Sweet Smell of Success

by Ernest Lehman

  The laughter of a nation, born of misery and despair.

  I looked at the faces and knew what they were waiting for. I knew what they would get, and out of what it had come. I, more than anyone, I knew, and remembered. And remembering, I was back in Reilly’s Gym again. Only yesterday …

  My God, it couldn’t have been only yesterday!

  Feeling again the sudden terror … seeing the maniacal look … reeling back from the jarring blow … the ponderous hulk moving implacably forward. …

  “Sammy, wait!”

  He belted me with another savage right. “This is for Gleason,” he sneered, closing in “And this is for Berle.” I tasted the leather again. “For Caesar … and Benny … and Hope …” Short ones to the ribs.

  “Sammy,” I panted. “For Chrissakes, Sammy …”

  His face was contorted. He didn’t hear me. The left was cocked. I saw it coming. “For Phil Silvers …”

  “Wait a minute!” I fell on him and tied him up in a sweaty clinch. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You going crazy?”

  “Good, Al, hey kiddo?” His laugh was a crazy sound in my ear. “Hot as a two-dollar pistol reduced to a dollar-ninety-eight. Feel the power in that right? Come on …”

  He struggled to break out of my arms. I held onto him, gasping for breath, aware that everyone in the gym was suddenly watching us, bewildered like I was.

  “Enough,” I gasped.

  He burst from my grip, stepped back. I saw the wicked grin on his face. “Get ‘em up, baby.” He moved at me again, purring, “Get ‘em up before I kill ya.”

  “Look, Sammy, it’s late. They’re waiting for us at the office. It’s—”

  “And this one—” he let go with the looping left—“is—”

  I sidestepped. “For Sammy Hogarth!” I cried, and caught him with everything I had, flush on the button. He shuddered to a dead stop like a poled ox and his jaw hung with surprise. “You wanna play, I can play.” My voice was hoarse.

  Anger flared up in his startled eyes, and for an instant the swift, darting mind weighed everything. Then slowly the face became a grinning mask, and he rumpled my hair with an open glove. “Scared the hell outta ya, didn’t I?” he chuckled. He glanced around at the other guys, who had halted their exercises to watch the great man in action. “Who has to worry about sponsors and ratings?” he called out to them. “I could go into Sugar Ray’s racket like that.” He shrugged. “Easy as committing suicide. They say to me: ‘Sammy, you couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag.’ So what? How many times does a man have to fight his way out of a paper bag? Unless it’s my brother Lester, who happens to be a salami sandwich.”

  They all laughed—not because what Sammy Hogarth had said was funny, but because it had been said by Sammy Hogarth. The conditioned reflex. It was what most comics had going for them when they were off stage. And if they were shrewd—which Sammy indubitably was—and kept their mouths shut most of the time, few people would ever find out how truly unfunny most funnymen were.

  He slapped me across the buttocks. “Whaddaya say, Al, let’s get moving.”

  I walked ahead of him, not looking at him, trying not to listen to him, the sweat stinging my eyes and the cut on my chin.

  “I feel good,” he was saying to my back.

  “That’s fine,” I muttered, yanking off the gloves.

  “You hear me?” He followed me into the shower room. “I feel good.” He stepped out of his shorts. “The timing is right. Everything is right. A hundred percent. Sammy is in tune with Sammy. I can feel it. My arms. My legs. Up here.” He tapped his forehead. “Down here …”

  I turned on the shower but it didn’t help much. He kept on talking.

  “It’s gonna be all right tomorrow, Al. Nothing to worry about. Good script. Good timing. Good Sammy. Everything good. Even your sketches. You don’t mind my saying so, I was beginning to figure you were over the hill, no more toothpaste in the tube. But those sketches—they play. Sammy makes them play. If they don’t play for Sammy, they ain’t got it for nobody. Every thing’s gonna be all right, baby. We got the world by the short hairs. And you with the fouryards-a-week you were gonna take from Gleason. Didn’t I tell you stick to Sammy? Hitch your wagon like all the rest. I got a sore behind from all the wagons hitched to me. You and Connie and Lester and Jake and Sonny and Phil and the whole goddam network—three goddam networks, what’m I saying?—all taking the short and easy ride with Sammy. Sometimes I wonder. Suppose there ain’t no Sammy. Suppose I slip on this here piece of soap and break my neck. Where the hell is everybody? What about you? Four lousy yards with Gleasons plus ulcers. I just hope you appreciate everything. From the way you hit me there, sweetheart, I wonder if you appreciate everything. Hey, kiddo?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do, you, Al?”

  I turned the water up harder.

  He came over suddenly and shut it off.

  “I said do you?”

  I stared at him, wondering if anything he had ever done on a nightclub floor or in front of the television cameras had ever been as comical as the sight of him standing there naked, without the two-hundreddollar suit and the Nat Lewis shirt and the Sulka tie to conceal the protruding belly and the fish-white skin. But all I could see was the face that went with it, thick-lipped and sensual and leathered with the years of greasepaint and the Florida winters, and I didn’t laugh. “Of course I do, Sammy” I said.

  His mouth twitched. “All right then.”

  I turned the water back on and began to soap myself rubbing too hard, as though I could get beneath the skin, beneath the surface sweat and dirt to other things. Tomorrow night, Sammy Hogarth would be making his bid to become the new Goliath of the television world. He would be starring in the tryout of the first combined-networks, comedy-in-color series in the history of the medium. And wrapped up in my hip pocket if the show went over would be the hundred-grand-a-year I had dreamed of, and struggled for, and lost sleep over, ever since I had turned my back on the decent, normal life to become a writer of jokes. Yet here I was, still finding it necessary to use a piece of soap as though it had magical properties.

  You can’t have your cake of soap and eat it, Al.

  Some day, when I saw the right opening, I’d use that as an ad lib and it would kill them. Right now, it was just another line with half a meaning. Like my whole life.

  I wasn’t merely Sammy’s head writer. It wasn’t that simple. I was also vice-president in charge of keeping the public from finding out what he was really like. Their acceptance of his pattern of humor was predicated entirely on their belief that he was a kind and jolly clown, a good-natured buffoon who was forever trying to pass himself off as a conniving, devious villain given to insulting his betters. As long as you were sure he was only kidding, you could laugh. One wrong move on his part, one betrayal of the truth that his humor of insult had a deep and savage drive behind it, and his charm would vanish in a twinkling, the priceless and hard-won illusion would be shattered beyond repair.

  That’s where I came in.

  I was keeper of the keys to the closets that had all the skeletons; guardian of the maps that told where the bodies were buried. I knew the location of each headstone, the meaning of every epitaph that Sammy Hogarth had written into the graveyard of Broadway. I knew about Wendell James, who had been plagiarized and bought off; the violence that had ended the affair with Valma Stevens; the Red-smear job on little Freddie Kintner, who had accidentally found out how Sammy doctored the recordings of his radio shows so that ad agency men, checking audience-reaction in post mortem sessions, would hear laughs where there had been only bored silence. Oh, I knew things about Sammy Hogarth that even he didn’t know. And worst of all, most sickening of all, was the knowledge that the two sketches I had handed in—the foundation upon which tomorrow night’s hopes had been built—were stolen property.

  Unknown to Sammy—stolen by me.

  A comedy writer often enters the craft from the
left field of personal unhappiness. Unable to face the bitter realities of his own existence, he makes of all life a joke. This becomes his stock in trade, and for a while he is able to turn it into money and whatever happiness money can purchase. But before long, there catches up with him an awareness that he has not appreciably affected the original, still-bitter realities. It is then that he finds himself running out of new jokes. So he begins to rewrite his old ones. And when he runs out of these, as eventually he must, he commences to rewrite the jokes of others, telling himself the old canard of show business that there is really nothing new under the sun. Finally, he loses even the ability to rewrite these jokes of others. He simply appropriates them, and passes them on as his own.

  Somewhere in Korea, one cross among thousands, poor Davey Farber lay sleeping. Once, he had laughed with me and made others laugh. That was when we had both been much younger. Davey would never grow older than twenty-six. But I would. I had. And with the years had come the slow death at the typewriter that had led, finally, to go into the bottom drawer of my desk and come up with some of the sketches he had turned out in Boston one hectic weekend at the Ritz, where he had been summoned there to try to breathe life into a dying revue only to see it fold after two performances. Going into the army, he had left with me, partly for safekeeping, mostly out of sentiment, the last remaining copies of some of his favorite scripts. And tomorrow night, Sammy Hogarth would be using two of these old and long-forgotten skits, thinking I had written them, thinking they were now his.

  “Enough. C’mon,” he was calling.

  I hurried out of the locker-room after him, struggling into my coat. Soap and water hadn’t done a bit of good. No damned good at all.

  II

  Outside, the late afternoon air was sharp with the tang of approaching winter. I whistled for a cab. But Sammy said, “Let’s walk.”

  I threw him a glance. “It’s after five.”

  “I don’t care if it’s after fifty. I said, ‘Let’s walk.’ I need the oxygen. I don’t feel so good. I’m all tensed up.”

  “But I thought you said before—”

  “After all these years don’t you know when Sammy is whistling in the cemetery?” We walked east on Forty-eighth, Sammy taking the big-striding steps and me scurrying to keep up with him. He was inhaling noisily, trying to suck the confidence into his body through his lungs. “Okay, the script is good, rehearsals went great. But I’m scared. It’s too big, too important. It means too much to me. Jesus, Al, just think—to be able to look Gleason and Silvers and those other fakirs in the face and see the jealousy … to be able to spit.” He expectorated into the street. “If only I could stop caring. If only I could say: ‘So what, Sammy, it’s only another show.’ But it’s more. It’s everything. It’s—”

  “It’s only another show, Sammy.”

  He looked at me. “Y’mean it, Al?”

  “Sure,” I lied. “It’s only another show.”

  We strode in silence for a while. The sidewalks were jammed. Everybody was knocking off, going home. But not us. We never stopped working. Not even when we closed Lindy’s at four in the morning and climbed into bed with the little red capsule. In show business, you can’t do too much sleeping if you want to wind up with the longest obituary in Variety.

  “Al?” We were nearing the office. “Do we have to go up now?”

  “You told the fellows to be there,” I said. “All day long at the studio, and now they’ve got to be there. The least you can do is show up. Besides, we’ve got to cut twelve minutes … unless you want us to do it without you.”

  “In the pig’s ass.”

  “All right then. If you don’t do it now, when are you going to do it?”

  “Tomorrow?” he ventured.

  “The dress is tonight.”

  Suddenly he began to pound his stomach.

  I’m getting sick!” he groaned. “My God, Al, suppose I get sick? Suppose—” He belched loudly.

  “That does it,” I said.

  “You think so?”

  “Of course. You’re all better now.”

  I wondered if there was any other nursemaid in New York who wore a camel’s hair coat.

  We went through the lobby and pushed our way into the crowded elevator. Some jerk called out, “Attaboy, Sammy. Knock ’em dead tomorrow.”

  I turned and withered the guy with a look.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Sammy snapped his fingers at the elevator man. “Get this goddam thing off the ground.”

  We didn’t move.

  He grabbed my arm. “We’ll walk.”

  He headed for the stairs and started up two at a time. I panted after him, and didn’t catch him until the fourth floor. There was nothing wrong with Sammy, at least not with that enormous, supercharged body. He was merely doing all his failing in fantasy today, so that he wouldn’t be doing it in reality tomorrow.

  I could hear the trouble in the office even before we got to the end of the hall. The rest of it I could see on Connie’s lovely face as we walked in. The door to the inner sanctum was shut, but the loud voices came through just the same.

  “What’s going on here?” Sammy ripped off his coat.

  Connie brushed a wisp of red hair from her eyes but didn’t look up from the desk. “Your brother,” she said letting the tone of her voice say the rest.

  Sammy turned to me, a look of panic on his face. “Al, am I ever … is there ever going to be a day? For Christ sake, peace I want! Now of all times can I have a little peace around of mind? Will somebody please make it understood around here that I cannot go on without … I must not be distracted and upset and worried … constantly … every day … by my own brother in the bargain!”

  “Will you relax, Sammy? You’re like a bride on her wedding night.”

  “That’s right,” he cried, “and somebody’s always waiting in the next room to—”

  “Come on.”

  I opened the door and we went into the noise and it stopped as though a director had shouted “Cut!”

  “All right now. A pack of wild animals,” Sammy shouted. “Anyone down the hall thinks I’m running a menagerie here. What the hell is it?” He whirled on his brother, who stood at the window with ashen face and lips working nervously. “Lester, I’m warning you.” Sammy’s voice was low. “I’m too much on edge. I’m all wound up. There is so much I can take and no more. Now what is it?” He slumped into the chair behind his desk.

  Lester Hogarth turned and stared for a moment at the three writers who sat lined up along the wall looking down at their laps like naughty children suppressing giggles. He blinked and tugged at his bow tie. He cleared his throat and tried to check the quiver of his lips. He fussed with his horn-rimmed glasses.

  “I would like to speak to you alone, Sammy,” he said in a precise, shaky voice.

  Jake Pitz and Sonny Carmichael and Phil Kane started to get up but Sammy waved an unlit cigar at them. “Siddown. Stay right where you are.” He glanced up at his brother’s white face. “Anything you want to say, say it in front of Al and Jake and Phil and Sonny. We’re a team. We have no secrets.” He waited.

  Lester blinked, glancing from one to the other of us with his sad, tired eyes. “Forget it, Sammy,” he said in a quiet voice. “It wasn’t important. It’s never important.” He started for the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  He kept on walking, and shut the door behind him.

  Sammy stared after him, his face twitching. Then he turned to the writers. “All right, lemme hear it.”

  Jake Pitz was spokesman for the team. Sonny and Phil did most of the writing. Jake, naturally, got more money. “He saw the monologue on the desk,” he explained, shrugging. “He started raving like a maniac. He won’t stand for it, he says. I tell him I’m only a hired hand. I have no personal interest in making him unhappy. If Sammy Hogarth wants to make with the jokes about his brother, that’s Sammy’s business. If Lester Hogarth doesn’t like it, tha
t’s his business. If he wants to act like a jerk and take it so seriously, I don’t want to hear about it. Personally, if you ask me, Sammy, I think he’s going off his rocker.”

  “Nobody asked you,” Sammy snapped. “Is that all that happened?”

  “Well not exactly.” Pitz threw a glance at the little guy with the angelic face.

  Sammy nailed Sonny Carmichael with a pointing finger. “I thought I told you … how many times do I have to tell you to lay off him? You’re aggravating something that’s enough aggravation already. What did you say to him this time?”

  “Aw, it was nothing, Sammy.” Carmichael flushed and cast his baby-blue eyes downward.

  “I know it was nothing. If it was something, you wouldn’t of thought of it. Lemme hear the nothing.”

  “Aw, I just asked him if he was listed on your income tax return. He gave me the stupid look, so I said. “I was just wondering—does Sammy have you down as a dependent, or does he list you under contributions to charity?”

  Sammy frowned. “Is that all?”

  “Nothing much else.” Sonny raised his eyes, gaining heart. “Except I told him, ‘Lester, I hear you’re gettin’ a raise.’ He said: “Is that right?” I said ‘Sure. With Sammy on three networks instead of one, you’ll be getting the same dough as now, even though you’ll be three times as useless. Isn’t that a raise?’”

  The frown held for a moment, struggling to stay there and then it fell apart suddenly, and Sammy was shaking with laughter, and, as though on signal, the writers began to laugh along with him. “I don’t know what I’m laughing at, it’s such a tired joke,” he wheezed. “Look at Al. He don’t think it’s so funny either, do you, sweetheart?”

  I turned away. “I’m going downstairs for some coffee. You want anything?”

  They were too busy giggling to answer.

  On the way out, I stopped at Connie’s desk and kissed her hair. She closed her eyes. “I’ll be downstairs,” I said.

  She turned to see if the door was closed, then said urgently, “Call me, Al.”