What Makes Sammy Run? (23 page)

My mind skipped from Julian to the newspaper office to plagiary and then all of a sudden it came to me.

“My God!
The Front Page”
!

Even then he wouldn’t give in until I had traced the parallel, scene for scene.

“Okay, pal,” he said. “Maybe I did follow the construction of
Front Page
. Only I changed the characters. And I jazzed it up a little more.”

“Those people didn’t know what a genius you are,” I said.

He looked around furtively. “Listen, Al,” he said. “Before it didn’t matter. I was only playing for marbles. But if you do any talking about this I’ll killya—so help me Christ, I’ll run you out of this town for good.”

Then he suddenly dropped his voice and smiled at me, but fiercely.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “I know I’m no angel. I’m only human like anybody else. But if I ever get to be one of the head guys out here you won’t find me forgetting my pals like some of these other bastards.”

“Last time we had an argument,” I said, “you seemed to think I was too dumb to do you any harm. Why the hell should I tell anybody what a bastard you are? Let them find out for themselves.”

He relaxed, even patted my hand reassuringly.

“Okay, pal,” he said. “I’d trust you like my own mother. It’s just a funny thing about this racket—the bigger you are, the jumpier you get. Only just remember, what I said about loyalty still goes.”

I’ll remember it all right, I thought. How could I ever forget a combination as unique as loyalty and Sammy Glick?

Rita came back, gradually, stopping at three tables en route.

“Sammy,” she said, “when are you going to write a play for me?”

“When he can find one,” I said.

“I don’t want to write for you until I feel something great,” Sammy said, “something that’s—you.”

She moved closer to him.

That’s the only real play you’ll ever get from him, I thought.

Kit rescued us by announcing the arrival of Sammy’s guests.

The Trocadero was the place to be seen that season, a chic, handsomely tailored night club with creamy walls, subtle illumination that retouched the women’s faces like fashionable photographers. A startling south wall made entirely of glass looked out and down at the houselights and the street lamps and the red neon smears of Hollywood, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Culver City and the rest of the sprawling communities in the long valley between the Hollywood Hills on the north and the ridge dotted with oil wells sloping up behind MGM, fifteen miles to the south.

Sammy sat at the end of his long table, surrounded by Rita, his Finemans and Colliers and his new sense of authority, being witty and charming and intelligent. I think I even heard him expressing an interest in rare books for Fineman. The chances were he had had his secretary doing some research for him on the subject. A moment later he was leaning toward Collier, discussing the technical problems he must have faced in trying to photograph penguins in their native environment. That was a new gift Sammy was beginning to acquire. He was learning to abandon the direct sledgehammer approach. It was still there, of course, but he was learning how to camouflage it. He was developing an amazing ability to appropriate and broadcast ideas and cultural attitudes which he never held long enough to absorb. I heard him discussing a current best-seller with Mrs. Fineman, which I would have bet anything she had read and he hadn’t, but that didn’t stop him from doing most of the talking about it, employing a razzle-dazzle literary double-talk technique that had good, simple Mrs. Fineman on the run.

I was glad to find out Kit didn’t like these parties either.

“What always amazes me,” she said, “is that with all the turnover in Hollywood from year to year, almost from month to month, the faces in here never seem to change.”

I looked around the room to see whom I was with. Kit pointed out to me the famous free-lance Hollywood photographer, Katz, a feverish little dwarf of a man who would look undressed without his Graflex and whose degree of interest in you as a photographic
subject had become an accurate test of your rating in the industry.

“Last time I was here,” Kit said, “someone pointed out to Katz that Major Adams was in the room—remember, one of the men who practically founded Hollywood, I guess, worked with Griffith for years and probably did more for pictures than any other producer before Thalberg? They say he’s down-and-out now but some of his old gang keep him going. Well, Katz barely looked up from his reloading. ‘Who, Adams?’ he said. ‘He’s nobody. Anyway, I gotta save my bulbs for the Tom Brown-Anita Louise party coming in later.’ And he said it so loud that poor old Adams turned around.”

We watched the people together, being very catty of course about the little ingénue with gold stars pasted on her bare shoulders. And the beautiful young juvenile singing into her ear the words of the popular song they were dancing to. And the look of aloof superiority that came over the dancers’ faces for the rhumba, flashing their heads expertly from side to side, so conscious of the figure they were cutting on the floor. And the ex-hatcheck girl on her way to stardom with her magnificent (but dead) pan, swirling around the floor with a dashing and toothy screen villain whose face seemed to be set in a permanent sneer. And the foolishly oblivious couple, he a half-bald, red-faced grinner, fugitive from middle age; she a young, plumpish and pretty blonde with a silly champagne smile and a gift for abandon. And the almost-matronly woman who had taken rhumba and tango and charm lessons and the fourteen-year-old who should have been in bed instead of awkwardly trying to simulate the rhythm of the rhumba. And …

“What do you think our chances are of taking a powder?” I said.

She took the table in and smiled. “He who hesitates,” she said, “is trapped here in the Black Hole of Trocadero until morning.”

We rose together, conspiratorially.

“Don’t bother to say good night,” she said. “So we don’t break up the party. Let’s just say we’re going out to get a little air.”

Outside it was good just to stand there a moment and let the
wind sweeping down the Strip from the sea blow the liquor fumes and the smoke and the chatter of simultaneous voices out of your mind.

We hopped a taxi back to the Colonial House to pick up Kit’s Ford.

She nosed the car into the boulevard and paused. “Where shall it be?”

I said, “Any place that is quiet, serves liquor and is uninhabited by Sammy Glick.”

She said, “I think I can fill that bill without too much trouble”; and we shot forward into the fast-moving traffic.

We drove up the steep winding road to her house near the top of the Hills. The night was clear and it seemed as if the world was full of nothing but little pulsing lights above us and below us. It was so beautiful you thought you ought to say something about it, but there was nothing good enough to say. I felt as if we were floating between two starry skies, flowing into each other at the horizon.

“Mmmmm,” I said.

“Wait till you see it from the studio window with the lights out,” she said. “Better than the Trocadero—and no cover charge.”

It was a cozy and inviting little house, consisting of one main living and dining room with beams across the high triangular ceiling, and two small rooms, a bedroom and a paneled study besides the kitchen.

“I really rented the house for the porch beyond that window,” Kit said. “In another month I’ll be sleeping out there. You can become surprisingly fond of Hollywood from that porch.”

She made highballs and we took them out there with us and leaned against the railing. It did top the view from the Troc. We could barely make out the neon lettering
Trocadero
half a mile below.

“It seems wrong to know he’s behind those lights and not be able to see him or hear him,” I said.

“Shhh,” she smiled, “I think I can hear him.”

We really paused and listened a moment.

“I think that’s only the wind rushing,” I said. “Though it may be him at that.”

“He and Rita are dancing,” she said, watching the Troc as if she could actually see them. “Skirting all around the edge of the floor by silent agreement, to make sure of being seen by as many people as possible.”

We were elbow to elbow, leaning over like ship’s passengers looking out to sea.

“What did you think of the play?” I said.

Instead of answering my question directly, she said, “I wonder what would happen if Sammy used all that energy and imagination to create something—not just to devise ways of reaching the top without creating anything.”

We kept going in to refill our glasses and returning to the rail and the view again, not growing intoxicated but only more intimate.

“Kit,” I said, “we’ve known each other almost a year now. We’re pretty good friends. And yet all we know about each other is Sammy Glick. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about anything else but Sammy Glick. He’s an obsession with me—and I know a hell of a lot about him now I wouldn’t have known without you—but, well—I’m beginning to feel he’s a kind of defense we use against each other.”

It was a mellow evening and the moon looked like something private that went with the porch and it was easy to talk.

I told her about leaving Middletown after my father died, going to New York with not enough money to last me over a month, pounding the sidewalks begging for a job, making a goddam pest of myself at every newspaper office in town because I was greatly in need of fifteen dollars a week. I told her how I used to get up at five o’clock to train racing pigeons before going to school and how, if I ever hit this town for any kind of money, I would like to have a small house out in the valley somewhere where I could have a pigeon loft again. I told her a little of how balled up I felt inside because there were times when I wanted to say what I had
to say as honestly as possible, and times when I felt as ambitious as Sammy without being able to free myself from the sense of relationship with everybody else in the world, which made it difficult to do anything which I thought might cause them pain.

Maybe I talked her ear off so that she had to open up in self-defense. She spoke in a monotone, keeping her head profiled to mine, and I felt that what she was saying came not only from her brain and her mouth but rooted deep in her, intestinal.

“My father’s goal was the United States Supreme Court. I guess he came closer than most people do to their goals because he finally did make the State Supreme Court. Through a lot of hard work and a lot of smart politics. I don’t think either one alone would have been enough. My father and mother shared one life between them, which sounds very romantic except the life they shared was his, exclusively. Her job was to see that his diet was observed and that he was not allowed to be disturbed when he was working and that the men who could help him were adequately feted and the wives of his associates duly luncheoned and teaed. In other words, she performed all her duties as automatically as any soldier. If she ever had a thought of her own or a job of her own or even a conversation of her own, I never knew it. Poor Mother. Their marriage always made me think of a motorcycle with Father at the controls and Mother sitting in the sidecar, not asking where she was going but only if he was sure he was warm enough without the extra scarf she brought along.”

“That sounds rather like a typical happy marriage,” I said.

“Oh, terribly typical,” she said. “But the happiness part is pretty much bunk. At least for the person in the sidecar.”

She told me how it was with her father dead. “That was when I was sixteen. Arranging his funeral was the last function Mother had in the world. After that she was through. There wasn’t anything left for her to do. And when she wasn’t reminiscing about him there didn’t seem to be anything for her to say. I was really fond of her. But I always remember what a relief it was to be back on the train on my way to school again. I felt sorry for her of course—but that didn’t keep her from driving me crazy. After
college Mother wanted me to go to law school. She had it all planned. I’d go into my father’s old firm and we’d live together and she’d take care of me. To be very ruthless about it—what she really wanted to do was turn me into my father, so she would have a place again. Well, I decided I had to be ruthless about it. I was already started on my book and I wanted to be away from her—on my own. I couldn’t see why the hell men should have a monopoly on independence any more. I made up my mind to stay out of sidecars. Have you ever thought of the difference between the two words spinster and bachelor? It seems pretty significant that spinster has a thought association of loneliness, frustration and bitterness. Bachelorhood is something glamorous—doesn’t the sound of the word give you a sense of adventure and freedom? So I decided I’d be a bachelor. I don’t mean sex orgies. Most girls go through that period, either with actual experiences or in their mind; they’ll slow down after a while if you let them alone. I mean that when I met a man that appealed to me—well, you know how men feel about it. I didn’t want to be a pushover, because then it wouldn’t mean anything any more; look at the rabbits. But I didn’t want to set up any barriers of fake coquetry either.”

She paused and finished her drink coolly. “If that sounds too immoral just make believe I’m very tight—which I probably am.”

I said, “It sounds plenty moral for my money.”

“I think so,” she said. “Not the Hays Office kind, of course. But under the bonnet of organized morality lurks a very filthy mind.”

We made another pilgrimage inside for drinks and out to the porch again.

“When you were talking before,” I said, “you know, about men that appealed to you? I couldn’t help thinking about Sammy.”

She laughed. “You mean the person we weren’t going to talk about?”

I said keeping him out of an entire conversation was too much to ask. And now that he had come up, I wanted to know.

We were absolutely cockeyed, but completely coherent because that’s the kind of mood we had set in the beginning.

When she didn’t answer me I said again, “What’s the real story on you and Sammy?”