I was sitting at my typewriter hoping for an interruption when the phone rang.
“Mr. Manheim,” a smooth male voice began importantly. “I am calling for Mr. Glick.”
“Well, for Chris’sake, when did he blow in?”
The way the important voice ignored my familiarity was a quiet reprimand. “Mr. Glick only expects to be in town a short time and I am making up a list of his appointments for the week. He would like to have you come in this Thursday at six o’clock.”
Why not? I thought. Now that I finally have him cross-indexed in my mind, he can’t give me mental indigestion any more. I can just sit back and watch him running through the next act as if it were a Greek tragedy. Or rather, an American tragedy.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I can make it. Where do I go?”
“Waldorf Towers,” he said. “Suite Thirty-three E.”
Twinkle, twinkle little guy, I thought. Up above the world so high.
When I finally found my way up to Sammy’s apartment, I was admitted by his Man Friday, Sheik Dugan, who ushered me in with beautiful manners, and I realized who it was I had spoken to on the phone. It was difficult to determine what Sheik’s official status was, but from the variety of duties he seemed to perform during my visit I would guess he had become a sort of combination secretary, valet, business manager, companion and procurer.
Sheik’s manner made me feel I was being led before royalty as he guided me through the lavish sitting room to an enormous, high-ceilinged bedroom where Sammy was sitting in a silk, initialed lounging robe while some guy was down on his knees in front of him tracing the outline of his foot on a special piece of paper.
I wasn’t sure whether he had taken on weight or whether it was just authority.
“Hello, Al,” he called. “How’s the boy?” He offered me his left hand, the Hollywood handshake. “Be with you in a minute. Just being measured for some shoes.”
It wasn’t the usual quick job with the sliding ruler. The man was measuring his foot from every possible angle and writing it all down on the chart. I sat there and watched the ceremony.
“Your left foot is eight and three-fifths, width B minus,” the fitter announced. “The right is eight and two-fifths, width an even B.”
Sammy seemed pleased with the discrepancy. “You see,” he said, “that’s why I have to have my shoes made to order. They may cost a little more but they wear twice as long. And when shoes don’t fit me perfectly, I get headaches.”
The shoe man took us both in with a salesman’s smile. “No use telling Mr. Glick anything about shoes,” he said. “He knows more about them than I do!”
“Well, in my business shoes are important,” Sammy explained. “I must walk nine or ten miles every story conference.”
“Now, what we like to do with our regular clients,” said the salesman, “is make a plaster mold of their feet. Then our designers can draw up any style shoe you wish and you’re sure of getting a one-hundred-percent perfect fit.”
Sammy couldn’t have been more flattered if he had been asked to pose for a bronze bust.
“Fine,” he said. “On your way out check with Mr. Dugan as to when I’ll have time for you again.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Glick,” said the shoe expert and he salaamed out.
“Well, Al, good to see you again,” Sammy said. “How have things been going for you?”
His tone was cordial but no longer chummy. More the democratic employer showing that he still knows the elevator boy’s name.
Sheik poked his head in the door. “Better start dressing, tootsie. Rita says she’ll be down in twenty minutes.”
“That gives me exactly an hour,” Sammy cracked. “Are my things laid out?”
“Maybe I better duck,” I said.
“No,” Sammy said. “Stick around. New York’s such a merry-go-round I may not have time to see you again. This trip is one of those quickies. Just in to catch some shows and see a few people and back to the jute mill. Let’s talk while I’m dressing.”
Sammy had caught the Hollywood habit of putting every waking moment to use. It reminded me of the famous director who even had his secretary go on reading scripts to him through the bathroom door.
“What’s this I hear about you and my old lady?” Sammy laughed as he started to throw his clothes on the bed. “You should have heard what she was giving out with about you this morning. Absolutely meshugah for you. You’re a sweet guy to go to all that trouble.”
The way he said it made me sorry I had ever gone down. It looked too much like sucking around. That was the only way Sammy saw it and it seemed to give him a new respect for me. He felt I was catching on.
He was stripped down to his silk shorts and I had to follow him to the bathroom as he started to shave.
“That was the first time I’ve seen the old lady since I went out to the Coast,” Sammy said. “Isn’t she a great character? What the hell, we don’t know how to be happy. We don’t know we’re having a good time until the waiter at the Troc hands us a check for a hundred bucks.”
Sammy Glick, I thought, the homely philosopher of the Waldorf Towers.
“I tell you, it was a real thrill,” Sammy went on. “But this’ll kill you. As I was getting out of the cab, some Hebe who was unloading a fish wagon took a look at me and yelled, ‘Well, how d’ya like it down here? Enjoying the sights?’ Is that a laugh? Right on the spot where I was born!”
I had the picture, Sammy the conquering hero, returning home in a wraparound camel’s-hair and an Eddie Schmidt suit, and some little guy Sammy might have gone to school with, a Jewish workman up since five, smelling of fish and hating his job, suddenly crying out his bitterness at this arrogant slummer.
It was a laugh all right, but only Sammy’s kind of laughter. The Jewish fish-boy didn’t know it but he was right. The closest Sammy could ever get to recapturing his youth was to go slumming.
Sammy had finished shaving and his beard was replaced by a clean blue shadow. I followed him back into the bedroom again as Sheik began to help him into his evening clothes.
“Well, I’ll have to run you out of here in a minute,” Sammy began in a new, efficient voice. “So I better tell you what I’ve got in mind for you. I suppose you know I’m assisting Sidney Fineman with the whole program. But just before I left the Coast I talked him into letting me make a couple of pictures on my own. These have to be B’s of course. But I want them to be unusual B’s—little pictures with big ideas.”
“Little pictures which show that you should be making the big pictures,” I said.
“Right!” he said, and then he looked at me searchingly. I tried to look innocent, but I knew he was beginning to suffer just as much about playing second fiddle to Fineman as he had about being a copy boy or only making five hundred dollars a week. Instead of sitting on the roof of the tenement with that terrible hunger to be out of the slums, he was up there on top of the Waldorf going crazy to get out of the B-picture field he was just about to enter.
“I’ve got plenty of great ideas,” he said. “One of them is to make a newspaper picture—only not the usual drunken reporter and madcap heiress crap. The real thing—the way you and I know it. Hoked up of course.”
“Something like The Front Page?” I said.
I couldn’t even get a rise out of him any more. That night at Paine’s swimming pool he was pretending to be a big shot. Now he was beginning to be one and the difference was interesting.
“Something like that,” he said. “Only more (he snapped his fingers loudly) up-to-date, more of an exposé. And I’m thinking of bringing you out to do the job.”
He threw it away, but not quickly enough to hide the gloat. I thought of that day he ran off with half my column. And I thought how funny it was that this latest gesture could spring from kindness, loyalty, shrewdness or sheer perversity.
“It won’t be like working for one of those high-powered producers,” he was saying. “You’ll be able to get to me any time you need help.”
“You forget who I am,” I said. “Blacklist Bill. Don’t let my gentle expression fool you. I am a subversive influence.”
“For Christ’s sake, I can get on the phone and clean that up in two minutes,” he said.
I was so eager to get back to Hollywood and try to win my H that I was even willing to let Sammy send me into the game. But since I had no illusions about how long my benefactor would stand by me if he found he didn’t need me, I thought I had better hold that need up to the light of reason a moment or two before I rushed for my trunk.
“What makes you so hot for me all of a sudden? I should think you’d want to start playing safe with a top-notch screen writer.”
“I’ve thought it out from every angle,” he said. “All I can spend on these pictures is two hundred grand, top. You figure your writing cost shouldn’t be over ten percent of the whole nut, so I couldn’t afford any of the top guys, anyway. Which is okay with me. What the hell, any halfwit is liable to get a good job out of a Lawrence Paine or a Bob Griffin. Nobody is going to go around saying, Did you see the great script Sammy Glick got out of Bob Griffin? And, anyway, I’d like to start out with somebody congenial. I thought of you first because of that promise I made in the Troc a couple of years ago. You could have done me a lot of harm by shooting off your mouth that night. I like to have people loyal around me.”
I think the main reason he picked me out was the one he didn’t mention. He was tackling something a little too early—like Shirley Stebbins—and he was just as unsure of himself. He probably wouldn’t stay scared very long but just at this moment it was reassuring to have me work for him. It gave him that necessary sense of power.
That made me realize why he was being so generous with Sheik. Israel had told me that when Sheik returned from reform school, he got himself a string of dames, hung around with the East Side gamblers and tried to muscle in on some of the small-fry rackets. But he was just another tough guy in an overcrowded field and about all he got for his troubles were a Heidelberg scar, a dose, and a couple of years in the can.
The second time he got out he heard that Sammy was in the dough out in Hollywood, so he wrote him for a little on account and while he was about it he wondered if there was anything in Hollywood he could do.
He didn’t really expect to get an answer but two weeks later a letter arrived with a train ticket and traveling expenses. Sheik would never understand why, but through this he became the instrument of Sammy’s endless revenge. Now Sheik was well-fed and well-mannered and elegant in white tie, but he was still the enemy slave brought home behind the conqueror’s chariot. He was the measuring stick that was always at Sammy’s elbow to remind him of his rise. Here was Sheik, whose fists had broken Sammy’s face, living the life of his malevolent dreams, and yet hanging by a hair which Sammy could snap any moment he wanted to drop him back into the ratholes and the flop-joints again.
As I was going out, Rita Royce and her party blew in.
“This is one of my writers,” Sammy introduced me. “I’m bringing him back to the Coast with me. He’s going to do my first picture, Deadline.”
While my hand was making the rounds, Sammy said, “Better call the Stork, Sheik, and tell them to hold that table for us—we’ll be ready for dinner in about an hour.”
At the door Sammy punched my arm twice in rapid succession, Jimmy Cagney fashion. “Well, I’m tickled to death to have you with me, kid. I know we’re going to knock them for a row of Academy Awards. I’ll have Sheik get a lower for you—right next to my drawing room—so if you get any great ideas in the middle of the night you can run right in and spill ’em, sweetheart.”
That night I sat in Bleeck’s wondering if I was a heel. Manheim, confess, I thought. The moment you heard that name you thought of Hollywood again. You thought what that name could do for you. You thought of all that Hollywood dough. You thought of getting back to Kit.
I gave myself five minutes for rebuttal.
The trouble with Hollywood is that too many people who won’t leave are ashamed to be there. But when a moving picture is right, it socks the eye and the ear and the solar plexus all at once and that is a hell of a temptation for any writer. I felt that when I went back for the fourth time to see The Informer. And one afternoon when I happened to catch a revival of the Murnau-Jannings masterpiece, The Last Laugh. And even when I saw one of my own jobs, a stinker if there ever was one, but with one scene in it that sang because I happened to stumble onto real picture technique. That is what held Kit there. Hollywood may be full of phonies, mediocrities, dictators and good men who have lost their way, but there is something that draws you there that you should not be ashamed of.