What Makes Sammy Run? (17 page)

CHAPTER 6       

F
ifteen minutes early, Julian’s hesitating voice trembled up to me from the reception room. I hated to keep him waiting because I know how it is when you’re down; the most trivial slight becomes persecution. But I didn’t want to leave too soon in case my producer called. Writers usually cover up for each other, but I couldn’t trust that bitchy streak in Pancake.

When I went downstairs I found Julian looking even more miserable than the night before. “It’s awfully nice of you …” he began.

“Let’s see,” I said, “where shall we eat?”

I ran through the usual list automatically. “Like Chinese food?”

Anything, he would eat anything.

“Good,” I said, “there’s a pretty good little Chinese place around the corner.”

A Chinese joint is usually a good place to talk, because it’s almost always empty and the waiter is so busy reading his language paper in the back that he barely has time to drop his plates and run. It’s easier to talk around waiters who seem more interested in something they can’t wait to get back to.

I ordered egg foo yong and cold pork and Julian thought a while and decided he would have the same and I yelled after the waiter to throw in a bottle of sake. Then I waited for Julian to begin.

He leaned forward uncomfortably, nervously cracking his knuckles.

“Don’t crack your knuckles,” I said. “It’s bad for your hands.”

He dropped his hands into his lap in embarrassment.

“I know,” he said. “Blanche keeps telling me.”

“Who’s Blanche?” I said.

“Oh, gee, I’m awfully sorry to bother you about all this, Mr. Manheim,” Julian said. “But that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Blanche is my wife. And she’s going to leave me.”

I hadn’t even known he was married. Why do poor little
nebs
like Julian always have to be the first ones married?

“We’ve been married three years,” he said. “Blanche and I were engaged all through high school. We’ve always been crazy about each other. And now …”

His voice trailed off like a distant radio station fading and I had to wait for it to come back again. “Now she says she’s going back to New York.”

I was sorry, very. But I was sorry about so many things I couldn’t do anything about.

“But you could,” he said. “If you could only talk to Mr. Glick. After all he’d listen to you—you’re a good friend of his.”

Please, Julian, I thought. When you say that, smile.

But that would have been asking too much of him at the moment. It struck me that Julian and Sammy must have been just about the same age, twenty-two or -three, probably brought up in the same kind of Jewish family, same neighborhood, same schooling,
and started out with practically the same job. And yet they couldn’t have been more different if one had been born an Eskimo and the other the Prince of Wales. And there were so many Julian Blumbergs in the world. Jews without money, without push, without plots, without any of the characteristics which such experts on genetics as Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford and Father Coughlin try to tell us are racial traits. I have seen too many of their lonely, frightened faces packed together in subways or staring out of thousands of dingy rooms as my train hurled past them on the elevated from 125th Street into Grand Central, too many Jewish
nebs
and poets and starving tailors and everyday little guys to consider the fascist answer to What Makes Sammy Run? And yet, if the same background that produced a Sammy Glick could nurture a Julian Blumberg, it wasn’t an open-and-shut case of environment either. I filed a mental note to mull over Kit’s idea again, that Sammy’s childhood environment was the breeding ground for the predatory germ that thrived in Sammy’s blood, leaving him with one of the most severe cases of the epidemic.

“Sammy Glick!” I said. “You don’t mean to tell me that your wife and Sammy …?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I don’t mean that. But I swear to God, Mr. Manheim, even that wouldn’t be as bad. It isn’t my wife that Glick’s stolen—it’s my—my whole life.”

I wished his eyes could have been angry, but they weren’t. They only cried.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “If you’re talking about the credit for that story, I’m with you. But I don’t see what I can do about it, Julian.”

“Oh, that isn’t it,” he said. “That story doesn’t matter, Mr. Manheim.”

“My name’s Al,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But that was just the beginning. Jesus, if I could only have my job in the ad department back and go on writing my novel at night. I can’t even write any more, Mr. Manheim. Honest to Christ, if I had a little more guts I’d throw myself off that bridge in Pasadena.”

His voice threatened to get away from him.

“Hold it,” I said. “You better eat that while it’s hot. There’s nothing lousier than cold Chinese food.

“Then begin at the beginning. Take your time. And telling me how upset you are won’t do either of us any good. Try to hold yourself down to the facts.”

I poured the sake and he wet his lips with it. When he began again he dropped his voice to a flat monotone to keep it steady.

It seems that Rosalie Goldbaum wasn’t the only one waiting for a letter when Sammy went west. Sammy was supposed to lay the groundwork for Julian and let him know the moment he found an opening. So Julian kept his little job in the ad department, waiting for
Der Tag.
But the only news of Sammy he ever had was via Parsons’ column. Finally, Blanche made him sit down and write a letter. It was long, plaintive and unanswered
.

One night he came home from his job to find Blanche packing. For the vacation in the Catskills she had been wanting? No, to California, to Hollywood
.

“But Blanche!” he said. “We haven’t heard from Sammy Glick. How can we go to Hollywood?”

Blanche was short and lean, toughened in the same tenements that Julian had passed through so curiously untouched
.

“Sit down and eat your dinner before it gets cold, Julie,” she said. “We’re going to California in the secondhand car I bought with part of the story money this afternoon. We’re going to pay a little visit to that friend Glick you were all the time telling me was doing so much for you.”

“Blanche, you sound mad. Don’t be mad at me,” he said
.

“Oh, don’t be silly, I love you,” she said furiously. “If I didn’t love you it wouldn’t get me so sore to see you let a
gonif
like Glick make a dope out of you when I know you could be a fine writer. Now sit down and eat so you can get through and help me pack.”

They had three blowouts, their radiator cracked from overheating crossing the Continental Divide, Julian drove a hundred miles out
of their way one night when Blanche fell asleep and when they arrived in Hollywood Sammy wouldn’t see them
.

They called the studio every day for a week, but Sammy was never in. They couldn’t reach him at home because the studio wouldn’t tell them where he was living. They frequented places they couldn’t afford, hoping to run into him. It wasn’t until their money had dwindled to the margin Blanche had laid aside in case they had to drive East again that Julian managed to get Sammy on the other end of a telephone
.

Sammy dispensed with the overtures. His voice grated: “Listen
, shtunk,
for Chri’sake who the hell told you to come out here?”

“But Mr. Glick, I thought …”

“The hell you did. If you thought you would have stayed home. Didn’t I tell you I’d send for you when the time came?”

“Yes, but I didn’t think it would take …”

“Listen, kid,” Sammy’s voice suddenly soft-pedaled. “Don’t think I’m having any cakewalk. As soon as I get set I’ll be able to fix you up, but right now they’ve got me going around in circles.” He paused, trying to suck Julian in on the laugh. “I guess we’re just a couple of kids who didn’t know when we were well off, hey, Julian?”

Julian thought of the trip home, of the lousy job, and Blanche. “Mr. Glick, I told Blanche you wouldn’t give me the runaround. There must be some way you could get me in. Not even as a writer. Maybe the story department could use a …”

“Look, do you wanna be smart?” Sammy told him. “Get the hell out of this lousy town and back to New York. You won’t have a prayer around here until the fall anyway—the summer’s always slow …” Then his voice tensed and quickened. “Listen, pal, they’re calling me for a conference. I’ll shoot you a wire the first time anything looks hot—now be a smart guy like I toldya. Have a nice trip back.” And he cut Julian off
.

I don’t know how he looked when he really hung up that phone but the secondhand version he gave me in the booth of that
Chinese restaurant was the closest I ever want to come to it. His pale blue eyes were pink-rimmed and his skin looked too thin to hold his face in. It was not a weak but a sensitive face, which seemed to be characterized by the gentle curve of a delicate nose.

“For days I didn’t even have the nerve to tell Blanche I had talked to him,” Julian said. “I knew what she would say and I felt like a big enough sap already. You know, love is a funny thing, Mr. Manheim. There never was anything small or selfish about Blanche, and yet I think things would have been better between us if I could have come home with that writing job.”

So he spent three weeks riding the street cars and the buses and trying to get by the studio reception desks. His Hollywood wasn’t that exclusive night club where everyone knew everybody else. He learned that Hollywood extended from Warner Brothers at Burbank, in the valley beyond the northern hills, to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, twenty-five miles southwest in Culver City. He found a new side of Hollywood, the ten-man-for-every-job side, the seasonal unemployment, the call-again-next-month side. The factory side. He learned how many Julian Blumbergs there were, who found nothing but No Admittance signs, for every Sammy Glick who opens the lock with a wave of his cigar like a magic wand
.

It wasn’t until he had made the rounds of all the major studios and began ringing doorbells on Poverty Row that he had his first nibble. A shoestring producer told him he had bought the stock shots from
Hell’s Angels
and
Wings
and needed an airplane story with no more than three principal characters, in as few interiors as possible
.

He worked all week and when the producer told him he seemed to be on the right track he put in another feverish week, finishing a thirty-page outline of a tight little melodrama. The producer’s secretary (who was also his entire staff) asked Julian to leave the manuscript with the assurance that if it were approved he would be hired. Two weeks later it was returned in the mail, with a brief, formal note
.

An unemployed writer in the hotel put him wise. Julian had
fallen for a familiar Poverty Row economy gag. The producer encourages as many as a dozen aspiring writers to work on his idea. They knock themselves out over his story for two or three weeks in return for nothing but the vaguest of promises. Then the producer comes out of it with enough free ideas to nourish the one writer he finally hires
.

When Julian heard this there was nothing to do but make a full confession to Blanche and throw the suitcase into the back seat again
.

The drive back took them three days longer than they expected because of a short in the battery and the piston rings’ wearing out. They had the trip budgeted so carefully that they reached Blanche’s parents’ apartment in the Bronx with exactly forty-three cents
.

“So you can imagine how we felt when we read this telegram,” Julian said. “Mother said it had been waiting there several days. I saved it as a souvenir of my Hollywood career.”

His mouth smiled, but nothing happened to his eyes. “It’s turned out to be the only item in my collection.”

He handed me the over-fingered, often-folded telegram. I read it, and then I read it again, and then again. It was like hearing Sammy Glick’s voice in the room.

DEAR JULIAN. HERE IS GREATEST BREAK OF YOUR LIFE. HAVE SCREEN-WRITING JOB FOR YOU. ENCLOSING MONEY FOR IMMEDIATE AIRLINE TRIP TO HOLLYWOOD FOR YOU AND WIFE. WIRE COLLECT WHEN I SHOULD MEET YOU AT AIRPORT. YOUR PAL

SAMMY

So the day the Blumbergs arrived from Hollywood in their broken-down jalopy they were flying back again via TWA. Sammy was waiting at the airport. He threw his arms around Julian like a brother. Five minutes later they were in the car Sammy had hired, rushing back to town
.

Julian’s mouth was dry with excitement. He thought he was heading straight for the studio
.

Twenty minutes later he found himself in Sammy’s apartment. Sammy wasn’t losing a moment. He sat Julian down, handed him a script and told him he could start working
.