‘Sammy’ Keeps On Running; Next as a Movie

Technically, Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run” is just entering its 50th year, having been published in the spring of 1941. Its publisher, Bennett Cerf of Random House, loved it but was confident it would fail. Hollywood novels didn’t sell, and Nathanael West’s “Day of the Locust,” published the year before, had not earned back the $500 advance West received.

Cerf promised Schulberg a dinner at the 21 club if the book took off. He and Schulberg ate at 21 a lot, because the book’s portrait of a brash, ruthless, amoral hustler from the Lower East Side, rising from teen-age office boy at a newspaper to Hollywood mogul, caught the national fancy.

Hedda Hopper snarled “How dare you!” at Schulberg in a Hollywood restaurant. At a Motion Picture Assn. board meeting, Louis B. Mayer cried that Schulberg should be deported. The author’s father, producer B.P. Schulberg, said, “Louie, he’s the only novelist who ever came from Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him, Catalina Island?” But the elder Schulberg also thought his son was finished in Hollywood and asked, “How will you live?”

John Wayne saw the book as a Communist plot and later challenged Schulberg to a tequila-heavy midnight fist fight when they coincidentally found themselves in Puerto Vallarta. It ended in no decision, thanks to the intervention of Schulberg’s late wife, Geraldine Brooks.

(The Daily Worker first praised the book, then a week later denounced it as a “bourgeois canard,” unfair to progressive forces in the industry.)

Sammy went into the language and, in 1952, into Cerf’s Modern Library, making Schulberg a shelf companion of Conrad and Dostoevski. In 1960, NBC did a two-part miniseries, with the late Larry Blyden as Sammy and John Forsythe as his kind mentor (and Schulberg’s moral eye on the proceedings), Al Mannheim. Steve Lawrence sang Sammy for two years in a Broadway musical.

Schulberg bought a farm in Bucks County, Pa. and there wrote his later novels, including “The Disenchanted,” his fictionalized account of a disastrous weekend at the Dartmouth Winter Carnival as junior writer/guardian to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Now, of all significant turns of event, Hollywood will evidently measure its own changes over the last half-century and film “What Makes Sammy Run?” the book it once regarded as a leprous act of treason by a native son. (Almost native: Schulberg lived here from age 4 until he went off to Dartmouth and then the service.)

Schulberg has written a screenplay of “Sammy” and will likely co-produce with Gene Kirkwood (“Rocky,” “The Pope of Greenwich Village”), starting, by present plan, this summer at Warner Bros.

The author was in town recently to consult with his movie colleagues and to promote the 50th Anniversary Edition of “What Makes Sammy Run?” (Random House: $19.95, 320 pages) and a new collection of stories called “Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales” (Random House: $19.95, 352 pages). The anniversary edition includes his foreword from the Modern Library edition and a new afterword for this one, as well as the short stories in which Sammy first appeared.

In the afterword, Schulberg worries, as he did over breakfast one day last week, that Sammy is no longer exclusively a Hollywood type.

Perhaps he never was. Schulberg initially heard from readers who had discovered Sammy in Hartford insurance companies, Southern chain stores and almost everywhere else.

Sammy was not exclusively Jewish either. The charge of anti-Semitism was laid on the book, although Schulberg pointed out that all of Sammy’s victims were Jewish, too. A psychoanalyst found Sammy characteristic of many ambitious, second-generation Americans fighting to replace the loss of prestige their fathers had suffered in coming to the new country, and to replace the tribal values the sons no longer shared with the fathers. “Detribalization,” Dr. Franz Alexander called the process and the struggle.

These days, Schulberg fears that “What Makes Sammy Run?” has become what he calls “a handbook for yuppies.” “It’s a new handle on Sammy,” Schulberg says. Sammy’s credo of “success at all costs and it doesn’t matter how you get there” makes the book seem not merely entertaining but a Bible of sorts.

He first realized this, Schulberg says, the afternoon a senior came up to him one day after a talk at Hofstra University and said, “I felt a little nervous about going out into the world and making it. But reading ‘Sammy’ gives me confidence. I read it over and over.”

In his eloquent afterword, Schulberg laments that, “The book I had written as an angry expose of Sammy Glick was becoming a character reference.” He concludes, “That’s how they’re reading it in 1989. And if that’s the way they go on reading it, marching behind the flag of Sammy Glick, with the big dollar sign in the square where the stars used to be, the 20th-century version of Sammy is going to look like an Eagle Scout compared to the twenty-first.”

But Schulberg also argues that conscience and social responsibility are still alive in America, “if not too well.”

Next August will be the 25th anniversary of the Watts riots and Schulberg’s founding of the Watts Writers Workshop. He remembers wandering down to Watts while the embers were still smoking, to see what he could do to help. At the Westminster Neighborhood Assn., someone suggested that if he was a writer he might teach writing to anyone who wanted to learn.

“I put a note on the bulletin board and went down every Wednesday afternoon to wait. For several weeks nothing happened except that people would put notes on the note about where I could shove my idea.” Schulberg sat and read, and gave the idea until Thanksgiving.

Then one man came by, was astonished when Schulberg demonstrated that you could write out of deep anger and still get it published, and signed on. The workshop met first in a pantry off the kitchen at the Settlement house, but quickly outgrew the space. Schulberg rented a house for $80 a month; then, when the writers outgrew it as well, found a burnt-out supermarket that the late James Thomas Jackson and other writers helped fix up.

One of the alumni, Johnnie Scott, is a full professor at Cal State Northridge. The late Harry Dolan’s play, “Losers Weepers,” was presented on NBC. The Workshop here is kept alive by Jimmie Sherman and other alumni from a base at USC. Its Eastern offshoot, the Frederick Douglass Center for the Creative Arts in New York, has an enrollment of 250, Schulberg says, and a faculty that includes other Watts veterans.

“You didn’t need a $500,000 survey to find out what was wrong down there,” Schulberg says. “Lousy education, high unemployment: They just couldn’t get out. And I’m not sure anything has changed, except that there are more drugs and the unemployment is worse.”

Schulberg, now 75, lives well out on Long Island near a bird sanctuary at Quoque. After his wife Gerry died of cancer, he remarried and now has children 10 and 7. His son is named Ben, after Schulberg’s father, B.P., who once ran Paramount. The studio’s present management last year named a building after the elder Schulberg and the son took a sentimental tour of the lot, where he had been a 17-year-old publicist before he went off to Dartmouth.

“Oscar and his shoeshine stand were gone,” Schulberg says. But, if he poked into enough offices on the lot and around Hollywood, he could probably still locate Sammy Glick, and not a ghost either.

“I hadn’t re-read ‘Sammy’ for some time,” Schulberg said at breakfast, “and when you do that, you usually see a lot of things you wish you could change, at least a little. But there’s not very much I’d want to do to this one. It was as if I’d written it last week.”