What Makes Sammy Run? (48 page)

“The problem is that people who read novels have no interest in Hollywood, and the people who go to movies don’t read books,” Cerf pontificated. It sounded reasonable. I was prepared to paste the O’Hara and Fitzgerald letters in a scrapbook for my young family while going back to screenwriting to support them.

But soon after publication, I was at “21” with Bennett Cerf not once but month after month, as the book took off in a way none of us had foreseen.
The New York Times
gave it the equivalent of four stars: “Best first-novel of the year.” In Hollywood, it was the
succès de scandale
my veteran producer/father had feared. “You’ll never work in this town again,” he had written me after reading it. “How will you live?” From the moment the book dared show its face in Hollywood bookstore windows, I was marked “traitor.” Sam Goldwyn, literally turning purple with anger, fired me. Hedda Hopper, the columnist who could make or break careers, accosted me in a popular Hollywood restaurant with “Humph! I read that book! How
dare
you!”

But the ultimate blow came from the tycoon of tycoons, Holly
wood’s boss of bosses, Mayer, my no-longer-benevolent “uncle Louie,” of MGM. At a meeting of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association, L.B. turned on my father: “B.P., how could you let your own flesh and blood write such a book?” And before my beleaguered father could answer, L.B. intoned, “You know what we should do with him? We should deport him!” The only member of the powerful MPPA who dared the wrath of L.B. was my liberal and maverick old man. “For Christ’s sake, Louie, he’s the only novelist who ever came
from
Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him, Catalina Island?”

With Mayer wanting to deport me, I had the unusual distinction of being attacked simultaneously by the Communist party and John Wayne. Although it was the first book in the history of Hollywood fiction to side with the Writers Guild in its bitter struggle against Mayer, Thalberg & Co., it failed to meet the Hollywood Communists’ high standards for social realism à la Stalin. But to John Wayne—Big Duke, the USC football lineman transformed into an all-American movie star through the magic of John Ford—
Sammy
was the personification, or novelization, of the
Communist Manifesto
.

Encounters with Wayne at parties, or in famous watering holes such as Chasen’s, Ciro’s and Romanoff’s, became Beverly Hills versions of
High Noon
. In Wayne’s superpatriotic eyes, an attack on Hollywood (or the Sammy Glicks of Hollywood) was an attack on Free Enterprise, Mother and The Flag. I was verbally abused, publicly denounced, and if flogging had been permitted in Hollywood along with tongue-lashing, I would have been as bloodied as Kunta Kinte in
Roots
.

If
Sammy
went on running into the fifties and sixties, so did John Wayne’s righteous indignation. One of the happiest moments of my life was sailing into Puerto Vallarta in the mid-sixties on a ninety-foot schooner with my wife, Geraldine Brooks. The timing was perfect, a Mexican Pacific sunset, the company of friends we could laugh with and exquisite margaritas. If I cashed
in my chips at this moment, I felt, I’d be ahead of the Dealer. Then Gerry was saying, “Budd, try not to get upset, but look who’s coming in with us.” I looked, and lost a little of my Baja California tan. Side by side with our
Double Eagle
was the John Wayne yacht. When the Great American Hero and I stepped ashore almost shoulder-to-shoulder, we were welcomed by the mayor. To celebrate this historic moment—the arrival of a legendary American film star and a prominent American writer, who still lived part-time in Mexico, Puerto Vallarta was planning an official reception/fiesta that evening. Big Duke and I as co-guests of honor! While I could honestly admire his hulking presence on the screen, he and Louis B. had drummed me out of Hollywood. Now he was lousing up Puerto Vallarta for me—and PV was still an appealing, largely unspoiled fishing village in those days.

At the Hotel Dorado I sulked. I’m not going down to that
pachango
and have Wayne shoot me down for
Sammy
again the way he wastes Injuns in those westerns of his. Said the ever-practical Gerry, “We’ll put you at a table across the room from his—with your back to him. You love Mexico, the music, the
tequila viejo
, the people—just forget Wayne’s there. Enjoy yourself.”

Which I was trying to do when I felt a muscular arm around my neck. John Wayne—with his rough-and-ready entourage behind him—was ready to drag me to the nearest jacaranda tree and string me up as a traitor. More than a score of years had passed since
Sammy
first appeared on the scene—but the great defender of the Alamo and the American Way (with the exception of the First Amendment) had never forgotten or forgiven. After a brief scuffle—when the guests of honor were separated, and the mayor was ready to run for cover rather than high office—the hero of
Fort Apache
fixed me with that famous look and lines only a natural like Duke could get away with: “How about you ’n’ me settlin’ this once ’n’ for all? I’ll be back at midnight. An’ I’ll be waitin’ for ya!”

ELEVEN-THIRTY
: In my room at the hotel I started warming up, Walter Mitty throwing furious combinations that would render
hors de combat
the mighty warrior of
Iwo Jima
and
The Longest Day
. I had been around boxers all my life. I liked them better than actors. I had watched them get ready. This was my moment.

QUICK DISSOLVE:
T
WO
old beach masters lunge at each other—but there’s an obstruction somewhere between them. It’s the invisible, five-foot-two, 110-pound Gerry making it impossible for either of us to throw a punch without hitting this uninvited but insistent “referee.” “Gerry,
please
get out of the way,” I beg. Wayne was trying just as hard to remove this unexpected obstacle to his heroics. So, as our corners pulled us apart, the only winner was Gerry. It went into the record books, like most Hollywood fisticuffs, as ND—no decision. Or maybe that should read “double TKO”—the
T
standing for tequila.

If Sammy Glick had been perceived as strictly and narrowly a product of Hollywood, if the character and the novel as a whole had been viewed as myopically and self-protectively as had Louie Mayer and John Wayne, my career might have been over and I would have been down and out in Beverly Hills. But the perception of Sammy Glick by the critics and the public was far broader and deeper than we could have anticipated. I had written about Sammy Glick because I had been brought up among Sammy Glicks, and I had used Hollywood as a background because Hollywood was my hometown and, until I exchanged palm trees for pine trees, the only community I knew.

But the Sammy Glick I had chosen as my prototype was not linked only to Hollywood hucksterism.
The New York Times Book Review
welcomed him to the select company of American anti-heroes from Simon Legree to George Babbitt. In review after review, Sammy Glick was described as “aggression personified,” a “conquistador from the gutter.” In time, Sammy Glick was to creep into the language, and even into some dictionaries. A “Sammy” might become rich, powerful and famous, but you wouldn’t want him to marry your daughter. In fact, you wouldn’t want to turn your back on him for fear he’d cop your watch, your story, your company, your wife, your life. The trouble was, Sammy lived by different rules from the rest of us; as the moralizing
narrator Al Manheim puts it to him, “You never had the first idea of give-and-take … It had to be all you all the way. You had to make individualism the most frightening ism of all.”

The reason the book enjoyed such spontaneous success, we were learning, was that I had touched a nerve—not a Hollywood nerve, not a Jewish nerve, but something flawed and dangerous in our national character—some upside-downing of the Golden Rule that resulted in its brutal opposite: “Do it to him before he does it to me!”

That was Sammy’s compulsive creed, that was his pirate flag, that’s what made him—in the words of one reader—”part of the established folklore of America.” “What Made Sammy Run?” became a subject not just for literary critics but for historians and psychiatrists.

As mentioned in our introduction, the eminent Dr. Franz Alexander, head of the Psychoanalytical Institute at the University of Chicago, in his provocative book
The Age of Unreason
, thought he had found his answer in Sammy’s being the ultra-aggressive, ruthless and belligerently self-centered type rather common among second-generation Americans from impoverished immigrant families. Their fathers have lost their prestige and their influence due to their inability to cope with their new environments.

While it was flattering to have Dr. Alexander devote an entire chapter to Sammy Glick, his answer made sense only up to a point. Was the Sammy Glick syndrome really limited to children of impoverished immigrants? “Detribalization,” Alexander had diagnosed the disease. The son has lost respect for his father’s (tribal) values, but has yet to be affected by the mores of his adopted culture. So he is left and lost in a moral no-man’s-land.

But if that were so, how would you account for the mail
Sammy
drew from all over the country? From insurance companies in Hartford, from chain stores in the South, from mail-order houses in the Middle West, people were writing that I could not have
written
Sammy
without personal knowledge of their own mail-room boy who had run over their backs to become office manager, and in some cases company president. Teenage white boys in Atlanta, third-generation sons of the middle class in Boston, no ethnic group, geographical area or economic stratum seemed to have a lock on Sammy. He was not from Rivington Street alone, or from Sunset and Vine. He was made in America.

Through the forties and fifties, Sammy endured as the quintessential antihero, the bad example, the free-enterprise system at its meanest, brass-knuckle, kick-in-the-groin dirtiest. By now the book had sold into the millions, read by people who loved to hate Sammy Glick.

It was in the early seventies that I began to feel the first disturbing shift in what was to become a 180-degree turn in our national attitude toward Sammy. Following a talk I had just given at a local college on the impact of success on American writers, a young man came up to thank me for creating Sammy Glick. “He’s a great character. I love him. I felt a little nervous about going out into the world and making it. But reading
Sammy
gives me confidence. I read it over and over. It’s my bible.”

He put out his hand, the hand that would soon be knifing friends and colleagues in the back. As I took it hesitantly, I asked myself, What have I done? Or what has a changing, greedier, more cynical America done to Sammy Glick? Speaking on other campuses through the seventies, I found to my dismay that the first young man hitching his star to Sammy Glick’s was not at all an aberration but the harbinger of a trend. Now all the young people in college reading a new edition of
What Makes Sammy Run?
were reacting to him as if he were a positive guide to their futures onward and upward. The book I had written as an angry exposé of Sammy Glick was becoming a character reference: How to succeed in America when really trying!

What had happened, of course, is that we had left the sixties behind, with its hippies and flower children and their communal dream of sharing and loving, and had moved on to the Nixon generation, the Bebe Rebozo generation of deal-makers and Do-
It-to-Them-Before-They-Do-It-to-Us. In that context, the Watergate break-in was no accident, nor was Attorney General Mitchell’s Glickish boast, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Nor the blanket apology for immoral acts or immoral behavior, “Everybody does it.”

No, not
everybody
does it; conscience and social responsibility are still alive if not too well in America. But the dramatic transformation of Sammy Glick from the antihero of the forties to the role-model hero for the Yuppies of the eighties is a painful reminder of the moral breakdown we are suffering without even seeming to realize that suffering is involved. This is a new nation, created in ambivalence, with idealistic individuality contending with selfish individualism. From the very beginning it was Jefferson versus Hamilton, the democratic dream versus the autocratic reality of hard money and the bank, social justice vs. a narrow interpretation of law and order.