What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  Just as a white evening gown was wrong for her, mascara, powder and lipstick were more out of place than ever when she pressed her lips together and set her jaw.

  “We might as well recognize we have some of the most unique union members in the history of organized labor. Like Brother Glick, swimming around in that fish bowl of champagne down there.”

  Lights were going out all over Hollywood. As I watched, the two o’clock curfew erased the blazing neon longhand of the Trocadero. Sammy Glick was probably leaning back in the plush seat of his rented Lincoln blowing cigar smoke into the face of the goddess millions of American guys of all nationalities were making love to as they fell asleep in flop houses, salesmen’s hotels and college dormitories.

  “Kit,” I said, “let’s have another drink. Let’s drink to a helluva wonderful country—and a cockeyed time.”

  CHAPTER 8

  That was the month everything happened. It started crazy right off the bat. I got a good job, the best I ever had. Kit swung it for me. After Masaryk died, it struck me that the story of his life ought to be a natural for pictures. His ties with American democracy gave it special significance for us, and with Mussolini shooting off his big guns in Ethiopia and Hitler his big mouth in Germany, an anti-fascist picture seemed like a good idea. I told Kit about it, and as usual she didn’t show too much excitement, but a couple of weeks later she bowled me over with the news that she had passed the idea on to Sidney Fineman and he had given her a favorable reaction and wanted to see me.

  Fineman said he had thought of doing Masaryk before, had even registered it, in fact, but he liked my angle on it and put me to work. Fineman was a refutation of everything I had ever heard about producers. His office was large but in good taste, with real books in the bookcases and theatrical prints on the walls. He could express a thought without making you find the words for it and an emotion without resorting to profanity. He knew much more about Masaryk than I did. He didn’t want to be yessed. He told me he could only hire me week-to-week but not to get panicky, that he wouldn’t even ask to see what I had done for at least four weeks.

  “Even then,” he said, “I don’t care if you only have a handful of pages as long as there’s something worth going on with. The danger in this story is that it will be a series of lectures on democracy. Moving pictures haven’t got time for sermons. Try to get in the habit of thinking in terms of pictorial action.”

  He gave me an example I’ll always remember. Fineman once imported a famous playwright from Broadway at five thousand a week. The first job the playwright had to do was an opening scene in a picture where he had to establish that the husband was tiring of his wife. Fifteen thousand dollars later the playwright brought in a twenty-page scene. Fineman thought the dialogue was brilliant but way over length for the start of the picture. The playwright protested that you couldn’t cut a line out of his scene without ruining it. Fineman showed the scene to his director, Ray MacKenna, one of the few men left in the business who got his training in the Mack Sennett two-reel comedy school. Mac sent the scene back to Fineman with one of his own. It was typed out on half a page. It read:

  INT. ELEVATOR MEDIUM SHOT

  Husband and wife in evening clothes. Husband wearing top hat.

  REVERSE ANGLE

  As elevator door opens and classy dame enters.

  CLOSE SHOT HUSBAND AND WIFE

  Get husband’s reaction to new dame. Removes hat with flourish.

  Wife looks from dame to husband’s hat to husband. Then glares at him as we

  CUT TO:

  Fineman chuckled at me over his curved pipe.

  “Mac couldn’t write a complete sentence,” he said. “But that was great writing—for the screen.”

  I couldn’t wait to get out of his office and start writing the greatest screenplay of all time. I hadn’t felt like that since I ran into an English teacher in college who had the effect on you of a literary laxative. You felt you would have to run out of class before it was over and rush back to your room and let it all out of your system. Kit’s enthusiasm for motion pictures had always been a little hard to take. But now I remembered something she had said somewhere along the line, “The most exciting way ever invented to tell a story is with a moving-picture camera.” I couldn’t wait to get into my office and begin telling it.

  Sammy Glick may get everything else, I thought, but by God this is a pleasure he’ll never know, the joy of writing that first line on the pad, which sounds so beautiful now and so lousy later, the tremendous pleasure and labor of creating something you believe in.

  Sammy looked in around lunchtime. He wasn’t dressed like a writer. More like a fight champ or a sweepstakes winner. The crepe soles on his white kid shoes seemed to be half a foot high and the flower in his lapel stood out like a red light against his white suede jacket.

  “You look like a fugitive from Esquire,” I said.

  He had to laugh because it was supposed to be a gag, but I don’t think his heart was in it.

  “Welcome to the big leagues,” he said. “I hear you sold Fine man a bill of goods. I want you to know I put in a good word for you. Hear you got a terrific story.”

  You could feel him selling your story back to you the same way he would his own.

  “I haven’t got any story yet,” I said. “Just a start, an idea.”

  “I bet it’s terrific, sweetheart,” he said. “I hope you make a million dollars.”

  Then he paused to look at me compassionately. “But I hear they got you working for peanuts. Three hundred and fifty a week.”

  I had to admit my disgrace, though I couldn’t figure out how he found out so fast.

  “I got a pipeline from the front office,” he said. “Me and Dan Young’s secretary are like this.”

  His hands performed an obscene gesture. “I mean Young’s secretary and I. I wound up with her at the last studio Christmas party and she still thinks I’m in love with her.”

  “Sammy,” I said, “I’m trying to work.”

  “Al, why don’t you cut it out?” Sammy kidded. “Your sense of fair play is going to ruin the racket for the rest of us.”

  He dragged me to my feet affectionately. “Time to duck out for a little lunchee. I’ll introduce you around the commissary. Cooped up in here all day isn’t going to get you anywhere. You got to spread your wings a little bit.”

  I hesitated. I wanted to think about Masaryk. And when you ate lunch with Sammy Glick, there was only one thing on the menu, Sammy Glick.

  “If you need a convincer,” Sammy said, “I told Julian to save a couple of seats for us at the writers’ table.”

  Julian hadn’t changed. He looked a little healthier, he was wearing a new suit which was just like the old one and his handshake didn’t seem so frightened, but you would never have taken him for a hit writer and that’s what he was becoming. Studio environment seemed to have no more effect on him than his tenement neighborhood had. He and Blanche had never been so happy, he said. They had rented a little cottage overlooking the ocean near Topanga Canyon and they had a baby coming along in the fall. He was even getting his novel finished.

  I said I couldn’t believe it. Everybody said it was absolutely impossible out here to do any writing of your own.

  “I know,” he said. “That’s what everybody says. But I don’t understand it. Every Saturday, unless I’m doing a rush job, I leave here at noon. Blanche and I go for a long walk along the beach, I take a quick dip—I’ve been doing it since the first of March—and then I write until I go to bed. You couldn’t want a better place to work than right there over the ocean.”

  Sammy hadn’t even sat down with us yet. He was all over the place like a headwaiter. We could hear him yelling to somebody across the room.

  “He spends two hours here every day,” Julian said. “This is where he really goes to work. He’s the commissary genius. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed our screen credits or not but they always say—Story by Sammy Glick—Screenpl
ay by Sammy Glick and Julian Blumberg. You know where he got all those story credits? Right here in the commissary.”

  The story of how he did it was so intriguing that we both forgot to order. Sammy would walk up to a director and say, “Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich in Titanic. Do I have to say any more?”

  Then he would just walk away from the guy, significantly, and leave it in his lap. The director has been desperate for a socko story all year. Tracy and Dietrich in Titanic. Jesus, it sounds like something. Natural suspense. And two great characters. Maybe Spence is a good two-fisted minister who tries to straighten Marlene out. Marlene is a tramp, of course. He’s real. She’s anything for a laugh. Then, even though the boat is going down you bring the audience up with a hell of a lift because Marlene suddenly sees the light.

  Meanwhile Sammy bumps into a supervisor. “I was just telling Chick Tyler my new story,” he says. “He went off his nut about it. Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich in Titanic. Do I have to say any more?”

  And he drops the hot potato in the supervisor’s lap and runs again. The supervisor knows Sammy hasn’t missed yet. And he’s been trying to get a cast like that ever since he’s been made a supervisor. So he drops by Tyler’s table.

  “Sammy Glick tells me you’re hot for his Titanic story,” he says.

  “Yeah,” Tyler says, “I think the kid’s got something. And it’s right down my alley.”

  By this time Tyler is practically thinking up the acceptance speech he’ll make on receiving the Academy Award. “I could get a great picture out of that,” he says. “Remember what I did with Strange Voyage? That’s for me!”

  All this time Sammy is hopping from table to table, pollinating his story like a bumblebee, catching them as they go in and out, asking everybody who can possibly help him if he has to say anything more and running off before they can answer. Everybody is now asking everybody else if they have heard Sammy’s Titanic story. And by this time, through unconscious generosity, they have contributed to the story two characters, a beginning, middle and a climax. Now Sammy manages to cross the path of the General Manager in Charge of Production. Sammy has heard that he’s been a little burned lately because people are saying he is losing touch with studio activities.

  “How do you do, sir,” Sammy says. “I suppose Tyler and Hoyt have told you my story for Dietrich and Tracy. Titanic? Everybody who’s heard it seems very excited about it.”

  He has heard about Glick, of course, and he never likes to appear ignorant of anything. “Yes, I have, Glick,” he says. “Sounds very interesting. I’m going to call you all in for a conference on it some time this week.”

  When they all get together, all anyone knows is that everybody else thinks it’s great. And since everybody has gone on record, no one is willing to admit just how little about the story he knows. So the safest thing is to let Sammy get something on paper, which means that Julian has to start dreaming up a story called Titanic while the trade papers and Parsons naturally pass on to their readers what Sammy has told them, that everyone on his lot is saying his epic drama Titanic is absolutely the greatest vehicle either of those two great stars has ever had.

  There was no bitterness or anger in Julian’s story. It was full of mild wonder and deep resignation.

  Sammy finally got around to us. He introduced me to everybody at the long table, selling me to them and them to me.

  “I want you to meet a very sweet guy,” he would say. “I want you to meet the sweetest guy in the world.”

  The talk around the table was almost all gags. Everybody seemed afraid to say anything unless he thought it would get a laugh. One of the writers had ordered wine and a young producer who had just been graduated from the writers’ ranks asked him, “What are you Guild members drinking these days—producers’ blood?”

  It got a good laugh and you could hear him repeating it with variations. “At the Guild Board meetings they toast Der Tag with producers’ blood. Hey, Joe, know what Brown is drinking …?”

  Everybody kidded about the Guild back and forth, but I felt that gagging was really the official court language and that underneath it all you could feel the friction growing.

  “Just wait till we join the Authors’ League, comrades!” Sammy shouted. “Then all us downtrodden writers can become producers and we’ll punish the producers by making them get down on their hands and knees—and write!”

  Some of the laughter was automatic, some frightened, some reactionary.

  That was the month I will never forget because it seemed to sum up everything about Hollywood that was splendid and crazy and hopeful and terrifying.

  You can choose your own adjectives for the front-page story in the Megaphone that was waiting for me on my desk one morning, for like everybody else I couldn’t start my day without reading the little trade journals from cover to cover.

  GLICK GETS $80,000 FOR

  LIVE WIRE FROM WORLD-WIDE

  —

  RETURNS TO HOME LOT TO ADAPT

  OWN PLAY AT $1250 A WEEK

  That, as Sammy would say, was the convincer. I decided that the history of Hollywood was nothing but twenty years of feverish preparation for the arrival of Sammy Glick.

  Sammy came in a little later, of course, making the rounds to take his bows. He was wearing a new outfit, gray checks of contrasting sizes for the coat and pants. And the flower which was becoming a fixture. “Sammy,” I said, “I read the bad news this morning. May I be the first to console you?”

  He thought I meant it as a gag. But I assured him I was serious. “I thought this play was going to put you in the two-thousand-a-week class,” I said. “But I see you’re only getting twelve-fifty.”

  I was right. All the excitement of that astronomical dough was over already. He was really eating his heart out about that extra seven-fifty. Of Hollywood’s one thousand screen writers, there might be three or four dozen getting twelve-fifty. But the two-grand-a-week boys were really the inner circle. It was the difference between the Big League and Triple-A.

  “They wanted me to sign a new contract,” he said, “but I wouldn’t do it. Why should I tie myself down?”

  The Guild was asking its members not to sign contracts that bound them for more than two years, so that at the end of that time they would all be free to take a strike vote if that became necessary to win recognition for the Guild. That was called Article XII. It was going to be called a lot of other things before the month was over. Kit was a very persuasive girl, but I had never expected to see the day when Sammy would be loyal to his own mother, much less nine hundred fellow writers he was breaking his neck and his heart to outdistance. And I told him so.

  “Hell, no,” he said. “That’s not why. If you ask me, the Guild has a helluva nerve telling us to do anything like that. If I signed a contract now it would probably get me there in a couple of steps, probably fifteen hundred and then seventeen-fifty. But I’m catching the express now, baby. I’m getting off at my station in one stop.”

  That day it seemed to me that when we were talking about the Guild’s struggle for a foothold in Hollywood and Sammy’s struggle for a stranglehold, we were talking about two different things. That only showed how much I had to learn about Hollywood and the Guild and, in spite of all these years and all my lessons, Sammy Glick.

  A few days later the Megaphone had a new headline that they were so happy about, it sounded as if they could hardly resist printing HOORAY at the end of it.

  OPPOSITION GROUP FORMS WITHIN GUILD!

  Responding to a rising tide of resentment among Guild members against their Executive Board for selling out their autonomy to the group of Eastern racketeers and Reds who controlled the Authors’ League, the news story chortled, the responsible element has formed a Committee of Five who have pledged themselves to rescue the writers’ ship from the hands of the crackpots and adventurers and steer it back to the port of sanity again. The five distinguished gentlemen who were so unselfishly volunteering their time and pres
tige to rescue their fellow artists from destruction were Lawrence Paine, Harold Godfrey Wilson, John McCarter, Robert Griffin and—Sammy Glick.

  Things had been moving so fast that it didn’t even seem strange to me any more than this copy-boy punk of mine should be taking it for granted that he was one of the spokesmen for the Guild elite without, as far as I could detect, ever having written a line. As I watched Sammy at the big-shot writers’ table in the commissary that noon, I kept wondering where the hell it was all going to end and how many pairs of shoes Sammy must have collected by now and whether he was twenty-four years old or twenty-five.

  I caught up with Kit on our way out and we fell in step.

  “Take a walk with me,” she said.

  We walked out past the sound stages and the machine shops and the labor gangs to the back lot. We walked past the New York street and up through the Latin Quarter of Paris until we came to a South Sea Island with a little beach leading down to real water. We crossed a little bridge to the island and sat down on the sand in front of a native hut. The hot April sun was just what the set designer ordered. I dug my hands into the warm sand and lay on my back, looking up through a palm tree supported with piano wire, at the cloudless sky.

  “Where are we?” I said.

  “This used to be Hollywood,” she said with a poker face and voice. “Before the Depression.”

  “If a rescue ship comes by,” I said, “hide.”

  She gave a little laugh that seemed to release her inside.

  We both lay back and laughed in the sun, not so much at what we were saying but at the idea of being on a desert island together. She started to say something else and I got ready to laugh again but she crossed me up.

  “Those sons of bitches.”

  “Who?” I said. I was still on our island.

  “The Committee of Five,” she said.

  “What do you think?” I said.