What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  While he waited for his call to go through, we didn’t say anything, he too intense and I too stunned. I just looked into his face, waited for his voice and wondered. His face was beginning to settle into a permanent sneer. I had begun to hear it in his voice too, an incredible contempt for other human beings, not only for those like me, the secretaries, the copy boys and the men on the staff who were unfortunate enough to be his everyday acquaintances, but for strangers too, the back of a taxi driver’s neck at which he yelled instructions, people he pushed out of the way in a crowd, the anonymous operator just now …

  It stemmed partly from the confidence he was taking on like fuel at every new station, but there was something more, some angry, volcanic force erupting and overflowing deep within him.

  “Hello, Mr. Selznick? This is Mr. Glick calling from New York …

  “Sammy Glick! I just wanted to let you know I’ve decided to let you handle my story …

  “No, of course you never heard about me. But you’re going to—plenty …

  “Don’t give me that maybe stuff. The most surefire story sale that’s come to Hollywood in years, and he tells me maybe. Well, I’ve got a couple of maybes of my own, Mr. Selznick. Maybe I won’t even show you that story. Maybe I’ll give another agency first crack at it instead …

  “Oh, I’m paying good money for a long-distance call just to make jokes, I suppose. Well, if that’s the way you feel. Good-bye …

  “Yes, it’s right here on my desk, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to send it to you until you show a little more interest …

  “Oh, that’s different. But you’ve got to read it as soon as you get it. Because the idea is so hot I don’t want to give anybody time to steal it …

  “And one more thing, I want you to call me as soon as you finish it. Call me collect here at the Record, if you don’t like the expense …

  “Now you’re talking my language. Girl Steals Boy will be on your desk the day after tomorrow. So long, Myron.”

  Sammy hung up, took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his forehead. Then he put his handkerchief back in his pocket, took it out again and wiped his head some more.

  “Whew!” he said. He slumped in his chair like a fighter after the final bell.

  I stared at him. I felt as I did when I stared at a photograph of the man who walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. With such a stunt I could have absolutely no sympathy, yet I was held fascinated by its crazy boldness. In Sammy was everything I hated most: dishonesty, officiousness, bullying. But I felt I wasn’t only staring at him with dislike, I was staring at him with actual awe for the magnitude of his blustering.

  He sat there smiling as I came over to him.

  “Sammy, were you scared?”

  I asked him that because the phone call was completely outside my sphere of experience. It was like asking a man how it felt to start out in a rocket to the moon. Even though superficially we were similar, both columnists, both Jewish, both men, both American citizens, both awake for the same brief moment in world time, I stared at Sammy now, asked my question and waited for the answer like a mystic trying to reach another world.

  “Sammy, were you scared?”

  “It’s a funny thing, Al,” Sammy said in the most quiet voice I had ever heard in him, “I’m scared now, all right. Goddam scared. I got scared the second I hung up. But I wasn’t scared when I called him. I didn’t even think about being scared.”

  I leaned forward. I felt closer to him than I ever had before. For just a moment his guard was down.

  “What were you thinking about, Sammy?”

  He murmured as if he were talking to himself.

  “I was just thinking about me. I just kept thinking nothing but me. I just kept saying Sammyglicksammyglick over and over inside my head and it kept growing louder SAMMYGLICKSAMMYGLICKSAMMYGLICK. I guess that don’t quite make sense, does it?”

  Oh, yes, I thought to myself; oh, yes, that makes sense all right. It makes the most fearful horrible frightening sense I ever heard.

  Sammy rose and snapped out of it.

  “Come on down to Bleeck’s,” he said. “I’ll beat the pants off you in the match game.”

  “The hell you will,” I said, and we walked down together and he beat me. And, as we played and drank together, I kept wishing I could really hate him because I was in no-man’s-land now and there was a terrible sense of frustration about not being able to hate him as much as he deserved.

  Weeks passed without Myron Selznick ever returning Sammy’s call. I watched closely for some sign of disappointment in Sammy but there was none. He went right on crowing around the office like a bantam cock. I began to picture Sammy twenty years from now, growing bald and mellow, making mild jokes about the impetuousness of youth. It was a tremendous temptation not to exult. Well, Sammy, my boy, so you finally bit off more than you could chew?

  Soon I was glad for my restraint. Because it was so wrong to imagine that Sammy could ever stop running this early in the race.

  I remember Sammy rushing in, triumphant and jumpy, as if he had stolen the cheese and avoided the trap. He had.

  “Shake hands with God’s Gift to Hollywood,” he said, grabbing my hand before I had time to stick it in my pocket.

  “Don’t use the name of our Lord in vain,” I said. “You mean you sold that story?”

  “Five thousand bucks,” he said.

  “Go home and get a good night’s sleep,” I said. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  “We should have had a better price for it,” he went on, “only this was my first story.”

  It was screwy, it was Horatio Alger, it was true.

  “It’s a disgrace,” I said. “Only five thousand. I’d be ashamed to take it.”

  “Well, that’s just a starter,” he said, “and there’s plenty more ideas where that one came from.”

  “You mean from Julian Blumberg?”

  “Aah,” he said, “that schlemiel had nothing on the ball but a prayer. He’s lucky I bothered with him.”

  “Like Miss Goldbaum,” I said quietly.

  There. That’s what it needed. All of a sudden I was hating Sammy Glick. Ah, that felt better. It was satisfying. No more being annoyed or disturbed or curious or revolted. There isn’t a decent emotion in the lot. But this felt like it was on the level, good-to-the-last-drop one-hundred-percent-pure hate.

  As if things weren’t bad enough, the next morning right between a spoonful of soft-boiled egg and a bite of toast I read something in the film section of the morning paper that brought on acute indigestion. You didn’t have to be an FBI man to detect the subtle hand of Mr. Glick.

  TEN GRAND FOR BOY GENIUS

  Sammy Glick, youngest radio columnist and ranking favorite for national boy-genius honors, has sold his first screen story to World-Wide for $10,000. Titled Girl Steals Boy, story is supposed to go into immediate production as one of big budget pictures on World-Wide’s program. It is the first of a series World-Wide has contracted for, according to Mr. Glick. Mr. Glick was undecided whether to accept any Hollywood offers or to remain in his position on the Record, he said last night Collaborating with him was Julian Blumberg.

  What I can’t understand, I thought, is how Julian ever managed to get mentioned at all. I was very bitter. I didn’t know whether to be painfully jealous of Sammy Glick or congratulate myself on not being like him. I’m afraid I did both.

  Sammy was in and out of the office the next few days, very important and mysterious, conscientiously neglecting his work.

  “You still here?” I said. “I thought you had gone to Hollywood.”

  “No,” Sammy said, “you know how it is, once you get newspaper ink in your veins.”

  “Sure,” I said. “In other words you haven’t got a job in Hollywood yet.”

  “No,” Sammy said, “not yet.”

  Then one day Sammy didn’t show up at all. Maybe he’s sick, I thought at first, but I quickly discounted this optimism.
Guys like Sammy Glick don’t get sick unless it helps them out of a contract or lands them an insurance payment. The afternoon passed and still no Sammy. Maybe he was murdered by Julian Blumberg, I dared to hope. But I knew better. Julian undoubtedly had talent, but he didn’t have the nerve to kill time.

  While I was wondering, Sammy came in, or rather, he made his entrance. He wore a new suit. He also wore a new expression. I took one look and I decided I liked it even less than the old one. He wore a blue-check tab-shirt and a red carnation in his buttonhole. His shoes screamed newness. Brown alligator. He caught my look. “Set me back fifteen bucks,” he said. I took a step back and drank him in. He took out his cigarette case and offered me a Parliament. Sammy Glick, my Sammy Glick, my little copy boy. America, America, I thought, God shed His grace on thee and crown thy good with …

  “Hello, obnoxious,” I said.

  “I came in to say good-bye,” Sammy said.

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  “I’m not kidding,” he said. “I’m off for Hollywood.”

  “I’ll bet you got Irving Thalberg plenty worried,” I said.

  “If he’s not he oughta be,” Sammy said. “I’ve got a hunch Hollywood is my meat.”

  “How did this happen?” I said. “Metro wire that they just couldn’t struggle along without you another day?”

  “Not exactly,” Sammy said seriously. “My agent sold me to World-Wide on the strength of that story.”

  “And that’s strength,” I said. “How about Julian what’s-his-name? Does he go too?”

  “No,” Sammy said simply, “World-Wide just wanted me.”

  “Well,” I said, “our gain is World-Wide’s loss.”

  “No more peanuts for me,” Sammy said. “From now on it’s two hundred and fifty bucks a week, starting a week from Wednesday.”

  Five guys whistled.

  There was a short pause, during which time I composed a short history of Sammy Glick, complete from twelve to two hundred and fifty a week, analyzing it from the sociological, psychological, philosophical and zoological points of view. It was America, all the glory and the opportunity, the push and the speed, the grinding of gears and the crap. It didn’t take nearly this long to think. It went zingo, just a look, a blank look.

  “See you in the Brown Derby,” Sammy was saying.

  Then I got nostalgic, I was always a soft guy, so I said:

  “Sure kid, and remember, don’t say ain’t.”

  That was too good for Sammy. He didn’t like it. He was going to be one of those big shots who didn’t like to be reminded. There seem to be two kinds of self-conscious self-made men, those who like to dwell on the patriotic details of their ascent from newsboy or shoe-shiner at two bucks and peanuts a week and those who take every new level as if it were the only one they ever knew, rushing ahead so fast they are ashamed, afraid to look back and see where they’ve come from. One is a bore and the other is a heel. Sammy may have had other faults, but he had never been a bore.

  I watched Sammy walk out of the office that day, and then I stood at the window and watched his new shoes and his new hat cross the sidewalk and disappear into a taxi, and then I leaned out the window and watched the taxi go ducking in and out through traffic like a broken-field runner.

  Like Sammy Glick, I thought, as I watched the cab at the next crossing jump out ahead of the car that should have had the right of way. There was a shrieking of brakes, a raw angry voice, and Sammy’s cab was away, around the corner on two wheels, though I stayed at the window a long while staring after it.

  CHAPTER 3

  For months after that, whenever I thought of the way Sammy Glick had blown in, over, and through our office, I was overcome. I tried to flatter myself into thinking that mine was a moral disgust, but of course it was much more than that, or would you call it much less? Left in the draft of Sammy’s speed I had caught a bad case of jealousy. From here on I may be accused of having the soul of a shopgirl, but I might as well admit it: Long before Sammy Glick had been shot through my life like a bullet I had had Hollywood on my mind. I had wanted to go for all the usual reasons: I was anxious to investigate the persistent rumors that the “streets paved with gold” which the early Spanish explorers had hunted in vain had suddenly appeared in the vicinity of Hollywood and Vine. I was half convinced that Southern California was really the modern Garden of Eden its press agents claimed it to be. And like all the other writers outside of Hollywood I had seen enough of its product to convince myself that I could do no worse.

  Of course I never mentioned this to anybody and, if it hadn’t been for the unexpected whim of some Hollywood mogul, I would still be pounding a typewriter for the Record. I don’t really know how it happened yet, for the only fiction writing I had managed to do was a story in the Post last year and another more recently in Cosmo, and neither of those would have set the world on fire, or Edward J. O’Brien either, for that matter. I guess one of the Monarch execs must have just got the idea of rounding up all the drama columnists in New York and when they pulled in the nets, there I was, floundering with the rest.

  The day after the news broke that I had “surrendered to Hollywood” (though it certainly hadn’t been much of a battle), a girl’s voice came quavering over the telephone to me.

  “Hello, Mister Manheim,” she said, “I’m awfully sorry to bother you this way and you probably don’t even remember me …”

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “Miss Goldbaum. Rosalie Goldbaum. You met me that night with Sammy Glick?”

  It wasn’t a question but there was a question mark at the end of her voice. It was a shrill voice, shrill but dead, like a high note on a cheap piccolo.

  I had to tell her a lie, which was that I was glad to hear from her again.

  She said thank you and then there was a pause. I thought she had hung up.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m still here,” she said.

  “Anything wrong?” I said. “Something the matter?”

  “When I read you were going to Hollywood …” she started. “When I read that, I wondered …”

  She must have been crying.

  “I mean I’ve got to see you,” she said.

  Oh, Christ, I thought. “Meet me at the Tavern at seven,” I said.

  I got there fifteen or twenty minutes late because I stopped to have a couple of drinks to take the curse off my rendezvous. She didn’t even know enough to find herself a table and wait for me. She was just sitting on a bench by the door. I hadn’t realized that first time how scrawny she was. When she took her coat off, her shoulder blades stuck out. Her eyes were red and soggy. When I took her hand and said Gladtoseeyou, it was soft and rubbery, like a half-blown balloon.

  Her eyes looked scared and she said too quickly, “Oh, it was awfully nice of you to come.”

  “We’d better get a table,” I said, and we walked to it without saying anything more. I put my hand lightly at her elbow to guide her and our eyes searched each other’s for a moment. There was something too intimate and uncomfortable between us.

  “How’ve you been since I saw you last?” I said as we sat down. “You’re looking swell.”

  It was stupid and it sounded flat so I let it go at that. I looked up at her and waited. It was her move.

  She looked down at the menu a moment as if wondering whether to order first or plunge right into it.

  “You’re going to Hollywood,” she told me. “You’ll see Sammy Glick.”

  Queer how she could have been so close to him and yet always use his full name. As if it already had achieved the rounded significance of an F. Scott Fitzgerald or a Sinclair Lewis. Somehow I sensed I shouldn’t wisecrack. So I compromised.

  “I can,” I said cagily.

  “Will you, would you, Mr. Manheim, see him for me?”

  “Sure,” I said, “when I run into him, I’ll tell him you said hello.”

  That was cruel, for I knew it was more than that. But it was the quickest wa
y I knew of finding out.

  “It’s not that,” she said. “I want to know how he is. I want to know …”

  “But you must get all that in his letters,” I broke in. “What more could I do?”

  “Find out why he’s stopped writing,” she blurted out. “He used to write, once in a while, anyway, when he first went out. But not any more. He just won’t answer any more. Not even a postcard in months and months.”

  She dried her leaking nose with her napkin.

  “I know it’s tough on you, Rosalie,” I said, “but maybe it isn’t as bad as you think. It’s never a cinch to get set in a new spot. Why, he’s probably up to his ears …”

  Can you imagine, me defending the slob? But I never was much of an actor and it didn’t sound convincing.

  “But you don’t understand, Mr. Manheim,” she interrupted. “It was all arranged. He promised to send for me the second week he was out there. I was so sure I even quit my job. I got rid of everything I couldn’t take along. I was all set. He told me not to worry, he’d send for me in a couple of weeks more. Until finally, he just stopped writing.”

  “Oh,” I said, losing my appetite.

  “He said the only reason we couldn’t go together was he didn’t have the train fare. He was going to send me his second week’s salary.”

  Her head moved with her mouth in nervous little jerks. She was getting all excited again just remembering what he had told her.

  “So now I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Skunk,” I said.

  “Oh, you’ve got to tell him I don’t understand,” she said, hurrying to keep ahead of her tears. “Ask him why, please ask him why.”

  She was crying. The waiter was standing over us impatiently. It was embarrassing. “Want yours with onions?” I asked.

  She blotted her eyes, her nose and her cheeks with her napkin. I don’t know why she had to wear mascara. Maybe it made her feel better able to face things but she didn’t have a face for mascara, and when it started to run she had the forlorn look of a doll with the paint streaking off in the rain.