What could connect Dartmouth College and a Vermont marble strike with the novel What Makes Sammy Run? They would seem to be a continent apart. But actually, without the former, the latter might never have materialized. It happened like this:
In the mid-thirties, as student editor of The (daily) Dartmouth, I was shoulder-deep if not over my head in the story of the marbleworkers’ union’s struggle for a living wage against the quarry owners, who turned out to be generous, longtime supporters of the college, the Proctor family of Proctor, Vermont. I wrote and featured on our front page a series of articles describing the lives of the families of the marbleworkers, pulling out all stops and not having to exaggerate, since the kids were hungry, the clothes threadbare, and the company houses drafty through bitter winters.
The series had set off an angry confrontation between spontaneous sympathizers with the strike and indignant defenders of the Proctors. To the friendlies, I was an undergraduate John Reed, and to the opposition a traitor to my college and my class. And I don’t mean the Class of ’36. President Ernest Martin Hopkins showed me drawersful of letters demanding my expulsion. The right-wing alumni and the American Legion seemed to think expulsion was much too good for me.
In the midst of this storm in a Dartmouth teacup, Bennett Cerf, the celebrated president of Random House, came to Hanover to deliver one of his joke-studded lectures. He phoned me at The Dartmouth office and asked if I would drop over to see him at the end of the day. Actually our “day” ended at three or four in the morning, when we put the paper to bed, but the Hanover Inn was a scant hundred yards away, so I dropped over around suppertime to meet the famous Mr. Cerf.
Bennett, as I would soon come to know him, told me he had been reading my marble-strike series, was impressed with both the style and content, and wanted to know more about my work. I told him that I had been writing a number of short stories for the campus literary magazine, and also a one-act play, Company Town, based on my experiences in Proctor. The state troopers, blatantly taking the side of the quarry owners, had actually stopped and turned back our trucks delivering food and clothing to the besieged families. (Ah, the bad old thirties!) It was excellent material, and I had made the most of it.
When Bennett asked me what my plans were after graduation, I told him I was going back to Hollywood to work for David Selznick as a reader/junior writer, but I intended to keep my hand in as a short-story writer. “Good,” the ebullient, ever-optimistic head of Random House said. “If you ever have a novel in mind, we’d be interested. Come and see us.”
Back in Hollywood, while working for the now-legendary Dave Selznick, I got my short-story career in gear very quickly. In my first two years out of college, I managed to sell stories to The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Story, Esquire—and Liberty. It was in that quirky mass-market magazine that I first published, in short-story form, “What Makes Sammy Run?” It was so well received that Liberty asked for another Sammy story and I came up with “Love Comes to Sammy Glick.”
Shortly after this I met with Bennett Cerf again. He had read the Liberty stories and asked if I saw them as the seeds of a Hollywood novel. In truth, I was in the process of making notes along that line. I was introduced to Saxe Commins, a warm and sympathetic editor, who encouraged me to leave Hollywood film-writing and come east to write the book. With a $250 advance (against the munificent total of $500) I was on my way. I holed up in Norwich, Vermont, just across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth, and, with outline in hand, began banging away. In less than a year the job was done.
From time to time, I would run out of money and have to stop for a short story to pay the rent and support a young wife and baby daughter. The novel was published on my twenty-seventh birthday, with pre-pub praise from Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara. Bennett had warned me that while he, Saxe, and everybody else at Random House was enthusiastic about the book, I should not expect much of a sale. People who read, they felt, don’t buy “Hollywood” novels.
But Sammy fooled all of us. With a rave from The New York Times, from Dorothy Parker, on coast-to-coast radio from Walter Winchell, and from Damon Runyon, in his salute to Sammy as “the all-American heel,” the book went into eight printings before publication and was the choice of book-review editors as “Best First Novel of the Year.” The hardcover sale went over fifty thousand and the countless paperback editions have sent the circulation into the millions. To my amazement, Sammy Glick is as well known today as he was in 1941 when he first struck terror in the hearts of the Hollywood tycoons.
The two short stories that follow are republished in their original form, the first using dialogue without quotation marks, a stylized or stylish experiment I was drawn to, perhaps from reading Saroyan and other groundbreakers in the thirties.
For the sake of literary history, if that doesn’t sound too pompous, I have left the secondary characters’ names as they were in the original stories. Al Manners, the laid-back narrator who becomes obsessed with Sammy’s ruthless climb to the top, becomes Al Manheim in the novel. Eugene Spitzer, the nebbish whose story Sammy steals for his breakthrough to Hollywood, becomes Julian Blumberg. Geoffrey Boyce, the dignified studio head whose place Sammy usurps, becomes Sidney Fineman. I believe the reason for these changes was to counter the possible charge of anti-Semitism. Since Sammy is obviously Jewish, I thought it should be clear that nearly all his victims—Rosalie, Manheim, Blumberg, Fineman, his brother, Israel—were also Jewish, suggesting the wide range of personalities and attitudes under the one ethnic umbrella.
B.S