What Makes Sammy Run?

by Budd Schulberg

  “How about dropping up to the apartment for a while? Remember Peggy and Sally Ann?—I told ’em to meet me there—said I might bring you along.” It was Tony.

  “You can take Peggy and Sally Ann both and …” Sammy began and stopped. “Sorry,” he finished. “Not tonight.”

  “One little nightcap,” Tony begged.

  “Not tonight,” Sammy insisted. “Thanks, Tony.”

  “Not going moral on me?” Tony asked.

  “I’m afraid it’s too late,” Sammy said, more stubbornly. “Maybe some other time, huh?”

  “Sure,” Tony agreed, changing his tone. “We’ll be seeing each other.”

  Sammy was gladder he hadn’t given in when he hit the fresh air. He had to see Laurette, cool, refreshing and clean like the wind that whistled past his car as he raced to her. It was two-thirty in the morning, he swayed up the steps to her door, drunker now on backslaps and self-approbation than anyone would ever be on champagne.

  He let himself in with his key. She had given him a key. Something seemed wrong with the house. Maybe he shouldn’t have come. But hadn’t she asked him to spend the night? One little reassuring shtup and he’d be on his way.

  Then he noticed what was wrong. The lights. They were all on, and the radio blaring. He stopped still, like any animal, listening. He heard laugher, a duet, low and intimate.

  Not alone. He swayed there in the hallway, eyes bulging, suddenly sober. Yelling, “Laurette—Laurette!”

  She came straight at him from the living room, pulling her robe tighter around her, that green satin.

  Her voice was vicious and low. Drunken and passionate, ugly and hoarse to Sammy. “Well?”

  He waited for her to alibi, apologize, plead, curse, weep. But that was all she said. He waited for her to go on, beg forgiveness; he wanted her to wilt beneath his righteous stare, but she only stood there, not bothering to hold the robe so closely around her any more, stood there proud and composed, stately and cruelly self-possessed. These were the elements he loved and admired and aspired to, and he hated them, he wanted suddenly to hide from them. He would make no scene, he would never ask her who was there. And she had been ready to tell him, she was all set to say, “Gordie Melville, dear,” and look at him, and watch him wilt like yesterday’s gardenia, knowing he could not crush her any more, letting him know the Gordon Melvilles would be her barricade.

  Sammy only stared, their future running through his mind like ticker tape:

  Mr. and Mrs. Glick held a house-warming at their charming Bel Air home Mr. and Mrs. Glick are celebrating their fifth anniversary with a three-month European tour Please tell Mrs. Glick not to expect me home tonight Mrs. Glick is calling from Honolulu, sir Mrs. Glick and I are only too glad to accept your weekend invitation Among those at the opening were Mr. Glick and his charming wife dazzling in white sequins and ermine Mr. and Mrs. Glick …

  They were going to have everything they wanted.

  “I’ll call you in the morning,” Sammy said almost in a whisper. “We have to meet my mother at the train at six.”

  She smiled at him boldly. “I was planning on it,” she said.

  Then she came toward him, calmly took his face in her two hands, and kissed him as if they had been married twenty years.

  He never remembered walking down the stairs out into the open again. The sobbing came only when the door was shut behind him. Tight, strained, hysterical little sobs he tried futilely to choke. And then he couldn’t hold it any longer. He sat down on the last step and cried into his nervous little hands.

  It was all over in a minute. He wiped his face with his silk initialed handkerchief, got behind the wheel of his roadster, and the next stop was Tony’s apartment.

  Ten minutes later he was with Tony and Peggy and Sally Ann. The all-night station was booming. “Here we are—back in the Swing Club,” the announcer said.

  Sally Ann jumped up and did a funny little dance to it. “Remember, honey? It’s just like last time!”

  Sammy didn’t smile. Then Tony came over and stuck a drink in his hand.

  “Well, kid,” he said, “I told you so—only even I didn’t figure it’s happening this fast. What a man!”

  “You called it all right,” Sammy admitted.

  “Just since that night in the Swing Club!” Tony marveled. “In charge of all production, and married to big money. Eastern money. Baby, I’ve got to hand it to you.”

  “You said it, Tony, I got Hollywood right where I want it—on its back!” Sammy whacked Sally Ann on her pretty little ass and she laughed appreciatively. He told Peggy to turn the radio up loud, the all-night jazz station. “Stompin’ at the Savoy …” He tossed off his drink and brought his live little hands together in a sudden clap of defiance. “Fuck ’em all! A one-way ticket on the fast express! I’m sitting pretty!”

  AFTERWORD

  In 1939—no, it can’t be almost fifty years ago!—this writer took his leave of Hollywood to go east, specifically back to his second alma mater, Dartmouth College, to write a book about his first alma mater, Hollywood. He had been taken there when he was four. His father, B.P., a twenty-six-year-old pioneer photoplay-writer, had worked himself up the movie ladder to producer and partner of L.B. Mayer in the now-forgotten, downtown Los Angeles Mayer-Schulberg Studio. By the time I was running the Blue-and-White daily, and a mediocre half-mile for L.A. High, Mayer and my old man had become bitter rivals, L. B. running MGM and B.P. running Paramount.

  After Dartmouth and three years as apprentice screen writer for three legendary moguls, David Selznick, Walter Wanger and Sam Goldwyn, I was ready to leave Hollywood because I had learned from years of watching and a few years of personal frustration that in the dream factories the writer was low man on the totem pole.

  Whether you made $100 a week or $2,500, you and your story ideas, your scenes, your completed screenplays, were shuffled like cards by the studio heads and their usually sycophantic assistants then known as “supervisors.”

  Everyone who goes into the writing life has hopes and dreams. But Sammy was to endure beyond my rosiest fantasies. In 1952, it was included in the Modern Library, and I wondered if the name listed between Schopenhauer and Shakespeare belonged to me. In 1960, NBC presented a two-part television version starring Larry Blyden as Sammy and John Forsythe as his Boswell, Al Manheim. Then a musical version starring Steve Lawrence ran for two years on Broadway. Year after year, paperback editions continued to appear, most recently in the late seventies with an Author’s Afterword speculating as to whether a Sammy Glick, greedy for political power, had taken over the White House a few years earlier.

  Despite its long life in other forms, once the all-powerful Mayer put it on his ex cathedra list, Sammy had remained a Hollywood untouchable. But now, after all the years of ostracism my father had predicted for the book at the hands of the original moguls, What Makes Sammy Run? has finally broken through the studio gates. A new generation of studio heads, fresh out of film schools or rock music, have practically forgotten Louie Mayer and his Doge-like taboos.

  Today, as we begin to address the problem of putting Sammy on screen, and to reappraise the contemporary significance of Sammy Glick, I find myself challenged by the question: What has happened in America—or is it to America?—that has so drastically changed our perception of Sammy Glick from dread repugnance to upwardly mobile acceptance, if not actual admiration and emulation?

  When I first took the book to Random House almost half a century ago, Sammy’s chances for enduring fame, on a scale of one to ten, seemed to hover around zero. Bennett Cerf, my publisher, warned the neophyte novelist to expect the worst. Even if it enjoyed good reviews, Cerf went on, the chances for commercial success were virtually nil. It was the cold verdict of the publishing world that there simply was no market, and precious few readers, for a Hollywood novel. The horror stories abounded. Only the year before, The Day of the Locust had not earned back its $500 advance to Nathanael West—that premature absurdist and avid
hunter—who had to keep on grinding out western-movie scripts at Republic to keep food on the table and shells in his shotgun. The popular hobo writer Jim Tully, the up-and-coming John O’Hara … all had come a cropper on the Hollywood novel. Even when Sammy won enthusiastic advance notice from a trio of literary heavy hitters, O’Hara, Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald, Cerf stood by his first printing of twenty-five hundred copies, and promised if the book sale exceeded what he considered a rosy estimate, he would wine and dine me at “21.”

  “The problem is that people who read novels have no interest in Hollywood, and the people who go to movies don’t read books,” Cerf pontificated. It sounded reasonable. I was prepared to paste the O’Hara and Fitzgerald letters in a scrapbook for my young family while going back to screenwriting to support them.

  But soon after publication, I was at “21” with Bennett Cerf not once but month after month, as the book took off in a way none of us had foreseen. The New York Times gave it the equivalent of four stars: “Best first-novel of the year.” In Hollywood, it was the succès de scandale my veteran producer/father had feared. “You’ll never work in this town again,” he had written me after reading it. “How will you live?” From the moment the book dared show its face in Hollywood bookstore windows, I was marked “traitor.” Sam Goldwyn, literally turning purple with anger, fired me. Hedda Hopper, the columnist who could make or break careers, accosted me in a popular Hollywood restaurant with “Humph! I read that book! How dare you!”

  But the ultimate blow came from the tycoon of tycoons, Holly wood’s boss of bosses, Mayer, my no-longer-benevolent “uncle Louie,” of MGM. At a meeting of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association, L.B. turned on my father: “B.P., how could you let your own flesh and blood write such a book?” And before my beleaguered father could answer, L.B. intoned, “You know what we should do with him? We should deport him!” The only member of the powerful MPPA who dared the wrath of L.B. was my liberal and maverick old man. “For Christ’s sake, Louie, he’s the only novelist who ever came from Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him, Catalina Island?”

  With Mayer wanting to deport me, I had the unusual distinction of being attacked simultaneously by the Communist party and John Wayne. Although it was the first book in the history of Hollywood fiction to side with the Writers Guild in its bitter struggle against Mayer, Thalberg & Co., it failed to meet the Hollywood Communists’ high standards for social realism à la Stalin. But to John Wayne—Big Duke, the USC football lineman transformed into an all-American movie star through the magic of John Ford—Sammy was the personification, or novelization, of the Communist Manifesto.

  Encounters with Wayne at parties, or in famous watering holes such as Chasen’s, Ciro’s and Romanoff’s, became Beverly Hills versions of High Noon. In Wayne’s superpatriotic eyes, an attack on Hollywood (or the Sammy Glicks of Hollywood) was an attack on Free Enterprise, Mother and The Flag. I was verbally abused, publicly denounced, and if flogging had been permitted in Hollywood along with tongue-lashing, I would have been as bloodied as Kunta Kinte in Roots.

  If Sammy went on running into the fifties and sixties, so did John Wayne’s righteous indignation. One of the happiest moments of my life was sailing into Puerto Vallarta in the mid-sixties on a ninety-foot schooner with my wife, Geraldine Brooks. The timing was perfect, a Mexican Pacific sunset, the company of friends we could laugh with and exquisite margaritas. If I cashed in my chips at this moment, I felt, I’d be ahead of the Dealer. Then Gerry was saying, “Budd, try not to get upset, but look who’s coming in with us.” I looked, and lost a little of my Baja California tan. Side by side with our Double Eagle was the John Wayne yacht. When the Great American Hero and I stepped ashore almost shoulder-to-shoulder, we were welcomed by the mayor. To celebrate this historic moment—the arrival of a legendary American film star and a prominent American writer, who still lived part-time in Mexico, Puerto Vallarta was planning an official reception/fiesta that evening. Big Duke and I as co-guests of honor! While I could honestly admire his hulking presence on the screen, he and Louis B. had drummed me out of Hollywood. Now he was lousing up Puerto Vallarta for me—and PV was still an appealing, largely unspoiled fishing village in those days.

  At the Hotel Dorado I sulked. I’m not going down to that pachango and have Wayne shoot me down for Sammy again the way he wastes Injuns in those westerns of his. Said the ever-practical Gerry, “We’ll put you at a table across the room from his—with your back to him. You love Mexico, the music, the tequila viejo, the people—just forget Wayne’s there. Enjoy yourself.”

  Which I was trying to do when I felt a muscular arm around my neck. John Wayne—with his rough-and-ready entourage behind him—was ready to drag me to the nearest jacaranda tree and string me up as a traitor. More than a score of years had passed since Sammy first appeared on the scene—but the great defender of the Alamo and the American Way (with the exception of the First Amendment) had never forgotten or forgiven. After a brief scuffle—when the guests of honor were separated, and the mayor was ready to run for cover rather than high office—the hero of Fort Apache fixed me with that famous look and lines only a natural like Duke could get away with: “How about you ’n’ me settlin’ this once ’n’ for all? I’ll be back at midnight. An’ I’ll be waitin’ for ya!”

  ELEVEN-THIRTY: In my room at the hotel I started warming up, Walter Mitty throwing furious combinations that would render hors de combat the mighty warrior of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day. I had been around boxers all my life. I liked them better than actors. I had watched them get ready. This was my moment.

  QUICK DISSOLVE: TWO old beach masters lunge at each other—but there’s an obstruction somewhere between them. It’s the invisible, five-foot-two, 110-pound Gerry making it impossible for either of us to throw a punch without hitting this uninvited but insistent “referee.” “Gerry, please get out of the way,” I beg. Wayne was trying just as hard to remove this unexpected obstacle to his heroics. So, as our corners pulled us apart, the only winner was Gerry. It went into the record books, like most Hollywood fisticuffs, as ND—no decision. Or maybe that should read “double TKO”—the T standing for tequila.

  If Sammy Glick had been perceived as strictly and narrowly a product of Hollywood, if the character and the novel as a whole had been viewed as myopically and self-protectively as had Louie Mayer and John Wayne, my career might have been over and I would have been down and out in Beverly Hills. But the perception of Sammy Glick by the critics and the public was far broader and deeper than we could have anticipated. I had written about Sammy Glick because I had been brought up among Sammy Glicks, and I had used Hollywood as a background because Hollywood was my hometown and, until I exchanged palm trees for pine trees, the only community I knew.

  But the Sammy Glick I had chosen as my prototype was not linked only to Hollywood hucksterism. The New York Times Book Review welcomed him to the select company of American anti-heroes from Simon Legree to George Babbitt. In review after review, Sammy Glick was described as “aggression personified,” a “conquistador from the gutter.” In time, Sammy Glick was to creep into the language, and even into some dictionaries. A “Sammy” might become rich, powerful and famous, but you wouldn’t want him to marry your daughter. In fact, you wouldn’t want to turn your back on him for fear he’d cop your watch, your story, your company, your wife, your life. The trouble was, Sammy lived by different rules from the rest of us; as the moralizing narrator Al Manheim puts it to him, “You never had the first idea of give-and-take … It had to be all you all the way. You had to make individualism the most frightening ism of all.”

  The reason the book enjoyed such spontaneous success, we were learning, was that I had touched a nerve—not a Hollywood nerve, not a Jewish nerve, but something flawed and dangerous in our national character—some upside-downing of the Golden Rule that resulted in its brutal opposite: “Do it to him before he does it to me!”

  That was Sammy’s compulsive cree
d, that was his pirate flag, that’s what made him—in the words of one reader—”part of the established folklore of America.” “What Made Sammy Run?” became a subject not just for literary critics but for historians and psychiatrists.

  As mentioned in our introduction, the eminent Dr. Franz Alexander, head of the Psychoanalytical Institute at the University of Chicago, in his provocative book The Age of Unreason, thought he had found his answer in Sammy’s being the ultra-aggressive, ruthless and belligerently self-centered type rather common among second-generation Americans from impoverished immigrant families. Their fathers have lost their prestige and their influence due to their inability to cope with their new environments.

  While it was flattering to have Dr. Alexander devote an entire chapter to Sammy Glick, his answer made sense only up to a point. Was the Sammy Glick syndrome really limited to children of impoverished immigrants? “Detribalization,” Alexander had diagnosed the disease. The son has lost respect for his father’s (tribal) values, but has yet to be affected by the mores of his adopted culture. So he is left and lost in a moral no-man’s-land.

  But if that were so, how would you account for the mail Sammy drew from all over the country? From insurance companies in Hartford, from chain stores in the South, from mail-order houses in the Middle West, people were writing that I could not have written Sammy without personal knowledge of their own mail-room boy who had run over their backs to become office manager, and in some cases company president. Teenage white boys in Atlanta, third-generation sons of the middle class in Boston, no ethnic group, geographical area or economic stratum seemed to have a lock on Sammy. He was not from Rivington Street alone, or from Sunset and Vine. He was made in America.