What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  “The panic is on,” she said.

  “Some of the boys seem to think they’re just sucking around for better jobs,” I said. “Others think it’s the Executive Board’s fault for pushing things too fast. You don’t know what to think.”

  “I know what to think,” she said.

  “But what are they doing it for?” I said. “What do they get out of it?”

  “I don’t think you can settle that with one answer,” she said. “Because they’re all doing the same thing for different reasons. Start with Larry Paine, for instance.”

  Listening to her gave me the impression of watching a river moving too swiftly, cutting its banks down sharp and straight, uncompromisingly.

  “Larry’s a good writer. But a complicated one. There’s nothing like a rich man’s son who’s done a little starving, just enough to scare him into becoming a self-made man. He’s a recluse and the kind of a drinker who reaches for that bottle when he wakes up in the morning. Something’s gone wrong. The way he laughs, for instance. It gets louder and harsher until I don’t know what it becomes, but it isn’t laughter. And those eyes, everybody notices those sunken, hurt eyes. He’s been nursing his paranoia along for years. I think he really believes the Guild was organized just to deprive him of his individuality!”

  She ran through the other four more rapidly. “Harold Godfrey Wilson is an old boozer who had written himself out ten years ago, and Jack McCarter is a young boozer who never had anything in him to write out and just coasted in behind Wilson.”

  Bob Griffin, she thought, was one of the most competent writers in the industry, naturally conservative but with a straight-from-the-shoulder integrity. “I think the only trouble with Bob is that he has read one too many editorials in the Megaphone about our being cannibalistically inclined toward producers and wanting to replace Louis B. Mayer with Joe Stalin.

  “And I believe,” she concluded, “that you can hazard a guess at Mr. Glick’s motives. And that is the Sanity Five that has volunteered to lead the writers to their New Jerusalem.”

  “How much support do you think they have?” I said.

  “Nobody knows,” she said. “They still have ten days to work over the membership before the general meeting. None of us has ever been organized before. It’s hard to say how we’ll hold up. Sitting up there on the platform with the Board all year, I’ve had a chance to watch the membership react. They blow hot and cold. Maybe that’s because they’re high-strung and they’re individualistic and, except for the handful of left-wingers, none of them knows a labor tactic from a sacrifice scene.

  “And of course they haven’t learned to work together. With longshoremen or fruit pickers that probably grows right out of their jobs. But with us it’s just the opposite. We’re pitted against each other. Two or three times I’ve worked on the same script with somebody else without either of us knowing it. That’s like rubbing two fighting cocks together. I’d say it’s fifty-fifty right now as to whether the Guild weathers the storm or not.”

  She looked at her watch. “Time to go to work,” she said, and jumped nimbly to her feet. “Well, what do you say? Think we’ve destroyed enough of the industry for one day? Or shall we go back to the office and commit sabotage by writing the stinkingest scenes we possibly can?”

  “I only hope Mr. Fineman doesn’t think my treatment of Masaryk is sabotage,” I said, as we started back toward the writers’ building again.

  Those were the Ten Days That Shook Hollywood. It was earthquake weather. Writers woke up excited or went to bed frightened. They fought battles of words in which the injuries sustained were nervous stomach and insomnia.

  One of the first casualties was Julian, who dropped into my office on his way home that Friday evening.

  “How would you like to come down to the beach for lunch tomorrow?” he said gravely.

  I said I would like to but I had planned to come back to the studio because I wanted to get my treatment in before the end of the month and the rumpus all week had put me behind schedule.

  “I’ve asked Kit too,” he said. “There’s something I wanted to talk over with you.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I guess I can work late tonight instead.”

  We drove out in her car with the top down. We drove past Westwood Village, the home of UCLA, which is either the model for Hollywood’s version of campus life or vice versa; past Sawtelle, the Old Soldiers’ Home, where veterans of our more recent wars live out their days watching cars go by; past Santa Monica with its swanky swimming clubs and its public beaches, where bronzed and pretty girls in little bathing suits wear sailor hats and munch hot dogs as they skip barefooted across the blistering pavement to the sand. Then we turned north up the coast highway curving to the shore, bordered by matchbox cottages, snug and dilapidated, with names like Crow’s Nest and Joe’s Joynt.

  Finally we reached a group of cottages which were a little newer, with the paint not yet eaten away by the salt air, and one of these was Julian’s.

  The house was clean and compact and shiplike. The long narrow dining room faced the sea, which was so close to us that big waves would shake the walls and send the surf swishing up below us. Blanche was one of those efficient little Jewish mothers who look as if that was what they were meant for from their first moment of puberty.

  Julian was dressed more informally than I had ever seen him before, in a loose-fitting dungaree suit and beach sandals, but he would never look really sporty. In spite of his natural graveness, he did his best to be jolly through lunch, but his sensitivity was of too simple a kind to conceal his uneasiness.

  Later, sitting on his porch overlooking the ocean, we heard the cause of it.

  “You know,” he said, “all the time that I’ve been working at World-Wide I’ve been working from week to week, without a contract. Two days ago,” he continued sadly, “they offered me a seven-year contract. Beginning at five hundred dollars a week.”

  He stopped, sighed, put his pipe back in his mouth and looked out at his ocean.

  All of us knew what he meant. There had been lots of rumors flying around World-Wide that writers were being offered unusually attractive contracts in order to tempt them into breaking the Guild provision. But I hadn’t really believed it. This was the first actual case I had heard of. Kit and I had been called in to help Julian wrestle with his conscience.

  I didn’t say anything. I watched Kit.

  “Unless all of us are free agents two years from now the Guild is licked,” she said. “God knows, none of us want to strike. But if we aren’t even in a position to threaten one, we’re just charging a machine gun with our bare hands and we might as well fold.”

  Julian looked as if he were going to burst out crying. Blanche was upset.

  “That’s all right for you to say, Miss Sargent. You’re all established. But Julian is finally getting a good start. And with our baby coming …”

  Jesus, what a hell of a complicated world, I thought. Here is a kid who is finally getting the break he’s been waiting for and deserves and he’s dying to take it, and who the hell can blame him, and Kit, that coldhearted humanitarian, isn’t going to let him.

  “Julian might still be ghost writing if it weren’t for the Guild,” she said. “Of course, if we ever have a Guild shop in Hollywood, all the interests of writers will be protected; but the ones it will help most are the boys like Julian, who aren’t able to take any kind of a stand alone.”

  “Then what does he pay his agent ten percent for?” Blanche said.

  “Agents can help just so much. But when we were asked to take that fifty-percent cut my first year out here, the agents were swept along with the rest of us. You probably don’t remember, but the crafts that were organized were the only ones that didn’t have to take it.”

  Julian kept turning his head from Blanche to Kit as if he were watching a tennis match. I tried to make out which side he was on. He looked miserable when Kit spoke and even more miserable when Blanche retaliated.
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  “You know I’m for the Guild,” he broke in. “I joined as soon as I was eligible. But, God, when I think of the difference between five hundred a week and losing my job …”

  “Who says you’re going to lose your job?” Kit said, almost angrily.

  “Sammy,” Julian said. “He had a talk with me yesterday. He told me what a damn fool he thought I was, if I didn’t sign it. He said he had it confidentially from the front office that if I didn’t sign it I’d never work for World-Wide again.”

  Oh, Sammy, you frantic marathoner, I thought, you bastard I used to hate and almost understand! You success!

  “How can you possibly ask him to turn it down?” Blanche said.

  Blanche is right, I thought. Blanche is right and Kit is right and never the twain shall meet.

  “I’m not asking him to turn it down,” Kit said relentlessly. “That’s something you’ll have to decide yourselves. All I can do is tell you what turning it down means.”

  Nebbish, poor Julian, I thought.

  When we left, the sun was taking its evening dip, slipping down into the ocean inch by inch like a fat woman afraid of the water.

  Instead of turning back toward Hollywood, we started north, just driving anywhere with the top down and the sunset just beyond our reach. The ocean and the clouds were red when we started out, soon after deep purple with a splinter moon giving the night a subtle, indirect lighting. We drove up past Malibu, left the last houses behind. The beach had disappeared and in its place were turbulent rock formations jutting out into the sea. On the other side of the road stretched pasture lands and cultivated fields.

  As we took a hairpin turn Kit said, “There’s my little beach down there.”

  I saw nothing but steep rocks below us piling into the water.

  “You can’t see it from the road,” she said. “The rocks are too high around it. I found it one hot day driving up to Frisco. It’s a beautiful place to go swimming in the raw.”

  “How would you like to go in now?” I said.

  She put her foot on the brake. “Okay,” she said. “It might be warm enough.”

  “But how can we get dry?” I said, a little panicky. “We haven’t any towels.”

  “I’ll look in the rumble,” she said. “I think I have some with my tennis stuff.”

  “I hope so,” I said unconvincingly.

  She found them. I almost broke my neck on the jagged path that angled down to the little beach that lay concealed and virginal below. Natural hydraulics working overtime for a couple of million years had scooped it right out of the cliffs.

  “Quite an improvement on our last island,” I said. “Unless that moon is being held up by piano wire.”

  “I’ve named it Glick’s Lagoon,” she said. “Because it’s the last stronghold of individualism.”

  “Was Sammy ever down here with you?”

  She shook her head. “I pointed it out to him once. But he didn’t want to stop. No one ever taught him how to play.”

  We undressed silently, seeing each other only as silhouettes. She was ready first and didn’t wait for me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her moving swiftly toward the water, her tanned arms and legs and head blending into the dark, the rest of her body that had been concealed from the sun looking from the back like a white, tight-fitting bathing suit. She was long-legged, almost hipless, V-shaped from her waist to her broad shoulders.

  The water was so cold it made my heart feel like an ice cube. I plowed madly, determined to stay in as long as she did. Her stroke was a smooth rhythmic crawl. She swam out beyond me and back and said, “Ready to go in?”

  “Yes,” I said with half a dozen y’s through chattering teeth. “But I’ll have to dive down and find my feet first. I think they both dropped off.”

  “They’ll probably come in with the tide,” she said.

  Five minutes later we were dressed again, warm and dry with towels around our heads and our bodies tingling. We sat there with our arms around our knees, catching our breath.

  “What are you thinking about?” she said.

  “Julian,” I said. “How awfully sorry I feel for Julian.”

  “Poor little guy,” she said.

  “That’s not the way you sounded a couple of hours ago,” I said. “Jesus, you were cold-blooded. I almost felt like telling him to take that contract.”

  “That’s what he asked us down to tell him,” she said. “He was right on the borderline. One word of sympathy would have been enough to tip him the other way.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “I’ll be damned if I do. This isn’t just a character you can X-out and rewrite. This is a guy’s life you’re playing around with.”

  “Whatever we do,” she said, “we have to do it all the way. If we want a Guild we have to fight it through. We can’t have half a Guild. It’s like a strike. You either scab or you try to stop the scabs. But you can’t strike and feel sorry for the scabs at the same time.”

  “Why not?” I said. “The strikers only strike because they want something out of life they aren’t getting. The poor scabs are in the same boat. I saw strikers beat hell out of a scab in my hometown once. He was just a desperate, hungry little guy. Being a scab wasn’t his idea of what he wanted to do in this world.”

  “That’s pity,” she said. “Pity is always good for a couple of Christmas baskets for the poor. But that leaves three-hundred-and-sixty-four other days to take care of. Your attitude is very picturesque, from a distance. But try bringing it closer home. What do you think Sammy is but a desperate, hungry little guy?”

  It was true. He was going around being desperate in a $150 tailor-made suit. He was hungrier than ever after five-dollar dinners at Marcel’s.

  “But Sammy is still in the Guild,” I said. “I think you ought to try to get together with his bunch. Work out some sort of a compromise, maybe. It doesn’t seem fair to put guys like Julian on such a spot.”

  “Sammy joined the Guild when it didn’t cost anything,” she said. “Everybody was doing it and it was absolutely safe. But now I think he’s getting ready to jump. All he’s waiting for is a nice, soft spot to land.”

  “Just the same,” I argued, “his bunch is still a powerful minority in the Guild. I think you ought to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

  “The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you’re too goddam good. But I’ll think it over. I’ll put it up to the Board.”

  The headline in the Megaphone the following Saturday read:

  PREDICT CIVIL WAR AT GUILD SESSION TONIGHT!

  But we didn’t have to wait that long. All the writers on our lot—some fifty or sixty of us—were called together in one of the projection rooms just before lunch. And I can think of nothing better calculated to take away an appetite.

  The atmosphere was electric. All of us seemed to be strung together with high-tension wires. The program began with Dan Young, the barrel-bodied, red-faced, profanely earnest studio manager, who seemed to feel that the story of how he had risen from truck driver right here at this studio to his present importance was a devastating argument for writers giving up the Guild foolishness and making the studio one big happy family. He even hinted that those who refused to participate in his family life (on his terms) would find themselves led by the hand to the studio gate and told never to darken his payroll again.

  After he finished, to cautious applause, he introduced the next speaker, the white-haired boy of the happy family, whom he laughingly described as “a member of your own ranks who seems to have a little more sense than the rest of you.”

  Sammy Glick informed us that we would get further by voting the way the studio was asking us to. If he had used the first person singular instead of the plural he would have been right.

  On the way out Sammy caught up with me and took my arm protectively. “Don’t stick your neck out too far, Al,” he said. “After all everybody’s got to look out for Number One.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but we
can’t all have a genius for it like you have.”

  I strolled back to the office with Kit. “We couldn’t have done better if we had organized that meeting ourselves,” she said. “That won more votes for us than it did for them. I was afraid a little pressure like that might run the boys out of the Guild. But it only seemed to pull them together. Now they’re really sore.”

  “Where do you think Sammy is going to end up?” I said.

  “It depends on what kind of a deal he can make with Young,” she said. “He’s probably holding out for general-manager-in-charge-of-production! ”

  The police department had taken the Megaphone’s prediction of civil war at the membership meeting seriously. Twenty or thirty policemen had planted themselves ominously around the hall to preserve law and order, staring curiously at the five or six hundred writers filling the auditorium.

  Just before the meeting opened Kit stopped at my seat on her way to the platform and said animatedly, “Well, Al, it looks as if it’s going to be run your way.”

  Then she was up there, facing the microphone. She ran her hand back over her hair once firmly, the way she always did before she began to speak. She spoke with an emphasis and implication of surprise that caught the membership immediately.

  “For the past four weeks, which we will always look back on fondly as the Days of the Terror …”—she waited for her laugh—”there has been mounting confusion on the question of Guild autonomy. To satisfy those critics of the Authors’ League amalgamation plan who honestly fear the loss of our independence, I propose that we vote tonight only on the principle of affiliation with the League, reserving the right to postpone official action on it until the membership is reassured that this does not mean the transference of Guild control from Hollywood to New York, Moscow, Mars or the dining room of the Algonquin.”

  I thought of our talk that evening at Glick’s Lagoon. Now I knew what she meant by getting my way.

  Lawrence Paine was recognized from the floor. Everyone leaned forward, expecting him to light the fuse that would set off the explosion. His gaunt, melancholy face was almost expressionless.