What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

I picked this up at the same time I found Exit Ghost by Philip Roth in the same free book exchange bin at the local coffee shop. I probably wouldn’t have helped myself to this one except that a friend was talking about it a few months ago. I can’t remember why. He asked if I knew the story and I thought vaguely I did, something like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, where a guy with no particular talent but tons of ambition climbs his way to success. I thought there might have been a movie. I didn’t remember anything else about it.

Well it turns out there never has been a movie, but it’s about the movie business. And it is about a striver who makes his way upward with no real talent, except for constantly playing every angle and with no morals to get in the way. The only difference is that J. Pierpont Finch is charming (at least the way Robert Morse plays him in the movie) where Sammy is risible. How to Succeed… is a comedy. What Makes Sammy Run? is a humorous, but uncomfortable, social and political commentary. (The book for How to Succeed…, by the way, came out in 1952, eleven years after What Makes Sammy Run?)

The main character is Sammy Glick. He starts out as a newsboy in New York City and ends as the head of a movie studio in Hollywood. The book is from 1941. It was a best seller at the time. I read a very nice paperback edition from 1990 that includes a forward to the Modern Library Edition from 1952 by Budd Schulberg, an afterward from 1987, also by Budd Schulberg, an author’s note (undated) and two short stories about Sammy Glick by Schulberg, originally published in Liberty magazine (also undated, but Schulberg explains, in the author’s note, that these were the seeds that became the novel, so the date must be sometime in the late 1930s).

The novel has an odd construction in that although Sammy Glick is the main character, the novel is told entirely through the eyes of a second character, Al Manheim. Manheim is working as the drama desk columnist at a New York paper called The Record when Sammy Glick shows up as a newsboy in the office running copy from the writers to the editors. Manheim is Glick’s first victim when Glick uses a couple of errors Manheim makes to bring himself to the attention of the editor in the guise of covering for Manheim. Then Glick finagles a column of his own by getting the editor to cut a few inches from Manheim’s column. Manheim makes it clear that Glick is no writer but he sucks up other people’s writing like a sponge and is able to plagerize without shame, or change and recombine what he’s borrowed just enough so it looks fresh.

Glick’s next victim is a writer named Julian Blumberg. Julian has written a little script for a radio play, called Girl Steals Boy, and because Glick has set himself up writing a column covering radio plays, Julian thinks he might get Sammy to help him get it on the air. Instead, Glick steals the idea and sells it to Hollywood, then goes out to Hollywood himself to work on the screenplay. All this takes place in the first thirty pages. Soon Manheim goes out to Hollywood himself with a job as a writer. Despite being appalled at Glick’s wanton hustling, Manheim stays involved in Glick’s life and narrates the whole story as Glick climbs the studio ladder, one neck at a time.

Glick writes another picture, this one called, Monsoon, which is a rip-off of the Somerset Maugham short story called Rain. Then he writes a play, which he intends to sell as a movie, and which he rips off from The Front Page. Hollywood is presented as so full of folks who know and care nothing about art that nobody catches on. In fact, because Hollywood depends on feeding back to people the same stories and situations that they’ve happily swallowed before, someone like Glick who can remember every cliched scenario and bit of dialog he’s every heard and find a new way to spin it or superficially alter the characters just enough to not get sued, is the actual talent that Hollywood is looking for. Glick calls Manheim a sucker for not playing the same game. And when Glick needs an actual writer to do some real work, he’s able to manipulate Julian Blumberg to come to Hollywood and ghost for him.

The other main character is a powerful woman, also a writer, named Kit Sargent. She’s intrigued by Glick, and attracted to him, too. But she’s not taken in by him. She and Al Manheim become a pair, which gives Al someone to talk to about Glick, in service of the novel. Kit’s too independent to get settled down, but by the end of the novel, she and Al marry.

There’s a too long middle section that has to do with the screen writers trying to start a union. Of course Glick makes this work for him, too, while selling out everyone else. Kit is one of the union organizers, and she gets Al involved, too. Julian Blumberg makes an heroic move turning down a seven-year contract so that he can stand in solidarity with the other writers if they decide to strike and then loses his job when the union idea falls through. Manheim loses his job, too, which leads to another too long section.

Manheim goes back to New York and gets his old job back at The Record. But he stays obsessed with Glick. He finds Glick’s old address in the personnel file at the paper and hunts down Glick’s mother and older brother still living in the same tenement apartment in the Lower East Side. The brother tells Manheim Glick’s childhood story. Glick, nee Glickstein, was born a hustler, running after something more than his immigrant parents could provide or imagine, and not caring who he runs over getting it. Glick’s father actually is run over while he’s pushing his push cart in the street and Glick dismisses him as a “dope.” The tough origin story started to feel a little too pat as an explanation for Glick’s character. My sympathy waned, then waxed back to loathing the guy.

At the end of the novel a new character is introduced who ends up being the means of Glick’s comeuppance, or as much as he gets. Her name is Laurette Harrington. She’s the daughter of a Wall Street banker financing the studio where Glick has promoted himself to being the assistant to the head, Sidney Fineman. The last few pictures have lost money so Fineman is worried they’re going to lose their backing. Glick puts in a good word for Fineman but in the process makes Fineman sound like a lovable dinosaur. Fineman is out. Glick is in. And Glick marries the daughter for extra security. But in the final scenes, Manheim, now engaged to Kit Sargent, gets a desperate call from Glick in his Beverly Hills mansion, the site of that afternoon’s gigantic wedding. Manheim rushes over and finds Glick drunk and alone. Earlier that evening Glick found his brand new wife in bed with an actor, and unrepentant. The marriage was just as transactional for her as it was for Glick and Glick isn’t enjoying the taste of his own medicine. He quickly shrugs it off, though, and orders his procurer, an old hoodlum named Sheik that used to terrorize little Sammy Glick when he was growing up on the Lower East Side but now is dependent on him, to call up a prostitute for him.

The whole book is a little sordid. It’s a long series of Glick being rotten, mean, self-serving, dishonest, ambitious and vain. Is “Trumpian” an adjective yet? It wasn’t long before I started rooting for him to be punished and he never quite is, even at the end. That Manheim doesn’t just cut his ties with the guy made me start to feel disappointed, or even a little suspicious, of him, too. The scenes get worse, but they also get repetitive. You just know Glick’s going to lie and cheat and find a way to get what he wants and to hell with anybody else. The suspense is wondering how he’s going to do it. It gets less fun as it goes along.

This being the late 1930s, the novel has that “wise-guy” kind of dialogue you know from movies and popular dectective novels of the time. I found myself smiling, but not laughing. Raymond Chandler does it better. And part of the fun of Chandler for me is the Los Angeles settings. The Hollywood of What Makes Sammy Run? is much less specific. There’s the Derby, and the writer’s meet at Musso’s before going over to the union meeting, but Schulberg’s Hollywood never feels like a real city, just a set.

Actually, speaking of “wise-guy” I kept thinking that if there was a movie version I’d love for Scorcese to direct it. He tells the same kinds of stories of amoral kids doing whatever it takes to make it, then making it, then realizing that despite all the wasted lives in their wake they were never chasing what they really needed, or even knew what they needed. Citizen Kane is that kind of story, too.

The cover of the book has a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald. He calls it, “A grand book, utterly fearless and with a great deal of beauty side by side with the most bitter satire.” Fitzgerald died in December 1940, just a few months before this came out. He left behind a half-finished manuscript for his own Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon.

They never did make a movie of What Makes Sammy Run?. Schulberg posits the novel comes across as too anti-Hollywood for Hollywood. But they did make a musical, in 1965. The musical of How to Succeed in Business had come out in 1961. Steve Lawrence was nominated for a Tony for the role of Sammy Glick. And they made a movie of Schulberg’s story and script for On the Waterfront (1954). He also wrote the story and script for, A Face in the Crowd (1957). He died in 2009.