Hollywood Harpooned

In a first novel out this week, What Makes Sammy| Run?,* Hollywood got a harpooning in just the way it argued could never be done. The evasive town had dodged shots by some expert marksmen--Novelists Aldous Huxley, John O'Hara, Nathanael West. But each seemed only to snag a loose end: the writer's world, the cowboys of Gower Gulch, the comedy of studio pomposity, the empty splendor of its rich.

In spite of his 26 years, Author Budd Schulberg was well equipped to tackle the job. He was raised in Hollywood where his father, B. P. (for Benjamin Percival) Schulberg, has been a top producer for 20-odd years. Since graduating from Dartmouth in 1936, he has worked off & on as a screen writer. In a neatly organized yarn about a little Jew named Sammy Click, who soars from a $12-a-week office boy on a Manhattan daily to head of a studio before he is 30, Budd Schulberg gathers in the stray and unconnected bric-a-brac which forms the composite Hollywood, fits it into a whole like a mammoth jigsaw puzzle.

Everything is there: the premiere which resembles a festooned church social; the serious artists (. . . When a moving picture is right it socks the eye and the ear and the solar plexus all at once and that is a hell of a temptation for any writer); the buzzing nightclubs ; the stragglers from Pasadena; the masculine-minded feminine population who even pay the checks; the trade-paper racket where you buy good reviews; the frightening bankers from New York who own the studios; the studio commissaries full of rumors and gossip ; the little houses along the beach where the underprivileged are as comfortable as the big shots in their Bel Air mansions. Only a few of these places and people get their right names, but the impression is still there.

What Makes Sammy Run? will provide plenty of lively guessing for Hollywood. For Sammy is an accumulation of several current careers, which Author Schulberg has painted with merciless accuracy. Sammy's start in Hollywood came by stealing the story of an underling in the advertising department of the paper, and larceny sponsored his success from then on. At one time, while Sammy was making $500 a week, the real author of his work was on Sammy's payroll for $25. Soon Sammy became a producer, eventually head of the studio after some deft back-stabbing of the people who had helped him along.

Author Schulberg's principal preoccupation is with what makes a Sammy Click. He finds Hollywood full of them, although most have "all their sammyglickness covered up with Oxford manners or have-one-on-me sociability or Christian morals that they pay their respects to every Sunday morning when they don't have too big a hangover." In parsing Sammy, he tries to find the Glick goal and comprehend the Glick means, even returns to Sammy's grubby childhood surroundings in Manhattan's Rivington Street, a thickly packed Jewish section.

"I thought of Sammy Glick," he reflects, "rocking in his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor; I thought of him as a mangy little puppy in a dog-eat-dog world. ... I saw Sammy Glick on a battlefield where every soldier was his own cause, his own army and his own flag, and I realized that I had singled him out not because he had been born into the world any more selfish, ruthless and cruel than anybody else, even though he had become all three, but because in the midst of a war that was selfish, ruthless and cruel Sammy was proving himself the fittest, the fiercest and the fastest."

*Random House ($2.50).

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