What Makes Sammy Run? (40 page)

CHAPTER 12     

   T
he reshuffling at the studio was announced three weeks later but Sidney Fineman hung around for several months, tying up threads he had begun. Kit did his last picture. She said it was really something to see him roll up his sleeves with the enthusiasm of a kid just breaking in.

“He wasn’t working to make money,” Kit said. “He enjoyed living well, like anybody else. But that wasn’t the main part. He was a picture maker. He had pride in his work, like an artist or a shoemaker. The reason he worked was to make good pictures.”

And it just happened that his last picture turned out to be a unique kind of hit. It had only two characters, a farmer and his
wife, and somehow it managed to electrify and convince and challenge and entertain just by following them through their ordinary passions and defeats and everyday triumphs without any heavies or comedy reliefs or sub-plots or sub-sub-plots, and the critics didn’t know whether to call it comedy or tragedy or fantasy but audiences called it entertainment of a fresh and provocative kind because it had all three, because a little of all their lives was in it. It might have earned Fineman a producing berth at one of the other studios, but somehow or other everybody was saying that it was impossible for Fineman to do anything as modern as that and most of the credit was given to Larry Ross, the kid assistant Fineman had upped from the writers’ ranks. As a matter of fact, as Kit discovered, the source of this rumor was none other than young Ross himself and apparently Sammy was glad to give it his stamp of approval because he was already claiming Ross as one of the protégés he had developed.

As soon as Fineman moved out of his office, Sammy had the wall to the adjoining room knocked down, to make it larger. Then he threw out the whole Colonial motif because he said it cramped him. When the office was finally remodeled it had the intimacy of Madison Square Garden. The walls were lined with leather and the solid glass desk looked like a burlesque runway. On one wall was an oil painting of Laurette, which made her look ten years younger, even though it had been painted just a few months before. Opposite her was a large autographed photograph of Harrington.

Because he died so soon after his separation from World-Wide, there was some talk that Fineman committed suicide, but the Hays Office hushed it up so fast that it was impossible to track it down. Of course, there are less spectacular ways of taking your life than by gun or gas; there is the slow leak when the will is punctured, what the poet was trying to say when he spoke of dying of a broken heart.

The papers said Fineman was only fifty-six. I would have guessed somewhere in the late sixties. The papers also said that he had recently been forced to resign his post at the studio because of failing health.

The day after he died a whistle blew in all the studios at eleven o’clock, a signal for all activity to cease for a full minute of silence while we rose in memory of Sidney Fineman. At one minute after eleven another whistle sounded, the signal for us to forget him and go on about our business again.

But the soul of Sidney Fineman was not let off that easily. Hollywood likes its death scenes too well for that. A few days later they gave Sidney a testimonial dinner at the Ambassador at ten dollars a plate.

I wanted Kit to go with me, but she held her ground. “I like to give my testimonials to people before they’re dead,” she said. “I’m going down to hear Hemingway. He’s raising money for the Loyalists.”

Mrs. Fineman sat at the table of honor between Sammy and Harrington, who had just come back to the Coast again to be on hand for the wedding.

Sammy’s speech had women digging frantically for their handkerchiefs. In presenting Mrs. Fineman a gold life pass to all World-Wide pictures, he said, “The greatest regret of my career is that I had to take the reins from the failing hands of a man who has driven our coach so long and so successfully. And I can only say that I would gladly step down from the driver’s seat and walk if I thought it would bring Uncle Sid back to us again.”

The columnists reported tears in Sammy’s eyes as he sat down.

“Perhaps the camera flashlights made his eyes water,” I suggested to Kit.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think it’s at all impossible that those were real tears. Sammy has the peculiar ability to cry at phony situations but never at genuine ones.”

“I didn’t think he had any tears in him for any occasion,” I said. “I thought that well had run dry long ago.”

“Oh, God, no,” she said. “Sammy is an emotionalist. Only
instead of letting himself go he just sounds one note over and over again.”

“I know which note that is too,” I said. “Mi mi mi mi …”

The wedding was a beautiful production. It was staged in the garden beyond the lawn terrace of the estate in Bel Air that Sammy had just purchased from a famous silent star who had gone broke after the advent of sound. The wags insisted on calling it Glickfair.

Beyond the garden were the swimming pool and tennis court and just across the private road a freak three-hole golf-course. The house itself was of baronial proportions, an interesting example of the conglomerate style that is just beginning to disappear in Hollywood, a kind of Persian-Spanish-Baroque-Norman, with some of the architect’s own ideas thrown in to give it variety.

There were at least a thousand guests milling around—from Norma Shearer to Julian Blumberg, whose first novel had shortened Hollywood’s memory of his Guild activities.

People were clustered about the garden like bees, buzzing
isn’t it lovely, lovely, just too lovely!
The flower girls were two little child stars and the bridesmaids who preceded Laurette down the terraced steps all had famous faces.

Laurette’s white satin wedding gown made her complexion seem whiter than ever. Her red lips and hair against that milky skin, and the solemnity of the moment as she moved to the funereal rhythm of the wedding march added to the unreality of the spectacle. She was a ghastly beauty floating through the Hollywood mist. She and Harrington in his striped trousers and top hat were like a satirical artist’s study of the whole grim business of marriage.

Sammy entered the garden from the opposite path, followed by Sheik, both in gray double-breasted vests and afternoon cutaways. Sammy was staring straight ahead of him, a smile set hard on his lips as if it were carved there. Sheik kept grinning, obviously a little lit, taking it big.

All through the marriage ceremony newsreel cameras were grinding. As Sammy and Laurette were declared man and wife for better or for worse for richer or for poorer in sickness and in health till death do them part, a professional mixed chorus suddenly stepped forward and sang, “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.”

After that the crowd broke, moving over to the terrace, where enormous banquet tables had been set up, manned by the entire staff of the Vine Street Derby. Four office boys staggered in with a six-foot-high horseshoe made entirely of gardenias, across which was strung a white silk banner with gold letters, “Long Life and Happiness Always.”

Everybody seemed to agree that this was the greatest wedding Hollywood ever had. “Even bigger than the MacDonald-Raymond,” I heard someone say. And I could almost see the
Megaphone
proclaiming:
GLICK NUPTIALS HIT ALL-TIME HIGH!

When it finally let out at dusk Kit was in a restless mood. “Let me drive,” she said. “I feel as if I want to do something. I wonder how long it will be before the world looks back on that the way we do at African rituals.”

We drove out to the ocean and up along the coast. It was quiet, relaxing, good to be alone. “Isn’t that our cove?” I said.

We stopped. Without either of us saying anything I took her hand and we started down. It was a night without stars. The tide was high and the wind whipped in off the water.

We stood with our arms around each other, looking out over the waves, cold but comfortable. We discovered one solitary light moving slowly along the horizon. We played with it. It was a rumrunner and we had the plot of a B-picture. It was a ghost ship, a derelict, and we had mystery. It was the Japanese fishermen who put out from Terminal Island before the sun is up, and we had realism.

We lay down on the clean cold sand that trembled with the force of the waves pounding down. There was a long moment when we no longer heard the ocean roar. Then we were listening to it louder than ever.

We didn’t feel like going home, going inside anywhere, so we
drove down to Ocean Park and strolled out on the amusement pier. Public dancehalls with the girls coming alone in cheap evening dresses, and the barrel passageway where a woman screams with embarrassment and delight as her dress suddenly blows up around her face, the Krazy House full of electric shocks and trap doors in the dark—a ten-cent introduction to a harmless form of masochism—the guy showing off to his girl by knocking all the bottles over with a baseball, and necking in the boat that moves foolishly along through dark tunnels, all the screwy, healthy releases that don’t cost too much, the cheap thrills people will probably always get a kick out of.

Kit insisted on going on the roller coaster seven times, sitting in the front seat, rising high over the ocean and then diving down, down past the Ferris wheel and the revolving airplanes and the merry-go-round, past the crowd flashing by like a crazy pan shot, heading straight for the water and then at the last possible moment swishing up into the sky.

“I have a wonderful idea,” Kit said, as she tried to get me on for the eighth time. “During my lunch hour I’m going over to Mines Field and take flying lessons.”

“The hell you are,” I said. “I forbid it.”

Those were always fighting words for Kit. “What do you mean you forbid it?”

“I absolutely refuse to let you take the chance,” I said.

“Al, you’re getting awfully possessive lately,” she said. “You’re beginning to act as if I were married to you.”

“That settles it,” I said.

“Settles what?”

“Our marriage.”

“Now, Al, if it’s just a question of living together …”

“It’s a question of marrying you,” I said. “I am not going to let you take another ride on that damn thing. I’m getting dizzy. I want to marry you. I want you to quit this funny business and come along like a good girl and get married.”

“Al,” she said, “you have a roller-coaster jag. We haven’t even got a license.”

“We’re going to drive down to Tiajuana. You don’t need a license in Tiajuana. All you need is five bucks and a woman. We can come back in the morning.”

“That sounds too much like a Hollywood elopement,” she said. “And who do we think we’re eloping from? People out here are always sneaking off to get married when there’s no one around even vaguely interested in trying to stop them. And anyway, I hate Tijuana. It’s just a little outhouse for San Diego.”

“What do we care what Tiajuana looks like?” I said. “We won’t even see Tiajuana. Let’s just jump in the car and start down. We can get there in four hours—they may still be open.”

“I always feel sorry for couples who have to get drunk in the small hours of the morning before they can work up courage enough to run off and get married. As if they’re afraid that any moment they’ll sober up and change their minds. Let’s just go down quietly to the City Hall and get it over with.”

I didn’t realize until she was all finished that she had said yes. “Kit!” I said. “Darling! Jesus! Kiss me.”

“You fool,” she said. “Not out here.”

We did.

“Where shall we go?” I said. “We’ve got to take a week off and celebrate.”

“I know a spot down on the Gulf where we can get a cottage right on the beach and swim and drink
tequila
and carry on right out in the open if we feel like it and forget all about Hollywood until we have to come back.”

And forget all about Sammy Glick, I thought, the four-star, super-colossal, marriage-to-end-all-marriages of Sammy Glick.

I realized that neither of us had said a word about Sammy’s marriage since we left that spectacle behind us. But somehow what had happened to us was bound up with that marriage.