Hollywood has down cold, with emphasis not on content but on the facility with which it is told. It was right in the groove that Hollywood has been geared for, slick, swift and clever. What Kit calls the Golden Rut.

  But in spite of the entertainment on the screen I preferred the show going on in the adjoining seat. I never saw a man work so hard at seeing a picture. “Eleven already,” he said to me a couple of minutes after the picture started, and I realized he had a clocker in his hand and was counting the laughs. And each time they laughed he jotted down feverishly the line or the bit of business. And every time they didn’t he’d mumble, “It’s that goddam ham—he’s murdering my line,” or “That’s a dead spot they can kill when they trim it.”

  I just sat there watching him learn the motion-picture business. He was an apt student, all right. He learned something about pictures in five months that I’m just beginning to understand after five years. Hollywood always has its bumper crop of phonies but believe it or not Sammy was one of the less obvious ones. He was smart enough to know that the crook who cracks his jobs too consistently is sure to be caught. His secret was to be just as conscientious about the real work he did as about the filching and finagling.

  The picture got a good hand as the lights came on again. I turned to follow Sammy up the aisle but Kit grabbed my arm.

  “Out this way,” she said. “It’s better.”

  She indicated the emergency exit on the side. It led us to an alley that ran around the theater. As we walked through the darkness toward the street, Kit said:

  “I always like to duck out before anybody asks me how I liked the picture.”

  “Even if you did?”

  “It isn’t that simple. Hollywood has a regular ritual for preview reactions. When they know they’ve got a turkey they want to be reassured. And when they have one that’s okay they expect superlatives.”

  She illustrated her point by telling the old Hollywood story about the three yes-men who are asked what they think of the preview. The first says it is without a doubt the greatest picture ever made. The second says it is absolutely colossal and stupendous. The third one is fired for shaking his head and saying, “I don’t know, I only think it’s great.”

  “Just the same,” I said, “I’m impressed. To tell the truth I didn’t know Sammy had it in him.”

  “Don’t misunderstand,” she said. “I think it’s a damn good movie. The only thing I have against those guys is that they’re like the old Roman Caesars—every piddling little success becomes an excuse for staging a triumph. And I just don’t happen to enjoy being dragged along behind the chariot.”

  When we reached the street Sammy was standing with half a dozen men bunched on the curb in front of the theater. They all seemed to be talking at once, though Sammy was doing his best to drown them out. Kit pointed out the others besides Sammy and Fineman, the director, the cutter, several other executives and the cameraman. A couple of others were hovering around the edge, mostly listening and reacting. Fineman and the director seemed to be having an argument. The director was yelling that if they yanked his favorite scene they could take his name off the picture. Sammy was supporting Fineman.

  We watched a boy bring out a ladder and climb up efficiently to change the lettering on the marquee, and then Kit said, “These sidewalk conferences are liable to last all night. Let’s go and have a drink. He can meet us there.”

  My mind kept remembering the way she had made herself at home at Sammy’s as we left that night. It was crazy to let it annoy me because I hadn’t even made up my mind yet whether I liked her or not. I liked the way her mind drove at things but there was something disconcerting about the way she kept you from getting too close to her.

  As we started for the parking station, she turned around and called to Sammy briskly, “The Cellar.”

  An anemic young man in a shabby overcoat was waiting at the car. I knew him, but I couldn’t place him until he began to talk. Of course it was Julian Blumberg.

  He was unable to hide the terrible effort it was for him to approach me. You could see it was an act of desperation.

  “Mr. Manheim, I don’t think you remember me …”

  His e
yes seemed to be forever crying. He kept cracking his knuckles, shifting his balance and looking everywhere but at me. The Jewish language has the best word I have ever heard for people like Julian: nebbish. A nebbish person is not exactly an incompetent, a dope or a weakling. He is simply the one in the crowd that you always forget to introduce.

  “Of course I do,” I said. “Glad to see you.”

  I tried to make it sound hearty. He extended his hand as if he expected me to crack it with a ruler. I could feel the perspiration in his palm.

  When I introduced him to Kit he gave her a preoccupied nod and then, as if he had been sucking in his breath for it a long time, he blurted out what he wanted to say to me. As with so many timorous people when it finally came out it sounded brusque and overbold.

  “Mr. Manheim, I’ve got to see you right away.”

  “Sure, Julian,” I said, “can you tell me what it’s about?”

  He looked at Kit suspiciously. “Alone,” he said. “I want to talk to you alone.”

  His voice begged and demanded at the same time. I suppose I should have been sore, but it was hard to miss the undertones in Julian’s rudeness.

  “All right,” I said, “will it take very long?”

  The determination valve suddenly seemed to loosen and the bluster leaked out of him. “Gosh, Mr. Manheim, I know I’m being a nuisance but I wouldn’t think of bothering you like this unless …”

  “How long would you say it would take?” I interrupted impatiently.

  “It’s—there’s quite a lot to tell. I’d say a couple of hours.”

  I looked at Kit. “Why don’t you two go ahead?” she said. “I don’t mind being alone.”

  That was the trouble, I knew she didn’t mind being alone.

  “I’ll tell you what you do, Julian. It’ll keep until lunch tomorrow, won’t it? How about dropping around at the studio? Twelve-thirty okay?”

  He was so grateful it was painful. He backed away like an awkward courtier, hoping he wasn’t being too much trouble and thanking me again.

  “Who is that damp little fellow?” Kit asked as she pressed her foot on the starter.

  I still didn’t feel I knew her well enough to tell her the story of Girl Steals Boy. So I just said he was a writer Sammy and I knew in New York who was out here looking for a job.

  “No wonder he looked worried,” she said. “There were exactly two hundred and fifty of us working today. The Guild keeps a daily check-up. And do you know how many screen writers there are? Nearly a thousand. With carloads of bright-eyed college kids arriving every week—willing to do or die for dear old World-Wide at thirty-five a week.”

  I don’t really believe that liquor will cure all the ills in our society. But two or three healthy slugs often cure our curious inability to know each other. Unless we know people well, we sit around with our words and our minds starched, afraid of being ourselves for fear of wrinkling them.

  Down in the Cellar, after the first couple of drinks, I could feel us loosening up with each other. It wasn’t in anything we said, it was just that we seemed to like each other better and we both knew it.

  We entertained ourselves for the first few minutes watching how different people came down the stairway and posed on the final landing before entering the room.

  When we had had enough of that game we found ourselves playing a new one called How I Met Sammy. She asked me first. I amused her for ten or fifteen minutes with a quick enumeration of the highlights of Sammy Glick’s Mein Kampf, but doing a Will Hays on the more extravagant of his achievements.

  “I met him during the revolution we almost had last year,” she said. “When Upton Sinclair was running for Governor.”

  I said I had heard about it but had never paid much attention to it.

  “Then you really missed something,” she said. “The panic was on when Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination by announcing that he was going to End Poverty in California.”

  “I always thought Sinclair was just another of your California crackpots,” I said.

  “Oh, his script had plenty of holes all right,” she said, “but I think it would have given the people a better run for their money than Merriam’s—which hadn’t changed a line since Birth of a Nation.”

  “Well, where does Sammy Glick come in?”

  “He’s practically banging on the door now,” she said. “At the height of the campaign World-Wide had a sudden loss of memory. It’s funny how a little thing like the Bill of Rights can slip your mind once in a while. They demanded that every employee contribute a day’s pay to the Merriam fund. That was something I thought even honest Republicans should resent, so I told them where to go, in my prettiest profanity.

  “A couple of days later I was sitting there in my office minding my own script, when a total stranger burst into my office as if his pants were on fire.”

  “I’m Sammy Glick,” he said.

  And waited as if that were all the introduction he needed.

  “Whatever you’re selling,” she said, “I’m not in the market for anything. I’m very busy.”

  “You’ve got me wrong,” he laughed. “I’m the new writer just moved in across the hall.”

  “How chummy,” she said. “If you’re ever short drop over and borrow a cup of dialogue.”

  Because she had never heard of Sammy Glick she tried to discourage him by turning back to her typewriter.

  “That’s a honey,” he laughed, moving in. “I’ll hafta remember that one.”

  As she turned around she found herself looking into his face.

  “Mr. Glick,” she began sweetly, “I suppose I ought to be hospitable and welcome you to Writers’ Building C. And now that I have will you get the hell out of my office and let me work? ”

  She had chased her share of brassy guys out of the office, ad-space salesmen and small-time agents and the usual studio lounge lice. When sarcasm didn’t get them, a little pungent cussing would. But this one was different. He settled down on the edge of her desk and looked over her shoulder.

  “I hear you’re working on Dancing Debs,” he said. “That oughta be a swell credit.”

  She rose, covered her typewriter, stuffed some of the papers on her desk into a big envelope and slung her coat over her shoulder.

  “Where you goin’?” he said.

  “Where I can work,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said, “don’t let me chase you out. I just dropped in for a friendly chat. Thought I’d give you a tip that the front office knows you’re the only writer on the lot who hasn’t come across for Merriam.”

  That was the way the pressure went. Nobody was ever called into an executive office and told to shell out or get out. That job was taken over by the stooges. The yes-men had a field day with their “all-for-your-own-good-old-fellow” stuff, coercion by innuendo in the best Hollywood style, pouring it in the victim’s ear as if he were being told the latest studio gossip.

  Next morning Kit reached the lot a few minutes before nine-thirty and had coffee at the studio diner before going to work.

  Sammy was there, having breakfast and making verbal passes at the waitress. When he saw Kit he slid over to greet her as if their first meeting had been love at first sight.

  “Which way do you come in the morning?” he asked. “Maybe you could pick me up.”

  “I come by way of Boulder Dam,” she said. “I’m sure it’s a little out of your way.”

  He took this as a joke and started reading the Megaphone with her. Of course the lead edit was about Merriam and Sinclair. Sammy began to read it out loud. She picked up the paper and paid her check. He followed her out. She walked faster, ignoring him. He trotted along beside her desperately.

  “Look, you’re a smart girl, you read the papers, you know how the cards are stacked against this nut Sinclair …”

  She managed to lose him by turning into a convenient ladies’ room.

  As she came down the hall he appeared at his doorway. She tried to sh
ut the door in his face but he slithered through like a cat.

  “No kidding, Katie—is that what they call you, Katie? I’m worried about you,” he said. “Now why don’t you let me get on the phone and tell Dan Young …” Dan Young was the studio manager who had sent out the notices about the day’s pay. Sammy reached for the phone.

  Kit looked at him curiously.

  “How long have you been in California?” she said.

  “Four days.”

  “So you’ve learned enough about the issues of the campaign in four days to become a political adviser,” she said.

  “How long does it take you to find out that the sun rises in the east?” Sammy said. “One good look.”

  “What do you know about Merriam?”

  Sammy’s answer came prompt and glib. “He’s for law and order. He’s a friend of the industry. He’s a right guy.”

  “If the people push over the Merriam machine,” she stated quietly, “it’s my guess they’ll find enough corruption crawling around under there to keep all the starving lawyers in California busy the rest of their lives—digging it out.”

  “So what?” Sammy said. “Everybody knows about Jimmy Walker. And he’s the best mayor New York ever had.”

  “I’m afraid you flunk in citizenship,” she said. “Didn’t you ever have to take Civics?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What a laugh. The teacher giving us all that crap out of a book when all we had to do to learn about politics was watch the Tammany guy on the corner.”

  She looked at him. She had a temper and she knew she was going to have to lose it, but she didn’t want to lose it for a moment or two. Anything on a large enough scale, even a pest, can be arresting.

  “And how about Upton Sindair?” she said. “What do you know about him?”

  “He’s a Bolshevik,” Sammy recited. “He’s out to cut up all the big dough in the State so everybody has the same. He wants to shut down the studios and start a revolution.”