Some Faces in the Crowd

by Budd Schulberg

  We kept leaving corn for Snowy night after night and we stayed up as late as we could on school nights in the hope of seeing him again, but it looked like he must have crawled off into the woods and died somewhere. We sure missed him. He wasn’t like our dog Toro or our cat Quaker; we had never fed him or patted him or even so much as touched him. But Snowy was a pet to us just as much as if we had ridden him or taught him to sit up and shake hands. He was the only white deer we ever had and it felt like a knife inside to think of him dead and gone or crawling off to a lonely death. Every night, with less and less hope, we kept a lookout for him, until the last day of gunning season. That was a Saturday, so Davy and I decided to take a long hike through the woods and across a stream to an old deserted, broken-down stone house we used for an emergency headquarters. At the stream we had just stopped to kick the ice in and have a drink when suddenly Davy grabbed me by the shoulder and pointed. It was Snowy all right, big as life and twice as spry, having a drink about twenty-five yards upstream. Boy, we felt so good we could have thrown our arms around him and kissed him, only by that time he was gone, flying up over the rocks and away from the stream as if he had wings on his feet.

  So the last day of gunning was coming to an end and Snowy was still in one piece, kinging it over the woods. We should have known Mr. Jeliffe was just sounding off when he claimed to have hit him. Mr. Jeliffe liked to talk about his trophies, but he wasn’t much of a shot. The way Billy put it, his aim was so poor he couldn’t hit the water if he fell out of a boat.

  That evening, exactly a month from the time we had first seen him, we went up to the meadow again to see if Snowy would come down to visit us again. The moon was like a big white balloon hanging over our head in the cold sky. We had stopped putting corn out because we figured it was healthier for Snowy not to be lured out of the woods. But now we reckoned it was safe again so we tried our old trick of dropping a trail of corn into the middle of the meadow. If we could get Snowy to make a habit of coming down, we would have time to train him now. After a while we could get him to eat out of our hands. He would get used to us and let us lead him around. Maybe we could tame him to the point where we could bed him down in the barn. Wouldn’t that be something to show the kids at school, a fourteen-point white buck for a pet! We’d be about the most famous kids in the county, and the luckiest, because if it’s bad luck to shoot a white deer it must be good luck to help one keep from getting shot and to turn him into a pet.

  That’s what Davy and I were whispering to each other when I’ll be six kinds of a jack-rabbit if Snowy doesn’t poke his head out of the woods, just the way he did the first time; poke his head out, take a good, slow, thoughtful look around and then mosey on into the meadow to nibble the corn, just as peaceful and unconcerned as if he was Hector the ram.

  We were watching him and thinking how noble and magnificent he looked when we heard a sharp whisper behind us—“Shh—quiet—and keep your heads down, boys.” Mr. Jeliffe, with his damn gun, had come creeping up like an Indian. The moon was making a regular spotlight for Snowy and we saw Mr. Jeliffe raise his gun and take aim.

  I yelled, “Davy, Davy, chase him into the woods!” Davy and I started running forward and Snowy took off across the fields as if his tail was on fire. We’ll never forget how beautiful he looked racing along the fence separating our place from the Jeliffe’s, closer and closer to the dark pines. Mr. Jeliffe could never hit a target moving at that speed but somehow we couldn’t stop running and shouting and waving our hands. Now he was almost to the woods, in the far corner of our property, only a few yards from the sheltering woods where Mr. Jeliffe could never get him. His speed must have been fifty or sixty miles an hour, and then, in one terrible moment, he wasn’t moving forward at all. He was crashing down through the small-branch and tar-paper roof of our clubhouse; into the four-foot drop we had tunneled out as a secret meeting place. We ran up to the hole and looked in, feeling trembly all over, feeling sick. Snowy was thrashing around on the dirt floor of our clubhouse. We saw him struggle up nearly to a standing position on three legs and then topple over again.

  “God damn it,” I said. “His leg is broke.”

  When he rolled over on his side and tried to raise again you could see where his rear left leg was hanging loose. He looked up at us and we had never seen him so close, so close that we could touch him. His eyes were wild and sort of pleading and terribly angry and sad as death.

  Mr. Jeliffe came up behind us and looked in. “Well, looks like you trapped him, boys.”

  I said to Mr. Jeliffe, “Go ahead shoot him. His leg is broke. You better shoot him quick.”

  It made an awful noise. Davy and I didn’t want to look, but finally we couldn’t help it; we had to look. Snowy was lying all white and still and terribly dead at the bottom of our clubhouse.

  Mr. Jeliffe said, “Well, looks like we’ll all be eating venison for a month.”

  We didn’t say anything. We just stood there thinking what kind of a man Mr. Jeliffe was and what a wonderful sight Snowy made the first time he lifted his antlers to the moon in our meadow.

  Mr. Jeliffe said, “Tell your dad I’ll have my man hang him and butcher him for both of us. But if you boys don’t mind I’d still like to have that head for the wall of my den.”

  Davy, who says those things faster than I do, said just one word. It was the one he has to pay fifteen cents for every time Dad hears him saying it.

  Mr. Jeliffe said, “Keep your hands off that carcass, boys. I’ll send my man over to carry it back.”

  Davy and I didn’t say anything. We both knew at the same time what we had to do. We went to the edge of the pines and broke off as many branches as we could carry. We covered Snowy with them and went back for another load.

  We had to work fast because Jeliffe’s man would be coming back any minute. Then, while Davy went on piling fallen branches and dead wood on top of the pine, I double-timed it back to the house for some matches. By the time I got back Davy had done a good job. It was a regular funeral pyre. I held a match to some of the pine branches and they caught like paper. We stood back and watched the flames leaping up.

  When Snowy was once more ash and dust and bone we would fill in our clubhouse with dirt and trample it down hard, so the dead would be safe from dogs and buzzards and Mr. Jeliffe. We would set up a cross with Snowy’s name on it. He was our white deer. Never again would Snowy come trotting into our pasture bearing his antlers like the crown of a king. But by God, neither was Mr. Jeliffe going to have Snowy’s wonderful white head mounted on his wall.

  A Biography of Budd Schulberg

  Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was a celebrated screenwriter, novelist, playwright, and journalist best remembered for his classic novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and his Academy Award–winning screenplay for On the Waterfront. Schulberg was the first major American novelist to grow up in Hollywood, a town with which he had a complex and sometimes contentious relationship.

  Born Seymour Wilson Schulberg on March 27, 1914, in New York City, Schulberg and his family relocated to Los Angeles a few years later. His father, Ben “B. P.” Schulberg, became one of the most prominent movie producers in the 1920s and ’30s, so Schulberg grew up among movie stars and powerful studio executives. His mother, Adeline Jaffe, was a talent agent who later became one of the first female literary agents. Both of Schulberg’s parents valued authors and literature, and cultivated Schulberg’s literary ambitions throughout his childhood. More than acting, though, Schulberg revered boxing; his father introduced him to the sport and to some of the era’s champions. His fascination with boxing would influence much of his writing career, including his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall.

  Schulberg attended Dartmouth College and graduated in 1936. He then worked in Hollywood as a writer (collaborating with F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others) while working on his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run? Once it was published, the book set off shockwaves with its frank exposure of the dark side of Hollywood’s g
olden era. The novel angered real-life industry heads and damaged his own father’s career. Schulberg was fired from his scriptwriting job with Samuel Goldwyn and nearly blacklisted in the filmmaking business.

  During World War II, Schulberg worked for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. In 1945, director John Ford tasked him to help assemble film evidence of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps to be used during the Nuremberg trials. This was the first time that film evidence was used in a trial to convict. He compiled footage shot by German filmmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl, who was arrested by Schulberg himself and brought to Nuremberg to help aid the prosecution.

  In 1951, Schulberg was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his former involvement with the Communist Party. Though he had been a member of the party for six years, he had quit after a bitter disagreement with party members who wanted to vet his script for What Makes Sammy Run?. During his testimony, he identified several fellow Hollywood figures as Communists. The HUAC trials caused another rift between Schulberg and the film industry, with many feeling that his testimony betrayed friends and colleagues.

  Despite this setback, Schulberg soon had his greatest film success, with his screenplay for On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan. The movie, about New Jersey longshoremen whose lives are controlled by the Mob, won eight Academy Awards and also evolved into a novel (1955) and a play (1988), both written by Schulberg. He soon reunited with Kazan, turning the title story from his collection Some Faces in the Crowd (1954) into a screenplay for the influential film A Face in the Crowd (1957), which launched the career of actor Andy Griffith.

  Throughout his career, Schulberg worked as a journalist and essayist, often writing about boxing, a lifelong passion. Many of his writings on the sport are collected in Sparring with Hemingway (1995) and Ringside (2006). Other highlights from Schulberg’s nonfiction career include Moving Pictures (1981), an account of his upbringing in Hollywood, and Writers in America (1973), a glimpse of some of the famous novelists he met early in his career.

  Schulberg married four times and had five children. He died at his home on Long Island in 2009.

  Schulberg’s parents, Adeline and B. P. Schulberg, hold an infant Budd in this early family portrait.

  Schulberg and his fourth wife, Betsy Schulberg, in Westhampton Beach, New York, in 2003. © 2003 Ken Regan

  Schulberg at work on his typewriter. At the top of this photo, he wrote the following note to his son: “For Benn, To a happy and productive life ahead! Love, Dad 8/14/2003.”

  Schulberg’s father, B. P. Schulberg.

  Origin: Culver Pictures Inc.

  Schulberg, B.P. (1892-1957), American film producer and executive

  “This picture is loaned for one reproduction only. Must not be used for advertising without written permission.”

  A portrait of Schulberg in 2003, with the following note to his son at the bottom: “For my dear son and best friend Benn with all my love, Dad 8/14/2003.”

  The Schulberg family in Westhampton, New York. From left to right: Jessica, Budd, Betsy, and Benn.

  From left to right: Schulberg, actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, Elia Kazan, and actress Myrna Loy.

  © Rita Katz

  Rita K. Katz

  40 East 88th STreet

  New York, NY, 10028

  © Rita Katz

  All Rights Reserved

  A letter from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to Schulberg, praising Moving Pictures, dated September 19, 1981.

  Brothers Stuart Schulberg and Budd Schulberg (from left to right) on the set of Wind Across the Everglades, a film written by Budd and produced by Stuart, in 1958.

  Budd Schulberg with his second wife, Virginia Anderson, at the pool outside his eighteenth-century farmhouse, Inghamdale, near New Hope, Pennsylvania, with Schulberg’s children David, Steve, and Victoria. This photo was taken around 1949.

  Schulberg with fellow members of the U.S. military, taken during World War II.

  Schulberg with sons David and Steve.

  Schulberg with Geraldine Brooks and pet cat at their family house on Long Island in the mid-1970s.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1938, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952, 1953 by Budd Schulberg

  copyright © 1948 by ’48 Magazine

  copyright © 1941, 1953 by Curtis Publishing Company

  cover design by Oceana Garceau

  978-1-4532-6182-8

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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