What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  “I would like to second Miss Sargent’s motion,” he said and sat down.

  Almost the entire audience rose spontaneously. The applause lasted several minutes. Dignified writers jumped up on their feet and whistled. They weren’t cheering Paine. They were cheering the miracle of unity and peace.

  The next move was a great piece of showmanship. “It is very appropriate,” the President announced, “that the second motion we must vote on tonight will be made by a member who this morning turned down a major studio seven-year contract doubling his salary.”

  Julian walked onto the platform. His reception was deafening. It’s a funny thing, I thought as I clapped with everybody else, we like to think of ourselves as the blasé, sophisticated people. And the first teaspoonful of emotion lays us right in the aisles.

  He stood up there self-conscious and heroic and stiff with stage fright, a typewritten sheet of paper trembling in his hand.

  “I move,” he stammered, “that this meeting approve the action of the Executive Board in ordering us not to sign contracts binding us and our material for more than two years from today and that this Article XII remain in effect until the Producers’ Committee opens negotiations with us for a minimum basic agreement.”

  This motion was seconded by none other than that courageous champion of the underdog, Samuel Glick. Now I am ready to face my Maker, I thought. For five years I’ve been waiting for Sammy Glick to make one positive gesture in the direction of the Brotherhood of Man. Now I can die in peace.

  It might have been a positive gesture, but it wasn’t exactly a modest gesture. That would have been too much. That would have been the regeneration stuff that has made so many pretty endings for the movies.

  Sammy raised his hand importantly to halt the applause. “As the spokesman for our Committee,” he said, “I wish to add that at a conciliation meeting with your Board just before we came in tonight, all differences were ironed out and our Committee pledged its support to the two motions on the floor. As loyal members of the Guild we are ready to carry out this pledge.”

  The audience sounded like a rooting section just after its team scored the winning touchdown. Sammy stood there at the mike longer than he had to, taking the bows. Suddenly everybody was loving everybody else. The cops must have thought the world had really gone nuts. They are sent to prevent screen writers from butchering each other and the crazy bastards do nothing but get up and make love to each other.

  Everything after that was passed by acclamation. Someone got up and urged that all the Guild officers be re-elected as a gesture of our support, and we all yelled Aye. Then Kit took the mike again to propose that Paine, Wilson, McCarter, Griffin and Glick be added to the Executive Board, to demonstrate the Guild’s concern for safeguarding the interests of the minority elements, and we all roared Aye again. The meeting was topped by an almost unanimous vote in favor of the two motions, and as much of the audience as possible adjourned to celebrate in the bar across the street.

  We all piled into the gaudy little joint and turned an early May evening into a New Year’s Eve midnight, only this time we really had something to celebrate.

  Sammy and Kit and I buried the hatchet in a bottle of Scotch.

  “Hey, Kit, what did I tell ya?” I kept repeating myself, being very gay and probably very boring. “This way everybody’s happy. Isn’t this just what I said oughta happen?”

  Or I’d pound Sammy’s sturdy little chest and tell him, “Sammy Glick, you of bastard, you know me. Don’t I always tell you just what I think of you? Well, when you were shoveling it at the studio this morning, I says to myself: There goes the biggest sonofabitch in the whole goddam world. It’s like the movie ads. Know what I mean, Sammy? See Sammy Glick in Ima Sonofabitch. Even bigger than last week, bigger ’n when he played Al Manheim for a sucker in the Record office, bigger every minute. But tonight! Tonight you really fooled me, Sammy. You finally came through and I’m proud of you. Hey, bartender, hit us all again and put your goddam money away, Kit, this one is on me.”

  And Sammy, drinking and kidding but never abandoned, “Well, Al, I’m really tickled to death. I think you and Kit had me pegged wrong about being against the Guild, but now that it’s patched up I know our outfit’s going to go places and I’m all for it.”

  My God, I thought, it almost sounds as if Sammy were actually going to stop running. Maybe he’s decided he’s gone as far as he needs and now he can cut off the motor and stop running people down. That thought made me very happy. It’s wonderful what a few drinks of Scotch will do on an empty brain.

  The following day was Saturday and, after we knocked off at noon, Sammy took us to the swank tennis club he was very proud of joining. I couldn’t see where Sammy had had time enough to attend to his private needs properly, much less learn tennis, but he had. We started volleying, and I thought this is one place where Sammy eats humble pie, but he started right off hitting them back one after another without much style but with plenty of confidence.

  “When the hell did you learn this?” I yelled across the net.

  “I just started taking lessons two weeks ago,” he said. “From the best teacher in the country. Five dollars an hour. You ought to try him, Al.”

  “I don’t have to,” I said. “I’ve been playing tennis since I was a kid.”

  As a matter of fact, I looked very lousy. My eye was off and I was wild as hell.

  “I’ll play you for dough,” he said, “and beat you.”

  I’ve always thought tennis is a better indication of character than handwriting or any of those other things they use. For instance, I liked to just get out there and slug the ball until I worked up a good sweat knocking most of the balls outside without paying too much attention to the score. Of the three of us Kit was the closest to a tennis player. She served her second serve just as hard as her first, chasing after her ball to the net and holding her ground with a good sense of volley and a stiff net game. Sammy was always reminding you of the score, especially if he were ahead. He played a smart, cautious game, getting everything back, making his awkward puny shots count by mixing up maddening lobs with shrewd little drop shots.

  We played a couple of sets of doubles with one of the good club kids, whom Sammy promptly chose as his partner, and then Kit beat Sammy 6–3 and then Sammy turned around and beat me 10-8, in spite of the fact that I looked three or four times as good as he did and had him set point half a dozen times. I really think the margin between us was that he objected to losing more than I did. He had to win the little things just as much as the big ones; and the more I thought of it, the more incredible it seemed that he had backed down on his Guild position the way he had the night before.

  A few nights later I was sitting in bed reading when there was a knock on the door. I grabbed for my robe, surprised that anyone would be knocking, more surprised to find Kit.

  “Well,” she said, “now I’ve seen everything! Got a drink?”

  She followed me into the kitchenette while I poured one for each of us.

  “I’m afraid we congratulated ourselves a little too soon,” she said. “Tonight Sammy and his playmates came to their first Board meeting. And it turned out to be their last.”

  I could feel it coming. I could feel him running again.

  “Well, they walked out on us,” she said. “Just got up and calmly announced they were resigning and walked out. Just told us what we could do with our pledges and took a powder.”

  She was still too overwhelmed to be really sore. It was the first time I had ever seen her really ruffled.

  “My God! All of them?”

  “All except Bob Griffin. He was absolutely furious. He said, ‘Boys and girls, everything in Hollywood always seems to run to the super-colossal. I only regret that the Committee of which I have been an active member had to give you the most super-colossal double-cross I ever saw.’ And he promised that he was going to stick with us to follow through the compromise program that the so-called Sanity Committee
had pledged itself to. He was really magnificent. I had a hunch about him. You may not always agree with him but at least his convictions are never for sale. He ended up by saying, ‘They say keeping pledges is a Rover-Boyish sentiment. I guess I’ll just never grow up.’ ”

  “Do you think Sammy and his pals were bought out?”

  “I don’t know,” Kit said. “I’m too mixed up to think anything tonight. But I felt Griffin thinks so.”

  “What’s the pay-off going to be?” I said.

  She shook her head back and forth several times wearily. “Oh, hell, I don’t know, Al. I guess it’ll be interesting to see. If we live through it.”

  We didn’t have to wait very long. The next morning there were rumors flying around about the number of Guild members who had already sent in resignations. First I heard ten and then I heard a hundred. Writers gave each other funny looks as they passed the stories around. What do you think, pals? they were asking each other silently, think we’re licked, think it’s getting time to quit? It was funny, that hot-and-cold business, the same pressure that made them so tough the day of the meeting was beginning to break them down now. Even though Sammy, Paine, Wilson and McCarter couldn’t have had more than forty or fifty followers, their unexpected run-out had sprung a leak in the hull for fear to rush in.

  And before the leak could be repaired it was torn wide open with another broadside.

  Dan Young called us all into the projection room again. His big red face was wrinkled in a triumphant grin.

  “Boys,” he said. “If I thought that every writer in Hollywood wanted this Guild, believe me I’d be for it myself one hundred percent. But how do you expect us to take you seriously when you can’t even agree among yourselves? Some of the biggest writers have quit already—and we understand more resignations are coming in every hour. Now what do you say we forget about the whole business—try to make World-Wide one big happy family the way we used to be?”

  He paused and smiled again. “Okay, boys, that’s all,” he said casually. “You’re going to be given resignation forms on your way out. You can turn them in to me any time within the next forty-eight hours.”

  He didn’t say what would happen to us if we didn’t. He didn’t have to. Sammy Glick would attend to that, the Sammy Glicks.

  We sat there passively, not thinking together any more, but each one alone and afraid, each one thinking of his own wife and his own script that was just beginning to come along so well and his own house in Beverly or Westwood or overlooking the ocean. We walked out as if those forms were the certificates of a disgraceful and contagious disease which each one of us thought he was the only one to have.

  I tried to sign that form all afternoon. I knew I was a dope if I didn’t, but somehow I just couldn’t get around to it. I stuck a sheet of paper in my typewriter and started to write about Masaryk. But I found myself wondering what Masaryk would do if he had been asked to resign from the Guild. So I put on my coat and went home early. I didn’t feel like seeing anybody so I got a little food out of the icebox and had supper alone, just me and that damned piece of paper.

  Then I sat there in a ringside seat for the wrestling match between my conscience and my ambition, a fight to the finish, with a forty-eight-hour time-limit and finally I left them there on the canvas with a headlock on each other and called Kit.

  “Kit? Did I wake you up?”

  “No, I just got in. I was running some pictures at the studio. Two stinkers.”

  “Listen, Kit,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you all night. I guess I’d like to be a hero and flush this goddam resignation blank down the drain. But there’s no use kidding myself. I feel like a tug-of-war, the whole damned business, the rope and both teams pulling.”

  I expected her to give me a good shot in the arm, but all she said was, “I know, Al. It’s very tough.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, “I suppose I’m making it a lot tougher than it is, but I was just beginning to get the feel of this picture thing. This Masaryk job was—it still is exciting as hell, and Fineman is a swell gent; there’s an awful lot I could learn from him. And yet I just can’t see myself pulling a Sammy Glick.”

  “It isn’t quite that bad,” she said. “I’m afraid everybody’s signing them, Al. I hear we have two hundred resignations already. I don’t feel like telling anybody to go out and be a martyr.”

  “You didn’t worry like that about Julian.”

  “That’s different,” she said. “That’s when it looked as if we were going to win. We had to take that chance. And then, well, maybe I am being a little selfish about it.”

  That was a landmark. I would always remember it as the first sign of affection.

  “Are you going to sign it, Kit?”

  “No,” she said. “But frankly, I’m in a much better spot. Three or four of my best credits all happened to come along this year. And they seem to feel that Keeler and I are clicking as a writer-director team. Of course, this may change their minds. But it does take less courage for me to hold out.”

  “In other words,” I said, “you’d sign it.”

  “Al, I’m afraid that’s a lonely battle you’ve got to fight out with yourself,” she said. “But I wouldn’t feel you were ratting out if you did. It’s too late for that.”

  “Okay, Kit,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll think it over. See you tomorrow.”

  When I went in to the studio next morning the form was still unsigned, but I had made up my mind. For a guy who didn’t care six months ago whether the screen writers were organized into a Guild or a sewing circle I had gone down the line for them every way I could. It had to stop somewhere. After all, I had come out here to be a writer, not a second John L. Lewis. So I took the paper out and scribbled my name at the bottom quickly, as if trying to keep myself from knowing what I was doing.

  Then I went to work and I began to see my story again because my mind felt free for the first time in weeks.

  Then Sammy Glick came in.

  I hadn’t talked to him since his famous coup d’état I had passed him in the hall a couple of times and had thought of saying something insulting, but what was the use. I had said it all the day he marched in when I wasn’t looking and invaded four inches into my column a long time ago. Anything I would have told him now would have just given him a laugh and maybe given me ulcers.

  He came in with a smile stretching from his right ear to that flower he always wore in his lapel. I went on typing. He slung his leg over the corner of my desk. I looked up. In his hand was my resignation blank.

  “Well, I see you’re being smart for once,” he said.

  I tried to remember if Sammy had ever handed me a compliment before.

  “That’s just what I dropped in to check with you about,” he said. “I didn’t want to see you pull a sucker act like Julian.”

  “Hasn’t Julian signed it?” I said.

  “I’m washed up with that sap for good,” Sammy said. “He’s hopeless. He doesn’t know to wipe himself.”

  Nebbish, poor Julian, a hero with quaking knees and a stomach full of butterflies.

  “Well, now that you’re using your head for something besides butting against a stone wall,” Sammy said, “I think I can put you onto a good thing. Julian was beginning to get too much dough to work with me anyway. I need somebody in the lower brackets—to balance what I’m getting. So, while I was getting my massage this morning, it hit me like a ton of scripts. Why the hell don’t I get Al? He needs a break and he’s just what I need. So you’re being transferred to our unit tomorrow. We’re going to have a helluva picture—we just got word this morning that we can get Gable from Metro for the lead. It’ll mean an A credit right off the bat. And, if you click, I’m liable to let you in on something really big that I’m not able to break yet.”

  “It’s very nice of you to rearrange my life for me this way,” I said, “but what about Masaryk?”

  “Listen, my fine-feathered frand,” he said, “between you and m
e and Louella O. Parsons you’re just writing for the shelf. That anti-fascist stuff hasn’t got a prayer. Why do you think Metro scrapped It Can’t Happen Here? It’s lousy for the English market. A producer who just got back told me that at lunch the other day. England doesn’t want to get Hitler and Mussolini sore.”

  He yanked his lapel-watch out of his breast pocket. “Jesus, I better run—I’ve got a date with Frank, Frank Collier—to look at the rushes on Monsoon. The stuff is coming through terrific. Keep in touch with me, sweetheart.”

  The door slammed and he was off. I stood up and looked at that resignation blank. I studied the signature that Sammy had complimented me on placing there. I had a crazy impulse to make an airplane out of it and send it diving down into the studio street. But instead I just folded it double and began to shred it into the wastebasket.

  I really felt sorry for Mr. Fineman when he had to call me in and tell me I was being closed out. This was not his way. He felt guilty and powerless. “I’m afraid Masaryk is going on the shelf for a while and I haven’t got another assignment for you at the moment.”

  He wanted to say more, but even if he had been able to, it would have been superfluous because the sympathy in his eyes, in his handshake, said it for him.

  All I ever ask of a writer is that he deliver, he was trying to tell me. All I ask is that he loves to write motion pictures. That’s the only kind of loyalty to the industry that means anything, and if that kind of loyalty comes through his work, whether he spends his nights in Main Street brothels or Writers Guild meetings is none of my business.

  “But I want you to know I liked your work, and I’d like to do a picture with you some time. All the luck, Manheim.”

  For the next two weeks my agent tried to get me an interview at the studios, but everywhere he went he got the same answer: They weren’t taking on new writers just now.

  I sat by the phone like an extra boy hoping for that call from Central Casting.