The reshuffling at the studio was announced three weeks later but Sidney Fineman hung around for several months, tying up threads he had begun. Kit did his last picture. She said it was really something to see him roll up his sleeves with the enthusiasm of a kid just breaking in.
“He wasn’t working to make money,” Kit said. “He enjoyed living well, like anybody else. But that wasn’t the main part. He was a picture maker. He had pride in his work, like an artist or a shoemaker. The reason he worked was to make good pictures.”
And it just happened that his last picture turned out to be a unique kind of hit. It had only two characters, a farmer and his wife, and somehow it managed to electrify and convince and challenge and entertain just by following them through their ordinary passions and defeats and everyday triumphs without any heavies or comedy reliefs or sub-plots or sub-sub-plots, and the critics didn’t know whether to call it comedy or tragedy or fantasy but audiences called it entertainment of a fresh and provocative kind because it had all three, because a little of all their lives was in it. It might have earned Fineman a producing berth at one of the other studios, but somehow or other everybody was saying that it was impossible for Fineman to do anything as modern as that and most of the credit was given to Larry Ross, the kid assistant Fineman had upped from the writers’ ranks. As a matter of fact, as Kit discovered, the source of this rumor was none other than young Ross himself and apparently Sammy was glad to give it his stamp of approval because he was already claiming Ross as one of the protégés he had developed.
As soon as Fineman moved out of his office, Sammy had the wall to the adjoining room knocked down, to make it larger. Then he threw out the whole Colonial motif because he said it cramped him. When the office was finally remodeled it had the intimacy of Madison Square Garden. The walls were lined with leather and the solid glass desk looked like a burlesque runway. On one wall was an oil painting of Laurette, which made her look ten years younger, even though it had been painted just a few months before. Opposite her was a large autographed photograph of Harrington.
Because he died so soon after his separation from World-Wide, there was some talk that Fineman committed suicide, but the Hays Office hushed it up so fast that it was impossible to track it down. Of course, there are less spectacular ways of taking your life than by gun or gas; there is the slow leak when the will is punctured, what the poet was trying to say when he spoke of dying of a broken heart.
The papers said Fineman was only fifty-six. I would have guessed somewhere in the late sixties. The papers also said that he had recently been forced to resign his post at the studio because of failing health.
The day after he died a whistle blew in all the studios at eleven o’clock, a signal for all activity to cease for a full minute of silence while we rose in memory of Sidney Fineman. At one minute after eleven another whistle sounded, the signal for us to forget him and go on about our business again.
But the soul of Sidney Fineman was not let off that easily. Hollywood likes its death scenes too well for that. A few days later they gave Sidney a testimonial dinner at the Ambassador at ten dollars a plate.
I wanted Kit to go with me, but she held her ground. “I like to give my testimonials to people before they’re dead,” she said. “I’m going down to hear Hemingway. He’s raising money for the Loyalists.”
Mrs. Fineman sat at the table of honor between Sammy and Harrington, who had just come back to the Coast again to be on hand for the wedding.
Sammy’s speech had women digging frantically for their handkerchiefs. In presenting Mrs. Fineman a gold life pass to all World-Wide pictures, he said, “The greatest regret of my career is that I had to take the reins from the failing hands of a man who has driven our coach so long and so successfully. And I can only say that I would gladly step down from the driver’s seat and walk if I thought it would bring Uncle Sid back to us again.”
The columnists reported tears in Sammy’s eyes as he sat down.
“Perhaps the camera flashlights made his eyes water,” I suggested to Kit.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think it’s at all impossible that those were real tears. Sammy has the peculiar ability to cry at phony situations but never at genuine ones.”
“I didn’t think he had any tears in him for any occasion,” I said. “I thought that well had run dry long ago.”
“Oh, God, no,” she said. “Sammy is an emotionalist. Only instead of letting himself go he just sounds one note over and over again.”
“I know which note that is too,” I said. “Mi mi mi mi …”
The wedding was a beautiful production. It was staged in the garden beyond the lawn terrace of the estate in Bel Air that Sammy had just purchased from a famous silent star who had gone broke after the advent of sound. The wags insisted on calling it Glickfair.
Beyond the garden were the swimming pool and tennis court and just across the private road a freak three-hole golf-course. The house itself was of baronial proportions, an interesting example of the conglomerate style that is just beginning to disappear in Hollywood, a kind of Persian-Spanish-Baroque-Norman, with some of the architect’s own ideas thrown in to give it variety.
There were at least a thousand guests milling around—from Norma Shearer to Julian Blumberg, whose first novel had shortened Hollywood’s memory of his Guild activities.
People were clustered about the garden like bees, buzzing isn’t it lovely, lovely, just too lovely! The flower girls were two little child stars and the bridesmaids who preceded Laurette down the terraced steps all had famous faces.
Laurette’s white satin wedding gown made her complexion seem whiter than ever. Her red lips and hair against that milky skin, and the solemnity of the moment as she moved to the funereal rhythm of the wedding march added to the unreality of the spectacle. She was a ghastly beauty floating through the Hollywood mist. She and Harrington in his striped trousers and top hat were like a satirical artist’s study of the whole grim business of marriage.
Sammy entered the garden from the opposite path, followed by Sheik, both in gray double-breasted vests and afternoon cutaways. Sammy was staring straight ahead of him, a smile set hard on his lips as if it were carved there. Sheik kept grinning, obviously a little lit, taking it big.
All through the marriage ceremony newsreel cameras were grinding. As Sammy and Laurette were declared man and wife for better or for worse for richer or for poorer in sickness and in health till death do them part, a professional mixed chorus suddenly stepped forward and sang, “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.”
After that the crowd broke, moving over to the terrace, where enormous banquet tables had been set up, manned by the entire staff of the Vine Street Derby. Four office boys staggered in with a six-foot-high horseshoe made entirely of gardenias, across which was strung a white silk banner with gold letters, “Long Life and Happiness Always.”
Everybody seemed to agree that this was the greatest wedding Hollywood ever had. “Even bigger than the MacDonald-Raymond,” I heard someone say. And I could almost see the Megaphone proclaiming: GLICK NUPTIALS HIT ALL-TIME HIGH!
When it finally let out at dusk Kit was in a restless mood. “Let me drive,” she said. “I feel as if I want to do something. I wonder how long it will be before the world looks back on that the way we do at African rituals.”
We drove out to the ocean and up along the coast. It was quiet, relaxing, good to be alone. “Isn’t that our cove?” I said.
We stopped. Without either of us saying anything I took her hand and we started down. It was a night without stars. The tide was high and the wind whipped in off the water.
We stood with our arms around each other, looking out over the waves, cold but comfortable. We discovered one solitary light moving slowly along the horizon. We played with it. It was a rumrunner and we had the plot of a B-picture. It was a ghost ship, a derelict, and we had mystery. It was the Japanese fishermen who put out from Terminal Island before the sun is up, and we had realism.
We lay down on the clean cold sand that trembled with the force of the waves pounding down. There was a long moment when we no longer heard the ocean roar. Then we were listening to it louder than ever.
We didn’t feel like going home, going inside anywhere, so we drove down to Ocean Park and strolled out on the amusement pier. Public dancehalls with the girls coming alone in cheap evening dresses, and the barrel passageway where a woman screams with embarrassment and delight as her dress suddenly blows up around her face, the Krazy House full of electric shocks and trap doors in the dark—a ten-cent introduction to a harmless form of masochism—the guy showing off to his girl by knocking all the bottles over with a baseball, and necking in the boat that moves foolishly along through dark tunnels, all the screwy, healthy releases that don’t cost too much, the cheap thrills people will probably always get a kick out of.
Kit insisted on going on the roller coaster seven times, sitting in the front seat, rising high over the ocean and then diving down, down past the Ferris wheel and the revolving airplanes and the merry-go-round, past the crowd flashing by like a crazy pan shot, heading straight for the water and then at the last possible moment swishing up into the sky.
“I have a wonderful idea,” Kit said, as she tried to get me on for the eighth time. “During my lunch hour I’m going over to Mines Field and take flying lessons.”
“The hell you are,” I said. “I forbid it.”
Those were always fighting words for Kit. “What do you mean you forbid it?”
“I absolutely refuse to let you take the chance,” I said.
“Al, you’re getting awfully possessive lately,” she said. “You’re beginning to act as if I were married to you.”
“That settles it,” I said.
“Settles what?”
“Our marriage.”
“Now, Al, if it’s just a question of living together …”
“It’s a question of marrying you,” I said. “I am not going to let you take another ride on that damn thing. I’m getting dizzy. I want to marry you. I want you to quit this funny business and come along like a good girl and get married.”
“Al,” she said, “you have a roller-coaster jag. We haven’t even got a license.”
“We’re going to drive down to Tiajuana. You don’t need a license in Tiajuana. All you need is five bucks and a woman. We can come back in the morning.”
“That sounds too much like a Hollywood elopement,” she said. “And who do we think we’re eloping from? People out here are always sneaking off to get married when there’s no one around even vaguely interested in trying to stop them. And anyway, I hate Tijuana. It’s just a little outhouse for San Diego.”
“What do we care what Tiajuana looks like?” I said. “We won’t even see Tiajuana. Let’s just jump in the car and start down. We can get there in four hours—they may still be open.”
“I always feel sorry for couples who have to get drunk in the small hours of the morning before they can work up courage enough to run off and get married. As if they’re afraid that any moment they’ll sober up and change their minds. Let’s just go down quietly to the City Hall and get it over with.”
I didn’t realize until she was all finished that she had said yes. “Kit!” I said. “Darling! Jesus! Kiss me.”
“You fool,” she said. “Not out here.”
We did.
“Where shall we go?” I said. “We’ve got to take a week off and celebrate.”
“I know a spot down on the Gulf where we can get a cottage right on the beach and swim and drink tequila and carry on right out in the open if we feel like it and forget all about Hollywood until we have to come back.”
And forget all about Sammy Glick, I thought, the four-star, super-colossal, marriage-to-end-all-marriages of Sammy Glick.
I realized that neither of us had said a word about Sammy’s marriage since we left that spectacle behind us. But somehow what had happened to us was bound up with that marriage.
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.”
“Okay,” he said. “If I have to pay, I’ll pay. But, by Christ, I’m going to get my money’s worth!”
I thought of Foxy Four Eyes’s back room on the occasion of Sammy’s introduction to the orgasmic mysteries, the day he learned to value the act of love in terms of money’s worth.
“Hello, Sheik,” he said. “To hell with your dogs. Drop by Gladys’s and pick up Billie Rand.… No, don’t pick up anything else. Ha, ha, ha … okay, sweetheart.”
He hung up, still laughing with Sheik. Then he saw me, on my way out, and stopped.
“What’s your hurry? Hang around a while. We’re going to have some laughs.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m putting my bachelor days behind me. Kit and I are getting married this week.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “I thought that was her voice when I called, but I wasn’t sure. Well, all I can say is you’re a lucky guy, Al. She’s a great girl.”
He said it with a memory, with a touch of remorse and I knew what he was thinking, that he would have liked to have her, that he would have liked to have someone, but it was impossible, it was absolutely physically, psychologically, economically impossible.
“Well, I’m tickled to death. We’ll have to get together and kill a case of champagne some night.”
He walked me to the door and then he left the door open and walked me to my car. He could not bear to be alone. He put one foot on the running board and leaned through the window.
“Before you go,” he said, “forget everything I told you tonight. I don’t know what the hell got into me for a minute. What the hell have I got to kick about? I feel great. I got the world by the balls. Keep in touch with me, sweetheart.”
There in the silence I could almost hear the motor in him beginning to pick up speed again.
As I drove off I saw him standing outside on his palatial stone steps, under his giant eucalyptus trees, looking out over his hundred yards of landscaping that terraced down to the wall that surrounded his property. He was a lonely little figure in the shadows of Glickfair, the terrible little conqueror, the poor little guy, staring after my car as it drove out through the main gates, waiting for Sheik to bring the girls and the laughter.
I drove back slowly, heavy with the exhaustion I always felt after being with Sammy too long. I thought of him wandering alone through all his brightly lit rooms. Not only tonight, but all the nights of his life. No matter where he would ever be, at banquets, at gala house parties, in crowded night clubs, in big poker games, at intimate dinners, he would still be wandering alone through all his brightly lit rooms. He would still have to send out frantic S.O.S.’s to Sheik, that virile eunuch: Help! Help! I’m lonely. I’m nervous. I’m friendless. I’m desperate. Bring girls, bring Scotch, bring laughs. Bring a pause in the day’s occupation, the quick sponge for the sweaty marathoner, the recreational pause that is brief and vulgar and titillating and quickly forgotten, like a dirty joke.
I thought how, unconsciously, I had been waiting for justice suddenly to rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like plague; a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. Fear of all the bright young men, the newer, fresher Sammy Glicks that would spring up to harass him, to threaten him and finally to overtake him.
I thought of all the things I might have told him. You never had the first idea of give-and-take, the social intercourse. It had to be all you, all the way. You had to make individualism the most frightening ism of all. You act as if the world is just a blindfold free-for-all. Only the first time you get it in the belly you holler brotherhood. But you can’t have your brothers and eat them too. You’re alone, pal, all alone. That’s the way you wanted it, that’s the way you learned it. Sing it, Sammy, sing it deep and sad, all alone and feeling blue, all alone in crowded theaters, company conventions, all alone with twenty of Gladys’s girls tying themselves into lewd knots for you. All alone in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, with power and with Harringtons till death parts you from your only friend, your worst enemy, yourself.
But what good are words when not even experience will regenerate? It was too late to hate him or change him. Sammy’s will had stiffened. It had been free for an instant at birth, poised bird-free in the doctor’s hand that moment in the beginning before it began to be formed to the life-molds, the terrible hungers of body and brain, the imposed wants, the traditional oppressions and persecutions, until at last Sammy’s will had curled in on itself, like an ingrown hair festering, spreading infection.
Now Sammy’s career meteored through my mind in all its destructive brilliance, his blitzkrieg against his fellow men. My mind skipped from conquest to conquest, like the scrapbook on his exploits I had been keeping ever since that memorable birthday party at the Algonquin. It was a terrifying and wonderful document, the record of where Sammy ran, and if you looked behind the picture and between the lines you might even discover what made him run. And some day I would like to see it published, as a blueprint of a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the twentieth century.