What Makes Sammy Run? (Sammy Glick on Television)

April 6, 2005
Back to '59: Sammy Is Running Again
By JOSEPH BERGER

In the cutthroat, double-dealing world pictured in books about Enron and Disney, Sammy Glick may seem like a quaint relic of a simpler time. But when he landed on the American imagination in 1941 in Budd Schulberg's Hollywood novel "What Makes Sammy Run," Sammy was an original, an archetype for the ruthless climber who sheds scruples and uses up friends as he slithers his way to the top.

He steals credits for scripts, drops his girlfriend for the studio owner's regal daughter and displays an almost acrobatic ability to feign ardent loyalty to his boss while making a case for dumping him at the same time.

"With me it's simple," he says. "Whatever is good for Sammy Glick is right, and whatever is bad for Sammy Glick is immoral, unethical, unconstitutional. In other words, it stinks."

Despite a character type as iconically American as George Babbitt, Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman, "What Makes Sammy Run" was never made into a film. But it did have a powerful performance on television - two episodes on consecutive Sundays in 1959 on the NBC anthology "Sunday Showcase" - that starred a corrosive Larry Blyden.

A full kinescope of that TV adaptation has recently been found after being lost to the public for decades. The Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan had possessed a videotape of the first hour practically since its founding in 1976, but its archivists could never find the concluding hour until the actress Dina Merrill, a museum trustee, asked to see her treasured role as Sammy's imperious goddess.

A new nationwide search unearthed an eight-reel kinescope of both segments at the Library of Congress. They had been mislabeled. Tonight the discovery will be celebrated with a screening at the museum attended by Mr. Schulberg, co-author of the teleplay with his brother Stuart, and Ms. Merrill.

"I thought I was writing about Hollywood," said Mr. Schulberg, now 91, living in the Hamptons and working on a boxing screenplay with Spike Lee. "But people started calling me asking if I knew this person or that person because they thought he was so like him. Then I realized in a way that I had touched a national nerve."

In today's world of "capitalism with the brakes off," Mr. Schulberg said, Sammy's kind of back-stabbing behavior is "taken for granted." Indeed, he said, he has had readers come up to him and thank him for advice on advancing their careers.

"I've written a how-to book, which is not exactly what I had in mind," he said.

Mr. Schulberg knew his Hollywood snakes because he was the son of a Paramount studio head, B. P. Schulberg, and as a young man wrote a screenplay with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mr. Schulberg suggested that Sammy was a composite of many of the scheming sycophants whom he saw "kissing up" to his father.

In the television version, filled with the kind of crisp dialogue not uncommon in an era when television drew writers like Paddy Chayefsky, Larry Blyden starts off as a newspaper copy boy who quickly sizes up the economic futility of a life in journalism. "Don't do me no favors," he tells his mentor, Al Manheim, played by John Forsythe, when offered a chance at promotion. "A cub reporter for $30 a week, and then all of a sudden you're a great big reporter for $50 and $60 a week for the rest of your life? No thanks."

Sammy then curries favor with a senior editor by pointing out an error in Manheim's column and is rewarded with a column of his own. Sammy vaults to Hollywood on the strength of a script he has stolen from a hapless writer, and the idealistic Manheim joins him. He watches Sammy make a loud fuss over a restaurant table, sell scripts on glib ad-libbing that, as one character says, "will pass for genius" in Hollywood, and put down Manheim as "intelligent but not smart." Finally he sees him snatch the job of the studio production chief, a man who Sammy had once said was "like a father to me."

The show tries to explain Sammy's hunger for success with glimpses of a penniless childhood on the Lower East Side where Sammy had to wear his brother's hand-me-down shoes.

"I didn't have to read no books to find out about Darwin," Sammy says. "I learned about that on the streets - survival of the fittest."

The teleplay, directed by Delbert Mann, who had earlier directed the acclaimed television and movie versions of "Marty," makes clear that Sammy's relentless drive is an aphrodisiac. A beautiful screenwriter, Kit Sargent, played by Barbara Rush, says she has a "crazed desire to hold all that frenzy and violence." But still she is scrupulous enough to tell Sammy, "If you were half the success, you'd be more of a man."

Sammy drops her for the aristocratic Laurette Harrington (Ms. Merrill), but gets his comeuppance. Still it is clear that Sammy Glicks are not easily stopped. The real question, Sammy says at the end, is not what makes Sammy run, but what makes "all the rest of you run after me."

Jane Klain, the museum's manager of research services, and Allen Glover, the curator, speculated that despite efforts to get Frank Sinatra, Mickey Rooney and even Tom Cruise to play Sammy, the novel had never been filmed because of Hollywood's discomfort with a close-to-the-bone portrayal of a studio chief by an inside player. Ms. Klain said it was easier to mount a television production because "television at the time tackled a lot of things that film was apprehensive about." An earlier, shorter television adaptation with Jose Ferrer as Sammy was broadcast in 1949, and the novel was turned into a Broadway musical in 1964 that starred Steve Lawrence and ran for more than 500 performances.

The actor Ben Stiller has written a screenplay with Jerry Stahl and, with backing from Dreamworks, hopes to direct it, but he said, "It's a hard movie to get made - when people say no you never get the real reason for what the resistance is."

In the 1959 teleplay Mr. Schulberg had Kit Sargent suggest that the story did not necessarily have to take place in Hollywood and that Sammy did not have to be Jewish. "I've known Glicks named Jones, Goldstein and Orsini," she says. "Where the stakes are high and the pressure is great, that's where you'll find Sammy. He's a universal type."

But the Jewish nerve was hard to avoid in depicting a heavily Jewish industry. Mr. Schulberg recalled that when he wrote two short stories for Liberty magazine that grew into the novel, Liberty's editors insisted he give many of the characters names that were less obviously Jewish. Al Manheim became Al Manners. But for the novel and 1959 script, characters retained Jewish names to show that the victims of Sammy's venality were also Jewish.

Ms. Klain described "Sammy" as one of the "legendary lost programs." The networks routinely threw away kinescopes of old shows and reused tapes, but NBC had given its kinescopes to the Library of Congress. Ms. Klain asked the library archives to comb its holdings more painstakingly, and the eight mislabeled reels were found.

"Jane ran upstairs very excited and said we'd found the second half of 'What Makes Sammy Run,' " Mr. Glover recalled.

Will the rediscovered teleplay of "Sammy" ever run outside the museum? "In the perfect universe there would be a television counterpart of Turner Classic Movies," Mr. Glover said.