Free What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg Page B

following Monday morning he was gone. He left a note for me saying the worst had happened, and that I had taken some of the curse off those last few weeks and that he was driving back to New York to see if he couldn’t get an advance on a new play he had started. A couple of years later I saw one of his plays that the Federal Theater was doing in Los Angeles, but I’ve never seen him again. It’s queer to think how many little guys there are like that, with more ability than push, sucked in by one wave and hurled out by the next, for every Sammy Glick who slips through and over the waves like a porpoise.
    After he left, I tried to think if there was anyone else in town I knew, and I suddenly remembered Henry Powell Turner, the poet, who had been a senior when I was a freshman at Wesleyan. I remembered how excited we all were at school when we heard that the book-length poem on the history of New England which he had read to the Literary Society while he was still in college had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I had met Henry again on his way out to Hollywood several years ago and he had told me, by way of making conversation, to be sure and look him up if I was ever out that way.
    The operator told me that Mr. Turner had a confidential number, so I finally wired him at his studio and asked him to call me. I didn’t hear from him until several weeks later when I picked upthe phone to hear a cultured woman’s voice say, “This is Mr. Henry Powell Turner’s secretary. Mr. and Mrs. Turner would like to have the pleasure of your company at dinner at seven-thirty this Wednesday evening.”
    What I remember most about the Turner manse was that it was a five-dollar taxi ride from the Villa Espana, that you could see the Pacific Ocean from its front lawn, and that it was the largest example of the worst kind of architecture I have ever seen. Hollywood Moorish.
    I had always thought of Henry Powell Turner as my ideal of what a great poet should look like. I could remember him as a student, built along heroic proportions, six feet three and over two hundred pounds, with blond curly hair and the kind of chiseled, classical good looks that always remind me of the way epic Greek poets looked—or ought to have looked. And even when I had seen Turner last, four or five years ago, he was still a romantic figure to me, erect and hearty as ever, with his wild yellow hair turning a more dignified gray at the temples.
    When I saw him again this time, in that huge, cold living room, with the expensive furniture and the high ceiling, there were only a few strands left of the old youthful yellow among the thinning, straightening gray, but he was hardly more dignified because he was already well on his way toward the state of drooling intoxication which I later discovered he managed to achieve with monotonous regularity each evening.
    I met his wife, a gaunt, high-strung woman, prematurely gray, with a boyish figure in low-cut red velvet. They asked me the usual polite questions during cocktails, and conversation died once or twice at dinner, though Turner and I did our best to squeeze the most out of our common interest in Wesleyan. That’s about all I remember about that dinner, except that it was served with an irritating pomp, and that Turner shattered whatever illusions I had left about him by telling one of those long dirty stories for which the only justification would be the tag line at the climax, which they never seem to reach. At the finish he laughed so loudthat he finally broke into a coughing fit which he managed to soothe with loud gulps of sparkling burgundy.
    When we rose from the table, his wife, ghostlike all through dinner, finally disappeared, and I found myself cooped up with him and several bottles of Bellows Scotch in his imposing study. I spent the next three or four uncomfortable hours in trying to follow him through his various stages of drunkenness. In the first, he recited some of his lyrical poetry. In the