What Makes Sammy Run? (5 page)

I hadn’t been on exactly chummy terms with Sammy for quite a time now but one afternoon he came up to me at Bleeck’s and, without taking his ten-cent cigar out of his mouth (this was a new addition to the evolving personality of Sammy Glick), he said, “Hello, Al, can I buy you a drink?”

I didn’t like the idea of his buying me a drink, so I offered to play him the match game to see who got the check and I lost. There’s no use making myself out a hero about this. I was pretty generally considered the King of the Match Game down at Bleeck’s and I didn’t like the way Sammy was starting to beat me.

After I finished my drink I started to edge away, but Sammy was too quick for me.

“Say, Al,” he said, “next Monday is my birthday, and since you sorta gave me my start I thought maybe you’d like to have dinner with me and my girl, at the Algonquin.”

“Gave you your start!” I said. “I did everything I could to get you canned.”

“No kidding, Al,” he said, just letting that roll off him. “I know birthday parties are old-fashioned, but I want you with us at dinner Monday night.”

“Monday night?” I said. “Sorry, Sammy, I’m a working man; I’ve got a show Monday night.”

I couldn’t think of a show Monday night, but, by God, I was going to find one.

“Then how about Sunday?” Sammy said.

“Well, it’s more fun to have your party on your actual birthday,” I said, “so why don’t you just go ahead without me? I’ll—sort of be there in spirit,” I added, a little lamely.

But Sammy always was too practical to go in for anything as philosophical as that. “No,” he insisted, “I wouldn’t think of having my party without my old pal Al, so I’ll just change it to Sunday night.”

We met in the Algonquin lobby. Sammy was standing with a spindly-legged, too thin, sickly-pale, vague little girl. She could have looked like an angel, only her face was made up like a Fourteenth Street chorus girl, heavy red lipstick and eye shadow and too much powder and orange rouge. I wanted to take my handkerchief and wipe it all off. The poor little kid. The blue eyes and the frail body and the sad beauty were hers. They grew out of the shadow of the tenement right up through the crowded sidewalk.

“Miss Rosalie Goldbaum,” Sammy said, “meet Mr. Al Manheim, who has the column next to mine.”

“Oh, Mr. Manheim, Sammy has told me so much about you,” Miss Goldbaum said.

Sammy took Miss Goldbaum’s arm and mine and guided us
through the lobby to the restaurant. He caught the headwaiter’s eye with an air of practiced authority. He smiled down his cigar. For the occasion he had bought himself a new pair of $7.50 black flanged shoes at the London Character Shop.

Dinner was what I would have called uneventful. Sammy was too busy looking around for celebrities to pay much attention to either of us. Miss Goldbaum was shy, strangely unsophisticated, full of self-conscious smiles and silence. Except when she talked about Sammy. And I encouraged her. For her heart was so full of Sammy that I began to wonder if I had overlooked one of his virtues. Perhaps this was another side; he was a kind and thoughtful lover and slowed down to a walk for Miss Goldbaum.

“You know, Mr. Manheim,” she said, “writing that column isn’t what Sammy really wants to do.”

“Of course not,” I said, “they forced it on him.”

“He just does that to make a living,” she said.

“It’s a damn shame,” I said, “this materialistic world crushing a beautiful soul like that.”

“It really is,” she said. “Because he writes me the loveliest things. I just know that some day he’s going to be a really great writer. Because he’s really a poet.”

“He’s a great man,” I said, expecting God to strike me dead any second. “You’re a lucky girl.”

“You’re telling
me
,” she said.

There was a lull. Sammy was staring across the room at George Opdyke, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I was about to say he was lost in thought, but Sammy was never really lost, and he never actually thought, for that implies deep reflection. He was figuring. Miss Goldbaum edged her undernourished white hand into his. Sammy played with it absent-mindedly, like a piece of silverware.

“Gee,” Miss Goldbaum burst out again, “honestly, sometimes when I look at Sammy I just can’t believe it, and him just a little kid right out of the East Side like me.”

“You’re a lucky …” I began and then I caught myself and ended feebly with, “Yeah—a diamond in the rough.”

She was becoming tiresome. Her tight little world was bursting with Sammy Glick. All her craving to live and her blood rushing to possess and to be maternal found expression in this one smart little guy. I wondered if she had known Sammy that time a year or so ago when he had proudly pronounced his independence of all women, except for what he could get gratis on Saturday nights.

I liked her and pitied her and didn’t want to hear her any more.

About that time Opdyke had finished his coffee and was passing our table and just at the moment that I was going to nod to him, for I knew him slightly, Sammy suddenly surprised me in a loud voice:

“Hey, Al, I thought you said you were going to introduce me to Opdyke.”

Of course that was the last thing I had intended to do but it was too late because Opdyke had already stopped the way anyone does when he hears his name. He paused a moment, just long enough for me to get the introduction out and Sammy had had his way again.

Miss Goldbaum looked at Opdyke with some reproach, as if to say, You can’t horn in on this, it’s
our
birthday party.

But you should have seen Sammy go to work. He offered Opdyke a cigar and said, “I sent you a column of mine a couple of months ago giving you a pretty good plug. I always wondered how you liked it.”

Opdyke looked at him questioningly. “I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you,” he said, “I get quite a few clippings in the mail.”

That would have been enough to discourage you and me, but all it did was give Sammy a better idea of how to proceed.

“You know, Mr. Opdyke,” he said, “I was always hoping I could meet you so I could tell you how much I liked
The Eleventh Commandment.”

This time Opdyke came to life a little bit. “Really,” he said, “I thought everybody had forgotten that little one-acter. I wrote
Eleventh Commandment
when I was just getting started.”

“It’s just as good today as it was when you wrote it,” Sammy
said. “I happened to read it just a couple of weeks ago. You’d be surprised how it stands up.”

“Is that a fact?” Opdyke said, rather pleased.

I could see what Sammy was doing and I had to hand it to him. If there’s anything every successful writer loves, it’s to hear praise for some obscure failure which he is still convinced is one of the best things he ever wrote. That was Opdyke’s Achilles’ heel, just the way it probably was Dreiser’s and Shaw’s and Sinclair Lewis’s, and Sammy had found it.

The next thing I knew Opdyke was actually sitting down with us. “This protégé of yours is a real student of the American theater, Al,” he said.

Protégé. I winced. And I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I was beginning to realize: that Sammy, knowing that Opdyke usually hangs out at the Algonquin, had probably been doing a little research on the playwright at the public library.

For the next fifteen minutes, Sammy was in his element, busy being sophisticated and artificially gay, trying his best to outwise-crack Opdyke.

After Opdyke left, with a hearty Glad-to-have-met-you for Sammy, Miss Goldbaum started to yawn and I mumbled something about having a lot of work to do before hitting the hay, and Sammy looked at Miss Goldbaum and said, “We both appreciate your celebrating this way with us.” She nodded happily. Yes, her Sammy said it exactly right, and the birthday party was over. The last I saw of them they were walking down the steps to the subway arm in arm and she was looking up at him. He was nineteen years old.

On the way home I stopped in “21” and had a drink by myself, somehow hoping to find the answer to Sammy Glick at the bottom of my glass. I didn’t want to hate Sammy too quickly because I wasn’t a hater by nature. I usually tried to find some reason for liking everybody. That had always been my favorite luxury in life, being able to like everybody. I suppose that could
be traced back to my heritage, in a small New England town where life was always peaceful and friendly, and where my father, the town’s only rabbi, had led a life of community service and true Isaiah-like vision that had won him Middletown’s approval and genuine respect. When I enrolled at the good little Methodist college in our town, I still expected to follow my father’s footsteps and go on to rabbinical school, but four active and enthusiastic years in college dramatics changed my mind for me and that’s how I happened to wind up in front of the footlights instead of the altar. My father’s life message of tolerance was imbedded too deeply in the undersoil of my adolescence for any Broadway cynicism to wipe away entirely, and sometimes at the most ridiculous moments the words of my father would return to me, phrased in the dignified Biblical language that had become his everyday speech, though I believe the wording was his own: “Try to love all your fellow men as you do your own brother, for the Lord placed all men upon the earth that they might prosper together.”

So that’s what I sat there saying to myself that night as I downed my Scotch and tried my very best to love Sammy Glick along with all the rest of my fellow men. Under the potent influence of Scotch and my father I began to feel downright repentant. Almost maudlin, in fact. Here he was a young kid just trying to get a good job and now that he had got it and was beginning to grow up he’d have a chance to relax and become one of the boys. Manheim, get a grip on yourself, I cautioned myself unsteadily. Stop seeing dark clouds behind every silver lining. You’re going to love Sammy Glick, Manheim, I lectured, you’re going to remember what your dear dead father told you and love Sammy Glick even if it kills you. Why, Sammy’s hospitality tonight is a beautiful gesture. It’s the beginning of a golden friendship.

You will have to forgive me for that because I was a little drunk by that time, and then too when it came to a knowledge of Sammy Glick I was still in the first grade.

But I skipped a couple of grades after I saw Winchell’s column
next evening. There it was, right at the top, the boldface print laughing up at me:

When rising columnist Sammy Glick celebrated his twenty-first birthday at the Algonquin last night, George Opdyke and colleague Al Manheim were on hand as principal cake eaters …

You didn’t have to be a mastermind to figure out how Walter got that item, or where those two extra years came from. So when Sammy blew into the office I gave him one of my searching looks.

“I see where George Opdyke got himself a plug in Winchell’s column this morning, Samuel,” I said.

“Yeah,” Sammy cracked, “you should have been there.”

“Listen,” I said, “you’ve got enough gall to be divided into nine parts.”

“Aw, don’t be sore, Al,” he said. “I can’t hide in this nest forever. I gotta spread my wings a little.”

“Then you must be a bat,” I said, “because that’s the only rat I know of with wings.”

“Why, Al,” Sammy said, “I’m surprised at you. I always thought you were my friend.”

He really meant it too. Trying to hurt his feelings was like trying to shoot an elephant with a BB gun. It simply tickled him.

“You’re physically incapable of having friends,” I said. “All you can ever have are enemies and stooges.”

That rolled off my tongue just like that, without thinking much about it, but I remember looking back on it in later life as one of my few profound observations.

“Sammy,” I continued, “try to learn before it’s too late. Don’t be cheap. Cheapness is the curse of our times. You’re beginning to spread cheapness around like bad toilet water. That item about George Opdyke’s celebrating your birthday was one of the cheapest things I ever saw.”

“Sure, it was cheap,” Sammy said. “After all, I got better publicity free than you could have bought for big dough. You
can’t ask for anything cheaper than that. And what are you squawking about? It didn’t do you any harm either.”

“You don’t have to convince me,” I said. “I know you’re a philanthropist. But while you were about it why didn’t you mention Miss Goldbaum? She’s the only one who would have got any joy out of seeing her name linked with yours in print. Why didn’t you give her a break?”

“Wise up,” he cracked, “she gets her break three times a week.”

“You—stink,” I ended lamely, so sore I couldn’t even try to be clever.

“Okay, I stink,” he said, walking off, “but someday you’ll cut off an arm for one little whiff.”