A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Read online

  Like my brother Ving, I had a knack for drawing when I was a kid. Ving was always more skilled but I loved creating my own silly cartoons. That's how I fell in love with newspapers. The local Worcester Telegram and the Worcester Post printed cartoons in every edition. The Boston American ran them in color in Sunday editions. I earned some extra pennies for my family by standing on a street corner in Worcester on Sunday mornings hawking those papers to passersby. Very often people would grab a paper and throw a quarter at me, telling me to keep the change. How I looked forward to those Sunday mornings on the street corner in Worcester! I'd take all the money home and give it to my mother. She was so proud of me.

  Rebecca's unswerving love gave me great self-confidence as a little boy. She was my fervent supporter, even when my ambitions surpassed my abilities. Take baseball, for example. I yearned to get involved, but I was too small to play with the older boys in the big empty lot across the street from our house. So Mother would wait until the end of a baseball game and invite the players over to taste her blueberry pies. The pies had been tickling their noses all afternoon, baked with blueberries my brothers and I collected in pewter buckets in the woods around our Worcester. When the blueberry pies came out of the oven, the most delicious aroma would come wafting from our house. I can still smell those blueberry pies cooling off on our windowsill.

  Thanks to Mother's pies, I became very popular with those baseball players. They promoted me from bystander to waterboy.

  "Sammy! Water!" some guy would yell. I carried the brimming bucket over to the bench and the player drank gulps with a big wooden spoon. After the games, some of the guys walked me across the street, not to get me home safely, but for another slice of blueberry pie that my mother would happily serve them from her kitchen window.

  That was how I got the chance to learn to play. I became pretty good in the infield and the outfield. I'm a southpaw, so they called me "Lefty." My hero was Carl Mays, whom I considered a greater player than Babe Ruth. I'd follow all the games in the local papers. At night, my dreams were filled with baseball, too. I'd hit the ball so hard that it blasted into the heavens and circled round the moon. I ran hard and tried to catch it but my little legs could never run fast enough in that ballpark in the sky.

  Decades later, I needed a copy of my birth certificate, so I wrote to the authorities in Worcester. I guess they considered me somebody special because an article about me ran on the front page of the Worcester Telegram, the paper I sold on the street when I was a little boy. I was happy it was still being published. Along with a clipping of the article, the editor of the Telegram wrote me a note explaining that everything in town had changed.

  In 1963 I went to Boston for the opening of Shock Corridor. It would have been easy to revisit my hometown in central Massachusetts. I was really tempted. But the little boy I'd been in Worcester had grown up fast. By then I was a hard-boiled middle-aged man who couldn't stand getting mired down in nostalgia. Burdened with memories of the intervening years, I never made that detour to Worcester. The kid in us embeds images from childhood in our mind's eye, beyond change. I wanted to remember the town as it was when our family moved away in 1923, never to return.

  My father's death that year changed everything, including my destiny. With her seven now fatherless children, Rebecca decided to move us to New York City, where there were more opportunities to better ourselves. We boarded a train that momentous day with our bundles, suitcases, and trunks for the trip down to Manhattan. I waved good-bye to a couple of my baseball buddies as the train pulled out, bidding farewell to Worcester and my childhood.

  Manhattan

  Explorer

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  New York City in the early twenties seemed like a human beehive to my eleven-year-old eyes, with hustling, bustling people everywhere urging you forward, dozens of different languages spoken on crowded sidewalks packed with fruit and vegetable stands, vendors shouting, taxis, doubledecker buses, trucks and horse-drawn carts jockeying for position on cobblestone streets, subways roaring underground, elevated trains overhead. My first explorations were exciting and anxiety-ridden, wandering around the different parts of the city as if I were Vasco da Gama discovering exotic lands. I got lost plenty until a cop explained to me that you couldn't ever get lost because the streets had numbers and the avenues ran north and south. New York made me dizzy with expectation.

  We settled into an apartment my mother found for us in a modest neighborhood on the Upper West Side-17znd Street-not far from the Hudson. We all found jobs to pull our weight and support the family. Ving worked as an assistant designer for a newspaper. The girls cleaned houses and looked after children. Tom cashiered in a dry-goods store. My first job was as a bellboy in a modest hotel on weekends. The establishment wasn't very reputable, its clients traveling salesmen, sailors on leave, gamblers in town for some action, and ladies who rented rooms for a couple of hours with a gentleman friend. I spared my mother details about the goings-on at the hotel and its colorful clientele. The job was an eyeopener.

  Before then, I'd never been aware of social classes. Suddenly they hit me smack in the face. We lived only a few blocks away from some elegant apartment buildings on the Hudson where doormen stood day and night in front of covered entrances helping well-dressed people glide in and out of their big cars. It struck me for the first time that theirs was a different universe from that of the people who rented cheap hotel rooms or that of my brothers and sisters scurrying to our jobs along with other workingclass people.

  By age twelve, I was a newsboy hawking papers on every corner in Manhattan.

  If it rained on my way home from school, I tried to make some extra money by waiting outside the subway station near our apartment with a big umbrella, accompanying commuters to their front door. Hell, the umbrella was bigger than I was. The people gave me a few pennies or maybe even a nickel when we got there. When I came home, I proudly handed my mother all my earnings. Every cent helped us make ends meet.

  In those days, kids of all ages sold newspapers on busy corners. I'd already had some experience in that business back in Worcester, so I asked a boy on the street where I could find out about becoming a vendor and getting one of those official wooden buttons that said "newsboy."

  "Park Row," said the kid.

  I'd never heard of the place, but it resounded in my head. The next afternoon after school I took the subway downtown. When I got off near Park Row, I looked up at the mighty Woolworth Building towering above me, a steeple of light, its zenith unattainable. Cass Gilbert's graceful skyscraper, with its sheath of Gothic detail, was the most beautiful structure I'd ever laid eyes upon. I walked into a stationery store to get directions.

  Seeing all the newspapers they sold in there, I asked the clerk, "How many different papers are printed every day in New York?"

  "Eleven," said the clerk.

  "Eleven," I repeated in awe.

  "And a few editions of each," he added proudly.

  I made it down to Park Row, the heart of the newspaper business in Manhattan, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge. I'd never seen so many newspapers piled up in one place at one time. Kids were everywhere, getting their allotments of evening newspapers to take out into the streets to sell. I felt right at home. A man signed me up and got me one of those wooden newsboy pins. For a penny a piece, I bought copies of five dailies with the change I had in my pocket. I got back on the subway and found a street corner near Grand Central. At two cents each, the newspapers sold out before I knew what had happened. From then on, as soon as school let out every afternoon, I'd hurry downtown to Park Row and get all the dailies I could carry in my shoulder pouch. Any street corner would be good enough for me to hawk my papers. When I sold out, I'd rush home to give the profits to my mother, have dinner, and collapse into the bed I shared with my brothers.

  One day, a kid on Park Row suggested I try selling papers on the corner of Forty-second and Broadway, in the heart of Times Square. He said that I'd sell out my papers fas
t, and, holy smoke, was he right! I couldn't take in the money fast enough. People threw change at me so fast that I was stunned at first. I was even more stunned when, out of nowhere, somebody kicked me in the ass very hard.

  "You little sonofabitch!" a man with a wooden leg screamed. "What the hell do you think you're doing? This is my territory!"

  The one-legged man had a real newsstand on the corner with papers from all over the world. I told him I was just getting into the business. He didn't stay mad at me for long. His name was Hoppy Fowler, and he became my first Manhattan mentor.' Hoppy explained to me that he'd paid the city a helluva lot of money for a license to sell newspapers, and he wasn't about to permit free commerce on his corner. I'd see Hoppy a lot in the years to come. He'd tell me great stories about Times Square and all its diverse characters. It was Hoppy who advised me to try selling papers at the docks where people drove their cars onto the ferries for the commute to New Jersey. I did exactly what he told me. It worked great. Traffic jams were inevitable every evening, people waiting in their cars. I spent many months on those docks selling out every daily in my shoulder pouch.

  I'd walk up and down between the lanes of idling cars, yelling, "Newspapers! Newspapers! I got all the papers!"

  By the end of World War I, William Randolph Hearsts Journal, with its banner headlines, was the keystone of a national press empire.

  That fall my mother put me in Public School Number 186. I was small but feisty. Selling newspapers on the streets of Manhattan teaches you how to fend for yourself. There were pencil sharpeners attached to the classroom windowsills. When I went over to sharpen my pencil one day, a tall black kid named Aloyicious Pope pushed me aside violently. His behavior made me so mad that I pushed him back as hard as I could. I didn't know he was the class bully. The little tyrant commanded me to meet him behind the playground after school. Without a split second's hesitation, I agreed.

  The rest of the day I regretted my false heroism. I remember wondering to myself what my family would think if I died behind the playground. Why did I have to accept the big bully's challenge? I set my mind to figuring out how I could salvage the situation. First, there was the advantage of being shorter than Aloyicious, therefore more agile. Besides, I knew lots about the boxing champions of the day-Joe Louis, Lou Tendler, Jack Dempsey, and Kid Chocolate-by following Ring Lardner's stories on the sports pages. Lardner wrote plenty about guys getting hit in the solar plexus. I'd never really hit anyone, and I wasn't sure where the solar plexus was. But maybe I could save my ass with some sports savvy anyway.

  More menacing than ever, Aloyicious Pope was waiting for me after school. I stared at him silently. Then I lowered my head and ran at him as fast as I could. I butted him right in the gut, knocking the wind out of him. He was stunned long enough for me to escape into the street. I ran home as fast as my legs could carry me. When I told my mother the story, she got very angry. She hated fighting and told me that a blow to someone's stomach was very dangerous. I had to invite Aloyicious home for a piece of her blueberry pie. She still made them, but now she bought the berries at a street market. The next day, I went right up to Aloyicious in the school hallway. He'd survived the blow to his solar plexus. We smiled at each other. He came home with me that day to savor my mother's delicious blueberry pie. We became good friends.

  One unforgettable day down on Park Row, I was hanging around the loading dock at the New York Evening journal, waiting for my papers. There was always a tremendous rumble coming from the building's basement, the ground shaking under your feet, as if a herd of stampeding elephants were coming down William Street. I asked a guy on the loading dock what caused those vibrations. The man laughed. He had only one good eye and was half deaf. I had no idea I was talking to the paper's press chief, Tom Foley, nor did I have any conception of what an important man he was at the journal.

  "Come on, kid," he said, holding out a powerful hand. "I'll show you."

  I grabbed his hand and he picked me up like a feather, pulling me up onto the steel platform. He took me down to the press room to see where all the racket was coming from. The presses were immense, noisy machines in constant motion, spitting out piles of printed paper. Overseeing the enormous spinning rollers, slipping in and out between the churning gears, were a team of sweating print men. They wore ink-stained shorts and paper hats made out of newsprint. With my mouth agape, my eyes gazed farther down the assembly line at the finished newspapers flying out at the far end of the room, sorted and folded. Other workers bundled them up for distribution. I was completely smitten.

  "You ain't seen nothin' yet, kid," said Foley. "Come on."

  He led me to an elevator and told Bill, a man with a wet mustache, to take us to the sixth floor. I discovered that Bill's mustache was wet with tobacco juice, when he spit into a bucket in the corner. Bill pulled a thick cord and the elevator cranked and wheezed into motion. It stopped a foot shy of the sixth floor, so we had to hop out of the contraption.

  As far as I could see was an armada of linotypes, big, noisy, smoking machines, each with an operator tapping on a keyboard, reaching up at regular intervals to pull a chain suspended overhead. The linotypes converted stories and headlines into lead type to make the engraved plates for the presses below. Foley explained that when the operators tugged the chains, big bars of lead descended into hot vats where the metal was melted, then remolded into individual characters. With a beautiful clanging and hissing, the linotypes spit out the hot lead type into neat metal columns.

  All that feverish production was overwhelming to me, especially since I'd walked by the journal building on William Street scores of times without ever imagining the intense activity inside. Holy smoke, it was paradise in there! Foley knew his history, too, explaining that on this very site was the old Rhinelander Sugar House, which the British had used as a prison during the Revolutionary War. He proudly told me that both the Journal and the American-the most powerful dailies in the country-were published right there, four editions every day, each edition selling one million, two hundred fifty thousand copies. That made five million newspapers spewing out every twenty-four hours. No wonder the goddamned sidewalks trembled! The owner of these newspapers, explained Foley, was William Randolph Hearst. The Journal was the flagship of Hearst's chain of more than thirty newspapers in cities across the United States.

  Foley must have been infected by my boyish enthusiasm. "Now I'm going to show you the heart, the inner organ, of a newspaper," he said. "Without it, kid, there'd be no papers for you to sell."

  We went up to the newsroom on the seventh floor. Scores of men and women were working at rows of desks in one large hall, typing, talking on telephones, perusing old newspapers, shouting quick questions at each other. There were pneumatic tubes everywhere and glass cylinders zipping back and forth. A constant rat-tat-tat came from the teletype machines spitting out wire stories from the press services. What really caught my eye was a group of teenage boys sitting on the edge of their chairs waiting to be called.

  "Copy!" some reporter yelled out.

  One of the boys immediately jumped up, rushed over, grabbed a sheet of paper from the reporter's outstretched hand, then darted away somewhere to deliver it. The boys were dashing all over the place, between the desks, out the doorway, then back again to their seats to await the next call.

  "This is where the newspapers are written?" I asked.

  "Yeah, right here," said Foley. "See that guy over there?" He pointed at a heavyset gentleman at a big desk. "That's the city editor. He's the number one guy in editorial. He's responsible for what gets in the paper. And what doesn't."

  "What's their job?" I asked, pointing at the boys hustling everywhere.

  "Copyboys," he said.

  "I want to come and work here in this room," I announced to Foley without further ado. "Right here, as a copyboy. How can I get the job?"

  "Slow down, kid," said Foley. "The managing editor is Joseph V. Mulcahy, and he does the hiring around here."

>   I was escorted to Mulcahy's glass-enclosed office. Mulcahy was a czar. He looked like he could breathe fire, his thick neck bulging from an unbuttoned shirt and loosened tie.

  "I want to be a copyboy," I told Mulcahy.

  "Is that right?" said Mulcahy.

  "Yes, sir," I said. "I can do it."

  "What's your name, my boy?"

  "Sammy. Sammy Fuller."

  "How old are you?"

  "Almost thirteen."

  "How much is `almost'?"

  "Maybe four or five months."

  "No 'maybe's' for me, my boy," said Mulcahy. "You have to be exact around here."

  "In six months, I'll be thirteen," I confessed.

  "There are laws in this country about children working. You have to be at least fourteen. That's the law."

  Dejection flooded across my face.

  "Now look here, Sammy," continued Mulcahy, writing down a name and address on a piece of paper, "you go and see this man at his office near city hall. He gives out work permits over there. I'll give him a call on your behalf. But for Chrissakes, tell him you're fourteen. Once you've got the permit, we'll see about an opening on the paper."

  Thanks to Mulcahy's backing and my lying about my age, I got the permit. After weeks and weeks of waiting, there was still no word. I'd almost given up hope. Then one day, Foley spotted me on Park Row picking up my allotment of newspapers to sell. He said Mulcahy wanted to talk to me in his office. I'd gotten the coveted job as a copyboy on the journal. I proudly announced the big news to my mother that evening. "Mama, I'm going to work for Mister William Randolph Hearst!"

  Run Sammy Run

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