What Makes Sammy Run? (21 page)

“Mmmm a tango,” she said with her whole body behind it.

“I think I’ll just sit this one out,” I said. “Go ahead, Billie, I’d only be in your way. Just let me sit here and watch.”

Later, a voice that seemed to come from behind me said, “Al, you’d better pay the check. They’re closing up.”

“My God,” I said, “Billie, you scared me. Jesus, I’ve been sleeping. I must have been sleeping for hours!”

“We only finished dancing a second ago,” she said. “You were just starting to close your eyes.”

“But I’ve been dreaming,” I said. “Know who it was about? Sammy Glick. He was climbing up a rope and I was chasing him, only the rope didn’t seem to be tied to anything—just going straight up in the air. And every time he got near the end, it just kept getting longer. And then I fell off …”

“Señor, your check,” the waiter said in a tolerant but wanting-to-get-home voice.

While I was waiting for the change I said, “Billie, I don’t think I ever asked you before. Do you know what makes Sammy run?”

She looked at me puzzled, not knowing whether to take it seriously or humor me.

“That’s all right,” I said, “take your time. I’ve been at it for years.”

“Do you know?” she said.

“Of course I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m working on it, little by little. You know what I need, Billie? A subsidy from the Carnegie Foundation. Then I could have a whole staff helping me. Because it’s a big job, Billie. Once we know what makes Sammy run it will be a great thing for the world. Like discovering the cause of cancer.”

“We better go home,” Billie said.

“Billie,” I said, “can you keep a secret? I think Kit is the only person in the world who knows what makes Sammy run. And she’s such a coldhearted bitch she won’t tell.”

When Kit called me for the next meeting I was either not myself or too much myself. I said, “I should think you could get a girl
at the Guild office to take over some of this secretarial work for you, Kit.”

“What is it, Al?” she said. “You sound sore at me.”

I’m not sore, I thought. I think I’m falling in love with you. There is a very subtle difference.

“I guess I’m just in sort of a mood today,” I said. “I think maybe I’ll pass this one up, Kit, if it’s all the same with you.”

As usual I browsed around Stanley Rose’s until I had an appetite and then as usual I went next door to Musso’s.

“Evening, Mr. Manheim,” the waiter greeted me. “Going to the Guild meeting tonight?”

Amelio was a good union man himself who would find no inner peace until Hollywood was an organized town. I said I was, in order to avoid indigestion over my chicken wings, for Amelio was the restaurant’s indisputable forensic star.

On my way out I got it again. I stopped to say hello to three writers who always ate at the same table by the door. “Want to have a drink with us?” they asked. “And then we’ll all go over to the meeting together.”

I told them I would probably see them over there.

I started walking down the Boulevard and turned in at the narrow alleyway leading to Henkel’s Art Gallery. The gallery was in a funny little bungalow with an easygoing, out-of-this-world atmosphere, which featured surrealist and abstractionist stuff and Mr. Henkel, blond, middle-aged, dumpy and vague, who spoke about art with a cigarette in his mouth so rapidly and indistinctly that I was rarely able to understand him, though occasional phrases always sounded significant.

I had only been in Hollywood a short time, but I was already beginning to meet people everywhere I went. This time it was my erstwhile collaborator, Pancake.

“Well,” he said, “it seems there are some writers left who are still more interested in the better things than in forming a union like a bunch of plumbers.”

I looked at my watch. I could still make it if I hurried. “As a
matter of fact,” I said, “I just came in here to kill a couple of minutes before going over with the rest of the plumbers.”

I must have arrived only half an hour late because the meeting hadn’t begun yet. People were still standing around in little groups, talking. I picked Sammy out right away. He must have swallowed a magnet when he was a little boy. I started over. He was with Harold Godfrey Wilson and a tall, lean fellow who would have had the face of a typical Yale man if it hadn’t been for the pale, sick skin and the tired patches under the eyes.

Sammy proudly introduced me to Lawrence Paine, whose name had been on some of the finest pictures Hollywood had turned out. I remembered that he had won the Academy Award for the best screenplay a year or so ago.

They went on talking about the Guild. “I’m all for the Guild,” Paine said. “But I’ll be damned if I like how it’s being run. They’re letting too many people in. What the hell, every lucky bastard who happens to sell one story isn’t a screen writer. The producers won’t take us seriously until we limit the membership to writers who’ve been employed at least a year, or get a thousand dollars a week.”

“If this bunch of Reds have their way we’ll be marching down Hollywood Boulevard in their May Day Parade,” Wilson said.

“What do you mean, Reds?” I said.

“Well, maybe not Reds,” Paine said. “Harold here always gets a little excited. But they’re goddam parlor-pinks and that’s just as bad. It’s up to the responsible element to save the Guild.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Paine,” I said. “I just joined the Guild on my way in tonight and I admit I don’t know too much about it. But it seems to me you want to save the Guild by kicking out the little guys like me. And they’re just the ones the Guild ought to be helping the most.”

“Apparently not all the lower-bracket writers feel the way you do about it. Young Sammy here is with us, aren’t you, Sammy?”

Young Sammy was with them, all right. Young Sammy was
applying for the job of bugle boy in the proud little army that marched under the banner of
$2500
a week.

After they wandered off Sammy shook his head and said, “Al, you’ll never get anywhere that way. Those guys have an
in
with some of the biggest producers in town. They know what they’re talking about. They don’t get twenty-five hundred a week for nothing.”

“You will,” I said.

“Twenty-five hundred a week,” he said.

I could feel him going crazy inside when he said it.

“What are you making now, Sammy?” I asked.

“A lousy five hundred,” he said. “But it isn’t the dough. Hell, as long as I stay single I can manage on five hundred all right. But the producers use five-hundred-a-week writers to wipe themselves with, Al.”

Kit was right, I thought. You couldn’t blame a man for having a clubfoot, or a tapeworm in his mind.

“You’re only a kid,” I said. “You’ll get your twenty-five hundred, you crazy son-of-a-bitch. I’ll bet you get it before you’re thirty.”

“You know you can get good credits out here for years without getting in the big dough,” Sammy said. “But I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been looking over guys’ shoulders while they hit the jackpot. Know how they do it? On the outside. With a hit play, for instance. That’s how these producers think. They see something they like in print or on the stage and right away their tongues are hanging out to pay the writer three or four times as much as the guys trying to make a rep in their own business.”

“What makes you think you can write a play?” I said.

“Hell, plenty of dopes write plays,” he said.

“Talented dopes,” I said.

“Talent can get you just so far,” he said. “Then you got to start using your head.”

The meeting was being called to order. There seemed to be a larger crowd than last time. It looked as if the Guild was on its way.

“What have you been doing for yourself?” Sammy said.

I didn’t give him the usual optimistic crap because I wanted to hear what he would say. I told him after my option had lapsed I had gone without a job for a couple of months and finally had landed at National, a little action-picture lot, on a flat-deal basis at a thousand bucks a script. Which means that you work twenty-six hours a day trying to get your dough as fast as possible.

“Any time limit on rewriting?” Sammy said.

I couldn’t remember any.

“Then they’ve got you by the balls but good,” Sammy said. “Once you get your grand they can keep you on the picture as long as they like.”

“I know,” I said, “but what the hell can I do? Maybe that’s a job for the Guild.”

“If you ask me,” Sammy said, “the Guild has one foot in the grave—and it’s goosing itself with the other. Maybe you ought to write a play too.”

The funny thing is I had been writing one. I had been writing one for three years. It was about a rabbi like my father and anti-Semitism in a small town and the fundamental quest of simple men for dignity, fraternity, peace and beer on Saturday night. I wanted to make the content of the play everything that I had seen and felt, and the form everything I knew. And I didn’t want to tell anybody about it until it began to come alive to me. Because it seems to me too many writers drain their excitement and energy away in conversation.

“I’ve been working on one for a couple of years,” I said.

“Don’t futz around with it too long,” Sammy said. “Try to peddle it. They buy lousy plays for pictures every day. And six months from now the chances are that they won’t remember what kind of
dreck
it was. All they’ll remember is that you are a playwright and look at all the lousy playwrights out here in the big money.”

I don’t know whether Sammy had the play already written the night we talked about it or whether he ran right home and dashed it off after that meeting, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of months later that I received an engraved invitation in the mail. Mr. Samuel Glick was requesting the pleasure of my company at the opening of his three-act comedy-drama
Live Wire
at the Hollywood Playhouse.

Sammy Glick, prominent scenarist and playwright, I thought tenderly and hatefully, my little Sammy Glick.

I was still admiring the tasteful typography of his announcement when Sammy called.

His voice was full of exulting raucous chimes out of tune.

“Hiya sweetheart, how’re they hanging? Well, are you all set for your greatest evening in the American theater?”

I said I had his invitation.

“It’s shaping up something terrific,” he said. “Everybody says it looks like the biggest opening this town ever had. I gave Fineman and Frank Collier a row each and they even promised to join my party at the Troc after the show. I sent Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer a couple of ducats and they haven’t sent them back, so it looks as if they’re in the bag too.”

“How do you get away with all those tickets?” I said. “What did you do, buy out the house for the night?”

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I got a little dough in the show myself. I talked my agents into backing it with me fifty-fifty. I hadda brainstorm, see? I told them the best goddam way in the world to hit the producers for six figures was to put the show on right under their noses with a helluva fanfare. My agents can smell big dough a mile away. They went right out and grabbed a first-class Broadway producer to front for us.”

“Sammy,” I said, “you’re a smart guy. At least if you’ve made a mistake so far I haven’t noticed it. So why in hell do you want to go telling me all this for?”

“In the first place,” he said, “you’re a good guy.”

He said it with absolute derision. “I never held it against you for putting the clip on me for Rosalie or Julian. If that’s your
pleasure, go ahead. I just figure your brain’s a little soft, that’s all, but it’s okay by me. I still like you. You’re good for me. If I tell you something in confidence you don’t shoot your mouth off to the first big shot you meet to try to get an
in.”

If he had hated me I might have had some satisfaction out of it. But he had more important people to hate.

“And in the second place, what the hell if they do find out? I’d just tell ’em it shows how much confidence I got in my own work.”

“And in the third place you’re so goddam pleased with yourself you have to tell somebody and I’m the best listener you’ve got,” I added.