As Kit and I came out of the preview we could see Sammy leaning against the lamppost with his hands in his pockets and his long cigar blowing triumphant puffs like a Roman candle.
“Well, what do you think?” he said with a grin that told you what he expected to hear.
“That’s a pretty good movie,” Kit said.
“When a sourpuss like you says pretty good, it must really be terrific,” Sammy said.
Sheik sailed over, making that circle of approval with his thumb and forefinger as he came. “Well, sweetheart,” he said, “it’s a killer. Even tops Deadline for my dough.”
Sheik was still Sammy’s shadow but he had been promoted. He was an agent now. He had just sort of drifted into it by going up to an ingénue he knew Sammy was signing and telling her he would use his influence to have Sammy take her. Other clients followed until now Sheik was clearing around three or four hundred a week. Still in the small-fry class, but between his firm grip on Sammy’s coattails and his increasing popularity as a ladies’ man, Sheik was definitely on his way.
Word had gotten around that Sheik was an ex-mobster and soon, with Hollywood’s talent for self-dramatization, Sheik had become a famous gunman, in fact, Capone’s right-hand man. A killer whom Sammy Glick and Hollywood had regenerated. This, along with his other social attributes, had begun to make him a celebrity’s celebrity.
“After Deadline the second-guessers were saying I could only make mellers,” Sammy said. “Now they’ll be saying I can only make comedies. It’s got a million laughs, hasn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” said Sheik. “You should have saved a few of ’em for some of World-Wide’s other pictures. Outside of your two, this year’s program is stinking up the studio so bad you have to have a gas mask to go through the halls.”
As Sammy laughed, I noticed that his face was puffing out a little bit. The lean ferret look wasn’t gone—it was just beginning to be framed with a fleshy border. Sheik watched Sammy’s face too, joining in his laughter like the background people at a cue from the director.
The leading lady knifed her way through, leaving a wake of panicky autograph hounds.
“You were O.K.,” Sammy told her.
She made a little curtsy and told him it had been a pleasure to work for him.
“O.K.,” Sammy said. “So next time don’t try to tell me you don’t like the part. Doesn’t this prove that we always know what’s best for you?”
As her public swallowed her up again, Sammy gave us a wink. “When those babies go soft on you—that’s the time to sock it home.”
Sidney Fineman came out of the crowd. The herringbone design under his eyes seemed more noticeable these days. His posture was still erect and dignified but you could feel him making the effort to keep it that way.
“That’s a good solid writing job, Manheim,” he said to me, and then he turned to Sammy with a tired, brave smile.
“Well, my boy, looks like you’ve done it again.”
Sammy shook his hand with a straight face. “Thank you, Mr. Fineman,” he said, “let’s hope so.”
He had learned how to be polite to his superiors now but it would never really become him. He called Fineman Grandma behind his back, when he wasn’t being more vivid.
We stood on the curb talking cutting and last-minute story points as the crowd drifted away.
“I have only one real objection,” Fineman said mildly. “The action seems to get started too quickly. There doesn’t seem to be enough time to plant the characters and the situation. What do you think, Sammy?”
Kit and I looked at each other, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. Sidney Fineman had his own studio in Hollywood when Sammy was still hawking papers on 14th Street. He had been the first one with enough daring to make a classic like Helen of Troy when everyone else was making two-reel horse operas. He never asked questions then.
When I first started writing the screenplay, Sammy had told me specifically that you never have to sell your characters or your plot in a farce comedy. For a moment I thought he was going to tell Fineman off about that. But apparently he had decided the time wasn’t ripe yet. For all he said was:
“Maybe you’re right. Let’s have another look at it in the morning.”
“Fine,” Fineman said. “Perhaps it will look better when we’re fresh.”
Sammy smiled at him as if to say, Speak for yourself, pal, I never felt fresher. “That’s right,” he said, “maybe it will.”
There was something in Sammy’s voice that cut the conference short. Sammy watched Fineman’s chauffeur help him into his big black limousine.
“The corpse is climbing back into his hearse,” Sammy cracked.
Only Sheik laughed.
“Well, where do we go from here?” Sammy said.
“Sunset Club,” Sheik said. “They’ve got a new dinge band there that’ll kill ya.”
“What did you get for me?” Sammy said.
“Some brand-new stuff,” Sheik said. “Punkins Weaver.”
“Is she O.K.?” Sammy said.
“Until the real thing comes along,” Sheik sang. “Blonde. Willing. Cute kid.”
Kit and I stopped in at one of the little bars on Vine Street, just south of Hollywood Boulevard. All along the sidewalk were little knots of poolroom characters who always seemed to be there, holding mysterious conferences. Down the street the playboys were getting out of red Cadillac phaetons or monogrammed town cars at La Conga. There was something savage and tense about that street. Autograph hunters prowled it, and ambitious young ladies in fancy hair-dos and slacks.
“God, this is a tough town,” Kit said.
“Why is it tougher than anywhere else?” I said.
“Because it still has the gold-rush feeling,” she said. “The gold rush was probably the only other set-up where so many people could hit the jackpot and the skids this close together. It’s become a major industry without losing the crazy fever of a gold-boom town.”
“What made you think of that? Fineman?”
She nodded. “Sometimes I think the three chief products this town turns out are moving pictures, ambition and fear.”
“I felt sorry for Fineman too,” I said. “For all his fame and his dough, I still wouldn’t like to be in his shoes right now.”
“Something tells me there’s going to be a lot of traffic in those shoes.”
“I don’t think Sammy’s ready to try them on yet,” I said. “Don’t forget Sammy likes to have his shoes fit.”
I sat in while they looked at the picture with the cutter again next morning, stopping it reel by reel to talk it over.
“I guess you’re right about the opening at that,” Fineman said. “Any more footage would make it drag.”
“I’m glad you see it my way,” Sammy said.
I don’t think Fineman saw anything more to it than that; an older man and his younger assistant working together to tighten up their picture. But I knew that tone in Sammy’s voice, the warning rattle. It was like reading a Fu Manchu book and wondering how and when the hand will strike.
After the picture had been run off, the cutter said, “Well, you don’t have to worry about that one. I’ll run it through again this afternoon and clean it up a little bit. If I nip a couple more hundred feet out of it it’ll be tight as a drum.”
Fineman seemed to be thinking of something else.
“Sammy, there’s something I want to talk to you about,” he said. “Walk back to my office with me.”
“What’s the matter with right here?” Sammy said. “We’d save a couple of minutes.”
“No,” Fineman said, not quite as soft-spoken as usual. “It’s a rather delicate matter.”
That night I had to go over to Sammy’s for a conference on the next picture. Sammy had moved from his apartment to one of those Hollywood Colonial manors in upper Beverly Hills.
The first thing he did was show me through every room, rattling off the names of all the celebrities who had lived there before him and the marquee names he had for neighbors.
“I tell you, there’s nothing like having a house of your own,” he said. “I get up in the morning and look out at those palm trees and the other big houses and I say to myself, Sammy, how did it all happen?”
I have a couple of ideas on it, I thought, if you really want to know.
“But now I’ll really show you something,” he said. “My grounds.” He turned on the floodlights that illuminated the garden. “I’ve got my own barbecue pit and my own badminton court. And have I got flowers! Do you realize you’re looking at twelve hundred dollars’ worth of hibiscus plants?”
“And you’re going to live here all alone?” I said.
“Well, the cook sleeps in,” Sammy said. “By the way, I’ve got Claudette Colbert’s cook. And, of course, my man.”
He must have felt self-conscious about that, for he added, “He’s off tonight but he’s really something. I think he must have been Ronald Colman’s stand-in. It’d panic you to see him bringing my breakfast up in the morning in a full-dress suit. The first time he stuck his puss in the door I said, ‘Charles, you look as if I ought to be waiting on you.’ And Charles just gave me the business, ‘Yes, sir, will there be anything else, sir?’ He never steps out of character!”
Neither do you, I thought, neither do you.
For the next couple of hours we sat in the study batting the story back and forth. Sammy’s mind drew a blank when it came to originality—but since the same goes for most screen stories, he actually turned this to advantage. What he had was a good memory and a glib way of using it. Our story was like so many others that he could lift ready-made situations from the shelves in the back of his mind, dust them off and insert them into our yarn like standard automobile parts.
“Now, I want you to work night and day on this,” he said. “Because MGM is making a submarine picture too, only on a terrific scale, and if we can get out with ours first we can steal a hell of a march on them and cash in on their publicity.”
Our work was over and I started to go.
“It’s early yet,” Sammy said. “You don’t have to run. How about a nightcap?”
He had a Capehart and a canopy bed and shiny new sets of Balzac and Dickens and twelve hundred bucks of hibiscus, but he didn’t seem to know what to do with himself when he wasn’t talking to somebody.
He mixed a drink for me. He was very solicitous. He said, “You know we’ve been working so hard we never have a chance to talk any more.”
I wondered when we had ever talked about anything but the life and works of S. Glick. And while I was wondering, that is just what the conversation drifted to again.
I happened to say that I thought Fineman was one of the best gents in the business.
“I guess everybody in the studio likes him,” Sammy said. “But that doesn’t mean so damn much. Between you and me, he’s just an old woman. He’s beginning to lean on me like a crutch.”
“He still seems to be able to navigate under his own power,” I said.
“That’s what I used to think,” Sammy said. “Until today.”
“The talk you had with Fineman?”
He said, in the way people have of saying much more than they are saying, “The talk I had with Fineman.”
Okay, Sammy, I thought, spill it, you predatory genius.
“When I was in there talking with the old man, all of a sudden it hit me—I had him by the balls. You understand, this is strictly between you and me. It mustn’t go out of this room.”
Strictly confidential between you and the world, I thought, and if you don’t tell it to somebody quick your lungs are going to blow up in your face like punctured balloons.
Fineman filled his pipe painstakingly and lit it It was hard to begin.
“Sammy, we’ve been working together for over a year now and I think we understand each other. I’d like to feel I can talk to you as a friend.”
Sammy’s face was what is known as expressionless. A very definite and frightening expression.
“You know you can, sir,” he said.
“Good. You may not have learned it yet and I hope you never will—but this is a business with a very short memory. It doesn’t matter what you did last year or the year before. If your last few pictures are lemons, you’re in hot water. That’s why I’ve decided to talk to you, Sammy. I know you appreciate how much I’ve done for you—and I felt you’d be willing to help me.”
Help. That was the turning point. That was the moment Sammy had been waiting for. He sat there trying to look noncommittal, like a poker player who has just discovered he is holding a royal flush.
“I’m your man, Sidney,” Sammy said. “Just say the word.”
“Some of the Wall Street crowd who control our lot are coming out to look over our production set-up.”
Sammy had got that tip from Young’s secretary two weeks before.
“They want to try to find out why we slumped to third place among the major studios this year. And I have it from a fairly reliable source that Harrington, the chairman of the board, favors a new production chief. Now, these aren’t men who know pictures. They’ve got ticker tapes in their brains. They know the pictures I let you make have been our most solid moneymakers and they’ll be interested in hearing what you’ve got to say. You know what I mean, I want them to know that we’re working well together. And, if I’m still in harness, I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you: Let you make four of the A’s on next year’s program—even suggest that you head your own independent unit, if that’s what you want—and I’ll get a new assistant. There’s a new lad on the lot called Ross who’s supposed to be very promising. How does that sound?”
Somewhere between the time Fineman started that speech and the time he finished, one era ended and another began. Sammy had sneered at Fineman before, but that had been mostly bravado for Sheik’s benefit. He had entered the office still in awe of him. Now, as Fineman went on talking, Sammy could see him shrinking as if he had drunk an Alice-in- Wonderland potion. Wondering, what the hell keeps that weak sister in this office at five G’s a week? An old-fashioned story mind—a quiet, indirect method of getting his way that’s supposed to pass for executive ability—an old-womanishness that’s won him the reputation of best-loved producer.
“Sid, old pal,” Sammy said. “You’re in. Just let them come to me. I’ll give them an earful Ani it will come from right here.”
He tapped the breast pocket of his camel’s-hair jacket reverently.
And while he was tapping it he got a new idea.
Sammy spent hours with Fineman at the office every day, but at night, except for the occasional Grand Central Station parties, there was a barrier. Fineman had never asked Sammy to his dinner parties or his Sunday morning breakfasts. Sammy finally had to give up hinting. It got Sammy sore just thinking about it. So I’m not good enough for the bastard’s home, but I’m good enough to save his lousy job for him! And Sammy never just got sore. Nothing so luxurious as that. He always got sore with a plan.
“Look, Sid,” he said. “Why wait for these Wall Street guys to come to me? Why wouldn’t it be smart for me to start working on them the day they blow in? What if I threw a big party for them at my new house, a swell dinner, and entertainment, with all our stars there …?”
“Don’t you think it would be my place to give the party?” Fineman said.
“But if I’m at your party what does it mean?” Sammy argued. “Hell, I’d have to come to my own boss’s party. But if I give a party in their honor, also celebrating the first anniversary of our association …!”
“If it’s handled right it might have a good effect at that,” Fineman reflected.
“Don’t worry,” Sammy said. “It’ll be handled right.”
“So a week from Saturday I break into the society columns,” Sammy said. “And by the way, you and Kit are invited. You two are still an item, aren’t you?”
“A permanent one, I hope.”
“By God, that’s what I need,” Sammy said suddenly. “I’m getting fed up with these floozies you’re always promising something to—a day’s work or a test. A man in my position ought to settle down and get some dignity in his life.”
“You mean you’re thinking of getting married?”
“Why not?” he said. “Hell, I’m not one of these guys who’s spoiled by getting in the dough. You know I’m just a simple down-to-earth guy at heart. All I want is a sweet, healthy girl to put my slippers on when I come home from work and give me a bunch of kids who can enjoy what I’ve got—maybe a nice bright kid to take over my business when I retire.”
“Have you got anybody in mind for the job?” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about it. I’m really thinking seriously of Ruth Mintz. You know, the daughter of the shorts producer on our lot? A nice refined girl. No beauty, but, hell, this town is lousy with beauty, and that’s only good for about ten years, anyway. She’s got a nice build. And she’s nuts about kids. What more could I want?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “what more could you? Do you love her?”
“Love,” he said. “How the hell have I had time to love anybody?”
When I finally made a break, I met Kit at the Derby for coffee. She was coming from a Guild meeting. The Guild had risen from the dead after the Nine Old Men decided to cut the nonsense and declare the Wagner Act constitutional. Three or four hundred writers had returned to the fold again and the battle now was to get the NLRB to come in and hang a company-union charge on the Photodramatists.
“How was the meeting?” I said.
“We saw through the night that our Guild was still there,” Kit hummed off key, patriotically. “How was yours?”
“Sammy was in a reflective mood,” I said.
“Was he sick?”
“No, he was falling in love.”
“With whom? Himself again?”
“With the idea of someone to bring his slippers to him when he comes home at night. And someone to give him an heir.”
“If that’s a pun,” she said, “you have to stand in the corner and repeat the name Sammy Glick five hundred times.”
“That’s the punishment Sammy is always inflicting on himself,” I said.
Our ham and eggs arrived and we were hoggishly silent for a minute.
“Did Sammy ever ask you to marry him?”
“Of course not! All Sammy is looking for is a nice simple housewife like his mother told him to marry, who looks like Dietrich, whose only interest in life is Sammy Glick, and whose father is a millionaire who can finance Sammy’s company and put him in with the Best People.” She laughed and added, “And all I had to offer was the Dietrich department.”
“You’re a fine figure of a woman, all right,” I said. “Nobody could say you were exactly homely.”
“Ah, you’ve hit on it at last—exactly. People look at me and say, she’s homely all right, but not exactly homely. And there you have the secret of my charm.”
“By God, you’re right,” I said. “I never realized it before. But there’s something about your face that’s fooled me for years into thinking it’s beautiful. It’s just your personality shining out like one of Oleson’s giant spots. And if you ever switched it off you’d be homely as sin.”
“Al!” she said. “You mustn’t make love to me like that right out here in the open.”
The night of the party Kit and I saw it happen, saw love come to Sammy Glick, or something as close to love as Sammy will ever know. Kit and I and little Ruth Mintz.
This is the way it began. The other members of the Wall Street scouting party were punctual, but Harrington didn’t show until the buffet dinner was almost over.
He came in with a dame on his arm, an amazing-looking dame, who made an entrance like the star at the end of the first act. The first thing that clicked when I looked at her was the horse shows in the rotogravure section of the Sunday Times. Only not the smartly tailored horsewoman in derby and cutaway, but the horse itself. She was a show horse with a dark red mane, prancing, beautifully groomed, high spirited, accustomed and proud to be on exhibition.
If Harrington’s life were ever screened, he would be played by Lewis Stone, though Stone would have to go easy on the make-up and underplay his scenes to do the role justice.
Sammy spotted them at the door like a master of ceremonies, beckoned Fineman over to do the honors and ran toward them.
“Mr. Glick,” Harrington spoke in efficient snaps. “Very glad to meet you, sir. I’ve been looking forward to this. I’d like you to meet my daughter, Laurette. ”
Sammy made a nervous little bow and kept on looking at her. She seemed to fascinate him. He went on staring at her with the out-of-this-world look of a monk at the Shrine of the Madonna, or a strip-tease patron.
“I know that girl,” Kit said. “Laurette Harrington. She was at Vassar for a little while.”
“I think we’re on hand for an historic event,” I said. “Sammy Glick is falling in love.”
“Sammy isn’t impetuous enough for that,” she said. “He’s just falling in love with the idea of being in love with a gal like that.”
Kit and I edged our way up to the ringside. Ruth Mintz was standing beside Sammy, but she might just as well have been standing in Outer Mongolia.
“Father hates being late,” Miss Harrington was saying. “It’s all my fault. I came home frightfully late after looking at pictures all day.”
“Perfectly all right,” Sammy said in his best party voice. “What pictures did you see?”
“Well, one I’ve really been chasing all over the world,” she said. “Blue Boy.”
“Blue Boy?” Sammy said. “A foreign picture?”
“Not exactly,” Laurette said. “It was done in England.”
“Oh, Gaumont-British,” Sammy said.
“No, by an Independent,” she said. “Gainsborough.”
People started to laugh. She began to laugh with them. When she did, tossing her head back, I had the impression of a red flame leaping up, red hair, full red lips and somehow her voice was red too.
“That,” Kit mumbled, “would be a bitch.”
Harrington stepped in and stopped the fun. “I’m afraid you’re misunderstanding each other. Laurette means the paintings at the Huntington.”
By that time the story was on its way toward becoming a Hollywood legend. By the next evening it would be attributed to at least three other people.
I don’t think Sammy ever forgave her for that one. I think it was part of his falling in love with her. Like his revenge on Sheik. He stood there in the hallway of his five-hundred-a-month house, hosting his first big Hollywood party and someone had suddenly hauled off and socked him and he just stood there, taking it, looking as he must have looked when he was taking his beatings from Sheik, telling her she could leave her wrap upstairs, staring after her as if he would like to murder or rape her.
Everywhere I looked, Sammy seemed to be running after Laurette. I had the impression of a chunky, gutty pony, stepping way up in class, coming up on the outside to challenge the tall, graceful thoroughbred on the rail. He was filling her plate for her, drinking brandy with her, dancing with her out on the patio to the rhumba orchestra. As they danced she looked a head taller because she danced it professionally, with her shoulders straight and her head tilted up while Sammy tore into it with his head down like a prizefighter. Now and then she would look down and bestow a smile upon him that was cold and too perfect on her lips.
Kit said, “There’s Ruth Mintz, looking like the little girl who’s lost her mother at the circus. Go and dance with her or flirt with her or something.”
When I picked Kit up again she had just run into Laurette in the powder room.
“I should have come here ages ago,” Laurette had told her. “Isn’t Sammy Glick amusing? Dad says he’s a dynamo. After the Great Danes from Yale and Princeton sniffing around me all summer, it might be fun to know a dynamo.”
“How long are you staying?” Kit said.
“I’m toying with the idea of taking a house for the winter,” Laurette said. “And I’m going to keep it absolutely jammed with theatrical people. I simply adore them.”
Laurette wasn’t a particularly witty girl, but she delivered all her lines as if she were, and by pointing them up with laughs she gave an impression of both great wit and vitality.
“Laurette babbles like an idiot,” Kit said. “But I don’t think she is. I get the feeling she has a good mind which she’s been brought up to believe is very poor taste for a woman of her position to use.”
On our way back from the patio I found Sammy chatting with Harrington and the other bankers and I paused a moment with Ruth to see if the sight of her would revive his interest in the girl he had chosen to be his slipper-and-child-bearer.
Sammy was talking, and from the way they were listening, he was going over.
“Now, of course, every producer must be first a businessman and then a creator,” Sammy was out-yessing them. “First we have to analyze the slump of the industry as a whole. I figure it’s ten percent the jump in radio popularity, fifteen percent double features, twenty-five percent the national decline in purchasing power and fifty percent the lack of new ideas in pictures themselves. Too many people are coming out of theaters saying, ‘I saw that same movie last month.’ ”
I recognized the explanation that Fineman had given me when I first went to work for him. Only Sammy seemed to know just how to feed it to them. Knew how they loved to listen to the sound of figures and statistics.
“That’s very interesting,” said Harrington. “What we need is more men out here who think of pictures as a commodity like any other—and forget this prestige business.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” Sammy jumped in. “After all, pictures are shipped out in cans. We’re in the canning business. Our job is to find some way of making sure that every shipment will make a profit.”
I wondered where Fineman was. I wanted to be around when Sammy put in that right word for him.
He could run with these men. They had college degrees and belonged to clubs and had summer homes and knew Herbert Hoover, but he knew what they were after. Laurette was different. She wasn’t a whore and she wasn’t an extra girl, and she wasn’t a star and she wasn’t a working girl, and she wasn’t a homebody and that perplexed him. Her job was not to do anything and do it attractively and amusingly. Sammy couldn’t bribe her with a day’s work, or slap her on the fanny, and he couldn’t even talk about himself without being heckled. She was someone he had to be polite to and that cramped his style. He felt she was laughing at him because his manners weren’t up to her standard and this undermined his confidence. And Sammy Glick without his confidence was not a pretty sight.
“Mr. Glick, can you make a noise like a dynamo?” I heard her say and Sammy just looked ill at ease and let her get away with it. Just looked at her as if to say, Okay, baby, you win the first round, you draw first blood, but it’s just enough to make me sore. These are big stakes and I’m willing to let you jab away until your arm gets tired and I begin to catch onto your style.
As Kit and I ducked out early, taking Ruth home and out of Sammy’s life, Sammy was leading Laurette out to show her his twelve hundred dollars’ worth of hibiscus.
At lunch in the commissary next day Kit looked over my shoulder and said, “Well! The Little King and the Red Queen.”
I looked around as they were coming in together. They posed a moment at the entrance. Laurette, slightly taller, the chic and haughty queen, with a green suede bag slung over her shoulder, a green turban pulling her copper-colored hair straight back from her face. You felt that everything was pulled tight on her, that her stockings were pulled as tight against her legs as possible, that the waistline was drawn in to the fraction of an inch, that she was rigged smart and snug as a ship. Sammy almost started in ahead of her and then he remembered and stepped aside to let her lead. He followed close behind her, with the preoccupied casualness of one who knows he is being watched. But he was so proud of the effect their being together was having that he couldn’t keep the exhilaration out of his face.
They passed near our table and disappeared into the executives’ dining room off the main commissary.
“She’s an exotic-looking thing,” I said.
“You mean those droopy lids and the dark shadows under her eyes?” Kit said. “That’s dissipation.”
“Just the same,” I said, “she looks like quite a dish. How come none of the aristobrats ever grabbed her off?”
“Seems to me she was married,” Kit said. “The year she came out. But it didn’t take. When she entered Vassar she had just come back from a year in Spain, trying to forget. I think she managed to forget all right, but in the process she got the habit of living as if she were always supposed to be forgetting something. Her mother was dead and I guess the old man was too busy staying rich to do much about it. Everybody talked about the way she came to class the first day with painted toenails. She caused quite a stir, while she lasted. A little bit like Tallulah Bankhead enrolling as a freshman at Smith.”
“I wonder what they have to talk to each other about,” I said. “I’d love to listen in on that conversation.”
“I wouldn’t,” Kit said. “She’s probably telling him of the screaming times she used to have in Biarritz before the Spanish War made the town so horribly political. And Sammy is wondering whether he’s making too much noise with his soup.…”
“And how much influence she has with her old man,” I added.
“I think you’re underrating him,” she said. “This isn’t just business. Didn’t you see his face? The bloom of true love is upon him at last.”
“But I wonder how goddam glamorous she’d look to him if her name weren’t Harrington.”
“It can’t be broken down like that. Sammy isn’t making a mechanical play for her because he thinks he can use her. It’s all mixed up together. The fact that her name is Harrington must be just as sexually exciting to Sammy as that moist red mouth or those snooty boobs of hers.”
We could follow the courtship in the papers after that. The orchids every day. The places they were seen dancing. The gifts. The photographers even gave us the tender looks on their faces over plates of hamburger in the Derby. A Hollywood columnist included it in her radio discussion of exciting romances of the year.
Once in a while when I was in and out of Sammy’s office I heard him talking to her on the phone but he never mentioned anything about it until a month or so later when I was at his house going over the script for the submarine picture. I had finished the job a couple of days ahead of schedule and he was in a good mood. He sent Charles to the bar to make us some highballs and then he turned to me with his preview face.
“Well, Al, what do you think of me and Laurette?”
He seemed to let the sentence drip over his tongue like tasting fine wine.
“Well, it all seems pretty fantastic,” I said. “But maybe you’ll be fantastically happy.”
“Oh, it hasn’t gone that far yet,” he said. “But it might, by God, it might. Jesus! I can’t believe it myself. But it’s beginning to look as if I’m going to get her.”
This may be love, I thought, but not the fine and mellow kind. It may not be in line of business but it’s grim enough to be.
“You know, it’s a funny thing,” he confided. “When I first met her, I thought she was just another Miss Rich Bitch. Just gave her a little rush because I thought I might be able to get a line on how Sidney stood with her old man. I guess I told you I was trying to do everything I can for him. And she kept taking me up on all my invites, but all the time she was doing it she was giving me the polite finger.”
There was the moment after Sammy had taken her to lunch the first day when he squeezed all his savoir faire into: “And when shall I see you again?” And she answered: “Now I know who puts that line in all the movies.”
Several evenings later he was taking her to an opening. He had even bought a new full-dress suit. Made for the occasion. He had sent out advance notices to the press agents that he and Miss Harrington would be among the notable couples attending.
When he called on her Laurette was in street clothes, having a drink with a hefty dame in a boy’s haircut who greeted him with a belligerent stare.
“This is Babe Lynch, ” Laurette said. “She just flew into town on her way to the air races in San Diego. I haven’t seen her in ages, so I knew you wouldn’t mind if I passed up the opening tonight.”
“If you had told me early enough I could have gotten an extra ticket, ” Sammy said. “In fact, if you make it snappy I can always find a way of getting her in. It isn’t our opening, but I’m a pal of the theater manager.”
“That’s sporting of you,” Laurette said. “But Babe only brought her flying togs. So why don’t you run along? Call me in the afternoon.”
Sammy swallowed his pride, but it stuck in his throat like a fish bone. Going down in the elevator he tore up the tickets. As they fell around his feet in little pieces he realized he might have given them to somebody, but to hell with everybody … They were his tickets and he could do what he liked with them.
He drove home, out Sunset Boulevard from the Beverly-Wilshire, fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, as fast as he wanted because he had a captain’s badge from the Police Department. Thinking, I’m going to get her. She thinks she’s too good for me, but I’m going to get her, me, Sammy Glick.
Nothing she could do would discourage Sammy. This was something worth being insulted for. Sammy was running with Class, and Class was something strange and wonderful. He had a crazy hunch that if he didn’t care how much dust he ate in the early laps, he could snap the tape with his strong little chest.
The next evening Sammy called the Beverly-Wilshire again. Hollywood is a terrible place to be left alone in, he said. She might want someone to show her the bright spots.
“How sweet of you,” Laurette said. “Come right over.”
When he arrived, she was having cocktails with a young man. The young man stood up, terribly tanned and tall, looking down at Sammy with an easy, attractive, self-assured smile. Sammy found himself staring into a broad and immaculate expanse of stiff shirt. Laurette was in evening clothes too.
“I thought George was on the other side of the globe,” she explained, ignoring Sammy’s face as she introduced them. “Imagine how thrilled I was when I found out he was back in Pasadena. I thought it might be fun if we all went together.”
George didn’t seem to mind Sammy at all, which made it worse.
“I haven’t seen Laurie since Biarritz two summers ago,” he explained with a maximum of white teeth as he poured Sammy a cocktail.
He was sore this time. He was so sore he forgot this was a precious bit of china that a loud word might crack.
“Listen, Miss Harrington, don’t let me butt in. Why don’t you two kids just run along and have a good time?”
But Miss Harrington would not hear of it. “Mr. Glick is so clever,” she told the bronzed face from Pasadena. “He knows everything about making pictures. He’s going to tell us all about it at dinner. Aren’t you, Mr. Glick?”
Sammy tried to turn the compliment aside, if it were a compliment, or the jibe, if it were that. But he couldn’t do it deftly enough. He had always been better with the sledgehammer than he was with the foils. Laurette kept laughing at him, silently and politely, her superiority piercing Sammy’s pride like banderillas, stinging, hurting …
Sammy sat with them in the Florentine Room, feeling a raw and ugly wound inside, out of place in his business suit—his running togs. He felt a little better when he beat George to it by ordering the most expensive wine in the place. But when it arrived, Laurette looked at it and told the waiter to send it back. “If you haven’t 1927, don’t bother. That’s the only good year left.”
The orchestra was playing a tango. Sammy didn’t know how to tango. Laurette and George danced it with their hands and their heads as well as their feet, like a professional team. Sammy’s eyes took every step with her, watched her dancing with her lips parted, her eyes half closed, her body swaying to the slow rhythm. He thought of the tango partners she must have left behind, American scions and Georgian princes and titled Englishmen. Maybe he could get a tango expert to come to the house, secretly, and then he would get up one evening and surprise Laurette, that bitch, the woman he loved. If it didn’t take too much time. Though it might be worth it to make time. He had finally found a woman worthy of his ambitions, she was the golden girl, the dream, and the faster he ran the farther ahead she seemed to be.
Then they returned to the table and Sammy stood up, feeling challenged and mean, and popped down too quickly again.
“What a beautiful dance,” Laurette said. “You feel wild and free.”
She knew Sammy had never felt wild and free.
The music was back to jazz. Sammy rose jerkily. The manners were gone. Just the speed, the fury, the one-man battle.
“Come on, let’s dance.”
He held her tight against him, his hand clamped against her bare back, his fingers tense and strong on her skin. It was a double satisfaction, the immediate thrill of her refined presence so close to Sammy Glick and the chance that this would reach the columns. He danced a dogged box-step which he forced her to follow. Both of them felt the struggle of it.
“You even dance like a dynamo,” she said.
“Okay. Wanna quit?” Sammy said.
He was beginning to find himself.
“No,” she said. “I’m enjoying it.”
She was. It was terrifying when he held her like that, not trying to be polite any more. She hadn’t been really terrified in a long time. To dance as badly as Sammy and not be ashamed of it set him apart from all the other men she had ever known.
She had the next dance with George and when she returned, Sammy was gone. The waiter handed her a note:
Decided I couldn’t waste any more time here so I ducked out to the studio to clean up some work. The bill is taken care of for the rest of the night. Have fun.
Sammy
“I took a chance,” Sammy said. “And my hunch was right. I had gone soft on her and she was taking me for as big a sucker as these studio broads would if you gave them a chance. You know what she did? She called me at the office after that polo player left. Said she wanted me to come back and talk to her. I told her to meet me at my place. And she came. What do you think of that, Laurette Harrington coming over to see me in the middle of the night? We sat up talking until it got light. I had her all wrong, Al. That sophisticated stuff is all on the surface. She’s just a sweet, simple kid at heart …”
All the running Sammy ever did in his life must have been just the trial laps for those next two months. He wasn’t even around the office very often. He was too busy.
One day we had an appointment at three and he finally showed a little after five. Irresponsibility was never one of Sammy’s faults so I suspected something colossal must have happened.
When he finally came in I knew it was more than merely colossal. It was so big that even he was overwhelmed. He came in quietly, underplaying the scene.
“Al,” he said, “have you ever heard of anybody scoring two holes-in-one the same afternoon?”
He made you play straight for him.
“Well, I’m your man. Only it’s a little more important than golf. Harrington and I have been sitting in Victor Hugo’s from one until just now. He’s one of the sweetest guys in the world, Harrington. And I’m not just saying that because he’s going to be my father-in-law.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “I hope you and Mr. Harrington will be very happy.”
“You should have seen me,” Sammy said. “I was as nervous as a whore in church. Thought sure as soon as I broke it to him he was going to run out and throw Laurette on the first plane. You know, fine old Southern family and all that crap. But Jesus, he was tickled to death. In fact he seemed so anxious to marry her off to me that I began to wonder whether he was on the skids himself and figured the head of a studio was a nice little thing to have in the family.”
“Head of the studio?”
“Yes,” Sammy said. “I did everything I could. But I’m afraid poor Sidney is out after all.”
“What do you mean afraid?” I said. “Afraid Harrington might change his mind?”
“Al,” he said, “it’s a good thing I have a sense of humor. Because if I didn’t you’d have been out on your ear long ago. As a matter of fact I really went out there and fought for Sidney this afternoon.”
“Arise, Sir Samuel, my true knight,” I said.
“Don’t give me that,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to apologize for. I kept my word. I told Harrington I’d be willing to work under Fineman. I couldn’t do any more than that, could I?”
“How should I know?” I said. “And why should you care what I think, anyway?”
“Listen, Al,” he said, “I’m no dope. I know how long those pals of mine would stick around if I couldn’t go on doing things for them. You’re different. You never asked me for anything—I mean for yourself. You’re my only friend. I’m only human. I’m not just a—dynamo. Every man’s got to have a wife and a friend.”
I still think the guy had something when he said forgive them for they know not what they do. Nine times out of ten that may be a virtue. But there is always that tenth time when a strong stand is needed and softheartedness becomes very flabby behavior. This was one time when I really had the impulse to break off diplomatic relations with Sammy. When he was knifing his fellow man in the back he performed with such gusto and brilliance that it fascinated me as a tour de force. He was so conscientious about being unscrupulous that you almost had to admire him. But there was something indecent about this new pose. It was a little too much like the tycoon who spends the first part of his life sucking and crushing and the last part giving away dimes and Benjamin Franklin’s advice. I could imagine the Sammy Glick of forty instead of thirty, with all the sordid details of his career washed from his mind, reviewing his life like an official biographer, believing that his contribution to mankind has entitled him to friendship, kindness and peace.
Suddenly he felt he had to justify himself. He insisted upon giving me a playback of that historic interview with Harrington.
They were sitting in Victor Hugo’s. The orchestra was playing chamber music, soft and refined, but the only music for Sammy was Harrington’s voice.
“Sammy, I’m going East tomorrow. I don’t know whether you realize it or not, but we’re contemplating some important changes in our organization out here. We feel your record entitles you to a say in this reorganization.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Sammy said. “Of course, it’s only fair to tell you how much I’ve learned from assisting Sidney. He’s been like a father to me. Everything I know about producing came from him. In fact, he’s taught me everything he knows.”
“That’s just what I’ve been wondering. Perhaps he has given you all he has to give. He let too many flops slip into the program this year.”
“Only a genius can make pictures on an average of one a week without some turkeys, Mr. Hanington. Sidney is a hard worker. He did the best he could.”
“I appreciate your sentiments. But, to speak frankly, the purpose of my visit was to determine whether his best was good enough.”
“The pictures would have made money if the overhead wasn’t so terrific. But it isn’t entirely his fault if production costs have been too high.”
“Then you think production costs are too high?”
“You put me in a difficult position, Mr. Harrington. I don’t like to speak about my superiors. Especially a man like Fineman, who was such a pioneer in this business. After all, I can remember when I was a kid seeing his nickelodeons.”
“Naturally, my boy,” Harrington said. “Loyalty is always to be commended. Always. But our first loyalty is to World-Wide, and I wonder if Fineman isn’t becoming a little too old-fashioned to uphold the standard of the World-Wide trademark.”
“You couldn’t find a better man than Fineman,” Sammy said, “among the older producers.”
“I’ve had a chance to watch you both function,” Harrington said. “And I may have some difficulty convincing the Board because you’re so young. But I’ve made up my mind that what this studio needs is new leadership. Young blood.”
The waiter came to the table. “Will that be all, Mr. Glick?”
Yes, Sammy thought. I think it will. I think that is just about it, pal.
“No,” he said, “bring Mr. Harrington and me another brandy.”
“To you and Laurette,” said Mr. Harrington.
“And to World-Wide,” Sammy added quickly.
He crossed to the window that looked out over the lot. The studio street was full of the pretty girls in slacks going home in twos and threes and carpenters and painters in overalls carrying their lunchboxes and cat calling to each other; a director exhausted from the day’s shooting and already worrying with a couple of assistants about the camera set-ups for the next; a star clowning as he climbs over the door into his silver Cord; the crazy-quilt processional of laborers, extras, waitresses, cutters, writers, glamour girls, all the big cogs and the little ones that must turn together to keep a film factory alive.
“Now it’s mine,” Sammy said. “Everything’s mine. I’ve got everything. Everybody’s always saying you can’t get everything and I’m the guy who swung it. I’ve got the studio and I’ve got the Harrington connections and I’ve got the perfect woman to run my home and have my children.”
I sat there as if I were watching The Phantom of the Opera or any other horror picture. I sat there silently in the shadows, for it was growing dark and the lights hadn’t been switched on yet and I think he had forgotten he was talking to me. It was just his voice reassuring him in the dark.
“Sammy,” I said quietly, “how does it feel? How does it feel to have everything?”
He began to smile. It became a smirk, a leer.
“It makes me feel kinda …” And then it came blurting out of nowhere—“patriotic.”