What Makes Sammy Run? (41 page)

It was about one o’clock and we were sitting in the kitchenette talking and drinking beer when the phone rang. Kit went to answer it. She called me, handing the phone over significantly.

“It’s for you. And you’ll never guess who.”

I thought of Sammy, installed in his canopied French Empire bed making love to three million dollars. ”

“ ’Lo, Al. Busy?”

His words came quick and sharp as ever, but there was a hollow-ness, a ring of humility I had never heard before.

“Sammy! For God’s sake! What do you want?”

“Al, I want you to come over. I want to talk to you.”

“Tonight? Now? Are you crazy?”

“Do me a favor and come over.”

“Jesus Christ, do you know what time it is?”

“It isn’t much after one o’clock.”

“But what about Laurette?”

“Come on over, Al. Please.”

I tried to think if I had ever heard him say that word before.

“Hold on a minute, Sammy.”

I looked up at Kit. “He wants me to come over. What the hell does he think I am?”

“He knows what you are, darling. That’s why he called you.”

“I’d love to know what it’s about.”

“Go ahead. I ought to be reading a script, anyway. Duty calls, Boswell.”

She understood. I could feel that old preoccupation with the destiny of Sammy Glick gripping me again.

“O.K.,” I said into the mouthpiece. “Keep your pants on. I’m coming.”

I could see the house as I turned in the Bel Air gate. It stood up there on top of a hill like a feudal castle. Bright lights from every room cast their yellow geometric shafts out into the black night.

The big oak-paneled door swung open so soon after I rang that Sammy must have been standing behind it waiting for me. Behind him was a spacious hallway suitable to a public building, with a curving marble stairway and elaborate chandeliers that seemed to dwarf him. He was wearing a silk monogrammed smoking jacket
over his dress trousers. In his hand was an almost empty highball glass. I had never seen him drunk before.

As I entered he grabbed my hand feverishly. His palm was damp. “Thanks, Tootsie. What took you so long?”

It had only been fifteen minutes from the time he called.

I followed Sammy through one bright and costly room after another until we reached the bar. He seemed to be suffering from a severe shock, terrifyingly becalmed, like an injured motorist wandering around after a bloody collision.

He mixed my drink in silence and then as he handed it to me over the bar he blurted, “Goddam it, I just didn’t have the guts to stick it out here alone tonight. I went through the house and turned all the lights on. I kept the radio going full blast. I sat at the bar and tried to get myself stinko. No dice. I was talking to myself. I was going nuts. Jesus, Al, you’re easygoing. You’re sane. Talk to me, Al. Keep me from going nuts.”

“When did she leave?” I said.

“How’d you know?” he asked anxiously.

“Doesn’t take a Philo Vance.”

“Oh,” he said, and he looked relieved. “I thought maybe it was out already. There’s so goddam much talk in this town. You’ve got to promise not to let it get out. I’ll ruin you in this town if you ever let it out.”

“Balls with that ruining-me-in-this-town stuff,” I said.

He came out from behind the bar and stood in front of me apologetically.

“O.K. Al, forget it. It just came out before I knew what I was saying. I know you’re regular, Al. You never tried to bitch me out of anything. I can talk to you. That’s why I got you over. If I can only talk it out, I’ll feel better, you know, get it out of my system. Like puking.”

His damp hands wiped up and down his face. Then his conversation went on jerkily and I had the impression that it was out of sync with the movement of his lips.

“After the wedding, a goddam madhouse. Nothing but champagne. Twenty-five hundred bucks’ worth down the drain. People
cockeyed all over the joint. Can’t find Laurette. Make a goddam fool of myself asking everybody if they seen Laurette. Then upstairs in the guest room … Jesus Christ, with that new punk I just signed, Carter Judd …”

He emptied his highball, keeping his face for a long time in his glass.

“Judd ducked out as I came in. But she just pulled herself together and waited for me. Just waited for me as if it was nothing at all.”

Sammy’s face blotched red and white, unable to hide the pain of his wounded pride. His features became so ugly and distorted I knew I was going to see him cry. He started to say, “I can’t believe … I thought …” and the tears came, forming foolishly in the corners of his fierce little eyes. I wondered why I thought of surrealism when I saw him cry and then I remembered the Dali exhibit of rain falling inside a taxicab. This was no less bizarre, no less grotesque. Sammy’s tears were rain falling inside a taxicab.

After the tears, came, hideously, the tight, strained, hysterical little sobs he tried so futilely to choke. But he couldn’t hold it any longer and the dam broke and the tears flowed over. He tried to blot his face with his handkerchief and when the flow could no longer be checked that way he sat down on the stool with his elbows on the bar and cried into his nervous little hands.

When he got his voice again he didn’t want me to see how he looked, so he spoke through his fingers latticed against his face. Before his speech had been nervous broken discords. Now his words came haltingly, absently, one at a time.

“I told her I couldn’t understand it. From a lousy casting couch broad, maybe. But when a high-class girl like her, a lady, an aristocrat …”

It was no fake. He was devastated. Kit was right. His was no calculating marriage for position. It did not have to be. He had fallen in love with position, with the name and the power of Harrington, and it came to him not as something sordid and cold but as love, as deep respect for Laurette’s upbringing and attraction to her personality and desire for her body.

He paused a long time, the glibness gone. In his mouth was the thick, sour taste of defeat, and distress was ugly on him. He was sweating with strain and the shame of it.

“It wasn’t so much what I saw. Hell, we were all drunk and kidding around. It was how she spoke to me, just stood there like a haughty bitch, saying …” His hands began to massage his face slowly again. “Jesus, I’ll never forget what she said …”

He balanced a desperate moment on the threshold, swaying, his eyes bulging, terribly sober
.

She came forward, straight at him, smoothing out her dress, the lovely cream satin wedding gown that Princess Pignatelli would be gushing over in her society column next morning
.

Her voice was vicious and low, drunken and passionate. Ugly and hoarse to Sammy. “Well?” she said
.

He waited for her to alibi, plead, weep, swear, apologize. But that was all she said. He waited for her to wilt beneath his righteous (and horrified, and frightened) stare, but she only stood there, proud and composed, stately and perverse and cruelly self-possessed. These were the elements he had loved and admired, and suddenly he hated them, he wanted to hide from them
.

“Don’t stand there gasping like a fish out of water,” she said. “What have you got to gasp about? You’ve got what you want. And Dad’s got what he wants. And little Laurie’s going to get what she wants.”

“What do you mean?” Sammy said, feeling his words fade off into the air like a skywriter’s. “What are you talking about?”

“Now listen, dear,” she said. “We’re going to see a lot of each other. What’s the use of trying to fool ourselves? I know why you married me—for the same reason you do everything else. And don’t worry—I won’t let you down. I’ll be the best hostess this town ever had. I’ll handle this pan of the business, and I’ll be careful, I won’t let my private life interfere with your career. Only you and I just signed a contract—the same goes both ways.”

He had wanted the devotion of Rosalie Goldbaum, he had wanted the companionship of Kit, he had wanted the domesticity
of Ruth Mintz and the glamour of Rita Royce, and he had thought he was getting the drop on all of them (and something more, something indispensable) in Laurette Harrington
.

His chin went forward defensively, he stood there drawing in slack sail, tightening up, and when he answered her his voice was screwed down hard, cold and metallic
.

“Sure. But the joint is lousy with snoopy columnists, that’s all. You want it to look right, don’t you? Now go on back to the party and stay out of the two-shots. Unless they’re with me.”

Then she smiled at him boldly and she seemed to tower above him as she came forward to take his frenzied little face in her hands and kiss it on the forehead as if they had been married twenty years
.

“All right, dear,” she said
.

He was imitating her voice.” ‘All right, dear.’ That was just the way she said it, ‘All right, dear.’ ”

“Where is she, now?” I said.

His shoulders rose and fell in a hopeless shrug. “How the hell do I know? With that Judd bastard, I suppose. I can keep him in louse parts till he’s a dead pigeon in pictures. But where will that get me? There’ll be others. They’ll be around her like flies, the sons-of-bitches. And the night I made her I thought I was the greatest guy in the world. Why, she’s a … Why, she’s nothing but a high-class …”

Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you, I sang to myself, in a small clear voice. Ah, at last I know the secret of it all …

“I don’t know what the hell to do,” Sammy said. “What would you do, Al? What would you do if you were me?”

“Sammy,” I said, “I’d like to help you, but that’s a very hypothetical question. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

He studied me quizzically. “You hate my guts, don’t you? You hate my guts just like all the rest of them.”

It was said without antagonism. Spoken regretfully.

“No,” I said, “that isn’t quite true. If you want to know what I really think—I think you couldn’t help yourself. With you it was
a choice of being a nice guy and a flop or the way you are now. No, I guess you didn’t even have that choice. The world decided it for you.”

“Don’t give me that double-talk,” he said. “I’m in a spot. No kidding, what would you do?”

“Sammy,” I said, “all I can tell you is that I’d pull out of this set-up so fast …”

He was back on his feet fast and his energy seemed to be flowing back into his body again.

“By God, I will! I’ll start moving out right now. By the time that bitch gets back in the morning she won’t even find a collar-button lying around this dump. I’ll get Charles out of bed. I’ll call the chauffeur …”

He started running across the room. Then suddenly he stopped and stared ahead, staring at something that wasn’t there, like a sleepwalker.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said.

“Now, what?”

“I wonder how walking out on his daughter will hit old man Harrington?”

“What do you care?” I said. “You don’t need Harrington. You’ve arrived.”

“But Christ,” Sammy complained, “you never know how you stand in this crazy business. Take that kid Ross, for instance. He’s got something on the ball. But I don’t like him. Don’t trust him. He’s a smart-aleck. I can see already he thinks he knows more than I do. And who the hell knows, maybe he does. But with Harrington in my corner …”

I could see the future running through his mind like ticker tape:

Mr. and Mrs. Glick entertain Morgan partners … Mr. and Mrs. Glick fly east to spend Christmas at famous Harrington estate … Among those seen at ringside tables after the opening were Samuel Glick and his lovely wife the former Laurette Harrington dazzling in white sequins and ermine … Just good friends says Laurette Glick of Clark Judd of Freddie Epson of Maurice del Rios … Utterly ridiculous says Mrs. Glick of
separation rumors … Cheap gossip says Samuel Glick in Chicago alone for studio convention … Harrington millions said to be behind Glick Productions … Mr. and Mrs. Glick request the pleasure of …

“Sammy,” I said as I stood up, “I hope you and Laurette will be very happy.”

I started to leave.

“Stick around,” Sammy said, and he picked up the phone on the end of the bar.

“Hello, Sheik …!” He laughed loudly. “I did! Well, bring her over here, ask her if she’s got a friend.… No, it’s no gag.… Goddam right I mean it … No, not her, she always tells me what a great actress she is and she’s all washed up, and she’s a lousy lay, anyway … Jesus, what the hell good are you? Sure, sure I know you can’t get me an Academy Winner at two o’clock in the morning … Ha, ha, ha … Hey, wait a minute!”

He turned to me energetically. “Hey, Al, remember Billie, the redhead I fixed you up with at the Back Lot a long time ago? I wouldn’t mind some of that tonight. Haven’t got her phone number by any chance?”

“She’s turned pro,” I said. “She’s working out of Gladys’s.”

“Hell,” he said. “I like to roll my own. I was going to make that dame open up tonight.”

I found myself getting satisfaction out of saying, “You better be satisfied to take her this way. Because I happen to know the only way you’d ever get to Billie is pay as you enter. You’ll never be able to understand it, but Billie is folks. Billie is a very moral lady.”