How Sammy still runs

There's a piano in the living room at Budd Schulberg's old home in Hancock Park, just as there was 75 years ago when Schulberg was a boy, living there with his family, right around the corner from the Barrymores and Louis B. Mayer, his father's old business partner. The Schulbergs were Hollywood royalty back then. Budd's father, B.P. Schulberg, was head of Paramount Pictures, which meant that a cavalcade of stars often lighted up their living room, the piano getting quite a workout. As a young Hollywood prince, Schulberg had a front-row seat. Clara Bow, the "It Girl," flirted shamelessly with him; Cary Grant and Gary Cooper cracked jokes; Marlene Dietrich arrived, just off the boat, with her Svengali, Josef von Sternberg.

Schulberg uses a cane to slowly navigate his way around his old house. While his hair is snowy white, his mind remains razor sharp, unclouded by the sentimentality of nostalgia. Being so close to Hollywood gave Schulberg a chance to see the flaws people farther away couldn't notice. Bow, it turns out, was sleeping with everybody in town, including his father. Dietrich, Budd recalls, "looked very mousy," not at all the sleek siren we saw on screen. One night, B.P. gave a party for Maurice Chevalier, who was new in town. Charlie Chaplin, a family friend, was there too. As needy as any comedian, Chaplin couldn't stand having to share the spotlight. "So he went over to the piano," Schulberg recalls, "and whenever Chevalier would sing, Charlie would pound away at the keys, as loud as he could, trying to drown him out."

Out of this world, teeming with people in a hurry to get to the top, came Sammy Glick, the showbiz hustler hero of Schulberg's seminal novel "What Makes Sammy Run?," which remains, six decades later, as timely a portrait of unchecked ambition as it was when first published in 1941. Over the years, Schulberg has also penned classic films, most notably the Oscar-winning "On the Waterfront." He's written about every boxer from Joe Louis to Mike Tyson and, after the 1965 Watts riots, he started the Watts Writers' Workshop. He still writes with vigor, penning a piece on Marlon Brando for Vanity Fair's recent Hollywood issue and reviewing a new Orson Welles book last month in the New York Times Book Review. Schulberg was in town recently for a Museum of Television & Radio screening of the newly discovered 1959 TV production of "What Makes Sammy Run?," cowritten by Schulberg and his late brother Stuart.