What Makes Sammy Run? (30 page)

“That’s all I have to worry about when I get back to New York,” I said. “Except for the little matter of finding a job.”

Sammy had paid his check and was making an exit. He looked over at us, waved fleetingly and ran.

I watched Sammy at the entrance, standing under the big caricature of Franklin D., looking the place over as if he were about to stick it up, while his man Sheik was helping him into his brown suede overcoat. Then Sammy adjusted with casual care the green Tyrolean hat that his face would never suit, Rita floated out of the ladies’ room and they were off.

“I wonder what shoes he’s wearing now,” I said. “Probably some little number whipped up by his official cobbler, with laces of human hair plucked from the heads of leading ladies.”

“He must have twenty pair,” she said. “What is that special yen for shoes?”

“Maybe he’s trying to find a pair he can’t wear out in a day,” I said. “If I solve the mystery in New York I’ll shoot a wire.”

We were on our porch watching the lights black out over Hollywood again.

We talked about everything, about the Guild and about Sammy and about screen writing and about the revolt of the generals that had just begun in Spain, but it wasn’t like any of the good talks we had had before, because words that night could only be a buzzing of irrelevance.

I kept noticing the wordless things, the casual, unladylike way she leaned over the porch wall, not caring what the wind did with her hair. The way the glow from the room behind us highlighted the bony handsomeness of her face; how long we were conscious of the closeness of our hands before they finally met, and then how much harder it was to talk.

And finally I said, “Kit, I’ve been trying to think of fancy ways of saying this for the past two hours. God, I’ve wanted you a long time! I guess you know how long, and I thought tonight …”

She looked at me and I saw how beautiful her eyes could be when they weren’t being hard and I met the look, inquisitively, and she turned away to stare out at the lights far below.

“Hell, this isn’t a roll in the hay for me, there’s plenty of that around. This is, well, maybe the best way of saying good-bye …” There was a pool of nausea in my stomach that suddenly became anger. “After all, I’m not a Sammy Glick that hits and runs.”

I thought she was going to get sore because I was, but instead she said, “Look, darling, I was never going to mention it again, but as long as you have … With Sammy there could never be any complications. You know how he is, monolithic, just tosses it off, never lets you get inside, no emotional entanglements to slow him down. But you, you’re such a sentimental dope, you’d be calling me long distance before you passed Kansas City, wanting to make an honest woman of me.”

She looked up at me, almost shyly, and grinned. “Or I’d be calling you.”

That was all it needed and her lips seemed to be there waiting and I had a flash of that first moment we danced together when she had almost seemed to take the lead. It was the same struggle now, the impulses controlled so long finally pouring out in unexpected violence, and then suddenly she relaxed. “Feminine as hell,” I could remember her saying, and I could feel myself holding her, feel her body accept my hands.

Then we were in the bedroom and I was fumbling impatiently with her dress but she stopped me, saying, “Don’t, Al. Let me do it. I’ll be right back.”

I didn’t understand then, but I did a minute later when she returned, her body trim and cool and confident.

“Hello,” she said in a half-whisper and we looked at each other as she switched off the main lights.

There is always that fear of anti-climax, that it won’t click, but
from the first moment both of us knew that was something we would never have to worry about. It was the way she went at a script, or fought for the Guild or played tennis.

Then she stretched to turn on the lamp near the bed.

“Hello,” I answered and we both smiled, our new, intimate smile. She reached over and laid her hand on my shoulder affectionately. Sammy may go through every girl in Hollywood, I thought, but this is another pleasure he will never know, the give-and-take companionship, the overtones. Slip ’em a lay, I could hear him saying. Sure, I get in three times a week, gratis.

We must have been lying there a long time, for the electric lights had become part of the night before and the dawn was a pale blue canopy over our window.

“Kit,” I said. “Maybe you were right. Maybe I would be calling you by the time I reached Needles. So why don’t you save us both a lot of time by coming along with me? We’ll get married when we get in.”

She hesitated a long time, but I could tell she wasn’t thinking it over, just trying to find the words to let me down easy.

“Al,” she said, “you could stay here and let me support you until this thing blew over, but you’d be miserable. You wouldn’t feel you had a place. That’s the way I’d feel if I left here now.”

“But God knows you could find plenty to do around New York.”

“Yes, but I’ve spent four years trying to be a screen writer and I’m just beginning to learn how to be a good one. Now that
Jefferson
is clicking, I’m getting assignments that really give me a chance to do something.”

We were as much apart now as if a bundling board had been there between us. “This is what I was afraid of,” she said. “Starting something we can’t finish. I thought you’d understand.”

“I wasn’t going to,” I said, “but, oh, hell, if you were just willing to trail me around and wait for me to come home for supper—I suppose that wouldn’t be you any more.”

She clasped her hands in back of her head thoughtfully.

“I’m going to miss you,” she said.

I sat there in the diner looking out at the pink-brown desert and finishing my coffee in peace when the steward handed me a Los Angeles paper.

I had caught the Hollywood habit of opening it straight to the film section. Sammy’s picture was in the lead column, denying the rumor that he and Rita Royce were secretly married. “I respect Miss Royce tremendously,” Sammy was quoted, “and we seem to have a great many mutual interests, such as the new play I’m writing for her.” The words read like an old refrain: “But we’re just good friends, very good friends.”

And then I came to what Sammy would call the topperoo.

Mr. Glick, the column cooed, is the young miracle man who has just signed a writer-producer contract with World-Wide. “Last night on the phone he would only laugh modestly when I asked him to confirm my tip-off from reliable inside sources that this new contract will begin at $2000 a week.”

I could just imagine that modest laughter. Sammy could only have one kind of laugh for $2000 a week and I was glad I didn’t have to be around to hear it.

I sat on the observation platform thinking of the evening when two thousand dollars a week had only been a terrible passion sizzling in his belly and it was consoling just to lean back and let the distance between us widen tie by tie. I listened to the sound of the wheels carrying on their endless conversation with the tracks. At first their rapid chatter sounded like nothing but metallic and monotonous double-talk. But later, as my ear became accustomed to their language, I realized that they were asking each other, over and over again, What Makes Sammy Run? What makes Sammy run what makes sammy run what makes sammy runwhatmakessammyrun …

CHAPTER 9       

I
t may sound like sour grapes but it was good to get Hollywood and Sammy Glick behind me. The first day I hit New York I must have walked a couple of hundred blocks. It felt great even though I was broke and New York can be a lonely and ugly town for the guys without money. But I ran into some of the old gang right away, guys who were nicer to you when you needed it than when you didn’t, and pretty soon I was back in the old groove, pounding it out for the
Record
again, beginning to work Hollywood out of my system.

I mean I was able to look at a guy without wondering whether he was a five- or a seventy-five-hundred man, and I could sit back in a movie and enjoy my fifty-five-cent dream without torturing
myself with the knowledge that the best scene in the picture had gone the way of all censors or that the writing which was credited to a famous Broadway playwright because he had a sole screenplay credit clause in his contract was really the work of half a dozen busy little B-writers.

But best of all I congratulated myself on getting Sammy Glick out of my life, or rather, getting myself out of his. Once in a while I couldn’t help reading about him, of course; one of the fan mags would name him on its list of Hollywood’s Ten Most Eligible Bachelors, or he was off to Hawaii for a much-needed rest, and I caught myself searching for his name in the columns from time to time, but on the whole I was able to conduct my life as if he had never been a part of it, settling down with the comforting thought that he would never be again.

This thought persisted for almost four weeks. Then one night some of us were sitting around the office a trifle on the alcohol side and the conversation took a sudden turn for Sammy Glick. One of the boys had just seen a picture of his,
Touchdown, Irish!
a drama of Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen, with exactly the same plot as
Hold ’em, Yale!
Sammy’s football picture of the season before, and of course we began to swap anecdotes of his days on the
Record
, all told with a sense of indignation, humor and envy. And then we got to arguing, God knows why, about where he came from. There were votes for the Bronx and Washington Heights and the Lower East Side and the usual bets were made. We wondered how we could settle it, and then I had a brainstorm. Didn’t we used to keep a file on all our employees?

Nobody knew, of course, so I yelled across to Osborne on the copy desk, “Hey, Oz, don’t we keep some sort of file on all the guys that work here?” and Osborne wasn’t sure, he had only been on the
Record
a couple centuries, and I could hear the question running through the room, “Hey, Jack, we got a personnel filing system in the joint?” and Jack saying he had heard of something like that, but he wouldn’t know where it was.