That night I sat in Bleeck’s wondering if I was a heel. Manheim, confess, I thought. The moment you heard that name you thought of Hollywood again. You thought what that name could do for you. You thought of all that Hollywood dough. You thought of getting back to Kit.
I gave myself five minutes for rebuttal.
The trouble with Hollywood is that too many people who won’t leave are ashamed to be there. But when a moving picture is right, it socks the eye and the ear and the solar plexus all at once and that is a hell of a temptation for any writer. I felt that when I went back for the fourth time to see The Informer. And one afternoon when I happened to catch a revival of the Murnau-Jannings masterpiece, The Last Laugh. And even when I saw one of my own jobs, a stinker if there ever was one, but with one scene in it that sang because I happened to stumble onto real picture technique. That is what held Kit there. Hollywood may be full of phonies, mediocrities, dictators and good men who have lost their way, but there is something that draws you there that you should not be ashamed of.
CHAPTER 11
As Kit and I came out of the preview we could see Sammy leaning against the lamppost with his hands in his pockets and his long cigar blowing triumphant puffs like a Roman candle.
“Well, what do you think?” he said with a grin that told you what he expected to hear.
“That’s a pretty good movie,” Kit said.
“When a sourpuss like you says pretty good, it must really be terrific,” Sammy said.
Sheik sailed over, making that circle of approval with his thumb and forefinger as he came. “Well, sweetheart,” he said, “it’s a killer. Even tops Deadline for my dough.”
Sheik was still Sammy’s shadow but he had been promoted. He was an agent now. He had just sort of drifted into it by going up to an ingénue he knew Sammy was signing and telling her he would use his influence to have Sammy take her. Other clients followed until now Sheik was clearing around three or four hundred a week. Still in the small-fry class, but between his firm grip on Sammy’s coattails and his increasing popularity as a ladies’ man, Sheik was definitely on his way.
Word had gotten around that Sheik was an ex-mobster and soon, with Hollywood’s talent for self-dramatization, Sheik had become a famous gunman, in fact, Capone’s right-hand man. A killer whom Sammy Glick and Hollywood had regenerated. This, along with his other social attributes, had begun to make him a celebrity’s celebrity.
“After Deadline the second-guessers were saying I could only make mellers,” Sammy said. “Now they’ll be saying I can only make comedies. It’s got a million laughs, hasn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” said Sheik. “You should have saved a few of ’em for some of World-Wide’s other pictures. Outside of your two, this year’s program is stinking up the studio so bad you have to have a gas mask to go through the halls.”
As Sammy laughed, I noticed that his face was puffing out a little bit. The lean ferret look wasn’t gone—it was just beginning to be framed with a fleshy border. Sheik watched Sammy’s face too, joining in his laughter like the background people at a cue from the director.
The leading lady knifed her way through, leaving a wake of panicky autograph hounds.
“You were O.K.,” Sammy told her.
She made a little curtsy and told him it had been a pleasure to work for him.
“O.K.,” Sammy said. “So next time don’t try to tell me you don’t like the part. Doesn’t this prove that we always know what’s best for you?”
As her public swallowed her up again, Sammy gave us a wink. “When those babies go soft on you—that’s the time to sock it home.”
Sidney Fineman came out of the crowd. The herringbone design under his eyes seemed more noticeable these days. His posture was still erect and dignified but you could feel him making the effort to keep it that way.
“That’s a good solid writing job, Manheim,” he said to me, and then he turned to Sammy with a tired, brave smile.
“Well, my boy, looks like you’ve done it again.”
Sammy shook his hand with a straight face. “Thank you, Mr. Fineman,” he said, “let’s hope so.”
He had learned how to be polite to his superiors now but it would never really become him. He called Fineman Grandma behind his back, when he wasn’t being more vivid.
We stood on the curb talking cutting and last-minute story points as the crowd drifted away.
“I have only one real objection,” Fineman said mildly. “The action seems to get started too quickly. There doesn’t seem to be enough time to plant the characters and the situation. What do you think, Sammy?”
Kit and I looked at each other, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. Sidney Fineman had his own studio in Hollywood when Sammy was still hawking papers on 14th Street. He had been the first one with enough daring to make a classic like Helen of Troy when everyone else was making two-reel horse operas. He never asked questions then.
When I first started writing the screenplay, Sammy had told me specifically that you never have to sell your characters or your plot in a farce comedy. For a moment I thought he was going to tell Fineman off about that. But apparently he had decided the time wasn’t ripe yet. For all he said was:
“Maybe you’re right. Let’s have another look at it in the morning.”
“Fine,” Fineman said. “Perhaps it will look better when we’re fresh.”
Sammy smiled at him as if to say, Speak for yourself, pal, I never felt fresher. “That’s right,” he said, “maybe it will.”
There was something in Sammy’s voice that cut the conference short. Sammy watched Fineman’s chauffeur help him into his big black limousine.
“The corpse is climbing back into his hearse,” Sammy cracked.
Only Sheik laughed.
“Well, where do we go from here?” Sammy said.
“Sunset Club,” Sheik said. “They’ve got a new dinge band there that’ll kill ya.”
“What did you get for me?” Sammy said.
“Some brand-new stuff,” Sheik said. “Punkins Weaver.”
“Is she O.K.?” Sammy said.
“Until the real thing comes along,” Sheik sang. “Blonde. Willing. Cute kid.”
Kit and I stopped in at one of the little bars on Vine Street, just south of Hollywood Boulevard. All along the sidewalk were little knots of poolroom characters who always seemed to be there, holding mysterious conferences. Down the street the playboys were getting out of red Cadillac phaetons or monogrammed town cars at La Conga. There was something savage and tense about that street. Autograph hunters prowled it, and ambitious young ladies in fancy hair-dos and slacks.
“God, this is a tough town,” Kit said.
“Why is it tougher than anywhere else?” I said.
“Because it still has the gold-rush feeling,” she said. “The gold rush was probably the only other set-up where so many people could hit the jackpot and the skids this close together. It’s become a major industry without losing the crazy fever of a gold-boom town.”
“What made you think of that? Fineman?”
She nodded. “Sometimes I think the three chief products this town turns out are moving pictures, ambition and fear.”
“I felt sorry for Fineman too,” I said. “For all his fame and his dough, I still wouldn’t like to be in his shoes right now.”
“Something tells me there’s going to be a lot of traffic in those shoes.”
“I don’t think Sammy’s ready to try them on yet,” I said. “Don’t forget Sammy likes to have his shoes fit.”
I sat in while they looked at the picture with the cutter again next morning, stopping it reel by reel to talk it over.
“I guess you’re right about the opening at that,” Fineman said. “Any more footage would make it drag.”
“I’m glad you see it my way,” Sammy said.
I don’t think Fineman saw anything more to it than that; an older man and his younger assistant working together to tighten up thei
r picture. But I knew that tone in Sammy’s voice, the warning rattle. It was like reading a Fu Manchu book and wondering how and when the hand will strike.
After the picture had been run off, the cutter said, “Well, you don’t have to worry about that one. I’ll run it through again this afternoon and clean it up a little bit. If I nip a couple more hundred feet out of it it’ll be tight as a drum.”
Fineman seemed to be thinking of something else.
“Sammy, there’s something I want to talk to you about,” he said. “Walk back to my office with me.”
“What’s the matter with right here?” Sammy said. “We’d save a couple of minutes.”
“No,” Fineman said, not quite as soft-spoken as usual. “It’s a rather delicate matter.”
That night I had to go over to Sammy’s for a conference on the next picture. Sammy had moved from his apartment to one of those Hollywood Colonial manors in upper Beverly Hills.
The first thing he did was show me through every room, rattling off the names of all the celebrities who had lived there before him and the marquee names he had for neighbors.
“I tell you, there’s nothing like having a house of your own,” he said. “I get up in the morning and look out at those palm trees and the other big houses and I say to myself, Sammy, how did it all happen?”
I have a couple of ideas on it, I thought, if you really want to know.
“But now I’ll really show you something,” he said. “My grounds.” He turned on the floodlights that illuminated the garden. “I’ve got my own barbecue pit and my own badminton court. And have I got flowers! Do you realize you’re looking at twelve hundred dollars’ worth of hibiscus plants?”
“And you’re going to live here all alone?” I said.
“Well, the cook sleeps in,” Sammy said. “By the way, I’ve got Claudette Colbert’s cook. And, of course, my man.”
He must have felt self-conscious about that, for he added, “He’s off tonight but he’s really something. I think he must have been Ronald Colman’s stand-in. It’d panic you to see him bringing my breakfast up in the morning in a full-dress suit. The first time he stuck his puss in the door I said, ‘Charles, you look as if I ought to be waiting on you.’ And Charles just gave me the business, ‘Yes, sir, will there be anything else, sir?’ He never steps out of character!”
Neither do you, I thought, neither do you.
For the next couple of hours we sat in the study batting the story back and forth. Sammy’s mind drew a blank when it came to originality—but since the same goes for most screen stories, he actually turned this to advantage. What he had was a good memory and a glib way of using it. Our story was like so many others that he could lift ready-made situations from the shelves in the back of his mind, dust them off and insert them into our yarn like standard automobile parts.
“Now, I want you to work night and day on this,” he said. “Because MGM is making a submarine picture too, only on a terrific scale, and if we can get out with ours first we can steal a hell of a march on them and cash in on their publicity.”
Our work was over and I started to go.
“It’s early yet,” Sammy said. “You don’t have to run. How about a nightcap?”
He had a Capehart and a canopy bed and shiny new sets of Balzac and Dickens and twelve hundred bucks of hibiscus, but he didn’t seem to know what to do with himself when he wasn’t talking to somebody.
He mixed a drink for me. He was very solicitous. He said, “You know we’ve been working so hard we never have a chance to talk any more.”
I wondered when we had ever talked about anything but the life and works of S. Glick. And while I was wondering, that is just what the conversation drifted to again.
I happened to say that I thought Fineman was one of the best gents in the business.
“I guess everybody in the studio likes him,” Sammy said. “But that doesn’t mean so damn much. Between you and me, he’s just an old woman. He’s beginning to lean on me like a crutch.”
“He still seems to be able to navigate under his own power,” I said.
“That’s what I used to think,” Sammy said. “Until today.”
“The talk you had with Fineman?”
He said, in the way people have of saying much more than they are saying, “The talk I had with Fineman.”
Okay, Sammy, I thought, spill it, you predatory genius.
“When I was in there talking with the old man, all of a sudden it hit me—I had him by the balls. You understand, this is strictly between you and me. It mustn’t go out of this room.”
Strictly confidential between you and the world, I thought, and if you don’t tell it to somebody quick your lungs are going to blow up in your face like punctured balloons.
Fineman filled his pipe painstakingly and lit it It was hard to begin.
“Sammy, we’ve been working together for over a year now and I think we understand each other. I’d like to feel I can talk to you as a friend.”
Sammy’s face was what is known as expressionless. A very definite and frightening expression.
“You know you can, sir,” he said.
“Good. You may not have learned it yet and I hope you never will—but this is a business with a very short memory. It doesn’t matter what you did last year or the year before. If your last few pictures are lemons, you’re in hot water. That’s why I’ve decided to talk to you, Sammy. I know you appreciate how much I’ve done for you—and I felt you’d be willing to help me.”
Help. That was the turning point. That was the moment Sammy had been waiting for. He sat there trying to look noncommittal, like a poker player who has just discovered he is holding a royal flush.
“I’m your man, Sidney,” Sammy said. “Just say the word.”
“Some of the Wall Street crowd who control our lot are coming out to look over our production set-up.”
Sammy had got that tip from Young’s secretary two weeks before.
“They want to try to find out why we slumped to third place among the major studios this year. And I have it from a fairly reliable source that Harrington, the chairman of the board, favors a new production chief. Now, these aren’t men who know pictures. They’ve got ticker tapes in their brains. They know the pictures I let you make have been our most solid moneymakers and they’ll be interested in hearing what you’ve got to say. You know what I mean, I want them to know that we’re working well together. And, if I’m still in harness, I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you: Let you make four of the A’s on next year’s program—even suggest that you head your own independent unit, if that’s what you want—and I’ll get a new assistant. There’s a new lad on the lot called Ross who’s supposed to be very promising. How does that sound?”
Somewhere between the time Fineman started that speech and the time he finished, one era ended and another began. Sammy had sneered at Fineman before, but that had been mostly bravado for Sheik’s benefit. He had entered the office still in awe of him. Now, as Fineman went on talking, Sammy could see him shrinking as if he had drunk an Alice-in- Wonderland potion. Wondering, what the hell keeps that weak sister in this office at five G’s a week? An old-fashioned story mind—a quiet, indirect method of getting his way that’s supposed to pass for executive ability—an old-womanishness that’s won him the reputation of best-loved producer.
“Sid, old pal,” Sammy said. “You’re in. Just let them come to me. I’ll give them an earful Ani it will come from right here.”
He tapped the breast pocket of his camel’s-hair jacket reverently.
And while he was tapping it he got a new idea.
Sammy spent hours with Fineman at the office every day, but at night, except for the occasional Grand Central Station parties, there was a barrier. Fineman had never asked Sammy to his dinner parties or his Sunday morning breakfasts. Sammy finally had to give up hinting. It got Sammy sore just thinking about it. So I’m not good enough for the bastard’s home, but I’m good enough to
save his lousy job for him! And Sammy never just got sore. Nothing so luxurious as that. He always got sore with a plan.
“Look, Sid,” he said. “Why wait for these Wall Street guys to come to me? Why wouldn’t it be smart for me to start working on them the day they blow in? What if I threw a big party for them at my new house, a swell dinner, and entertainment, with all our stars there …?”
“Don’t you think it would be my place to give the party?” Fineman said.
“But if I’m at your party what does it mean?” Sammy argued. “Hell, I’d have to come to my own boss’s party. But if I give a party in their honor, also celebrating the first anniversary of our association …!”
“If it’s handled right it might have a good effect at that,” Fineman reflected.
“Don’t worry,” Sammy said. “It’ll be handled right.”
“So a week from Saturday I break into the society columns,” Sammy said. “And by the way, you and Kit are invited. You two are still an item, aren’t you?”
“A permanent one, I hope.”
“By God, that’s what I need,” Sammy said suddenly. “I’m getting fed up with these floozies you’re always promising something to—a day’s work or a test. A man in my position ought to settle down and get some dignity in his life.”
“You mean you’re thinking of getting married?”
“Why not?” he said. “Hell, I’m not one of these guys who’s spoiled by getting in the dough. You know I’m just a simple down-to-earth guy at heart. All I want is a sweet, healthy girl to put my slippers on when I come home from work and give me a bunch of kids who can enjoy what I’ve got—maybe a nice bright kid to take over my business when I retire.”
“Have you got anybody in mind for the job?” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about it. I’m really thinking seriously of Ruth Mintz. You know, the daughter of the shorts producer on our lot? A nice refined girl. No beauty, but, hell, this town is lousy with beauty, and that’s only good for about ten years, anyway. She’s got a nice build. And she’s nuts about kids. What more could I want?”