What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  “The music’s getting on my nerves,” Sammy said as we sat down.

  I was surprised to hear he thought he had them.

  “What d’ya say we blow ’n’ go back to my joint? I wanna try my story on you.”

  “You remember us,” I said, “we were here for the first show.”

  “Oh, hell that was just roughing it out,” he said. “Now I’ve really got it licked.”

  Half an hour later Kit, Billie and I were seated on Sammy’s modernistic gray suede couch watching him like an audience. You had to hand it to him. He was always improving. I mean, he was becoming more and more expert at being Sammy Glick. The way he was telling this story, for instance. He wasn’t outlining it, he was acting it. What the story lacked in character and plot his enthusiasm and energy momentarily overcame. As I watched him perform I realized why he was repeating it. This must have been the only way he could write, telling his story over and over to people who supplied a line here, an idea there, until the story began to take shape like a snowman forming hastily under many hands. Instead of listening I found myself sifting the qualities which made his kind of storytelling possible.

  First, no qualms. Not the thinnest sliver of misgiving about the value of his work. He was able to feel that the most important job in the world was putting over Monsoon. In the second place, he was as uninhibited as a performing seal. He never questioned his right to monopolize conversation or his ability to do it entertainingly. And then there was his colossal lack of perspective. This was one of his most valuable gifts, for perspective doesn’t always pay. It can slow you down. I have sat in my office and said to myself, There are twelve million of your fellow Americans unemployed this morning. Who the hell are you? If that kept me from writing a line all morning it might mean I had perspective. Or thinking how the world was fifty million years ago and all the men who had their chance at living in it and what that had to do with the big pay-off scene in Nick Turner—Boy Detective I was supposed to turn in by five o’clock. That’s perspective too. Or just staring up into millions of stars at night till you become molecular. Perspective is a fine thing. It can make you very unhappy. I couldn’t imagine Sammy ever unhappy. Or happy either. I wondered what emotions he did have. Perhaps only a burning impatience to be further, further on.

  Billie liked the story because she could just see Raft and Lamour playing the parts.

  Kit started to tell Sammy how to put a picture story together. “The scenes can’t be like a lot of people gathered at random, Sammy, even if they’re colorful people. A good picture should be like a family tree. Every scene giving birth to the one that follows.”

  You didn’t have to have much of an imagination to see the tentacles of Sammy’s mind closing around that idea. I could almost hear him explaining his theory of film continuity to Collier that Sunday.

  When my turn came I said, “Sammy, I still don’t think the vehicle is worthy of you, but the acting is devastating. But deafeningly.”

  I wasn’t exaggerating. The worse the story became, the louder it seemed to get.

  “Just the same,” Kit said, “there must be something in that technique. Adolf and Benito have been doing it for years and look where those boys are. What a marvelous pair of Hollywood phonies they’d be! Can’t you just see them taking over a story conference?”

  Sammy seemed rather flattered by the comparison.

  “She’s right, Al,” he said. “Here’s a little motto your Uncle Sammy made up himself—hang it up in your office—I’ll give it to you free: Work hard, and, if you can’t work hard, be smart; and, if you can’t be smart, be loud.”

  “You sound like Moses,” I said, “proclaiming the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai.”

  “Moses was a sap,” Sammy said. “Look at the joke they made of those Commandments of his. They’ve been playing him for a sucker for three thousand years. At least mine work. For instance, just to wise you up a little bit, take the first story conference I ever had out here.”

  He took that first conference, all right. We had a very vivid picture of the producer, the supervisor, another writer and Sammy trying to dope a good, quick way for the boy and girl to meet at the opening of the picture.

  “The supervisor keeps throwing out but the producer plays tough. All he says is corny, stinks or 1902. The other writer is a Caspar Milquetoast with an expression on his face like he’s really thinking. Looks like he needs an enema. I’m thinking too, but not about the scene. I’m thinking I know from nothing about what I’m supposed to be doing and any minute the producer who’s no deadhead is going to find it out.

  “Then Milquetoast starts mumbling something under his breath. Like this, see?” Sammy tried to give us his interpretation of a timid soul. It was a difficult part for him. “ ‘I wonder if it’s a bad idea to have the landlady show the boy into a room she believes vacant but actually is still occupied by the young lady?’

  “This time the producer don’t even bother to say no. Maybe he doesn’t even hear him at all. Everybody just goes on thinking. The poor schlemiel looks around waiting for a reaction and ends up talking to himself. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I guess it is.’ ” The poor schlemiel turned out to be S. Henley Forster who has had more books reprinted in the Modern Library than any living American writer.

  “The dope probably doesn’t know it, but he showed me how to smack a story conference. I sit there a couple of seconds till I’m sure I have the producer’s eye. Then I start opening my eyes and sucking in my breath like I’m just discovering America or something. Then I start getting to my feet, slow, like this, looking at everybody as I rise. Significantly.

  “ ‘Wait a minute!’ I yell. I can feel them all moving in.

  “ ‘Jesus H. Christ I’ve got it!’

  “They look like I’ve slugged ’em over the head with sandbags. The boss doesn’t even say swell or let’s have it. I can feel I’ve got ’em already. Jesus, what a feeling!

  “ ‘Here’s the boy,’ I says, ‘wandering through the rain in a strange city looking for the cheapest room he can find.’ ”

  Even for us Sammy turned his collar up and started trudging through the rain.

  “ ‘The landlady, a terrific old character, leads me up the rickety stairs.” You’re in luck, young man,” she says to me, “there was somebody in this room but she had to be out by six o’clock. I can’t afford to run a free mission around here.” ’ I’m not giving you the dialogue, you understand, just ad-libbing, but you can see where the dialogue can be terrific. Now we got suspense, see? We’ve got a lonely kid that the audience is crazy about already and we’ve got them wondering about the lovely young girl who’s just been turned out into the cold.

  “ ‘Now the door swings open. I walk in. All of a sudden I look up and stop. Dead in my tracks. Staring …’

  “That’s where I paused,” Sammy told us. “Let ’em have a moment for the scene to sink in.

  “ ‘The camera swings over and what do you think we pick up?—our girl, half-dressed, just as little on as the Hays Office will let us get by with. She looks up—like a tigress—fighting for shelter. We’re right into a helluva situation. It’s a terrific moment. I keep looking at the girl. She keeps looking at me. Everybody in the audience knows the battle I’m fighting. How the hell can I take this room tonight and throw this tragic little waif out into the gutter?’ ”

  Sammy paused again, looking at us dramatically, just as he had for his producer. “ ‘The landlady is talking to me, telling me she’ll have the girl out of there right away. I don’t even hear her. And then, do you know what I say? Without taking my eyes off the girl I ask the landlady, ‘How much does she owe you?’ And when she tells me, I just say, ‘It’s paid,’ just like that, ‘It’s paid …’

  “ ‘And if you don’t think that’s the most terrific opening you ever had on any picture let me out of my contract and I’ll go back to my old job of managing editor of the New York Record!’ ”

  Sammy turned his collar down again, in
dicating that the curtain had fallen. “Jesus, I murdered them. The producer jumped up and kissed me. Then he had me tell the whole thing through again. Then he asked the supervisor and the other writer what they thought of it. I wish I could have had a picture of that poor schlemiel’s puss when he told the producer he agreed with it completely.”

  Sammy’s laugh invited us to join in at Forster’s expense. His excuse for dwelling on the story was its lesson for me. But from the relish with which he re-enacted his crime you could see how the experience fattened his pride. It made me realize more sharply than ever what a peculiar phenomenon his pride was. He was prouder of the method with which he had triumphed than if he had thought of the original suggestion himself.

  “Now I know what I have to do to become a successful screen writer,” I said. “Take elocution and singing lessons.”

  I tried to kid about it, but I was really depressed. For if making the grade out here meant going through the song-and-dance that Sammy had just presented, I felt I might as well start applying for hand-outs at the Motion Picture Relief.

  But Kit reassured me. “You may not believe it, but there are some writers out here who really write. I’ve seen them do it on honest-to-god typewriters, with my own eyes. Dudley Nichols, for instance. He and John Ford have just done a job called The Informer that made me want to wash my mouth out with soap for all the nasty things I’ve been saying about Hollywood.”

  That was the first time I had ever heard anybody make Hollywood sound like a job, instead of a happy hunting ground where the customary weapons were a fabulous gall and a mouth energetic and loud. I was settling down beside her, ready to hear more, when Sammy came over and dropped his arm around her.

  “I can’t understand it,” he said, “a smart wench like her—just lousy with ideals.”

  Out of his mouth that word sounded like something from a foreign language.

  “You know she’s on the Board of the Screen Writers Guild,” he said. “She even got me to join her lousy organization.”

  It disturbed me not to be able to get a line on what they thought they were doing with each other. You could hardly call it an intellectual companionship. And yet if it was love it was a new kind on me. I think I had collected enough evidence to prove to myself that the only love Sammy Glick was capable of was a violent passion for his own future. And why a dame in her league wanted to play around with a swift little rodent like Sammy Glick seemed to be one for Dr. Freud.

  “Look at the time,” I said. “How about it, Billie? Maybe you and I ought to drag each other out of here before he starts charging us rent.”

  Kit showed Billie into the bedroom to get her hat and coat. I didn’t know why I should have felt annoyed that she knew her way around so well.

  Sammy and I had a nightcap. I must have been a little further gone than I thought, to tell him about my studio troubles with Pancake.

  Sammy responded like a fireman hearing the alarm. “Let me show you how to give that guy the finger,” he said. He wanted to help me. There was real benevolence in his voice, of his own peculiar brand.

  “If you turn in one treatment with both your names on it and that fat swish lets the producer know he did all the writing, you’re dead. If you want to play it cozy, write a treatment of your own without letting Pancake know and then get to your producer alone and tell him you thought Pancake was so far off the line it seemed faster to straighten it out yourself. That way you’ve got a chance of scaring him into bouncing Pancake off the picture and grabbing yourself a solo screenplay credit.”

  I couldn’t see myself doing it, and I told him so. I wasn’t sure whether I would ever make a screen writer or not, but I had no illusions about my powers as a politician.

  “Don’t be a sap,” he said. “You’ve heard of the survival of the fittest.”

  I admitted that I held with the theory of evolution, but in a somewhat more complex form.

  “You can give it all the fancy names you want,” he said, “but when you come right down to it it’s dog eat dog.”

  Somehow, I had been hoping that Kit was going to leave with us. But she had made herself very much at home. She had even let her hair down. I never understood before what a nice figure of speech that was. Instead of the large, neat knot that gave her that brisk, efficient look, it fell down over her shoulders now, softening her face, making her look relaxed, almost girlish.

  “So long, sweetheart,” Sammy said to me. “We’ll be previewing some night next week. I’ll give you a ring when I find out what night and we’ll all get together.”

  There he stood in the doorway of his classy apartment, in his early twenties, in his expensive shoes, in his brand-new flashy jacket, in his brand-new Horatio Alger mind, but still looking like a kid off the streets who had sneaked in and put on the clothes he found in the closet. My best friend. My worst enemy shouldn’t have such a best friend.

  Back in my room, Billie and I had our moment and then as the passion drained, our bodies returned us to what we really were, casual acquaintances.

  The longer the silence lasted the further apart we drew. Finally she said, “What’re you thinking about, honey?”

  “Oh, just a lot of things, Billie,” I said. “Nothing much, I guess.”

  “You know,” she said, “I like it with you a lot. You’re sweet.”

  There was nothing ever sordid about sex with Billie. The way she talked about it, it might have been surfboard riding or mountain climbing, anything she happened to be good at and enjoy.

  “Billie,” I said, “don’t answer this unless you want to. How many men have you been with?”

  The question wasn’t intended to startle her, but the casualness of her answer startled me.

  “Well, when I was fourteen,” she said, “I tried to keep track of all the boys I knew. And when I was fifteen I tried to keep track of all the boys I kissed. And when I was sixteen—but now I’ve even lost track of that.”

  She chuckled as if she had told a joke on herself.

  “Billie, what do you think of Sammy Glick?”

  She pulled the sheet up to her neck. “Oh, I don’t know. He’s a pretty smart feller, all right.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “How do you feel about him?”

  This time she really seemed to think it over. “All I know,” she said slowly, “is that I’d hate to go to bed with him.”

  The principal furniture in Billie’s mind was a good-sized bed.

  “Why, Billie?”

  She hesitated, giggling with the embarrassment of anyone out of the habit of probing ideas. “Oh, I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I’ve always liked to do it because it’s just about the most fun you get out of life and because—I bet you laugh at me for this—it’s always seemed like the friendliest thing two people can do in the whole world. That’s why I’ve never wanted to turn pro. But—I know this sounds crazy—but somehow I’ve always felt that if I ever went to bed with him—even if he didn’t pay me—I’d feel like I was doing it for money.”

  I kept turning that over in my mind as I was falling asleep and the more I played it back the surer I was that Billie, in her own sweet horizontal way, had said something more searching about Sammy than anything I had been able to hit on yet. And I had been working at it ever since the little copy boy burst into my office and launched his undeclared war against the world.

  CHAPTER 5

  You could see the beams of the giant searchlights ballyhooing Sammy’s preview plowing broad white furrows through the sky. “There it is,” Sammy said as we turned off Sunset toward the Village. The words came out of his mouth like hard, sharp-sided pebbles. “Jesus.”

  He meant those lights up there were spelling Sammy Glick. There was no other word for the sound of pride mouthed with apprehension.

  There wasn’t much talking. Sammy’s mood always provided the backdrop for the rest of us, and he was nervous. Even when he tried to cover it with wisecracks, they were nervous wisecracks.

&nbs
p; “What kind of a house is this?” he said.

  “A tough one,” Kit said. “They only laugh when it’s funny, not when it’s supposed to be funny. And they never cry when it’s maudlin. Only when it’s pathetic.”

  “Jesus,” Sammy said.

  “And they’re preview-wise,” she warned. “They’ve had so many previews out here that they all sound like little DeMilles. They complain about the angles, and the smoothness of the dissolves, and they even tell you what to cut.”

  “The bastards,” Sammy said, “they better think my picture is funny. I know it’s funny. I counted the laughs myself. One hundred and seventeen.”

  The theater entrance was full of excitement that came mostly from women who were attracted to the leading man, and men resentful or regretful that they would never go to bed with anybody like the star, and unimportant people who idealized their envy into admiration and kids who wanted to have more autographs than anybody else in the world.

  All the lights were on in the theater and everybody in the audience had his head turned toward the entrance. It looked crazy, as if the screen had suddenly been set up behind their backs. They were all watching for the celebrities to fill up the loge section that had been roped off for them. I realized why Sammy had rushed us through dinner. He wanted to be sure and get there before the lights went out.

  The three of us started down the aisle together but we had only gone a couple of rows when we lost Sammy. When I looked around, Sammy was practically in the lap of a dignified, gray-haired man, with a pink, gentle face, which was a little too soft around the mouth.

  “That’s his producer,” Kit said as I was about to ask. “Sidney Fineman.” I looked again. Fineman was one of the magic names like Goldwyn and Mayer.

  As we waited for the lights to fade, we talked about Fineman. He was one of the few real old-timers still on top. He had written scenarios for people who have become myths or names of streets like Griffith and Ince. He was supposed to have one of the finest collections of rare books in the country.