What Makes Sammy Run? (25 page)

Meanwhile Sammy bumps into a supervisor. “I was just telling Chick Tyler my new story,” he says. “He went off his nut about it. Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich in
Titanic
. Do I have to say any more?”

And he drops the hot potato in the supervisor’s lap and runs
again. The supervisor knows Sammy hasn’t missed yet. And he’s been trying to get a cast like that ever since he’s been made a supervisor. So he drops by Tyler’s table.

“Sammy Glick tells me you’re hot for his
Titanic
story,” he says.

“Yeah,” Tyler says, “I think the kid’s got something. And it’s right down my alley.”

By this time Tyler is practically thinking up the acceptance speech he’ll make on receiving the Academy Award. “I could get a great picture out of that,” he says. “Remember what I did with
Strange Voyage?
That’s for me!”

All this time Sammy is hopping from table to table, pollinating his story like a bumblebee, catching them as they go in and out, asking everybody who can possibly help him if he has to say anything more and running off before they can answer. Everybody is now asking everybody else if they have heard Sammy’s
Titanic
story. And by this time, through unconscious generosity, they have contributed to the story two characters, a beginning, middle and a climax. Now Sammy manages to cross the path of the General Manager in Charge of Production. Sammy has heard that he’s been a little burned lately because people are saying he is losing touch with studio activities.

“How do you do, sir,” Sammy says. “I suppose Tyler and Hoyt have told you my story for Dietrich and Tracy.
Titanic?
Everybody who’s heard it seems very excited about it.”

He has heard about Glick, of course, and he never likes to appear ignorant of anything. “Yes, I have, Glick,” he says. “Sounds very interesting. I’m going to call you all in for a conference on it some time this week.”

When they all get together, all anyone knows is that everybody else thinks it’s great. And since everybody has gone on record, no one is willing to admit just how little about the story he knows. So the safest thing is to let Sammy get something on paper, which means that Julian has to start dreaming up a story called
Titanic
while the trade papers and Parsons naturally pass on to their readers what Sammy has told them, that everyone on his lot is saying his epic drama
Titanic
is absolutely the greatest vehicle either of those two great stars has ever had.

There was no bitterness or anger in Julian’s story. It was full of mild wonder and deep resignation.

Sammy finally got around to us. He introduced me to everybody at the long table, selling me to them and them to me.

“I want you to meet a very sweet guy,” he would say. “I want you to meet the sweetest guy in the world.”

The talk around the table was almost all gags. Everybody seemed afraid to say anything unless he thought it would get a laugh. One of the writers had ordered wine and a young producer who had just been graduated from the writers’ ranks asked him, “What are you Guild members drinking these days—producers’ blood?”

It got a good laugh and you could hear him repeating it with variations. “At the Guild Board meetings they toast
Der Tag
with producers’ blood. Hey, Joe, know what Brown is drinking …?”

Everybody kidded about the Guild back and forth, but I felt that gagging was really the official court language and that underneath it all you could feel the friction growing.

“Just wait till we join the Authors’ League, comrades!” Sammy shouted. “Then all us downtrodden writers can become producers and we’ll punish the producers by making them get down on their hands and knees—and write!”

Some of the laughter was automatic, some frightened, some reactionary.

That was the month I will never forget because it seemed to sum up everything about Hollywood that was splendid and crazy and hopeful and terrifying.

You can choose your own adjectives for the front-page story in the
Megaphone
that was waiting for me on my desk one morning, for like everybody else I couldn’t start my day without reading the little trade journals from cover to cover.

GLICK GETS $80,000 FOR
LIVE WIRE FROM WORLD-WIDE

—

RETURNS TO HOME LOT TO ADAPT
OWN PLAY AT $1250 A WEEK

That, as Sammy would say, was the convincer. I decided that the history of Hollywood was nothing but twenty years of feverish preparation for the arrival of Sammy Glick.

Sammy came in a little later, of course, making the rounds to take his bows. He was wearing a new outfit, gray checks of contrasting sizes for the coat and pants. And the flower which was becoming a fixture. “Sammy,” I said, “I read the bad news this morning. May I be the first to console you?”

He thought I meant it as a gag. But I assured him I was serious. “I thought this play was going to put you in the two-thousand-a-week class,” I said. “But I see you’re only getting twelve-fifty.”

I was right. All the excitement of that astronomical dough was over already. He was really eating his heart out about that extra seven-fifty. Of Hollywood’s one thousand screen writers, there might be three or four dozen getting twelve-fifty. But the two-grand-a-week boys were really the inner circle. It was the difference between the Big League and Triple-A.

“They wanted me to sign a new contract,” he said, “but I wouldn’t do it. Why should I tie myself down?”

The Guild was asking its members not to sign contracts that bound them for more than two years, so that at the end of that time they would all be free to take a strike vote if that became necessary to win recognition for the Guild. That was called Article XII. It was going to be called a lot of other things before the month was over. Kit was a very persuasive girl, but I had never expected to see the day when Sammy would be loyal to his own mother, much less nine hundred fellow writers he was breaking his neck and his heart to outdistance. And I told him so.

“Hell, no,” he said. “That’s not why. If you ask me, the Guild has a helluva nerve telling us to do anything like that. If I signed
a contract now it would probably get me there in a couple of steps, probably fifteen hundred and then seventeen-fifty. But I’m catching the express now, baby. I’m getting off at my station in one stop.”

That day it seemed to me that when we were talking about the Guild’s struggle for a foothold in Hollywood and Sammy’s struggle for a stranglehold, we were talking about two different things. That only showed how much I had to learn about Hollywood and the Guild and, in spite of all these years and all my lessons, Sammy Glick.

A few days later the
Megaphone
had a new headline that they were so happy about, it sounded as if they could hardly resist printing
HOORAY
at the end of it.

OPPOSITION GROUP FORMS WITHIN GUILD!

Responding to a rising tide of resentment among Guild members against their Executive Board for selling out their autonomy to the group of Eastern racketeers and Reds who controlled the Authors’ League, the news story chortled, the responsible element has formed a Committee of Five who have pledged themselves to rescue the writers’ ship from the hands of the crackpots and adventurers and steer it back to the port of sanity again. The five distinguished gentlemen who were so unselfishly volunteering their time and prestige to rescue their fellow artists from destruction were Lawrence Paine, Harold Godfrey Wilson, John McCarter, Robert Griffin and—Sammy Glick.

Things had been moving so fast that it didn’t even seem strange to me any more than this copy-boy punk of mine should be taking it for granted that he was one of the spokesmen for the Guild elite without, as far as I could detect, ever having written a line. As I watched Sammy at the big-shot writers’ table in the commissary that noon, I kept wondering where the hell it was all going to end and how many pairs of shoes Sammy must have collected by now and whether he was twenty-four years old or twenty-five.

I caught up with Kit on our way out and we fell in step.

“Take a walk with me,” she said.

We walked out past the sound stages and the machine shops and the labor gangs to the back lot. We walked past the New York street and up through the Latin Quarter of Paris until we came to a South Sea Island with a little beach leading down to real water. We crossed a little bridge to the island and sat down on the sand in front of a native hut. The hot April sun was just what the set designer ordered. I dug my hands into the warm sand and lay on my back, looking up through a palm tree supported with piano wire, at the cloudless sky.

“Where are we?” I said.

“This used to be Hollywood,” she said with a poker face and voice. “Before the Depression.”

“If a rescue ship comes by,” I said, “hide.”

She gave a little laugh that seemed to release her inside.

We both lay back and laughed in the sun, not so much at what we were saying but at the idea of being on a desert island together. She started to say something else and I got ready to laugh again but she crossed me up.

“Those sons of bitches.”

“Who?” I said. I was still on our island.

“The Committee of Five,” she said.

“What do you think?” I said.

“The panic is on,” she said.

“Some of the boys seem to think they’re just sucking around for better jobs,” I said. “Others think it’s the Executive Board’s fault for pushing things too fast. You don’t know what to think.”

“I know what to think,” she said.

“But what are they doing it for?” I said. “What do they get out of it?”

“I don’t think you can settle that with one answer,” she said. “Because they’re all doing the same thing for different reasons. Start with Larry Paine, for instance.”

Listening to her gave me the impression of watching a river moving too swiftly, cutting its banks down sharp and straight, uncompromisingly.

“Larry’s a good writer. But a complicated one. There’s nothing
like a rich man’s son who’s done a little starving, just enough to scare him into becoming a self-made man. He’s a recluse and the kind of a drinker who reaches for that bottle when he wakes up in the morning. Something’s gone wrong. The way he laughs, for instance. It gets louder and harsher until I don’t know what it becomes, but it isn’t laughter. And those eyes, everybody notices those sunken, hurt eyes. He’s been nursing his paranoia along for years. I think he really believes the Guild was organized just to deprive him of his individuality!”

She ran through the other four more rapidly. “Harold Godfrey Wilson is an old boozer who had written himself out ten years ago, and Jack McCarter is a young boozer who never had anything in him to write out and just coasted in behind Wilson.”

Bob Griffin, she thought, was one of the most competent writers in the industry, naturally conservative but with a straight-from-the-shoulder integrity. “I think the only trouble with Bob is that he has read one too many editorials in the
Megaphone
about our being cannibalistically inclined toward producers and wanting to replace Louis B. Mayer with Joe Stalin.

“And I believe,” she concluded, “that you can hazard a guess at Mr. Glick’s motives. And that is the Sanity Five that has volunteered to lead the writers to their New Jerusalem.”

“How much support do you think they have?” I said.

“Nobody knows,” she said. “They still have ten days to work over the membership before the general meeting. None of us has ever been organized before. It’s hard to say how we’ll hold up. Sitting up there on the platform with the Board all year, I’ve had a chance to watch the membership react. They blow hot and cold. Maybe that’s because they’re high-strung and they’re individualistic and, except for the handful of left-wingers, none of them knows a labor tactic from a sacrifice scene.

“And of course they haven’t learned to work together. With longshoremen or fruit pickers that probably grows right out of their jobs. But with us it’s just the opposite. We’re pitted against each other. Two or three times I’ve worked on the same script with somebody else without either of us knowing it. That’s like
rubbing two fighting cocks together. I’d say it’s fifty-fifty right now as to whether the Guild weathers the storm or not.”

She looked at her watch. “Time to go to work,” she said, and jumped nimbly to her feet. “Well, what do you say? Think we’ve destroyed enough of the industry for one day? Or shall we go back to the office and commit sabotage by writing the stinkingest scenes we possibly can?”

“I only hope Mr. Fineman doesn’t think my treatment of Masaryk is sabotage,” I said, as we started back toward the writers’ building again.

Those were the Ten Days That Shook Hollywood. It was earthquake weather. Writers woke up excited or went to bed frightened. They fought battles of words in which the injuries sustained were nervous stomach and insomnia.

One of the first casualties was Julian, who dropped into my office on his way home that Friday evening.

“How would you like to come down to the beach for lunch tomorrow?” he said gravely.

I said I would like to but I had planned to come back to the studio because I wanted to get my treatment in before the end of the month and the rumpus all week had put me behind schedule.

“I’ve asked Kit too,” he said. “There’s something I wanted to talk over with you.”

“Okay,” I said, “I guess I can work late tonight instead.”