What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  When it rang a voice started talking a mile a minute.

  “Oh, you dumb son-of-a-bitch, you glutton for punishment, you momser you.”

  “Where the hell are you, in a pay phone? Where you don’t want to waste time saying hello?”

  “Listen to him,” Sammy said. “He’s going down for the last time and he tries to make jokes yet. Well, Al, I don’t know whether I’m just getting soft or whether I’m queer for you. But I’m going to give you one more chance.”

  “I didn’t do it, mister, honest, don’t hit me again,” I said.

  “Listen, Al,” he said, “I don’t see what you have to be so goddam cheerful about. I kept telling you. But you wouldn’t listen to me. You had to stick your neck out like a giraffe. Now you really bitched yourself up. But good. But I’ve got some influence in this town now and there may still be an outside chance of cleaning you up. Now here’s what I want you to do. Larry Paine is having a little get-together at his place tonight and I thought you might be doing yourself a hell of a lot of good if you came …”

  This seemed to be a good chance to find out what the boys were up to. And of course there was the old curiosity as to how this was going to quicken the already mercurial pace of Mr. Glick.

  Paine’s home was an old plantation in Bel Air. The butler showed me into the bar, where I found the Four Horsemen, Paine, Wilson, McCarter and Glick, entertaining fifteen or twenty other writers. I spotted Lorna Flint, the old silent star who was in the writing game on a raincheck, George Pancake and my epic poet, Henry Powell Turner.

  After two or three drinks, the party turned out to be a meeting.

  Lawrence Paine called us to order and congratulated us on being the founding fathers of a new writers’ organization, the Association of Photodramatists.

  We, he informed us, were to have much the same aims as the defunct Screen Writers Guild, except that we would be a more select group, with a more discreet program.

  Then Sammy nominated Paine as President, Jack McCarter seconded it and Sammy announced that he had been unanimously elected, although my right hand had stayed right in my pocket where it belonged.

  Pancake nominated Henry Powell Turner for Vice-President. Turner rose, jowly and almost bald now, and I noticed how his fingers trembled as they reached to clutch the back of the seat in front of him.

  “I regret that it will not be practical for me to accept this office,” he explained. “For I am quitting Hollywood for good, to devote myself exclusively to poetry again, as soon as I finish my present assignment.”

  So the Vice-President of the Association of Photodramatists turned out to be Sammy Glick.

  After Wilson and McCarter were honored with the remaining offices, we were all invited to sign up as charter members. Pancake signed with a flourish and handed me the pen.

  “I thought you were opposed to writers’ organizations?” I said.

  “This one is different,” he said righteously.

  “You said it!” Sammy cut in. “These guys know what side their contract is buttered on.”

  He looked down the list officiously. “Where’s your name?” he accused me.

  “In my wallet,” I said.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” he said.

  “I’ve just been through one war,” I said. “I don’t think I could take another.”

  “There’s not going to be any war,” he said. “I got it all fixed.”

  “How about recognition?” I said. “The Guild’s been battling over that for years.”

  “That shows you how smart your Guild is,” he said. “We’re going to be recognized right off the bat. I got it straight from Dan Young. What do you think of that?”

  “I think that’s very interesting,” I said. “What were you and Young doing discussing the recognition of an organization that hadn’t even been formed yet, much less elected spokesmen?”

  “I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to sound him out on the idea,” he said.

  “Do whom any harm?” I said. “So you and Young decided that it was wrong for the Guild with nine hundred members to represent all the writers in Hollywood, but all right for your Photodramatists with twenty members?”

  “That’s because they know we have the industry at heart,” Sammy explained. “They know they can trust us.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He put his hand on my arm intimately.

  “Come outside a moment, Al. I want to talk to you.”

  We walked along the edge of the pool. Sammy’s tone was conspiratorially important.

  “You know I told you the other day I had something I wasn’t ready to break yet? Well, it still hasn’t quite jelled, but there’s a good chance I won’t be writing much longer. I’ll be on the hiring end …”

  Sammy paused to take a deep, proud draw on his cigar.

  I wondered if this was the price of his sell-out tactics in the Guild. If he became a writer by using Julian Blumberg as a stepping stone, it seemed only fitting that he should become a supervisor by climbing over hundreds of other writers.

  All I could think of to say was, “I’ll be god-damned.”

  “Shut up and listen,” he ordered. “If this thing goes through, I’m thinking of keeping a writer with me all the time. You know, someone who’s loyal to me. What’s the percentage in going down with the Guild when you can waltz into a set-up like that? So why not be smart for once and join an outfit that’s strictly class?”

  “Sammy,” I said, “why not try not being smart for once? Just once.”

  Sammy’s voice knifed cold through the night air. “Okay, Al, I was only trying to help you. But if you haven’t learned by this time that it’s every man for himself, it’s no skin off my ass. It’s your funeral.”

  Sammy thrust his hands into his pockets and started back to his Association of Photodramatists, taking long brisk strides with his head down as if he were bucking a stiff wind. It was the great-man walk he was developing.

  The next evening there was another little meeting in Hollywood. But this gathering was small for another reason, it was not a beginning, but an ending.

  The Guild had called its members to a final reckoning. It wanted to learn whether it was still in existence. A handful of us stood around the door hopefully as the survivors straggled in. When the meeting began the room was so empty that the President asked us all to move up, so we wouldn’t look so desolate. It was a sad and splendid little meeting full of the warmth and understanding toward each other that people have to dig deep in themselves to tap, which they only reveal when their farms have been washed away by flood or their homes blown off the earth by bombs or when somebody dies.

  I looked around and smiled at friends I had never met or talked to. It was strange to see who the die-hards turned out to be. Some of those who had been the most belligerent and loudest were gone. But Bob Griffin was there, for some reason he would probably never be able to explain even to himself. And Julian, a shade paler than usual, faint from fright at his own courage, wanting nothing more from life than that little yellow house with the surf splashing up below it, martyring himself because he couldn’t learn how to run, forward or backward.

  Kit topped the evening off with a little hail-and-farewell speech that somehow managed to sound hard-boiled and idealistic at the same time.

  “In four hectic weeks we have seen our Guild murdered by a small group of willful (for want of a better name) men with only one allegiance—to themselves. Our President has asked me to deliver the funeral oration but I’m afraid any elegy would be out of place because I have a feeling that the corpse is going to be very obstinate about being buried.”

  Afterwards Kit, Julian and I adjourned to Barney’s Beanery to cry into our beer. In one corner of the joint somebody was playing a Louie Armstrong in a jukebox and in the other those two ex-vaudeville headliners were singing familiar songs that everybody has forgotten. And yet there was something nice and peaceful about the place.

  The only d
iscordant note was a recent discovery of Julian’s that began to round out the picture of Sammy Glick, union member and all-around Brother of Man.

  “Yesterday when I went back to clean out my desk—by the way, I’m no longer employed by World-Wide—I could hear Mr. Wilson shouting at the top of his voice—you know he has the office next to mine. Well, I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I thought I heard something about Sammy and it sounded interesting, so I used a trick I learned in that mystery picture we did: I put an empty glass against the wall and pressed my ear against it.

  “Wilson was doing the worst cursing I ever heard. He was screaming his head off about the studio double-crossing him and calling Sammy every dirty name under the sun. After a while I began to get it. ‘Son-of-a-bitch-bastard!’ Wilson was howling, ‘For ten years the one thing I want is to be a producer. I figure the best way to get my break is to lead the stampede out of the Guild like the studio wants. And then, when it looks like I’m all set, a little jerk who could be my son, God forbid, beats me to the punch!’ ”

  It seemed a rather devious way of becoming a producer—but there it was. We all got hysterical at Julian’s picture of Wilson foaming at the mouth because Sammy had appropriated the fruits of his treachery, but it would have been funnier if it hadn’t contained so much horror, the horror of a foetus called Sammy Glick sprinting out of his mother’s womb, turning life into a race in which the only rules are fight for the rail and elbow on the turns and the only finish line is death.

  “Sammy is really revolutionizing Hollywood,” Kit laughed. “It’s getting so a man isn’t even safe being a louse any more.”

  “Wilson ought to picket in front of Sammy’s office,” I added. “Sammy Glick Is Unfair to Organized Double-Crossers!”

  The next day I got a call from my agent. “Hello,” he said. “How are you at dishwashing or making paper flowers? Because I’m afraid you’d better start looking for another trade.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Tough,” he said. “Very tough. Jesus, I didn’t know you were one of the ringleaders of the Guild.”

  “Neither did I,” I said. “So I’m really on the blacklist?”

  “If there was a blacklist, I guess you’d be on it, all right,” he said. “But they don’t need anything like that in this chummy little business. All it takes is a couple of big shots happening to mention it over a poker game—or meeting in Chasen’s and passing the word along. That’s why you should have played ball.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve been following the career of the greatest ballplayer of them all.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

  “About Joe DiMaggio,” I said. “Skip it, pal.” I guess I was just thinking I was back where I came from again, watching the kid run for a high one in the old Stadium.

  It was to be the last dinner before I caught the train for New York in the morning.

  “Where shall it be for dinner?” I said. “Let’s make it some place special.”

  “Oh, I think it’s only fitting that you pay your respects to the Derby,” Kit said. “It’s the Hollywood version of the farewell visit to the college chapel.”

  We sat in the Derby watching the people watch each other.

  “It’s a funny thing,” Kit said. “If you watch an animal while it eats, it stops. But here in the Derby several hundred people pay and pay well for the privilege.”

  “And of watching everybody else,” I said.

  Everybody turned to stare at the foreign star who had just come in with her husband and her new lover. She walked between them with a haughty pride, the way one does with Russian wolfhounds.

  “Look at that poor bastard,” Kit said, pointing out the husband, a big director in Europe who hadn’t been able to get a job here and who seemed to be laughing gaily at something the lover had just said.

  “He knows everybody in the room read about his wife and that other guy in Parsons’ column this morning, and he’s feeling just terribly modern and Noel Coward.”

  “And lousy,” I added.

  I looked around the Derby, at the familiar faces, at the faces I had never seen before but which looked familiar because they fitted so well into the pattern, at the caricatures on the wall which seemed to be unconsciously mocking them all.

  Then I suddenly heard a familiar voice.

  “Saw your picture, Dave. Tuhriffic!”

  I knew who it was before I spotted him, several tables down the aisle. No voice carried quite like Sammy’s. He had stopped at Dave Roberts’s table, draping himself over it to embrace the famous director.

  “There he blows!” I said.

  “Blows is right!” Kit answered.

  “Tuhriffic!” Sammy was exclaiming. “You made me cry. You know what a tough audience I am and I swear to God when that little kid comes home Christmas morning and finds her doll broken, you got me”—he indicated the general direction of his heart and tapped it several times meaningfully—”here.”

  He gave Roberts’s hand a tender good-bye squeeze and rejoined his own table. Rita was waiting for him, and a tall, elegant Englishman I had seen at the Larry Paine gathering, and a swarthy young man in a dapper stiff white collar and flashy suit.

  “Who’s he with?” I said.

  “The one who looks like a bodyguard is something Sammy just dug up,” Kit said. “Called Sheik Dugan. Sammy seems to be breaking him in as a high-class stooge. Out here they’re as necessary a social prop as valets. The other one is Sir Anthony Abbott. Came over with quite a fanfare about being the greatest writer in England. So far the chief contribution he’s made to Hollywood seems to be a five-goal rating for Zanuck’s polo team.”

  “Remember that time you told me you knew a lot of Sammy Glicks,” I said. “I thought you were crazy until I started thinking about that gang at Paine’s the other night. They were all so different—a titled Englishman and a famous poet and an aesthetic nance and a tough, drunken ex-reporter—but they all really had the same idea Sammy had. They were all running. Sammy was just a little bit faster, that’s all.”

  Kit nodded. “I wonder if the thing that makes Sammy so fascinating for us is that he is the id of our whole society.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know how the id is supposed to be the core of your basic appetites which the superego dresses in the clothes of respectability to present to the outside world? Somehow Sammy never had time to get dressed up the way all those others have, Wilson and McCarter and Sir Anthony, all their sammyglickness covered up with Oxford manners or have-one-on-me sociability or Christian morals that they pay their respects to every Sunday morning when they don’t have too big a hangover. I think that’s what first hit me about Sammy. He wasn’t something trying to be something else. He was the thing itself, the id, out in the open. It might not be very pretty but there it was.”

  “So Sammy’s got id,” I said. “And that’s what keeps him running.”

  “Oh, I doubt if it’s that easy,” she laughed. “To find out why Sammy really runs so much faster than anyone else, you’d probably have to know what kind of infancy he had, and whether his kindergarten teacher used to slap him, and under what conditions he learned the facts of life, whether he ever suffered from malnutrition—the whole works.”

  “That’s all I have to worry about when I get back to New York,” I said. “Except for the little matter of finding a job.”

  Sammy had paid his check and was making an exit. He looked over at us, waved fleetingly and ran.

  I watched Sammy at the entrance, standing under the big caricature of Franklin D., looking the place over as if he were about to stick it up, while his man Sheik was helping him into his brown suede overcoat. Then Sammy adjusted with casual care the green Tyrolean hat that his face would never suit, Rita floated out of the ladies’ room and they were off.

  “I wonder what shoes he’s wearing now,” I said. “Probably some little number whipped up by his official cobble
r, with laces of human hair plucked from the heads of leading ladies.”

  “He must have twenty pair,” she said. “What is that special yen for shoes?”

  “Maybe he’s trying to find a pair he can’t wear out in a day,” I said. “If I solve the mystery in New York I’ll shoot a wire.”

  We were on our porch watching the lights black out over Hollywood again.

  We talked about everything, about the Guild and about Sammy and about screen writing and about the revolt of the generals that had just begun in Spain, but it wasn’t like any of the good talks we had had before, because words that night could only be a buzzing of irrelevance.

  I kept noticing the wordless things, the casual, unladylike way she leaned over the porch wall, not caring what the wind did with her hair. The way the glow from the room behind us highlighted the bony handsomeness of her face; how long we were conscious of the closeness of our hands before they finally met, and then how much harder it was to talk.

  And finally I said, “Kit, I’ve been trying to think of fancy ways of saying this for the past two hours. God, I’ve wanted you a long time! I guess you know how long, and I thought tonight …”

  She looked at me and I saw how beautiful her eyes could be when they weren’t being hard and I met the look, inquisitively, and she turned away to stare out at the lights far below.

  “Hell, this isn’t a roll in the hay for me, there’s plenty of that around. This is, well, maybe the best way of saying good-bye …” There was a pool of nausea in my stomach that suddenly became anger. “After all, I’m not a Sammy Glick that hits and runs.”

  I thought she was going to get sore because I was, but instead she said, “Look, darling, I was never going to mention it again, but as long as you have … With Sammy there could never be any complications. You know how he is, monolithic, just tosses it off, never lets you get inside, no emotional entanglements to slow him down. But you, you’re such a sentimental dope, you’d be calling me long distance before you passed Kansas City, wanting to make an honest woman of me.”