What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  I sold five stories last month, said Sammy, under a different name, because I’m under contract over here.

  He made no bones about it. He was glorifying the American rat. He put his arm around my neck affectionately as he walked me to the door.

  Here’s a hot one Lubitsch told me, he said.

  I heard that three weeks ago in “21,” I told him when he finished.

  Just one more tip, he said. If you want to get into the real dough out here, write something on the outside. Write a play. Like me. When I get it produced it will be twenty-five hundred a week and my terms.

  I’ll do it tonight when I get home, I said.

  Eight weeks later, when I was still waiting for an assignment, I get a little printed notice in the mail: Mr. Samuel Glick requests the pleasure of my company at the opening of his play, Live Wire, at the Hollywood Playhouse.

  Sammy’s car picked me up that night and brought me to his apartment. He was having a cocktail with Public Beauty Number One. Sixty million people would hock their lives to shake this girl’s paw, and here was Sammy gurgling champagne with her.

  Well, the play was really pretty good. The scene was a radio station and there was plenty of excitement and fireworks. All the time I keep thinking this seems awfully familiar. And then I think maybe I just dreamed it, like people do sometimes.

  One or two people yell, Author, author! and Sammy takes a bow, and someone sets a basket of roses on the stage, and all of a sudden it is a big success and I am sitting next to a hit author, and everyone is stepping over me to shake his hand, and he is modestly denying that he must have worked very hard on it, saying it just came easy, three or four nights’ work, and then every one is amazed, and someone says a new genius has come to Hollywood, and Sammy says, Oh, I wouldn’t say that exactly.

  Going out the lobby, Sammy said he was thirsty, and I said come up to my place and have a drink; but Sammy said, How about the Brown Derby? because he wanted to see more people.

  And the Beauty said, The Vine or the Beverly Hills? I guess she would have liked to go to both.

  So we got to one or the other, and it took Sammy ten minutes to get to a table, so many people flocked around him and his favorite star, and all the time I’m trying to think where I saw this play before.

  Finally, when the Beauty said, Excuse me, I have to comb my hair, and went out to the ladies’ room—even movie idols do—Sammy said, Well, Al, you haven’t told me what you think about the play.

  I think it’s just like something else I’ve seen, I said.

  You’re pretty smart, he said.

  All of a sudden it came to me: Five-Star Final!

  As long as you know, he said. I might as well tell you. I used exactly the same construction as Five-Star Final, scene for scene, only I changed the characters, and I made it funny.

  Those people don’t know what a genius you are, I said.

  The star came back, stopping at three tables en route.

  Sammy, she said, when will you write a play for me?

  When he can find one, I said.

  I don’t want to write for you until I feel something great, Sammy said, something that’s—you.

  She moved closer to him.

  I gotta go, I said. Thanks for everything. It was an evening I’ll never forget.

  Good-bye, Mr. Masters, she said, feeling very proud and democratic that she had remembered my name.

  I didn’t see Sammy for six months after that. But I used to read about him in the papers. Live Wire went to New York and he sold it back to Colossal for a hundred fifty thousand. Then Parsons carried a story that he and the Beauty were secretly married, but both their agents denied it, and finally they said, We’re just good friends, very good friends. Then DeMille got him to write his recent epic.

  The next time I saw him was at the preview of my first picture at Pasadena. I ran into him in the lobby on my way out.

  Hello, Sammy, I said.

  You’ve got some smart stuff here, Al, he said, but the story line isn’t straight enough.

  No, I said; it isn’t exactly Five-Star Final.

  He didn’t bat an eye. After all, he said, there’s only one Five-Star Final.

  I was about to say something, but Sammy’s limousine was at the curb and he was gone. I got involved in a story conference on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. The more I thought about Sammy the more I realized he had more drama than all my characters put together. My little office boy was going up. He was a human rocket. Would he reach the moon, or would he break like a Fourth-of-July firework, splattering his sparks into the sea?

  By the time Al had finished his story, the Derby was completely empty. He and the other guy looked at each other in silence. Al stared at the caricature of President Roosevelt above the door. As he stared, an aggressive little man, a little dark ferret of a man, pushed the door open energetically and stood expectantly awaiting the headwaiter. He was followed by four others, all of whom seemed to be talking to him at once.

  There he is now, Al said.

  Speak of the devil, said his friend.

  Of course everything I told you is confidential, said Al, strictly on the q.t.

  Hollywood is a jungle and the smaller animals have to run for their lives.

  Mr. Glick and his party came down the aisle. He saw Al, and stopped.

  Hello, Al. How’s tricks?

  Can’t complain. You’re looking good, Al said.

  That’s the funny angle on this whole thing, said Al, studying his glass, after Sammy had passed. My agent tells me I may go to work for him next week. And I’d still rather have my name on a Sammy Glick production than any picture in town.

  “LOVE COMES TO SAMMY GLICK”

  Leaning against a lamppost outside the theater, Sammy Glick could hear them. The preview had been over for three minutes. They were still clapping. He had done it again.

  His pal Tony Kreuger came over. Tony was an agent, his clothes were made on Bond Street, and he sent his sainted mother two hundred bucks a week. He spent the rest on broads and nightclubs. He had a talent for showing Sammy a good time. Sammy wasn’t exactly backward, but he never had time to learn how to talk to women, he took them as they came. He had enough to do, just getting ahead.

  “Well, kid,” Tony said, blowing him a kiss, “it’s a sweetheart!”

  Sammy nodded, ahead of him. “I clocked a hundred and sixteen laughs.”

  “Some of World-Wide’s other pictures could have used a few of them,” Tony said. “Outside of your three the program stank up the studio.”

  Sammy watched the people as they squeezed out into the lobby. The stars of the picture cut their way through to him, leaving desperate autograph hunters rocking in their wake.

  “You were O.K.,” Sammy told the stars.

  They smiled. They were modest and gracious. They told him it was a pleasure to work with him.

  “O.K.,” Sammy said, “so next time don’t try to tell me you don’t like the part.”

  He grinned after them. “When they go soft on you—that’s the time to sock it home!” he said to Tony.

  Out of the crowd came a middle-aged man who wore his clothes like someone who had been successful a long time. He was one of those tall, aristocratic men just beginning to lose the glow of handsomeness.

  “Well, my boy,” he said, “I’m afraid you’ve done it again.”

  Sammy shook his hand seriously. “Thanks, Mr. Boyce,” he said, “let’s hope so.”

  He had learned how to be polite to his superiors now. He still called the studio production chief Mr. Boyce. He called him Grandma behind his back.

  They stood on the curb talking cutting and last-minute story points as the crowd drifted away.

  “I have only one real objection—that it gets started too quickly,” Boyce said mildly. “What do you think, Sammy?”

  “Let’s look at it again in the morning,” Sammy said.

  Boyce walked on toward his big black Packard limousine.
“The corpse is going back to his hearse,” Sammy cracked to Tony.

  Boyce sank into the back seat and closed his eyes as the car started. Sammy stood on the curb looking after him.

  “Where do we go from here?” he asked Tony.

  “Swing Club,” Tony said.

  “Who’ve you got?” Sammy wanted to know.

  “Same old Peggy,” Tony said.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of it?” Sammy asked. “That’s all she’s good for.”

  “That’s just the point,” Tony agreed. “She’s nothing but a hayride and she knows it. At least she never bugs me about auditions and screen tests like the other broads.”

  “And what did you get for me?” Sammy said.

  “Something new,” Tony said. “Sally Ann Joyce.”

  “Is she O.K.?” Sammy asked.

  “I picked her up in the beauty parlor at the Roosevelt,” Tony said. “And when she gives you a facial …”

  It was like every other evening, a montage of hot riffs, champagne, wisecracks, Swing Club, come-ons, feelies, promises. The music had been loud and distorted, it had taken old melodies and twisted them like hairpins, it was a symphony strictly from hunger, the four of them beating their feet to anguish and festered ambition, rocking to the beat of a selfish muse.

  When it was all over, Sammy’s girl kissed him at the door. “So long, baby,” he said, patting her, “you were swell.”

  “Thanks,” Sally Ann said, “it takes two. We’ll do a repeat.”

  “You’re the boss,” Sammy said.

  “Sure,” she said, “and I know you—you’re the cute little blonde who wants a screen test.”

  Sammy grinned. She was a good kid. The town was full of good kids.

  Sammy was right on time for his appointment with Boyce. They met in the projection room. Sammy asked him how he was.

  Boyce said he was fine. He didn’t look fine. He was beginning to look tired when he got up in the morning. He looked at Sammy’s stocky, concentrated figure. It was taking on weight, but it was taking on power, too. Somehow, he was glad when the lights went out.

  They looked at the first reel of the picture.

  “You’re right about the opening, any more footage would kill it,” Boyce said.

  “I’m glad you see it my way, Mr. Boyce,” Sammy said.

  Walking back to their offices, Boyce said to Sammy, “Will you drop down to my office for a few minutes?”

  The office was spacious, though it wasn’t exactly Sammy’s idea of the real place for a big shot. Full of English antiques and real books.

  Boyce filled his pipe, trying to begin.

  “I won’t beat around the bush,” he said. “I like to think I can talk to you like a friend.”

  “You bet you can,” Sammy said.

  “I’m in a spot,” Boyce went on, “and I think you can help me.”

  “Shoot,” Sammy said confidently.

  “I don’t suppose you know that the bankers are coming out next week,” Boyce said. “They’ve got control of World-Wide now and they want to look over our production set-up.”

  Sammy had found that out from Boyce’s secretary weeks before. “No,” he said, “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, then, I’ll level with you,” Boyce said. And he told Sammy the whole thing. Boyce’s pictures had been falling off. There was something in the wind about the bankers coming out to choose a new production chief. They wanted to know why the only three real moneymakers on the program had been Sammy Glick’s.

  Boyce paused. He couldn’t tell anybody he knew Sammy’s record was a thousand percent because he had managed to slip his name off every picture that was going sour.

  “Money talks,” Boyce said. “The right word from you may do the trick. And if I’m back in harness again, you’ll handle the five biggest properties on next year’s program.”

  Sammy’s expression didn’t change. “You’re in, Geoffrey,” he said. “Let them come to me. I’ll give them an earful. And it will come from right here.” He tapped his heart dramatically.

  Sammy had been just barely listening. When Sammy first came to World-Wide, he was a smart kid and Geoffrey Boyce was a dignified genius. He had made up his mind to be Boyce’s assistant if it killed him. Now in ten unexpected minutes he had wriggled up out of his respect for Boyce, leaving it behind to blow away like a snake’s skin.

  But then, as Boyce went on speaking in that quiet, cultivated way, Sammy remembered that there was a difference. There was a reason why Boyce had never invited him to his home socially, there was a reason why Boyce’s friends were brokers and horsewomen and civic leaders while Sammy trucked to swing music with Tony and the Peggys and the always Sally Anns. This was a new world into which Sammy couldn’t run. He would have to crawl.

  “You’re giving a party for those bankers, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose I have to,” Boyce said.

  “Then get a load of this,” Sammy said. “Why let the bankers search me out? Why not have me right there, smacking them in the face, showing them you and I are like this?”

  “Of course,” Boyce said. “Thanks, Sammy.”

  “Forget it,” Sammy said. “I should thank you.”

  When Sammy returned to his office, his secretary showed him a clipping from the morning edition of the evening paper. Is Sammy Glick’s heart Suzy-Q-ing for filmcutie Sally Ann Joyce?

  “Get that dumb broad on the phone,” he told his secretary, “and tell her to lay off the press releases. And next time they juggle my name with any of those floozies, get them to deny it. And if Tony Kreuger calls me, tell him I’m out.”

  “Turning over a new leaf, Mr. Glick?”

  “Yeah,” he said, unabashed, “and don’t forget to burn the old ones. Glick marches on.”

  The night of the dinner party, Sammy arrived just on time, but he didn’t feel as sure of himself as usual. He felt subdued. Sammy recognized Harrington from his pictures. A. J. Harrington. The brains of the company. And Sammy was going to meet him right here in this room. Harrington was perfectly cast for his part. Tall, athletic, early fifties, a sort of Charles Evans Hughes still able to wield a polo mallet.

  While Harrington was shaking hands, a woman came into the room. She was something to stare at, tall, handsome, elegant. To Sammy she seemed like something that had just stepped out of a Saks Fifth Avenue window.

  “Mr. Glick, I want you to meet Miss Harrington,” Boyce said.

  She was the most untouchable woman he had ever seen. He stood there staring at her, and bowed stiffly.

  “My father has talked about you,” she said.

  He saw that she was taller than he was.

  “I’m very glad, Miss Harrington,” Sammy said.

  “Why?” she laughed. “You don’t know what he said yet.”

  “That’s right,” Sammy said. “How stupid of me.” He knew that wasn’t just what he meant to say.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “You’re not being stupid at all. Father raved about your pictures.” Her eyes were laughing at him. She knew how to make him feel small and uncomfortable.

  Sammy said, “I hope you did, too.”

  “I haven’t seen them,” she said. “I’ve been in Europe all summer.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll never miss them,” Sammy laughed weakly.

  “You shouldn’t be so modest,” she said.

  “After all, they’re just moving pictures,” Sammy said uncomfortably. “I mean they won’t live, or anything.”

  “I have a feeling modesty doesn’t become you,” she said.

  He offered her his arm as they went in to dinner. He wondered if she was smiling because she knew he had never done that before.

  The only one who seemed to have a good time at dinner was Miss Harrington. To the Boyces it was too obvious that this was only the lull, the seven-course, elaborately served lull before the storm. Paine, the other banker, and Harrington knew it, too. Sammy sat next to Miss Harrington, trying to thin
k of the right thing to say, conscious of her smooth white arms close to him, watching her all the time out of the corner of his eye, casting a quick glance now and then at the revealing semicircles that plunged seductively into her low-cut dinner gown, trying to see behind the pride and the elegant aloofness of that face.

  Mr. Harrington frowned, watching them. Laurette had found another victim. He hoped Mr. Glick wasn’t the sensitive kind.

  Laurette went on talking, went on mocking, asking Sammy how pictures were made, what he thought of the medium as an art form, whether he thought Gainsborough would have made a good cameraman.

  But nothing she could say could insult Sammy, it would only give him a line on how to proceed; he was beginning to get ideas. He thought back to the women he had known, Rosalie Goldbaum, scrawny and sincere, lost track of years ago; then all the Sally Ann Joyces. This was something new, worth being insulted for. This was Class, and Class was something strange and wonderful to Sammy.

  After dinner the men assembled in the den.

  “I hope my daughter didn’t upset you,” Harrington remarked.

  “Upset me!” Sammy said. “Nothing upsets me. She’s been charming.”

  Then they talked business and Sammy made a fine showing. If the box-office drop was due partly to general recession and partly to double features, he had a solution for both problems. He had a way of talking fast that sounded so sure.

  “It’s young men like you who are going to lick this thing,” Harrington said.

  “I wish there were more of them,” Paine snapped. “In my time there were more men who wanted to get rich fast. It made them hop.”

  “It’s slower going these days,” Sammy said. “You’ve got to be tougher.”

  When the guests had gone, Boyce asked Sammy to stay on.

  “Good work, Sammy,” he said. “You made a fine impression.”

  “It’s a cinch,” Sammy said. “It’s like choking babies.”

  “I suppose they made an appointment with you,” Boyce asked.

  “No,” Sammy said, “but Miss Harrington is having lunch with me at the studio tomorrow.”

  “Good idea to have her on our side,” Boyce said. “Harrington thinks a lot of her.”