What Makes Sammy Run? (26 page)

We drove out in her car with the top down. We drove past Westwood Village, the home of UCLA, which is either the model for Hollywood’s version of campus life or vice versa; past Sawtelle, the Old Soldiers’ Home, where veterans of our more recent wars live out their days watching cars go by; past Santa Monica with its swanky swimming clubs and its public beaches, where bronzed and pretty girls in little bathing suits wear sailor hats and munch hot dogs as they skip barefooted across the blistering pavement to the sand. Then we turned north up the coast highway curving to
the shore, bordered by matchbox cottages, snug and dilapidated, with names like Crow’s Nest and Joe’s Joynt.

Finally we reached a group of cottages which were a little newer, with the paint not yet eaten away by the salt air, and one of these was Julian’s.

The house was clean and compact and shiplike. The long narrow dining room faced the sea, which was so close to us that big waves would shake the walls and send the surf swishing up below us. Blanche was one of those efficient little Jewish mothers who look as if that was what they were meant for from their first moment of puberty.

Julian was dressed more informally than I had ever seen him before, in a loose-fitting dungaree suit and beach sandals, but he would never look really sporty. In spite of his natural graveness, he did his best to be jolly through lunch, but his sensitivity was of too simple a kind to conceal his uneasiness.

Later, sitting on his porch overlooking the ocean, we heard the cause of it.

“You know,” he said, “all the time that I’ve been working at World-Wide I’ve been working from week to week, without a contract. Two days ago,” he continued sadly, “they offered me a seven-year contract. Beginning at five hundred dollars a week.”

He stopped, sighed, put his pipe back in his mouth and looked out at his ocean.

All of us knew what he meant. There had been lots of rumors flying around World-Wide that writers were being offered unusually attractive contracts in order to tempt them into breaking the Guild provision. But I hadn’t really believed it. This was the first actual case I had heard of. Kit and I had been called in to help Julian wrestle with his conscience.

I didn’t say anything. I watched Kit.

“Unless all of us are free agents two years from now the Guild is licked,” she said. “God knows, none of us want to strike. But if we aren’t even in a position to threaten one, we’re just charging a machine gun with our bare hands and we might as well fold.”

Julian looked as if he were going to burst out crying. Blanche was upset.

“That’s all right for you to say, Miss Sargent. You’re all established. But Julian is finally getting a good start. And with our baby coming …”

Jesus, what a hell of a complicated world, I thought. Here is a kid who is finally getting the break he’s been waiting for and deserves and he’s dying to take it, and who the hell can blame him, and Kit, that coldhearted humanitarian, isn’t going to let him.

“Julian might still be ghost writing if it weren’t for the Guild,” she said. “Of course, if we ever have a Guild shop in Hollywood, all the interests of writers will be protected; but the ones it will help most are the boys like Julian, who aren’t able to take any kind of a stand alone.”

“Then what does he pay his agent ten percent for?” Blanche said.

“Agents can help just so much. But when we were asked to take that fifty-percent cut my first year out here, the agents were swept along with the rest of us. You probably don’t remember, but the crafts that were organized were the only ones that didn’t have to take it.”

Julian kept turning his head from Blanche to Kit as if he were watching a tennis match. I tried to make out which side he was on. He looked miserable when Kit spoke and even more miserable when Blanche retaliated.

“You know I’m for the Guild,” he broke in. “I joined as soon as I was eligible. But, God, when I think of the difference between five hundred a week and losing my job …”

“Who says you’re going to lose your job?” Kit said, almost angrily.

“Sammy,” Julian said. “He had a talk with me yesterday. He told me what a damn fool he thought I was, if I didn’t sign it. He said he had it confidentially from the front office that if I didn’t sign it I’d never work for World-Wide again.”

Oh, Sammy, you frantic marathoner, I thought, you bastard I used to hate and almost understand! You success!

“How can you possibly ask him to turn it down?” Blanche said.

Blanche is right, I thought. Blanche is right and Kit is right and never the twain shall meet.

“I’m not asking him to turn it down,” Kit said relentlessly. “That’s something you’ll have to decide yourselves. All I can do is tell you what turning it down means.”

Nebbish
, poor Julian, I thought.

When we left, the sun was taking its evening dip, slipping down into the ocean inch by inch like a fat woman afraid of the water.

Instead of turning back toward Hollywood, we started north, just driving anywhere with the top down and the sunset just beyond our reach. The ocean and the clouds were red when we started out, soon after deep purple with a splinter moon giving the night a subtle, indirect lighting. We drove up past Malibu, left the last houses behind. The beach had disappeared and in its place were turbulent rock formations jutting out into the sea. On the other side of the road stretched pasture lands and cultivated fields.

As we took a hairpin turn Kit said, “There’s my little beach down there.”

I saw nothing but steep rocks below us piling into the water.

“You can’t see it from the road,” she said. “The rocks are too high around it. I found it one hot day driving up to Frisco. It’s a beautiful place to go swimming in the raw.”

“How would you like to go in now?” I said.

She put her foot on the brake. “Okay,” she said. “It might be warm enough.”

“But how can we get dry?” I said, a little panicky. “We haven’t any towels.”

“I’ll look in the rumble,” she said. “I think I have some with my tennis stuff.”

“I hope so,” I said unconvincingly.

She found them. I almost broke my neck on the jagged path that angled down to the little beach that lay concealed and virginal
below. Natural hydraulics working overtime for a couple of million years had scooped it right out of the cliffs.

“Quite an improvement on our last island,” I said. “Unless that moon is being held up by piano wire.”

“I’ve named it Glick’s Lagoon,” she said. “Because it’s the last stronghold of individualism.”

“Was Sammy ever down here with you?”

She shook her head. “I pointed it out to him once. But he didn’t want to stop. No one ever taught him how to play.”

We undressed silently, seeing each other only as silhouettes. She was ready first and didn’t wait for me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her moving swiftly toward the water, her tanned arms and legs and head blending into the dark, the rest of her body that had been concealed from the sun looking from the back like a white, tight-fitting bathing suit. She was long-legged, almost hipless, V-shaped from her waist to her broad shoulders.

The water was so cold it made my heart feel like an ice cube. I plowed madly, determined to stay in as long as she did. Her stroke was a smooth rhythmic crawl. She swam out beyond me and back and said, “Ready to go in?”

“Yes,” I said with half a dozen y’s through chattering teeth. “But I’ll have to dive down and find my feet first. I think they both dropped off.”

“They’ll probably come in with the tide,” she said.

Five minutes later we were dressed again, warm and dry with towels around our heads and our bodies tingling. We sat there with our arms around our knees, catching our breath.

“What are you thinking about?” she said.

“Julian,” I said. “How awfully sorry I feel for Julian.”

“Poor little guy,” she said.

“That’s not the way you sounded a couple of hours ago,” I said. “Jesus, you were cold-blooded. I almost felt like telling him to take that contract.”

“That’s what he asked us down to tell him,” she said. “He was right on the borderline. One word of sympathy would have been enough to tip him the other way.”

“I don’t like it,” I said. “I’ll be damned if I do. This isn’t just a character you can X-out and rewrite. This is a guy’s life you’re playing around with.”

“Whatever we do,” she said, “we have to do it all the way. If we want a Guild we have to fight it through. We can’t have half a Guild. It’s like a strike. You either scab or you try to stop the scabs. But you can’t strike and feel sorry for the scabs at the same time.”

“Why not?” I said. “The strikers only strike because they want something out of life they aren’t getting. The poor scabs are in the same boat. I saw strikers beat hell out of a scab in my hometown once. He was just a desperate, hungry little guy. Being a scab wasn’t his idea of what he wanted to do in this world.”

“That’s pity,” she said. “Pity is always good for a couple of Christmas baskets for the poor. But that leaves three-hundred-and-sixty-four other days to take care of. Your attitude is very picturesque, from a distance. But try bringing it closer home. What do you think Sammy is but a desperate, hungry little guy?”

It was true. He was going around being desperate in a $150 tailor-made suit. He was hungrier than ever after five-dollar dinners at Marcel’s.

“But Sammy is still in the Guild,” I said. “I think you ought to try to get together with his bunch. Work out some sort of a compromise, maybe. It doesn’t seem fair to put guys like Julian on such a spot.”

“Sammy joined the Guild when it didn’t cost anything,” she said. “Everybody was doing it and it was absolutely safe. But now I think he’s getting ready to jump. All he’s waiting for is a nice, soft spot to land.”

“Just the same,” I argued, “his bunch is still a powerful minority in the Guild. I think you ought to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

“The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you’re too goddam good. But I’ll think it over. I’ll put it up to the Board.”

The headline in the
Megaphone
the following Saturday read:

PREDICT CIVIL WAR AT GUILD SESSION TONIGHT!

But we didn’t have to wait that long. All the writers on our lot—some fifty or sixty of us—were called together in one of the projection rooms just before lunch. And I can think of nothing better calculated to take away an appetite.

The atmosphere was electric. All of us seemed to be strung together with high-tension wires. The program began with Dan Young, the barrel-bodied, red-faced, profanely earnest studio manager, who seemed to feel that the story of how he had risen from truck driver right here at this studio to his present importance was a devastating argument for writers giving up the Guild foolishness and making the studio one big happy family. He even hinted that those who refused to participate in his family life (on his terms) would find themselves led by the hand to the studio gate and told never to darken his payroll again.

After he finished, to cautious applause, he introduced the next speaker, the white-haired boy of the happy family, whom he laughingly described as “a member of your own ranks who seems to have a little more sense than the rest of you.”

Sammy Glick informed us that we would get further by voting the way the studio was asking us to. If he had used the first person singular instead of the plural he would have been right.

On the way out Sammy caught up with me and took my arm protectively. “Don’t stick your neck out too far, Al,” he said. “After all everybody’s got to look out for Number One.”

“Sure,” I said, “but we can’t all have a genius for it like you have.”

I strolled back to the office with Kit. “We couldn’t have done better if we had organized that meeting ourselves,” she said. “That won more votes for us than it did for them. I was afraid
a little pressure like that might run the boys out of the Guild. But it only seemed to pull them together. Now they’re really sore.”

“Where do you think Sammy is going to end up?” I said.

“It depends on what kind of a deal he can make with Young,” she said. “He’s probably holding out for general-manager-in-charge-of-production! ”