Vos es tut nisht a yid tsulib parnose: a review of What Makes Sammy Run?
I recently re-read What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg (NY: Penguin Books, 1980 [first published in the U.S. in 1941 by Random House, Inc.; first published in the UK in 1941 by Jarrolds; first Penguin Books edition published in 1978 with a new afterword by the author; reprinted in 1980]; ISBN: 0-14-00.4795-6; 252 pps.), from Wed., 8 July 2009 to Sat., 11 July 2009.
I suppose it's not too great a coincidence that Schulberg passed away on Wednesday, 5 August: after all, the man was 95, and therefore can be said to have had a long, good run.
What Makes Sammy Run? is the story of an unscrupulous gonif/über-user named Sammy Glick (née Glickstein), who begins as the hoodlum younger son of a devout Orthodox Jew in NYC's Lower East Side and ends as a much-feted, much-envied Hollywood producer. The tale is told by the closest thing Sammy has to a friend, a newspaper theatre critic turned screenwriter named Al Manheim: Sammy the teenaged copyboy goes over Al's head to his editor and persuades him to let him carve off a piece of Al's column for his own (which he plagiarized); thanks to a total lack of scruples and a keen sense of what sells, Sammy is soon able to parlay "his" column into a career "writing" plagiarized screenplays, and thence into producing movies, always with an eye on attaining the executive suite.
What Makes Sammy Run? spans from the mid-to-late-1920s to the late 1930s/early 1940s, and is told in three main arcs: Sammy's relatively meteoric rise; Manheim's seduction by Sammy and the idea of making a progressive, socially significant movie that is also boffo box office, and his first-hand experiences with the labor movement (an account of the squabbles that led to the formation of the Writers Guild of America); and the "older, sadder, wiser" period in which Manheim investigates Sammy's childhood while Sammy himself, at the arc of his triumph, learns a few hard truths about his way of life. If the book's narrative structure comes off as a vague, down-market version of The Great Gatsby, it should come as no surprise: Schulberg was a great admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even worked on a screenplay with him towards the end of Fitzgerald's career (and, sadly, life).
What Makes Sammy Run? is a mostly entertaining read, although it's never nearly as witty, incisive or shocking as readers -- particularly the Hollywood community -- found it when it was first published. (According to the afterword that Schulberg wrote for this edition, in 1978, Louie B. Mayer of MGM was so incensed by the book that, at a meeting of the Motion Pictures Producers Association, he called for his deportation. As Schulberg recalled: "Only one member at that august gathering dared to laugh -- my father. 'For Christ sake, Louie, he's the first novelist who was ever raised in Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him -- to Catalina Island?'" [p. 251]) The prose creaks badly in spots, particularly when Manheim spouts his humanist wheeze about "the mysterious sense of poetry [that] all peasants seem to have" (p. 183), that Jews have a unique way of crying "because only they have had so much practice at it" (p. 200), or that Sammy Glicks -- Manheim sees him as a type almost from the first -- arise only out of dire poverty and ethnic tensions or, as he styles it, "I thought of Sammy Glick 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" (p. 203). Modern liberal or progressive readers are apt to find that the humanist platitudes of Manheim and his foil, Catherine (Kit) Sargent end a bit too abruptly: terms like "fag" and "nance" are bruited about with no qualifiers to indicate that one really shouldn't use them, unlike the ethnic slurs.
There are some fine historical details to be gleaned here, such as how little traction anti-fascist pictures had in a largely Jewish-controlled Hollywood in the late 1930s (Manheim wants to make an anti-fascist bio-pic of Czech president, statesman and philosopher Tomáš Masaryk [who died on 14 September 1937], but is soon schooled by Sammy: "'Why do you think Metro scrapped It Can't Happen Here? It's lousy for the English market...England doesn't want to get Hitler and Mussolini sore'" [p. 165].); how Hollywood was relatively slow to acquiring pretensions about itself -- never mind the lack of the auteur theory: editors were merely called "cutters" (p. 91); Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle and Oil! (the latter of which was the basis for the 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson movie There Will Be Blood), was vilified by the right as a Bolshevik (and, according to Wikipedia, "by American and Soviet communists as a capitalist"...) when he ran for governor of California in 1934 -- which, in light of the current vilification of Barack Obama as a socialist, sounds a glum note of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose; how highly regarded among progressive writers Dudley Nichols' adaptation of Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel The Informer (previously filmed in England in 1929) was -- the fact that the eponymous 1935 movie copped four Academy Awards, for Best Actor (Victor McLaglen), Best Director (John Ford, who was O'Flaherty's cousin), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Nichols, who became the first Oscar recipient to decline, in this case due to union disagreements; although, according to the Internet Movie Database, "Academy records show that Dudley was in possession of an Oscar statuette by 1949") and Best Score (Max Steiner), and was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Editing, surely didn't hurt; and the well-nigh incredible fact (??) that movie theatre patrons of the 1930s were so considerate that a gentleman could put his hat underneath his seat while watching the show without it becoming irreparably stained by discarded gum and popcorn and spilled soda (p. 81). (This last bit, I suspect, detours the novel from the historical into the deepest fastnesses of fantasy.)
Schulberg's novel is sufficiently hard-hitting to offer an intimation of incest among the Jewish community of New York (p. 195); the fact that such tidbits lie cheek-by-jowl with rosy-eyed naïveté about the shtetls ("Here in America life moves too fast for the Jews"; p. 194) is the main reason, and symptom, of the unevenness of What Makes Sammy Run?. Still, Schulberg can turn an occasional nice phrase (as his "Nothing is ever quite so drab and repetitious and forlorn and ludicrous as truth"; p. 104) and surprising insight (as his "What is a Jew?" piece in the ninth chapter; "..if it is only a unit of national culture it is withering away in America, for the customs and traditions that the Glicksteins brought over at the end of the nineteenth century...were thrown overboard as excess baggage by anyone in such a hurry as [Sammy]"; p. 194), which is -- aside from the look at early "talkies"-era Hollywood and the un-PC 1930s snark -- what kept me reading.
Still, few authors can claim to have created a widely recognized archetype (or have the title of one of their books enter the common vernacular; a 1957 traffic safety film was jauntily titled "What Makes Sammy Speed?"), and for that reason alone, What Makes Sammy Run? is worth at least one read-through. Schulberg's portrait of the shoe-obsessed, glad-handing, back-stabbing, emotionally stunted, intellectually incurious, self-promoting, shamelessly thieving go-getter named Sammy Glick is broad enough so that he is not merely a specific movie mogul (as many of Schulberg's contemporaries felt; one suspects that, more than being afraid that Sammy was based on them, most of the various producers and studio execs were afraid that he wasn't) or merely an archetype of a movie mogul; he is the avatar of the all-American businessman, repellent and fascinating in his own unique way: Babbit on crystal meth. Sammy's career is enough to make one mutter, "Vos es tut nisht a yid tsulib parnose" ("What a Jew doesn't do in order to earn a living"; Michael Wex's Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods [2005; 2006 HarperPerennial trade paperback edition; ISBN: 978-0-06-113217-9; p. 149), but again, Sammy's ethnicity is more coloring than an essential part of his character; the pages of any business-oriented magazine are replete with homages to innumerable Sammy Glicks. Schulberg feared that What Makes Sammy Run? had become a how-to manual eagerly perused by would-be Sammys; as he concluded his afterword, "Would that I had written an epitaph rather than an ode for Sammy Glick" (p. 252).
I suppose it's not too great a coincidence that Schulberg passed away on Wednesday, 5 August: after all, the man was 95, and therefore can be said to have had a long, good run.
What Makes Sammy Run? is the story of an unscrupulous gonif/über-user named Sammy Glick (née Glickstein), who begins as the hoodlum younger son of a devout Orthodox Jew in NYC's Lower East Side and ends as a much-feted, much-envied Hollywood producer. The tale is told by the closest thing Sammy has to a friend, a newspaper theatre critic turned screenwriter named Al Manheim: Sammy the teenaged copyboy goes over Al's head to his editor and persuades him to let him carve off a piece of Al's column for his own (which he plagiarized); thanks to a total lack of scruples and a keen sense of what sells, Sammy is soon able to parlay "his" column into a career "writing" plagiarized screenplays, and thence into producing movies, always with an eye on attaining the executive suite.
What Makes Sammy Run? spans from the mid-to-late-1920s to the late 1930s/early 1940s, and is told in three main arcs: Sammy's relatively meteoric rise; Manheim's seduction by Sammy and the idea of making a progressive, socially significant movie that is also boffo box office, and his first-hand experiences with the labor movement (an account of the squabbles that led to the formation of the Writers Guild of America); and the "older, sadder, wiser" period in which Manheim investigates Sammy's childhood while Sammy himself, at the arc of his triumph, learns a few hard truths about his way of life. If the book's narrative structure comes off as a vague, down-market version of The Great Gatsby, it should come as no surprise: Schulberg was a great admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even worked on a screenplay with him towards the end of Fitzgerald's career (and, sadly, life).
What Makes Sammy Run? is a mostly entertaining read, although it's never nearly as witty, incisive or shocking as readers -- particularly the Hollywood community -- found it when it was first published. (According to the afterword that Schulberg wrote for this edition, in 1978, Louie B. Mayer of MGM was so incensed by the book that, at a meeting of the Motion Pictures Producers Association, he called for his deportation. As Schulberg recalled: "Only one member at that august gathering dared to laugh -- my father. 'For Christ sake, Louie, he's the first novelist who was ever raised in Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him -- to Catalina Island?'" [p. 251]) The prose creaks badly in spots, particularly when Manheim spouts his humanist wheeze about "the mysterious sense of poetry [that] all peasants seem to have" (p. 183), that Jews have a unique way of crying "because only they have had so much practice at it" (p. 200), or that Sammy Glicks -- Manheim sees him as a type almost from the first -- arise only out of dire poverty and ethnic tensions or, as he styles it, "I thought of Sammy Glick 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" (p. 203). Modern liberal or progressive readers are apt to find that the humanist platitudes of Manheim and his foil, Catherine (Kit) Sargent end a bit too abruptly: terms like "fag" and "nance" are bruited about with no qualifiers to indicate that one really shouldn't use them, unlike the ethnic slurs.
There are some fine historical details to be gleaned here, such as how little traction anti-fascist pictures had in a largely Jewish-controlled Hollywood in the late 1930s (Manheim wants to make an anti-fascist bio-pic of Czech president, statesman and philosopher Tomáš Masaryk [who died on 14 September 1937], but is soon schooled by Sammy: "'Why do you think Metro scrapped It Can't Happen Here? It's lousy for the English market...England doesn't want to get Hitler and Mussolini sore'" [p. 165].); how Hollywood was relatively slow to acquiring pretensions about itself -- never mind the lack of the auteur theory: editors were merely called "cutters" (p. 91); Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle and Oil! (the latter of which was the basis for the 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson movie There Will Be Blood), was vilified by the right as a Bolshevik (and, according to Wikipedia, "by American and Soviet communists as a capitalist"...) when he ran for governor of California in 1934 -- which, in light of the current vilification of Barack Obama as a socialist, sounds a glum note of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose; how highly regarded among progressive writers Dudley Nichols' adaptation of Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel The Informer (previously filmed in England in 1929) was -- the fact that the eponymous 1935 movie copped four Academy Awards, for Best Actor (Victor McLaglen), Best Director (John Ford, who was O'Flaherty's cousin), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Nichols, who became the first Oscar recipient to decline, in this case due to union disagreements; although, according to the Internet Movie Database, "Academy records show that Dudley was in possession of an Oscar statuette by 1949") and Best Score (Max Steiner), and was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Editing, surely didn't hurt; and the well-nigh incredible fact (??) that movie theatre patrons of the 1930s were so considerate that a gentleman could put his hat underneath his seat while watching the show without it becoming irreparably stained by discarded gum and popcorn and spilled soda (p. 81). (This last bit, I suspect, detours the novel from the historical into the deepest fastnesses of fantasy.)
Schulberg's novel is sufficiently hard-hitting to offer an intimation of incest among the Jewish community of New York (p. 195); the fact that such tidbits lie cheek-by-jowl with rosy-eyed naïveté about the shtetls ("Here in America life moves too fast for the Jews"; p. 194) is the main reason, and symptom, of the unevenness of What Makes Sammy Run?. Still, Schulberg can turn an occasional nice phrase (as his "Nothing is ever quite so drab and repetitious and forlorn and ludicrous as truth"; p. 104) and surprising insight (as his "What is a Jew?" piece in the ninth chapter; "..if it is only a unit of national culture it is withering away in America, for the customs and traditions that the Glicksteins brought over at the end of the nineteenth century...were thrown overboard as excess baggage by anyone in such a hurry as [Sammy]"; p. 194), which is -- aside from the look at early "talkies"-era Hollywood and the un-PC 1930s snark -- what kept me reading.
Still, few authors can claim to have created a widely recognized archetype (or have the title of one of their books enter the common vernacular; a 1957 traffic safety film was jauntily titled "What Makes Sammy Speed?"), and for that reason alone, What Makes Sammy Run? is worth at least one read-through. Schulberg's portrait of the shoe-obsessed, glad-handing, back-stabbing, emotionally stunted, intellectually incurious, self-promoting, shamelessly thieving go-getter named Sammy Glick is broad enough so that he is not merely a specific movie mogul (as many of Schulberg's contemporaries felt; one suspects that, more than being afraid that Sammy was based on them, most of the various producers and studio execs were afraid that he wasn't) or merely an archetype of a movie mogul; he is the avatar of the all-American businessman, repellent and fascinating in his own unique way: Babbit on crystal meth. Sammy's career is enough to make one mutter, "Vos es tut nisht a yid tsulib parnose" ("What a Jew doesn't do in order to earn a living"; Michael Wex's Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods [2005; 2006 HarperPerennial trade paperback edition; ISBN: 978-0-06-113217-9; p. 149), but again, Sammy's ethnicity is more coloring than an essential part of his character; the pages of any business-oriented magazine are replete with homages to innumerable Sammy Glicks. Schulberg feared that What Makes Sammy Run? had become a how-to manual eagerly perused by would-be Sammys; as he concluded his afterword, "Would that I had written an epitaph rather than an ode for Sammy Glick" (p. 252).