What Makes Sammy Run? (28 page)

“Boys,” he said. “If I thought that every writer in Hollywood wanted this Guild, believe me I’d be for it myself one hundred percent. But how do you expect us to take you seriously when you can’t even agree among yourselves? Some of the biggest writers
have quit already—and we understand more resignations are coming in every hour. Now what do you say we forget about the whole business—try to make World-Wide one big happy family the way we used to be?”

He paused and smiled again. “Okay, boys, that’s all,” he said casually. “You’re going to be given resignation forms on your way out. You can turn them in to me any time within the next forty-eight hours.”

He didn’t say what would happen to us if we didn’t. He didn’t have to. Sammy Glick would attend to that, the Sammy Glicks.

We sat there passively, not thinking together any more, but each one alone and afraid, each one thinking of his own wife and his own script that was just beginning to come along so well and his own house in Beverly or Westwood or overlooking the ocean. We walked out as if those forms were the certificates of a disgraceful and contagious disease which each one of us thought he was the only one to have.

I tried to sign that form all afternoon. I knew I was a dope if I didn’t, but somehow I just couldn’t get around to it. I stuck a sheet of paper in my typewriter and started to write about Masaryk. But I found myself wondering what Masaryk would do if he had been asked to resign from the Guild. So I put on my coat and went home early. I didn’t feel like seeing anybody so I got a little food out of the icebox and had supper alone, just me and that damned piece of paper.

Then I sat there in a ringside seat for the wrestling match between my conscience and my ambition, a fight to the finish, with a forty-eight-hour time-limit and finally I left them there on the canvas with a headlock on each other and called Kit.

“Kit? Did I wake you up?”

“No, I just got in. I was running some pictures at the studio. Two stinkers.”

“Listen, Kit,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you all night. I guess I’d like to be a hero and flush this goddam resignation blank down the drain. But there’s no use kidding myself. I feel like
a tug-of-war, the whole damned business, the rope and both teams pulling.”

I expected her to give me a good shot in the arm, but all she said was, “I know, Al. It’s very tough.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said, “I suppose I’m making it a lot tougher than it is, but I was just beginning to get the feel of this picture thing. This Masaryk job was—it still is exciting as hell, and Fineman is a swell gent; there’s an awful lot I could learn from him. And yet I just can’t see myself pulling a Sammy Glick.”

“It isn’t quite that bad,” she said. “I’m afraid everybody’s signing them, Al. I hear we have two hundred resignations already. I don’t feel like telling anybody to go out and be a martyr.”

“You didn’t worry like that about Julian.”

“That’s different,” she said. “That’s when it looked as if we were going to win. We had to take that chance. And then, well, maybe I am being a little selfish about it.”

That was a landmark. I would always remember it as the first sign of affection.

“Are you going to sign it, Kit?”

“No,” she said. “But frankly, I’m in a much better spot. Three or four of my best credits all happened to come along this year. And they seem to feel that Keeler and I are clicking as a writer-director team. Of course, this may change their minds. But it does take less courage for me to hold out.”

“In other words,” I said, “you’d sign it.”

“Al, I’m afraid that’s a lonely battle you’ve got to fight out with yourself,” she said. “But I wouldn’t feel you were ratting out if you did. It’s too late for that.”

“Okay, Kit,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll think it over. See you tomorrow.”

When I went in to the studio next morning the form was still unsigned, but I had made up my mind. For a guy who didn’t care six months ago whether the screen writers were organized into a
Guild or a sewing circle I had gone down the line for them every way I could. It had to stop somewhere. After all, I had come out here to be a writer, not a second John L. Lewis. So I took the paper out and scribbled my name at the bottom quickly, as if trying to keep myself from knowing what I was doing.

Then I went to work and I began to see my story again because my mind felt free for the first time in weeks.

Then Sammy Glick came in.

I hadn’t talked to him since his famous
coup d’état
I had passed him in the hall a couple of times and had thought of saying something insulting, but what was the use. I had said it all the day he marched in when I wasn’t looking and invaded four inches into my column a long time ago. Anything I would have told him now would have just given him a laugh and maybe given me ulcers.

He came in with a smile stretching from his right ear to that flower he always wore in his lapel. I went on typing. He slung his leg over the corner of my desk. I looked up. In his hand was my resignation blank.

“Well, I see you’re being smart for once,” he said.

I tried to remember if Sammy had ever handed me a compliment before.

“That’s just what I dropped in to check with you about,” he said. “I didn’t want to see you pull a sucker act like Julian.”

“Hasn’t Julian signed it?” I said.

“I’m washed up with that sap for good,” Sammy said. “He’s hopeless. He doesn’t know to wipe himself.”

Nebbish
, poor Julian, a hero with quaking knees and a stomach full of butterflies.

“Well, now that you’re using your head for something besides butting against a stone wall,” Sammy said, “I think I can put you onto a good thing. Julian was beginning to get too much dough to work with me anyway. I need somebody in the lower brackets—to balance what I’m getting. So, while I was getting my massage this morning, it hit me like a ton of scripts. Why the hell don’t I get Al? He needs a break and he’s just what I need. So you’re being transferred to our unit tomorrow. We’re going to have a
helluva picture—we just got word this morning that we can get Gable from Metro for the lead. It’ll mean an A credit right off the bat. And, if you click, I’m liable to let you in on something really big that I’m not able to break yet.”

“It’s very nice of you to rearrange my life for me this way,” I said, “but what about Masaryk?”

“Listen, my fine-feathered frand,” he said, “between you and me and Louella O. Parsons you’re just writing for the shelf. That anti-fascist stuff hasn’t got a prayer. Why do you think Metro scrapped
It Can’t Happen Here?
It’s lousy for the English market. A producer who just got back told me that at lunch the other day. England doesn’t want to get Hitler and Mussolini sore.”

He yanked his lapel-watch out of his breast pocket. “Jesus, I better run—I’ve got a date with Frank, Frank Collier—to look at the rushes on
Monsoon
. The stuff is coming through terrific. Keep in touch with me, sweetheart.”

The door slammed and he was off. I stood up and looked at that resignation blank. I studied the signature that Sammy had complimented me on placing there. I had a crazy impulse to make an airplane out of it and send it diving down into the studio street. But instead I just folded it double and began to shred it into the wastebasket.

I really felt sorry for Mr. Fineman when he had to call me in and tell me I was being closed out. This was not his way. He felt guilty and powerless. “I’m afraid Masaryk is going on the shelf for a while and I haven’t got another assignment for you at the moment.”

He wanted to say more, but even if he had been able to, it would have been superfluous because the sympathy in his eyes, in his handshake, said it for him.

All I ever ask of a writer is that he deliver, he was trying to tell me. All I ask is that he loves to write motion pictures. That’s the only kind of loyalty to the industry that means anything, and if that kind of loyalty comes through his work, whether he spends
his nights in Main Street brothels or Writers Guild meetings is none of my business.

“But I want you to know I liked your work, and I’d like to do a picture with you some time. All the luck, Manheim.”

For the next two weeks my agent tried to get me an interview at the studios, but everywhere he went he got the same answer: They weren’t taking on new writers just now.

I sat by the phone like an extra boy hoping for that call from Central Casting.

When it rang a voice started talking a mile a minute.

“Oh, you dumb son-of-a-bitch, you glutton for punishment, you
momser
you.”

“Where the hell are you, in a pay phone? Where you don’t want to waste time saying hello?”

“Listen to him,” Sammy said. “He’s going down for the last time and he tries to make jokes yet. Well, Al, I don’t know whether I’m just getting soft or whether I’m queer for you. But I’m going to give you one more chance.”

“I didn’t do it, mister, honest, don’t hit me again,” I said.

“Listen, Al,” he said, “I don’t see what you have to be so goddam cheerful about. I kept telling you. But you wouldn’t listen to me. You had to stick your neck out like a giraffe. Now you really bitched yourself up. But good. But I’ve got some influence in this town now and there may still be an outside chance of cleaning you up. Now here’s what I want you to do. Larry Paine is having a little get-together at his place tonight and I thought you might be doing yourself a hell of a lot of good if you came …”

This seemed to be a good chance to find out what the boys were up to. And of course there was the old curiosity as to how this was going to quicken the already mercurial pace of Mr. Glick.

Paine’s home was an old plantation in Bel Air. The butler showed me into the bar, where I found the Four Horsemen, Paine, Wilson, McCarter and Glick, entertaining fifteen or twenty other writers. I spotted Lorna Flint, the old silent star who was in the writing game on a raincheck, George Pancake and my epic poet, Henry Powell Turner.

After two or three drinks, the party turned out to be a meeting.

Lawrence Paine called us to order and congratulated us on being the founding fathers of a new writers’ organization, the Association of Photodramatists.

We, he informed us, were to have much the same aims as the defunct Screen Writers Guild, except that we would be a more select group, with a more discreet program.

Then Sammy nominated Paine as President, Jack McCarter seconded it and Sammy announced that he had been unanimously elected, although my right hand had stayed right in my pocket where it belonged.

Pancake nominated Henry Powell Turner for Vice-President. Turner rose, jowly and almost bald now, and I noticed how his fingers trembled as they reached to clutch the back of the seat in front of him.

“I regret that it will not be practical for me to accept this office,” he explained. “For I am quitting Hollywood for good, to devote myself exclusively to poetry again, as soon as I finish my present assignment.”

So the Vice-President of the Association of Photodramatists turned out to be Sammy Glick.

After Wilson and McCarter were honored with the remaining offices, we were all invited to sign up as charter members. Pancake signed with a flourish and handed me the pen.

“I thought you were opposed to writers’ organizations?” I said.

“This one is different,” he said righteously.

“You said it!” Sammy cut in. “These guys know what side their contract is buttered on.”

He looked down the list officiously. “Where’s your name?” he accused me.

“In my wallet,” I said.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” he said.

“I’ve just been through one war,” I said. “I don’t think I could take another.”

“There’s not going to be any war,” he said. “I got it all fixed.”

“How about recognition?” I said. “The Guild’s been battling over that for years.”

“That shows you how smart your Guild is,” he said. “We’re going to be recognized right off the bat. I got it straight from Dan Young. What do you think of that?”

“I think that’s very interesting,” I said. “What were you and Young doing discussing the recognition of an organization that hadn’t even been formed yet, much less elected spokesmen?”