What Makes Sammy Run?

  “Who’s he sucking around now?” I said.

  “A good-natured lush called Franklin Collier,” she said. “He was married to one of the big silent stars, I forget-her-name. When she got tired of him she packed him off to Iceland to make a picture. He surprised her and everybody else in town by not only coming back alive but bringing Pengi with him.”

  Pengi was the epic that was so beautifully acted by a cast of penguins, one of the sensations of the twenties.

  “Is Collier a good …”

  She had the disturbing habit of beginning to answer your questions before you had finished asking them.

  “He’s always had a flair for outdoor pictures,” she said. “He’s sort of a one-man Last Frontier. But when it comes to stories, I don’t think he knows his ass from a hole-in-the-script.”

  She didn’t use those words the way women usually do, conscious they’re making you think they’re talking like men, but having to get a running start for every word not considered fit for ladies or dictionaries.

  Sammy returned with a tall man in his late forties, with a red face and bald spot, slimly built except for a pot belly which made me think of a thin neck with a large Adam’s apple. He wasn’t navigating too well under his own power and Sammy, almost a head shorter, guiding him to our table, looked like a busy little tug piloting a liner into port.

  “Mr. Manheim,” Sammy said with his best Sunday manners, “I want you to meet not only one of the greatest producers in town but one of my favorite people.”

  I almost expected Mr. Collier to start making an after-dinner speech. I thought that was going a little too far, even for Sammy, but Mr. Collier took it very gracefully, or perhaps it was only drunkenly. He seemed to be bowing, but it turned out he was only aiming his bottom cautiously at the seat of the chair. The waiter brought his drink over from the other table and Collier stared into it with an expression that might have been either thoughtful or thirsty.

  “Now what was I just saying, son?” Collier began.

  “What Mr. Rappaport told you about my work,” Sammy prompted.

  “Correct,” Collier said. The only effect his drinking seemed to have on his mind was to throw it into slow motion. “Rappy tells me you did a hell of a job on Girl Steals Boy, Glick. Hell of a job.”

  “We’ll know better after the sneak,” Sammy said. “And we’ll know best when we see whether Mr. and Mrs. Public buy tickets.”

  Later Kit told me Collier’s favorite beef was that writers didn’t care what made money and what didn’t as long as their stuff went over with the Hollywood first-nighters. And Sammy didn’t sound as if he were exactly stabbing in the dark.

  Collier looked around at us in triumph. “If only more of you writers talked that language!”

  Then he turned back to Sammy as if he were going to kiss him. “Well, you and I could talk pictures till all hours of the morning. But I’m in a spot, son, hell of a spot, and maybe a bright young kid like you can help me out. I’ve got Dorothy Lamour for a South Sea picture that’s supposed to start in six weeks. It opens at the Music Hall Easter week. It’s got a surefire title, Monsoon. All I need now is the story.”

  Sammy jerked the cigar from his mouth as if it were a stopper checking his flow of words. “South Sea story! You’re looking for a South Sea story! Well, of all the goddam coincidences I ever heard of!”

  Hold your hats, girls and boys, I thought, here we go again.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got one!”

  “Have I!” Sammy yelled. “Is this a break for both of us! I’ve only got the greatest South Sea story since Rain, that’s all.”

  It was so convincing it even made me wonder if he hadn’t been holding out on us.

  “I’ll tell you something about me,” Collier said happily. “I never made a mistake in my life when I played my own hunch. Something just told me you might come through on this.”

  He took a little notebook from his pocket and wrote in a large, precise, drunk-under-control hand: Glick—Monsoon.

  “You folks won’t mind if Sammy tells us his yarn right here?” he asked us.

  “Go right ahead,” Kit said, “maybe we can even get the boys to play us a little South Sea music.”

  I tried to figure out how she felt about him, but it wasn’t simple. She was as eager as I to put him on the spot, but I don’t think she was hoping to see him go on his trim little can the way I was. I think she was just pushing him off the high board because she enjoyed the spectacle of seeing him straighten out and get his balance before knifing into the water.

  It made me panicky just to imagine myself out on that kind of limb, but Sammy didn’t even look ruffled. As the boys in the band started working again, he said, in a voice buttered with boyish sincerity, “Listen, Mr. Collier, I’d love to tell you the story now, but it wouldn’t be fair to you. When you hear this story I want you to hear it right. Now what if I came out to your house next Sunday? …”

  He had sidestepped his tackler beautifully and was off again. Sammy not only had his lunch date Sunday but Collier was urging him to come early and try the pool.

  Sammy hardly let Collier get out of earshot before he asked his question.

  “Neither of you happen to know of a good South Sea story I could use? I’d split the sale with you.”

  I stared at Sammy as if I were practicing to be an X-ray machine. I just couldn’t seem to take him easy. Kit was leaning back, relaxed, but with her eyes busy, as if she were enjoying a football game in which she wasn’t rooting for either side.

  “Sammy,” I started to say and then I stopped because I knew I couldn’t think of anything equal to the occasion. So all I finally said was “Sammy Glick,” using it like a swear word.

  “A little birdie tells me that lunch is going to cost him just about ten G’s,” Sammy said.

  “This time you’ve lost me,” Kit confessed. “How can you sell anything while you’re under contract? The studio owns everything you write.”

  “Everything I write after I began working for them,” Sammy said coyly. “It wouldn’t be fair for the studio to own everything I wrote before I came to Hollywood, would it? So who has to know when I wrote my South Sea story?”

  All he had to do was say South Sea story once more and I’d begin to believe he had really written one. The only answer I could think of was, “What South Sea story?”

  “Don’t worry,” Kit assured me, “he’ll have it. It would be different if he had to write the greatest South Sea story since Rain overnight. But he has three whole days.”

  “That reminds me,” Sammy said, “what’s Rain about?”

  “Holy Jesus,” I said with reverence.

  “Sammy, now I know you’re a great man,” she said. “What other writer in the world could compare his story, which he hasn’t written, with a classic he’s never read?”

  “I didn’t have to read it,” Sammy explained. “I saw the movie. But I was such a little kid that all I can remember is Gloria Swanson shaking her cute little can in a minister’s face.”

  “That’s the plot all right,” she said. “What more can I tell you about it?”

  “Come on, Kit, stop the clowning, give out with Rain.”

  Sammy was through playing for the evening. She began to tell Maugham’s story. She told it well. You could feel the machinery in his mind breaking it down. I kept my eyes on his face. Sharp, well-chiseled, full of the animal magnetism that passes for virility, his skin blue-complexioned from his close-shaved heavy beard adding five years to his appearance, he was almost handsome. If it wasn’t for that ferret look. In moments like this when he was on the scent of something you could see the little animal in him poking its snout into a rabbit hole.

  Just as she was reaching the climax, where the good Sadie starts giving way to the old Sadie again, Sammy suddenly leaned forward and cut in.

  “Wait a minute! I got an angle! I’ve got it!”

  There was an old junk dealer in my youth who used to collect all our ol
d newspapers to grind into fresh pulp again. That was the kind of story mind Sammy was developing. Without even warning us he launched into one of the most incredible performances of impromptu storytelling I have ever heard—or ever want to.

  “All you gotta do to that story is give it the switcheroo. Instead of the minister you got a young dame missionary, see. Dorothy Lamour. Her old man kicked off with tropical fever and she’s carrying on the good work. You know, a Nice Girl. Then instead of Sadie Thompson you got a louse racketeer who comes to the Island to hide out. Dorothy Lamour and George Raft in Monsoon! Does that sound terrific? So Dotty goes out to save George’s soul and he starts feeding her the old oil. Of course, all he’s out for is a good lay, but before very long he finds himself watching the sunrise without even thinking of making a pass at her. The soul crap is beginning to get to him, see? He tells her she’s the first dame he ever met he didn’t think about that way. Now give me a second to dope this out …”

  I told him I would be much more generous than that, I would gladly give him several decades, but he didn’t stop long enough to hear me.

  “Oh, yeah, how about this—just about the time George is ready to break down and sing in her choir every Sunday morning they get caught in a storm on one of the nearby islands. They have to spend the night in a cave huddled together. Well, you can see what’s coming, she can’t help herself and lets him slip it to her. When they realize what they’ve done they both go off their nut. He goes back to his booze, shooting his mouth off about all dames looking alike when you turn them upside down, and Dotty feels she’s betrayed her old man, so she goes to the edge of the cliff and throws herself into the ocean. But good old George manages to get there in time and jumps in after her. Then you play a helluva scene in the ocean where you get over the idea that the water purifies ’em. Jesus, can’t you see it, George coming up for the third time with Dotty in his arms hollering something like: ‘Oh, God, if You get us outa this—I’ll work like a bastard for You the rest of my life.’ And you’re into your final fade with Dorothy and George married and setting up shop together, in the market for new souls to save.”

  Sammy looked at us the way a hoofer looks at his audience as he finishes his routine.

  There was a moment of respectful silence.

  “Of course,” Sammy explained, falling back on the official Hollywood alibi, “I was just thinking out loud.”

  “But where,” I said, “does the monsoon come in?”

  “Jesus,” he said, “I’m glad you reminded me. What the hell is a monsoon?”

  “A monsoon is a sequel to a typhoon,” Kit explained.

  “Only bigger,” Sammy interpreted. “So the monsoon’ll have to be coming up all the time they’re in the cave. It’ll be a natural for inter-cutting. Symbolical. When she does her swan dive from that cliff she lands right in the middle of it. That will really give the rescue scene a wallop.”

  “I’m glad you added the monsoon,” Kit said. “I couldn’t quite see how an ordinary ocean would purify them. But a monsoon makes it convincing.”

  “What do you think of it, Al?” he said.

  “I don’t know much about art,” I said, “I only know what I like. I think it stinks.”

  He looked at her with a question mark. “I think Collier will buy it,” she said seriously.

  Sammy turned on me with a leer not quite hidden in a smile. “That shows what you know about story values, Al.”

  His shell of egotism hadn’t quite had time to harden yet, but he was already beginning to show annoyance when his picture judgment was questioned. I wasn’t especially interested in qualifying for the job of Sammy’s future yes-man so I pressed my point.

  “I didn’t hear Kit say anything about the story. All she said was that you might sell it.”

  “Well, what more do you want me to do with it?” Sammy said. “Win the Nobel Prize for literature?”

  “Haven’t you learned yet never to argue with Sammy about himself?” she said. “That’s one subject on which I’m convinced he’s infallible.”

  “But why should you want to encourage crap like that?”

  “You don’t really think what we say has anything to do with it when there’s so much more encouragement at the other end, good at any bank?”

  Her voice was crisp and confident.

  I decided that I would always prefer to have her on my side.

  “As long as they sell South Sea pictures before they know what they’re going to be about,” she continued, “the kind of ad-libbing Sammy just gave us will be a work of genius.”

  “Sammy’s story is a work of genius,” I said, “like Shirley Temple is my child bride.”

  “Look up the word genius in the dictionary sometime,” she said.

  Sammy was lining up the plot on the tablecloth. “How the hell can I get George to find out she’s drowning?” he said.

  I stuck a cigarette in my mouth and Kit promptly lit it for me.

  “Feel like dancing?” she said.

  For some reason it reminded me of a night down in the Village when a man invited me to dance. I wanted to go on talking with her, but I knew I would feel foolish having to take her in my arms. I don’t think I ever had that reaction to a woman before. I tried to beg off on the grounds that it would leave Sammy alone. But he said, “Go ahead, dance. You know me, Greta Garbage, I von to be alone.”

  As we rose Sammy’s hard, stubby fingers snapped staccato.

  “Know who Dorothy’s mother oughta be?” he said. “An exotic little savage her old man converted. So when she starts going for George she’s just reverting to type!”

  “Don’t you think that psychology stuff is a little highbrow?” I said over my shoulder, and we were out there on the floor, set to music.

  I felt like a kid at his first dance. Scared of getting too close to her. I held her at arm’s length literally and otherwise. She was so damned cool and well-groomed. Not only her clothes, but her face and her mind. I had a screwy temptation to mess her up a little bit, muss her hair, mix her up. She had it all down so pat. When it came to understanding our little friend I felt she had a couple of laps on me. My dancing wasn’t too good because I was conscious of not being able to think of anything to say.

  Finally, she had to start it. “How long have you been out here?”

  “Not so very long,” I said. “I don’t know, maybe a month.”

  “Suppose it isn’t fair to ask whether you like it or not?”

  “I’m making twice what I was in New York, and the climate’s a whole lot better. Why shouldn’t I like it?”

  She smiled at me with so much understanding it was humiliating. “Don’t worry, hardly anybody does at first.”

  “How about the eminent author of Monsoon?” I said.

  “They’re different,” she said.

  I told her I could only see one Sammy Glick at that table, unless the last couple of drinks had caught up with me.

  “I meant all the Sammy Glicks,” she said.

  “There is only one Sammy Glick,” I insisted. “I know. I met him when he couldn’t have been much over seventeen. Why, I’ve practically seen him grow up and …”

  “I doubt that,” she cut in. “I don’t think Sammy Glick was an adult at birth, but he must have become one very soon afterwards.”

  “I hope you aren’t right,” I said. “For his parents’ sake. But I had Sammy working out on me every day for years. And I’m willing to swear on my option that he’s a unique contribution to the human race.”

  “I hate to disillusion you,” she said, “but he has plenty of soul mates running in the same race.”

  “I won’t believe it till I see it, God forbid,” I said. “One Sammy Glick in my life is all my constitution will stand.”

  “I’ve known Glicks before,” she said. “My first producer out here was a Glick. And so was the agent I just got rid of, Barney Burke.”

  “God rest their souls,” I said.

  “Of course, I will admi
t Sammy is an unusual model,” she said. “With a special hopped-up motor. But he’s put out by the same people.”

  The only topic we had in common was Sammy—and I was afraid of pushing that too far because I wasn’t sure how things stood with them. The conversation hit an air pocket.

  She could dance, all right. She danced the way professional models walk, with a haughty effortlessness. The only trouble with her dancing was it made me feel pretty much the way her talk had. She followed so well she seemed to anticipate me. At times it was really hard to tell whether I was doing the leading or not.

  The music stopped and I made a false start toward the tables, but it was only a beat between numbers and she started dancing with me again.

  “I love to dance,” she said. “But no one ever seems to think of taking me dancing.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” I said, “I’ve always liked to dance and yet I’ve always been lousy at it.”

  “You’re not a lousy dancer,” she said, “you’re fair. I like to dance with fair dancers. For some reason they’re usually better guys.”

  The music blared. Billie promoted. Sammy figured. The crowd pushed, and we pushed back, in time to music.

  We danced along silently and I wondered what we were going to talk about next. Until she suddenly said, “I guess you’re his best friend, aren’t you?”

  There it was again. Beginning to haunt me. The wording of a familiar Jewish phrase came back to me: My worst enemy shouldn’t have such a best friend!

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I am. Maybe I am at that. Only I don’t think friendship is one of Sammy’s fortes.”

  “He only has one forte,” she said, “himself.” She didn’t say it bitterly: solemnly.

  We were hardly dancing now, just standing there in the middle of the floor, feeling the music and getting to know each other.

  The band struck its intermission chord. “Thanks,” I said. “Let’s go back and see how W. Somerset Glick is getting along.”

  She laughed. “Even Houdini couldn’t turn Rain upside down!” We laughed with each other again. More than the remark deserved. I couldn’t help taking her figure in as I stood aside to let her lead the way, single file, to our table. Not as masculine as I thought. Athletic, but not so much the Babe Didrickson type as the Helen Wills.