What Makes Sammy Run? (47 page)

“But I haven’t even told you I loved you,” Laurette said.

“But you couldn’t have done what you did if you hadn’t loved me,” Sammy argued. “I would never have tried if I wasn’t sure you did.”

“You’re always sure, aren’t you?” she asked. Her father had already told her he thought the marriage was a good thing. But she knew it was more than that. She would never have known how to turn him down. He was so set on it she had the feeling a tidal wave would sweep up across Hollywood if she said no.

“This is the greatest day of my life,” Sammy said. “Baby, you and me are going to have everything we want in the world.”

The next afternoon Boyce called Sammy in. He had aged. Sammy was startled to see how old he looked.

“Well, Sammy,” he said, “I want to thank you.”

“Thank me!” Sammy said. “What for?”

“I just got through talking with Harrington,” Boyce said. “He told me you did everything you could for me—but the board back east had already decided. They want you.”

“I’m sorry, Geoffrey. If there’s anything I can do …”

“Thanks,” Boyce said. “Nobody can really help anybody else these days. You’ve got your own worries.”

“Sure,” Sammy said. “We all have.” He knew he didn’t have any worries. The world was his kite. All he had to do was let out more string. Up, up, up!

Then Harrington and Paine announced that Mr. Samuel Glick was the new chief executive of World-Wide. The first thing Sammy did was remodel Boyce’s office. He wanted something much bigger, and much more modern.

One week later Harrington had the honor to announce the engagement of his daughter Laurette to Mr. Samuel Glick.

The day of the announcement Sammy wrote the first letter he hadn’t dictated in two years. It was to his mother in the Bronx.

Dear Mama—

I can hardly believe it is your little Sammy writing you, so many wonderful things have happened to me. Now I’m the whole boss of the studio. But that isn’t what I wanted to write you about. Mama, don’t be worried, I am going to marry the finest girl in the world. Oh sure, she may be rich and ritzy but I just want you to know that I never forget what you told me about getting married when I left home—that a good, simple wife meant more than anything I might ever do. But Mama, no matter how perfect this all is for me, it wouldn’t be right if you weren’t here to meet the bride and be at the wedding. So I am enclosing a thousand bucks. Buy some nice clothes and start out here on the Super Chief. I want you to be as happy as I am. Your loving son,

Sammy    

The next morning Sammy’s secretary called in and said Tony Kreuger was on the phone.

“Hello, Tony,” he said. “What’s new, kid?”

“Same old merry-go-round,” Tony said. “You seem to have a corner on the news these days.”

“I know it,” Sammy said. “I guess I’m a lucky guy.”

“All kidding aside,” Tony said with a sudden note of sincerity,
“I think it’s swell, pal, I’m tickled to death for you, and the beauty of the thing is you deserved it.”

“That’s damned nice of you, Tony—anything else on your mind?”

“I was wondering if I could throw a stag for you Saturday night,” Tony said. “Get some of the old gang in.”

On the morning of the stag party, Laurette called Sammy for lunch. “I’ve just bought a new sport dress, darling,” she said, “so I thought we might go Vendoming.”

Sammy was sorry—he was working so hard now he only had a sandwich and a milkshake sent in. But he’d drop in for cocktails.

“All right for you,” Laurette chided. “Throw me into the arms of other men.”

“They know me well enough to throw you right back,” Sammy said.

That afternoon, as she smiled across the table at Gordie Melville, the Australian who ran a local fencing school and doubled for swashbucklers like Errol Flynn, she wondered if Sammy was right. She wondered at the way his insolence had first amused her, then overwhelmed her—and now? She studied Gordie carefully. He would smile when she smiled, and if she leaned forward he would meet her at the middle of the table. She liked to do it. It brought back that necessary sense of superiority. She would not let Sammy crush it. Maybe, if she laughed with Gordie, she could rediscover her kind of pride again.

Late that day Sammy dropped in for cocktails at Laurette’s. She met him in a green satin lounging robe. They kissed. “Couldn’t you possibly stay tonight?” she asked.

“No chance, honey,” Sammy said. “Can’t let the boys down.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” she said.

“There’ll be thousands of nights from now on, huh, honey?” He patted her affectionately. He still couldn’t picture himself doing that, but there it was.

The stag turned out to be an elegant affair at the Ambassador. It was the final victory dinner, with two hundred of Hollywood’s more prominent males doing him homage. And Sammy was king
of them all. As he came in, they all stood up, raised champagne glasses and droned, “Poor Sammy, poor Sammy,” but Sammy could laugh because he had met the enemy and they were his.

Sammy took the seat of honor, with Tony at his right hand. It was the beginning of a dizzy, exultant, triumphant evening. Over and over again, Sammy told Tony and every other willing listener how he rose from newsboy on the east side. Sammy was feeling great. He got up and made a speech. Then the lights went blue and purple and a gorgeous stripper took off the last bead. Sammy drank more champagne in the dark, smiling to himself. This was what he wasn’t going to marry and he felt cocky inside and out.

“How about dropping up to the apartment for a while? Remember Peggy and Sally Ann?—I told ’em to meet me there—said I might bring you along.” It was Tony.

“You can take Peggy and Sally Ann both and …” Sammy began and stopped. “Sorry,” he finished. “Not tonight.”

“One little nightcap,” Tony begged.

“Not tonight,” Sammy insisted. “Thanks, Tony.”

“Not going moral on me?” Tony asked.

“I’m afraid it’s too late,” Sammy said, more stubbornly. “Maybe some other time, huh?”

“Sure,” Tony agreed, changing his tone. “We’ll be seeing each other.”

Sammy was gladder he hadn’t given in when he hit the fresh air. He had to see Laurette, cool, refreshing and clean like the wind that whistled past his car as he raced to her. It was two-thirty in the morning, he swayed up the steps to her door, drunker now on backslaps and self-approbation than anyone would ever be on champagne.

He let himself in with his key. She had given him a key. Something seemed wrong with the house. Maybe he shouldn’t have come. But hadn’t she asked him to spend the night? One little reassuring
shtup
and he’d be on his way.

Then he noticed what was wrong. The lights. They were all on, and the radio blaring. He stopped still, like any animal, listening. He heard laugher, a duet, low and intimate.

Not alone
. He swayed there in the hallway, eyes bulging, suddenly sober. Yelling, “Laurette—Laurette!”

She came straight at him from the living room, pulling her robe tighter around her, that green satin.

Her voice was vicious and low. Drunken and passionate, ugly and hoarse to Sammy. “Well?”

He waited for her to alibi, apologize, plead, curse, weep. But that was all she said. He waited for her to go on, beg forgiveness; he wanted her to wilt beneath his righteous stare, but she only stood there, not bothering to hold the robe so closely around her any more, stood there proud and composed, stately and cruelly self-possessed. These were the elements he loved and admired and aspired to, and he hated them, he wanted suddenly to hide from them. He would make no scene, he would never ask her who was there. And she had been ready to tell him, she was all set to say, “Gordie Melville, dear,” and look at him, and watch him wilt like yesterday’s gardenia, knowing he could not crush her any more, letting him know the Gordon Melvilles would be her barricade.

Sammy only stared, their future running through his mind like ticker tape:

Mr. and Mrs. Glick held a house-warming at their charming Bel Air home Mr. and Mrs. Glick are celebrating their fifth anniversary with a three-month European tour Please tell Mrs. Glick not to expect me home tonight Mrs. Glick is calling from Honolulu, sir Mrs. Glick and I are only too glad to accept your weekend invitation Among those at the opening were Mr. Glick and his charming wife dazzling in white sequins and ermine Mr. and Mrs. Glick …

They were going to have everything they wanted.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” Sammy said almost in a whisper. “We have to meet my mother at the train at six.”

She smiled at him boldly. “I was planning on it,” she said.

Then she came toward him, calmly took his face in her two hands, and kissed him as if they had been married twenty years.

He never remembered walking down the stairs out into the open again. The sobbing came only when the door was shut behind him. Tight, strained, hysterical little sobs he tried futilely
to choke. And then he couldn’t hold it any longer. He sat down on the last step and cried into his nervous little hands.

It was all over in a minute. He wiped his face with his silk initialed handkerchief, got behind the wheel of his roadster, and the next stop was Tony’s apartment.

Ten minutes later he was with Tony and Peggy and Sally Ann. The all-night station was booming. “Here we are—back in the Swing Club,” the announcer said.

Sally Ann jumped up and did a funny little dance to it. “Remember, honey? It’s just like last time!”

Sammy didn’t smile. Then Tony came over and stuck a drink in his hand.

“Well, kid,” he said, “I told you so—only even I didn’t figure it’s happening this fast. What a man!”

“You called it all right,” Sammy admitted.

“Just since that night in the Swing Club!” Tony marveled. “In charge of all production, and married to big money. Eastern money. Baby, I’ve got to hand it to you.”

“You said it, Tony, I got Hollywood right where I want it—on its back!” Sammy whacked Sally Ann on her pretty little ass and she laughed appreciatively. He told Peggy to turn the radio up loud, the all-night jazz station. “Stompin’ at the Savoy …” He tossed off his drink and brought his live little hands together in a sudden clap of defiance. “Fuck ’em all! A one-way ticket on the fast express! I’m sitting pretty!”

AFTERWORD

In 1939—no, it can’t be almost fifty years ago!—this writer took his leave of Hollywood to go east, specifically back to his
second
alma mater, Dartmouth College, to write a book about his
first
alma mater, Hollywood. He had been taken there when he was four. His father, B.P., a twenty-six-year-old pioneer photoplay-writer, had worked himself up the movie ladder to producer and partner of L.B. Mayer in the now-forgotten, downtown Los Angeles Mayer-Schulberg Studio. By the time I was running the
Blue-and-White
daily, and a mediocre half-mile for L.A. High, Mayer and my old man had become bitter rivals, L. B. running MGM and B.P. running Paramount.

After Dartmouth and three years as apprentice screen writer for
three legendary moguls, David Selznick, Walter Wanger and Sam Goldwyn, I was ready to leave Hollywood because I had learned from years of watching and a few years of personal frustration that in the dream factories the writer was low man on the totem pole.

Whether you made $100 a week or $2,500, you and your story ideas, your scenes, your completed screenplays, were shuffled like cards by the studio heads and their usually sycophantic assistants then known as “supervisors.”

Everyone who goes into the writing life has hopes and dreams. But
Sammy
was to endure beyond my rosiest fantasies. In 1952, it was included in the Modern Library, and I wondered if the name listed between Schopenhauer and Shakespeare belonged to me. In 1960, NBC presented a two-part television version starring Larry Blyden as Sammy and John Forsythe as his Boswell, Al Manheim. Then a musical version starring Steve Lawrence ran for two years on Broadway. Year after year, paperback editions continued to appear, most recently in the late seventies with an Author’s Afterword speculating as to whether a Sammy Glick, greedy for political power, had taken over the White House a few years earlier.

Despite its long life in other forms, once the all-powerful Mayer put it on his
ex cathedra
list,
Sammy
had remained a Hollywood untouchable. But now, after all the years of ostracism my father had predicted for the book at the hands of the original moguls,
What Makes Sammy Run?
has finally broken through the studio gates. A new generation of studio heads, fresh out of film schools or rock music, have practically forgotten Louie Mayer and his Doge-like taboos.

Today, as we begin to address the problem of putting
Sammy
on screen, and to reappraise the contemporary significance of Sammy Glick, I find myself challenged by the question: What has happened in America—or is it
to
America?—that has so drastically changed our perception of Sammy Glick from dread repugnance to upwardly mobile acceptance, if not actual admiration and emulation?

When I first took the book to Random House almost half a
century ago, Sammy’s chances for enduring fame, on a scale of one to ten, seemed to hover around zero. Bennett Cerf, my publisher, warned the neophyte novelist to expect the worst. Even if it enjoyed good reviews, Cerf went on, the chances for commercial success were virtually nil. It was the cold verdict of the publishing world that there simply was no market, and precious few readers, for a Hollywood novel. The horror stories abounded. Only the year before,
The Day of the Locust
had not earned back its $500 advance to Nathanael West—that premature absurdist and avid hunter—who had to keep on grinding out western-movie scripts at Republic to keep food on the table and shells in his shotgun. The popular hobo writer Jim Tully, the up-and-coming John O’Hara … all had come a cropper on the Hollywood novel. Even when
Sammy
won enthusiastic advance notice from a trio of literary heavy hitters, O’Hara, Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald, Cerf stood by his first printing of twenty-five hundred copies, and promised if the book sale exceeded what he considered a rosy estimate, he would wine and dine me at “21.”