The Children of Sammy Glick
The joys of the old-school mover and shaker story
On May 1st I’ll be in conversation with my pal Matthew Specktor at Powerhouse Arena for the release of his new book The Golden Hour. Matthew is one of my favorite writers, and the conversation will be great, but reading through his beautiful family history, I couldn’t stop thinking about how honest it is. That sounds like it should always be the case, right? Matthew’s dad is the CAA super-agent Fred Specktor, and the book charts his rise to power as well as his mother’s brief career as a screenwriter who crossed the picket line during the 1981 Writers Guild strike and found out the “You’ll never work in this town again” thing sometimes ends up really happening. Matthew is also in the book, and it makes The Golden Hour feel almost like it was written by one of the background characters in Less Than Zero. He’s the son of a famous industry guy who’s not sure how to make his own way in the world while one parent rises, the other falls, and their marriage falls apart. It’s tragic, but also a different look into a world that’s been written about so many times before. Specktor is generous as he shows us his experiences growing up in a Hollywood family, the type that works more behind-the-scenes and not in front of camera. A celebrity memoir this isn’t.
Specktor is one of the L.A. kids who grew up wanting to write books. He’s a child of Joan Didion the same way Bret Easton Ellis is. His fiction and non-fiction often calls back to Hollywood lore and legend, but he always brings it back to the personal, making it clear why he’s so hung up on the subject he’s decided to write about. That’s part of the reason I’m always so excited to see his latest work: most of the time stories about Hollywood are written in the glossiest way possible, usually with the help of another writer. The history of the men (almost always men) who built the movie and music industries are often written with legacy in mind, so you’ll get little bites of gossip, but more often than not it’s some Horatio Alger story about how the guy pulled himself up from the bootstraps, made it from poverty to the penthouse, and met some really fascinating people along the way, and a lot of excuses for doing whatever bad they felt they had to do in order to get the job done.
“Brownsville was, in many ways, an unattractive place. The streets were dirty and crowded, and there was a constant clamor of sirens and police whistles, as fire engines and cops fought their way through a sprawl of junk shops, tinsmiths, stables, and garages,” Swifty Lazar wrote in his autobiography (co-written with Annette Tapert), Swifty: My Life and Good Times. The 1995 book that came out after Lazar’s death is filled with little bits of gossip and plenty of name-dropping, but I always focus my attention on the start, because the stuff about being the child of immigrants, fighting to survive, wanting to work for yourself, and getting your drive to succeed from watching your father who was cold to his children, but an excellent provider, is the most interesting stuff to me. It’s self-aggrandizing in a Freudian way, like I’m finding out everything I want to know when the person tells me about their childhood. When the book has a little bit of a What Makes Sammy Run feel to it then I’m usually easily hooked. Fred’s younger years in Specktor’s book has some of that, except the writer’s father isn’t portrayed as a power-hungry cut throat artist either because he isn’t or the fact that his son wrote the story means there was a little leniency granted. I could see both being true, but the point isn’t to hold his father’s feet to the fire: The Golden Hour is about a family attempting to stay together in a place known for tearing people apart.
Hollywood being a particularly brutal place is part of what makes books like What Makes Sammy Run, Swifty, or The Golden Hour so interesting. To make it in that town, you’ve got to do a lot of scratching and clawing, and that’s just to get a gig in a mailroom. When you read these kinds of books, you get an account of how these people rose to power, but how they kept it or lost it is often the most brutal stuff. The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans is the gold-standard of the entertainment power player tell-all story, and writers from Nathanael West to Joan Didion have created timeless stories out of Hollywood weirdness, but it’s the music mogul story where things can get super sloppy. Rich Cohen’s The Record Men: The Chess Brothers and the Birth of Rock & Roll and And Party Every Day: The Inside Story Of Casablanca Records by Larry Harris are both interesting accounts of how record labels are built with mob money, cocaine, exploitation of artists, and sometimes all three, but Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business by Fredric Dannen is basically the bible for the topic. Howling at the Moon by Walter Yetnikoff, one of the subjects in Hit Men, is sort of its Book of Enoch, a larger telling of one of the stories too sordid to make it into the big book. After starting things off with a daydream he had where he’s having earth shattering sex with Jackie O, the old CBS Records boss snaps back into reality and has his first Nat Sherman and a big glass of morning vodka before hopping on a call with Michael Jackson. After that, he needed his morning milk.
“Milk was my code word for coke […] I needed a little milk, not a lot, just a friendly snort to blow away the morning blues.” The music guys, I’ve found, usually have an easier time letting it all hang out—literally. My mental image of Yetnikoff is his face that’s on the cover, but he’s wearing a bathrobe open with no underwear or shirt on, and he’s totally chill about it. All the guys in these kinds of books usually go from being immigrant or first-generation Americans to indulging in the trappings of the good life. Fred Specktor is somewhat of an exception; he’s Jewish like Lazar, Evans, and Yetnikoff, but he’s American-born, his grandfather started things off for the family in the States, buying small businesses out west that were drowning in debt, and turned them around before selling them again for a profit. Fred is born into a middle-class existence and grew up on the southern edge of Beverly Hills, “where the grandeur of the movie stars’ homes has long since given way to dingbats and duplexes that are split into smaller units, rental properties whose bright green lawns and orderly facades belie their chintzy construction.” He wants to succeed, but the chip on his shoulder maybe isn’t as big, and maybe that’s why he’s not only been able to keep going in the business this long (Specktor celebrated his 90th birthday last year), but also why his son’s portrayal of him feels so honest. Maybe it’s because he didn’t come from the shtetl or some Jewish ghetto in New York or Chicago the way the fictional Sammy Glick or the real Swifty Lazar did. It’s a reminder that making it in America is tough for just about everybody, but some of us start from an even lower rung than others, and that feeling never goes away.
As for Yenikoff, he grew up in the same part of Brooklyn as Lazar, “the tenement-heavy Brownsville section of East New York where everyone lived and died by what the Dodgers did.” His memories of the place aren’t all rose-colored, but he doesn’t talk up how tough the streets were like Lazar did, either. Instead, his whole trajectory is given away in two simple sentences as he talks about his family life as a kid living in a home owned by his grandparents.
I couldn’t wait to skip out. Our Brooklyn home bristled with tension.