What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  “Sammy Glick!” I said. “You don’t mean to tell me that your wife and Sammy …?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I don’t mean that. But I swear to God, Mr. Manheim, even that wouldn’t be as bad. It isn’t my wife that Glick’s stolen—it’s my—my whole life.”

  I wished his eyes could have been angry, but they weren’t. They only cried.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “If you’re talking about the credit for that story, I’m with you. But I don’t see what I can do about it, Julian.”

  “Oh, that isn’t it,” he said. “That story doesn’t matter, Mr. Manheim.”

  “My name’s Al,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But that was just the beginning. Jesus, if I could only have my job in the ad department back and go on writing my novel at night. I can’t even write any more, Mr. Manheim. Honest to Christ, if I had a little more guts I’d throw myself off that bridge in Pasadena.”

  His voice threatened to get away from him.

  “Hold it,” I said. “You better eat that while it’s hot. There’s nothing lousier than cold Chinese food.

  “Then begin at the beginning. Take your time. And telling me how upset you are won’t do either of us any good. Try to hold yourself down to the facts.”

  I poured the sake and he wet his lips with it. When he began again he dropped his voice to a flat monotone to keep it steady.

  It seems that Rosalie Goldbaum wasn’t the only one waiting for a letter when Sammy went west. Sammy was supposed to lay the groundwork for Julian and let him know the moment he found an opening. So Julian kept his little job in the ad department, waiting for Der Tag. But the only news of Sammy he ever had was via Parsons’ column. Finally, Blanche made him sit down and write a letter. It was long, plaintive and unanswered.

  One night he came home from his job to find Blanche packing. For the vacation in the Catskills she had been wanting? No, to California, to Hollywood.

  “But Blanche!” he said. “We haven’t heard from Sammy Glick. How can we go to Hollywood?”

  Blanche was short and lean, toughened in the same tenements that Julian had passed through so curiously untouched.

  “Sit down and eat your dinner before it gets cold, Julie,” she said. “We’re going to California in the secondhand car I bought with part of the story money this afternoon. We’re going to pay a little visit to that friend Glick you were all the time telling me was doing so much for you.”

  “Blanche, you sound mad. Don’t be mad at me,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, I love you,” she said furiously. “If I didn’t love you it wouldn’t get me so sore to see you let a gonif like Glick make a dope out of you when I know you could be a fine writer. Now sit down and eat so you can get through and help me pack.”

  They had three blowouts, their radiator cracked from overheating crossing the Continental Divide, Julian drove a hundred miles out of their way one night when Blanche fell asleep and when they arrived in Hollywood Sammy wouldn’t see them.

  They called the studio every day for a week, but Sammy was never in. They couldn’t reach him at home because the studio wouldn’t tell them where he was living. They frequented places they couldn’t afford, hoping to run into him. It wasn’t until their money had dwindled to the margin Blanche had laid aside in case they had to drive East again that Julian managed to get Sammy on the other end of a telephone.

  Sammy dispensed with the overtures. His voice grated: “Listen, shtunk, for Chri’sake who the hell told you to come out here?”

  “But Mr. Glick, I thought …”

  “The hell you did. If you thought you would have stayed home. Didn’t I tell you I’d send for you when the time came?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t think it would take …”

  “Listen, kid,” Sammy’s voice suddenly soft-pedaled. “Don’t think I’m having any cakewalk. As soon as I get set I’ll be able to fix you up, but right now they’ve got me going around in circles.” He paused, trying to suck Julian in on the laugh. “I guess we’re just a couple of kids who didn’t know when we were well off, hey, Julian?”

  Julian thought of the trip home, of the lousy job, and Blanche. “Mr. Glick, I told Blanche you wouldn’t give me the runaround. There must be some way you could get me in. Not even as a writer. Maybe the story department could use a …”

  “Look, do you wanna be smart?” Sammy told him. “Get the hell out of this lousy town and back to New York. You won’t have a prayer around here until the fall anyway—the summer’s always slow …” Then his voice tensed and quickened. “Listen, pal, they’re calling me for a conference. I’ll shoot you a wire the first time anything looks hot—now be a smart guy like I toldya. Have a nice trip back.” And he cut Julian off.

  I don’t know how he looked when he really hung up that phone but the secondhand version he gave me in the booth of that Chinese restaurant was the closest I ever want to come to it. His pale blue eyes were pink-rimmed and his skin looked too thin to hold his face in. It was not a weak but a sensitive face, which seemed to be characterized by the gentle curve of a delicate nose.

  “For days I didn’t even have the nerve to tell Blanche I had talked to him,” Julian said. “I knew what she would say and I felt like a big enough sap already. You know, love is a funny thing, Mr. Manheim. There never was anything small or selfish about Blanche, and yet I think things would have been better between us if I could have come home with that writing job.”

  So he spent three weeks riding the street cars and the buses and trying to get by the studio reception desks. His Hollywood wasn’t that exclusive night club where everyone knew everybody else. He learned that Hollywood extended from Warner Brothers at Burbank, in the valley beyond the northern hills, to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, twenty-five miles southwest in Culver City. He found a new side of Hollywood, the ten-man-for-every-job side, the seasonal unemployment, the call-again-next-month side. The factory side. He learned how many Julian Blumbergs there were, who found nothing but No Admittance signs, for every Sammy Glick who opens the lock with a wave of his cigar like a magic wand.

  It wasn’t until he had made the rounds of all the major studios and began ringing doorbells on Poverty Row that he had his first nibble. A shoestring producer told him he had bought the stock shots from Hell’s Angels and Wings and needed an airplane story with no more than three principal characters, in as few interiors as possible.

  He worked all week and when the producer told him he seemed to be on the right track he put in another feverish week, finishing a thirty-page outline of a tight little melodrama. The producer’s secretary (who was also his entire staff) asked Julian to leave the manuscript with the assurance that if it were approved he would be hired. Two weeks later it was returned in the mail, with a brief, formal note.

  An unemployed writer in the hotel put him wise. Julian had fallen for a familiar Poverty Row economy gag. The producer encourages as many as a dozen aspiring writers to work on his idea. They knock themselves out over his story for two or three weeks in return for nothing but the vaguest of promises. Then the producer comes out of it with enough free ideas to nourish the one writer he finally hires.

  When Julian heard this there was nothing to do but make a full confession to Blanche and throw the suitcase into the back seat again.

  The drive back took them three days longer than they expected because of a short in the battery and the piston rings’ wearing out. They had the trip budgeted so carefully that they reached Blanche’s parents’ apartment in the Bronx with exactly forty-three cents.

  “So you can imagine how we felt when we read this telegram,” Julian said. “Mother said it had been waiting there several days. I saved it as a souvenir of my Hollywood career.”

  His mouth smiled, but nothing happened to his eyes. “It’s turned out to be the only item in my collection.”

  He handed me the over-fingered, often-folded telegram. I read it, and then I read it again, and then again. It was like hea
ring Sammy Glick’s voice in the room.

  DEAR JULIAN. HERE IS GREATEST BREAK OF YOUR LIFE. HAVE SCREEN-WRITING JOB FOR YOU. ENCLOSING MONEY FOR IMMEDIATE AIRLINE TRIP TO HOLLYWOOD FOR YOU AND WIFE. WIRE COLLECT WHEN I SHOULD MEET YOU AT AIRPORT. YOUR PAL

  SAMMY

  So the day the Blumbergs arrived from Hollywood in their broken-down jalopy they were flying back again via TWA. Sammy was waiting at the airport. He threw his arms around Julian like a brother. Five minutes later they were in the car Sammy had hired, rushing back to town.

  Julian’s mouth was dry with excitement. He thought he was heading straight for the studio.

  Twenty minutes later he found himself in Sammy’s apartment. Sammy wasn’t losing a moment. He sat Julian down, handed him a script and told him he could start working.

  Julian began reading obediently, too busy to notice Blanche’s suspicions. What kind of a job was this that kept them from the studio? she wanted to know.

  “Lots of writers work at home,” Sammy said. “I told them I thought it would go faster here. And to tell you the truth—you aren’t exactly on the payroll yet, Julian.”

  “Oh,” said Julian.

  “Not exactly?” said Blanche.

  “I’ll come clean with you,” Sammy said. “The studio canned the writer who was working with me because they seemed to think I could get along better alone. But I find I haven’t got time to knock the script out myself so I thought it would be a swell idea to get you out here to give me a hand. And as soon as you have a couple of scenes under your belt it’ll be a cinch for me to get you a regular job by showing ’em what you can do. Meanwhile you can move in with me and I’ll loan you twenty-five a week to keep you going till you’re on your feet.”

  It didn’t sing like the telegram. But at least it was an in and even Blanche was willing to ride along.

  Julian rolled up his sleeves without knowing the difference between a fade-in and a stand-in. He stayed up all that night reading one screenplay after another, getting the feel of it. By morning he discovered that he was able to find holes in the script that grew out of the bizarre collaboration of S. Henley Forster and Sammy Click. Twenty-four hours after he arrived he was rewriting the first scene and he kept batting out scenes for the rest of the week in eighteen-hour stretches. The plan was for him and Sammy to write alternate sequences. Only Sammy was always being called to conferences at the studio that lasted most of the day. But he explained to Julian that he was still carrying the brunt of the work as he was going ahead and laying out the ensuing scenes. In his mind.

  In the frenzy of those first days Julian began to feel he had been writing scenarios all his life. When Sammy read his work all he said was, “This stuff sounds okay,” but Julian noticed that he didn’t waste any time racing off to the studio with it.

  Blanche and Julian took the day off and discovered Hollywood was a small town on a large scale with simple, modest houses separated by small, neat lawns. It was Julian’s last day before he was to take his place with Sammy at the studio. They rode to the end of carlines, holding hands and giggling like kids. They felt as if they were taking the first deep breath since they arrived. It was fun to remember that this was late winter, with the green trees and the warm sun. Blanche wondered happily how long it would take for this crisp heat to dry up Julian’s sinuses. They even stopped in to ask the rent of one of the cute little stucco bungalows on Orange Grove Avenue. Fifty dollars a month with a small yard of their own and two orange trees, tiny ones but each with a real orange.

  Sammy was waiting for them when they got home. With a face full of bad news. “Tough luck, kid,” he said. “I’m afraid your scenes didn’t go over like I thought they would.”

  He let Julian feel just lousy enough before adding:

  “But I haven’t lost faith in you. In fact just to show you where you stand with me I’m going to throw in ten bucks a week extra with that twenty-five.”

  That was more money than Julian had ever made before, enough for him and Blanche to take a flat of their own in one of the cheap apartment houses above Hollywood Boulevard.

  Sammy started calling Julian his secretary. He was doing all his work at the studio now, but he thought it would be good practice for Julian to go on writing through the script and promised to go over his scenes with him and give him pointers, to help him learn the trade.

  When the script was finished and Sammy was waiting for his next assignment, Julian didn’t like to sit around without writing so he started working on an original called Country Doctor because he thought it would help Sammy plead his case at the studio. He was almost too frightened of Blanche’s beautiful and brutal candor to tell her the story, but she surprised him by saying, “Julian, if you were only as smart as you knew how to write! It doesn’t matter how much money there is in this story as long as you make sure it says—By Julian Blumberg. So the big shots will finally find out my pupsie is a writer.”

  Julian wrote easily, and it was his sort of stuff, simple and human, and he had it finished in a week. For the next three days he wondered whether it was good enough to show to Sammy. He had decided it wasn’t when Sammy came to him and said, “Say, I read that yarn of yours Blanche showed me. It’s pretty fair—got a couple of nice moments. I’ll see what I can do with it.”

  “Well,” Julian said,” weeks went by and it looked like he’d forgotten all about my story, so I started helping him with his next screenplay because there didn’t seem to be anything better to do. And then one day Blanche happened to be reading through the trade papers and found this:

  He handed me a ragged little clipping. I was beginning to feel like a district attorney. “Exhibit B,” I said.

  Sammy was running through the room again as I started to read: “Sammy Glick makes it two in a row as his latest original, Country Doctor … ” and handed the squib back.

  What a two-scene that must have been, Julian’s stammering request for an explanation—Sammy hammering back at him:

  “Listen, Julie, don’t be a schlemiel all your life. Everybody thinks I’m hot at the studio right now. So I saw a chance of smacking them for a bonus that means twice the dough they’d pay a Julian Blumberg.” He made the name sound like a cussword. “Jesus Christ, what the hell have you got to bitch about when I’m putting the money in your pocket?”

  “But it isn’t fair …”

  “No fair,” Sammy mimicked. “Like they say in sissy schools. No fair! For Chris’sake, grow up, this isn’t kindergarten any more, this is the world.”

  That was one of the most philosophical observations Sammy ever made.

  I was beginning to feel like a groggy fighter waiting for his manager to toss in the towel and Julian seemed to sense this, for he said, “Well, there isn’t a whole lot more to tell, Mr. Manheim …”

  My God, more! I thought. If what he had been telling me were supposed to be fiction I would have broken in ten minutes ago to tell him his story was hopeless hyperbole. But you could tell Julian was telling the truth. It’s strange that a writer as gifted as Julian could be so stupid that he was incapable of telling anything but the truth. I believed him because truth is never hard to recognize. Nothing is ever quite so drab and repetitious and forlorn and ludicrous as truth.

  “I guess you must have thought I was a little shell-shocked when you saw me after the preview last night. Well, maybe I was. Because that picture was the biggest shock in my life, Mr. Manheim. How do you think you’d feel going in to a movie cold and suddenly starting to realize you’re hearing all your own scenes?”

  Oh, God, I thought, I’m going to explode. Sammy Glick is a time bomb in my brain and it’s going to go off any moment and blow me to bits.

  “The whole picture,” Julian was saying. “All those scenes I thought I was just doing for practice—actually showing on the screen—all mine—every line, mine—you know what I felt like doing, Mr. Manheim? I felt like jumping up right in the middle and screaming. I wanted to tell everybody there that the only line Glick
wrote on Girl Steals Boy was the by-line on the cover. I felt like telling all of them that now I know why he had me fly out in such a hurry—because when he got the other writer bounced he knew he couldn’t stay on the picture alone—he didn’t dare.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I said. “I suppose you’d’ve been rushed to the psychopathic ward, but it would have been worth it.”

  “I just got sick to my stomach,” Julian said. “I mean actually throwing up, in the men’s room. And when I came out Blanche made me talk to Sammy right away. I’ve seen Blanche mad, but I’ve never seen her like that before. I thought it might be better to wait and see Sammy in the morning. But she said either I saw him right then and there—or she’d go home and move out. You see, Blanche is a funny kid, Mr. Manheim. To look at her you wouldn’t think she was anything but a nice, frail little Jewish girl. But …”

  “So you did have a talk with Sammy last night?” I said.

  “I caught him for a moment in the lobby on his way out,” Julian said sadly.

  “Sammy, you’ve got to listen to me! How could you do this to me, Sammy? Telling me they didn’t like my scenes when they used …”

  Sammy looked around the lobby coldly, saw the little group nearby surrounding Sidney Fineman.

  “I don’t want to discuss it here.”

  “But Sammy, I can’t go on this way. Blanche …”

  “I said shut up.”

  Then he looked up and added, “Thank you very much. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  Julian looked around. A gray-haired gentleman with a smiling pink face was joining them. He slipped his arm around Sammy with fatherly affection.

  “Looks like we have a hit, son,” he said. “And everybody’s talking about the writing.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fineman. Julian, I don’t suppose I have to tell you who this is—Sidney Fineman?”

  “I’m very glad to meet you,” said Julian.

  “How do you do,” said Fineman. Julian felt he was being cordial and oblivious to him at the same time. “How did you like the picture?” It was hardly a question the way Fineman put it, more like the perfunctory How-are-you in passing an acquaintance on the street. And it demanded the same kind of “Fine-thanks” answer.