If I were trying to tell this as a picture story instead of just putting it down the way it happened, my hate for Sammy Glick would have to be exalted into something noble and conclusive. I mean if he passed me on the street I would have to cross over to the other side and sooner or later we would come to grips, probably on the edge of a cliff. But that doesn’t seem to be the way we’re made. Most of us are ready to greet our worst enemies like long-lost brothers if we think they can show us a good time, if we think they can do us any good or if we even reach the conclusion that being polite will get us just as far and help us live longer.
I’m afraid all this is just an apology for admitting that the next time Sammy called me, a couple of weeks after that first soirée, I didn’t hang up on him. In fact, I didn’t even refuse his invitation. And without that slackening of moral fiber I would never have had an excuse for knowing him better. For there was no use kidding myself any longer. I wanted to know him. Not that I ever expected to solve the mystery of What Makes Sammy Run. But I had been much too involved with Sammy already ever to be able to forget him. Or even want to. He rankled. He was like a splinter festering under my skin. If I broke off now, I had the feeling his memory would go on torturing me. I had the crazy feeling that only by drilling into him, deeper and deeper, could I finally pass through him and beyond him and free my mind of him at last.
Or maybe all I am trying to say is that he was slowly driving me nuts.
“Hiya, sweetheart,” he said, “don’t you love me any more?”
“As much as ever,” I said.
“How’s tricks over at that sausage factory of yours?”
He always made you feel that any confession of failure was on a level with admitting that you had a yen for nothing but female dogs and ten-year-old corpses. So all I gave him was a cagey “Okay, I guess.”
“You guess! Don’t talk like a schlemiel, you schlemiel. Sounds like you’re letting them push you around.”
“Being pushed around can be quite a luxury,” I said. “At Atlantic City you have to pay for it.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll pay for it here too. Remind me to give you a couple of pointers on How to Win Friends and Influence Producers when I see you tonight.”
“Tonight I am going to get into bed and read,” I said.
“Listen, dope, there’s only two things bed is good for. And one of them isn’t reading.”
I told him to try me some other time as I was already half undressed. As a matter of fact I did have my tie and shoes off.
“If you’re half undressed that means you’re also half-dressed, right?” he said. “So get those gunboats out of dry dock and get the hell over here. We’re unpacking and deflowering a new crate of virgins that just came in. I told Billie we might look in on her later too.”
I felt the knot which held me to the bedpost slipping a little bit. I had come to admire Billie considerably.
“Not tonight, Sammy,” I said. “I’m right in the middle of a book.”
He had to know what book and I told him. “Fontamara. By Ignazio Silone.”
“Who the hell is Ignats Silone?” he said.
“For my dough one of the greatest writers in the world,” I said.
“No kidding!” He was interested. “Has he got a good story?”
“One of the greatest stories I ever read,” I said. “All about how a ragged little group of peasants rise against Mussolini.”
“Well, for Chri’sake, who do you think’s gonna make a picture about a lot of starving wops? In the first place, you’d lose your whole foreign market and …”
As soon as I could get a word in I told him I knew it didn’t have a chance for pictures.
“I don’t know why the hell I waste my time with a crazy bastard like you,” he said. “You’re shell-shocked, you don’t add up. What good do you think it’s gonna do you to crap around with stuff like that?”
Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read.
“Sure,” Sammy said, “I never said I had anything against reading books …”
“The publishers will be relieved to know that,” I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already rounding the bend of his next sentence.
“But as long as you’re going in for it there’s plenty of good, dead authors that’ll hand you terrific picture plots on a silver platter. Why, I knew a guy who made a nice little pile out of one of De Maupassant’s stories just the other day. And all he had to do was switch the hooker from a French carriage to a Western stagecoach. If you were smart you’d try to hit on something like that and write yourself an original.”
I found myself thinking that wherever De Maupassant was I hoped he was unaware of what was going on. He had too little faith in mankind as it was.
“Hello, where the hell are you?” Sammy was saying. “Have you hung up?”
“No,” I said, “but only because I have no conscience.”
“That’s what you get for being a rabbi’s son,” he said, “a conscience. Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.”
I’m not sure why I switched and said I’d come. It might have been the lousy day I had had at the studio. My producer had thrown out my first script and put another writer on with me. His name was George Pancake. I hate to sound obvious, but Pancake couldn’t have been over five foot five and looked as if he shaded two hundred pounds. He had the body of a wrestler and the face of a fag. The boys in the office across the hall told me Pancake was a credit hound, one of those writers who practically have convulsions over sole screen credits, so I knew I was in for trouble. The first thing Pancake said when we started talking it over was that he thought it would go faster if he did all the writing, as I obviously hadn’t caught on to what producers want. Then he started dictating a new line as fast as he could talk and it suddenly hit me that he wasn’t just coming on the story at all. He must have been working on it for weeks without my knowing it. When that dawned I felt so low I knocked off early, went home and called a masseur. There is something about a massage that makes it a better gloom-chaser for me than getting plastered. But it didn’t quite sweat the mood out of me and just as I was about to climb into bed with my rebellious peasants and my blues I had a notion that a little of Billie and Sammy Glick might not be such a bad idea, if only to get my mind off my own tsurus.
I sat at Sammy’s little bar a few minutes, while he stood behind it making drinks and telling me what a riot his next picture was turning out to be. When the doorbell rang I started to answer it, but Sammy told me to sit still and let his Jap get it.
“My Jap’s in the kitchen going crazy carving cheese into flowers,” he explained. “I think he’s a fugitive from the WPA Artists’ Project.”
We heard the door open and a woman’s voice say, “Hello, Naga.”
“This,” Sammy said mysteriously, indicating the door, “is the most terrific thing I ever met.”
I looked up as Sammy turned to meet her. She came toward us with a mannish, swinging stride, like a good woman golfer following her ball, hatless, coatless, not even carrying a bag, with both hands thrust deep into the pockets of a smartly tailored suit.
Sammy went for her with open arms, rocking back and forth as he hugged her, half kidding, half on the level. I stood on the sidelines, conscious that I was seeing a new kinetic element in the life of Sammy Glick. This was no faithful poodle like Rosalie Goldbaum or a cute little doll like Sally Ann Joyce. She was arresting, but no beauty, at least not stamped from the Hollywood mold. She looked the type that always gets picked to play the leading man in girls’ school productions. She was in her middle twenties, tall, maybe five-eight, and neatly put together though there was something about the masculinity of her carriage and gestures that scared you off. Her skin was tanned and seemed to have been pulled too tight across her face, revealing the bone structure. Her lips seemed even fuller than they were in her lean face. She left her eyebrows pretty much a
lone and I noticed that her nails were cut short and unpainted. She might have done things with her hair, which was walnut brown, but she just combed it back into a thick coil.
“Hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” she said. “I spend my entire day trying to duck my producer and then I have to meet him in the hall on my way out. Ever try putting over a story you know is falling apart as you go along? Great way to lose weight.”
Her voice was low-keyed but not husky, and her words raced ahead of each other as if hurrying to keep up with a mind that was always crowding them.
She maneuvered neatly out of Sammy’s embrace and turned to me. “My name’s Sargent.”
Her eyes were dark and restless, with large shiny pupils that made me nervous. She extended her hand, and when I took it I wasn’t surprised to find her grip intimidating.
“Kit,” Sammy said, “I want you to meet one of the sweetest guys in the world, Al Manheim. Al, this is Kit Sargent, my favorite screen writer.”
He put his arm around her shoulder. It wasn’t quite long enough to make the gesture look graceful.
“Kit is doing the next Gable-Loy.”
There was almost as much pride in his voice as if he had the assignment himself.
“Oh, you’re Catherine Sargent!”
I felt like Merton-of-the-Movies blurting it out that way, but I suddenly realized this was the gal all the critics were nominating a couple of years back to write the great American novel. I could still remember that first book of hers, The Sex Express, which penetrates the mind of a flapper after her day is done and the depression has set in, when she’s floundering in a backwash of neuroticism and mental disease. I also remembered the author’s photo on the jacket, a picture that made her look a little more elegant than she looked now but which caught nicely her cool smile. Under it was a blurb by Dorothy Parker which ran something like: “Miss Sargent, fresh from Vassar, takes us on a fascinating and frightening journey …”
I told her how her book had hit me.
“I’m glad you thought so,” she said.
I suppose that was modesty, but it made me feel like a dope. All she had to do to make me feel that way was just stand there and smile through me. Because we really haven’t learned to take female superiority in stride, I resented it.
“Her book must have been all right,” Sammy said. “It sold twenty thousand copies and got her a sweet five-year ticket.”
“How did you like it, Sammy?” I asked.
“What I read of it was terrific,” he said, “but I couldn’t get through the first chapter. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go over to the Back Lot and make like crazy.”
His humor hadn’t improved but he was beginning to develop a surefire delivery, with some of the knack of the fast-talking comics. I laughed and he was encouraged.
“We’re going to find Billie and have like a bacchanale.” The way he pronounced it, it rhymed with ukulele.
We got into his yellow Cadillac. Sammy raced the car too fast in first and threw it into second with naive abandon.
“I can go sixty in second,” he said.
He only reminded you once in a while that he was in his early twenties. It was frightening to think what he would be like when he really grew up.
When we reached the Back Lot the band was beating it out and the music came at us like a Santa Ana wind.
“Will this be all right, Mr. Glick?” asked the headwaiter, showing a lot of teeth in what was supposed to be a smile.
“No,” Sammy said, “I want that one over there.”
He pointed to a table practically in the middle of the dance floor, with a RESERVED sign you couldn’t miss.
“I’m very sorry, that one is reserved, Mr. Glick.”
“Balls,” Sammy commented.
“Really, Mr. Glick, you know if I could …”
“Balls, you just hang those signs out to try to give the joint a little class.”
Kit started for the ladies’ room. “Let me know how it comes out,” she paraphrased. “I’ll be in Number Three.”
People were beginning to look around. I tried to act as if I weren’t with Sammy, for I hate headwaiter scenes.
“If I don’t get that table,” I heard Sammy say, “you’ll never get me in here again.”
I could imagine what the headwaiter would like to have told him. But we got the table.
We sat there without anyone taking our order for a minute or two and then Sammy looked around and yelled, “Hey, waiter, gasson, what do you have to do to get a menu in this place—send in your agent?”
The waiter hurried over, grinning as if he loved being beckoned that way.
“Never talk to waiters like that,” Kit said.
“Can I help it,” he said, “if I only went one year to finishing school?”
“It isn’t manners,” she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, “it just isn’t smart.”
I thought of the time I first told him not to say ain’t. He took this the same way, a little peeved but making mental notes. I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion. I was beginning to see what Kit had for Sammy. Of course she stood for something never within his reach before. But it was more than that. Sammy seemed to know that his career was entering a new cycle where polish paid off. You could almost see him filing off the rough edges against the sharp blade of her mind.
“I want a Scotch and soda,” said Sammy. “And don’t bother sticking your thumb …”
He caught himself and made a nice recovery. “Have you two made up your minds?”
I said Scotch and soda too.
Kit said Scotch and water.
The waiter had only taken a couple of steps when Sammy called him back. “St. James, if you have it,” he said.
He tried to make it casual, but he couldn’t quite get away with it and I knew he must have picked that up since our last outing.
The band broke into a rhumba. Sammy rose and reached out his hand for Kit.
“I feel like dancing,” he said with a cigar in his mouth.
“You don’t know how to rhumba,” she said.
“I can do as good as the rest of these jerks,” he said, and his voice carried.
“I hate a bad rhumba,” she said. “There’s something about a bad rhumba that’s indecent.”
“What do you think the rhumba is,” Sammy said, “a spring dance?”
As he pulled her to her feet, not roughly but forcefully, he noticed a swarthy, sideburned Latin who was dancing under the impression that he was Veloz. “That guy looks like a leading man in a dirty picture,” he laughed. Then he broke into song, singing through his teeth and his cigar, with an exaggerated Jewish accent. “I’m a Letin from Menhettin …”
“Now look,” she said, “either dance with me—or the cigar.”
Sammy was a crude dancer, but he wasn’t like so many bad dancers who can’t make up their minds. Because he wasn’t self-conscious about it and forced her to follow all his mistakes, he got away with it. It wasn’t exactly a thing of beauty, but you had to hand it to him, he had a sense of rhythm. Back in the New York office if anybody had told me that three years later I would be sitting in a Hollywood night club watching my copy boy dance the rhumba with one of those Vassar smarty-pants I would have called the Bellevue psychopathic ward to come down and take him away. But now that I was actually at a ringside table watching it happen, I couldn’t make myself feel too surprised. He had about as much interest in dancing the rhumba as he had in writing. But I had begun to take for granted his ability to do everything just well enough so it wouldn’t break his stride.
She was dancing under wraps but looked as though she really enjoyed it, even with Sammy. But not he. He looked desperate and busy. He was working at it, he was working at having fun. Recreation never seemed to come naturally to him. In fact the only activity that did seemed to be that damned running. I don’t think
he ever drank because he liked the taste of whiskey or frequented the Back Lot through any craving for hot music. He just went through the motions of relaxing because he was quick to discover and imitate how gentlemen of his rank were supposed to spend their leisure. It wouldn’t have surprised me if this even extended to sex. He seemed to be a lusty little animal, but I think if Zanuck offered to give up his job to Sammy on the condition that Sammy never touch a woman again our hero would have gone impotent before you could say general-manager-in-charge-of-production.
The waiter set our drinks up again. They went on dancing. I kept an eye on Billie doing a little drink promoting at the bar. They came back to the table because the floor was getting too crowded, and the waiter went for another round.
Kit fixed a cigarette to her long holder and eyed the dance crowd with frowning amusement.
“Kirstein says the way people dance with each other is the real barometer of any country’s society,” she said. “Just look at ours—no more group spirit—every man for himself, covered with sweat and trying to push all the other couples off the floor.”
Trying to follow her and watch Sammy at the same time was distracting. I noticed that Sammy hadn’t been listening. He was preoccupied with somebody on the other side of the room.
She turned her head for an instant, caught on and gave him a patient smile. “Go ahead,” she said, “go over and see him, you’re practically over there anyway.”
Her voice was that of a mother trying to practice child psychology on a delinquent child.
He rose, thrusting his cigar through his lips, and there was something pugnacious about the way he clenched it between his teeth in the corner of his mouth. It stuck out in front of him like a cannon leveled at the world.
“I’ll try to get him over for a drink,” he said.
He didn’t circle the dance floor to reach the other side. He walked straight across it, pushing his way through the dancers.
What Makes Sammy Run? Page 8