What Makes Sammy Run? (9 page)

At night I usually had supper at the Vine Street Derby, always hoping to run into someone I knew, and then I’d stroll down Hollywood Boulevard, stopping in at one of the joints for a drink, or browsing around in Stanley Rose’s bookstore listening to the conversation, or maybe dropping in at a movie. After a while I felt as if I were wandering around a small town, because there never seemed to be anything to do and I began to notice the same faces drifting by night after night.

The only friend I made in those early days was an unknown playwright who had the office two doors down from mine. He told me he had come out to Hollywood about a year ago because the doctor had told him his four-year-old daughter’s sinus trouble was going to get serious if he didn’t get her out to a warm, dry climate. When I met him he was just beginning to get jittery because his option was coming up in a couple of weeks and he didn’t seem to think he could get a job anywhere else if they let him out. He said the reason he was scared was because he hadn’t any credits. Anybody who goes a year in Hollywood without getting a single screen credit, he said, might just as well shop around for another profession.

I asked him how it happened that none of his pictures had
reached the screen, and he explained that the first script he wrote had been shelved because at the last minute they couldn’t get the actor it had been written for, and the second one never reached first base because it was a topical subject and one of the other studios beat them to it, and the third one was stymied because it couldn’t get by the Hays Office. I didn’t see why that should hurt him if the producers had liked his scripts, but he took a more pessimistic view of it. He said by the time a year had gone by, all they would probably remember is that he had worked twelve months without getting anything on the screen and that would be the pay-off.

I tried to cheer him up, even took him and his young wife out to dinner one night, but when I came to my office the following Monday morning he was gone. He left a note for me saying the worst had happened, and that I had taken some of the curse off those last few weeks and that he was driving back to New York to see if he couldn’t get an advance on a new play he had started. A couple of years later I saw one of his plays that the Federal Theater was doing in Los Angeles, but I’ve never seen him again. It’s queer to think how many little guys there are like that, with more ability than push, sucked in by one wave and hurled out by the next, for every Sammy Glick who slips through and over the waves like a porpoise.

After he left, I tried to think if there was anyone else in town I knew, and I suddenly remembered Henry Powell Turner, the poet, who had been a senior when I was a freshman at Wesleyan. I remembered how excited we all were at school when we heard that the book-length poem on the history of New England which he had read to the Literary Society while he was still in college had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I had met Henry again on his way out to Hollywood several years ago and he had told me, by way of making conversation, to be sure and look him up if I was ever out that way.

The operator told me that Mr. Turner had a confidential number, so I finally wired him at his studio and asked him to call me. I didn’t hear from him until several weeks later when I picked up
the phone to hear a cultured woman’s voice say, “This is Mr. Henry Powell Turner’s secretary. Mr. and Mrs. Turner would like to have the pleasure of your company at dinner at seven-thirty this Wednesday evening.”

What I remember most about the Turner manse was that it was a five-dollar taxi ride from the Villa Espana, that you could see the Pacific Ocean from its front lawn, and that it was the largest example of the worst kind of architecture I have ever seen. Hollywood Moorish.

I had always thought of Henry Powell Turner as my ideal of what a great poet should look like. I could remember him as a student, built along heroic proportions, six feet three and over two hundred pounds, with blond curly hair and the kind of chiseled, classical good looks that always remind me of the way epic Greek poets looked—or ought to have looked. And even when I had seen Turner last, four or five years ago, he was still a romantic figure to me, erect and hearty as ever, with his wild yellow hair turning a more dignified gray at the temples.

When I saw him again this time, in that huge, cold living room, with the expensive furniture and the high ceiling, there were only a few strands left of the old youthful yellow among the thinning, straightening gray, but he was hardly more dignified because he was already well on his way toward the state of drooling intoxication which I later discovered he managed to achieve with monotonous regularity each evening.

I met his wife, a gaunt, high-strung woman, prematurely gray, with a boyish figure in low-cut red velvet. They asked me the usual polite questions during cocktails, and conversation died once or twice at dinner, though Turner and I did our best to squeeze the most out of our common interest in Wesleyan. That’s about all I remember about that dinner, except that it was served with an irritating pomp, and that Turner shattered whatever illusions I had left about him by telling one of those long dirty stories for which the only justification would be the tag line at the climax, which they never seem to reach. At the finish he laughed so loud
that he finally broke into a coughing fit which he managed to soothe with loud gulps of sparkling burgundy.

When we rose from the table, his wife, ghostlike all through dinner, finally disappeared, and I found myself cooped up with him and several bottles of Bellows Scotch in his imposing study. I spent the next three or four uncomfortable hours in trying to follow him through his various stages of drunkenness. In the first, he recited some of his lyrical poetry. In the second, he mocked his own poems with dirty limericks composed extemporaneously, “which,” he laughingly informed me three or four times, “I have seen fit to create in line of my duties as Hollywood’s Poet Laureate.” In the next he reviewed his chief conquests of the current season with a glint that brought me back to the lurid tales we used to swap in our adolescence. And of course he reached the final stage full of teary nostalgia for the glories of his youth and eloquent resolutions to return to New England and his Muse, “as soon as I finish the MacDonald-Eddy script I have to do when I get back from my vacation.”

I finally managed to escape around one in the morning, after we had topped off the evening by killing the second bottle of Scotch and singing a Wesleyan song. I must have been more upset than I realized when I left there, because by the time I reached my room and started to undress, the vision of Henry Powell Turner before and after was still with me. Only now what I had taken merely for boredom or disgust came into sharper focus as I began to be stunned by the horror and sense of mental nausea most of us feel when we’re forced into ringside seats for great personal tragedies.

So I buttoned my shirt again, put my tie back on and called a cab. For I had decided that the only way to forget the wreck of my epic poet was to make an evening of it. I asked the cab driver where a man could get a drink and a couple of laughs at an hour like this and he drove me to the Back Lot Club.

You have to stay up till two o’clock to realize what a small town Hollywood is. It goes to sleep at twelve o’clock like any decent
Middle Western village. The gay nightlife you dream about there is confined to private houses and the handful of hotspots which enjoy special privileges for which they are taxed in a very special way. At least that’s the way it was when I first went out there before Judge Bowron and his reformers had won the Battle of Los Angeles and began to fumigate the City Hall.

The Back Lot was a noisy, gaudy example of what most people seem to imagine all Hollywood is after dark. But except for an occasional celebrated face, it might have been any night spot in any American city. It was a montage of hot music, drunken laughter, loud wisecracks and hostesses like lollypops in red, green and yellow wrappers. The music took the old sweet melodies and twisted them like hairpins. It was a symphony strictly from hunger, to which everybody beat their feet in a frenzy of despair, trying to forget luck that was either too good or too bad, festered ambitions or hollow success. It made me realize again how true jazz music was, how it echoed everything that was churning inside us, all the crazy longings raw and writhing.

I had a few drinks while I looked the place over, and then a few more while my angle narrowed from a full shot of the crowd, to a group shot of the ladies who floated through the semidarkness on the loose, to a close-up of one particular hostess, large, but well-proportioned inside her tight satin evening gown, with a reddish glint to her hair combed strikingly back from her face and falling gracefully to her bare shoulders, where it emphasized the creamy whiteness of her skin. I watched her hips slip up and down as she moved among the tables and it wasn’t until she lingered at one of them to chat with a little blonde co-worker that I realized who the little blonde’s escort was. Sammy Glick.

It was one of those moments when I would have greeted the devil as a long-lost brother if he had only been willing to sit down and have a drink with me. And, in the mood I was in, the redhead was something of an attraction too. It didn’t make sense, but my friends have always considered me a disgustingly normal person, and it was normal if unprincipled to get the idea that Sammy might be able to supply the kind of good time I was looking for.

Sammy had been doing a lot of drinking but he wasn’t drunk. That didn’t surprise me, for it was hard to imagine him ever letting his defenses down long enough really to lose control. As soon as he spotted me he leaped up, yelling, “Well, if it isn’t little Alsie-palsie,” and threw his arms around me. It was strange to think that Sammy probably liked me as much as he could like anybody in the world. I think that was because anybody who took life the way Sammy did, gangster, dictator or screenwriter, was doomed to be lonely, and even though Sammy knew I could read him like the top line of an optometrist’s chart, he also knew that he could relax with me because I wasn’t willing or didn’t know how to use him for a ladder the way he used me. And at moments like these when he slowed down to a trot I sensed a flash, just the tiniest sparkle of appreciation for the way he had climbed on my shoulders to leap over the wall, and a hint or two of the old respect that he felt in those early days on the
Record
when I was still trying to teach him not to say ain’t.

“Al,” he said, “this is one of those lost angels I was telling you about, Sally Ann Joyce.”

He put his arm possessively around the little blonde and grinned at her. She took this as her cue to laugh. She seemed too young to look so tired around the eyes.

“Honey,” he said,” I want you to meet one of the sweetest guys in the world. Al Manheim.

“And last but never least, you can see for yourself,” Sammy said, indicating the redhead, “is Billie. I don’t think I know your last name, honey.”

“Rand,” Billie said, moistening her large lips and trying to look pleased about the whole thing, “Billie Rand.”

“Rand,” Sammy laughed, “the name is familiar, but I can’t quite place the body. But I bet you can guess where I’d like to place it.”

Sammy led the laughter, which they joined automatically. I pushed Billie’s chair in for her and as she looked up over her shoulder to smile into my face she didn’t seem to mind my staring down her dress.

“What are you trying to do, Al,” Sammy said, “give us an imitation of a tourist at the edge of Grand Canyon?”

Sally Ann and Billie giggled dutifully again, though I wasn’t sure whether they thought it was that funny or not. We drank a couple more rounds, while Sammy told the girls what pals we had been in New York, and it was funny to see how he could carry himself away with his own salesmanship. By the time he was through he made it sound as if the only reason I had come to Hollywood was to be near him.

“Maybe you boys want to be alone,” Billie said, knowing that was always good for a laugh.

It was, but of course Sammy managed to top it.

“Don’t give up, girls,” he said. “Haven’t you heard we’re ambisextrous?”

The last time the waiter set our drinks up again he told us the bar was closing in ten minutes.

Sammy pushed the table away rudely. “Let’s get out of this hellhole,” he said. “You’re all coming up to my apartment.” He took one girl under each arm, calling to the boss on the way out: “Don’t worry about your girls, Pop—I’ll see that they get to bed early.”

The boss gave a fake laugh and tried to make his voice sound as friendly as possible, “Glad you came in, Mr. Glick. Come back again.”

I was feeling pretty woozy from all that liquor and the smoke, but I remember wondering as I hit the open air how many people in this world would tell Sammy they were glad he had come—in that same tone of voice.

Sammy’s apartment was in the fashionable Colonial House just off the Sunset Strip. The names of the tenants underneath the mail boxes at the entrance read like a list of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors.

Sammy’s place was one of the smallest in the building and even that must have been way beyond his means for those early days, but he wrote off only part of the expense to shelter, the rest to prestige.

The apartment was furnished with an elegance that didn’t seem to fit Sammy, at least not yet, with a bedroom that opened off a long living room with a fireplace at one end. Sammy brought out Courvoisier. I wondered where he picked up all those little tricks, and then Billie and I started playing records and doing a little slow dancing, while Sammy and Sally Ann took over the big couch.

As we danced, hardly moving together, I heard the sound and silence of held kisses, several shrill, half-giggled
Sammy, don’ts
! and then Sammy started giving her the business about putting her in the movies. It was hardly more than kidding, and Sally Ann knew it, but you could tell from the way she kidded back how much that meant to her. It was all so naked that I wished I were drunker or not there. It was no secret to anybody that she was working out on him and he was working out on her, each one wanting something and not quite admitting it. Some people call that the Hollywood tug of war, though that concept is a little narrow. Hollywood may be one of its most blatant battlegrounds, but it is really a world war, undeclared.