How Sammy still runs

There’s a piano in the living room at Budd Schulberg’s old home in Hancock Park, just as there was 75 years ago when Schulberg was a boy, living there with his family, right around the corner from the Barrymores and Louis B. Mayer, his father’s old business partner. The Schulbergs were Hollywood royalty back then. Budd’s father, B.P. Schulberg, was head of Paramount Pictures, which meant that a cavalcade of stars often lighted up their living room, the piano getting quite a workout. As a young Hollywood prince, Schulberg had a front-row seat. Clara Bow, the “It Girl,” flirted shamelessly with him; Cary Grant and Gary Cooper cracked jokes; Marlene Dietrich arrived, just off the boat, with her Svengali, Josef von Sternberg.

Schulberg uses a cane to slowly navigate his way around his old house. While his hair is snowy white, his mind remains razor sharp, unclouded by the sentimentality of nostalgia. Being so close to Hollywood gave Schulberg a chance to see the flaws people farther away couldn’t notice. Bow, it turns out, was sleeping with everybody in town, including his father. Dietrich, Budd recalls, “looked very mousy,” not at all the sleek siren we saw on screen. One night, B.P. gave a party for Maurice Chevalier, who was new in town. Charlie Chaplin, a family friend, was there too. As needy as any comedian, Chaplin couldn’t stand having to share the spotlight. “So he went over to the piano,” Schulberg recalls, “and whenever Chevalier would sing, Charlie would pound away at the keys, as loud as he could, trying to drown him out.”

Out of this world, teeming with people in a hurry to get to the top, came Sammy Glick, the showbiz hustler hero of Schulberg’s seminal novel “What Makes Sammy Run?,” which remains, six decades later, as timely a portrait of unchecked ambition as it was when first published in 1941. Over the years, Schulberg has also penned classic films, most notably the Oscar-winning “On the Waterfront.” He’s written about every boxer from Joe Louis to Mike Tyson and, after the 1965 Watts riots, he started the Watts Writers’ Workshop. He still writes with vigor, penning a piece on Marlon Brando for Vanity Fair’s recent Hollywood issue and reviewing a new Orson Welles book last month in the New York Times Book Review. Schulberg was in town recently for a Museum of Television & Radio screening of the newly discovered 1959 TV production of “What Makes Sammy Run?,” cowritten by Schulberg and his late brother Stuart.

But it’s Hollywood that runs deepest in his veins. Watching him ramble around this stately old house, a documentary crew led by Albert Maysles close behind, you get the tingly feeling of what it might have been like to hear Civil War stories from one of the last surviving Confederate soldiers. (The house’s current resident has owned it since the 1960s.) At 91, Schulberg is one of the few living links to the early days of Hollywood -- who else is still around who can say he wrote a screenplay with F. Scott Fitzgerald, yakked about movies with Sergei Eisenstein and is still owed $100 by Harry Cohn? When Fitzgerald opens “The Last Tycoon” by saying “Rudolph Valentino came to my fifth birthday party -- or so I was told,” he’s using an anecdote Schulberg told him about his own childhood.

Schulberg worked for Sam Goldwyn, who had his wife read his scripts and tell him what stories she liked. He knew Cohn, who had loudspeakers installed in his studio so he could yell at anyone at a moment’s notice. (When Schulberg’s mother once came to visit, Cohn bellowed: “Here comes the person with all the movie brains in the Schulberg family!”) Budd visited the Paramount set of Marx Brothers movies, once laughing so loudly that he ruined a take. His father’s first studio, a now-forgotten lot shared with Mayer in downtown L.A., was next to a zoo populated with ostriches and a mangy lion. B.P. and Mayer’s brother took a publicity still of themselves posing with the lion. When Mayer went off to start MGM, the beast metamorphosed into the studio’s famous logo.

Back then, nobody was nibbling sushi or drinking bottled water. Schulberg would wake up in the morning to the reassuring sounds of his father retching after a long night of carousing -- reassuring because his father had actually made it home. One night when Budd went upstairs to do his math homework, B.P. and Zeppo Marx were at the card table. When he came downstairs the next morning, they were still there, finishing the game, his father writing out a check for $22,000.

As young screenwriters in the late 1930s, employed by David O. Selznick, Schulberg and Ring Lardner Jr. found themselves working with Ben Hecht, the feisty newspaperman B.P. had brought to Hollywood to write “Underworld,” the first great gangster picture. “Ben was writing ‘Nothing Sacred’ as they were shooting it -- we couldn’t wait to see how it would end,” Schulberg told me, sitting upstairs in his old bedroom. “Then late one night, Selznick calls and says to hurry down to the studio. There’s a crisis. When we arrived, David’s secretary gave us a bowl of Benzedrine and said, ‘You better take these before you go in.’ ”

Selznick had just had a huge blowup with Hecht, who was already on the Super Chief headed back East. Selznick told his young charges that they had to write the ending of the picture -- and pronto, since it was being shot the following day. “We did the best we could, but it’s a pretty lame ending,” says Schulberg.

He did better with “On the Waterfront,” which was turned down by every studio in town. Finally, Schulberg bumped into producer Sam Spiegel, who was staying across the hall at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Spiegel was having a party that night but told Schulberg to come by at 7 the next morning. When Budd arrived, there were bottles and cigarette butts everywhere. Spiegel was sound asleep. Undeterred, Schulberg woke him up and pitched him the movie. “He was still under the sheets up to his eyes,” Schulberg recalls. “When I finally got done, I didn’t know if he was awake or not, so I shook him a little. He pulled down the covers and said, ‘OK, OK, I’ll do it.’ ”

Go to any industry watering hole today, whether it’s the Grill or the bar at the Peninsula Hotel, and you can find Sammy Glick holding court in some corner of the room. Schulberg moved back East decades ago, but Sammy has stayed, embedded deep in the DNA of show business, as enduring a literary archetype as Lolita or Holden Caulfield. It’s hard to imagine a Hollywood story, from Michael Tolkin’s “The Player” to the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” or David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” that doesn’t owe a debt to Schulberg’s scrappy hustler, not to mention Tony Curtis’ frenetic Sidney Falco in “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Sammy hasn’t just survived, he thrives everywhere in showbiz. “The character is still completely relevant today,” says veteran talent manager Bernie Brillstein, who got his showbiz start in the William Morris mailroom in the 1950s. “Originally the motivation was about having power and getting laid, but now it’s all about making money. I saw a lot of 22-year-old Sammy Glicks who you knew were going to make it. They had the drive, but they also had the charm. You need both to get ahead.”

Starting in the mailroom

For decades, the William Morris Agency mailroom has been an incubator for an army of Glicks, weeding out the wannabes from the indefatigable hustlers. In the early 1960s, the young David Geffen got a job there, first by posing as a cousin of pop producer Phil Spector -- a Glick in his own right -- then by lying that he’d graduated from UCLA. When it became apparent that the agency would check up on his story, Geffen came into work an hour early every day for four months until he intercepted a letter from UCLA, replacing it with a faked missive saying he was a graduate.

Geffen was never particularly embarrassed by the incident, viewing it as a necessary step in his career ascent. As he told David Rensin, author of “The Mailroom,” a history of talent agency mailrooms, “If you want to succeed, you’d better not care too much about what other people think about what you’re doing.” In showbiz, boundless ambition is rarely frowned upon. In the frantic scramble to get movies going or sign hot new artists, it’s accepted that everyone needs to take a few shortcuts. When Schulberg wrote “What Makes Sammy Run?,” he saw Glick as a ruthless snake slithering his way to the top, betraying anyone who got in his way. Today’s industry, however, sees Sammy with more affection. Glicks nowadays are admired for their fierce ambition and shameless chutzpah.

In 1992 a young agent, unhappy over the performance of his new Sony cordless phones, sent a heated letter to the Sony top brass, not only demanding that the company replace his phones but claiming that his “friend and business associate” Peter Guber, then head of Sony Pictures, “would be embarrassed to know their company made products that perform so poorly.” It turned out he’d never met Guber, who angrily told him to “erase my name from your Rolodex and from your memory.” But after Guber received an apology, he correctly predicted that the agent, Jay Sures, now co-head of United Talent Agency’s television department, was going places. “He has some chutzpah that, if he can keep it in check, will be useful. He’ll turn out to be a really good agent.”

If you accept this benign interpretation that most Sammy Glicks are overachievers, not necessarily slimeballs, then it’s easier to understand why they are embraced instead of shunned. One of the quintessential Sammy Glicks of the record business is Eagles manager Irving Azoff, who upon learning that one of his rivals was having a lavish birthday party, sent a gift-wrapped box with a live boa constrictor inside. His behavior is tolerated because no one gets better deals for his clients. In showbiz, a fanatical desire to trounce the competition is part of the price of doing business.

One of the most telling details in “DisneyWar,” James B. Stewart’s account of Michael Eisner’s rise and fall, was how Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Bob Iger all took great pride in getting to work at the crack of dawn. Katzenberg was such an obsessive operator that when one of his early bosses, Gulf & Western chief Martin Davis, got annoyed with him, he called Katzenberg “a little Sammy Glick.”

The Glicks of today simply have a different streetwise style, the shameless hucksterism supplanted by a high-tech hyperactivity. When Brett Ratner was campaigning for the job of directing the film “The Family Man,” he arrived 20 minutes late for a meeting with producer Marc Abraham. “He was with a model who was not his girlfriend and was twice as tall as he is, talking on one cellphone, with another ringing in his pocket,” Abraham recalled. When the producer told him that if he took another call he’d lose the job, “one of his phones kept going off, and watching Brett not answer it was like watching a drug addict at a party trying to walk by a mound of cocaine without stopping.”

Needless to say, Ratner got the job. He had the aura of a winner in a town where winning is everything.

In “Sammy,” Schulberg went out of his way to separate Glick from the stereotype of the pushy Jew, but any subtle distinctions were lost in the uproar over the book. One of Schulberg’s few defenders at the time, Dorothy Parker, offered the most eloquent defense of the book’s distasteful antihero, saying, “Those who hail us Jews as brothers must allow us to have our villains, the same, alas, as any other race.”

Today many of the most eye-catching Glicks aren’t Jewish at all. Take, for example, Sean “Puffy” Combs, who was portrayed in a 1999 Slate story as an arriviste right out of “What Makes Sammy Run?,” with Eric Weisbard comparing the way Puffy shamelessly lifted samples from pop hits to the way Glick stole story ideas from screenwriters. Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr., an ambitious Memphis congressman who just announced that he’s running for Bill Frist’s Senate seat in 2006, has also been dubbed a “Sammy Glick on the Hill” by recent political bloggers.

Still, it’s hard to separate the Glick persona from its Jewish immigrant origins. It seems fitting that if “What Makes Sammy Run?” makes it to the big screen, it will be thanks to the appeal of Ben Stiller, who’s been working on the project for a decade. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect casting fit. As the New Yorker’s David Denby somewhat harshly put it this year, “Stiller is the latest, and crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make.” Stiller has certainly inherited Woody Allen’s crown as the king of Jewish anxiety, but he also exudes an undercurrent of libido-charged ambivalence that would make him a perfect match for Glick.

It’s still a long shot that the movie will ever be made. Warners had the rights for years, but the studio fumbled so many attempts to get the film off the ground that when DreamWorks negotiated a first-look deal with Stiller’s production company, it had to pay $2.6 million to Warners just for the rights to “Sammy.” Having appeared in five films last year that made nearly a billion dollars worldwide, Stiller clearly has the clout to get the project going. DreamWorks has expressed support for the movie, but Stiller, who is much in demand for acting parts, hasn’t yet moved ahead.

At one point, according to producer Bill Gerber, who acquired the book for Warners in the 1980s, the movie was to be financed by Elie Samaha, which would have had a special synchronicity, since Samaha, recently convicted of padding the budgets of his movies, was a coarse throwback to the ruthless Glicks of yore. In Hollywood, the rise to the top is an irresistible subject. Gerber, who grew up in an industry family, says that when a friend gave him the book, he admitted that he’d never read it. “But I knew the story,” he says. “My mother’s been calling me Sammy Glick for years.”

So why did Schulberg write “What Makes Sammy Run?”? He says today that he created the ultimate Hollywood hustler “because that was the world I knew.” It seems clear that he must have indulged in some subconscious score settling. Initially the novel was titled “What Makes Manny Run?,” a not-so-subtle reference to Manny Cohen, the man who took B.P.’s job as Paramount chief in 1933 and whom Schulberg describes in his memoirs as a “diminutive mogul squatting behind his imposing desk like a watchful toad.” B.P. warned Budd that Cohen would sue him, so the name was changed to Sammy.

A character cobbled together

The actual Sammy character was a composite. Though Schulberg has never volunteered specifics, his memoirs supply helpful hints. In his father’s day, there was always a crop of young hustlers at the studio, waiting to pitch one of the sultans who ran the lot. At MGM it was Robert “Hoppy” Hopkins; at Warners it was Darryl Zanuck and Jerry Wald, both of whom went on to greater triumphs as producers. To read Schulberg’s description, they were perfect Sammy prototypes: “men with big dreams, hungry and without shame, glib toreros who discovered in the big studio compound the perfect arena for their hyperthyroid energies.”

When the book became a bestseller in 1941, Schulberg had just finished a script for Sam Goldwyn. After delivering it, he waited -- and waited -- and heard nothing. “In Hollywood, you know silence means trouble,” he recalls. “Finally Goldwyn called me in, the blood rushing to his face, and started shouting, ‘How could you write that book! It’s a disgrace!’ He fired me on the spot.”

Not long afterward, Mayer raged at B.P. during an industry meeting. “Damn it, B.P., you know what we should do? We should deport him!” It was a typical reaction from a studio mogul who had the district attorney in his pocket and was accustomed to running his business like his own principality. Never much of a fan of Mayer, B.P. sarcastically replied: “Louie, he’s the only novelist who ever came from Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him, Catalina Island?”

Schulberg did, in a fashion, go into exile. Having renounced communism after being a party member in the 1930s, he later testified as a friendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, earning him the enmity of many old industry friends on the left. He remains an ardent liberal, noting with pride that the FBI kept a file on him for decades after he left the party. Except for one period in the mid-1960s, he’s remained on the East Coast, living these days in Westhampton Beach on Long Island. He doesn’t keep much in touch with Hollywood, although he’s written “Save Us Joe Louis,” a screenplay based on the titanic 1938 title fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, which Spike Lee is set to direct if he can get the financing. A lifelong fight fan, Schulberg got into the ring only once himself, to spar with Archie Moore, who promptly broke his nose.

He’s curious to see “Cinderella Man,” the new Russell Crowe boxing film that ends with James Braddock’s stirring 1935 victory over Max Baer, which earned Braddock the heavyweight championship. Schulberg saw Braddock in action, and his take on the film is as jaundiced as his view of Hollywood. “Braddock was old and over the hill, and if Baer had been in shape, he would’ve killed him,” he explains. “But Max was lazy as hell. When he did his road work, he had a girl stashed about a half-mile away and that was it. He did the rest of his road work horizontally.”

His old eyes gleam. What he says next is spoken with abiding affection. “It wasn’t that good of a fight. But you know, it’s the movies. I bet they make it seem like it was the best fight ever.”