What Makes Sammy Run? (11 page)

“My Jap’s in the kitchen going crazy carving cheese into flowers,” he explained. “I think he’s a fugitive from the WPA Artists’ Project.”

We heard the door open and a woman’s voice say, “Hello, Naga.”

“This,” Sammy said mysteriously, indicating the door, “is the most terrific thing I ever met.”

I looked up as Sammy turned to meet her. She came toward us with a mannish, swinging stride, like a good woman golfer following her ball, hatless, coatless, not even carrying a bag, with both hands thrust deep into the pockets of a smartly tailored suit.

Sammy went for her with open arms, rocking back and forth as he hugged her, half kidding, half on the level. I stood on the sidelines, conscious that I was seeing a new kinetic element in the life of Sammy Glick. This was no faithful poodle like Rosalie Goldbaum or a cute little doll like Sally Ann Joyce. She was arresting, but no beauty, at least not stamped from the Hollywood mold. She looked the type that always gets picked to play the leading man in girls’ school productions. She was in her middle twenties, tall, maybe five-eight, and neatly put together though there was something about the masculinity of her carriage and
gestures that scared you off. Her skin was tanned and seemed to have been pulled too tight across her face, revealing the bone structure. Her lips seemed even fuller than they were in her lean face. She left her eyebrows pretty much alone and I noticed that her nails were cut short and unpainted. She might have done things with her hair, which was walnut brown, but she just combed it back into a thick coil.

“Hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” she said. “I spend my entire day trying to duck my producer and then I have to meet him in the hall on my way out. Ever try putting over a story you know is falling apart as you go along? Great way to lose weight.”

Her voice was low-keyed but not husky, and her words raced ahead of each other as if hurrying to keep up with a mind that was always crowding them.

She maneuvered neatly out of Sammy’s embrace and turned to me. “My name’s Sargent.”

Her eyes were dark and restless, with large shiny pupils that made me nervous. She extended her hand, and when I took it I wasn’t surprised to find her grip intimidating.

“Kit,” Sammy said, “I want you to meet one of the sweetest guys in the world, Al Manheim. Al, this is Kit Sargent, my favorite screen writer.”

He put his arm around her shoulder. It wasn’t quite long enough to make the gesture look graceful.

“Kit is doing the next Gable-Loy.”

There was almost as much pride in his voice as if he had the assignment himself.

“Oh, you’re Catherine Sargent!”

I felt like Merton-of-the-Movies blurting it out that way, but I suddenly realized this was the gal all the critics were nominating a couple of years back to write the great American novel. I could still remember that first book of hers,
The Sex Express
, which penetrates the mind of a flapper after her day is done and the depression has set in, when she’s floundering in a backwash of neuroticism and mental disease. I also remembered the author’s photo on the jacket, a picture that made her look a little more
elegant than she looked now but which caught nicely her cool smile. Under it was a blurb by Dorothy Parker which ran something like: “Miss Sargent, fresh from Vassar, takes us on a fascinating and frightening journey …”

I told her how her book had hit me.

“I’m glad you thought so,” she said.

I suppose that was modesty, but it made me feel like a dope. All she had to do to make me feel that way was just stand there and smile through me. Because we really haven’t learned to take female superiority in stride, I resented it.

“Her book must have been all right,” Sammy said. “It sold twenty thousand copies and got her a sweet five-year ticket.”

“How did you like it, Sammy?” I asked.

“What I read of it was terrific,” he said, “but I couldn’t get through the first chapter. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go over to the Back Lot and make like crazy.”

His humor hadn’t improved but he was beginning to develop a surefire delivery, with some of the knack of the fast-talking comics. I laughed and he was encouraged.

“We’re going to find Billie and have like a bacchanale.” The way he pronounced it, it rhymed with ukulele.

We got into his yellow Cadillac. Sammy raced the car too fast in first and threw it into second with naive abandon.

“I can go sixty in second,” he said.

He only reminded you once in a while that he was in his early twenties. It was frightening to think what he would be like when he really grew up.

When we reached the Back Lot the band was beating it out and the music came at us like a Santa Ana wind.

“Will this be all right, Mr. Glick?” asked the headwaiter, showing a lot of teeth in what was supposed to be a smile.

“No,” Sammy said, “I want that one over there.”

He pointed to a table practically in the middle of the dance floor, with a
RESERVED
sign you couldn’t miss.

“I’m very sorry, that one is reserved, Mr. Glick.”

“Balls,” Sammy commented.

“Really, Mr. Glick, you know if I could …”

“Balls, you just hang those signs out to try to give the joint a little class.”

Kit started for the ladies’ room. “Let me know how it comes out,” she paraphrased. “I’ll be in Number Three.”

People were beginning to look around. I tried to act as if I weren’t with Sammy, for I hate headwaiter scenes.

“If I don’t get that table,” I heard Sammy say, “you’ll never get me in here again.”

I could imagine what the headwaiter would like to have told him. But we got the table.

We sat there without anyone taking our order for a minute or two and then Sammy looked around and yelled, “Hey, waiter, gasson, what do you have to do to get a menu in this place—send in your agent?”

The waiter hurried over, grinning as if he loved being beckoned that way.

“Never talk to waiters like that,” Kit said.

“Can I help it,” he said, “if I only went one year to finishing school?”

“It isn’t manners,” she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, “it just isn’t smart.”

I thought of the time I first told him not to say ain’t. He took this the same way, a little peeved but making mental notes. I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion. I was beginning to see what Kit had for Sammy. Of course she stood for something never within his reach before. But it was more than that. Sammy seemed to know that his career was entering a new cycle where polish paid off. You could almost see him filing off the rough edges against the sharp blade of her mind.

“I want a Scotch and soda,” said Sammy. “And don’t bother sticking your thumb …”

He caught himself and made a nice recovery. “Have you two made up your minds?”

I said Scotch and soda too.

Kit said Scotch and water.

The waiter had only taken a couple of steps when Sammy called him back. “St. James, if you have it,” he said.

He tried to make it casual, but he couldn’t quite get away with it and I knew he must have picked that up since our last outing.

The band broke into a rhumba. Sammy rose and reached out his hand for Kit.

“I feel like dancing,” he said with a cigar in his mouth.

“You don’t know how to rhumba,” she said.

“I can do as good as the rest of these jerks,” he said, and his voice carried.

“I hate a bad rhumba,” she said. “There’s something about a bad rhumba that’s indecent.”

“What do you think the rhumba is,” Sammy said, “a spring dance?”

As he pulled her to her feet, not roughly but forcefully, he noticed a swarthy, sideburned Latin who was dancing under the impression that he was Veloz. “That guy looks like a leading man in a dirty picture,” he laughed. Then he broke into song, singing through his teeth and his cigar, with an exaggerated Jewish accent. “I’m a Letin from Menhettin …”

“Now look,” she said, “either dance with me—or the cigar.”

Sammy was a crude dancer, but he wasn’t like so many bad dancers who can’t make up their minds. Because he wasn’t self-conscious about it and forced her to follow all his mistakes, he got away with it. It wasn’t exactly a thing of beauty, but you had to hand it to him, he had a sense of rhythm. Back in the New York office if anybody had told me that three years later I would be sitting in a Hollywood night club watching my copy boy dance the rhumba with one of those Vassar smarty-pants I would have called the Bellevue psychopathic ward to come down and take him away. But now that I was actually at a ringside table watching it happen, I couldn’t make myself feel too surprised. He had about as much interest in dancing the rhumba as he had in writing. But I had begun to take for granted his ability to do everything just well enough so it wouldn’t break his stride.

She was dancing under wraps but looked as though she really enjoyed it, even with Sammy. But not he. He looked desperate and busy. He was working at it, he was working at having fun. Recreation never seemed to come naturally to him. In fact the only activity that did seemed to be that damned running. I don’t think he ever drank because he liked the taste of whiskey or frequented the Back Lot through any craving for hot music. He just went through the motions of relaxing because he was quick to discover and imitate how gentlemen of his rank were supposed to spend their leisure. It wouldn’t have surprised me if this even extended to sex. He seemed to be a lusty little animal, but I think if Zanuck offered to give up his job to Sammy on the condition that Sammy never touch a woman again our hero would have gone impotent before you could say general-manager-in-charge-of-production.

The waiter set our drinks up again. They went on dancing. I kept an eye on Billie doing a little drink promoting at the bar. They came back to the table because the floor was getting too crowded, and the waiter went for another round.

Kit fixed a cigarette to her long holder and eyed the dance crowd with frowning amusement.

“Kirstein says the way people dance with each other is the real barometer of any country’s society,” she said. “Just look at ours—no more group spirit—every man for himself, covered with sweat and trying to push all the other couples off the floor.”

Trying to follow her and watch Sammy at the same time was distracting. I noticed that Sammy hadn’t been listening. He was preoccupied with somebody on the other side of the room.

She turned her head for an instant, caught on and gave him a patient smile. “Go ahead,” she said, “go over and see him, you’re practically over there anyway.”

Her voice was that of a mother trying to practice child psychology on a delinquent child.

He rose, thrusting his cigar through his lips, and there was something pugnacious about the way he clenched it between his
teeth in the corner of his mouth. It stuck out in front of him like a cannon leveled at the world.

“I’ll try to get him over for a drink,” he said.

He didn’t circle the dance floor to reach the other side. He walked straight across it, pushing his way through the dancers.

“Who’s he sucking around now?” I said.

“A good-natured lush called Franklin Collier,” she said. “He was married to one of the big silent stars, I forget-her-name. When she got tired of him she packed him off to Iceland to make a picture. He surprised her and everybody else in town by not only coming back alive but bringing
Pengi
with him.”

Pengi
was the epic that was so beautifully acted by a cast of penguins, one of the sensations of the twenties.

“Is Collier a good …”

She had the disturbing habit of beginning to answer your questions before you had finished asking them.

“He’s always had a flair for outdoor pictures,” she said. “He’s sort of a one-man Last Frontier. But when it comes to stories, I don’t think he knows his ass from a hole-in-the-script.”

She didn’t use those words the way women usually do, conscious they’re making you think they’re talking like men, but having to get a running start for every word not considered fit for ladies or dictionaries.

Sammy returned with a tall man in his late forties, with a red face and bald spot, slimly built except for a pot belly which made me think of a thin neck with a large Adam’s apple. He wasn’t navigating too well under his own power and Sammy, almost a head shorter, guiding him to our table, looked like a busy little tug piloting a liner into port.

“Mr. Manheim,” Sammy said with his best Sunday manners, “I want you to meet not only one of the greatest producers in town but one of my favorite people.”

I almost expected Mr. Collier to start making an after-dinner speech. I thought that was going a little too far, even for Sammy, but Mr. Collier took it very gracefully, or perhaps it was only drunkenly. He seemed to be bowing, but it turned out he was only
aiming his bottom cautiously at the seat of the chair. The waiter brought his drink over from the other table and Collier stared into it with an expression that might have been either thoughtful or thirsty.

“Now what was I just saying, son?” Collier began.

“What Mr. Rappaport told you about my work,” Sammy prompted.

“Correct,” Collier said. The only effect his drinking seemed to have on his mind was to throw it into slow motion. “Rappy tells me you did a hell of a job on
Girl Steals Boy
, Glick. Hell of a job.”

“We’ll know better after the sneak,” Sammy said. “And we’ll know best when we see whether Mr. and Mrs. Public buy tickets.”

Later Kit told me Collier’s favorite beef was that writers didn’t care what made money and what didn’t as long as their stuff went over with the Hollywood first-nighters. And Sammy didn’t sound as if he were exactly stabbing in the dark.

Collier looked around at us in triumph. “If only more of you writers talked that language!”

Then he turned back to Sammy as if he were going to kiss him. “Well, you and I could talk pictures till all hours of the morning. But I’m in a spot, son, hell of a spot, and maybe a bright young kid like you can help me out. I’ve got Dorothy Lamour for a South Sea picture that’s supposed to start in six weeks. It opens at the Music Hall Easter week. It’s got a surefire title,
Monsoon
. All I need now is the story.”