Three. What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg
1941, Vintage (for the edition I’ve read), 352 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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By the time I’ve read “What Makes Sammy Run?”, namely last week, it had sold a thousand-fold more copies than its author, Budd Schulberg, or its original publisher, Bennet Cerf of Random House, ever intended it to. In the preface to the “extended scenes” bonus (two short stories that were the basis to the book, and were added to this edition as an interesting window into how short stories are expended into a book), Schulberg reveals the origins of the book, and comments on how the publisher has prepared him for very meagre sales for a “Hollywood” book — those who read books, he said, don’t care about Hollywood, and those who care about Hollywood don’t read books.
But Schulberg’s book wasn’t just an ordinary “Hollywood” book. By the time he had written the short stories that have preceded the book and published them in various magazines, he had two major motion pictures that he’s written under his belt, at least one of which, “On the Waterfront”, would faithfully be included in 100 best movies in history lists many years from now. Moreover, he was the son of B.P. Schulberg, one of Hollywood’s original moguls and at one point, the head of Paramount Pictures. Schulberg was not only currently a part of Hollywood, he was born and raised there. So everything that was written in the book, at least allegedly, had some basis in reality. And many people who’ve read the book spent more time debating not the question in the book’s title, but “Who was really Sammy Glick?”
“What makes Sammy Run?”, which spends the majority of the novel trying to answer this question, is told from the point of view of Al Manheim, a theatre columnist in a New York newspaper who becomes a screenwriter in Hollywood. But it is not his story — he is just the narrator, an observer, a commentator, and the constant wonderer regarding the question which forms the novel’s title. In the book’s limelight is Sammy Glick, both the book’s protagonist and antagonist, who begins as a young errand boy in the newspaper, and quickly exercises his upward mobility, mostly through exploiting situations in which he can appear to be more competent than he actually is. After conspiring to become the radio columnist for the paper, another newspaper employee asks him to review a radio play that he’s written, but Glick has other plans. He contacts an agent in Hollywood and manages to sell the radio play as a screenplay, and start on his way to Hollywood writer and producer stardom. Manheim, who spends the rest of the novel reluctantly in Glick’s shadow in Hollywood, narrates it in anger and disbelief, chronicling Sammy’s rise through the ranks, stepping on a myriad of career corpses, all the way to the unavoidable end in which Sammy has everything he ever wanted — and is still not content. During the course of the book Manheim finds the answer to the question bothering him, and becomes emphatic to Sammy’s life and his choices.
The book was written as a moralist parable of what life is actually like in Hollywood (in the ‘40’s, but I suspect the general theme is still the same in today’s Hollywood), as a cautionary tale for people of good conscience to avoid the Sammy Glicks of the world. Because Sammy Glick is clearly portrayed as Jewish, some early readers have criticised the book as an example of auto-antisemitism. A biography of Sam Goldwyn has even indicated that Goldwyn offered to pay Schulberg a large sum of money in exchange for not publishing the book, in fear that it will trigger a wave of antisemitism in Hollywood and in other industries. Schulberg himself was worried about this mis-portrayal, and has changed the names of several characters, who were not Jewish in the short stories, to Jewish names in the book, in order to indicate that Glick screws other people indiscriminately of their background, and that other members of the same faith and ethnicity, most of which were his victims, did not consider it the gracious way to move forward in the world.
Later in the book’s published life, as Schulberg tells in his author’s note to the edition I’ve read, he was horrified to see a 180-degree turn in the approach to the book. Many readers have treated it as a handbook, even a bible, describing how to get ahead and achieve your dreams. Instead of a moralist parable, it became a rags-to-riches instruction manual in which it was deemed the expected thing to behave in the same way Sammy Glick behaved in the book, in order to survive and thrive in a world of equally vicious predators. It was the ‘80’s, and Yuppies have infested the earth. Sammy Glick had switched industries, into a world in which it was interesting to backstab, to manipulate and to outsmart, and he also changed his name. He was now Gordon Gecko.
