What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  “I don’t know,” I said, “what more could you? Do you love her?”

  “Love,” he said. “How the hell have I had time to love anybody?”

  When I finally made a break, I met Kit at the Derby for coffee. She was coming from a Guild meeting. The Guild had risen from the dead after the Nine Old Men decided to cut the nonsense and declare the Wagner Act constitutional. Three or four hundred writers had returned to the fold again and the battle now was to get the NLRB to come in and hang a company-union charge on the Photodramatists.

  “How was the meeting?” I said.

  “We saw through the night that our Guild was still there,” Kit hummed off key, patriotically. “How was yours?”

  “Sammy was in a reflective mood,” I said.

  “Was he sick?”

  “No, he was falling in love.”

  “With whom? Himself again?”

  “With the idea of someone to bring his slippers to him when he comes home at night. And someone to give him an heir.”

  “If that’s a pun,” she said, “you have to stand in the corner and repeat the name Sammy Glick five hundred times.”

  “That’s the punishment Sammy is always inflicting on himself,” I said.

  Our ham and eggs arrived and we were hoggishly silent for a minute.

  “Did Sammy ever ask you to marry him?”

  “Of course not! All Sammy is looking for is a nice simple housewife like his mother told him to marry, who looks like Dietrich, whose only interest in life is Sammy Glick, and whose father is a millionaire who can finance Sammy’s company and put him in with the Best People.” She laughed and added, “And all I had to offer was the Dietrich department.”

  “You’re a fine figure of a woman, all right,” I said. “Nobody could say you were exactly homely.”

  “Ah, you’ve hit on it at last—exactly. People look at me and say, she’s homely all right, but not exactly homely. And there you have the secret of my charm.”

  “By God, you’re right,” I said. “I never realized it before. But there’s something about your face that’s fooled me for years into thinking it’s beautiful. It’s just your personality shining out like one of Oleson’s giant spots. And if you ever switched it off you’d be homely as sin.”

  “Al!” she said. “You mustn’t make love to me like that right out here in the open.”

  The night of the party Kit and I saw it happen, saw love come to Sammy Glick, or something as close to love as Sammy will ever know. Kit and I and little Ruth Mintz.

  This is the way it began. The other members of the Wall Street scouting party were punctual, but Harrington didn’t show until the buffet dinner was almost over.

  He came in with a dame on his arm, an amazing-looking dame, who made an entrance like the star at the end of the first act. The first thing that clicked when I looked at her was the horse shows in the rotogravure section of the Sunday Times. Only not the smartly tailored horsewoman in derby and cutaway, but the horse itself. She was a show horse with a dark red mane, prancing, beautifully groomed, high spirited, accustomed and proud to be on exhibition.

  If Harrington’s life were ever screened, he would be played by Lewis Stone, though Stone would have to go easy on the make-up and underplay his scenes to do the role justice.

  Sammy spotted them at the door like a master of ceremonies, beckoned Fineman over to do the honors and ran toward them.

  “Mr. Glick,” Harrington spoke in efficient snaps. “Very glad to meet you, sir. I’ve been looking forward to this. I’d like you to meet my daughter, Laurette. ”

  Sammy made a nervous little bow and kept on looking at her. She seemed to fascinate him. He went on staring at her with the out-of-this-world look of a monk at the Shrine of the Madonna, or a strip-tease patron.

  “I know that girl,” Kit said. “Laurette Harrington. She was at Vassar for a little while.”

  “I think we’re on hand for an historic event,” I said. “Sammy Glick is falling in love.”

  “Sammy isn’t impetuous enough for that,” she said. “He’s just falling in love with the idea of being in love with a gal like that.”

  Kit and I edged our way up to the ringside. Ruth Mintz was standing beside Sammy, but she might just as well have been standing in Outer Mongolia.

  “Father hates being late,” Miss Harrington was saying. “It’s all my fault. I came home frightfully late after looking at pictures all day.”

  “Perfectly all right,” Sammy said in his best party voice. “What pictures did you see?”

  “Well, one I’ve really been chasing all over the world,” she said. “Blue Boy.”

  “Blue Boy?” Sammy said. “A foreign picture?”

  “Not exactly,” Laurette said. “It was done in England.”

  “Oh, Gaumont-British,” Sammy said.

  “No, by an Independent,” she said. “Gainsborough.”

  People started to laugh. She began to laugh with them. When she did, tossing her head back, I had the impression of a red flame leaping up, red hair, full red lips and somehow her voice was red too.

  “That,” Kit mumbled, “would be a bitch.”

  Harrington stepped in and stopped the fun. “I’m afraid you’re misunderstanding each other. Laurette means the paintings at the Huntington.”

  By that time the story was on its way toward becoming a Hollywood legend. By the next evening it would be attributed to at least three other people.

  I don’t think Sammy ever forgave her for that one. I think it was part of his falling in love with her. Like his revenge on Sheik. He stood there in the hallway of his five-hundred-a-month house, hosting his first big Hollywood party and someone had suddenly hauled off and socked him and he just stood there, taking it, looking as he must have looked when he was taking his beatings from Sheik, telling her she could leave her wrap upstairs, staring after her as if he would like to murder or rape her.

  Everywhere I looked, Sammy seemed to be running after Laurette. I had the impression of a chunky, gutty pony, stepping way up in class, coming up on the outside to challenge the tall, graceful thoroughbred on the rail. He was filling her plate for her, drinking brandy with her, dancing with her out on the patio to the rhumba orchestra. As they danced she looked a head taller because she danced it professionally, with her shoulders straight and her head tilted up while Sammy tore into it with his head down like a prizefighter. Now and then she would look down and bestow a smile upon him that was cold and too perfect on her lips.

  Kit said, “There’s Ruth Mintz, looking like the little girl who’s lost her mother at the circus. Go and dance with her or flirt with her or something.”

  When I picked Kit up again she had just run into Laurette in the powder room.

  “I should have come here ages ago,” Laurette had told her. “Isn’t Sammy Glick amusing? Dad says he’s a dynamo. After the Great Danes from Yale and Princeton sniffing around me all summer, it might be fun to know a dynamo.”

  “How long are you staying?” Kit said.

  “I’m toying with the idea of taking a house for the winter,” Laurette said. “And I’m going to keep it absolutely jammed with theatrical people. I simply adore them.”

  Laurette wasn’t a particularly witty girl, but she delivered all her lines as if she were, and by pointing them up with laughs she gave an impression of both great wit and vitality.

  “Laurette babbles like an idiot,” Kit said. “But I don’t think she is. I get the feeling she has a good mind which she’s been brought up to believe is very poor taste for a woman of her position to use.”

  On our way back from the patio I found Sammy chatting with Harrington and the other bankers and I paused a moment with Ruth to see if the sight of her would revive his interest in the girl he had chosen to be his slipper-and-child-bearer.

  Sammy was talking, and from the way they were listening, he was going over.

  “Now, of course, every producer must be first a businessman and then a creator,” S
ammy was out-yessing them. “First we have to analyze the slump of the industry as a whole. I figure it’s ten percent the jump in radio popularity, fifteen percent double features, twenty-five percent the national decline in purchasing power and fifty percent the lack of new ideas in pictures themselves. Too many people are coming out of theaters saying, ‘I saw that same movie last month.’ ”

  I recognized the explanation that Fineman had given me when I first went to work for him. Only Sammy seemed to know just how to feed it to them. Knew how they loved to listen to the sound of figures and statistics.

  “That’s very interesting,” said Harrington. “What we need is more men out here who think of pictures as a commodity like any other—and forget this prestige business.”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” Sammy jumped in. “After all, pictures are shipped out in cans. We’re in the canning business. Our job is to find some way of making sure that every shipment will make a profit.”

  I wondered where Fineman was. I wanted to be around when Sammy put in that right word for him.

  He could run with these men. They had college degrees and belonged to clubs and had summer homes and knew Herbert Hoover, but he knew what they were after. Laurette was different. She wasn’t a whore and she wasn’t an extra girl, and she wasn’t a star and she wasn’t a working girl, and she wasn’t a homebody and that perplexed him. Her job was not to do anything and do it attractively and amusingly. Sammy couldn’t bribe her with a day’s work, or slap her on the fanny, and he couldn’t even talk about himself without being heckled. She was someone he had to be polite to and that cramped his style. He felt she was laughing at him because his manners weren’t up to her standard and this undermined his confidence. And Sammy Glick without his confidence was not a pretty sight.

  “Mr. Glick, can you make a noise like a dynamo?” I heard her say and Sammy just looked ill at ease and let her get away with it. Just looked at her as if to say, Okay, baby, you win the first round, you draw first blood, but it’s just enough to make me sore. These are big stakes and I’m willing to let you jab away until your arm gets tired and I begin to catch onto your style.

  As Kit and I ducked out early, taking Ruth home and out of Sammy’s life, Sammy was leading Laurette out to show her his twelve hundred dollars’ worth of hibiscus.

  At lunch in the commissary next day Kit looked over my shoulder and said, “Well! The Little King and the Red Queen.”

  I looked around as they were coming in together. They posed a moment at the entrance. Laurette, slightly taller, the chic and haughty queen, with a green suede bag slung over her shoulder, a green turban pulling her copper-colored hair straight back from her face. You felt that everything was pulled tight on her, that her stockings were pulled as tight against her legs as possible, that the waistline was drawn in to the fraction of an inch, that she was rigged smart and snug as a ship. Sammy almost started in ahead of her and then he remembered and stepped aside to let her lead. He followed close behind her, with the preoccupied casualness of one who knows he is being watched. But he was so proud of the effect their being together was having that he couldn’t keep the exhilaration out of his face.

  They passed near our table and disappeared into the executives’ dining room off the main commissary.

  “She’s an exotic-looking thing,” I said.

  “You mean those droopy lids and the dark shadows under her eyes?” Kit said. “That’s dissipation.”

  “Just the same,” I said, “she looks like quite a dish. How come none of the aristobrats ever grabbed her off?”

  “Seems to me she was married,” Kit said. “The year she came out. But it didn’t take. When she entered Vassar she had just come back from a year in Spain, trying to forget. I think she managed to forget all right, but in the process she got the habit of living as if she were always supposed to be forgetting something. Her mother was dead and I guess the old man was too busy staying rich to do much about it. Everybody talked about the way she came to class the first day with painted toenails. She caused quite a stir, while she lasted. A little bit like Tallulah Bankhead enrolling as a freshman at Smith.”

  “I wonder what they have to talk to each other about,” I said. “I’d love to listen in on that conversation.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Kit said. “She’s probably telling him of the screaming times she used to have in Biarritz before the Spanish War made the town so horribly political. And Sammy is wondering whether he’s making too much noise with his soup.…”

  “And how much influence she has with her old man,” I added.

  “I think you’re underrating him,” she said. “This isn’t just business. Didn’t you see his face? The bloom of true love is upon him at last.”

  “But I wonder how goddam glamorous she’d look to him if her name weren’t Harrington.”

  “It can’t be broken down like that. Sammy isn’t making a mechanical play for her because he thinks he can use her. It’s all mixed up together. The fact that her name is Harrington must be just as sexually exciting to Sammy as that moist red mouth or those snooty boobs of hers.”

  We could follow the courtship in the papers after that. The orchids every day. The places they were seen dancing. The gifts. The photographers even gave us the tender looks on their faces over plates of hamburger in the Derby. A Hollywood columnist included it in her radio discussion of exciting romances of the year.

  Once in a while when I was in and out of Sammy’s office I heard him talking to her on the phone but he never mentioned anything about it until a month or so later when I was at his house going over the script for the submarine picture. I had finished the job a couple of days ahead of schedule and he was in a good mood. He sent Charles to the bar to make us some highballs and then he turned to me with his preview face.

  “Well, Al, what do you think of me and Laurette?”

  He seemed to let the sentence drip over his tongue like tasting fine wine.

  “Well, it all seems pretty fantastic,” I said. “But maybe you’ll be fantastically happy.”

  “Oh, it hasn’t gone that far yet,” he said. “But it might, by God, it might. Jesus! I can’t believe it myself. But it’s beginning to look as if I’m going to get her.”

  This may be love, I thought, but not the fine and mellow kind. It may not be in line of business but it’s grim enough to be.

  “You know, it’s a funny thing,” he confided. “When I first met her, I thought she was just another Miss Rich Bitch. Just gave her a little rush because I thought I might be able to get a line on how Sidney stood with her old man. I guess I told you I was trying to do everything I can for him. And she kept taking me up on all my invites, but all the time she was doing it she was giving me the polite finger.”

  There was the moment after Sammy had taken her to lunch the first day when he squeezed all his savoir faire into: “And when shall I see you again?” And she answered: “Now I know who puts that line in all the movies.”

  Several evenings later he was taking her to an opening. He had even bought a new full-dress suit. Made for the occasion. He had sent out advance notices to the press agents that he and Miss Harrington would be among the notable couples attending.

  When he called on her Laurette was in street clothes, having a drink with a hefty dame in a boy’s haircut who greeted him with a belligerent stare.

  “This is Babe Lynch, ” Laurette said. “She just flew into town on her way to the air races in San Diego. I haven’t seen her in ages, so I knew you wouldn’t mind if I passed up the opening tonight.”

  “If you had told me early enough I could have gotten an extra ticket, ” Sammy said. “In fact, if you make it snappy I can always find a way of getting her in. It isn’t our opening, but I’m a pal of the theater manager.”

  “That’s sporting of you,” Laurette said. “But Babe only brought her flying togs. So why don’t you run along? Call me in the afternoon.”

  Sammy swallowed his pride, but it stuck
in his throat like a fish bone. Going down in the elevator he tore up the tickets. As they fell around his feet in little pieces he realized he might have given them to somebody, but to hell with everybody … They were his tickets and he could do what he liked with them.

  He drove home, out Sunset Boulevard from the Beverly-Wilshire, fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, as fast as he wanted because he had a captain’s badge from the Police Department. Thinking, I’m going to get her. She thinks she’s too good for me, but I’m going to get her, me, Sammy Glick.

  Nothing she could do would discourage Sammy. This was something worth being insulted for. Sammy was running with Class, and Class was something strange and wonderful. He had a crazy hunch that if he didn’t care how much dust he ate in the early laps, he could snap the tape with his strong little chest.

  The next evening Sammy called the Beverly-Wilshire again. Hollywood is a terrible place to be left alone in, he said. She might want someone to show her the bright spots.

  “How sweet of you,” Laurette said. “Come right over.”

  When he arrived, she was having cocktails with a young man. The young man stood up, terribly tanned and tall, looking down at Sammy with an easy, attractive, self-assured smile. Sammy found himself staring into a broad and immaculate expanse of stiff shirt. Laurette was in evening clothes too.

  “I thought George was on the other side of the globe,” she explained, ignoring Sammy’s face as she introduced them. “Imagine how thrilled I was when I found out he was back in Pasadena. I thought it might be fun if we all went together.”

  George didn’t seem to mind Sammy at all, which made it worse.

  “I haven’t seen Laurie since Biarritz two summers ago,” he explained with a maximum of white teeth as he poured Sammy a cocktail.

  He was sore this time. He was so sore he forgot this was a precious bit of china that a loud word might crack.