What Makes Sammy Run? (16 page)

“I really lost my temper,” she said. “You’d have thought that would have been the end of it.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not me. Sammy’s built too much like a boomerang. The harder you throw him out the faster he comes back.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “Two hours later he was trying to get me to have lunch with him. That afternoon he called me on the phone about the Merriam business again. I hung up on him and he called me right back and said we were cut off. Finally, I went to Sidney Fineman, who was my producer then, and told him I wasn’t being paid to vote for Merriam but to turn in the best script I could. And that a leech across the hall that called itself Sammy Glick was pestering me so much about my day’s pay to save the industry that he was ruining the chances of one of its pictures to show a profit. Sidney was sympathetic. He made it pretty clear that he wished he could resist the pressure himself.

“Of course, I felt a little guilty about snitching on my neighbor that way. Even a neighbor like Mr. Glick. But the next time we met in the hall he had a smile not only from ear to ear but all the way round the back of his neck.”

“Thanks, baby, for the plug you put in for me.”

All she could do was look and sound bewildered
.

“You musta told some of the top guys I was after your dough for Merriam. That’s what I need. That gets ’em talking about me, see. Hell, every punk on the lot has laid it on the line for Merriam, so that adds up to nothing. But this way they all hear about it. Next time they hear the name Sammy Glick it rings a bell in their brains.”

“I’ll bet he was wetting his pants he was so scared his name might never ring those bells,” I said.

“I doubt it,” she said. “I don’t think Sammy knows how to be
afraid. He’ll probably learn it out here, because this place is full of fear. But when he does I think something will have gone out of him. Like a tomcat I had castrated once.”

“Were you afraid?”

“When I was holding out on that Merriam thing? Of course. Terrified. All my heroics were strictly on the surface. Maybe that’s where heroics always are.”

“And was Sammy right—about your being a dead pigeon?”

“No,” she laughed. “They wouldn’t even fire me, thank God. In other words those threats turned out to be a super-colossal bluff.”

“That’s a helluva way to start a friendship,” I said. “I thought mine was queer. But yours is absolutely bughouse.”

“Maybe friendship is the wrong word,” she said. “I used to wonder why I kept seeing him after the Merriam affair blew over. I think it was the sense of excitement I seemed to feel around him. I don’t know, he does something to the air you breathe, intensifies it. Haven’t you felt it? Know what it reminds me of sometimes? A shrill note held too long. Makes you want to scream.”

“I didn’t know you ever let anything get you like that,” I said.

It was spoken with an irritation that made her smile. “It bothers you.” There was that disconcerting habit of stating unnecessary questions as facts.

I hadn’t realized how much it bothered me until I began to talk about it. “Everything about you and Sammy bothers me. That night I left you at Sammy’s, for instance. That bothered the hell out of me.”

We looked at each other until we weren’t acquaintances any more. After the pause, she didn’t change the subject, only the direction of it.

“I’m sorry for him.”

“Sorry for him! Sorry for Sammy Glick?”

“I have a crazy theory about that,” she said. “You know the cripple who peddles papers outside the Derby? We’re sorry for him because a germ he didn’t have anything to do with got inside
him and twisted him out of shape. Maybe we ought to feel the same way about guys with twisted egos.”

“But the kid with the papers is helpless.”

“So is Sammy,” she said. “In his own way. Ever have him tell you anything about his childhood?”

Her Sammy Glick was a new conception and I paused to see what I could do with it.

“Try to think of it this way,” she instructed. “There was an epidemic raging in that neighborhood of his—more contagious than polio—and he caught one of the worst cases on record.”

There was just time enough to file the idea for further reference, for Sammy was coming down the stairs, making a triumphal entrance with Sidney Fineman. Sammy lingered to shake hands around the first table. You could tell from the faces that he was being congratulated. By some inexplicable telepathy, news of his success had preceded him. It seemed to me to be black magic, for the people congratulating him had been at the Cellar when we arrived. It had Kit stopped too. She said that one of the things which distinguished the old Brown Derby on Wilshire was the way guests at one end of the room could hear distinctly every word being said at the other, because of the trick acoustics of the dome-shaped ceiling. And that it always seemed as if all Hollywood must be covered by one of those Derby ceilings.

Fineman and his party found a table and Sammy continued his victory march down the aisle until he reached us. From the moment he sat down, the conversation continued to be about Sammy Glick, but in a different key. It was Variation on an Old Theme by Glick,
allegro con spirito
.

It would have been deadly if Sammy hadn’t been hopped up with success. He sprayed us with words like a verbal machine gun. He described every detail of the evening just as if we hadn’t been there at all.

“I’m over the hump,” he said. “From now on I can write my own ticket. But I’d be a fool to move in yet. Why not wait till it’s held over a third week at the Music Hall and starts to clean
up in the sticks? By that time I’ll be able to spit in the boss’s eye and make him like it.”

I had never seen him so wound-up before. He seemed to have memorized every word of praise he had received all evening. He told us how the cutter had said that even though the picture ran eighty-five hundred feet it moved so fast it could stand that footage. And what the theater manager had said. He went on talking about Sammy Glick with such flaming enthusiasm that so help me God I could feel the excitement beginning to catch in me.

The effect was hypnotic, like hearing a record over and over again:
So I told Fineman … I’m in a terrific spot … My picture … I said … I…

He talked at you with so much force it was hard to eat. You felt he was sticking his face right into your plate and the words into your mouth. If you have ever seen Henry Armstrong fight you know how Sammy was learning to talk, leaning against you, never letting up, swarming all over you as he forced you back and back.

I watched for an opening and when Sammy had his mouth full of his last bite of steak sandwich I made a motion that we adjourn.

“I hafta wait for the reviews,” Sammy said. “They mean a helluva lot.”

Hurrying importantly down the stairs was a beefy middle-aged man whose clothes were dapper, if not his body. Nine-tenths of his silk handkerchief was hanging out of his breast pocket. His eyes seemed too small for his large face, and too close together. He looked like a confidence man, but a confidence man who had risen to the position of employer of other con men.

I noticed that Kit and Sammy stopped talking to watch him, that people at other tables were doing the same thing. Kit kept her eyes on him as he entered the room. “You can stop worrying about that review, Sammy,” she said. “You’re in.”

“Jesus,” Sammy said. “I gotta read it.”

The note of anxiety that had been there before the preview was back again. He was off to Fineman’s table on the double-quick.

I was mystified. “I’ve heard about portable telephones in here,” I said. “But when you start getting wireless messages …”

“This is like every other spiritualist trick,” Kit said. “Very impressive until you go behind the scenes.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

She led me off on a little verbal tour through Darkest Hollywood.

“All I had to do was watch the guy who just came in. Gabby Hanigan, who runs the
Megaphone.
”

“What do you mean, watch him? Who’re you, the girl with the X-ray eye?”

“All it takes is practice,” she said. “I’ve been watching Hanigan come in after previews this way for years. When he’s written a rave he’s giving you the big hello all the way down the stairs. But you can always tell when he’s thrown the hook into you because then he just gives it this …” Her hand made two quick fluttery motions and stopped. “So this time it looks in the bag. Gabby was waving to Fineman like a Boy Scout the moment he came into sight.”

She was right. Sammy came trotting back with a proof copy of the review. He rolled it out on the table for us with a flourish.

“Read that,” he said crisply, and he shook his head as if further expression failed him. “Tuhriffic.”

It was. You could almost hear the headline screaming: “
GIRL” CINCH B.O. SMASH
. Kit began to read it out loud, with an ironic inflection which Sammy was too intoxicated to appreciate. It read like a press-agent blurb. It drooled over Fineman’s showmanship, the acting, the directing, the photography. It didn’t say anything about them except that they were all wonderful. And Sammy had a whole paragraph to himself. He was hailed as a brilliant addition to the ranks of Hollywood writers. The reviewer seemed especially impressed with his craftsmanship and originality.

“Sammy,” I said, “tell me the truth. Is Gabby Hanigan your father?”

“Father, hell,” he said. “That plug is going to set me back two hundred smackers.”

I said I hadn’t realized the
Megaphone
was that kind of sheet. I mentioned the word
bribe
.

“What do you mean bribe?” Sammy said. “They just came in a couple of days ago trying to sell me a full page ad and when I told them I’d think it over and let them know after I read the review, they said not to lose any sleep over it.”

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I didn’t mean to jump at conclusions.”

I was mystified again. And with good reason. How could Sammy get so upset about a review that was already in the bag?

“There you have your finger on my favorite Hollywood foible,” Kit said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve sat in this very room with producers who were absolutely sweating blood to read a review they had already made sure of. And not only that, but gloat over it like children when it finally arrived.”

I said I couldn’t believe it. But Sammy could. “That’s not so crazy as it sounds,” he explained. “This Hanigan guy is nobody’s fool. I hear he likes to cross you up once in a while, just to keep you guessing.”

“Why the hell does Hollywood let him get away with it?” I said.

“Because there are still too many people out here more interested in boosting their own stock than in making pictures,” Kit said. “As long as they’re around we’ll have our Hanigans and our canned reviews instead of the real, slugging criticism that might do some good.”

Sammy was signing the check. “Come on, smarty pants,” he said. “Reform the industry tomorrow. Tonight we celebrate.”

The Triangle Club wasn’t Monte Carlo, but it was the best Hollywood could do. You had the old thrill of being stared at through a peephole and feeling privileged as the door swung open. This was partly for the effect, partly because gambling was illegal in Los Angeles and they had to slip the city machine something for protection. It was the place the top producers liked after working their guts out until midnight, hoping to slow down with
champagne cocktails, five-dollar steaks and a couple of grand tossed away at roulette before trying to catch up with a little sleep that was as restful as a Vorkapich montage.

They knew Sammy here too. More people were stepping up to grab his hand. They all seemed to know he had a hit. That was the Hollywood grapevine clicking again, the thing about it that impressed me most—a gigantic industry involving thousands of people situated in a boom town with a village psychology. Take out the cyclamen drapes, the lush carpet, the mirrored bar, and all the rest of the trappings, and you would have the village beer joint. For hardly anywhere else could Sammy have become so quickly known or his exploits so discussed.

I don’t remember much about that night except that Sammy kept buying us champagne and blew five hundred bucks at the crap table (and told everyone it was a thousand) and Kit tried to explain that it wasn’t really a loss because a guy called Veblen said we make our reputations by how much money we can publicly throw away, and I tried to get her to come home with me which even surprised me and made me realize how much champagne Sammy must have bought, and I lost my week’s salary at blackjack which is strictly a sucker’s game, and I began seeing Sammy’s face exploding around me like a pinwheel, and when I asked myself
What makes Sammy run?
a woman’s voice answered
How many times are you going to ask me that?
and I said, “Pardon me, but I don’t think we’ve met,” and the answer came, “Of course we have, you’ve been to my house for dinner,” and even then she had to repeat it several times before I could realize that the woman in my arms was Mrs. Henry Powell Turner and that somehow the Triangle Club had disappeared and the walls that were spinning around belonged to my room at the Villa Espana.