It’s 2005, and Sammy is still running
When Budd Schulberg’s Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? was published in 1941, it was considered a cautionary tale about ruthless careerism and corporate backstabbing. Today, in an age when “everybody does it” is the defense of scandal-makers large and small, in business and politics, entertainment and academia, it reads like a how-to book.
Sammy is back in the news thanks to the rediscovery of the complete 1959 television adaptation of the novel. Schulberg and his brother co-w
rote the teleplay, which starred Larry Blyden as the monstrously driven screenwriter Sammy Glick. Like the novel, it traces Sammy’s rise from copy boy at a New York daily newspaper to the head of a movie studio. The novel’s narrator describes Sammy’s career as a “blitzkrieg against his fellow men.” Sammy doesn’t step on fingers and toes as much as he gouges eyes and snatches hanks of hair.
The book scandalized both Hollywood and the Jews — then as now a sort of Venn diagram of overlapping interest groups. Schulberg, himself the son of a top Hollywood executive, was considered a traitor to his class, his profession, and his people. Even now “Sammy” remains shorthand for the pushy, grabby, nouveau riche Jew, so I can only imagine what he meant to Jews in the 1940s. Schulberg can’t be blamed, however, if anti-Semites seized upon Sammy as vindication: as he has repeatedly pointed out since the book’s publication, nearly of all of Sammy’s victims in the novel are fellow Jews. “Just as Jews…have no monopoly on the Sammy Glicks,” Schulberg wrote in the introduction to the Modern Library edition of the novel in 1952, “Sammy himself cannot and should not be interpreted as the personification of an American Jewry that has also given us Brandeis and Gershwin, Baruch, General Rose and Irving Berlin, not to mention Benny Friedman, Hank Greenberg and Barney Ross.”
While that list of names may date Schulberg (I had to look up Major General Maurice Rose, commander of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Armored Division, who died in battle in March 1945), Sammy remains timeless — but hardly frozen in time. In the early 1970s Schulberg began to feel “the first disturbing shift in what was to become a 180-degree turn in our national attitude toward Sammy.” By 1989, Schulberg would write that the turn was complete: Sammy Glick had become a “character reference” and “role-model hero” for a generation of young people on the make. “Reading Sammy gives me confidence,” a college student told Schulberg. “I read it over and over. It’s my bible!”
Schulberg was shocked by what he described as the “moral breakdown” of the 1980s, and must be positively apoplectic over what he sees today. You can just imagine the 91-year-old writer rereading the book review he contributed to Sunday’s New York Times, and then flipping to the profile of embattled Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff in the magazine section. And I mean flipping.
It’s probably unfair to compare Abramoff to Sammy Glick. Glick grew up in abject poverty on the Lower East Side; Abramoff’s parents moved to Beverly Hills when he was a boy. Sammy turned his back on religion, while Abramoff adopted Orthodox Jewish practice as a teenager. Sammy was a successful filmmaker; Abramoff’s stab at movie production, the lurid 1988 thriller Red Scorpion, was a critical and box office flop.
But there are certain parallels, shall we say. There is, of course, the “shanda fur die goyim” factor whenever a highly visible Jew is at the center of a storm of negative publicity. And you can’t get publicity much worse than Abramoff’s: A federal grand jury and the U.S. Senate are investigating allegations that he defrauded Native American clients out of millions of dollars, while House Democrats are seeking an ethics inquiry into travel expenses allegedly paid by Abramoff for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and two Democratic congressmen. The investigation has uncovered e-mail messages between Abramoff and his colleagues in which Abramoff uses language hardly becoming a founder of the Committee for Traditional Jewish Values in Entertainment.
In Abramoff’s case the scrutiny is compounded by questions relating to some of his Jewish philanthropic works. Teachers at the now-defunct yeshiva Abramoff founded near Washington are suing him for unpaid wages. And Newsweek reported that some of the money donated by tribes to his charitable foundation for inner city youth has found its way to Beitar Illit, a settlement in the West Bank, where it paid for bullet-proof vests and the like.
History and the courts may well vindicate Abramoff. Yet it’s sad when the best thing you can say about a lobbyist’s track record of payouts, strong-arm tactics, and nasty e-mails is that “it wasn’t illegal.” Indeed, Abramoff invoked what Schulberg once described as the “blanket apology” for wrong-doing: “Everybody does it.”
“This is the system that we have,” Abramoff told the Times. “I didn’t create the system.” As even the Weekly Standard told it last year in its critical cover story on Abramoff: “Stripped of its peculiar grossness, Abramoff’s Indian story really is just another story of business as usual in the world of Washington lobbying.”
The last line of Schulberg’s novel describes Sammy Glick’s story as “a blueprint for a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the century.”
It turns out he was being optimistic. Sixty-four years later, Sammy’s ethical heirs are hard at work, reading the story of his climb like an instruction manual. “And if that’s the way they go on reading it,” wrote Schulberg, “marching behind the flag of Sammy Glick, with a big dollar sign in the square where the stars used to be, the twentieth-century version of Sammy is going to look like an Eagle Scout compared to the twenty-first.”