What Makes Sammy Run? (24 page)

“You don’t really want me to talk about it,” she said. “You know it’ll only make you uncomfortable.”

“Uncomfortable!” I said. “Why should it?”

“Okay, pal,” she said. “But don’t blame me if it makes you sore. As you probably guessed, our little corporal is pretty damn good in bed. Sex hasn’t much to do with friendship or love or any other of those virtuous relationships. Most people know that, but they don’t like to admit it. Well, the first day Sammy came into my office to save California from annexing itself to Russia, I was ready to tear him limb from limb and at the same time I had this crazy desire to know what it felt like to have all that driving ambition and frenzy and violence inside me.”

She broke off, staring down tensely, her composure finally ripped.

“Jesus,” she said quietly, “you get to know a man that way. And it’s strange to see the same selfishness and cruelty and power working out there too.”

There was a long pause. No embarrassment, just that she had finished.

Finally, she said, “Well, are you sore?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m glad you told me.”

“So am I,” she said. “You’re a good guy to tell things to.” She paused. “I feel as if I’ve opened a window and hung my mind out to air.”

The wind was fresh and cool, rippling by like a mountain stream and we stopped to rediscover it.

“The Chamber of Commerce boasts about the sunshine and the palm trees and the Chinese Theater,” she said. “And the things that have the most vitality they’re always on the defense about—the long rains and the night winds.”

In her white gown she reminded me of a sail as she pivoted to catch the wind squarely. She threw her head back and my eyes
were drawn to the neck line curving up to her chin as if this were some intimate nakedness suddenly exposed.

“Kit,” I said, and I bent to kiss her. She seemed preoccupied with something out there and oblivious of me. But as my mouth reached hers, she turned her head, casually, as if by accident, and my lips brushed idly against her cheek.

Nothing was said about that, nothing about that ever.

She inspected her glass and said, “Let’s freshen our drinks,” and we went inside.

“I’m worried about the Guild,” she began as if we had been talking about that all evening.

I said I had seen the blast in the
Megaphone
that morning.

“That wasn’t a blast,” she said. “That was just the pop of Hanigan’s little trial balloon. But Hollywood never likes to do things in a small way. Something tells me that when our blast comes, it will really be a production.”

“What do you think will happen, Kit?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I wish I did. All I know is that if it comes to a showdown over the Authors’ League, a lot of Guild guys who have been using their heads and their voices may have to start using their guts.”

“But there’s no sense looking for trouble,” I said. “If it just gets that bunch Sammy was sucking around sore at the Guild we’ll never get anywhere.”

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “I’m beginning to wonder whether the only way the Guild can please them—is to go out of existence.”

Just as a white evening gown was wrong for her, mascara, powder and lipstick were more out of place than ever when she pressed her lips together and set her jaw.

“We might as well recognize we have some of the most unique union members in the history of organized labor. Like Brother Glick, swimming around in that fish bowl of champagne down there.”

Lights were going out all over Hollywood. As I watched, the two o’clock curfew erased the blazing neon longhand of the
Trocadero
. Sammy Glick was probably leaning back in the plush seat of his rented Lincoln blowing cigar smoke into the face of the goddess millions of American guys of all nationalities were making love to as they fell asleep in flop houses, salesmen’s hotels and college dormitories.

“Kit,” I said, “let’s have another drink. Let’s drink to a helluva wonderful country—and a cockeyed time.”

CHAPTER 8       

   T
hat was the month everything happened. It started crazy right off the bat. I got a good job, the best I ever had. Kit swung it for me. After Masaryk died, it struck me that the story of his life ought to be a natural for pictures. His ties with American democracy gave it special significance for us, and with Mussolini shooting off his big guns in Ethiopia and Hitler his big mouth in Germany, an anti-fascist picture seemed like a good idea. I told Kit about it, and as usual she didn’t show too much excitement, but a couple of weeks later she bowled me over with the news that she had passed the idea on to Sidney Fineman and he had given her a favorable reaction and wanted to see me.

Fineman said he had thought of doing Masaryk before, had
even registered it, in fact, but he liked my angle on it and put me to work. Fineman was a refutation of everything I had ever heard about producers. His office was large but in good taste, with real books in the bookcases and theatrical prints on the walls. He could express a thought without making you find the words for it and an emotion without resorting to profanity. He knew much more about Masaryk than I did. He didn’t want to be yessed. He told me he could only hire me week-to-week but not to get panicky, that he wouldn’t even ask to see what I had done for at least four weeks.

“Even then,” he said, “I don’t care if you only have a handful of pages as long as there’s something worth going on with. The danger in this story is that it will be a series of lectures on democracy. Moving pictures haven’t got time for sermons. Try to get in the habit of thinking in terms of pictorial action.”

He gave me an example I’ll always remember. Fineman once imported a famous playwright from Broadway at five thousand a week. The first job the playwright had to do was an opening scene in a picture where he had to establish that the husband was tiring of his wife. Fifteen thousand dollars later the playwright brought in a twenty-page scene. Fineman thought the dialogue was brilliant but way over length for the start of the picture. The playwright protested that you couldn’t cut a line out of his scene without ruining it. Fineman showed the scene to his director, Ray MacKenna, one of the few men left in the business who got his training in the Mack Sennett two-reel comedy school. Mac sent the scene back to Fineman with one of his own. It was typed out on half a page. It read:

INT. ELEVATOR MEDIUM SHOT
Husband and wife in evening clothes. Husband wearing top hat
.

REVERSE ANGLE
As elevator door opens and classy dame enters
.

CLOSE SHOT HUSBAND AND WIFE
Get husband’s reaction to new dame. Removes hat with flourish
.

Wife looks from dame to husband’s hat to husband. Then glares at him as we

CUT TO:

Fineman chuckled at me over his curved pipe.

“Mac couldn’t write a complete sentence,” he said. “But that was great writing—for the screen.”

I couldn’t wait to get out of his office and start writing the greatest screenplay of all time. I hadn’t felt like that since I ran into an English teacher in college who had the effect on you of a literary laxative. You felt you would have to run out of class before it was over and rush back to your room and let it all out of your system. Kit’s enthusiasm for motion pictures had always been a little hard to take. But now I remembered something she had said somewhere along the line, “The most exciting way ever invented to tell a story is with a moving-picture camera.” I couldn’t wait to get into my office and begin telling it.

Sammy Glick may get everything else, I thought, but by God this is a pleasure he’ll never know, the joy of writing that first line on the pad, which sounds so beautiful now and so lousy later, the tremendous pleasure and labor of creating something you believe in.

Sammy looked in around lunchtime. He wasn’t dressed like a writer. More like a fight champ or a sweepstakes winner. The crepe soles on his white kid shoes seemed to be half a foot high and the flower in his lapel stood out like a red light against his white suede jacket.

“You look like a fugitive from
Esquire
,” I said.

He had to laugh because it was supposed to be a gag, but I don’t think his heart was in it.

“Welcome to the big leagues,” he said. “I hear you sold Fine man a bill of goods. I want you to know I put in a good word for you. Hear you got a terrific story.”

You could feel him selling your story back to you the same way he would his own.

“I haven’t got any story yet,” I said. “Just a start, an idea.”

“I bet it’s terrific, sweetheart,” he said. “I hope you make a million dollars.”

Then he paused to look at me compassionately. “But I hear they got you working for peanuts. Three hundred and fifty a week.”

I had to admit my disgrace, though I couldn’t figure out how he found out so fast.

“I got a pipeline from the front office,” he said. “Me and Dan Young’s secretary are like this.”

His hands performed an obscene gesture. “I mean Young’s secretary and I. I wound up with her at the last studio Christmas party and she still thinks I’m in love with her.”

“Sammy,” I said, “I’m trying to work.”

“Al, why don’t you cut it out?” Sammy kidded. “Your sense of fair play is going to ruin the racket for the rest of us.”

He dragged me to my feet affectionately. “Time to duck out for a little lunchee. I’ll introduce you around the commissary. Cooped up in here all day isn’t going to get you anywhere. You got to spread your wings a little bit.”

I hesitated. I wanted to think about Masaryk. And when you ate lunch with Sammy Glick, there was only one thing on the menu, Sammy Glick.

“If you need a convincer,” Sammy said, “I told Julian to save a couple of seats for us at the writers’ table.”

Julian hadn’t changed. He looked a little healthier, he was wearing a new suit which was just like the old one and his handshake didn’t seem so frightened, but you would never have taken him for a hit writer and that’s what he was becoming. Studio environment seemed to have no more effect on him than his tenement neighborhood had. He and Blanche had never been so happy, he said. They had rented a little cottage overlooking the ocean near Topanga Canyon and they had a baby coming along in the fall. He was even getting his novel finished.

I said I couldn’t believe it. Everybody said it was absolutely impossible out here to do any writing of your own.

“I know,” he said. “That’s what everybody says. But I don’t understand it. Every Saturday, unless I’m doing a rush job, I leave here at noon. Blanche and I go for a long walk along the beach, I take a quick dip—I’ve been doing it since the first of March—and then I write until I go to bed. You couldn’t want a better place to work than right there over the ocean.”

Sammy hadn’t even sat down with us yet. He was all over the place like a headwaiter. We could hear him yelling to somebody across the room.

“He spends two hours here every day,” Julian said. “This is where he really goes to work. He’s the commissary genius. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed our screen credits or not but they always say—Story by Sammy Glick—Screenplay by Sammy Glick and Julian Blumberg. You know where he got all those story credits? Right here in the commissary.”

The story of how he did it was so intriguing that we both forgot to order. Sammy would walk up to a director and say, “Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich in
Titanic
. Do I have to say any more?”

Then he would just walk away from the guy, significantly, and leave it in his lap. The director has been desperate for a socko story all year. Tracy and Dietrich in
Titanic
. Jesus, it sounds like something. Natural suspense. And two great characters. Maybe Spence is a good two-fisted minister who tries to straighten Marlene out. Marlene is a tramp, of course. He’s real. She’s anything for a laugh. Then, even though the boat is going down you bring the audience up with a hell of a lift because Marlene suddenly sees the light.