What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  “I shou’n’t’ve come,” she whimpered, “only Sammy was always telling me you were his closest friend.”

  I almost choked on a mouthful of steak. My God, that was probably true!

  On the way out I slipped her twenty-five bucks. Just to salve my conscience for being considered a friend of a jerk like Sammy Glick. She sneaked it into her purse as quickly as possible, as if her hand was trying to put something over on the rest of her.

  “Give me your address in Hollywood so I can pay you back when I find another job,” she said.

  “Forget it,” I said, “you can pay me back next time you see me.”

  We shook hands and she held mine a moment as if dreading to break away even from the slim protection I represented, pressing my hand hard to keep from crying again. I looked after her as she turned down toward Broadway and the crowd swallowed her up. I couldn’t help wondering what New York would do to her now that Sammy Glick had used her and thrown her away.

  All the way out on the train my mind still felt damp with Miss Goldbaum’s tears. So as soon as I got set in Hollywood, or as set as a bewildered stranger ever gets in this town, I gave Sammy a buzz. He talked so loud I had to hold the receiver at arm’s length. It was like a loudspeaker.

  “Hello, chump,” he yelled, “welcome to Los Angeles, the city of Lost Angels.”

  “What do you mean, chump?” I said, already resigned to the fact that time had not mellowed Mr. Glick.

  “I was having a drink with your producer the other night,” he said. “He was boasting about getting you for a hundred and fifty a week. Why the hell didn’t you let me know you were coming? I could have fixed it for you.”

  I told him I thought I could manage to struggle along for a while on a hundred and fifty dollars a week.

  “Jesus, Al,” he laughed, “you know about as much about Hollywood …”

  “As Rosalie Goldbaum,” I said.

  That would have stopped the average heel, but not a man who had a genius for it like Sammy.

  “Listen, Al,” he said, “I haven’t got time to talk about that now. Why don’t you run over here tomorrow around lunchtime?”

  I said I would and he gave me that glad-hand business. “Okay, Alsie-palsie. Glad you’re gonna be with us, keed.”

  I spent that afternoon and the next morning wandering around the studio that had employed me, trying to find out why. Then I hurried over for my audience with Little Caesar. I told myself at the time that I was only eager to see justice done by Miss Goldbaum, but there was a lot of curiosity mixed up in it too. Morbid curiosity. Like wanting to pull a bandage off to see an infection you know has spread.

  There was his SAMMY GLICK in gold metal lettering, screwed onto the door of his office with a certain permanence. Inside, I found that I had only gained admission to his secretary, who was occupying an office that seemed somewhat larger than our city room. I told her I was an old friend of Sammy’s, which is what you would call a white lie, and she told me that Mr. Glick would be tied up in a story conference for the next half hour.

  An hour and twenty minutes later Mr. Glick made his appearance. The first thing I noticed was that he wasn’t wearing a tie. Instead he wore a big yellow scarf with horses racing around the edges, and a big yellow handkerchief to match, which dangled rakishly over the pocket of a sports coat you could have played checkers on. He reeked of toilet water. He was certainly a long way from the thin, pale, eager little kid who used to say, “Thank you, Mr. Manheim.” At least superficially. He had one of those California tans. He had filled out a little, but he still looked fast on his feet.

  We sat down in his office. On his walls were a couple of autographed pictures of stars, and several of him, one playing tennis, and another playing genius on the set with the director and principals. He swung his feet up on his desk and I noticed his earners-hair socks and tricky shoes, leather strips woven like a Mexican basket, with a space left for the toes to stick out.

  “These are swell shoes for working,” he said. “Lucky Hamilton, the director of my first picture, brought them back for me from Mexico City. The Greasers call them huaraches. I’m a sucker for shoes.”

  I never could get excited about clothes, so there didn’t seem to be much to say. But you never have to worry about conversation with Sammy Glick around.

  “Well, how’s the chain gang back in the office?” he said. “Still working so hard they haven’t got time to starve to death?”

  “They all wanted to be remembered, Sammy,” I said.

  As if I actually believed that Sammy would ever remember anybody who couldn’t do him some good.

  “Great old gang,” he said meaninglessly, and then, more himself: “But once you get the Indian sign on these producers out here the dough comes rolling in so fast you can use it for wall paper.”

  “Miss Goldbaum wants to be remembered too,” I said.

  Sammy stopped running for a moment. He looked at me, and I knew he was wondering how much I knew.

  “I want to talk to you about that, Al,” he said. “But how about grabbing a little lunchee first? Where do you want to go, the Derby, the Vendome, or Al Levy’s? Those are the only restaurants in Hollywood.”

  He picked the Vendome because that’s where everybody was going then.

  We drove over in his yellow Cadillac roadster. I couldn’t see how he could afford a car that big as soon as this.

  “I couldn’t,” he explained. “I grabbed it up from a ham actor who bought it on the strength of a contract he was going to get. As soon as I heard that fell through, I beat it over to see him and showed him how it was cheaper for him to let me take the payments off his hands than for him just to give the car back to the dealers again. It’s only gone sixteen hundred miles. Just saved me the trouble of breaking it in.”

  It was funny to see him taking the Vendome in stride too. He was on speaking terms with everybody, the parking attendant, the hatcheck girl who could have been a stand-in for Jean Harlow, the headwaiter who led us to a table from which he flourishingly removed that restaurant symbol of rank, the RESERVED sign.

  The moment Sammy sat down he started looking around to see who was there. He waved to a bald, bulky middle-aged man across the way with a high-blood-pressure complexion.

  “Didn’t expect to see you up this early, Harry,” Sammy yelled across.

  “I still don’t know whether I’m up or not,” the man laughed back.

  “That’s Harold Godfrey Wilson,” Sammy said proudly. “He’s one of the top screen writers in the business. Twenty-five hundred a week. He threw a terrific party last night. Everybody had to come as their pet aversion.”

  “I could just have sent you.”

  Sammy reminded me of one of those willing club fighters who laugh when they get hit. “Same old Al,” he grinned, “still trying to get a rise out of me.”

  A group of women came by, of all ages and sizes, but all dressed much the same, in chic dark dresses, fantastic hats, silver foxes and lots of jewels. Sammy leaped to his feet like a Boy Scout at the sound of the Star-Spangled Banner.

  “That was Louella O. Parsons,” he said when he sat down after exchanging a few pleasantries. “The first thing I did when I got to town was call her up and give her an item for her column. That’s a good habit to get into because every couple of times you can slip her a story about yourself too. That’s one of the main tricks in this town, to keep them reading about you.”

  I could see we had come to the wrong place to talk about Miss Goldbaum, but I finally managed to work her back into the conversation again, while Sammy was drinking his coffee with B & B.

  “Well, how is she, Al?” he asked.

  “Swell,” I said, “just swell. High and dry.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I’m sorry, Al. I swear to God.”

  He was still a kid in many ways. He sounded actually frightened. And the sad part of it was he was really telling the truth when he said he couldn’t help it.

 
“The trouble with me is that I was too softhearted with Rosalie,” Sammy said. “I never told her I was going to bring her out here. She just took it for granted and I didn’t want to hurt her.”

  “That’s your weakness all right,” I said. “You’re just killing her with kindness.”

  “What could I do with Rosalie out here?” he said. “Rosalie’s one of those nice Jewish girls whose main idea in life is to stay home all the time and start having kids right away. And this is a town where you’ve got to keep circulating. She’d go nuts inside a month.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “she must have been nuts to be able to love you in the first place. But since she doesn’t seem to take the same view of it I do, the least you could do is let her down easy with a nice letter and enough money to tide her over till she’s on her feet again. Give the poor kid a break.”

  And then, for no reason at all, I added, “Give everybody a break.”

  I seemed to have tapped the tiny pool of Sammy’s better nature. For, as I said, he was still a kid then. The crust hadn’t completely hardened.

  “How much would you send,” he asked, “if you were me?”

  “I shudder at the thought,” I said, “but I’d give her every cent I could spare. After all, she quit her job to come out here.”

  “How would fifteen hundred do?” he asked.

  I had the feeling that this was more a grandstand play for me than kindness toward Miss Goldbaum. I didn’t see how he had that much money put away on his present salary and told him so.

  “I’ve been playing casino with my producer Joe Rappaport,” he said. “The drunker he gets the bigger he bets. He’s a cinch for a couple of hundred every time we play.”

  Getting fifteen hundred dollars not to have to live the rest of your life with Sammy Glick was my idea of a bargain.

  “O.K.,” I said, “I’ll write her that that fifteen hundred is on its way, just in case it slips your mind.”

  “I sprinkle rosin on my mind every morning,” Sammy said. “Nothing ever slips up there.”

  The check arrived. I reached in my pocket to pay it, but the waiter had already handed Sammy a pencil and he signed it.

  Then Sammy made one of those bumblebee exits, buzzing from table to table on his way out.

  Driving back to the studio Sammy felt more expansive, now that he had disposed of the Goldbaum question.

  “Got anything to work on yet?” Sammy asked.

  “At the moment I’m very busy working on the producer’s secretary,” I said, “trying to convince her that it’s his duty to call me in and let me know what I’m being paid for.”

  “As long as you have a six months’ contract,” Sammy said, “you can afford to warm your ass for a while. You don’t have to start impressing them till around the fifth month.”

  “But I didn’t come out here to sit on the bench all season,” I said. “I want to learn everything I can about screen technique.”

  “Screen technique is a pushover,” Sammy said. “All you’ve got to do is read a couple of good scripts. I’ll let you read mine. Then you can compare it with the finished product. It’s being cut and scored now. They’ll be previewing in two or three weeks.”

  “You mean Girl Steals Boy?” I said. “All finished already?”

  “Already?” Sammy said. “They’ll be shooting my next one in a couple of weeks. When they really make you start writing out here they don’t fool. I had to do my last one in three and a half weeks. One day I even dictated twenty-seven pages of screenplay. What I always say is, writing either comes easy to you or it doesn’t.”

  “That reminds me,” I said, “what ever became of Julian Blumberg?”

  “Oh, he’s around,” Sammy said casually. “Drove out in an old heap four or five months ago. I’ve been trying to get him a job. But it’s pretty tough because the studios aren’t hiring junior writers in mass lots the way they did a year ago.”

  “What are junior writers?” I wanted to know.

  “Well,” Sammy said, “nobody’s exactly sure, but I’d say they’re writers who aren’t given anything to write, and if they do write something of their own they can’t find anybody to read it.”

  By this time we had reached his studio. “I would drive you back to Monarch,” he said, “but I’m working on a football story and I’m running a couple of college pictures in the projection room this afternoon. Just to make sure it isn’t too similar.”

  “Which I suppose is a polite way of saying you’re looking for something you can lift,” I said.

  He seemed actually pleased that I saw through his feeble euphemism. He grinned. “You’ll be all right out here,” he said. “You learn fast.”

  That was one thing you had to give Sammy. He made no bones about it. At least with me. He was glorifying the American rat.

  He put his arm around my neck intimately as we got out of the car. “Here’s a hot one Lombard told me,” he said, and he giggled it into my ear.

  “I heard that three weeks ago at Bleeck’s,” I told him.

  But he was impregnable. He took it with his own peculiar brand of joie de vivre. I found myself realizing that he had cut a lot of warts off his personality since I had seen him last. He was in the first grade of the charm school. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a great many people out here who actually thought he had it already. People who didn’t know him very well. That is, people he hadn’t got around to using yet.

  “Well, keep in touch with me, Al,” he said. “Call me and we’ll make a night of it sometime.”

  Being a timid soul unless I’m cornered, which is what I was most of the time with Sammy, I didn’t bother to point out that it might be his place to call me. I just said, “Thanks for the lunch, Sammy,” or something equally useless and then I watched him hurry across the street and up the studio steps. His form was smoother and his stride wasn’t as jerky as it was in the old days on the Record, but he was still running all right. And from the way he was hugging the rail it looked as if Hollywood was the perfect track for him. I was always a man of simple ambitions, but one of them was to be around when Sammy crossed the finish line, wherever that would be.

  When I got back to my cubbyhole of an office, I shoved down the window to keep out the sound of the machine shop across the way, plunked my feet on the desk and pondered what kind of a world it was which could give Sammy a reputation on the basis of one story he hadn’t written, while its real author couldn’t even get himself hired as a junior writer.

  I was still pondering two hours later when the secretary of the producer I was still trying to see called to say that I might as well not wait any longer this afternoon as he was tied up in a story conference. Out of sheer desperation I asked her if there wasn’t anything else a person could be in a story conference besides tied up, but she didn’t even chuckle. So then I sat down and wrote a very businesslike letter to Miss Rosalie Goldbaum advising her to forget Sammy Glick but not to forget to write me whether she got that fifteen hundred or not. I told her to find herself a good clean hardworking boy and not to pine for Sammy, for he was one of those geniuses who could only be married to his work. I just marked that down under the heading of kindness, then. That was because I didn’t know as much about Sammy Glick then as I do now, or about the world either. It was funny as time went on how the more I learned about one the more I understood about the other.

  Those first few months in Hollywood were the loneliest I’ve ever known. You’d think a writer on contract to one of the biggest studios in Hollywood would be thrown into that merry-go-round of social life the fan magazines and the columns like to tell you about. Unless you have an unusual talent for knowing everybody, it isn’t so. It seemed as if the few friends I knew in Hollywood from the theater crowd had all gone back to the land, to Bucks County or Cape Cod or one of those places. After a couple of weeks I moved out of the Hollywood Plaza into a big, pink, reasonably priced apartment house called the Villa Espana. I spent desperate and lon
ely hours in my office at the studio mulling over the story they had finally given me to read, an action melodrama about smugglers, come-on girls and the coast of Florida. I knew that Sammy Glick would have thrown it back in their faces and demanded something more in keeping with his artistic temperament, but I supposed the producers knew their business and, as it turned out, this story did have the makings of a fair C picture. But it was dismal, ditch-digging work, and I felt more alone than ever because the producer didn’t even seem to care how I was doing. The only word I had for weeks and weeks was the producer’s request, via interoffice communication, to keep turning in pages.

  At night I usually had supper at the Vine Street Derby, always hoping to run into someone I knew, and then I’d stroll down Hollywood Boulevard, stopping in at one of the joints for a drink, or browsing around in Stanley Rose’s bookstore listening to the conversation, or maybe dropping in at a movie. After a while I felt as if I were wandering around a small town, because there never seemed to be anything to do and I began to notice the same faces drifting by night after night.

  The only friend I made in those early days was an unknown playwright who had the office two doors down from mine. He told me he had come out to Hollywood about a year ago because the doctor had told him his four-year-old daughter’s sinus trouble was going to get serious if he didn’t get her out to a warm, dry climate. When I met him he was just beginning to get jittery because his option was coming up in a couple of weeks and he didn’t seem to think he could get a job anywhere else if they let him out. He said the reason he was scared was because he hadn’t any credits. Anybody who goes a year in Hollywood without getting a single screen credit, he said, might just as well shop around for another profession.

  I asked him how it happened that none of his pictures had reached the screen, and he explained that the first script he wrote had been shelved because at the last minute they couldn’t get the actor it had been written for, and the second one never reached first base because it was a topical subject and one of the other studios beat them to it, and the third one was stymied because it couldn’t get by the Hays Office. I didn’t see why that should hurt him if the producers had liked his scripts, but he took a more pessimistic view of it. He said by the time a year had gone by, all they would probably remember is that he had worked twelve months without getting anything on the screen and that would be the pay-off.