What Makes Sammy Run? (19 page)

The receptionist’s pencil poised over the pad of studio passes. “Mr. Glick. Who shall I say is calling?”

Since Sammy was waiting for Julian the chances are he’d only brush me off. I didn’t like to do it, but I had to figure what Sammy would have done if he were in my spot.

“Mr. Blumberg,” I said.

I walked down the corridor to his door, slowing up as I reached it because I was scared. Here I was going out of my way to do something I hated more than anything else in the world. Avoiding controversies has always been an obsession with me. The only times I could digest were when I was liking everybody around me.
Will you please tell me why you had to get yourself into this?
I thought.
Who the hell do you think you are, Sammy Glick’s conscience?
I wasn’t so far off at that. As I stood there turning the knob I knew that my best excuse for knowing Sammy Glick was as a kind of self-appointed first-aid station, trying to revive the victims he left behind him as he kept hitting-and-running his way to the top.

When I walked in on him he gave me a hollow “Hello-Al,” looked around for Julian, questioned me with his eyes, and caught on.

“Your collaborator isn’t coming,” I said. “He’s on his way over to see his wife. To tell her she doesn’t have to leave him. Because you’re going to promise that the next picture he writes he not only gets paid for but gets his name on.”

Sammy had looked at me in a lot of interesting ways since that first meeting, but I had never seen anything like this before. I have never had a gangster pass death sentence on me with his eyes, but now I know what it is to see not only friendship but even recognition iris out of them, the pupils contracting and ossifying till they looked as if they could be plucked out and fired through a shotgun.

“Aren’t you satisfied just being a Boy Scout? Whatta you wanna do, get your Eagle Badge too?”

The Sammy Glick I met when I first came to Hollywood was a cream puff compared to the one with whom I now found myself caged. He was still in his early twenties but no sign of youth remained. The little knives of ambition had already begun to cut lines into his face and the way he hunched over his cigar somehow suggested middle age.

“Sammy,” I said, “at the rate you’re going you’ll die of old age before you’re thirty.”

He planted himself so close to me that I instinctively backed away. His voice spat in my face. “Listen, you son of a rabbi. When I want sermons I don’t have to listen to amateurs. I can buy tickets for the big shots in the racket—like Wise or Magnin.”

I tried everything I could think of to break him down, flattery, nostalgia, the brotherhood of man, the camaraderie of the newspaper game and even, as a last resort, the need of Jews to help each other in self-defense.

“Don’t pull that Jewish crapola on me,” Sammy said. “What the hell did the Jews ever do for me?—except maybe get my head cracked open for me when I was a kid.”

What makes Sammy run?
The childhood, Kit had said, look into the childhood.

Sammy took his eyes from me only for a moment, but it brought relief. He looked past me, almost thoughtfully, as thoughtful as a man rushing through life like Sammy could ever be.

“Jews,” he said bitterly and absently.

“Jews,” he said, like a storm trooper.

That was all he said but I knew it was much more than that. I knew he was speaking his hate and his fear and his rage of anything that had or would ever stand in his way.

He paced around me impatiently. “Let me tell you something for your own good,” he said. “Wanna know why you’re a flop out here? Because you pay too goddam much attention to other people’s business. When I was a kid I felt kind of gypped because I couldn’t go to college and make the basketball team. I was a helluva basketball player once. But when I look at you I think maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get my mind all cluttered up with crap at that. I may not know a lot of cushy words, but, by Jesus, I know about life. Take Darwin, for instance. I didn’t have to read any books to know all about the survival of the fittest.”

I felt lousy. We were in the same room all right but we couldn’t seem to connect. I knew I was making a mess of it, that all I was
doing was convincing him that I was a lunatic. And not even a dangerous one. I think he actually felt that he was going out of his way to be kind to me. And I suppose he was, according to his lights, those crazy blinding lights of his.

“What do you mean fittest?” I said. “Who’s more fit to write screenplays, you or Julian?”

His hand tightened around his cigar the way his voice did around his words.

“Listen, pal, you’ll be doing yourself a big favor if you get out of here. Because I’m liable to be in a position to do you some good one of these days. And when I am I don’t want to have to remember what a jerk you’re making outa yourself.”

“I don’t leave this office until Julian’s taken care of,” I said.

The statement was not as heroic as it sounded because it wasn’t given quite enough voice. It wasn’t fear that stifled me, but a terrible sense of inadequacy.

That was something Sammy never had to worry about. His whole body was behind his voice. Even when everyone else was silent he used his voice as if he were yelling down a crowd.

“You can tell Julian for me,” he said, “that if he don’t like the fifty bucks he can crap in his hat, pull it over his head and call it curls.”

That phrase has its ghost writer too, I thought, for it was a folk cry of the New York gutters I had heard before. But Sammy spoke it with a terrifying eloquence.

I said all the four-, five- and seven-letter words I could think of, most of them outside in the corridor, after the door had slammed behind me. I stood there trying to begin thinking what to do next. I don’t know whether I thought first of Kit and then saw her name on the opposite door or vice versa. Like most inspirations, the impulse probably followed the stimulus so rapidly that it seemed to be snatched from the sky. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of her before. She knew how to be just as tough as Sammy in her own way. I had to admit that the characteristics that had made me hesitate about her were the ones that might do Julian the most good.

The secretary told me she was very sorry, but Miss Sargent left word for her to admit no one this afternoon, not even to put calls through.

I said this was an emergency and must have made it pretty strong for the secretary asked, “Is it a matter of life or death?”

“Both,” I said.

This seemed to bewilder her sufficiently to stir her to action. A moment later the door to the inner office swung open and Kit appeared, dressed in tailored slacks, with a pencil stuck in her hair and no makeup.

“Sorry to pull the big-shot stuff on you. But all you have to do to start a salon around here is leave your door open.”

We shook hands and she signaled me into the office. It was full of smoke and an atmosphere of being worked in. At the desk, which was littered with typewritten notes, sat a stenographer still writing in her shorthand pad.

“While we’re talking it might not be a bad idea to start typing up that last scene, Ellen,” Kit told the stenog. “Be ready for you again in fifteen minutes.”

She led me to the couch and told me to sit down.

“Don’t mind my standing up,” she said. “I’ve been pacing up and down this office so much all day I can’t stop. I feel like Charlie Chaplin still going through the motions after he leaves that factory in
Modern Times.”

She demonstrated his nervous reflex-action gag.

I asked her what she was working on.

“On something really respectable for a change,” she said.
“Young Tom Jefferson
. You know Tom has always been my secret passion. I’ve been after them to make a Jefferson picture since the day I checked in here—but they were always afraid of it for the British market. Then I had the brainstorm of getting an English star like Howard to play the part. So it looks as if it’s going through—if I can only hammer out the goddam story line.”

She glanced at her watch, and her tone changed.

“But this isn’t what you came in to talk about,” she said, “so
I better give you the floor. Because I really will have to run you out of here in fifteen minutes.”

She paced while I talked. I was watching to see if the revelation would shock her, but her only comment when I finished was, “I’ve been wondering who was doing Sammy’s stuff. That Blumberg kid looks sad enough to be a real humorist.”

“I’ve just been in talking to Sammy,” I said. “No dice.”

“I’m afraid you’re too nice a guy to do much good in this world,” she said. “It takes a cold bitch like me to get anywhere with him.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I said.

“I know you wouldn’t,” she said, “you’d only think it.”

She perched on the couch beside me for a moment.

“You’re not the iceberg you’d like to have us think you are,” I said.

She smiled at me as if she was going to laugh and then remembered she didn’t have time. “How much time have I got to make an honest man of Mr. Blumberg?”

“Blanche is about to give him up as a lost cause any moment,” I said. “Could you get to Sammy this afternoon?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I make it a rule never to let anything cut into my work. I don’t even take calls from the Guild office. The only way to get ahead in this business is to do one thing at a time.”

“Sounds a little like Sammy,” I said.

“A little bit of Glick would be a good thing in all of us,” she said. She caught my look, and smiled. “I know, a very little bit.”

“I could call you at home tomorrow,” I said. “Want to give me your number?”

“That’s not time enough,” she said. “You’ve given me a tough assignment. Tell Blanche to cool off and hang on. I’ll give you a ring when it’s under control.”

She saw me to the door without any last-moment embarrassments, told Ellen she was ready for her and shook hands with me again.

“So long, Al,” she said. “Sorry I have to rush you off this way. Don’t let Julian’s worries throw you.”

When I looked back her door was closed and her swift, low-pitched voice was already beginning to dictate again.

I helped Julian talk Blanche into unpacking her bags and then I returned to the wars with Pancake.

Kit didn’t call me for ten days. But when she finally did she said:

“Tell that bashful genius of yours to be at the studio at nine in the morning, ready to take off his coat, hang his inhibitions behind the door and go to work.”

“What did you have to do, promise to marry him?”

“You know better than that,” she said. “Sammy is only infatuated with me and respects me. Marriage is one of the trump cards he has to hold until the pot is big enough.”

“And Julian actually has a real job?” I said. “And gets paid real money? And doesn’t do his writing as if in training for the German underground?”

“One hundred dollars a week,” she said. “No contract, just week to week, but that doesn’t matter as long as he’s teamed with Sammy. Sammy’s option was lifted for another year and I have a hunch he won’t let Julian stray very far from him.”

“A hundred bucks a week!” I said. “That isn’t hay. Even if Sammy is getting three or four times that much.”

“If the ratio of talent to bombast is only one to four,” she said, “talent is coming up in the world.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “We should be thankful for small miracles. Like having a credit line read—by Sammy Glick and Julian Blumberg. How the hell did you swing it?”

“The Guild’s supposed to protect writers from unfair practices,” she said. “Not only from employers—but from other writers.”

“A very pretty sentiment,” I said. “But since when was Sammy a sucker for sentiment?”

“From the moment I promised him Julian would get up and tell all at the next membership meeting. One of the planks in our Code is to stamp out ghost writing. Ghosting is the writers’ Fate Worse Than Death.”

“But the Guild isn’t recognized, is it?” I said. “You haven’t any power. So what good will your public confessional do?”

“Hollywood consists of half a dozen studios and half a dozen restaurants,” she said. “And as you probably know, writers are talkative fellows. And when six hundred writers start saying the same thing …”

“I see,” I said.

“So did Sammy,” she said.

I said it seemed odd for her to put the screws on Sammy that way after the compassion she was expressing for him just the week before.

“That’s like saying because we know the cause of a disease and feel sorry for its victim, we shouldn’t quarantine him,” she said.

I thought: I was the one who felt sorrier for Julian. And Kit was the one who did him some good.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll cry uncle.”

“Not until you join the Guild,” she said. “After all, you’ve had a practical demonstration in your own home.”

“I haven’t got anything against the Guild,” I said. “But, oh, hell, I guess I’m an individualist.”

“So is Al Smith,” she said, “and he belongs to everything from the Grand Street Boys to the Liberty League.”

“Pancake tells me that screen writers shouldn’t have a Guild because they aren’t employees.”

“He didn’t happen to say what they were?” she said.

“Artists,” I said.

“Tell that to the producers,” she laughed.

“When am I going to see you?” I said.

“I’ll give you a ring before the next Guild meeting,” she said. “Maybe we can all go together.”

“Jesus,” I said, “I seem to meet nothing but B-girls out here.”

She laughed. “I guess we’re all B-girls for something.”

“Well, thanks a helluva lot for going to bat for the kid,” I said. “It was damn nice of you.”

“Forget it,” she said in that same tone of voice that always
made me feel a little foolish and a little peeved. “The Guild is always at your service. See you, Al.”

As soon as she hung up, I dialed Julian’s apartment to break the news.

“Hello, Julian?” I said.

“Hello, sweetheart—come on over and drink to the future of a writing team that’s going to make Hecht and MacArthur look like a couple of office boys.”

“What the hell are you doing there?”