What Makes Sammy Run? (42 page)

“Okay,” he said. “If I have to pay, I’ll pay. But, by Christ, I’m going to get my money’s worth!”

I thought of Foxy Four Eyes’s back room on the occasion of Sammy’s introduction to the orgasmic mysteries, the day he learned to value the act of love in terms of money’s worth.

“Hello, Sheik,” he said. “To hell with your dogs. Drop by Gladys’s and pick up Billie Rand.… No, don’t pick up anything else. Ha, ha, ha … okay, sweetheart.”

He hung up, still laughing with Sheik. Then he saw me, on my way out, and stopped.

“What’s your hurry? Hang around a while. We’re going to have some laughs.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m putting my bachelor days behind me. Kit and I are getting married this week.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “I thought that was her voice when I called, but I wasn’t sure. Well, all I can say is you’re a lucky guy, Al. She’s a great girl.”

He said it with a memory, with a touch of remorse and I knew what he was thinking, that he would have liked to have her, that he would have liked to have someone, but it was impossible, it was absolutely physically, psychologically, economically impossible.

“Well, I’m tickled to death. We’ll have to get together and kill a case of champagne some night.”

He walked me to the door and then he left the door open and walked me to my car. He could not bear to be alone. He put one foot on the running board and leaned through the window.

“Before you go,” he said, “forget everything I told you tonight. I don’t know what the hell got into me for a minute. What the hell have I got to kick about? I feel great. I got the world by the balls. Keep in touch with me, sweetheart.”

There in the silence I could almost hear the motor in him beginning to pick up speed again.

As I drove off I saw him standing outside on his palatial stone steps, under his giant eucalyptus trees, looking out over his hundred yards of landscaping that terraced down to the wall that surrounded his property. He was a lonely little figure in the shadows of Glickfair, the terrible little conqueror, the poor little guy, staring after my car as it drove out through the main gates, waiting for Sheik to bring the girls and the laughter.

I drove back slowly, heavy with the exhaustion I always felt after being with Sammy too long. I thought of him wandering alone through all his brightly lit rooms. Not only tonight, but all the nights of his life. No matter where he would ever be, at banquets, at gala house parties, in crowded night clubs, in big poker games,
at intimate dinners, he would still be wandering alone through all his brightly lit rooms. He would still have to send out frantic S.O.S.’s to Sheik, that virile eunuch: Help! Help! I’m lonely. I’m nervous. I’m friendless. I’m desperate. Bring girls, bring Scotch, bring laughs. Bring a pause in the day’s occupation, the quick sponge for the sweaty marathoner, the recreational pause that is brief and vulgar and titillating and quickly forgotten, like a dirty joke.

I thought how, unconsciously, I had been waiting for justice suddenly to rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that
what was coming to him
was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like plague; a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. Fear of all the bright young men, the newer, fresher Sammy Glicks that would spring up to harass him, to threaten him and finally to overtake him.

I thought of all the things I might have told him. You never had the first idea of give-and-take, the social intercourse. It had to be all you, all the way. You had to make individualism the most frightening ism of all. You act as if the world is just a blindfold free-for-all. Only the first time you get it in the belly you holler brotherhood. But you can’t have your brothers and eat them too. You’re alone, pal, all alone. That’s the way you wanted it, that’s the way you learned it. Sing it, Sammy, sing it deep and sad, all alone and feeling blue, all alone in crowded theaters, company conventions, all alone with twenty of Gladys’s girls tying themselves into lewd knots for you. All alone in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, with power and with Harringtons till death parts you from your only friend, your worst enemy, yourself.

But what good are words when not even experience will regenerate? It was too late to hate him or change him. Sammy’s will had stiffened. It had been free for an instant at birth, poised bird-free in the doctor’s hand that moment in the beginning
before it began to be formed to the life-molds, the terrible hungers of body and brain, the imposed wants, the traditional oppressions and persecutions, until at last Sammy’s will had curled in on itself, like an ingrown hair festering, spreading infection.

Now Sammy’s career meteored through my mind in all its destructive brilliance, his blitzkrieg against his fellow men. My mind skipped from conquest to conquest, like the scrapbook on his exploits I had been keeping ever since that memorable birthday party at the Algonquin. It was a terrifying and wonderful document, the record of where Sammy ran, and if you looked behind the picture and between the lines you might even discover what made him run. And some day I would like to see it published, as a blueprint of a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the twentieth century.

THE SAMMY GLICK
SHORT STORIES

AUTHOR’S NOTE

What could connect Dartmouth College and a Vermont marble strike with the novel
What Makes Sammy Run?
They would seem to be a continent apart. But actually, without the former, the latter might never have materialized. It happened like this:

In the mid-thirties, as student editor of
The
(daily)
Dartmouth
, I was shoulder-deep if not over my head in the story of the marbleworkers’ union’s struggle for a living wage against the quarry owners, who turned out to be generous, longtime supporters of the college, the Proctor family of Proctor, Vermont. I wrote and featured on our front page a series of articles describing the lives of the families of the marbleworkers, pulling out all stops and not having to exaggerate, since the kids were hungry, the clothes
threadbare, and the company houses drafty through bitter winters.

The series had set off an angry confrontation between spontaneous sympathizers with the strike and indignant defenders of the Proctors. To the friendlies, I was an undergraduate John Reed, and to the opposition a traitor to my college and my class. And I don’t mean the Class of ’36. President Ernest Martin Hopkins showed me drawersful of letters demanding my expulsion. The right-wing alumni and the American Legion seemed to think expulsion was much too good for me.

In the midst of this storm in a Dartmouth teacup, Bennett Cerf, the celebrated president of Random House, came to Hanover to deliver one of his joke-studded lectures. He phoned me at
The Dartmouth
office and asked if I would drop over to see him at the end of the day. Actually our “day” ended at three or four in the morning, when we put the paper to bed, but the Hanover Inn was a scant hundred yards away, so I dropped over around suppertime to meet the famous Mr. Cerf.

Bennett, as I would soon come to know him, told me he had been reading my marble-strike series, was impressed with both the style and content, and wanted to know more about my work. I told him that I had been writing a number of short stories for the campus literary magazine, and also a one-act play,
Company Town
, based on my experiences in Proctor. The state troopers, blatantly taking the side of the quarry owners, had actually stopped and turned back our trucks delivering food and clothing to the besieged families. (Ah, the bad old thirties!) It was excellent material, and I had made the most of it.

When Bennett asked me what my plans were after graduation, I told him I was going back to Hollywood to work for David Selznick as a reader/junior writer, but I intended to keep my hand in as a short-story writer. “Good,” the ebullient, ever-optimistic head of Random House said. “If you ever have a novel in mind, we’d be interested. Come and see us.”

Back in Hollywood, while working for the now-legendary Dave Selznick, I got my short-story career in gear very quickly. In my
first two years out of college, I managed to sell stories to
The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Story, Esquire
—and
Liberty
. It was in that quirky mass-market magazine that I first published, in short-story form, “What Makes Sammy Run?” It was so well received that
Liberty
asked for another Sammy story and I came up with “Love Comes to Sammy Glick.”

Shortly after this I met with Bennett Cerf again. He had read the
Liberty
stories and asked if I saw them as the seeds of a Hollywood novel. In truth, I was in the process of making notes along that line. I was introduced to Saxe Commins, a warm and sympathetic editor, who encouraged me to leave Hollywood film-writing and come east to write the book. With a $250 advance (against the munificent total of $500) I was on my way. I holed up in Norwich, Vermont, just across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth, and, with outline in hand, began banging away. In less than a year the job was done.

From time to time, I would run out of money and have to stop for a short story to pay the rent and support a young wife and baby daughter. The novel was published on my twenty-seventh birthday, with pre-pub praise from Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara. Bennett had warned me that while he, Saxe, and everybody else at Random House was enthusiastic about the book, I should not expect much of a sale. People who read, they felt, don’t buy “Hollywood” novels.

But
Sammy
fooled all of us. With a rave from
The New York Times,
from Dorothy Parker, on coast-to-coast radio from Walter Winchell, and from Damon Runyon, in his salute to Sammy as “the all-American heel,” the book went into eight printings before publication and was the choice of book-review editors as “Best First Novel of the Year.” The hardcover sale went over fifty thousand and the countless paperback editions have sent the circulation into the millions. To my amazement, Sammy Glick is as well known today as he was in 1941 when he first struck terror in the hearts of the Hollywood tycoons.

The two short stories that follow are republished in their original form, the first using dialogue without quotation marks, a
stylized or stylish experiment I was drawn to, perhaps from reading Saroyan and other groundbreakers in the thirties.

For the sake of literary history, if that doesn’t sound too pompous, I have left the secondary characters’ names as they were in the original stories. Al Manners, the laid-back narrator who becomes obsessed with Sammy’s ruthless climb to the top, becomes Al Manheim in the novel. Eugene Spitzer, the
nebbish
whose story Sammy steals for his breakthrough to Hollywood, becomes Julian Blumberg. Geoffrey Boyce, the dignified studio head whose place Sammy usurps, becomes Sidney Fineman. I believe the reason for these changes was to counter the possible charge of anti-Semitism. Since Sammy is obviously Jewish, I thought it should be clear that nearly all his victims—Rosalie, Manheim, Blumberg, Fineman, his brother, Israel—were also Jewish, suggesting the wide range of personalities and attitudes under the one ethnic umbrella.

B.S
     

“WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN?”

Al sat with a friend in a booth at the Vine Street Brown Derby watching the people watch each other.

It’s a funny thing, Al said, if you watch an animal while it eats, it stops. But here in the Derby several hundred people pay, and pay well, for the privilege of being watched while they eat.

Al is a writer. He writes scenarios, but he could say that because he worked on a newspaper for ten years, and he didn’t forget it. He remembered going down to New York and begging for a job, making a pest of himself because he needed twenty dollars a week to be a man in this world. Al was getting five hundred now. That was because he had no push. He seemed content with being small fry. He was lazy. He would never get anywhere. When other
writers gave him good ideas for stories he would give them credit. He was a washout.

A big man with a fat body carefully hidden in smartly tailored clothes stopped at the table. He squeezed Al’s hand affectionately.

Saw your picture, Al, he said. Tuhriffic!

And he pressed his pudgy hand against Al’s as if to indicate that further expression failed him.

That’s the original phony, Al said, as the fat man left his table to squeeze somebody else’s hand. I happen to know he told Sol Morris my picture stinks.

Al looked around at the new star who had just come in with her husband and her lover, at the too-flattering caricatures of Hollywood celebrities on the wall, at the too-revealing starched uniforms of the waitresses.

Sometimes I feel if I passed my hand over all this it would topple down like a house of cards, Al said. Just like that. Pffffffffft.

Whenever I think of it I think of a little kid we used to have on the paper. He was fifteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty.

Good morning, Mr. Manners, he said to me the first time we met. I’m the new office boy, but I ain’t going to be an office boy long.

Don’t say ain’t, I said, or you’ll be an office boy forever.

Thanks, Mr. Manners, he said; that’s why I took this job so I can be around writers and learn all about grammar and how to act right.

Get the hell out of here, I said.

He raced out too quickly; a little ferret. Smart kid, I thought. Smart little kid. He made me uneasy. I guess I’ve always been afraid of people who can be agile without grace.

In three weeks Sammy did more running around that office than Paavo Nurmi in his whole career. It made me feel great. Every time I gave him a page of copy, he’d run off with it as if his life depended on it. I can still see Sammy racing through the office.