“A lousy five hundred,” he said. “But it isn’t the dough. Hell, as long as I stay single I can manage on five hundred all right. But the producers use five-hundred-a-week writers to wipe themselves with, Al.”
Kit was right, I thought. You couldn’t blame a man for having a clubfoot, or a tapeworm in his mind.
“You’re only a kid,” I said. “You’ll get your twenty-five hundred, you crazy son-of-a-bitch. I’ll bet you get it before you’re thirty.”
“You know you can get good credits out here for years without getting in the big dough,” Sammy said. “But I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been looking over guys’ shoulders while they hit the jackpot. Know how they do it? On the outside. With a hit play, for instance. That’s how these producers think. They see something they like in print or on the stage and right away their tongues are hanging out to pay the writer three or four times as much as the guys trying to make a rep in their own business.”
“What makes you think you can write a play?” I said.
“Hell, plenty of dopes write plays,” he said.
“Talented dopes,” I said.
“Talent can get you just so far,” he said. “Then you got to start using your head.”
The meeting was being called to order. There seemed to be a larger crowd than last time. It looked as if the Guild was on its way.
“What have you been doing for yourself?” Sammy said.
I didn’t give him the usual optimistic crap because I wanted to hear what he would say. I told him after my option had lapsed I had gone without a job for a couple of months and finally had landed at National, a little action-picture lot, on a flat-deal basis at a thousand bucks a script. Which means that you work twenty-six hours a day trying to get your dough as fast as possible.
“Any time limit on rewriting?” Sammy said.
I couldn’t remember any.
“Then they’ve got you by the balls but good,” Sammy said. “Once you get your grand they can keep you on the picture as long as they like.”
“I know,” I said, “but what the hell can I do? Maybe that’s a job for the Guild.”
“If you ask me,” Sammy said, “the Guild has one foot in the grave—and it’s goosing itself with the other. Maybe you ought to write a play too.”
The funny thing is I had been writing one. I had been writing one for three years. It was about a rabbi like my father and anti-Semitism in a small town and the fundamental quest of simple men for dignity, fraternity, peace and beer on Saturday night. I wanted to make the content of the play everything that I had seen and felt, and the form everything I knew. And I didn’t want to tell anybody about it until it began to come alive to me. Because it seems to me too many writers drain their excitement and energy away in conversation.
“I’ve been working on one for a couple of years,” I said.
“Don’t futz around with it too long,” Sammy said. “Try to peddle it. They buy lousy plays for pictures every day. And six months from now the chances are that they won’t remember what kind of dreck it was. All they’ll remember is that you are a playwright and look at all the lousy playwrights out here in the big money.”
I don’t know whether Sammy had the play already written the night we talked about it or whether he ran right home and dashed it off after that meeting, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of months later that I received an engraved invitation in the mail. Mr. Samuel Glick was requesting the pleasure of my company at the opening of his three-act comedy-drama Live Wire at the Hollywood Playhouse.
Sammy Glick, prominent scenarist and playwright, I thought tenderly and hatefully, my little Sammy Glick.
I was still admiring the tasteful typography of his announcement when Sammy called.
His voice was full of exulting raucous chimes out of tune.
“Hiya sweetheart, how’re they hanging? Well, are you all set for your greatest evening in the American theater?”
I said I had his invitation.
“It’s shaping up something terrific,” he said. “Everybody says it looks like the biggest opening this town ever had. I gave Fineman and Frank Collier a row each and they even promised to join my party at the Troc after the show. I sent Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer a couple of ducats and they haven’t sent them back, so it looks as if they’re in the bag too.”
“How do you get away with all those tickets?” I said. “What did you do, buy out the house for the night?”
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I got a little dough in the show myself. I talked my agents into backing it with me fifty-fifty. I hadda brainstorm, see? I told them the best goddam way in the world to hit the producers for six figures was to put the show on right under their noses with a helluva fanfare. My agents can smell big dough a mile away. They went right out and grabbed a first-class Broadway producer to front for us.”
“Sammy,” I said, “you’re a smart guy. At least if you’ve made a mistake so far I haven’t noticed it. So why in hell do you want to go telling me all this for?”
“In the first place,” he said, “you’re a good guy.”
He said it with absolute derision. “I never held it against you for putting the clip on me for Rosalie or Julian. If that’s your pleasure, go ahead. I just figure your brain’s a little soft, that’s all, but it’s okay by me. I still like you. You’re good for me. If I tell you something in confidence you don’t shoot your mouth off to the first big shot you meet to try to get an in.”
If he had hated me I might have had some satisfaction out of it. But he had more important people to hate.
“And in the second place, what the hell if they do find out? I’d just tell ’em it shows how much confidence I got in my own work.”
“And in the third place you’re so goddam pleased with yourself you have to tell somebody and I’m the best listener you’ve got,” I added.
He chuckled. “I love you, you fresh bastard,” he said.
“By the way,” I said, “what kind of a play did you dig up for the occasion?”
“A million laughs,” he said. “I knocked it out in exactly four weeks and everybody who’s seen it says it’s sensational. There’s so much excitement about it that my press agent Stan Dickey says he’s having an easier job getting space for it than for Once in a Lifetime.”
“You need a press agent like Fred Astaire needs dancing lessons,” I said.
“You oughta get hold of Dickey yourself, Al,” Sammy said. “He knows his way around. People are suckers for the printed word, Al, and that even goes for the top guys. They believe what they read, even when they’re on their guard. If they read it often enough. I’ve had Dickey plugging me ever since I took Julie into the studio with me. I made a smart deal with Dickey. I told him he could keep working for me as long as he gets my name in there at least three times a week.”
Sometimes it made me sore when Sammy talked that way, sometimes it just made me wonder how the hell homosaps got that way, sometimes it left me sick to think what a tremendous burning and blinding light ambition can be where there is something behind it, and what a puny flickering sparkler when there isn’t. Sammy’s flame was deceptive because you were always looking at it through the powerful magnifying glass of his own ego. But when the telephone wires failed to transmit the magnetic current it was like standing off and looking at a small, cold star. This time, listening half to what Sammy was saying now, half to everything he had ever said to me before, I thought of Sammy, distinguished and dead at fifty, a front-page story which Stan Dickey had written and Sammy previously okayed, with governors and bankers and people in high places as honorary pallbearers and everyone mourning the loss of a captain of industry, an Elk, a self-made man and a Great American.
“Al,” he said. “Here’s the reason I called you. Do you wanna be a really good guy?”
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Take Kit off my hands tonight.”
“Sure,” I said, “I guess tha
t’s okay with me. But what’s the story?”
“I’m taking Rita Royce,” he said.
He said it in the same tone of voice as the first time he ordered St. James Scotch. Rita Royce was one of the better known of the new crop of aphrodisiacs, a sort of streamlined Theda Bara.
Kit pushed open the door of her Ford convertible. She was wearing a short fur jacket over a white evening gown that emphasized her tan. She had her hair a different way, up on her head in a smooth roll, and it was almost a shock to see how feminine she could look when she wanted to.
She said, “Hi.”
“What’s with you and Sammy tonight?”
She answered me by imitating a hypothetical gossip in the audience. “Doesn’t Rita Royce look simply divine? Isn’t the young man with her Sammy Glick, the one who’s supposed to be so brilliant?”
There wasn’t any bitterness in it at all. She made you see it the way it really was, amusing and just a little pathetic.
“I’m surprised he didn’t pair you with Gary Cooper,” I said. “It would have been good publicity.”
“He did want to palm me off on some glamour-boy who’s supposed to be on his way up at Metro,” she said. “But I’m afraid I’m something of a chauvinist about actors. Even intelligent ones. In fact, sometimes they’re worse because they know more words to use about themselves. So I held out for you.”
“I’m deeply grateful to you, ma’am,” I said. “Otherwise I might not have been on hand for the unveiling of another milestone in my best friend’s career.”
“His milestones are coming so fast,” she said, “they’re like telephone poles through the window of a train.”
Sammy had asked us to his apartment for cocktails before dinner. I have never shown the slightest inclination to sketch, but when Sammy came strutting toward us in a new full-dress suit, his chest puffing out his stiff white shirt like a pouter pigeon, with his hair slicked, a blood-red carnation in his lapel and a look on his face as if he had just swallowed his producer, I wished for one moment my fairy godmother would turn me into Toulouse-Lautrec. Even the customary patent-leather evening shoes weren’t good enough for him tonight. He had discovered dancing pumps, those dainty, ultra-evening slippers with the pointed toes and the little black bows.
The cocktail session was fun to watch. It was fun to see Sammy trying to use manners to match his dress clothes. Funny to see him trying to form sentences without his four-letter words, leaving his conversation ridiculously stilted. And poor Rita, who seemed as if she might be a good kid under all those layers of glamour. If only she didn’t have to try so hard to live up to that amazing body of hers.
Rita raised her glass and read her line as if it were the only one she was going to have in the picture and she had to make it remembered. “To our young genius—success.”
I caught Kit’s eye as we drank and we smiled at each other guiltily. As Rita drank she fell back on that hackneyed bit of business of smiling up over the rim of her glass with her eyes fluttering. You could feel sorry for Rita and like her, or embarrassed for her and dislike her, depending on your disposition at the moment.
Sammy acknowledged her toast with one of his own. “We can’t drink to your success, because that’s already established. So we’ll drink to its continuance.”
I could count back the years on one hand to the time when I was teaching the young genius and littérateur not to say ain’t.
As I sat on the edge of Sammy’s fancy desk sipping my drink I couldn’t help noticing his clippings. There were items about Sammy from papers all over the country, mailed to him by a clipping service. When Sammy caught me looking at them he came over and shoved a paper under my nose.
“See this?” he said coyly.
It was the Hollywood Megaphone. I began to read the lead editorial in the corner. The editor was taking potshots at the Writers Guild again. “What makes these wild-eyed members of the Screen Writers Guild think they can get away with biting the hand that feeds them?” it asked. “We are not against the Guild. We are for this industry. If the Guild were for this industry too, instead of trying to ruin it by joining up with the Eastern playwrights who hate Hollywood and always have, we would be for the Guild too.”
“What is all this fuss about the Authors’ League?” I said. “What possible good would it do the Guild to ruin the industry?”
“Where are you reading?” Sammy said. “I meant at the bottom of the page—with the red circle around it.”
It was half a dozen lines headed: GLICK THUMBS DOWN $75,000.
Sammy Glick, local boy-wonder scribe, puts thumbs down on major studio offer of 75 G’s for his play Live Wire, it was understood last night. Prefers to hold picture deals off until curtain goes up for first time at Playhouse Fri. Night.
I always love those journalistic outs—it was alleged, it was learned in semi-official circles, it was understood. “Who was it understood by,” I said, “except you and Stan Dickey?”
Sammy slapped me on the back, playfully but jolting me, and his laugh was a little too loud for the evening-clothes atmosphere.
“One of these days remind me to rub you out,” he gagged. “You know too much.”
We drove to the theater in a sleek black Lincoln Sammy had hired for the occasion. As we got out, there was a little flurry of excitement around Rita, started by a plump young lady in slacks and a gangling, scabby-kneed girl who shoved their autograph books in her face while Sammy stood looking on, drinking it in. One frantic little fan, taking no chances, even wanted Kit’s autograph. “You don’t want my autograph,” Kit told her.
The child insisted that she did. Kit looked at me helplessly, took the pencil and scribbled her name. The child stared at the page, puzzled a moment, cried out feverishly, “That was nobody!” ripped the page out, crumpled and threw it away and fought her way into the middle of the next circle.
As we took our seats photographers were prowling up and down the aisles hunting celebrities. Sammy and Rita were trying very hard to seem interested in what each had to say and watch the cameramen out of the corners of their eyes at the same time. When the flashlight boys finally sighted them Rita tilted her head with just the right come-on smile without seeming to realize she was being photographed at all. But Sammy took it big. He looked at that camera like a lover. The man who took that picture may have been just another publicity hack but that picture of his was worth saving as a real photographic study. In fact I clipped it out of next morning’s paper for that collection of Sammyglickiana I am going to turn over to the Smithsonian when the species finally runs itself into extinction. The most striking thing about that photograph is that it isn’t so much a picture of two people sitting together as two individual portraits that merely happen to be side by side. Rita is staring off at an imaginary leading man with a wistful gleam in her eyes. And Sammy is looking right at you, sneering joyfully. The head is cocked slightly at an angle, like an alert Boston bull. The eyes gloat. The sneer comes only from the mouth, which veers ever so slightly off center.
This photographic study was captioned: Lovely Rita Royce Shares Spotlight with Samuel Glick As Young Playwright’s Comedy Live Wire Wins Acclaim at Last Night’s Opening. With Them Is a Friend.
The unidentified Friend, of course, with his head turned away from the camera watching Sammy Glick, is myself.
The play was what Sammy needed, all right. It was one of those things about two red-blooded guys who are always scrapping and loving each other, in this case a couple of announcers in a radio station getting each other in and out of jams with enough gags and surprises and general hell-raising to keep the audience sufficiently amused. I was thinking how much the play was like its author, nothing really there to offer, but slugging the onlookers into submission with sheer noise and velocity, and back of all this I kept thinking something tells me this is awfully familiar and then the show was over and someone in the house, probably Stan Dickey, started to call Author, Author, and the cry was picked up and Sammy was ta
king a bow and all of a sudden it’s a big success and I’m sitting next to a hit playwright and everyone’s stepping over me to shake his hand, and he’s modestly denying that he must have worked very hard on it, saying it just seemed to come to him, five or six nights’ work and everyone’s amazed and pleased and someone, not Stan Dickey any more, for by now it’s spontaneous, says a new genius has come to Hollywood and Sammy says, “Oh, I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
We waited in the car while Sammy went backstage to congratulate and get congratulated by the cast, and when he returned he was not the same as when he left us a few minutes before. I’ll be damned if even his voice hadn’t changed. It seemed lower and more dignified. He wasn’t just one more of those bright five-hundred-dollar-a-week boys any more. No more worries about being classed with Julian. He was ready for big time. No more trying to wangle invitations to Harry Godfrey Wilson’s clambakes. He was already thinking of asking Wilson and Paine and McCarter and the rest of the upper crust over for a little stud poker himself soon.
Of course Sammy wasn’t going to waste any time establishing his new social position. In fact we headed straight for the Trocadero, where Sammy was throwing a celebration party for himself. He seemed almost more elated about bagging the Finemans and the Colliers for it than he did about his play. I guess it was just as important at that.
We were there before any of the others, so we went into the bar to wait. Sammy ordered champagne cocktails and then Rita said, “Excuse me, I have to comb my hair,” and went out to the ladies’ room. She could say, “Pass the salt,” and make it sound exotic. “I’ll chaperon you,” Kit said, as she rose and followed her out.
It was funny to watch Rita parading through the room like a peacock and know she was only going to the can. Funnier to watch Kit striding after her. It was a gait better suited to slacks than evening gowns. But I actually preferred Kit’s figure. Rita’s voluptuousness looked as if it might turn into fat some day if she didn’t watch herself. But Kit made you feel she was always going to be this way, hard and slim.