What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

First published: 1941

Type of plot: Black humor

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: New York City and Hollywood

Principal Characters:

• Sammy Glick, (née Shmelka Glickstein), a dynamic and ambitious young man
• Al Manheim, an intelligent writer fascinated by Glick
• Kit Sargent, a talented and wise screenwriter
• Julian Blumberg, a talented but unassertive writer
• Sidney Fineman, an older and respected Hollywood producer
• Laurette Harrington, a rich and beautiful woman who becomes Sammy’s wife

The Novel

What Makes Sammy Run? tells of the rise to riches and fame of Shmelka Glickstein, who when he was five years old began to change his name to Sammy Glick. The action spans the 1930’s, moving from New York to Hollywood (and briefly back to New York again). The title not only names the novel’s central character but also asks the novel’s major question: What makes Sammy do what he does?

Sammy’s tale, which is told by a newspaperman named Al Manheim, proceeds chronologically, with flashbacks when other characters tell Manheim their Sammy stories. Manheim marks very clearly the stages of Sammy’s development. At first Sammy, aged about seventeen, is only a copy boy at the New York Record. Not only does he run his errands faster than anyone else, but he also angles to improve himself; he learns points of grammar from Manheim. Sammy is confident, aggressive, ambitious, opportunistic, and attuned to the moment. He bides his time until he gets a column of his own—about the new medium, radio.

Sammy’s next stage comes when an unassuming writer named Julian Blumberg brings him a script to review. Sammy, who is not creative or even a writer, sees the script’s potential. Sammy telephones a leading Hollywood agent and sells the story for five thousand dollars. Sammy is thus off to Hollywood, abandoning Blumberg and a naïve girlfriend, and after a few months, Manheim follows him.

Sammy is now a young screenwriter striving to get ahead. When he shows Manheim around, he dresses in a California casual style and drives a yellow Cadillac roadster. He seduces some women with promises of jobs in the movies, though he also is the lover of Kit Sargent, a talented screenwriter. Sammy shows Manheim how he gets ahead by improvising the beginning of a screen treatment for a South Seas movie. In a flashback, Manheim learns how he also butters up studio heads by doing political jobs for them.

Sammy’s next stage is more ominous. He lures Blumberg to Hollywood, then treats him shamefully once again. When Manheim confronts him, Sammy seems like a gangster, and he dismisses Manheim’s appeal to Jewish solidarity with contempt.

Sammy wants to be among Hollywood’s highest-paid writers. To get to the top, he must write a successful play, so Sammy does just that. Manheim realizes that the play is an artful pilfering of The Front Page (a hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur). As a playwright, Sammy is more authoritative and seems to show, as he manipulates people, broader cultural horizons than before.

Sammy’s next stage takes place as screenwriters try to organize a union. Sammy aligns himself with the highest-paid writers, a group that double-crosses the lower-paid writers and breaks the union. Both Blumberg and Manheim lose their jobs. Sammy in turn double-crosses one of the double-crossers and becomes a producer.

Manheim retreats to New York, but when Sammy calls, Manheim returns to Hollywood to discover the end of Sammy’s story. Sammy takes over as head of World-Wide Pictures by elbowing out Sidney Fineman, an illustrious but fading film pioneer. All he needs is the approval of Harrington, the moneyed chairman of the board. At a lavish party given at his new mansion, Sammy gets Harrington’s blessing, but he becomes obsessed with Harrington’s daughter, the aristocratic Laurette. They are married. Within hours after the wedding, Laurette is unfaithful and lets him know she will be unfaithful in the future. Sammy cannot get rid of her, for her father owns his company. Sammy is trapped, yet he rallies and faces his unhappy future. Manheim thinks that justice has been done: Sammy’s life will be eaten away as by a disease.

The Characters

In What Makes Sammy Run? Schulberg appears to have invented a new stock character: Sammy Glick. Perhaps growing up in poverty in a New York City ghetto has made him a man without a conscience: totally self-centered, young, pushy, ruthless, conniving, smart, immoral, possessed of extraordinary energy, and determined to succeed. He is incapable of friendship or love; he uses men to further his career, and he uses women and discards them. What he lacks in ability (he can only feed on other’s ideas), he makes up in a kind of secondary creativity. He can take someone else’s stories, elaborate upon them, and sell them.

The novel’s other character’s are also stock characters, but more familiar kinds. The narrator of the novel, Al Manheim, is Sammy’s foil. He is intelligent, literate, and moral, a man who believes in social and family ties. The reader knows he is reliable, for he was educated at Wesleyan and is a son of a rabbi from a small New England town. He thus combines traditional Jewish moral authority with the New England virtues of honesty and plain-speaking. Like most readers, he hates what Sammy does, but his hatred alternates with fascination.

Almost all of the other characters are also American Jews. Although Julian Blumberg is a talented writer, he is woefully unassertive. He is a good man; he has a good wife. He exists to be duped, used, and discarded by the likes of Sammy. Sidney Fineman is another such character. Although he once made memorable films, he is uneasy with the present emphasis on money over art—an easy prey to Sammy’s wiles.

Kit Sargent, who is probably not Jewish, is talented, witty, and wise, and she possesses a subtle beauty very different from that of the usual Hollywood starlet. She shares Manheim’s function: They form a chorus to point out Sammy’s evil deeds and to direct the reader’s reactions. Their slowly developing friendship and love underlines Sammy’s heartlessness. In contrast, Laurette Harrington represents Sammy’s ultimate dream: elegance, money, sex, and class. Of the other women in the novel, Billie Rand is the most notable, the loose woman with a heart of gold.

Schulberg develops these characters economically, mainly though smart and funny dialogue. Their persons and actions are described only briefly, except for Sammy’s aging face and his wardrobe. Schulberg focuses his symbolism on Sammy. His wonderful, fashionable shoes call attention to his running, an action that the title and the early chapters emphasize. Sammy’s force is communicated in metaphors drawn from machines, mainly automobiles, though he also resembles a little animal such as a ferret or a rabbit.

Though each of the novel’s stock characters play a role in presenting Sammy and in asking the title’s question, some of them are more fully developed. Billie’s friendliness and her distaste for Sammy are memorable. Kit and Manheim are complex enough to engage a reader’s attention, and Schulberg has created Sammy himself with enough attention to his childhood years and with enough real magnetism (and even charm) to make some readers feel at times a kind of affection for him.

Critical Context

Upon publication, What Makes Sammy Run? was an immediate though controversial success, much like Sammy himself. Though Schulberg presents a great range of Jewish characters, from Sammy to the saintly Blumberg, What Makes Sammy Run? was called anti-Semitic by many.

The novel grew out of Schulberg’s political convictions and his experience growing up in Hollywood and later working as a screenwriter himself. His fable dramatized many of the social and political issues of his day, giving Sammy’s story a politically left-of-center reading that was not so strident as to offend many readers. In addition, readers were both fascinated and repelled by its central character and by the Hollywood background: the infighting, intrigues, and sexual escapades of that city’s glamorous people. The book raises serious issues as well. Its treatment of sex was frank for its day. It deals sympathetically and openly with the problems that immigrants experienced in adjusting to American life.

This was Schulberg’s first novel. He went on to write other successful works that show many of the same concerns. His novel The Harder They Fall (1947) was about corruption in professional boxing. His story and screenplay for On the Waterfront, which dramatized corruption at the docks, won an Academy Award in 1954. His 1950 novel The Disenchanted drew upon the life of his acquaintance F. Scott Fitzgerald, a man who could be seen as defeated by Hollywood, a clear contrast to the successful Sammy Glick.

Echoes of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) are heard in some descriptions of Sammy Glick. The greatest stylistic emphasis on What Makes Sammy Run? may be the slapstick, smart-talking comedies that Hollywood was turning out during Schulberg’s early years as a screenwriter.

Bibliography

Hartung, Philip T. Review in Commonweal, June 6, 1941, 163. A typical contemporary reaction to the novel’s indecency and immorality: Hartung remarks that some communities may ban it; that the novel seems anti-Semitic; and that Hollywood insiders say it is accurate.

Schulberg, Budd. Introduction to What Makes Sammy Run? New York: Random House, 1952. The Modern Library edition. The author makes revealing comments about his novel’s genesis and themes.

Schulberg, Budd. Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince. New York: Stein and Day, 1981. Schulberg describes growing up in Hollywood.

Winchell, Mark Royden. “Fantasy Seen: Hollywood Fiction Since West.” In Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Original Essays, edited by David Fine. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. A good discussion of authors who created the negative antimyth of Hollywood. Schulberg’s novel is compared unfavorably to Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941). The fictional Fineman is based on the real Irving Thalberg.