Sammy Glick came by on his way to smooch D.O.S. and got the picture on the run. “Blew it again,” he said. “I knew it. Hit me for a hundred in my office and blows it. Fuckin’ has-been.”
Larry heard that and wheeled around. “Listen, you little sonofabitch. I heard that! I got more talent in my little finger ’n’ you’ve got in your whole—”
Two Clover Club bouncers straight out of Warner Brothers B-movies closed in.
“All right, Mr. Moran, it’s good night now.” Judy followed in a kind of cold trance, as they started moving him toward the door. “Wait a minute—wanna see the boss—sign a chit—five-hundred-dollar credit …”
Judy saw how they were able to move him without roughing him. Almost without making a scene. Though Errol Flynn said to his date, who looked like a cheerleader from Hollywood High, “Hey, I remember him. Larry Moran. Made one of my first pictures. Been wondering where he went.” To which the little jailbait beauty, who was not as dumb as she looked, said, “Well, now you know.”
Outside the club Larry was ready to pound on the door and demand his rights, but somehow Judy managed to get him back to the cab.
“Nex’ stop, Barney’s Beanery,” he said. “Open all night. Barney’s a pal.”
“Next stop, bed,” Judy said.
“Yours or mine?” Larry laughed. How could he still laugh, Judy wondered. Or maybe that’s how he went on winning, or losing and laughing.
“I’ll drop you at your apartment,” Judy said.
There was nothing to say now, so Larry whistled the “Hi-ho” theme from Snow White. In a few minutes they were at Larry’s apartment, a run-down three-story stucco on Yucca north of Hollywood Boulevard.
“Sure you don’ wanna come in?”
“I’m sure,” Judy said, thinking of all the times she would have said “Yes! Yes!” in her fantasies.
“Well, we had a run for our money,” Larry said. He was actually grinning. He wasn’t part of the tragedy. Only she was. Now he was the onlooker.
“I’ll call you—how’s for lunch at the Derby, OK?”
She nodded, thinking, almost admiring—how will he pay for it? He never worries: When he sings, “Life is just a bowl of cherries,” by God he means it …
He wasn’t too drunk or too broke to notice the look on her face, and he wouldn’t have been Larry Moran if he hadn’t wanted to leave her with an upper—“Come on, baby, it’s singin’ in the rain, let a smile be your umbrella, ’member what your boss Sammy said, what they want now is young love, action, music ’n’ laughter!”
She watched him manage to both lurch and swagger his way to the door of the faded yellow-brown stucco apartment. And she wondered when he’d find the hundred-dollar bill she always carried in her change purse.
Now if this had been one of Sammy’s movies, Judy was thinking as she slowly drove home, Larry would have multiplied his thousand by ten, marched out in triumph, signed a new contract and she would have become Mrs. Larry Moran.
But this was Hollywood, the dream factory, with emphasis on factory, where she wasn’t Loretta Young, and Larry Moran wasn’t Larry Moran anymore.
FOR STAN SILVERMAN
who, as editor of the Dartmouth Jack-o’Lantern, gave me early encouragement laced with tough but constructive criticism and who, half a century later, is still with me and at me
ALSO BY BUDD SCHULBERG
FICTION
What Makes Sammy Run?
The Harder They Fall
The Disenchanted
Waterfront
Some Faces in the Crowd
Sanctuary V
Everything That Moves
Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales
NONFICTION
Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali
The Four Seasons of Success
Swan Watch (with Geraldine Brooks)
Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince
Writers in America
(Four Seasons, revised and updated)
PUBLISHED PLAYS AND SCREENPLAYS
A Face in the Crowd
(screenplay, with an introduction by Elia Kazan)
Across the Everglades
(screenplay, with an introduction)
The Disenchanted
(play, with Harvey Breit)
What Makes Sammy Run?
(musical libretto, with Stuart Schulberg)
On the Waterfront
(with an afterword)
ANTHOLOGY
From the Ashes—Voices of Watts
(edited, with an introduction)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BUDD SCHULBERG’s career as a novelist began with the meteoric success of What Makes Sammy Run? Among his other novels are Waterfront, The Harder They Fall, Sanctuary V, and The Disenchanted, which Anthony Burgess included in his New York Times list of “The Ninety-nine Best Novels of the Twentieth Century.”
Schulberg won an Oscar for his screenplay On the Waterfront, several awards for his film A Face in the Crowd, and a Tony nomination for his Broadway adaptation of The Disenchanted. He attributes his ability to adapt his own work to stage or screen to his upbringing in Hollywood, where his father ran a major motion-picture studio.
Currently he is writing the screenplay for What Makes Sammy Run?, scheduled for production early in 1990, coinciding with the publication by Random House of the anniversary edition of his celebrated novel.
Budd Schulberg, Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales
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