What Makes Sammy Run? (7 page)

“Sure,” I said. “In other words you haven’t got a job in Hollywood yet.”

“No,” Sammy said, “not yet.”

Then one day Sammy didn’t show up at all. Maybe he’s sick,
I thought at first, but I quickly discounted this optimism. Guys like Sammy Glick don’t get sick unless it helps them out of a contract or lands them an insurance payment. The afternoon passed and still no Sammy. Maybe he was murdered by Julian Blumberg, I dared to hope. But I knew better. Julian undoubtedly had talent, but he didn’t have the nerve to kill time.

While I was wondering, Sammy came in, or rather, he made his entrance. He wore a new suit. He also wore a new expression. I took one look and I decided I liked it even less than the old one. He wore a blue-check tab-shirt and a red carnation in his buttonhole. His shoes screamed newness. Brown alligator. He caught my look. “Set me back fifteen bucks,” he said. I took a step back and drank him in. He took out his cigarette case and offered me a Parliament. Sammy Glick, my Sammy Glick, my little copy boy. America, America, I thought, God shed His grace on thee and crown thy good with …

“Hello, obnoxious,” I said.

“I came in to say good-bye,” Sammy said.

“Good-bye,” I said.

“I’m not kidding,” he said. “I’m off for Hollywood.”

“I’ll bet you got Irving Thalberg plenty worried,” I said.

“If he’s not he oughta be,” Sammy said. “I’ve got a hunch Hollywood is my meat.”

“How did this happen?” I said. “Metro wire that they just couldn’t struggle along without you another day?”

“Not exactly,” Sammy said seriously. “My agent sold me to World-Wide on the strength of that story.”

“And that’s strength,” I said. “How about Julian what’s-his-name? Does he go too?”

“No,” Sammy said simply, “World-Wide just wanted me.”

“Well,” I said, “our gain is World-Wide’s loss.”

“No more peanuts for me,” Sammy said. “From now on it’s two hundred and fifty bucks a week, starting a week from Wednesday.”

Five guys whistled.

There was a short pause, during which time I composed a short
history of Sammy Glick, complete from twelve to two hundred and fifty a week, analyzing it from the sociological, psychological, philosophical and zoological points of view. It was America, all the glory and the opportunity, the push and the speed, the grinding of gears and the crap. It didn’t take nearly this long to think. It went zingo, just a look, a blank look.

“See you in the Brown Derby,” Sammy was saying.

Then I got nostalgic, I was always a soft guy, so I said:

“Sure kid, and remember, don’t say ain’t.”

That was too good for Sammy. He didn’t like it. He was going to be one of those big shots who didn’t like to be reminded. There seem to be two kinds of self-conscious self-made men, those who like to dwell on the patriotic details of their ascent from newsboy or shoe-shiner at two bucks and peanuts a week and those who take every new level as if it were the only one they ever knew, rushing ahead so fast they are ashamed, afraid to look back and see where they’ve come from. One is a bore and the other is a heel. Sammy may have had other faults, but he had never been a bore.

I watched Sammy walk out of the office that day, and then I stood at the window and watched his new shoes and his new hat cross the sidewalk and disappear into a taxi, and then I leaned out the window and watched the taxi go ducking in and out through traffic like a broken-field runner.

Like Sammy Glick, I thought, as I watched the cab at the next crossing jump out ahead of the car that should have had the right of way. There was a shrieking of brakes, a raw angry voice, and Sammy’s cab was away, around the corner on two wheels, though I stayed at the window a long while staring after it.

CHAPTER 3       

F
or months after that, whenever I thought of the way Sammy Glick had blown in, over, and through our office, I was overcome. I tried to flatter myself into thinking that mine was a moral disgust, but of course it was much more than that, or would you call it much less? Left in the draft of Sammy’s speed I had caught a bad case of jealousy. From here on I may be accused of having the soul of a shopgirl, but I might as well admit it: Long before Sammy Glick had been shot through my life like a bullet I had had Hollywood on my mind. I had wanted to go for all the usual reasons: I was anxious to investigate the persistent rumors that the “streets paved with gold” which the early Spanish explorers had hunted in vain had suddenly appeared in the vicinity of Hollywood
and Vine. I was half convinced that Southern California was really the modern Garden of Eden its press agents claimed it to be. And like all the other writers outside of Hollywood I had seen enough of its product to convince myself that I could do no worse.

Of course I never mentioned this to anybody and, if it hadn’t been for the unexpected whim of some Hollywood mogul, I would still be pounding a typewriter for the
Record
. I don’t really know how it happened yet, for the only fiction writing I had managed to do was a story in the
Post
last year and another more recently in
Cosmo
, and neither of those would have set the world on fire, or Edward J. O’Brien either, for that matter. I guess one of the Monarch execs must have just got the idea of rounding up all the drama columnists in New York and when they pulled in the nets, there I was, floundering with the rest.

The day after the news broke that I had “surrendered to Hollywood” (though it certainly hadn’t been much of a battle), a girl’s voice came quavering over the telephone to me.

“Hello, Mister Manheim,” she said, “I’m awfully sorry to bother you this way and you probably don’t even remember me …”

“Who is this?” I said.

“Miss Goldbaum. Rosalie Goldbaum. You met me that night with Sammy Glick?”

It wasn’t a question but there was a question mark at the end of her voice. It was a shrill voice, shrill but dead, like a high note on a cheap piccolo.

I had to tell her a lie, which was that I was glad to hear from her again.

She said thank you and then there was a pause. I thought she had hung up.

“Hello?”

“I’m still here,” she said.

“Anything wrong?” I said. “Something the matter?”

“When I read you were going to Hollywood …” she started. “When I read that, I wondered …”

She must have been crying.

“I mean I’ve got to see you,” she said.

Oh, Christ, I thought. “Meet me at the Tavern at seven,” I said.

I got there fifteen or twenty minutes late because I stopped to have a couple of drinks to take the curse off my rendezvous. She didn’t even know enough to find herself a table and wait for me. She was just sitting on a bench by the door. I hadn’t realized that first time how scrawny she was. When she took her coat off, her shoulder blades stuck out. Her eyes were red and soggy. When I took her hand and said Gladtoseeyou, it was soft and rubbery, like a half-blown balloon.

Her eyes looked scared and she said too quickly, “Oh, it was awfully nice of you to come.”

“We’d better get a table,” I said, and we walked to it without saying anything more. I put my hand lightly at her elbow to guide her and our eyes searched each other’s for a moment. There was something too intimate and uncomfortable between us.

“How’ve you been since I saw you last?” I said as we sat down. “You’re looking swell.”

It was stupid and it sounded flat so I let it go at that. I looked up at her and waited. It was her move.

She looked down at the menu a moment as if wondering whether to order first or plunge right into it.

“You’re going to Hollywood,” she told me. “You’ll see Sammy Glick.”

Queer how she could have been so close to him and yet always use his full name. As if it already had achieved the rounded significance of an F. Scott Fitzgerald or a Sinclair Lewis. Somehow I sensed I shouldn’t wisecrack. So I compromised.

“I can,” I said cagily.

“Will you, would you, Mr. Manheim, see him for me?”

“Sure,” I said, “when I run into him, I’ll tell him you said hello.”

That was cruel, for I knew it was more than that. But it was the quickest way I knew of finding out.

“It’s not that,” she said. “I want to know how he is. I want to know …”

“But you must get all that in his letters,” I broke in. “What more could I do?”

“Find out why he’s stopped writing,” she blurted out. “He used to write, once in a while, anyway, when he first went out. But not any more. He just won’t answer any more. Not even a postcard in months and months.”

She dried her leaking nose with her napkin.

“I know it’s tough on you, Rosalie,” I said, “but maybe it isn’t as bad as you think. It’s never a cinch to get set in a new spot. Why, he’s probably up to his ears …”

Can you imagine, me defending the slob? But I never was much of an actor and it didn’t sound convincing.

“But you don’t understand, Mr. Manheim,” she interrupted. “It was all arranged. He promised to send for me the second week he was out there. I was so sure I even quit my job. I got rid of everything I couldn’t take along. I was all set. He told me not to worry, he’d send for me in a couple of weeks more. Until finally, he just stopped writing.”

“Oh,” I said, losing my appetite.

“He said the only reason we couldn’t go together was he didn’t have the train fare. He was going to send me his second week’s salary.”

Her head moved with her mouth in nervous little jerks. She was getting all excited again just remembering what he had told her.

“So now I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“Skunk,” I said.

“Oh, you’ve got to tell him I don’t understand,” she said, hurrying to keep ahead of her tears. “Ask him why, please ask him why.”

She was crying. The waiter was standing over us impatiently. It was embarrassing. “Want yours with onions?” I asked.

She blotted her eyes, her nose and her cheeks with her napkin. I don’t know why she had to wear mascara. Maybe it made her
feel better able to face things but she didn’t have a face for mascara, and when it started to run she had the forlorn look of a doll with the paint streaking off in the rain.

“I shou’n’t’ve come,” she whimpered, “only Sammy was always telling me you were his closest friend.”

I almost choked on a mouthful of steak. My God, that was probably true!

On the way out I slipped her twenty-five bucks. Just to salve my conscience for being considered a friend of a jerk like Sammy Glick. She sneaked it into her purse as quickly as possible, as if her hand was trying to put something over on the rest of her.

“Give me your address in Hollywood so I can pay you back when I find another job,” she said.

“Forget it,” I said, “you can pay me back next time you see me.”

We shook hands and she held mine a moment as if dreading to break away even from the slim protection I represented, pressing my hand hard to keep from crying again. I looked after her as she turned down toward Broadway and the crowd swallowed her up. I couldn’t help wondering what New York would do to her now that Sammy Glick had used her and thrown her away.

All the way out on the train my mind still felt damp with Miss Goldbaum’s tears. So as soon as I got set in Hollywood, or as set as a bewildered stranger ever gets in this town, I gave Sammy a buzz. He talked so loud I had to hold the receiver at arm’s length. It was like a loudspeaker.

“Hello, chump,” he yelled, “welcome to Los Angeles, the city of Lost Angels.”

“What do you mean,
chump
?” I said, already resigned to the fact that time had not mellowed Mr. Glick.

“I was having a drink with your producer the other night,” he said. “He was boasting about getting you for a hundred and fifty a week. Why the hell didn’t you let me know you were coming? I could have fixed it for you.”

I told him I thought I could manage to struggle along for a while on a hundred and fifty dollars a week.

“Jesus, Al,” he laughed, “you know about as much about Hollywood …”